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Part 2: Groundless panic about White women’s safety razed a town
Betty Kimble and her brother William Clark are descendants of those who lived Quakertown in Denton, Tex., and attended the relocated school. (Photo courtesy of the Betty Kimble collection and Denton County Office of History and Culture)
This story is the second of two parts. Find the first one here.
For many Black people, the racist mass shooting that killed 10 in a Buffalo grocery store echoed a far too familiar history of White supremacist violence, as survivors’ testimonies showed. The 1921 Tulsa massacre was not exceptional, except, perhaps, for its size. For more than a century, Black communities have lived with the constant threat of deadly attacks.
This is the story of one lesser-known incident of violence wreaked on Black communities.
In the 1880s, formerly enslaved people established a prosperous community in Denton, Tex., called Quakertown. In 1921, the city demolished it — ostensibly to protect White female students at the nearby College of Industrial Arts (now the Texas Woman’s University) from being raped by Black men of Quakertown. Two of this article’s co-authors, Ms. Alma Clark, 94, and Ms. Betty Kimble, 90, live in Denton and are documentarians and tellers of Quakertown’s history.
Black women’s knowledge
Historians have long documented that people who have endured racial and gender discrimination have keen insights into White supremacy. The new Texas law that limits teaching about race comes from an old impulse to “correct” and erase such living memories of racial violence. Ms. Clark and Ms. Kimble generously shared their archival collections with a co-author of this article, Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, through interviews and gatherings as part of Quakertown Stories, a TWU faculty-led project funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Collaboration has been key to writing this history. Along with Ms. Kimble’s and Ms. Clark’s textual and photographic sources, their careful preservation of their loved ones’ Quakertown stories (including Ms. Clark’s late husband Reverend Willie Clark and Ms. Kimble’s grandmother Kitty Clark and great-uncle Jack Cook) are foundational to telling what happened to Quakertown.
“Negro schoolhouse burns”
By the early 1900s, Quakertown was a bustling community of over 305 people and several Black-owned businesses. Most of its families had moved to Quakertown to enroll their children in the Frederick Douglass Colored School. In 1913, the local newspaper reported that the school was “mysteriously” set on fire before school hours. Ms. Clark recalls that the Quakertown community “suspected that it was the Klansmen because they were very prevalent during that time.” No one was arrested.
Determined to keep the school going after the fire, teachers held classes at Quakertown’s Saint James A.M.E. Church and Lodge of Tabor #218 until the community rebuilt the school (renamed Fred Moore School in 1949) in a different location.
Things got worse. In 1920, Frances M. Bralley, president of the College of Industrial Arts, demanded that the city remove “the menace of the negro quarters close proximity to the college,” in hopes of increasing student enrollment at the college and obtaining college accreditation. In 1917, he had promoted the deadly myth that students were in danger of being raped by Black men when he hosted a campus screening of “Birth of a Nation,” the White supremacist propaganda film that portrayed Black men as dangerous to White women.
Messages like these emboldened locals, who threatened to murder the Rev. Willie Clark’s cousin after accusing him of pursuing one of the college students. The cousin fled Quakertown by hopping on a moving train and did not return to Denton until 40 years later.
In a push to bring the City Beautiful Movement to Denton, the Denton Federation of Women’s Clubs urged the construction of a racially-segregated park in place of Quakertown. In the South, the movement destroyed Black communities under the guise of creating “orderly” and “aesthetically pleasing” cities with parks, Confederate statues, and ornate buildings. In 1921, the majority of townspeople voted in favor of a bond that ordered Quakertown residents to abandon or sell their properties.
Ms. Kimble insists that educators tell students the truth about Quakertown’s history. As she put it: “The main thing is to let them know what the Blacks had before they ran them out … It [Quakertown] was a thriving community. It’s not there anymore because of TWU (formerly College of Industrial Arts), and they didn’t want White girls to walk through Quakertown with Black men there. I think they should know all of this.”
Quakertown residents did not leave without a fight. Ms. Kimble recalls that one resident, Mary Ellen Taylor, “sat on her porch in her rocking chair when they were moving [her] house. She was not going to give up her house. She was a feisty and stern woman.” Ms. Kimble’s “Aunt Dicie” refused to move to southeast Denton, purchasing a spacious home only a few blocks away from the park. Outspoken and fearless Will Hill sued the city. Edwin Moten, Denton’s first Black doctor, organized a city meeting to prevent the bond from taking effect. Others planned to leave the United States altogether and join Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement.
Refusing to leave the city they helped build, some people resettled in southeast Denton and protected themselves against continued KKK harassment with weapons and by remaining as close-knit as they were in Quakertown.
Reparative justice
Ms. Clark’s and Ms. Kimble’s remembrances of Quakertown have inspired dialogue about reparative justice. In April, the Quakertown Stories team hosted a town hall meeting that brought together Quakertown descendants, the mayor, city council members, and TWU administrators, faculty, and students to discuss pathways forward for reparative justice.
Participants proposed several ideas: creating university scholarships for descendants, integrating Quakertown’s history into school curriculums and lowering disproportionately higher utility rates in southeast Denton. TWU announced its plan to build a Quakertown memorial. Dianne Randolph, the founder of TWU’s Black Alumni Association and a member of the memorial committee, said that “the mission will allow voices of those removed to be heard, remembered, and enable us to glean future lessons of telling an inclusive story, rather than a ‘selective’ one.”
While no consensus has been reached about reparations, Ms. Kimble reminds us that everyday people have the power to address White supremacy today. She says: “Get out there and speak up! Don’t be afraid whenever you feel like justice needs to be done. Voting is the main thing, and learn all you can that led up to all of this.”
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham (@Phillips3D) is an associate professor and program director of women's and gender studies at Texas Women’s University.
Alma Clark was raised in Lampasas, Tex., by a family that stressed the importance of education and was the first Black student to integrate the city’s high school. | 2022-06-18T11:43:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | White racism brought down a Black community. Will there be reparations? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/juneteenth-quakertown-texas-black-race-riot-white-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/juneteenth-quakertown-texas-black-race-riot-white-violence/ |
Part 1: How formerly enslaved people created a community of their own
Photo of Quakertown residents enjoying themselves. The community had its own doctor’s office, theater, funeral home, grocery store, midwifery service, nursery school, drugstore, tailor and shoe shop, confectionary, wood yard, meat market, day-care center, and three barber shops, churches, and cafes. Photo courtesy of the Ruby Cole collection, Denton County Office of History and Culture. (Ruby Cole Collection/Ruby Cole collection, Denton County Office of History and Culture)
This story is the first of two parts.
In June 2021, President Biden and Vice President Harris declared Juneteenth a federal holiday. As many readers will know by now, while President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 declaring the end of slavery, enslavers and others in the Confederate state of Texas refused to obey. Not until June 19, 1865 — Juneteenth — did the announcement reach many in Texas. For some enslaved people, emancipation didn’t come until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, when holdout Texas enslavers were forced to abide by the proclamation.
Generations of Black Texans have fought since 1866 for the nation to learn about and acknowledge the delayed emancipation of enslaved Black people in the state. Women’s oral histories help expand American awareness of Black Texans’ persistent resilience and struggles post-emancipation, which were never recorded in history textbooks.
Ms. Alma Clark (94 years old) and Ms. Betty Kimble (90 years old), two of the co-authors of this article along with Women’s and Gender Studies scholar Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, tell and analyze that history in Denton, Tex. The two have been leading the documentation of Quakertown, a thriving community that formerly enslaved people established in Denton after Juneteenth. The community lasted until the College of Industrial Arts (renamed Texas Woman’s University in 1957) and a local White women’s club played significant roles in getting the city to pass a 1921 bond to build a city park that would demolish and replace Quakertown.
Centering women’s memories
We have gotten to know each other through interviews, gatherings, and a town hall meeting as part of Quakertown Stories, a Texas Woman’s University (TWU) faculty-led initiative funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities aimed at integrating the history of Quakertown into TWU’s curriculum. Ms. Clark’s and Ms. Kimble’s memories center our telling of Quakertown’s history because in general, research finds, women anchor and archive community histories.
Ms. Clark preserved the stories that her husband Rev. Willie Clark shared with her about living in Quakertown before he passed away at the age of 90 in 1991. Ms. Kimble held onto memories of her grandmother and great-uncle, who also lived in Quakertown. Ms. Clark and Ms. Kimble have extensive backgrounds in community organizing and leadership and have carefully stored in their recollections and homes rare photographs, notes, newspaper cutouts, and familial conversations about key facts in Quakertown’s history. They have generously shared histories, photographs, and carefully cultivated greens from their gardens.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. Here's what did.
Something they could call their own
When Ms. Clark describes Quakertown, she says with pride, “It was like a town within a town. Isn’t that something? A bunch of proud people — knowing that with all their skills, their talents, and their knowledge, that they could build it freely and bring others along to sustain each other … It was something they could call their own.”
Quakertown began in 1875, when 27 formerly enslaved Black families who, after emancipation, had originally settled in Dallas, moved two miles south of downtown Denton in search of better living conditions. Originally called Freedman Town, this was one of what urban planning professor Andrea Roberts calls “freedom colonies,” which formerly enslaved people established after emancipation. In 1878, Freedman Town residents established the Frederick Douglass Colored School. Black families migrated to Denton from across Texas and the country to enroll their children in the school. They also purchased land near the school, and renamed the community Quakertown in honor of the Quakers, a religious group that had advocated for the abolition of slavery.
By the early 1900s, Quakertown consisted of 295 buildings and approximately 305 people. Residents established several businesses and organizations, including a doctor’s office, funeral home, grocery store, midwifery service, nursery school, drugstore, tailor and shoe shop, confectionary, wood yard, meat market, day-care center, three barber shops, three churches, three cafes, and a venue where people watched films and performed plays and songs of the Harlem Renaissance era. Community members were socially and politically active, founding fraternal lodges, women’s organizations, and a business league.
Numerous women in Quakertown owned property, which was rare for formerly enslaved Black women in the South. Ms. Clark’s mother-in-law Maude Woods (Clark) Hembry owned a home where Ms. Clark and her husband later raised their three children. Ms. Kimble’s grandmother Kitty Clark moved with her family from Bolivar, Tex., to Quakertown because “all the Blacks were there.” She purchased a spacious home on the immediate outskirts of the community because by the time that she arrived, Quakertown proper didn’t have any land left on which to build more homes. She and her husband Glasco raised their sons Homer Clark (Ms. Kimble’s father) and Andrew Clark while she worked casually as a laundress. As historian and founder of Black history month Carter G. Woodson noted, Black laundresses were respected entrepreneurs in the Black community who preferred doing laundry in their own homes to working inside of White people’s homes after slavery.
Having a doctor in a practically independent Black community was also a source of pride. Edwin Moten, Texas native and graduate of Shaw University and Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, set up his own medical practice in Quakertown. He treated his patients by combining his formal medical training with African medicinal knowledge. White doctors often sought his knowledge about natural treatments. In the words of Ms. Kimble, Angelina Burr was a “stern and no non-sense” property owner and midwife who was a respected women’s healthcare expert and community businesswoman. She also delivered babies for poor White women in Denton who could not afford medical services. Quakertown residents sustained their businesses and close-knit community for nearly 40 years.
The White press has a history of endangering Black lives, going back a century
In 1921, Frances M. Bralley, president of the College of Industrial Arts,, the Denton Federation of Women’s Clubs, and other civic leaders lobbied for and voted in favor of a bond that approved funding for the city to a municipal park in place of Quakertown. Their rationale was that the college’s White women students were in danger of being raped by Black men of Quakertown as they walked from the college campus through Quakertown on their way to downtown Denton. The bond — issued through everyday organized harassment and violence — removed physical traces of the vibrant community named Quakertown, but some people who stayed in Denton refused to sell their homes to the city. Rev. Clark’s family and other families moved the physical structure of their homes to the southeastern part of Denton with mules and logs and lived in those same homes for several generations. Ms. Clark’s and Ms. Kimble’s memories and archives teach us that Juneteenth is about both the possibilities of and continuous fight for Black freedom.
Part 2: White racism brought down a Black community. Will there be reparations?
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham (@Phillips3D) is an associate professor and program director of women’s and gender studies at Texas Women’s University.
Alma Clark was raised in Lampasas, Tex., by a family that stressed the importance of education, and was the first Black student to integrate the city’s high school. | 2022-06-18T11:44:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Juneteenth led to 'freedom colonies' like Quakertown in Texas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/juneteenth-quakertown-texas-black-race-white-supremacy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/juneteenth-quakertown-texas-black-race-white-supremacy/ |
Once a notorious slave pen, it’s now a museum on slavery — and freedom
Alexandria’s Freedom House Museum officially reopens on Juneteenth, with new exhibits expanding out of its former home in the basement
Erin Smith, 37, discusses an exhibit about the slave trade with her children Braden, 12, Grayson, 8, and Lily, 5, at the Freedom House Museum in Alexandria, Va., on June 16. (Julie Nikhinson for The Washington Post)
“Back then, they could have possibly sold you from your family, too," his mom, Erin Smith, told the Black middle-schooler as he clutched her arm. “You would be valuable. They would profit from it.”
Smith nodded. As she explained to him and his two younger siblings — and as a large sign next to them did, too — this brick rowhouse in Old Town Alexandria had once served as the site of the largest slave-trading operation in the pre-Civil War United States. At least 8,500 enslaved people, including those listed by name and age on the wall, had been forcibly brought here from plantations around Northern Virginia and then shipped off to be sold in New Orleans and Natchez, Miss.
They were once America’s cruelest, richest slave traders. Why does no one know their names?
Daniel Lee, a city historian, said the pair intentionally located their enterprise outside the city limits of what would have then been D.C., in part to keep away from the more respectable businesses closer to the Potomac River.
‘Like we descended from Hitler’: Coming to terms with a slave-trading past
The building will get a new name, too — one that she hopes “will reflect our ongoing mission to tell the story of the slave trade" and further transform the building into a site to further examine and discuss the ideas of racism and reconciliation. | 2022-06-18T13:10:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Freedom House in Alexandria, now owned by city, opens for Juneteenth - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/alexandria-freedom-house-museum-slavery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/alexandria-freedom-house-museum-slavery/ |
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) speaks during the Moms Demand Action rally on June 8 in D.C. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
For eight years, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has steered the nation’s capital through booming economic growth, fast-moving gentrification, a viral pandemic, a revolt for racial justice outside a White House hostile to the District’s control of its own police force — and then an insurrection at the heart of the city where those same police officers rushed to rescue the nation’s democratic institutions.
Throughout it all, when the country’s attention turned to the District, calm and careful Bowser was the city’s face.
Now, D.C. voters are deciding whether to make Bowser the only mayor other than Marion Barry, once the legendary “mayor for life,” to be elected three times — or reject her in favor of one of her left-leaning opponents, who say she’s made the city less livable for its longtime residents by failing to blunt rising violent crime and the surging cost of housing.
“It’s a choice between the status quo, which is a more centrist type of Democratic politics, and the progressive wing,” said Derek Hyra, a professor at American University and the author of “Race, Class and Politics in the Cappuccino City.” The District has flourished economically under Bowser’s watch, Hyra noted, but at the same time, “It keeps growing unevenly.”
What’s at stake for D.C. voters in the primary resembles debates among Democrats across the country, analysts say, where more centrist candidates have clashed with leftists over how to best address key issues. The national mood has shifted in the two years since George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police, a time when many Democratic lawmakers promised to explore alternatives to policing or reduce departments’ funding in local budgets. New York City voters in November elected former police chief Eric Adams as their mayor, over the objections of the city’s liberal bloc to his tough-on-crime politics. In famously liberal San Francisco, voters recalled left-leaning school board members.
Along with the mayor’s race, the city’s three competitive ward-level council races and the race for council chair all reflect the District’s version of the moderates-versus-liberals Democratic fights, with council and mayoral candidates staking out positions on police (hiring more versus rethinking their jobs), housing (subsidizing development versus approaches that rely less on private companies) and schools (strict mayoral control versus loosening it) that reflect national divides. And in the heavily Democratic District, the Democratic primary effectively decides the outcome of November’s election for most races.
Bowser, who has long been a moderate Democrat, gained worldwide attention for painting “Black Lives Matter” in huge yellow letters in the street outside the Trump White House after Floyd’s murder — but has never embraced the “defund the police” goals of the movement. A harsh critic of the D.C. Council’s modest reduction in police funding in 2020, Bowser has funneled millions more into policing each of the past two years and has vowed to greatly increase the size of the police force in her next term.
She has courted developers building new housing across the city, spending $1 billion to subsidize the creation of designated-affordable units in those buildings. She also advocates for the city’s current public education structure, which places her firmly in charge of the school system and a large number of charter institutions.
Two council members are running to her left: Robert C. White Jr., who has held a citywide council seat for six years and whose foremost legislative accomplishment has been granting prison inmates the right to vote in D.C. elections, and Trayon White Sr., a vigorous advocate for the city’s poorest ward, which he represents on the council.
Trayon White and Robert White are skeptical of Bowser’s plan to hire more police officers, and focus their own crime-reduction plans on alternatives like professional violence interrupters. Both have vowed to weaken mayoral control of the school system, giving more oversight power to independent authorities. They have expressed discomfort with Bowser’s friendliness toward developers and have explored alternative housing development strategies, like community land trusts.
(A fourth candidate, a former neighborhood commissioner and disbarred lawyer named James Butler, won 10 percent of the vote when he challenged Bowser in a much less competitive election in 2018, but he has not gained major endorsements, fundraising or name recognition this year.)
The candidates have staked out varying positions on a host of local issues, some of which don’t fall neatly into the national framework of moderate versus liberal. Robert White supports an upcoming ballot initiative to pay workers the full minimum wage before tips; Trayon White and Bowser oppose it. Bowser and Trayon White want the scandal-plagued Washington Commanders football team back in the District, at a new complex to be built atop the aging RFK Stadium site; Robert White does not. Robert White wants to open more public boarding schools. Trayon White wants to drastically cut fines for traffic infractions.
But for many D.C. voters, kitchen-table issues such as housing costs, education and public safety are the top concerns. Crime and housing topped the list when The Washington Post polled residents about their foremost issues in February, the most recent polling available. Since then, the education-focused group Democrats for Education Reform DC — a branch of a national group that has chapters in seven states and the District — has emerged as by far the biggest outside spender in the election, fueling conversations about DFER’s support for Bowser and council candidate Eric Goulet due to their embrace of mayoral control and charter schools. Bowser’s and Goulet’s opponents, some of whom are against mayoral control and charter schools, have criticized the group’s $1 million in election spending.
Bowser’s vow of better middle schools falls short in poorest D.C. wards
Voters’ desire for more police or a strong hand at the head of the school system could fuel a desire to avoid big changes at the polls.
“If people feel streets aren’t safe, or they’ve seen a change in homelessness or violent crime, even progressive people can elect someone who represents a strategy some view as moderate,” Hyra said. “It’s something at stake in our city and relevant to the rest of the nation.”
Others note voters who see rising crime and costly rent under Bowser are open to exploring a change after eight years.
William Craig, a 36-year-old freelance writer, is among those looking for something new. After he cast his ballot during early voting at the Cleveland Park Library along D.C.'s bustling Connecticut Avenue corridor this week, he said he feels Bowser has made big promises but hasn’t lived up to them — citing, for instance, the fact that homelessness remains an issue even though it was among Bowser’s top campaign priorities before she first took office.
In the eight years since, she has brought the number of people who are homeless to its lowest point in 17 years and has reduced family homelessness by nearly 80 percent, but Craig still says she has fallen short — especially when he sees the homeless encampments that have proliferated even as Bowser has dismantled some.
“I’d like to see more care taken for the homeless. I’d like to see care more available to them. That’s one promise I don’t think that she’s kept. She’s made a lot of statements that have been really bold,” Craig said. When he talked to Robert White, by contrast: “He made me see the future, see the hope for a slightly better future.” White won his vote.
Bowser promised to end homelessness. Here's how it's going.
Bowser’s supporters have praised her for steady leadership during a tumultuous time. “Muriel’s done a good job … I think she’s trying. She’s caring for people. There hasn’t been a lot of big scandals. Overall, I think the city’s in a good position,” said Andrew Russell, 79, a Ward 5 resident. He finds local politics to be a relief from the large-scale wrongdoing he sees in national politics and wants that to continue.
Joanne Craig, 54, voted for Bowser because she felt Bowser is most likely to support the city’s police force, for which Craig has worked for more than 30 years. Craig has been concerned to see national ideas critiquing police enter local politics. “I’m really concerned about how the police department is being treated. It seems like the council, the majority if not all of them, have voted to defund the police.” she said. “Even after all they went through on January 6, they didn’t seem to want to support them.”
Some of Craig’s neighbors east of the Anacostia River, in the city’s poorest sections, feel Bowser has neglected their needs. Theresa Wilkey, a home health aide, voted for her ward’s council member, Trayon White, for mayor, noting his propensity to rush to the scene of violent incidents in the ward. “I know him from the neighborhood. He seems to help out a lot of elderly people in the neighborhood, and a lot of the youth too,” said Wilkey, 65. “If someone gets hurt, he’s always there at the hospital or there at the site trying to lend a hand to everyone.”
Wilkey received her ballot in the mail and dropped it off in a drop box at the Deanwood Library this week. This primary is the first in which the city has mailed a ballot to every registered Democrat, rather than requiring voters to request mail-in ballots. That, too, observers say, might change which sort of Democrats participate in the contest — though no one is quite sure how the extra ballot access might shift the outcome.
“D.C. is super blue. We’re just different shades of blue,” said Charles E. Wilson, chair of the D.C. Democratic Party. “Voters here are deciding if the city’s heading in the right direction under Bowser, or if there needs to be a change in approach — and whether one of her three challengers is the right leader to implement that change.” | 2022-06-18T13:10:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. election is referendum on status quo versus liberal shakeup - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/dc-election-mayor-bowser-primary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/dc-election-mayor-bowser-primary/ |
Metro’s Blue, Yellow line construction will require detours this fall
Bridge and tunnel repair and prep work to open a new station is prompting Metro to reroute passengers
A Yellow Line Metro train travels from D.C. to Virginia across the Potomac River. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Two Metro projects will alter Blue and Yellow line traffic this fall as the transit agency prepares to open a new station and repair a bridge between the Pentagon and L’Enfant Plaza stations.
Work to connect Metro’s new Potomac Yard station to the system and construction work to rehabilitate a Yellow Line tunnel and bridge will start Sept. 10, then last more than eight months, requiring station shutdowns on both lines. Metro has proposed alternative routes and said it will offer free shuttle bus service to help passengers navigate the interruptions.
The Potomac Yard station, between the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Braddock Road stations, is scheduled to open in the fall to provide Alexandria residents easier access to Metro. New tracks that will link the station to Metro’s existing rail system will require a six-week shutdown of service south of the airport, which will require the closure of six Blue and Yellow line stations until Oct. 22.
Metro announces travel alternatives for major Blue and Yellow Line construction this fall https://t.co/vdZf9rTrKV #wmata pic.twitter.com/5OvvugiQnH
Afterward, Metro will need to conduct additional testing and training on weekends and after-hours.
The Yellow Line tunnel and bridge rehabilitation work is a separate project that will shut down the Yellow Line tunnel near the L’Enfant Plaza station and the bridge across the Potomac River until about May 2023. Both structures — built before Metrorail opened — are nearing their life expectancy, and Metro’s chief engineer has identified the steel-lined tunnel as the agency’s top repair priority. Metro said workers plan to strengthen the tunnel’s lining to stop water intrusion, while miles of communications cables used by multiple jurisdictions will be replaced.
Metro interim General Manager Andrew Off said he understands the inconvenience both projects will cause.
“The project teams understand that station closures and service changes can be very disruptive to our customers, and we are working hard to use the closure time efficiently,” Off said in a statement. “These projects are carefully coordinated with the local jurisdictions to ensure convenient, reliable service is available across the region while we complete this critical work to maintain and improve our system.”
Service changes will come in two phases, Metro said.
During this fall’s six-week Blue and Yellow line closures south of the airport first, which will last until Oct. 22, the entire Yellow Line will shut down, along with rail service south of the airport. Yellow Line stations north of the airport will be serviced by Blue and Green line trains. Blue Line service will be increased with trains departing every seven to nine minutes from the airport and New Carrollton stations until 9:30 p.m., when wait times will be about 15 minutes.
Metro said passengers traveling between the Pentagon and L’Enfant Plaza stations should plan on about 15 minutes of extra travel time. Green Line trains, meanwhile, will operate every eight minutes, then every 10 minutes after 9:30 p.m.
Metro will offer seven free shuttles during this phase to replace rail service, including local and express shuttles that have fewer stops in Virginia and three shuttles that will cross the Potomac River. The shuttle schedule includes a Blue Line local bus that will run between the Franconia-Springfield, Van Dorn Street, King Street-Old Town, Braddock Road and Reagan National Airport stations every 10 to 20 minutes.
Yellow Line local shuttle service between the Huntington, Eisenhower Avenue, King Street-Old Town, Braddock Road and Crystal City stations will run every 10 to 15 minutes. The shuttle will not stop at the airport, Metro said.
Express shuttles will be available between 4:30 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays and 6:30 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekends. They include a Blue Line express shuttle that will run between the Franconia-Springfield and Pentagon stations every six minutes, and a Yellow Line express shuttle between the Huntington and Pentagon stations that also will run every six minutes.
Another set of shuttles will operate only during weekday rush hours — between the Crystal City, Pentagon City, Smithsonian and L’Enfant Plaza stations every 12 minutes, Metro said. It will not stop at the Pentagon.
A second bus will operate between the Pentagon, Smithsonian and Archives stations every 12 minutes. And a third will run between Mount Vernon Square in the District, Alexandria and Potomac Park every 20 minutes.
The second phase will stretch from Oct. 23 until May 2023, and will start with the reopening of stations south of the airport. The Yellow Line, however, will remain closed with those stations being served by Blue or Green lines, Metro said.
Blue Line trains will run every 12 minutes between the Largo Town Center and Franconia-Springfield stations and every 12 minutes between the Huntington and New Carrollton stations. After 9:30 p.m., trains will arrive about every 15 minutes.
Green Line trains will run every eight minutes during the day and every 10 minutes after 9:30 p.m.
Metro will run three limited-stop shuttles that cross the Potomac River during weekday rush hours, the agency said. The first carries riders between the Crystal City, Pentagon City, Smithsonian and L’Enfant Plaza stations every 12 minutes. It does not stop at the Pentagon.
The second services the Pentagon, Smithsonian and Archives stations every 12 minutes. The third shuttle will run between Mt. Vernon, Alexandria and Potomac Park every 20 minutes.
Metro suggested that riders also consider other travel options, such as the bus rapid transit line Metroway, the 16Y Columbia Pike-Farragut Square bus line that runs between Barcroft and the McPherson Square station — which will add extra service during the project — and Virginia Railway Express. VRE service is available at the Franconia-Springfield, King Street-Old Town, Crystal City and L’Enfant Plaza stations. | 2022-06-18T13:10:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Metro's Blue, Yellow line construction will require detours this fall - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/18/metro-blue-yellow-construction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/06/18/metro-blue-yellow-construction/ |
These women pivoted to mental health work — because of the pandemic
By Sarah Fielding
Samantha Kubik, 26, has worked in luxury goods for the past five years. But during the pandemic, Kubik said, she became frustrated with using her energy to sell “people things they didn’t need and constantly putting out fires over something as trivial as a piece of jewelry.”
She realized she wanted to uplift people instead of stressing over the bottom lines — and could finally clearly see how important mental health care is, she said.
A year ago, Kubik began volunteering at a suicide hotline for weekly evening or overnight shifts. The difference between this and her day job was immediately evident.
“At the hotline, there is such a level of respect, support and appreciation,” Kubik said. “Having my own mental health struggles, I know the impact mental health services can have.”
This summer, Kubik switched paths and began applying for master’s degrees in counseling. She is one of a number of women who have chosen to leave their chosen field since the beginning of the pandemic to pursue a career in mental health.
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Women are already overrepresented in the field: In 2017, they made up about 82 percent of therapists, 73 percent of counselors and 67 percent of psychologists, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. This share had increased over the nearly past two decades, according to the American Psychology Association: Women made up 50 percent of the workforce in psychology in 2004 and 70 percent in 2019.
Mental health care, however, is still inaccessible to many Americans. Mental Health America’s 2022 report found that 56 percent Americans with a mental illness do not receive treatment. The pandemic has worsened the crisis: It led to a rise in anxiety and depression and a shortage of treatment and resources.
What’s more, women suffered disproportionate job losses during the pandemic — and employers are often the providers of health insurance. Others decided to leave their jobs amid the “Great Resignation” and pursue opportunities that felt more closely aligned to their values.
In a devastating pandemic, teens are ‘more alone than ever.’ Many struggle to find help.
The pandemic opened Mindie Barnett’s eyes to what really mattered to her. The 48-year-old is entering her second year of a master’s degree in clinical psychology and family therapy this fall, and is attending online classes while running her public relations firm and juggling duties as a single mom.
“Post-pandemic, I had time to reflect on my own life, the stress level I’m dealing with owning a public relations firm and my newfound interest in mental health,” she said. Barnett has represented mental health experts in her role as a publicist and credits this exposure, in part, to growing her interest in entering the field.
However, becoming a clinician is not the only mental health-centered path women are pursuing. Anushka Dias, 26, left an advertising job she held for three years to pursue becoming a mental health researcher. She had felt no connection to the advertising work, she said, and the pandemic left her reconsidering if she would still be happy there 10 years on. Now she is close to completing a master’s degree in global mental health and society.
The move utilizes Dias’s undergraduate degree in psychology and anthropology, she said, and it makes her feel like she is contributing to the things she truly cares about changing in the world, especially in her native India.
“I feel like there are voices of suffering and joy left out of the conversation when we look at mental health from a singular lens of fixing the problem before trying to understand it,” Dias said. “A range of personal experiences and observations about how mental health care is structured told me that something is wrong. People I knew would seek therapy and were on medication, but the feeling of getting better just seemed to plateau after a point.”
The decision to start over in a new profession has, at points, felt like a regression for Dias, she said. She still suffers from burnout when diving into research — an issue people throughout the mental health field are facing. She sometimes wonders if it would have been better to stick to a career where personal and professional matters did not intersect.
“Those lines get blurred very often, and I find myself feeling emotionally exhausted easily,” Dias said. Indeed, a July 2020 study of more than 2,000 psychiatrists in North America found that 78 percent had high burnout levels, and 16 percent qualified for a major depression diagnosis. Women were more likely to experience both of these.
But women continue to enter the mental health field, and some are taking preemptive measures to look after themselves. Dias has coped with burnout by becoming more focused on self-care, finding time to enjoy unrelated activities and spending time with friends with whom she can speak openly about the struggles.
Kubik, for her part, hopes that the field’s mobility will allow her to pivot to a different aspect of mental health work if being a clinician becomes too overwhelming. In the meantime, she is also exploring coping mechanisms, such as yoga and breathwork, to protect her own mental health, she said.
Quanesha Johnson, 41, resigned from her position as a school educator to open a private counseling practice before the pandemic. But she said she knows the importance of finding balance, especially during this time: For her, that comes in the form of a community of fellow mental health-centered workers who provide support for each other. Johnson has found that working in the mental health field during the pandemic has further emphasized “the importance of appropriate rest, taking care of my body and that even though I am in the helping profession, it’s okay to seek support for myself,” she said.
Johnson noted that, even as she deals with the emotional weight of issues such as full caseloads, racial injustice and navigating working from home, she has never been more invigorated to provide education and support around mental health.
“I want to help increase representation in the field and see mental health resources be equally accessible for communities of color,” she said.
Indeed, the pandemic has shown many women that their careers are not as fulfilling as they could be. But this realization does not equal an automatic switch — for many people, keeping the job they have is critical to maintain economic stability.
For Kubik and Dias, who did make the jump, there is a fear of not being able to secure jobs. But, they said, they feel certain this is what they are meant to do.
“Work is such a huge portion of our day, and I wanted to be able to enjoy what I was doing,” Kubik said. “More importantly, I realized I feel energized working with people and making a difference in their lives.” | 2022-06-18T13:10:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | These women pivoted to mental health jobs because of the pandemic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/18/women-mental-health-career-pandemic-pivot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/18/women-mental-health-career-pandemic-pivot/ |
New books delve into Queen Elizabeth’s 70-year evolution
Review by Autumn Brewington
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, Prince George of Cambridge, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh during the annual birthday parade in 2016. (DZY/Getty Images)
The Platinum Jubilee celebrations might be over, but royal fascination is forever. Fans of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II have new options for learning about her seven-decade reign. One fast, fun read tackles the most visible element of the monarch’s role — her fashion. The other book dives deep into the history of the House of Windsor.
“The Queen: 70 Years of Majestic Style,” by Bethan Holt
This book’s charm extends well beyond its pictures, though it has an impressive collection of the rarest of shots: the queen in pants. It is impossible to cover all of the queen’s looks, so Holt, fashion news and features director at Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, categorizes the monarch’s vast wardrobe into different phases of her job (on tour, off-duty), accessories (yes, there is a chapter just on jewels), milestone moments, colors, designers and more. The book discusses influential figures such as her majesty’s longtime dresser, Margaret “Bobo” MacDonald; Norman Hartnell, who designed her wedding and coronation gowns; and the keeper of the queen’s clothes today, Angela Kelly (nicknamed AK-47 for her “steely attitude”). (Kelly, with permission rarely accorded a royal staffer, has published two books on the queen’s fashion; “The Other Side of the Coin” was updated last month to include the covid era.)
Attention 'The Crown' fanatics: Your royal education continues with these books
Holt’s assessments are shrewd: She notes that the queen, known for being steadfast in her public role, has not changed her private style — plaid skirt, sweater, sensible shoes — since childhood. Holt charts how the queen became a muse for designers and an icon as she has aged, even trending for a bright green suit she wore at her 2016 birthday parade (#Neonat90). Fans of both fashion and the royals can find much to like in this slim volume.
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“Queen of Our Times,” by Robert Hardman
The journalist and biographer tells an admiring story of the life of Queen Elizabeth II amid political and social issues throughout her record-long reign. At 624 pages, it is not a quick read. But it covers an impressive amount of history without getting bogged down — taking readers from the end of Elizabeth’s grandfather’s reign to the 1936 abdication of her uncle and through Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne, including the abrupt exit from royal life by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the death of the queen’s 99-year-old husband, Prince Philip, in 2021, and the run-up to the Platinum Jubilee.
Hardman argues that Elizabeth’s commitment to her role is driven by more than a sense of duty: “she jolly well likes being Queen and always has.” He addresses family conflicts (not just Prince Andrew), Commonwealth concerns and, lately, quiet steps of “transition” as mobility issues curtail the queen’s public appearances. (For now, Hardman writes, there is no plan to turn over the throne to Prince Charles; rather, courtiers aim to “optimize” both the 96-year-old queen and her heir as she hands off specific duties.)
He recounts some events as they happened in real time — such as the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 — but also folds in later reflections from key figures, such as former British prime ministers David Cameron, Tony Blair and John Major, and foreign officials including George W. Bush, who recalls meeting the queen while his father, George H.W. Bush, was in office and later hosting her as president himself.
Over and over, the text debunks inaccurate depictions in the Netflix series “The Crown,” including pushing back against the show’s portrayal of the queen’s reluctance to visit Aberfan, the Welsh town where a 1966 mining disaster engulfed a local school, killing nearly 150 people, mostly children. (”Her view was that it doesn’t help anyone to have the Queen bursting into tears,” Hardman quotes one former private secretary as saying, and palace staff maintain the monarch did not want to compromise rescue efforts.) While readers may at times wish Hardman’s own views were presented more directly, he ultimately makes a clear argument that the United Kingdom — however loosely united it is these days — is unlikely to do away with the monarchy, even if the end of the Elizabethan era portends significant changes.
Fans of ‘The Crown’ want to know more about the Windsors. These five books should help.
Hardman’s extensive research included some access to royal archives, and he quotes from the war diaries of the queen’s father. The book is littered with original interviews, including quotes from Prince Philip and Prince Charles. “Queen of Our Times” does not have the same dishy tone and pace of Tina Brown’s “The Palace Papers”; readers may find themselves wanting less from American experts on “soft power” and more about the queen’s flexing of royal muscle (”Get that dog out of my house,” she reportedly ordered after learning that the wife of a visiting African president had snuck her pet pooch into Buckingham Palace, flouting UK customs rules). Still, this authoritative work is likely to inform both longtime fans and new followers about the role of royal diplomacy and Queen Elizabeth’s evolution from young monarch to seasoned sovereign. | 2022-06-18T13:14:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth II is the focus of two new books - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/06/18/queen-elizabeth-crown-jubilee-books/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/06/18/queen-elizabeth-crown-jubilee-books/ |
It’s an art. (Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images North America)
Starbucks, which has long made its bathrooms available to the public, recently announced it may soon insist, however gently, that you will have to purchase something for this privilege. A latte for the loo, as the Brits might say.
This is unfortunate. Most of us — unlike Vladimir Putin — can’t take our toilets with us; we have to depend on private establishments. All this begs a larger question: Why aren’t public restrooms more readily available?
The answer requires going back to the 19th century. Our potty shortage is nothing new. Consider, for example, this long-winded but otherwise familiar complaint articulated by well-meaning reformer Augustus K. Gardner at a meeting in New York City in 1862.
“Any man, and far more, any woman,” he declared, “may walk from one end of this City to the other, in the most dire torture, without finding the relief to the necessities of the body, without such indecent exposure of the person as would render the individual liable to arrest and fine by the civic authorities.”
But the risk of arrest rarely deterred city residents, men especially. The historian Peter Baldwin neatly captured the spirit of the age when he wrote: “Urinating men, like defecating horses, were an everyday sight on the street.”
The stench was bad, but that was nothing compared to the real issue: Men were exposing themselves in public. One observer writing in the New York Tribune worried how “ladies, passing on the sidewalks, are frequently subjected to indelicate displays that they cannot avoid witnessing.”
Not that the alternatives were much better. At this time, city saloons offered the closest thing to restrooms for ordinary men, but only if they bought booze. These “vile grog shops,” the New York Times lamented in 1872, made “the profit of a vile dram … the compensation of convenience.” The want of public restrooms, reformers concluded, drove men to drink.
Increasingly, municipal officials promoted public toilets as a way to tame immorality, keep men sober and, increasingly, curb disease. But these early efforts often failed to deliver. In 1883, one writer described the public urinal in Newark, New Jersey, as “a place that reeks with filth and upon whose walls are written the vilest obscenities.”
There was another problem: Public toilets always shortchanged women. A typical public restroom built in Boston around the turn of the century featured 16 toilets and 12 urinals for men — but only 12 toilets for women. Moreover, many public toilets catered to men exclusively. London, as late as the 1920s, had three times as many facilities for men than for women. And while men used them for free, women had to pay for the privilege.
Why the disparity? Historians like Maureen Flanagan have argued that 19th-century city planners believed women belonged in the home, only venturing outside for short periods of time. A woman walking the streets for hours, never mind visiting a public toilet, was immediately suspect: low-class at best, and quite possibly a prostitute.
In fact, when women requested that men build toilets to accommodate the ladies, many men got, well, hysterical. One official in London described such a request as an “abomination,” while another declared that any woman making such an outlandish demand had apparently “forgot their sex” and “should not have anything provided for them at all.”
Given the stigma attached to using public toilets, most women looked for other options. By the late 19th century, urban department stores, which focused on female shoppers, made clean private toilets a significant part of their pitch.
Unlike filthy, crowded and poorly lighted public toilets, department stores offered comparatively luxurious facilities for women of the middle and upper classes — just like home, where indoor plumbing had become the norm. Smaller retail establishments followed suit, offering the promise of clean bathrooms to entice female visitors of all classes.
Still, this wasn’t the most equitable solution. As women assumed an increasingly visible role in urban reform movements in the early 20th century, they argued that public “comfort stations” should be available to the masses. This short-lived campaign led to the construction of more modern facilities in many cities. But it also went awry.
Property owners and businesses near proposed comfort stations objected, claiming they would attract crime and disease or, even more troubling to many, gay men seeking sexual encounters. But the biggest objection, perhaps, was that they took lots of tax dollars to operate.
By the 1930s, the idea that government would supply public bathrooms began a decades-long decline in the US. Instead, the older reliance on private facilities remained the norm. It even spread to new venues.
The rise of the automobile, for example, allowed people to venture far from the privacy of their own toilets. In response, gas stations, taking a page from the department stores, began to make sanitary bathrooms a big selling point.
As historian Susan Spellman has explained, they did so on the assumption that women would decide when and where their husbands would stop the car. Though no one views gas stations as paragons of cleanliness today, they enjoyed a reputation for several decades as the best bet when nature called.
If, of course, you were white. African-Americans in the South had no such access to clean bathrooms; they also faced discrimination in other parts of the country. In fact, as historian Bryant Simon has observed, battles over access to public bathrooms became very much entangled with the larger civil-rights movement.
Many whites, already reluctant to use tax dollars to fund public facilities, became even more hostile to the idea. There were a few places where public restrooms became more numerous — construction of the interstate system led to more state-funded rest stops — but most people in the US turned to private establishments.
Though gas stations stopped making clean restrooms their calling card, other retailers stepped up to the plate. Which is why we go to Starbucks when we need to go.
More From Stephen Mihm in Bloomberg Opinion:
• Why Ukraine’s Wheat Fields Sow Dictators’ Megalomania: Stephen Mihm
• What Comes First — Inflation or Political Instability?: Stephen Mihm
• 1970s-Era Inflation Advice Was Hollow and Still Is: Stephen Mihm | 2022-06-18T13:14:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Is It So Hard to Find a Decent Public Bathroom? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-is-it-so-hard-to-find-a-decent-public-bathroom/2022/06/18/604cd8cc-ef07-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-is-it-so-hard-to-find-a-decent-public-bathroom/2022/06/18/604cd8cc-ef07-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Why Supreme Court Watchers Are Making Bingo Jokes
Let’s talk about bingo: the game, the word and the dog.
The US Supreme Court just decided a case involving all three. The result in Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo v. Texas turned on whether the gaming machines operated by a tribe on its lands constituted a version of bingo. Long story short: If the game was bingo, the machines were permitted; if not, they were prohibited.
The majority ruled for the tribe, an outcome that accords with my own view that tribal sovereignty should be as broad as possible. But Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the four dissenters, argued that the tribe should have lost on the grounds that game played on the machines was … not actually bingo. Court-watchers have been having fun with one of Roberts’s footnotes:
“A photograph from the record of this version of ‘bingo’ is appended to this opinion. It confirms that the electronic bingo played at the Speaking Rock Entertainment Center is about as close to real bingo as Bingo the famous dog.”
The famous dog, of course, is the one with the “name-o” of Bingo, star player in what the humorist Ken Cowherd once labeled “the most irritating children’s song in history.” But the term has an older and more interesting history.
A word of uncertain etymology, “Bingo” seems to have entered the language as a slang term for brandy. The Oxford English Dictionary traces this meaning to 1699, and by the 18th century the usage was common. At some point the term became the basis of “Little Bingo” — a drinking song that scholars have dated to 1780. But the song is older than that. An April 1776 advertisement in an Edinburgh newspaper announces that a “Mr Dutton” will be performing “the song of Little Bingo.” A note at the end of the announcement adds: “As a number of Mr Dutton’s friends have been desirous of having the words to Little Bingo, he has printed a number of them, which will be delivered gratis at the doors.”
By 1785, the dog had entered the song. Little Bingo “leapt over the style” (that is, the stile), and the farmer “loved a cup of good ale” — which, we are told, he called “rare good stingo.” But still the song was not for children. The words seem to have been used to determine who would drink next, or perhaps how many gulps; that is, like many drinking songs, it was sung in the service of getting drunk. The book in which the lyrics appear mixes “Bingo” with other bawdy tunes, some about alcohol, some about sex (including sex outside of wedlock).
At some point in the second half of the 19th century, the verse was transformed into the familiar children’s song, often used in a game of musical chairs. And here’s the key point: Whether sung by drinkers or children, the song incorporated concepts of winning and losing.
Which brings us to bingo the game — the one that either was or was not being offered on the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo tribal lands. As a game, bingo is essentially a lottery, involving chance not skill. The OED calls the origin of this sense of the word “obscure” and attests the usage only to 1936. Actually, it’s older. An 1893 article in a Nebraska newspaper refers to bingo as an “old reliable” game that is “very popular” among ladies. Other citations around the same time confirm that by the end of the 19th century, the game had been around for a while.
But the term has also come into the language as signaling a level of derision. One thinks for example of “Bingo Bob” — the White House staff’s nickname for the word-fumbling vice president in the later seasons of the West Wing. If a financial adviser is accused of “playing bingo” with client money, nobody takes the phrase to be a compliment.
Intriguingly, the word has even worked its way into our professional lives. College students play “turkey bingo” — with victory going to the one who does the best job of predicting who’ll be speaking in class. And then there’s “Supreme Court bingo” — a game that seems to involve guessing which justices will vote with other justices.
Not that the case before the Supreme Court involved any of these nuances. The federal statute in question allowed the tribe to engage in any form of gaming not “fully” prohibited by Texas law. The state had long permitted old-fashioned bingo — the kind where people sit at tables using physical cards as numbers are called out — and the majority ruled that the tribe’s gaming machines incorporated the same idea. Roberts’s little joke was meant to rebut this conclusion. In his view, “live-called bingo” was, let us say, an entirely different animal.
Gags and humor are not what one expects in US Supreme Court opinions. In Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, however, the joke that wound up in Roberts’s footnote was actually signaled at oral argument, when counsel for the tribe was explaining that the machine in question looks like a bingo machine, only to be interrupted by the chief justice: “What makes it look like a bingo machine?” At which point, if the official transcript is to be believed, the courtroom erupted in laughter.
Oh, and speaking of jokes: If you’ve been keeping track of the first letters of this and the four preceding paragraphs, congratulations on spotting the name-o. After all, we can’t let the chief justice have all the fun.
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• Threat to Kavanaugh Will Irrevocably Change Justices’ Lives: Therese Raphael | 2022-06-18T13:14:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Supreme Court Watchers Are Making Bingo Jokes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-supreme-court-watchers-are-making-bingo-jokes/2022/06/18/60b22dbc-ef07-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-supreme-court-watchers-are-making-bingo-jokes/2022/06/18/60b22dbc-ef07-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
After 91 years, Black teen exonerated by defense lawyer’s great-grandson
In this 1931 news clipping, 16-year-old Alexander McClay Williams watches the district attorney exhibit the ice pick Williams allegedly used to kill a White matron at his school. Williams appears to have a black eye after weeks of interrogation. Williams's conviction was posthumously overturned on Monday, 91 years later. (Obtained by the Washington Post)
As the first Black attorney in Delaware County, Pa., William Ridley was used to the odds being stacked against him. His parents escaped slavery, and he once faced down a Ku Klux Klan mob in his yard. But in 1930, he was handed a case he couldn’t win.
During the two-day trial, prosecutors omitted evidence they knew might have cleared Williams. An all-White jury convicted the teenager in under four hours, and sent him to the electric chair, the youngest person put to death in the state’s history.
This week, in the same courthouse where the ruling was passed down 91 years earlier, Ridley’s great-grandson, Sam Lemon, finally won justice for Williams.
A judge overturned Williams’s conviction Monday, the culmination of more than 30 years of work by Lemon to try to win posthumous justice for his great-grandfather and Williams’s family, which was never the same after losing their son.
Before a packed courtroom of Williams’s surviving relatives and other advocates, Delaware County President Judge Kevin F. Kelly granted a motion for a retrial nine decades after the original, a move lawyers involved in the case say has little precedent in the state’s history. Immediately after, Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer moved to dismiss the charges, acknowledging they should never have been brought in the first place.
“It’s a stain on our state and it’s a stain on the criminal justice system here in Delaware County,” said Robert Keller, a local attorney who worked with Lemon to reopen the case. “It basically went under the rug and it was until Sam Lemon and his endeavor to bring light to this case and to try to seek some sort of redemption for his great-grandfather.”
During the two-day trial, prosecutors neglected to introduce key pieces of evidence that suggested Williams was not the killer. Never presented to jurors were the bloody handprint of an adult man found at the scene or the fact that Robare had divorced her ex-husband, Fred Robare — the man who was the last to see her alive and reported discovering the body — for “extreme cruelty.” The county’s chief detective told a local newspaper that the killing was committed by a “full grown and strong man,” a finding that was also never mentioned in court.
“I don’t know who did it, but I agree with the detective that it was an adult, that this is a crime of passion,” said Keller, the attorney who worked with Lemon. “It just sounds like a domestic violence case.”
Lemon, an administrator at a local university, said he first learned of the Williams case from his grandmother — Ridley’s daughter — when he was a child. He wondered how his great-grandfather could have lost the case at the height of his five-decade legal career, and why a teenager would commit such a horrible crime.
Living in Ridley’s former home as an adult, he returned to the case, not knowing it would kick off a 30-year research journey. He pored over court and genealogical records, visited the crime scene, and even commissioned a psychological autopsy to examine Williams’s psyche. He wrote a book and spoke publicly about the case, but felt more needed to be done.
The conviction had impacted both the Williams and Ridley families, Lemon said. Ridley faced the disappointment of the local Black community, who felt that the only Black lawyer in town should have been able to win Williams’s freedom. And Williams family was devastated by losing their son — his father became an alcoholic and his mother lost a baby, according to Lemon. They never discussed Alexander again.
In 2017, Keller convinced a judge to partially expunge Williams’s record, a largely symbolic move that did not make a ruling on Williams’s guilt or innocence.
“Sam [Lemon] and the family was never satisfied with that,” Keller said. “They were happy that we brought it into a courtroom, but they wanted the actual case to be looked at.”
“He was targeted early in the investigation, he was browbeaten into giving a confession,” he said. “This young man, even by 1930s standards, just was railroaded and not given the due process that every criminal defendant in America is entitled to.”
Stollsteimer and Keller agreed to jointly approach Kelly, the president judge, though they doubted Pennsylvania law could provide any recourse so long after Williams’s death. According to Stollsteimer and Keller, it was the judge who did his own research and discovered similarities to the George Stinney Jr. case in South Carolina.
It took 10 minutes to convict 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. It took 70 years after his execution to exonerate him.
Kelly urged the two lawyers — who would ordinarily be opponents in court — to jointly file for a new trial by applying coram nobis.
“We had a judge who wasn’t afraid to bury this and to recognize that the history of our county had this horrible thing happen, and that it’s important that we bring it to the public’s attention,” Keller said.
On his final day as president judge, Kelly granted the motion, overturning the 91-year-old conviction and fulfilling Lemon’s goal of three decades.
“I always felt it was a task that had been given [to] me because I had a unique perspective and unique insight,” Lemon said. “It was like being a witness to a crime and I couldn’t just look the other way.”
“I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I did right by Alexander and Vida [Robare] and my great-grandfather,” he added. | 2022-06-18T13:15:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A judge exonerated Alexander McClay Williams, a Black teen executed for murder 91 years ago - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/18/pennsylvania-teen-exonerated/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/18/pennsylvania-teen-exonerated/ |
Pete Aguilar’s rising star status meets the moment at Jan. 6 hearing
Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) during the House Jan. 6 committee's third public hearing on June 16 in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
As he dug through deposition testimony, Rep. Pete Aguilar noticed a common thread among the aides to former vice president Mike Pence: the power of prayer.
So when the California Democrat neared the end of his questioning Thursday, he asked the witness about finding solace in the Book of Daniel during the hours spent hiding in the bowels of the Capitol from rioters on Jan. 6, 2021.
“He refuses an order from the king that he cannot follow and he does his duty in — consistent with his oath to God,” Greg Jacob, the former counsel to Pence who sheltered with him that day, told Aguilar.
With the exchange, Aguilar drew out the type of moment he has been searching for as one of nine lawmakers on the select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. While some are searching for the legal foundation to prompt a Justice Department prosecution of former president Donald Trump, Aguilar sees the mission as reaching the tens of millions of voters who have not paid attention to every detail in the attack.
Even members of his own family have become more concerned about the cost of gas and groceries in these tense economic times.
“Part of this is,” Aguilar explained in an interview in his office late Thursday, “how do I reach my grandmother? How do I get people who aren’t as steeped in the political weeds to pay attention to this stuff?”
In just his fourth term, Aguilar, 42, takes this approach to both the committee investigation and the work Democrats have to do to expand their appeal beyond their most fervent supporters.
A junior member of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team, Aguilar is the highest-ranking member of the congressional Hispanic Caucus. He’s also a member of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of largely suburban lawmakers from swing districts.
After serving as mayor of Redlands, a city of 70,000 about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, Aguilar narrowly won the longtime GOP stronghold in 2014 and has built it into a solid blue seat ever since.
That combination, along with ambition that appears to lie only in the House, explains why close friends view Aguilar as the man who could become the first Hispanic speaker of the House.
“We’ve got to spread our message about fighting for the middle class. We have to make it real for folks at the kitchen table. They have to feel it, not just hear it, but they have to feel that House Democrats are fighting for them,” Aguilar said in an interview this month, before the committee launched its high-profile hearings.
Pelosi (D-Calif.) picked him for the select committee because he is the type of lawmaker others gravitate toward, more than just a “team player.”
“Usually it means they’re a good follower, but that’s not the case with you,” she said, according to his recollection of the call.
As vice chairman of the Democratic caucus, he ranks sixth in leadership, an amorphous job. He’s told other lawmakers they should view him as a “human suggestion box.”
Sometimes that means convening groups, including Senate Democrats, to discuss what types of immigration legislation has a chance to reach President Biden’s desk. Other times, it means Aguilar listens to complaints about the House schedule.
His recurring theme, on pushing legislation and in campaigning, is that Democrats too often assume voters are devout consumers of politics as if they’re all devotees to MSNBC’s prime time lineup.
Most don’t understand the historically razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, nor do they fully understand arcane rules like the filibuster.
“They need to feel safer and better, and they need to know that the Democrats care. It isn’t that we aren’t doing things. I think we are. It’s that they don’t feel that we’re doing enough,” Aguilar said. “And they feel that the President is better than the last guy, but that they still don’t feel as comfortable in their own personal position.”
Of Mexican descent, Aguilar has grown frustrated with how Democrats treated all Hispanics with a broad brush, leading to a troubling decline in political support from that voting bloc. The anti-police rhetoric cost Democrats votes in South Texas, he said, where a huge portion of Hispanic families work for the Border Patrol or local law enforcement.
