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By Joe Biden
President Joe Biden walks to the South Lawn of the White House to board Marine One after speaking with first lady Jill Biden, Wednesday, July 6, 2022, in Washington. Biden is traveling to Cleveland to announce a new rule that will allow major new financial support for troubled pensions that cover some 2 million to 3 million workers. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Joe Biden is president of the United States.
Next week, I’ll travel to the Middle East to start a new and more promising chapter of America’s engagement there. This trip comes at a vital time for the region, and it will advance important American interests.
A more secure and integrated Middle East benefits Americans in many ways. Its waterways are essential to global trade and the supply chains we rely on. Its energy resources are vital for mitigating the impact on global supplies of Russia’s war in Ukraine. And a region that’s coming together through diplomacy and cooperation — rather than coming apart through conflict — is less likely to give rise to violent extremism that threatens our homeland or new wars that could place new burdens on U.S. military forces and their families.
One month before my inauguration, our embassy in Baghdad faced the largest rocket attack in a decade. Attacks against our troops and diplomats had increased fourfold over the preceding year. My predecessor repeatedly ordered B-52 bombers to fly from the United States to the region and back again to deter these attacks. But it didn’t work, and the attacks continued.
The war in Yemen was escalating, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with no political process in sight to end the fighting.
After my predecessor reneged on a nuclear deal that was working, Iran had passed a law mandating the rapid acceleration of its nuclear program. Then, when the last administration sought to condemn Iran for this action in the U.N. Security Council, the United States found itself isolated and alone.
In my first weeks as president, our intelligence and military experts warned that the region was dangerously pressurized. It needed urgent and intensive diplomacy. To restore deterrence, I ordered airstrikes in response to the attacks against our troops and began serious diplomatic outreach to bring about a more stable region.
In Iraq, we ended the U.S. combat mission and transitioned our military presence to focus on training Iraqis, while sustaining the global coalition against the Islamic State we forged when I was vice president, now dedicated to preventing ISIS from resurging. We’ve also responded to threats against Americans. The frequency of Iranian-sponsored attacks compared with two years ago has dropped precipitously. And, this past February, in Syria, we took out ISIS leader Haji Abdullah, demonstrating America’s capability to eliminate terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide.
In Yemen, I named an envoy and engaged with leaders across the region, including with the king of Saudi Arabia, to lay the foundation for a truce. After a year of our persistent diplomacy, that truce is now in place, and lifesaving humanitarian assistance is reaching cities and towns that had been under siege. As a result, the past few months in Yemen have been the most peaceful in seven years.
With respect to Iran, we reunited with allies and partners in Europe and around the world to reverse our isolation; now it is Iran that is isolated until it returns to the nuclear deal my predecessor abandoned with no plan for what might replace it. Last month, more than 30 countries joined us to condemn Iran’s lack of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency on its past nuclear activities. My administration will continue to increase diplomatic and economic pressure until Iran is ready to return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, as I remain prepared to do.
In Israel, we helped end a war in Gaza — which could easily have lasted months — in just 11 days. We’ve worked with Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Jordan to maintain the peace without permitting terrorists to rearm. We also rebuilt U.S. ties with the Palestinians. Working with Congress, my administration restored approximately $500 million in support for Palestinians, while also passing the largest support package for Israel — over $4 billion — in history. And this week, an Israeli prime minister spoke with the president of the Palestinian Authority for the first time in five years.
In Saudi Arabia, we reversed the blank-check policy we inherited. I released the intelligence community’s report on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, issued new sanctions, including on the Saudi Arabia’s Rapid Intervention Force involved in his killing, and issued 76 visa bans under a new rule barring entry into the United States for anyone found to be involved in harassing dissidents abroad. My administration has made clear that the United States will not tolerate extraterritorial threats and harassment against dissidents and activists by any government. We also advocated for American citizens who had been wrongfully detained in Saudi Arabia long before I took office. They have since been released, and I will continue to push for restrictions on their travel to be lifted.
From the start, my aim was to reorient — but not rupture — relations with a country that’s been a strategic partner for 80 years. Today, Saudi Arabia has helped to restore unity among the six countries of Gulf Cooperation Council, has fully supported the truce in Yemen and is now working with my experts to help stabilize oil markets with other OPEC producers.
On Friday, I will also be the first president to fly from Israel to Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. That travel will also be a small symbol of the budding relations and steps toward normalization between Israel and the Arab world, which my administration is working to deepen and expand. In Jiddah, leaders from across the region will gather, pointing to the possibility of a more stable and integrated Middle East, with the United States playing a vital leadership role.
Of course, the region remains full of challenges: Iran’s nuclear program and support for proxy groups, the Syrian civil war, food security crises exacerbated by Russia’s war against Ukraine, terrorist groups still operating in a number of countries, political gridlock in Iraq, Libya and Lebanon, and human rights standards that remain behind much of the world. We must address all these issues. When I meet with leaders from across the region, I will make clear how important it is to make progress in these areas.
Still, compared to 18 months ago, the region is less pressurized and more integrated. Former rivals have reestablished relations. Joint infrastructure projects are forging new partnerships. Iraq, which had long been a source of proxy conflicts and regional rivalries, now serves as a platform for diplomacy, including between Saudi Arabia and Iran. My friend King Abdullah of Jordan recently referred to the “new vibe” in the region, with countries asking, “how can we connect with each other and work with each other.”
Throughout my journey, I’ll have in mind the millions of Americans who served in the region, including my son Beau, and the 7,054 who died in conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001.
Next week, I will be the first president to visit the Middle East since 9/11 without U.S. troops engaged in a combat mission there. It’s my aim to keep it that way. | 2022-07-09T22:43:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Joe Biden op-ed: What I hope to accomplish in Saudi Arabia and Israel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/09/joe-biden-saudi-arabia-israel-visit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/09/joe-biden-saudi-arabia-israel-visit/ |
Miss. man indicted in ex-lawmaker’s killing
Ex-lawmaker's killing leads to indictment
A man has been indicted on a murder charge a year after a former Mississippi lawmaker was fatally shot while she was doing yard work in a rural area where her sister-in-law had died.
Former state representative Ashley Henley (R), 40, was killed in June 2021 outside the burned-out mobile home where her sister-in-law, Kristina Michelle Jones, was found dead in December 2020.
Henley and other relatives contended that Yalobusha County authorities were doing too little to examine possible criminal charges in Jones’s death.
Court records show Brooks made a court appearance Thursday, and Circuit Judge Smith Murphey set his bond at $250,000. Brooks remained in the Yalobusha County jail Saturday, according to the jail docket. His age and current address were not available.
The AP reached Brooks’s attorney, Bradley Peeples, by phone Saturday and he declined to comment on the case.
1 dead, others hurt when van hits pedestrians at N.C. race: A popular five-mile footrace near Linville, N.C., was canceled after a van struck pedestrians, killing one and injuring several others, according to investigators. The woman who died was identified as Julie Holderness, 72, of Greensboro, the Highway Patrol said. Four others were hurt, including two who required hospitalization and one who was treated at the scene by medics, the Highway Patrol said. Holderness died after being taken to a hospital, officials said. Van driver James Russell Deni, 80, of Boone, "has been charged with unsafe movement and misdemeanor death by vehicle," officials said.
Yosemite wild fire grows; more resources committed: The Washburn Fire burning in Yosemite National Park has grown to more than 700 acres, fire officials reported Saturday. The fire grew about 300 acres in the 24 hours since evacuations began. More than 200 fire personnel are working to put out the flames, with more expected to arrive in the coming days. The fire broke out Thursday afternoon near the Washburn Trail near Mariposa Grove, home to about 500 giant sequoia trees and the largest sequoia grove in Yosemite. The grove, in the southern part of Yosemite, was evacuated and remains temporarily closed. Crews began to wrap some of the trees with foil wrap Friday to preserve them and prevent them from burning. The weather in the coming days is expected to be hot and dry in the area.
Police say Fla. woman hid mother's body in freezer: A Florida woman was charged with failing to report her mother's death more than two months after the woman's body was found in a freezer in the home they shared. The woman, 64, was arrested Thursday and also charged with tampering with evidence. Her 93-year-old mother's body was found after a welfare check was conducted in late April, according to the Sebastian Police Department's Facebook page. The daughter told investigators she bought the deep freezer and put her mother's body in it so she could keep receiving her disability payments. Authorities ruled out homicide in the woman's death. | 2022-07-09T22:44:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss. man indicted in ex-lawmaker’s killing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/miss-man-indicted-in-ex-lawmakers-killing/2022/07/09/6454eb62-ff33-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/miss-man-indicted-in-ex-lawmakers-killing/2022/07/09/6454eb62-ff33-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html |
Aaron Yoder, a head track and field coach at Bethany College in Kansas, runs backward on Saturday in a demonstration for attendees. (Craig Hudson/For the Washington Post)
When runners competed in Alexandria on Saturday morning, they couldn’t see the finish line. Instead, sprinting backward, they had only their instincts and their teammates to guide them.
Fourteen runners, ranging from ages 12 to 69, competed in what organizers with the Potomac Valley Track Club say is the first backward-running track meet held in the United States. On the oval track at Alexandria’s Edison High School, they raced in the mile, 100, 200, 400 and 800-meter events — all facing astern. A handful of competitors ran every event.
The unusual-looking sport is gaining popularity in the United States as casual and competitive runners who train backward are starting to realize it can be gentler on the body, said Bob Draim, one of the organizers of the Saturday’s meet.
Draim and Aaron Yoder, who holds the 5:30 world record for the backward mile, started discussing the idea for a track meet dedicated to backward running more than a year ago.
After missing Olympics, Sha’Carri Richardson remains in a lane of her own
Draim half-jokingly said that he looked up how many people ran in the Boston Marathon when they first started in 1897 — 15 people, which means even big races start small, he said.
“So this is the beginning, and hopefully next year will be a little bigger,” he said.
When the starting pistol fired, the sprinters shot backward from their initial forward-leaning positions with hardly a glance back. Few, if any, runners throughout the meet looked behind their shoulder, instead relying on the track’s lines to guide them. The competitors — most of them seniors — were almost completely upright as they raced, their strides springy and light.
Two runners fell backward in the middle of their races during the entire meet — but that’s rare, said Draim’s wife, Ida. The sport requires an acute awareness of one’s surroundings as well as a focus on balance, which often minimizes the risk of falling.
“The more I relax and get into the zone of the running, the faster I naturally go,” she said. “It really has its own Zen to it.”
About four years ago, Bob Draim was preparing for a 10-hour surgery to treat a second recurrence of neck cancer. Running a backward mile was on his bucket list. The surgery went well, and Draim continued including backward running in his training ever since.
But getting Ida to try it was not easy.
“I thought it was the silliest looking thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It looked so strange that I was really reluctant to try.”
Ida Draim underwent hip resurfacing surgery in 2017, but pain in her hip flexor persisted, and it often flared when she ran ordinary 5K and 10Ks. But after a few months of consistent rearward training, she said she was able to compete in those races with ease.
Now, the couple goes on backward runs every week at the Mount Vernon High School track.
“We are well-known to a bunch of other adults who do forward running,” she said. “They always point to us as the ‘backward running people.’ ”
Many of the runners competing Saturday said they pursued backward running following injuries.
That’s how Yoder, the current world record holder for the backward mile, found his way into the sport. He had first tried the exercise as a high school athlete looking for a challenge, running backward on a treadmill in his Kansas home. Years later, following a knee injury, Yoder’s doctors recommended he stop running altogether. But he wanted to stay active, so inverted his stride. Soon, he broke the record.
Perspective: "I just ran 135 miles in the middle of a polar vortex"
Lena Cromley, who normally struggles with knee pain, decided to start training a week out from the meet when her dad sent her a video of Yoder.
“It’s different, you feel like you’re falling backward,” the 21-year-old said. “I’m excited to see how much faster I can get because I’ve only been training a week.”
Unlike traditional track meets, Saturday’s races were far from competitive — many agreed that the backward running style allowed them to focus more on breaking personal bests than competing with each other.
This relaxed mentality is part of the sport’s appeal, said Yoder.
“Running communities are really awesome, but this is even better, because you’re really vulnerable out there,” he said. Since everyone’s relatively new to the sport, the runners are quick to support and cheer each other on, he added.
Backward running has also been a practice in confidence for many of the runners. Instead of worrying that the sport looks ridiculous to a passerby, Draim said he takes pride in the exercise.
“It’s a good feeling to know that you can do something that you think is good for you and not really worry about looking funny,” he said. “In our experience at the track, once people have seen it, it’s not a novelty after the first few minutes. And so for the most part, people don’t even notice.”
Yoder added that the sport also has also allowed him to take a break from the “forward-driven” mentality that prioritizes success and goal-setting he said is prominent in today’s culture.
“Instead of looking at how far you need to go, sometimes it’s important to see how far you’ve come in life,” he said. | 2022-07-09T23:48:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In a backward-running track meet, looking back is the fastest way ahead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/09/backward-running-track-meet/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/09/backward-running-track-meet/ |
Volunteer-based courtroom accountability group is spun out of Prince George’s County branch
Qiana Johnson is a founder of both Courtwatch PG and its new District counterpart, Courtwatch DC. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Qiana Johnson stood at the microphone in the Eaton House, a progressive co-working space in downtown D.C., and described what she saw as the main facet of a courtroom: its emptiness. In Johnson’s telling, a court is a place where powerful actors — the judge, the prosecutors — have wide latitude to do what they want and little threat of accountability.
Johnson, 41, saw it herself, after she was convicted of theft and other charges in 2015 and separated from her two sons. After her release two years later, she began work on courtroom accountability and prison abolition. Now, Johnson serves as the executive director of Life After Release, legal defense conductor of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams and the founder of Courtwatch PG. Johnson said she wants people to see injustice for themselves and on Saturday launched a D.C. branch of Courtwatch.
“As I was going through the criminal legal system, what I realized was that it had nothing to do with right or wrong, just or unjust,” Johnson said. “It felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. I thought, ‘People are not going to believe what I’m going through. I have to find a way to let people see this for themselves.’” Now she wants “a community-based program that would entice people to come into the courts, watch the courts, and report back.”
Marshals Service employees have alleged racism for decades. Their case may finally be heard.
A core principle of Courtwatch is addressing the arbitrary nature of the justice system. One of the roughly 40 attendees Saturday cited a woman she knew of who’d been in the hospital with bleeding legs but was nevertheless brought to the courtroom. The audience viewed several D.C. hearings on video and pointed to problems, such as one defendant’s lack of a microphone, which made it difficult to hear them.
“Judges in D.C. aren’t accountable to their community,” Johnson said. “What we’re watching the courts for in D.C. is to show the inconsistencies in how police show up. Through watching the courts in D.C., we can actually determine police brutality.”
To give defendants back their humanity, Johnson and others at the event referred to the defendants as “loved ones.” One attendee, JT Todd, who has lived in the District for three years, thought court viewings can protect someone from “being put into the system.”
“I wanted to get involved with community activism and help increase harm reduction,” Todd, 22, said. “I’d like to prevent putting people in prison and replace it with something more humane.”
Johnson said she hopes Courtwatch can shine a light and show people how much latitude a prosecutor has. She asks volunteers — about 100 per month, she says — to watch hearings, either live or remotely, for careless judges, overzealous prosecutors and other forms of maltreatment that punish defendants.
“Judges and prosecutors have more power than the president, if you ask me,” Johnson said.
Holding courts accountable — with help from students, retirees and Fiona Apple
Johnson said Courtwatch does rigorous tracking through spreadsheets and forms and has a contractor writing software to collate its findings. Watchers record names of each attorney and judge, the charges, the type of recommendation offered by the state, what the judge recommended or ordered and other measures. A notation in the file might be triggered by, say, visible signs that the defendant was in discomfort or looked abused, she said. In one video at the event, viewers saw a man who struggled to walk. Johnson said she wants to create a robust yearly report analyzing all of it that will help hold judges accountable.
“Nobody knows what goes on in these courtrooms, and it’s some of the most egregious things, but judges don’t have to report that,” Johnson said. “Everybody has to provide a report of what’s going on in their offices. Judges don’t have to do that.”
Johnson said that court watchers — 70 are trained in D.C. — go through two hours of training to understand legal language, what to do and not do in a courtroom, and how a court operates. They are sometimes recruited through nonprofits such as Harriet’s Wildest Dreams. She also said the training helps potential watchers learn how to process grief: “It’s brutal and gruesome to hear what people go through.”
Johnson said her work highlights how courtrooms affect people of color in an unjust way. Through organizing and activism she hopes to turn Courtwatch’s findings into policy and bills that can come before the D.C. Council, such as a measure ensuring that court-viewing remains a possibility open to anyone. | 2022-07-10T00:15:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Courtwatch aims to hold D.C. courts accountable for systemic racism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/09/courtwatch-dc-systemic-racism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/09/courtwatch-dc-systemic-racism/ |
Juan Soto hit a home run in the second straight game, but the Nationals fell in Atlanta. (Brett Davis/Getty Images)
ATLANTA — There have been moments during the Washington Nationals’ season when Juan Soto has looked ready to recapture the form that has made him one of the most feared young hitters in baseball — only for those moments to be short-lived.
But after Soto hit a home run in his second straight game — an opposite-field shot in a 4-3 loss Saturday at Atlanta — it looks like this might be the stretch for which the Nationals have been waiting.
“That means I’m in a good position and I’m seeing the ball pretty well,” Soto said of his third-inning home run. “And whenever I start hitting the ball that way, that’s when everything starts going for me.”
Soto finished 2 for 4 with that homer and a ninth-inning single, bringing his average up to .242. In July, he’s hitting 10-for-21 (. 476) with three home runs and five RBI. His performance still wasn’t enough to help the Nationals, whose record dropped to 1-8 in July after they left the tying run in scoring position in the ninth.
When Soto is at his best, the left-handed hitter’s approach is to stay in the middle of the field and send the ball to either center or left. But at times this season, Soto has gotten away from that approach and his at-bats have looked like his first plate appearance Saturday. Braves starter Kyle Wright threw Soto a first-pitch curveball. Soto rolled it over to second base.
So Soto made an adjustment in the following at-bat. Wright started the at-bat with almost the same pitch. Soto took it. Two pitches later, the curveball came again and Soto let it travel into the strike zone before sending it over the 375-foot sign in left field.
“That’s my favorite part of the field to hit the ball,” Soto said. “I’ve always said since Day One, I love to hit the ball that way and see how the ball fades that way and everything. It’s one of the most beautiful things in baseball.”
The Nationals (30-57) got an additional solo shot from Yadiel Hernandez in the seventh, and Soto was part of threats in the eighth and ninth.
He started the eight inning with a walk, Josh Bell doubled, and Soto scored when Nelson Cruz singled to cut the Braves’ lead to 4-3. But the rally stalled.
In the ninth, Soto singled with two outs to put two runners on. The at-bat against A.J. Minter was vintage Soto. Minter put him in an 0-2 hole, but Soto didn’t expand his zone, rather waiting for a pitch up that he was able to serve into right field to keep the game alive. Bell grounded out to end it.
“When he starts seeing the ball the way he’s seeing it right now and staying on the ball, good things happen,” Manager Dave Martinez said. “You saw that today.”
How was Patrick Corbin’s outing Saturday? Not nearly as effective as his previous two starts. He was able to give the Nationals six innings but gave up four runs on eight hits, seven of them singles.
Corbin showed signs of improvement in recent outings, allowing just two runs over 15 innings and throwing the ball a bit harder than earlier in the season. But on Saturday, the Braves got to Corbin one single at a time.
The lone hit that wasn’t a single came in the first inning when Austin Riley hit a two-run homer to give the Braves (51-35) a 2-0 lead. They scored two more in the fourth on four singles.
Corbin was able to retire the final six batters he faced, and his slider continued to be effective like his past few outings — he got eight whiffs on 13 swings Saturday.
How is Victor Arano’s rehab coming along? Martinez said that he is “relatively close” but that he doesn’t want to put a timetable on his return because of the severity of his knee injury. Arano suffered a bone bruise June 5 against the Cincinnati Reds and has been working his way back to action since.
Arano traveled to West Palm Beach, Fla., last week to continue his rehab, and Martinez hopes to stretch him out before he makes his return. | 2022-07-10T00:54:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nationals fall to Braves as Juan Soto's bat starts to heat up - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/09/nationals-braves-juan-soto-patrick-corbin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/09/nationals-braves-juan-soto-patrick-corbin/ |
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s prime minister said late last month that the island nation’s debt-laden economy had “collapsed” as it runs out of money to pay for food and fuel. Short of cash to pay for imports of such necessities and already defaulting on its debt, it is seeking help from neighboring India and China and from the International Monetary Fund. | 2022-07-10T01:46:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | EXPLAINER: Why Sri Lanka's economy collapsed and what's next - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/explainer-why-sri-lankas-economy-collapsed-and-whats-next/2022/07/09/db4a0e64-ffe7-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/explainer-why-sri-lankas-economy-collapsed-and-whats-next/2022/07/09/db4a0e64-ffe7-11ec-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Blinken to stop in Tokyo to pay respects to slain leader Abe
Flowers, bottles of water and a framed photograph of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe sit near the place where he was fatally shot during a political event in Nara, Japan, on July 9. (Kosuke Okahara/Bloomberg)
TOKYO — U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will make an unscheduled stop in Tokyo to pay respects to the assassinated former Japanese leader and staunch U.S. ally Shinzo Abe, the State Department said Sunday.
Blinken is in Southeast Asia for meetings with world leaders. The State Department did not specify which officials Blinken will meet while he is in Tokyo.
Blinken’s visit comes as an investigation continues into the motives and weapons of the alleged gunman, and the security protocols in place, and as Japan holds its upper house election. A win by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, of which Abe and the incumbent prime minister Fumio Kishida are members, would clear the way for Kishida to enact some of his most ambitious and controversial policies in the coming years.
“Secretary Blinken will travel to Tokyo, Japan, to offer condolences to the Japanese people on the death of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and to meet with senior Japanese officials. The U.S.-Japan alliance is the cornerstone of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific and has never been stronger,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Sunday.
Blinken will depart Bangkok for Tokyo on Sunday night local time. | 2022-07-10T01:47:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Blinken to stop in Japan to pay respects to Shinzo Abe after assassination - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/09/shinzo-abe-assassination-election-blinken/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/09/shinzo-abe-assassination-election-blinken/ |
Tony Sirico, ‘Sopranos’ actor who played Paulie Walnuts, dies at 79
Tony Sirico, who played Paulie Walnuts on “The Sopranos,” in 2007. (Peter Foley/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
“I have an arsenal of weapons and an army of men, and I’m going to use them,” Tony Sirico, who played the mob henchman “Paulie Walnuts” in the HBO crime drama “The Sopranos” was once quoted as saying, “and … I’m going to come back here and carve my initials in your forehead. You better learn a lesson. You better show me the respect I deserve.”
The lines seem to have come from a script for the groundbreaking series, which aired from 1999 to 2007, won 21 Emmy Awards and is acclaimed as one of the greatest programs in television history. But the words are taken verbatim from a 1970 police charging record, documenting the reasons for Mr. Sirico’s arrest on extortion and weapons charges.
Long before he became renowned for playing a silver-haired enforcer for New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini), Mr. Sirico was a real-life hoodlum who was arrested 28 times and spent two stints in prison, totaling almost three years.
The memories of his earlier life were never far from the surface as Mr. Sirico portrayed Paulie Walnuts throughout the six-season run of “The Sopranos,” creating one of television’s most unforgettable characters. Mr. Sirico was 79 when he died July 8 at an assisted-living facility in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Before “The Sopranos,” Mr. Sirico had played a mobster in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), had acted in several films directed by Woody Allen, including “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Mighty Aphrodite” and “Everyone Says I Love You,” and appeared in the 1997 police corruption drama “Cop Land” with Sylvester Stallone and Ray Liotta.
Ray Liotta, star of ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Field of Dreams,’ dies at 67
When he auditioned for “The Sopranos,” Mr. Sirico was 55 and living with his mother in a small apartment in Brooklyn. He tried out for two roles and was told by David Chase, the show’s creator, that he didn’t get either of them.
“He said, ‘No, I got you in mind for somebody else,’” Mr. Sirico said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in 2001, “and along came Paulie Walnuts.”
Mr. Sirico wore a pinkie ring in real life, the same as Paulie. When the show’s wardrobe staff picked out a shirt for him, he said he had one just like it at home. On the show, while sitting outside a meat market that was an informal mob clubhouse, Paulie would flip open an aluminum reflector, brightening the tan on his neck and face.
And then there was his hair: a pompadour first sculpted into place in the ’50s, now highlighted by two wings of silver slicked back on the sides. Mr. Sirico refused to let anyone touch his hair and spent hours combing and spraying it before shooting a scene.
When Tony Soprano revealed he was seeing a therapist, Paulie admitted he had too: “I had some issues.”
Mr. Sirico once said, “If Paulie can’t curse, he can’t talk,” and he delivered some of the show’s funniest lines, always in a serious, deadpan style, usually punctuated by profanity. In one episode, he was cooking lunch for his pals when he paused for a long disquisition on the dangers of wet shoelaces.
“Why would they be wet?” he asked, while everyone was eating. “You go to public bathrooms? You stand at the urinal? … You look at ladies’ johns, you could eat maple walnut ice cream from the toilets … But the men’s? Heh! … Even if you keep your shoes tied, and you’re not dragging your laces through urine …”
Perhaps Mr. Sirico’s most memorable episode came in the third season, when he and his fellow mobster — Christopher Moltisanti (played by Michael Imperioli) — journey to New Jersey’s desolate Pine Barrens in pursuit of a Russian rival in the dead of winter.
Paulie: “Get … outta here.”
“I was a pistol-packing guy,” he told the Times. “The first time I went away to prison, they searched me to see if I had a gun — and I had three of ’em on me. They’d ask why I was carrying and I’d say I live in a bad neighborhood. It was true.”
In 1970, he entered the maximum-security Sing Sing prison in New York, where he saw a troupe of actors who had been inmates. “I thought, ‘I can do that,’ ” he said.
“I have been in over 40 films and God knows how many TV shows, and I have had a gun in my hand in most of them,” Mr. Sirico said on “Larry King Live.” “But, I don’t feel bad about it, Larry. I pay the rent and mortgage.”
Mr. Sirico had an early marriage that ended in divorce. Survivors include two children; two brothers; a sister; and at least two grandchildren.
When Mr. Sirico took the role of Paulie Walnuts on “The Sopranos,” he said he would do anything except rat out his friends as an informant — in part because he still lived in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. He demanded a script be altered only once, when Paulie was called a “bully.” He had no problem with his new description as “psycho.”
The success of “The Sopranos” brought Mr. Sirico other roles, including a voice-over part as a talking dog on “Family Guy” in 2013. He also raised millions of dollars for charities.
Unlike many of his associates, Paulie Walnuts survived all six seasons of “The Sopranos.” The character made Mr. Sirico a popular figure around the world, and especially in his Brooklyn neighborhood. He even found friends among his onetime enemies on the police force.
“I ran out of my local OTB” — an off-track betting booth for horse races — “and a cop was putting a ticket under the wipers of my double-parked car,” Mr. Sirico told the New York Daily News in 2000. “When he saw me, he tore up the ticket and asked for an autographed picture, which I carry in the trunk … In one year, it’s like I got a life transplant. Sometimes I gotta remind myself I’m Tony Sirico, from Bensonhurst.” | 2022-07-10T02:21:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tony Sirico, 'Sopranos' actor who played Paulie Walnuts, dies at 79 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/09/sopranos-actor-tony-sirico-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/09/sopranos-actor-tony-sirico-dies/ |
Deluge swamps much of Washington area Saturday morning
More than three inches measured officially in D.C. in two hours
Many of us may have learned what was happening Saturday morning when the harsh honking sound suddenly emanated from our televisions, jolting us awake as we dozed on the couch.
It was the Emergency Alert System with a flood warning, issued as torrents of rain began to inundate parts of the Washington area, overwhelming the ability of creeks, streams and road and street drains to carry it away.
By chance, as much as for any other reasons, some of the heaviest downpours pelted Reagan National Airport, where the National Weather Service makes its official readings for Washington.
The figures there fell into what a reasonable observer might describe as the reasonably astounding range.
In the hour between about 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., the gauges at the airport collected 1.51 inches of rain. That is a heavy rainfall. But the storm, which had screeched us awake, was not done with us.
In the next hour, between about 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., even more rain fell. At 1.53 inches, it brought the total for the two drenching hours to 3.04 inches.
That two-hour total represents the amount of rain that would seem reasonable for many a full month. Often that much rain does not fall in an entire month.
It seemed that we had experienced a spectacular meteorological event, a kind of prodigy of precipitation.
With Bastille Day not far off, it was the kind of thing that may have caused the historically-minded to recall the saying attributed to Louis XV, the pre-revolutionary French king.
“Apres moi,” he said, “le deluge.”
But even with the alert blaring from our televisions, many of us may have been deprived of the sight.
For one thing, it fell in darkness, from a sky full of clouds. For another, it appears that the two-hour, three-inch total confined itself to only parts of the metropolitan area. Even Sections of the District did not report so much rain to the Weather Service.
On the other hand, some places in the Washington region got even more.
In the Loveville area of St. Mary’s County in Southern Maryland, a spotter reported to the Weather Service a total rainfall of 4.58 inches.
The report was made about 9 a.m. and covered the previous 24 hours. But data indicated that most or all of that rain fell in a relatively brief period.
Needless to say, high water, as deep as a foot or a foot-and-a-half, was reported flowing over streets and roads in St. Mary’s, as streams came out of their banks.
Closer to Washington, high water was reported on roads in Montgomery County as well.
In Montgomery, Beach Drive was closed between Wyndale Road and Woodbine Road.
It was also closed between Kensington Parkway and Connecticut Avenue, according to county fire and rescue spokesman Pete Piringer.
High water was blamed, Piringer said.
In addition, authorities received accounts of fallen trees that blocked streets and roads.
It appeared that many had come down less as a result of wind than as a consequence of rain softening or eroding the surrounding soil.
In Montgomery, more than two inches of rain was measured in areas that included Garrett Park, Silver Spring, Potomac and Chevy Chase, according to reports made by Saturday morning to the Weather Service.
In Virginia, 2.5 inches or more was measured in places that included the Mount Vernon and Chantilly areas of Fairfax County.
But as an indicator of the lack of uniformity of the storm’s liquid output, many parts of the region saw an inch or less, based on information gathered by the Weather Service.
Spots that did not seem to participate to the fullest in the morning’s frenzy of precipitation reportedly included Bowie, Brentwood and Bladensburg.
In many sections of the Washington area, the almost biblical quantities of rain might have caused many residents to look through reference works to consult instructions for constructing an ark.
But at the same time, even over the 68.3-square-mile area of the District, totals varied considerably, and might have caused some residents to wonder why that alarm sounded early Saturday.
For example, although a substantial 2.48 inches fell in Adams Morgan, the total measured by morning at Catholic University was more than half an inch less, at 1.90 inches. At the National Arboretum the figure was 1.04 inches.
Meanwhile, in many places, rain continued through the day on Saturday, if in less than deluge quantities.
As of 5 p.m., the day’s official rainfall figure for Washington stood at 4.05 inches, boosting July’s total to 4.74, or 3.42 above average for the month thus far. | 2022-07-10T03:00:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Deluge swamps much of Washington area Saturday morning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/deluge-swamps-much-of-washington-area-saturday-morning/2022/07/09/a45f8f80-ffe4-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/deluge-swamps-much-of-washington-area-saturday-morning/2022/07/09/a45f8f80-ffe4-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html |
Johnny Davis, the Wizards' top pick in last month's NBA draft, had six points in his debut in the Summer League against Isaiah Stewart, left, and the Pistons. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
LAS VEGAS — Rui Hachimura deserved bonus points for sticking around as a spectator during the Washington Wizards’ NBA Summer League debut against the Detroit Pistons on Saturday. He outlasted Deni Avdija, Kyle Kuzma, Daniel Gafford and new point guard Monte Morris, all of whom showed their support from the sideline before dispersing to schmooze with agents, fellow players and other NBA power brokers who flock to the desert for the league’s annual summer spectacle.
But Hachimura stuck it out. His reward was a front-row seat to Johnny Davis’s first game and a second-half scoring bonanza that came up short in a 105-99 loss.
Davis will be a strong focal point of this summer’s games, and not just because he was the Wizards’ first-round pick (10th overall) in last month’s draft. None of the team’s young core will play in Las Vegas, a move that gives summer league coach Zach Guthrie — a Wizards assistant who focused primarily on the offense during the 2021-22 season — plenty of time with Davis, forward Isaiah Todd and a handful of G League players whom Washington favors.
Here’s what to know from Saturday’s game:
Davis gets his feet wet
Davis took his time getting acquainted Saturday. The Wizards’ front office and coaching staff noted his strong decision-making through a three-day mini camp ahead of the Summer League, but the 20-year-old spent more time setting his teammates up than looking for his own shot against the Pistons.
Davis didn’t take a shot in the first quarter and went 1 for 9 from the floor for six points, and he had five rebounds and two assists. Guthrie wasn’t too worried after given that it was Davis’s first taste of pro basketball.
Defense starts slow
Quarters are only 10 minutes long as opposed to the normal 12, which makes it even more, er, impressive that Detroit scored 39 points in the first. Washington’s squad should have some built-in chemistry already as the roster was populated with Capital City Go-Go players, but it looked lost at times in the first half. The Pistons ended with 14 three-pointers and shot 55 percent from the field — and that was without fifth overall pick Jaden Ivey for much of the game. Ivey left with a sprained ankle after five minutes but still managed to score 11 points. Every Pistons starter scored in double figures.
Cade Cunningham, who sent minor shock waves through the NBA Twittersphere when he was named to the Summer League roster, did not play. He was probably only named to the team so he could practice with the group.
G League players make waves
The roster consists primarily of Go-Go players looking to impress Wizards brass, and Jordan Goodwin and Jordan Schakel both did just that Saturday.
Schakel, a shooting guard who appeared in four games last season as a call-up during a coronavirus outbreak, was aggressive throughout, drawing contact to get to the free throw line nine times. He scored a team-high 24 points and hit three three-pointers.
Goodwin, another shooting guard who appeared in two games as a call-up last season, had 20 and fueled the Wizards’ second-half comeback on the heels of a Devon Dotson three-pointer at the buzzer heading into the fourth quarter. Washington fought back from a 22-point deficit.
Guthrie started Davis at shooting guard alongside Schakel, Todd, big man Vernon Carey Jr. and point guard Pierria Henry. Henry is a particularly interesting character — he went undrafted out of UNC Charlotte in 2015 but has spent the past few years establishing himself as one of the more noteworthy perimeter defenders in the EuroLeague.
The Wizards like the experience Henry adds to the group in addition to his defensive prowess (though that wasn’t on display much Saturday). Henry, at 29 the oldest player on the roster, led Istanbul-based squad Fenerbahce to the 2021-22 Turkish League title. He had three points and two assists in just under 15 minutes in his debut.
What to read on the Washington Wizards
Beal gets the max: The 29-year-old guard agreed to a maximum contract that will cement him as the cornerstone of the franchise. Only in Washington do NBA stars get $251 million participation trophies, writes Candace Buckner.
Wes Unseld’s first season: Players praised the coach’s even keel. But the defense was still bad.
Offseason needs: Securing Bradley Beal’s future is at the top of the organization’s to-do list. Finding a permanent solution at point guard is No. 2 on the Wizards’ offseason checklist.
Candace Buckner: Forget the excuses about lineup disruption, chemistry issues brought on by the massive trade-deadline makeover and Bradley Beal’s season-ending injury. The Wizards took a step back this year.
Peace for Kristaps Porzingis: The big man called Washington the “perfect place” to help him reach his career goal because of the Wizards’ mix of young and veteran players.
Kyle Kuzma’s fashion game: What started as a desire to look sharp became part of his identity when he was drafted with the 27th pick in 2017 and he moved to Los Angeles.
Read more on the Wizards | 2022-07-10T03:13:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Johnny Davis makes his Wizards debut in NBA summer league - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/09/johnny-davis-makes-his-wizards-debut-nba-summer-league/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/09/johnny-davis-makes-his-wizards-debut-nba-summer-league/ |
Dear Carolyn: My husband and I have been together for 10 years and married for seven. I am very passionate about politics and current events, even more so after the past few years.
My brother-in-law, “Brad” is silent on these topics. A few times I asked my husband what he thought and he just said Brad “wasn't very political.”
I volunteer for a local chapter of a national organization that aligns with my values. Last week I saw a donor list and Brad donated a substantial sum (unusual surname). I came home and asked my husband about it. I was surprised Brad has this kind of money to donate. I’m also surprised somebody who isn’t very political would use their money this way. My husband did not seem surprised at all and just said that I saw the donor list as a volunteer and I shouldn’t bring it into the family.
I cannot shake the feeling that all of this, from Brad not being political to my husband knowing he made the donation, is really weird. Do you have any insights?
— In-Law
In-Law: I don’t know, but I have opinions. So many opinions.
I think Brad is a private person. Even if he isn’t one in general, non-private people often choose to be private about their politics and personal wealth. (Or maybe I just wish they did.)
I don’t think being private about something is weird when it’s entirely one’s own business and it costs no one anything not to know.
I do think being private about something can be odd, even difficult, when someone else in the family is public and outspoken about the same thing — but it’s nothing beyond the reach of a little finesse.
“A little finesse” might be the very definition of your husband’s remark that Brad “wasn’t very political” — because while it’s clearly not true in the old-fashioned sense (i.e., where we agree there is a reality to be known and proven), it’s true enough in the sense that Brad is not going to exist as a political person around you. Which is his prerogative. For all we know Brad is private about his politics around your husband as well.
But I suspect this is more likely the case: The brothers have opted not to stand in your way but also not join you in openly demonstrating political passion.
I think there is nothing wrong with this. There are many ways to be on board. And there are many reasons to be discreet, including, for example, other family members. Maybe some back the other “side” and are highly reactive as well.
But if you are picking up signals that the brothers aren’t on board with your methods, and/or Brad has opted for privacy because he specifically doesn’t want to engage on this with you, then respect your instincts. Not that you need to change what you’re doing to fall in line with everyone (or anyone) else, but you do want to be mindful if there are marital or family consequences to what you’re doing. Freedom is the opportunity to make informed choices. Because this part of the scenario is about feelings, your gut is a valid source. You could also ask your husband.
If there is a chance that what you call “passionate” is what they’d call “strident,” then a little reflection couldn’t hurt. Rarely does. Even if you don’t change a thing.
I think the most valid item in this entire scenario is your husband’s caution that you have proprietary info, meaning it is not for public debate or prying. Imagine if all our boundaries were so clear.
Finally, I think in This Political Climate it is a minor miracle that Brad’s furtive activism is in support of your cause. Whatever energy you’re plowing into your “What’s with Brad?” inquiry could go into a discreet reservoir of joy.
All of that being said: Okay, this level of privacy about an area of apparent agreement has some low-key weird to it. But not enough to give it any more thought unless things get plainly weirder — at which point you keep minding your own business anyway.
Just my 22 cents.
Dear Carolyn: Morally corrupt sister-in-law has no boundaries. I want little to do with her, but my partner keeps pushing to interact more. How do I deal with this?
Anonymous: By recognizing your partner is the problem.
A partner with boundaries would accept your decision to have little to do with someone, especially when you have good reason but even when you don’t. Because it’s your life and your time. A partner with boundaries would not “keep pushing” anything on someone else.
So, that’s the main issue to the secondary issue of the no-boundaries sister-in-law: Your partner learned, presumably at the same parental knee, at least some of the no-boundaries playbook.
Ideally your partner would explore this in therapy — which you could (theme alert!) suggest but not “keep pushing.” But you can deal with this solo, as always, by calmly holding your line through whatever fallout you must. | 2022-07-10T04:32:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Why would a relative hide his support for your cause? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/10/carolyn-hax-brother-in-law-support-cause/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/10/carolyn-hax-brother-in-law-support-cause/ |
Father Vitalii Kester, outside St. Mykolai the Miracle Worker after a Sunday morning Mass for a handful of parishioners in the eastern Ukrainian village of Kostiantynivka on July 3. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
KOSTIANTYNIVKA, Ukraine — Father Vitalii Kester’s Sunday routine is not what it used to be, before war drove most of his congregation away and he started wearing Army pants beneath his robes and splitting his day between one Mass at church and another with soldiers on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine.
Kester made a stop as his house, where he and his wife, Natalia, ate a quick lunch of sandwiches and coffee. (Greek Catholic priests can be married.) She tries to go with him on his Sunday trips to the front — “It is easier to go than to not know that he is okay” — but today she had to stay behind to collect water.
“I’m okay now,” he said. “My knees are bothering me a bit.” | 2022-07-10T06:21:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukrainian priest says mass, then heads to war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/ukraine-priest-mass-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/ukraine-priest-mass-war/ |
Russia-Ukraine war live updates Offensives focused near Slovyansk, as south readies for counterassaults
Russia and Ukraine responsible for March nursing home attack, U.N. says
People walk near a shopping center on Saturday that was destroyed by a Russian military strike in Druzhkivka, Ukraine, in the Donetsk region. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
Russian forces continue to focus offensive operations in the eastern Donetsk region, with unsuccessful assaults northwest of the city of Slovyansk, according to analysts. Residential areas in the city were hit on Saturday, the regional governor said.
Russia in recent weeks has seized the nearby cities of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk in its campaign to capture the country’s east, informing fears that Slovyansk could be next. The city was a focal point during conflict in 2014, when pro-Russian separatists gained control of Slovyansk, leaving behind a complex web of conflicted loyalties.
Ukrainian officials also appear to be preparing for conflict in the south as they seek to recapture territory from Moscow. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Friday told residents of the Russian-held Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions that they needed to evacuate — even if it meant going to Russia or annexed Crimea — because Ukrainian forces were set to “de-occupy” the territory. “It will be a huge fight,” she said, according to local media.
Following the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday criticized China’s “alignment” with Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, questioning how any country could be neutral in the face of such aggression. The day before, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba accused Moscow of playing “hunger games” with the world’s food supply, as Russia stands accused of blocking tons of grain from leaving Ukraine. In Kherson, police are investigating claims that Russia is “purposefully” destroying crops.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked more than a dozen foreign envoys, including Ukraine’s often abrasive ambassador to Germany. He called the dismissals a “normal part of diplomatic practice.”
The first Ukrainian soldiers have arrived in the United Kingdom for what Defense Minister Ben Wallace called an “ambitious new training program” that is eventually expected to prepare 10,000 recruits for front-line combat.
Canada on Saturday said it will export a sanctioned Russian gas turbine back to Germany in a decision poised to upset Ukraine, which pressed Ottawa not to skirt the sanctions it has levied on Moscow.
By John Hudson2:40 a.m.
The top U.S. diplomat has not held a single meeting or phone call with a senior Russian official throughout the conflict — a cold-shoulder strategy he continued over the weekend at a gathering of foreign ministers of the world’s 20 biggest economies in Indonesia, where his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, was sometimes in the same room with him.
Russian and Ukrainian forces were responsible for a March attack that destroyed a nursing home in the Luhansk region, according to a new U.N. report.
Russian-backed forces attacked the nursing home on March 11 while patients and staffers were inside. Days earlier, the nursing home’s management requested multiple times that authorities evacuate its residents, but Ukrainian forces had already mined and surrounded the area, according to the report from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published June 29.
Ukrainian soldiers entered the care home March 7, the report said, because its location had “strategic value.” Two days later, they exchanged fire with approaching Russian forces, but the report said “it remains unclear which side opened fire first.”
During the second exchange on March 11, 71 patients and 15 staff members were inside the nursing home as the attack began, according to the report. A fire also broke out while fighting ensued.
Dozens were killed, but the exact number is still unknown, the report said. At least 22 patients survived.
The OHCHR said the nursing home attack was “emblematic” of its concerns that both Russian and Ukrainian armed forces were using “human shields.”
The office defines human shields as using civilians to “render certain points or areas immune from military operations,” which is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. | 2022-07-10T06:51:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Latest Russia-Ukraine war news - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ |
Biden’s Middle East Trip Fraught With Risk and Opportunity
President Joe Biden is headed to the Middle East this week, seeking to prod Saudi Arabia and the other oil producers in the region to pump more crude to help bring down energy prices. Bloomberg News reports that without a pledge from the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates — the two key members of OPEC — to boost production, Biden would lose a powerful tool for alleviating the economic and political pain caused by high fuel prices. Biden, who will first make a stop in Israel, is unlikely to encounter sympathetic crowds, especially after criticizing Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record while running for president.
Here’s what Bloomberg Opinion columnists and contributors have been saying about what Biden needs to accomplish during the trip and what’s at stake:
Biden Needs to Seek More Than Oil From Saudi Arabia“In agreeing to visit Saudi Arabia, US President Joe Biden has stepped back from his vow to treat the country as a ‘pariah.’ Critics have blasted him for overlooking Saudi human-rights violations, including the brutal murder and dismemberment of former Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In exchange, Biden has won only a token increase in oil production that won’t do much to lower gas prices at home. Even so, Biden’s trip can serve a valuable purpose. Healthy US-Saudi ties are critical to calming a volatile part of the world and stabilizing global energy markets.” — Bloomberg’s editorial board
Biden’s Gulf Reversal Is the Wrong Kind of Realism“On closer inspection, however, the notion that Biden’s proposed pivot to the Gulf is a realist triumph quickly falls apart. Saudi Arabia, of course, occupies a unique position in the global economy thanks to oil production, and the US cannot and should not cut off all ties with Riyadh. Until now, the Biden administration has walked a careful line, maintaining active diplomatic connections while publicly criticizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. With a major policy shift, it’s not merely that the administration would be embracing MBS and his human-rights abuses, appalling though they are. The bigger problem is that it would do little to support US interests, while potentially obligating Washington to a host of new commitments in the region.” — Emma Ashford
Biden’s Risky Trip to the Mideast Is Also Pointless“Biden’s every word will be scrutinized for political preference. Pleasantries will be touted by his hosts and denounced by others as meddling in Israeli politics. His visit to the West Bank, where he plans to meet the head of the Palestinian Authority, is a controversy waiting to happen. No American president has ever visited the contested area before. The break from diplomatic precedent will be welcomed by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. But the battle here is for the future, and there is no reason to suppose that a summer chat between 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas and the 79-year-old Biden will make much of a difference in the contours of the Holy Land.” — Zev Chafets
Biden Needn’t Abandon Principles in Saudi Arabia“When President Joe Biden visits Saudi Arabia, he’ll be moving past the antipathy he expressed during the presidential campaign toward the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He’s right when he says that whatever his personal feelings about the Saudis’ human-rights record, the US partnership with Riyadh is indispensable, for reasons ranging from oil prices to the containment of Iran to great-power competition with China. But Biden shouldn’t avoid raising human rights with King Salman and the crown prince. A serious conversation about ongoing abuses should be a win-win for the US and the Saudis.” — Hussein Ibish
US and Saudi Arabia Can’t Stay at Odds Forever“The most important partnership in the Middle East has been put in jeopardy by the peevishness of a prince and political opportunism of a president. Repairing the Saudi-American relationship will require the first to behave like a grown-up, the other like a statesman. That’s asking a lot of two men who have little in common beyond a reputation for stubbornness. One operates in a conscience-free bubble that comes with absolute power, while the other wields a selective moralism characteristic of a performative political culture. But the war in Ukraine just might help them both get over themselves.” — Bobby Ghosh
Can Saudi Aramco Meet Its Oil Production Promises?“If the oil market was a religion, its central article of faith would be the maximum production capacity of Saudi Aramco, a tenet based on confidence in what we hope to be true and belief in properties we have not yet witnessed. The market is about to have its epiphany. Aramco, the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil giant, claims it can sustainably pump 12 million barrels a day, well above the kingdom’s OPEC+ August target of 11 million barrels. For the global economy, Saudi spare capacity is the last line of defense against more energy inflation. But apart from a few top company executives and a handful of Saudi royals, no one knows for sure whether Aramco can deliver. The rest either have blind faith in Aramco — or simply don’t believe.” — Javier Blas | 2022-07-10T07:52:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s Middle East Trip Fraught With Risk and Opportunity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/bidens-middle-east-trip-fraught-withrisk-and-opportunity/2022/07/10/bac71ca4-001e-11ed-b39d-71309168014b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/bidens-middle-east-trip-fraught-withrisk-and-opportunity/2022/07/10/bac71ca4-001e-11ed-b39d-71309168014b_story.html |
Live updates:Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Offensives focused near Slovyansk, as sout...
Grady Kurpasi, a retired Marine and Iraq War veteran, was last seen battling Russian forces nearly three months ago. His loved ones fear he has been killed or captured.
Grady Kurpasi, who retired from the Marine Corps last year, is seen here speaking to schoolchildren in Swansboro, N.C., in 2019. (Lance Cpl. Aaron Douds/U.S. Marine Corps)
The family and friends of a U.S. military veteran who went missing in Ukraine have accused the Biden administration of inaction, saying any hope for finding him alive hinges on diplomacy between Washington and Moscow but that so far the government’s efforts are lacking.
Grady Kurpasi, 50, was last seen April 26 in southern Ukraine, where his team of international volunteers was engaged in combat with Russian forces. His loved ones fear he has been killed or captured — and they are mindful of the Kremlin’s recent declaration that Americans taken off the battlefield shall not be granted protections afforded to prisoners of war.
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the administration is closely monitoring the situation and seeking information for the family, but stopped short of saying what more the government may do. Neither the Russian Embassy in Washington nor the Ukrainian Defense Ministry responded to requests for comment.
The mystery surrounding Kurpasi’s whereabouts presents a unique dilemma for President Biden, who has rallied Western support for Ukraine while ruling out direct military intervention and strongly cautioning Americans against getting involved. At least two U.S. citizens are believed to have been killed in the fighting, and another two are known to be captured.
American detainees won’t get Geneva Convention protections, Kremlin says
Kurpasi is a retired Marine Corps infantry officer and Iraq War veteran. The day of his disappearance, he and a British man, Andrew Hill, had left their position in a makeshift observation post to investigate the source of incoming fire, a member of the group told The Washington Post. Hill was captured by Russian forces, and another two members of their unit were killed soon after.
The State Department made contact with Kurpasi’s wife, Heeson Kim, soon after he was reported missing. Last month, a group of veterans who served with him in the Marines provided officials with a 46-page document detailing, among other information, the coordinates of his last known location and where his phone had been detected after his disappearance.
In a statement, the State Department said U.S. officials are in contact with Ukrainian and Russian authorities regarding American citizens “who may have been captured by Russia’s forces or proxies while fighting in Ukraine.” The agency declined to address questions about Kurpasi’s disappearance specifically.
His wife and friends said they are upset by what they characterized as a lack of urgency from the administration. In an email, Kim said, “I don’t have confidence that they invested or are going to invest any resources” to help track down what happened to her husband.
Biden has faced public pressure from the families of other Americans held by Russia, including WNBA star Brittney Griner, who on Thursday pleaded guilty in a drug case that has magnified the diplomatic standstill between the world powers over the war in Ukraine.
Griner’s case has been elevated to an office within the State Department that deals with citizens it decides are wrongfully detained, and the president has told her wife that he is working to secure her release. That drew a rebuke from the family of Paul Whelan, a Marine Corps veteran sentenced by a Russian court to 16 years in prison over espionage charges he has denied. Whelan’s sister told CNN last week she was “astonished” her brother’s case has not received such attention. Biden called her following the report, vowing to secure his release, a White House official said.
