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The vice president is expected to take a leading role in the administration’s response to the Supreme Court decision on abortion rights
Vice President Harris speaks during a meeting about abortion rights and Roe v. Wade on June 14 from her ceremonial office. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Vice President Harris will meet on Friday with Democratic state legislators from states that are expected to enact or bolster abortion bans in coming months, following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a senior White House official.
Administration officials see the first female vice president, who is of Black and Asian descent, as a particularly strong messenger on the issue of abortion rights. On Saturday, at the Essence Festival, one of the largest gatherings of Black women in the country, Harris said there is a link between states taking away the right to an abortion and those that are restricting voting rights.
“At least 11 states are doing both at the same time,” Harris said. “No surprise there.”
During Friday’s meeting, according to the official, Harris will encourage the legislators to continue fighting for reproductive rights in their states and convey the White House’s commitment to helping them.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision, the administration has scrambled to show it is doing all in its power to protect access to abortions — and faced wilting criticism from members of the Democratic base concerned the White House is not doing enough.
Biden and Harris have told voters they should express their anger at the polls this November and give Democrats the legislative majorities they need to enshrine abortion access into federal law. But those exhortations ring hollow for some activists who say their votes handed Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2020 and they have been disappointed in the result.
Biden has said his administration would seek to ensure access to medication abortions, which can be prescribed via telehealth visits and induced by pills shipped in the mail, potentially skirting state abortion restrictions. The administration has also sought to find ways to help women cross state lines to obtain an abortion.
States seek to prevent women from crossing state lines for abortions
Harris had initial reservations about becoming the face of the administration’s response, worried she could be pigeonholed on the issue because of her gender, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a sensitive dynamic. Ultimately, she decided to take on the issue and is expected to play a prominent role in coming months.
Friday’s meeting, which will take place in the vice president’s ceremonial office, will be live-streamed on the White House’s website.
The attendees include Indiana House Minority Leader Phil GiaQuinta; incoming Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell; South Dakota House Minority Whip Erin Healy; Nebraska state Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks; and Montana state Sen. Diane Sands. | 2022-07-08T00:42:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Harris to meet with Democratic legislators from anti-abortion states - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/07/harris-abortion-ban-states/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/07/harris-abortion-ban-states/ |
DOT proposal would require states to track carbon emissions from driving
Federal highway officials say the proposed regulation would bring clearer data, but critics say it’s an example of federal overreach
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speaks during a briefing about the bipartisan infrastructure law at the White House on May 16. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)
The Department of Transportation on Thursday proposed a new requirement that states and metropolitan areas measure the amount of carbon dioxide being released through driving on interstate highways and other major roads.
Transportation is the top U.S. source of greenhouse gas emissions, and federal highway officials under President Biden say the proposed regulation is meant to bring clearer data, increased transparency and better decisions at all levels of government and among the driving public. The rule is intended to track and reduce tailpipe emissions that spur climate change.
The Biden administration effort is similar to a greenhouse gas measurement enacted in the final days of the Obama administration. The Trump administration, saying that earlier plan imposed “unnecessary regulatory burdens … with no predictable benefits,” repealed the requirement in 2018 before states had to take action.
House bill would force states to cut transportation emissions, with ‘consequences’ for those that don’t
“Climate change results from the incremental addition of [greenhouse gas] emissions from millions of individual sources, which collectively have a large impact on a global scale,” according to the proposal. It states that better information can increase public awareness about emissions trends and illuminate the “trade-offs among competing policy choices” of different types of transportation projects.
“We don’t have a moment to waste,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “Our approach gives states the flexibility they need to set their own emission reduction targets, while providing them with resources from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to meet those targets and protect their communities.”
Failing to hit the emissions targets would have little legal consequence. If significant progress is not made, the state transportation department “shall document the actions it will take to achieve the target,” according to the proposal.
The effort brought pushback from some Republicans and the road-building industry. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), ranking member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, said the greenhouse gas performance measure represents an overreach that was not part of last year’s infrastructure bill.
“Unfortunately, this action follows a common theme by both DOT and the administration, which is implementing partisan policy priorities they wish had been included in the bipartisan bill that the president signed into law,” she said in a statement.
Nick Goldstein, vice president of regulatory and legal issues at the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, said a Supreme Court decision late last month that restricts the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon from power plants underscores a similar problem in the Department of Transportation’s approach to greenhouse gases. He said his members don’t believe Congress intended for the Federal Highway Administration to regulate greenhouse gases.
“The larger point was agencies need to comply with the authority and the mission that was explicitly given to them by Congress,” Goldstein said. “The same logic applies here. The Department of Transportation is going outside its lane in this rule and trying to act like the EPA.”
The Federal Highway Administration argued that Congress listed “environmental sustainability” as part of key “national goals and performance management measures” under federal law.
“The environmental sustainability, and specifically the carbon footprint, of the transportation system is a critically important attribute that State DOTs can and should use to assess the performance of the Interstate and non-Interstate National Highway System (NHS),” according to the proposal.
In addition to interstates, the National Highway System — which is what’s covered under the proposed rule — includes roads that are important to the nation’s economy, defense and mobility, according to federal highway officials.
Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said Transportation Department officials are following congressional intent.
“Congress created a national goal of making our roads, highways, and bridges environmentally sustainable a decade ago,” he said in a statement, noting that Congress directed the Transportation Department “to establish a system for states to measure their performance towards that goal — an authority the department has rightly used” in the proposal released Thursday.
Under the proposal, state and local officials would use data on fuel consumption and driving distances to tally on-road carbon dioxide emissions. They would then calculate the percentage of driving that takes place on the National Highway System, and that total would be the basis for the required “declining targets” on carbon emissions.
States would set statewide emissions reduction targets two and four years into the future, according to the proposal, which notes the administration has set a goal of cutting emissions by half of 2005 levels by 2030, and of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
For example, state departments of transportation “might set targets that would result in steady, incremental progress toward net-zero emissions, or that achieve aggressive early … reductions, or be more gradual at first and become more aggressive later,” according to the proposal.
States would submit their tally of total on-road emissions and the emissions from the National Highway System, but only the latter would be used to gauge performance, according to the proposal. | 2022-07-08T01:01:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DOT proposal would require states to track carbon emissions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/07/dot-greenhouse-gas-emissions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/07/dot-greenhouse-gas-emissions/ |
MR. CAPEHART: Good afternoon. I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor of The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live and another in our series on race in America co-produced with the “Capehart” podcast. When you hear the name Lena Waithe, you think of the Emmy award-winning writer, the actress and producer behind the Netflix series “Master of None” and Showtime’s “The Chi,” which is back for its fifth season. But Lena Waithe’s big passion is Hillman Grad, the production company she founded in 2015. And since March, Rishi Rajani has been its CEO. And they both join me now. Rishi Rajani, Lena Waithe, welcome to Washington Post Live.
MS. WAITHE: Thank you for having us.
MR. RAJANI: Thank you.
MR. CAPEHART: Well, thank you both again for being here. Lena, let me start with you. As we noted in the intro on the screen, you have said about Hillman Grad quote, "Our goal is to not only open doors for the next generation, but to also keep those doors open for generations to come." Talk more about your mission,
MS. WAITHE: I think it’s really to ensure that, you know, the buck doesn't stop here, you know? I think it's about ensuring that the business continues to grow, it continues to flourish, and that people have opportunities that they really can, you know, take advantage of. And I just think it was important that we continue to hold our mentees’ hand throughout their journey, because there's no finish line. And when we act as if there is one, people tend to get lost, and they fall--they fall behind. And so we want to continue to hold people's hand.
MR. CAPEHART: That is a great--a great thing to remind people, there is no finish line.
Rishi, you once wanted to work on Wall Street. So how did you get into this whole entertainment business and into the leadership at Hillman Grad?
MR. RAJANI: Well, it's funny because I didn't know that this job existed. You know, I didn't know that being a producer existed. I didn’t know that getting into the film and television industry and getting to be a creative advocate was a real career path. And so, in going to NYU, I initially thought, oh, well, I just need to go make a bunch of money so that I can, you know, be able to finance art at some point. But there I discovered a community, a community of artists. And you know, NYU has a fantastic film program, and a lot of those filmmakers needed a support system. And so I became that support system at school, and that kind of segued into the career and the career that I've had in Hollywood over the past 10 years. And I think Lena saw something in me, which I will always really appreciate, in terms of getting to become her partner and building out Hillman Grad. And together, we've been able to support a lot of artists for the past many years.
MR. CAPEHART: I want to get into the meaning of Hillman Grad in a moment. But I do know, Rishi, when you first met Lena, you and she connected on your shared mission to create protest art. Explain what protest art is?
MR. RAJANI: It's interesting, because I think while our mission initially really was kind of like focused around this idea of protest art, it's really grown I think bigger and more beyond that, which is that there's this sort of, quote-unquote, "diversity renaissance" in Hollywood and this idea that, you know, we need to tell stories from underrepresented artists and voices. However, I think Lena and I got really frustrated by still being put into a box, still feeling like those stories were incredibly monolithic. There's only one way to be a queer person, there's only one way to be a Black person, there's only one way to be a brown person. And I think for us, we wanted to do--and I think our own form of protest and our own form of making revolutionary art--is to really be able to build a platform for people who have never had their stories told to tell their stories, people who’ve never been the hero to be the heroes. And that's really what we want to do at Hillman Grad, is to be that platform, that support system, introduce new voices into the ecosystem, because I don't think anyone is really doing that and no one's really searching for, you know, people across the spectrum of race and sexuality and geographic location and age and disability and financial status and acknowledging that Hollywood hasn't done the best job of finding, you know, stories from people that don't come within like Hollywood families. And we want to be that for people.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, in fact, you in an--in an interview--where you said this in the interview, I can't find it--but this quote is from you. It says, "It's not just racial diversity. It's not just sexual diversity. It’s geographic diversity, it’s financial diversity, it’s diversity of disabilities, it’s age diversity. It's really anyone who hasn't been given a space. That's what Hillman Grad is.
And so, Lena, coming back to the name Hillman Grad, anyone who's watched "The Cosby Show" or "A Different World" knows that Hillman was the fictious HBCU that--the oldest child's name is escaping me right now--but that's where she went. So why did you name--
MS. WAITHE: Denise, yeah.
MR. CAPEHART: Denise, Denise.
MS. WAITHE: Yeah.
MR. CAPEHART: So why did you name your company Hillman Grad?
MS. WAITHE: Oh, well, it really started out as my Instagram handle. And it was sort of a funny thing. You know, those that knew, knew. Those that didn't, didn't. And it kind of also helped me to kind of see who my people were, like, if you knew, if you winked at me about it, then it meant okay, you know, you're paying attention. And that's really all it was for a while. And then I got cast on a Netflix show, and people knew who I was and my publicist was like, you’ve got to change your Instagram handle to your name. And I was kind of sad about that. But when it came time to create, you know, the production company, it really was about, okay, I want to call it something that is close to my heart and that is the world of "A Different World" and what that show represented for me and so many other people. So because--and also too, Debbie Allen, Susan Fales, both people that I've now gotten the honor to work with, were spearheading--and also Gina Prince-Bythewood who wrote on that show who I got to work with--Reggie Bythewood wrote on that show, who was a mentor of mine, whose birthday's today, who I reached out to him, like, "A Different World" represents a community of artists and people and storytelling that's not always easy, but it's always entertaining. And I think that, to me, is something that I was very inspired by, and I think it's really what Hillman Grad is all about. It's about entertainment that is relatable, but very--but presented in a way that's very beautiful, because our audiences deserve beautiful art just like everybody else.
MR. CAPEHART: I'd love to get you--the both of you to respond to something that Vernā Myers of Netflix said to me here, almost a year ago. It was--a year--like it was July 30th of last year when I interviewed her. She talked about the quote-unquote "inclusion lens," and she said we are creating such excitement and innovation just by changing who's writing, who's directing, who's behind the camera, who's in--who's in front of the camera. Rishi, you go first. Do you share that view?
MR. RAJANI: I do and I don't. I think that it's really important to be shifting who gets to tell stories, I mean making sure that the people, you know, in front of and behind the camera look different than they have ever before. I also think it's really important to think about equity when it comes to budgets of shows. I think that that has been a pretty significant [unclear] is that you'll give a person of color their TV show, and then make them make it for half the cost of a TV show by a well-established White creator. And I also think that there needs to be a lot more equity and inclusion amongst the ranks of decision makers. At the studios, at the networks, at places like Netflix, when you get to the highest ranks of those, you still end up with a lot of those faces, the same faces we've been seeing for the last, you know, 10 years in those positions of power that ultimately get to decide what gets greenlit and what doesn't get greenlit, what the budget, is what the budget isn't. And so as much--as important as it is to change the face of who the creators are, it's also important to change the face of who the executives are, and it's also important to start thinking about how do we increase the budgets for these shows, because we've established that these audiences exist out there, and there's an appetite for this content.
Lena, your thoughts?
MS. WAITHE: I mean, I think that it's important that we don't assume that just because two people are Black, they're going to see something the same way artistically. And I think--I think it's really about ensuring that Black artists aren't forced to change their vision because say maybe another Black exec sees it differently because they came from two different walks of life, you know? And so I think what's really important--and that's something that's really nuanced--is that no matter who's in the room, it's about, I always want to ensure that the artist has a way to express themselves and to ensure that their vision is what lands on the screen, because that's ultimately when the audience will really receive it. And so I think it's really about making sure that everyone is on the same page creatively, and so that way, culturally, if everybody's different, at least the creative space can remain protected. And I think that's something that's really important for all of us moving forward.
MR. CAPEHART: Now let me stick with you here, Lena, because you have deals at a slew of studios and telling stories--the stories that you want to tell. And I'm just wondering, how have you found creative agency and inspiration in your story?
MS. WAITHE: Well, I mean, I think what's interesting about my story is that all the things that make me who I am, are things that some may say are different. They may say, oh, this makes you othered, or this sort of puts you in a minority group. But in essence, it’s really, I think made me appeal to so many people, because I think most people feel like an outsider or they feel like they don't fit in or that they don't really know where they belong. And I think that is what helps me to be able to relate to people, because I can have empathy, I can give grace, I really--I can do that with the characters that I create, that I write, is that I always say I don't believe in heroes or villains because we can be either depending on the day.
MR. CAPEHART: Well, yeah, that is--given the day or maybe even time of day, you never know, somebody gets on your last nerve.
Rishi, I was trying to find--I guess I know in my notes I saw something in there about how you really love storytelling, and you were that kid who was in the library with the books and reading. And so I'm wondering, given that you love storytelling, what are you looking for in the storytelling you love? You're the CEO of Hillman Grad. If I came to you with an idea, what idea would you be hoping I come to you with?
MR. RAJANI: Oh, it's such a good question. I think, you know, ultimately, I think for Hillman Grad our objective and approach when we consider content and material that comes in is to really think about, like, the reason for it existing in the world. I think, you know, especially in this moment right now we have a real responsibility as one of the--you know, it's one of the few production companies that really has like an emphasis and focus on underrepresented--what is an underrepresented artist. So, it's not just good enough to put out a piece of material that's just like it's a good movie or a good idea. It's also I think really important to think about what it's saying and what its intention is and is it allowing us to see the world in a different light, is it presenting a perspective that we haven't seen on screen before to help normalize? Does it help kind of showcase like sort of the idea that, you know, perhaps us, even though we may look differently as two human beings, you know, we can see things similarly and that there's a lot of divides and kind of like--you know, there's a lot of issues kind of facing the country right now for people of color, and it's our job at Hillman Grad to make sure we're putting out perspectives that we can really stand behind and be proud of when it comes to the content we put into the world.
MR. CAPEHART: You know what--sorry. Keep going, Rishi.
MR. RAJANI: Oh, no, I'll give a couple examples of just things that we have that are coming down the pipeline that we're really excited about. You know, there's a--there's a filmmaker named A.V. Rockwell that Lena and I are really excited about who, you know, came to us with a project called "A Thousand and One" that represents a beautiful mother-son story set across a gentrifying New York City and represents a perspective that we haven't seen before that's played and captured beautifully by Teyana Taylor. You know, we have a film called "Chang Can Dunk" that’s coming out with Disney+ that is about a five-foot seven Chinese American kid that's trying to learn how to dunk a basketball, and in itself is a really fun and entertaining film, but again, represents a different kind of coming-of-age high school experience that we've never seen before. And so it's exciting for us, because these are the types of filmmakers who these are their first films and they haven't had an opportunity yet in ecosystems. We want to give them the opportunity. But they're also telling stories that I think will really allow people to see themselves, and I think that's the most important thing for us.
MR. CAPEHART: And I'm sorry for cutting you off there for a moment there, Rishi, because I was jumping in to ask Lena this question jumping off something you had said in that moment. In an interview almost a year ago, two years ago, July of 2020, in an interview with IndieWire, you said, Lena, "being an activist is not everybody's ministry, but you can't be a Black artist today and not be affected by what's happening in some way, shape, or form." That was two years ago, and looking at the date, that is about a month, almost a month after the killing--the murder of George Floyd. Two years--two years, hence, talk more about that. Do you still feel as strongly as that as that quote sounds?
MS. WAITHE: Yeah, I completely agree. I still stand on that and that--and not for any reason to feel as if, oh, to say that I was right, but more, to be honest, about how I feel now. And I am very much affected by what's happening in the world, and I also feel very powerless in many ways, which I think I'm not alone in that. But I think what I can do, where I have some sort of power is at my keyboard, is within my work, to either write away from it so that way the audience can get a breather and society can get a break. Or I can also, if I choose, want to walk into it and talk about--sort of try to reflect back to us what our experience may feel like and to let everyone know that it's okay to not have all the answers and to not always have it together. I think that, to me, when I'm watching something that's showing a very human experience, I feel seen. And I think that's what--I think that's what especially artists of color are sort of--that's--maybe it's a dilemma, but it's also just a part of it, part of the artistic journey, because I think so much interesting work is coming out in these times, because that's how artists grapple with what's going on in the world, is we purge into the work, and hopefully it touches someone when it reaches audiences.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, Rishi, there are so many outlets now for artists to have their works--to have their work seen. And I’m wondering how the multiplication of platforms, from television to streaming, how that's provided or whether it's provided more opportunities for not just diverse storytelling, but for people of diverse backgrounds to tell their stories.
MR. RAJANI: Yeah, I mean, the landscape has obviously allowed for a lot more buyers, a lot more people that have gotten to the streaming space that has been, you know, really exciting from the perspective of being sellers and being producers. I think it's also become a lot harder to stand out. And so one of the things that we have been seeing is this shift in these streamers who I think for a certain period of time were the places to be able to go make movies that were a little bit more experimental, a little bit lower in budget. And unfortunately, I think we're sort of kind of coming out of that zone, and I think there's--because there's so much competition between all the various streamers. They’re in some ways almost, I think, acting like the big studios did in the past in looking for big packages, big talent, big movie star names, big writer and director names. And so while there was I think that--sort of like that really great moment where we were seeing a lot more work from diverse creators and emerging filmmakers getting picked up, I think it's gotten just competitive in that way before. And I think everything's shifting and the landscape of movie theaters themselves and who's actually going to go see movies in theaters, has changed so much that I don't think we know what the film industry is going to look like five years from now. But I know that the artists still need advocates. And so we get a lot of news every single day when we're pushing these types of stories, and we just need to kind of keep on our drum and making sure that we're the people that stand by these artists. And so that's why good producers need to exist.
MR. CAPEHART: Now among the most well-known productions of Hillman Grad is "The Chi," which is in its fifth season, already streaming on Showtime. I want to play a clip from the--from the new season where Emmett tries to convince Tiff to come home to be a family.
MR. CAPEHART: And I'm not going to do any spoilers. That is in episode one. You just have to watch to find out her decision, which is in that--in that scene. But I wanted to show that--I wanted to show that scene, Lena, because it gets back to something that you said in November 2019 in another--on "Colbert," where you said as an artist, I want to humanize Black people so much that maybe they'll stop killing us. And what I found interesting about that was that was about eight months before George Floyd. Talk about why "The Chi" is so important, and why it's important that it is now in its fifth season.
MS. WAITHE: I think "The Chi" has something that is just innately human, that just speaks to the human experience of trying to figure out love, trying to find out who you are in your community, trying to figure out what kind of life you want to live, and how you want to be perceived by your family, by your people, by yourself. And I think these are all the things we grappled with on the show. And in essence, in that scene, you're seeing that. You know, Emmett is like, I'm ready. I want to be a family man. I want to be a husband. I want to be a father. And she is already past her breaking point. It’s too late. He messed up one too many times. And so now he'll be forced to figure out who he is without that picture that he wanted. And she'll have to figure out who she is and what she wants. And I think so many people are on that journey and don't know how to vocalize it. And I think seeing Black people in sort of the sort of middle-class, working-class environment, which I think that's what I come from, that's what I know, it's people just really figuring it out day to day. And I think that's what people can really relate to. And I think it just generates these conversations and people are really passionate about their opinions and their predictions, who they're rooting for. But I also get a big education in terms of the double standard, because a lot of people will say, I don't know why Emmett is even running after Tiff. You know, but it's like but Emmett was unfaithful. Emmet didn't necessarily do right by her all these years. He wasn't, you know, taking care of their son for a long time. But he is often more forgiven by the audience. And Tiff, you know, she gets it a lot. She gets a lot of hits. And I find that to be very--it's very interesting, shall we say?
MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, the thing about the really--the stories are relatable. I think also--and tell me if I'm wrong, because it is y'all's show--but they're relatable because the stories and the characters are--the relationships are complicated and their lives are complex. And I think we've gotten in--we've gotten so used to seeing our stories presented in a two dimensional or a one dimensional or throwaway fashion, that to see Black people living complex and complicated lives is something that's like, whoa, this is--this is real.
MS. WAITHE: Yeah, yeah. And I--what I realized is how much the show means to people. What's so gratifying--because when I'm out in New York or I'll be, you know, in D.C., Atlanta, and they'll say, I love "The Chi," you know, and I will say, oh, I think--because people say it reminds me so much of our city, or reminds me of the politics here or reminds me of my family and how we get down. And so I realized that it's really about the city, it's--but it's about the people. And I think some people, you know, may feel like, oh, is it very Chicago, is it very Chicago. And it's like, yeah, because that's where it is. It’s just innately Chicago. And but the stories are--really have a broader appeal. I mean, this season, our fifth season, it was our most watched premiere in the history of the show. So, it means that people are talking. They're telling people about the show, and we're gaining a bigger crowd because it's the complexities that keep people coming back. And we plan on continuing to make these characters complex, and you won't know who to root for by the end of this season.
MR. CAPEHART: We've got less than five minutes left. Rishi, unless you want to add to that, I’ve got to get you both on--well, it'll probably be a final question.
MR. RAJANI: Well, the one thing that I will chime in and add to that is I'm so proud of Lena and so proud of the show, but not just because of the content that is appearing on everyone's television screens, but Lena has also turned this series into a launching pad for filmmakers, up and coming filmmakers getting their first episode of TV to direct. Off the show we had a couple of filmmakers named Quincy, Deondray, and Boma that all got their first starts on this season of the series. Lena’s also turned it into a platform for showcasing the work of up-and-coming Black designers through the fashion and looks on the show. And so it's become a community effort in a lot of ways and kind of grown bigger than even just the content of the series itself. And so it represents everything we're trying to do here at Hillman Grad in turning these into community building initiatives as well.
MS. WAITHE: I also want to shout out the music real quick.
MR. CAPEHART: Go ahead, Lena. The music?
MS. WAITHE: The music as well--yeah, the music is a big part of the show, and we have a lot of artists that are on our Hillman Grad record label. Like Kenya Barris and Jai'len Josey are also featured a lot this season. So, I want to get that out there.
MR. CAPEHART: So how did--like we've got less than four minutes left, but now I'm sitting here thinking, how do you do all of this? You're doing television shows, you're doing movies, you have a record label. How do you keep all these plates spinning? I think that's a question for the CEO.
MR. RAJANI: I mean, we’d be remiss--
MS. WAITHE: Our book publishing endeavor with Zando, as well. But I think we--yeah, but I think we--because we have a phenomenal team of people that is led so graciously and with love by Rishi. And every single person at the company has a great heart. They have, you know, just great heads on their shoulders, and they're extremely passionate about what they do. And we give a lot of people autonomy. They get a chance to be the leaders of their own ships. And so in essence, I'm honored to be, you know, just a part of these fleet of ships that are pretty much floating in the same direction. But go ahead, Rishi.
MR. RAJANI: No, that's it. It's all about our team. And it's all about the people that we have working in the company and across this, you know, film and TV and our record label under Def Jam, our book publishing vendor division under Zando, our podcast side. We're launching a fashion line this year called Hillman Heritage [phonetic]. We're getting into the branded content space as well. But, you know, Lena puts a lot of trust in us as a team, and that's something that we haven't gotten a lot--I think a lot as people of color trying to make it in Hollywood. And so because of that sort of respect and autonomy that we've delivered to the team members, people want to be able to deliver on their own projects as well. And so I'm very grateful for what we built, and I think we're only going to keep going up from here.
MR. CAPEHART: I just want to say I'm doing this interview from home, but I also have to keep my eyes on so, what's happening in the news. And as you were as you were responding, Rishi, an ad for "The Chi" was on the television. It was just a little--a little surreal--a little surreal moment there. Real quickly, in the minute that we have left, Lena then Rishi, real fast, if you had one piece of advice to young artists about using their voice through art, what would it be? Lena first.
MS. WAITHE: Be obsessed with the craft. Be obsessed with the craft and be vulnerable in the work and you can't go wrong.
MR. CAPEHART: Rishi.
MR. RAJANI: Don't ever try and write to the marketplace. Write about what you want to write about. Write what you're passionate about. And that's what's going to help you stand out.
MR. CAPEHART: Rishi Rajani, Lena Waithe, this has been such a great conversation. I wish we could keep going. But thank you both very, very much for coming to Washington Post Live.
MR. CAPEHART: And thank you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, head to WashingtonPostLive.com. Once again, I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor of The Washington Post. Thanks for watching Washington Post Live. | 2022-07-08T01:01:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Race in America: Giving Voice with Lena Waithe and Rishi Rajani - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/07/transcript-race-america-giving-voice-with-lena-waithe-rishi-rajani/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/07/transcript-race-america-giving-voice-with-lena-waithe-rishi-rajani/ |
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference on March 10, 2022, in Weslaco, Texas. (Joel Martinez/The Monitor via AP)
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state National Guard soldiers and law enforcement officers Thursday to apprehend and return migrants suspected of crossing illegally back to the U.S.-Mexico border, testing how far his state can go in trying to enforce immigration law — a federal responsibility.
The order comes days after a group of right-wing Texas officials — alongside a few Trump administration leaders and U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) — asked the Republican governor to invoke the state and U.S. Constitution in declaring an “invasion” at the southwest border and to use his powers to repel it. The leaders of the sparsely populated counties near the border with Mexico complain they have been overrun by smuggling attempts and increasing numbers of migrants evading detection.
The order appears unconstitutional, law experts said, and may have little practical impact on Abbott’s ongoing, expensive and controversial border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. But it represents an escalation for the governor, who is running for reelection and eyeing national office, in a broader drama full of anti-immigrant rhetoric, performative and legally dubious actions designed to challenge the federal government’s exclusive powers over immigration enforcement — potentially all the way to a conservative-majority Supreme Court.
“I think it is pretty clear under current precedent that this is the type of decision that the federal government gets to make,” said Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “But I also think the most relevant Supreme Court precedent may very well be the target of this policy."
In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled on a series on immigration-related laws, including the infamous S.B. 1070 or “show me your papers” law, passed by the Arizona legislature, affirming states cannot enforce their own immigration laws.
“I cannot envision a legal argument under which the governor of Texas would be allowed to engage in unilateral immigration enforcement,” said Denise Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. “We don’t want each state enforcing their own immigration laws."
Busing migrants, halting trade: Abbott bets future on divisive border plans
But Texas has poured billions, including by diverting federal covid relief funds, into its border crackdown, sending thousands of National Guard troops and directing Department of Public Safety officers to help patrol and arrest migrants in south Texas. With each new step, Abbott is blurring the lines between federal and state authority. The state has bused migrants to Washington, halted commercial traffic on international bridges for what critics called unnecessary inspections, challenged the Biden administration in court, emptied state prisons to jail migrants and is raising money to build a border barrier.
Civil rights groups have asked the Justice Department to investigate Operation Lone Star for possible civil rights violations. The Texas Tribune reported this week that federal officials had opened an inquiry into Abbott’s program but DOJ officials did not respond to questions about the scope of their probe. A federal watchdog is, however, reviewing Abbott’s shifting of roughly $1 billion in relief funds to pay for the initiative.
“This is all a show,” said Claudia Muñoz, whose Texas-based group Grassroots Leadership runs a hotline for migrants detained by state officials on trespassing charges. “But it’s also more than symbolic because he puts money behind it. Texas is testing the different ways they can take control of the immigration system and the federal government is letting them get away with it.”
The governor has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of encouraging the increasing numbers of immigrants taking risks and putting their lives in the hands of smugglers to reach Texas and the United States. He went after the president after San Antonio law enforcement found dozens of dead and dying migrants abandoned inside a sweltering tractor trailer last month.
“While President Biden refuses to do his job and enforce immigration laws enacted by Congress, the state of Texas is once again stepping up and taking unprecedented action to protect Americans and secure our southern border," Abbott said in a statement. "As the challenges on the border continue to increase, Texas will continue to take action to address those challenges caused by the Biden administration.”
But the Biden administration has largely kept in place — compelled by court order — border policies implemented during his predecessor’s tenure, including a public health order expelling most border crossers and the Migrant Protection Protocols or “Return to Mexico” program. The Supreme Court last month cleared the Department of Homeland Security to end the policy. White House officials and Democrats have called Abbott a hypocrite for not levying similar criticism on Trump.
The wording of the executive order is vague about what "returning migrants to the border” means for soldiers and troopers who apprehend them. Under the current operation, individuals caught on privately owned land are arrested and transferred to state prison. Advocates say more than 3,000 migrants have been detained interminably without formal charges, access to lawyers or the right to a speedy trial. Many were later handed over to federal authorities for deportation or expulsion.
The state of Texas does not have the power to deport. Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze explained that “illegal immigrants will be returned/transported back to the border at [port of entries]."
But at least one Texas jurisdiction has already begun taking matters into its own hands. Kinney County, a rural south Texas ranching community along the Rio Grande, was one of the first local governments to declare an emergency over the “border crisis" and has become the spotlight for the far-right campaign to push the state further in its incendiary rhetoric and border security. The amplification of the county’s narrative has attracted attention from across conservative media.
This week the county’s top elected official, Tully Shahan, brought together a group of rural Texas sheriffs, elected leaders, Roy, and former Trump officials Mark Morgan and Ken Cuccinelli, to declare their communities are “waging war” and the president is “destroying Western Civilization.” The county is also tied into federal litigation over the policy priorities and directives to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement it says infringe on agents’ ability to enforce the law and represented by Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state known for hardline views against illegal immigration.
Sheriff Brad Coe last month initially told conservative media outlets he deported four migrants after U.S. Border Patrol agents did not take them into custody. He later walked that back explaining that the individuals had been involved in a smuggling incident that ended in a crash. Coe, a retired Border Patrol agent, said he did not have a safe place for them in the county jail so he put the migrants in his truck, drove to the Eagle Pass, Tex., port of entry and dropped them off.
“Coe took them to the bridge and they walked across into Mexico and he will do it again,” said Matt Benacci, the sheriff department’s spokesman. “Border patrol wasn’t going to take them so he made the best decision he could consistent with keeping them in safe circumstances.”
Attorney Katie Dyer, who unsuccessfully sued to have Coe held in contempt over his detention of migrants, said the county has been a willing facilitator of Abbott’s agenda. But she said the danger comes when other jurisdictions take note and replicate.
“Kinney has taken on this leadership role,” she said. “We are already seeing this blueprint and pushing of these issues formulating in other states. When you have one state that is ignoring the line between federal and state jurisdiction that puts all of us at risk of ignoring the law moving forward.”
While Abbott’s move was met with approval by hardliners on the right, the governor did not do what the small group of Texas sheriffs and elected leaders asked for: declare an invasion.
“We acknowledge Governor Abbott’s recognition that the facts on the ground along the border comport with the Constitution’s understanding of an invasion,” said Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official, in a joint statement with Russ Vought, president of the conservative Center for Renewing America. But they said Abbott’s move doesn’t go far enough and amounts to little more than “catch and release.” | 2022-07-08T01:26:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Abbott challenges feds by ordering Texas soldiers, troopers to return migrants to border - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/07/texas-abbott-immigration-enforcement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/07/texas-abbott-immigration-enforcement/ |
USWNT makes quick work of Jamaica, moves to cusp of World Cup berth
Sophia Smith drives the ball past Jamaica's Havana Solaun during the first half at the Concacaf W Championship in Monterrey, Mexico. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP via Getty Images)
MONTERREY, Mexico — The Concacaf W Championship carries enormous consequences for the U.S. women’s national soccer team. But because they are in a group with Mexico, the Americans have been the opening act in these doubleheaders, performing before small crowds in sweltering, late-day heat.
Through two matches, the two-time defending world champions have defied the casual atmosphere by scoring twice in rapid succession in the first half.
Three days after Alex Morgan provided an early two-goal cushion against Haiti, 21-year-old Sophia Smith on Thursday did the same during a 5-0 victory over Jamaica — a result that took the top-ranked Americans to the cusp of a 2023 World Cup berth.
A Haiti victory or draw against Mexico in Thursday’s late match would send the United States to the World Cup for the ninth consecutive time. If that weren’t to occur, Group A’s two World Cup places would not be settled until Monday, when the Americans (2-0-0) face Mexico (0-1-0) and Jamaica (1-1-0) plays Haiti (0-1-0).
The eight-nation tournament will also award one automatic berth in the 2024 Olympics, but that will come down to the tournament final July 18. (A second slot will be determined next year.)
Canada (1-0-0), Costa Rica (1-0-0), Panama (0-1-0) and Trinidad and Tobago (0-1-0) comprise Group B.
Rose Lavelle, Kristie Mewis and Trinity Rodman scored in the second half for the United States on the third anniversary of its World Cup championship in France, the program’s fourth since FIFA took the women’s game global in 1991.
As the only top 25 teams in the FIFA rankings in the field, the United States and No. 6 Canada, the reigning Olympic champion, were not expecting much drama in the group stage. So far, that’s held true.
Buckner: Megan Rapinoe, Simone Biles changed their sports — and their country
Keeping his promise to rotate the lineup early in the tournament, U.S. Coach Vlatko Andonovski introduced five new starters Thursday: goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher, defenders Sofia Huerta and Naomi Girma, midfielder Ashley Sanchez and striker Ashley Hatch.
They replaced Casey Murphy, Kelley O’Hara, Becky Sauerbrunn, Andi Sullivan and Morgan, respectively.
Megan Rapinoe, a second-half substitute in the 3-0 victory over Haiti, was excused from Thursday’s game to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. She was expected to rejoin the team late Thursday.
The Reggae Girlz, who made their World Cup debut in 2019, are under the direction of Lorne Donaldson, a Jamaica native and fixture in the Denver youth soccer scene. His pupils included Smith and U.S. forward Mallory Pugh.
His prized player with Jamaica is striker Khadija “Bunny” Shaw, a former University of Tennessee star who has scored at a torrid pace for French club Bordeaux before joining English power Manchester City last year.
Strong and clinical, Shaw scored the lone goal in a 1-0 upset of Mexico on Monday and presented a major threat to the U.S. central defense of Girma and Alana Cook, who entered the night with just 13 combined appearances.
The lineup also featured midfielder Chinyelu Asher, a Silver Spring native and Archbishop Carroll graduate who has played for the Washington Spirit.
The United States set the terms and did not relent over 90 one-sided minutes.
Smith’s first goal came in the fifth minute after a clever touch at speed past Deneisha Blackwood and an even cheekier shot. Better positioned to use her left foot, she opted for the outside of her right, sending an angled bid into the far side of the net.
Three minutes later, Smith beat goalkeeper Rebecca Spencer to Huerta’s long ball, poking it toward the target. Jamaican defender Allyson Swaby cleared the ball as it was crossing the goal line. Initially, play continued, but the assistant referee signed a goal — a ruling confirmed by video replay.
Smith raised her career total to eight goals in 18 appearances.
Over the next 20 minutes, offside calls voided goals by Hatch and Pugh, the latter after video replay showed Pugh a sliver past the last defender as Huerta crossed. Later, Spencer stopped Pugh’s onrushing attempt.
Jamaica’s counterattacks fizzled, and Shaw didn’t faze Cook or Girma.
Smith’s night was over at halftime, allowing her to rest up for the Mexico clash.
Lavelle stretched the lead in the 59th minute. Left alone on the back side, she one-timed Sanchez’s cross from an acute angle for her 21st career goal.
Rodman, who at 20 is the team’s youngest player, made her tournament debut, replacing Hatch, her Spirit teammate. With the match under control and up to three games left, Andonovski exhausted his five subs by the 65th minute.
One of those subs, Mewis, converted a penalty kick in the 83rd minute after Margaret Purce was taken down by Paige Bailey-Gayle. Three minutes later, Pugh’s cross connected with Rodman for an easy finish from close range and her second international goal.
The Americans remained perfect against Jamaica: 5-0-0 with a 31-0 scoring differential.
Notes: The U.S. Soccer Federation is in the process of scheduling two friendlies for the women’s team in each of three FIFA international windows: Aug. 29-Sept. 6, Oct. 3-11 and Nov. 7-15. The matches in the first and last windows will be played at U.S. venues, while the sites of the October games haven’t been determined. …
Earnie Stewart has signed a contract extension to remain the USSF’s sporting director through 2026, people familiar with the deal said. His previous pact was to expire this December. Stewart, a former U.S. World Cup attacker, joined the federation in 2018 as general manager of the men’s national team, then shifted to the broader role a year later. | 2022-07-08T02:01:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | USWNT makes quick work of Jamaica, moves to cusp of World Cup berth - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/07/uswnt-makes-quick-work-jamaica-moves-cusp-world-cup-berth/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/07/uswnt-makes-quick-work-jamaica-moves-cusp-world-cup-berth/ |
In a statement, the space agency said it “strongly rebukes using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine.”
Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov pose with a flag of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic at the International Space Station (ISS), in this picture released July 4, 2022. Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS — THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT. (Roscosmos/Via Reuters)
She added that, “obviously we need to continue to monitor the situation. … We've operated in these kinds of situations before and both sides always operated very professionally and understand the importance of this fantastic mission and continuing to have peaceful relations between the two countries in space.” | 2022-07-08T02:32:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NASA rebukes Russia for using ISS as Ukraine propaganda - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/07/nasa-russia-ukraine-space-station-rebuke/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/07/nasa-russia-ukraine-space-station-rebuke/ |
Mets’ Chris Bassitt wants to halt MLB covid testing: ‘There’s no reason’
Mets pitcher Chris Bassitt said he probably won't tell the team if he tests positive for the coronavirus again. (Frank Franklin II/AP)
On his first day back from the covid-19 list, New York Mets pitcher Chris Bassitt said he regrets telling the team he tested positive for the coronavirus and that MLB should consider stopping future tests.
“I probably won’t [tell the team again] the rest of my career,” said Bassitt, who was placed on the list July 1 and missed his scheduled start against Texas last week. “There’s no way. There’s no reason.”
After calling the current state of covid policies “ridiculous,” the right-hander was asked what an alternative solution might be.
“Stop testing it,” he answered. “Stop acting like covid is far worse than a lot of other things. … I was never sick. Never had a symptom. So sitting out for two weeks or possibly a week for zero symptoms? I don’t know. … I guess the answer is I should have never said anything.”
Bassitt said he tested himself because he was feeling sluggish in a game against Houston and opted to be cautious with his young daughter in mind. When the test came back positive, he chose not to put his teammates at risk. But when his symptoms never escalated, he started questioning his decision.
Bassitt said he was still able to throw and run while away from the team. The former A’s pitcher, playing his first season with the Mets after being traded in March, is 6-5 with a 4.01 ERA in 15 starts. He is scheduled to start New York’s game against Miami on Friday.
Before this season, MLB updated its league-wide policy to eliminate regular testing and treat the sickness like any other injury — meaning a player who tests positive is put on a covid IL.
Bassitt is not the first player to raise concerns about the system. In April, Diamondbacks pitcher Ian Kennedy voiced his frustrations as closer Mark Melancon dealt with an asymptomatic case.
“It feels like the rest of the country is moving away from masks,” Kennedy told the Arizona Republic. “They’re dropping all these mandates. Even the CDC stayed at five days [of quarantine] if you do have symptoms, then after, if you’re symptom-free after five days, then you’re kind of fine. Whereas we’re doing things — Mark is sitting in a hotel room with no symptoms. That’s our closer. We need him in our bullpen.”
Kennedy went on to propose a similar solution to that laid out by Bassitt.
“We’re testing people who don’t have symptoms; it’s almost like we’re trying to find something,” Kennedy said. “We’re trying to seek it out. If we’re not showing symptoms at all, let’s just not test. The rest of the country is not.” | 2022-07-08T02:53:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mets’ Chris Bassitt wants to halt MLB covid testing: ‘There’s no reason’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/07/mets-chris-bassitt-covid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/07/mets-chris-bassitt-covid/ |
Ivan Miroshnichenko was drafted by the Washington Capitals with the 20th pick in the draft. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
On a busy NHL draft day packed with trades and surprise picks at the top of the first round, the Washington Capitals swung big Thursday and selected Russian winger Ivan Miroshnichenko with the 20th pick.
Miroshnichenko was considered a top-10 pick before he received a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis in March. The 6-foot-1, 185-pound forward subsequently underwent treatment in Germany and was cleared for practice in early June.
He said he had “a feeling” the Capitals were going to draft him at No. 20. The plan for him is to stay in North America before going to the Capitals’ development camp next week. He then expects to rejoin his team in Russia.
“He’s a really good player,” MacLellan said, “[The scouts] liked the personality. They liked the character. Like what he’s battling through right now. Hopefully it works out and we got a really good player on our hands.”
Washington did its due diligence on Miroshnichenko’s medical reports and interviewed him in-person Wednesday in Montreal.
Slovak forward Juraj Slafkovsky was selected No. 1 by Montreal, the draft’s host city, followed by Slovak defenseman Simon Nemec, selected second by the New Jersey Devils. It was the first time in NHL history that Slovak players went 1-2 in the draft.
Canadian center Shane Wright was projected on several draft boards to go No. 1 but fell to the Seattle Kraken with the fourth overall pick. The Arizona Coyotes picked flashy American center Logan Cooley with the third pick. Wright, 6-foot, 191 pounds, put up 94 points in the Ontario Hockey League last season.
After two years that were held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, Thursday’s draft was an in-person event, drawing coaches, scouts, general managers and agents to the draft floor in Montreal.
Wright’s drop was just one of a handful of surprises in the first round, but the first splashy move came earlier in the day when the Chicago Blackhawks dealt star forward Alex DeBrincat to the Ottawa Senators for the seventh overall pick, plus two other picks.
The Canadiens made two trades early in the first round, trading Alexander Romanov and the 98th overall pick to the New York Islanders for the 13th pick. Montreal then traded the 13th pick and the 66th pick to the Blackhawks for center Kirby Dach.
The Capitals have not been coy about their goaltending needs. MacLellan said the Capitals are looking for a veteran goaltender either through the trade market or free agency, which opens July 13. The Capitals have five selections over the final six rounds.
Capitals goalies Ilya Samsonov and Vitek Vanecek are both restricted free agents. Unless they are traded, MacLellan said the Capitals intend to extend qualifying offers to both. The deadline to do so is Monday.
Washington is not the only team seeking to improve its goaltending situation.
On Thursday, the New York Rangers made the first major move in the goaltending market, sending netminder Alexandar Georgiev to the Colorado Avalanche. The trade signaled the end of Stanley Cup-winning goalie Darcy Kuemper’s time in Colorado. Kuemper, who has been linked to Washington, is an unrestricted free agent and is expected to receive significant contract offers during free agency.
Right before the first round of the NHL draft, the Minnesota Wild re-signed goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury to a two-year, $7 million contract through the 2023-24 season, taking another veteran goaltender off the market.
The 20th pick was the earliest Washington has drafted since it took Jakub Vrana with the 13th pick in 2014. The Capitals did not have a first-round pick in the 2021 draft after dealing that selection in their blockbuster deal with the Detroit Red Wings to acquire Anthony Mantha in April 2021. Washington took center Hendrix Lapierre at No. 22 in the 2020 draft and center Connor McMichael at No. 25 in the 2019 draft.
Capitals assistant GM Ross Mahoney acknowledged that Washington had its eyes set on four or five players at the 20th spot and varied in position. Washington’s typical approach to the draft has been to choose the best player available, no matter position. Mahoney said Wednesday that he felt the draft held some uncertainty in the early selections but that there were several names that looked promising after the first round. | 2022-07-08T03:41:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NHL draft: Capitals nab Russian Ivan Miroshnichenko with 20th pick - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/07/capitals-draft-ivan-miroshnichenko/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/07/capitals-draft-ivan-miroshnichenko/ |
Shinzo Abe, former Japanese leader, is shot at campaign event
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on June 22. (Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images)
TOKYO — Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot at a campaign event Friday, public broadcaster NHK reported, citing Japanese police sources.
Party officials cited in Japanese media said Abe was unconscious, and NHK reported that the 67-year-old was showing no vital signs. He had been giving a speech in Nara, east of Osaka, ahead of elections for Japan’s upper house of parliament on Sunday.
At least two gunshots were heard on-site. A suspect was arrested on-site for attempted murder, and a gun has been seized, NHK reported. Police later identified the suspect as a man in his 40s named Tetsuya Yamagami, from Nara, according to Japanese media reports.
Gun laws in Japan are among the world’s strictest, and shootings are extremely rare.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resigns, citing health reasons
Footage aired on NHK showed Abe giving a speech, then a plume of smoke forming behind him as he collapsed. Officials ran to apprehend the shooter, who appeared to be positioned behind Abe.
Videos posted on social media from the campaign event showed a chaotic scene with Abe, unmoving, lying on the ground as attendees yelled for an ambulance.
Abe resigned as prime minister in 2020, citing health reasons, but remains influential in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
As Japan’s longest-serving leader, he oversaw a period of relative stability as prime minister from 2012 to 2020, raising Japan’s global image and emphasizing a strong alliance with the United States, even as former U.S. President Donald Trump tested longstanding relationships with allies.
Abe focused on reviving Japan’s stagnating economy through a package dubbed “Abenomics,” and sought to expand Japan’s military defenses. He tried to modify the country’s pacifist postwar constitution, which was controversial, and continued to push the country toward greater defensive postures even after he left office.
Previously, he led the country from 2006 to 2007 but stepped down because of chronic ulcerative colitis, the same condition that led to his resignation in 2020. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who was campaigning in Yamagata when the shooting occurred, was headed back to Tokyo and canceling campaign events.
Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, in a statement Friday praised Abe as an “outstanding leader of Japan and unwavering ally of the U.S.,” and offered prayers to Abe’s family and the Japanese people.
“We are all saddened and shocked by the shooting of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo," he said. | 2022-07-08T03:54:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe shot during speech in Nara - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/07/japan-shinzo-abe-shot-nara-attack/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/07/japan-shinzo-abe-shot-nara-attack/ |
Successor Beware! Boris Johnson Has a Real Legacy.
Boris Johnson, UK prime minister, makes a resignation speech outside 10 Downing Street in London, UK, on Thursday, July 7, 2022. Johnson is bowing to the inevitable after his government hemorrhaged dozens of ministers and junior aides, and members of his cabinet -- including newly-appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi -- told him to his face that he should step down. Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
Of one politician’s dignified end on the scaffold Shakespeare wrote, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” Boris Johnson’s belated resignation, however, was wholly in keeping with his chaotic tenure at No. 10.
As the dirt is heaped on his political grave, it is easy to forget that Johnson’s three-year premiership, unlike those of his unlucky predecessors, was consequential. Some achievements like the early rollout of the vaccine program will stand. Whoever follows him into No. 10 will have to contend with a real legacy, for good and ill.
From the beginning of his mandate, moralists and Cold Warriors on both the left and right wings of his party forced him to abandon the UK’s so-called “golden era of relations” with China for a more confrontational stance. Johnson learned his lesson well. His early, full-hearted support for the Ukrainian cause in its war against Russia — and his generous welcome for Hong Kong refugees — can be traced back to his China debacle. Both the Tories and the Labour party — which lost a hand every time Johnson played the patriotic card — will likely continue his new Cold War with the dictators.
Johnson also reversed course on his plan to tackle the housing crisis when Tory backbenchers revolted against planning deregulation. His successor, the fourth Conservative prime minister in six years, is guaranteed a bumpy ride in Parliament and is therefore unlikely to use up capital on hard-pressed Generation Rent when they need the votes of affluent, aging Boomers.
Second, the issue of Europe needs resolving. Johnson “got Brexit done” — mostly. His predecessor, Theresa May, couldn’t even make it to first base on a departure deal. Her predecessor, David Cameron, miscalculated on a referendum and lost both the vote and his job. Thatcher was brought down by divisions over Europe, too. Johnson, however, was destroyed by his own behavior in office. Europe was the making of him.
Yet the loose ends of Brexit are left hanging. Relations with the UK’s biggest trade partner and strategic ally, the European Union, are at rock bottom: The two sides are at war over Northern Ireland’s trading regime. The next prime minister can either double down the defiance or reach an accommodation with Brussels. Northern Ireland — bereft of a devolved government — is a running sore that needs immediate treatment by a new leader.
The Last Thing Scotland Needs Right Now: Therese Raphael | 2022-07-08T05:34:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Successor Beware! Boris Johnson Has a Real Legacy. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/successorbeware-boris-johnson-has-a-real-legacy/2022/07/08/a4d7138a-fe7b-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/successorbeware-boris-johnson-has-a-real-legacy/2022/07/08/a4d7138a-fe7b-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the country's longest-serving leader since World War II. (Toru Hanai/Reuters)
Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, one of the country’s most powerful postwar leaders, was shot Friday when attending a campaign event in the city of Nara, Japanese officials said. Abe is not displaying vital signs, according to public broadcaster NHK.
A longtime fixture in Japan’s political landscape, Abe served as the country’s premier for a short stint — from 2006 to 2007 — before holding the country’s highest political office again between 2012 and 2020. His center-right Liberal Democratic Party has dominated Japanese politics since it was founded in 1955.
By the time he resigned due to ill health in August 2020, Abe had become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister since World War II. His tenure exceeded that of his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who led Japan from 1957 to 1960; his father, Shintaro, also served as chief cabinet secretary, the country’s second-most powerful position.
Abe’s legacy looms large for next Japanese prime minister
The economic policies he pursued during his second stint in office, dubbed “Abenomics,” were intended as shock therapy for an economy that had become stagnant after a lengthy postwar boom. Abe’s “three arrow” strategy called for a combination of monetary easing, government spending and economic reforms to end more than two decades of lost growth. Debate over whether the strategy worked is not settled, though few structural reforms were enacted and the cycle of hyper-low inflation was not broken.
Abe continued Japan’s long-standing security alliance with the United States, but relations with Tokyo’s closest neighbors were strained during his time in office. He bolstered right-wing nationalists by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which honors, among others, World War II war criminals. Abe also enacted laws to allow Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to fight alongside allies overseas, in a move that particularly angered China.
He also became a particularly vocal critic of Beijing’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific after leaving office. Earlier this year, Abe urged the United States to abandon its policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan and commit to defending the self-governing island in event of a Chinese attack. During the coronavirus pandemic, Japan also delivered millions of vaccine doses to Taiwan — a transfer that Abe reportedly helped facilitate.
Abe also notably cultivated a close friendship with President Donald Trump, when the two were in office. He was the first foreign leader to meet Trump after the 2016 election and rolled out the red carpet during the president’s 2019 state visit to Japan. Trump became the first foreign leader to meet Japan’s new emperor, Naruhito, and took ringside seats at the first sumo tournament of the new imperial era, with the winner being presented a specially made “Trump Cup.” | 2022-07-08T05:35:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who is Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese prime minister who was shot - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/japan-shinzo-abe-legacy-shooting-gun-attack/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/japan-shinzo-abe-legacy-shooting-gun-attack/ |
INDIANAPOLIS — Emma Meesseman scored 20 points and the Chicago Sky beat the Indiana Fever 93-84 on Thursday night for home court in the Commissioner’s Cup.
PHOENIX — Diana Taurasi and Sophie Cunningham each scored 23 points and Phoenix beat New York.
LOS ANGELES — Breanna Stewart scored 19 of her 23 points in the first half and Seattle routed Los Angeles. | 2022-07-08T05:36:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sky beat Fever 93-84 for home court in Commissioner’s Cup - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wnba/sky-beat-fever-93-84-for-home-court-in-commissioners-cup/2022/07/08/918ce12e-fe76-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wnba/sky-beat-fever-93-84-for-home-court-in-commissioners-cup/2022/07/08/918ce12e-fe76-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Volodymyr Onishchuk looks over the rented field where he plants wheat and barley, in Bashtanka, Ukraine, on June 24. (Serhiy Morgunov for The Washington Post)
BASHTANKA, Ukraine — The morning Russian tanks and troops stormed across Ukraine’s borders, Volodymyr Onishchuk’s grain got stuck. He had delivered about $100,000 worth to a storage site at Ukraine’s Black Sea port in Mykolaiv on Feb. 23, but by Feb. 24 — when the ship with his harvest was to set sail — Russian troops were on the ground and warships lingered menacingly off the Ukrainian coast.
On that day, Onishchuk wasn’t overly concerned that he hadn’t been paid yet. Fending off Russia was foremost on his mind. But then one week passed — and then a month and then four months — with Ukraine’s main ports still blockaded by Russia’s fleet. Not only was he missing the money from his last yield but a new crop was nearly ready to send to market, with no way to profitably move it. And future crops were uncertain.
“If we don’t sell this grain now and don’t cover our expenses, tomorrow we simply won’t be able to plant,” he said.
Farmers across Ukraine are increasingly feeling the financial strain of Russia’s Black Sea blockade, and the sector’s economic collapse is affecting food security across the world. Ukraine accounted for 10 percent of global wheat exports in 2021, according to the United Nations.
The high cost of exporting grain via alternate routes — by truck or train to a Western neighbor or on a barge through smaller ports on the Danube River — means farmers are losing money, they said.
Many farmers are declining to export the current harvest at all — unless a diplomatic solution is reached to unblock the Black Sea ports. Some said they’ll store their grain in silos for now. But with no money coming in, they might not be able to harvest this fall — threatening to dramatically slash the output of one of the world’s largest grain producers for years to come.
“We feed the world, but we also have to feed ourselves,” said Oleksandr Chumak, a farmer in the southern region of Odessa.
Chumak and Onishchuk said that while wheat prices on the global market have skyrocketed to more than $400 a ton, wheat traders are offering them about $60 a ton because of the high cost of getting the grain out of the country — from expensive fuel to long delays at the border. Onishchuk, who rents his land and has to pay about 40 employees, said that covers only about half his costs.
Ukraine has worked to improve the other export routes, but they each come with their own headaches. Farmers and government officials said most of the grain is now going out via the Danube River, where it flows down to Romania’s Black Sea ports of Sulina and Constanta. But the Romanians are struggling to handle the volume of grain Ukraine needs to export, which creates costly waits, officials said.