“They’re very different,” he said. “How you talk to a Mexican American in Southern California versus a Cuban American in South Florida, we have to acknowledge that we can’t have boiler plate campaign literature.”
Aguilar has linked arms with Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.), both just ahead of him in leadership ranks, to forge an alliance that many rank-and-file Democrats see as the next generation of leaders.
“We’re all very close. Pete Aguilar is a good friend, a colleague and a partner in government in the closest possible way,” Jeffries, 51, said of the trio.
But that leads to the most sensitive topic in the caucus: when the trio of 80-somethings — Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) — will step aside.
Most Democrats just publicly pay tribute to the combined 106 years of congressional experience among Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn, more than half of that time serving in their current leadership slots.
“With that status, in my opinion, they get to choose their timing. They get to pick what that looks like and whenever that transition will occur,” Aguilar said.
GOP voters choose nominees with first loyalty to Trump, not McConnell
When Pelosi called last summer to ask him to serve on the Jan. 6 committee, Aguilar’s first reaction was to try to say no, out of fear for how the profile might impact his wife and two children. “I didn’t need the death threats,” he recalled thinking.
Now, he’s consumed by the investigation. Each hearing has a clearly defined topic that can be presented in a roughly two-hour span, far different from the rolling 10- or 12-hour marathons of some congressional hearings.
It’s meant to have broad appeal to a society that now binge-watches limited series with six or seven episodes on HBO or Netflix, with the pace of the popular “Slow Burn” podcast.
“This isn’t Watergate, where you only have five networks and everybody is going wall to wall. We’ve got to be concise,” he said.
Aguilar drew the assignment of laying out Trump’s pressure campaign to get Pence to simply reject certain states that Biden had won, a completely unconstitutional move.
He spent six weeks poring over the depositions from top Pence advisers and Trump aides, barely doing anything else. That’s when he noticed how faith kept coming up with Pence’s team.
Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, testified that they began Jan. 6 with a prayer in the vice president’s office and that when the tumult ended early the next morning, Short texted Pence a scripture verse that ended with “I have kept the faith.”
This prompted Jacob’s own reflection about the Book of Daniel and defying the king.
Aguilar said those moments need to be drilled into the public so that enough people will learn how perilous that day was.
“There’s these profiles of people along the way that all collectively kind of stood in the breach to protect democracy,” he said. “And I think that’s the story worth telling.” | 2022-06-18T13:15:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pete Aguilar’s rising star status meets the moment at Jan. 6 hearing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/pete-aguilars-rising-star-status-meets-moment-jan-6-hearing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/pete-aguilars-rising-star-status-meets-moment-jan-6-hearing/ |
Dave Martinez came down on Juan Soto for not hustling in the Nationals' 5-3 loss to the Phillies on Friday afternoon. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Being one of the best players in baseball, and being dubbed the Washington Nationals’ franchise player by his general manager, manager and teammates before this season, has often lent Juan Soto a bright spotlight for the right reasons. But Friday brought one of the few departures from that. This time, the root cause was Soto jogging down the line on a grounder to second in Game 1 of the Philadelphia Phillies’ doubleheader sweep.
No matter that, by night’s end, Soto’s on-base-plus-slugging percentage had dropped to .796 and his average to .216. And no matter that the right fielder missed two games this week with a right knee contusion. Manager Dave Martinez was peeved by what he saw on that sixth-inning play.
“He needs to start running balls out,” Martinez said Friday afternoon. “As you know, I don’t care for that much. Everybody’s hustling, everybody’s running. It’s a groundball double play. I know his knee right could be bothering him a little bit, but those situations … it’s 90 feet. I just want good effort.”
How did Soto respond to the pointed criticism?
“I mean, I’m just going out there, just trying to push as hard as I can,” the 23-year-old said. “My knee is just going up and down, and I’m trying my best. At the end of the day, it’s just my fault. I’m not going to blame anybody, but I’m going to try harder the next time.”
Last May, Martinez made Soto apologize to the team for not running on a flyball that landed in front of home plate and would have scored a run if he did. Martinez called the matter “embarrassing for the whole club” in his postgame presser. Each situation has echoes of when Bryce Harper was criticized for not hustling during his years in D.C.
It is true that more eyes are on Soto than anyone else. Generally, he wants that. But he’s currently stuck in the worse stretch of his still-young career and noticeably frustrated. In his first at-bat Friday, he struck out swinging, thought he may have clipped Garrett Stubbs’s mitt for catcher’s interference, then lobbed his helmet and bat to the dirt. In his last four games, Soto is 0 for 14 with three walks.
“I’m always trying to do my best, trying to play hard,” Soto said, when asked about setting an example for his teammates, something he’s talked about doing in the past. “It doesn’t matter if it’s going good or it’s going bad. Just go out there, try to do my best. I know that things aren’t going my way, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to try as much as we can to help the team.”
And what does he think is going wrong at the plate right now?
“My swings feel very on time,” he answered. “I’ve just been missing a couple balls and just taking a couple pitches that I shouldn’t take. But at the end of the day, yes, I feel good.”
That last part could be a tiny consolation for the last-place Nationals (23-45). They just need it to yield a good result or two. | 2022-06-18T13:16:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Juan Soto responds to Dave Martinez's criticism of his effort - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/juan-soto-criticism-effort-dave-martinez/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/juan-soto-criticism-effort-dave-martinez/ |
All the Jan. 6 evidence that Trump and Co. knew their plot was corrupt
Greg Jacob, former counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, testified on June 16 Trump lawyer John Eastman pressured Pence to reject electors. (Video: The Washington Post)
At this point, the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings might as well be one big criminal referral to the Justice Department. And to make the case that Donald Trump and his allies broke the law, the committee has had to establish that they were acting corruptly — i.e. that they likely knew their scheme was wrong, and they pursued it anyway.
To do that, the committee in its last two hearings has focused on two things: that those involved in the push to overturn the election a) knew that their efforts were likely illegal and b) were told their claims of voter fraud were bogus, repeatedly.
Here’s what we’ve learned on both fronts thus far.
Evidence Trump’s team knew their plot was illegal
In Trump lawyer John Eastman’s own words:
In his memos outlining the plot to overturn the election on Jan. 6, Eastman said Vice President Mike Pence should simply disregard the Electoral Count Act because Eastman viewed it as unconstitutional.
In a Dec. 19, 2020 email, he conceded that having alternate electors who weren’t certified by state legislatures would mean they were “dead on arrival in Congress.” “… The textual claim that the ‘executive’ certification would prevail in such an instance over the legislature-certified slate is contrary to Article II” of the Constitution, Eastman wrote in the Dec. 19 email. He nonetheless pressed forward.
After the Capitol riot, he again pressed Pence’s general counsel, Greg Jacob, to have Pence violate the Electoral Count Act. In an email on the evening of Jan. 6, he argued that it had already been violated by how Congress handled the aftermath of the riot and asked them “to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations.”
He asked to be put on a “pardon list” in the days after the insurrection, saying in an email: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.” This doesn’t necessarily show he knew it was illegal in advance — and a federal appeals court has ruled that accepting a pardon isn’t an admission of guilt. He also argued in the email he was merely insulating himself from “the outright lies and false witness being spewed.” But it reinforces that he viewed himself as having legal liability.
From the testimony of Greg Jacob, then chief counsel to the vice president, on June 16:
Eastman admitted the plan would violate the Electoral Count Act: “Mr. Eastman acknowledged that that was the case.”
Eastman admitted to him that the plot would lose on the merits in the Supreme Court: “When I pressed him on the point, I said ‘John, if the vice president did what you were asking him to do, we would lose 9-0 in the Supreme Court, wouldn’t we?’ And he initially started at, ‘Well, I think maybe you would lose only 7-2,' and after some further discussion, acknowledged, ‘Well, yeah, you’re right, we would lose 9-0.’ ... [He] ultimately acknowledged that, no, we would lose 9-0 — no judge would support his argument.”
Testified that Eastman thought that, while his plan would fail on the merits, the Supreme Court might decline to interfere in a political dispute: “When I raised concerns that that position would likely lose in court, his view was that the court simply wouldn’t get involved, they would invoke the political-question doctrine and therefore we could have some comfort proceeding with that path.”
From the testimony of White House lawyer Eric Herschmann:
Giuliani conceded the plan was unlikely to pass legal muster over the “long term”: “We had an intellectual discussion about … the VP’s role. And he was asking me my view and analysis about the practical implications of it. And when we finished, he said, ‘Look, I believe that you’re probably right.'
Evidence they were told their election claims were bogus
Below we’ll highlight both instances in which Trump was told that his voter-fraud theories were wrong more broadly, and also specific claims (in bold).
From testimony by former attorney general William P. Barr:
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit.”
On Nov. 23, 2020, he said he told Trump of his voter-fraud claims: “They’re not meritorious, they’re not panning out.”
“I reiterated that they’ve wasted a whole month on these claims on the Dominion voting machines, and they were idiotic claims. … I told them that it was crazy stuff, and they were wasting their time on that. And it was doing a great grave disservice for the country.”
On Trump’s allegation of “vote dumps” in Detroit: “I said, ‘Mr. President, there are 630 precincts in Detroit. And unlike elsewhere in the state, they centralize the counting process. … So, there’s nothing. … Did all the people complaining about it point out to you, you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time? I mean, there’s no indication of fraud in Detroit.' And I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public were bull -- it was bullshit, I mean, that the claims of fraud were bullshit.”
On allegations of “vote dumps” in Philadelphia: “But once you actually go and look and compare apples to apples, there’s no discrepancy at all. And, you know, that’s one of the — I think at some point, I covered that with the President.”
From testimony from former deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue:
“I said something to the effect of, ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We’ve looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada. We’re doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false.’ ”
“And then I went into, for instance, this thing from Michigan — this report about 68 percent error rate. The reality is it was only 0.0063 percent error rate, less than one in 15,000.”
“So, then I talked about a little bit about the Pennsylvania truck driver. … This claim was by a truck driver who believed, perhaps honestly, that he had transported an entire tractor-trailer truck full of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. … And I essentially said, 'Look, we looked at that allegation. We looked at both ends, both the people who loaded the truck and the people that unloaded the truck. And that allegation was not supported by the evidence.”
“I said, 'Okay, well, with regard to Georgia, we looked at the tape, we interviewed the witnesses. There is no suitcase; the president kept fixating on the suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, no, sir, there is no suitcase, you can watch that video over and over, there is no suitcase, there was a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots. And that’s just how they move ballots around that facility. There’s nothing suspicious about that at all.”
“I told him that there was no multiple scanning of the ballots. One part of the allegations that they were taking one ballot and scanning it through three or four or five times to rack up votes, presumably for Vice President Biden. I told him that the video did not support that. ”
“Then he went off on double-voting. … He said dead people are voting. Indians are getting paid to vote. He met people on Native American reservations. He said there’s lots of fraud going on here. I told him flat-out that much of the information he’s getting is false and/or just not supported by the evidence. We look at the allegations, but they don’t pan out.”
On Trump’s allegations about Antrim County, Mich., and Fulton County, Ga.: “I do know that they came up in subsequent conversations with the president … and I essentially told them we looked into that, and it’s just not true. … I told the president myself that several times in several conversations that these allegations about ballots being smuggled in, in a suitcase and run through the machines several times it was not true — that we looked at, we looked at the video; we interviewed the witnesses, it was not true.” | 2022-06-18T14:15:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The evidence Trump and John Eastman knew their Jan. 6 plot was corrupt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/evidence-january-6-plot-corrupt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/evidence-january-6-plot-corrupt/ |
Britain will electronically tag some asylum seekers with GPS devices
A woman thought to be a migrant who crossed the English Channel by boat shows a love symbol as she waits to disembark in Dover, England, on June 17, 2022. (Matt Dunham/AP)
LONDON — Britain will start placing electronic tagging devices on some asylum seekers after they arrive on small boats via the English Channel or through what the government calls “dangerous and unnecessary routes.”
The plan launched this week, which the Home Office described as a one-year pilot, will involve adults who face deportation, and it may impose a curfew on some or allow the detention or prosecution of those who do not comply with the new rules.
The British Home Office said the plan will test whether monitoring migrants with GPS devices will help “maintain regular contact” and “more effectively progress their claims,” as well as collect information on how many escape custody. But refugee advocates denounced it as treating desperate people seeking shelter as criminals.
The government indicated that among those who could be tagged would be people who challenged the option of going to Rwanda to wait for the processing of their claims or return to their home countries. A legal showdown ended this week with the British government canceling the inaugural flight proposed under the heavily criticized Rwanda policy.
Britain cancels flight to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda after court challenges
“The government will not be deterred as we plan for the next flight to Rwanda,” the Home Office said in an email.
While the government has defended the Rwanda policy as a way to deter dangerous Channel crossings and stop smugglers, it has sparked uproar, including from human rights activists, the United Nations and the most senior bishop of the Church of England.
More than 10,000 people have entered Britain this year via the English Channel. In a single disaster in November, at least 27 migrants died while attempting the crossing.
Under the monitoring trial, people fitted with the location-tracking device will be required regularly to report in person to immigration centers or police stations.
Britain to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda to discourage illegal sea crossings
It was not immediately clear how many people could be tagged, although a Home Office report on the program published Wednesday said children and those who are 18 weeks or more pregnant would be exempt.
The instructions said that the potential harm of the device on a person’s mental or physical health would be taken into account, as well as whether they were a victim of torture or modern slavery, but that this would not necessarily preclude the use of a tag. The program would target people who were released on immigration bail from holding centers after entering the country.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended the plans Saturday as necessary to ensure “that asylum seekers can’t just vanish into the rest of the country,” according to British media, as critics highlighted fears about the impact on mental health and privacy rights.
Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised similar concerns about the use of electronic tagging devices on migrants in the United States.
The head of the Refugee Council charity, which is based in Britain, described the tagging program as a “draconian and punitive approach” against vulnerable people. Enver Solomon also disputed assertions that it would discourage migrants from undertaking the journey, calling instead for solutions that provide safe routes into the country.
“It’s appalling that this government is intent on treating men, women and children who have fled war, bloodshed and persecution as criminals,” he said in an email to The Washington Post.
Monish Bhatia, a lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck, University of London, warned that monitoring migrants with the devices could harm their mental health and lead to “anxiety, depression, suicide ideation.”
He wondered how long people would have to wear the tag and whether there would be any privacy safeguards for the data the government could collect through the program. “Tagging is highly intrusive & experienced as punishment,” he tweeted. | 2022-06-18T14:15:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Britain to tag some migrants with electronic monitoring devices - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/britain-electronic-tagging-migrants-asylum-seekers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/britain-electronic-tagging-migrants-asylum-seekers/ |
An unusual piñata, and a lesson on fatherhood
A tribute to the dads without dads who raised us.
The piñata Vargas and her siblings had made for their dad. (Theresa Vargas /TWP)
Several years ago, for a party my three siblings and I threw for my dad, we had a piñata made.
It wasn’t in the form of a superhero or a wrench or a car. Those “dad” symbols would have worked fine, but they could have appeared at a party for any father. We wanted something that told of our father.
Our piñata was in the shape of the Hamburger Helper mascot.
We had grown up frequently seeing that white-gloved, four-fingered figure on the boxes my dad pulled from the pantry. He and my mom divorced when I was 9 and that meant he had to figure out on his own how to feed us on the nights we stayed with him. During those years, we ate a lot of Hamburger Helper.
If you’ve never had that meal-in-a-box, think of it as a no-frills elopement between noodles and ground beef. The flavors carry names such as “Bacon Cheeseburger,” “Four Cheese Lasagna” and “Deluxe Beef Stroganoff,” and while the seasonings in those boxes vary, the effort that goes into turning them into dinner does not. It’s easy. It’s quick.
When my dad was making those meals, he couldn’t have imagined that years later, his children would look back so fondly on them that they would pay a person to make a giant, papier-mâché version of “Lefty.”
To be clear, that piñata was not an homage to flavor. It was a tribute to a dad who tried his best, always.
What, didn’t everyone’s dad light a fire near their face?
On Father’s Day, people will honor dads in all forms: Dads who worked hard. Dads who taught them crucial lessons. Dads who turned into wonderful grandpas.
My dad is all those things. He’s also a dad who didn’t have a dad in his life when he was growing up.
Many of the dads who will be given hand-drawn cards and hastily wrapped gifts on Sunday will fall into that category — fathers who were fatherless during their formative years. Those dads deserve to feel appreciated — not because they stayed (they should have) — but because they are giving their children what they didn’t have growing up. They are fathering, not by example, but despite the shoddy examples they were shown. My dad joined the army at 17 to help take care of his family.
There are complex, and sometimes simple, reasons fathers are absent from homes. But the numbers show it’s an issue that warrants public attention because it has left too many moms on their own, unsupported. One in four children live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in their homes, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
As a child, I didn’t understand the significance of not having a paternal grandfather in my life. But as a parent and a journalist who writes often about the toll of poverty on families, I see constantly how society tends to throw vitriol at families when fathers leave but offers little support or praise to the dads who break cycles of abandonment.
And those dads are all around us. They are slinging diaper bags over their shoulders. They are dropping off kids at birthday parties. They are clapping loudly at graduation ceremonies.
Many of them might be rocking fatherhood and know it. Others might be scrambling to afford rent, gas or groceries and doubting whether they are doing enough or providing enough or are enough.
For those dads, I offer encouragement in the form of that Hamburger Helper piñata. I tend to think about it when my own parenting insecurities start to creep in, and in a place like Washington, where ambitions are high, it’s easy for that to happen. Summer camps get booked even before it’s warm outside.
My siblings and I grew up in a working-class neighborhood filled with mostly Black and Mexican American residents. As children, we weren’t dining on pricey meats or organic vegetables. When we ate lettuce it was usually iceberg, and we had no idea that apples came in different types. But on those nights my dad cooked, we were fed and cared for and made to feel safe — and that’s what we remembered.
When people learn about my background and find out that my siblings and I have all found success in our chosen fields, they often ask about my parents. What did they do right? I’ve been asked many times.
The honest answer is they let us know that we didn’t have to do everything right. They gave us the freedom to fail, by letting us know they would be there for us no matter what.
The best parenting lesson my dad gave me wasn’t anything he said. It was showing me the power of being present in a child’s life and letting them know they are your priority.
He also taught my siblings and me to laugh at ourselves. And we do, often.
After all, you can’t really take yourself seriously when you’re swinging a stick at a giant hand with a face on it. | 2022-06-18T16:12:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A tribute to the dads without dads who raised us - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/pinata-dads-fathers-day/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/pinata-dads-fathers-day/ |
FILE - The field of runners compete in the women’s NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championships, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. The pandemic shutdown created financial pressures, particularly for Division I programs with lost revenue from the cancellation of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and uncertainty about whether football –- which largely funds schools’ abilities to offer Olympic and lower-profile sports programs –- would go forward at all. (AP Photo/Doug McSchooler, File) | 2022-06-18T16:18:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Title IX: Law ensured balanced cutbacks during pandemic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/title-ix-law-ensured-balanced-cutbacks-during-pandemic/2022/06/18/49e00d8a-ef1a-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/title-ix-law-ensured-balanced-cutbacks-during-pandemic/2022/06/18/49e00d8a-ef1a-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Known for his witty political analysis, he was a syndicated columnist and a genial presence on television.
Political analyst Mark Shields speaks during a taping of NBC's "Meet the Press" in 2008. (Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the Press)
Mr. Shields spent more than a decade working on Capitol Hill and managing Democratic political campaigns before turning to commentary in 1979, when he joined the editorial board of The Washington Post. He soon became a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular presence on television panel shows, eventually spending 33 years as a commentator for what is now PBS NewsHour.
The Wall Street Journal once called Mr. Shields one of the “wittiest political journalists in America” and “frequently the most trenchant, fair-minded, and thoughtful.”
He was, by his own admission, a traditional Massachusetts liberal in the mold of one of his political heroes, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.). He helped organize Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, which was gaining momentum before Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968.
Thereafter, Mr. Shields tended to view politics with a touch of sorrow-filled regret. He often mused that if Kennedy had been elected he would have become the most inspiring and transformative president in a generation. Instead, Mr. Shields was left to measure the aspirations and achievements of later generations of political figures, typically couching his views with bemused sense of humor, brushed with the disappointment of reality.
At different times in his career, Mr. Shields was paired with conservative commentators Robert Novak, David Gergen, Paul Gigot and, for more than 20 years, New York Times columnist David Brooks. Mr. Shields interviewed Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the air and, in an increasingly rare display of bipartisan camaraderie, remained on friendly terms with nearly all of them, even after sometimes heated political disagreements.
In 2012, he and Brooks received a first-ever award for “civility in public life,” presented by Allegheny College. Accepting the honor, Mr. Shields said his evenhanded approach was fostered at “NewsHour,” first by hosts Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer and later Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill.
This is a developing story. A complete obituary will follow. | 2022-06-18T17:49:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mark Shields, political commentator, dies at 85 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/18/tv-political-commentator-mark-shields-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/18/tv-political-commentator-mark-shields-dies/ |
President Biden falls to the ground after riding up to members of the public in Rehoboth Beach, Del., on June 18, 2022. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — President Biden tumbled to the ground while on a morning bike ride near his vacation home here Saturday, falling as his shoes apparently got caught in the toe cages as he tried to stop.
Biden bore no visible scrapes from his fall, and a White House official said later that “he is fine” and that “no medical attention is needed.” | 2022-06-18T17:49:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden falls off bike - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/biden-bike-fall/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/18/biden-bike-fall/ |
By Gabriela Sá Pessoa
A protester stands before an image of Bruno Pereira at a June 15 rally in Brasília urging a search for the expert on Indigenous communities, who disappeared along with journalist Dom Phillips in a lawless region of the Amazon. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
Police said Mr. Pereira and Phillips were shot to death. At least two men are in custody, and police are expecting more arrests to come soon.
Mr. Pereira frequently went on weeks-long expeditions by boat and foot into the thick jungle of the Javari Valley, considered home to the world’s largest concentration of the uncontacted: Indigenous communities that have avoided and are supposed to be protected from the outside world. It’s a lawless territory larger than South Carolina where the absence of the state has allowed widespread illegal mining, fishing and logging to move in.
“These are statements that contradict the extreme dedication, seriousness and commitment that Bruno has with his work,” she said. “If his workplace, our workplace and that of many others, became a dangerous place, where we need an armed escort to be able to work, there is something very wrong there. And the problem is not with us. It is with the one who allowed this to happen.”
Mr. Pereira accompanied Phillips on a 17-day journey in the Javari Valley for a 2018 article in the Guardian. Phillips began the story with a description of a morning with Mr. Pereira: “Wearing just shorts and flip-flop as he squats in the mud by a fire, 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.”
Mr. Pereira told Phillips about the challenges of working with a government that was depriving the agency of critical resources. But he downplayed the difficulties for officials such as himself.
Until his death, he was working as an adviser for the Javari Valley Indigenous Peoples Union, or Univaja. He had been training Indigenous people who didn’t speak Portuguese to use satellite technology to map invasions in their territory. When he accompanied Phillips on his final trip, he was not working in an official capacity.
Throughout his career, Mr. Pereira believed in the importance of avoiding contact with isolated Indigenous people. But as Phillips wrote, his monitoring expeditions provided “invaluable intelligence” to help protect those communities.
“There are several dilemmas that we went through to make this decision, and many others even to get these images of them for the whole world to see,” Mr. Pereira told TV Globo about the expedition in 2019. “But people also have the right to choose how to live and to own their land, and we will continue to fight for it. It is time for everyone to get out of their own bubble and understand that there are other Brazils out there. ”
Albertoni, the doctor who accompanied Mr. Pereira on expeditions, said Mr. Pereira made a point of learning ancestral songs important to the culture of the communities where he spent time. He recalled seeing Mr. Pereira singing with a Kanamari community while they all drank ayahuasca, a traditional psychoactive brew that is sacred in many Indigenous cultures.
“You could see how much of an enlightened soul Bruno was,” Albertoni said. “There in the dark, you couldn’t tell the difference between him and the Indigenous people singing in their language, because his relationship with them and their culture was so intense.”
He had begun teaching his young children the Kanamari songs, Albertoni said.
“What surprised me was his sensibility and interest in learning more,” said Beto Marubo, a coordinator with Univaja and member of the Marubo community. He described Mr. Pereira as a “cheerful and playful person” who managed to connect with Indigenous people who were often reserved. “The Indigenous came to respect him as a connoisseur of the jungle … of the dangers and of the knowledge that the jungle offers.” | 2022-06-18T18:49:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bruno Pereira, expert on Brazil’s Indigenous communities, dead at 41 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/bruno-pereira-brazil-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/18/bruno-pereira-brazil-dies/ |
A crowd gathers for a christening ceremony for the future USS Basilone, which is in the background, on Saturday, June 18, at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. The christening of a Navy destroyer on Saturday highlighted the sacrifices of two generations — the ship’s namesake killed in World War II and another Marine who died more than 60 years later. The future USS Basilone bears the name of a Marine who was awarded the Medal of Honor before his death on Iwo Jima. (AP Photo/David Sharp) | 2022-06-18T19:20:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Navy destroyer bears name of decorated Marine killed in WWII - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/navy-destroyer-bears-name-of-decorated-marine-killed-in-wwii/2022/06/18/d12a120e-ef38-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/navy-destroyer-bears-name-of-decorated-marine-killed-in-wwii/2022/06/18/d12a120e-ef38-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Something in the Water festival makes a splash in downtown D.C.
A music festival? In D.C.? Pharrell Williams moved his three-day Something in the Water concert from Virginia this year.
By Natachi Onwuamaegbu
Roddy Rich performs on the first night of Something in the Water. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
At most music festivals, there’s a mad rush for the front row, but on the first day of Something in the Water, concertgoers craved the shade. They huddled on the pavement, forced more and more hot air onto themselves with handmade paper fans, stretched their legs and nodded their heads to the music. It was hot — scorching — and no amount of free water faucets or cheery sunscreen reminders could take that away.
Still, smiles were pasted on most of the music lovers’ sweaty faces. A festival? In D.C.? It was hard to remember the last time something of this scale made its way to the District.
Until now, Shine Ivuy, 26, had never attended a festival in D.C. despite living in the city for several years. She’s previously had to trek to North Carolina to see her favorite artists. “I’m excited that I finally have a festival that’s local that I can attend,” Ivuy said Friday afternoon, placing a hand on her forehead to shield herself from the sun.
“Last time, he brought out Jay-Z, and I didn’t pay for Jay-Z,” Xavier Jackson, 28, said on Friday, referring to the previous Something in the Water festival he attended. “It’s worth it.”
“When I put in my time-off request, I said it was to celebrate my Blackness,” said Jackson, an Apple employee, as he stood in a long merchandise line with Ivuy. “That’s what this is.”
During the set by Yvngxchris, a native of Chesapeake, Va., a fan threw futuristic sunglasses onstage for the artist to wear. They didn’t stay on long. Neither did his pants during his second-to-last song, revealing his turquoise paisley boxer briefs.
The cluster of people dancing in front of him weren’t fazed. They continued jumping, their box braids and Afros bouncing to the beat as they filmed on their phones.
“That was the last song, but y’all want more?” Yvngxchris asked them.
“Yeah!” the crowd yelled.
This is the first time the festival is being held in the nation’s capital. Something in the Water was previously staged in Virginia Beach, Pharrell’s hometown. The name is a nod to the cluster of musical talent from the area, such as Missy Elliott, who performed at the 2019 festival, and Pusha T, who was set to perform this weekend.
Williams moved this year’s festival a few months after Virginia Beach police killed his cousin, Donovon Lynch, in March 2021. Following the shooting, Williams proposed that the city hold a forum to “talk about your issues, talk about your struggles.” But, according to Williams, they never did. Six months later, Williams said the city’s “toxic energy” couldn’t be home to the festival. D.C. was chosen instead.
“Ultimately, the goal is for Virginia Beach to realize that they messed up and that they could have just addressed the situation if they wanted to, and they didn’t,” said Jackson, a Virginia Beach native. “I think it makes total sense, what Pharrell did.”
“I’ve been wanting to go to this festival since it was at Virginia Beach. He’s here to keep me company,” Karen said as she gestured to her son (whose tall, lean stature bears a strong resemblance to Pharrell — though that’s just a coincidence).
The move from Virginia Beach isn’t the only thing looming over the festival; some were concerned about their safety after recent mass shootings. Even though festival organizers say it will have 800 to 850 guards on the festival grounds during the day, and another 100 patrolling at night, some are making backup plans.
“I’m a little more nervous now that it was so easy to get in,” said Roberson, 19, the tip of the Capitol visible behind her on Friday. “We got here early and walked through an open gate. They asked if we had wristbands, and that was it.”
But they don’t regret their decision. A slight bit of fear is worth the freedom of celebration.
“I think we’re just trying our best to be safe,” said Nalani, 20. “All we can do is at least try to plan and savor the good.” | 2022-06-18T22:14:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Something in the Water' music festival debuts in Washington, D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/18/something-water-pharrell-williams-festival/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/18/something-water-pharrell-williams-festival/ |
Kenny Atkinson reverses course on Hornets job, will stay with Warriors
After agreeing to become the head coach of the Hornets, Kenny Atkinson reversed course and will return to the Warriors as an assistant. (Nick Wass/AP)
Golden State Warriors assistant Kenny Atkinson will return to Steve Kerr’s bench after reconsidering his decision to become the next head coach of the Charlotte Hornets, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
The Hornets agreed this month to make Atkinson their next coach. However, the Hornets never officially announced Atkinson’s hiring during the NBA Finals, and Kerr declined to comment on the hiring until it was made official. In a rare move in NBA coaching circles, Atkinson then reconsidered his decision as the Warriors claimed their fourth title in eight years. ESPN first reported Atkinson’s reversal Saturday.
The Hornets, who also interviewed longtime coach Mike D’Antoni in recent weeks, must reopen their search for James Borrego’s successor.
Charlotte would have been the second head coaching stint for the 55-year-old Atkinson, who was set to inherit a young roster headlined by all-star guard LaMelo Ball. Atkinson previously coached the Brooklyn Nets for four seasons, compiling a 118-190 record from 2016 to 2020.
Atkinson’s decision comes less than a week before the NBA draft. Charlotte holds the No. 13 pick.
During a 13-year NBA career that has included assistant coaching stops with the New York Knicks, Atlanta Hawks, Los Angeles Clippers and Warriors, Atkinson has cultivated a reputation as a player development expert with a hard-charging personality and a knack for culture building. In Brooklyn, he inherited a team that won 21 games during the 2015-16 season and delivered a playoff berth in 2019 with gradual improvement on the defensive end.
Perspective: Stephen Curry, ordinary in size and celestial in talent, has changed the game
The Nets parted ways with Atkinson in 2020 as the high-profile free agency additions of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving began a new era for the franchise. Atkinson was replaced by Steve Nash, who has been more deferential to Brooklyn’s stars. Charlotte fired Borrego in April after four seasons.
Borrego, who twice guided the Hornets to the East’s play-in tournament, delivered a 43-win season this year but occasionally clashed with his young players. Hornets General Manager Mitch Kupchak said in May that Borrego was fired because the franchise wanted to “seek out another voice” as owner Michael Jordan chases the organization’s first playoff appearance since 2016.
Atkinson, who joined the Warriors in July, would have been the team’s second assistant to land a top job during Golden State’s title run. The Sacramento Kings last month hired Mike Brown, who spent six seasons with the Warriors. | 2022-06-18T22:23:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kenny Atkinson reverses course on Hornets job, with stay with Warriors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/kenny-atkinson-golden-state-warriors-charlotte-hornets-coach/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/kenny-atkinson-golden-state-warriors-charlotte-hornets-coach/ |
Capitals’ Nicklas Backstrom undergoes hip surgery, faces ‘lengthy recovery’
Capitals center Nicklas Backstrom underwent hip resurfacing surgery. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Washington Capitals center Nicklas Backstrom underwent left hip resurfacing surgery Friday, a procedure that will require a “lengthy recovery process,” the team announced.
The Capitals provided no timetable for Backstrom’s expected return. The surgery was performed at the ANCA Clinic in Belgium, the team said, and Backstrom was expected to start rehabilitation immediately.
Backstrom, 34, dealt with a nagging hip injury throughout the 2021-21 season. The veteran center underwent arthroscopic hip surgery, a minimally invasive procedure, in 2015, but the issue flared up at the end of the 2020-21 season. He opted to not have surgery last summer and instead spent the offseason rehabbing, then missed the first two months of this season.
“The best thing I want to do is play hockey, and that’s my life,” Backstrom said in May. “Obviously I want to be back. I want to be back to normal, not worrying about this.”
Tom Wilson will miss six to eight months after ACL surgery
His decision to finally have surgery was not surprising. Backstrom said in mid-May that his hip would “never be 100 percent” again and that surgery was likely. Hip resurfacing requires doctors to remove damaged bone and shave and reshape what is left before placing a metal cap on top to cover the bone.
When asked in May whether Backstrom’s hip injury could be career-ending, Capitals General Manager Brian MacLellan avoided the question, instead saying Backstrom was going to “explore all options.”
Backstrom had six goals and 25 assists in 47 games during the 2021-22 season. He has three years left on the five-year, $46 million contract he signed in January 2020.
Other NHL players who have undergone the procedure include Ryan Kesler, who played 15 seasons, had hip resurfacing surgery — first on his right hip in May 2019, then on his left hip in February 2020 — and has not played in the NHL since March 2019.
Former Florida Panthers defenseman Ed Jovanovski had hip resurfacing surgery in April 2013 and played in 37 games during the 2013-14 season before the Panthers bought out his contract. He retired in 2015.
Outside of hockey, tennis star Andy Murray is one of the most prominent athletes to undergo hip resurfacing.
Backstrom wasn’t the only Capitals player to have surgery in the offseason. The Capitals also announced Saturday that defenseman Alex Alexeyev underwent a surgical labral repair on his left shoulder. Alexeyev is expected to miss four to five months. Alexeyev made his NHL debut with the Capitals last season but mainly played in the American Hockey League.
In late May, Capitals winger Tom Wilson had surgery to repair an ACL tear in his left knee. Wilson’s recovery time is six to eight months. The earliest he would return is late November. Wilson was injured in Game 1 of Washington’s first-round Stanley Cup playoff series against Florida. | 2022-06-18T22:23:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nicklas Backstrom has hip resurfacing surgery, faces long recovery - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/nicklas-backstrom-hip-resurfacing-surgery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/nicklas-backstrom-hip-resurfacing-surgery/ |
Bills WR Stefon Diggs pays it forward, hosts D.C. youth football camp
Buffalo Bills wide receiver Stefon Diggs hosted a free football camp at the Emery Heights Community Center in Washington, D.C. (Julia Nikhinson for The Washington Post)
Stefon Diggs flew through the rungs of an agility ladder laid out on the turf of the Emery Heights Community Center in D.C., showcasing the precise footwork that has landed him in the upper echelon of NFL wide receivers.
On the ladder next to him, a young boy in a white camp T-shirt sprinted past with no regard for foot placement, reaching the end of the ladder well before Diggs.
“He cheated!” Diggs yelled while laughing. “You cheated!”
For nearly three hours Saturday morning, Diggs made his way around the field where he played youth football two decades before, participating in drills with the roughly 250 children who showed up to his “Diggs Day” camp. Along the fence were scatterings of Bills gear and parents holding their children’s No. 14 jerseys.
Diggs, who starred at Good Counsel High School in Olney, Md., before playing three years at Maryland, said he had always intended to host a camp near his hometown, but the effort was delayed by the pandemic.
Perspective from 2021: Stefon Diggs wanted a new start. The Bills needed a spark. Now the NFL is on notice.
“I wish I could have gotten the ball rolling quicker,” he said. “But better late than never.”
Diggs is entering his eighth season in the NFL, where he ranks among the best receivers in the league. In April, Diggs signed a four-year, $96 million contract extension with the Buffalo Bills, who acquired him in a 2020 trade with the Vikings.
“In my younger years, I was really just trying to see myself in the league and make sure I got some longevity in it,” Diggs said. “I was gonna make sure I did it at the right time.”
Now, Diggs said the camp will be an annual tradition, and he hopes that it will only grow in scale. Open to kids aged 6 to 14, the camp was free — a component that was essential to Diggs.
“He remembers people’s struggles about trying to pay for camps, and trying to get the extra money to pay for camps and get cleats, and that whole deal of being a football player,” Diggs’s mother, Stephanie, said.
“Everybody wants to have dreams of playing in the NFL,” Diggs said. “Why not give them something to start up?”
Even before reaching the NFL, Diggs had already begun to inspire young football players.
Among them is Maryland wide receiver Dontay Demus Jr., who was a volunteer coach for Diggs Day. Demus has traced a similar path to Diggs — a local receiver turned Maryland football standout with NFL aspirations. He said he has long idolized Diggs, who is seven years his senior.
“I used to watch Stef's highlights every day so it's nothing I haven't seen,” Demus said. “He's a very good role model, and I'm just taking a whole lot of notes.”
Also in attendance Saturday were some of Diggs’s friends and a handful of family members, including his brother Trevon, who plays cornerback for the Dallas Cowboys.
The younger Diggs brother, who attended the Avalon School in Wheaton, Md., before playing college football at Alabama, also accumulated a throng of kids clamoring for pictures and autographs. (“My dad really likes the Cowboys,” said one.)
“It's good, just knowing the impact we have on the community, just being able to bring everybody out, bring all the kids out, it's amazing,” Trevon Diggs said. “So the only thing we've gotta do is just keep going, expanding and just tapping into the youth.”
On Saturday, Stefon Diggs’s impact on the community was clear. At one rotation during the camp, he spiraled footballs high into the air, cheering when kids caught them and doling out high-fives even when they didn’t. He did push-ups, gave pep talks and sat on the turf to lead a series of stretches.
As he stood toward the back of the stretching lines, children craned their heads to get a clear view of the NFL star.
“Face that way,” he said with a laugh, pointing toward the front of the lines.
It didn’t work. Many pairs of eyes followed Diggs as he walked around the turf. The receiver knows his impact, even if it still takes him by surprise sometimes.
“Hopefully we can kind of pay it forward and give not only experience but knowledge to kids early on. The earlier, the better,” Diggs said. “Hopefully you can change some lives along the way.” | 2022-06-18T22:23:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bills' WR Stefon Diggs hosts D.C. youth football camp - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/stefon-diggs-youth-football-camp/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/stefon-diggs-youth-football-camp/ |
Katie Ledecky adds another 400 gold, with a rival absent and a new one present
Katie Ledecky wins her 16th gold medal at worlds, capturing the 400 freestyle in 3:58.15. (Petr David Josek/AP)
There were any number of ways to frame Katie Ledecky’s victory in the women’s 400-meter freestyle Saturday at Duna Arena in Budapest. You could zoom in on the 15-year-old Canadian in the next lane over who announced her presence as a serious challenger to Ledecky in the coming years. You could zoom all the way out to Australia to find the world record-holder whose glaring absence loomed over the race.
But Ledecky, 25, didn’t become the greatest female distance swimmer in history by focusing on her rivals, present or absent. What Ledecky saw Saturday in her opening event of the FINA World Championships were the things that mattered most:
⋅ Another gold medal, the 16th of her career at world championships, five more than any other female swimmer in history.
⋅ A time, 3 minutes 58.15 seconds, that may have disappointed some who wanted to see her retake the world record she lost to Australian sensation Ariarne Titmus (3:56.40) last month, but that broke Ledecky’s own meet record from 2017 and represented the fourth-fastest 400 of her decorated career.
⋅ And perhaps most importantly to Ledecky in a year in which she set no specific time goals and aimed only for improvement, a personal-best time for the 2021-22 season by more than a full second.
Katie Ledecky is 25 and getting faster, still reaching for another wall
“I wanted to push to the point of pain tonight,” Ledecky, who will also swim the 800 free, 1,500 free and 4x200 free relay, told reporters in Budapest. “It’s the fastest I’ve ever been at worlds, so I’m really happy with that and really excited about the rest of the [meet]. I’m just always trying to improve … We kind of set out this year [without] setting any time goals, just trying to improve each meet, and so far I’ve done that, so that’s pretty good.”
Canadian phenom Summer McIntosh was a strong runner-up, pushing Ledecky throughout and earning the silver in 3:59.39, becoming just the fourth female in history to go under four minutes, along with Titmus, Ledecky and Italy’s Federica Pellegrini. McIntosh pulled within a second of Ledecky with 100 meters to go, but Ledecky held her off with a furious finishing kick. Nonetheless, the 400 free at the 2024 Paris Olympics, which had been setting up as a two-way battle for gold between Titmus and Ledecky, may have just gained a third contender.
“I was a little nervous. [McIntosh] hung in there the whole time, so she definitely pushed me a lot,” Ledecky said. “… Summer is now in the sub-four-minute club, so it’s only going to get harder, these races. So I know I have my work cut out for me. It’s a good steppingstone here, to just kind of have a baseline for the next couple years moving [toward] Paris.”
American veteran Leah Smith took the bronze medal in 4:02.08, the seventh world championship medal of her career. All told, Team USA won six of the available 15 medals awarded on the opening day of the world championship meet. Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Caeleb Dressel helped the Americans to the gold medal in the 4x100 free relay, though it was Ryan Held’s 46.99 split in the second leg that put that race away.
As for the women’s 400 free, no one will ever know if or how the dynamic would have been altered had Titmus chosen to swim at worlds, rather than skip it in favor of July’s Commonwealth Games. It’s possible Titmus — whose world record last month at the Australian national championships took down Ledecky’s mark (3:56.46) from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics — would have vanquished Ledecky head-to-head the way she did at last summer’s Tokyo Olympics.
It’s also possible Ledecky, who seems rejuvenated by a move last fall to a new coach (Anthony Nesty) and training group at the University of Florida, would have summoned something extra in the presence of her top rival. Ledecky, though, on Saturday shot down any notion she was motivated by trying to regain her world record from Titmus.
“That wasn’t any added motivation,” said Ledecky, a seven-time Olympic gold medalist. “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, it must motivate you more.’ But I’m always motivated. I’m always excited to see what I can do. … If I didn’t have motivation before, that would’ve been a problem.” | 2022-06-18T22:24:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Katie Ledecky wins gold in 400 free at world championships - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/06/18/katie-ledecky-400-free/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/06/18/katie-ledecky-400-free/ |
Virginia man killed in robbery among recent victims of D.C. violence
Christian Gabriel Monje, above with his mother Maria Monje, was shot over Memorial Day weekend in Washington. (Paola Monje)
He aspired to be a chef, but the pandemic put his dreams of opening a food truck on hold.
Instead, Christian Gabriel Monje started driving a school bus in Fairfax County and eventually transitioned into a related office job, his sister said. She said her brother had concentrated on moving ahead, even as food remained his passion. His Instagram page is filled with pictures of his chicken and pasta and other culinary creations.
The 29-year-old who grew up in Fairfax County was shot in downtown Washington after visiting a friend over Memorial Day weekend. He died Thursday after his family said he spent 17 days on life support at George Washington University Hospital.
Police said Monje was shot about 4:30 a.m. on May 30, at 17th and Rhode Island Avenue NW, between Scott Circle and Massachusetts Avenue, an area with restaurants and businesses.
Paola Monje, 31, said police told the family her brother had been robbed and shot in the head, all his possessions taken but a single credit card found buried in his pants pocket.
“He was in such a safe area,” she said. “We’re in shock. It can’t be.”
A D.C. police spokeswoman said the investigation is in its early stages and no arrest has been made. She confirmed robbery is being looked at as a possible motive. The death of Christian Monje has been ruled a homicide.
There have been more than 90 victims of homicide in the District this year, a roughly 13 percent increase from the same period in 2021. Killings have climbed in the city each of the past four years, and violent crime is a top concern for residents and a mayor facing a primary on Tuesday in her bid for a third term.
Violence has continued in recent days. About 4:10 a.m. Saturday, police said Terrell Gerald Johnson, 41, of Southeast, was fatally shot at Mississippi Avenue and Atlantic Street in Southeast, on the border of Congress Heights and Bellevue. Shortly after 6 a.m., police said Israel Minger, 27, of Northeast, was fatally shot in the 1500 block of F Street NE in the Kingman Park area.
On Thursday, police said Dimaris Smith, 42, of Southeast, was fatally shot in the 1300 block of 46th Street SE, near Bowen Road in Benning Ridge. That shooting occurred one day after and two blocks from where 16-year-old Deandre Coleman was fatally shot on Hillside Road in Southeast. Police said they have no evidence to suggest a connection.
D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III spoke of rising violence at an event on Friday to announce $20,000 signing bonuses for new recruits to put more officers on the streets. Contee talked of recent victims, including Coleman, and of opportunities forever lost to people “because they are tragically killed.”
Monje graduated from Robinson Secondary High School in Fairfax County. His sister said that he had gone into the District to meet a friend he had not seen in a long time and was apparently attacked as he headed home.
Paola Monje said her brother was funny and upbeat and loved her son, his nephew. He was into music and could most often be seen with his ear buds. He was known as “Chef Dembow,” a tribute to his culinary skills and a genre of music popular in the Caribbean rooted in rap and reggae.
His Facebook page includes photos of his family and food. Paola Monje said she is considering quitting her job at a bank and starting a food truck to honor her brother. She does not cook, but she is going through his social media posts to find his favorite foods she can replicate them later.
“It’s something I’m going to really work toward,” she said. Paola Monje said she is not sure what type of food she might make, nor the theme, for the truck. But she knows the name: “Chef Dembow.” | 2022-06-18T23:36:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia man killed in robbery among recent victims of D.C. violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/dc-shootings-monje-robbery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/dc-shootings-monje-robbery/ |
Virginia public health chief expresses ‘regret’ in disrespecting staff
Dr. Colin M. Greene, now the Virginia Health Department commissioner, was acting director of the Rappahannock-Rapidan Health District in this January 2022 photo. (Culpeper Star-Exponent)
Colin Greene, the embattled Virginia health commissioner who in comments to his staff and media interviews dismissed the role of structural racism in public health, on Friday walked back his views in a staff-wide note as public officials questioned his fitness for office.
“I am fully aware that racism at many levels is a factor in a wide range of public health outcomes and disparities across the Commonwealth and the United States. I also deeply regret that any of this has caused you to feel discounted or disrespected; such has never and will never be my intent,” he wrote late Friday in a note obtained by The Washington Post.
The message came a day after Va. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) issued a statement, saying he was disappointed Greene did not “effectively communicate our mission,” after Greene said invoking racism alienates White people and suggested a genetic reason for disparities in Black maternal mortality.
Greene, a retired Army colonel and Youngkin appointee who since taking office five months ago has clashed with his own experts on racial disparities and agency scientists over coronavirus restrictions, stopped short of apologizing for his comments in the three-paragraph message. Greene, through a spokeswoman, declined an interview and did not answer written questions Saturday.
The chairwoman of the Board of Health, Faye O. Prichard, and longtime board member Jim Edmondson, both appointees of former governor Terry McAuliffe (D), said they think Greene should resign.
“My reaction is, too little too late,” Edmondson said Saturday. “Damage done. You can’t say those things and not mean them.”
They plan to address their concerns about Greene’s views at their regular quarterly public meeting Thursday, which Greene is expected to attend.
Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), chairman of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, said the governor agreed to “a meeting” about Greene’s remarks, at the caucus’s request, but did not say who would be there.
“We spoke briefly and will speak again to make arrangements for the meeting,” Bagby said.
Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter declined to comment after receiving detailed questions about Greene and his statement.
Greene’s statement comes three days after The Post reported Greene’s views that racism is not a public health crisis, gun violence is a Democratic talking point and that he is not convinced structural racism is a factor in Black mothers and their babies dying at a much higher than their White counterparts — a fact established by decades of research.
The story is based in part on interviews with Greene and Vanessa Walker Harris, the director of the health department’s office in charge of addressing maternal and infant mortality, who said a March meeting with Greene left her and her team traumatized and fearful for their jobs.
State Sen. Jennifer L. McClellan (D-Richmond) said Greene’s note is “gaslighting” and downplays the impact of his questions about the link between racism and health outcomes.
“Based on my conservations with employees at the Department of Health, this has had a chilling effect on their ability to do their job to address health disparities,” she said.
Four employees who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the agency said reading Greene’s views left them demoralized, will deepen the mistrust vulnerable communities already have in government, which was put to the test during the pandemic, and politicize an agency that should be apolitical.
In a virtual meeting of several hundred health department employees Friday, some set their computer screen backgrounds to solid blue with the message “I believe that Racism and Gun Violence are public health issues. #IsupportDrWalkerHarris,” according to three of the employees and a screenshot of the message.
Post articles and related coverage about Greene’s views have been omitted from a daily compilation of news stories sent to staff, known as “VDH in the news,” typically an noncontroversial summary of positive and negative articles, according to two employees.
The leaders of the department’s office of epidemiology, including State Epidemiologist Lilian Peake, on Friday held a “listening session” to “provide a safe space for anyone on our team to voice their thoughts and feelings” after hearing from many of them about The Post article, according to an internal email.
They also reaffirmed that one of the core values in the office’s strategic plan is “fostering an environment … inclusive of age, race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, culture, ethnicity, and nationality in order to overcome health and social inequities …”
“We believe this value is foundational to building respectful relationships with our colleagues and the communities we serve,” they wrote.
Youngkin appointed Greene as acting health commissioner in the early days of the administration and removed “acting” from his title in early May. A Temple University-educated physician, Greene, 63, previously served as a local health director in northwestern Virginia and has pressed the agency to focus on convincing people in hard-hit rural areas to become vaccinated against the coronavirus.
He oversees a department with a budget of more than $800 million and about 3,800 full-time employees, many of whom were on the front lines of the pandemic. The department is based in Richmond and coordinates with 35 local health districts, which track disease outbreaks, promote prevention to combat illness and conduct emergency preparedness training.
Greene serves at the will of the governor, until the next regular legislative session in January when his appointment is subject to confirmation by state lawmakers, several of whom publicly questioned his leadership this week.
He is scheduled Thursday to give a general report on the agency to the Board of Health, which helps oversee the Department of Health’s mission and approves healthcare-related regulations. All 15 board members were appointed to staggered terms by Democratic governors, including Prichard, Edmondson and two others whose terms expire at the end of the month, giving Youngkin a chance to appoint four new members.
Prichard said Greene’s statements contradict the mission of the agency.
“This is in conflict with everything that the Board of Health has put forward on moving Virginia forward and meeting our health goals,” she said. “We are definitely going to want a lot of answers.” | 2022-06-18T23:37:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia public health chief walks back views, expresses regret - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/greene-virginia-health-racism-regrets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/greene-virginia-health-racism-regrets/ |
In this image provided by the U.S. Coast Guard, a Coast Guard Station Miami Beach small boat crew inspects a boat that was part of a collision near Key Biscayne, Fla., late Friday, June 17, 2022. The Coast Guard, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, Miami-Dade Police Department, and Florida Fish and Wildlife crews assisted 10 people and recovered two bodies after their vessels collided. (U.S. Coast Guard via AP) (Uncredited/U.S. Coast Guard) | 2022-06-18T23:54:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Coast Guard: Boats collide in Florida, 2 dead, 10 rescued - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/coast-guard-boats-collide-in-florida-2-dead-10-rescued/2022/06/18/7681d5f0-ef59-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/coast-guard-boats-collide-in-florida-2-dead-10-rescued/2022/06/18/7681d5f0-ef59-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Ryan Zimmerman lived his childhood dream. Nats fans are lucky for it.
Perspective by Adam Kilgore
Ryan Zimmerman's number was retired on Saturday. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
At the start of his baseball journey, like so many kids south of Baltimore before baseball returned to Washington, Ryan Zimmerman would play Wiffle ball in his Virginia Beach backyard and pretend to be Cal Ripken. At the end, on a sun-drenched and breezy Saturday afternoon, he sat on a makeshift stage on the Nationals Park infield with his infant son in his lap and his number painted on the grass, listening to the people he loves most talk about him and trying not to cry.
When it came Zimmerman’s time to speak Saturday afternoon, he began with a deep exhale. He thanked all the people who helped him play 16 seasons in the big leagues, from the moment the Washington Nationals made him their first-ever draft choice in the summer of 2005 to the final day of the 2021 season. He choked up when he thanked his parents, Keith and Cheryl. He peered up at the crowd, cheering for him one more time.
“I hope I give you the same feeling I have inside,” Zimmerman said. “You should. Because it’s as much yours as it is mine.”
Ryan Zimmerman calls it a career
In high school, Zimmerman wore No. 1, a nod to Anfernee Hardaway, his favorite basketball player — he liked the Lil’ Penny commercials. When he arrived at the University of Virginia, a sawed-off infielder from Georgia named Matt Dunn wore No. 1. Coaches gave Zimmerman 11, and he liked how two 1s looked together on his back.
“Super boring story,” Zimmerman said, but it explains why no Washington National will ever wear No. 11 again, why it is the No. 11 that was unveiled Saturday and will forever hang on the facade high above the first base line. Former teammates flocked to Washington and the only sellout crowd of the season came to watch as Zimmerman provided Washington yet another baseball milestone: It is now a baseball town that has watched the full career cycle of a hero, from draft day to enshrinement.
“We all pretend to be this person, like when you’re little,” Zimmerman said before the ceremony. “But nobody ever believes it’s going to happen.”
Zimmerman is Washington’s Ripken. To those outside Washington, that will reek of overstatement. He will not be a Hall of Famer. He made two all-star teams. Injuries derailed him and forced him away from third base, a position few have ever played better. Bryce Harper, Anthony Rendon, Max Scherzer and Juan Soto reached greater peaks while playing alongside him.
But they don’t understand what Zimmerman and Washington meant to each other. He arrived when the team barely existed, a few months after it operated out of trailers in the RFK Stadium parking lot. He won Gold Gloves and Silver Sluggers surrounded by 100-loss teams. He met his wife here and built a life here. He was the soul of the team that broke through in 2012 and won it all in 2019. Washington watched him grow up, excel and struggle through injury with the same consistent grace. Washington didn’t have a baseball team for 33 years, and then suddenly it had Zimmerman for 16. How lucky is that?
“Without him, this franchise is in a different place,” former National Jayson Werth said. “We were talking about it last night. I don’t know who is the next guy in the ring of honor. There’s no one in the conversation.”