The lack of a strong public response to Kurpasi’s disappearance may suggest the administration has made a distinction in how it views such cases. Griner was arrested while working in Russia whereas Kurpasi joined the war in Ukraine on his own accord.
Kurpasi’s friends said that Biden has not spoken to the family and that the U.S. government rarely shares anything illuminating about the case. Rather, they contend, the State Department appears dependent on them for information. “The response I got back was, ‘He was fighting under another flag, so keep digging and doing what you’re doing to help,’ ” said George Heath, one of Kurpasi’s friends.
The two U.S. military veterans captured in Ukraine, Alexander J. Drueke and Andy Tai Huynh, are being held by Russian-backed separatists. Drueke’s aunt Dianna Shaw said the family is encouraged by the efforts of State Department personnel and lawmakers in Alabama. U.S. and Ukrainian diplomats are working to get both men on a list of captives potentially eligible for negotiated release, she said.
“When you have good civil servants, you get good results,” Shaw said.
Kurpasi, who lives with his wife in North Carolina, was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States. He enlisted in the Marines at age 29 and served three tours in Iraq, according to his military service record provided by the Marine Corps.
In 2007, Kurpasi was wounded along with several other Marines when an insurgent detonated a suicide vest during a mission in the city of Ramadi, said Don Turner, a fellow veteran who served with Kurpasi and Heath.
Kurpasi was later commissioned as an officer after graduating from UCLA, where he received a scholarship from the Pat Tillman Foundation. The group provides education grants to promising leaders with a military background. He retired from the military in 2021.
Although the U.S. government has warned American citizens not to join the war, Kurpasi, friends say, was compelled to help the Ukrainians fight back and felt his leadership experience would be valuable. He arrived in mid-March and participated in battles outside the capital, Kyiv, before assembling a team that was dispatched to the south, near Mykolaiv.
The events surrounding Kurpasi’s disappearance were recounted by a surviving member of his unit, Team Raven, which had been tasked with holding an observation post to blunt Russia’s advance outside the coastal town of Oleksandrivka and buy time for civilians to escape.
The team members received fire from an area they believed was a Ukrainian position, but they did not have radio communication with nearby units, a German volunteer named Pascal told The Post. He spoke on the condition that his full name not be disclosed, citing a fear of reprisal.
Kurpasi and Hill, the British fighter, left to investigate. They radioed back, saying they were receiving artillery and small-arms fire, and needed covering fire to return. Russian units shelled the position in response.
Grady Kurpasi and Andrew Hill, both volunteer fighters in Ukraine, are seen on Apr. 26 near Mykolaiv, according to a volunteer fighter who filmed the footage. (Video: Obtained by The Post)
Willy Joseph Cancel, another U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was part of Kurpasi’s team, was hit along with a Dutch volunteer. Pascal said he tried to treat their wounds but was unsuccessful. He described having to crawl more than a half-mile before running toward a friendly unit.
Pascal said he could not retrieve the bodies of those slain and did not see what became of Kurpasi and Hill after they walked away.
Hill was captured and later charged with fighting as a mercenary by officials in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed zone within eastern Ukraine. Russian state media has reported that he could face the death penalty.
Photos taken from Hill’s phone and distributed to his contacts on the WhatsApp messaging platform after his capture appear to show a Russian fighter with a camouflage tarp used by Kurpasi, his wife said. It has led his family and friends to believe that Hill may have information about what happened to Kurpasi, and they have urged the State Department to work with British counterparts to see if they can glean anything from him.
Kim told Kurpasi’s friends that a State Department official told her that they would try. A spokesperson for Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said the department will not discuss individual cases.
There are many military veterans working to uncover what happened to Kurpasi, Turner said, adding that their friend would do the same if the roles were reversed.
“When you served with somebody, you have a bond,” he said. “And that bond is unbreakable.”
Missy Ryan contributed to this report. | 2022-07-10T09:19:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Family of Grady Kurpasi, missing in Ukraine, pleads for Biden's help - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/grady-kurpasi-missing-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/grady-kurpasi-missing-ukraine/ |
By Vanessa LoBue
Despite vast differences in the details, these memories do have a couple of things in common: They’re all autobiographical, or memories of significant experiences in a person’s life, and they typically didn’t happen before age 2 or 3. Most people can’t remember events from the first few years of their lives — a phenomenon researchers have dubbed infantile amnesia. But why can’t we remember the things that happened to us when we were infants? Does memory start to work only at a certain age?
Babies can form memories
While people cannot remember much before age 2 or 3, research suggests that infants can form memories — just not the kinds of memories you tell about yourself. Within the first few days of life, infants can recall their own mother’s face and distinguish it from the face of a stranger. A few months later, infants can demonstrate that they remember lots of familiar faces by smiling most at the ones they see most often.
How learning happens in the brains of sleeping babies
There are lots of different kinds of memories besides those that are autobiographical. There are semantic memories, or memories of facts, such as the names of different varieties of apples, or the capital of your home state. There are also procedural memories, or memories of how to perform an action — think opening your front door or driving a car.
Research from psychologist Carolyn Rovee-Collier’s lab in the 1980s and 1990s famously showed that infants can form some of these other kinds of memories from an early age. Of course, infants cannot exactly tell you what they remember. So the key to Rovee-Collier’s research was devising a task that was sensitive to babies’ rapidly changing bodies and abilities to assess their memories over a long period.
In the version for 2- to 6-month-old infants, researchers place an infant in a crib with a mobile hanging overhead. They measure how much the baby kicks to get an idea of their natural propensity to move their legs. Next, they tie a string from the baby’s leg to the end of the mobile, so that whenever the baby kicks, the mobile moves. As you might imagine, infants quickly learn that they’re in control — they like seeing the mobile move and so they kick more than before the string was attached to their leg, showing they’ve learned that kicking makes the mobile move.
Sleep training could benefit some babies — and their parents
The version for 6- to 18-month-olds is similar. But instead of lying in a crib — which this age group refuses to do for very long — the infant sits on their parent’s lap with their hands on a lever that will eventually make a train move around a track. At first, the lever doesn’t work, and the experimenters measure how much a baby naturally presses down. Next, they turn the lever on, and every time the infant presses on it, the train moves around its track. Infants again learn the game quickly and press on the lever significantly more when it makes the train move.
What does this have to do with memory? The cleverest part of this research is that after training infants on one of these tasks for a couple of days, Rovee-Collier later tested whether they remembered it. When the little ones returned to the lab, researchers showed them the mobile or train and measured whether they still kicked or pressed the lever.
Using this method, Rovee-Collier and colleagues found that at 6 months, if infants are trained for one minute, they can remember an event a day later. The older the infants were, the longer they remembered. She also found that training infants for longer periods of time and giving them reminders — for example, showing them the mobile moving very briefly on its own — helps them remember events longer.
Is my memory going or is it just normal aging?
One is that autobiographical memories require you to have some sense of self. You need to be able to think about your behavior with respect to how it relates to others. Researchers have tested this ability in the past using a mirror-recognition task called the rouge test. It involves marking a baby’s nose with a spot of red lipstick or blush — or “rouge” as they said in the 1970s when the task was created.
Then researchers place the infant in front of a mirror. Infants younger than 18 months just smile at the cute baby in the reflection, not showing any sign they recognize themselves or the red mark on their face. Between 18 and 24 months, toddlers touch their own nose, even looking embarrassed, suggesting that they connect the red dot in the mirror with their own face — they have some sense of self.
Another possible explanation for infantile amnesia is that because infants don’t have language until later in the second year of life, they cannot form narratives about their own lives that they can later recall.
Finally, the hippocampus, which is the region of the brain that largely is responsible for memory, isn’t fully developed in the infancy period.
Scientists will continue to investigate how each of these factors might contribute to why you can’t remember much, if anything, about your life before age 2. | 2022-07-10T10:55:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What scientists know about infantile amnesia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/10/infant-toddler-memory-amnesia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/10/infant-toddler-memory-amnesia/ |
The new threat to good schooling for minority Americans
The right might be targeting a seminal Supreme Court case that protects educational fairness
Perspective by Rann Miller
Rann Miller is the director of anti-bias and DEI initiatives as well as a high school social studies teacher for a school district located in Southern New Jersey. He is the author of the upcoming book, "Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids," with an anticipated release date of February 2023.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) listens to former president Donald Trump as they speak during a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border wall on June 30, 2021, in Pharr, Tex. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., generated international attention to the vulnerability of children, particularly children of color, in a state with few gun regulations. But gun violence is not the only threat students of color are facing in the classroom.
Shortly after the May leak of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Tex.) wondered whether Plyler v. Doe — the landmark decision that requires states to offer public education free of charge to all children, including children of undocumented migrants — could be next.
In challenging Plyler, Abbott threatened to unravel more than a century’s worth of efforts to provide educational opportunity to the nation’s children and specifically those from Black, Latino and Indigenous communities. But rather than a new assault, Abbott’s remarks are part of a tradition of systemic racism designed to harm communities of color and undermine court rulings that have continually sided with parents fighting for educational justice.
From the earliest days of the country, there were debates about who was worthy of an education and what ends an education should serve. Race played a critical role in how those questions were answered, producing anti-literacy laws preventing free and enslaved Black people from learning to read and boarding schools that separated Indigenous children from their families, cultures and languages.
Where Latino children were concerned, fewer than 18 percent of children between 5 and 17 were enrolled in public schools during the early years of the 20th century, but by 1930, the number increased to 50 percent. Yet, enrolling in public schools did not mean attending the same schools as White children. In California, for example, increased immigration from Mexico and increased labor needs in the citrus industry resulted in most school districts placing Mexican schoolchildren into separate schools from their White counterparts. Such was the experience for many families, until a group of parents chose to fight back.
In 1944, the Mendez family moved to Orange County to lease a farm from a Japanese-American family who had been forced into an internment camp. Despite the proximity of the 17th Street School to their home, the White-dominated Westminster Elementary School district denied 9-year-old Sylvia Mendez and her brothers entrance to the school because of their Mexican appearance and ancestry. Instead, the district forced them, and others like them, into a separate and unequal school across town.
The Mendez kids were not alone: By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Spanish-speaking children in places such as Orange County attended intentionally segregated schools that were not only often far from their homes but also starved of resources.
But the Mendez’s cousins — who happened to have fairer skin and a French surname — were admitted to the 17th Street school, prompting Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez to file a federal lawsuit, along with similarly aggrieved parents, in 1946. The resulting case, Mendez v. Westminster, led to the end of formal segregation in California. In an amicus brief in support of Mendez, Thurgood Marshall, who would argue Brown v. Board of Education, said: “Our Democracy is founded in an enlightened citizenry. It can only function when all of its citizens, whether of a dominant or of a minority group, are allowed to enjoy the privileges and benefits inherent in our Constitution.”
Two years later, another group of Mexican American professionals and civil rights advocates filed suit in Texas on behalf of Mexican American children which led to Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District and resulted in the discontinuance of segregation according to language difference.
The momentum of these cases laid the legal and cultural groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education, led by yet another set of parents, Oliver and Leola Brown. The Browns utilized the courts to secure access for their daughter, Linda, to attend the school of their choosing. Linda Brown said that “had it not been for this walking, you know, to school and going so far to school,” she and her husband might never have challenged the discrimination their daughter faced. Like Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, the Browns just wanted to send their child to school closer to home.
Together, these cases brought about important legal victories. But that was only the beginning of the pursuit of educational justice through the courts because policymakers continued to enact policies to evade integration. Their tactics included facilitating residential segregation — which effectively segregated schools — and enacting school closure laws that led to the creation of private academies for White children and gave school boards plausible deniability.
Policymakers facilitated White flight to the suburbs, for example, with the GI Bill and FHA loans that effectively restricted access of Black families and others from those homes and schools, and numerous districts in states such as Virginia and Alabama closed their schools to stop federally mandated integration.
So parents of color kept fighting. In 1968, Jose Cisneros led the charge against his children’s school district for failing to fix its buildings in Cisneros v. Corpus Christi ISD, which came to ensure that the principles of Brown applied to Mexican American children. In 1969, Black and Latino parents in Denver challenged the segregation of the city’s schools and, in Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, the Supreme Court sided with them, holding that the evidence against the school district implicated it in facilitating racial discrimination. And in 1972, Mexican American parents in New Mexico, through Serna v. Portales Municipal Schools, ensured that having a Spanish surname didn’t prevent one from getting an education.
Building upon this work, in the early 1980s, a group of undocumented migrant families filed suit to test the constitutionality of a Texas law that prohibited funding the education of noncitizens.
And in Plyler v. Doe, the very case Abbott mused about, the Supreme Court ruled the Texas law unlawfully punished minors who weren’t responsible for their actions, imposed a severe burden on a vulnerable group and ignored the lifetime of hardship a lack of education would levy on the children of undocumented migrants.
The ruling assured children of every race, color, creed and identity the opportunity to obtain an education in Texas. And as legal scholar Justin Driver noted, the court’s ruling in Plyler prevented the Texas measure from becoming the dominant approach nationwide.
Abbott’s comments on Plyler aren’t surprising, given the way that states have long labored to evade the responsibility to educate all children.
But the case hammers home that due process and equal protection apply to everyone in America — a principle that is central to combating anti-immigrant, racial profiling laws that discriminate so brutally against Black, Latino and immigrant communities. It also reminds us that families of color have long led the fight for social justice and educational equity, even as White policymakers and politicians routinely have sought to stand in their way.
But Abbott’s comments are just one more example that the fight for educational equity is far from complete. | 2022-07-10T10:55:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The new threat to good schooling for minority Americans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/10/new-threat-good-schooling-minority-americans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/10/new-threat-good-schooling-minority-americans/ |
Protesters swim in a pool at the Sri Lankan president’s official residence on July 10, a day after crowds stormed the compound in anger over the nation’s economic crisis. (Eranga Jayawardena/AP)
The announcement of the president’s decision to resign, made by the parliamentary speaker late Saturday, marked a major win for the protesters but plunged the island nation into political turmoil over what happens next.
Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of Colombo this weekend to demand President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s ouster over disastrous economic policies that have driven the country to collapse. Angry crowds seized the presidential residence and office, and celebrated their victory by diving into the swimming pool and lounging on his bed.
By nighttime, Rajapaksa had conveyed his decision to resign on Wednesday. He had moved out of his home a day ahead of the protests, and his whereabouts remain unknown.
Earlier in the evening, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had offered to resign to quell growing unrest, but his offer did not placate irate protesters who set his home ablaze.
“This was a failed president and a failed government,” said Faiszer Musthapha, a member of an opposition party that previously allied with Rajapaksa. He said the long-suffering people of the country had taken control. “It was the might of the people on show,” he said.
The country has been in bailout talks with international lenders, but continuing political instability threatens to jeopardize that process.
Local media reported that the International Monetary Fund said it hopes for an early resolution so that talks may resume on a bailout package.
At the presidential residence, celebrations by the jubilant crowd continued into the night. Protesters sang and danced with the country’s flag wrapped around their arms.
📷 Gagana pic.twitter.com/L8Ptc8OI8V | 2022-07-10T10:55:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uncertainty remains after Sri Lankan president offers to resign - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/sri-lanka-protests-gotabaya-rajapaksa-resignation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/sri-lanka-protests-gotabaya-rajapaksa-resignation/ |
Fairfax firefighter was sexually harassed, suffered retaliation, agency finds
A former female Fairfax County firefighter was touched inappropriately by a captain while still employed by the department in 2017 and was transferred to a less desirable job for calling the conduct an assault, a federal agency that combats workplace discrimination has found.
But the Fairfax County department has refused the proposed remedy by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), despite its pledge to root out sexual harassment and gender discrimination. The proposal included improving efforts to target sexual harassment, fresh training and a $150,000 monetary award.
That move surprised the former firefighter and her attorney, given the department has faced a series of lawsuits from women and the 2016 suicide of a female firefighter who was bullied online by commenters who appeared to be familiar with the department. The death of Nicole Mittendorff grabbed national attention.
Female firefighter's suicide is a 'fire bell in the night'
“The county has not tried to right the wrong, to say, ‘How can we improve?’ ” the firefighter said in an interview. “There is nothing. I was kind of hung out to dry.”
The woman asked not to be identified, citing the possibility of retribution in her current job in law enforcement, another male-dominated field.
The fire department said in a statement it demoted the captain, but declined to discuss the reasons for rejecting the EEOC’s proposed resolution, citing ongoing legal wrangling in the case. Fire Chief John S. Butler said in a statement that the department has “worked hard” to improve its culture in recent years.
“We continually focus on promoting and implementing initiatives to facilitate a healthy work environment focused on inclusion and equality and are constantly assessing our progress,” Butler said. “We know there is room for improvement and will continue working to move the department forward.”
When the EEOC finds an employee has been discriminated against, it proposes a remedy, known as a “conciliation agreement,” that gives the employer a voluntary opportunity to address the issue. The employer has the right to accept the agreement, reject it or make a counter proposal.
Gillian L. Thomas, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU who is representing the firefighter, said in her experience it is unusual for an employer to reject a conciliation agreement outright. Thomas said they are usually a starting point in negotiations to reach an arrangement acceptable to both sides.
Since Fairfax County has rejected the proposed agreement, the Department of Justice (DOJ) can now pursue civil litigation against the department to seek remediation if it so chooses. A DOJ lawsuit alleging racial and gender discrimination in the department in the late 1970s led to decades of monitoring by a federal judge that only ended late last year. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.
The current case began when the former firefighter was a recruit at the fire academy in 2017, according to her EEOC complaint.
That December, the woman joined other recruits at a fundraising pub crawl at a Reston bar. Captain Jeff Loach, who was an instructor at the academy and secretary of the department’s union at the time, also attended.
According to the former firefighter’s complaint, Loach touched her in an overly familiar way during the course of the evening and told her he had behaved so improperly with another female firefighter that “she could probably own [my] house,” which the woman understood to mean the other female firefighter could have sued him for harassment.
As the woman was leaving the bar, the woman alleged in the complaint, Loach came up behind her and touched her buttocks inappropriately.
Afterward, the woman said Loach laughed and said, “Now if you need any help getting through recruit school, you know who to call,” according to the complaint.
The woman felt she had nowhere to turn about what happened, since Loach was a teacher at the fire academy and he was a top-ranking member of the firefighters’ union, according to her complaint. The woman completed the academy and became a full-time firefighter in March 2018.
In September 2018, the woman was working at the fire academy helping audit tests and assisting with training when Loach approached her and asked if she considered him touching her at the bar an assault, the complaint alleges. The woman replied that she did and Loach walked away, according to the complaint.
About 35 minutes later, the woman got a call from a supervisor telling her she was being reassigned to a job at headquarters, according to the complaint. The complaint further alleges that she was not given a reason and none of her superiors on duty that day knew why she was being transferred.
The woman’s new job consisted of answering a phone that rarely rang and sharpening pencils on one occasion, according to the complaint. The woman was eventually returned to her old job at the fire academy.
She filed the EEOC complaint in October 2018.
Loach and his union, IAFF Local 2068, did not respond to calls, text or email messages requesting comment on the case.
Fairfax County attorneys wrote in their response to the woman’s EEOC filing that she first reported the sexual harassment in September 2018. Fire department supervisors began to immediately investigate what occurred and reported it to a Fairfax County human rights agency.
The fire department probe found Loach was untruthful about what happened and his conduct was unbecoming, while the Fairfax County agency found Loach had touched the woman inappropriately and violated the county’s sexual harassment policy, according to documents filed in the EEOC case.
As a result of the probes, Loach was demoted to a non-officer rank, according to the county’s response to the EEOC complaint. The Fairfax County agency did not find the woman’s transfer was retaliatory. Fire department officials said it was the result of a staffing mix-up.
“The department took immediate action upon being made aware of the incident and followed all relevant policies and procedures which led to an immediate personnel action,” said Tony Castrilli, the director of public affairs for Fairfax County.
The woman disputed in her filings that the department acted quickly to address the issues, saying it took months.
The county argued in response to the woman’s EEOC complaint that it should not be sustained because the window to take action had expired, the alleged sexual harassment occurred at a non-work event and the woman had failed to establish her transfer was retaliatory. The EEOC rejected those arguments.
The Fairfax County fire department has been sued six times for alleged sexual harassment and discrimination since 2005. In 2016, Nicole Mittendorff’s suicide focused scrutiny on the treatment of women in the department. In 2018, one of Fairfax fire’s highest ranking women resigned a post helping other women in the department, saying it tolerated harassment of women.
A review by county officials released in 2018 found the department had problems with leadership, communication and the status of paramedics, but it did not face widespread issues with the treatment of women in its ranks.
Richard Bowers, the fire department’s former chief, retired in 2018 amid turmoil over treatment of women in the department. Butler, the new chief, has promised change.
The former firefighter said that change has yet to materialize for many female firefighters in Fairfax County. Her experiences led her to leave the department in late 2020, taking a large pay cut and losing benefits to start over in a new job.
“It’s upsetting because I had a lot of goals and aspirations to do good work there,” the woman said. “It seemed like a bright future and then it came crashing down.” | 2022-07-10T12:18:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fairfax County firefighter sexually harassed, agency finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/fairfax-firefighter-sexual-harassment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/fairfax-firefighter-sexual-harassment/ |
From left, Kerri Green, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Sean Astin, Ke Huy Quan, Jeff Cohan and Martha Plimpton in a scene from the 1985 film “The Goonies.” (Michael Ochs Archives/Warner Bros./Getty Images)
A young WWII soldier’s remains could be those of Spike Lee’s lost cousin
“We’re about 90 percent sure they are, but there is nothing definitive that we’ve seen that says they are from the ship that went missing in 1693,” said Williams, who also is a cultural resources program manager for the Washington State Department of Transportation. | 2022-07-10T12:26:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Santo Cristo de Burgos shipwreck inspired 'The Goonies'; timbers found - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/10/goonies-shipwreck-timbers-oregon/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/10/goonies-shipwreck-timbers-oregon/ |
President Biden departs the White House for a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach on July 8. (Chris Kleponis/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The Biden administration faces an intensifying reckoning over its record on human rights as the emergence of a bellicose Russia and an increasingly powerful China places new, often discordant demands on President Biden’s promise to place American ideals at the center of U.S. dealings with the world.
The visit, however, is taking place against a backdrop of competition in the region with China. Beijing has vowed to deepen ties with Saudi Arabia while the Gulf kingdom, amid a prolonged rift with the United States, has increased its arms purchases from China and explored denominating some of its massive oil sales to China in yuan, potentially threatening the preeminence of the dollar.
U.S. officials have also been disappointed in what they view as tepid Gulf support for the Western campaign to isolate Russia over Ukraine, including decisions by some countries to abstain from U.S.-backed measures at the United Nations. In addition, soaring energy prices have cushioned Russian President Vladimir Putin from the effects of sanctions, and Saudi Arabia and other producers have been unwilling to do much to increase production.
“In the case of Biden I fear that he is essentially saying ‘Let’s forget about Jamal Khashoggi; let’s forget about the repression of all domestic activists in Saudi Arabia; let’s forget about the bombing of Yemeni civilians for a slightly cheaper tank of gas,'” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “That sends a disastrous message.”
Before touching down in the coastal city of Jiddah for a meeting of regional leaders — where Biden is also expected to hold talks with Egypt’s Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, who has presided over a period of intense repression in the Arab world’s most populous state — Biden will visit the West Bank and Israel, itself assailed by human rights groups for its treatment of Palestinians.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan, describing his philosophy last year, said that no administration could claim to make human rights the sole factor in its foreign policy. “No one would ever be able to sit up here and say with a straight face that we’re going to have a 100 percent scorecard on this, and I’m not going to claim that we could,” he said.
Karen DeYoung contributed to this report. | 2022-07-10T12:26:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Saudi trip captures competing demands of rights agenda, ‘great power’ contest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/biden-saudi-human-rights-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/biden-saudi-human-rights-china/ |
Distinguished pol of the week: A champion for rational gun laws
President Biden awards the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to former Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords on July 7. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords reminds us each time she appears in public of her personal strength, bravery and selflessness. After a shooter nearly killed her in a shopping mall parking lot in 2011 (was it really that long ago?), she not only overcame physical and emotional trauma but created one of the most successful gun-safety advocacy and research groups in the country. She has also formed a PAC to support candidates dedicated to tackling gun violence.
Giffords was all over the news in recent days. She helped usher through Congress the first gun-safety bill in nearly 30 years, and on Thursday, she was one 17 recipients to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
At the White House ceremony, President Biden described Giffords as “one of the most courageous people I have ever known.” Few could quibble with his characterization that she is “the embodiment of a single signature American trait: never, ever give up.”
Also this week, the Giffords PAC announced on Twitter that it would spend $10 million in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Colorado to “mobilize voters and elect gun safety champions on the ballot in key battlegrounds.” It added, “After the recent votes on gun safety in Congress, we know where legislators stand — and we will hold them accountable.”
Her group has already endorsed Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democrat running for Senate in Pennsylvania, as well as incumbent Democratic Sens. Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) and Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) in their reelection races. It also endorsed House Democrats in some of the toughest races in the cycle (e.g., Abigail Spanberger and Elaine Luria in Virginia, Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, Dina Titus in Nevada) and Democratic gubernatorial candidates in swing states (e.g., Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania). As the gun issue moves front and center in the midterms, a Giffords endorsement might prove far more valuable than a National Rifle Association “A” rating — a sure sign the politician has opposed reasonable gun measures.
After the slaughter of children at a school in Uvalde, Tex., Giffords spoke at a gathering memorializing gun victims. “Stopping gun violence takes courage, the courage to do what’s right,” she said. “Courage, new ideas. I’ve seen great courage when my life was on the line. Now is the time to come together, be responsible. Democrats, Republicans, everyone. We must never stop fighting. Fight, fight, fight. Be bold, be courageous. The nation’s counting on you.”
Americans disgusted with the ongoing scourge of gun violence and the GOP’s decades-long mission to block measures such as a ban on high-powered semiautomatic weapons should take to heart her message that “we must never stop fighting.” Her recognition at the White House should remind lawmakers, voters and gun-safety advocates that the recent small, albeit critical win in Congress cannot be the last.
If Giffords can wake up each day with the determination to prevent further tragedies, there is no excuse for others to falter. For her courage, tenacity and moral integrity, we can say well done Ms. Giffords. | 2022-07-10T12:26:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Thank you, Gabby Giffords, for being a champion of rational gun laws - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/gabby-giffords-champion-rational-gun-laws/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/gabby-giffords-champion-rational-gun-laws/ |
Del. Neil C. Parrott offers an amendment to the minimum wage bill during the Maryland General Assembly on Feb. 27, 2019. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, which stretches from Germantown through Cumberland and the state’s long panhandle, has become winnable for Republicans after shedding many reliably Democratic voters in Montgomery County during redistricting.
Six Republicans are vying in the July 19 primary to challenge Rep. David Trone (D), the co-founder of Total Wine & More, who is our choice in the Democratic primary. Mr. Trone, seeking a third term, faces nominal opposition from Ben Smilowitz, who runs a nonprofit on disaster response that he created after Hurricane Katrina, and perennial candidate George Gluck. Mr. Trone has focused in the House on addressing addiction, mental health and drug trafficking, delivering results in collaboration with Republicans.
The most obvious choice for conservatives is Del. Neil C. Parrott of Hagerstown, an Eagle Scout brimming with earnestness, who was elected to the General Assembly as a tea party organizer in 2010 and quickly emerged as a leading crusader for direct democracy in Annapolis. We disagree on much, but we admire Mr. Parrott’s integrity and respect the authenticity of his convictions.
Mr. Parrott passes the litmus test for earning our endorsement, which is that he acknowledges Joe Biden is the legitimate president and condemns the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Parrott says he declined an invitation to attend Donald Trump’s rally on the Ellipse that fateful day, where the president incited a mob to attack the Capitol, because he felt the outcome of the election was settled and didn’t see any point in continuing to contest the results. He has proven willing to stand up to leaders of his own party, even when it’s unpopular. In May 2020, he sued Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to challenge his emergency pandemic orders.
That said, Mr. Parrott has spent more than a decade trying to make it harder to vote. He proposed a voter ID bill during his first year in the assembly. After the 2020 election, Mr. Parrott traveled to Philadelphia to analyze provisional ballots in an effort to help Mr. Trump, and maintains that 1 to 2 percent of ballots he reviewed had signatures that didn’t appear to match the voter’s original registration form. He introduced legislation last session, which didn’t go anywhere, that would have required signatures on ballots in Maryland to exactly match registration forms.
At 51, Mr. Parrott is more than twice as old as his leading rival. Matthew Foldi, 25, has been raising big money and racking up endorsements from GOP establishment figures inside the Beltway, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).Mr. Foldi has youthful vigor. He is antsy to issue subpoenas and conduct oversight of the Biden administration. But he has yet to demonstrate the maturity necessary to serve in Congress.
It’s disheartening how many other candidates in the GOP primary field play footsie with Mr. Trump’s lies about election fraud or feign ignorance of established facts. Asked whether Mr. Biden is the legitimate president, Mr. Foldi was cagey: “There’s no doubt Joe Biden won Maryland,” he said. Asked whether he would have voted to accept the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania two years ago, Mr. Foldi refused to answer on the grounds he wasn’t there.
Sadly, it was not hypothetical, and this kind of evasiveness reflects a candidate not ready for prime time. There are other indications Mr. Foldi would focus more on trolling than governing and be an overly reliable rubber stamp for party leadership. In Mr. Parrott, Republicans in the 6th District have a better choice. | 2022-07-10T12:27:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Primary endorsement for Maryland's 6th district: Parrott, Trone - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/maryland-6th-district-primary-endorsement-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/maryland-6th-district-primary-endorsement-2022/ |
In this photo taken on April 26, the Twitter logo is seen outside its headquarters in downtown San Francisco, Calif. (Amy Osborne/AFP)
Twitter is taking on the Indian government, and the stakes are high. The company’s lodging of a lawsuit to dispute over broad content-blocking orders could mark a pivotal moment for internet speech around the world.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been chipping away at free expression online for some time now, most notably with the passing of a law last year extending the executive’s censorship powers. Now, the government can demand that news and information providers remove certain material within 36 hours of receiving a request, and it can initiate criminal proceedings against a designated company grievance officer located in the country if these mandates are rebuffed. These threats don’t appear idle: Twitter’s top executive was summoned by police in one state for failing to take down a violent video; armed forces once showed up at the company’s offices as part of an investigation about a matter as anodyne as a tweet having been labeled “manipulated media.”
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that while Twitter has in the past resisted blocking the posts of Indian journalists, activists and politicians, the company acquiesced this month after apparently receiving a noncompliance letter. The firm geographically restricted tweets from writers including Post Opinions contributor Rana Ayyub as well as advocacy organization Freedom House. The decision reflects the difficult position Twitter found itself in: bound by the law wherever it chooses to operate, even when that law doesn’t reflect its values — and with the safety of its employees at stake. Twitter’s next move, similarly, revealed its limited avenues for recourse. The company filed a complaint in court alleging not that the government’s law is itself impermissible, but that it is being impermissibly applied.
Twitter’s petition argues that the government has tried to smother more tweets than the law authorizes. That’s in line with critics’ claims that the administration has been more interested in scrubbing out dissent and unflattering reporting than in protecting anyone’s safety. The platform also contends that authorities have failed to provide justification for their demands, or to review past takedowns to ensure they remain necessary. The case is, essentially, a test of whether free expression in India will continue to thrive — whether, when an unjust law unjustly applied makes it all but impossible for a company to protect speech, the judiciary will step in to protect it.
This battle is not only about Twitter, and not only about India. Some countries have already imposed rules as restrictive as India’s revised code; others are considering it. The same goes for the so-called hostage-taking laws threatening employees that intimidate firms into closer cooperation. Not only social media companies should be resisting them. For all the responsibility Twitter may have to its users, or India’s government to its citizens, democracies around the world committed to civil liberties also have a duty to fight for the internet’s future. | 2022-07-10T12:27:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Twitter's India lawsuit is a pivotal moment for internet speech - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/twitter-india-lawsuit-free-expression/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/twitter-india-lawsuit-free-expression/ |
FILE- In this photograph provided by the Sri Lankan President’s Office, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, right, greets prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe during the latter’s oath taking ceremony as the new finance minister in Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 25, 2022. Both men Saturday said they would resign, after the country’s most chaotic day in months of political turmoil, with protesters storming both officials’ homes and setting fire to one of the buildings in a rage over the nation’s severe economic crisis. (Sri Lankan President’s Office via AP) (Uncredited/SRI LANKAN PRESIDENT’S OFFICE) | 2022-07-10T12:27:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | President and PM: 2 men at heart of Sri Lankan crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-and-pm-2-men-at-heart-of-sri-lankan-crisis/2022/07/10/4da28c84-0042-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-and-pm-2-men-at-heart-of-sri-lankan-crisis/2022/07/10/4da28c84-0042-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Live updates Novak Djokovic, Nick Kyrgios face off in Wimbledon men’s final
Novak Djokovic is taking aim at his 21st Grand Slam title. (Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images)
The No. 3 player in the world, Novak Djokovic, will take on Nick Kyrgios in the Wimbledon men’s final on Sunday. Djokovic is playing in his 32nd Grand Slam final. It’s the first for Kyrgios. Follow along for live updates:
WIMBLEDON, England — Elena Rybakina, a stoic font of tennis power who surged in early 2020 before the coronavirus pandemic struck, made what you might call a revival Saturday. She won Wimbledon, and even though she reacted with little more than hushed wonder — a slight fist pump, a half-smile, a slight shake of the head, an exhalation — her arrival among Grand Slam champions had its volume.
When the 6-foot Rybakina sorted out the variety and cleverness of 5-6 Ons Jabeur in an interesting 3-6, 6-2, 6-2 women’s final on Centre Court, she became the first player representing Kazakhstan to win a Grand Slam tournament, just as Jabeur had become the first Tunisian, first African woman and first Arab woman to grace a Grand Slam final. Rybakina did it with a booming serve and a calming voice.
“I’m actually speechless,” she said on court.
“I can’t believe, still,” she said in the interview room later.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she also said in the interview room later.
“Today, I was too stressed out,” she also said in the interview room.
“When I was giving speech in the end I was thinking, I’m going to cry right now, but somehow I hold it,” she said. “Maybe later when I’m going to be alone in the room, I’m going to cry nonstop. I don’t know.”
By Candace Buckner8:10 a.m.
It will be Djokovic, supernatural problem solver, vs. Kyrgios, super-loud creator of problems. You can see the emotional outbursts from here.
Final arrangements came when Djokovic, in the lone semifinal of Friday, figured out himself and Cameron Norrie as he figures out over and over himself and whoever’s over there. Just as he trailed in the quarterfinals to Jannik Sinner here, in the final to Matteo Berrettini last year, in the 2021 French final with Stefanos Tsitsipas and on and on, he told his nerves to cut it out and produced his usual array of stunning shots and won, 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4, against a player ranked 12th on Earth. | 2022-07-10T12:27:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wimbledon men's final live updates: Novak Djokovic vs. Nick Kyrgios - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/wimbledon-mens-final/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/wimbledon-mens-final/ |
Gunmen kill 15, wound 9 in South Africa’s Soweto township
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Gunmen shot and killed 15 people and wounded another nine inside a South African tavern in Soweto township overnight on Sunday.
The attackers entered the tavern in the Nomzamo informal settlement in Orlando East soon after midnight and opened fire on patrons, according to a police statement.
“A group of men armed with rifles and 9mm pistols entered the tavern and started shooting randomly at the patrons who were sitting inside,” the statement said.
The shooting is the latest mass casualty event at taverns in South Africa in recent weeks. Also Saturday, four people were shot dead and eight wounded at a tavern in Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal Province.
The shootings come two weeks after 21 teenagers died at a tavern in East London South Africa in what officials are calling possible poisoning. There is no indication that any of the mass casualty events are connected.
Police are still investigating the motive behind the Soweto shooting.
Witnesses, who refused to give their names, told News24 they ducked for cover and some neighbors used their cars to transport victims to a hospital.
“I thought they were shooting outside my house. I didn’t want to be caught by stray bullets. I heard people running in my yard,” one neighbor said. “Later, I went outside and saw five dead bodies outside the tavern,” she said.
Another neighbor said gunshots were nothing new in the area at night but this time “it sounded like it was a war.”
Ward Councillor Mohau Molefe said he feared the shooting could inflame tensions between varying ethnic groups in the area near Johannesburg.
“This incident is going to spark a lot of unrest in this community because there are people who believe this could be associated with tribal wars,” Molefe told eNCA television network.
“There are people from different ethnic groups staying in this community and some have more rifles than others.”
“There is no clear motive of what could be the reasons that have led to 15 dead bodies in that space. We are all worried, we are all trembling. We are not sure what is going on,” said Molefe. | 2022-07-10T13:27:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gunmen shot and killed 15, wounded 9 inside a South African tavern in Soweto township - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/shooting-soweto-tavern/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/shooting-soweto-tavern/ |
Some barriers to entry are better than others. (Photographer: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Should law school applicants still have to take the LSAT? A proposal by a committee of the American Bar Association would eliminate the longstanding rule that accredited law schools must require prospective students to take a “valid and reliable test” as part of the application process. If the LSAT is axed, maybe the bar exam should be next.
The recommendation to eliminate the admissions testing requirement comes amidst cascading charges that reliance on the Law School Admission Test hurts minority applicants. The proposition is sharply contested by many friends of diversity.(1) Some find it stigmatizing to be told they can’t do as well on the test as White applicants. But given that the case against the test appears to have persuaded the wordily named Council of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the LSAT does indeed represent an unfair barrier to entry to the legal profession.
Why doesn’t the same argument apply to the bar examination?
Moreover, the ABA admits that minority bar examination passage rates continue to lag. A 2021 study found that a rising percentage of non-White students at a law school is correlated with a reduction in the school’s bar passage rate. Hmmm. If the LSAT is a problem because of its supposed effect on diversity, maybe the bar examination should join it in the waste bin. Or the exam could be optional, leaving employers to decide whether they want to require it.
The barrier to entry, even minority entry, might be justified if we could point to the vital public purpose the bar examination serves. That’s harder than one might suppose.
The ABA called for a written examination for all lawyers back in 1921, and reaffirmed its position in a resolution adopted fifty years later. That 1971 resolution is worth a read. It’s short on data and long on strangely specious assertions. For instance, the examination requirement was said to “encourage law graduates to study subjects not taken in law school” and to force them to satisfy people other than “those who taught them,” a feat that the ABA described, remarkably, as constituting “a valuable experience in preparation in appearing before a completely strange judge.” Nine years later, the Montana Supreme Court explained that without a bar examination, control over entry to the profession would be in the hands of “the wrong people” — law professors, for instance.
None of this is persuasive. If, for example, a student can learn entire subjects during the bar review process, perhaps there’s no need for law school. The profession once understood this, for the tradition of “reading for the bar” while apprenticed to a practicing lawyer is far older than the American Bar Association.
But in 1881, three years after the ABA was founded, the forerunner of the aforementioned wordily named committee announced that there existed “little dispute” that formal schooling turned out better lawyers than “apprenticeship as an attorney’s clerk.” The classroom, the committee explained, best inculcated the valuable habits of “disputing, reading, reasoning, and discoursing.” How did the members know this? It was, wrote the members, “the verdict of the best informed.”(2)
Today’s justifications are little better. In fact, nobody can explain what the bar examination measures — or whether it measures anything at all. The test has never been properly validated. We’ve no clue what it predicts.(3) Critics are on the mark when they label the bar exam “a superb hazing ritual” supported only by “arguments that sound selfish, condescending, and protectionist.” Yet many schools try to raise the bar passage rate among their students by essentially teaching to the test.
If none of this is persuasive — if the ABA nevertheless wants to retain the barrier of the bar exam — then there’s this to consider: Although law school grades are the best predictor of success on the bar exam, the LSAT predicts too, albeit weakly. On top of that, there may be a correlation between a school’s average LSAT score and the bar passage rate of its graduates. But if the LSAT is nevertheless bad, the bar examination is worse.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against standardized testing in every circumstance. For example, I’d support a plan under which the bar authorities would follow the medical profession in requiring a certification process before members can market themselves as specialists in particular fields. But there’s no persuasive justification for forcing graduates of accredited law schools to jump through yet another hoop before they’re allowed to practice their trade.
• New York State Democrats Flunk an Education Test: Michael R. Bloomberg
• San Francisco’s School Decision Is Reason to Celebrate: The Editors
(1) According to studies conducted by the Law School Admission Council, the test slightly over-predicts law school grades of minority students.
(2) A number of secondary sources incorrectly date this report 1879.
(3) Some work suggests a weak correlation between passing the exam with a low score and facing bar discipline at some point in one’s career. But not everyone is persuaded, and even the study’s authors say more research is needed. | 2022-07-10T13:58:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | RIP to the LSAT? Let’s Kill the Bar Exam, Too - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rip-to-the-lsat-lets-kill-the-bar-exam-too/2022/07/10/05324804-0051-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rip-to-the-lsat-lets-kill-the-bar-exam-too/2022/07/10/05324804-0051-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Solution to Evan Birnholz’s July 10 crossword, “Captain Obvious Goes to the Movies”
Solution to July 10, 2022 crossword, “Captain Obvious Goes to the Movies” (Evan Birnholz/FTWP)
Today’s theme is Captain Obvious describing movie titles as literally as possible.
23A: ["___, you’ll find a mattress, a dresser and a nightstand”] is “IN THE BEDROOM.”
32A: ["___, it will be nighttime”] is “FROM DUSK TILL DAWN.” I once used this same clue in a previous Captain Obvious puzzle for the answer AT THE END OF THE DAY.
50A: ["___, but others prefer cold”] is “SOME LIKE IT HOT.”
69A: ["___, and you’ll have performed a good deed”] is “DO THE RIGHT THING.”
93A: ["___, you must capture one robber”] is “TO CATCH A THIEF.”
108A: ["___? Then we should expect gore”] is “THERE WILL BE BLOOD.”
122A: ["___? Then you’re not quite a movie star”] is “ALMOST FAMOUS.”
I don’t really have much to say about today’s puzzle. It doesn’t feel right for me to spend that much time discussing a crossword.
For those who don’t know, I grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. I lived there for the first 18 years of my life until I went to college. My immediate family has moved away to other cities, but I still have friends from childhood who live and work in Highland Park. And for about 48 hours beginning this past Monday, I spent most of it in fear that the worst could have happened to them after a gunman opened fire on the annual 4th of July parade, killing seven people and wounding dozens more. I did not personally know any of the seven people who lost their lives. I do have friends who were either at the parade or had been in town but for whatever reason could not attend. One of my best friends growing up had even been asked to emcee the parade but he couldn’t make it.
One of the saddest and most infuriating aspects about living in a country where gun violence is as rampant as it is here is that, after you read the news about yet another mass shooting (more than 300 in 2022 as of this writing), you start becoming resigned to the despair that nothing is going to change. It is comforting to know that my friends are okay, but even that comfort is short-lived every time I read a news story about the victims and their loved ones who survived.
I hope you enjoyed today’s puzzle. Please forgive me that I could not approach it with more joy. | 2022-07-10T13:58:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Solution to Evan Birnholz’s July 10 crossword, “Captain Obvious Goes to the Movies” - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/07/10/solution-evan-birnholzs-july-10-crossword-captain-obvious-goes-movies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/07/10/solution-evan-birnholzs-july-10-crossword-captain-obvious-goes-movies/ |
Indonesian Muslims offer Eid al-Adha prayers at the Great Mosque in Semarang, Indonesia on July 10, 2022. (Antara Foto/Via Reuters)
Millions of Muslims around the world are celebrating Eid al-Adha — a major Islamic festival celebrated at the end of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia — as the easing of coronavirus restrictions worldwide make it possible for worshippers to gather.
President Biden called this weekend’s festivities a “symbol of the progress we have made in fighting” the coronavirus but warned the pandemic is not over yet.
“It’s a symbol of the progress we have made in fighting this pandemic and of all work we must still do to strengthen our recovery. Let us all take this opportunity to renew our shared commitment to work for peace, care for the vulnerable, and pursue greater equality and opportunity for all people,” the U.S. president added.
Amid fears of delta variant, Eid al-Adha celebrations begin
There were more than 4.6 million new cases reported globally to the World Health Organization last week. New cases in South-East Asia — a region that includes countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world, such as Indonesia, India and Bangladesh — grew by 20 percent between June 27 and July 3.
Some Eid celebrations marred by war, others return to pre-covid scale
In some parts of the world, Eid celebrations were restricted last year due to the pandemic, with strict limits on the number of worshippers allowed into Mecca, the holy city toward which Muslims pray every day. Eid al-Adha falls on the last day of the hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim is meant to undertake at least once in their life. | 2022-07-10T13:59:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos: Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha 2022 as covid restrictions ease - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/eid-al-adha-photos-world-celebrations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/eid-al-adha-photos-world-celebrations/ |
The evil eye isn’t just a trend. Here’s what it means to me.
Perspective by Eda Uzunlar
The evil eye symbol (🧿) has been found through thousands of years of history across cultures, including in Latin America and parts of Asia. The symbol, most often depicted as four concentric circles in the shape of an eye, is used to ward off variations of evil intentions. More recently, it’s trended on the pages of fast fashion websites and manifestation TikToks.
In much of the Middle East and North Africa, the symbol wards off “nazar” — a curse motivated by the envy of others that can bring about bad things in your life. This fear of envy can keep you from being boastful, sure, but it can also keep you from celebrating your accomplishments or pursuing success in the first place. It even made me hesitant to make this comic — the evil eye is always watching. | 2022-07-10T15:29:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What does the evil eye symbol really mean? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/10/evil-eye-isnt-just-trend-heres-what-it-means-me/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/10/evil-eye-isnt-just-trend-heres-what-it-means-me/ |
Biden has put the forced-birth crusaders on notice
President Biden delivers remarks at an event at the White House on July 8. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
If there was any lingering doubts about President Biden’s commitment to abortion rights, he squashed them on Friday.
Biden slammed the Supreme Court, declaring that its decision to overturn abortion rights wasn’t "a constitutional judgment”; instead, he argued, it was "an exercise in raw political power.” And he brought the legal and historical receipts, accurately dinging the court for “playing fast and loose with the facts.” As he noted, “Even 150 years ago, the common law and many state laws did not criminalize abortion early in pregnancy, which is very similar to the viability line drawn by Roe.”
Biden was on target when he declared that "the court has made clear it will not protect the rights of women, period.” He added that the ruling "practically dares the women of America to go to the ballot box and restore the very rights they’ve just taken away.”
While Democrats and other defenders of women’s rights have been irate over Biden’s rhetorical reticence until now, there should be no argument that the immediate solution at the federal level is to produce Democratic majorities in the midterms that will codify Roe v. Wade and, in the Senate, carve out an exception for the filibuster to restore women’s fundamental rights. Biden has issued multiple executive orders on the issue, such as protecting interstate travel and access to FDA-approved abortion medication, but critics are off base in imagining there is some storehouse of executive powers that can override the Supreme Court and state law.
Biden is right that the best solution is to elevate the abortion issue in House and Senate elections (as Democrats in House and Senate races have hastened to do). He directed the country’s attention toward Republicans’ cruel efforts to impose abortion bans at the state level — and then take the crusade nationwide.
“These are the laws that not only put women’s lives at risk, these are the laws that will cost lives,” he said. “And in a number of these states, the laws are so extreme they have raised the threat of criminal penalties for doctors and health care providers. They’re so extreme that many don’t allow for exceptions, even for rape or incest.” He showed real anger relaying the story of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to go out of state to obtain an abortion. “I can’t think of anything as much more extreme,” he said.
Biden and Democrats are on strong ground politically in keeping the spotlight on this issue. A recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 65 percent of the country thinks abortion should be legal in all or most situations. The outlier is the GOP’s White, evangelical Protestant base, with only 25 percent of that demographic saying the same. “By contrast,” the poll reports, “64% of white Catholics, 69% of white mainline (nonevangelical) Protestants, 75% of Black Protestants, 75% of Hispanic Catholics, 82% of non-Christian religious Americans, and 84% of religiously unaffiliated Americans support abortion legality in most or all cases.”
Moreover, the intensity is on the abortion rights side:
In a substantial reversal, slightly more Americans who say abortion should be legal in most or all cases also say they will only vote for a candidate who shares their views (34%) than do those who say it should be illegal in most or all cases (31%). ...
The same trend is apparent by party affiliation, with Democrats becoming more activated on the issue. In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, 43% of Democrats say they will only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion, compared with 17% in the fall of 2020. Independents have become eleven percentage points more likely to say they will only vote for a candidate who shares their abortion views (25% vs. 14% in 2020), but Republicans have held steady (31% vs. 32% in 2020).
A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that, contrary to previous polling data, women are much more supportive of abortion rights than men. Poll director Jocelyn Kiley tells me, “In this new survey conducted July 27 to July 4, we find that two-thirds of women (66 percent) say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with a narrower majority (57 percent) of men.” That’s a far cry form the last decade, when there was “little or no overall gender gap,” Kiley explains. Democrats would be smart to focus attention on women voters who now find themselves constitutionally in the world of 1868, as misinterpreted by the historically cherry-picked Dobbs decision.
The wave of forced-birth zealotry at the Supreme Court and in state legislatures exemplifies the Christian nationalist view that the government should impose religious values (e.g., personhood begins at conception) on others, regardless of decades of precedent and of modern America’s moral, social and political values. There is no better example than Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R), who declared on Thursday: “Today we wake up in a state where the church doors are open and the abortion clinic’s doors are closed. All the Glory to God the Father! Amen!”
This sentiment is utterly antithetical to the First Amendment and to our democratic commitment to a pluralistic society. The country will head further down the road of Christian nationalism unless the American people reject this theocratic crusade.
Biden is right in his assessment that neither the Supreme Court nor Republicans who have pushed their extreme agenda for decades “have a clue about the power of American women.” If Biden has correctly predicted that Americans will “turn out in record numbers to reclaim the rights” that the court obliterated, the midterm red wave Republicans banked on may evaporate. That’s what happens when they treat women like expendable incubators. | 2022-07-10T15:29:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden has put the forced-birth crusaders on notice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/joe-biden-puts-abortion-crusaders-on-notice-supreme-court-roe-dobbs-executive-orders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/joe-biden-puts-abortion-crusaders-on-notice-supreme-court-roe-dobbs-executive-orders/ |
A house wren engages in throaty song. Will it be good enough to attract a mate before summer is over? (John Kelly/The Washington Post)
I’m worried that the wren in my backyard may not have game. And by “game” I mean “the smooth moves that would enable this bird to successfully woo a lady bird.” Hope may be the thing with feathers, but this bunch of feathers is hopeless.
At least, that’s what it looks like to me. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching this little guy sing his little heart out. He seems no closer to closing the deal. The nest box that he’s filled with twigs is still a bachelor pad.
“It’s a competitive process,” said Pierre Comizzoli, a research veterinarian at the National Zoo. “We always believe that all animals reproduce. It's not true. For example, some males are going to be dominant.”
In some animal species — elephants, primates, deer — one extra tasty male may, um, fall in love with numerous females, leaving other males out of luck.
“In respect to these songbirds we have in our backyard, the female is the chooser and the male is the displayed,” said ornithologist Bruce Beehler, a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History. “He’s the one that does the best that he can. He gets the nest ready. He sings. He gets a patch of territory. It’s up to the female to decide who’s the sexiest or has the best nest or the best song.”
