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By Timothy Leslie
(Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Timothy Leslie is a retired technical writer and journalist who lives in Vancouver, Wash.
In mid-May, on the first day of my first-ever visit to D.C., I learned something extremely disappointing and entirely unexpected: Unruly and disinterested teenage students who are on school-sponsored class trips to the National Mall are ruining the experience for others.
My visit got off to a great start. I stood in silent awe as I gazed upon the original Star-Spangled Banner, one of the most treasured artifacts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. There it was, the actual flag hoisted over the federal garrison at Fort McHenry on the morning of Sept. 14, 1814, to signal American victory over the British in the Battle of Baltimore; the actual flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write what would become our national anthem.
As I soaked up the majesty of the enormous old flag, the other visitors in the darkened chamber seemed to share my sense of reverence for this incredible piece of U.S. history. When they spoke at all, they whispered or spoke softly, and no one tried to take photographs, which the museum prohibits. At that point, a large group of teenage students, all wearing identical class trip T-shirts, walked into the exhibit. That was not a surprise. Before entering the museum that afternoon, I had passed dozens of such school groups as they emerged from the countless charter buses that lined the streets on both sides of the National Mall. But what happened next did surprise me. The students talked loudly, pushed one another and appeared to have little interest in their surroundings. As the teens noisily jostled for a position in front of the exhibit, one girl pulled out her phone and took a flash photo.
With the Star-Spangled Banner’s captivating spell temporarily broken by the commotion, I exited the small chamber and turned my attention to an interactive tabletop screen that displayed magnified digital images of the old flag. By touching or waving a hand over the circular “targets” that appear to float above the massive screen, visitors can access informational pop-up boxes that offer key details about the flag’s history. I was happily engaged with this display when three teenage girls peeled off from their school group and stood beside me. Before long, the girls began randomly swatting the digital targets and laughing loudly. Now unable to concentrate on the display, I turned and spoke to the girl standing closest to me. “This is not a game,” I said. The girl slowly turned her head and gave me a look that seemed to say, “Are you serious?” She and her friends then continued banging on the screen until they finally tired of it and walked away.
During my remaining two days on Capitol Hill, I paid special attention to these groups of students, who seemed completely unaware that their antics might tarnish the names of the high schools and towns displayed so prominently on their T-shirts. I watched as a museum staffer tried her best to tame groups of teens who were racing through the U.S. Botanic Garden. I observed five teenage girls push through crowds as they rushed from one museum display to another, stopping only long enough to take selfies. And I witnessed wave after wave of students taking skyward photos of their feet pressed against the Washington Monument, the venerable memorial defiled by dirty shoes and reduced to an Instagram prop. In each of these incidents, teachers and chaperones were either absent or unwilling to intervene.
This unacceptable behavior from our youths is disappointing because it shows such disregard for the incredible history and culture of our nation’s capital and such disrespect for other visitors. Of course, much of the blame must be borne by the schools and teachers who are failing to prepare their students for such activities.
I would suggest four steps that schools should take to improve this situation.
Require an equity stake. Humans often devalue the things they receive free. Schools should require students to participate in extracurricular fundraising events as a condition of signing up for a class trip.
Assign topical homework. We cannot expect students to care about events and artifacts they know nothing about. Weeks before a trip, teachers should assign meaningful reading and writing assignments with completion due before departure.
Communicate the ground rules. Students deserve to know the rules in advance and how teachers will enforce them during the trip. Schools must clearly define and reinforce the limits for acceptable behavior.
Punish bad behavior. Chaperones and teachers must respond immediately to transgressions. A student will not soon forget the interminable afternoon spent in exile on the charter bus.
If every school would take the time to implement these simple steps, it would make future class trips to D.C. and elsewhere more enjoyable for everyone. | 2022-06-17T14:25:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Taking a class trip to D.C. doesn’t come with a license to behave badly - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/taking-class-trip-dc-doesnt-come-with-license-behave-badly/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/taking-class-trip-dc-doesnt-come-with-license-behave-badly/ |
By Tonia Wellons
A man sleeps outside Union Station in view of the U.S. Capitol on May 31. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Tonia Wellons is president and chief executive of the Greater Washington Community Foundation.
A recently established $95 million Health Equity Fund has the potential to help reshape the way D.C. addresses its long-standing health inequities. Some might believe the best investment would be to support organizations providing direct services to people struggling with diabetes, hypertension, covid-19, maternal and infant mortality, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, food insecurity, gun violence, and the many other issues that disproportionately affect people of color in our city. Those challenges absolutely deserve our community’s attention and funding.
The Greater Washington Community Foundation and the Health Equity Committee administering the Health Equity Fund have decided to focus on root causes and early interventions. Because 80 percent of D.C.’s health outcomes are driven by social, economic and other factors, and only 20 percent by clinical care, we plan to deploy the full resources of the fund to projects that disrupt more traditional approaches to social change with the goal of ultimately helping to close the intolerable racial health and wealth gaps. In other words, instead of putting a Band-Aid on these problems, we are going to focus on the reasons people are bleeding in the first place.
The Health Equity Fund was established last year with resources from a settlement among D.C.’s Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking; Group Hospitalization and Medical Services Inc. (a CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield affiliate); and the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.
One of the largest funds of any kind focused on community-based nonprofits that serve D.C. residents, the fund is also the largest undertaking in The Community Foundation’s nearly 50-year history.
This month, The Community Foundation issued its first competitive Request for Proposals for grants. Mindful that health and wealth are inextricably connected, this first round of $10 million in grants to 40 organizations will boldly invest in economic mobility and wealth-building in D.C.’s historically underinvested communities. Future funding will be devoted to policy advocacy, community and multisector anchor partnerships with hospitals and health systems, and behavioral health and trauma-informed systems of care.
If you are a nonprofit working to address these issues, we want to hear from you. We are especially looking to support disruptive systems-changing strategies that improve prospects for Black, Latinx or Indigenous people of color and other marginalized populations. Let me share several examples of what I mean by disruptive systems-changing strategies.
Thirty years ago, the approach used to address chronic homelessness by service organizations and government — and embraced by funders — was to require unhoused residents to prove they were “housing ready.” That meant meeting certain conditions, such as sobriety or treatment, as a prerequisite to housing. But these requirements often thrust those same unhoused people back onto the streets. Recognizing this disturbing trend, one nonprofit began asking the unhoused residents what they needed. The answer: a safe, stable place to live. Thus, the innovative Housing First model was born. In contrast to the traditional approach, Housing First mandates neither treatment nor sobriety before moving clients into permanent supportive housing. Housing First providers offer clients, but do not require clients to accept, supportive services tailored to individual needs and goals, understanding these services are most effective when clients choose them voluntarily. Housing First has become the accepted standard in our region, around the country and in other parts of the world, and one that The Community Foundation has long supported, including through the Partnership to End Homelessness. The results of Housing First speak louder than words: Permanent supportive housing has a long-term retention rate of 90 percent, in contrast to a 45 percent success rate for the old model.
Other examples are around us — from organizations that are addressing long-standing inequities around our food system (the historical legacy of slavery, sharecropping and entrenched systemic racism), to those that encourage local youths to use photography to document disparities in their schools and communities, and local incubators that bring venture and philanthropic capital to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) enterprises so they can grow and scale.
Let’s all get our creative juices flowing as we reimagine how to address the root causes of D.C.’s persistent health inequities. If anything, the past two years have reminded us that our economic, social and health systems favor people who already have access to wealth and health care. The time has come — actually, it’s well past time — to improve the health outcomes of all D.C. residents. | 2022-06-17T14:25:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | We must reimagine how to address D.C.’s persistent health inequities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/we-must-reimagine-how-address-dcs-persistent-health-inequities/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/we-must-reimagine-how-address-dcs-persistent-health-inequities/ |
Not all parents who are cautious about vaccines are anti-science. It’s important to answer their questions.
Perspective by Jennifer Reich
A coronavirus vaccine is prepared for administration at a vaccination clinic. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s coronavirus vaccines for children as young as 6 months. Shots should be available next week, which will provide some parents a long overdue tool to protect their children from covid.
More than a decade before the coronavirus pandemic, I began researching how parents decide to reject recommended vaccines for their children. Despite the common assumption that these parents are ignorant or anti-science, I found that most parents who reject some or all vaccines work hard to weigh their understanding of the risk of the disease against their understanding of the risks of the vaccines and possible benefits of vaccination. I met families who rejected all vaccines and others who consented to some and rejected others. Some even developed different vaccine strategies for each child in their family based on their view of each child’s needs and vulnerabilities.
Although their perceptions of risk and benefit may not match actual statistical probability — with an inclination to underestimate the risk of infection and overestimate the risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine — their views and strategies are not uncommon. Before covid, as many as one-third of American parents were taking a cafeteria-approach to childhood vaccines, accepting some and rejecting others based on their perceptions of safety, perceived seriousness of the disease, and estimated risk of infection. These parents give us some insight into what we should expect with a coronavirus vaccine for young children — and the future of childhood vaccines more generally.
Parents of unvaccinated children need more guidance
Notably, accessing the two vaccines that the FDA is likely to authorize soon for children under 5 present some challenges, which highlights how parents will need to choose these vaccines and seek them out. Pfizer’s vaccine for children under 5 years will require two visits three weeks apart and a third shot eight or more weeks later. Moderna’s vaccine for children 6 years and younger requires two shots four weeks apart. These visits are unlikely to align with other routine doctor appointments and under existing federal law, vaccines cannot be given to children under age 3 at pharmacies or community sites.
Whether a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid, is seen as a necessary solution is open to interpretation. Throughout the pandemic, children have represented about 19 percent of all covid infections, and represent about 22 percent of the U.S. population. There have thus far been 442 deaths from covid in children 0-4 years. In early June, 2.7 children out of every 100,000 under the age of 5 years were hospitalized with covid, a significant drop from January when the weekly prevalence was 15.3 of every 100,000.
This rate is much lower than the estimated 1-2 percent risk of hospitalizations adults face, but with more than 18.5 million pediatric infections, that is still a large number of children who are very sick. One FDA advisory committee member suggested the number of deaths for young children is similar to the risks of being struck by lightning. Another member argued the risk of infected children is nonetheless significant, explaining, “I know that the death rate from covid among young children may not be extremely high, but it’s absolutely terrifying to parents to have their child be sick and have to go to the hospital or even go to the emergency room or their primary care doctor because they’re sick and having trouble breathing.” Whether parents view these figures as representing a significant risk will influence their decision to seek out vaccines.
Parents do fear covid. A survey earlier this year suggests that about half of parents are afraid their children will become seriously ill because of covid. Parents don’t just fear their child will be one of the tens of thousands of hospitalizations for covid or multisystem inflammation syndrome in children (MIS-C), a condition in which children who were infected — often with mild or no symptoms — experience organ failure weeks later.
Parents also fear their children will miss school, that preschools will close, that parents will miss work or that children will be more infectious to others. Some are aware that covid infection may help trigger longer term health conditions, including Type 1 diabetes. Fear of infection is not equally distributed. As many as 65-70 percent of parents who have incomes below $75,000 or who identify as Black and Hispanic are afraid of infection.
Despite half of parents expressing fear of infection, few parents intend to vaccinate their children against covid. Almost 40 percent of children between 5-11 years are vaccinated (a notable doubling of the number from November), while fewer than 20 percent of parents of children under the age of 5 years express an intent to immunize their children against covid when a vaccine is authorized. How, then, can we understand why almost 93 percent of children are fully vaccinated against polio, a disease not seen in the U.S. since 1993, but fewer than one-third of parents of young children want a vaccine against a virus in wide circulation? Understanding the gap between fear and vaccine choice brings us back to the complicated perceptions of risk and benefit on which parents base their vaccine decisions.
Parents are confident that they are best able to decide what their children need. Any successful vaccine campaign for children will have to address parents’ questions and concerns, and show that the vaccine, for which there is limited trial data, is effective in preventing serious illness and safe for young children. There is, so far, little information about how well the vaccine will prevent infection in young children or how long immunity will last. Even with these uncertainties, most parents have not expressed opposition to a vaccine. Rather, surveys this spring show that more than half of the parents of children under the age of 5 years say they do not have enough information about safety and effectiveness and about 40 percent say they want to wait and see before deciding to vaccinate their young children.
Insisting that parents should vaccinate their children because all vaccines are equally important, a staple of public health messaging, is unlikely to succeed. Parents have become savvy consumers of health information and are increasingly comfortable evaluating each vaccine and picking and choosing the ones they trust while rejecting or postponing others. While health-care providers remain a trusted source of information on vaccines, people also look to friends, news, and schools for information. Information about coronavirus vaccines needs to address parents’ questions and make clear what is known and not yet known.
What I say to persuade parents to vaccinate their kids — and what I hold back
On this front, there is good news about coronavirus vaccines. Information reviewed by the FDA show that young children had lower rates of complication, including myocarditis, than did teens, which should be reassuring to parents. While children indisputably have lower risk of hospitalization and death than do adults, vaccination may reduce the risk of long-term outcomes of infection. Increasingly, scientists are highlighting how viral infections can cause harms years — even decades — after infection and recovery, including post-polio syndrome, measles’s damage to immune memory, cancer from human papilloma virus infection, or paralysis or hearing loss that can appear years after chickenpox infection (as Justin Bieber appears to be experiencing now). Parents deserve to understand these issues and pediatricians, school nurses, child care workers and others who work with families must be able to answer questions.
Whether parents of young children will see this vaccine series as a useful tool for managing family priorities remains unclear. It is, however, clear that parents deserve straightforward information about the benefits the vaccine may hold for their children and the community as well as the limitations of what is not yet known about boosters and protection from transmission. Given that parents are already evaluating other childhood vaccines in terms of their perceptions of possible benefits, health-care providers and those who work with families should be prepared to discuss these issues honestly. | 2022-06-17T14:25:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why some parents are skeptical about covid vaccines for young children - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/covid-vaccine-under-five-parents-hesitation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/covid-vaccine-under-five-parents-hesitation/ |
The scandal hasn’t faded. More than 100 women, including Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, are collectively seeking more than $1 billion from the federal government for the FBI's failure to stop Nassar when agents became aware of allegations against him in 2015. He was arrested by Michigan State University police in 2016, more than a year later. | 2022-06-17T14:25:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Larry Nassar loses last appeal in sexual assault scandal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/larry-nassar-loses-last-appeal-in-sexual-assault-scandal/2022/06/17/89e36540-ee3d-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/larry-nassar-loses-last-appeal-in-sexual-assault-scandal/2022/06/17/89e36540-ee3d-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
By Will Hawkes
May 24 marked the opening of the Elizabeth Line, which stretches from Heathrow Airport and Reading in the west to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east. (Cover Images/AP)
The London Underground train hurrying me toward Paddington station is a bit unusual. In place of the usual riders — harried commuters, eye-contact avoiders and world-weary big-city hipsters — there are pensioners, teenagers, families, all thrilled to be here. It’s May 24, and the Elizabeth Line, the most exciting thing to hit Transport for London since the double-decker bus, opens today. It has been about 30 years in the making, cost about 19 billion pounds (about $23 billion) and is four years behind schedule, but no one seems to care. Strangers are even talking to one another, an extinction-level phenomenon on the Tube.
My grandfather William Hawkes was the stationmaster at Southall. He’d struggle to recognize it today. There’s a new glass-fronted station building for the arrival of the Elizabeth Line, and, beyond that, this outer suburb is very different from when he knew it before the Second World War. Then it was home to Welsh migrants, among others. Since the 1960s, it has been London’s most significant center of Punjabi culture and remains an iconic South Asian neighborhood.
Turning north from the station, you pass first the Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha, a large Sikh temple on Park Avenue, then Saravanaa Bhavan, part of an Indian chain that bills itself the “World’s No. 1 Indian Vegetarian Restaurant.” The building has its own history, having been home to Glassy Junction, a legendary Punjabi pub, until it closed about a decade ago.
I’m going to a local culinary institution, Rita’s Chilli Chaat Corner, which opened in 1968. The food is generous and good-value, the service warm and Rita’s Royal Mix Chaat (about $13.70) enormous. It’s a symphony of flavor and texture: crunchy papdi crackers, samosas and tikkis, chili and coriander sauces, chole (a chickpea curry) and bhel, puffed rice with sweet tamarind chutney.
By the time I’m finished, I’m more than full. Tentative plans to pick up some jalebi, a deep-fried sweet snack, go out the window, but I do stop into Quality Foods, a supermarket with subcontinental treats, to pick up some spices.
They’ve moved Paddington Bear. Until recently, a statue of London’s most famous marmalade sandwich fan was under the clock next to Platform 1, away from much of the station’s human traffic. Now, thanks to the arrival of the Elizabeth Line, he’s been shifted. Where to? “Oh, he’s over by the pasty stand,” a station employee tells me. “He was a bit in the way here.”
I find him surrounded by yellow safety barriers. No more pictures for Paddington, at least in the short term: There used to be a regular stream of small and not-so-small people lining up for their Kodak moment. (Happily, there’s still a bench shaped like a Paddington book on Platform 1, which fulfills much the same function.)
Paddington’s new perch gives him a slightly better view of the station’s vast magnificence. Built as the terminus for the Great Western Railway in 1854, it’s second only to St. Pancras among London termini in terms of heart-lifting delight. Three wrought-iron arches support a glazed roof, rising and swooping across the station. Walk to the western end and climb onto a raised walkway for the best view — and a close-up of delicately curved ironwork.
The rise of working from home on Fridays means that old hospitality industry canard, “Thursday is the new Friday,” may have finally come true, at least for some of London’s office workers. So what does Soho, historically London’s most energetic central district but often quiet during the pandemic, look like on a Thursday evening in late May?
One of the Elizabeth Line exits at Tottenham Court Road station spills out directly into Dean Street, arguably Soho’s main thoroughfare. Just after 7 p.m., there are crowds outside the Toucan, the Nellie Dean, and the Crown & Two Chairmen; Old Compton Street is buzzing with noise, taxis edging along behind groups of oblivious 20-somethings. In the Coach & Horses on Greek Street, it’s a little quieter, although bar staff are busy. (The London Pride ale is tasting very good.) Meanwhile, there’s barely standing room in the French House, inside or out, but there rarely is.
On Wardour Street, a Toyota Prius is blasting, rather incongruously, “California Dreamin’ ”; a young man with face painted white, Marcel Marceau-style, is playing the Beatles’ “Michelle” to a nonexistent crowd on Archer Street; and bass reverberates around Great Pulteney Street, emanating from an event at the clothes store Daily Paper.
Farringdon
As you walk down Leather Lane, you notice a pattern. A five-minute stroll from Farringdon station, this historic street market has become renowned for good lunch options in recent years, but one option is on the verge of excluding all others: falafel. There’s Falafel Time, Dukan 41, Falafel & Grill House, Balady and many others, too.
How do you choose? It probably doesn’t matter. I plump for Falafel Time, where I’m furnished with a large and varied box containing not only falafel but also hummus, halloumi, tahini, chili sauce and salad for less than 7 pounds (roughly $8). It’s delicious, harmonious and gone in five minutes.
Leather Lane is not the only market close to Farringdon station, though. There’s also Smithfield, the city’s ancient meat market, where it was once easy to get a huge English breakfast and a pint of beer at 7 a.m.; now, only the Fox & Anchor, to the northeast of the market, keeps that tradition alive. By 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, though, the market is as dead as its produce, although there’s plenty of noise from the work to convert the western section into the new Museum of London.
A small group, perhaps 12 in number, has gathered outside a hexagonal black building just south of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. They’re waiting for that evening’s performance at the new Abba Voyage experience, a live show featuring avatars of the Swedish pop sensations. There are families, teens and some old enough to have seen Abba in their heyday, all decked out in Abba T-shirts. They’re keen: A nearby countdown clock says there are 5 hours, 10 minutes and 25 seconds to go before the performance.
A summer-travel survival guide
Farther north, close to the London Stadium and Stratford station, five equally enthusiastic young men are trying to get a bicycle and a trailer — an electric-powered trailer, no less — to move a bit faster. They’re failing. There’s plenty of performative huffing, puffing and shouting, but not much progress.
I was last inside the Olympic Stadium in 2012, on the night British athletes won three gold medals; “Super Saturday,” the U.K. press called it. Now it’s home to West Ham United, London’s fourth-most-popular football team, a focal point for a burgeoning new neighborhood. Not everything is new around here, though: In Hackney Wick, about a 10-minute walk away, the Lord Napier Star — closed for about 25 years, derelict and comprehensively graffitied — recently reopened, bucking a trend of pub closures dating back decades. It’s at the heart of what has become one of London’s unlikeliest nighttime hubs.
There are two Woolwiches, or so it seems, divided by Beresford Street. To the south, there’s the old Woolwich, which hums with blue-collar life but could badly do with some cash. To the north, there’s the regenerated Royal Arsenal, where the new Elizabeth Line station can be found, which has seen plenty of investment in recent years.
Until the late 1960s, this was the U.K.’s most important munitions and armaments factory, peaking in size during the First World War, when about 80,000 people worked here. In the square opposite the station, there are mature trees — lime, plane, sycamore, chestnut — and the 18th-century Dial Arch, once a workshop, now a pub. It inspired the formation of the Arsenal Football Club, based in Woolwich until it scuttled north of the river in 1913.
Hawkes is a writer based in London. His website is willhawkes.contently.com. Find him on Twitter: @will_hawkes.
The Stratford Hotel
20 International Way, E20 1FD, London
011-44-203-961-3333
thestratford.com/hotel
Located next to Stratford International station, this modern hotel contains a fine restaurant, offers Pilates classes and provides easy access to Olympic Park and beyond. Double rooms from about $144 per night.
The Resident Soho
10 Carlisle St., W1D 3BR
residenthotels.com/the-resident-soho
You’ll find the Resident down a calm cul-de-sac just off Dean Street, with in-room mini-kitchens (including microwave, Nespresso, fridge and kettle) as standard. Double rooms from about $215 per night.
Rita’s Chilli Chaat Corner
112-114, The Broadway, Southall, UB1 1QF
Southall is full of inexpensive options, but few with the history of Rita’s, which opened in 1968. Try Aloo Tikki (fried potato cakes served with chickpea curry and chutney). Open daily, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Dishes from about $6.
Leather Lane Market
Leather Lane, EC1
Falafels dominate Leather Lane’s lunch market, but there are plenty of other options, including a Yorkshire Burrito (a Yorkshire pudding filled with roast meat, stuffing, vegetables and more). Open Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
29 Greek St., W1D 5DH
coachandhorsessoho.pub
Once famous for its truculent landlord, the Coach & Horses — also named Norman’s, because of said landlord — may be Soho’s best place for a beer. Open Monday to Saturday, noon to 11 p.m., and Sunday until 8 p.m. London Pride about $6 per pint.
The Piazza, WC2E 7BB
ltmuseum.co.uk
Learn about trams, buses and the world’s oldest underground railway at this museum in Covent Garden. Timed-entry tickets recommended, but walk-in tickets available. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; last entry 5 p.m. Adult tickets about $25 per person and allow entry for one year; children free.
visitlondon.com | 2022-06-17T14:26:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | London's new Elizabeth Line is a boon for travelers. Here's why. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/06/17/london-tube-elizabeth-line/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/06/17/london-tube-elizabeth-line/ |
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees addresses the global refugee crisis
The United Nations Refugee Agency reports that the global refugee numbers are at their highest since records began, with more than 100 million people displaced by war and violence worldwide. On World Refugee Day, Monday, June 20 at 1:00 p.m. ET, join The Washington Post’s David Ignatius for a conversation with Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about the current solutions available, the impact of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the path forward for the international community. | 2022-06-17T14:26:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees addresses the global refugee crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/06/20/un-high-commissioner-refugees-addresses-global-refugee-crisis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/06/20/un-high-commissioner-refugees-addresses-global-refugee-crisis/ |
Nelson Cruz is heating up just in time for the MLB trade deadline
Washington Nationals designated hitter Nelson Cruz is starting to swing the bat better after a slow start. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
When Nelson Cruz signed with the Washington Nationals this spring, General Manager Mike Rizzo wanted a veteran with power to provide protection behind Juan Soto in the lineup. Still, Cruz was 41 and there were questions about how much he had left.
He hit .226 after he was traded to the Tampa Bay Rays at the trade deadline last year, though Cruz hinted at having trouble seeing at Tropicana Field. Doubts intensified when Cruz’s batting average dipped to .143 on May 3.
His lack of success mirrored the Nationals, who dropped to the bottom of the NL East quickly. But Manager Dave Martinez reiterated as Cruz was struggling that his slugger would find his rhythm once it turned warm and baseballs started to carry. By the end of May, he had raised his batting average to .237. This month, he’s hitting .340 (18-for-53) with three home runs and nine RBI, raising his season average to .261.
“You do hard work to see results and it’s nice to see results,” Cruz said. “At the end of the day, it’s about wins and losses. And unfortunately, we haven’t been able to stay in a winning streak for long periods of time.”
Cruz signed with the intention of being a part of a contending team in Washington. But Washington (23-43) sits 19.5 games back of the NL East-leading New York Mets. The Nationals have the worst record in the National League and the third-lowest winning percentage in baseball (only the Kansas City Royals and Oakland Athletics are worse).
Rizzo hinted on a radio interview with 106.7 the Fan last week that the Nationals would look to trade its players with expiring contracts. Cruz fits that definition.
“I try to not think about it,” Cruz said about the possibility of being traded. “I signed to be with this team and that’s my goal. But I also understand it’s part of the business. I have to be prepared for everything.”
If Cruz does get traded next month, it will be the second straight season he’s been dealt at the trade deadline. The Minnesota Twins, who were well out of the playoff picture last year, sent Cruz to a playoff contender in the Rays.
This year, the Twins are in first place in the AL Central. Joe Ryan, one of two pitching prospects in the trade, is Minnesota’s leader in wins and strikeouts and trails the Twins’ leader in innings pitched by ⅓ of an inning. The other pitcher, Drew Strotman, is in Class AAA.
The Nationals hope to get that level of production in return by trading Cruz: a return of young prospects that Washington could develop and build around.
Cruz said being traded last year was difficult for him because he had to work his way from the ground up in the middle of the season to adjust to his new coaches, teammates and a front office. But despite the changes, he said that once it’s time to step on the field, his mind shifts back to baseball.
He’s set to turn 42 on July 1, the third-oldest player in the majors behind Albert Pujols (42) and Rich Hill (42). Yet aside from his first month, he hasn’t shown any signs of a major drop-off.
“This guy’s kept himself in unbelievable shape,” Martinez said. “That’s just him understanding his body and doing the work in between games to get himself ready to play everyday … I look at home and I think to myself ‘Man, this guy could play for another two or three years easy.’
Cruz credits his daily routine of sticking to his diet and working out before games and, of course, getting his rest, which includes naps before home games.
Cruz isn’t sure how much longer he plans to play. He doesn’t think about his age — he jokes he only thinks about it when he’s asked. But he still feels young and plans to play like it, even if he’s not wearing a Nationals uniform much longer.
“It’s something that you can’t escape from, you know?” Cruz said about getting older. “Age will catch up with everybody. I don’t think age necessarily has to limit the way you play.
“I feel like I’m running pretty good. My speed’s there. My bat speed’s there … But whatever you put in your mind, it’s gonna work. If you say you’re old, you’re gonna be old.” | 2022-06-17T14:58:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nelson Cruz heating up with MLB trade deadline looming - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/nelson-cruz-nationals-trade-deadline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/nelson-cruz-nationals-trade-deadline/ |
Lego prepared for questions on Youngkin and critical race theory in Va.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin speaks during a news conference with the Lego Group on June 15 in Richmond. (Haban Athuman/Richmond Times-Dispatch/AP)
RICHMOND — The Lego Group delivered a major gift to Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) this week with plans to open a $1 billion factory in Chesterfield County, but it briefly made public a frequently asked questions document that seemed to distance the company from Youngkin’s conservative stance on race and the environment.
The FAQ is no longer accessible online, but was seen by several news reporters — at least one of whom posted images of it on Twitter. At a time when the Walt Disney Co. is at odds with the state of Florida over LGBTQ policies, and major companies frequently make business decisions based on social issues, the document highlights questions about whether Youngkin’s tilt to the right will affect Virginia’s reputation in the business world.
Noting that Youngkin “has made prohibiting ‘critical race theory’ in K-12 classrooms a key pillar of his policies,” the FAQ asked whether Lego supports that stance.
“We stand against racism and inequality,” the company said in response to its own question, adding that Lego has “donated to organisations that support black children and educate all children about racial equality.”
Another question asked why the company would locate “in a state where the governor supports non-renewable energy, such as coal, and is critical of renewable energy investment?”
Lego answered itself that it had extensively researched the state and was confident it could carry out an “ambitious sustainability agenda.” The new facility, which is set to employ more than 1,700 people, is designed to be carbon neutral and features a solar energy power plant.
“Virginia is one of fewer than a dozen states that has a 100 percent carbon neutrality commitment, and we are happy to do our part by investing in the on-site solar plant to provide the energy we need to operate our factory,” the FAQ continued.
Youngkin has criticized the ambitious renewable energy agenda passed last year when Democrats were in control of the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion, and has vowed to extract the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — a multistate compact setting up a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions credits.
The FAQ was briefly included Wednesday among the fact sheets and videos that Lego’s outside public relations firm released around the announcement.
“The document was intended for internal use only and shared in error,” the Lego Group said Thursday night in a written statement, adding that the company is “looking forward to starting work” on the factory “and contributing to the local economy and community.” The plant is scheduled to open in the second half of 2025.
Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter declined to comment, though she said she was not aware that the FAQ had been removed.
Virginia has won CNBC’s award as the top state for business for an unprecedented two years in a row, both times under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam. The award singled out Virginia for inclusive policies such as diversity requirements for state agencies, expanded access to the vote and anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ workers.
Youngkin was recognized for diversity practices when he was co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group private equity firm, but has adopted a far more hard-line stance since running for office last year.
He courted the red base of the GOP with dire warnings about critical race theory, an academic framework for the study of systemic racism that was not on Virginia’s K-12 curriculum, and made a prohibition of the topic his first executive action as governor. He also launched an effort to purge racial equity programs from schools and established a “tip line” for parents to accuse teachers or administrators of exposing children to subjects they find objectionable.
The state has continued to land new businesses under Youngkin, who has called economic development a priority. In addition to promoting the Lego announcement, Youngkin has touted recent decisions by Boeing and Raytheon to relocate their corporate headquarters to Arlington. | 2022-06-17T15:46:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lego prepared for questions on Youngkin, critical race theory in Va. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/lego-virginia-youngkin-faq-crt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/lego-virginia-youngkin-faq-crt/ |
What Strikes and ‘Quits’ Say About US Labor’s Resolve
Analysis by Katia Dmitrieva and Josh Eidelson | Bloomberg
After decades of declining power, US workers are showing renewed resolve. Employees at unionized companies authorized strikes last year at a rate rarely seen in recent times, and nonunion workers are voting with their feet, fueling a labor market reckoning that’s become known as the Great Resignation. The question is whether this amounts to a significant shift in the employee-employer power balance or just a blip.
1. How are workers showing resolve?
There were strikes in 2021 at unionized workplaces including those of Deere & Co. and Kellogg Co., non-union walkouts at companies such as Activision Blizzard Inc. and McDonald’s Corp., and high-profile unionization campaigns at top US companies, including a landmark victory at a Starbucks Corp. store in Buffalo, New York. This year, tech workers at the New York Times, staff at more than 100 additional Starbucks cafes and thousands of employees at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in the New York City borough of Staten Island voted to unionize. (Workers at another Amazon warehouse nearby voted down the idea.) As part of the Great Resignation -- or the Great Reassessment, depending on whom you ask -- a record 4.54 million workers left their jobs in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracked historically elevated “quits” levels throughout 2021.
2. What explains the Great Resignation?
Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University who is credited with coining the term, says the pandemic inspired epiphanies about family time, remote work, commuting, passion projects, and life and death. Resignation rates were highest in health care, technology and other fields that “experienced extreme increases in demand due to the pandemic, likely leading to increased workloads and burnout,” according to Ian Cook, a vice president at Visier Inc., a Vancouver-based human resource analytics software company.
3. How had labor’s power declined?
Since the 1980s, and most acutely since the last recession ended in 2009, wage growth lagged while corporate profits soared. That means workers’ share of the fruits of economic output fell. The 250,000 or so American workers who earn the federal minimum wage have been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. And the US remains an outlier among advanced economies for not requiring employers to provide paid parental leave, vacation time or sick leave.
4. What caused that decline?
The increased automation of some jobs, and the outsourcing of others to places in the world where pay is low, are two factors. Another is a drop in union membership. When the American Federation of Labor merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO in 1955, more than one in three American workers had union jobs. As the US economy shifted from manufacturing to services, and labor law tilted toward employers, unions lost ground. More than half of US states have so-called right-to-work laws, which say employees can’t be forced to fund a union. In 2021, 10.3% of workers in the US belonged to a union, down from 20.1% in 1983, when comparable data collection began.
5. Why do unions matter so much?
By negotiating collectively, unions can generally secure higher pay, greater benefits and safer work conditions than individuals haggling on their own behalf. Union workers earn about $200 more per week on average than non-union workers -- $1,169 versus $975 in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- and have better retirement pay and health insurance. Studies have shown that unions also help raise pay for non-union workers by setting a higher prevailing wage. Critics of unionization say that it’s a relic from the days of assembly-line factories, and that the salaries of union members come at the expense of fewer overall jobs.
Despite the wave of activism in 2021, the share of private-sector workers who belong to a union fell by 0.2 percentage point, to 6.1%. In the US Congress, what would be the biggest piece of pro-worker legislation in decades is stalled, as advocates in the Democratic Party struggle to assemble the 60-vote supermajority required to advance bills in the Senate. The legislation would, for the first time, empower the National Labor Relations Board to impose monetary penalties against labor law violators. President Joe Biden, who has called himself the most pro-union president in US history, publicly supported Amazon workers seeking to unionize, appointed union advocates to key positions and sought ways to use executive power to advance organizing. | 2022-06-17T15:55:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What Strikes and ‘Quits’ Say About US Labor’s Resolve - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-strikes-and-quits-say-about-us-labors-resolve/2022/06/17/d630c1c2-ee4c-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-strikes-and-quits-say-about-us-labors-resolve/2022/06/17/d630c1c2-ee4c-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Biden repeats call to world leaders to cut greenhouse gas emissions
With a stalemate in Congress over Build Back Better, the president had little new to offer in a virtual summit on Friday
President Biden speaks to reporters before departing the White House on June 17, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Last year, President Biden held two hopeful meetings with leaders of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases — but on Friday he returned to a virtual summit with little to show in the way of new U.S. incentives for renewable energy.
A factory wants to reopen making ‘green’ aluminum. Now it just needs clean energy.
Senior Biden administration officials said the president was “laser focused on driving forward an agenda and actions” that would strengthen U.S. energy security and “bring together a broad coalition about taking action that meets the urgency of this moment.”
But the $550 billion package of tax incentives and other measures in the president’s Build Back Better proposal has stalled in Congress. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine has added pressure to increase U.S. output of natural gas for export and boost global crude oil supplies.
Biden highlighted several areas for action, such as the construction of hydrogen hubs in the United States; a “green” shipping contest sponsored by Norway and the United States to decarbonize fuels by 2050; and a renewed call for world leaders to match the U.S. goal of zero emissions for 50 percent of new autos.
Biden also called on countries to clamp down on the flaring of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. “We flare enough gas to offset nearly all of the E.U.’s gas imports from Russia,” he said.
The group said that the flared gas could fetch about $40 billion at market prices. “Wasting this valuable product is harmful, particularly at a time when countries are grappling with an energy crisis,” EDF said.
The EDF report also warned that the oil and gas industry is not on schedule to meet a widespread target of achieving zero routine flaring by 2030. The report said that flaring volumes would have to tumble 19 percent a year through 2030 to achieve zero routine flaring from all global oil production.
The world’s biggest emitter of methane is China, accounting for about 30 percent of all emissions. Senior administration officials said that White House special climate adviser John F. Kerry had spoken to Chinese negotiator Xie Jianhua “multiple times” in the past month.
Leaders made big climate promises. They’re struggling to follow through.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who is attending the meeting, said that fossil fuel companies had “exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as Big Tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.” | 2022-06-17T15:55:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden again calls on world leaders to cut greenhouse gas emissions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/17/biden-greenhouse-gas-build-back-better/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/17/biden-greenhouse-gas-build-back-better/ |
Jan. 6 was Mike Pence’s proudest day. He should own it.
A photo of Vice President Mike Pence at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is seen on a video screen on June 16 behind the House committee investigating the attack. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Mike Pence did the right thing on Jan. 6, 2021. Why is he so ashamed of his actions?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. In following the Constitution and certifying the results of the 2020 election, Pence defied both Donald Trump and the MAGA mob at the Capitol yelling, “Hang Mike Pence!” Now the former vice president wants to have a political future in the Republican Party, which requires buying into the lie that the election was “stolen” from Trump. Having punctured that lie by certifying Joe Biden’s victory, Pence can hardly reverse himself now. So he zips his lips, hoping not to magnify the contradiction by calling attention to it.
“The way he views it is, he did his duty, he doesn’t need to talk about it more,” Marc Short, who was Pence’s chief of staff, told The Post. “He doesn’t want to re-litigate the past.”
As the Jan. 6 select committee showed in its hearing Thursday, however, the past isn’t done with Pence. He was the focal point of that tumultuous day, and sooner or later he is going to have to own that fact.
Trump’s last hope of clinging to power after losing the election was the insane theory, pushed by a right-wing lawyer named John Eastman, that the vice president could decide which electoral votes to count and which to discard — effectively, that Pence could ignore the voters and decide who won the election.
Thursday’s droning testimony had all the fizz of an academic legal seminar, but it was important because it revealed the emptiness at the heart of Trump’s attempt to reverse his loss to Biden. One of the most respected conservative jurists in the nation, retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, told the committee that Eastman’s ideas were dangerous and absurd. “There was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States, at all,” he said, “for the theory espoused by Mr. Eastman. At all. None.”
If Pence had done as Trump wanted, Luttig testified, that “would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis.”
But “the vice president never budged” from his position that he had no power to reject legally certified electoral votes or somehow suspend the process and throw the election’s outcome into doubt, Pence’s former general counsel, Greg Jacob, told the committee.
And neither did Pence budge when the Jan. 6 mob overran the building and chased the members of the House and the Senate out of their respective chambers. Whisked to a secure location in the Capitol complex, he insisted on staying put until the riot could be quelled and he and Congress could finish performing their constitutional duty. Jacob testified that when the Secret Service tried to put Pence into a car, Pence refused because he worried that he would be hustled away.
That makes Pence a hero — if only for a day.
It’s hard to overlook the way he stood silently by Trump during the long years of his presidency, still as an eerily realistic statue, while Trump violated every norm in the book and generally behaved like a puffed-up, autocratic buffoon.
Pence must have recognized Trump’s manifest unfitness for the presidency, but all the while he said nothing. Perhaps he thought the Republican-passed tax cuts and the conservative judicial appointments were worth overlooking Trump’s misconduct. Perhaps he hoped to someday inherit Trump’s loyal following and become his successor. Whatever his mind-set, he was complicit in the toxic dysfunction of the Trump era.
At the critical moment when Trump enlisted the MAGA hordes to pressure his vice president to overturn the will of the voters, though, Pence stood firm. He made the right choice.
He might want to pretend that Jan. 6 never happened, but history won’t let him. Nor will Trump.
Pence can’t have it both ways. He can’t be the loyal sidekick who rode shotgun with Trump for four years and also be the public servant who bravely defied a president’s illegal order to stage an effective coup d’état. He has to choose one of those identities, because he can’t occupy both at the same time. It’s a sad sign of the Republican Party’s distorted values that Pence’s best moment is a millstone around his neck.
If he tries to run for president in 2024, does he imagine that Trump will do anything but attack him for his act of betrayal? Pence has a career in the GOP only if Trump’s hold on the party is broken. And he should know by now that Trump interprets silence as weakness.
It should have been Pence in the witness chair at Thursday’s hearing. Pence should have volunteered — should have demanded — to testify. Pence kept our democracy alive; he could help restore the nation by treating that act as a point of pride. | 2022-06-17T15:56:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Mike Pence should be proud of what he did for his country on Jan. 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/mike-pence-should-be-proud-jan-6/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/mike-pence-should-be-proud-jan-6/ |
Now 25 but getting faster, Katie Ledecky still reaching for another wall
“The results are just the start. Or I hope they’re just the start,” Katie Ledecky said of her new coach and training program. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, File)
Later this summer, Katie Ledecky will celebrate the 10th anniversary of her breakthrough gold-medal swim in the women’s 800-meter freestyle at the 2012 London Olympics at the age of 15, an occasion she likely will mark with another 10,000 meters of training, a post-workout chocolate milk and perhaps some wild extravagance such as an extra hour of sleep.
Ten years ago, Ledecky’s feat was unprecedented for someone so young. These days — six more Olympic gold medals, three coaches, two cross-country moves and one Stanford degree since — she is doing things unheard of for someone so old.
When she dives off the starting blocks Saturday for her first swim at the FINA World Championships in Budapest — the 400-meter freestyle, the first of four events on her program over the eight-day meet — Ledecky, 25, will do so as a certified legend, the undisputed greatest female distance swimmer in history and one of the most decorated U.S. Olympic athletes ever.
“No way,” Ledecky said when asked if she could have imagined 10 years ago the career she has had. “I think right after 2012, my biggest goal was just to get back to another international meet, make the world championship team the next year. I never imagined I’d compete at this many world championships and Olympics. When you’re just starting a career like that, at 15, I wasn’t going to look ahead that far. Now I’m at the point where I’m one of the older members of the team. … So it’s hard not to think back see how far I’ve come.”
Multimedia: How Katie Ledecky swims faster than the rest of the world
Team USA will be led in Budapest by a quartet of familiar names: Ledecky, breaststroker Lilly King, backstroker Ryan Murphy and free/fly superstar Caeleb Dressel, who own a combined 20 Olympic gold medals, including eight at last year’s Tokyo Olympics and are all favorites to win multiple golds. The meet, however, was shoehorned into the schedule after Japan delayed its world championships in Fukuoka from 2022 to 2023 because of covid-19 concerns; as a result, the meet will be missing several prominent names, including Australia’s Ariarne Titmus, Ledecky’s top rival.
Last month, Titmus, 21, dashed off a time of three minutes 56.40 seconds in the final of the 400 free at the Australian national championships in Adelaide, shaving six-hundredths of a second off Ledecky’s standard from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and marking the first time one of Ledecky’s world records had been lowered by someone other than herself. (She remains the world record holder at 800 and 1,500 meters.)
“It was a really great swim. And I’d say I was not surprised to see it. She’s been very close in the past, and she was having a really great meet leading up to that event,” Ledecky said of Titmus, who last summer in Tokyo became the first woman to beat Ledecky in an Olympic final, edging her for gold in the 400. “My hat goes off to her for that swim. I know what it takes to go 3:56.”
Because of Titmus’s decision to skip worlds this summer, Ledecky likely won’t face her rival head-to-head again until next summer’s world championships in Fukuoka, a preview of what is certain to be one of the marquee matchups of the 2024 Paris Olympics. But Titmus will be represented in Budapest at Saturday’s 400 free final — at least digitally — by the thin red line moving across the water on television screens, representing her new world record.
Ledecky wouldn’t acknowledge being motivated by trying to get her record back, but also wouldn’t rule out the possibility it could happen.
“Of course, I’d love to go 3:56 again, or faster. Whether that’s in my capabilities, we’ll find out,” she said. “But I feel good about how I’m training, and I don’t see why I couldn’t get back down there, whether that’s this year or in the coming years. Being 3:57 last year [a 3:57.36 in Tokyo, her best time in the event since 2016], I was pretty close. It’s within reach.”
Just after the Tokyo Olympics — where she won the 800- and 1,500-meter freestyles, the sixth and seventh golds of her Olympic career, adding silvers in the 400 free and 4x200 free relay — Ledecky began contemplating leaving Stanford, where she had trained since the fall of 2016 as an undergraduate and later as a professional.
She chose the University of Florida and coach Anthony Nesty largely because the Gators boasted the deepest and most elite group of male middle-distance and distance swimmers in the world — a roster led by Bobby Finke, gold medalist in the 800 and 1,500 freestyles in Tokyo, and 400 free bronze medalist Kieran Smith. The theory: If the Gator men could push Ledecky to her limit in practice every day, something few if any American women can do, it would make her faster and sharper.
“It’s a lot of fun to be able to race at practice and really forget about looking at the clock,” Ledecky said. “For a few years at Stanford, on a lot of my distance sets, I’d basically be racing the clock. And I just kind of obsessed over the clock. So it’s been really nice to just kind of try to chase the guys and push them as much as I can.”
At a December meet, having trained with Ledecky for several months at that point, Finke was asked what it’s like to race her in practice every day. “You just have to expect to lose sometimes,” he said, “just because of how insane she is.”
Look back: Katie Ledecky raced 2,100 meters and won a silver medal on the busiest day of her Olympics
Even before she makes her first swim at world championships, Ledecky’s move clearly has already paid off. At April’s U.S. world championship trials in Indianapolis, Ledecky’s times in all four individual events — the 200, 400, 800 and 1,500 frees — were significantly faster than her corresponding times at the 2021 U.S. Olympic trials. In the case of the 800, Ledecky’s signature event and one in which she has taken gold at every Olympics and world championships for the past decade, her time of 8:09.27 was her fastest in nearly four years.
(Although Ledecky will drop the 200 free in Budapest to avoid having to race the 200 and 1,500 on the same day, she will swim it in the relay and could add the individual race back to her program for Paris, depending on how the schedule sets up.)
“The results are just the start. Or I hope they’re just the start,” Ledecky said. “They’re just a byproduct of being very happy in my environment and enjoying each day with my teammates and letting the results take care of themself.”
Twenty-five was long considered an unofficial age of demarcation for female distance swimmers — because of lack of financial opportunity as much as physiology. Four-time Olympic gold medalist Janet Evans, Ledecky’s predecessor as the queen of American distance swimming, retired at 24. Brooke Bennett won Olympic golds in the 800 free in 1996 as a 16-year-old and again in 2000 at age 20, but shoulder injuries effectively ended her career by 24. Since the women’s 800 free made its debut in Mexico City in 1968, the gold medalists have been 16, 15, 15, 18, 18, 17, 20, 16, 20, 22, 19, 15, 19 and 24 — with the last three being Ledecky.
“I’ve heard it throughout my whole career: Distance swimmers are best when they’re young,” she said. “And I always thought that was kind of silly, because there’s a lot of evidence that some of the best endurance athletes are older. I don’t see age as being a limiting factor here.”
Ledecky will be 27 by Paris, but she is already talking about extending her career through Los Angeles in 2028, when she would be 31. The grueling workload of a distance swimmer has chased plenty of younger swimmers to a landlocked life, but she still relishes the 6 a.m. practices, the relentless pursuit of improvement and the countless hours spent staring at that black line at the bottom of the pool.
“Distance training isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s something I just love,” she said. “I don’t see myself stopping after 2024. At this point — I’m not going to commit to anything, but I could very easily see myself going through 2028 now. I just love the sport. I love the training. I love the challenges.” | 2022-06-17T15:57:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Katie Ledecky enters another world championships at 25, and faster - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/06/17/katie-ledecky-fina-swimming-world-championships/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/06/17/katie-ledecky-fina-swimming-world-championships/ |
FILE - Liverpool’s Sadio Mane passes the ball during the Champions League final soccer match between Liverpool and Real Madrid at the Stade de France in Saint Denis near Paris, Saturday, May 28, 2022. Sadio Mané looks to be headed for Bayern Munich in a move that will end his trophy-filled six-year stint at Liverpool. A person familiar with the situation says Liverpool has reached an agreement with the German champions for the transfer of the Senegal forward in a total package worth $42.9 million. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File) | 2022-06-17T15:57:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | AP source: Liverpool reaches agreement with Bayern over Mané - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/ap-source-liverpool-reaches-agreement-with-bayern-over-mane/2022/06/17/863715f6-ee4f-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/ap-source-liverpool-reaches-agreement-with-bayern-over-mane/2022/06/17/863715f6-ee4f-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
How to do Vegas without setting foot in a casino or club
A view of Fremont East District in Las Vegas on May 28. (Photos by Mikayla Whitmore for The Washington Post)
No local will dispute that the city you see in TV shows and movies is over-the-top. There are tourism-board slogans to thank for that image, too. If you have no interest in playing blackjack, popping bottles or wandering a convention floor on your company’s dime, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s nothing for you here. You’d be wrong.