There are 10-year-old Nationals fans, kids who have 2019 World Series gear and Soto posters on their walls, who may have never seen Zimmerman play third base. Their parents can tell them how otherworldly he was charging a bunt, and they can tell their kids about how he took Gerrit Cole deep in Game 1. Zimmerman is a great ballplayer, a man of charity and a world champion. He is also connective tissue.
“He’s meant everything to the franchise,” Nationals managing principal owner Mark Lerner said. “Not only is he a class act and a great ballplayer, but the fact he stayed with one team his entire career, that doesn’t happen very often. He deserves this day. This is just another step. There will be nobody like Ryan Zimmerman, nobody like that ever again.”
Svrluga: Ryan Zimmerman was the Face of the Franchise, Mr. Walk-Off, Washington’s forever
In Cincinnati or Boston or Milwaukee, Zimmerman’s career would have been part of franchise history. In Washington, Zimmerman shaped franchise history. He sat behind a video board that read, “Thank you, Mr. National.”
“The unique story of my career is I was here from the very beginning, and it's just sort of being lucky to be here in the first year and then staying here and being able to grow with the fan base, with the organization, with the Lerners,” Zimmerman said. “That’s what makes me a little bit different, a little bit special. And it's nothing that I did. I was just here.”
Of course, it’s also what he did — and how he did it. He was a terrified 20-year-old when he walked into manager Frank Robinson’s office in the visiting clubhouse in Atlanta, nervous because he didn’t own a suit to wear on the team flight, barely removed from buying $2 pitchers. (“It probably wasn’t even $2 back then,” Zimmerman said.) Believe it or not, he hitched a ride from the Atlanta airport to the ballpark with Dunn, the former Virginia teammate who wore No. 1.
Zimmerman showed Washington how rich of an experience following a baseball team could be. He walked off the Yankees on Father’s Day at RFK and christened Nationals Park with a Sunday night walk-off. He played third base like an acrobat early in his career, before shoulder injuries forced him briefly to left field and ultimately to first.
“That’s part of kind of my journey in my career,” Zimmerman said. “Sort of, at the end of the day, kind of what made me who I am.”
Ryan Zimmerman became the face of the franchise in D.C. They had a front-row seat.
General Manager Mike Rizzo told prospects to watch Zimmerman and copy his every move. Manager Dave Martinez realized at one point that he could remain calm in stormy times because Zimmerman rubbed off on him. If he was the face of the franchise, the countenance never changed.
“Zim was always the cornerstone,” former first baseman Adam LaRoche said. “There was something about one of the founding fathers, founding players still being the best player on the team, still being really, really, really good. All things Nationals has always revolved around him. And forget all the on-field stuff. He’s just one of the greatest human beings you’ll ever meet.”
Zimmerman is not quite from Washington, but he is now of Washington. He lives in a big house in Great Falls, Va. His kids will go to school here. He is part-owner of the Salt Line, the seafood restaurant and bar in the shadow of the right field upper deck. Saturday, he bought the first round for every customer who darkened the door.
How Zimmerman and his wife would spend a dream day in D.C.
A field in Southwest Washington is named after Zimmerman. He had it written into his contract that he could use Nationals Park one night a year for an event that would benefit the ziMS Foundation, the charity he founded to fight multiple sclerosis, the disease his mother, Cheryl, has lived with for most of his life. Cheryl watched from in front of the temporary stage Saturday, sitting in her wheelchair just behind the pitcher’s mound.
As part of Saturday’s ceremony, Cheryl narrated a video — a feat of strength, given her condition, that reduced Zimmerman to tears. She noted how in 2005, a “baby-faced” ballplayer arrived in Washington.
“They didn’t know it,” Cheryl said, her voice clear and strong even if weakened by disease. “But they were meant for each other.”
During his speech, Zimmerman choked up most when he told he told his parents they had made it possible to be here.
“Dad, thanks for raising me to be a good man and always leading by example,” he said.
“Mom, thanks for showing me what true strength and courage looks like,” he said.
He turned to his four kids, ages 8, 6, 2 and two months.
“Thank you for showing me baseball is not the most important thing in the world,” he told them.
From the archives: Ryan Zimmerman became the face of the Nationals. This is how he started.
Zimmerman received a new official title Saturday — special adviser for baseball and business operations — but his life now revolves around carpool schedules and golf outings. Ian Desmond’s hair was flecked with gray as he sat behind Zimmerman onstage. LaRoche became a grandpa a couple weeks ago. Werth’s kids aren’t kids at all anymore. The teenagers who watched him at RFK has kids of their own.
Zimmerman will raise his kids and watch as another group of Nationals tries to return the franchise to the heights he led it to. No matter what they do, even if his number will be there forever, there will never be another Ryan Zimmerman. | 2022-06-18T23:54:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ryan Zimmerman's no. 11 retired by Nationals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/ryan-zimmerman-number-retired-nationals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/ryan-zimmerman-number-retired-nationals/ |
An Apple store in Sydney. (Brent Lewin/Bloomberg)
Apple workers in Towson, Md., voted to join a union on Saturday, becoming the first of the tech giant’s U.S. retail stores to do so.
The vote means workers at the store plan to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers once a contract is ratified. Saturday evening’s initial tally was 65-33, and the official count was pending.
This vote is part of an organizing wave sweeping the nation as workers increasingly band together to demand higher pay, better benefits and more negotiating leverage with their employers during the pandemic. In New York, the first Amazon warehouse voted to form a union in the spring. Dozens of Starbucks stores across the country have unionized, and labor movements have pushed into outdoor retailer REI and video-game maker Raven Software.
Apple store in Maryland becomes third to launch union drive
Workers in at least two other Apple stores are trying to organize, including at a store in New York and one in Atlanta, where workers became the first location to file documents with the National Labor Relations Board. But the Communications Workers of America withdrew its request for an election there last month, saying in a statement that Apple’s “repeated violations of the National Labor Relations Act have made a free and fair election impossible.”
From Amazon to Apple, tech giants turn to old-school union-busting
“We are fortunate to have incredible retail team members and we deeply value everything they bring to Apple,” spokesman Josh Lipton said in a statement before the vote. “We are pleased to offer very strong compensation and benefits for full time and part time employees, including health care, tuition reimbursement, new parental leave, paid family leave, annual stock grants and many other benefits.”
Apple store in Atlanta first to file to form a union
Workers in Towson told The Post last month that they hope forming a union will give them a seat at the table on scheduling, pay, coronavirus safety measures and more. Some said that Apple had been too slow to increase pay, and that the company needed to give individual stores more control over their scheduling systems, rather than having a corporate office control most of it. | 2022-06-19T00:37:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Apple workers in Maryland vote on whether to unionize - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/18/apple-union-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/18/apple-union-vote/ |
Keegan Bradley fired a 1-under 69 on Saturday to stay in contention heading into the U.S. Open's final round. (Amanda Sabga/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Keegan! Keegan!
It boomed out of the grandstand on No. 18 as if from some other, throatier sport. It came as Keegan Bradley walked up to finish his merciless round amid all the other merciless rounds, except that Bradley’s brutal round had yielded a 69 that placed him in contention at 2 under par.
“As a kid, I dreamed of playing in front of Boston fans and being a Patriot or being in the Garden,” he said. “Most of the time I’m playing across the world or the country, and I’m by myself, and every now and then I’m in Hartford [at the tour stop there] and I get to feel that, or in a Ryder Cup. Out here today felt like I was in a home game, which is something that as a kid, it’s a dream.”
Their cheers did matter, as it happened. They had mattered halfway along to the ruckus on No. 18, when Bradley rang in an 11-foot putt on No. 9 for one of his five birdies that went with his four bogeys and nine pars. The crowd “went crazy for me” approaching the green, he said, “and then I made the putt, and they went wild.”
That made him feel something rare: “a jolt of energy” from an audience. “It put me on a path to, ‘All right, we no longer are trying to save this round. Let’s get ourselves into contention here,’ and I did that.”
It has been some week, regardless. It has provided him another rarity, a hankering to scan the crowds. “Every now and then I’ll look,” he said, “and I’ll see an aunt or an uncle or a friend, and it’s really, really fun.” (His aunts in life include the World Golf Hall of Fame member Pat Bradley, an early inspiration.) He has gotten a kick out of passing a crooked tree each day on No. 18, because that’s where his dad stood during that Ryder Cup so Keegan could find him after he rushed out to join the American celebration. | 2022-06-19T01:21:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At U.S. Open, Keegan Bradley is living out his Boston sports dream - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/us-open-fan-favorite-keegan-bradley-lives-his-boston-sports-dream/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/us-open-fan-favorite-keegan-bradley-lives-his-boston-sports-dream/ |
PITTSBURGH — The San Francisco Giants don’t overwhelm with their bats. Or their pitching. Or their defense. Their margin of error isn’t quite as wide as the two rivals they are trying to chase down in the loaded NL West.
“We’re a mix-and-match team style of club ... the team that finishes the game is probably not going to be the team that starts the game,” Kapler said. | 2022-06-19T01:26:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Crawford, Giants pounce on shaky Pirates bullpen in 7-5 win - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/crawford-giants-pounce-on-shaky-pirates-bullpen-in-7-5-win/2022/06/18/f71b573a-ef64-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/crawford-giants-pounce-on-shaky-pirates-bullpen-in-7-5-win/2022/06/18/f71b573a-ef64-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Man fatally shot in Fairfax County, police say
Shooting occurred near Hybla Valley area, according to police
A man was shot and killed Saturday night in Fairfax County, police said.
The victim was shot in a car parked in the 8000 block of Seaton Street, in the southeastern part of the county, near the Route 1 corridor, according to a preliminary police account.
He was taken to a hospital, where he died, they said.
Police said the attackers reportedly were in a vehicle. They drove from the scene after the shooting, police said.
The site is a residential street about a half-mile east of Route 1. | 2022-06-19T02:57:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fairfax-shot-killed-Saturday-night - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/man-fatally-shot-fairfax-county-police-say/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/18/man-fatally-shot-fairfax-county-police-say/ |
On day of honoring the past, Nats of the present lose eighth in a row
Phillies 2, Nationals 1 (10)
Josiah Gray allowed one hit and struck out four in six innings for the Nationals in Saturday's loss to the Phillies. (Nick Wass/AP)
Lane Thomas, wearing No. 28, slapped a game-tying single through the right side in the ninth inning, filling Nationals Park with a roar that sounded as if it were from 2019 or maybe 2012, just not from the past few years. Josiah Gray, wearing No. 40, had done his part, too, holding the Philadelphia Phillies to one hit and no runs in six innings, a gem that finished with a career-high 117 pitches. But Reed Garrett, wearing No. 53, couldn’t record an out in the 10th, leading the Phillies to a 2-1 win over the Washington Nationals.
No players for the home team wore No. 11. As of 3:46 p.m. Saturday, no National will again.
To honor the player who once did, who was the first draft pick in team history, played here for 16 seasons and won a World Series in 2019, Nationals Park became the museum of modern D.C. baseball. Ian Desmond, Gio Gonzalez and Jayson Werth were introduced to some of the biggest cheers of an otherwise cheerless year for Washington. They were joined by Danny Espinosa and Adam LaRoche, Ted and Mark Lerner, then a video tribute that included Anthony Rendon, Trea Turner, Max Scherzer, Bryce Harper and Dusty Baker, among others — including Anthony S. Fauci.
On Baseball: Ryan Zimmerman lived his childhood dream. Nats fans are lucky for it.
A capacity crowd of 42,730 took in the perfect afternoon, the sky light blue and marked by just a few small clouds. And at the eye of its attention was a sniffling 37-year-old, who retired this past winter and traded cleats for dress shoes.
“For Ryan, you’d do anything,” Werth said of Ryan Zimmerman, the answer to each trivia question above. Werth even tamed his long blond hair into a ponytail and tucked it beneath a hat. Mike Rizzo, the Nationals’ general manager, typically wears a suit or sport coat twice a season, on Opening Day and for the early rounds of the draft. But on Saturday, Rizzo added a third, then followed Desmond and Werth in honoring Zimmerman at a podium between the mound and second base.
The last time the Nationals truly celebrated was in that exact spot, when they stood on a portable stage in October 2019, shoulder to relaxed shoulder and held the National League Championship Series trophy in front of an adoring city. Almost three years later, they are 23-46, a season-worst 23 games below .500. The team was leveled in July, before the final months of Zimmerman’s career, and is stumbling through the first full year of a rebuild. Saturday’s loss was its eighth in a row.
“I’m sure the fans are going to start coming more and more as the weather starts heating up and we get back to our winning ways,” Gray said. “So I’m looking forward to bigger crowds like that this year and years to come.”
On one hand, Zimmerman and former teammates were a reminder of how good the Nationals were for the better part of a decade, a stretch that finished with Washington’s first MLB title in 95 years. But on the other, they provided such a sharp contrast to the current on-field product, a club that almost certainly will sell again this summer.
Zimmerman knows about teams rising, little by little, from last place to annual contention. He once lived every step of that process.
“If you don’t ever want this to happen, root for the Dodgers,” Zimmerman said, pairing dry wit with a laugh, when asked about his message to frustrated fans. He has an official title now, as a senior adviser for baseball and business operations. He has already been around the organization because of a five-year personal services contract.
“That’s my only advice because they’re probably the only team that’s ever going to [avoid tear-downs],” Zimmerman continued, switching to his experience of playing for two 100-loss teams before the Nationals made their leap. “But other than that, I mean, it’s part of it. We had a decade where we were either in the playoffs or competing for the playoffs or at the trade deadline acquiring people. At some point, something’s got to give, and last year was that point.
“… I mean, that’s what you have to do. Nobody likes to lose. Fans don’t like to lose. Players don’t like to lose. [Manager Dave Martinez] doesn’t like to lose. … But it happens, it happens to every organization. I know this team doesn’t want it to happen for a long time. So I don’t think you’re looking at a long time of this.”
A few hours later, after Zimmerman gave a tear-filled speech — and after he threw out the first pitch to his dad, Keith — “this” continued with a tight defeat. Gray, one of the 12 players acquired at July’s deadline, traded zeros with Aaron Nola for six innings. The 24-year-old Gray loaded the bases in the first, stranded every runner and responded with the best start of his young career. He struck out four, walked three and limited the Phillies (36-31) to one hit, Didi Gregorius’s first-inning single.
And to cap his outing, throwing 16 more pitches than he ever had in the majors, Gray fielded the grounder, smacked his chest twice and flipped the ball to Josh Bell. He paused his walk to the dugout for a fist clench and scream, then disappeared through a loud ovation and into a line of high-fives. In the next inning, Yairo Muñoz put the Phillies ahead with a solo homer off Erasmo Ramírez. Then in the 10th, once Thomas had tied it with that single off Brad Hand, the Phillies went up on Rhys Hoskins’s RBI single and Seranthony Domínguez stranded Washington’s automatic runner in the bottom half.
So on a day for remembering the past, for toasting a player who was there at the bare beginning, that’s how the Nationals fell. | 2022-06-19T02:57:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | On Ryan Zimmerman Day, Nationals fall to Phillies for eighth straight loss - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/nationals-phillies-ryan-zimmerman/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/nationals-phillies-ryan-zimmerman/ |
What’s Rory McIlroy thinking at the U.S. Open? Just look at him.
Leaving the 12th green on a windy day at the Country Club, Rory McIlroy was full of expression. As usual. (Warren Little/Getty Images)
BROOKLINE, Mass. — Rory McIlroy’s Saturday afternoon began with his driver in his left hand, his arm outstretched pointing further left, a wayward start to a crooked day. It continued with a smirk and twist of the neck at the third hole, the first astonished face after sliding a 10-foot putt for birdie at the fourth, the second exasperated glare after his tee shot at the par-3 sixth came up short and left.
By the eighth, his cap was pulled low over his face, before his left hand ran back through his hair, all but knocking it off. By the 18th tee came a Xerox of the pose from four hours before: driver in his left hand, arm extending further left. If you can hear him, duck. He will be a Hall of Fame golfer at some point. If there’s a Hall of Fame for body language expressiveness, he will be a founding inductee. He must be a ringer in charades, an easy mark in Texas hold ’em.
“It was one of the toughest days on a golf course I’ve had in a long time,” McIlroy said.
He said it out loud because he was asked to assess his round. No need, really. His 5-foot-9 frame screamed it all day.
This was the U.S. Open for almost anyone Saturday, because if your name wasn’t Matt Fitzpatrick or Will Zalatoris, the combination of the Country Club’s inherent chicanery and winds that would wobble the USS Constitution left the field with its collective head in its hands.
McIlroy, though, is a special case in such circumstances, and not just because he is a special player. If you want to know how the 33-year-old Northern Irishman is playing, take a five-second glance at him. The book is always open, and he’ll hand you reading glasses should you need them. If his puffed-out chest reaches the green 30 seconds before the rest of his body, he’s killing it. If he’s reduced to a bagful of slumped shoulders and palms on faces … well, you know. There’s no mystery.
Saturday’s path to a 3-over-par 73 that dropped him from 4 under and one back to start the day to 1 under and three back by nightfall could have been interpreted in a number of fashions. Was the 20-foot par putt that needed a quarter more of a turn to save par bad luck — or what he deserved for missing the green? Was the six-footer he missed for birdie at the seventh misfortune or a missed stroke? Was 73 just fine given he hit just 7 of 18 greens, or should he have hit more greens to produce a score lower than 73?
In sum: Was the day about leaving shots out there, or holding it together?
“I’m sort of going home thinking that I held this round together,” McIlroy said, “when it could have got away from me quickly.”
His standing three behind Zalatoris and Fitzpatrick, with only four other players between himself and the leaders, matters for McIlroy and for the Open. Every weekend at a major in which McIlroy’s name is on the leader board is presented as an opportunity for history. He has four of the shiniest trophies. One more would move him into a club that currently has just 19 members. Two more would tie him with Phil Mickelson, Nick Faldo and Lee Trevino. Three more …
Stop. We have been doing this with McIlroy for more than a decade. After all this time, his legacy is a peculiar combination of secure and stagnant. He is a strutting, slumping example of the talent and tenacity it takes to contend so often and the fortune and fortitude necessary to close even one of them out.
Given it is eight years and 28 majors since the last of his four titles — the 2014 PGA Championship — it’s tempting to think of McIlroy as a tease. Think of it this way: The leader board heading into Sunday’s final round is led by a pair of players looking for their first professional wins stateside — Zalatoris of Texas and Fitzpatrick of England — who would be deemed worthy, even if young. It includes the defending champion of this event, Jon Rahm, not to mention the newly minted Masters champ, Scottie Scheffler, who just happens to be the top-ranked player in the world.
And yet of the 11 players who will sleep Saturday night knowing they have completed 54 holes at even par or better, the major titles scoreboard reads thusly: McIlroy 4, Everyone Else 3.
“Look,” he told Irish radio before meeting with the international media, “I’m one great round away from winning another major championship.”
One great round is not his problem. Four great rounds has been. Recently, he has been scrutinized for his performance in majors not because he hasn’t contended, but in an odd way, for the way he has. At the Masters, his final-round 64 was thrilling and lifted him into a runner-up finish behind Scheffler, but it also led to head-scratching: Why was it preceded by two indifferent 73s and a 71? At the PGA Championship last month in Tulsa, he opened with 65 to lead, closed with 68 to secure a top-10, but sandwiched them around a 71 and a 74.
He is blessed with abilities and cursed by their existence, and his body contortions and facial expressions betray just that. After that final tee shot at 18, he slumped toward his ball, which he was sure was so far left he would be assessed a penalty shot.
“When I saw it up there, I was like, ‘Oh, no,’” he said.
Instead, some good fortune: It was in a position near a grandstand, so he was granted relief. The result: The opportunity to drop, then sling a 150-yard draw around the corner. That he did was a reminder of why he’s so enthralling.
After he pulled that off, he was neither strutting nor slumped as he strolled back to the fairway. Rather, he was googly-eyed, almost discombobulated. That was his day, and that is this tournament.
“I’m always sort of trying to look at the positive side of things and be optimistic,” he said. “Yeah, in this game of golf, you need to be an eternal optimist.”
He laughed at that notion, then tossed his head back, something of an eyeroll. An eternal optimist, in this game and these conditions, with a major on the line eight years since you have won one? Rory McIlroy’s face can’t hide what an absurd notion that is. | 2022-06-19T02:57:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rory McIlroy is in the mix and full of expression at U.S. Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/us-open-rory-mcilroy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/18/us-open-rory-mcilroy/ |
Ask Amy: My husband’s female co-workers text him outside of work
I’m at my wits’ end because he just doesn’t get it. We’ve had infidelity issues in the past (on both sides), and I don’t trust his or others’ intentions.
Upset: You aren’t “wrong” for feeling the way you feel. Your feelings are your feelings, and you get to have them.
You two are continuing to play out the dynamic left over from your mutual infidelity.
I know she may be different four or five years later, but it is still an irritant. The second graduate is a son of a niece whom we have not met since he was a baby, if even that.
We received an announcement of his graduation. Coincidentally, both grads went to the same college, although they don’t know each other.
Am I being small-minded? What is your suggested course of action? Should I still enclose a check?
Wondering: Because one of these young people is a stranger and the other has a bit of a history with you, you should think primarily about what would make YOU feel the best.
Would it make you feel good to ignore the ungrateful grad? (It might …).
I'd probably send a card and a very modest amount to both, congratulating them and telling them that their first post-grad cappuccino (or martini) is on you.
Many days my wife and I discuss your advice. I'll read a letter out loud, and we both try to guess what you'll say.
Randy: Many families report doing this together — and it makes me extremely happy. Thank you! | 2022-06-19T04:28:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My husband’s female co-workers text him outside of work - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/19/ask-amy-husband-texts-women/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/19/ask-amy-husband-texts-women/ |
Vehicles pass a Texaco Inc. petrol station, against a backdrop of the skyscrapers in the City of London, U.K., on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. U.K. petrol prices rose at the fastest pace in almost 13 years last week as the war in Ukraine sent fuel prices to record highs, government figures show. (Bloomberg)
It’s easy to blame petrol station owners for the escalating cost of fuel, but they’re not the source of woe for motorists in the UK facing soaring prices. They’re just the human faces having to deal with anger that should be directed elsewhere.
The cost of filling a 15 US gallon (55 liter) fuel tank on a standard family saloon car has risen beyond £100 ($120), putting an increasing strain on the budgets of people who are still reluctant to use public transport for fear of catching Covid and, more immediately, face a week of strikes that threaten to bring much of the country’s rail network to a halt.
In absolute terms, petrol prices at the pump have risen by more than 40 pence a liter, equivalent to about $1.85 a US gallon, since the start of the year. On June 15 the national average price was £1.87 a liter ($8.61 a US gallon) and there’s a whole host of factors that have driven it up.
Rising crude prices are a big contributor to higher costs at the pump. Crude was already strengthening as demand worldwide recovered from the pandemic at a faster rate than supply. The OPEC+ group of oil producers, who cut production by more than 10 million barrels a day (about 10% of total world output) in April 2020 have struggled to keep pace with their own plans to restore it gradually. They have fallen further behind their collective production target in recent months, as more members reach capacity limits that have fallen due to lack of investment in the past two years. It was then given another boost after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February and buyers in Europe responded by shunning Russian barrels.
Looked at in percentage terms, the rise in crude prices has been much bigger than the increase in pump prices. Crude is up by more than 60% since the start of the year, compared with an increase of about 30% in the price of petrol at the pump.
The government’s tax cut has had very little impact on prices. A reduction of fuel duty by 5 pence a liter (equivalent to about 26 cents a US gallon when it was made) was soon wiped out by the higher cost of value added tax (VAT). Fuel duty is charged at a flat rate — currently 52.95 pence a liter ($2.44 a US gallon) — while VAT is levied at 20% of the final price (including the fuel duty).
As petrol prices have continued to rise since the duty cut, the VAT payable has risen with them, more than wiping out the reduction. While the government received about 83 pence a liter from petrol sales through fuel duty and VAT at the start of March, it now gets 84 pence, according to figures from motoring organization the RAC.
No wonder that petrol retailers and consumer groups are calling for another, bigger, cut in fuel duty. But while it would be welcomed by motorists, it’s unlikely to help for long. The problem, as I argued here, is that cutting prices stimulates demand and, in a market that’s globally short of supply, that’s simply going to push prices up even more.
Raw materials (crude oil and biofuels) and taxes together account for 84% of UK pump prices for petrol and a similar proportion for diesel. That leaves about 30 pence a liter (or $1.37 a US gallon) to cover the cost of turning the crude into fuel, shipping, storing and selling it. Most of that is taken up in producing the fuel in refineries, with the difference between crude prices and wholesale petrol prices at almost 22 pence a liter (or $1.01 a US gallon), leaving just 8 pence a liter (36 cents a US gallon) for delivery, distribution and retailers.
Refining costs have risen along with everything else. Rising natural gas prices, which soared over the winter and remain elevated amid disruptions to Russian exports after its invasion of Ukraine, have increased the cost of removing sulphur from fuels, necessary to meet environmental standards for fuels.
Even so, oil companies are coming under pressure from governments on both sides of the Atlantic and that’s only going to intensify as they start to announce quarterly profits that will be boosted by soaring prices, while those same price rises are stoking inflation.
In the UK, petrol prices are high because of the large tax take, but they are rising because crude prices are rocketing. With limited spare capacity globally, both to produce and to refine oil, the only way that prices will ease is if demand is reined in to meet the available supply. While cutting taxes is popular, it isn’t going to solve the underlying problem that demand needs to come down — not just in the UK, but everywhere.
How Russian Is It?: A Very Crude Question: Julian Lee
The US Is Depleting Its Strategic Petroleum Reserve Faster Than It Looks: Javier Blas
We’ll Need Sanctions and Stamina to Defeat Putin: Clara Ferreira Marques | 2022-06-19T07:31:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who Gets What in the Great British £100 Fuel Fill-Up - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/who-gets-what-in-the-great-british100-fuel-fill-up/2022/06/19/df729de2-ef95-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/who-gets-what-in-the-great-british100-fuel-fill-up/2022/06/19/df729de2-ef95-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Analysis by Niall Ferguson | Bloomberg
I knew Paul Volcker. Jay Powell is no Paul Volcker.
I didn’t perhaps know “Big Paul” as well as Lloyd Bentsen knew John F. Kennedy, but I knew him well enough to talk trout fishing in a cloud of a cigar smoke, getting a crick in my neck as well as smoke in my eyes because he was so darn tall.
I never met Arthur Burns — Volcker’s predecessor, but one, as Federal Reserve chairman — who preferred puffing on a pipe to cigars. But I think I’ve read enough about Burns to suggest plausibly that the current Fed chair, Jay Powell, has more in common with him than with Volcker. This is unfortunate, and potentially disastrous for the US economy.
On Wednesday, Powell sought to re-establish his and the Federal Reserve’s credibility with an increase of 75 basis points in the federal funds rate — the biggest rate hike since 1994. The initial media and market reactions were quite positive. I was, and am not, convinced.
It’s not just that the Powell Fed has a track record for blinking under political pressure — he already had that in common with Burns, long before anyone had heard the word “Covid.” Think back four years, to 2018, the year of Powell’s appointment by President Donald Trump.
The Fed had embarked on a path of monetary-policy normalization after the protracted period of stagnation that followed the global financial crisis of 2008-09. The Fed funds target rate, having been stuck at between 0% and 0.25%, was first raised by a quarter point (25 bps) in December 2015. Beginning a year later, immediately after Trump’s election, then Fed Chair Janet Yellen began climbing a stairway to monetary normality, raising the target rate in 0.25% steps at roughly regular intervals. By the end of 2017, the upper end of the target was 1.5%.
Powell, who became chairman in February 2018, kept on climbing, reaching 2.5% just before Christmas of that year. At the same time, the Fed’s balance sheet began shrinking. In February 2019, it fell below $4 trillion for the first time since December 2013.
Trump repeatedly attacked Powell for this monetary tightening, comparing him to President Xi Jinping of China. “We have a very strong dollar and a very weak Fed,” he tweeted on Aug. 23. “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?”
There was more, much more. In the space of less than two years after he appointed Powell, Trump tweeted about the Fed 100 times. The climax came on Dec. 24, 2018, after a three-month stock market selloff: “The only problem our economy has is the Fed,” tweeted Trump. “They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch — he can’t putt!”
It worked. The Fed blinked. The rate hikes stopped. On Aug. 1, 2019, the Fed cut by 25 bps, the first of three cuts before the pandemic struck. That fall, the balance-sheet contraction ended, with new Fed purchases of short-term bonds that Powell insisted was “not QE” — for quantitative easing.
Five decades earlier, President Richard Nixon did not have Twitter at his disposal. But his view of Fed independence was not dissimilar to Trump’s, as Burton Abrams has shown. No sooner had Burns’s Fed nomination been announced, in October 1969, than Nixon made clear just what he thought of “the myth of the autonomous Fed.”
On Oct. 10, 1971, Nixon told Burns that any worries about the “liquidity problem” were “just bullshit.” In the president’s words, “I don’t want to go out of town fast,” an allusion to his prospects for re-election in 1972. The last thing he wanted was “a recession next year.”
A month later, the two men spoke on the phone. “Look, I wanted you to know that we are reducing the discount rate today,” Burns told Nixon, relaying the news that the Fed had reduced the discount rate (then the main policy rate) by 25 bps to 4.75%.
A month later, Burns reported another cut, to 4.5%. “Good, good, good,” replied Nixon. “Great. Great. You can lead ‘em,” meaning the Federal Open Markets Committee. “You always have, now. Just kick ’em in the rump a little.”
But Nixon was rarely satisfied for long. On Valentine’s Day, 1972, he complained to George Shultz (who was then director of the Office of Management and Budget) that Burns was seeking justifications for “not raising the money supply.” And he added: “War is going to be declared [on the Fed] if he doesn’t come around some.”
As in 2018, but with much better political timing, leaning on the Fed worked. Nixon swept to re-election on a booming economy. The price Americans paid came later in a surge of inflation, which the 90-day price and wage controls imposed in August 1971 and the subsequent “Price Commission” and price “freeze” of June 1973 could only partly suppress. The money supply (M2) grew at double-digit rates in the election year. Velocity (often overlooked) went up in 1973. Inflation peaked at 12% in the last quarter of 1974 — by which time, of course, Watergate had swept Nixon “out of town.”
Back in early March last year, along with just a handful of economists (notably former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard), I warned of the risk that US inflation would overshoot, as a consequence of fiscal overkill (the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of March 2021), ongoing supply disruptions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the disastrously slow monetary-policy response by Powell and his colleagues. Their mistake was to think that they could run the US economy hot and explicitly switch to an average inflation target without letting slip the anchor that had held down inflation expectations for two decades.
Even now, with inflation above 8% and the Fed scrambling to catch up with expectations, I still hear complacent arguments about the transitory nature of the problem, despite the evidence that the monetary-policy mistake of early 2021 was even bigger than those of the 1960s and 1970s. The argument is that pretty much every component of inflation except energy is now heading downward, while warehouses are overflowing with inventories.
Sure, we can reasonably expect inflation to reach a peak at some point this year. But the lesson of history is that it’s unlikely to come all the way back down to below 3% next year, below 2.5% in 2024, and then 2% thereafter. Yet that’s exactly what the Fed’s projections anticipate — as do those of the Congressional Budget Office and the International Monetary Fund.
The thing the economists’ models omit are the unforeseeable events that have a way of occurring in this thing we call “history.” Despite the fulfillment of my prediction last year that the Fed would have a real problem with inflation expectations if there was a war, people still seem to be assuming that global economic life will return to “normal” (meaning 2019) starting very soon.
Team Transitory thinks that not only inflation is transitory. They think the pandemic and the war in Ukraine are transitory, too. But the striking thing about all three is precisely that they just keep going, in defiance of Americans’ attention-deficit disorder.
Has China’s “Zero Covid” policy miraculously prevailed over the omicron variants of the virus? Only in Beijing’s propaganda. In both the capital and Shanghai, they are back to mass testing and restrictions.
Is an end to the war in Ukraine imminent? Only in the imaginings of those who have insisted all along that Ukraine would win it. On the bloody battlefields of the Donbas, Russia is gaining ground in a brutal war of attrition.
The 1970s are here to remind us that one damned disaster leads to another — and sometimes more than one — and that’s what makes it much harder than it looks in an economics textbook for a central bank to recover from a big monetary-policy mistake.
The late 1960s was the last time US inflation expectations became unanchored. Despite staying relatively contained in the first half of that decade, both headline and core CPI had climbed to 6% by the decade’s end. In addition to Fed errors, the costs of the Vietnam War and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs were to blame. True, inflation peaked in early 1970 and then came back down to below 3% in August 1972. But that did not mean it was transitory.
Now long forgotten, a sustained rise in food prices was soon driving inflation back up, even before the oil-price shock that followed the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973. That year, 57% of the increase in headline consumer price inflation could be attributed to food; only about 8.2% was attributable to energy.
A combination of factors led to strong food-price inflation — notably failed harvests in the Soviet Union in 1971 and 1972, as well as US government controls on how much land American farmers could use to grow crops. The oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries in October 1973 was the coup de grace, greatly amplifying the inflationary problem created by the laxity of the Burns Fed.
Today, in a similar way, the war in Ukraine is battering the world economy with a food- and energy-price shock. Smart guys and central bankers who say we should ignore the prices of those things — to focus on “core” inflation — overlook that consumers do just the opposite: They ignore core and focus on groceries and gas. And doing so right now is precisely what causes people to expect higher inflation in the future.
The result will be stagflationary, as it was in 1974. Higher prices for inelastic goods will force consumers to cut back on other purchases, hampering real demand growth. That’s why there was a recession in 1974-75, which in turn brought down inflation to 5% by the end of 1976. But that didn’t mean inflation was transitory, much less mean-reverting. Another spate of geopolitical instability — culminating in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — drove inflation up yet again. It peaked at just below 15% in April 1980.
Judging by the absolute numbers, the Fed’s current tightening path looks closer to the failed tightening of the mid-1970s than to what had to be done later to achieve a “regime change” to disinflation. The Fed hiked by 350 bps in 1973-74, more than seems currently to be envisaged (150 bps since March, with another 175 bps promised in the Fed’s revised Summary of Economic Projections). The 1977-80 tightening, by contrast, amounted to 775 bps. Moreover, in real terms, the Fed was never this far behind the curve in the 70s.
As the late, great historian of the Fed Allan Meltzer showed, the Fed raised rates plenty of times during the Great Inflation. Between the “big error” he identified (the rate cuts of August 1968) and the big solution (the appointment of Volcker 11 years later), the Fed hiked rates at 21 of its 36 meetings. In four cases, however, the Fed paused or even lowered rates well before inflation was defeated.
The hiking cycle that began on Dec. 18, 1968, concluded four months later with a 50-bps hike, for a total of 75 basis points. The Fed then paused for nearly 20 months, before easing in November 1970, with inflation at 5.6%. Similarly, the 25-bps hike of July 1971 lasted a mere four months and was reversed in November of that year, thanks in part to Nixon’s browbeating of Burns.
A more committed effort began in January 1973, when the Fed hiked by 50 bps in the face of mounting inflation. It continued hiking for the next 15 months, with a final 50-bps hike in April 1974, bringing the discount rate to 8%. However, a series of cuts began in December 1974, when inflation was running at 12.1%. Within two years, the Fed rate was back to 5.25% — only 75 bps above the start of the previous hiking cycle.
Following these three abortive attempts, the Fed embarked on its most sustained hiking cycle in August 1977, two years before Volcker was appointed. Over the next 30 months, the Fed raised 14 times, bringing the discount rate to a postwar high of 13% in February 1980. In Meltzer’s words, “the simple explanation” for why inflation persisted during the 1970s is that the Fed failed to sustain efforts to end it.
The Jimmy Carter administration appointed G. William Miller to replace Burns after his term was up in March 1978. Under Miller, according to Meltzer, the FOMC understood inflation as a monetary problem “much more than in the past.” Yet the problem only worsened. Miller’s tenure was brief. After 17 months he was appointed Treasury secretary.
With Volcker at the helm, the Fed raised the discount rate three times in just over two months. In an unusual Saturday night news conference on Oct. 6, 1979, he announced his intention to slay the inflationary dragon with a 1% hike and a package of monetary measures. In February 1980 the Fed hiked by a further 100 bps, the final move in a 775-bps hiking cycle.
Yet even Big Paul was capable of blinking. By the April 22 meeting, the Fed faced not only high inflation but also rising unemployment and rapidly declining output — in short, a recession.
The Fed’s subsequent rate cuts appeared to confirm the suspicions of skeptics that it had once again abandoned its anti-inflationary policy. In total, the Fed cut the discount rate three times for a total of 300 bps over two months, beginning at the end of May 1980. By August, contrary to the Fed staff’s projections, the recession was over. That allowed Volcker to return to the inflation-fighting fray by raising rates by 100 bps in September 1980.
True, the September and October decisions of the board were carried by 8-4 votes, but the dissenters at both meetings were arguing for even tighter policy. The board executed three 100-bps hikes for a total of 300 bps over three months, lifting the discount rate back to 13% before the year’s end. The Fed hiked once more in May 1981 by 100 bps.
Monetary policy during the great inflation was not inert; it was just ineffectual — not so much a stairway as a game of snakes and ladders. At first in the 1960s, in Meltzer’s words, Fed staff and some board members “denied for several years that inflation had either begun or increased. They did not deny the numbers they saw … [but] gave special explanations … in effect claiming that the rise in the price level resulted from one-time, transitory changes that they did not expect to repeat.” (My emphasis on “transitory.”)
Then, when the Fed did act, it failed to follow through. In April 1969, November 1971, April 1974 and February 1980, the rate hikes stopped not because the Fed had won its fight against inflation, but because GDP and employment were going down. In each case (apart from in 1971), hiking ceased during or shortly before a recession, even when inflation was clearly not under control. To quote Meltzer again, bringing down inflation expectations ultimately necessitated “more restriction than anyone on the FOMC had anticipated.”
Will the Powell Fed be more like the Burns Fed or the Volcker Fed? We won’t know for sure until it confronts something much uglier than the current equity bear market. All we do know is that Powell has blinked before now — and in response to a 19% stock market correction in late 2018 and a president with a Twitter habit. Trump’s successor is not much of tweeter. But the market is already down further.
The Fed Has a Narrow Path Between Inflation and Recession: The Editors
The Fed Needs to Get Real About Interest Rates: Bill Dudley
Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. The Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the founder of Greenmantle, an advisory firm, he is author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” | 2022-06-19T09:02:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Fed Hasn’t Fixed Its Worst Blunder Since the 1970s - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-fed-hasnt-fixed-its-worst-blunder-since-the-1970s/2022/06/19/a382ff3c-efa6-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-fed-hasnt-fixed-its-worst-blunder-since-the-1970s/2022/06/19/a382ff3c-efa6-11ec-9f90-79df1fb28296_story.html |
Abdul Muzikir, now 67, was convicted of killing a 24-year-old news reporter as a group of Hanafi Muslims took hostages.
Police marksman Clarence Phillips stands with his rifle near the District building, where gunmen took hostages in March 1977. (AP Photo) (AP)
Maurice Williams was just 24 years old, working as a news reporter for Howard University’s WHUR-FM radio, when he was shot to death during a 1977 takeover of a city government building by a dozen Hanafi Muslims.
A judge later sentenced his shooter, Abdul Muzikir, to more than seven decades behind bars, telling him the punishment meant “you will die in jail.”
But in April, Muzikir, now 67, was ordered released from prison, as part of an effort to let out inmates who have served at least 20 years in prison, are determined not to be a danger to society and might be particularly susceptible to the pandemic because of their age or health conditions.
Muzikir’s release — which came over the objection of a federal prosecutor — evoked memories of a dark chapter in D.C. history, when a dozen Hanafi Muslims violently stormed government property and took hostages. They were hoping, authorities have said, to force officials to turn over five people convicted of murdering seven family members of Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the leader of the plot.
Williams became one of the few working journalists killed in the nation’s capital. The late Marion Barry — then a council member who would go on to become mayor — was also shot and wounded.
In court papers and interviews, some of the victims’ family members said they were at peace with Muzikir’s release — if he truly was no longer a threat.
“He served his time, why not let him live the rest of his life free,” said Williams’s brother, Myron Williams, in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “He accomplished a lot while he was in prison. It’s time.”
Muzikir, who court records say is now residing with his family in Silver Spring, Md., declined to comment through his attorney, Jon Anderson with the District’s Public Defender Service.
In all, 149 hostages were held captive in three downtown buildings between March 9 through March 11. In addition to the downtown District building where Williams was killed, the gunmen held hostages at gunpoint at the headquarters of B’nai B’rith, then located in the 1600 block of Rhode Island Ave. NW and the Islamic Center, in the 2500 block of Massachusetts Avenue NW.
Myron Williams said he believed Muzikir, also known as Marquette Anthony Hall, and the other co-defendants were “brainwashed” by Khaalis. “He was only 22 at the time, and it was a different time in our country then,” he said.
Barry’s widow, Cora Masters Barry, wrote in a letter to the judge that she, too, did not oppose Muzikir’s release. “I hope with the years that he has left, they will be fruitful. That’s all,” she said in a brief interview with The Washington Post.
Since the pandemic began in 2020, D.C. Superior Court judges have granted 203 people compassionate release, according to court data. Another 182 had petitions pending as of May 31, while 547 had their petitions denied, according to the data. A majority of the petitions cited concerns over covid-19.
A majority of Muzikir’s co-defendants were sentenced to decades in prison, which were effectively life sentences. Muzikir was sentenced to 77 years to life in prison, according to prosecutors. All of the co-defendants have either died in prison or have been released, Muzikir’s attorney wrote.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamela S. Satterfield opposed Muzikir’s release. In a 17-page petition to Judge Peter A. Krauthamer, she argued that Muzikir’s petition should be denied because, she wrote, he did not show any remorse for his involvement in the takeover, nor for killing Williams.
Satterfield noted Muzikir was the “only hostage-taker” who fired his weapon, shooting Williams in his chest at close range and injuring three other hostages. “The gravity of his crimes is serious and the consequences of potential re-offense is great,” Satterfield wrote.
In her filing to the judge, Satterfield wrote that two family members of Muzikir’s victims opposed his release — though one of them told The Post he did not.
Satterfield included in her filing a quote from Stephen Pierce, the son of Robert Pierce, who was a law intern in the District building when Muzikir shot him in his back. Robert Pierce was paralyzed in his legs and one side of his body; his son said he died about 25 years after the attack.
“A violent offender who does not express remorse for his crimes, much less offer a sincere apology to his victims, seems like a poor candidate for early release,” Stephen Pierce wrote, according to the prosecutor’s filing.
But in an interview, Pierce said despite those concerns, he did not object to Muzikir’s release.
Satterfield, in an email, said she interpreted Pierce’s words as an objection.
Satterfield also wrote that the stepdaughter of another person who was shot — Mack Wesley Cantrell, who was working as a guard in the District building — emphatically opposed Muzikir’s release. Cantrell was shot in the face and later died of a heart attack. His stepdaughter, Satterfield wrote, said Muzikir “took a life of a good man who never go to know his grandchildren and niece and nephews.”
“He was protecting people at the District building. An (sic) you went there and shot him,” the stepdaughter wrote, according to Satterfield’s court filing, which did not name the woman. “He needs to stay in jail where other people will be safe from him.”
Muzikir’s public defender encouraged the judge to base his ruling on Muzikir’s nearly spotless prison record. The attorney wrote Muzikir had only incurred one disciplinary infraction during his 44 years of incarceration, and that was for a nonviolent offense: failing to take down a clothesline hanging in his cell after he had been ordered to do so. Muzikir also earned his associate’s degree and learned graphic arts in the prison’s print shop, his attorney wrote.
In his ruling, Krauthamer wrote that whether Muzikir was remorseful had “no bearing on his current or future dangerousness,” and that nowhere in the District’s compassionate release statute was expressing remorse a stipulation.
Krauthamer wrote that Muzikir would “not pose a danger” when let out and granted his release.
Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report. | 2022-06-19T10:29:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man convicted in Hanafi Muslim takeover of D.C. buildings released - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/19/abdul-muzikir-release-hanafi-muslims/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/19/abdul-muzikir-release-hanafi-muslims/ |
Maryland has a glass ceiling. Democrats won’t break it this year.
Maryland’s crowded Democratic primary race for governor has no women at the top of the ticket, and almost all picked a woman for a running mate.
Maryland Democrats have a large and talented field chasing the top political job in 2022, jockeying to win the governor's mansion back from Republicans. (Erin Cox/TWP)
In a deeply blue state where leaders pride themselves on promoting diversity, the Democratic ballot for governor of Maryland is entirely male.
No women are running at the top of the ticket in a state with no women in Congress and none elected to statewide office.
And yet in the upcoming primary, Democrats have an unprecedented seven women — all women of color — jockeying behind men for lieutenant governor, the No. 2 position.
“It seems to signal that while women can have a seat at the table they just can’t be at the head of it,” said Krishanti Vignarajah, who ran in Maryland’s last gubernatorial Democratic primary four years ago.
Then, in what was deemed “The Year of the Woman,” when more Democratic women than ever ran for Congress and for governor across the country, Vignarajah was one of three women at the top of the ticket. This year, all but one person in the all-male field picked a woman for lieutenant governor, an undefined role that has been largely ceremonial.
The number of women and specifically the number of Black and Brown women chosen as running mates is unprecedented in Maryland, the most diverse state on the East Coast, and is seen by some as a much-needed acknowledgment that elected officials should mirror the people they represent. For some others, it’s not enough.
The women, who met this monthfor the lone lieutenant governor forum of the race, are offering sharp critiques of Maryland’s track record on serving women.
“With everything that’s at stake right now, it’s not enough to be pro-choice anymore. You have to have a proven track record of advocating for access to abortion,” said Michelle Siri, running mate to former U.S. education secretary John B. King, Jr., and executive director of The Women’s Law Center of Maryland.
The women drew from experiences as working mothers, as public servants who became “the first” or “the only” of their gender or race in the room, as people who experienced gender discrimination or launched careers to promote gender or racial equity.
Candace Hollingsworth, the former mayor of Hyattsville who is running with former attorney general Doug Gansler, described the wage gap as another way that women, particular women of color, have to work harder and longer to get just as far as other people. Women in Maryland make 86 cents to every dollar paid to a man, according to the National Women’s Law Center, and the gap is wider for Black and Latinx women. The consequence, Hollingsworth said, can be measured in time away from families or a lack of time to pursue political office.
“Pay equity doesn’t just give us more money,” she said, “it gives us our time back, time that we could use to pursue our passions and our dreams.”
As the women discussed ways to promote women’s issues, the sole male running mate on the ballot — Jared Dispenza, who is running with retired professor Jerome Segal — yielded his time to the rest of the field.
“The best thing I can do is shut up and listen,” he said.
State comptroller Peter Franchot chose former Prince George’s County Council member Monique Anderson-Walker; author and former nonprofit chief Wes Moore named Aruna Miller, an engineer and former state delegate; former U.S. labor secretary Tom Perez selected former Baltimore City council member Shannon Sneed; former nonprofit executive Jon Baron tapped Natalie Williams, a public affairs director for an education group and millennial candidate Ashwani Jain selected LaTrece Hawkins Lytes, a longtime Maryland resident and political newcomer.
While the Democrats have assured they will not shatter Maryland’s glass ceiling this year, the Republicans might. The lead contender in a four-way race for the Republican nomination is former Maryland commerce secretary Kelly Schulz.
Vignarajah said she is impressed with the talented pool of Democratic candidates, but “it seems like we’re going backward, rather than forward … It is a real disappointment that the only woman running for governor is on the Republican side.”
The disparity has not gone unnoticed.
“There’s a lot of women who look at this state — a state that used to have Barbara A. Mikulski, who is an icon of women in politics — and it’s frustrating,” said Mileah Kromer, a political scientist at Goucher College. “On it’s face, it’s ridiculous that we don’t have women in the congressional delegation or in statewide office.”
Md. Democrats jab, offer broad visions in lone governor’s race debate
Women make up 51.6 percent of the state’s population but disproportionally register with Democrats, as they do nationwide. Women make up nearly 59 percent of registered Democratic voters in Maryland, about 48 percent of Republican voters and 47 percent of unaffiliated voters, according to the state Board of Elections.
But Maryland is not the only state that has never had a woman at the helm. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, 19 states, including California, Pennsylvania and Georgia, have never elected a woman as governor.
“While Maryland is unique, unfortunately it’s not that unique,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the center. Dittmar said the dynamics in each state tend to be different, including who is recruited and who is supported to run.
Dittmar said the issue tends to be highlighted more in Maryland because the state doesn’t have female representation in Congress and it is the state from which Mikulski, the “dean of the Senate women” and the longest serving woman in Congress, hails. “It takes work and intention to ensure that representation exists at all levels,” she said.
There also is a lack of racial diversity in the state’s executive offices.
Nearly a third of Maryland residents are Black; more than 10 percent are Latino and nearly seven percent are Asian, according to recent census data.
Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford (R), who is Black and took office as part of Gov. Larry Hogan’s ticket, is the only Black statewide elected official in Maryland. No Black or Latino candidate has ever been elected statewide on their own. Several are on the ballot this year.
“Women of color are the core of the Democratic Party … I think we have a group of candidates this time that really looked at the race and said I need to recognize that women aren’t in this race,” said Susie Turnbull, a former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and former chair of the state Democratic Party.
Turnbull, who ran for lieutenant governor on Ben Jealous’s ticket in 2018, said she was somewhat surprised when Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who had the name recognition and the war chest to mount a competitive bid, did not jump in this year’s race.
Alsobrooks announced last year that she would not make a gubernatorial run, opting instead to seek reelection. She said she wanted to dedicate her time to her 16-year-old daughter and to help county residents recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
Laura Neuman, a Democrat who is White and ran a short-lived run for governor this year, abruptly ended her campaign because of a family emergency.
Neuman and Vignarajah each said it is an uphill climb for women to launch and it gets even steeper as they appear to have to work for credibility.
“I was surprised how many times people said to me ‘maybe you should be someone’s running mate,’ when I was talking about whether or not I was going to get into the race,” said Neuman, who noted that she was a business woman who held public office and a native of Maryland.
Vignarajah said she was told more than a few times that she should consider staying home to take care of her infant daughter.
“You get the comments ‘why don’t you run for a lower office first?,’” Vignarajah said. “'Why are you running with a baby? You should take care of your baby.'”
She would offer the same reply each time: “That’s what I’m doing, trying to take care of my baby by making this world a better place.” | 2022-06-19T10:29:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland Dems picked women as running mates, not candidates for gov - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/19/women-maryland-governors-race/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/19/women-maryland-governors-race/ |
Colombia holds historic presidential election, marking a new era
A worker cleans a table at a convention center turned polling station, ahead of the June 19 presidential election, in Bogotá, Colombia, on Friday. (Santiago Arcos/Reuters)
Colombians head to the polls on Sunday for a high-stakes election between two populist presidential candidates promising to fundamentally transform the country.
It is a presidential election unlike any other in Colombia’s history, one that will test the long-running but fragile democracy in the third largest nation in Latin America. It could mark the start of a dramatic shift in the country’s economic model, the role of its government and its relationship with other countries in the hemisphere — including the United States, its most important ally.
Voters have cried out for a change from the status quo. They’re demanding someone drastically different from the right-wing incumbent, Iván Duque. And for the first time, they will choose between two anti-establishment presidential candidates who ran without the backing of the traditional political class that has governed Colombia for generations.
Gustavo Petro, a senator and former guerrilla member who vows to reshape the economic system to lift up the poor, could become the country’s first leftist president, bringing an end to two centuries of center-right leadership. Rodolfo Hernández, a wealthy businessman and outsider candidate who pledges to root out corruption, could send the country down an unpredictable path.
“These are clearly two candidates that are going to signal and actually execute a change with the traditional parties, and in some cases with important cornerstones of our economic system,” said Sandra Botero, a political scientist at Colombia’s University del Rosario. “I don’t think we’ve had an election that is this close, and where so much is at stake, for decades. Regardless of who wins, we seem to be standing at a critical juncture.”
The election marks yet another blow to the political establishment in Latin America, where voters have sought to punish incumbent governments for the devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. If Petro wins, it would add to a wave of South American countries looking left: In Peru, a rise in poverty helped propel Marxist rural schoolteacher Pedro Castillo to the presidency last year. In Chile, the free-market model of the region, voters this year chose as president 36-year-old former student activist Gabriel Boric. And in Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leads polls to unseat President Jair Bolsonaro in October.
Polls show the two candidates tied, setting the stage for a tight race. Campaigns on the left and the right have made accusations of electoral fraud, and a recent lapse in a legislative vote count further deepened mistrust in the country’s electoral system. Fears are mounting that the losing candidate on Sunday could contest the results and spark civil unrest one year after historic protests swept the country.
On Wednesday, police in multiple cities detained activists who stood on the front lines of last year’s protests, accusing them of threatening to disturb public order around the elections. Alejandra Barrios Cabrera, director of Colombia’s Electoral Observation Mission, said the arrests “could end up generating an opposite effect,” further emboldening protesters. “The detentions demonstrate the nervous situation the country finds itself in right now,” she said, but added that both candidates have said they will urge a peaceful response.
The vote comes after the most violent election cycle in more than a decade, in which both campaigns faced assassination threats. At least 290 municipalities in Colombia are at “high and extreme risk” of armed violence surrounding the election, Colombia’s ombudsman’s office warned last week.
But Javi López, the Spaniard who leads the European Union’s election observation mission in Colombia, said that last month’s first round of elections were carried out “peacefully and calmly.” He said the electoral system made important improvements that helped “overcome a climate of mistrust.”
Voters will choose between two competing visions of change for the country. Both candidates have sought to tap into widespread frustration in a country where more than 40 percent of people are living in poverty and nearly half are struggling to find enough to eat.
Two outsider candidates for president head to runoff in Colombia
Petro, the former mayor of Bogotá running in his third presidential race, proposes redistributive policies such as free higher education and a universal public health-care system. He says he would raise taxes on the 4,000 wealthiest Colombians while establishing a minimum wage for single mothers. He plans to end new oil exploration and move the country toward renewable energy.
Hernández, the former mayor of Bucaramanga who has never held or run for a national office, pledges to tackle government corruption, cut costs and reduce the national deficit.