And the ones who are second, third or fourth best?
“I wouldn’t be surprised if close to half of the males out in the environment of the typical songbird do not reproduce in an average year,” Beehler said. “It’s rough and tumble. It looks on paper very tidy, and when it works, it works great, mainly for the female.”
Most successful songbirds will have already produced one brood so far this year, back in the spring.
“The ones that are really gung ho try to have a second brood,” Beehler said. “They get one set of babies out, send them on their way, then try again. That's what evolution is all about: getting out those offspring, as many as possible.”
That’s hard for male songbirds that aren’t able to carve out a bit of space to call their own.
“Birds that don’t even get territories, they’re called floaters,” Beehler said. “They’re sort of hanging around, hoping to find a little niche where they can establish themselves.”
Maybe that’s what I’m seeing: a floater. Or a young bird that hasn’t learned the ropes yet.
Male wrens build two or three nests in hopes of gaining a female’s approval.
“Females are attracted based on the location of the nest or how he’s constructed it,” Beehler said. “House wrens are also wonderful singers, one of my absolute favorites. So song is probably important to the female as well.”
Success comes with age.
“These birds don’t live a long time,” Beehler said. “With age comes experience. Practice makes perfect. The youngest birds — or ones coming back for the first time to reproduce — they’re going to be the ones not having success.”
For some species, there’s another complication: The places to mingle are too spread out.
“That’s the problem we have in the wild: The density of the animals is too low,” Comizzoli said. “And actually they cannot meet. If they do not meet, well, they cannot reproduce. That’s kind of unfortunate. This situation is really a consequence of human activity like deforestation or destruction or the fragmentation of the natural habitat.”
When you have a low density of individuals, it’s like living in a small town: The pickin’s are slim. And no one likes to settle.
“Even if they can see each other, maybe they’re not going to like each other,” Comizzoli said.
Scientists at places like the National Zoo try to help, introducing animals to one another in captive situations. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee chemistry, especially with some critters.
“Cheetah females are extremely picky,” Comizzoli said. “They’re not going to breed with just any males. They’re going to be choosing their partners. If you don’t have enough males in your collection, and for some reason the females don’t like any males, well, they’re not going to reproduce.”
For some animals — giant pandas spring to mind — that leaves artificial insemination as the best option.
Right now we’re at the peak of summer. That wren is still dutifully trilling his love song. I asked Beehler if the bird would give up eventually, stop singing, take up a hobby for the rest of the summer like fantasy baseball or investing in NFTs.
“He probably won't,” Beehler said. “He probably will go until the weather tells him it's time to go south. He’ll pack his bags and think, ‘That was a crappy summer. Here’s hoping next spring is better.’”
Maybe what that bird needs is a wingman. | 2022-07-10T16:08:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A wren in my backyard is singing his little heart out. In vain, I fear. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/house-wren-dating-woes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/house-wren-dating-woes/ |
The French president has never hid that he was an early Uber supporter. But documents suggest that his backing for the controversial company went far beyond what has been known publicly.
PARIS — As Uber rushed to expand across Europe, company executives received worrisome news out of southern France. A local official in the port city of Marseille just appeared to have banned the UberX service, throwing the company’s plans for the country into turmoil.
Mark MacGann, Uber’s top European lobbyist, appealed for help. He texted Emmanuel Macron, who in the fall of 2015 was the French economy minister.
The next morning, MacGann received a response. “I will look into this personally,” Macron wrote. “Let’s stay calm at this stage,” he added.
It’s no secret that Macron, who became France’s president in 2017, was an early supporter of Uber’s controversial expansion, which involved sometimes-violent clashes between taxi and Uber drivers. But company executives’ internal messages from 2013 to 2017 suggest that Macron’s backing went far beyond what has been known publicly and on occasion conflicted with the policies of the leftist government he served.
Internally, an Uber lobbyist described Macron as a “true ally.” At times, the extent of his early support surprised even company executives.
Over the past five years, he’s faced a mounting backlash to the way he liberalized the French economy, steamrolling anyone who raised concerns over the social impact of his moves, according to his critics.
Mélenchon campaigned heavily on his criticism of the “uberization” of French society, an umbrella term used to describe ride-hailing and home delivery services, and he lashed out against Macron’s support for a sector that he views as having undermined French worker rights.
Uber’s French resistance grows violent
They believed that Macron was willing to support them by pushing for more lenient treatment of the company from regulators. As legal scrutiny of the company mounted, including from the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Prevention, an authority attached to Macron’s own ministry, MacGann noted in a 2014 email to colleagues that Macron had “told his cabinet to talk to the DGCCRF to ask them to be ‘less conservative’ ” in interpreting the law. MacGann did not respond to questions about these exchanges, but said that he “met and got to know Emmanuel Macron” during his time at Uber.
Macron’s underlying commitment to Uber’s business model was rarely cast into doubt, despite executives’ concluding later that he was a less valuable ally than they had thought.
In a statement in response to the documents, the French presidency said that the “economic and employment policies at the time, in which [Macron] was an active participant, are well known.”
“His functions naturally led him to meet and interact with many companies engaged in the sharp shift which came out during those years in the service sector, which had to be facilitated by unlocking administrative and regulatory hurdles,” said the Élysée, the office of the French presidency.
Although the Élysée did not directly respond to questions about Uber’s perception that Macron may have been willing to intervene with French authorities on the company’s behalf, Emmanuel Lacresse, Macron’s former deputy chief of staff, denied that this was the case. “The Minister has never intervened with the Bouches du Rhône prefecture concerning the suspension of the Uber X service in Marseille, nor on any legal proceedings whatsoever concerning the Uber company. Nor were instructions given to the DGCCRF,” Lacresse wrote in a statement. (The Bouches du Rhône prefecture was the local authority that appeared to have banned UberX in 2015.)
In a response, Laurent Nuñez, the official who in 2015 infuriated Uber with his Marseille decision and who is now a top national security official under Macron, denied having been pressured by Macron’s economy ministry to take a more lenient approach at the time.
A spokesman for the DGCCRF “strongly” denied that Macron had put pressure on the authority. “Our investigative services have not been pressured or induced into any form of leniency on the Uber case,” he said.
The idea for Uber was partly born in France in 2008, according to Kalanick, and the company’s path there was paved in part by a major deregulation effort that Macron helped to champion. But Uber became serious about having a major French presence only around the time Macron became economy minister, in 2014.
Macron presided over one of the government’s most important departments from the third floor of the “fortress of Bercy.” In the imposing building that juts out over the banks of the Seine river, Macron met with Uber executives and strategized over moves that at times appeared to be opposed to the objectives of then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls and others who advocated stricter rules for Uber and similar companies.
In 2015, Uber talked with Macron about encouraging a “supportive” member of parliament to try to amend one of Macron’s own legislative proposals to make it more Uber-friendly. Their alternative plan, according to an internal summary from Thibaud Simphal, then Uber’s general manager in France, was a “strong comms campaign in the next four weeks” as Macron and Uber jointly pushed rules to make it easier for the company to recruit professional drivers.
On July 3, the day Uber suspended UberPop, executives shared a screenshot among one another that appeared to show Macron telling then-Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick that Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve had “accepted the deal.”
“Cazeneuve will keep the taxi quiet and i will gather everybidy next week to prepare the reform and correct the law,” the message continued.
In 2016, months after the suspension of UberPop, a government decree seemed to tweak the rules in Uber’s favor, significantly reducing the number of required hours of training.
Cazeneuve, in a response to a request for comment, denied having any knowledge of a deal. In a statement, Uber said that “it’s false to suggest that there was a deal or that the rules were eased.” The company added that the suspension of its UberPop service was “prompted by the level of violence targeting our users, both drivers and riders, which no longer allowed us to operate the service safely” and was “in no way followed by more favorable regulations.”
“Uber never benefited from any favor or privilege from prefectures, the Ministry of Economy or MPs in France. All my interactions with public authorities were conducted in good faith,” Simphal, who still works for the company as global head of sustainability, said in a statement.
In a response to questions from The Post and other news organizations, Kalanick did not directly address his text conversation with Macron on July 3. Devon Spurgeon, a spokesperson for Kalanick, said in a statement that “Uber’s expansion initiatives were led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy, and compliance groups.”
Uber’s relationship with Macron was especially sensitive because its operations in France were, by this point, under growing legal scrutiny. Months before Macron had offered to look into the Marseille official’s apparent suspension of UberX — a service that relies on professional drivers — two company executives were taken into custody. They were later convicted of complicity in operating an illegal transportation service. A ruling from France’s highest court is still pending.
Uber’s internal documents show that Macron was in frequent contact with Uber officials at the time, including Kalanick.
Ostensibly, Uber’s pitch to the French public seemed perfect for Macron’s hopes for turning France into a “start-up nation.” Both he and the company promised that their plans would benefit disadvantaged groups neglected in the past.
Uber initially recruited many drivers from some of the country’s poorest communities, where its lofty promises quickly gained traction. Those who joined, encouraged by Macron and others, hoped to change the course of their lives.
In some cases, Uber may indeed have been an opportunity. “At the beginning, it was really interesting to work for Uber,” said Sarah Abdelnour, an associate professor at the Paris Dauphine University who conducted extensive research and interviews around 2016 and 2017.
But what those drivers had not known was that “they were used to defend a company that had a desire to establish itself by creating a buzz, by surfing on almost a kind of social discourse,” Abdelnour said.
Uber’s expensive strategy to crowd taxis out of the market dramatically changed in the fall of 2015. The company unexpectedly slashed fares, sharply cutting its drivers’ earnings. Disillusioned, many stopped accepting ride requests.
But others — some having borrowed the equivalent of thousands of dollars to buy their own cars — had little choice other than to keep driving for the company.
“The drivers I met were forced to use Uber,” said Sophie Bernard, a second researcher with Paris Dauphine University. “One can use other platforms — in fact there are lots of competitors in France — but it’s really Uber that controls the market.”
In a statement, Uber defended its operations in France, saying that “well-regulated platform work has the potential to offer opportunities to all.” A 2016 study commissioned for the company suggests that Uber and similar platforms have been a “major net contributor to job creation and economic growth,” especially in and around Paris, the company added.
Even as criticism of the company mounted, Macron continued to echo Uber’s marketing narratives, applauding the company in a 2016 interview for combating “exclusion.”
Macron’s support “was extremely important” for Uber, said Laurent Lasne, author of a book that criticizes the multinational for its business practices. “It was for sure a form of legitimization.”
Why his ‘city of heart’ does not love Macron back
The extent to which Macron upended France’s transportation sector is a matter of perspective.
Uber argues that its expansion “helped grow” the overall market and did not come at the expense of taxi drivers.
But according to taxi unions, at least initially, Macron’s backing of Uber aggravated an existential threat to their businesses. Within months, demand for taxi rides plummeted, according to the unions, and taxi licenses dramatically lost value — dropping tens of thousands of dollars, according to Guillaume Lejeune, a sociologist who has focused on the taxi industry.
In the end, though, Uber’s bet on Macron may have been a lose-lose situation for all sides.
Over time, executives began asking whether they had overestimated his influence. After Uber suspended its controversial UberPop service in France in July 2015, with managers believing the company had a “deal” with Macron and the government that would normalize its status, French authorities surprised the company and raided Uber’s offices.
“Sorry to bother you,” lobbyist MacGann texted Macron, telling him that about 20 government investigators had barged in.
“Can you ask your services to give us advice?” MacGann asked. Macron didn’t text back.
“Macron, he has been sidelined,” MacGann wrote in an email on Jan. 30, 2016, shortly after the government had announced its crackdown. “We exchanged SMS last night and he is very frustrated,” he wrote.
Damien Leloup, Adrien Sénécat, Abdelhak El Idrissi and Martin Untersinger from Le Monde, Harry Davies from the Guardian and Elodie Guéguen from Radio France contributed to this report. | 2022-07-10T16:38:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | French president Macron's Uber support ran deeper than the public knew - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/uber-macron-france/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/uber-macron-france/ |
Below is the response from a spokeswoman, Devon Spurgeon, on behalf of Travis Kalanick to the Uber Files investigation.
Travis Kalanick never authorized any actions or programs that would obstruct justice in any country. Mr. Kalanick never authorized or directed any illegal conduct in Uber’s expansion efforts in Russia, and in fact had very limited involvement in those expansion plans. And Mr. Kalanick never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety. Any accusation that Mr. Kalanick directed, engaged in, or was involved in any of these activities is completely false
In pressing its false agenda that Mr. Kalanick directed illegal or improper conduct, the ICIJ claims to have documents that Mr. Kalanick was on or even authored, some of which are almost a decade old. Tellingly, the ICIJ flatly rejected requests to review any of those documents, which further exacerbates concerns about many of the source documents’ authenticity.
When Mr. Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009, he and the rest of the Uber team pioneered an industry that has now become a verb. To do this required a change of the status quo, as Uber became a serious competitor in an industry where competition had been historically outlawed. As a natural and foreseeable result, entrenched industry interests all over the world fought to prevent the much-needed development of the transportation industry. As the ICIJ and the world know, Uber persevered. It would not be surprising to learn that the very reporters and individuals involved in the ICIJ’s reporting on these issues in fact use Uber themselves on a regular basis, demonstrating precisely how meaningful Uber has become all over the world.
Regarding false accusations that Uber’s use of "kill switches" or other means to temporarily restrict access to Uber's data in the event of an extrajudicial raid constituted "obstruction of justice" or other related crimes.
Uber, like most other businesses operating overseas, used tools that protect intellectual property and the privacy of their customers, and ensure due process rights are respected in the event of an extrajudicial raid. They are a common business practice and not designed or implemented to “obstruct justice.” These fail-safe protocols do not delete any data or information and all decisions about their use involved, were vetted by, and were approved by Uber’s legal and regulatory departments. Notably, Mr. Kalanick did not create, direct or oversee these systems set up by legal and compliance departments and has never been charged in any jurisdiction for obstruction of justice or any related offense.
Regarding false accusations that Mr. Kalanick authorized or directed the use of Greyball:
Mr. Kalanick never authorized nor directed the program called Greyball for any illegal purpose. The program was designed and used to protect Uber drivers from harassment and assault from taxi drivers—an unfortunate occurrence during the early days of Uber. Government regulators were aware of the harassment and assaults Uber drivers suffered at the hands of taxi drivers, and the program was meant to try and protect Uber’s drivers. Notably, neither Mr. Kalanick nor anyone else at Uber has ever been accused of or charged with any offense related to Greyball by any enforcement agency.
Regarding false accusations that Mr. Kalanick directed or was aware of violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or other US or foreign law with regards to Uber’s efforts to expand in Russia or elsewhere:
Regarding Uber’s attempted expansion into Russia, Mr. Kalanick’s role was limited to a trip to Russia that included a few meetings arranged by Uber’s policy and business development teams. Mr. Kalanick was asked for his involvement following Uber’s robust legal, policy, business development teams having vetted and approved the strategy and operations plans. Mr. Kalanick acted at all times lawfully and with the clear approval and authorization of Uber’s legal team. Furthermore, Mr. Kalanick is not aware of anyone acting on Uber’s behalf in Russia who engaged in any conduct that would have violated either Russian or U.S. law. | 2022-07-10T16:56:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Response from Travis Kalanick to the Uber Files - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/10/travis-kalanick-response-uber-files/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/10/travis-kalanick-response-uber-files/ |
In push for global expansion, company officials saw clashes with taxi cab workers as a way to win public sympathy, a trove of new documents shows
By Aaron C. Davis
(Lucy Naland/Washington Post illustration; Justin Sullivan/Getty; Uber screenshots; Unsplash; iStock)
Five years into Uber’s war to supplant the taxi industry, executives at the ride-hailing app were in danger of losing a crown jewel in their global conquest: Paris.
The San Francisco start-up was flush at the start of 2016, valued by investors at more than $50 billion, and was racing to expand into Africa, India and Asia. But Uber’s first international outpost — the French capital — had become the center of a bloody battle over the company’s ambition, a trove of documents from inside the corporation shows.
In the previous year, more than 80 Uber drivers had been physically attacked across Europe, and dozens of their cars destroyed, in clashes with taxi drivers who were fearful of losing their livelihoods as Uber’s low fares upended their industry. When protests against the company erupted in Paris, managers began working from an unmarked office and for safety reasons were ordered not to wear Uber-branded clothing in public, the documents show.
In a series of text messages on Jan. 29, 2016, Uber’s then-chief executive, Travis Kalanick, pushed his top lieutenants to mount a counterprotest. Kalanick wanted a peaceful sit-in or march in the city’s center. “Civil disobedience” “15,000 drivers” “50,000 riders,” he wrote in a burst of unpolished, often abbreviated messages. One executive in response raised concern “about taxi violence against” Uber drivers, and another said the company could “look at effective civil disobedience and at the same time keep folks safe.”
Kalanick shot back, saying that if the crowd was big enough, Uber drivers would be safe. And if clashes did occur, he appeared to suggest, that could benefit Uber, too:
“I think it’s worth it,” the chief executive wrote. “Violence guarantee success.”
The text exchange is among more than 124,000 company documents obtained by the Guardian and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nonprofit newsroom in Washington that helped lead an examination of those records. Reporters from The Washington Post and more than 40 other news organizations around the world collaborated over four months to mine the trove of corporate emails, instant messages, company presentations, briefing papers, invoices and other documents. The documents provide a vivid, insider account of how from 2013 to 2017, Uber used bare-knuckle tactics to expand rapidly around the globe as it became one of the most-used transportation companies on the planet.
The company launched operations on four continents in rapid succession, often without seeking licenses to operate as a taxi and livery service, casting itself as merely a technology platform that connected willing passengers and drivers. To try to rewrite laws to recognize its position, Uber exported sophisticated American lobbying methods, the documents show, and it leveraged violence against its drivers in its efforts to win sympathy from regulators and the public.
In some instances, when drivers were attacked, Uber executives pivoted quickly to capitalize, the documents show. If a driver had been stabbed or beaten, or bricks had been thrown at his car, company officials behind the scenes provided details to the media if they thought the violence would result in negative attention for the taxi industry, the communications show. Uber would simultaneously activate its lobbyists, using attacks on drivers to secure meetings with politicians and push for regulatory changes, the documents show.
In the case of the demonstration in Paris, Kalanick and Uber managers helped arrange for a public show of support for the company at a time when taxi drivers were already clashing with police over Uber’s growing presence in the country. The night after the counterprotest in the city’s center, police said they intervened to prevent serious injuries as some 50 taxi drivers clashed with Uber drivers on the outskirts of Paris.
Two former Uber executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that company officials saw potential utility in the violent clashes and sought to capitalize on such incidents for public relations and political benefit. One said that the company would have been foolish not to do so. “Why can’t we be as fierce competitors as they are, so long as we are doing it in a reasonably legal way?” the person asked.
The other former executive, who had knowledge of Kalanick’s push for the Paris counterprotest, said the episode fit a pattern. “It was considered as beneficial to weaponize Uber drivers in this way, to get them to stand up for what they wanted — and of course, that served Uber’s purposes,” the former executive said.
In response to questions from The Post, Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s senior vice president for marketing and public affairs, acknowledged past mistakes in the company’s treatment of drivers, especially under Kalanick, who was forced out as chief executive by investors in 2017. But she said no one, including Kalanick, wanted violence against Uber drivers.
“There is much our former CEO said nearly a decade ago that we would certainly not condone today,” she wrote. “But one thing we do know and feel strongly about is that no one at Uber has ever been happy about violence against a driver.”
Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Kalanick, said in a statement to The Post that any suggestion he acted inappropriately was false. “Mr. Kalanick never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety,” the statement read.
It said the company’s expansion initiatives were “led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries” and were carried out “with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy, and compliance groups.” It continued: “Uber became a serious competitor in an industry where competition had been historically outlawed. As a natural and foreseeable result, entrenched industry interests all over the world fought to prevent the much-needed development of the transportation industry.”
The documents shed new light on how Uber’s arrival in Paris and around the world drove taxi drivers to desperation. Uber burned through investor money, suddenly and radically altering the ride-hailing market with artificially low fares when it entered a new foreign city, especially in Europe, where some of the most violent protests unfolded. In Madrid, the documents show, the company at one point was paying incentives of $17.50 an hour to each driver — accounting for almost two-thirds of their pay. In Hamburg, Uber drivers would have made $2.20 per hour under market conditions, minus a small commission, but the company paid each driver an additional $15 per hour — giving away rides almost for free.
Uber was spending heavily to influence the levers of power in countries it entered. Globally, the company’s budget for policy and communications work was $90 million in 2016, according to one draft budget document. Uber confirmed that the figure was accurate and that about 45 percent went to public affairs work overseas. To press its case with foreign governments, the company was also spending heavily to hire big names such as David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser under President Barack Obama.
As it operated in some countries despite court orders to desist, Uber maintained a 24-hour, multicountry emergency-response system that was used to keep company information out of the hands of investigating authorities, the documents show. The “kill switch,” as the company’s chief executive and others called it, was used at least a dozen times to sever connections to Uber’s internal computer networks as investigators moved in, sometimes with employees using stall tactics to keep detectives away from screens until they went dark, records show.
Hazelbaker said Uber does not employ such tactics today. She said “mistakes” made under Kalanick led five years ago to “one of the most infamous reckonings in the history of corporate America. That reckoning led to an enormous amount of public scrutiny, a number of high-profile lawsuits, multiple government investigations, and the termination of several senior executives. It’s also exactly why Uber hired a new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, who was tasked with transforming every aspect of how Uber operates.”
“We have not and will not make excuses for past behavior that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come,” Hazelbaker said.
The statement provided by Kalanick’s spokeswoman said there are legitimate business purposes for companies operating overseas to use tools to restrict access to their computer networks, including protecting “intellectual property and the privacy of their customer,” as well as ensuring “due process rights are respected in the event of an extrajudicial raid.” It continued, “These fail-safe protocols do not delete any data or information and all decisions about their use involved, were vetted by, and were approved by Uber’s legal and regulatory departments.”
Plouffe said in a statement that Uber and governments had to find a way forward in a legal landscape that was at times unsettled. But Plouffe said that, internally, he sometimes protested the company tactics.
“During my time at Uber, there was a very public, global and sometimes fierce debate about how and whether ridesharing should be regulated,” Plouffe said. “Sometimes those debates and negotiations were straightforward, sometimes they were more challenging, and sometimes there were people within the company who wanted to go too far. I did my best to object when I thought lines would be crossed — sometimes with success, sometimes not.”
Today, Uber has abandoned its ambitions to dominate markets such as Germany and India. It is winding down its operations in Russia and has pulled out of China altogether. In some countries, Uber has begun to work with the taxi industry it couldn’t replace, allowing passengers to book cab rides on its app.
Nonetheless, Uber is growing. The company operates in 71 countries and books some 19 million trips over its app each day — a testament to its convenience for customers and to the weakness the company rightly identified in the taxi industry’s ability to meet demand.
In the wake of that success are altered lives and livelihoods. Taxi drivers from Cape Town to Connecticut have been plunged into financial hardship, according to records and interviews, strapped by falling fares and in some cases encumbered by debt from mortgaged taxi licenses that have plummeted in value. As the Uber subsidies waned, many of its drivers also have struggled to make ends meet. From New York to New Delhi, a handful of taxi and Uber drivers have died by suicide, citing deep debt and disgust with the company.
Moments of candor tucked in the gigabytes of leaked internal records show that some Uber executives knew early on that the phone app was on a collision course with hard realities.
“Get some sleep when you can,” the company’s head of communications, Nairi Hourdajian, wrote to one of the company’s top European lobbyists in December 2014. “Remember that everything is not in your control, and that sometimes we have problems because, well, we’re just f------ illegal.”
Hourdajian declined to comment.
In the 15 years after he dropped out of UCLA in 1998 to start a file-sharing company, Kalanick knew only the scrappy world of Silicon Valley start-ups. He went without a paycheck for years at a time, living with his parents and putting everything he had into one venture after another, each seeking to strike it big by using computers to disrupt an antiquated market. After launching Uber in San Francisco in 2010, Kalanick enjoyed increasing celebrity and wealth, and millions in seed funding was ballooning into what would eventually be billions in venture capital. But he could not shake the start-up mind-set, the sense that he was the challenger taking on Goliath.
“I’m still the David,” Kalanick told an audience at a tech conference in 2014. “The opponent is an a--h--- named Taxi,” he said. “Nobody likes him, he’s not a very nice character,” he said, adding that “we have to bring out the truth about how dark, and how dangerous and evil the taxi side of things is.”
Domestically, Uber had faced pushback from taxi unions, and challenges from other start-up ride-hailing apps, not the least of which was Lyft. Kalanick recognized that feuding with up-and-coming competitors could quickly become a race to the bottom, to outsubsidize riders’ fares. To keep ahead, he sought to push Uber into new markets where its prime adversary would be the legacy taxi business.
Kalanick set a goal of operating in 500 cities worldwide by 2017. In some of those places, there were no laws governing Uber’s business model, and cities embraced it. But in many others — as had been the case across much of the United States — the laws were complex and unsettled, and the question of how they applied to Uber and similar companies was in dispute.
In early 2014, the company heavily promoted the hashtag #UberEverywhere, highlighting dozens of cities worldwide where it had launched operations.
In a memo to Uber managers in India that August, Allen Penn, whom Kalanick had tapped to lead Uber’s expansion across Southeast Asia, summed up his view of the company’s approach: “Embrace the chaos.” The company had started there with a luxury-car offering but was drawing objections from regulators as it pressed into what was expected to be a much bigger market of low-cost ride hailing.
“We will likely have both local and national issues in almost every city in India for the rest of your tenure at Uber … so get used to this,” Penn said. “We will generally stall, be unresponsive, and often say no to what they want. This is how we operate and it’s nearly always best.”
To be clear, Penn wrote, echoing his boss, Uber’s troubles were the fault of the taxi industry and jealous upstarts: “Competitors apply this pressure to govts to f--- with us because they want to disrupt our business growth.”
Penn did not respond to emails and messages seeking comment.
It wasn’t just India and France. Taxi drivers on three continents were protesting during the summer of 2014, calling on officials to clamp down on Uber’s ride hailing for allegedly violating local laws. Authorities from Thailand to the Netherlands were investigating. In Germany, courts in Hamburg and Berlin were asked to decide if Uber was legal. Frank Horch, Hamburg’s senator for economic affairs, said in an interview on Aug. 11 that he wanted to ban Uber for not having permits to operate.
Inside Uber, Horch’s comments drew immediate attention. A network of employees monitored threats and comments made about the company around the clock. Uber’s communications teams had built 89 databases, spanning five continents and containing a combined 2,000 names of people the company saw as threats or points of opportunity for influence or lobbying, according to the documents.
In response to the German lawmaker’s comment, an Uber lobbyist wrote: “Horch needs neutralizing politically as well as in media terms.”
Uber campaign
With investors, including Google, voicing concerns, Kalanick set in motion a newly focused effort to win over politicians needed to rewrite laws around the globe to facilitate Uber’s operations. He announced on Aug. 19, 2014, that the company was hiring a campaign manager with name recognition among leaders worldwide — Plouffe, who had led Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Kalanick boasted that Plouffe would be senior vice president of policy and strategy and Uber’s “field general,” in charge of messaging and beating the “big taxi cartel.”
Plouffe was more diplomatic, writing on the company’s website that Uber had a chance to be a “once in a decade, if not once in a generation company,” and telling Politico his job would be to “change the point of view of established politicians.”
Plouffe began promoting positive aspects of the company. Driving for money gave people freedom and flexibility to make extra cash, he said. The online app connected neighborhoods that were underserved by taxis. Sober Uber drivers would mean safer roadways, as drunk drivers would be kept off the road at night. If Uber were broadly used, people wouldn’t need to own cars at all, reducing roadway congestion and emissions.
Plouffe’s staff began coordinating with Jim Messina, Obama’s former deputy White House chief of staff, records show. Messina was already on board as an Uber consultant.
A spokesman for Messina said in a statement to The Post that Uber was one of many companies Messina advised over the past decade. His work for company executives “involved helping them understand the political landscape in certain European countries where the company was seeking to grow its business,” the statement said.
Plouffe was also enmeshed in high-stakes regulatory fights in dozens of countries. “URGENT Berlin,” read the subject of an October 2014 email relaying news that Uber had received a cease-and-desist letter and was facing fines of $25,000 per day. Soon, emails from Plouffe’s aides and others in the company were going out to officials from Berlin to Brazil seeking to set up meetings to head off regulatory actions. If Plouffe’s name wasn’t immediately recognizable, Uber staffers left little doubt about their negotiator’s calling card in many of the messages: “Plouffe (Obama White House).”
Plouffe was also soon exposed to the depths of the company’s struggles with regulators and police, the documents show.
In November 2014, he was copied on an email with the subject line “Re: Kill Paris access now.” The forwarded message recounted how officers from France’s General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control had just raided Uber’s Paris location and company officials had shut down access to company data. Plouffe responded, inquiring about the authorities who raided the company. “They report to Macron, correct?” he wrote, referring to French President Emmanuel Macron, then the economic minister.
Plouffe did not provide detailed responses to The Post’s questions. He did dispute that he had traded on his name recognition from working for Obama to advance Uber’s goals.
“Let me tell you, you get in the room with a transportation minister, I don’t care where it is, state capital, city council, European capital, African country, they don’t care what I or anyone else did before,” he said, adding that the negotiations “tended to get very specific about a whole set of issues around ride-sharing.”
By December 2014, Plouffe and Uber were facing a new crisis. A woman who hailed an Uber to take her home in New Delhi was raped by a driver who had a history of sexual assault allegations. The company initially cast some blame on the Indian government for failing to mandate background checks on drivers.
Facing public outrage and a suspension by Indian authorities, Uber said it would conduct stricter background checks on all drivers in the country. But the fallout did not end there.
Uber’s hoped-for year-end headlines about the speed of its global expansion instead read like a rap sheet: Uber offices in Bangalore, India and Chongqing, China were raided by authorities. In Bangkok and Madrid, the company was served with orders to cease operations. And in South Korea, authorities issued an indictment for Kalanick’s arrest, for allegedly running an illegal taxi ring. A headline on NBC News read: “Uber’s Wild 2014: Can Lawsuits and Protests Bring it Down?”
‘Keep the violence narrative going’
By the start of 2015, discussions were intensifying inside Uber over how to highlight violence against its drivers to win sympathy from the public and government officials, documents show.
“We need to use this in our favour,” Uber lobbyist Cristian Samoilovich in Amsterdam wrote to a colleague in March of that year, after an adviser to the European Commission wrote on Facebook that an Uber he was in had been attacked by a gang of taxi drivers in Brussels. At the time, Brussels officials were considering changing ride-hailing laws to legalize rides booked over smartphones.
That same week, taxi drivers in the Netherlands were protesting to demand that authorities enforce a court ruling from three months earlier that UberPop, the company’s service using nonprofessional drivers, was illegal and punishable by fines of up to 100,000 euros per day. Four Uber drivers were attacked in one night. In one of those incidents, masked men surrounded an Uber car and held a weapon to the driver’s throat while taking his license plate and slashing his tires. In another, an Uber driver was “seriously injured,” according to the documents.
Niek Van Leeuwen, the company’s general manager for Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, recounted the deteriorating situation in a March 11, 2015, email to Kalanick, Plouffe and others. The company’s response plan involved pushing the story of violence to try to get politicians to speak out against it, “while dragging out the enforcement process as long as possible,” Van Leeuwen wrote, referring to the court-ordered fines and the possibility that authorities might take other action to stop Uber from operating.
Days later, van Leeuwen provided an update: “police reports on violence have been shared with De Telegraaf newspaper and will be published without our fingerprint on the front page tomorrow.”
Company lawyers were also drafting a proposed emergency law change, he wrote. Van Leeuwen wanted to wait for the right moment to present it to lawmakers. “We keep the violence narrative going for a few days, before we offer the solution,” he wrote on March 16.
Mark MacGann, Uber’s head of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, replied the next day with praise for the publicity the violence story had received: “Excellent work. This is exactly what we wanted and the timing is perfect.”
MacGann forwarded images of the news coverage to his boss and to Plouffe that same day, writing: “Step one in the campaign, get the media to talk about Taxi violence against” Uber drivers.
More than 10 additional Uber drivers were attacked in the city over the next two nights. On March 19, Uber urged lawmakers to approve its emergency rule change allowing UberPop to operate legally, according to internal company communications. “We strongly condemn the use of violence and the damaging of vehicles of our drivers,” the company wrote to lawmakers. “Violence can never be the answer to innovation, and should not be a basis for regulation.”
Samoilovich told The Post he did not remember writing that the company should use the violence to its favor but remembered the confrontations. “I was of the opinion that politicians should take their responsibilities and regulate a hre zone and legal vacuum that was building up frustration and anger,” he wrote in an email.
Van Leeuwen did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
MacGann said in statement: “There is no excuse for how the company played with people’s lives. I am disgusted and ashamed that I was a party to the trivialisation of such violence.”
By mid-2015, attacks on Uber drivers had become so frequent that the documents show the company had set up an internal “Taxi intimidation Tracker,” the documents show. Uber had identified at least 80 physical attacks on its drivers, which had sent more than 10 people to the hospital.
“The reaction to Uber in Europe has seen some of the worst violence and sinister union opposition in our five year expansion to 58 countries and 6 continents,” MacGann wrote in July to a communications executive.
He ticked through the toll it had taken on drivers: “Dozens of cars destroyed, people deprived of what is often their most expensive, and only asset,” he wrote. “Increasing and credible intel of taxi entrapment and ambushing of Uber drivers.”
MacGann went on to describe the threats Uber managers were facing in Europe. Managers “frequently” required bodyguards when speaking in public, he wrote. One had around-the-clock protection, and another had a device with a panic button in case of a serious incident.
That July in Portugal, taxi drivers committed “acts of violence” against Uber drivers on three occasions, sending at least one to the hospital, Rui Bento, a general manager for Uber’s Portugal office, said in an email to colleagues. One of the country’s largest taxi associations, ANTRAL, had succeeded in getting a court to temporarily ban use of the Uber app. ANTRAL’s president, Florêncio Almeida, had spoken out against the ride-hailing service, which he considered illegal.
In his email, Bento said the company was “considering leaking” information about the attacks to local newspapers. The benefit, he wrote, would be to drive a story that “creates a clear link between the public declarations of violence of the president of ANTRAL and these actions (degrading their public image).”
In an emailed response, Yuri Fernandez, an Uber communications manager, proposed investigating Almeida’s background to “see if we have enough intel to make it sexy for Media.” It’s unclear whether Uber went through with investigating Almeida or planting stories about the attacks.
Bento and Fernandez did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
In late January 2016, a Geneva taxi driver attacked an Uber driver with a screwdriver, nearly killing him, according to an email that Steve Salom, a general manager for Uber in Switzerland, sent his colleagues.
“Most importantly: the driver partner is fine,” Salom began the email, before kicking off a debate about what the company should do with the information about the attack.
“Do you have talking points to speak to it in the media or to politicians?” Uber policy staffer Maxime Drouineau asked, adding that the incident “happens really at the worst moment” for taxi drivers who opposed legalizing Uber in the country.
Salom later mentioned the attack during an interview with a Swiss publication, saying it was an example of how taxi drivers are acting on their fears about Uber’s expansion.
Drouineau declined to comment when reached by The Post.
Salom said he believed it was right to draw attention to the violence. “Uber drivers were beaten up a number of times, and threats by taxi drivers were happening and reported to us several times a day,” he wrote in an email. “I had team members that were threatened and I personally received a number of threats. By discussing such events with the press, we were trying to show drivers’ day-to-day reality as well as ours. … We believed that visibility on such events would provide balance and show another side of the story taxis were giving.”
In March 2016, on a tour of the Middle East, where Plouffe was introducing Uber executives to elites from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he was asked about the violence targeting Uber drivers. Plouffe acknowledged the violence and nodded to the belief that is spelled out in greater detail in the internal company documents: There was a potential upside.
“We have seen some violence around the world, but that usually ends up expediting regulatory engagement with the government,” he told a crowd at the American University in Cairo, according to a report by the Egyptian news organization Mada Masr. According to the news report, Plouffe added that riders and drivers are Uber’s “most important ally” to get regulation reform moving.
The battle for Paris
In Paris, the city where Kalanick claimed he had partly thought up the idea for Uber years earlier while looking for a cab on a winter night, the government’s stance on Uber had hardened by 2016.
In fact, the company was in a fight for survival there. Police had raided its Paris office. Two of its top officials had been charged with complicity in operating an illegal transportation service and briefly taken into custody. Government officials had repeatedly urged Uber to shut down UberPop, which had a base fare of just one euro, cheaper than any taxi in the city.
That year, the aggressive strategy Uber deployed in entering the French market had led to chaotic scenes across the country: Taxi drivers blocked vital intersections and airport access roads, chanting anti-Uber slogans as the black smoke of burning tires billowed around them. Tensions quickly escalated. Mobs of enraged taxi drivers chased their Uber competitors, stopping their cars and damaging or toppling some of them.
Emails and text messages from that period document the extent to which Uber’s executives were aware of the escalation.
Ahead of a major taxi protest in January 2016, Thibaud Simphal, then-Uber France’s general manager, shared “intel” with his colleagues that the demonstration would become “big and potentially violent.”
Uber took the threat so seriously that it abandoned its own premises the day of the protest, renting a nondescript office in the center of Paris, where it set up a guarded “situation room,” according to the documents. Other staffers were instructed to work from home or from cafes.
Early on the morning of Jan. 27, Simphal told colleagues that the team in Paris reported 53 incidents overnight, three of which were “relatively serious cases involving taxi violence including 1 badly damaged car and 2 beaten up drivers.” Though police were out in force, he wrote, “we’re afraid that some driver assaults will happen overnight.”
Two days later, when Kalanick pushed for a counterprotest, Rachel Whetstone, a senior communications executive, responded to him by noting that MacGann had raised concerns about violence against Uber drivers. “Unions being taken over by far right spoiling for a fight,” she wrote, adding in another text, “One to think through.”
MacGann then added that “extreme right thugs” had infiltrated some taxi protests, and that the company would have to keep people safe, probably by calling on contacts with the Paris police. “We’ll be smart,” he wrote.
Kalanick responded with the “violence guarantee success” text. In another message he added: “These guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and setup must be thought out.”
Simphal texted MacGann and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, head of Western Europe at Uber. As the officials rushed to set up the counterprotest for Feb. 3, Simphal appeared to make light of the legal challenges the company faced, saying that “we have officially become pirates.”
MacGann wasn’t amused, particularly because Simphal and Gore-Coty were the two officials who had been charged by French authorities. “You both need to speak this morning to your personal lawyers so that you don’t screw your criminal case,” he responded.
Less than six months later, Simphal and Gore-Coty would be convicted of complicity in operating an illegal transportation service. At sentencing, they avoided jail time but were fined 20,000 euros and 30,000 euros, respectively. Uber was also found guilty of that offense and others and was fined 800,000 euros. Half of the fines were suspended.
After Kalanick was forced out, Uber said it welcomed being regulated and would work with governments in France and elsewhere to find compromises. The company has continued to appeal the 2016 verdicts, saying they raise troubling legal issues. The matter is now pending before the French Supreme Court.
Whetstone told The Post that she “consistently pushed back on Uber’s more aggressive business practices” and resigned after 18 months because of “significant, ongoing concerns about the company’s culture.”
In a statement, Simphal said he should have chosen his words at the time more carefully and did not wish violence on any of the company’s drivers. “In a context of confusion and violence, my words were sometimes hasty; but my intention was never to fuel violence,” Simphal wrote. “These crises as well as the trial I faced were very difficult experiences, but also real learnings that have taught me a lot.”
Reached for comment, Gore-Coty also expressed remorse, writing in an email: “I joined Uber nearly ten years ago, at the start of my career. I was young and inexperienced and too often took direction from superiors with questionable ethics. While I believe just as deeply in Uber’s potential to create positive change as I did on day one, I regret some of the tactics used to get regulatory reform for ride sharing in the early days. I have personally experienced the consequences of these decisions, including an ongoing trial in France.”
As Feb. 3, 2016, quickly neared, a group called AMT, which described itself as an association of non-taxi drivers, appeared to be arranging the protest. In public, AMT presented itself as an independent organization. But many drivers suspected Uber to be behind the group and its members.
AMT’s critics had good reason to be skeptical, the documents show. In internal messages, Uber executives described AMT as “our drivers union” and wrote that it would be “very useful for the next hours and weeks… ;)”. Uber executives said they were preparing a logo for AMT’s use, providing “political and media training” to the group’s leader and helping to coordinate the protest Kalanick had pushed for. In text messages, Simphal and others debate the time and location that was later promoted by AMT.
Uber’s role in helping to organize the protest was not reflected in its public communications. In a text on Jan. 31, Alexandre Quintard Kaigre, an Uber public-policy official in France, wrote to a colleague in French that Simphal “is aligned with our idea of Uber being the most absent” organization in the protest and communications in the days that followed.
AMT’s director at the time did not respond to a request for comment. Kaigre also did not comment when reached by The Post.
When the counterprotest got underway, there were far fewer than the “15,000 drivers” and “50,000 riders” Kalanick had hoped for in his texts days earlier. Only a few hundred drivers showed up, according to media reports at the time. After dark the next night, on the outskirts of the city, police intervened as taxi drivers and Uber-aligned protesters clashed.
Contributing reporting from: Alice Crites in Washington; Joseph Menn in San Francisco; The Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington, Johana Bhuiyan in New York and Felicity Lawrence in London; The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Sydney Freedberg in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Nicole Sadek in Durham, N.C.; and Damien Leloup and Adrien Sénécat of Le Monde and Elodie Guéguen of Radio France in Paris. | 2022-07-10T16:56:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uber leveraged violence against its drivers to win favor over taxis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/10/uber-taxi-driver-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/10/uber-taxi-driver-violence/ |
A prayer for the dead
People work next to a trench on Hart Island in New York in April 2020. (Johannes Eisele/AFP)
The July 4 front-page article “Died in a penthouse. Buried on an island of the poor.” transported me to a cold, wintry day in November 1967, when I was privileged to ride on the rusted, floating hearse to Potter’s Field in New York. As a chaplain intern at Bellevue Hospital, one of my requirements was to accompany the caskets, each with a body, to their final destination and provide an interment ceremony. I had known one of the men who died at the hospital. He died with no home and no known family or friends. My mind focused on him while all around me were so many dead.
We docked, and the workmen unloaded the cargo of deceased. I invited them to join me in the final service. They declined and disappeared. At age 26, I was left alone to do my first funeral. I had taken a book of formal prayers and scriptures for funerals and started. Soon this felt empty and meaningless on this chilling, gloomy day. I stopped and instead told them that I hoped there were times when they felt hope, joy and closeness. I told them that I wished life had been easier for them. I told them that I hoped they had been able to forgive those who had hurt them. I asked about their pain and struggles, about their relationships, and more. I expressed that my prayer is that whatever life after death holds for us, it will be good for them.
This day and the memories have shaped my life ever since.
Elaine Tiller, Silver Spring | 2022-07-10T16:57:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A prayer for the dead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/prayer-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/prayer-dead/ |
Tax land, not buildings, to help with the housing crisis
Apartments in Arlington. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Regarding the July 4 front-page article “As inflation grows, so does housing crisis”:
We have some general inflation, but we have special problems with the lack of affordable housing. This is partly because of snob zoning and the wrong kind of property tax. In most jurisdictions, both buildings and land are taxed, with land values often being underassessed in practice.
This means that someone who is considering erecting an apartment building will not find it profitable to do so until rents have risen enough to cover the building tax, other expenses and a return on capital. Someone who invests in a vacant lot in a populated area with the intention of keeping it vacant until, perhaps decades later, he can sell it at a good profit will typically pay low taxes on it. As a result, not enough housing is constructed, so what there is costs too much.
An important reform is to tax real estate only on the value of the land, not on the buildings or other improvements. That way, land could be bought much more cheaply, and real estate bubbles, which are bubbles in land prices, would not inflate. People could build houses and apartments without raising their tax bills, so we would have more housing, making it cheaper. Some might criticize this proposal on environmental grounds, but by encouraging infill development, it would also have the merit of reducing sprawl into the countryside.
Nicholas D. Rosen, Arlington
The writer is president of the Center for the Study of Economics. | 2022-07-10T16:57:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Tax land, not buildings, to help with the housing crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/tax-land-not-buildings-help-with-housing-crisis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/tax-land-not-buildings-help-with-housing-crisis/ |
Woman stabbed to death in Northeast D.C.
Police are investigating after a man was stabbed to death in Northeast D.C. this weekend.
At about 2:40 a.m. Saturday, police were sent to a hospital, where they found a woman suffering from stab wounds, D.C. police said in a statement. She was pronounced dead and taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, they said, adding that her name is being withheld while authorities are notifying her next of kin.
Upon further investigation, police determined that the stabbing took place inside “an establishment” in the 1600 block of New York Avenue NE.
D.C. police offer a reward of up to $25,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest and conviction of a person or people responsible for a homicide committed in the city. Anyone with information about this case is asked to call police at 202-727-9099 or submit a text to the department’s tip line at 50411. | 2022-07-10T18:01:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Woman stabbed to death in Northeast D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/northeast-dc-stabbing-new-york-avenue/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/northeast-dc-stabbing-new-york-avenue/ |
Two churches vandalized, set on fire in Bethesda over the weekend
A fire official said the incidents are connected by similarities in time and location
Two churches in Bethesda were vandalized and set on fire over the weekend in incidents that authorities think are connected.
On Saturday at 1:30 a.m., the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service responded to a call about a fire at North Bethesda United Methodist Church, at 10100 Old Georgetown Road. The main part of the church was not affected, and damage was minimal, said Pete Piringer, a spokesman for the agency.
About 24 hours later, at approximately 2 a.m. Sunday, the fire and rescue service responded to a call about a fire at St. Jane Frances de Chantal Parish at 9601 Old Georgetown Road — less than a mile from North Bethesda United Methodist Church. That fire damaged several church pews but was quickly extinguished, Piringer said, adding that investigators think the fire was intentionally set.
The damage was enough to suspend activities in the main section of the church, and Sunday Mass was moved to another part of the church, Piringer said.
Officials at both churches did not immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
Authorities think the two incidents are linked and are continuing their investigation, Piringer said.
“They’re certainly connected by the similarities as far as the time of day and location,” he said. “There were multiple fires either set or attempted to be set in both locations.”
Piringer said that both churches were also vandalized but that investigators are not “in a position to release that information at this point.” | 2022-07-10T18:27:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two churches vandalized, set on fire in Bethesda over the weekend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/bethesda-churches-vandalized-fire/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/bethesda-churches-vandalized-fire/ |
A screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on June 13. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
We are not yet to the point where a recession is unquestionably in the cards. Yes, gross domestic product shrank last quarter, retail inventories are rising, stocks are in bear territory, and the housing market has had a whopping shock. But Friday’s job’s report showed the economy adding 372,000 jobs in June, well above expectations and enough to keep the unemployment rate at a very heartening 3.6 percent.
So I won’t say that a recession is in the offing. I will just say that it would be wise to start planning for one.
Those old enough to have survived at least one downturn — and that one was a doozy — probably know the basic drill: save, try to manage those fixed expenses that can’t be easily adjusted (such as your car payment or mortgage), and be prepared to cut discretionary spending. (Do you really need five different streaming services?) But not so the under-35s, most of whom have never really known a world where the labor market doesn’t just keep getting better for them. Yes, there was a short, sharp spike in unemployment during the pandemic, but it resolved itself much faster than a normal recession — and in the meantime, extra unemployment benefits left many workers, especially the younger and lower-paid, financially better off than they had been when they were working.
Those younger employees face a rude shock if the Federal Reserve is unable to engineer a soft landing and instead tips us into a significant recession. Many will discover for the first time the harsh world of a lengthy unemployment. Many more will see their workplaces change as the balance of power shifts back toward employers.
For example, employees who strongly prefer to work remotely are winning their battle with bosses who want them in the office every day. That seems likely to change as the labor market weakens. It’s easy to say, “Let me work remotely or I’ll walk” when unemployment is under 4 percent and you know you can walk straight into another job. It’s a lot harder if the unemployment rate is pushing double digits. Too, “I’ll walk” might be sweet music to the ears of an employer in a cash crunch; enforcing in-office requirements could become a kinder, gentler substitute for layoffs.
Workers might also find employers a lot cooler to in-office activism. A great deal of commentary has been devoted to “woke capital” as a social phenomenon, tracing its roots to a younger, more progressive generation of workers greatly empowered by social media tools they wield so much more adroitly than their elders. But workplace activism is also a kind of fringe benefit: In lieu of more pay or vacation time, employees get to demand that their employer reflect their ideological values back to them.
It’s obviously easier to make those kinds of demands in a tight labor market, but it’s also easier for employers to grant those kinds of demands when the economy is booming and they can afford to offend some customers in the name of keeping the workplace peaceful. But a number of corporations have already cracked down on politics at the office, clearly having decided that the costs are too high: internal disruption, offended customers, indignant public officials with power over decisions that affect the core business. If GDP declines further, and CEOs are scraping for every sale, those costs will loom even larger, while the risk of losing outraged employees will seem much less important.
There’s probably no real way for younger workers to prepare for that culture shock. Throughout their working lives, the professional workplace has grown steadily more progressive, more attentive to their feelings, more responsive to their demands. And that’s true even in industries that weren’t booming, such as journalism, because those employers had to compete with healthier sectors for workers.
It’s only natural to think of whatever you’ve always experienced as the natural order of things. (Notice how hard it was for any of us to believe that no, really, we moderns could still suffer a pandemic.) And as with any such shock, the adjustment won’t be a happy one.
But it might be a healthy one — if it makes all of us revisit the idea that every job has to be everything to us: paycheck, political vehicle, social network, social worker. We have been demanding that the workplace do things it’s not particularly suited for — and in exchange, it has demanded our whole lives.
It’s okay to work for an employer whose politics differ from your own — I’ve been doing it for two decades, and I write about politics for a living! It’s okay to have an employer that offers you only a paycheck, while you find your friends and personal fulfillment elsewhere. You can live a perfectly good life going to the office five days a week — then leaving it behind you as soon as the elevator doors close. | 2022-07-10T20:03:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The reordering power of a recession may come as a shock to younger workers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/recession-economy-shock-younger-workers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/10/recession-economy-shock-younger-workers/ |
Former Trump strategist stands out for having hand both in urging Congress to reject electoral votes inside Capitol and mobilizing mob outside
Rosalind S. Helderman
Stephen K. Bannon's image on-screen during the public hearing June 21. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Two nights before supporters of President Donald Trump were set to march on the Capitol, Stephen K. Bannon was working to get the head of the Proud Boys out of jail.
The leader of the far-right extremist group, Enrique Tarrio, was arrested by D.C. police that night for burning a church’s Black Lives Matter banner during a demonstration the month before. When Bannon heard the news, he started making calls to help Tarrio post bail.