“Our official advertising has been: We’ve adjusted the rules so you can party all night. But there’s a lot more nuance to the city,” said entertainment columnist John Katsilometes, who has lived in Vegas since 1996. “It’s not just people carrying a three-yard margarita down the Strip.”
As I learned while living in Vegas for nearly four years, there’s so much beyond the four-mile stretch of fountains, ringing slot machines and faux landmarks.
A local's guide to Las Vegas
You’ll find hiking that rivals popular Southwest destinations, a growing art scene and award-winning food from chefs who aren’t named Gordon Ramsay or Bobby Flay. And there’s an often-overlooked community that makes this tourism machine run 24/7. These are just a few of the reasons I’ve been back five times since I moved to D.C. more than a decade ago.
Las Vegas is a hotel town. It’s not an Airbnb town — or not in the way you think. You won’t find lots of little homey apartments to rent like you would in D.C. or New York.
That doesn’t mean you have to snake through the smoky gaming floor of a mega hotel-casino to get to your room. I often opt for Vdara, a hotel and condo tower on the Strip. Some owners list their units on rental sites for lower rates than the hotel, and you can also avoid the dreaded $45-per-night resort fee. The latest one I rented included free parking. Overall, I saved hundreds of dollars.
Vdara is nonsmoking, nongaming and every room is a suite with a kitchen. It’s steps away from luxury casino-hotels like the Cosmopolitan, Bellagio and Aria, where Vdara guests have access to even bigger pools than the one at their home tower — clutch on 100-plus-degree days.
I’ve recommended similar options to friends, such as the Signature, a non-casino hotel with suites and condos attached to the MGM Grand. If you want to go all out, the Waldorf Astoria and Four Seasons are other casino-free options. For more of a boutique style, there’s The English, a new hotel downtown by chef Todd English.
If the lights of the Strip are the first thing you notice when landing in Vegas, the mountains are surely the second. About 20 minutes from the Strip is Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area — nearly 196,000 protected acres of red sandstone peaks and limestone that have become a booming destination for rock climbing.
According to Erin McDermott, executive director of Friends of Red Rock Canyon, more than 4 million people visit each year.
“It’s so fun that I can see John Legend on the Strip one day, and the next day go out to Red Rock and have a national park experience,” McDermott said. The area’s popularity is growing, she said, thanks to social media and famous climbers such as Alex Honnold, who highlighted his move to Vegas in the film “Free Solo.”
Don’t let its rock-climbing reputation scare you; there are hikes for every skill level. McDermott recommends the Moenkopi trail, which is about two miles and connects to the Calico area (a favorite of mine because of its concentration of red rocks). For more experienced hikers, McDermott suggests the six-mile Windy Peak hike. Reservations are required from October to May for the 13-mile scenic loop drive.
Ride-hailing can get you to Red Rock’s visitor center, but getting a ride back can be a challenge, McDermott said; cell service is spotty or nonexistent. If you don’t have a rental car, McDermott suggests finding scooter, e-bike or driving tours, such as Pink Jeep.
If you have a rental car, consider Valley of Fire State Park. A chance to see petroglyphs carved by Native Americans at least 2,000 years ago is well worth the hour-long drive from the city. The ¾-mile Mouse’s Tank hike (more like a walk) is one of the best ways to see them. Then do the spectacular 16-mile drive through the valley that will make you feel like you’re in a car commercial.
Of course, there’s more beyond these desert landscapes. Mount Charleston, about an hour from Vegas, offers skiing in the winter and a cooler escape during summers. You can also kayak Lake Mead near the Hoover Dam.
A guide to Vegas's Arts District
One of the biggest changes in Vegas in recent years has been the explosion of the Arts District. Originally 18 blocks between the Strat Hotel and Casino (the space needle-looking one) and Fremont Street (“old Vegas”), the neighborhood of galleries, thrift stores, restaurants and bars has almost doubled in size, Arts District president Abby Stroot said. Murals cover once abandoned and industrial buildings where new owners have moved in. They still coexist with auto and upholstery shops and long-standing antique shops.
“The core of the Arts District is small business. … It’s people who are passionate about what they do, their business, community, and that’s really what started,” said Stroot, whose sewing business Pincushion began in the district.
The area is constantly changing, Katsilometes said. “If there are few months between visits, there are things down here that are going to take you by surprise.”
The great American reboot
Katsilometes noted the boom in performance spaces in the Arts District and downtown — a side effect of when performers from Strip productions had to get creative during the pandemic shutdown.
The Arts District alone is home to the Majestic Repertory Theater and Particle Ink — both immersive experiences in different ways. AREA15, off Interstate 15, is a giant mixed-use space devoted to virtual reality, rides and interactive art. Downtown, Cheapshot hosts raunchy, circus-like performances in an intimate space.
“People don’t think Vegas has culture, and I think that is so wrong,” Stroot said.
Restaurant heavyweights flock to Vegas. Instagram-famous Carbone? It’s at Aria. Three Michelin-starred Joël Robuchon? Bring your formal wear. Guy Fieri’s Kitchen and Bar? You can dine in his college town. But you’ll find most locally loved (and owned) spots away from the Strip.
Lotus of Siam may already be on your radar. James Beard-award-winning chef Saipin Chutima’s Thai restaurant specializes in northern dishes with an extensive wine list. Its current location on Flamingo Road is a quick Uber from the Strip, or a long walk if you feel motivated. The original restaurant — inside a strip mall on Sahara Avenue with The Green Door swingers club — is under renovation.
A guide to Vegas's Chinatown
After a day of hiking on my last visit, I stopped at Letty’s de Leticia’s Cocina, a small Mexican spot in the Arts District, recommended by locals, with 11 tables that were full and had others waiting on a Sunday afternoon.
Esther’s Kitchen, a few blocks away, was on everyone’s list. It is unassuming from the front, and don’t let street construction deter you. Inside, pasta is made fresh every morning, along with sourdough loaves that rest on racks outside the kitchen. The best part of the meal was listening to my server — a Vegas native — talk about how the neighborhood has changed.
As Ryan Doherty, whose runs several bars and restaurants downtown, reminded me: Vegas is a hospitality town, which sets it apart from other cities.
“I think we have some of the best service in the world here,” Doherty said. “In L.A. … that server is waiting for their callback. This server, it’s their career.”
It’s not an exaggeration to say that you could easily spend thousands of dollars on bottle service at a nightclub in one trip. I promise you’ll have a truer local — and more affordable — experience downtown.
“We are always telling people, ‘Hey, it’s $50 to get into that nightclub, but if you take a $20 Uber to the Arts District, you can get in instantly to any of the bars down here,’” Stroot said. The area includes the Jamaican cocktail bar and restaurant Jammyland, the vintage-inspired Velveteen Rabbit and the dive-y ReBar, home of $3 beers.
If you’ve ever walked through the Fremont Street Experience, you may have gotten to the end of the lit-up canopy and turned around. Doherty said that changed around 2016, when there was just enough twinkle to get visitors to cross into Fremont East. Doherty’s Corner Bar Management group has been a key part of the growth in the area, opening seven venues in the city in the past two years.
A guide to Fremont East
Commonwealth, their original bar downtown, has a rooftop overlooking El Cortez, the hotel and casino once owned by mobster Bugsy Siegel. Inside is a speakeasy called The Laundry Room — once an actual laundry room — where guests agree to rules, like no talking politics or religion, before entering the tiny, dark bar.
It’s a stark contrast with Corner Bar’s newest venue, We All Scream, a colorful and ice cream-serving nightclub. There’s more, and no two venues serve the same crowd. They sit beside longtime favorite bars including Atomic Liquors, Downtown Cocktail Room and The Griffin.
“Las Vegas is a city like no other in the sense that we build up, and we tear down. We are so focused on innovation that the subject of history preservation can be overlooked,” said Neon Museum executive director Aaron Berger.
I toured the museum’s Neon Boneyard on the city’s 117th birthday (purely coincidence), guided by Frank DeFrancesco, who is Vegas born and raised.
Berger said one of their goals is to tell the story of underrepresented people. A massive piece in the museum’s collection is the bright pink Moulin Rouge sign, which DeFrancesco tells us was the first desegregated casino — open only for six months in 1955. It later became the site of a meeting to integrate all Vegas casinos.
The Neon Museum’s oldest sign is from the Green Shack on Fremont Street — advertising steaks, chicken and cocktails — either from 1933 or 1934, DeFrancesco says, after prohibition. One of its biggest treasures is the 188-foot-tall Hard Rock Casino and Hotel guitar, which tunes itself with a sequence of neon lights.
Ask Berger what Vegas sign he’s eyeing the most, and he’ll tell you the Hacienda Horseman — a man riding a bucking horse in the downtown area. Berger said he believes the 1940s sign shows the first person of a color depicted in neon.
Beyond the Neon Museum, you’ll find history scattered throughout the valley, including pop culture anomalies like the Burlesque Hall of Fame in the Arts District and hundreds of games at the Pinball Hall of Fame, with machines dating back to the 1930s. You can also explore the valley’s earliest days at the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort — the first non-Native American settlement — or the city’s dark past at the Mob Museum. | 2022-06-17T15:57:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Things to do off the Las Vegas strip - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/fremont-las-vegas-things-to-do/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/fremont-las-vegas-things-to-do/ |
Lhamon, Scurry and Spencer discuss the societal and cultural impact of Title IX 50 years later
The passage of Title IX 50 years ago transformed the playing field for women and girls. Join Washington Post Live on Thursday, June 23 at 11:00 a.m. ET for a series of conversations with Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, Briana Scurry, former goalkeeper for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team, and Jasmyne Spencer, player for the Angel City Football Club, about the societal and cultural impact of this groundbreaking legislation and the challenges that remain.
Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education
Former Goalkeeper, U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team
Author, “My Greatest Save”
Angel City Football Club Player
Content from National Women’s Law Center
Title IX: The Next Era for Education Justice
Fifty years ago, the landmark Title IX law was passed, prohibiting sex discrimination in education and ultimately paving the way for a new generation of progress in the fight for gender justice. In a segment presented by the National Women’s Law Center, the organization’s Vice President for Education and Workplace Justice, Emily Martin, will be joined by Director of Justice for Student Survivors, Shiwali Patel, to discuss the next era of Demanding IX for all students – regardless of gender – so that they can learn with safety, dignity, and equality.
Vice President for Education & Workplace Justice, National Women’s Law Center
Shiwali Patel
Director, Justice for Student Survivors & Senior Counsel, National Women’s Law Center | 2022-06-17T15:57:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lhamon, Scurry and Spencer discuss the societal and cultural impact of Title IX 50 years later - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/06/23/lhamon-scurry-spencer-discuss-societal-cultural-impact-title-ix-50-years-later/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/06/23/lhamon-scurry-spencer-discuss-societal-cultural-impact-title-ix-50-years-later/ |
Europe heat wave makes Tube sweaty in London, kills baby birds in Spain
People cross London Bridge on Friday, the hottest day of the year. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)
LONDON — This city was not built for extreme heat. The London Underground, though a marvel of the Victorian era, is only partially air-conditioned. And the soupy, sweaty “Tube” put even the stiffest upper lips to the test on Friday, Britain’s hottest day of the year.
“You just grin and bear it,” said Michael Finch, a 33-year-old lawyer who was pulling luggage, carrying a 5-litre water bottle and playing to type.
“Make sure you have some water,” he advised, “and then look forward to getting out the other side.”
Discomfort is being felt across much of western Europe this week, as a punishing heat wave sends temperatures soaring.
The thermometer at London’s Heathrow airport topped 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius). “Worcester will be hotter than Hawaii,” one local headline read.
Valencia, Spain, hit 102 degrees (39 Celsius) on Friday, a June record high, while the hottest city in France was Villevieille, in the south, at 107 degrees (41.6 Celsius).
The heat wave in France is expected to peak on Saturday. Germany, Spain, Poland and Austria will all feel usually hot over the next few days. The heat is then expected to shift to southern Europe early next week.
The U.K.’s Met Office said that the temperatures were surprising for mid-June, though they have started recording higher temperatures in recent years.
“This is the type of thing that climate scientists were warning about, and unfortunately, it does look like this is going to become more common,” said Alex Burkill, a senior meteorologist at the U.K.’s Met Office.
In Spain, where hot air blowing in from Africa has helped push up temperatures, authorities have issued dozens of heat warnings and emergency services are continuing to battle wildfires. In southern Spain, hundreds of baby birds have reportedly died after leaving their scorching nests too early.
The extreme heat, coupled with lack of rain, has reduced some of Europe’s major rivers to low levels. Italy’s Po, the country’s largest river, is so low that shipwrecks are resurfacing. Authorities in northern Italy are increasingly concerned about the possibility of water shortages.
Across France on Friday, the highest heat-warning category was issued for areas in the west and southwest of the country.
“Be vigilant!,” French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne wrote on Twitter.
Paris faces high levels of air pollution linked to the heat wave, which prompted lowered speed limits in and around the city on Friday.
French railway company SNCF warned that many of its connections could be delayed on Friday, as the heat may force train conductors to slow down. SNCF said it had deployed additional workers to monitor potential deformations of railway tracks.
In France, and other countries, locals are snapping up portable air conditioners to help cope with the heat. The concept of air conditioning never really caught in Europe the same way it has in America, but their popularity here has risen in recent years.
France usually exports electricity during the summer, but the heavy use of air conditioners and fans this week forced network operator RTE to import electricity from abroad, AFP reported. France heavily relies on nuclear energy, but many of its reactors are currently taken off the grid due to maintenance and safety issues.
Record-hot summers have already prompted fundamental changes in France and elsewhere in Europe. After a heat wave killed 15,000 people in France in 2003, French nursing homes developed emergency plans for weeks like this. Many of them are now equipped with air-conditioned rooms, additional ventilation, or sprinklers that cool down building facades. France’s Ministry of Health operates an information hotline.
In Paris, city authorities encourage residents and tourists to use a dedicated website to find over 900 “islands of coolness” which include city parks, cemeteries, swimming pools and museums. The site also points to dedicated “cooling routes” — for example, streets with lush trees — that connect those spaces. Other French cities rely on misting devices.
But climate scientists say that more needs to be done as climate change makes periods of intense heat more frequent.
Hannah Cloke, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, said Britain was “really not prepared” for extreme heat, with offices, houses and nursing homes “not built to help keep people cool.”
“People aren’t taking it very seriously. They think about ice creams and having fun, but they aren’t seeing the risk for vulnerable people,” she said. Hundreds of people in Britain die every year from heat waves.
To help keep cool, many Brits on Friday flocked to outdoor swimming pools and ponds and fountains.
Sandra Greenidge, a 47-year-old babysitter, brought the toddler she looks after to London’s Southbank Center cultural complex, where fountain jets blasted water in the air, creating “rooms” that appear and then quickly disappear.
“We don’t have the infrastructure for … this heat,” she said. “Considering that, we do reasonably well. A lot of places have become dual purposes — like the galleries providing things like this for children.”
The toddler wiggled out of her arms, grabbed his bucket and waded back into the fountain. “We may be here for hours,” Greenidge said.
Noack reported from Paris. | 2022-06-17T15:59:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Europe heat wave hits U.K., Spain, France - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/17/heat-wave-europe-uk-spain-france/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/17/heat-wave-europe-uk-spain-france/ |
Former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro pleads not guilty to contempt
Former White House official Peter Navarro speaks to members of the media following a court appearance earlier this month. (Eric Lee/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro pleaded not guilty Friday to two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The plea came at a brief hearing in federal district court in Washington, where Navarro appeared with his new lawyers, John P. Rowley III and John S. Irving IV, and took a less combative posture than he had immediately after his arrest. U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta scheduled his trial for Nov. 17.
Outside the court, Navarro’s defense attorney questioned the appropriateness of Navarro’s arrest, but said the legal team would take that matter up “at the appropriate time.” Navarro alleges he was in contact with the FBI and could have turned himself in, but that agents improperly pulled him off a jetway at Reagan National Airport and put him in handcuffs and leg chains
Navarro is one of two former Trump aides to face criminal charges after ignoring committee subpoenas for testimony and documents from the Jan. 6 committee. The other, former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, is set to face trial July 18 after a judge on Wednesday refused to dismiss his indictment.
After announcing Navarro’s indictment, the Justice Department said it would not pursue charges against to other Trump aides, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications chief Daniel Scavino Jr., who the House had similarly referred for prosecution for rebuffing the committee.
The House investigative panel issued a subpoena to Navarro on Feb. 9, seeking information about his actions to develop a strategy to delay or overturn certification of the 2020 election.
In a letter accompanying the subpoena, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the select committee, cited news reports that the former Trump trade and manufacturing policy adviser “worked with Steve Bannon and others to develop and implement a plan to delay Congress’s certification of, and ultimately change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”
The letter also cited a recent book by Navarro, “In Trump Time,” in which he detailed a plan called “The Green Bay Sweep.” He described the plan as the “last best chance to snatch a stolen election from the Democrats’ jaws of deceit.”
Navarro’s team asked for a trial date in January or later, noting that the former Trump trade adviser would be promoting a different, forthcoming book through the end of the year, “Taking Back Trump’s America.” The book, attorney Irving said, “is important to him in terms of income and what not. It’s not a trivial thing.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Vaughn objected that because the judge’s schedule is packed with Jan. 6 Capitol riot cases, picking a date in 2023 could mean the trial would slip to April.
“The government has serious issues about delaying trial for a book tour,” Vaughn said. “The public has an interest in the resolution of this case.”
Mehta agreed. “I don’t think it’s in the public interest to wait until April. It’s got complicated legal issues, but as far as trying it, it is not going to take that much time,” he said. | 2022-06-17T16:34:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro pleads not guilty to contempt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/peter-navarro-not-guilty-contempt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/peter-navarro-not-guilty-contempt/ |
What John Eastman and ‘the pardon list’ means
White House lawyer Eric Herschmann said on June 16 that he told Trump lawyer John Eastman on Jan. 7 to get a criminal defense lawyer, because he’ll need it. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
It’s been reported on, whispered about and hinted at since the dust was still settling on the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection: There was an effort afoot to pardon key players in the GOP attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
On Thursday, the Jan. 6 committee put some meat on the bones. It disclosed an email that showed that none other than the Trump lawyer who led the plot, John Eastman, sought to be put on what he called “the pardon list” shortly after Jan. 6.
Among the many significant disclosures in the committee’s hearing Thursday, it was surely one of the biggest. The email may not have been a smoking gun in itself, but it bellowed yet more smoke over the scandal. And in combination with other recent disclosures, it lends significantly more weigh to the idea that the effort to overturn the election was indeed criminal.
The way Eastman made the request was also crucial: He didn’t just say he was seeking a pardon; he indicated in the email to fellow Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that there was a known “pardon list” circulating. That suggests that the plotters weighed the possible need for a pardon in some considerable measure — that those who led the effort to overturn the election believed they might have enough legal liability that they floated the extraordinary step of obtaining rare, preemptive presidential pardons.
It appears to be the first time we’ve seen firm evidence of such a request. And while by itself it doesn’t constitute an admission of guilt, it fills out a fast-crystallizing picture that those involved in the plot knew what they were doing was, at the very least, potentially illegal. And in the case of Eastman, there is significant evidence that he knew his plot was indeed illegal.
Getting to this moment has been a slow build.
CNN reported less than two weeks after Jan. 6 that Trump had considered pardons both for himself and his family, as well as for Republican members of Congress. But he was reportedly talked out of it by White House lawyers, who warned that he would likely need to cite specific crimes people were being pardoned for. The report mentioned that some House Republicans had “sought clemency from Trump,” but didn’t specifically say who had sought them.
Last month, the Jan. 6 committee cited such an effort in a letter seeking testimony from one House Republican, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.); CNN reported that a “Stop the Steal” leader said he planned the rally with Biggs and other members of Congress. But that letter did not specifically say Biggs himself sought a pardon. It merely cited “information from former White House personnel” that suggested some House lawmakers sought pardons, and that Biggs had been “identified as a potential participant in that effort.”
Then came last week, when Jan. 6 committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) started naming names — or at least, a name. She said Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and “multiple other Republican congressmen” sought pardons. Perry denied it, in no uncertain terms.
We don’t yet know the truth of the Perry allegation — or just how much other GOP lawmakers were implicated. But we do now know that there was a pardon effort at the highest levels of this plot.
That by itself doesn’t establish consciousness of guilt. There are differing views on whether accepting a pardon constitutes a legal admission of guilt. But a federal appeals court ruled last year — apparently for the first time — that it didn’t.
In Eastman’s case, though, his seeking a pardon is, in many ways, the cherry on top of his other statements and actions.
At Thursday’s hearing, Greg Jacob, the former general counsel to then-Vice President Mike Pence, added to the evidence that Eastman knew what he was doing was illegal. He said Eastman conceded to him that his plot to overturn the election would have lost 9-0 at the Supreme Court, on the merits. But he said Eastman believed the court might punt on the merits and stay out of the dispute altogether.
Separately, Eastman’s own memo acknowledged that he was urging Pence to disregard the Electoral Count Act. Eastman did so because he viewed the law as unconstitutional — even though courts had not declared it as such.
And even shortly after the Capitol riot, as he continued to push for Pence to help overturn the results, Eastman told Jacob that he wanted Pence to consider committing a “relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act. (In Eastman’s mind, this was okay because he believed the act had already been violated: In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, a debate over objections to election results had taken longer than the two hours allotted to Congress.)
That’s a whole lot of evidence that Eastman knew he had been pushing for something that violated the law. He might have felt that law was unconstitutional or that it had already been violated, but he was literally saying the law should be ignored. And then he asked for a pardon.
Eastman could certainly argue that he was merely seeking to insulate himself from being targeted by the incoming administration. Indeed, in the blurred portion of the email, he appears to have gone on to say that a pardon would “taint me, but given the outright lies and false witness being spewed, having that protection is probably the prudent” course.
I went frame-by-frame through the Committee video, and found a bit more detail from Eastman's pardon email:
EASTMAN: "I've decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works. Will taint me, but given the outright lies and false witness being spewed..." pic.twitter.com/Y5XASxGGK3
— Tom Dreisbach (@TomDreisbach) June 16, 2022
Eastman might also have thought the law was bad or even unconstitutional, and he might have believed the Supreme Court might give him a pass because it prefers to stay out of political disputes.
But you can’t ignore all the evidence that he seemed well aware that his plan violated the law. That’s by his own admission.
Also relevant here is what happened the day after the riot. In a clip played repeatedly by the Jan. 6 committee this week, White House lawyer Eric Herschmann testified about a conversation he had with Eastman on Jan. 7.
When Eastman pressed forward with claims of election problems, Herschmann says he told Eastman: ″Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer; you’re going to need it.”
So it would seem plenty of others believed that Eastman had legal liability shortly after Jan. 6.
We still don’t know how extensive the pardon deliberations were. But what we do know — based both on early reporting and by the evidence Thursday — is that people were pretty scared that what they had done could come back to bite them. What’s more, the Eastman email seems to be on top of other evidence the committee previously alluded to, from “former White House personnel.” So there’s surely more to come. | 2022-06-17T16:34:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What John Eastman and ‘the pardon list’ means - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/john-eastman-pardon-list/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/john-eastman-pardon-list/ |
D.C. United and its supporters moved into Audi Field in July 2018. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
MLS is planning to award the 2023 All-Star Game to Audi Field, bringing the summer exhibition to Washington for the first time since 2004, people familiar with the selection process said Friday.
An announcement seems likely next week. D.C. United and league officials said they did not want to comment.
MLS held the All-Star Game at RFK Stadium in 2002 and 2004. The league’s marquee game, MLS Cup, was staged at RFK three times before the format changed in 2012 to reward hosting rights to the higher seed.
The All-Star Game format has fluctuated throughout its history, starting in 1996 with an East vs. West match. Between 2005 and 2019, the MLS all-stars faced prominent visiting clubs, including Bayern Munich, Chelsea and Manchester United.
Since canceling the 2020 game because of the pandemic, the league has turned to a clash between select squads from MLS and Liga MX, the Mexican top division. This year’s game will take place Aug. 10 at Allianz Field in St. Paul, Minn. It’s unclear whether that MLS-Liga MX pairing will continue next season.
MLS has made a concerted effort to award the All-Star Game to clubs that are new to the league or have built new stadiums. Audi Field, which holds 20,000 spectators, opened in July 2018 and Allianz Field debuted in 2019. The only exception in recent years was Chicago’s Soldier Field in 2017, when Real Madrid visited.
Last year’s showcase was held at Banc of California Stadium, home to Los Angeles FC, a 2018 expansion team that christened its venue that same season.
The most recent All-Star Game in any sport to visit Washington was Major League Baseball’s in 2018 at Nationals Park. | 2022-06-17T16:38:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MLS expected to award 2023 All-Star Game to Audi Field - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/mls-all-star-game-washington-2023/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/mls-all-star-game-washington-2023/ |
France's President Emmanuel Macron, right, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, left, Prime Minister of Italy Mario Draghi, center, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, second left, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Kyiv on June 16. The European Union leaders vowed to back Kyiv's bid to become an official candidate to join the bloc in a high-profile show of support for the country fending off a Russian invasion. (Ludovic Marin, Pool via AP)
It felt like a historic occasion when the leaders of Europe’s largest states, Germany, Italy and France, finally visited Kyiv on Thursday. Air raid sirens howled as their night train pulled into the Ukrainian capital. French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of “a message of European unity.” But behind the warm words, there was also plenty of cold calculation as Europe’s leaders push to end the war as soon as possible.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, none of the European Union heavyweights had seen fit to visit Ukraine. Macron, who boasted that he has spent “at least a hundred hours” on the phone with Vladimir Putin, declared that he would travel to Kyiv only if he felt it was “useful.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke dismissively of not wanting to “join the queue of people who do a quick in-and-out for a photo opportunity.”
But the Thursday visit didn’t turn out to be particularly “useful” to Ukraine, which has been pleading desperately for more weapons; nor was it much more than a photo op. Apart from six additional howitzers from France, all the European leaders offered was support for Ukraine’s bid to become a member of the E.U. at some point in the future.
But how large the Ukrainian state will still be if it joins is anyone’s guess. The visitors made it clear that they want the war to end as soon as possible — and that they expect Kyiv to make concessions to make that happen.
Italy, which gets 40 percent of its imported gas from Russia, had already begun to circulate a peace plan that would implicitly compel Ukraine to give up political control over Crimea and Donbas. Both Italy and Germany have also begun to undermine sanctions against Russia by allowing their energy companies to open ruble accounts to pay for gas and oil, thus helping to fuel Putin’s war machine.
Macron, who had been widely criticized for recently declaring that Russia shouldn’t be “humiliated,” doubled down on that notion. He said that the harsh terms imposed on Germany after its loss in World War I had been “a historic mistake” that “lost the peace because [France] wanted to humiliate Germany.” The implication is that if Russia is not treated with leniency now, it will commit far worse crimes in the future, just as Germany did in World War II.
Macron’s analogy is particularly ill-suited since it assumes that Russia has already lost the war. But this could not be further from the truth. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russia controls one-fifth of his country. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has said that Russia outnumbers Ukraine in artillery fire by 20 to 1 in some areas. By contrast, Germany was defeated in 1918 and forced to accept terms that cost it 13 percent of its territory in Europe. Nobody can or will make such demands on Russia. Macron’s analogy is wrong in every way, and he knows it.
Behind the desire to end the conflict soon lies the false assumption that this will allow Europe to resume business as usual. Russia is a crucial trading partner for Germany. Macron wants an end to the painful side effects of the war that are threatening to unravel his new tenure as president, and his Italian counterpart Mario Draghi, too, is struggling with the fallout from the sanctions. The trio sees a swift end of the war as necessary if they are to form a new axis of economic and political power in continental Europe after Brexit.
But this realpolitik approach is not only morally wrong, it is also shortsighted. Putin has notoriously argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a constituent republic, was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He has made it clear that he seeks to undo this “catastrophe.”
If Putin is appeased now, as he was in 2014 when Germany and France failed to freeze the conflict in Ukraine, he will simply take the time to regroup. Bowing to economic pressures undermines the entire concept of deterrence. Germany long dismissed warnings that Moscow might try to leverage its deep dependence on Russian natural gas, thereby emboldening the Kremlin. Now Germany, Italy and France seem prepared to make the same mistake again.
With Poland, the Baltic States, Finland and Sweden seriously concerned about their security, the soft Western European approach is also likely to exacerbate tensions within the E.U. The German government, in particular, remains tone-deaf to their concerns.
Russia, meanwhile, shows little sign of concern. During the Kyiv visit, former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev sneered at the European leaders, calling them “fans of frogs, liverwurst and spaghetti.” Yet even as Moscow continues its indiscriminate bombing and shelling of Ukrainian civilians, Russia’s politicians are still treated as rational actors by those who seek peace at all costs.
Putin cannot, and will not, give up his claim on Eastern Europe. The supposed realpolitik of Europe’s most powerful countries is both shameful and ill-considered. France and Germany, of all countries, should know that an ambitious dictator can never be appeased.
A young soldier’s death reminds Ukrainians that the war is taking their best | 2022-06-17T16:42:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | European leaders still can’t shake the urge to appease Russia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/macron-scholz-draghi-kyiv-ukraine-russia-appeasement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/macron-scholz-draghi-kyiv-ukraine-russia-appeasement/ |
Readers critique The Post: The battle of the sexes wages on
Regarding the June 5 Sports article “Swiatek dispatches Gauff with ease in final”:
I don’t know Billie Jean King, but I feel comfortable she would share my disappointment in the amount of front-page newspaper real estate in the Sports section devoted to this year’s women’s French Open champion, Iga Swiatek, on June 5. The photograph and text on the back page were more deserving to be on the front than what was published.
Here we have a champion who played a formidable match against Coco Gauff (a great player in her own right), winning her second title at Roland Garros, retaining her status as the No. 1 player in the world, and extending her match winning streak to 35.
I’m just not clear how her accomplishment in a major sport receives less attention than a perspective on someone who hasn’t won anything of note in ages.
Please, we’re supposed to be making progress for equality in, among other things, the sports world.
Laurie Lieberman, Alexandria
There are Republicans in D.C., too
The Post’s credo, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” apparently does not apply to its coverage of political campaigns for elected offices or endorsements of candidates in the District of Columbia.
In the May 15 editorial “For D.C. mayor,” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s voters were “urged to reelect her to a third term.” The endorsement for D.C. delegate to the U.S. House [“For D.C. delegate,” editorial, May 23] stated: “We urge voters to again return Ms. Norton to the House.”
In general, Democratic Party primary endorsements for incumbents called for their “reelection.” Does this mean the editorial board is intent on ignoring the fact that the D.C. Republican Party has candidates seeking nominations for mayor, delegate, council chair, at-large council member and other offices? Post editorials should be informing voters that these endorsements are for Democratic Party nominations and that winners will be facing Republican candidates in November.
Nelson Rimensnyder, Washington
The writer, a Republican, is a candidate for D.C. delegate to the U.S. House.
Is it a republic or a democracy? Yes!
In response to the June 4 Free for All letter “A republic, if KidsPost can keep it,” I have to ask how the writer defines his terms. We live in a republic, not a democracy, he says. What definition of democracy is he using? “Direct democracy,” which means citizens directly vote on every law? No country in the world has such a system. Or representative democracy, which means the voters directly elect representatives who make decisions on their behalf (which we clearly have today)?
It’s true that the framers of the Constitution associated the word “democracy” with mob rule. But it’s also true that by “republic,” they meant a constitutional representative democracy — that is, a constitutional system that incorporates indirect majority rule, with limits on government power and minority rights protected. So when people assert that we live in a republic, not a democracy, it’s a contradiction in terms, because the republic they created was then, and is even more today than it was in 1787, a form of democracy.
If the question is “Do we live in a republic or a democracy?,” the answer is “both.”
Steve Miller, Rockville
D-Day anniversary is not just another day
I looked in vain in the June 6 edition of The Post to see something to commemorate D-Day, which happened 78 years ago. No luck! It looks as though D-Day is fading into oblivion. We had so many casualties that day, and it was a heavy-priced victory, something that should not be forgotten. Let’s do better on the 79th anniversary!
Frank Cohn, Fort Belvoir
The writer is a World War II veteran.
A boondoggle it wasn’t
In his review of Jeff Nussbaum’s book “Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History,” historian Douglas Brinkley referred to the letter that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had prepared in case the Normandy landings of 1944 failed — or, as Brinkley put it, if the invasion “turned into a Dunkirk-like boondoggle” [“In undelivered speeches, history’s alternate paths,” Outlook, June 5].
But the famous Battle of Dunkirk was the opposite of a failed invasion; it was the successful evacuation of British troops from France in 1940. And “boondoggle” means, according to Merriam-Webster, “a wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft.” If the Normandy invasion had failed and Hitler had kept his grip on Western Europe, it would have been a disaster or a tragedy, perhaps, but certainly not a boondoggle.
Paul Boudreaux, Takoma Park
I know that policies on reporting ages of people in news articles and photographs have likely changed in recent years, but, given the captions on the May 31 front-page photographs, I am having trouble making sense of The Post’s policies. The caption for the top photo, of three women at a flower shop in Uvalde, Tex., included the ages of all three women. As all three women are clearly adults, their exact ages do not seem very relevant to the photo. The caption for the second photo on the front page, of two men in Buffalo, Wyo., did not include the men’s ages.
A critical distinction when it comes to ‘actual malice’
The June 3 Style article examining the outcome of Johnny Depp’s libel suit against Amber Heard [“Why Depp won in U.S. but not in U.K.”] inaccurately described the American legal standard for a public figure to prevail in a libel suit.
The article stated that to satisfy the “actual malice” standard (adopted by the Supreme Court in the 1964 decision New York Times v. Sullivan), the plaintiff must show that the defendant knew that “a libelous statement was untrue when they made it.” This misstated the test established by the Supreme Court, which provides that a plaintiff may recover if the defendant either (1) knew the statement was untrue, or (2) acted with reckless disregard of whether the statement was true. This is a critical distinction, with significant implications. For example, if a media entity publishes a falsehood without doing due diligence to determine the truth of a statement, it can have legal exposure under the actual-malice standard.
John S. Ross III, Holden, Mass.
The writer is an instructor of constitutional law at Assumption University.
Getting the wrong idea about teachers and summer break
I understand the point of Joe Heller’s June 7 editorial cartoon was related to the crazy battlegrounds that schools have turned into — figuratively and literally, unfortunately. However, I must protest the misapprehension held by so many people: teachers and the summer break!
First of all, I know of no public school system (and have never heard of a private school, either) that gives teachers a three-month break (unlike some colleges). Here in Montgomery County, it’s at most eight weeks, not 12. And, contrary to the biggest misapprehension people hold, teachers are unemployed during those eight weeks. And, because teachers are contract employees, they cannot collect unemployment (unlike auto workers who traditionally were “laid off” while assembly lines retooled for new-model production).
Actually, I really liked the cartoon and thought it very timely and pertinent. I just wish Heller had written “two” instead of “three” months.
Leslie Backus, Silver Spring
The writer is a retired science teacher.
Reporter’s dismissal could lead others to fear speaking out
Regarding the June 10 Style article “Post reporter who criticized paper online is dismissed”:
As a subscriber, I’m disturbed by the firing of Felicia Sonmez. In my eyes, her dismissal has done more damage to the reputation of The Post than any public comments Sonmez made. It is discouraging that The Post fired her. I find it likely that other staff members have experienced the problems she raised, and kicking her out will result in a culture of fear rather than of collegiality. The Post’s staff might be less likely to speak out about injustice at the paper, and good, honest reporting is likely to suffer. I value reporting done by people who have the strength to uncover the wrongs of the powerful, and I value leadership that listens to dissent rather than crushes it. Please demonstrate the strength of character needed to run a top-notch newspaper and hire her back.
Emily Severance, Peña Blanca, N.M.
There has to be some good news, right?
It is encouraging that there are far fewer times we have to see the previous president’s name and picture on page after page of The Post. However, the ultra-negative and sad items in the news these days were augmented by four negative articles about President Biden on the first four pages of the June 5 edition. Then there was Michael de Adder’s editorial cartoon about Biden having no political capital. Is there nothing to be reported that might be positive and encouraging about this president? I find that hard to believe.
Marcia Hoogstra, Washington
Thanks for not alerting us to this spoiler
Regarding the June 5 book review “The cinematic tale of a French baron, a kidnapping and a severed finger” [Outlook]:
Jonathan Kirsch, who reviewed the true-crime thriller “The Last Baron: The Paris Kidnapping That Brought Down an Empire” by Tom Sancton, did an excellent job of recounting the story of the 1978 kidnapping of Baron Édouard-Jean Empain without letting the reader know how the victim eventually fared. In fact, Kirsch ended his review by writing, “Above all, it is a wholly authentic thriller. For that reason, and out of deference to the author and his readers, the denouement cannot be revealed here.” Too bad that the review was accompanied by a photograph of Empain arriving at a Paris hospital after the kidnapping. Well, I guess he survived his ordeal. Thanks for spoiling the ending.
Sara Downes, Woodway, Tex.
Some clarification, please, on the definition of ‘mass shooting’
In the June 5 edition of The Post, Glenn Kessler wrote that there had been four mass shootings this year, based on the definition included in Kessler’s Fact Checker column, “What research shows on effectiveness of gun-control laws to stop mass shootings.” On the editorial page, The Post noted that there had been more than 232 mass shootings in 2022 thus far [“Our hands aren’t tied”]. I understand that the definition of “mass shooting” is different depending on the organization collecting the data, but this discrepancy seems unreasonably large and contradictory. The Fact Checker noted that there are at least eight databases that track mass shootings. Could The Post clarify for readers what the numbers are, who collects the data, the various definitions, etc.? And thank you for covering this critical issue.
Joan Kelsch, Arlington | 2022-06-17T16:42:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Iga Swiatek's French Open win deserved more attention - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/readers-critique-post-iga-swiatek-french-open-win-attention/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/readers-critique-post-iga-swiatek-french-open-win-attention/ |
ESPN seeks to dismiss Sage Steele’s free speech lawsuit
ESPN filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit of prominent host Sage Steele, who alleged her freedom of speech was violated for comments she made on a podcast. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)
ESPN filed a motion Thursday to dismiss the lawsuit of prominent on-air personality and “SportsCenter” host Sage Steele, who is suing the sports network for violating her free speech rights.
Steele alleged in a lawsuit filed in April that her right to free speech was violated after she was removed from assignments over comments she made on a podcast last year about Barack Obama’s racial identity and ESPN’s vaccine mandate, which she called “sick” and “scary.”
ESPN declined to comment. Representatives for the law firm representing Steele did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last fall, Steele appeared on the podcast of former NFL quarterback Jay Cutler and called the Coronavirus vaccine mandate from ESPN’s parent company, Disney, “sick” and “scary.” She then contrasted her own racial identity, which she said was biracial, with former president Barack Obama identifying as Black.
“I think that’s fascinating considering his Black dad was nowhere to be found but his White mom and grandma raised him,” she said. “But, hey, you do you. I’m going to do me.”
Steele also said that female journalists share in the responsibility for preventing harassment on the job. “When you dress like that, I’m not saying you deserve the gross comments, but you know what you’re doing when you’re putting that outfit on, too,” she said.
In her lawsuit, Steele alleged that in response to the comments, ESPN stripped her of assignments and didn’t protect her from harassment from colleagues who criticized her on social media. Ryan Clark, an NFL analyst, declined to appear on the air with her, she alleged.
Because of a quirk in Connecticut law that extends first amendment protections to the private sector, several legal experts were intrigued by the legal analysis the case presented.
The motion also responded to Steele’s claims of lost assignments, which included not appearing at an ESPN conference highlighting the work of women in sports and a V Foundation event to support cancer research. According to the filing, it was the public relations team for Halle Berry, who was scheduled to be interviewed by Steele at the women’s event, who did not want Berry to be interviewed by Steele because of her controversial comments.
The motion also alleged that the organizers of the V Foundation fundraiser asked ESPN to remove Steele from her duties at the event because they perceived her comments about the coronavirus vaccine to be “anti-science."
Since the lawsuit was filed, Steele, 49, has continued as a host on ESPN, leading to the unusual situation of a high-profile TV star suing the network on which she currently appears. The lawsuit has been viewed internally at ESPN with some confusion. Steele signed a lengthy contract extension several years ago that expires in 2024. She makes around $3 million a year, according to two people with knowledge of her salary, and is the highest-paid female talent at the network. | 2022-06-17T16:51:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ESPN seeks to dismiss Sage Steele’s free speech lawsuit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/espn-sage-steele-lawsuit-dismiss/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/espn-sage-steele-lawsuit-dismiss/ |
Jean-Louis Trintignant, French actor of powerful reserve, dies at 91
He became an international star in the 1960s and ’70s with “A Man and a Women,” “Z” and “The Conformist.”
French actress Anouk Aimee and actor Jean-Louis Trintignant in 1986 while starring in “A Man and A Woman: 20 Years Later.” (AFP via Getty Images)
Jean-Louis Trintignant, a French actor of understated magnetism who achieved international renown in the 1960s and 1970s playing an amorous racecar driver in “A Man and a Woman,” an enigmatic prosecutor in “Z” and a closeted gay fascist assassin in “The Conformist,” died June 17 at his home in the Gard region of southern France. He was 91.
His wife, Marianne, confirmed his death to Agence France-Presse but did not provide a cause. In 2017, he revealed a cancer diagnosis.
In a career spanning seven decades and more than 130 films, Mr. Trintignant was regarded as one of the most accomplished, if reluctant, European movie stars of his generation. He was private, restless, fearful of repeating himself in his work and sometimes threatened to withdraw entirely from show business.
His reputation rests on a handful of commercial successes and art-house favorites: filmmaker Claude Lelouch’s deliriously stylized “A Man and a Woman” (1966), Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” (1969), Éric Rohmer’s cerebral and sexy romantic drama “My Night at Maud’s” (1969) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s unsettling “The Conformist” (1970).
At 82, Mr. Trintignant came out of a 15-year retirement to give a masterly performance as a cultured Parisian caring for his incapacitated wife in “Amour” (2012), which garnered the Oscar for best foreign language film as well as the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a signature Trintignant turn, featuring a character whose intellect and emotional reserve conceal an inner torment.
“The best actors in the world,” he once said, “are those who feel the most and show the least.”
The aimless son of a prosperous industrialist, he said he began acting merely as a way to overcome his shyness on the road to becoming a director. In his early filmography, the unimposing 5-foot-8 Mr. Trintignant was often typecast as timid, innocent, powerless person facing forces he did not understand or control.
He came to moviegoers attention in Roger Vadim’s “And God Created Woman” (1956), a showcase for Brigitte Bardot’s freewheeling sexuality. He played her solemn husband who watches his virile brother win her attention. Off-screen, the two co-stars embarked on a torrid affair that ended both their marriages, Bardot’s to Vadim and Mr. Trintignant’s to actress Stéphane Audran.
A run of milquetoast parts followed — the standouts of which were his roles in “The Easy Life” (1962) and “The Success” (1963), Italian-made comedies in which Mr. Trintignant’s mild, rigidly moralistic persona contrasted with the boisterous charisma of Vittorio Gassman. The films were critical and popular hits that vaulted Mr. Trintignant to the front rank of European cinema.
As a film presence, he carried none of the overt sexual mystique of other French stars of the era — the roguishness of Jean-Paul Belmondo, the prettiness of Alain Delon, the world-weariness of Yves Montand. Mr. Trintignant’s trademark was a superficial, pleasant ordinariness that masked depths of strength or despair.
“He emphasized his averageness, turned his lack of apparent definition into a weird kind of strength,” film critic Terrence Rafferty wrote in the New York Times. “In movie after movie he presents himself as a man so unremarkable that you have to wonder if anything at all is going on underneath that opaque surface. And then slowly, painstakingly, he unwraps the package and shows you what’s inside. He always seems cautious and watchful, waiting for the moment when he can (or must) reveal himself.”
He cemented his popularity in “A Man and a Woman,” co-starring with Anouk Aimée as star-crossed widowed lovers. They commence a nearly wordless affair against the backdrop of sunset beach strolls and conversations shot through mist-soaked windshields.
The drama, with an instantly canonized samba score by Francis Lai, won the Oscar for best foreign language film and was a box-office sensation. Mr. Trintignant, an amateur racecar driver and the nephew of two-time Monaco Grand Prix winner Maurice Trintignant, did his own racing on-screen.
In “Z,” Mr. Trintignant was a seemingly detached and colorless prosecutor conducting an official probe into the military-ordered killing of an opposition leader. His horn-rimmed glasses, well-worn suit and cipher-like personality suggest a bureaucrat going through the motions, but his unyielding resolve and political savvy gradually emerge.
The film won the Oscar for best foreign language film, and Mr. Trintignant’s performance earned him the Cannes Film Festival award for best actor. “He suited me very well,” the actor recalled of the character, “someone very subdued, very timid, but who knows exactly what he wants, and I’m a little like him; in the end, through sheer obstinacy, I always get what I want.”
In “The Conformist,” he played a sexually confused political opportunist in 1930s Italy who finds succor in fascism and agrees to become an assassin for the Mussolini regime.
Mr. Trintignant later wrote in his memoirs that this mother and his infant daughter Pauline died during filming. “Maybe it’s horrible to say this,” he observed, “but in such moments, the sensibility becomes extraordinarily sharp. And Bertolucci, who was very close to me, made use of my grief.”
New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael commended Mr. Trintignant for “an almost incredible intuitive understanding of screen presence; his face is never too full of emotion, never completely empty.” Comparing him to Humphrey Bogart, Kael added: “He has the grinning, teeth-baring reflexes of Bogart — cynicism and humor erupt in savagery.”
A youthful rebel
Jean-Louis Xavier Trintignant was born in Piolenc, a village in southern France, on Dec. 11, 1930, and grew up in nearby Pont-Saint-Esprit and Aix-en-Provence. Rebelling against his parents’ wishes, he dropped out of law school and soon began acting in Paris. He won good reviews for his stage work in demanding parts such as Hamlet while embarking on a hectic film career.
He appeared in experimental films directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, better known for his avant-garde literature. Mr. Trintignant was also Simone Signoret’s young lover in “The Sleeping Car Murders” (1965), Costa-Gavras’s acclaimed directing debut, and played a tightly wound Catholic undone by a chaste encounter with a divorcée in “My Night at Maud’s.”
He portrayed an aloof playboy in a menage a trois with two lesbians in “The Does” (1968), a moody psychodrama set in Saint-Tropez, France. One of the women was played by Audran, who was then married to the film’s director, Claude Chabrol.
Mr. Trintignant scored a huge hit with “Without Apparent Motive” (1971), as a detective in the French Riviera. In “Other People’s Money” (1978), a film that won the French equivalent of the best-picture Oscar, he was a bank executive tied up in a financial scandal. In 1983, he starred with Fanny Ardant in filmmaker François Truffaut’s final credit, the tepid mystery-comedy “Confidentially Yours,” and took a small role in the Nick Nolte film “Under Fire,” as a shady Frenchman on the CIA payroll in dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s Nicaragua.