Both candidates have suggested declaring states of emergency to push through their agendas without the support of Congress. And both Petro and Hernández were accused of authoritarian tendencies in their time as mayors.
In Bogotá, Petro oversaw a slew of staff departures and was criticized for refusing to listen to his advisers. In the midsize city of Bucaramanga, the foul-mouthed Hernández was known for insulting his employees and was once suspended for slapping the face of a city councilman. Hernández was also charged by Colombia’s attorney general with improperly giving out waste management contracts to benefit his son. (He denies the accusations but is scheduled to face trial next month).
Either presidency could have profound implications for the rest of the hemisphere, and could reshape the country’s role as the United States’ most stable partner in the region. Both candidates have criticized the two countries’ shared war on drugs and have supported some type of drug legalization. They’ve criticized aerial fumigation of coca, the base plant for cocaine. And they would revive diplomatic relations with Venezuela, a drastic shift from the Duque administration’s aggressive approach against the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro.
Petro has worried some U.S. officials by proposing a change in the extradition treaty between the two countries and in foreign trade agreements. Hernández, meanwhile, has revealed few details about any of his policies, including his approach to diplomacy. “It’s really a leap into the unknown in terms of the bilateral relationship,” said Kevin Whitaker, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia and now a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
The campaign has notably lacked any public debates in recent weeks between the two candidates, after Hernández refused to participate. After a court ordered the candidates to organize a debate last week, Hernández agreed to meet only under certain conditions, including control over which journalists would moderate it. The debate never took place.
Instead, the emotionally-charged campaign in recent weeks has often played out on social media, through frequent scandals and attacks on Twitter and in viral videos on Hernández’s quirky TikTok account.
In Bucaramanga, resident Monica Cordero is “100 percent with the engineer,” she said, referring to Hernández. Cordero lives right next to a park renovated during Hernández’s time as mayor, a project meant to help improve the low-income surrounding neighborhood but that has now become a hub for crime and drug deals. Cordero continues to believe in Hernández, a man she says “makes sure the money goes to the poor.”
“He always shows his face,” she said. “He’s not a politician.”
But Luis Fernando Barrios, 21, can’t stand Hernández’s “explosive” temperament, he said as he voted in the first round in a working-class neighborhood in Bogotá. He isn’t thrilled by Petro’s style either, but he thinks the leftist is the only candidate who can bring a real change to the country.
The engineering student, who participated in some of last year’s protests, said his family has felt the strain of the pandemic’s economic crisis. His father is a cattle farmer and his mother works in a clothing warehouse. “The cost of everything is going up, but the money isn’t,” he said.
Petro would be “something totally different from what we’ve had for 20 years,” he said. “We don’t have any other option.” | 2022-06-19T10:29:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colombia elections: Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández run for president - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/colombia-election-petro-rodolfo/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/colombia-election-petro-rodolfo/ |
Macron faces critical test as French parliamentary election gets underway
By Rick Noack
A box containing cast ballots at a polling station June 19 in Marseille, France. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)
PARIS — French voters headed to the polls in the decisive round of parliamentary elections on Sunday, as President Emmanuel Macron’s absolute majority hung in the balance.
If he loses control over the lower house of parliament on Sunday, it could obstruct his second term at a time when Europe faces profound challenges prompted by the war in Ukraine.
Surveys suggest Macron’s party and his allies could lose dozens of seats and may fail to reach the 289-seat threshold they would need to rule without having to build coalitions with political opponents.
Macron beat far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the presidential election runoff in April, securing another five-year term, but he has since faced an emboldened and more united left-wing opposition, composed of the Greens, the Socialists, the Communists, and the party of far-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Many leftist voters primarily cast their ballots for Macron in April to prevent a far-right victory, not because they supported Macron’s proposals.
Under Mélenchon’s leadership, the left-wing alliance has portrayed the parliamentary election — a vote that usually tends to favor the president’s party and allies — as an extension of the presidential election, and as a realistic opportunity to influence Macron’s second term without risking to empower the far-right.
Although French presidents wield more power over foreign policy and other areas than their counterparts in many other European countries, Macron still needs a parliamentary majority if he wants to implement his political agenda over the next five years.
“The whole Fifth Republic has been designed in order to prevent a situation of instability in parliament,” said Vincent Martigny, a political scientist at the University of Nice, referring to France’s political system that has been in place since the late 1950s.
If Macron were to lose his majority, it would “create, for the first time since 1958, a very strong instability in parliament,” he said.
After his reelection in April, Macron promised to unite the country and he made gestures to leftist voters he had disappointed during his first term, during which he had shifted to the right on various issues. But those moves appeared to have come too late for him to regain lost support. In the first round of the parliamentary elections last weekend, Macron’s alliance and his left-wing challengers finished neck-and-neck. It was the worst parliamentary election result of an incumbent president in over half a century.
As the possibility of a hung parliament became increasingly realistic over the past weeks, Macron doubled down on his criticism of Mélenchon and appealed to voters to allow him to pursue his agenda. “Nothing would be worse than adding French disorder to the world’s disorder,” he said last week.
Despite his bloc’s weak performance last Sunday, Macron spent much of the past week outside of France, traveling to Romania to visit French troops on the eastern NATO flank, and then heading to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky. Macron’s Ukraine trip briefly put the war back into the political spotlight in France, but polls suggest that other issues like the rising cost of living, the impact of climate change or health care are more important to voters.
French voters’ focus on social and domestic issues has played into the hands of Mélenchon, whose foreign policy proposals remain controversial in France and across the European Union. The far-left leader has wanted to pull France out of NATO, and he has argued in favor of France deliberately ignoring E.U. law. On Friday, Mélenchon said he would naturalize WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who could soon be extradited from Britain to the United States, if he’s elected prime minister after Sunday’s vote.
Mélenchon remains unlikely to be elected prime minister — a role that, unlike the president’s position, relies on a parliamentary majority. But his alliance could still make deep inroads into French politics and become a forceful opposition.
Abstention rates could play a key role in Sunday’s vote. Whereas turnout dropped to a record low in last weekend’s first round, some observers anticipate a possible rebound in participation this Sunday because more constituencies remain competitive than five years ago.
In France, parliamentary seats are not distributed proportionately. Instead, the two-round system is designed to result in a runoff vote between the two leading candidates in their respective constituencies, barring the rare event of a clear first-round victory. In practice, this favors bigger alliances like Macron’s bloc or Mélenchon’s left-wing alliance over smaller or more isolated parties like Le Pen’s National Rally.
Even though Le Pen obtained a record score in the presidential election with 41 percent of the vote share, her party is only estimated to win a few dozen out of the 577 parliamentary seats.
Élisabeth Borne appointed as next prime minister of France
Le Pen had refused to form an alliance with her far-right competitor Éric Zemmour, whose party failed to qualify any of its candidates for the second round.
Mélenchon’s success at forming a broad left-wing alliance has stunned some observers, but the alliance’s long-term survival chances remain in doubt.
The parties’ strong performance last weekend largely reflected a desire among many leftist voters in France for more parliamentary representation, even if it requires concessions. Leftist voters worry Macron is unlikely to follow through on his promises to take their concerns more seriously in his second term.
Yet the leftist bloc’s rise could force Macron to shift further to the right after Sunday’s vote.
If Macron lacks a large number of seats, one of the only options for him could be a coalition with the center-right Republicans party. Another alternative could be to build ad hoc alliances for each proposed bill.
But compromises across ideological lines are rare in the French parliament, said Martigny, “and especially for Mr. Macron, who is not a man of compromise.” | 2022-06-19T10:29:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Emmanuel Macron tested as France’s parliamentary election gets underway - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/macron-france-parliamentary-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/macron-france-parliamentary-election/ |
‘Day Zero’ water crisis looms on South Africa’s eastern cape
People refill water bottles at the Newlands spring tap in Cape Town, South Africa, in February 2018. The city was then forced to reduce its water usage in face of an approaching “day zero,” the day when the city's taps would have run dry. (Charlie Shoemaker for The Washington Post/Charlie Shoemaker )
JOHANNESBURG — Activists in Gqeberha have long warned of “day zero” — the moment when the taps in this South African coastal city will run dry. Years of severe drought and municipal mismanagement have edged Gqeberha closer and closer to that reality. Now, day zero is nearly here.
On Monday, city officials announced that one of its four major dams had reached a level so low that barges trying to extract water sucked in mud instead. Another dam is expected to fail in the next two weeks, a third in about a month. Large parts of the city could be completely without running water by the end of the month, according to local officials.
Four years ago, when Cape Town announced it was nearing its own day zero, the world turned to watch. Headlines blared that this was the first time in modern history that a major world city would be without running water. Gqeberha, by contrast, has received little international attention.
For many in South Africa, water shortages have long been a way of life. Recurring droughts in the region — which experts say are almost certainly exacerbated by climate change — combined with decaying infrastructure and poor maintenance, have led to repeated water outages in Nelson Mandela Bay, where Gqeberha is located, as well as in other cities.
Since 2015, Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth, has been in the grip of a historic drought. But the city estimates it also loses about a third of its water supply to leaks in its piping, and has a backlog of about 3000 unfixed leaks, according to Luvuyo Bangazi, spokesperson for the municipality’s joint operations crisis committee.
Sibusiso Khasa, a campaigner with Amnesty International in South Africa, said that when he visited Nelson Mandela Bay last week, he frequently saw water pouring from burst pipes, creating man-made lakes in roads and fields, while nearby residents complained their taps were dry.
“Yes, it’s drought disaster. And yes, climate change is a factor, but there’s also been a failure at the level of the municipality to fix these leaks,” he said.
Nelson Mandela Bay is ruled by a volatile coalition government, and city appointments related to water have turned over repeatedly in the last several years. Last year, South Africa’s national treasury labeled the city “dysfunctional,” with more than $1 billion in “irregular expenditures” between 2018 and 2020, and city officials have been implicated in several high-profile graft cases in recent years.
“You do have to concede that political challenges or instability in administrations has had an unavoidable knock-on effect on decision-making” related to water, Bangazi said.
Like many crises in South Africa, Gqeberha’s water shortage is also a study in inequality. Although rolling water outages have affected the entire area, residents of the city’s walled suburbs can offset the impact by drilling boreholes or simply buying bottled water. But much of Nelson Mandela Bay’s population lives in townships, the under-resourced, apartheid-era communities originally built around South African cities to house Black workers. These areas still have the least functional infrastructure and the most dense populations.
“There’s a water apartheid here,” says Siyabulela Mama, a member of the Water Crisis Committee, a group set up to advocate on behalf of working class communities in Nelson Mandela Bay. In his township of Zwide, he says running water only comes on intermittently. Residents are forced to rely on roaming tankers, collecting water in buckets to drink, cook, wash clothes, and bathe.
In Kwa Nobuhle, a township in the nearby town of Kariega, Ntombentle Nelana says much of her life now revolves around finding water and preserving her supply. At her house, she says water comes out of the taps only a couple hours a day, usually in the middle of the night. “If you’re asleep and you don’t hear it, you can easily miss it,” she said. The city sends out water tankers, “but you don’t know when they are coming.”
Nelana can no longer afford to water her garden, which she once relied on for spinach, peppers, and watermelons. “When you wash your body, you then keep that water for washing your clothes, and after you wash your clothes, you keep it for the toilet,” she says. But sometimes it isn’t enough, and Nelana, whose only work is a part-time job as a gardener for the municipality, has to buy bottled water from local shops. “It’s expensive for me,” she said.
Bangazi says the only time water is shut off is when maintenance is being done on the system. “There are no dry taps in Nelson Mandela Bay,” he claims.
But city officials have urged all residents to limit their daily consumption to 50 liters — roughly four toilet flushes. Doing so, they say, will help delay “day zero” by a month or more, giving local government enough time to build infrastructure to reroute water from a still-functional dam that supplies a different part of the municipality. Similar water-saving measures helped Cape Town avert catastrophe in 2018.
On Tuesday, the municipal council approved an emergency intervention plan by the national department of water and sanitation. All the while, water levels continued to dwindle.
“Government has known since 2016 that there was a drought,” Khasa says. “So why are they only intervening now, when it’s too late?” | 2022-06-19T10:30:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Day Zero’ water crisis in Gqeberha on South Africa’s eastern cape - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/south-africa-water-day-zero/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/south-africa-water-day-zero/ |
Decades of falling rates give way to higher borrowing costs and new math for investments
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday as the Federal Reserve announces the largest hike in interest rates since 1994. Cheap borrowing has fueled the economy for decades, but that may be coming to an end. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates this week by the largest amount since 1994, it did more than declare war on inflation.
The U.S. central bank also launched a high-stakes test of the economy’s ability to shed its dependence on limitless credit and tolerate higher borrowing costs for consumers, businesses and the government.
For 40 years, the formula for U.S. economic growth has been the same: cheap money. Consumers could borrow easily to buy homes and cars. Companies, whether profitable or not, could tap bond investors for cash to fund their operations. And Washington could afford to bail out both Wall Street and Main Street by running eye-popping budget deficits made possible by borrowed funds.
Whenever the stock market wobbled — beginning with the 1987 crash — the Fed rode to the rescue by slashing rates and flooding markets with cash.
“It’s just a completely different environment,” said Eric Winograd, senior economist with AllianceBernstein in New York.
Warehouses in China and the U.S. show global economy struggling to adjust
The Fed’s three-quarter percentage point increase in its benchmark lending rate this week marked an abrupt end to more than four decades of falling, and ultimately near-zero, interest rates.
The shift has rocked financial markets, driving mortgage rates to their highest level in nearly 14 years, sending bonds into their steepest plunge ever and tanking speculative investments such as technology stocks and bitcoin, a cryptocurrency.
As the economy adjusts, more tumult lies ahead. Consumers, already feeling the pinch of higher prices, will pay more for credit card balances and auto loans. The least creditworthy companies will struggle to raise money needed to hire and expand. And Uncle Sam will face tens of billions of dollars in higher annual interest bills.
American households may find the transition out of the low-rate era particularly challenging. The jump in rates has closed the door on mortgage refinancings, a source of added cash for millions of homeowners over the past year, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The high inflation that prompted the Fed to act is also making it hard for people to grow their wealth.
“Stocks, bonds and cash — we’re in a bear market for all three,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist for Charles Schwab & Co.
Higher rates already are crimping financing for heavily-indebted companies such as Dunn Paper, a maker of specialty paper in Port Huron, Mich., which missed an interest payment at the end of March. The total value of debt considered “distressed” by S&P Global Ratings has nearly doubled over the past month to $49 billion, including securities from companies such as Rite Aid and Bed Bath & Beyond, as investors demand higher yields from such risky issuers.
The federal government, which spent freely during the pandemic, will also feel the sting of higher rates. Annual interest on the national debt will reach $399 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But that estimate assumes that the government will pay 2.1 percent to borrow money from long-term bond investors. If instead the yield on the 10-year Treasury security this year averages its current 3.25 percent figure, taxpayers would pay an additional $32 billion in interest, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The added interest costs from higher rates alone is more than the combined annual budgets for NASA and the National Park Service.
Interest rates represent the price of money, the foundation of all investment and commerce.
The Fed influences borrowing costs across the economy through its control of the federal funds rate, the price banks pay for overnight loans. That rate, in turn, affects mortgages and feeds into investor calculations of stock and bond values.
As rates increase, the certainty of earning money today from a bond or certificate of deposit becomes a better financial proposition than placing a bet on a risky new technology company that may only begin posting profits in a few years. That explains why the technology-rich Nasdaq index is down roughly 30 percent this year.
Over the past seven decades, the Fed’s benchmark lending rate has traced an extraordinary arc. From about 1 percent in the mid-1950s, the Fed funds rate reached a peak of 20 percent in 1980, before beginning a four-decade slide to the ultralow borrowing costs of the past decade.
Rates began falling in the early 1980s after Fed Chairman Paul Volcker vanquished years of double-digit inflation by raising borrowing costs to previously unheard-of heights. Over the next two decades, the end of the Cold War and economic reform in China brought a massive increase in the global supply of labor and capital, pushing rates down further. Aging populations also contributed to the decline by increasing total savings.
More recently, financial crises led to painful recessions that the Fed sought to remedy by lowering borrowing costs to near zero.
The economy generally prospered during the 1982-2007 era of falling rates, known as “The Great Moderation” for its blend of low inflation and steady growth.
But the period of near-zero rates that followed the 2008 crisis and lasted almost without interruption until this year bred financial excess: companies with chronic financial losses that stayed alive thanks to periodic infusions of inexpensive loans; novel investment structures designed to evade regulatory scrutiny; and trendy stocks that rode a wave of public enthusiasm before crashing against financial reality.
With risk-free savings offering paltry returns, investors flocked to these higher-risk alternatives.
“Zombie” companies, which remain in business only by borrowing money to make their interest payments, proliferated. Among them: Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, a provider of billboard advertising, which lost money in each of the past two years, yet made more than $710 million in interest payments.
As the stock market nearly doubled from its March 2020 pandemic low, investors over the past two years gravitated to special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). These were “blank check” shell corporations used to acquire private businesses and take them public without the customary regulatory hurdles. Many became notorious financial debacles, such as electric truck maker Nikola, which went public via a SPAC in June 2020 and saw its share price sink from nearly $80 that month to less than $6 today. The company last year agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission $125 million to settle charges that it had defrauded investors by misleading them about its products, technology and sales outlook.
“Meme” stocks also became fashionable as millions of Americans turned to investing during the pandemic. Early last year, investors on a Reddit message board highlighted shares of GameStop, a flagging video game retailer, and drove them to $347 from $17. Since then, the stock has dropped 60 percent.
“There was a lot of froth that needed to come out of the markets as a consequence of ultralow rates, which distort the allocation of capital,” said Neil Shearing, chief economist for Capital Economics in London.
The Fed’s rate hikes have made investors more discriminating. In the bond market, investors now demand a greater reward before they buy the riskiest securities.
In January, companies issuing high-yield or “junk” bonds needed only to offer an additional 2.8 percentage points of return above risk-free U.S. treasuries. Now, those companies — already facing a tougher business climate because of a slowing economy — must offer investors more than 5 points of additional yield. The additional expense may make the difference for some between staying in business and going bust.
Easy money also lifted the value of assets — which benefited those who already owned some, thus widening inequality. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own 54 percent of all stocks and mutual fund shares, up from about 44 percent when the Fed first dropped interest rates to zero, while the poorest half of Americans now own a smaller share, according to Fed data.
Even as the Fed vows to raise rates steadily over the next year, some doubt its ability to pilot the $24 trillion U.S. economy back to what Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell this week called “more normal levels” of interest rates and keep it there.
The Fed’s latest projections call for its key lending rate, which was near zero as recently as March, to rise to 3.4 percent by the end of this year and 3.8 percent by the end of 2023, which would be the highest levels since 2008.
“This is an economy that is set up for much, much lower interest rates,” said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, global chairman of research for Barclays. “I do not think we will get to 3.8 percent.”
The Fed’s aggressive, if belated, rate hikes are slowing the economy more quickly than policymakers appreciate, he said. That weakness will eventually force Powell to reverse course.
The Fed’s current rate hike campaign, which began in March, is designed to cool off the worst bout of inflation the U.S. has seen since the Volcker years.
Before the pandemic, policymakers spent years worried that inflation — and interest rates — were too low.
After the 2001 and 2007 recessions, the Fed cut rates by more than 5 percentage points to spur growth. But once it dropped its key rate near zero and held it there for seven years starting in late 2008, officials warned that such aggressive measures would not be possible in response to future recessions.
The unusual recovery from the pandemic recession overwhelmed those concerns. Trillions of dollars in federal stimulus, coupled with the impact of supply chain snarls and the war in Ukraine, combined to drive inflation to a 40-year peak of 8.6 percent.
Now, the Fed projects its policy rate in the long run will hover at 2.5 percent, a level it has not been able to hold consistently since the 2008 crisis.
Powell, who was late to recognize the inflation threat last year and was surprised again last month at how quickly prices rose in May, acknowledges the road ahead is unclear.
“No one knows with any certainty where the economy will be a year or more from now,” he told reporters last week. | 2022-06-19T10:34:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Federal Reserve interest rate hike opens new era for economy, markets - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/19/fed-rates-economy-markets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/19/fed-rates-economy-markets/ |
What’s better for disadvantaged students, trades or college?
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois struggled for a solution. One state excels at both.
A student on the campus of the University of Maryland at College Park in September 2020. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
I regret we can’t have Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois on our TV screens. What great guests they would be live on Fox and MSNBC, displaying the cogent depths of two of America’s best thinkers.
We still have one big issue those two luminaries couldn’t resolve, and with which our country still struggles. Du Bois and Washington disagreed over whether Black children should be prepared for trades or for college. A new book illuminates that debate — now focused on all disadvantaged children — and reveals the remarkable success that vocational-technical schools in Massachusetts have had strengthening job skills and book learning.
We education writers rarely look at voc-tech, as it is called. As high school students, most of us were intent on heading to college. I took a mechanical drawing class because my Boy Scout leader said it would be good for me. But all my other courses were the standard grade-grubber’s selection of English, math, science and history.
The new book on this issue is “Hands-On Achievement: Massachusetts’s National Model Vocational-Technical Schools,” edited by Chris Sinacola and David J. Ferreira and published by the free-market think tank Pioneer Institute. It has many surprises.
Public high schools advertising themselves as models of vocational and academic instruction have often been weak in both areas. But Massachusetts has made great strides since its 1993 Education Reform Act required that vocational students be taught with the same academic standards and tests used by regular public schools.
Reversing vocational education failure
At the beginning, many educators thought that was a bad idea. They said the state tests were too much of a burden for voc-tech students. But teachers across the state made it work. By 2008, 96 percent of students at voc-tech schools were passing both the English and math portions of the state tests, better than the 94 percent statewide passing rate. Dropout rates at voc-tech schools also have declined.
Vocational subjects in Massachusetts have been updated to electronics construction, medical assisting, biotechnology and other skills where jobs are plentiful. Many states are doing that. What’s different is the way Massachusetts’ voc-tech high schools schedule their classes: all voc-tech one week, all academic classes the next week, and then repeat.
The book’s experts working on voc-tech and examining the Massachusetts approach are Ken Ardon, William Donovan, Alison L. Fraser, Jacqueline M. Moore and Wilfrid J. Savoie.
The book says the state’s voc-tech students typically “spend the first half of their freshman year exploring up to 10 career and technical majors offered at their schools.” They select the ones they like and are matched with the proper small classes.
“Over the next three-and-a-half years, students proceed on an alternating schedule. One full week is spent in shop focusing on their chosen vocation, the next week in traditional academic classes,” the book says. “Students work closely with the same teachers for over three-and-a-half years.”
The book explains that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was famous for the vocational model he learned at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia and installed in the college, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, he founded for Black students in Tuskegee, Ala. “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem,” Washington said. “It is at the bottom of life we must begin and not at the top.”
W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963) focused on academics at his college, Fisk University in Nashville. He later became the first African American to receive a doctorate at Harvard. His specialty was sociology. He wanted to turn the highest performing Black students into intellectual superstars, what he called “the talented tenth.” He said “the Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”
I think both of them would have approved of the methods Massachusetts is using to deepen both vocational instruction and the reading, writing and math also necessary for success in the trades. Many of those students then go on to two- or four-year colleges, much better prepared for whatever path they have chosen.
Long disparaged, education for skilled trades is making a comeback
A national survey of educators whose voc-tech students were making gains revealed their most effective teaching methods included hands-on experiments or projects that made content more concrete, having students write in their voc-tech classes to clarify and communicate their ideas, increasing the number of students using math to solve real-world problems and assigning more reading.
The book says “a majority of vocational schools in Massachusetts require that students produce a senior project and/or a portfolio in order to graduate. ... After selecting a topic, the student conducts research, keeps a portfolio, and meets throughout the year with a senior project advisor and perhaps a project mentor from the community.”
This is similar to the project-based learning used for college-focused high school students in the International Baccalaureate program’s extended essay writing and Advanced Placement program’s seminar and research Capstone courses.
High schools in the past have been reluctant to cede power over their curriculums to businesses and unions with jobs to offer. There is often a question of who is in charge. That does not appear to be a problem in Massachusetts, where local employers work closely with voc-tech schools. Nashoba Valley Technical High School in Westford, Mass., for instance, collaborated with the Lowell Five Cent Savings Bank to create a branch where full-time employees worked side-by-side with students.
Many voc-tech schools in Massachusetts have also lengthened their school year. The Blackstone Valley Regional Technical High School in south-central Massachusetts has 195 school days a year, compared to the American standard of 180. That is the longest school year for any Massachusetts public school.
Washington and Du Bois probably would have applauded the effort to enhance both of the approaches to education they emphasized. But they might also have wondered why it has taken so long. | 2022-06-19T10:34:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Massachusetts excels at vocational, technical education for students - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/19/massachusettes-vocational-technical-high-school/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/19/massachusettes-vocational-technical-high-school/ |
People demonstrate during a Juneteenth rally at the Brooklyn Museum, in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 19, 2020. President Biden signed into law June 17, 2021, a bill designating Juneteenth as the 11th federal holiday. (John Minchillo/AP)
In 1903, a Black man walked into an office in a small town in Texas, seeking any news about whether slavery had ended.
The earnest inquiry from the man, who had been forced to labor without pay, came more than 38 years after Major Gen. Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island, Texas, with more than 2,000 federal soldiers to deliver the belated news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Texas. Word of the end of bondage for the more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state arrived on June 19, 1865 — two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Despite the clear instructions in General Order No. 3 and the announcement that day by Granger’s men that “the people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” not every enslaved Black person in Texas was freed with that proclamation.
Enslavers across the state resisted the general’s order, hiding the news from enslaved Black people. Many Black people were forced to continue to labor under the oppression of ruthless enslavers and unscrupulous plantation owners.
Last year, President Biden signed a bill to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday. On Thursday, in advance of the holiday, human rights activists installed a 150-foot Pan-African flag garden on the Ellipse, south of the White House, demanding that Biden establish a commission to study reparations. “Making Juneteenth a holiday is not enough,” one banner said.
The announcement on June 19, 1865, did not end slavery in Texas. The barbaric institution continued in other forms and by other names, according to historians.
“There was almost universal agreement from statements of enslaved people that many Texas slaveowners held off making the announcement,” said historian C.R. Gibbs. “They wanted another crop.”
Many Black Texans didn’t receive the news until 1866. “Slaveowners resorted to tricks. They delayed. They postponed. This was money,” said Gibbs, author of “Black, Copper & Bright: The District of Columbia’s Black Civil War Regiment.” “They wanted to continue to get every last drop of sweat from slavery.”
Even after Granger’s order, Black people remained in “such a delicate situation in Texas,” Gibbs said. “You have the collapse of the Confederate government. And roving bands of men who wanted to turn the clock back. A Union officer once said, ‘Given a choice between hell and Texas, I would live in hell and rent out Texas.’ It was just that bad in Texas.”
During the Civil War, Texas was a refuge for enslavers evading emancipation. “Slaveowners in Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana ran their ‘Negroes’ from Arkansas, Louisiana and other parts of the states into Texas because the U.S. Army had not reached Texas,” said W. Marvin Dulaney, a retired University of Texas-Arlington historian and president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
After Granger’s order, the Union Army literally had to march across Texas to enforce the order and free enslaved Black people. In some cases, enslavers killed enslaved Black people rather than allow them their freedom.
“Texans were so resentful that African Americans would become free, they literally carried out a pogrom,” Dulaney said, citing a speech by Barry A. Crouch, a professor of history at Gallaudet University. “They killed as many as 2,500. They were just murdered outright across the state.”
Violence increased against African Americans between 1865 and 1868, Dulaney said. In some cases, enslaved Black people in Texas were run down by bloodhounds or shot rather than be released from bondage. “It takes almost over a year for the Union Army to literally go across the state and free African Americans from slavery,” Dulaney said.
Slavery formally ended in the United States on Dec. 6, 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which stated, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
That “exception clause” created a loophole, permitting slavery to continue in another form and allowing officials in the South to perpetuate slavery conditions, including forced prison labor and convict leasing.
Granger’s Juneteenth order contained a similar caveat. It declared that “all slaves are free” but that the relationship between “former masters and slaves” should become “that between employer and hired labor.” It continued, “The freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
That last line, historians say, set the stage for the continuation of slavery through convict leasing and “Black code” laws that would restrict the freedom of Black people.
“Granger was warning them against idleness,” Dulaney said. “That order would lead to creation of vagrancy laws and Black codes that would be wielded against Black people, forcing many into forced labor without pay.”
The sharecropping system and laws prohibiting Black people from hunting and fishing also prevented Black people from feeding themselves and required them to work for White people.
“You had to sign a work contract at the beginning of each year or you could be rented out to a plantation,” Dulaney said. “In many cases, it was like being sold. The owners would have control over you. It was like being a slave.”
James Madison’s plantation vowed to share power with Black descendants. Then things blew up.
Some enslavers resisted the emancipation order by fleeing — taking their enslaved workers south into Cuba and Brazil, where slavery had not been outlawed. The kidnapping of Black people out of the country struck fear in those who were still in precarious situations in the control of their former enslavers — without protection from Union troops.
Frederick Douglass’s brother Perry Downs, who was enslaved in Texas, recounted hearing his enslaver say that he would run his “property” out of Texas.
No one knows how many enslaved Black people were driven farther south by enslavers to avoid freeing them. “There were unnamed numbers of Black people taken out of the United States to places where there was still slavery,” Gibbs said.
Slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888.
To this day, descendants of Confederates who drove enslaved Black people into Brazil celebrate with festivals in the cities of Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, celebrating “the Confederate States of America” with Confederate flag displays and dances.
In the United States, as communities prepare for Juneteenth celebrations, historians say, revelers should also pause in somber acknowledgment that the hardship of involuntary labor and racial terror against Black people continued long after Granger stood on the courthouse steps in Galveston reading the famous order for long-awaited freedom.
“Juneteenth should be celebrated to recognize the symbolic emancipation of African Americans from slavery” in Texas, Dulaney said. “Let’s celebrate it. But also realize it took much longer and much more than an order from a Union army general to end slavery in this country.” | 2022-06-19T10:34:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Not all enslaved Black people in Texas were freed on Juneteenth - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/19/juneteenth-texas-black-still-enslaved/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/19/juneteenth-texas-black-still-enslaved/ |
Father’s Day once was highly political — and could become so again
The holiday’s lack of history allowed activists to give it meaning after America’s divorce laws changed
Perspective by Kristin Celello
Kristin Celello is associate professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York and author of "Making Marriage Work A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States."
In many ways, Father’s Day has always been a second-class holiday in the United States.
Sonora Smart Dodd, whose father raised her and her siblings after their mother died in childbirth, was inspired to propose the holiday in 1910 after attending a church service honoring mothers. Even so, while federal law enshrined the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day in 1914, it took another half-century for fathers to receive similar recognition, first with Lyndon B. Johnson issuing a presidential proclamation in 1966 and then with Congress enacting an official holiday in 1972.
For decades, there was less political will to honor fathers, especially because many men regarded the holiday as “silly.” Such thinking continues to this day, as some men celebrate being fathers by using the holiday as a ticket to spend a day at the golf course, enjoying hours on “their” day away from their children.
This understanding of Father’s Day, though, misses the ways in which Americans have used the holiday as a political vehicle. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Father’s Day was a key battleground regarding parental rights and responsibilities for activists radicalized by the nation’s rapidly shifting familial landscape. At the root of this politicization of Father’s Day — maybe surprisingly — was the history of divorce.
The history of divorce in the United States dates to the colonial period. While the venues in which divorce cases took place changed over time, moving from state legislatures to the courts, the common denominator was that one spouse had to prove that the other spouse was at fault for the marital dissolution. The grounds for divorce varied by state, but often included adultery, desertion and cruelty.
While the United States had the highest divorce rate in the world in the late 19th century, the decision to divorce nevertheless remained a serious one — especially as divorced women frequently experienced financial hardships as well as a deep social stigma. Cases in which a spouse did not contest the divorce were common, but contested ones had the potential to become drawn-out and possibly even lead to media scandal. The majority of divorcing couples in the early to mid-20th century did not have children, but the “tender years doctrine” meant that in most cases, mothers retained custody of their minor children if they did.
By the mid-20th century, many Americans regarded this “fault” system as something of a joke. The public — and judges — knew that many divorcing couples colluded so as to have their cases fit the letter, if not the intent, of the law.
The entire landscape changed in 1969, with the advent of no-fault divorce. The initial idea behind the new laws was to make ending a marriage more honest and less acrimonious. Yet it had an unexpected consequence: a skyrocketing divorce rate.
No-fault divorce laws, however, did not deal with some of the most contested aspects of marital dissolution, especially questions about finances and child custody. Divorcing mothers and fathers alike developed critiques of the no-fault divorce system, which they believed perpetuated gender inequality and directly harmed their children.
The experience of divorce drew many White, middle-class women to the burgeoning women’s movement. Elizabeth Coxe Spalding, for example, was a mother of six and a proud Republican who served as the head of the National Organization for Women’s (NOW) Task Force on Marriage, Family Relations and Divorce in the mid-1970s. NOW had originally cheered the innovation of no-fault divorce laws, but quickly backtracked on that approval as they discovered the ramifications. Spalding received innumerable letters from divorced mothers who had left the workforce after becoming mothers and found themselves with few employable skills after their marriages ended.
These former housewives and newly single mothers — the vast majority of whom had custody of their children — also complained vociferously about their difficulties in collecting alimony (if awarded) and child support, further contributing to their precarious financial circumstances. They felt that their ex-husbands — the fathers of their children — took advantage of this legal landscape, maintaining their own personal standard of living while their children’s circumstances suffered dramatically.
Enter Father’s Day. As some feminists came to view child support enforcement as a key women’s issue, they turned to the new holiday as an opportunity to publicize their cause. In 1971, a group of women and children from the Association for Children Deprived of Support (ACDS) picketed the home of California assemblyman, and potential gubernatorial candidate, Robert Moretti on Father’s Day to press him to champion child-support reforms.
Several years later, in 1975, NOW chapters in Tulsa, Pittsburgh and Hartford, Conn., all participated in “Father’s Day Actions.” The Tulsa protesters promised, in a news release, that “Fathers who are not paying child support can expect that their names and the amounts they are in arrears will be announced” and publicly “displayed by mothers, children and concerned NOW members.” The Hartford women, for their part, laid a wreath at the door of the Superior Court of Connecticut to “mourn the loss of paternal responsibility by all the fathers involved in divorce, separation, and enforcement.”
Some divorced fathers, however, had their own political agenda for Father’s Day.
Fathers’ rights advocates objected to being used as “wallets” and claimed that their ex-wives purposely kept them from seeing their children in violation of visitation orders. In 1971, the National Council for Family Preservation — one of several failed attempts by fathers’ rights advocate Richard F. Doyle to form a robust national organization like NOW — urged its member groups to hold protests on the Saturday before Father’s Day, noting that fathers might “want to be elsewhere with their children on Sunday.” In a news release, Doyle called for the recognition of the “stupid and cruel divorce laws and practices that have made this holiday a mockery for countless fathers and children.”
By the 1980s, fathers’ rights groups across the country planned events and protests to mark the holiday, often focusing on calls for a legal presumption of joint custody. The New York Times reported in 1984 that more than 100 protesters, including men, women and children, had descended on Times Square in New York City carrying signs with slogans such as “I need to be more than a weekend Dad” and “A full-time father is the best child support.”
The Seattle-based organization Husbands Against Dirty Divorce (HADD) planned a Father’s Day brunch in 1986 to bring attention to the fact that the holiday was not accorded the same respect as the other spring holidays. They noted that Mother’s Day was “the number one holiday for the restaurant business, followed by Easter, while Father’s Day is way below bottom of the list.” That same year, the Ohio chapter of the National Congress of Men held a “joint custody awareness” event and picnic at their state capitol building in Columbus, with a concurrent event in Cincinnati, to mark the day.
The politicization of Father’s Day has subsided since the 1980s. Over time, lawmakers on the state and federal levels responded to the critiques of the no-fault divorce system that drove Father’s Day advocacy on both sides. New laws strengthened child support enforcement and joint custody became normalized — giving advocates for both divorced mothers and fathers what they most wanted.
Problems tied to support and custody haven’t disappeared, but these issues are no longer as polarizing and urgent as they seemed to the first generation of parents to experience no-fault divorce.
Yet the several decades that Father’s Day assumed significant political importance reveal that seemingly mundane cultural traditions can be reinvented as powerful political and cultural symbols. Sometimes, in fact, being mundane or banal offers up an opportunity. Because Father’s Day was an empty vessel, father’s rights activists and feminists, from opposite sides of the political-cultural spectrum, could fill it with their own meanings.
The tumult in gender roles, marital law and family structure that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s precipitated the politicization of Father’s Day. As the American family evolves and we continue to debate family and paternal roles in everything from education to reproductive rights to sexual identity, the continued relative lack of meaning of Father’s Day may enable the holiday to again become political. | 2022-06-19T10:34:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Father’s Day once was highly political — and could become so again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/19/fathers-day-was-once-highly-political-could-become-so-again/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/19/fathers-day-was-once-highly-political-could-become-so-again/ |
The freedom of Juneteenth was fleeting. This is what came next.
Black generosity has always been vital to the freedom struggle
Perspective by Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Tyrone McKinley Freeman is author of "Madam C.J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy during Jim Crow" (University of Illinois Press, 2020). He is a 2022 laureate of the Dan David Prize in History and associate professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family school of philanthropy at IUPUI.
People march during a Juneteenth reparations rally on Broad Street on June 17 in Newark. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Many African Americans think of Juneteenth — which commemorates the public announcement of the end of slavery made by the Union Army on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Tex. — as a second Independence Day for the United States and the first real Independence Day for them. It has been celebrated by Black communities for generations and increasingly by several states over the past 40 years. In 2021, President Biden made it a federal holiday.
While America’s founding documents declared freedom for all, the country denied it to Black people and maintained their enslavement. A century later, that first “Juneteenth” announcement by Union Army Gen. Gordon Granger declared “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” for African Americans. They were finally free — or so they thought.
But the freedom announced that day was fleeting. Within three decades it was gone, replaced by the legal Jim Crow segregation system despite the recent passage of constitutional guarantees ending slavery, defining citizenship and extending suffrage to freedmen (not women) in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. This denial of basic rights was undergirded by White racial terror, lynching, humiliation, rape and other human violations against which African Americans had little recourse.
While African Americans across the United States fought the everyday indignities and de facto discrimination they faced outside the South, their efforts were particularly focused on ending the legal segregation and racial terror of Jim Crow. Movements to regain legal rights and break apart Jim Crow segregation in the South have been well documented. Black generosity is not as well documented.
Black individuals and communities propelled and sustained the fight for equality in the South through a range of voluntary philanthropic actions, including charitable giving, volunteerism and building their own institutions, such as schools. In this moment when several constitutional freedoms are under threat, we have much to learn from that first “Juneteenth” generation and their significant efforts to regain what America had taken away from them.
One member of that generation was Madam C.J. Walker (1867-1919), the Black entrepreneur and philanthropist who built a successful beauty products business in Indianapolis in the early 1900s. She gave generously of her time, talent and treasure to fight Jim Crow segregation by supporting Black education, social services, anti-lynching advocacy and Southern voting rights (even though as a woman, she was never entitled to vote in her lifetime).
Like millions of other African Americans, she participated in Black organizations that promoted and practiced generosity to meet community needs and fight for freedom. These organizations included fraternal orders, women’s clubs and churches.
In the late 1800s and into the 20th century, Black fraternal orders proliferated as African Americans founded and joined secret societies, such as the Colored Knights of Pythias, to create safe spaces for themselves, incubate Black businesses and perform charity. In the 1890s, Black women formed the National Association of Colored Women, a federation of clubs that provided social services, education, advocacy and other programs for Black families. Facing threats of racial and sexual violence, Black clubwomen took public stands against injustice.
Denied services by many White nonprofit agencies, hospitals, schools, orphanages and churches, African Americans joined with White allies to create civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and the National Urban League in 1911. But they were also prolific in building their own institutions through advocacy and charitable giving.
This mobilization of Black generosity was so pervasive that activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois declared in 1909, “Few races are more instinctively philanthropic than the Negro.”
Most of the Divine Nine Black collegiate sororities and fraternities, such as Alpha Kappa Alpha and Alpha Phi Alpha, were founded in the early 20th century to promote leadership development and community service. They funded college scholarship programs for Black students and regularly donated to organizations such as the NAACP. Later, their membership ranks produced thousands of foot soldiers in the struggle for freedom, including iconic leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Septima P. Clark.
Black churches conducted a range of “home and foreign missions” work that included building schools domestically and abroad, promoting literacy, caring for the sick and advocating for policy change. The labor and capital for these efforts came directly from their congregations as membership in Black Baptist and Methodist churches, for example, swelled to 6 million people by the 1920s.
Decades later, these churches provided people, food and money for protest marches and civil rights campaigns that spread across the Jim Crow South.
Generations of African Americans after Juneteenth fought for equality they would never see, and their generosity led to the churches, schools, fraternal orders, service clubs and advocacy networks that formed the front lines of the civil rights movement of the 20th century.
For instance, in 1919, Madam C.J. Walker placed the NAACP into her estate plans as a beneficiary of the sale of her 34-room mansion in Irvington, N.Y. She died a few months later, but her legacy lived on. In 1952, Walter White, the national head of the NAACP, told an audience in the Bronx at a graveside memorial service for Walker that: “Mme. Walker’s generosity virtually saved the NAACP in the dark days of the depression.” On the cusp of historic legal victories in the 1950s and 1960s, White implied that the NAACP was in position and ready for that next leg of the freedom struggle because of generosity such as that of Walker.
After the first Juneteenth, the generosity of African Americans built the organizational infrastructure that toppled Jim Crow and achieved social change in the 1950s and 1960s through numerous Civil Rights Acts. But the freedom they yearned for and invested in is now under threat.
Today, fundamental rights once presumed secure are being contested and reversed. State legislatures are making it harder for Americans to vote. Schools are banning curriculums that teach students the history of oppression that gave rise to Juneteenth. The Supreme Court is threatening women’s reproductive health rights, at a time when Black women have the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.
While the moment it commemorates is indeed celebratory, Juneteenth should remind us that freedom ain’t free or promised. And that the generosity and resistance exerted to re-secure lost freedoms must never cease. | 2022-06-19T10:34:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The freedom of Juneteenth was fleeting. This is what came next. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/19/freedom-juneteenth-was-fleeting-this-is-what-came-next/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/19/freedom-juneteenth-was-fleeting-this-is-what-came-next/ |
Peter Thiel helped build big tech. Now he wants to tear it all down.
Inside the billionaire investor’s journey from Facebook board member to an architect of the new American right
Billionaire Peter Thiel reflected in an elevator door as he arrives at Trump Tower in New York City on Dec. 5, 2016. (DOMINICK REUTER/AFP/Getty Images)
On a summer morning in 2019, Rep. Matt Gaetz was having breakfast at the Los Angeles mansion of billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who would become one of the Republican Party’s biggest donors. At the time, Thiel was locked in a to-be-or-not-to-be debate over whether to leave the board of Facebook. Aware of Thiel’s love of Shakespeare, Gaetz (R-Fla.) playfully dubbed him Hamlet.
Like many Republicans, Gaetz viewed the social media giant as increasingly monopolistic and dangerous. He and another guest, entrepreneur and former right-wing provocateur Chuck Johnson, encouraged Thiel to leave the company. But Thiel demurred, telling the pair that he hoped to change it from within, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
Last month, Thiel finally stepped down from the social network, formally dissolving one of the most powerful partnerships in the history of Silicon Valley. As Facebook’s first outside investor, its longest-serving board member and a close adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg since he launched the company as a Harvard sophomore in 2004, Thiel helped alter the direction of the company whose products serve billions.
Thiel’s ambition to serve as an architect of the American right had grown increasingly at odds with his position on the board of one of the movement’s top enemies — a political shift that dovetailed with his own growing alienation from Silicon Valley.
Peter Thiel to exit Facebook’s board to focus on 2022 midterms
Reports at the time said that Thiel left the Facebook board to focus on politics, including a slate of 2022 congressional candidates aligned with former president Donald Trump.
But interviews with members of his inner circle indicate that his departure was years in the making, driven by a growing philosophical rift between Thiel and Facebook as conservatives became uncomfortable with the tech industry’s willingness to police online speech. Thiel, according to those close to him, lost his appetite to serve as Facebook’s defender as his political aspirations matured.
This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Thiel’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Since March of 2021, Thiel has pumped more than $20 million into 16 political campaigns, including the Ohio Senate race where close associate J.D. Vance last month won the Republican nomination, in part by attacking Big Tech and social media censorship. Thiel also has given at least $13.5 million to acolyte Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona who serves as president of Thiel’s personal foundation and has positioned himself as an adversary of Big Tech.
New reporting shows Thiel has set his sights on transforming American culture — and funding its culture wars — through what his associates refer to as “anti-woke” business ventures, including a right-wing film festival, a gay dating app for conservatives founded by a former Trump administration ally and a firm, Strive Asset Management, that will “pressure CEOs to steer clear of environmental, social and political causes,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the firm’s co-founder such as oil companies “committing to reduce production to meet environmental goals.”
More such investments are coming, the people said — though Thiel himself isn’t sure of the endgame.
“Peter deeply believes that there is huge opportunity in creating a parallel economy,” said Ramaswamy, a former biotech CEO and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside America’s Social Justice Scam.”
“Serving Americans who are disaffected from corporate America today would be the backbone of the next generation of major companies — and almost nobody is going after that opportunity in a serious way,” he said.
The radicalization of J.D. Vance
Thiel’s growing political clout mirrors that of another Silicon Valley billionaire, Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed libertarian who espouses increasingly right-wing views to his 94 million Twitter followers, as he finalizes his deal to buy the social network. The men are not close — Thiel pushed out Musk when the two ran PayPal — but they’ve become more aligned politically, often echoing each other’s rhetoric as they criticize “socially responsible” investing and express concern about Big Tech’s control of speech.
They share a mutual PayPal-era friend, David Sacks, who has vetted individuals interested in political opportunities with both billionaires, according to one of the people. Thiel is enthusiastic about Musk running Twitter, two associates said.
Thiel and Musk may herald the rise of a new breed of tech billionaire, turning their deep pockets and distinct ideologies away from the companies that made their fortunes toward building a new version of the American right. It’s a powerful group that has the potential to anoint a rising generation of political leaders, transforming both the GOP and Silicon Valley.
During Trump’s presidency, new reporting shows Thiel’s relationship with Facebook became increasingly strained, beset by conflicts that left him feeling that the company was acting against his values, according to four people. In a 2021 talk alongside former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Thiel criticized Facebook for supporting “woke politics” and “de-platforming” the account of former president Trump.
“Since at least 2018, he’s become very concerned about Facebook. He was uncomfortable with how they were using their monopolistic power,” said another one of the people familiar with his thinking. “But he was reluctant to leave because he felt he could do more, affect more change, from the inside.”
By 2022, Thiel was convinced: His change would be made from the outside.
From asset to alienation
Thiel declined requests for an interview. Facebook referred The Post to Zuckerberg’s public comments on Thiel’s departure from the board. “Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I’m deeply grateful for everything he has done for our company — from believing in us when few others would, to teaching me so many lessons about business, economics, and the world,” Zuckerberg said in a news release.
Thiel has always been an outlier among Facebook’s largely liberal staff and board of directors. A gay self-proclaimed libertarian and a German immigrant who came to the U.S. as a young boy, he earned his initial wealth in Silicon Valley by co-founding the payments processor PayPal in 1998. He put a $500,000 angel investment into Facebook in 2004, when Zuckerberg was still a student at Harvard.
He also was an early and enthusiastic participant in the culture wars. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, he founded the right-wing campus newspaper Stanford Review, which published articles calling liberal professors secret Marxists and railed against the inclusion of non-White authors in the school’s curriculum, according to journalist Max Chafkin, author of the Thiel biography, “The Contrarian.”
Still, Thiel was long considered Facebook’s most influential board member, giving Zuckerberg opinions that went against the grain of other top advisers, said three of the people.
“Mark listened to him,” one of the people said. “Mark appreciated the contrarian impulse. Peter stood for a diversity of opinion on the platform, and Mark stood for a diversity of opinion on the board.”
And Thiel’s influence could be felt throughout the company. In his best-selling 2014 book, 'Zero to One,” he argued that businesses should strive to make such a singular product that they become monopolies — while entrepreneurs consolidate power to run their companies like monarchies. Zuckerberg appeared to heed these lessons, multiple people said, from the structure of Facebook’s board, which gives the CEO the majority of voting shares and ultimate control, to his aggressive efforts to purchase or copy nascent competitors, a strategy that has given rise to accusations that the company is a monopoly. (Facebook denies these accusations.)
For years, Thiel acted as a bridge builder with conservatives, particularly in the spring of 2016, after the tech site Gizmodo reported that a small group of employees were intentionally blocking right-leaning news outlets from trending topics, a feature used to showcase popular news stories on the platform. That summer, Thiel helped counter charges of liberal bias by brokering a closed-door meeting between Zuckerberg and prominent conservative politicians and publishers, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Some Facebook executives thought Thiel was overstepping to help his soon-to-be political allies. Those tensions would explode later that summer, when Thiel donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and spoke in support of him at the Republican National convention.
The move put the investor on a collision course with Facebook’s Democratic board members and liberal employee base. After Thiel’s convention speech, he received an email from fellow board member, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who called the decision “catastrophically bad judgment.” Hastings declined to comment.
Feeling attacked, Thiel shared the email with Johnson, who later leaked it to the New York Times, according to two of the people. Thiel’s leak caused a rift and sense of betrayal within the board , according to two people familiar with the matter.
Thiel’s support of Trump — along with comments that resurfaced from a book co-authored with David Sacks that “a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than a belated regret” and that some rape charges are “seductions that are later regretted” — provoked outcry within Facebook during election season, but Zuckerberg continued to defend his adviser. (Thiel apologized for the comments.)
“We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate,” Zuckerberg wrote, according to a leaked copy of an October 2016 memo referencing “concerns about Peter Thiel.”
Thiel stayed on the board after the incident, but soon began to speak about a desire to resign, three of the people said. In 2017, he largely sold off his remaining Facebook shares.
After Trump won the presidency, Thiel, with assistance from Masters, began to tap talent in Silicon Valley to work with the new administration. At the same time, he became increasingly embedded in a right-wing philosophy that began to view “Big Tech censorship” as a target and was highly critical of China.
He became close with Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, a China hawk, in the run-up to the 2016 election. After returning from a book tour in the country, Thiel began to espouse increasingly strong anti-China views, including the belief that U.S. tech companies were harboring Chinese spies. In 2019 he claimed that Google, a longtime target of Thiel’s attacks, was being “infiltrated” by Chinese intelligence and called the company “treasonous.” He later attacked Apple for relying on China for its supply chain.
Zuckerberg had courted China for years in hopes of breaking into its lucrative market.
Soon after Thiel escalated his anti-China rhetoric, Zuckerberg did an about-face. In a 2020 congressional hearing, the CEO accused China of stealing U.S. technology. New evidence suggests this may have been partially due to Thiel’s influence: Thiel and Zuckerberg spoke about China, and Facebook’s sudden anti-China stance was in part fueled by a desire among company executives to curry favor with people in Trump’s orbit, they said.
Meanwhile, the right’s stance on social media was already beginning to change. Following revelations in 2017 that Russian operatives had used Facebook to sow widespread disinformation, and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which was organized and promoted on social media, tech companies created new rules about hate speech and misinformation, hiring thousands of content moderators to enforce them.
The result: a series of crackdowns that disproportionately impacted conservatives, who were more likely to break these rules. Among the earliest targets were conspiracy theorist and media personality Alex Jones and alt-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, whose ban came after he’d participated in a harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones.
“For people on the right, all this was seen as retribution for winning the 2016 election,” said Amalia Halikias, Masters’ campaign manager and a former campaign policy director for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), another longtime beneficiary of Thiel’s largesse.
Thiel’s proteges were leveraging this alleged persecution to build momentum. Hawley would go on to become one of the biggest critics of Big Tech in the Senate, along with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), another elite law school graduate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Thiel since his first Senate bid in 2012.
The reluctant kingmaker
By 2018, Thiel had become so alienated from Silicon Valley that he relocated his home and his investment firms to Los Angeles, said several of the people.
His connections with the far-right, meanwhile, were growing. Thiel, who had long been a quiet donor to conservative think tanks became a funder of the National Conservatism Conference, an emerging venue for rising populist figures on the right. He grew closer with Johnson, who’d met Thiel at a conference while a college student, and who has been permanently banned from Twitter since 2015, for allegedly attacking a Black Lives Matter activist. (Johnson, who has sued Twitter over his suspension, says his removal was unfair and that his tweet was “part of a journalistic project.”)
Through Johnson, Thiel became friendly with Gaetz, then viewed as a rising star in the GOP. The pair enjoyed long philosophical conversations about what they perceived as the power of technology companies to silence people and threaten American democracy, two of the people said. Last year, Gaetz suggested that his supporters use their Second Amendment rights to fight against Silicon Valley’s ability to “cancel” people who don’t “conform to their way of thinking.” (A Gaetz spokesperson said at the time that the interpretation was a “wildly irresponsible mis-framing” of his comments.)
In addition to his support of candidates that attacked Facebook, Thiel has also undermined both the company and Zuckerberg personally, new reporting shows. He was upset that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave more than $400 million to nonprofits to help fund election administration during the 2020 election, a donation viewed by the right as disproportionately helping Democrats. It prompted an angry joint New York Post op-ed from Vance and Masters, who had discussed the issue with Thiel, the people said.
In 2021, Thiel followed his Stanford Review friend and fellow investor Keith Rabois to Miami, where they bought waterfront mansions and opened up a branch of Thiel’s venture capital firm Founder’s Fund.
Though Thiel largely sat out the 2020 presidential election, in March 2021 he gave $10 million to the long-shot candidacy of Vance, a former employee who wrote the best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy.” A $10 million contribution to Masters followed in April.
With Thiel’s help securing Trump’s endorsement and a last-minute infusion of $1.5 million, Vance won the Ohio primary, said a person familiar with the inner workings of the campaign. Vance now faces Democrat Tim Ryan in the race to replace retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a moderate who endorsed Vance’s primary opponent.