“We put calls out last night trying to put bail up for the guy,” Bannon said the next morning on his “War Room” podcast. “It’s just not acceptable.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, Bannon said he was later waved off helping the Proud Boys, though he declined to declined to specify who had done so. “They said they were all whack jobs so don’t get involved,” he said. Bannon also denied any direct contact with Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, the other extremist group charged with seditious conspiracy in planning the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The dash to bail out Tarrio is just one of many episodes involving Jan. 6 that Bannon could clarify if he ends up testifying before the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, which will hold a public hearing Tuesday that is expected to focus on extremist groups. Committee members see Bannon as a key figure because they think his podcasts contributed to radicalizing some of Trump’s supporters, and they have evidence showing that Bannon repeatedly talked to Trump and his advisers in the lead-up to Jan. 6.
But the offer came in a combative letter emphasizing Trump’s frustrations with the hearings and eagerness to present a defense.
Offering to testify might help Bannon in his contempt trial, which he has been seeking to delay. But the path to finding out what he knows remains far from certain. Bannon could still assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as other witnesses such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark have done.
Bannon might also insist on conditions, such as testifying on live TV, that the committee might not want to accept. In a letter to the committee, Bannon lawyer Robert J. Costello indicated that Bannon “prefers to testify at your public hearing.” The hearings have yet to feature any live witnesses aligned with Trump.
In an interview Sunday on CNN, committee member Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) raised cautions about any demand of live testimony. “Ordinarily, we do depositions, you know, this goes on for hour after hour after hour,” she said. “We want to get all our questions answered, and you can’t do that in a live format.”
So far, Bannon’s name has been hardly mentioned in the committee’s hearings. Of the six hearings so far, he came up in passing only twice, for less than 30 seconds of total screen time. The Justice Department has cited Bannon’s absence from the hearings to argue against delaying his trial for defying the committee’s subpoena, scheduled to start July 18. Bannon has a pretrial hearing set for Monday in Washington.
The panel has not telegraphed that it found any secret links between Bannon, the White House and violent extremists. “A lot of it is in plain sight,” one official on the committee said.
Bannon dismissed the prospect of an explosive new revelation. “There’s no silver bullet,” he said.
Tarrio was released from police custody on Jan. 5 and ordered by a judge to leave the District. He was not present at the Capitol when members of the Proud Boys organization are accused of acting as the leading edge of the violent siege, with some allegedly overrunning barricades, breaking the first window breached by rioters and assaulting police officers. Prosecutors have charged Tarrio and his top lieutenants with seditious conspiracy over their activities that day, alleging that he helped lead the action from Baltimore.
Even as Bannon has denied responsibility for the violence that took place on Jan. 6, he considers himself an ideological architect of the efforts to overturn the election. In particular, he credits his podcast with turning out the crowd for the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington. He also urged Trump in a Dec. 30, 2020, phone call to return to Washington from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida retreat. Bannon said he told Trump he needed to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral college votes on Jan. 6.
“We saved Trump,” Bannon said in his interview with The Post. “If it hadn’t been for ‘War Room,’ he was going to go to Mar-a-Lago and fritter away because the cast around him — who all testified in the hearings — didn’t want him to return.”
Speaking of incoming President Biden, Bannon said he told Trump on the call: “You need to kill this administration in the crib early on just by its own incompetence and its illegitimacy,” he recounted on his podcast last year. In the interview with The Post, Bannon elaborated that his goal was to sow widespread doubts about the election results.
“We’re going to start at 35 percent, we’re going to get it to 40, to 45, to 50 percent of the country is going to question his legitimacy,” he said.
Bannon’s podcast — which was kicked off YouTube after the riot but remains one of the country’s most popular shows on Apple’s platform, with more than 200 million total downloads — gave listeners a real-time window into the plans and moves among Trump allies to keep the president in power, notwithstanding the election results.
Those discussions began even before the ballots were cast. In September 2020, Bannon’s show started exploring various conspiracy theories for how the Democrats would “steal” the election and how Trump and the Republicans could fight back, including some ideas extending past Election Day. In a Sept. 25 episode, former Trump Cabinet secretary Bill McGinley came on the show to describe a scenario for the House of Representatives to settle a disputed election in Trump’s favor.
“What happens on January 6th, let’s say for whatever reason, there is a complete meltdown in the process in one or more states, it’s still tied up in the courts and litigation has maybe gone up and down to the Supreme Court, there is no clear winner … and there’s just serious questions about which candidate or the electoral college slate won the vote,” McGinley, who declined to comment on the record, said on the show. “You trigger what’s called a contingent election. And that means that the House of Representatives is to immediately take up the question: Who should be president of the United States?”
The next day, Trump first raised the idea of a House vote for president during a rally outside Harrisburg, Pa. “We have an advantage if we go back to Congress,” he said. “Does everyone understand that?”
Bannon went on to feature interviews with Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, lawyers who were leading Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results in the courts and Congress.
Around the same time that Eastman was preparing confidential memos urging Pence to reject the electoral votes, listeners of Bannon’s podcast could hear Eastman publicly proclaiming the same discredited theory. Bannon repeatedly hinted that he was working closely with Trump’s legal team, including that he had been on a conference call with Eastman to discuss those theories.
“A lot depends on the courage and the spine of the individual involved,” Eastman said Jan. 2 after explaining his theory on the air.
Bannon prodded, “That’d be a nice way to say a guy named Vice President Mike Pence?”
Bannon also played a role in raising money to support efforts to challenge the election. Lin Wood, a lawyer who filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s loss in the weeks after the November 2020 election, said he received a phone call from Bannon not long after the election, offering to raise money to support Wood’s group, the Fight Back Foundation.
“He said, ‘Look, I want to help your efforts. I can raise 2, 3, 4 million dollars,’ ” Wood recalled in an interview.
Wood said he was wary, noting that his foundation typically only receives small-dollar donations. “When you start taking money from someone in those types of figures, I’ve always been concerned about the strings that might be attached,” he said.
Several weeks later, Wood said Bannon called again and said he had identified a donor in Chicago who was interested in giving $100,000. Still worried, Wood said the foundation placed the donation, which arrived by wire in early December, in escrow for a year to ensure that there was nothing problematic about the donor, whose name he said he could not recall. About a year later, he was advised that the money was “old and cold,” and he arranged for it to be deposited in the Fight Back Foundation’s general fund.
Text messages reviewed by The Post show the donation was organized by associates of Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire who has maintained close personal and business links to Bannon. Mother Jones first reported the donation to Wood’s foundation suggested by Bannon and the link to Guo. Lawyers for Guo did not respond to a request for comment and Bannon declined to respond to questions about the episode.
In the days leading up to Jan. 6, Bannon used increasingly heated and frantic rhetoric to frame the congressional session as a climax to a constitutional crisis in which Pence would determine Trump’s future. “This gets to the heart — you go read Roman history, this is like toward how the republic fell, right, and became a totalitarian or authoritarian empire,” he said on Jan. 2. “We’re at that moment. That’s what this week is.”
He hosted Kylie Kremer, an organizer of the Jan. 6 rally, and encouraged “everybody in the Mid-Atlantic region to come.” “It all comes down to, are we going to affirm the massive landslide of Donald J. Trump?” Bannon said. “Or are we going to turn to over our constitutional republic … to the forces of darkness?”
In between broadcasts, Bannon made appearances at a “command center” inside the Willard Hotel near the White House where Giuliani, Eastman and others were holed up plotting their pressure campaign on Pence. The day before the rally, Bannon declared, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
On the morning of Jan. 6, Bannon marveled at the size of the crowd forming on the National Mall and repeatedly told people they were on the “point of attack” and the “cusp of victory.”
Bannon has been evasive about his precise activities during the riot, telling the Atlantic that he didn’t recall whether he spoke with Trump. “Hey, if they come up with it, I’ll have to rethink it, but I don’t think I did,” he said.
Two days after the insurrection, the White House received a formal letter requesting a pardon for Bannon. The letter came from Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), one of the lawmakers who led the objections to the electoral college results based on false claims of fraud. The committee has heard testimony from Ali Alexander, an organizer of the Jan. 6 rally, that he was in touch with Gosar about planning the event. Gosar has not addressed that allegation.
It is not clear why Gosar sent the pardon petition, and his spokesman declined to say. The letter, which was obtained by The Post and has not been previously reported, asked Trump to pardon not only Bannon but his three co-defendants in the fraud case. Federal prosecutors accused the four men of misspending money they had raised from Trump supporters purportedly to help fulfill the president’s signature campaign promise of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Gosar’s letter assailed the case as a “political hitjob” and a personal affront to Trump and his supporters. “Prosecuting Mr. Bannon is yet another example of this particular U.S. Attorney’s Office targeting people associated with you,” Gosar wrote. “To them, taking him down is taking you down by proxy.”
White House counsel Pat Cipollone opposed pardons for Bannon and the We Build the Wall supporters, the former senior administration official said, adding that Trump polled “dozens” of people on Bannon’s pardon, and talked to Bannon himself.
Cipollone testified behind closed doors on Friday. It was unclear whether Bannon’s pardon was discussed.
By midnight on Trump’s last full day in office, some of Trump’s advisers hoped they could kill Bannon’s pardon, the former senior administration official said, but Trump had been appreciative of Bannon’s vociferous support of his efforts after the election, and weighed that against some of his own personal frustrations with Bannon, and the words of his advisers.
Meanwhile, White House aide Johnny McEntee and Kris Kobach, who served on Trump’s aborted commission investigating voter fraud in the 2016 election, told lawyers for the three co-defendants that they would all be pardoned, according to a person familiar with the matter. McEntee and Kobach did not respond to requests for comment.
But of the four, only Bannon received a pardon, coming down after midnight on the 20th. Bannon declined to answer questions about the pardon.
Two of the co-defendants, Brian Kolfage and Andy Badolato, eventually pleaded guilty in the case. The other, Tim Shea, went to trial, which ended in a deadlocked jury. The Justice Department said in June it would retry the case.
For Bannon, who has repeatedly fallen in and out with Trump, the pardon conferred the imprimatur of being back in the fold. In a sign of Bannon’s enduring pull with Trump’s supporters, his podcast has become a coveted platform for pro-Trump lawmakers and candidates seeking to burnish their movement credentials and boost their fundraising.
In another sign of his influence, Bannon has encouraged listeners to take local Republican Party positions, leading to thousands of recruits around the country, according to an investigation by ProPublica.
Despite Bannon’s continued service to the former president’s cause, Trump has mostly kept him at arm’s length since the pardon, largely avoiding acknowledging him with public statements or appearances. Trump and Bannon speak to each other irregularly, with Trump more often consulting associates who are also close to Bannon. He recently spoke to Bannon, an adviser said, about whether he would waive his claim of privilege for Bannon to testify. And Trump has listened to clips of Bannon’s show at times, advisers said, with others often flagging segments for him.
Last year Trump hired Liz Harrington, an editor at Bannon’s War Room media operation, to be his spokeswoman. At a festive reunion for Trump White House alumni at a special Mar-a-Lago screening of an election-conspiracy-theory film in April, Bannon was not present. Instead, guests in the ballroom beamed in for interviews on Bannon’s podcast, including a brief surprise appearance by Trump.
Isaac Stanley-Becker and Lena H. Sun contributed to this report. | 2022-07-10T21:34:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bannon, dangling possible testimony, brings new focus to Jan. 6 role - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/bannon-dangling-possible-testimony-brings-new-focus-jan-6-role/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/bannon-dangling-possible-testimony-brings-new-focus-jan-6-role/ |
Ann Cabell Baskervill, the commonwealth’s attorney for Dinwiddie County, issued a statement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Sunday, following stories by the newspaper about her absence.
“I suffered a severe concussion from a fall in April which resulted in a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury,” she said. “The doctors have advised me that rest and immediate continued treatment are crucial for my recovery.”
The top prosecutors from two nearby jurisdictions have also offered staff to help prosecute some of Dinwiddie’s pending murder cases, the newspaper reported. | 2022-07-10T23:06:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia prosecutor takes leave for brain injury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-prosecutor-takes-leave-for-brain-injury/2022/07/10/9a1f96d8-009c-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-prosecutor-takes-leave-for-brain-injury/2022/07/10/9a1f96d8-009c-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Brad Smith is carried off after getting hurt in the second half Friday against the Philadelphia Union in Chester, Pa. (Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
D.C. United’s Brad Smith will miss the remainder of the season with a knee injury suffered Friday night, the latest gut-punch for the reeling MLS club.
The Australian wing back will undergo reconstructive surgery to repair a torn ACL in his left knee and miss up to nine months, the team announced Sunday.
Smith, who was acquired from Seattle in January, entered late in the first half of a 7-0 defeat at Philadelphia and was stretchered off midway through the second half.
The injury came the same day United announced Bill Hamid, the longtime starting goalkeeper, will miss two to three months with a hand injury. Defender Andy Najar was a late scratch from the Philadelphia game because of an undisclosed injury.
Smith, 28, had appeared in 16 of 17 matches, starting 14 and contributing one assist in his fifth MLS season. His professional career began in 2013 with Premier League power Liverpool and has included stints with Swindon Town, Bournemouth and Cardiff City.
He was a member of Seattle’s 2019 championship team, but with the Sounders deep on the left side and United in need of a replacement for Bundesliga-bound Kevin Paredes last winter, D.C. acquired him for $750,000 in general allocation money.
At the midway point of the season, United (5-10-2) sits ahead of only the Chicago Fire (4-10-5) in MLS’s 28-team standings. Entering Wednesday’s home game against the Columbus Crew (6-5-7), D.C. is in a 1-5-2 rut. In that span, it has conceded 24 goals — more than nine teams have allowed all year. | 2022-07-10T23:06:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brad Smith to miss rest of D.C. United's season with ACL injury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/brad-smith-dc-united-injury/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/brad-smith-dc-united-injury/ |
Braves 4, Nationals 3 (12 inn.)
Lane Thomas's three-run, pinch-hit homer provided all of Washington's offense Sunday. (Brett Davis/Getty Images)
ATLANTA — As the Washington Nationals continue to seek building blocks on their way back to contention, Lane Thomas’s role for the future isn’t clear.
In the Nationals’ 4-3, 12-inning loss to the Atlanta Braves on Sunday afternoon that yielded a three-game sweep, Thomas provided a glimpse of his possible value. His pinch-hit, three-run homer in the sixth inning gave the Nationals a 3-2 lead.
It didn’t hold up. Austin Riley hit a solo home run in the eighth to tie the score before adding a walk-off single off Jordan Weems in the 12th. The Nationals (30-58) have lost four in a row and 10 of 11. They scored three runs or fewer in all seven games of this road trip against the Philadelphia Phillies and Braves (52-35), losing six of them.
Seeking to jump-start the offense, Manager Dave Martinez shuffled his lineup. He put Luis García in the leadoff spot, moved Josh Bell up to No. 2 and shifted all-star reserve Juan Soto into the third spot.
The changes didn’t help much; those three went 1 for 11 but did manage four walks. Washington had five hits — just three after the first inning and only one in extra innings. Washington got the go-ahead run to third base in each extra inning but failed to drive him in — Bell struck out swinging to end the 10th, Keibert Ruiz was caught looking to close the 11th, and Victor Robles flied out to left in the 12th.
In other words, Thomas brought home all of the Nationals’ runs with his ninth homer. He replaced Yadiel Hernandez, who started in left field against Braves right-hander Ian Anderson. Anderson walked a pair of batters with one out in the sixth, and the Braves turned to lefty Dylan Lee.
Lee got Ruiz to fly out to left, setting up Thomas’s moment. The matchup was ideal for him: Thomas hits lefties and fastballs well, and Lee primarily throws fastballs against righties. Thomas watched a first-pitch curveball in the dirt, then turned on a fastball and sent it into the visitors’ bullpen to give Washington the lead.
The Nationals got Thomas during their sell-off at the trade deadline last year when they sent Jon Lester to the St. Louis Cardinals. He hit .270 and had an .853 on-base-plus-slugging percentage in 45 games with Washington to finish the season.
The 26-year-old hasn’t been as productive this season. Those struggles, coupled with his limitations as an outfielder, put Thomas’s ability to be an everyday outfielder on a contender in doubt. But given his ability to hit hard-throwing relievers, he could be effective as a reserve outfielder. That’s the scenario that played out Sunday.
What roster moves did the Nationals make? Right-handed reliever Hunter Harvey (right pronator strain) was reinstated from the 60-day injured list. Starter Joan Adon was sent back to Class AAA Rochester after scuffling during a fill-in start Thursday at Philadelphia. To make room on the 40-man roster, Jackson Tetreault was placed on the 60-day IL after suffering a stress fracture in his right scapula.
Harvey made three rehab appearances, including two for Rochester. He said the rehab process took longer than he anticipated, but he wanted to take extra time to make sure he felt right.
The Nationals added the 27-year-old, a first-round pick of the Baltimore Orioles in 2013, off waivers from the San Francisco Giants in March.
How is the rotation lining up? Against the Seattle Mariners at Nationals Park, Josiah Gray is slated to start Tuesday, followed by Erick Fedde on Wednesday. There’s usually a gap in the rotation between Gray and Fedde, but Fedde will be on his normal rest following Monday’s day off.
As for the next series, a four-game set against the visiting Braves that will take the Nationals into the all-star break, Martinez said he has yet to decide, but Patrick Corbin and Paolo Espino (who allowed two runs in four innings Sunday) are likely to be in the mix. With Adon back in the minors, Washington needs another starter. Aníbal Sánchez could be an option; he has made three rehab starts for Rochester after a neck injury sidelined him since spring training. | 2022-07-10T23:06:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lane Thomas delivers, but Nationals fall to Braves again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/nationals-braves-lane-thomas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/nationals-braves-lane-thomas/ |
CHICAGO — Left fielder Robbie Grossman dropped Luis Robert’s short fly with two outs in the eighth to end his record errorless streak at 440 games and set up two unearned Chicago runs that snapped a tie, lifting the White Sox to a 4-2 win over the Detroit Tigers on Sunday. | 2022-07-10T23:07:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | White Sox take advantage of error, score 2 in 8th of 4-2 win - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/white-sox-score-2-unearned-runs-in-8th-to-beat-tigers-4-2/2022/07/10/1dba7a54-0097-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/white-sox-score-2-unearned-runs-in-8th-to-beat-tigers-4-2/2022/07/10/1dba7a54-0097-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Juan Soto, despite an unsteady start, is an all-star again
He is slated to be the team’s lone representative for the July 19 matchup at Dodger Stadium
Juan Soto is now a two-time all-star. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
ATLANTA — For the second straight season, Juan Soto will take his place among baseball’s best at the All-Star Game. On Sunday, the Washington Nationals star was named a reserve outfielder for the National League at the July 19 matchup at Dodger Stadium.
“It feels great to be a part of it, representing the Washington Nationals,” said Soto, who made his all-star debut last season at Denver’s Coors Field. “It feels great to be out there and be on the list of all the all-stars that the Washington Nationals have had in the past and be around those guys.”
Soto has struggled at the plate for lengthy stretches this season, managing a .243 batting average in 85 games. Still, he has a solid .871 on-base-plus-slugging percentage because he leads the majors with 73 walks; the next-closest hitter is former Nationals slugger Kyle Schwarber (52), an all-star with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Soto has gotten hot lately, hitting 11 for 24 (.458) in July. He had a hit and two walks in the Nationals’ 4-3 loss to the Atlanta Braves on Sunday, extending his on-base streak to 20 games.
Soto said the most exciting part of last year was the Home Run Derby. He said Saturday that he hadn’t decided whether he would participate this year.
“I enjoy getting to know more people, getting to know more guys and making them my friends,” Soto said of the festivities. “Even if we’re fighting against each other during the season, it doesn’t mean we’re going to be bad guys outside of the game.”
Soto is the lone Nationals player on the NL roster. A case could’ve been made for first baseman Josh Bell, who has been the team’s most consistent hitter and ranks second among NL first baseman in batting average (.304) and on-base percentage (.386). He leads the Nationals in batting average, hits (96) and RBI (47, tied with Nelson Cruz).
This is the first time Washington hasn’t had multiple all-stars since 2011, when Tyler Clippard was its lone representative. Schwarber joins Trea Turner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Bryce Harper of the Phillies as former Nationals who were named all-stars; Harper will miss the game with a broken thumb.
“We’re going to have fun. That guy’s really fun,” Soto said of Turner, a pending free agent. “I hope we’re going to have a good time there and try to convince him to come back. We’ll see.” | 2022-07-10T23:18:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nationals' Juan Soto is MLB all-star again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/juan-soto-all-star-nationals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/juan-soto-all-star-nationals/ |
Company hires Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm and plans to file law suit in Delaware this week after Tesla founder backs away from $44 billion bid
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, speaks during the Satellite 2020 at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
As Musk moves to abandon deal, Twitter faces 'worst-case scenario'
Twitter’s hiring of the high-profile legal team was first reported by Bloomberg.
Twitter insists it has fully complied with the deal’s disclosure requirements, including by providing Musk with a “fire hose” of data comprising millions of tweets sent in real-time.
Musk argues in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the true size of Twitter’s user base is a material fact about the company, since 90 percent of its revenue comes from advertisements. If Twitter were not being truthful, his legal team believes it gives him a valid reason to get out of a deal he is contractually obligated to close on.
Twitter executives believe they have a strong case that Musk has violated the terms of the takeover deal, which he signed in April, agreeing to pay $54.20 for each share of the company’s stock. Twitter shares closed Friday below $37.
But at a minimum, the company is likely to face a lengthy courtroom battle with one of the world’s richest and most mercurial individuals, which could paralyze its ability to launch new initiatives and attract workers.
Bret Taylor, the chairman of Twitter’s board, responded to Musk’s decision to quit the deal by saying in a tweet that the company is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
Twitter’s share-price slide is part of a broader technology stock slump that has included Tesla, the electric carmaker that boasts Musk as its largest shareholder. Tesla shares have lost roughly one-third of their value since early April.
Twitter’s hiring of Wachtell, Lipton comes just days after Musk’s attorneys said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Twitter was “in breach” of the terms of the takeover deal for failing to fully disclose information on its reliance upon “false and spam accounts” in its membership claims. | 2022-07-11T00:37:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Twitter prepares for legal action against Elon Musk - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/10/twitter-legal-action-musk-deal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/10/twitter-legal-action-musk-deal/ |
A man walks past the logo of the Israeli cyber firm NSO Group at one of its branches in the Arava Desert in Israel on July 22, 2021. (Amir Cohen/Reuters)
A few days after the reports were published, “L3 reached out to the U.S. government and said they would not be moving forward,” the official said, who, like others familiar with the matter, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. The New York Times first reported that L3Harris notified the administration the talks were off.
The administration’s concerns were outlined in a White House statement last month that said L3Harris’s acquisition of the spyware would “pose a serious counterintelligence and security risk to U.S. personnel and systems,” and noted the spyware — named Pegasus — had “also been misused around the world to enable human rights abuses, including to target journalists, human rights activists, or others perceived as dissidents and critics.”
The breakdown of talks means the American defense contractor would no longer seek control of one of the world’s most sophisticated and controversial hacking tools. This story was jointly reported by The Washington Post, the Guardian and Haaretz.
The Biden administration last fall placed NSO Group on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, limiting its ability to use American technology. The move came after several U.S. agencies determined its spyware had been used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” government officials, activists, journalists, academics and embassy workers around the world.
The counterintelligence concerns arose from what U.S. officials say is NSO Group’s close relationship with the Israeli government. Israel’s Defense Ministry must sign off on all the firm’s contracts. Israel, while a close partner of the United States, is not among the circle of intelligence allies known as the Five Eyes, which includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. One of the unresolved questions during NSO and L3Harris’ discussions has been whether the Israeli government would be able to use NSO’s surveillance technology.
The administration’s concerns, the U.S. official said, were “informed by an intelligence community analysis of the potential impacts” of L3Harris acquiring the Israeli spyware. U.S. spy agencies conducted the analysis after learning L3Harris was interested in such a deal.
A second person familiar with the talks said that “the moment there was … definitive pushback” from the U.S. government, “there was a view [within L3Harris leadership] that there was no way the company was moving forward with this.” In other words, the person said, “If the [U.S.] government is not aligned, there is no way for L3 to be aligned.''
The New York Times on Sunday, citing five people familiar with the discussions, reported that L3Harris’s representatives told the Israeli officials that U.S. intelligence agencies supported the acquisition as long as certain conditions were met. The conditions included allowing NSO’s cache of “zero days” — software vulnerabilities that allow Pegasus to hack cellphones — as well as Pegasus source code to be sold to Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Times reported.
“We are unaware of any indications of support or involvement from anyone in a decision-making, policymaking or senior role,” said the U.S. official. “The U.S. Government was not involved in and did not support or attempt to facilitate any reported potential transaction involving a foreign commercial surveillance software company on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List. In fact, the intelligence community expressed concerns after learning about the possibility of the sale, which informed the administration’s concerns.” | 2022-07-11T00:37:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | L3Harris drops bid for NSO spyware following U.S. concerns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/nso-spyware-l3harris-talks-ended/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/10/nso-spyware-l3harris-talks-ended/ |
Biden weighs declaring health emergency for abortion access
Biden weighs declaring emergency on abortion
President Biden said Sunday he is considering declaring a public health emergency to free up federal resources to promote abortion access even though the White House has said it doesn’t seem like “a great option.”
“I don’t have the authority to say that we’re going to reinstate Roe v. Wade as the law of the land,” he said. Biden said that Congress would have to codify a national right to abortion and that for it to have a better chance in the future, voters would have to elect more lawmakers who support abortion access.
Biden said his administration is trying to do a “lot of things to accommodate the rights of women” after the ruling, including considering declaring a public health emergency to free up federal resources. Such a move has been pushed by advocates, but White House officials have questioned its legality and effectiveness and noted it would almost certainly face legal challenges.
Spirit plane towed after brakes ignite
The brakes in the landing gear of Spirit Airlines Flight 383 from Tampa ignited upon landing, officials at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport wrote in a tweet. Atlanta firefighters put out the fire and the plane was towed to the gate for passengers to disembark, airport officials said.
Video posted on social media showed smoke coming from under the plane at the airport.
Scottie Nelms, a passenger on the plane, told Fox 5 that the flight was uneventful until after landing and passengers heard a weird noise from the left side of the plane.
“Nobody knew what it was until we stopped completely in the middle of the landing strip,” Nelms said. “We saw a flame coming from the engine and people and myself started freaking out.”
Republicans fire state party chairman
The race to replace Gov. Pete Ricketts (R), who couldn’t run because of term limits, became more heated after eight young women accused Herbster of groping them. Herbster denied the allegations and has refused to endorse Pillen.
The divisions within the party were exacerbated in the days before the convention after the party refused to issue credentials to six activists who had been critical of Pillen or Ricketts.
Welch, who led the party for eight years, said many in the party seemed to believe the state GOP sided with Pillen during the primary, but he maintained that the party remained neutral, even though Ricketts spent aggressively to support Pillen.
Later, the delegates voted in favor of a resolution calling for election ballots to be counted by hand under video surveillance.
5 wounded in Coney Island boardwalk shooting: A shooter unleashed a hail of bullets on Brooklyn's Coney Island boardwalk early Sunday morning, wounding five people, one of them critically, police said. The attacker opened fire on a crowd standing on the boardwalk about 2 a.m., police said. Police recovered 28 shell casings, a New York Police Department spokesman said. One victim, a 31-year-old man, was in critical condition, shot in the back. A second man, 19, suffered a gunshot to his left leg. Two women, ages 27 and 26, were shot in the left leg, and a 36-year-old man shot in the chin. Police were looking for the shooter Sunday. | 2022-07-11T00:37:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden weighs declaring health emergency for abortion access - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/biden-weighs-declaring-health-emergency-for-abortion-access/2022/07/10/cb616c0e-ff33-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/biden-weighs-declaring-health-emergency-for-abortion-access/2022/07/10/cb616c0e-ff33-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html |
The decision would appease some Democrats urging such a move, but others in his administration have said it’s an unnecessary step
President Biden stops to talk to reporters during a bike ride in Rehoboth Beach, Del., on July 10. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
But the White House has not ruled out making such a declaration, as Biden hinted at on Sunday.
“That’s something I’ve asked the … medical people in the administration to look at, whether … I have the authority to do that and what impact that would have,” he said when asked about the declaration.
Biden also said that he had not yet made any decision on whether to cut some of the tariffs on Chinese goods.
At the start of the brief exchange with reporters, the president joked about the last time he was on his bike near his beach house here. In that instance, as he pulled over near reporters and a gathered crowd, he toppled over when he couldn’t get his foot out of a toe cage.
This time, his approach was smoother.
“I want you to know an important thing,” he said with a smile. “I took off the clamps.” | 2022-07-11T00:37:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden says he’s weighing calls for public health emergency on abortion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/10/biden-says-hes-weighing-calls-public-health-emergency-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/10/biden-says-hes-weighing-calls-public-health-emergency-abortion/ |
Taj Gibson averaged 4.4 points and 4.4 rebounds for the Knicks last season. (Nam Y. Huh/AP)
LAS VEGAS — With Thomas Bryant heading back to the Los Angeles Lakers, the Washington Wizards plan to fill the hole in their frontcourt with Taj Gibson. The 37-year-old landed a one-year contract with Washington after being let go by the New York Knicks, according to a Sunday tweet from his agency, Priority Sports.
Representatives from the Wizards — many of whom were sitting courtside for the team’s Summer League game against the Phoenix Suns — declined to comment because Gibson is traveling and had not yet signed the deal. The Athletic first reported the move.
Gibson’s contract falls in line with Washington’s complementary additions to Bradley Beal’s five-year, $251 million deal this offseason. The Wizards are expected to bring in the 6-foot-9 Gibson using the minimum salary exception, meaning only about $1.8 million of Gibson’s approximately $2.9 million salary will count against the salary cap. For that, the Wizards get a knowledgeable big man to slot behind Kristaps Porzingis and Daniel Gafford.
Gafford, a fourth-year center, may benefit from Gibson’s experience the most. Gafford long has focused on consistency and the mental aspect of the game as areas where he would like to improve; Gibson is heading into his 14th year in the NBA after Chicago drafted him 26th in 2009. He has played for the Bulls, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Knicks; he averaged 4.4 points and 4.4 rebounds in 18.2 minutes for New York last season.
He joins point guard Monte Morris, wing Will Barton and guard Delon Wright as the Wizards’ offseason acquisitions. The team plans to introduce its other three newcomers at news conferences this week.
Summer league win
Vernon Carey Jr. had 15 points and 11 rebounds to help the Wizards roll to a 97-72 victory over the Suns.
Jaime Echenique added 12 points and Tyler Hall and first-round pick Johnny Davis contributed 11 points apiece for the Wizards. Echenique pulled down six rebounds, and Devon Dotson finished with a game-high six assists. | 2022-07-11T02:08:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taj Gibson to sign with Washington Wizards - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/taj-gibson-washington-wizards/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/taj-gibson-washington-wizards/ |
Wayne Rooney is in line to return to D.C. United. (Steve Luciano/AP)
Wayne Rooney returned to Washington on Sunday night to become head coach of D.C. United, the MLS team he starred for in 2018 and 2019.
Rooney and United agreed to terms and are expected to finalize a multiyear deal in the next few days, people in the organization said.
The former Manchester United and English national team star flew into Dulles International Airport on Sunday night and was greeted by two D.C. United staff members.
In a brief interview before being driven away, the 36-year-old said he has a “few things to sort out” with the contract but was looking forward to the “challenge” of coaching United, which lost Friday at Philadelphia, 7-0, tying an MLS record for scoring margin. D.C. is 5-10-2 for 17 points, tied for the fewest in the 28-team league.
Team officials said they did not want to comment.
Once the deal is completed, Rooney will replace interim coach Chad Ashton, who replaced Hernán Losada early in the season. Ashton will continue to guide the team as Rooney awaits his work permit, then return to an assistant’s job. Until he receives the permit, Rooney will serve as a consultant.
United is prepared to pay him more than $1 million per year, a person close to the situation said. That would be a club record for a coach.
Rooney will bring an assistant with him from English circles, that person said, and attempt to persuade players he knows to sign with United during the transfer window, which is open until Aug. 4. Among the targets: Uruguayan forward Luis Suárez, the 35-year-old former Liverpool, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid star who is a free agent. | 2022-07-11T02:34:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wayne Rooney agrees to coach D.C. United - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/wayne-rooney-dc-united-coach/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/10/wayne-rooney-dc-united-coach/ |
Shinzo Abe’s family to hold private wake for slain former Japan leader
Mourners offer flowers near the entrance of the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo on Sunday, after the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe last week. (Toru Hanai/AFP/Getty Images)
TOKYO — Relatives of Shinzo Abe planned to gather Monday evening in a private wake, traditionally held here the night before a funeral, as investigators examined security issues and the motives of a gunman who assassinated the former Japanese leader three days ago.
Monday’s “tsuya," a ceremony to send off the dead, is expected to be a small event mostly for Abe’s family, held at the Zojo-ji Temple in Tokyo. A private funeral is scheduled for Tuesday, and larger ceremonies are expected at a later date in the capital and in Abe’s hometown in Yamaguchi prefecture. Plans for a state funeral have not been announced.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unscheduled stop to Tokyo on Monday to offer solidarity and condolences to the Japanese people. The top U.S. diplomat rerouted his itinerary after a trip to Thailand and Indonesia, where a meeting of Group of 20 foreign ministers was jolted last week by the news of the deadly shooting in Japan, where gun violence is rare.
Japan reels after assassination of Shinzo Abe
“I’m here because the United States and Japan are more than allies; we are friends. And when one friend is hurting, the other friend shows up,” Blinken told reporters after meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. “I’m really grateful to him for taking time to see us in this incredibly difficult time.”
Around the region, tributes have flowed for Abe. In Taiwan, people offered condolence messages at the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association office in Taipei, while Taiwanese flags at government buildings and public schools flew half-mast. In Australia, the Sydney Opera House was lit up in the colors of the Japanese flag.
South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin on Monday visited a memorial for Abe arranged by the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Other South Korean officials, including President Yoon Suk-yeol and national security adviser Park Sung-han, were expected to pay tribute there.
The man accused of assassinating Abe, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami of Nara, told investigators he believed that the former prime minister was linked to a religious group he blamed for his mother’s financial difficulties.
Japanese media, citing police sources, subsequently reported that Yamagami told investigators that his mother had donated money to the group. Yamagami told investigators that his mother had become bankrupt after the donations, according to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, which cited police sources. He said his family fell apart because of his mother’s obsession with the group, and he targeted Abe “out of resentment,” the newspaper reported.
On Sunday, a Tokyo-based representative of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which in Japan was formerly named the Japan Unification Church, confirmed that the man’s mother is a member. But she had not shown up to recent gatherings, said the representative, who was reached by phone but spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing privacy reasons amid the ongoing criminal investigation.
The official did not have information about the mother’s donations to the church. Police have declined to name the religious organization cited by the suspect. And it was not known whether the mother belonged to other religious organizations.
The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification is expected to hold a news conference later Monday to clarify information about the suspect’s mother, Yoko Yamagami.
The police chief of Nara, where Abe was killed, on Saturday acknowledged security lapses at the political rally that Abe had attended, and pledged to identify and resolve the flaws. | 2022-07-11T03:40:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shinzo Abe's family to hold private wake after assassination - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/japan-shinzo-abe-wake-assassination/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/10/japan-shinzo-abe-wake-assassination/ |
Man killed in double shooting Saturday, police said
Police identify Atlantic Street shooting victim.
The man killed in the double shooting Saturday in Southeast Washington has been identified by police as a 33-year-old D.C. resident.
Amos Jones, of Southeast, was fatally shot just before noon in the 100 block of Atlantic Street, SE, the police said.
A woman was also shot. She was taken to a hospital with wounds that were not life-threatening, the police said. | 2022-07-11T04:05:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man slain in Atlantic Street double shooting, D.C. police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/man-killed-double-shooting-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/man-killed-double-shooting-dc/ |
Two die in Montgomery car crash, officials say
Both were in the same car, according to police.
Two people were killed Sunday night in a car crash in Montgomery County, the county police said.
Both were in one of the two cars that collided in the 15000 block of Georgia Avenue NW about 7:45 p.m., police said.
The two were described only as adults.
The driver of the other vehicle was taken to a hospital with injuries described as not life-threatening. | 2022-07-11T04:06:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two people killed Sunday in Montgomery County car crash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/two-killed-crash-georgia-avenue-montgomery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/10/two-killed-crash-georgia-avenue-montgomery/ |
Hi Carolyn! After having my first baby, I am finding that when people say they “want to help,” what they actually mean is they want to do things that make THEM feel helpful.
— Vegetarian
Vegetarian: Holy crap in a casserole.
If your husband won’t IMMEDIATELY tell them to cut it out, then I need to think of a whole new answer. Besides suggesting you ask them, “Could you be any more hostile?”
Re: Meals: Actually I think this isn’t so bad IF the following applies: it’s not a vegetarian household; the husband enjoys meat meals; and, most importantly, the husband is the one doing all the cooking, this makes cooking easier, and he doesn’t then resent having to make her food. If all that applies, then it’s a little help. Otherwise not.
Anonymous: She was the one cut open to remove the child she spent the majority of the past year growing. It is exactly, precisely, exquisitely, So Bad.
And I make a living finding ways to be sympathetic.
· If your husband doesn’t put a stop to it, then you need to let all three of them — husband, mother-in-law and sister-in-law — know what effect the meat dishes are having on your health, your mental health and your marriage. Sheesh.
· There is nothing hard about making vegetable soup or mac and cheese. They are choosing not to do so. In a way, this is a helpful flag.
Yes, your husband needs to speak up about the meals. It’s incredibly hurtful.
But this is just the beginning. Don’t give her a key. Be proactive about your values as parents. How do you want to raise this little person?
You need to be a team. Then you need to communicate your choices. And there need to be consequences if those are railroaded or ignored. Moving too far away for anyone to drop off a hot dish may be a long-term consideration.
· Give the meal back! Ask them what’s in it, and if there’s meat, hand it back to them.
· I’d like to give a shout-out to my mother-in-law and all the others out there like her. I am a different religion. I was apparently the first vegetarian she encountered. I also don’t see eye to eye with her on politics. And I’ve never felt anything other than welcome. I hope I treat my children’s partners the same way.
· They’re lucky they didn’t get the meals back on their heads. | 2022-07-11T04:45:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: In-laws keep bringing meat dishes to vegetarian new mom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/11/carolyn-hax-vegetarian-new-mom-in-laws-meat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/11/carolyn-hax-vegetarian-new-mom-in-laws-meat/ |
Do you want to be the one to explain “fashionably late” to a small child who is beginning to think that no one will show up and imagining humiliating reasons why?
For that matter, try explaining to Miss Manners what is chic about disregarding the host's instructions. We only allow that 15-minute leeway because all dinner guests always get stuck in traffic. Not because it is cute.
Dear Miss Manners: I attended a reception co-hosted by a friend at the other co-host’s residence. It turned out that the reception, a small social gathering with food and drink, was actually a meet-and-greet function featuring a candidate running for state office. There was a bit of a stump speech and a follow-up Q&A.
Granted, a bait-and-switch gathering — one that is supposedly a party, but is actually about selling something, whether a bowl for leftovers or a candidate for office — is not really a social event. Miss Manners would worry that a letter of thanks would appear to endorse the candidate, if you are not inclined to do so.
A stigma attached to giving paperback books? Uh-oh.
And while you overthink this, your dog is thinking, “Can’t we just get on with the walk?”
And can’t you? Compliments are well-meaning, and should not be parried with quibbles. Miss Manners asks you to say “Thank you” and move on. | 2022-07-11T04:45:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: Should we arrive on time for a kid’s birthday party? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/11/miss-manners-birthday-party-time/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/11/miss-manners-birthday-party-time/ |
The family of Shinzo Abe will hold a wake Monday, a day before a planned funeral. Japan and, indeed, much of the world, remains stunned by the assassination of the former prime minister, which took place at an election rally Friday where Abe was stumping for a local candidate. In the 21st century, such fatal shootings of prominent leaders are exceedingly rare, let alone in a country that registered only one gun-related homicide in 2021.
Police have opened an investigation, and the culprit, who has confessed guilt, said the killing was not politically motivated.
Abe leaves behind a considerable and complex legacy. He is the longest-serving Japanese premier in t-World War II era and a leading proponent of Japan’s economic reform and geopolitical reimagining in the 21st century. His loss was memorialized around the world — flags flew at half-staff from Washington to New Delhi to myriad other capitals.
Here are some ways in which he will be remembered:
The preeminent statesman of the Indo-Pacific
In power for much of the past decade, Abe pushed forward what he and his allies dubbed a “proactive” vision of Japan’s place in Asia and the world. Abe tugged at the 20th-century tethers that restrained Japan under a pacifist constitution and sought to focus attention on the threats posed by a saber-rattling, nuclear-armed North Korea and an expansionist China.
“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 f President Xi Jinping’s regime,” wrote Bloomberg’s Gearoid Reidy.
His energetic global diplomacy — visiting more than 80 nations in his tenure — yielded mixed results. Few world leaders called on Russian President Vladimir Putin as frequently as Abe, but those overtures did little to mend fences between the Kremlin and the influential Group of Seven nations. In 2019, an Abe mission to Iran awkwardly preceded a deadly conflagration over the Persian Gulf.
But Abe did emerge as the linchpin in a new vision of Asian security, one that was loosely strung around cooperation with major regional democracies, with the United States also closely involved. More than previous Japanese leaders, Abe was deeply animated by the perceived need to hedge against China’s rise.
“He knew two things: that the United States’ continued presence is vital for the region and beyond, and that for the United States to stay engaged in the region, Japan is vital,” Tomohiko Taniguchi, a longtime Abe foreign policy adviser and speechwriter, told The Post’s Josh Rogin. “His tactful relationship-building [efforts] both with [Barack] Obama and [Donald] Trump were all based on that realist consideration.”
“Abe was the first world leader to elaborate the vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific,” wrote H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser in the Trump White House. “He encouraged cooperation among the so-called Quad — Japan, the United States, Australia and India — to address emerging challenges in the region.”
“I think he will be remembered as among the most consequential leaders of contemporary Asia,” said Kurt Campbell, the current White House’s top Asia-focused official, to reporters after Abe’s death.
The assertive — and divisive — nationalist
At home and in Japan’s neighborhood, Abe was hardly a figure of consensus and unity. His right-wing nationalism periodically incensed the public and officials in nearby China and South Korea, where Abe’s denial or downplaying of Japanese atrocities during World War II rankled. His unrealized desire to amend the country’s pacifist constitution to change the footing of Japan’s “self-defense” forces was bitterly opposed by adversaries to the left and remains a source of tension within Japanese politics.
“He was the most polarizing Japanese political figure in several generations, a political battler whose commitment to his vision of the country’s future invited the adoration of his friends and the opprobrium of his critics,” wrote Tobias Harris, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
“While many are extolling him as a great leader, his personal vision for rewriting Japanese history, of a glorious past, created a real problem in East Asia which will linger, because it divided not just the different countries’ approach to diplomacy with Japan; it also divided Japanese society even further over how to approach its own responsibility for wartime actions carried out in the name of the emperor,” Alexis Dudden, historian of modern Japan and Korea, told the New Yorker.
The champion of the neoliberal order
His bid to revive Japan’s stagnating economy after the global financial crisis — a set of pro-growth policies dubbed “Abenomics” — achieved mixed results. Company profits surged and unemployment was halved while he was in office, but he still fell short of his stated goals.
“Abe was thwarted; the core ambition — a 2 per cent inflation target — was never met on his watch,” explained a Financial Times editorial. “But the effort was not in vain. Ultra-expansive monetary policy successfully weakened the yen and cut borrowing costs. His ambitions were let down by fiscal squeamishness — in particular, by raising the consumption tax too quickly, which choked off momentum. Japan needed more of Abe’s bold positivity, but benefited from what it got.”
On the world stage, at a time of ascendant populism in the West, Abe emerged as a pillar of the traditional “liberal” order. He was a proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — an ambitious U.S.-led free trade pact — and worked to keep it, or a version of it, alive after it was nixed by President Donald Trump.
The “shadow shogun”
Even out of office, Abe loomed large over Japanese politics and was a commanding figure of an influential faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. His authority and kingmaker role led him to be hailed by some as the “shadow shogun” within the party.
Now, Japan’s politicians are left to navigate an economic and political environment conditioned for years by Abe’s agenda. After the ruling party secured a clear majority in Japan’s upper house of the parliament, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, an Abe ally, finds himself in a “golden period” of three years without elections to complicate his rule. He had set about on a somewhat different course than his predecessor, invoking a “New Capitalism” that sought to tackle economic inequality and was, in some senses, a tacit rebuke of Abe’s neoliberalism.
Abe’s death “may now make it more difficult for Kishida to distance himself from Abe so explicitly,” explained Bloomberg’s Reidy. “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.” | 2022-07-11T04:49:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Four ways to see slain Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s legacy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/shinzo-abe-legacy-japan-remembered/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/shinzo-abe-legacy-japan-remembered/ |
Boris Johnson’s Fall Is Populism’s Latest Act of Self-Destruction
BIARRITZ, FRANCE - AUGUST 25: U.S. President Donald Trump and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrive for a bilateral meeting during the G7 summit on August 25, 2019 in Biarritz, France. The French southwestern seaside resort of Biarritz is hosting the 45th G7 summit from August 24 to 26. High on the agenda will be the climate emergency, the US-China trade war, Britain’s departure from the EU, and emergency talks on the Amazon wildfire crisis. (Photo by Dylan Martinez - Pool/Getty Images) (Photographer: Pool/Getty Images Europe)
Yet for all the local color, this was a British variation on the global story of populism’s dangerous appeal and destructive power. We have seen similar themes play out in almost every corner of the world. A charismatic leader wins power by promising to champion the people against the powerful. He breaks many of the formal rules of politics, starting with sartorial and behavioral codes but also targeting institutional rules, particularly when they involve putting constraints on his power. He frequently achieves remarkable things that convention-bound politicians deemed impossible. But he eventually crashes and burns — the victim not only of personal foibles but also of the logical contradictions inherent in his promises.
Johnson was on the lightweight end of global populism. His attempt to hole up in Number Ten even as his government collapsed was as nothing compared with Donald Trump’s support for the assault on the Capitol on January 6th. Johnson’s most spiteful act was to sack Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, for having the gall to tell him to his face to resign; Trump reportedly cheered on calls for his vice president, Mike Pence, to be hanged!
Bolivia’s Evo Morales tried every means imaginable to extend his time in power from referendums to court actions. Silvio Berlusconi controlled Italy’s three top television channels which provided slavishly favorable coverage of his political career. The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte called for the use of “death squads” against drug gangs. Hungary’s Viktor Orban boasts about creating an “illiberal democracy.” Johnson is a piker by comparison with some of these figures.
Yet he nevertheless did serious damage to his country, damage that is even more striking when you consider that Britain is one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies. He transformed the Conservative Party from a broad church into an ideological clique, expelling 21 Remainers, including Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames, and giving jobs exclusively to Brexiteers, regardless of their abilities or public personas. He tried to remove constitutional constraints on the power of the executive by proroguing Parliament and denouncing both the Supreme Court and the House of Lords as constraints on the “will of the people.” Though Johnson’s days are numbered, his government threatens to break international law by unilaterally withdrawing from the Northern Ireland protocol.
Destruction is part of populism’s DNA, even in its most moderate form. Populism inevitably involves norm-breaking: Rule one of the populist playbook is that you demonize conventional politicians — those identikit suits and meaningless sound bites! — and offer something more “authentic.” Equally inevitably, populism involves disintermediation — populist leaders appeal over the heads of established institutions, particularly political parties, to the people.
Johnson had a rocky career as a party man: Michael Howard, the Conservative leader from 2003 to 2005, sacked him for lying over an affair, and Theresa May was repeatedly on the verge of sacking him as foreign secretary for incompetence and insubordination. Instead, he succeeded by turning himself into a brand — cultivating his messy hair and bumbling mannerisms, appearing on the satirical TV show “Have I Got News for You,” reveling in his scandalous private life and selling himself first as a liberal mayor of London and then as a nationalist Brexiteer. One reason why he was so reluctant to bow to pressure from the party to resign is that he didn’t owe his career to his party but instead to his own mastery of branding.
Populists tend to surround themselves with friends and hangers-on rather than party functionaries: Downing Street insiders have repeatedly compared the prime minister’s office to a court, in which petitioners beg the king to look favorably on their pleas, and, if they can’t get the king’s attention, lobby the queen, Carrie Johnson, who has variously been dubbed Carrie Antoinette and “Princess Nut Nut.”
Populists also make contradictory and un-costed promises that are eventually exposed as guff. Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s right-hand man when he first arrived in Downing Street who stormed out in spectacular circumstances, likens his former boss to a shopping trolley (complete with emoji) that careers all over the place. Johnson didn’t know whether he was a Thatcherite Tory, trying to cut the state, or a big government liberal, trying to provide the just-about-managing with security; in the end, he tried to do both, promising to build 40 new hospitals while also cutting taxes. The hospitals haven’t materialized and the tax-cutting refrain eventually drove his chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to resign, precipitating the final few days of chaos.
When it comes to institutional damage, the prize must go to Trump given that he wreaked his havoc in the world’s oldest liberal democracy, rather than, like Orban or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in countries with checkered pasts. In Britain, the Conservative Party eventually rejected Johnson and his soft populism. In the US, Trumpian populism has eaten the Republican Party from within, just as some wasps will eat their host arachnids from the inside.
But the economic costs of Brexit are mounting. When the government tried to celebrate the sixth anniversary of Brexit on June 23rd, it found itself with nothing to say — Johnson pointed to the “Brexit triumph” of the freedom to put a crown stamp on pint glasses (something the EU had actually never forbidden) and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister of state for Brexit opportunities, was reduced to mouthing vapidities. Though disentangling the effects of Covid-19 from the effects of Brexit is difficult, the Office of Budget Responsibility’s current estimate is that Brexit has, so far, reduced UK GDP by about 1.5% with a further reduction of 2.5% still to come. This would, in turn, translate to about £12 billion less a year in tax revenues, rising to well over £30 billion. The Centre for European Reform estimates that the UK has seen a growth shortfall relative to economically comparable countries of more than 5% since Brexit. That’s a lot of economic damage for one man to have on his conscience.
Could Johnson’s defenestration mark the end of the populist era? Johnson has complained bitterly in private that the premiership has impoverished him, given the number of children he has to support and his wife’s expensive taste in interior design. He will now busy himself making money giving speeches (at which he can excel) and writing books (he was reportedly writing a book on Shakespeare when he became PM). Given his literary skills and extraordinary life, his memoirs are likely to be a page-turner, the very opposite of David Cameron’s soporific “For the Record.” Trump’s chances of making a comeback look slimmer by the day as the House of Representatives’ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol produces yet more toe-curling revelations. The flames of populism are burning a bit less brightly in the emerging world at the moment.
Yet this is more likely to be a pause for populism to regain its breath rather than a full stop. Even if you assume that inflation can be quickly brought under control and a recession averted — heroically optimistic assumptions both — structural forces are on the side of populist politicians. The new media landscape makes it easier for entrepreneurial leaders to get their message across. At the same time, the combination of the outrage-industrial complex (Fox News and its look-alikes) and social media stokes popular anger. The modern economy seems to specialize in producing what might be called disruptive stagnation: disorientating changes in technology combined with stagnant living standards for large groups of people. It’s as if people are being forced to move house over and over again not for a bigger house or a shorter commute but just for the sake of moving — a recipe for mounting discontent whose expression technological innovation makes ever easier.