Mr. Trintignant and Aimée reunited for Lelouch’s unfortunate update, “A Man and A Woman: 20 Years Later” (1986), but he fared better in “Three Colors: Red” (1994), the last and most highly regarded installment in director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy about fickle destiny. Mr. Trintignant played a prickly and reclusive former judge who spies on his neighbors but who is also capable of unexpected tenderness.
As Mr. Trintignant’s career slowed, he spent more time at his medieval estate near Uzes, in the south of France, foraging for mushrooms and riding his motorcycle. His second marriage, to filmmaker Nadine Marquand, ended in divorce and, in 2000, he married professional racecar driver Marianne Hoepfner, his companion for decades.
Three years later, he plunged into a depression after a daughter from his second marriage, actress Marie Trintignant, died from injuries sustained in a beating by her lover, French rock star Bertrand Cantat, who was convicted of manslaughter.
In addition to his wife, survivors include a son from his second marriage, Vincent Trintignant.
Mr. Trintignant was still reeling from the loss of his daughter when the script for “Amour” was offered. He told reporters that he almost turned it down because he found it too depressing and that he “was in a really dark period in my life,” even contemplating suicide.
Producer Margaret Ménégoz persuaded him to take the role by joking that she would assist him in the act, if only he would delay until filming was over. When the shoot was complete, Mr. Trintignant recalled to the Los Angeles Times, Ménégoz asked him, “O.K., how do we go about it?”
“Well,” he replied, “let’s wait a little.” | 2022-06-17T17:09:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jean-Louis Trintignant, French actor of powerful reserve, dies at 91 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/17/jean-louis-trintignant-french-actor-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/17/jean-louis-trintignant-french-actor-dies/ |
Indian military’s ‘path of fire’ recruitment plan sparks mass unrest
Shams Irfan
Authorities imposed restrictions June 17 on gatherings in Gurugram, near India's capital as protests against a new military recruitment process spread. (Video: Reuters)
NEW DELHI — India unveiled a plan this week aimed at modernizing its fighting forces to defend against external threats. Instead, it triggered a wave of violence at home.
Protesters across the country on Friday set trains ablaze, pelted officials with rocks and attacked the homes of government leaders after the Indian military announced a new recruitment policy to trim salary and pension costs. At least one man was killed after police in Secunderabad, near Hyderabad in the south, opened fire on protesters, according to the Hindustan Times, citing local police. In several cities, protesters shut down highways and forced the cancellation of dozens of trains.
The chaos, which spread from northern Bihar to southern Telangana and engulfed at least eight other states, highlighted the economic frustrations — and the political sensitivity surrounding government jobs — in a country where nearly a quarter of people under 30 are unemployed and where the state is often seen as the only hope for steady work.
Under the new policy, called “Agnipath,” or Path of Fire, the armed forces will annually recruit 46,000 personnel under the age of 21 but will not be obligated to retain them after they finish a four-year contract. Officials argued that the scheme would induct men and women during their physical peak while reducing costs for a sprawling military with roughly 1.4 million active personnel — making it the country’s second-largest employer and one of the world’s largest standing armies. Even though India’s defense budget has remained relatively flat, more than a quarter of funds now go to covering pensions, and costs are rising every year.
By thinning the military’s ranks, proponents contend, India could buy weapons and technology to better compete against rivals such as China, which has raced ahead with its own modernization drive while decommissioning hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army. In India, though, the politics are much trickier.
“The problem here is: With a finite budget, you can either pay for troops or bring in technology,” said Pravin Sawhney, a defense analyst and former army officer who has argued that India needs more advanced weapons to compete with China. “But in India, where there is so much unemployment, [the military] is a key source of employment as well. So whatever you do, you’ll annoy a constituency.”
In Bihar, a poor state that experienced some of the worst unrest, a mob attacked the home of the deputy chief minister. In Uttar Pradesh and Telangana, videos on social media showed police officers and railway workers struggling to douse blazing trains with hoses and bottled water. Video from a highway in Uttar Pradesh showed a man running while clutching a baby as rocks whizzed threw the air toward police.
Although the military is seen in many countries as a source of livelihood and a career path for the poor, it occupies a particularly important role in modern India. In the countryside, stories abound of families sending each of their sons to serve. In cities, special prep schools are filled with teenagers hoping to pass the army’s entrance exams.
Gaurav Kumar Singh, a 19-year-old from Patila village in Bihar, long dreamed of joining the army. For three years, he has prepared for his exams and would run six-mile loops with 20 other boys from the village to prepare for the physical fitness test.
“It was all in vain,” he said Friday, explaining that he felt a mixture of disappointment and worry.
“In rural areas, if you are serving in the army, your social and economic status changes automatically,” he said. “You get a desired match for marriage. You get easy loans to build a house. You have a steady income with which you can help your family financially. The army used to be a lifetime security package for a family in rural Bihar.”
Now, Singh said, he could enter the four-year program, but there is no guarantee of a job after that. “What if I’m not selected after four years? What will I do then?” he asked.
For India, the constraints of its defense budget have ramifications far beyond Singh’s village. Since the Obama administration, U.S. officials have sought to boost American weapons sales to India, but they have struggled to compete, partly because Russian offerings are cheaper.
The United States views India as one of its most crucial partners in Asia, but India’s reliance on Russian weapons — and the country’s refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine — has become an irritant in U.S.-India relations.
As chaos spread across the country, government leaders and their supporters mobilized to put a positive spin on the recruitment campaign. Defense Minister Rajnath Singh defended the policy as a “golden opportunity” for more Indian youths to serve their country and said the government would lift the age limit for recruits to 23 for one year. Other officials suggested that even a brief stint in the army would benefit job seekers wanting to pursue other careers, such as policing.
Meanwhile, policymakers and retired officers heatedly debated the military’s priorities — and the role it should serve in Indian society.
“The armed forces are a volunteer force. It is not a welfare organization,” V.P. Malik, a former chief of army staff, told the NDTV television channel.
But retired Lt. Gen. Kamal Davar, a former defense intelligence chief, said India needed to maintain a large, professional army because of its precarious position between its longtime rivals Pakistan and China. Military service was not a short-term job, he argued, but a calling.
“It takes a long time to get proficient, trained and battle-ready,” he said in an interview. “Soldiering is not just firing a rifle. It is not a simple job.”
Irfan reported from Srinagar. | 2022-06-17T17:17:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indian military’s ‘path of fire’ recruitment plan sparks mass unrest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/17/india-military-recruitment-protests-agnipath/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/17/india-military-recruitment-protests-agnipath/ |
A sauna-like air mass could bring record temperatures to major cities, including Atlanta and Nashville.
High temperatures on Wednesday as predicted by the National Weather Service. (Pivotal Weather)
The signs are growing that there could be a significant heat wave across the South, Southeast and Mid-Atlantic next week, with tropical humidity and highs 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average. Records may be in jeopardy in a number of major U.S. cities, with highs well into the lower 100s across Georgia and the Carolinas, for instance.
More than 50 million Americans are in line to experience temperatures above 100 degrees, and it’s likely heat advisories and excessive-heat watches and warnings will be issued as the event nears. It comes less than a week after much of the Southwest, the Plains and the Ohio and Tennessee valleys dealt with stifling heat and humidity.
It all stems from the same parent heat dome that has been languishing and refusing to budge from its perch over North America. It initially built into the Western United States. Its next act will feature an expansion and intensification of its sphere of influence, with the ridge of high pressure soon to sprawl across the entire Lower 48.
How hot it’s going to get
The next big pulse of heat will be established Tuesday of next week and will really dominate from Wednesday onward. According to a plot produced by Tomer Burg, a graduate student in atmospheric sciences at the University of Oklahoma, temperatures at the 850 millibar level — roughly a mile up — will reach top-tier records in the skies over Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. When it’s hot in the sky, it’s even toastier at the surface. That indicates decent chances of triple-digit heat.
“High temperatures alone (but more certainly heat indexes) Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday could necessitate Heat Advisories across portions of the area,” wrote the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City, Ga. The combination of highs pushing 100 degrees and Gulf humidity will make for heat indexes potentially nearing 110 degrees.
As for actual air temperatures, Atlanta is looking at a forecast of 98 degrees on Tuesday and 100 on Wednesday and Thursday. Macon could see highs around 102 or 103 degrees. In Macon, the temperatures could beat records of 101 degrees set in 1925 and 1988 on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. Atlanta will likely topple daily records that have stood since World War II.
Nashville is predicted to see a high of 101 degrees on Tuesday and Wednesday — both likely topping records from 1988 — and a high of 100 degrees Thursday, which may fall a degree short of tying a record.
The temperature in Birmingham, Ala., will be around 100 on Tuesday and 102 on Wednesday and Thursday, readings that will be within a degree or two of daily records. Most of the remainder of the South, including South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas and interior Louisiana, will be around 100 degrees for three or more days in a row. Houston is likely to hit 100 degrees during the spell, and overnight lows in some places, like Dallas, might not dip below 81 at night.
Dew points, meanwhile, will sit in the mid- to upper 60s along the Interstate 20 corridor and the lower 70s along Interstate 10, combining with the heat to yield heat indexes in the 105- to 110-degree-range. This could be especially problematic for low-income residents, the elderly and other vulnerable populations who may not have the means to escape the brutal heat.
On Friday, the ongoing heat across the eastern United States was beginning to pull back south a bit as a cold front collapsed toward the Gulf Coast. Heat advisories were still in effect for parts of the coastal Carolinas, the Deep South, the Ozarks and the central Plains, but alerts had been dropped over the Midwest and parts of the Tennessee Valley.
Heat advisories were issued in Montana ahead of the next pulse of anomalous heat, which is expected to bring highs in the upper 90s to near 100 degrees on Saturday. There’s a chance that Glasgow could nick 100 degrees; the average high this time of year is about 79.
Both Aberdeen and Pierre, S.D., are looking at highs of 100 degrees on Saturday, with upper 90s to near 100 ubiquitous across the Plains, the lower Mississippi Valley and most of the South ahead of the southward-sagging cold front. The front probably won’t make any additional southward progress before the next pulse of arriving warmth scours out any extant temperature air. Instead, the sauna-like steam bath is about to reign once again.
Heat dome dominates
The heat is tied to an upper-level ridge, or a crest in the jet stream. This roadblock shunts fierce high-altitude winds and storminess to the north over Canada and the Great Lakes, with sunshine and high pressure building in to the south. High pressure areas bring sinking air, which warms up and dries out. The result? The heat dome bakes the landscape beneath it.
Through the weekend and into early next week, an “omega block” pattern will keep the heat dome in place over the Mississippi River. An omega block consists of two low pressure systems flanking the high, one on either side, and the trio of weather systems interlocking like meshed gears. That allows each to sit in place and spin for an extended period of time. That means the high won’t easily budge.
Eventually the omega block will break down around Tuesday, allowing the heat dome to expand west and flatten, occupying most of the Lower 48, before intensifying late in the week. That will mean even more significant heat for the northern Plains, with toasty temperatures for just about everyone else too.
The Climate Prediction Center continues to forecast elevated temperatures for much of the continental United States for the next week or two. Heat domes are ordinary staples of the summertime, but are made more intense by human-induced climate change. | 2022-06-17T17:22:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Triple digit heat possible for East Coast, Southeast next week - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/17/heatwave-eastcoast-midatlantic-northeast/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/17/heatwave-eastcoast-midatlantic-northeast/ |
Stocks stem losses but remain on track for worst week since March 2020
A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, when markets plunged amid worries about inflation and rising interest rates. (Seth Wenig/AP)
Investors looking for reprieve after a brutal turn of losses were greeted with some relief Friday, but Wall Street was still headed for its worst week since the chaotic early days of the coronavirus pandemic as the Federal Reserve’s aggressive moves to tame inflation — and the danger of sparking a recession — began to settle in.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 88 points or 0.3 percent in midday trading, a day after the blue-chip index dropped below 30,000 for the first time since January 2021. The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq climbed 107 points or 1 percent.
Investors are still grappling with the Fed’s momentous decision to raise interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point. The move has far-reaching consequences for consumers, because it makes it more expensive to borrow money and carry a credit card balance. New data released Wednesday also pointed to a bumpier road ahead, complete with higher unemployment, slower economic growth and record-high prices that will take longer to come back down.
Americans brave enough to glance at their 401(k)s or other investment accounts probably met with some ugly math. Portfolios spanning nearly every sector have suffered losses, and color coded grids showing the wins and losses of stocks flashed a solid wall of red. The S&P 500, a key benchmark for measuring financial performance over time, has lost nearly a quarter of its value this year.
The broad index is headed for a 6 percent decline for the week, its steepest loss since the outset of the public health crisis in March 2020.
But it’s not just investor sentiment that has turned sour. Higher interest rates are designed to strong-arm American consumers to spend less of their money, cooling demand for products and services. While Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell has defended the decision to aggressively raise interest rates to contain inflation, some experts worry the strategy could amount to an overreaction and yank the economy into a recession later this year or in 2023. More rate hikes are expected in the months ahead, but they may come in smaller increments.
Richard Saperstein, chief investment officer of Treasury Partners, said the market is reacting to the uncertainty over the Fed’s efforts to tame inflation. But he said an additional concern remains the unpredictable events tied to the ongoing war in Ukraine which the market has not fully considered.
As Wall Street whipsaws, gas prices continue to spike while inflation has yet to peak, according to the latest data that may have surprised policymakers hoping for cooling prices. But the economy has added several million jobs this year and consumer spending remains robust. The conflicting signals present a puzzle to analysts and political leader and highlight the uncertainty over the future of the economy. | 2022-06-17T17:26:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stocks stem losses but remain on track for worst week since March 2020 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/17/stocks-today-worst-week-since-march-2020/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/17/stocks-today-worst-week-since-march-2020/ |
Russian gas has been attractive to Europe because it was easy to transport and almost always available. Its role has grown in recent years as some European countries moved to end coal and nuclear power generation and their domestic gas production declined. Russian state-controlled company Gazprom was supplying about a third of all gas consumed in Europe, until the war in Ukraine prompted the region to rethink its energy security strategy.
A supply crunch in 2021 offered an insight into Europe’s reliance on gas from Russia, with benchmark prices more than tripling. Stockpiles in the EU fell to a record low, with heavy maintenance taking place in North Sea fields and supplies of liquefied natural gas redirected to meet soaring demand in Asia. In 2022, with Russian supplies under threat, European LNG imports were pushed to full throttle, domestic producers promised to keep output as high as possible and EU buyers tapped new supplies from Africa to Central Asia and used more renewables. Yet Russian volumes were still too large to fully replace in the short term. In mid-June, flows through the Nord Stream pipeline -- the biggest link from Russia to the EU -- fell by about 60%, forcing utilities to tap reserves normally used during the peak winter season.
Germany, the EU’s powerhouse, has been scaling back its use of coal and nuclear power and relies on Russian gas for just over a third of its needs. The country, which lacks LNG facilities, is now rushing to build those and secure supplies of the super-chilled fuel, and aims to wean itself off Russian gas by mid-2024. It also sends some gas to Poland, which according to Gazprom is of Russian origin, meaning that a potential standoff between Moscow and Berlin would hurt several countries at once. | 2022-06-17T17:26:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Europe Became So Dependent on Putin for Its Gas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-europe-became-so-dependent-on-putin-for-its-gas/2022/06/17/a5aaaf36-ee56-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-europe-became-so-dependent-on-putin-for-its-gas/2022/06/17/a5aaaf36-ee56-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Analysis by Ellen Milligan | Bloomberg
The UK’s cost-of-living crisis is poised to become more painful in coming months, with energy bills set to jump again in October, when a price cap is adjusted, and the Bank of England raising this year’s peak inflation forecast to more than 11%.
1. What is the government’s cost-of-living payment?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has announced a package of support, and while some critics say it doesn’t go far enough to help cushion the blow, it comprises money to help every household with add-ons for pensioners, those with disabilities, and people on benefits.
2. Who is eligible for one-off cost of living payments?
Every household in the country paying for electricity will receive £400 ($488). Unlike support announced earlier this year, this is a grant, so no one will have to pay it back. More than 8 million households on means-tested benefits are eligible for a £650 payment. These are people who receive universal credit, government allowances, income support or certain tax credits.
3. What are pensioners and the disabled getting?
Households including anyone over the state pension age in late September, currently 66 years or above, will receive a £300 payment, while six million people receiving disability benefits will get £150. These payments are additional to the £650 sum for households that receive it.
4. How will the payment be made?
The £400 grant will automatically be deducted from energy bills across six months from October. Direct debit and credit customers will have the money credited to their account, while customers with pre-payment meters will have the money applied to their meter or paid via a voucher. The £650 payment for households receiving benefits will be paid directly to people’s bank accounts in two instalments, the first from July and the second in the autumn. People on disability benefits will receive the £150 from September while the £300 for pensioners will be paid by direct debit as a top-up to their winter fuel payment in November or December.
5. How do people claim the payments?
These are all automatic, so no one needs to apply for them. The one-off payments are also tax-free and will not count toward the government’s benefit cap. | 2022-06-17T17:26:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to Access the UK Cost-of-Living Support Package - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-to-access-the-uk-cost-of-living-support-package/2022/06/17/66f1e750-ee60-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-to-access-the-uk-cost-of-living-support-package/2022/06/17/66f1e750-ee60-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
A sign for Covid-19 vaccinations in the international terminal at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, June 13, 2022. The Biden administration is lifting its requirement that all travelers test negative for coronavirus before flying to the US, amid pressure from airlines that viewed the measure as excessive and blamed it for depressing ticket purchases. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Covid-19 may be unpredictable, but the breakdown of negotiations over more Covid funding was, unfortunately, entirely predictable. Now the US may be unprepared if — or when — there is a pandemic surge in the fall.
A tenuous bipartisan deal for $10 billion in additional emergency aid fell apart on Thursday as Republicans accused the White House lying about whether funds were running out. Last week the administration announced it was diverting roughly the same amount of money — $10 billion — from testing and other programs to buy updated vaccines, 10 million courses of Pfizer’s Paxlovid antiviral treatment and more monoclonal antibody treatments.
That didn’t sit well with Senator Mitt Romney, a key player in the talks, who said the move “makes our ability to work together and have confidence in what we’re being told very much shaken to the core.”
White House officials may have figured that Republicans would never get on board. Even so, the reallocation made a deal all but impossible. Rallying GOP support was already tough for Romney and Richard Burr, another Republican negotiator, because Republicans have balked at any new spending, particularly on preventative measures such as testing and vaccines.
So where does that leave the country? What’s apparent is that even with more than 100,000 new cases a day, continued disruption and the likelihood of additional surges and variants, the US is moving away from a government-led approach to combating Covid. And that will bring a huge shift once the current supply of tests, treatments and vaccines runs out.
The Kaiser Family Foundation issued a comprehensive report in March detailing the implications of what happens when the federal government loses its purchasing power. One of the conclusions: Those most vulnerable to serious complications from Covid will be the most hurt. It will “exacerbate existing disparities in health and financial security.”
The uninsured will need to pay out of pocket for testing and treatment. There won’t be enough free vaccines. Medicare beneficiaries could face out-of-pocket costs for treatment medications. For those with private insurance, insurers will need to negotiate prices, which could lead to higher costs and premiums.
“People of color are more likely to be uninsured than their White counterparts and face more potential barriers to accessing care,” according to the report. “Any changes that result in more limited access to Covid-19 testing, treatment services, or vaccines, or that require people to pay out of pocket for these services, will likely exacerbate these disparities and may also result in more financial burden.”
Another conclusion: There’s no guarantee these tools will even be available. The federal government has been able to secure initial access to tests, antivirals and vaccines because it prepaid for them. Without that certainty, manufacturers may slow down or stop production altogether when demand declines. Insurers and the US will also be competing for access with global purchasers.
“The last thing that manufacturers of existing vaccines and therapeutics need is a boom-and-bust cycle where the US government commits to supporting manufacturing and then doesn’t commit, and then goes back,” said Rena Conti, a health economist at Boston University and a co-author of an Brookings Institution report arguing for federal investment in vaccines and therapeutics.
“When funding is inconsistent, manufacturers look for other opportunities to repurpose those plants or that highly skilled labor supply,” she told me. Public investment in new therapeutics and vaccines is necessary, she said, “because the private sector will always underinvest.”
Remember when people couldn’t find tests during the omicron surge in December and January? That’s because manufacturing slowed down as demand dropped last year. The US had to make purchasing commitments to secure enough vaccines and 20 million courses of Paxlovid, the antiviral.
There’s not enough time for a smooth transition to the private market before Covid’s next mutation. No one knows what that variant will look like — but vaccines, tests, monoclonal antibody treatments and antiviral medications will be necessary. As will money. Without that investment now, it’s unlikely the US will be prepared for whatever comes this fall.
In other words, expect more economic disruption and more unnecessary suffering — just in time for the midterm elections. Apparently neither party is immune to playing politics with public health.
• Where Did $6 Trillion in Covid Funding Go?: The Editors
• Voters Aren’t Worried About Covid. Politicians Should Be: Jonathan Bernstein
• Have Public Health Officials Just Given Up on Covid-19?: Faye Flam | 2022-06-17T17:27:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Just Failed the Nation on Covid Funding - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/washington-just-failed-the-nation-on-covid-funding/2022/06/17/3f359a08-ee5c-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/washington-just-failed-the-nation-on-covid-funding/2022/06/17/3f359a08-ee5c-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
He ran out of gas in Death Valley. Days later, he was dead, park says.
The sun rises over the Panamint Mountain Range, seen from Highway 190, during a weekend of extreme record-breaking high temperatures on July 11, 2021, in Death Valley National Park. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Days after David Kelleher disappeared into Death Valley National Park, visitors found the Southern California man dead Tuesday. He appeared to have tried to walk to find refuge in temperatures that reached as high as 123 degrees.
Kelleher’s car had been parked in the same spot for days, and when authorities searched it, they found a message confirming their fear. “A crumpled note inside Kelleher’s vehicle said, ‘Out of gas,’ ” National Park Service officials wrote Wednesday in a news release.
Officials said the 67-year-old man from Huntington Beach, Calif., had been walking from Zabriskie Point toward Furnace Creek in hopes of getting help in Death Valley National Park, which is known to be one of the hottest places on Earth. Rescue crews searched the area but the operation was limited because of the heat.
Visitors discovered Kelleher’s body Tuesday afternoon about 2½ miles from his car — but only about 30 feet from California Highway 190, the officials said.
A note helped rescuers find two missing campers in Death Valley. For one of them, it was too late.
A park ranger had first encountered Kelleher on May 30. Records show Kelleher was cited for off-road driving and, that same day, Kelleher “mentioned being low on gas,” officials said in the news release.
Then, on June 8, a park ranger noticed only one car was left in the parking lot at Zabriskie Point, a legendary Death Valley spot known for its breathtaking sunrises and sunsets. When that park ranger saw the same vehicle in the parking lot three days later, authorities initiated an investigation Saturday. They learned that the car belonged to Kelleher and initiated a search around the Golden Canyon and Badlands Trails, the officials said.
Fuel has been a problem across the United States as surging gas prices have forced many drivers to put off filling their tanks, often leaving them stranded. In April, AAA received more than 50,000 calls for roadside help from drivers who had run out of gas — a 32 percent increase from the same time the previous year.
And it comes amid a record-setting heat wave, which spread from Texas to California around the time Kelleher went missing before making its way east, sending temperatures toward the triple digits and triggering heat advisories in more than a dozen states.
But heat wave aside, Death Valley, in the northern Mojave Desert, is known for its sweltering temperatures. Last summer, Death Valley experienced a record high for the planet — a daily average of 118.1 degrees.
Death Valley had planet’s hottest 24 hours on record amid punishing heat wave
Kelleher’s death is the second fatality reported in June in the national park. John McCarry, 69, of Long Beach, Calif., was found dead June 1 in Panamint Valley. Park officials are also still searching for Peter Harootunian, who has been missing since his vehicle was noticed to be abandoned May 23. The man has not been found, and the search for him has been scaled back to limited and continuous, the officials said.
It is not known exactly how many people have died in Death Valley. Last year, two campers went missing in Death Valley after leaving a note in their car: “Two flat tires, headed to Mormon Point, have three days’ worth of water.” When authorities found them, Emily Henkel, then 27, was injured, and Alexander Lofgren, a 32-year-old Army veteran and congressional staffer, was dead.
The National Park Service cautions visitors to avoid extreme heat by forgoing low-elevation hikes after 10 a.m., staying within close range of air conditioning and carrying drinking water and salty snacks. | 2022-06-17T17:27:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | David Kelleher found dead in Death Valley after running out of gas, officials say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/17/death-valley-death/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/17/death-valley-death/ |
Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy outside of the Takoma Park Police Department on April 9, 2021 in Takoma Park, Md. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
One of Maryland’s most experienced and respected prosecutors, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy, is running for reelection in the July 19 Democratic primary. His outstanding performance in the office he has held since 2007 — a record that has cemented his reputation as a energetic, thoughtful criminal justice reformer — is ample reason for county voters to support him. We endorse Mr. McCarthy for a fifth four-year term.
The winner of the primary will face no Republican opponent in the heavily Democratic county. As for Mr. McCarthy’s three primary rivals, all are progressives who favor reforms that would divert from incarceration of nonviolent and youthful offenders, drug users, and those suffering from mental health problems. All would lean into crime prevention, community outreach and racial equity.
Their dilemma is that Mr. McCarthy’s own achievements along those lines are impressive. His challengers say they would do more, or go faster, but struggle to explain how. And while each has experience as a prosecutor, none offers a track record or breadth of expertise remotely approaching Mr. McCarthy’s.
At 70, he remains vigorous and proactive after four decades as a prosecutor, despite a battle with cancer a few years ago. As head of an office of roughly 150 people, half of them prosecutors, he has pioneered or dramatically expanded initiatives to give certain offenders — especially those who tend to pose little threat to others — a chance to right their lives. During his tenure, the number of inmates in the county jail has dropped by about one-quarter, even as Montgomery’s population has climbed by more than 10 percent.
Mr. McCarthy’s initiatives include starting a mental health court, despite pushback from the judiciary, which has enabled struggling offenders to get the help they need instead of sitting behind bars. He has championed a court for drug offenses that has provided a pathway for hundreds of users to get back on their feet through intensive, long-term treatment. Through community service programs expanded under his watch, thousands of other offenders are diverted from incarceration annually. In addition, he launched and vastly expanded a program in middle schools to tackle truancy before it becomes an ingrained habit for preteens and younger adolescents.
Mr. McCarthy also commissioned a sweeping study of his office by outside experts — a project many elected prosecutors would vehemently resist — to identify and address racial equity in criminal justice. He has pledged to make the findings public when they are available next year, and post them online going forward, which is evidence of his commitment to transparency.
None of his opponents match his stature. Among them, Perry Paylor, a deputy state’s attorney in Prince George’s County, is qualified on paper but vague about how he would do the job. Tom DeGonia, a former Montgomery felony prosecutor, is capable; however, little seems to distinguish his agenda from programs Mr. McCarthy has already developed. Bernice Mireku-North co-chaired a county criminal justice reform study that recommended, among other things, lessening the police presence in some of Montgomery’s highest crime areas, a poor idea. A former prosecutor in Anne Arundel County, she is promising but has never handled major felonies and lacks the experience to run an office of Montgomery’s size and scope.
Mr. McCarthy deserves reelection. | 2022-06-17T17:27:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Primary endorsement for Montgomery County State’s Attorney: John McCarthy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/john-mccarthy-montgomery-county-maryland-states-attorney-primary-endorsement-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/john-mccarthy-montgomery-county-maryland-states-attorney-primary-endorsement-2022/ |
In some cultures, multiple fathers — or no fathers at all — are the norm
I’m an adoptive and biological dad, but other traditions suggest our definitions are arbitrary
Perspective by Nicholas A. Christakis
Nicholas A. Christakis, a social scientist and physician at Yale, is the author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.”
In Western society, father figures can can take many forms — biological, adoptive, or “social” caretakers like godfathers or mentors. In some other cultures, multiple men can be considered a child’s biological fathers. (Brook Mitchell/Getty Images)
My wife and I had three biological children starting 30 years ago, and then, five years ago, we became foster parents to a young boy whom we legally adopted when it became clear that he needed a permanent home. I call him “son” and he calls me “dad,” though others sometimes mistake me for his grandfather. I love my new son no less, though occasionally differently, than our biological children. If I’m honest, in one way I may love him more, because we became a father and son, together, of our own free will. I like to playfully remind him, when he is particularly irritated with me, that most people can only dream of being able to choose their parents, whereas I heard him tell a judge in a courtroom that he’d picked my wife and me for the job. Being unmoored from the biological tie is a relief in a way, too: I don’t seek a reflection of my (neurotic) self in my boy, and no one asks him to shoulder that burden, either, though he did recently complain that he was worried my nerdiness was “wearing off” on him.
Our relationship, like the parent-child experience of millions of other adoptive families in the United States, reflects the way the biological and social meanings of fatherhood can diverge widely. As we celebrate Father’s Day, we might consider how cultural constructions demonstrate the arbitrariness of how we define a father.
To start with, in every culture and historical era, there are many ways to become a father, socially speaking, even if there is only one fundamental way to do so biologically. Adult relationships vary in form across societies and include not only the type most common around the world today — heterosexual monogamy — but also same-sex marriage, nonmarital unions, polyamory, polygyny and polyandry.
Genetic testing is changing our understanding of who fathers are
This sheer variety of human mating practices helps explain some of the more baroque notions of biological paternity found around the world — notions that are hard to reconcile with the reality that babies are produced by sex between one man and one woman. This fact, the “doctrine of single paternity,” is understood by almost all cultures, and has been for millennia, long before the biology was worked out by modern science.
But in some cultures in Amazonia (and a few scattered elsewhere), children are believed to have multiple biological fathers. Anthropologists have described more than a dozen groups with such beliefs about what’s known as “partible paternity,” and the distinctiveness and geographic separation of these cultures suggests that this belief system was independently invented multiple times.
With partible paternity, the woman’s role in producing babies is typically downgraded, unsurprisingly, to “receptacle.” In some of these cultures, the baby is thought to be made by an accretion of semen — like a snowball. In some, the men are even felt to pay a physical price for the pregnancy. The men report that they expend so much energy to make a baby through repeated intercourse that they can become wasted from the effort.
The Tapirapé people of Brazil did not believe anthropologist Charles Wagley when he told them that a single act of sex could result in a baby, and they insisted that intercourse had to continue throughout the pregnancy, and it could be with different men. All the men who had sex with a pregnant woman were considered the biological fathers of the child — although just the mother’s mate at the time was called “cheropu” (father). Only when a pregnant woman was known to have four or more sexual partners did the Tapirapé concede that the child might have “too many fathers.”
This type of belief system about multiple fathers can be advantageous to the survival of women and children, who can benefit from the support of more than one man.
But for most human societies, the opposite is more common: knowing the identity of the biological father (paternity certainty) is a fundamental part of social organization (and gossip). And the biological and social processes that make it easier for males of our species to acquire such certainty (including, unfortunately, cultural and religious practices that constrain and shame women) have played a crucial role in our biological and cultural evolution.
Paternity certainty was probably an important facet of the evolutionary transition from our hominid ancestors.
The traditional evolutionary argument is that men will provide women with food and protection during pregnancy and the child’s early infancy only if they can be confident that they are advancing the survival of their own offspring and not some other man’s. But some scholars have wondered how provisioning pregnant and nursing partners could have played such a singular role in the origins of pair bonding if some members of our species — like the Tapirapé — had such freewheeling ideas about paternity. It would seem logical that men would have evolved to feel a sense of threat from male competitors for their partner’s fidelity. But it turns out that is not so essential. Human culture is extremely variable.
Indeed, at the opposite end of the fatherhood spectrum from the Tapirapé are the Na people, a group of mountain farmers near Tibet whose unique sexual practices have been the subject of Chinese texts for thousands of years. Anthropologist Cai Hua’s aptly titled book “A Society Without Fathers or Husbands” was written in 2001, but Marco Polo apparently also found the Na noteworthy for their unusual ideas about fatherhood.
Na households are matrilineal, with women living with their siblings, mothers and maternal uncles. Men from outside the family are rarely allowed to join the household, but they are allowed — at a female occupant’s behest — to sneak into her home for sexual assignations.
People in Na society do not care who their own biological fathers are, and it’s the matrilineal men (uncles and brothers) who fill the role of adult male supervision, caretaking and instruction of children. Despite endless probing, Hua couldn’t find anyone interested in talking to her about biological paternity. Though the Na do realize that offspring can physically resemble the man who was their biological father, most Na deem it irrelevant and uninteresting, since it involves no special rights or obligations.
The Na know that a man is required for a woman to make a baby, but they believe that babies are already in women, like seeds in the ground, and are merely “watered” by men. (They say, “If the rain does not fall from the sky, the grass will not grow on the ground.”) They feel that it makes no difference who does the watering.
The Na belief that no particular man is biologically necessary for the creation of a child, and the Tapirapé belief that many men are required starkly illustrate the decoupling of the biological and social aspects of fatherhood. Even in modern Western society, where children are rightly considered to have only one biological father, they sometimes have multiple social fathers — including loving male relatives, adoptive fathers, foster fathers, godfathers, figurative “uncles,” legal guardians, even mentors and older friends.
Still, despite the diversity of fatherhood, one thing remains painfully constant: Not every child has a good father figure, but surely every child deserves one. | 2022-06-17T17:27:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In some cultures, multiple fathers — or no fathers at all — are the norm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/fathers-day-adoption-biological/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/fathers-day-adoption-biological/ |
The case for mandatory gun-liability insurance
You have to buy insurance to drive a car. Why not if you own a gun?
Perspective by Jason Abaluck
Ian Ayres
Shop owner Tony Hook stands behind a counter at RTD Arms & Sport in Goffstown, New Hampshire on June 2, 2022. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty)
A breakthrough on potential new gun regulations is welcome news, but the recently announced proposals from a bipartisan group of senators are striking in their narrowness. They include incentivizing states to pass more red-flag laws, improving background checks for buyers younger than 21 and widening the group of sellers required to register as federal firearms dealers. Better than nothing, these reforms nonetheless would address only a small fraction of the more than 45,000 gun deaths and 120,000 gun injuries that occur each year in the United States.
The modesty of the ideas on the table is a byproduct of intense polarization over gun rights, suggesting a need for new approaches. One possibility — long advocated by some economists — is to require gun owners to purchase liability insurance. This would create a several-hundred-billion-dollar incentive for insurers to find ways to reduce gun violence. Relative to other regulations, this requirement might even appeal to some gun rights advocates. The National Rifle Association wouldn’t support it, of course, but it might win support from conservatives looking for a market-based approach that wouldn’t have much impact on responsible gun owners.
Gun insurance would accomplish two goals: First, it would raise the cost of gun ownership for people whose firearms are deemed relatively more likely to be used in crimes (by themselves or others), based on an assessment of risk factors made by insurance companies. That would make those people less likely to obtain guns in the first place. Second, it would provide a strong financial incentive for gun owners to keep these weapons out of the hands of people who might commit crimes with them. Granted, mass shooters won’t be concerned about their future premiums — but many owners would take steps to ensure their weapons are well secured. And a 21-year-old with a history of violent behavior might find it much harder to obtain a gun if insurers insist that they pay premiums equal to several times the purchase price of a weapon. (Insurance would be a condition of ownership.)
The logic is analogous to that underpinning car insurance. If you drive a car, you may seriously damage another person’s property or even kill them. To discourage reckless driving, the law makes you legally liable should this happen. For most people, the potential liability exceeds their savings, which is why all 50 states require car owners to buy car insurance so payments can be made in the event of an accident.
In the case of guns, insurance would work similarly: If a gun you own were used in a crime (by you or someone else), you would be liable for the cost of that crime. The liability could be tens of thousands of dollars in the case of a robbery or tens of millions of dollars in the case of a mass shooting. To minimize legal costs, these liability amounts could be set by a regulatory agency, paralleling the workers’ compensation program. Gun owners would need insurance to guarantee their ability to pay, and insurers would set the premiums. They would set those rates based on obvious factors like age or past offenses as well as less obvious ones that they discover. (Perhaps Rotary Club members are 80 percent less likely to commit crimes.) Premiums would still be subject to anti-discrimination laws, so they could not vary systematically with race.
Liability insurance is not a substitute for other gun regulations, but it would supplement them nicely. Insurance companies would be motivated to conduct effective background screenings before agreeing to a contract that could cost them millions if they missed something. They would do this research even in circumstances where such checks are not currently required, as when firearms are purchased from private dealers. Insurers might give discounts to gun owners who show that they have purchased gun safes even in jurisdictions that don’t require them, and people whose guns were used in crimes would face high costs when obtaining another, unless they could prove to insurers that the same thing won’t happen again.
Economists like the idea of mandatory gun insurance because it attacks the problem of “externalities”: impacts on other people that aren’t part of the usual cost of a good or action. Absent regulation, for instance, why should a factory owner care if producing steel generates air pollution? The classic solution is to tax each unit produced by factories an amount equal to the environmental damage each unit causes. Steel production will continue, but it will be constrained not just by demand for the product but by the cost of environmental harms.
Could taxes make gun owners pay for the externalities of gun ownership? In fact, we can and do tax firearm purchases (in 1937, the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional to impose what today would be a tax of more than $4,000 on the sale of a machine gun). But a tax is a blunt instrument: A gun purchased by a 55-year old who completed a safety course may pose considerably less risk to others than a gun bought by a 19-year-old with a driving-under-the-influence conviction. Taxes don’t make that distinction.
Insurance companies, on the other hand, would. If the companies charged only $100 in annual premiums to someone with a history of violent behavior, they’d lose money on the policy, given the frequency with which payouts would have to be made on behalf of people with such pasts. On the other hand, if they asked a farmer in Wyoming whose rifle poses little risk to anyone to pay $10,000 a year, other insurance companies would gladly offer to insure the man’s gun for less.
Over the years, many state legislatures have debated gun insurance plans, though none have passed. In February, the San Jose City Council approved the nation’s first law requiring residents to purchase coverage for some accidental discharges. But gun crimes are far more prevalent than gun accidents.
It will not always be the gun owner who commits a crime: Among prisoners who possessed a gun during their offense, 90 percent were not the original retail purchaser. Therefore, to reduce gun crimes, we should hold purchasers of firearms accountable if others use their weapon to do harm.
Penalizing gun owners if their weapons are used for crimes means tracking chains of ownership. The Tiahrt amendments, which have been attached to Justice Department appropriation bills since 2003 — they are named for former congressman Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) — forbid anyone but law enforcement to receive the results of gun traces conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A workable gun insurance proposal would require changing the Tiahrt amendments to let courts properly determine liability (and ideally, to let insurers better model risk). When a chain of ownership cannot be established beyond the first private sale, we could still hold accountable the insurer of the last identifiable owner. (Mandating liability insurance does not in principle require amending the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields gun manufacturers from legal liability when crimes are committed using their products.)
Insurance companies have objected that they typically don’t make liability payments for intentional acts. Making a payment for an illegal shooting would be like paying out a claim in the case of arson, as opposed to an accidental fire, they argue. But this is a legal concern only if the insurance compensates a bad actor. It is routine to have insurance that covers intentional bad acts. That’s why your homeowner’s insurance compensates you if your home is burgled — or burned down by a stranger.
Suicide, which accounts for two-thirds of gun deaths, does present a challenge for this approach, since paying liabilities to surviving family members could, perversely, incentivize such acts. One solution would require insurers to make a payment to a different recipient — perhaps, for instance, to a fund used to reward victims in cases where guns could not be traced to any insured owner. This would still incentivize insurers to raise the cost of firearms for people with higher suicide risk, based on their mental health history. (Disclosing that history might be voluntary, but people with low-risk records would probably do so.)
Mandatory auto insurance does not prevent all car accidents. But it does financially encourage safe driving. The system rewards good outcomes — a lack of crashes — and incentivizes preventive measures such as driver’s ed. Just as drivers with a record of recklessness should pay a higher cost to drive a car, so should reckless gun owners pay a higher cost to own a firearm. | 2022-06-17T17:27:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The case for mandatory gun-liability insurance - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/gun-insurance-reform-uvalde-liability/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/gun-insurance-reform-uvalde-liability/ |
Biden says Americans (like his poll numbers) are ‘really really down’
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. Dear readers, The Daily 202 will be off on Monday for the Juneteenth holiday. We will be back on Tuesday.
President Biden delivered a grim diagnosis of the national mood on Thursday, as sky-high gas prices and fears of a recession foretold a possible Democratic rout in November. Americans, he told the Associated Press, are “really really down.” And the coronavirus crisis is to blame.
For months, Biden has vacillated between talking up his economic record, notably rip-roaring job creation and low unemployment as the economy climbs out of the pandemic, and expressing the kind of empathy political reporters tend to call the “I-feel-your-pain” approach.
What seems to be emerging from the past couple of weeks or maybe months is not just a Biden echo of former president Bill Clinton, who deployed that “pain” line to great effect in 1992, but also a warning to voters that Republicans will make the pain worse.
“I understand Americans are anxious, and they’re anxious with good reason,” he said last week at the Port of Los Angeles. “I was raised in a household when the price of gasoline rose precipitously, it was the discussion at the table. It made a difference when food prices went up.”
“The problem is Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to stop my plans to bring down costs on ordinary families,” he told the AFL-CIO this week, accusing Republicans of favoring the rich and corporations and planning to go after Social Security and Medicare.
Talking up the economy hasn’t worked. His job-approval numbers are bad, notably on the economy. Big majorities say the country is on the wrong track. And as my colleague Emily Guskin chronicled in Thursday’s The Early 202, a majority of Americans think the economy is already in a recession.
“An Economist/YouGov poll taken this week found that 56 percent of Americans believe the U.S. is currently in an economic recession. About 2 in 10 each say that we are not in a recession (22 percent) or say they are unsure (22 percent). The poll asked a different group of respondents a question with more response options: a 43 percent plurality said we were in a recession, while 33 percent said the U.S. economy was ‘slowing down,’ 14 percent said it was “stable” and only 10 percent said it was ‘growing,’” she wrote.
We won’t know whether they’re right until late June when we get gross domestic product numbers. The economy shrank in the first quarter of 2022. If it shrinks in the second quarter, that’ll satisfy the broad definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Which gets us to Thursday’s interview.
“People are really, really down,” Biden told AP reporter Josh Boak.
Asked what he could do as president to turn the national frown upside down, Biden replied: “Be confident. Be confident. Because I am confident. We are better positioned than any country in the world to own the second quarter of the 21st century. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.”
The “R” word
The president also acknowledged mounting fears of the “R” word — not Russia or Republicans, but recession. “First of all, it’s not inevitable,” he said. “Secondly, we’re in a stronger position than any nation in the world to overcome this inflation.”
But fears of a recession — that the economy is entering one, or is already there — as well as a Federal Reserve interest-rate hike to rein in inflation hit hard Thursday, my colleagues Hamza Shaban and Aaron Gregg reported.
“The two developments could prompt Americans to pause spending and lead to a rapid cooling of the housing market, adding to fears that the Fed’s Wednesday actions might help spur a recession this year or next. But Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell has defended the decision to raise interest rates three-quarters of a percentage point, arguing that it was necessary to cool inflation. More rate increases are expected in the months ahead.”
The Dow Jones industrial average slipped more than 700 points, about 2.4 percent, to close below 30,000 for the first time since January 2021. Mortgage rates saw their biggest one-week jump since 1987.
Through it all, there are signs the national mood may not be entirely sour. A May Washington Post-Ipsos poll found 86 percent of Americans are satisfied with their lives overall. And the number of “very satisfied”? Thirty-seven percent.
“The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for lawmakers to severely limit or even ban abortion in the state, reversing a decision by the court just four years ago that guaranteed the right to the procedure under the Iowa Constitution,” the Associated Press’s David Pitt reports.
“The British government on Friday ordered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States to face espionage and hacking charges. Assange has 14 days to appeal the decision,” Salvador Rizzo and William Booth report.
“World stocks [are] headed for their worst week since markets' pandemic meltdown in March 2020 as leading central banks doubled down on tighter policy in an effort to tame inflation, setting investors on edge about future economic growth,” Reuters’s Simon Jessop reports.
“World stocks were flat on Friday to take weekly losses to 5.5% and leave the index on course for the steepest weekly percentage drop in more than two years.”
European Commission backs Kyiv’s EU ambitions
“The European Commission on Friday issued an opinion recommending that Ukraine should be granted candidate status for European Union membership — a first step that will add significant momentum to the country’s campaign to join the bloc,” Emily Rauhala, Adela Suliman, Amy Cheng and Jaclyn Peiser report.
The announcement came after leaders in Germany, France, Italy and Romania pledged their support for Ukraine to become a candidate to join the E.U. Thursday. “To move forward, all 27 member states must agree. Even if they do, full membership could be many years away.”
“Fifty years ago today, June 17, 1972, an inept burglary at the Washington offices of the Democratic National Committee ignited a political scandal that still affects the ways Americans conduct and evaluate their politics,” Bruce J. Schulman writes.
“Watergate involved a complex web of illegal activities that drove President Richard M. Nixon from the White House in 1974 and sent many of his senior advisers to prison. But its implications echoed far beyond the 1970s.”
“Not only did it become a cultural reference point, with the suffix ‘gate’ attached to almost every subsequent episode of political corruption, but it mobilized the federal bureaucracy against the White House, inspired curbs on the power of the presidency and set the stage for the subsequent impeachments of presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.”
“As the House committee investigating the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol focused almost entirely Thursday on the role Mike Pence played in averting a constitutional crisis, the former vice president was far from Washington,” the Wall Street Journal's Alex Leary and John McCormick report.
“As recent progress on a bipartisan gun safety deal on Capitol Hill illustrates, the nascent [gun control] movement has coalesced into something more formidable. It went from being considered a guaranteed-to-lose issue for Democrats to something candidates organize around, especially on the state level, But because gun control was viewed as particularly divisive, many major philanthropists and big foundations have been reluctant to dive into an issue long seen as not just polarized but intractable,” the New York Times's Nicholas Kulish, Katie Glueck and Michael C. Bender report.
“Yet as gun sales and gun deaths have risen in tandem, and the number of mass shootings continues to increase, including the attacks last month in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, big donors have begun to move off the sidelines.”
“More than a year and a half after the oldest Americans gained access to coronavirus vaccines, the nation’s youngest citizens are poised to start getting shots next week, a move made possible when federal regulators Friday authorized vaccines for children as young as 6 months,” Laurie McGinley and Yasmeen Abutaleb report.
“For many parents and pediatricians, the Food and Drug Administration clearing of two vaccines — one by Moderna and the other by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech — comes as a huge relief.”
On tap today and Saturday: Vaccine advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will decide whether to recommend the shots to parents for their youngest children. Should the agency’s leaders concur, the shots could be rolled out as soon as Monday.
Biden lays out new climate goals at Major Economies Forum on energy and climate
At the third virtual gathering of world leaders at the Major Economies Forum under his presidency, President Biden introduced several new initiatives across the energy, transportation and agricultural sectors, Maxine Joselow reports.
The new global efforts include:
Initiatives to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas industry and eliminate routine flaring.
A challenge to other nations to collectively commit $90 billion to scale up clean technologies needed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, of which the United States will devote $21.5 billion under the bipartisan infrastructure law.
A collective goal for countries to make 50 percent of new cars sold electric by 2030.
The Global Fertilizer Challenge to raise $100 million in new funding to support research into alternative fertilizer to reduce agricultural emissions.
Biden references Buffalo shooting in Juneteenth proclamation
This morning, President Biden referenced last month’s mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store as reminder of the persistence of racism in the United States as part of a proclamation on Juneteenth, a federal holiday on June 19 commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States,” our Post Politics Now colleagues report.
What the Fed’s interest rate hike means for mortgages, visualized
“The rapid rise in mortgage rates means home buyers will need to pay significantly more for a home loan compared to even just eight months ago,” Kevin Schaul reports.