Though Thiel has expressed doubts about whether the Trump administration was too chaotic to achieve its aims, according to two of the people, he maintains ties with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Thiel had lunch with Trump at Mar-a-Lago as recently as February, one of the people said. He had brought Masters to meet with Trump in the hopes of securing an endorsement, two people said.
Vance’s argument — that he was a former Silicon Valley insider who turned against it — resonated powerfully with GOP primary voters, said Luke Thompson, who ran a Thiel-funded super PAC that supported Vance.
At his campaign rallies and town halls, Vance got his biggest applause when he went after tech companies, railing against bans of prominent conservatives, including Vance himself, who was briefly suspended for what Twitter said was a misunderstanding about whether his account was legitimate.
“I bet half the people in this room have been shadow-banned on Facebook,” Vance said at a rally in Dayton during the last week of his campaign.
But Thiel’s association with Facebook sometimes hurt both men, particularly Masters. When Masters campaigns in Arizona, locals ask why his main funder is a Facebook board member. His opponent recently ran an attack ad calling Masters a “puppet of California Big Tech.”
Masters’s response, like Vance’s, has been to say that insiders can dismantle the system from within.
Thiel has given a total of at least $20,188,842 this cycle, making him the fifth largest GOP donor according to the Center for Responsive Politics Open Secrets database. But the database only tracks disclosures through March 31, so the tally does not account for Thiel’s latest donations to Masters and Vance, or his investment in dark money groups that seek to influence the GOP’s trajectory but are not tied to a specific candidate.
Peter Thiel puts another $3.5 million behind Blake Masters in Arizona
He has also given small amounts to more than a dozen other candidates, some of whom have embraced the falsehood that widespread election fraud caused Trump to lose the presidency.
Despite his large checks, people who know Thiel say that the perception of him as a political kingmaker is wrong. He takes bets on individuals he knows well, rather than casting a wide net, they say. Unlike other megadonors, Thiel has not created a full-fledged political operation, with employees whose job is to vet political giving opportunities.
“Most donors are interested in spreading their influence across many candidates,” Thompson said. “They don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket.”
People familiar with Thiel’s giving style noted that he treats politics like venture capital and candidates like start-up founders, giving large amounts early on to support ideas and people with potential.
And Thiel, the people said, is not sure what he wants. He has told people he is unsure whether he will support Trump in 2024, said a longtime associate, who noted it was unclear whether Thiel himself believes in the “big lie.”
“There’s an ambivalence toward the political apparatus as a whole and more of a focus on trusted individuals. He is well past the point of dabbling, but there is still this hesitancy,” said one of the people.
Unlike Musk, whose main megaphone for provocation is Twitter itself, Thiel is a behind-the-scenes operator who has focused on investments that cater to consumers who he thinks are overlooked by societal institutions that have moved to the left.
In addition to the film festival, he has funded a Catholic prayer app, the conservative dating app, and a right-wing YouTube alternative Rumble. A recent investment is Strive, a firm that aims to rival megafirms like Vanguard and will buy large stakes in companies and push them away from environmental, social, and what the group describes as political agendas that the hurt the bottom line.
“He isn’t like the general putting his chips on the table and drawing out a coherent plan,” said a person familiar with Thiel’s thinking. “He is taking strong sniper shots for people and things he cares about. He is more like a professor. But intellectually, he is in battle mode.”
Though he is not active on Twitter, Thiel engages in rhetorical bomb-throwing. During his keynote at a Miami cryptocurrency conference in April, a crowd cheered and booed as Thiel angrily read out what he described as his personal “hate list” — individuals and ideas that he said were the true enemies of cryptocurrency, and therefore, economic progress.
When Facebook announced Thiel’s decision not to stand for reelection to the board this spring, many Facebook employees openly rejoiced, two people said.
But Thiel is expected to continue to informally advise Zuckerberg, and his influence is unlikely to fade completely. The company did not want him to leave the board, two people said.
But being free of the formal Facebook connection, the people said, will allow Thiel to push his ideas in bigger ways — even if he himself does not know quite what that future looks like.
“The left wants a villain. The right wants a sugar daddy,” said one of the people. “I can see how he could slot into that role. But there’s no grand vision for it.”
Josh Dawsey contributed to this report. | 2022-06-19T10:34:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Peter Thiel helped build Facebook, now he's building a new anti-tech right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/19/peter-thiel-facebook-new-right/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/19/peter-thiel-facebook-new-right/ |
An estimated one-third of American adults and one-quarter of children and adolescents take multivitamins. (iStock)
The first multivitamins hit the market in 1943. By the 1950s, bottles of them could be found on many family dinner tables. Americans were gobbling them down — and still are. But do we need them?
“People view them as a form of insurance,” says JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “They are hedging their bets. I don’t discourage anyone from taking a multivitamin. But multivitamins and other supplements will never be a substitute for a healthful diet.”
An estimated one-third of American adults and one-quarter of children and adolescents take multivitamins, with U.S. sales totaling $8 billion in 2020, according to the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Dietary Supplements.
Morning or night? With food or without? Answers to your questions about taking supplements.
Some experts believe a nutritious, well-rounded diet should be enough for many people. “I place my emphasis on whole foods,” says Donald D. Hensrud, associate professor of nutrition and preventive medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. “I focus on helping my patients eat a healthy diet.”
But other experts say it is more complicated, because people often need more vitamins at certain life stages or have health conditions that make it difficult to absorb vitamins from food. Some also need supplements in addition to multivitamins.
“Some nutrients are very hard to get from food, like vitamin D, as very little occurs naturally in foods,” says Bonnie Liebman, nutrition director at Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). “Many older people don’t produce enough stomach acid to extract natural vitamin B-12 from milk, meat or eggs. Vitamin B-12 deficiency can cause irreversible nerve damage and can mimic dementia — something you want to avoid.”
The facts about multivitamins
Scientists who study multivitamins say there is growing evidence that multivitamins also can convey additional health benefits, including a delay in cognitive decline among older people. A recent three-year study of more than 2,200 participants 65 and older funded by the National Institute on Aging, for example, found that those taking a daily multivitamin demonstrated significant cognitive improvement in abilities that tend to decline with normal aging, including short-term memory and such executive functions as decision-making, when compared with those who received a placebo.
The unpublished results, which were presented at a scientific meeting in the fall, showed that multivitamin-takers demonstrated only 1.2 years of mental decline, rather than three years. Put another way, they preserved 1.8 years — almost 60 percent — of their mental sharpness. The research was part of a larger trial that looked at the effects of multivitamins on cancer. The cognition results are expected to be published soon.
The larger study, known as the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study, or COSMOS, began in 2014 to try to replicate the findings of an earlier trial, the Physicians’ Health Study II, which ran from 1997 through 2011. PHS II saw an 8 percent reduction in total cancers among those 50 and older who took daily multivitamins, but — unlike COSMOS — did not show any cognitive benefits. The COSMOS study, on the other hand, which ran only 3½ years, did not find a drop in cancers.
About half of parents give their children a dietary supplement
But the researchers — the same in both studies — stress that differences in the design and length of the two studies account for the seemingly contradictory results.
“COSMOS was just not long enough to tease out the cancer effects,” says Howard Sesso, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the investigators. “For cancer, you really need more time to detect the impact of nutritional interventions. We are following up with the participants, sending out surveys to find out if they are still taking multivitamins and to see whether they have developed cancer.”
There also were significant differences between the two studies in how they measured cognition. For example, the first baseline cognition assessment in PHS II occurred one to two years after participants began taking the pills, meaning researchers would have missed any cognitive improvements that happened in those first two years, Sesso says.
“COSMOS had a better study design,” he says. “The first baseline cognition assessment took place before they started taking the multivitamin or placebo. The potential benefits were seen in follow-up assessments at one, two and three years.”
Regardless, experts say multivitamins are important for those who suffer from impaired absorption, the result of medications, gastric bypass surgery or such digestive disorders as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, inflammatory bowel disease and celiac disease.
Multivitamins can also provide necessary nutrients during specific life stages. Anyone considering getting pregnant should take multivitamins before and during pregnancy to ensure they get enough folic acid, which prevents fetal neural tube defects such as spina bifida. By contrast, postmenopausal women should avoid iron-containing multivitamins, since they no longer lose iron through menstruation.
How vitamin D plays a role in your health
Some people also require additional supplements such as B-12 and vitamin D. The latter, necessary for bone health, often is inadequate in those who avoid sun exposure — a wise practice to prevent skin cancer — and in those confined indoors, such as nursing home residents.
Manson has conducted several studies on vitamin D supplements that suggest taking extra vitamin D can lessen the risk of developing autoimmune diseases and reduce deaths from cancer, although not prevent it. “Vitamin D may modify the biology of tumors so they are less likely to metastasize,” she says.
She also is studying the effect of vitamin D on coronavirus symptoms — specifically, whether it can reduce upper respiratory infections — but there are no results yet. Nevertheless, she thinks taking a little more of it is a good idea. (The recommended daily allowance or RDA is 600 international units, or IUs, or 15 micrograms, but the amount varies among multivitamins.)
“During the pandemic I recommend 1,000 to 2,000 IUs, even though the jury is still out in terms of benefits during covid,” she says. “It is very safe. For bone health and other chronic disease, 600 to 800 is sufficient.”
Experts say it’s also smart to take vitamin B-12 supplements later in life. Most multivitamins contain 2.4 micrograms, the RDA for adults, but some people may need more, experts say.
“Approximately 15 percent of people over the age of 65 have early vitamin B12 deficiency,” Hensrud says. He suggests his patients in this age group take 500 to 1,000 micrograms daily. “Vitamin B-12 isn’t absorbed well and has a large safety threshold,” meaning high doses won’t hurt, he says. “It’s probably the safest vitamin there is.”
Most dietary supplements don’t do anything. Why do we spend $35 billion a year on them?
CSPI warns consumers not to rely on multivitamins for enough calcium and potassium. “You’re better off getting enough potassium by filling half your plate with fruits and vegetables, rather than looking for a supplement,” Liebman says. “Whether you need a calcium supplement depends on how much you are getting from foods.”
Premenopausal women and men up to age 70 need 1,000 milligrams of calcium daily, she says. “You can’t rely on a multi to get it because it wouldn’t fit in a single tablet, and because you may get enough from food.”
Women need 2,600 milligrams of potassium daily, while men require 3,400 milligrams, she says. “Potassium can help lower blood pressure or help keep it from rising as you age,” Liebman says. In addition to fruits and vegetables, other potassium sources include dairy foods, beans and seafoods.
Most experts agree that taking a multivitamin can’t hurt and probably could help, and people need not spend a lot of money on them.
“I think an ordinary multivitamin-and-mineral supplement is reasonable for many people,” Liebman says. “You don’t need the Cadillac of multivitamins. A Chevy is fine. Many store brands are usually perfectly adequate.”
What vitamins should be in your multivitamin
Vitamin A 700-1,050 mcg (2,300-3,500 IU)
Vitamin C 60-300 mg
Vitamin D 20-25 mcg (800-1,000 IU)
Vitamin E 13-35 mg (20-80 IU)
Vitamin K 20 mcg or more
Thiamin (B-1) 1.1 mg or more
Riboflavin (B-2) 1.1 mg or more
Niacin (B-3) 14-20 mg
Vitamin B-6 1.7-6 mg
Folate Premenopausal women 660-680 mcg DFE (dietary folate equivalent) (400 mcg folic acid); everyone else 400-680 mcg DFE (235-400 mcg folic acid)
Vitamin B-12 2.4 mcg or more
Calcium Don’t rely on a multivitamin
Iron Premenopausal women 18 mg; everyone else (no more than 8 mg)
Iodine 150 mcg
Magnesium 40-350 mg
Zinc 8-24 mg
Selenium 18-55 mcg
Copper 0.5-2.2 mg
Chromium 25 mcg or more
Potassium Don’t rely on a multivitamin
(Note: “Or more” doesn’t mean that a nutrient is safe at any dose, but that levels in multivitamins are unlikely to be high enough to cause harm. This list does not apply to prenatal multivitamins for pregnant people. See your doctor.)
Source: Center for Science in the Public Interest | 2022-06-19T12:05:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What to look for in multivitamins - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/19/essential-multivitamin-ingredients/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/19/essential-multivitamin-ingredients/ |
Afghan families in the U.S., severed and in pain
Afghan refugees play inside an Afghan refugee camp at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, N.M., in November 4. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The trauma of Ukraine’s millions of migrants fleeing carnage, thousands of whom have arrived in the United States, cannot be cause for American amnesia concerning the plight of Afghan refugees. The fact that this country has resettled tens of thousands of Afghans in the past year is a credit to the Biden administration. But the work is not done.
U.S. forces managed to board more than 76,000 Afghans on evacuation flights last summer as they fled the pandemonium of Kabul’s sudden fall to the Taliban. That airlift, despite the backdrop of an embarrassingly chaotic military withdrawal, was a stunning display of U.S. ingenuity, resources and resolve.
But even as Washington has continued arranging for Afghans to depart their country and be granted admission here — nearly 10,000 have arrived since the fall — thousands more who aided the U.S. war effort, and their immediate family members, have been left behind. Those severed families — children, husbands and wives wrenched apart during the turmoil of the sudden U.S. exit — were the subject of a heart-rending article by The Post’s Abigail Hauslohner. It was a timely reminder of this country’s unpaid moral debt to a cohort of people whose lives have been torn asunder, and in many cases endangered, in the aftermath of the two-decade-long U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
Those separated from their families include some 1,400 Afghan children who have arrived in the United States without their parents. They include Afghans who worked directly for U.S. agencies and with the U.S. military, as well as their spouses, children and grandchildren. They include others whose livelihoods — with nongovernmental organizations or the media, for example — were possible only because of the U.S. security presence, and whose continued employment and safety may now be permanently jeopardized.
It’s true that extracting people from Afghanistan is difficult and dangerous work. For those who want to leave, even to be reunited with their immediate family, the task is infinitely more complicated than simply booking a commercial flight out of Kabul. It’s also the case that U.S. officials have continued to work on getting Afghans out, including roughly 350 who have been arriving weekly in this country for the past two months.
That’s not nothing; it’s also not enough.
As The Post reported, the Biden administration has not established any systematic process by which to proactively identify and assist resettled Afghans in the United States who remain separated from their close family members, many or most of whom remain in Afghanistan. No easy-to-access official channel is available through which such information can be transmitted to the State Department, the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security. Why not?
Advocates for the refugees believe the number of severed Afghan families based partly in the United States numbers in the tens of thousands. And while major questions remain about the long-term immigration status of Afghans already in this country — problems Congress could address by granting them a path to citizenship — easing procedures for reuniting those families is a separate matter, and a far more urgent one. | 2022-06-19T12:05:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Afghan families in the U.S., severed and in pain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/afghan-families-us-severed-pain/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/afghan-families-us-severed-pain/ |
The baby formula crisis isn’t over. Key problems remain.
Similac and Enfamil products are seen on largely empty shelves in the baby formula section of a Target store, in San Diego on May 25. (Photo by Bing Guan/Reuters).
The baby formula crisis is still here, and the latest data show an alarming sign that it is getting worse. The in-stock rate for powdered baby formula was 76.5 percent for the week ending June 12, according to research firm IRI. That’s down from 79 percent in early May, when the shortage became a major story. In yet another blow, Abbott Nutrition once again had to halt production at its infamous Michigan plant that produces specialty formula after severe thunderstorms caused flooding in the plant.
The key problem at the heart of this mess remains: The United States does not have enough baby formula supply to meet its needs. We need to open up this market to more competition now — and for years to come.
Three companies dominate the nation’s baby formula market. For decades, the United States has put up barriers that have made it pretty much impossible for foreign or domestic manufacturers to break that stronghold. The Food and Drug Administration has stringent import rules. On top of that, since 1989, Congress has required every state to strike a deal with one company to be the supplier for the state’s “WIC” (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) that serves low-income families. Since WIC purchases account for about half of all baby formula sales, the company that wins any state’s contract is almost guaranteed to have its products commanding the state’s shelves and sales.
Our view: The FDA must be held to account for the baby formula crisis
The WIC state monopolies have generated substantial savings over the years, enabling the program to serve millions more babies. But there has been a dangerous side-effect: A heavy reliance on three companies and seven production facilities for most U.S. formula. That’s how we ended up in a situation where one prominent Abbott formula factory shutdown led to mass shortages and babies being hospitalized.
This is a wake-up call. Other rich nations don’t have these crises, largely because they have more competition. The FDA and White House finally acted in May to speed up foreign formula imports. Congress also passed the Access to Baby Formula Act to make it easier to temporarily waive WIC monopolies. But these are short-term fixes. We should not allow a return to the old system in a few months when the emergency (hopefully) ends.
First, we need to keep the imports coming. The FDA claims its heavy-handed import controls are about safety, but formula could come from Europe, Australia and Singapore, which are places that have equally good — if not better — health outcomes for kids.
Opinion: Breastfeeding isn't free. Here's what it cost me
Second, Congress should seriously consider whether it’s time to ditch WIC state monopolies, which would also require additional funding to WIC, at least for a few years, to ease the transition. At a minimum, Congress could make it easier for companies to compete for WIC contracts by passing the bipartisan WIC Healthy Beginnings Act.
Third, the FDA needs to improve its food safety oversight, especially for domestic baby formula.
There’s blame to go around in this crisis. Abbott’s Michigan factory was not up to standards. The FDA failed to respond to red flags in a timely manner, and the FDA and White House should have intervened sooner. But long-standing problems exacerbated this shortage and must be fixed.
Opinions on parenting | 2022-06-19T12:05:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Baby formula supply shortages continue as key problems remain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/baby-formula-supply-shortages-continue/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/baby-formula-supply-shortages-continue/ |
Fix the electoral count law now, before Trump tries to exploit it again
Former president Donald Trump at a Republican-led event called, “Faith and Freedom Road to Majority” in Nashville on June 17. (Harrison Mcclary/Reuters)
On one end of Capitol Hill last week, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack heard damning testimony detailing how President Donald Trump and a coterie of partisan lawyers advanced a dangerous argument: that the vice president has the legal authority to overturn a presidential election when Congress meets to count electoral college votes. Trump official after Trump official testified that they knew it was wrong. John Eastman, a lawyer who advocated for the theory, acknowledged as much in front of Mr. Trump on Jan. 4, according to testimony from Greg Jacob, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s general counsel. But Mr. Trump and his allies nevertheless waged a relentless public campaign to pressure Mr. Pence to betray the nation’s democracy. Belief in this antidemocratic nonsense spurred the Jan. 6 mob, which infamously chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”
On the other end of the Hill, a bipartisan group of senators finally made some progress in their effort to make another Jan. 6 less likely. The group, led by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), agreed on a general plan to reform how electoral votes are counted. Ambiguities in the law provided room for Mr. Trump and his acolytes to expound outré theories about the vice president’s powers. Jan. 6 also exposed other weaknesses, such as the ease with which members of Congress may object to and toss out electoral college votes. That led an alarming number of GOP lawmakers to try to disqualify electors from the swing states Joe Biden carried.
The bipartisan group would make explicit that the vice president has no unilateral authority to toss out a state’s electoral slate. The senators would raise the bar allowing lawmakers to object to a state’s electors. Currently one member of each chamber is enough to trigger a challenge; under the reform, 20 percent of each chamber would be required. Washington would also send money to the states to protect election workers, who have seen a wave of threats since Mr. Trump started spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote.
These reforms are crucial, but not enough. The grounds on which lawmakers should be permitted to reject a state’s electors should be well-defined and extremely narrow. When a sufficient number protests a state’s electoral slate, it currently takes only a bare majority in each chamber to sustain that objection, which means a partisan Congress could overturn an election by a simple majority. The senators should raise this threshold. They should also ensure that federal courts are empowered to sort out any state-level meddling in the electoral college process — in case, for example, a governor sends in a bogus slate of electors.
There are also some things lawmakers should resist. Reforming the electoral vote counting process would require 60 senators — that is, substantial Republican support. Attaching other voting-related bills to this effort would kill it. | 2022-06-19T12:05:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Fix the electoral count law now, before Trump tries to exploit it again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/fix-electoral-count-law-now-before-trump-tries-exploit-it-again/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/fix-electoral-count-law-now-before-trump-tries-exploit-it-again/ |
Distinguished person of the week: He sounded the alarm and lowered the boom on the GOP
J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge who served as an adviser to Mike Pence, testifies before the Jan. 6 select committee on June 16. (Susan Walsh/AP)
The House Jan. 6 committee’s members and staff deserve praise for their masterfully executed hearings made for the YouTube era. Among the most gripping moments last week was the appearance of former judge and respected conservative lawyer J. Michael Luttig, who advised Mike Pence in the lead-up to Jan. 6.
Luttig stands apart from the many other lawyers who enabled the Trump crew and failed to alert the public before the Jan. 6 insurrection. He serves as a reminder of the professional and constitutional obligations of lawyers in public service and of all citizens’ duty in a democracy to avoid a collapse of the American experiment.
Luttig’s written statement Thursday began with an ominous line: “A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on January 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge.” For those who want to move on, Luttig warned, “The settlement of this war over our democracy is necessary to the settlement of any war that will ever come to America, whether from her shores or to her shores.” And he made clear it’s up to Republicans to end it: “Though disinclined for the moment, as a political matter of fact only the party that instigated this war over our democracy can bring an end to that war.”
One can only hope the Justice Department is as clear-eyed as Luttig in pursuing the defeated former president. Luttig described the crime: “Knowing full well that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his allies and supporters falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost.”
During his appearance before the Jan. 6 committee on Thursday, Luttig delivered in slow and methodical fashion the airtight argument demonstrating that the scheme from chief insurrectionist plotter John Eastman had no historical or legal justification. He explained that the Constitution gives the vice president no role in certifying electoral votes beyond opening the ballots in the presence of Congress. He declared, “I would have laid my body across the road before I let the vice president overturn the 2020 election.” The failure of so many in Donald Trump’s orbit to do the same remains a stain on their records they cannot erase.
Luttig reminded the country that if not for Pence’s stalwart refusal to knuckle under to Trump, the United States would have been “plunged" into “a revolution within a constitutional crisis.” Indeed, testimony from other witnesses suggested that Eastman was comfortable with the possibility that his plot might result in violence.
At the close of Thursday’s hearing, Luttig said almost with trepidation: “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.” He explained that is “not because of what happened on Jan. 6 but because they have told us they plan to do it again”; it’s because the coup attempt never ended. “The former president and his allies are executing their blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view,” he said.
No more effective or damning admonition has been delivered about Trump and his party. Coming from a conservative judicial icon who was considered for the Supreme Court by past GOP presidents, his warning should carry great weight.
For advising the former vice president, for thoroughly rebuking Trump’s legal enablers and for warning the country of the ongoing danger to the country posed by Trump and his minions, we can say, well done, Judge Luttig. | 2022-06-19T12:06:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | J. Michael Luttig deserves praise for his warnings on Trump during Jan. 6 hearings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/jan-6-hearing-j-michael-luttig-sounds-alarm-gop-threat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/jan-6-hearing-j-michael-luttig-sounds-alarm-gop-threat/ |
Texas AG Paxton’s shameful Uvalde cop-out: ‘God always has a plan’
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) awaits the arrival of Vice President Mike Pence at Love Field in Dallas on June 28, 2020. (Tony Gutierrez/AP)
When thoughts and prayers seem inadequate in the wake of a tragedy, you can always blame God.
That would seem to be how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sees it after a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., took the lives of 19 children and two of their teachers. The carnage came just 10 days after a gunman with allegedly racist motives mowed down 10 shoppers and employees — all of them Black — in a Buffalo supermarket.
In a podcast interview recorded the day after the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School and unearthed last week by Salon, Paxton was asked by North Texas pastor Trey Graham what he might say to the victims’ families.
“I’d have to say, look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan,” the attorney general replied. “Life is short no matter what it is.”
It was all in God’s plan. That’s a suggestion we often hear from pious, well-meaning people when other words fail in the face of an unspeakable, inexplicable tragedy. The idea is that some day we will all understand that larger purpose of our suffering. It is meant to be a balm.
But those words sound more like a shrug when an elected leader — and in this case, one who is his state’s top law enforcement officer — offers that as an explanation for a horror that was preventable and made worse by human error. Worse, it is a dereliction of responsibility and of the imperative to do something to prevent something like this from happening again, as it has happened over and over.
What Paxton doesn’t want to consider, he made clear, is that the events in Uvalde had anything to do with gun laws, which have been loosened considerably in Texas in recent years. He won’t countenance even proposals for a red-flag law allowing courts to order the seizure of guns from people deemed an imminent threat. That, he said, “becomes pretty risky for our freedom.” The only new gun measure he indicated he might support is one that requires schools to train and arm teachers to defend themselves in the classroom.
Graham also pressed Paxton on why mass shootings happen more often in Texas than in other states. (The Dallas Morning News notes that Texas leads the nation in the number of people killed in mass shootings since 2009, and is second only to Nevada in the number killed in a single episode.) “Part of it is we’re just a big state,” Paxton replied. It might just come down to “the law of averages,” he said, adding, “Other than that, I don’t really have an explanation.”
Paxton, it should be stressed, is a popular politician with Texas Republican voters, despite being indicted on felony securities fraud charges shortly after becoming attorney general in 2015 and more recently coming under an FBI investigation for allegations he abused his office to help a wealthy donor. (He has denied wrongdoing; his office also did not respond to my request for a comment for this column.)
On the day of the Uvalde shootings, Paxton easily won a GOP primary runoff, which is tantamount to reelection, against Land Commissioner George P. Bush, which may have brought an end to the Bush dynasty in the Lone Star State.
In the meantime, the intensity of emotion surrounding what happened in Uvalde may already be dying down. The last of the funerals, that of 11-year-old Layla Salazar, took place on Thursday. Television networks that swarmed the town have largely moved on. While a special committee of the Texas legislature is investigating what happened — and didn’t — in Uvalde, and has been charged with making recommendations for the future, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has resisted Democratic calls for a special session.
In Washington, the Senate left town Thursday for the weekend after bogging down over a bipartisan deal that aims to produce the first major expansion of gun laws in three decades. Their framework agreement was announced with great fanfare the weekend before, but fleshing out the details into actual legislative language that can clear the 60-vote threshold needed to pass the 50-50 Senate is turning out to be a difficult challenge.
Still, it is possible to hope that maybe this time will be different. That sensible and long-overdue gun reform might really be possible. That schools and stores and, yes, even houses of worship might no longer have to fear being chosen as the target of the next depraved person with access to firearms.
Or at least we can pray real change can happen. God willing. | 2022-06-19T12:48:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Texas AG Paxton blames the Uvalde massacre on God. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/texas-ag-paxtons-shameful-uvalde-cop-out-god-always-has-plan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/texas-ag-paxtons-shameful-uvalde-cop-out-god-always-has-plan/ |
Thanks, Kevin McCarthy, for making the Jan. 6 hearings worthwhile
House Jan. 6 committee members Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) listen during a hearing at the Capitol on June 16. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The hearings organized by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection are getting high marks for calling public attention to new and damning information while also offering a compelling narrative of a frightening criminal effort to destroy our democracy.
We have witnessed a crisp debunking of the "big lie" and President Donald Trump’s knowledge that his election fraud charges were, to avoid the barnyard epithet, ridiculous. We have been riveted by how Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to void the 2020 election illegally — as if Pence were a servant to a dictator unwilling to relinquish power.
In a perverse way, the country owes a debt to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). He made this refreshing presentation possible. In an astonishingly foolish decision, McCarthy withdrew all his appointees to the committee after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected two of his five nominees. She refused to seat Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.) because they actively spread disinformation about 2020 — and because Jordan was closely involved in Trump’s efforts to challenge the election.
In defending Pelosi’s decision at the time, Rep Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) turned out to be prophetic. “The speaker is making clear we’re going to have a serious comprehensive investigation,” Raskin said. “This will not be just another run-of-the-mill, partisan food fight.” It wasn’t, thanks to the exclusion of Trump’s bomb-throwing apologists.
Yes, nostalgia is always misleading. Many Republicans defended Nixon to the bitter end. Most others did not turn on him until a July 24, 1974, Supreme Court ruling forced Nixon to release White House tape recordings that proved his involvement in a coverup within a few days of the of the Watergate break-in two years earlier. Support for Nixon evaporated, and he resigned on Aug. 8, 1974. | 2022-06-19T12:49:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Thanks, Kevin McCarthy, for making the Jan. 6 hearings worthwhile - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/thanks-kevin-mccarthy-for-making-jan-6-hearings-worthwhile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/thanks-kevin-mccarthy-for-making-jan-6-hearings-worthwhile/ |
Melissa Francis alleged her male colleagues made far more than women. She won an unusually large settlement, according to documents viewed by The Post.
Melissa Francis at Fox studios in New York in 2015. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
Fox News agreed to a roughly $15 million settlement with a female former host who complained about gender-based pay disparities at the cable news network, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
Francis and her attorney declined to comment on the settlement, which has not been previously reported. Francis separately filed a complaint with the New York State Department of Labor claiming that Fox retaliated against her after she pointed out pay disparities at the network. Her attorney, Kevin Mintzer, said she filed the pending complaint with the state “not for herself but for the women of the company who remain behind.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Fox News said: “We parted ways with Melissa Francis over a year and a half ago and her allegations were entirely without merit. We have also fully cooperated with the New York State Department of Labor’s investigation and look forward to the completion of this matter.”
The amount paid to Francis is on a scale with the blockbuster settlements the network offered a number of female employees who leveled claims of sexual misconduct and harassment against Roger Ailes, the co-founder of Fox News, and former prime-time star Bill O’Reilly. Mintzer said that despite Fox News’s pledges of improving its climate since those allegations were settled, “what happened to Melissa shows that sexism and retaliation remain standard practice at the company.”
The Fox spokesperson replied that the company has dramatically transformed its culture, its lineup of programming and its executive ranks in recent years, adding: “Fox News has always been committed to the equitable treatment of all employees which we have demonstrated consistently over our 26-year history, and we are extremely proud of our business.”
One lawyer unconnected to the case who has helped women receive settlements from other networks said the size of Francis’s award suggests Fox realized it would have a weak position defending itself in court against a lawsuit. “For a settlement this large, there would probably need be pretty convincing evidence of an obvious and gross disparity in pay,” said Ari Wilkenfeld, a partner at the Atkinson Law Group in Bethesda, Md.
Francis, 49, a former child actress and Harvard University graduate who had covered financial news for CNBC, was first hired by Fox in 2012 as an anchor for Fox Business. After making numerous appearances on Fox News, she was promoted in November 2017 by the flagship channel as a permanent co-host for its midday ensemble show “Outnumbered,” where she and anchor Harris Faulkner were joined by a rotating panel of two other women and a sole male panelist, labeled the “One Lucky Guy.” Francis, meanwhile, continued co-hosting Fox Business’s “After the Bell” show and made frequent guest appearances on Tucker Carlson’s highly rated prime-time opinion show on Fox News.
But on Oct. 7, 2020, she abruptly stopped appearing on either network.
In an interview, Francis described the events that she says led up to her being moved off the air.
After Fox offered Francis her promotion in 2017, she said she was granted a negligible increase in compensation. She believed her salary, which was below $1 million, was far less than what her peers were making. But she agreed to wait for the next contract negotiation in 2019. In the meantime, she asked former colleagues and agents what other people were making at Fox News.
The spreadsheet she created with the data she found adjusted for certain variables, she said, including whether someone worked as a solo anchor, which is typically paid more, or as part of an ensemble. She also considered a host’s typical airtime — prime-time opinion show hosts are generally paid more than daytime anchors — and adjusted for experience and ratings. But the trends remained constant, she said: Men were paid many times more than their female counterparts.
On Nov. 11, 2019, Francis had a call with Dianne Brandi, a former executive vice president for legal and business affairs for Fox News who continues to represent Fox in some contract negotiations. When Brandi told her that her new contract would not include an increase in compensation, Francis said she responded by telling Brandi about her research and the “pretty staggering gender pay gap” she had found, mentioning her calculations regarding the salaries of specific daytime Fox hosts.
Francis said Brandi urged her to try a different tack in negotiating her salary and retorted, “That’s how the world works. Women make less. It’s just a fact.” At the time, Fox had recently appointed several women to senior executive positions, including Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. (Another, executive vice president and general counsel Lily Fu Claffee, left the company in April of last year, shortly after authorizing the settlement Francis would eventually receive.)
Speaking on behalf of Brandi, a spokesperson for Fox News said, “Melissa Francis’s version of that conversation is untrue and patently absurd.”
“It is illogical that anyone with Dianne Brandi’s level of experience in negotiating talent contracts for a living would make such a ludicrous statement,” the spokesperson added.
Francis said a Fox executive for human resources later was similarly unresponsive to her salary concerns. In January 2020, Francis’s lawyer sought the disclosure of the salaries of other Fox News personalities. Fox denied the request. She entered into arbitration with the company in August of that year. On Oct. 7, the date the arbitrator had set as a deadline for Fox News to hand over salary information, Francis was at her home studio preparing for her 4 p.m. episode of “After the Bell.” At 3:45 p.m., she said she saw a message flash on the teleprompter: “You’ve been canceled.”
She did not appear on the air again.
Francis officially resigned from Fox News on Feb. 2, 2021, and later lodged a complaint with the New York State Department of Labor, alleging she was retaliated against for pointing out a pay disparity at her network.
The department declined to comment, saying it “does not comment on open and ongoing investigations.”
Mintzer, Francis’s attorney, said, “We look forward to receiving the findings of their investigation.” | 2022-06-19T13:32:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fox News paid Melissa Francis $15 million after pay disparity claim - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/06/19/fox-news-melissa-francis-gender-pay-gap-settlement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/06/19/fox-news-melissa-francis-gender-pay-gap-settlement/ |
Hurricane Agnes and the Susquehanna: How devastation inspired mitigation
The disastrous flood 50 years ago claimed dozens of lives and caused billions in damage but prompted a strong response
People are rescued by boat from their homes on June 23, 1972, after Hurricane Agnes caused heavy flooding in Harrisburg, Pa., when the Susquehanna River overflowed its banks. (PAUL VATHIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
The mighty Susquehanna meanders down the Appalachian Plateau, shuttling water from the highlands of New York and Pennsylvania hundreds of miles toward the Chesapeake Bay. The waterway has long proved a valuable resource for the population centers that sprouted along its shores, such as Binghamton, N.Y., and Harrisburg and Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
But in June 1972, a prolonged and punishing torrent of rain pushed the generally benevolent river to unprecedented heights. A flood catastrophe ensued — worse than any before or since — spurred by an improbable source: a scrappy tropical storm named Agnes.
Agnes wrought havoc from Florida to New York, killing 128 people and causing $3.1 billion in damage. It was the most expensive tropical system in U.S. history at the time, a record that would stand for more than a decade.
No region was harder hit than the Susquehanna River basin. But the devastation paved the way for flood mitigation and response efforts that withstood their first test just over a decade ago.
How Agnes formed
On June 14, 1972, the first tropical depression of the Atlantic hurricane season developed in the northwestern Caribbean Sea. The depression quickly gained strength and was declared Tropical Storm Agnes the next day.
The storm strengthened steadily as it crawled north into the eastern Gulf of Mexico, becoming a low-end hurricane by June 18. Agnes was not unusually strong, but it was exceptionally large — 1,150 miles across. The National Hurricane Center declared it “one of the largest June hurricanes of record.”
The storm’s atypical size helped pull enormous amounts of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, dropping nearly nine inches of rain at landfall in the Florida Panhandle.
Agnes weakened to a depression as it passed through the Southeast, reaching the Carolinas on the June 21. Around the same time, a cold front developed near the Great Lakes and drew in some of Agnes’s moisture. Rain fell across the Mid-Atlantic, where soils were already saturated after a wet spring — priming the ground for the flooding disaster to come.
The depression moved over the North Carolina Outer Banks into the Atlantic, where it intensified into a tropical storm. But instead of continuing eastward out to sea, Agnes reversed course and turned inland, unleashing a multiday deluge from Virginia to New York.
“The storm got sucked into the jet stream, and it stalled and rained itself out over Pennsylvania,” said David Nicosia, the meteorologist-in-charge of the Binghamton office of the National Weather Service.
The storm dropped 7 to 15 inches of rain from Northern Virginia to southern New York, with locally higher amounts.
Extraordinary flooding occurred throughout this zone, with some of the worst of it focused along the Susquehanna River and its tributaries.
Flooding on the Susquehanna River
The Susquehanna had flooded before. In one particularly destructive event in March 1936, the river rose 20 to 30 feet across. Nearly 28 percent of Harrisburg was under four to 15 feet of water.
“The 1936 flood led to the Flood Control Act of 1936,” said Michael Bilder, hurricane program manager for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Mid-Atlantic region. “It was the first time the federal government recognized that it had a role to play in flood-fighting nationwide.
Yet the levees and flood walls constructed after that 1936 flood were no match for Agnes.
The tropical storm instigated record river crests — up to 15 feed above flood stage — far beyond levels imagined by architects of the flood control.
Levees were rapidly overtopped in dozens of cities and towns as the river flexed and expanded into its ancient flood plain, disregarding the development along its banks. Inundations were certainly not as severe as they may have been without the 1936 flood protections, Bilder said, but they were exceptional nonetheless.
“Nearly 50,000 homes were destroyed or incurred major damage, with an additional 65,000 homes experiencing minor damage,” Bilder said. “There was extensive damage to critical infrastructure, especially bridges, roads and railroads. … At least 43 million tons of debris required removal.”
Of the $3.1 billion in damage from Agnes, more than $2 billion occurred in the Susquehanna River basin.
Agnes motivated substantial flood response and mitigation efforts in its aftermath.
Before the storm, “federal-level emergency management was not particularly well-organized,” said MaryAnn E. Tierney, administrator of FEMA’s Mid-Atlantic region, in an email. “The enormity of the disaster finally convinced federal lawmakers and officials to start serious discussions about creating the organization that would be ultimately called the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
Agnes further led to a reevaluation of flood control strategies. Tierney said levees were raised in the vulnerable Wyoming Valley in northeast Pennsylvania and that properties in flood plains were either removed or elevated. Levees up to 41 feet were built in low-lying areas in the valley.
Tierney also noted subsequent legislation led to drastic increases in the proportion of households with flood insurance.
Flooding since Agnes
The work performed after Agnes would prove invaluable in the face of a modern-day deluge.
In September 2011, Tropical Storm Lee crawled north from the soupy Gulf of Mexico. Its waterlogged remnants dropped more than 10 inches of rain across a swath of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, mirroring the pattern of Agnes.
The winding Susquehanna responded similarly. The river approached and, in some cases, exceeded levels from 1972, but levees and flood walls protected communities.
Wilkes-Barre, Pa., devastated by Agnes, this time was spared.
“During Lee, the Susquehanna crested at 42.66 feet in Wilkes- Barre — almost two feet higher than the record set during Agnes,” Tierney said. “The levee system performed as designed and, according to the Luzerne County Flood Protection Authority, is estimated to have prevented approximately $5 billion in property damages.”
Flooding causes Pennsylvania, N.Y. evacuations as Tropical Storm Lee hits Northeast
Lee’s impacts fell short of Agnes’s despite similar rainfall. It killed 12, while its inflation-adjusted cost was about one-third of Agnes’s.
When asked whether the region is ready for another Lee or Agnes, Tierney replied that she would “never be so prideful” as to answer affirmatively.
Although the threats posed by the temperamental Susquehanna have been lessened, just last year the remnants of Hurricane Ida caused disastrous flash flooding in parts of the Northeast. It was a clear signal that extreme events, intensified by climate change, will continue to redefine what is possible in the region.
More Washington Post retrospective articles on Hurricane Agnes
Hurricane Agnes: A look back after 40 years (from 2012, focused on Washington, D.C. area)
The wrath of Agnes (from 1999)
Agnes: 3-day flood, 20-year wake (from 1992)
The deluge that transformed Occoquan (from 1992)
Useful resource: 50th Anniversary of Hurricane Agnes website from federal, state and local government agencies in Virginia, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania | 2022-06-19T13:32:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Agnes and the Susquehanna, response to the tropical storm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/19/hurricane-agnes-susquehanna-50years-storm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/19/hurricane-agnes-susquehanna-50years-storm/ |
Savior of abandoned music contemplates his collection
By Joe Heim | AP
Joe Bussard accompanies one of his 78’s with a rendition of an “air trumpet” April 14, 2022 in Frederick, Md. Bussard, 85, is a longtime collector of 78 rpms and has one of the largest and most important private collections in the country. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via AP)
Join the crowd, crow. People have been not knowing what to think about Bussard for decades. His singular obsession has entranced some and baffled others. If you weren’t interested in his passion, Bussard probably wasn’t much interested in you.
“I was like, okay, whatever, eye roll, and then damn, if he wasn’t right,” White recalled in a phone interview from Nashville. “Thirty seconds into this song, l was like, ’Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. What is this? Who recorded this? What is the speaker we’re listening to this through? What amplifier are you using? Because, damn, you weren’t kidding me, it sounds like this band is in the room with us right now.
He bought from dealers and at estate sales, but mostly he drove on twisty back roads through the hollers of West Virginia and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and down through the Deep South of Georgia, the Carolinas and Mississippi. He asked everyone he met if they had “any of them old records,” and they’d point him up to an attic or down the road to their cousin’s house or to an abandoned five-and-dime in town. | 2022-06-19T13:37:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Savior of abandoned music contemplates his collection - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/savior-of-abandoned-music-contemplates-his-collection/2022/06/19/f30e4844-efcf-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/savior-of-abandoned-music-contemplates-his-collection/2022/06/19/f30e4844-efcf-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
The 13th Amendment nearly preserved slavery — with Lincoln’s support
This image shows a depiction of Abraham Lincoln taking the oath of office as the 16th president of the United States administered by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in front of the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 1861. (AP)
In a last-ditch effort to prevent Southern states from seceding on the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inauguration in 1861, Congress passed a constitutional amendment that would have prevented Congress from abolishing slavery in states where it already existed.
Had three-quarters of states ratified this proposal, it would have become the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — which we know today as the amendment that banned slavery after the war.
As the United States celebrates Juneteenth, which President Biden made a federal holiday last year to commemorate the end of slavery in 1865, it’s striking to look back at how supermajorities in both houses of Congress endorsed this pro-slavery 13th Amendment just four years earlier, with support from anti-slavery Republicans.
In fact, Lincoln himself gave tacit approval to the amendment in his inaugural speech on March 4, 1861, just two days after the Senate passed it 24-12 — meeting the two-thirds threshold without a vote to spare. The new president said he had “no objection to its being made express and irrevocable,” and two weeks later, he sent letters to governors of all the states (including those that had seceded) with a copy of the joint resolution to amend the Constitution.
The amendment came out of a furious four-month period between Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861, when Congress also considered more far-reaching compromises that would have allowed the extension of slavery — which Lincoln forcefully opposed. For example, in a Dec. 10, 1860, letter to Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a fellow Illinois Republican, the president-elect urged him to reject “Pop. Sov.” — or popular sovereignty — which allowed people in federal territories to decide for themselves whether to enter the Union as free or slave states:
Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground — that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run — is Pop. Sov. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter. Yours as ever A. LINCOLN.
“Politics was changing almost minute-to-minute between November and March in response to seismic shifts — within states, between states, and how the federal government related to the people in the states,” said Ted Widmer, a historian at Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York and author of the book “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.”
“It was immensely complicated.”
Widmer noted that Lincoln’s view had always been that the Constitution protected slavery where it existed, but he objected vehemently to its expansion across the Mississippi River, into the territories.
Senate passage of the would-be 13th Amendment came two days after the House approved it 133-65, just squeaking past the two-thirds threshold. It read:
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any state, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
It was known as the Corwin Amendment, for its House sponsor, Rep. Thomas Corwin (R-Ohio), a former U.S. Treasury secretary who chaired a House committee that was trying to find a compromise between the North and South in the months before the Civil War.
Although he was a Republican, Corwin was an “unorthodox” one, wrote University of Virginia professor Norman Graebner in an Ohio History Journal article, “Thomas Corwin and the Sectional Crisis.” Graebner described Corwin as a conservative politician who had declared repeatedly that a new state had the right to decide the question of slavery for itself. That was too far for most Republicans.
“Republicans agreed overwhelmingly to the principle of constitutional guarantees for slavery in the states, but they condemned Corwin for submitting territorial compromises to his committee,” Graebner wrote.
Still, there was enough support for Congress to pass Corwin’s constitutional amendment to protect slavery where it existed. The Senate sponsor was New York Republican William Seward, who would go on to become Lincoln’s secretary of state and close adviser during the Civil War.
When Lincoln mentioned the amendment in his inaugural speech, he was keen on keeping as many border states in the Union as possible, said Widmer.
“Seven states have seceded, but Virginia has not, which is very important,” he explained. “People forget that Virginia is still in the United States when Lincoln becomes president. And that was important for a lot of reasons, including the safety of Washington, D.C., as capital of the U.S.”
He continued, “So Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware are all in the Union when Lincoln becomes president. If he loses those states, he’s toast, basically. Virginia is so symbolic — it’s where so many presidents have come from, it’s an extremely large and important state. Lincoln doesn’t want to lose Virginia — or Kentucky, the state he’s born in. So he’s willing to compromise when it’s important to keep those border states in.”
Virginia did wind up leaving the Union, and Richmond soon became the capital of the Confederacy.
But why didn’t the Southern states just work to ratify the amendment, stay in the Union and declare victory?
“The Southern states didn't believe the North would abide by the amendment,” said Mary Frances Berry, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America.” “Their leaders didn't trust Lincoln or the Congress.”
Widmer said some Southerners opposed secession, and the amendment might have appealed to them.
“But things were moving very, very fast, and it’s only one month from Lincoln’s inaugural to Fort Sumter” — the beginning of the Civil War. “By the time that happens, it’s just that much harder to compromise. It’s become a hot war at that point, and the desire for compromise slackens as a result.”
The Civil War essentially made the amendment moot, but a handful of states, including Maryland, did vote to ratify it. In 2014, the Maryland General Assembly voted to rescind that ratification.
Had the amendment passed and Southern states stayed in the Union, “they would have preserved their slave-based economy for a very long time,” Widmer said. “But by continuing to fight, they actually gave more power to Lincoln, who could initiate change through executive orders and military orders. The Emancipation Proclamation is a military measure. So the more they fought a total war, the more they created avenues for Lincoln to whittle away at slavery, and ultimately to end it.”
He noted that Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until 1888. “There’s a pretty good chance it would have lasted that long here too.” | 2022-06-19T15:08:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 13th Amendment nearly preserved slavery—with Lincoln’s support - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/19/13th-amendment-lincoln-preserve-slavery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/19/13th-amendment-lincoln-preserve-slavery/ |
People make their way across Pittman-Sullivan Park on San Antonio's east side at dusk. (Julia Robinson for The Washington Post)
SAN ANTONIO — Visitors entering Rebecca Flores’s San Antonio home pass a sepia-toned photo of her large Tejano family on the Texas farmland they worked before they moved into the city. It’s a reminder of what they left behind and how far they’ve come in a land where their roots go back more than 300 years.
The home’s deep-blue walls pay tribute to a family whose ancestors were among the first Canary Islanders to settle this colonial outpost and who, in 1959, pooled savings from their minimum wage incomes to buy the house. Flores, 79, wants to keep the home in her family, but she and many of her mostly Mexican American neighbors say they are being priced out of their homes due to skyrocketing property taxes and a hot housing market that has developers pressuring them to sell in the rapidly gentrifying city.
Records show the value of her property has more than doubled in recent years and were it not for exemptions, her taxes would be as high as a mortgage. She has been bombarded by offers from investors eager to cash in, and the names of property owners on her block have changed from Villaseñores and Herrera to those of corporations.
San Antonio’s impending housing crisis threatens to displace the longtime residents who helped give the city its distinctive culture and character. It’s a crisis facing cities across America where housing is in short supply, affordable housing is even scarcer and investors are sweeping into high-demand markets with big cash offers that are pricing many Americans out of the market altogether.
'Why can’t poor people have nice things?’
Ten years ago, a multibillion-dollar push by the city to incentivize development in San Antonio’s urban core yielded explosive investment along its enchanting riverway — a realization of former mayor Julián Castro’s “Decade of Downtown” campaign.
The leveraging of taxpayer dollars for private development was wildly successful — and critics say, destructive — in the city’s economically segregated inner-core neighborhoods, which have its oldest housing stock and most vulnerable residents. Redevelopment brought luxury housing, high-end shopping districts, tourist attractions and made downtown a hot destination. But it also triggered soaring property values, intensified code enforcement action — which made it easier for older buildings to be demolished for redevelopment and, residents say, gentrification that has made the historically Black east side unrecognizable.
Advocates say this new form of “redlining” spreading to the city’s Tejano west side means many will no longer be able to afford homes in communities their families built over generations. Residents agree some of the improvements that have come with the redevelopment have been good, but said the price has been too high.
“I love what they’ve done on the river but why is it at the cost of people who have lived here forever? Why can’t poor people have nice things?” said Flores. “We’ve been living next to a ditch for years and finally, they fixed it. Now we have to leave? That’s what irritates me.”
City leaders say they are listening and aiding residents with everything from money to help rehabilitate homes to integrating advocate recommendations into their housing strategy to a $150 million bond issue approved by voters this month that will be used for affordable housing initiatives. Mayor Ron Nirenberg (I) said the city has curbed the “wild West” development mentality with a reset on tax incentives and affordability metrics. But the solution cannot continue to be disinvestment, he said.
“We are trying to slow or turn back the tide that began decades ago,” Nirenberg said. “ We have been living for the last 20 years in a new Gilded Age where there are haves and have-nots. Until we get serious about equity, we are facing the possibility of losing many communities who have been struggling through cost-burden housing.”
But while elected officials tout actions they say they’ve taken to help residents, property owners and advocates point to what they see as failures. A recent report by researchers at the University of Texas School of Law found that San Antonio’s code enforcement officers are the most aggressive among Texas cities, ordering at least 25 times as many home demolitions as their counterparts in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and Austin combined since 2015. Residents displaced when their homes are condemned often cannot afford housing in the redeveloped neighborhoods that replace them.
Property valuations in Bexar County, home to San Antonio, have increased by an average of 73 percent over the last 10 years, raising the tax bill of the average homeowner between $2,300 and $3,000, according to the county appraisal district. The number of homeowners protesting their valuations has jumped 50 percent in the past five years. Neighbors are helping each other apply for tax exemptions, and some residents are exploring housing trusts and historic preservation to protect their land. These things combined, residents say, leave them with few options to save their neighborhoods from the kinds of destabilizing changes that Austin has experienced.
“San Antonio looks like what Texas will look like in 20 years and Texas looks like what the United States will look like in 20-25 years,” said Roger Enriquez, a University of Texas San Antonio criminal justice professor who directs the school’s engagement with the city’s west side. “The rest of the country needs to pay attention to what’s happening here because it’s almost a crystal ball into the future and what will happen if solutions aren’t found.”
‘No way to stop it’
San Antonio officials realized in 2010 that the city of 1.5 million — projected to grow by another million in less than 30 years — was facing a housing shortage. The city’s military and medical industries and low-cost living made it attractive. It also was poised for spillover from the boom in Austin, located about 80 miles north.
Deputy City Manager Lori Houston said years of neglect meant there was no market-rate housing downtown to meet the growing demand. Neighborhoods in the city’s core were falling apart and plagued with crime. Through a “community-driven” vision, she said, the city focused on making downtown more livable. Once done, they’d turn back to affordability issues, she said.
“It was wildly successful,” Houston said. “After we saw these housing projects come online, we heard a lot of concerns from the community and from council members.”
Developers received rebate deals for nearly everything they built, forgoing taxes for up to 75 years and obtaining federal housing grants to develop public housing. But most of the new housing — including the affordable units built as a condition of receiving public money — were priced above what most San Antonians could afford, according to a report from the National Association of Latino Community Asset Builders. The median household income for San Antonians is $67,521 a year, nearly $15,000 less than the national median.
Beautification projects along the San Antonio River and its creeks brought valuable amenities to a city that welcomes about 34 million tourists a year. Spruced-up bike and pedestrian trails connected the downtown to high-end retail and dining to the north, and old Spanish missions to the south. The money that had chased “White flight” into suburban development, shifted back to the city, said architect Jim Bailey, who served on Nirenberg’s housing task force in 2018.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods on the city’s east and west sides were under increasing pressure from displacement.
“Every time you invest in public infrastructure in the inner city, if you don’t first ask the questions about what this development will do to generational residents, you’ll displace people,” said former city council member María Antonietta Berriozabal, who served on mayoral housing task forces and blamed a lack of political for what she called the city’s sluggish intervention.
Between 2014 and 2017, various task forces and studies produced about a half-dozen reports but led to little progress.
“We spent three years banging our head against the wall … and started to see the problem unfolding before our very eyes,” said Bailey, the architect, who with Berriozabal produced a report recommending the city change its charter to use bonds for housing. “But it felt like a problem that was too big for a city to fix.”
The pace of development was staggering in Wanda Smith’s neighborhood on the east side. Seemingly overnight, she said, the historical homes of Dignowity Hill’s Black community were sold, gutted, rehabbed and resold to non-Black families after their original owners were pushed out.
Smith’s youthful scrawl is etched into the sidewalk her father kept immaculate for decades. Alongside her name is a date: Jan. 29, 1972. The sidewalk is adjacent to a ragged, crumbling alley she has repeatedly complained about to the city. An Amazon delivery truck recently had to be towed away after it got stuck in the buckled asphalt.
“There seems to be no way to stop it,” said the retired teacher, whose property taxes increased to nearly $5,000 this year from $1,200 in 2010. She has tried to rally her longtime neighbors, but they seem resigned to the changes, she said. “The city is just going to do what they want.”
Real estate agent Richard Acosta, who helps residents protest their appraisals, estimated valuations have increased 50 percent in the past decade. Local government relies disproportionately on property taxes for revenue because the state does not have income taxes. Officials are exploring policy changes to alleviate the pressure, but there are few paths that wouldn’t involve getting major tax reform legislation through the Republican-controlled state legislature.
Lola Rodriguez, 35, inherited the house that had been in her family for 70 years. Her grandparents built a stone nicho, a household altar encasing the Virgin of Guadalupe and other saints, on the front lawn, to thank God for giving them a home. Her late grandfather paid off the home for $70,000, but Rodriguez, who works two jobs and is raising two children, is struggling to keep up with the spiraling taxes, fees and potential code compliance issues.