More problematic is that Western countries helping Ukraine to move grain will soon have their hands full with their own harvests. Some grain has been loaded onto train cars going west, but the European Union and Ukraine use different sizes of track, so the grain must be transferred from one car to another at the border — another time-consuming and expensive task.
Ukraine will have plenty of grain for its own consumption, but Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said Russia is trying to create another Holodomor, on a global scale — a reference to the famine of the 1930s, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.
“They want to introduce the whole world to this,” Kubrakov said of the Russians. “They want the international community to take off some of the sanctions and then the grain can get out. So they’re holding people all over the world hostage basically. This is terrorism.”
“Even after all of our efforts, we understand that we can only export about 20 percent of what we need to,” Kubrakov added.
Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskyi said he expects Ukraine to have about 60 million tons of grain to export this year, including some of last year’s harvest that hasn’t been moved yet. But Ukraine is currently exporting 2 million tons of grain a month — only about a third the amount of previous years.
“Many of us do not have enough capital to pay salaries — and I’m not even talking about the taxes,” said Chumak, the farmer in the Odessa region.
“We just need to destroy the entire Russian fleet and then everything will be fine,” he said. “Long-range rocket systems will be cheaper than solving these logistics issues.”
At Onishchuk’s farm in the Mykolaiv region, he walked through grain fields in brown slippers and pointed to a large crater where a missile had landed in March. This town of Bashtanka was the site of a fierce fight between Russian and Ukrainian forces before the Russians retreated in mid-March. Farming on Onishchuk’s plots had to be stopped until a de-miner could check the full territory — more than 5,000 acres.
He has since invested in a large metal safe to store important documents, such as his land lease agreement, in case there is more shelling.
Onishchuk typically sells 5,000 tons of grain a year, a relatively modest yield. Unlike some of Ukraine’s biggest producers, he doesn’t own a large steel cylindrical grain bin, which can store dry grains for years. The cool brick warehouses he uses for storage hold less grain and only for about six months. Solskyi said the Agriculture Ministry is working to provide farmers with other storage options, including large plastic silo bags.
But with Onishchuk still waiting for his last shipment to leave the Mykolaiv port, he’s had to confront how much longer he can afford to wait and whether his business of 17 years might be doomed. He won’t be selling this latest harvest if the price remains so low. Will he plant in the fall?
“I’ll let you know,” he said. “I still have hope. If I didn’t have hope, I would have fled the country.”
Lesia Prokopenko, Kostiantyn Khudov and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report. | 2022-07-08T06:57:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine grain farmers devastated by Russia’s Black Sea blockade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/07/ukraine-grain-farmers-black-sea-blockade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/07/ukraine-grain-farmers-black-sea-blockade/ |
Workers gather along a section of flooded railway in Shangrao in central China's Jiangxi province on June 21, 2022. (Chinatopix/AP)
Last month, in Dapocun village, on a tributary of the Yangtze River in southwest China, rushing waters flooded a bridge and nearby houses. Heavy rains felled cornstalks. Ponds overflowed, leaving fish all over the road.
“This year was the biggest,” local resident Li Zhongfu, 55, said of the flood. “I think the last one like this was some 20 years ago.”
Data suggests Li is right. Jiangjin, the district surrounding Dapocun, had 84.7 millimeters (3.3 inches) of rain within one hour, the highest category for torrential rain.
Between March and June, rainstorms in southern China mostly matched or exceeded what had been the highest recorded levels. At the same time, a heat wave in northern China pushed temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), creating record demand for electricity to power air conditioning in Henan province. The National Climate Center this week predicted more severe flooding and droughts for the rest of the summer, with more than 600 millimeters (23.6 inches) of rain expected near the southern border and temperatures regularly above 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) in much of northern China.
Public attention to extreme weather adds urgency to President Xi Jinping’s promises that China, the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases, will be able to transition to a carbon neutral economy faster than any other nation. But even as China invests heavily in renewable energy, its reliance on coal-fired power and a carbon-intensive model of economic growth continue to alarm climate activists, who fear Beijing is pivoting too slowly.
Last year, dramatic scenes of passengers trapped in a subway car in Zhengzhou as water rose around them awoke many Chinese cities and their residents to the perils of extreme weather events made more frequent and intense by climate change. The downpours, typhoons and heat waves of 2022 have underscored how far there is still to go to mitigate the worst damage.
As China mines more coal, levels of a more potent greenhouse gas soar
Li Shuo, a policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia, said that over time, growing evidence of the effects of climate change will become a strong driver of Chinese climate action, much as public concern over air pollution did 10 years ago.
“It’s still early to tell if this summer will elevate public concern on extreme weather events and climate impact to the same level as we saw last year, but the trend line is clear,” he said.
The need for greater preparedness was hammered home by a drumbeat of dramatic images and traumatic headlines in recent weeks.
In the southern town of Qingyuan, a lone white pagoda stood above waters that had submerged smaller buildings nearby. In the northern city of Shijiazhuang, gale force winds decapitated an ornamental archway; its crown of reinforced concrete and tile crushed eight people. Off the coast of Guangdong, a typhoon tore apart a Chinese engineering vessel working on an offshore wind power farm, killing about half the crew.
Xi’s ambition for China to be seen as a global leader in tackling global warming has drawn fresh attention to climate change in the country. Mentions of the subject in tightly controlled Chinese media rose sharply over the past two years. Worsening floods, heat waves and dust storms, despite being a long-standing feature of China’s springs and summers, are increasingly connected to shifting global weather patterns.
The impact of these changes is felt at the local level in towns such as Youxi in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where Zhang Xinghua’s family’s fields of Sichuan peppercorns, the spice that gives local cuisine its distinctive numbing flavor, were submerged.
“The flooding was very sudden this year,” said the 41-year-old shopkeeper, who added that the changing weather has strengthened his belief in climate change. “The rains came down. The wind was strong, and the rain was strong.”
In response to the rising threat of climate-related extreme weather events, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment last month launched a multi-department effort to draw up a national climate change adaptation strategy set to be finalized by 2035. But experts worry about persistent gaps in early warning systems.
Luo Jingjia, a scholar at Nanjing University of Science Information and Technology, said that meteorological departments often worry about being held responsible for predicting a severe event that doesn’t materialize, especially because local governments want a clear, yes-or-no answer.
Luo added that the problem is not just with the science of prediction but also with governance. “There are problems with the response to extreme weather because of the level of communication between departments, which causes catastrophic losses,” he said.
After the Zhengzhou floods, China’s Ministry of Emergency Management launched a new warning system to better coordinate between departments and break information silos that separated weather prediction from flood response, according to Yin Jie, a professor at East China Normal University who was an expert adviser for the project.
“The system of disaster prevention and mitigation in China does not yet come under a unified jurisdiction and needs further integration. It is still in an early stage and is not that accurate yet,” Yin said.
Under Xi, China’s position in international climate change debates has evolved away from being a passive actor, cajoled into action by developed nations, into a bid to become a climate-fighting leader for the developing world. But at home, discussion of global warming’s role in worsening extreme weather remains carefully controlled.
China expected robust economic growth in 2022. It’s not looking good.
Environmentalists’ excitement over China’s pledge that its carbon dioxide emissions would peak before 2030 and that the country would reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060 has been undercut by Beijing’s failure to rapidly shift away from coal.
For state planners, even a huge build-out of wind and solar power — China plans to install about the equivalent of the United States’ entire current capacity this year — will be unable to keep pace with energy demand in the near term. The top leadership has consistently reiterated in recent months that coal is, for now, the “mainstay” of the country’s power generation and will remain so for the near future.
Rather than aiming to cap emissions as soon as possible, China’s vast rollout of 570 gigawatts of solar and wind power between 2021-25 is aimed at laying the groundwork for a sharp decline in the second half of the decade, according to analysis from the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
After 2025, coal should be phased down, transitioning from a “mainstay” to “supporting” power source, meaning that new power stations fueled by coal should only be built to ensure stability of the power grid, but many new projects approved in recent months fail to meet those criteria, CREA wrote.
When it comes to climate action, the Chinese Communist Party leadership faces a series of unattractive trade-offs. To force carbon-intensive industries to curb greenhouse gases quickly threatens to undermine an already fragile economy. But fail to transition toward sustainable growth in time and the effects of global warming could be far worse.
Aside from damage caused directly by storms and heat waves, projections suggest rising temperatures could increase food insecurity in China’s arid north or lead to rising sea levels that within 50 years could submerge east coast manufacturing hubs.
“Even if industrial carbon emissions now return to what they were 100 years ago, equivalent to no development, or achieving carbon neutrality or zero carbon emissions, the laws of nature will still continue for hundreds of years,” Yin said. “It is difficult to reduce atmospheric extremes. We now have to do more to adapt.”
Dou reported from Chongqing, China. Shepherd and Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan. | 2022-07-08T06:57:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China's summer floods and heat waves fuel plans for climate action - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/china-floods-heat-wave-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/china-floods-heat-wave-climate-change/ |
I’ve found this a difficult newsletter to write. For much of the day, it was hard to think of anything other than the astonishing goings-on in British politics. Then, as I was finishing it, came the shocking news of the shooting of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.Matters of profit and loss pale in comparison with matters of life and death.Markets continue to churn. In a few hours as I write, the publication of US non-farm payroll data for June will give people all kinds of excuses to buy and sell things. The central question confronting the world of investment continues to be the state of the US economy, and the impact the employment market has on inflation; at this point, there isn’t long to wait.
While we anticipate some important data, and try to deal with the gravity of events, it’s easy to miss good news. So, let me offer a few reasons for optimism that it has been easy to overlook.
China’s Stimulus
Bloomberg has a scoop that China is contemplating a direct stimulus to its economy by bringing forward $220 billion in bonds issuance to back infrastructure. You could take this as tacit confirmation that the economy is in trouble. It’s a return to the old strategy of pumping up construction spending whenever growth is running out of steam. And it’s only a matter of bringing forward spending that had already been planned; the idea is that local governments building projects can now access financing that would not otherwise have been available to them until next year.
However, the plan also shows that the authorities are prepared to relent in the face of signs that local governments are using the financing that’s there. If they’re prepared to go back to an old playbook that worked, that’s fine by global investors. This graphic from my colleagues illustrates what is going on:
Plenty of bearish arguments hinge on the notion that Chinese authorities are resolved not to resort to a major priming of the pump. Any sign that they are growing less conservative is welcome. There are other unmistakable signs that China’s economic deceleration after renewed Covid shutdowns early this year hasn’t been as bad as feared. Its domestic stock market is surging back, even as the rest of the emerging world is falling back.
There are reasons for this. The strong dollar is seriously problematic for the rest of EM, but less so for China. The country’s entire experience of the pandemic is out of alignment with the rest of the world. The acute selloff for the commodities that China traditionally gobbles up, such as copper, shows the degree of concern. So if the Chinese government really is prepared to pick up the pace again, that will help far beyond its shores. It’s at least worth watching.
Inflation owes a lot, if not everything, to stretched supply chains. This problem is beyond the reach of central banks, but still threatens to make the task of monetary policy far harder by embedding inflationary pressure and prompting higher wage demands.
On this issue, there is again some good news. The New York Fed now keeps an index of global supply chain pressure, which smooshes together shipping and freight costs and other measures of how swiftly supply chains are moving. Theserose sharply in 2020, declined, and then surged once more as fresh Covid-19 lockdowns affected activity, particularly in China.
The latest version of the index shows that pressure remains elevated, but is unmistakably declining:
This doesn’t mean the issue is over. It does, however, suggest that one of the world’s most acute problems is beginning to ease. Which is reason to be cheerful.
We all know from personal experience that the pandemic hasn’t gone away altogether. It’s still around, grumbling away as a problem that diminishes quality of life. But at a global level, Covid-19’s ability to take lives really does appear to have been curtailed. These are the latest global numbers as reported to Johns Hopkins University. Omicron was a savage wave, but in its wake the pandemic’s death toll has declined as never before. Nobody will say that it’s over with any confidence after the false dawns of the last two years, but it’s hard to see how anyone could hope for numbers much more encouraging than this, particularly after the horrors of omicron at the turn of the year:
Incidentally, it’s interesting to note that deaths peaked and started to decline exactly at the point when vaccines began to roll out. There is no proof of cause and effect, of course, but there’s a widespread mantra now that vaccines “don’t work.” The facts suggest otherwise. On the critical issue of keeping alive, the circumstantial evidence suggests they’ve worked very well indeed.
Put together a China prepared to prime the pump again, easing supply chains, and the most promising signs yet that Covid can be controlled, and that’s a case for the global economy to perform much better than most assume over the rest of this year.
Keep these thoughts in mind as you brace for Payrolls Friday.
If you want to read the research paper on factor investing under inflation by Robeco that I mentioned Thursday, you will need to look for it at this link, and not the one I previously offered. My apologies.
Also, in an error that amazingly only one reader appears to have spotted, I butchered a chart of the differential between US and German 10-year yields. I said it had been eliminated. It hadn’t. The point that the gap between 10-year yields has narrowed while the gap between two-year yields has widened remains intact, but the correct chart (below) of the gap in 10-year yields is much less dramatic than I made it appear. Again, my apologies.
I’m writing this immediately after hearing the Abe news. It puts the fate of Boris Johnson, whose resignation address struck me as lacking in contrition and saturated with self-pity and entitlement, into a cruel and worthwhile perspective.
It also puts the note I was planning to write, on the pleasures of watching Wimbledon in high summer, into a pretty harsh perspective. I’ll press on, because at times like this it’s especially important to seek comfort. Tennis has charms to soothe the troubled brow, particularly when it takes placee in the cheerful greenness of south-west London. It’s a good idea to unwind and get your fill of it this weekend. Some of my favorite matches from the past: Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe’s 22-minute tiebreaker in the 1980 final; Borg vs. the late Vitas Gerulaitis in the 1977 semifinal; and Rafael Nadal dethrones Roger Federer in the 2008 final — you can watch either the whole six-hour event, or these edited highlights, or these very edited highlights. Plus here’s Serena Williams at her imperious best in 2015, and, to prove that it happened once, losing to Maria Sharapova for the last time in a major, in the final of 2004. I will be traveling next week, and probably not sending a newsletter each day. Have a good weekend everyone, and enjoy next week.More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
• Abe’s Shooting Stuns a Country Known for Safety: Gearoid Reidy
• Billionaires Can’t Get Enough of Private Equity: Shuli Ren
• Verdict on Johnson’s Prime Ministership Is Mixed: Bobby Ghosh | 2022-07-08T08:37:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | There’s Good News for the Global Economy, If You Look - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/theres-good-news-for-the-global-economy-if-you-look/2022/07/08/66f83984-fe8c-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/theres-good-news-for-the-global-economy-if-you-look/2022/07/08/66f83984-fe8c-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
(Valeria Mongelli/Bloomberg)
“And I have written, way back, a number of law review articles about the Ninth Amendment and the — and the 14th Amendment and why that privacy is considered as part of a constitutional guarantee. And the — they’ve just wiped it all out.”
— President Biden, remarks in Madrid, June 30
The president has been a fierce critic of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned a right to abortion established by the court in Roe v. Wade nearly a half-century ago. During a recent news conference, he said that he had written “a number of law review articles” and that two amendments to the U.S. Constitution had established a right to privacy that was crucial to the reasoning in the Roe opinion.
As we have documented before, the president has a tendency to sometimes embellish the factual record about his past. Earlier this year, he said he was arrested during civil rights protests when there was no evidence that ever happened. He also has claimed he was arrested for trying to see Nelson Mandela, but that was false.
These remarks about law review articles from the past caught our attention. Biden’s first campaign for the presidency, in 1988, collapsed after reporters discovered that Biden had flunked a class in law school for submitting a paper that borrowed heavily from another law review article without proper citation — and then made false or exaggerated claims about his law school record during a discussion months earlier with voters in New Hampshire.
So did Biden write such law review articles?
HeinOnline, an online platform of research articles, shows 19 law review citations that list Biden as an author or co-author. (The full list also includes six articles in Foreign Affairs magazine and other nonlegal publications.) But these articles concern issues such a violence against women, war powers, federal drug policy, world trade and foreign policy — issues that were central to Biden’s long career in the Senate. None of these law review articles concerned the right to privacy.
When we asked the White House for evidence of his statement, we received a long list of citations to comments Biden made about the right to privacy, often when he presided over Supreme Court nominations as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. For instance, one citation noted that Biden got Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., during his confirmation hearings, to agree that there was a right of privacy to be found in the 14th Amendment, and one that “extends to women.”
While these remarks certainly demonstrate Biden’s long-standing interest in the legal debate over these amendments, they cannot be called law review articles.
The White House also provided an opinion piece that appeared under Biden’s name in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1991, headlined, “Yes, the Constitution implies rights that aren’t spelled out.”
This is more on point. The op-ed focuses on the Ninth Amendment, which simply states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This amendment was an effort by James Madison to deal with concerns that, by listing certain rights, the Bill of Rights would prevent Americans from receiving any rights that had not be spelled out. Biden said in the op-ed that the amendment meant that “we assume that our personal lives are free from government intervention, absent specific constitutional authority for that action.”
But some years after that op-ed was published, the court, in a 1997 ruling, said that these additional rights need to be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.”
In his majority opinion in Dodd, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. used that standard to argue that “the inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
Alito’s recounting of history is not universally accepted. “When the United States was founded and for many subsequent decades, Americans relied on the English common law,” reads an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. “The common law did not regulate abortion in early pregnancy. Indeed, the common law did not even recognize abortion as occurring at that stage. That is because the common law did not legally acknowledge a fetus as existing separately from a pregnant woman until the woman felt fetal movement, called ‘quickening,’ which could occur as late as the 25th week of pregnancy.”
In any case, an opinion piece is not the same thing as a law review article, which tends to be longer and deeper in the legal weeds than a typical op-ed.
Biden can fairly claim to have written an op-ed for a newspaper about the Ninth Amendment and the right to privacy that he believes is part of it. He can also claim to have engaged in long discussions with justices now on the court about the rights embodied in the Ninth and 14th amendments. He certainly has a deep understanding of these issues from his long service on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But the president stated he had written “a number of law review articles” about these amendments. That’s gilding the lily — and a president must remain accurate about his achievements. He earns Two Pinocchios.
Two Pinocchios | 2022-07-08T08:37:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s inaccurate claim about writing law review articles on privacy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/bidens-inaccurate-claim-about-writing-law-review-articles-privacy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/bidens-inaccurate-claim-about-writing-law-review-articles-privacy/ |
D.C. United forward Taxi Fountas has nine goals and three assists in the first 10 games of his MLS career. (Tony Quinn for The Washington Post)
With 15 years as an MLS assistant under his belt, D.C. United interim coach Chad Ashton knows all too well how a decorated signing from abroad can struggle to acclimate to the North American circuit. With the taxing travel, culture shock and steamy heat and humidity, there’s no shortage of obstacles between an MLS newcomer and his comfort zone.
All of that makes the instant impact of United forward Taxi Fountas even more remarkable. Since joining D.C. from Austria’s Rapid Vienna in April, the 26-year-old Greek attacker has racked up nine goals and three assists — equaling the most prolific output over a player’s first 10 games in MLS history.
“You see really veteran, big-time names come into this league and don’t have the immediate success he’s had,” Ashton said. “We knew he was a very good player. But did we expect this much success this quickly? Maybe not quite that much.”
The caveat to Fountas’s blistering start has been United’s results: a 3-5-2 mark since his debut, dropping D.C. to second-to-last in the Eastern Conference as the season approaches its midpoint. But after a Fountas hat trick powered United (5-9-2) to a 5-3 victory at Orlando City on Monday, snapping a six-match winless skid, the club sits a manageable eight points out of a postseason spot with two games in hand entering Friday’s trip to face the second-place Philadelphia Union (7-2-9).
“We’ve lost a lot of games obviously in this season, but that was a huge win,” Fountas said through an interpreter. “It really gave us the strength to keep going, to keep playing because we have a long road ahead. The important thing now is to get to the playoffs so we can continue to build.”
Taxi Fountas has arrived for D.C. United, endearing himself to teammates, fans and turtles
Fountas has emboldened United’s attack with the kind of dynamic threat the club hadn’t boasted since Luciano Acosta’s departure following the 2019 season. Fleet-footed and decisive on the ball, Fountas has converted his precise finishing into a goal tally that’s just one off the league lead — even though he has played roughly half as many minutes as his fellow Golden Boot contenders.
“He just has the understanding and the feel for where to be in dangerous situations — and then capitalizes on those as well,” wing back Julian Gressel said. “He can really unbalance opponents’ defenders and give us that final-third quality that we’ve been maybe lacking before we got him.”
Fountas has posted those numbers for a D.C. team that’s still pinning down his ideal position. At times, Fountas has started as one of two playmakers underneath a lone striker. Ashton also has partnered him with a target forward — Ola Kamara or Michael Estrada — in a two-man front line. In the win over Orlando, Ashton started Fountas, Kamara and Estrada together for the first time. Nominally deployed on the left side of that three-man front line, Fountas was given free rein to drift wide, drop into the midfield and find the game centrally.
“You want to give him as much freedom as possible because he can hurt you from all different positions on the field,” Ashton said. “Now, the idea of fitting that into a defensive scheme is the part that’s got to be consistent. … But for the most part, we want to give him a green light to be able to move freely throughout the field and find good spots — and he does that.”
“I like the freedom to play wherever, to do whatever I can,” Fountas said. “Wherever the coach puts me, I will still give my all. ... Their belief in me to play in all these different positions kind of instills me with my own faith to play better.”
Fountas’s outsize influence on the field reflects his buoyant personality off it. Although Fountas is still learning English, he has learned enough to be conversational. (“His favorite word, by far, is ‘bro,’ ” Ashton noted.) And the club’s highest-paid player has quickly developed a reputation as the locker room’s chief jokester.
“At times, I’ve got to rein that in a bit because he’s got to know, ‘Hey, there’s certain times when it’s time to work and be more serious,’ ” Ashton said. “But you can see that he enjoys his job. … He’s a person you want to be around, and that carries over to the field. It’s like: ‘Hey, that’s the guy — get him the ball. That’s the guy that’s going to make things happen.’ ”
With the summer transfer window have come changes to Fountas’s supporting cast. Peruvian playmaker Edison Flores — a pricey signing who, unlike Fountas, never found his rhythm in MLS — was sold to Mexican club Atlas, and depth attacker Griffin Yow departed for Belgium’s Westerlo. On the arrivals side, United added Chilean winger Martín Rodríguez from Turkey’s Altay and remains in the market for additions.
As much as Fountas could benefit from more weapons to share the attacking burden, he’s not dwelling on United’s roster moves.
“The team’s primary responsibility and focus is to bring new players, bring great energy, bring that excitement,” Fountas said. “My job is to look at what I’m doing, focus on my work, making myself a better player and building up the team as a whole.” | 2022-07-08T08:37:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taxi Fountas surges for D.C. United - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/taxi-fountas-dc-united/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/taxi-fountas-dc-united/ |
There is no asking price for the Washington Nationals, though Forbes values the team at about $2 billion. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Michael B. Kim, whose private equity firm manages more than $25 billion in assets, is among the prospective buyers of the Washington Nationals, multiple people with knowledge of the process said this week.
Kim, a former executive at global investment firm the Carlyle Group, founded his own business, MBK Partners, in 2005. He met in person last week with team officials at Nationals Park, part of the process for anyone hoping to purchase the club from the Lerner family, which announced its intention to explore a sale in April.
Kim’s emergence as a potential bidder does not make him a front-runner to land the team. One other group has met with club officials in person, and an in-person meeting with a third group is scheduled for later this month, multiple people familiar with the process said.
As many as five or six individuals or groups are expected to meet with club officials to learn more about what they would be buying. Major League Baseball must first approve potential buyers, who then receive the opportunity to go over the Nationals’ finances. In-person — and in some cases virtual — meetings are the next step in what is considered part of due diligence; not every group approved by MLB will be granted such meetings. There is no sale price for the Nationals, and would-be buyers wouldn’t submit an offer until these discussions are complete, according to people familiar with the process. Forbes values the Nationals at about $2 billion.
The groups that have met with the Nationals do not have Washington ties, according to those familiar with the process.
Barry Svrluga: July may be one of the most important months in Nationals history
Ted Leonsis, whose Monumental Sports and Entertainment owns the Washington Capitals, Mystics and Wizards, has not yet signed a nondisclosure agreement that MLB requires of any prospective buyer, according to two people with knowledge of the process. Mark Lerner, the Nationals’ managing principal owner, is a minority partner in Monumental.
Kim was at Nationals Park on June 29, and his experience could provide an outline of how the process will unfold with other groups over the course of the summer. Kim met with officials both from the business and baseball sides of the operation and also toured the ballpark, which is owned by Events DC, the semipublic tourism and convention company that also owns the Washington Convention Center.
Kim was born in South Korea and educated in the United States, where he now has dual citizenship. He graduated from Haverford College and Harvard Business School and went on to run Carlyle’s Asian operations for nearly a decade.
His MBK Partners, based in Seoul, has made groundbreaking deals in Korea, including a $6.1 billion deal to take over Tesco’s Korean operation, Homeplus, which was the country’s largest private-equity deal to date, according to Forbes. Forbes lists Kim as South Korea’s third-richest person, placing his wealth at $7.7 billion. In 2020, he published a novel, “Offerings,” about a Seoul-based investment banker.
The sale of the Nationals is being run by New York investment bank Allen & Company, which has extensive experience shepherding sports franchises through ownership changes. In April, when the Lerners said they would consider selling the Nationals as well as bringing on new minority partners, Mark Lerner called it “an exploratory process.”
But increasingly, those familiar with the Lerners’ thinking and with the process believe this will end with a sale. Though there is no timetable, most people familiar with the process believe a sale could be completed by the end of the year. Indeed, there’s some optimism that MLB’s owners could vote to approve a new group at their next meetings in November.
The Lerner family, headed by local real estate magnate Theodore Lerner, bought the Nationals from MLB for $450 million in 2006, nearly two years after MLB moved the franchise from Montreal. The family oversaw a massive rebuild of the entire system that led to four National League East titles, another wild-card appearance and the 2019 World Series championship. | 2022-07-08T09:21:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michael B. Kim among Washington Nationals' prospective buyers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/michael-b-kim-washington-nationals-sale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/michael-b-kim-washington-nationals-sale/ |
Private nature retreat in Lovettsville, Va., for sale for $3.5M
The 40-acre property, which is part of Furnace Mountain Estates, is bordered on three sides by Catoctin Creek
The family room has windows on three sides. It has a stone fireplace and a vaulted ceiling with wood beams. (Upward Studio)
A buyer seeking privacy and nature would find plenty of both at this property in Lovettsville, Va.
The Craftsman-style house is in Furnace Mountain Estates, a luxury community in western Loudoun County, not far from Leesburg, Va., or Frederick, Md. It was built in 2006 by Kholer Custom Homes of Burke, Va. Because the first owner did not live in the house, P.J. and Steven Barger, who bought it in 2009, are the first occupants.
“We were looking for a lot of land,” P.J. said. “We had looked at different farm properties. It was really the setting. The house was the cherry on top of the sundae. We’ve built houses before. We knew what we could do to it, the potential it had, and it was still within the right location for us at that time.”
Lovettsville, Va., property | The Craftsman-style house is in Furnace Mountain Estates, a luxury community in western Loudoun County, not far from Leesburg, Va., or Frederick, Md. It is listed at $3.5 million. (Upward Studio)
Although the house was move-in ready, there was much that needed to be done inside and outside. The basement wasn’t finished. The bedroom above the garage didn’t exist, nor did the timber barn. The backyard was dirt.
The Bargers reconfigured the driveway, creating a courtyard out front. They added a swimming pool. They hired a carpenter to install shelving and cabinetry in the living room and a bench window seat with drawers in the bedroom above the garage. Hardwood flooring was laid down in the owner’s bedroom, and the kitchen was outfitted with new countertops and backsplash. The wet bar off the family room was renovated.
The exterior of the house is covered in cedar, HardiePlank (fiber-cement) and stone. A wide porch leads to double entry doors. The foyer has some of the many wood accents found throughout the house. More millwork surrounds the fireplace in the living room. The family room is surrounded on three sides by windows. It has a stone fireplace and a vaulted ceiling with wood beams. The walkout lower level has a wet bar, an exercise room and a media room.
“It’s a house that’s big enough for all of us,” P.J. said.
Outdoor spaces include a deck, a large terrace and a pavilion with a fireplace next to the pool. A large timber barn provides additional storage. A three-car garage is attached to the house. The 40-acre property is guarded on three sides by Catoctin Creek.
“We love the beauty and the privacy,” P.J. said. “The stars are amazing, the wildlife. The creek around [the property], it’s like a little moat. That’s pretty special to go down there with the kids.”
Although at times it can feel as if she is far from civilization, P.J. said the proximity to Leesburg and Frederick, which are less than a half-hour away and the MARC train station at Point of Rocks, which is 10 minutes away, makes living in the country doable.
“It’s very quiet,” P.J. said. “You don’t hear anything from anyone. It’s very secluded, but you are close to everything.”
The five-bedroom, nine-bathroom, 9,000-square-foot house is listed at $3.5 million. The homeowners association fee is $75 per month.
41370 Eagle Ridge Lane, Lovettsville, Va.
Features: The 2006 Craftsman-style house was built by Kholer Custom Homes of Burke, Va. It has a cedar, HardiePlank and stone exterior. The house has two indoor fireplaces and one outdoor fireplace. The property includes a swimming pool, a pavilion and a timber barn. The three-car garage is attached to the house. Catoctin Creek borders the property on three sides.
Listing agent: Kathryn Harrell and Jim Lemon, Washington Fine Properties | 2022-07-08T10:04:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Private nature retreat in Lovettsville, Va., for sale for $3.5M - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/08/private-nature-retreat-lovettsville-va-sale-35m/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/08/private-nature-retreat-lovettsville-va-sale-35m/ |
‘Elf’ showcased James Caan’s soul
Move over, Sonny Corleone
Perspective by Travis M. Andrews
From left, Amy Sedaris, James Caan and Will Ferrell in the 2003 holiday comedy “Elf.” (New Line Cinema/Everett Collection)
You’re going to read an awful lot about Sonny Corleone over the next few days.
That’s only natural. James Caan, the tough leading man who portrayed the explosively violent and oldest of Vito Corleone’s sons in “The Godfather,” died on July 6 at 82. Among his many enduring roles — which include Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo in 1971’s “Brian’s Song,” the debt-ridden English professor in the original 1974 version of “The Gambler” and the heroic Staff Sergeant Dohun in 1977’s World War II epic “A Bridge Too Far” — Sonny is the one average filmgoers will likely remember 50 years from now.
Talking about Sonny makes sense, but it might not be what he wanted. As he told The Washington Post some 42 years ago, “Everyplace I go, I spend half my time undoing Sonny Corleone.”
So let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Walter Hobbs.
Caan’s character in the 2003 family-friendly holiday comedy “Elf” might not be the first thing that sprung to the minds of most film critics when his death was announced, but it’s certainly the one occupying my mind. I’m not the least bit embarrassed by this, nor should you be if you’re in the same camp. It’s easily one of his best performances in a career in which each seemed to best the last.
Obituary: James Caan, who played Sonny Corleone in ‘The Godfather,’ dies at 82
Am I biased? Of course. Anyone with any sort of positive relationship with “Elf” — i.e. most people who have seen it — would be, too. My mother, Mindy, adores “Elf” more than any other film (including “The Godfather”) and, as a result, fires it up at least once every December (and usually again in July) to watch with my brother Tyler and me.
I am far from alone in this experience.
On the first watch, you notice Will Ferrell’s Buddy the Elf. How could you not, with six-plus feet of manic, hyperactive flesh snug in his elf garb, the definition of exuberance, a sugar high fueled by jelly beans coated in maple syrup?
As with all successful family films, the movie manages to delight parent and child alike, partially by introducing the younger generation to an army of Hollywood’s elder statesmen. “That’s Bob Newhart playing Papa Elf,” your mama might exclaim. “And Santa is Ed Asner?! You know, from my old favorite sitcoms like ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ ”
And there’s Caan — there’s Sonny Corleone, Paul Sheldon, Tony Archer, Brian Piccolo, the dude from “Thief” — as the gruff, absent father who needs to learn the meaning of Christmas. That’s who you notice on the second watch. And the third. And so forth until you can’t remember how many times you’ve watched it.
“Elf” is just like “The Godfather,” really: It doesn’t work without James Caan. He might not play the main character in either, but he’s one of the most important in both. And, in some ways, “Elf” highlights a certain natural progression of his career. It went a whole lot farther in undoing Sonny Corleone than, say, “Misery.”
Caan might have seemed like an unusual choice for a broad holiday comedy, the seriousness of his career and sternness of his characters almost off-putting. It’s particularly striking given how picky he could be — he rejected starring roles in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Blade Runner” and “Superman” (because he didn’t want to wear a cape), among others.
In “Elf,” he was able to channel a workaholic publishing executive who refuses to reprint a children’s book missing a couple of pages in the name of the almighty dollar, and who is annoyed — if not terrified — to learn he might unknowingly have a son from a previous relationship. Caan drew on the rigid, hardened and sometimes explosive tough guys for which he’d become known, toning it down to fit a holiday film. He’s prickly, but not a complete jerk, tough but vulnerable. Just cruel enough to end up on the naughty list, but just empathetic enough to pull himself off it — after a little help from the family he loves, often despite himself.
Pitting the capitol-S Serious actor against Ferrell’s manic creation was part of director Jon Favreau’s plan, though it made for a nervous crew. “All of us were a little scared of James Caan,” producer Jon Berg said in the Netflix documentary series “The Movies That Made Us.”
From 1980: The Candid Caan — Real Life, No Sharks
That fear didn’t last. Just leave it to Ferrell. “The first time I met him I just put him in a bear hug and yelled ‘Dad!’ I thought that would break the ice,” he told the entertainment website Blackfilm in 2003.
Knowing that the key was to have Caan’s Walter bristle against Ferrell’s Buddy, the former “Saturday Night Live” actor and improv comedian decided to agitate the Oscar-winner until he made the journey from annoyance to bemusement.
“I was really lucky that my job in the film was to try to drive him crazy, and I would. I would try to offset anything he could throw at me,” Ferrell told Blackfilm. “I knew it was driving him crazy on one level. It’s great to see Jimmy in a way that we’re not used to seeing him in and it adds to the effect. His specific casting in that role adds to obviously why it works so well.”
Caan has “a great sense of humor. So if you could make him laugh, all the tension disappears. We kept him laughing, and he kept us laughing,” Favreau told Rolling Stone. “It took him a while to get with the programming. I surrounded him with a lot of improvisers, like Andy Richter and Kyle Gass and Amy Sedaris. When I’m working with improv people, I give them the green light to just bring it and try things. So every take was different. Eventually, something just clicked in Jimmy and he just went with it. He was a lot of fun. We ended up hanging out a lot off-set. Whenever we’d go into an Italian restaurant, they’d put on ‘The Godfather’ soundtrack. Everywhere he goes, ‘The Godfather’ theme.”
No, “Elf” probably won’t be added to the Criterion Collection anytime soon. It didn’t sweep at Cannes; ponderous documentaries won’t be made about it. The headlines you’ll read this week will likely focus on “The Godfather.” But every December — and maybe even July — we’ll be focused on “Elf,” waiting for the moment when Caan’s Walter puts on that Santa coat and begrudgingly belts “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.” | 2022-07-08T10:09:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Appreciation: ‘Elf’ showcased James Caan’s soul - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/08/james-caan-dies-appreciation-elf-movie/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/08/james-caan-dies-appreciation-elf-movie/ |
First-generation academics were always rare. Now they’re vanishing.
(John Bulmer/Popperfoto/Getty Images)
To understand critical issues facing the U.S. economy — soaring inflation, worker shortages and perhaps a looming recession — researchers must understand human behavior. They need to know how everyday Americans will react when pump prices double or shelves go bare.
That’s why it’s somewhat alarming to learn that academia in general — and economics in particular — has quietly become the province of an insular elite, a group likely to have had little exposure to the travails of America’s vast middle class.
In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts.
This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.
The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years. The data includes extensive information about almost half a million recipients in the 2010-to-2018 period alone.
It shows that the elite dominate even more among the top schools that produce about half of all future economics professors. Among the top 15 programs, 78 percent of new PhDs since 2010 had a parent with a graduate degree while just 6 percent are first-generation college students.
To an outsider, the long path to a professorship can seem frustratingly opaque, particularly in economics. PhD programs tend to require a hidden curriculum of classes in subjects such as mathematics that are not technically required for economics majors. If you discover economics late in your college career and don’t have expert guidance, it might already be too late to get on the PhD track. Similar hidden hurdles lurk in the job market and academic publishing.
University of Southern California economist Robert Metcalfe said the hidden curriculum is just the beginning. Elite social networks determine which economists get accepted at top schools and published in top journals, and it can be difficult for first-generation students such as himself to break in.
“I’m always on catch-up. That’s because I come from a background that didn’t know anything about academia,” said Metcalfe, who grew up in southern Wales in the United Kingdom, where his dad worked as a warehouse man at a brewery while his mom stayed home to raise four kids. “I got tenured before the age of 40, but I just feel like I’m always one step behind in the academy.”
At every point where first-generation students typically fall through the cracks, Metcalfe was fortunate to find mentors from working-class backgrounds who could help him through. Among them was influential University of Chicago economist John List. List, son of a secretary and a truck driver in Sun Prairie, Wis., helped pioneer the use of real-world economic experiments. He has advised everyone from White House officials to executives at Uber, Lyft and Walmart, where he currently reigns as chief economist.
“I would not be an academic economist today,” Metcalfe said, “if senior role models who shared my working-class background hadn’t helped me navigate and survive elite academic institutions such as the University of Oxford and the University of Chicago.”
This summer, Metcalfe and List aim to expand their mentoring with a student workshop called First-gen Research and Mentoring in Economics (FRAME).
Stansbury said she also wonders if courses like Econ 101 might put off students from low-income backgrounds. “I also worry that some of the terminology that’s used, like ‘unskilled’ or ‘low ability’ to describe people who are in low-paid jobs or with little formal education, is offensive,” Stansbury said. “And I can see that this would be disproportionately so to people who are coming from backgrounds where these words are describing family members and friends.”
This study is one of the first to describe academia’s struggles with economic diversity, but its racial diversity issues have been well documented. They’re particularly pronounced in economics, which has fewer underrepresented minorities among its PhD graduates (about 6 percent) than any other major field.
Why do people from elite backgrounds dominate academia? A separate analysis suggests a simple answer: When many of a job’s rewards are non-monetary, that job tends to be done by people for whom cash is not a concern.
“Who gets to be in the kinds of occupations you associate with more creative, enjoyable and fulfilling work? We found that, among people with similar levels of education, people in those jobs disproportionately come from richer families,” said Boston College economist Danial Lashkari. “Sharing these results with colleagues, we have heard numerous anecdotes that make us think this finding resonates with many on a personal level.”
In a recent working paper, Lashkari and New York University’s Corina Boar used a long-running U.S. survey to calculate the quality of working life enjoyed by professionals in scores of different jobs based on worker treatment, physical strain, intellectual stimulation and worker autonomy. At the top of the list, we find professors and other postsecondary educators, curators and librarians, and architects. Drivers, freight handlers and mail delivery workers are at the bottom.
The academics then used surveys that follow people across lifetimes and generations to find out whether certain jobs were more or less likely to attract people from wealthy backgrounds than people with more humble roots. When they compared the two lists, they found a strong relationship between a job’s non-monetary benefit and how attractive it was to children from high-income households.
If a talented student from a wealthy background is offered a choice between becoming a curator or professor or doing less-rewarding work in finance that pays $25,000 more a year, that person probably will gravitate toward more enjoyable and fulfilling work at a museum or university, Lashkari said. To them, an extra $25,000 just doesn’t mean that much. Whereas someone without a privileged background is less likely to pass up better-paid work in finance or law.
Lucie Schmidt was the first in her family to graduate from college. She was also a single mother. Like many in her position, it never occurred to her to study economics: She was interested in poverty, not business and finance. But when she took an economics class to meet a prerequisite, she saw an opportunity.
“If you care about reducing poverty,” Schmidt said, “economics provides you with these really great tools to analyze those kinds of policies.”
Now she’s an economist at Smith College, where she maintains a list of first-generation economists on Twitter. She studies family structure, the social safety net and anti-poverty programs, many of which have been aimed at single mothers.
“Having been a recipient of some of these programs at one point gives you a different perspective,” Schmidt said. “There’s a pretty direct link, I think, between the things that I’m interested in and my personal history.”
The University of Chicago’s List, who reminded us that “the chosen people at birth don’t have a monopoly on innovative ideas,” draws a clear line between his formative years and his substantial contributions to the field. The endless weekends he spent driving across the Midwest, dealing baseball cards at shows to help finance his education, showed him how economic theories could be tested in the real world.
“Those experiences gave me unique insights that helped me to introduce field experiments in a novel way in the early 1990s to economics,” List told us.
“Step back and ask yourself: How many other ideas did we lose because of exclusivity? Many future breakthroughs will come from individuals with off-the-beaten-path histories,” he said. “So it is not only equitable to give everyone a shot, I firmly believe it is efficient too.”
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Where fun facts are serious business | 2022-07-08T10:09:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia in U.S. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/08/dept-of-data-academia-elite/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/08/dept-of-data-academia-elite/ |
While some guns are available in Japan for the likes of hunters, any purchase requires stringent checks. Photos apparently from the scene show an unusual, almost handmade-looking firearm. Last year, a man killed himself in Ibaraki with a gun believed to have been made with a 3D printer. But because of Japan’s safety record, security at political rallies is weak. It’s not at all unusual to see former prime ministers or other big-wigs campaigning at a street corner or in front of a train station, without a visible police or security detail.
At the time of writing, we know little of the suspect and nothing of his motivations. Abe has attracted violent protest in the past, including a 2014 self-immolation against security legislation that he spear-headed. But this kind of attack on a national figure of his stature is utterly without precedent in the country’s modern history.
(Updates throughout with news of the death of Shinzo Abe.) | 2022-07-08T10:09:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shinzo Abe’s Assassination Will Scar Japan Forever - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/shinzo-abes-assassination-will-scar-japan-forever/2022/07/08/b79ce40a-fe84-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/shinzo-abes-assassination-will-scar-japan-forever/2022/07/08/b79ce40a-fe84-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
One of China’s largest-ever debt restructurings is looming, with the Communist Party now in the driver’s seat, after China Evergrande Group was formally declared to be in default. While the state’s intervention has quelled fears of a disorderly collapse that would jolt the world economy, investors who hold bonds of the world’s most indebted property developer are wondering how much of their money they’ll see after the dust settles. Meanwhile, Evergrande is under pressure to deliver thousands of pre-sold housing projects -- and pay its workers -- to avoid sparking social unrest.
Evergrande, founded in 1996, grew through massive borrowing. Back in 2010, it sold what was at the time the biggest high-yield dollar bond among Chinese builders at $750 million. The firm subsequently embarked on even more of a debt binge to fuel growth, becoming the largest dollar-debt borrower among peers and for a time the country’s biggest developer by contracted sales. It owns more than 1,300 projects in 280 cities, according to the company’s website. Following a liquidity scare in 2020, Evergrande outlined a plan to roughly halve its $100 billion debt pile by mid-2023. But China’s housing market started slowing down amid regulatory curbs. Another liquidity scare sent the company’s stock and bonds tumbling, and after having made late payments on some dollar bonds it missed a deadline in December to pay two dollar-bond coupons before grace periods ended. The board announced the establishment of a “risk management committee” dominated by provincial officials. A preliminary restructuring plan is expected by the end of July.
Its annual property sales fell for the first time in at least a decade last year, plummeting 39% from 2020’s level as sales were frozen for months before resuming in April 2022. Meanwhile, it had some 1.97 trillion yuan in liabilities as of June 30, 2021 -- the most among its peers in China and the latest figures from Evergrande. Almost half of that amount was bills to suppliers and other payables, while interest-bearing debt totaled 572 billion yuan, down 20% from the end of 2020. The company had also reduced its net debt-to-equity ratio to below 100%, meeting one of the government’s “three red lines” -- metrics imposed to limit borrowing by real estate companies. Evergrande has $19.2 billion in offshore dollar bonds outstanding, the most among Chinese developers. Another risk is the firm’s guarantees on related-party debts, including private-placement bonds with limited disclosure.
The industry is in a deep slump. Combined contracted sales at the top 100 developers were halved year-over-year in the first half of 2022. Property loan growth slowed to the weakest pace in over two decades at the end of March. Yields on Chinese junk dollar bonds remain above 20% as defaults this year have already set an annual record. Many have had to seek extensions on both onshore and offshore debt in order to avoid potential missed payments. | 2022-07-08T10:09:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What’s Next for China Evergrande, Crushed by Debt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/whats-next-for-china-evergrande-crushed-by-debt/2022/07/08/ebf0bab8-fe9f-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/whats-next-for-china-evergrande-crushed-by-debt/2022/07/08/ebf0bab8-fe9f-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Yang Qianye of the Chinese embassy reads literature inside the China Folk House Retreat on June 26 in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. — The farmhouse was just like countless others John Flower had come across in his time in rural China, but the details stood out: tall, hand-carved wooden columns up front, delicate carvings of flowers and tree branches laid into the folding screen doors, a bright red cabinet with ornate patterns lining the back wall.
It was going to be demolished, located on land soon to be flooded by the construction of a new dam on the Mekong River. Flower joked with the house’s owner, Zhang Jianhua, when Zhang invited him inside for tea.
“I admired the house and said, ‘I wish I could take it home with me,’ ” Flower said. “He said, ‘Why not? We can try.’ ”
So Flower did. He bought the house from Zhang, returned with a team of craftsmen, and disassembled it, plank by plank, to ship to the United States, where he rebuilt it in a clearing in the woods of Harpers Ferry, W.Va.
Flower, an Arlington, Va.-based high school history teacher, wants to use the farmhouse to host cultural events, summer camps and exchanges with Chinese students — the kinds of opportunities most American students have missed out on for more than two years as the coronavirus pandemic severed most travel links between China and the United States and kicked off a turbulent period for relations between the two countries.
“I can't take 60 kids to China,” Flower said. “But I can have 60 kids come here and experience China, in a way.”
Flower had the opportunity to experience China more closely than most. He studied Chinese philosophy and history at the University of Virginia and moved to the southwestern province of Sichuan to conduct a three-year study in 1991. In 2003, he gave up a tenured position at the University of North Carolina to teach Chinese history at the D.C. private school Sidwell Friends, where he and his wife Pam Leonard developed a China fieldwork program that brought high school students to study in rural China.
In 2012, Flower and Leonard moved their program to Yunnan, a province on the southwestern reaches of the Chinese countryside bordering Myanmar. There, on a trip to a remote village named Cizhong on the edge of the province in 2015, Flower found Zhang and the house he’d eventually bring to the United States.
The idea that started as a joke over tea seemed feasible — Zhang, who was being relocated by the local government, was happy to sell his house to save it from demolition — and the educational opportunities were too exciting to pass up.
“It would be a text,” Flower said. “Like bringing an incredibly interesting book.”
The journey back to the United States was long and painstaking. Flower and a team of craftsmen returned to Cizhong in 2017 to document the house’s design and carefully pry its beams and floorboards apart. It took months to truck the pieces across China to the eastern port of Tianjin and then ship them to Baltimore. Flower did it at his own expense.
“We joked it was my son’s college fund,” he said.
Eventually, Zhang’s farmhouse found a home in the woods of Jefferson County, W.Va., in the summer of 2019. Flower and Leonard formed a nonprofit, the China Folk House Retreat, and began accepting donations to realize their goal of turning the house into an educational camp.
But just as their team began to reassemble what they hoped would be a bridge between the United States and China, the world’s borders slammed shut. Flower, who’d continued to run his study abroad programs, was two days away from bringing another cohort of students to Yunnan in late February 2020 when his friends in China called about a new disease spreading in the country.
“At first, we were like, ‘Let’s be cautious, let’s just postpone,’ ” Flower said. “And then it got longer. And then we saw what was happening.”
Flower hasn’t been back to China since. Nor have any of his students. They watched from home as the virus first discovered in China spread across the world, shutting down global travel and prompting an anti-Asian backlash in the United States. Relations between the United States and China were strained further when the United States joined an international outcry against China last year by declaring the country’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims a genocide, and most recently when government officials traded barbs over Chinese activity in the Indo-Pacific at a defense summit in June. A Pew Research Center study in April found 82 percent of Americans surveyed had unfavorable opinions of China.
Flower is no stranger to sea changes in U.S.-China relations — his interest in the country began in the 1970s, when China turned to a policy of “reform and opening” and established diplomatic relations with the United States after decades of mutual distrust. He sees his work as cultural, not political, and believes it’s all the more important now.
“It’s sad,” Flower said. “But I think the most important thing is that we keep the relationships alive, and we emphasize people-to-people relationships even more when the government-to-government relations are so fraught.”
Yang Wendou, who coordinates Flower’s program in China, shares the same view.
“I’m an educator,” Yang said from Yunnan. “I won’t be able to say much about politics. But from my perspective, the more difficult U.S.-China relations get, the more we need to strengthen the exchanges between our people.”
In the pandemic, the Chinese Folk House Retreat has become a rare conduit for that exchange. Craftsmen from nearby towns volunteered to help rebuild Zhang’s home, which was originally constructed in 1989 — studying unfamiliar Chinese techniques to rejoin the beams that made up the house’s wooden frame. Every summer, Flower hosted summer camps for D.C. and Virginia high school students, who helped with the construction while studying Chinese language and culture. Since 2019, the China Folk House Retreat has expanded to include a traditional Chinese moon gate and the skeletal frames of a kitchen and dormitory to be completed next year.
In late June, Flower’s faith in cultural exchange was returned by the Chinese government when Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the United States, visited the camp. In an interview, Qin acknowledged that relations between China and the United States are at “a critical crossroads.” But, speaking days before China announced a surprise lessening of the country’s strict quarantine policies for travelers arriving from abroad, he expressed a desire to reestablish travel ties severed by the pandemic.
“I believe that covid will be over sooner or later,” Qin said. “And all these cultural exchanges … will come back.” He concluded his public remarks to the camp with an invitation: “Don’t forget when covid is over, go to China.”
Flower thinks that’s the key to improving relations between the populations of two of the world’s superpowers. Bringing American students to China, he said, gave them a unique perspective on the country and its people. Eventually, he hopes to host students, and even carpenters and craftsmen, from China to study and share their knowledge in West Virginia, too.
“I’m doubling down, tripling down,” Flower said. “I think this kind of project is needed now more than ever.” | 2022-07-08T10:09:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why a teacher moved a Chinese farmhouse to the woods of West Virginia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/west-virginia-chinese-house/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/west-virginia-chinese-house/ |
Gwendolyn Stulgis with her husband, Frank Stulgis, on their wedding day on May 6. Stulgis decided to give her gown away to another bride. (Kirsten Pesa Photography)
Gwendolyn Stulgis knew exactly what she wanted in a wedding dress: a long-sleeve lace gown with a beaded train. She also knew she would only wear it once — which bothered her, given the steep price of designer dresses.
She decided her maximum price would be $1,000. When she started dress shopping last October, Stulgis soon found the dress of her dreams, though it was far beyond her budget at $3,000.
Staring at her reflection at a bridal shop in Warren, Ohio, Stulgis decided she’d splurge.
“I fell in love with it,” said Stulgis, 37, who is the vice president of a staffing agency.
But she had some reservations.
“I didn’t want to spend so much money on a dress that I would put in a box and never wear again,” she said. “That’s just not me.”
So, Stulgis came up with a plan. After her wedding on May 6, she would gift the dress to a bride-to-be who otherwise couldn’t afford a gown.
“I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to keep,” said Stulgis, who paid for the dress in monthly installments up until just before her wedding.
Knowing how exorbitant gowns can get — the average price of a bridal gown last year was about $1,800 — she decided to give it away rather than sell it.
Brides are wearing black. I did years ago and don’t regret a thing.
She took to social media to find a bride who would be just as thrilled to wear it as she was.
“I felt absolutely gorgeous in it and want someone else to feel how I felt,” Stulgis wrote in a May 19 Facebook post that she shared in various groups.
She included several photos of the gown and clarified the size in a comment. She also laid out some particulars: The recipient of the dress should have a wedding date within a few months of the post, and after it is worn, the bride must dry-clean it and pass it on to another bride, creating an ongoing chain.
Her goal, she wrote, was to “keep going as long as the dress can stand.”
She asked anyone interested to send her a private message explaining why they wanted the dress. The post was shared widely, and once local news picked up the story, it spread even further. Submissions started pouring in, and by the June 2 application deadline, Stulgis had received 72 messages — all of which she read with her husband.
One submission stood out. It was from Margaret Hyde, who lives in Portage County, Ohio.
“Between covid and life throwing rotten lemons at us, our wedding budget keeps getting smaller,” Hyde, 32, wrote in a private Facebook message to Stulgis.
She went on to explain why she wanted the dress and shared a bit about herself.
“I am a simple woman who doesn’t like to talk about herself much,” wrote Hyde, who works at an auto-parts store.
“I serve my community as much as I can,” she continued, adding that she keeps several little free pantries around her neighborhood stocked and donates to her local food pantry whenever she can.
Unbeknown to Hyde, her soon-to-be sister-in-law, Alycia Ashley, also messaged Stulgis on Hyde’s behalf a few days earlier.
“She is the most selfless person I know,” Ashley wrote. “I’ve never met a more deserving woman who would carry on your wish to pass this gown on to someone after her.”
Hyde said she was initially hesitant about entering the dress contest, but she had told Ashley that she was interested in the gown. It was the style she had wanted but couldn’t afford.
“I’m a giver. I’m not normally a taker,” said Hyde, who at the last minute decided to send Stulgis a submission.
In a Facebook Live on June 4, Stulgis announced the lucky bride who would get her dress. Hyde was in shock.
“I wasn’t expecting to win at all,” said Hyde, who had searched far and wide for a dress but couldn’t find one that was affordable. She was considering making her own outfit as a last resort.
“I found several that I loved, but there was no way I could fork out thousands of dollars for one night,” she said.
Stulgis met Hyde in person to pass along the dress, which Hyde intends to give away — along with her shoes and some costume jewelry — once she has worn it at her wedding in October.
“I met her, and I felt like it was meant to be,” Stulgis said.
“The fact that I can pass this on, too, I absolutely love,” Hyde added.
Others were intrigued by the concept. In the process of trying to find the recipient of her dress, Stulgis received messages from many women who also wished to give away their wedding gowns.
“There’s just so many dresses and so many kind people,” Stulgis said.
She decided to start a Facebook group called Shared Dream Dresses to encourage women around the world to also give away their gowns to someone who would love to wear it.
“All gowns are free and donated and cleaned from the previous owner and passed on,” the group’s description reads.
Women are entitled to alter the gowns as they wish, Stulgis said, with the caveat that, once worn and washed, they will repost it in the group for another bride to claim.
In the four weeks since the group has launched, more than 2,100 members have joined and roughly 100 brides have successfully secured a dress to wear on their wedding day.
“It’s not about me anymore. It’s about other people wanting to give away their dress to someone else who needs one,” Stulgis said. “It’s really working out, and it’s so lovely.”
Jennifer Francis, 58, was one of the first members to join the group and excitedly offered up her formal ivory strapless gown, which she bought for her upcoming August wedding but ended up picking a different dress. The gown is unworn, and all the tags are still on it.
