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Why the right called the 10-year-old rape victim story a hoax
Protesters rally at the Ohio Statehouse in support of abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. (Barbara J. Perenic/The Columbus Dispatch/AP) (Barbara J. Perenic /AP)
When the Indianapolis Star published a story two weeks ago about a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio who traveled to Indiana for an abortion, it was inevitable that it would get national attention. The story rocketed around social media, and President Biden cited it as evidence of harm done by the rush to restrict abortion in Republican states such as Ohio after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
As it spread, the conservative media swung into action to tell their audiences something different: This story simply must be a lie, a fabrication, a hoax. You know how those liberals are.
In fact, the story is true. Police in Columbus have now arrested and charged a man with the crime.
This is a perfect case study of how conservative media operate and the function they serve for their audiences, sometimes filling their heads with nonsense and sometimes affixing blinders so that inconvenient facts can be denied.
Let’s note that there was never any real reason to doubt the veracity of the story. It was reported by a reputable journalist at a reputable newspaper, with an on-the-record quote from the Indiana doctor who treated the victim. That victim’s name wasn’t released, nor were the details of the crime. But that’s precisely because of important privacy rules that protect victims. You’d have to be incredibly dishonest to trumpet that absence of detail as evidence of a hoax.
Yet that’s exactly what the conservative media did. The Wall Street Journal editorial page featured an editorial titled “An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm,” in which the editorial board claimed “there’s no evidence the girl exists” and concluded that it was “an unlikely story from a biased source.”
Fox News launched a concerted push across multiple programs to discredit the story. A host on “Outnumbered” called it “fake.” Another said the Indianapolis Star was guilty of “misreporting” or “disinformation potentially.” Tucker Carlson told his viewers, “It turned out the story is not true.”
Dave Yost, the Republican attorney general of Ohio, embarked on a media tour to cast doubt on the story, saying there was “not a whisper” of evidence it occurred. He added that it was “more likely that this is a fabrication.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted a link to a story quoting Yost, adding, “Another lie. Anyone surprised?” (He has now deleted the tweet.) South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem tweeted, “Now it looks like the story was fake to begin with.”
The Journal editorial page has published a laughably weak correction, in which the board wrote, “We wondered Tuesday about the case” — they wondered — and said stories like this ought to be “readily confirmed.” You see, it was the liberals’ fault in the first place.
It’s important to remember that many who raised these doubts believe that if a 10-year-old girl is raped and becomes pregnant, she should be forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term. To them, a story like that might be unfortunate, but it shouldn’t weigh against the bans they’re promoting.
Given that fact, one might ask why conservatives didn’t ignore this case altogether. The reason is that they understand the power of dramatic personal stories to affect public debates. That’s how conservative outlets work, by finding vivid individual stories that weave a larger picture of the world they’re portraying. The left-wing professor who indoctrinated students, the terrible crime committed by an undocumented immigrant, the “welfare queen” milking the system — all make a political assertion concrete and emotionally weighted.
Of course, that’s how most news media work, and liberals use individual human stories to make their claims, too. Before the story emerged of the girl from Ohio, Democrats were warning of exactly this kind of case, that outlawing abortion would mean victims, including very young victims, would have to carry rapists’ babies to term.
If that’s the argument you’re making, the younger the hypothetical victim you posit, the more dreadful the story is. Here was a case where it wasn’t hypothetical. It was real — which is why it was so useful for Democrats and so threatening to Republicans.
Conservatives handled that threat by claiming the whole thing was made up. They knew that if they hit that assertion often enough, eventually when their audiences hear “10-year-old forced to carry rapist’s baby,” rather than saying, “How awful — maybe there should be some exceptions in these laws,” their audiences will say, “That’s just more left-wing propaganda. Those stories are made up.”
When the conservative media took that approach after the story broke, they knew full well that in the end they might turn out to be right or wrong about it. But clearly they didn’t really care. They can accomplish their goal either way, because they’ve trained their audiences to live in a world where there is no such thing as an objective fact. There are the things our side says, which are “true,” and the things everyone else says, which are presumed to be lies.
Just as a majority of Republicans believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election, if a few months from now you poll whether a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio traveled to Indiana for an abortion, most Republicans will say it never happened and liberals made it up.
That way they don’t have to question the consequences of their position on abortion. As a bonus, their beliefs about the liberal media are reinforced.
And the truth? Who cares about that? | 2022-07-14T19:59:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why the right claimed a story of a 10-year-old rape victim was a hoax - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/conservative-media-rape-victim-abortion-hoax/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/conservative-media-rape-victim-abortion-hoax/ |
Migrants take refuge inside Union Station in D.C. on July 12, after a bus ride that originated in Texas. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post)
For several decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have instructed U.S. deportation agents to prioritize some illegal immigrants over others. Felons, drug traffickers, national security threats and violent gang members have generally topped the list for removal from the country.
Setting such priorities has been a constant — a fact that seems to have eluded a federal judge in Texas, who last month tore up the Biden administration’s approach. A federal appeals court in Ohio disagreed, ruling this month that the administration’s policy is broadly in line with past practice and grounded in legal precedent. But for now, the Texas judge’s ruling remains in force and deportation agents have no guiding rules beyond a vague instruction to focus on “the greatest threats,” whatever that means. The Supreme Court might ultimately decide.
It is unrealistic, as well as bad policy, for the government to take a helter-skelter approach to expelling unauthorized migrants. In addition to so-called bad guys, that cohort now includes millions whose spouses and children are U.S. citizens, as well as many who have mortgages, own businesses and support families. Most have never been charged with a crime. Few Americans want to see deportation agents sweep up soccer moms as readily as rapists.
The Trump administration took a notoriously hard line on illegal immigration, but it, too, prioritized certain immigrants for deportation, especially felons, gang members and drug traffickers. Those priorities, like those of other administrations, faced no serious legal challenges given the well-established principle that the federal government, whose resources are finite, has broad discretion in determining how to enforce immigration law. But Republican state attorneys general, in line with a party playbook that wields illegal immigration as an electoral cudgel against Democrats, have determined that the Biden administration’s deportation guidance is somehow beyond the pale.
Actually, that guidance, issued by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last fall, represents a modest attempt to provide a framework for deportation authorities in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is, explicitly, not an ironclad rule for agency personnel, who remain free to use what is known as prosecutorial discretion, as previous administrations have done. Mr. Mayorkas’s memo prioritizes migrants for deportation who pose a threat to national security, border security and public safety, including those convicted of aggravated felonies. It offers further advice that deportation decisions should be determined by “an assessment of the individual and the totality of the facts and circumstances.”
That’s an admittedly squishy standard, though not as squishy as the one now in place. But it also seems like common sense. While some immigrant advocates feared it left too much wiggle room for agents to deport migrants, in fact deportations have declined — a data point the GOP attorneys general cited in arguing that the administration is not enforcing the law. Yet deportations also declined sharply under the Trump administration compared to the Obama administration, with nary a peep from Republican attorneys general.
In fact, the Biden administration has expelled about 1.5 million unauthorized migrants, a staggering number, without even the benefit of deportation proceedings in court — a policy it has executed under a still-applicable public health order prompted by the pandemic. Its discretion in setting deportation priorities is in keeping with preceding administrations — and deserves restraint from judges asked to flyspeck it, not interference.
Biden admitting refugees from Latin America is a step forward | 2022-07-14T19:59:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A deportation policy in chaos — thanks to one federal judge in Texas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/immigration-deportation-policy-federal-texas-judge/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/immigration-deportation-policy-federal-texas-judge/ |
As stars and politicians age, we’re entering a new era of stagnation
Tom Cruise, who believe it or not is 60, earlier this month at the women's tennis championships at Wimbledon. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
Our politicians and our movie stars alike are getting older, and for the same reason. Nothing’s more valuable in our scattered, fractured sociopolitical landscape than name recognition. Stars recycling past triumphs by making sequels is more dreary than disastrous. But stagnant political thinking in a rapidly changing world renders us unable to handle new dangers and challenges.
Consider Keanu Reeves, by no means the oldest working actor at 57. He’s been a key part of the cultural conversation for more than three decades, ever since “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Parenthood” debuted in 1989. He’s been a legitimate action star for more than a quarter century, with hits such as “Speed,” “The Matrix” and its sequels, and “John Wick” and its sequels hitting multiplexes at a regular clip.
Tom Cruise just turned 60 and also just turned in the biggest box office hit of his 40-plus year career with “Top Gun: Maverick,” even adjusting for inflation. At 67, Denzel Washington is playing a possibly age-inappropriate Macbeth when he isn’t plotting his third outing in “The Equalizer” series. Clint Eastwood, 92, tried to convince us he is still spry enough to catch a rogue chicken in last year’s “Cry Macho.”
Even the Chrises — Pratt, Evans, Pine, and Hemsworth — have been the hot young things for a decade or longer now, and all of them, save Hemsworth, are over 40. (The Australian and God of Thunder turns 39 next month.) And this isn’t limited to the guys: The two best female-centered films of the year, “The Lost City” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” star a 57-year-old (Sandra Bullock) and a 59-year-old (Michelle Yeoh), respectively.
Writing in the Ringer, Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur quantified this in a series of charts, all of them showing a dramatic increase in the age of the average lead actors since roughly 2000.
“Whereas the star, or the top two or three stars, of the typical movie or TV series released in the closing decades of the 20th century was typically in their late 30s—several years older than the median age of the United States population at the time—today’s average actor age has reached the mid-40s and is steadily climbing toward 50,” they wrote.
Politics has followed a similar trajectory. At 78, Joe Biden was the oldest person ever to be sworn in as president. The second-oldest? Donald Trump, at 70. The two very early front-runners for their party’s nomination in 2024? That’s right: Biden, who would be 82 at a 2025 inauguration, and Trump, who would be 78.
And they’re not alone. “Today, it seems, you’re nobody in Washington unless you’re 80,” Zachary B. Wolf snarked at CNN’s website.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been the top House Democrat for nearly 20 years, is 82. Her deputy, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, is 83. The No. 3 Democrat, South Carolina Rep. James E. Clyburn, is 81. The leadership on the Republican side of the aisle is similarly aged: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell turned 80 this year while Sen. Charles E. Grassley is 88 and plans to run again. As one gimmick account noted on Twitter, “Four U.S. Senators [Grassley, Dianne Feinstein, Richard C. Shelby, and James M. Inhofe] are literally older than chocolate chip cookies.”
It’s fair to ask whether people born before the advent of cable TV and nuclear power — in addition to delicious desserts — are in the best position to represent a nation beset by issues that would have been unimaginable when they began their careers. That’s especially true when those leaders rely on assumptions about how politics work that no longer apply.
Stars and pols alike are getting older for a similar reason: In a world where it costs a ton of money to simply generate awareness for a product, nothing is as valuable as a well-known name. In politics, this manifests in the remarkably powerful incumbency effect. In 2016, 98 percent of House members won reelection. Incumbency was worth an extra 3.2 percent at the polls.
Similarly, there’s likely a reason stars in movies started to get older right around the same time Hollywood began to lean more heavily on intellectual property derived from comic books and elsewhere. Creating brand awareness, be it for a property or an actor, became more and more expensive. Rather than trying to mint new stars, it was safer for a studio head to greenlight a picture with a known property as the marquee name on the poster. No one will hold an executive accountable for relying on a fading star rather than going with their gut to create a new one.
Both gerontocracies invite repetition at best and stagnation at worst. And while I’m looking forward to “John Wick: Chapter 4” even as I hold out hope for the next generation of John Wicks to emerge, another sequel on the horizon fills me with near crippling terror. “Biden-Trump Redux” is a repeat the country cannot afford. | 2022-07-14T19:59:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | From Tom Cruise to Nancy Pelosi, stars and politicians are getting older together - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/tom-cruise-nancy-pelosi-gerontocracy-rules/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/tom-cruise-nancy-pelosi-gerontocracy-rules/ |
Pacers to extend offer to Deandre Ayton, complicating Suns’ Kevin Durant pursuit
The Indiana Pacers have agreed to sign Deandre Ayton (right) to a maximum offer sheet as they pursue a rebuilding effort. (Darron Cummings/AP)
The Indiana Pacers agreed to sign restricted free agent center Deandre Ayton to a maximum offer sheet, a person with knowledge of the decision confirmed Thursday, in a move that could complicate the Phoenix Suns’ hopes of trading for Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant.
Indiana, which is constructing a young core around guards Tyrese Haliburton and Bennedict Mathurin, will sign Ayton to a four-year, $133 million offer sheet, ESPN.com first reported.
Once Ayton officially signs the offer sheet, the Suns will have two days to decide whether to retain Ayton by matching Indiana’s offer or to let him go. Per league rules, Phoenix would not be able to trade Ayton until Jan. 15 if it elects to match the offer. Earlier this month, the Suns lost veteran center JaVale McGee, who signed a three-year contract with the Dallas Mavericks.
As the No. 1 pick in the 2018 draft, the 23-year-old Ayton was this summer’s highest-profile restricted free agent. After handing out big contracts to Chris Paul, Devin Booker and Mikal Bridges, Phoenix opted to let Ayton enter restricted free agency while his fellow draft classmates like Luka Doncic, Trae Young and Jaren Jackson Jr. all signed lucrative extensions.
The athletic fourth-year center responded by averaging 17.2 points and 10.2 points per game, but his campaign ended on a sour note when he was benched down the stretch of Game 7 during a second-round loss to the Dallas Mavericks following a disagreement with Coach Monty Williams.
Ayton and Bridges, a talented two-way wing, were viewed as possible centerpieces in a deal for Durant, who has reportedly targeted Phoenix and the Miami Heat as his top destinations in a trade. Without Ayton, it’s unclear whether the Suns will be able to construct a package of players and picks that is suitable to the Nets while still remaining among the league’s top title contenders.
The rebuilding Pacers traded all-star center Domantas Sabonis to the Sacramento Kings in February, and they parted with veteran guard Malcolm Brogdon in a deal with the Boston Celtics earlier this month. To sign Ayton, Indiana will probably need to execute a salary cap-clearing trade. | 2022-07-14T20:00:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pacers to extend offer sheet to Suns center Deandre Ayton - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/deandre-ayton-offer-sheet-pacers-suns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/deandre-ayton-offer-sheet-pacers-suns/ |
NTSB says father, not 13-year-old son, was driving pickup in Texas crash that killed nine
The federal investigators also said subsequent testing found methamphetamine in the father’s blood.
A flag flies at half-staff at the University of the Southwest on March 17, in Hobbs, N.M. Six student golfers and the coach of University of the Southwest were killed in a crash in Texas. (John Locher/AP)
The driver of a pickup truck that collided with a golf team’s van in March, killing nine people in Texas, was a 38-year-old man, not his 13-year-old son, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday, correcting information the agency released shortly after the fiery head-on crash.
Federal investigators said the man driving the 2007 Dodge 2500 was heading southbound when the pickup crossed into the northbound lane of Highway FM 1788, which had a speed limit of 75 mph.
At its March briefing, the NTSB said the pickup’s left front tire, a spare, blew out, pulling the truck across the centerline of the highway.
But in a preliminary report released Thursday, the agency said, “to date, the investigation has not found evidence of a sudden or rapid loss of tire air pressure or any other indicators of catastrophic failure of the pickup truck’s front left tire.”
Robert Molloy, director of the NTSB’s Office of Highway Safety, said Thursday that “out of concern of the family,” he would not detail early evidence gathered by crash investigators and information that led the agency to incorrectly describe who was driving.
Molloy said the catastrophic damage from the crash and resulting fire “made understanding some of the details of the crash very difficult.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which is a party to the investigation, did not immediately answer questions on the circumstances.
Regarding the status of the left front tire, Molloy said although preliminary evidence pointed toward a catastrophic failure, a subsequent teardown and examination of the wheel and its components by NTSB researchers, as well as other roadway evidence, provided no evidence of such a failure.
The NTSB, known for its caution and the rigor of its investigations into complex airline, marine and roadside crashes, said the preliminary information released Thursday is “subject to change, and may contain errors,” which would be corrected after the investigation is complete and a final report released. | 2022-07-14T20:00:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NTSB: Driver in Texas crash that killed golf team members wasn't 13 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/14/ntsb-texas-crash-golf-team/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/14/ntsb-texas-crash-golf-team/ |
Coin Crew Games co-founders Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Mohammed Salyh. (Washington Post illustration; Courtesy of Coin Crew Games)
Coin Crew Games co-founders Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Mohammed Salyh never particularly enjoyed going to school. So naturally, they decided to set “Escape Academy,” their new game, in a secret boarding school.
“I dropped out of high school,” Bushnell said, when asked about what got him into designing games. “I’ve always just hated academia.”
“That’s why we made Escape Academy,” quipped Salyh.
“Escape Academy” is an adventure game about a student at the eponymous academy, which has a sprawling campus filled with environmental puzzles meant to train the next generation of escape room masters. It also directly draws upon Coin Crew’s experience developing in-person escape rooms.
Bushnell and Salyh first met in 2017 at Two Bit Circus, an amusement center in Los Angeles with arcade machines, carnival games and real-life escape rooms. The pair were hired to design the escape rooms for Two Bit Circus before it opened. Since then, they’ve worked together as Coin Crew making games intended for nights out with friends or family gatherings. And when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Coin Crew started developing “Escape Academy.”
Review: ‘Escape Academy’ is a delightfully frustrating co-op scramble
The pivot was a logical one. Prior to Two Bit Circus, Salyh worked as a game designer specializing in mobile games at Disney, Zynga and Age of Learning.
“I went to school for animation and I thought I wanted to do animation for games, but I quickly found out that I’m just a terrible animator,” Salyh said, laughing. “I really enjoyed the design aspect a lot more. I started making Flash games on websites like Newgrounds … That was the first time I thought ‘oh, I could do game design as a career.’ ”
As for Bushnell, it was in his blood. He is the youngest son of Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari. Video games — the fun, the design and the business of them — were regular discussion topics at the Bushnell dinner table.
“I’m a Bushnell. That’s like pocket aces in games,” he said. “I just have a lot of connections in the industry. Also, besides the crushing work, making games is the most fulfilling thing you can do. It’s great.”
“Escape Academy” is still intended to be played with friends (there’s a solo mode, but the game is better as co-op experience) but it’s the first time that Coin Crew made a video game designed to be played in your own home, which posed some unique challenges.
“With a real world escape room, we’re designing 45 minutes to an hour of content for people,” Salyh said. “In ‘Escape Academy,’ we’re designing six to eight hours of content. … The scale of what we’re doing is just so much bigger than anything we’ve ever done as a single product.”
The team wanted to authentically evoke the feeling of real world escape rooms, which Salyh described as a combination of time pressure and urgency. If that equation is present when an escape room participant finds the big item that leads to freedom, then the payoff is a satisfying eureka moment.
To make that sort of video game, Coin Crew expanded. Art director Michelle Huttunen joined during the beginning of the project.
“Going from doing location-based games to games for console and PC just requires so much higher fidelity of art and artistic direction,” Salyh said. “Being able to add somebody to our leadership team who had those chops was so key because going into this, that was one area where we found ourselves quickly out of our depth.”
The team also felt it was important for the game to have a story with characters. But what sort of narrative frame could explain why a protagonist would find themselves constantly trapped inside a sequence of unique, elaborate prisons? Among the concepts that came up during brainstorms, such as time travel and parallel universes, only one seemed to fit the bill.
“Why are you escaping from a room?” said Bushnell. “Oh, it’s a classroom! Done. We’re teaching critical thinking. Done, full stop.”
School is also widely relatable. For Salyh and Bushnell, school was mundane and not that interesting. But the pair said that common experience of banality allows players to fantasize about what school could be, citing the fantasy series “Harry Potter” and the hit anime “My Hero Academia.”
State Department pursues diplomacy through video games in the classroom
Thematically, school is also a place with a variety of ability and commitment levels. Some students aim high, some have no interest and the rest are somewhere in between. “Escape Academy” is going for all crowds. It’s a game for hardcore players and casual players. It’s even a game for people who don’t want to play at all and prefer to watch the action instead.
“If we’re going to talk about what Coin Crew’s guiding philosophy is, it’s social accessibility,” said Bushnell. “And that doesn’t mean a casual game. It doesn’t mean Bejeweled or something like that. It’s more about how we build an experience that’s fun for the not-super gamer and the gamer.”
There aren’t a lot of virtual escape games on the market. Coin Crew developed “Escape Academy” as an opportunity to make a splash in an uncontested space — but also as an invitation for other companies to make more titles in a genre that has been largely ignored.
It’s also poetic. The modern day escape room, part of a broader genre of location-based games, was actually inspired by video games such as the 1993 adventure game, “Myst. In “Myst,” players explore the eponymous island and unlock its mysteries by solving a series of elaborate mechanical puzzles spread throughout the landscape. But unlike today’s escape rooms, “Myst” was strictly single-player and had no time limits on any of the puzzles, meaning individuals could enjoy the game at a comfortable pace.
“Escape Academy” is, essentially, a pizza effect game — the sociological term for when a foreign adaptation of culture returns to its origin nation to then influence the native culture. By taking the mounting tension and group problem solving mechanics developed in modern escape rooms and boomeranging them back to the original video game genre, Coin Crew is hoping to create a virtual experience that captures the magic of a real world session.
“It’s such a social experience,” said Salyh. “It makes you feel smart. It makes you talk. It kind of pushes you. You might think, can I do this? And by the end you’re like, yeah. I can do this.” | 2022-07-14T20:01:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | These game devs built Escape Academy after covid closed escape rooms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/14/escape-academy-virtual-escape-room/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/14/escape-academy-virtual-escape-room/ |
Transcript: Future of Work: The Technology of Tomorrow and the American Workforce
MR. PALETTA: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Damian Paletta, deputy business editor, and I’m so honored to be joined today by Labor Deputy Secretary Julie Su.
Hi, Deputy Secretary. How are you?
MS. SU: Hi, Damian. It's good to be with you.
MR. PALETTA: Thanks. I'm really excited to talk to you about the economy, the American workforce, and the big technological changes affecting all of that, and I'm really also excited to hear from viewers. Please join the conversation. You can tweet at us using the hashtag @PostLive, and we'll continue your comments and questions over the course of program.
Deputy Secretary, I was wondering if we could start. I mean, I really want to talk about where this is all going, but let's start with where we are first. There's some really interesting data that came out on Wednesday about inflation. You know, a lot of Americans are concerned at 9.1 percent price growth year‑over‑year. Obviously, this affects a lot of workers. Can you give me your insight into how this is manifesting itself in workers and what the government can do to try to blunt the impact of that on workers?
MS. SU: Yeah. Thank you so much, Damian.
So we are seeing continued improvement in the jobs numbers, first of all, right? So our June jobs report shows continued broad‑based economic recovery. The economy added 372,000 jobs. The unemployment rate has dropped from the time the president took office from 6.4 percent down to 3.6 percent. Labor force participation is back up. So, in terms of the impact on workers, we are seeing that the addition of 9 million jobs to the economy since President Biden took office is having an impact. It's also obviously a demonstration of the profound resilience of America's businesses and its workers, and of course, these aren't just numbers on a page. These are millions of Americans who are back at work and able to support themselves and their families with good‑paying jobs and enjoy the dignity that a job provides.
You mention inflation, which is really important. Obviously, this is of great concern to all of us, but one point that I think sometimes gets lost is that the numbers yesterday also show what economists call "core inflation," which includes‑‑which does not include energy and food cost, but that core inflation has come down for the third month in a row, and so that's a sign of progress.
There are some things that are not reflected yet in those numbers, and we are hopeful that, you know‑‑that inflation is peaking, and of course, we need to continue to tackle that. We need to tackle it more quickly, and we definitely need to get prices under control.
MR. PALETTA: You mentioned the jobs report. I mean, I don't think any of us have seen anything like, you know, so many consecutive months of close to 400,000 jobs. So, I mean, I think the strongest part of this economy right now is the labor force, and one of the things that I think caught a lot of us by surprise in terms of journalists was the labor shortage that we experienced kind of coming out of the pandemic. You know, there continue to be really millions of open jobs. Do you see that being something that's going to work itself out, this labor shortage, as we kind of get further and further through this, or is that something that's going to continue into the future?
MS. SU: Right. So this is one of those areas where I think it's so important to look at‑‑look at data and really understand what's actually happening.
What is often short‑handed as a labor shortage, we see really as a job quality shortage, and how do we know that? We do see that workers are resigning from jobs, but many more have actually been hired. In fact, hiring is outpacing quits in every major sector, with higher levels of both in lower wage sectors, which basically means that workers are feeling empowered to look for new work. And that's why for the Department of Labor, our biggest priority now is figuring out how we create and focus on connecting people to good quality jobs.
That's why the Labor Secretary launched a Good Jobs Initiative that is really aimed at working across federal government to make sure that the trillion dollars in infrastructure investments but also all across the economy, jobs that we have are actually good jobs that are incentivizing people to come back, that are going to provide them a path to the middle class, that are going to provide them the economic security that they want and need.
And we are seeing across the board that our focus on equity matters too, right? We need to make sure that there are good jobs in the economy and that every individual, every community from, you know, rural to, you know, communities of color to those who have been left out of the economy, even in good times, have access to those good jobs.
MR. PALETTA: That's so interesting. I mean, that's a case, I would think, where technology would really help workers, you know, know‑‑this way, they would be‑‑they would know that there's jobs that are available to them that might pay more, have better conditions, work with their lifestyle more. Is that‑‑how can we get more workers to have access to that technology and data; whereas, in the past, maybe the Great Recession of 2008, they wouldn't have access to the same information?
MS. SU: That's right. So we are laser‑focused on really, you know, transforming the workforce system to both connect workers to the good jobs they want and need and to connect employers to the people that they want and need.
And there is, as you state, Damian, a very important technology aspect to this, right? So, when people talk about technology and the future of work, it's often about how we're going to train workers for technology‑related work‑‑and that's really important‑‑or it's about how robots are coming to take our jobs, and we have to prepare for the impending apocalypse. And there are versions of these assertions that we do grapple with, but I think they're too narrow, and I think what we've seen is that adoption and deployment of technology has only accelerated during COVID, right? Whole workplaces that went remote were only possible because of technology, including government. Right before COVID, many people, including those in government, just did not think that that would be possible, but we've learned that you can work from home. You can work collaboratively with others from home. You can improve access to services remotely in many ways, and this does require different kinds of investments. But it also requires a real attention to one of the downsides, which is how technology can exacerbate inequities. So your question really gets to how do we make sure that everybody knows what good jobs are available, what good jobs connect to the skills that they have, and what kind of training they can get to do those good jobs. And those are really important priorities for our Good Jobs Initiative at the Department of Labor but also for the government as a whole.
MR. PALETTA: Yeah. I'm actually really interested in that because you could see both sides of it, as you said. I mean, obviously, for example, people with disabilities might be able to do a job using technology that they couldn't five years ago, but on the other hand, you know, we have, for example, fewer women. The participation rate among women right now is not as high as it was before the recession. I think a lot of us understand why that is, and I wonder whether there could be‑‑technology could be used to sort of separate people out in a way that doesn't help groups like women or even like farmworkers and things like that in a way that they could. Is there efforts in place to try to bring more and more people into this recovery so that everyone benefits the same way?
MS. SU: 100 percent, yes. So we are focused on that.
I think, you know, really the question about technology is related to this because it has to do with how do we think about developing technology in a worker‑centered way, right? Imagine if we thought about all of our technological development, deployment, research, investments in ways that could actually benefit workers.
And you talk about care, right? If we could‑‑you know, that's a matter of technology and a matter of job quality. If we could ensure that care jobs were actually good jobs‑‑we certainly saw through the pandemic, right, that this was a deeply impacted industry, but we also see that that's work that is work‑enabling. It's work that if there are‑‑is good, quality, accessible care that more people, especially women, are able to go to work. So I think all of those things are definitely connected.
I will also say, right, there's also the digital divide issue. So we saw this across COVID, again, not issues that were created by COVID but certainly exacerbated by them, where people with means found it much easier to both deploy the technology that was needed. For example, in schools, right, where some teachers and students‑‑
MR. PALETTA: Yeah.
MS. SU: ‑‑simply didn't have the resources they needed to access to care, and so that's one of the reasons why ending the digital divide is such a priority of the president, of the Department of Labor, and building a reliable broadband from coast to coast in every community is very fundamental to the president's infrastructure vision. We also saw that there are jobs that are not going to go remote. They're caretaking jobs. They're, you know, nurses and farmworkers and grocery clerks and supply chain workers from porch to truckers to warehouses. So, when we think about the future of work, one of the most important challenges before us is what is the future of work for workers who are not working behind computers, many of whom are‑‑you know, they've struggled in jobs that don't pay a living wage, don't have job security, don't have paid leave, don't have a voice on the job. And it's critical that we be honest about these aspects too, and here technology has sometimes not been used for the benefit of workers, right? It's not being used to help them do their jobs better. It's used for surveillance or to track whether they're working faster, to track‑‑you know, the things that deter them from taking needed breaks or like going to the bathroom or organizing for power with their coworkers, and that's a side of the future of work and technology that we also are concerned about and really need to examine.
And they're not inevitable, right? All of these are policy choices that‑‑
MS. SU: ‑‑we can make, and if we want to create a pathway to economic security, a path to the middle class, decent jobs for everybody, we've got to grapple with that issue too.
MR. PALETTA: I mean, I have so many new questions, but I thought that answer was so intriguing. If we could just start with it's hard‑‑I think we all come out of this pandemic feeling like we're chained to technology. You know, it's hard to separate out your family day from your workday because you're always kind of working and always, you know, in my case, being a parent too. But how has‑‑what is the side of technology that has made it harder for people to separate those boundaries out, and is there anything that the government can do, talking to employers or talking to workers about having‑‑you know, reasserting those boundaries? Because really the day feels like it never ends.
MS. SU: Yeah.
MR. PALETTA: The weekend feels like it never begins, and technology, I think, is a big part of that.
MS. SU: Right, right. I mean, that becomes another‑‑not entirely new, but‑‑right? Like, you know, definitely one of those issues that have become exacerbated through more and more work at home about job quality, right?
MS. SU: Like, how do we make sure that, you know, it's not just about wages. It's not just about safety on the job and making sure that every worker who goes to work gets to come home safely, but for those who are working at home all the time, how do we think about issues like workplace safety? How do we think about things like, you know, breaks, right, and hours worked? I think that those are, you know, tough challenges. I know that employers are grappling with them.
I know that, you know, for us, the Department of Labor, all of these things do play into how we think about worker well‑being.
You also mention, though, you know, one of the things that I think is important, which is some of the opportunities. We have also seen that there are more opportunities for workers with disabilities, for example, when you can use technology to create more accessible workplaces, when you provide more flexibility. And I think, you know, people have said‑‑and I think this is true‑‑that we're unlikely to go back to a world in which those who have found ways to work effectively remotely are going to go back to offices, and, you know, it forces us to think about what that means. It also forces us to, you know‑‑or it's an opportunity too to think about how we train staff, right? This is about not just working with technology, but how do you continue to get it to be advantage of working with other people when you're working remotely as well as how do you look at management and supervision, like making sure that people understand how to manage and supervise effectively and still really engage employees in a remote or hybrid environment?
MR. PALETTA: I'm really interested in how technology could be used for surveillance of workers in a way that maybe it wasn't years ago, and, you know, quite frankly, with the new Supreme Court decision of overturning partially Roe v. Wade, you would think that companies and even insurance companies would have access to really personal information of their workers that could be subpoenaed or, you know, tried to access by people. Like, what are‑‑is that a conversation that the government should be having about what‑‑how to protect certain information or data from workers, and is it something that we could see being discussed more openly in the months ahead?
MS. SU: Yeah. So, certainly, again, this is something that predates COVID, but the idea of, you know, collection of data about workers and then how transparent employers are about that collection, right, how transparent or who sort of owns that data and whether that's an asset for workers, I think that's an important piece of this whole puzzle.
You know, I think one of the things that is another kind of side of the technology conversation is as technology is utilized in the workplace, our focus is on how do we think about human complementary technology, right, worker complementary technology. There are ways that historically technology has been utilized to improve working conditions.
A good example is, you know, turn of the 20th century when you had manufacturing jobs that were‑‑that were, you know, dangerous and difficult. You had children working in factories. You had long hours. The combination of technology that helped to routinize and mechanize some dangerous work, but also workers having a seat at the table, you know, union power, workers organizing, having the ability to push for policies like the eight‑hour day and weekends, things like that, I think, show that the potential of when you combine, you know, worker voice and, you know, worker well‑being with technology being deployed.
And I think we have that opportunity now again because we are seeing another moment in which workers are asserting their power in the workplace. They're saying, you know, that, as I mentioned earlier, "We want to do better jobs, jobs that provide us economic security, that, you know, care about, you know, our well‑being," and making choices around organizing and demanding better, it could be another opportunity to really look at how technology and worker voice together can lead to really positive changes.
On the flip side, you know, some deployment technology has not had that effect. I mentioned surveillance earlier, right?
MR. PALETTA: Mm‑hmm.
MS. SU: Using technology just to speed up work, especially for vulnerable workers, workers who are overwhelmingly people of color, immigrant workers, right, women workers in workplaces where they're particularly vulnerable, but also the biases that can get reinforced through technology, we really have to make sure that we're not using technology to hire, right, to manage or discipline in ways that just reinforce biases that are also longstanding that we need to fight.
MR. PALETTA: Madam Deputy Secretary, we have a question from Twitter kind of along those lines. It's from Anthony Atto. He asks, you know, what kind of mechanisms are you proposing that would be‑‑that would have worker‑centric technology implementations? Could labor bargaining be expanded to include technology, and what about non‑unionized workplaces?
MS. SU: Right. All‑‑
MR. PALETTA: What are your thoughts on how technology could factor into that?
MS. SU: All very, very important questions. Right.
So one of the things, you know, that we are seeing is, again, recognition of the transformative impact of technology but also of the value, the benefit of when you merge. You know, how do we think about technology that's going to make work better and therefore make lives better? That's related to all the questions that you've asked now.
And there is, you know, private‑sector research going into, you know, what does human‑centered AI look like? Right? There's a lot of sort of interest in are there ways that technology, rather than being utilized to deter workers from organizing, could actually be used to support worker organizing, especially workplaces that are more diffused, right?
So I think that this is why this is such a moment of also opportunity. The important thing is that we are‑‑these are all choices that can be made. These are all policy decisions about how‑‑where we put research and development to technology, how we deploy it, and then what rules we're going to put in place to make sure that we don't think about just a collision course between technology and workers, but we think about ways to really enhance well‑being, to improve jobs, and to improve access to those jobs so that all communities benefit from the good things that will come.
MR. PALETTA: You mentioned AI. I think the rapid development of AI has a lot of people excited but also nervous. How do you see AI fitting into different kinds of workplaces, you know, maybe not just at technology companies but also, you know, warehouses and factories? You know, can AI be implemented in a way that really benefits workers, or is it something that they should be concerned about? Could it, like, replace their job, potentially?
MS. SU: Right. So I think one of the‑‑you know, every, like, decade or so, sort of few decades, there is the hand‑wringing over whether technology is going to, you know, take over all jobs.
I think what we have found throughout history is that more often than not, what happens is it changes jobs, right? There are some jobs that change more than others, but that for the most part, technology has the‑‑you know, provides different ways of thinking about work. Here one of the opportunities, I think, is clearly because of the rapid advancement in different types of technology, to really think about how we could again make workplaces safer by eliminate some of the tasks that are leading to worker injuries and sometimes worker death but also really thinking about how it could also free up humans to do work that requires uniquely human traits, right? Things like, you know, empathy and good judgment. You know, in a concrete way in the workplace, it could mean that we eliminate some more rote manual work but allow for better use of humans to provide customer service. Like, there's all kinds of things that I think we could imagine if we are thinking about the complement between creating more good jobs and using technology in a meaningful way.
MR. PALETTA: Have you seen‑‑I mean, obviously, one of the things that I think was really great about this recovery is that a lot of people and maybe the lower‑skilled jobs had opportunities to move from a lower wage to a much more competitive wage. Now, obviously, inflation eats into that, but do you see those people having kind of advanced in position, that they can kind of hold the ground they've made up? I mean, I think we're all concerned if there's a recession, you know, who knows what the impact will be? But do you feel like a lot of the people who were able to kind of move up the economic mobility ladder will be able to kind of retain the ground they've gotten because of technology, or could they find themselves kind of back in the same situation they were in maybe 2019? In other words, is this technology going to maybe disappear if we face a real severe economic downturn?
MS. SU: Right. So part of the‑‑you know, the president's vision, right, of the economy that leaves no one behind, when he says we're going to‑‑
MS. SU: ‑‑build an economy from the‑‑you know, from the bottom up and the middle out, I think it is about making sure that we not only see temporary gains, but that we're looking at longer‑term, you know, again, job, you know, mobility for workers, right, genuine economic security.
I mean, the kinds of investments that have been made just in the last‑‑you know, in the last couple of years since the president has been in office are really historic in nature, right? Some of them were very immediate, American Rescue Plan, let's get people back on their feet kinds of things.
But the trillion dollars in infrastructure investments are about not only fixing roads and bridges, about making sure clean water, you know, flows out of the pipes in homes and schools. It's not just about electrical vehicle charging stations from coast to coast, but it is about making sure that people get the job that's going to be required to make those things happen and that will give them economic security to enjoy those things, right? People can only enjoy good broadband and clean water, you know, flowing from pipes in homes where they can afford the rent or the mortgage, and these are not just jobs for now. These are going to have long‑term impacts on jobs for decades, right, clean energy, jobs around clean energy, jobs around, you know, new forms of energy, the batteries, the things that are going to be required to sustain this new and improved, better‑for‑our‑climate economy, our long‑term jobs.
And so we're‑‑part of our focus on good jobs is about making sure that these are long‑term, sustainable improvements, but again, part of the equity piece of this is that we've also seen historically that even when good jobs do get created, there is an equitable access to those jobs. And we are laser‑focused on making sure that the same communities‑‑African Americans, communities of color‑‑you know, marginalized folks‑‑we talked about women already and women of color who have been so devastated in the last two years that we've seen, you know, rollbacks in their progress in the workplace, how do we ensure that the prosperity that we're building in the economy going forward, that the recovery that we've talked about here already is broadly shared by everybody? Those are technology questions, but they're also much broader than technology.
MR. PALETTA: And just to build on that point, I mean, last year, we saw a tremendous amount‑‑and even this year‑‑of union‑organizing activity. A lot of workers were joining together to try to make their case for better working conditions, better pay, better benefits. Do you see that as being kind of a healthy evolution of the kind of labor movement in the United States, or are you worried that it might have set up a really adversarial situation, whereas, if we do have a recession, it might lead to kind of a mess? In other words, do you think this was‑‑made progress, or do you think this could put us in kind of a weird situation if there's a downturn?
MS. SU: Right. Well, so let me say two things about that at the outset. One is that one thing that we've seen throughout the economy during this recovery is that employers are raising wages and investing in their workers in various ways, right, looking for new and better ways to make their jobs better. Partly, it's a recruitment strategy, but, you know, obviously, good employers understand that their well‑being is intimately tied to the well‑being of their workers, and that's sort of‑‑you know, that has helped to fuel the recovery.
The other is that for a long time, you know, data has demonstrated that workers want a union at far higher rates than work‑‑than, you know‑‑that they actually have a union. That's why the president has been very strong about saying, "The right to join a union is fundamental. It is not just an exercise of workers' rights. It's an exercise in democracy," and why here at the Department of Labor‑‑and our Labor Secretary is very clear about this‑‑we really believe in the right to organize. And what we are seeing is, in a time where workers have more choices, they are organizing, sometimes against really, really great odds. I think that that is an inspiring sign of how a robust economy in which workers have a choice and are able to exercise that choice is going to lead to better outcomes.
When I mentioned earlier about, you know, how technology has actually benefited working people, it hasn't happened just by accident, right? It's happened because workers are at the table helping to decide on their future.
One thing that's interesting, I think, is to think about some international comparisons. A couple year ago, I had a chance to speak with the consulate general of Denmark, and we were talking about technology and, you know, this idea of robots taking over jobs, and what she shared is that in Denmark, there's actually very little fear over technology and its impact at work, that some‑‑87 percent, I think she said, of people believe that technology is actually going to help improve work. Part of that is because workers are at the table and helping to design the use of technology, right? This relates to the question we got from the doctor on Twitter, right, like how can‑‑
MS. SU: ‑‑technology be actually used to help support workers and worker organizing, but that when employers and employees work together, when there is, you know, a positive labor‑management and employer‑employee relations, that that is better for everybody. It's better for the workplace. It's better for the economy. It's better for job quality, and that is ultimately, like, our vision of what a Build Back Better economy should look like, right?
I don't think that we should assume that worker organizing is contrary, right, to‑‑or, you know, is about creating conflict. I think it's a really powerful way, as we've seen, for not just resolving conflict but building good workplaces together.
MR. PALETTA: And if I could just ask one more question, and it's more big picture. I mean, I think a lot of Americans feel like they're working more than they've ever worked before because, like I said, the boundaries have kind of been erased. Is that what you're seeing in the data? Are Americans working more hours than they have, or are they just working differently than they have? What is actually happening to our work life that maybe did not happen before the pandemic?
MS. SU: Right. So I think, as with many things, right, you know, it's complex. It's nuanced. It differs.
MS. SU: But I think you are pointing out something that's really important, which is that it has been an incredibly hard couple of years for a whole bunch of reasons, and, you know, some of it is the obvious global public health crisis, the ensuing economic crises. But it's also, right, like a lot of the other inequities that have been exposed, right? The racial reckoning our country is undergoing, crises in our democracy. And I think people feel legitimately stressed about all of these things that have‑‑sort of a convergence of things that are‑‑that are making it hard for us to realize all the benefits of things we started this conversation with, right, which is that the economy is recovering. It's recovering faster than at any time in history, that, you know, jobs are coming back, and jobs are getting better, and wages are going up. And, you know, there's historic public investments.
So I do think that there is‑‑you know, it's a moment of reckoning.
MR. PALETTA: Okay.
MS. SU: It's a moment of thinking about, you know, right, like where we're going, but the important part about this is that these are choices that we have to make, right? Policy matters too. We've seen that in the investments, the public investments‑‑
MR. PALETTA: Yes.
MS. SU: ‑‑that we've made, right, and that‑‑
MR. PALETTA: Thank you.
MS. SU: ‑‑you know, these kind of crises are opportunities too.
MR. PALETTA: That's all the time we have, but, Madam Deputy Secretary, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a fascinating conversation.
For The Washington Post Live, I’m Damian Paletta, and please join us next time. You can find a calendar of our events at WashingtonPostLive.com. Thank you very much. | 2022-07-14T20:01:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Future of Work: The Technology of Tomorrow and the American Workforce - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/14/transcript-future-work-technology-tomorrow-american-workforce/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/14/transcript-future-work-technology-tomorrow-american-workforce/ |
Penny Mordaunt could be the next U.K. prime minister. Few know who she is.
Former British Government Minister Penny Mordaunt leaves the Cinnamon Club in London after launching her campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party. (Tolga Akmen/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
LONDON — In the zesty but odd and insular contest to replace Boris Johnson as Britain’s prime minister, an unlikely figure has emerged among the top runners: Penny Mordaunt, a junior trade minister who was briefly the country’s first female defense secretary, who in her youth served as a magician’s assistant, and later appeared on a reality TV show and did a short stint as head of foreign press for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.
On Thursday, Conservative Party lawmakers winnowed down their list of contenders for the premiership to five, with former chancellor and finance minister Rishi Sunak on top with 101 votes, followed by Mordaunt with 83 and Foreign Minister Liz Truss with 67.
The next U.K. prime minister? What to know about the candidates to replace Boris Johnson.
The strong showings by Mordaunt and Truss make it more likely that a woman will be among the final two, who will then campaign to seek votes from the 200,000 dues-paying Tory party members — a process often described as “more of a selection than election.”
Until now, Mordaunt, 49, was not a household name in Britain, far from it.
In recent snap polling, most respondents could not name her when shown a photo.
It’s fair to say most of the general public has never heard of her.
When Johnson ran in 2019, there was already a string of biographies written about the flamboyant former London mayor and Brexiteer — alongside millions of pages of commentary, plus Johnson’s own writings over two decades as a newspaper columnist and magazine editor.
Want to understand Boris Johnson? Read his incendiary journalism.
Mordaunt did write a book, too, called “Greater: Britain After the Storm,” described by the publisher as “about restoring national pride and positive politics.” It has soared in recent days onto the Amazon UK best seller list. Former Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair blurbed it: “Uplifting and highly readable.”
The British press and her fellow Tories — both friend and foe — are rushing to supply their own details to Mordaunt’s biography.
David Frost, a former Brexit minister, launched a scathing attack on the politician who was once his deputy. “I am quite surprised at where she is in this leadership race,” he said in an interview with TalkTV. “She was my deputy — notionally, more than really — in the Brexit talks last year.”
Frost said, “She wasn’t fully accountable, she wasn’t always visible. Sometimes I didn’t even know where she was. This became such a problem that, after six months, I had to ask the prime minister to move her on and find somebody else to support me.”
Mordaunt’s team responded that she “had nothing but respect” for Frost and that “Penny will always stick up for Brexit and always has.”
The race to replace Johnson remains highly uncertain. Early favorites for party leader often go on to flop. The candidates have yet to take part in televised debates; the first is scheduled for Friday.
There could be mischief making in the days ahead, with Conservative lawmakers working to prevent specific candidates from progressing to the further rounds of secret balloting.
“It’s very unpredictable,” said Ben Page, global chief executive of Ipsos, a market research and polling company, describing the contest.
But Mordaunt does have momentum.
Among the candidates, she gained the greatest number of supporters between the first and second rounds of votes.
And when Defense Secretary Ben Wallace decided not to run, she overtook the field as the runaway favorite with Conservative Party members, who will pick the winner in the last stage of the contest.
One poll suggested that if she could make it to the final two, she’d win. She’d be Britain’s third female prime minister, following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
Yet even in Tory circles, she is something of a vague figure. “She’s a bit of a mystery, to all of us,” Matthew Parris, a former Conservative lawmaker who is now a political columnist, told the BBC.
“In her favor, she has an attractive personality, she’s obviously fun, she sounds like a good sport. On the other side of the balance, the thing she has to got to rebut are words like ‘flaky’ or ‘politics at the shallow end.’ She was once a magician’s assistant — you can’t cut the deficit in half.”
That job was one she had when she was younger, trying to help her family make ends meet. Her mother died of cancer when Mordaunt was 15.
She became a member of Parliament in 2010 and served for 85 days as defense secretary before she was sacked by Johnson for backing his rival in the 2019 leadership contest.
She is a Royal Navy reservist.
In this race, she has pitched herself as a Brexiteer who will return the party to its roots. The Conservative Party, she said at a recent event, had recently “lost its sense of self.”
“If I can compare it to being in the Glastonbury audience when Paul McCartney was playing his set, we indulged all those new tunes but what we really wanted was the good old stuff that we all knew the words to,” she said, describing the former Beatle, now 80, playing his new material at a youth concert, when what most wanted to hear was “The Long and Winding Road” and “Get Back.”
The tunes the Tories want to hear, Mordaunt said, included the words: “low tax, small state, personal responsibility. We need to get back to that.”
Her leadership bid got off to a bumpy start, though, when she was forced to edit her campaign video several times over — cutting out images of Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, who was convicted of killing his girlfriend; British sprinter Jonnie Peacock, who asked for his image not to be used in the film; and Jo Cox, a murdered Labour minister whose family raised concerns to the campaign.
Mordaunt herself didn’t appear in the video.
Page, of Ipsos, said her relatively low-level status worked for and against her. She was never in Johnson’s Cabinet and thus isn’t saddled with baggage from his administration they way the others are. At the same time, she can’t point to the same level of experience as Sunak or Truss.
“She has humor, which the British value,” said Page.
He referenced how once Mordaunt, having lost a bet to Royal Navy colleagues, gave a speech in the House of Commons about farming while managing to slip in the word “cock” several times.
He said her compelling backstory could go over well with the public.
“She hasn’t had a completely privileged, affluent childhood, so she might have a bit more of a common touch — which is always a bit of a problem for the Conservative Party. The British like an underdog.”
Her challenge, Page said, will be convincing people of “her competence in office.” | 2022-07-14T20:14:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Penny Mordaunt could be the next U.K. prime minister. Few know who she is. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/14/penny-mordaunt-uk-prime-minister-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/14/penny-mordaunt-uk-prime-minister-election/ |
When it comes to green travel, impact matters more than words
Green travel is a contentious topic. The notion of embracing low-impact and environmentally conscious travel is a laudable one, but in reality, it’s complicated. And the popularization of a number of related terms, such as “sustainable travel,” “responsible travel” and “eco-tourism” has further obscured the issue.
Given that tourism produces harmful emissions, the term “green travel” can seem like an oxymoron. An oft-cited study found that, between 2009 and 2013, tourism accounted for about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions; presumably, that number has since increased. Some people even argue that if you care about the planet, you should stay home. But on the other end of the spectrum, there is tangible evidence that mindful, ethical or “responsible” travel choices can lead to a variety of positive effects that include environmental, economic and cultural benefits — for host communities and visitors.