The 1,400-square foot home was most recently appraised at more than $202,000 — nearly $70,000 more than four years ago, and keeps rising despite the foundation needing major work. Houses on her street recently sold for more than $300,000.
“I haven’t expanded or improved, or found gold on my land,” she said. “There’s nothing more valuable on it than the fact that other people want to live there.”
She has moved her recycling bin close to her mailbox to easily dump the piles of offers she gets from investors who want her property.
“People tell me to sell high and go somewhere else. But why should I have to leave?” she said. “There’s no way I could afford purchasing my house if I wasn’t already in it. The question is how much longer do we hold out?”
Ian Benavidez, assistant director of the city’s Neighborhood and Housing Services Department, said the city offers resources to help families keep their homes such as funding for roof repairs and helping eligible residents apply for tax exemptions. But officials won’t apologize for the city’s efforts to boost development.
“I think investing in communities, done responsibly, is a net positive,” Benavidez said. “I think any time that you’re pushing people out, it is a bad thing. But I don’t think that’s what the city has intended to do, those are just market forces that … every city is dealing with.”
Resident Lisa Woods is close to losing the clapboard bungalow her uncles built in 1929. She paid the back taxes they owed, but the tax bill has jumped to $1,300 from $900. The house sits on a dead-end street of flipped $400,000 properties and Airbnbs.
Woods said she has always found a way to keep the promise to her mother to keep the house in the family, but it’s difficult. She said she has applied for aid for urgent repairs, but last year’s winter freeze left her with costly pipe repairs so she shut off the water.
“I do a lot of crying,” said Woods, who is on a fixed income because of her disabilities. “This house means everything to me. There’s nothing like pulling into this driveway, and knowing I own this home.”
Michael Shannon, head of the city’s department of Development Services, disputed several of the characterizations of the city’s code enforcement policy and called demolition “a last resort.” At a March forum, he said the city has a responsibility “to care about the safety of people in unsafe structures. Our codes are very clear.”
But Trinity University professor Christine Drennon said the homes selected for razing, often with people living in them, are concentrated in the same neighborhoods with heavy real estate activity and targeted for redevelopment. The once-undervalued land is now more prized than the aged structures standing on it.
“I worked my whole life to be in this home,” said Jesse Aceves, 63, who has sued the city over his demolition order and lives defiantly inside the crumbling home without utilities. “It’s not fair.”
San Antonio’s west side is an ethnic enclave where migrants fleeing the Mexican Revolution settled in the early 20th century. Many built wood homes from lumberyard kits and raised families despite rampant anti-Mexican discrimination. While White San Antonians built wealth, west side residents created an identity and culture around their advocacy. They fought for better working conditions, fair representation in the city and infrastructure improvements for more than 100 years. Some of San Antonio’s best-known politicians came from these barrios.
“The fight for our space goes way back,” said city council member Teri Castillo, who represents the area and is a sixth-generation west-sider. Her office has pushed the city to find alternatives to demolition for hundreds of properties on the code compliance list. “We’ve seen it happen to the Black community on the east side and people are worried the pattern will continue.”
Flores, the 79-year-old grandmother, has everything she needs — her church, a bus stop, Tony’s and Maria’s restaurants serving local fare — nearby. She wants that for her daughter and granddaughters. But they may have no choice but to sell when she inherits the house and its tax debt.
“This is how the fiber of a community is frayed,” she said. “Investors come and take over. It’s just like 1836, people with money came and changed laws, got the land and the power and they threw all the Mexicans out. Here we are in 2022, and they are doing the same thing all over again.” | 2022-06-19T15:08:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Texas taxes push Black, Hispanics out of homes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/19/texas-housing-crisis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/19/texas-housing-crisis/ |
In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Bahrain’s new Ambassador to Syria Waheed Mubarak Sayyar, center, presents his credentials to Syrian President Bashar Assad, third left, in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, June 19, 2022. Assad received on Sunday the credentials from Bahrain’s first ambassador to Syria in more than a decade as Damascus improves its relations with Gulf Arab countries. (SANA via AP) (Uncredited/SANA)
DAMASCUS, Syria — A new ambassador from Bahrain formally took up his post in Syria on Sunday, the country’s first full diplomatic mission there in more than a decade as Damascus continues to improve its relations with Gulf Arab states. | 2022-06-19T15:09:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Syrian leader receives credentials from Bahrain ambassador - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/syrian-leader-receives-credentials-from-bahrain-ambassador/2022/06/19/6b03048c-efdc-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/syrian-leader-receives-credentials-from-bahrain-ambassador/2022/06/19/6b03048c-efdc-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
A 10-year-old boy stands by the grave of his father, who died defending Irpin as a member of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, in May 2022. (Mikhail Palinchak/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Many countries around the world are celebrating Father’s Day on this third Sunday in June.
In Ukraine this year, the holiday is bittersweet.
Men of fighting age cannot leave the country, lest they be called up to join the fight against Russian invasion forces. Many have sent their families away to safety, and many have been killed on the battlefield.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his close aides say 100 to 200 Ukrainian soldiers are dying virtually every day, with hundreds more injured.
In a wartime Father’s Day message, Zelensky, who has two children, praised fathers who “defend” Ukraine.
“Being a father is a great responsibility and a great happiness,” Ukraine’s leader said Sunday in an Instagram post. “It is strength, wisdom, motivation to go forward and not to give up. And no matter how difficult it is — to protect and defend the most precious. Thank you, our heroes.”
Zelensky has a daughter and a son. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in April, he spoke fondly of his teenage daughter and joked that “without knocking the door, I can’t speak with my daughter.”
He told Tapper he wanted his children to remember him as “a human being that loved life to the fullest, and loved his family, and loved his motherland — definitely not a hero.”
The Ukrainian president’s post was accompanied by photos of men in Ukraine, some in military fatigues, others dressed as civilians, caring for their families in hospitals and underground bunkers.
In a few of the shots, fathers can be seen sending their children away in trains as they stay behind.
Officials in Kyiv have called for more weapons and ammunition from the West as they struggle to maintain control over areas of the east where the most intense fighting is underway.
Father’s Day was an opportunity for some to call for end to the war.
“On Father’s Day, we wish all the soldiers of Ukraine to return home as soon as possible with victory,” a post from Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said.
In an accompanying video, which features the logo of Ukraine’s State Border Service, a soldier tells the camera, “We are defending our country for the sake of our children.”
“We must end this war so that our children grow up under a peaceful sky and so that our children do not have to fight like us,” another adds.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, shared a video of a son reuniting with his father, who is in military fatigues. “We are doing everything we can to ensure that children will see their parents returning home from war,” the parliament’s caption said. | 2022-06-19T16:09:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Volodymyr Zelensky on Father's Day praises dads who 'defend' Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/zelensky-fathers-day-ukraine-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/zelensky-fathers-day-ukraine-war/ |
Hundreds of civilians missing, taken or simply gone: The untold toll of the Ukraine war
A woman in Borodianka, Ukraine, walks past a poster seeking information on people who have gone missing during the Russian invasion. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
It wasn’t the call Oleg Buryak expected.
He was hoping to hear that his 16-year-old son, Vlad, had safely escaped the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, where Moscow’s forces were quickly closing in. Instead, it was a Russian military man on the other end of the line.
They had taken his son, the soldier said, and he was being kept in an undisclosed location.
Almost overnight, Buryak, head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration, was thrust into a frantic, detective-like pursuit, scrambling for clues, trying to figure out where Russian soldiers were holding his son, and how to get him back.
Soon, Vlad found a guard who allowed him to make occasional calls. The teenage boy was growing desperate, his father said. At home, Vlad loved computer games. In his cell, he was surrounded by the constant, terrible sound of other prisoners being tortured.
“What are you doing to get me out of here?” Vlad asked his father.
For nearly four months, the world has watched in horror as Russian forces flattened Ukrainian cities, with images of slaughtered civilians in Bucha and Mariupol attracting international outrage and prompting Western powers to increase their military aid. But all the while a less visible phenomenon was taking place in homes, at checkpoints, during street protests: Russian soldiers were detaining and abducting hundreds — perhaps thousands — of civilians.
Authorities and human rights advocates say these cases are part of a larger pattern of Russian abductions and disappearances, a military tactic meant to terrorize communities and demoralize civilian resistance.
Many among the missing are victims of forced disappearance — detainment followed by silence, the captor refusing to even acknowledge they’ve taken someone captive. Others are locked in Russian-controlled jails, sometimes used to barter for Russia’s captured soldiers, or extract information.
For many more, their whereabouts are unclear: Some are simply incommunicado, others are likely dead. And for each person missing, one expert said, there are “concentric rings of harm” that ripple through their communities.
The Ukrainian government has recorded at least 765 cases — which can involve more than one victim — of what they call forced disappearances, an umbrella term to describe different forms of illegal deprivation of liberty.
Experts and officials agree the real number is almost certainly much higher. How much higher? No one really knows, but Ukraine’s national police have fielded more 9,000 missing person reports since Russia invaded.
“It is just tip of the iceberg,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, one of Ukraine’s most well-known human rights organizations, which has documented 459 cases of civilians held in captivity since the beginning of the invasion.
A final text message
It was the end of March when it became clear Russia was about to seize Melitopol. But despite Buryak’s desperate pleas, Vlad refused to leave his grandfather, who was bedridden and battling stage-four cancer.
“I will stay with grandpa until the end,” Vlad told his father.
Roughly one week later, his grandfather died. Still mourning the loss, Vlad was ready to leave.
Buryak found his son a seat in a car with two women and three children, all trying to escape the city. They left early and made it roughly 45 miles north to the city of Vasylivka, where they ran into the last Russian checkpoint. Soldiers went car to car, interrogating the passengers.
Vlad was in the back seat looking at his phone when one of the Russian guards took his device and soon after learned his father was a government official. The car’s other passengers were released, but Vlad was detained.
Buryak immediately started calling all his friends and met with high-ranking authorities, pleading for help to arrange a prisoner exchange, which the Russian soldiers had said was the only way to secure Vlad’s release. But conversations with Ukrainian authorities led nowhere, he said.
The Security Service of Ukraine assigned an investigator to his case, but Buryak said she has made little progress. The Security Service did not respond to an interview request. Vlad’s case sheds a somber light on the hurdles Ukrainians face in finding their loved ones, when even a prominent government official with connections struggles to arrange his son’s release.
“Except for my friends, nobody is helping me,” Buryak said in a recent interview.
Some 300 miles north of where Vlad was taken, Viktoria Andrusha, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, managed to send her sister one last text: “They just passed down the street.” Soon after, they — a group of Russian soldiers driving an armored vehicle — stormed into her parents’ home in the village of Staryi Bykiv, about 60 miles east of Kyiv.
They tore through the house and found Andrusha’s cellphone with the message to her sister, Iryna. Their parents later recounted to Iryna the terrifying moments that followed. The soldiers accused Andrusha of sharing intelligence with the Ukrainian military and blamed Russian casualties on her text. As they questioned her with guns drawn, they demanded that she speak Russian. She refused.
“You’re nobody here, this won’t happen your way,” Andrusha told the soldiers, Iryna said. “We are on our land, you’re not welcome here.”
That day in late March would be the last time her family saw her.
A flood of disappearances
Yuriy Belousov, Ukraine’s lead prosecutor for human rights violations, said his team is overwhelmed.
Ukrainian authorities have opened more than 13,000 investigations into possible war crimes, an unprecedented effort during a bloody and ongoing conflict. They have registered nearly 800 instances of forced disappearances. In just one of the cases, Russian soldiers took 70 Ukrainians from their houses and kept them in a basement for weeks, Belousov said.
Officials and nongovernmental organizations say they are struggling to keep up with the flood of reported disappearances, and some experts say Ukraine’s criminal justice system is unprepared to deal with the vast number of cases. They also have proved especially difficult to investigate, since many of the missing people have been secreted away to Russia or Russian-held territory, putting them out of authorities’ reach, activists and officials say.
“But it doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything,” Belousov said in a recent interview. “We are instructing and telling our staff at our regional offices to not wait for the Russians to leave.”
Belousov’s focus is to ensure Russian perpetrators are convicted in eventual war crimes trials. When they can, investigators rush to the crime scene and gather evidence: they talk to witnesses and relatives, they search for fingerprints and forgotten belongings of Russian soldiers.
They also scan social networks and Russian media, where they often find videos of captured Ukrainians that offer tidbits of information to puzzle cases together and they interview victims who have been released.
Before the war, Belousov led a small unit of 45 people, investigating wrongdoings committed by Ukrainian law enforcement. Now, almost every employee in prosecutors’ offices across the country has been asked to investigate war crimes, he said.
The scale of atrocities has prompted international organizations, including the International Criminal Court and the International Commission on Missing Persons, to help document the reported cases.
The United Nations has recorded 210 cases of forced disappearances since the beginning of the war, its mission in Ukraine said in a statement to The Post last month. Investigators have found that victims were usually taken at their home, workplace, or at checkpoints. Many men disappeared after being taken to “filtration camps.”
In most of these cases, the U.N. mission said, victims “were held incommunicado in improvised places of detention” — schools, government buildings, warehouses, barns and police stations. After days or weeks of detention, many victims were transferred to Russia, or Russian-held areas like Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, regions controlled by Russian-affiliated armed groups before the February invasion.
Only in rare cases have relatives received information directly from Russian military officials, the U.N. mission said.
The United Nations also has documented 11 cases of forced disappearances committed by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies.
Russian officials have in the past denied reports of kidnappings and forced dislocations, calling their alleged use of filtration camps a “lie” and blaming civilian harm on Ukrainians. The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the reported forced disappearances.
‘The crime of absence, the crime of invisibility’
In recent history, scholars trace the tactic of forced disappearances to Nazi Germany, when Adolf Hitler’s “Night and Fog” decree ordered the seizure of anyone in occupied territory who was “endangering German security.” They were transferred to Germany and effectively vanished without a trace. Since then, disappearances have been “the authoritarian’s gateway into violating people’s fundamental rights with impunity,” said Elisa Massimino, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Human Rights Institute.
Tetiana Pechonchyk, director of ZMINA, a Kyiv-based human rights organization, said the majority of the disappearances she has logged have come from Russian-occupied or recently liberated regions, such as Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Kyiv. Once investigators gain access to occupied territory, the numbers are expected to soar.
Pechonchyk said Russian forces are targeting prominent community members, many of whom are actively involved in opposing the Russian invasion — journalists, activists, humanitarian volunteers and local officials.
“Why? To break local resilience,” she said. “The Russians saw how strong Ukrainian civilians were in opposing the war and so they have chosen precise people to send a signal to dissuade and stop this resilience.”
Olena Kuvaieva, a lawyer with the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, is compiling evidence of abductions for an eventual case in front of the European Court of Human Rights, where an emergency provision could compel Russia to release unlawful detainees or, at least, improve their living conditions. But there’s no guarantee Moscow would comply.
“We’re trying to create a situation where Russia is pressed from every corner — from the journalists, from the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, the international community,” Kuvaieva said. “We hope this pressure will work.”
But some human rights activists in Ukraine have said that the international outpouring has done little to deter Russian forces from committing such crimes. A case in The Hague’s International Criminal Court is nice, they say, but a verdict in the distant future does not prevent Ukrainians’ ongoing suffering.
“We have a completely ineffective international system,” said Matviichuck, of the Center for Civil Liberties. Despite the robust architecture of international courts and mandates “what we have learned is that they can do nothing.”
Massimino said the frustration is justified, but she argued the international justice system has improved in recent years, both at the intergovernmental and state levels, pointing to tribunals set up to prosecute war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and a growing infrastructure to support domestic prosecutions.
It will take both international and local efforts to deter and prevent war crimes, she said.
Ukraine took an important first step last month when it handed down a guilty verdict in its first war crime trial. Investigating and prosecuting a kidnapping or forced disappearance will be even more difficult, experts say.
“You can’t see a picture of a forced disappearance,” Massimino said. “It’s the crime of absence, the crime of invisibility.”
The practice has been used in Pinochet’s Chile and Argentina’s Dirty War. In Algeria, as many as 20,000 people disappeared during the civil war in the 1990s, and activists say the government is still denying the practice and suppressing information about victims. In Bosnia, investigators are still finding bodies of the roughly 30,000 people who went missing during the war there nearly three decades ago. And more recently, about 100,000 people have been reported disappeared in Syria and Mexico.
The human rights nonprofit Freedom House bluntly declared last year: “Impunity for perpetrators of enforced disappearances remains the norm.”
‘The silence scares us’
After weeks of frantic efforts and sleepless nights, Buryak recently managed to orchestrate a plan he thinks will get Vlad home. He said the Russian counterparts have agreed to it, but declined to offer more details, fearing it could endanger his son and the negotiation process.
Vlad, who has been transferred to a different location, has slowly recovered his optimism and is “holding up strong.”
Buryak is hopeful, but with uncertain days ahead, he said emotion is a luxury he can’t afford.
“Vlad needs me like this: coldblooded, rational and wise,” he said. “I have no right to get into my feelings right now. When we free him up then we will cry, we will be happy, we will do everything.”
The months since also have been agonizing for Andrusha’s family. They have heard nothing from her Russian captors, but have learned through the informal whisper network of captured and returned Ukrainians that she was being held in a detention center in the western Russian region of Kursk, where human rights monitors say many others are also being kept. But their most recent information is from early May. Since then, nothing.
Andrusha’s family has contacted the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, they have called every number they can find and filled out every online form available. They have plastered Andrusha’s photo across their social media feeds.
“What reaction can there be? Anger!” Iryna said. “The silence scares us. It’s a dead end. Since we cannot go there on our own, we cannot get any information.”
Still, the family has hope. A math instructor devoted to her work, Andrusha is beloved in the classroom.
“The whole school is looking for her — all of her students, their parents, honestly, the whole country,” Iryna said. “Everybody keeps waiting until we can finally post that she’s back home and she’s okay.” | 2022-06-19T16:35:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hundreds of people missing in Ukraine in pattern of Russian abductions, Ukraine says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/people-missing-ukraine-russia-invasion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/19/people-missing-ukraine-russia-invasion/ |
No point of view should enjoy greater legal protection than other perspectives
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on June 6. (T. Narayan/Bloomberg News)
The June 15 editorial “A response to India’s intolerance” calls for members of the Indian government to stop disparaging Islam. This might have some pragmatic value, considering how desirable it would be to reduce tensions between India and Pakistan.
However, there is another aspect to this. We can never allow considerations of comity and goodwill to be a Trojan horse for blasphemy laws, or for the automatic assumption that religious believers have a greater right than anyone else to be insulated from offensive comments. The notion that all religious beliefs deserve to be respected should be redirected to a concern for equal legal rights for adherents of all points of view, whether on matters of religion or anything else. No point of view should ever enjoy greater legal protection than other perspectives just because it contains belief in a supernatural being or beings.
In a truly free society, no belief or idea can be legally protected from doubt and ridicule. That it might be prudent to avoid saying certain things can never be elevated to an enforceable prohibition. An expression should never be banned for just being extremely offensive, regardless of whether it scandalizes a religious or any other type of cherished concept.
Edward Tabash, Los Angeles
The writer, an attorney, is chair of the board of directors of the Center for Inquiry. | 2022-06-19T16:40:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | No point of view should enjoy greater legal protection than other perspectives - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/no-point-view-should-enjoy-greater-legal-protection-than-other-perspectives/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/19/no-point-view-should-enjoy-greater-legal-protection-than-other-perspectives/ |
Goodbye, farewell and adieu to Spoiler Alerts
R.I.P. Spoiler Alerts, 2014-2022
Perspective by Daniel W. Drezner
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.
In 2014, I began writing on a regular basis at The Washington Post. This space was my idiosyncratic look at developments in international relations, American politics and popular culture.
Eight years later, it is time to give the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts their notice of termination. Today will be my last column.
Given recent events at The Post, I fear some conspiratorially minded readers might conclude that I am a small piece of collateral damage from all the drama. The truth is more banal: My contact was up, and management wanted to go in a different direction. The Post is figuring out how to best organize its opinion sections, and I do not fit into those plans.
If that sounds bad for me, the truth is that it was growing ever more difficult for me to tolerate the status quo, as well. This had nothing to do with the folks at PostEverything; they always edited me with a light touch, and their interventions always improved my prose.
My problem was the pace. I wrote four columns per week on average. If one thinks of those as simple blog posts, perhaps that does not seem like too heavy a lift. Over time, however, Spoiler Alerts morphed from being a blog to being much more like a column. Each contribution got a bit longer, a bit more polished The tone of Spoiler Alerts became less irreverent and more, dare I say, mature.
Part of this evolution was probably because I was writing for, you know, The Washington Post. Consciously or subconsciously, I was striving to ensure that I belonged at the same newspaper that employed legendary reporters and columnists. Another part, no doubt, was the times we live in. A lot has happened over the past eight years: two wars (or, rather, one long war) in Ukraine, Donald Trump’s election and presidency, a pandemic, the Afghanistan pullout, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, and so forth. I found a few ways of writing about some of this with a bemused tone, but there were limits.
The biggest driver for this change, however, is probably a less forgiving public sphere. As I have noted before, Spoiler Alerts was a form of “contingent writing” — speculations about the state of the world that might or might not turn out to have legs. Some of these musings held up well; others, not so much. And that was fine — I have been perfectly fine admitting when I was wrong.
At some point over these past eight years, however, it seems as though the judgment of public discourse shifted. Years ago, many were lamenting the notion that prominent pundits could prove to be massively wrong about big questions and still not lose their standing in the marketplace of ideas. That trend mostly persists, but it has been obscured by a more prominent one, in which the consequences of being impolitic are far more severe.
We live in an age in which retweeting a tasteless joke and then apologizing and deleting it 10 minutes later still winds up being on your permanent record. Not all infractions are equal, and in some cases such behavior merits serious sanctions. There is something bizarre, however, about the capricious nature of reactions and overreactions to acts that less than a decade ago would barely have merited a shrug.
It is entirely possible that as a middle-aged straight white guy, my read on this is wrong. Another trend I have noticed over the past eight years is that my inner cranky-old-man voice is starting to get louder. I am keenly aware that this voice is not always wrong, but it ain’t always right, either. That said, a public discourse that is implacably hostile to only a particular slice of norm infractions is not fertile ground for the contingent writing that inspired Spoiler Alerts.
We need a more forgiving public discourse, one in which it is possible for mistakes to be made, apologies to be sincere, criticism to be tolerated, and respect to be preserved across genuine ideological disagreements.
I will probably have more fully formed thoughts about this in the near future. Maybe those thoughts will be published somewhere — but not here. It is time for the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts to log off and wish loyal readers a very fond farewell. | 2022-06-19T16:40:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Goodbye, farewell and adieu to Spoiler Alerts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/19/goodbye-farewell-adieu-spoiler-alerts/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/19/goodbye-farewell-adieu-spoiler-alerts/ |
Avalanche star Valeri Nichushkin is ‘built for this time of year’
Valeri Nichushkin scored two goals Saturday en route to a 7-0 Colorado win over the Lightning. (Harry How/Getty Images)
Denver — Colorado Avalanche forward Valeri Nichushkin can be described in many ways. Some of his teammates liken him to a train, a truck or a horse, while others stick with the physical attributes: big, long, strong and fast.
The descriptors can go on and on, but no matter how one wants to characterize the 27-year-old Russian, it all leads back to a couple common thoughts: His skill set is unlike any other; and on a team full of superstars, Nichushkin has emerged as one of Colorado’s most important players.
Nichushkin has eight goals in the postseason thus far, scoring twice in Colorado’s 7-0 blowout win in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals against the Tampa Bay Lightning. He was inches away from a hat trick in the second period of Game 2, if not for Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, who made a dazzling glove save to rob Nichushkin.
“Val some nights — most nights — is our best player, to be honest,” Colorado forward Andrew Cogliano said.
The series now shifts to Tampa Bay, with Monday’s Game 3 at Amalie Arena.
Avalanche puts a touchdown on Lightning, take command of Stanley Cup finals
Nichushkin is a pending unrestricted free agent and is expected to sign a significant contract after his impressive season. He has been one of the best players — if not the best — in these Stanley Cup finals. Nichushkin has three goals and one assist in the series.
"He's been a horse for us all playoffs,” said Colorado center Alex Newhook. “It's been fun to watch. He goes out there and does everything right, he does everything well. He plays in every situation and he's a truck for us. He's been doing everything right.”
Colorado Coach Jared Bednar said Nichushkin was simply “built for this time of year.” Nichushkin has been paired on Colorado’s top line with center Nathan MacKinnon and winger Gabriel Landeskog.
“He’s such a hard-working guy and shows on ice,” Colorado defenseman Cale Makar said. “He’s so valuable for us in every single zone … you see his offensive talent that he’s shown lately. He’s the full package. He’s been incredible for us. He’s such a driven human being.”
And while Nichushkin has thrived in his role with Colorado this season, that wasn’t always the case.
Nichushkin was once a heralded prospect, selected 10th overall in the 2013 NHL draft by the Dallas Stars. Nichushkin had a promising start, recording 14 goals and 20 assists as a rookie during the 2013-14 season.
But in his second season, things took a turn. He had hip surgery and played in only eight games. He had a subpar 2015-16 season in Dallas before he returned to Russia to play in the Kontinental Hockey League for two seasons. He then returned to Dallas for the 2018-19 season, a year he failed to record a single goal and had only 10 assists.
“In Dallas, it was maybe just a different scenario,” said Cogliano, who played with Nichushkin in Dallas in 2018-19. “I don’t think he was comfortable there. I think there were different things going on … since coming here, I haven’t seen a level of play from a guy consistently — a 200-foot game offensively and defensively — like I’ve been seeing in Val.”
Nichushkin was bought out by the Stars during the 2019 offseason and the Avalanche signed him to a one-year, one-way $850,000 contract in August 2019. He recorded 13 goals and 27 points in 57 games. He re-signed for two years in October 2020 and has been a needed force in the Colorado room.
This year, Nichushkin scored 25 goals in the regular season for the first time in his career. He finished with 52 points.
“It feels like he’s way more consistent now,” said Josh Manson, one of Colorado’s key trade deadline acquisitions in March. “He fits in the structure so well, he forechecks so hard. He’s such a big, strong guy. He’s lanky and he just constantly puts you under pressure and he’s strong enough to turn the puck over. He’s been amazing ever since I got here.”
Nichushkin’s development has been a product of his work ethic and internal motivation since he arrived in Colorado. Bednar said most nights, whenever he is looking at video after a game, he’ll think he’s the last one there. But, when he turns the corner to leave, he’ll often see Nichushkin walk out of the room, just getting done with a weight room session after the game.
The next morning? Nichushkin’s the first one in the room.
“This is a guy that is highly dedicated, highly motivated … he’s found his place here,” Bednar said. | 2022-06-19T16:40:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Valeri Nichushkin of Colorado Avalanche shines in Stanley Cup finals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/19/valeri-nichushkin-stanley-cup-finals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/06/19/valeri-nichushkin-stanley-cup-finals/ |
“Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told a news conference Friday, while sporting a yellow blazer over a blue blouse — colors of the Ukrainian flag. “We want them to live … the European dream.”
Kyiv already has grounds for disappointment. It wanted fast-track candidate status without conditions attached. “But the commission listed six steps it wants to see Ukraine take,” my colleagues reported. “Among them: implementing laws to ensure the selection of qualified judges and to limit the influence of oligarchs. It also asked that Ukraine improve its track record on investigations, prosecutions and convictions for corruption.”
“Ukraine wasn’t close before and it is not close now,” said one E.U. diplomat, who spoke to my colleagues on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Turkey, for example, won candidate status in 1999 and began accession talks in 2005. But long-ruling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s autocratic turn away from the West — combined with hostility from some corners in Europe to the accession of a sizable Muslim-majority nation — effectively put the prospect of Turkey’s entry in deep freeze.
Ukraine doesn’t face such civilizational angst — it has become a kind of lodestar for European politicians and commentators, who see in its struggle a unifying, rallying moment for the geopolitical West. For weeks, Ukrainian officials and parliamentarians have been making their case to governments across the continent on broader ideological grounds.
For now, though, the tunnel of the war remains long, winding and dark. On Sunday, Zelensky returned from visiting the front lines in the country’s south, where Russia is looking to consolidate significant territorial gains. “We will not give away the south to anyone,” he said — in part a statement of defiance as Ukraine’s outgunned fighters hold the line, but also an implicit rejection of suggestions from some corners elsewhere that Kyiv may need to settle for territorial concessions.
A poll published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) last week found the emergence of two distinct political camps among the European public when it comes to views on the Ukraine war. On one hand, there’s the “peace” camp, which seeks an end to the war as soon as possible — “even if it means Ukraine making concessions,” ECFR noted. Then there’s the “justice” camp, which thinks punishing Russia and restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity should take precedence over demands for peace.
Of the 10 countries surveyed, Italy emerged strongly in the former camp and Poland in the latter. “There are potential divisions over the cost of living, refugees and nuclear escalation, but the big divide is between those who want to end the war as quickly as possible and those who want Russia to be punished,” noted ECFR Director Mark Leonard in an email statement. “If badly handled the gap between the ‘peace camp’ and the 'justice camp’ over Ukraine could be as damaging as that between creditors and debtors during the euro crisis.” | 2022-06-20T04:20:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | European Union rallies behind Ukraine. But fatigue is around the corner. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/20/european-union-ukraine-support-fatigue/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/20/european-union-ukraine-support-fatigue/ |
Ask Amy: I found out my daughter’s father is not who I thought he was
Dear Amy: After 36 years, I found out via a DNA test that my daughter was the product of a one-night stand, and that she is not the daughter of the man I married.
All those years ago, when I found out I was pregnant, I married the man I was dating and in love with. I’ve had no contact with the one-night stand man since the morning after.
Mama: Yes, you should tell your daughter.
The ubiquity of DNA testing is quickly blowing the lid off family secrets, and the speed of this huge and sweeping change also gives you an out.
You don’t actually have to spend years sitting on this knowledge and wrestling with this dilemma. Because she’s going to find out, anyway. So tell her now.
Fast-forward a few years. We’ve now been married for six years. I’m now 24 and brought up the topic of wanting a baby to my husband.
Childless: The choice to have a vasectomy is a pretty solid indicator that your husband had made up his mind about not fathering more children; you obviously discussed this before marrying, and it sounds as if he has done his best to be honest with you.
Alison: I love this idea! | 2022-06-20T04:50:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: I found out my daughter’s father is not who I thought he was - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/20/ask-amy-daughter-biological-father/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/06/20/ask-amy-daughter-biological-father/ |
Now Is the Summer of Britain’s Railway Discontent
London tube trains at Northfields Train Depot in London, UK, on Tuesday, June 14, 2022. Rail and underground strikes due to hit the UK for three days later this month could cost the economy almost 100 million pounds ($125 million), with London dealt the biggest blow. (Bloomberg)
Many workers will have the luxury of avoiding the trains this week, thanks to the age of hybrid working. But for millions who still need to commute to reach their jobs, take exams or visit relatives, not to mention many businesses, the shutdown is going to be excruciating. With inflation and living costs rising, other unions are threatening similar strikes, potentially making this the start of Johnson’s summer of discontent.
Taxpayers injected over £4 billion ($4.89 billion) annually in subsidies before the pandemic; the government added over £15 billion more since. That kind of support is untenable, especially given all the other demands on the public purse. The fact is that a sector already laboring under long-standing problems, will have to be more efficient and find new ways to attract customers.
Britain’s railways have come a long way in the years since they were privatized in the 1990s — passenger numbers doubled, operating companies added a third more services and trains improved. But privatization led to fragmentation: Most passenger services are run by train operators granted franchises which lease the “rolling stock,” while the rail infrastructure is owned and maintained by the publicly owned Network Rail. That disparate structure has created a range of knock-on problems including spiraling costs, commercial failures, poor maintenance, delays to upgrades and a burden on both users and taxpayers.
Over a year ago, following the publication of a once-in-a-generation review of the rail sector by Keith Williams, the former chief executive of British Airways, the government announced plans for legislative changes to address the post-privatization mess, stimulate competition and put the focus back on the passenger. The vast majority of the rail network is to be brought under a single public body, Great British Railways, which will own the infrastructure and plan both fares and timetables. The country’s current franchising system would be replaced with passenger service contracts — modeled on public-private partnership approaches in Sweden, Germany, Australia and even London — to instill competition and improve services.
The government estimated the reforms will deliver £1.5 billion in savings a year after five years — 15% of the pre-pandemic fares income. However, the plan is stuck in the station. There is a team that will oversee the transition and much talk about a new headquarters, but no sign yet of the new passenger-first spirit or the openness and transparency that was promised. Grant Shapps, Johnson’s minister in charge of transport, has hardly mentioned the new strategy.
There are some questions about how the plan will work in practice, but the arguments for change are overwhelming, including the prospect of greener travel and freight transport. And the costs of delay are enormous. The CPS estimates that taxpayers will have to fork out up to £6 billion a year if the government doesn’t get going with reform.
It’s not clear, though, that the government is in a hurry. It has slow-walked negotiations. Johnson has always found having a bogeyman useful, whether it’s the European Union opposing plans to change the Northern Ireland Protocol or lawyers blocking the deportation of refugees to Rwanda. It also puts the Labour Party in an awkward position and reminds voters how a Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, liberated Britain’s economy from a union chokehold in the 1980s.
But the party that has held power for over 12 years can’t avoid responsibility. Change is overdue. And the government has failed to follow through on a manifesto pledge to ensure that minimum service will be maintained in the event of strike action. Its other threat — to change the law to allow rail companies to hire agency workers to replace striking workers in the future — only works if Britain has the skilled labor to step in, which is doubtful in the event of a large-scale strike.
Who’s Really Supposed to Pay for Your Commute?: Chris Hughes
The Business of Britain Should Be Business: Adrian Wooldridge | 2022-06-20T06:18:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Now Is the Summer of Britain’s Railway Discontent - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/now-is-the-summer-of-britains-railway-discontent/2022/06/20/a8e455d8-f056-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/now-is-the-summer-of-britains-railway-discontent/2022/06/20/a8e455d8-f056-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
FILE - Police secure an area around a supermarket where several people were killed in a shooting, Saturday, May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, N.Y. New York’s new law barring sales of bullet-resistant vests to most civilians doesn’t cover the type of armor worn by the gunman who killed 10 people at the Buffalo supermarket, a gap that could limit its effectiveness in deterring future military-style assaults. (Derek Gee/The Buffalo News via AP, File) | 2022-06-20T06:18:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New body armor rules in NY miss vest worn by Buffalo killer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/new-body-armor-rules-in-ny-miss-vest-worn-by-buffalo-killer/2022/06/20/134320ce-f059-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/new-body-armor-rules-in-ny-miss-vest-worn-by-buffalo-killer/2022/06/20/134320ce-f059-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
What to watch on Monday: ‘Mind Over Murder’ premieres on HBO
Monday, June 20, 2022 I The final episodes of ‘The American Presidency With Bill Clinton’ air on the History Channel
American Ninja Warrior (NBC at 8) A new obstacle makes its debut during the San Antonio qualifying rounds.
Basketball Wives (VH1 at 8) Jackie hosts a podcast to bring the women together, and Brittish reflects on her former relationship with Lorenzo. Angel starts to feel the pressure of her baby’s arrival, and Brandi gets a call regarding her health.
Below Deck Sailing Yacht (Bravo at 8) Guests return from a wedding ceremony, and the crew attempts to end the season with the perfect reception dinner.
Roswell, New Mexico (CW at 8) Liz, Max, Michael and Cameron construct a plan that could get them closer to catching Bonnie and Clyde. Maria hides her recent lack of visions, and Kyle has a date.
Beat Shazam (Fox at 9) Competitors include a big sister and little brother, best friends and a pair of teachers.
Irma Vep (HBO at 9) Rene dives into his relationship with his ex-wife, who once portrayed Irma Vep, and Mira revisits her past.
The Great Giveback With Melissa McCarthy and Jenna Perusich (HGTV at 9) Melissa and Jenna renovate the bedroom and en-suite bath of a newlywed who lived through a challenging childhood and is now the director of a nonprofit for families in need.
Breeders (FX at 10) Paul takes his parents to the countryside to re-create a beloved memory, but uncovered secrets leave them all shocked.
Payback (TV One at 10) A woman claims that her husband started a fire that badly burned him while he was experiencing diabetic delirium, and police discover a troubling motive.
Mind Over Murder (HBO at 10) The story of the six people who were convicted in the 1985 murder of 68-year-old grandmother Helen Wilson. Five of them originally confessed to the crime, and all six were later exonerated by DNA evidence in 2009. Episodes air weekly.
The American Presidency With Bill Clinton (History Channel at 9) The final three episodes of this show, hosted and executive-produced by former president Bill Clinton, air back-to-back and focus on how American presidents have dealt with extremism, decision-making and the United States as a world power.
Tonight Show/Fallon (NBC at 11:34) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kristen Bell, Coast Contra.
Late Show/Colbert (CBS at 11:35) Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), the Lumineers.
Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC at 11:35) Jenny Slate, Cooper Raiff, Weezer, guest host Sean Hayes.
Late Late Show/Corden (CBS at 12:37) Dave “Lil Dicky” Burd, Giancarlo Esposito, Betty Who.
Late Night/Meyers (NBC at 12:37) Adam Scott, James Murray, Sal Vulcano, Brian Quinn, Ralph Alexander. | 2022-06-20T06:18:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What to watch on Monday: ‘Mind Over Murder’ premieres on HBO - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/06/20/what-watch-monday-mind-over-murder-premieres-hbo/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/06/20/what-watch-monday-mind-over-murder-premieres-hbo/ |
— KEEGAN MURRAY: While the Holmgren-Smith-Banchero trio could go 1-2-3, the Iowa forward and first-team AP All-American won't be far behind. The 6-8, 225-pound Murray, who turns 22 in August, made a rapid rise from averaging 7.2 points as a freshman to 23.5 points and 8.7 rebounds while shooting 55.4% overall and 39.8% on 3-pointers. That all-around development has made him ESPN’s No. 5 overall prospect at a loaded position. | 2022-06-20T07:54:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Smith, Holmgren, Banchero top list of forwards in NBA draft - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nba/smith-holmgren-banchero-top-list-of-forwards-in-nba-draft/2022/06/20/40e1747c-f063-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nba/smith-holmgren-banchero-top-list-of-forwards-in-nba-draft/2022/06/20/40e1747c-f063-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
BROOKLINE, Mass. — Englishman Matt Fitzpatrick won the U.S. Open on Sunday, winning his first major on the same course where he took the U.S. Amateur title nine years earlier.
WASHINGTON — Washington Capitals center Nicklas Backstrom underwent invasive surgery on his left hip, a move that could sideline him long term but is designed to give him a chance to continue playing hockey. | 2022-06-20T07:54:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Weekend Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/06/20/3f0c33be-f066-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/06/20/3f0c33be-f066-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
FILE - Britain’s Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge holding their son, Tuesday July 23, 2013, as they pose for photographers outside St. Mary’s Hospital exclusive Lindo Wing in London. The world watched as Prince William grew from a towheaded schoolboy to a dashing air-sea rescue pilot to a father of three. But as he turns 40 on Tuesday, June 21, 2022, William is making the biggest change yet: assuming an increasingly central role in the royal family as he prepares for his eventual accession to the throne. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File) | 2022-06-20T07:54:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | William at 40: A milestone birthday in a life under scrutiny - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/william-at-40-a-milestone-birthday-in-a-life-under-scrutiny/2022/06/20/999c3be0-f065-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/william-at-40-a-milestone-birthday-in-a-life-under-scrutiny/2022/06/20/999c3be0-f065-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
When I was supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization about a decade ago, I would often point out to Americans the enormous capability of the alliance: combined defense spending near $900 billion (outspending China and Russia by nearly three times); 24,000 combat aircraft; 3 million men and women under arms, almost all of them volunteers; and 800 oceangoing warships. It was the richest and most capable military alliance in human history.
But I’d also carefully point out its Achilles’ heel: the need for consensus to finalize any important decision, meaning all 28 members (there are now 30) had to vote favorably before a single soldier, sailor or airman could deploy. I spent countless hours in Brussels briefing the North Atlantic Council, the highest governing body of NATO, to make the case to undertake an operation in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Libya or on the waters of East Africa on counterpiracy.
Today, the alliance has a seemingly easy decision before it: whether to allow Sweden and Finland, both imminently qualified nations, to join. Unfortunately, Turkey is holding up the vote, which could already have occurred without Turkish opposition.
What will be the ultimate outcome, and what can the alliance learn from this challenging moment?
Clearly, Finland and Sweden are excellent candidates. I commanded some of those nations’ militaries in Afghanistan, Libya and the Balkans — where they deployed under NATO leadership as partners. Both have highly capable armies, navies and air forces, and the Swedes produce the superb Gripen fighter plane. They are near-Arctic nations with deep experience in the high north, where Russia continues an aggressive posture.
But Turkey, a NATO member for 70 years, objects to their membership, complaining that both nations harbor what Ankara considers Kurdish terrorists — members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Because all 30 nations must agree the accession of new members, Turkey’s objection raises a significant barrier.
When told they are on the losing end of a 29-1 argument, the Turks quickly point out that the Balkan nation of Macedonia had to wait 10 years, and undergo a name change to Northern Macedonia, before it was finally allowed to join NATO, because of a single holdout, Greece. The Greeks, who have a northern province also called Macedonia, objected to the original name of the country. A combination of pressure from the rest of the alliance and the negotiated name-change finally undid the logjam.
But a key difference is that Macedonia, a tiny nation with a very small military, did not offer the kind of powerful military advantage to the alliance that the two northern nations do. And all of this is unfolding in the face of the war in Ukraine — which portends further conflict by Russia.
During my time as NATO commander, I saw several other standoffs where one nation or a small group of countries tried to hold out against the overall pressure of the alliance. The most dramatic was in the case of the 2011 Libyan intervention, in which some members did not want the alliance to fulfill the United Nations resolutions establishing a no-fly zone and an arms embargo against Moammar Al Qaddafi’s regime.
This was ultimately decided by a compromise wherein all the nations agreed with the overall mission, but some chose not to send their armed forces to participate. Of note, Sweden, although not a member at that time, fully participated, and its Gripen aircraft did highly effective work.
During my time as NATO operational commander, the Turks were a strong supporter of our missions. They capably participated in every operation, and provided significant forces in Afghanistan (where they had charge of security in the capital of Kabul for more than a decade), the Balkans, Libya and on counter-piracy. Turkey has the second-largest army in the alliance, and hosts the NATO land command (a vital three-star headquarters) in the coastal city of Izmir.
No one wants to set up a situation where Turkey becomes isolated politically, diplomatically and militarily. There is already mutual discontent between Ankara and Brussels over the Turkish decision to purchase the Russian S-400 air-defense system; ongoing disputes with Greece in the Aegean Sea; and pressure on the military, media and judiciary after an attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016. The Turks have been rebuffed from membership in the European Union for decades.
Both sides need to tread carefully here. NATO should listen respectfully to Turkish concerns and encourage Sweden and Finland to do what they can — within the constraints of their own legal and political systems — to address the Kurdish issues. Turkey needs to be mindful of the larger context of the moment given the war in Ukraine, and the very strong sentiment across the alliance to bring in the Swedes and Finns. Off-the-radar diplomacy will be key, as the glare of publicity and frustrated public statements will not move the discussion forward constructively.
This is a deeply meaningful moment for NATO. The secretary-general or deputy secretary-general should consider undertaking shuttle diplomacy between Ankara, Helsinki and Stockholm. Senior military leaders must help their political counterparts see the operational value of bringing the two Nordic nations into the alliance. NATO’s supreme allied commander, the highly regarded US Air Force General Tod Wolters, should be quietly and respectfully making the case in Ankara for this accession.
Finally, as the most powerful member of NATO, the US, has a special responsibility to finding a path to untying this Gordian knot. Simply cutting through it by force won’t solve the underlying tensions which have been exacerbated by the EU’s long rejection of Turkish membership. There may be incentives the US can offer Turkey, ranging from military purchases to economic support for refugees they host from Syria.
The path forward is narrow, and will require effort by all sides to bring these two superb candidates to membership. This mission needs to be at the top of the list for the US State and Defense Departments, both for the military capability it will add to NATO and for maintaining the political unity that is required to keep the alliance healthy.
• NATO Should Think Twice Before Accepting Finland and Sweden: Emma Ashford
• What Ukraine Can Learn From Finland’s Stand 80 Years Ago: James Stavridis
• Russia Is Right: The U.S. Is Waging a Proxy War in Ukraine: Hal Brands | 2022-06-20T09:25:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NATO Must Bring Finland, Sweden and Turkey Together - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/nato-must-bring-finland-sweden-and-turkey-together/2022/06/20/2c4516da-f078-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/nato-must-bring-finland-sweden-and-turkey-together/2022/06/20/2c4516da-f078-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
The West is in the throes of its most serious crisis of leadership since the 1970s. In their most recent elections, the British had to choose between disaster (Boris Johnson) and calamity (Jeremy Corbyn) while the Americans had a menu of senescence (Joe Biden) and malignity (Donald Trump). The new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is not a patch on the previous one, Angela Merkel, whose own reputation is being revised downward. The European Union has a legitimacy-sacking weakness for choosing its presidents from the ranks of machine politicians such as Jean-Claude Juncker and Ursula von der Leyen. The most impressive politician in Western Europe, Emmanuel Macron, has just had his wings clipped, losing his majority in parliament, with parties led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the far left, and Marine Le Pen, on the far right, making substantial gains.
Companies are acknowledging the shortcomings of the leadership class by clearing out their C-suites. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. notes that 668 US CEOs left their posts in the first four months of this year, the highest January-May figure since the firm began tracking monthly CEO changes in 2002. The same problem afflicts the nonprofit sector. “We’ve been around for 26 years,” says Gayle Brandel, the CEO of PNP Staffing Group, an executive search firm that specializes in the sector, “and I haven’t seen anything like this.”
What can explain this general crisis? The great management guru Peter Drucker liked to point out that it was impossible to understand leadership without understanding followership. The crisis of leadership is also — and perhaps primarily — a problem of followership. “Followers” often simply refuse to follow: Millions of people resigned during the pandemic in order to retire early or work for themselves, while millions more are ignoring stern injunctions to return to the office. Or else they make it clear that they will only follow if they are given a hefty raise.
Surliness is frequently mixed with angry hostility. Politicians are treated as devils incarnate. CEOs are mocked for pronouncing pieties about ESG while pocketing supersized salaries. Asked why he was abandoning journalism for politics, Boris Johnson replied that they don’t put up statues to journalists. These days the public is in the mood for tearing down statues rather than putting them up.
Leaders have traditionally used two devices to secure the loyalty of potential followers — deference and competence. In the deference-based model, the people followed their betters because they were born to rule. They possessed the blue blood of true aristocrats or the blessing of God (“the rich man in his castle/the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly/and ordered their estate,” as the 19th century hymn has it). In the competence-based model, followers respect their leaders because they have superior knowledge or skills — they defer to them on condition that they can get things done.
The deference-based model has long since collapsed. You would be hard-pressed to find a monarchist who would justify Prince Andrew’s conduct toward Virginia Giuffre. But in collapsing it has left a residue of resentment toward anyone who claims to be better than regular people. Now the competence-based model is under strain. Everywhere you look, “so-called experts,” as Michael Gove, a prominent Tory politician called them, are having trouble doing the job we set them. Central banks’ failure to control inflation is only the most recent in a string of failures that includes stoking the bubble that burst in 2008. Airline CEOs preside over airport chaos and flight cancellations while supermarket CEOs struggle to fill the shelves.
The collapse of these two models of leadership is reflected in figures about the decline of trust, figures that are at their worst, in the rich world, for the United States but which are also moving in the wrong direction in high-trust societies such as Sweden. In the 1960s most Americans trusted big institutions to do the jobs assigned to them — some 77% said that they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. Today these figures have all collapsed. Business leaders vie with journalists and elected officials for the wooden spoon of the least trusted group.
The collapse is reinforced by the combination of the polarization of politics and the rise of new media. The right demonizes the left (and vice versa) on an ever-wider range of subjects, which now includes issues once above politics such as national monuments and vaccination policy. Replacing gatekeepers, the internet broadcasts the ravings of nutters as effectively as the measured words of experts, if not more so. How are followers to follow when one half of the leadership class accuses the other of being traitors and when fake news mixes merrily with real news?
The most obvious result of the crisis is that it’s getting harder to get things done. The New York Times, the Guardian and, currently, the Washington Post have all been convulsed by painful and time-consuming internal struggles as journalists take it upon themselves to discipline their fellow scribes, often in internal chat rooms but sometimes on Twitter, for alleged sins of one sort or another. An exasperated article in the Intercept, a left-wing website, claims that “the progressive advocacy space across the board,” from abortion-rights advocates such as Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute and Pro-Choice America to environmental pressure groups such as the Sierra Club to social justice groups such as the ACLU, Color of Change, Movement for Black Lives and the Human Rights Campaign, has “more or less effectively ceased to function” because of internecine squabbles, most prominently between managers and workers. “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95% of my time on internal strife,” said one activist. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battle in play,” noted another. “The toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it — callout culture, cancel culture, whatever — is creating this really intense thing,” said a third, “and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one’s able to talk about it, no one’s able to say how bad it is.”
The crisis is also introducing a new power relationship into the heart of organizational life — leaders are becoming stars and followers fans. Populist leaders are more like a cross between pop stars and sports heroes than old-fashioned politicians: They adopt exotic personas, hold rallies in giant stadiums and devote their time to excoriating the enemy. Before coming to office, Donald Trump told his top aides that they should think of each presidential day “as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”
The same dynamic is spreading to business. Elon Musk has a hard core of fans — known as Musketeers — as well as nearly 100 million followers on Twitter. “He can tell the future for me and you/He’s got a nose for knowin’ what to do,” sings one fan, Jim Ocean, in his composition, “The Future Smells like Elon Musk.” CEOs increasingly make crowd-pleasing pronouncements about contentious social issues such as racial justice and trans rights.
Yet the record of populist politicians suggests that this is a dangerous model. The flip side of having fans is that you have anti-fans who will do everything they can to make your life a misery. Political stars find it more difficult than old-fashioned leaders to deliver concrete results: Trump’s presidency ended in disgrace, while Johnson is struggling to hold onto his job after 148 MPs, or 41% of his party, voted that they had no confidence in him. They also become prisoners of their fans — if they fail to deliver “madder music and stronger wine,” they can be dumped for someone who will.
Musk’s high-profile bid for Twitter has earned him a lot of enemies, particularly in the Democratic establishment, without so far producing tangible results. CEOs’ general flirtation with popular causes has annoyed conservatives, most obviously in the case of the Walt Disney Co. in Florida’s debate over sex education, while sometimes turning them into prisoners of activist groups.
Persuading people to put their trust in leaders again will be the work of decades, if it is possible at all in an internet-driven world. Policy makers need to focus on increasing social mobility rates, proactively searching for talent in every corner of society. The relations between “leaders” and “followers” are being progressively poisoned by a growing sense that the people at the top of organizations belong to a discrete ruling class that, as well as lacking roots in the wider society, looks after its own members. Organizations need to focus on their core functions rather than sprawling into secondary issues: Central banks should focus on controlling inflation rather than addressing climate change or advancing diversity. Sprawling outside your core remit is dangerous at the best of times since it involves both diluting institutional attention while also raising unrealistic expectations. Sprawling when you are failing to execute your core function is a guarantee of a crisis of legitimacy. “To be trusted institutions must be trustworthy,” the Hoover Institution’s John F. Cogan and Kevin Warsh write in a bracing new essay, “and to be trustworthy institutions must be competent.”
In the shorter term, leaders can do several things to make “followership” more palatable. Pick your battles carefully: Trying to force people back to the office if the data demonstrate that they can do their job equally well at home is foolish. Devolve as much operational decision-making to people in the front line, in line with Colin Powell’s dictum that “the commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong unless proved otherwise.” Break down the walls between “leaders” and “followers” by giving as many members of the team as possible a temporary role as leader. This has the beneficial consequence of showing the rest of us what leaders must put up with.
Above all, give more recognition to the role of “followers.” Business schools put on innumerable courses on how to be an effective leader. How about a few on how to be an effective follower, particularly given that all leaders, however spectacular their careers, will have to spend some time taking orders. Companies gear their reward system to managers, as if telling people what to do is intrinsically worth more than, say, inventing a new product or solving a technical problem. How about linking reward systems to value-added rather than spans of control?
Calling for better followers doesn’t have the same rhetorical ring as calling for better leaders. But if we are to address the crisis of authority paralyzing the West’s politics and spreading, with worrying speed, to the business world, it is just as vital.
(Updating first paragraph with results of French election.) | 2022-06-20T09:25:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The West Is Facing a Followership Crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-west-is-facing-a-followership-crisis/2022/06/20/cb754fd0-f06f-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-west-is-facing-a-followership-crisis/2022/06/20/cb754fd0-f06f-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
Bats and balls — but not baseball — win over Texas kids
The growth of Dallas’s South Asian community and their obsessive love for cricket is turning North Texas into an international hub for the sport
Young members of the Crown Cricket Academy attend practice in North Texas in April. (Christopher Lee for The Washington Post)
DALLAS — Puuna practices thrusting her hands forward so her cricket bat strikes the ball perfectly. Suchiit just likes to run between the wickets. Asher, his coach Jig Thakkur says, shows promise when he bowls the ball toward the batsman.
The 4- and 5-year-olds are some of the youngest players of Dallas’s burgeoning youth cricket league, an enterprise of acceptance and appreciation built slowly and organically over the last decade by some of the most obsessed fans in the world: Texas’s south Asian immigrant families.
Asian Americans, particularly those from cricket-loving nations, represent the fastest-growing immigrant communities in the United States and Texas, according to 2020 census data. That growth has transformed Texas’s neighborhoods and culture, from food to business to politics. Now, much as Latin American immigrants helped propel soccer to the masses decades ago, they are ushering in, at ever younger ages, love for a new sport in places where football and baseball often take precedence.
In the cities and suburbs of Houston and Dallas, immigrants and their U.S.-born children spend entire weekends playing the bat-and-ball game rooted in southeastern England. Two teams of 11 players — batsmen, fielders and bowlers (or pitchers) — battle to score runs on a grass oval in a game that resembles baseball but is far more grueling. The heavier, smaller cricket ball is “bowled” at the same velocities as baseballs and are caught with bare hands. Two batsmen try to score against the opposing team simultaneously and can be thrown “out” 10 different ways.