“Senate Democrats are preparing for possible summer action on their still-elusive climate, tax reform and prescription drugs bill, grinding behind the scenes on a new version during high-profile gun safety talks,” Politico’s Burgess Everett reports.
“Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) met twice this week on a potential party-line package. There’s more afoot: Schumer and his staff are working with the Senate parliamentarian to help tee up a possible July or August vote.”
“Supreme Court justices were divided over 2020 election issues and ultimately declined to accept any of Donald Trump’s baseless claims, but one justice stood out for emphasizing ballot fraud in sympathy with those who refused to accept the results: Clarence Thomas,” CNN’s Joan Biskupic reports.
“The presidential election controversy is roiling the Supreme Court again, as the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack continues to obtain communications between Thomas’ wife, Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, and Trump adherents who were trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and part of activities leading up to the January 6 rampage. The committee has now asked Ginni Thomas to speak about her efforts to reverse the election results.”
The Biden’s are in Rehoboth Beach, Del., for the weekend.
At 1:15, Vice President Harris will speak with community members in Pittsburgh, about removing and replacing lead pipes.
Harris will return to D.C. at 3:25 p.m. At 4:30, she and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will visit Dulles International Airport to meet with aviation and transportation workers helping to deliver infant formula. | 2022-06-17T17:27:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden says Americans (like his poll numbers) are ‘really really down’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/biden-says-americans-like-his-poll-numbers-are-really-really-down/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/biden-says-americans-like-his-poll-numbers-are-really-really-down/ |
New Mexico county weighs defying order to certify election results
The state Supreme Court has ordered commissioners to do their jobs and approve the vote totals
Couy Griffin, one of three county commissioners in Otero County, N.M., says he won't vote to certify results of the June 7 primary election, citing his distrust of the state's voting machines. Griffin founded a group called Cowboys for Trump and was convicted for his actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP)
A New Mexico county commissioner convicted for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has vowed to defy a state Supreme Court order and not certify primary-election results in his county during a scheduled Friday meeting, a decision that could throw the state’s electoral process into chaos.
Couy Griffin, 48, the founder of a group called Cowboys for Trump, said in an interview that he was too concerned about the security of the state’s voting machines to vote to certify the June 7 primary-election results for Otero County, citing widely discredited theories about hacking and election fraud.
The three-member, all-Republican commission in the small county on the Texas border is scheduled to hold an emergency meeting Friday afternoon to decide whether to certify election results in time to meet a state deadline. A second jurisdiction in the central part of the state, Torrance County, had delayed a certification vote earlier this week and was due to consider the issue Friday morning.
Griffin on Friday was in Washington, where he was set to be sentenced in U.S. District Court on one count of entering a restricted area during the Capitol attack.
“My oath to the people I serve is more important than any threat the government makes toward me,” Griffin said in an interview Thursday. “If they threaten me by putting me in prison, I’ll honorably go to prison.”
Couy Griffin guilty of trespassing during U.S. Capitol attack
On Wednesday, New Mexico’s Supreme Court granted an emergency petition by the secretary of state asking that the Otero commissioners do their job and approve some 7,300 votes from the June 7 primary, where races such as the county’s only state legislative seat and county sheriff hang in the balance.
New Mexico's Supreme Court orders county commission to certify vote
New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver has also referred the matter to the state’s attorney general, Hector Balderas, saying in a motion filed Thursday that the Otero commission had committed “multiple unlawful actions” when it voted to hand-count election returns, remove ballot boxes, discontinue use of state voting systems and delay certifying the primary vote.
Griffin and the other two Otero commissioners — Vickie Marquardt and Gerald Matherly, neither of whom returned calls or emails requesting comment — face being held in contempt of court and penalties, such as potentially being removed from office.
“The Commission must comply with the rule of law or we will take legal action,” Balderas said in a statement. | 2022-06-17T17:28:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New Mexico county weighs defying order to certify election results - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/new-mexico-county-weighs-defying-order-certify-election-results/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/new-mexico-county-weighs-defying-order-certify-election-results/ |
By Jade Le Deley and Sylvie Corbet | AP
FRESNES, France — A former hotel housekeeper who fought for the rights of her co-workers has become a symbol of the recent revival of France’s left, which is expected to emerge as the main opposition force in the French Parliament to President Emmanuel Macron’s government.
Analysis: What John Eastman and ‘the pardon list’ means | 2022-06-17T17:28:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former hotel housekeeper aims to give French workers a voice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-hotel-housekeeper-aims-to-give-french-workers-a-voice/2022/06/17/6c284b08-ee59-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-hotel-housekeeper-aims-to-give-french-workers-a-voice/2022/06/17/6c284b08-ee59-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Kim Kardashian wears Marilyn Monroe's famous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress to the Met Gala held in early May. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
After days of outrage online over whether Kim Kardashian damaged Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress by wearing it to the Met Gala earlier this year, Ripley’s Believe It or Not stepped in to squash the claim. The company, which acquired the famous dress several years ago, announced Thursday that a report written on the garment’s condition in early 2017 noted similar damage to what was seen after Kardashian wore it.
The report stated that “a number of the seams are pulled and worn. This is not surprising given how delicate the material is. There is puckering at the back by the hooks and eyes,” in addition to other damage.
“From the bottom of the Met steps, where Kim got into the dress, to the top where it was returned, the dress was in the same condition it started in,” Ripley’s executive Amanda Joiner, vice president of publishing and licensing, added in a statement.
A representative for Kardashian declined to comment.
The theory that Kardashian damaged the dress — which Monroe wore 60 years earlier while serenading President John F. Kennedy with a birthday song — traces back to ChadMichael Morrisette, a collector who photographed the gown earlier this week at the Ripley’s location in Los Angeles after spotting what he believed to be new damage to the garment. He shared the photographs with another collector, who posts on Instagram under the handle @marilynmonroecollection and circulated before and after images in support of Morrisette’s claim.
“Was it worth it?” the Instagram caption reads, directed to Ripley’s.
In austere times, the Met Gala returns to ‘Gilded’ era
The company’s decision to loan Kardashian the frock for the May 2 gala supporting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute drew the ire of textile conservators and fashion historians who found it risky and disrespectful to the garment’s iconic nature. Fashion designer Bob Mackie, who drew the sketch for the 1962 Jean Louis gown while working as an assistant to the Hollywood costumer, told Entertainment Weekly after this year’s Met Gala that he thought it was a “big mistake” for Kardashian to wear the dress on the red carpet.
Monroe “was a goddess,” Mackie said. “A crazy goddess, but a goddess. She was just fabulous. Nobody photographs like that. And it was done for her. It was designed for her. Nobody else should be seen in that dress.”
According to Vogue, Monroe’s custom dress sold twice at auction: once in 1999 for more than a million dollars as part of her estate sale with Christie’s, and again in 2016 when it sold for $4.8 million at a Julien’s Auctions event and was acquired by Ripley’s. The magazine stated that the dress is stored in “a darkened vault that’s controlled at the optimum 68 degrees and 40-50% humidity.” Kardashian said she “had to wear gloves” to try it on.
The dress was too small in parts, according to Kardashian, who said she adhered to a strict diet afterward so the garment would fit in time for the Met Gala. Vogue reported that she wore the dress only for her red carpet appearance, putting it on in a makeshift dressing room near the base of the stairs and changing into a replica after she walked up the steps. A Ripley’s conservationist wearing gloves assisted Kardashian with the process.
Kardashian told Vogue she was “extremely respectful to the dress and what it means to American history.” | 2022-06-17T18:14:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kim Kardashian did not damage Marilyn Monroe’s dress, Ripley’s says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/17/kim-kardashian-marilyn-monroe-dress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/17/kim-kardashian-marilyn-monroe-dress/ |
Deshaun Watson speaks to reporters after a Browns' practice this week in Berea, Ohio. (AP Photo/Ron Schwane)
The league hopes the entire disciplinary process, including the resolution of any potential appeal to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell or a person designated by him, is completed by the start of training camp, a person with knowledge of the matter said. The Browns are scheduled to open training camp July 27.
“Like I said, I never assaulted anyone or I never harassed anyone or I never disrespected anyone,” Watson said Tuesday at a news conference at a Browns offseason practice. “I never forced anyone to do anything.”
“I can’t control that,” Watson said this week of the NFL’s disciplinary process. “I met with the NFL a couple weeks ago and I did everything they asked me to do. I answered every question truthfully that the NFL asked me. I spent hours with the people that they brought down. And that’s all I can do is just be honest and tell them exactly what happened. I know they have a job and so I have to respect that. And that’s what we wanted to do is cooperate. And they have to make a decision [that’s] best for the league.”
Hardin confirmed that he is involved in representing Watson in the NFL process along with the union but declined further comment on the league proceedings.
The league “ideally” would like to have the entire process, including the resolution of any appeal, completed by the start of training camp, a person familiar with the NFL’s view said, adding the disclaimer that the approach taken by Kessler and the NFLPA could slow the proceedings.
This first case being resolved under the new disciplinary system is a high-profile matter. A person on Watson’s side wondered whether Goodell might be reluctant to overturn the neutral arbitrator’s disciplinary ruling in the first case.
The league and NFLPA could reach a settlement at some point to preclude any appeal or further legal action by Watson.
The Browns completed a trade with the Houston Texans for Watson this offseason and signed him to a new contract worth a guaranteed $230 million over five seasons. Watson did not play last season, being placed on the Texans’ inactive list on a weekly basis.
Any suspension would be without pay, based on Watson’s $1.035 million salary for the 2022 season. The NFL could seek to have a fine imposed, in addition to any salary lost by Watson. The league also could stipulate that additional discipline could be imposed if new information surfaces. | 2022-06-17T18:40:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL to seek ‘significant’ suspension of Deshaun Watson - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/nfl-deshaun-watson-discipline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/nfl-deshaun-watson-discipline/ |
Phil Mickelson won't be playing the weekend at the U.S. Open, his first major tournament since joining LIV Golf. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
Phil Mickelson’s first major tournament since joining the breakaway LIV Golf Invitational Series will be a short one, as he will miss the cut at the U.S. Open in Brookline, Mass. Mickelson finished 11 over par after 36 holes, well off a cut line that’s projected to be in the vicinity of 4 over.
Considering his unfortunate history at the one major he’s never won, Mickelson has long been the center of attention at the U.S. Open, but this year’s spotlight was shaded differently. After years spent criticizing the PGA Tour’s control of players’ media rights, his support of what became known as LIV Golf — and his willingness to downplay the human-rights violations committed by its Saudi backers — became public knowledge in February. That led to an extended absence: Mickelson’s last PGA tour event was in late January. He missed the Masters for the first time since 1994 and did not show up to defend his PGA Championship victory from 2021.
Mickelson’s missed cut isn’t exactly a surprise at a tournament in which he’s had a tortured history. He’s finished second at the U.S. Open six times, which trails only Jack Nicklaus’s seven second-place finishes at the British Open in grand-slam runner-up finishes. The difference? Nicklaus also won the British Open three times, while the U.S. Open remains the only major to elude Mickelson. And in his eight U.S. Opens since his most recent runner-up in 2013, Mickelson has no finish better than a tie for 28th, with three missed cuts.
Since his stirring run to the 2021 PGA Championship title, when at 50 he became the oldest player to win a major, Mickelson has missed the cut in two of the three majors he’s played and finished a noncompetitive 62nd in the other. His results on the regular PGA Tour weren’t much better, and he finished tied for 33rd out of 48 at the first no-cut LIV tournament.
His future in non-LIV events is less certain. The PGA Tour suspended all the players who joined the breakaway circuit but has no say about who can compete in golf’s majors, which are operated by outside entities. As a past winner of the Masters and the PGA Championship, Mickelson has a lifetime pass to those tournaments — assuming Augusta National and the PGA of America do not change their rules — and he gets free entry into the British Open as a past champion until the age of 60. Plus, Mickelson has three more years of automatic U.S. Open qualification by virtue of his PGA Championship win last year. | 2022-06-17T18:40:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Phil Mickelson will miss the cut at the U.S. Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/phil-mickelson-cut-us-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/phil-mickelson-cut-us-open/ |
Emma Thompson wants us to like our bodies. She knows it’s hard.
In the Hulu movie “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” Thompson plays a middle-aged woman who finds self-fulfillment with the help of an enlightened sex worker.
Perspective by Ann Hornaday
Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.” (Nick Wall/AP)
Consent isn’t just normalized in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” Thompson observes, “it’s eroticized. Every time he says, ‘Is this okay?’ and Nancy says, ‘Yes,’ the ‘yes’ is such an erotic act. It’s the pulling of the thread a little tighter … then the thread drops again and then you pull it again, and each time you get closer together. It’s so beautiful to watch and feel. You feel these characters more than watch them.”
“I kept thinking, ‘How did they do this thing with Timothee Chalamet’s character, where I’m looking at him all the time, I’m noticing the beauty of who he is and his body and everything, but I feel with him all the time?’” she explains. “I’m not just looking at him. He’s not disposable in any way. He’s my entry point to the film.”
During the production of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” Hyde made a pact with her two stars: At any time, they could decide not to shoot something even if they had previously agreed to do it. They also had the right to ask for things to be removed during editing. “I think that [gave] them the freedom to do what they wanted to do … and know they’ve got the final call. They didn’t ever want to change anything. But I think they needed that power.”
Thompson says she has been spared the worst of Hollywood’s obsession with looks; most of the characters she has played aren’t distinguished by their faces or bodies; when she was sent a script describing a character as a beauty, she says, “I’d just not continue to read it.” Still, she hasn’t been immune to the “self-imposed restrictions in order to feel as though I’m not beyond the pale. But at 63, I am already. It’s done. So in a way, there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain by trusting in myself and actually trusting in the audience. … I’ve been talking about trusting Bryan and Sophie and Daryl, and of course I do. We all work within a situation of extreme trust. But in order to allow this film out into the world, I had to trust my audience.”
“That’s exactly what I wanted for Nancy,” Thompson says. “It’s a neutral gaze. It’s not approval — ‘Oh my God, I look great.' And it’s not, ‘Oh my God, I look horrible.’ It’s, ‘That’s my body. And I know that it can bring me joy.’ | 2022-06-17T18:57:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Emma Thompson wants us to like our bodies. She knows it’s hard. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/06/17/emma-thompson-interview-leo-grande/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/06/17/emma-thompson-interview-leo-grande/ |
The first lady, who still teaches, said in a speech that PTA members should lobby their representatives.
First lady Jill Biden speaks at the 125th anniversary convention of the National PTA at the National Harbor on June 17. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Three weeks after the deadly mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex., first lady Jill Biden called on parents and teachers to advocate for a bipartisan agreement on gun safety in Congress, as she also voiced frustration about "those who’ve tried to divide us in these last few years.”
“From reopening schools to class curriculum, we’ve been told that parents and teachers are at odds,” she told the National PTA, as leaders met for their 125th anniversary convention at the National Harbor in Maryland, just outside Washington. “But as I visit schools and I meet with families, that’s not what I’ve seen.”
She also argued passionately for gun reform measures in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, recounting the day she stood with President Biden before 21 crosses set up to honor the 19 children and two teachers who were killed May 24 at Robb Elementary School.
“I touched the pictures of the beautiful faces that would never again laugh or open birthday presents or tell their parents that they loved them,” she said. She said the scenario has become an all-too-common fear for teachers and families.
Jill Biden's former students tell stoties about her classes
Biden, who likes students to call her “Dr. B,” has kept her post as a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College even after her husband was elected president — the first first lady to hold a full-time job outside the White House. She taught at NOVA when Joe Biden was vice president, too, and counts this year as her 38th as a teacher.
“Even as our schools are reopened, we know that recovery isn’t always the same as healing," she said. “Our students are still wrestling with the aftershocks of this pandemic — isolation, anxiety and sorrow. I hear it so much: Parents who are worried that their kids are having a hard time catching up after learning virtually. Educators who tell me that they’re feeling burned out. Students who are dealing with the trauma of loss and grief.”
“We know that in places across the country — like Florida, Texas, or Alabama — rights are under attack,” Jill Biden said at the White House ceremony. “And we know that in small towns and big cities, prejudice and discrimination still lurk. | 2022-06-17T18:58:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jill Biden urges gun safety, rejects education culture wars - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/17/jill-biden-pta-gun-uvalde/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/17/jill-biden-pta-gun-uvalde/ |
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
When a sitting president tries to overturn an election he lost, many people inside the federal government wind up getting involved, whether they wanted to be or not. That’s one lesson from Thursday’s compelling hearing of the House select committee investigating Donald Trump’s coup attempt.
You could see the story told in that hearing as a tale of heroes: Not only Mike Pence, who resisted Trump’s pressure to help steal the election, but also a cadre of White House lawyers who pushed back against the appalling scheme designed by Trump lawyer John Eastman.
But let’s keep things in perspective. While some credit is due, let’s not build any statues to people whose career-defining achievement is that after years of working for perhaps the most corrupt president in history, in the end they declined to participate in the destruction of American democracy.
It starts with Pence. Say this for him: While his lickspittlery during the Trump presidency was unrivaled, in the end Pence withstood Trump’s abuse and refused to declare the election invalid so the coup could succeed. As Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the House select committee, put it: “We are fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage.”
What hasn’t gotten as much attention is that Pence gave some serious thought to helping Trump carry out the coup, which would have been nothing less than the worst catastrophe for the American system of government since the Civil War.
As Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their book “Peril,” Pence called former vice president (and fellow Hoosier) Dan Quayle in December 2020 to kick around the idea of overturning the election. He pressed Quayle on whether the vice president’s ceremonial role counting the electoral votes could be used to invalidate electors and defy the will of the voters. Quayle replied, “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.”
The point is not that Pence should have known the ins and outs of the Electoral Count Act beforehand. The very fact that his response to the idea was anything other than “We lost, and I will not demolish the American system of government so we can stay in power” shows it took him far too long to remember his loyalty to the country.
So, yes, he should get credit for arriving at the right decision in the end. But a hero? No.
Then there are the aides who testified on Thursday, particularly White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, Pence chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence counsel Greg Jacob. Their testimony illuminated the days leading up to the insurrection, including Eastman’s efforts to build support for his scheme and Trump’s pressure on Pence. Perhaps most important, their testimony established that Trump was well aware he was trying to persuade Pence to break the law.
But like Pence himself, they all went to work in Trump’s service when it was more than clear who Trump was. This isn’t just about ideology — plenty of conservative Republicans took a principled stand not to work for someone so abominable.
Until Trump’s final assault on the country, those advisers were, as far as we can tell, loyal underlings. Herschmann, for instance, who described in colorful terms his contempt for Eastman and his scheme, vigorously defended Trump at his first impeachment trial.
What they did after the 2020 election was straightforward: They told their bosses the truth about what the law says. Then they went back to their careers; they didn’t raise a public alarm at the time, nor afterward. When they were called to testify, they did so candidly.
Which is good for the rest of us, but it’s nothing more than the bare minimum we ought to expect from any patriotic citizen. They satisfied a standard of integrity, but it was a low one.
They stand out because of who surrounded them. Among many things Trump revealed was just how many Republican scoundrels were around to populate the federal government when he took over, from white nationalists and small-time grifters to deranged conspiracy theorists. In that group, a lawyer with even a modicum of ethics begins to look like a champion of justice.
We’ve gotten so used to GOP hypocrisy, dishonesty, contempt for rules and norms, authoritarianism, and pathetic Trump worship that we tend to lionize any Republican who displays any principle or commitment to the good of the country. So when a figure such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) or Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger takes a political risk to stand up to Trump in service of their ideals, they seem extraordinary.
But if we’re going to praise them, we shouldn’t characterize their actions as superhuman. It’s what we should expect of everyone. The fact that they’re so greatly outnumbered in their party by those who rallied behind Trump’s attack on the American system of government — and continue to do so to this day — is what’s most important, and most frightening. | 2022-06-17T18:59:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | There were no heroes in the Trump administration on Jan. 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/no-heroes-trump-administration-january-6/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/no-heroes-trump-administration-january-6/ |
Counting on the Supreme Court to uphold key rights was always a mistake
Liberals are re-learning the lesson that only democratically enacted rights are reliable.
Perspective by Samuel Moyn
Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale University, is the author of “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.”
Mathias Ball for the Washington Post
Not since Roe v. Wade came down in 1973 have the threats to basic women’s rights in this country been more serious. The situation reflects a flaw in our political system: The Supreme Court has been allowed to usurp the place of national majorities in envisioning and enacting the highest values of American citizenship — the rights we hold.
Contrary to a popular misconception, when the court has assigned and defined rights, more often than not it has reinforced the rule of powerful and privileged minorities rather than protecting ordinary (let alone marginalized) citizens. That is the dismal but often-denied truth driven home by Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which would overturn Roe against the preferences of a majority of Americans. The need for a course correction is clear, even if the final opinion modifies the argument against Roe or the justices find a compromise to uphold the intrusive Mississippi restrictions without overruling their old case.
The fact that the Supreme Court has seldom protected important rights flies in the face of the court’s self-image and contradicts a romanticized view of the institution that arose during the mid-20th century, thanks in part to decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe. “Fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections,” Justice Robert Jackson wrote in 1943, in a case forbidding West Virginia from compelling students to pledge allegiance to the flag. It has since been cited as immortal wisdom: The whole point of rights, Jackson said, is “to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities … and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.” Majority rule indulges bigotry if it does not pave the way to tyranny, many of us learned in high school civics class, which is why the Constitution accords rights the highest protection and why so many think the judiciary is the branch that ought to delineate them.
But those civics teachers were wrong. Understanding the judiciary as a safeguard of justice against the majority’s injustice has proved to be folly. In fact, historically speaking, rights have most often been granted through elections, when coalitions in Congress agreed on their importance. Meanwhile, Supreme Court justices have regularly withdrawn rights from deserving majorities and minorities. We are relearning that lesson today: The future of American rights, precisely because they are so precious, is democratic. Indeed, it depends on forcing the Supreme Court to let national majorities rule.
How the Supreme Court dominates our democracy
The historical evidence against the idea that the Supreme Court is a reliable guarantor of rights is strong. The court heard next to no cases about constitutional rights for nearly a century after the nation’s founding. The Bill of Rights, appended to secure the Constitution’s ratification, applied only to a small federal government. After the Civil War shifted some power away from the states to Washington, Congress took the lead on rights, passing a Civil Rights Act in 1866 to protect the equality of newly emancipated African Americans before the law. Lawmakers went on to craft the 14th Amendment, which made clear Congress’s power to define and protect rights through “appropriate legislation.”
But then the Supreme Court drastically restricted the rights Congress had accorded. It minimized the protections of the 14th Amendment, in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), and gutted Congress’s civil rights statutes, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). Astonishingly, for a long time — well into the 20th century — the most prominent rights the Supreme Court protected in the name of the Constitution were those that helped rich business owners at the expense of the majority — by, for example, striking down maximum-hour laws for workers or a federal minimum wage.
No wonder President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his confrontation with the Supreme Court during the Great Depression, called for taming the institution. “The government of the United States refuses to forget,” he explained, “that the Bill of Rights was put into the Constitution not only to protect minorities against intolerance of majorities, but to protect majorities against the enthronement of minorities.” The Supreme Court attempted a last stand against democracy by invalidating early New Deal statutes such as the National Industrial Recovery Act, but the justices relented after Roosevelt’s massive electoral victory in 1936, allowing his national political coalition to have the laws it wanted. (Roosevelt’s 1937 proposal to “pack” the court by adding new members, though tabled in Congress, also played a role.) For example, in the pivotal case of National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Loughlin Steel (1937), the court let the Wagner Act survive, with its extension of workers’ rights to bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions.
From the end of the Civil War through the New Deal, Americans understood that the Supreme Court had to be kept in check so that legislated rights could prevail. But having been tamed, the court drifted again from the understanding that rights come from legislation, in the name of protecting civil liberties during World War II — when Jackson wrote — and for the sake of racial justice during the Cold War. For a comparatively brief time, before President Richard Nixon began the right-wing transformation of the court, liberals controlled the institution and came to believe that judges were indispensable to the progress of rights. But then the empire struck back. Conservatives regained control of the Supreme Court and have used it for 50 years to curtail rights — or, as with gun rights, to introduce questionable ones. As before the New Deal, the constitutional rights defended most steadfastly by the court are business-friendly, including “free speech” for corporations.
Liberals have refused to unlearn lessons from the Supreme Court’s role in the second coming of civil rights, in the middle of the 20th century, and the results have been grievous. Congress was uniquely hobbled during that period: The Solid South, a crucial part of the Democrats’ coalition for decades, prevented Congress from being the first mover on civil rights. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, had been stocked by Democrats with liberals for almost 20 years; that allowed the court to strike an early blow in Brown. The justices also made the Bill of Rights applicable to the states, and many protections in the criminal process followed. To justify this new interventionism, new myths were crafted to the effect that judicial protection of rights has always been essential in America, and in any democracy that deserves the name.
But beyond treating an exceptional moment as the basis for an enduring consensus, there was a less pleasant reality. Relying on the courts to achieve racial justice — including in Brown — hardly succeeded in any deep and enduring way, as the record of public school resegregation and police and prison violence in recent decades proves. And liberals were building an antidemocratic superweapon that could be used by their enemies in the future. Indeed, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), a conservative court struck down important parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — an example of the democratically enacted legislation that ultimately did the most to secure rights for African Americans in the civil rights era. As abortion rights advocates are now seeing, while the higher judiciary giveth, it more often taketh away. And in the abortion rights successor case Maher v. Roe (1977) — which said women on Medicaid were not entitled to financial support for abortions — and so many other domains, the court has never afforded constitutional protection to the poor, who most need rights of all kinds.
Worse, the liberal reliance on rights protection through interpretation of the Constitution from on high has allowed conservatives to present themselves as friends of the democratic process, even when their policies, on abortion rights and across the board, have been unpopular.
In his draft abortion decision, Alito makes the case that getting rid of rights that judges make up merely clears the way for people to decide whether to retain them. In this, he echoes the late justice Antonin Scalia, who often made the same argument. But Alito doesn’t mention that he has regularly voided legislation that expresses the popular will. For example, when the people of Illinois decided to require employees of some unionized workplaces to contribute payments to the union (not full dues), Alito wrote for the court in Janus v. ASFCME (2018), invalidating the law.
The court continues to curtail Congress’s power to act to protect rights. The most dramatic instance in the recent past came when Congress tried to undo Scalia’s opinion in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which degraded religious freedom for minorities. (The court concluded in that case that a generally applicable law barring peyote use could be enforced against Native Americans who used it in religious services.) Writing for the majority in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), Justice Anthony M. Kennedy decreed that Congress may not second-guess — let alone supplement — the Supreme Court’s judgments about religious liberty or the parameters of constitutional rights in general. In other words, the court gets to override Congress in the name of the Constitution — but the reverse is not true.
Republicans won’t be satisfied with overturning Roe
The most powerful response to any proposal that elected representatives take the lead in defining and protecting American rights is that Congress isn’t sufficiently democratic, either. Majority views can be dangerous sometimes (the civics teachers were right about that). Moreover, Congress — with a Senate that privileges small states and gerrymandered districts across the land — has never reflected democratic principles. The question, however, is whether majorities in a flawed national legislature are the better option to define and defend rights than the Supreme Court. The fact that political majorities aren’t likely to unerringly vote to expand rights does nothing to change the harder fact that judges are even less likely to do so.
In choosing whether Congress or the Supreme Court takes the lead on rights, we are not choosing between majority voting or something else; we are deciding which majority gets to make policy. After all, the Supreme Court reaches its results by majority vote. More important, the justices owe their appointments to two institutions with deeply anti-democratic features: the Senate (which overrepresents residents of small states) and the presidency (ditto). If Congress is not democratic enough, its pathologies are intensified in the Supreme Court.
The stalling of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have codified Roe, in the Senate last month shows that it may be too soon for a popular coalition to pass abortion rights legislation. The move to end debate on the measure was defeated 51 to 49. But if the Democrats set aside the filibuster, as almost all of them want to do, the measure is only a vote short of majority approval.
In any case, it is clear that a new approach to American rights is required now, in the face of a conservative Supreme Court that will continue to limit rights (or protect corporate and gun rights) for as long as we can foresee.
Whichever branch of government ultimately endorses and enshrines rights, the political fights over these rights will be hotly contested and never finished. That was certainly true during the Supreme Court’s “heroic” phase in the mid-20th century: The landmark civil rights and personal rights decisions were possible only because political movements created the preconditions for the justices to rule as they did. And justices began to whittle those same rulings down as soon as popular support for them waned.
Once we accept that abortion rights must be protected through political means, rather than judicial fiat, there is no reason not to be ambitious. A federal guarantee should stick neither with Roe’s argumentative faultiness — dubiously grounded in a right to privacy rather than women’s equality — nor its narrow protections. A new federal abortion right could ensure that it is a funded entitlement for the poor women who most need it.
And to the obvious objection that the Supreme Court could junk a law establishing this right or erode it again, Congress could safeguard its efforts by diminishing the court’s power to overturn the law. The statute could specify that the court lacks jurisdiction to hear challenges to it (“jurisdiction-stripping”), or it could establish that a supermajority of justices is required to strike it down. Both approaches would be controversial, and the court could resist them as a challenge to its power. But the court also resisted New Deal efforts to drag American social policy into the modern era. As Roosevelt said, “Whenever legalistic interpretation has clashed with contemporary sense on great questions of broad national policy, ultimately the people and the Congress have had their way.”
Arbitrary and unreviewable power of the sort the Supreme Court now possesses is the worst threat to democracy and rights alike. Abortion rights are at stake in the Dobbs case and its political aftermath but, equally fatefully, so is whether democracies can legislate rights of almost any kind. Only when rights are legislated, progressives need to learn, are they made reliable. | 2022-06-17T18:59:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Counting on the Supreme Court to uphold key rights was always a mistake - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/supreme-court-rights-congress-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/supreme-court-rights-congress-democracy/ |
Bob Brown, a beloved two-sport D.C. prep coach, dies at 71
Brown guided St. Albans baseball and basketball teams to conference titles
Bob Brown (center), was named All Metropolitan Coach of the Year in 1986. (Courtesy of Mark Wilkerson)
Bullis basketball coach Bruce Kelley was at the Laurel Park racetrack on a warm spring afternoon in 2007, hoping it’d be his lucky day.
Kelley, a horse racing novice, was courting a competitor, Bob Brown, and looking to develop chemistry after asking the former St. Albans High School coach to join his staff.
Kelley and Brown placed $5 bets on three races, and the first two horses they picked won. During the final race, the duo lamented a likely loss before their horse seized a comeback victory. Kelley and Brown laughed and hugged, and Kelley used his winnings to buy them lunch. Their earnings were hardly life-changing, but that moment helped Kelley forge a lasting bond with Brown, whose 14 years as an assistant coach at Bullis formed the second act of a decades-long coaching career considered one of the most impressive in D.C., Maryland and Virginia high school basketball history.
Brown, who also coached baseball at St. Albans, died this week at 71, according to close friends.
“For 40 years, he’s coached high school sports in this area,” Kelley said in a recent phone interview. “There’s no one else like him.”
Brown served as baseball coach of St. Albans, the all-boys private school in Northwest D.C., from 1976 to 1990, winning 11 Interstate Athletic Conference championships, including 10 straight from 1978 to 1987.
But he was best known for his run as the St. Albans basketball coach, from 1986 through 2007, when he won more than 300 games and five IAC championships. Under Brown, the program developed a reputation for punching above its weight, especially during the 1992-93 season. It beat some of the region’s top-ranked teams that year, including No. 1 Anacostia and No. 5 DeMatha.
Brown was known for his unpredictable defensive schemes, his knack for experimentation and his enthusiastic pursuit of top competition, whether that took his basketball teams to local powerhouses or his baseball teams to small towns in South Florida.
Brown also developed a reputation for his character.
Anwar McQueen, a star guard who played on the 1992-93 team, recalls an episode when he overslept, awaking too late to make the team’s flight to Vero Beach, where they were to play games in Florida. McQueen felt he had let the team down and he anticipated his punishment. Instead, Brown picked him up and they made a 17-hour drive to Florida, during which Brown shared stories about past players and summer road trips to Las Vegas.
“That’s my most memorable experience with him,” McQueen said. “It was indirectly deemed as punishment for me missing the flight but I really got to know him. It really led to another level of personal trust and respect for one another.”
Brown stayed in touch with McQueen and advised his former player before McQueen pursued his own coaching career, which included a stop at Morgan State. Brown did the same for several other players who followed a similar path, including Craig Brown (no relation), who become his primary caregiver.
“Our family just loved him,” Craig Brown said of his former basketball coach. “My wife is so taken aback.”
Despite his success at St. Albans, the school dismissed Brown in 2007, seeking a fresh face for its basketball program after more than three decades, according to a former administrator. The decision upset former players and even competitors, including Kelley, who offered Brown an assistant coaching job and eagerly opened the floor for Brown’s input and influence — which contributed to another six championships.
“He was an assistant coach, friend, co-coach, colleague and mentor,” Kelley said. “I’ve been doing this a while, but he’d been doing it twice as long. He’d say, ‘Look, when we played Spingarn back in ’87, this is what we did.’ Or, ‘I tried this against DeMatha back in ’91.’ He’d always tell me if I was pushing the guys too hard or being too critical. And he was always on me to play more zone.”
Brown was a key staffer at Bullis until 2020, when the pandemic and a right leg amputation curbed his physical involvement. He continued to dissect game film and share his advice with Kelley over the phone.
Kelley hoped to reintegrate Brown as a consultant. He said that idea excited Brown during their last conversation. But on Tuesday, Kelley received a call from Craig Brown, who’d visited his old coach’s home and found he had died. Craig Brown said the medical examiner suspected a heart attack within the previous 48 hours.
In the days since, former players and colleagues have checked in on each other and exchanged stories about Brown’s exploits as the owner of a popular concession stand or the time he prank-called an opposing coach, pretending to be the league commissioner.
Kelley tears up when he considers his fondest memory of Brown.
“It’s how he made my son feel as a basketball player,” he said. “My son was a JV player at Bullis, and like a lot of other boys, average. But Bob ran some plays for him and just made him feel like he was a better player than any other coach could, including me. I’m going to cry, because countless boys had that feeling for him.” | 2022-06-17T19:00:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bob Brown, a beloved two-sport D.C. prep coach, dies at 71 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/bob-brown-beloved-two-sport-dc-prep-coach-dies-71/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/bob-brown-beloved-two-sport-dc-prep-coach-dies-71/ |
His advisers are studying plans for a reelection launch and flooding key states with cash. But they can’t shake worries within their party on his readiness for another campaign.
President Biden takes a selfie with a White House visitor while he walks to Marine One. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Former Democratic senator Chris Dodd, a close Biden ally and friend, said there is no reason to think the president will not run again. “The one thing I guarantee you is he is no quitter,” Dodd said. “There is always some speculation in every administration, but from my conversations, he is a guy who is running again.”
In public and private, Biden himself has emphasized that he is running, effectively shutting down any discussion of the topic between the president and his close advisers, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democrats close to the White House, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Biden remains consumed by inflation, the war in Ukraine and the other daily crises that arrive at his desk, and even as aides have had to publicly and repeatedly reiterate that he is running in 2024, there are no plans to expedite the official launch of a reelection campaign, to the frustration of some Democrats trying to finalize their own plans.
Several prominent Democrats are maneuvering in case Biden changes his mind as donors, lawmakers and strategists fret about his age and ability to run a grueling campaign. If reelected, Biden would be 86 by the end of his second term.
Republicans assail Biden and Democrats daily for failing to curb increasing prices, a surge in crime and an influx of migrants at the southern border, while hammering at social issues related to racial justice, school curriculums and transgender rights.
“I think people watch him with a clenched jaw and a lot of tension in their body, hoping he doesn’t make a mistake at any moment,” said a senior Democratic election strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. “It is obviously hard to do that as president, and it is really hard to do that as president running for reelection.” Asked whether it would be good for Democrats if Biden ran again, the person said, “I think it is a coin flip.”
But a subset of the Democratic Party remains convinced there is a good chance Biden will not ultimately go through with another campaign, and many do not see Vice President Harris as a suitable successor, especially given the way her 2020 presidential primary campaign collapsed. That has resulted in some not so quiet jockeying among Democratic leaders, who vow not to run against Biden but see an opening should he bow out.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) is speaking in New Hampshire on Saturday at the state Democratic Party’s annual convention. Aides to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a memo to allies that he “has not ruled out another run for president” if Biden does not run, though the 80-year-old lawmaker said this week, “I think Biden will probably run again, and if he runs again I will support him.”
And many of the 2020 Democratic candidates — including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) — could be in the mix as well.
Although Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), speaking recently on CNN, declined to explicitly endorse Biden’s reelection, there are no visible signs in the party of an active effort to push the president aside if he wants to run.
Biden ran for president in 2020 promising “strong, steady, stable leadership,” but Democrats admit that his standing has taken a hit through the first year-and-a-half of his administration, which included a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and a failure to unite Democrats around his legislative agenda. A Wall Street Journal poll in March found 57 percent of Americans disapproved of the job Biden was doing in “being a strong leader.”
Biden’s own strategists have been heartened by continued support for Biden’s character, which they hope would contrast well with Trump in a rematch. The same poll found that Americans believe Biden “tries to do the right thing” by a margin of 50 to 48 percent. | 2022-06-17T19:19:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden sends every signal he is running again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/biden-signals-run-for-reelection/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/17/biden-signals-run-for-reelection/ |
The highs and lows of ‘The Wendy Williams Show’
Wendy Williams answers questions before a live audience in Silver Spring, Md., on a 2018 tour stop celebrating the 10th anniversary of “The Wendy Williams Show.” (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
When Wendy Williams debuted her nationally syndicated daytime talk show in the summer of 2009, some industry-watchers wondered if the brash host, who made a name for herself on hip-hop radio stations in Philadelphia and New York, could translate to a national audience. Williams quickly proved her critics had nothing to worry about: By the spring of 2010, the talker, distributed by Debmar-Mercury, had been renewed in 80 percent of the country, including 18 of the top 20 markets.
On Friday, “The Wendy Williams Show” aired its final episode amid Williams’s ongoing health struggles and reports that the 57-year-old host was placed under a financial guardianship after Wells Fargo argued in a petition that she had been the “victim of undue influence and financial exploitation.” (Williams has publicly insisted she is of sound mind). She didn’t host her show at all during its 14th season and did not turn up on the finale, which was helmed by comedian Sherri Shepherd. Shepherd, who took over in February following a string of guest hosts, is set to debut her own show in Williams’s former time slot this fall.
Some of Williams’s staffers, who maintained a visual presence on the show, had tears in their eyes as Shepherd thanked the production crew and the show’s loyal viewers. “Most of all, we have to thank you, Wendy Williams,” Shepherd said as the audience leaped to a standing ovation. “There is nobody, nobody, like Wendy Williams. From her days on the radio to ruling daytime talk for 13 seasons, Wendy earned her title as the queen of all media.”
An appearance by Vanessa Williams, who was the first guest of “The Wendy Williams Show” in its national bow, helped achieve some synergy in the jewel-toned studio. But the episode was a dissonant and unceremonious end for the pioneering media personality, who — as demonstrated by a reel of clips from over the years — brought a unique, no-holds-barred flair to daytime TV with her gift of gab and diva accents including a shoe cam and plush purple furniture. “She was real. She is real — she’s still with us,” Vanessa Williams said while praising the host as “resilient and down to earth.”
Here’s a timeline of some of the show’s best and worst moments over the past 13 years.
July 2008: “The Wendy Williams Show” launches a successful six-week test run
Any questions about whether Williams would resonate in Texas as well as she had in New York City evaporated as Williams pulled high ratings in Los Angeles, Dallas and Detroit as well.
July 2008: Williams spars with guest Omarosa Manigault
When “The Apprentice” breakout appeared on “The Wendy Williams Show” to promote her 2008 book, things started out on a friendly note as Manigault and Williams exchanged a hug and a pair of air kisses. But it quickly devolved into a skirmish as Manigault called out Williams for promising to “straighten her out” (“I said smooth you out,” Williams corrected). “I know how to chill but I will not be disrespected,” Manigault said. Williams, looking serious, told her “this is not the time for you to look for your moment.” When Williams grabbed the reality show star’s book to show it to viewers, Manigault snatched it back.
Before the segment concluded, the women traded appearance-based insults, with Williams suggesting Manigault try the hyaluronic acid filler Restylane and Manigault saying she preferred wigs that “don’t sit up three inches on my head.”
“I wanted to throw her off the set,” Williams told the Associated Press of the viral interview. Meanwhile, Manigault, who made a much more cordial return to the show in 2013, told the Associated Press, “I stand by everything I said.”
July 2009: “The Wendy Williams Show” goes national
“The responsibility that I ultimately feel to the audience is to entertain, maybe enlighten, and help you take your mind off messy things,” Williams told the New York Times ahead of her big debut. “We all have things that are messy going on in our life, that we would rather forget for a moment. I do, you do, we all do. And truthfully, being out in front of the people for those six weeks was just, ah, my God, such a Calgon bath. And then I’d go back home and deal with the mess. And that’s what I want people to do.”
September 2014: Williams literally eats crow
After losing her bet that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s marriage wouldn’t outlast Kardashian’s 72-day marriage to NBA player Kris Humphries. Williams tapped a chef to make “crow gumbo” for her to sample in front of her “co-hosts” (Williams’s term of endearment for her audience).
June 2017: Williams interviews Sean “Diddy” Combs
Williams interviewed tons of celebrity guests over the years but it was a big deal when Diddy took the seat opposite Williams. The hip-hop heavyweight was one of the adversaries William made during her radio days as a gossipy host. But their TV conversation suggested they had moved past the animosity.
“I want to just tell you how proud I am of you because I don’t think you get enough credit for really being the first one to cover our culture — you know, the hip-hop culture and also hip-hop celebrities — and just understanding that it’s news,” Diddy told Williams.
From 2018: Wendy Williams made a lot of enemies in radio 20 years ago. Now she’s a daytime-television staple.
October 2017: Williams faints live on air
Dressed as Lady Liberty, Williams took a terrifying tumble while doing a live Halloween costume segment. She later told “Good Morning America” reporter Amy Robach that she was “scared to death” by the fall, and that she had been dehydrated and so hot that it felt like being “in the middle of a fire.” But she maintained her diva profile even then, joking that fans knew she put her hand up to her head mid-collapse “to make sure my crown is there.”
She also opened up about her Graves disease diagnosis, which was mentioned in a 2009 New York Times profile, which noted that after watching footage of her test run, “she learned to be mindful of her posture and what she called her ‘eye pop.’ (She has a thyroid condition related to Graves’ disease that can make her gaze a little intense.)”
January 2018: Williams says she’s “sick” of #MeToo and appears to defend singer R. Kelly
Williams faced criticism after declaring herself “sick of this #MeToo movement.” She then launched into a bizarre defense of R. Kelly, who at that point had faced decades of sexual-assault allegations, arguing that the singer “wasn’t a MeToo” and asserting that one of his alleged victims, a 14-year-old girl, “was there at his house, she let it go down.” (In 2021, Kelly was found guilty of federal sex trafficking and racketeering.)
“It is disgraceful that as wide as your audience is and as many young girls, many Black girls watch your show that you would openly victim blame like you did yesterday,” tweeted Tarana Burke, the activist who founded the #MeToo movement. “You are the reason why we can’t make headway in our community around sexual assault.”
Sexual-abuse and harassment allegations were consistently a dicey subject for Williams. When actress Keke Palmer appeared on the show in 2017, Williams questioned her about a lawsuit Palmer had filed for “sexual intimidation” against singer Trey Songz. “I don’t want to keep browbeating that one situation,” Palmer said. “But I will say, Wendy: I would have loved to turn on your show and saw you be a little bit more compassionate and less accusatory and ridiculing.” When Williams responded that she “couldn’t,” Palmer hilariously interrupted: “Why, girl? Because the gag is, you wasn’t there!”
When Terry Crews came forward about being sexually assaulted, Williams was slammed for saying the actor wasn’t brave, “just talking.” And in 2019, Williams again drew ire for saying two men who accused Michael Jackson of sexually abusing them as children were making “a money grab” and discussed which allegations she believed to be true and those she deemed “lies.”
April 2018: Williams lands a milestone interview
Williams’s show was the first stop for Cynthia Nixon, following the “Sex and the City” star’s announcement that she was running for governor of New York. Nixon told Williams that Black women, a key portion of the host’s audience, were the backbone of the Democratic Party.
“We knew that by doing Wendy’s show — which reaches all corners of the state — we could get Cynthia in front of a diverse audience and introduce them to the real her,” a senior strategist for Nixon’s campaign told The Washington Post in 2018, the same year Williams went on a multi-city tour promoting the milestone 10th season of her talk show.
March 2019: Williams reveals that she is a resident at a sober-living house
In a stunning moment, Williams, who has been open about struggling with cocaine abuse during the height of her radio career, revealed on the air that she had been staying at a sober-living house. Williams later told the Los Angeles Times that her time in rehab and the sober house was “100 percent against my will,” and an authorized Lifetime movie about her life suggested that Williams denied drinking excessively.
Wendy Williams seems like the perfect Lifetime movie subject. So why is it so unsettling to watch?
September 2019: Williams puts divorce drama in writing
Five months after filing for divorce from her estranged husband following years of rumors and reports he fathered a child with another woman, Williams removes his name from the executive producer credits of her show. Right up to the very last episode, the credit reads “Just Wendy.”
January 2020: Williams denies passing gas on-air
After online speculation she dubbed “Fartgate,” Williams addressed the flatulation rumors head-on. “I have never farted once on this show. As a matter of fact, I barely fart,” she told viewers. “You know why? Because gas gets released several different ways, and mine is belching, because all I do is talk.”
“If I farted, I would have definitely been laughing, because farts are always funny,” she added.
February 2020: Williams comes under fire for a joke about a tragic death
Online backlash erupted after Williams made a “Price Is Right” joke while discussing the manner of death for Amie Harwick, the former fiancee of the game show’s host, Drew Carey. (We won’t repeat the barb.) A year later, William again drew backlash for flippantly reporting on the murder of a TikTok star.
October 2021: A slew of celebrity hosts helm the already-delayed 14th season
Amid Williams’s reported health battles, celebrities such as Michael Rappaport, Leah Remini and Fat Joe stepped in to help guest-host the show. When Debmar-Mercury announced the cancellation of “The Wendy Williams Show” in March, Williams had not hosted a single episode of the 14th season. Still, she told GMA that she planned to return. “Give me about three months,” she said in a phone interview. “There are private things that I have to deal with and then I’ll be ready to come back and be free and ready to do my thing.”
June 2022: “The Wendy Williams Show” airs its final episode — without Wendy Williams
After nearly 13 years of national syndication, “The Wendy Williams Show” aired its final episode on June 17. Ahead of the credits, the crew gathered to recite Williams’s trademark “how you doin'” catchphrase one last time. | 2022-06-17T20:07:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The highs and lows of ‘The Wendy Williams Show’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/17/wendy-williams-show-ending/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/17/wendy-williams-show-ending/ |
Former President Donald Trump has appeared in several videos displayed at hearings by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Susan Walsh/AP)
YouTube took down a clip uploaded by the Jan. 6 committee to the video platform, saying the video, which featured a clip of former president Donald Trump telling lies about the 2020 election, spread misinformation without the proper context.
The video was one of many uploaded by the House committee, which is investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, as a way to create an online record of its work and share it with a larger number of people.
The video featured former Attorney General William Barr but also included a clip of a TV interview in which Trump said some of his votes had been given to Joe Biden. The video was short, and didn’t include Barr or anyone else specifically calling out Trump’s statement as a lie.
“Our election integrity policy prohibits content advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, if it does not provide sufficient context,” said YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone.”
In the wake of the 2020 election, YouTube changed its policies to ban claims that the election was fraudulent or stolen. In the days after Jan. 6, it banned Trump’s channel from the platform, an action that was also taken by Facebook and Twitter on their sites.