“I really just wanted to bless somebody with this dress,” said Francis, who lives in New York City.
Several women wanted it, Francis said, but there was one bride who was only a few days away from her wedding and, due to financial hurdles, still hadn’t gotten a gown. Francis paid to have the dress express shipped to Cambridge, Md., where the woman lives.
“She was very appreciative,” said Francis, who is one of five moderators in the Facebook group and also monitors the posts to ensure no one is trying to sell anything.
In the end, “I didn’t get that dress for myself. It was really for her,” Francis said.
Along with wedding gowns, women have also started sharing bridesmaids dresses, mother-of-the-bride ensembles and other accessories.
Stulgis’s mother, Lisa Toner, gave away two of her own gowns in the Facebook group.
“I’m never going to wear them again, and I want to let somebody enjoy them,” she said. “They were going to hang in my closet forever. At least someone now can wear these gowns and not have to worry about the burden of spending thousands of dollars for something that they’re going to wear for four to five hours.”
“When Gwendolyn decided to do this, I was just amazed,” she continued. “I think it’s a wonderful idea. I hope it spreads all over and makes every woman smile.”
That’s exactly her daughter’s wish.
“I’d like to help as many brides as we can,” Stulgis said. “Everyone deserves to feel beautiful on their wedding day.” | 2022-07-08T10:09:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gwendolyn Stulgis gave away her wedding dress on Facebook. Other brides followed. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/08/gwendolyn-stulgis-wedding-dress-giveaway/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/08/gwendolyn-stulgis-wedding-dress-giveaway/ |
The new Supreme Court case that imperils American democracy
Giving legislatures the power to overturn the will of voters risks the government’s legitimacy
Perspective by Christine Adams
Christine Adams is professor of history at St. Mary's College of Maryland and author of book on "The Creation of the Official French Royal Mistress," with Tracy Adams.
Security fencing at the Supreme Court in Washington. (Bloomberg/Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomber)
On the last day of June, the Supreme Court announced that it would take up Moore v. Harper this fall, a case stemming from a ruling by the North Carolina Supreme Court that its state constitution prohibits extreme gerrymandering. In Harper, Republican legislative leaders asked the Supreme Court to rule that it is unconstitutional for state courts and constitutions to protect federal voting rights. In their view, only state legislatures should be able to determine election rules — absent intervention by Congress. By this logic, state legislatures, under the “independent state legislature theory,” could reject presidential election results they do not like.
Legal commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire consequences for American democracy, already under attack, if the right-wing justices who control the Supreme Court rule in favor of the Republican petitioners.
In fact, we know that governments that disregard the will of voters quickly lose legitimacy with them. In revolutionary France, the coup of Sept. 4, 1797, irrevocably damaged the standing of the newly established republican government in the eyes of its citizens and set it on the path to a popular dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte.
The French Revolution of 1789 sought to establish a constitutional monarchy that would be more responsive to the needs of its citizens. The king had resisted changes, leading to the overthrow of the monarchy and the creation of the First Republic in September 1792.
What followed was the “Reign of Terror,” a bloody effort by revolutionaries to protect the fledgling government against both internal and external enemies of the French republic. The Committee of Public Safety, appointed by the National Convention (the French legislative body), led the effort to purge the nation of perceived traitors. Thousands of French men and women suspected of insufficient loyalty to the new government faced execution. Eventually the National Convention feared for their own safety, and they turned on the most prominent members of the committee, including Maximilien Robespierre, who was sent to the guillotine with his closest associates on July 28, 1794.
With the end of the “Terror,” the National Convention hammered out the Constitution of Year III (1795), establishing a new governmental structure with a bicameral legislature and an executive board of five directors. Taxpaying male citizens were allowed to vote, but with certain restrictions. The French bourgeois politicians who shaped the new constitution wanted to maintain republican constitutional structures and feared a return of the monarchy. But, they now associated popular sovereignty with mob rule and unreasonable demands for political rights and social benefits. They considered it essential to keep power in the hands of law-respecting property owners such as themselves.
However, continued economic and financial turmoil, along with France’s continuing war with most of Europe, meant that the new government, called the Directory, was extremely unpopular with both the Jacobin left and the royalist right.
And yet, the new constitution dictated that, in the interests of continuity and stability, two-thirds of the deputies in the new Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Elders would be elected from former members of the National Convention. This kept the legislature in republican hands for the first two election cycles.
When the first real opportunity for French voters to weigh in on their representatives came in April 1797, a coalition of royalists won a decisive victory and took control of both legislative chambers. This resurgent royalism worried three of the Directors — Paul Barras, Jean-François Reubell and Louis-Marie La Revellière-Lépeaux — while Directors Lazare Carnot and the newly chosen monarchist François-Marie Barthélemy urged the others to cooperate with the right-majorities on the councils.
Tensions increased over the summer of 1797 as the dominant royalist coalition grew increasingly assertive. The three Republican directors sought an allegiance with the military as they made plans to fight back.
On Sept. 4, 1797, the government declared martial law, claiming that a royalist conspiracy made it necessary. They annulled the previous April’s election results in half of France’s departments, while ordering the arrest of Carnot and Barthélemy, along with about 50 right-wing deputies, and removed approximately 200 deputies from the two legislative councils. They continued with a purge of conservatives throughout the government, closed down 32 newspapers and took renewed action against priests and other political opponents, a significant number of whom were deported.
While the Directors had for two years touted themselves as centrist constitutional guardians against the violent anarchy of the political left and the drive for royalist rule on the right, they were now exposed as willing to use force to override elections and to pressure the judiciary to act against their political enemies.
The Directors further undercut their own legitimacy as they worked to make sure that their opponents would be denied a majority in the elections of 1798. Most notably, they encouraged the creation of alternate electoral assemblies in districts where they feared the selection of either leftist or right-wing candidates for the councils or judicial positions.
And so, as the election results came in May 1798, the two legislative houses legally annulled the election of over 100 deputies and replaced them with candidates supportive of the regime — this time eliminating left-wing candidates most often.
In the end, these actions made it clear that the “constitutional” government did not represent the democratic aspirations of its citizens. With the regime so clearly committed to retaining its own power rather than respecting electoral results, it then became impossible for the Directory to call on the French public to uphold the constitution when a popular general named Napoleon Bonaparte carried out his own coup d’etat on Nov. 9, 1799. When the councils tried at first to resist the coup, objecting to Napoleon’s violation of the Constitution, he responded, “The Constitution! You yourselves have destroyed it. … It no longer has the respect of anyone.” Once soldiers threw their support to Napoleon and forced the Council of Five Hundred to disperse, the members of the Directory quietly stood aside. A rump of deputies approved Napoleon’s illegal seizure of power.
It is possible that the judges on the Supreme Court who voted to take up Harper this fall, and the Republican state legislators who have asked them to do so, genuinely see their actions as justified, much as the members of the Directory believed that they could only preserve republican institutions by subverting the constitution. It is difficult, though, to see the desire to put sole control of election rules in the hands of a partisan legislative body as anything more than a power grab.
Regardless, French history shows how dangerous such a move would be. Constitutional government gains its legitimacy through the democratic process. But increasingly, Americans are cynical about our democratic institutions. According to a recent survey, “voters are losing faith in our elections, our institutions, and most of all, in the ability of our democracy to survive.” Recent Supreme Court decisions and Republican willingness to ignore norms, and even laws, in their drive for political power has exacerbated these threats.
However, there is a stark historical lesson about continuing down this path. While the Directors thought that their decision to subvert the constitution would save the Republic and their political careers, it, in fact, laid the groundwork for Napoleon’s victory and their own downfall. | 2022-07-08T10:09:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The new Supreme Court case that imperils American democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/08/new-supreme-court-case-that-imperils-american-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/08/new-supreme-court-case-that-imperils-american-democracy/ |
Why I cross out my name when I write it
I needed a way to reject my family’s role in the history of slavery without denying it
Perspective by Baynard Woods
Baynard Woods is a writer living in Baltimore. He is the author of "Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness."
A statue is strapped on the back of a flatbed tow truck after being toppled from its pedestal on June 25, 2020, in Denver. (David Zalubowski/AP)
In August 2017, I stood with about a dozen other people in the predawn streets of Baltimore, watching equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson swing from a crane as they were removed from their plinths. A few days earlier, I was covering the racist rally in Charlottesville when James Alex Fields slammed his car into an anti-fascist march, killing Heather Heyer, seriously wounding a dozen more and shocking Americans into addressing the history behind the thousands of Confederate monuments in the United States.
I grew up in South Carolina, where I had been raised to revere Lee, Jackson and other white-supremacist enslavers. Among their number, I counted members of my own family. Standing out there, sleepless and shattered, I realized that my own name had stood as a Confederate monument over every story I had ever written.
I’d been looking into my family’s history since the Mother Emmanuel church massacre in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, but after Charlottesville, I again began to contemplate what it meant that in 1860, to take a single year, various Baynards believed that they owned 781 people, while the Woodses — from whom I’m directly descended — claimed possession of 23 more. But enslavers tended to marry enslavers, so I have no idea how many thousands of people were held in bondage by those associated with my family.
The question of what to do with Confederate monuments became, in my mind, mixed up with the question of what to do with my name. For me, the answer was easy with monuments to enslavers. Pull them all down. But the situation with my name and byline seemed more complicated.
The monument controversy nobody is talking about
Since before Reconstruction, Black Americans have thrown off “slave names,” but I had never read or heard about White people addressing our enslaver names. But I knew I could no longer carry mine innocently, so I decided to try to grapple with what it represents.
I quickly realized that, though I could no longer bear my name — which I share with my Trump-supporting father, who died last year — I could not change it either. To change it would only continue the coverup that kept me from recognizing its reality. And any name I chose would probably be just as fraught as my own.
I avidly sought out stories of other people engaged in undoing their names. In her book “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,” the African American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman writes that she chose a Swahili name in an attempt to “undo the past and reinvent myself,” without taking into account that “Swahili was a language steeped in mercantilism and slave trading and disseminated through commercial relations among Arab, African, and Portuguese merchants.” In what seems almost like a warning against my best intentions, she writes, “The ugly history of elites and commoners and masters and slaves I had tried to expunge with the adoption of an authentic name was thus unwittingly enshrined.”
In his autobiography, Malcolm X explains his name. “For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slavemaster name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my maternal forebears,” he writes. The X served as a variable, standing in for the name that was stolen. And when White reporters asked about the X or what his “real name” was, he had the opportunity to remind the reporters of that theft.
As an inheritor of that racist history, that was not an option for me. Seeking some way to acknowledge the past embedded in my name without continuing to honor it, I recalled the philosophical strategy of putting a word “under erasure.” It was a technique popularized by the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who argued that certain words contain their own negation, which he signified by crossing them out. Such words, he suggested, are unavoidable tools for speaking and thinking, but they are also inadequate. As such, they had to be eliminated while also remaining legible.
My own version of that would be: “Since the legacy of slavers cannot be borne, their names are crossed out. Since the legacy of slavers cannot be covered up, their names remain legible.”
But it is not a neutral action. I am trying to unbind the knots of power that still have effects in the present. As Derrida writes, when a name is “cancelled by a work of erasure,” it is “obliterated rather than forgotten, toned down, devalued.” And so I leave my name, but I cross it out, allowing the slash to act as crime scene tape, both marking off that history and acknowledging it. The strike through my name serves as a reminder of my civil, psychological and ethical obligation.
I’m aware that such a gesture could be empty and even harmful, especially if followed too fervently. It could serve to make me feel better while adding extra work for someone else trying to figure out how to deal with the practical issues surrounding this idiosyncratic byline.
This technique is not something I want to impose on others, nor could in every circumstance even if I wanted to. This publication, for instance, doesn’t allow a strike-through command in the byline field. But when I am in control and when it is my choice, as on the cover of my new book, I choose to cross it out as a reminder of the white supremacy we still need to undo.
Slavery reparations seem impossible. In many places, they’re already happening.
The backlash to anti-racist education shows that there is power simply in naming Whiteness. But drawing attention to the workings of Whiteness is, of course, inadequate to address the horrors hidden in our names — and of other names erased.
In 1871, my great-grandfather I.M. Woods was involved in the assassination of Peter J. Lemon, a Black county commissioner in South Carolina, as part of a wave of Klan terrorism attempting to topple the Reconstruction regime, which happened in 1876 when a vicious campaign of murder, fraud and repression ended in the storming and occupation of the state Capitol.
Lemon was a remarkable man, born into bondage in Clarendon County in 1842. When the Civil War began, he managed to escape and went to fight with the 5th Massachusetts cavalry, for the Union side. He returned to Clarendon County and was elected as a county commissioner in 1868, despite an election fraught with racist violence and voter fraud. He helped lead a Black militia, formed to fight back against the brutal attacks of the Ku Klux Klan. Hundreds if not thousands of people, Black and White, who supported the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction were tortured and killed.
On April 19, 1871, Congress passed the Third Enforcement Act, also called the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was intended to protect the newly established rights of the formerly enslaved and end the campaign of terror in South Carolina and other states. On that same day, according to congressional testimony and a coroner’s report, Lemon was lured to the Clarendon County town of Manning on county business and ambushed and shot by a party of six to eight White men, one of whom I believe was my great-grandfather.
The coverup was effective enough that no one was ever held accountable. The name of Peter Lemon was largely erased, rarely mentioned in print again, other than in threat: In 1887, 16 years after Lemon’s assassination, the Manning Times printed a letter to the superintendent of the town, which had hired a Black man as a police officer. “You are spotted,” the letter read. “And it would be to my surprise if you don’t reconsider this matter you will be done like Peter Lemon the Radical you can guess what became of him.”
My great-grandfather, on the other hand, was praised by other White people as a man who could be counted on when times got tough. He was a stalwart of the Democratic Party, which at that time was the party of “white man’s supremacy,” and was elected to the South Carolina State Legislature, which passed the apartheid Jim Crow laws that governed the state for another 70 years. Having learned all of this, I figured that crossing out my own name would be meaningful only if I could restore the name of Peter Lemon to the public record. I began sharing my research with a local activist and historian named George Frierson. Last April, on the 150th anniversary of the crime, we discovered the place where Lemon had been shot. Last month, we made a joint presentation to the Clarendon County Council, putting Lemon’s name back into the public record, urging them to name their administrative building after Lemon and denouncing my family’s role in his murder.
Next, I hope to fund the installation of a new gravestone in the cemetery where the historical records show that Lemon was buried.
These actions, too, are insufficient. But I need to acknowledge the harm those previously bearing my names have caused. Every such action will always be flawed, but nevertheless necessary, just as my name can neither be changed nor borne.
Only when we are aware of the cost of our history can we begin to reckon what is owed. For me, this is a first, small step toward reparations. | 2022-07-08T10:10:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why I cross out my name when I write it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/name-crossed-out-slave-holding-family/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/name-crossed-out-slave-holding-family/ |
From "Cue the Sun," published by Stanley Barker. The book's photos were shot from the windows of moving buses while traveling around India. (Trent Parke/Magnum Photos)
Photographer Trent Parke’s book “Cue the Sun” (Stanley Barker, 2022) is a ravishing document. It is also, unfortunately, out of print. This is astounding. It was published just two months ago.
I’m not sure when it went out of print, but it’s not really surprising. “Cue the Sun” is as much a stand-alone piece of art as it is a book of photographs. Parke has a pretty ravenous following (his book “Dream/Life,” which is also out of print, is selling for $1,500) and this book is sumptuous and unique.
Here’s the publisher’s description of Parke’s book:
“This highly anticipated artist’s book is constructed as a unique, vast, double-printed concertina, taking you on a fantastical journey through the kinetic Indian night to a breath-taking dawn.”
Parke made the images just one week before the coronavirus pandemic while on a trip across parts of India. He was there accompanying cricket legend Steve Waugh, who was traveling the country compiling his own book of photographs.
There are photographers, other artists and even athletes who spend so much time honing their discipline that it becomes more or less automatic. You can think of it as muscle memory or “being in the zone.” Parke is no exception to the rule, and this book proves it.
The photos in “Cue the Sun” were all made from behind the windows of buses as Parke and Waugh traveled between Agra, Amritsar, Delhi, Dharamshala, Meerut and Mathura.
There’s not much depth to the images, at least not in a sociopolitical way. They’re mostly surface studies — side glances made by an extraordinary visual mind. Though Parke was a somewhat passive player, sitting in a bus and peering out as he trundled past the scenery, his mind (muscle memory) was filtering everything through his considerable visual sensibilities.
I would go so far as to say it’s almost immaterial where the photos were made. There’s no overt social or political message. I don’t think most of Parke’s output is really about describing the exterior of things. Instead, Parke’s work is more about the internal, imagination, ideas and feelings.
Of the work in “Cue the Sun,” Parke says:
“I kept feeling as though I could have been in any number of other countries at a given time. Through the windows I felt the past and future collide. The contradiction, beauty, chaos and hope. Humanity on the move.”
It’s as if this book, itself an objet d’art with its beautiful production and seemingly infinite scroll of accordion pages, is Parke reaching into the cacophony of life, plucking memorable scenes and then putting them all together for us. The genius of the book lies not in the individual photos but in how those photos are put together — the sum of the parts.
I would be remiss if I didn’t own up to the fact that I am, and have been, a fan of Parke’s work for a very long time — from the first time I encountered his dreamlike black-and-white work in “Dream/Life” to his epic account of traveling the expanse of Australia in “Minutes to Midnight.” His work has always been inspirational to me.
“Cue the Sun” is not unlike having a deluxe vinyl version of your favorite album. It is utterly and absolutely gorgeous.
There are precious few copies of “Cue the Sun” available out there, and they are now going for more than the original asking price. But if you find one, and can afford to take the leap, it’s worth it. | 2022-07-08T10:10:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This stunning photo book is the result of an extraordinary visual mind - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/08/this-stunning-photobook-is-result-an-extraordinary-visual-mind/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/08/this-stunning-photobook-is-result-an-extraordinary-visual-mind/ |
As Biden visits Middle East, GAO questions U.S. complicity in Yemeni deaths
President Biden waves to reporters as he departs the White House. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
One question hovering over President Biden’s Middle East trip next week, especially his Saudi Arabia stop, is how complicit American-made weapons are in the deaths of Yemeni civilians.
During the trip, Biden will discuss the U.N.-mediated truce in Yemen, which White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “has led to the most peaceful period there since war began seven years ago.”
Yet that long and brutal war has been fueled by the supply of U.S. weapons to the Saudi-led coalition waging it. Reports have documented massive civilian deaths. Last year, the United States vowed to end support of the coalition’s offensive operations, including through arms sales.
But a report by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, raises troubling questions about how seriously State Department and Defense Department officials take that pledge.
Starting in 2015, the United States provided military support to the coalition, the report explained, which sought to restore Yemen’s government after an Iran-backed Houthi military offensive overtook Sana’a, the capital.
Through 2021, the Pentagon approved $54.6 billion in military support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the report. More than a third ($18.3 billion) was for missiles, including air-launched, ground-launched, and sea-launched varieties. Aircraft, ships, ammunition and weapons, all of which can be used offensively, also were included.
During that period, 23,000 airstrikes killed or injured more than 18,000 civilians, according to U.N. estimates.
Questions about American complicity in those deaths and injuries remain because U.S. officials can’t define the terms of the discussion — or war.
“In February 2021 the President announced his intent to end U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen,” Jason Bair, GAO’s director of international affairs and trade, said in an email. “While State officials told us that they attempt to distinguish between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons, they have no specific definitions of ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive.’ ”
If the U.S. government can’t tell the difference between offensive and defensive weapons, that’s a fundamental problem generating others issues.
“Without clear definitions of ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons, it can be difficult for the State Department to implement the President’s wishes” to end offensive weapons assistance, Bair added. He noted that “State’s assessment is based on the INTENDED use of the weapons, which may or may not match the actual use. State and DOD lack a comprehensive picture of how U.S. assistance has actually been used in the war in Yemen.”
There’s another problem with terms. Pentagon policy prohibits the “the misuse or unauthorized transfer” of defense goods and services, but those terms are not defined.
“DOD and State officials both said that use that causes civilian harm would not necessarily constitute ‘misuse,’ ” GAO’s report said.
While American officials don’t know how much harm American materials have caused in Yemen, the United Nations found “that U.S.-origin defense articles may have been used in strikes that caused substantial civilian harm in a manner that violated international humanitarian law,” the watchdog reported.
Curiously, U.S. officials haven’t tried to find out what harm their military supplies have caused.
“Despite several reports that airstrikes and other attacks by Saudi Arabia and UAE have caused extensive civilian harm in Yemen,” the report said, “DOD has not reported and State could not provide evidence that it investigated any incidents of potential unauthorized use of equipment transferred to Saudi Arabia or UAE.”
The Pentagon also “has not fully measured the extent to which its advising and training have facilitated civilian harm reduction in Yemen,” GAO found.
That tells Phyllis Bennis, a program director at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, that “the U.S. military has no intention of tracking — let alone trying to seriously diminish — civilian casualties that it causes in the so-called Global War on Terror. It speaks to the legacies of racism, xenophobia and indeed cruelty in these wars.”
Asked to comment on the GAO report, the Pentagon punted to State.
“We have engaged with the Saudi-led Coalition for several years on efforts to reduce the risk of civilian casualties and harm,” State’s public affairs office said by email. “The Saudis have received training from U.S. forces on Law of Armed Conflict, air-to-ground targeting procedures, and best practices for mitigating the risk of civilian casualties. The Saudi government has taken some steps to improve its targeting processes and adopted mechanisms for investigating alleged incidents of civilian casualties, though we recognize there is work to be done. …
“To truly address the issue of civilian casualties in Yemen,” the statement continued, “we must also stop the kinds of violence that have been responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties in recent years, like shelling, small-arms fire, and land mines. We have unfortunately seen the latter persist even during this current U.N. truce.”
How GAO’s findings affect Biden’s trip and ongoing U.S.-Saudi relations depends to some extent on Congress, according to Akshaya Kumar, director of crisis advocacy for Human Rights Watch.
“Now they have a GAO report that shows the oversight is inadequate and incomplete,” she said. “So, we’re really hoping that Congress then takes up the mantle once again to pressure the administration to rethink its approach.”
While American officials don’t know how much harm American materials have caused in Yemen, the United Nations found “that U.S.-origin defense articles may have been used in strikes that caused substantial civilian harm in a manner that violated international humanitarian law,” GAO reported.
For Human Rights Watch, which has published numerous reports about the tragedy in Yemen, the solution is not complex.
“The U.S. government … should just stop selling all weapons to the kingdom Saudi Arabia, at least until there’s an end to these abusive actions in Yemen,” Kumar said. “Just end all arms sales.” | 2022-07-08T10:10:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As Biden travels to Saudi Arabia, GAO report questions U.S. involvement in Yemeni deaths - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/biden-yemen-gao-report-arms-saudi-arabia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/biden-yemen-gao-report-arms-saudi-arabia/ |
Now featuring a surveillance-state ‘Hamlet,’ the Park Avenue Armory is a magnet for the arts on a grand scale
Alex Lawther as Hamlet in director Robert Icke's production of “Hamlet” at the Park Avenue Armory on Manhattan's Upper East Side. (Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory)
NEW YORK — The Park Avenue Armory, onetime home of the National Guard’s Silk Stocking Regiment and relic of the Gilded Age, could easily have fallen short of its repurposed ambitions. The immensity of the landmarked space, a 55,000-square-foot drill hall on Park Avenue with a ceiling that soars 85 feet high, did not conform to the demands of a 21st century arts world striving to meet audiences on ever more intimate terms.
But 15 years after it opened its doors, the Armory — occupying a city block between East 66th and 67th streets — has not only defied expectations, it has exceeded them as a new fortress for battalions of creative minds. The myriad artists who’ve accepted the space’s physical challenge, choreographers (Bill T. Jones), directors (Sam Mendes), multidisciplinary artists (Taryn Simon and Carrie Mae Weems), have succeeded in that most hard-won of missions: planting a vital new flag in New York City’s teeming landscape of the arts.
Emerging from the pandemic shutdown, the Armory has chalked up another achievement. A play that it introduced to American theatergoers in 2019 — Stefano Massini and Ben Power’s epic “The Lehman Trilogy” — opened on Broadway last fall, and wound up collecting five Tony Awards at last month’s ceremony, including the trophy for best play.
'The Lehman Trilogy' expands your notion of what three actors on a stage can conjure
“It’s really a wonderful story, a fairy tale,” Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director since 2015, said of the evolution of the venue, which he contends is singular. “The Lehman Trilogy” had to be reconfigured for its far smaller Broadway confines.
Audi explained that he became enamored with filling a hall “where this kind of large-scale theater experience is possible — a visionary experience where there’s much more freedom for scenography, more freedom for creating a special relationship with the audience, with sound, with technology.”
That exploration has led the Armory to tinker with scale in exhilarating ways, compelling theatergoers to think freshly about how live performance envelops us in an environment that utterly envelops it. The programming encompasses both original and well-known material, with this summer’s agenda leaning heavily on the classical: a repertory of “Hamlet” and Aeschylus’s “Oresteia” that runs until Aug. 13. Both are directed by Robert Icke, a graduate of Cambridge who has worked in leadership roles at such outstanding London companies as Headlong and Almeida Theatre, the latter founded in 1979 by Audi.
Icke’s “Hamlet” offers up a Denmark in 2022 in which surveillance cameras record the intrusion of the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father (David Rintoul) and a skittish Hamlet (Alex Lawther) languishes so shyly and introspectively he really does seem to want to disappear — to will his too solid flesh to melt. The production opened to mixed reviews earlier this month. But I’ve come to realize that no ideal “Hamlet” exists, so I was maybe more willing to let Icke (pronounced “Ike”) take me on an eye-filling, sometimes uneven but always interesting tussle with the play. This “Hamlet’s” most theatrical moments — the play within a play, the climactic duel, an ethereal epilogue of Icke’s devising — underline the advantages of seeing canonical work in monumental settings.
“I was feeling a little bit like I was getting too comfortable with the small canvas and that at some point, I was going to have to try and make this work on a bigger and bigger canvas,” Icke said in a Zoom interview from the Armory, where his “Oresteia” has its official opening later this month. (He directed versions of both plays in Britain before the pandemic.) “By the end of my time at the [325-seat] Almeida, it started to feel slightly exclusive, in a way that I didn’t really like.”
The Armory, with an annual budget of about $28 million, has housed productions in the Drill Hall for as few as 100 patrons for a stunning, socially distanced dance piece last year by Jones, “Afterwardsness,” and for as many as 1,800 for the Berlin Philharmonic. In addition to six major events each year, the organization holds lecture series, recitals and art installations in smaller quarters in and off the main hall, and has a commissioning arm for artists in a variety of genres.
“It’s kind of in a league of its own,” said Weems, whose “The Shape of Things,” a multimedia investigation of the circuslike dimension of American political life, premiered at the Armory in December. “They were just really terrific all the way through. They just gave me the room to explore, to work, to question, to doubt, to change, to make course corrections when I needed to do that. The level of patience and the level of care was really quite remarkable.”
Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s founding president and executive producer, had experience in the site-specific theater sector, some of it produced indoors in “found” spaces, at other times done in the open air. “There’s something special about being in a nontheatrical environment to create work,” she said via Zoom. “I remember the first time I went to see the Drill Hall. I just looked at this and I thought: ‘Oh my God. No rain dates!’ ”
The Armory has been a protean play space, some inspiring combination of coliseum, soundstage and great chamber. In 2014, Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford turned the Drill Hall into a Scottish plain, staging “Macbeth” on a muddy battlefield set between two 550-seat grandstands that I dubbed “Game of Thanes.” In 2018, playwright-director Simon Stephens mesmerizingly updated Federico García Lorca’s 1934 “Yerma” — the tragic tale of a woman who couldn’t conceive — by placing the action in a glass box that made it seem as if her world was a stifling terrarium.
Such visually compelling adaptations happen again and again at the Armory, which has learned over time what works and what doesn’t. A summer 2011 residency by the Royal Shakespeare Company on an overly labyrinthine structure yielded only lackluster stagings of crowd pleasers such as “Romeo and Juliet” and “As You Like It.” But a captivating mounting in 2017 of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape,” directed by Richard Jones and starring Bobby Cannavale, amounted to a pinnacle moment for the Drill Hall. Scenes unfolded on a conveyor belt, with actors swaying in the claustrophobic bowels of a ship. They froze in position intermittently, like contorted statuary, courtesy of choreographer Aletta Collins.
'The Hairy Ape' with Bobby Cannavale is a vision
The effect was a dreamlike conjuring of the early 20th century, in a cavernous space of vintage architectural finishes. “It’s like a great European train station,” Weems said of the Drill Hall. “The beautiful trusses and beautiful walkways, the elevated platforms that allow you to look down into the space. The place itself, the architecture, has incredible history.”
When an artist knows how to work on such a big scale, Audi said, what happens in the Drill Hall expresses something ineffable and deeply emotional. “It’s a dialogue with the space,” he said of the work. “And that’s kind of magical. It’s very difficult to describe, but it’s very, very touching.”
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Robert Icke. Sets and costumes, Hildegard Bechtler; lighting, Natasha Chivers; sound, Tom Gibbons; video, Tal Yarden; music, Laura Marling. With Ross Waiton, Joshua Higgott, Michael Abubakar, Gilbert Kyem Jr., Calum Finlay, Tia Bannon, Marty Cruickshank. About 3 hours 40 minutes. “Hamlet” runs in repertory with “Oresteia” through Aug. 13 at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave., New York. 212-933-5812. armoryonpark.org. | 2022-07-08T10:11:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A New York armory from the Gilded Age is a haven for the cutting edge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/07/08/hamlet-park-avenue-armory/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/07/08/hamlet-park-avenue-armory/ |
Innovations such as ‘cool pavement’ have the potential to cool down roadways and make walking and biking more pleasant
A growing number of cities are searching for strategies to offset the effects of higher temperatures on their communities. In the D.C. region, eight of the hottest summers on record have occurred since 2010, according to The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang.
Ladd Keith is an assistant professor of planning and sustainable-built environments at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. Keith and a team of researchers are exploring how communities can create “cool corridors” that take into account thermal comfort and safety. In one project, they are collaborating with the city of Tucson to examine whether innovations such as cooler pavement surfaces can make walking and biking more tolerable and extend the life of streets and roads.
Keith said it’s important for leaders to understand the effect rising temperatures can have on communities and why cities should consider incorporating heat-resilience strategies into infrastructure planning. He’s also co-author of a guidebook on how communities can plan for urban heat resilience. This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: What drew you to this particular area of study?
A: Before I came back to academia, I was co-chair of the planning commission for the city of Tucson and became really interested in how cities are planning for climate change. This was around 2005, 2006. I realized most of the resources available to communities related to climate change back then were all for coastal communities. But back then there was almost nothing available for cities that were dealing with [extreme heat]. That’s really changed, particularly over the last three years.
Q: So heat sometimes gets overlooked because you can’t see it, but you can certainly feel it.
A: It’s a little bit ironic because the fingerprint of climate change is literally rising temperatures. Yet that’s the last thing that we’ve planned for. And so cities are just really, really far behind with how they plan and govern it. If you look at how many flood plain managers and flood risk professionals there are around the United States, there’s tens of thousands of them. And we currently only have three dedicated staff people in offices in Miami, Phoenix and Los Angeles who specialize in heat. So even though it’s the No. 1 weather-related killer, we’re just not addressing it very well.
Q: Can you explain what the concept is behind cool corridors?
A: I would describe it as a multimodal transportation route where thermal comfort for pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users is prioritized as a critical design feature. The goal is to increase thermal comfort along these core corridors through the use of heat mitigation strategies. Features like trees or building new structures, increasing urban greening vegetation — and particularly for transit users, improving transit stops and bicycle parking. You can imagine other features — fountains for drinking water, things like that.
Q: Here in D.C., we’ve been looking at travel corridors in terms of speed and safety, which is where bus shelters come into this, but it sounds like there should be more thinking about not just those elements, but elements that can also control the temperature?
A: Absolutely. And I think regionally across the U.S., cities are just so different with so many climates and different natural vegetation. So what counts as a cool corridor in a place like Tucson might be very different than Washington, D.C. And so I think there’s a local flavor to cool corridors to consider. But the idea is to elevate and integrate the idea of thermal comfort for pedestrians, bicycle users and transit users.
More Q&As with transportation news makers
Q: Can elements that help with heat also potentially help places with cold?
A: That’s a good question. Some elements would certainly be the same — better sheltered bus stops or streetcar stops or light rail would certainly help with both the cold and the heat. So you can look at thermal safety in both directions, for sure.
Q: How can cool corridors make cities more livable? And can they make some types of commutes more comfortable for people?
A: The idea is to make walking and biking more comfortable and safe for the entire community. But particularly, it’s an equity issue because for community members that may not have transportation options besides walking or biking or transit, they’re exposed to extreme heat during their daily travel. For vulnerable or marginalized community members, cool corridors can really be a public health, a public safety issue. There are a lot of broader benefits, too. The transportation sector is one of the primary drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, so if we want to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are leading to warming temperatures, we’re going to have to help make non-vehicle transportation options more feasible and appealing.
Q: Are we seeing cities start to incorporate heat resilience into their planning?
A: The city of Phoenix just this spring began planting a lot of trees along one of its first officially designated cool corridors. The city of Los Angeles has a program that has a goal of combining cool pavement along with urban forestry in some of the city’s hottest areas. One of my favorite examples is Las Cruces in New Mexico, which is obviously a much smaller city. They had cool corridor pilot projects back in 2018. So they were one of the pioneers in this. I like to point to that one because cool corridors aren’t just for large cities that have a lot of resources.
Q: Within communities, do certain populations tend to be more vulnerable to the impact of extreme heat and could cool corridors be a strategy for improving the quality of life in those areas?
A: Heat equity is a really important concept. Heat isn’t equitably distributed across the city. And unfortunately, vulnerable neighborhoods are often marginalized, lower income, minority populations. There have been several studies that have shown that formerly “redlined” neighborhoods are much hotter than their richer counterparts, even to this day, by as much as 12 degrees. Cool corridors can help redress some of those inequities.
Q: Can you tell me about the work your team is doing in Tucson with the Cool Pavement Project?
A: It’s an evaluation of Tucson’s pilot Cool Pavement Program and it’s funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Institute for Transportation and Communities. And so myself, along with my research colleagues Kristina Currans and Nicole Iroz-Elardo, are partnering with the city [to evaluate] an asphalt rejuvenator that supposedly has heat reduction benefits when it’s applied. The city applied this asphalt rejuvenator last December and we’ve been taking measurements [of surface temperatures] and we’re doing the analysis right now.
Q: So what is cool pavement?
A: There are a lot of different types of cool pavements, so it’s not very well-defined because these are relatively new technologies. You may have seen the pictures of folks painting streets like literally white or lighter colors, like in Los Angeles or Phoenix. [Tucson’s project] is interesting because it’s an asphalt rejuvenator that contains different chemicals to reflect the sun, so it’s more like a sunscreen than a paint.
D.C. has one of the most intense urban heat islands in the U.S.
Q: What are you trying to find out?
A: The goal of the project is really to see if the asphalt rejuvenator actually does function well as a cool pavement treatment. We’re taking surface temperature readings all through the day and night to see if it reduces the heat gained through the day and if it reduces the heat emitted back from the road. Nighttime heat is incredibly dangerous, too. We’re also taking measurements to evaluate what pedestrians would feel if they were walking along this road.
Q: Are cool corridor projects expensive?
A: Because cool corridors are such an open concept with many applications, it depends on what you’re talking about. Is it just a few more trees? Is it increased bus shelters or shading along the road? Or is it a whole cool corridor with cool pavement? Certainly cool pavements and treatments can be more expensive. But as more cities adopt these, there is the possibility the prices will come down as they become more widely available.
Q: Is there anything else about the work you’re doing in this area that you’d like to mention?
A: One of the big-picture things is that our governance structures for heat are much further behind [how we manage] other climate risks. If you ask anyone about what transportation resilience looks like, a lot of times people look at flood resilience or resilience to hurricanes. My point is that we should consider heat resilience along with those other components. | 2022-07-08T10:11:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As temperatures rise, his research could help cities stay cool - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/08/research-heat-resiliency-cool-pavement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/08/research-heat-resiliency-cool-pavement/ |
'Shocked’ and ‘saddened’ world leaders react to Shinzo Abe’s assassination
Shinzo Abe, front left, at a Group of 20 world leaders' meeting in Australia in 2014. (Ian Waldie/Bloomberg)
World leaders past and present expressed their shock and sadness at the death of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated on Friday while attending a political rally.
News of the shooting of Japan’s longest serving leader has reverberated around the globe and cast a spotlight on political violence and gun culture in the country and elsewhere.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Abe a “dear friend” and said his country would observe a national day of mourning on Saturday “as a mark of our deepest respect.”
“Deeply saddened by the heinous killing of Shinzo Abe, a defender of democracy and my friend & colleague over many years,” tweeted NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Russia, which has had strained relations with Japan since Tokyo imposed sanctions in response to the Ukraine invasion, also sent its sympathies.
Shinzo Abe, former Japanese leader, is critically wounded in shooting
Abe, who came from a high-profile Japanese political family and resigned as prime minister in 2020 due to ill health, was shot at a campaign event Friday, Japanese officials said. Japan has among the world’s strictest firearms laws and gun violence is rare.
The 67-year-old had been giving a speech in Nara, near Osaka, ahead of elections for Japan’s upper house of parliament on Sunday. Videos showed a chaotic scene with Abe, unmoving, lying on the ground as attendees yelled for an ambulance.
Before learning of Abe’s death, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is in Indonesia attending a gathering of Group of 20 foreign ministers, called the shooting a “very, very sad moment.”
“Our thoughts, our prayers are with him, with his family, with the people of Japan,” Blinken said.
John Hudson in Nusa Dua, Indonesia, Grace Moon in Seoul, Regine Cabato in Manila, Amar Nadhir in Bucharest, Robyn Dixon in Riga, Latvia, and Eva Dou contributed to this report. | 2022-07-08T10:11:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World leaders shocked by Shinzo Abe’s death after gun attack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/shinzo-abe-death-reactions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/shinzo-abe-death-reactions/ |
South Africa plunged into darkness during power crisis
Alicia Skeepers assists a customer in East London, South Africa, on July 7. (Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters)
KHAYELITSHA, South Africa — It has become a fact of life in South Africa, as predictable as the rising sun. Every day, it seems, the power goes off.
Sometimes it only happens once a day, for two hours. Other days, rolling blackouts can last eight hours or more, crippling economic activity and disrupting life in this nation of 60 million people, which is still struggling to get back on its feet because of the pandemic.
Blackout warnings frequently pop up on cellphones, and people try to plan their days and nights around the power outages in their area.
The wealthy minority here have backup power systems at home to keep the lights on, and the WiFi and refrigerator running, but no one is immune. Traffic signals don’t work, causing jams at major intersections. Gas stations and stores can’t handle electronic transactions, and cash machines can’t function.
For the poor majority in this deeply unequal society, it is an ever-worsening nightmare. Already coping with high unemployment and soaring inflation, families in townships and informal settlements struggle to prepare meals at night, while children do their homework in the dark.
“We are all struggling,” said Xolelwa Maha, a community leader in the PJS informal settlement of Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township. “When I go home there is no electricity and I can’t cook until it comes back on. Sometimes that is too late and the children have gone to bed without a proper meal for days.”
South Africa has used load shedding, or rolling blackouts, to conserve electricity since 2008, but the current outages are the worst anyone can remember. In April alone, 1,054 gigawatt-hours of power got cut nationwide, compared to 2,521 gigawatt-hours cut for all of 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.
The government has blamed the additional blackouts on a recent wildcat strike by workers at Eskom, the state utility company, but the problems with South Africa’s power grid run much deeper — rooted in an aging fleet of coal-fired power plants, a lack of maintenance, corruption, theft and vandalism. The strike has been resolved, but cash-strapped Eskom has warned that a backlog of repair work at the power stations could take weeks to clear, while the system could face more breakdowns.
In Cape Town, water service in some areas cannot be maintained because outages prevent pumps from filling reservoirs that supply the region. “Heavy machinery, such as water pumps, sewage pump stations, electricity transformers, and substations, are just not made to take this kind of abuse,” the city warned in a statement this week. “The constant on-again/off-again is causing dozens of localized trips.”
Energy expert Chris Yelland said the constant power cuts are a national emergency, and they could become a national disaster.
“In the worst-case scenario, a partial or a national blackout with all its consequences, including social unrest,” is possible, Yelland said. “The government and Eskom have had more than a decade to talk through and address the challenges, but the hard statistics show that the situation is not improving.”
Busisiwe Mavuso, chief executive of Business Leadership South Africa, called for diversifying electricity sources because the nation can no longer rely on Eskom.
“I’ve been told of companies forced to lay off staff because they simply couldn’t open their doors,” Mavuso wrote in her weekly newsletter. “Those with generators couldn’t get diesel to fill them fast enough. Those on batteries found them running dead.” The situation has been exacerbated by record gas prices, which have surged 36 percent in South Africa this year, in part because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Greg Bing, owner of AP Jones, a family clothing store in Cape Town’s southern Fish Hoek suburb, said years of power outages have had a “huge effect” on business.
“After the worst of covid was over we were waiting for the euphoria, but now we’re having to deal with this hole,” Bing said. “We can’t seem to get out of the quagmire.”
Bing bought a generator to keep the lights on in the store and batteries to operate cash registers and credit card machines. “The problem is that with increased frequency of load shedding the batteries don’t have time to recharge properly and the phones don’t work,” he said.
Down the road in Fish Hoek, Shiji John, owner of the Bhandaris Indian restaurant, said people were too afraid to go out at night during the blackouts. “No one comes out in the dark,” John said. “I don’t know how we can continue to operate a business like this.”
Even in such challenging times, there are small success stories.
Business at Mohammed Hussein’s corner convenience store in the PJS informal settlement in Khayelitsha has been good thanks to a project funded by a Swiss research university, ETH Zurich, to install small solar lights on 750 houses in the area.
While neighboring streets are plunged into darkness during load shedding, the area outside his shop is still illuminated, attracting people from all over in search of a late-night snack.
“People come from neighboring areas because there is light,” Hussein said. | 2022-07-08T10:11:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | South Africa plunged into darkness during load shedding power crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/south-africa-power-loadshedding-eskom/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/south-africa-power-loadshedding-eskom/ |
In 2011, Roki Sasaki survived the devastating earthquake and tsunami in his hometown of Iwate and lost his father and two other relatives when their home was washed away. (Chiba Lotte Marines)
TOKYO — All of Iwate Prefecture was counting on Roki Sasaki three years ago. Sasaki, then 17, had broken Shohei Ohtani’s high school record by throwing a 101-mph fastball and was expected to lead Ofunato High to its first shot in 35 years at competing in Koshien, the annual high school tournament considered one of Japan’s most sacred sports events.
That’s when Coach Yohei Kokubo did the unthinkable: He benched him.
Kokubo was worried about the stress that hard throwing was taking on Sasaki’s developing body, but his decision was at odds with the country’s notoriously brutal, win-at-all-costs teenage baseball training culture. After Ofunato lost in a Koshien qualifier without Sasaki, fans inundated the school with angry phone calls.
Three years later, Sasaki again appears poised to follow Ohtani, the Los Angeles Angels star, drawing attention from Major League Baseball scouts as potentially the next big thing. In April, Sasaki pitched the first perfect game in the Japanese major leagues in 28 years, becoming the youngest to do so. The next game, he followed up with eight more perfect innings before being pulled. The 20-year-old right-hander with a 100-mph fastball and a confounding splitter has catapulted into a global sensation — and sparked debate in Japan over how the country nurtures its future superstars.
“I can feel people’s interest, for which I am really thankful and feel absolutely honored,” Sasaki said in a written interview with The Washington Post last month. “One of my goals is to be playing until I’m 40. I hope that I can continue to play successfully not just for this year but over a long period of time for those around me, and also prove that the decisions and considerations made for me were the right decisions.”
Born in Iwate, one of the hardest-hit areas of the March 2011 triple disaster that devastated Japan, Sasaki was 9 when he lost his father and grandparents to the tsunami that resulted from a massive earthquake and triggered a nuclear meltdown. After their home was swept away, Sasaki, his mother and his siblings were relocated from Rikuzentakata to a temporary home about 12 miles north in Ofunato, where they lived until 2017.
“Eleven years have passed but the hardships and sadness I felt then have still not disappeared,” Sasaki said at a news conference on the 11th anniversary of the tragedy. “And it is thanks to support from all around that I have been able to focus on baseball under those circumstances. … Don’t take what’s in front of you and the important people in your life for granted.”
It was on a makeshift field at Ofunato Middle School, which was an emergency shelter for victims of the tsunami, where Sasaki found joy and inspiration in baseball. Training conditions were less than ideal, with limited space to practice because temporary housing lined the school grounds.
The Fukushima tsunami 10 years later: The day that changed Japan
Nonetheless, Sasaki was moved by baseball, particularly by Masahiro Tanaka of the Rakuten Eagles, from his home region of Tohoku. He recalls watching Tanaka close out the winning game in 2013 for the team’s first and only Japan Series championship, solidifying Tanaka’s status as Japan’s No. 1 pitcher. Tanaka then left to play for the New York Yankees.
“Now having become a professional player myself, I hope that I too can bring such joy and hope to children,” Sasaki told The Post.
In 2019, he was drafted in Nippon Professional Baseball’s first round to play for the Chiba Lotte Marines. While Sasaki already has gotten attention from MLB, he faces complicated international posting restrictions if he leaves the Japanese league before he’s 25.
The Marines sidelined Sasaki in 2020 to build up his strength. He debuted May 16, 2021, and this April 10 he became the 16th pitcher in Japanese baseball history to throw a perfect game, 28 years after Hiromi Makihara in 1994. On April 17, Sasaki followed up with eight perfect innings.
He is now nicknamed the “Monster of the Reiwa Era,” placing him on par with Daisuke Matsuzaka, the “Monster of the Heisei Era,” who pitched for the Boston Red Sox and New York Mets before returning to Japan and retiring in 2021. This summer, Sasaki was ranked first by fans in NPB all-star voting.
“It was beyond what I imagined. I was really stunned,” Matsuzaka said after the two met in February, complimenting Sasaki’s control of his fastball.
His early accomplishments have underscored efforts to overhaul Japan’s notoriously brutal teenage baseball training culture, featuring hours-long daily practices with the goal of playing at the summer Koshien.
A Japanese teenager threw 881 pitches over two weeks. Is that abuse?
Baseball is wildly popular in Japan, and Koshien, an annual tournament named after the stadium where it’s held, is a revered event. Since Koshien began in 1915, 21 years before Japan’s first professional baseball game, it has been canceled only for World War II and, in 2020, because of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a tradition for those who don’t make it through the single-elimination tournament to scrape dirt from the field into a bag, often while in tears, as a keepsake to remember playing there.
During the 2019 prefecture tournament, Ofunato High was just one game from the coveted chance at playing in Koshien. Sasaki had thrown 435 pitches in the eight days leading up to the game. He wanted to play in the last game of the prefectural final, but Kokubo decided not to play Sasaki in two consecutive games to prevent injury. Sasaki had thrown 129 pitches the previous day.
Ofunato High lost, 12-2, to Hanamaki Higashi High, which represented Iwate Prefecture in that year’s Koshien.
Despite its unpopularity with local fans, the decision helped Sasaki preserve his strength, allowing him to become stronger and in better control of his 6-foot-3 body, experts say. Surveys by the Baseball Federation of Japan and Japanese sports doctors found as much as 60 to 70 percent of young baseball players in Japan suffer from pain and injuries, especially in their shoulders or elbows, and that the injuries are worse for pitchers.
Repetition is especially problematic for young hard-throwing pitchers such as Sasaki, said Takashi Kawamura, associate professor of health and sport sciences at University of Tsukuba and an expert in the biomechanics of baseball and coaching. He said while there is more recognition of the physical toll on young athletes, it remains rare for coaches to sacrifice a chance at winning for the health of a single player.
“The long-standing mentality and culture focused on winning is still intact, especially putting Koshien as the ultimate goal, without considering a long-term career beyond that,” said Kawamura, who mentored Kokubo. “Whether they go on to play professional or not, baseball shouldn’t end in middle school or high school but should be played in a way that it can be enjoyed for a long time. So I hope this mentality will continue to spread and be put into practice.”
Fresh off a perfect game, Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki nearly throws another
Experts say while it may take a long time, change may be coming for Japan’s youth baseball culture. It’s notable that despite the backlash in 2019, Kokubo’s decision is now accepted — which may signal the potential for the public’s acceptance of alternative paths to fame, said Jim Allen, a longtime baseball writer in Japan.
“Japan is changing enough that [Sasaki] doing it differently — four years after his high school senior year, when it was a national scandal — is now accepted as just part of the scenery,” Allen said. “To me, that’s really the meaning, that he’s symbolic of the change.”
Sasaki is the product of a new path that his coaches carved outside of the system, Allen said, and may inspire other coaches and parents to emulate them.
“He’s sort of the new wave, and because of his success, he’s going to be a signal that things don’t have to always be the same,” Allen said. “He’s doing it the only way he’s being allowed to do it, and that happens to be a different way. … Even if he’s not the revolutionary, he’s the revolution.” | 2022-07-08T11:14:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Roki Sasaki, after sitting out Koshien, has a perfect game and Japan's attention - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/roki-sasaki-japan-youth-baseball/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/roki-sasaki-japan-youth-baseball/ |
Two people killed in separate incidents in Prince George’s County
Two people were fatally shot in separate incidents in Prince George’s County.
One incident happened around 4:50 p.m. Thursday in the 2000 block of Oglethorpe Street in the Chillum area. When police went to an apartment for a welfare check, they found a woman who was pronounced dead on the scene.
In another incident, police said they found a man — who was later identified as Antoine Dorsey, 27, of Greenbelt — around 9 p.m. Tuesday in the road near Beaver Dam and Biocontrol roads in the Beltsville area. He had been shot and was taken to a hospital, where he died.
Police are trying to figure out a motive and find the killer in both cases. | 2022-07-08T11:23:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two people killed in separate shootings in Chillum, Beltsville areas of Prince George's County - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/two-killed-chillum-beltsville/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/two-killed-chillum-beltsville/ |
Newspapers reporting the resignation of Boris Johnson lay on the floor at Downing Street in London, Britain, July 8, 2022. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)
LONDON — Welcome to Day One of Boris Johnson’s new, strange and super awkward premiership, dubbed the “the long goodbye” by friendly British newspapers. Others compare his new government to a kind of zombie entity.
The embattled, soon to be discarded prime minister, who succumbed to a ministerial revolt and announced his resignation on Thursday, plans to stay in office until his fellow Conservative Party members choose his successor — a process that might not be complete until September or October.
And so Johnson may trundle on, for weeks to months — a leader degraded by almost 60 resignations, which saw top ministers branding the him as not fit for leadership, because he cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
This could cause problems.
Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world, a member of the elite wealthy nation club of the Group of Seven, and a crucial ally to the United States, Europe and Ukraine.
Johnson quickly appointed a new jiffy cabinet to keep the government functioning, but many of these new faces are inexperienced low fliers.
First order of business, Johnson told his cabinet, he “would not seek to implement new policies or make major changes of direction,” according to a readout provided by 10 Downing Street.
Like many countries, Britain is the midst of a cost of living crisis, facing 9 percent inflation and forecast to slide into a recession. This summer there are threats of massive national strikes by unions representing railway conductors, teachers, postal workers, nurses and others.
Johnson assured the nation that “major fiscal decisions should be left for the next prime minister.” Or as Robert Buckland, who returned to the cabinet as Welsh secretary, put it: “This prime minister no longer has the political authority to do new things.”
Okay, then what?
Many are wary of what Johnson might do during his last summer at 10 Downing. He will certainly try to resuscitate his standing — he will have the world stage and a bully pulpit and a massive PR operation at his service.
“It’s very difficult to see how Boris Johnson, given the character that he is, is going to be able to govern for three months in quiet humility and contrition,” George Freeman, who resigned as science minister on Thursday, told reporters.
It is still possible that Johnson could end up vacating his offices sooner than he wants. Some members of his own party still want him gone tomorrow.
A former Conservative Party prime minister, John Major, wrote that leaving Johnson in office for the summer “unwise, and may be unsustainable.”
Johnson’s predecessors — who were also shoved aside — were Theresa May and David Cameron. They both remained in office as their party chose a new prime minister. But both still had the backing of their members of parliament. They were trusted. May left because she couldn’t ink a Brexit deal. Cameron left because he lost the Brexit referendum to Johnson.
But the problem here is that Johnson is so damaged.
David Gauke, writing in the New Statesman, explained that May and Cameron “may have been flawed, but Johnson is different. He has been forced from office because he is in disgrace.”
In its editorial, the Times of London argued that Johnson should go now and let an interim leader such as Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab to step in while a successor is chosen. He previously stood in for Johnson while the prime minister was seriously ill with covid.
The editorial suggested that while Cameron and May could be relied on as caretakers to act with “honesty and integrity,” Johnson could not.
“Mr Johnson, by contrast, is leaving in disgrace, rejected by his own party for his persistent dishonesty, rule-breaking and flagrant disregard for the codes and conventions that underpin public life,” it said.
The opposition Labour Party is threatening to call a vote of no-confidence if Johnson doesn’t step down immediately.
The party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner, on the BBC, called the current prime minister “a proven liar who’s engulfed in sleaze and we can’t have another couple of months of this.”
“So they do have to get rid of him, and if they don’t, we will call a no-confidence vote because it’s pretty clear — he hasn’t got the confidence of the house or the British public,” she said.
Ed Davey, the leader of another party in opposition, the centrist Liberal Democrats, said it was “ludicrous” to leave Johnson in power.
If the majority of lawmakers in Parliament backed it, one possible option could also be a general election.
But it’s doubtful that Conservative lawmakers, even very disgruntled ones, would go before the voters as there’s a real chance of they could lose their majority if an election was held today.
The race to succeed Johnson kicked off Friday with Tom Tugendhat out of the tracks early with an article in the Daily Telegraph saying that he was putting together a “broad coalition” of supporters and would offer the party a “clean start.” Tugendhat is the chair of the influential foreign affairs committee and a frequent critic of the Johnson administration.
According to the Daily Mail, more than a dozen lawmakers are preparing leadership bids. The Attorney General Suella Braverman said she wanted to give it go — even before Johnson resigned — and former minister Steve Baker suggested he was mulling it over. Other names doing the rounds include: Ben Wallace, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Nadhim Zahawi and Penny Mordaunt.
Any Conservative lawmaker can put their name in the hat as long as they have enough nominations. In 2019, candidates needed eight nominations. Those rules could be changed next week. | 2022-07-08T11:31:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boris Johnson begins lame duck rule in Britain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-resignation-fallout/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-resignation-fallout/ |
What to watch with your kids: ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ and more
Natalie Portman, left, and Chris Hemsworth in “Thor: Love and Thunder.” (Jasin Boland/Marvel Studios)
Thor’s new adventure focuses on love; violence, language.