Cricket spread and remains wildly popular wherever the British Empire colonized — from the West Indies to the Indian subcontinent, Australia and South Africa. It was the game of choice for the Founding Fathers but fell into obscurity after the Civil War.
It surged back in U.S. coastal communities after immigration law changes in the 1960s attracted thousands of skilled workers from Asian countries to the San Francisco Bay area, New York City and Southern California. But it is Texas, and Dallas more specifically, that is drawing coaches, parents and players to an increasingly sophisticated cricket development infrastructure. The added benefits of plentiful tech jobs and decent weather are turning North Texas into the American hub for international competition — and place of belonging in a country where Asian immigrants may not always feel welcome.
U.S. Major League Cricket — backed by investors such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and billionaire Ross Perot Jr. — has chosen the Dallas suburbs as their headquarters. It is breaking ground this year on its first sanctioned complex, transforming a former minor league baseball diamond into a world-class cricket oval, said Tom Dunmore, the league’s vice president of marketing. The goal is to host the 2024 World Cup for T20 cricket — a version of the sport played here, which shortens the game from international rules.
“My dream is to one day see an Olympian cricket player from Dallas,” said cricket booster Babu Venkatachalapathy, who is running for a spot on USA Cricket’s board of directors. “Politicians and businesses are paying attention. They know that the Asian community is built on trust and relationships so as a community, we will show up if needed.”
Some local school districts are now incorporating cricket into physical education classes.
“We are past that stage where people don’t confuse it with croquet,” said Anwar Shahabuddin, who helped organize the North Texas youth cricket league. “Even in Texas, people don’t do a double take when they see us out there.”
All the feverish ambition surrounding North Texas cricket doesn’t impress Thirunavukkarasu Kumaran, known by all as “Coach Kenny.” The Tamil immigrant is a former professional cricket player who represented India’s national team. He grew up playing the game in any alley, ditch or patch of dirt he could find.
Still, by the time he moved to the United States a decade ago, Kumaran said, he wanted nothing to do with the game. His experience in the subcontinent where cricket is a billion-dollar industry, and dogged by corruption, scandals and politics, soured the coach on the sport.
But when a friend in Dallas asked if he would give his son private lessons, Kumaran couldn’t refuse. Teaching children to play the game felt innocent enough, he said.
One player turned into scores of athletes, his coaching prompted more coaches and soon he was founding Dallas’s first youth cricket academy. Other academies opened as well and the North Texas Youth Cricket League was born, boasting more than 300 players, boys and girls, who spend the bulk of their weekends on the pitch. And their parents — the majority of whom work in information technology — are just as cricket-crazed, watching their kids play for hours and serving samosas and biryani between matches.
Kumaran’s under-13 team known as the Stallions was down a player at their mid-April matchup in McKinney, Tex., against the formidable Avengers. A family emergency took the team captain to India unexpectedly so Angad Raut, 12, had to step up.
“You can say what you want, but don’t make it personal,” Angad admonished his teammates in the huddle as coach Zanher Aulam watched from a few steps away. He smirked as the nervous boy tried to set the tone for the game.
“I want to hear you all talking out there,” the 12-year-old continued. “Senior guys, take a role.”
The team knelt and touched the ground in prayer before running toward the cricket oval.
Aulam coached at the college level in the United Kingdom, Australia and later Los Angeles. But the Sri Lankan said he saw something magical happening in North Texas.
“I moved here just for the cricket,” Aulam said laughing. “There is something pure about how much these kids love this game.”
Playing cricket will not yield the children athletic scholarships to top U.S. schools — it’s not an NCAA-sanctioned sport — or likely lead to a professional league draft, fame and fortune, at least not yet. But that is not Kumaran’s goal. He said he is training these children to help their communities flourish, build strong cultural networks and learn how to navigate the peculiarities of their adopted nation. The sport, in its unique U.S. iteration, is allowing families to share space with others who also obsess unapologetically about a game loved by multiple generations.
“When we grew up, all we could do was study, get good marks in school and get a job to go to the States. But here, people want their kids to have more of what they didn’t have — a chance to play,” Kumaran said. “If you look at football and basketball, you need height and physical strength. As South Asians, we lack some of that and no Indian mom is going to let their son play football.”
Nithilan Karthik, 12, was on the spelling bee track until he became mesmerized watching the Cricket World Cup on television in 2019, his father Karthik Sukumaran said. He wasn’t the best at spelling and a severe asthma attack jolted Nithilan into taking his health and fitness more seriously. From his first try as a wicket keeper, one of the most demanding fielding positions — not unlike a baseball catcher — Nithilan’s bookish and sedentary life was upended. School is still important, his father said, but the game has unveiled an entirely new set of possibilities, relationships and pursuits his son had never considered.
“When I look back, I see my values have changed,” said the 12-year-old, adding he is now friends with other “jocks” at his middle school. “I thought life was more centered around academics. But cricket helped me understand you can learn a lot more from sports.”
Nithilan and dozens of kids now spend several mornings and afternoons a week practicing at the English Indoor Cricket Academy. The cavernous 16,000-square foot warehouse outfitted with eight batting and bowling lanes is equipped with the same kind of pitching machines used in baseball cages. The machine is retrofitted for a cricket ball and stands higher to deliver a wicked-fast bowl, akin to a baseball throw.
Players use the long runways of turf grass to practice their elegant run-ups, kicking up their legs up and rotating their arms like windmills to send the cricket bail sailing. The young bowlers’ choreography is enough to leave their teammates’ mouths agape.
Professional U.S. team cricketers practice alongside 10-year-olds as their coaches’ rebukes and praise echo off the aluminum walls, while the owner of the academy, Mohammad Abid, huddles in his tiny office repairing bat handles. The children draw the aum, the Hindu symbol for the universe — representing the union of body, mind and spirit — on the knob of their bats.
“When I tried to explain to my landlord and zoning committees what we wanted to do, it was difficult. Few people got it,” said Abid, who opened with one 60-foot-long batting lane in 2017 and is now looking for a warehouse with double the space. “But the community has grown up.”
More than 200 parents are now part of the Dallas cricket parents’ group text. They commiserate over cracked vases, holes in the walls and dented front doors caused by their kids practicing inside the house. They plan birthday parties and sleepovers and track their athletes’ stats in a made-for-cricket app that pulls up team standings and baseball card-like profiles of each cricketer.
Chris and Meredith Opat said their son Gabriel is “not a typical North Texas cricketer.” He stands out with his blond hair and light skin, but the family from Dallas’s Southlake neighborhood is an integral part of the community. The family fell in love with the game while living in Scotland, and after moving back to the United States they sought out a cricket team for their 12-year-old.
“You can’t find a house here but there are seven cricket academies to choose from,” Chris Opat said, joking about skyrocketing home prices. The boys on Gabriel’s team get together for sleepovers, video games and practice.
“This whole thing is a family,” Meredith Opat said, gesturing to families gathered for a youth league’s awards ceremony.
Gabriel said the game is already shaping his ambitions. “I want to go to Cambridge University,” he said.
“To play cricket or to study?” his father questioned.
“Both,” the boy said coyly. “Good answer,” his father replied.
The best players were recognized with trophies at the league ceremony — delayed by the pandemic — at a packed Indian restaurant. When the moments finally came, beaming parents like Sudhakar Krishnamurthy popped up to take pictures of their little ones. A buffet of the aromatic seasonings of Hyderabadi cuisine filled the room as players boasted about the runs they scored the week before.
“My son is a little reserved in nature. I don’t know what happened in school but he was in a shell and not talking much,” Krishnamurthy said. “After Akhileshnandha started playing this game, he made friends and is a different person. It’s not just a game, it's a team sport that delivers social connection, teaches the children how to respect each other, build patience and how to get things done collectively.”
One of the best parts, the father said, is the new curiosity his 15-year-old has about India, its various ethnic groups, regions and languages — all of which he encounters on the cricket grounds. Now, when they visit India, the teenager said he feels comfortable talking to anyone as long as the conversation starts with cricket.
Kumaran, the coach, snuck into another room as the awards were presented. Texas represents a homecoming of sorts for Kumaran, who read Western novels as a kid in India, rides a motorcycle and walks around with the point of his cowboy boots sticking out the bottom of his dungarees. His return to the sport he previously loved and then loathed feels redemptive, he said, even if his 5-year-old son Arjun finds cricket boring.
“I am teaching them to be happy,” Kumaran said. “It’s about making the kids see what I see in them. We need independent thinkers to lead our community tomorrow.” | 2022-06-20T09:25:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cricket, famous elsewhere, gives Asian immigrants a Texas foothold - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/texas-cricket/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/texas-cricket/ |
Why gas is so expensive in some U.S. states but not others
Adrian Blanco
How gas prices compare to the
Data as of June 19
(scaled by processing capacity)
Petroleum product pipeline
The Gulf Coast is the largest domestic supplier
of transportation fuels with just over half of
total U.S. refining capacity.
transportation fuels with just over half of total
U.S. refining capacity.
Whiting, Ind.
Linden, N.J.
barrels per
The Gulf Coast is the largest domestic
supplier of transportation fuels with just
over half of total U.S. refining capacity.
Port Arthur, Texas
Largest U.S. capacity:
The Gulf Coast is the
largest domestic supplier
of transportation fuels
with just over half of total
“Delivering gas in Texas is obviously cheaper because the refineries are right there,” Molchanov said. “In places where there are no refineries, the fuel needs to be delivered maybe thousands of miles, and that costs more.”
As fuel prices have climbed, some states, including Florida, New York and Georgia, have paused their gasoline taxes.
Clean energy regulations can increase costs at the state and local level. Regulations governing the mix of chemicals referred to as “gasoline” mean gas stations have to pay more in some states to serve cleaner-burning fuel.
California’s Air Resource Board, for example, maintains a raft of requirements applying to the specific formulation that gas producers and importers can sell in the state, applying strict rules to chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde and sulfur. As a result, the state imports a lot of Middle Eastern gas, according to GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan.
“California is a petrol island, if you will,” De Haan says.
Regulations on so-called cleaner-burning gasoline, or CBG, also can come into play within individual states. Arizona’s retail compliance standards for gasoline place tighter restrictions on Phoenix and the surrounding area, for example, while Tucson and other parts of the state have less stringent requirements.
Data on national and state gas prices comes from AAA. Petroleum refinery and pipeline locations, along with processing capacity, are from the U.S. Energy Information Association. Processing capacity is as of Jan. 1, 2021 and reported in barrels per stream day, or the maximum amount a refinery could produce if it ran at full capacity all day. State tax rate data was provided by the Federation of Tax Administrators. | 2022-06-20T10:34:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why gas is so expensive in some U.S. states but not others - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/20/gas-prices-by-state-explained/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/20/gas-prices-by-state-explained/ |
Man killed in crash Sunday morning in Ashburn
A man was killed in a crash Sunday morning in Ashburn.
The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office said the crash happened around 5:30 a.m. on Gloucester Parkway near Ringold Drive. An initial investigation found the driver of a Honda Accord lost control of his vehicle and ran off the road before the car rolled over, officials said.
The man was 29 years old. The sheriff’s office did not immediately release his name, pending the notification of his family. He was pronounced dead at the scene. | 2022-06-20T10:51:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A man was killed in a crash Sunday morning in Ashburn - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/man-killed-in-crash-in-ashburn/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/man-killed-in-crash-in-ashburn/ |
Winchester, Va., man killed in Maryland crash
A 45-year-old man from Winchester, Va., was killed in a crash on Saturday in the Mount Airy area.
Montgomery County police said the crash happened around 8:15 a.m. Saturday in the 28540 block of Ridge Road, not far from Interstate 70. Authorities later identified the victim as passenger Rene Rivas Quinteros.
An initial investigation found that the driver of a Toyota Camry was headed southbound on Ridge Road and crossed into the northbound side for “unknown reasons,” police said, and hit a tree. The driver suffered minor injuries and was taken to a hospital. Quinteros was pronounced dead at the scene. | 2022-06-20T10:52:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man killed in a crash on Saturday in Mount Airy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/man-killed-in-crash-in-damascus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/man-killed-in-crash-in-damascus/ |
Man fatally shot in Prince George’s County
A man was fatally shot Sunday night in Prince George’s County.
The shooting happened in the 8200 block of Bellefonte Lane, not far from Route 5, in the Clinton area. Police officers responded to a shooting, and when they arrived, they found a man outside who was suffering from gunshot wounds.
He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His identity was not released, pending notification of his family.
Police said they are looking for a suspect or suspects and trying to determine a motive in the case. | 2022-06-20T10:52:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A man was fatally shot in Prince George's County - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/man-shot-in-prince-georges-county/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/man-shot-in-prince-georges-county/ |
Pedestrian killed in hit-and-run crash in Maryland
A pedestrian was stuck and killed by the driver of a vehicle in a hit-and-run crash in Prince George’s County.
The crash happened around 11:50 p.m. Sunday at the intersection of Silver Hill Road and Navy Day Drive, in the Suitland-Silver Hill area. When police arrived, they found a man who was unresponsive, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
His identify was not released, pending the notification of his family. Police said the driver left the scene. Officials had only vague details about the vehicle that struck the man, saying it was gray, with front-end damage on the passenger side.
The incident remains under investigation. Anyone with information is asked to call 1-866-411-TIPS. | 2022-06-20T10:52:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pedestrian killed in hit-and-run crash in Prince George's County - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/pedestrian-killed-prince-georges-county/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/pedestrian-killed-prince-georges-county/ |
Association requiring owner to upgrade roof to match aesthetic changes
Workers install a new roof on a house. (iStock)
Q: Where can I find information about the power of homeowners’ associations? Can an association force me to replace a perfectly good roof because they want me to upgrade to their new favorite roof style of shingles?
It is my responsibility to repair the roof. But having me pay more than $10,000 for a new roof simply because they have changed their aesthetics seems ridiculous. I am sure this sort of thing was not addressed in the documents I signed when I bought the townhouse.
A: We agree. It seems quite odd (not to mention wasteful) that a homeowners association would require owners to replace their roofs solely for aesthetic reasons.
Start your search for information with a reading of the governing documents for your homeowners association. Those documents assign the rights to the association’s managers to operate the homeowners association and to set up rules and regulations for all of the owners in the association.
We do want to distinguish between condominium associations and homeowners associations. In many condominium associations, the structures are maintained by the association, and it has the right to make improvements to the buildings on behalf of all of the owners.
More Matters: A look at association fees and why they’re everywhere now
In an association of single-family homes or townhouses, the association may set rules and regulations regarding the aesthetics of the association for future construction and for the upkeep of lawns. What we don’t know is which part of your association documents gives the association the right to require owners to make changes to their homes when those homes are not in need of repair.
We can imagine situations where an association could require structural changes to homes for safety reasons. Let’s say you live in an area prone to fires. And, your homeowners association wanted to make changes to protect all homeowners from fires that could destroy the entire community. Changing roof files to those that offer greater protection from fires might be a smart move for the entire association. Life, health and safety changes might be well within the charter of the association.
But what about aesthetics? If the association has the power to compel change for aesthetic purposes, it should be spelled out in the association’s governing documents. If the board of managers has that specific right, you might have no choice other than to write a check and comply. But if they don’t? Feel free to point that out.
More Matters: Seniors want to move on, but ‘stuck’ in home after not qualifying for new mortgage
The association board can insist that all roof replacements going forward must abide by the association’s new requirements. That’s likely within their rights. They can also pass rules relating to the choice of paint colors, type of exterior improvements, the height and size of fences, the locations of landscaping, the manner in which homes must be maintained, among many other matters.
Assuming the board’s requirement is solely for aesthetic purposes, we’d hope they would recognize the costs involved and allow homeowners to phase in the change as their roofs need replacement. We understand it might take quite some time (five, 10 or even 15 years) for the change to take place. But when it comes to a significant expense, it feels wrong to compel homeowners to make a change that is not needed today.
If the documentation is inscrutable, you might have to hire a local real estate attorney with experience with associations to provide clarity and insight as to your legal (and other) options. | 2022-06-20T10:56:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Association requiring owner to upgrade roof to match aesthetic changes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/20/association-requiring-owner-upgrade-roof-match-aesthetic-changes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/20/association-requiring-owner-upgrade-roof-match-aesthetic-changes/ |
Companies see only headaches on the horizon for refineries, undercutting the White House push to boost production
A section of the shuttered Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in 2021. (HRP)
Hilco Redevelopment Partners has been hauling out 950 miles of pipe from the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, abandoning the property’s 150-year history of processing crude oil into fuel in this city. The firm is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convert the 1,300-acre site along the Schuylkill River into a green, high-tech campus for e-commerce and life sciences companies.
Oil refineries across the country are being retired and converted to other uses as owners balk at making costly upgrades and America’s pivot away from fossil fuels leaves their future uncertain. The downsizing comes despite painfully high gasoline prices and as demand globally ramps up amid sanctions on gasoline and diesel produced in Russia, the third-biggest petroleum refiner in the world, behind the United States and China.
Five refineries have shutdown in the United States in just the past two years, reducing the nation’s refining capacity by about 5 percent and eliminating more than 1 million barrels of fuel per day from the market, leaving the remaining facilities straining to meet demand. Yet even at this lucrative moment for what’s left of the refining industry, a White House desperate to bring down gas prices is having little success persuading owners to expand operations, and more closures are imminent.
The futility of the White House effort came through in the response to letters President Biden sent this week to the nation’s major oil companies, chastising them for squeezing “historically high profit margins” out of their refineries. “At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote. Biden threatened to invoke emergency powers if the companies don’t bring prices down.
The companies are unmoved. The profits follow years of heavy losses at many facilities after demand plunged during the pandemic. Unpredictable shifts in oil markets had created a challenging business climate before that. Even at this moment of windfall refinery earnings, where the profit margin on each barrel of oil processed has jumped from a dollar or two a year ago to as much as $18 today, investors are hardly jumping at the opportunity to enter the sector. They fear the profits are short lived. The administration’s environmental priorities — as well as rising public and corporate concern about climate change — would make many refineries obsolete in the not-too-distant future.
“I don’t think you are ever going to see a refinery built again in this country,” Chevron CEO Michael Wirth said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this month.
Some of the nation’s 129 refineries are owned by large oil companies such as Chevron, while others are operated independently. At the facilities, the components of crude oil are separated and processed into fuel for vehicles and planes, as well as industrial petroleum products such as lubricants.
The last major refinery to come online in the United States, in 1977, is the one owned by Marathon Oil in Garyville, La. It is capable of pumping out 578,000 barrels per day. Since it opened, more than half the refineries in the U.S. have closed.
While the Biden administration says market manipulation by Big Oil is behind the shortage of refined fuel right now, the major fossil fuel companies don’t have a monopoly on production. There is a large refining facility in Houston up for sale right now.
In the absence of any offers, LyondellBasell plans to shut its 700-acre operation on the Gulf Coast no later than the end of next year. Quitting the refining business, the company said in a statement, “is the best strategic and financial path forward.” The company did not comment on industry speculation that a fire that knocked part of its century-old Houston facility offline last week may push the closure date even sooner, as LyondellBasell faces the prospect of costly repairs.
“Just getting the equipment you need could take three years. Electric vehicles might already make up 20 percent of the car market by then. You could find yourself investing a bunch of cash to rebuild a refinery that may not be needed for long.”
The White House would have to take extreme steps to compel companies to refine more right now. That could involve Biden invoking emergency powers to curb exports of refined gasoline and diesel or to force companies to restart operations at idled American refineries, according to a memo ClearView sent clients.
Senegal sees opportunity and ‘hypocrisy’ in Europe’s search for gas
The president wrote in his letter that he is “prepared to use all tools at my disposal” to bring prices down, scolding oil executives for making record profits off a refining shortage that is “blunting the impact of the historic actions” by the White House to confront soaring gas prices. Those actions included releasing 1 million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the suspension of an environmental rule limiting high blends of ethanol into gasoline in the summer.
Analysts caution that any actions the White House tries to take to spur more production could backfire. Curbing exports, for example, would intensify fuel shortages in Europe and could lead to further political destabilization there. It could also motivate companies to move more operations overseas, worsening shortages in the United States.
The Trump administration had worked aggressively to keep the plant that was churning out 335,000 barrels of fuel per day from closing, warning it played an important role in U.S. energy security and independence. The White House had dispatched Peter Navarro, a top Trump economic adviser, to try to help advance the bid of a group of energy executives who planned to rehabilitate the bankrupt facility.
Fire broke out at a Philadelphia refinery after several massive explosions on June 21. There were no immediate reports of injuries, authorities said. (Video: The Washington Post)
The city was emerging from the trauma of a refinery explosion that sent an enormous fireball over the area and catapulted large pieces of machinery throughout the property. A 38,000 pound fragment of the plant was hurled across the river by the explosion. Nobody was killed, but 3,271 pounds of highly toxic hydrofluoric acid leaked into the community. It can cause lung damage and severe skin burns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The explosion was triggered by a pipe that had not been inspected since 1973. It was so corroded that the pipe’s metal had become thinner than a credit card, according to investigators from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. The board noted that such corrosion had been the culprit in earlier refinery explosions in California and Utah, and “it’s just a matter of time” before another such explosion at a refinery leads to fatalities or contamination of a local community.
The Philadelphia refinery had already fallen into bankruptcy the year before it was engulfed by fire. New pipelines from the North Dakota Bakken region and the Permian Basin in Texas had begun pumping crude directly to Gulf Coast and Midwest refineries. Those refineries could then afford to sell their products much more cheaply than the Philadelphia facility, which could only access the North Dakota and Texas crude through rail car shipments.
Like many of the nation’s refineries, the one in Philadelphia was not equipped to process all types of crude. It could not, for example, handle the heavy crudes from Canadian tar sands that became available on the market for cheap, pushing the Philadelphia facility into further financial despair.
The refinery was also not equipped to blend ethanol into its fuels, forcing it to purchase expensive credits on the open market to meet its obligations under the federal Renewable Fuels Standard. The price of those credits had soared by 2017, creating a crushing financial burden.
“This is a phenomenon we are seeing around the country,” said Cary Coglianese, director of the program on regulation at Penn Law. “Neighborhoods are growing up around these facilities. There are lots of people who are not benefiting from the jobs they bring, but are suffering the risks associated with them. It changes the political playing field dramatically.”
Perez, who is based in Chicago, vividly recalls the day one of his colleagues approached him with the idea of buying the refinery. It struck him as absurd, knowing the cleanup would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the environmental liabilities are immense and it would take years to tear down the thicket of pipes and heavy equipment.
“I said, ‘We are not buying a refinery,’” Perez said. “I don’t even need to see it.”
But Perez was lured out, and on his visit he was struck to find the property just down the road from the airport, close to downtown Philadelphia and right by the port. It struck him that the highest and best use for such a strategically located piece of land in a city serious about going green was no longer petroleum processing.
“The community was very excited by our commitment to taking the refinery offline,” said Perez, whose company bought the property for $252 million. “Within day one of closing, we started the endeavor of unwinding 150 years worth of refining operations here.” | 2022-06-20T10:56:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Biden's push to boost refining is unlikely to move oil companies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/20/refineries-profit-gas-prices/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/20/refineries-profit-gas-prices/ |
Russian gas has been attractive to Europe because it was easy to transport and almost always available. Its importance grew in recent years as some countries moved to end coal and nuclear power generation and production from their own gas fields declined. Russian state-controlled company Gazprom was supplying about a third of all gas consumed in Europe, until the war in Ukraine disrupted supplies and underscored the risk of overdependence on one energy provider.
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. 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.
The EU’s economic powerhouse relies on Russia for more than half of its gas and about a third of its oil. The standoff with Moscow led Germany to double down on renewables and invest in LNG import facilities, but it will take years for those other sources to come online. In the meantime, the government was reviving heavily polluting coal plants and subsidizing purchases from alternative energy suppliers to offset the sharp drop in Russian gas imports. | 2022-06-20T10:56:39Z | 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/2022/06/20/8db76bd6-f080-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-europe-became-so-dependent-on-putin-for-its-gas/2022/06/20/8db76bd6-f080-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
How an Emboldened Far-Right Is Changing French Politics
Analysis by Samy Adghirni | Bloomberg
Marine Le Pen, nationalist presidential candidate, speaks during an election campaign event in Arras, France, on Thursday, April 21, 2022. With just four days to go until the French decide between two radically different visions for their future, opinion polls show there are still many undecided voters. (Bloomberg)
Only once has France had a far-right government -- in the dark days of Nazi occupation during World War II. That lingering association with a period of national calamity confined extreme conservative groups to the margins of politics for the rest of the 20th century. Now they’re making a comeback, exploiting economic insecurity to peddle a narrative of a proud nation in decline, besieged by alien cultures. In an April presidential election, far-right figures secured the most votes since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Two months later, France’s largest far-right party hit another milestone by winning a record number of seats in parliament.
1. What is the French far-right?
The term encompasses various populist groups that have come and gone since the late 19th century. They tend to promote conservative values and favor tough enforcement of law and order. Some are monarchists and traditionalist Catholics and many hold extreme, racist and anti-Semitic views. Right-wing dissident paramilitaries fought against Algerian independence in the early 1960s, committing attacks that caused hundreds of deaths. The most successful far-right party today is the National Rally, founded as the National Front in 1972 and led for almost four decades by Jean-Marie Le Pen before he was replaced by his daughter Marine.
2. Who are its main players?
Le Pen, a former French paratrooper during the Algerian war, has been convicted of racism and anti-Semitism and once claimed the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history. He ran for president four times and only once reached the second-round run-off, in 2002, where he was dealt a crushing defeat by Jacques Chirac. Marine Le Pen took over in 2011 and began trying to soften the party’s image, changing its name and later ejecting her father from the movement. She ran for president three times and made it to the run-off twice. Le Pen is now progressively handing over the party to her deputy, Jordan Bardella, a fresh face from the suburbs of Paris. Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal, often described as a rising star of the far-right, defected from her aunt’s camp in March and is now vice president of Reconquest, a newer group led by writer and media pundit Eric Zemmour, who has been convicted of hate speech and stoked controversy for comments seen as denying the basic facts of the Holocaust.
3. What are their policies?
The National Rally wants to cut immigration and asylum, bar families of foreign nationals from joining them in France and expel undocumented migrants. Zemmour called for the deportation of a million illegal immigrants and foreigners who have committed crimes or are suspected of terrorist sympathies. He called for a ban on Muslim names, Islamic veils and mosque minarets, and said Muslims should give up their faith and beliefs, seeing them as incompatible with French republican values. The far-right wants to increase legal protection for police officers accused of violence, halt European Union integration and reimpose border controls. Le Pen said France should leave NATO’s integrated command, a structure described as the military alliance’s “backbone,” and has cultivated ties with authoritarian leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
4. How close did she come to the presidency?
Le Pen sought to moderate her views for her third presidential run in April, dropping a plan to ban dual citizenship -- a calling card of the far right -- and scrapping an explicit pledge to pull France out of the EU. She courted younger voters with promises of tax breaks and tried to soften her image -- sharing personal stories about her life as a single mother with three children. She polled just behind incumbent President Emmanuel Macron for part of the 2022 campaign before losing to him in a second-round run-off, securing around 41% of votes, an improvement on her 34% score last time around in 2017.
5. Is the far-right influencing mainstream politics?
Rattled by the electoral success of Le Pen, Zemmour and far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon in April, Macron redoubled a commitment to improve living standards and household purchasing power. He also sharply reduced the number of visas granted to Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian nationals. In June, historic gains by the National Rally helped to deprive Macron’s centrist movement of its majority in parliament, and Le Pen vowed to use her party’s new legislative clout to influence government policy and block his reforms. Ideas that emerged on the far right have become dominant themes within the traditional center-right Republicans party. Even some leftist figures like Arnaud Montebourg have said things that were unthinkable in his sphere of politics a few years ago. Montebourg has proposed blocking cash transfers to countries that refuse to take back their undocumented nationals caught in France, an idea long advocated by the far right.
6. Who are the far-right’s new voters?
A decline of France’s old establishment parties has left more wavering voters to be courted by the far-left and far-right. Le Pen’s promise to reverse a decline in living standards and boost wages found a receptive audience in deprived provincial areas during the presidential campaign. Zemmour used a slick social-media strategy to lure wealthier and younger people, promoting the so-called Great Replacement theory, which argues that White, Christian Europeans are being supplanted by Muslim immigrants who want to change the culture from within. The sense of an existential threat was sharpened by a succession of deadly attacks by Islamist militants over the past decade.
7. What are their slogans?
Marine Le Pen has softened her father’s rallying cries of “France for the French” and “The French first” to “The France we love.” Her supporters chant “this is our home” during rallies. Some of the far-right’s tropes have seeped into mainstream politics. The concept of “ensauvagement,” the idea that the nation is turning savage, struck a nerve with voters alarmed by crime rates in areas with large immigrant populations. A line was crossed in 2020, when Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who has responsibility for the police, said: “Personally, I use the word ensauvagement and I repeat it.”
• A London School of Economics blog on the risk of a 2027 presidential election dominated by the extremes.
• A profile of Jordan Bardella, the rising star in the French far-right
• Bloomberg QuickTakes on the rise of Zemmour, street protests during Macron’s tenure and the Yellow Vests phenomenon.
• Foreign Policy asks “Is Marine Le Pen a Fascist?”
• A post-election analysis in The Atlantic.
• A Bloomberg Opinion mid-election editorial on the risks of a Le Pen presidency, and columns on an uninspiring French election and the retreat of political moderation. | 2022-06-20T10:56:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How an Emboldened Far-Right Is Changing French Politics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-an-emboldened-far-right-is-changing-french-politics/2022/06/20/b5c57cfe-f084-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-an-emboldened-far-right-is-changing-french-politics/2022/06/20/b5c57cfe-f084-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
‘We will always have room in the classroom for anyone,’ said Dan Gill, who has been an educator for 52 years
Dan Gill, 75, a teacher at Glenfield Middle School in Montclair, N.J., always keeps an empty chair in his classroom. (Courtesy of Dan Gill)
All 26 chairs in Dan Gill’s middle school classroom are occupied — aside from one, which he leaves vacant.
For the past 30 years, the social studies teacher at Glenfield Middle School in Montclair, N.J., has kept an empty seat in the front corner of his classroom. It represents a childhood memory — which, Gill said, not only propelled him to become a teacher but also shaped the way he teaches.
“The chair symbolizes that we will always have room in the classroom for anyone,” said Gill, 75, who described Glenfield Middle School as having a diverse student body. “It symbolizes acceptance.”
As a 9-year-old boy in New York City, Gill and his best friend at the time, Archie Shaw, went to a friend’s birthday party together. When they knocked on the door of the friend’s apartment, the child’s mother looked disapprovingly at Archie — a Black boy. She invited Gill inside, then told Archie he had to go home because “there are no more chairs,” Gill recalled her saying.
“I can still see this woman’s face,” he said, adding that he offered to sit on the floor and give Archie his seat. “She said: ‘No, you don’t understand. There are not enough chairs.’ ”
“That’s when it hit me,” Gill continued. “She was judging him because of the color of his skin.”
Although he was only a child, He had some sense of the racial inequalities that plagued society. At the time, it was the beginning of the civil rights movement.
“I felt so bad because he had been humiliated,” Gill said. “We gave her the presents and I said we’re going to go to my house, where there are plenty of chairs.”
In hindsight, Gill presumed the child’s mother did not know her son had invited a Black boy to his birthday party. “I don’t think she would have allowed it,” he said.
Both boys, confused and hurt by what had happened, cried when they got back to Gill’s house, he said. His mother took them for ice cream to cheer them up.
Gill lost touch with Shaw as they got older, but that day stayed seared in his mind and influenced his desire to become an educator.
“When I look back now, I think that really made me want to help young people,” he said, explaining that he hoped to set a positive example. “Any bad behavior that kids have, they get it from an adult, and any good behavior they have, they get it from an adult.”
When he began his teaching career 52 years ago, he started a tradition of telling the story to his students annually on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, “as a way to punctuate what the day means in the lives of ordinary people, and how they should act when confronted with racism,” Gill said.
As he honed his teaching skills, Gill said he realized “kids learn really well through metaphors,” he said. So, he decided to add an empty chair to his classroom about 30 years ago — and it has remained there ever since.
“It’s been a really effective tool,” said Gill, who teaches students in grades 6 to 8. The chair embodies “the idea of opportunity; it’s the idea of welcoming; it’s the idea of treating people with respect.”
Over the years, the chair — and, more importantly, the story behind it — has resonated with students. One teen even made a customized necklace with a chair on it, Gill said.
Naturally, there have been a few students “that don’t get it,” Gill said, “but the group psychology of it is that the kids that do get it will explain it.”
For Maggie Horn, 16, learning about the chair in 2017 left a strong impression on her. It’s a story she regularly remembers and references often in conversations with peers.
“Its message was something that could speak to sixth-graders and allow us, for the first time, to understand what it meant to be privileged, and what it meant not to be,” Horn said. “That was really powerful for us all.”
“It helped me understand the idea of belonging, and that everyone deserves to feel like they belong,” she added. “It helped me understand that everyone deserves a seat — quite literally.”
Amid America’s racial reckoning in 2020, Horn said the chair was the first thing that came to mind.
“I thought of Mr. Gill’s story, and how timely it still is today,” she said.
It is most rewarding, Gill said, “when they come back and visit me, and kids say, ‘I always remember the chair.’ ”
Emily McCarthy, 25, is one such former student.
“When I think about the lessons that I learned from Mr. Gill, I think a lot of them started with that chair,” she said.
School administrators said that Gill, who has been at the school for 45 years, has left an impression on the whole community. He was also heavily involved in the school’s desegregation efforts in the 1970s.
“I often refer to him as our anchor,” said Erika Pierce, the principal of Glenfield. “He is an amazing force to have in the building, and such a wealth of knowledge for all of us.”
Students throughout the school — including those who have not been taught by Gill — are aware of the chair story, she added, explaining that he has shared it at schoolwide assemblies.
“The chair really speaks to his educational philosophy about inclusion and making sure that everyone feels that they have a place and a space, and that they’re valued,” Pierce said.
Now, Gill is getting the opportunity to tell the story to a wider audience. Last month, he won an impromptu book pitch at the Montclair Literary Festival, securing himself a publishing contract for a children’s book he wrote, titled “No More Chairs.”
He had no intention of participating in the “Pitch-a-Palooza,” but at the last minute, he decided to give it a shot. Writing a book about the chair, Gill said, “has always been in the back of my mind.”
Gill’s one-minute pitch won against 13 contenders, an experience he called “so surreal.”
The text for the book is complete, and Gill is now working with an editor to refine the writing. He is also in the process of finding an illustrator, and he hopes the book will be published within a year.
He plans to retire in 2023, but “through this fortuitous opportunity, I’m going to be able to still teach,” Gill said. “I’m really happy that I now have a wider audience to share the story.”
He will be dedicating the book to Archie Shaw, who passed away last year.
“It’s wonderful to be able to share this meaningful story that can touch other people, and motivate them to open up their hearts,” Gill said. | 2022-06-20T10:57:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why this teacher keeps one chair empty in his middle school classroom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/20/teacher-racism-chair-dan-gill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/20/teacher-racism-chair-dan-gill/ |
DeSantis pushed a culture war. Now, his approach will be put to the test.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Orlando on Feb. 24, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Mark Schaefer is a moderate Republican who voted, reluctantly, for President Donald Trump in 2020. His wife, Deb Schaefer describes herself as a lifelong Democrat who supported President Biden.
But when it comes to Florida politics, the couple is united in their excitement over Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. “We love him,” Deb Schaefer said outside her house in Jacksonville’s waterfront Riverside-Avondale Historic District.
They know DeSantis, who has blazed a national profile as he seeks reelection this November, isn’t perfect. Deb, 52, worries about abortion rights, and Mark, 54, fears he is making Florida less tolerant of his gay and lesbian friends. But they said that probably won’t impact their vote for him this fall.
“He has made a huge difference in the quality of life here in Florida,” Deb said. “He took a big chance and kept things open [during the pandemic] … and I don’t want to see things shut down again.”
The Schaefers’ enthusiasm highlights the way DeSantis has grown his appeal in this perennial swing state. After narrowly winning the governorship in 2018 by four-tenths of one percent and with 49.6 percent of the vote, DeSantis is cruising toward November’s election with an approval rating hovering around 55 percent, a war chest of more than $100 million total raised and buzz about a potential presidential bid in 2024.
Though DeSantis has governed as a conservative firebrand — leading efforts to restrict abortion access and limit conversations about race and sexual orientation in the classroom — he has built support among some political moderates with his hands-off approach to covid-19.
“Our view was while all of these other states were locking people down it was our responsibility to lift people up,” DeSantis said last month in Miami at an event marking the National Prayer Breakfast. “That meant protecting their freedoms, their right to worship, the right to earn a living, and the right to send their kids to school five days a week.”
DeSantis’s success foreshadows his potential strategy for winning the White House in two years. And the governor’s ability to attract a spectrum of voters — and his approach to the pandemic — face a crucial test in November, especially in heavily populated communities like Duval County, home of Jacksonville.
A small majority of voters in this growing and diverse region supported DeSantis’s opponent, Andrew Gillum in 2018. But the governor’s supporters believe he’ll be able to win here this time, buoyed by his “freedom first” agenda.
Democrats, meanwhile, argue that the governor’s fiery and culturally divisive approach will backfire, particularly among the area’s younger or more moderate voters.
“DeSantis says Florida is the 'freest state in the nation.’ Well, apparently not if you are a woman and want the right to choose, apparently not if you are Black and want to cast your ballot, and apparently not if you are LGBTQ and don’t want to be harassed,” Rep. Charlie Crist (D), who is running against Nikki Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner, for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
After being out-organized by the GOP for the past two years, Florida Democrats are slowly becoming more engaged for the fall campaign, veteran Florida political analyst Susan MacManus said. She also sees signs that issues such as abortion rights and the fight over gun control have energized core Democratic supporters, she added.
Yet, MacManus said DeSantis still benefits from public perception that the state’s economy remains relatively strong due to his approach to the pandemic, she said. The governor also has solid support from suburban women, she said, many of whom back his education policies.
And MacManus remains skeptical that Democrats have a strategy for wining back South Florida Latino voters who shifted to the right during the 2020 presidential election.
“Democrats have rallied their base a bit, and now the base is paying more attention than they were,” MacManus said. “But now Democrats have to capitalize on it.”
Treating Floridians ‘like grown-ups’
For decades, Duval County was a Republican stronghold as White religious conservatives and military families delivered decisive margins for GOP candidates. But over the past decade, as the county added 150,000 new residents and Democrats stepped up their efforts to turn out Black voters, Duval County has become more competitive in statewide races.
In 2018, Gillum, who was running to become the state’s first Black governor, became the first Democrat since 1986 to carry Duval County in a governor’s race, defeating DeSantis there. Two years later, even as much of the rest of the state trended to the right, Biden carried Duval County with 51 percent of the vote.
Jacksonville City Councilman Rory Diamond, a Republican, believes DeSantis will carry Duval County this year because of his economic record and political skills.
“I think he is going to win in Duval County by a large margin, probably the biggest margin in a generation for any gubernatorial candidate,” said Diamond, who represents heavily Republican Jacksonville Beach. Diamond believes DeSantis will inspire presidential election-level turnout among Republicans and win back suburban Independents who trended left in 2020.
In the southern part of Duval County, a 40-year-old housing development named “Secret Cove” exemplifies the passion that Republican-leaning voters feel for DeSantis this year. While most people here voted for DeSantis in 2018, many residents say their support for him has only grown since then.
With 380 houses clustered around the bass-filled lake, some Secret Cove residents refer to their community as “Little Mayberry,” a reference to the idyllic community portrayed in the 1960s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show.”
And DeSantis, many residents here say, is just the sort of politician they have been waiting for.
Even as they watch crime rates surge in other parts of the nation, Secret Cove remains largely crime-free. Most residents here remain on sound financial footing, thanks in part to rising home values.
As he stood in front of his house recently, 70-year-old Tom Sikes said he’s waited decades for a Florida governor like DeSantis to “fight back” against corporations and liberalism. Like Trump, DeSantis has learned a politician doesn’t need to be liked to be effective, Sikes said.
“Trump came in and said, ‘You are a jerk. You are a jerk. And you are a jerk,’” Sikes said. “DeSantis is the same way, and he is not going to take crap from anyone anymore … and if you just stand up to [liberals], a lot of them will back down.”
The portrait of DeSantis as a fearless fighter was widely repeated in interviews with Secret Cove voters. Many here also praised the governor’s covid policies and his support for restrictions on the teaching of LGBTQ issues in schools.
Florida has seen 350 covid-19 deaths per 100,000 residents, compared to the national average of 304 per 100,000 residents. Even though doctors and scientists have widely rebuked DeSantis’s approach to the pandemic, many Floridians say the governor’s stance closely tracks with their own views.
Colleen Lumley, 58, said she began admiring DeSantis during the pandemic because he treats Floridians “like grown-ups.”
“If you want to wear the mask, wear it. If you don’t, don’t,” said Lumley, who lives in a lakeside home. “You got options in Florida, as opposed to someone saying, ‘You can’t go to this restaurant because it’s closed, and you can’t go in because you won’t wear a mask’.”
As he washed turnip greens that he plucked from his garden, Secret Cove resident John Norse credits DeSantis for tackling “political correctness” in schools and employers, including his decision to challenge Disney’s self-governance status after the company spoke out against his parental rights bill that limits how teachers discuss LGBTQ issues with elementary school students.
“This is where Democrats go overboard where they just can’t even be half-normal,” said Norse, 58, who described himself as a devout Christian.
A mixed reception
Yet amid explosive development in southern Duval County, DeSantis will also have to make inroads with voters in the new apartment communities that surround Secret Cove, as well as in the racially diverse neighborhoods closer to Downtown or along the St. Johns River.
And there, views of the governor are more mixed.
In the Schaefers’ Riverside-Avondale community, century-old houses have been restored and residents congregate at garden parties or eclectic neighborhood eateries. The neighborhood leans left, but it has become a magnet for covid-era newcomers from northern states.
In an interview, Mark Schaefer said he didn’t like everything about DeSantis. He said the governor’s tone with Disney appeared “a little too un-governor-like” and “childish.” He was also initially skeptical of the “Parental Rights in Education” legislation, a measure critics refer to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
“But then I read the bill, and was like, ‘I also don’t want kids in grades kindergarten through third grade being taught that they may be another sex',” said Schaefer, a pharmaceutical sales agent.
Deb Schaefer, who also works in pharmaceutical sales, added that her support for DeSantis stands in sharp contrast to her views about Trump, whom she viewed as uncouth. She believes DeSantis is better-read and more intellectual than the former president.
One potential complication is the debate surrounding abortion. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, Deb Schaefer said she could reconsider her likely support for DeSantis, especially if he supports an effort to outlaw abortion here.
“Would it make me shift all the way back [to Democrats]? I don’t know,” she said.
Two doors down from the Schaefers’ house, the couple’s neighbor and friend Richard Ceriello said he can sum up his own view on DeSantis in less than a dozen words.
“I think the man is really quite evil,” said Ceriello, 71, a former public school teacher and longtime Jacksonville community and LGBTQ activist. “He has clearly taken a lesson from Trump and others, and his agenda is to vilify educators, vilify intellectuals.”
Ceriello, who lives in a historic farm house that was built around 1878, said he rarely talks about politics with his neighbors. To do so would run counter to the notion of Southern charm and sensibility, he said.
But Ceriello worries about a rise in hate crimes in Jacksonville — including the recent theft of a memorial that had stood in a park to honor the memory of a victim of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando — that he said coincided with the state’s push to restrict LGBTQ teachings this spring.
“He is using the LGBTQ community as a whipping boy, so he can gain some sort of traction for his campaign,” said Ceriello, who is active in several local gay rights and civic organizations.
In Jacksonville, Ceriello predicts DeSantis’s policies will backfire with voters.
“The whole demographics of this city are changing, and all of these people from the Northeast are moving here,” said Ceriello, noting that at least four openly gay candidates are running for seats on the Jacksonville City Council this year.
A fight for Black voters
Democratic officials agree. Many here say they believe they’ll be able to win in Duval County this fall. DeSantis’s rhetoric around race and gender — along with his hard line on abortion rights — will help them turn out voters, they say.
They also argue that they have an advantage on the ground. Even as Florida Republicans have made steady gains on Democrats in voter registration in Florida since 2020 — there are now 135,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state — Duval County Democrats maintain an advantage of about 33,000 voters.
The 2020 Census also showed Duval County is on the cusp of becoming majority-minority county, as both the Black and Latino populations continue to grow.
“For DeSantis to win Duval County this time, our voter turnout on the Democratic side will have to completely collapse,” said Daniel Henry, chairman of the Duval County Democratic Party.
Henry said Duval Democrats will be focused on mobilizing Black voters, who make up 31 percent of the county population and have traditionally voted for Democratic candidates.
Those voters, Henry said, have felt targeted by some of DeSantis’s most divisive policies, including his proposal to eliminate a North Florida congressional district that had a Black representative.
Republicans, however, argue that some Black voters will give DeSantis credit for keeping Florida’s economy largely open during the pandemic. They believe they can make small inroads with this community.
In February, the Republican National Committee opened a “community center” on Jacksonville’s west side to reach out to Black voters. Located in a shopping center and wedged between Roxy’s Beauty Supply and DT Nail Supply stores, the community center offers visitors free classes on gardening, makeup, resume writing, automotive repair and financial literacy.
In neighborhoods nearby, some Black voters said they are willing to consider the GOP message this year, especially amid widespread concerns about inflation.
“The costs are just getting too high,” said Ida Lynn, who emigrated from Haiti in 1994. “I always vote for the Democrats, but this year I don’t know.”
But Dwight Whing, 67, said he and most of his Black neighbors will be out to vote this year to send a message to DeSantis and the GOP.
“The way he governs, he just acts like, ‘I am the governor’ and if anyone opposes him he just goes into attack mode,” said Whing, who recently retired from the tire industry. “I can’t say I oppose everything he’s done. … But the last couple elections have been very eye opening to people about how important their votes are.” | 2022-06-20T10:57:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Ron DeSantis wooed voters: culture wars and a hands-off covid strategy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/ron-desantis-florida-campaign/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/ron-desantis-florida-campaign/ |
The history missing from the LGBTQ story told during Pride month
Why reinserting race and class into our understanding of Pride is so important
Perspective by Beau Lancaster
Beau Lancaster (he/him) is a historian, podcaster and filmmaker of the forthcoming documentary, “Gay, Black and Blue: The Raid On Blues Bar.”
Participants celebrate during the L.A. Pride Parade in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles on June 12, 2022. (Richard Vogel/AP)
Every Pride Month, we celebrate the visibility, contributions and history of the LGBTQ community. It takes place in June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an event that began with a police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Village that resulted in five days of demonstrations by LGBTQ people and others and helped spark a new phase in the LGBTQ movement.
Yet, while Stonewall had major historic ramifications, change came slowly. In fact, police raids persisted throughout the country. For instance, in 1982, police raided the Blues Bar, a working-class African American LGBTQ bar in Times Square.
The Blues Bar raid, the protest it triggered and the failure of New York’s government to offer justice to the victims teach us a different multiracial history than the one we learn from Stonewall. The historical amnesia of the Blues Bar raid reveals something fundamentally flawed in the way that LGBTQ history has been told and provides lessons for the push for equality moving forward.
New York Police Department officers raided the Blues Bar on Sept. 29, 1982, at 10:30 p.m. The bar, which was located on 43rd street on Eighth Avenue, was just a few blocks from the Waldorf Astoria, which was then hosting the Human Rights Campaign’s first fundraising dinner. Founded in 1980, the then-nascent LGBTQ political advocacy organization had welcomed former vice president Walter Mondale as its keynote speaker that year.
Twenty NYPD officers entered the bar claiming its patrons had attacked two officers nearby. Various witnesses claimed the police had been at the Blues Bar weeks prior harassing patrons and accusing the bar of being involved in crime. There was no evidence to substantiate that, however.
The police did not accept denials by the bar patrons that they had not attacked any officers. Instead, the officers attacked 40 patrons, the majority of whom were Black men, along with some trans women.
During the nearly 30-minute attack, police referred to their bullets as “f--- suppositories” and threw homophobic slurs at the patrons. Police used one person’s crutches to beat them and knocked another one’s front teeth out so violently that their blood stained the bar’s wall. The officers particularly acted out against the trans women. Several patrons were sent to the hospital requiring immediate medical attention. The bar also suffered tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.
Arthur Bell, one of the few reporters who covered the Stonewall rebellion also covered the Blues Bar raid and referred to it on air as “worse than Stonewall.”
The attack sparked a protest on Oct. 15, 1982, with more than 1,500 LGBTQ people — one of the largest such demonstrations in New York before the more visible AIDS-related protests in the coming years. LGBTQ people of all races, genders and backgrounds marched. This included Black trans woman Marsha P. Johnson, who also took part in the Stonewall riots.
One of the raid victims, Herb Jackson, spoke to the crowd that night and said: “I’m glad that we’re united …. I’m so glad that everybody’s here — Black, White, Puerto Rican, red, yellow. I don’t care what color you are, man. You are my brothers and sisters.”
The rally convinced Jackson that the police couldn’t “get away with this.” Jackson believed the demonstration would break the case “wide open” and lead to a “full, thorough investigation on what went down.”
While there was an investigation into the raid, it ultimately proved unsuccessful in holding the police accountable. Many different factors led to the case not moving forward. This included pressure applied by some real estate elites who did not want to challenge the gentrification that was transforming the landscape of Times Square. The investigation also coincided with the beginning of the AIDS crisis, which immediately overwhelmed the city’s LGBTQ activists and organizations. The raid’s victims also did not trust the district attorney’s office to conduct a fair investigation, and Mayor Ed Koch did not apply ample pressure on the district attorney’s office to work with the victims.
But another major factor contributed to the investigation’s lack of success: the interconnected role that race, class and homophobia played for the victims before, during and after the raid.
The government and most of the world still openly disdained LGBTQ people regardless of race, gender or class. Violence at the hands of police and ordinary people was often the norm.
The LGBTQ community was also segregated, with many LGBTQ people of color often feeling isolated or erased from the movement. Many LGBTQ bars and clubs were informally racially segregated. Blues Bar was in Times Square, where many LGBTQ bars and clubs frequented by people of color were located at the time. Meanwhile, many White LGBTQ bars and clubs frequently performed “double carding” wherein Black and other people of color were often asked to present two or more pieces of identification to enter.
Even after the gains produced by the LGBTQ rights movement in the 1970s, LGBTQ bars and clubs had little to no legal protection in New York. The city did not pass a gay civil rights bill until 1986. This meant such establishments were technically illegal. That left proprietors in perpetual fear of their liquor licenses being revoked — a penalty that frequently occurred. To counter that, many White LGBTQ bars and clubs bought protection from the mafia, which added pressure to keep the bars segregated.
Grass-roots interracial LGBTQ organizations, such as Black and White Men Together and Dykes Against Racism, organized demonstrations against double carding. Despite their efforts, many bars remained segregated.
The Blues Bar raid inspired a sense of solidarity among White LGBTQ people and others, who joined the protests and marches. Being White allowed many LGBTQ people to create their own spaces, but it did not necessarily provide protection from the harassment of police or society at large. In addition, the AIDS crisis and the fear, hate and bigotry it provoked during the 1980s and beyond demonstrated that newly secured “gay rights” didn’t guarantee the protection of most LGBTQ people anyhow — regardless of race and class.
Meanwhile, as the raid at Blues Bar reveals, many LGBTQ people of color confronted not just homophobia, but also racial and class bigotry. Even within the LGBTQ community and movement, they were regularly made invisible and were excluded from being part of the culture.
After the Blues Bar raid, Lionel Mitchell observed in the New York Amsterdam News, a historic Black newspaper, that “many white gays were asserting that the police would not have dared brutalize White people in the same way.”
Mitchell found it most revealing of White privilege that “while white gays were having their $150 fundraiser across town in a near lily-white affair,” a reference to the HRC fundraising dinner, “the poorly organized Blacks, scarcely protected by the all-new won 'gay rights,' were being stomped within an inch of their lives by that police department.”
Police raided the Blues Bar because it was a Black, LGBTQ working-class bar owned by Black folks and located in a gentrifying neighborhood.
Sept. 29, 2022, marks 40 years since the Blues Bar raid. Part of its legacy is this lesson about the intersectional roles of race, sexuality and gender identity in society.
The Blues Bar raid reminds us that the story of Pride and the history of the LGBTQ movement is incomplete without including people of color and recognizing the importance of their intersectional experiences. | 2022-06-20T10:57:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The history missing from the LGBTQ story told during Pride month - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/20/history-missing-lgbtq-story-told-during-pride-month/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/20/history-missing-lgbtq-story-told-during-pride-month/ |
Title IX’s interpretation has reshaped athletics in good and bad ways
An unexpected impact of a seminal law
Perspective by Elizabeth A. Sharrow
Elizabeth A. Sharrow is associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Basketball player Sydnei Caldwell of the Pennsylvania Quakers attends the inaugural IX Awards in Las Vegas on June 17. The IXs celebrate the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law that protects students and educators from sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.
Lawmakers modeled the Title IX around Titles VI and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During the legislative discussion over the law, members of Congress were chiefly concerned with addressing women’s exclusion from higher education, sex bias in textbooks and discriminatory practices in faculty hiring.
The bill did not specifically reference athletic programs, but once Title IX became law, debates over implementing it swiftly centered on its application to interscholastic and intercollegiate sports. Though Congress indicated its vision for Title IX in integrating classrooms, its lack of forethought about sports left bureaucrats unprepared to craft policy for athletics. Debate across the 1970s heightened fears about the consequences of integrating athletic teams, leading to policy guidelines that promoted deeply sex-segregated teams that, over time, undermined the goal of full sex-based equality.
Even so, the implementation of Title IX dramatically reshaped American athletics. Since 1972, women’s intercollegiate athletic participation has expanded roughly 12-fold, with the formation of thousands of teams for girls and women. Similarly, the athletic participation of girls in high school has markedly increased. About half of girls graduating from American high schools now do so with significant athletic experience compared with one in 12 girls in 1971.