YouTube has for years been a key platform used by conspiracy theorists to broadcast false claims about vaccines and election results. During the pandemic, the company began clamping down on lies about covid-19 and the efficacy of vaccines. The 2020 election and the campaign by Trump and his supporters to have its results overturned forced the company to grapple even more with its role as a broadcast platform for false claims that may undermine people’s faith in elections.
The company’s leaders have said repeatedly they don’t want to act as political censors or gatekeepers and have tried to craft policies that they can enforce in a way that appears neutral. That appears to be the reasoning behind taking down the Jan. 6 committee’s clip. | 2022-06-17T20:16:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | YouTube pulls Jan. 6 committee clip over Trump election disinformation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/17/jan6-youtube-committee-clip-pulled/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/17/jan6-youtube-committee-clip-pulled/ |
The onetime music journalist had lived in Brazil since 2007 and was researching a book on the Amazon when he died
Foreign correspondent Dom Phillips reporting in Brazil in 2019. (Joao Laet/AFP/Getty Images)
Authorities did not announce whether the other set of human remains collected belonged to Pereira, but tests are continuing. No cause of death has yet been confirmed. But police say it is likely the men were shot to death. At least two men are in custody, and police are expecting more arrests to come soon.
He was a versatile reporter who wrote about politics, poverty and cultural developments in Brazil. As a contributor to The Post from 2014 to 2016, he covered the country’s preparations for the World Cup soccer tournament and the Summer Olympics of 2016. He later examined whether the Games had conferred a lasting benefit on Rio de Janeiro.
In 2019, Mr. Phillips asked Bolsonaro about the deforestation in the countryside. Bolsonaro, who favors mining and other commercial development, responded, “First, you have to understand that the Amazon belongs to Brazil, not to you.”
A video of the exchange became a sensation among Bolosanaro’s supporters, who used it to bolster their view that the president was being attacked by the media.
In 2018, Mr. Phillips joined Pereira and photographer Gary Calton on a 17-day journey into the Amazon — almost 600 miles by boat and a 45-mile trek on foot — as Pereira, then a government official, attempted to make contact with isolated Indigenous groups.
“As he squats in the mud by a fire,” Mr. Phillips wrote in an evocative story for the Guardian, “Bruno Pereira, an official at Brazil’s government indigenous agency, cracks open the boiled skull of a monkey with a spoon and eats its brains for breakfast as he discusses policy.”
When a local man was asked if agricultural development and mining should be permitted in the Indigenous territories, he said, “No. We take care of our land.”
After Mr. Phillips and Pereira failed to appear for a scheduled meeting on June 5, Indigenous people reported that a boat was seen following them.
Mr. Phillips’s wife, Alessandra Sampaio, called for the Brazilian government to take prompt action to find her husband and Pereira. Brazilian celebrities, including soccer star Pelé, joined the public plea. News organizations — such as The Post, the Guardian and the New York Times, all of which Mr. Phillips had written for — released an open letter demanding that the Brazilian government “urgently step up and fully resource the effort” to find the men.
“Anything might happen," he said. "It could have been an accident. They could have been executed.”
After their remains were found, Bolsonaro said, “That Englishman was disliked in the region ... He should have more than redoubled the precautions he was taking. And he decided to go on an excursion instead.”
“The victims are not the ones to blame,” one of Bolsoanaro’s political opponents, Orlando Silva, said in a tweet.
Dominic Mark Phillips was born in July 23, 1964, in Bebington, a town near Liverpool in the Merseyside region of northwestern England. He left college to travel in the 1980s and lived in Israel, Greece, Denmark and Australia, taking odd jobs that included picking fruit, working as a chef and cleaning a meat factory.
He became a devotee of a form of electronic dance music called house and, in the late 1980s, helped found an arts magazine in Bristol, England. He moved to London in 1990 and worked as a top editor at Mixmag, a magazine chronicling house music. He coined the term “progressive house” to describe “a new breed of hard but tuneful, banging but thoughtful, uplifting and trancey British house.”
He left the publication in 1999 to produce documentaries and videos about music. In 2009, he published “DJ Superstars Here We Go!,” a book described in a Guardian review as, “in part, a memoir of his days reporting on clubs and after-parties awash with champagne, vodka, cocaine and ecstasy.”
Mr. Phillips first visited Brazil in 1998. After settling there nine years later, he largely gave up his late-night ways and often rose before dawn to do stand-up paddling on waterways.
In addition to his wife, survivors include a sister and a brother.
Mr. Phillips turned down several prestigious job offers, preferring to stay in Brazil as a freelance writer, contributing to the Financial Times, Bloomberg News and soccer magazines. He was well known among international journalists and taught English and volunteered in poor neighborhoods.
Terrence McCoy in Brazil contributed to this report. | 2022-06-17T20:20:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dom Phillips, British correspondent in Brazil, dies at 57 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/17/dom-phillips-brazil-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/17/dom-phillips-brazil-dies/ |
As the World Cup rejects Washington, Daniel Snyder’s ignominy goes global
The Washington Commanders haven't found a replacement site for their longtime home at FedEx Field. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
As the bus full of World Cup officials last fall was making its way to FedEx Field from a downtown D.C. hotel, someone among the entourage, a U.S. Soccer official confided to me, remarked how unpleasantly surprised they were that the trip to a potential 2026 men’s World Cup site was taking so long.
That was just the first of their eye-openers.
Upon finally arriving at the stadium in suburban Maryland where the local NFL team plays, officials were shown repairs of a pipe that burst during a game a few weeks earlier, showering a dwindled Washington football team fan base in a dozen seats or so with liquid that team executives swore was not sewage.
And although the World Cup honchos were long gone by season’s end, visiting other potential sites throughout the county, they were certainly apprised of a season-ending event at FedEx that I’d say was a metaphor for the stadium and the franchise that calls it home. Several Philadelphia fans trying to congratulate their winning quarterback Jalen Hurts as he exited the field had the railing they leaned over collapse and send them tumbling about six feet to the ground. Stadium officials said the railing wasn’t intended to be load bearing.
So when Colin Smith, a World Cup official, said Thursday — after it was announced that Washington didn’t make the cut to be an official part of the 2026 tournament — that it was difficult to “ … imagine a World Cup coming to the U.S. and the capital city not taking a major role …” he was just being polite. We didn’t deserve the 2026 World Cup, but it’s not our fault.
Blame Daniel Snyder. Because World Cup officials all but decided Snyder’s stadium was a little short of being a dump.
Some among us have grown accustomed to our NFL franchise making us an embarrassment in the region, what with the Ravens up the parkway in Baltimore playing winning football in a stadium built just a year after FedEx at about half the cost, and with a reputation for being both accessible and enjoyable.
Some among us are growing accustomed to our team making us a national embarrassment, what with Snyder refusing Wednesday to appear before a congressional committee investigating allegations that his team’s workplace is, among other things, hostile to women.
But Thursday elevated us to a new level of ignominy: worldwide. Thanks to Snyder.
To be sure, the District’s vision of hosting games had been abandoned weeks ago, when the cities merged bids in a futile effort to overcome Washington’s stadium flaws. Now, the men’s 2026 World Cup will kick off for one of the few times in a near-100-year history without the capital city of the host country as a site for a single game. Bonn, West Germany, was left out in 1974. Tokyo didn’t join Seoul when Japan and South Korea co-hosted in 2002. And while Canada and Mexico are co-hosting 2026 with the United States as the hub, Mexico City will host games while Ottawa was never considered.
Even in 1994, when the United States first hosted a World Cup, soon-to-be demolished RFK Stadium hosted games despite being past its prime.
“It’s been an incredibly competitive process,” Smith said. “All the cities have been amazing. This was a very, very difficult choice.”
Indeed, well before Smith’s colleagues toured FedEx there were criticisms of FedEx’s playing surface as the worst in the NFL after a series of high-profile injuries. The franchise all but admitted as much when it embarked on a major field reconstruction project just before last season. Apparently, it was a little too late for World Cup officials relying on athletes worth hundreds of millions of dollars to their pro teams.
But this rejection wasn’t just about timing. It was about poor stewardship of the stadium, rivaled only by the poor stewardship of a once-bedrock NFL franchise.
This may have been Snyder’s coup de grace in killing this golden goose of an NFL franchise. The team I grew up with in Section 312 of RFK is so long gone. The winning waned. The coveted season ticket is no more. Less than 10 years after FedEx opened in 1997, it grew into the largest NFL stadium with accommodations for 91,000 fans. It was either first or second in attendance in the NFL for a few years. By 2021, it attracted the second-fewest ticket buyers in the league.
Barry Svrluga: The options for a Commanders stadium site: Bad, worse and nonexistent
That’s not just because it’s a long drive for so many fans, as the World Cup officials griped. It’s also a long ride for less and less reason. The team I grew up with won as many playoff games in the ‘80s and ‘90s as all but one team, the San Francisco 49ers. It was must-see in person as well as on TV.
The team since then, the one of the 2000s, has won fewer playoff games than every team in the league save the Detroit Lions. No wonder attendance has declined so precipitously.
Now what was the crown jewel of professional sports franchises in the area may as well be a knickknack. No one covets it.
Earlier this month, amid the myriad controversies surrounding the team, Virginia Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax) tabled legislation that would have helped fund a new stadium for Snyder’s football team.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan reiterated that his state would cough up $400 million to build up the area around FedEx if Snyder wants to sign a new lease after the current one expires in 2027, but would not finance a new stadium.
And while old RFK is due for demolition, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and the city council are divided over how to use the land it’s on. For now, the city doesn’t even own it; the federal government does.
But there’s no need to rush to build new or renovate the old. The world’s biggest sporting event said it isn’t coming, one more ignominious achievement for Daniel Snyder. | 2022-06-17T20:24:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The World Cup's rejection of Washington, FedEx Field and Daniel Snyder - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/washington-world-cup-fedex-field-daniel-snyder/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/washington-world-cup-fedex-field-daniel-snyder/ |
Whooping crane hatches at National Zoo site, boosting endangered species
Parents Tehya and Goliath are ‘protective and attentive to its needs,’ zoo officials said.
A whooping crane chick hatched May 26 at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. (Chris Crowe, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)
One of the most endangered species of crane in the world has hatched for the first time at the National Zoo’s research facility in Virginia.
And it had quite a journey to get here.
The “thriving” baby whooping crane arrived May 26 at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, zoo officials said in a statement Friday. The bird team at the facility had taken its egg “under their wing” the week before, officials said, after the International Crane Foundation and Necedah National Wildlife Refuge staff in Wisconsin found it “abandoned in a wild nest.”
Without biological parents to care for the egg, surrogates — Tehya, a 16-year-old female whooping crane, and Goliath, a 25-year-old male — were chosen, zoo officials said.
The two surrogate parents had successfully raised colts with other mates before they came to the zoo’s facility a few years ago, the zoo’s statement said, and “the wild egg was laid around the same time as the pair’s infertile eggs, so the incubation period aligned.” Whooping cranes breed in the spring, and their eggs take between 30 and 35 days to hatch.
The stakes for the Front Royal egg were high, since whooping cranes’ populations have suffered amid the destruction of their habitat, poaching and natural disasters. In 1941, just over 20 whooping cranes were left in the wild, the zoo said. Thanks to conservation efforts, there are now an estimated 700 in the wild and 140 in human care, officials said.
To get Tehya and Goliath ready for parenthood, officials said, the keepers gave them a fake egg with which to “practice their natural parenting behaviors,” while the real egg was kept in an incubator. Shortly before the egg was about to hatch, “keepers switched the fake egg for the fertile one,” officials said.
When the colt hatched, both parents cared for it right away, officials said, and are “protective and attentive to its needs.” The colt is being closely monitored, but caretakers are allowing the family to “bond without interference,” the statement said. Caretakers called the colt “healthy, alert and curious about its surroundings.”
Eaglet removed from nest at arboretum in D.C. — and viewers freak out
Whooping crane babies are called colts because they have long legs. They fledge when they’re between 80 and 100 days old, the zoo noted, but typically stick close to their parents’ territories for up to nine months.
The colt will have its first veterinary exam at 5 weeks of age, zoo officials said, at which point a DNA sample will be taken to determine its sex. | 2022-06-17T20:25:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Baby whooping crane hatches at National Zoo facility in Virginia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/baby-whooping-crane-national-zoo/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/baby-whooping-crane-national-zoo/ |
D.C. will not use schools as voting sites in November following safety concerns
Voters wait to enter the polls at Ballou High School on Oct. 27, 2020. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)
The District will not use schools as voting sites in the November general election following safety concerns from parents overusing them this month for early voting.
The decision comes amid a national push to restrict public access to schools following a deadly mass shooting in a Texas elementary school last month. It also illustrates the tension between making it harder to enter schools while also making polling locations non-intimidating and accessible places to vote.
Early voting for the D.C. primaries spans more than a week, launching June 10 and running until June 19. The city is using a dozen public school campuses as early voting sites, and 43 schools as Election Day voting sites on June 21. The last day of school is June 27.
Typically visitors to D.C. schools, including parents, need to provide photo identification to enter, but voters only need to provide proof of residency to cast a ballot, not a photo identification.
“It kind of pits the protocols that are important for the school administration to feel like they are running a safe school versus what election officials need to run a fair election,” said Priya Cook, a mother of two students at Bancroft Elementary in Mount Pleasant, which is being used as an early voting site.
Long lines in the 2020 election coupled with a need during the coronavirus pandemic for more spacious polling locations pushed the city to seek around 30 large sites across all eight wards for early voting. The Board of Elections settled on public recreation centers and libraries — as well as cafeterias and gymnasiums in school buildings.
Nick Jacobs, spokesman for the D.C. Board of Elections, said the board attempted to use recreation centers, but some wards didn’t have enough of them with ample space, forcing the city to turn to schools. The board assessed polling places’ security needs, and paid for security guards for schools where elections officials found a need, he said.
“We need bigger areas like gymnasiums to accommodate more space and more equipment, and also with covid to not have everyone too bunched up," Jacobs said. "You couldn’t use the proverbial church basement anymore because it was a little more compact.”
After the primary, the board will assess whether it operated more polling locations than necessary this election cycle, he said. Because schools won’t be used in November, the city may have fewer voting sites.
Kenneth S. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, which consults with schools on safety plans, said public schools are frequently used as voting locations across the country, including in the District. Safety concerns emerged after the Columbine High school shooting in 1999, he said, and it’s now common for school districts to cancel classes for Election Day, often holding planning days for teachers so children are not in the building.
But, he said, it gets more complicated when counties and cities use schools as early voting sites for extended periods and officials cannot guard voting locations as they would school buildings on a typical day. Having police officers in voting locations, for example, could be perceived as voter intimidation.
Trump said he is not aware of safety issues that have occurred inside schools on voting days, but that it presents “one more potential opportunity that you may be opening up access to someone who may have ill intentions.”
“There is not a lot of logic to it,” he said. “We are going to fortify our schools, spend millions of dollars on it, to make sure that strangers do not have access to school — except for 2 to 3 days when anyone can get it in while school is in session.” He offers some safety suggestions, including restricting one part of the school that ideally has its own entrance for voting.
Turnout at many of the city’s early voting centers has been low so far; Bancroft had recorded 115 early voters between June 10 and June 15. Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Northwest Washington recorded 68 ballots. And Kimball Elementary in Southeast Washington had just 46 early votes in that time.
“If there’s 10 people that show up in that voting place during a week of early voting, maybe it’s not worth it,” said Michele Cerebelli, a parent of two students at Oyster-Adams Bilingual School.
Cerebelli was so concerned when he heard that Oyster-Adams Bilingual School would be used as a polling place throughout early voting this year that he called the assistant principal who said she had been getting many similar calls.
The school normally locks its doors during the day, Cerebelli said, but has to keep the entrance to the polling place open.
“Someone claiming he’s a voter can get access to the school,” Cerebelli said. “With what happened recently in Texas, I dislike the idea.” | 2022-06-17T20:25:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. schools out as voting sites for November election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/17/dc-schools-not-voting-locations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/17/dc-schools-not-voting-locations/ |
Thousands of flights were canceled or delayed Thursday and Friday, mainly as the result of weather-related issues.
Passengers walk through Reagan National Airport in April. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
More than 1,700 flights into, within or out of the country were canceled and more than 8,700 — about 31 percent — were delayed with serious issues at airports in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. The average length of the delay Thursday was 81 minutes.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday issued ground stops and ground delays in response to weather problems and, in some cases, traffic constraints caused by a shortage of gates at airports, including at Charlotte-Douglas International, an American Airlines hub. Such measures are designed to ensure airports don’t become congested.
Airlines trim summer schedules, aiming to avoid high profile meltdowns
Air travelers should be able to expect reliable service as demand returns to levels not seen since before the pandemic.
At Reagan National Airport in the Washington, D.C. region on Thursday, more than 200 flights — roughly 43 percent of scheduled departures — were delayed, and 79, or 16 percent, were canceled. At Dulles International Airport, only 4 percent of scheduled departures were canceled, but 30 percent of flights were delayed. At Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, 37 percent of flights were delayed Thursday, according to FlightAware.
Passengers left on planes for hours at Reagan National after storms
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Airlines for America’s Calio and Buttigieg, raising concerns about carriers’ performance during Memorial Day. Markey on Thursday reiterated the need for carriers to be held accountable. | 2022-06-17T20:25:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Flight delays: Buttigieg meets with airline executives amid cancellations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/17/flight-delays-cancellations-buttigieg/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/17/flight-delays-cancellations-buttigieg/ |
Pr. George’s police officer arrested after altercation at NYC club
The officer, who was accused of pointing a gun at someone in the incident, was suspended without pay
A Prince George’s County police officer was arrested and suspended without pay following an incident in which he was accused of pointing a gun at someone during an altercation at a nightclub in New York, authorities said.
Officer Aaron Holliday, 26, was off-duty at the time of the incident, which occurred around 11 p.m. Tuesday in front of the Manhattan nightclub The Q NYC, authorities said.
According to New York City police, a 38-year-old man reported to authorities that he was in a verbal dispute with Holliday and that Holliday pointed a weapon at him. Holliday, who has been with the Prince George’s department for four years, was charged with menacing, reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a loaded weapon, and was suspended after his arrest, according to Prince George’s and New York City police.
The Prince George’s Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division has launched an investigation into the incident, authorities said.
Glenn Franklin Hardy, Holliday’s attorney, said his client has pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released following his arrest.
“He has full faith in the criminal justice system and believes that he will be vindicated when this is all over,” Hardy said. | 2022-06-17T20:29:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pr. George’s police officer arrested after altercation at NYC club - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/prince-georges-officer-arrested-nyc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/prince-georges-officer-arrested-nyc/ |
Two legislators hope to be D.C. mayor. What have they done on council?
From left, D.C. Council members Robert C. White Jr. (At Large) and Trayon White Sr. (Ward 8). Both men are vying to beat Mayor Muriel E. Bowser for the Democratic nomination for mayor this month. (Jahi Chikwendiu, Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
D.C. Council members Robert C. White Jr. and Trayon White Sr. — Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s top challengers in the Democratic mayoral primary — were elected in 2016, giving them six years on the city’s powerful legislative body to create laws and policies that shape D.C. life.
Robert White holds a citywide council position, tasked with representing residents in all eight wards. Trayon White represents Ward 8, which has a high concentration of poverty, and his bills and votes have focused on serving his constituents. Although neither has been a main leader behind the council’s hallmark bills of the past six years, both have built reputations as advocates for liberal solutions to the city’s big challenges, including housing, education and crime.
Their legislative records overlap, generally placing them to the left of Bowser: For example, both were introducers on an overhaul of the Youth Rehabilitation Act, which Bowser refused to sign and continues to criticize, saying the law makes it too easy for young offenders who commit serious gun crimes to avoid lengthy sentences. Both men voted to raise taxes on high-income earners last year, over Bowser’s objections, though neither was part of the trio of left-leaning council members who crafted the tax plan.
But the two diverge on some issues, such as whether workers who receive tips should receive the full minimum wage — Trayon White voted to overturn voters’ support of a 2018 ballot initiative that would have mandated such wages and said he’ll vote against a similar initiative on November’s ballot, while Robert White supports the initiative and voted against repealing it four years ago. Last month, Robert White voted for removing police from public schools, while Trayon White, citing violent confrontations in school buildings, voted for keeping officers there.
While both have made promises on the campaign trail — for example, Robert White says he’ll guarantee a job to any D.C. resident who wants one, and Trayon White vows to clear some of drivers’ traffic tickets — a look at their legislative records and accomplishments on the council can offer clues about what type of mayor each one might be.
Robert C. White Jr.
Robert White has declared that he would be the “education mayor”— the same moniker that Bowser gave herself when she first ran for mayor nearly a decade ago. The council member argues that his leadership would improve the academic outcomes of Black students in the city in ways he said the mayor has failed to do.
But a look at White’s council record provides few clues to how he would boost student outcomes. Asked to name his biggest legislative achievement on the issue of education, White named the 2018 Birth to Three Act — a law spearheaded by Vincent C. Gray (D-Ward 7) that focused on early childhood care and includes ambitious plans to subsidize parents’ child-care expenses that has never been funded or implemented.
White hasn’t introduced big laws on public education, but he has been vocal during council fights on contentious bills such as the closing of the alternative middle and high school Washington Met (which he voted to keep open) and the relocation of Banneker High to the larger former Shaw Middle School site (which he voted to move to the site instead of reopening a neighborhood middle school at the location).
In an interview, White pointed to his advocacy on key education issues, saying he has heightened the urgent need, for example, to improve reading proficiency of D.C.'s Black and Hispanic children, most of whom are performing below grade level.
“Legislation isn’t the only way you make progress,” White said. “One of the most valuable things I’ve brought to the council is an intense focus on the lack of urgency in improving education, the disparate outcomes and the need for more accountability at the top of the system.”
On other subjects, White’s signature legislative accomplishments deal primarily with incarceration. White has written legislation helping former inmates get back on their feet when they return to D.C., and a law that allows D.C. residents who are incarcerated to continue voting while they are behind bars.
The logistical scramble to help D.C.'s inmates vote in 2020
White led the way on creating a civilian review board with the authority to investigate complaints about misconduct by Metro Transit Police, and at a time when D.C. police were racking up overtime, he co-introduced a bill to require the department to report overtime spending to the council, which Bowser (who later gave the police chief carte blanche to use “any overtime necessary” to combat gun violence) refused to sign.
He also introduced successful legislation to give local minority-owned businesses preference for medical marijuana licenses, and has proposed a law that would give preference to government contractors who create apprenticeships for D.C. residents. In one of his earliest votes, White voted to create the city’s paid parental leave program, which Bowser opposed because it was funded by a tax on employers and often benefits people who work in the District but live in the suburbs.
D.C. police spent $40 million on overtime during racial justice protests
In 2017, White wrote a bill that created a task force to study the idea of turning downtown office buildings into housing. The task force returned with a bleak outlook, saying office buildings weren’t the best way to address the housing shortage. But White has continued to promote the idea of converting office buildings as one of the key planks of his vision for housing policy, and Bowser has recently explored the idea as well. “Now we see we should have started doing that five years ago when I suggested it,” White said.
Some of the legislation he has proposed has failed, like a financial literacy program for students and a stipend for senior citizens to rent rooms to other seniors that he termed the “Golden Girls” bill.
As mayor, he says, he could better pursue his vision on police overhauls, housing and education. In a system where the mayor has control of public education, White said it’s difficult to shape schooling through the council.
He would loosen the mayor’s control of schools, and says he would listen to school communities and staff before making changes. Critics have slammed the Bowser administrations for taking a top-down approach to education.
Among his education proposals on the campaign trail: changes to the controversial teacher evaluation system that ties student performance to job security.
Trayon White Sr.
In his six years as Ward 8′s council member, Trayon White has charted a track record of legislation, although he hasn’t passed laws on some topics that he touts as his top priorities such as schools.
He introduced legislation in 2017 to decriminalize fare evasion on Metro, so youths hopping the turnstiles wouldn’t end up with a criminal record; it passed, despite Bowser’s veto. He spearheaded a law that now lets families view police officers’ body-camera footage if their relative is killed by an officer, invoking on the council dais the death of Marqueese Alston in 2018 and Alston’s pursuit of the footage for more than a year. With Anita Bonds (D-At Large), White successfully introduced legislation that bans evictions on days when it’s snowing or raining and allows tenants limited access to their apartments for the week after an eviction so they can claim their belongings, rather than losing their possessions or seeing them tossed to the curb right away.
D.C. elections: What mayoral candidates say about housing, schools, crime
As he recounted some of these bills during an interview last month — while also questioning a city leader about conditions at the D.C. jail during a Zoom hearing and handing out yard signs to supporters — Deborah Rorls stopped her car and told White she needed help: She wanted to buy a condo, but living on Social Security as her only income, she was struggling. Glancing down at two of his phones, White asked questions — whether she had owned a home before, whether she had a job — and then recommended the Douglass Community Land Trust as an organization that might help. He made sure Rorls had his phone number before she left.
That’s what keeps his phones — he carries three at a time — ringing off the hook. “If I check my messages, I probably got three or four of those today” from other people asking for help finding affordable housing, he said.
As he rides to his next campaign stop, a call comes in from a resident with a complaint about police conduct. A minute later, White has connected her with a police commander. While they talk, he turns down his phone volume and pulls up a text from a mother that’s been haunting him — a bloody photo of her teenage son, who suffered a gunshot wound, White says.
Once a week, he starts his day with therapy to grapple with the violence he’s witnessed. Much of what troubles him includes youths. “I’m seeing the violence. I’m seeing the young guys walking around with guns in their possession and they’re 15,” he said. “I’m doing funerals a few times a week.”
White’s legislative output has slowed down, though he insists he’s still working on as many ideas as ever. This council period, he has introduced fewer bills than any member but Gray, who missed part of the term after suffering a stroke.
He has proposed some ideas that he has not been able to enact, particularly on public safety. He wants to make it easier for convicted felons to get more crimes expunged from their records so they can more easily pursue jobs and housing after they finish their sentences. “My priorities are not everyone on the council’s priorities,” White said.
Sometimes, he has introduced bills that colleagues have praised in concept, but died when those same council members pointed out legal or logistical flaws in White’s drafting. That’s what happened when White suggested, after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer, that D.C. law require police to take a suspect for a medical evaluation if ever a person says the words, “I can’t breathe.”
It happened again when White introduced legislation in memory of Stormiyah Jackson, a 12-year-old who killed herself at a D.C. charter boarding school, meant to prevent smaller settlements in wrongful death lawsuits because of the race or gender of the deceased. “We’re still working on that,” White said. “We’re not going to let that die at all.” | 2022-06-17T20:29:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two legislators hope to be D.C. mayor. What have they done on the council? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/robert-trayon-white-record-dc-council/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/robert-trayon-white-record-dc-council/ |
Coastal Living’s editor on how to get that beachy look at home
(Simone Noronha for The Washington Post)
Jessica Thuston is Executive Editor at Dotdash Meredith, where she oversees the publishing of Coastal Living and Southern Living. She has written articles and edited magazines about decorating, architecture, home renovation and design, gardening, travel, and food for nearly two decades. She has also appeared on national television shows, including The TODAY Show and CNN. Thuston can answer all your questions about how to get that coastal look at home and how to plug into the popular coastal grandmother vibe.
Recent Q & have covered whether it’s okay to replace a tub with a stand-alone shower, how to keep mice out of your house, what to do with a collection of costume jewelry and how to use the steam settings on your washer and dryer. | 2022-06-17T20:29:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Coastal Living’s editor on how to get that beachy look at home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/06/30/coastal-living-grandmother-beachy-decor/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/06/30/coastal-living-grandmother-beachy-decor/ |
Are we not moved by the cries of these children?
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) wipes her eye as she and Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) listen to testimony during a House committee hearing on gun violence on June 8. (Andrew Harnik/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
I just finished watching the House hearings regarding the recent mass shootings [“Courage from heartbreak,” editorial, June 9]. All those from Buffalo and Uvalde, Tex., who spoke need to be heard. How can anyone listen to the testimony of the young girl who watched her teacher be shot, saw her classmates killed and covered herself with a dead friend’s blood to survive and not be moved? How can anyone hear the testimony of the doctor who saw pulverized and decapitated children and not choke up? How can anyone listen to the tearful testimony of a mother whose daughter did not survive and not cry with her? Well-meaning measures such as red-flag laws are not enough, but it seems as though the needed measures — such as banning assault weapons — are too much for the politicians who listen but cannot hear.
Katharine Powell, Walkersville
I am an American living in France, and the contrast of levels of gun violence astounds and disgusts me. Automatic and semiautomatic weapons cannot, in essence, be legally purchased by private citizens in France. But even in the United States, I don’t think that I can buy a machine gun, or a bazooka, or a .50-caliber weapon, or land mines, or hand grenades, etc.
So, even in the United States, there must be some rules for what one can and cannot buy. These already restrict the right to own weapons. But if such rules already exist, the question of banning the sale of semiautomatic weapons is not about a person’s fundamental right to own a gun, but rather a judgment as to what should remain in control of the military and what should be made available to members of the public. This is a social judgment, not a challenge to the Second Amendment.
Ted Lazo, Paris | 2022-06-17T20:30:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Are we not moved by the cries of these children? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/are-we-not-moved-by-cries-these-children/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/are-we-not-moved-by-cries-these-children/ |
Mr. Trump’s character is on full display
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol during a hearing on June 13. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Gary Abernathy’s June 14 op-ed asked, “They proved Biden won, but is that the point?” I would respond “yes,” that is one of the points when a large number of citizens believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Mr. Abernathy then commented that “the committee’s strategy on proving that Trump knew he lost is a tactic fraught with peril.” Mr. Trump lies. He lied about Barack Obama’s citizenship, his Trump Foundation, his Trump University. He bragged about molesting women. He paid hush money to two women with whom he had extramarital affairs. He refused to pay people who did work for him. According to his niece, Mary L. Trump, he paid someone to take his SAT.
The Jan. 6 committee presents evidence of his “big lie,” which is the most destructive in his litany of lies. Of course he knows he lost. Of course he would lie because it serves him well. If I had any doubt about his mental status, the committee’s strategy has erased it. He is not detached from reality. He knew, and he knows.
Mr. Trump’s character is on display, and it is deeply flawed. We see it. Where is the peril? As for not having a bipartisan commission, Senate Republicans blocked the establishment of an independent commission. Sadly, it must serve their goals.
John Gualtieri, Alexandria
Regarding George F. Will’s (mostly) cogent June 12 op-ed, “Show us, don’t tell us, what happened”:
If the election of 1800 truly is “the most important election in world history,” so, too, is the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol the most selective — in the sense that it selected out members of the minority party.
As a result, the committee’s “select” composition has itself negated the principle, rooted in American history and tradition, that the validity of an investigatory body’s findings and the public’s confidence in them depend on the adversarial system being brought to bear on the process to winnow facts from fiction and bring the truth to light.
Mr. Will observes that “Republicans have almost entirely shunned the Jan. 6 committee.” But the reality is that some Republicans were shunned from committee participation, and that exclusion, undertaken for apparent partisan purposes, will cast a shadow over the committee’s ultimate findings.
Steven Sarfatti, Cabin John
The June 10 Metro article “911 Calls: Plan to kill was dropped” reported that law enforcement officials said Nicholas Roske arrived in Maryland with plans to kill Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. It struck me as odd that, even though Mr. Roske quickly realized what he was doing was wrong, retreated from Justice Kavanaugh’s home, realized he needed mental help and turned himself in to the police, he has been charged with attempted murder.
However, the “patriots” who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, arrived in Washington planning to overturn the election, chanted that Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be hanged, did not realize they were wrong, did not retreat from but entered the Capitol, and did not turn themselves in to the police but attacked the police. Yet they were not charged with attempted murder.
An attempted attack on the life of an individual is bad, but an attack on the very existence of our democratic government is much worse.
Tom Busby, Silver Spring | 2022-06-17T20:30:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Mr. Trump’s character is on full display - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/mr-trumps-character-is-full-display/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/mr-trumps-character-is-full-display/ |
The real objective of sports in school
Thank you, Monica Hesse, for your June 14 Style column, “We’re missing the point of school sports.” My daughter is the “transgender girl who desperately needs teammates.” Before 2020, when the pandemic hit, she played on the boys’ ultimate Frisbee team, consistent with the sex she was assigned at birth. She came out as trans during the pandemic.
After school sports resumed, she tearfully confided that she wasn’t a boy and didn’t belong on the boys’ team anymore; but she also feared that the girls’ team wouldn’t accept her. After conversations with coaches and parents, we were thrilled when she was not only allowed to play on the girls’ team but also was welcomed enthusiastically … and not because she was the biggest, fastest or most skilled; she’s not. She’s just a girl who desperately needed a team.
Ms. Hesse’s observation that the purpose of high school sports is “to embrace physical fitness, receive a sense of community, hone self-discipline and learn how to work hard, cooperate on a team and win and lose gracefully” was on full display recently at the High School National Invite for the top ultimate Frisbee teams in the country. My daughter’s team made it to nationals … and lost to many teams of mostly cisgender girls, finishing in 11th place. But they won the tournament’s Spirit Award.
Suzan Charlton, Arlington | 2022-06-17T20:30:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The real objective of sports in school - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/real-objective-sports-school/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/real-objective-sports-school/ |
The U.S. can’t solve every global issue, but applying common sense will help
Yemeni children get a relief box and water containers donated by UNICEF at a camp for internally displaced persons near Sanaa, Yemen, on June 13. (Yahya Arhab/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Most of the United States is concerned about our country’s support for Ukraine. Some want a more robust effort to get arms and other forms of support to blunt Russian advances while also meeting the staggering humanitarian needs of the civilian people relocating in and out of Ukraine. Other Americans question the seemingly over-the-top support for Ukraine while we deal with domestic problems and the needs of other nations caught up in the throes of war and civil distress from poverty, hunger, chaos and lack of basic services. The United States cannot solve all these issues, but some issues should be addressed with common sense.
For example, why does our nation support the conflict in Yemen [“Many Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen, called war crimes, had U.S. support,” news, June 13] by selling advanced military capabilities to Saudi Arabia when we know there is a terrible human tragedy underway in Yemen? Can relations with the Saudis be so important that we ignore the evils of our own country? What must we do to advance reasonable solutions for achieving peace and harmony in our nation and to begin to solve problems of poverty, health discrimination and other injustices everywhere?
James J. Sheridan, Columbia | 2022-06-17T20:30:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The U.S. can’t solve every global issue, but applying common sense will help - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/us-cant-solve-every-global-issue-applying-common-sense-will-help/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/us-cant-solve-every-global-issue-applying-common-sense-will-help/ |
White nationalists are getting bolder. Enforcement must, too.
Authorities arrest members of the white-supremacist group Patriot Front near an Idaho Pride event on June 11. (Georji Brown/AP)
Thirty-one members of the Patriot Front, a white-nationalist group involved in the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally, were arrested in Idaho last weekend. Their plan to riot at an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene was foiled by a local resident who called police about what looked “like a little army,” Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said. Only two were from Idaho; the rest came from states as far as Texas, Illinois, Arkansas and Virginia. That these white nationalists nearly pulled off their plan is unsettling. It’s not an isolated example of recent hate-group brazenness.
We need to be honest about a pressing national security threat to the United States: white-supremacist domestic terrorism. Sometimes, as in Idaho, potential violence is stopped before it happens. Other times, as in last month’s tragic shooting in Buffalo, hate takes irreplaceable lives. The left has its own violent actors; for instance, antiabortion centers have experienced increased violence since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade. But numbers show it is a greater threat from the right: Fifty-five percent of deaths by domestic extremists in the past decade came at the hands of white supremacists, according to Anti-Defamation League data, with 75 percent of the killings by right-wing extremists overall.
Addressing any terrorist threat can be fraught, and addressing domestic terrorism even more so: It requires a tricky balance between protecting national security and safeguarding civil liberties. Past counterterrorism has disproportionately targeted Black, Arab and South Asian communities and activists. Shielding vulnerable communities from white-nationalist violence is a worthy goal, but in doing so, elected officials must tread cautiously against opening new avenues for abuse. It especially must not create expansive new enforcement powers, which would accrue from designating domestic terrorism a crime, with all the novel legal authority that would entail.
President Biden, to his credit, has begun to tackle this challenge, redirecting the nation’s counterterrorism efforts inward. His administration released the nation’s first strategy for addressing domestic terrorism last year, promising improved information-sharing by law enforcement and reallocation of Homeland Security funding. But there’s more to be done: The Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the FBI, and state and local law enforcement must focus their existing resources specifically on white-supremacist and neo-Nazi violence. Justice’s civil rights division needs the capacity to thoroughly investigate hate-crime reports. And local and state law enforcement, often on the front lines of stopping white supremacy, need continued support at the federal level. Congress should ensure all these undertakings are as transparent as possible.
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, introduced days after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, would go a long way toward realizing these aims. The bill languished until after the Buffalo mass shooting but in recent weeks passed the House with unanimous Democratic support and one lone Republican vote. It moved on to the Senate, where Republicans blocked it. Congress cannot wait until the next tragedy to reexamine domestic terrorism efforts. White-supremacist domestic terrorism has been an ugly force in the United States’ past and present. Lawmakers must do what they can to stop this scourge from being part of the country’s future. | 2022-06-17T20:31:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | White nationalists are getting bolder. Enforcement must, too. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/white-nationalists-are-getting-bolder-enforcement-must-too/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/white-nationalists-are-getting-bolder-enforcement-must-too/ |
The untold story of ‘All the President’s Men’
On the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, we look at the classic film that still shapes our understanding of this event, and hear about how the movie as we know it almost didn’t exist.
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman starred as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively, in the 1976 film “All the President’s Men.” (Courtesy of the Everett Collection)
Fifty years ago today, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the posh Watergate building in D.C. Nobody knew it at the time, but the break-in was the first in a series of events that spiraled into the Watergate scandal, and eventually, the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon.
For many people, their memories of this event have become encapsulated in a movie: the iconic 1976 film “All the President’s Men.” Based on the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the film follows the pair as they dig into the break-in and crack open the scandal, tracing the source of the burglary back to the White House.
Ann Hornaday, The Post’s film critic, calls the movie a metonym for Watergate — a stand-in for this entire period in history — “that from the moment it opened seemed to fuse seamlessly with private memory and collective myth.”
Today, guest host and media reporter Elahe Izadi talks with Ann about what it means for a film to function in this way. And we hear a dramatization of a deleted scene from an early draft of the screenplay, as Ann reveals how the classic as we know it almost didn’t exist.
Finally, vaccines for young kids
On Wednesday, independent advisers to the Food and Drug Administration recommended the agency authorize coronavirus vaccines for children under 5. What this move means for families and how it will affect where we are in the pandemic. | 2022-06-17T20:31:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The untold story of ‘All the President’s Men’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-untold-story-of-all-the-presidents-men/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-untold-story-of-all-the-presidents-men/ |
A new ‘National Conservative’ manifesto sounds a lot like fascism
Former president Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on Oct. 9, 2021. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Donald Trump’s annexation of the Republican Party is less a manifestation of Trump’s strength than a demonstration of the GOP’s division. The former president exploited the dissatisfaction of the party’s isolationist wing at precisely the moment that the dominant neoconservatives lost their mojo in the sands of Iraq.
Now, one wing of the warring party has drafted a manifesto, trying to graft an actual philosophy onto Trump’s raging id. But before we get to that, some context.
By definition, two-party systems force strange bedfellows to share a bunk; this is how Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) come to be tugging on the same blanket. Across the aisle, no union has been more contentious for Republicans than the attempt to unify nationalists, who would build walls around the United States, with internationalists who would spread freedom around the world.
The end of the Cold War was rough on the globalists. The GOP shattered in the first post-Cold War election, in 1992, when the ultimate internationalist George H.W. Bush saw economic nationalists defect to billionaire Ross Perot, while cultural nationalists joined a revolt led by Patrick J. Buchanan. Though Team Global reasserted itself in the early 2000s under former president George W. Bush and John McCain, policing the world turned out to be trickier, and less popular, than they anticipated.
In 2016, Trump blended enough of Perot’s anti-free-trade rhetoric with enough of Buchanan’s “America First” rhetoric to knock off the next Bush in line — former Florida governor Jeb Bush. So exultant were the isolationists to win a nomination after so many decades that they cheerfully overlooked the obvious fact that Trump didn’t believe in anything other than himself.
Enter the new manifesto — titled “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles” — a rather slapdash document published by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a policy shop that borrows the name, though not the temperament, of the 18th-century father of conservatism.
The statement glorifies a particular concept of nationhood. Nations are not, according to its authors, a form of political organization with strengths and limitations, successful in some places and dysfunctional in others. Nations are “the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.”
If nations are to save us from the imperium, one would expect them to operate differently from the nations of today. But read a little deeper into the statement and you discover that nothing really new is proposed on the international front. The statement makes clear that not all nations are “capable of self-government.” And it allows "capable" nations to make trade treaties and defensive alliances..
So what are the allied nations to do about failing states? The statement suggests that the great problem of the world is that well-functioning nations have insufficient sovereignty. But the real trouble arises from malfunctioning nations — those that implode (by collapsing within) or explode (by expanding aggressively).
Self-governing nations, acting in defensive alliances to advance their own interests, will naturally seek to minimize the risks of implosion and explosion. Which is exactly the thought process that NATO and its allies have followed through the more than 70-year reign of the internationalists.
“National Conservatism,” as defined by the statement, doesn’t call for much change in facing the rather conspiratorial-sounding imperium. Rather, after the throat-clearing about globalism, the statement turns to its real concerns: the internal operation of nations.
“Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private,” the authors declare. In regions of a nation where the moral vision is corrupted by “immorality … national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”
Policies around family, immigration, race and education will be analyzed through this same prism — the national interest as defined by “Christianity and its moral vision.” Deviations (presumably “immoral”) will no doubt be corrected by that same energetic national government.
It is tempting to point out that this supposedly new statement — with its faceless conspiracy of the globalist imperium, its exaltation of a cultural coherence that never existed, and its casual licensing of government power to enforce conformity — has an awful lot in common with fascism.
But it is perhaps more useful to note that self-named National Conservatives are building their house on sand, as the Bible might put it. There are as many views of the Christian mission on Earth as there are readings of the U.S. Constitution. The idea that a more overtly Christian nation would be a more harmonious nation — or even a more peaceful nation — has zero support from the bloody and contentious history of the past 2,000 years.
Tolerance, open-mindedness and compromise, on the other hand, have an impressive track record on those too-rare occasions when people give them a chance. | 2022-06-17T21:12:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What a new manifesto on ‘National Conservatism’ actually says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/national-conservative-manifesto-edmund-burke-foundation-trumpism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/national-conservative-manifesto-edmund-burke-foundation-trumpism/ |
Hawaii just expanded gender-affirming care for trans residents
The new law clarifies that treatments insurers had deemed ‘cosmetic’ should be covered as long as a medical provider deems it medically necessary
In 2016, Hawaii took a seemingly small but significant step forward for its trans residents: The state passed a law barring insurance companies from discriminating against transgender and nonbinary Hawaiians. But in the years since the anti-discrimination law, trans residents, advocates and lawmakers found that it hadn’t done enough — people were still being denied coverage for care that could help them affirm their gender identity.
On Thursday, Hawaii Gov. David Ige (D) signed a bill into law that clarifies certain treatments insurers had deemed “cosmetic” — such as laser hair removal, voice therapy and facial feminization surgery — should be covered as long as a medical provider deems it medically necessary. The legislation, H.B. 2405, would also require insurers to give patients clear information about which gender transition services are covered.
“The bill is key to protecting people from discrimination in accessing gender-affirming treatment,” Ige said at a signing ceremony, Honolulu Civil Beat reported. The governor also signed two other bills expanding LGBTQ protections in state: one that bars people from being excluded from juries because of their gender identity and expression, and another establishing a commission that will examine the status of Hawaii’s LBGTQ residents.
The health-care bill, which was crafted with input from health-care providers, trans advocates and insurers, passed with overwhelming support in both chambers of Hawaii’s legislature. The law went into effect immediately on Thursday.
The issue highlights how difficult it is for transgender and nonbinary people to access medically necessary and potentially lifesaving gender-affirming health care, even in areas that embrace and support them, said Hawaii state Rep. Aaron Ling Johanson (D), a champion of the bill and chair of the state’s Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee.
Johanson said the policy change had been a “passion project” for him.
“One of the things that we came to find was that … ‘cosmetic’ treatments are a very critical part of accomplishing gender-affirming care for the patient,” Johanson said. But “clashes” persisted between trans and nonbinary Hawaiians and insurance companies, he said, because some insurers decided the care was not medically necessary, even if a patient’s medical provider had recommended it. (Hawaii Medical Service Association, the state’s largest insurer, declined to comment.)
“It’s just heartbreaking when you hear from a lot of these folks who have higher rates of depression or thoughts of suicide because they’re just stuck in a system that doesn’t help them,” Johanson added.
Fan Liang, medical director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Transgender Health, said that for trans and nonbinary patients, there tends to be more coverage for “top” and “bottom” surgeries (chest and genital surgeries), but not for procedures such as facial or voice surgeries. That’s a big oversight, Liang said, considering how important these characteristics are in everyday life.
“When you engage with somebody, the first thing that they appreciate, really, is your face and facial expressions,” Liang said, adding that many of her patients have told her stories of being misgendered over the phone. Some worry their voice is “a telltale giveaway” of their transition.
Generally, Liang said, gender-affirming care, which includes psychosocial and educational resources as well as medical interventions, helps trans and nonbinary people live more freely, whether that’s relieving their gender dysphoria or reducing the likelihood they’ll be singled out or discriminated against.
“It really is a medical necessity,” Liang said. “These patients are living with an incongruence that permeates all aspects of their lives.”
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In passing its new gender-affirming care bill, Hawaii has joined a handful of states, including Washington and Colorado, that have tried to expand access to transition care.
Trans people and their advocates have long noted the structural barriers to receiving care: Even when patients can get their treatments approved and covered, there are not many providers capable of performing these procedures, and it is not unusual for patients to travel out of state or to be put on lengthy waiting lists to receive it.
This is true even in “progressive” places like Hawaii, where some residents have traveled to California — a five-hour flight — to get the transition care they need, advocates say.
Jenn Jenkins, a policy advocate who worked on Hawaii’s health-care bill, said that in their eyes, the law simply clarifies what was intended in the state’s 2016 nondiscrimination policy.
“This is already the law. It was just not as plainly written as we’ve done it [now],” Jenkins said. Still, this clarification could greatly expand gender-transition access among trans and nonbinary Hawaiians, particularly trans women who had been particularly susceptible to having their claims denied, Jenkins added.
Advocates and lawmakers agree the bill is a significant step forward at a time when many state lawmakers are looking to limit access to transition care among trans youth and adults. Conservative lawmakers who have introduced bills curbing access to gender-affirming care for minors say the policies are meant to protect children.
For Johanson, the lawmaker, the state’s “aloha spirit,” which emphasizes community care, helped make this new law possible. Jenkins, meanwhile, noted that Hawaiians have been “much more open to the idea of a spectrum of gender” because those beliefs are at the root of Hawaiian culture.
Native Hawaiians have long recognized a third gender identity, “mahu.” Historically, trans and nonbinary Hawaiians have taken roles as teachers and leaders in their communities, explained Maddalynn “Maddie” Sesepasara, a trans advocate who manages the Kua’ana Project, a transgender support organization.
This cultural reverence was made apparent in 2019, Sesepasara said, when indigenous elders protesting a billion-dollar telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea mountain called on Hawaii’s mahu community to join them.
“We know we have a place. We know we are respected,” Sesepasara added.
That doesn’t mean trans Hawaiians have not faced the same systemic barriers, discrimination and barriers trans people face elsewhere, advocates say. After Christian missionaries came to the islands, “mahu” became a derogatory term, Sesepasara said, though this has slowly changed over the last 40 years.