“Thor: Love and Thunder” is the sequel to 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok” and the fourth Thor movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This time around, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) bids goodbye to the Guardians of the Galaxy when a new threat appears in the universe: Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), whose mission is to kill every god. Expect plenty of comic-book-style action and violence, including weapon use and hand-to-hand combat, as well as two injuries/deaths that are likely to upset younger audiences. The story focuses more on love and romance than most other MCU films, with kissing and affection between a couple and discussions of true love and the “ones who got away.” There’s also a suggestive scene in the realm of the gods where a planned orgy is mentioned more than once and women literally swoon at seeing Thor stripped of his clothes. Language includes several uses of the word “s---,” plus “p--- off,” “hell” and “oh, my God.” Families can check in on the movie’s messages about the importance of choosing love, asking for help and persevering despite the odds. (119 minutes)
Duck & Goose (TV-Y)
Gentle series promotes empathy, understanding and fun.
“Duck & Goose” is a gentle animated series based on the best-selling children’s books by Tad Hills. Duck (voice of Connor Andrade) and Goose (Jecobi Swain) are best friends who love exploring their meadow world, which changes with the seasons. Even though they get along, Duck and Goose see the world differently and have a lot of contrasting ideas about how things should be done. Luckily, they learn that it’s okay to disagree, saying, “You be you, and I’ll be me,” and are able to work together in the end. Parents will love the social-emotional lessons and pleasant tone, while preschoolers will enjoy the sweet adventures. (Six-minute episodes)
Swashbuckling adventure has kid role model, monster attacks.
“The Sea Beast” is a thrilling adventure about a young orphan (voice of Zaris-Angel Hator) who stows away on a sea-monster-hunting ship and embarks on a journey that could change history. It includes animated action violence and potentially scary images of enormous sea monsters attacking ships and causing destruction. Monster hunters attack and kill the giant creatures with a variety of weapons (spears, cannons, etc.). Chaos and fighting lead to a child getting seriously injured, and a little blood is briefly shown. There are swashbuckling sword fights and close calls with drowning, an adult points a gun at a child, and a child wields a knife. Adult characters drink, and language includes “bloody hell” and “a--.” The story models the power of young people standing up for others and making a big difference, as well as teamwork, integrity and looking past the surface of a situation. And the film boasts a diverse cast, including a young, strong female character who’s kind, optimistic and brave. (119 minutes)
The Princess (R)
Blood, gore in martial arts-heavy fairy tale twist.
“The Princess” is a gory, medieval castle-set action film, not a family-friendly fairy tale. Star Joey King demonstrates courage while fighting her way out of a guarded tower, but lots of blood is spilled — and dozens are killed — in the process. People are wounded or killed by sword, fire, strangling, punching, falling and being shot with arrows. A main character is beheaded, and another nearly drowns. People are also punched, bludgeoned, knocked over, handcuffed, drugged, stabbed in the eye, bitten and slapped. One character seems to take pleasure in killing others, and a group of men surrounds a woman, touches her and talks about taking off her clothes. Two people kiss, and there’s mention of a brothel. The main character does everything to avoid marriage, which is considered part of her “duty” as a princess. She’d rather be a ruler and a warrior. Men appear drunk in several scenes. Language includes “b----,” “bloody hell” and “harlot.” (94 minutes) | 2022-07-08T11:40:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Common Sense media's weekly recommendations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/08/common-sense-media-july-8/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/08/common-sense-media-july-8/ |
Live updates June jobs report looms amid rising inflation and recession fears
Looking back at the May jobs report
The unemployment rate in May remained unchanged at 3.6 percent. The June report arrives Friday amid persistent inflation and growing recession fears. (Matt Rourke/AP)
Talk of recession is everywhere. Inflation is at 40-year highs, the stock market is spiraling, and consumer sentiment has tanked to an all-time low.
Economists and policymakers will be closely watching this morning’s employment numbers from the Labor Department, which will tell us how many new jobs were created in June. The hope is that jobs growth — which has been hovering around 400,000 new positions per month — will slow to a sustainable pace that could help moderate inflation, without a significant rise in unemployment.
The labor market is a crucial indicator of whether the country is in a recession, and so far there is little indication of a dramatic cooldown. The unemployment rate, at 3.6 percent, is expected to remain near historic lows. The Federal Reserve expects the jobless rate to rise gradually to 4.1 percent by 2024.
Economists are generally forecasting jobs growth of between 200,000 and 300,000 in June. Overall, U.S. employers have added more than 6 million jobs in the past year.
By Abha Bhattarai7:39 a.m.
U.S. employers added 390,000 jobs in May, marking another blockbuster month in the labor market that points to sustained economic growth even as head winds mount.
The unemployment rate was 3.6 percent, unchanged from April, the Labor Department reported last month.
“There are signs that the white-hot labor market is cooling,” said Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo. “But if you step back and look at the big picture, this is still an exceptionally strong pace of hiring.”
The burst of new jobs, which could contribute to heightened inflation, adds even more fuel to the Federal Reserve’s already aggressive plan to raise interest rates.
The labor market has proved to be a surprisingly resilient pillar of the economy. The pace of growth eased slightly in May — following nearly 12 months of at least 400,000 new jobs per month — though economists were expecting a more marked slowdown.
“Despite the slight cool-down, the tight labor market is clearly sticking around and is shrugging off fears of a downturn,” Daniel Zhao, a senior economist at Glassdoor, wrote in an email. “We continue to see signs of a healthy and competitive job market, with no signs of stepping on the brakes yet.”
In all, U.S. employers have added more than 6.5 million jobs in the past year, with many of those gains concentrated in industries such as manufacturing, hospitality and transportation, which are racing to keep up with booming demand. That trend continued in May, with broad growth across almost all sectors. | 2022-07-08T11:40:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | June jobs report: Live updates and analysis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/08/jobs-report-june-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/08/jobs-report-june-2022/ |
By Jonathan Rauch
People protest in response to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.”
Whatever their differences, absolutists on both sides of the abortion debate have responded to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade by maneuvering to impose their moral vision on the whole country. Pro-lifers are already demanding a federal ban on abortion; pro-choicers, a federal law protecting abortion rights. States on both sides will try to apply their powers extraterritorially, creating a legal crossfire.
These efforts to nationalize abortion policy are misguided and counterproductive. Instead, if the country is wise, it will go in the opposite direction, taking inspiration from an unexpected quarter: the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act(DOMA).
That law stepped in at a moment when the debate about same-sex marriage — like the abortion debate today — was turning into a national donnybrook. It had two transformative effects. First, it planted the issue firmly with the states. Second, it kept the federal government out of the picture for almost 20 years. Though marriage equality advocates viewed it at the time with dismay, in hindsight it was a success for the country and ultimately for marriage equality, too.
To see DOMA’s relevance today, begin with the fact that right now, after almost 50 years during which abortion has been constitutionally protected, there is hardly any legal clarity about the boundaries of state and federal powers. Can pro-life states ban abortion drugs the FDA has approved? Can they ban their residents from obtaining out-of-state abortions? By the same token, can pro-choice states shield their abortion providers from subpoenas and extradition? Can they use licensing laws to bar abortion providers from cooperating with out-of-state prosecutors? Sorting out such questions will require years of litigation. In the meantime, millions of Americans will be unsure of their rights.
Efforts by Congress or the executive branch to impose a national abortion policy will be equally chaotic. If Democrats managed to revoke the filibuster and pass a national abortion-rights law, it would be litigated to death and probably overturned the moment Congress and the White House changed hands. The same would be true if Republicans rammed through a national ban.
A generation ago, same-sex marriage was not quite as intractable as abortion, but it came close. In 1994, Hawaii’s courts triggered fury and panic by signaling a ban on same-sex marriage. Conservatives sought a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. But the amendment never came close to passing.
What did pass, in 1996, was DOMA. It had two parts. One clause said the federal government would not recognize any same-sex marriage, a legally questionable provision that was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court. The other clause is the one to emulate today. It said, simply, that no state needs to recognize a same-sex marriage licensed by another state. Effectively, it denationalized the issue by letting states go their separate ways.
What then unfolded was an extraordinary national conversation. Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2003. In response, dozens of states banned it. For equality advocates like me, those were dark days. Yet opponents’ arguments gradually crumbled, and the public consensus turned. By the early 2010s, support in the Gallup poll for same-sex marriage topped 50 percent.
I was fearful of a backlash when, in 2015, the Supreme Court intervened by mandating marriage equality nationally. To my surprise, the ruling found broad acceptance. What made all the difference was that by 2015 the country had been debating gay marriage for more than 20 years. Today, according to Gallup, support for same-sex marriage is above 70 percent. For equality advocates, those two decades of argument in the states turned out to be a gift, because they placed marriage equality on a much stronger footing with the public than had the Supreme Court or Congress intervened too early.
Whatever you think of Roe v. Wade jurisprudentially, as a political matter it did come too early, preempting a moral debate the country was only beginning to have. The revocation of Roe provides a second chance to have that debate — provided that we not repeat Roe’s error by imposing a national policy too soon.
The legal issues around abortion are too complex for a two-sentence DOMA-type law. Still, Congress could take important steps to localize the issue. It could make abortion bans unenforceable across state lines, for example, which would please pro-choicers. It could clarify that states have the power to restrict abortion within their boundaries, which would please pro-lifers. Such measures allowing states to go their separate ways would provide time and political space for a durable policy consensus to form.
That prospect may seem to offer little comfort to millions of American women who have lost a constitutional right, something LGBTQ Americans did not have to face. Nonetheless, there is a possibility that a consensus will gradually form around a federal abortion-rights law — ironically, one that may resemble the Roe regime.
For now, all we know is that avoiding nationalization keeps the policy equivalent of a nuclear weapon out of the hands of absolutists on both sides. For the next 10-plus years, the United States’ national abortion policy should be to have no national abortion policy.
Many more babies will be born post-'Dobbs.' We need to help them and their moms. | 2022-07-08T11:41:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The abortion debate could use its own Defense of Marriage Act - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/abortion-gay-marriage-defense-of-marriage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/abortion-gay-marriage-defense-of-marriage/ |
I’m a journalist who stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or our product?
By Amanda Ripley
(Maren Amini for The Washington Post)
Amanda Ripley is the author of “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped — and How We Get Out” and host of the Slate podcast “How To!”
I have a secret. I kept it hidden for longer than I care to admit. It felt unprofessional, vaguely shameful. It wasn’t who I wanted to be.
But here it is: I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years.
It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades, and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it “work.” Every morning, I read The Washington Post, the New York Times and sometimes the Wall Street Journal. In my office at Time magazine, I had a TV playing CNN on mute. I listened to NPR in the shower. On weekends, I devoured the New Yorker. It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it! Usually, it made me feel more curious, not less.
But half a dozen years ago, something changed. The news started to get under my skin. After my morning reading, I felt so drained that I couldn’t write — or do anything creative. I’d listen to “Morning Edition” and feel lethargic, unmotivated, and the day had barely begun.
What was my problem? I used to cover terrorist attacks, hurricanes, plane crashes, all manner of human suffering. But now? I was too permeable. It was like I’d developed a gluten allergy. And here I was — a wheat farmer!
So, like a lot of people, I started to dose the news. I cut out TV news altogether, because that’s just common sense, and I waited until late afternoon to read other news. By then, I figured, I could gut it out until dinner (and wine).
But the news crept into every crevice of life. I couldn’t avoid exposure — in my email inbox, on social media, in text messages from friends. I tried to toughen up. I gave myself stern lectures: “This is real life, and real life is depressing! There is a pandemic happening, for God’s sake. Plus: Racism! Also: Climate change! And inflation! Things are depressing. You should be depressed!”
The problem is, I wasn’t taking action. The dismay was paralyzing. It’s not like I was reading about yet another school shooting and then firing off an email to my member of Congress. No, I’d read too many stories about the dysfunction in Congress to think that would matter. All individual action felt pointless once I was done reading the news. Mostly, I was just marinating in despair.
I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong. Wasn’t it important to be informed? Quitting the news felt like quitting the world.
Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in “The Social Dilemma,” when all those tech executives admitted that they didn’t let their kids use the products they had created.
And that gets to the heart of the problem here: If so many of us feel poisoned by our products, might there be something wrong with them?
Last month, new data from the Reuters Institute showed that the United States has one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world. About 4 out of 10 Americans sometimes or often avoid contact with the news — a higher rate than at least 30 other countries. And consistently, across all countries, women are significantly more likely to avoid news than men.It wasn’t just me and my hypocrite journalist friends after all.
Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working?
So maybe there is something wrong with the news. But what? A lot of people say the problem is bias. Journalists say the problem is the business model: Negativity is clicky. But I’ve started to think that both theories are missing the most important piece of the puzzle: the human factor.
Today’s news, even high-quality print news, is not designed for humans. As Krista Tippett, the journalist and host of the radio show and podcast “On Being,” puts it, “I don’t actually think we are equipped, physiologically or mentally, to be delivered catastrophic and confusing news and pictures, 24/7. We are analog creatures in a digital world.”
I’ve spent the past year trying to figure out what news designed for 21st-century humans might look like — interviewing physicians who specialize in communicating bad news to patients, behavioral scientists who understand what humans need to live full, informed lives and psychologists who have been treating patients for “headline stress disorder.” (Yes, this is a thing.)
When I distilled everything they told me, I found that there are three simple ingredients that are missing from the news as we know it.
First, we need hope to get up in the morning. Researchers have found that hope is associated with lower levels of depression, chronic pain, sleeplessness and cancer, among many other things. Hopelessness, by contrast, is linked to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and … death.
“Hope is like water,” says David Bornstein, co-founder of the nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network. “You need to have something to believe in. If you’re in the restaurant business, you’re gonna give people water. Because you understand human biology. It’s weird that journalism has such a hard time understanding this. People need to have a sense of possibility.”
Last December, the New York Times published an ambitious multimedia project called “Postcards from a World on Fire,” chronicling how climate change has altered life in 193 countries. It led with a graphic of the Earth in flames, spinning in space, and the words, “Cities swallowed by dust. Human history drowned by the sea.” I kid you not. This was a well-intentioned effort, but it was simply not designed for humans. I don’t know what species it would work for, but it’s not one I’m familiar with.
By contrast, consider another recent New York Times article, this one about a different problem— homelessness. That piece detailed how the city of Houston moved 25,000 people experiencing homelessness into their own homes. It was not credulous; it featured extensive reporting and plenty of caveats. But reading it, you feel a space open up in your chest — like unlocking a trap door out of a dungeon.
Second, humans need a sense of agency. “Agency” is not something most reporters think about, probably because, in their jobs, they have it. But feeling like you and your fellow humans can do something — even something small — is how we convert anger into action, frustration into invention. That self-efficacy is essential to any functioning democracy.
Nowhere is the crying need for agency and hope more apparent than in climate coverage. Of all the climate stories aired on nightly news and Sunday morning shows in 2021, only a third discussed possible solutions, according to a study by Media Matters for America. What would agency look like? It might look like the Post’s April article detailing six ways to halt climate change. Or it might look like the viral videos on TikTok, where non-journalists such as @thegarbagequeen have started to fill the void, celebrating incremental environmental victories and debunking “climate doomers.”
Finally, we need dignity. This is also not something most reporters think about, in my experience. Which is odd, because it is integral to understanding why people do what they do.
What does dignity look like? Shamil Idriss, the head of Search for Common Ground, which works to prevent violence in 31 countries, explains it simply: “To me, it’s the feeling I have that I matter, that my life has some worth.” In journalism, treating people like they matter means, most importantly, listening to them — maybe the way WBEZ’s “Curious City” listens to its audience to decide what to investigate, for example. It can mean inviting viewers to talk to each other, with civility, like Atlanta NBC station 11Alive did, enlisting local parents skeptical of critical race theory to interview school officials and historians on camera. And it means writing about people as more than the sum of their circumstances, as journalist Katherine Boo did so famously in the pages of this newspaper.
There is a way to communicate news — including very bad news — that leaves us better off as a result. A way to spark anger and action. Empathy alongside dignity. Hope alongside fear. There is another way, and it doesn’t lead to bankruptcy or puffery. But right now, these examples I’ve listed remain far too rare.
It’s hard to generalize about the news media. The category includes hard-working beat reporters, dedicated fact-checkers and producers, as well as shameless propagandists, dupes and conflict entrepreneurs. It’s almost too big a category to talk about with any clarity. But it’s fair to say that if news sites were people, most would be diagnosed as clinically depressed right now.
Changing that may require journalists to accept that some of their own
core beliefs are outdated. “The journalist’s theory of change is that the best way to avert catastrophe is to keep people focused on the potential for catastrophe 24/7,” Bornstein says. That used to work — kind of. Reporters could rigorously chronicle threats and corruption, and then sit back and let the accountability rain down. But that dynamic only works if the public is more unified and journalists are widely trusted. These days, it doesn’t matter how many of former president Donald Trump’s lies reliable fact-checkers count; it won’t change anyone’s mind. A lot of journalists, perhaps frustrated by their impotence, have responded by getting louder and more shrill. Which only causes more people to (yes, you guessed it) avoid the news.
A better theory of change, Bornstein suggests, might be something like: “The world will get better when people understand problems, threats and challenges, and what their best options are to make progress.” He and his colleagues have now trained over 25,000 journalists to do high-quality solutions stories all over the world.
Finally, and this is closely related: The people producing the news themselves are struggling, and while they aren’t likely to admit it, it is warping the coverage. News junkies tend to drink deeply from the darkness, mistakenly thinking it will make them sharper. All that angst has nowhere to go — and it leaks into our stories.
I know what you’re thinking: What about the money? The business model for news requires clicks. And the easiest way to get attention is through a fire hose of outrage, fear and doom.
But how do we know people won’t click — or subscribe — if the news were designed for humans? How do we know, if hardly anyone has tried?
There aren’t many major news outlets systematically creating news for humans yet, but one that I admire (and now subscribe to) is the Christian Science Monitor. Each issue features reporting from around the globe, vivid photos, brutal realities — right alongside hope, agency and dignity. Stories include a brief explainer called “Why we wrote this,” treating readers like respected partners.
It’s a kind of low-ego, high-curiosity journalism that I’ve started trying to emulate in my own work. I don’t always succeed. It can feel uncomfortable to, for example, let listeners dictate the subject of the podcast I host. But last month, I spent four hours at an antiabortion rally with a camera crew and did something I’d never done before: I just tried to understand, deeply, what people told me. I didn’t try to extract the most chilling quote or the vivid, ironic anecdote. I just asked deeper questions, without judgment. It felt less transactional, more human. I also felt more informed.
So, as we brace ourselves for the coming midterms, variants and cataclysms, here’s my plea to all my fellow journalists: Please send a search party for the 42 percent of Americans who are avoiding the news. We can’t all be wrong. Or oversensitive or weak. And we might just be you. | 2022-07-08T11:41:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What news designed for 21st century humans might look like - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/ |
Sudan’s leader says the military will step aside. That’s not likely.
Eight months after Sudan’s military coup, what happens now?
Analysis by Salah Ben Hammou
A protest in the Barari area of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, on July 4. (Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images)
On Monday, Sudanese Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced that the military would withdraw from the U.N.-mediated tripartite talks — and pull out of Sudan’s political process more generally.
The announcement came eight months after Burhan and the military toppled the government of former prime minister Abdalla Hamdok, in October 2021. Hamdok’s government, working alongside the military, had been navigating the country’s democratic transition following the exit of longtime strongman Omar Hassan al-Bashir in April 2019.
Since the 2021 coup, Sudanese citizens have participated in widespread protests against its leaders, who have responded with brutal force. In addition to international condemnation and severe foreign-aid cuts, Sudan has seen a crippling political crisis develop over the past eight months. The recent U.N.-led talks reportedly aimed to build a political agreement between civilian leaders and the military. Now the coup leaders appear to be exiting the political stage — a surprising move that Burhan claims will allow the formation of a civilian government.
My ongoing research suggests the military isn’t likely to step away from politics entirely. A closer look at the civilian factions involved in the political process — many of which are known military allies — suggests that the military’s influence will probably continue.
When civilians participate in coup politics
Civilian collaboration in military coup politics around the world is actually quite common, if perhaps less studied. Sudan’s coups, for example, have seen frequent civilian involvement, including the country’s first successful coup in 1958, when Prime Minister Abdalla Khalil ordered the military to topple his own government. In October, I explained here in TMC how former rebel leaders who once opposed Bashir’s regime organized protests days before the coup to demand the military’s intervention against Sudan’s transitional government. But as recent developments show, civilian collaboration can extend well beyond the initial power grab and become part of post-coup politics.
Sudan’s military coup seems to be supported by some civilian politicians. That’s happened before.
Since the coup, Burhan and the military have reintegrated civilian remnants of Bashir’s fallen regime into the government, including members of the former ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and its affiliates. These measures include appointing party members to ministerial positions, unfreezing their financial assets and stacking the civil service with NCP loyalists.
This happened after the military’s reinstatement of Hamdok in November failed to quell unrest in the streets, and the former premier then resigned in January. The United Nations, the African Union and the United States put considerable pressure on Sudan to return to civilian governance. To that end, the military’s civilian allies — including the former rebels who demanded the coup — continue to participate in the tripartite talks. That didn’t sit well with pro-democracy groups like the Forces of Freedom and Change and the Resistance Committees, who boycotted the talks.
Why civilians take up the military’s interests
Beyond publicly legitimizing coup leaders, civilian collaborators can advance core interests of those who orchestrated the coup. And they can help neutralize anti-military opposition within the government by blocking legislation aimed at meaningful reform or barring the opposition from power altogether.
In other words, civilians can serve as proxies for the military itself. It’s a tactic politically dominant militaries often use — even in non-coup situations. For example, some analysts point out that Myanmar’s military relied on a political party to advance and secure its interests even in the face of a democratic transition. However, once that party saw a crippling electoral defeat, the military re-intervened in 2021, as political scientists Megan Ryan and Darin Self explain here in TMC.
Myanmar’s military distrusts its ruling party. That’s why it staged a coup and detained leaders and activists.
In Sudan, pro-military civilians like NCP loyalists and their affiliates can ensure that the military’s economic enterprises and resource exploitation in the periphery — key points of contention for the pro-democracy movement — continue even if a civilian government emerges. In addition, the reintroduction of NCP loyalists into government and financial institutions puts party leaders in a powerful position against the opposition.
As the military reportedly intends to form a “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” with unspecified powers after its exit, these developments give little indication that the coup leaders’ political role will evaporate. And the NCP and its offshoots, along with the former rebel leaders, have much to gain by continuing to support Sudan’s coup leaders. The NCP, for example, was outlawed after Bashir’s removal in 2019, and pro-democracy groups targeted its extensive patronage networks. In recent months, the military leadership has reversed many of these measures, though the party remains legally banned.
Similarly, former rebel leaders Minni Minnawi and Jibril Ibrahim faced little hope of electoral success with a democratic transition. But tying their fates to the armed forces and its affiliates may ensure them some political power regardless of electoral politics. Just as civilian support helps entrench the military’s influence, the military’s support can entrench its civilian allies.
What do Sudan’s pro-democracy groups think?
Pro-democracy civilian groups aren’t buying Burhan’s claim that he’ll step back from politics. In fact, the Forces of Freedom and Change denounced the move as “a tactical retreat and transparent maneuver” and have called for greater demonstrations for a genuine civilian government.
Some observers have noted that the announcement was also designed to divide the opposition. However, the refusal of pro-democracy groups to acquiesce could undermine the military’s gambit to divide its opponents and rely on its civilian proxies.
Since the announcement, Burhan has dismissed members of the ruling Sovereignty Council in preparation for the military’s exit from power, while anti-military protests continue to fill the streets. With the tripartite talks now canceled, it’s not clear whether these developments will prompt a further international response.
Are there takeaways here, for observers and academics — as well as policymakers? In the complicated politics of military coups, assuming a simple binary divide between “civilians” and “soldiers” obscures important details. And these assumptions may also miss the complex ways in which coup leaders retain political power — even as they claim to be stepping back.
Salah Ben Hammou is a PhD student in security studies at the University of Central Florida. | 2022-07-08T11:41:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Sudan, anti-military protests continue to fill the streets - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/sudan-coup-leaders-burham-tripartite-talks-/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/sudan-coup-leaders-burham-tripartite-talks-/ |
The machine behind the ‘God particle’ is on the hunt for dark matter
Researchers at CERN are firing up the Large Hadron Collider for the third time, hoping to make another historic discovery
A technician works in Large Hadron Collider tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN. (Laurent Gillieron/AP)
Ten years ago, a team operating the world’s largest particle collider made history by discovering the Higgs boson particle, a finding key to understanding the creation of the universe, earning it the nickname the “God particle.”
After a more than three year pause for upgrades, the accelerator, run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is collecting data again. This time it’s out to prove the existence of another mysterious substance — dark matter.
“If we can figure out the properties of dark matter, we learn what our galaxy is made of,” said Joshua Ruderman, an assistant professor of physics at New York University. “It would be transformative.”
Scientists’ search for Higgs boson yields new subatomic particle
All the stars, planets and galaxies in the universe account for only 5 percent of the universe’s matter, according to scientists at CERN. Roughly 27 percent of the universe is thought to be composed of dark matter, which does not absorb, reflect or emit light, making it extremely hard to detect. Researchers say it exists because they’ve seen its gravitational pull on objects — and have witnessed how it helps bend light.
Inside the collider, superconducting magnets are chilled to roughly minues-456 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than space — while two particle beams traveling close to the speed of light are made to collide. Using advanced sensors and monitors, scientists analyze the substances created by those collisions, which replicate conditions similar to the Big Bang. It allows them to learn about the earliest moments of the universe.
“This is a significant increase,” said Mike Lamont, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology. “Paving the way for new discoveries.”
Higgs boson and what it means for technology
At the beginning of the universe, particles did not have mass, so scientists have long questioned how stars, planets and additional life were created. In 1964, physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs and others theorized a force field gave particles mass when they connected, but they couldn’t document the existence of the entity.
The particle has fascinated scientists and the general public alike. CERN and the collider are featured prominently in the Dan Brown book and adapted movie “Angles & Demons.”
During the Large Hadron Collider’s four-year experiment, scientists are hoping to find evidence of dark matter. As they fire up the machine, protons will spin at nearly the speed of light. The hope, researchers said, is that when they collide, it creates new particles resembling the properties of dark matter.
They also hope to learn more about how the Higgs boson particle behaves. On Tuesday, shortly after the collider began collecting data, scientists at CERN announced they’d found three new “exotic” particles that could provide clues as to how subatomic particles bind together.
At the Large Hadron Collider, a peek at the future of science
Ruderman, of New York University, said CERN’s quest to learn about dark matter and explain the origins of the universe has him eagerly awaiting the results from the experiment. The research excites him greatly. “It’s why I wake up in the morning,” he said.
Once data starts coming out from the experiment, Ruderman will see if it’s producing new particles. Even if it does, it will be hard immediately to tell if it is dark matter or not.
As planned, the trial could capture 10 times more data than previous experiments, according to CERN’s website. But unraveling the universe’s secrets isn’t easy.
“This is hard,” Ruderman said, “and something that could take a whole lifetime of exploration.” | 2022-07-08T11:42:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | CERN researchers turn on Large Hadron Collider in dark matter quest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/08/cern-particle-accelerator/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/08/cern-particle-accelerator/ |
Friday briefing: Shinzo Abe assassination; U.S. gun violence; Elon Musk’s Twitter deal; Grand Slam history; and more
Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese leader, was assassinated this morning.
What we know: Abe was shot at least twice during a speech at a campaign event. A man in his 40s was arrested.
It’s a huge shock: Japan has some of the world’s strictest gun laws and Abe, who resigned as prime minister in 2020, remained popular and influential. He was 67.
The scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings.
The numbers: More than 45,000 people have been killed by guns each of the past two years, the highest level since 1995. People have also been buying guns at record levels.
Why is this happening? There’s no clear answer, but pandemic stress, tension between the police and the public, general anger and the sheer number of guns around may all be factors.
President Biden will take steps to strengthen abortion rights today.
What to expect: He’ll sign an executive order that will, among several other things, try to protect access to abortion medication and emergency contraception.
Why now? It comes two weeks after the Supreme Court got rid of abortion rights, and some have criticized Biden for not having a more urgent response.
Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter may be falling apart.
Why? The Tesla CEO’s team says it can’t verify the number of spam accounts on the social media site — a sticking point for Musk.
Could he really back out? It would potentially trigger a massive legal battle, and Twitter could try to force him to go through with the deal anyway.
How we got here: Musk decided to buy Twitter in April; however, he also has a history of making big promises that don’t always become reality.
WNBA star Brittney Griner pleaded guilty to drug charges in Russia.
The details: She admitted to carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil yesterday, which is illegal in Russia. She faces 10 years in prison, but the U.S. is working to secure her release.
On the ground in Ukraine: Russian forces are pausing to rest and resupply, with more intense attacks likely to happen in the coming weeks.
James Caan, who played Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather,” has died.
How we’ll remember him: As a trigger-happy Mafioso, but also the captive novelist in “Misery,” the dying football player in “Brian’s Song” and Buddy’s irritable dad in “Elf.”
A message on Caan’s Twitter account said he passed on Wednesday evening. There were no further details. He was 82.
The Wimbledon finals are this weekend.
There’s history being made: 27-year-old Ons Jabeur became the first Arab woman and first African woman yesterday to make it to any Grand Slam final. The match is tomorrow.
On the men’s side: Star player Rafael Nadal withdrew with an injury yesterday. The last semifinal game, between Novak Djokovic and Cameron Norrie, is today, with the final on Sunday.
And now … what to watch this weekend: “Thor: Love and Thunder” is in theaters — and our critic said it’s pretty fun. What to listen to: The best new audiobooks of July. | 2022-07-08T11:42:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Friday, July 8 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/07/08/what-to-know-for-july-8/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/07/08/what-to-know-for-july-8/ |
Police officers respond to the scene in Nara where former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot. (Kosuke Okahara/Bloomberg News)
The fatal shooting of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe at a campaign event Friday has shocked a country that has some of the world’s strictest laws on gun ownership, with political assassinations rare in the past few decades.
The 67-year-old Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister and a staunch U.S. ally, was giving a speech Friday ahead of elections for the upper house of parliament when he was shot.
How hard is it to get a gun in Japan?
Anyone trying to shoot and own a gun in Japan has to apply for a permit, which starts with attending a class on gun safety and passing a written test.
It’s a long process involving background checks on family, work and criminal records, and requiring a medical certificate that attests to mental health. Police look into details like potential alcohol problems or whether the hopeful gun owner has a history of domestic or neighborhood disputes.
An officer will visit to inspect the locker that is legally required to store the gun and should be affixed to a wall. It must have three locks on the outside, the rules say. There’s also a full-day training course on safe shooting and practicing techniques.
In Japan, even the gun enthusiasts welcome restrictions on firearms
“Gun violence is very, very rare,” according to Satona Suzuki, a lecturer in Japanese History at SOAS, University of London.
Political assassinations that were a feature of the late 1920s and 1930s were now seen as “a thing of the past,” according to Suzuki.
“People will be shocked,” she said after Friday’s shooting.
“They’ll be scared, but it’s not like America. It’s not crazy gunman going to schools or malls,” Suzuki added. “It’s a different kind of anxiety.”
Abe’s own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, survived a stabbing assassination attempt in 1960 when he was prime minister.
Adela Suliman in London contributed to this report. | 2022-07-08T11:42:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shinzo Abe’s death in shooting shocks Japan, nation with strict gun laws - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/japan-shinzo-abe-shooting-gun-laws/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/japan-shinzo-abe-shooting-gun-laws/ |
Calgary’s culinary scene is rich in local flavors
By Liza Weisstuch
At the aquaponic farm at Granary Road, leafy greens, herbs and tomatoes are among the produce grown through a system in which bacteria convert fish waste to nutrients that feed the plants. (Liza Weisstuch for The Washington Post)
There’s a steel black box near the entrance of the Derrick. It’s about the height of a billiards table and rather unremarkable. But when the bartender lifted the heavy cover, several people seated nearby turned their heads, captivated by the lavender light it emitted. The bartender plucked some cilantro from fresh bunches sitting in very shallow water in the box. The UV light keeps the greens fresher longer, he told me. Moments later, he chopped them up and used them to garnish my cocktail, a highly involved mix of gin, cilantro-infused vermouth, caraway-infused maraschino, green Chartreuse, citrus and fennel thickened with egg whites — a celebration of spring’s garden freshness.
The harvest box, as it’s called, is supplied and stocked weekly by Garden Collective, a group of five entrepreneurs who grow herbs and vegetables in a 2,200-square-foot enclosed garden on the second story of an office-mall hybrid building. My bartender said I could go see it for myself, so the next morning, I did. It’s at the end of a Plus 15, the Calgarian term for the 60-plus skywalks, each about 15 feet above the street, that connect the city’s buildings. They make up one of the world’s largest pedestrian skywalk networks. Garden Collective’s space is behind vast glass windows and across from a shop that sells diamonds. Passersby frequently pause to snap photos.
It was co-founded by Zishan Kassam, a Calgary, Alberta, native and software product manager by day. “We have the modern technology to be able to grow in a city, so why are we so reliant on supply chains that start abroad?” he said, noting how the pandemic made the situation all the more urgent. He explained how, within the limited confines of the space, he has an unconstrained capability to adjust temperature, light and the nutrient levels in the dirt to modify the flavor and character of the herbs and leafy greens, which he sells to at least 10 restaurants at any given time.
The city has long been known for the Calgary Stampede, the century-old rodeo event that takes place every summer and typically draws more than 1 million visitors. But that seasonal event doesn’t define Calgary year-round. It’s also a popular stopover for people heading to take in the stunning nature of Lake Louise and Banff National Park, which is close to the Canadian Rockies. And in recent years — thanks to a lively culinary scene fueled by chefs who have managed to create locally focused menus, despite the prairie city’s extreme weather — Calgary has become a destination in its own right.
It welcomes about 7.7 million visitors annually, and it’s preparing to welcome more in the coming years. Two new boutique hotels — the Westley, which opened last year, and the Dorian, slated to open later this month — will feature local chefs and art. This is part of the lead-up to the increased draw the city expects when the reimagined Glenbow, the city’s arts and culture center, opens in 2024, the same year as the BMO Centre at Stampede Park. The expansion will make BMO Centre Canada’s second-largest convention center.
Canada, we missed you! A six-province jaunt provides a chance to revel in the classics.
Major Tom is one of the restaurants that uses Garden Collective’s bounty. The glam-yet-laid-back spot is on the 40th floor of an office tower. If you face west and squint, you can make out, in the distance, a ski jump turned zip line in Canada Olympic Park (or WinSport, as it’s known today), site of the 1988 Winter Olympics. The Calgary Tower, a major tourist attraction, is a few short blocks away. On a Thursday in May, the city below twinkled all the way to the horizon, but the more radiant part of the evening was the baked Pacific lingcod, served with charred eggplant, olives and green-tomato vierge, a French interpretation of marinara sauce. Marigold petals from Zishan and the crew were scattered on top.
Garrett Martin, the culinary director, told me he visited Garden Collective that afternoon for a tasting, and explained the process. “If we don’t think something has enough flavor or needs sweetness, they just manipulate the water content, light or heat exposure to get different results. They’ve been doing a lot of tweaking for us, and it’s been coming through nicely,” he said. The team once grew dill, but it didn’t pack a lot of a punch, Garrett recalled. A few weeks later, they brought back a more dilly dill. “I love to support local, but it has to be good,” he said.
“Locally grown” is a common priority these days. More and more chefs, restaurateurs and bartenders focus on area specialties in the interest of highlighting regional bounties, cutting carbon footprints and supporting local farmers and makers. But that’s challenging in some places, such as Calgary, where the growing season is short and plagued by hail, wind, and unseasonal snow and frost. But over the week I spent there in May, I found a city that operates like a sturdy Möbius strip, a system closed in on itself, yet mesmerizing in how it functions.
It’s something I saw in high-definition at Rouge, which serves modern dishes in a historical house with creaky floors and Victorian flourishes. The restaurant gained widespread acclaim when it notched a spot on the San Pellegrino World’s 100 Best Restaurants list in 2010. But more recently, one of its claims to fame is co-founder and culinary director Paul Rogalski’s role in “Wild Harvest,” an outdoor adventure and cooking show that airs on PBS stations across the United States. He co-stars with producer Les “Survivorman” Stroud. Les forages, Paul cooks. It has informed the dishes served at Rouge.
He offered to show me around the garden out back, where he has a beehive, a greenhouse, and beds of herbs and veggies. As we walked, he told me about the rewards of experimenting with spruce tips in the kitchen, and the abundant chickweed — whose name is tragic to him. (“Nothing is a weed. It’s either prolific and invasive or not.”) He plucked the sweetest asparagus I’ve ever known, as well as sorrel, which I’d later have in a tangy sauce in a fish dish. He pointed out crab apple blossoms, which made an appearance in dessert.
Sal Howell, proprietor of River Café, has a similar philosophy. River Café is located on the tiny, quiet Prince’s Island Park on the Bow River, a 365-mile body of water that’s fed by the glacial runoff of the Canadian Rockies. The island is about a mile from downtown, but it feels a universe away. Sal founded the cafe in 1991 as a concession stand, but built it out into a fishing-lodge-inspired wonderland, complete with a hanging birch-bark canoe and hickory furniture. The place serves Canadian Rocky Mountain cuisine. I had read about Sal’s garden, and when I asked her what she’s growing, I was again led outside.
“There’s rhubarb coming up. And I see lovage and chives — lots and lots of chives,” she said, pointing to the different greens poking up from the garden that wraps around the building. She leaned over and plucked a few lovage leaves for each of us. It struck me as celery’s alter ego, its feathery leaves slightly peppery with a fleck of anise.
Howell’s kitchen staff makes clever use of what most people would dispose of, which results in creations such as vinegar made from beer-foam runoff. Sourcing local here is an extreme sport. Lamb, grains, seafood and wine are easy enough to get, but when it comes to citrus, olive oil and other pantry staples that have no place on the Canadian prairies, it’s more challenging. But they pull it off beautifully. Camelina and flax oils do the jobs usually done by olive oil. The popular hummus is made with red lentils and is flavored with sumac instead of lemon juice.
Canada has reopened: Here’s why visitors should book an Indigenous experience
These are all sophisticated restaurants — not exactly the kind I’d dine in every week if I lived here. But what’s particularly striking to me is that enjoying Calgary’s self-contained ecosystem can be an everyday pursuit, too. A local friend and I took a 35-minute drive, past horse farm after horse farm, to Granary Road. The destination is home to an “active learning park,” with activities that offer children a crash course in nature, such as a small bat museum in a maze of caves and an ant-farm-themed climbing and slide complex. But it’s educational for adults, too.
On a Friday afternoon at the farmers market, which is held in a grand wood building with arched ceilings every weekend April through September, I got into a conversation with DJ Fendick, who does business as Mister Grow It All. He makes jun tea, the “champagne of kombucha,” he declared. It’s produced with fermented green tea and honey instead of the familiar mix of fermented black tea and sugar. With delicate effervescence and a gentle mint flavor, the basil mojito variety was particularly intriguing.
At a nearby booth, I inspected leafy greens fanned out across the table. “None of that spent any time in a truck,” said the young woman helming the table. She had a long braid and tattoos of brightly colored flowers up and down her arms. She turned to the floor-to-ceiling windows and pointed to a giant greenhouse beyond the play area. “It’s from our aquaponic farm. You can take a tour.”
Mikayla MacDonald was my guide through a sweeping greenhouse containing a vast system of tanks, PVC pipes, plastic trays called deep-water culture beds, and vertical towers of white geometric cubes that would make for fitting decor in a mid-century-modern-style living room. A career physiotherapist, she works here on the weekends. She calls it her hobby. She walked me through the process, which, in the simplest terms, goes like this: Fish produce ammonia when they digest, and beneficial bacteria convert it to nutrients, or natural fertilizer, which feeds the plants. All the while, water is recirculated. She sent me off with an electric-green cluster of bok choy.
On the way back to the city center, we took a detour for a quick lunch at Mash. The pizza joint started as a brewery and turned into a regional mini-chain, where workers use the spent grain from brewing to make the pizza crust. There will be nine locations by the end of summer.
The bartender’s nails were painted with flames in honor of the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup playoffs, in which the Calgary Flames were competing that week. The grains make a flour that’s higher in protein and vitamin B than common flour, she explained as she pulled a pint of Papa Bear Prairie Ale. The leftover cereals from that brew went into my mushroom pie, imbuing the crust with an earthy density. Plus, because it’s all one company, the integration factor saves on both money and carbon emissions. It’s a most clever — and tasty — prairie ecosystem in full effect.
Weisstuch is a writer based in New York City. Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @livingtheproof.
700 Second St. SW, 40th Floor
403-990-3954 (text only)
majortombar.ca
The postcard-perfect views from this 40th-floor dining room are as much of a draw as the classy, unpretentious menu. For added drama, sit at the bar, where spirits are arranged on towering shelves. Chefs put a premium on locally sourced ingredients. Open Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Starters from about $5; entrees from about $16.
1240 Eighth Ave. SE
rougecalgary.com
A number of vegetables and herbs used in the kitchen are grown in the garden in the back of this charming restaurant, located in a house built in 1891. Chef and co-owner Paul Rogalski, who stars in “Wild Harvest,” brings his knowledge of nature’s eccentric flavors to his imaginative menus. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tasting menus from about $88, starters from about $12 and entrees from about $21.
The Derrick Gin Mill & Kitchen
620 Eighth Ave. SW
thederrickyyc.com
Shelves of old-timey oil cans and sepia-toned photos of drilling machinery nod to the history of oil drilling in Alberta. The taxidermy on exposed-brick walls and the extensive list of craft cocktails indicate that it’s a vintage-inspired modern hangout. The menu includes elevated pub fare with an emphasis on smoked meats. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. or later. Starters from about $5, sandwiches from about $15 and mains from about $20.
River Café
25 Prince’s Island Park
river-cafe.com
No cars are allowed on Prince’s Island Park, so factor in a few minutes to walk to this restaurant on the Bow River. What started as a concession stand in 1991 was transformed into an upscale, playful eatery in 1995. The menu celebrates Canada’s bounty with an eye on sustainability. Look for British Columbia oysters, Pacific salmon and Alberta lamb, as well as creatively prepared veggies. There’s also an award-winning wine list. Open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Starters from about $12, lunch entrees from about $18 and dinner entrees from about $28.
The Mash
1126 Kensington Rd. NW
masheats.ca
What started as Half Hitch Brewing Co. in 2016 has become a regional chain that will have more locations by the end of the summer. Pizzas here are cooked with the grains left over from beer production. Options include the familiar, such as pepperoni and wild mushroom, and the eccentric, such as Nashville hot chicken or dill pickle and bacon. Open Monday through Wednesday, 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., and Thursday through Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pizzas from about $12; beer from about $5 for 16 ounces.
Granary Road
226066 112 St. W., Foothills County
granaryroad.com
Perhaps best described as an agricultural amusement park, Granary Road features a working farm, mini-golf, goat yoga, and a park with interactive, educational activities for kids. The farmers market offers locally made spirits, kombucha, baked goods and body products, as well as fruits and vegetables, some of which are grown at the on-site aquaponic farm, which you can tour for a small fee. Farmers market open Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Learning park open daily, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Park admission about $12 for ages 3 and up; free for children younger than 3.
visitcalgary.com
Potential travelers should take local and national public health directives regarding the pandemic into consideration before planning any trips. Travel health notice information can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s interactive map showing travel recommendations by destination and the CDC’ | 2022-07-08T12:10:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where to eat in Calgary, Alberta - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/08/calgary-canada-food/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/08/calgary-canada-food/ |
An unruly women’s club that pointed the way to modern feminism
Review by Karen Iris Tucker
Heterodoxy members, from left, Doris Stevens, Alison Turnbull Hopkins and another suffragist, Eunice Dana Brannan, during their detention at Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. (Library of Congress)
They were an unusual and proudly unruly group, mostly college-educated women, a rarity at the time, in the early 1900s. They came together every other Saturday afternoon in a bustling, smoky eatery called Polly’s, to debate the as-yet nascent definition and import of “feminism,” as well as other political and social issues of the day. Their club, appropriately named Heterodoxy for the divergent mix of opinions its participants posed, formed in 1912. It was just a few years before their scruffy Greenwich Village haunt became a magnet for the masses because of its reputation as a hotbed of free love and radical thought and a wellspring for revolutionary change.
Some of the group’s members were married, others in then-scandalous open relationships, and still others in same-sex unions. Many in the circle disavowed form-fitting clothes and long locks, instead choosing short haircuts and flowing batik-print tunics. Such were the stylish markers of where they worked, argued, staged satirical political plays, held salons and marched together for suffrage and workers’ rights, from their launchpad of their bohemian Village enclave.
So relates historian and author Joanna Scutts in “Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism,” a deeply researched and kinetic historical telling of Heterodoxy’s fruitful, if also fraught, period, from its inception until the early 1920s. In vibrant prose that summons the idealism and daring of the very existence of Heterodoxy as a center for sisterhood and women-led political thought, Scutts brings to life the stories of women who formed friendships among their ranks, the majority of whom were upper-middle-class authors, journalists, sociologists and artists.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Scutts says that she wrote most of “Hotbed” during the coronavirus pandemic and the stay-at-home guidelines in New York that began two weeks after she gave birth. Unable to travel to visit archives, she says, she received essential remote research resources, including digitized materials and photographs, from the New York Public Library, Yale’s Beinecke Library and the Schlesinger Library.
She notes that most of the Heterodoxy members have since faded from our written history. While some in the club were the subjects of biographies, many of those books are no longer available. For Scutts, this made “Hotbed” a critical text for posterity. As she writes in her introduction, “This is a story about feminism … in its first American incarnation. It’s also a story about how history is written: what matters and what doesn’t in the stories we tell; who gets forgotten and why.”
Among the Heterodoxy members, and perhaps the most well-known, was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the novella “The Yellow Wallpaper,” standard reading for today’s feminist scholars (although we struggle with the author’s legacy of racism). Grace Nail Johnson was the only Black member of the group and the wife of James Weldon Johnson, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a working-class union activist and socialist member of the club, whose fiery oratory style drew crowds. In describing how integral her full-body approach to speaking was for capturing audiences, Scutts quotes Gurley Flynn: “We gesticulated, we paced the platform, we appealed to the emotions. … Even when newly-arrived immigrants did not understand our words they shared our spirit.”
Together, Hurley Flynn and the other Heterodites agitated for upending societal constructs that made life brutal, or even deadly, for women, even as they argued over competing priorities implicating race, class and national vs. international agendas. Scutts takes us through such pivotal moments as the early suffrage parades with well-to-do women in white dresses and straw hats on horseback, spectacles she says were “designed to be seen, photographed, and discussed even more widely in the media—to go viral, 1910s-style.” The book also chronicles how Heterodoxy members spearheaded workers’ strikes to address deplorable factory conditions. Those efforts took place in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in which 146 workers — mostly Italian and Jewish — were killed. “Hotbed” moves on to World War I in 1914, the country’s first Red Scare beginning in 1917 and, in 1920, the ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
One of “Hotbed’s” most compelling features is its unflinching depiction of Heterodoxy as a collective of mostly wealthy White women who struggled with how to forge solidarity across race and class boundaries. This took shape, for example, in their interactions with immigrant women striking for better working conditions. Scutts points out that “Many strikers resented the press attention lavished on these glamorous upper-class activists and suspected — not entirely wrongly — that their cause was at risk of being co-opted to advance the suffrage agenda.” As one striker suggested, rather starkly, to a Heterodoxy member: “You can go with us on the picket line. If there’s a lady with us the police won’t beat us up.”
Scutts is equally baldfaced in detailing the racism within the group’s microcosm. By example, she writes, “White suffragists rarely acknowledged that the risks of marching, or speaking out in public, were very different for a working-class African American woman. … They sidelined or excluded Black women, who nonetheless continued to participate … and fought to be treated fairly and recognized for their contributions.”
Perhaps the most trenchant features of “Hotbed” are the parallels to today’s landscape. Noting the disparate effects of inequality from more than a century ago, Scutts writes in “Hotbed,” “Rich women had always been able to control the size of their families and discreetly obtain contraceptives or abortions. It was working-class women whose health and futures were at risk. …”
Those statements are no less true today. As Scutts says in her epilogue, “Voting rights are under sustained assault, and feminists continue to turn out into the streets in the thousands to demand rights that the Heterodites were also fighting for—as well as some that they could only have dreamed about.”
Karen Iris Tucker is a Brooklyn-based journalist.
Hotbed
Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism
Seal Press. 405 pp. $30. | 2022-07-08T12:58:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism," by Joanna Scutts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/an-unruly-womens-club-that-pointed-way-modern-feminism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/an-unruly-womens-club-that-pointed-way-modern-feminism/ |
A chronicle of good triumphing over the mob
Review by Michael Daly
On Feb. 9, 1990, John Gotti, right, arrives at court in New York. In "The Gotti Wars," former assistant U.S. attorney John Gleeson recounts his years-long battle to bring the mobster to justice. (David Cantor/AP)
Rain began to fall as I carried my infant daughter up Fifth Avenue in the spring of 1988. I ducked into the nearest shelter, which happened to be the lobby of Trump Tower.
“Hey, it’s the Irish kid,” somebody called out.
I looked over and there was John Gotti, boss of the Gambino crime family. He was unshaven for the first and only time I had seen him, and I figured he must have been up in one of the apartments. I had contributed to him becoming a celebrity gangster with a New York Magazine cover story two years before. I knew that Mafiosi sometimes used “kid” to describe an associate of whatever age. I was 36, and I suddenly felt like a kind of accomplice.
“What’s the baby’s name?” Gotti asked.
Reflexively, I turned away with little Sinead Daly in my arms. New fatherhood had made me hyper conscious of the dirt and fumes I otherwise would not have noticed as I carried her up the street outside. I now had the sudden and alarming sense that she was in the presence of absolute evil. I answered him nonetheless.
Several days later, a box from Tiffany’s arrived at my Brooklyn home. I opened it to discover a small silver cup with a kitty — in Italian a gatto — engraved on the side.
“To Sinead from J.G.,” the inscription read.
I did not want Sinead anywhere near this gatto from Gotti, and I threw the gift in a bottom drawer. Gotti strutted about for another five years until he was finally brought down by a team of prosecutors and agents headed by another J.G., only one you would be glad for your kid to meet: Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gleeson.
Gleeson has now written “The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster,” a meticulous chronicle of good triumphing over evil. He notes that Gotti addressed him in a very different way than he did the reporters who helped glamorize the Mafia boss into more than a murderous thug.
“He loved calling me an ‘Irish faggot,’ ” Gleeson writes.
The book comes to us 30 years after the guilty verdict that is the saga’s climax and two decades after Gotti’s death in prison from throat cancer. The American Mafia itself is all but gone.
But Gleeson manages to make the oft-told tale of Gotti’s downfall fresh with new perspective, insight, wisdom and humor. Gleeson brings readers along on a kind of coming of sage journey that began in the spring of 1985, when this son of the Westchester suburbs was a 31-year-old fledgling prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn.
A senior prosecutor named Diane Giacalone enlisted him to assist in a case against Gambino crime family underboss Aniello Dellacroce and then lesser members such as John Gotti. The Gambinos had long been a target of law enforcement, and there was a trove of electronic surveillance for Gleeson to review that accorded him an education in mob language. He listened to hours of recorded gangster chatter captured on wiretaps.
“For some reason,” he writes, “I’d thought ‘youse’ was a plural pronoun, but I quickly learned otherwise.”
As this exchange made clear:
“Anybody else there?”
“No. I’m alone.”
“Good. I’ll come by youse in ten minutes.”
He discovered that gangsters had favorite expressions.
“John Gotti was fond of ‘D’ya understand what I’m tryin’ to say?’ Sometimes it seemed unnecessary. ‘I hate that mother----er. I’d like to ---in’ kill him. D’ya understand what I’m tryin’ to say?’ They understood all right.”
The case seemed to lose much of its importance on Dec. 2 of that year, when the lead defendant, underboss Dellacroce, died of cancer. Then, 14 days later, Gotti and his crew staged a gangland coup, gunning down Gambino boss Paul Castellano and his driver, Tommy Bilotti, outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. The news broke when Gleeson was home asleep. He writes that his wife woke him and told him “to come out to the living room to watch what was happening because Paul Castellano was dead and John Gotti was going to be the new Gambino boss.”
Gleeson recalls, “Literally overnight—before the completion of a single news cycle—our case was transformed.”
Suddenly, Giacalone and Gleeson’s case became the biggest mob prosecution in the country. I confess to having joined in the breathless reporting on Gotti as a new Al Capone, without the scar and with a better coif, thanks to a daily haircut.
But Gotti beat the rap, and the big case became a huge defeat. Gleeson did not learn until long afterward that one of the jurors had been bribed. Gleeson writes that he figured at the time the acquittal came partly because the judge allowed the defense lawyers to verbally savage and humiliate Giacalone in the courtroom.
Giacalone left the Eastern District soon after. Gleeson finally got a second chance to prosecute Gotti in 1992. Gotti had since also been acquitted in a state case and had become known as the Teflon Don. Gleeson introduces readers to George Hanna, an FBI agent, and Kenny McCabe, an investigator with Brooklyn’s District Attorney Office, and other greats of New York law enforcement who quietly did their jobs, undermining Gotti even as we in the press made him a celebrity gangster.
When he took over as boss, Gotti had moved his headquarters from the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens, which had nothing to do with hunting or fishing, and everything to do with truck hijacking and loan sharking. He settled into Dellacroce’s former social club in downtown Manhattan, the Ravenite, which had everything to do with crime of all kinds. He apparently thought he was secure from eavesdropping in an upstairs apartment an elderly woman of the neighborhood let him use for covert meetings. He was wrong, and the resulting recordings alone would almost certainly have been enough for a conviction. His fate was sealed, however, when his underboss, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano became what was then the highest-ranking mobster ever to cooperate with investigators.
Some readers may feel the government was too charitable with Gravano, who was sentenced to five years after admitting to 18 murders, including those of Castellano and Bilotti, as well as his wife’s brother.
The book convincingly argues that, along with ensuring Gotti’s conviction, other information Gravano provided and the precedent he set caused other high-ranking mobsters to flip, dealing a virtual death blow to the American Mafia.
“His extraordinary cooperation had earned him unparalleled leniency,” Gleeson writes. “The sentence would spread through the prison system like wildfire. The flood of cooperation we’d already seen since Gravano flipped would soon become a tsunami.”
After Gravano’s sentencing, Gleeson returned to his desk and saw a phone message from the White House. His nomination for a federal judgeship had been confirmed.
“As a direct result of John Gotti,” Gleeson writes, “I was a district judge at the age of forty-one. My life in crime had paid off.”
Gleeson was on the bench for more than two decades before stepping down and joining a prominent law firm. He now presents us with this book about the takedown of someone who really was America’s most notorious mobster. The acknowledgments accord due credit to an Italian American from Queens who otherwise is everything Gotti was not.
“Diane Giacalone empowered me by giving me so much responsibility, and then taught me how to try a case,” Gleeson writes. “When a defense that started out as criminally misogynistic and then became just plain criminal resulted in across-the-board acquittals, she showed me and everyone what grace under pressure looks like.”
The silver cup with the gatto from Gotti came out of the bottom drawer only after good had prevailed and my daughter Sinead was in her teens.
“Why didn’t you show me?” she asked.
The answer was as simple as the difference between the two J.G.s. The Irish Kid is sending her this book as a worthy gift.
Michael Daly is a special correspondent with the Daily Beast. His most recent book is “New York’s Finest: Stories of the NYPD and the Hero Cops Who Saved The City.”
Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster
Scribner. 348 pp. $28.99 | 2022-07-08T12:58:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster by John Gleeson - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/chronicle-good-triumphing-over-mob/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/chronicle-good-triumphing-over-mob/ |
Tales of complicated rogues — from the lovable to the murderous
Review by Rachel Newcomb
Chef Anthony Bourdain has a drink at Tintol restaurant in Times Square in 2006. In Patrick Radden Keefe's "Rogues," Bourdain stands out as a lovable rogue in contrast to the overtly criminal variety. (James Keivom/New York Daily News/Getty Images) (New York Daily News Archive/NY Daily News via Getty Images)
In most of his previous best-selling books, including “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” and “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,” journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has masterfully illuminated what he calls his “abiding preoccupations.” These are, namely, “crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” His latest book, “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks,” offers a glimpse at these preoccupations in his shorter-form work, a collection of essays originally written for the New Yorker. Taken separately, each piece offers a portrayal of rogues variously defined, ranging from the overtly criminal to the lovable (in the case of chef Anthony Bourdain). Taken together, the essays reflect the collective preoccupations of the unsettling era in which we now live: mass shootings and terrorism, unaddressed mental health issues, and the many flavors of financial corruption.
Keefe is frequently engaged with stories involving a rogue and a pursuer who is obsessed with bringing the criminal to justice. (Or, in the case of death penalty defense lawyer Judy Clarke, getting the accused off.) Take accused German wine forger Hardy Rodenstock, who died in 2018 still insisting on the authenticity of his discoveries, most notably bottles from the 1780s that supposedly once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. One collector of the “Th.J.” bottles, as they came to be known, was American tycoon Bill Koch, brother of the renowned conservative donors Charles and David. Koch spent considerable amounts of time and money filing lawsuits against Rodenstock, throwing himself “into his battle against Rodenstock and phony wine with the same headlong enthusiasm that he devoted to collecting wine in the first place.” Another avenger profiled is Ken Dornstein, who lost his brother in the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing. A respected journalist in his own right, Dornstein has spent almost his entire adult life chasing down the shadowy culprits behind the bombing, a quest complicated by the 2011 Arab revolutions and the collapse of Libya.
Often in Keefe’s work, the lines between criminal and crusader are blurred, as in the case of computer technician Hervé Falciani, who stole confidential data from the private Swiss bank HSBC containing the names of wealthy individuals who had offshored their money. Swiss law enforcement pursued him, but the French, eager to gain evidence of citizens who had evaded taxes, welcomed him as a hero.
Judged solely by the severity of their crimes, many of the lawbreakers are overtly despicable. Yet while not excusing their misdeeds, Keefe nonetheless manages to highlight the humanity and contradictions in their lives. The Syrian arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, provider of weapons and ammunition to terrorists and guerrillas, was faultlessly hospitable to guests at his Marbella mansion and was described as a loving father to his children. And Mathew Martoma, convicted of insider trading based on advance knowledge of poor results in tests of an Alzheimer’s drug, stood out to his undergraduate professor at Duke as someone with an abiding interest in the study of medical ethics. Keefe also re-creates the mundane everyday lives of his subjects prior to their crimes: Boston marathon bomber and erstwhile jihadist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev spent his college evenings “getting high and playing video games with friends,” photographs of his dorm room revealing “a painfully American banality: cinder-block dorm rooms, big-screen TVs, mammoth boxes of Cheez-Its.”
Intimate characterizations are at the heart of Keefe’s writing. Chef Anthony Bourdain, for example, “with his Sex Pistols T-shirt and his sensualist credo” had “something of the aging rocker about him,” belying the fact that he was “controlled to the point of neurosis: clean, organized, disciplined, courteous, systematic. He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus.” In a meeting with the former president of Guinea, Alpha Condé, an idealistic ruler attempting to counter corruption in the country’s iron ore mining industry, Keefe writes that Condé “listed slightly to the right while we talked, in a posture of heavy-lies-the-crown fatigue.”
A book largely about highly publicized rogues and those engaged with trying to entrap them, “Rogues” is a fast-paced and frequently suspenseful read. While the often-high-profile crimes committed are familiar, Keefe is a virtuoso storyteller, able to create suspense with his descriptions of how those crimes unfolded. There is a feeling in many of the essays that, given the smallest of detours, events might not have happened as they did. What if, for example, neurobiologist Amy Bishop, who in 2010 shot and killed three of her colleagues in a department meeting at the University of Alabama after not receiving tenure, had been investigated for the 1986 murder of her brother, whom she supposedly shot by accident? What if the television show “The Apprentice” had never existed: Would Donald Trump have ascended to the presidency? Keefe makes a convincing case that “The Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett not only created reality television as we know it today but also fashioned the successful image of a man whom American viewers could then envision as presidential. “The Apprentice,” Keefe writes, “portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth — a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines.”
The collection ends with a 2017 essay about the meteoric rise of chef Anthony Bourdain. Keefe masterfully captures Bourdain’s frantic energy and creativity, as well as his struggles with substance abuse. Tragically, Bourdain took his own life a year after the essay was published. It’s a depressing endnote that suggests the perils of notoriety — good rogues are gone all too soon, while others manage to evade justice indefinitely. “Rogues” reveals much that is troubling about our world today: the challenges of international cooperation, the ill-gotten gains of obscenely wealthy individuals, and the intractable presence of terrorism and mass shootings. The overwhelming impression from these essays is that justice in our violent, turbulent world is fragile and elusive. Fortunately, there is no shortage of individuals engaged in lifelong crusades to pursue it or, in the case of Keefe, to write about it.
Rachel Newcomb is a professor of anthropology at Rollins College.
True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
Doubleday. 368 pp. $30 | 2022-07-08T12:58:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks," by Patrick Radden Keefe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/tales-complicated-rogues-lovable-murderous/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/08/tales-complicated-rogues-lovable-murderous/ |
Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter is all smiles after his acquittal in a Swiss court. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
A federal court in Bellinzona, Switzerland, acquitted former FIFA president Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, his former right-hand man, of corruption charges on Friday following an 11-day trial.
After an investigation that lasted six years and cost both men their influential roles in world soccer’s governing body, Swiss prosecutors in November formally accused Blatter of approving an illicit payment of more than $2 million to Platini in 2011. At the trial, the defendants argued that the money was back pay for services rendered by Platini in his role as a FIFA adviser.
Blatter and Platini said at the trial that they came to a “gentlemen’s agreement” over his pay in 1998, a time when Blatter claimed FIFA could not afford his salary. Platini would sign a contract to work for FIFA in August 1999, with the adviser job paying him around $300,000 annually.
Prosecutors alleged that the “gentlemen’s agreement” never happened and that Platini “submitted to FIFA in 2011 an allegedly fictitious invoice for a debt still existing for his activity as an adviser for FIFA in the years 1998 to 2002.” But one of the judges said that the agreement seemed credible and that the millions paid by FIFA to Platini in 2011 were appropriate, considering his standing as president of UEFA, European soccer’s governing body.
The payment, which was revealed in a 2015 investigation into bribery, fraud and money-laundering at FIFA by the U.S. Department of Justice, led to Blatter’s downfall after 17 years as FIFA president. The 86-year-old remains banned from the sport and is the subject of a separate Swiss investigation into other alleged illicit payments.
Platini, a former star for the French national team, was in line to replace Blatter before he, too, was barred from the sport for unethical conduct, a ban that ended last year. He has long claimed that the charge was a way to keep him from taking over as FIFA president when Blatter retired.
Platini now could run next year for the FIFA presidency in an attempt to topple Gianni Infantino, who replaced Blatter in 2016. Infantino had previously served as UEFA general secretary under Platini for six years. In November, Platini filed a criminal complaint against his former underling in France, accusing Infantino and other FIFA officials of influence-peddling.
“Believe me, going from being a legend of world soccer to a devil is very difficult, especially when it comes to you in a totally unfair way,” Platini said in his statement Friday. | 2022-07-08T13:03:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ex-FIFA leaders Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini acquitted of corruption - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/sepp-blatter-michel-platini-acquitted/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/sepp-blatter-michel-platini-acquitted/ |
One of Africa’s longest-serving heads of state, he led his resource-plentiful nation through seemingly endless conflict for 38 years and funneled vast riches to his family.
By Bob Drogin
José Eduardo dos Santos in 2017 as he arrives to attend the swearing in ceremony for the newly elected Angolan President João Lourenço. (Ampe Rogerio/Getty Images)
José Eduardo dos Santos, who presided over Angola during a brutal civil war and navigated the crosscurrents of the Cold War to last 38 years as president, becoming one of Africa’s longest-serving and most rapacious tyrants, died July 8 at a clinic in Barcelona. He was 79.
The government of Angola announced his death on its Facebook page. News reports said he had been traveling to Spain for several years for cancer treatment.
During his nearly four decades in power, from 1979 to 2017, Mr. dos Santos led his resource-plentiful nation through seemingly endless conflict and an uneasy peace marked by corruption that funneled vast riches to his family and a favored few while leaving most Angolans in dismal poverty.
More than half a million people were killed in a civil war that displaced more than 3 million and left much of the country in ruins or pocked with land mines, even as Angola became Africa’s second-largest oil producer and third-largest producer of diamonds.
A fiercely private, even reclusive figure, Mr. dos Santos largely eschewed any cult of personality. Even his image on the country’s currency was partly concealed by another portrait. He gave few speeches or interviews, revealing little of his personal life. He offered a tight-lipped smile in official photos, none of which showed his office or homes.
Mr. dos Santos was eventually forced into exile — to a $7.2 million mansion in Barcelona — after his successor, President João Lourenço, unexpectedly launched an anti-corruption crackdown that closed in on the long-untouchable dos Santos family and its associates.
The chief target of the probe was Isabel dos Santos, the former president’s eldest daughter and reputedly Africa’s richest woman. She was charged in 2020 with money laundering, forgery and other financial crimes stemming from her tenure as head of Angola’s national oil company, Sonangol.
Prosecutors relied in large part on a massive trove of leaked financial and business records revealed by news organizations working with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington-based investigative nonprofit. The “Luanda Leaks” scandal tied Isabel dos Santos or her husband to more than 400 corporate entities in 41 countries and offshore tax havens.
She had opulent homes in London and Dubai and built a secretive business empire worth an estimated $3.5 billion, but denied wrongdoing. Two of her half siblings fled abroad. A half brother, José Filomeno dos Santos was arrested in 2018 and later sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling up to $500 million from Angola’s sovereign wealth fund, which he had led.
In all, the Lourenço government estimated that more than $24 billion was looted during Mr. dos Santos’s rule, allegedly through illegal diversion of oil revenue, sweetheart government contracts, deeply entrenched patronage and other schemes.
Mr. dos Santos “allowed his immediate and extended family and associates to dominate commercial activity in what became a stagnating economy [and] a textbook kleptocracy,” said Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at Chatham House, a British think tank.
Despite his understated public image, Mr. dos Santos held nearly unfettered power. He headed the armed forces, oversaw security agencies and led the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, the forces that have dominated nearly every facet of Angolan life since the Portuguese colony won independence in 1975.
At that point, Mr. dos Santos’s faction was backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. The United States and apartheid-era South Africa supported the MPLA’s chief military rival, known by the acronym UNITA, fueling a ruinous superpower proxy war for control of Angola. The country’s civil war outlasted the Cold War, sputtering to a close only in 2002.
During his long tenure, Mr. dos Santos’s regime relied on what State Department human rights reports described as arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings, as well as a murky judicial process and limits on free assembly, speech and the press.
A shrewd dealmaker, Mr. dos Santos achieved his political longevity by swapping allies and ideologies as the world changed around him. As the Soviet Union began to implode, the onetime Marxist-Leninist permitted a partial market economy, allowing Chevron, Texaco and other U.S. companies to tap Angola’s vast offshore oil fields, the country’s chief income source.
In time, he abandoned Marxism-Leninism completely, expelled Cuban forces and allowed the country’s first multiparty elections. The United States became Angola’s largest trading partner, and Mr. dos Santos made four working visits to the White House by 2004.
Since then, an increasing share of the country’s oil has gone to China. As part of a loans-for-oil program, China has invested more than $20 billion in roads, schools, power plants and other infrastructure in Angola, according to the Portuguese news agency Lusa.
Nevertheless, the World Bank estimates that more than half of Angola’s more than 30 million people survive on less than $1.90 a day. Life expectancy in Angola remains among the world’s lowest, and infant mortality ranks among the highest.
José Eduardo dos Santos, the son of a bricklayer, was born in Luanda, the capital, on Aug. 28, 1942. His high grades secured him one of the few spots available to African students at a school attended by children of the Portuguese elite. Amid rising anti-colonial sentiment on the continent, he enlisted in the MPLA’s army at age 20 determined to end four centuries of Portuguese rule.
Like many African militants, he found support in Moscow. He received a degree in petroleum engineering in 1969 from a college in Baku, Azerbaijan, then a Soviet republic.
He was serving on the MPLA’s central committee when Portugal agreed to grant independence to Angola in 1975. The transitional government in Luanda collapsed when fighting broke out between the MPLA and rival guerrilla groups, including the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA.
With help from Havana and Moscow, the MPLA managed to secure a shaky new government under President Agostinho Neto, but his death from cancer in 1979 elevated Mr. dos Santos — then a key cabinet member — to president, commander of the armed forces and head of the People’s Assembly.
Angola — a country twice the size of France — remained in dire straits. The currency was all but worthless and the civil war, often fought by child soldiers, destroyed infrastructure and sent millions fleeing.
The 1992 multiparty elections, which were conducted under a cease-fire and supervised by the United Nations, marked the first real chance for peace. But when Jonas Savimbi, the U.S.-backed UNITA leader, lost decisively to Mr. dos Santos, he falsely claimed fraud and reignited the war.
Savimbi’s forces soon captured vast swaths of territory and cut supply lines to cities, producing starvation in some areas. As casualties and atrocities mounted, Alioune Blondin Béye, the U.N. special envoy to Angola, called it “the worst war in the world.” A peace deal was achieved only after Angolan troops killed Savimbi in February 2002.
Mr. dos Santos was married to Ana Paula dos Santos, a former fashion model and flight attendant. He was reported to have fathered four to eight children by various wives and relationships, but no official list of survivors was immediately available.
Suffering from poor health, Mr. dos Santos voluntarily stepped down at the 2017 legislative elections and handed power to Lourenço, his former defense minister and political protege.
A year later, Mr. dos Santos sat in stunned silence at an MPLA conference as his chosen successor denounced recent “corruption, nepotism, flattery and impunity” in a barely veiled attack on the former ruling family.
To the gathering, Mr. dos Santos offered no apologies, acknowledged unspecified mistakes and said he was leaving with his “head high.” | 2022-07-08T13:03:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola dies at 79 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/08/jose-eduardo-dos-santos-angola-dictator-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/08/jose-eduardo-dos-santos-angola-dictator-dead/ |
Naira Ashraf's mother attends the trial of her daughter's accused killer in Mansoura, Egypt, on June 26. (Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images)
BEIRUT — Egyptian student Naira Ashraf boarded a bus to her university for the end-of-the-year exams last month while, unknown to her, on that same bus was a colleague carrying a concealed knife. As she got out he stabbed her repeatedly in front of the university gates, before slitting her throat.
Violence against women is nothing new in the region, but the back-to-back cases by men who felt entitled to these women’s affections, and the apparent copycat nature of the second attack, have struck a chord with women across the Levant, Gulf and North Africa. They have served as a reminder that no woman is safe, anywhere, from anyone.
The gruesome, public nature of both murders, both taking place on campus grounds, caused a ripple of outrage that defied borders. Women from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia took to social media to express anger and solidarity. Large groups of mostly women protested in Sudan, holding signs that said “Abolish the patriarchy” and “Free health care and education means women live in safety.”
Egypt’s women are rising up against sexual violence. Others are still being jailed for TikToks.
As women called for a largely symbolic general cross-border strike on Wednesday to protest the persistent violence against women, another gruesome case emerged: A Jordanian man was arrested after killing and burying his 9-year-old and 12-year-old daughters.
In the past, such femicide cases would just spark anger within countries, but this summer’s string of murders, and in particular the cases of Ashraf and Irshaid, appeared to cause a larger reaction across the region.
Women in the region, and worldwide in general, are more likely to be killed by family members or people who know them. As a result, many cases are covered up, with so-called honor killings — homicides of women who have “brought shame” to their families — frequently presented as suicides.
Men killing their partners rationalize their actions by blaming the woman’s behavior and the victim somehow becomes responsible for her own killing, Begum said.
In each of these cases, authorities failed the women, Begum noted, with laws and policies that discriminate against women and treat them as second-class citizens. In many cases, including Ashraf’s, repeated complaints about the assailant were filed to police before the attack.
Neighbors told local outlet Cairo 24 that her attacker never made any trouble and people used to hear only the family’s voices “when he used to beat his mother and sisters.”
Last year, a Kuwaiti woman filed two police complaints against a man she said had been harassing and threatening her for over a year after she turned down his marriage proposal. He was detained and released, after which he crashed his car into hers, kidnapped her and her two children, and then fatally stabbed her in front of them.
Outrage in Kuwait after woman is stabbed to death by man she reported repeatedly for harassment
In Beirut on Thursday, a group of mostly women gathered to protest the recent rise in cases of violence against women around the region.
“Women are still being killed because there are no deterrents,” said Faten Abou Chacra, a campaign coordinator with Kafa, a nonprofit that works against female violence and exploitation. Its Arabic name means “enough.”
Lebanon has a domestic violence law, but Abou Chacra said its rarely invoked and she blamed the state for not protecting women and children and having no national strategy to try to change the current way of thinking.
“Everything is cumulative,” she said. “The sexual harassments that take place are hushed up, which evolve into assault, which is hushed up, which evolves to rape.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report. | 2022-07-08T13:03:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Killing of students Naira Ashraf in Egypt and Iman Irshaid in Jordan cause outrage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/killings-university-women-egypt-jordan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/killings-university-women-egypt-jordan/ |
The increasing availability of good jobs for those without degrees coincides with challenges for traditional higher education
By Lawrence Lanahan
A man rides his bike on the University of Maryland campus in College Park. Gov. Larry Hogan announced in March that the state government would strip bachelor’s degree requirements from thousands of job listings. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)
Troy Groom, of Hyattsville, Md., was browsing social media this spring when he read something that made him perk up: Gov. Larry Hogan (R) announced in March that the state government would strip bachelor’s degree requirements from thousands of job listings.
Groom had left Bowie State University when his first daughter was born. That daughter now has a college diploma. Groom still does not. But he had gained experience and credentials: a two-decade rise in retail and a suite of computer networking certificates that led him to three years of information technology contracting gigs.
When Groom interviewed for his first IT job, he heard the dispiriting sentence that trips up so many careers: “I’m looking for someone with a bachelor’s degree.” But the hiring manager at that job looked past the unchecked box and took Groom on as a configuration management analyst.
That was one position, and one hiring manager. Who knew what would happen with the next job search? With Hogan’s move, however, the lack of a degree wasn’t an obstacle: It was a reason to be recruited.
Maryland drops degree requirement from some jobs, adding to debate over value of college
Thanks to a tight labor market, more good jobs are opening up to workers who lack a bachelor’s degree. A month after Maryland’s announcement, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) directed government agencies in his state to embrace hiring workers for skills, not degrees. Private sector employers have been rolling back B.A. requirements, too.
While the pandemic labor shortage has prompted more employers to welcome applications from workers without degrees, workforce advocates have been pushing back for years with some success against so-called degree inflation triggered by the Great Recession. When the economy tanked in 2008 and millions of laid-off workers began competing for scarce jobs, employers got pickier about who they hired and increasingly added four-year degree requirements to some “middle-skills” jobs that had frequently been filled by workers without degrees. (Middle-skills jobs, which include positions in fields such as health care, IT and sales, require some training or education beyond high school, although not necessarily a B.A.)
The increasing availability of good jobs for those without degrees coincides with challenges for traditional higher education. Enrollment, already on a decade-long decline, dropped precipitously during the pandemic, emptying a million seats at two-year and four-year colleges.
Colleges lost 465,000 students last fall. The continued erosion of enrollment is raising alarm.
Opportunity@Work connects STARs to training programs and works with employers to develop job listings for its Stellarworx employment website. The organization says 70 million Americans are STARs. Maryland labor secretary Tiffany Robinson estimated that 47 percent of Maryland workers are, too.
“We had a flood of applications on the first tranche of postings,” Robinson said.
Businesses like Google, IBM, and Accenture have also made high-profile moves to boost skills-based hiring. In a report earlier this year, the labor analytics firm Burning Glass found that just 9 percent of Accenture’s “computer support specialist” listings required a bachelor’s in 2021, down from 46 percent in 2017.
The Burning Glass report, which Fuller co-wrote, found that between 2017 and 2019, the number of positions requiring a B.A. dropped by more than 5 percent in roughly half of all middle-skills occupations. Only a quarter of these changes were “cyclical,” or attributable to the labor market. Sixty-three percent of the changes were deemed “potentially permanent” shifts in hiring practices.
But workers will still need some alternative way to build the skills required to get hired without a college degree. Many job seekers never get that chance because they are stuck in low-wage, low-skill jobs and, as Fuller put it, “can’t afford not to work.”
Fuller points to the work of Social Finance, a nonprofit that helps workers train without going under financially. In February, Google announced a $100 million partnership with Social Finance to help as many as 20,000 workers earn IT certificates. Social Finance will draw on nonprofit workforce groups such as YearUp and Merit America to train participants and counsel them toward employment.
Halid Hamadi, a 28-year-old Washington, resident, stumbled upon a Merit America IT training program on Indeed.com. “I was like, ‘Okay, that’s too good to be true,’” he said. “Because in bold they said, ‘We’re looking for minorities that don’t have a bachelor’s degree.”
Hamadi had withdrawn from Penn State University in 2016 for financial reasons and taken a minimum wage retail job back home in Montgomery County in Maryland. Merit America provided a stipend that helped him afford a bus pass to attend job counseling sessions while he completed a 13-week Coursera program to earn a Google IT certification. His first job was a $45,000 “tier one” tech support position with a health care software developer. Two promotions later, he was an integration engineer making $75,000.
Another Merit America participant, 32-year-old Amber Wallace Dekie of Manassas, Va., graduated high school in 2008.
A bachelor’s degree still holds prestige as a ticket to the middle class, but its value has received increasing scrutiny. In the last several years, rising tuition and student loan debt have led more Americans to reconsider an investment in postsecondary education. When Gallup asked Americans in 2019 about the value of college degrees, just 51 percent answered “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013.
Whether even more Americans opt out of four-year college will depend in part on the jobs available without that diploma. Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said that a decade from now, 40 percent of jobs for those who lack a four-year degree but have some postsecondary education will be good — which he defined as paying at least $40,000 per year by the time the worker reaches age 40. That’s compared to 75 percent for four-year degree holders.
And he noted that while 30 percent of two-year degree holders earn more than those with four-year degrees, a bachelor’s degree still pays off in the long run through a significant advantage in lifetime earnings.
Still, while more workers may be finding good jobs without degrees, not all of them have foreclosed on the idea of returning to school. Some, like Wallace Dekie, worry they’ll hit a career ceiling without a college diploma.
“Certificates are huge in IT. A certificate will get you in the door. But if you’re going to go anywhere, you need that [B.A.] in addition,” she said.
She’s currently looking into an online bachelor’s program at Western Governors University, an online-only institution.
The strategy of earning certificates in the IT field has also worked out well so far for Groom, even if it depended on the good luck of having a hiring manager who looked past his lack of a college diploma. Groom has already earned six figures in one year. The Hogan administration’s move to hire for skills rather than degrees has opened another potential career path for him, and he hopes landing an IT job with the government will give him an entree to a career in cybersecurity. | 2022-07-08T13:12:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | More workers without degrees are landing jobs. Will it last? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/08/jobs-no-college-degrees/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/08/jobs-no-college-degrees/ |
President Biden speaks at Max S. Hayes High School in Cleveland on July 6. (Daniel Lozada/Bloomberg)
Okay, America. Now that the celebration of your 246th birthday is over, you’ve got some work to do. Or, at least the “you” who are Democrats do. Y’all are experts at hair-on-fire complaining and savior hunting, all while ignoring the power of your own vote and growling at anyone who reminds you of it.
There has been story after story after story about how Democrats are mad at President Biden for fill-in-the-blank deficiency. (My colleague Dana Milbank recently did his usual excellent job of cataloging the absurdity of it all.) I’m not saying the White House is perfect or isn’t in need of some messaging improvements. What I am saying is enough with the self-defeating backbiting. Neither Biden nor the party — or the country, for that matter — can afford the consequences.
The mewling and moaning seem to have begun in earnest late last month after Biden’s remarks on the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. “Voters need to make their voices heard,” Biden said. “This fall, we must elect more senators and representatives who will codify a woman’s right to choose into federal law once again, elect more state leaders to protect this right at the local level.”
This “Schoolhouse Rock!” statement of fact was greeted with derision and cries of “Is that the best you’ve got?" The maddening, all-too-typical shortsightedness makes me want to grow my hair out — so I could tear my hair out.
Dana Milbank: Give Biden a break
Biden is a president elected by the people, not a king ruling from on high. He needs a House and Senate that will send him legislation he can sign into law. If Biden is to do all the ambitious things today’s complainers (rightly) want, they need to give him a bigger Democratic majority in Congress than the wafer-thin one that exists now.
But here’s what most irksome: Those complainers will claim demoralization because of what they see as Biden’s legislative impotence, and then stay home in November. And if this abdication ends up rolling out the red carpet for Republicans, said complainers will blame Democrats for the ensuing mayhem of the GOP demolishing even more rights.
Before you turn the comments and my mentions into a dumpster fire of invective, let’s walk down memory lane to that time Democrats lost the House and then the Senate in successive midterm elections.
A wave of hope-and-change put President Barack Obama in the White House in the 2008 election. In the 2010 midterms, 26 million fewer Democrats voted for House candidates than in 2008. Tea party-powered Republicans claimed the House majority by gaining 63 seats; the GOP vote fell off, too, as is common in midterms for both parties — but not nearly as sharply.
Yes, Obama won reelection in 2012. But by the time of the 2014 midterms, he was begging the coalition that sent him back to the White House to show up at the polls. Nope. Not only did the GOP increase its House majority to the largest since World War II, but Democrats lost their Senate majority. About 15 million fewer Democrats cast ballots for Senate candidates in 2014 than in 2008 — compared with only about 6 million fewer Republicans.
Democrats are facing a few structural and historical headwinds. The president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms of its first term; the one exception since World War II is 2002, after the 9/11 attacks. Voter suppression efforts in the states are focused on African Americans and other key Democratic constituencies. Gerrymandering is a problem, of course, and the Senate is built in a way that disadvantages Democrats. Unfair as it may be, voter participation is the one power individuals can wield against those headwinds.
And let me be clear that I understand the urgency of doing something right now to safeguard the lives and health of women and girls post-Roe. But it is imperative we do everything possible to try to prevent what could be a Republican wave and the conservative revanchism that would undoubtedly attend it.
During an interview about her documentary “Aftershock” on Black maternal mortality, I decided to ask Tonya Lewis Lee what she would tell the increasingly vocal “why should we vote again?” crowd now that the right to abortion has been stripped away. She was unequivocal. “Voting matters. You need to vote again and again and again,” Lee said. “Voting is everything.”
Indeed, it is. You can either spend your time griping about nothing getting done or you can vote to help elect people who will do what the American people need. To argue that voting is a waste of time or useless is to participate in your own powerlessness. | 2022-07-08T13:12:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Democrats complaining about voting risk giving up their power - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/democrats-complaining-voting-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/democrats-complaining-voting-abortion/ |
Effect of Supreme Court ruling: The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision has not immediately affected abortion rights in Alaska, given the existing precedent in the state.
Effect of Supreme Court ruling: The decision didn’t have any immediate impact on Colorado law -- but providers are preparing for a surge of out-of-state patients. Democratic House Majority Leader Daneya Esgar says lawmakers must consider how to invest in a health care workforce to ensure Colorado has the capacity to meet that anticipated demand. Colorado’s health department reports there were 11,580 abortions in the state in 2021; of those, 14% were for non-residents. More than 900 of those non-residents were from Texas, Wyoming and Nebraska. | 2022-07-08T13:12:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Abortion ruling prompts variety of reactions from states - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/abortion-ruling-prompts-variety-of-reactions-from-states/2022/07/08/6c5c4664-feb3-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/abortion-ruling-prompts-variety-of-reactions-from-states/2022/07/08/6c5c4664-feb3-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
The traditional Rose Bowl matchup could be a casualty of the latest round of college realignment. (Tournament of Roses/Pool/Getty Images)
The current state of college football is this: Across the nation, paunchy over-exalted ticket managers who title themselves athletic directors are racing in ungainly circles trying to find a padded, covering seat for their butts in a game of musical chairs. For years they cried that name, image and likeness payments to players would be a threat to the game’s tradition and uniqueness. It’s nothing compared to the destruction wrought by these administrative gluttons with their combination of treachery and ineptitude, who would give away a century to grab a television minute.
The 101-year-old Rose Bowl is in danger of collapsing into one of those tumbled-down structures you see on the slopes of old Rome, while the supposed business geniuses turn college football into something sickish that looks like three different tumors stuck together. They have arrived at a situation where Stanford, Texas Christian, Cincinnati and Central Florida could all wind up clapped into the same distended conference, in which players must take red eye flights home from games, just so said administrators can claim to be media honchos while covering their years of overdrafts.
All the people saying college football would lose the character that made it distinct if players were ever allowed NIL payments? They failed to recognize that the real people leeching it of originality and distinctiveness were the ones sitting in the corner offices.
These functionaries would do any kind of business, no matter how unseemly, rather than do the most fundamental thing: balance sensible budgets in the name of academia. College athletics is supposed to be a break-even proposition, a nonprofit endeavor with education as its aim. Amateurism was never required for that. Simple integrity was. The right intention.
Instead, they have ruled college football with market panic and predatory practices. These continental leaps by schools toward creating bloated “superconferences,” are not the result of the “rapidly changing sports media and college athletic landscapes,” as Southern Cal President Carol Folt tried to sell it disingenuously to her constituency. They are the result of the slow gathering of lousy practices over decades, which were the furthest thing from well-intentioned.
UCLA is frantically clutching at the end of a rope and swinging across the country to the Big Ten because it has apparently run up a $102.8 million deficit, which the Big Ten’s media rake-off will help alleviate. A good deal of the deficit is the inheritance left by former athletic director Dan Guerrero when he retired rich in 2020. As The Will Hobson revealed in a devastating expose of college sports fiscal practices in 2015, Guerrero increased his salary from $299,00 to $920,000 between 2004 and 2014, though his duties remained the same.
Another of Guerrero’s bequests to the world of college athletics was to grow UCLA’s administrative staff from 91 to 141 employees and its non-coaching payroll from $9.1 million to $16 million in that span, after adjusting for inflation. Such excesses put these schools on a path toward catastrophe, even before a real one arrived with the pandemic.
But the frenzied economic climate goes back much further than this kind of disastrous bloating of athletic departments in the last 20 years, the $50 million gross misallocations to indoor waterfalls and locker rooms like first-class yacht cabins.
It dates to the powers schools’ subversion of Supreme Court’s 1984 antitrust ruling in the case of NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which stripped the NCAA of its ability to regulate college football’s TV contracts and team appearances on the air. The ruling was intended to be a corrective to the NCAA’s overbearing exercise of its powers, but the problem with it is that it failed to recognize there is a legitimate state regulatory interest in curbing the excess profiteering of athletic department scoundrels who are simply using the kids for skim.
The University of Georgia’s president at the time, Fred Davison, didn’t bother to disguise why the big football schools were suing to strip the NCAA of regulatory control over TV rights. He wanted an end to “a tyranny of the majority to impose itself on the commercial enterprise.” Why should Georgia have to split airtime and media profits with a mass of smaller colleges? Even then, the ministers at the power schools were talking about forming a single “superconference,” in which the peons would be brushed aside so the giants could compete solely against giants — and not have to profit share with Rutgers or Hofstra or Vanderbilt. They’ve been trying to get to this consolidated-wealth point for decades and decades.
John Feinstein: USC and UCLA share values with the Big Ten all right. Greed, for one.
In a dissent, Justices Byron “Whizzer” White and William Rehnquist recognized this ulterior motive and where it led. White wrote that the court was “subjugating the NCAA’s educational goals” to “purely competitive commercialism.” And the end game would be total cannibalism. They were exactly right.
So now Virginia, North Carolina, Clemson and Florida State may be flirting with the Southeastern Conference, and the Big 12 may try to swallow half a dozen Pac-12 schools, not because it’s good for the players or the student body or will lead to interesting and uplifting competition, but because of the mega-broadcasting rights deals, and for those who are left out, it could mean the gutting of entire athletic departments.
If college football is anything more than pageantry and fevered boosterism, it’s because there is something worth teaching in it. It doesn’t make you naive to say college athletics can and should have a genuine moral-educational component. In the right hands, the game is a discipline that has absolutely nothing to do with money or amateurism. It teaches a certain brand of, for lack of a better word, citizenship. It’s all about restraint of selfish desires for a larger goal, in the name of a collective prideful endeavor. When you strip the final vestiges of that away, now the game truly does become unrecognizable.
This “new landscape” of college football is not new at all but rather the black decay of a half century of totally unrestrained commercialization by the administrators. And the game they’re blighting is likely to be a lot less captivating and worthwhile as a result. That’s what will ultimately kill interest in the sport, not the cash in the pockets of the kids. | 2022-07-08T13:46:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | College football realignment was caused by short-sighted administrators - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/college-football-realignment-big-ten-sec/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/college-football-realignment-big-ten-sec/ |
Grambling State women's volleyball coach Chelsey Lucas was fired this week, just five months after being tapped to lead the Tigers' program. (iStock)
Within three months of her hiring at Grambling State, women’s volleyball coach Chelsey Lucas was making headlines.
A 2007 Grambling graduate, Lucas starred on the court for the Tigers, making her a familiar face upon being tapped in February to lead the program. But by April, she had drawn the ire of athletes, parents and alumni after dropping all 19 players from the roster. Grambling State, whose administration initially supported Lucas’s actions, announced Tuesday that it fired the first-year coach, amid an ongoing investigation into her decision.
“The decision was made due to the determination of an internal investigation within the volleyball program,” the school said in a statement.
Grambling State volleyball went 11-17 last season under previous coach Demetria Keys-Johnson, who stepped down in December to take another position at the university. Lucas was then hired Feb. 14, after compiling a 37-44 record at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff over three seasons and an 18-15 mark last year.
Lucas’s relationship with Grambling State players was tense from the beginning, according to multiple reports, which cited players who speculated that Lucas remained bitter over an incident that occurred last season when Pine-Bluff played Grambling State.
“When we played them at home and we beat them, our school has like this chant, but at the end of the chant you say, like, the B-word,” senior Sheila Borders told Andscape. “I guess she thought I was calling them B-words, but, like, the whole school says it. They say it at basketball games and football games. It’s nothing personal.”
During her first meeting with Grambling State players, Lucas reportedly said, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me again. I bet y’all will think twice about who y’all call a b----.” In the weeks after her appointment, Lucas held three practice sessions, “most of which consisted of very few volleyball related drills and a lot of punishment-related running,” according to the Monroe News-Star.
Some of Borders’s former teammates tried to push past the icy reception and develop a relationship with Lucas. Borders’s mother turned to the transfer portal, looking to fact-check rumors that Lucas’s former Pine-Bluff players intended to transfer to Grambling State.
“The girls know the girls at UAPB, they’re in the same circle of sport,” said Tasha Bryce, Borders’ mother told the News-Star. “So they were told [by the UAPB players] that they were going to enter the transfer portal and then they were going to come over. Not going to lie, I fact-checked. … Sure enough they were all there.”
On April 4, Lucas reportedly called individual meetings in which she informed the 12 scholarship players that she would not renew their scholarships for the upcoming season. Seven walk-ons were told their spots would be renewed. Lucas reportedly offered four former scholarship players the opportunity to remain on the team as walk-ons, but all four declined.
Grambling State’s administration publicly supported the decision, with athletic director Trayveon Scott issuing a statement at the time that said, “Just as the transfer portal empowers student-athletes, our coaches are also empowered to make the decisions they deem necessary to advance their programs.”
The decision left Grambling State players scrambling to find new programs late in the offseason, with some short of graduation by a few credits.
“[Lucas] said that we weren’t able to practice much, which we weren’t, and she said based off of that she was not able to renew my scholarship, so I didn’t really get any time to show what I could do,” junior Maurisa Harris told KSLA News 12. “When I was in there and she told me, my heart completely broke. … I didn’t cry in there, but I did when I left and it just hurts really bad, the fact that it was snatched away so fast.”
In the aftermath of those April meetings, players who had been removed from the program started a Change.org petition calling for Lucas’s job and for the school to reinstate players’ scholarships, which garnered more than 3,700 signatures. Grambling State in early May said it hired an outside firm to open its investigation into the allegations involving Lucas and the program. That same month, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith amplified the situation during a segment on “First Take.”
Lucas, who had not publicly commented on the matter until after her firing, told KSLA that she was ordered not to speak to the media about the matter. In an interview with 247 Sports, she disputed details surrounding the allegations against her.
She said the school’s administration was not only aware of her roster decisions, but that Scott, the athletic director, suggested she “get rid of ’em all.” Lucas claimed she met with only 14 players on April 4, and that some were offered the chance to stay.
“There were girls that … I gave them reasons of why that you would no longer be a part of Grambling State University program and there were young ladies, there were student-athletes, that I asked, that I asked, ‘I want you to be a part of this program,’ ” she said.
“The narrative of this team, even when I came in, from the administration, [was] that this was a bad character team. That’s what I was getting, but at the same time I wanted my administration to give me a fair chance to make sure I go in and be able to be the coach for them and evaluate and assess these young ladies on and off the court.”
Scott declined to comment through a university spokesperson. In its statement, the school called student-athletes a priority but said “any additional comments will be held until the conclusion of the investigation.”
“As we move forward in this transition and commence a national search for the next coach, all volleyball student-athletes who received scholarships for the 2022-23 academic year will keep their scholarships and remain on the team,” Scott said in the statement. “Walk-ons will also continue to hold their roster spot.” | 2022-07-08T13:46:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Grambling State fires Chelsey Lucas, volleyball coach who cut entire team - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/grambling-state-volleyball-coach-fired/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/grambling-state-volleyball-coach-fired/ |
Evidence of firearms in Jan. 6 crowd grows as arrests and trials mount
During a recent Jan. 6 committee hearing, testimony about armed Trump supporters accompanied police radio reports
Video of rally attendees is shown as Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies during a hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Some of the startling revelations of the recent blockbuster Jan. 6 House committee hearing came in snippets of police radio traffic captured during President Donald Trump’s rally on the Ellipse and from Trump’s purported response to being told there were armed protesters just outside a secured area.
The chatter included reports of a man with an AR-15 in a tree on Constitution Avenue who was accompanied by two men with pistols on their hips. Another officer radioed, “I’ve got three men walking down the street in fatigues carrying AR-15s, copy, at 14th and Independence.”
The recordings aired during the June 28 hearing in which former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump reportedly “was angry that we weren’t letting people through the [metal detectors] with weapons.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Park Police said the agency investigated “a report of an individual on the Washington Monument grounds in a tree possibly armed with a pistol. USPP officers contacted the individual and it was determined the individual was unarmed.” A spokesman for the D.C. police said there was no indication that any arrests were made or weapons confiscated on the basis of the people cited in radio transmissions played by the committee.
At 15th Street and Independence Avenue the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, a Washington Post reporter watched as a group from Broward County, Fla., was stopped by D.C. police because people in the group were carrying large assault rifles. They said the guns were not loaded and “just a symbol” of their Second Amendment rights. They were briefly detained but released once the guns were handed over to police. Some in the crowd protested that “you can’t suspend a constitutional amendment,” but the interaction occurred before the Capitol was breached and did not turn violent. It is unclear whether the group the reporter encountered was the same reported on the hearing’s radio transmissions or why the men were not arrested when D.C. law prohibits the open carrying of guns.
Federal authorities have said that officers were confiscating weapons illegally brought into the District starting Jan. 5 and encountered people brandishing gun parts in an intimidating manner. The latter category included two men stopped the morning of Jan. 6 who wore slings attached to machine gun barrels while walking along the Mall. The men were not charged because the barrels alone were not firearms, authorities said. It is unclear whether they were part of the group seen by a Post reporter.
U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, whose pursuit by a mob inside the Capitol was the subject of a viral video, has said that but for police restraint in the use of force, the riot “could have easily been a bloodbath,” a sentiment echoed by several officers on the witness stand in Jan. 6 criminal trials.
Defendants have said as much as well. In video evidence played at his trial, Guy Reffitt of Wylie, Tex., said that as he stood near the front of the mob on the west side of the Capitol, he counted eight firearms carried by five people.
Reffitt said that his count included his .40-caliber pistol and his Texas companion’s .45-caliber handgun, five firearms carried by a couple he met at the Capitol and a .22-caliber weapon carried by a woman who stopped to help him after he was hit with bear spray. Reffitt was found guilty in March of encouraging one of the first surges by the mob to overwhelm police while carrying his semiautomatic handgun in a hip holster.
Of the rioters who approached the Capitol on Jan. 6, four have been charged with taking guns onto the Capitol grounds, and two of those have been convicted. Three other supporters of Donald Trump have been convicted of bringing weapons into D.C. but not to the Capitol. And a New York City man suspected of taking weapons to the Capitol was found to have a cache of guns and ammunition in his Manhattan residence and was sentenced to 3½ years in prison.
Also, at least three other men from outside the D.C. area also were arrested for carrying unregistered guns in the city on Jan. 6, court records show, but it is unclear whether they attended either the Trump rally or the Capitol riot. All three pleaded guilty in D.C. Superior Court and their charges were later dismissed.
At least some were aware of D.C. laws that strictly limit firearm usage and ban the open carrying of guns.
“You aren’t going to do anybody any good rotting in jail,” Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes told his followers in a recorded online meeting in November 2020, according to court documents. “Pepper spray is legal. Tasers are legal, and stun guns are legal. And it doesn’t hurt to have a lead pipe.” An armed group would stay in Virginia “awaiting the President’s orders ... then D.C. gun laws won’t matter,” Rhodes said in the meeting, according to court documents. Attorneys for Rhodes, who has pleaded not guilty to seditious conspiracy and other charges, said he and other defendants staged firearms hoping Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, transforming the Oath Keepers into a kind of militia to keep Trump in office.
About 825 people have been charged federally in the Jan. 6 riot. Most have been charged with misdemeanor-type trespassing counts. Although only a handful have been charged with firearms violations, at least 121 people have been charged with using or carrying dangerous weapons, and about 20 have been found guilty, a Washington Post database shows. Scores of police officers reported being attacked that day with chemical spray, stun guns, flagpoles and clubs. A Florida man who hurled a fire extinguisher, a plank and a long pole at officers was sentenced to more than five years in prison in December, the longest sentence of any defendant so far.
Last month, Mark Andrew Mazza, 57, of Shelbyville, Ind., pleaded guilty to assaulting an officer with a baton and carrying a pistol without a license. Mazza told authorities that he lost his .45-caliber Taurus revolver loaded with shotgun shells and hollow-point bullets on the Capitol grounds during the mob fighting before entering the Capitol building. He later filed a false police report saying the gun had been stolen in Ohio, court records state.
Both Reffitt and Mazza are awaiting sentencing.
In addition, then-DEA Agent Mark Ibrahim of Orange County, Calif., posed for photos with his DEA badge and a pistol inside his waistband on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, prosecutors have said. Photos seem to show Ibrahim circling the Capitol grounds, and then climbing onto the Peace Monument at First Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where he recorded a video of himself delivering a monologue, court records state. He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of possessing a dangerous weapon on Capitol grounds. Ibrahim told investigators he did not recall intentionally exposing his weapon, according to court filings. His attorney declined to comment.
DEA agent trespassed at Capitol on Jan. 6 and lied about it, prosecutors say
Also, Maryland tow truck driver Christopher Alberts was arrested outside the Capitol Visitor Center on Jan. 6 after a D.C. police officer spotted him with a loaded 9mm handgun on his hip as people were leaving the grounds that night, court records show. Alberts also wore a bulletproof vest, carried a backpack and had a full spare magazine of bullets, prosecutors said. He was later indicted on multiple counts of entering restricted grounds and assaulting law enforcement officers, and has pleaded not guilty. Alberts’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Three men who identified themselves as Trump supporters but did not enter the Capitol on Jan. 6 also were arrested and convicted of gun charges. Lonnie Leroy Coffman, 70, of Falkville, Ala., marched around the Capitol that morning and then wandered away before the riot. But his unoccupied truck attracted police attention because it was on First Street SE, in the area where pipe bombs had been found outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties. While U.S. Capitol Police officers were sweeping the area, they spotted a handgun on the passenger seat of Coffman’s red GMC Sierra 1500.
Coffman pleaded guilty to possession of unregistered weapons and was sentenced to 46 months in prison, the third-longest term issued to a Jan. 6 defendant so far.
“I don’t think I’ve seen, in all my years as a judge, quite such a collection of weapons,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said. She began serving as a superior court judge in D.C. in 1984 and moved to the federal bench in 1997.
Alabama man with molotov cocktails, guns on Jan. 6 gets 46-month sentence
Cleveland G. Meredith Jr., a devoted follower of the radical QAnon ideology, drove toward the nation’s capital from Colorado on Jan. 6 with a rifle, a 9mm handgun, 2,500 rounds of ammunition and high-capacity magazines. In one text message, he told his family he was “gonna collect a … ton of Traitors heads.” But his truck broke down and he didn’t arrive until after the riot had ended. The next day, Meredith texted his family that he was considering “putting a bullet in her [Nancy Pelosi’s] noggin on live TV.” His family called the FBI. Meredith was arrested, pleaded guilty to one count of making felony threats and was sentenced to 28 months in prison.
One Trump supporter was charged in D.C. Superior Court with illegal gun possession. About 6:20 p.m. on Jan. 6, a D.C. police officer was sent to check out a report of a suspicious man in a white van parked on Maryland Avenue, about a block northeast of the Capitol. Grant McHoyt Moore, 65, of Georgia, was inside the van and, according to a police arrest affidavit, “pointed to a red MAGA hat on the dash and said, ‘I’m one of those.’”
Moore told the officer he had a handgun in a backpack on his passenger seat, for which he had a license in Georgia but not the District, the affidavit states. The officer found a loaded Ruger .380 handgun with three extra loaded magazines. Moore was charged in D.C. Superior Court with possession of an unlicensed firearm and unregistered ammunition, and pleaded guilty with a “deferred disposition,” meaning the charge will be dismissed if the defendant remains trouble-free for six months. Moore did so, and the case was dismissed.
Samuel Fisher, 33, of New York City, posted at least one photograph on Facebook of himself at the Capitol on Jan. 6, followed by a photo of himself holding a handgun in front of a flag with a message that read, “Don’t Tread on Trump, Keep America Great,” court records show. On the morning of the riot, Fisher wrote on Facebook, “I got a Vest and My Rifle.” The FBI said agents searched his apartment on New York’s Upper East Side several days after the riot and discovered several weapons, including a modified AR-15 rifle, a ghost gun pistol, a loaded shotgun, and 13 loaded high-capacity magazines. He pleaded guilty in New York to one count of criminal possession of a weapon and was sentenced to 3½ years in prison.
Fisher was not charged with taking a gun to the Capitol. He pleaded guilty to a federal trespassing charge on Wednesday.
Peter Hermann contributed to this report. | 2022-07-08T13:59:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Guns on Jan. 6: Multiple people brought firearms to Washington - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/jan6-defendants-guns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/jan6-defendants-guns/ |
Story by Nick Miroff
Photos by Eric Thayer For the Washington Post
YUMA, Ariz. — The young men wearing parkas and sweatshirts appeared out of the darkness around 2 a.m., running for a gap in the border wall and sending up great clouds of dust.
“Don’t run!” the other migrants shouted in Spanish. “Walk!" the Border Patrol agents yelled.
The 15 men, all from India, clustered together anxiously in line along with hundreds of others waiting to turn themselves in. The crowd included families from Colombia and Venezuela. Smiling Cuban 20-somethings taking selfies. Several young Iranians, the only ones wearing protective masks for covid. A group of Georgians heading for New Jersey.
The polyglot queue in Yuma of what authorities call “give ups” presented a jarring contrast to the wild chases happening about 300 miles farther east along the border. Under a blazing afternoon sun in Nogales a day earlier, young men from Mexico wearing head-to-toe camouflage climbed over the border wall every few minutes in choreographed intervals, racing into dry creek beds, residential backyards and a sprawling junkyard. A dozen or so U.S. agents charged after them on ATVs, bicycles and horseback, badly outnumbered.
Arizona spans more than 370 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and perhaps no other state better encapsulates the array of challenges facing U.S officials trying to manage the illegal entries. Border crossers are arriving from more countries and in greater numbers than ever, at the same time that Mexican migration has surged to levels not matched since the mid-2000s.
CBP encounters along
Southwest Border by year
Data is in fiscal years. 2022 data is through May.
Source: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol
CBP encounters along Southwest Border
CBP encounters along Southwest Border by year
“The people who are crossing the border don’t pick where they cross the border,” John Modlin, the Border Patrol chief of the Tucson sector, said in an interview. “They are at the mercy of the smuggling organizations.”
CBP divides Arizona into two sectors, Yuma and Tucson. The Mexican traffickers who control smuggling routes have developed a tailored strategy for each one to move clients paying thousands of dollars to enter the United States.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection sectors
in the Southwest Border
Total number of encounters at the
Southwest Border as of May 2022
Title 8: Standard immigration proceedings
Title 42: Public health policy linked to pandemic
allowing CBP to quickly return some nationalities
Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Total number of encounters at the Southwest Border
Title 8: Standard
Title 42: Public health policy linked
to pandemic allowing CBP to quickly
return some nationalities back to Mexico
U.S. Customs and Border Protection sectors in the Southwest Border
Total number of encounters at the southwest border as of May 2022
immigration proceedings
The Tucson sector is used mostly for young men from Mexico. Smugglers guide them via cellphone through isolated desert and mountain areas, or send them to blitz the border wall in ones-and-twos, stretching U.S. agents whose numbers are spread too thin to stop them all. As daytime temperatures soar past 100 degrees, emergency rescue calls are constant and deaths from heat exposure are common. The smugglers play a numbers game, knowing agents are too tied up to arrest everyone and migrants rarely face legal consequences for getting caught.
In Nogales, Ariz., young men from Mexico wearing camouflage suits jump the border wall in broad daylight, running and hiding in residential backyards, storm drains and junkyards. Smuggling organizations on the Mexican side have lookouts on the hillsides above town who send the men in ones-and-twos, playing a numbers game against U.S. agents spread too thin to stop them all. Many of those arrested are quickly returned to Mexico under the pandemic-era Title 42 public health policy, which effectively allows border crossers to try again and again until they succeed. Once detained, agents direct migrants to remove any camouflage layers and shoelaces while checking their documents.
Adults from Mexico and Central America’s Northern Triangle countries arrested in the Tucson sector are typically sent back across the border under an emergency public health policy implemented at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The policy, known as Title 42, gives U.S. agents a quick way to return migrants, but CBP officials acknowledge a spike in recidivism rates because there is no punishment or threat of jail for repeat crossing attempts.
[How covid-era immigration restrictions work at the border]
In Nogales, one young man from Mexico’s Puebla state said it was the third time he’d been caught by agents in 15 days. His mother and father were waiting for him in New York City, he said. “I’ll keep trying,” he shrugged.
A cheap cellphone found in the bushes near the spot where he was arrested had text messages from an apparent smuggler. “POLLO,” one message read, using the smugglers’ term for customers. “ANSWER,” it said in Spanish.
The Yuma sector’s pattern is the near-opposite. Migrants from all over the world, including many families with children, arrive in groups of 60 to 100 between midnight and dawn. Vans, trucks and passenger vehicles drop them off along the banks of the Colorado River on the Mexican side, and they wade through knee-high water into the United States, entering through unfinished segments of the border wall.
The challenge for U.S. agents in this sector amounts to more an administrative than physical one: handling huge volumes of newcomers, including children, in the middle of the night, speaking dozens of languages.
At a gap in the border wall along the banks of the Colorado River outside Yuma, Ariz., migrants from all over the world arrive in large groups in the middle of the night to surrender to the Border Patrol. Those who claim a fear of persecution are generally processed and released into the United States while their applications for humanitarian protection are pending. The scene resembles an international arrivals hall, with people of all ages coming from India, South America and Eastern Europe after catching flights to Mexico. Agents use cellphones with new facial recognition software that scan identification documents. The Title 42 policy is rarely applied in Yuma because Mexico does not accept returns from these nations.
The process at the busiest crossing point in Yuma has become so routinized that it resembles an outdoor international arrival hall. There are portable restrooms, crates of bottled water and trash bins where migrants are instructed to toss any personal items that don’t fit into a small plastic bag.
Cubans have been arriving in numbers not recorded since the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and many of those lined up in Yuma announced and narrated their U.S. landing on social media. Others video-chatted with loved ones on WhatsApp. Arizona served as a roundabout way for them to get to Florida, but a much safer one than the sea.
Southwest Border encounters
SINGLE ADULTS
INDIVIDUALS IN FAMILY UNITS
INDIVIDUALS IN
FAMILY UNITS
UNACCOMPANIED
Summer temperatures in Yuma reach 110 degrees during the day and remained close to 90 well past midnight. The group of men from India who ran to the wall remained in tight formation, sweating profusely in puffy coats and cold-weather gear. “Punjab” several said when asked where they were from, shaking their heads at questions about how they’d arrived and why they’d left India.
A Colombian man, Ronald Lopez, arrived panting and dizzy, aided by his wife, Diana, and son, Samuel, 9, who was wearing a New York Yankees cap. The family got lost in the brush along the river, Lopez said, and his diabetes triggered a low-blood sugar episode. He collapsed against the border wall.
A young Brazilian ahead of him in line who said he had medical training appeared with a jar of Nutella. Lopez scooped out the sticky hazelnut spread with his fingers and gulped it down with bottled water set out by the Border Patrol.
“Papi, it’s all right, you’ll be okay,” Samuel said, hugging his father as both cried. “We made it. We’re in the United States. This is your dream.”
Lopez said he worked at a car dealership in Bogota, but his wife had felt unsafe back home. A friend in New York with a cookware business needed a new salesman. So the family flew to Cancún.
A Mexican immigration agent threatened to deport them, Lopez said, but let them through for $600. They caught another flight to Tijuana, where he said police along the highway took the rest of the family’s cash, more than $1,000.
“We’re making this sacrifice for a better life,” Lopez said. “Things in Colombia are very hard.”
Of the 33,326 migrants taken into CBP custody in Yuma in May, about 3.5 percent were expelled under the Title 42 policy, the lowest figure anywhere along the border. Mexico generally does not accept the return of non-Mexicans from outside Central America, and migrants who claim a fear of harm if deported are generally bused out of the Yuma area and released into the United States pending a court hearing.
Agents in Yuma have encountered migrants from 109 countries so far this year, according to CBP figures.
Some, but not all, submit formal applications for asylum in the United States. U.S. immigration courts rarely grant asylum, but the adjudication process typically takes several years. During that time applicants are allowed to live and work in the United States, and the odds they will face arrest and deportation if denied are low, government statistics show.