Beyond sports, women’s educational attainment has mushroomed at all levels. Sports play an important role in higher education attainment and its lifelong benefits. Data show that girls with athletic experience probably will enroll in college, participate in the workforce as adults and enjoy a healthy adolescence and adulthood.
But tension over how to implement Title IX and who will benefit remain, 50 years after it was passed. Research shows that girls and women of color and those from lower-income families are much less apt to enjoy either access to sports or to their spillover benefits. Transgender women and girls are openly targeted for exclusion from competition by a swell of state laws passed since 2020. That leaves interest groups, scholars and everyday Americans increasingly grappling with the uneven legacies of Title IX.
Among the many changes to the organization of school-sponsored athletics, one feature remains extremely durable: the reliance on sex segregation for training and competition.
The road to finalizing federal policy guidance in 1979 was not exactly straightforward. The meager legislative discussion of athletic inequalities came to the forefront when the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) began drafting implementation guidelines in 1973. Lacking a robust trail of legislative intent on sports, initial policy guidelines provided negligible direction. Policymakers quickly realized that participation opportunities for girls and women in school-sponsored sports were wildly outpaced by those provided for boys and men.
Even so, initially, federal policymakers considered minimal interventions to the status quo. In a July 1973 memo, HEW Secretary Caspar Weinberger suggested that women should be allowed merely to try out for existing men’s “noncontact” teams. The memo argued that if women failed the tryout, schools were not required to establish a separate “women’s team” to meet women’s needs. This proposed policy might have enabled limited sex integration, but it avoided structural change. The same structures that had long-denied women and girls access to training, coaching and development opportunities would have gone unchallenged by Weinberger’s vision.
At the same time, activists began emerging from the liberal feminist movement. On issues of athletic inclusion, the movement was neither a highly structured nor institutionalized lobbying force. Activists had not yet become embedded in the policymaking process with access to legislators and department officials to provide key advocacy perspectives, nor capable of mounting a sweeping response to questions of policy design. But some activists, including Bernice Sandler, who had been instrumental in the passage of Title IX, began shifting their focus to sports.
Sandler and Margaret Dunkle, organizing through the Project on the Status and Education of Women (PSEW) of the Association of American Colleges, wrote an important policy document on the topic of athletic equity in 1974. In the paper, titled “What Constitutes Equality for Women in Sport?” PSEW argued for strict enforcement of Title IX’s nondiscrimination provisions with regard to athletics without explicitly taking a stand on “mixed teams.” PSEW outlined the perceived strengths and weaknesses of promoting segregated sports using logic premised on the notion that women and men were “different” types of athletes in need of separate and different teams. However, they conceded that segregation would better serve the “average female” more so than the “superior woman athlete.”
The National Organization for Women (NOW), fresh off the legal battle to integrate Little League Baseball teams and years of advocating to pass the federal Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), emerged as the most pro-integration feminist group. On the one hand, its policy documents reveal that the group feared women’s abrupt incorporation into sporting spaces would require them to meet the long-standing, ostensibly gender-neutral standards for team tryouts and physical strength. NOW acknowledged that generations of male-centric athletics left girls and women initially underprepared for that challenge. Although it stopped short of demanding full integration in the initial stages of policy implementation, it noted in 1974, “NOW is opposed to any regulation which precludes eventual integration. Regulations that ‘protect’ girls and/or women are against NOW goals and are contradictory to our stand on the ERA.”
However, advocating for immediate and full integration, in addition to possibly disadvantaging the average girl, would have also required that activists confront entrenched male interests. This included mediating the concerns of coaches and athletic directors who were already mobilizing through the NCAA against Title IX’s more modest implementation. Even the most active women’s groups, including NOW, PSEW and the National Coalition for Girls and Women in Education , found themselves advocating for a “difference-based,” sex-separate approach to creating athletic opportunities for women. Doing so ensured they did not lose to established interests that favored men.
In 1979, the Education Department interpreted Title IX as mandating that schools create “women’s” teams where they were historically lacking. This interpretation has remained largely static in the four decades since. This has ensured that women largely compete in separate competitive venues from men.
Since 1979, the robust discussion among feminist groups on the question of sex-integrated sports has largely been forgotten. By implementing Title IX without abruptly treating women precisely “the same” as men — by offering merely tryouts to historically male teams — policymakers probably avoided deepening women’s exclusion. Yet, by not creating policy pathways aligned with NOW’s concern that eventual integration would ultimately best serve the most skilled women athletes, so, too, did they foreclose opportunities for women to directly challenge sexist assumptions about their innate inferiority to men through integrated competition.
Sex segregation, cemented by policy design and through years of practice, has also narrowed contemporary possibilities for transgender and nonbinary athletes who seek full inclusion in school-sponsored teams that align with their gender identity. Since 2020, conservative lawmakers in a majority of American states have introduced bills to ban gender-diverse students from school-sponsored teams, proposing genital examinations to determine athletic team eligibility in multiple states. To date, 18 states have passed laws banning trans athletes from segregated teams for girls and women — a deleterious outcome that might have been avoided had NOW’s long-term vision for even partial integration been realized in the ensuing years.
We now live with the fraught legacies of this sex segregation. Resource distributions favor men’s teams. The lack of contact between women and men suppresses men’s emergence as allies in the fight for equality. And cultures of androcentrism, or the prioritization of men, dominate contemporary athletics. Impending policy debate and discussion should examine this history to grapple with the future and advance the quest for gender equality under Title IX. | 2022-06-20T10:57:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Title IX’s interpretation has reshaped athletics in good and bad ways - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/20/title-ixs-interpretation-has-reshaped-athletics-good-bad-ways/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/20/title-ixs-interpretation-has-reshaped-athletics-good-bad-ways/ |
Live updates:Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Turkey meets NATO hopefuls; Ukraine ramps ...
A new survey examines the conversations between Ukrainians and their Russian relatives
Analysis by Tymofii Brik
Aaron Erlich
People sit on a train in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region during an evacuation effort on June 18. The train was heading to Dnipro and Lviv, Ukraine. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
In Russia, an estimated 11 million people have relatives in Ukraine. With so many family ties connecting the two countries, why haven’t more Russians risen up against Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine?
According to recent news stories, the answer partly is that many Russians believe President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda narratives over their own kin’s firsthand accounts.
Are these headline-grabbing accounts isolated incidents, or do they represent broader trends? Are Russian and Ukrainian relatives still communicating? If so, have some Ukrainians pierced the veil of Russian propaganda, at least with their family members?
In addressing these questions, our recent survey offers clues about the durability of Russians’ support for the war. Our findings also provide broader insights into the effectiveness of dictators’ strategies for maintaining power by monopolizing information and deceiving citizens.
From April 15 to 17, we fielded an online survey of Ukrainians, using a panel of smartphone users established by Gradus, a Ukrainian research firm.
Before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, the panel was representative of the Ukrainian urban adult population under age 60, excluding Crimea and the eastern zones where there has been conflict since 2014. The panel subsequently lost 7 percent of its respondents, primarily in war-torn regions and among fighting-age males. Accordingly, caution is warranted in drawing conclusions from the poll on the views of male combatants, people in Ukraine’s most conflict-affected regions, older Ukrainians and rural inhabitants.
Our survey had a sample size of 1,880 respondents, a 43 percent response rate, and a 2.1 percentage point margin of error.
Are Ukrainians talking about the war with Russian relatives?
Forty-eight percent of respondents reported having at least one relative in Russia, a legacy of Soviet and post-Soviet migration trends. Of these 908 respondents with relatives, a majority — 59 percent — discussed the war with their kin, mainly via WhatsApp, Telegram and video and voice calls.
During the war’s first two weeks, however, many of these conversations stopped, according to our survey. By the time of the survey, about seven weeks after Russia’s invasion, fewer than half (46 percent) of these communications about the war were ongoing.
While news stories frequently focus on clashes between parents, children or siblings, these interactions are in fact relatively uncommon. We found that 72 percent of respondents who discussed the war with relatives talked exclusively with extended family members, such as aunts, uncles and cousins. Far fewer report discussions with siblings (19 percent) and parents (6 percent).
Russian journalists report the facts about Ukraine. Why do Russians ignore them?
We asked respondents with multiple relatives to focus on their closest family member. Below we refer to these conversations.
What do Ukrainians and Russian relatives talk about?
Few topics appear off limits. Approximately 74 percent of the 534 respondents who discussed the war with their closest relatives had talked about Russia’s intentional bombing and shelling of Ukrainian cities, and 67 percent had discussed Russia’s killing of civilians. Topics such as Russian looting (41 percent), torture and rape (38 percent), and use of weapons that violate international law, such as cluster bombs, arose less frequently (27 percent).
Many of these conversations also broached Russia’s false claims justifying the invasion. We found that 52 percent of respondents had discussed the claim that Ukraine’s leaders are “Nazis.” And 36 percent had conversed about Russia’s claim to be liberating the breakaway areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, while 30 percent discussed the claim that Ukraine is committing genocide against ethnic Russians. The claim that Ukraine was developing nuclear weapons received less attention (20 percent).
How influential is Russia’s war propaganda?
We asked respondents to rate the extent to which their Russian relatives believed Russian war propaganda at the outset of their discussions, on a scale of 1 to 10, where higher values represent stronger beliefs. The median rating was 8. Of course, these ratings are based on respondents’ recollections from the war’s early days. Nevertheless, they clearly show that many Ukrainians perceive that Russian propaganda holds sway over their relatives.
Ukraine has been winning the messaging wars. It’s been preparing for years.
As expected, respondents perceived older relatives and relatives who receive news from Russian state television, as opposed to the internet or other sources, to be more influenced by propaganda. Surprisingly, respondents perceived relatives from Moscow and St. Petersburg as no less indoctrinated than relatives from smaller Russian cities and rural areas.
Can Ukrainians puncture the Russian information bubble?
The evidence is mixed on whether Ukrainians’ communications encourage their Russian relatives to rethink the veracity of pro-Kremlin information. On the one hand, 54 percent of respondents report that their conversations have had no effect on relatives’ beliefs in Russian propaganda. In fact, 8 percent of respondents report that their Russian relatives have come to believe propaganda more strongly because of these discussions. On the other hand, 22 percent report that conversations have induced relatives to believe Russian propaganda a little less, and 16 percent report that relatives have come to believe a lot less.
Respondents who at the time of the survey were still communicating with Russian relatives, however, are more optimistic. Just 37 percent of these 228 respondents report that their conversations have had no effect, and only 4 percent report that conversations have strengthened their relatives’ beliefs. For this group, 59 percent report that their Russian relatives had come to believe state propaganda a little or a lot less.
Most respondents reported relying more on facts (59 percent) than on logic (48 percent) or emotion (26 percent) to influence their relatives’ beliefs about the war. Yet as many Ukrainians, Russians, Americans and others have experienced in our current “post-truth” era, evidence and logic frequently prove ineffective against “alternative” facts espoused by someone ensconced in a distinct information bubble.
Consequently, Ukrainian citizens’ family ties may be an underutilized instrument in Ukraine’s information war tool kit. Social science research suggests that perspective-taking and similar persuasion techniques make people receptive to new viewpoints precisely because they rely less on facts and logic and more on emotional connections and subtle cues related to gestures, tone and facial expressions. Such techniques might help Ukrainians counter Russian propaganda’s influence, one conversation at a time, as they continue conveying the truth about the war to their Russian relatives.
Tymofii Brik (@brik_t) is rector and head of sociological research at the Kyiv School of Economics.
Aaron Erlich (@aserlich) is an assistant professor of political science and a member of the Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship at McGill University in Canada. He has been conducting public opinion research in Ukraine since 2015.
Jordan Gans-Morse (@J_GansMorse) is an associate professor of political science and faculty director of the Russian, Eurasian and East European studies program at Northwestern University. In 2016-2017, he was a Fulbright scholar in Ukraine. | 2022-06-20T10:57:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What Ukrainians tell Russian family members about the war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/20/russia-ukraine-relatives-conversations-propaganda/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/20/russia-ukraine-relatives-conversations-propaganda/ |
Brooke Alexander found out she was pregnant 48 hours before the Texas abortion ban took effect
Brooke Alexander cradles one of her twin daughters as she watches her fiance, Billy High, practice some skateboarding tricks at the Portland Skate Park in Portland, Tex. (Marvi Lacar for The Washington Post)
CORPUS CHRISTI, Tex. — Brooke Alexander turned off her breast pump at 6:04 p.m. and brought two fresh bottles of milk over to the bed, where her 3-month-old twins lay flat on their backs, red-faced and crying.
Running on four hours of sleep, the 18-year-old tried to feed both babies at once, holding Kendall in her arms while she tried to get Olivia to feed herself, her bottle propped up by a pillow. But the bottle kept slipping and the baby kept wailing. And Brooke’s boyfriend, Billy High, wouldn’t be home for another five hours.
“Please, fussy girl,” Brooke whispered.
She peeked outside the room, just big enough for a full-size mattress, and realized she had barely seen the sun all day. The windows were covered by blankets, pinned up with thumbtacks to keep the room cool. Brooke rarely ventured into the rest of the house. Billy’s dad had taken them in when her mom kicked them out, and she didn’t want to get in his way.
The hours without Billy were always the hardest. She knew he had to go — they relied entirely on the $9.75 an hour he made working the line at Freebirds World Burrito — but she tortured herself imagining all the girls he might be meeting. And she wished she had somewhere to go, too.
Brooke found out she was pregnant late on the night of Aug. 29, two days before the Texas Heartbeat Act banned abortions once an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity, around six weeks of pregnancy. It was the most restrictive abortion law to take effect in the United States in nearly 50 years.
For many Texans who have needed abortions since September, the law has been a major inconvenience, forcing them to drive hundreds of miles — and pay hundreds of dollars — for a legal procedure they once could have had at home. But not everyone has been able to leave the state. Some people couldn’t take time away from work or afford gas, while others, faced with a long journey, decided to stay pregnant.
Nearly 10 months into the Texas law, they have started having the babies they never planned to carry to term.
Texas offers a glimpse of what much of the country would face if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer, as has been widely expected since a leaked draft opinion circulated last month. If the landmark precedent falls, roughly half the states in the country are expected to dramatically restrict abortion or ban it altogether, creating vast abortion deserts that will push many into parenthood.
Sometimes Brooke imagined her life if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, if Texas hadn’t banned abortion just days after she decided that she wanted one. She would have been in school, rushing from class to her shift at Texas Roadhouse, eyes on a real estate license that would finally get her out of Corpus Christi. She’d pictured an apartment in Austin and enough money for a trip to Hawaii, where she’d swim with dolphins in water so clear she could see her toes.
When both babies finally started eating, Brooke took out her phone and restarted the timer that had been running almost continuously since the day they were born.
She had 2½ hours until they’d have to eat again.
Brooke and Billy first met at the downtown skatepark with a big group of friends, one clear-skied night in May of last year. They didn’t talk that first day — but Brooke noticed how effortlessly Billy dropped into the quarter-pipe, the way his blond hair flipped out from underneath his red beanie. She followed him on Instagram, and her stomach did a little dance when she saw that he followed her back.
Soon, they were spending almost every day together: throwing themselves into the Gulf of Mexico waves on Padre Island and watching the sun set over the pier. At the skatepark, he’d help her do the tricks she’d been scared to try alone.
“Pinkie promise me you’ll do it,” he’d say, all blue eyes and dimples, as she peeked over the edge of the ramp.
Once he hooked her little finger, there was no backing down.
Billy was different from the other guys Brooke knew. He held her hand in public and introduced her to his dad. When she took him to the mall, he grinned each time she stepped out of the dressing room, telling her how good she looked in each new crop top she tried on.
He made her feel pretty. “I wasn’t used to feeling like that,” Brooke said.
Brooke took the pregnancy test at 11 o’clock on a hot night at the tail end of the summer. When the two pink lines appeared, she looked over at Billy, then slid onto the bathroom floor, finally connecting the signs she’d ignored for weeks.
The nausea she’d chalked up to food poisoning. The two missed periods. That moment a few weeks back, when Billy put a hand on her stomach and asked if she was sure she wasn’t pregnant.
Leaving Billy in her bedroom with the pregnancy test, Brooke grabbed her keys and drove to her best friend’s house, where they sat on his bed and examined her options.
She could always get an abortion, she told him.
Then he reminded her of something she vaguely remembered seeing on Twitter: A new law was scheduled to take effect Sept. 1.
Brooke had 48 hours.
The abortion clinic in South Texas — two and a half hours from Corpus Christi — had no open slots in the next two days, the appointment books filling up fast as patients raced to get in before the law came down. When Brooke called, the woman on the end of the line offered the names and addresses of clinics in New Mexico, a 13-hour drive from Corpus Christi.
In the meantime, the woman said, Brooke could get an ultrasound: If she was under six weeks, they could still see her.
400 calls, no more appointments: Texas abortion clinic scrambles to see patients before 6-week ban may take effect
“We’re gonna see how far along it is,” Brooke texted her dad, Jeremy Alexander, later that night. “See if abortion is an option.”
“What’s the cut off date,” he asked.
“They just passed a law today!!” she responded in the early hours of Sept. 1, referring to the ban that had just taken effect. “What are the f---ing odds I believe it’s 6 weeks.”
“Fingers crossed????” her dad said.
Brooke’s ultrasound was scheduled for 9 a.m.
Whenever a new client walks into the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend, they are asked to fill out a form. After all the usual questions — name, date of birth, marital status — comes the one that most interests the staff: “If you are pregnant, what are your intentions?”
From there, the team sorts each client into one of three groups:
If they’re planning to have the baby: “LTC,” likely to carry.
If they’re on the fence: “AV,” abortion vulnerable.
If they’re planning to get an abortion: “AM,” abortion minded.
The Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend — which advertises itself as the region’s “#1 Source of Abortion Information” — is one of thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across the United States, antiabortion organizations that are often religiously affiliated.
When Brooke showed up with her mom for her appointment, she had no idea she’d walked into a facility designed to dissuade people from getting abortions. She also didn’t know how much significance her form held for the staff: By signaling that she wanted an abortion, she became their first “AM” of the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Brooke heard about the pregnancy center from her mom’s friend, who knew she needed an ultrasound. This place offered them for free. Brooke felt a sense of calm, sitting in the waiting room, lulled by its decorative throw pillows and soft watercolors of ocean scenes.
The advocate assigned to her case, Angie Arnholt, had been counseling abortion-minded clients at the pregnancy center for a year. While many of the center’s volunteers signed up only to talk to “LTCs” — happy conversations about babies their clients couldn’t wait to have — Arnholt, a 61-year-old who wears a gold cross around her neck, felt called to do what she could to help women "make a good decision,” she later told The Washington Post.
Back in a consultation room, Brooke told Arnholt all the reasons she wanted to get an abortion.
She’d just enrolled in real estate classes at community college, which would be her first time back in a classroom since she dropped out of high school three years earlier at 15.
She and Billy had been dating only three months.
Sitting across from Brooke and her mom, Arnholt opened “A Woman’s Right to Know,” an antiabortion booklet distributed by the state of Texas, flipping to a page titled “Abortion risks.”
The first risk listed was “death.”
As Brooke listened to Arnholt’s warnings — of depression, nausea, cramping, breast cancer, infertility — she tried to stay calm, reminding herself that women get abortions all the time. Still, Brooke couldn’t help fixating on some of the words Arnholt used: Vacuum suction. Heavy bleeding. Punctured uterus. (Serious complications from abortion are rare. Abortion does not increase the risk of mental illness, breast cancer or infertility, according to leading medical organizations.)
Starting to panic, Brooke looked over at her mom.
When she found out Brooke was pregnant, Terri Thomas told her daughter to get an abortion. While she was a devout Christian — going to church a few times a week, twice on Sundays — she had her own views on this particular issue. Thomas had her first kid at 20, she said, just as she was transferring out of community college with hopes of starting law school. If the timing had been different, she said, she might have been a prosecutor. Instead, she hopped from one retail job to another: Bath & Body Works to Walgreens to Home Depot.
Growing up, Brooke said, she bounced back and forth between her mom’s house and her dad’s, depending on who was the more stable parent at the time. Her happiest years as a kid were spent with her dad, she said, on a tree-lined street with a ping-pong table in the garage and a trampoline in the backyard. But then Brooke’s dad started using cocaine.
While Alexander has been sober for a few years now, he said, back then he couldn’t kick the habit. Around the time he stopped paying rent, and sewage started backing up in their toilets, Brooke moved back in with her mom.
With her mom, Brooke always felt like she was tiptoeing. If Brooke forgot to turn off the lights or do the dishes, Thomas would start screaming. Thomas felt she had every right to respond that way, she said: She was the “hen” in her henhouse.
Arnholt ushered Brooke into the ultrasound room, where Brooke undressed from the waist down and lay back onto an examination table, looking up at a large flat-screen TV.
As the ultrasound technician pressed the probe into her stomach, slathered with gel, Brooke willed the screen to show a fetus without a heartbeat.
The technician gasped.
It was twins. And they were 12 weeks along.
“Are you sure?” Brooke said.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Thomas recalled saying as she jumped up and down. “This is a miracle from the Lord. We are having these babies.”
She wondered: If her babies had heartbeats, as these women said they did, was aborting them murder?
Eventually, Arnholt turned to Brooke and asked whether she’d be keeping them.
Brooke heard herself saying “yes.”
Brooke walked out of the pregnancy center that day with an ultrasound photo and a handful of lollipops that Arnholt promised would help with her morning sickness.
Arnholt and the ultrasound technician each followed up with Brooke a few times over text. Brooke scheduled what the pregnancy center called a “pre-natal appointment,” where she sat through another ultrasound, then dropped by for a parenting class, earning “points” she redeemed for a package of diapers.
After that, Brooke didn’t go back to the pregnancy center. She said the class felt like a waste of time.
Instead, she turned to Billy.
Within a few weeks, Brooke and Billy had a plan. He would join the Air Force as soon as he graduated from high school; Brooke would wait for him to finish basic training, then follow him wherever he got assigned.
Soon they were debating baby names. Surrounded by their friends and families one afternoon in October, Brooke and Billy fired gender-reveal cannons into Thomas’s backyard, unleashing two giant puffs of pink smoke.
“I’m so happy I met you billy,” Brooke wrote in an Instagram post announcing her pregnancy. “Starting a family with you is gonna be one of the hardest things I’m ever gonna experience, but I’m glad I get to do it with you.”
Brooke started her real estate classes in early November — and she loved everything about going to school. When she showed up the first day in her favorite crop top and jeans, the cinder-block building “felt like an opportunity,” she said. Most days, she’d buy a Frappuccino from the vending machine and sit down in the chair she’d claimed as her own, opening her textbook to a page she’d already covered in yellow highlighter.
Brooke got an 83 on the final exam, the highest grade in the class.
She texted everyone she could think of who might want to hear the news: Billy, her brother, her mom, her dad, her grandpa. After three years out of school, she couldn’t believe she’d done so well.
“I felt like, man, I must be really smart,” she said.
Throughout the fall, Billy was her biggest worry. He’d stayed pretty quiet back when she was deciding what to do about the babies. Just once, he told her he’d prefer to get an abortion, but would support her completely in whatever she chose.
He’d thought about adoption, but Brooke wouldn’t even consider it.
“I don’t think I’m ready for this,” he’d told her.
Billy was scared to lose what he described as “the freedom of being a teenager.” After he graduated, he’d planned to keep working at Freebirds — just enough hours to get by — so he could maximize his skate time and “just chill.” People respected Billy at the skate park: Whenever he geared up to film some tricks, everyone else cleared out of the bowl.
By November, Billy was paying all of Brooke’s bills. She’d stopped working at Texas Roadhouse; the smell of the meat and grease had been making her sick to her stomach. To swing Brooke’s $330 car payment, they applied for a WIC card and ate ramen or pancakes for dinner. When they overdrafted Brooke’s credit card, Billy worked double shifts until he could pay it off.
Brooke wanted to work, but she couldn’t hack a waitressing job. At seven months pregnant, she struggled to stay on her feet for too long and felt utterly exhausted by even the simplest tasks.
She started falling asleep while doing her homework. Then she missed a class. Then another.
When she decided to drop out of real estate school, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her teacher. She convinced herself it wasn’t that big of a deal — they’d be moving away soon anyway, and the Air Force would pay Billy enough to support them both.
Brooke wedged her real estate textbook in a line of books on her dresser, between “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and the fourth Harry Potter.
Maybe she’d come back to it one day.
Anytime Brooke went out with the babies in public, she knew that people were staring. She was 18 and she looked 18, with rosy cheeks and curly blond ringlets tied together with a ribbon.
As she struggled to maneuver her double stroller through the doors at Freebirds, she imagined everyone was judging her, writing her off as a clueless kid and a bad mom.
She was determined to prove them wrong.
Somehow, mothering came naturally to Brooke. Whenever one of the babies started crying, Brooke would tick through her mental checklist: Was her daughter hungry? Tired? Did she need to be changed? If it was none of those things, Brooke would pick up her daughter and hold her close, swaying from side to side, kissing the silky brown strands on the top of her head.
Almost always, her baby would stop crying.
“I think they can smell me,” she said. “And that makes me feel so special.”
Brooke knew the little things about her daughters that no one else would notice. Olivia had a higher-pitched cry. Kendall was harder to soothe. You could always tell when they were about to wake up, because they’d start to smile.
Looking at her daughters, Brooke struggled to articulate her feelings on abortion. On one hand, she said, she absolutely believed that women should have the right to choose what’s best for their own lives. On the other, she knew that, without the Texas law, her babies might not be here.
“Who’s to say what I would have done if the law wasn’t in effect?” she said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
Brooke considered all that she’d lost: Long nights at the skate park, trips to the mall, dropping $30 on a crab dinner just because she felt like it.
“I can’t just really be free," she said. "I guess that really sums it up. That’s a big thing that I really miss.”
She sat silently for a while, Olivia’s hand wrapped around her finger.
“It’s really scary thinking that I wouldn’t have them,” she said.
There was only one way she could make sense of it, she said: Losing them now — as fully formed human beings — would be different from losing them back then.
All through the pregnancy, Brooke had planned to bring the babies home to her mom’s house, where they’d all live together until Billy made enough money to pay for a home.
Brooke’s mom had promised to be there for them, back in the ultrasound room, and Brooke had believed her.
But after a couple of weeks, Brooke started to feel like her mom could turn on her at any moment.
Thomas would remind Brooke that she was staying in her house rent-free, running the TV and AC all night without paying for electric.
After Brooke left dirty dishes in the sink one night in mid-May, she woke up to her mom yelling at her from the kitchen.
“You don’t get a prize for getting yourself knocked up and pregnant,” Thomas remembered saying.
“I don’t know what you think I owe you, but you don’t get a prize for that.”
“You treat me like some random chick off the street,” Brooke said. “I’m your daughter.”
Thomas said she told her to find another place to live.
Brooke packed up a few things and drove the babies to Billy’s dad’s house. Billy’s room wasn’t exactly where she’d imagined raising her daughters, with its stash of skateboard magazines and a giant Freebirds billboard behind the bed, advertising fountain drinks for 95 cents. But it was a place she was welcome.
The next morning, Brooke woke up to a text from her mother.
“I am by no means a perfect human or a perfect mom, but I love you no matter what,” she wrote. “You don’t have to stay over there.”
Brooke would rather rely on Billy than her mom, she decided — though in her most anxious moments, she worried he might kick her out, too.
She often relived an argument they’d had one Saturday night in April, when they got a little too drunk and Billy finally talked about all the things he’d been avoiding: He didn’t really like the way his life was turning out, he told her. He didn’t want to join the Air Force; he just wanted to skate.
“That’s not my fault,” she’d told him. “I didn’t get myself pregnant.”
At one point, he recalled, he suggested they try living apart.
They were over that now, Brooke reminded herself as she hung up her clothes in Billy’s closet. She placed a bouquet of flowers on his desk and lit a candle, filling the room with a scent called “Forever Love.”
Bit by bit, she would make Billy’s room a home.
Twenty minutes across town, a woman Brooke had never met would soon be sharing her story, holding up the twins as an antiabortion triumph, just two weeks after the leaked draft decision revealed a Supreme Court on the brink of overturning Roe.
The Coastal Bend Republican Coalition gathered on May 19 for its weekly meeting at a local barbecue joint. Over brisket and coleslaw, members listened to the speaker they’d invited for the evening: Jana Pinson, the executive director of the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend.
To explain the center’s work, Pinson told a story about a girl who showed up with her mom on the morning the Heartbeat Act took effect, asking for an abortion.
The mother and daughter “were so furious with us,” Pinson said, "so angry.”
But as soon as they saw the ultrasound, she said, everything changed.
“The moment we put that wand on her sweet belly and two babies popped up … it absolutely melted them.”
Last year, Pinson said, 583 abortion-minded and abortion-vulnerable women chose to continue their pregnancies after visiting their facility.
At their banquet in March — with over 2,800 attendees from across the region — Pinson and her staff lit 583 candles.
One of those was for Brooke.
Three weeks later, the babies stayed home while Brooke and Billy drove to the courthouse. Billy was about to leave for a five-month stint in basic training and technical school. For Brooke to qualify for military benefits, they had to get married.
At 11 o’clock on a Monday morning, they walked into a courtroom with an American flag behind the bench, Brooke in a flowery sundress, Billy in jeans. She’d looked around for white dresses on Amazon but couldn’t justify the $30: She was terrified she’d run out of money while Billy was away.
The loneliness scared her, too. She kept imagining the long nights alone in Billy’s house, trying to calm two crying babies without him. He wouldn’t have his phone at basic training; she would hear from him mostly through letters. She knew she’d have to manage that little voice in the back of her head: What if he changed his mind about their life together?
Standing with Billy in front of the justice of the peace, Brooke told herself that, one day, they would have their “love story moment.” She would walk down the aisle in a wedding gown. Their friends and family would cry and cheer as she and Billy publicly declared how much they meant to each other.
“I, Brooke Alexander, take thee, Billy High, to be my wedded husband,” she repeated.
If it wasn’t for the Texas law, Brooke knew she might not be standing here. She’d probably be studying for her next exam, while Billy mastered some new trick on the quarter-pipe. She liked to think they’d still be together — spending their money on movie tickets and Whataburger, instead of diapers and baby wipes.
But that alternate life didn’t matter anymore. She had two babies she loved more than anything else in the world.
“I do,” she said, tears in her eyes.
Brooke pulled out her phone once they finished the ceremony: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
Time to grab some lunch and head home; the babies would be hungry.
Story editing by Peter Wallsten. Photos by Marvi Lacar. Photo editing by Thomas Simonetti. Copy editing by Mike Cirelli. Design by Stephanie Hays. | 2022-06-20T10:57:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This Texas teen wanted an abortion. She now has twins. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/20/texas-abortion-law-teen-mom/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/20/texas-abortion-law-teen-mom/ |
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen adresses reporters Monday, June 20, 2022 in Henin-Beaumont, northern France. French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance was projected to lose its majority despite getting the most seats in the final round of parliamentary elections Sunday, while the far-right National Rally appeared to have made big gains. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-06-20T10:57:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Le Pen: Huge gains in French parliament a 'seismic event' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/le-pen-huge-gains-in-french-parliament-a-seismic-event/2022/06/20/e8ef4ab0-f084-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/le-pen-huge-gains-in-french-parliament-a-seismic-event/2022/06/20/e8ef4ab0-f084-11ec-ac16-8fbf7194cd78_story.html |
He asked whether she was cheating on her husband. “It was a good question to ask,” Graham said. “I would’ve asked it again.”
Naghmeh Panahi is pictured outside of her house in Boise. (Kyle Green for The Washington Post)
BOISE — When Naghmeh Panahi’s Christian-pastor husband was imprisoned in Iran, she found one of her biggest advocates in a powerful evangelical leader, the Rev. Franklin Graham.
Graham “took me under his wing,” Panahi said, and the two grew close between 2013 and 2015, texting and speaking by phone several times a month. Graham sent 71 emails to Panahi from his private Gmail account, according to a review by The Post. He boosted her story with his massive online following, sent private planes to whisk her to speaking engagements, bankrolled a trip to Disneyland for her two children and took her family out for a steak dinner in Boise. He helped turn her bright-yellow shirts, her husband’s favorite color, into a symbol for evangelicals who wanted to fight for religious freedom abroad.
But the unlikely friendship between Graham and an Iranian immigrant came to an abrupt halt — and since last fall, on social media and at a handful of churches and conferences across the country, Panahi has been more widely sharing why. Her then-imprisoned husband, Saeed Abedini, had abused her physically and emotionally for most of their 13-year marriage, she said, and when Graham first heard, he called her in November 2015.
In May, at a conference on abuse in churches, Panahi shared her story about how Graham had treated her. Two days later, the Southern Baptist Convention released the results of a third-party investigation into a years-long coverup of sexual abuse. The shocking report reignited outrage over the mishandling of abuse claims by evangelical leaders that included the 2018 backlash to Southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson’s attempt to persuade an abused woman to go back to her husband , fueling a #ChurchToo movement. (Patterson did not respond to a recent request for comment.)
‘The man is the head of family’
Abedini continued in ministry and, after he became a U.S. citizen, decided to go back to Iran to help set up an orphanage. In 2012, he was taken into custody by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and sentenced to eight years in prison for allegedly compromising Iran’s national security by leading illegal house churches.
A father figure
Graham responded in an email right away that he would help, and he did, both in public and in private: standing with Panahi at a White House vigil, writing to then-President Barack Obama on her behalf and, as an amateur pilot, personally flying her from New York City to speak to his ministry in Charlotte.
Failed reunions
Abedini, along with Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian and four other Americans, was released in a prisoner exchange in January 2016. He was given a hero’s welcome, meeting with Republican leaders Panahi had worked with, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Panahi said Cruz never acknowledged her abuse allegations; a Cruz spokesman said his office was not “made aware of the details of Naghmeh’s marriage” before his advocacy.
He insisted the couple reunite at his retreat center outside Asheville, N.C. Panahi initially agreed, until she spoke with Graham’s sister, the prominent Bible teacher Anne Graham Lotz.
“I believe it was not a marriage-counseling situation where ‘he leaves the top off the toothpaste’ situation,” Lotz recounted. “I would not want them back together where he could hurt her or the children.” Lotz declined to comment on her brother’s response.
That May after a restraining order had expired, Panahi said, during a visit with the children, Abedini grabbed their 8-year-old son by the neck when the boy didn’t clean up a water spill; Panahi took her son to a hospital, where he was put in a neck brace. A district court judge in Boise granted an emergency protection order and ordered a child-protection investigation, according to a transcript of the couple’s divorce proceedings. The findings of that investigation are not public because it involved a minor.
Three months later, Panahi said, she met with Graham and her husband one more time in a hotel conference room in downtown Boise, to show she was trying to make the marriage work, even though Abedini had not met with an abuse counselor as she had requested.
‘Don’t go through the church’
Boz Tchividjian — a grandson of the Rev. Billy Graham, a nephew of Franklin Graham and a lawyer who represents sex abuse survivors — said there is a pattern in parts of conservative evangelicalism that emphasizes the authority of men and fosters skepticism among leaders toward abuse allegations. | 2022-06-20T10:57:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Franklin Graham pushed a woman to return to her abusive husband - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/06/20/franklin-graham-domestic-abuse-abedini/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/06/20/franklin-graham-domestic-abuse-abedini/ |
Pedestrian and his dog killed Saturday in crash in Prince William
A pedestrian was killed Saturday in a crash involving a drunk driver in the Woodbridge area.
Prince William County police said the incident happened just before 10 p.m. near Old Bridge Road and Cape Cod Court. An initial investigation found that the driver of a Ford Focus went off the road and hit a pedestrian who was walking his dog, police said in a statement.
The car eventually hit a power pole, causing it to snap and fall.
The pedestrian, who was later identified as Luis Alfredo Perez, 45, of Woodbridge, was taken to a hospital, where he died. Police said his dog, an Akita, died at the scene.
The driver, Banze Mwenze Gentil, 40, of Woodbridge, was intoxicated, police said. He was arrested and charged with driving under the influence, involuntary manslaughter and other offenses. He is being held without bond, and it was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer. | 2022-06-20T11:05:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A pedestrian was killed Saturday in a crash in Prince William - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/pedestrian-killed-in-crash-in-prince-william/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/pedestrian-killed-in-crash-in-prince-william/ |
Jeremy Hunt, a former Army captain, is attempting to unseat a 30-year Democratic incumbent to win a House seat in Georgia. For a Black Republican, that is a tough task.
By Clyde McGrady
Nikki Haley, a former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor, records a campaign video with House candidate Jeremy Hunt in Columbus, Ga., on June 8. (Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post)
COLUMBUS, Ga. — Jeremy Hunt sprang to the front of the large DoubleTree Hotel conference room to address the crowd of 200 mostly White military veterans, Republican county officials and state lawmakers who were weeks away from deciding the Republican nominee for Georgia’s only competitive House race.
Hunt, a Black graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, wasted no time tossing out the red meat he hopes will fire up enough Republicans to get him past Tuesday’s primary runoff.
“I’m not afraid of the cultural fight,” he said, before railing against perceived Democratic Party domination of Hollywood, academia and Big Tech, the latter he accused of feeding children “poison on our phones.”
“We have to make sure that we get back our culture,” he continued. “I don’t want to be telling stories about how America used to be. And I don’t want my daughter to grow up in an America where she’s told that she’s a victim based on the color of her skin. You can take that foolishness back to the 1960s where it belongs.”
The room erupted in applause.
Over the next 10 minutes, the 28-year-old Hunt, clad in a navy blue suit (sans tie), addressed the crowd’s anxieties over rising fuel prices, American exceptionalism, standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, and why grandparents feel alienated from their grandchildren who have been indoctrinated with “woke nonsense.”
After the rally, White voters zeroed in on why they thought Hunt could ultimately defeat the 30-year incumbent, Rep. Sanford D. Bishop Jr.
“He’s articulate,” said Jeff Jolly, the 68-year-old chairman of the Grady County GOP. “He’s young. And he’s likable. And he will listen.”
If Hunt, who finished in first place (37 percent) in the six-way May primary, wins the runoff, he’ll have to beat Bishop, a Black Democrat. This task has been made slightly more achievable by a favorably redrawn congressional map that makes the 2nd District slightly more conservative.
And slightly less Black.
A Hunt victory will require a complicated two-step. In a hyperpartisan era, he will have to win over a conservative base that feels besieged by the culture wars raging across the country, while simultaneously appealing to Black voters who have historically been wary of the Republican Party. The district is 49 percent Black after congressional lines were redrawn by the Georgia legislature, down from 51 percent.
The district in southern Georgia encompasses hundreds of acres of dairy farms, churches and roadside barbecue stands. Tall oaks cast long shadows across fields that will soon yield cotton, peanuts or corn. In its previous iteration, it was among the 10 poorest districts in the country and only 18 percent of its residents over age 25 held college degrees.
It is also a place where many feel connected to Fort Benning, the base where Hunt served after graduating from West Point — another calling card for the former U.S. Army captain.
“When I found out that he had gone to West Point, graduated with honors, I knew what that meant,” said Brenda Jolly, 67. “It’s almost impossible to get into West Point. I like the military experience.”
The district is a nearly perfect staging ground for Republicans hoping to make inroads with poor and working-class Black voters.
It is a challenge being taken on by several Black Republicans this year. Wesley Hunt, considered a party rising star, is running for a House seat in Texas, while John James is running in Michigan and Jennifer-Ruth Green in Indiana. Another Georgia star, Herschel Walker, is running to unseat Sen. Raphael G. Warnock but has been beset by controversy.
While Hunt can be loquacious, there is one challenge hanging over his House run that he doesn’t like to bring up: Trump. The most prominent figure in the Republican Party — or his history of racially insensitive remarks — is never mentioned in Hunt’s stump speech. That may be a safe bet after Gov. Brian Kemp won the state’s Republican primary by 50 points even after the former president endorsed his opponent.
Hunt said that he has benefited from Trump’s ascendance and the former president’s shedding more light on the concerns of working-class voters. But “we’re not going to win this based on the previous administration. We’re going to win this based on focusing on the future and what our movement’s going to do for our communities,” he said.
At the DoubleTree rally, Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, and the first minority and first female governor of South Carolina, doesn’t mention Trump either. She opens her speech supporting Hunt with a story she’s fond of telling about her childhood in the Palmetto State.
“My father wore a turban — and still does to this day,” said Haley, who is Indian American. “My mother wore a sari. We weren’t White enough to be White. We weren’t Black enough to be Black. And I remember when I would get teased on the playground. I would come home and my mom would say, ’Your job is not to show them how you’re different. Your job is to show them how you’re similar.’”
Hunt likes to tell his own optimistic story of American acceptance, with a twist of redemption. He’s a sixth-generation Georgian, whose enslaved ancestors worked the southern Georgia soil. His grandmother went to Fort Valley State University, a small historically Black college near Macon. His father, Garland Sr., attended Howard University.
At Howard, Garland would flirt with Pan-Africanism and the teachings of Louis Farrakhan, even introducing the Nation of Islam leader during a campus event. “He was racist,” Hunt says of his father. “I mean, he just felt like White people were all evil.”
But that was before Garland became a born-again Christian. “I began to see the most important thing was my love for Christ, not my love for race,” Garland said during a 2018 interview with the Stream, a Christian website. “I had to confess some racial prejudice in my own heart. Then I asked the Lord to help me, and He did.” Garland would go on to write books, co-host a local television show (“The Gospel in Black and White”), and found a church dedicated to racial reconciliation.
“He’s definitely a chip off the block,” Garland said of his son. Garland has been involved in Republican politics for decades and would bring Hunt to party events where they met leaders like former senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), “who would speak to [Jeremy] before he spoke to me.”
Hunt said he learned from his father that racism could be an obstacle only if he let it.
His belief would be tested when he was a junior at a predominantly White high school in Johns Creek, Ga. Shortly after Barack Obama became America’s first Black president, Hunt walked out of his home to discover his 1997 Nissan Maxima covered in white paint, he says, with expressions like “Kill Obama” and “F that n-----.” It took him about 30 minutes to clean it off.
“I was more offended that they thought I supported Obama,” he joked in an interview back at his Columbus campaign headquarters. But at the time he was distraught and sought his father’s advice. “Go to school, get excellent grades, be the top of your class,” he said his father told him. “That’s how you defeat racism.”
Hunt, who is taking Yale Law School classes online and was attending in person before his campaign, says he didn’t want to give in to “victimhood.”
Hunt bursts with energy when he talks yet manages to stay on message, punctuating his sentences with hearty guffaws. He becomes especially animated when talking about what he sees as the overinflated concerns of the Black middle class being given more attention than those of poor and working-class Black people. In his campaign manager’s office, littered with loose papers of voter information and Tucker Carlson shot glasses, Hunt lays out his case for why Black voters should support him over Bishop.
“They mock our values,” he says of Democrats. “They mock Christianity. We are the party of the working class.” He has a plan to reach out to Black churches throughout the district. “And so that’s how we’re going to win this.”
It’s a conundrum that has bedeviled some Republicans for years: Black voters who are cultural, religious or economic conservatives still voting Democratic. The 88 percent of Black voters Biden won in Georgia helped him carry the state by the thinnest of margins.
“My sense is that an African American Republican is not going to really do that much better than a White Republican running against an African American Democrat,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University. “Black Republicans have tended to be elected in districts where Whites make up a large majority of the electorate. They haven’t been elected by winning a large share of Black votes.”
What makes Hunt so confident that this time is different?
Electoral inertia. The president’s party typically fares poorly during the midterms, and this fall is shaping up to be a particularly brutal one for Democrats. Republicans see an opening among disaffected voters who may want to punish Democrats for high gas prices, rampant inflation and general pandemic malaise.
If anyone understands the challenges Hunt faces, it’s Dylan Glenn, who as a young Black Republican made two doomed attempts to win the 2nd District seat, in 1998 and 2000.
Bishop has used his seat on the House Agriculture Committee to forge deep ties with conservative farmers who wield political clout in a district where agriculture is a major economic engine. For half of his tenure the district was actually majority White. “He used to be the most conservative member of the Black Caucus,” said Charles Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. Bishop easily won this year’s Democratic primary with almost 94 percent of the vote.
In addition to an entrenched incumbent, Hunt is facing some of the same challenges that stymied Glenn, attacked by his opponents as a “carpetbagger” whose campaign was controlled and underwritten by the D.C. Republican establishment.
Chris West, who Hunt faces in Tuesday’s runoff, has referred to the political novice as his “out of state opponent.” One of Hunt’s primary opponents, Wayne Johnson, has sued, complaining that the political novice is receiving an unfair advantage through his frequent appearances on Fox News, which Hunt’s campaign denies. Fox didn’t return a message seeking comment.
In addition to Haley, Hunt has been endorsed by Trump secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. In a statement, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who helped lead the charge to object to 2020 election results, called him a “rising star” with “courage.”
“He’s the hope,” Glenn said of Hunt. “I commend him for being willing to take that on. It’s not going to be easy.”
As the runoff neared, Hunt and his small team of volunteers canvassed a Columbus neighborhood of manicured lawns, dotted with American flags and signs celebrating the University of Georgia’s recent college football national championship. Hunt walked briskly from house to house, shaking hands with potential voters in the street and going a full 30 minutes before sweat even surfaced on his brow. (He wanted to canvass again after the rally but his wife, Ky, insisted he take a break, to the relief of his tired volunteers.)
“But will they accept you in south Columbus?” one voter asks, referring to a Black, less affluent part of town where the median household brings in less than $24,000 a year.
“We’ve got to give them an alternative. And so we show up in the community,” he responded. “That’s going to be our fight. But I’m up for the challenge. …This election we’re going across racial lines, political lines, we’re getting everybody.”
Black Republicans have trouble being accepted within the party, struggling to prove their conservative ideological bona fides, said Rep. Byron Donalds, one of the two Black Republicans in the House. “You’ve got to work hard and do what’s necessary for you to be successful,” said Donalds, who represents a mostly White district in Florida. “Nobody’s going to give you anything in life. Forget politics,” he said, chuckling. “They’re definitely not going to give you anything in politics.”
Whatever hope Hunt has of winning may lie with voters like Farah Dewsbury, a 45-year-old Black Army veteran who has previously supported Bishop but voted for Hunt in the Republican primary.
“I thought he was a fresh face,” she said. “I love the fact that Jeremy is a Black conservative because there’s a notion amongst most minorities that because you’re Black, you’re going to be a Democrat.” | 2022-06-20T11:26:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A Black Republican tries to bring in Black voters to the GOP - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/20/jeremy-hunt-georgia-black-republicans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/20/jeremy-hunt-georgia-black-republicans/ |
Officials say the victim, a dog breeder, flashed a hand signal to alert law enforcement he was in danger
The three suspects are being held in Martin County Jail in Florida. (Google Street View)
The driver of a green BMW was walking back to the car with his three passengers after a traffic stop last week in Florida when he put his hand behind his back and used his fingers to make a gun gesture. He was trying to get the attention of the sheriff’s deputies who had pulled him over for speeding, he later told the officers. He was in danger.
A deputy noticed the sign and called the man over. The speeding was on purpose, the driver told the officer — the passengers had been holding him hostage, and this had been his first chance to get help.
“Deputies searched the vehicle and found guns, knives and large amounts of cash,” the Martin County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post.
Arrest reports say the three passengers had robbed the victim, who is a dog breeder, and were forcing him at gunpoint to drive to get the puppies in Fort Lauderdale.
The men — Tsdekiel Sellers, 22; Benyahveen Radcliffe, 25; and Kashaveeyah Bragdon, 22 — were arrested and face several charges, including kidnapping, aggravated assault and unlicensed carry of a firearm, according to court records. They are being held in Martin County Jail and do not yet have attorneys, according to court records.
Radcliffe and Sellers first interacted with the victim at his Port St. Lucie home on June 14, according to a report from the Port St. Lucie Police Department, which assisted with the investigation. After Bragdon dropped them off, the pair tried to break into the victim’s house, but the victim “developed a ruse” to get them out, he told officers. He did not contact law enforcement after the incident.
The trio allegedly returned the following day around 2:30 p.m. The victim told police that he heard a “loud banging noise” and then saw the handle to his back door on the floor. Sellers, who is from Atlanta, and Radcliffe, who is from Buffalo, had allegedly broken in and were armed. They “began ransacking the residence,” an arrest report says, stuffing items into several duffel bags, including $10,000 cash, and questioned the victim about the dogs he was breeding.
After telling them the dogs were at his aunt’s house in Fort Lauderdale, Sellers and Radcliffe forced the victim at gunpoint into his car and instructed him to drive, the report says. Bragdon, who is from Tallahassee and allegedly drove the two other suspects to the victim’s house, told police he followed them in his car.
After a few stops, all three suspects got into the victim’s car and allegedly instructed him to drive to Fort Lauderdale so they could collect the puppies. It was then that the dog breeder came up with his plan, the report says.
Knowing that officers often patrol a particular overpass on Interstate 95 in Martin County, the victim decided he would drive 15 miles over the speed limit to catch their attention, he told officers. A sheriff’s deputy pulled them over around 8:40 p.m. and told the men to exit the BMW as another deputy circled the car with a K-9. The officers then gave the victim a written warning and said that he and his passengers were free to go, the report says.
Then the victim flashed the hand signal, the deputy said.
“He stated that the occupants of the car have been keeping him against his will for several days and [he] has not been able to call 911,” the report says, adding that the victim told them “there were multiple firearms concealed in the car and that he was afraid the three other males would use them against him.”
The deputies searched the BMW and found guns in the back seat arm rest and the glove box and a steak knife in the pocket of Radcliffe’s hoodie, according to an arrest report. When questioned by deputies, Radcliffe allegedly said the men knew each other because they were part of a group called the Israelites and said they went to Florida to meet women.
Bragdon told police that he “never possessed a firearm during the incident,” a report says. Law enforcement noted that the suspect “was very cooperative during the investigation and wrote an apology statement to the victim and allowed the [sheriff’s] office to download the data to his cellular device on his own free will.”
Records do not say when Bragdon, Radcliffe and Sellers are due back in court. Sellers’s bond was set at $2.55 million, Radcliffe’s at $2.2 million and Bragdon’s at $700,000, a sheriff’s deputy at the county jail told The Washington Post. | 2022-06-20T12:23:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida dog breeder held hostage broke traffic law to get police attention - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/dog-breeder-hostage-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/dog-breeder-hostage-florida/ |
(Zurab Kurtsikidze/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
But a new court case alleges the investment opportunity was all part of a ploy. According to an arrest affidavit, representatives for Windsor Jones, along with two other companies, Charles Winn and Vintage Whisky Casks, are accused of running an international scheme that involved cold-calling, fake names and British accents. The companies — which all purported to operate between the United States and United Kingdom — swindled more than $13 million from at least 150 people, federal investigators allege.
An unnamed 89-year-old from Ohio and a 73-year-old from Michigan are among the scores of victims. The octogenarian dropped over $300,000 on rare dessert wines and a purported storage locker in France, according to court records. Meanwhile, the septuagenarian wired over $85,000 to Charles Winn in the hopes of receiving a potential return of up to 40 percent and an opportunity to tap into the Chinese market. Neither saw their supposed investments bear fruit, according to the documents.
After paying a hefty price, some individuals would later consider pulling out of the investment — only to be ghosted or handed excuses by the supposed brokerage programs, according to the affidavit.
‘Casanova Scammer’ admits to stealing $1 million from women on dating apps
That informant, who worked for Charles Winn and Vintage Whisky Casks, helped investigators connect with several people who had sent checks to the company — and the agency’s warning allowed investors to void their checks and save over $466,000, according to the affidavit. However, the companies responded by persuading other individuals to send money through wire transfers, investigators said.
After connecting the FBI with the employee, the Cuyahoga County informant tipped off investigators that Alexander would be traveling from England to Ohio. The two met, and Alexander did a sales pitch for whiskey investments — telling him that the company’s employees “would only get paid 10% of the profit after the whiskey matured and was sold to third parties.”
Under the conditions of his release, Alexander — whose calls were decried as incessant and “pushy”— is prohibited from contacting “any person who is or may be a victim.” | 2022-06-20T12:23:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Casey Alexander arrested in wine and whiskey investment scheme, feds say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/fine-wine-whiskey-fraud-arrest/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/fine-wine-whiskey-fraud-arrest/ |
Louisville mayor punched by man in second attack on local Democrats
Police, who have released surveillance images, are asking for the public’s help identifying the attacker
"You gotta get back up and keep going,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer (D) said after he was punched and fell down. ( Joshua Lott for The Washington Post)
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer (D) had just given someone a hug Saturday evening when a man walked up and punched him, causing the mayor to fall backward onto the ground in downtown Louisville, according to video footage of the incident.
Footage of the assault posted by WDRB shows a man casually walk up to Fischer and then suddenly strike the mayor with his right fist. As the mayor fell down, the attacker walked away as another person tried to confront him.
Fischer was not seriously injured, according to Louisville police, who are now searching for the attacker. The incident took place at the Fourth Street Live retail complex.
By Sunday, the mayor appeared relatively unshaken.
“You know, occasionally in life things happen,” Fischer told WLKY. “You know, you get knocked down. You gotta get back up and keep going.”
The attack on Fischer came about four months after a gunman opened fire at the campaign office of Craig Greenberg, a Democratic candidate running to replace Fischer, who is in his third and final term as mayor. Staffers used tables to barricade themselves inside the office, and Greenberg said after the February incident that one bullet had grazed his sweater. A local activist, Quintez Brown, faces both state and federal charges in connection with the incident; he has pleaded not guilty, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
A mayoral candidate was shot at in his office. Police charged an activist with attempted murder.
On Saturday night, Greenberg wrote on Twitter that Fischer and his family were in his thoughts.
“Whoever is responsible for this assault needs to turn themselves in,” Greenberg wrote. “We cannot solve our disagreements with violence.”
Police have not publicly stated the attacker’s potential motive, and it is unclear what Fischer was doing at the downtown Louisville complex when he was punched. Earlier on Saturday, Fischer attended the city’s Pride parade, according to his Twitter account.
The incident raised questions about how the attacker slipped past the mayor’s security detail and how he was able to escape. Jessica Wethington, a spokeswoman for the mayor, told the Courier-Journal that the mayor’s security detail was present during the attack.
She said the mayor was “fine” immediately following the assault and needed no serious medical treatment, adding: “The mayor says he is glad he can still take a punch.” | 2022-06-20T12:23:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police look for man who punched Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/greg-fischer-mayor-punch/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/20/greg-fischer-mayor-punch/ |
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