Medical transitions are a personal choice — one that not all trans and nonbinary people are able to make or willing to seek. But for Hawaiians who need medical treatments to affirm their gender identity, these procedures could mean the difference between being targeted and being able to “blend in” and be comfortable in society, Sesepasara said.
And a time when the cost of living has soared on the islands, some Hawaiians have become increasingly desperate to complete their transitions.
“These are not cosmetic surgeries,” Sesepasara said. “These are surgeries that are going to save transgender folks in Hawaii.”
Jenkins hopes Hawaii’s new law could be a “little bulb of light” for trans communities in other parts of the country, where vitriol and attacks against trans people and other LGBTQ individuals have spiked.
“It’s our contribution to the possibility that we can change things for the better,” they said. | 2022-06-17T21:30:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hawaii will expand gender-affirming care for trans residents - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/17/hawaii-transgender-affirming-care-law/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/17/hawaii-transgender-affirming-care-law/ |
Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin sentenced for Jan. 6 trespassing
The Otero County, N.M., commissioner said he merely went to the Capitol to pray with protesters
Couy Griffin, an Otero County, N.M., commissioner convicted of misdemeanor trespassing at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, speaks to reporters after his sentencing. (Tom Jackman/The Washington Post)
After being convicted at trial, many defendants wait quietly for their sentencing. Not Couy Griffin, a New Mexico county commissioner and founder of “Cowboys for Trump.”
Soon after he was convicted by a federal judge in March of entering restricted grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, he returned to social media and the airwaves to disparage the case against him, insult the judge and assert that FBI and “Team Pelosi” were responsible for the attack on the Capitol.
“I don’t think justice was served,” Griffin said of his case, in a radio interview earlier this month. On Twitter, he wrote that U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden’s “PRE written response” announcing the verdict “was pathetic! I wonder who wrote it??”
At Griffin’s sentencing Friday, McFadden noted the “tension” between Griffin’s professed remorse in the courtroom, and his numerous public statements after his conviction. But the judge said that very few people who didn’t enter the Capitol on Jan. 6 were charged, and sentenced Griffin to 14 days in jail and a $3,000 fine. Griffin already served 20 days in the D.C. jail upon his arrest last year, so he was released Friday.
After his sentencing, Griffin implored reporters to follow up on discredited conspiracy theories about the Capitol’s doors mysteriously opening on Jan. 6, about an Arizona man falsely accused of being an FBI agitator in the crowd, and the possibility that voting machines in New Mexico might be electronically hacked. He said he would participate in an Otero County commission meeting later Friday by phone to refuse to certify a recent election until the voting machines are inspected.
Federal prosecutors had pointed out that the secretary of state in New Mexico has asked for a criminal investigation into Griffin’s actions in refusing to certify a recent election there. And an online fundraiser for Griffin has raised nearly $50,000.
McFadden told Griffin that as an elected state official, he’d taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. “The actions and statements you’ve taken since then are in tension with that oath,” the judge said. Griffin responded afterward was that he felt he was upholding his oath, “to make sure that our elections are transparent and legal … I traveled to Washington, D.C. to stand and peaceably protest … I was representing millions of other Americans that feel the same way that I do.”
Instead of taking his case to a jury, Griffin elected a bench trial with McFadden, an appointee of former president Donald Trump. Evidence at his two-day trial showed that Griffin and his videographer climbed over various barricades and barriers, then clambered onto the inauguration stage in front of the Capitol and spent more than an hour speaking through a bullhorn to the surging mob. He said he was leading the group in prayer.
After his arrest, Griffin was initially ordered held without bond, in part because he said on a video that he would return to Washington for Biden’s inauguration and “there’s going to be blood running out of that building.” He was released 20 days later, in part because he might be awaiting trial longer than the maximum six-month misdemeanor sentence he faced.
The trial forced federal prosecutors to disclose the location of then-Vice President Mike Pence during the Jan. 6 riot, over Secret Service objections, to prove that Griffin had entered a restricted area, though he did not enter the Capitol itself. McFadden acquitted Griffin of disorderly conduct, but convicted him of the misdemeanor charge of entering a restricted building or grounds.
Pence spent Jan. 6 at underground Senate loading dock, Secret Service confirms
After the trial, Griffin tweeted that “[t]he media has tried to make me look like the biggest loser the last couple days. Truth is I was 1 for 1 with the US Government. The 1 I lost I will appeal. We SHOULD have won a grand slam on both counts.”
Griffin also amplified his unfounded claims that the riot was a left-wing plot. “[w]here is the investigation into the coordinated and PLANNED SET UP of Jan 6th!!” Griffin tweeted in May.
Griffin’s advisory sentencing guideline range for the misdemeanor conviction was zero to six months. Both the prosecutors and the probation and parole department recommended he serve 90 days. His lawyer, David B. Smith, requested two months probation.
At his sentencing, Griffin told the judge, “I have huge respect for law enforcement … I am a respecter of the system.” He said he had been a pastor before entering politics in Otero County. “I lived a life devoted to the Lord,” Griffin said. “On January 6, my actions were taken as the result of my faith … That was why I went down to the Capitol on January 6, to go pray with people.”
Griffin said “there was no signage, there was nothing that indicated I was going into a restricted or unauthorized zone.” McFadden responded that was “preposterous … you knew you shouldn’t be there and you continued to do it.”
“I suspect you were prosecuted because you went to great lengths to publicize your actions. Frankly, I think that’s completely legitimate,” McFadden said.
He told Griffin, “You’re not being sentenced for your beliefs about voting fraud,” and took aim at those advancing similar claims about fraud nationally.
“They are as mistaken as you are,” the judge said. “The difference is they didn’t then decide to storm the Capitol building.”
Separately Friday, an Indiana man pleaded guilty to carrying a loaded handgun and assaulting police with an officer’s stolen baton in the Capitol breach.
Mark Andrew Mazza, 57, of Shelbyville, Ind., faces up to 20 years in prison for assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon, and five years for carrying a pistol without a license. He is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 30 in Washington, D.C.
Mazza is the second person to be convicted of carrying a handgun in the Capitol riot, with charges pending against a third. Two other defendants have pleaded guilty to brining unregistered firearms in their vehicles. | 2022-06-17T21:51:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin sentenced for Jan. 6 trespassing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/couy-griffin-sentenced/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/couy-griffin-sentenced/ |
Man who killed woman in front of her kids gets 21-year prison sentence
Joseph Fox had pleaded guilty in the killing of Sierra Johnson, who was shot to death in a car while her two children sat in the backseat
Sierra Johnson, 27, was shot and killed in front of two of her children. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
A Capitol Heights man who pleaded guilty to killing a 27-year-old pregnant mother in front of two of her children was sentenced Friday to 21 years in prison.
Joseph Fox, 28, had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder while armed and related offenses in the killing of Sierra Johnson, who was shot to death in a car while her two children sat in the back seat. The incident occurred Jan. 19 near the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Euclid Street NW.
Seeing Sierra one last time
According to authorities’ account, Fox and Johnson — who had been involved on and off for the better part of a decade — were together in the front seat of the car while the two children sat in the back. Authorities said Fox shot Johnson at least four times in the car, then got out and did so once more. The children were not hit.
Johnson was the seventh of 10 kids and the first of her siblings to receive a college degree. She graduated from Trinity Washington University with a degree in criminal justice and worked at Macy’s while raising her three children: two girls and one boy.
At the time of Johnson’s killing, Fox was on supervision as part of his probation from a previous charge. In 2018, he was convicted of simple assault and attempted second-degree theft in a 2017 dispute with Johnson. | 2022-06-17T21:56:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man who killed pregnant woman in front of her kids sentenced to 21 years - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/joseph-fox-sentence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/joseph-fox-sentence/ |
Police make arrests in killings in Southeast, Northeast Washington
Two men were each charged with first-degree murder while armed in the Jan. 21 shooting of Marquette White, 20, of Northeast. (Peter Hermann/The Washington Post)
D.C. police have made arrests in two separate homicides that occurred in Northeast Washington in January and in the city’s Southeast quadrant in April, the department has announced.
Two men — Maurice Williams Jr., 19, and Seaun McDowney, 18 — were each charged with first-degree murder while armed in the Jan. 21 shooting of Marquette White, 20, of Northeast.
The shooting occurred shortly after 8:30 p.m. in the 3800 block of Commodore Joshua Barney Drive NE, near Fort Lincoln Park. Police said authorities in Atlanta arrested Williams and McDowney on April 28 and they were extradited to the District.
A D.C. Superior Court judge on Friday ordered both men, who police said have no fixed addresses, detained. Each has a court hearing scheduled for June 28.
McDowney’s attorney, Roderick Thompson with the D.C. Public Defender Service, did not respond to a message seeking comment. Williams’s attorney, Brian K. McDaniel, did not return a phone message to his law firm. An arrest affidavit filed in court on Friday said police investigated an argument over money as a possible motive.
Police also announced the arrest of Robert Baskerville, 28, in the April 16 fatal shooting of Darron Holmes, also 28, of Southeast Washington.
The shooting occurred about 10:45 p.m. in the 1200 block of Southern Avenue SE. Court documents filed on Friday indicate the motive for the shooting grew out of a domestic dispute.
Baskerville, of Oxon Hill, Md., was charged with second-degree murder and on Friday was ordered detained by a Superior Court judge. He has a hearing scheduled for June 27.
Pierce O. Suen, Baskerville’s attorney with D.C. Public Defender Service, did not respond to a message seeking comment. | 2022-06-17T21:56:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police make arrests in two separate homicides in Southeast, Northeast Washington - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/police-homicide-arrests-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/police-homicide-arrests-dc/ |
A reporter’s FOIA request scored details on EA Sports College Football
(Washington Post illustration; EA Sports; iStock)
Details about the highly anticipated next installment of EA Sports College Football emerged from an unusual source on Friday: a FOIA request.
Matt Brown, a journalist and the author of the newsletter “Extra Points,” has been sending FOIA, or Freedom of Information Act, requests to dozens of universities to muster information about the 22nd installment of EA Sports’ college football video game franchise, which has been dormant since 2013. On Friday, Brown reported that the game’s development is “in full swing,” and the title is on track to be released next summer, according to emails between the Collegiate Licensing Company and multiple universities.
According to Brown’s findings, EA Sports is going through the laborious process of collecting photos and audio files for every participating Division 1 college football program, including the songs from the bands and signature cheers from the stands, to re-create the game day experience. The company is even asking schools to explain how teams use and distribute the stickers on players’ helmets week to week to re-create the same detail over the course of a season, for example.
EA Sports did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
According to emails Brown collected, the Collegiate Licensing Company has told universities that nearly 120 schools have conceptually approved participation to be in the video game. (There are 131 schools in Division 1 NCAA football.) And the schools that participate are expected to earn anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000, depending on their institution’s historical ranking in the AP top 25.
“I have been told that the remaining schools are still supplying assets and are still communicating as if they are planning on being in the game,” Brown, 35, said. “Some of those institutions, like Northwestern, Tulane and Notre Dame, have said we won’t be in the game unless we can pay players.”
Including real players in the game and using their names and likenesses was the chief reason the series was discontinued after EA and the NCAA were taken to court over the unpaid use of player likenesses. Previously, the NCAA prohibited payments to college athletes, but a recent Supreme Court ruling overturned that prohibition, clearing the way for players to be compensated for their inclusion in the game. Last year, the lead attorney representing athletes in a case against the NCAA told The Post that EA Sports was willing to pay athletes to do so.
“I have been told that there is a high level of expectation within entities that work in the licensing world that athletes will be paid and that they will appear in the game,” Brown said. “It would be really surprising to me if that wasn’t resolved.”
Brown told The Post he’s gathered all of this information after filing 60-70 public records requests to schools with college football programs. In February of 2021, after EA Sports first announced it was bringing back the college football franchise, Brown created a spreadsheet and started sending out public records requests to universities with football programs. Brown said he does the work because he’s running a business, and his audience “cares deeply about this stuff.”
“The cool thing about this is because you’re working with so many public institutions, there’s a paper trail that’s accessible in a way that something with Madden or 2K is not,” Brown said. “A lot of people play video games, so a lot of people are interested in these stories.”
Here’s what FIFA’s divorce with EA Sports means for video game fans
Since April of 2020, Brown has been writing full time on college sports financing and licensing for his newsletter and podcast. He has an entire section of his website dedicated to public records he’s obtained in his reporting, including the financial reports and coaching contracts at certain schools. Some schools and institutions charge processing fees for digging up records requests, and Brown estimates that he’s spent somewhere in the “low three-figures” procuring records from institutions. To Brown, EA Sports’ game — and whether players will appear in the game — is a clear, practical example of how players may financially benefit from the shift in long-standing NCAA policies.
“More people play this video game than buy jerseys and certainly than buy trading cards,” Brown said. “This is, by far, the most popular. So, if I want to write about those issues, this is a good vehicle to do it.” | 2022-06-17T22:00:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FOIA request scores EA Sports College Football details - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/06/17/college-football-game-ea-sports/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/06/17/college-football-game-ea-sports/ |
NEW YORK — Wall Street closed out its most punishing week since the 2020 coronavirus crash with a meandering day of trading Friday that left it a bit higher. The S&P 500 rose 0.2%. That was nowhere near enough to make up for big earlier losses, and the index fell to its tenth drop in the last 11 weeks. Markets around the world have shuddered as investors adjust to the bitter medicine of higher interest rates that central banks are increasingly doling out. Higher rates can bring down inflation, but they also risk a recession by slowing the economy and push down on investment prices. ___
NEW YORK — Retailers and marketers have been quick to commemorate Juneteenth with an avalanche of merchandise from ice cream to T-shirts to party favors. But many are getting backlash on social media for what critics say is undermining the day. Juneteenth was designated as a federal holiday last year to honor the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. A search for Juneteenth items among online sellers like Amazon and J.C. Penney produced everything from toothpicks with pan-African flags to party plates and balloons. Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, apologized last month after getting slammed on social media for a Juneteenth ice cream flavor of swirled red velvet and cheesecake under its store label Great Value. ___
PRAGUE — Russia has reduced natural gas to Europe again as countries have worked to ease their dependence on Russian supplies amid the war in Ukraine. Friday marks the third day of significant reductions to the fuel that powers industry and generates electricity in Europe, which also have hit Germany and Austria. It has further spiked already-high energy prices that are driving record inflation in the European Union. Russia side has told Slovakia’s state-controlled gas company that it would reduce gas flow to the country by 50%. Russian energy giant Gazprom also told Italian gas company Eni that it would supply only 50% of the gas requested for Friday. France is no longer receiving any natural gas from Russia. ___
NEW YORK — Friday was another difficult day for airline travelers in the United States. Airlines canceled more than 1,100 flights by early afternoon Friday, as they try to recover from storms that raked the central and eastern parts of the country. That follows more than 1,700 canceled flights on Thursday. All this is happening while the number of passengers rises with the beginning of summer vacation season. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with airline CEOs to go over steps the airlines are taking to operate smoothly over the rest of the summer. ___
WASHINGTON — The Securities and Exchange Commission is moving closer to a final rule that would dramatically change what public companies reveal about the risks posed by climate change to their operations. Public comment on the proposal closed Friday. Companies, auditors, trade groups, lawmakers, individuals and others submitted more than 10,000 comments. Opinions ranged from skepticism about the SEC’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions data at all, to praise that the nation’s top financial regulator was finally looking to mandate climate-related disclosures. ___
WASHINGTON — Equating the oil and gas industry to Big Tobacco, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says that “fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat.” But President Joe Biden wasn’t quite itching for a fight. With both soaring energy prices and a warming planet weighing on world at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, Biden on Friday talked about trying to ease the pain of high gas prices while pushing more long-term green policies. Guterres dismissed the idea of boosting gasoline production and bluntly vilified the fossil fuel industry at a virtual session that included oil rich Saudi Arabia, China, Europe and Egypt. It was the first time Guterres compared the energy industry to tobacco interests. ___
NEW YORK — The fast-growing legal sports betting industry is extending its reach to the middle of the ocean. BetMGM and Carnival Corporation announced a deal Friday to put sports books on more than 50 U.S.-based cruise ships. The arrangement will allow betting while the ships are at sea or docked in a state that allows sports betting. Passengers can bet using a mobile app or at physical kiosks on the ship. It encompasses the Carnival Cruise Line, Holland America Line and Princess Cruises. Princess began offering sports betting last October. The sports betting operations will be phased in over the next few months. ___
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — President Vladimir Putin has said at Russia’s showpiece investment conference that the country’s economy will overcome sanctions that he called “reckless and insane.” Putin began his address Friday to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum with a lengthy denunciation of countries that he contends want to weaken Russia, including the United States. He says the U.S. “declared victory in the Cold War and later came to think of themselves as God’s own messengers on planet Earth.” Russia came under a wide array of sanctions after sending troops into Ukraine in February. Putin said trying to damage the Russian economy “didn’t work.” | 2022-06-17T22:00:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Wall Street's week, canceled flights - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-wall-streets-week-canceled-flights/2022/06/17/21172486-ee86-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-wall-streets-week-canceled-flights/2022/06/17/21172486-ee86-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Congress, don’t waste this chance on privacy legislation
The Capitol is seen beyond a cascading water fountain in Washington on June 17. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Congress is finally close to passing the privacy legislation lawmakers have been promising for years — and close, also, to letting the opportunity pass. Compared to the hurdles legislators have faced so far, the ones that remain aren’t tall, and there’s no excuse not to surmount them.
Key members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate Commerce Committee introduced this month the bipartisan, bicameral American Data Privacy and Protection Act. But other important players still refrain from offering the legislation their full-throated support. House Energy and Commerce chair and ranking member, respectively, Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), and Senate Commerce Committee ranking Republican Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.) have signed on. The Senate panel’s chair, Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), has not. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), also central negotiators along the way, have expressed concerns of their own.
The bill isn’t perfect, but it’s better than good, and it deserves the backing of today’s holdouts. Most importantly, the legislation instructs internet companies to collect and process only the personal information that is reasonably necessary to provide the service consumers are receiving — no surprises. This change shifts the paradigm; no longer would the burden be on consumers to understand and consent to all manner of invasive practices. Instead, the onus would be on companies not to violate a newly bolstered set of rights to which all citizens are entitled.
On the two areas that bedeviled lawmakers for so long, lawmakers have found compromise. A private right of action enabling individuals to sue companies would be delayed for four years after the bill is enacted, and prospective litigants would have to notify state and local officials before filing. The legislation would also preempt the privacy laws states have passed in recent years, replacing a patchwork of conflicting state statutes with national rules easier for companies to follow with an appropriate list of exceptions. Certainly, there’s room for change: narrowing that four-year window to two years, say, or — unrelated to these former sticking points — securing a commitment of appropriations for a Federal Trade Commission about to be saddled with new responsibility. But the objections from those yet to climb on board are minor enough that alterations to be made in the markup process should be enough to overcome them.
Congress may think it still has time to work on this bill. But the truth is, the turnover that is expected to follow the upcoming midterm elections could worsen the chances of success by committees whose current leadership has been laboring for almost two years now to bring this bill to life. Letting it die now would be a grave mistake. | 2022-06-17T22:01:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Congress, don’t waste this chance on privacy legislation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/congress-dont-waste-this-chance-privacy-legislation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/congress-dont-waste-this-chance-privacy-legislation/ |
DENVER — Visitors to Ball Arena are reminded of the altitude challenge facing them as soon as they walk through the doors with a sign welcoming them to the “Mile High City, elevation 5,280 feet.”
That reminder becomes reality during the first few shifts of a hockey game, especially one as crucial as the start of the Stanley Cup Final. The Tampa Bay Lightning looked like they were feeling it early in Game 1, though they came back to tie it before losing in overtime. They said they don’t consider the elevation a reason they shouldn't be able to tie the series on Saturday night. | 2022-06-17T22:02:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lightning not using elevation as excuse in Stanley Cup Final - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nhl/lightning-not-using-elevation-as-excuse-in-stanley-cup-final/2022/06/17/4b6ba528-ee85-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nhl/lightning-not-using-elevation-as-excuse-in-stanley-cup-final/2022/06/17/4b6ba528-ee85-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Sens. Shaheen and Tillis discuss the latest news out of Ukraine and NATO’s renewed significance
In the premier interview of Washington Post Live’s “Across the Aisle,” Sens. Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Tillis (R-N.C.) talk with The Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell on Wednesday, June 22 at 1:00 p.m. ET about working together as co-chairs of the Senate NATO Observer Group, their upcoming bipartisan congressional delegation to the NATO summit in Madrid and the latest news out of Ukraine.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) | 2022-06-17T22:03:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sens. Shaheen and Tillis discuss the latest news out of Ukraine and NATO’s renewed significance - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/06/22/sens-shaheen-tillis-discuss-latest-news-out-ukraine-natos-renewed-significance/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/06/22/sens-shaheen-tillis-discuss-latest-news-out-ukraine-natos-renewed-significance/ |
Donna Edwards gets help from Pelosi to swat at attack ad tied to AIPAC
Former Maryland Congresswoman Donna F. Edwards (D). (Cheryl Diaz Meyer/For The Washington Post)
A new super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is spending money to attack former Democratic congresswoman Donna F. Edwards as she asks voters to send her back to Congress in Maryland’s 4th District.
Edwards pushed back forcefully Friday — including with a virtual appearance from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — against a $600,000 ad buy from the United Democracy Project. The super PAC has been inserting itself into races across the country, spending millions against candidates opposed by AIPAC, long one of the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying arms in Washington. The group’s attacks, however, have often been about issues unrelated to Israel policy.
The group’s ad — which does not broadcast an affiliation with AIPAC — attacked Edwards over criticism about her constituent services during her time in office from 2008 to 2017; she did not seek reelection so she could run for the Democratic nomination for Senate, a race in which her record on constituent services was an issue as well. (The United Democracy Project ad heavily cites editorials from The Washington Post’s editorial board, which is separate from the newsroom — though the ad also included one 2016 Post news article.)
At the end of the news conference, Edwards’s campaign manager put a laptop on the lectern and pulled up a video message from Pelosi. “When Donna Edwards first represented Maryland’s Fourth Congressional District, and that was for nearly a decade, she was one of the most effective members in Congress,” Pelosi said on the video. “Donna fought hard for Prince George’s County — for jobs and investments in her community, to help constituents in need and to deliver results.”
United Democracy Project’s foray into the 4th District race indicates that a proxy-war between pro-Israel groups — AIPAC endorsing Ivey and the liberal J Street endorsing Edwards — could be making a dent in the race in its final stretch before the July 19 primary. A spokesman for UDP, Patrick Dorton, said this is the sixth race UDP has gotten involved in this year, including helping Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) and Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) by spending against their opponents. Dorton said UDP plans to be active in the Maryland race until the primary election day.
The Post previously reported in April that AIPAC had funneled nearly $160,000 in donations from its supporters to Ivey’s campaign before it formally endorsed him. Now, on AIPAC’s list of “featured candidates,” Ivey is at the top and is one of two “key races” prioritized by the organization.
“We strongly support Glenn Ivey because he deeply appreciates the importance of the US-Israel relationship,” an AIPAC spokesman, Marshall Wittman, said in a statement. “His stance stands in stark contrast to one of his major opponents, whose record while in Congress was hostile to America’s alliance with Israel.”
AIPAC’s fallout with Edwards dates to her first term in 2009, when Edwards voted “present” on a resolution “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.” Dorton also cited Edwards’s “present” votes on a 2011 resolution expressing support for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and 2012 legislation to enhance security cooperation between the United States and Israel, among several others.
But Edwards has retained strong support from J Street, which on Friday condemned the UDP ad and called on Ivey to do the same. It commended Edwards for her support for “peace, diplomacy and human rights for both Israelis and Palestinians.”
“It’s appalling. These baseless attacks against an experienced Democrat like Donna Edwards are being funded by a hawkish, Republican-aligned group which is actively fundraising for those who threaten our democracy,” Kevin Rachlin, vice president of public affairs for J Street, said in a statement, referring to the fact that AIPAC is also backing Republicans who objected to 2020 election results. “As Speaker Pelosi made clear, these attacks against Donna are baseless. Glenn Ivey must show his commitment to American democracy by calling for United Democracy Project to pull its misleading ads from this race.”
A spokesman for Ivey, Ramón Korionoff, said Ivey would “continue to focus on reaching voters every day about the issues that matter most to them, combating crime, lowering inflation and educating our children.”
“As the ad points out, [Edwards] was the least-effective Democrat in Congress during her tenure and she failed to deliver for her constituents when they needed her most,” Korionoff said. “Glenn has a record of getting things done and always showing up and doing the work.”
When confronted with the criticism about her past constituent services work elsewhere on the campaign trail, Edwards has taken a softer tone. One voter at a campaign forum at Riderwood Senior Living in Beltsville, Md., last month said she had heard about problems with Edwards’s constituent services while she was in office. The voter asked from the crowd, “How would that be different this time you’re in office?”
Edwards did not take issue with the criticism then.
“I think that is a fair question and criticism,” Edwards responded. “Having stepped away for the last six years, I’ve had an opportunity to really think about that. I think there was some great things we did in our office, from college fairs we held and houses we saved from foreclosure, to opening up opportunities for small-business people. … But I hear the criticism. And all I can say is the commitment that any legislator makes, which is that I’ll do better. I’ve heard it and I’ll do better.”
Edwards was joined by several allies at her news conference Friday who testified about their positive experiences with Edwards and her work helping constituents, including one who said Edwards helped save her house from foreclosure.
Del. Karen Toles (D) also stressed the importance of electing a liberal woman to Maryland’s federal delegation, which has not had a female member since Edwards and Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) left office in 2017.
“The stuff that you hear is B.S., OK? It’s just B.S.,” Toles said, referring to the attack on Edwards. “Let me say when we elect the congresswoman back, she will be the only woman in the entire delegation from the state … Only women have these issues when it comes to trying to get elected to office. You don’t hear them talking about men saying they have constituent issues. They only talk about women. Women that are mothers. Women that are educators. Women that are working multiple jobs yet have the courage to run for office. We will not be deterred. We will send her back.”
The 4th Congressional District primary represents somewhat of a rematch between Ivey and Edwards. Ivey launched a short-lived primary against Edwards in 2012 but dropped out. He sought to fill the seat Edwards vacated in a 2016 Democratic primary but lost to Rep. Anthony G. Brown (D-Md.), who is not seeking reelection to run for Maryland attorney general.
Former Prince George’s delegate Angela Angel is also seeking the Democratic nomination.
Gun debate looms again in Va. congressional district miles from NRA | 2022-06-17T23:01:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Donna Edwards gets help from Nancy Pelosi to hit back at AIPAC-affiliated attack ad - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/edwards-ivey-maryland-aipac/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/edwards-ivey-maryland-aipac/ |
White House and DeSantis dispute whether governor reversed himself under pressure
By Yasmeen Abutaleb
Lori Rozsa
Dan Keating
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has ridden a wave of anger against pandemic restrictions recommended by federal health officials. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has agreed to allow state pediatricians and health-care providers to order newly authorized vaccines for children under 5 after the state this week became the only one in the nation to not preorder the shots, White House officials said Friday.
DeSantis, however, angrily rejected the White House’s characterization that he had reversed himself, saying in a statement that “we have never held the position that the state would prohibit health care providers from ordering the vaccine. We have always maintained the position that the State of Florida has chosen not to be involved in the preordering or distribution of the vaccine for children under 5.”
Florida pediatricians cheered the news that they would be able to order the shots, although they, too, seemed bewildered about how and why that had come to pass. State health officials are now accepting the orders from providers, which they were not doing before Friday, said Lisa Gwynn, president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Our main concern now is we aren’t sure when the vaccine will be delivered since we missed the ordering deadline.” she said, noting that parents eager to immunize their children have been frantically calling doctors’ offices.
The debate over his policies regarding vaccines for the youngest Americans is the latest controversy engulfing DeSantis and his response to the coronavirus amid projections of an omicron-fueled surge in Florida this summer that is already filling the state’s hospitals and as he seeks reelection to a second term and positions himself as a 2024 Republican presidential front-runner eager to wrest the populist mantle from former president Donald Trump.
Riding a wave of predominantly partisan anger against pandemic restrictions, DeSantis has turned the coronavirus into a culture-war issue that critics say he is using for political advantage. As temperatures rise and the state’s infection rates continue to climb — Florida is among the top five states for new coronavirus infections, according to a Washington Post analysis — his embrace of positions that run counter to federal health guidance on vaccines, masks and other tools is raising concern among doctors and others.
“I don’t see the benefit of this outside of a bit of political theater for the governor,” said Holly Bullard, a Sarasota mother eager to vaccinate her 2-year-old. “Me and a lot of other parents I know have just been counting the days until we could get our kiddos the vaccine. We talk about parents’ rights, but I have a right for my pediatrician to have medicine that will help my child. I don’t want to have to go to the back of the local store with my son when we have a doctor he knows and trusts.”
The state’s position on children’s vaccines builds on the views of the governor’s top health appointee, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has repeatedly questioned the safety and efficacy of the shots despite robust evidence that they protect against severe illness and death. This year, Ladapo became the first state health official to recommend against coronavirus vaccinations for healthy children because he argues they are at lower risk of severe illness from covid — a position slammed by pediatricians and top infectious-disease experts who advise the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Florida is still refusing to offer the pediatric vaccines through state and local health departments, which will make it more difficult to vaccinate children who do not have a regular provider. “This will specifically leave the most vulnerable, underserved children of Florida behind,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha said on a call with reporters Friday, calling the decision “regrettable.”
DeSantis and Ladapo have said the risks of administering coronavirus vaccines to healthy children may outweigh the benefits, because children are not at high-risk of developing severe disease from the virus. Medical authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, and top federal health officials disagree, saying that while children are less likely than older adults to be hospitalized or die, they are still vulnerable.
More than 31,000 children have been hospitalized with covid in Florida since the pandemic began, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. So far in 2022, more than 14,000 have been admitted.
Studies also show that unvaccinated children are more vulnerable to severe disease: One CDC study found that hospitalizations of children aged 5 to 11 during the omicron period were twice as high for those who were unvaccinated compared with children who got the shots. Thirty percent of hospitalized children had no underlying medical conditions, the study found.
Nationally, the covid death toll of those 18 or younger is 1,257, according to the CDC. In Florida, 45 children age 15 and younger have died of covid as of June 9, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Conservative creds
By his own admission, DeSantis’s opposition to federal health guidance has paid him political dividends as he burnishes his conservative creds. “Before covid, I was known, but I was not known the way I’ve become since covid and all the other issues that we’ve taken on,” he said last month on a conservative podcast called “The Truth with Lisa Boothe.”
DeSantis boasts that under his “freedom first” leadership, Florida’s economy is thriving, in part because he has pushed and signed legislation that outlaws mask and vaccine mandates. For a time, the state withheld funding from school districts that defied his ban on mask mandates.
He also remains popular in Florida, with a 58 percent approval rating and 37 percent disapproval, according to a University of North Florida poll from February.
The governor also insists the coronavirus is in the rearview mirror and often suggests Florida is doing better economically than New York, which like most of the rest of the country had shuttered schools and nonessential businesses in the first year of the pandemic but reopened more than a year ago.
But Florida residents have fared far worse than New Yorkers since vaccinations became widely available in spring 2021. At the outset of the pandemic, Florida had a lower age-adjusted death rate than New York, which was consumed by infections that first spring.
Over the last 11 months, Florida’s death rate is about twice that of New York, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country. Between July 2021 and this April, Florida’s age-adjusted death rate was 110 per 100,000 residents, compared with 58 per 100,000 for New York, a Post analysis showed.
DeSantis’s evolution from vaccine booster to apparent skeptic was gradual. After heavily promoting vaccinations for seniors in early 2021, he spent the last year questioning the efficacy of booster shots, calling them a “private matter” and refusing to disclose whether he had received one. He had also promoted earlier antiviral treatments called monoclonal antibodies against covid. Today, though, Florida ranks among the worst states for availability of the highly effective covid antiviral Paxlovid.
Florida Democrats also point to his appointment in September of Ladapo, a Harvard-educated doctor who has espoused controversial views about masks and vaccines. Ladapo signed the Great Barrington Declaration in the pandemic’s earliest days, encouraging state governments to let the coronavirus spread unchecked among healthy people to encourage herd immunity before vaccines and effective treatments were available.
“The governor put this person, who most people would consider a kook, in the highest position for public health in Florida,” said state Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat from South Florida who served on the House Public Health subcommittee.
While DeSantis says his covid policies have saved the state’s economy, Skidmore questioned why promoting and giving residents easy access to tools to protect themselves from the coronavirus, such as vaccines, boosters and antivirals — would hurt the economy.
“We can’t we have both?” she asked. “Why couldn’t we have opened everything up, and protected our economy and allowed people to protect themselves and their families without ridiculing them and making them feel like it’s an attack on freedom?”
Jacqueline Dupree and Emily Guskin contributed to this report. | 2022-06-17T23:32:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida doctors say they can now order pediatric vaccines - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/17/florida-pediatric-vaccine-desantis-covid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/17/florida-pediatric-vaccine-desantis-covid/ |
Iowa court rules there is no abortion right in constitution
Court: No abortion right in constitution
The Iowa decision stemmed from a lawsuit filed by abortion providers who challenged a 2020 law that required a 24-hour waiting period before a woman could get an abortion. A judge who struck down the law cited the state high court’s 2018 ruling.
Suspect held after 3 die in church shooting
The 71-year-old visitor had previously attended some services at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church before police say he showed up for a potluck dinner, pulled a handgun and fatally shot three of the elderly participants, one of whom died in his wife’s arms as she whispered words of love in his ear.
The Alabama shooting victims had gathered with other church members for a “Boomers Potluck.” Walter Barlett Rainey, 84, died in the arms of his wife of six decades, according to his daughter, Melinda Rainey Thompson.
Police Capt. Shane Ware said the suspect and the victims were all White. He said Vestavia Hills police are still investigating what allegedly motivated the suspect, who occasionally attended services at the church. He said the man’s name is being withheld until prosecutors formally charge him with capital murder. | 2022-06-17T23:32:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iowa court rules there is no abortion right in constitution - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/iowa-court-rules-there-is-no-abortion-right-in-constitution/2022/06/17/18549158-e922-11ec-b037-e344f38e0a4f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/iowa-court-rules-there-is-no-abortion-right-in-constitution/2022/06/17/18549158-e922-11ec-b037-e344f38e0a4f_story.html |
The soul-crushing lot of a Supreme Court liberal
Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the swearing-in ceremony of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch at the White House on April 10, 2017. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
To be a liberal justice on a Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority is a daunting — even soul-crushing — task. In the cases that matter most, you are consigned to almost certain loss. Victory happens, if it occurs at all, only along the doctrinal edges; winning consists of avoiding greater harm.
So how do you keep going in the face of this? How do you convince the public — more important and perhaps more difficult, how do you convince yourself — that the institution on which you are serving for life deserves legitimacy and respect, even as it proceeds to take the law in directions with which you profoundly disagree?
On the cusp of what could be a cataclysmic moment in the history of the court, with the conservative justices seemingly poised to remove constitutional protection for abortion, expand gun rights, and lower the wall of separation between church and state, Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered a revealing — if not entirely convincing — glimpse into how she manages that emotional and intellectual feat.
“Look, there are days I get discouraged,” Sotomayor acknowledged in an appearance at the liberal American Constitution Society. “There are moments where I am deeply, deeply disappointed. And yes, there have been moments where I’ve stopped and said, ‘Is this worth it anymore?’ And every time I do that, I lick my wounds for a while. Sometimes I cry. And then I say, okay — let’s fight.”
Sotomayor’s former law clerk, Tiffany Wright, conducted the interview — and put the hard question to the justice directly, citing polls showing declining public trust in the court: “Why should the public continue to have confidence in its institutions of government, including the Supreme Court?”
The answer was perhaps as much Sotomayor convincing herself as rallying her audience, and its timeline was grimly telling. Her answer stretched back to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the reviled 1857 case in which the court ruled that Black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” It took a civil war, three constitutional amendments, and nearly another century, until the court’s school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, for the damage to be reversed.
“Dred Scott lost his 11-year battle for freedom in the courts. … Yet he won the war,” Sotomayor observed, referring to Brown. “And so that’s why I think we have to have continuing faith in the court system, in our system of government, in our ability … to regain the public’s confidence that we as a court, as an institution, have not lost our way. … I truly believe in the magical words, the arc of the universe bends toward justice. And I can’t keep going unless I continue to believe that.”
Wow. That is one long arc. But how else to keep going?
It is fascinating to contrast this Sotomayor, determined and dug in for the long haul, with some of the exasperated, no-holds-barred Sotomayor she’s displayed in the past few years, with three new conservative justices joining the court. Of course, the two can coexist — maybe, for sanity’s sake, they need to.
But consider Sotomayor’s profession of “continuing faith in the court system,” and her unsparing question, during oral argument last December in the Mississippi abortion case, about the impact of the court reversing its precedents because new justices had arrived: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.”
Consider her scathing dissent, in September, from what she termed the court’s “stunning” refusal to block the Texas abortion law from taking effect: “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
Note her tart observation, in a case decided June 8, about how “a restless and newly constituted Court” was — without any other justification — cutting back on already neutered precedent, this time about individuals’ ability to sue government officials for violating their constitutional rights.
Restless and newly constituted indeed. This is the reality that Sotomayor and her liberal colleagues, Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen G. Breyer, and soon, in Breyer’s place, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, know they will confront, for years to come. Consignment to a semi-permanent minority is not what they (apart from Jackson) signed up for, but it is where they are. Their greatest influence will not be directly on the court itself, but on how the public perceives its actions, and the hope that, as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes put it, “the intelligence of a future day” will recognize the wisdom of their dissents.
Because this newly constituted court isn’t going to be reshaped any time soon. The next few weeks will demonstrate just how “restless” it is. But we already had ample reason to worry — even before Sotomayor chose to deploy that unsettling adjective.
Ruth Marcus on the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court just made corruption a little easier | 2022-06-17T23:32:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Supreme Court liberals ponder years in the minority - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/court-liberals-years-in-minority/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/court-liberals-years-in-minority/ |
In an image released June 16 by the House Jan. 6 committee, then-Vice President Mike Pence glances at a tweet by President Donald Trump as the insurrection was taking place at the Capitol. (AP)
What makes a political figure heroic is often in the eye of the beholder. Faults we might forgive in one, we censure in another. | 2022-06-17T23:32:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Mike Pence emerges an unlikely hero from the carnage of January 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/mike-pence-jan-6-hearings-unlikely-hero/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/mike-pence-jan-6-hearings-unlikely-hero/ |
MJ Daffue of South Africa looks on from the 18th green during the second round at the U.S. Open. At one point Friday, Daffue was 6 under and led by three shots. He finished at 1 under after a double-bogey on No. 18. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
BROOKLINE, Mass. — In early 2000 in South Africa, 11-year-old MJ Daffue and his father played a round of golf with Retief Goosen and Goosen’s brother, leaving Daffue “awestruck” and primed for future utterances such as, “My life was changed that day.” At 12, Daffue sat up till 4 a.m. or so to watch Goosen win the 2001 U.S. Open at Southern Hills in Tulsa. At 15, Daffue sat up till 4 a.m. or so to watch Goosen win the 2004 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island.
He’d sleep through school on those Mondays — well, part of school.
“Math,” he said.
Draw a line from there to Friday, and there came a brew of holy mercy and good grief. At 33, Daffue (pronounced “Duffy”) became the first player in this 122nd U.S. Open to reach 6 under par. He led the first major he ever tried by three. He had a golf community and a community of golf visitors around the Country Club waking up, noticing the front-nine 32 he crafted and saying, What the …?
At the head of the class was a guy who spent a good decade-plus banging around the golfing wilds, who has been a volunteer assistant coach at the University of Houston, who hopes to coach college golf someday, who planned to play the Korn Ferry Tour stop in Wichita this week to get points for his PGA Tour card, but who snared that PGA Tour card in late May to make this possible. When a reporter asked Dustin Johnson if there were any contenders whose names he had not known, the 2016 U.S. Open champion and all-around la-dee-da guy said, “I mean, the one guy that was leading for a little while, obviously playing well.”
And then: Oh, well.
Golf would not have this nuttiness for long, of course, so it would resume its centuries-old meanness. It would insist upon a back-nine 40 that left Daffue at 1 under par. It would send him on No. 14 to a concrete path between a fence and a hospitality zone, and it would ask him to try to master that. (He did, actually, with a wow of an escape.) It would get him to No. 18 at the 3 under par he held at his 6:56 a.m. tee time, and it would take him on a No. 18 horror tour with which any duffer would empathize. It included stops in tall grass in front of a bunker, then the deep gullet of a hungry bunker, then to some awkward space few go, back off the green beside a fence in grass too healthy to be helpful.
Svrluga: The Bryson DeChambeau Experience remains golf's wildest shot
“I would say I think I started losing focus on my clarity on my targets and how I’m envisioning my shots,” Daffue said. “I got a little quick in my process. That’s just obviously part of the nerves.”
By No. 11, he had made a mistake on the “number” (yardage) he wanted to hit.
“It’s just your thought process, too,” he said. “You think about your front number and the pin. When you stand over a shot, you’ve already forgotten your front number. There are so many things going through your head.”
Phil Mickelson's first major post-LIV defection ends badly
Goosen himself could nod from afar, seeing as how golf permitted him two U.S. Open titles and then, with a three-shot lead toward a third after three rounds in 2005 at Pinehurst in North Carolina, decided it might be time he enjoy an 81. Daffue, ranked No. 296, had led the U.S. Open in early days, much like his friend Andrew Landry, ranked No. 624, in 2016 at Oakmont in Pennsylvania. Goosen has been texting encouragement, and Daffue has been remembering not to forget to marvel.
“Not a lot of people get to lead the U.S. Open by three shots,” he said, proving he doesn’t shirk the leader-board-looking. “I just told myself, ‘Enjoy it. You’ve done a lot of work. It’s finally paying off.’” He just “did the simple things really bad,” he said. That happens, but: “You know, if you’d told me before yesterday I would be 1 under par in the top 15 after finishing my round today, I would have said yes.” | 2022-06-17T23:33:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Golf gives, golf takes. At the U.S. Open, MJ Daffue gets a taste of both. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/us-open-golf-mj-daffue-south-africa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/us-open-golf-mj-daffue-south-africa/ |
Smoke rises over the remains of a building destroyed by a military strike in Lysychansk in the Luhansk region of Ukraine on June 17, 2022. (Oleksandr Ratushniak/Reuters)
The United States and its allies are making preparations for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine, officials said, as the Biden administration attempts to deny Russia victory by surging military aid to Kyiv while scrambling to ease the war’s destabilizing effects on world hunger and the global economy.
President Biden’s announcement this week of an additional $1 billion in security aid for Ukraine, the single largest tranche of U.S. assistance to date, offered the latest proof of Washington’s determination to ensure Ukraine can survive a punishing battle for the eastern Donbas region. European nations including Germany and Slovakia unveiled their own shipments of advanced weapons, including helicopters and multiple-launch rocket systems.
“We’re here to dig in our spurs,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said after convening dozens of nations in Brussels to pledge greater support for Kyiv.
The decision to supply Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated arms such as anti-ship missiles and long-range mobile artillery — capable of destroying significant military assets or striking deep into Russia — reflects a growing willingness in Western capitals to risk unintended escalation with Russia.
The support appears to have emboldened the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who this week vowed to retake all of Russian-controlled Ukraine, even areas annexed by Moscow long before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion.
But analysts say that despite the surge in outside aid, and strong morale among Ukrainian troops, Kyiv and its backers can hope for little more than a stalemate with Russia’s far bigger, better armed military. Unlike in Moscow’s failed attempt to seize the capital Kyiv, the Donbas battle has played to Russia’s military strengths, allowing it to use standoff artillery strikes to pound Ukrainian positions and gradually expand its reach.
Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who now heads the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said the battlefield impasse leaves the United States with a stark choice: either continue to help Ukraine sustain a potentially bloody status quo, with the devastating global consequences that entails; or halt support and permit Moscow to prevail.
“That would mean feeding Ukraine to the wolves,” Daalder said, referring to a withdrawal of support. “And no one is prepared to do that.”
A senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe ongoing international deliberations, said Biden administration officials had discussed the possibility of a protracted conflict with global spillover effects even before February, as U.S. intelligence suggested Putin was preparing to invade.
The Biden administration hopes that the new weaponry, in addition to successive waves of sanctions and Russia’s diplomatic isolation, will make a difference in an eventual negotiated conclusion to the war, potentially diminishing Putin’s willingness to keep up the fight, the official said.
Even if that reality does not materialize immediately, officials have described the stakes of ensuring Russia cannot swallow up Ukraine — an outcome officials believe could embolden Putin to invade other neighbors or even strike out at NATO members — as so high that the administration is willing to countenance even a global recession and mounting hunger.
Already the war, compounding the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, has plunged the world economy, now expected to suffer years of low growth, into renewed crisis. It has also deepened a global food emergency as the fighting pushes up prices of basic goods and cripples Ukraine’s grain exports — which typically feed hundreds of millions of people a year — pushing some 44 million people closer to starvation, according to the World Food Program.
“While it’s certainly challenging — we’re not certainly sugarcoating that — in terms of how to navigate these stormy waters, our guiding light is that the outcome of Russia being able to achieve its maximalist demands is really bad for the United States, really bad for our partners and allies, and really bad for the global community,” the State Department official said.
On Friday, Ukrainian forces attempted to defend dwindling areas under their control in Severodonetsk, a strategic city in Luhansk province that Pentagon officials expect to fall soon.
In a sign of how Western weaponry has the potential to pull the West deeper into the war, a U.S. defense official on Friday confirmed that a U.S.-made Harpoon anti-ship missile had struck a Russian tugboat in the Black Sea. For the first time as part of Biden’s latest arms package, the United States said it will provide Ukraine mobile Harpoon launchers.
Ukrainian leaders’ longtime ambition to integrate more further into Europe moved closer to reality on Friday, when the European Commission recommended that Ukraine be made an official candidate for European Union membership. Zelensky hailed what he called a “historic decision,” even though membership might be years away.
Putin, lashing out at the West in a speech on Friday, said he had nothing against the idea of Ukraine joining the E.U. but also warned that “all the tasks of the special operation will be met,” as the Kremlin calls the invasion, and said his country could employ nuclear weapons if its sovereignty was threatened.
Underscoring what Western nations say is a radically altered security outlook, NATO leaders are expected to unveil new deployments to Eastern Europe at a late June summit in Madrid.
Ahead of that meeting, Gen. Mark. A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has defended the need to stop Russia in stark claims, equating the suffering among civilians in Ukraine to what Nazi Germany inflicted on Europe. But he has also cautioned that while Moscow faces chronic issues in its Ukraine offensive, including leadership, morale and logistics, the numbers “clearly favor the Russians” in eastern Ukraine.
The prospect of a negotiated conclusion seems distant with Putin appearing undeterred, likely pursuing what analysts describe as a strategy of seizing the entire Donbas region then offering a cease-fire that would freeze in place Russia’s control of that and other areas.
“My concern is that basically Russia on one hand and the Ukrainians and their partners on the other are pursuing mutually incompatible goals,” said Samuel Charap, a Russia expert at the RAND Corporation. “That leads the Russians to keep pushing harder and harder and us to give more and more.”
Many experts believe the war is likely to settle into a lower intensity conflict or a situation like that on the Korean Peninsula, where north-south fighting was halted in a 1953 armistice without a formal end to the war. A heavily militarized boundary developed between the two Koreas, with occasional flare-ups, and is a scenario some analysts predict could occur between Ukraine and the parts of its territory controlled by Moscow.
“I don’t think either Putin or Zelensky can continue at the current level of combat for years,” James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, said in an email. “Certainly for some months, but unlikely years.”