After CBP processing in Yuma, some migrants are transported to the Casa Alitas Welcome Center in Tucson, operated by Catholic Community Services in a former juvenile detention center brightened by cheerful decor.
Nonprofit and charity organizations work with the Border Patrol to assist migrants when they are released from U.S. custody. Buses from the border arrive throughout the day at the Casa Alitas Welcome Center in Tucson, where Catholic Community Services provides covid screening, meals, WiFi access and travel coordination to help migrants reach their destinations in the United States or reunite them with relatives.
Sanjay Salim Chodry arrived at an intake area with his wife and two young children after a 10,000-mile journey from Gujarat, India. The family flew to Turkey, then Cuba and El Salvador before traversing Mexico and arriving in Yuma, Chodry said.
Shelter staff handed his family plates of pasta and vegetables. “No meat, right?” he asked, making sure the food was vegetarian.
“Everything in India is too expensive,” he said. “America is the number-one superpower.”
The shelter offered covid screenings, meals, WiFi access and travel coordination so migrants could purchase plane and bus tickets to their U.S. destinations. Director Teresa Cavendish said the number of migrants arriving from the border had dipped in June as summer temperatures rose.
“There’s a lull right now, but it won’t last,” she said. “I think there are still a lot of people waiting to see how the administration will respond if Title 42 is not lifted.”
The Biden administration attempted to lift Title 42 in May, but a federal court blocked the move, ordering the administration to keep the policy in place.
In the Tucson sector, about 74 percent of the 25,923 CBP arrests in May ended with an expulsion under Title 42, one of the highest rates along the border.
Tucson also has some of the largest numbers of “gotaway” incidents in which a border crosser is detected entering illegally but not taken into custody, according to CBP. The agency is recording about 1,000 such cases per day border-wide, according to a senior official who was not authorized to share the unpublished figures.
The push-and-pull factors that fuel migration have become powerfully aligned since President Biden took office. The pandemic, a sputtering global economy and myriad conflicts around the world are driving people to leave their homes in search of better lives; U.S. labor demand, an overburdened American asylum system and the Biden administration’s reputation for permissiveness serve as draws.
Republicans have been pounding the president’s border record ahead of the November midterm elections, and the deaths discovered in San Antonio in late June of 53 migrants being transported in a truck lacking adequate air or water — the deadliest human smuggling incident case in U.S. history — brought new waves of partisan blame.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a $564 million spending bill this week to add more barriers and detection technology along the border, while also boosting assistance to local law enforcement agencies. In May, Ducey began sending busloads of migrants from Arizona to Washington — if they volunteer for a ride — following a similar initiative started by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
Polls show immigration and border management are among Biden’s worst-rated issues, and video footage of the crossings in Yuma are featured in Republican ads.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other Biden officials say they plan to ramp up criminal prosecutions for illegal reentry, the enforcement tool used by CBP in the past primarily to deter Mexican migrants.
The court ruling extending Title 42 does not preclude the Biden administration from referring repeat offenders to U.S. attorneys. Officials did not provide information about the number of such cases the agency has referred for prosecution in recent months.
Border Patrol agents Jesus Vasavilbaso and Robert Ortiz check the sewer tunnels in Nogales, Ariz., where the border wall extends underground. Ortiz chats with a man on the Mexican side of the border barrier in downtown Nogales, next to the official pedestrian crossing. In the deserts north of Sasabe, they track and apprehend Rigoberto Miranda, from Guatemala, who said he had been hiking for three days in triple-digit heat. He carried a cellphone and two battery chargers. Smugglers in Mexico use WhatsApp, Google Maps and other apps to remotely guide clients through isolated areas, resulting in high numbers of emergency rescue calls and deaths from exposure.
In interviews, CBP officials praised Mexican authorities for boosting enforcement along the south side of the border. But scouts working for smuggling organizations were visible on the hillsides above Nogales on a recent afternoon, brazenly directing the timing and location of crossing attempts.
Frustrated Border Patrol agents in Yuma said they were watched by smugglers on the Mexican side, too. Every time agents finished processing one large group and loaded them onto vans, a new group would arrive, as if the smugglers were staggering flights like air traffic controllers.
A young family from Russia arrived with a 4-year-old daughter they said was a U.S. citizen, born in Miami. There were four men from an extended family in Venezuela who shared photos of their grueling five-day jungle trek through Panama’s Darien Gap.
“I leave a hard life behind,” said Philipe Adeichvilli, who said he worked as a police officer in his hometown of Kutaisi, Georgia. “I think in USA my life will not be in danger.” He was headed for New Jersey.
I leave a hard life behind. I think in USA my life will not be in danger.— Philipe Adeichvilli, heading from Georgia to New Jersey
Chris Clem, the Border Patrol chief in Yuma, said despite the record volume of migrants arriving to the sector, U.S. agents have kept the process moving quickly. CBP cellphones are loaded with new facial recognition software that scans identification documents and uploads the information to intake files on agency servers, not unlike the formal process at official ports of entry.
On the opposite side of the border wall in Yuma, a young man who said his name was Alfredo lingered just out of view from the agents, scavenging. He said he crosses the border every night to pick through discarded backpacks, shoes and clothing, searching for items of value.
“I find money all the time,” he said. “Mexican pesos. They don’t want them anymore.”
Alfredo said he lost his job as a dental assistant in the Mexican border town of Los Algodones when people stopped crossing over for crowns and fillings during the pandemic. U.S. agents don’t bother him as long as he stays on the other side of the wall, he said.
“There’s no work in my town anymore,” he said. “Only smugglers.”
Editing by Efrain Hernandez Jr. Design by Carson TerBush. Graphics by Hannah Dormido. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Design editing by Madison Walls. Graphics editing by Tim Meko. Copy editing by Thomas Heleba.
Nick Miroff covers immigration enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security for The Washington Post. He was a Post foreign correspondent in Latin America from 2010 to 2017, and has been a staff writer since 2006. Twitter Twitter | 2022-07-08T14:34:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Across southern Arizona, the full range of migrant border woes - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/border-arizona-immigration-biden/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/border-arizona-immigration-biden/ |
By Darius Baxter
D.C. paramedics, firefighters and police offers at the intersection of 14th and U streets in Northwest Washington on June 19 after people were shot. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
Darius Baxter is president and chief executive of GOODProjects.
Hundreds of millions of Americans are tired of not feeling safe in their homes, schools, places of worship and grocery stores.
As with many of my fellow Washingtonians, I am devastated for the family of the 15-year-old who was shot and killed at the Juneteenth music festival, Moechella. I’m also horrified by the string of mass shootings across our country these past few months, most recently the lives lost at the Highland Park, Ill., Independence Day parade — an event meant to celebrate this country but that instead reflected the atrocities that plague it.
In response to this violence, I went to the Senate last month and spoke during 24-7: The People’s Filibuster for Gun Safety. Together with community and faith leaders, I demanded Congress enact gun regulations that protect our children, keep our schools safe and reduce the threat of violence in our communities.
Republicans and Democrats, local and federal agencies and gun manufacturers all have a role to play in ensuring vulnerable communities, such as mine in Southwest Washington and similar ones around the country, are safe places for our children to learn, grow and play.
As I testified during the People’s Filibuster, the Senate advanced the most significant gun safety bill of our lifetime. Though one can admit this is a step in the right direction, we cannot rest, knowing there is more for us to do here in D.C. and around the country.
The United States is in a crisis. My hometown, D.C., has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Yet shootings are on the rise for the fifth year in a row. Inconsistencies in gun safety regulations in neighboring states and lack of real accountability for the corporations profiting off the sale and distribution of guns have created a Silk Road for guns to flow into our neighborhoods, too often ending up in the hands of our city’s young people. And with nearly 70 percent of Americans calling for more gun safety regulations, this sentiment is not unique to Washingtonians.
I grew up surrounded by the terrors of gun violence. I was born at Columbia Hospital for Women in D.C. in 1993 during the crack epidemic. The city was known worldwide as the “Murder Capital,” suffering more than 450 homicides that year. My beautiful mother, Stephanie, was a teacher in D.C. Public Schools. My father, Garret, was a D.C. police officer.
They did their best to protect my brother, Demetrius, and me from the constant threat of gun violence that surrounded us. It touched everything we knew and everyone we loved. Despite my parent’s best efforts, gun violence ultimately destroyed our home. When I was only 9, my father was gunned down after dropping me off at football practice. The fairy-tale world that every child deserves to grow up in began deteriorating before my very eyes.
At that moment, I committed my life to creating pathways for families such as ours. In 2016, I co-founded GOODProjects with a group of dedicated individuals. We are creating a future for our children that is free from senseless acts of gun violence and builds true prosperity in communities.
Now more than ever, our generation has the opportunity to take actions that not only change laws but also change hearts and minds. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act gives Congress a framework for what it will take to keep our streets safe.
The violence crisis we are facing needs a bottom-up approach, including investing in local, grass-roots leadership. One cannot expect people who have been marginalized for centuries to buy into a system to prevent gun violence that is not working for them or with them.
Our children need heroes. I definitely did. They are growing up in a time where they are more desperate than ever for something to live for. The simplest step we can take together is rebuilding safer, stronger, functioning communities.
Gun violence is both a catalyst and result of trauma for the victims, the perpetrators and their loved ones. A person who wakes up in the morning feeling hopeful is far less likely to walk into a grocery store looking to harm innocent bystanders. A child who feels the love of a caring adult is far less likely to want to take the life of a peer. I find no joy living in a world where a fourth-grade student testified during the People’s Filibuster about learning escape routes during mass-shooter drills at her school.
All of our citizens, no matter their culture, political affiliation or income level, deserve universal access to therapeutic services to help navigate this world. And not just for children — this includes working-age adults and seniors, too.
Local and federal governments must be willing to respond to the crisis of violence in our country by investing in the education, training and placement of culturally competent behavioral health professionals in every school and workplace.
Though we must focus on the mental well-being of our communities, we must not lose focus of the immediate threat: free and open access to guns for far too many people. We must hold gun manufacturers and distributors accountable. Congress has protected gun manufacturers from any legal ramifications for crimes committed with their products. Big Tobacco was held responsible, but there has yet to be accountability for gun manufacturers.
I am proud to have stood up during the People’s Filibuster alongside hundreds of Americans from all walks of life to testify about what too many children are experiencing as they grow up surrounded by gun violence. The American people agree that change is necessary and it is time for our elected leaders to catch up.
We have the tools and resources to come together to put an end to gun violence once and for all in D.C. and the rest of my beloved country.
As Americans, we cannot stand for another 30 years of inaction. Together, we must continue to demand a safer, stronger country. | 2022-07-08T14:43:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Build bridges to address the crisis of violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/build-bridges-address-crisis-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/build-bridges-address-crisis-violence/ |
By Melissa C. Goemann
A stock image of a gavel and handcuffs. (iStock)
Melissa C. Goemann is the senior policy counsel at the National Juvenile Justice Network.
It is clear by now that two plus years of this pandemic has caused unprecedented, widespread negative impacts on Americans’ physical, mental and financial health for both adults and children. It is not surprising that amid this upheaval, some localities saw an increase in crime. Yet despite data at the national, state and county levels showing a substantial and steady decline in youth offending over the past decade, an irresponsible narrative is taking hold that youth crime is starting to get out of control.
A quick scan of news headlines underscores just how unchecked this narrative of children has become. One data point being cited to support this narrative was that the number of youths under the age of 21 who have been deemed homicide suspects increased from three in 2021 to nine in 2022 in Montgomery County. Any homicide is one too many and requires us to address underlying causes; however this data point alone cannot be responsibly categorized as a “surge in violence." In fact, the number of youth suspects in both contact and non-contact shootings has decreased so far from 2021. The overall arrest data for Montgomery County also tells a different picture. The vast majority of arrests in the county are for adults, not youths. For example, in the most recent arrest data from June 1 to July 1, there were nine arrests of youths under 18 out of a total of 386 arrests in the county. In data from Jan. 1, 2018, to Nov. 8, 2021, there were 330 arrests for youths under 18 compared with 4,679 for those 18 and older).
Furthermore, though it is tempting to draw conclusions based on one point in time, conversations on youth crime must take place within a broader context. A review of data provided by Maryland and Montgomery County over the past decade also paints a different narrative about young people. Montgomery County referrals to the youth justice system declined 51.8 percent from 2011 through 2020 (the height of the pandemic). Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services also reported youth crime fell in all categories from 2012 through 2021. These trends showcase children thriving despite a global pandemic thrusting them into a new normal.
Narratives that criminalize youths without providing the fuller scope of circumstances have dangerous consequences. One only has to look back to the false “superpredator” myth of the 1990s to see the immense damage that can be wrought when unfounded projections are repeated and accepted as fact. Posited by influential criminologists and spread by journalists, dire predictions were made of a superpredator youth crime wave that never materialized. But the die was cast, and it led nearly every state in the nation to pass legislation significantly increasing the ability of states to try children as adults, throwing thousands of children into adult jails and prisons where many were physically and sexually abused. We live with the consequences of these laws today as many states, including Maryland, continue to automatically try many children as adults.
Scapegoating young people is not only damaging to the youths who are demonized, but it also hurts our ability to effectively analyze and then address issues of concern. When we view children as just that, children, we expand the menu of responses from “lock them up and throw away the key” to policies that meet youth needs and thereby increase public safety.
We call on everyone — journalists and politicians included — to take heed: Inflaming the fire of a moral panic directed at our children is not only reckless but also can cause severe and lasting harm to our young people while deflecting attention from the real problems. Understanding data contextually and seeking the full scope of young people’s experiences helps us foster solutions-driven conversations that focus on how to resource services and supports to further help young people thrive.
Young people need compassion, support and solution focused investments; let’s give them that. | 2022-07-08T14:43:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Montgomery County’s demonization of youths won’t solve any problems - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/montgomery-countys-demonization-youths-wont-solve-any-problems/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/montgomery-countys-demonization-youths-wont-solve-any-problems/ |
By Andrew T. Bodoh
The Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond on July 24, 2020. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Andrew T. Bodoh is a civil rights lawyer in Virginia.
At 7:35 p.m. on June 1, 2020, the first gas canister exploded over the peaceful protest, thrown by a Richmond police officer in protective gear. It came without warning, with two more exploding seconds later. Then officers started firing canisters over and into the crowd.
The attack at the Robert E. Lee statue on Richmond’s Monument Avenue took only minutes, but it has irrevocably altered Virginia’s capital city.
The third canister landed near Richmond resident Keenan Angel, kneeling on the front line. He felt the gas and heard people behind him retreating. He held the line to buy more time. Two more local residents, spouses Jarrod and Megan Blackwood, saw the unprovoked attack from their front-line perch. Jarrod Blackwood, a lawyer, knew his rights and wanted to stay until the police arrested him without cause, but they had a child at home who could not spend the night alone. Once in their car, Megan Blackwood went to Twitter and invited the public to the City Hall at noon the next day to demand answers.
On the north side of Lee Circle, Christopher Gayler retreated by crossing the street. He turned to record what he saw, capturing the image of a rocket-propelled canister screaming in his direction.
Apart from the Blackwoods, these four were strangers to one another, joining thousands in a deliberately peaceful protest following the murder of George Floyd. This crowd did nothing more violent than a chant before the police attacked, and the officers gave no warning. Protesters had ropes on the J.E.B. Stuart Monument a long block away, but there were no ropes on the Lee monument and there was no sign it was under attack.
Richmond quickly went into damage control. Thirty-three minutes after the attack at the Lee Monument, the city tweeted that it had to gas the protesters because some officers were cut off, and the police needed to get them to safety. The mayor then co-opted the demonstration at City Hall the next day with the obligatory apology and a promise of investigations. Yet a year later, the Commonwealth Attorney’s office disclosed it was not investigating the incident. But no matter. The mayor took down the Confederate monuments and congratulated himself with a New York Times op-ed. He assured the world the city discovered the gassing was “unintentional.”
In fact, the scene commander ordered the attack. He ordered it before he was on scene. He then ordered it time and again from Lee Circle, though he could see no evidence justifying the attack.
Angel, Gayler and the Blackwoods set out to tell a different story — the truth. They contacted my law firm after we filed suit on behalf of Jonathan Arthur, one of our attorneys that was among the demonstrators attacked at Lee Monument. They joined in a lawsuit to hold the city accountable. They would not let go without assurances the truth would be told.
On July 1, my firm announced the fruits of that courageous determination. The joint settlement of Arthur’s state case and the case of these federal plaintiffs obligates the city to give the Library of Virginia all the body-camera footage from the June 1, 2020, events at the Lee and Stuart monuments, along with radio traffic recordings, dispatch reports and all the relevant policies, among other things. The city must allow these materials to be accessed and reproduced by the public. Additionally, the public can contribute their own videos, pictures and narratives of those events to tell the story of what really happened that day.
This collection is a memorial to the victims of the police violence, for there is no memorial better than the truth.
This collection will be a repository of information for public policy advocates to study how something like this happens and to discuss how to stop it from happening again. This will be a model for other cities and litigators to address police misconduct in the future.
I spent hundreds of hours with the audio and video recordings. We carefully tracked the events moment by moment. Well more than a dozen officers on the scene had enough information to say what was happening was wrong, but they didn’t. We need officers to oppose unlawful commands. We need local politicians and agencies to tell the truth when officers err. We need prosecutors with the courage to charge officers who violate the law. We need municipalities to preserve and publicly archive these files so we can find ways to do better. We need accountability and responsibility.
And so, we hope with this settlement, Richmond will never be the same. | 2022-07-08T14:43:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Richmond will never be the same - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/richmond-will-never-be-same/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/richmond-will-never-be-same/ |
What critics of diversifying Arlington’s housing get wrong
The Virginia Square/GMU Metro station in Arlington on Oct. 25. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Emily Hamilton is a senior research fellow and director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Arlington.
Arlington is known for its high-rise buildings near Metro stations, but on most of the residential land in the county, apartments, duplexes and townhouses are banned outright. On July 12, the Arlington County Board will discuss a proposal that planners have spent years studying and preparing for. It would legalize more “missing middle” housing — from townhouses to small eight-unit apartment buildings — across many parts of Arlington in an effort to allow more, lower-cost housing to be built.
Similar debates are happening in prosperous cities and towns across the United States, where a lack of options have workers and families living beyond their means, in cramped quarters or on the wrong side of packed freeways and far-flung suburbs. Opponents of permitting more moderate housing density — the type that falls between single-family houses and high-rises — argue that it would harm the environment, increase prices and require higher taxes. But research shows the naysayers are wrong on all three counts.
Many of Arlington’s single-family neighborhoods have a lovely tree canopy, and some local environmentalists oppose permitting more units where trees might be eliminated. A state law gives localities the authority to mandate more tree-canopy coverage on lots zoned for fewer units per acre, but the proposed new structures in Arlington would not exceed the size of single-family structures. This limits the extent to which adding missing middle housing would reduce the tree canopy.
The focus on individual plants, however, misses the forest for the trees. National environmental groups and climate scientists agree that places like Arlington — with Metro service, walkable neighborhoods and proximity to the region’s job centers — are the most environmentally friendly places to build new housing. Building in Arlington is better for the environment on every margin relative to walling off its neighborhoods, creating further pressure to clear cut forests at the edge of the region and expecting drivers to burn fossil fuels getting there. Further, missing middle homes usually share walls and roofs and are less energy-intensive to heat and cool than single-family houses.
Others argue that permitting more missing middle construction will increase housing costs because new construction might replace the county’s oldest, least-expensive single-family houses. But both basic economics and real-world evidence show that banning housing construction does not, in fact, improve housing affordability. Houston is the U.S. city that’s seen by far the most missing middle construction in recent decades, in the form of small-lot houses. Partly as a result, Houston’s median house price is below the nation’s, despite decades of rapid local economic and population growth.
And, as anyone who lives in Arlington can see, current zoning makes it profitable for home builders to tear down small houses and replace them with new single-family houses that are some of the most expensive in the region. New construction costs would be lower with duplexes, triplexes and other, more affordable options allowed.
Finally, some critics have raised concerns that missing middle construction and accompanying population growth will lead to higher property tax rates for Arlington’s current residents. But permitting more housing to be built along existing streets, bike lanes, sewers and parks mean that more people will be sharing and paying for existing infrastructure. For example, the borough of Palisades Park, N.J., permits widespread duplex construction while surrounding towns don’t, and it has the lowest property tax rates among its neighbors. In the 1990s, Palisades Park policymakers imposed a brief moratorium on new duplexes. Property values fell and property tax rates rose, and the moratorium was quickly overturned.
Townhouses, duplexes and other types of missing middle make up the core of the housing stock in many of the country’s oldest and most-beloved neighborhoods. Widespread single-family-home zoning, however, largely prevents their construction today. Missing middle housing is one key component of solving the housing affordability problem in the D.C. region. | 2022-07-08T14:43:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What critics of diversifying Arlington’s housing get wrong - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/what-critics-diversifying-arlingtons-housing-get-wrong/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/what-critics-diversifying-arlingtons-housing-get-wrong/ |
This primal scream over Trump’s enablers provides only a partial catharsis
Review by Joe Klein
Supporters of President Donald Trump gather on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., to protest the 2020 election results. Explaining his purpose in writing "Thank You for Your Servitude," Mark Leibovich writes: “I . . . never found Trump that captivating as a stand-alone character. . . . Far more compelling to me were the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side." (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
As a certifiably “serious” person, I’ve spent the past seven years trying to understand Trump voters. After all, they’re our fellow citizens. Their flagrant anger must have some justification. It must be our fault. I mean, extensive analysis and soul-searching and self-flagellation need to be undertaken if the republic is to survive, right? There must be a way to find common ground. (I really believe this, by the way.)
Mark Leibovich is having none of it. In his new book, “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission,” he uses caustic quotation marks around his occasional attempts to “understand” his fellow Americans as an indication of the futility of the enterprise. His purpose is more derisive and disdainful: “I . . . never found Trump that captivating as a stand-alone character. . . . Far more compelling to me were the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side,” he writes. Most of the events he describes are familiar, he says. “In all likelihood you’d rather not relive many of them. I sympathize.” But “the idea [of the book] is to tell the story of this ordeal through the supplicant fanboys who permitted Donald Trump’s depravity to be inflicted on the rest of us.”
Shooting vultures in a barrel, you say? Can there be fatter targets than Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy or Rudy Giuliani? Indeed, I was prepared to bluster about how cheap and dangerous such corrosive cynicism is. But Leibovich, by the end, sort of won me over.
Part of it is that he’s just so good at this. He is a world-class ranter, continuing an American tradition that includes such dyspeptic luminaries as H.L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke. Trump, he writes, “has a way of wearing you down. He invades your habitat, like the opossum that gets into the attic, dies, stinks, and attracts derivative nuisances.” Trump’s utter lack of shame “gave him the advantage of being bulletproof in his own scrambled head.” Sen. Ted Cruz saw his own “unpopularity in Washington [as] a defining asset.” Attorney General William Barr was the “Yo-Yo Ma of WH toadyism, with Trump as his cello.” Lindsey Graham was a “Gilligan to Donald Trump’s Skipper.”
Leibovich is, more subtly, a brilliant interviewer able to wheedle not-quite-admissions from his subjects, who give him all the access in the world. “I’m pretty much brain dead,” Lindsey Graham admits to him after the 2020 election, knowing full well that the journalistic aim of the enterprise is evisceration. “I’ll be seeing you back in D.C. We’ll visit.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy shows Leibovich cellphone photos of him posing with Trump, Pope Francis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kobe Bryant, and talks about how much he loves going to the Super Bowl and the Oscars. Former House speaker Paul Ryan tells Leibovich, “The President put out a tweet last night that was really good.”
The entire Trump project was a scurrilous joke, of course. A parody of American political life and decline. The primary venue for Leibovich is the Trump Hotel, which he compares to the set of “Cheers.” It serves as a nesting place for “Trump’s usual collection of pet rocks.” He gleans gems at the Benjamin Bar, trolls the BLT Prime steak house upstairs where Giuliani has a regular table with the nameplate, “Rudolph W. Giuliani, Private Office.” Lev Parnas, one of Giuliani’s Ukrainian enablers says he never went to the White House, “All I saw is the Trump Hotel.” William Barr guarantees his place in the pantheon by signing a contract to hold a holiday party at the hotel with a minimum cost of $31,500. In advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Trump raises minimum room rates from $476 to $1,999 per night.
Yes, we’ve seen these scenes before. But, gradually, I began to feel my gorge rising — the joke was on us, the American people, especially those of us, the dreaded elite, who took things like, well, health care and pollution and education and overseas authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin seriously.
Leibovich builds his case sequentially. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s fellow Republicans devolved toward cowardice through stages of moral blindness and, finally, lickspittle supplication. First, they ignored Trump’s utter lack of knowledge and crass behavior, hoping not to alienate his surprising legions. Their attacks on the Play-Doh despot were belated and pathetic. Florida’s Marco Rubio talked about the size of Trump’s hands. Ted Cruz didn’t even endorse him in his convention speech. South Carolina’s Nikki Haley said, “Donald Trump is everything we . . . teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” But he slaughtered the traditional Republicans. They swallowed hard and backed him against Hillary Clinton, secure in the fog of conventional wisdom that she would win and provide a perfect piñata for Republicans when she became president. But Clinton campaigned with all the zest of a day-old kale salad, overwhelmed by Trump’s deluge of nacho cheese dip. Then the Republicans figured, well, he’ll pivot toward solemnity now that he’s president. Nope. “If your campaign is a cult of personality, can you really modulate that personality and still retain the cult?” Leibovitz points out.
The Republicans were stuck in a devil’s bargain: They got their Supreme Court nominees and tax breaks for rich people, but they had to genuflect before a man most of them considered a “moron” (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson), an “idiot” (Chief of Staff John Kelly) and a “dope” (national security adviser H.R. McMaster). They were wrong, though. Trump is the Napoleon of nincompoops. He has a genius for identifying the soft underbelly of Washington’s tired conventions, and the weakness of his opponents. And he’s in on the joke: “The perverse beauty of Trump was that he could be weirdly forthcoming about how full of sh-- he was,” Leibovich writes.
So the GOP lapsed into nihilism. Its leaders regurgitated Trump’s lies. “It’s all theater, it doesn’t matter,” Graham said. When asked about how he would be remembered in history, Giuliani said, “My attitude about my legacy is: f--k it.” And the first lady wore a jacket emblazoned “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?”
They could be this brazen — they could almost get away with destroying American democracy — because a significant percentage of the American people, the folks that we “serious” people keep trying to “understand,” are too lazy and crass and bigoted to care; They just want revenge against the people who propose transgender bathrooms. And by the time Leibovich gets around to Jan. 6, 2021, I’m all in with the Atlantic’s exquisite Caitlin Flanagan, who describes the rioters as “deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans . . . with bellies full of beer and Sausage McMuffins, maybe a little high on Adderall.”
What a catharsis! After all those hours of trying to figure out why the most pampered and affluent and free people in history — people up to their ears in cellphones and flat-screen televisions and supercharged pickup trucks — are so angry, it feels good to whup the yokels upside the head, doesn’t it? I mean, at a certain point, our oh-so-civilized attempts at “understanding” become indulgence. Our attempt to respectfully bind the national wounds becomes a lesser version of the Republicans’ capitulation to the slovenly ignorance of the Trumpers. Why can’t we be as angry at them as they are at us?
Because we know better. We know that if we don’t figure this out, we don’t have a country. So, thanks for the primal scream, Mark. It felt . . . wonderful. But now it’s time to search, once more, for our better angels, even if they’re drowned out by chants of “Let’s go, Brandon” at the NASCAR races.
Joe Klein is the author of seven books, including “Primary Colors” and, most recently, “Charlie Mike.”
Thank You for Your Servitude
Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission | 2022-07-08T14:43:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission by Mark Leibovich - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/10/this-rant-over-trumps-enablers-provides-only-partial-catharsis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/10/this-rant-over-trumps-enablers-provides-only-partial-catharsis/ |
Boris Johnson didn’t want to quit. So how did they get rid of him?
Prime ministers are not all-powerful — they rely on the support of their party colleagues in Parliament
Analysis by Tom Quinn
A photo illustration of British newspaper front pages from July 8 following Prime Minister Boris Johnson's resignation. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Thursday that he would resign as Conservative Party leader, clearing the way for his departure as prime minister when his successor is chosen. This was inevitable, after a convulsive 36 hours, in which member after member of the U.K. government resigned. They were reacting to a scandal in which Johnson had appointed a party whip (to manage Conservative votes in Parliament) who had been accused of sexually inappropriate behavior. Johnson may have known about the whip’s reputation before his appointment.
This was only the most recent scandal to afflict Johnson, following his violation of his own government’s strict covid-19 lockdown rules in 2020. Many members of the public see Johnson as a dishonest politician without integrity. Many Conservative legislators came to share this perception. So how did they make Johnson resign, and what happens next?
The ruling party has power over the government
Britain has a parliamentary system in which the ruling executive (the government) emerges from, and is responsible to, the legislature. Usually — in 18 out of 21 post-World War II elections — one party wins a majority of parliamentary seats and can form the government by itself. That is what happened this time. After pledging to “get Brexit done,” Johnson’s Conservatives won the 2019 election with an 80-seat majority in the 650-seat U.K. Parliament, the party’s biggest majority in 32 years.
That majority is important. It means that the government can win any parliamentary vote provided that its own MPs (Members of Parliament) remain loyal. That in turn means that most key political developments occur inside the governing party. The prime minister is the leader of that party. He or she has huge patronage power to appoint ministers, as well as setting the general direction of government and party policy.
There are limits to that power
However, prime ministers are not all-powerful. If they don’t have the support of their own party colleagues in Parliament, they risk being replaced. This week saw Johnson lose the last vestiges of support from Conservative MPs, who had grown tired of his scandals and general disorganization. They feared that Johnson would lead them to defeat at the next election if he were left in place.
MPs’ problem was that Johnson did not want to go. Contrary to some overblown media commentary, Johnson wasn’t doing what President Donald Trump did, trying to cling to power through unconstitutional means. Even if it looked bad, he was entitled to stand his ground until his MPs could demonstrate that he could not remain in office.
Dissatisfied Conservative MPs had tried to remove Johnson as party leader last month in an internal party confidence vote, but he narrowly won it. This week’s events severely reduced that support but party rules prevented another vote within 12 months of the last. That led MPs to start talking about changing the rules to allow another challenge to take place sooner.
However, Johnson’s opponents’ primary tactic was to target his authority as prime minister. They achieved this following the resignations of two senior cabinet members, the chancellor of the exchequer (the U.K. finance minister) and the health secretary. Both cited Johnson’s lack of integrity. Their resignations this week precipitated a full-blown crisis for the prime minister.
Johnson initially tried to ride out the storm, appointing replacements. His Conservative opponents responded by organizing a continual drip-feed of resignations on Wednesday, mostly by junior ministers, but by some senior ministers too. The result was the highest number of resignations from a British government (other than during a reshuffle) in a single day. More resignations followed on Thursday morning. These resignations destroyed Johnson’s authority, demonstrating that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of his own party. Indeed, people didn’t want to take jobs from him. He was unable to fill vacant ministerial positions.
There will be a new leadership competition
Johnson reluctantly announced he was stepping down as Conservative leader. The party’s processes for choosing a new leader involves two rounds of voting. In the first, MPs vote over the broad field of candidates. In the second, roughly 100,000 individual members of the Conservative Party vote to choose one of the two candidates who got most support from the MPs. This can take a long of time: it took seven weeks to select Johnson as Conservative leader in 2019.
Voting for the party leader is not the same thing as voting for the prime minister. British prime ministers are not elected but are appointed by the monarch, who conventionally invites the leader of the majority party in Parliament.
Johnson would like to remain as caretaker prime minister until the new Conservative leader is chosen in the fall. Many Conservatives, including former prime minister John Major, oppose this plan, and are calling for him to resign immediately, given the scale of resignations and the lack of trust in Johnson. If they succeed in getting Johnson to resign, he could hand over to an alternative caretaker prime minister, most likely the first secretary of state, Dominic Raab.
None of this is likely to lead to a general election. A U.K. election is not due until 2024 and the opposition parties do not have the votes to force an early election by defeating the government in a parliamentary confidence vote. Even so, if the Labour opposition tables a motion of no confidence in a Johnson caretaker administration, Conservative MPs would be forced to support the government to maintain it in office, despite their lack of confidence in the prime minister personally. It would be one further embarrassment the Conservatives would be forced to endure.
Tom Quinn is a senior lecturer (associate professor) in government at the University of Essex, U.K. (@uniessexgovt), and the author of “Electing and Ejecting Party Leaders in Britain” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). | 2022-07-08T14:44:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why did Boris Johnson resign? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-tory-resign-uk-government-crisis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-tory-resign-uk-government-crisis/ |
By Alex Pulaski
A monument to John Wesley, who lived briefly in Savannah, Ga., before he helped found the Methodist Church, anchors Reynolds Square. (Photos by Alex Pulaski for The Washington Post)
For Black tour guides in Savannah, the historical is personal
A history of prosperity, at a cost
In Savannah, a quest for the superlative buttermilk biscuit
The view from the top
Pulaski is a writer based in Portland, Ore.
JW Marriott Savannah Plant Riverside District
400 W. River St.
bit.ly/savjw
Wonderfully transformed from a shuttered power plant to a vibrant hotel, dining and entertainment destination. Rooms have modern touches but maintain a link to the past through exposed steel beams and brickwork. Rooms from about $290.
Hamilton-Turner Inn
330 Abercorn St.
hamilton-turnerinn.com
This delightful 17-room inn, which received a mention in John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” has come full circle, from ornate home to neglected space to restored beauty. It has rightfully earned a spot in best-of lists, and with a window onto Lafayette Square, it transports visitors to another time. Rooms from $249.
107 W. Jones St.
mrswilkes.com
Lines for this lunch-only spot typically stretch down the block, with good reason. The parade of family-style dishes has to be seen — and tasted — to be believed: fried chicken, black-eyed peas, sweet potato souffle and more. Open Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Cost is $30 per person, tax included. Credit cards not accepted.
Common Thread
commonthreadsavannah.com
Pair a modern menu with a beautifully restored old house. Dinner entrees, such as the short rib and pork collar, are spectacular. We sat in the bar rather than the main dining room, and bartender Bonnie Wallace and bar manager James Nowicki turned a great dinner into a festive feast. Open Sunday to Thursday, 5 to 9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m. Entrees start at $18.
thegreyrestaurant.com
This restaurant is set in a renovated 1938 art deco Greyhound bus terminal, highlighting the soulful recipes of chef Mashama Bailey. Open Wednesday to Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The three-course dinner is $75 per person.
Local 11ten
local11ten.com
A modern, bustling place where the fresh ingredients, especially the seafood, shine. Standouts include market crudo of thinly sliced red snapper, and pan-seared halibut in a tarragon white wine sauce. Open Wednesday and Thursday, 5:30 to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 5:30 to 9:30 p.m.; and Sunday, 5:30 to 9 p.m. Entrees start at $28.
Clary’s Cafe
claryscafe.com
From what I gather, not much has changed here since Berendt memorialized the place in “Midnight” (other than the stained-glass homage to the book). Cheerful service and simple, hearty fare at remarkably low prices. Open daily, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Entrees start at about $7.
Stone & Webster Chophouse
bit.ly/stone-webster
One of the dozen-plus spots to grab a bite at the Plant Riverside District, this casual-but-upscale eatery specializes in hearty cuts of meat, such as an aged filet mignon or a tender Berkshire pork chop. Open Tuesday to Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m. Entrees start at $42.
Architectural Tours of Savannah
architecturalsavannah.com
Guide Jonathan Stalcup takes small groups on a journey from the 1730s, when Savannah was founded, to the 1950s, when efforts to save the city’s buildings took root. He explains the city’s layout and dissects historical buildings. Tours run once a day, usually at 10 a.m. Tours $30 per person.
Footprints of Savannah Walking Tours
footprintsofsavannah.com
Historian Vaughnette Goode-Walker starts her tours by thanking the ancestors, then takes listeners on a sobering journey through the city’s history in the enslaved person and cotton trades. She shows copies of ship manifests and receipts for sold enslaved people, and ends up at a building constructed as an enslaved person mart in the 1850s. Tour typically starts at 10 a.m.; 9:30 a.m. during summer. Costs $25 per adult; $10 for children under 12.
Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters
telfair.org
Tours offer a frank view of how enslaved servants lived and were treated for about the first half-century of this home’s history. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Last tour begins at 4:15 p.m. Tickets $22 for adults, $20 for seniors and active military, $15 for students, $5 for children 6 to 12, and free for children 5 and under; includes entry to the Jepson Center and Telfair Academy.
Mercer Williams House Museum
429 Bull St.
mercerhouse.com
Packed with relics collected by Jim Williams, the main character in “Midnight,” this well-preserved house is a must-see for the book’s fans. It is also the place where Williams and the man whose killing he was acquitted of — after four trials — breathed their last. Open Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Tickets $12.50 for adults, $8 for students and active military, and free for children 7 and under.
330 Bonaventure Rd.
bonaventurehistorical.org
Characters in Berendt’s book often made their graveyard visits in the dead of night. Although I can only imagine how creepy it would be in the moonlight, Bonaventure is strikingly beautiful and peaceful in the daytime. Open daily, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free. | 2022-07-08T14:44:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What's new in Savannah, Ga. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/08/savannah-georgia-travel-vacation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/08/savannah-georgia-travel-vacation/ |
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) delivers his annual State of the State address on March 8, 2022, in Sacramento. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
California will start making its own affordable insulin as part of an effort to combat high drug prices for a lifesaving medication that’s been made inaccessible for some Americans living with diabetes, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Thursday.
Newsom said in a video posted to Twitter that $100 million from the state budget he recently signed for 2022-2023 would be allocated for California to “contract and make [its] own insulin at a cheaper price, close to at cost, and to make it available to all.” Half of the $100 million would go toward the development of a “low-cost” insulin, Newsom said. The other $50 million would go toward a facility in the state to manufacture insulin that would “provide new, high-paying jobs and a stronger supply chain for the drug.”
“California is going to make its own insulin,” Newsom said in the video. “Nothing epitomizes market failures more than the cost of insulin. Many Americans experience out-of-pocket costs anywhere from $300 to $500 per month for this lifesaving drug. California is now taking matters into our own hands.”
It’s unclear when the state’s insulin would be available or how much it would cost. A spokesman with the governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.
The announcement out of California comes as top senators in Congress recently unveiled a bipartisan bill to curb the high cost of insulin, which has been decried for years by advocates, doctors and President Biden. The bill from Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) last month would place a $35 monthly cap on the cost of insulin for patients with private insurance as well as those enrolled in Medicare, though it wouldn’t afford the same protections to the uninsured. The bill also seeks to make insulin more accessible by cracking down on previous authorization requirements that can force patients to jump through hurdles to get insurers to help pay for medications.
Senators unroll bipartisan plan to curb insulin prices
Despite the pledge from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to bring the insulin pricing bill to a vote, the legislation faces an uphill climb in passing the chamber, as some Republicans have previously blasted the idea of a $35 cap as a price control.
More than 37 million Americans have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accounting for about 11 percent of the U.S. population. Even though more than 7 million Americans with diabetes are dependent on insulin each day, some Americans have struggled to keep up with the soaring costs of the drug, according to Yale researchers.
Since diabetics typically use two or three vials of insulin per month, costs can skyrocket to more than $6,000 annually for people with no insurance, inadequate coverage, or high deductibles. Some of the list prices for the drug can range from $125 to more than $500. Humalog, a branded insulin drug that cost about $21 per vial when Eli Lilly introduced it in 1996, listed at the end of last year at about $275 in the United States.
A 2019 study published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine found that the high costs for the drug had caused an estimated 1 in every 4 people with diabetes to skip doses or ration how much they took. Black, Latinx and Native American patients are disproportionately affected by the high costs due to them not having insurance or the level of insurance to cover the prices, research shows.
California’s push to make its own insulin isn’t the first time a state or group has tried to make the drug in response to the costs.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed legislation in 2019 to cap insulin co-payments at $100 per month to those patients with private insurance. In response to the high costs this year, Civica Rx, the nonprofit company for a consortium of large U.S. hospitals, said in March it planned to manufacture and sell generic versions of insulin at no more than $30 per vial and $55 for five injector-pen cartridges. Civica Rx said it expects to begin selling insulin in 2024, once it completes construction of a 140,000-square-foot pharmaceutical plant in Petersburg, Va. — and if it wins licensing from the Food and Drug Administration.
A group of hospitals has a plan to get around Congress’s refusal to lower the cost of insulin
Newsom signed the $308 billion state budget on June 30. Included in the budget was a $17 billion relief package to give “inflation relief” checks as high as $1,050 to residents to address concerns surrounding the nation’s highest average gas prices. The plan would also suspend California’s sales tax on diesel fuel and give additional aid for residents who need help with rent and utility bills, according to lawmakers.
California has the highest number of new diabetes cases among all states, according to the governor’s office. Ethnic minorities, the elderly, men and the poor are most affected by diabetes in California, according to the state.
The governor said in a news release last week that the budget investing $100 million in insulin is in place to “develop and manufacture low-cost biosimilar insulin products to increase insulin availability and affordability in California.”
“In California, we know people should not go into debt to receive lifesaving medication,” Newsom said in the video. | 2022-07-08T14:51:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California will make its own insulin to the drug's high prices, Gavin Newsom says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/08/california-insulin-newsom-drug-prices/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/08/california-insulin-newsom-drug-prices/ |
By John Farrell
Climate change might be playing a role in reports of larger-than-normal fish in unexpected areas. (Video: John Farrell, Brian Monroe/The Washington Post)
Big fish sightings appear to have spiked around the world: In the last year-and-a-half, there have been reports of a 661-pound, record-breaking stingray in Cambodia, a 240-pound lake sturgeon outside Detroit and a 100-pound Opah fish on the Oregon coast. As these fish show up in unexpected places, experts say climate change may be helping drive this trend.
The fish “aren’t growing larger, they are relocating to new environments,” said Francisco Werner, director of scientific programs at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries.
As waters warm — fueled by oceans absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat from global warming — fish are relocating. Werner’s work has shown that there is a prevailing pattern to these shifts, that fish populations are shifting toward the poles and cooler waters.
They are “trying to maintain some optimum temperatures and preferred temperature ranges that they like,” he said.
Last year, a huge opah fish — the kind typically found in tropical waters — washed up on the north Oregon coast. And Tiffany Boothe, assistant manager at an aquarium in the small beach community of Seaside, said it wasn’t the first time southern, warm-water fish had shown up in Oregon.
Salmon travel deep into the Pacific. As it warms, many ‘don’t come back.’
On the other coast, drastic temperature shifts in waters have meant changing conditions for fish there. In the Gulf of Maine, for example, waters have warmed five times faster than the global average for the past 15 years, said Kathy Mills, a researcher at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. As a result, Maine’s waters may offer a glimpse into future fish movement as planetary warming continues. Mills said the cod fishery “really supported the first fisheries in the country, and we have seen these populations decline as waters warm.”
“They just aren’t able to be as productive and continue producing as many young and have those be as viable and survive to adulthood as they could under cooler temperature conditions,” Mills said.
In contrast to the dwindling cod, Mills notes that, “American lobster now is experiencing temperatures that are really conducive for high population productivity.”
As a result, Lobster has boosted Maine’s economy as the highest value single species fishery in the country. But if warming trends continue, they may move on.
Even as Maine experiences a lobster boom, Mills worries about the species’ future with unchecked global warming.
“The question now is whether we’re seeing temperatures move into or beyond thresholds where they’re no longer conducive to this high productivity of American lobster,” she said. It “raises questions about what the future of the fishery might look like.” | 2022-07-08T15:26:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Big fish sightings are spiking. Climate change may be the cause. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/08/big-fish-warm-waters-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/08/big-fish-warm-waters-climate-change/ |
By Chris Alcantara
July 8 at 11:19 a.m.
Mortgage rates are near their highest point since the Great Recession, adding thousands in costs for would-be home buyers. The average interest rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage has risen to 5.3 percent as of July 7, according to the Freddie Mac, up from an average of about 3 percent in December.
Below, you can see how this jump affects the monthly cost of a typical mortgage. If you already have a mortgage, plug in your existing interest rate to see how much more expensive it would be if you signed today.
How much more expensive a mortgage is at 5.3% interest
Enter value greater than $0
Only 0-100% allowed
Old interest rate
Only 1-99% allowedDec. 2021 average
Monthly principal and interest payments
at 3% interest$0
at 5.3% interest$0
Monthly differenceDifference$0
Note: Calculations are based on a fixed 30-year mortgage. Calculations ignore mortgage insurance, closing costs, HOA feeds, property taxes, and other payments.
While the principal — the amount borrowed that needs to be paid back — stays the same, the change in interest payments can be enormous. Over the course of a 30-year mortgage, additional interest can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Total payments over a 30-year mortgage
After putting 20% down on a $450K house
At 3% interest, $0 total
$-360000 interest
At 5.3% interest, $0 total
The 5.3 percent figure is just the average 30-year rate. The actual rate that a home buyer gets depends on other factors such as income, debt, credit history and the size of the down payment.
To tame inflation, the Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising interest rates. This makes buying a home even more expensive in a market where home values have been skyrocketing. However, the housing market appears to be cooling, with May sales down 10 percent year-over-year, according to Redfin. But home prices in most metro areas haven’t yet been affected.
Chris Alcantara is a graphics reporter at The Washington Post, where he uses code and data to report on business and technology. He joined The Post in 2016. | 2022-07-08T15:31:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Calculate how much more mortgages will cost as interest rates rise - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/mortgage-interest-rates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/mortgage-interest-rates/ |
Goalie Vitek Vanecek was traded to the Devils on Friday. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The Washington Capitals traded goaltender Vitek Vanecek to the New Jersey Devils on Friday in exchange for second- and third-round picks in this week’s draft, the first in what is expected to be a series of significant moves in net this offseason. Washington also sent its 46th pick in the draft to the Devils in the trade.
Now the lone NHL goaltender on the Capitals’ roster, Samsonov is a restricted free agent with arbitration rights. Capitals General Manager Brian MacLellan said Wednesday that Washington plans to extend a qualifying offer to Samsonov before Monday’s deadline.
Having traded Vanecek, the Capitals will turn their focus to finding a starting goaltender. MacLellan made clear Wednesday that the Capitals are looking for a veteran goaltender either through a trade or free agency, which opens July 13.
The Capitals have six selections in the final six rounds of the draft. Washington acquired the 37th pick and 70th pick from the Devils in the trade for Vanecek. The Capitals also have the 85th pick, 149th pick, 181st pick and the 213th pick.
The free agent goalie market has thinned over the past two days. On Thursday, Alexandar Georgiev was traded from the New York Rangers to the Colorado Avalanche; the Minnesota Wild re-signed goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury to a two-year, $7 million contract; and Ville Husso signed with the Detroit Red Wings following a trade from the St. Louis Blues early Friday.
Among the top names who could be moved are Colorado’s Darcy Kuemper, Toronto’s Jack Campbell, Anaheim’s John Gibson and Montreal’s Jake Allen. | 2022-07-08T15:35:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Capitals trade goalie Vitek Vanecek to New Jersey for draft picks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/vitek-vanecek-trade-capitals-devils/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/vitek-vanecek-trade-capitals-devils/ |
Mr. Abe served as Japan’s prime minister from 2012 to 2020, but left office without reaching his goals of transforming the economy and giving the military greater roles
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2020. (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)
Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving prime minister of Japan, who sought to revive the country as an economic and military power to confront China’s rising influence, died July 8 after being shot by a gunman. He was 67.
The assassination, during a campaign event for party allies in Nara, near Osaka, left Japan stunned. The killing brought an outpouring of tributes around the world for Mr. Abe, the scion of a prominent political family whose stamp on Japan’s politics and international affairs spanned nearly a generation. Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has led Japan for all but four years since the mid-1950s.
Mr. Abe brought a measure of stability as prime minister from 2012 to 2020 after years of revolving-door leadership that complicated Japan’s critical alliances, including its trade and defense ties with Washington. Yet challenges — some self-imposed — gave the eight-year Abe era a sense of rough edges and unfulfilled aspirations.
Mr. Abe (pronounced AH-bay) took power as the country was still reeling from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear facility and left a radioactive no-go zone in parts of the country. One of his first official visits outside Tokyo was a tour of the Fukushima site, wearing a mask and blue coveralls.
He stepped down in September 2020 because of medical issues — chronic ulcerative colitis — amid the pandemic that upended his economic visions and delayed until 2021 one of his crown jewels, bringing the Olympics back to Tokyo.
At the Closing Ceremonies of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, Mr. Abe dressed as Super Mario of Nintendo fame to celebrate the preparations for the Tokyo Games. Mr. Abe did not attend the lockdown-style opening of those Summer Olympics, allowing his successor, Yoshihide Suga, to have center stage.
Mr. Abe also struggled with many of his signature initiatives.
At the top were efforts to bring some of the Silicon Valley ethos of innovation and risk-taking into Japan’s tradition-laden economy, still one of the world’s largest but stuck in a slow-growth slumber for decades. At the same time, he pushed hard to expand Japan’s military capabilities in the face of a rising China and a nuclear-armed North Korea, planning for new bases on islands and boosting defense spending.
But he could not find the political or public backing to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution written during the U.S. occupation after World War II.
Mr. Abe asked for “forgiveness” that he was leaving office without managing to make the constitutional changes or reaching other goals, including bringing back the remaining Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea and settling territorial disputes with Russia over an island chain, known in Russia as the Kurils and in Japan as the Northern Territories.
“It is really with a very heavy heart that I am resigning without being able to attain those things,” said Mr. Abe, who also was prime minister for a year in 2006-2007. He left then, too, citing medical troubles.
Shinzo Abe was born in Tokyo on Sept. 21, 1954, to a family deeply involved in Japan’s postwar politics and carrying the burden of connections to the former imperial rule and its militaristic expansionism.
His great-uncle, Eisaku Sato, held the previous record as longest-serving prime minister (from 1964 to 1972) and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 for his work on nuclear nonproliferation. Mr. Abe’s father, Shintaro Abe, held high-profile political and government posts for more than three decades, including trade minister and foreign minister in the 1980s, when he also sought to find a settlement with Russia over the disputed islands.
Mr. Abe was perhaps most strongly influenced by his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who served as a cabinet minister during World War II and prime minister from 1957 to 1960, and also sought to revise Japan’s constitution to allow a more assertive military and diplomatic role. Kishi had been imprisoned by U.S. forces as a potential war criminal after Japan’s surrender, but was later released as part of Washington’s “reverse course” policy to emphasize rebuilding Japan as a Cold War bulwark.
A timeline of Abe's life and career
Mr. Abe was raised as Japan was on its stunning economic trajectory after World War II, on its way to the heady Japan Inc. powerhouse years of the 1980s. At an early age, Mr. Abe appeared to be being groomed to take his place in the center-right LDP.
He studied political science at Seikei University in Tokyo, graduating in 1977, and then spent a year at the University of Southern California to study political science and get a firsthand look at U.S. culture and sensibilities.
In an address to a joint meeting of Congress in April 2015, Mr. Abe recounted the story of his landlady in California, Catherine Del Francia; her “out of this world” Italian cooking; and the array of people who would visit. “They were so diverse,” Mr. Abe said. “I was amazed and said to myself, ‘America is an awesome country.’ ”
In 1982. Mr. Abe served as executive assistant to his father, who was then foreign minister. He was first elected as a member of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, in 1993 for the southwestern prefecture of Yamaguchi. He smashed open a barrel of sake to celebrate.
He steadily rose through the LDP ranks to become its leader in 2005, putting him in line as a potential prime minister. That came in September 2006. It gave Mr. Abe a first chance to test his economic agenda, which became known as the “three arrows”: easier borrowing, increased government spending, and other economic changes aimed at revamping the economy to deal with issues such as an aging population and an ossified bureaucracy.
Mr. Abe appeared to be at the apex of his political rise, but upheavals in his government — including allegations of doling out illegal farm subsidies — soon stole the limelight. The subsidies probe apparently led to the suicide of Mr. Abe’s agriculture minister, Toshikatsu Matsuoka. Mr. Abe stepped down after just one year, citing medical issues and sending his party into disarray. It took five years for him to get back to the prime minister office.
Mr. Abe’s style was workmanlike — with occasional flashes of wry humor — and his inner circle was built mostly around technocrats and loyalists. In a relative sense, Mr. Abe’s leadership was designed for low drama to avoid the missteps of his first time as leader.
Still, there were troubles — led by perceptions of his harboring nationalist sympathies. South Korea accused Mr. Abe of not fully acknowledging that Japanese occupation troops forced women into sexual slavery, despite a 2015 document that offered Japanese compensation. In 2013, Mr. Abe faced sharp backlash after visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors, among others, World War II war criminals.
In a speech on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, he appeared to suggest that Japan needed to move on from the shadows of the war. “We must not let our children, grandchildren and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize,” he said in August 2015.
'Shocked': World leaders react to Abe's slaying
In addition to his wife, survivors include his mother, Yoko Abe; and two brothers, Nobuo Kishi, Japan’s defense minister, and Hironobu Abe, a retired executive of Mitsubishi Corporation Packaging.
Shinzo Abe took special interest in building rapport with the Oval Office, often using his love of golf as a calling card.
He was the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump after his election victory in 2016 — even as many other U.S. allies were keeping a distance. In 2013, Mr. Abe presented President Barack Obama with a Japanese-made putter and recounted how his grandfather as prime minister played golf with President Dwight D. Eisenhower after their first meeting in Washington in 1957.
Joe Biden, then the vice president, asked Mr. Abe whether Eisenhower or his grandfather had the better score.
“It’s a state secret,” Mr. Abe replied. | 2022-07-08T16:06:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shinzo Abe, former Japanese prime minister, slain at 67 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/08/abe-japan-assassination/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/08/abe-japan-assassination/ |
‘Dreamers,’ DACA and Biden’s First Try on Immigration: What to Know
Analysis by Laura Litvan and Erik Larson | Bloomberg
Demonstrators hold their fists in the air while kneeling outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, June 18, 2020. A divided U.S. Supreme Court dealt a surprise blow to President Donald Trump, blocking him from ending the Obama-era program that shields 670,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation and lets them seek jobs. Photographer: Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
The young immigrants known in the US as Dreamers, and the federal program known as DACA that was designed to protect them from deportation, have dominated the fraught debate over immigration reform in Washington for the better part of a decade. President Joe Biden wants to put Dreamers on a fast track to citizenship. But nine states are suing to have DACA declared illegal, which could lead to these immigrants being kicked out of the country.
1. Who are the ‘Dreamers’?
The term refers to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children and have lived in America much or most of their lives, despite technically not being allowed to be there. The name originated with a bill first proposed in the 2001-2002 Congress, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, that aimed to help such undocumented immigrants attend college in the US and earn legal permanent residency upon graduating. Though revised and re-introduced many times, the bill has never passed Congress, and it’s been upstaged in recent years by the more pressing debate over DACA, which Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, repeatedly vowed to repeal.