Culture continues to be dominated by preening elites who think they are not only more clever than the average person but also, thanks to their commitment to diversity and equity, more virtuous. The corporate elite has doubled down on its obsession with cosmopolitan values despite evidence that many regular people find this both irritating and alienating. And the ancient gods of belonging continue to beckon, perhaps even more so as technology and globalization break down traditional communities and promote anomie.
• It Should Be Easier to Get Rid of Presidents, Too: Matthew Yglesias | 2022-07-11T06:42:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boris Johnson’s Fall Is Populism’s Latest Act of Self-Destruction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/boris-johnsons-fall-is-populisms-latest-act-of-self-destruction/2022/07/11/2345ae86-00d7-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/boris-johnsons-fall-is-populisms-latest-act-of-self-destruction/2022/07/11/2345ae86-00d7-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Why US Sees Saudi Arabia Again as Partner, Not Pariah
Analysis by Iain Marlow | Bloomberg
For more than seven decades, despite stark differences on matters such as human rights and the Arab-Israeli conflict, the US and Saudi Arabia maintained a close alliance based on an exchange of security for oil. During Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign he said he’d end the amity, vowing to make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah” over the 2018 murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul. Biden didn’t actually go that far after taking office in 2021, but he did cool relations, notably shunning the de facto Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and releasing a report blaming him for the killing. Now, with Russia’s war in Ukraine causing oil prices -- and thus gasoline costs for US consumers -- to spike, Biden is working to repair ties with the world’s largest crude exporter, which in theory could nudge prices down by ramping up production.
1. What’s the history of US-Saudi ties?
In 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia’s founder King Abdulaziz ibn Saud held a historic meeting aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. They disagreed vehemently about the future of what was then British Mandatory Palestine, with the American supporting Israel’s establishment in part of it and the king opposed to a Jewish state in the Middle East. They nevertheless laid the groundwork for a strategic arrangement whereby the US provided security guarantees to Saudi rulers in exchange for access to the kingdom’s vast oil reserves. Over the years the US complained, but not loudly, about the constraints on civil rights and the unequal treatment of women and minority Shiite Muslims in the kingdom. Ties occasionally veered off course. In 1973, Saudi Arabia led an Arab oil boycott of the US and other countries that supported Israel in that year’s Arab-Israeli war, contributing to a recession in the West. Still, the relationship endured. It was deepened by Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, which overthrew a US-backed monarch in a country that rivals Saudi Arabia for regional dominance, and by Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which borders Saudi Arabia.
2. Why did things sour between the US and Saudi Arabia?
The Sept. 11 attacks on the US, which were masterminded and mostly orchestrated by Saudi nationals, introduced a bitter note in 2001. More than that, a broader, structural change undermined the fundamentals of the relationship in recent years: The shale boom has made America the world’s largest producer of oil and thus less reliant on imports from the Middle East. At the same time, Crown Prince Mohammed has abandoned the kingdom’s usual, cautious foreign policy in favor of an assertiveness that’s made Saudi Arabia a vexing ally for the US. He launched a disruptive blockade of Qatar, which hosts the largest US military base in the region, and a devastating intervention in Yemen’s civil war. US intelligence assessed that he ordered the 2018 operation that ended with the murder of Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen who was a US resident and a Washington Post contributor. The crown prince has denied any involvement in the killing while accepting symbolic responsibility for it as the country’s unofficial ruler. Then-US President Donald Trump embraced Saudi Arabia, making it the first place he visited overseas after taking office in 2017. But relations cooled quickly with Biden in office.
3. What did Biden do?
Early on in his presidency, Biden ended US support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive operations in Yemen, including related weapons transfers. The Saudi bombing campaign, aimed at dislodging Iran-backed Houthi rebels who took over Yemen’s capital and surrounding areas in 2014, has been widely criticized for disproportionately affecting civilians. Biden preserved assistance aimed at helping defend Saudi territory from Houthi attacks. Unlike Trump, who met and spoke directly with Prince Mohammed, Biden shunned him. The White House said it was more appropriate for the president to deal with his counterpart, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and relegated the crown prince, who is also the defense minister, to liaise with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. This was seen in the kingdom as insulting to the man who already effectively rules the country and will almost certainly become its next king. In an op-ed on July 9, Biden said his goal has been “to reorient -- but not rupture” relations with Saudi Arabia.
4. Why is Biden reversing course with the Saudis now?
Biden is under pressure to lower the cost of gasoline to avoid voters punishing his Democratic Party in congressional and state elections in November. Oil prices were already rising before the war in Ukraine, as consumption, which had slowed during the worst of the pandemic, revived, outstripping the growth in crude supplies. Then the US and its allies hit Russia, the source of 10% of the world’s oil, with a wave of sanctions, reducing its exports and notching prices up further. In theory, US shale producers could pump more oil, but they are riding the brakes instead, having changed their business models to focus on generating profits for investors rather than increasing production. In a symbol of goodwill, Saudi Arabia and the alliance of oil producers it leads agreed in June to pump a little extra.
5. Could the Saudis do more to bring prices down?
Possibly, but not a lot. Saudi Arabia and its neighbor, the United Arab Emirates -- effectively the only two producers with significant spare capacity -- hold just under 3 million barrels a day of idle output between them, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s about 3% of demand. They would need to deploy all of that -- pumping on a sustained basis at levels rarely if ever seen before -- to offset the losses the IEA expects Russia to suffer in coming months as global sanctions take effect. In any case, additional supplies of crude oil would not address what is arguably a more pressing problem: a shortage of oil refining capacity to make gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Years of plant closures provoked by the pandemic have created a bottleneck.
6. What does Saudi Arabia want from Biden?
Biden’s plan to visit the kingdom this week and to meet the crown prince goes a long way toward meeting Saudi Arabia’s desire for recognition as a major US partner. The Saudis also want a road map for many more decades of US foreign investment and cooperation in a range of sectors. Officials will probably ask for additional military hardware, such as more Patriot anti-missile interceptors to fend off attacks from the Houthis in Yemen and, potentially, Iran. They want diplomatic support to turn a fragile truce in that war into a long-lasting peace. And they seek greater assurances on regional security, particularly given fears that a nuclear-armed Iran is on the horizon. | 2022-07-11T06:42:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why US Sees Saudi Arabia Again as Partner, Not Pariah - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-us-sees-saudi-arabia-again-as-partner-not-pariah/2022/07/11/477c4360-00db-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-us-sees-saudi-arabia-again-as-partner-not-pariah/2022/07/11/477c4360-00db-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
The president on May 6 declared a public emergency for the second time in two months, giving him sweeping powers to suspend laws, detain people and seize property. A nationwide curfew was imposed and local media reported the army was called out in Colombo as some protests turned violent. Two months later, after protesters stormed the president’s official seaside residence, Parliament Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena announced that Rajapaksa would step down. Ranil Wickremesinghe, who only became prime minister in May after Rajapaksa’s brother Mahinda resigned, also said he would leave. | 2022-07-11T06:42:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Sri Lanka Landed in a Political and Economic Crisis and What It Means - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-sri-lanka-landed-in-a-political-and-economic-crisis-and-what-it-means/2022/07/11/78ad3c9c-00df-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-sri-lanka-landed-in-a-political-and-economic-crisis-and-what-it-means/2022/07/11/78ad3c9c-00df-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Netanyahu Doesn’t Need Trump Anymore. He Should Say So.
WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 15: Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords on the South Lawn of the White House on September 15, 2020 in Washington, DC. Witnessed by President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu signed a peace deal with the UAE and a declaration of intent to make peace with Bahrain. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) (Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images North America)
“Nobody shoots at Santa Claus” is a timeless political maxim attributed to Al Smith, a critic of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal generosity to voters.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like most Jews, wasn’t raised to believe in Santa Claus. Then he met Donald Trump and started a friendship that served him well — until it didn’t.
To Bibi, the American president was a department store Santa who actually owned the emporium. He showered Israel with dazzling gifts: Recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a US embassy in Jerusalem, the US-brokered diplomatic deal with Arab nations known as the Abraham Accords, and a Palestinian peace plan tailored to Bibi’s specifications. Trump even tore up the Iranian nuclear deal struck by his predecessor, an agreement that Israel had strenuously opposed.
At the time, the friendship with Trump was a campaign asset for Bibi. He festooned the country with giant billboards featuring him in a warm handshake with the leader of the free world. The caption: “In a Different League.” (There also were billboards with Putin; in those days, he was still an asset among Russian-Israeli voters).
As we now know, Trump did no such thing. He had no intention of accepting the election results, and he counted on his close friends, including Bibi, for support. In this he misread Netanyahu. Bibi is capable of playing hardball politics but he plays by the rules, and he wasn’t about to become an enabler of an American coup d’état.
When Trump realized this, he took it as an act of lèse-majesté. In an interview with Israeli author Barak Ravid, the former US president expressed this resentment in Trumpian language. “F***k Bibi,” he said. Netanyahu responded to this with a mild reminder that his job, as prime minister, required him to be on good terms (if possible) with every US administration.
For a while Trump maintained silence on the subject of his erstwhile best friend. But recently he has taken a step back from the vendetta. Israel has a new election, scheduled for Nov. 1. Netanyahu is an early favorite, and evidently Trump wants a reconciliation. “I was disappointed by [Bibi] in certain ways but overall, I liked him,” he told conservative news outlet Newsmax last week. “If he ran, I would certainly give it some thought. We’ll see what happens. I don’t know what will happen. He disappointed me in certain ways but he also did a very good job in other ways.”
This is an endorsement that Netanyahu doesn’t need and shouldn’t accept. Trump can do him no harm, and no good, in the upcoming Israeli election. If Bibi, who is enmeshed in a drawn-out corruption trial, is elected prime minister again, he won’t want to be tarred in Washington as a friend of the fiend who tried to overthrow American democracy.
President Biden is expected in Jerusalem this week. He will get an extra warm welcome from the caretaker prime minister (and candidate), Yair Lapid. He and Biden are cut from the same pragmatic, centrist cloth. If Lapid were an American, he would be a senator from Colorado. They should get along fine.
The Biden-Netanyahu meeting could be an opportunity for Bibi. Trump is rumored to be on the verge of announcing another presidential run. He may want Bibi’s support, but he shouldn’t get it.
How? After their meeting this week, Bibi should publicly praise Biden. He can let it be known that despite his gratitude toward Trump, Israel has many ardent friends in Washington — including Republicans such as Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton and Mike Pence — all of whom happen to be presidential aspirants. It would make headlines, distance Bibi from Trump and give timid Republicans a chance to see that it is actually possible to shoot at Santa Claus.
• Trump’s Final Scene Didn’t Go According to Script: Timothy L. O’Brien | 2022-07-11T09:45:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Netanyahu Doesn’t Need Trump Anymore. He Should Say So. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/netanyahudoesnt-need-trump-anymore-he-should-say-so/2022/07/11/ab19c2e0-00f8-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/netanyahudoesnt-need-trump-anymore-he-should-say-so/2022/07/11/ab19c2e0-00f8-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
For the second straight year, Shohei Ohtani is a two-way all-star
Shohei Ohtani, the Angels' two-way sensation, will appear in next week's All-Star Game as a designated hitter and pitcher for the American League. (Julio Cortez/AP)
Los Angeles Angels phenom Shohei Ohtani made history last year by becoming the first player named an all-star as both a pitcher and a hitter. Now he’s making that feat the norm.
Ohtani was again selected as an American League representative in both roles for this year’s All-Star Game, set for July 19 at Dodger Stadium. Fans voted Friday for the 28-year-old to start at designated hitter, and MLB selected him Sunday as a pitcher.
“I think it’s awesome,” Angels interim manager Phil Nevin told reporters in Baltimore on Sunday. “This game is about the big stage and everybody being able to see the best players in our game, and he certainly is on both sides of the ball. Seeing him get an inning on the mound and then watching him hit, I think that’s what all fans want to see.
The unanimous AL MVP last year, Ohtani is enjoying another dominant season. The Japanese star, who throws with his right arm and bats left-handed, is 8-4 with a 2.44 ERA, 111 strikeouts and 20 walks in 81 innings over 14 starts.
Ohtani has won his past five starts while recording an 0.27 ERA. He is also one of six pitchers since 1913 to go 4-0 with no earned runs and at least 40 strikeouts in a four-start span. At the plate, Ohtani has hit .299 with eight home runs and 22 RBI in his past 27 games.
In the Angels’ 5-2 win over the Miami Marlins on Wednesday, Ohtani became the first player to strike out 10 batters, drive in two runs and steal a base in the same game since the RBI became an official statistic in 1920, per ESPN. Five of the Angels’ 11 wins since June 3 have come with Ohtani on the mound.
Ohtani has yet to decide if he’ll participate in the Home Run Derby on July 18. It’s also unclear whether he’ll be the AL’s starting pitcher; Tampa Bay Rays left-hander Shane McClanahan and Houston Astros right-hander Justin Verlander also will contend for that role.
In the first stage of the all-star fan voting process for hitters, Ohtani finished second to Astros designated hitter Yordan Alvarez. When the players went head-to-head in the second stage, Ohtani received the most votes to earn the starting nod.
Ohtani is the second Japanese player to start multiple All-Star Games, following 10-time all-star Ichiro Suzuki.
“It’s a huge honor, and I would like to give it my best for all the people that voted and support me,” Ohtani said in a statement.
After injuries limited Ohtani in his first three MLB seasons, he has played all but three of the Angels’ 87 games this year.
“I’m never worried about anything he’s going to do physically,” Nevin said. “He’s very mindful of what is good and bad for his body.” | 2022-07-11T09:45:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shohei Ohtani earns All-Star Game nods as hitter and pitcher - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/11/shohei-ohtani-all-star-game/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/11/shohei-ohtani-all-star-game/ |
Kyrgios wore a red cap to Wimbledon. Here’s why that’s controversial.
Throughout Sunday’s three-hour Wimbledon final, Nick Kyrgios was on his best behavior — at least when it came to the tennis tournament’s notoriously strict dress code. Then it came time to accept his trophy.
The Duchess of Cambridge, who handed Kyrgios his runner-up trophy, did not noticeably react to Kyrgios’s faux pas. Other observers, however, were astonished — especially because Kyrgios had gotten flak after donning the red cap earlier in the tournament.
One journalist called the move Kyrgios’s “final act of defiance.” Others pointed out that Kyrgios might get fined. Wimbledon officials did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
The rule that players wear white on the tennis court dates to the tournament’s beginning, in 1877. At that time, it was generally believed that sweating was improper and that white clothing would either curb a player’s perspiration or hide it, Time reported. Yet as times have changed, the dress code at Wimbledon has not eased up. In fact, it has become stricter, with tournament officials even checking the color of players’ underwear during matches.
Now, the rule is that players must wear “suitable tennis attire that is almost entirely white … from the point at which the player enters the court surround.” Acceptable clothing “does not include off white or cream,” and colored trim around the neckline or sleeves “must be no wider than one centimetre.” There are other highly specific guidelines, although some players this year were allowed to wear colors supporting Ukraine.
Far from its sweat-phobic origins, Wimbledon has more recently embraced the all-white rule as a “great leveler” and a way for “letting the tennis and the players stand out,” rather than their clothing.
But even the game’s finest champions have challenged the rule. Roger Federer, an eight-time Wimbledon winner, said in 2014 that a dramatic tightening of the dress code that year was “too strict,” the New York Times reported. A year earlier, Federer was forced to change his shoes after he wore a pair with orange soles during his first-round match, according to the Associated Press.
Before winning Wimbledon in 1992, American Andre Agassi had boycotted the tournament, eschewing its traditionalism and dress code. “Why must I wear white? I don’t want to wear white,” Agassi wrote in his 2009 memoir. “Why should it matter to these people what I wear?”
This year, protesters showed up at the tournament’s main gates, demanding that organizers change the dress code because female players may feel anxiety wearing all-white clothing when they’re menstruating, according to the Guardian. The demonstrators wore white tops and red shorts — outfits modeled after Tatiana Golovin, a French player who in 2007 got away with wearing bright red knickers on the Wimbledon grass.
Though Kyrgios is not alone in rejecting Wimbledon’s dress code, he has rankled observers in other ways. He was fined $10,000 in late June for spitting toward a spectator who Kyrgios said was heckling him. During his match with Djokovic on Sunday, Kyrgios hounded the chair umpire to remove a distracting spectator who he said looked to have had “700 drinks,” and he was fined about $3,800 for audibly cursing during the match, Britain’s Sun newspaper reported.
“I just like wearing my Jordans,” Kyrgios said. | 2022-07-11T10:02:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nick Kyrgios wears red cap to Wimbledon, defying all-white dress code - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/11/nick-kyrgios-red-cap/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/11/nick-kyrgios-red-cap/ |
Tony Philiou with his family and several employees at his McDonald's restaurant in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. When he closed the restaurant for three months amid renovations, he continued to pay all 90 employees their regular wages. (Courtesy of Mary Powers)
When Tony Philiou started working at McDonald’s in 1962, he was paid 90 cents an hour to slice cheese. He slowly took on more responsibility and became a supervisor, then manager — until he bought the franchise.
From the start, “I had pride in what I was doing,” said Philiou, 90, who originally took a part-time job at a McDonald’s in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, as a second source of income when he was 30.
At the time, he was newly married with two young children. Although he had a full-time job at an auto parts factory, he had recently bought a house that required renovations. He needed extra money.
He expected his McDonald’s job to be a short-term gig, but 60 years later, he’s still going strong — with no intention of retiring. Philiou continued to work simultaneously at the factory for 16 years, before taking the plunge and pivoting to McDonald’s full-time. There, he had strong mentors who helped him climb the ladder, he said, and now he hopes to do the same for his staff.
He knows restaurants are a challenging business, and to him, ensuring employees are properly paid is a key to success. That’s why, when his restaurant closed for renovations for just over three months in late March, Philiou continued paying all 90 employees their regular wages.
“How are these people going to make it without paychecks?” Philiou asked himself once the renovation plans were finalized. He made a bold financial decision: “We’re going to pay everybody the full thing.”
Paying employees while the restaurant was closed, “was a big investment,” said Philiou, who visits the store several times a day to schmooze with staff and customers and help with whatever is needed. “We depleted the account a little bit, but they helped make the account.”
Kocsis started working under Philiou in 1982, while he was saving up for college. He went to Kent State and continued working at the McDonald’s during spring breaks and summer vacations. When Kocsis graduated with a degree in business management, Philiou encouraged him to carry on his career at the franchise as a supervisor. Kocsis has been working there ever since.
“Our turnover is very low compared with other quick-service restaurants,” said Kocsis. “I think it’s because they enjoy working here, and they’re treated with respect. They feel good working here, so they want to stay.”
That’s true for Mary Conti, 78, who started out at the restaurant in 1977 as a crew person. She never left — and has no foreseeable plans to. Conti, now a manager, took the job when her three children were old enough to go to school.
“I’ve been working here through their education, and put a couple of them into college,” she said. Over the years, Conti said, she has received countless “special perks” from Philiou, who has sent her on several trips — including a cruise — to reward her for her hard work.
“Tony has been very, very good to me and my family, and the whole crew,” said Conti, who is working four days a week and “enjoying partial retirement.”
“This is a second family for us over here,” said Mary Powers, 64, who owns a McDonald’s franchise with her husband four miles away in Chesterland. “Anything we can do to show them how much we appreciate them, we do.”
Philiou bought the franchise in 1978. He has been married to his wife, Effie, for 68 years, and they have three daughters, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Over the course of his career, he owned and then sold six other locations. He plans weekly pizza parties for his staff, as well as regular celebrations and events. He also likes to celebrate successes — no matter how small. | 2022-07-11T10:11:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | His McDonald’s closed for months due to renovations. He kept paying the staff. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/11/tony-philiou-mcdonalds-renovation-payroll/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/11/tony-philiou-mcdonalds-renovation-payroll/ |
Hyattsville man accused of killing sister
(Prince George's County Police)
A 34-year-old man has been arrested and charged with allegedly stabbing to death his sister, Prince George’s County police say.
The killing occurred around 4:50 p.m. Thursday in the 2000 block of Oglethorpe Street just off Queens Chapel Road in the unincorporated area of Hyattsville.
Police said in a statement that they received a call for “unknown trouble” and when officers arrived they found Nashanna Belnavis, 38, of Hyattsville, unresponsive inside an apartment. She had “trauma to the body,” police said, and was pronounced dead on the scene.
Police said an initial investigation found that she was fatally stabbed by her brother, Timothy Edwards, also of Hyattsville. He’s charged with first- and second-degree murder and other assault charges. Edwards is being held on no bond; it was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer. | 2022-07-11T11:07:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Timothy Edwards accused of killing sister in Hyattsville, Md., area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/11/hyattsville-murder-sister/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/11/hyattsville-murder-sister/ |
Josh Bell has been the Nationals' most consistent hitter this season. (Brett Davis/Getty Images)
Every summer, the announcement of MLB’s All-Star Game rosters brings a flood of chatter about who didn’t make the cut. This season, you could make a strong case for the Washington Nationals’ Josh Bell, who stood out in a crowded field at first base in the National League.
“I think I need about 15 homers before the break to catch up with those guys,” Bell said. “It’s definitely a tough position, especially with [the St. Louis Cardinals’ Paul] Goldschmidt breaking records; [the New York Mets’ Pete] Alonso has double the RBI as me. … It’s definitely fun being in the conversation.”
When the rosters were unveiled Sunday, Goldschmidt and Alonso were joined on the NL roster by C.J. Cron of the Colorado Rockies, his team’s lone selection. Star outfielder Juan Soto was the Nationals’ only representative. Does he think Bell should be joining him July 19 at Dodger Stadium?
“Yeah, definitely,” Soto said. “He’s putting up the numbers. He has everything to be an all-star. Why not?”
How about hitting coach Darnell Coles?
“I’ll be highly disappointed if he’s not,” Coles said Saturday.
Bell still could make the All-Star Game as an injury replacement, and there’s no question that the 29-year-old has been the Nationals’ most consistent hitter. The switch hitter leads the team in batting average (.304), hits (96) and doubles (19), and he’s second among NL first basemen in batting average and on-base percentage (.386).
When he looks at stats to see how he stacks up against his peers, Bell said he typically considers on-base-plus-slugging percentage, where he checks in at .877. He’s fourth among NL first basemen — trailing the three NL all-stars and just a tick behind Alonso (.881).
Bell got off to a slow start last year after testing positive for the coronavirus, then found his rhythm toward the end of the season. Entering this year, he wanted to do a better job of taking advantage of runners in scoring position.
In April, Bell felt he hit too many double play balls with men on, a result of thinking too much about moving runners over instead of driving them in. Bell finished the month hitting .365, but 55 percent of the balls he hit were grounders, many of them into the shift. So he changed his approach.
“Sometimes I get caught up in, ‘Just get the runner over,’ ” he said. “But if I can get balls on a line, that’s when the RBIs come. And that’s when the pressure’s off Nelson [Cruz] behind me.”
In June, Bell found the right balance: His groundball percentage dropped to 46.8 percent, and his power numbers increased. He had 16 extra-base hits in June after totaling 12 in the first two months.
Coles said Bell is extremely routine-oriented, which allows him to make adjustments to his swing midseason. But Coles didn’t want Bell to change his swing too much.
“Sometimes what can end up happening is you can overthink things or you can add things that don’t necessarily need to be there,” he said. “He’s been really good about not doing that. And my job is to make sure that he doesn’t take it to a point where [the change] doesn’t make sense.”
Early in his career, no matter which side of the plate he was batting from, Bell’s stances and swings were similar. That changed in 2018 after a conversation with Pittsburgh Pirates teammate David Freese. Freese told Bell that a former Cardinals teammate, Lance Berkman, viewed himself as a different hitter from each side of the plate.
Moving forward, Bell approached the plate with two different swings — and he ended up a 2019 all-star with the Pirates. His right side is his natural one, so his knees are bent and he can let loose with a short, compact swing. The left-handed swing feels less natural: He stands up straight so he can load and generate more power. He focuses on being short with his right hand — his dominant hand — so he can generate a quick swing.
Bell’s preparation and swing adjustments have produced results. But with the numbers he has put together, Bell might not be around much longer, given the Aug. 2 trade deadline and his ability to reach free agency in the offseason. Still, he has made the most of this season — even if he doesn’t make it to the All-Star Game.
“We always work our tails off in the offseason. ... This time last year, I was hitting .224 — something like that,” Bell said. “So for me to be able to kind of bounce back after last season, that slow start, and have a strong one, it’s just fueling the fire and knowing that what I’m doing is working.” | 2022-07-11T11:07:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Josh Bell, all-star snub, has been the Nationals' best hitter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/11/josh-bell-all-star-game-nationals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/11/josh-bell-all-star-game-nationals/ |
Installing water sensors and other modern home water sensing devices is a good idea. (Dreamstime/TNS)
Q: I just finished your article on water sensors and was disappointed you did not mention whole house water shut-off valves. I recently experienced water damage that required 90 percent of my wood floors to be replaced at an insured cost of about $55,000.
My next move is to have installed a Moen Flo water shut-off valve (top rated by Consumer Reports) along with water sensors. The cost and installation will be around $1,000. And that was what my deductible was on my homeowners insurance policy.
A: We’re so sorry that you had that level of water damage. Spending $55,000 on new flooring is a huge amount of money, even if you only paid the $1,000 deductible. On top of that, we’re sure replacing the floors caused extraordinary pain and disruption to your life.
But this is why we think installing water sensors and other modern home water sensing devices is a good idea. We didn’t mention a whole house water shut-off in the column you saw because we wrote about it a few years back. We do like them and we should have linked to the former column.
More Matters: New high-tech systems can detect water leaks in your home
We installed the Moen Flo water shut-off system and other water sensors around our home. The Moen Flo water shut-off takes care of the home in case there is a broken pipe or other catastrophic leak in the home. The water sensors take care of other water issues that can come up around sump pumps and ejector pump pits, around sinks and water filters, and even around water heaters, whole home humidifiers and air conditioners.
They’re good products, but they can take time to work as advertised. When you install a whole house water shut-off valve, you are likely to have an adjustment period in which you’ll have to tweak the system. We had around a six-month adjustment period. During that time, the system shut off the water to the home for odd reasons. In some instances, the garden sprinklers caused the system to shut the water off. In others, a toilet that wasn’t operating right and kept running also shut the water off. These unexpected shut-offs were quite annoying.
There were times we worried whether the water would be on when we woke up in the morning. Over time, the software has gotten better and we were able to adjust the sensitivity of the system so that we rarely remember the system is on and working.
As you’re installing your system, whichever one you choose, recognize that the software may need to learn your usage patterns. Over time, the system gets to know the water usage for the home, including lawn watering, laundry and dish washing. If you end up using a whole lot of water for something new, know that the system may send you a notification that your water will get turned off in a few minutes. The system will send you emails and even call your cellphone, but if you’re like us and leave your cellphones charging in a room other than where you sleep, you might miss the call and end up with the water shut off.
Even with these minor annoyances, we still feel that the cost of the system is worthwhile. If you own a vacation home, we think it’s a must-have (along with other remote monitoring software). If you’re not at the vacation property, you should have almost no water usage.
And, if you are consuming water, and it isn’t for a humidifier, you may have a leak and should investigate (or send someone to inspect the property, if it isn’t easily accessible). In any event, you can remotely shut off the water to the home and not worry about flooding your vacation home while you’re away.
All of these remote monitoring devices connect to the internet, so if the internet goes down, the system may go down. And, at some point, you might get fed up with monitoring so many disconnected devices and look for something that will provide more complete monitoring of your property.
© 2022 Ilyce R. Glink and Samuel J. Tamkin. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. | 2022-07-11T11:16:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Homeowner recommends whole house water shut-off valves - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/11/homeowner-recommends-whole-house-water-shut-off-valves/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/11/homeowner-recommends-whole-house-water-shut-off-valves/ |
The company enticed drivers in the developing nation with lucrative subsidies, then undermined these workers with policies that made their jobs more perilous, documents in the newly unearthed Uber Files show
By Douglas MacMillan
(Lucy Naland/Washington Post illustration; Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post; Morne De Klerk/Getty; Uber screenshots; iStock)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — He had been a cop, a factory worker and a taxi driver, but at 44, Shaun Cupido had yet to find a path to prosperity. Murderous gangs ruled Manenberg, the apartheid-built township where he had spent his whole life, and he was sick of having to remind his three children to lie down and cover their heads every time they heard the pop of bullets.
Then, in 2017, Cupido found a job he thought might finally change his fortunes. Uber promised to let South Africans make their own hours and be their own bosses. He rented a car, began ferrying tourists around Cape Town’s waterfront shopping districts and cliffside resorts, and for a while, the money was good. He started to dream of building his own business operating a fleet of cars for the ride-hailing company.
But little by little, he said, Uber made changes to its service that lowered his pay and raised his risks. The company recruited new drivers to the city, flooding the streets with competitors and cutting Cupido’s daily number of customers in half. Trying to make up the difference, he logged 12-hour days and began driving in the sprawling slums of the Cape Flats, where many drivers were afraid to go.
“Hustling,” as he called it, grew even riskier after Uber began letting passengers in South Africa pay in cash as part of an effort to boost ridership. Cupido heard about drivers getting robbed and attacked, but he trusted his instincts for danger.
The Uber Files is a rare look inside years of Uber’s internal deliberations made possible by more than 124,000 records that were obtained by the Guardian and shared with more than 40 news organizations, including The Washington Post. The joint investigation, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, provides insights into how the company viewed its drivers.
Emails, presentations and text messages from 2013 to 2017 show Uber officials, led by then-chief executive Travis Kalanick, carrying out a business plan that proved to gradually undermine their own drivers. Top executives advised local managers around the world to spend millions of dollars on lucrative incentives for new drivers and then steadily raise Uber’s commission, depriving those drivers of income and increasing the money that flowed to Uber, the documents show.
In public, Uber repeated a message that its service empowered people to become “entrepreneurs.” In private email exchanges, company officials referred to drivers as a mass of “supply” whose low pay and minimal job protections were necessary for Uber to profit.
In written responses to questions from The Post, Uber spokesman Gus Glover said drivers have found good economic opportunities using its app, even as their earnings fluctuate “as a normal part of business.” Because drivers may freely choose to work for different app-based services, Glover said, it is “fundamental that we endeavour to create conditions to retain drivers on the platform.”
In a statement, Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Kalanick, said the Uber co-founder helped pioneer a new business model. “To do this required a change of the status quo, as Uber became a serious competitor in an industry where competition had been historically outlawed,” Spurgeon said. “As a natural and foreseeable result, entrenched industry interests all over the world fought to prevent the much-needed development of the transportation industry.”
She did not answer questions about Uber’s treatment of drivers, its business in South Africa or its rollout of cash payments.
The challenges for drivers are particularly pronounced in countries like South Africa, where extreme levels of unemployment and inequality give Uber access to a deep pool of laborers willing to endure challenging work with few benefits. One in three working-aged South Africans are unemployed — the highest jobless rate in the world among countries tracked by the World Bank.
“The vast majority of workers can’t walk away and go to another job because there is no other job,” said Darcy du Toit, a lawyer and emeritus professor at the University of the Western Cape, who researches labor conditions in the digital economy and helped a group of drivers challenge Uber for worker rights in a South African court.
“The Uber platform became a platform of crime, a platform of fear,” said Derick Ongansie, 66, a former Uber driver who helped organize driver protests and one of the drivers who mounted a legal challenge against the company. “Once you get into that vehicle, you either fear that the traffic cop is going to pull you over and impound your vehicle, or you fear the criminal.”
South Africa is one of the violent-crime capitals of the world, and workers in its volatile transportation sector had been targets of theft and violence long before Uber arrived in the country. The Post did not find data showing Uber caused a rise in crime in South Africa. However, the company’s policy decisions, such as enabling cash payments after previously rejecting the idea as less safe, exposed some workers — including many first-time drivers — to a level of risk they say they had not envisioned.
Stephan Swart, a former manager for Uber in South Africa who says he was briefed on internal management decisions about drivers from 2015 to 2018, said Uber knew requiring drivers to keep cash would make them more vulnerable to robberies. Uber rolled out the policy anyway, he said, because managers believed it would appeal to South Africans who lacked credit cards, boosting rides in the country by as much as 30 percent, and helping Uber compete with other forms of transportation, such as traditional taxis, that accept cash.
Uber did not respond to Swart’s claim but said the company has taken steps to improve driver safety in South Africa, including giving them the ability to reject cash transactions, more upfront information in the app about passenger destinations and a button that drivers can press to call emergency security services.
“Safety is and has always been a top priority for us, and we have invested heavily over the years in technology to help keep drivers and riders safe,” Frans Hiemstra, Uber’s general manager in sub-Saharan Africa, said in an emailed statement.
Lying in a hospital bed with stitches in his head, Cupido realized he was too scared to ever drive for a living again. He spent a month recovering from his attack, then took the first job he could find, working the graveyard shift at a factory downtown. “I just lost everything,” he said.
The Washington Post’s Douglas MacMillan on how Uber undermined drivers in South Africa with policies that made the jobs more perilous. (Video: Douglas MacMillan, Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
‘Stepping stone’
“We said, ‘No, it’s not going to happen. We’ll all be out of business,’ ” said David Drummond, a taxi business owner and another former member of the industry council. “Instead of doing 10 trips a day, we’ll do one trip a day. It’s not sustainable.”
Uber’s Glover denied that the company stated an intention to bring 10,000 cars to Cape Town when it arrived in the city.
Uber recruited its first drivers in Cape Town, a city of roughly 4 million people, by approaching taxis and offering the drivers cash payments equivalent to roughly $400 to join the app, according to Swart. Cape Town’s earliest Uber drivers were also rewarded with about $4 per trip in driver subsidies, an incentive that managers saw as “aggressive” but necessary to build the city’s initial supply, according to an internal presentation given to Uber’s regional managers in January 2015.
One of the locals who signed on was Ongansie, a former trucker, who became an Uber driver in 2014. “The money was too good,” he said. “We’d do 3,000 rand a day just driving around.” That was about $290 a day before expenses.
Uber has long promised drivers they will make good money. In a 2014 submission to the South African government, part of the Uber Files, the company said it “not only creates more jobs for more people, it creates better paying jobs.” In public statements, Uber executives sometimes pointed to a body of academic research by economists — some affiliated with Uber — whose work showed that Uber helps drivers become more productive and thus make higher hourly wages than traditional taxi drivers.
Another group of independent academic researchers has argued this research often failed to account for one of the company’s key advantages over taxis: a mountain of outside financing it was willing to spend sweetening driver earnings and lowering prices for riders. Over time, Uber pulled back these subsidies, increased its commission and multiplied the number of drivers on the platform — altering the financial picture for drivers who came to rely on the app, documents and interviews show.
“That happened all the time. You’d lure the drivers in with subsidies, and over time you cut back on that,” said one former senior Uber executive interviewed by The Post. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.
Uber’s Glover told The Post that incentives and referrals are a common way for companies to grow their business. “As the market has matured we have adjusted these incentives accordingly,” he said.
Citing the strong driver numbers, the pricing team in Uber’s San Francisco headquarters sent emails to regional managers overseeing the Middle East and Africa operations in December 2015, saying it looked like a good time to raise the company’s commission to 25 percent of every ride, up from 20 percent.
The regional managers pushed back, warning that taking from drivers could backfire. These managers argued that “if we push partners to 25% we are putting pressure on [drivers’] earnings and the risk is that this will end up with protests again and union formation around our drivers,” Joanne Kubba, a public policy manager for Uber’s Middle East and Africa operations, wrote in one email.
Uber raised the commission, helping South Africa become one of the company’s most lucrative markets. Despite losing money in its global business for much of its existence, Uber became profitable in Johannesburg 14 months after launching there — its fastest city outside the United States to turn a profit, according to a 2015 management presentation. Another document shows Uber turned a profit in Cape Town by March 2015, within two years of launching.
As Kubba predicted, driver protests became a regular feature of life in Cape Town. Crowds of drivers swarmed Uber’s local offices in the downtown waterfront. But because Uber’s senior leaders refused to raise drivers’ pay, there was little the local managers felt they could do, according to Swart, who at the time oversaw driver recruitment.
Once a year, Swart helped organize “engagement days” for drivers, where Uber served hot dogs and held question-and-answer sessions. “We would do these phony baloney sort of events to prove that we look out for the drivers,” Swart said in a recent interview, his first about his experience at the company. “We would listen to drivers and hear their concerns, but you often felt like, ‘Yes, we hear it, but what can we really do about it?’ ”
Glover, the Uber spokesman, said the company regularly meets with drivers to hear their concerns. Driver earnings “are affected by factors such as seasonality and the macroeconomic environment (cost of living, fuel etc),” he said in an email. “We closely monitor these changes and review prices accordingly to ensure that driver economics remain healthy.”
In his third year driving with Uber, Ongansie, the former trucker, says he made about one-third as much in earnings as his first year. After expenses — including gas, insurance, cellphone data and car maintenance — his hourly pay often came out to less than $1 an hour.
At an event announcing the partnership, Alon Lits, Uber’s then-general manager for sub-Saharan Africa, described the rental agreement as “a stepping stone” for drivers. “It becomes an ecosystem for drivers to work towards self employment and ownership,” he said in a video of the event posted online by WesBank. WesBank later scrapped the partnership because, after Uber began accepting cash payments, many drivers failed to pay off their loans, according to Chris de Kock, who stepped down as chief executive of WesBank in June.
“It could be that the business case for drivers did not allow enough to cover all expenses,” de Kock said in an email, adding that he didn’t remember enough about the specifics of Uber driver earnings, so he “cannot say for sure.”
Glover did not respond to specific questions about the WesBank partnership, but he said Uber has worked with a number of financial institutions to give drivers access to vehicles at affordable rates. “It is important that these financial offers work for drivers, and we have therefore reviewed and changed the offers when they have not,” he said.
Robberies, hijackings, murder
When Elize Faivelowitz’s phone rings, it usually means something bad has happened to an Uber driver in Cape Town.
“This is a dangerous business,” said Faivelowitz, 51. “You will possibly get hijacked, and you can get murdered.”
Timothee Nduwimana, a 32-year-old Uber driver in Cape Town, said taxi drivers held him hostage earlier this year when he was picking up passengers during a taxi driver strike. The taxi drivers took Nduwimana from his vehicle and held him somewhere private, he said, warning him they would burn his car if his boss — the person from whom he rented the car — didn’t send the equivalent of about $300.
“They started to slap me. Then, when the boss heard how I was crying, he sent the money,” Nduwimana said.
Uber drivers all over the world have faced vicious attacks. At least 50 workers for app-based ride and food delivery services have been killed in the United States in past five years, according to Gig Workers Rising, a driver advocacy group. In countries including France, Switzerland, Belgium and Portugal, Uber’s executives tried to exploit incidents of violence against drivers in the company’s efforts to publicly discredit the taxi industry, documents show.
Timothee Nduwimana says he has been robbed, forcibly removed and slapped while driving for Uber in Cape Town, South Africa. (Video: Douglas MacMillan/The Washington Post)
In its responses to The Post, Uber acknowledged past mistakes in its treatment of drivers but said no one at the company wanted violence against Uber drivers. In markets such as South Africa and Brazil, where there is a history of violence, Uber developed extra features designed to ensure the safety of riders and drivers, the company said.
Uber declined to comment on Nduwimana’s story or on the Gig Workers Rising report.
In 2016, Uber began requiring some drivers to accept cash for payment in a few developing countries including South Africa. According to two people who were senior executives at the time, the strategy sparked an internal debate about the wisdom of making drivers potential targets of crime in places where robberies were common. Both former Uber executives spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.
The policy contradicted Uber’s marketing and lobbying messages, which had said for years Uber was safer than traditional taxis because it used no cash. Less than two years before launching cash payments, Uber had even lobbied the South African government to ban cash payments from inside ride-hailing services, according to a draft of the proposed rules Uber executives circulated in October 2014.
“Unlike traditional taxi and charter/shuttle operators who are required to carry large sums of cash, Uber drivers operate on a cashless system and are therefore at far less risk of robbery,” the draft proposal said. Prohibiting cash would “ensure that drivers are safer,” the document said.
After Uber launched cash as a payment option in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2016, attacks or robberies involving Uber drivers in the city rose tenfold — from an average of 13 a month to 141 a month — according to a Reuters report, which cited data obtained from a public information request.
In his responses, Glover said Uber’s “original model” focused on card payments, but as the business grew, “we introduced cash payments in order to be inclusive and offer mobility options to as many people as possible.”
Uber acknowledged in its most recent annual filing with securities regulators that the use of cash with its services “can increase safety and security risks for Drivers and riders, including potential robbery, assault, violent or fatal attacks, and other criminal acts.” Cash-paid trips accounted for seven percent of all money spent on Uber rides and goods last year, the filing said.
A ruling overturned
But in South Africa, little has changed. In 2017, the country’s labor tribunal found a group of former Uber drivers were “economically dependent on the ability to drive for Uber” and were therefore Uber employees. But the next year, following a legal challenge by Uber, the ruling was overturned because of a technicality. The drivers had signed contracts with Uber BV, the company’s Netherlands-based holding company, but had lodged their complaint with Uber SA, its South African subsidiary — invalidating the tribunal’s ruling.
“Uber, like other major platforms, litigate with vast resources to defend their business model,” said du Toit, one of the lawyers who worked on the case. “This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for most workers to challenge them in the courts.”
As the coronavirus pandemic dried up tourism and gas prices climbed, many drivers found it even harder to make a living. This March, drivers in Johannesburg and Durban shut off their ride-hailing apps for three days to protest for better pay, calling on ride-hailing companies to reduce their cut to 10 percent. Uber kept its commission unchanged at 25 percent.
An annual study of 12 app-based platforms for drivers and other tradespeople in South Africa by Fairwork, a joint research project of the University of Oxford and the Berlin Social Science Center, found Uber’s treatment of workers ranked lower than that of six other companies operating in the region. Uber, unlike some other companies, did not guarantee workers the local minimum wage, did not provide clear and transparent terms of their employment and did not give them the freedom to collectively bargain.
Being there, he said, made the pain come rushing back. “It brings back the agony.”
The threat of gang violence still hangs over Cupido’s community of Manenberg like storm systems. On days when it looks clear, he walks his 13-year-old son home from school. On days when the neighborhood erupts with shooting, he drives to school in his car.
Cupido has given up on his dream of entrepreneurship. He’s resigned to live in Manenberg, working nights at the factory, coaching soccer for the local youth and trying, as best he can, to keep his kids out of danger.
Alice Crites and Aaron C. Davis in Washington, and Joseph Menn in San Francisco contributed to this report. | 2022-07-11T11:16:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uber leak: Company policies and promises put South African drivers in peril - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/11/uber-driver-south-africa-attacks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/11/uber-driver-south-africa-attacks/ |
How a Spy Museum curator would spend a perfect day in D.C.
Talking about espionage at work is just a typical day on the job for Andrew Hammond
As the historian and curator of the International Spy Museum, which celebrates its 20th anniversary on July 19, Andrew Hammond stays busy, between hosting the museum’s podcast, SpyCast, and sharing the history of its expansive spy collection with visitors.
“The job is an amazing job,” says Hammond, who lives in the H Street corridor. “I get to meet really interesting people, and I get to research really interesting artifacts.”
Hammond served in the Royal Air Force before going back to school full time in 2005. He received his PhD in history and international relations from the University of Warwick in England and held several fellowships at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the Library of Congress and more institutions before landing his coveted job at the Spy Museum in 2020.
Like a CIA agent astutely observing his surroundings, Hammond would spend much of his D.C. dream day outdoors at some of the city’s best people-watching spots.
The first thing that I would do would be to go to the Wydown on H Street. They are a coffee shop, and their blueberry muffins are to die for. They’re so good. You’ve got the really nice stuff on top of the crumbling muffin. And you get to the bottom and there are these not-too-hot-but-warm blueberries that just explode in your mouth. I typically get up quite early, usually before my wife and my daughter. I would pop over there, grab a latte, grab a muffin and then I would come back and I would sit on the balcony and watch H Street come alive.
I’m really obsessed by bialys, and when I left New York, I spent a lot of time trying to find the best bialy in the city, and I haven’t really found a great one in D.C. Maybe they do exist, but I haven’t found them. So if we’re going out, we would probably go to Buffalo and Bergen, and I would get a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese and a regular drip coffee with half-and-half.
I think after that, I think if it was a nice day, I would go with my wife and my daughter to the Sculpture Garden and the National Gallery of Art. I really like just sitting and whiling the time away. If it were my dream day, I wouldn’t want to frantically rush from one place to the next. So I think I’d just like to sit there and just soak up the atmosphere, look at the art and spend time with my family.
And then if [the weather] wasn’t good, there’s an antique shop that me and my wife love in the Logan Circle, 14th Street NW area called GoodWood. We don’t always buy something when we go there, but we kind of like to just rummage around in there and spend time looking through stuff.
After that, I think that it would probably be time for a late lunch, early dinner by that point. And there’s an amazing place that we discovered just a few weeks ago called Paraíso Taqueria on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southeast. I used to spend a lot of time on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the Library of Congress, and this place is so good. The nachos are a whole tortilla that’s fried, and you get it with salsa. It’s not the boilerplate “here’s some chips and salsa” and it’s, like, perfunctory — this is part of the experience. My wife and I love the cod tacos. They’re really excellent. If I was looking for some alcohol, it would be a margarita. Classic, on the rocks.
After that, we would walk home, and on the way, we would stop either in Lincoln Park or Stanton Park. I love the parks on the east side. We would sit under a tree and just watch the world in action. People practicing sports or doing tai chi, kids playing, people walking their dogs. I love just lying on a blanket in the park and just listening to all those sounds. I think I would probably spend the hours leading up to darkness just sitting in one of those parks.
Coming full circle back to H Street, Copycat Co. is just an excellent cocktail bar. I love the ambiance. Personally, I really like spirit-forward cocktails, like Negronis, Manhattans, martinis, those types of things. I love just sitting in a cocktail bar just whiling away a couple of hours. So I think that’s where I would probably have the nightcap. And I’ve always thought to myself, if I was ever to have another life, I would open up a speakeasy called Espionage. And it would be quite playful, but rooted in the real world of intelligence. Trying not to make it too hokey. You know, like a code word to get in, secret items on the menu, cocktails called names like the Dead Drop, Covert Action, Encryption, Double Agent — and then get a really awesome mixologist. | 2022-07-11T11:17:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Spy Museum historian and curator Andrew Hammond's perfect day in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/11/spy-museum-curators-dream-day/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/11/spy-museum-curators-dream-day/ |
Known to millions as ‘Dr. Glaucomflecken,’ Will Flanary zings the personality types that are drawn to different specializations
Perspective by Dawn Fallik
Will Flanary, a.k.a. "Dr. Glaucomflecken," mines medicine for humor that he shares with more than 1.6 million followers on social media. (Jessicia Gubuan/Bridgetown Pictures)
Emergency room doctors savor adrenaline and bike helmets. Orthopedic doctors are bros who love the gym. Neurosurgeons are just a tad confident. And medical students are living in a special kind of hell, from match day to rotations.
They have one thing in common — being mocked by Will Flanary, an ophthalmologist known to millions in the medical world as “Dr. Glaucomflecken,” a term for a sign of glaucoma.
On TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, Flanary posts videos several times a week — for more than 1.6 million followers — about the medical system. Sometimes it’s a sarcastic look at coronavirus guidelines, an insider’s view of the medical hierarchy (nurses are the true rulers) or the expensive world of peer-review publishing. But mainly, the young, mellow-voiced doctor focuses on the strong personalities involved in everyday medical practice.
There are many YouTube “reaction” videos from doctors on Flanary’s assessments of their character — such as trauma surgeon David Hindin, neurosurgeon Martin Rutkowski and neurologist Anna Nordvig — who say the portrayals are spot-on.
For nonmedical personnel, Flanary’s videos give insight and a few tips in dealing with a world most only see from the patient side. For example, neurologists may have a slight rage stroke hearing someone described as having an “altered mental status,” which they describe as “garbage terminology” because it could mean anything from slightly confused to comatose.
Flanary, 36, has been on both sides of the stethoscope. He was diagnosed with testicular cancer twice — the first time was when he was in his fourth year of medical school at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and the second time while he was in his third year of residency at the University of Iowa. Then, on May 12, 2020, he went into cardiac arrest (not heart attack) and was saved by his wife, Kristin, who performed CPR. Flanary still doesn’t know what caused his heart to stop beating.
What’s the difference between heart attack and sudden cardiac arrest?
From his home in Portland, Ore., Flanary, who served as the Yale Medical School commencement speaker this year, talked about finding humor in the everyday, what he hears from other doctors and his side hack as a Cameo star. This interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity.
Q: How did this whole social media gig get started?
A: It’s been a little bit surprising, I’ve just done it as a creative outlet. I started doing the video format at the right time — especially with the pandemic, more people have been on online. It’s been a little bit surprising how popular the characters are — it’s taken on a life of its own.
Q: Why do you think it’s become such a hit, particularly for people outside the medical world?
A: They may not get some of the terminology, some of the jokes, but they get the personalities, and that resonates with people. That’s a big compliment to me, that people who are not in medicine still watch, because that tells me my acting skills are decent.
Q: A lot of the doctors you portray have very specific personality traits. What is an ophthalmologist’s personality?
A: We’re kind of boring. We don’t like to work for long periods of time. We love taking breaks. We really enjoy sitting down. That’s effectively a personality — “loves to sit down.”
Q: You wrote in your bio about doing stand-up, but never explained how you ended up becoming an ophthalmologist?
A: When I started med school at Dartmouth, everyone was assigned a random adviser, and my adviser was an ophthalmologist. It wasn’t until I was able to do a rotation in ophthalmology at the beginning of my fourth year that I made the decision, so I decided really late. It was the juxtaposition between my previous rotation, which was vascular surgery, where you’re standing for like six-hour cases, holding the retractor and you have really sick patients. And then there’s ophthalmology, where I get to sit down to operate. I get to go home at a reasonable time and develop meaningful relationships with my family. I like knowing there’s an end to my day when you get to go home.
Q: You made a video in March about “Match” day, where medical students “match” into residency, basically cementing their medical specialty. But your video focused on the students who don’t match, and how they’ll be okay. That garnered so many comments from students and doctors.
A: That’s a good example of one that surprised me. One thing I’ve learned is that the videos that get the biggest reaction are the ones where there is an emotional reaction. And those are the ones where there’s a lot of truth about a subject that’s a little bit more sensitive … people have a more of a reaction to it because they feel heard. [Not matching] is a really difficult thing to deal with, and I’m able to put it through a lens of humor.
Medical school can be brutal, and it’s making many of us suicidal
Q: I watched some reaction videos from doctors. The trauma surgeon laughed really hard at the part where the “surgeon” tells the “medical student” he’s mad at the student for not being psychic. “It’s wrong, but it’s also true,” said the surgeon. How do you know the little idiosyncrasies so well?
A: Every specialty in medicine has a kind of personality, an essence, and they’ve been the same since the beginning of modern medicine. I don’t know if the specialty makes the personality or the personality is drawn to the specialty, it’s a chicken or egg kind of thing. I draw a lot on my experience from med school, and even though I’m 10 years removed from med school, things don’t really change — there’s always going to be the dynamic between surgery and anesthesia. Sometimes I’ll still have to do some research, so I’ll get on Reddit message boards and read what people love about being a neurologist or a cardiologist, so I’ll get a lot from that.
Q: Do you ever get any flack from doctors?