As the conflict grinds on, it is prompting conversations about what trade-offs the United States may need to make in its larger foreign policy goals or its massive military budget. The Senate Armed Services Committee, citing inflation and the war in Ukraine, on Thursday added $45 billion to the defense budget, bringing the likely bill to $847 billion for the next fiscal year.
Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, said the war also continues to eat up the bandwidth of senior U.S. officials that could be spent on long-term planning and modernization. In the past officials have cited crises like the multiyear war against the Islamic State as factors that delayed a planned shift to focus on China.
“They keep having to deal with Ukraine because the situation is evolving and it is immediate, and we need to provide the assistance that we can and figure out how to support the Ukrainians,” she said. “But that means that they don’t have the time and attention to sort of press ahead on those other issues that are really important, and those long-term changes that would be necessary if the U.S. is really going to pivot its attention and focus to the Pacific.”
The Biden administration has vowed it will not pressure Kyiv to accept concessions to cement a resolution to the war. Officials point out that Zelensky, even if he were inclined to yield large parts of Ukraine’s territory, could face a revolt from Ukrainians if he accepted Moscow’s terms.
“Our job is not to define those terms,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said at a think tank event on Thursday. “Our job is to give them the tools they need to put themselves in the strongest position possible.” | 2022-06-18T00:24:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With scant options in Ukraine, U.S. and allies prepare for long war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/long-war-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/long-war-ukraine/ |
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Del. Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach), standing at left, explains budget amendments during the General Assembly's special session on June 17 in Richmond. (Steve Helber/AP)
RICHMOND — The Virginia General Assembly handed Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) a few minor wins Friday as they considered his proposed changes to the state budget, but nixed some of his more controversial amendments, including an effort to put more restrictions on public funding for abortions and his attempt to temporarily suspend the gasoline tax, which were both rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Youngkin’s own party resisted one of his proposals, with the Republican-controlled House of Delegates choosing not to act on a budget amendment that would have created a felony for demonstrating at the home of a judge with the intent to intimidate.
House and Senate negotiators had agreed on a $165 billion, two-year state spending plan on June 1, using a surplus of revenue to fund both tax cuts and major increases in spending, including raises for teachers and state employees. Youngkin had one final chance to tinker with that budget, proposing about three dozen amendments that lawmakers took up Friday.
“I believe that my amendments are necessary in order to continue the work that can unite Virginians, Republican and Democrat alike,” Youngkin said in his message to lawmakers as he submitted the proposals.
The final budget needs to be in place by the end of the month because the new fiscal year starts July 1.
In his first major action on abortion, Youngkin proposed a budget amendment that would have prohibited using public money to pay for abortions in cases where the fetus has “incapacitating” physical deformities or mental deficiencies. Hotly debated in the House and approved by Republicans on a party-line vote, the matter failed in the Senate as the Democratic majority united against it.
The proposed felony was another of Youngkin’s most contentious proposals. He sought the change after drawing criticism from some conservatives last month for saying he had no power to order state police to arrest demonstrators outside the Alexandria home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, whose draft of an opinion overturning the federal right to an abortion leaked to the media.
Democrats blasted Youngkin’s effort to “legislate by budget,” saying the new governor was trying to bypass the legislature’s usual careful review of changes to the criminal code.
“He is literally putting into this sacred criminal code taking people’s liberty away, and you guys are about to vote for it because he’s bullying you,” House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) told Republicans.
As it turned out, Republicans moved to set the proposal aside instead of voting on it — though House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) prefaced the action by saying they would do so “as long as y’all don’t think Delegate Scott’s speech had something to do with it.”
Gilbert said later that he agreed with Youngkin’s intent but felt the new felony needed more time for review.
“It’s the kind of thing that, we spoke to the governor about maybe sending down a bill … and allowing it to go through a more natural process” of consideration by committee, Gilbert said.
“We are certainly sympathetic to the need for urgent action,” he added, but said that “we don’t want to have unintended consequences because there’s some word that we didn’t get right because we didn’t discuss it in criminal subcommittee as we normally would. We have to be very careful with criminal law.”
Because the budget bill originated in the House, that chamber had to act first on all the amendments. Only those passed by the House went on to the Senate for consideration. By early Friday evening, that chamber had yet to act on many of Youngkin’s most significant proposals.
Democrats who control the Senate blocked several amendments, including one that would have added two staffers to the office of Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R), who presides over that chamber.
The Senate also decided to “pass by,” or not vote on, an amendment that would have directed the University of Virginia to create a program on the Constitution and democracy, and another that would have directed $1.6 million to the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University to study K-12 educational issues.
Without Senate action, those items were effectively dead. On a party-line vote, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment that would have set aside $500,000 for supplemental security for the lieutenant governor and attorney general and $250,000 for the Virginia State Police to do a threat assessment for officials in state government.
The Senate approved a raft of technical amendments, as well as one that requires the state’s public colleges and universities to come up with plans to guarantee free speech on their campuses. Three Democrats sided with all Republicans in supporting that amendment.
The Senate also voted 22 to 17 to approve a change to the way prison inmates can earn credits for good behavior. Under new restrictions, which had been approved on a party-line vote in the House, about 500 inmates will no longer be eligible for early release on July 1.
The Republican-controlled House passed all of Youngkin’s amendments, apart from two related to the new felony proposal. House Democrats put up a fight almost every step of the way, most of them hammering on a theme that Youngkin “just doesn’t get it.”
One of Youngkin’s proposals would have taken $5 million that had been designated over the next two years to help the children of undocumented immigrants afford higher education and instead direct the money to students at two of the state’s historically Black universities.
Asked to explain why the money was being shifted away from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Del. Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach), the chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee, said: “This was a recommendation by the governor and I assume that the governor decided it was just a choice of his, that he thought, if he’s going to preference someone, he would rather preference historical Black colleges and universities as opposed to DACA.”
“I’m flabbergasted by what was just said,” Del. Alfonso Lopez (D-Arlington) responded. “It is inappropriate to pit two high-need groups of students against each other.”
The amendment passed the House on a party-line vote. The Senate had not yet acted by early evening.
The House also approved an expansion of Youngkin’s plan for “lab schools” around the state — K-12 schools that, under current law, can be set up in partnership with public four-year colleges and universities with teacher-training programs.
The budget compromise passed this month by the House and Senate includes $100 million for the program. One of Youngkin’s amendments would allow private, nonprofit institutions of higher learning and those without teacher-training programs to participate. Another amendment would add to the $100 million by diverting per-pupil funding from traditional public schools to lab schools.
Some Republicans welcomed the effort to allow education funding to follow the student, a long-sought goal for advocates of school choice. But at least some Democrats called it a threat to existing public schools.
“That is concerning to me. That’s basically a cut in public education,” Sen. Jennifer L. McClellan (D-Richmond) said in an interview a day ahead of the vote. The measure had not come up for a vote in the Senate as of early Friday evening.
Similarly, Youngkin’s plan to suspend the state’s gasoline tax for three months passed the House on a party-line vote but failed in the Senate as one Republican joined every Democrat in opposing it. | 2022-06-18T00:59:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia General Assembly gives Youngkin mixed results on budget - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/virginia-general-assembly-youngkin-budget/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/virginia-general-assembly-youngkin-budget/ |
BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS — JUNE 17: Collin Morikawa of the United States reacts on the ninth green during the second round of the 122nd U.S. Open Championship at The Country Club on June 17, 2022 in Brookline, Massachusetts. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
BROOKLINE, Mass. — For a weird while it looked like this U.S. Open might turn out to be some sort of funky qualifiers’ paradise. Up to the rafters of the leader board went five unknowns who qualified in Ohio, two who qualified in Texas, one who qualified in Canada, this guy, that guy, that other guy. It felt like if you hadn’t played one of the 36-hole qualifiers you must have been some sort of hopeless slacker.
Then came the midday and afternoon of Friday at such a geezer of a country club they call it the Country Club, and up the boards around the course crashed the surnames of the stars: SCHEFFLER, then MORIKAWA and RAHM, then, wait, MCILROY. Now they’ve got themselves a whopper of a leader board approaching the weekend, with Collin Morikawa up top with Joel Dahmen at 5 under par, Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm among five players at 4 under par, and No. 1 Scottie Scheffler among five at 3 under par.
As the shadows lengthened Friday afternoon, the best did seem to be Morikawa, not that it came as a jolt. The reigning British Open champion and 2020 PGA titlist might not be hitting like he’s accustomed to hitting, but he’s missing in the right spots, in the eccentric parlance one often hears around this batty sport. He started on the back nine, rang up a sublime 32, stammered a lone bogey on No. 4, then treated the bleachers at the par-5 eighth hole to one of the great mis-hits they’ll ever see, an approach that went up the scary hill and bounded onto the front left part of the green and came to sit six feet from eagle.
“That’s such a terrible stat,” the business major said and grinned. “I mean, I’ve played 11 majors. It’s not a big enough stat to really make anything out of it, but hopefully.”
Svrluga: The Bryson DeChambeau Experience remains golf's wildest show
Ah well, at least he’s got his topic du semaine on which to elaborate: the flummoxing fact he’s hitting a little draw rather than a little cut these days. “No, I think what it proves is you can play this game with many shots,” the 25-year-old said. “I remember the first time I played with Tiger and he hit every shot that called for it. Pin is on the right, you hit a little cut. Pin is on the left, you hit a little draw. This is just going to hopefully make my iron play and make my game a little but more well-rounded than just hitting a cut. But this week we’re going to work with what we have, and right now it’s a little baby draw.”
He and Rahm finished together, Rahm with his 67 saying they could “feed off each other,” and as Rahm spoke and praised the leader board “a testament to the health and the state of this game” — an issue in question lately — McIlroy was wrapping up outside.
That’s true especially because his double-bogey at the par-4 No. 3 might have made many quit the game, in many cases a wise decision. His approach from smack amid the fairway landed in some tall and scruffy vegetation behind the green, so he walked back there and began whacking at the half-hidden ball.
On the first whack it croaked into the air and quit barely ahead of where it started.
On the second whack it croaked even worse, such that one might say it budged.
As this all looked sort of familiar if also brand-new, he finally plucked it onto the green 22 feet away, then made one of the better putts for a 6 you will see. Yet he refrained from crawling into the weeds and sleeping or weeping, and he birdied three of his final seven holes in this, his 28th major since his last major win, which came in August 2014 and marked his fourth in the previous 15 majors.
“Yeah,” he said, “I have to go out with the mind-set this week and I’m going to try to win my first again. I think that’s sort of the — I’m playing as good a golf as I’ve played in a long time.”
Before all the noise of all of that, Scheffler had sneaked in with a midday 67, a reminder he has spent the past four months as the best of the best, with his four PGA Tour wins and his Masters triumph and his ensuing runner-up finish in Fort Worth even if he did miss the cut at the PGA Championship.
He, too, overcame wretchedness: a chunk on No. 5. He, too, produced something gorgeous, a 55-yard knock from under a tree in the grass on No. 14, one which bounded its way up the green and into the right side of the cup so gently that it didn’t even need the help of the flagstick to stop. He just did all of that as he does things: quietly.
There’s under the radar and then there’s well under the radar, from which so many players have come to shine here: Dahmen (5 under), who qualified in Columbus; Hayden Buckley and Beau Hossler (4 under), who qualified in Columbus and Springfield, Ohio; Nick Hardy (3 under), who qualified as an alternate in Springfield; Michael NeSmith (3 under), who qualified in Dallas; Patrick Rodgers (3 under) who qualified in Columbus; first-round leader Adam Hadwin (2 under), who qualified as an alternate in Dallas; and MJ Daffue (1 under), who led for a while on Friday and qualified as an alternate in Springfield.
They’ve all had some heady days here, but now they’re alongside those who have had many more heady days. | 2022-06-18T01:20:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Collin Morikawa, Rory McIlory and Jon Rahm in mix at U.S. Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/us-open-golf-morikawa-mcilroy-rahm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/17/us-open-golf-morikawa-mcilroy-rahm/ |
Updated June 17, 2022 at 1:21 p.m. EDT|Published June 17, 2022 at 5:29 a.m. EDT
A satellite image from Maxar Technologies shows the FSO Safer tanker moored off the port of Ras Issa in Yemen. (DigitalGlobe/ScapeWare3d/Getty Images)
The FSO Safer tanker has been rusting away off Yemen’s coast since 2015. Sitting in the delicate ecosystem of the Red Sea, famous for its corals and fish, it threatens to release roughly four times the amount of crude oil spilled off Alaska in the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989.
Seawater has already seeped into the engine room, according to U.N. officials who are sounding the alarm that a tank rupture would wreak havoc on marine life, vital shipping lanes and regional economies.
For years, the United Nations has sought to launch a rescue mission to transfer the oil and move the ship to a safer location for inspections or dismantling. But the vessel is anchored in waters northwest of Yemen’s port city of Hodeida near territory held by the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels. The 2014 war between them and the now-Saudi-backed government put an end to maintenance and prevented any offloading.
The opposing sides have finally agreed to a plan to prevent a disaster, the United Nations said, but now it doesn’t have the money to implement it.
To help pay the remaining $20 million, the United Nations’ Yemen coordinator, David Gressly, is appealing online to people everywhere to raise $5 million by the end of the month so that work can start in July.
At a briefing on Monday, Gressly appeared to acknowledge that the call for $5 million from the public was unusual, describing it as “an ambitious goal,” but maintained that a disaster was looming. The increase of currents and winds in the winter will heighten the risk of the vessel breaking up and spilling the oil into the Red Sea.
The entire plan, involving first unloading the oil and later replacing the 1,230-foot vessel — one of the world’s largest tankers — would cost $144 million, according to U.N. estimates.
A disaster in the Red Sea would add to the plight of Yemenis who have endured nearly eight years of war, starvation and disease, and threaten the livelihoods of many who rely on the sea’s resources. Gressly said it may take up to 25 years to restock fisheries.
“An oil spill of the anticipated magnitude at this location would suddenly interrupt critical aid supplies by closing nearby ports, thereby stopping essential shipments of food, fuel and medicine,” said Richard Carter, director of the Coastal Coordination Program at The Ocean Foundation in Washington, D.C.
Calling the tanker “a ticking time bomb,” the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, Tim Lenderking, said this month that Washington was urging not only governments, but also private companies that use the Red Sea for commercial activity, to step up funding for the U.N. project.
Carter said it makes sense to look for external financing in the case of an “orphaned” vessel such as Safer, where ownership and liability might be unclear.
Under the memorandum of understanding, signed in March, a short-term solution would transfer the oil from the Safer to another ship. But the agreement is contingent on mobilizing donor funds.
They also warned that any funding for the project in the absence of a U.N. commitment to implementing the terms of the memorandum will risk a repeat of the fate of previously allocated funds, but they did not expand further.
Lenderking told reporters it could take just “a cigarette butt, the discharge of a weapon, [or] a rough wave” to cause a spill, and he said the supertanker also risked exploding.
Carter warned that if the vessel sinks, explodes or spills its cargo, the consequences would be catastrophic.
“Millions of people would be exposed to highly-polluted air, desperate aid-dependent citizens would be deprived of supplies needed for their survival and the marine environment over a large region would unnecessarily become a tragic casualty of war,” he said.
Ali Al-Mujahed in Sanaa, Yemen, and Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report. | 2022-06-18T01:51:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.N. crowdfunds to prevent oil spill from FSO Safer tanker off Yemen - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/17/yemen-tanker-spill-red-sea-crowdfunding/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/17/yemen-tanker-spill-red-sea-crowdfunding/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social |
TV crew arrested in House office building, authorities say
Comedy segment crew was completing filming, publicist says
Caitlin Moore
A television production team in Washington to record a segment for “The Late Show” was “detained” Thursday night in a House of Representatives building, according to a spokeswoman for the show.
Seven people were arrested Thursday night in the Longworth House Office Building after a disturbance was reported there, the Capitol Police said Friday in a statement.
The police statement gave no names or affiliations, and a police spokeswoman declined to give details beyond what was in the statement.
According to the statement, officers saw seven people in a sixth-floor hallway at a time when the building was closed to visitors.
The people were part of a group that had been directed by Capitol Police to leave the building earlier in the day, the statement said.
They were charged with unlawful entry, according to the police statement.
A statement from CBS said: “Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was on-site at the Capitol Wednesday and Thursday with a production team to record interviews for a comedy segment” on behalf of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
The spokeswoman said the group’s interviews were authorized and prearranged through aides to the members of Congress interviewed.
After leaving an office on the day’s last interview, the spokeswoman said, the production team “stayed to film stand-ups and other final comedy elements in the halls when they were detained” by Capitol Police. | 2022-06-18T02:34:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colbert show crew arrested on Capitol Hill - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/17/colbert-arrested-capitol-hill-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/17/colbert-arrested-capitol-hill-congress/ |
The logo of Zilingo Pte is displayed on a window at the company’s office in Singapore, on Monday, Feb.. 11, 2019. Zilingo said it raised $226 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings Pte. The latest financing valued the fashion platform at $970 million, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information is private. That makes 27-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer Ankiti Bose among the youngest female chief executives to lead a startup of the size in Asia. Photographer: Ore Huiying/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
That isn’t all. As reported first by Bloomberg News, an investigation led by Kroll Inc. has unearthed mysterious payments running into millions of dollars signed off by Bose. These include close to $7 million paid to a controversial law firm. Other employees and investors say they have no idea what these sums — unusually large for a startup — were for.
The Great Chinese White Elephant of Sri Lanka: Andy Mukherjee
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Singapore Still Wants Smart, Rich Expats: Rachel Rosenthal
(1) The technical name for this measure is Contribution Margin 2. | 2022-06-18T02:34:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to Torch Your Unicorn - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-to-torch-your-unicorn/2022/06/17/ca236d0c-eea2-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-to-torch-your-unicorn/2022/06/17/ca236d0c-eea2-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Carolyn Hax: Can you ask those who are less well-off not to buy gifts?
Hi, Carolyn: My husband and I are fortunate to be very financially comfortable. We employ a housekeeper who is very dear to us and is living on the edge financially. One of our neighbors is also in a precarious financial spot; we bought after the neighborhood gentrified, and she inherited her house and is barely able to pay the taxes.
We receive gifts from both of these people. The thought means a lot to me, but I am very uncomfortable with the idea that either of them spent good money on me. I'd feel far better if they both spent their money on things they need.
On the flip side, it seems incredibly patronizing or insulting to say, “Don’t get me gifts, but I want to give them to you” (we give our housekeeper a very large payment for the holidays). Is there a way to insist on one-way gifts?
— Thanks but No Thanks
Thanks but No Thanks: Nope. Accept the gifts graciously. Be a good neighbor, too. And consider giving your housekeeper a raise, even if it means a smaller holiday bonus.
If it makes you feel any better about the neighbor's gift-giving, she apparently owns her home outright in a neighborhood that has appreciated enough in value to be referred to as having “gentrified.” Therefore, it's not inconceivable that she is both cash poor and has a higher net worth than you do.
Hi, Carolyn: I have a class ring. It’s not my class ring. I’m pretty sure it’s from a neighbor many, many years ago when I was a slightly kleptomaniac child, but I was a child and may have that wrong.
How do I return this? I know from sleuthing that the same neighbor still lives there, so I have an address. Do I send a letter first, or a letter and the ring, or just the ring (the most mysterious option)? How do I explain the kleptomaniac tendencies? “It was shiny, and I am like a crow …” Thanks for any help you can provide.
— Crow
Crow: Mail your neighbor a photo of the ring and a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and ask whether this ring belongs to anyone in the house and if they can correctly say what is inscribed inside the ring. (If nothing, then nothing, right?)
You actually don't need to explain anything, just send the ring if they claim it, but I don't see why it's such a big deal that you swiped a ring as a child-child. Every little kid is “slightly kleptomaniac” until the values and morality kick in. Had you been caught, a parent presumably would have marched you over there to return it to your neighbor and own up in person, case closed. You just weren't caught.
… And, for whatever reason, didn’t get around to sending the ring sooner. If there’s a story there, besides just forgetting you had it and only recently coming across it again, then that’s the thing you still need to reckon with internally. Otherwise it seems pretty straightforward.
Carolyn Hax: Who invited Bill? Being asked to pay after a family reunion.
Carolyn Hax: Taking offense at ‘thank you.’ Let’s just sit with that for a minute.
Carolyn Hax: How to tell others to back off when they ask why you’re not drinking | 2022-06-18T04:32:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Can you ask those who are less well-off not to buy gifts? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/18/carolyn-hax-gift-giving-financially-secure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/18/carolyn-hax-gift-giving-financially-secure/ |
In this image from video released by the House Select Committee, an exhibit shows Ivanka Trump, former White House senior adviser, during a video interview with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol at the hearing Thursday, June 16, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Instead of convincing Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters of his misdeeds, the revelations from the hearings into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are prompting many of them to reinforce their views that he was correct in falsely asserting a claim to victory. (House Select Committee via AP) (Uncredited/House Select Committee) | 2022-06-18T05:37:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jan. 6 witnesses push Trump stalwarts back to rabbit hole - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/jan-6-witnesses-push-trump-stalwarts-back-to-rabbit-hole/2022/06/18/8ae46338-eebd-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/jan-6-witnesses-push-trump-stalwarts-back-to-rabbit-hole/2022/06/18/8ae46338-eebd-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Russia-Ukraine war live updates U.S. hopes arms surge will sap Putin’s will; Kyiv and Moscow trade blows in east and south
Russian vessel violated Danish waters, officials say
Analysis: As war rages on, outgoing Pentagon official calls for more funding for tech start-up work
The Azot chemical plant in Severodonetsk on June 17. (Reuters)
The United States hopes the West’s upcoming surge of military assistance to Ukraine — along with Russia’s increasing isolation on the world stage — will drain President Vladimir Putin’s will to fight. The danger of Russia swallowing its neighbor and having its revanchist ambitions emboldened is so high that Biden administration officials said they are willing to risk the global economic turmoil that could accompany a protracted war.
In the devastated city of Severodonetsk, a complete cease-fire is needed to facilitate the evacuation of 568 people trapped in a chemical plant, regional authorities said. Moscow has concentrated most of its combat power on the city and neighboring Lysychansk, U.S.-based analysts said, though Russian forces have also suffered high casualties. Ukraine notched some victories in the south, including a successful strike on a Russian tugboat with at least one U.S.-made Harpoon anti-ship missile, a U.S. defense official confirmed Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky celebrated Friday’s recommendation from the European Commission that Ukraine receive candidate status for its application to join the European Union. Ukraine “has done everything possible” ahead of a crucial summit next week, when all 27 E.U. members will discuss Kyiv’s accession efforts, the president said.
Russia has sharply reduced gas flow to European countries such as Italy and France in a move viewed as retaliation for their support of Ukraine. The curtailment poses no immediate risks but could have consequences when energy demands rise in later in the year.
An adviser to Zelensky ridiculed Putin after the Russian leader claimed the West was using the war as a scapegoat for self-inflicted economic woes.
A former U.S. soldier who disappeared in Ukraine is alive, according to his family members, who have seen a video of him taken after he was believed to have been captured by Russian forces.
A Russian warship violated Danish territorial waters Friday, Danish officials said.
The Danish Defense Command said that a Russian corvette sailed into Denmark’s territorial waters north of the island of Christiansø.
“Later that night, the same corvette again crossed the territorial sea boundary also north of Christiansø,” Danish officials said. “After a call on civilian VHF [very high frequency] radio from the Navy’s maritime task force, the Russian ship immediately left Danish territorial waters.”
Denmark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeppe Kofod called the incident a “deeply irresponsible, gross and completely unacceptable Russian provocation in the middle of [the Democracy Festival of Denmark].” The festival brings together politicians such as Kofod and ordinary Danes for dialogue about democracy, according to the festival’s website.
“Bullying methods do not work against Denmark,” he said, adding that a Russian ambassador was summoned to his office about the matter.
The ambassador told Reuters in a statement that “no evidence of what happened, including the coordinates of the alleged crossing of the Danish maritime border by the ship, was presented.”
Danish Defense Minister Morten Bødskov said “Russia knows Denmark’s borders very well,” but added that there were no threats against Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea.
“We must accept that the Baltic Sea is an area with higher tensions than before,” he said, adding that Danish defense forces are present at sea and in the air.
Denmark has been skeptical of Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union, though the nation has sent military aid to Ukraine.
By Cat Zakrzewski and Aaron Schaffer2:15 a.m.
Mike Brown, the outgoing director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), said in an interview with The Post’s Technology 202 that the Silicon Valley office is in urgent need of more money and manpower to help the U.S. military adapt to the changing nature of warfare, especially as the war in Ukraine rages on. He’s calling for a major shift in how the Pentagon works with companies building the latest drones, cybersecurity software and satellites. | 2022-06-18T06:38:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Latest Russia-Ukraine war news: Live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ |
In George Bernard Shaw’s prophetic comedy “The Apple Cart,” a fictional King Magnus fights an attempt by Prime Minister Proteus to deprive him of the right to influence public opinion through the press. He wants a cipher for a sovereign. The King threatens to abdicate and stand for election himself — in the knowledge that the British monarchy is more popular than any dreary or opportunist politician.
Back in the real world, the royals are supposed to “never complain, never explain.” The Queen is famous for her discretion and dutifully dull pronouncements. Yet her heir, Prince Charles has been taking a leaf out of King Magnus’s book. He has been telling “friends” that the government’s controversial policy of deporting to Rwanda asylum seekers and migrants who have been smuggled illegally into Britain is “appalling,” according to a piece in The Times of London.
The number of migrants who have crossed the Channel from France in tiny, unseaworthy vessels since 2108 has risen above 50,000, with more than 10,000 so far this year, according to government figures. The scheme to fly them to Rwanda is intended to act as a deterrent to others — and give reassurance to voters that the Tories’ claim to protect Britain’s borders can be translated into practice.
The senior leadership of the Church of England has already denounced the plan as an “immoral policy that shames Britain,” but it’s traditional for the bishops to elide their liberal political views with the Bible against the Tories. Not so, the monarchy, which usually avoids a scrap with No 10.
Charles’s office at Clarence House has not denied his remarks, although a spokesperson insists that “he remains politically neutral.” This is constitutionally the case, but not in actual fact.
The Prince of Wales is known to chafe against his restraints. That’s only human for a 73-year old man who has been kept waiting for the top job for decades. But then his mother’s superhuman silence on the burning issues of the day is also what endears her to her people and prevents schisms deepening around the royals for all their foibles and pratfalls.
It may not be long before Charles III takes the place of the 96-year old Elizabeth II. So the unpalatable fate that beckons is that he must learn to be dull, too.
The Prince may think that Prime Minister Boris Johnson — the wily latter-day Proteus in this drama — is on the backfoot after the Partygate scandals and the subsequent resignation of his second ethics adviser, Christopher Geidt, this week. Ironically, Geidt was ousted by Charles and his scapegrace brother Prince Andrew from his previous job as the Queen’s chief adviser when he tried to restrict their freedoms too tenaciously.
Still, Geidt’s advice holds good. The heir to the throne would be wise not antagonize his prime minister needlessly — Johnson has seen off most of his critics during his turbulent career and notoriously holds a grudge.
And Johnson has friends. The tabloid press are cheerleaders for the Rwanda policy. They regard Charles’s enthusiasm for fads like homoeopathy and organic food as eccentric. In a cost-of-living crisis, more than one commentator has observed that organic food is good to eat, provided that you have a princely income.
It was thought that Charles had learned his lesson 10 years ago after it was revealed that he was in the habit of sending “black spider” letters — named after his idiosyncratic spiraling script — offering advice to ministers on matters from environmentalism to planning rules. A freedom of information request by The Guardian forced their publication. The paper sneered that “the letters show behind the curtain, most of the time, Prince Charles behaves more as a bit of a bore on behalf of his good causes than as any sort of wannabe feudal tyrant.” But the letters might be seen as harbingers of problematic royal behavior.
Take the timing of the Prince’s latest apparent intervention: The European Court of Human Rights stopped the government’s first official flight to Rwanda on the tarmac last week in order to deliberate the legality of the policy. Tory MPs and their press friends are furious. By no coincidence, Charles heads off next week to Rwanda, which hosts the Commonwealth Heads of Government. The United Nations High Commissioner has praised Rwanda’s record on taking refugees from other war torn African countries. Paul Kagame, its president, who brought peace to his country after the genocidal attacks on the Tutsis in the 1990s, has long been the poster boy for British aid. Critics, however, say his recent human rights record has been “appalling,” too.
The government’s policy does divide political opinion along sharp lines. A majority of Conservative voters and Brexit supporters are in favor of the £120 million ($146 million) scheme, while Labour voters and Remainers generally oppose it. The latest opinion poll conducted for the Tony Blair Institute shows that more than half rightly suspect that the scheme won’t work. Israel and Denmark have tried to offshore asylum seekers without success, though the European Union pays Libya to detain migrants and asylum seekers in miserable detention camps.
Refugee and immigration policy remains a hot-button issue for voters and the latter was a major factor behind the Brexit vote. So Charles should keep out.
Britain has only just emerged from the divisions created by the toxic EU referendum campaign. The nation a fortnight ago celebrated 70 years of the Queen’s reign in a display of unity that impressed many foreign observers plagued by partisan politics of their own.
Geidt’s advice is going unheeded by both his former masters. Last week, Prince Andrew, now disgraced by his former association with the convicted sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, tried to barge his way back into the limelight. It was only the threat of a walk-out by Prince William, Charles’s eldest son, that got his uncle pulled from a royal line-up.
Like it or not, the Prince of Wales must act as his brother’s keeper. At the conclusion of the Apple Cart, the prime minister backs down — but the ultimate contest between King and the political class is left unresolved. The Prince of Wales, seeking a succession which will reassure as well as invigorate, will have to perfect the hardest act of all for a natural intervener: minding the “Firm’s” business, not everyone else’s.
The Queen Has Had Far More Triumphs Than Failures: Martin Ivens
A Multiplicity of Britains Under One Queen: Adrian Wooldridge
Confessions of an Accidental Monarchist: Howard Chua-Eoan | 2022-06-18T08:40:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Prince of Wales and His Discontents - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-prince-of-walesand-his-discontents/2022/06/18/762c4fc6-eedd-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-prince-of-walesand-his-discontents/2022/06/18/762c4fc6-eedd-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Tampa Bay confident in its bounce-back abilities ahead of Game 2
Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals is Saturday night in Denver. (AP Photo/John Locher)
DENVER — The Tampa Bay Lightning finds itself in a familiar situation entering Game 2 of these Stanley Cup finals, down 1-0 in the series to a potent Colorado Avalanche team looking to dethrone the two-time defending champion.
It is the third time Tampa Bay has lost the first game of a series this postseason, digging itself in a hole that is temporarily frustrating for the veteran group. However, Tampa Bay’s focus is always on the bigger picture.
Resiliency, Lightning Coach Jon Cooper said Thursday, is a word often used too freely, but in this case, it embodies his team. And with two days off in between Game 1 on Wednesday and Game 2 on Saturday night in Denver, Tampa Bay had ample time to go over its mistakes and make adjustments.
“To me, it’s about winning the series,” Cooper said. “It’s not about winning Game 1. Yeah, would we like to win every single game? There’s no question. . . . It sucks we lost Game 1, but let’s turn the page here, and let’s see if we can get Game 2. It’s about the series.”
Cooper said the Lightning’s Game 1 loss wasn’t “an effort thing, it was an execution thing” and if Tampa Bay wanted to avoid going down 2-0 in the finals, it will need to focus on the details. Turnovers, specifically, will need to be kept in check and team breakouts need to be clean when entering the zone.
The Lightning also will have to counteract Colorado’s lethal speed.
“Probably gave up a couple more odd-man rushes than we would have liked,” Cooper said. “In large part, that’s because their [defensemen] like jumping into the rush. They’ve got outstanding instincts. . . . Basically shrinking the ice is what you have to do.”
Tampa Bay felt as if it sat back for the first 10 minutes of Game 1, which was uncharacteristic for the experienced team. It found a rhythm after it figured out how to counter Colorado’s attack but just couldn’t capitalize in overtime.
“Maybe we were just trying to get a feel for them,” Lightning forward Alex Killorn said of Tampa Bay’s slow start in Game 1. “It’s got to be the other way around. We have to come out and set the tone. We knew they were going to have a good start. We just weren’t as ready as we’d like to be.”
Tampa Bay also will need goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy to be at his best. Vasilevskiy let in three goals on 15 shots in the first 20 minutes of the finals, though Cooper called him the team’s best player in Game 1. The three goals were difficult to track, and Vasilevskiy rebounded well in the final two frames, not letting Colorado score again until the overtime dagger from Andre Burakovsky.
Vasilevskiy finished with 34 saves. Colorado Coach Jared Bednar said putting more shots on net will be a focus for his team in Game 2, continuing its relentless attack.
“I don’t think he had a rough start,” Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said of Vasilevskiy. “He’s an all-world goaltender. . . . They’ve had a ton of chances, a couple of power plays as well, and he stood tall; he gave us a chance. Like I said, it wasn’t our best game by far.”
Tampa Bay also will need to see continued improvement from center Brayden Point, who Cooper admitted didn’t look like his usual self in Game 1. Point, who had a secondary assist in Game 1, was playing in his first game since he suffered a lower-body injury in the first round.
“He’s a warrior,” Stamkos said of Point. “He’s going to gut it out. It’s just great for him to get back and great for our team to see him back out there.” | 2022-06-18T08:40:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tampa Bay Lightning look to bounce back in Game 2 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/tampa-bay-lightning-stanley-cup-finals-resilient/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/tampa-bay-lightning-stanley-cup-finals-resilient/ |
BROOKLINE, Mass. — Collin Morikawa showed signs of emerging from pedestrian play at just the right time at the U.S. Open, matching the low score of the championship with a 4-under 66 Friday for a share of the 36-hole lead with Joel Dahmen and a shot at a third straight year winning a major. | 2022-06-18T08:40:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Friday Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/friday-sports-in-brief/2022/06/18/4ee35294-eed7-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/friday-sports-in-brief/2022/06/18/4ee35294-eed7-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Local and state Democrats look to ban gun sales near schools
Frustrated by a federal impasse, Democrats are borrowing from the Republican abortion strategy, proposing incremental limits on guns that they hope will pass or politically damage their opponents
Flowers, balloons, toys and other items left by mourners on May 31 for the students and teachers killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Tex. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Democrats across the country have started pushing for bans on gun sales near schools and child-care centers in an incremental effort to move gun restrictions forward as national Republicans block more comprehensive measures.
North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock (D) has drafted legislation to ban the sale of firearms within 1,400 feet, or about a quarter-mile, of the property lines of any school or child-care center. The proposal, which will be attached to an upcoming bill, does not cover existing stores or include college campuses, but it does include locations of organized clubs like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
This month, in Asheville, N.C., school board member Peyton O’Connor introduced a resolution to ask the city council and the Buncombe County Commission to enact zoning regulations that would prohibit establishing or operating a gun shop within five miles of any school or child-care facility.
Supporters say they have lawmakers ready to introduce similar policies, both at the state and local level, in California, Colorado, South Carolina, New Hampshire and New York. Brian Tabatabai, a city council member in West Covina, Calif., who plans to introduce a zoning ordinance banning gun shops near schools, said he hoped local and state government could break the impasse in Washington on the issue of gun laws.
“Local government matters, and I know a lot of people are frustrated and a lot of people feel hopeless that they have no power because Washington seems so stagnant and stuck,” Tabatabai said. “But I want people to know that city hall is open, that public comment is available and that those little ordinances, those little bitty laws, those are the things that affect your life, and that’s where we can put our energy.”
This push to ban gun shops near schools comes in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Tex., in which an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers, and injured 17 others. The Uvalde shooter purchased the AR-15-style rifle he used at Robb Elementary School within days of his 18th birthday. The shooter who killed 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo just 10 days earlier was also 18 years old.
While neither of the shootings would have been affected by the school-adjacent measures now being pushed, some Democrats see it as another way of lessening access by young people. The approach also is akin to Republican strategies against abortion rights, in which small moves succeeded in pushing the effort closer to the ultimate goal of ending abortion.
Gun rights organizations have, however, cast even incremental changes in current law to be the first step toward more stringent restrictions. In Republican-run states, that could make even small changes at the local level difficult to implement. If Republicans manage to block the smaller measures, Democrats say, they at least hope to make it politically painful.
“We need to act and do something other than continue to offer thoughts and prayers,” said Deon Tedder, a Democrat serving in the South Carolina House who is planning to introduce similar legislation this year, timed to the next meeting of the state legislature. “We make sure liquor stores are not too close to churches and playgrounds and schools here in South Carolina, so why then can we not prohibit the sale and trading of firearms near our schools? This is something that should be bipartisan.”
The Asheville school board is expected to vote on O’Connor’s resolution at a meeting this month. One of its key proponents is Andrew Aydin, who once served as an adviser to Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) before moving to western North Carolina.
“There are gun shops close enough to the major high schools in both Asheville and Hendersonville that you can walk off campus on your lunch, go to a gun shop, buy a gun and be back before your lunch period is over,” said Aydin, who now works as a comic book writer. “It doesn’t matter if we’re worried about a student, a teacher or a parent … If we’re not going to have background checks, if we’re not going to have waiting periods, we should at least make it impossible for people to easily walk to buy a gun and walk back.”
Martin Young, the spokesperson for the East San Gabriel Valley Republican Center near where Tabatabai’s ordinance will be proposed, said he could get behind the proposal.
“When people say they want to take away all the guns, I don’t support that,” said Young, who served in the Air Force and identifies as a center-right Republican. “But I don’t want some numb-nut just walking around with a gun. I don’t think this would be a foolproof solution, but I think we have to start doing something to prevent children from being gunned down like in Uvalde, Texas.”
Michael Ceraso, a Democratic strategist based in Washington, said smaller-scale gun restrictions could open up a new front in the debate.
“We want to start new conversations at the local level and win debates there, which then turn into laws,” said Ceraso, whose focus has been on local and state races. “That’s a long-term strategy, we haven’t been discussing long-term strategies on this issue because we’re always reacting. We’re always reacting to the next tragedy. We’re always reacting to the next election.”
Ceraso said an inspiration is the Republican effort to chip away at abortion rights.
“Republicans have been uber-successful just throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall, locally, statewide, nationally and in the courts,” Ceraso said. “They just throw things against the wall, and a majority of it doesn’t stick and then something does stick and that’s how we got, for instance, all of these restrictions to reproductive health care.”
Murdock, who represents Durham, N.C., said her measure to ban gun sales near schools was prompted by the two recent mass shootings as well as an unrelated shooting involving a 4-year-old.
Murdock and other advocates for banning gun sales near schools point to a 2020 study on the effects of gun shops located near schools in Orange County, Calif. The researchers found that proximity significantly increased the likelihood of students bringing a firearm to campus.
Murdock has been contacting city council members and state legislators across the country. She hopes at least 100 lawmakers will commit to introducing similar bans by the end of the summer.
Murdock and others made clear that part of the Democrats’ goal is to force Republicans into a difficult political position by shifting the focus to school safety.
“If Republicans object to this, they’re literally arguing that they want there to be more guns closer to schools,” Aydin said. “We think that’s an impossible position for them.”
Both the North Carolina Republican Party and Republican leaders in the state legislature declined to comment on the proposal, saying they were waiting for Murdock to formally introduce her legislation before commenting. The Washington Post provided both the party and legislative leadership with a copy of the legislation, but they still declined to discuss it. Neither the National Rifle Association nor the South Carolina Republican Party responded to multiple requests for comment.
For Mark-Anthony Middleton, the nonpartisan mayor pro tempore of Durham who is lobbying the city council to pass a resolution supporting Murdock’s legislation, this effort isn’t about curtailing gun rights, but about doing something to address the rise in childhood gun deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gun-related incidents are now the leading cause of death among children and teens.
“I’m a gun owner. I support the Second Amendment. This isn’t about stripping people of their guns,” Middleton said. “I hope that this will spark a national discussion, or at least add another element to the national discussion, about how we can protect our kids because I don’t think protecting the Second Amendment and protecting the lives of our children are mutually exclusive.” | 2022-06-18T09:32:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats seek to chip away at gun rights in states and cities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/18/schools-guns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/18/schools-guns/ |
How Cuba became a pioneer in covid-19 vaccines for kids
Diana Hernandez, 24, left, gets a follow-up vaccination at a clinic in Playa, the northernmost municipality in Havana, alongside her daughter, Manuelita Sarracino, 15 months, and husband, Juan P. Sarracino, 25, look on. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
HAVANA — Long before he was declared a U.S. national security threat, Vicente Vérez was a Cuban chemist who loved kids.
His specialty was vaccines. In the 1990s, he helped create an inexpensive vaccine targeting the bacteria known as haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, which had been killing children under 5. It was a global hit. So when covid-19 came along, Vérez knew what he had to do.
“We didn’t have much experience with viral illnesses,” he said. ”But obviously, facing an emergency situation like we had, a pandemic — well, we had to try something.”
Today, as the United States finally rolls out coronavirus vaccines for small children, Vérez is celebrating an unlikely achievement: Most of Cuba’s youngsters got their shots months ago. His Soberana 02, used in children as young as 2, is one of a pair of homemade vaccines credited with taming covid-19 on the communist island.
The Cuban vaccines have not yet been approved by the World Health Organization, although they’ve gotten the green light from regulators in Mexico, Iran and Vietnam. Scientists say their development might become a case study of how poorer countries can invent their own shots.
“They were not privy to the gazillion dollars some of these companies received,” said Maria Elena Bottazzi, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, referring to multinationals like Pfizer and Moderna. “Sometimes, with very little, you can get very far.”
A coronavirus vaccine was a moonshot, even for the world’s most sophisticated laboratories. For Cuba, the obstacles were titanic. It faced U.S. sanctions, a snarled global supply chain and a domestic economy in free fall. Cuba had such a shortage of syringes it had to beg for international donations. A New York-based charity, Global Health Partners, sent 6 million.
“Sometimes vaccines take 14 or 15 years to develop,” said Vérez, head of the Finlay Vaccine Institute in Havana.
How did Cuba reach the finish line so fast?
Its vaccine-makers credit the extraordinary teamwork of scientists around the globe. When the pandemic began, they quickly shared discoveries on the internet, such as the genetic sequencing of the new virus, known as SARS CoV-2.
But Cuba wasn’t starting from scratch. In the 1980s, then-leader Fidel Castro poured more than $1 billion into an ambitious new biotech industry. He sent students abroad for PhDs and built a “Scientific Pole” in Havana consisting of around 50 research institutions and enterprises.
“When covid came, they had three decades of experience” inventing and manufacturing vaccines, said Amilcar Pérez Riverol, a Cuban scientist who now works at the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Oldenburg in Germany.
As Biden lifts Trump-era sanctions, Cubans hope for an economic lift
Vérez’s scientific achievements won him global acclaim — but he couldn’t accept an award in 2005 from the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif. The chemist was denied a U.S. visa, he said, on national-security grounds. At the time, the U.S. government worried Cuba might be developing a bioweapons program. Asked to comment on the case, the State Department declined, saying visa records were confidential.
René Roy, a prominent Canadian chemist and Vérez’s partner in developing the synthetic Hib vaccine, said they picked on the wrong guy. “He is a model for many people,” he said. “He is dedicated to human health in general, and in particular to kids.”
Years of work on children’s vaccines turned out to be an advantage for the Cuban scientists. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines used a new technology called mRNA, which instructs cells to make the spike protein that, in turn, triggers an army of antibodies to stand guard against the arrival of the coronavirus. The Cubans relied on a more traditional approach. They created subunit vaccine conjugates, which include harmless parts of a virus that stimulate the immune system to make antibodies.
That technique had been used “in hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines for children in the world,” said Vérez. He strongly believed it was effective — and safe.
Around 400 people worked on developing, testing and producing the Cuban vaccines. “For two years, there was no such thing as Saturday or Sunday,” said Gerardo Guillén, another leading scientist, whose team created Abdala, the shot used on most Cuban adults.
The challenges weren’t just the complexities of a new virus. Much of the state-of-the-art equipment and inputs for pharmaceuticals come from the United States or Europe. Cuba tried to skirt U.S. sanctions by making purchases through third countries. “We always have to be changing intermediaries, because when they [U.S. authorities] identify them, they cancel them,” said Guillén, director of biomedical research at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana. The Cuban scientists resorted to traveling abroad to borrow foreign colleagues’ equipment.
Asked for response, the State Department said the embargo “includes important exemptions and authorizations” for exports such as “agricultural commodities, medicine, medical devices, and certain other items.” Yet some companies shy away from selling to Cuba, worried they could fall afoul of American regulators. The United Nations’ human rights office warned in 2020 that the U.S. embargo was hurting Cuba’s pandemic response.
Cuba managed to control the pandemic early on, closing borders and vigorously screening for cases. But once the island partially reopened to tourism in November 2020, the highly infectious delta variant swept in.
With cases soaring, Cuba started vaccinating adults in May 2021, even before its own regulators had approved the shots. The country’s vaccine success stood in sharp contrast to the woeful state of its public health system, which had long been touted as a major achievement of the 1959 Revolution. Between the pandemic, U.S. sanctions and the inefficiencies of state planning, Cuba’s economy withered. A lack of medication was one factor spurring last July’s nationwide protests.
Vérez was confident his Soberana 02 would succeed — so much so, that he tested it on himself in early clinical trials. (Cuba has now authorized it for both adults and kids). Last September, Cuba launched the world’s first mass children’s coronavirus vaccine campaign, reaching 1.7 million youngsters, from age 2 to 18. “We had very few adverse effects,” he said of the three-shot regimen. Scientists are now working on a vaccine for babies.
According to a Reuters tally, 94 percent of Cuba’s 11 million people have received at least one dose of the domestically made vaccines. With cases plunging, Cuba jettisoned its strict mask mandate last month, after nearly three weeks without a covid-19 death.
The Cuban vaccines have been sent to Vietnam, Venezuela, Syria and Nicaragua. Soberana 02 is also being manufactured in Iran. But their international adoption has been slowed by the global approval process. Abdala is being studied by the WHO, and the application for Soberana 02 will be submitted after it’s reviewed by a private research organization to identify any gaps, said Vérez.
Results from the first two sets of clinical trials for the Cuban vaccines have been published by respected scientific journals. Peer review is still pending for the third phase.
The vaccines could offer advantages for poorer countries that lack the ultracold freezer network that some shots require. “The storage and transportation is much easier,” said Pérez Riverol.
In some ways, the vaccines represent the culmination of Castro’s vision of a thriving Cuban biotech program. Yet Pérez Riverol’s experience shows how endangered that dream is. He recalls being among about 30 students in Cuba who received bachelor’s degrees in 2007 in microbiology and virology. More than 90 percent of them have since emigrated, he said, part of an accelerating brain drain.
While it’s not unusual for bright young scientists from small countries to study or work abroad, this is different, said Pérez Riverol.
“It’s a migration of no-return.” | 2022-06-18T09:41:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Cuba became a pioneer in covid-19 vaccines for kids - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/cuba-coronavirus-vaccine-abdala-soberana/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/cuba-coronavirus-vaccine-abdala-soberana/ |
Poor People’s Campaign to march, rally in D.C. on Saturday
Several thousand people gather on the National Mall in 2018 for the 50th anniversary of “Resurrection City,” when thousands of people camped out there in 1968 to fight poverty. (Keith Lane for The Washington Post)
Mark Pringle feels the pressure, as a fourth-generation farmer in rural Kansas, to keep his family farm running, even as it’s become increasingly difficult.
He’s dealt with extreme weather, intensified by human-caused climate change; a lack of affordable and accessible mental and physical health care; and a rising cost of living.
So Pringle is traveling to the nation’s capital to march alongside the thousands of people expected to rally Saturday demanding that leaders center the needs of the country’s most vulnerable people, enacting legislation that supports the millions who have been forced into poverty or earning low wages.
“We’re people living in rural areas, and it’s just so important that we tie it all together,” Pringle, 63, said. “This has been going on too long, more and more people being left behind in this country. And it’s always struck us as wrong.”