“Done well, tourism can be a significant force for good, both for nature and for local communities,” Tim Williamson, marketing director of Responsible Travel, an activist travel company, wrote via email. “Travel is important — but for it to be sustainable, we have to fly much less. We can’t offset our way out of the climate crisis. We can’t carry on consuming more, flying more, and plant some trees to balance it all out. We do have to restore nature, as well as — not in place of — slashing emissions.”
Four climate experts weigh in on how we can change our travel carbon footprint in a meaningful way
Green travel will not solve the climate crisis, but knowing what to look for can empower you to make choices that do less harm and more good if you do choose to travel. “The more informed you are, the more you’re able to influence things by creating demand for more sustainable and responsible tourism options,” said Edith Alusa, CEO of Ecotourism Kenya and a director of the board of the Global Ecotourism Network.
Here are some expert tips on how to decode the lexicon of green travel.
Don’t get hung up on the terms. The key to better understanding and identifying sustainable travel options is recognizing that it’s actually actions — not words — that matter. Definitions can vary from person to person, and over time, language evolves. “Impact is more important than semantics,” Williamson wrote. “The labels are different, but when you boil it down, they’re part of the same movement: They all share the ambition to make tourism better. It’s the substance behind the term that really matters.”
Do your homework. Anyone can slap sustainable-travel terminology on their website, but not everyone has the evidence to back it up. “There’s a lot of clever marketing around,” Williamson wrote. Keep an eye out for greenwashing (a deceptive practice of spending time and money trying to appear eco-minded but not taking action) and “be a bit critical. Don’t just accept terms or certification schemes — look behind the labels at the actual policies.”
Make a list. If you want to find responsible travel options, get clear with yourself. “Jot down the things that are really important to you and your own values,” said Jamie Sweeting, vice president of social enterprise and sustainability at adventure travel company G Adventures and the president of Planeterra, a nonprofit that focuses on harnessing the power of tourism for good. Maybe your list includes items such as cultural conservation, plant-based meals, and child and animal welfare, for example. Referencing your list and seeking travel options that align with your values can help you stay on track and avoid getting lost in the lingo.
Ask questions. “You need to be an investigator,” Alusa said. Before you book a tour or hotel, prepare questions. For example: Are they certified, accredited or held accountable in some other way, such as a membership organization? Do they support the local economy? What is their relationship with the community? Are they ensuring the preservation of the natural environment? Do they employ local guides?
Regardless of any trendy terms you might find on a website, search for solid evidence such as data, policies and reports. “Look for commitments that are measurable and seek travel providers’ annual reports showing successes and failures,” Shannon Guihan, chief sustainability officer and head of TreadRight for the Travel Corporation, wrote in an email. “We have a 5-year How We Tread Right (HWTR) sustainability strategy that details 11 measurable sustainability goals, and we report on progress annually.”
If you can’t find answers to your questions on a company’s website, contact the property or tour operator directly. “Ask what framework or strategies they have to ensure that they are contributing to conservation,” said Peris Aloyo, sustainability and client experience coordinator for Cottar’s Safaris in Kenya. “Do they have a CSR [corporate social responsibility program]? Do they have community outreach programs with the people they’re working with on the ground to ensure that local people benefit from their businesses?”
Susanne Etti, global environmental impact specialist at Intrepid Travel, suggested asking whether these businesses are actively engaged in efforts to monitor their carbon footprint to reduce negative effects on climate change. “Look beyond bold claims and great media coverage. Do a little digging to find out how they are tackling their environmental impacts,” she wrote via email.
As the pandemic prompts eco-awareness, the travel industry responds
Lean on and learn from other experts. You don’t have to navigate responsible travel and the ever-changing terminology alone. Contact organizations that provide training, accreditation and transparent standards, such as the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, and ask for guidance. Use do-good booking platforms and travel search engines such as Fairbnb, Kind Traveler, Responsible Travel and Tourism Cares. Call on a travel agent or operator who specializes in responsible tourism, understands the nuances of the nomenclature and has established relationships with trusted travel partners.
“Finding an operator who shares your personal values takes the pressure off planning and researching the trip on your own, especially when it comes to making responsible travel decisions,” Etti said. You can also join responsible travel communities on social media, where you can ask questions, share resources and learn alongside other travelers who share your values.
Understand that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. The evolution of terminology, while sometimes confusing, is evidence of the evolution of the travel industry — hopefully in a more sustainable direction. These terms have become popular, because more travelers are showing interest in making more informed choices. Sweeting said that this newer movement — particularly in response to the climate crisis, climate activist Greta Thunberg and travel-specific movements such as flygskam (flight shame) — has fueled a need for the industry to address the balance sheet of positive and negative effects.
And now, conscientious travelers are increasingly looking to go beyond just reducing their negative effects and are aspiring to be net-positive travelers. “Regenerative travel is taking things to the next level,” Sweeting said. “How can you use tourism as a regenerative tool to uplift your own life, your mental health, your physical health and your well-being while also using travel to regenerate the ecosystems, economy and people in the places you visit? Very little travel fits into that definition at the moment. But it’s wonderful as an aspirational goal for all travel to try to be regenerative in some manner.”
There is always more to learn and do. Sustainable tourism “is most certainly a journey and not to be mistaken with a fixed point,” Guihan wrote. We can keep moving in the right direction through the choices we make. “If sustainable tourism is the aspiration, then responsible tourism is the practices and behavior,” Alusa said.
Start now. Don’t let terminology intimidate you. “You can’t do everything at once right away,” Alusa said. “It’s incremental. The fact that you’ve decided that you want to think a little more about it, you’re already on the right track.” Decide what you can do, and commit to making more informed decisions. Maybe it’s opting for a form of transportation or accommodation that has a lower carbon footprint for your next trip. Maybe it’s exploring closer to home or immersing yourself in one destination rather than rushing around to see three. Maybe it’s contributing to a conservation or community project. “When you know better, do better,” Alusa said. “And be open to growth.”
Fitzgerald is a writer based in Honolulu. Her website is thisissunny.com. | 2022-07-14T20:19:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Understanding the nomenclature of green travel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/14/green-travel-semantics-explainer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/14/green-travel-semantics-explainer/ |
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks among abortion-rights activists on June 24 in Washington after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
President Biden issued an executive order to protect reproductive health care last week. This week, the Justice Department announced the establishment of a reproductive rights task force. Among the choice words in either effort are “monitor,” “evaluate,” “identify,” “ensure” and “protect” — as in access to reproductive health care. Noticeably absent is a specific proposal raised by pro-abortion forces in recent weeks: to build abortion clinics on federal land.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was the first person I saw to suggest this seemingly simple measure. But something bugged me about this novel idea. If it was so simple, why wouldn’t the Biden administration just do it? Short answer: It’s complicated and puts the lives of real people needlessly at risk.
It’s complicated, because the Supreme Court’s decision last month to overturn the 49-year-old constitutional right to an abortion did not clarify the law so much as introduce new legal uncertainties. And building abortion clinics on federal land in states with restrictions or outright bans raises myriad questions.
First, because of the Hyde Amendment, federal money cannot be spent to facilitate abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the pregnant person. But what if the feds leased land or facilities to abortion providers?
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, told me that’s technically okay. “Leasing federal land to someone else isn’t spending money; it’s making it. So there’s no Hyde Amendment problem with this particular idea,” he said. But University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman cautioned, “If the federal government did that, however, it would likely be sued.”
Still, the real problem is not the Hyde Amendment. It’s the Assimilative Crimes Act. In plain language, Vladeck said, this 1948 statute “says that the federal government can prosecute state crimes committed on federal property within that state if there is no federal law authorizing such activity.”
What that means is that prosecution would be at the discretion of the federal government. That alone for me is the biggest reason not to attempt this well-meaning idea. There is no way Democratic President Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland would seek such prosecutions. But, Litman warns, “a future Republican administration might.” Imagine a President Greg Abbott in 2025, acting within the five-year statute of limitations.
Meanwhile, even if a facility successfully opened before the advent of an unfavorable presidential administration, there would be serious questions about the criminal liability that patients and providers could face. Could providers be prosecuted for violating state law before and/or after an abortion is performed? What criminal liability faces the patient before and/or after they arrive or leave the facility?
All this, plus the threat of future federal prosecutions, makes putting abortion clinics on federal land a risk too high to take. While I understand the desire to take bold action now and worry about the legal challenges later, we can’t forget the real lives affected by these actions. Again, none of this would help people facing unwanted pregnancies this year; patients don’t have years to wait to get the care they need. The chilling effect on doctors and other providers could deny care to countless others.
Meg Autry, an obstetrician and gynecologist and a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, is pursuing another idea. Borrowing a strategy used by an earlier organization, Women on Waves, in Europe and beyond, Autry has started a nonprofit that is raising money to float a ship in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico to provide abortion and other reproductive health-care services. As Autry told The Post, it’s “an option for patients who don’t have other options.” With the exception of Florida (for now), all of the states on the Gulf Coast ban or severely restrict abortions.
Vladeck and Litman told me that the floating clinic would avoid the Assimilative Crimes Act. This and pledges by Democratic big-city prosecutors in red states not to file charges against patients and medical workers are impressive work-arounds, but danger lurks on the horizon.
Antiabortion activists and Republican lawmakers have been gearing up for a nationwide ban since before Roe was overturned. Asked during an interview more than a month before the court decision was handed down whether a national ban on abortion was possible, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said, “Yeah, it’s possible.”
Yeah, it’s possible — if Republicans regain unified control of Washington by retaking the House and Senate in November and then the White House in 2024. If that happens, Autry’s ship would be sunk. All the efforts by the Biden administration to safeguard access to reproductive health care would stop. And access to a safe, legal abortion anywhere in the United States would likely end. | 2022-07-14T21:24:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why building abortion clinics on federal land in red states is a bad idea - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/abortion-clinics-federal-land-bad-idea/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/abortion-clinics-federal-land-bad-idea/ |
Mr. President, I read the polls. Democrats don’t want you to run again.
President Biden stops to refute a reporter's claim that Democrats don't want him to run again as he hosts a congressional picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on July 12. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
When a reporter asked President Biden about a new poll showing most Democrats don’t want him to run again in 2024, Biden turned, walked over and snapped: “They want me to run. Read the polls. Read the polls, Jack!”
A New York Times-Siena College poll out this week shows only 26 percent of Democrats want Biden to be their standard bearer in 2024, while 64 percent say they want someone else. This is in line with the findings of a new Harvard-Harris poll, which found that only 30 percent of Democrats would vote for Biden in a Democratic presidential primary and that 71 percent of Americans don’t think he should run for a second term.
Perry Bacon: Is the Democrats' problem Biden or inflation?
But Biden was having none of it. “You guys are all the same,” Biden scoffed at the reporter. “That poll showed that 92 percent of Democrats, if I ran, would vote for me.” No, it didn’t. The Times-Siena poll found that 92 percent said they would vote for Biden in a general election rematch with Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean Democrats want him to be their nominee; it means they don’t want Trump to be president again. Big difference.
Why is Democratic support for a second Biden run collapsing? Two-thirds of Democrats say it is because he is too old or cite his terrible job performance. They see what the rest of the United States sees: Biden is struggling under the burdens of his office. He has delivered the worst inflation in 40 years, highest gas prices ever recorded in this country, the fastest drop in inflation-adjusted wages in four decades, a record labor shortage that is fueling inflation, the worst crime wave in many cities since the 1990s and the worst recorded border crisis in U.S. history. That litany of worsts is almost without precedent. As a result, Biden is the most unpopular U.S. president since Harry Truman. The Times-Siena poll put his job approval at a dismal 33 percent.
Who can replace him in that role? Not Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Not any of the left-wing also-rans from 2020, such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Not his vice president, who is just as unpopular as he is. And certainly not California Gov. Gavin Newsome, whose record is so bad that his state ran out of U-Haul trucks last year because so many Californians are fleeing to red states like Texas and Florida — or Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, whose state is second only to California in out-migration. There is no moderate alternative palatable to suburban swing voters who put Biden in the White House.
The New York Times reported recently that “Biden’s top advisers reject the idea that an open primary would deliver Democrats a stronger standard-bearer. They fear his retirement would set off a sprint to the left.” They are right. And that’s not what Democratic primary voters want. According to the Times-Siena poll, only 10 percent of Democrats say they want to replace Biden because he is “not progressive enough.” So, Democrats may be stuck with Biden — whether they like it or not. | 2022-07-14T21:24:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Mr. President, I read the polls. Democrats don’t want you to run again. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/biden-wrong-polls-do-show-most-democrats-dont-want-him-run-again/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/biden-wrong-polls-do-show-most-democrats-dont-want-him-run-again/ |
Harry S. Truman at the back of a train, probably during a whistle-stop campaign tour in 1948. (Library of Congress)
Economists point out that the 9.1 percent inflation rate for June compared with a year ago is the highest since 1981. But politicians should look even further back — to the Truman era — for lessons about responding to spiking prices.
The 1946 midterm elections were, like 2022, dominated by high inflation after a catastrophic event. Rationing and price controls, put in place during World War II, forced Americans to save much of their money. Once those controls were removed, prices predictably surged as people made up for years of suppressed demand. Inflation skyrocketed, peaking at more than 20 percent in 1947. Republicans, who had been out of power since 1932, gained 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate, taking control of Congress.
Harry S. Truman, who became president when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945, was viewed as a sure loser. Democrats attacked the rough-hewed man from Missouri as not up to the task. Republicans blithely assumed they had thrown off FDR’s legacy and would get back to running the country after trouncing Truman in 1948.
It didn’t happen, and both parties today can learn from that experience.
Truman fought back against the tides within his party, refusing to knuckle under to leftist demands for more state involvement in the economy or to segregationist demands to end his push for civil rights. Instead, Truman crafted his own, centrist path. He also heartily embraced the fight against Soviet Communism and became the first world leader to recognize Israel’s independence.
Republicans also hastened their own demise. They were split between conservatives who wanted to reverse the New Deal’s expansion of governmental power and moderates who were disposed to limit its growth. Their nominee, New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, was firmly in the latter camp, while the party’s congressional membership tilted toward the former. The result was a cacophonous mishmash of priorities. When the Republican National Convention split the difference by saddling Dewey with a conservative platform he privately opposed, Truman saw his opening.
He railed against the party’s conservative wing, arguing that voting for Republicans would turn back the clock to the pre-New Deal era. He called Congress back into a special session after the conventions, challenging lawmakers to pass the legislation their platform pledged to back. Party leaders did not take the bait. Truman instead labeled them the “Do Nothing Congress” and took his message to the people. On one campaign stop, his energetic denunciation of his opponents led one listener to memorably shout, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Dewey, meanwhile, offered soporific statements of American cliches that were intended to run out the clock until his supposedly inevitable triumph.
Democrats and President Biden can imitate Truman after the midterms. They can chart a unifying course that risks angering progressive activists but frees the main party from being chained to their demands. Biden can also use his State of the Union address to lay down a challenge: Moderate policies will be met with cooperation; extremism with opposition. The result, if done right, would be a fighting Biden who offers a clear, positive message, joined by others in his party willing to take his side.
Republicans are best served by doing the opposite of what their political ancestors did. They cannot push policies that please the base but alienate centrists. They should instead push issues that unify the party as much as possible. Assuming they gain control of Congress in the midterms, that means they may earn presidential vetoes, but at least the GOP will be fighting for the entire party coalition, not just the loud minority.
The party also cannot nominate someone who simply utters platitudes or attacks Democrats. Republicans sorely need a new, positive agenda that speaks to current challenges rather than the ones Ronald Reagan faced 42 years ago. If the polls are correct, millions of people who voted for Barack Obama and Biden will vote Republican this fall, much as millions who had voted for FDR voted Republican in 1946. The party cannot throw away this once-in-a-generation chance to make a new beginning.
The midterms’ likely outcome will present both parties with a rendezvous with destiny. Learning the right lessons from 1946 can help them rise to the challenge. | 2022-07-14T21:24:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Harry Truman bucked inflation. Both parties can learn from him. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/inflation-midterms-2022-demcrats-and-republicans-can-learn-harry-truman/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/inflation-midterms-2022-demcrats-and-republicans-can-learn-harry-truman/ |
Draghi Turmoil Is Bad News for Italy
Boris Johnson, UK prime minister, left, and Mario Draghi, Italy’s prime minister, at the ‘family’ photo on day two of the Group of Seven (G-7) leaders summit at the Schloss Elmau luxury hotel in Elmau, Germany, on Monday, June 27, 2022. G-7 nations are set to announce an effort to pursue a price cap on Russian oil, US officials said, though there is not yet a hard agreement on curbing what is a key source of revenue for Vladimir Putin for his war in Ukraine. (Bloomberg)
Much of Europe assumed Italy had ushered in a new dawn when Mario Draghi was appointed prime minister on Feb. 13, 2021. On Thursday, however, not quite a year and a half later, the Draghi era entered its twilight.
Draghi tendered his resignation after part of his coalition rebelled, abstaining in a vote he deemed crucial to remaining in office. President Sergio Mattarella rejected his attempt to quit and suggested Draghi test the waters for support next week by addressing lawmakers and explaining the crisis. That buys Draghi time and the possibility of avoiding a snap election by cobbling together an alternative coalition.
Still, the euro area’s third-largest economy is descending yet again into political turmoil. It is bad news for Italy and Europe and a rude awakening for international investors. The great hope has fizzled that the prime minister would guarantee improved public finances and economic growth in a country that hasn’t seen much in years.
This all comes at the worst possible time and in the worst possible conditions: There’s a war going on and we are just days before the European Central Bank comes out with an anti-fragmentation tool largely to benefit the country by restraining its bond spreads. It is further proof that Italy’s political class is incapable of looking beyond the next election cycle.
Even in the country’s most difficult hours, Rome can’t help but put party machinations before national interest. As a result, not only has Draghi’s reputation been tarnished, Italy risks losing its place at the table in Brussels alongside Germany and France. It was his prestige — as the former president of the ECB who rescued the European Union amid the euro crisis — that gave Italy that new clout and sense of robust discipline. All of that’s now a mirage, thanks to the shortsightedness of local politicians.
Take Giuseppe Conte, the leader of the abstaining Five Star Movement and the catalyst for Draghi’s move to resign. He justifies the current government crisis by arguing that Italy is facing serious economic problems and Draghi hasn’t listened to his demands about inequality. He isn’t prepared to take the blame for the fall. But you can’t be in government and work against it.
There are some real ideological differences between the two men. For example, Draghi approves of sending weapons to aid Ukraine but the Five Star base does not. Most of the recent drama, however, is posturing to revive Conte’s moribund party in the polls even though an election does not guarantee anything for Five Star in terms of seats. Meantime, the economic crisis that Conte says he wants to soften will be amplified by the turbulence he has created.
The next general election isn’t due till the spring of 2023, but in Italian politics, practice leaves plenty of room for improvisation. If Draghi can form another coalition, he should do it and lead the government through the winter. The prime minister doesn’t like to get his fingers dirty in the petty, everyday politics but the extra time would avoid the unhealthy fibrillation that comes with a snap election campaign. In his former life as ECB head, Draghi restored confidence in the euro with three simple words: “Whatever it takes.” This time around, he could do the same for Italy by simply staying put. It is not the ending he was hoping for. In fact, it’s the mess he wanted to avoid. But no one gets a clean exit from Italian politics.
Staying on will give him a chance to mitigate what comes after. If recent polls are anything to go by, the far-right Brothers of Italy party would likely win the next election. Its leader, Giorgia Meloni, has benefited enormously from opposing Draghi. (It is the only major political group not part of his coalition.) She’s wasted no time calling for an election. Brothers of Italy taking the most seats in the legislature would send shockwaves from Rome to Brussels. It would undo much of what Draghi has achieved since February 2021. Markets would be panicked over the possibility, once again, of the dreaded Italexit.
While international commentators have been too sanguine about a post-Draghi Italy, I am not entirely convinced Italexit will be as imminent as it was in previous political convulsions — even if Meloni is ascendant. The subject, for the most part, has disappeared from public discourse. Only a small fringe seriously wants it; the politicians who raise the issue use it as bargaining chip to agitate for concessions from Brussels.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Draghi era was to be a form of containment. In 2018, Italy had been shaken by a populist earthquake that saw both the fringe right and left win power and influence as voters pushed to transform what they saw as a government that no longer delivered. The new powers-that-be promised transparency and an end to political intrigues. That didn’t work out. Draghi was appointed (he was never elected) to patch things together. His day in the sun was always going to be short. The next best hope — if and when the next election comes — is that Italians not return to the parody of politics they voted to dismantle four years ago.
• The Woman Who Might Lead Italy to the Far Right: Rachel Sanderson
Ukraine Has Better Heroes Than This Friend of Fascism: Andreas Kluth | 2022-07-14T21:28:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Draghi Turmoil Is Bad News for Italy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/draghi-turmoil-is-bad-news-for-italy/2022/07/14/44649f9e-03ae-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/draghi-turmoil-is-bad-news-for-italy/2022/07/14/44649f9e-03ae-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
The nationwide hotline for mental health emergencies switches to a simple 988 number on July 16. (Jenny Kane/AP)
“I look at 988 as a starting place where we can really reimagine mental health care,” said Hannah Wesolowski, chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a nationwide grass-roots group. “We’re really looking at a fundamental tide shift in how we respond to people in mental health crisis.”
The network of more than 180 local call centers, drastically underfunded throughout its history, fielded 3.6 million calls, chats and texts in the 2021 fiscal year, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Officials expect that to jump to 7.6 million contacts in the coming year, as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — 800-273-TALK (8255) — gives way to 988. The 800 number will remain active indefinitely. (The expected increase in contacts doesn’t include a hotline option reserved for veterans.)
The hotline in Tucson, for example, is widely considered the gold standard for comprehensive care of people suffering mental health crises. When someone calls that city’s hotline, trained counselors help resolve the emergency on the phone 80 percent of the time. If they can’t, one of 16 “mobile crisis teams” is dispatched to the caller’s door — or any other location — day or night.
“We have the space. We have the staff. We have the training,” said Margie Balfour, chief of quality and clinical innovation at Connections Health Solutions, the company that runs the Tucson stabilization center.
SAMHSA organized what had been a collection of individual call centers into a nationwide network in 2004, awarding the contract to operate and grow the system to the nonprofit Vibrant Emotional Health (then known as the Mental Health Association of New York City.)
In the first quarter of 2022, for example, North Carolina was able to handle 90 percent of its calls in-state while Illinois responded to just 20 percent, according to Vibrant data.
The overall network’s capacity was able to address 85 percent of calls, 56 percent of texts and 30 percent of chats, according to a government report, citing a December 2020 analysis. Already, increased hiring and spending has improved call centers’ ability to keep up with demand, said John Draper, executive vice president at Vibrant.
Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a briefing for reporters this month: “988 will work if the states are committed to it. It won’t work well if they’re not. There is no reason, no excuse, that a person in one state can get a good response and a person in another state will get a busy signal.”
A lack of resources can be dangerous: The Wall Street Journal calculated recently that 1 in 6 callers hangs up without reaching anyone.
“Suicidal crisis callers report significant reductions in intent to die, hopelessness, and psychological pain over the course of their crisis call,” Columbia University researchers Madelyn Gould and Alison Lake wrote in a September report on 988 and suicide prevention to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors.
They added that “crisis counselors are able to secure the caller’s collaboration on an intervention on over 75% of imminent risk calls.”
“Our goal is to make 988 like 911,” Becerra said. “If you are willing to turn to someone in your moment of crisis, someone will be there. 988 won’t be a busy signal. 988 will get you help. That is the goal.” But he made clear that the states, not the federal government, will have to fund call centers on a continuing basis.
The number of suicides in the United States rose steadily from 29,350 in 2000 to 48,344 in 2018, before declining to 45,979 in 2020, according to the National Center on Health Statistics. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and other factors, government and health officials agree that the country is in the grip of a mental health crisis, especially among younger people, with sharply rising rates of depression and anxiety.
Equal mental health insurance coverage elusive despite legal guarantee
Tucson’s continuum of services grew over 20 years, a collaboration of the state, county and private participants, Balfour said. Now officials around the country point to its program as a model for other locales.
Dispatchers for the mobile crisis teams sit with 911 dispatchers and sometimes redirect calls for police to pairs of clinicians instead, Balfour said. Police are trained to bring people to the stabilization center instead of hospitals or jails when appropriate. They can be in and out in minutes, rather than spending hours with patients in an emergency room. There is a dedicated entrance at the facility for law enforcement so officers don’t have to remove and store their weapons, she said.
Available slots for follow-up care at mental health clinics are entered into the hotline’s computer, easing access to help. The hotline handles about 10,000 calls per month, Balfour said. The stabilization center handles about 1,000 adults per month as well as 200 to 300 children and teens, she said.
It has an observation area with chairs for 34 adults and 10 younger people and an adult inpatient unit with 15 beds, where patients can stay three to five days, she said, including while they withdraw from drugs and begin medically assisted treatment. The beds help prevent hours and days “boarding” in emergency rooms untreated while hospital personnel search for a bed in an appropriate facility.
The center strives for “90 minutes from door to doc” and turns away no one, including walk-ins, Balfour said. Patients may be suicidal, violent, intoxicated, psychotic or detoxifying.
“Our model is we take everybody,” she said. “We want the people that typically get denied at other places. We want those high-acuity, potentially violent people.” | 2022-07-14T21:28:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The national suicide hotline is changing to 988 starting Saturday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/14/suicide-hotline-988/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/14/suicide-hotline-988/ |
Officers responding to a 911 call from the children’s mother discovered their bodies inside Karels’ home in Round Lake Beach in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. The Lake County Coroner’s Office determined the cause of death to be drowning. Officers at the scene found a note from Karels that said, “If I can’t have them, neither can you," the Lake County State’s Attorney Office said. | 2022-07-14T21:29:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Suburban Chicago man pleads not guilty in kids' drownings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/suburban-chicago-man-pleads-not-guilty-in-kids-drownings/2022/07/14/efabca0c-03b4-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/suburban-chicago-man-pleads-not-guilty-in-kids-drownings/2022/07/14/efabca0c-03b4-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Iranian gets life term for crimes in 1980s war
An Iranian citizen was sentenced Thursday to life in prison by a Swedish court after being convicted of committing grave war crimes and murder during the final phase of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
The Stockholm District Court said Hamid Noury, who was arrested in 2019, took part in atrocities in July to August 1988 while working as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at the Gohardasht prison outside the Iranian city of Karaj.
A life sentence in Sweden generally means a minimum of 20 to 25 years in prison, but it could be extended. If he is eventually released, Noury will be expelled from Sweden. Noury, 61, can appeal the verdict.
The court said he participated “in the executions of many political prisoners in Iran in the summer of 1988.” A second wave of executions was directed at left-wing sympathizers who were deemed to have renounced their Islamic faith, the court statement said.
During the trial, Noury denied wrongdoing.
The verdict comes at a tense time for ties between Stockholm and Tehran. A number of Europeans have been detained in Iran in recent months, including a Swedish tourist, two French citizens and a Polish scientist.
Zoonotic diseases surge in Africa, WHO says
The number of outbreaks of diseases that jumped from animals to humans in Africa has surged by more than 60 percent in the past decade, the World Health Organization said, a worrying sign that the planet could face increased animal-borne diseases such as monkeypox, Ebola and coronavirus in the future.
There has been a 63 percent rise in the number of animal diseases breaching the species barrier from 2012 to 2022, as compared with the decade before, the U.N. health agency said in a statement Thursday.
While diseases in animals had infected people for centuries in Africa, recent developments such as quicker travel across the continent have made it easier for viruses to cross borders, said the WHO’s Africa director, Matshidiso Moeti.
The WHO also noted that Africa has the world’s fastest-growing population, which increases urbanization and reduces roaming areas for wild animals. Scientists also fear that outbreaks that may have once been contained to distant, rural areas can now spread more quickly to large African cities with international travel links, which might then carry the diseases around the world.
U.N. mission ordered to halt troop rotations
Mali’s Foreign Ministry has told the United Nations peacekeeping mission to suspend all flights scheduled to move its forces after the West African nation detained 49 Ivorian soldiers who flew in to help with security for a company contracted by the world body.
“For reasons related to the national security context, the government of Mali has decided to suspend, as of today, all rotations of the military and police contingent of [the U.N. Mission to Mali], including those already scheduled or announced,” read a letter from the ministry to the U.N. mission that was seen by the Associated Press.
The ministry says it hopes to meet with U.N. representatives to find “an optimal plan making it possible to facilitate the coordination and regulation of the rotation of contingents operating within” the U.N. mission.
A spokesman for the U.N. mission acknowledged the letter and said the mission was ready for immediate discussions.
Tensions have been high between Mali and the United Nations since Sunday, when the soldiers from Ivory Coast were detained. Mali said the soldiers did not have proper authorization to come to Mali and accused them of being mercenaries. Ivory Coast has called for the immediate release of the soldiers, saying that all agreed-upon communications were made for their arrival.
Honduran ex-president's son killed in attack: Gunmen killed a son of former president Porfirio Lobo and three other young men as they left a nightclub in Honduras's capital, officials confirmed. At least five gunmen blocked the exit of a parking ramp and pulled Said Lobo Bonilla and three others from two vehicles, according to security video that was widely circulated by local news outlets. The attackers, wearing what appeared to be vests from a police anti-gang squad, lined the men up against a wall. The images then cut off. Officials did not comment on a possible motive for the killings. | 2022-07-14T21:29:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: July 14, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-july-14-2022/2022/07/14/10324062-037e-11ed-b005-46df9be530f3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-july-14-2022/2022/07/14/10324062-037e-11ed-b005-46df9be530f3_story.html |
Facing lawsuit, Catholic bishops allow lesbian to foster child
Kelly Easter, an unmarried lesbian living in Tennessee, filed a lawsuit arguing that a federal foster-care program administered by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. (Americans United for Separation of Church and State)
An unmarried lesbian will be allowed to foster a child after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) let a lawsuit alleging discrimination go unchallenged, suggesting single LGBTQ adults may be able to foster through Catholic organizations while same-sex couples generally continue to be banned.
The decision comes in response to a complaint from Tennessee resident Kelly Easter, arguing that a federal foster-care program administered by the USCCB discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. Easter sued in October after Michigan-based Bethany Christian Services, a sub-grantee of the USCCB, allegedly told her that the bishops’ conference would not let her apply to foster a refugee child.
In a February letter to Bethany, obtained by The Washington Post, the USCCB characterized the dispute as a misunderstanding and said it does not prohibit single gay people from fostering because of their sexual orientation. Easter dropped her lawsuit in June, as previously reported by Baptist News Global.
The question of whether Catholic foster-care organizations can decline to partner with LGBTQ people took a turn in the spotlight last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that Philadelphia was wrong to stop contracting with Catholic Social Services for its refusal to work with same-sex couples. Whether the USCCB will reverse its opposition to letting same-sex couples foster children remains undetermined, as does whether Easter could still foster if she becomes partnered.
“There is this unanswered question: So if she gets married, are you going to turn around and take the child away and stop working with her?” said Kenneth Upton, an attorney with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represents Easter. “I don’t know what the USCCB’s answer would be to that.”
Supreme Court unanimously rules for Catholic group in Philadelphia foster-care dispute
The bishops’ conference declined an interview request but reiterated in a statement that the court case was “driven by a misunderstanding.” It said church teaching does not prohibit placing a child with a single adult, regardless of that person’s sexual orientation.
“That is neither a ‘change’ in the USCCB’s position, nor a change in Church teaching,” wrote Chieko Noguchi, a spokeswoman for the bishops’ conference.
Easter began to think about fostering in 2020, when she was struck by news coverage of unaccompanied refugee children arriving in the United States, according to her lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in D.C. She contacted the Department of Health and Human Services’ refugee office and was directed to Bethany, which told her that it was bound by a USCCB policy barring gay people from fostering.
When Easter read a few months later that Bethany would begin serving LGBTQ couples, she contacted the organization again. It told her that she still could not participate through Bethany’s office near her home, because that location was funded by the USCCB, which maintained its ban, the lawsuit says. Although she could participate through another office with a different funding source, that location was not viable with her work as a Realtor, she says in the lawsuit.
School flying BLM, LGBTQ flags can’t call itself Catholic, bishop says
Four months after Easter sued HHS in October, the USCCB sent the letter saying it would not stand in the way of her fostering a child.
“In reality, neither the USCCB’s religious beliefs nor its subgrant agreement with BCS bars a single person with a homosexual orientation from serving as a foster parent by virtue of his or her orientation,” wrote William Canny, the USCCB’s executive director of migration and refugee services.
Easter’s attorneys dismissed her case without prejudice, which Upton said means they could refile it if circumstances change. Easter is in the process of applying to foster through Bethany, Upton said.
“This is something she’s been wanting to do for a couple of years, so it was a journey for her to get here, and she’s just thrilled to be either through or almost through the process,” he said. “It’s easy to forget the individual stories when you start talking about the impact more broadly.”
That impact could become clearer through a separate case in Texas, where Catholic Charities of Fort Worth, a USCCB affiliate, allegedly told two married Texas A&M University professors that they could not be foster parents because their family did not “mirror the Holy Family.” The lawsuit filed by Fatma Marouf and Bryn Esplin against HHS and the USCCB could offer insight into whether the bishops’ conference will continue to block same-sex couples from fostering. | 2022-07-14T21:29:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Catholic bishops allow lesbian to foster child after lawsuit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/14/lesbian-foster-parent-catholic-bishops/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/14/lesbian-foster-parent-catholic-bishops/ |
Transcript: Race in America: Giving Voice with Claudia Forestieri and Zoe Saldaña
MS. IZADI: Good afternoon. I’m Elahe Izadi, media reporter for The Washington Post, and welcome to Washington Post Live and another installment in our “Race in America” series. Today I am joined by the executive producer of the new show “Gordita Chronicles,” Claudia Forestieri, and who is also the creator, and Zoe Saldaña. A reminder to our audience that you are welcome to join our conversation. Please tweet at us using the handle @PostLive. Welcome to Claudia and Zoe. It’s great to see you both.
MS. FORESTIERI: Thank you.
MS. SALDAÑA: Thank you for having us.
MS. IZADI: Yeah, thanks for joining us. Let's just jump in with Claudia. This show is your brainchild. What inspired you to create a show about this immigrant family who came to Miami in the 1980s?
MS. FORESTIERI: Well, believe it or not, one of the inspirations was Donald Trump. So before getting into TV writing, I was news producer for Telemundo news, and I was working in the newsroom when President Trump, the summer of 2016, said those horrible things about immigrants. And it reminded me of a time in the '80s growing up when they were saying a lot of bad things about the immigrant population in Miami. Crime had risen because of the cocaine trade, and all the immigrants were kind of tainted by it, if you will. And Time magazine even had a cover that said "South Florida Paradise Lost?". So when Trump said those words, it reminded me of another time where immigrants were actually being blamed for an area's problems. And look at Miami now, right? So, I was like, wow, like, you know, people didn't know then what Miami was going to turn into.
Also I was trying to break in. I had been--in 2016, I had been in LA for seven years. I had been trying to break in as a TV writer, which is extremely competitive. And even though I had written several scripts, and I had gotten into a diversity writing program, someone gave me this tip, which is write only a script--a script that only you can write, so a story so individual that like people are going to be like, oh, my God, she can, you know, mine her own life for material. So that's what those two factors motivated me to look back at this time in Miami, in my childhood, of when my life kind of was turned upside down.
MS. IZADI: Yeah, what's fascinating is--in the show is that you all are able to sort of bring up that history within this comedy show.
Zoe, I wanted to turn to you now and ask you what prompted you in your own history to want to help create this show that centers an American Dominican family.
MS. SALDAÑA: We were invited. My sisters were approached by our agents about the project. HBO Max and Sony had raised a great level of interest for Claudia's show. And the moment we read the pilot, we got to meet Claudia, and they needed like--you know, they were encouraging an executive producer to jump along that was going to sort of help and amplify, you know, the show once it was done. And so when we read it, we completely fell in love with it. We saw ourselves in the show as being daughters of immigrants for--even though we're from New York, but it's still an immigrant story, nonetheless.
And we just wanted to meet Claudia. We wanted to make sure that Claudia felt confident in us, that we were going to provide that level of support that she really needed as a woman, you know, in this business, but also as a person of color writing, you know, her memoir, in a way. And the moment we met, it just felt really beautiful. And my sisters were--you know, added support to Claudia and to Brigitte, the showrunner from day one. And I was only--I was only called any time, you know, big phone calls needed to be made. And in a way, I do have to say that I've worked so hard to get to this place where I'm able to amplify stories like this that are so personally close to who I am. And it just felt--it just felt really like serendipitous.
MS. IZADI: Yeah, and I want to get to later in the conversation the power of having creative partners who can relate to you, and the power in amplifying your story when you have that. But first, Zoe, I did want to refer back to in the introduction that we saw, we saw a clip from the show in which Cucu and her sister are sort of wondering if the American dream was oversold to them. And so, Zoe, I'm wondering what you think that scene says about in a broader sense the motivations of many immigrant families coming to the U.S. and how the dream that people have of America, how that compares to the realities that they have to contend with once they arrive.
MS. SALDAÑA: I hear your question. I think that what Claudia did so brilliantly by being so honest about, you know, her personal life and conveying that is that the immigrant experience is universal, right? And that's what's so relatable about it. Because we can relate to that, but we did the reverse migration where we were born in the States, and when I was nine, my family moved us to Dominican Republic and they sold us that island like it was, you know, like a 24 carat, you know, diamond. And there we got there and after a beach day and all these things, all that beautiful jazz of vacation time goes away and you're living the reality of living, like, the island life. You're presented with its own unique challenges. So, I don't know. What Claudia did was just show you that it doesn't matter if you are coming to the U.S., or coming to Miami specifically, or if you are Muslim, if you are, you know, Latino, if you are Asian, the immigrant experience is super universal. Everybody leaves their mother country for the betterment of their family, for better opportunities. And obviously, like they can't--they have to sell it to not just each other, but to their children as well. And once they get there, it's like they're rolling their sleeves and they're hitting that ground running. And they are staying positive, they're staying hopeful, and primarily, they're staying together.
And I feel like that's the essence of "Gordita Chronicles," and I feel like it's one of the reasons why we were a hundred--we got 100 in Rotten Tomatoes, I just have to flaunt because I'm just so proud of Claudia and all the work. [Audio distortion]. Claudia, where are you?
MS. FORESTIERI: I'm sorry, what? I didn't get--
MS. SALDAÑA: Oh, no, I thought you were jumping in. No, no. I'm just--like what I was saying is that I am so very proud. And it just goes to show that when you are genuinely honest about your experience, that is--that is the relatability that people need to connect with you. But also by connecting with you, they're connecting back to themselves. You know, and I feel like America needs that like right now.
MS. IZADI: Yeah. And Claudia, so much of the story is centered on one of the central characters, Cucu, who I want to ask you about. But first, let's go to this clip in which we see a scene from "Gordita Chronicles" with Cucu trying to reach Gloria Estefan and try and get her to perform at her school dance. Let's take a look.
MS. IZADI: Claudia, tell us a little bit more about Cucu. To me, she strikes me as this character who is allowed to feel vulnerable, but we also can sense her confidence and her assertiveness and how she takes on those around her.
MS. FORESTIERI: Yeah. So you know, she's all of those things, and she's sassy and she's persistent. She doesn't take no for an answer. So, in her home country, in the Dominican Republic, she enjoyed a certain life and a certain status, and she had friends and she had family. She had all these wonderful comforts. So, when she comes to the United States, it's kind of like a slap in the face that she kind of has to start all over again. But even though she's new and people don't know her, she's still craving that same status that she had. And that's kind of like her series long arc, which is, you know, I know I'm fantastic, everybody loved me back home, it's only a matter of time before they love me here in this new place. So that's where she's coming from.
So, in real life, I never promised to bring Gloria Estefan to the school dance, but only because I didn't think of it, because if I would have thought of it, I mean, because everybody loved Gloria Estefan. Like she was like Miami's number one idol. And so, you know, there's a lot of similarities between the fictional Cucu and me growing up. But this Cucu I feel is a little bit more lucky and more happy than I was. I spent a little bit of time kind of being sad about being Gordita.
But, you know, also we wanted to show the beginning of the immigrant journey for Cucu from the POV of a 12-year-old, because at the beginning things are rosier, and you do come with all this optimism and all these high expectations. So, it's really fun to see that first part of the journey. And hopefully, we'll keep being able to develop her character and deepen it more as well as her journey if we get, you know, season two, fingers crossed.
MS. IZADI: Yeah, and I was going to ask you if you also tried to get Gloria Estefan to come to your school, if that was inspired by real life. Bold move. But Claudia, you know, I don't want to give anything away, but the second episode, we do see Cucu navigating being bilingual. And you were able to weave and the show was able to weave in a little bit of the history of Miami Dade County at the time. Can you talk to us a little bit about what was going on in Miami at that time and why it was important to tell that story at this moment in time within our political landscape?
MS. FORESTIERI: Sure. So, at the time, in the early '80s, the Cuban community had been in Miami since even before 1959. Before Fidel takes over, there was already kind of this Cuban community in Miami that was built up. But between '80 and '81, there was the Mariel boatlift. So there was a large amount of Cuban exiles coming to Miami. That also coincided with the rise in the popularity of cocaine, which at the moment they were blaming, you know, all the Latins, which is what they would call us back then, for all this rising crime without, side note, even acknowledging that the reason there was such--you know, cocaine was so popular is because you had a lot of Americans demanding it and wanting and eager to pay a lot of money for it.
So, it was a tense time for Miami. There was a huge demographic shift. Latinos were becoming more of the majority and there was a backlash. And as a result of that, I've--early in the '80s, I believe it was Miami Dade County--back then it was just Dade County without the Miami--and they passed a law banning the use of any language other than English in public buildings. Thankfully that law was recalled in the early '90s, I believe 1993 when the makeup of the Board of Supervisors in Miami--sorry, in Miami they call them commissioners--it shifted and they went from being minority Latino on the commission to majority in the '90s. And as soon as they had enough votes, they were able to get rid of that law.
But in the '80s, you have that law for most of the '80s, where Spanish--speaking Spanish was banned. And that was because of xenophobia, basically. They were scared. A lot of people in power that were not Latinos were scared that, you know, Latin immigrants and Spanish speaking immigrants were going to take over. And so we kind of wanted to poke a little bit of fun at that. And again, I don't want to spoil it either, as you pointed out. We just--that's one of the things that we love doing with the show that thankfully Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz, who is a brilliant comedic mind--I can't say enough wonderful things about her--but she--you know, one of her wonderful skills was taking some of these real-life memories and events and finding ways to make them really, really, really funny, along with our wonderful writers' room, which we had all these wonderful comedic writers that make joke writing look easy. So we took this sad, kind of harsh reality of this anti-Spanish language movement and were able to make this funny story out of it. And of course, that's something that's still debatable now in the United States. Like should English be the only language spoken? There are many cities where Spanish is the second language and people--there's still a large resistance to that.
MS. IZADI: Yeah, yeah. I want to pivot now to talk a little bit more about representation. And we actually have a question from Twitter, so I'm going to look down and look at my phone here. And this one is for Claudia. It comes from @miamime. And he writes, Claudia, I like that you're bringing a voice to the Dominican experience in Miami. How do you present it as a distinct--as distinct from the Cuban experience, and what are the similarities with other immigrants? And I'll just add that, again, not spoiling anything, but I was struck by, you know, there are Cuban immigrants also in the show, too, so depictions of them as well.
MS. FORESTIERI: Yeah. Yeah, great question from Will. Love that question. So, in Miami, I like to say that being Dominican was kind of like being a minority within a minority. So, right now in Miami, and for the last few decades, the Cuban American population, the Cuban culture is dominant in South Florida. And it's such a beautiful thing. I didn't even really appreciate it until I left Miami, because being able to grow up in a place where you can speak Spanglish and speak English and Spanish, and you know, after the '80s, after that law was struck down, like Spanglish and Spanish really flourished more in South Florida. So that was beautiful.
But of course, there are differences between the different Caribbean groups, and sometimes there's tensions between the different Latino groups. So, we were always looking for ways to highlight what unifies us and also the differences. Like in episode two, the mom befriends two neighbors. One is Cuban, one is Colombian. And she commits a big faux pas, which is not offering them cafecito. So that's a Latino tradition that is, you know, universal in Latin America. Somebody comes over to visit you, you offer them coffee, especially if it's in the afternoon. You have to offer them something. So the--you know, the mom, even though she's not Cuban or Colombian, she--across Latin America, that's something everybody knows like you must do. So she--you know, steps in it by doing that. But then we also showed later, a little bit of so that's something they all have in common--right?--that tradition of, you know, serving coffee, offering your guests something.
But then what they didn't have in common was their preference of coffee, if it was Cuban, Colombian or Dominican. There's also a big debate about whether Puerto Rican coffee is the best, or Nicaraguan. So that was like, you know, a cute way for us to point out, yes, these women have similarities because they're all Latinas, but also, they have their distinct culture. So that was one of the ways that we were going to do it.
And also, in episode seven we have the baseball episode. I don't want to give it away, but basically, Victor's boss assumes that because he's from the Dominican Republic, and Dominicans are known for being good at baseball, that, you know, Victor automatically was going to be good at baseball, and that's something also that happens with Latin American immigrants. Like people like believe they know a little bit about your country, they think like, oh, Claudia's Dominican, she must dance really good Merengue. Which by the way, of course, I do. But not all Dominicans can dance Merengue. So we--it was just really cool to be able to point out the similarities and the differences and to be able to laugh about them.
MS. IZADI: Yeah, all the talk of cafecito has me wanting one right now. It's 2:00 p.m. on the East Coast.
Zoe, I want to turn to you now and ask you, you know, we're talking about different types of representation in Hollywood and pop culture, television specifically. Where do you see the state of representation in Hollywood when it comes to Latinos, Latino stories? And how have you been thinking about this in your role as a producer and behind the scenes, not just in front of the camera?
MS. SALDAÑA: I do believe that accurate representation is important. I think that there's so many groups that have been blatantly omitted from the American narrative for so long that portraying them as they are, as authentically as they are, is really important, and I feel like it's part of swinging that pendulum to that other extreme in order for us to finally within some years, maybe a decade or so, find that balance, you know, find that middle ground. Unfortunately, in the past, I had some personal experience with that, when I came to myself--appropriating myself with a character choice in my career. And I only reached a resolution once I opened my heart, I opened my mind to a group that even though I may in a very general term belong to, I'm still very specific within that group.
Like Claudia was saying, you are a minority in a minority group. And that is important for us to keep in mind as content creators, because if we are telling a queer story, I think it is important for us to cast queer, you know, actors. If we're telling a story about Dominicans, I think it's really important for us to try to the best of our abilities to look for that Dominican representation, because there is a level of transparency that we as consumers and as audience but also primarily as Americans, we are demanding. And I think--and I think it's important for us to pay attention to that. So our job as executive producers--Mariel, Cisely and myself at Cinestar--was to really dig in into Claudia and understand where Claudia was seeing this and where she wanted to go and see how we were going to be good assets to her in helping her find the most amazing cast that was going to meet the requirements that she had set for herself for the show. And that was--you know, that was what we did.
And I feel like once you surrender to that reality, you become such an ally to so many groups that have felt misrepresented, overlooked. And it's in your--and you put yourself in a position to really gain confidence. And I feel like trust and confidence is something that we're losing as Americans, not just as consumers, but also like as active Americans and voters and everything. So, you can only do that by really, really being transparent in the level of support that you are providing for these groups.
MS. IZADI: Yeah, and something that you just said struck me as, you know, this might be a very specific story, but once you sort of raise your consciousness and awareness around telling authentic stories, it's not just about the very specific group that you might identify with but that is a universal experience unto itself.
Claudia, when I was watching this show, you know, I'm also--I'm not an immigrant, but I'm the daughter of immigrants. And it really just was so relatable to me. But I also was reflecting on growing up and how a lot of the pop culture depictions that I grew up seeing of immigrants either sidelined them or made them the butt of the joke. And this show strikes me as in a trend. I wonder if you think it's a trend, too, of centering immigrant stories and they're the protagonists and they're not the butt of the joke, and we're kind of seeing America through their eyes. Are you seeing this happen? And if so, what is the role of what Zoe was just talking about, about having those allies within the industry helping to bring those stories forward?
MS. FORESTIERI: Am I seeing this happen in Hollywood in the industry of more stories being told from immigrant point of view?
MS. IZADI: Yeah. Is that the trend you're seeing?