2. What is DACA?
It’s a program -- Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals -- established by President Barack Obama in 2012 without congressional involvement to shield many of the Dreamers from deportation. The program allows them to apply for renewable, two-year permits that protect them from deportation and allow them to work legally. Applicants must have arrived before 2007 at an age younger than 16 and must have been younger than 31 as of 2012. They must have no significant criminal record and be enrolled in high school or have a diploma or the equivalent. The program doesn’t provide a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Obama said it was not intended as “a permanent fix” but was merely “a temporary stopgap measure” until Congress finally approved the Dream Act. (Critics say Obama’s action was an egregious example of presidential overreach.) Nevertheless, DACA is still around. In one of his first acts as president, Biden issued an executive order calling on the secretary of homeland security to take all appropriate actions to “preserve and fortify” DACA.
3. How many people are protected by DACA?
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 646,000 people are enrolled in DACA. The vast majority are from Mexico, with smaller contingents from Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries. Most had no connection to their previous countries. Some didn’t know they were undocumented until they sought driver’s licenses or college aid. Current law makes it difficult for them to obtain legal status unless they leave the US and apply. Another 685,000 people meet all the criteria to apply for DACA, the institute estimates. Under Trump, whose efforts to abolish DACA were thwarted by the courts, the government stopped accepting new applications for more than three years. In December 2020, a district court ordered officials to resume taking them. After another court ruled that DACA was illegal in mid-2021, the government stopped granting new requests, though it continued to accept them.
4. What’s the lawsuit about?
In a case before a federal appeals panel in New Orleans, nine Republican-led states claim that a president can’t legally usurp congressional authority to set immigration policy or alter federal programs without following all required rule-making steps. They also complain that DACA grants federal benefits -- which the states must pay for -- to whole classes of people in the country illegally in violation of immigration law. Lawyers for the Biden administration argued that DACA complies with existing immigration law because agents retain discretion to reject specific applicants on a case-by-case basis, while focusing limited resources on expelling higher-priority offenders. They stressed in court papers that Dreamers’ ability to lawfully work, access employer health care, buy homes and pay property taxes reduces the financial burden on states to provide education and health services to undocumented immigrants.
5. What does Biden propose?
He has urged Congress, as part of an overhaul of US immigration policy, to pass legislation making Dreamers eligible to apply immediately for permanent residency in the US and eventually for citizenship. In March 2021, the House of Representatives, where Biden’s Democratic Party has a majority, passed such a bill, the Dream and Promise Act, but it stalled in the Senate, which is split 50-50 between the two parties. | 2022-07-08T16:14:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Dreamers,’ DACA and Biden’s First Try on Immigration: What to Know - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dreamers-daca-and-bidens-first-try-on-immigration-what-to-know/2022/07/08/82b9cf4e-fed1-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dreamers-daca-and-bidens-first-try-on-immigration-what-to-know/2022/07/08/82b9cf4e-fed1-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
In this photo released by the National Park Service, the Washburn Fire burns near the lower portion of the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park, Calif., Thursday, July 7, 2022. (National Park Service via AP) (Uncredited/National Park Service)
WAWONA, Calif. — A portion of Yosemite National Park has been closed as a wildfire rages near a grove of California’s famous giant sequoia trees, officials said. | 2022-07-08T16:15:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wildfire rages near Yosemite grove of giant sequoia trees - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wildfire-rages-near-yosemite-grove-of-giant-sequoia-trees/2022/07/08/6fc88224-fed4-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wildfire-rages-near-yosemite-grove-of-giant-sequoia-trees/2022/07/08/6fc88224-fed4-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Boris Johnson shows it’s the economy, stupid, again
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1972, President Richard M. Nixon announced the Soviet Union would buy American wheat, corn and other grains for $750 million over three years.
This week’s portrayals of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson highlight his charisma, thirst for power and shamelessness, making him sound as though created by Machiavelli, the Italian diplomat synonymous with unscrupulousness, and movie-making provocateur John Waters.
Just like his run up the British political ladder, there’s a can’t-look-away quality to his fall from power. But there’s also a lesson in his political riches-to-rags story — from landslide 2019 victory to 2022 vote of no confidence, as my colleague Adam Taylor put it, and ultimately to resignation.
From this side of the Atlantic, Johnson was as much the London Mayor stuck on a zip wire in 2012, awkwardly waving two Union Jacks, as he was the graduate of tony Eton and elite Oxford who nonetheless harnessed populist support for Brexit, Britain’s exit from the European Union.
And, oh, the scandals. Back to Adam again for the succinct version:
“There was Britain’s disastrous early pandemic response, which included the prime minister almost dying of covid-19 himself. Then there were accusations of cronyism and corruption, including dubious dealings with Russian oligarchs and a Downing Street redecoration at a wealthy donor’s expense.”
“‘Partygate,’ the catchy name given to a rolling scandal involving rule-breaking pandemic parties at Downing Street, earned him the ignoble honor of being the first British prime minister to be charged with a crime while in office. And though he became prime minister in 2019 after pledging to ‘get Brexit done,’ his government is still mired in the details, even threatening to pull out of its own deal regarding the Northern Irish border.”
His resignation statement drew nearly as much attention for its style as its substance, with Johnson saying of fellow conservatives exhausted with him “the herd is powerful, and when the herd movies, it moves,” praising Britain’s “Darwinian system” for picking leaders, and saying he was sad to go “but them’s the breaks.”
But what caught The Daily 202’s attention was a line in the resignation letter from Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who said this about the Conservative Party: “We may not have always been popular, but we have been competent in acting in the national interest. Sadly, in the current circumstances, the public are concluding we are now neither.”
“The current circumstances.”
Economic spiral
Over at the New York Times, Eshe Nelson describes the current circumstances: “Inflation in the country has reached an annual rate of 9.1 percent, the highest in four decades, driven by supply chain disruptions from pandemic lockdowns and the war in Ukraine. And price pressures keep building as companies begin to pass on the increase in costs to their customers and workers demand higher wages to cope with the rising cost of living.”
“Households are facing the worst squeeze on their living standards in generations because wage growth is not keeping up with inflation, which isn’t expected to peak until at least the fall when the price cap on household energy bills is reset higher. Disposable household income, once adjusted for inflation, is expected to fall by more than 2 percent this year.”
Or, as Adam put it: “As Johnson leaves, the country he leads is suffering through a crisis of its own. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently estimated that Britain would have the worst economic growth of any G-20 country outside Russia next year. Inflation is expected to hit 11 percent year-on-year this autumn, higher than any other G-7 nation.”
“And while there is no shortage of global factors, economists say that Johnson’s signature policy — Brexit — will come to be seen as a key culprit for these lost years of stagnation and decline. This era of audacity and rule-breaking in British politics could possibly be about to end. Its repercussions will outlast it by a long way.”
A lesson — nay, refresher — for other leaders
None of this is to say that scandals and personality don’t matter. But it’s hard to imagine the last 48 hours of tumult in British politics —hard to imagine Johnson’s fall — without the previous two years of pandemic struggles, roaring inflation now and a gloomy outlook ahead.
And that may offer something of a lesson to French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and, yes, President Biden. Not a lesson, because they all know it, but a refresher, one that featured prominently in America’s 1992 election: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
All three are struggling domestically as voters grapple with high gas prices and inflation. Each faces a different set of domestic political factors, none of them has had scandals on the scale Johnson did, but they all face unforgiving economic forces.
As Johnson might say: Them’s the breaks.
“A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court barred the use of most ballot drop boxes Friday and ruled voters could not give their completed absentee ballots to others to return on their behalf, a practice that some conservatives disparage as 'ballot harvesting,'” Patrick Marley reports.
U.S. unemployment rate holds at 3.6 percent in June
“This morning, the Labor Department reported that 372,000 jobs were created in June, a healthy showing that beat forecasts, which generally expected between 200,000 and 300,000 new jobs. For economists and policymakers, the hope is that jobs growth — which has been hovering around 400,000 new positions per month — will slow to a sustainable pace that could help moderate inflation, without a significant rise in unemployment,” Abha Bhattarai reports.
“Newsom said in a video posted to Twitter that $100 million from the state budget he recently signed for 2022-2023 would be allocated for California to ‘contract and make [its] own insulin at a cheaper price, close to at cost, and to make it available to all,’” Timothy Bella reports.
“Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, a towering political figure at home and abroad, died after being shot at a campaign event Friday, doctors said, shocking a nation where firearms laws are among the world’s strictest and gun violence is rare,” Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Julia Mio Inuma report.
“He is also planning to sign an executive order that, according to a statement released late Thursday by the White House, will attempt to safeguard access to abortion medication and emergency contraception, protect patient privacy and bolster legal options for those seeking access to such services,” Matt Viser reports.
On Capitol Hill
House Democrats launch probe into the handling of reproductive health data
House lawmakers on Friday sent letters to five data brokers and five popular health apps, demanding information about how they collect personal reproductive data. The letters are a response to mounting concerns that such data could be used to surveil women seeking abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe. v. Wade.
In the letters, the lawmakers warn that this data could "pose serious threats" to both women seeking care, as well as health-care providers. They warn of the potential for broad government surveillance, as well as ways it could be used to intimidate or harass people seeking abortion.
“Geographic data collected by mobile phones may be used to locate people seeking care at clinics, and search and chat history referring to clinics or medication create digital bread crumbs revealing interest in an abortion," wrote Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.).
The letters demand apps like the period tracker Flo or the location provider SafeGraph provide details about their communications with local governments, as well as their policies about selling data.
-Tech policy reporter Cat Zakrzewski
“Arizona spans more than 370 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and perhaps no other state better encapsulates the array of challenges facing U.S officials trying to manage the illegal entries. Border crossers are arriving from more countries and in greater numbers than ever, at the same time that Mexican migration has surged to levels not matched since the mid-2000s,” Nick Miroff reports.
Mark Leibovich “never loved the Trump story,” he writes for the Atlantic.
“Better objects of our scrutiny — and far more compelling to me — are the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side. It’s been said before, but can never be emphasized enough: Without the complicity of the Republican Party, Donald Trump would be just a glorified geriatric Fox-watching golfer. I’ve interviewed scores of these collaborators, trying to understand why they did what they did and how they could live with it. These were the McCarthys and the Grahams and all the other busy parasitic suck-ups who made the Trump era work for them, who humored and indulged him all the way down to the last, exhausted strains of American democracy.”
“The most transmissible variant yet of the coronavirus is threatening a fresh wave of infections in the United States, even among those who have recovered from the virus fairly recently,” the New York Times's Lauren Leatherby reports.
Biden is nowhere close to hitting his refugee goals
“Biden officials expect to fall short by about 100,000 refugees on their goal to resettle 125,000 in the U.S. this fiscal year, according to two sources with direct knowledge of internal estimates,” Axios's Stef W. Kight and Jonathan Swan report.
“The Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the panel’s top Republican sent a joint letter to the Federal Trade Commission this week urging an investigation of TikTok’s data-handling and other practices. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance Ltd., has its headquarters in Beijing,” the Wall Street Journal's John D. McKinnon reports.
Gun deaths by race, visualized
“The spate of shooting attacks in communities such as Highland Park, Ill.; Uvalde, Tex.; and Buffalo has riveted attention on America’s staggering number of public mass killings. But the rising number of gun deaths in the United States extends beyond such high-profile episodes, emerging nearly every day inside homes, outside bars and on the streets of many cities, according to federal data,” Mark Berman, Lenny Bernstein, Dan Keating, Andrew Ba Tran and Artur Galocha report.
Planned Parenthood staffers are unionizing to prepare for life after Roe
“Employees at Planned Parenthood’s state affiliate in Massachusetts voted almost unanimously for a union Wednesday, as abortion care workers deal with the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the national right to have an abortion in America. And some workers say the win will give them a desperately needed voice in the workplace as they prepare to serve a flood of out-of-state patients as more and more states restrict or ban abortion,” Vice News's Paul Blest reports.
Texas governor orders state police to return migrants to border
“Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday ordered the Texas National Guard and the state police to begin apprehending migrants who illegally cross the border from Mexico and taking them back to ports of entry, a move that could put the state into direct conflict with the federal government over immigration,” the NYT's J. David Goodman reports.
“Mr. Abbott, in a statement, said the goal was to return 'illegal immigrants to the border to stop this criminal enterprise endangering our communities.'”
Biden will leave the White House for the CIA headquarters at 1:55 p.m. He will speak there at 3:40 p.m. and return to the White House at 4:30 p.m.
At 7:45 p.m., Biden will leave the White House for Rehoboth Beach, Del. He's scheduled to arrive at 8:40 p.m.
Weekend read: She died and became the ‘Christmas Tree Lady.’ Now we know her name.
“For a quarter-century, the unidentified woman in Pleasant Valley Memorial Park was known as ‘the Christmas Tree Lady,’ because she had placed a small Christmas tree on a blanket next to her, sometime early on Dec. 18, 1996. Neatly coifed, smartly dressed, her pockets contained no identification but two envelopes with a $50 bill and the same typed note in each: ‘Deceased by own hand...Prefer no autopsy. Please order cremation, with funds provided. Thank you, Jane Doe,’” Tom Jackman reports. | 2022-07-08T16:15:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boris Johnson shows it’s the economy, stupid, again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-shows-its-economy-stupid-again/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-shows-its-economy-stupid-again/ |
The rarity of the Abe assassination, in two charts
Police officers at the scene where former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot while making a speech in Nara, Japan, on July 8, 2022. (Kosuke Okahara/Bloomberg News)
The last time an American president was shot was 1981. Ronald Reagan, barely two months into office, was struck by a bullet that ricocheted off his limousine, part of a volley of shots fired by would-be assassin John Hinckley. Reagan’s wound was serious enough to warrant an extended hospital stay, but he survived. Since then, despite the increase in political vitriol and in the number of firearms owned in the United States, no similar incident has occurred.
Assassination of world leaders was once far more common than it is today. That’s one reason that the killing of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe on Friday is so shocking: Assassination of high-ranking politicians is rare in the world’s most-developed countries. From 1920 to 1970, there were 13 assassinations of actively serving or former world leaders in those nations. From 1971 to today, there were seven, with none in the past 20 years.
It has been more than 80 years since there was a similar assassination in Japan. The period shortly before World War II saw a flurry of killings of top political leaders in the nation, but, in the years since, no similar events have occurred.
The sole U.S. dot on that graph was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963; Oswald was shot to death two days later by Jack Ruby. President Gerald Ford survived an assassination attempt in 1975, when Sara Jane Moore fired at him twice, missing both times. Then, six years later, came the attempt on Reagan.
In each case, you’ll notice, the weapon was a firearm — as was the case with Abe. The shooter used a homemade gun to kill the former prime minister, a function in part of the stringency of Japan’s gun laws. As The Washington Post’s Tokyo bureau chief Michelle Ye Hee Lee noted, the country had one shooting death in 2021 — a smaller number than the United States sees every half-hour. The United States has more people but not so many as to make up the difference: There are 2.6 Americans for every resident of Japan.
One obvious factor in the difference is that the United States has far, far laxer gun laws than Japan’s. The rates of gun homicide and gun ownership between the countries couldn’t be more disparate.
What occurred in Japan, then, was unusual for two reasons: Such killings of national leaders occur less frequently than they used to in developed countries; and, in general, gun homicides in Japan are rare. The shock experienced following Abe’s death is understandable.
These figures also raise another useful point: Another component of the lack of assassination attempts on American presidents is almost certainly good luck. | 2022-07-08T16:15:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The rarity of the Abe assassination, in two charts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/rarity-abe-assassination-two-charts/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/rarity-abe-assassination-two-charts/ |
Will Tunisia still be a democracy if the president controls the courts and legislature?
Analysis by Zaid Al-Ali
Tunisians holding loaves of bread demonstrate in Tunis on June 18, 2022, against a referendum on a new constitution called by President Kais Saied. (Jihed Abidellaoui/Reuters)
Tunisian President Kais Saied published June 30 the text of a draft constitution that will be put to a referendum vote July 25. The head of Saied’s handpicked drafting committee, a respected constitutional law professor, has since denounced the draft. He claims that the president introduced major changes before it was published and that the president’s version creates a risk that a new autocracy will be established.
What’s behind these concerns? The draft 2022 constitution creates a personalistic system without meaningful checks and balances. And it would allow the president to exercise exceptional powers at his own discretion. If adopted in this form, Tunisia’s new constitution could lay the foundation for an extended period of autocratic rule.
The draft constitution would replace Tunisia’s celebrated 2014 constitution, which was crafted in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. But many observers, not just Saied, think the 2014 constitution gave the parliament too much authority, in light of the country’s weak political party culture. That system led to weak governance, with the parties that controlled parliament divvying up government institutions between them.
The draft constitution prioritizes clarity and coherence in policymaking and implementation. It seeks to achieve this by re-concentrating powers in the hands of the presidency.
Many observers immediately remarked that the draft reestablishes Tunisia as a dictatorship. In fact, by itself, the draft does not do this. It calls for presidential, parliamentary and local elections, and it reconfirms the existence of traditional institutions, including judicial independence.
But there’s a catch. The draft does not create a meaningful system of checks and balances, which makes it easier to twist and bend democracy to suit the desires of a single individual. The president of the republic would have so much authority that he could easily remain in power unchallenged long into the future, without having to violate the constitution.
In fact, the draft looks very much like the 1959 constitution, which laid the framework for Tunisia to be governed as an autocracy for half a century, until the breakdown that led to the 2011 uprisings. There are differences between the two texts, but both are designed to achieve the same general objective: one-man rule.
What does a hyper-presidential system look like?
Tunisia’s 2022 constitutional draft is notable for what it does not address. It purports to establish a bicameral system but says almost nothing about the institutional relationship between the two legislative chambers. The draft notes the existence of a judicial council but is virtually silent about its composition or powers.
The provision on local government is just two lines long. And there’s no detail on what local governments actually will be doing and how independent they will be, if at all, from central government. The only independent institution that’s mentioned is the electoral commission, although there’s no detail on how the commissioners should be appointed.
Tunisia’s president threatened the judicial system. What do Tunisians think about these power grabs?
All of these crucial rules are left to legislation. This is not in keeping with modern practice, which broadly considers that the constitution itself should lay out crucial rules governing the functioning and independence of government institutions. South Africa’s well-constructed constitution, for instance, played a major role in preventing disgraced President Jacob Zuma from permanently seizing control of government institutions.
Under the proposed draft, the Tunisian president has very significant lawmaking powers, while parliament’s lawmaking powers are greatly reduced. The president has sole responsibility for determining policy and would form the government entirely on his own, without the need for parliamentary approval. Parliament can suggest legislation to be submitted to the government, which has no obligation to draw up a bill. And parliament cannot pass any legislation that touches upon the president’s administrative powers or on financial issues.
The president, in fact, can adopt laws on his own, including during parliament’s recess period or when the parliament is dissolved. The president would continue to exercise his current legislative power until the next parliamentary election — whose date he will solely be responsible for choosing. In the meantime, the president alone will be able to determine how all these institutions will function.
In practice, this means there’s no way to hold Tunisia’s president accountable, or for another branch of government to counterbalance his powers. There are no meaningful corrective mechanisms — and no opportunity to recall the president. Quite the opposite: In case parliament puts up too much opposition to his performance, the president can simply dissolve it, which is a power he can exercise with complete discretion. And this power may be difficult to challenge, as the constitutional court’s composition has been determined in a way that favors a traditional (and therefore pro-executive) approach to constitutional interpretation.
Tunisia’s democracy is at risk
The draft also creates a number of exceptional mechanisms that represent direct risks for Tunisia’s democratic system. The 2014 constitution allowed the president to declare a state of emergency interpreted by the president as allowing him to suspend the constitution and dissolve parliament unilaterally because of an internal political crisis.
That particular provision is repeated almost word for word in the new draft, except that there is now no mention of any judicial oversight — which suggests that Tunisians will have even less opportunity to curb the president’s powers. In addition, the president’s electoral term can be extended in case of “imminent danger,” again a scenario that he will interpret on his own.
The 2014 constitution provided that rights and freedoms could be limited only “for reasons necessary to a civil and democratic state.” That wording, which was celebrated in Tunisia and led to real changes in how rights and freedoms are protected in practice, has been deleted in the draft.
The draft has not yet entered into force, and the outcome of the July 25 referendum is still unclear. A wide range of political figures in Tunisia have objected to the draft. If the document is adopted in its current form, Tunisia’s current system of one-man rule seems likely to continue far into the future.
Zaid Al-Ali is an adviser on constitutional issues in the Arab region and the author of “Arab Constitutionalism: The Coming Revolution” (Cambridge University Press, 2021). | 2022-07-08T16:15:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What's in Tunisia's new constitution? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/tunisia-saied-coup-constitution-backsliding-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/08/tunisia-saied-coup-constitution-backsliding-democracy/ |
By Danica Kirka and Hanna Arhirova | AP
FILE - In this image provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, center, and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, center left, walk in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 9, 2022. Johnson may have been shown the door in Britain, but he remains a popular figure in Ukraine, where he is widely admired for his uncompromising support for the country’s effort to defeat the Russian invasion. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, File) (Uncredited/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office)
KYIV, Ukraine — Don’t worry Boris, there’s one country where your popularity remains undimmed. | 2022-07-08T16:15:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Don't worry Boris: They still love you in Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dont-worry-boris-they-still-love-you-in-ukraine/2022/07/08/4b689f4e-fed5-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dont-worry-boris-they-still-love-you-in-ukraine/2022/07/08/4b689f4e-fed5-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar, wearing the overall leader’s yellow jersey, celebrates as he crosses the finish line to win the seventh stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 176.5 kilometers (109.7 miles) with start Tomblaine and finish in La Super Planche des Belles Filles, France, Friday, July 8, 2022. Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard finished second. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)
LA PLANCHE DES BELLES FILLES, France — Tadej Pogačar won his second Tour de France stage in a row in the first summit finish of the race to extend his lead in the yellow jersey on Friday. | 2022-07-08T16:16:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pogačar wins Tour de France stage 7 to extend lead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/pogacar-wins-tour-de-france-stage-7-to-extend-lead/2022/07/08/c8b49a82-fed2-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/pogacar-wins-tour-de-france-stage-7-to-extend-lead/2022/07/08/c8b49a82-fed2-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
A visa program that launched last year lets remote workers experience Brazil’s beach life
By Carla Vianna
The view from Pedra da Gávea, the toughest hike in Rio de Janeiro. (Courtesy of Walter Tebe)
RIO DE JANEIRO — Before the pandemic forced the city to cancel Carnival and New Year’s celebrations, Rio de Janeiro regularly teemed with international tourists. But in 2021, when visitors became virtually absent, city officials felt they needed to start attracting a different type of traveler: the remote worker.
Last year, the tourism board and local government created the Rio Digital Nomads program. The initiative, which grants at least a year of residency, sells the vibrant Carioca lifestyle with hopes of turning the city into a continental hub for young professionals. It started as a website and has grown into a larger movement. Countries in Europe and the Caribbean were already welcoming remote workers with special visas, and in January, Brazil became the first in South America to create one.
“The logic was to activate Rio de Janeiro, where tourism no longer existed,” says Sebastian Saavedra, the program coordinator.
I relocated to Rio during the pandemic to try the digital nomad lifestyle. I had left my full-time journalism job a few months before the pandemic hit, and I had little to no opportunities as a fully remote freelance writer and travel blogger living in New York City. As a Brazilian American who had never lived in Brazil, I saw the move not only as an opportunity to reconnect with my parents’ native culture, but also as a fresh start for my career.
Here, it’s more about prioritizing time in nature or with friends — and no one takes pride in being stuck behind a laptop longer than absolutely necessary.
The work-life balance of a digital nomad in Rio could not be more different from New York’s mentality. Here, it’s more about prioritizing time in nature or with friends — and no one takes pride in being stuck behind a laptop longer than absolutely necessary. Sandwiched between lush green mountains and the sea, Rio offers stunning nature and the modern comforts of a big city.
The pandemic is changing the digital nomad scene
“For me, the big pull to Rio was that it had everything I needed in terms of travel and adventure,” says Caroline Cunningham, a 28-year-old freelance digital marketer from Virginia.
During the two months she spent in Rio, her work schedule was planned around outdoor activities such as sunrise hikes, sunsets on Ipanema Beach and post-work drinks in Lapa, a historic neighborhood known for its nightlife.
“Rio has its own personality, where you can feel the energy of the city,” Cunningham says. “I don’t think there are many places like that.”
If the visa piques your interest, consider the pros and cons of moving to Rio de Janeiro home as a remote workers.
A year of residency
The visa makes it easier for remote workers to spend a year in the country, with the possibility to extend it for another.
Anyone can apply, as long as you can prove that you are able to work remotely. You will need proof of employment through a contract or other document that shows you earn income from a non-Brazilian source. You will also need to be making at least $1,500 per month or have at least $18,000 in bank funds available.
Walter Tebe, a 32-year-old instructional designer from California, was one of the first Americans to apply. Tebe was already in Rio on a different visa, and he received the new one four to five weeks later. He advises you to apply from the United States or your home country beforehand to avoid any issues.
Meet the people getting paid $10,000 to move to West Virginia
So far, Brazil has received more than 100 applications from people all over the world, including Australia, Belgium, France, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain, and the United States, among others, according to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.
Here’s a full guide on how to apply.
An active, outdoor lifestyle
Typical days in Rio start and end with your feet in the sand. Whether it’s an early-morning surf lesson, seaside yoga or a post-workout dip, the beach is an inherent part of everyday life here.
Most Cariocas — as locals are known here — live in flip flops. While indoor gyms exist, you can find everything from spinning to CrossFit on the beach. At sunrise, the patterned black-and-white sidewalks that line Ipanema and Copacabana beaches already are full of runners, bikers and barefoot surfers.
Tebe, who applied for the digital-nomad visa, fell in love with the active lifestyle in the city.
“There are people literally dancing and singing on the street. The pagode. The samba. There’s so much energy in the city of Rio,” he says. “Even though I was there for almost a year, I barely scratched the surface of things to do.”
What to consider before going fully remote
Now that life is returning to normal, many digital nomads are planning their visits around bucket-list events such as Carnival and Rock in Rio.
Avid hikers such as Karalea Davis like to tackle the dozens of trails close to the city. There is Tijuca National Park, one of the largest urban forests in the world, as well as several mountains, including Pedra da Gávea, a challenging hike with a steep rock-climbing section.
“It’s a city on the beach in the jungle,” says Davis, a 30-year-old marketing analytics manager. “Do you like hiking? Do you like going to the beach? Do you like going to events? Do you like mountain escapes? Island escapes? You can do all of that from Rio.”
A post shared by Carla • Travel • Brazil (@bycarlavianna)
Your money goes far
Rio de Janeiro is not the cheapest destination to live in South America, but the currency exchange rate favors travelers earning U.S. dollars or euros. The U.S. dollar is worth over four times the Brazilian real.
“As someone who’s earning a currency that has a good exchange rate with the real, that makes life a lot more affordable than where I was living previously, which was in San Diego,” Davis says.
How to find the right visa to move to Europe
As of July 8, 1 dollar equaled about 5.30 reais. In Mexico City, another popular digital-nomad hub, the currency exchange is about 1 dollar to 20 pesos. Meanwhile, in Croatia, 1 dollar is worth 7 kuna; in Georgia, it equals about 3 Lari; and in Portugal, it nearly equals a full euro. All four countries also offer visa options for digital nomads.
Many digital nomads are freelancers without steady paychecks, a lifestyle that can feel unstable in the United States. Yet in Rio, digital nomads can easily get by with $1,000 to $1,500 a month.
“In Latin America, I’m able to live and travel very well. I enjoy my life and have a nice work-to-life balance that I had never experienced while living in the States,” says Mariana Ortegon, a 32-year-old digital nomad who traveled to Rio for Carnival this year.
Digital nomads may feel some hesitation before coming to Rio because of its “unsafe” reputation. Ortegon, for instance, was warned several times about the rampant muggings.
“Being Colombian and growing up in the U.S., I almost lived through my mom's experiences of a ‘scary Colombia’ and ‘scary South America.’ I was a little more aware of my surroundings than I usually am traveling, but my experience was absolutely perfect,” she says after attending Carnival.
Most of the violent crime in Rio occurs in the favelas and low-income neighborhoods that are on the outskirts of the tourist region. Visitors typically stay in Ipanema, Leblon, Copacabana or Botafogo, which are located in the city’s wealthy South Zone (Zona Sul).
Still, locals often warn visitors to be extra careful with their bags and smartphones, even in the South Zone. Most digital nomads avoid walking around with a phone or camera in their hands, and laptops stay out of sight and in a bag close to their bodies. At night, they say, Uber is a safer bet than walking.
Brazil is a Portuguese-speaking country, and English isn’t widely spoken. Even if you’re fluent in Spanish, it probably won’t help in Rio.
Every tourist point in the city will have signs translated into English, and you can easily find English-speaking guides. Restaurants in Ipanema, Leblon and Copacabana typically have English versions of their menus, too.
If you’re spending an extended amount of time in the city, though, you will probably need to take Portuguese lessons. It’s not an easy language to learn on your own, and most day-to-day interactions happen in Portuguese.
The lack of cafe culture
A common complaint about Rio is it lacks the cafe culture travelers have experienced in other cities. While there are plenty of traditional bakeries and casual cafes throughout the city, not many offer WiFi, air conditioning or a comfortable spaces to work from. Some nomads say the city also lacks the kind of co-working spaces where they can meet people with similar lifestyles.
The digital-nomad program acknowledges that issue by connecting travelers to available spaces to live and work in the city.
On the cafe front, Aussie Coffee is one of the few exceptions. Owner Daniel Hobbs, an Australian engineer who has lived in Rio for nine years, greets everyone who walks in the door. There are plenty of coffee shops in Rio, he says, yet few places “actually feel friendly.”
He designed his cafe’s seating in a way that encourages people to talk to each other. He says he wants Aussie Coffee to feel like a part of their routine, no matter how long they stay.
“There’s always been a steady flow of digital nomads,” Hobbs says. “They might stay for two weeks or two months. Then they’ll go and usually get replaced by some more. Some people fall in love with the city, and they stay.” | 2022-07-08T16:16:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Digital nomad visa in Rio de Janeiro: The pros and cons - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/digital-nomad-visa-brazil-rio-de-janeiro/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/digital-nomad-visa-brazil-rio-de-janeiro/ |
By Morgan Coates, Adela Suliman and Amy Cheng | Jul 8, 2022
Born in 1954, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, came from an elite political family.
His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi led Japan from 1957 to 1960; his father, Shintaro Abe, served as chief cabinet secretary, often seen as the country’s second-most powerful position.
Newly elected Abe settles into the presidential seat at the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party on Sept. 20, 2006, in Tokyo.
Abe won a landslide election in 2006 and served as premier for a short stint until 2007 — before resuming the country’s highest political office again from 2012 to 2020.
His conservative Liberal Democratic Party has dominated Japanese politics since it was founded in 1955.
Abe raises his fist on Sept. 20, 2006, after his landslide victory in a ruling party vote.
Abe places a rosette on the name of his party's candidate during elections for the upper house on July 21, 2013.
Abe was known for trying to aggressively transform Japan’s standing on the international stage. He met with numerous world leaders including the pope and Queen Elizabeth II and worked hard to forge extremely close ties with ally the United States.
He addressed a joint meeting of Congress flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John A. Boehner at the Capitol during an official visit in 2015, becoming the first Japanese leader to address both chambers.
Queen Elizabeth II visits with Abe and his wife, Akie, at Buckingham Palace on May 4, 2016.
Abe speaks to a joint meeting of Congress on April 29, 2015.
Abe with President Barack Obama on Dec. 27, 2016, in Honolulu.
Abe stands near German Chancellor Angela Merkel as she deliberates with President Donald Trump in June 2018 during the G-7 summit in Charlevoix, Canada.
He notably cultivated a close friendship with President Donald Trump when the two were in office. He was the first foreign leader to meet Trump after the 2016 election and rolled out the red carpet during the president’s 2019 state visit to Japan.
Trump is joined by Abe as he feeds carp in a pond at Tokyo's Akasaka Palace on Nov. 6, 2017.
Toru Hanoi/AP
While leader, he tried to make Japan more assertive on the world stage — trying unsuccessfully to amend Japan’s pacifist constitution — and in 2015 passed legislation that allowed Japan to take part in overseas combat missions alongside allies.
Wary of an assertive China, Abe sought to develop close ties with India and was a strong proponent of the Quad, an informal network of Japan, India, Australia and the United States viewed as a counterweight to Beijing.
In the years after he left office, Abe became a particularly vocal critic of Beijing’s growing aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
Trump, Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi bump fists on June 28, 2019, during their meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka.
Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Abe on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing.
Kim Kyung-Hoon/AFP/Getty Images
Tokyo’s relations with Moscow have become strained in recent months, as Japan imposed sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As prime minister, Abe worked to improve relations with Russia with hopes of resolving a long-running dispute over islands near Japan that the Soviet Union seized in 1945. Russia withdrew from talks to resolve the issue in March. Abe tried to fix the dispute as prime minister but couldn’t persuade the Kremlin to shift its position.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Abe arrive for a group photo in 2007 at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany.
Relations with some of Tokyo’s closest neighbors were strained during his time in office. He bolstered right-wing nationalists by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which honors, among others, World War II war criminals.
A Shinto priest leads Abe as he visits the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.
Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images
At home, Abe attempted to revitalize the Japanese economy with policies he pursued, dubbed “Abenomics,” intended as shock therapy for an economy that had become stagnant after a lengthy postwar boom.
Abe played a key role in helping Japan win the bid to host the Olympics in 2020. He appeared at Brazil’s Closing Ceremonies in 2016 dressed as the Nintendo game character Super Mario.
The 2020 Tokyo games were delayed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Abe attends a budget committee session at the upper house of parliament in Tokyo on Feb. 20, 2013.
Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg News
Abe appears as Super Mario during Closing Ceremonies at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Yu Nakajima/AP
A longtime fixture in Japan’s political landscape, Abe resigned because of illness in August 2020.
In a tearful resignation speech he said he’d done his “utmost” for Japan.
For years, he battled ulcerative colitis, a chronic bowel condition, which contributed to his decision to step down.
A giant TV in Tokyo shows Abe on Aug. 28, 2020, while he gives his resignation speech.
On Friday, a gunman opened fire on Abe with what police have described as an improvised weapon.
World leaders past and present expressed shock and sadness at the death of the former prime minister. He was 67.
Editing by Helier Cheung, Morgan Coates, Reem Akkad. | 2022-07-08T16:16:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The career of Shinzo Abe, assassinated former Japan prime minister, in photos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/japan-shinzo-abe-photos-life-career/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/japan-shinzo-abe-photos-life-career/ |
D.C. schools and teachers struggle to reach contract after 3 years
The chancellor says the sticking point is compensation. The union says it’s working conditions.
Lewis D. Ferebee, chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, speaks during a mayoral news conference on June 6. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
The District’s public school system and the Washington Teachers’ Union appear to be at an impasse, failing to reach an agreement on a labor contract that is already three years expired. Both sides said they had wanted to approve a new contract before the end of the last academic year, and are now hoping they can break the stalemate and reach an agreement over the summer.
The two parties have had standing meetings every week for the last three years to negotiate the contract, according to the school system and union.
The labor contract deliberations overlapped with months of publicly contentious negotiations in 2020 and 2021 over how to safely reopen school buildings during the pandemic, which the two groups ultimately reached agreements on.
Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee said the sticking point in the labor contract is over compensation, though would not elaborate on what each side wants and what they have already agreed on, citing sensitivity of the ongoing negotiation process.
“I don’t think we are that far apart and I am still hopeful that we get there,” Ferebee said. “The ball is in their court.”
D.C. teachers union votes against strike, prompting city to withdraw request for a restraining order
Jacqueline Pogue Lyons, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, however, said the remaining disagreements are not about money, but rather over how much time teachers are guaranteed to have to plan lessons and grade assignments each week.
The current contract gives 225 minutes each week outside of their teaching time for planning. Lyons would not say what the teachers are seeking, but she said the unions’ demands would not cut into student instruction time. The union has said that staffing shortages during the pandemic have required teachers to cover classes for absent colleagues, cutting into planning time.
“We were very disappointed. We wanted to walk out of school this year with a contract,” Lyons said. “We thought it was important that teachers have more time to plan thoughtful and engaging lessons to make up for what was lost during the pandemic.”
The Washington Teachers’ Union, which represents the city’s 4,000 traditional public school teachers, has collective bargaining rights that allow the union to negotiate a contract with the city that covers compensation and workers’ conditions. The current 120-page contract includes provisions about teacher development trainings, base compensation, overtime pay and class-size limits for each grade.
The city’s public charter school teachers are not part of this union or covered by the contract.
The current contract went into effect October 2016 and expired in October 2019. Since then, the union and school system have operated under the agreements set forth in that contract, but teachers have not received an increase in their base pay. Teachers are, in part, paid based on how many years they have worked in classrooms. They have continued to receive these raises while the contract is lapsed.
Ferebee, who started leading the school system in 2019, has not yet negotiated a teacher labor contract during his tenure. He changed the principals’ contracts from one to two years — a change that principals had long sought.
The Washington Teachers’ Union’s previous contract had been lapsed for five years before the groups reached their last agreement in 2017. Teachers received some retroactive pay as part of that deal.
Lyon started leading these negotiations after her predecessor and longtime labor leader in the city, Elizabeth Davis, died in a car crash in April 2021. Lyons was elected to serve a full-term as president last month.
In June, Washington Teachers’ Union members rallied in the Wilson Building — the District’s city hall — for a fair contract. They called for smaller class sizes, pay to keep up with inflation, protected planning time and due process for teachers if they appeal their teacher evaluation score or go through the grievance process.
Standard classes for grades 3 through 12 are limited to 25 students. Lyons said while she would want smaller class sizes in certain instances, the union is no longer arguing for that.
“We would love that,” she said. “But we took that off the table a long time ago.”
During negotiations, if representatives on either side feel they can no longer budge on their positions, they put down their best and final offers. If they still do not agree once both sides lay out their final offers, they can take it to the arbitrator, with a mediator ultimately deciding the terms of the contract.
“What we offered is generous, fair and responsive to the needs that have been expressed,” Ferebee said. “I think an arbitrator would find that what we presented is very reasonable.” | 2022-07-08T17:02:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. schools and teachers’ struggle to reach contract after 3 years - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/08/dc-teachers-union-contract/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/08/dc-teachers-union-contract/ |
Bill Hamid started 10 of United's first 12 regular season matches this year but missed the past three. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Bill Hamid, D.C. United’s longtime starting goalkeeper, will be sidelined two to three months with a hand injury, the MLS club announced Friday. He is likely to miss at least 13 matches.
Hamid, 31, underwent surgery June 30 to repair damage in his left hand, a rupture of a distal intermetacarpal ligament. The team said he suffered the injury early in the season and has been playing through it.
Hamid missed the past three matches, the first two with what United said was an illness. He then was listed as unavailable for Monday’s 5-3 victory in Orlando with the injury.
Hamid hadn’t played since May 28, United’s last game before a three-week break.
Rafael Romo, a Venezuelan who signed with United in late April after many years in Europe, has started in Hamid’s absence and is expected to remain atop the depth chart. Romo has made six appearances across all competitions, with five starts.
Jon Kempin (three starts in all competitions) is the backup, with Loudoun United’s Luis Zamudio on call.
Except for a short stint in Denmark in 2018, Hamid has been employed by United since September 2009, when he became the organization’s first homegrown player. He’s been the primary starter since late 2010 and, among goalkeepers, is D.C.'s career leader in regular season appearances (279).
A number of injuries, though, has limited his availability in recent years. His contract expires in December. This year he’s making $700,000, fifth highest on the team, according to MLS Players Association data. | 2022-07-08T17:28:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. United's Bill Hamid out with ruptured ligament in his hand - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/bill-hamid-hand-injury/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/08/bill-hamid-hand-injury/ |
Miyares asks for closed hearing in case about Loudoun school assaults
The next hearing in the court case filed by the Loudoun school board against Attorney General Jason S. Miyares is supposed to take place July 11. (iStock)
Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares is asking that a hearing in a high-profile court case related to Loudoun County Public Schools’ handling of two sexual assaults remain closed to the public. Earlier, he had called for transparency in the case.
The hearing comes as part of a suit the Loudoun school board has filed seeking to halt the work of a special grand jury convened in Miyares’s investigation into the Northern Virginia school district’s handling of a pair of sexual assaults by a high school student. That case has generated significant controversy and criticism for the school district, which transferred the student after his first sexual assault to a second campus, where he committed a second.
The hearing, meant to be open to the public, is scheduled for next week. Its purpose is unknown: Attorneys are scheduled to discuss “sealed filings” that have so far been kept from the public record by the joint agreement of both parties to the suit.
In a court filing Tuesday, Assistant Attorney General Thomas J. Sanford asked that that hearing be closed because “public access … would play a negative role.” Privacy, he wrote, would “protect the proper functioning and secrecy of the Special Grand Jury.”
Grand jury proceedings are normally kept closed to the public.
The court has not yet ruled on his request, and the Loudoun school system has not filed a response. But Sanford wrote in his filing that his understanding “from conferring with counsel [is] that the School Board will now oppose this motion.”
Asked for comment Friday, Miyares spokeswoman Victoria LaCivita said, “The brief speaks for itself.” Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde Byard declined to answer questions Friday, writing in an email that “Loudoun County Public Schools does not comment on pending litigation.”
Va. judge reverses decision to place teen on sex offender registry in bathroom assault case
During Glenn Youngkin’s campaign for governor, he often blasted Loudoun and promised retribution once he was in office. Shortly after Youngkin and Miyares took power in early 2022, Miyares — acting on instructions laid out in one of Youngkin’s first executive orders — opened an investigation into Loudoun’s handling of the sexual assaults.
At the time, both officials cited the need to make information about the cases public. Youngkin wrote in his order that the Loudoun school board had “withheld key details and knowingly lied to parents” about the sexual assault cases. Miyares said in a statement that Loudoun had “covered up a sexual assault on school grounds” and called for “transparency and accountability” going forward.
The Loudoun school system announced this spring that Miyares had convened a grand jury in his investigation into the assaults. Grand juries are groups of citizens empowered to investigate possible criminal misconduct and bring criminal charges if warranted. In the district’s April 28 statement, Byard wrote that “LCPS intends to cooperate with the lawful requests of the special grand jury, while protecting the privacy rights of our students.”
In late May, though, the Loudoun school board sued to stop the work of the grand jury, arguing that its formation is unlawful under a section of Virginia law that limits the attorney general’s ability to institute criminal proceedings in most scenarios unless specifically requested by the governor. In a court filing, a Loudoun attorney wrote that the grand jury’s actions were causing pain and expense for the district and for subpoenaed families.
“Those families will be forced to take legal action at personal expense” to keep their children’s school records private, attorney Steven Webster wrote. “In fact, several families have already been forced to hire counsel to file motions to quash in order to protect the privacy rights of their students.”
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said the school board’s lawsuit raises legitimate questions about the scope of Miyares’s authority under Virginia law. And, he said, he can see compelling arguments on both sides as to whether the hearing next week should be open to the public.
“I know the assistant AG argued that a grand jury is private, but there’s really strong public interest,” Tobias said. On the other hand, the case “involves alleged sexual behavior of juveniles that you could conceive of a situation where you might want to close it or there might be a public interest in closing it to protect the juveniles.”
The next hearing in Loudoun’s lawsuit is scheduled for July 11. For now, it remains unclear whether it will take place openly or in closed session. | 2022-07-08T17:41:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Attorney General Miyares wants closed hearing in Loudoun County school assault case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/08/loudoun-schools-closed-hearing-miyares/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/08/loudoun-schools-closed-hearing-miyares/ |
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, left, was sued by former Alabama Chief Justice and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore after Cohen interviewed him for a 2018 episode of the series “Who Is America?” (AP Photo)
An appeals court on Thursday rejected the $95 million defamation lawsuit former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore filed against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen over the satirical television series “Who Is America?”
Moore sued Cohen, CBS and Showtime for defamation, intentional inflection of emotional distress and fraud after an unflattering appearance in a 2018 episode that mocked his sexual misconduct allegations. He said he was tricked into the interview. By rejecting the suit, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a lower court’s ruling. Neither Moore nor Cohen’s representatives have responded to The Washington Post’s request for comment.
On “Who Is America?” Baron Cohen donned disguises to speak with (and spoof) U.S. politicians and conservative figures. On the episode in question, Cohen, poses as the fictional Israeli anti-terrorism expert Erran Morad and interviews Moore, to whom he presents a wandlike device he says can detect “sex offenders and particularly pedophiles.” It begins to beep as Cohen waves it over Moore, a reference to a series of Post investigative reports from late 2017 in which several women shared accounts of Moore pursuing them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. The former justice lost a special election to fill an Alabama Senate seat in December 2017.
Cohen — known to lampoon prominent figures, often while playing his characters Ali G, Borat Sagdiyev and Brüno Gehard — won the legal battle’s earliest round when a D.C. district judge in April 2019 upheld the validity of the consent agreement Moore signed and ruled that the defamation case be moved to New York. Moore previously said in a statement that he believed he was being flown to Washington, D.C., to “receive an award for my strong support of Israel.”
In July 2021, U.S. District Judge John P. Cronan of New York dismissed the suit, which also contained claims of emotional distress and fraud from Moore’s wife. Cronan, pointing to the waiver Moore signed ahead of the interview, said Cohen’s claims were “clearly a joke and no reasonable viewer would have seen it otherwise.”
The appeals court’s summary order agreed that “the segment at issue was clearly comedy.”
“Baron Cohen may have implied (despite his in-character disclaimers of any belief that Judge Moore was a pedophile) that he believed Judge Moore’s accusers,” the court document states, “but he did not imply the existence of any independent factual basis for that belief besides the obviously farcical pedophile-detecting ‘device,’ which no reasonable person could believe to be an actual, functioning piece of technology.” | 2022-07-08T17:46:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Roy Moore's Sacha Baron Cohen lawsuit rejected by appeals court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/08/roy-moore-sacha-baron-cohen-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/08/roy-moore-sacha-baron-cohen-lawsuit/ |
HONOLULU, HI - DECEMBER 27: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam’s Kilo Pier on December 27, 2016 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Abe is the first Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor with a U.S. president and the first to visit the USS Arizona Memorial. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images) (Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images North America)
But after a year in office, Abe’s beautiful country didn’t quite materialize, and he was out — brought down by low polling numbers, cabinet scandals and his ulcerative colitis. He was confined, it seemed, to political irrelevancy. That Abe not only fought his way back to the top but righted the wrongs of his first term is perhaps the most extraordinary part of his story.
It would have been easy for him to coast — take a series of backroom Liberal Democratic Party jobs and work behind the scenes. Instead, with new drugs helping contain his illness, Abe secured internal support when the LDP was forced into opposition in 2009. His moment arrived three years later, when as party leader again, he goaded the Democratic Party of Japan into agreeing to a snap election. Soon he was back in office, rejuvenated and promising to “Take Back Japan.” It was an extraordinarily active few years: Abe took the predominant post-bubble narrative of Japan as a washed-up nation and flipped it on its head.
He repositioned Japan as a geopolitical power. Having initially been treated with suspicion by the Obama administration, Abe’s approach to China — a healthy mix of hawkish skepticism and realpolitik acknowledgment of its trading status — became what is now the backbone of western policy towards President Xi Jinping’s regime. Abe worked to unite countries with similar interests in containing China, sowing the seeds of the Quad, and bringing Japan so close to India the country declared a national day of mourning at the news of his death. He also pushed to make Japan a more equal ally, spending extensive political capital to pass legislation loosening restrictions on the military.
Abe led supposedly protectionist Japan into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, even as the US turned away. Despite initial public opposition, he saved the agreement after both candidates in the 2016 US presidential election turned their backs on the deal.
Domestically, his accomplishments are often under-appreciated. While the “three arrows” of his Abenomics program failed to stoke the 2% inflation he promised while in office, his forceful use of the first two — monetary and fiscal policy levers — broke Japan out of the deflationary spiral that was threatening to spin out of control. His support for corporate governance and stewardship reforms has changed Japan’s boardrooms permanently. And his support for women in the workplace, while it still has a long way to go, will have lasting changes, with more women now staying in the workplace and climbing the management ladder.
Not everything was a success, of course. The third arrow of Abenomics — structural economic reform — never really flew, and he failed to overhaul the labor market as the country needed. He never saw his dream of reforming the constitution. By the last year of his administration, he was running out of steam, dodging allegations of scandal. Much of his energy at the end was spent placating Donald Trump, who came into power full of 1980s ideas about Japan.
Sadly there will be no last redeeming arc to Abe’s final years. Covid forced the postponement of the Olympic Games that he was so instrumental in bringing to Tokyo. The stress of dealing with the pandemic appeared to revive his illness, forcing him to resign from the premiership in 2020. While the Olympics went ahead successfully in 2021, the spectator-free Games were not the celebration either of Japan, or of triumph over Covid, that Abe had hoped for.
The question now is where his absence will be most keenly felt. Right until his death, Abe was a political colossus. As leader of the largest faction in the LDP, he was a kingmaker, while as the party’s most prominent hawkish voice, he worked to cast off the postwar consensus that’s held the country back. Most recently, he argued Japan must double defense spending, and suggested that the country should host US nuclear weapons.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has both paid lip service to some of the ideas of Abenomics but also rejected many of its “neoliberal” tenets in favor of policies of redistribution. With the policy of New Capitalism — bolder perhaps than Abe’s ideas but also harder to grasp — Kishida has sought to chart a new course for the economy, one that many expected would become clearer after Sunday’s elections.
The tragedy may now make it more difficult for Kishida to distance himself from Abe so explicitly. In the coming months, he will have to decide on a replacement for Haruhiko Kuroda at the Bank of Japan, a decision that may define Kishida’s entire economic legacy. Abe’s death comes as the yen drops to a historic low; and there is intense pressure on the BOJ to join other central banks in tightening, though Kishida has been broadly supportive of the Abe-Kuroda consensus so far.
Internationally, things are more secure. Thanks to Abe, the US now relies upon Japan as its key ally in the region. Kishida is following the pattern. Some feared he might be too dovish on China, but his forceful rhetoric and action since the invasion of Ukraine appears to have put those concerns to rest. The geopolitical consensus-building Abe spent so much time on is likely to grow stronger, at least until the next US presidential election.
However, Kishida may need special powers to equal Abe’s ability translate political and security wonkery into real-world action. What other Japanese leader could simultaneously embody Superman, a samurai and Super Mario? Fully 15 years ago, Abe pledged to make Japan “a new role model in the international community of the 21st century.” That sounds much less fanciful now than it did then. He undoubtedly leaves a more beautiful Japan behind. But its future feels less secure without him.
The Long-Lasting Legacy of a Short-Term Prime Minister: Gearoid Reidy
China’s Belligerence Is Spoiling Its Chance to Lead Asia: Mihir Sharma
Japan’s Assertive Foreign Policy Can Start in Southeast Asia: Clara Ferreira Marques | 2022-07-08T17:46:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shinzo Abe Made Japan Assertive. Can It Stay the Course? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/shinzo-abe-made-japan-assertive-can-it-stay-the-course/2022/07/08/6e147510-fedd-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/shinzo-abe-made-japan-assertive-can-it-stay-the-course/2022/07/08/6e147510-fedd-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
As the US economy went into meltdown during the 2008 global financial crisis, one euro was worth about 1.6 times the US dollar. Now a combination of Europe’s front-line exposure to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the European Central Bank’s tardiness in raising interest rates have driven it nearer to parity, or a 1:1 ratio with the dollar. It’s the first time it has sunk to that level since 2002, in the early years of the euro’s existence.
2. Why is a weaker currency bad?
For years, policy makers have welcomed a weaker currency as a means to stimulate economic growth, since it makes the bloc’s exports more competitive. But now, with inflation in the euro zone at the highest since such records began, its weakness is undesirable as it fans price gains by making imports more expensive. In June, euro-area consumer prices jumped 8.6% from a year earlier. Some policy makers have highlighted a weaker euro as a risk to the central bank’s goal to return inflation to 2% over the medium term, although the ECB does not target the exchange rate. Still, when measured against other currencies apart from the dollar, the euro looks more resilient. | 2022-07-08T17:46:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the Euro Has Tumbled Near Parity to the US Dollar - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-the-euro-has-tumbled-near-parity-to-the-us-dollar/2022/07/08/7e4de43c-fedf-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-the-euro-has-tumbled-near-parity-to-the-us-dollar/2022/07/08/7e4de43c-fedf-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
For most U.S. students, summer break is in full swing, ushering in days away at camp, by the pool or plowing through that summer reading list.
But starting July 1, queer and transgender students in six states could face dramatically different school environments from what they had in the past.
At the beginning of the month, 10 anti-LGBTQ laws went into effect, all of them related to education. The laws include Florida’s novel restrictions banning classroom discussions of gender and sexuality, which have become a template for other states seeking to limit what students learn about these issues and when.
Also effective as of July: restrictions on the sports teams that transgender students can join in Indiana, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah, and an Alabama law that echoes Florida’s “don’t say gay” law but also prevents transgender students from using bathrooms, lockers and other such facilities that align with their gender.
Alabama lawmakers pass bills curbing rights of trans kids
While school districts across the country are still months away from recognizing the full impact of these new policies, LGBTQ and civil rights advocates say they are alarmed. These laws could have a devastating impact on the mental health of LGBTQ students, a population that already has higher rates of depression and suicide, and could stoke a culture of fear and suspicion among students and school staffers, experts say.
What’s more, given how new these kinds of laws are, there is confusion among schools, community members and advocates about how they will be enforced.
These bills will have lasting effects on LGBTQ students, said Sam Ames, the director of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, which provides support to LGBTQ youths experiencing mental health crises. And the organization’s surveys suggest that these policies may already be having an impact as young people observe nationwide debates over their place in society.
Ames believes it is not a coincidence that so many education-focused bills came into effect at the same time. And, they added, the different bills will affect different aspects of young people’s lives — whether that is forcing a trans boy to use a girl’s locker room; forbidding a child to talk about how they identify or who they’re attracted to; or mandating that a girl deemed “too masculine” have their sex confirmed before they can play a team sport.
“The only thing that these [laws] really have in common is their target,” Ames said.
The lawmakers who have introduced these bills have argued that they’re meant to protect children, promote fairness and, in the words of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), push back on “woke gender ideology.”
South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) said the state’s ban on trans girls competing in female sports, the first such bill to be signed into law this year, would ensure “that girls will always have ... an opportunity for a level playing field, for fairness, that gives them the chance to experience success.”
Ames and other advocates argue that, in reality, these bills will only harm students who already are vulnerable to discrimination and a lack of institutional and familial support.
Florida and Alabama’s laws banning classroom discussion also would require school staffers to report to parents if their children share that they may be gay or transgender. (This could also apply to students seeking counseling regarding depression, substance use or divorce, the New York Times reported.)
This would effectively force teachers and counselors, who may be the only affirming adults in LGBTQ kids’ lives, to out them to their parents, said Ames, an outcome that could endanger their safety. Research has shown that queer and trans young people experience parental abuse and homelessness at higher rates than their straight or cisgender peers.
“If we’re talking about forcibly outing transgender students to their classmates, parents and school staff, we are putting them in an enormous amount of harm’s way,” Ames said.
Experts hope LGBTQ youths will call 988 — a new suicide lifeline number
Other experts point out that cisgender students could be affected by some of these policies, which could encourage a climate of gender policing and distrust in school communities.
This is because of how vague and confusing some of these laws are, said Elizabeth Skarin, the campaign director at the American Civil Liberties Union of North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
For example, South Dakota’s law — which applies to all K-12 public schools and public colleges — bans trans girls from playing on female sports teams, but it doesn’t say anything about the teams on which transmasculine youths can play.