Rev. William Barber builds a moral movement
The event, called the Mass Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington, will begin with a Shabbat service at 8:45 a.m. at Freedom Plaza, before participants march toward 3rd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the rally. Organizers estimate the crowd will include anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 people, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. There will be parking restrictions and street closures.
The demonstration is organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, a resurgence of the movement organized by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. before his death in 1968. Rev. William J. Barber II, a North Carolina preacher who is co-chair of the campaign, said leaders have found inspiration in studying the activism of King and other leaders in the civil rights movement. Saturday’s event will precede Juneteenth, a day that has come to symbolize the end of slavery in the United States.
This is an urgent moment, Barber said, in which poor and low-income people are disproportionately impacted in areas such as health care, housing, gun violence, abortion rights, labor conditions, white supremacy and racism, immigration, the climate crisis and voting restrictions. Inflation is also rising at its fastest pace in four decades, leaving no respite for people who were already struggling to buy groceries, pay for gas or make rent.
DC prepares for Poor People's Campaign rally, Juneteenth
Barber said the movement aims to bring together people across race, ethnicity, religion and region, as King’s work did, to “shift the moral narrative” and mobilize a voting bloc of poor people who can influence policy everywhere from their hometowns to the U.S. Capitol and White House. The demonstration Saturday, he said, will be an example of the power of poor and low-income people.
“We have people coming from every corner of this country, every race, every creed, every culture, people breaking through all of the lines of divisions,” Barber said. “We’re saying to America: ‘We’re giving you two years. If we don’t see significant movement on things like living wages, we’re going to come back here, but also all across the country and engage every nonviolent to at our disposal.’”
Those gathering Saturday, Barber said, will represent the 140 million people who are poor and low-income, according to the organization’s analysis of the census’s supplemental poverty measure. His group held a memorial service Friday night at the Lincoln Memorial to mourn the more than 1 million Americans who have died of covid-19.
Barber’s organization is advocating for what he calls a Third Reconstruction, an agenda that includes changing the poverty measure to reflect current costs of living, providing paid family and medical leave for all workers, ending all evictions, and raising the minimum wage. Other causes will be folded in, too. Pringle, the Kansas farmer, hopes to raise awareness of those who have died by suicide, including two of his friends who were also farmers, tragedies he linked to working long hours while dealing with major health issues, the cost of farming and the stigma of asking for help.
This revival of the Poor People’s Campaign, focusing on how some of the most pressing issues of today affect the poorest Americans, has organized protests in the nation’s capital for years.
50 years later, the new Poor People’s Campaign lays out a political strategy beyond its Washington rally
Barber also has spoken at the annual March on Washington, to honor King’s historic demonstration. He was arrested alongside Rev. Jesse L. Jackson outside the Capitol last summer while protesting for Congress to end the filibuster, protect voting rights and raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. | 2022-06-18T10:11:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Poor People’s Campaign to march, rally in DC on Saturday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/poor-peoples-campaign-dc-march/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/poor-peoples-campaign-dc-march/ |
Juneteenth is growing. Some Texans worry it’s losing meaning.
The traditional holiday celebrates the day enslaved people in Galveston learned they were free, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation
People carry a Juneteenth flag as they march during a Juneteenth reenactment celebration in Galveston, Tex., on June 19, 2021. (Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images)
As a kid, Ernest Owens always viewed Juneteenth as one of the few days a year it was okay to be unapologetically Black.
His family started the day in Galveston, Tex., watching the Jubilee parade, named after the first Juneteenth celebrations more than 100 years ago. Surrounded by Black families like his own, Owens says, he loved watching the procession of cars and live music. When they returned home to eat, he would fill his plate with Southern favorites doused in hot sauce.
It has always been “a very Black holiday,” Owens says, that acknowledged the history that school textbooks often skipped, about the longer wait enslaved Texans had for their freedom.
Although many of those traditions have continued, Owens says he has watched the history begin to wear thin as the holiday stretched from its Texas roots across the country. Now a national holiday, Juneteenth is being lauded by people who didn’t know of its existence a few years ago.
“There was something uniquely different about Southern Black people’s experiences, specifically Texans,” he said. “In the last two years, that intimacy has been lost."
Juneteenth recognizes the day — June 19, 1865 — people enslaved in Galveston learned they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. The next year marked the first Juneteenth celebration statewide, and it has been a cultural mainstay since then, with parades, cookouts, art shows, and games. Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday, in 1979.
“As an adult who is navigating the weird feeling of being a proud Texan, which is ingrained into anyone born here, it’s interesting,” Jasmine Langley, who lives in Dallas, says of traditional Juneteenth celebrations that blanket the state. “It always stirs those juxtaposing feelings of ‘I hate this racist, backwards state’ and ‘I can’t imagine living anywhere other than Texas.’”
What is Juneteenth? Emancipation history with photos
Awareness of the traditional Texas holiday began to grow amid the social unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. President Biden signed a law last year making it a federal holiday.
In 2021, the number of states that gave public-sector employees the Friday before Juneteenth off doubled compared with the previous year, according to CNN. Schools such as Michigan State University and Boston University held their first Juneteenth celebrations, while campuses such as Ohio State University closed for the holiday. This year, the U.S. Post Office joined the list of government agencies closing on Monday in observance of Juneteenth.
Some celebrations have fallen into political territory. In St. George, Utah, the Washington County Republican Party is hosting its first Juneteenth celebration this year at the Dixie Convention Center. “We’ve had the opportunity to educate a lot of people and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to reach across here. This isn’t about a woke holiday,’ ” said Lesa Sandberg, the group’s chair. “We’re not anti-Black people. We love Black people, we have shared common values with them, and we want to remind the world that we do.”
The group picked Amala Ekpunobi, who hosts a show for the conservative nonprofit PragerU, to be the keynote speaker. Last year, in a YouTube video titled “Exposing the TRICK of Juneteenth,” Ekpunobi said the holiday was used by liberals to further the idea that Black people were oppressed. “Juneteenth is being pushed because it perpetuates the very same narrative of things like critical race theory," she said. Ekpunobi did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Those who have celebrated Juneteenth for years worry the holiday is being co-opted.
Some companies have already been forced to retreat from their Juneteenth-related marketing.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis apologized after having to remove a menu item for its upcoming Juneteenth Jamboree: watermelon salad, which reinforced a racist stereotype that all Black Americans like watermelon. The museum is “currently reviewing how we may best convey these stories and traditions during this year’s Juneteenth celebration,” according to a statement.
Walmart debuted a red velvet- and cheesecake-flavored Juneteenth ice cream this year. Its carton was adorned in red, yellow and green — Pan-African colors. But the traditional Juneteenth flag, designed by National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation Founder Ben Haith in 1997, is red, white and blue to replicate the flags for the United States and the Lone Star State. The big-box store also released Juneteenth napkins with “It’s the Freedom for Me" written on them and sold a tank top with the words “Because my ancestors weren’t free in 1976″ modeled by a White woman.
Walmart apologized and said it was "reviewing our assortment and will remove items as appropriate.”
In trying to profit from Juneteenth, Walmart failed to realize that Black people aren’t a monolith, said Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. “It felt like an attempt to capture as much Blackness as possible, even if it was not rooted in cultural specificity,” he said.
Ahmad Islam and Sherman Wright, chief executive and chief operating officer respectively of advertising agency Ten35, said brands should already have strong relationships with their Black audiences before even considering Juneteenth messaging.
After George Floyd’s murder, many brands either felt obligated to respond or were "opportunistically looking for ways to start the dialogue and say something meaningful,” Islam said.
But “if you’re only showing up ... in June because of Black Music Month, and then Juneteenth, and in February because of Black History Month, then you’re off to a rough start,” Wright said. “In this day and age, brands will be called out for it.”
Morgan Malachi, who works at the Tubman House Center for Reparative Justice in Philadelphia, said she’s been disappointed that some organizations are missing important details about the holiday. She objected to the Philadelphia Juneteenth Parade & Festival using the Pan-African red, green and black colors to advertise the event rather the traditional Juneteenth flag colors.
“I have looked a lot into emancipation days for about two years now, and I’ve seen historical pictures,” she said. “Our people, we celebrate it using the American flag.”
Malachi said she will still attend the parade but will be handing out her own fliers that encourage Black Americans to remember Juneteenth’s purpose.
“We set the tone in how our holidays and how our culture is celebrated,” Malachi said. “Independence Hall is respected. That’s why it’s still there. The Liberty Bell is respected. ... I want Juneteenth and every Emancipation Day in this country to be respected in the same way,” she said.
White people learn about Juneteenth, celebrated by millions of black Americans every year
Juneteenth traditionalists may have to make room for the holiday to take on new meaning.
April Columbus, 44, knew little about Juneteenth growing up in St. Bernard, La., but became more invested after her daughter’s dance team was invited to a Juneteenth parade in Atlanta five years ago. Columbus called the event “the most positive African American experience,” with all-Black vendors selling handmade goods, spots for authentic Caribbean food and soul food, and performances from Black singers, dancers and poets.
Learning about Juneteenth inspired her desire to start looking into her own local history. For the Juneteenth ceremony she has organized for St. Bernard Parish this year, she also plans to incorporate Louisiana history by placing a wreath on a local marker for unknown enslaved people. The parish is known in Louisiana for its brutal history of slavery, Columbus said, so confronting its traumatic history toward Black people has helped her community heal.
“You respect what came before, and you move on,” she said.
A lot of Black history and culture were lost at the hands of slavery, Columbus said, but that means Black people can create new traditions. Local Juneteenth commemorations are her way of doing that.
“They always say if you learn about your past, you won’t make the same mistakes,” she said. “We want to leave a positive legacy.” | 2022-06-18T10:11:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Juneteenth is growing. Some Texans worry it’s losing meaning. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/18/juneteenth-texas-holiday-walmart-misunderstood/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/18/juneteenth-texas-holiday-walmart-misunderstood/ |
The Espionage Act has become dangerous because we forgot its intention
The Julian Assange case exposes how changing concepts unintentionally broadened a law
Perspective by Daniel Larsen
Daniel Larsen holds a fixed-term university lectureship in international relations at the University of Cambridge. This op-ed is based on his article “Creating an American Culture of Secrecy: Cryptography in Wilson-Era Diplomacy,” available on advance access in the journal Diplomatic History.
John Shipton attends a news conference at the British Consulate in New York, June 17, 2022, in response to the decision to extradite his son Julian Assange to the United States. (REUTERS/David Dee Delgado)
To guard government secrets, the Justice Department has increasingly weaponized the Espionage Act of 1917 — a law that critics have condemned as “overbroad” and “vague.” The department’s 2019 decision to charge Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, with violating the Espionage Act crossed a new line. On Friday, the British government ordered the extradition of Assange on this indictment, although he pledged to appeal. Many observers are expressing concerns about the future of journalism if the government is heavy-handed in applying the Espionage Act.
But originally, the secrecy provisions of the Espionage Act were not the draconian behemoth that people today imagine them to be. In 1917, there was nothing particularly broad nor vague about these provisions. A century later, however, they have become very dangerously misunderstood — and misapplied.
The great danger of these secrecy provisions hinges on a key phrase: The statute protects all information “connected with the national defense.” The act says nothing about what this phrase might mean. Despite how vague this sounds, the Supreme Court declared the law constitutional in 1941. Although the concept of “classified material” did not exist in 1917, everyone now assumes that any secret that is “classified” must be protected by the Espionage Act.
This assumption is wrong. The act has become so dangerous only because our society has entirely forgotten the concept of “the national defense.” Americans in 1917 understood this term intuitively. A few decades later, that understanding started to vanish as Americans embraced a newer, far more expansive concept: “national security.”
During World War I, a lengthy German espionage and sabotage campaign exposed the need for U.S. anti-espionage legislation. As early as December 1915, President Woodrow Wilson fulminated to Congress about the Germans who had “formed plots,” “entered into conspiracies” and “sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the Government.” The following year, German saboteurs blew up an enormous munitions cache in New York harbor, setting off a deafening explosion that woke people across New York and New Jersey and even damaged the Statue of Liberty. Somehow only six people died.
With U.S. troops headed into harm’s way in 1917, the stakes rose. Congress took up the president’s demand for a new espionage law. A blistering debate raged over a provision to impose censorship on war news, but once this was taken out, the rest of the Espionage Act passed with little controversy, about two months after the U.S. entry into the war. Even the New York Times declared that when “more important to the enemy than to our own people,” it was “the business of the government to keep secret military facts.”
Designed to keep military facts a secret — to protect the Army and Navy as the United States began to fight a brutal war — Congress had no need in 1917 to define “the national defense,” because of the consensus understanding of the term. In early 20th century America, the concept of the national defense was ubiquitous. People thought of America’s international position in terms of its “national defense.” They debated the country’s “national defense” in newspapers, journals and Congress. The House floor manager of the Espionage Act was completely unworried about the term: National defense’s “meaning is pretty well understood in the minds of the public,” he argued.
“National defense” was understood narrowly, but with a sense of elasticity in case of war. It encompassed the military and its needs, and agriculture. Agriculture was central to defense because a war could be lost as easily through civilian starvation as through battlefield defeat. Then, if the military needed them to fight a war, vast sectors of the American economy — including production, transportation and communications — could become matters of national defense. But in peacetime these military needs diminished, and these aspects largely returned to civilian use.
Diplomacy had nothing to do with “national defense” but instead belonged to an entirely distinct concept: “foreign relations.” And secrecy had been mostly unimportant in American diplomacy in the decades before Wilson’s presidency.
An observer defined the term “national defense” in 1927: “National defense means the protection of the country, primarily, from outside aggression, international war, not internal disturbances for which we have police forces and constabulary.”
Of course, the Espionage Act was used against “internal disturbances.” In 1917-1918, it became a notorious government weapon. But the provision the government used wasn’t the one related to government secrets. Instead, the government abused a different section of the law, which prohibited “willfully obstruct[ing] the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States” during wartime, to punish people agitating for labor protections, doing journalism or refusing to engage in patriotic acts.
The main secrecy provisions of the Espionage Act, on the other hand, went largely unused at first. The earliest interwar prosecutions came with a trio of cases in the late 1930s, which involved the sharing of naval secrets with foreign countries. One case reached the Supreme Court in 1941 — the only time the court has addressed the secrecy provisions of the Espionage Act. The court defined the term “national defense” only briefly as “referring to the military and naval establishments and the related activities of national preparedness.” The court did not elaborate, because it did not need to: Americans still understood the concept just as they had in 1917. “National preparedness” merely referred to the military’s broader economic needs. But the Court’s definition is generally not understood today, because the concepts of “national defense” and “national preparedness” have both been forgotten.
Americans forgot these concepts because in the mid-1940s, a new idea, one theorized by a Princeton professor, took the country by storm: “national security.” That professor, Edward Mead Earle, loathed “national defense.” The older concept’s narrow military emphasis rendered it far too small, he thought. Thinking in terms of “defense” encouraged “sitting back and waiting until the enemy is at one’s gates,” he wrote.
This new idea of national security, as historian Dexter Fergie argued, “heralded a novel way of imagining the world.” National security was elastic, and in comparison with the older concept, it was enormous. Before this new idea emerged, there existed, as Fergie wrote, “no concept that linked together so many disparate policy domains, from information and infrastructure to terrorism and trade.”
As “national security” rose in prominence, the original meaning of “national defense” was lost. By the 1970s, legal scholars examining the Espionage Act were already looking at “national defense” with befuddlement.
In the second half of the 20th century, the secrecy provisions of the Espionage Act became a regular tool to prosecute those accused of providing government secrets to foreign countries — such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 after being convicted of giving top-secret military information to the Soviets during World War II.
The use of the act to try to punish leakers, however, was extremely rare. The first attempt came in 1973, with charges against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The case collapsed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Two other cases, both for leaking classified military information, subsequently succeeded in 1988 and 2003.
But by that point, people ceased to remember what “national defense” originally meant and instead increasingly treated it as synonymous with “national security.” This conflation reached a zenith in 2006, when a district judge wrongly defined “national defense information” as information that “could threaten the national security of the United States.”
The scope of the Espionage Act has accordingly exploded. A turning point came with the Obama administration, which prosecuted at least eight leakers under the Espionage Act. The Trump administration prosecuted at least another four. Many of these prosecutions have had nothing to do with military secrets. Julian Assange’s leak of U.S. diplomatic cables certainly had nothing to do with the military. Reality Winner’s leak of an NSA document about the 2016 election had no clear military implications, nor did Terry Albury’s leak of mere law enforcement material. Joshua Schulte currently faces Espionage Act charges, even though the CIA cyber material he leaked has no evident military connection.
Understanding this older concept raises crucial questions of fundamental fairness. The concept of “the national defense” no longer meaningfully exists. How can we have prosecutions under a law with a dead concept at its core — a concept that defendants and juries cannot intuitively comprehend?
The Espionage Act has become so dangerous only by a forgetting of history. The act originally was a vigorous but narrow military secrecy law — not the leviathan of government secrecy it has become. | 2022-06-18T10:12:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Espionage Act has become dangerous because we forgot its intention - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/18/espionage-act-dangerous/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/18/espionage-act-dangerous/ |
If the justices strike down New York’s century-old restrictions on carrying concealed firearms, similar regulations in California, New Jersey, Maryland, Hawaii, and Massachusetts would be vulnerable.
The Supreme Court is reviewing New York's century-old restrictions on carrying handguns in public in the first major Second Amendment case before the court in more than a decade. (Ted S. Warren/AP)
With Congress closing in on a bipartisan gun-safety deal after last month’s run of mass shootings, the Supreme Court soon will issue a ruling that could make it easier for people in at least a half-dozen states to legally carry loaded firearms in public.
It will be the first major Second Amendment decision from the court in more than a decade. And if the justices strike down New York’s century-old restrictions on carrying concealed firearms, as appeared likely when the case was argued last fall, similar regulations in California, New Jersey, Maryland, Hawaii, and Massachusetts would be vulnerable.
Elected leaders in those liberal-leaning states and gun-control advocates throughout the country are bracing for a decision that extends the constitutional right to gun ownership beyond a person’s home to gathering spots such as restaurants and shopping malls. And they fear that, depending on how broadly the court may rule, related restrictions, including state bans on high-powered, semiautomatic firearms, also could be at risk.
“Recent events have underscored the importance of this case. How the court interprets the Second Amendment is far from an abstract exercise,” said Eric Tirschwell of Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.
“If the court forces New York to allow more people to carry guns in public, the result will be more people shot and more people killed, and that’s what the evidence and social science tells you.”
In battle at Supreme Court over N.Y. gun law, a surprising split among conservatives
New York’s law requires a gun owner to obtain a license to carry a handgun. To get the license, they must demonstrate to local authorities a specific need for carrying the gun. Gun-rights advocates say citizens should not have to justify the need to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms. If New York’s “proper cause” requirement is invalidated, the Second Amendment groups will be closely monitoring states with similar laws to ensure that officials take steps to loosen permitting rules.
“If they don’t do that,” said Matthew Larosiere, policy director for the Firearms Policy Coalition. “We’ll certainly be suing them.”
Larosiere said he expects most jurisdictions will “see the writing on the wall and attempt to rewrite” policies to align with the ruling. “Perhaps there will be a state or two on the West Coast that doesn’t want to do this and we will insist that they be dragged to court,” he said. “That’s something we’d rather avoid as it’s better to have people’s rights respected.”
Democratic leaders are preparing to defend their laws, which they say are necessary to ensure public safety, particularly in more densely populated areas. What works for Wyoming doesn’t necessarily work for a state like New Jersey, said the state’s acting attorney general, Matthew Platkin (D).
“This case is critical and concerning. It’s been a years’ long effort to tie the hands of states that would like to pursue common sense, and in my opinion constitutional, gun safety measures,” he said. “Any effort to tie our hands makes it harder for us to keep our residents safe.”
To carry a handgun in New Jersey, applicants must show a “justifiable need” related to a specific threat. Permits for people other than former or current law enforcement officials are rarely issued. The restriction is one reason New Jersey has fewer per capita gun deaths per year than most other states, Platkin said, citing data maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It is unknown how the justices will rule, but two things are clear: a decision is expected no later than early July, and when the case was argued in November, a majority of the conservative-leaning court indicated they believe Americans generally have a right to carry a handgun outside their home and that New York’s law is too restrictive.
If they do issue a broad ruling with implications for other states, Platkin said New Jersey would “take the most aggressive position we can to defend our laws.”
Thousands of people have obtained permits to carry loaded, concealed guns in public in D.C.
Ever since the Supreme Court in 2008 declared a right to gun ownership, lower courts have generally sided with states that restrict the right when determining how the Second Amendment applies beyond people’s homes. The justices have turned down numerous requests from gun-rights advocates to review those decisions.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2008 decision made clear that the Second Amendment is not unlimited and identified several lawful restrictions, including bans in “sensitive places” such as schools and government buildings. But recently four conservative members of the court — Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas — have expressed frustration in their writings about their colleagues’ apparent reluctance to reenter the gun debate. During November’s argument, the six conservative justices expressed varying levels of support for the two people challenging New York’s law with backing of a National Rifle Association affiliate.
Twenty-five states do not require a permit to carry a firearm in public, while several others require permits but do not ask applicants to justify their need for a weapon. There are five states with laws very similar to New York’s that would be most directly affected by a ruling. Permit requirements in two other states — Rhode Island and Delaware — are somewhat less stringent because they give state officials less discretion to reject applications, and experts said those states will not necessarily be impacted by the decision in the New York case.
Maryland’s permitting system has been challenged repeatedly and upheld in state and federal court. The regulations require applicants to show a “good and substantial reason” for carrying a firearm. Attorney General Brian Frosh (D) predicts the state police will be inundated with new applications to carry firearms if the justices invalidate New York’s law.
“Lives will be lost if the norm is that people can carry firearms in public,” Frosh said, adding that an increase in carry permits “will make the lives of law enforcement much more difficult and put all of us in Maryland at greater risk.”
One legal challenge to Maryland’s law is on hold pending the outcome of the Supreme Court case. The justices have yet to decide whether to review a separate challenge to the state’s ban on certain semiautomatic firearms. An appeals court upheld the restrictions, writing that the banned guns are “weapons of war” not protected by the Second Amendment.
Until a court ruling in 2017, gun owners in the nation’s capital who wanted to carry firearms in public also were required to demonstrate a “good reason” before they could obtain a permit. In the months before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down a key provision of the city’s permitting law, there were only 123 active licenses and the D.C. police denied about 77 percent of all applicants.
Since then, thousands have obtained permits, including more than 3,600 approvals in fiscal 2021, according to police department data. The city denied less than 10 percent of applicants, and more than half of those who applied during that time were not D.C. residents.
In New York, law enforcement officials say they are preparing to meet the practical and legal challenges they expect if the Supreme Court weakens the state’s permitting regulations in the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen.
“We will have to innovate and adapt to meet the new public safety challenges that the decision may pose — and we will,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) wrote in a June 1 memo to staff. “We are preparing now to meet the moment and continue our fight against gun violence in a post-Bruen world, in collaboration with our legislative and law enforcement partners, and the communities we serve.”
Across New York, at least 65 percent of applicants were approved for an “unrestricted” carry license in 2018 and 2019, according to a state analysis of records submitted to the court. But in New York City, carry permits are restricted to a relatively small number of applicants and largely available only to active and retired law enforcement officers.
If the law changes, the district attorney’s office anticipates criminal defendants will attempt to get pending weapons possession charges dismissed and convictions overturned.
Steven Wu, who heads the DA’s appeals division and will lead a review of the ruling, said the most pressing concern for a densely populated environment is that many more weapons could be “floating around the city.”
“We want to be ready,” Wu said.
Jacobs reported from New York. | 2022-06-18T10:12:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Court could soon make it easier to carry guns in six states - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/supreme-court-guns-ruling/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/supreme-court-guns-ruling/ |
Metro to close last sales office as services move elsewhere
In-person support for ticketing and farecard purchases will continue to be available amid a move to digital
The Metro Center sales office, the last physical location to provide in-person ticketing services to riders, will shutter June 30. (Gaya Gupta /The Washington Post)
Metro’s lone sales office for conducting various in-person transactions is closing at the end of the month, the latest change as the transit industry increasingly moves toward digital services amid a trend accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Metro Center office is the last of its kind after a years-long decline in the number of physical locations, although its services will still be available elsewhere. The office will close June 30.
While in-person support for ticketing and fare card purchases will exist at Metro stations and commuter stores, the closure comes as Metro has increased virtual services and mobile payment options. The move is expected to reduce Metro’s expenses at a time when the transit agency is struggling to return to pre-pandemic ridership, a decline that has meant a significant loss in fare revenue.
The sales office has provided support to help riders transfer balances, add fare money and replace lost cards, although most customers use it to purchase reduced-fare passes, such as those for seniors and people with disabilities. Services offered through the office will be available through other channels, such as commuter stores, fare-vending machines at stations, online or at Metro’s new Transit Accessibility Center.
Barb Fraze, 65, came to the sales office on a recent afternoon to get a senior SmarTrip card and transfer balances during her lunch break. She said she hopes to avoid making the longer trek to Metro’s accessibility center at L’Enfant Plaza.
Fraze, who said she considers herself “fairly tech-savvy,” said she plans to stick with Metro’s physical ticketing system. But after trying to transfer balances to her new SmarTrip card at the sales office, she was eventually told she needed to complete the transaction online.
“I just think that there are people who will be like, ‘How do I do this?’” said Fraze, who said she was comforted by the option of calling Metro’s customer service for support. “I think it’s going to be a struggle for some people who are not tech-savvy.”
Metro’s board approved the closure as part of its fiscal 2023 budget. A budget proposal cited “a decreasing demand for in-person purchases of fare media products and services as more customers use mobile fare media and internet sales.”
The decision comes as lower ridership is taking a toll on Metro’s finances.
The agency previously estimated it will face a budget gap of a half-billion dollars beginning next summer — before it received a federal grant and notched recent ridership increases — while Metro is also bracing for a shortfall in its capital projects budget. Transit officials did not respond to a request for comment about how much money the closure would save annually.
Metro shuttered most of its in-person sales offices in November 2016, citing a nearly $300 million budget gap and declining usage. At the time, the four offices that closed each handled fewer than 200 interactions daily.
When the sales office relocated from Metro’s headquarters in 2018 to its location at Metro Center, its hours were expanded from 8 a.m. through 6 p.m. on weekdays. Since then, those hours have been cut to 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
While ridership is on the rise and has surpassed the transit agency’s initial pandemic-era goals for the fiscal year, the increase is likely not enough to financially recover. About $2.4 billion in federal money helped Metro to avoid cutting service earlier in the pandemic, but that aid will begin to run out next summer. Transit officials have said that unless ridership dramatically improves, Metro might have to decrease service without other revenue streams.
Last month, 85 percent of Metrorail trips were paid with physical SmarTrip cards, while 15 percent were paid with mobile devices, said Metro spokesperson Ian Jannetta. Like other transit agencies, Metro has no plans to phase out physical forms of payment.
The transit agency has encouraged customers to sign up for mobile payment options, including adding their SmarTrip card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay and downloading the SmarTrip app. Many transit systems around the country have joined in on touchless payment systems, which have become more popular during the pandemic.
Every New York subway station offers touchless card readers, allowing riders to tap their phone or credit card to an electronic reader. The system will cease offering its paper ticket by 2024. San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system accelerated its transition from paper tickets to contactless cards in 2020 amid coronavirus concerns.
At Metro, that evolution began to advance after it ended paper fare cards in 2016 — the same year it canceled plans for a mobile payment system, citing a lack of interest. After rapid growth in smartphone use, Metro announced new plans to launch a mobile payment system in 2019.
Those options were ultimately launched during the pandemic in September 2020, when Metro announced riders could use Apple Pay and a new mobile app to use a virtual SmarTrip card. Android users were able to start paying virtually in June 2021.
Despite the growing popularity of mobile and touchless systems, many Metro riders who use the sales office said they are resistant to upending their routines. Most customers who visit the location are seniors looking for SmarTrip customer service, which is now offered at L’Enfant Plaza, Jannetta said.
According to Metro budget documents, the proposed closure required a Title VI equity analysis by the Federal Transit Administration. The analysis determined the closure would not disproportionately affect minority or low-income riders but did not assess its effects on senior riders.
Addie Brinkley, 68, came to the sales office for the first time earlier this month to replace a lost fare card. She said she plans to continue using Metro’s physical payment system, adding that she prefers the security and simplicity of reloading money at ticketing kiosks.
She said she’s not likely to make a switch to mobile payments until she takes computer classes at an adult education charter school.
“I wouldn’t know how to use a computer,” Brinkley said. “I’m old-school.” | 2022-06-18T10:12:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Metro to close last sales office as services move elsewhere - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/18/metro-sales-office-closure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/18/metro-sales-office-closure/ |
Searching for relief, a fashion executive grew desperate about the absence of an explanation
By Sandra G. Boodman
(Cam Cottrill For The Washington Post)
In the hours before her life was upended, Megan Freedman had attended a memorable business dinner surrounded by cherished colleagues at a trendy restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif., overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
“We’d had the most fun,” recalled Freedman, the owner of a New York City fashion showroom who was in Los Angeles in October 2019 to meet with her designers and buyers for national retailers. Perched on a wall outside the restaurant after dinner, Freedman was chatting as she and her friends waited for their cars. When she stood up, her left leg suddenly buckled and she fell. “I wasn’t drunk,” she said. “I just went boink and someone had to lift me up.”
The next morning, Freedman awoke to stabbing pain in her partially numb leg. “I was 100 percent sure I had a herniated disk,” she recalled. Freedman had spent the previous few days “lifting a ton of boxes and schlepping” heavy suitcases heaped with clothing samples to meetings. A few years earlier she had suffered a similar pain in her left arm caused by two herniated disks in her neck.
“I figured I had sciatica,” she said, referring to the pain that radiates down the leg and is often caused by a bone spur or disk that presses on the sciatic nerve.
Freedman would spend the next eight weeks bouncing between doctors’ offices and emergency rooms in Los Angeles and Manhattan in what she described as “ridiculous” pain. Her leg was often so weak she had to hoist it with her hands.
In December 2019, hours before her discharge from a New York hospital after a nine-day stay, Freedman learned she had a serious illness that had developed seemingly without warning.
“I come from a family full of heart disease and cancer,” said Freedman, 54. “I never expected this.”
Crying on the plane
Alarmed by the intensity of her pain and difficulty walking, the friend with whom Freedman was staying drove her to the emergency room of a Los Angeles teaching hospital. Doctors there also suspected sciatica and gave her the narcotic painkiller Dilaudid. If she wasn’t better in three days, they advised, she should come back.
Chronic pain is terrible. A new way of understanding it may help.
Freedman did not improve and fell several times. She returned to the ER and underwent an MRI scan of her lower spine, which found nothing concerning. Doctors prescribed a stronger opioid, which she said barely touched the pain. Two days later she flew back to New York. “I just sat there crying on the plane,” Freedman recalled.
She consulted the Manhattan orthopedist she had seen for her neck. He reviewed the MRI and took X-rays. Unable to determine what might be wrong, he referred Freedman to a spine specialist. The specialist was perplexed, as was a second spine orthopedist. The latter gave her the first of two epidural steroid injections in her lower back; when neither alleviated the pain, he advised that she see a neurologist.
Freedman remembers feeling a creeping sense of desperation about her unrelenting pain and the absence of an explanation.
The neurologist ordered an electromyography test and a nerve conduction study to check the functioning of nerves and muscles in Freedman’s leg. The results seemed to indicate that the pain was emanating from the front of her pelvis, not her spine. Concerned that she might have a blood clot or peripheral artery disease, in which veins become narrowed because of a buildup of plaque that restricts blood flow, he ordered an ultrasound of her left leg up to the groin along with a CTA, a scan that inspects blood vessels for abnormalities.
On a Sunday morning several days before the tests were scheduled, Freedman headed for the ER of the Manhattan teaching hospital with which the neurologist is affiliated.
“I just couldn’t take the pain any longer,” she recalled. After waiting several hours she was taken to an exam bay where she said a young physician told her the ER staff had “bigger fish to fry” and recommended she head home. Freedman isn’t sure what prompted his remarks, but said he appeared to believe she had sciatica and needed to rest.
A woman’s laborious search uncovered the probable cause of her searing abdominal pain. Getting a doctor to help was much harder.
Humiliating encounter
“That was the worst moment,” she said, weeping at the memory. “Being told there’s really nothing wrong with you and you should just go home. I felt so humiliated.”
Soon afterward, Freedman went to the ER at Mount Sinai, the teaching hospital where she had been seeing a neurologist for several years to treat chronic migraines.
The reception was different. Doctors admitted her and teams from various specialties — oncology, neurology, endocrinology and rheumatology — began ordering tests in an attempt to figure out what was wrong with Freedman, who had acquired a nickname: “the weird leg lady.”
Initially, doctors zeroed in on a mass on her ovary described as “concerning”; it was ultimately deemed benign. A “highly suspicious” thyroid nodule was similarly dismissed. Doctors noted that Freedman’s leg strength improved after a course of steroids and that she was able to walk, although her pain was persistent and severe. Sciatica was again ruled out; scans showed only mild spinal degeneration.
Steroid medication gave me disturbing side effects. They changed my life in bad — and good — ways.
But Freedman’s EMG and nerve conduction studies were abnormal, and an MRI showed inflammation in her left femoral nerve, one of the largest nerves in the leg, which controls movement and senses pain.
Doctors suspected that her history of thyroid dysfunction and her improvement on steroids suggested an autoimmune disease in which the body mistakenly attacks itself; they began running down the possibilities. A positive blood test for PR3, which detects antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA), a protein that mistakenly attacks healthy white blood cells, greatly narrowed the options.
On the day of Freedman’s discharge, a team of rheumatologists trooped into her room to tell her they believed she had granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA), formerly known as Wegener’s disease. GPA is a form of vasculitis — inflammation of the blood vessels — that can damage organs. The disease often affects the kidneys, lungs and sinuses.
GPA, which mimics an infection, can occur suddenly or develop over weeks or months. Severity and symptoms differ depending on which organ is involved. Treatment includes high doses of corticosteroids, usually along with other powerful medications to calm the immune system. If treated early, full recovery is possible; without treatment, GPA can be fatal.
An ‘atypical presentation’
At the beginning of his career in the early 1970s, Anthony S. Fauci, the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his colleagues delineated the mechanism of the illness, which at the time killed most people within two years. Fauci also helped devise drug treatment for GPA that is 95 percent effective.
In Freedman’s case, the disease attacked her femoral nerve. “It was a somewhat atypical presentation,” said Weiwei (Wendy) Chi, the Mount Sinai rheumatologist who has treated Freedman since shortly after her diagnosis. Freedman also had a history of sinusitis and nosebleeds, which can be early signs of GPA.
She immediately began taking high doses of steroids, which improved the ability of her leg to function but did nothing to blunt the pain; the damage to her femoral nerve is probably permanent. None of the medications typically used to treat her pain have worked, Chi said, so “she’s on opiates for the time being.”
“The most confusing part of her case is the persistent pain,” which remains severe and undiminished, Chi observed. “I hate giving people chronic opioids but we’ve tried so much else and none of it really helped.”
‘I was just clawing at myself.’ A retired nurse who couldn’t stop scratching feared she was facing an organ transplant.
The 2 1/2 years following Freedman’s diagnosis have been rough. She was hospitalized several times for acute pancreatitis, a serious and painful inflammation of the pancreas often caused by gallstones. She contracted the coronavirus from her hospital roommate during one stay. In May 2021, Freedman underwent surgery to remove her gallbladder.
Her business of 20 years imploded as a result of the pandemic. Freedman said that she was forced to shutter her showroom and lay off her five employees; she now works from home.
Because her life depends on a regimen of drugs that suppress the immune system, the coronavirus poses a heightened risk. She received virtually no protection from the first two vaccine doses because her body did not make antibodies.
As the omicron wave swept through New York City in late 2021, Freedman decided she could not risk living there with her family, which includes a son in high school. She decamped to a small city in California’s Coachella Valley near her brother, returning to New York two months ago. (She got covid-19 anyway in January.)
In California, she received injections of Evusheld, an experimental medication approved for immunocompromised people. Doctors hope that she developed antibodies after a dose of a different coronavirus vaccine administered in April, after her return to New York.
Before GPA, her health had been good. “This disease is frightening and has really kicked my butt,” she said. “Not many people know much about it, and many who have it have very severe cases.”
Freedman “has been relatively stable for the last three years,” said Chi, who characterized the severity of her illness as “in the middle. She doesn’t have life-threatening organ disease like rapid kidney failure.”
“In the most severe forms people can be totally healthy one day and in the ICU the next,” the rheumatologist added. “It’s such an unpredictable disease.”
Submit your solved medical mystery to sandra.boodman@washpost.com. No unsolved cases, please. Read previous mysteries at wapo.st/medicalmysteries.
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Back pain plagued her for 30 years. A recurring clue sparked a delayed diagnosis. | 2022-06-18T11:43:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Medical Mystery: She was ambushed by searing leg pain that struck without warning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/18/medical-mystery-leg-pain/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/18/medical-mystery-leg-pain/ |
The slow, frustrating effort to vaccinate young children — against polio
By Jodie Tillman
Mimi Meade, 7, winces as she receives the polio vaccine on April 26, 1954, in McLean, Va. (Harvey Georges/AP)
A highly effective vaccine had countered a deadly virus, and America was moving on. Only the virus hadn’t disappeared, of course, and millions of unvaccinated young children remained vulnerable to its devastating impacts.
The year was 1961, and the virus was polio. It had been six years since Jonas Salk’s heralded vaccine was approved, and cases of the disease had plummeted following remarkably successful vaccination drives.
Yet scattered outbreaks continued, especially in poor urban areas. Barely more than half of the U.S. population had been vaccinated, and President John F. Kennedy was particularly concerned that 4.8 million children — most of them under age 5 — had yet to receive their shots.
“I hope that the renewed drive this spring and summer to provide vaccination for all Americans, and particularly those who are young, will have the wholehearted support of every parent in America,” Kennedy said at an April 1961 news conference.
Even though many parents did embrace the vaccine, the nation’s experience with polio showed the challenge of immunizing the youngest children — a challenge that is replaying today in the coronavirus pandemic.
After more than two years of the pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration authorized vaccines for children under 5 on Friday, with shots expected to be available next week. But only 1 in 5 parents say they’ll get those young children immunized as soon as possible, according to a report published last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Children ages 5 to 11 became eligible for the vaccine in November, but only 4 in 10 parents said their children in that age group had gotten vaccinated, the report stated.
Unlike the coronavirus, however, polio struck children the hardest. That is why Kennedy and public health authorities were particularly concerned about the vaccination gap among kids.
Parents had been counting on a vaccine as horror stories of paralysis and death among children had piled up since the first recorded polio epidemic in the United States in 1894. Nearly 1.5 million schoolchildren participated in the mass Salk trials, according to David Oshinsky’s “Polio: An American Story.” Volunteering for the experiment was seen as a privilege; on the parental consent forms, the standard phrase “I give my permission” was changed to “I hereby request,” Oshinsky noted.
But while schools served as a “safety net” and later helped administer a high volume of vaccines, uptake for babies and preschoolers lagged, said James Colgrove, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University.
Before 1955, children between ages of 5 and 9 were at the greatest risk of getting polio, according to Elena Conis, author of “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization.” By the end of the decade, however, the paralytic cases were concentrated in children under 5.
This was particularly pronounced among poorer families in cities. When an outbreak of polio struck Providence, R.I., in 1960, for instance, epidemiologists found that the cases were almost entirely confined to children in the city’s poorest areas, wrote Conis, a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
The world’s first anti-vaccination movement spread fears of half-cow babies
A primary reason for the disparities with the polio vaccine, she said, was that child visits had shifted from public clinics to private pediatrician offices, which were “increasingly the domain of the middle class.” The Salk vaccine required three injections, plus a booster, which meant multiple trips to the doctor.
Kennedy aimed to close the vaccine gap with the Vaccination Assistance Act of 1962, which gave states money to carry out mass immunization programs for polio as well as diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. It also established the leadership role of the federal government in coordinating immunization policy — a role that has become particularly important, and controversial, during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The story of vaccination and society in modern times begins with Kennedy’s proposal,” Conis wrote.
The federal government also launched public health campaigns. One of them, “Babies and Breadwinners,” was aimed at getting the vaccines to babies and men, who, while not as vulnerable as children, were nonetheless at risk. (Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was paralyzed from the waist down after being diagnosed with polio at age 39, was the most famous case.)
Months after Kennedy’s news conference, the government licensed Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine. The relative ease of delivery of oral doses ushered in a renewed vaccination campaign, Colgrove said. On “Sabin Sundays,” millions of children, as well as adults, showed up at churches and schools for their free doses, often delivered on sugar cubes. A federal public health campaign featured Wellbee, a cartoon bee that urged kids to “drink the free polio vaccine.”
It wasn’t until 1979 that the United States was declared polio-free, thanks to widespread use of the vaccine.
Polio vaccines shifted the disease’s epidemiology — concentrating cases primarily in poor urban areas with low vaccination rates — in a pattern that continued for other diseases when vaccines became available. Just a few years after the first measles vaccine hit the market in 1963, Conis wrote, new outbreaks were concentrated in low-income urban neighborhoods, where vaccination rates were lower.
Also in the 1960s came a new round of vaccine hesitancy among some middle-class parents, many of them influenced by the social movements of the time. They began to question the need for immunizations, particularly for diseases like measles that, though potentially fatal, had seemed a routine part of childhood, Conis said.
Continued outbreaks of preventable diseases prompted a shift away from persuasion and toward compulsion when it came to children.
In 1968, half the states required immunizations for school entry. “To reach the single preschool child in the slum is difficult, but to mount a campaign to attain really high levels of immunization in kindergarteners, and the 1st, 2nd graders in school should be relatively easy,” one Centers for Disease and Prevention official said, according to “Vaccine Nation.”
First U.S. vaccine mandate in 1810 launched 200 years of court battles
In 1977, the federal government provided money to help states implement mandatory immunization programs, including monitoring progress and auditing student records. As a result, all states had mandatory immunization requirements for school by 1981, according to Colgrove.
Colgrove said the lesson from the country’s experiences with polio and other transmissible diseases is that the most effective way to ensure vaccination for the youngest children is to require it before they can start school.
But whether that lesson applies to covid is an open question. Children are not affected as severely as adults. Coronavirus vaccines were developed and rolled out at record speed, and more than half of parents with children under 5 say they don’t have enough information about the safety or effectiveness of the vaccine, according to the Kaiser report published last month.
On top of that, distrust of institutions, including the government, runs high. “It’s just a more complicated vaccine to promote through the schools,” Colgrove said. Speaking of the successful polio vaccination drives in schools, he added, “We’re not in that environment anymore.” | 2022-06-18T11:43:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vaccinating young children against polio challenged JFK, officials - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/18/polio-vaccine-young-children-jfk/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/18/polio-vaccine-young-children-jfk/ |
Juneteenth reminds us of an often forgotten side of the liberation struggle
A man holds an African-American flag during a demonstration in Chicago to mark Juneteenth a national holiday on n June 19, 2020. (Nam Y. Huh/AP)
One hundred and fifty-seven years ago, at the tail end of the United States’ great civil conflict — and the geographical tail end of the Confederacy — Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger led 2,000 soldiers into Galveston, Tex., where a third of the population still lived in slavery more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was supposed to have taken effect. He issued the following general order, which was read out at several locations by federal troops:
This good news wasn’t really news to many of the people in Galveston; word does get around when big things are afoot. In this case, the word made manifest on June 19 was “jubilee” (derived from an ancient Hebrew term for a day when, among other things, slaves could be set free). Juneteenth, as it came to be known, turned into an annual day of celebration for African Americans in Texas and then in other parts of the country. In recent decades, nearly every state has given it some form of recognition. Last year, it became a federal holiday for the first time.
Opal Lee and DeForest "Buster" Soaries: Juneteenth is meant to unite us, just like the Fourth of July
Many people helped bring about the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, passed in 2021 by substantial margins in both houses of Congress. One of the most prominent advocates was Opal Lee, a retired schoolteacher who has spent her retirement doing good things, including advocating for the holiday. At age 94, she was present for the signing ceremony here in Washington. This initiative shows a side of the liberation struggle that is sometimes forgotten, as University of Maryland professor Ira Berlin wrote in an article in The Post 30 years ago:
“From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves. Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and that of their posterity — atop the national agenda. Steadily, as opportunities arose, slaves risked all for freedom by abandoning their owners, coming uninvited into Union lines and offering their help as laborers, pioneers, guides and spies.”
Juneteenth has been, and still is, a day for feasting, singing and dancing, if you feel like it (it’s a free country). But above all, it is a day for celebrating the ideals of freedom and equality — not only in the nation’s laws but in the hearts and minds of one another. | 2022-06-18T11:43:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Juneteenth reminds us of an often forgotten side of the liberation struggle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/18/juneteenth-reminds-us-an-often-forgotten-side-liberation-struggle/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/18/juneteenth-reminds-us-an-often-forgotten-side-liberation-struggle/ |
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on Feb. 24. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
At last, the nation’s youngest children will get some protection from the coronavirus. Regulatory approval means shots could be administered as soon as this week to children under 5 years old. The mRNA vaccines that have been lifesavers for adults will come in smaller doses for children that, while not perfect, should at least prevent serious illness or death. This is welcome news everywhere but in Florida.
In an astoundingly callous move, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Department of Health has refused to put in an order with the federal government for a supply of the pediatric vaccines for children under 5, leaving pediatricians and parents to scramble on their own. The deadline for placing a preorder was Tuesday, and the 49 other states met the cutoff. The department said in a statement that it “does not recommend” the shot “for all children,” but, after protests, announced on Friday that it would begin accepting orders for shots from doctors and health-care providers. The department is led by state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a DeSantis appointee who has been an outspoken skeptic of coronavirus vaccines.
At a Miami news conference, Mr. DeSantis left no doubt this recklessness came from the top. “I would say we are affirmatively against the covid vaccine for young kids,” he said. “These are the people who have zero risk of getting anything.”
Not exactly. While child deaths and hospitalizations are an extremely small fraction of the total, the American Academy of Pediatrics reports that 1,055 children nationwide have died of covid. In total, some 13.5 million children of all ages have been infected over the course of the pandemic. Florida has had 386,196 cases from ages 5 to 11 during the pandemic, and 187,307 in children under 5, according to the state. This is not “zero risk.”
Long covid is a serious and major complication from infection. The youngest children will have to live with it the longest.
But Mr. DeSantis appears to relish playing politics with public health. He is running for reelection and has his eye on a Republican presidential campaign. His decisions and comments are a craven bid for support from the anti-vaccine movement. We’ve seen this before. Mr. DeSantis also fought vaccine and mask mandates. His campaign sells “Freedom over Fauci” flip-flops that leave a message when worn on the beach: “Fauci can pound sand.”
Speaking of sand, it would appear that is where the governor has his head. Mr. DeSantis’s misguided views could discourage parents from getting vaccines for their youngest children, leaving them unvaccinated and thus vulnerable. Already, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the youngest cohort of the population previously approved for vaccines — ages 5 to 11 — had the lowest uptake, with only 29.5 percent getting two shots, compared with 59.8 percent for 12- to 17-year-olds. The low rate of vaccination is in part caused by hesitancy based on misinformation, distrust and suspicion. A vital task for public health officials and elected leaders is to assuage the doubts and anxieties of parents. Instead, Florida’s governor and his administration are adding to them.
The Editorial Board on the pandemic
Congress has time for UFOs — but not for pandemic funding
A new covid wave? Be less alarmed, more prepared. | 2022-06-18T11:43:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | By not ordering covid vaccines, Ron DeSantis abandons Florida children - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/18/ron-desantis-florida-refuses-children-covid-vaccines/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/18/ron-desantis-florida-refuses-children-covid-vaccines/ |
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