A: I never get backlash from surgeons. I’ve gotten the most backlash from family medicine/primary care doctors. They don’t like the portrayal of the some of them as overworked, underpaid sympathetic figure, always doing some sort of fellowship. They think that by portraying the character that way, I’m dissuading people from entering that field, which I don’t buy for a second. But it’s a minority — most people are just fine with it.
America to face a shortage of primary care physicians within a decade or so
Q: What did you learn about being a doctor from being a patient?
A: It reinforced for me how important it is for doctors to show who they are from a personality standpoint. For a long time, there’s been this idea that it’s not professional to show that side of yourself as a doctor; that you’re supposed to be this emotionless machine and you can’t show that things affect you mentally, or make you angry or sad or laugh. Social media is a great way to show that side, because you can reach a big audience and it shows the public that we have things that suck about our job or that we hate health care, and it allows the general public to relate to us, and that’s something that’s been missing for a long, long time.
Q: I see that you are frequently hired on Cameo ($249) to send messages — usually congratulations on medical school acceptance but also for wedding anniversaries. How is that working out?
A: I’ve done more than 1,000 Cameos!
Q: Does your family think you’re as funny as everyone else does?
A: No! They’re all funnier than me. | 2022-07-11T11:17:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will Flanary, known as 'Dr. Glaucomflecken,' makes videos that mock peers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/11/dr-glaucomflecken-will-flanary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/11/dr-glaucomflecken-will-flanary/ |
Daniel Vajdich saw danger in plans to bypass Ukraine to deliver Russia’s gas to Germany. But the project’s backers had friends in Washington, too.
Daniel Vajdich, a Washington lobbyist for Ukraine, fought for sanctions against Russia's state-owned oil and gas companies. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
In December 2019, a 1,200-foot-long, 400-foot-wide ship called Pioneering Spirit muscled through the waters of the Baltic Sea off the Danish island of Bornholm.
The floating behemoth — the biggest construction vessel in the world, according to its owner — is frighteningly fast at doing what it’s designed to do: string together huge tubes in deep waters so that fuel can flow from one place to another. The fight over this one ship’s journey was costing millions of dollars in Washington lobbying clout. It was a moving part in a global political battle that would ultimately entwine with a devastating war in Europe.
Hour by roiling hour, Pioneering Spirit was speeding toward setting in place some of the final stretches of a 750-mile pipeline, known as Nord Stream 2, that would add a massive new direct connection between Russia’s state-controlled gas empire and the lucrative German market, as well as the rest of Western Europe.
Four thousand miles away, in Washington, a tiny lobbying shop called Yorktown Solutions, raced against Pioneering Spirit. The firm’s founder, Daniel Vajdich, could be thought of as Ukraine’s man in Washington — a lobbyist and overall fixer.
At 37, he emits the polished gloss of a man on the rise in a capital dominated by much-older power brokers: not one strand of his thick, sweptback hair is out of place or gray. He has the fitted suits, the Patek Philippe watch. His arguments, ever at the ready, also come in bespoke tailored dimensions: bite-size for a short-attention-span public and encyclopedic for the congressional staffers who drill down on the fine print.
As the big ship got closer to its goal, Vajdich’s clients — an association of energy-related firms led by the state-owned Ukrainian energy company — were getting more worried. Nord Stream 2 was going to allow Russia to bypass the pipelines in Ukraine that it was paying tens of millions of dollars to use. That would deal a savage blow to the former Soviet republic’s economy.
But the Ukrainians also worried that rendering their country irrelevant as a gas transit path would leave them in a weakened state, more vulnerable to a Russian invasion. On top of that, they fretted it would make Europeans cozier with — and more beholden to — the autocratic Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Kyiv wanted its man in Washington to kill Nord Stream 2.
To do that, his four-person firm was going to have to persuade Congress and the Trump administration to come crashing down on Nord Stream 2, which would run alongside the other Russian pipeline bottle-feeding Europe with affordable gas — Nord Stream 1.
Talking about the intricacies of pipelines cries out for the development of a guiding philosophy, or a pitch, if one prefers, to answer a key question that gets asked in the halls of the U.S. Congress a lot: Why should we care?
Vajdich crafted a response, and repeated it over and over. As he sees it, stopping the new pipeline would be in the national security interest of the United States and thwart the Russian president from weaponizing energy on a continent filled with U.S. allies.
“Energy is not about energy,” Vajdich said in an interview, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stretched on. “It’s about security. That’s why we talked about consequences.”
For years, though, the pipeline project’s Russian backers have had friends in Washington, too. Some of the best-known lobbyists in town have worked on behalf of Nord Stream 2 AG, a company that is based in Switzerland but owned by the Putin-controlled Russian energy company Gazprom. These marquee names have gravitas, connections and juice: Vin Roberti, a former Connecticut legislator turned mega-lobbyist, and Walker Roberts, a former deputy staff director on the U.S. House International Relations Committee who is now perched at the lobbying powerhouse BGR Group.
Five non-Russian companies involved in financing Nord Stream 2 had considerable capital cachet, hiring lobbyists from the firm co-founded by President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty. Germany, an important U.S. ally, was also exerting heavy pressure to block any moves against the pipeline.
For a long time, said Vadym Glamazdin, the former government relations envoy to the United States of Ukraine’s energy company, it has been “like David vs. Goliath.” It’s Vajdich against the big players.
No campaign contributions
The kids in Saratoga, an upscale Northern California enclave, were not like the kid with the funny name.
Vajdich, the son of a tech engineer turned entrepreneur, wasn’t just different because the spelling of his name made its pronunciation a bit of a riddle — it’s VY-ditch and derives from his ancestral roots in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungry and Austria. (Given his work for Ukraine, many assume he’s Ukrainian, which is fine by him. “Some are Ukrainian by birth and others by choice,” he said, using a phrase popular with Ukrainian diplomats.)
Growing up in a land of privileged liberal politics, Vajdich was an outlier because he tilted hard to the right even from childhood. Looking back, he thinks he became even more politically conservative in reaction to the blue landscape.
Since moving east, Vajdich has checked lots of the boxes that can help guide the most industrious Young Future Stars of Washington into places of influence.
Impressive degree, Capitol Hill staffer, national political campaign? He checked them all, including working on the short-lived presidential campaign of Wisconsin’s former Republican governor, Scott Walker, and advising the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who’s a Russia-sanctions hawk. After graduate school, he did a stint at the Carnegie Center in Moscow. In those days, he thought there was a chance of good U.S.-Russia relations. He’s now convinced that Russia will be an adversary for decades to come.
When he started his firm in late 2015, Vajdich said, he wouldn’t hire former members of Congress or ambassadors, and eventually instituted a ban on campaign contributions by his team — a departure from a Washington ritual in which lobbyists spending several nights a week double- and triple-booked to hand out checks at political fundraisers.
“When I started this, it was just a theory,” Vajdich says of his self-imposed bans. The theory became a selling point.
The ‘airdrop’ proposal
For Vajdich, taking on the Ukrainians as a client in 2017 meant taking on a client with an image that reeked from the excesses of its kleptocratic elite. A former president suspected of plundering government coffers, Viktor Yanukovych, had fled in 2014, leaving behind a gaudy estate that featured a zoo and a private lake with its own galleon.
The endemic corruption — both at the upper echelons of government and in the state-owned energy company, Naftogaz — did not inspire confidence in Europe that the gas flowing from Russia to Ukraine could be counted upon. New leaders in the government and at Naftogaz helped, but the stigma remained. Vajdich says he needed to persuade often-skeptical American policymakers that the Ukrainians could be “reliable partners.”
Vajdich and the staffs of sympathetic members of Congress agreed on a plan. It was called an “airdrop,” borrowing a military term, and involved parachuting Nord Stream 2 sanctions into a national defense bill. The outside-the-box move would require an almost impossible to imagine bipartisan melding of Democratic and Republican congressional leaders. They called it PEESA, which stands for the Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act.
The proposal focused on a big target: the giant ship, Pioneering Spirit, and others like it.
The idea was given little chance of passing.
Vajdich, who can be witty, charming and self-deprecating when the mood is right, also doesn’t shy from confrontation. He adopted what he called a “scorched earth” approach.
“Your boss is protecting Putin’s pipeline,” Vajdich recalled telling one chief of staff whose office was, unknowingly, creating an impediment with a proposal that had nothing to do with Nord Stream 2. “She’s going to be the one to blame if Putin gets this project.” The chief of staff did not like being talked to that way, Vajdich said.
The argument that it was in U.S. interests to block Putin’s pipeline took hold. Vajdich sensed the resistance beginning to fall away, and Congress came around. In December 2019, President Donald Trump, who had called Germans “captives to Russia,” approved sanctions that specifically targeted deep-water pipe-laying ships. The Germans were furious. The following day, AllSeas, Pioneering Spirit’s Swiss-based owner, announced it had stopped laying pipe.
The next time Glamazdin, the Ukrainian government-relations envoy, came to Washington, Vajdich took him to a downtown Washington restaurant to celebrate. Glamazdin had the bartender make a drink he’d invented: 1 ounce of dark rum, half an ounce of crème de cassis, a dash of bitters and an ounce of ruby port. Stirred — not shaken.
He called it “Black Poison.”
‘Gift to Putin’
Vajdich and the Ukrainians were on a winning streak. At the beginning of 2021, they got the sanctions expanded to include Nord Stream 2 financing and supply companies.
Still, there were some highly respected voices in Washington urging restraint. An Atlantic Council column co-authored by Daniel Fried, the former U.S. ambassador to Poland, argued that Nord Stream 2 should not be killed. Fried and his co-authors wrote that the United States should instead consider a variety of options that would repair damage to U.S.-German relations left over from the Trump administration.
Around the same time, Vajdich was picking up signals that concerned him. He got a call from a contact on Capitol Hill who said, “You’re never going to believe this.” The source was giving him a heads-up that the Biden administration was moving toward waiving sanctions against Nord Stream 2 AG, the company overseeing the pipeline, and its German chief executive, Matthias Warnig, a former East German intelligence officer. In May, President Biden waived the sanctions. This required some Washington spin. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, went on CNN and, pressed by the anchor, Dana Bash, did more than spin — he took a pinwheeling leap that might have brought a figure-skating audience to its feet. The sanctions waivers did not apply to Russians, Sullivan said: “It was a German individual and a Swiss company.”
That was almost too easy for the CNN fact-checker who called the statement “misleading” after the broadcast, noting that even though Nord Stream 2 is registered in Switzerland, it is owned by the Russians. (The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has also stated that Nord Stream 2 is a “Russian-owned” company.) Sullivan did not respond to interview requests for this report.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats criticized the decision, which was publicly announced by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who stated that it would help repair U.S. relations with Europe. One Republican senator called it a “gift to Putin.” In damage control mode, the administration argued that the completion of the pipeline was inevitable because Russia was now using its own ship to finish the pipeline.
Vajdich was flabbergasted. He “takes it personally,” said his wife, Brittany Vajdich. (Vajdich likes to call his wife his “second-grade sweetheart,” because they met in elementary school.) At home in Northwest Washington, she heard her husband yelling a lot during phone calls.
That summer, as the threat of a Russian invasion loomed more ominously, the Germans, who had pushed so hard for completion of Nord Stream 2, issued a joint statement with the United States saying they would deploy sanctions and “other tools” against the pipeline if Russia “weaponized” energy or committed acts of aggression against Ukraine.
Vajdich fumed. He felt Russia was already weaponizing energy because its promises of cheap gas through the new pipeline had brought the Germans squarely into the pro-Nord Stream 2 camp.
Within a few months, the pipeline was complete. Putin was massing troops at the border of Ukraine. The Biden administration was trying to persuade the public that the completion of the pipeline might actually play a role in preventing war.
The pipeline “is leverage for the West, because if Vladimir Putin wants to see gas flow through that pipeline, he may not want to take the risk of invading Ukraine,” Sullivan told reporters in December.
Just as Glamazdin and Vajdich had been predicting, Putin invaded Ukraine in February.
With the invasion in full swing, Biden began imposing a raft of sanctions against Putin, the Russian financial system, oligarchs and many other entities. Nord Stream 2’s high-powered lobbyists began to peel off, ending their contracts. “We terminated our engagement on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project this past February in compliance with U.S. sanctions,” said a spokesman for Roberti — who had been paid $10.2 million by Nord Stream 2 AG since 2017.
Vajdich received $2.5 million from 2017 to 2021 from Ukrainian energy producers, according to his foreign agent registration filing — about a fourth of Roberti’s haul alone — and has a $960,000 contract for 2022.
Richard Burt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who heads a wholly owned subsidiary of the McLarty firm, and another lobbyist at the company have received $3.53 million from five Nord Stream 2 financing companies since 2017, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Burt declined to be interviewed for this story; Roberts, the BGR Group lobbyist who has received $3.76 million from Nord Stream 2, according to records compiled by OpenSecrets, did not respond to interview requests.
What’s left for Vajdich to navigate is a surreal world. The Germans, who are U.S. allies in supporting Ukraine as it battles Russian forces, continue to pay the Russians for gas. That’s because the other big pipeline, Nord Stream 1, continues delivering gas from Russia to Germany. (Germany’s ambassador to the United States recently told CNN that the country intends to stop accepting Russian gas as soon as possible. The Russians, just as Vajdich and his clients feared, began squeezing Germany and the rest of Europe in late June by substantially reducing gas shipments via Nord Stream 1.)
Even stranger, Russia has paid Ukraine under its contract to transit gas through the country it is invading — even when it’s not using the Ukrainian pipelines. In effect, Russia is helping fund the country against which it is waging war.
In this odd and often misunderstood, geopolitical landscape, Vajdich sees more U.S. congressional fights ahead. He suspects European supporters of Nord Stream 2, particularly in Germany, will take another run at putting the pipeline into service. It currently is just lying there without ever having been used. And he’s recently embarked on a new battle with the same adversaries, this time representing Ukrainian titanium industries in their fight against corporate interests who want to block sanctions against Russian titanium interests.
For now, Vajdich is stuck watching a war laying waste to Ukraine — and yelling into the phone at home, where everyone gets an earful.
The other day, his wife was taking their 4-year-old, Dashiell, to school. The little boy turned to her, she says, and asked: “When are we going to Ukraine? Maybe I can roar at the bad guys. That could help, right?” | 2022-07-11T11:17:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How D.C. lobbyist Daniel Vajdich tried to stop Putin’s pipeline - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/11/dc-lobbyist-ukraine-nord-stream-pipeline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/11/dc-lobbyist-ukraine-nord-stream-pipeline/ |
Biden’s push for human rights includes needed democracy-building at home
President understands that we need to fix democracy at home to spread our values abroad
Perspective by Sarah B. Snyder
Sarah B. Snyder is a historian who teaches at American University’s School of International Service. She is the author of two award-winning books, "From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy" and "Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network."
Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, at the State Department in October. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The recent address by U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power at Freedom House was just the latest attempt by the Biden administration to articulate its agenda of democratic renewal. This commitment to democracy promotion and the protection of human rights marks a profound shift from the Trump era but is not a new theme in U.S. foreign policy. Power’s decision to build her speech around the 40th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s Westminster Address on this topic emphasized the long, bipartisan history of promoting democracy.
Yet, while Power tapped into the rhetoric and ideas of John F. Kennedy and Reagan — exemplifying how deeply rooted this agenda is in American history, as well as its bipartisan appeal — Biden’s agenda also has a unique twist designed to suit our moment. It recognizes that promoting democracy and championing human rights should not just be tenets of U.S. foreign policy, they also need to be modeled at home.
In her speech, Power quoted Kennedy, who as a U.S. senator said in 1959: “The free world cannot shame Russia and China into freedom — but it can inspire democracy to enrich its own freedoms.” Advancing freedom required not just military strength, but a “dedication to advancing the hopes of new nations” and a “determination to prove that freedom can lift the haggard burden of poverty from desolate lands.”
Kennedy saw democracy promotion as crucial to winning the Cold War. But human rights activists suggested that waging the Cold War with authoritarian but anti-communist allies had actually come to threaten the United States’ commitment to democracy — both domestically and internationally.
American policy debates in the 1960s over issues like civil rights, the Vietnam War and U.S. support for dictators abroad shaped activists’ thinking. They wanted to restore democratic principles to U.S. policies and to protect human rights internationally. But these activists also saw their agenda as reflecting long-held tenets — most especially the United States’ commitment to a liberal democratic order.
They sought to spread the United States’ political model abroad, particularly in the wake of the civil rights movement. As democracy expanded in the United States because of the greater fulfillment of civil and political rights, activists aspired to internationalize those successes. Human rights advocates in these years trumpeted their commitment to democracy, both at home and abroad. Over the next decade, they — along with sympathetic members of Congress such as Donald M. Fraser (D-Minn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) — worked to institutionalize attention to human rights in U.S. foreign policy and target undemocratic regimes on both sides of the Iron Curtain, such as the governments of the Soviet Union, Greece and Chile.
Despite these efforts, by the early 1980s U.S. officials expressed anxiety about the future of democracy internationally. This concern stemmed in part from the Polish government’s imposition of martial law in the face of the rise of the Solidarity movement and the re-intensification of Cold War hostilities.
To address these concerns, the Reagan administration and members of Congress collaborated to create the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization funded by the U.S. government that would support democratic institutions around the world. One element of the bipartisan support for democracy promotion was a belief, espoused by Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under Reagan, that “democratic institutions … are the only guarantee of human rights over the long run.”
Yet, Abrams’s neoconservatism and the ideological tenets subscribed to by others in the administration influenced their approach; Reagan, Abrams and their allies saw communism as a greater threat to democracy and human rights than right-wing authoritarianism. They did share Kennedy’s view that democracy promotion presented a means to wage the ideological Cold War, including through support to the Polish underground. But unlike those on the left, many on the right, including the Reagan administration, only slowly and belatedly pressed Cold War allies, like apartheid-era South Africa, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, on the need for greater democracy and protection for human rights.
Even so, bipartisan support for the endowment and the meaningful level of financial grants it disbursed demonstrated the degree to which the U.S. government united behind democratization as a significant project — one that proponents thought could facilitate transformation internationally.
This joint political and financial commitment to the stated agenda of democracy promotion explains why Power’s address echoed both the 1960s-era activists and 1980s-era government officials who thought that the United States could facilitate fundamental international change in a way that other actors simply could not. Despite abundant evidence of the perils facing democracy in 2022, including 16 years of Freedom House’s assessment that democracy is declining around the world, Power articulated an optimistic vision in line with the American exceptionalism trumpeted by both groups.
Importantly, in these contemporary efforts the United States is partnering with the United Nations, civil society and democratic allies. Power’s address and the agenda she unfurled demonstrate a belief in strong links between economic and political development as well as a potential broadening of the idea of political development or “democratic development,” to use Reagan’s term.
Even more significantly, the programs Power outlined are not just international, but many have a domestic focus, underscoring the work the United States needs to do on its own democracy to lead abroad. Too often Americans have treated human rights violations as something that only happens elsewhere, but of course that is not the case.
It was significant that the administration’s Summit for Democracy, held in December 2021, included state-level leaders and prominent activists. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R) emphasized the value of the democratic system and the practices — listening, behaving civilly and considering other perspectives — necessary to keep democracies functioning well. Sherrilyn Ifill, then-president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, spoke frankly about the country’s mixed record on achieving full democratic rights and norms. Featuring these speakers revealed the ways in which protecting human rights is increasingly recognized as essential for the future of American democracy.
Americans have long seen support for democracy as consistent with American values and ideals. Indeed, a recent Pew Research Center poll showed that 20 percent of Americans asked think “promoting democracy in other nations” should be given top priority, and 58 percent would assign it “some priority.”
The Biden administration’s decision to outline its democracy promotion agenda at an event hosted by a historically conservative nongovernmental organization and with a speech that explicitly honored Reagan’s legacy marks a deliberate effort to maintain the project’s long-standing bipartisan support, after Donald Trump and his acolytes called it into question. The comprehensive program Power outlined is intended to “foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means,” as Reagan put it 40 years ago.
Biden’s commitment to democracy promotion and the protection of human rights marks a revival of the purported idealism of Cold War-era U.S. foreign policy. His resurrection of this agenda telegraphs the values on which he thinks a post-Trump foreign policy should be based. It is also crucial to safeguarding democracy and human rights at home — an often overlooked element of U.S. human rights policy that Biden is now moving to spotlight. | 2022-07-11T11:17:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s push for human rights includes needed democracy-building at home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/11/bidens-push-human-rights-includes-needed-democracy-building-home/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/11/bidens-push-human-rights-includes-needed-democracy-building-home/ |
It’s the resurrection of an old dream
Perspective by Andrew McGregor
Andrew McGregor is a professor of history at the Mountain View Campus of Dallas College. He is currently working on a book about Bud Wilkinson and Oklahoma football.
UCLA guard Jaime Jaquez Jr. and USC forward Isaiah Mobley during an NCAA game March 5 in Los Angeles. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
The news that the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles are jettisoning the Western-based Pac-12 Conference to join the predominantly Midwestern Big Ten stunned many. While the move certainly reveals the blatant professionalization of college football and thinly veiled truth that cash is king, it also resurrects cleavages from the early days of the NCAA and reveals deep-seated tensions dating back to the 1940s.
Before the departures of USC and UCLA put the Big Ten and Pac-12 at odds, the two conferences had long been partners. Mutual respect and shared academic standards united them, and they worked together to shape college athletics. Although the future of the Pac-12 is now uncertain, the move by USC and UCLA to join the Big Ten makes sense within this larger history of college athletics and the fight to shape them.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the Pacific Coast Conference and the Big Ten formed a sort of alliance. Most famously, beginning in 1946, they agreed to a contract with the Rose Bowl for one team from each conference to play annually. The two conferences also worked together as a voting bloc within the NCAA. They generally agreed on most issues and advocated for more faculty control of college sports and a true “amateur model” that rejected athletic scholarships and recruiting. This contrasted from the Southern Conference and the Big Eight, based in the Southern Plains states, which had long embraced athletic scholarships and recruiting.
The Midwest and West Coast schools favored stronger NCAA regulatory powers and the 1948 Sanity Code — which banned off-campus and alumni recruiting, demanded equal admissions requirements for athletes and limited the amount, source and type of financial aid colleges could award — while the Southern Conference and the Big Eight did not. For a moment, the regional divide threatened the future of the NCAA as the Southern conferences threatened to walk away. A feeling of superiority among some fans emerged as they looked down upon the blatant commercialization of Southern schools.
During the mid-1950s the PCC and Big Ten also began applying pressure for changes in the NCAA’s new television plan, which initially restricted the number of college football games broadcast annually to 20. They thought their schools did not have enough televised games and jointly advocated for a regional broadcasting model to highlight several schools rather than favor big-name programs from the South. Although critical of commercialization and recruiting, they were concerned that the NCAA’s TV plan limited their revenue and their ability to promote their schools to potential students.
This fight exposed how the two conferences readily abandoned their idealistic views when they felt like those values put them at a disadvantage, even as they remained committed to using their collective leverage to shape NCAA policy.
Ironically, the vision of athletics embraced by the PCC and the Big Ten prompted USC and UCLA to abandon it in 1957. Both had faced accusations of impropriety tied to paying players. The allegations splintered the conference, which theoretically still clung to an idealistic view of amateur athletics that did not include scholarships or recruiting — despite most of its members violating these rules. USC and UCLA felt hamstrung by the conference and its hypocrisy. By 1958, the conference had collapsed, and the strained relationship prevented some former members from even communicating with one another.
But the breakup of the PCC in 1958 did not last long. Although ostracized, USC and UCLA were not alone in their violations but instead symbols of the conference’s internal disagreements as its members struggled to reconcile their idealism with the reality of big-time football. The idealism among the conference’s members led to the creation of the Athletic Association of Western Universities, which included the majority of the old PCC’s members. The new conference also helped the schools to fulfill the existing Rose Bowl contract.
According to college football historian Kurt Kemper, the AAWU had bigger aspirations than simply replacing the PCC: “The AAWU schools hoped to create a national conference of schools with an equal devotion to big-time football and academic standards.” The AAWU thought such a conference “would prove attractive to television executives and advertisers” because of “broad geographical scheduling” that would create matchups with national reach. Speculation about the membership of the potential superconference varied, but did include some Big Ten members, reflecting the shared values and goals among institutions that had long operated in the same NCAA voting bloc.
The proposed superconference garnered national support from sportswriters and attracted interest from colleges across the country. President Dwight D. Eisenhower even liked the idea. Yet, it did not materialize because faculty, especially those at UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley, did not want to include members with lesser academic standards.
During the ensuing decades, the alliance between the AAWU and its successor conferences and the Big Ten held the Southern conferences in check. Through their dominance of the NCAA, they transformed the Sanity Code into a more robust regulatory system that included an enforcement mechanism. In fact, several Southern schools, like the University of Oklahoma, were among the first investigated and placed on NCAA probation. Combined, the two conferences branded themselves as putting “academics first” and presented a united front on issues of academic integrity, recruiting and athletic scholarships.
The alliance between the West Coast-based schools that made up the PCC and AAWU (and today the Pac-12) and the Big Ten continued into the 21st century, when faculty from the then-Pac-10 and Big Ten joined to create the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics to advocate for changes to college sports, including new eligibility standards and athlete welfare and race and gender equity, centered on academic integrity and success.
As the college sports landscape continues to shift, remaking regionally focused athletic conferences into bicoastal entities focused on having schools in more major television markets, these old alliances have reemerged in terms of conference realignment. Midwestern and Western schools are once again at odds with Southern schools. Yet, alliances, like that between the Pac-12, Big Ten and Atlantic Coast Conference — agreed to in 2021 — no longer seem sufficient to balance the power.
Last summer, the Southeastern Conference announced the addition of the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma from the Big 12 Conference, solidifying their power and influence within the NCAA and in terms of securing the most lucrative television contracts. At the time, the move positioned the SEC as the dominant superconference, shifting power away from the NCAA.
Now, the Big Ten has responded. However hypocritical statements justifying the decision of USC and UCLA to jump conferences based on improved academics and athlete welfare may be, they reflect the ease with which the schools could envision themselves in the Big Ten thanks to long-standing shared values among their former home and their future home — and perhaps an unspoken feeling of superiority. Grounded in historical relationships, USC and UCLA membership in the Big Ten provides them an opportunity to finally achieve the goals of the AAWU. Whether the move helps to rebalance the college football landscape or further inflame regional tensions remains unclear. | 2022-07-11T11:17:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | History explains why it makes sense for USC and UCLA to join the Big Ten - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/11/history-explains-why-it-makes-sense-usc-ucla-join-big-ten/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/11/history-explains-why-it-makes-sense-usc-ucla-join-big-ten/ |
After a year and half of avoiding making strategic choices in the Middle East, President Biden will finally show his hand.
His upcoming trip to the region will answer three critical questions: What will U.S. security commitments in the Persian Gulf look like going forward? What will the Biden administration’s role be in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? And how will Biden navigate the United States' classic dilemma of relying on allies who systemically violate its norms and values?
None of these questions has an easy answer. American choices in the Middle East all come with a distasteful cost. This is why every U.S. president avoided making them until events forced them to. President Biden is no exception. But given the ongoing reconfiguration of global politics, Biden’s choices are likely to impact U.S. leadership far beyond the immediate concerns he is trying to address. He must be careful not to create more problems than he is trying to solve.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown the fallacy of the idea that the Middle East is no longer a U.S. strategic interest. The conflict has demonstrated that the stability of global energy markets, the United States’ global position and leadership of its allies are all tied to the Middle East. The crisis caught the Biden administration unprepared and seems to have given Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates the upper hand. In the United States’ rush to rally those important allies, it runs the risk of being led by them into conflicts it should avoid. Concretely, Biden must avoid adopting Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s expansive — and sometimes aggressive — definition of Gulf security in return for their cooperation on energy or Israel. If the United States overcommits itself, it may soon find itself choosing between a conflict with Iran and failing to deliver on its promises, with irreparable credibility losses.
Meanwhile, the normalization of relations between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco through the Abraham Accords have failed to produce broader peace and an end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Recurrent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians show the United States cannot ignore this conflict. So far, the Biden administration has opted for a modest goal: protecting the status quo between Israel and Palestine, with limited objectives such as reopening the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem and preventing provocative measures by both sides. But the last 20 months have shown that the political resources required to achieve that is high. In other words, this strategy is unsustainable for long.
Finally, Biden must make tough choices regarding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, and, to a lesser extent, Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. MBS poses not a moral dilemma for the U.S. president, but a strategic one. The problem is not that the crown prince had, according to the CIA, ordered the killing of U.S. resident and Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. It is that MBS is a reckless and unreliable player with boundless ambition. The way MBS dealt with the marginal challenge posed by Khashoggi shows a unique level of brutality, recklessness and hunger for absolute power. This has been evident in other occasions as well: abducting the Lebanese prime minister and forcing him to resign during his visit to the Saudi capital; detaining tens of prominent Saudi businesspeople and forcing them to submit to his will; toying with Vladimir Putin while the Russian leader invades Ukraine and sets energy markets ablaze. These examples show what kind of leadership awaits Saudi Arabia — and the United States — if MBS becomes king. Saudi Arabia is too important to be left in the hands of such a player. If Biden chooses to appease MBS now, the crown prince will create a bigger problem for the United States later.
The same goes for Egypt’s president. Here, too, the real challenge for the United States is not Sissi’s brutality; it’s that Sissi has built a Putin-like regime for other Arab leaders to emulate, promotes anti-American rhetoric and flirts with China and North Korea. At the same time, the United States is paying him for things he would do anyway, such as fighting terrorists or mediating cease-fires between Hamas and Israel. Enabling Sissi doesn’t serve a single clear U.S. goal in the region. In fact, it undermines most of these goals.
It is true that the United States cannot freely choose its Middle Eastern allies or shape their values or agenda. It must deal with existing realities, no matter how inconvenient. But it can do this in two diametrically opposed approaches: One favors immediate goals with little or no concern for the longer term; the other uses U.S. engagement and power to address immediate concerns while pushing seriously for longer-term transformations. Biden should seek the latter.
Regarding Gulf security, the president should address the legitimate concerns of Arab allies, but also push them toward broader security arrangements with Iran to stabilize the region and safeguard U.S. leadership. He should make small steps of progress between Israelis and Palestinians, but also engage them in serious dialogue about the untenable consequences of the status quo. And he must engage Saudi Arabia and Egypt in ways that check their rulers’ powers, not enable them further. Such strategies would be American leadership at its best. | 2022-07-11T11:17:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Middle East policy is too important to be guided by short-term concerns
- The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/biden-trip-saudi-arabia-mbs-egypt-middle-east-policy-must-consider-long-term-goals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/biden-trip-saudi-arabia-mbs-egypt-middle-east-policy-must-consider-long-term-goals/ |
Will Israel further normalize relations with its Arab neighbors?
My research finds that closer ties with Israel means Arab regimes have new tools to repress their own citizens
Analysis by Dana El Kurd
Workers display Israeli and U.S. flags along Jerusalem streets on July 10, ahead of President Biden's visit to Israel. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images)
As President Biden prepares to visit Saudi Arabia to meet with nine Arab leaders, Saudi, American and Israeli media have reported that talks of a broader normalization are underway. The U.S. envoy to combat antisemitism traveled to Saudi Arabia to encourage such talks, and Israeli officials have floated the prospect of a U.S.-led regional security agreement between Israel and some Arab Gulf nations. Biden has emphasized Israel’s security even more than oil as a reason for his visit.
The 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (along with Bahrain and Morocco), is the centerpiece of this regional security vision. The increased security coordination, as well as rising bilateral trade rates, have led some analysts to conclude that “peace is taking off.”
But normalization is not about peace, per se. The countries normalizing relations were not at war with Israel previously, and the process has rolled ahead without progress toward Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
My research on the Abraham Accords, as well as other normalization steps between Israel and Arab governments, shows that such agreements can have a negative impact on conditions within participating countries. Specifically, these kinds of agreements facilitate the sharing of technologies such as digital surveillance spyware, which can enable authoritarian regimes to increase repression. Normalization with Israel can also be a way for Arab countries to win credit with Washington without making domestic policy changes on issues such as human rights and political prisoners.
The regional security framework Biden reportedly aims to construct might be better understood, in this light, not as a peace agreement but as a form of authoritarian conflict management. For the citizens of countries that join, domestic conditions may worsen.
Surveillance technology partnerships are on the rise
Normalized relations between Israel and its new partners involve an economic component. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics recently released bilateral trade figures showing an almost 120 percent increase in bilateral trade with the UAE since last year, and a 40 percent jump in Israel-Morocco trade.
The increases in bilateral trade reflect, to a large extent, expanded connections between countries like the UAE and the Israeli defense industry. Emirati investments in Israeli surveillance and hacking companies have increased, along with partnerships between Emirati and Israeli businesses.
This has facilitated greater Emirati acquisition of repressive technologies — including spyware tools and surveillance drones — that Arab governments can then use to harass activists and dissidents at home and abroad. One prominent example is the case of Alaa al-Siddiq, an Emirati activist living in exile in London, who reported being hacked by the UAE government using Israeli software a few weeks before her death in a car crash.
On the Israeli side, such investments and new markets help boost the Israeli military industrial complex’s ability to develop new tools and methods, despite a U.S. blacklist on companies such as the NSO Group.
Gulf states repress pro-Palestinian sentiment
Surveys — and my field research — show that Arab publics remain, by a large majority, pro-Palestine. Citizens in Arab countries generally oppose normalization with Israel before the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Government-led normalization, in fact, often entails staving off any dissent from citizens.
A wide range of research has shown that the Palestinian issue mobilizes Arab publics. There’s a domestic component to this: The unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict pushes citizens in Arab countries to demand greater accountability from their governments, and thus poses a risk to authoritarian control.
This dynamic is also evident in the countries that have normalized relations with Israel. In Bahrain, the government took steps to limit public outrage over the Abraham Accords by passing new civil service bylaws forbidding government employees (a sizable portion of the population) from expressing opinions contradictory to official foreign policy. In the UAE, government officials encouraged citizens and residents to use a designated app to report on one another for the crime of opposing official government policy. Following the signing of the accords, both governments were swift to stifle dissent. In Bahrain, for instance, the government disbanded protests and shut down events such as panel discussions and lectures on Palestine.
Social ties in normalizing countries appear to be fraying as a result of this repression. Activists from the UAE report that fear of punishment has led families to cut ties with their relatives who have spoken out about these issues. Similarly, in Bahrain, citizens note that public expression is “more restricted than it was in the past” and that people are “confused,” unsure of who is safe to speak to.
Will new conflicts emerge?
Given these trends, regional normalization agreements do not mean that peace has arrived in the Middle East — or that parties have ceased to be in conflict. Instead, the region’s authoritarians seem to be using foreign policy to help keep a lid on domestic opposition.
There is also a risk of inflaming new conflicts. The increased security coordination within the region allows Israel to ignore the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict: Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and the denial of Palestinian self-determination. Palestinians find themselves increasingly isolated from their Arab neighbors and less hopeful about the possibility for a two-state solution.
And Israel may feel emboldened to take faster and more aggressive steps, including annexing Palestinian territory and confiscating property. That could trigger more violence, similar to the East Jerusalem protests and Israeli crackdowns last summer.
The UAE and other regimes that have normalized relations with Israel may think that increased repression and official propaganda will eventually change minds. But a new generation of activists in the Arab world is increasingly making the connection between its struggles for democracy and accountability, and the ongoing injustices to Palestinians. Moreover, the region’s history attests to the impact of the Palestinian conflict on broader political mobilization, including during the Arab Spring a decade ago. As such, the Abraham Accords could be creating the very problems it claims to overcome.
Dana El Kurd (@danaelkurd) is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond and a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. She is author of “Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine” (Oxford University Press, 2020). | 2022-07-11T11:18:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As Biden heads to the Middle East, ‘normalization’ is the buzz - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/11/biden-israel-saudi-mbs-abraham-accords/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/11/biden-israel-saudi-mbs-abraham-accords/ |
Biden’s Saudi trip spotlights age-old tension between human rights agenda and political reality
Analysis by Tobi Raji
Good morning, Early Birds! We hope you had a restful weekend. Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
In today's edition … Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tests positive for covid … President Biden and Vice President Harris will host an event this morning celebrating Biden's signing of the bipartisan gun legislation last month … what Steve Bannon might say at the next Jan 6. hearing … Democrats next moves on abortion… but first …
President Biden will make his first official trip to the Middle East on Wednesday in what will be another test of his ability to balance the administration’s stated focus on human rights and advancing strategic interests.
The visit to Saudi Arabia — which comes as Russia’s war on Ukraine continues to disrupt global energy security — has drawn ire from lawmakers and top foreign policy aides on its purpose and utility.
Critics have slammed Biden’s visit to the oil-rich kingdom, given their record of human rights abuses under Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership, including the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (The crown prince has denied ordering Khashoggi’s killing.)
But it’s Biden’s sit-down with MBS during a bilateral meeting that underscores the tension between his values-based approach to foreign policy and the governing realities of the current world.
“This visit to Saudi Arabia is clearly a significant setback to the desire to place human rights at the center of American foreign policy,” Christopher J. Bolan, foreign policy adviser on Middle East and South Asia affairs for Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney, said.
However, “forging an effectively bilateral relationship with the Kingdom and its leadership is something that serves American interests,” Bolan added, and “President Biden’s meeting with him is a reluctant recognition of that unpleasant reality.”
On the agenda: Biden will kick off his three-day trip to the Middle East with a stop in Israel, where he’ll meet with Prime Minister Yair Lapid to discuss Israeli national security. He’ll also visit the West Bank and meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Biden will then travel to Saudi Arabia for the Summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Jiddah. He will hold bilateral talks with King Salman and his leadership team, including MBS, White House spokesman John Kirby confirmed on Thursday. They are expected to discuss the cease-fire in Yemen, counterterrorism, climate change and energy security, Kirby said.
According to Bolan, Saudi Arabia has a lot to gain from a meeting with Biden.
“For MBS personally, this visit cements his position as de facto ruler of the country. It also demonstrates his ability to pursue independent Saudi foreign and domestic policies despite intense public pressure and scrutiny from the U.S. Congress and President Biden.”
According to Biden, the U.S. has much to gain from a meeting with Saudi leadership as well. “A region that’s coming together through diplomacy and cooperation — rather than coming apart through conflict — is less likely to give rise to violent extremism that threatens our homeland or new wars that could place new burdens on U.S. military forces and their families,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Saturday.
Not the first, and likely not the last
Biden isn't the first U.S. president to re-engage authoritarian governments in an attempt to balance competing issues.
“Almost every president tries to balance values and interests,” Dennis Ross, who has worked on Middle East policy under five presidents, told The Early. “Sometimes on a short-term basis, they will see that they choose one over the other.”
Most recently, Biden faced open criticism when he invited Brazil to last month’s Summit of the Americas and held a one-on-one meeting with Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s far-right leader. Bolsonaro made baseless claims of electoral fraud, threatened to contest the results of the country’s upcoming presidential elections and cast doubt on Biden’s presidential win.
Both the Trump and Obama administrations embraced former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, despite his presidency being marred by corruption, including his recent extradition for allegedly receiving millions in bribes as part of a drug-trafficking scheme.
And President Jimmy Carter’s Middle East foreign policy was heavily influenced by the U.S.’s dependence on oil, Bolan added.
“There will be times when our short-term interests don’t align perfectly with our long-term vision for the region,” Obama said of American diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa during a 2011 address to the State Department.
Campaign promises vs. political reality
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers and voters are skeptical of thawing a relationship with the region, despite concern over high gas prices, which Republicans have sought to blame Biden for ahead of the November elections.
“While I recognize the geopolitical imperatives of visiting Saudi Arabia, I am deeply concerned a meeting with MBS at this moment risks sending the absolutely wrong message if we don’t center the conversation around human rights,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote in a statement to The Early. “We cannot let him believe he can rule with impunity simply because we’re addicted to foreign oil. This isn’t just about Saudi Arabia, this is about the credibility of our global human rights agenda.”
Robert W. Jordan, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during George W. Bush’s administration and a longtime friend of Khashoggi, said there were several times when he expressed “complete and utter disgust” with Khashoggi’s killing. But noted that “an ambassador and a president have broader responsibilities, some of which sometimes conflict.”
“Not all partnerships are pleasant partnerships,” Jordan continued.
Human rights advocates are still not convinced. “In the case of Biden I fear that he is essentially saying ‘Let’s forget about Jamal Khashoggi; let’s forget about the repression of all domestic activists in Saudi Arabia; let’s forget about the bombing of Yemeni civilians for a slightly cheaper tank of gas,’” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told our colleague Missy Ryan.
But Ross doesn’t believe that Biden is sacrificing his long-term commitment to human rights by traveling to Saudi Arabia.
“The reality is, if you put this relationship on a more solid footing, it’s also going to mean the Saudis will be more generally responsive to American concerns,” Ross said. If the trip “produces that, then it will be a successful trip.”
The final legislative sprint — filled with hurdles
Congress is back and ready (or not) for the last legislative sprint — even if it feels like a marathon — before the midterm elections. The Senate returns today and will be in session for four weeks; the House is back tomorrow and will depart again in only three weeks.
Democrats have lofty goals for the mid-summer session before they turn their focus and time to the midterm elections.
But in another reminder of the barely-there Democratic majority, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has tested positive for covid, sidelining him from votes for at least a week.
“Consistent with the CDC guidance, Leader Schumer will quarantine this week and work remotely. Anyone who knows Leader Schumer knows that even if he’s not physically in the Capitol, through virtual meetings and his trademark flip phone he will continue with his robust schedule and remain in near constant contact with his colleagues," Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman said in a statement.
Schumer's absence won't derail their legislative ambitions for this work period (see below) but it's another reminder of how fragile and how important every member of the Senate majority is.
Build Back Better is back
A slimmed-down version of Democrats' once-massive reconciliation package is back, as negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) have made significant progress in the past week.
As our colleague Tony Romm scooped this weekend, the scaled-back reconciliation package includes:
Lower drug costs for seniors, improved financial health of Medicare and closure of a tax loophole that benefits the wealthy. They even have advanced talks around addressing the challenges posed by a faster-warming planet, raising the prospect that they can secure a limited initiative to penalize methane emissions.
Some on K Street are also optimistic that the bill could pass.
“We probably have a two-in-three chance of getting reconciliation through to the president before mid-August,” said Rich Gold, who leads Holland & Knight’s public policy and regulation group.
But Republicans will do everything in their power to make sure it goes nowhere. They're publicly and privately pressuring the two senators whose support is critical for Democrats' success: Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Republicans will highlight the two Democrats' concerns, including inflation, Biden's low poll numbers and higher taxes.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 Senate Republican, previewed the argument on “Fox News Sunday.”
"To my friend Joe Manchin from West Virginia, whose vote is going to be necessary for this," Barrasso said, "I would remind him that Joe Biden's popularity in that state it is as low as it is in Wyoming. Only 17 percent. Joe shouldn't walk the plank for Joe Biden."
USICA stand off
Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Biden administration will try to wrap up House and Senate conference negotiations on the microchip and technology bill, known as USICA, the United States Innovation and Competition Act.
But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he'd work against an agreement on the bipartisan measure if Democrats move forward with reconciliation. (Read above).
The administration and Democrats say it's a national security threat if the bill isn't passed. Schumer has scheduled an all-senator national security briefing for Wednesday to press the issue and put pressure on McConnell.
Senate Democrats are in a rush to move nominations ahead of the midterm elections in case Democrats lose control of the Senate.
They'll vote this week on a series of nominations, including Steve Dettelbach to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The White House was forced to withdraw Biden's first pick for the long-vacant position, David Chipman, who failed to secure the support of two Democratic senators and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine.)
Leahy update
Schumer isn't the only senator out for health reasons. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), 82, who had surgery on his hip after a fall over the recess, but he is expected to be available for any critical votes.
“Senator Leahy’s recovery and physical therapy are proceeding well and he expects to be available for votes this week if necessary," David Carle, a Leahy spokesman, told The Early.
What Bannon could say at the next Jan 6. hearing
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is set to hold another hearing on Tuesday. It's expected to focus on Trump's Dec. 19, 2020, tweet — a “siren call” as Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) told NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday — urging his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 and other messages from Trump and his allies, as our colleagues Amy Wang and Olivier Knox report.
Steve Bannon's lawyer, meanwhile, told the committee on Saturday that he'll willing to testify — although the offer “could turn out to be a ploy,” as our colleagues Isaac Arnsdorf, Jacqueline Alemany, Rosalind Helderman and Josh Dawsey report.
“Bannon could still assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as other witnesses such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark have done. Bannon might also insist on conditions, such as testifying on live TV, that the committee might not want to accept.”
If he does testify, Bannon could help clarify why he tried to help get Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, out of jail days before Jan. 6, as well as the circumstances surrounding Trump's last-minute pardon of Bannon before leaving office.
Democrats' next moves on abortion
First in the Early: Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) sent a letter to Biden on Friday urging him “to prioritize equity” as his administration responds to the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. He wants Biden to address the disproportionate impact the “decision will have on racial minorities and economically disadvantaged families, as well as immigrant and tribal communities.”
Among Padilla's suggestions: The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, should “develop policies and protocols to ensure that pregnant women and girls in immigration detention or in Office of Refugee and Resettlement custody are not denied access to reproductive healthcare — including abortion — because they are detained in states where access to abortion is now restricted.”
The letter comes as the House plans to take up at least two bills aimed at protecting women seeking abortions and medical providers performing them. One of them, from Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), is an updated version of her bill that passed the House earlier this year codifying Roe v. Wade. The other, by Reps. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Tex.), Marilyn Strickland (D-Wash.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), would protect women traveling across state lines to seek an abortion.
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) has been in touch with Harris about her bill, the My Body, My Data Act, which would protect ovulation and period app users health data, Jacobs told The Early. Biden in the abortion-related executive order he signed on Friday directed his administration to explore privacy protections for app users.
Biden says he's weighing calls to declare a public health emergency on abortion. By The Post’s Matt Viser.
Why the Jan. 6 committee rushed Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony. By the New York Times’s Robert Draper.
Military contractor said U.S. intelligence officials backed its attempt to buy blacklisted Israeli spyware firm. By the New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman.
Buttigieg says officials like Kavanaugh ‘should expect’ public protest. By The Post's María Luisa Paúl.
House GOP marches into deeper blue terrain as Dem prospects fade. By Politico's Ally Mutnick and Sarah Ferris.
Thanks for reading. You can also follow us on Twitter: @tobiaraji, @theodoricmeyer and @LACaldwellDC. | 2022-07-11T11:18:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s Saudi trip spotlights age-old tension between human rights agenda and political reality - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/11/bidens-saudi-trip-spotlights-age-old-tension-between-human-rights-agenda-political-reality/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/11/bidens-saudi-trip-spotlights-age-old-tension-between-human-rights-agenda-political-reality/ |
Why El Salvador’s mass arrests won’t lower the murder rate
By promising to reduce homicides, politicians are forced to make deals with the gangs
Analysis by Michael Ahn Paarlberg
A man is arrested for alleged gang connections in El Salvador on June 22. (Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images)
For several months now, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has pursued a campaign of mass arrests.
Under his recently extended state of emergency, police have arrested more than 43,000 people on suspicion of membership in the gangs MS-13 and Barrio 18, which the government classifies as terrorist groups. Grounds for arrest include having tattoos, living in neighborhoods with gang presence or simply “looking like criminals.” Amnesty International has reported on human rights abuses, including indefinite pretrial detention, trials in absentia and lifting sentencing restrictions on minors as young as 12. At least 59 people have died in custody, according to the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal.
Repackaging an old strategy
The arrests are unprecedented in scale, but the underlying strategy is hardly novel.
Since 2003, El Salvador and neighboring countries have used this anti-crime strategy — called la mano dura, “hard hand” — or zero-tolerance policing. Critics charge that these policies have criminalized entire communities, profiling all poor youths as likely gang members. El Salvador’s National Civil Police once estimated the number of individuals “tied to gangs” to be improbably high, around 500,000, in a country of only 6.5 million.
Biden wants to halt deportations. Here’s what happens when migrations are sent back.
Not all criminal groups are alike
As my research shows, Central American and U.S. governments often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach for addressing transnational organized crime. Then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for example, once listed MS-13, the Sinaloa drug cartel and Hezbollah as among the top criminal threats to the United States, as if these were similar organizations.
But they aren’t. The resulting law enforcement strategies treat all criminal groups as mafia or cartel-type transnational criminal organizations: highly profitable, well resourced, diversified in activities, and with a hierarchical structure resembling that of a corporation.
In reality, transnational gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 are relatively resource-poor, decentralized, horizontally organized by franchise, and involved in unsophisticated criminal activities like street-level drug dealing and extorting local vendors and residents.
By conflating very different criminal groups, governments in both migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries overlook core features that help shape their choices of leaders and their evolution into transnational activities.
It matters that El Salvador’s gangs come from the United States
Although news media reports often describe MS-13 and Barrio 18 as “Central American gangs,” the groups started in Los Angeles among Salvadoran refugees fleeing the 1979-1992 civil war. Through the 1980s, they were little more than neighborhood gangs of juvenile delinquents and not transnational.
The Clinton administration’s mass deportations changed that status. After passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, which lowered the bar for deportable crimes, the U.S. government deported thousands of people for often petty crimes. Those included some gang members. Effectively, the United States exported the gangs through immigration enforcement policy.
U.S. deportation policies have filled Central American countries with a sustained, decades-long influx of deportees with no employment prospects. Relatively few are gang members, but given U.S. politicians’ rhetoric, all face the social stigma of deportation and the presumption that they’re “gang bangers.”
With the gangs now established in countries with limited public safety resources, those countries have responded with indiscriminate arrests and mass jailing. As of last year, El Salvador has the fourth-highest imprisonment rate in the world. The latest crackdown has put 2 percent of the population behind bars, surpassing the longtime global leader, the United States. In overcrowded prisons, the gangs consolidate their power and direct activities on the streets.
How deporting immigrants from the U.S. increases immigration to the U.S.
Do mass arrests work?
My research finds that zero-tolerance deportation and policing policies in the United States and El Salvador are linked and counterproductive. The gangs are largely under control in the United States. But when exported to countries with limited resources for public safety, those countries respond with mano dura approaches that strengthen the gangs and drive further migration to the United States.
First, spikes in violence tend to follow lulls. That’s what happened in March. After a years-long drop in homicides following Bukele’s election, the gangs allegedly killed 87 people in two days. When mano dura failed before, the next administration relaunched it and rebranded it as “super mano dura.” Bukele has dubbed his strategy “Plan Control Territorial,” but it is essentially the same as his predecessors’.
Second, governments often make secret pacts with the gangs. The administration of then-President Mauricio Funes had brokered a gang “truce” that resulted in a previous drop in homicides in 2012. Officials from his government have been prosecuted for this deal by the current government. The latest drop — and decline in gang arrests by police before the crackdown — coincide with the Bukele government’s own negotiations with the gangs. News reports and former officials exposed this latest pact. The U.S. Justice and Treasury departments have investigated and sanctioned top government officials who facilitated the negotiations.
Third, while the Bukele government has been locking up teenagers, it has freed top leaders of MS-13 known as the “ranfla.” One top official personally escorted a gang leader to Guatemala so that he could escape extradition to the United States to be prosecuted for conspiracy to engage in narcoterrorism. The last government pact with the gangs — rumored to include cash payments to the gangs in exchange for campaign support and a drop in homicides — resulted in March in a killing rampage, after the government allegedly suspended those payments. This spike set off the current state of emergency and mass arrests.