MS. FORESTIERI: Actually, I would say no. Unfortunately, right now we're one of very few shows with Latino families at the center. "Gentefied," which was a beautiful show created by Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez, who are both brilliant TV show writers and creators, unfortunately, was cancelled by Netflix. We had "Vida," which is a brilliant show created by Tanya Saracho, which showed flawed Latina women also living here in Los Angeles, was also cancelled. So, I think right now we're at a point where, I don't know, sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back, or maybe even two steps back. And I wish that because of this show it would motivate other networks to greenlight shows about other immigrants. I think there's space for a show about Dominican immigrants set in New York. And you know, there's so much talent and so many funny Dominican writers that haven't gotten a chance. Puerto Rican writers, there's--you know, Nicaraguan writers, like, I have another friend also who's of Nicaraguan descent. So if you ask me, I hope this show kicks off a trend. I know, that's bold for me to say. But I think that it's very painful when you think about just the lack of Latinate representation and the big gap that we still have. You know, we're almost 20 percent of the population, less than 6 or 5 percent of the characters in TV and film. Those are rough numbers. I don't know if they've changed recently. But I think that really also something that we wanted to do with this show is, we didn't want to just capture the immigrant population. We also wanted to capture the nonimmigrant population. That's why I always felt that having this be a comedy was the right choice. Because you, you know, get a lot more flies with honey, right? I think a lot of people that might not be able to relate to immigrants in their everyday life, who are not immigrants or not people of color, when they see what some immigrants go through, when they're able to laugh at it along with us, then, you know, maybe that'll open their eyes and soften them. And at least, you know, through comedy, you're able to really humanize people. So, I really hope things start to change for the better. We've had some victories in the last few years. But if you ask me, not enough,
MS. IZADI: No, yeah, thanks for pointing that out and just how much it contrasts with the actual population of this country and the lack of representation in popular media.
Zoe, I'm thinking back to when you first joined the industry. I believe that you were advised to change your name. How do you look back on that advice now? And what has it been like with the power of reclaiming your name in this moment?
MS. SALDAÑA: It's funny because, I don't know, I can answer that in so many different ways. But what I do want to start off by saying is that the people that were advising me, loved me and had--you know, had to also change, you know, their name three decades before when they started, you know, as entertainers in New York. And this was what everybody did. So, you need to understand that the immigrant experience has been alive and kicking in a very universal way in America, for the last I would say, you know, 300 years or more, because we are a land of immigrants. We're standing on stolen territory. So, everybody has that thing of like that fear of wanting to--not wanting to be picked on and not wanting their children to be picked on.
So when I was encouraged to do that, you know, and I thought about it, when I said no, I was--I was celebrated for that as well. But they were doing right by me by offering me that option, you know? And I think that we are moving in the right direction, even though it's at a very slow pace and sometimes it may seem very frustrating and hopeless. But we are moving forward.
Remember, we're also going through like a lot in America. It's not just--it's not just an immigrant crusade. It's also a crusade against women. It's also a crusade against the LGBTQIA community. You know, the old establishment is dying, and it's desperate to keep control, and violence will be at its most uproar. And that's what happened.
So, to jump back to what I'm saying about changing your name, we are in a different place than we were 10 years ago, than we were 20 years ago. But it's still happening. People are still wanting to avoid the dilemma, to avoid the extra time spent explaining yourself. And they do sometimes remove that extra vowel from your last name and add that extra consonant. And it's unfortunate but also, I do believe that I'm not one to judge anybody's immigrant experience. And I do think that if we look at it from a scope of compassion, we do understand that we're all just avoiding being bullied. You know, and that's the whole living experience as to why sometimes we don't teach our kids our native tongue, or we don't teach our children about history. It has nothing to do with just the fact that we're all uneducated. Sometimes it's fear that paralyzes from--and us wanting our children to thrive and not have to survive every day because they're getting picked on for being different.
And once you provide that kind of compassion, you sort of understand it is going to happen, but you have an option. That's what we know today that we've known before. You do have an option to still be your authentic self and choose a path of absolute uniqueness, and you will still find people that will end up supporting communities that will support you for who you truly are.
MS. IZADI: I wish we could talk for a whole other hour, half an hour, but unfortunately, we've just run out of time. I want to thank you both so much, Claudia and Zoe, for joining me today.
MS. SALDAÑA: Thank you.
MS. IZADI: And thanks to all of you for tuning in. Go to WashingtonPost.com/--I’m sorry, go to WashingtonPostLive.com to register for our upcoming programs. I’m Elahe Izadi, and thanks for joining Washington Post Live. | 2022-07-14T21:30:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Race in America: Giving Voice with Claudia Forestieri and Zoe Saldaña - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/14/transcript-race-america-giving-voice-with-claudia-forestieri-zoe-saldaa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/14/transcript-race-america-giving-voice-with-claudia-forestieri-zoe-saldaa/ |
Karol Nawrocki, right, head of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), stands in front of a grave as he meets the media near Działdowo, Poland, Wednesday, July 13, 2022. Special investigators in Poland say they have found mass graves containing the ashes of at least 8,000 Poles slain by Nazi Germans during World War II in forest executions. The occupying Nazis tried to hide the killings by incinerating the bodies and planting trees on the burial pits. (Mikolaj Bujak/Institute of National Remembrance via AP) | 2022-07-14T21:30:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ashes of 8,000 WWII victims found in two Poland mass graves - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ashes-of-8000-wwii-victims-found-in-two-poland-mass-graves/2022/07/14/0254b5fe-037b-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ashes-of-8000-wwii-victims-found-in-two-poland-mass-graves/2022/07/14/0254b5fe-037b-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
D.C. police officer charged with child sex abuse
WASHINGTON, DC — A D.C. police vehicle (Peter Hermann/The Washington Post)
A D.C. police officer on the force for about three years was arrested Thursday and charged with two counts of fist-degree child sex abuse, according to a department statement.
Authorities identified the officer as Charles Johnson II, 28, of Northwest Washington. He was arrested on a warrant and could make an appearance in D.C. Superior Court on Friday.
A police department spokesman, Dustin Sternbeck, said Johnson was suspended in May when detectives began an investigation. He is assigned to the 1st District station, which includes Capitol Hill, the Waterfront, Chinatown and the Navy Yard.
Officials released few details of the case on Thursday, describing the victim only as a juvenile female who he knew. Police said the alleged abuse occurred on multiple occasions between January 2020 and September 2021. Additional information is expected to be released in court documents unsealed at Johnson’s initial court appearance.
It could not be determined whether Johnson has an attorney. A man who answered the phone at Johnson’s residence and said he is related to Johnson said the family had no comment. The man declined to provide his name. | 2022-07-14T21:54:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. police officer charged with child sex abuse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/officer-arrest-sex-abuse-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/officer-arrest-sex-abuse-dc/ |
Algae bloom prompts health advisory for Triadelphia Reservoir
WSSC Water, which owns the Maryland reservoir also used for boating and fishing, advised against touching the water but says the drinking water supply remains safe
People using the Triadelphia Reservoir for fishing and boating are warned to avoid touching the water because of a potentially toxic algae bloom. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
A Maryland water utility issued a health advisory Thursday, warning people who use its Triadelphia Reservoir for boating and fishing to avoid touching the water because of potentially toxic algae that can cause serious health problems.
WSSC Water said it found high concentrations of cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae, in the reservoir, which is on the Patuxent River in Montgomery and Howard counties. The drinking water that comes from the reservoir is being closely monitored but so far has not been affected and continues to meet water quality safety standards, WSSC Water spokesman Jerry Irvine said.
The algae bloom is similar to one in September 2020 and is common in stagnant water during warmer temperatures, Irvine said. People who drink or touch the reservoir water can get a rash, gastrointestinal, disorientation, fatigue and numbness.
Because the reservoir also serves as a recreational area for hikers, boaters and kayakers, the utility advised people to avoid touching the water when wading in to launch canoes or other boats or rinsing it off immediately with clean water. Pets, which aren’t allowed in the reservoir, also shouldn’t swim in or drink the water, the utility said. Fillets from fish caught there should be thoroughly washed with drinking water, but fish livers or digestive organs should not be eaten, the utility said.
People or pets who touch or drink the water should contact a local health department, Irvine said. | 2022-07-14T21:54:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Algae bloom prompts health advisory for WSSC's Triadelphia Reservoir - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/14/triadelphia-reservoir-health-advisory-algae/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/14/triadelphia-reservoir-health-advisory-algae/ |
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
A wave of new abortion bans is taking effect in Republican-run states, but many of them contain an exception: An abortion can be performed if it’s necessary to save the life of the mother. In practice, however, that’s a far fuzzier line than it might appear.
The Biden administration wants to make sure that the exception is meaningful, and Republican states look like they’ll try to make sure it isn’t. Which means one key upcoming area of intense fighting over abortion will concern what happens in hospital emergency rooms and operating rooms.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a strong contender for the wingnuttiest AG in all the land, has filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s latest effort to establish that this exception is indeed meaningful. The lawsuit claims that the effort attempts “to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
Paxton’s lawsuit is weak, to say the least. But it provides another indication where this is all headed.
The background: After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a guidance to state officials and hospitals reminding them of requirements mandated by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).
That’s a federal law requiring medical facilities to either give “stabilizing treatment” to someone who arrives with a medical emergency, or transfer her to another hospital. Under the law, if you show up to a hospital with a gunshot wound, the hospital must treat you even if, say, you don’t have insurance.
In this case, the administration was letting everyone know that if a patient “is experiencing an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA, and that abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve that condition, the physician must provide that treatment." This applies no matter what a state’s law says about abortion.
Paxton’s lawsuit claims that because EMTALA does not specifically mandate particular medical procedures that must be performed, the federal government therefore can’t require that an abortion be performed. But the law does require hospitals to do what is necessary to preserve patients’ lives — and in cases where that means an abortion, then doctors ought to be able to say they’d followed federal law.
Jenny Ma, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, notes that this is exactly what Texas is trying to prevent. “This lawsuit is just another example of how radical the anti-abortion movement really is,” Ma told us.
For good measure, Paxton throws in that “EMTALA contemplates that an emergency medical condition is one that threatens the life of the unborn child." How he decided that the law “contemplates” this, he does not say.
Nevertheless, it shows how the radical idea of “personhood” for a fetus — which says from the moment of fertilization its rights are equal to that of a human being, rights that can potentially overcome those of the woman carrying it — will be finding its way into state laws.
All this points to dark turns that our post-Roe future will likely take. At issue will be whether health care providers in states banning abortion will have flexibility to make hard decisions in life-threatening situations for women, or whether they’ll feel constrained by fear of prosecution.
As legal experts note, “trigger bans” on abortion that took hold in some states after Roe’s demise are vaguely worded. This makes it hard to know whether an exception to a ban — to protect a patient from death or serious injury — might actually apply in any given situation.
That threatens to render providers more reluctant to make crucial decisions in such situations. And the perils of this vague wording may also be germane in the case of future state laws that ban or severely restrict abortion, yet include such exceptions.
One danger is that providers might fear prosecution so much that they’d be reluctant to act in urgent situations. Another is that providers might not want to practice in such places, which could have other terrible consequences.
The Texas lawsuit is another sign of where things are headed. The federal government issued guidance designed to make it clear that under federal law, providers do have flexibility to act to protect women in urgent situations.
And Texas is effectively responding: No, you don’t.
“In Texas now, doctors have to worry that they will face homicide charges or be labeled as ‘murderers’ for acting to save a pregnant person’s health or life in severe emergencies,” Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told us. “Across the country, doctors who have largely been shielded from abortion politics are going to find that the criminal law is hanging over their shoulder.”
This area — how to define these exceptions, and whether to give providers flexibility to act to save patients’ lives — will likely become a major area of moral contestation. It may also constitute a legal vulnerability for these laws, as drafters find it’s hard to define exceptions in ways that enable providers to act without fearing prosecution.
Of course, to some drafters, this sort of vagueness may be a feature of these laws — as it could ensure that providers do fear acting in exactly that way — and not a bug. | 2022-07-14T22:08:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Texas's new lawsuit against Biden shows our dark post-Roe future - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/texas-lawsuit-paxton-biden-post-roe-future/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/texas-lawsuit-paxton-biden-post-roe-future/ |
The 10-year-old pregnant girl exists. Why did people think she didn’t?
People seemed all too eager to dismiss a horrifying story that made a good case for why abortion can be merciful.
The case generated headlines and a mention by President Biden — “Just imagine being that little girl,” he said — and then some parties began to wonder aloud whether the story was so wretched it couldn’t be true. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) said that there was “not a damn scintilla of evidence” to corroborate the story. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) tweeted, “It looks like the story was fake to begin with.” A reporter with the Daily Caller presented, as apparent evidence the story was a concoction, the fact that the physician who had publicized the case declined to offer additional information.
Other members of the media also cast doubt on the story. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board criticized Biden for perpetuating an “unlikely story from a biased source that neatly fits the progressive narrative but can’t be confirmed.” The Washington Post Fact Checker column wrote cautiously about the case, particularly the fact that it was attributed to a single source (the physician) and to the fact that abortions performed on 10-year-olds are “pretty rare.” (“The intent of the piece was to spotlight the need for careful reporting in a time when information spreads rapidly,” said Shani George, vice president of communications for The Washington Post, in a statement.)
Moving onto the attorney general: In an interview, Yost said: “I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. There’s not one of them that wouldn’t be turning over every rock, looking for this guy and they would have charged him. They wouldn’t leave him loose on the streets.” But this ignores the fact that sexual assault crimes are undercharged, that rapists do end up “loose on the streets,” all the time. Only about 30 percent of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, and fewer than 1 percent end in a conviction.
The truth came out in the end. But only after many grownups had made a wretched story about a child into a damning story about themselves. | 2022-07-14T22:25:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 10-year-old pregnant girl exists. Why did people think she didn’t? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/14/10-year-old-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/14/10-year-old-abortion/ |
From left, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and daughters Sherry, 20, and Sydney, 18, at the governor’s summer residence on Mackinac Island. (Sarah Rice/The Washington Post)
A year before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was already thinking about how to protect abortion rights in her home state. In particular, she was working to overturn a 1931 abortion ban that would go back into effect were Roe v. Wade ever ruled unconstitutional.
Many in the party labeled her an alarmist for her messaging well before the Dobbs decision. But now, she’s considered ahead of the curve in the fight to protect abortion rights.
As Whitmer prepares for her reelection campaign this November, her push for abortion rights will be one of the issues Michiganders will be judging her on in the polls. It will also be part of a legacy she leaves for her daughters, as they face the precarious reality of abortion access in their state.
Ruby Cramer, a political enterprise reporter for The Post, spent time with Whitmer shortly after the Dobbs decision to better understand her unique presence — and her family’s — in politics. | 2022-07-14T22:34:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Inside Gretchen Whitmer's abortion fight - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/inside-gretchen-whitmers-abortion-fight/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/inside-gretchen-whitmers-abortion-fight/ |
Nintendo buys animation studio amid video game blockbuster renaissance
(Washington Post illustration; iStock; Nintendo)
Nintendo has bought out Dynamo Pictures, a Tokyo-based CG production studio that will be renamed Nintendo Pictures, according to a recent filing from the Japanese video game giant. The acquisition and name change are projected to close on October 3.
In the filing, Nintendo said it’s acquiring Dynamo “to strengthen the planning and production structure of visual content in the Nintendo group.” The studio has a diverse portfolio of animation and motion capture projects under its belt, and has done work for several games like “Monster Hunter: World" and “Death Stranding.” The studio previously collaborated with Nintendo to create animated shorts based on its Pikmin series.
This buyout comes at the heels of the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie. The film was announced by Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary game designer and father of the Mario franchise, during the September 2021 Nintendo Direct stream. Miyamoto shared the ensemble cast of the movie which includes Chris Pratt (Mario), Anya Taylor-Joy (Princess Peach), Charlie Day (Luigi), Jack Black (Bowser), Keegan-Michael Key (Toad) and Seth Rogen (Donkey Kong).
Charles Martinet, the iconic voice of Mario and Luigi in the video games, is also involved in the project.
Why can't Hollywood make a good video game movie? Play our game to find out.
In the past, game-to-film adaptations have been viewed as cheesy, and associated with lackadaisical treatment of the source material. Two of the most infamous examples include the 1993 “Super Mario Bros.” and 1995 “Mortal Kombat,” which had a clunky, awkward charm to them but were ultimately dicey productions.
But now, many contemporary projects are establishing a much higher standard of artistry and quality control. “Arcane,” the Netflix show set in the “League of Legends” univerise, was showered with praise by critics, fans and even viewers who had never touched the game before. “The Witcher,” based on the eponymous dark fantasy novels by Andrzej Sapkowski but with a good bit of inspiration from the video game trilogy by CD Projekt Red, is another acclaimed Netflix adaptation that’s moving onto its third season with a prequel spinoff in the works.
“The Last of Us” television show, based on the massively successful post-apocalypse action game from Naughty Dog, is set to premiere on HBO in 2023 with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey playing Joel and Ellie, respectively. And it isn’t alone — screen adaptations of over a dozen high profile video game franchises have been announced, including Call of Duty, Yakuza, Mass Effect, BioShock, Portal and more.
Many of these projects are game companies collaborating with or outsourcing their projects to film companies. But Nintendo seems to be taking a different approach.
From Star Wars to Marvel, licensed video games are becoming more ambitious. Here’s why.
Out of the big three game console manufacturers (the others being Microsoft and Sony), Nintendo is famous for having the most robust and respected catalogue of first-party titles. Many of its iconic video game series such as Mario, Super Smash Bros., Pokémon, Metroid, The Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing were all developed in-house.
By purchasing Dynamo Pictures, Nintendo might be preparing for a future where film and television shows based on its properties will be done in-house as well. | 2022-07-14T22:42:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nintendo buys animation studio Dynamo Pictures to develop films, shows - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/14/nintendo-dynamo-pictures-acquisition-movies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/14/nintendo-dynamo-pictures-acquisition-movies/ |
Planners break ground on Desert Storm memorial, aiming to open in 2024
Officials say they have sufficient funds to complete the project and hope to begin construction next year
Adm. Christopher W. Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks at the ceremonial groundbreaking for the National Desert Storm and Desert Shield Memorial. (Omari Daniels/The Washington Post)
Scott C. Stump took the stage near the corner of Constitution Avenue and 23rd Street NW on Thursday morning, ceremonially breaking ground at a site he hopes will soon host a memorial to those who served in Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield.
The memorial has been in the making for years, with the past four spent raising money and finalizing the design. Stump, a Gulf War veteran and the CEO and president of the National Desert Storm Memorial Association, said the group has sufficient funding to complete the project. Officials hope to begin construction early next year and open it to the public in 2024.
“At every phase of this journey, we were told it would be impossible to find funding,” Stump said. “Today’s ceremony sends the message of Desert Storm that we can lay down our differences and do something bigger than ourselves.”
In total, officials raised nearly $40 million for the memorial, said Cee Freeman, vice president and deputy associate director of the memorial’s planning and design team.
A few hundred people gathered to watch the ceremony, which honored those involved in the U.S.-led campaign to repel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the early 1990s during the Persian Gulf War.
Stump said $10 million came from the Kuwaiti government, as well as unspecified “additional funding,” and thanked Salem Abdullah Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, for helping secure the money.
“With this memorial, the relationship between America and Kuwait has come full circle,” al-Sabah said. “It evokes the memory of those who made the sacrifice to give Kuwait its freedom from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.”
In an interview before the ceremony, Stump said he hopes the final design approval for the memorial will be done by the end of the year, and officials want to begin construction in the first quarter of 2023. The House of Representatives authorized construction of the memorial in 2014, and the Commission of Fine Arts approved the site in 2018. Stump described the memorial’s future appearance as having two barchan dune forms that would create an oasis in the middle, and a wall color and texture that would evoke the desert where Desert Storm took place.
“No matter how great an idea is, if you don’t have the funding, it stays a great idea and never comes to fruition,” Stump said.
Why does it take so long for memorials to be built in Washington?
Stump said the idea of a Desert Storm memorial first came to him in November 2010, before Desert Storm’s 20th anniversary. Stump said he felt Desert Storm had been forgotten to history because it fell between the Vietnam War and the more recent war in Iraq, when a U.S.-led coalition overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. Stump said he then rallied with others he served with and shared his vision.
Retired Brig. Gen. Rhonda L. Cornum, whose Black Hawk helicopter was shot down during Desert Storm, spoke at the ceremony about her experience as a prisoner of war, and what she hoped the memorial would teach people about warfare.
“I never felt like I would be abandoned. Desert Storm is a demonstration of all good things that can happen on a positive, moral mission,” Cornum said. “I hope this memorial teaches people to not judge the importance of a war by how long it takes or the number of deaths, but what’s at stake and what’s accomplished.”
Stump said that the coronavirus pandemic hurt the association’s ability to fundraise and engage donors, and some donors did not follow through on pledges. While Kuwait donated millions and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) donated $500,000, Stump said the bulk of donations came from individual donors or veterans and their family members.
“It’s been very humbling to see the level of support down to the individual level,” he said. “If we wouldn’t have had those, we wouldn’t be where we are now in the lead-up to getting this approval.”
Freeman said the memorial’s engineers and architects are working to meet the proposed launch date of Nov. 11, 2024. Freeman called the memorial the biggest project he has ever worked on.
“I take a lot of pride in knowing that there are thousands of Desert Storm and Desert Shield veterans and family members that will see this for history,” Freeman said. “Just to know that families that will be there and knowing their sons and daughters will never be forgotten is a sense of a pride like I’ve never had ever on any project.”
Stump said that site selection took 39 months, which is longer than normal, as officials sought to justify the memorial’s placement to the Commission of Fine Arts.
Stump said the association wanted the memorial in a visible location that visitors could easily access; the site is near the Lincoln Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial.
Stump said that Desert Storm helped change how citizens viewed those who served in the military, particularly after those who returned from Vietnam received a less-than-warm welcome home.
“That was a feeling of appreciation they never got,” Stump said.
Russell Pryor, 52, a Desert Storm veteran who is involved in raising money in Indiana for the memorial, called the groundbreaking a “euphoric” experience and said he hopes more Americans learn about Desert Storm.
“We want to help people understand the importance of the war and provide a feeling of comfort that those who served will not be forgotten,” he said. | 2022-07-14T22:51:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Planners break ground on Desert Storm memorial, aiming to open in 2024 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/desert-storm-memorial-ground-breaking/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/desert-storm-memorial-ground-breaking/ |
GM, partners plan network of 2,000 EV charging stalls across nation
GM, partners plan 2,000 EV charge stalls
General Motors, Pilot Travel Centers and EVgo said Thursday that they will build 2,000 charging stalls at “up to” 500 Pilot Flying J sites across the nation.
Construction will start this summer, with the first chargers operating in 2023, GM spokesman Philip Lienert said. The network should be finished in a couple of years, he said.
GM said the network would be along highways to enable interstate travel. When finished, the chargers would help the Biden administration move toward its goal of 500,000 stations nationwide by 2030 as it tries to get people to switch from gasoline-powered vehicles to fight climate change.
Bipartisan infrastructure legislation approved by Congress ended up providing just half of the $15 billion that Biden had envisioned.
Uber faces sex assault claims by 500 women
Uber Technologies is being sued by more than 500 women across the United States who claim to have been assaulted by drivers on the platform.
The complaint, filed by Slater Slater Schulman in San Francisco, alleges that women were “kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually battered, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed or otherwise attacked” in their rides. It claims Uber has known about the sexual misconduct by some of the drivers since 2014.
Uber has long struggled to handle complaints of misconduct on the ride-hailing app. Just two weeks ago, the company released its second safety report that showed it received 3,824 reports of the five most severe categories of sexual assault in 2019 and 2020.
Uber has faced several lawsuits against it from women alleging sexual assault by drivers. In 2018, it agreed to settle a class action case brought by two women who claim they were taken advantage of by drivers after they had consumed alcohol. Uber has long defended itself by asserting that it can’t be held responsible for the behavior of its drivers, who are contractors not employees.
Uber said in a statement: “There is nothing more important than safety, which is why Uber has built new safety features, established survivor-centric policies, and been more transparent about serious incidents. While we can’t comment on pending litigation, we will continue to keep safety at the heart of our work.”
Bank of America was fined $225 million by regulators for unfair and deceptive practices related to a prepaid card program to distribute unemployment insurance and other public benefit payments. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered the bank to pay $125 million and provide remediation to consumers who were harmed by the practices related to the card program. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also ordered the bank to pay a $100 million civil money penalty and redress harmed consumers.
Emirates airline said on Thursday that it had rejected demands by London's Heathrow Airport to cut capacity despite being threatened with legal action and that it would continue to operate to schedule. Britain's busiest airport this week asked airlines to stop selling tickets for summer flights, capping the number of daily passengers flying from the hub to 100,000 to ease pressure on operations that have resulted in delayed and canceled flights.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused the Federal Trade Commission of a lack of transparency about its competition enforcement in a lawsuit Thursday, stepping up its campaign on behalf of corporate giants against antitrust threats from the Biden administration. In an unusual move designed to pressure a federal agency whose policies the trade group opposes, the Chamber alleged that the FTC refused to turn over public records about its proceedings, creating a "black-box environment" of uncertainty for business. The FTC declined to comment on the lawsuit. | 2022-07-14T23:00:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GM, partners plan network of 2,000 EV charging stalls across nation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/gm-partners-plan-network-of-2000-ev-charging-stalls-across-nation/2022/07/14/97408ccc-035f-11ed-b005-46df9be530f3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/gm-partners-plan-network-of-2000-ev-charging-stalls-across-nation/2022/07/14/97408ccc-035f-11ed-b005-46df9be530f3_story.html |
Temperatures were more than 1.1 degrees Celsius, or around 2 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than during Junes in the late 19th century, according to NASA
The Millennium Bridge in London on June 17. (Hollie Adams/Bloomberg News)
Last month was among Earth’s warmest Junes ever recorded, according to data released by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This June was more than 1.1 degrees Celsius, or around 2 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than an average June in the late 1800s, according to NASA’s well-regarded global temperature data set, with measurements dating to 1880. That ties with temperatures from June 2020 for the warmest on record.
NASA’s assessment differs slightly from a report out Thursday from NOAA, which also keeps a global temperature data set that uses somewhat different methods. NOAA concluded that last month was Earth’s six-warmest June on record, also dating to 1880.
Much of the difference probably lies in the two data sets’ treatment of the polar regions, experts with NASA and NOAA said. At present, the NASA data set contains more inputs from the Arctic and Antarctic, the latter of which showed very high temperatures in June. But both data sets show that the globe has warmed dramatically, especially since around 1980.
“Even though we’re ranking slightly different, we’re still saying the same story here,” said Ahira Sánchez-Lugo, a scientist with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) who is lead author of the agency’s Global Climate Report.
Both agencies use about 10,000 land-based temperature stations around the globe — in addition to a large array of ocean measurements — to calculate the global average temperature.
Sánchez-Lugo said warming was particularly dramatic last month in parts of Europe and Asia. She noted that while summer months always feature heat waves, “we’re seeing these types of heat waves occur more intensely and more frequently.”
Also, while we tend to think of summer as featuring the longest days of the year and the most sunshine, Sánchez-Lugo said nighttime temperatures also are rising.
“During nighttime, we’re supposed to be able to cool off. Not only us, but animals, crops, everything,” Sánchez-Lugo said. “When that doesn’t happen, then that’s when we get heat exhaustion, or heat disease, because the nighttimes are not cooling as they used to.”
Scientists emphasize that the real message lies in the totality of the data, not the data for just one month.
“The exact rankings for any month are subject to more uncertainty, and while they may get attention, it’s the underlying trend that matters.” | 2022-07-14T23:00:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Last month among the warmest Junes on record, reports say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/14/nasa-noaa-june-heat-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/14/nasa-noaa-june-heat-climate-change/ |
D.C. opens first shelter for homeless LGBTQ+ adults
By Marissa J. Lang
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) speaks outside the LGBTQ+ adult shelter on July 14. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
When Barbara A. Martin was 19, she said, she “burst out of the closet.” She was afraid and unsure of how her family might respond to hearing her declare that she is a lesbian, she said, but she couldn’t hold her truth in anymore.
Her parents were devastated. They mocked her, she said, and made her feel ashamed and unsafe in her own home. So, she left.
Martin, like many members of the LGBTQ+ community, began a new life with nothing but what she could carry with her out the door.
She struggled on and off with addiction, depression and homelessness. Back then, she said, there were no safe places for her to seek refuge. But today, Martin stood alongside D.C. officials and community advocates to announce the opening of the District’s first low-barrier shelter for LGBTQ+ adults — a vulnerable population that often falls through the cracks in the homeless services system.
Laura Zeilinger, the director of the D.C. Department of Human Services, which oversees many of the city’s homelessness programs, said that the most recent numbers indicate that about 18 percent of the District’s unsheltered adults — those who spend their nights in tents, cars and otherwise outside of the city’s shelter system — identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Among those who have sought refuge in shelters, Zeilinger added, about 7 percent identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
This disparity, according to data collected during the 2022 point-in-time count, “tells you something about why we need this shelter,” Zeilinger said.
Mayor Bowser promised to end homelessness. Here’s how it’s going.
With oversized scissors in hand, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) cut through a rainbow ribbon strung across the entrance of the new shelter in Ward 7 on Thursday as a small crowd cheered in the late-morning heat.
The shelter, which has yet to be officially named — the mayor’s office said they are seeking input from the community before announcing the name — will open its doors to unhoused residents in the beginning of August.
At any given time, 40 people will be given beds in the facility, which will also provide access to other supportive services to residents who come to the facility seeking refuge. Those services include life skills training, continuing education classes, substance abuse treatment programs, employment assistance, job placement programs, mental health resources and other links to community resources specific to the LGBTQ community.
Located at 400 50th Street SE, the Ward 7 facility will be the first of its kind in D.C., to cater to LGBTQ adults 25 and older. The District has for years had dedicated shelters for LGBTQ youth. The city estimates that roughly 40 percent of homeless D.C. youth identified as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Other cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, offer housing catering to an aging LGBTQ+ community.
The need is likely to grow as the baby boomer generation ages. According to the American Psychological Association, more than 2.4 million people in the U.S. aged 65 or older identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Older adults in the LGBTQ community are more likely to be affected by poverty and health disparities, and may be more vulnerable to neglect and mistreatment in aging care facilities, according to the APA. All of these disparities can be compounded by intersections of sex, race, ethnicity and disability status, the group adds.
Earlier this year, Bowser cut a ribbon at the opening of a men’s shelter on the St. Elizabeths East campus — part of the mayor’s ongoing efforts to make homelessness “rare, brief and nonrecurring” in D.C.
The LGBTQ+ shelter, Bowser said Thursday, is another important step toward that goal.
“People avoid homeless shelters also for a multitude of reasons,” Bowser said. “We know, and we have seen it in the creation of our small, dignified family shelters, that when we get shelter right people will come into shelter.”
The District’s shelter system for single adults consists of separate facilities for men and women. Transgender and gender nonconforming people experiencing homelessness may elect to go into whichever shelter aligns more closely with their gender identity.
Zeilinger acknowledged the disproportionate violence experienced by Black transgender women in particular, and in her remarks on Thursday recalled two 2019 slayings that shook the community and drew officials’ attention to the lack of resources available to some of the most vulnerable Washingtonians.
“We must remember the lives lost,” she said, “while we think about the essential services we will offer.” | 2022-07-14T23:00:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. opens first shelter for homeless LGBTQ adults - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/dc-lgbtq-homeless-shelter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/dc-lgbtq-homeless-shelter/ |
Muhammad Aziz, 83, one of the two men who spent decades in prison for the murder of Black activist and civil rights advocate Malcolm X in 1965, looks down during his exoneration trial at the state Supreme Court in New York on Nov. 18, 2021. (Curtis Means/Pool via Reuters/File Photo)
NEW YORK — A man who wrongfully served two decades in prison for the 1965 murder of civil rights leader Malcolm X and was exonerated only last year has sued the city and former law enforcement officials involved in the investigation, seeking at least $40 million.
Attorneys for Muhammad A. Aziz filed a case Thursday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, marking the start of a potentially lengthy battle to secure financial compensation for the 84-year-old who was home in the Bronx nursing a leg injury on Feb. 21, 1965, when the historical assassination occurred.
At an emotional court proceeding in November, Aziz was formally cleared of wrongdoing — 55 years after the crime — with the endorsement of then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The occasion followed decades of previous efforts by Aziz and his advocates to try to undo his conviction.
Another innocent man, Khalil Islam, was posthumously exonerated.
“As a result of his wrongful conviction and imprisonment, Mr. Aziz spent 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit and more than 55 years living with the hardship and indignity attendant to being unjustly branded as a convicted murderer of one of the most important civil rights leaders in history,” Aziz’s attorneys David Shanies and Deborah Francois wrote in a 59-page civil complaint.
They served decades in prison for killing Malcolm X. Now their names are cleared.
Aziz, they said, was a 26-year-old father of six when he was charged in Malcolm X’s murder based on active acts of corruption that included witness intimidation and concealing evidence by investigators from the New York Police and FBI, the attorneys said.
The city allowed the immoral and corrupt policies in its policing agenda at the time that led to Aziz’s false arrest and subsequent first-degree murder conviction and detectives knowingly tossed aside exculpatory information in hasty investigation in order to make a case against Aziz, according to the lawsuit.
“The presumption of probable cause created by the grand jury indictment is overcome by the fact that Mr. Aziz’s indictment was secured based on bad-faith police misconduct,” the complaint says, adding that bad eyewitness identification was “the central piece of evidence presented to the grand jury and proximately caused the resulting indictment.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement: “As someone who has fought for a fairer criminal justice system for my entire career, I believe the overturning of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam’s convictions was the just outcome. We are reviewing the lawsuit.”
Aziz’s lawyers have described at length the trauma he and his family endured as a result of his bad conviction. His relationship with his children was fractured by his two-decade-long absence during his prison term, and his children grew up without their father.
“While I do not need a court, prosecutors, or a piece of paper to tell me I am innocent, I am glad that my family, my friends and the attorneys who have worked and supported me all these years are finally seeing the truth we have all known officially recognized,” Aziz said at the New York Supreme Court hearing last year.
Aziz and Islam Islam served a combined 42 years in prison. Aziz was granted parole in 1985 and Islam in 1987. A third man, Mujahid Abdul Halim, confessed to the killing and maintained that Aziz and Islam were innocent. Halim was paroled in 2010.
Aziz was a member of a New York City mosque but Halim was tied to a religious center in Newark. It is believed that his true associates in the murder plot were also connected to the Newark faction.
Malcolm X was murdered at a time when the Nation of Islam was divided. The charismatic leader at the time was rivaled by his former mentor Elijah Muhammad. In a motion submitted by the Manhattan DA’s office last year, prosecutors reinvestigating the matter suggested Nation of Islam infighting as a possible motive.
A half-century after the murder, the DA was unequivocal that “no physical evidence tied Aziz or Islam to the murder or crime scene.”
“There was no evidence that Aziz or Islam had any connection to Halim, or had ever met him.” | 2022-07-14T23:00:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Muhammad Aziz sues New York for $40 million over Malcom X conviction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/14/aziz-malcom-x-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/14/aziz-malcom-x-lawsuit/ |
U.S. Navy helicopters fly alongside the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the Ionian Sea on July 3. (MC2 Crayton Agnew/U.S. Navy)
House lawmakers on Thursday approved an $840 billion plan to direct Pentagon policy and spending in the year ahead, lending strong bipartisan support to legislation that aims to help the United States better compete with China technologically, address mistakes made during last year’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, improve scrutiny of the military aid supplied to Ukraine and target a rise in domestic extremism.
The vote was 329 to 101.
The legislation, considered one of the few “must-pass” bills Congress authors each year, is yet to be reconciled with the Senate’s version. The text of that document has not been made public and is expected to reshape some how much money will be directed toward the Defense Department.
The House bill devotes considerable attention to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s breakthroughs in hypersonic weapons and other cutting-edge military technology, and rampant inflation that is battering the U.S. economy. It also directs military leaders to analyze the dangers posed by individuals in uniform who espouse white supremacist beliefs, neo-Nazism and antisemitism. The legislation specifically mentions the Proud Boys, a far-right group whose prominent role last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol has been an intense focus of federal prosecutors and the House select committee running a parallel investigation.
The bipartisan endorsement reflected in Thursday’s vote did not accompany every provision. For instance, all Republicans voted against a measure requiring a report to Congress on efforts to combat threats posed by white supremacy and neo-Nazism in the ranks. Other amendments that fell mostly along party lines included directives to stream online the legal proceedings of Guantánamo Bay detainees, establish certain fair-labor standards for military contractors, and guarantee victims of harassment and discrimination that their cases will be heard within 180 days.
On Russia, in addition to demanding that the U.S. military in Europe detach itself from the Kremlin’s energy supplies, the House voted this week to prevent Moscow from trading in gold or rejoining international organizations. Lawmakers also ordered the Pentagon to implement within six months better accounting practices for all of the U.S. military assistance being sent to Ukraine, and instructed the Department of Defense Inspector General to report biannually on the U.S. response to Russian aggression.
On China, lawmakers backed a series of measures regarding its expanding global footprint and to cement U.S. relations with Taiwan, including feasibility studies to enhance military cooperation.
And on Afghanistan, while the underlying bill called for improvements to the convoluted visa processing system that resulted in thousands of American allies being left behind after U.S. personnel withdrew, the House added several amendments intended to “surge capacity” for bringing more eligible Afghans to the United States. Those include directions for removing requirements that Afghans applying for student visas must declare their intent to return to Afghanistan, and for the Pentagon to craft plans for reimbursing U.S. service members and veterans who helped evacuate visa-eligible Afghans at personal expense.
Some of the amendments endorsed by the House are likely to complicate foreign policy priorities for President Biden, including one provision that would temporarily halt weapons sales to Saudi Arabia over the slaying of journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. Biden is in Saudi Arabia, attempting a reset of relations with the leaders who the U.S. government believes ordered the killing.
There is also a provision to prohibit selling any F-16s to Turkey without the Biden administration first providing certain guarantees of how they will be used — a restriction that could complicate efforts to dissuade Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s resistance to Sweden and Finland joining NATO. | 2022-07-14T23:00:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NDAA: House lays out demands for Pentagon over Russia, extremism, inflation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/14/ndaa-pentagon-defense-authorization-bill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/14/ndaa-pentagon-defense-authorization-bill/ |
Armed man arrested outside Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s home in Seattle
Armed man arrested outside Jayapal's home
The man, whose name was redacted from publicly available police reports, was released from jail Wednesday because police could not confirm his threats or that he told Jayapal to “go back to India,” and an investigation is ongoing, the Seattle Times reported.
A neighbor told police that she heard the man shout something like “Go back to India; I’m going to kill you” and that she had seen the man drive by Jayapal’s house three times while shouting profanities, according to the statement.
Jayapal, 56, was born in India and moved to the United States to attend college when she was 16. She has served as a member of Congress since 2017 and was the first South Asian American woman elected to the House.
Attorney charged in death of wife, son
Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced patriarch of a legal dynasty in South Carolina, was charged Thursday with double murder more than a year after the mysterious deaths of his wife and son outside their home.
Murdaugh, 54, has faced a slew of other criminal allegations since the killings of his wife, Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22, who were fatally shot outside the family’s Islandton, S.C., home in June 2021. But until now, there have been no charges from the double homicide, which has rocked the small rural community in the state’s Lowcountry.
The killings have captured national attention, in part because of the Murdaugh family’s prominent status in South Carolina, where three generations of Murdaughs once served as elected prosecutors for 87 consecutive years.
A Colleton County grand jury indicted Murdaugh on two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.
Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, lawyers for Murdaugh, said their client had no motive to kill his wife and son.
In addition to being accused of killing his family, authorities also allege Murdaugh was part of a multimillion-dollar insurance fraud scheme.
and Meryl Kornfield
Father, not teen, was driver in fatal crash
The driver of a pickup truck that collided with a golf team’s van in March, killing nine people in Texas, was a 38-year-old man, not his 13-year-old son, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday, correcting information the agency released shortly after the head-on crash. | 2022-07-14T23:00:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Armed man arrested outside Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s home in Seattle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/armed-man-arrested-outside-jayapals-home-in-seattle/2022/07/14/5e8e1ca2-ff34-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/armed-man-arrested-outside-jayapals-home-in-seattle/2022/07/14/5e8e1ca2-ff34-11ec-87e4-55be07124164_story.html |
Construction workers at a renovation site at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on July 7. (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
But this also reflects the looming electoral strategy among Republicans, who believe they have found a deep vulnerability among Democrats. A recent, comprehensive New York Times poll seemed to confirm this view. Analyzing some of the findings of the poll, David Leonhardt wrote, “Many Democrats — both politicians and voters, especially on the party’s left flank … seem more focused on divisive cultural issues than on most Americans’ everyday concerns, like inflation.” To be fair, President Biden still beats Trump in a head-to-head matchup, but that dynamic might not help the Democrats in the midterm elections, when Trump is not on the ballot.
Yet Democrats have another big weak spot, and it centers on performance. Democrats in power often seem unable to get anything done. Democrats squabble more — and more in public — than Republicans. Despite the fact that much of the GOP establishment despised Trump, once he was elected, they nearly all fell in line, mostly passed his agenda and supported him unfailingly. Democrats, by contrast, rarely remind the public of the two big bills that they did pass — covid-19 relief and infrastructure — and in fact spent months bickering over the third one they’ve proposed, Build Back Better. Why is the Biden administration not announcing large new public works projects every week, financed by the federal funds appropriated in those two bills?
The answer is that it has become very difficult to build anything in America, especially in blue states. President Barack Obama, who passed another big infrastructure bill in 2009, famously said later that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” That’s because, as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted, the number of permits, reviews, and delays that have become part of the normal approval process have delayed or doomed the prospects of large-scale public projects. Democrats have become paralyzed by their own ideas and interest groups, and no one seems able to break through and actually get things done.
It’s not that there is any shortage of money. Consider the state where I live, New York. The state budget is an eye-popping $220 billion. Florida, with nearly 2 million more residents, spends half that sum. New York City’s budget is $100 billion. That’s more than double the budget for the state of Illinois — and Illinois’ population is some 50 percent larger! New York is the most heavily taxed state in the country; its tax rates are highly progressive. The top 1 percent of New York City residents pay more than 40 percent of the city’s income taxes. And yet, New York’s infrastructure and services at every level are in bad shape. | 2022-07-14T23:01:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Forget pronouns. Democrats need to become the party of building things. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/republicans-exploits-culture-wars-democrats-performance-building-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/republicans-exploits-culture-wars-democrats-performance-building-abortion/ |
Ivana Marie Zelníčková Trump, the former president’s first wife, was born under Communist rule in the former Czechoslovakia to an engineer and a telephone operator. Trump was a skier and fashion model who immigrated to the Americas in the 1970s, first arriving in Canada.
Ivana Trump, then wife of Donald Trump, is introduced at a news conference for the new Harrah's at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City
Trump pictured in April 1987.
The Trumps wave to reporters as they board their luxury yacht the Trump Princess in New York.
Trump participates in a ceremony at Grand Army Plaza's Pulitzer Fountain in the Brooklyn.
Trump, left, and Joan Rivers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the premiere of “Avalon.”
Phillip W. Schoultz/AP
Trump, president of the Plaza Hotel in New York, accepts the first bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau for 1990 from Jean-Jacques Pignard, mayor of Villefranche, representing the Beaujolais region of France.
Osamu Honda/AP
Trump models clothing designed by Thierry Mugler for the 1992 spring and summer ready-to-wear collection in Paris.
REMY DE LA MAUVINIERE/AP
Ivana and Donald Trump make their way past reporters as they leave court in New York. The couple said “I do” again, but it was to show they understood an agreement that ends the disputes that have kept them in court almost since they divorced in 1991.
Betsy Herzog/AP
Trump with her children Ivanka and Eric beside Riccardo Mazzucchelli.
Trump, left, talks with her friend Maty Abascal before the showing of designer Oscar de la Renta's fall 1994 women's wear collection in New York.
Chrystyna Czajkowsky/AP
Trump with her ex-husband, Donald Trump, during the men's singles finals match at the U.S. Open in New York.
Trump and her daughter, Ivanka, arrive for the traditional Red Cross Ball in Monaco.
Vanina Lucchesi/AFP/Getty Images
Trump stands with friend and former team member of the Czech national ski team George Syrovatka at the Jay Peak Ski Area in Jay, Vt.
Jon-Pierre Lasseigne/AP
Trump arrives at amfAR's Cinema Against AIDS 2006 event in France.
Trump arrives for the presentation of Dior's Haute Couture spring-summer 2009 collection, designed by John Galliano, in Paris.
Trump dances at the Opera Ball in the State Opera House in Prague.
Michal Dolezal/CTK/AP
Trump enters the stage to deliver a speech during the 17th Life Ball in Vienna.
Trump, second from right, attends the Zang Toi Spring 2013 fashion show during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Lincoln Center in New York.
Ivana at Fashion Week in New York. | 2022-07-14T23:01:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ivana Trump, a former wife of Donald Trump, dies at 73 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2022/ivana-trump-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2022/ivana-trump-dies/ |
Five shark attacks reported in two weeks off Long Island, officials say
Young sand sharks swim in a tank at the Kuwait Scientific Center in Kuwait City on July 5. (Yasser Al-Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images)
Five shark attacks have been reported in the past two weeks off Long Island, N.Y., including two within hours Wednesday, a dramatic increase in shark encounters that officials there said may represent a “new normal.”
Four of the reported attacks took place on Fire Island in Suffolk County, including two at the popular Smith Point Beach and two near the village of Ocean Beach. The fifth was reported on Jones Beach Island in neighboring Nassau County.
None of the victims were seriously injured, and the sharks sighted were estimated to be four to five feet in length, officials said.
Shark sightings have been increasing off U.S. coasts, which scientists attribute to successful conservation efforts that have restored populations closer to historical levels. Still, the recent spate of attacks was highly unusual — there were only 47 confirmed unprovoked attacks nationwide in 2021, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File.
“This is not something that is precedented in any way in our history here in Suffolk County,” Suffolk County Executive Steven Bellone said at a news conference Thursday. “Prior to July 3, we had not had a recorded shark bite at [Smith Point Beach] since it had opened, during beach hours, back in 1959.”
Bellone said the county is deploying drones and increased lifeguard patrols to monitor the waters, acknowledging that the uptick may represent the “new normal.”
“The idea of more frequent contact with these kind of sharks may be what we will be coming to expect,” Bellone said at a separate news conference Wednesday, ahead of the fifth attack.
The first of the recent attacks took place June 30, when a 57-year-old man swimming at Jones Beach suffered a laceration on his right foot that paramedics identified as a “possible shark bite,” according to the Nassau County Police Department.
Three days later, Zach Gallo, 33, a lifeguard at Smith Point Beach, was playing the role of a victim in a rescue training exercise when he became one himself, WABC reported. He felt a roughly four-foot shark whip him with its tail and then bite his hand, according to the station.
“I felt pressure in my hand, pulled it back and I just started hammering, punching and I connected with the shark three times, and then on the third time it spun away,” Gallo told WABC. “I guess my adrenaline, survival instincts kicked in.”
Gallo returned to work Thursday, saying at the news conference with Bellone that he was grateful his injuries were minor and that his fellow lifeguards came to his aid.
“If you do go in the ocean, make sure you are going into an area that’s protected by lifeguards,” Gallo said.
On July 7, first-year lifeguard John Mullins, 17, was bitten on his foot while also playing the role of a victim during a training exercise near Ocean Beach, according to CBS New York.
“The teeth were inside my skin and when I pulled my foot out, it kind of just felt like a scrape, like a rake going up my foot,” Mullins told the station. “We never expect to be attacked while we’re training, but they handled it well.”
Mullins received five stitches and was out of work while his foot healed, CBS New York reported.
On Wednesday morning, a surfer was bitten by a roughly four-foot tiger shark, leaving a four-inch gash, according to Bellone. The man was knocked off his board and saw the shark circling back toward him, but a wave carried him into shore, Bellone said.
Roughly 11 hours later, police were called to Seaview Beach after a 49-year-old Arizona man standing in “waist deep water” was bitten from behind on his left wrist and buttocks, according to Suffolk County police. He walked out of the water and was taken by helicopter to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, police said.
Christopher Paparo, manager of the Marine Science Center at Stony Brook University, said the series of attacks is “definitely something that you don’t hear every day,” but stressed that the chances of encountering a shark remain “very low.”
He said the sharks off Long Island are mostly sand tiger sharks, sandbar sharks, and dusky sharks, all fish eaters that probably attack humans mistakenly while hunting bait fish.
Paparo said the increase in encounters is a “sign that we’re doing things right” in terms of conservation.
“What happened in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, they were heavily fished, and many of their populations neared complete collapse,” he said. “Then through regulation and conservation of not only sharks, but their food — the Atlantic menhaden, which is better-known as bunker — these populations have rebounded, and we’re starting to now see them once again in the numbers that they used to be.”
Paparo said beachgoers should swim in lifeguard-protected areas and avoid the water when it is murky or they see schooling fish. Sharks also typically feed more at dawn and dusk, he added.
Bellone said officials do not expect any serious injuries from shark attacks given the species that have been sighted, but urged beachgoers to be conscious of their surroundings. Do not wear shiny jewelry or enter the water while bleeding, and stay closer to shore, he said.