For Skarin, the law is not only “fundamentally unacceptable” in how it codifies discrimination against trans girls, but it is also unclear how it will work. This is true of similar bills in other states, she said.
“The laws are either poorly written or they’re unclear or they sort of leave open the door to questions, which is typically not what you want out of a law,” Skarin added.
Then, there’s the matter of enforcement.
The state of South Dakota itself will not be making sure schools follow with the law. Instead, it allows for private citizens to sue schools or school districts that they think are not complying with the ban.
“It’s really taking the power of the government and putting it in the hands of private actors to decide if they’re going to sue,” Skarin said. (This structure mirrors abortions bans in states such as Texas, which empowers private citizens to sue abortion providers for terminating pregnancies and also to sue any person aiding someone seeking an abortion.)
This kind of law also is notable because it could make it harder for the state to be sued for potentially violating the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Skarin added. (The ACLU and the federal government argue that laws like South Dakota’s clearly violate both.) It could also be more difficult for the courts to block the law as it’s being challenged.
The South Dakota governor’s office has insisted that the law complies with the Constitution and is ready to defend the law in court.
Last year, Noem did not sign a similar bill into law out of concern that it could put the state at risk of litigation and spur a backlash from the NCAA. But the governor, who is running for reelection, championed the law this year. Her office amended the 2022 bill to say that the state would give legal representation and pay the costs of any lawsuits filed against the law, the Associated Press reported.
At this point, it’s unclear if and how parents and other community members will file such lawsuits.
A 2021 Associated Press report found that among two dozen state lawmakers who introduced anti-trans sports bans last year, most could not cite a single instance of a trans girl’s participation causing problems. And Skarin said that because the number of trans girls who play sports is so low, it’s possible that these laws would more frequently affect cisgender athletes: girls who dominate competition or who appear aggressive or masculine, a dynamic that can affect Black women and girls more than their White peers.
The same issues are at play in Florida’s law, which bans instruction or classroom discussion about LGBTQ issues for kindergarten through third grade (and limits these topics in subsequent grades to “age-appropriate” instruction), and gives parents the right to sue schools if they think the law has been violated. The law is broad enough that it could be interpreted in many ways, said Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel for the ACLU of Florida.
This not only could empower bigots, she said, but also will create a “chilling effect” among educators and school officials who are anxious and confused about what could be deemed inappropriate, and school districts, which would be forced to pay the cost of going to court.
Gross thinks the intent of these laws is to erase LGBTQ people and communities in as many ways as possible.
“[These bills] are all different pieces of the same puzzle, which is basically a nationwide attack on LGBTQ individuals,” she said.
But Ames, of the Trevor Project, said there’s still much that concerned parents, educators and community members can do to support LGBTQ students in the face of these bills.
Affirmation and acceptance go a long way, and simply using a child’s preferred name and pronouns can help prevent social isolation, depression and suicidal thoughts, experts say. And at a time when a nationwide mental health crisis is affecting millions of American children, schools also can put in place suicide prevention policies that are inclusive of LGBTQ students.
“If you have a young transgender person in your life ... tell them what is happening is wrong,” Ames said. “Tell them that while these politicians might be powerful, control is different than strength. And these youth have shown time and time again that what they have is strength.” | 2022-07-08T17:47:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anti-LGBTQ education laws, including ‘don’t say gay,’ went into effect - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/08/anti-lgbtq-education-laws-in-effect/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/08/anti-lgbtq-education-laws-in-effect/ |
Even conservative justices have a right to privacy
Law enforcement officers stand guard as abortion rights activists march in front of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's house on June 29 in Chevy Chase, Md. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“The home is different,” Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 1988, upholding the constitutionality of a Wisconsin suburb’s ordinance prohibiting “targeted picketing” outside residents’ homes. “A special benefit of the privacy all citizens enjoy within their own walls, which the State may legislate to protect, is an ability to avoid intrusions.”
More than three decades later, with another question of residential picketing in front of the court but on a more personal basis, there is a certain irony to the factual setting of O’Connor’s opinion.
Then, the justices were grappling with the question of protesters gathering outside the home of a doctor who performed abortions — carrying signs, shouting slogans and warning children to stay away from the “baby killer.”
Now, the tables have turned. The picketers are protesting the court’s decision to eliminate constitutional protection for abortion. And their intended targets are the homes of the justices themselves, on the leafy streets of Chevy Chase, Md., and in the suburbs of Virginia.
Earlier this month, Supreme Court Marshal Gail A. Curley wrote to the states’ governors and local executives asking that they enforce existing prohibitions against residential picketing.
“For weeks on end, large groups of protesters chanting slogans, using bullhorns, and banging drums have picketed Justices’ homes in Montgomery County,” Curley wrote to Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich. “This is exactly the kind of conduct that Maryland and Montgomery County laws prohibit.”
A Montgomery County ordinance provides that protesters “must not picket in front or adjacent to any private residence.” They are allowed to march in residential areas, but “without stopping at any particular private residence.”
But Elrich, responding in public comments Wednesday, declined Curley’s request. He dismissed it as a publicity stunt: “It’s not about security when you get a message from the press office about security,” he said of the letter, which was released to the public.
And he invoked the example of authoritarian regimes: “I think all you got to do is look at Putin’s Russia, and get an idea of where you don’t want to go,” Elrich said. “This idea where people can gather together and if you gather together, you’re gonna be arrested. That’s not happening here.”
I’m heartsick — I’m furious — over the conservative majority’s brute force move to do away with a half-century of reproductive freedom and precedent. My sympathies are with the protesters. And I’m steadfast in my support for free speech rights; my job and my country depend on robust support for the First Amendment.
But count me with Curley — and O’Connor — over Elrich. The pickets at justices’ homes — they’ve primarily targeted Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — are beyond the pale. As I’ve written before, they’re unnecessary; protesters can make their views amply known at the court itself. They are, if anything, counterproductive. Maybe making justices’ lives miserable will make people feel better, but it won’t accomplish anything beyond that.
Justices, and their families, deserve as much protection from bombardment within their own homes as abortion doctors do. So yes, yet another irony: The privacy rights to which conservative justices gave the back of the hand in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization argue for authorities stepping in to shield them at home.
This is a tricky area of First Amendment law. Streets — even quiet, suburban streets — are considered traditional public forums. That means they can’t be placed off-limits to protests. “Streets, sidewalks, parks, and other similar public places are so historically associated with the exercise of First Amendment rights that access to them for the purpose of exercising such rights cannot constitutionally be denied broadly and absolutely,” the court observed in a 1968 case.
But as long as they’re not drawing distinctions based on the content of the speech — for example, allowing pickets for labor organizing but not for other purposes — governments can impose carefully drawn restrictions on protesting.
That’s precisely what Montgomery County has done — and for the sake of the justices, their beleaguered families and at least some of their exasperated neighbors — Elrich should enforce the law as written. That will still leave the streets of Chevy Chase a far cry from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
As an intellectual matter, the question of whether the picketing can be limited is distinct from issues of protecting justices’ safety — in particular the chilling fact that a California man was recently charged with attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh, and turned up at his house in the middle of the night with a cache of weapons and ammunition, according to court documents. The scope of protesters’ free speech rights shouldn’t be circumscribed by others’ deranged, and criminal, behavior.
But as a matter of common sense, in terms of where we are as a community and how we want to behave as fellow citizens, how can we separate them? Those who share my pro-choice views recoiled at protests targeting abortion providers and clinic employees at their homes, and they were not reluctant to connect those actions to clinic bombings or murders of physicians.
It should be possible to find ways to express justified outrage at the conservative justices without terrorizing them and their families. Can we not at least manage that? | 2022-07-08T17:47:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Where protest ends and harassment begins - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/kavanaugh-protests-abortion-elrich/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/kavanaugh-protests-abortion-elrich/ |
James B. Comey and Andrew McCabe became highly paid self-employed taxpayers, who are likelier to be audited by a research program
Former FBI director James B. Comey is sworn in before testifying at a June 2017 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election. Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, were both subject to rare IRS audits after President Donald Trump fired them. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The tax audits that examined the returns of two former senior FBI officials and adversaries of former president Donald Trump are part of a little-known research program designed to help the Internal Revenue Service collect data on possible future tax cheats.
James B. Comey and Andrew McCabe, the former FBI director and deputy director, were subject to inquiries from the IRS’s National Research Program for their tax returns from 2017 and 2019. Those audits are designed to help the IRS capture data on certain types of tax filers who are more likely than others to misreport their incomes, even inadvertently, and they’re different from the enforcement audits designed to nab people for breaking the law. IRS algorithms select taxpayers for National Research Program audits from a pool that disproportionately includes high-income taxpayers who are self-employed, or who generate revenue through sole proprietorships or from investments.
Comey and McCabe were government employees for years, drawing predictable salaries that were reported to the IRS along with their tax withholding, and they would not have fallen into those categories during that time.
But then Trump fired them — Comey in 2017, and McCabe in 2018. Comey wrote two lucrative books and started giving paid speeches, and McCabe joined CNN as an on-air law enforcement analyst. Those arrangements, say tax policy experts and former high-ranking IRS officials, would have made both men far more likely to be chosen for a research inspection than they were as FBI employees, because the pool of high earners with such eclectic income streams is significantly smaller.
The rare audits were first reported by the New York Times. Lawmakers and the IRS commissioner have asked the agency’s top tax watchdog to investigate.
Trump raged about Comey and McCabe constantly — advisers say they were near the top of his proverbial enemies list as president — and former officials told The Washington Post that Trump mused frequently that they should be investigated. But former IRS officials said the National Review Program would be hard to use as a deliberate weapon.
By firing his enemies, though, Trump set the pair up to make much more money than they did at the FBI — launching them into a new tax bracket that the IRS examines much more frequently than it does even well-paid government employees.
The odds of both men being pulled into the research program’s audits by coincidence shortly after Trump fired them may seem slim, but former top tax policy officials told The Post they were certain that’s what happened — though they acknowledged that it looked suspicious.
“We like to see patterns, so that’s what we’re seeing,” said Mark Mazur, the Biden administration’s former assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, who previously led the IRS office in charge of the enigmatic research program.
The idea of using the IRS against political adversaries certainly crossed the former president’s mind.
Trump, who famously refused to release his own tax returns and claimed they were under audit, regularly complained that the IRS had been “a pain in the ass” to him over the years, one former official said, and he was “incredibly well versed” in previous accusations that past administrations had tampered with the IRS for political purposes.
One former senior official said Trump would rant that people should be investigated and audited, though neither of the two officials who spoke to The Post said they ever heard Trump give specific orders to that effect. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
“They did it to us,” Trump would say in 2017, accusing the IRS of carrying out politically motivated audits of pro-Republican groups under President Barack Obama, a storyline conservative media had focused on frequently, though no evidence emerged to support such a claim. “He would say this person should be investigated, this person should be audited. I never heard him give a direct order,” one of the former officials said.
The IRS has worked for years to avoid giving even the appearance of political bias, though Trump administration officials said that would not have deterred the former president.
“He did not care one bit about what the rules were supposed to be,” one of the former officials said.
Through a spokesman, Trump said he knew nothing about the audits of McCabe and Comey, even as he criticized the two men.
The agency has faced previous suspicions that its examinations had been leveraged by political actors. Shortly after the 2012 presidential election, Mark Everson, who served as IRS commissioner during the George W. Bush administration, received a call from an investigative reporter about the coincidental enforcement audits of two aides to Mitt Romney, now a senator from Utah, who was the Republican challenger to Obama that year.
“I said to the reporter: ‘Please tell me you have something more than that the individuals said they were under audit shortly after the election,’” Everson said. The story never ran. Everson said it would be impossible for the IRS to quickly start a set of investigations after a presidential election, even if it wanted to. “Things happen, and in the political world they talk and conjure up conspiracies.”
The research program involves audits that are intrusive and complicated for taxpayers to deal with, but they’re very different from the enforcement audits most people think of when they worry about hearing from the IRS.
Enforcement audits are aimed at specific individuals suspected of violating the tax code. Their purpose is to collect revenue and deter further cheating. For the research audits, taxpayers are selected at random by an algorithm, and the procedures don’t mean that the IRS suspects fraud. The agency uses the results to regularly reprogram its enforcement software so it can more accurately go after questionable activity in the future.
“The fact that he’s in a [National Research Program] sample, a stratified random sample, how is this payback?” one former top IRS figure said of Comey.
The Taxpayer Advocate Service, the IRS’s internal consumer rights watchdog, has for years asked Congress to compensate taxpayers who are chosen to sit for a research audit, since many individuals spend hours procuring financial documentation for examiners and often retain counsel because they feel intimidated by the process.
“These folks, they weren’t selected because you had concerns,” said Nina Olson, who served as national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. “They’re really doing a public service.”
The research program, IRS insiders say, is seen as an annoying necessity within the agency. When the tax collector began the program in 2001, it sent highly trained enforcement agents to examine close to 15,000 taxpayers each year. The depth of the study frustrated the agents, who were not recovering revenue, and members of Congress, who received complaints from constituents about the invasive nature of the program, according to a former top IRS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive internal discussions.
Details of the research program are closely held because the agency fears that information leaks about topics the IRS is studying could embolden would-be fraudsters.
The tax agency in recent years has surveyed between 4,000 and 5,000 taxpayers, a significant drop that experts say is indicative of the IRS’s chronic lack of resources and its pivot away from enforcement activity, especially against high earners.
In 2019, the last year for which data is available, 53 percent of individual enforcement audits were completed against taxpayers with incomes less than $50,000, according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, and 8 in 10 of those filers claimed anti-poverty tax credits.
Jeff Stein and Lisa Rein contributed to this report. | 2022-07-08T17:48:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump fired Comey and McCabe, making their taxes more interesting to the IRS - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/08/irs-trump-comey-audit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/08/irs-trump-comey-audit/ |
US inflation is at a four-decade high, borrowing costs are surging and stocks have taken a beating. With the Federal Reserve embarking on an aggressive campaign to temper demand and tame prices, concerns are growing that its moves will tip the US into recession. In recent weeks, there’s been a plethora of discussion on whether a downturn is inevitable, when it might start and how bad it might be.
It’s often understood as a period when economic output contracts for two straight quarters. But the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, a group of academics whose determination is regarded as official in the US, defines a recession differently: as a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months” and looks at three criteria: depth, diffusion and duration. To assess these criteria, they consider factors such as employment, inflation-adjusted spending, industrial production and income. And while each of the criteria needs to be met to some degree, NBER says extreme conditions revealed by one criterion may offset weaker signals from another. For instance, the pandemic-driven recession of 2020 was broad-based and characterized by a sharp drop in economic activity, but it was extremely short, lasting just two months.
For Americans facing decades-high inflation, near-record gas prices and ballooning grocery bills, it certainly may feel like it, but most economists say the US economy is not currently in a recession. That said, a slew of recent data raised concerns that a recession might be imminent.
The government’s hallmark measure of economic activity -- gross domestic product, or GDP -- did contract in the first three months of this year, the first time it has done so since 2020. But the pullback largely reflected a surge in imports. Because GDP is meant to only capture domestic production, surging imports dragged down the headline figure. Earlier estimates of the figure had pointed to robust consumer spending, but the government’s third GDP estimate came with a sharp downward revision to household outlays in the period. While still solid, that revision, paired with a decline in inflation-adjusted spending in May, sparked new worries. It’s possible the US economy will shrink in the second quarter as well. The Atlanta Fed’s running estimate of real GDP, called GDPNow, is forecasting a second-straight quarterly decline. While that would fit the definition of two-straight quarters of shrinking GDP, that wouldn’t necessarily mean the US is officially in recession as determined by NBER.
Bloomberg Economics says there’s close to a three-in-four probability there will be a recession by the start of 2024. Economists at Deutsche Bank AG, one of the first major banks to forecast a recession, now expect one to begin in mid-2023; Wells Fargo & Co. predicts the same. Nomura Holdings Inc. expects one even sooner, starting at the end of 2022. The likelihood of a recession could climb even higher if gasoline prices continue to rise and the Fed opts for another 75-basis-point rate hike in July. (When the central bank raised interest rates by that much in June, it was the biggest such move since 1994.)
A recession is not a foregone conclusion, as President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has held out hope for a so-called soft landing -- a cooling in economic activity that doesn’t lead to a recession -- but he acknowledged on June 22 that achieving one will be “very challenging.” So far, the labor market remains a bright spot in an otherwise darkening economic picture, with employers adding more jobs than expected in June.
The global economy is facing a similar picture of high inflation and increasingly aggressive steps by central banks to curb it. “The world economy is again in danger,” World Bank President David Malpass declared in a report released in early June. He noted that even if a global recession is averted, the combination of high inflation and slow growth -- something known as stagflation -- could persist for several years. Economists at Citigroup Inc. pin the probability of the world economy falling into recession at nearly 50%. In Europe, much of the fate of the economy hinges on access to Russian gas, though recession risks still differ by country. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has emphasized that a recession is still not the central bank’s baseline scenario, but some of her colleagues describe the risk as non-trivial, though they argue that any potential contraction would be temporary. Meantime, in China -- the world’s second-largest economy -- the outlook remains uncertain. The economy is showing mixed signs of recovery, strained by stringent Covid-19 measures and associated lockdowns, but the government is seeking ways to step in.
(Updates with latest data and views.) | 2022-07-08T19:17:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What You Need to Know About Recessions — Including Whether We’re in One - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/what-you-need-to-know-about-recessions-including-whether-were-inone/2022/07/08/10e10716-fee5-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/what-you-need-to-know-about-recessions-including-whether-were-inone/2022/07/08/10e10716-fee5-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
The Pentagon said its latest transfer should enhance Ukraine’s ability to target Russian military assets
Ukrainian military personnel fire on Russian positions using a U.S.-supplied M777 howitzer in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)
“We know what their use rate is. We know what their store rate is,” the official said. “The Ukrainians have asked for more precision capability, and HIMARS is not the limit of what the U.S. is able to provide them for precision capability.”
The conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region has been marked by fierce battles and heavy shelling, allowing Russia to make slow but steady gains while incurring heavy casualties. A senior Ukrainian official claimed this week that 36,000 Russian troops and 12,000 mercenaries have been killed in battle. The Pentagon has declined to offer such estimates.
At this stage, Russia appears to control the entirety of the Luhansk oblast, after seizing the city of Severodonetsk late last month. Commanders are trying to expand their gains in the Donetsk oblast, moving southward from Izyum, which has been under Russian control since April. They are targeting Slovyansk, a strategically key city near the region’s western border, but the effort is slow-going.
A senior U.S. military official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, speculated Friday that Russian forces might soon become exhausted if they press forward without a pause.
“If I took the number of casualties that the Russians took to gain that portion of ground, I’d probably have to stop and refit,” the official said.
Friday’s announcement comes as some in Congress accuse the Pentagon of poorly accounting for where U.S. military assistance ends up once it is transferred to Ukraine and failing to ensure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
“Where I think we are, if not blind, then legally blind, is in how well the equipment is being used, what the expenditure rates are on the ammunition, is there leakage into the black market, is the ministry of defense playing favorites,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) said in a recent interview. “We, from a congressional oversight standpoint, have a responsibility over now billions of taxpayer dollars to have better insight on where its going, who its going to and how it’s being used.”
For now, it appears the United States is relying primarily on the Ukrainian military to provide visibility on where the weapons go once transferred.
“From the time we send the capabilities to Ukraine, deliver them to Ukraine, they move into the battlefield, our military leaders and experts and professionals are in communication with the Ukrainians to understand how they’re deploying those capabilities, what their usage rate is,” the senior U.S. defense official said. “We are tracking that very carefully, and we are very mindful of our duties and obligations to maintain awareness of the capabilities we’re providing to Ukraine.”
Despite Russia’s recent conquests, the administration has sought to project optimism that Ukraine can still gain an upper hand, with the aid of additional capabilities. When asked Friday whether the Kremlin had momentum, the senior defense official characterized Russia’s progress as “very, very incremental, limited, hard-fought, [and] highly costly.”
“We don’t see this at all as Russia winning this battle,” the official said. “But the fighting is hard, and the Ukrainians are having to fight hard to prevent the Russians from achieving their objective.”
The question remains, however, whether the West’s willingness to continue supplying Ukraine with the weapons will last as long as the Ukrainians are willing to defend their territory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a speech this week that the artillery was “finally” and “powerfully” making an impact on the battlefield, according to reports. In Moscow, meanwhile, the Russian parliament this week passed economic control measures to send more weapons and repair capabilities to the front line — a sign its resources may be wearing thin. | 2022-07-08T19:18:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. sending Ukraine precision artillery rounds, additional HIMARS - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/08/ukraine-pentagon-precision-weapons/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/08/ukraine-pentagon-precision-weapons/ |
FILE - In this image taken from police surveillance video provided by New Haven Police, Richard Cox slides down the back of a police van while being transported after being detained by New Haven Police, on June 19, 2022, in New Haven, Conn. Cox’s family met with Justice Department officials, Friday, to discuss possible federal legal action. (New Haven Police via AP, File) (Uncredited/NEW HAVEN POLICE) | 2022-07-08T19:18:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Family of man hurt in police van seeks civil rights charges - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/family-of-man-hurt-in-police-van-seeks-civil-rights-charges/2022/07/08/b476369a-feee-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/family-of-man-hurt-in-police-van-seeks-civil-rights-charges/2022/07/08/b476369a-feee-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Tories awaken to the cost of being led by an entertainer. The GOP still hasn’t.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomes President Donald Trump to the NATO summit at the Grove hotel in Watford, northeast of London, on Dec. 4, 2019. (Peter Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)
Every stage of Boris Johnson’s political progression has been utterly ludicrous and farcical — and that extended to his downfall, or “clownfall,” as the Economist dubbed it. Suddenly, in the past few days, there was a mass exodus from the British government among cabinet ministers who professed themselves to be shocked by the prime minister’s duplicity. “A decent and responsible Government relies on honesty, integrity and mutual respect,” thundered Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis in his letter of resignation.
Well, yes. But it’s hardly news that Johnson possesses none of those qualities. Dishonesty wasn’t a bug in the BoJo operating system, it was the system itself. “People have known that Boris Johnson lies for 30 years,” says Rory Stewart, a former Conservative member of Parliament. “He’s probably the best liar we’ve ever had as a prime minister.”
In this respect, Johnson was very much like former president Donald Trump. The difference, of course, is that while Trump continues to exercise an inexplicable hold on his political party, Johnson’s grip has finally been broken. The questions are: How could Conservatives have ignored for so long what was so blindingly obvious? And how can Republicans still stay in denial?
Until this week, the Conservative Party chose to overlook Johnson’s pathological mendacity because he was so popular. The secret of his popularity was that he was terrifically entertaining. Like a certain orange-tinted former U.S. president, he did not present as a normal politician. He made a virtue of his lack of seriousness to make it seem as if he was just a regular bloke despite his posh background. He bumbled his way to the top.
But the joke wore thin when Johnson actually had to govern. He promised to miraculously make Britain stronger and wealthier by exiting the European Union; he’s achieved just the opposite. Johnson’s management of the covid pandemic was no more successful. A House of Commons committee found that Johnson “made a serious early error” by flirting with the crackpot theory that allowing people to be infected would lead to “herd immunity.” The result was “many thousands” of avoidable deaths.
Eventually, Johnson instituted a strict lockdown, but he failed to abide by it. The result was the “Partygate” scandal, as evidence emerged of Johnson and his aides illegally partying at 10 Downing Street. Johnson was finally felled by one scandal too many. His chief deputy whip, Chris Pincher (a name straight out of Dickens), had to resign after being caught groping men in a bar. Johnson professed shock, until it emerged that he had been informed of similar misbehavior in the past when he had brought Pincher into the Foreign Office.
The lessons of Johnson’s rise and fall are simple and old-fashioned: Don’t treat politics as a branch of the entertainment industry; it’s too serious for that. Knowledge and competence are important in leaders; their lack is not a virtue. And character counts above all: Someone who can’t be trusted to tell the truth can’t be trusted to govern. It’s staggering that it’s taken the Tories this long to accept those basic home truths.
What’s even more staggering is that Republicans in the United States still have not, even though Trump’s political sins are far more serious. Johnson did not, after all, incite a mob to ransack Parliament in order to stay in power. His offenses are political misdemeanors compared to Trump’s major felonies.
Why, then, is the BoJo show closing while the Trump show rolls on? In part it’s because British politics is less populist and Tories are less radicalized than Republicans; there are Murdoch-owned newspapers but no Fox “News” Channel in the U.K. It’s also because British political parties are more powerful. While Tory parliamentarians don’t choose their leader, they do winnow the field down to two candidates for a vote by the party rank and file. Even if the winner becomes prime minister, that person can be, and often is, toppled by colleagues in the cabinet and the House of Commons.
If the United States had a similar system, with the Republican establishment in control of the primaries, the likely GOP nominee in 2016 would have been Jeb Bush, not Donald Trump. And if it were routine for Congress and the Cabinet to evict underperforming presidents, Trump might not have lasted long in office.
But our political parties are too weak and our standards for evicting an incumbent are too high: The president has to commit either “high crimes and misdemeanors” or be unable to discharge “the duties of his office.” Of course, Trump did commit high crimes and he was unable to discharge his duties. But Republicans feared the wrath of their rabid base if they were to make him the first president ever removed under either the Constitution’s impeachment clause or the 25th Amendment. (Richard M. Nixon resigned before being impeached.)
Now, despite everything, Trump could still make a comeback, because he retains a Svengali-like hold on the Republican base. It’s a tribute to the British political system that Boris Johnson is finally being removed from office, and a terrible indictment of the U.S. political system that Trump — who has done far worse — could still return to it. | 2022-07-08T19:18:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Tories awaken to the cost of being led by an entertainer. The GOP still hasn’t. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-resignation-donald-trump-republications-tories-gop-conservatives/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-resignation-donald-trump-republications-tories-gop-conservatives/ |
Where do British Conservatives go from here?
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reenters 10 Downing Street in London after making his resignation speech on July 7. (Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News)
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation from office sets off a race among Conservatives to find his successor. That person will have to solve a problem that is bedeviling conservative leaders worldwide: How can the party build a durable conservative-populist alliance?
The old right-left axis was largely built around economics. Conservative parties wanted more private economic activity and lower government taxation and spending while their left-leaning foes wanted the opposite. This shook out politically in a simple manner: The right typically won the well-to-do; the left won the poor and working classes; and the two did battle in the middle. This was especially true in class-riven Britain, where Conservatives were often the graduates of posh private schools and were so numerous in the established Anglican Church that it has been described as “the Tory Party at prayer.”
That political order is being undone. Much as Democrats in the United States are winning more votes in well-off suburbs, the opposition Labour Party and the center-left Liberal Democrats have been gaining among the upper classes in Britain. This is partly due to the Brexit debate, which pushed even educated voters to the left, and working-class voters — who had been moving rightward for more than a decade — to the right. Johnson’s massive victory in 2019 rested on an inverted pyramid of success: For the first time in modern history, the Tories did best with the least advantaged Britons.
This is the demographic basis of the populist-conservative alliance. Populist working-class voters want protection from the economic and cultural shocks of the modern world. Conservative voters want to protect traditional values in both economics and culture. In some areas — opposition to “woke” ideology, for example — the two sentiments overlap. In others, they clash.
Economics will be a big flash point in this unavoidable conflict. Many traditional Conservatives, for example, backed Brexit to usher in a low-tax, free-trade nirvana — what some called a “Singapore on the Thames.” But the former Labour-voting working classes viewed Brexit as protection against the ravages of free trade and an immigration regime that left them behind. Old blue Conservatives are inclined, like Johnson himself, to lean right economically and a bit to the left culturally. The party’s new voters want the exact opposite.
Johnson’s successor will have to finish the task of solidifying this coalition. As British political scientist Matthew Goodwin points out, there is no going back to the pre-Brexit Conservative Party. Attempting to restore that bygone era is doomed to fail; instead, Tories will have to seriously think through and flesh out what the new conservatism stands for and means.
This will require a new paradigm on economics above all else. The question is no longer about high taxes vs. low taxes; it is right taxes vs. wrong taxes. It’s not a matter of government being bad and the private sector being good; it’s a matter of justice and dignity for all, achieved through a mixture of private and public action that has typified modern economies since the 1930s.
A politically successful new conservative-populist model must meet two basic tests: First, it must show working-class voters that they matter, meaning the next prime minister must lean against the traditional party values and embrace the values of the Conservative Party’s new voters.
Former Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is the example to avoid. He tried to create a conservative workers party between 2006 and 2014, but he ultimately failed because he backed less restrictive immigration policies and insulted his conservative Moderate Party’s new working-class voters in doing so. Sweden now has a strong working-class populist party, the Sweden Democrats, who are roughly as big as the Moderates. Britain’s Conservatives cannot risk that happening to them.
Conservatives must also ensure that all boats are lifted by rising economic tides. This can come in the form of investing in worker productivity through education, restricting mass immigration to ensure there is a tight labor market at home or a host of other measures. The key is understanding that just as all politics are local, all politics are personal. It doesn’t matter how much national GDP is growing if the gains are all accruing to certain people in specific regions.
British and U.S. politics often move in similar directions at the same time. Just as Bill Clinton presaged Tony Blair and Brexit presaged Donald Trump, Johnson’s replacement will likely become the model for the next Republican presidential nominee. Whether it is a positive example or one to be avoided remains to be seen. | 2022-07-08T19:18:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Where do British Conservatives go from here? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-resignation-tories-where-do-british-conservatives-go-from-here/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/boris-johnson-resignation-tories-where-do-british-conservatives-go-from-here/ |
Sorry, but the Constitution contains no right to eat dinner
Dinner is a sin. How could there possibly be a right to it? (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
“Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.” — Statement from Morton’s, after protesters gathered outside the D.C. steakhouse while Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh ate there
Oh, this is embarrassing! The right to congregate and eat dinner is actually not to be found anywhere in the Constitution. I have been studying the Constitution very carefully, including the emanations of the penumbras, and I can see why people might think there was some inherent right to dinner. Eating seems so fundamental: Whether or not you want to have steak inside yourself seems like something you ought to be able to determine on your own behalf. Eating and chewing, alone or in the company of others, feels as though it ought to be up to the person most affected, and protected from abridgment of any kind, even by the states.
But actually, there is a higher authority to whom we must answer on this question. The Bible (technically not the Constitution, but there are people working to fix that!) relates that Adam and Eve ate dinner, once, in public, and this was such a grave offense that they were kicked out of their home immediately and hassled with flaming swords. Mankind was then forced to develop farming and wear pants.
God was very clear on the subject: Dinner is a sin. How could there possibly be a right to it? Jesus ate a nice dinner with 12 friends upstairs in a restaurant one time and he was sent to die in a horrible manner. He who eats dinner will get his deserts, afterwards.
Some argue that even if this made any theological sense, theology should not hold sway in the governance of our country, where there is (or at any rate, used to be) something called the establishment clause that separates church and state. To this, the Supreme Court responds, “You have hit adulthood, and you still believe in Establishment Clause?”
Besides, it is not merely the Bible that suggests you have no right to dinner and are naive and wrong to think that you do. Why, didn’t the philosopher Pythagoras believe that fava beans contained souls, and therefore avoid eating them at all costs? And where are fava beans served but at dinner? (Lunches and dinners, I suppose, if you are creative — but that is not very originalist.)
Can we update our thinking on this point at all, given that Pythagoras was operating in the 6th century BCE and the bean thing sounds made up? No. Tradition is the bedrock of all jurisprudence. To those who would suggest that we evolve, or that we not impose our religious or leguminous beliefs on others, I say, “HERETIC! HERETIC! TORCHES, QUICKLY!”
I understand that all this may seem counterintuitive to Justice Kavanaugh, as a person who lives in the present time and is accustomed to thinking of himself as an entity entitled to respect and endowed with the power to make choices for himself and his family.
He might want his old freedom back, or ask for someone to escort him through the gantlet of protesters who want him to feel bad about his choices, which after all don’t affect anyone other than millions of people whose lives are going to be fundamentally changed and whom he is consigning to a status lower than that of full person with the bodily autonomy and right to direct their lives that this entails.
He might say, “This is a horrible constraint to put on me! I am just trying to live my life, with my family, according to my own lights! I just want to have dinner, like a person!” And I sympathize! I would love to find that this was a right. But there is no right, however seemingly basic, that cannot vanish away like a ghostly mist the second someone remembers that there might be a medieval text, somewhere, out there that disagrees. And the Bible. And the beans. I’m sorry! My hands are tied. | 2022-07-08T19:18:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Sorry, Brett Kavanaugh, but the Constitution has no right to steakhouse dinners - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/brett-kavanaugh-dinner-steakhouse-mortons-protest-satire/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/brett-kavanaugh-dinner-steakhouse-mortons-protest-satire/ |
In March 1972, seven Black reporters for The Washington Post revealed they had filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Ellsworth Davis/The Washington Post)
“Racial Bias Charged at Washington Post,” read the headline in the New York Time’s on March 24, 1972. The seven Black reporters who filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against The Post were dubbed “the Metro Seven” because they were all assigned to the metropolitan desk.
The complaint, supported by 26 of 30 other Black members of the newsroom, charged The Post with “denying Black employees an equal opportunity with respect to job assignments, promotional opportunities, including promotions to management positions and other terms and conditions of employment.” The statistics were awful. Of 310 employees connected with newsroom operations, only 37 were Black, including 13 reporters, one editorial writer, two Metro desk editors, one columnist and two photographers, according to the New York Times. It was a public indictment of modern-day journalism. The Metro Seven inspired Black and female staffers in media worldwide to advocate for their rights. The seven pioneers all ended up in the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.
One of the reporters was Leon Dash, Pulitzer Prize winner, NABF founder and, as we discovered after I joined The Post in 1990, a cousin from New Bedford, Mass., where my father was born. Two other complainants, LaBarbara Bowman, a reporter I first met in the early ’70s while working as a Senate staffer on D.C. matters and home-rule legislation, and Richard Prince, longtime columnist on the media and people of color, are storied figures and friends of several years standing.
But the architect of this first-ever formal class action on behalf of Post employees was their lawyer, former EEOC chairman Clifford L. Alexander Jr. The crew of young writers-turned-activists was nurtured by Alexander, and coached to stay focused on the task of bringing inclusion and diversity to a top-flight newspaper found lacking in both.
The Post’s Fourth of July obituary on Alexander, who died at his home in Manhattan at 88 on July 3, rightly lauded him as an Ivy League-educated, crusading Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman and first Black secretary of the Army. And The Post chronicled a few of his “first Black” milestones: Harvard University student-body president; partner at Washington’s prestigious Arnold & Porter law firm; Kennedy administration national security staffer.
But there was far more to Cliff Alexander than those marquee notices. Because of his exceptional academic preparation, motivation supplied by well-grounded family and friends, and a self-confidence borne out of having successfully competed in a racially prejudiced climate, Alexander blew through the hidden and barely visible barriers that prevented many Black men and women from climbing ladders more easily scaled by their White counterparts.
And from his work on behalf of Lyndon B. Johnson helping to steer the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and his deep dive as EEOC chair into the nasty nitty-gritty of employment discrimination in major U.S. industries, corporations and labor unions, Alexander became a preeminent American leader on busting through racial boundaries.
His name meant much to me.
In 1968, I interrupted a State Department trajectory that would have led to a promising Iron Curtain assignment because of turmoil at home — Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy’s murder, cities in flames, a Vietnam War-torn country. I sought and obtained a detail from State to EEOC, where I hoped to serve with Alexander and his team of superb associates. It wasn’t to be. Before I arrived, Alexander resigned in the face of the Nixon administration’s opposition to his hard-charging style. I nonetheless stuck around long enough to be astounded by the scope and number of confidential conciliation agreements that EEOC negotiated with corporate America. Talk about fine upstanding companies with dirty, discriminating hands.
The news media, in Alexander’s telling, lacked clean hands, too. In a March 19, 2008, interview on NPR’s “Wisdom Watch” with Michel Martin, Alexander let loose.
He cited an EEOC hearing in which a New York Times witness applauded the paper’s great editorial positions on inclusion. “I remember saying to him at the end of the testimony, why don’t you practice what you preach? Because indeed at the New York Times, they weren’t doing a darn thing about giving Black people or Puerto Ricans in New York City an opportunity to be reporters.” That was more than 50 years ago.
His 2008 assessment: “We see in most areas of the media, and radio, and television, and the written, in particular in the newspaper world, that the inclusiveness, and I like to call it inclusiveness, not diversity, the inclusiveness is not their top priority, nor is it a place where they see how important it is for them to be able to hear views — conservative, Republican, from Latino, Asian, Black, male, female, and they don’t get it yet.
Part of the problem, he said, “is that the media becomes quite self-serving. It talks about itself in grandiose terms but does not like the criticism of itself. And so, in order to understand why you should be inclusive, you’re going to have to understand and discuss honestly that you have a problem.”
It fell to Alexander in 1991 to put his finger on the corrosive problem that plagued Black America then, and which remains now with people of color and other aspiring marginalized groups. He told the public via a Senate panel: “You see us as less than you are. You think that we are not as smart, not as energetic, not as well suited to supervise you as you are to supervise us.”
Look around, news media. Look around, America. | 2022-07-08T19:18:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Clifford Alexander’s fight remains unfinished - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/cliff-alexander-pioneering-lawyer-against-discrimination/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/cliff-alexander-pioneering-lawyer-against-discrimination/ |
A health-care worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine at a clinic in Peabody, Mass., on Jan. 26. (Vanessa Leroy/Bloomberg News)
Stop and reflect on the success of the coronavirus vaccines. While most vaccines take five to 10 years to develop and manufacture, the remarkable mRNA shots appeared in less than a year. They were safe, efficacious, free, and dramatically reduced serious illness and death, one of the great biomedical achievements of all time. Yet their results could have been even better.
A study by Oliver J. Watson and colleagues at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, published June 23 in the Lancet, sheds light on the scope of the achievement. Using mathematical modeling to examine 185 countries and territories, the scientists found that the coronavirus vaccines saved 19.8 million lives in the first year of vaccination, starting Dec. 8, 2020. This is based on a broad definition of pandemic suffering, the estimated excess death toll, and amounts to averting an astounding 63 percent of all deaths — in other words, cutting the loss by more than half. By a narrower definition of pandemic suffering — officially-reported deaths — coronavirus vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths, or 79 percent. A separate study published earlier, consistent with the latest one, showed that vaccines prevented about 1.1 million deaths in the United States in the first year.
It could have been better. If the World Health Organization’s global target of a vaccination rate of 40 percent of all populations by the end of 2021 had been met, it would have averted nearly 600,000 additional deaths, the study says, the majority in poorer countries. In the United States, the vaccine success was tempered by the refusal of millions to accept the shots. Overall, 71 percent of the eligible U.S. population is fully vaccinated with two shots; but only 49 percent of those eligible have gotten a first booster dose. Even fewer, 26 percent of the eligible population have a second booster. In all age groups, the total uptake of these remarkable lifesaving vaccines fell far below the number eligible, and many of those who refused paid a high price. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in April, people over 50 years old who were unvaccinated had 42 times the risk of dying from covid-19 as those with all the shots, including two boosters. The tragedy is that so much hesitancy was caused by the deliberate spread of disinformation from anti-vaccine campaigners.
In a deeply unsettling move, anti-vaccine campaigners in Ohio are organizing a ballot initiative on a proposal that would effectively block vaccine mandates. According to an independent, nonprofit news organization, the Ohio Capital Journal, the provision declares: “An individual’s right to refuse any medical procedure, treatment, injection, vaccine, prophylactic, pharmaceutical, or medical device shall be absolute.” If approved by referendum, this would be written into the state’s constitution, making Ohio the only state with such a provision — though whether it would violate the U.S. Constitution might be in question. | 2022-07-08T19:19:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Coronavirus vaccines were a triumph but reached too few - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/covid-mrna-vaccines-distribution/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/covid-mrna-vaccines-distribution/ |
Residents of Prince George's County, Md., cast their vote in Springdale, Md. on Nov. 8, 2016. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Prince George’s County,Md., which brackets D.C. to the east, is nearing a milestone — a population of 1 million — and remains among the wealthiest majority African American localities in the nation. Nonetheless, as many residents attest, the county has struggled to attract high-end retail and dining venues, and suffered rates of covid-19 infection and death that were among the worst in the state.
Prince George’s now appears to have turned a corner, with employment and economic activity rebounding. It’s essential that the county sustain its track record of sound leadership — a sea change from the malfeasance just over a decade ago, when the top local elected official went to prison on federal corruption charges. A key to that is a functional county council that reins in querulous infighting and focuses on what many Prince Georgians want — quality new development, more affordable housing, and a more muscular commercial and industrial tax base, along with new jobs, to support public amenities, services and schools and relieve some of the property tax burden borne by homeowners.
The all-Democratic council’s recent record is mixed. It managed a rewrite of local land-use laws but also wasted time and taxpayers dollars on a politically charged gerrymander of local electoral districts, which failed in court after months of drama. Many residents were outraged, and rightly so.
In the Democratic primary July 19, nine of the council’s 11 seats are contested, including four races in which there is no incumbent, and one where the incumbent was elected just six months ago to fill an empty seat. Our endorsements in the contested races are as follows:
At-large: The two incumbent at-large members, Mel Franklin and Calvin S. Hawkins II, are knowledgeable candidates who face nominal opposition for reelection. We support Mr. Franklin, a three-termer who has led a crusade to promote minority and locally owned businesses, as well as Mr. Hawkins, a first-termer chosen as the council’s chairman about 18 months ago on the strength of his collegiality, political agility and long experience in county affairs.
District 2: Two strong candidates are vying for this seat, each with experience in the state legislature: Wanika Fisher, an incumbent member of the House of Delegates, and Victor Ramirez, a former state senator. We support Ms. Fisher, a bright young lawyer whose focus on food equity makes sense in a county where too many lack access to good-quality nutrition.
District 3: Our choice is Eve Shuman, an energetic former family lawyer who spent several years as Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s top aide in Prince George’s. Her main rival, Eric Olson, is a principled public servant running to reclaim a seat he held for eight years. However, on the council he opposed several development projects, including the county’s first Whole Foods, which many constituents wanted.
District 4: Ingrid Harrison, an even-tempered member of the Bowie City Council, would make a solid addition to the county council, where she worked as a staffer for two past members.
District 6: The smartest candidate in a crowded field is Wala Blegay, a labor attorney whose progressive agenda — if she can harness it to work consensually on the council — would be useful in a district split between wealthy areas and poor ones afflicted with high crime.
District 7: Krystal Oriadha lost this seat by a handful of votes four years ago to the incumbent, Rodney Streeter, a decent but ineffectual council member. In this rematch, she would bring more focus to an inside-the-Beltway district struggling with urban decay and violent crime.
District 8: We offer qualified endorsement for incumbent Edward Burroughs III, who faces no serious opposition for a seat he won easily in a special election just six months ago. Few young politicians in the county can match Mr. Burroughs’s intelligence — or his capacity for divisiveness.
District 9: We support the incumbent, Sydney J. Harrison, who sponsored enlightened legislation that will require healthful food and beverage options for kids’ meals at every restaurant in the county.
The Post endorses David Blair for Montgomery County executive
The Post’s endorsements in the Democratic primary for Montgomery County Council | 2022-07-08T19:19:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Endorsements for Prince George’s County Council Democratic primary - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/heres-who-post-endorses-prince-georges-county-council/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/heres-who-post-endorses-prince-georges-county-council/ |
RIP James Caan, who taught millions of American males how to cry
U.S. actor James Caan holds a news conference to open the 6th annual Hollyshorts Film Festival August 5, 2010 in Los Angeles. (Gabriel Bouys/AFP)
On the evening of Nov. 30, 1971, American males got in touch with our feelings, thanks to a TV movie called “Brian’s Song.”
It was the Tuesday after the long Thanksgiving weekend. We’d celebrated the holiday in the manly way: dad in his jacket and tie and me in an itchy sweater, accompanying the womenfolk to church. We mumbled along as the congregation sang “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” because mumbling was more masculine than singing. Then we returned home to watch football while mom toiled in the steamy kitchen.
Did we offer to help? Ha! Males did not cook in those days unless they were outdoors, or French. The sole exception to this rule was the carving of the Thanksgiving turkey, a solemn task reserved for The Father — even if, like mine, he was neither a butcher nor a surgeon but simply worked at a warehouse.
We might say today that carving the turkey was “a performance of masculine stereotypes.” So it was. But we had no words for such a concept because we weren’t in touch with our feelings. Dads carved turkeys. We knew this from pictures in our schoolbooks.
Equally rigid was the rule that Big Boys Don’t Cry. This Eleventh Commandment was a source of great concern to me. At 10 years old, I was most definitely a Big Boy, with a poster of an NFL lineman over my bed and a plastic ring from Woolworth’s on my girlfriend’s finger. But I was still known to cry sometimes. I secretly feared I was a crybaby.
On the fateful night, we took our customary places around the 19-inch TV screen. It seems unimaginable now, but back then, Americans had only three choices (apart from local programming and educational stuff). The obvious choice for manly males was the new movie on ABC. It was about football.
But it was not about football. “Brian’s Song” was a love story to the sound of crashing shoulder pads and trilling whistles, with a haunting theme song that soon filled the radio airwaves. It celebrated the real-life brotherhood between the gifted halfback Gale Sayers (played by supercool Billy Dee Williams) and the bantam fullback Brian Piccolo on the Chicago Bears football team of the late-1960s. James Caan played Piccolo.
Gale Sayers’s speech in ‘Brian’s Song’ is an essential piece of sports-movie history
Their friendship was the beau ideal of warrior comrades. Shared struggles ripened into mutual respect, then deepened into genuine trust and, finally, as Piccolo faced his early death by cancer, became something even more. “I love Brian Piccolo,” Sayers declared — in life and in the movie. It was a shocking statement to the wartime generation and its sons, boldly naming a feeling we craved despite its fearsome power.
Men cried that night for the young and beautiful dead, and for those who survived them and went on.
It had not always been true that big boys don’t cry. The literature of past ages is full of tears of joy, of sorrow, of pride, of wonder. Even the Bible pauses for this two-word verse: “Jesus wept.” But there was a damming of the tear ducts among men who knew the love and loss of comrades from Ypres to Iwo Jima to Ia Drang.
And the bond between Sayers and Piccolo was something more in 1971, when the nation was aflame. Sayers was Black. Piccolo was White. Their brief and glorious friendship suggested that healing might be possible, even as Piccolo’s death at 26 warned of its evanescence.
“Brian’s Song” came at the start of a decade of magnificent filmmaking, but it was not a great movie. Only a powerful one. It was a statement of intense feeling that neither hid nor apologized for its heart. It was an argument in favor of caring, the case for giving a damn.
I tried not to cry during the final minutes, dutifully performing my masculine stereotype. But I failed. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a guy who succeeded. When I stole a guilty glimpse toward my father to see if he had caught me welling up, I saw glassy pools in his eyes.
I don’t know that he cried very often after that. I, on the other hand, have been a river of tears. It’s a joke among my family and friends. Here’s a sunrise. Here’s a commercial for coffee at Christmas. Here’s a sappy old song on the radio. Dave’s probably going to weep. I’ve learned to stop apologizing.
Caan went on to play Sonny Corleone in arguably the best of those 1970s masterpieces, “The Godfather.” His performance earned an Oscar nomination. Yet for me and for millions of American males who were surprised by feeling on that long-ago November night, he was forever Brian Piccolo. Which is why, when news came of his death, I cried.
Older audiences are coming back. But movie theaters need fresh blood.
If ‘Lightyear’ can spark a backlash, then no LGBTQ victories are safe
Finally, ‘Top Gun’ has a female pilot. Real life should catch up. | 2022-07-08T19:19:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | James Caan, in ‘Brian’s Song,’ taught American males how to cry - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/james-caan-brians-song-brian-piccolo-death/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/james-caan-brians-song-brian-piccolo-death/ |
The death of Shinzo Abe is a loss to the U.S. and its allies
Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in Nara, Japan, on July 8, a short time before he was fatally shot. (Asahi Shimbun/Reuters)
Americans should appreciate how important Abe was for our nation. Over the past several decades, Japan had sought a role behind the historic memory of its part in initiating World War II and its conduct during that conflict. Abe agreed that Japan was right to believe, after this discreet but public soul-searching by his fellow citizens, that they lived in a “normal” country. And as with any “normal” country, Japan was legitimately entitled to defend its interests, especially in the hostile geography of Northeast Asia.
This Abe was determined to achieve, and he made giant steps toward reaching that once impossible goal.
Abe knew his country’s history well, but he could also see that it was time for Japan, and the rest of the world, to move beyond 1945. Germany had done so, forming a full military defense capacity (albeit one that has fallen into ill repair), and becoming a NATO member. Why shouldn’t Japan be able to do the same? And why shouldn’t the United States fully support Abe’s aspirations, not for Japan, but for ourselves and our other friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific and around the world?
I first met Abe in the early days of the George W. Bush administration, during a visit to Tokyo. At the suggestion of the U.S. Embassy, I had breakfast with Abe, then the deputy chief cabinet secretary and little known outside Japan. Our diplomats had tagged Abe, scion of a prominent political family, as a rising star, and so I found him to be, over 20 years ago.
He had focused on the threat of the North Korean nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. As a Diet member, he made uncovering the fates of dozens of Japanese hostages kidnapped by Pyongyang a major campaign theme, demanding their safe return to their families, or at least a full accounting of what had happened to them. He never wavered from that goal. When he was assassinated, he was wearing the blue pin representing solidarity with the hostage families on his left lapel.
Through several U.S. administrations during his two stints as prime minister, and as a private citizen and political leader when not in office, Abe never tired of explaining to U.S. officials why they had to take the North Korea threat seriously. No one needed to convince Japan that Pyongyang was dangerous. Nonetheless, naive, ill-informed and obtuse leaders from more distant lands often needed to have the obvious explained to them.
I never saw Abe lose his sense of humor or his patience, as he tried repeatedly to stress why commitments made by various Kim dynasty leaders from the North shouldn’t be trusted. We could have used more of his wise warnings over the coming years. Now, that is not to be.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Nara, many instant commentators have said that Abe’s policies were “divisive” and “controversial.” That tells us more about the ideological biases of the commentators than about Abe himself.
He was prudent in his approach, meticulous in his planning (in politics and foreign policy) and resolutely calm in his demeanor. What distinguished him was the strength of his beliefs, despite adversity — adversity so intense that, in 2007, he resigned prematurely from his first term as prime minister, leaving the cognoscenti certain that his political career was over.
But Abe, who was as resolute as any politician in the contemporary democratic world, fought back. Five years later, he was reelected to lead Japan again and became its longest-serving prime minister. What really irritated his opponents were his successes, not his failures.
Abe’s international view is more important today than it ever was. He understood the long-term, indeed existential, threat posed by China, in all its spreading ramifications.
In the last years of his administration, Abe more than anyone else stressed the possibilities of a new constellation in Asia, the Quad: India, Australia, Japan and the United States. Initiated roughly 15 years ago but never developed effectively, Abe saw its potential, quietly pushing other Quad leaders to see what he did.
Especially as nations came to understand China’s role in the coronavirus pandemic, heads of governments in many Indo-Pacific countries intensified their search for more effective ways to constrain China, and they too see the Quad as an important building block.
We do not yet know the motives of Abe’s assassin. He might simply be a madman. But we should not let Abe’s tragic death obscure the permanent contribution he made to his country’s progress, or his friendship toward the United States. | 2022-07-08T19:19:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | John R. Bolton: Shinzo Abe's death is a loss to the U.S. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/john-bolton-shinzo-abe-assassination-reflection/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/john-bolton-shinzo-abe-assassination-reflection/ |
John Garvey improved Catholic University — and Washington
By Tim Busch
The Catholic University inaugurates John Garvey in 2011 as its 15th president at the Basilica of the National Shrine. (Dayna Smith for the Washington Post)
Tim Busch, a member of the board of visitors at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America and an emeritus board member, is co-founder of the Napa Institute and chief executive of Pacific Hospitality Group.
D.C. owes John Garvey a deep debt of gratitude. He has stood on principle, strengthened the city and shaped our nation and world to a profound extent. Garvey retired as president of the Catholic University of America on June 30.
Garvey steered the nation’s most prominent religious university since 2011. Established with approval from the pope in the 1880s, the Northeast Washington school has educated generations of Catholics, including thousands of priests and future bishops and tens of thousands of lay leaders from all walks of life. The university confronted many challenges in the rapidly shifting 21st century, yet, under Garvey’s guidance, it has held fast to its mission and moral code. And D.C. benefited every step of the way.
At the time of Garvey’s appointment, CUA, as the university is normally called, was grappling with the damage of the Great Recession. Like most schools, the financial crisis of the late 2000s hit the school hard, threatening its ability to offer students aid and address the needs of its community. Garvey aimed to put CUA on a firmer footing. Over 11 years, he raised a stunning $430 million while more than doubling the school’s endowment.
That funding has helped pay tuition for tens of thousands of students, huge numbers of whom come from D.C., Maryland and Virginia. It has also sparked a transformation in the Brookland neighborhood surrounding the school. A struggling area going back decades, Brookland has seen a massive surge of investment and construction in recent years. What started at the edge of the university has radiated outward, creating one of the most exciting and dynamic parts of the city. Brookland is now a destination, with CUA its anchor.
The neighborhood’s transformation reflects the school’s. Garvey prioritized new and improved educational programs, the better to help students succeed and contribute to society. That includes a cutting-edge nursing school building, with $40 million for construction and another $40 million for scholarships, as well as the creation of a new business school. (I and several others provided the initial funding.) With the public angry at corporate America for short-term profiteering and immoral business practices, Garvey set out to train a new generation of business leaders to serve their communities and a higher purpose. Notably, the business school now connects students with small and medium enterprises across D.C.
As society broadly became less religious, Garvey made the Catholic University of America even more attuned to faith. In one of his first moves as president, he reinstituted single-sex dorms. Though the move generated criticism beyond the campus, morality and common sense supported it. Garvey explained that his decision would diminish a culture of binge-drinking and hookups, both of which are at odds with Catholic teaching. Parents in particular rejoiced at the decision, and as the president wrote in The Post, it would “foster … a greater sense of mutual respect between men and women on campus.”
Under Garvey, CUA led the legal charge against the Obama administration’s contraception mandate on the grounds that it would force the school to cover medications and treatments at odds with Catholic teaching. A constitutional lawyer by training, he defended what he called the school’s “constitutional right to practice its religion without government interference.” When the Supreme Court took up the issue, he urged it to respect America’s first and most fundamental freedom and praised the justices when they did exactly that.
These actions weren’t always popular in Washington. Yet John Garvey never backed down from what he and his institution believed. Such courage enriched this city. It promoted intellectual and religious diversity, creating a space in D.C. where people of orthodox belief could gather and grow. It also promoted a culture of respect. Though Garvey stood firm on matters of right and wrong, he never stood on a soap box. Instead, he extended the hand of friendship to those who disagreed, while collaborating with them on other issues, including immigration.
Garvey announced last fall that he would retire. His successor, Peter Kilpatrick, has the tough task of following someone who did so much for so many in so little as a decade. He may not be the president most people think of when it comes to our nation’s capital, but Garvey should be remembered as a president who made Washington proud. | 2022-07-08T19:19:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | John Garvey improved Catholic University — and Washington - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/john-garvey-improved-catholic-university-washington/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/john-garvey-improved-catholic-university-washington/ |
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