Bukele is just the latest president to run on reducing crime. But that strategy empowers the gangs. As Funes found, the only way to lower the homicide rate is through negotiations. The exact terms are secret, though they probably involve perks for imprisoned gang leaders, payoffs and protection from extradition, in exchange for a pause in violence. Even this is a mirage, as the drop in killings coincided with a rise in disappearances. And as gangs learned, politicians’ sensitivity to the homicide rate means that the easiest way to extract further concessions is to drop more bodies on the streets.
Michael Ahn Paarlberg (@MPaarlberg) is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies. | 2022-07-11T11:18:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bukele’s ‘state of emergency’ won’t drop the murder rate. Deals will. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/11/bukele-el-salvador-homicides-gangs-ms-13-barrio-18/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/11/bukele-el-salvador-homicides-gangs-ms-13-barrio-18/ |
A lobbying push in the Russian parliament fell apart, and stiff competition from a homegrown rival proved insurmountable
(Lucy Naland/Washington Post illustration; Alexander Miridonov/Kommersant/Sipa/AP; Uber screenshots; iStock)
When Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick touched down in Moscow in June 2016, Uber was on the march in Russia.
The company had worked hard to forge ties in a nation notoriously tricky for Western businesses and had leaned on all the questionable, grow-at-all-costs tactics that had become its hallmark around the globe.
It cultivated oligarchs and government officials at a time when the country faced growing international condemnation for seizing Crimea from Ukraine and stoking war in that country’s east. It sold a $200 million stake to a pair of oligarchs in a quest to get close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite the authoritarian drift of Putin’s government, then, according to previously unpublicized emails among company executives, offered a $50 million deal sweetener that it didn’t publicize. It agreed, emails show, to hire a lobbyist for as much as $650,000 in an arrangement so concerning to Uber’s lawyers that they insisted the lobbyist submit to training in U.S. anti-bribery law.
Uber’s approach appeared to be working, and on the second night of Kalanick’s trip, tech entrepreneurs and government officials assembled around a vast table to dine with the Uber executive at the Moscow City Golf Club.
Four miles from the Kremlin, the 9-hole club stood atop a former city dump and wasn’t as fancy as those in the suburbs, but it still offered a kind of stuffy luxury. According to a table plan obtained by The Washington Post, Kalanick was to sit across from one of Putin’s ministers and the head of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank.
Kalanick left the following morning, seemingly happy with his time in Moscow. His team was pleased, too.
“Russia trips seems to have been a success,” Rachel Whetstone, then the company’s communications director, wrote to Mark MacGann, then an adviser to Uber based in Europe who had joined the trip to chaperone Kalanick.
“Was a great 36 hour immersion,” MacGann replied. “Media very strong.”
Uber viewed Russia as among the company’s most important foreign markets, according to a memo that is part of the Uber Files, a trove of more than 124,000 documents obtained by the Guardian and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nonprofit newsroom in Washington, D.C., that helped lead the project, and dozens of other news organizations, including The Washington Post. The documents provide a detailed look at the aggressive strategies Uber adopted to grow in Europe and other international markets.
That memo shows that Uber believed Russia’s dozen “millionniki” — cities home to at least a million people — presented a ripe opportunity. But like the golf club’s, Uber’s foundations in Russia were questionable. A little over a year later, Uber would essentially pull out of the country.
The retreat was evidence that even with piles of investor cash and a willingness to embrace the Russian elite at a time of growing authoritarianism, Uber’s growth had limits. In nations such as Russia and China, which Uber also exited, the pathways to power were obscure to outsiders, and homegrown competitors could dominate.
The files do not contain evidence that Uber violated sanctions or broke the law as it tried to grow in Russia. But today, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost everyone with whom Uber allied then is under sanction for their alleged ties to Putin by U.S. or European authorities.
Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Kalanick, said he had only limited involvement in Uber’s expansion in Russia and was not aware of anyone acting on Uber’s behalf in the country in a way that violated American or Russian laws.
“Mr. Kalanick’s role was limited to a trip to Russia that included a few meetings arranged by Uber’s policy and business development teams,” Spurgeon said. She added that Kalanick “was asked for his involvement” after Uber’s “robust” legal, policy and business development teams had “vetted and approved the strategy and operations plans.”
“Mr. Kalanick acted at all times lawfully and with the clear approval and authorization of Uber’s legal team,” Spurgeon said. “Mr. Kalanick is not aware of anyone acting on Uber’s behalf in Russia who engaged in any conduct that would have violated either Russian or U.S. law.”
Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Uber, said nobody currently at the company was involved in developing its strategy in Russia and that today it discloses its anti-corruption policies.
“Current Uber management thinks Putin is reprehensible and disavows any previous association with him or those close to him,” Hazelbaker wrote.
But in 2016, Russia’s future remained unclear, and Uber’s leadership had reason to think its investments would pay off.
The files show that Sberbank’s chief executive, Herman Gref, introduced Uber officials to the mayor of Moscow, and Uber credited the bank’s help in securing a deal with city authorities that avoided a demand that all Uber drivers have yellow cars. They also show that in February 2016, Uber accepted $200 million from LetterOne, the investment firm of Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, oligarchs who made their fortunes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and struck a secret deal worth an additional $50 million to encourage them to aid its success in Russia.
With the help of a lobbyist Fridman and Aven’s firm recommended, company emails and memos show, Uber was working to have a federal law on taxis written to stop regional governments from being able to limit Uber’s growth.
Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School, said that pursuing that kind of lobbying strategy in Russia, where the risk of corruption is high, would have been risky under American anti-bribery laws.
“It’s kind of a blazing red flag,” she said. “There are many companies that would opt to walk away from something like this.”
By year’s end, Uber expected to be in 18 cities in Russia, according to a company memo.
But there were signs that not all was well. As an American company with global ambitions, Uber was increasingly out of step with how Russia was evolving in the mid-2010s.
The company’s core customers were westward-looking members of the middle class — whom Uber portrayed as wanting to use the same app Parisians used, even if they could no longer afford to travel to France, according to a company memo — and its political allies were economic reformers with ties to the United States and Europe. But the rising force in Russia was Putin, who was consolidating control over the country and curbing the independence of tech companies in particular.
Uber had other weaknesses, too. Consultants hired by Uber had concluded that Fridman and Aven’s political influence was not what it had been thought to be, according to a report they provided to the company. Company executives would soon come to believe their handpicked lobbyist hadn’t done much to justify his tens of thousands of dollars in monthly fees. And while Uber hadn’t faced the kind of entrenched opposition from the taxi industry that it had battled elsewhere in Europe, it did have to contend with a large, homegrown rival in the form of Russia’s answer to Google, Yandex.
Despite MacGann’s upbeat appraisal of the Moscow trip for Whetstone, he shared a different view of Kalanick’s performance with David Plouffe, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who, as an Uber executive, had helped lay the groundwork for the company in Russia.
“Neither his head nor his heart are in it,” MacGann wrote in an email. “He’s exhausted.”
Hunting for allies
Uber had entered Russia in 2013, initially facing little opposition. But after it launched the low-cost UberX service, the authorities began to take notice. A backbench member of the Duma, the lower chamber of Russia’s parliament, wrote to Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in September 2014 calling for the company to be banned. There was little threat of that, Uber’s leaders concluded, but they began looking for oligarchs and other influential figures who could serve as allies.
Emil Michael, then Uber’s chief business officer, wrote to MacGann that month wondering whether Roman Abramovich, then the owner of the Chelsea soccer club in England, might be a good choice: “I think we want someone aligned with Putin and I don’t know the politics in Russia super well.”
In early 2015, Uber’s leaders in Russia and Europe began sizing up a shortlist of the country’s richest men, emails show. Experts on Russian politics say it’s not clear how much sway many oligarchs — billionaires who in some cases made their fortunes by snapping up government assets after the fall of the Soviet Union — held as Putin tightened his grip.
But Uber’s leaders and advisers saw them as the key to success, replicating an approach the company had used in other countries that involved lining up strategic partners who brought both money and political influence.
In Russia, though, it was a potentially risky path.
MacGann sent a note listing five possible names, and Dmitri Izmailov, Uber’s manager in Russia, circulated a brief memo in January summarizing their wealth, business interests, political ties and accusations of wrongdoing they had faced: “It’s a colourful group of people.”
Izmailov declined to comment.
Among the candidates was Alisher Usmanov, a metals magnate, who was convicted of economic offenses in the 1980s during the Soviet era. His spokesman said the charges were politically motivated and later overturned. Hazelbaker said that at the time he was being considered, Uber executives were aware he had been accused of corruption.
Three days later, MacGann wrote to Michael that he had spoken with an investor who worked for Usmanov.
Michael urged caution: “We got to be clean with Russia investors, but at the same time not insult them so let’s be careful what we say to any Russian investors.”
Asked recently about the exchange, a spokesman for Michael said Uber’s foreign investors were approved and vetted by the company’s policy and public relations team, and its legal and compliance team.
“Uber operated in Russia along with most other large U.S.-based global businesses,” the spokesman said. “Uber never courted any individuals who were subject to U.S. sanctions in any way and abided by best practices for all U.S. businesses operating in the country.”
Usmanov would invest $20 million in Uber before the end of 2015, according to Uber memos. The company’s team in Russia planned to put his influence to use, according to a strategy document from that fall, but there’s no record in the files of him aiding Uber. When Uber was asked by Fortune about the investment in early 2016, Michael wrote to MacGann and another Uber executive, “We DO NOT want to confirm this at all.”
Grigory Levchenko, a spokesman for Usmanov’s company, USM, said Usmanov had never been involved in politics. “USM and Uber were negotiating a purely financial investment, and USM’s involvement was limited to this,” Levchenko said, adding that USM made a profit on its investment in Uber.
By March 2015, Abramovich had decided not to invest but continued to advise Uber as it sought other partners in Russia. The company’s leaders had added Sberbank to its target list. The bank traces its history back to the time of the czars, and under Gref’s leadership it had been overhauled and modernized.
MacGann said he could make the introduction to Gref, and in July 2015, he and Plouffe made a trip to Moscow to begin the long courtship that culminated in the golf club dinner.
Plouffe did not respond to questions about his activities for Uber involving Russia. Gref and Sberbank did not respond to questions about their dealings with Uber.
Dealing with the Russian authorities
As the Uber team began to establish relationships in Russia, the challenge the Moscow authorities posed to Uber’s growth was becoming clear.
A top official in the Moscow government had called for national regulation of ride-hailing companies and demanded an investigation into Uber. On Aug. 24, 2015, a local prosecutor paid Uber a visit, asking for a meeting within two days to address a litany of complaints against the company. The local authorities wanted Uber to use only drivers with taxi licenses and operate only yellow vehicles, something that Uber saw as a major barrier to recruitment.
“Looks like we need to ramp up our alliances on the ground, and fast,” MacGann wrote after learning about the investigation.
Other threats loomed. Under the heading “growing pressure,” an October 2015 summary of Uber’s position in Russia also listed investigations from a federal anti-monopoly authority, a tax agency and prosecutors in St. Petersburg.
But Uber was beginning to make headway and lock in allies. Usmanov had invested, and talks were underway with LetterOne. Uber and Sberbank had signed a publicly announced deal to work together on mobile payments and vehicle financing. An executive at the bank promised to speak to the Moscow official who had demanded the investigation and explore the possibility of a meeting between Uber and the mayor of Moscow, an Uber executive wrote in an email after the agreement was signed. U.S. authorities had placed limited sanctions on Sberbank, but Uber’s lawyers advised in December 2015 that they wouldn’t get in the way of the agreement, according to an email.
Then, in Davos for the 2016 edition of the World Economic Forum, Kalanick personally helped reel in LetterOne’s investment. Kalanick met Alexey Reznikovich, the managing partner of LetterOne Technology, at the five-star Belvedere Hotel, according to his calendar.
“TK did great job at getting Alexey comfortable — created strong contact,” MacGann wrote.
Reznikovich did not respond to requests for comment.
In February, the deal was signed. Uber agreed that LetterOne could publicize the investment, a break from its usual practice. But in a news release, Kalanick only hinted at what Uber saw as the major value of the partnership, saying, “L1′s knowledge of emerging markets will be crucial.”
Unmentioned: A $50 million side deal with LetterOne in the form of warrants — financial instruments that typically allow the holder to buy more stock at favorable prices — designed to incentivize LetterOne to help Uber grow in Russia, according to company emails describing the deal.
Hazelbaker said even if LetterOne “did nothing” it could have still used the warrants, and that they were tied to “Uber’s relative growth in Russia, as measured by the number of trips happening in the country.”
In a recent interview, Aven, who resigned as a LetterOne director earlier this year, said he recalled one meeting with an Uber employee but was not involved in the investment in the company. He said he did not lobby on Uber’s behalf.
“I can give you a comment because it’s easy,” he said. “I was not involved with Uber at all.”
Fridman, who also resigned as a LetterOne director this year, said his involvement with Uber also was minimal.
“Except for my very short meeting with Mr. Kalanick, I was not involved with the Uber investment or with any lobbying,” Fridman said in a recent interview.
A spokesman for LetterOne also said the company did not engage in any lobbying, and the decision to hire any lobbyist was Uber’s.
“L1 became a modest strategic investor in Uber’s multibillion-dollar funding round on the basis of Uber’s potential in Asia and Russia,” the spokesman said.
But to Uber leaders, the partnership quickly proved its worth. Within weeks, they were crediting LetterOne and Sberbank with helping Uber and the Moscow authorities reach an operating agreement, emails show, easing one major source of pressure on the company. Uber agreed to use cars with taxi licenses and share some data with the local government but avoided requirements such as having to operate yellow vehicles.
With allies in place and the Moscow authorities at bay, MacGann and one of Uber’s outside advisers began crafting a strategy in a document titled “taming the bear.” The focus was passing a favorable federal law through the Duma that would allow Uber to grow relatively unchecked by limiting the power of regional authorities to require cars of a particular color or cap the number of taxi licenses.
“The team believes that we should get organized, and fast, for an effective and comprehensive all-out lobbying campaign,” they wrote in a draft memo outlining the plan.
Experts on Russian politics said Aven and Fridman’s influence by 2016 was likely not substantial, but Uber’s leaders were optimistic nonetheless. In an email, MacGann described the men as being part of a circle of the top 20 people who mattered in Russia.
“Having allies such as Aven, Gref and Fridman is quite unprecedented for a foreign (and US to boot) business seeking to disrupt the status quo in Russia and generate substantial income,” MacGann wrote.
The new investors from LetterOne were keen to help — with one addition.
They proposed having Vladimir Senin, an executive at a bank they also ran, serve as Uber’s lobbyist at a cost of $50,000 a month, according to emails among Uber leaders describing the pitch. The proposal troubled Uber’s leadership team, including Whetstone, who urged colleagues in emails to be sure they considered other consultants.
“I don’t want to have our agencies decided by outsiders or to appoint an agency without a tender between three or four firms so that we know we have the best fit at the best cost,” she wrote.
The potential cost, which at one point in the discussions with Senin ballooned to a proposed $800,000 for about 7 months’ work, also became an issue.
“It is so much money,” Whetstone wrote. “Can we negotiate. Basically over 100k a month which I would never normally pay.”
Whetstone declined to comment on the specifics of her involvement with Uber’s business in Russia. She said in general that she “consistently pushed back on Uber’s more aggressive business practices.”
Senin did not respond to requests for comment.
Uber’s lawyers also raised concerns about the arrangement, according to a summary of their guidance, written by Uber executive Fraser Robinson. They worried about the possibility that Senin would take actions for which the company would be legally responsible.
“Ultimately there is no absolute way to prevent this, but the best we can do will most likely be to speak to L1 and tell them that they need to make 200% clear to Senin that any bribes will not be tolerated, and that we may hold the discretionary warrants as collateral,” Robinson wrote to MacGann.
Robinson declined to comment.
In an April 2016 email, an Uber lawyer wrote that it would be preferable for LetterOne itself to be responsible for the lobbying. Otherwise, Senin and his team should be required to undergo compliance training and provide documentation of their activities.
Just as MacGann had labeled some of the legal advice too conservative, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, an outside adviser to Uber, called the idea “totally absurd.”
“I see this all the time from idiot lawyers in the US who think that the world should work like a suburb of Seattle,” he wrote to MacGann.
In a statement, Wegg-Prosser’s firm, Global Counsel, said its work for Uber’s European team “was undertaken in adherence with all relevant EU and UK guidelines.”
Ultimately, Uber agreed to hire Senin in a deal worth up to $650,000. A draft of his contract included the training requirement and a pledge that he would not violate anti-corruption laws. Hazelbaker said a contract Uber found in its records “contains robust anti-corruption provisions.”
In response to questions, MacGann said he had concerns at the time about the amount Uber was being asked to pay Senin.
“This was clearly irregular,” he said. “I made my concerns clear to the management team in San Francisco, including to my direct boss at the time.”
But the company was up against a deadline, fearing that in Duma elections in the fall a key sympathetic lawmaker might lose his seat.
Kalanick comes to Moscow
In the spring of 2016, Uber’s team in Europe began planning for Kalanick to come to Moscow. He had already met some of Uber’s key partners at Davos and hosted Gref at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, but now it was time to visit them on their home turf.
The trip would illustrate how closely tied politics and business were in Russia, with Kalanick often sharing a table with corporate leaders and top government officials.
“God love the Russians, where business and politics are so ….cosy,” MacGann wrote.
Even though it was June, Kalanick’s first night in Moscow was as cold, he said, as the coldest day in California. Huddled under red blankets or wearing coats, a crowd of about 1,700 people had turned out to see Kalanick explain how Uber could help bust Moscow’s traffic — “probki,” as he had learned Russians called it. Kalanick, wearing a borrowed jacket, delivered his presentation awkwardly before taking questions.
A reporter from a Russian outlet struck right at the heart of one of Uber’s biggest challenges in Russia: the stiff competition from other operators.
“Your ambitious plan about Russia and changing the traffic situation, are they real?” the reporter asked. “Uber honestly is nowadays one of the smallest taxi apps. I’m sorry for that, but we have Yandex Taxi.”
“Boo,” Kalanick said, talking over her. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Yandex’s taxi company was a branch of the Russian tech firm, which also ran a search engine and mapping service. In internal reports, Uber estimated that in March 2016, Uber was conducting 420,000 trips per week to Yandex’s 750,000. Uber executives saw potential for working with Yandex but also found the Russian company unwilling to join its lobbying efforts.
On Monday morning, Kalanick met with one of Russia’s deputy prime ministers at a pizzeria before heading across town to Fridman’s offices. Kalanick might have boasted about cutting traffic, but to get to the dinner with Gref on time, his team decided they would have to take the Metro.
“Good news: we took metro and it meant we were on time for Gref influencer dinner instead of 45 minutes late,” MacGann texted Whetstone. The bad news, he said, was that they had passed through stations that looked like some of the grimmer parts of London, rather than the palatial ones for which Moscow is famous.
The visit ended the next morning on an inauspicious note: Kalanick overslept and forgot his phone at the hotel.
‘Absolutely terrible waste of money’
The week before Kalanick’s visit, Uber had hired an in-house government relations executive in Russia. Marat Murtazin had held a similar role with oil giant BP. That meant he had an awkward history with Fridman and Aven, who had used the proceeds from a collapsed joint venture with BP to launch their investment firm.
As Murtazin got to grips with Uber’s position in Russia, he soon began to question whether Senin was doing the lobbying work he claimed. Other Uber executives, including Whetstone, were also concerned about Senin’s performance.
“I think that we let Senin to play a guaranteed win lottery without even making him to pay for a lottery — ticket,” Murtazin wrote to Robinson in his idiosyncratic English.
Murtazin did not respond to requests for comment.
By July 2016, Uber had decided to end Senin’s contract. But it was a delicate subject, because some company leaders feared it would alienate Aven, his patron. They ultimately paid him $300,000, leaving Senin “very happy,” according to Murtazin.
“What an absolutely terrible waste of money,” MacGann wrote to Murtazin.
Hazelbaker confirmed Senin was paid.
“We certainly would not engage with Mr. Senin … today,” she said.
The prospects of the taxi law passing before the election were also slipping away as different factions battled over its contents. Uber’s team decided to regroup and develop a plan for the new session of the Duma. The taxi law was never passed, according to the Duma’s records.
In June 2017, Kalanick resigned as chief executive after a wave of allegations about sexual harassment at Uber. Within weeks, Uber had signed a deal to form a joint venture controlled by Yandex, marking the end of its efforts to expand in Russia. Uber began winding down its involvement in that venture in 2021, accelerating its efforts after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Fridman and Aven’s LetterOne later sold its stake in Uber at a loss, according to Russian media reports.
Just as the company’s buccaneering culture had finally caught up with Kalanick, Russia had shown that there were parts of the globe that Uber simply couldn’t conquer.
Harry Davies of the Guardian and Nicole Sadek of ICIJ contributed to this report. | 2022-07-11T11:18:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uber leak: Company lobbied oligarchs, Sberbank to forge ties in Russia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/uber-leak-russia-lobbying/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/uber-leak-russia-lobbying/ |
Democrats are overreacting about the Supreme Court
By Curt Levey
The U.S. Supreme Court building in D.C. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg)
Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, is a constitutional law attorney.
With the end of the Supreme Court’s term, Democrats are denouncing the court as ideologically motivated, extreme, undemocratic, even destabilizing. Their angst is understandable, but it’s misguided.
It’s understandable because, until recently, progressives were able to rely on the court to achieve or ratify many of their most important policy goals. It’s misguided for at least two reasons. First, this court is not ideologically motivated — that is, committed to conservative outcomes. It is committed to a textualist approach that sometimes will produce outcomes that political conservatives cheer and sometimes will infuriate them.
Second, Democratic warnings of a constitutional apocalypse — with the court supposedly poised to strip away Americans’ rights to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), homosexual sex (Lawrence v. Texas), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges) and other rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution — are overblown. The court is not inclined to do any such thing.
Any impression that conservatives could rely on this court for conservative outcomes was dispelled on the final day of the term. The court upheld the Biden administration’s repeal of President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. It also declined to review New York state’s vaccine mandate for health-care workers, which lacks a religious exemption.
Given strong legal arguments on both sides of the “Remain in Mexico” debate, an ideologically motivated court could have found plenty of reasons to strike down the repeal. Instead, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the court’s liberals in ruling it lawful, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreeing but for a procedural point. Similarly, the right-wing Supreme Court that Democrats imagine would have taken the vaccine case to cheers from conservatives. A few days earlier, the court disappointed law-and-order conservatives when it ruled 9 to 0 that convicting doctors allegedly operating opioid “pill mills” requires that they genuinely believed they were prescribing the medication improperly.
These mixed results are best understood by recognizing that this court is reliably conservative in the jurisprudential sense, rather than the ideological sense. That is, the majority — rather than pursuing a conservative policy agenda — is focusing on the text and intent of statutes and the Constitution, in contrast to the more flexible “living Constitution” approach popular on the left. While that often results in decisions that please conservatives, this court is not afraid to rule otherwise when that’s where textualism — or originalism, as many call it — leads.
And that’s how it should be. A court that never disappoints conservatives is likely a court that believes in a conservative version of the living Constitution.
As the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization notes, “Americans hold sharply conflicting views” on abortion policy, but the Constitution is silent on the issue. For the textualist justices, that is the bottom line.
While textualism is not an exact science, it takes a lot of hand-waving to conjure up a right to abortion or even a broad right to privacy in the words of the Constitution, as written and amended. Nor can abortion rights be found among the common law rights that were implicitly incorporated into the Constitution. Roe v. Wade can’t change that fact. The issue must, therefore, be left to the democratic process.
Textualism easily explains the court’s other conservative decisions this term as well. The Second Amendment explicitly guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” Likewise, the court’s decisions on religion and the administrative state are firmly grounded in the text and intent of the First Amendment and the Constitution’s placement of lawmaking authority in the hands of Congress.
While this approach will often disappoint progressives, the rights to contraception and the like are in no danger. To start, the Dobbs decision cannot be used to undermine those rights because the court made clear that abortion is “critically different”; it involves ending what Roe called a “potential life” and “[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
The parade of horribles trumpeted on the left assumes that the Dobbs majority has a hidden agenda to overturn other unenumerated rights. But there is no secret agenda. The conservative legal movement has been shouting for 40 years that Roe should be overruled. There are few if any voices in that movement calling to overrule Griswold, Lawrence or even the more recent Obergefell decision.
Those three decisions resulted in or from profound changes in our culture and in popular opinion. Roe never stuck in the same way. Regardless of what the court says about Griswold and Lawrence, the democratic process would prevent any state from outlawing contraception or homosexual sex. Bans on either have moved outside the Overton window, and prohibition of same-sex marriage is quickly moving in that direction.
What the future does hold is more controversial cases in the next Supreme Court term, including blockbuster cases on affirmative action and the power of state legislatures to set voting rules. Next term will tell us a lot more about the fortitude and vitality of this court’s conservative majority. I expect it will continue to be guided by principled textualism, fearing neither intense criticism from the left nor disappointment among some conservatives when those principles lead to liberal outcomes. | 2022-07-11T12:04:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Democrats are overreacting about the Supreme Court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/democrats-are-overreacting-about-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/democrats-are-overreacting-about-supreme-court/ |
Video shows protesters being shoved down stairs by unidentified men during a protest over the freezing of deposits in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou on July 10. (Video: Reuters)
Hundreds of rural bank customers in central China’s Henan province were swarmed, beaten and dragged away by a group of unidentified men on Sunday as they protested local government corruption amid a months-long freeze of their deposits.
Since mid April, the depositors have been pressuring the Henan authorities to help recover savings from at least four small “village” banks that stopped withdrawals. The campaign attracted national attention last month after a planed demonstration in Henan’s capital Zhengzhou was thwarted by digital health codes that mysteriously turned red. After a nationwide outcry over misuse of the coronavirus-fighting system, the central government stepped in, punishing five local officials.
Over the weekend, the depositors tried again, this time with valid “green” codes. At daybreak on Sunday, according to videos of the incident shared on Chinese social media, hundreds of protesters unfurled banners alleging corruption on the steps of the local branch of the People’s Bank of China, including one in English that declared “No deposits. No human rights.”
How a huge Chinese ‘Ponzi scheme’ lured investors
“The Chinese dreams of 400,000 depositors in Henan have been shattered,” read another banner, referring to President Xi Jinping’s slogan promising a better life for those who work hard and remain loyal to the Chinese Communist Party. Many waved Chinese national flags.
They also accused the government of working with the “mafia” to violently suppress protests. It’s unclear exactly why the banks have frozen withdrawals, but police are currently investigating Henan New Fortune Group, a shareholder of four banks, on suspicion of illegal fundraising, according to local media reports.
“I’ve been in shock from yesterday until today,” one protester said in an interview, asking to remain anonymous out of fear of official repercussions for talking to foreign media. He repeatedly described the thugs as “unidentified” but added “I never thought it could happen that officials could use this kind of violent beating against unarmed and defenseless regular people.”
“If I hadn’t experienced it myself, I really wouldn’t believe it. When foreign media reported similar incidents in the past, I always thought it was slander,” he said.
Chinese university is scene of rare coronavirus lockdown protest
Lao added that an “immune system” of media and the law should have prevented the depositors’ quest to retrieve their savings from descending into such brutal scenes. “This is a concrete display of there being a problem with the immune system: all normal pathways to seek relief are blocked. What’s scary is this might just be the start,” she said.
China’s rural banks are currently the focal point of a government campaign to rein in debt. These institutions make up about 29 percent of all the high-risk financial entities in the country as of mid-2021, according to the People’s Bank of China.
Facing increased competition from larger institutions, many small banks have in recent years attempted to attract depositors using higher interest rates and also signing up clients from across the country for online services. The regulations for the banks were not set up for internet finance, He Ping, a professor at Renmin University’s School of Finance, told Sanlian Lifeweek Magazine.
Henan’s Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said on Sunday that they will accelerate the verification process for customers of the four village banks under investigation and will announce a resolution to the problem soon.
Yet depositors continue to look for ways to pressure the Henan government not to ignore the case, including commenting beneath the official Weibo account of the United States Embassy to China. “Quickly report on Zhengzhou. Save us,” one user wrote on Sunday. | 2022-07-11T12:26:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bank protesters in Henan province in China attacked by plainclothes groups - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/china-bank-protests-henan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/china-bank-protests-henan/ |
A psychic said Stephanie Johnson’s life would be tough. She was right.
Johnson, a former burlesque dancer known as Tanqueray, overcame many obstacles before she was featured in “Humans of New York.” Then things changed quickly.
Review by Helene Stapinksi
(Paul Ninson)
Just when we need it, ‘Humans’ reminds us what it means to be human
In her Salvation Army room Johnson would lie awake all night and listen to the city’s sounds. “That’s how New York sounds late at night. … It sounds like you’re going to lose your place in line. And if you don’t get out of bed — the thing that was supposed to happen to you is gonna happen to someone else.”
Throughout her career Johnson designed costumes for herself and her fellow dancers — an incredible cast of characters including one woman who played the harmonica with her private parts and another who served hot dogs to audience members in much the same way. After coming up with her own stage gimmick (which you’ll have to read the book to learn about), Tanqueray would become one of the most famous strippers in New York, so high-profile that she landed a column in the adult magazine High Society. Her fictionalized sexploits led to jobs with the NYPD, she says — one time as the featured performer at a party celebrating a break in the Son of Sam case (where, she says, the lead detective dressed in drag.) The fire department hired her for their bachelor parties but would often have to stop the show to run out on a call.
As Johnson aged, the work fell off, naturally, so she turned to doing makeup for cross-dressers, among other odd jobs. “I hope when I get to heaven God shows me a movie of my life. But just the funny parts, 'cause then we’d both start crying.”
Helene Stapinski is the author of “Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History” as well as the forthcoming “The American Way: A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman and Marilyn Monroe.”
By Stephanie Johnson and Brandon Stanton
St. Martin’s. 192 pp. $24.99 | 2022-07-11T12:47:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tanqueray, by Stephanie Johnson and Brandon Stanton - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/07/11/tanqueray-humans-stanton/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/07/11/tanqueray-humans-stanton/ |
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 19: A restaurant table sits empty along a street in Manhattan on August 19, 2021 in New York City. Despite continued concerns about the Delta variant of the Covid virus, the United States economy continues to grow with the leading economic index jumping 0.9% last month. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America)
If people fear that the economy is about to take a turn for the worse, they will reduce spending, trade down to cheaper brands, postpone consumption and economize in general. The net effect if enough people take such action would be a recession. And guess what? The part of the University of Michigan’s latest monthly index of consumer sentiment that shows whether people say it’s a good time to buy a major household item has fallen to a record low in data going back to 1980. The same goes for the buying a vehicle. Buying a house is only slightly better, only dropping to its lowest since 1982.
There is usually a definable turning point for an economy, one single event or catalyst that starts a recession. In 2008, it was the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The collapse of a huge Wall Street bank caused consumption to begin falling almost immediately. It wasn’t until 2013 that consumers became convinced that the recession had passed. Sure, the stock market had rallied in those years, and the job and housing markets had recovered, but people still had their doubts, resulting in the slowest recovery following any major downturn on record.
Now, we may look back upon a government report on June 10 showing the consumer price index rising 8.6% in May from a year earlier as this economy’s turning point. Since then, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s widely followed GDPNow Index, which aims to track the economy in real time, has turned negative for the second quarter, reaching its lowest point since the early days of the pandemic and the lockdowns in 2020.
Economists have been trained to discount “soft” economic data such as sentiment surveys because it was always better to watch what consumers actually do – the “hard” data – and not what they say. Right now, the hard data is saying we’re not in a recession, but my guess is those statistics will take a turn for the worse sooner rather than later. So much of the economy is predicated on sentiment, and the last few months have seen a massive destruction in confidence.
If people believe there is going to be a recession, there isn’t anything anyone can do to make them believe otherwise. I mean, you can’t just ask them to cheer up. Sure, the Federal Reserve could cut interest rates, but this would be the worst possible time to make such a move and it’s just not going to happen. If it’s true that inflation is always and everywhere a psychological phenomenon, then so is recession. | 2022-07-11T12:47:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Americans Are Talking Themselves Into a Recession - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/americans-are-talking-themselves-into-a-recession/2022/07/11/d6aa76a2-0111-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/americans-are-talking-themselves-into-a-recession/2022/07/11/d6aa76a2-0111-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Dozens of local governments on both coasts have banned natural gas hookups in new residential and commercial construction. In response, by the most-recent count of S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Gas Ban Monitor, 20 state legislatures in the middle of the country have banned local authorities from banning natural gas hookups. At first glance it looks like another red-state, blue-state exercise in polarization and posturing that’s bound to end badly.
There is, however, an encouraging twist. The goal of those pushing for gas-hookup bans is to shift all home energy use to electricity, with the idea being that as power keeps getting greener (as of 2021 about 38% of U.S. electricity generation was from non-carbon-dioxide-emitting sources,(1) up from 30% a decade earlier) this will put a dent in global warming. And where is one most likely to find an all-electric home in the U.S. now? In Florida, where 77% of all occupied housing units used only electricity for cooking and space and water heating in 2020 and where Gov. Ron DeSantis and the legislature outlawed bans on gas-hookups last year.
In the 20 states that have enacted such laws, all-electric homes make up 38% of the total, versus 18% in the rest of the country. Among the states with the smallest all-electric shares are California, where more than 50 local ordinances now ban new gas hookups and state regulations come close, and New York, where New York City recently adopted a hookup ban and the state legislature considered one earlier this year.
These statistics, released this month, are from the 2020 edition of the Residential Energy Consumption Survey conducted every few years by the US Energy Information Administration. This marks the first time such numbers have been available for all the states, although the Census Bureau’s biennial American Housing Survey contains similar information for some larger states and metropolitan areas. The EIA withheld data from Vermont and New Mexico on all-electric homes “because either the relative standard error was greater than 50% or fewer than 10 households were in the reporting sample,” which indicates that their all-electric share is probably pretty tiny.
Beyond switching to electricity, another priority of those hoping to cut carbon-dioxide emissions is substituting heat pumps for less-energy-efficient gas, oil or electric furnaces. The EIA asked about heat pumps too. There are too many states with data withheld to make a map worthwhile, so here’s a table of the 15 states with the most central-heat pumps, which account for almost two-thirds of the national total and are mostly in the South.
What you see here are the effects of history, geology and climate rather than political attitudes. States where a lot of the housing was built before World War II, and where gas distribution networks were established long ago, are less likely to have a lot of all-electric homes. And because until recently air-source heat pumps stopped working when outside temperatures approached freezing, they are found mostly where it seldom gets that cold. (Ground-source heat pumps work well in cold places but have a much higher up-front cost, and new air-source pumps designed for cold climates are just beginning to catch on.)
Another way to see the impact of history and geology is by looking at where people cook with gas. Seventy-percent of Californians do, the highest share of any state. Florida and Maine are tied for last place at just 8%.
You can see why politicians in California and New York are making such a big deal about electrification — they have a really long ways to go! You can also see why they’re likely to run into obstacles, given how accustomed their constituents are to cooking with gas. As I’ve written before, people don’t tend to get attached to their natural-gas furnaces, but they do like their Viking ranges. Bans on gas hookups in new construction (1) don’t take anything away from people who already have it and (2) actually make life easier for developers and utilities (at least those that provide electricity as well as gas) who can avoid the cost and hassle of installing gas infrastructure. But growing pressure to convert existing gas stoves to electric seems likely to spark opposition even in deep-blue areas.
On the other hand, the electrification push is getting help from rising temperatures. The share of households without air conditioning is much higher in the West and Northeast than in the rest of the country, but ever-hotter summers and persistent wildfire smoke may change that.
This provides a market opportunity for heat pumps, which along with keeping dwellings cooler could take over heating needs as well. In states with high levels of air-conditioner use, replacing AC-only systems when they break down with two-way heat pumps presents another big opportunity. This gets me thinking about how things might play out in the ban-the-gas-bans states, most of which have lots of air conditioners already. The best-case scenario is that market forces will drive increased electrification regardless of the politics, especially in states such as Florida where all-electric is already the norm. The worst is that using gas for cooking and heating becomes some sort of anti-woke statement.
But other than with cooking, for which the evidence is mixed, the electric options seem to be clearly better than their gas-powered rivals — as in, more energy-efficient and also safer given that they don’t require piping flammable gas into homes and then burning it. And the gap will only grow as heat-pump technology keeps advancing and gas-furnace technology doesn’t. Also, there’s no risk of Americans fully turning their backs on electricity, which they need for their lights and TVs and computers and microwaves and … second fridges.
Given the tight range of results (from 25% with two or more fridges in Maine to 47% in Idaho), I wouldn’t make too much of the geographical distribution here. A lot of the variation between states is within the margin of error. But if a government agency is going to provide data on multiple-fridge ownership by state, it would be a crime not to make a map of it.
When the Weather Is Hot Enough To Kill: Fickling & Pollard
Talk of an Oil Market Recession Is Overblown: Javier Blas
Your Old Fridge is Putin’s Friend. Dump It!: Javier Blas
(1) In order of the amount of electricity generated, these are nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, solar and geothermal. | 2022-07-11T12:48:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where Have People Gone All-Electric? Not the Places You’d Expect - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/where-have-people-goneall-electric-not-the-places-youd-expect/2022/07/11/a1d22d98-010d-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/where-have-people-goneall-electric-not-the-places-youd-expect/2022/07/11/a1d22d98-010d-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
It’s all about politics. What else? (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg)
This turned out to be a good weekend for thinking about the presidency, with three worthwhile pieces that helped explain what’s needed in the White House — and, probably more importantly, the limitations of the office.
Item One: Ben Dreyfuss has a highly entertaining blog post mocking a suggestion that the comedian Jon Stewart should run for president. In fact, he’s Fisking (an old timey blog-era word for rebutting somebody else’s article line by line) a Politico column urging the idea. I recommend it! But Dreyfuss focuses more on Stewart’s shortcomings than his key point that the White House is no place for an amateur, even if the amateur in question is smart and good at television. The presidency is a political job, and the best presidents have been experts in politics broadly conceived.
A secondary point: Please, please, please do not base your choice of presidential candidate on who you think would do well in campaign debates. Campaigns are less important than people think, and debate performances are only minor portions of campaigns. Base your support on who you think is most electable, or as an effort to push the party in your direction on policy, or on which candidate you think has the skills to be effective in office. Not on who might get better press coverage for 24 hours during the campaign before everyone’s attention moves on to whatever is next.
Item Two: I strongly recommend a blog post on the limitations of the presidency from political scientist Steven Taylor. He’s exactly correct that most of the things that have made liberals upset with President Joe Biden are functions of the basic political context, not about Biden himself, or the White House staff, or Democratic leaders in Congress.
That’s not to say that they’re all doing everything perfectly, but just that any differences between what Biden is doing and what plausible Democratic alternatives would be are marginal. No White House strategy can change the composition of the Supreme Court or the narrow margin Democrats hold in the House of Representatives or break the Senate tie that forces Democrats to depend on West Virginia’s Joe Manchin to reach 50 votes. Biden has to work within that world — along with all the other normal constraints that presidents face, even when they have a more friendly Congress and a less antagonistic court.
Again, that hardly means that Biden has been perfect, or that people shouldn’t criticize him. Just don’t fall for the nonsense that presidents can do anything as long as they want it badly enough.
Item Three: A Sunday New York Times article raised the matter of Biden’s advanced age. There’s a lot of babble out there about this — a lot of false claims that he’s sharply declined cognitively — but putting that aside, there are two ways to look at the fact that he will turn 80 in November. One is that as long as Biden is unpopular, everything about him is going to be interpreted as a negative, including his age. If he was at 60% approval instead of falling a bit below 40%, the age story would be that he is defying it and thriving.
But yes, Biden is very old for the presidency, and even if it’s not affecting him in any serious way right now, there’s no guarantee that it won’t next month or next year. Let alone the four years that a second term would give him. And the truth is that not only was nominating Biden in 2000 a risk for Democrats, so was nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — she’ll turn 75 this fall, in what would have been the second year of her second term — just as it was a bad risk for Republicans to nominate Donald Trump, who just turned 76, in 2016 and 2000. Once those candidates are nominated, party voters have little choice but to vote for them, but the parties shouldn’t do it.
And while Biden as president has strong incentives to pretend that he’ll run for re-election at least up to the midterm elections this fall, soon after that he’ll have to either commit to running for a second term that would be even more risky for the nation, or announcing that he won’t run. | 2022-07-11T12:48:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Presidents Aren’t Kings. Remember That, Democrats. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/presidents-arent-kings-remember-that-democrats/2022/07/11/4e5d34de-0115-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/presidents-arent-kings-remember-that-democrats/2022/07/11/4e5d34de-0115-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Perspective by Robert Pinnegar
Today, rental housing demand is sky-high — with a record 97.6 percent occupancy rate — as three generations are choosing to rent, including baby boomers who are interested in downsizing, millennials and recent Generation Z college graduates. (Taylor Glascock for The Washington Post)
There’s no denying that the cost of living continues to increase. The price we pay for food, transportation, clothing, shelter, airfare — virtually all goods and services — is on the rise. And like every other sector of the economy, housing providers and the more than 40 million Americans who live in apartments are facing steep costs.
But why exactly are rents rising and what can be done to help stabilize housing costs? A number of factors that affect the housing market make it impossible to pinpoint exactly when the rental market will stabilize, but here are some important insights into what’s driving our nation’s housing dilemma.
A significant imbalance
Rising rents are largely a byproduct of limited supply and high demand across the rental market. Today, rental housing demand is sky-high — with a record 97.6 percent occupancy rate — as three generations are choosing to rent, including baby boomers who are interested in downsizing, millennials and recent Generation Z college graduates. Further, new household formation is on the rise after two years of tamped demand due to the covid pandemic; three years’ worth of graduates are emerging to find rental housing, and households that may have condensed during the pandemic are beginning to disperse as individuals look for their own homes.
More Pinnegar: Common lease terms renters should know before signing on dotted line
Our nation is also facing a decades-long supply and demand imbalance. We need to build 328,000 new apartment homes at all price points each year just to meet the current demand, yet that level of construction has only occurred five times since 1989. Further, a significant portion of the nation's housing was built before 1980 and requires considerable investment and capital improvements to remain operational. Current challenges like severe undersupply, labor shortages, inflationary pricing and supply chain delays are further raising costs for housing providers and presenting challenging barriers to building and rehabilitating housing.
The white-hot housing market — fueled by shortages of all housing types, including single-family owner-occupied homes — continues to push up costs for mandatory operational expenses like property taxes and insurance premiums. Housing providers must cover these expenses to keep their rental properties available for residents, which means rents may need to be adjusted to keep up with the operational expenses and overdue capital improvements.
There is no solitary solution that will immediately address our housing shortage, but there are steps that can be taken to set us on the right path.
Reducing regulatory burdens and encouraging the rehabilitation and development of all housing types will help secure the nation’s aging stock and enable more homes to be built to meet demand. The Biden administration has recently announced a multifaceted plan that will help our nation address housing challenges head-on, by encouraging zoning reform — 75 percent of residential land is zoned for single-family use — and deploying new financing tools to build and preserve both market-rate and affordable housing.
More Pinnegar: Renting in retirement: What you should consider
Additionally, we must address the lack of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families by reforming and improving the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. By overhauling and investing in this program, we can create an effective solution for getting people into homes that they can afford.
While there is no exact date when we can expect rents to stabilize, the industry and its residents can expect some relief as global supply chain issues are addressed and access to necessary building materials is increased. That, in addition to an increase in skilled laborers, will help strengthen the labor market and reduce construction and maintenance delays currently hampering the housing supply.
The first step to solving any problem is understanding the problem. Knowing that a lack of supply and heightened demand have left our nation, and millions of Americans, with a severe housing crisis allows us to dig deeper into the root causes and address them properly. While there is no quick fix, responsible policies that will address the underlying issues placing upward pressures on rent — the nation’s supply/demand imbalance — needs to be the focus.
Robert Pinnegar is president and CEO of the National Apartment Association in Arlington, Va. | 2022-07-11T14:19:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rising rents: What are the causes and what can be done? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/11/rising-rents-what-are-causes-what-can-be-done/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/11/rising-rents-what-are-causes-what-can-be-done/ |
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Union drew up a plan to cut gas imports from Russia by two-thirds by the end of 2022. Russia, after suffering punishing sanctions, hit back, with President Vladimir Putin signing a decree demanding that all buyers from “unfriendly” countries pay in rubles starting from April. They would have to open special accounts with Russia’s Gazprombank JSC, in foreign currency and rubles, to handle their payments. Buyers in Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands refused to abide by the new terms and had their gas cut off. Later, Russia also slashed supplies via its biggest pipeline to the continent, cutting shipments even to those who found workarounds to the new payment order. As a result, customers in Germany, Italy, France and Austria didn’t get all the gas they asked for.
With its vast Siberian fields, Russia has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. It began exporting to Poland in the 1940s and laid pipelines in the 1960s to deliver fuel to and through satellite states of what was then the Soviet Union. Even at the height of the Cold War, deliveries were steady. But since the Soviet Union broke up, Moscow and Kyiv have quarreled over pipelines through Ukrainian territory, prompting Russian authorities to find other routes.
A supply crunch in 2021 offered an insight into Europe’s reliance on gas from Russia, with benchmark prices more than tripling. Stockpiles in the EU fell to a record low with heavy maintenance taking place in North Sea fields and supplies of liquefied natural gas redirected to meet soaring demand in Asia. In 2022, with Russian supplies under threat, European LNG imports were pushed to full throttle, domestic producers promised to keep output as high as possible and EU buyers tapped new supplies from Africa to Central Asia. Yet Russian volumes were still too large to fully replace in the short term. In mid-June, flows through the Nord Stream pipeline -- the biggest link from Russia to the EU -- fell by about 60%, forcing utilities to tap reserves normally used during the peak winter season.
The EU’s economic powerhouse relies on Russia for more than half of its gas and about a third of its oil. The standoff with Moscow led Germany to double down on renewables and invest in LNG import facilities, but it will take years for those other sources to come online. In the meantime, the government was reviving heavily polluting coal plants and subsidizing purchases from alternative energy suppliers to offset the sharp drop in Russian gas imports.
About a third of Russian gas flowing to Europe normally passes through Ukraine. Supplies via the country have been curbed since May 11 after a transit point was put out of service amid fighting in the eastern part of the country. Prior to the cuts, Ukraine had been expecting to earn at least $7 billion from transit fees under a five-year transit deal in December 2019.
Outside supplies, mostly from Russia, Norway and Algeria, account for about 80% of the gas the EU consumes. Germany imports much of its gas via a pipeline under the Baltic Sea called Nord Stream, which has been fully operational since 2012. (A further pipeline, Nord Stream 2, was completed in late 2021 but became entangled in politics and is now firmly on ice.) Nord Stream started a 10-day maintenance period on July 11, with Germany and its allies bracing for the possibility that Putin could cut off flows for good. Belgium, Spain and Portugal face the problem of low storage capacity, as does the UK, which is no longer part of the bloc and closed its only big gas storage site. The continent has a mass of pipelines but many cross several borders, creating plenty of possible choke points, while some nations still lack connecting links. | 2022-07-11T14:19:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Europe Became So Dependent on Putin for Its Gas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-europe-became-so-dependent-on-putin-for-its-gas/2022/07/11/8c5cbe8c-0122-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-europe-became-so-dependent-on-putin-for-its-gas/2022/07/11/8c5cbe8c-0122-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
(Gaia Stella/For The Washington Post)
It’s easy to see that people prefer their rules cut-and-dry. Nuance is often lost or ignored. So it goes with the age-old question of whether you can — or should — refrigerate tomatoes.
I’ve seen more than my fair share of Twitter spats on the topic or well-intentioned but misinformed advice treated as conventional wisdom.
Think of the refrigerator as “a tool in your tomato toolbox,” says Timothy McDermott, an assistant professor and extension educator with Ohio State University Extension. That tool, however, is best used for a limited amount of time.
Here’s what you need to know about refrigerating tomatoes to ensure you’re eating them at their best.
What to do with all those peak summer tomatoes, from tiny cherries to giant heirlooms
When to use the refrigerator
Tomatoes are climacteric, meaning they will continue to ripen after they are picked. Once the tomatoes are at their peak, whether you’ve bought them ripe or you’ve let them ripen for a few days in your kitchen, the clock begins to tick. You have a relatively short time between perfectly ripe and rotten.
You can slow ripening by storing tomatoes at around 50 degrees, in somewhere like a root cellar or a small wine fridge devoted to produce, McDermott says. But for most of us, our only options are a much warmer room temperature or a much colder refrigerator.
Stored at room temperature, “most ripe tomatoes retain best eating quality for 2 to 3 days,” according to the University of California division of agriculture and natural resources. If you don’t think you’ll get to them that quickly, as soon as they’re ripe, you can move your tomatoes into the refrigerator to keep them from softening too much. (Don’t wait the 2 to 3 days after they’re ripe, in other words.)
Lester Schonberger, a senior research associate at Virginia Tech’s department of food science and technology, says that the consensus seems to be that tomatoes should be refrigerated for no more than 3 days. From personal experience, McDermott says the window for smaller cherry or grape varieties, as well as firmer paste tomatoes (such as Roma or plum), may be slightly larger.
If you have a tomato that you have cut into but don’t intend to finish, it needs to be refrigerated in a covered, sealed container, Schonberger says.
How the fridge affects tomatoes
Here is where a lot of the confusion arises. Will refrigeration harm the flavor or texture of tomatoes?
The answer is not as quickly or significantly as many of us have been led to believe. First, a little background from Schonberger: “Our sense of a tomato’s flavor is predominantly due to a combination of the tastes sensed through our tongue and the aromas sensed in our nose.”
A few things happen when you refrigerate a tomato. One is that the volatile flavor compounds (meaning they readily escape into the air) that are essential to our perception of taste continue to escape through the stem scar. The other, which Schonberger cites from a 2016 study, is that refrigeration is associated with a decline in the production of these compounds. The study notes no significant decline in the volatile compounds after 1 or 3 days of cold storage, although after a week, there was. These longer-stored tomatoes also scored significantly lower with the study’s consumer tasting panel.
Some, but not all, of those volatile compounds can be restored by returning the tomato to room temperature for anywhere from an hour to a day (this is purely for flavor/aroma and not ripeness). Somewhat relatedly, “temperature changes how you can taste something,” says Alexis Hamilton, a postdoctoral associate at Virginia Tech’s department of food science and technology. Our taste buds register sweet flavors better at warmer temperatures (hence the need to flavor very cold foods such as ice cream more than you would think), so it may be that our perceptions of tomato taste improve once the chill is off those that have been refrigerated.
As to texture, Schonberger says that mealiness is more likely “a result of growing conditions and plant stress,” with some varieties more inclined to be mealy than others.
If you’d really like a nonacademic deep dive on refrigerated vs. non-refrigerated tomatoes, I highly recommend Daniel Gritzer’s extremely thorough piece over on Serious Eats. It includes multiple tests and blind tastings, in which tasters often scored refrigerated tomatoes (or refrigerated tomatoes brought back up to room temperature) almost as high as or even higher than those that were never chilled.
When not to refrigerate
Don’t store unripe tomatoes in the refrigerator. Once you do that, there’s no going back, McDermott says.