At a news conference Sunday, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman jumped into the water himself, seeking to reassure beachgoers that they can avoid sharks with simple precautions.
“If you’re going to go in the ocean, it’s good to go with a partner. Always go on a protected beach where there are lifeguards,” Blakeman said. “If you do those things, you will be safe.” | 2022-07-14T23:01:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Five shark attacks have been reported off Long Island in two weeks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/07/14/long-island-shark-attacks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/07/14/long-island-shark-attacks/ |
Gay men targeted in Meridian Hill Park by fake cop, prosecutors say
Meridian Hill Park at night. (Joe Flood/Flickr)
A former elementary school teacher from Prince George’s County was arrested Thursday and accused of assaulting men in a D.C. park with chemical spray between 2018 and 2021.
Prosecutors say Michael Thomas Pruden, 48, pretended to be a Park Police officer five separate times when he went into Meridian Hill Park after dark and approached men in what is known as a place to meet for sex. According to court records, he told them the park was closed and they should leave, and then assaulted them with pepper spray.
The indictment in D.C. federal court charges him with five counts of assault on federal land and one count of impersonating a federal officer. A hate crimes sentencing enhancement alleges that four of the victims were targeted because of their perceived sexual orientation.
Pruden was acquitted by a jury of a similar attack in Alexandria federal court last year. In that case, prosecutors said two men were walking on Daingerfield Island on the afternoon of March 21, 2021, when Pruden, prosecutors alleged, approached, identified himself as a police officer, then attacked one man with pepper spray and a stick while uttering “an anti-gay slur.” At trial, prosecutors were not allowed to refer to the D.C. attacks.
A defense attorney complained to the Washington Blade in 2019 that plainclothes police were soliciting men for sex in Meridian Hill Park and then arresting them in sting operations.
“The U.S. Park Police receives complaints about lewd acts that occur within Meridian Hill,” a public information officer told the paper. “As with any other complaint of illegal activity, we then take actions to stop it.”
After his arrest last year, a Prince George’s County Public Schools spokeswoman said that Pruden had taught in the system since 2014. He was suspended at that time.
On Thursday he was arrested in Norfolk, according to the court records. | 2022-07-14T23:39:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gay men targeted in Meridian Hill Park by fake cop, prosecutors say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/gay-men-meridian-fake-cop/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/gay-men-meridian-fake-cop/ |
On anniversary of a Maryland lynching, students’ poems call for change
Precious Oladipupo, 12, recites her poem during a remembrance on July 13 in Towson, Md., for Howard Cooper, a Black teenager who was lynched by a White mob in 1885 outside the former Baltimore County Jail, rear. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
TOWSON, Md. — “Listen up closely,” Precious Oladipupo told the crowd gathered outside the old Baltimore County Jail in Towson. “We must not hold our heads down, crying. We are beautiful, our brown skin glows.”
They were the first lines of a poem Oladipupo, 12, put together in an afternoon after reading Maya Angelou and listening to Beyoncé. She spoke quickly, but the words resonated with the few dozen people who gathered to remember Howard Cooper, a 15-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Baltimore County in 1885, on the anniversary of his death.
As efforts persist elsewhere to limit the teaching of America’s brutal past, what happened to Cooper, one of the younger victims of racial terror in the state’s history, brought dozens of people on Wednesday to the old jailhouse where he had been held to reflect on his death and its connection to the social justice movements of today.
Historians and advocates described the harrowing details of Cooper’s lynching over a century ago, while middle school students from Baltimore County’s public schools read poems decrying killings of Black people today: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd.
“I’m disappointed because my relative was mentioned in the 1800s, and here we are in 2022 and I can’t say too much has changed,” Stephanie Robinson, a distant cousin of Cooper’s, said at the event, organized by the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project. “Except the style in which we’re being lynched.”
At least 38 Black people were lynched in Maryland between 1854 and 1933, according to the memorial project, an organization founded in 2018 by Will Schwarz to bring awareness to the killings and push for their public acknowledgment.
“I never learned about lynching in high school,” Schwarz said. “To me, it just became an important thing that people understand that this happened here, and also understand how it continues to integrate into our lives.”
They’ve seen progress; Maryland formed a landmark commission to document lynchings in the state in 2020 and Gov. Larry Hogan (R) granted posthumous pardons to 34 victims of lynching in front of the same Towson jailhouse last year.
But Schwarz wants the work of remembering Cooper and victims like him to continue.
“Part of the way we get people to acknowledge this history is by being visible in the community,” Schwarz wrote to The Washington Post. “Events like the one tonight … help keep the subject in the public square.”
The details of Cooper’s life were mostly unrecorded, but public historian Jennifer Liles discerned some information about his family from census records, which she shared Wednesday.
Cooper was born to Henrietta and Joshua Cooper in Ruxton in 1870. His twin brother, Henry, died in childhood, and Howard Cooper grew up just as laws in Baltimore County began to demand more support be given to African American schools there. One opened near the Coopers in the 1880s, but Howard was too old to enroll.
Cooper was convicted of assault and rape by an all-White jury, which deliberated for less than a minute in 1885, according to the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project. As Cooper’s attorneys prepared an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, a mob of masked men broke into the Baltimore County Jail and hanged Cooper from a sycamore tree.
“I often ponder if there were adequate schools for all children in Baltimore County, would Howard’s life have been different?” Liles said.
For the second year the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project partnered with schoolteachers to invite middle-schoolers — many just younger than Cooper was — to participate in the commemoration. Justin DePrima, an English teacher at Dunbarton Middle School, organized a countywide competition for original poetry about Cooper and racial justice and received 60 entries.
DePrima said the subject was on his students’ minds throughout the past two years as protests swept the country following the killing of numerous Black people by police officers.
“We’re teaching during the pandemic, and I asked the students — they’re so unmotivated at home, there’s so many distractions — ‘What do you want to learn about?’ ” DePrima said. “They’re like, ‘We want to know more about what’s going on with Black Lives Matter.’ ”
Discussing the protests and, eventually, the history of racism and practices like lynching was delicate, DePrima said. But he felt like they were topics his students needed to know to make progress on issues of racial injustice today. He expressed concern at attempts in other parts of the country to restrict education about the subject.
“In this region, I feel supported,” DePrima said. “But it’s a motivator. I know I need to take extra steps to combat what’s going on at a national level.”
They’ll be back in front of the old jail next year, when DePrima hopes to expand the poetry competition to more schools and ages. In the meantime, the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project hopes to continue organizing remembrances across the state.
Precious Oladipupo’s father, Bolaji Oladipupo, said he was proud to hear his daughter speak. “She said she wants to be a lawyer,” he said. “This is one of the good ways to start.”
The rising seventh-grader at Southwest Academy in Woodlawn was nervous to read her words before a large crowd for the first time. She did it anyway. And she plans to keep writing. | 2022-07-14T23:39:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland students reflecting on Howard Cooper's lynching want justice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/hoard-cooper-maryland-lynching/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/hoard-cooper-maryland-lynching/ |
Teen charged with murder in encounter with squeegee workers
Baltimore Police arrested a 15-year-old boy Thursday in connection with the fatal Inner Harbor shooting last week in which a baseball bat-wielding man confronted a group of squeegee workers.
The teen was arrested at a home in Baltimore County and was charged as an adult with first-degree murder. Detective Vernon Davis, a police spokesman, said the department does not publicly identify minors charged with criminal offenses.
Police Commissioner Michael Harrison in a statement said the arrest is a sad reminder of the ease with which the local youth can get their hands on a gun.
A dashboard-camera video of the shooting last week obtained by the Baltimore Sun shows a squeegee worker shoot at 48-year-old Timothy Reynolds five times at the intersection of Light and Conway streets.
Reynolds drove through that intersection, parked on the other side of Light Street and emerged from his car with the bat, Harrison said previously. It is still not clear what happened to cause Reynolds to get out of his car.
He can be seen walking away from the intersection, presumably back toward his car, as three squeegee workers follow him. They get near him but another car obstructs the view. Less than a second later, they turn to run as Reynolds starts chasing with the bat raised.
About the same time as he swings his bat toward one of the workers, another throws what appears to be a rock at his head from behind. The video shows the rock hitting Reynolds’s head and bouncing off.
Reynolds, still holding his bat, turns around when a third squeegee worker pulls a handgun and starts firing. The first shot appears to hit him somewhere in the side of his body and he starts falling. As the shooter starts to walk away, he shoots at Reynolds four more times. Reynolds was lying on the ground until first responders rendered aid. He died shortly after.
Under Maryland law, people defending themselves have a duty to retreat, meaning they are supposed to try to leave unless doing so is unsafe or impossible. It is also against state law for people under age 21 to possess a handgun.
Outside a three-story brick apartment building in Essex where the teen was arrested, two marked Baltimore Police cars were all that remained hours after the arrest. Family members of the teen could not be reached for comment, and no one answered the door at the apartment. It is unclear whether the teen has an attorney.
The squeegee workers are a political issue, and the imagery of the shooting, after a middle-aged White man chasing after a group of young Black men with a bat, has reignited a debate with racial undertones.
For decades, Baltimore leaders have explored ways to get young window washers away from busy and dangerous city intersections. Officials say city workers frequently contact the youths to offer other opportunities, even jobs that pay the same, in recognition of the draw of the quick dollar and the deep-rooted issues that leave some squeegee workers in need of an immediate payout.
Accusations of violence, property destruction and harassment, sometimes substantiated, are regularly used as evidence the city must do something about the squeegee workers. There have been 59 calls for “squeegee disturbances” at East Conway and Light over the past 18 months, according to Open Baltimore data. Calls about the window washers at that intersection spiked in June, when there were 13, more than double as many as the month with the next-most calls since January 2021.
The vast majority of interactions with squeegee workers are not violent, and most people working intersections as squeegee workers are teens and children trying to survive and are not a threat. Many of the workers need the money to provide for younger siblings or their own children.
“If these corners were filled with White kids who squeegee, the narrative would be different,” Baltimore City Council member Kristerfer Burnett said Monday. | 2022-07-14T23:39:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Teen charged with murder in encounter with squeegee workers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/teen-charged-with-murder-in-encounter-with-squeegee-workers/2022/07/14/9ace1bfe-0394-11ed-b005-46df9be530f3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/teen-charged-with-murder-in-encounter-with-squeegee-workers/2022/07/14/9ace1bfe-0394-11ed-b005-46df9be530f3_story.html |
After stroke, John Fetterman takes small steps back into Pa. Senate race
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman makes a campaign stop at the Horn O Plenty restaurant in Bedford, Pa., on April 3. (Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post)
From a small box in the top right-hand corner of the Zoom screen, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman appeared, throwing up both arms to gesture surprise to the several dozen campaign volunteers who signed on Tuesday evening for a social media training.
“Heeyyyy everybody, hey!” Fetterman said, according to video of the session, provided to The Washington Post. “And, well one, thank you all, and let me just stop by saying, you know, we’re not the special guests, you’re all the special ones and I just want to thank you for doing this and, and, helping this campaign.”
The brief greeting to supporters is the first unedited glimpse of Fetterman since he suffered a near-fatal stroke nearly two months ago, sidelining him days before the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary that he won in May. He has remained off the campaign trail as he’s focused on his recovery, his absence sparking questions about whether he’d be mentally and physically well enough for a vigorous campaign in one of the most consequential races in the country.
In the Zoom video viewed by The Post, a smiling Fetterman sat beside his wife, Gisele, wearing his signature oversized hoodie, this one blue. A “Fetterman for Senate” banner hung on a white brick wall behind them. While on camera only for a few minutes, he spoke clearly and did not exhibit any obvious signs of impaired speech.
“I’m never, I never feel entitled to have support, but the fact that you do, I’m so grateful for that, and you know, from the bottom of my heart I want to thank you and what you’re willing to do to help us flip this seat. Thank you so much,” Fetterman told the volunteers on the call.
Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman joined a campaign Zoom call on July 12, one of his first appearances since he suffered a stroke in May. (Video: The Washington Post)
In recent days, Fetterman has begun to take baby steps back into the fray, though there remains no set plans for him to resume traditional campaign events with voters across the state. Fetterman’s advisers are adamant that he will be ready to take on his Republican opponent, celebrity talk show host and heart surgeon Mehmet Oz, in November.
In a statement to The Post, Oz’s campaign acknowledged Fetterman’s health status and then took a swipe at his politics.
“As a physician, Dr. Oz has performed thousands of heart surgeries so he understands how scary this condition is for the patient and family and has been praying for John Fetterman’s recovery,” said Brittany Yanick, an Oz spokeswoman. “Now that he’s back, John Fetterman can’t hide from voters forever. Pennsylvanians will soon learn about John Fetterman’s radical ideas ... We are glad John is healthy again so we can focus less on his heart and hoodie and more on the crazy far-left ideas he has in his head.”
Party leaders in the state are eager to see Fetterman get back out on the campaign trail. During the primary he would do multiple stops a day, speaking to large crowds and staying for selfies with anyone who wanted a photo.
“Democrats are concerned because John is a terrific in-person campaigner and we’re worried because each day he can’t get out and campaign in person is a day we could take another step to victory,” said former Pennsylvania governor Edward G. Rendell.
Fetterman surprised volunteers with an in-person visit at a field office on Saturday and, according to a video posted on Twitter, told them he’d back on the trail “soon.” After the quick greeting on the Zoom call Tuesday, his campaign said, he appeared virtually at a fundraiser hosted by JStreetPAC, the political arm of the liberal pro-Israel group. That event lasted more than an hour, and he took questions from donors. Next Thursday he’s scheduled to do his first in-person events, including an afternoon fundraiser and then a sold-out private gathering hosted by Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania, a political action committee that is closed to the news media.
JStreet spokesman Logan Bayroff confirmed Fetterman’s virtual presence at the hour-long event attended by about 100 people and that he participated in a lengthy back-and-forth exchange with donors for about 25 minutes.
“He sounded good. Obviously he acknowledged that he’s on the road to recovery, but he sounded good,” Bayroff said. “We are fully aware that he’s on the road back to the trail and ... we’re extremely excited and appreciative that he was back out there and made the time to meet with us.”
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is hosting a fundraiser for Fetterman in D.C. on Tuesday, headlined by Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) that the candidate isn’t attending. President Biden is scheduled to be in Philadelphia for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on Wednesday, according to multiple sources, but Fetterman isn’t involved.
Democrats across the state say they remain committed to Fetterman’s candidacy and no one has seriously suggested that he should withdraw from the race because of his health. Joe Calvello, Fetterman’s spokesman, responded to a question about Fetterman not running with a string of profanities.
“John Fetterman will be at the top of the ticket this November,” Calvello said. “Our campaign is running full speed ahead, we are organizing, we are up on TV, John and our team are 100 percent focused on flipping this seat blue.”
Although Fetterman hasn’t been out on the trail physically, he’s been fully engaged and active, his advisers say. On Tuesday, ahead of the Zoom pop-in and virtual appearance at the fundraiser, Fetterman took calls in the morning and had a brainstorming meeting with his communications team. He went for a 4.7-mile walk on a trail near his home in Braddock, Pa., and also did a call with Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).
“I had a good conversation with John Fetterman about the urgent need to tackle pressing issues for working families in Pennsylvania, Montana, and across the country like lowering the cost of gas, groceries, and prescription drugs,” Tester said in an emailed statement. “He’s not your typical candidate and is exactly the kind of person we need more of in the Senate, and I know he’s hard at work to make that happen in November.”
The Pennsylvania Senate race is crucial to Democrats’ hopes of holding on to their slim majority in a difficult political year. Flipping the seat, currently held by retiring Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, could help blunt expected GOP wins elsewhere.
The state has a long history of swinging between political parties, electing Barack Obama by sizable margins in 2008 and 2012, but picking Toomey in 2010 in that year’s tea party wave. Pennsylvania voters then chose Donald Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
The 52-year-old Fetterman, a towering presence at almost 6 feet and 9 inches, who is rarely seen in a suit and tie, has built a brand on his everyman persona. Many Democrats believe he will appeal to the state’s more independent-minded voters, particularly the working class, and especially in a matchup against Oz, a wealthy celebrity.
“You couldn’t have a better situation in a worse year,” said T.J. Rooney, former Democratic state party chairman, referring to the match up between Fetterman and Oz. “It’s the ying and the yang, the up and the down, the contrasts, it shapes up as well as you could hope for other than he had a medical setback and that is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.”
Few people have seen Fetterman speak outside of short, scripted appearances filmed and promoted on social media by his campaign. After his stroke, his campaign didn’t reveal the severity of his illness for weeks. On the day of the May primary, Fetterman had surgery to install a pacemaker with a defibrillator, which the campaign officials said doctors told them was to treat atrial fibrillation (A-fib). Nearly three weeks later, his cardiologist revealed that the medical device was needed to treat cardiomyopathy — a disease diagnosis Fetterman first received in 2017 that decreases the amount of blood his heart could pump. Fetterman also later shared that he “almost died.”
The state Democratic Party has until Aug. 15 to replace Fetterman on the ballot, but if anyone is considering that, they’re not saying.
“Who in the hell are you going to replace him with?” Rooney said. “There is definitely no talk and it’s unfathomable and unthinkable at this point.”
Most Democrats are comforted that Fetterman’s absence from the trail is in the dog days of summer when the average voter isn’t tuned in to horserace politics. From his home, Fetterman has trolled Oz on social media, mostly over his residency in New Jersey and tweeted a compilation video of Oz’s many mansions that was viewed more than a million times. Over the July 4 weekend, Fetterman’s campaign flew a plane over the New Jersey shore, where many Philadelphians spend their summer weekends, carrying the message: “Hey Dr. Oz, Welcome Home to NJ! ♥ John.” Then on Thursday, Fetterman’s campaign paid Snooki, the reality star from the late aughts show “Jersey Shore,” to do a Cameo for Oz telling him, “Jersey will not forget you.”
Fetterman has also continued to air TV ads in the state, including one currently running statewide that calls Oz “Doc Hollywood” and attacks him for not living in Pennsylvania.
Mark Alderman, a big-time Democratic donor in the state, said Fetterman’s appeal is his ability to channel the emotions of an angry electorate. Alderman said there is concern among Democratic insiders about whether his health forces him to temper that image.
“He’s a visceral candidate, people are mad, he looks mad, he looks like the guy you want on your side if you’re mad,” Alderman said. “Anything that distracts from his public persona as a tall, strong, vigorous, angry guy is going to be a problem for him in the fall, but we’re not there yet.”
Fetterman also holds the edge over Oz in recent polls, and announced this week that he’d raised $11 million in the second quarter of the year, most of which came in after he won the primary. That huge haul helped quell any nerves Democrats in the state may have felt about their top-of-the-ticket candidate still away from trail, said Alan Kessler, another major Democratic donor in Philadelphia.
“I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that, it’s a good sign of the enthusiasm, the interest, whether it’s the Roe decision or the gun issue or whatever, but it’s almost as though those issues are propelling the campaign even without having the principle,” Kessler said. “Those who were nervous or worried, there couldn’t be a better sign than that.”
“I don’t see anyone pushing panic buttons,” he added.
Oz’s campaign said that he’s done more than 40 in-person events in the state since securing the GOP nomination, after a bruising primary that he won by less than 1,000 votes. While Oz’s campaign is dark on TV, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is airing an attack ad tying Fetterman to Biden.
Oz has recently ramped up his social media activity, tweeting several times a day, and almost daily making a reference to Fetterman as a far-left politician like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
“Mid-week reminder: John Fetterman is endorsed by AOC AND Bernie Sanders. If that doesn’t tell you he’s a socialist, nothing will,” Oz tweeted on Thursday.
On the Tuesday night Zoom call, Fetterman did not mention Oz or discuss any specific issues. As he spoke, he gestured with his hands, placing them over his heart and then making a heart shape with his fingers.
“Let me just say, my career in politics is, was because I won by one vote back in 2005, so what you’re doing is very important and so helping our campaign, so truly thank you. Thank you for getting involved like this,” Fetterman told the volunteers. “I really am very, very grateful.” | 2022-07-14T23:47:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrat John Fetterman slowly resumes campaigning, as he recovers from stroke - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/14/fetterman-stroke-senate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/14/fetterman-stroke-senate/ |
D.C. offers active-shooter training to nightlife and church workers
As fear of indiscriminate violence escalates nationwide, city officials said they wanted to help educate those who could be vulnerable
Attendees inside and outside the classroom at D.C.'s active-shooter preparedness training on July 14. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
A manager at Ford’s Theatre came for advice about how to update their security protocols. A man who was blocks away from the Navy Yard shooting in 2013 enrolled to make sure he knew how to stay safe in the city. And the general manager of a craft cocktail bar showed up Thursday afternoon simply because active-shooter trainings are a part of life these days.
They sat together, with dozens of other bar owners and nightlife employees, to learn how to respond if their venue turned out to be next on the long list of establishments devastated by mass shootings.
“Has it happened in D.C.?” asked senior D.C. police officer Dorian DeSantis, a member of the department’s emergency response team, referring to mass shootings.
“Yes,” the audience in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library replied.
“Will it happen again in D.C.?” said DeSantis.
“Yes,” the room responded.
Trainings about how to respond to active shooters are not uncommon in schools, and the city has offered similar programming in the past. But the Thursday sessions, run by the Mayor’s Office on Volunteerism and Partnerships, come as fear of mass, indiscriminate violence has escalated. Officials brought together representatives from multiple agencies, including police, fire and homeland security, to offer what they called the first “one stop shop” active-shooter trainings to D.C. residents. They were tailored to members of the nightlife sector and the religious community, who had a separate session in the morning, because of their vulnerability to mass violence.
“We have seen a lot of instances across the country, indeed across the world over the last several years, of these types of situations,” said Christopher Rodriguez, director of the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, which helped facilitate the trainings.
This is what cities across the country have accepted as necessary, as the fear of mass shootings intensifies with every elementary school classroom and holiday parade shattered by indiscriminate gunfire. In San Antonio, for example, a group of bar tenders signed up for an active-shooter training session held at a local pub. In the D.C. region, everyone from students to pastors to bar owners have learned how to barricade doors and scan rooms for exits.
“Are you guys studying what happened down in Uvalde?” asked Gabriel Tolliver, a 55-year-old film and TV industry executive, at the training Thursday.
“Yeah, that was gut-wrenching,” DeSantis said.
Fear over recent shootings has some avoiding crowds, businesses
Police told audience members at the afternoon session that places of commerce were the most common sites of mass shootings and reminded attendees of some of the worst moments in their industry’s history. The shooting at Pulse nightclub in Florida that left 49 people dead. The day a man opened fire at a crowd at a music festival in Las Vegas and slaughtered 60 concertgoers. The rampage at a movie theater in Aurora, Co. that killed 12. The hope, public safety officials told the audience, is that D.C. residents and venue operators could learn from the tragedies of the past to prepare for what could come.
“Do you hear the stress in their voices? And they are trained professionals,” DeSantis said, as he played a video of authorities in Aurora, Colo., responding to reports of an active shooting at the theater. “We are trying to reduce stress level in you if something like this ever happens.”
The training is one of multiple strategies from the District government to keep bars and clubs safe in D.C., as covid restrictions have been rolled back and officials say the nightlife corridors have become more crowded than they were before the pandemic. In June, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced a pilot program that deploys teams of police officers, transportation officials and other agency employees on the H Street, Connecticut Avenue and U Street corridors to disrupt “patterns of violence” on weekend nights.
Authorities said that not all task force team members have received this interagency active-shooter training, which is still in its early stages. There are no more open sessions scheduled, officials said, but community members can request the trainings.
On Thursday, a cast of public safety officials offered advice about how trainees could save lives — walking them through how to recognize warning signs of potential mass shooters, what to do if a gunman is nearby and how to treat bullet wounds.
D.C. Fire and Emergency Services Capt. Charles Steptoe taught the group about how to treat gunshot injuries depending on where the bullet strikes.
“Hold your arm out,” he said, tying a tourniquet around the arm of William Howard, a 25-year-old who owns a media company that operates in bars across D.C. “Okay, this is where the pain would come in.”
Howard, who came to the event to make sure he knew how to safely run a business, said he walked away eager to join D.C.'s Community Emergency Response Team — a group of volunteers that support first responders at disaster sites.
“I really appreciate this entire thing,” he said. | 2022-07-15T00:05:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. offers active-shooter training to nightlife and church workers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/dc-active-shooter-training/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/dc-active-shooter-training/ |
Biden nominates three new judges to D.C. courts
The D.C. Superior Court and D.C. Court of Appeals had been confronting a record number of empty seats
The D.C. Superior Court building in downtown Washington. (Keith L. Alexander/The Washington Post)
President Biden on Wednesday announced he was nominating three new judges to D.C. courts.
The president nominated Vijay Shanker to the D.C. Court of Appeals. Shanker is the deputy chief of the appellate section in the criminal division of the Justice Department, where he has worked since 2005.
Biden also nominated two prosecutors — Laura Crane and Veronica Sanchez — from the U.S. attorney’s office in the District to serve as judges in D.C. Superior Court.
Crane has prosecuted cases in the office since 2014 and had previously worked at the law firm WilmerHale. Sanchez has worked as a prosecutor since 2009 and had previously worked as a trial attorney in the antitrust division of the Justice Department.
The judgeships in D.C. Superior Court and the D.C. Court of Appeals are federally appointed positions. But nominees for the D.C. courts go through a more complicated nomination process than federal judges across the country. The judges in the District are first selected by the city’s Judicial Nomination Commission, whose members are selected by locally and federally appointed officials. The commission sends its selections to the president, who nominates one and sends that person to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for consideration.
As of late January, the D.C. Superior Court and D.C. Court of Appeals were confronting a record 19 total empty seats — 16 of which were in Superior Court, a quarter of its entire bench, though the Senate soon after confirmed three D.C. judicial nominees. The empty seats, due largely to judges retiring, left the courthouse strained with an onslaught of cases, many of which had been delayed more than two years due to the pandemic and are now being rescheduled.
According to the White House, the president’s nominations Wednesday make up the 23rd round of nominees for federal judicial positions and his tenth slate of nominations this year. He has put forward a total of 123 judicial nominees. | 2022-07-15T00:27:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden nominates three new judges to D.C. courts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/biden-nominates-dc-judges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/biden-nominates-dc-judges/ |
MLB agent sues Doug Gottlieb over Freddie Freeman tweet
Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman left the Braves as a free agent this past offseason. (Jeff Roberson/AP)
Baseball agent Casey Close is suing radio personality Doug Gottlieb for libel, according to court documents obtained by ESPN on Thursday, providing the latest twist in a weeks-long saga involving the agent and Los Angeles Dodgers star Freddie Freeman.
It stems from Freeman’s offseason decision to leave the Atlanta Braves, the only team he had played for in 12 MLB seasons, to join the Dodgers on a six-year, $162 million free agent contract. The deal turned heads because of Freeman’s history with the Braves and his importance to their 2021 World Series run.
Close, one of the biggest agents in the game and a part of Freeman’s team at Excel Sports Management, reportedly engaged in a long negotiation with the Braves that ended with Atlanta going in a different direction. On March 15, with Freeman still on the open market, Atlanta traded for Oakland A’s first baseman Matt Olson and quickly signed him to an eight-year, $168 million contract extension. Two days later, Freeman joined the Dodgers.
Both players settled into their new roles as the season began and both the Dodgers and Braves started strong. It wasn’t until late June, when the two teams met for a three-game series in Atlanta, that issues arose.
Freddie is back home. 😭 pic.twitter.com/Yuo4sDSLAQ
Freeman, making his first appearance in Atlanta as a visiting player, was visibly emotional throughout the opening game of the Braves series. Four days later, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that Freeman had parted ways with Close and Excel. Olney also stated that those close to Freeman believed “his weekend-long emotion was tied, to some degree, to lingering anger and sadness that his negotiations concluded with him playing with a team other than the club that initially drafted him.”
In the aftermath of Olney’s reporting, Gottlieb — a Fox Sports Radio host and former college basketball star — sent a viral tweet that tied everything together, claiming that Close never told Freeman about the Braves’ final offer and Freeman was unaware until visiting Atlanta. When he was told, Gottlieb said, Freeman fired Close.
The next day, Close issued a statement through Excel stating that the Braves were responsible for creating a “false narrative” around Freeman’s departure.
“I will not stand by as the circumstances surrounding Freddie Freeman’s departure are mischaracterized,” Close said.
The agent also spoke to Sports Illustrated about Gottlieb’s tweet.
Now, a legal option has been chosen as Close and Excel are suing Gottlieb for libel. The complaint filed Thursday claims that Gottlieb’s tweet damaged the plaintiffs’ names, businesses and reputations, and that “Close has received death threats from people believed to be Atlanta Braves fans.”
“Plaintiffs have been damaged in an amount to be determined at trial but estimated to be tens of millions of dollars,” the document reads.
Freeman has not commented publicly on the matter. In a statement to ESPN, Close claimed this lawsuit was an attempt to correct any misconceptions.
“The Complaint sets the record straight as to what occurred during the negotiations with the Atlanta Braves,” he said. | 2022-07-15T00:31:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MLB agent Casey Close sues Doug Gottlieb over Freddie Freeman tweet - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/doug-gottlieb-freddie-freeman-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/doug-gottlieb-freddie-freeman-lawsuit/ |
Dylan Strome had 22 goals and 26 assists for Chicago last season. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
Strome had 48 points, including a career-high 22 goals, with the Chicago Blackhawks last season. The 25-year-old also averaged a career-high 17 minutes 26 seconds of ice time. He played center last season with Chicago, mostly on a line with Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat, but also can skate on the wing. Strome was drafted No. 3 overall in 2015 by the Arizona Coyotes. | 2022-07-15T00:31:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dylan Strome signs with Washington Capitals on one-year contract - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/dylan-strome-washington-capitals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/dylan-strome-washington-capitals/ |
Mystics forward Elena Delle Donne (11) tied a season high with 26 points against Chiney Ogwumike (13) and the Los Angeles Sparks on Tuesday. (Keith Birmingham/The Orange County Register/AP)
PHOENIX — Mike Thibault remembers the first time he saw Elena Delle Donne play. She was an eighth-grader running point guard and had a sequence that Thibault recalls to this day.
Delle Donne came off the pick and roll and dribbled behind her back before stepping back for a three-pointer. The next time down she threw a cross-court dart of a pass to a teammate. Thibault just shrugs his shoulders and turns his palms to the sky at the thought of it.
Nearly two decades later, Delle Donne has two WNBA MVP trophies, a league championship and an Olympic gold medal. She’s healthy and helping the Washington Mystics look like title contenders with the team’s offense in its best stretch of the season.
“I preach all the time about consistency,” Thibault said. “Well, it’s a lot more consistent when Elena plays most of the games. It’s no coincidence that our offensive efficiency is going up the more she’s played.
The Mystics were 4-1 in their past five games heading into Thursday night’s game at Phoenix, and the offense has started to look like it should with all of the weaponry on the roster. The team averaged 78.7 points and ranked 10th in the league through the first 20 games of the season. In the past five, it has put up 86 points per game and set its season high for points twice.
Washington is also third in the WNBA in field goal percentage (48.0), fifth in three-point percentage (39.8) and third in effective field goal percentage (55.3) over the course of those past five games.
The presence of Delle Donne seems to be the biggest factor; she has been available more after the grueling stretch of the first 20 games of the season. The team implemented scheduled rest days to help manage her surgically repaired back early this season. She missed only one of the past five games, a loss to Connecticut on July 3.
“Having a player like [Delle Donne] just changes how defenses have to play against you,” Mystics forward Alysha Clark said. “So it opens different things up. And then, too … our bench is coming in playing really confidently right now.
“And I just think we’re finally starting to understand where each other likes to play, have a little chemistry in that way. Just learning one another and finally being in a place where we can just play and flow.”
Delle Donne added: “This has all been part of the plan. I’ve been able to continue to get stronger and continue to work, get comfortable.”
The 94-81 win against the Los Angeles Sparks on Tuesday was a perfect example of that. The 94 points were a season high as were Delle Donne’s 26 points, Natasha Cloud’s 21 and Shatori Walker-Kimbrough’s 12. Delle Donne was efficient (10 for 14) and used a bevy of moves to beat double teams and score through contact. She also got the Sparks’ defense out of sorts by finding open teammates when the extra defenders came.
But it’s not all about Delle Donne. Cloud directed traffic as well as a point guard can against the Sparks. Walker-Kimbrough played so well that she was on the floor down the stretch of the fourth quarter. Everyone seemed to make the extra pass, but it was more than just swinging the ball around the perimeter. Passers used ball fakes to move defenders and found wide-open shooters in perfect position despite challenging angles.
“I think that’s just the evolution of offense as you go throughout the season,” Clark said. “You understand tendencies of other teams and what they like to do on defense, and you exploit that. So that’s the difference between just the next pass and the extra right pass. It’s just knowing what’s coming and reading what they give you.”
Thibault credited the improvements to getting out of the tough part of the schedule and having a chance to practice and shoot the ball more. The team also has been able to get more reps in running the same sets, and Thibault has liked the increased pace of play.
Walker-Kimbrough and Myisha Hines-Allen have come off the bench to bolster a second unit that has struggled at times. Walker-Kimbrough can be streaky but has proved to be a knockdown shooter during her career. She has posted back-to-back 12-point games and tends to get a lot of open looks. Hines-Allen scored 14 points on 6-for-9 shooting in a win over Atlanta on July 6, and her decision-making has helped the offensive flow.
“It was real slow in the beginning of the season,” Walker-Kimbrough said. “We have good coaches and good teammates that genuinely have confidence in me. And, honestly, it’s just trusting the work. Not getting too discouraged. Trusting the process, trusting the journey.”
The Mystics have been one of the best defensive teams in the league this season, ranking first in points allowed (75.7) and second in defensive rating (95.4). Now the offense is starting to catch up with 11 games remaining as the team puts itself in position for what it hopes is a deep playoff run.
Clark added that basketball is “a game of ebbs and flows” and she feels this is the offensive tide turning — as long as the Mystics keep taking good shots.
“Just keeping our aggression on both ends of the floor,” Clark said. “When we come out and other teams don't feel us first, it kind of has an effect on our offense. Having that attack mentality on the offensive side, putting pressure on the defense to have to guard, I think is just how our team plays best.
“Just being able to keep that intensity and that aggressiveness on both sides of the ball [and] we’ll be all right.” | 2022-07-15T00:31:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mystics finding their offense at the right time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/mystics-offense-elena-delle-donne/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/mystics-offense-elena-delle-donne/ |
University of California at Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges in D.C. on July 12. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Everyone agrees it was an epic own. There’s much less agreement about who got owned.
In Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) asked University of California at Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges whether she thought a baby that is not yet born has value. This ensued:
“I believe a person with the capacity for pregnancy has value,” she answered. “They have intelligence. They have agency —”
“No, I’m talking about the baby,” Cornyn interrupted.
“And I’m talking about the person with a capacity for pregnancy,” she retorted. When Cornyn noted that she wasn’t answering the question, she said, “I’m answering a more interesting question to me.”
Then, when it was his turn to speak, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) returned to this exchange, saying, “You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be ... women?”
In even tones, Bridges replied that while many cisgender women have the capacity for pregnancy, many don’t, while some trans men and nonbinary people do. But after a little back-and-forth, she gave up. “So, I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic,” she said with an exasperated laugh, “and it opens up trans people to violence.”
Fareed Zakaria: Forget pronouns. Democrats need to become the party of building things.
Within those rarefied circles, Bridges’s answers were exquisitely and exactly correct. She allowed no hint that late-term fetuses might have moral value, because that might suggest their interests could be weighed against those of the, well, pregnancy-capable. Nor did she concede an inch to the idea that biology can trump gender identity. And when she ran out of patience with Hawley’s questions, she pounced in exactly the prescribed manner: Your questions are transphobic, Senator, and you are putting trans people at risk of violence or suicide by denying their lived reality.
Yet outside those circles, Bridges’s answers don’t really sound so convincing. In most of America, “Does a late-term fetus have value?” is a softball. And when Hawley leaped in to ask whether women are the ones who give birth — a question few Americans today would struggle with — she resorted to extended question-begging. That might be fine for a Berkeley classroom. But it just won’t do for a political debate in which the majority of voters disagree with you.
Anyone who has ever tried to convince anyone of anything should be able to see that Bridges’s approach was counterproductive. Why, then, did so many articles and tweets cheer the way she “SHUT DOWN” Hawley?
Because there is one place that snickering, eye-rolling and so forth are very effective: within an insular group, where they help delineate the lines of acceptable belief. A sufficiently incredulous “Are you suggesting … ?” effectively signals a silent corollary: “… because if you are, we’ll shun you.” It tells people that this topic is not up for discussion.
Within progressive institutions, “that’s transphobic” is another such signal, and it works … within progressive institutions. In fact, it works too well; it leaves them unprepared to argue with outsiders.
When I was reporting on the story of transgender college swimmer Lia Thomas, I noticed a curious disconnect. If you read newspapers, watched television or listened to academic experts, you might have thought that most people supported Thomas, with some dissent from a few reactionaries or jealous competitors. Yet the overwhelming majority of people I actually spoke to thought it was unfair for her to compete in women’s events, even though most of them were liberals who would never dream of voting Republican.
I wondered then whether that decision might have gone differently, or at least been less surprising, if Thomas’s supporters had been forced to grapple more directly with the things her opponents were saying — quietly, in private, where they couldn’t be overheard. And I wonder, now, what further surprises are in store if progressives can’t figure out how to talk to the majority of the country that disagrees with them on a whole lot of things. | 2022-07-15T00:32:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges’s Senate testimony is a Rorschach test - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/berkeley-law-professors-senate-testimony-didnt-go-how-left-thinks-it-did/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/berkeley-law-professors-senate-testimony-didnt-go-how-left-thinks-it-did/ |
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on July 8. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/AP)
The West’s trump card is its fundamental economic strength — if it can summon the will to exercise it. President Biden said on Feb. 24, the day the war began, that he would “impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time. … We’re going to impair their ability to compete in a high-tech 21st-century economy.”
This threat of an ever-tightening squeeze on Russia’s economy was underlined by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on April 25: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks in similar terms of winning a “very protracted” conflict that could last years.
The best evidence that sanctions are working, albeit slowly, comes from Russian officials themselves. “The situation is not easy,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged last month. Herman Gref, the head of Sberbank, Russia’s largest, warned: “We may need around a decade to return [the] economy to the 2021 levels.” He told journalists recently that cargo shipments to Russia had fallen sixfold because of Western sanctions.
“We’re playing the long game, too,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told me on Thursday. The United States assembled a coalition of three dozen countries to support the sanctions, she noted, with this satisfying result: Exports of semiconductors to Russia have fallen 74 percent compared with a year ago. “You can’t sustain a modern military without semiconductors,” Raimondo observed.
Because of high energy prices, Russia still has cash. But it’s growing harder for Moscow to buy what it needs because of Western export controls. A senior Commerce Department official told me that U.S. exports to Russia of proscribed products — basically anything that’s needed for the Russian military, technology companies or the energy sector — have declined 95.9 percent by value compared to a year ago.
The Biden administration might be overly optimistic about the effect of sanctions. But a study last month by the Peterson Institute for International Economics shows significant impact. Using export data from 54 countries (which accounted for 90 percent of Russia’s imports last year), they found that the sanctioning countries’ exports to Russia have fallen 60 percent since the second half of 2021 — and that exports from non-sanctioning countries have fallen by 40 percent. | 2022-07-15T00:32:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Putin's long game in Ukraine could falter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/russia-putin-ukraine-sanctions-biden/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/14/russia-putin-ukraine-sanctions-biden/ |
A nurse fills a syringe with malaria vaccine before administering it to an infant at the Lumumba Sub-County hospital in Kisumu, Kenya on July 1. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)
The coronavirus pandemic coincided with the worst backslide in global vaccination coverage in a generation, according to new data from the United Nations. This came despite a historic effort to develop and distribute billions of coronavirus vaccines during the pandemic.
The new data, released late Thursday by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, showed that average global childhood coverage for vaccines developed for 11 key diseases had fallen from 71 percent in 2019 to 68 percent in 2021, marking the first time in over 30 years that the metric had fallen.
The decline for some key vaccine programs was worse. The full three-dose coverage for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine (DTP) was 81 percent in 2021, a drop of five percentage points from 2019. DTP is often used as a benchmark for vaccine coverage globally as it’s been in wide use for decades.There were similarly alarming drops in coverage of measles and polio, two diseases that can have devastating and deadly impacts.
Vaccine coverage for human papillomavirus (HPV) also declined by five percentage points since 2019. As the vaccine is relatively new and not as widely used as some others, this meant that a quarter of all global coverage has been lost, a huge setback for the health of women and children.
“This is a red alert for child health. We are witnessing the largest sustained drop in childhood immunization in a generation. The consequences will be measured in lives,” said Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF, the U.N. agency focused on childhood health. “Covid-19 is not an excuse.”
The number of children either not fully vaccinated with DTP, which prevents a number of potentially fatal illnesses including whooping cough, or not vaccinated at all for it rose from 19 million in 2019 to 25 million in 2021, the data shows. The spread of these children is deeply unequal, with 18 million in low and middle-income countries; India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Ethiopia and the Philippines recorded the highest numbers.
Why Covax, the best hope for vaccinating the world, was doomed to fall short
Some experts fear that with rising populations in Africa, as well as sharp demographic change in many parts of the world leading to more children, it could become even harder to catch up after the pandemic.
That the decline in these vaccinations came amid the global coronavirus vaccine effort may seem surprising. By any measure, the development of coronavirus vaccines came at a record pace. The global rollout, though rife with logistical problems and hoarding by wealthy nations, has seen an enormous 12 billion doses administered since the pandemic began.
But despite the attention given to vaccines over the past two years, the pandemic itself had many knock-on impacts on regular vaccination efforts, from lockdowns to closed borders to the general impact of huge levels of illness and death.
Even the unprecedented focus on vaccination efforts could have had a negative impact, given a prominent backlash from those anti-vaccine or vaccine hesitancy. Money that once went to vaccinations for long-standing diseases like measles and polio has in some cases been diverted.
“There’s never been more money in global public health than there is now,” Lily Caprani, head of government advocacy for UNICEF. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to children’s services. The opposite is true: basic essential health services and routine immunization have experienced a massive diversion [of funding].”
Caprani added that while numerous global efforts have launched to better prepare for the next pandemic, few had taken close looks at “basic frontline health,” such as community-based health care workers.
Attention on the pandemic itself has declined recently too, especially in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, where the domestic focus has been on inflation and the international focus largely confined to the war in Ukraine. Demand for doses in many countries is down, with tracking firm Airfinity recently announcing that at least 1 billion had been wasted during the pandemic.
However, the coronavirus could still cause further disruption. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned this week that “new waves of the virus demonstrate again that covid-19 is nowhere near over,” with concern in particular about the BA. 4 and BA. 5 subvariants.
The rapid spread of monkeypox internationally, far beyond where the disease was commonly found in the past, has also posed a new challenge to vaccination efforts. There has been heated criticism of the FDA for not ensuring there was enough supply in the United States to meet demand.
Global health talks clouded by conspiracy theories about pandemic treaty
There is some hope that vaccination efforts can get back on track. Some countries managed to maintain high levels of coverage during the pandemic, including Uganda and Pakistan. Ongoing efforts to strengthen global health structures after covid-19 could be used to better ensure routine immunization goes forward.
“Planning and tackling Covid-19 should also go hand-in-hand with vaccinating for killer diseases like measles, pneumonia and diarrhea,” Tedros said in a Thursday statement. “It’s not a question of either/or, it’s possible to do both.”
Jennifer Requejo, global health data lead for UNICEF, said that while the current trends were alarming, global vaccination rates have rallied after previous periods of stagnation.” There are things that can be done,” Requejo said. “We know that it’s possible through political commitment [and] through greater resources.”
But the global rollout of coronavirus vaccines has shown that even with enormous resources, achieving high levels of immunization can be a struggle. “Even in high-income countries, you saw the huge effort it took to mobilize these armies of vaccinators,” said Caprani. “And they simply don’t have that workforce in low and middle-income countries with weaker health systems.”
Requejo said that even before the pandemic, coverage rates of vaccination for DTP had stagnated in part due to rapidly increasing population numbers in key countries. “There are some regions, like Africa, where you have an increasing birth cohort. So 85 percent coverage in 2008 is X number of people, but its X plus a couple of million more that you need to deliver just to maintain that level,” Requejo said.
The U.N. Population Division estimated Monday that the world’s population will reach 8 billion later this year. Some of the countries expected to see their population increase dramatically, such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, already have millions of unvaccinated children. Both are expected to see their population grow by well over 100 million by 2050. | 2022-07-15T00:33:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Global vaccinations backslide amid pandemic, United Nations said - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/14/vaccines-dtp-measles-polio/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/14/vaccines-dtp-measles-polio/ |
Susie Steiner, author of stylish British crime thrillers, dies at 51
As a Guardian journalist, she helped popularize the “Keep Calm Carry On” poster. She later wrote best-selling novels about Manon Bradshaw, an English police detective
Author Susie Steiner was known for her trilogy of novels about Manon Bradshaw, a volatile detective in the English county of Cambridgeshire. (Jonathan Ring)
During a writers’ retreat in southwest England, Guardian journalist Susie Steiner spotted a poster that seemed to capture the essence of British stoicism in five morale-boosting words: “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Printed in white block letters on a plain red background, the message was a source of comfort for Ms. Steiner, especially as she labored over her first novel, a family drama about sheep farmers on the Yorkshire moors.
When she returned to her newspaper office in late 2005, she included the poster in an article about her favorite gifts for the home, noting that the motivational picture dated to World War II and had been rediscovered a few years earlier by a secondhand bookshop in Northumberland. “Truly,” she wrote, “there is no better mantra to live by.”
After her story came out, “all hell broke loose,” said Barter Books co-owner Stuart Manley, who had started selling copies of the poster after finding one of the original prints in a box of old books. In a 2020 interview with the Guardian, he credited Ms. Steiner’s article with turning the poster into a national phenomenon, leading to a host of derivative mugs, postcards, flags and pint glasses bearing cheeky messages like “Keep Calm and Drink On.”
Like other Brits, Ms. Steiner grew exasperated by the trend, even as she took its message to heart. She spent more than a decade working on her farming novel, “Homecoming,” and by the time it was published in 2013 she had lost most of her vision to a hereditary disorder. She was deemed legally blind just six months after she sold the book at a publishing auction.
“It can sometimes seem that just when you get the thing you want most in life, something else gets taken away, as if some celestial reckoning is going on,” she wrote in an article at the time.
Relying on a small window of vision in her right eye, she went on to write critically acclaimed novels about a volatile but sympathetic police detective, Manon Bradshaw, who solves murders in Cambridgeshire even as she struggles to raise her adopted son as a single mother and confronts mundane domestic problems like a broken coat rack. “Her sexual fantasies, such as they are, generally involve men performing minor DIY while retaining their emotional equilibrium,” Ms. Steiner wrote.
Just after she turned in the manuscript for her third and final Bradshaw book, “Remain Silent,” in May 2019, Ms. Steiner was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. She had written the novel, she later said, “with a 9cm tumor pushing my brain over its midline. But I didn’t know about it.”
Ms. Steiner was 51 when she died July 2 at a hospital in the Hampstead section of London. Her husband, Tom Happold, confirmed the death, of cancer.
While Ms. Steiner’s first novel was generally well received, she established her reputation as a stylish and witty writer after turning toward crime fiction with her Bradshaw books, which made bestseller lists in England and found a wide audience in the United States. The first two volumes, “Missing, Presumed” (2016) and “Persons Unknown” (2017), were shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, a top honor for British crime fiction.
Both books were “saved from sinking into soap opera by winning prose, sympathetic characters and an appreciation of life’s joys as keen as a knowledge of its dangers,” wrote Wall Street Journal reviewer Tom Nolan.
“What I loved about Susie’s crime writing was that it combined an exceptional kind of character study with a superbly plotted mystery and police procedural,” her American editor, Andrea Walker of Random House, said in an email. “Detective Manon Bradshaw’s personal life — the mystery of how she might find true love; how she might be a working parent without having a mental breakdown; how she might lose the extra 20 pounds she’s been carrying for decades — was given as much weight as the mystery behind the central crime in the story.
“Long before the proliferation of this kind of character-driven crime series on Netflix and the success of a show like ‘Mare of Easttown,’ ” she added, “Susie was writing this kind of fiction.”
Susan Elizabeth Steiner was born in London on June 29, 1971, and grew up on the city’s north side, where she studied at the Henrietta Barnett School for girls. Her parents, John Steiner and the former Deborah Pickering, were both psychoanalysts. In writing novels that explored characters’ fears, dreams, hidden motivations and desires, Ms. Steiner effectively became a psychoanalyst herself, her husband said in a phone interview.
Ms. Steiner said she was an “obsessional journal writer” when she was a teenager — “mostly melodrama about my heightened emotional states” — and turned toward journalism during her junior year at the University of York, when she started writing for a student publication called Nouse, in what she described as an effort to “make it look like I always wanted to do journalism.”