If you’re sure you are going to eat the ripe tomatoes relatively soon, just leave them on the counter. If you’re faced with a sudden influx of tomatoes, eat your “flavor bombs,” such as heirlooms, first, McDermott advises. Those tend to not hold up as well as smaller or paste varieties, as well as the sturdier red slicing tomatoes.
If you have so many tomatoes that you won’t even make a dent by the time the refrigeration window closes, consider other ways to preserve them, Hamilton says, whether that’s through canning, making a sauce or dehydrating them. The freezer can be your friend, too, especially if you roast or stew the tomatoes first.
Make a big batch of pantry-friendly tomato sauce for a leg up on dinner all week
How to refrigerate
The University of California recommends placing tomatoes in the crisper drawer in their original clamshell package, a paper bag or a plastic bag with a few slits. This helps prevent moisture loss. McDermott says a reusable container with a vented lid is another option. Whatever you use, the partial venting is key, McDermott says, because it prevents the buildup of ethylene, a ripening hormone that can eventually cause rotting.
Schonberger recommends paying attention to other standard food safety advice, including keeping refrigerated tomatoes away from or above other ingredients you intend to cook, such as raw meat, to prevent cross-contamination.
McDermott emphasizes focusing more on whether you should or shouldn’t refrigerate tomatoes when it comes to high-quality fruit. If you want the best tomatoes that will last the longest, “your preparation starts in your garden,” he says. Homegrown tomatoes allow you the most control over variety, storage and ripening, all of which may render the refrigeration question moot, if you time things right. | 2022-07-11T14:19:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can you refrigerate tomatoes? Yes, if you do it right. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/07/11/can-you-refrigerate-tomatoes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/07/11/can-you-refrigerate-tomatoes/ |
The Food and Drug Administration is being asked by a pharmaceutical company for permission to sell birth control pills without a prescription. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
“This is good news,” Susan F. Wood, a former assistant commissioner for women’s health at the FDA and now director of George Washington University’s Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health Services, said in an email. She said she hoped the FDA would promptly approve the application and “doesn’t put any barriers” for its use, referring to the age limits the agency initially imposed for Plan B, the emergency contraceptive.
“This is not a substitute for access to abortion care in the U.S., but will provide one more tool for the toolbox for preventing unintended pregnancies and more options for family planning,” Wood said.
Welgryn said the application “is coming at the right moment,” given the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last month.
“It will provide another option for managing reproductive health,” Welgryn said. “But it is not the solution for abortion access.”
“Birth control pills are one of the most studied medicines on the market today and they meet FDA’s standards for over-the-counter status,” the letter said. “Additionally, evidence supports the safety and benefits of over-the-counter birth control pills with no age restriction, and adolescent sexual and reproductive health experts support access for people of all ages.”
The agency approved over-the-counter use of the emergency contraception pill, Plan B, also known as the “morning after pill” in 2006, but the medication became available without age limits only in 2013 after years of wrangling, political controversy and legal battles.
“As we learned with Plan B, the initial age restrictions were entirely unnecessary, and when these age restrictions were finally dropped did not increase any risks for young people. (The sky did not fall!),” Wood said. “In fact, expanded access to anyone needing contraception will only reduce the risk of unintended pregnancy, hopefully something we all agree on.” | 2022-07-11T14:19:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Drugmaker seeks approval for first nonprescription birth control pill in U.S. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/11/birth-control-pills-over-the-counter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/11/birth-control-pills-over-the-counter/ |
By Carl Tobias
Elizabeth Wilson Hanes, nominee to be United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia, testifies June 22 before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill. (Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)
Carl Tobias is the Williams Chair in Law at the University of Richmond.
When the Senate returns today from its July Fourth Recess, the upper chamber should expeditiously confirm U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Wilson Hanes to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Hanes, whom President Biden nominated on April 27, is very experienced. She has served as a magistrate judge since 2020, when the court’s Article III judges appointed her to help them resolve its substantial docket, as a litigator for consumers in civil disputes across four years and as an assistant federal public defender for seven years. The opening that she would fill has been empty for more than eight months. Thus, the Senate must promptly confirm Hanes.
The vacancy arose on Nov. 1, when District Judge John Gibney assumed senior status after 11 years of dedicated service on the court whose reputation for speedily deciding civil cases has earned it the nickname “Rocket Docket.” Gibney had dutifully afforded Biden five months’ notice that he intended to take senior status. Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) promptly instituted a process to suggest accomplished, mainstream candidates for Biden’s consideration. The senators asked a panel of experienced counsel they had assembled to speedily evaluate, interview and rate applicants. The group strongly recommended multiple highly qualified individuals last autumn. Warner and Kaine in turn recommended Hanes and Melissa O’Boyle, who has served as an Eastern District assistant U.S. attorney since 2007, to the White House on Nov. 4.
Hanes is exceptionally intelligent, diligent, ethical and independent. She earned a qualified rating from a substantial majority of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary and a well-qualified ranking from a minority. The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider Hanes in late July, and members should overwhelmingly approve her because she is an extremely qualified, mainstream nominee.
The Eastern District opening has existed for more than eight months. Kaine and Warner recommended Hanes in early November. Protracted nomination and confirmation times mean judicial nominees essentially have their careers and lives on hold. This could be particularly true for Hanes, as she might need to relocate her chambers, and the nominee’s family is based in Richmond. This extended vacancy has meant that Gibney has been carrying a sizable docket, even though many senior status judges are responsible for considerably fewer lawsuits. Gibney has continued to efficaciously resolve a large case load so that the district keeps speedily, economically and equitably concluding a significant, critical docket. Litigants, counsel and the public are indebted to the experienced jurist for his exceptional, ongoing service. However, he earned the right to assume senior status many months ago.
With the Senate’s return from its recess, Judiciary Committee members should quickly meet to deliberate on Hanes’s nomination and strongly report her, and the chamber must promptly set a floor debate and confirm her to the Eastern District vacancy that has long remained open. Her excellent record means that she deserves expeditious confirmation, and the nominee’s substantial capabilities will enable the court to burnish its hard-earned reputation as the Rocket Docket. | 2022-07-11T14:20:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Confirm Hanes to the Eastern District - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/confirm-hanes-eastern-district/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/confirm-hanes-eastern-district/ |
Temperatures are expected to rise to 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) this week, experts warn
A man uses water from a hose to beat back a fire in Canecas, in the outskirts of Lisbon, on July 10. (Mario Cruz/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Several wildfires are raging across Portugal, where a state of emergency has been declared amid a punishing heat wave sweeping Europe, where temperatures are expected to climb even higher in the days to come.
As of Sunday, an estimated 3,000 firefighters were working to extinguish the blazes, Portugal’s civil protection agency said, with areas along the outskirts of Lisbon the hardest hit. At least 29 people have been injured since the fires broke out, local authorities said Sunday.
The European Commission said Monday that it had “mobilized its firefighting fleet to help Portugal fight destructive forest fires,” as residents evacuated their homes in danger zones.
Weather experts in Portugal say temperatures of up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius) could be reported from Tuesday in Alentejo — the region between Lisbon and the Algarve, Sky News reported. Strong winds of 40 miles per hour are also predicted across several regions. Local media reported Monday that fires in the districts of Santarém, Leiria and Vila Real were “the most worrying.”
Forest fires are not uncommon in Portugal, a heavily forested country that is fanned by winds from the Atlantic Ocean. Spain, which has also experienced devastating wildfires in recent weeks, sent Portugal two firefighting planes on Sunday, as the European Union said it stood “ready to provide further assistance.”
Experts say extreme heat and unseasonably warm temperatures will only become more frequent and severe as the world grapples with the effects of human-caused climate change. Last month, a historic heat wave across Europe broke records in France and Spain, where temperatures reached as high as 104 degrees, unusual for the month of June.
Scientists have long warned that climate change is extending the “wildfire season” in Portugal from two to five months, the BBC reported. In 2017, more than 100 people died following a series of blazes that sparked widespread condemnation of the government’s response to forest fires. Some emergency workers complained of a lack of equipment, while others said the forests were not properly managed or protected.
The current nationwide state of emergency means people are barred from forest areas deemed high risk and that farmers are asked not to use any type of machinery that may cause a spark.
Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa took to Twitter over the weekend, writing “PLEASE DO NOT START FIRES AND DO NOT USE MACHINES.”
The use of fireworks at celebrations and festivals has also been banned amid the high temperatures and drought, the Associated Press reported.
The fires came on quickly in some areas. “It was very sudden, a lot of smoke, all of a sudden the old house was lit,” one witness told the BBC on Monday.
In Spain last month, wildfires broke out near Valencia and across other parts of the country following days of extreme heat. In Italy, Rome recorded its highest temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.6 Celsius).
Poland and Austria were also hit by abnormally high temperatures as was Britain, a nation where air-conditioning is scarce — raising concerns for the elderly and the homeless.
Hannah Cloke, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, told The Washington Post that Britain was “really not prepared” for extreme heat, with offices, houses and nursing homes “not built to help keep people cool.” | 2022-07-11T15:28:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Portugal wildfires draw aid from Europe amid severe heat wave - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/portugal-wildfires-heatwave-europe/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/portugal-wildfires-heatwave-europe/ |
Macron’s Uber dealings may prompt parliamentary inquiry in France
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday is facing public criticism and parliamentary scrutiny after a trove of documents detailed close links between him and Uber during his time as France’s economy minister.
“We urgently need to be able to get clarity, and to draw the consequences,” said Alexis Corbière, the vice president of the main far-left party’s parliamentary group, who suggested a special inquiry beyond the debates expected in the French Assembly and Senate this week. “A President — or someone who wants to become one — cannot be a lobbyist in the service of interests of private companies,” said Corbière, according to Public Sénat, a parliamentary television channel.
France’s left-leaning and far-right opposition parties, emboldened by recent gains in the country’s parliamentary election, jumped on the revelations on Sunday night and Monday morning, describing them as a looming “state scandal,” and potential evidence of a “collusion of interests.”
Macron never hid that he was an early Uber supporter. But company executives’ internal messages from 2013 to 2017 suggest that his backing went far beyond what had been known publicly — and on occasion conflicted with the policies of the left-leaning government he served at the time.
The documents are part of the Uber Files, a trove of more than 124,000 internal records obtained by the Guardian and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit newsroom, and dozens of other news organizations worldwide, including The Washington Post.
According to the files, Uber managers and lobbyists believed that Macron was willing to support them by pushing regulators to be “less conservative” in their interpretation of rules limiting the company’s operations, and by attempting to ease rules that hampered the company’s expansion in France. At times, Uber was even surprised by the extent of his backing, internal communications show.
While the documents end in 2017, the year Macron was elected president, they directly relate to how Macron has tried to implement his agenda since.
That criticism is expected to find a bigger stage in Parliament during his second term, now that he has lost his absolute parliamentary majority, amid gains from the far-left and far-right. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a staunch critic of Uber and other multinationals operating in France, is now the public face of the biggest opposition bloc in the lower house of Parliament, where the possible inquiry would take place.
Mélenchon has regularly complained of the “uberization” of French society, an umbrella term used to describe ride-hailing and home delivery services, and he lashed out against Macron’s support for a sector that he views as having undermined worker rights.
Members and allies of Mélenchon’s party, France Unbowed, were among the most vocal critics on Monday.
Mathilde Panot, the alliance’s leader in Parliament, suggested Macron had helped Uber in “looting the country,” and criticized the president for having acted as a “lobbyist for a U.S. multinational aiming to permanently deregulate labor law.”
Aurélien Taché, a left-wing member of Parliament, said the files raised questions about “Emmanuel Macron’s conception of loyalty in politics, towards the government to which he belonged at the time and towards his country.”
According to the files, Macron was in frequent contact with Uber executives between 2014 and 2016 and strategized over moves that at times appeared to conflict with the objectives of then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls and others who advocated stricter rules for Uber and similar companies.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right party — which, despite her defeat in the presidential contest, won 11 times more seats in last month’s parliamentary election than it did in 2017 — similarly seized on the files, describing them as “the first scandal of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term.”
But Macron’s allies — who still hold a simple majority in Parliament — appeared ready to defend his interactions with the company.
“Above all, he is the president who has allowed the arrival of a certain number of companies and indeed to promote the emergence of companies in our country, promote their establishment, support our reindustrialization, facilitate job creation. I believe that this is clearly the role of a minister of the economy and of a head of state,” Aurore Bergé, who leads Macron’s party in Parliament, said on French TV.
The Uber files may raise questions in France that go beyond the extent of Macron’s support.
The files also show that Uber used covert tech to thwart government raids during its global expansion. And as enraged taxi drivers, fearing for their professional survival, clashed with their Uber competitors on the streets of Paris in 2015 and 2016, some company executives viewed the physical confrontations as a means to win public sympathy and support.
“The most important question” now, wrote Cédric O, France’s former state secretary for digital affairs under Macron, “is whether or not the establishment [of Uber] was a good thing, socially and economically.”
The Uber Files is an international investigation into the ride-hailing company’s aggressive entrance into cities around the world — while frequently challenging the reach of existing laws and regulations. Documents illuminate how Uber used stealth technology to thwart regulators and law enforcement and how the company courted prominent political leaders and Russian oligarchs as it sought footholds outside the United States. | 2022-07-11T15:28:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uber files leak: Macron’s dealings may prompt parliamentary inquiry - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/uber-files-leak-macron-france-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/11/uber-files-leak-macron-france-investigation/ |
The hot game on TikTok: Guessing locations on Google Maps
(Washington Post illustration; Trevor Rainbolt; iStock)
Picture a dirt road. The reddish brown soil in front of you has been packed down by traffic. On the opposite side of the road, wooden stakes fence the border. Stretching into the street, you can see the shadow of a fern that’s barely out of frame. It’s a nondescript dirt road, the kind you might find anywhere in the world.
“This is very much Brazilian dirt,” says Trevor Rainbolt, glancing at just that scene from his computer in Los Angeles. He zooms into a map of the world, mousing over to South America.
“Northeast Brazil, probably?” he adds. Rainbolt drops a pin and submits his answer. His guess is roughly 480 kilometers from the exact coordinates, a bit closer toward the Atlantic but still in northeast Brazil. All told, it took him five seconds to identify the approximate location.
For a little more than a year, Rainbolt, 23, has been playing GeoGuessr, a trivia game powered by Google Maps, for four to eight hours a day. The objective of GeoGuessr is simple: Players are placed in a location on Google Maps’ Street View and they’re able to navigate around the map to gather clues to guess where exactly they are in the world. The closer a guess is to the actual location, the more points they win.
Out of this, Rainbolt has developed a niche skill: figuring out where he is on Google Maps in just a matter of seconds. He first started dedicating time to the game after watching others on YouTube, such as Tom Davies, who’s known for his YouTube channel GeoWizard. But, Rainbolt has gotten so good at GeoGuessr that people have started to make parody videos of his work. In a 54-second video he posted on TikTok last month, Rainbolt successfully guessed the vicinity of five different roadside locations from Botswana to Brazil by glancing at pictures of dirt. That video has been viewed more than 8 million times.
“Bro memorized local sediments,” one person wrote in the comments, adding a skull emoji.
Rainbolt’s video isn’t some one-time viral fluke. Like any performer iterating on their act, he’s been adding constraints to his stunts. He’ll blur half the image he has to guess from, or play two games at the same time. He’s even started guessing locations at a glance with photos that disappear in the blink of an eye. Now, Rainbolt has more than 870,000 followers on TikTok. Another 179,000 accounts, including John Mayer, follow him on Instagram. And his TikTok videos consistently get more than a million views; Rainbolt’s most popular video has been played more than 17 million times. He’s not the only person playing GeoGuessr on TikTok, either. The hashtag for the game has more than 1 billion views on the app.
“It’s really, really cool to see more mainstream people get behind it,” Rainbolt said. “I’ve been doing the same thing I’ve been doing for the past year in front of ten people on Twitch … To see it finally get recognition from people is insane. Honestly, it’s so cool.”
In his videos, Rainbolt runs through GeoGuessr at breakneck speed, spending five or six seconds on a round. By comparison, some GeoGuessr players on YouTube will take upward of thirty minutes for a five-round game to get as close as possible to the answer. Rainbolt says his speed runs are just how he plays the game — but it also happens to fit perfectly on TikTok, where attention spans are short. As a finishing touch, Rainbolt plays a recomposition of Vivaldi’s “Winter I” in the background to make sure “you’re glued in.”
“I love the irony behind making Google Maps intense,” Rainbolt said. “I have to play into the irony, I feel like. Because it’s like ‘Oh, this guy is a professional Google Maps player.’ I have to own that, right? That’s like the most nerdy thing ever.”
@georainbolt 0.1s blindfolded next? #geo #geography #geoguessr #geowizard #MoveWithTommy ♬ Richter: Winter 1 - 2012 - Max Richter & Daniel Hope & Raphael Alpermann & Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin & André de Ridder
GeoGuessr, the browser game behind Rainbolt’s videos, is nearly a decade old. A Swedish software engineer, Anton Wallén, first published the game as a pet project in 2013. Nowadays, GeoGuessr is a 30-person company based in Stockholm, supported by a subset of users who pay $2 a month to play as many games as they want a day. You can also play GeoGuessr free, but only for five minutes at a time. The subscription fees help the company pay Google, which charges them for accessing their maps software, said Daniel Antell, a co-founder and chief information officer for GeoGuessr. Antell declined to say how much the deal with Google costs but added the company spends “tens of thousands per month” to keep the site up and running.
Antell’s not on TikTok, but he’s seen Rainbolt play GeoGuessr. Rainbolt’s speedruns aren’t necessarily how the team originally imagined people would play the game, Antell said, but he was impressed.
“That guy must be super smart,” Antell said. “I think it’s really cool.”
Fleeing the Russian invasion, one Twitch streamer stopped at the border to help other Ukrainians
Rainbolt told The Post the videos on his TikTok account are a “highlight reel” from the game. Sometimes — like with the dirt road challenge — he has a great run on the first try. Other times, it may take 15 minutes to string together five solid rounds.
“It’s not like I’m sitting there for eight hours a day and really hoping to get lucky,” he added. But, “it does take time.”
Rainbolt doesn’t want to be seen as some geography “whiz-kid,” though. Roadways, like maps, give some sense of direction. The paint on the road, the bollards, the various street signs and the telephone poles are different country by country. (The telephone poles in mainland Malaysia have black signs with white text, for example.) That’s how Rainbolt can guess where he is.
It can be easy to overlook those small details when you first play a game of GeoGuessr, but that’s what serious GeoGuessr players study to progress in the game. And when it comes to dirt roads, the color of the soil, the size of the rocks, even the fences that line the road help Rainbolt form “educated guesses.”
“Once you see the countries and their soil colors … it’s just human intuition,” Rainbolt said. “Can I describe to you why I think that it looked like it was Nigerian soil? Probably not, but it does. It’s just part of that sixth sense you pick up on when you play the game so much.”
Guesswork isn’t Rainbolt’s day job. In Los Angeles, he’s a social media strategist at a start-up that runs viral sports entertainment accounts on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Rainbolt dropped out of college after his freshman year to start working for the company.
“I’ve been making content professionally every day for the past five years,” Rainbolt said. “It’s a pretty easy thing to mix a hobby with.”
Rainbolt isn’t sure what he’ll do with his newfound TikTok fame. He’s planning to take it “day-by-day,” and absolutely wants to keep making videos riffing off GeoGuessr — maybe even some other videos around travel. That said, besides a cruise growing up, Rainbolt has never left the U.S.
“Everything I’ve learned is from Street View,” Rainbolt. “Eventually, I would love to see these places in person.”
After more than a year of playing GeoGuessr, Rainbolt wants to visit Svalbard, an archipelago off the coast of Norway, or travel to Laos to see the limestone peaks in Vang Vieng. There’s just one problem: His passport is expired. | 2022-07-11T15:41:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GeoGuessr turns Google Maps into a game for TikTok - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/11/geoguessr-game-rainbolt-tiktok/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/11/geoguessr-game-rainbolt-tiktok/ |
LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman won't be at the Celebration of Champions ahead of the British Open. (Alastair Grant/AP)
Greg Norman, whose breakaway golf circuit has thrown the sport into chaos this summer, is not pleased that he was not invited by British Open officials to play in this week’s Celebration of Champions, a four-hole exhibition and dinner for former winners that precedes every British Open played at the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland.
“I’m disappointed. I would have thought the R&A would have stayed above it all given their position in world golf,” Norman, a two-time British Open winner, told Australian Golf Digest. “[It’s] petty, as all I have done is promote and grow the game of golf globally, on and off the golf course, for more than four decades.”
Greg Norman is throwing his sport into chaos. This time, he’s doing it with Saudi money.
Norman is the chief executive of the LIV Golf International Series, the Saudi-funded circuit that has lured some of the game’s top names away from the PGA and European tours. He has been criticized for downplaying Saudi Arabia’s spotty human-rights record, and the R&A declined to invite him to this year’s Celebration of Champions. Norman said the group sent him a letter saying he was not welcome.
“The 150th Open is an extremely important milestone for golf and we want to ensure that the focus remains on celebrating the championship and its heritage,” the R&A said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we do not believe that would be the case if Greg were to attend.”
The R&A previously had said that any golfer who had qualified for the British Open could play in this year’s tournament. The PGA and European tours have suspended and/or fined the golfers who joined LIV, but they have no say on who gets to play in majors like the British Open.
Norman himself expressed a desire to play in this year’s British Open, saying earlier that “I think I can still get in” and writing the R&A to ask for an exemption. Past champions 60 and younger — or past champions older than 60 who won the tournament within the previous 10 years — receive automatic invitations to the British Open, but Norman is 67 and last won in 1993. He hasn’t played in the tournament since 2009; he could have entered through 2015 as a past champion but didn’t, saying he didn’t want to take a spot from younger players.
The R&A did not play along.
Jack Nicklaus, Norman’s former mentor and a vocal supporter of the PGA Tour, called Norman “an icon in the game of golf” during a news conference on Monday. Norman had previously called Nicklaus a “hypocrite” for criticizing LIV.
“We’ve been friends for a long time, and regardless of what happens, he’s going to remain a friend,” Nicklaus said on Monday. “Unfortunately, he and I just don’t see eye to eye in what’s going on. I’ll basically leave it at that.”
The Celebration of Champions takes place the Monday before the tournament. Previous British Open and Women’s British Open winners will play the first, second, 17th and 18th holes at the Old Course before a dinner in their honor. The British Open itself begins Thursday.
“We are deliberately inviting a field that represents the past, present and future of this game we all love and reflects our purpose to ensure that golf is seen as welcoming, accessible and can be played by anyone who wants to,” the R&A said. “It will be a lot of fun and we look forward to revealing the full draw on Monday before enjoying a fitting celebration of this great Championship at the home of golf.” | 2022-07-11T15:46:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Greg Norman not invited to British Open celebration - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/11/greg-norman-british-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/11/greg-norman-british-open/ |
Biden needs to address the coming crisis between Israel and Palestine
By Jeremy Ben-Ami
Palestinian protesters stand behind shields during clashes with Israeli troops after a demonstration against Israel's settlements near Kafr Qadoum village on July 1. (Alaa Badarneh/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Jeremy Ben-Ami is the founder and president of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group.
President Biden’s first official visit to Israel and the Middle East this month provides an opportunity for a vital reset of U.S. policy. Despite the collapse of Israel’s governing coalition, the trip still offers the best opportunity of Biden’s presidency to reassert the United States’ position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was upended during the Trump years.
The president’s agenda will center on promoting budding diplomatic ties between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. Such cooperation is a welcome development for those hoping to see Israel fully accepted in its region after 75 years. Yet the president must know — based on decades of experience with Israel and the region — that there will be no true and lasting peace in the region without meaningful progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ignoring the simmering tension, violence and injustice that dominate the Israeli and Palestinian reality will further the continuing deterioration of the status quo between the parties.
While campaigning, candidate Biden committed to reversing many steps taken by President Donald Trump that undermined prospects for a two-state solution and America’s potential to mediate the conflict. But a year and a half into Biden’s term, his administration has yet to follow through on those promises, such as to reopen the U.S. Consulate dealing with the Palestinians.
Nor has the administration reaffirmed renewed U.S. recognition of the distinction between Israel itself and the territory under its military occupation since 1967. Indeed, senior officials have essentially refused to use the word “occupation” in public.
On the ground, settlements are expanding at a steady pace, demolitions and evictions of Palestinians are increasing, and settler violence is growing bolder — with almost no effective action by Israeli authorities to restrain it. Palestinian terrorism is on the rise, and the status quo on the Temple Mount is cracking.
While Israel has refrained from de jure annexation of occupied territory, its policy and actions continue to push inexorably toward de facto annexation of large swaths of the West Bank. These steps violate international law and in many cases seem deliberately designed to obstruct the achievement of a two-state solution.
Over one-tenth of Israel’s Jewish population now lives in occupied territory, governed by different laws and with greater rights than the millions of Palestinians who live next to them in the same territory. The seeming irreversibility of this situation is fueling instability in Palestinian politics and society. The American role in enabling it is opening serious rifts within the Democratic Party and in the Jewish and progressive communities.
The Trump administration substituted business and security deals with a handful of Arab countries for a meaningful effort to resolve the actual conflict. While normalization of relations has tangible benefits for Israel and some in the region, Biden must ensure that the process is not used to provide cover for the Israeli right’s intention to permanently rule out Palestinian independence.
Indeed, the president must ensure his trip agenda goes well beyond the White House’s stated intention to have him “reiterate his strong support for a two-state solution, with equal measures of security, freedom, and opportunity for the Palestinian people.” That’s an important goal — but truly achieving it will require much tougher leadership, clarity and resolve.
The president should reaffirm that the United States — like its allies and nearly every country in the world — regards the territory over the 1949 Green Line to be “occupied” under international law. A public clarification is vital as the word was so publicly scrubbed from the U.S. diplomatic lexicon by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
While at every turn the president should and will use his trip as a platform to reaffirm the United States’ long-standing commitment to Israel’s security, he must also make clear the limits of U.S. tolerance for Israeli policy and action that expand settlements, promote demolitions and evictions in the West Bank or otherwise undermine a two-state future.
He should draw on his long-term friendship with Israel and its leaders — dating back to Golda Meir — to warn that ever-deepening occupation and the emerging one-state reality undermine the country’s relationship with the United States, its long-term security and its democratic foundations.
These are hard truths for many to hear — but only an honest reckoning with the root causes of the conflict can pave the way for decisive action to finally, peacefully end it. For the sake of both peoples and the United States’ own interests, that kind of honesty and direct leadership is exactly what’s needed from President Biden. | 2022-07-11T15:51:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden needs to address the coming crisis between Israel and Palestine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/biden-israel-palestine-crisis-occupation-west-bank/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/biden-israel-palestine-crisis-occupation-west-bank/ |
A launch truck fires a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) during combat training at the Yakima Training Center in Washington on May 23, 2011. (Tony Overman/AP)
It has become commonplace to observe that Ukraine is mired in a “long war” — one that could last for years, according to NATO’s secretary general. That could well be correct. The war, after all, has already lasted nearly five months and continues to grind on. But I fear that by so readily accepting that there is no end in sight, we might be giving in to fatalism and defeatism. Instead of becoming resigned to a never-ending war, the West should be focusing on how to shorten the conflict by enabling Ukraine to win.
It is wildly premature to suggest that any of these objectives have been durably achieved; Putin hasn’t given up his evil scheme of enslaving Ukraine. It is also highly insensitive to tout supposed U.S. success when roughly 20 percent of Ukraine remains under enemy occupation and more Ukrainians are being slaughtered every day. Would we be satisfied if an army of war criminals occupied 20 percent of the United States? By my calculation, that would include the entire states of California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Michigan and Texas. We wouldn’t live with such an outrage — and neither should the Ukrainians.
Why aren’t we sending more HIMARS? I put that question on Friday to a senior U.S. defense official, who responded by pointing out all the difficulties involved, from moving these systems to Ukraine to training enough Ukrainians to operate them to providing spare parts to keep them functioning. All true. But why doesn’t the administration announce right now that it is planning to send 60 HIMARS as soon as practicable and ramp up training to make sure Ukraine has enough operators to use them? That kind of commitment could shift the balance of power on the ground, enabling a Ukrainian counteroffensive to take back lost land. Simply making the announcement would buoy Ukrainian spirits and undermine Russian morale.
The U.S. military is very good at achieving tactical goals: If you tell soldiers or Marines to take a hill, they will move heaven and earth to take it. The problem is that it isn’t clear what goal the U.S. aid program is trying to achieve. President Biden recently pledged to continue supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes” to ensure it is “not defeated” by Russia. That’s not good enough. Our goal should not be averting a Ukrainian defeat. It should be enabling a Ukrainian victory. That’s the only way to shorten the war and end the suffering. | 2022-07-11T15:51:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Talk of a ‘long war’ in Ukraine is defeatist. Focus on shortening it. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/help-ukraine-win-war-russia-weapons-himars/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/help-ukraine-win-war-russia-weapons-himars/ |
Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Perez in Silver Spring on July 7. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
A week before Maryland primary voters go to the polls, with each party’s leading gubernatorial candidates locked in a statistical dead heat, the political jockeying and tsunami of ads flooding the airwaves have blurred what looks to us like a clear choice on both party ballots.
On the Democratic side, Tom Perez, whose experience as a civil rights prosecutor, local and state official, top Justice Department civil rights enforcer, and former U.S. Cabinet secretary is light-years ahead of the rest of the field, has distinguished himself as the most clear-eyed, straight-talking and substantive contestant.
Among the Republicans, Kelly M. Schulz, who has served in term-limited Gov. Larry Hogan’s Cabinet as both labor secretary and commerce secretary, is a voice of moderation in a party where that has become a scarce commodity.
Mr. Perez and Ms. Schulz have run on very different platforms — his strikingly detailed, hers resolutely broad-brush. What they have in common is that each is self-evidently competent and qualified to be governor, by dint of their broad backgrounds in governance. Neither has heeded the siren song of extremism that has come to exert a tight grip on many in the GOP, and plenty in the Democratic Party as well.
The Post endorsed Mr. Perez and Ms. Schulz this spring, and the campaign has reinforced our confidence in each.
In the sole televised debate among the crowded field of Democrats, in June, and in a radio interview featuring Mr. Perez and one of his two chief rivals this month, his agenda of concrete proposals and command of policy set him apart. His added dimension, presented with a crisp blend of detail and big-picture framing, is an ability to harness lessons he has learned from an impressive career in public service and apply them to Maryland’s most pressing problems.
On the staggering toll of homicides and gun violence that has gripped Baltimore and other parts of the state, for instance, his proposals would mobilize local, state and federal authorities to work in tighter coordination, including with the assistance of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; President Biden’s nominee to lead that agency once worked under Mr. Perez’s supervision in the Justice Department.
Other Democrats in the primary race, notably Wes Moore, a former nonprofit executive and Army combat veteran, have run strong races. But none, including Mr. Moore, would enter office with the knowledge and strategic savvy that Mr. Perez would possess on Day 1.
Like Mr. Perez, Ms. Schulz has projected a sense of balance along with a centrist agenda. In her case, the contrast with her main primary rival, state Del. Daniel L. Cox (Frederick), a right-wing extremist, is obvious. Mr. Cox, endorsed by former president Donald Trump, peddles the lie that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and wrote that Vice President Mike Pence was a traitor for not intervening to overturn the results. Ms. Schulz, who has dismissed such nonsense, has advanced a traditional conservative agenda of lower taxes and tough measures to fight crime.
Both Mr. Perez and Ms. Schulz are solid picks to lead the state. | 2022-07-11T17:17:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Tom Perez, Kelly Schulz are best candidates for Maryland governor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/maryland-governor-endorsement-perez-schulz/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/11/maryland-governor-endorsement-perez-schulz/ |
(Washington Post illustration; David Levene/The Guardian)
MacGann, the public face of the company’s tumultuous European expansion, said he leaked the trove of documents to make up for his role in its aggressive practices: “We had actually sold people a lie.”
“I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity,” he said. “When that turned out not to be the case — we had actually sold people a lie — how can you have a clear conscience if you don’t stand up and own your contribution to how people are being treated today?”
Regarding MacGann, though, Uber spokesman Noah Edwardsen said in a statement Monday “he is in no position to speak credibly about Uber today.” He said that "Mark had only praise for Uber when he left the company six years ago,” citing a departure email in which he called himself “a strong believer in Uber’s mission.”
MacGann and Uber recently settled a legal dispute out of court that the Guardian reported related to compensation, and that terms prohibited MacGann from discussing the matter.
But Uber’s spokesman said that MacGann received 550,000 euros. “It is noteworthy that Mark felt compelled to ‘blow the whistle’ only after his check cleared,” Edwardsen said.
When MacGann was asked whether he leaked the documents out of vengeance against his former employer, he acknowledged that “certainly, I have had my grievances with Uber in the past.” But, he added, “people need to look at the facts that I’m helping to expose.”
In 2013, former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed himself as the confidential source who provided documents to the Guardian and The Post, which exposed the National Security Agency’s vast global surveillance programs. In 2018, former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie shared materials with journalists that showed how the data firm improperly harvested data from millions of Facebook users to target voters on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign. And in 2021, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen shared confidential company documents with the Wall Street Journal, and later the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, that showed the company failing to thwart the spread of false and incendiary content. The Facebook Papers, like the Uber Files, were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Post.
But the company was facing resistance in several countries, primarily from taxi drivers who couldn’t compete with the low fares offered by Uber, whose drivers in new cities were heavily subsidized, at first, with millions of dollars in investor capital. Protests erupted in Berlin, London and Paris. Local courts in Germany had restricted some of Uber’s services. MacGann was put in charge of a team tasked with lobbying governments to allow Uber to make inroads, sometimes in the face of legal or regulatory hurdles.
“The mantra that people repeated from one office to another was the mantra from the top,” MacGann said. “Don’t ask for permission. Just launch, hustle, enlist drivers, go out, do the marketing, and quickly people will wake up and see what a great thing Uber is.”
Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Uber founder and then-chief executive Travis Kalanick, said in a statement that Uber’s “expansion activities were led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal policy, and compliance groups.” Kalanick helped pioneer a business model that “required a change of the status quo, as Uber became a serious competitor in an industry where competition had been historically outlawed,” she added.
In a statement sent to The Post after MacGann had unmasked himself Monday, Spurgeon said “we have no comment at this point.”
The Uber Files also implicate MacGann, though, along with his former colleagues, in some of Uber’s more hard-charging business practices. They show him personally appealing to Emmanuel Macron, then the economy minister for France, after a local official in the city of Marseille banned an Uber service in 2015, and participating in an aggressive lobbying and influence campaign to try to solidify a foothold in Russia.
In a text message exchange from January 2016, Kalanick urged his top lieutenants to organize a counterprotest in Paris, and appeared to downplay concerns “about taxi violence” against Uber drivers. “I think it’s worth it,” Kalanick wrote. “Violence guarantee success.”
Spurgeon said the former executive “never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety. Any accusation that Mr. Kalanick directed, engaged in, or was involved in any of these activities is completely false.” Hazelbaker, the Uber spokeswoman, acknowledged past mistakes in how drivers were treated, especially in the years that Kalanick ran the company, but said that no one, including Kalanick, wanted to see violence against Uber drivers.
In his interview with the Guardian, MacGann said he thinks Kalanick “meant that the only way to get governments to change the rules, and legalize Uber and allow Uber to grow, as Uber wished, would be to keep the fight, to keep the controversy burning. And if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go.”
Angry taxi drivers who felt their livelihoods were threatened by Uber saw MacGann as the face of Uber and, at times, aimed their ire at him. He said he received death threats on Twitter and harassment at airports and train stations, and that taxi drivers followed him, recorded where he lived and posted photos online of him with his children. “They needed someone to shout at. They needed somebody to intimidate, somebody to threaten,” MacGann said. “I became that person.”
MacGann said he does not blame those who lashed out at him and shares their frustration with Uber’s business practices. He was dismayed that the company’s only reaction to the threats against him was to assign him bodyguards. “There was no change in behavior,” MacGann said. “No change in tactics. No change in tone. It was, keep the fight, keep the fire burning.”
MacGann said he didn’t see how to promote fundamental change from the inside. In November 2015, he announced his resignation, around the same time several other top executives also left.
MacGann did not share those concerns publicly at the time. He told the Financial Times that his 18 months thus far at Uber was “like five years anywhere else … it’s all consuming, but it feels like a privilege.” He told the Wall Street Journal that he was confident the company had “turned a corner” in Europe and that “it’s hard to leave what is unquestionably the most exciting enterprise of our generation.”
Rachel Whetstone, then Uber’s communications and public policy chief, called MacGann “a wonderful leader” who helped the company recognize “the need for modern regulations that promote safety while also increasing choice.” David Plouffe, then Uber’s head of global policy, called him “a terrific advocate for Uber on three continents.” Both have since left the company. | 2022-07-11T17:22:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uber whistleblower Mark MacGann source of Uber Files data leak - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/11/uber-files-whistleblower-mark-macgann/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/11/uber-files-whistleblower-mark-macgann/ |
Facing bans, Uber ran PR campaigns through media conglomerates in Germany and India
(Lucy Naland/Washington Post illustration; Ben Margot/AP; Rolf Vennenbernd/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP; Uber screenshots; iStock)
Uber’s global ambitions came up against a major obstacle in September 2015: Its path into the lucrative German market was slowed by unfavorable legal rulings and resistance from the powerful taxi industry. But one executive had an idea to win over the leaders of Europe’s biggest economy.
“They have a problem, and we have a solution,” Ryan Graves, senior vice president of global operations, wrote in an email to his colleagues.
Germany’s problem was that hundreds of thousands of unemployed Syrian refugees were scrambling for a foothold in the country. Uber’s proposed solution? Hire them as Uber drivers. “There is no job that can scale faster than being an Uber driver,” Graves wrote.
His colleague, Rachel Whetstone, seemed to like the idea. She proposed an unusual strategy for advancing Uber’s interests — and suggested enlisting the help of Bild, Germany’s most popular tabloid newspaper, to overcome the expected political hurdles.
“Bild is the best route to get this done and get to Merkel,” she wrote in an email, referring to the country’s chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel.
Ultimately, the bold refugee-hiring plan never saw the light of day. Yet within months, Uber had nonetheless invited the German publishing conglomerate that owns Bild to claim a piece of its world-conquering vision as a $5 million strategic investor.
The conversation about Germany, revealed within a trove of more than 124,000 leaked internal documents from Uber, is a window into the aggressive global influence campaign that was the company’s strategy for powering its way into skeptical local markets around the world.
In a concerted effort to influence international politicians, regulators and thought leaders — at a time when the company faced legal challenges and local bans — Uber underwrote academic research that positioned its gig driver service as an economic mobility engine. And it invited media owners to invest in Uber, in hopes of enlisting them to make high-level connections and spread a favorable message.
“Having [Bild parent company Axel] Springer on our side is very valuable if we are to make progress in Germany,” Whetstone wrote in one of the emails. “I believe they will actually do things proactively to help.”
The Guardian obtained the documents, called the Uber Files, and shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nonprofit newsroom in Washington, D.C. that helped lead the project, and dozens of other partners worldwide, including The Washington Post.
The deal with Axel Springer — whose U.S. holdings now include Politico and Insider — resembled one that Uber struck a year earlier in India, during an emergency campaign to repair its image after a driver raped a passenger in 2014. Uber pursued and secured a $16 million investment from the digital arm of the Times of India group, which included a “commercial marketing arrangement,” the company said at the time of the 2015 deal.
Other media investors who bought stakes in Uber included Lord Rothermere, who owns the Daily Mail in Britain, Ashley Tabor-King, founder of the largest commercial radio group in Europe, and Carlo de Benedetti, publisher of Italian newsweekly L’Espresso — whom Uber executives asked to help make a connection for Kalanick with then-Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi in 2015, according to emails. (De Benedetti acknowledged hosting several of the company’s executives for dinner at his house in Rome that year but said that “I never made lobbying operations with them or anybody else.”)
Uber’s aggressive approach to media partnerships was a hallmark of the company’s strategy as it expanded under the leadership of founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick. Mark MacGann, a former top lobbyist for Uber who worked on establishing these partnerships, said that every one of the company’s investment rounds carved out space for “strategic” investors.
“This meant people or entities that had demonstrable political influence in their home countries, whether it was oligarchs in Russia, media groups in Germany and Spain, luxury and telecom tycoons in France, captains of industry in Italy,” the former executive said. “We didn’t really need the money, we believed we were doing them a favor by taking their money, because we wanted the top-level political access and influence that came with the money.”
Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s senior vice president of marketing and public affairs, said the company behaved like many other start-ups in seeking “strategic investors who could help us understand certain markets and grow our business.” They included media companies, she said, but “we never presumed that we would receive favorable coverage — in fact, it’s fair to say we have received lots of critical coverage from all of the outlets … many, many times.”
Malte Wienker, a spokesperson for Axel Springer, said that its $5 million investment was “economically insignificant” for both companies, amounting to about 0.01 percent of Uber’s value and less than 0.1 percent of Axel Springer’s equity interests over the past 10 years. Wienker added that the company’s editorial divisions work independently of its business side and that “we fail to recognize the one-sided, overly friendly reporting on Uber that you imply.”
Uber’s Hazelbaker said that the Axel Springer investment was public, and that “any advertising space given by Axel Springer was clearly declared as such according to their standards” and that to Uber’s knowledge, “there was at no time editorial content influenced or altered” by the company.
In a statement, Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Kalanick noted that he and his team “pioneered an industry that has now become a verb” but that “to do this required a change of the status quo, as Uber became a serious competitor in an industry where competition had been historically outlawed.”
Uber’s first ventures into many European countries in the early 2010s drew vocal opposition from taxi associations, which accused the company of violating local labor laws and undercutting the taxi industry’s competitiveness by offering subpar wages to Uber drivers, many of whom were immigrants.
In the summer of 2014, more than 10,000 taxi drivers across Europe and Britain took to the streets to protest Uber, which had by then expanded to more than 100 cities in 45 countries. In response, Uber repeatedly circulated a statement casting its car-dispatch service as a “truly revolutionary innovation” that, like other disruptive businesses, faced “stiff opposition from incumbents and rearguard actions by regulators.”
In Germany, Uber was hit that fall with a fine of 250,000 euros after it continued operating in violation of a Berlin court’s order to stop operating two of its services. But Kalanick insisted to colleagues that the fine “does not bother me in the least,” according to emails, and urged the company’s representatives in Germany to “do what is possible to keep building the business and fighting the fight.”
Embarking on a public relations charm offensive is a well-worn strategy for ambitious start-ups, said Matt Stoller, who studies the political and economic impact of big technology companies at the American Economic Liberties Project.
“If you are trying to lose money until you acquire market power, your core competency, at least for a period of time, is storytelling,” he said.
Early in 2015, Kalanick made plans to meet with Bild Editor in Chief Kai Diekmann and Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner, documents show.
Later, another Uber executive, Fabien Nestmann, the company’s western Europe public policy chief, suggested in an email that Uber partner with “someone like Bild” in a community-service gesture toward refugees. It launched in five German cities in early September 2015. “BILD REFUGEE CAMPAIGN: “WE HELP” blared a headline on one such effort. “Taxi service Uber picks up your donation,” the Bild headline, on an article that began, “Bild helps refugees. And this is how you can help too!” It urged readers to use the Uber app to beckon a car that would pick up donations of food, clothing and other goods and ferry them to relief organizations serving the influx of refugees.
But Whetstone — a powerful public relations executive married to former British prime minister David Cameron’s policy guru Steve Hilton — had bigger ideas.
In the September 2015 email exchange in which her colleagues dreamed about a massive refugee-employment program, she expressed an eagerness to gain the support of Diekmann. A consultant hired by Uber had previously identified the Bild editor as “one of the single most powerful figures in German media” who had “single handedly forced the last President from office,” according to internal messages. Whetstone expressed optimism that Diekmann could help cinch the high-level connections and introductions that Uber sought — although that would have been a highly unconventional and ethically fraught role for a journalist to play.
Whetstone also attempted to recruit the Bild editor in chief into a top job at Uber in November 2015, according to documents. Instead, though, Diekmann stayed with Axel Springer, winning a promotion at the end of the year to become the publisher of Bild.
In late 2015, Uber executives exchanged messages about the possibility of Axel Springer making an investment. At the time, an invitation to invest in Uber was a rare and valuable commodity. The company’s fast growth was the stuff of hyperventilating headlines and CEO envy, especially among media company leaders who wanted to shed their hidebound reputations and present themselves as digital visionaries.
Whetstone wrote in an email to colleagues that a partnership with Axel Springer would be especially welcome, as “they have traditionally been somewhat close” to the powerful taxi industry. “So anything we could do to work with them would be great.”
Fraser Robinson, who oversaw Uber’s business development in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, replied that “the key value here would be their support and influence in Germany and Brussels. They claim to have done a lot to help Airbnb with policy in Germany and are going to send examples.”
Axel Springer made its investment in Uber in early 2016, according to internal company emails, and announced the deal in April 2017.
According to documents, at the time the two entities had discussed the deal in terms of a relatively small $5 million investment of “media + cash.” What form exactly the “media” would take was not spelled out in the emails.
Axel Springer’s Wiekner said that “media” didn’t include editorial coverage but simply meant giving free advertising space in the company’s publications.
Documents suggest that Uber executives anticipated that it would also mean high-level introductions in Germany.
In the spring of 2016, Uber made a more formal bid to hire Diekmann, according to internal company messages and a person familiar with the discussion, offering him a top communication job, but he turned it down.
As they were closing their deal, Axel Springer offered to introduce Kalanick to policymakers at an Axel Springer-sponsored conference in Berlin in June 2016 — letting it be known that Merkel had been the company’s guest at another summit just the previous day.
Kalanick took them up on the offer, taking a seat onstage at the Berlin conference alongside Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of the automotive conglomerate then known as Daimler AG — now the Mercedes-Benz Group — where both were interviewed by Diekmann on “the future of mobility and what place trends such as connected or self-driving cars will have in this future.” There was no public mention of Axel Springer investment in Uber, nor was there any reference to Diekmann’s recent flirtation with going to work for Uber.
The event generated buoyant headlines. Business Insider: “Uber’s CEO is so confident in his company that he’s let his driver’s license expire.” The Star newspaper of Malaysia: “Now roughly equal in value, Uber and Daimler trade gentle blows.” Insider: “Uber’s CEO rocked up to a German tech conference in a Trabant.” Fortune: “Travis Kalanick Says Don’t Expect an Uber IPO For a Very Long Time.” Afterward, Kalanick and Zetsche attended a private dinner at Diekmann’s home, according to internal company emails.
Hazelbaker said that Uber was just one of many participating companies in the conference. Zetsche said that there was a “benefit for the Mercedes brand” in sharing a stage with Uber, noting “the young audience and a certain coolness factor,” though he was not aware of any financial relationship between Uber and Axel Springer. “Certainly I didn’t see the event in that light.”
A year later, after he left Axel Springer, Diekmann joined Uber’s advisory board in Germany. In that capacity, he counseled Uber’s communications team for how to shape media coverage — including in Germany, where his former newsroom, Bild was a key player.
Diekmann says there was no conflict of interest between his role as a newspaper publisher and the efforts he made for Uber. His role at Axel Springer, he said in a statement, was to gather ideas and establish tech world contacts “to further advance digitalization at Bild and the company in general. This was about picking up the ‘spirit,’ about understanding and networking to accelerate the strategic and cultural transformation that was already in motion.” Both Diekmann and Hazelbaker said that his consulting work for Uber began only after he left Axel Springer.
Whetstone, now an executive at Netflix, left Uber in the spring of 2017. “I consistently pushed back on Uber’s more aggressive business practices — which were established well before my arrival — with some success but resigned after eighteen months due to significant, ongoing concerns about the company’s culture.”
It’s an open question what Uber’s bold public-relations goals accomplished in Germany. After being hit with more violations and fines for using drivers who had not obtained the proper license to transport passengers, Uber pulled out of three German cities. Although the company said at the time it would continue to offer limousine services and employ licensed taxi drivers, it has always continued to be hampered by restrictions to its business in the country.
Uber also sought to strike an alliance with a powerful media partner in India.
After the 2014 rape of a passenger — a case that drew international media attention, and resulted in the driver being convicted and sentenced to life in prison — the Indian government banned Uber cars from the streets of Delhi for operating without proper permits. Indian officials also faulted the company’s background check system for allowing the perpetrator to drive despite a previous history of sexual assault.
Uber’s immediate plan was to go silent. The company was “deliberately not briefing the press of this situation because the situation is dynamic/fluid,” Ben Novick, then an Uber communications manager in Europe, wrote in an email at the time, “and we do not want to give a running commentary until we agree our next legal steps.”
But Uber was making an exception to grant an interview to a local newspaper with whom the company had a strong relationship. Novick wrote that Uber would talk to the Times of India “to tackle some of the misconceptions in the media about the case.”
Later, Kalanick exchanged a series of emails with his top deputies who were trying to plan a February 2015 India trip for him — the purpose of which was to “get Delhi back live” and “thus not have that ‘ban’ cloud,” as an Uber general manager based in Asia wrote. (The company restarted its service in Delhi in late January even though the government ban was still in place.)
The manager wrote that he planned to set up meetings for Kalanick with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and cabinet officials as well as court local investors. Kalanick, though, emphasized that one priority for the trip should be to preserve Uber’s relationship with the Times of India, the far-reaching media conglomerate that has been owned by the well-connected Jain family for decades.
Weeks earlier, an editor within the Times’s family of publications had invited Kalanick to join a panel discussion on “new regulations for new-economy companies” at its January 2015 Global Business Summit — a chance, the editor promised, for Kalanick to meet key government officials and business leaders and help set the agenda for policy formulation. Though Kalanick ultimately decided not to travel to India because of the continuing controversy over the rape case, he told his executives that he was “down to go above and beyond” for the Times of India group, according to the documents.
“If there is something we can do for them that makes sense, we should do it,” Kalanick wrote.
The next month, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with Times Internet, the digital arm of the Times of India Group, which “centered around a commercial marketing arrangement accompanied by a small investment,” Uber said in a company statement.
According to data from venture capital industry researcher PitchBook, the investment was for $16 million. Times Internet said at the time that the deal was part of an investment initiative that had previously invested in HuffPost and Gawker Media, aiming “to help the best companies in the world succeed in India.” Later that year, Bennett Coleman & Company, the owner of the Times of India, invested an undisclosed amount in yet another Uber funding round.
In May 2015, David Plouffe, a top White House adviser under President Barack Obama who had joined Uber as a senior vice president, gave an interview to the Times of India that was published under the headline: “Uber is growing because people know it is safe.”
Sivakumar Sundaram, chairman of the executive committee of Bennett Coleman, said in a statement that Times Internet made its own investment decisions independently of its parent company. He denied that the company made connections for Uber “with any form of political access or promoting changes in legislation/regulation.” And he added that a corporate firewall within the Times Group kept the business side from influencing editorial decisions.
In July 2015, a judge ruled that it was legal for Uber to resume operations in Delhi while it sought a license from city officials.
Douglas MacMillan, Alice Crites, Petra Blum of WDR, and Felicity Lawrence of the Guardian contributed to this report. | 2022-07-11T17:22:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Uber leak: Company wooed media in Germany and India for PR as it faced bans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/11/uber-germany-india-media-campaigns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/11/uber-germany-india-media-campaigns/ |
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