After graduating in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in English, she wrote for newspapers including the Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, Times of London and Guardian, which she joined in 2001. She worked there as a writer and editor, focusing on lifestyle features, while writing fiction on the side, and left the paper in 2012 to become a full-time author.
By then she had given up driving as a result of retinitis pigmentosa, the genetic condition that robbed her of her sight. As her vision diminished, writing seemed to get easier. “My sight loss, which has begun to limit me only in the last five years, has accompanied an increase in my creative output as a novelist,” she wrote in a 2016 essay for the Independent. “The two seem intertwined, as if the less I can see of the world, the more I can focus inwardly.”
Ms. Steiner married Happold, a former Guardian journalist who now runs a video production agency, in 2006. In addition to her husband, survivors include two sons, George and Ben; her parents; a brother; and a sister.
Before she began her cancer treatments, Ms. Steiner started researching a potential novel based on the life of Bernard Spilsbury, a British pathologist and pioneer of modern forensic science. That project was put on hold during her chemotherapy and radiation treatments, when reading became a “lifeline” as she turned toward books about mortality, grief and cancer, all while isolated at home amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“It falls to writers to make sense of the terror of illness,” she wrote in a 2020 essay for the Guardian, “because people who are suffering — people who are lonely, sick and bereaved — need the solace that stories provide, to see their suffering reflected in the suffering of characters. I’m not sure that I will want to read lockdown novels: it’s bad enough living it. There are an additional 35,000 bereaved people or families out there now. That seems a more pressing need: to talk about grief.” | 2022-07-15T01:01:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Susie Steiner, author of stylish British crime thrillers, dies at 51 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/14/author-susie-steiner-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/14/author-susie-steiner-dead/ |
Fairfax students call for sex ed reform after fall of Roe v. Wade
An abortion rights advocate protests in Kentucky. (Jon Cherry/Photographer: Jon Cherry/Getty I)
Students are calling on Fairfax County Public Schools to reform its sex education program — adding more information about contraception and increasing student access to contraceptives — in response to the fall of Roe v. Wade.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling in June that overturned Roe, the landmark case that had ensured a constitutional right to abortion for half a century. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas also suggested the court could reverse landmark cases that established the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage.
Separately, a month before the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Fairfax County School Board postponed acting on the recommendations of a committee convened to discuss its sex education program, known as the Family Life Engagement (FLE) curriculum. The committee had recommended several major changes including making sex ed classes for fourth- through eighth-graders co-ed, rather than separated by gender. Now, the school system plans to gather community feedback on this idea next fall before taking definitive action.
These twin developments at the national and local level alarmed some students, said Rivka Vizcardo-Lichter, 14, who is a member of LGBTQ student group the Pride Liberation Project. The group developed a list of demands, including immediate adoption of the FLE committee’s recommendations. And, to increase pressure on district officials, she and roughly three dozen other students, in conjunction with the Fairfax NAACP, held a rally outside a school board meeting Thursday evening.
“Why we’re doing this is because it’s pretty clear that this whole country is at a crisis point with the reasoning of the Dobbs decision,” Vizcardo-Lichter said. “It’s very clear that the Supreme Court can no longer be trusted to ensure key protections for marginalized communities … it’s important our school districts recognize this and take action.”
In addition to asking the district to adopt the FLE committee recommendations, the student group is requesting that Fairfax expand its FLE curriculum to include detailed discussions of contraception and reproductive health clinics. The Pride Liberation Project is also urging Fairfax to “explore contraceptive access in our schools and broadening the FLE curriculum in general,” Vizcardo-Lichter said.
Asked about the students’ requests Thursday, Fairfax spokeswoman Helen Lloyd said in a statement — referencing the proposed end of gender segregation in sex ed — that “this is something the School Board will be reviewing this coming school year as outlined during the work session in June.”
The request that the school system provide students access to contraception “is outside the scope and purpose of … FLE instruction,” school spokeswoman Julie Moult wrote in an email.
The Fairfax FLE curriculum comprises instruction across grades K-12 on the subjects of “family living and community relationships,” “abstinence education,” “the value of postponing sexual activity,” “the benefits of adoption as a positive choice in the event of an unwanted pregnancy” and “human sexuality and human reproduction,” according to the district’s website. Parents are allowed to review the complete curricula for the program and to remove their students from lessons if they so choose.
Instruction on sex ed topics such as puberty, which begins in fourth grade, is offered in a gender-separate manner through eighth grade and in gender-combined settings thereafter, according to Moult.
Fairfax maintains a standing committee charged with advising school officials on the FLE curriculum. The group meets throughout the school year and presents an annual report in the spring. For the 2021-2022 school year, the 35-member committee comprised high school students, parents, teachers, administrators, school board appointees, health professionals, county residents and members of various faith communities.
In May, the committee presented recommendations to the school board including adding discussion of “gender identity” to a 10th-grade lesson on “Human Sexuality,” removing a testicular self-exam video from a 10th-grade lesson and “[exploring] instruction of gender identity in elementary school and a more inclusive curriculum overall.” Its most controversial suggestion, though, was ending gender segregation in fourth-grade classes on puberty as well as in fifth-eighth grade lessons on puberty, reproductive systems, the reproductive process, sexually transmitted infections and abstinence.
The committee wrote in its report that segregating students by biological sex was “not inclusive” of LGBTQ students.
Further, “dividing students into boys and girls classes sends a message that bodies different than their own should not be talked about and are mysterious,” committee members wrote in the report. “When students are separated by boys and girls, it affirms a rigid binary based on anatomy.”
The report noted that several nearby school districts — including those in Virginia’s Arlington County and Alexandria City, as well as Maryland’s Prince George’s County — offer mostly gender-combined sex ed instruction. The report acknowledged, however, that many other regional districts continue to separate students by gender, including those in Virginia’s Loudoun County, Prince William County, Chesapeake City and Suffolk City. It is unclear what the picture is nationally.
The idea of gender-combined lessons drew immediate pushback from some parents, according to Stacy Langton, a 52-year-old mother of two Fairfax students who has pushed to remove books from Fairfax school libraries that she deemed inappropriate for their sexual content. Langton, who said she attends every single school board meeting, said parents often spoke against gender combination in sex ed classes — which she herself strongly opposes.
“That would make my children very, very uncomfortable. My son is still in that phase where girls are icky,” Langton said. “I just think that would be incredibly awkward … and it’s really just not appropriate, and I think most parents do not want this for their kids.”
At a May meeting, the school board decided to “pursue further study and extended community review next before Board action on recommendations,” according to Fairfax documents posted online. That means all revisions to Fairfax’s sex ed curriculum are on pause at least until the fall.
This is atypical for the sex ed curriculum review process, according to Fairfax spokeswoman Moult. In a normal year, the school board votes on the FLE committee’s report and recommendations in June. The delay is “due to the timeline overlapping with the end of the school year and the significance of the changes being proposed,” Moult said.
Meanwhile, some students have decided they are tired of waiting.
Roughly 40 of them showed up on Thursday outside Luther Jackson Middle School — the location of the school board meeting, close to a major road — holding rainbow flags and handmade posters decorated with slogans such as, “HONK IF YOU SUPPORT TRANS KIDS” and “LGBTQ+ RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.” Led by a teen with a megaphone, they chanted, “Co-ed! FLE!”
Standing across the street from them were a handful of parents who regularly attend board meetings, including Langton. Those parents hoisted pictures of school board members plastered with the word “RESIGN.”
Vizcardo-Lichter, who led the protest and who identifies as a member of the LGBTQ community, said everything about Fairfax’s sex ed curriculum — both its form and its substance — feels inadequate to the national moment. She said that segregating students by gender is hurtful and exclusive, and that it creates a “hostile environment” for transgender and nonbinary students, those who do not identify fully as either male or female.
“If there are closeted transgender students, they’d feel uncomfortable being put in the class that doesn’t align with their gender, but they’re not able to say that because they’re closeted or it’s not safe,” she said. “For nonbinary students it’s upsetting and unsafe to be told you need to either go in the class for girls or the class for boys.”
She’s also deeply concerned by the content of sex education lessons, which she said leave out any useful information about contraception: “In practice, it’s essentially just teachers repeating ‘Abstinence 100! There’s no other option!’ ”
Asked about Vizcardo-Lichter’s assertions, Fairfax spokeswoman Moult wrote in a statement that “both abstinence and contraception are included in instruction. Contraception is included in instruction in grades 8-12.” She wrote that 10th-grade FLE lessons include a mention of Planned Parenthood “as a resource for students experiencing unintended pregnancy.”
Now that Roe is gone, Vizcardo-Lichter said, what she views as a dearth of information could prove life-threatening for some students.
“Now that reproductive rights are being restricted across the country, it’s important that students have access to an evidence-based sexual education curriculum that actually talks about reproductive rights,” she said. “And we need to recognize that my peers and myself need to be equipped to talk about these issues in a safe and respectful way.” | 2022-07-15T01:19:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fairfax County Public Schools students want sex ed reform post-Roe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/14/fairfax-students-sex-ed-reform-roe/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/14/fairfax-students-sex-ed-reform-roe/ |
Man killed outside Domino’s Pizza in Prince George’s County
A man was killed Thursday evening outside a Domino’s Pizza in Forestville, Md., and police said the shooter still at large.
Prince George’s County police said the shooting occurred about 5:45 p.m. One man was found on the sidewalk outside the pizza place, which is in a strip mall at the corner of Marlboro Pike and Donnell Drive. He had multiple gunshot wounds and succumbed to his injuries after being taken to the hospital.
No one is in custody and police did not provide a description of a suspect. County Police Cpl. Antonia Washington said she could not confirm whether either the victim or the perpetrator worked in the shopping center. | 2022-07-15T01:50:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man killed outside Domino's in Forestville, Md. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/man-killed-dominos-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/man-killed-dominos-prince-georges/ |
The House Jan. 6 select committee's chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), closes the seventh public hearing in Washington on July 12. (Reuters/Pool)
“The Department notified us that many U.S. Secret Service (USSS) text messages, from January 5 and 6, 2021 were erased as part of a device-replacement program,” he wrote in a letter dated Wednesday and obtained by The Washington Post. The letter was earlier reported on by CNN.
The Secret Service’s text messages could provide insight into the agency’s actions on the day of the insurrection and possibly those of former president Donald Trump. A former White House official last month told the House select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol that Trump knew his supporters were armed, wanted to lead the mob to the Capitol and physically assailed the senior Secret Service agent who told him he could not.
Cuffari, nominated by Trump in 2019 and confirmed by the Senate, has faced significant criticism since he took over the office. His first-year audits plummeted to historic lows, he clashed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the veracity of an inspection of a detention center, and he blocked investigations into the Secret Service’s handling of George Floyd protests in Lafayette Square and the spread of the coronavirus in its ranks, documents show.
The nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), an independent watchdog, has called on President Biden to remove Cuffari.
Cuffari’s office did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday, and DHS had no immediate comment on his allegations.
A person briefed on the Secret Service’s reaction to Cuffari’s letter said the agency rejects his characterizations that they eliminated or deleted records after Cuffari’s office requested them.
According to two people briefed on the documents request, the Secret Service began a long preplanned, agencywide replacement of staff telephones to improve communication across the agency in January 2021.
It wasn’t until sometime in February 2021 that Cuffari’s office requested that the Secret Service produce records that centered on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol, seeking internal agency communications, memorandums, emails and telephonic records such as text messages.
By the time of the request, the people said, as many as a third of Secret Service personnel had been given new cellphones.
Most of the replacement program began with staff in Washington offices, and if they did not back up their old text messages, the people said, the information from Jan. 6 and the days before that is lost. That could conceivably include the texts sent and received by former White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato and former Trump security detail leader Bobby Engel and other senior leaders in the Secret Service.
This device replacement program, and resulting failure to back-up texts, does not appear to affect emails.
The Secret Service has a policy requiring employees to back up and store government communications when they retire old electronic or telephonic devices, but in practice, staff do not consistently back up texts from phones.
A similar issue came up in 2018, when the Justice Department inspector general said he used “forensic tools” to recover missing text messages from two senior FBI officials who had investigated Hillary Clinton and Trump and exchanged notes critical of the president. The missing messages generated criticism when GOP leaders and the president questioned how the FBI failed to preserve them.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said lawmakers “need to get to the bottom of whether the Secret Service destroyed federal records or the Department of Homeland Security obstructed oversight.”
“The DHS Inspector General needs these records to do its independent oversight and the public deserves to have a full picture of what occurred on January 6th,” he said in a statement. “I will be learning more from the DHS Inspector General about these concerning allegations.”
Devlin Barrett in Machipongo, Va. contributed to this report. | 2022-07-15T02:02:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Secret Service erased texts from January 5 and 6, 2021, official says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/14/secret-service-texts-erased/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/14/secret-service-texts-erased/ |
FILE - Protesters rally at the Ohio Statehouse in support of abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on, June 24, 2022 in Columbus, Ohio. The story about an alleged rape of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion touched on a white-hot issue due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion. (Barbara J. Perenic/The Columbus Dispatch via AP, File) | 2022-07-15T02:02:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ohio rape shows how a story can spread faster than facts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ohio-rape-shows-how-story-can-spread-faster-than-facts/2022/07/14/6572575a-03d9-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ohio-rape-shows-how-story-can-spread-faster-than-facts/2022/07/14/6572575a-03d9-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
United States 3, Costa Rica 0
Emily Sonnett, a Washington Spirit defender, celebrates her first international goal in the U.S. national team's 3-0 win over Costa Rica on Thursday in Monterrey, Mexico. (Miguel Sierra/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
The U.S. women’s national soccer team on Thursday moved within one victory of qualifying for the 2024 Olympics, defeating another badly outmatched opponent at the Concacaf W Championship in Monterrey, Mexico.
The two-time reigning World Cup champions needed more than a half-hour to go ahead of Costa Rica, but after Washington Spirit defender Emily Sonnett scored the first goal of her 69-game international career, the Americans were on their way to a 3-0 semifinal victory.
Mallory Pugh added a goal before halftime, and the Spirit’s Ashley Sanchez scored in second-half stoppage time.
On Monday, the top-ranked United States will face the winner of Thursday’s late game between No. 6 Canada and No. 51 Jamaica for a place in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Costa Rica will play in the third-place game Monday.
Concacaf will award a second Olympic berth next year, when the second- and third-place teams from this tournament meet in a two-leg playoff.
All four semifinalists qualified for the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Panama and Haiti will compete in a 10-team international playoff early next year for three World Cup slots.
The United States has beaten Costa Rica in 17 all-time meetings by a 90-2 margin. Its all-time record against the first four opponents in this tournament is 70-1-1 with a 342-17 goal differential.
Despite the breezy victory, the Americans were not at the top of their game much of the night.
“We made too many technical errors,” Coach Vlatko Andonovski said. “Too many for the players that were on the field because we know they’re technical. … For some reason, we made a little too many [mistakes], and that’s something that we’re going to look into to see what it is — mental preparation or physical preparation. Whatever it is, we’re going to have to fix it for the next game.”
The United States squandered abundant opportunities throughout the match, most notably in the first half by veteran striker Alex Morgan.
The breakthrough came in the 34th minute off a scramble from close range after a corner kick. Lindsey Horan’s bid hit the post and caromed in the six-yard box. Sonnett, a 28-year-old defender who starred at the University of Virginia, twice poked at the ball and scored her first goal since making her national team debut in 2015 and first in any competition since 2019, when she played for the Portland Thorns.
On Monday, she was involved in the sequence that led to Kristie Mewis’s 89th-minute winner against Mexico in the group-stage finale.
Sonnett started because Emily Fox, Andonovski’s first-choice left back, remains in covid protocols and missed her second consecutive match.
Pugh extended the lead in first-half stoppage time by scoring her first goal of the tournament.
U.S. pressure on the ball forced a giveaway deep in Las Ticas’ end. At the top of the box, Rose Lavelle executed a back-heel pass to Pugh in stride for an eight-yard shot past goalkeeper María Bermúdez and into the far corner.
“Rose doing what Rose does best with that little flair,” Pugh said, “and I was just able to put it away.”
Throughout the second half, the lead was never in jeopardy but did not grow until the waning moments either, when the 23-year-old Sanchez, a second-half sub, smashed in a one-timer from the heart of the box for her third international goal.
Casey Murphy did not have to make any difficult saves in recording her third shutout of the tournament — and the team’s fourth. The 26-year-old, who made her national team debut in November, has not conceded a goal in seven of her eight career starts.
“It looked a little bit easy for the back line, but sometimes this is even a little bit harder because they’re only called on to defend in two or three instances,” Andonovski said. “They have to maintain 100 percent focus throughout the whole game, and they executed everything well. The fact we didn’t allow any shots or any serious opportunities speaks for their performance.” | 2022-07-15T02:46:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | USWNT tops Costa Rica to reach Concacaf W Championship final - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/uswnt-costa-rica-concacaf/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/14/uswnt-costa-rica-concacaf/ |
A new self-portrait has been discovered behind the cardboard backing of one of the painter’s early paintings
Perspective by Sebastian Smee
Conservator Lesley Stevenson with the van Gogh painting “Head of a Peasant Woman” and the X-ray image of a self-portrait revealed recently. (Neil Hanna/Handout/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Vincent van Gogh painted three dozen self-portraits in just 10 years. That’s really a lot (there are about the same number of extant paintings by Johannes Vermeer). But now, miraculously, it seems we have one more. Or we might, if conservators at the National Galleries of Scotland manage to get it out from under a layer of glue and cardboard.
The Edinburgh museum announced its exciting discovery this week after X-rays showed that van Gogh had painted the head of a man on the reverse side of a 1885 painting titled “Head of a Peasant Woman.” The image of someone looking very much like Vincent had been covered in cardboard, most likely by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the wife of his younger brother Theo, in 1905, when she sent “Head of a Peasant Woman” to an important exhibition in Amsterdam.
The painting was later acquired by Evelyn Fleming on the advice of her lover, the Welsh painter Augustus John. She couldn’t have known that she was purchasing two van Goghs for the price of one. (Fleming’s son — by her husband — was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.)
Vincent van Gogh’s early work was mediocre. This exhibition shows how he became great
Everything about van Gogh fascinates us. The reasons can seem bottomless. What’s amazing is that, even after every aspect of his life has been subjected to a century-long barrage of scholarship, both scientific and archival, we remain in the dark about so many things.
Did he, for instance, die by suicide, or was he murdered, as his most recent biographers claim? If he was mentally ill, what exactly was his ailment? What medicines did he take to try to treat his problems, and what effect did they, or his illness, have on his art? What exactly made him cut off part of his ear and give it to a prostitute in Arles, in the south of France?
After this latest revelation, I have yet more questions, and I know I’m not alone.
Why, for instance, was the self-portrait covered in cardboard? Was there something van Gogh-Bonger thought we shouldn’t see — or did she simply know that van Gogh himself considered it unfinished and unworthy of display? (Remember: For almost his entire career the world had been telling him everything he painted was unworthy of display.)
Van Gogh-Bonger’s husband, Theo, the art dealer who was Vincent’s financial and psychological lifeline, died six months after Vincent. Van Gogh-Bonger, who hadn’t known either brother very long, was left not only with a baby boy named Vincent (he was born six months before his namesake’s death at 37), but also with hundreds of unsold van Gogh paintings.
According to Martin Bailey, a van Gogh expert who writes for The Art Newspaper, van Gogh-Bonger probably covered the back of the “Head of a Peasant Woman” (and thus the self-portrait) to make the painting more secure before framing it and sending it to the Amsterdam exhibition.
At the time, “Head of a Peasant Woman” — an unflinching, thickly painted portrait of Gordina de Groot — would have been considered the more important work. That’s because it was linked to “The Potato Eaters,” the painting van Gogh considered his most important achievement to date.
He had painted “Head of a Peasant Woman” in Nuenen, the Dutch town where his parents recently moved, in 1885. When he arrived in Nuenen at the end of 1883, relations with his family were tense. But van Gogh decided to stay on because he was in love with the landscape, the local inhabitants and their earthy, hardscrabble lives. He had been reading Emile Zola’s great novel about the rural underclass, “Germinal,” and was under the spell of paintings of farm labor by his hero, Jean-Francois Millet.
In March 1885, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Van Gogh stayed on in Nuenen and grew close to one peasant family in particular, the de Groots. “When I went to [their] cottage this evening I found the folk eating their meal by the light of the little window instead of under the lamp,” he wrote to Theo in early May. “Oh, it was astonishingly beautiful.”
The two women in the tableau, he added, were “almost exactly the same color as dark green soap.” He wanted to paint them. The young Gordina de Groot was one of these two women. She sat for several paintings by van Gogh. When she later fell pregnant, van Gogh was accused by the village sexton of being responsible.
The painter denied it, saying he knew from Gordina herself who the father was (a member, he claimed, of the priest’s congregation). But because the sexton went about cautioning locals against sitting for van Gogh and directly warned the painter against being “too familiar with people beneath [his] station,” and because his studio was very close to the sexton’s house, the situation remained awkward, and van Gogh finally left Nuenen for Antwerp in November 1885, and Paris early the next year.
He evidently took the portrait of Gordina de Groot with him. In light of the new discovery, experts’ best guess is that two years later, in Paris, he used the reverse side of the canvas to paint the self-portrait that has just been revealed by X-ray.
Van Gogh actually painted about 20 self-portraits during his time in Paris, and still more after his move to Arles. It was expensive hiring models; his own face was free and he could try out things on himself without having to justify it. But he was surely fascinated, too, by his own developing identity as a painter. If he wasn’t exactly using self-portraits to shore up his confidence, he was definitely expressing curiosity about the strange (and so far unsuccessful) new life he had chosen. Some of his experiments worked. Some no doubt didn’t.
X-rays have revealed other paintings — a seminude and a standing nude, for instance — behind some of van Gogh’s Paris self-portraits, including at least two in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The practice suggests that he was short of canvas and that he perhaps didn’t care to preserve what he had painted earlier. It’s interesting that in this case, he didn’t paint over the head of Gordina, instead preserving her image and simply painting himself on the reverse side. Was there more to their relationship than we know?
In October 1887, soon after painting the newly discovered self-portrait (if the dating is right), van Gogh wrote to his sister Willemien asking for news of the de Groots. “How did that business turn out?” he asked, referring to Gordina’s pregnancy. “Did Sien [Gordina] marry her cousin? And did her child live?”
In fact the child, a son, did live — he was born on Oct. 20, 1885 — but at the time Gordina remained unmarried. (Presumably van Gogh asked about her cousin because he was the one most likely to give the baby the protection of his name.)
But as it turns out, painting on the reverse side of canvases was not unprecedented for van Gogh. According to Bailey, three other Nuenen paintings turned out to be double-sided after cardboard backing was removed by the Dutch conservator Jan Cornelius Traas in 1929. In each case, portraits were discovered. Bailey also reports that “it has long been suspected that there could be something on the hidden side of ‘Head of a Peasant Woman,’ ” implying that this latest discovery may not be quite as surprising as advertised.
Still, speculation is one thing, hard evidence quite another. A new self-portrait by van Gogh is exciting however you look at it.
“To understand all is to forgive all,” van Gogh wrote to his sister (borrowing a phrase from Madame de Staël), “and I believe that if we knew everything we’d arrive at a certain serenity.” Of course, it’s possible to find serenity “even when one knows little — nothing — for certain.” This, he wrote, “is perhaps a better remedy against all ills than what’s sold in the chemist’s.”
Sadly, for much of the time, serenity eluded van Gogh. But I think he experienced it — in addition to a lot of excitement — while painting. What’s wonderful is that we can find serenity (along with an array of other emotions) in front of the pictures he left us — of which we now have one more than we thought. | 2022-07-15T03:08:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In van Gogh’s hidden self-portrait, thrilling questions about the artist - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/14/van-gogh-hidden-painting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/14/van-gogh-hidden-painting/ |
Man charged in killings in two Maryland suburbs
A 21-year-old man from Baltimore County has been charged in a fatal shooting in District Heights, Md., in June, Prince George’s County police said Thursday, a day after the same suspect was accused of murder in Anne Arundel County.
Ja’Quan Green, of Middle River, Md., was arrested July 7 in Upper Marlboro while police were responding to an unrelated 911 call, officials said. During his arrest, police found a gun in his waistband.
Police said ballistics experts subsequently matched the gun to the one used to kill Daniel James Harris of Lanham on June 13 on Forest Park Drive in District Heights. Two others were injured in that shooting.
Police said the two men did not know each other and the motive for the killing is unclear.
Ballistics matching has come under increased scrutiny, and Maryland’s highest court is planning to reconsider its reliability this year.
On Wednesday, Anne Arundel County police accused Green of killing Britrain Marcelus Gray, 23, of Odenton, Md., on May 13. Gray was working an overnight shift at the McDonald’s drive-through in Gambrills, Md., when he was killed, his family said in a post raising money for his funeral.
Gray “was a funny and hardworking young man. Famous for bringing smiles to everyone’s faces through effortlessness entertainment and energetic backflips,” the post reads. | 2022-07-15T03:29:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man charged in two killings in Maryland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/man-charged-district-heights-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/man-charged-district-heights-shooting/ |
La Repubblica, the Rome-based daily he founded in 1976, became one of Italy’s leading newspapers
Eugenio Scalfari, a founder and former editor in chief of the Italian daily La Repubblica, in Milan in 1992. (AP)
The cause was not immediately available. Mr. Scalfari’s death was reported by La Repubblica and announced by officials including Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who said in a statement that his “passing … leaves a gaping hole in our country’s public life.”
He wrote for magazines including Il Mondo and L’Europeo before helping found L’Espresso in 1955. He also served as editor in chief of L’Espresso from 1963 to 1968. The magazine gained wide notice in 1967, when it revealed that Gen. Giovanni De Lorenzo, Italy’s former counterintelligence chief, had plotted an unsuccessful coup three years earlier.
The Vatican described the statement as “the fruit” of Mr. Scalfari’s “reconstruction.” Mr. Scalfari conceded that he did not take notes and that at his age — he was 93 at the time — he could make “mistakes.”
In Italy, a reporter for the New York Times wrote in a report on the contretemps, “Mr. Scalfari personifies an impressionistic style of Italian journalism, prevalent in its coverage of the Vatican, politics and much else, in which the gist is more important than the verbatim, and the spirit greater than the letter.”
According to the official Vatican News online outlet, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said that Pope Francis has “painfully [learned] of his friend’s passing. He fondly preserves the memory of the meetings — and of the meaningful conversations on man’s ultimate questions — he had with him over the years.”
Stefano Pitrelli, a reporter in The Post’s Rome bureau, contributed to this report. | 2022-07-15T03:34:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Eugenio Scalfari dies; founded Italian newspaper La Repubblica - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/14/eugenio-scalfari-la-repubblica-newspaper/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/14/eugenio-scalfari-la-repubblica-newspaper/ |
Dear Amy: I recently reconnected with a fellow I loved many years ago.
Our previous relationship ended because a misunderstanding caused him to become violent with me. Fast forward many, many years, and he is just as angry, but now has a terminal illness.
I fell in love with him again and tried to be supportive, knowing that he didn't have long to live.
After six months of enduring love bombing, narcissism, threats of suicide, uncontrolled crying and extreme anger from him, I decided to break it off.
Now I’m left feeling guilty because he is nearing the end of his life.
My question is: Should I put his behavior on the back burner because of his illness, or did I do the healthier thing by breaking it off with him?
Please help!
— Grieving in Pa.
Grieving: A “misunderstanding” should not cause anyone to become violent. You excused this man’s behavior of many years ago because of a “misunderstanding,” and you are excusing his behavior now because of his illness.
Reading deeply into your question, I intuit that — aside from this man’s unfortunate prognosis — you have an ongoing problem.
Excusing his violence and then diving into another relationship with him might indicate that on some level you believe you have the power to fix people.
Externally, this seems kindly and generous.
Actually, it is a function of your own ego and anxieties, and it is something for you to work on moving forward.
When you recognize with some humility that you don’t have the power to fix, but only to forgive, then you should liberate both this man and yourself from this dysfunctional cycle.
Engaging with someone who creates so much turmoil for both of you isn’t good for either of you. Yes, you should break things off with him.
Take responsibility for your own actions, but not his.
He had a (female) co-worker who left the area and moved to another state — around five years ago. I was not aware of this, but I recently learned that he calls her quite often to talk about his problems. I’m concerned that he shares his problems with her and not with me. She is also married.
Worried: My opinion about this depends somewhat on what kinds of problems your husband shares with his former co-worker, and what kind of gifts they are exchanging.
If he is sharing intimate and private details about his — or your — life, that's another.
If he is sending her bottles of Shalimar or a gift pack from Victoria's Secret, I'd say that was a clear “tell.” (You can double-check the order history through your (or his) Amazon account.)
Dear Amy: I was absolutely shocked by your response to “Protective fiance,” whose guy was sexually harassed by a woman at a bar.
Surprised: Gee, thanks! | 2022-07-15T04:26:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: Should I forgive his behavior because he’s dying? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/15/ask-amy-behavior-abusive-dying/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/15/ask-amy-behavior-abusive-dying/ |
Dear Carolyn: My wife insists that I wear a shirt when working from home, even when I’m not on camera. Neither of us has been to the office since March 2020. I rarely spend more than an hour or so per day on camera, and, of course, I’m wearing a shirt then — and pants — and if I’m on camera with a customer, I’ll be wearing a button-down shirt with a collar. This exceeds what I’ve seen my colleagues wear on customer-facing calls, but I feel it’s appropriate.
However, when I’m working at my desk, no videoconferencing app is running, my camera is switched off and the lens cover is in place, I don’t see why I can’t work buck naked if I feel like it and the temperature permits.
My wife says that, because we work for the same (very large) company, and thus people who know me know her, at least by association, I owe it to her to follow this convention. She even said that the day I appear shirtless on camera, even by accident, she will quit her job, change her name and file for divorce. I suspect she’s not entirely serious, but I also think I’m willing to live with those odds, because there’s zero chance of what she’s concerned about actually happening.
When I pointed this out, her fallback position was that it is a social norm. Is it? I think it’s HER norm, and she does have a tendency to invest emotional energy in how others live, whereas I could give zero [stuffs] about such things. If she hates seeing me without clothes on because she finds my body unattractive, that would be extremely hurtful to me but at least an honest reason. But she never complains about my nudity around the house outside of work hours, and we do enjoy conjugal pleasures from time to time, so I don’t think that’s it.
California: A million managers thank you for the motivational speech to get their employees back to the office.
I struggle to recall a piece of writing that better captures what happens to people when they spend too much time in too little space, putting too much energy into the same people who know them too well. Since Sartre, at least.
More than you need a shirt, you and your wife need some air.
I will back you with the full force of … whatever, I have no force beyond these words, but I will back with all of my words the principle of your being entitled to work as you see fit. If I could make your wife drop the issue, I would.
At the same time, hello? This is not about your brave resistance to investing “emotional energy in how others live.” This is about your refusal to invest T-shirt energy in how your wife feels.
I know, I know. My take, though, on her “honest reason” for asking you to cover up: She has no idea, no rational justification, and she’s making stuff up because it’s just erfing driving her erfing nuts. Because that’s what happens to people who are part of couples who need some air. It doesn’t have to make any sense to be honest. Or reasonable, sometimes.
So your decision isn’t shirt or no shirt. It’s which principle do you want to serve: personal autonomy or marital harmony? Your call, not mine. Though I recommend all spouses choose the latter until their integrity won’t allow it and they have to embrace the former.
Or how about this instead: Put on a shirt, and I’ll stop typing.
Either way, A-plus on the pants. | 2022-07-15T04:26:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Wife insists he wear a shirt when working from home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/15/carolyn-hax-wife-insists-husband-wear-shirt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/15/carolyn-hax-wife-insists-husband-wear-shirt/ |
There is a lot of trouble “them men” have gotten themselves into with just such an excuse, and it is no longer tolerable.
Unfortunately, he may tell you that his stubbornness outweighs your need for him to change. If that is the case, Miss Manners suggests you put some serious thought into whether it is worth it to keep him.
I don't look forward to having a casual friend going through boxes of my personal items or generally being underfoot while I'm deciding where things should go, etc. I have two healthy adult daughters and sons-in-law who are providing any help I require.
I have repeatedly responded to her offers by saying, “Oh, Sally, I'd really enjoy it if you'd just come over and have a cup of coffee with me and see the house. Please don't bother cooking, or even think about cleaning the bathroom!”
Her response is something like she “just might have to help, whether I want her to or not.” I have stomach issues that make me very careful about what I eat, so I particularly don't want her to bring food I won't be able to eat, which would make her feel awful.
Why not go out instead?
“You know what would really help? A break from all of this moving and unpacking. Let's go for lunch or a walk so that I can take my mind off all of this.” | 2022-07-15T04:26:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: My boyfriend makes mean comments all the time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/15/miss-manners-boyfriend-mean-comments/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/15/miss-manners-boyfriend-mean-comments/ |
Motorcycle crash shuts Maryland highway in both directions
A motorcycle driver suffered life-threatening injuries after a collision involving a Montgomery County police vehicle Thursday evening.
The crash occurred about 7:30 p.m., a spokesman for the Maryland Transportation Authority Police said, at mile marker 6.5 on Maryland 200, also known as the Intercounty Connector.
Authorities said the motorcyclist appears to have collided with the police car. A passenger in the police car was hospitalized, with injuries not considered life threatening.
The collision forced the closure of all lanes in both directions between Georgia Avenue and Shady Grove, leading to miles of gridlock and confusion as drivers turned around to try to escape the roadblock. | 2022-07-15T04:35:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Motorcycle crash in Montgomery County shuts down Maryland highway - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/motorcycle-police-crash-maryland-highway/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/14/motorcycle-police-crash-maryland-highway/ |
A Tory Dark Horse’s Momentum Draws Fire From the Right
“Politics is about momentum; I’m afraid I didn’t have it this time,” conceded Jeremy Hunt, after his first-round defeat in the Tory leadership race. Momentum, however, is very much with a woman whom only 11% of Brits could identify in a photo. But she now has a shot at becoming the next prime minister.
Penny Mordaunt, the trade minister, came in second to Rishi Sunak in Tuesday night’s secret ballot among Conservative lawmakers and did so again on Wednesday, picking up more votes than any other leadership candidate as the business end of the race gets underway. While that has boosted her chances of becoming the next Conservative leader — and UK prime minister — it has also put a giant target on her back.
David Frost, the former Brexit negotiator and her former boss, unloaded Thursday morning. In an interview with broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer, the Tory peer questioned her competence and work ethic. He said he wouldn’t serve in a Mordaunt cabinet. Politics is a blood sport.
The surge of support, and campaign to tear her down, followed a surprise YouGov poll Monday showing her leagues ahead of her rivals and handily beating both Sunak (the parliamentary frontrunner) and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss in a runoff with the party membership, the selectorate that will ultimately decide the next leader. That kind of poll can change the course of the race since MPs are swayed by who they think is or isn’t acceptable to the membership, notes Tim Bale, politics professor at Queen Mary University of London and an expert on political party membership.
Most people still know relatively little about Mordaunt, so she doesn’t carry a lot of baggage. Of course, as the race nears it climax, Mordaunt will face the relentless spotlight of media attention. That crucial momentum could stall.
Frost isn’t the only person to question whether Mordaunt is up for the leadership job, but the vetting will have to be quick as this is a fast-moving race. It seems unfair to suggest she’s lacking in ideas, having written a well-reviewed book while serving as a junior cabinet office minister (with a forward by Bill Gates). In it, she mooted reforms such as an elected House of Lords and splitting up the Treasury. Her campaign is also pledging to reduce VAT on fuel by 50%, raise income-tax thresholds by the rate of inflation and reduce the size of the cabinet (not likely to be a popular move among MPs whose votes she’s seeking).
Individual reforms don’t necessarily add up to a governing vision though, and it’s her approach to British conservatism – certainly very different from the US variety, though she actually worked in George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns – that will be probed in the coming days, and possibly weeks, if she survives to the final two ballots. Unlike Sunak and Truss, she’s also untested on a major political stage, having served less than three months as Britain’s first woman defense secretary (before Johnson fired her for backing Jeremy Hunt in the 2019 leadership race).
But there is much about Mordaunt’s background and personality to appeal to both Tory members and voters more broadly – and pose a headache for opposition leader Keir Starmer in the Red Wall seats — the traditional Labour districts that Johnson won and that he’s trying to take back. She was the first member of her family to go to university. Like many notable politicians, she suffered tragedy as a young person, losing her mother to breast cancer at the age of 15. She cared for a younger brother (while her father too battled cancer) and worked as a magician’s assistant to help fund her studies. In writing her book, she discovered that she has dyslexia.
Conservative members value military service and Mordaunt, the daughter of a paratrooper and a serving reservist in the Royal Navy, ticks a lot of boxes. If Truss models herself on Margaret Thatcher, almost to the point of self-parody, Mordaunt’s vibe is a more modern coalition builder.
Like Johnson, Mordaunt is not slave to convention. She famously delivered a parliamentary speech on poultry welfare interspersed with the shorthand word for cockerel on a dare with naval colleagues. She donned a swimsuit on the reality TV show “Splash!” Not everyone found these exploits the hallmarks of a future leader, but it didn’t seem to do her much harm. Her more liberal views on trans rights don’t sit well with social conservatives or the conservative media, but that is far from the issue foremost on voters’ mind, much less one on which the next election will be won or lost. Indeed, there is much about her that is both relatable and admirable; whether she has the gravitas and stamina to be a leader now is harder to answer.
Mordaunt’s popularity with the Tory base says a lot about how fed up party members are with the current lot. While Sunak was the clear frontrunner with MPs for now, his support was well behind where Johnson, or indeed every previous winner in modern times, was at that stage. That may also reflect the steady criticism of him from the media Tory members tend to read.
All of this whittling down (which should be over by mid-next week) is happening pretty fast given how much is at stake. It may be the third such beauty contest the party has held since 2016, but it’s the first Tory leadership race since David Cameron won in 2005 that hasn’t been explicitly about Brexit. It will determine whether the Tories can lose Johnson with his almost unique ability for cross-party appeal (before he self-immolated), but keep the winning coalition he assembled. It will have to do so against the backdrop of a far less rosy economic and geopolitical backdrop and at a time when voters will want to see proof of delivery.
Mordaunt, as she tweeted Thursday, is “on the march,” winner of the momentum stakes for now. She’ll now face some tougher questions about the direction she wants to take the party and a major hill in the form of Truss, who is unlikely to stand aside without a fight.
• The Lonely Tory Defending UK Fiscal Restraint: Marcus Ashworth | 2022-07-15T06:36:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A Tory Dark Horse’s Momentum Draws Fire From the Right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-tory-dark-horses-momentum-draws-fire-from-the-right/2022/07/15/cf6f6522-03fb-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-tory-dark-horses-momentum-draws-fire-from-the-right/2022/07/15/cf6f6522-03fb-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
The strangest thing about the turmoil surrounding UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s removal is the sustained lack of interest in Britain’s biggest and most pressing problem. Johnson bungled Brexit, and the country could be paying the price for years. His trade agreement with the European Union is broken and in danger of collapsing – threatening severe consequences for an economy already reeling from high inflation and slowing growth. Yet one too many petty scandals, not Brexit mismanagement, is what brought him down. As the competition to succeed him plays out, Britain’s future relations with Europe barely rate a mention.
Johnson says the Tories were elected in 2019 to “get Brexit done.” (The prospect of a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn had something to do with it too.) He says he duly delivered. But now he calls the deal he struck unsustainable because of its most conspicuous feature: an economic border separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. This protocol has destabilized the province’s fragile politics, and Johnson has threatened to scrap it unilaterally, leading to almost certain retaliation from the EU.
Yet the candidates to replace Johnson are mostly arguing about taxes and spending, experience and leadership, competence and integrity – aiming to position themselves as effective modern conservatives as though Brexit was done and dusted. The front-runners, Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, both agree the protocol needs attention, but like the rest of the field they’ve been vague about how to mend it. The Labour opposition (now led by the more electable Keir Starmer) is happy to play along. Labour has no more clue than the Tories about how to solve Britain’s Brexit problems. Both parties, internally divided between Leave and Remain, think it more politically productive to squabble with each other about almost anything else.
It’s understandable, and not just because of the internal splits. Britain’s Brexit options are limited and unappealing. Not even Leave’s most ardent advocates would say things have gone well; Remainers celebrate Johnson’s mismanagement (like every other post-Brexit development) as vindication. But almost nobody believes that the decision can be reversed, in full or in part, in the foreseeable future.
The idea that Britain might turn supplicant for renewed membership — presumably on terms that would be less favorable than those it secured through years of grudging and obstreperous participation — is unthinkable. It’s almost as hard to imagine any kind of deal that would require a new treaty, with all the delays and complications this would involve. The EU doesn’t want it, and the UK couldn’t face it.
Still, a plan for making the best of a bad situation doesn’t seem too much to ask of Britain’s would-be leaders.
What might this look like? It would need to start by acknowledging — even if tacitly — Brexit’s two great tactical errors. These have nothing to do with the pros and cons of Brexit in principle. Many of the criticisms that Brexit advocates made of the EU’s overweening ambitions, half-baked fiscal arrangements, mercantilist instincts, anti-democratic institutions and ever-proliferating deadweight bureaucracy are correct. But Brexiteers refused to see that: First, as a former member, Britain would be negotiating with the EU from a position of weakness; second, and even more important, the EU would be pleased to watch Brexit fail, and fail conspicuously, to discourage other rebellions.
This is why Johnson’s approach, all theater and provocation, has failed. Standing on what Britain supposedly needs and demands might have traction at home, but has none whatever with the EU. Britain’s only hope is patient, cooperative, detail-oriented talks based on mutual advantage. Once points of contention are cast as non-negotiable matters of sovereignty — so that one side must win and other must lose — there’s no doubt who the loser will be.
The Northern Ireland protocol can be repaired without tearing up the treaty. Crucially, Britain’s next prime minister should accept responsibility, as Johnson couldn’t bear to, for what’s wrong with the current arrangements — and agree to remedy the defects with technical fixes on implementation as opposed to formal rewriting of the instrument. There’s plenty of scope in the existing deal for making the economic border in the Irish Sea much less troublesome — in particular, by minimizing checks and other regulatory barriers affecting goods for final sale in the province.
The EU has already shown some flexibility, but it could and should go further. Doing so would be in its interests. Such accommodations pose minimal risks to the integrity of the EU’s single market. Promoting political stability in Northern Ireland is very much in the interests of the Republic of Ireland, an EU member. And harmonious economic relations with the UK also serve the economic interests of the wider EU.
Britain needs a leader who can grapple in good faith with the details and make this case without issuing useless threats; who can sell the formula to the politicians in Northern Ireland that oppose any kind of friction in trade between the province and the mainland; and who can persuade voters in the rest of the country that mutual advantage is a vastly more promising approach than Britain versus Europe. Johnson was temperamentally incapable of playing this role. To prevent Brexit going even more badly wrong, Britain’s next prime minister should give it a try.
• Boris Johnson Exits, But the Damage to the UK Will Linger: Max Hastings | 2022-07-15T06:36:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Britain’s Aspiring Leaders Are Far Too Quiet on Brexit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britains-aspiring-leaders-are-far-too-quiet-on-brexit/2022/07/15/cf0f9a5c-03fb-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britains-aspiring-leaders-are-far-too-quiet-on-brexit/2022/07/15/cf0f9a5c-03fb-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Analysis by Vrishti Beniwal | Bloomberg
No other major economy has been expanding as fast as India lately, beating both China and the US. But beyond the headlines lies the grim reality of rising unemployment. The nation of 1.4 billion people isn’t creating enough jobs for its growing workforce, despite campaign promises by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make it a priority. Output is increasing as a result of pandemic-related government spending while the private sector sits on the fence, deterred by dim conditions for new investment. Meanwhile, pandemic-related disruptions and rising inflation are making it harder for everyone to get by. Tensions boiled over in June when angry youth facing bleak job prospects blocked rail traffic and highways in many states for days, even setting some trains on fire.
2. Who’s most affected?
Women and the young. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of working women in India dropped to 19% from 26%, according to data compiled by the World Bank. As Covid infections surged, a bad situation turned dire: CMIE estimated that female labor force participation plummeted to 9% by 2022 -- putting it in the same league as war-torn Yemen. Rosa Abraham, an economics professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, who tracked more than 20,000 people before and after India’s first pandemic lockdown in 2020, found that women were several times more likely to lose their jobs than men and far less likely to recover work after restrictions lifted. At the same time, young people are finding it harder to get jobs. CMIE estimated the unemployment in the 20-24 age group was 43.7% in June. That compares with 18.4% in May for the 16-24 category in China, which is also facing a worsening crisis.
3. What’s behind those numbers?
India’s poor system of education and job-training means degrees are often considered worthless by employers. In large-scale surveys, employers have said that less than half the college graduates entering the workforce have the cutting-edge skills they need or the ability to pick them up in the workplace. So many would-be job seekers decide instead to continue their studies, join family members in farming or just stay home, surviving on rental income, pensions received by elderly household members or government transfers. Many women are opting for unpaid work at home, taking care of elderly relatives and kids.
India has the advantage of youth -- half the population is under 30 -- but it will start aging in coming decades. If it gets old before it develops and gets rich enough to support everyone, that would have repercussions for the $3.2 trillion economy. To sustain world-beating growth and woo global investors, Modi needs to ensure there’s a trained workforce for industry to draw on. There’s also the potential for social unrest, as illustrated by the protests that erupted in June over a new military recruitment plan that offered shorter contracts and fewer benefits. India needs to create at least 90 million new non-farm jobs by 2030, according to a 2020 report by McKinsey Global Institute.
5. What’s the government doing?
It has announced plans to hire a million people by the end of 2023 to fill vacancies in government departments. The program to enlist young men as soldiers on four-year contracts lured a record number of applicants in its first weeks, despite the backlash from some quarters. The government says the program will help boost employment by supplying a trained, disciplined workforce to local industry. Private sector jobs that are mushrooming are mainly in the gig economy, such as drivers for Uber Technologies Inc. or delivery workers for Zomato Ltd. To create jobs on a mass scale India needs to boost manufacturing and that hinges on creating infrastructure, removing red tape and reviving investor sentiment. With national polls barely two years away, Modi’s opponents have started talking about a labor market crisis.
The government in April cited what it called “authentic data” from the Statistics Ministry showing the labor market recovering. But economists have described those figures as outdated and inadequate. For starters, they come with a lag of one year: Official data for the year ending June 30, 2021, was only released in June 2022. And it showed the unemployment rate fell to 4.2% that year, down from an official 4.8% -- despite harsh Covid lockdowns and an economic slowdown. Markets and academicians prefer to rely on the survey-based unemployment data from CMIE as it’s more timely and correlates better with ground realities. The government has started some new efforts to get data directly from businesses, and is working on more surveys aimed at the so-called informal sector, such as migrant laborers and domestic workers, which covers 75% of the workforce. | 2022-07-15T06:37:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why India’s World-Beating Growth Isn’t Creating Jobs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-indias-world-beating-growth-isnt-creating-jobs/2022/07/15/c62846fa-03fb-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-indias-world-beating-growth-isnt-creating-jobs/2022/07/15/c62846fa-03fb-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) had publicly questioned whether the OB/GYN followed a legal requirement to report the procedure
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita. (Darron Cummings/AP)
Hours after a man was charged Wednesday with raping a 10-year-old Ohio girl, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) questioned whether the Indianapolis doctor who helped the child obtain an abortion had reported the procedure to state officials, as required by law.
“We’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end — including looking at her licensure, if she failed to report,” Rokita told Fox News’s Jesse Watters on Wednesday night. Watters had suggested the doctor could face “a criminal charge.”
Rokita again raised doubts Thursday in a letter to Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb (R), saying that his office had requested, but not received, documentation from state agencies that the girl’s abortion had been properly reported by the OB/GYN, Caitlin Bernard.
But records obtained by The Washington Post on Thursday afternoon show that Bernard indeed reported the minor’s abortion to the relevant state agencies before the legally mandated deadline to do so. The doctor’s attorney, Kathleen DeLaney, said in a statement to news outlets that Bernard is “considering legal action against those who have smeared [her], including Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita.”
In Indiana, abortion is legal up to 22 weeks into a pregnancy. Under the state’s laws, providers are required to report all pregnancy terminations within 30 days. For patients under the age of 16, the reporting window is cut to three days, and doctors must alert both Indiana’s department of health and department of child services — a way for authorities to quickly launch investigations into possible child abuse cases.
The case of the 10-year-old Ohio girl was first reported by the Indianapolis Star on July 1, one week after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Though the story quickly gained international attention, it was followed by a wave of skepticism from conservative politicians, pundits and media outlets that expressed doubts about the story. (The Post also published a fact-check that initially concluded the girl’s abortion was a “very difficult story to check.”)
On Wednesday, however, the Columbus Dispatch confirmed the account, reporting that a 27-year-old man, Gerson Fuentes, had been charged with raping the girl. According to the newspaper, a detective testified in court that the girl had received an abortion in Indianapolis on June 30.
The 10-year-old initially sought treatment from an Ohio doctor but was unable to receive abortion services because she was just over six weeks pregnant, the cutoff imposed by a new Ohio law. The doctor then asked Bernard for help — “and so the 10-year-old girl was soon on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care,” the Star reported.
During his Wednesday night interview with Fox News, Rokita also accused Bernard of having “a history of failing to report” child abuse cases — an allegation that hinges on claims made by an antiabortion group in 2018 that have since been amplified by some conservative outlets.
That year, Indiana Right to Life alleged that nine physicians across the state, including Bernard, “failed to follow the legal reporting requirements to protect young children from sex abuse” in 48 cases between July 2017 and May 2018.
The Indiana Department of Health did not respond to multiple requests from The Post. A review of records from DocInfo — a physician licensure and disciplinary information data set from the Federation of State Medical Boards — and the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana did not show any disciplinary activity or license terminations against Bernard or any of the other doctors.
Rokita’s office did not respond to requests for further documentation of his claims.
Katie McHugh, an Indiana OB/GYN and board member with Physicians for Reproductive Health, called the allegations “baseless attacks” that underscore how “abortion providers are being targeted by a state that is creating a threatening pose that is neither legal, nor is it appropriate.”
“This is a waste of government time and of taxpayer dollars for a political stunt that doesn’t chase after the actual criminal here,” McHugh added. “It doesn’t even center on the victim and instead focuses on a physician providing legal and evidence-based care.”
Some abortion services will likely be outlawed as Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature holds a special legislative session later this month. Though details of the proposed abortion law are scant, it’s expected to closely follow a model for legislation crafted by National Right to Life general counsel Jim Bopp, Politico reported. Bopp’s model almost completely bans abortion — with a sole exception for cases where the pregnant person’s life is at stake.
With Roe gone, antiabortion lawmakers want to ban patients from crossing state lines. National political reporter Caroline Kitchener explains more. (Video: Casey Silvestri, Courtney Beesch/The Washington Post)
The restrictions could come at a time when Indiana abortion providers are facing an uptick in patients seeking the procedure. McHugh said three of the state’s nine clinics have stretched their operations to increase their patient load by at least 50 percent since Roe was reversed. Many patients, such as the 10-year-old girl from Ohio, hail from neighboring states with more restrictive laws.
“There are so many cases just like that one. Every abortion provider I am privileged to know has taken care of patients that are preteens victimized and impregnated by predators,” McHugh said. “Her story isn’t new, and it’s not something that was invented. This just shows that restrictions and regulations don’t prevent abortion — they only serve to make it less safe.” | 2022-07-15T06:37:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indianapolis doctor reported 10-year-old's abortion as required - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/15/indiana-doctor-abortion-report-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/15/indiana-doctor-abortion-report-investigation/ |
Mystics lose composure after blazing start in heated loss to Mercury
"That's going to be like the playoffs," said Mystics Coach Mike Thibault, pictured against the Connecticut Sun on July 3. "Physical and chippy and all of that. We said to our players early on, you can't do this game with them." (Sean D. Elliot/The Day via AP)
PHOENIX – Myisha Hines-Allen is typically one of the most jovial players on the Washington Mystics roster, always sporting a smile and cracking jokes. Thursday night painted a different picture as she had to be physically restrained after an encounter with Phoenix Mercury forward Sophie Cunningham.
The confrontation reflected the heated nature of a contest in which the Phoenix Mercury rallied from a 15-point, first-quarter deficit to pull out an 80-75 victory in a physical and chippy game that had a distinct playoff feel. The Mystics (15-11) return home to face the Minnesota Lynx on Sunday after splitting the two-game road trip that included a win in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
“I thought a couple of people, I’m not going to name names, just when all that stuff started,” Mystics Coach Mike Thibault said before trailing off. “There’s a history. There are Phoenix players who understand that that’s part of getting under people’s skin in pro basketball. I thought we let it affect us a little bit tonight.”
The fans inside Footprint Center roared late in the second quarter after Natasha Cloud had to pull Hines-Allen to the opposite end of the court. She had closed out on a Cunningham three-point attempt and there was some contact, but no whistle. Cunningham, who has a reputation around the league as an irritant, fell to the floor, and Hines-Allen stepped over her in a moment reminiscent of the infamous Allen Iverson-Ty Lue snapshot from the 2001 NBA Finals. The Mercury forward gave Hines-Allen a shove from the ground and the two were face-to-face seconds later, vocalizing their displeasure. Both were given technical fouls.
“Yeah, we don't want to play into their antics,” Hines-Allen said. “But I don't think that's what caused us to spiral downhill.”
The Mystics were up by eight at the time in a game that had already featured a high level of physicality from both sides. Ariel Atkins went to the locker room and came back in the first quarter after she took a forearm from Diana Taurasi and hit her head while crashing to the hardwood. Mercury forward Diamond DeShields went down in the first quarter after contact, limped off the court and never returned. Mercury Coach Vanessa Nygaard was issued a technical foul in the second quarter and Cloud was hit with a flagrant 1 for shoving Skyler Diggins-Smith in the third quarter. Elena Delle Donne and Diggins-Smith were called for technical fouls late in the fourth quarter.
All of the extracurriculars seemed to throw the Mystics off as their 15-point first-quarter advantage shrank to just two (60-58) at the break.
The Mystics did not respond well to the chaos and struggled to hit open shots against Phoenix’s zone. The second half was more a testament to which team could keeps its poise, and Phoenix simply made more plays as Washington totaled just 30 points after the break.
Hines-Allen thought the Mystics were hesitant against the zone and didn’t play like themselves defensively after the first quarter.
“I think we could have been more aggressive,” Atkins said. “I think we allowed [the zone] to let us get a little lazy and lackadaisical. We just didn't have the same aggression.
“I don’t think they got under our skin, to be honest with you. That’s just the way that they are. That’s the way they play. Some calls probably should have been made. Some calls probably weren’t. It is what it is.”
Neither team played well offensively as the physicality led to a choppy game full of fouls and long stoppages for video review. The Mercury, however, leaned on Taurasi and Diggins-Smith and made enough plays in the fourth quarter to pull out a win.
Taurasi posted 29 points, seven rebounds and two assists while Diggins-Smith tallied 24 points, nine assists and five rebounds. Diggins-Smith hit a pull-up three-pointer with 42.7 seconds remaining to provide Phoenix with a seven-point cushion at 77-70.
Delle Donne finished with 19 points and a season-high 12 rebounds to notch her second double-double of the season. Atkins contributed 14 points.
The Mystics hit just 14 of 51 attempts from the field after the first quarter and Thibault was frustrated that Delle Donne didn’t get more touches in the fourth quarter.
“That's going to be like the playoffs,” Thibault said. “Physical and chippy and all of that. We said to our players early on, you can't do this game with them. That's not what you want. Just play.
“If it were me, I would love to get some of those looks. We scored 40-something in the first half and 30 in the second. It's that simple.”
The Mercury brought attention to Brittney Griner’s illegal detainment in Russia with several moments during the game dedicated to her charity and keeping her situation in the forefront of everyone’s thoughts.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it’s been 147 days since BG was wrongfully imprisoned,” Nygaard said before the game. “And that is crazy to me. I can remember 100. They made a big deal about 100. ... One hundred forty-seven days is a long time. We have to continue to honor BG.” | 2022-07-15T06:37:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mystics come undone after blazing start and fall to Mercury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/15/mystics-lose-composure-mercury/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/15/mystics-lose-composure-mercury/ |
The Vatican is trying to fight abuse. A case in Congo raises warning signs.
Alain Uaykani
An aspiring Roman Catholic nun, 17, who says she was raped by a priest when she was 14, recites the rosary in Kinshasa. (Arlette Bashizi for The Washington Post)
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The 14-year-old girl returned on the back of a motorbike to the convent where she lived and studied. Sobbing and in pain, she pulled aside a nun.
The girl said she’d just been raped by the priest who dropped her off.
The nun, Henriette Okitanunga, tried to comfort the girl. She said she then followed the new rule laid out by Pope Francis for handling such a report: She alerted her superior to a possible crime.
“Your Excellency,” the nun recalled texting to Nicolas Djomo, the local bishop.
After clerical abuse scandals that have rocked much of the Catholic world — generally in nations with the resources to pressure and expose the church — attention is turning to regions where the scale of abuse remains both a mystery and a cause for trepidation. The Vatican’s hope is that bishops in the developing world, trained in new guidelines, can avoid the mistakes that have so badly damaged the Roman Catholic Church elsewhere.
The text Okitanunga said she sent to Djomo’s phone in March 2020 raises a defining question for the church’s future: In places where Catholic leaders have fewer checks on their power, how are they responding?
Djomo’s response, unfolding over the past two years, provides one answer — and it shows the potential for the public crisis to proliferate in new parts of the world. For all the pope’s attempts at reform, a bishop such as Djomo still has significant authority in his diocese — and there remains little recourse for those who disagree with his handling of a claim.
A Washington Post investigation into the case — based on interviews and on a review of letters and emails sent to Djomo and other church officials — shows that the bishop failed to follow the Vatican’s guidelines. The nuns, priests and the alleged victim who pressed Djomo about the accusations say he orchestrated a coverup that upended the life of the victim, kept his own reputation intact and absolved the alleged abuser within the church’s own system.
Some of those involved say Djomo demanded they stay quiet. Those include the nun who first informed him and, later, the alleged victim, who says he beseeched her in a one-on-one meeting to forgive the priest, an encounter that made her feel “sick.”
The girl’s uncle alleges that after the family pressed ahead with a court case, Djomo offered him $15,000 — an enormous sum in a nation where most people live on less than $2 a day — to persuade his relatives to resolve the matter. The uncle, a priest who worked for Djomo, said the bishop eliminated his job after he refused.
Separately, when the nuns supported the girl, their founder says, Djomo retaliated by disbanding their association.
After the girl’s family took the case to police, Djomo did take at least one disciplinary measure, barring the accused priest, the Rev. André Olongo, from ministry and from having unsupervised contact with minors. But that sanction, implemented eight months after the alleged rape, proved to be short-lived. This year, Djomo sent his findings on the case to the Vatican, after a diocese-run investigation that did not include an interview with the alleged victim. The Vatican weeks ago determined there were insufficient grounds to show wrongdoing, Djomo said.
“He has been acquitted. It was absolutely false,” Djomo said in a brief interview.
Djomo cut short an initial conversation with The Post, saying he had to prepare for Mass, and declined further questions, referring them to the Vatican. He did not respond to a list of questions about his handling of the rape accusation.
The Vatican said its Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith had “been able to deal with this case based on the evidence that was provided to it” and had determined it could not “proceed any further.”
“Should further, certain evidence be supplied by civil authorities, by the accusers, or by other witnesses, it would unfailingly be taken into due consideration,” the Vatican’s statement said.
Olongo, the priest who was accused, declined to speak with Post reporters. Faustin Abedi, a lawyer who has helped to represent Olongo during the case, said the priest says he is innocent.
The Post does not publish the names of alleged victims of sexual violence. The girl, now 17, is an aspiring nun still living with the disbanded association — the Sisters Servants of Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted — whose remaining members have fled rural Tshumbe and Djomo’s diocese for Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, where they pray and study in a small concrete building in a slum near the airport.
The girl says she feels recurring stomach pain and panics because she fears she’ll be prevented from becoming a nun since she is not a virgin. “She feels like she is no longer like the others,” said one of her aunts, Marie Walo, 26. One nun, Louise Ekoko, said the girl “lost the joy” that came naturally to her before the alleged rape. She struggles to sleep and eat.
The Vatican announced in June that Francis had accepted Djomo’s resignation. Bishops are required to submit letters of resignation to the pope at age 75, but the Vatican often extends their time. Djomo, who turned 78 on July 3, had been permitted to stay on for nearly three additional years. The Vatican, as is its custom, did not provide an explanation for why the pope eventually accepted Djomo’s resignation and allowed him to retire.
During his brief interview with The Post, which occurred hours after his resignation was announced, Djomo said the accusations of a coverup were false, and he accused the founder of the nuns’ association, Charlotte Ekumu, of fabricating a story.
“I have documentation. You have nothing,” he said. “Don’t trust Sister Charlotte. Trust the bishop.”
Catholic bishops are the governors of the church, answering only to the pope, and Djomo’s 25 years in Tshumbe show just how far a bishop’s powers can stretch. He operated in the middle of the vast Congolese backcountry, leading a West Virginia-size diocese with fleeting electricity and scarcely a paved road, one of the poorest places in a nation still reeling from a century of colonialist plundering and despotic rule. With the government absent in much of the country, the church functions as the de facto state. Djomo’s diocese teaches the students and funds the medical clinic and even helps build roads. When Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi visited the region this year, he stayed at Djomo’s house, according to several familiar with the trip.
On the issue of clerical abuse, much of the Vatican’s messaging has been aimed at bishops in regions like this.
When Francis convened a first-of-its-kind summit on abuse in 2019, it was born in part from the idea that the global church — not just in the United States and Europe, but also in Africa and Asia, where Catholicism is growing — was at risk. Speakers tried to puncture the theory, held by a minority of bishops, that abuse was just a Western problem. One Indian cardinal said no church leader should believe that “things are different in my part of the world.”
The new church rules that Francis drew up merely modeled practices already well established in countries seared by scandal. But they were groundbreaking in places like Congo.
Those rules, the most substantial effort by any pope to address the abuse crisis, have aimed to create a global system in which all church figures are more responsive and accountable. Nuns and priests are required to report accusations to higher-ranking religious authorities. Dioceses are supposed to establish special offices for receiving claims. Whistleblowers are to be protected. One of the Congolese summit attendees, the Rev. Georges Kalenga, led training workshops with the country’s bishops upon returning from Rome.
“The sin doesn’t have a color or a continent,” Kisangani Archbishop Marcel Utembi, the president of the Congolese conference of bishops, told The Post. “The church cannot hide any cases.”
Why the Vatican continues to struggle with sex abuse scandals
But there are reasons for concern. Clerical abuse has proved to be widespread in country after country, when someone looks for it. And in much of Africa, few have been looking for it — not the government, not lawyers, not the media. Even the Vatican, which doesn’t publish data on abuse cases, has far from a full picture.
“We do not know enough,” said the Rev. Hans Zollner, a German priest who helped organize Francis’s summit.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa, the continent’s Catholic stronghold, a taboo against discussing abuse has a chilling effect on victims. Those who do come forward must contend with weak justice systems and corruption. Innocent Prosper, the executive director of Lizadeel, a Congolese nongovernmental organization that works with victims of sexual violence, said he knows of clerical abuse cases but they rarely go far, often being settled with payoffs, which people in dire poverty find difficult to reject.
“Money is playing a big role,” said Prosper, whose group also is supporting the aspiring nun. “One day you have a case, and the next day you wake up and the family is saying the case is over.”
How a case is handled depends disproportionately on one figure: the bishop. Because of the bishop’s place in the hierarchy, the church has struggled for years to construct a system of checks and balances that will boost the likelihood that a prelate accused of a coverup can be investigated and potentially disciplined. Francis’s attempt at a solution, drawn up after the summit, calls on bishops to police one another: If a bishop is accused of covering up abuse, a metropolitan bishop — generally a figure heading an important urban archdiocese — can look into the case with the backing of the Holy See.
Three years in, Bishop-Accountability.org, an independent clearinghouse for abuse data, has found 28 instances in which this process has been used — with a majority of the examples occurring in Poland, which has been convulsed by recent revelations of clerical abuse. The clearinghouse found no such examples in Africa.
The Post sent emails, in English and French, to 27 national-level bishops conferences in Africa seeking data on abuse cases and asking whether any bishops had been investigated or sanctioned. Only the Burundi conference responded, saying that a national-level office that was set up to receive abuse claims had not received a single accusation and that no bishop had been investigated.
In the alleged rape in Tshumbe, people supporting the girl say they tried to alert others outside the diocese. The girl’s uncle — the Rev. Alphonse Okongo — sent three letters in February and March 2022 to the Vatican ambassador to Congo and church higher-ups in Rome. Ekumu, who founded the nuns’ association, said she met in person in 2021 with one of the leaders of the Vatican body that handles abuse files, the Rev. John Joseph Kennedy, describing to him Djomo’s alleged coverup.
But the uncle, Okongo, says he never received a response. And Ekumu says she never received a follow-up despite sending emails subsequently. Kennedy did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Even the Congolese national conference of bishops, where Kalenga has become the anti-abuse czar, says it has never heard about the 14-year-old girl’s case. Kalenga cited a “weakness in the system” — in which the investigation into an abuse case typically amounts to a closed conversation between the relevant bishop and the Vatican.
“Each bishop is the boss of his area,” Kalenga said. “Unfortunately, it’s like that.”
Before the alleged rape and its aftermath, the nuns lived in a simple convent just minutes by car from the bishop’s house. The Servants of Mary made house visits to the elderly and sick, and many taught in Tshumbe’s schools.
Sometime around 2019, a new priest was assigned to oversee the nuns’ spiritual lives.
The Rev. André Olongo, a priest with a brawny build, developed a reputation in the convent for being aggressive and behaving inappropriately, according to the nuns. Several nuns say he began having consensual sex with one member of their association and made unwanted passes at others. But to the extent that those might have been warning signs, Ekumu said it was difficult to avoid a priest appointed and trusted by the bishop. Sometimes the 14-year-old girl was sent to run errands for Olongo.
The alleged victim says she believes, in retrospect, that Olongo was grooming her for abuse.
In one instance, she says, Olongo told her that all priests take nuns as partners, implying that sexual relations were the norm. On a separate occasion, she says, he fondled her breasts as she fetched some water. She says the pattern escalated on March 28, 2020, when he asked her into his room to make the bed. She says Olongo lifted her, dropped her on the bed and raped her.
“He removed my clothes by force,” she said.
The alleged victim’s father, Michel Tadiongo, described his daughter as a bright, shy girl who had gravitated to the idea of a religious life because she so admired one of her teachers, a nun. The family sent her off to the association in 2019. It wasn’t until months after the alleged rape that she found the strength to tell her parents, she says. Tadiongo remembered thinking that the family “couldn’t allow this to be hidden.” One family member, with legal training, helped Tadiongo take the case to police. (The alleged victim’s surname is different from that of her uncle or her father.)
From that point, the case traveled on two tracks, one in the slow gears of the Congolese justice system and the other in the hands of the bishop.
Those familiar with the case say Djomo took several steps to weaken or dismiss the case on both tracks. He dissolved the Servants of Mary, turning potential witnesses into de facto nuns in exile. In April 2020, Djomo had called the association a “beacon of hope.” But in announcing the suspension in July 2021, he said the group was founded on “lies” and “duplicity” and was involved with the practice of witchcraft. He accused Ekumu, the founder, of spending “more than half the year” in the United States, where she has family, and of “obstinate disobedience” to the bishop.
The nuns say the alleged victim has convinced herself that the turmoil is her own fault.
“I don’t sleep when I think about this,” the girl said in an interview.
Djomo is accused by the alleged victim’s family of trying to pay them to drop the court case. Okongo, the girl’s uncle, who served as a priest under Djomo, said the bishop invited him to a meeting in September 2021 at a church. Okongo says Djomo remarked on the family’s difficult financial situation and said he could help to ameliorate it.
“A way to buy silence,” Okongo called it.
Djomo, Okongo says, offered him $15,000 — as much as the priest, the family’s breadwinner, would make in five years.
Okongo says he rejected it: “It’s dirty money.”
Okongo does not have documentation of the alleged offer and says Djomo made it orally. He says he immediately notified his siblings, including the alleged victim’s father, who confirmed that account. Two months later, when Djomo issued his priests their duties for the coming year, Okongo’s name was nowhere on the list — an effective job removal. The diocese stopped paying his salary. Okongo described it as an act of retaliation. He has moved to Kinshasa, where he is unemployed and sleeping at his younger sister’s house.
Djomo did not respond to a question about the alleged offer.
Months after the rape allegations against Olongo came to light, he was listed in a church document as holding a management position in the diocese. But then the family took the case to court, and Djomo instituted the sanction that prohibited him from ministry and from unsupervised contact with minors.
With those prohibitions in place, Olongo retreated to Kinshasa, taking refuge in a compound used by the diocese to house clerics who are either studying in the capital or visiting. One recent afternoon, two Post reporters buzzed at the compound entrance, announced their identities, asked for Olongo and were ushered into a central room.
The priest appeared minutes later, shaking hands. But after the reporters explained the reason for the visit, he broke off the conversation, saying he would call his lawyer. Other priests entered the room and threatened to call the police. “It’s unthinkable you would come to humiliate him,” one said. Olongo said that “if anything happens — if I see my name in the article — you’ll be responsible.”
The priests ushered the Post journalists toward the door.
But two days later, one priest staying at the compound made contact with The Post. He wanted to meet.
In that meeting, two Tshumbe priests said the diocese has dealt in recent years with at least a half-dozen instances of alleged sexual abuse or misconduct by priests. In at least three cases, the priests said, Djomo moved to discipline those who were accused. (The Post obtained three decrees — from 2018, 2019 and 2020 — ordering the defrocking of priests facing abuse allegations.) But in other cases, the priests said, Djomo worked to protect accused clerics from consequences.
“It depended on his personal preference for the priest,” one of them said.
Olongo was one of Djomo’s favorites, the priests said, and was viewed by the bishop as a potential successor. And he was among the protected ones, the priests said.
The alleged victim’s uncle said he knew of an earlier rape accusation against Olongo because he had been transferred to the village of Djalo to replace him after that allegation. One of the priests who met with The Post said, independently of the uncle, that he knew about the existence of that allegation.
Abedi, the lawyer who has represented Olongo, said that he did not know of any earlier accusations against the priest and that he knew little about Olongo’s life beyond the matter of this case.
Boniface Okitapambi, the lawyer representing the aspiring nun of the Servants of Mary, said he has been involved in two cases in the past several years in which Tshumbe priests were accused of impregnating minors. In one case, in which he defended the priest, the cleric was sentenced to a period of house arrest, Okitapambi said. The other case is ongoing.
Okitapambi said the case of the aspiring nun has gained more traction than any other, in part because of the family’s persistence.
Tadiongo said his family is Catholic but is willing to challenge the church as a way to preserve his daughter’s “career and faith.”
“We don’t care if the church is strong,” he said.
In Congo, justice can be hard to come by. Okitapambi, who mostly handles divorces and property disputes, and says he can’t afford his own car, has been “disappointed many times” by the Congolese system. The U.S. Department of State, in its annual human rights report, says the Congolese judiciary is “corrupt and subject to influence and intimidation.” Okitapambi says relying on that system is his only choice.
“With all the ups and downs, it’s still better to try,” he said.
The family filed charges more than 18 months ago but has seen no resolution. The family is seeking the arrest of Olongo and $40,000 in damages from the priest, as well as $70,000 from the diocese for “harm suffered.” The sides have jostled over where the case should be heard, and jurisdiction was eventually transferred to Kinshasa.
Olongo has filed a counterclaim against the alleged victim, one family member and two nuns, alleging that he is being defamed.
Alleged abuse of deaf children on two continents points to Vatican failings
The court case has become more critical because the church’s own internal procedure has effectively ended.
Several months ago, the alleged victim’s uncle and father and a handful of nuns received letters from Djomo’s diocese asking them to present themselves in person to provide their testimony. By that point — so long after the alleged rape — many of the people invited had moved elsewhere. Kinshasa is 600 miles from Tshumbe. And they’d lost faith in Djomo to lead a fair investigation. Many of the nuns refused to participate. So did Okongo, the uncle, who wrote to the bishop that the inquiry appeared “suspicious.” The alleged victim, who does not have a cellphone, was never contacted.
The Rev. Marcel Kilombo, the Tshumbe priest who was deputized by Djomo to lead the investigation, said the bishop delayed launching his own inquiry because he was “waiting for the justice process to conclude.” Kilombo said Djomo reversed course after the Vatican applied pressure. Kilombo said he “could not blame” many of the invitees for declining to testify, but some people did show up to speak.
Kilombo said that on the basis of the information he collected, he was “personally convinced” that there had been a rape.
But he said it was up to Djomo to compile the information and make a report to the Vatican.
“The bishop is the only one who knows the content of the report and what he sent to Rome,” Kilombo said.
Djomo referred questions about his handling of the case to the Vatican.
The Post approached other priests in the diocese about the case. The Rev. Jules Omokonge, who has served as head of clergy in the diocese, said that after Rome’s decision of insufficient grounds to find wrongdoing, many clerics were “convinced that this case was a fake accusation.” But Omokonge said that he had no proof to support such a belief and that it was “very difficult” for priests to get information on abuse cases in the diocese. Such cases, he said, were “handled by the bishop himself.”
Priests say Djomo, during a recent visit to Kinshasa, went to the compound where Olongo was staying and notified the priests there of the Vatican’s finding. The news soon trickled out on WhatsApp groups — a setback so disappointing to the alleged victim’s supporters that they decided not to tell her.
The announcement ended up being one of Djomo’s last moves as bishop of Tshumbe. Days later, he returned to his diocese and began his retirement. Olongo, meanwhile, no longer faces restrictions; he can resume ministry and have contact with minors.
“He is free now,” Djomo said in his brief conversation with The Post. “He can say Mass. I am so glad.” | 2022-07-15T06:37:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As Vatican confronts Catholic church sex abuse, Congo case raises warning signs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/congo-catholic-priest-sex-abuse/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/congo-catholic-priest-sex-abuse/ |
Russia-Ukraine war live updates Vinnytsia strike work of ‘terrorist state,’ Zelensky says; Griner trial continues
45 nations pledge to coordinate war crimes investigations in Ukraine
CCTV footage shows the moment of impact and people running for cover when Russian missiles struck a shopping center in central Ukraine on July 14. (Video: Storyful)
Kelsey Ables
President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced Russia as a “terrorist state” after a missile attack on civilian targets in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia that left at least 23 dead. “And if someone launched a missile attack on a medical center in Dallas or Dresden, God forbid, what would it be called? Wouldn’t it be called terrorism?” he said. Rescue operations are ongoing.
Early Friday, at least ten missiles struck two universities in the southern city of Mykolaiv, a regional military leader said. Russian troops in eastern Ukraine also launched small-scale offensives on Thursdayaround the cities of Slovyansk, Siversk and Bakhmut, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. The Kremlin will probably step up attacks there soon, the think tank said.
WNBA star Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Russia on drug charges for months, faces another day in court Friday. The Kremlin said it would ignore public pressure in the United States for her release, instead urging the Biden administration — which considers her wrongfully detained — to “work through established channels.” Griner has pleaded guilty to carrying 0.702 grams, or about 0.02 ounces, of cannabis oil. It isn’t clear when she will be sentenced.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen on Friday denounced the Russian invasion in a closed-door meeting of the Group of 20 nations that was attended by a senior Kremlin official.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe released a second report that contains evidence Russia committed rape, torture and executions amid its ongoing invasion.
More than 40 countries, including the United States and those in the European Union, agreed to work together to assist investigations into alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
More than 40 countries, including the United States and those in the European Union, agreed Thursday to work together to assist investigations into alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
The agreement came hours after three Russian cruise missiles struck the city of Vinnytsia, killing more than 23 people, including three children. Since the start of the war, Russia has repeatedly denied its involvement in deliberately targeting civilians and high-traffic areas in Ukraine.
Representatives from 45 countries signed a political declaration at the Ukraine Accountability Conference in The Hague on Thursday, and steps will be taken to coordinate investigations — including training Ukrainian prosecutors and expanding the number of forensic teams operating out of Kyiv.
“In all situations across the world where international crimes are committed we should feel the same urgency for action and for cooperation. I believe that the work we do today can set a model for action that can be used to accelerate accountability efforts in all situations addressed by my Office,” said International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan, in a statement.
The countries also pledged $20 million to assist the ICC, as well as the prosecutor general’s office in Ukraine and United Nations support efforts.
There are 23,000 war crimes investigations open, with different countries leading specific operations.
In a statement issued by the State Department Thursday, spokesman Ned Price said that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) published a June report showing that experts found “clear patterns of serious violations of international humanitarian law attributable mostly to Russian armed forces” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The report also notes similarities to an initial report on human rights abuses and international humanitarian law violations from April.
“The current report, like its predecessor, also documents evidence of direct targeting of civilians, attacks on medical facilities, rape, torture, executions, looting, and forced transfer of civilians to Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine and forced deportations to Russia itself,” Price said.
On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that over 900,000 Ukrainians were “forcibly deported” to areas across Russia. If true, war crime experts say that the move shows “genocidal intent” — on par with systemic violations seen during World War II.
By Robyn Dixon and Alex Horton2:15 a.m.
RIGA, Latvia — Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday warned Washington not to exert pressure on Moscow over prisoner exchanges, hours before American WNBA star Brittney Griner arrived at a suburban court to face a third hearing in her trial on drug charges for which she could serve 10 years in prison.
Amid intense domestic pressure on the Biden administration to secure Griner’s release, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that this was “futile” and claimed that U.S. officials were trying to use the pressure as leverage. | 2022-07-15T06:37:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Latest Russia-Ukraine war news: Live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news-live-updates/ |
Biden seeks to repair ties with Palestinians with hospital and Abbas visit
President Biden speaks during a visit to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem on July 15. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
JERUSALEM — President Biden, devoting the last hours of his Israeli visit to restoring the ties with Palestinians severed by predecessor, visited a Palestinian hospital Friday in East Jerusalem before crossing into the West Bank for a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The administration also announced $15 million in emergency aid to help the territories during grain shortages caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as an initiative to speed the rollout of 4G technology in the West Bank and Gaza.
“It’s an honor to see first hand the quality of care you provide to the Palestinian people,” Biden said after touring Augusta Victoria Hospital, the leading advanced-care facility available to residents of the East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, most of whom need Israeli permission to travel there.
Some protesters in Ramallah held up “Biden Go Home” posters during a demonstration Thursday. An Israeli advocacy group, B’Tselem, mounted billboards near the 26-foot-high separation wall in Bethlehem reading “Mr. President, This is Apartheid,” a characterization Biden has rejected.
Biden has affirmed his support for a peace agreement that would end the Israeli occupation and create an independent Palestine, but has also made clear that conditions aren’t there for progress toward those goals. He once indicated his intention to reopen the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem, but has so far hasn’t in the face of Israeli objections.
The president condemned a string of terrorist attacks that killed 15 in Israel last spring, but he did not publicly mention two Palestinian Americans who died during encounters with the Israeli military in the West Bank in recent months: An elderly man who died after being left in the cold at roadblock and Shireen Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera journalist shot during an Israeli raid. The U.S. has accepted findings that the shot was most likely fired by an Israeli soldier.
“Palestinians see it as a positive thing that this president has restored some of the funding and talks to Palestinian leaders, but overall the feeling about this trip and the last year and half is one of disappointment,” said Khalil Shikaki, a pollster and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. “The hope that he would be very different from Trump has faded. Now they see him as only slightly different.”
Palestinians are waiting for Biden to put pressure on both Israel — to curtail settlements, ease the Gaza blockade and other reforms — and Abbas himself, who has refused to hold elections since he took office in 2005. With the progressive wing of the Democratic Party increasingly aligning with Palestinian causes, many here expected Biden to engage with the conflict more than he has.
“He’s not even doing as much as Obama did,” said Shikaki. “That they can’t even do something as small and symbolic as opening the consulate is seen as a real lack of courage or will or ability.”
Some Palestinians see Biden’s events in the West Bank, slotted between his days in Israel and his departure for Saudi Arabia, as a footnote to his real priority: deepening Israel’s ties with other Arab nations in the region.
The Saudi government announced Friday that it was opening its airspace to Israeli commercial flights, ending a traditional blockade that will save hours on flights between Israel and parts of Asia. Biden and Israeli officials hailed the shift as a step toward the kind of formal relations with Israel that Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab states have embraced, despite the lack of progress toward Palestinian statehood. | 2022-07-15T09:17:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden visits Palestinians, Abbas ahead of Saudi trip - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/biden-palestine-jerusalem-abbas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/biden-palestine-jerusalem-abbas/ |
Travis Herzog was giving his weather report on the Texas heat wave when the lights went out. (KTRK)
During his 3 p.m. weather report on Wednesday, Travis Herzog, a meteorologist for KTRK in Houston, stood in front of a screen showing the astronomically high temperatures broiling Texas — as hot as 105 degrees in College Station.
When you “have this kind of heat over major populations,” Herzog explained, “you get a big draw on that electric demand.”
But just before Herzog uttered the word “electric,” the lights went out, turning Herzog into a silhouette in front of the weather map.
“It looks like we may have just switched over to generator power; our lights just went out,” Herzog said before continuing to talk about the “excessive heat” in some Texas cities. Seconds later, the lights turned back on.
“Maybe it’s just my electrifying personality, maybe not,” Herzog tweeted afterward. “But this time I was fully expecting Ashton Kutcher to come around the corner and say, ‘You’ve been PUNKED!’ ”
The quirky moments came as Texas is experiencing a record-breaking heat wave that is pushing the state’s power grid to its limits. This past week, Texas endured triple-digit temperatures in many cities, prompting state energy officials to request that residents conserve energy and turn up their thermostats.
Concerns of power shut-offs during the extreme weather have left residents on edge, the Texas Tribune reported. In February 2021, 3.5 million Texans lost power amid a record cold wave, in which temperatures in some areas dropped to freezing. More than 200 people died.
This month, it’s the heat that’s become dangerous. In Houston, where Herzog works, temperatures reached 105 degrees on Sunday, making it the hottest July day in city history. That day, College Station, north of Houston, reached 111 degrees, its second hottest day on record. San Antonio has reached at least 100 degrees on a record 35 days this year.
Herzog tweeted Wednesday that he did not know why exactly the lights went out twice during his broadcasts. He explained that the display behind him and the other production equipment are connected to a backup power source, and that is why he didn’t go off the air.
“What I can tell you is that grid conditions are getting *really* tight,” Herzog wrote. “Hopefully we can get through this with the lights and A/C ON!” | 2022-07-15T09:39:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Power flickers as Texas meteorologist says heat wave may cause outages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/15/texas-meteorologist-lights-heat-wave/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/15/texas-meteorologist-lights-heat-wave/ |
‘Islamic State in Africa’ explores nine militant Islamist groups
This book takes a comprehensive look at the rise of Islamic State affiliates operating on the continent
Analysis by Dan Eizenga
For many African countries, violence linked to militant Islamist groups is a pressing security threat. These armed extremist groups amplify grievances and intercommunal differences to recruit new members and foster anti-government sentiments. Civilian communities often bear the brunt of this violence, as virtually none of these groups enjoy widespread popular support.
Militant Islamist violence in Africa reached new heights in 2021, sustaining a decade-long trend. But the pattern is not uniform across the continent. In North Africa, Mozambique and the Lake Chad basin — an area comprising parts of Nigeria, eastern Niger, Chad and Cameroon — violence declined in 2021. But militant Islamist violence in the Sahel — comprising parts of Mali, Burkina Faso and western Niger — nearly doubled.
Where are Islamic State groups active?
In “The Islamic State in Africa,” Jason Warner, Ryan O’Farrell, Héni Nsaibia and Ryan Cummings provide the first comprehensive account of nine African militant Islamist groups. Each group proclaims ties to the Islamic State. The authors ask why allegiance to the Islamic State has persisted in Africa despite the group’s decline in Iraq and Syria, particularly after the 2019 death of founding leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. To address this puzzle, the authors investigate the emergence and evolution of Islamic State groups in Africa.
Readers will learn about the group’s background before jumping deeper. Nine case studies offer a close look at Islamic State affiliates in Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, the Lake Chad basin, the Sahel, Somalia, Congo and Mozambique. These cases explore the Islamic State affiliates’ varying trajectories. The group identifies its affiliates in Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria and Somalia as wilayat, or provinces, of the Islamic State. Other groups — the Sahel, Congo and Mozambique — are “wings” or “affiliates.” The Islamic State never accorded Islamist militants in Tunisia affiliate status, only referring to them abstractly as Jund al-Khalifa, or “soldiers of the caliphate.”
How do you analyze disparate groups?
Fitting these diverse cases into a single analytical framework poses a challenge. To do so, the authors identify three distinct historical periods related to when a particular group pledged allegiance, or bayah, to the Islamic State. They compare the groups’ activities before their pledge, then the period after a pledge was made but remained unacknowledged and, ultimately, the period after the Islamic State’s acknowledgment. The authors then deploy three separate analytic frames for each period to explore the groups vis-a-vis the Islamic State.
The terminology poses a challenge
At times, these concepts distract from the major contributions of the book. The first of those frames, “democratization of jihad,” requires the authors to address the confusing choice of democratization as a term. They explain that it’s not about a greater degree of democracy or decision-making power within groups. Instead, when the Islamic State emerged on the global scale, it presented an alternative for militant Islamist groups. Having two global Islamist militant networks with which to align themselves “democratized” jihad, according to the authors.
In some cases, this appears significant. In Algeria and Somalia, militants broke away from al-Qaeda to form an alternative. The narrative is less clear in other cases. Boko Haram in Nigeria, for example, followed a trajectory driven more by internal divides than global alliances.
In the Sahel, there are already many different groups of aspiring Islamist militants. Elsewhere, including Mozambique and Congo, al-Qaeda is absent. In Libya and Tunisia, direct links and fighters’ experiences in Iraq and Syria appear to have influenced the decision to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State — as did the direct efforts by the group’s leaders to establish a province in Libya.
Given this variety of motivations, context and connections, it is unclear how “democratization” emerged as the best term to capture these dynamics. “Diversification” or “multiplication” might perhaps have offered a clearer picture.
“Affiliate utility validation,” a second frame, refers simply to how the Islamic State viewed the group pledging bayah to al-Baghdadi as contributing to Islamic State goals. However, Islamic State goals have shifted over time, causing perceptions to change concerning a specific group’s usefulness to the group’s cause. This allows the authors to identify a wide range of Islamic State justifications for acknowledging a group as an affiliate, depending on the strategic drivers at the time.
Are these local or global groups?
Are African Islamic extremists primarily acting locally? Or are they operating at the behest of larger global militant networks? The authors deploy their concept of “sovereign subordinates,” a third frame, to navigate this debate. They argue that Islamic State affiliates are subordinate to the group in principle, but each makes sovereign decisions over much of their activities and territories. The primacy of sovereignty puts the authors largely on the local side of this debate. Yet certain editorial and stylistic decisions obscure this position.
Perhaps the most glaring example is the book’s title, which conjures an image of a centralized and singular Islamic State coming to Africa, marking a new frontier in the global war on terror. This view risks mischaracterizing the groups — and ultimately, misdiagnosing effective policy prescriptions for those engaged in counterterrorism efforts.
The authors appear to realize this risk, arguing in the conclusion for the need to contextualize counterterror responses to local conditions. They state: “Nor, despite the focus of this book, do we advocate trying to address these particular affiliates primarily through the lens of their affiliation with the Islamic State.” One wonders, then, how the tacit promotion of the Islamic State lens might have an impact on efforts to reduce extremist violence.
Different audiences will appreciate this resource
Overall, the book offers a wealth of information, contributing a great deal to the scholarly body of work focused on militant Islamist groups in Africa. The laudable compendium of detailed case studies will appeal to anyone looking to explore these contexts. The organization of the volume is clear, offering opportunities for the book to be used in classrooms. The cases also will undoubtedly be of use to policymakers in Africa and beyond. This important book offers digestible accounts of militant Islamist groups and their African contexts — a complicated puzzle that may be unfamiliar to many in the general public.
Daniel Eizenga, PhD, is a research fellow with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, where his work focuses on militant Islamist groups in Africa. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. | 2022-07-15T09:39:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What do we know about IS operations in Africa? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/islamic-state-africa-is-alqaeda/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/islamic-state-africa-is-alqaeda/ |
Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson talked to the media during offseason practices. (Gail Burton/AP)
Lamar Jackson could use some help. Some assistance from a roster of agents, managers and publicists who call themselves Team Lamar. And the sole purpose of Team Lamar should be to flood the mainstream with commercials featuring their No. 1 guy.
Do what Baker Mayfield’s people did. But unlike Team Baker, Team Lamar would be selling a winning product. This should make it easy for them to come up with ad campaigns — for a sports drink, insurance company, fast food sandwich, it really doesn’t matter. Imagine the camera slowly zooming in on Jackson, standing alone in a vast prairie. The wind is blowing those amber waves of grain, a bald eagle is soaring above, and Jackson suddenly drops back three steps and slings the football. Just throwing, throwing, throwing to absolutely no one.
If the message is still a little too abstract, the spot could close with a voice-over guy — he has to sound like Sam Elliott — whispering the words: “Just look at that great American quarterback.”
Maybe then Jackson, who plays under center for the Baltimore Ravens, could finally fit the stereotypical image stuck in the minds of some NFL executives, coaches, scouts and players.
The trouble is, Jackson doesn’t employ a cabal of image-makers that could be tasked with elevating his profile and changing the narrative that surrounds his career. And he hasn’t shaken free from his 2018 draft report card in which he was praised for his athleticism and running ability, with those skills showing how his game transcended mere passing. But his athletic reputation then, like now, was not centered on the qualities traditionalists associate with the quintessential star quarterback.
Almost five years in, despite his 37 wins as a starter and the unanimous MVP award in 2019, too many people in the league still don’t see Jackson as an elite quarterback.
Judging by the survey released this week by ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler, Jackson’s a nonconformist at best and a conundrum at worst. Fowler polled a mixed bag of more than 50 NFL folks about the best quarterbacks in the league, and Jackson was not named among the top 10. A surprising development but also the tax paid for possessing a different kind of talent while trying to thrive in a traditional space.
While the game has evolved, thrust forward by the arrival of athletes who are built like power lifters but as nimble as ballerinas, a particular mind-set remains stuck in the olden times. NFL quarterbacks should play a certain way.
Jackson doesn’t play like typical NFL quarterbacks. And they certainly can’t play like him. He’s a trapezoid peg in the square hole of signal callers. He doesn’t quite fit.
In sports, sometimes it’s hard to be a freak.
Just as Jackson was receiving the top individual honor in the NFL, the NBA’s resident three-headed monster, Giannis Antetokounmpo, had started collecting his back-to-back MVP awards.
As Giannis led the Milwaukee Bucks to the championship in 2021, he still heard the cries of critics: ‘Yeah, but can he shoot?' Similarly, while Alex Ovechkin was climbing the NHL’s all-time scoring list, the protectors of hockey purity found smudge marks on his masterpieces, labeling Ovi as less than a complete player who didn’t care enough or play any defense.
Jackson hears the “yeah, but …” as much as any current great player, and judging by his recent Twitter beef with former NFL safety Bernard Pollard, he’s tired of it. After Pollard criticized Jackson’s passing, the quarterback devoted his Wednesday night rushing to his own defense, the way he spends Sundays escaping out of pockets. It’s not only that if a play breaks down, Jackson and his feet will take off; the Ravens have designed an offense around his powerful runs. He’s a more realized Fran Tarkenton. A faster Steve Young. An even more acrobatic Michael Vick. His legs and athleticism vs. your defensive line and secondary? Good luck.
Oh, and there’s a right arm attached to his body, too. It might have happened during the summer months when football fans are desperate for content, but Jackson earned the mind-blown emoji from the official NFL Twitter account when he flicked a football 50 yards from his knee. It might not be as impressive, but during real games he has often shown off his throwing ability — such as his jump pass for a touchdown last season in a Week 2 win over the Kansas City Chiefs or his 68-yard connection to tight end Mark Andrews in 2018.
They didn’t look like the pretty spirals tossed by Aaron Rodgers or the bombs launched from Patrick Mahomes. But they were plays that led to the stats that matter most in the league: wins and playoff appearances. In four years with Jackson, the Ravens have made the playoffs three times.
If purists can pause the grainy highlight film of men playing with single-bar face masks long enough to stop holding Jackson’s skill set against him, then they would see he’s as pure football as they come.
He embodies the very ethos of American ruggedness, something you would expect to be celebrated. His team plays in one of the NFL’s toughest divisions, with the emerging Cincinnati Bengals and the perennially competitive Pittsburgh Steelers, and he still became the youngest quarterback to reach 35 wins, beating out Dan Marino.
He says “Hell yeah!” to the stickiest of situations, such as going for it on fourth and one late in the fourth quarter, and he shows up to work even though his contract extension has yet to be resolved. Besides a few odd updates to social media — Jackson changed his Twitter banner and Instagram profile pic to a screenshot of a movie character with gold-plated teeth reading “I Need $” — he hasn’t used public whining to get his way in contract negotiations with the Ravens.
This strap-up-and-let’s-go-play persona should be how he’s marketed. As spellbinding as his version of football is in a league that actively encourages kids to play the game, Jackson would seem like the preferred superhero to represent the shield. But Jackson has not turned himself into a pitch man. He doesn’t even have an agent. As far as we know, Team Lamar consists of just himself and his mother.
The lack of representation hurts his branding and possibly weakens his position at the negotiating table, but Jackson does things his way. He’s hard to figure out in the same way that he’s difficult for defenses to wrap their arms around. His way has worked, but being offset from the norm means paying a price, even if it’s symbolic — such as not making a list chosen by anonymous judges.
NFL executives, coaches, scouts and players still don’t think Lamar Jackson is a top-10 quarterback. That’s because he’s one of one. | 2022-07-15T09:40:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Lamar Jackson remains polarizing in the NFL - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/15/lamar-jackson-twitter-bernard-pollard/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/15/lamar-jackson-twitter-bernard-pollard/ |
Tiger Woods of the US waits to play on the 11th tee during the first round of the British Open golf championship on the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, Thursday July 14, 2022. The Open Championship returns to the home of golf on July 14-17, 2022, to celebrate the 150th edition of the sport’s oldest championship, which dates to 1860 and was first played at St. Andrews in 1873. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) | 2022-07-15T09:40:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | British Open | Woods starts 2nd round; LIV golfers starring - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/golf/british-open--woods-starts-2nd-round-liv-golfers-starring/2022/07/15/41eefd28-0420-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/golf/british-open--woods-starts-2nd-round-liv-golfers-starring/2022/07/15/41eefd28-0420-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
By Widlore Mérancourt
Armed forces in Port-au-Prince on July 11. (Odelyn Joseph/AP)
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — While the gangs clash outside, Florient Clebert, his four sons and a daughter have been trapped inside their home for days. They’ve seen several neighbors killed. His brother was shot in the head last week and could not be treated in a hospital.
Now the family is running out of food. Clebert, 39, an out-of-work substitute teacher, has been unable to get to the bank to withdraw money. Government forces, meanwhile, seem to be doing nothing.
“We are the masses, and we are abandoned,” he told The Washington Post on Thursday, his voice trembling as gunfire rang out in the background.
Scores of people are dead amid days of violent clashes between warring gangs in Cité Soleil, the Haitian capital’s largest slum, and thousands more have been trapped without food or water, exacerbating the spiraling insecurity and humanitarian crises in this beleaguered Caribbean nation.
Jöel Janéus, the mayor of Cité Soleil, said many of the dead haven’t been counted yet that but more than 50 people have been killed and more than 110 wounded since the current round of violence erupted last week. He said the gangs have burned most of the bodies, and many families have few answers about the whereabouts of their loved ones.
Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s office and the interior ministry have been in touch with local officials, Janéus told The Post, but have taken little action to end the bloodshed. He said he spent his own money on food and water for residents because the mayor’s office has no money.
Janéus said he was in hiding. “I’m receiving a lot of pressure and threats,” he said.
The carnage in Cité Soleil, a community of more than 260,000 people on the Port-au-Prince Bay, is part of a surge of violence and kidnappings for ransom by armed gangs amid worsening political instability following the still-unsolved assassination a year ago of President Jovenel Moïse.
Haiti’s gangs use TikTok, Instagram, Twitter to recruit and terrorize
The United Nations said this week that 1.5 million people in Port-au-Prince are trapped, “deprived of basic services and their freedom of movement,” by the gang violence. The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to vote Friday on whether to extend its political mission in Haiti.
The violence in Cité Soleil erupted last week between warring coalitions of gangs: G-Pèp and the G-9, a federation of nine gangs led by Jimmy Chérizier. The United States has imposed sanctions on Chérizier, a former police officer who goes by the nickname Barbecue, for allegedly leading armed groups in “coordinated, brutal attacks in Port-au-Prince neighborhoods.”
In a video shared on social media this week, Chérizier held a long gun and proclaimed, “The fight to liberate the country is launched against kidnappers and robbers.”
Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network said that more than a dozen people have been disappeared in Cité Soleil and that more than 120 homes have been destroyed by arson or by heavy machinery that it alleged the National Equipment Center provided the G-9.
Kington Louis, director general of the National Equipment Center, told The Post that the allegations are false. He said one of the center’s loaders was hijacked by the gangs who assassinated the driver when he refused to do what they demanded.
In Haiti, coronavirus and a man named Barbecue test the rule of law
Doctors Without Borders called on the gangs to spare civilians. The organization said the needs for food, water and medical aid are acute in Brooklyn, an isolated neighborhood of Cité Soleil that residents have been unable to leave since July 8.
“Along the only road into Brooklyn, we have encountered corpses that are decomposing or being burned,” Mumuza Muhindo, the group’s head of mission in Haiti, said in a statement. “They could be people killed during the clashes or trying to leave who were shot. It is a real battlefield.”
A fuel terminal near Cité Soleil temporarily suspended deliveries this week, exacerbating nationwide fuel shortages and spurring protests that blocked main roads across the capital. Fuel deliveries resumed on Thursday.
Janéus, the mayor, has been personally affected by spiraling insecurity. In November, armed bandits descended on his home in Croix-des-Bouquets, a neighborhood east of Port-au-Prince that’s a stronghold of the notorious 400 Mawozo gang, and kidnapped his wife.
Abductions by the busload: Haitians are being held hostage by a surge in kidnappings
Friends, family and residents of Cité Soleil pitched in to help him collect the $40,000 ransom the gang demanded. Janéus said he negotiated with Germine “Yonyon” Joly, the leader of 400 Mawozo, who ran the gang’s operations from a Port-au-Prince prison by cellphone.
Joly was transferred to the United States in May to face charges over his alleged roles in a criminal conspiracy to violate U.S. export laws by smuggling firearms to Haiti and a conspiracy to commit hostage-taking in the kidnapping last year of 17 missionaries with an Ohio-based charity in Port-au-Prince.
“My three kids are now in the U.S.,” Janéus said, “but my wife is with me in Haiti. Although she’s seeing a psychologist, she is still unstable since the kidnapping.” | 2022-07-15T10:09:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thousands trapped, dozens killed by gang violence in Cité Soleil - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/haiti-gang-violence-cite-soleil/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/haiti-gang-violence-cite-soleil/ |
Just like Musk signed a deal with Twitter, his banks signed a deal with him to put up the acquisition money. Neither can get out easily.
Elon Musk at a 2020 aerospace conference in Washington. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
What role does debt play in Musk’s original agreement to buy Twitter?
Musk is the world’s richest man, valued at $218 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, but even he doesn’t have $44 billion in hard cash sitting under his mattress. He signed two agreements with banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays to loan a total of $25.5 billion. He put up a significant amount of his own wealth in the form of Tesla shares as collateral, should he not be able to pay the loans back. The rest of the deal was to be funded with cash, split between Musk himself and a consortium of hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds who later agreed to help him buy the company and would be co-owners if the deal is successful.
Why haven’t the banks tried to bail already?
The banks are only on the hook to fund the deal if it closes, and many people don’t believe Twitter will be successful in getting a court to force Musk’s hand. A more likely outcome is that the judge in Delaware Chancery Court, where the trial will take place, will force a compromise, making Musk pay Twitter a hefty fee for putting it through so much trouble, but letting him walk away in the end, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
If the banks do find a way to pull out, does that give Musk an out?
No, Musk’s agreement with Twitter has a clause that requires him to go through with the deal even if his debt financing becomes unavailable.
If Musk’s debt arrangements do become a factor in a potential settlement or trial, it wouldn’t be the first time financing became a factor in a court case over a merger agreement. Last year, Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick, who experts expect will preside over the Twitter case, oversaw a court case featuring a private equity firm that tried to pull out of an agreement to buy cake-decorating supply company DecoPac by blaming the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic. McCormick said the private equity firm acquiring DecoPac had to move forward, even though they no longer had the original financing to complete the deal.
Why does Twitter want the deal to go through at this point?
The Twitter board’s main role is to serve its shareholders — the banks, pension funds, hedge funds and individuals who own its stock. Right now, Twitter shares are trading at around $36, a lot less than the $54 a share Musk has agreed pay those shareholders to buy the company. If Twitter’s board were to let Musk walk away, it would be leaving a significant amount of money on the table, and could expose them to shareholder lawsuits. | 2022-07-15T10:22:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Elon Musk can’t get out of buying Twitter even if his bankers bail - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/15/elon-musk-debt-financing-twitter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/15/elon-musk-debt-financing-twitter/ |
Phoebe Robinson as Phoebe in Freeform’s “Everything’s Trash” (Freeform). (Giovanni Rufino/Freeform)
Actress, comedian, publisher and author Phoebe Robinson says she is a reformed workaholic. Yeah, we don’t really believe her either.
How could anyone, when in the last year alone Robinson has launched a stand up special (” Sorry, Harriet Tubman”), released her third book (” Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes”), celebrated the best-selling success of one of her imprint’s authors and earlier this week debuted her starring role in “Everything’s Trash,” her first half-hour comedy? That’s a lot of work and Robinson, who has been at it since hitting the New York comedy scene more than a decade ago, is far from finished.
But in “Everything’s Trash,” which premiered its first two episodes on Freeform this week, the silly outweighs the struggle. So it’s work but fun, which is Robinson’s wheelhouse. “TV Phoebe,” as the multi-hyphenate calls her small-screen character is an up-and-coming podcaster figuring out the whole adulting thing in Brooklyn. Adding to the cast of characters is TV Phoebe’s blerdy older brother, her perfectly put together producer and her quirky but lovable roommate. It’s a hangout show with heart, delivered at a time when it feels like everything truly is trash.
“I hope people can feel uplifted and joyful when they’re watching the show and then maybe open their hearts up a little bit more,” said Robinson. That’s a tall order but when she’s worked this hard to make it happen audiences might oblige. Here we chat with Robinson about the show, why New York is everyone’s favorite place and what Real Phoebe has learned.
Q: We have to start with the title of the show, “Everything’s Trash.” It comes from your 2018 essay collection of the same name but in the years since things have gotten, shall we say, much worse. Explain what it means for literally everything to be trash.
A: We’re all trash. But by acknowledging that, we can then sort of work through those issues, those flaws, those insecurities and try and be our best selves. Because I think there is a lot of toxic positivity. We’re like, yasss, queen, slay, you’re iconic. Okay most of us aren’t iconic. We’re sort of fumbling our way through adulthood and that’s okay. We don’t have to have everything figured out. We don’t have to have all the right answers. But as long as we’re trying, that’s the best that we can hope for.
Q: Heartwarming shows seem to be having a moment — “Abbott Elementary,” “Ted Lasso.” Is it the times? Do we need a mental break?
A: Right now with the way that the world is and living through an endemic, I think we want shows that are a little less cynical or a little less depressing. But what’s fantastic is that there’s room for all of those. So while you have [my] show, “Abbott Elementary” and “South Side” — you also have [heavier shows like] “Succession” and “Better Call Saul” and “Yellowjackets.” It’s a really rich time for TV. You can watch my show and feel good. If you want to feel a little bit stressed you can watch a “Yellowjackets” and go, Oh I don’t know what’s gonna happen next week.
Q: Let’s talk representation. Obviously you’re a Black woman in Brooklyn but the plot of “Everything’s Trash” doesn’t feel driven by that fact. The same goes for a lot of other new shows created and starring majority people-of-color casts. It feels like progress, that one experience doesn’t have to stand in for every experience.
A: When I sat down with my showrunner, Jonathan Groff, who came from “Blackish” and “Happy Endings,” a lot of sort of heartwarming friend shows, we wanted to make sure that we were reflecting different kinds of blackness. My brother on the show, Jayden, and also my brother in real life‚ PJ, they are dyed-in-the-wool nerds. It’s great to show like a blerdy Black man, because people like to act as if all Black men are king alphas. No, there’s some betas here. Our sister in law character, Jessie, comes from money. Then you have Malika, my producer, who is where Phoebe could be in five years if she got her life together. There’s room for all of those different kinds of Black experiences because that’s just being human. Respectability politics has no place in this show because to me that’s centering white patriarchal standards. These characters are human: flawed people who are going to make mistakes that are sometimes funny, sometimes not.
Q: Running with that operating principal in the writers’ room sounds freeing.
A: There’s always a lot of pressure on people of color, women of color, particular people from the queer community to represent an entire demographic. And I don’t want to do that. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Quinta [creator and star of “Abbott Elementary”] is doing. It’s just taking the burden off. You can actually write really three dimensional characters if you’re not trying to adhere to some sort of standard.
Q: The show’s star is named Phoebe and your name is Phoebe. “Insecure” creator Issa Rae has said her only regret was naming her character on the show Issa. Did you grapple with the decision?
A: Honestly, I was just lazy. I was like, there are so many things I have to do. I’m head writing the show, I’m executive producing, I’m starring in it and I created it. This is just one decision I don’t have to think about. Her name is Phoebe and let’s move on. If people conflate the two, that’s understandable. I’m certainly in a different place than this character is now so it’s nice to go back to that time in my life, where I was riding around New York City eating dollar pizza and doing stand up shows at night and podcasts for free. But talk to me in season three.
Q: Speaking of trying to succeed as a young creative in New York City, in the second episode you dig into TV Phoebe’s struggles. Why does the city have such a hold on folks who feel like they have to make it there or else?
A: Growing up in Ohio I watched Felicity and was like, that’s going to be me when I come to New York. I’m going to be in love triangles wearing chunky sweaters. And I struggled for a long time. I’ve been in this career for 14 years and things didn’t really take off until about nine years in. There was a lot of eating sad salads or I’m going to pay my electric bill this month and not pay these other bills. New York is such a romantic place in the sense that like anything can happen at any moment. But there’s also a specialness about New York. New York is like, “Bitch I don’t need you. If you don’t like it here you can leave. I’ll be fine. There’s another busload of people coming in.”
That kind of toughness that New York has, people who live here have that toughness too. Where it’s like, I’m going to make it no matter what. I know to the outside it looks like I’m struggling or that this is a fool’s errand, but to me, I know this is all going to happen. It’s this unbreakable spirit that New York has. We’re all in this struggle together and one day I’m going to have an apartment with a washer-dryer in the apartment. That was my dream for so long and I made it happen. I was like, I’ve made it!
Q: In the pilot episode’s very first scene, Phoebe is buying (well, her partner in paying) for Plan B. Given where the country stands on female reproductive rights, that moment was funny serious. What’s it liking watching now as opposed to when you wrote it back in 2019.
A: A lot of women have had that experience of ‘the condom broke and I got to go get emergency contraception.’ Given all that’s going on now, I just want people to watch this scene and either they identify with it or they go, that hasn’t been my experience, but I’m going to go on this journey. This is a young woman trying to move through her life in the way that she thinks is the best. I hope people have open minds and open hearts and laugh at it. There’s so much to TV Phoebe outside of that one moment. A lot of times this country likes to reduce people to one moment and then pass judgment. And I really want people to watch the show judgment free.
Q: TV Phoebe is on a journey of maturity that real Phoebe’s already gone through. What have you learned about yourself on the other side?
A: I’m confident, a bit of the ambivert (I have extrovert qualities and introvert qualities), silly. I try to not take myself too seriously because, you know, life is hard enough. I’m a reformed workaholic, I’m very proud to say. I think I’m a person who’s becoming okay with not having everything figured out. I was Miss One-Year, Three-Year, Five-Year Plan. After coming out of doing this show and how intense the process was from developing it to writing it to shooting it to editing it, I’m in a place where it’s okay to not have a death grip on things. I think I’m hopeful. No matter how many times I’m told no, I am hopeful that the universe will lay a path out in front of me and I just have to walk the path. Most things I’ve wanted out of life have not happened on my timeline. So I’m just always like “Okay, I know you’re going to be late, Universe. I know you’ve got other things to do, so I’m just going to wait it out.” | 2022-07-15T10:23:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Phoebe Robinson on her new show “Everything’s Trash” - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/15/phoebe-robinson-everythings-trash-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/15/phoebe-robinson-everythings-trash-interview/ |
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, low-income people in some states with abortion bans are facing shrinking financial options
Demonstrators in support of abortion rights prepare to march to the city hall on July 9 in Odessa, Texas. (Eli Hartman/AP)
The threat of legal jeopardy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade is forcing a retreat by nonprofit groups that provide vital financial support to low-income women seeking abortions.
Health Insurance coverage for abortion is spotty or nonexistent in conservative states, and in many blue states as well. Local and regional abortion funds, which receive grants from large national advocacy groups as well as donations from grass roots supporters, have for years filled the gap.
But disruptions to that support system are rapidly unfolding — and threaten to exacerbate inequality between those who struggle to pay for abortion and those who can more readily book a ticket to a state where abortion is legal, advocates from multiple states said in interviews.
At least seven abortion funds in Texas have shut down and stopped paying for procedures and travel assistance since the June 24 Supreme Court decision, fearing their staff and volunteers would face criminal prosecution — even for abortions obtained out-of-state. Leaders of the funds said they fear that simply supplying advice to patients on how to obtain an out-of-state abortion could put them in legal jeopardy.
“If we want to keep our staff and our board out of jail, we have to cease operations,” said Rockie Gonzalez, founder of Frontera Fund, one of the shuttered Texas funds, which serves patients in the Rio Grande Valley. “We are seeing the criminalization of an entire network that has built a functional safety net for pregnant people.”
Some of the slack can be taken up by abortion funds operating in states where abortion remains legal, and such funds are seeing demand soar from people stuck in states with bans. But lawyers and advocates for abortion rights say the legal environment is uncertain and changing fast. And they warn that providing aid to residents of states with prohibitions — even when done from seemingly safe territory outside those states — may carry risks.
The National Abortion Federation and its NAF Hotline Fund — a large advocacy and abortion funding group in Washington, D.C., supported with tens of millions of dollars from billionaire Warren Buffett’s charitable foundation, public records show — said it has stopped sending payments to abortion funds in multiple states with abortion bans, including Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Kentucky.
The federation said it continues helping patients travel to states where abortion is legal and maintains its hotline to offer guidance nationwide. But continuing to support local abortion funds in hostile states could expose the national organization to legal danger, Veronica Jones, NAF’s chief operating officer, said in an interview.
“Failing to incorporate this new reality into our decision-making would put our entire operation at risk, ultimately leaving hundreds of thousands without access to care,” Jones said. Even with the cutbacks, she said the federation has helped more than 3,000 people across the country obtain abortions since the Supreme Court ruling.
A phone message left at Buffett’s foundation was not returned; the foundation says on its website it does not respond to most inquiries.
Newly enacted and proposed laws banning abortion are expected in 26 states, and even stricter laws are beginning to take shape for consideration in upcoming legislative sessions, which typically begin in January. Antiabortion lawmakers have made clear they plan to target not just abortion providers but also employers, funders and volunteers who “aid and abet” abortion, moves intended to make it harder for low-income patients to get around abortion bans by traveling elsewhere.
Under model state legislation proposed last month by the National Right to Life Committee, “conspiring to cause” or “aiding or abetting” abortion would be a felony and would encompass virtually any sort of support. Its list of potential offenses includes posting information on a website to help patients find services.
In a federal court filing last month, Texas antiabortion lawyer Jonathan F. Mitchell, a key architect of the Texas SB 8 civil liability law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone who aids an abortion, defended the idea of targeting activists who help pay for abortions with donations.
“Contributing money to help others terminate the life of an unborn child is no more 'speech’ than hiring a hit man or contributing money to organizations that murder innocent civilians,” Mitchell wrote in the filing.
In an email to The Post, Mitchell said abortion funders in Texas and elsewhere who are curtailing operations are clearly responding to a legally dangerous environment in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision.
“Anyone who knowingly pays for an abortion or abortion travel could be criminally charged if any part of the abortion or the travel occurs in a state where abortion has been outlawed,” Mitchell wrote. “It’s not clear whether the courts would ultimately allow an antiabortion state to prosecute abortion funders in these situations, but they can’t take the risk.”
Last week, the Texas Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative state lawmakers, said in a letter that it plans to introduce legislation that would specifically target employers and others who provide financial support for out-of-state abortions. The provisions would bolster existing prohibitions and apply “regardless of where the abortion occurs, and regardless of the law in the jurisdiction where the abortion occurs,” their letter said.
President Biden has said the federal government will protect the rights of people who cross state lines to get abortions, and ensure access to Food and Drug Administration-approved abortion pills for all Americans, regardless of where they live. But the administration has yet to release any specifics about how those protections would work, despite intense pressure from Democratic allies. On July 8, Biden issued an executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to develop a plan.
Meanwhile, the right to travel for an abortion may not be much use to low-income people in Texas if they are prohibited from receiving abortion funding and advice, said Emily Berman, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
“Is that right to travel really meaningful if you can’t get any help in doing it?” Berman said.
Even in states where abortion is protected, some activists said they have encountered evidence of the chilling effect.
Three days before the Supreme Court wiped out the constitutional right to abortion, Megan Jeyifo, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, received a text message from the leader of a national foundation that had pledged ongoing support just one day earlier. She declined to identify the foundation.
“I am so sorry for the bad news — especially having reached out to you — but our lawyers have put the brakes on any donations to abortion services given several states will move to make helping women move across state lines against the law after Roe is overturned,” the funder said in the text message, which Jeyifo read aloud to a Post reporter.
Jeyifo said she is not concerned about being targeted personally by prosecutors or litigants in another state, partly because Illinois leaders have vowed to enact protections that would stifle abortion-related investigations in Illinois by other states.
“Our job is to connect people to the care they need by any means necessary,” she said.
Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the country, says on its website that it helps patients pay for abortion using a sliding fee scale based on income at its national network of reproductive health clinics. The organization declined to respond to questions about the legal issues raised by helping people located in states where its services are prohibited.
For the independent abortion funds, which have a national network that helps them coordinate financial and legal strategies, the rapidly changing legal landscape has forced them to keep a close eye on state legislatures and courts, sometimes on a daily basis. Fund leaders said they are in frequent contact with their own lawyers to understand what’s legal and what’s not.
Some states had abortion bans on the books from the days before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Critics call these “zombie” laws because they sprang back to life after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Some states have more-recently-passed “trigger laws” designed to ban or severely restrict abortion in the event Roe fell. Some states have both.
The map of states where abortion is legal is shrinking fast, especially in the Midwest, where Illinois is emerging as an island in a sea of antiabortion states — and a key destination for desperate patients.
The Conant Family Foundation, a Chicago philanthropic organization, has been strategizing with other foundations about how to funnel money to other states. Conant also is supporting a move by a Memphis clinic to establish a new facility in Carbondale, Ill., the southernmost stop in Illinois on the City of New Orleans Amtrak line. The passenger line cuts through Jackson, Miss., and Memphis, on its way north toward Illinois.
“I thoroughly review each organization and trust them not to get us into legal difficulties without consulting us first,” said Leslie Ramyk, Conant’s executive director.
In Kentucky, where a trigger law was temporarily halted by a state court, abortions continue to be performed while the case plays out. Nonetheless, the National Abortion Federation has already pulled back funding there, advocates said. The Chicago Abortion Fund sent $5,000 to a Kentucky abortion clinic as a block grant to help patients left in the lurch by NAF’s withdrawal, Jeyifo said.
Jones, at the NAF, confirmed Kentucky was among the places where it cut funding but declined to discuss the decision.
Erin Smith, executive director of the Kentucky Health Justice Network, one of the state’s abortion funds, said the loss of the national financial support “has hurt us significantly.” Only medication abortions are being performed in Kentucky; patients who need a surgical abortion are being sent to Illinois and Indiana, which increases costs, Smith said.
In Alabama, after that state’s trigger law took effect, the Yellowhammer Fund said it was shutting down until July 15 to review the legal landscape. Oklahoma’s Roe Fund also has suspended operations.
In Oregon and Florida, where abortion remains legal, nonprofit funders said they are seeing big spikes in requests for financial assistance from states where abortion is being outlawed.
Though Florida law bans abortions after 15 weeks, that measure has been temporarily blocked by a state judge — opening the door to a flood of requests for aid from patients prepared to travel from Alabama, Mississippi and other states, said Julia Desangles, co-executive director of the Florida Access Network abortion fund. If Florida’s ban takes effect, patients needing later-term procedures will have to travel at least as far as North Carolina, she said.
Money from grass roots donors, meanwhile, has strengthened since the Supreme Court ruling, with $80,000 flooding in a single day, Desangles said. The network has been able to boost aid to individual patients from an average of $175 to up to $300, including people from neighboring states.
“It’s been really overwhelming emotionally to have that kind of fall on us,” Desangles said.
The Northwest Abortion Access Fund, which provides funding for abortions in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, is retraining staff and volunteers who offer hotline assistance to people seeking abortions. Representatives can provide factual information about what services are legal in which states, but they cannot make recommendations, said Riley Keane, who leads the organization’s logistical support efforts.
Queries from Texas have quadrupled since passage of SB 8 last year — and many callers are afraid, she said: “Exposing yourself to a legal battle is terrifying.” | 2022-07-15T10:36:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Groups that aid abortion patients pull back, fearing legal liability - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/abortion-aid-drying-up/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/abortion-aid-drying-up/ |
The least diverse cities and most common statutes in America. And more!
Statues loom over House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), center left, at the Capitol in 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In its purest form, data describes the world around us. It doesn’t extrapolate or infer. It doesn’t show cause and effect. It’s a simple tool for converting reality into fun facts.
The cool kids — and by that I mean academics and policymakers — sometimes roll their eyes at data that is merely descriptive. Not us! We here at the Department of Data love these meat-and-potatoes data sets.
But we can’t blast out a news alert about the most valuable interstate highways or the least diverse cities. So we’re carving out a dedicated space to dive into the humble data sets and rankings that delight us but might otherwise escape notice.
Without further ado, let’s take a Data Dive.
America’s least-diverse cities
Yes, cities are more diverse than rural areas — especially if you define “diverse” as less White, as we typically do in American English. On average, U.S. cities clock in at 56.6 percent White, compared with 83.5 percent in rural areas. But 1 in 4 metro areas — home to about 18.6 million people — are actually less diverse than the average rural area.
Pittsburgh, the largest such metro, is 84.9 percent White, according to the Census Bureau’s 2016-2020 American Community Survey. With 2.3 million residents, Pittsburgh is bigger than many more-diverse metros, including Las Vegas, Austin and San Jose.
The least-diverse metro areas are concentrated in Appalachia, the northern Great Plains and Rockies, and just outside major cities in the Midwest, such as Chicago, Minneapolis and Indianapolis.
The least diverse metro of all is Parkersburg-Vienna, alongside the Ohio River in West Virginia, at 95.1 percent White. Several other West Virginia metros join it in the top 10.
The people most honored in statues and monuments
Statues paint an idiosyncratic portrait of American history. Consider Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko. The two Polish noblemen turned Revolutionary War generals are honored with more U.S. statues and monuments than all but a handful of native luminaries, according to the National Monument Audit.
The audit was a year-long project to build a list of about 50,000 monuments from 42 smaller catalogues, such as the Historical Marker Database. It covers tributes from mighty Mount Rushmore to a small monument in Ohio that pays homage to the man who “brought the tuberous rooted begonia to this country from Belgium.” (That man was, of course, Carlton Lowe, who established Lowe’s Greenhouse in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in 1926.)
Our colleague Gillian Brockell has already covered the report’s headline findings. A.) Half of the 50 most represented men owned other human beings. And B.) Women are so rarely represented that mermaids easily outnumber congresswomen. (Counts of men in statues include Pulaski, who some scholars believe may have been intersex.)
Top spots in the rankings hew closely to the national mythology. Abraham Lincoln leads, despite a notable lack of memorials in the South, followed by George Washington, Christopher Columbus — admittedly a controversial Italian who never set foot on the U.S. mainland — and Martin Luther King Jr.
But from there, the list unravels. There are more statues of Saint Francis of Assisi (another Italian), disgraced rebel Robert E. Lee and Pulaski than of Benjamin Franklin, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses S. Grant. Noted non-Americans Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare and Kosciuszko all make the top 25.
A closer examination of the two noble Poles helps explain what’s going on. As brigadiers, Pulaski and Kosciuszko were outranked by more than 20 major generals in the Continental Army and its allies, yet they’ve outflanked pretty much every Revolutionary commander other than George Washington in the statuary sweepstakes. (The Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette has more statues than Kosciuszko but fewer than Pulaski).
The audit includes a data point that might explain this: It lists the groups that sponsored certain monuments. Among the sponsors for Pulaski? The Polish American Citizens of Northampton, Mass. And for Kosciuszko? The Polish National Alliance of America.
As it happens, a substantial share of the nation’s statues were erected during the age of mass migration, when waves of Polish people arrived in search of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — and some connection to their new country.
Ewa Barczyk, author of the forthcoming “Footsteps of Polonia: Polish Historical Sites Across North America,” said the Polish immigrants of that era, who often faced substantial discrimination, were eager to erect concrete symbols of the contributions they had made to their community.
“Earlier generations of Poles — the workers who came here, worked hard and were successful — built these huge, beautiful churches and erected many statues,” Barczyk said. “They wanted to have visible signs to show their faith. The statues were manifestations of pride for their fellow Poles who fought valiantly for freedom and symbolized the connection between Poland and America.”
That pattern of people repurposing figures of the past to meet the political needs of the present is noticeable throughout the database. The most common sponsor of all? The United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The most valuable interstate highways
Like the Roman and Inca roads before them, interstate highways seem destined to shape the global economy long after the American empire has faded. They represent infrastructure at a scale that transforms entire regions and industries.
Together, interstates add more to the U.S. economy than all but six of the states they were built to link. According to a new analysis, the interstate system generates about $742 billion in trade-related activity every year — about as much as the state of Ohio.
The single most valuable interstate, I-80, bisects the continent with an almost 3,000-mile-long ribbon of pavement, linking the economic powerhouses of San Francisco and Teaneck, N.J. (Toledo, Des Moines, Omaha, Salt Lake City and Reno, Nev., lie in between.)
I-80 is the most valuable highway in part because it’s one of the longest. On a mile-for-mile basis, the most valuable major highway is I-75, which runs from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula all the way down to the southern reaches of America’s Lower Peninsula, also known as the state of Florida.
These highways are economically important not just because they’re vital trade routes linking east with west and north with south, but also because few other viable alternatives exist along much of their length, according to a recent working paper from economists Taylor Jaworski and Sergey Nigai of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Carl Kitchens of Florida State University.
For their analysis, the economists built an elaborate economic model linking every county in the United States to the domestic and global markets. Their model accounts for myriad details, including the flow of goods between industries and countries, alternative water and rail routes, and the traffic congestion the interstates relieve — and create.
When all those factors are counted, interstates are worth several times more than previous estimates have shown, Jaworski said. But while all states bore the cost of the highways, the benefits weren’t spread equally, which suggests that future infrastructure packages could explore ways to make the direct beneficiaries foot more of the bill.
“We probably need to have some innovative thinking about how we have a 21st-century infrastructure and how we finance that,” Jaworski said.
The analysis doesn’t measure the ways interstates have destroyed value, such as displacing minority communities or causing air pollution that leads to early death, lower test scores and lower fertility. But Jaworski said we don’t yet know whether those drawbacks cancel out highways’ transformative contributions.
“The car and highways reshaped American life, and we can trace many of the benefits of these changes,” Jaworski said. “We know something about the costs, but less precisely.”
At the Department of Data, fun facts are serious business. See anything here we should investigate further? Or maybe there’s something else you want us to measure? Are you interested in the highest-income Hispanic communities, the neighborhoods with the least expensive homes, or why so many home buyers feel buyer’s remorse right now? Just ask!
If you follow the column here, we’ll send the answer to each question to your inbox as it publishes. If we use your idea in a column, we’ll send you a button and a membership card marking you as an official agent of the Department of Data. This week’s button goes to our Washington Post colleague Gillian Brockell. | 2022-07-15T10:36:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The least diverse cities, most common statues and more! - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/diversity-statues-highways/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/diversity-statues-highways/ |
Two new data points on Friday morning will offer a more complete snapshot of the country’s economic health
A supermarket in Manhattan last month. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
Recession fears are ticking up this week after an unexpected pickup in inflation sent markets tumbling and gave businesses and consumers new reason to pause.
Two more economic data points coming Friday morning will provide new insights on Americans’ spending habits and their expectations for the economy, and could prompt policymakers to take even more forceful action to combat 40-year high inflation.
Retail sales, to be released at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time by the Commerce Department, will show whether consumers pulled back on purchases of both big-ticket items like cars, appliances and furniture, as well as essentials like clothing and food in June. Consumer spending, which makes up more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy, is an important measure of the country’s economic health.
Meanwhile, a closely watched index of consumer sentiment released by the University of Michigan at 10 a.m. will give economists an idea of how Americans are feeling about the economy. Consumer sentiment fell to an all-time low in June, with many Americans worried about long-term inflation.
“We’re at this weird moment where you sort of want the economy to slow. You just don’t want it to go into reverse,” said Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University. “There are a lot of unusual uncertainties that we don’t usually see.”
The looming question is whether the U.S. economy shrank again in the second quarter of 2022, after unexpectedly contracting in the first three months of the year. The next round of gross domestic product figures will be released July 28.
“After flying well above cruising altitude last year, the inevitable descent in economic growth is clearly underway,” Wells Fargo economists wrote in a note on Thursday. “The tight stance of policy alongside still high inflation suggests a recession is more likely than not next year.”
There’s a mix of signals in the business world. On Thursday, two of the nation’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, reported lower profits partly because of fewer mergers and initial public offerings on Wall Street. JPMorgan even reported that it was setting funds aside to protect against losses in the event of a downturn. Yet its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, said Americans are better situated to withstand a recession than they were before the financial crisis.
For families, the economy feels more dire. Americans are facing higher prices on everyday essentials like food, gas and housing. New inflation figures released Wednesday showed that prices have risen 9.1 percent in the past year, exceeding economists’ expectations and putting renewed pressure on the Fed to move aggressively to cool the economy.
There are also growing fears that a sharp Fed move could, in turn, could tip the U.S. economy into recession.
“It’s hard to find much encouraging news in the latest inflation report,” said Karen Dynan, an economist at Harvard University and former economist at the Federal Reserve Board. “This was the most important data point the Fed will get prior to its meeting later this month, and it’s probably going to have to intervene more aggressively than it had hoped to in order to restrain demand. And it also raises the odds that they cannot achieve that without a downturn.”
The blistering June inflation report raised questions about whether Fed officials would move even more aggressively to tame inflation at their upcoming policy meeting. Inflation notched yet another peak last month, zapping any hope that the Fed’s moves so far were bringing prices down.
For weeks, policymakers have leaned toward another hike of three-quarters of a percentage point, mirroring the increase they adopted in June. But it was unclear whether they would start to show support for a hike of a full percentage point before their July 26-27 policy meeting.
So far, officials appear to be sticking to their original message. And if anything, they are warning against reacting too suddenly to one bucket of data. On Thursday, Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors, said that even though the latest consumer price index report was “a major league disappointment,” there were hazards to snap policy decisions.
“You don’t want to overdo the rate hikes,” Waller said. “A 75 basis-point hike is huge. Don’t think because you’re not going 100, you’re not doing your job.”
The message was echoed by St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard, who told Nikkei Asia that his preference was to stick to a hike of three-quarters of a percentage point for now. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly told the New York Times that even though she expected a brutal inflation report, she still favors a hike of three-quarters of a percentage point.
An outlier is Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, who does not have a vote on the Fed’s policy committee this year. Asked about the possibility of a hike of a full percentage point on Wednesday, Bostic told reporters that “everything is in play.” | 2022-07-15T10:36:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Recession fears are centerstage again with U.S. economy sending mixed messages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/economy-recession-uncertainty/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/economy-recession-uncertainty/ |
Haley LaFloure picked up a couple-dozen doughnuts on the way to work.
“I don’t even like doughnuts,” the 25-year-old said. “I sat down and was like, What am I going to dhybiwith these?"
Even buttoned-up employers are learning to let loose. Citigroup has deemed Fridays “Zoom-free," while accounting giant KPMG promises “no-camera Fridays" and lets employees clock out for the weekend at 3 p.m. in the summers.
“We want to make sure people are getting a break so they can recharge their batteries," said Paul Knopp, chief executive of KPMG U.S. “We’re giving them a lot more agency about how they work — and where they work.”
“Employers recognize that it’s tougher to get people to come back in, so they’re asking, ‘What can we do?' " said Julie Schweber, an adviser at the Society of Human Resource Management. “The answer is basically: If you feed them, they will come. Food trucks, special catered events, ice cream socials, that’s what’s popular right now.”
“Honestly, the best socializing happens on Friday,” he said. “Why not have a beer or two? If people are going to be a little less productive one day of the week, I’d rather it be Friday than Monday."
“Since they’re not at the office, people come in early to pluck away at their laptops while they sip a cocktail or two,” said General Manager Dave Robinson. "By 4:30 or 5 on Fridays, we’re completely full.”
"It’s painful,” owner Dan Raskin said. “Before the pandemic, Friday was the busiest day of the week — people would have an easier day at work and go out with their friends for lunch — but now it’s one of the slowest.”
That’s also the case at LAZ Parking, which operates more than 3,000 garages nationwide. Demand on Mondays and Fridays is much lower — by about 20 percent — than it is mid-week, said Leo Villafana, the company’s vice president for the Mid-Atlantic region. Wednesdays are the busiest days, though even when people do come in, they tend to stay for shorter periods.
“When you ask employees when they want to work from home, everyone wants Fridays," he said.
“Fridays from home have become institutionalized,” he said. "There’s really no turning back.”
“What people don’t want is to work remotely, together, in the office,” said Lenny Beaudoin, global head of workplace and design at commercial real estate services firm CBRE. “Why make the trip if I’m just logging onto Zoom, like I do at home? It’s up to organizations to have better conversations and choreograph their schedules. It can’t be haphazard."
“Just like nobody likes to eat in an empty restaurant, nobody wants to go to an empty office,” he said. “When people do come in to work, they want a real social connection."
“Friday, the turnout is definitely much lower — you can see that just by coming into the office and looking around," said Alicia Garcia, the company’s chief culture officer. “We’re finding that people really appreciate that flexibility.”
“Fridays are the emptiest days,” said Johnson, who also works from home that day. “The office is open if people want to come but we don’t push it."
“I will admit I kicked off at 4 o’clock last Friday to get a haircut," he said. “It tends to be a great catch-up day." | 2022-07-15T10:36:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fridays in the office: Empty - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/its-official-fridays-office-are-over/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/its-official-fridays-office-are-over/ |
An early look at plans for new rail, pedestrian bridges over the Potomac
The $2 billion rail project between D.C., Virginia is on track to double capacity over the Potomac River by 2030
A rendering of the proposed rail bridge over the Potomac River between Arlington and Washington. Virginia is advancing a plan to build a new two-track rail bridge to significantly expand commuter and passenger train service within the decade. The new bridge would align about 40 feet north of the existing two-track Long Bridge, which carries freight and passenger trains between the nation’s capital and Virginia. (Virginia Passenger Rail Authority)
Virginia is advancing a $2 billion plan to expand freight and passenger train traffic over the Potomac River, hoping to alleviate a growing bottleneck at a bridge that has connected the Southern and Northeastern U.S. for more than a century.
The plan calls for a new two-track span parallel to the Long Bridge, which serves as the main route for trains traveling south of the nation’s capital. The new span between Washington and Arlington would double train capacity to support commerce and increasing demands for passenger rail along the busy East Coast corridor.
The project will also add a pedestrian and bike bridge between Long Bridge Park in Arlington and East Potomac Park in the District, creating a walkable connection from the growing Crystal City neighborhood to the Southwest Waterfront area. Plans call for the project to be completed by 2030.
Virginia unveiled design concepts for the project this month, the state’s latest move to expand rail options across the state. It’s part of a $3.7 billion deal Virginia sealed last year with Amtrak and CSX that would bolster capacity, expand routes to new cities and ease rail connections to the nation’s capital.
Virginia is advancing a plan to build a new two-track rail bridge over the Potomac River connecting Arlington and the District. (Video: Virginia Passenger Rail Authority)
The new rail bridge will be built with many of the features in the existing span, including its structure, material and form, with steel girders and similar pier spacing, according to preliminary site plans approved this month by the National Capital Planning Commission. The plans also call for the use of Ashlar stone cladding for the bridge piers, and abutments and walls near the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which officials say will make it compatible with the character of the highway.
The bridge will be constructed 40 feet north of the existing crossing. Michael Weil, an urban planner with the NCPC, which has review authority over the project, said the design will complement the existing Long Bridge “without overwhelming its historic character.”
The project is in the early stage of design, with construction expected to begin in 2026. The commission’s approval gives an important green light to keep the project on a timetable for completion in eight years. The Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, created two years ago to administer rail-expansion programs, is overseeing the Long Bridge project with financial commitments from the state and Amtrak. The authority is also leading efforts to seek federal infrastructure grants.
“All these things are coming together to show this project is real and is happening,” said Michael McLaughlin, the authority’s chief operating officer.
The project within the 1.8-mile corridor comes alongside other pieces of Virginia’s multibillion-dollar rail deal, including construction of a fourth track south of Washington; the acquisition of hundreds of miles of track and right of way; and numerous other improvements in the I-95 corridor and across the state. Adding capacity over the Potomac is a critical component for the state’s ambitions to double passenger rail operations in the Washington-to-Richmond corridor within the decade.
Adding two tracks to create a four-track crossing over the Potomac will allow the state to handle more commuter and intercity rail service, as well as increases in freight transportation over decades, officials said. The expansion will allow Virginia to significantly boost Amtrak and VRE commuter services while separating passenger and freight trains, which officials say will improve service reliability.
Concurrent with the design of the Long Bridge project, Virginia is advancing design of a $185 million project to add a fourth track approaching the bridge from Alexandria, which officials said is funded. Farther south, plans call for adding a third track from Franconia to Occoquan and a rail bypass at Franconia-Springfield, which will allow for the movement of trains when other trains are serving the VRE station.
Approval of the Long Bridge preliminary plans comes in the same month Virginia added more Amtrak service between D.C. and eastern and western parts of the state. With the additions, Amtrak runs eight state-funded round trips daily from Washington. Plans call for more intercity and commuter service in 2026, after the fourth track in Alexandria is completed, with more trains in 2030 following the expansion of Long Bridge.
“Not only are we getting more trains, we’re going to get more trains at different times of the day,” said McLaughlin, adding that late-night and bidirectional trains outside standard commuting hours will give Virginians the option to go into D.C. for an evening sporting event or dinner.
For more than a century, the Long Bridge has carried freight and passenger trains across the Potomac River between Crystal City and the District’s Southwest Waterfront. The bridge’s two-track configuration creates a bottleneck as trains funnel from three tracks to two, slowing the movement of freight and passengers.
As the NCPC reviewed the preliminary design this month, planners lauded the design of the bridge. Commissioners and some residents and leaders sought changes to the design of the pedestrian and bike bridge, which would align about 25 feet north of the new Long Bridge, saying the planned 14-foot deck would be too narrow to accommodate the expected number of users.
Some advocates have suggested widening the span to 20 feet to allow for more space between passing traffic in either direction, in line with other facilities such as the recently built W&OD Trail bridge over Langston Boulevard in Arlington.
Shirlene Cleveland, senior director of the Long Bridge project at the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, said at a July 7 commission meeting that the authority will review the comments and recommendations before assessing whether to widen the pedestrian bridge.
“Obviously the corridor is very narrow,” she said. “We have to fit two bridges in between an existing rail bridge and WMATA’s existing Yellow Line bridge. So we’ll see what’s possible.”
NCPC Chairwoman Elizabeth A. White said she was generally pleased with the project as planned, but urged the authority to look at requests for the pedestrian bridge from a safety point of view to “get it right.”
“It does seem the overall approach is going in the right direction,” she said. | 2022-07-15T11:06:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Long Bridge rail project: A look at plans for new Potomac bridges - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/15/long-bridge-potomac-pedestrian-rail/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/15/long-bridge-potomac-pedestrian-rail/ |
June inflation hit a new 40-year high of 9.1 percent, making that rainy-day fund even more important
Food costs were among the largest contributors to the latest increase in prices. (Frederic Brown/Agence France Presse/Getty Images)
With inflation at the highest level in 40 years, your emergency fund just got elevated to “stat” status. It has always been the case that you need a rainy-day fund, because it’s not a matter of if you’ll have a financial emergency, but when. For millions of Americans, that when is now.
Inflation skyrocketed to 9.1 percent in June, according to the most recent consumer price index report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was the largest 12-month increase since the period ending November 1981. Gas, housing and food costs were the largest contributors to the increase in consumer prices.
As with any economic downturn, the more affluent may complain, yet they can still weather rising prices without any significant pain. Many other Americans will experience financial discomfort (some will suffer more distress than others) and will establish new measures of austerity, such as cutting streaming services, eating out less or canceling vacation plans. And then there are those less fortunate who are already struggling. They will see their precarious situations get worse.
Biden says inflation ‘unacceptably high’ but not as bad as it looks
As inflation continues to soar, Americans need to rethink how they handle their emergency savings, says Kia McCallister-Young, director of America Saves, an initiative of the Consumer Federation of America.
She provided some guidance on what folks should do whether they are struggling, have some savings, or have a well-funded emergency account. “A lot of us are still recovering from the pandemic, so getting an understanding of where you are within those three categories is the first step in determining what you can do,” she said in an interview.
No savings
No doubt you’ve heard the standard advice to aim to save three to six months’ worth of living expenses. To do that, you start by adding up your monthly expenses, including everything from your rent or mortgage payment and auto loan to average grocery and utility expenses. If your bare bones monthly expenses total $3,000, having an emergency fund for three months would mean saving $9,000.
“The reality is that this can feel daunting to many and impossible for some,” McCallister-Young said. Instead, America Saves recommends starting with a $500 goal. Even a modest amount in a time of a financial setback is better than nothing.
One easy way to reach this initial goal is to save automatically by diverting some of your direct deposited paycheck into a dedicated emergency savings account. Or you can have your financial institution do an automatic transfer for you.
Finding the money may require more cost cutting or taking on a second job. There are a lot of employers looking for workers. Employers added 372,000 new positions last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
“Private-sector employment has recovered the net job losses due to the pandemic and is 140,000 higher than in February 2020,” the agency said. “In June, notable job growth occurred in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and health care.”
The unemployment rate continued to hold at 3.6 percent in June
Some savings
You were doing well. You managed to save a few months’ worth of living expenses or even hit that benchmark of six months. But rising prices have forced you to dip into your emergency fund.
If you haven’t already, take an assessment before all the savings are gone, McCallister-Young said. “Now is the time to get a clear view of your finances,” she said. “Look at your recent income, monthly expenses and savings contributions, then adjust where you can and do what makes sense for right now.”
America Saves can help you take a deep dive into your budget. The organization is holding a free virtual workshop on July 28 at 2 p.m. Eastern time. You can find information about the workshop at AmericaSaves.org. Search for “6 Steps To Establishing A Spending & Savings Plan.”
Take advantage of the free financial coaching and counseling through America Saves, which can help you identify resources to help with your situation. “We really want people who have low-to-moderate income to take advantage of that because we pair them with someone in their local community who has access to those resources,” McCallister-Young said.
Strong savings
Despite rising inflation, you have more than enough in your rainy day fund. You might have juiced up your savings during the pandemic because you couldn’t spend. Or you greatly reduced your expenses because you could work from home and may still be teleworking.
If you’re in this group, you may be able to afford to increase your savings. During an economic downturn, fortunes can change quickly. If you’re doing well, err on the side of more rather than less savings. If you’re a highly compensated individual, you might need an emergency fund with 12 months of living expenses. If you lose your job, it might take that long to find a similar paying position.
If you’re doing better than most and your savings cushion is strong, consider helping others. “These individuals are also well-positioned to take those savings and invest them back into their local nonprofits, charities and organizations that are providing financial aid and support to those feeling the most significant impacts of inflation,” McCallister-Young said.
She added something else during our conversation. Employers could help their workers boost their savings too, and not just with a pay raise. Companies should be asking what they can do to alleviate some of that financial stress on their workers, McCallister-Young said.
“I just wanted to call out to these corporations that this is part of taking care of your people, recognizing that inflation is now at an all-time high,” she said. “Going to work every day, whether you’re taking public transportation or you’re driving, is affecting your staff’s bottom line right now.” | 2022-07-15T11:10:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Americans need to rethink emergency fund advice as inflation soars - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/inflation-emergency-fund-advice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/15/inflation-emergency-fund-advice/ |
A wheat harvest in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, on Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (Bloomberg)
The surge in food prices that followed the outbreak of war in Ukraine underlined the country’s pivotal role in feeding the planet. By disrupting exports of Ukrainian wheat, corn, barley and oilseeds, the conflict has stoked a hunger crisis in poorer nations and contributed to a surge in inflation in the developed world. The prolonged fighting was decimating Ukrainian farm incomes and destroying infrastructure, making it increasingly unlikely that production will bounce back to normal when peace returns.
Europe’s second-largest country, Ukraine is covered in level plains containing dark, rich soil that’s ideal for agriculture. Cheap food from Ukraine has helped to shape the course of European history, feeding the populations of fast-growing industrial cities in the 19th century and sustaining the vast Soviet Union through decades of isolation. Before the war, Ukraine exported more grain than the entire European Union and supplied about half of globally traded sunflower seeds and oil. More than 30 countries that are net importers of wheat rely on Russia and Ukraine for over 30% of their wheat import needs.
They collapsed when Russian forces invaded in late February and imposed a blockade on Ukraine’s key export terminals of Odesa and Mykolayiv. By mid-year, at least 25 million tons of grains harvested in 2021 were still stuck in the country, just as a new wheat harvest was due to begin. Some wheat, corn and barley was transported overland to Romania, Poland and Baltic Sea ports on roads, railroads and Danube river barges. These routes could only handle about a fifth of Ukraine’s prewar exports and efforts to boost volumes were held back by a dearth of fuel for trucks and transport bottlenecks. Ukraine’s ex-Soviet rail tracks use a wider gauge than their western counterparts, causing border delays of up to 30 days. Grain exports in June totaled just 1.4 million tons versus about 5 million tons monthly in a typical year.
The slump in deliveries from the fourth-biggest grain exporter sent prices shooting higher and left import-reliant nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East scrambling to secure alternative supplies. The shortages were contributing to sporadic political unrest and 43 countries were at risk of famine, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. Ukraine has been one of the largest contributors to the WFP: Eritrea and Somalia were almost entirely dependent on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat supplies last year, while Tanzania, Namibia and Madagascar relied on them for more than 60% of supplies, according to UN data.
4. What’s stopping Ukraine resuming exports?
While the biggest export terminals were largely undamaged and still under Ukrainian control, the ports and coastal waters were riddled with mines. Ukraine accused Russia of stealing grain shipments and selling the cargoes as its own. Russia benefits from the blockade as it’s deprived the Kyiv government of revenue to sustain the resistance, inflicted economic pain on Moscow’s western adversaries and boosted the value of its own wheat on the international market (Russia is an even bigger wheat exporter than Ukraine).
5. Can anything be done to resolve the dispute?
The UN led talks in July to try to end the impasse and allow escorted convoys from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. A first round of discussions ended with a “ray of hope,” according to Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who said more work was needed to achieve a breakthrough. Ukraine’s government was wary of clearing mines in the Black Sea that help to protect its ports, as Russian troops could then launch an assault on them. Russia’s government has previously suggested it might allow the ports to reopen if the U.S. and its allies relax sanctions on Moscow -- an idea they were unlikely to accept.
The government expects this year’s crop to be 40% smaller than last year’s after farmland was damaged or cut off by the conflict. Farmers who are able to gather their crops could run out of room to store it as silos are still loaded with last year’s grains. That lack of storage capacity, combined with a collapse in incomes that’s left farmers without money to buy seeds, means it could take years for exports to fully recover. | 2022-07-15T11:10:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Russia’s War in Ukraine Means a Hungrier World - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-russias-war-in-ukraine-means-a-hungrier-world/2022/07/15/589076a8-042d-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-russias-war-in-ukraine-means-a-hungrier-world/2022/07/15/589076a8-042d-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
The Washburn Fire burns in Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park, Calif., on July 8. (Noah Berger/AP)
Then came a serendipitous encounter during the California Gold Rush, followed by bark sent across the country for exhibition and extensive writing and art to help convince nonbelievers that the massive trees were real — and that their protection should be codified.
Sequoias, which stand hundreds of feet tall and live for thousands of years, have been a national landmark for more than a century. But now, a fire is threatening over 500 giant sequoias as it encircles Yosemite National Park’s Mariposa Grove.
Home to the famous “Grizzly Giant,” the grove is the largest in the park. During a community meeting Monday, Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon called Mariposa Grove the “root of the whole national park system.”
It closed on July 7 after visitors reported seeing smoke near the park’s Washburn Trail.
“Our visitors come from all over the world to see a magical icon like the sequoia that we thought was, to some degree, untouchable,” said Sharon Miyako, the acting branch chief of field interpretation operations at Yosemite.
Last week, firefighters placed sprinklers around the Grizzly Giant and Mariposa Grove Cabin, built over 100 years ago by Galen Clark, a protector and promoter of the grove who was appointed Yosemite’s first guardian.
“The tribes continue to have an ongoing role in using, stewarding and protecting the grove,” she said.
While there are some reports of White people spotting sequoias as early as 1833, the Gold Rush, which began in 1848, was the impetus to further discovery, said Daegan Miller, a historian and author of “This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent.”
In the early 1850s, Augustus Dowd, a hunter who was helping feed gold miners, was chasing a grizzly bear when he came across sequoias in what is now the Calaveras North Grove. At first, people didn’t believe the trees he saw could truly be as tall as he observed.
“All early tales of the great size of the trees were considered as exaggerations, and whenever scores of feet were discussed the listener thought that inches were meant,” Lawrence Cook, then-NPS Chief of Forestry, wrote in a 1955 book “The Giant Sequoias of California.”
Attempts to prove the sequoias’ existence led to calls for their preservation, and the chance for people around the world to marvel at them.
The tallest tree Dowd found, named the “Discovery Tree,” was cut down, and its bark was shipped to New York City for an exhibition. But settlers in the east were unconvinced.
The stump of the Discovery Tree, which was used as a dance floor at the time, can be seen today at the Calaveras Big Trees State Park. As news of California’s big trees continued, a different sequoia’s bark was stripped and sent to another exhibition in New York, this one titled, “Vegetable Wonders of the Gold Regions.”
Known as the “Mother of the Forest,” the tree drew immense attention — as well as public outcry that it had been destroyed for display, lending to conservation efforts for California’s sequoias.
“That was like hard physical evidence that these things existed,” Miller said. “So we got the evidence, but then people were like, ‘Oh my God, why are we chopping these things down?’ ”
The National Park Service states: “Within five years, Clark ascended to a critical role in the development of what would eventually become Yosemite National Park.”
In 1864 — decades before Yosemite National Park and the National Park Service were established — President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill that gave the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to the state of California “for public use, resort, and recreation.”
The grove rose in prominence as a destination for tourists, environmentalists, painters and photographers. The Grizzly Giant in particular captured the awe of many — including Theodore Roosevelt, who camped beneath the tree in 1903.
“It was during that time that he formed a lot of his ideas to give us some of the more preservationist-minded legislation that he put forth,” said John Woolman, an NPS interpretive park ranger stationed in Yosemite.
“Its character that it gives off is so different than any other tree that I’ve actually seen,” Woolman said. “It’s its own entity.”
On the tours, rangers’ stories have always had a common theme when it came to sequoias and fire — resilience. Miyako said they would talk about how fire actually helps the trees release seeds more easily, how they’ve survived many lightning fires over thousands of years.
But those stories now include a more sobering fact — last year, wildfires killed nearly a fifth of the world’s sequoias, according to some estimates. They’ve started to question that resiliency, something Miyako never thought would happen.
“When I started here, the idea of seeing sequoias threatened, the idea that we would be telling people that we were closing the grove for fire and we would need to set up some protections for sequoias, that was unthinkable,” she said. “And now it has become something that we’re seeing on an annual basis.”
And the driving force behind these intensified threats? Humans. It’s a point Woolman tries to make on every tour he gives now. | 2022-07-15T11:11:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What you need to know about Yosemite's Grizzly Giant - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/15/yosemite-sequoia-fire-threat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/15/yosemite-sequoia-fire-threat/ |
Actress Constance Wu says she attempted suicide, spotlights Asian American mental health
Constance Wu arrives at the premiere of “The Terminal List” on June 22 at the Directors Guild of America theater in Los Angeles. (Mark Von Holden/Mark Von Holden/Invision/AP)
Hollywood actress Constance Wu has revealed that she attempted to take her own life after facing a social media backlash in 2019.
Known for her roles in “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Hustlers,” Wu abruptly left social media in 2019 after making what she called “careless” comments about her displeasure over the renewal of “Fresh off the Boat,” a TV series she was starring in, which she said “ignited outrage and internet shaming that got pretty severe.”
On learning of the show’s renewal in 2019, where she played a no-nonsense mother of an immigrant family, Wu fired off tweets featuring expletives, stating that she was “so upset.” Her comments sparked criticism online and she later explained to her fans that appearing in the show would take her away from an unspecified passion project, before quitting social media.
After a three-year hiatus Wu said in a statement Thursday that the episode had pushed her to attempt suicide. She said she was “a little scared” to return to social media.
“This next part is hard to talk about … but I was afraid of coming back on social media because I almost lost my life from it,” she said.
She added that the social media backlash to her 2019 comments, especially from fellow Asian Americans, made her feel like a “blight” on her community. “I started feeling like I didn’t even deserve to live anymore. That I was a disgrace to AsAms, and they’d be better off without me,” she said using an abbreviation.
Wu, who grew up in Richmond and is the child of Taiwanese immigrants, said the “scary moment” forced her to reassess her life and career and prioritize her mental health.
U.K.’s elite Cambridge University opens inquiry into student deaths
Wu’s leading role in “Crazy Rich Asians” in 2018 catapulted her to international fame and led to a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of a professor who travels to Singapore to meet her partner’s family and encounters extreme wealth. More broadly, the movie, based on a novel by Kevin Kwan, was celebrated for breaking stereotypes and for its Asian American representation.
“AsAms don’t talk about mental health enough,” Wu said in her personal statement. “While we’re quick to celebrate representation wins, there’s a lot of avoidance around the more uncomfortable issues within our community.”
Adding, “If we want to be seen, really seen … we need to let all of ourselves be seen, including the parts we’re scared of or ashamed of — parts that, however imperfect, require care and attention.”
A national study in 2007 reported that while nearly 18 percent of the general U.S. population sought mental health services in a 12-month period, only 8.6 percent of Asian Americans did so.
Fear of stigma as well as pressure to be a “model minority,” to academically succeed, to care for parents and community were among the issues that lead to mental health stresses, according to psychiatrists at McLean Hospital.
Almost 20 percent of American adults, some 50 million people, experienced a mental health illness in 2019, according to national nonprofit Mental Health America, with over half of adults not receiving treatment. Suicidal ideation and thoughts have continued to rise every year since 2011, it added. Echoing other reports, it found that young White Americans were the most likely to receive mental health treatment, while “Asian youth were least likely to receive mental health care.”
Shanghai faces mental health crisis as covid lockdown drags on
This week the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline launched a new three-digit number allowing people to call or text 988 to route them to a hotline of trained counselors starting from Saturday — it will be available across the United States.
Wu also shared details for suicide prevention and support alongside her statement and added that she had written a memoir “Making a Scene” detailing more about her life and experiences. She said she hoped her book would “help people talk about the uncomfortable stuff in order to understand it, reckon with it, and open pathways to healing.” | 2022-07-15T11:11:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Constance Wu says she attempted suicide after 'Fresh off the Boat' tweets in 2019 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/15/constance-wu-mental-health-suicide/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/15/constance-wu-mental-health-suicide/ |
The fall of Roe forecasts trouble ahead for key LGBTQ rights
Roe v. Wade opened the door for more constitutional rights for LGBTQ Americans. Now we could see that pattern in reverse.
Perspective by Wesley G. Phelps
Wesley G. Phelps is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas and author of the forthcoming book titled "Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement" (University of Texas Press, 2023).
Supporters of same-sex marriage stand beneath a large rainbow flag outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington on April 28, 2015. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
Writing for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that the Constitution contained no explicit right to an abortion and that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”
Alito tried to assure Americans that the decision posed no danger to other landmark cases that rely on a constitutional right to privacy — which Roe, echoing a 1965 case about birth control, affirmed as a fundamental liberty protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. But Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion that several of these cases, notably Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established constitutional protection for same-sex marriage, must now be revisited in light of Dobbs.
While it is difficult to determine which justice is a more accurate predictor of the future, the potential exists for landmark victories in the movement for LGBTQ equality to be re-litigated and possibly overturned. Because the Lawrence decision serves as a bedrock upon which all subsequent gains for LGBTQ equality rest, the historical connections between Roe and Lawrence hold the key to grappling with the potential consequences of the Dobbs decision. Both Roe and Lawrence were based on a constitutional right to privacy, and recognizing this link may reveal where the court will go with regard to the rights of LGBTQ Americans.
At the time of Roe, many queer activists understood how helpful the Supreme Court’s abortion decision could be in their own struggle for equality. In February 1973, a few weeks after the Supreme Court invalidated a Texas state abortion law in Roe, the Texas legislature considered adopting a new penal code that criminalized sexual contact between members of the same sex.
Appearing before a state senate committee charged with studying the proposed criminal code, Frank Stovall, a gay rights activist based in Austin, warned of the dangers of adopting what became known as the homosexual conduct law. “Sodomy is in essence a crime without a victim, which in essence is no crime at all,” he told the committee. The potential harm of the proposed statute, according to Stovall, rested with its violation of bodily autonomy, and he invoked Roe to illustrate this point. “What was the real right involved [in Roe]?” he asked. “The right that the Supreme Court upheld in its landmark decision was the right of a woman to control her own body.” He went on: “The sodomy laws concern essentially the same issue. It is a basic human right of every individual in this society to control his or her own body without any legal interference.”
Although state legislators ignored these objections and approved the new sodomy statute anyway, Stovall and other queer activists continued to insist that the constitutional right to privacy applied in both instances.
All of the legal challenges to the Texas homosexual conduct law, up to and including Lawrence, built upon the constitutional interpretation of the right to privacy affirmed by Roe. A federal case known as Baker v. Wade illustrated this link.
In 1979, Dallas resident Don Baker filed suit in federal district court, claiming that the new sodomy statute violated his and all other gay and lesbian Texans’ right to privacy because it illegally extended the reach of the state into the bedrooms of citizens with no compelling interest to justify the intrusion. Echoing Roe, Baker argued that the Texas homosexual conduct law “violates plaintiff’s fundamental right to privacy to control his body in personal relationships, in the privacy of his own home.”
In August 1982, U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer agreed. “The right of two individuals to choose what type of sexual conduct they will enjoy in private,” Buchmeyer wrote in his opinion, “is just as personal, just as important, just as sensitive” as decisions involving whether to bear a child. “Accordingly, homosexual conduct in private between consenting adults is protected by a fundamental right of privacy.”
Although three years later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Buchmeyer’s ruling, finding that the state of Texas had a legitimate interest in promoting morality with the statute, Baker v. Wade nevertheless laid the groundwork for using the constitutional right to privacy relied upon in Roe to challenge state sodomy laws.
Two decades later, queer activists made a similar argument against the Texas sodomy law before the U.S. Supreme Court, this time with more success. Harris County sheriffs’ deputies arrested John Lawrence and Tyron Garner near Houston in 1998 for allegedly violating the homosexual conduct law. While Lawrence and Garner’s legal team raised a number of constitutional objections to the Texas sodomy law, only the privacy argument prevailed before the court. In June 2003, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in Lawrence v. Texas, ruled that the Texas sodomy statute, like the invalidated state abortion law struck down in Roe, violated the constitutional right to privacy. Lawrence and Garner, as well as millions of other LGBTQ Americans, Kennedy wrote, “are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”
In other words, Roe helped pave the way for Lawrence and remains a critical legal building block for dozens of advances in LGBTQ equality during the last 50 years. Recognizing the deep connections between Roe and Lawrence is essential to understanding just how threatening the recent Dobbs decision is to the rights of LGBTQ Americans. By overturning Roe, the U.S. Supreme Court has removed a significant pillar in the foundation of equality and created the potential for dramatic changes in the lives of millions of people who depend on a constitutional right to privacy in their daily lives. | 2022-07-15T11:11:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The fall of Roe forecasts trouble ahead for key LGBTQ rights - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/15/fall-roe-forecasts-trouble-ahead-key-lgbtq-rights/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/15/fall-roe-forecasts-trouble-ahead-key-lgbtq-rights/ |
The rise of the conservative legal movement reshaped gun politics
These changes will have major implications for dealing with our epidemic of gun violence.
Perspective by Josephine Harmon
Josephine Harmon is a researcher in Political Science at University College London. She teaches at the University of Bath, University of Exeter and King’s College London and has lectured at the British Library.
Guns have dominated the headlines for more than a month. The May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. reignited discussions about the politics of guns. Four weeks later on June 23, the Senate came together to pass narrow legislation that still represented the most significant gun regulations in decades — the same day the Supreme Court made it more difficult to regulate possession of firearms in public. Then, the July Fourth holiday brought yet another bloodbath, this time at a parade in Highland Park, Ill., leaving seven people dead.
The Court’s ruling received the least attention of these events. But it was a reminder of one of the least visible aspects of gun politics: the rise of the conservative legal movement. Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, everything from frustrated teenagers and alienated men to singer Marilyn Manson and video games have received blame for mass shootings. Those on the left also blame the power of the National Rifle Association and its decades long ability to thwart any tightening of gun laws.
While these are important aspects of American gun politics, conservative legal elites have also shaped gun laws at every level in the United States. Most visibly, the conservative Supreme Court majority has handed gun rights advocates multiple victories since 2008. The role of conservative elites and legal activism in driving gun politics are part of a broader story that has reshaped American politics and law.
After the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Congress passed the Gun Control Act with relatively little dissent. Constitutionally, Congress was free to do so because the governing Supreme Court precedent from 1939 enshrined the idea that the Second Amendment only protected a “collective right” to bear arms as part of militia service. The strong support for the Gun Control Act reflected the fact that gun politics were not nearly as divisive at the time. In fact, they would not become fraught until the late 1970s — what sociologist David Yamane calls Gun Culture 2.0.
The shift in the politics of guns coincided with the rise of a unique strain of conservatism, based in the South and West, which primarily attracted White suburbanites and was oriented around individual rights, government deregulation, low taxes, staunch anti-Communism and conservative social positions. The creation of new conservative think tanks, direct mail tactics and grass roots groups linked to national organizations provided the necessary infrastructure to propel these ideas and help wrest control of the Republican Party from more moderate forces.
This wider political change explains to some extent the rise of a far more militant gun movement.
This rising conservative movement helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, and just 16 years after the Gun Control Act, Reagan signed the 1984 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act — a signal of the rising importance of the South and West politically, as well as the triumph of individual rights over collective action and government regulation.
But the shift in gun politics also developed because of another key part of the rising conservative movement: new groups pushing a militant brand of conservative legal thinking.
Between the late 1930s and the late 1960s, liberals dominated the Supreme Court and issued seminal decisions oriented around the idea of a living Constitution, in which judges read the document in light of how society had evolved.
Conservatives abhorred this idea and the changes it produced. Richard M. Nixon pledged to reshape the Court, but his four appointments created more of a center right Court — one that limited the scope of liberal precedents rather than overturning them. During the 1980s, conservatives went back to the drawing board.
To challenge liberal jurisprudence conservatives popularized an originalist and textualist interpretation of the Constitution — resurrecting ideas that had previously been consigned to the backwaters of legal thinking. This philosophy posited that judges should not read the Constitution in light of how society had evolved, but instead with the goal of determining the original intent behind its provisions when they were drafted in 1789. The consternation that mainstream legal organizations like the American Bar Association leaned left also led to the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982 at Yale and at a handful of other universities. The society helped to promote this originalist reading of the Constitution.
The newly organized conservative legal movement quickly gained influence in the Republican Party. GOP politicians saw originalism, and members of this new legal movement as a pathway to more reliably conservative judges — ones who would undo the liberal 1960s Supreme Court rulings that conservatives loathed. The Federalist Society became a gateway for vetting potential judges to ensure that they shared conservatives’ vision for the courts and constitutional interpretation. Conservatives welcomed this as a potential antidote to ensure that future Republican appointees did not turn out like Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, who ended up being far more liberal than expected.
As the Federalist Society and its vision for the law gained currency among Republicans, and as Republican presidents appointed more judges in this mold to federal courts including the Supreme Court, originalism began to dislodge the idea of a living Constitution.
The newly militant gun movement took advantage of this shift by pushing what had once been a radical idea: that the prevailing interpretation of the Second Amendment as simply ensuring a collective right to bear arms as part of militia service was wrong. Instead, they argued that the amendment protected an individual right to carry firearms, rendering many gun control laws at the federal and state level suspect.
The Supreme Court had largely ignored the Second Amendment for decades, but in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, a conservative five justice majority sided with the gun rights movement. For the first time — in a majority opinion written by Antonin Scalia, one of the legal thinkers at the forefront of the originalist movement and a member and steadfast supporter of the Federalist Society — the Court recognized the Second Amendment as protecting the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms.
Since Heller, the Supreme Court has seen a slew of Second Amendment cases, with the revolution wrought by this new interpretation of the Second Amendment culminating in late June, with the ruling that struck down a more-than- a-century-old law in New York that strictly regulated open carry on firearms. The decision raises the question of whether — even as the public clamors for increasing restrictions after each new mass shooting and Congress finally took a step toward addressing the issue — the Court will allow significant new restrictions on gun possession?
The conservative legal movement deserves much of the credit (or blame) for today’s changed landscape. While its influence in moving the Court to rely on originalism to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion has received a lot of attention, its behind-the-scenes role in moving the Court to apply this once obscure legal theory to the Second Amendment has received far less scrutiny.
And barring unexpected changes in the Court’s membership, this originalist way of thinking will continue to shape what the political branches can do to address gun violence and an increasing array of hot-button issues in the years to come. | 2022-07-15T11:11:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The rise of the conservative legal movement reshaped gun politics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/15/rise-conservative-legal-movement-reshaped-gun-politics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/15/rise-conservative-legal-movement-reshaped-gun-politics/ |
What to watch with your kids: ‘Paws of Fury’ and more
Familiar adventure centers rude humor, slapstick violence.
“Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank” is an animated comic adventure loosely based on Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy “Blazing Saddles.” Hank (voice of Michael Cera) is a dog who wants nothing more than to become a samurai, even though that honor is always bestowed upon cats. He ends up assigned to defend an all-cat village and convinces a retired samurai named Jimbo (Samuel L. Jackson) to become his mentor. The adventure is mostly appropriate for families with younger kids but does include lots of martial-arts-based cartoon violence — some of it with weapons. There’s also rude and potty humor (jokes about flatulence, burping, butts, spaying and neutering) and insult language (“idiot,” “imbecile,” “dimwits,” “suck,” etc.). One line, “mother cocker spaniel,” sounds a bit like Jackson’s infamous cursing. Catnip is depicted as an addictive substance that can be abused, and a major character is portrayed as being dependent on it. Although the movie isn’t educational in nature, its themes encourage courage, empathy and teamwork, as well as tolerance and acceptance. (102 minutes)
Standout performances in uneven, trauma-filled adaptation.
“Where the Crawdads Sing” is a romantic mystery/drama based on Delia Owens’s best-selling 2018 novel. It’s set in the coastal marshes of 1950s-1960s North Carolina, where young Kya is dubbed “Marsh Girl” because she lives in near-complete isolation. As a young adult, Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who doesn’t trust the nearby townspeople, is accused of murder. Like the book, the film deals with heavy subjects, including child abandonment, domestic abuse and sexual assault. The language is largely insults and uses of “damn” or “goddamn”; a White man also calls a Black man “boy.” Violent scenes involve disturbing acts of intimate partner abuse, child abuse and sexual assault. A character is alcohol-dependent and has an unspecified mental health condition. Kya experiences two pivotal romantic relationships, both of which include kissing and love scenes. The movie’s depiction of two Black characters, while better than the book’s, still plays into the “magical Negro” cliche, in which a character of color exists only to help a White main character. Issues related to trauma and isolation are threaded throughout the story, but so are the importance of nature, conservation and education, giving parents and teens plenty to talk about after watching. (125 minutes)
The Deer King (R)
Beautifully drawn anime has bloody violence, complex story.
“The Deer King” is a mystical fantasy anime film about an ancient people trying to survive a pandemic spread by infected wolves. It’s the directorial debut of Masashi Ando, the animation director of “Princess Mononoke,” and is similar to that classic in both story and animation style. There are scenes of intense, bloody violence: Expect dog attacks, flying arrows that hit their targets, a limb being sliced off and stacks of dead bodies. A child is frequently in peril, and there’s quite a bit of sword use and snapping animal jaws. Language is infrequent but includes insults and a use of “damn.” Adults drink an unspecified substance out of indistinct bottles. The story can sometimes be a bit challenging to follow, especially for those watching the English-subtitled version, which uses terminology that may not be immediately familiar to all viewers. What comes through loud and clear, though, are themes of courage and perseverance, as well as the movie’s message that the loving bond between a parent and a child has nothing to do with sharing blood. Note: The film’s true ending comes after the credits. (113 minutes)
Diverse but muddled adaptation has drinking, mild innuendo.
“Persuasion” is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s final completed novel that aims for a more modern feel than previous versions. Characters of color are featured in lead roles, which isn’t typical for films set in early-19th-century upper-class England. Plus, main character Anne (Dakota Johnson) is positioned as a feminist who spars intellectually with men and stands up for women’s rights. The movie also has a few mature elements. Expect flirting, kissing and innuendo. Adults, including Anne, drink. A boy injures his arm and has to be carried home crying. A woman falls, hits her head and gets a serious concussion that takes months to heal. (109 minutes) | 2022-07-15T11:11:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Common Sense Media's weekly recommendations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/15/common-sense-media-july-15/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/15/common-sense-media-july-15/ |
An emergency declaration on abortion rights could do more harm than good
By Lawrence O. Gostin
Abortion-rights supporters tie green flags to the fence of the White House during a protest on July 9. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP)
Lawrence O. Gostin is a professor and faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at Georgetown Law, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law & Human Rights and author of “Global Health Security.” James G. Hodge is a professor of law and director of the Center for Public Health Law & Policy at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to roll back federal constitutional protections for abortion rights, anxious Americans have turned to the executive branch for remedies. With more than half the states instituting abortion restrictions, the Democratic base is publicly pushing President Biden to unlock “critical resources and authority” to meet the demand for reproductive services. On Sunday, Biden said he is weighing whether to declare abortion access a public health emergency, and on Tuesday, more than 80 Democratic House members signed a letter urging him to do just that.
We have no doubt that this ruling constitutes a public health emergency. With well over 6 million pregnancies in the United States every year, including more than 1 million abortions, it affects the health of a huge swath of Americans. Pregnancy brings with it substantial risks, including conditions such as ectopic or nonviable pregnancies that are routinely treated with abortion to avoid harm to a woman’s health or life. It is plausible that maternal deaths could increase by tens of thousands in a post-Roe v. Wade America. And 1 in 8 pregnancies ends in miscarriage, which is managed in ways often indistinguishable from abortion, placing women who miscarry at great risk, too.
The Biden administration should acknowledge, document and act on these risks. And yet, we believe an emergency declaration could be a grave error.
An emergency declaration for abortion access would face formidable legal challenges, potentially tying the administration up in court for months. A single federal judge could enjoin it, pending endless appeals. Eventually, the declaration would almost certainly end up being heard by the same six conservative justices who decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The administration could yet again find itself on the losing side of a high-stakes legal challenge — this time, one that would also give the courts the opportunity to curb emergency powers during a future pandemic.
Even more consequential is the impact on public health agencies. Declaring abortion access a health emergency would further politicize these agencies, which have been battered and demoralized during the coronavirus pandemic. The field would then be entangled in three of the most politically divisive issues in the American culture wars: covid-19 mandates, immigration (via Title 42) and, now, abortion.
Finally, emergencies, such as a major infectious disease epidemic, are supposed to end. Poor health outcomes for pregnant women who lack abortion access won’t be resolved without an act of Congress or reconsideration by the Supreme Court. Neither is projected for the foreseeable future.
If the Biden administration does want to proceed with declaring an emergency, various methods carry their own challenges. There are three different kinds of emergency declarations the White House is likely weighing.
First, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra could declare a public health emergency under Section 319 of the Public Health Service Act (PHSA). (Yes, the same law that embroiled the administration in litigation over the transit mask mandate and Title 42 immigration exclusions.) That law, however, is meant to apply for “a disease or disorder” causing an emergency, specifically an infectious disease or bioterrorism attack. It is unclear what “surveillance, resources, or federal contracts” the administration would use, even if the courts allowed the emergency to stand. Covid-19 was the easiest case for a PHSA declaration. Abortion access is the hardest.
Second, Becerra could issue a declaration under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, or PREP Act, to extend liability protections to entities and individuals who manufacture, distribute, or administer covered “medical countermeasures.” In March 2020, during the Trump administration, the office of the secretary issued a PREP Act declaration for coronavirus drugs and vaccines. The HHS claim that abortion medications or other procedures are medical “countermeasures” under the PREP Act would be a heavy lift in the courts. Still, of all the options, a PREP declaration would be the most promising.
Third, the president could declare an emergency under the Stafford Act, which would release disaster assistance to states, tribes, cities and nonprofit organizations. That relief is administered under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and was clearly intended for natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. While Stafford Act emergencies are diverse, Congress couldn’t have had in mind assisting blue states like California, New York, and Illinois in coping with the health-care surge as desperate women pour across state lines.
Progressives are right in thinking that abortion access in a post-Roe world is a medical emergency. The action by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority will surely cause a major increase in maternal mortality, especially among the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable women — disproportionately women of color. Maybe the pitfalls would be worth it if it could save thousands of lives. But a declaration that unleashed funding and powers of unclear extent, for what could be a brief duration because of judicial interventions, could have more downsides than advantages.
Finally, if you’re wondering why an emergency declaration might be counterproductive, consider this. If the next incumbent of the Oval Office is a Republican, it’s just as likely the president could declare an emergency for the so-called right to life. For those who care about the lives and safety of Americans, that shows how deeply destructive the politicization of public health can be. | 2022-07-15T11:11:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Biden declaring a public health emergency on abortion might do more harm than good - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/15/biden-abortion-public-health-emergency-risks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/15/biden-abortion-public-health-emergency-risks/ |
Jordan Gale
A note from my mother, written over a family photo. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 2022. (Jordan Gale)
Life can be a supremely chaotic mess. Sometimes it feels like nothing is working, despite our best efforts. And there are a vast number of ways we can respond, some positive and some negative.
For some, life seems to move along smoothly. For others, there are numerous pitfalls and setbacks along the way. None of us is born onto a level playing field, no matter how vociferously some like to say that we are.
There are people who are born into great privilege, either by race or economics. We’re being disingenuous if we don’t accede to that fact. And some people are born with the legacy of genetic predispositions to things like mental illness or addiction.
Yes, some people, luckily, are born into environments that give them a cushion against life’s obstacles. That’s great, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t have any scientific studies in front of me to prove that the vast majority of people on planet Earth probably weren’t born with a smooth path ahead, but it sure seems that way.
Photographer Jordan Gale was born into a tumultuous life. And he has been examining that through an ongoing series he has titled “Don’t Be This Way Forever.” A few months ago, he reached out to me with his project, and it grabbed my attention so much that I wanted to share it here with all of you.
Gale sent me the following description of his ongoing project:
“For most of my life, the concept of home has been a notion I’ve struggled with. I’ve spent many years trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and the distressing familiarities of home.”
“I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a relatively small town in Middle America. I grew up an only child in a single-parent home where, more often than not, we struggled to get by. Like many households in my community, money and substance abuse issues were ongoing struggles.
“I knew at an early age we were poor, and knew of my mother’s various drug uses. As I came into my own as a teenager, I began to feel ashamed of my upbringing, and began to resent the space I was born into, fearing I’d never leave Iowa or make a life of my own.”
“These emotions ultimately caused me to perpetuate my own self-destructive tendencies as a young adult, deepening my anger, anxieties and feelings of stagnancy.
“My essay, ‘Don’t Be This Way Forever,’ has taken on many forms over the years. At the heart of my photographs exists a visual diary seeking to confront my various tumultuous relationships in my hometown. These photographs span roughly a decade, before leaving home and during my subsequent visits since.”
“The act of making pictures in this space has been a cathartic process, aimed toward better understanding my past actions and emotions, while attempting to mend the frail relationships I’ve left behind and often return to. The photographs don’t always provide answers, but the effort put into making this work sparks conversations, and that is all I can ask for.”
We may not always get tidy answers when we seek a deeper understanding of our lives, the ups, downs, successes and failures. And it is very difficult to confront our uneasy realities. But if there is any chance for happiness or acquiescence, it is so important to ask the questions anyway, as Gale continues to do with this ongoing photo essay.
You can see more of Gale’s work on his website, here.
This photo series was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (economichardship.org), a journalism nonprofit. | 2022-07-15T11:11:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of family and addiction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/15/heartbreaking-photos-photographer-grappling-with-complex-past/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/15/heartbreaking-photos-photographer-grappling-with-complex-past/ |
Our research suggests that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal helped in the 2020 elections. Could it boost incumbents’ votes in the 2022 midterms as well?
Analysis by Meagan Carmack
Nives Dolšak
Aseem Prakash
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) rallies hundreds of young climate activists in Lafayette Square near the White House to demand that President Biden work to make the Green New Deal law in 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In its recent decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that without explicit congressional authorization, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot compel power plants to stop using coal.
The court relied on the controversial major questions doctrine, which holds that the democratically elected Congress, not federal agencies, must decide issues that have major implications for the economy.
So, will Congress amend the Clean Air Act to explicitly authorize the EPA to regulate power plants? That depends in no small part on whether they believe that’s what voters want them to do.
Opinion polls suggest that, overall, Americans favor federal climate laws. But does that translate into votes? We looked into whether American voters will cast ballots for politicians who want new climate legislation — and found that Democrats who endorsed the Green New Deal (GND) resolution in Congress got a higher share of votes in the next election than their colleagues who did not.
The Supreme Court's EPA decision could undo most federal laws
What is the Green New Deal?
After the 2007-2009 recession, economist Edward Barbier introduced the concept of a “Green New Deal.” A decade later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) introduced that as a policy proposal, the Green New Deal resolution, House Resolution 109, and closely related Senate Resolution 59, in February 2019.
The Green New Deal outlined a comprehensive plan for how the United States could shift from carbon-based fuels to renewable energy sources in a way that promoted “justice and equity” in “front-line and vulnerable communities,” according to the text. The plan included limiting carbon emissions, supporting renewable energy, subsidizing electric cars and much more, aiming to do so in ways that would benefit the historically underprivileged.
In the House, 102 of 232 Democrats endorsed the resolution. No Republican did, in keeping with the Fox News framing of the bill as “socialist,” since it would give the federal government a sweeping role in the economy.
Climate issues and the voting booth
Similar plans have been proposed in several countries, and one was adopted in the European Union. Over the past several years, worldwide mobilization on climate issues has increased. That includes mass student climate strikes under the banner of Fridays for the Future, organized by Greta Thunberg, although those have been interrupted by the pandemic.
Similarly, until the pandemic, climate issues had begun to dominate the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos. Even since the pandemic, however, a number of leading companies, including oil and gas companies, have pledged to pursue zero-emission targets. Some stock market luminaries, such as BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, have become outspoken climate advocates.
Green parties with an explicit climate agenda performed exceptionally well in the 2019 Swiss federal election, winning more than 20 percent of votes. Campaigning for another term this year as French president, Emmanuel Macron promised to become an environmental president, as did Gustavo Petro, the newly elected Colombian president. In Brazil, protecting the Amazon is a major issue in the forthcoming presidential elections.
The United States generally lags behind its industrialized peers on climate action, with a strong lobby opposing any moves away from carbon-based fuels. The country did not ratify the 1998 Kyoto Protocol, which committed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have a federal carbon tax or cap-and-trade policy, unlike most industrialized countries, including those in the European Union. In 2017, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris agreement.
And yet opinion polls suggest that a bipartisan majority of Americans support climate action. We investigated whether voters reward candidates who support climate policy.
GND endorsements and 2020 congressional elections
Based on congressional records, we examined how co-sponsoring the Green New Deal resolution affected House members as they sought reelection in 2020. We focused on only 386 House seats, because in the remaining 49 House seats the incumbent retired, was defeated in the primaries, died, or resigned. We then compared those Democrats’ share of the vote in the 2020 election with those of Democrats who did not co-sponsor the resolution.
Because some voters tend to repeatedly vote for specific political parties, our statistical analysis took into account the candidates’ share of the vote in the 2018 elections. Our analysis also accounted for differences in the districts, such as voters’ average income, profession or race. Thus, by accounting for confounding factors, we were able to singularly focus on whether Green New Deal co-sponsorship is associated with House candidates’ vote share.
We found that Democrats who co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution had a 2.1 percentage point higher vote share than those who did not.
Further, that co-sponsorship helped incumbents more than other ways they might have tried to assure voters that they cared about the environment. For example, we checked to see whether being endorsed by the Sierra Club, a leading U.S. environmental group, or having high League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores, affected their votes. Neither were associated with candidates’ vote shares. This probably means that Democratic voters perceive climate change as something different from other environmental concerns.
Further, the Republican campaign against the GND might have helped those Democrats. Neither the Sierra Club’s endorsement nor the LCV score brought controversy or publicity. Voters may therefore have been more likely to know about the Green New Deal co-sponsorship, making it a more credible climate policy credential.
Given the many concerns this year — gas prices and inflation, abortion laws, voter disappointment in President Biden — it’s hard to know whether climate policy will surface in the midterm elections. But if it does, candidates may wish to consider how they communicate their positions to potential voters.
Meagan Carmack is a PhD student in political science and a graduate fellow at the Center for Environmental Politics, University of Washington, Seattle.
Nives Dolšak is a professor in sustainability science and director of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, University of Washington Seattle.
Aseem Prakash is a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and founding director, UW Center for Environmental Politics, University of Washington, Seattle. | 2022-07-15T11:11:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cosponsoring the Green New Deal boosted Democrats' vote share - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/green-new-deal-election-midterms-democrats/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/green-new-deal-election-midterms-democrats/ |
Bank customers protested in Henan, China. Who attacked them?
Research on “contractors for hire” explains the extraordinary attempt to disperse angry crowds who wanted local banks to return their deposits.
Analysis by Lynette H. Ong
Unidentified personnel in white shirts moved in to disperse protesters in the city of Zhengzhou, in China's Henan province, on July 10. (Reuters) (Social Media/Via Reuters)
Earlier this week, more than a thousand angry customers gathered at the Chinese central bank’s branch in Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan province, to protest frozen accounts in the village banks. The protesters hoisted a banner that read, “opposing the Henan government from colluding with the mafias to violently beat up depositors.”
An unusual message, perhaps — but the banner turned out to be somewhat prescient. An unidentified group of muscular men in white shirts attacked the protesters, dragging them down a flight of steps before hauling them away in vehicles. Uniformed police officers stood by and watched, and eyewitnesses who recorded the proceedings shared the story on social media worldwide.
What do we know about this perhaps surprising pattern of behavior?
Why governments outsource repression
While local governments outsourcing unsavory work, such as protest control, is not uncommon in China, this highly publicized event points to the limitations of “outsourcing repression,” the title of my recently released book. My research explains how Chinese officials hire anonymous “contractors” to carry out coercive acts to minimize citizen resistance — and potential backlash. It’s a strategy that is intended to minimize the costs of protests and accountability typically associated with government repression. But the strategy is effective only if carried out covertly, and the “contractors” keep casualties to a minimum.
How far have human rights in Hong Kong eroded? We measured.
In my research on repression in China, I studied how the Chinese government mobilizes outside contractors and neighborhood volunteers, to use a range of low-grade violence as well as nonviolent tactics to get citizens to comply. Who are these hired “contractors,” exactly? My research finds these are loose gangs of individuals who sell their muscle power for a profit. They’re typically people without regular jobs, and are not necessarily well-organized mafia group members or trained hit men. Most of the time, these contractors rely on verbal threats, as well as physical actions like shoving and beating people, to intimidate citizens into compliance. It’s rare, however, that deaths result from their violent acts.
In my book, I analyzed more than 2,200 instances of land grabs and housing demolitions in China, collecting the details from the accounts of victims or eyewitnesses, and from local media sources. I wanted to understand how citizens respond to the local government’s deployment of different groups to carry out moves like land grabs. Consistently, my data reveals that outside contractors were less likely to provoke protest compared to when the police, or government or grass roots officials, were deployed. This is despite the fact that hired contractors were more likely to carry violent acts than the police or other agents.
Local governments seek plausible deniability
However, it’s noteworthy that in these events, hired contractors typically deployed on their own, late at night or early in the morning, often in dark alleys, carrying out acts of intimidation out of public view. Their elusive identities allow the hiring authority — typically the local government — plausible deniability, and thus the ability to evade accountability. Hiring contractors to do a dirty job can be an expedient strategy to get things done quickly — without having to bear the consequences most of the time — provided that the hired agents don’t kill or seriously injure people. That would attract widespread attention or generate sympathy from the public.
On rare occasions where conditions deteriorate — if the hired contractors use excessive violence, resulting in deaths, or harm to the elderly or pregnant women, for instance — higher-level officials would likely step in to press for accountability and identify a scapegoat to face up to public pressure. In Zhengzhou this week, Henan government officials announced some concessions, promising to return some of depositors’ funds right away.
What gets local governments in trouble?
In China’s decentralized system, the central government faces pressure to maintain its ruling legitimacy — while local governments are burdened with unfunded central mandates. Thus, outsourcing repression has become a popular and expedient strategy for local or provincial officials to gain citizens’ compliance with policies that are unpopular or appear to lack legitimacy.
Drawing on detailed case studies, I highlight examples of local mayors and political leaders who were removed from their positions and punished by the central government, when exceedingly violent land grabs or housing demolitions resulted in serious casualties — and violence that took place under their watch. These events are rare in relation to the total number of cases when local leaders deployed hired contractors, but clearly carry significant implications for the authorities doing the hiring.
Outsourcing repression has become a prevalent strategy used across a wide range of policy areas in China, from urbanization, protest and petition control, to enforcement in the past of the one-child policy, and collection of illegal taxes. The common element among these situations is the immense pressure local governments face in meeting the central-level targets imposed on them, and the lack of legality or legitimacy of their actions on citizens. A recipe for provoking public outrage, as the case studies in my book suggest, is when hired contractors beat up hapless victims, while the police or other authorities watch. Under those circumstances, plausible deniability — the very advantage this strategy might offer — is denied at the outset. Instead, the outcome may bear the telltale signs of official complicity in criminal behavior.
Yes, this happens elsewhere
Beyond China, the use of contractors to carry out government coercion conjures up images of the “Battle of the Camel” in Tahrir Square during the 2012 Egyptian revolution or the 2019 Yuen Long attack in Hong Kong. Both incidents, like the protests in front of the central bank in Zhengzhou, provoked public wrath because they were carried out in broad daylight under the scrutiny of international media. Of course, this defeats the very purpose of outsourcing repression. Yet, when executed with precision, this can be a powerful autocratic tool to coerce citizen compliance, while minimizing the political backlash.
In this particular incident in Zhengzhou, the burly white-shirted men might have been plainclothes police, though there is no way to confirm their identities. However, since the protesters had previously encountered attacks by unidentified men, they had reasons to anticipate a similar repressive strategy would be used against them.
Lynette H. Ong is professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022). Follow her on Twitter @onglynette. | 2022-07-15T11:12:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What happened in the Zhengzhou protests in China? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/henan-zhengzhou-china-bank-protests/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/henan-zhengzhou-china-bank-protests/ |
Seven questions for Frank Lowenstein
Good morning, Early Birds! President Jimmy Carter delivered his infamous malaise speech 43 years ago today. (Carter described a national “crisis of confidence” but didn't actually use the word “malaise.”) Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
In today’s edition… Theo speaks with Frank Lowenstein, former President Barack Obama's special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, about Biden's trip … Poll Watch: How has Americans' opinion on abortion changed since SCOTUS's decision to overturn Roe leaked … what we're watching on immigration policy… but first …
🚨: “Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) informed Democratic leaders on Thursday he would not support an economic package that contains new spending on climate change or includes new tax increases to pay for the legislation,” per our colleagues Tony Romm and Jeff Stein. “But Manchin did say he was open to revising federal laws that might lower prescription drugs costs for seniors” and expressed support for extended subsidies to keep health insurance costs down.
That means that the Democrats' slimmed-down Build Back Better plan just got even skinnier. The crushing inflation numbers Wednesday soured Manchin on a larger package. It's the “lowest common denominator” if there is a chance to pass anything before members return home for the August recess, one source familiar with the negotiations said.
Still, Democrats and environmental groups are fuming.
“There truly aren’t words for how appalled, outraged, and disappointed we are,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement.
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) called for organizing “to ensure Manchin does not get away with this.”
And other Democrats are turning to the President Biden to take action, through executive orders and calling a climate emergency.
Will those furious Democrats accept a bill that addresses just two of their priorities and gives Democratic incumbents a significant issue to tout on the campaign trail? We'll see.
Seven questions for … Frank Lowenstein: We talked with former president Barack Obama's special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations — a role that no longer exists — about President Biden's trip to Israel, the impossibility of a two-state solution and the lesson the Israelis learned from former president Donald Trump. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
The Early: Biden called for a “lasting negotiated peace” and a “two-state solution” in his press conference in Jerusalem on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid. What do you think of his record of trying to encourage such an outcome?
Lowenstein: Well, I think there's a fundamental difference in the way they're approaching Israel versus how President Obama and Secretary [of State John] Kerry approached it. We took a very active role in trying to advance negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians [under Obama].With President Biden, what you're seeing is much more of a hands-off approach.
I think the mentality there is: Listen, we've tried to be very much involved. We've tried to be very proactive. And it hasn't worked. It was not a successful effort, and we paid a political price for that. All the guys that were there under Obama are still there under Biden: [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken and [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan and [Deputy National Security Adviser] Jon Finer. They were part of various efforts to really try to advance the peace process. And I think they realize that there's very little we can do to really move that forward, and so there’s no great benefit to the United States in getting in the middle of it.
The Early: Do you think Biden's hands-off approach has been more or less effective than the Obama approach?
Lowenstein: Well, they’re different times. When President Obama was in office, I think our mentality was: We are nearing the end of the window for the two-state solution, and we don't see an alternative that's gonna be in Israel’s interest. So we're going to take one last shot at seeing if we can advance negotiations. That didn't work. I think that the Biden administration is left with a different set of circumstances. There's no scenario now in which negotiations can work.
The Early: In 2015, you showed a map of the Israeli settlements and the areas in the West Bank off-limits to Palestinian development to Kerry, who in turn showed it to Obama. It was titled “What a One State Reality Looks Like.” Do you think a two-state solution is effectively impossible at this point?
Lowenstein: It's only gotten worse. The settlement enterprise exploded under President Trump — the legalization of illegal outposts, the demolitions of Palestinian structures, all of that. Right now, it is impossible. But that doesn't mean it's impossible forever.
The Early: What would need to change for a two-state solution to become possible again?
Lowenstein: The Palestinians would have to do a much, much better job of advocating for their cause. If there was a unified front among the Palestinians and they had a more effective and engaged leadership, I think they could make a case for two states — or for whatever outcome they're seeking — much more effectively than they are now. There's corruption issues that need to be addressed. There's increasing concern [about] the behavior of the security forces there. And I think the Palestinians need to really demonstrate that they can govern themselves effectively.
On the Israeli side, to be very blunt about it, I think that the cost of the occupation is very low right now. I don't think the Israeli people feel like there's any downside to that occupation right now at all. There's no real administrative burden. There's minimal financial burden. There's not a great military burden. So there's no incentive on their end to make the kind of concessions and compromises that would be required to even advance toward a two-state solution .
The Early: Biden hasn’t reversed some of Trump’s moves in Israel, such as moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Does that surprise you at all?
Lowenstein: No, I wouldn't say I'm surprised. I think the Trump guys had a very, very clear plan — along with their friends in the Israeli government — to really move the goalposts and redefine the conflict. And they largely succeeded in doing that. And once those goalposts had been moved, the political cost to Biden of moving them back becomes very, very high. And what's the benefit to the Biden guys? They don't believe — and nobody believes — that real progress toward a negotiated two-state solution is possible right now. So why would we have a big fight with the Israelis when that fight is unlikely to result in any meaningful progress?
The Early: How much does the possibility that Trump will win in 2024 weigh on the situation?
Lowenstein: The lesson that they learned from Trump is that if they continue to create their own reality on the ground there, eventually the world will come around and say, “Okay, there's really nothing we can do about that. We might as well just accept it.” I think the prospect of Trump or another Republican coming into office bolsters the narrative among the Israeli right that they can just keep on doing what they're doing and there's no need for them to make any concessions.
The Early: Do you think that narrative is correct?
Lowenstein: The evidence would suggest that they're not wrong.
But the real question is: What is in the best interest of Israel as a country going forward? Having the right-wing settler movement there continue to consolidate complete control over the West Bank and expand settlements and reduce the amount of space that's available for the Palestinians, or even for theoretical Palestinian state? I think that's not going to be in Israel’s interest long term.
A week of best efforts
Congressional Democrats will end the week the way it started: with no clear path to address abortion prohibitions, providing another stark reminder of their limitations.
In the first abortion votes since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the House will vote on a pair of bills to protect access to abortion. The Women's Health Protection Act, sponsored by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), which the House passed last year, would nationalize access to abortion. The Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, led by Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Tex.), would ensure women can travel freely throughout the country for medical care.
Neither piece of legislation will pass the Senate.
A group of Democratic senators tried. Led by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), from a state where abortion is legal and who is also at risk of losing her reelection, they attempted to force a vote by unanimous consent, a dramatic tactic to send a message on legislation that doesn't have the votes, on a freedom to travel bill. It was blocked by Republicans.
Also, this week, 18 Senate Democrats and 81 House members sent a letter to the Biden administration asking that he declare a national public health emergency to provide more flexibility for patients to receive and medical professionals to provide medical care. But the Biden administration has so far been reluctant to act because there is little money to devote to the effort and they fear court challenges by conservatives that would prevail in conservative courts.
"I think we have to continue to try we have to continue to do our work and we have to continue to make the case to the American people and show them that we're doing everything we can to support them and to defend their rights," Fletcher said.
More abortion-related news from our colleagues:
Groups that aid abortion patients pull back, fearing legal liability. By The Post’s Christopher Rowland.
Texas sues Biden administration for requiring abortions in medical emergencies. By The Post’s Katie Shepherd.
A post-Roe surge could reshape this conservative Illinois steel town. By The Post’s Caroline Kitchener.
After arrest in rape of 10-year-old girl, Fox News switches its focus. By The Post’s Timothy Bella.
And next week, potential movement on an assault weapons ban
The House Judiciary Committee is expected to mark up an assault-weapons ban next week, according to a source familiar with the committee's plans but requested anonymity because the mark-up hasn't yet been announced.
After the Uvalde shooting, the House passed a series of gun-control-related measures but didn't ban assault weapons, which many House Democrats and President Biden called for. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at the time that the Judiciary Committee would bring up the legislation soon.
The Supreme Court — with newly minted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the bench — will decide today whether to reinstate a Biden administration policy limiting border arrests to immigrants deemed a threat to national security, public safety and border security.
A federal judge in Texas placed an injunction on the deportation policy following a suit from Republican attorneys general in Texas and Louisiana filed last year. The suit argued that the policy burdened state taxpayers with the costs of law enforcement and immigration services.
Meanwhile, WNBA star Brittney Griner will return to court outside Moscow today.
How opinions on abortion changed since the SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade
Washington Post polling analyst Emily Guskin examines whether abortion has risen as a top issue in polls since the court’s ruling.
The Economist and YouGov release a joint poll every week, making it a useful tool to track how public opinion shifts after major news events. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe had clear potential to boost abortion’s importance to voters. To figure that out, we looked at the average share of U.S. citizens saying abortion is a “very important” issue to them at three points in time: three weeks since the court’s decision, three weeks before the draft Roe opinion leaked, and the seven weeks in between.
In polling since the court’s ruling, about half of Americans (49 percent) called the issue of abortion “very important” to them. That is similar to the 46 percent who said the same soon after the decision to overturn Roe leaked, but is up from 43 percent who said the same before the draft opinion leaked.
Abortion still ranks well behind the jobs and the economy (69 percent “very important”), health care overall (65 percent) and crime (62 percent), though it has climbed up from near the bottom of all 14 issues tracked in the Economist/YouGov poll. In the average of polls since the court’s decision, abortion’s importance is on a par with criminal justice reform (50 percent) and immigration (47 percent) and now stands above climate change and the environment (43 percent) and foreign policy (42 percent).
Only among one party has there been a sustained shift in opinion. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of Democrats now say abortion is a very important issue, up from 57 percent who said abortion was very important to them in the average of polls after the Roe decision leaked and 49 percent before the leak.
At the same time, the share of independents saying abortion was very important to them increased slightly after the decision leaked — from 36 percent to 40 percent — but is back at 38 percent after the ruling. The share of Republicans saying the issue was important has ticked down over the same time period — from 44 percent before the decision leaked to 42 percent right after and 41 percent in the average of the last few polls.
The share of both men and women saying abortion was a very important issue increased since the decision leaked — but while the average of men who say it is very important now is 39 percent, it is a much higher 58 percent among women.
We are devouring all the news about the strength of the dollar compared to the euro because one of us has late summer plans to travel overseas. This visual and relatable piece by Hamza Shaban told us specifically how much we'll save.
The rise of the conservative legal movement reshaped gun politics. By The Post’s Josephine Harmon.
Mixed messages on the economy raising questions about recession risks. By The Post’s Abha Bhattarai and Rachel Siegel.
House lays out demands for Pentagon over Russia, extremism, inflation. By The Post’s Karoun Demirjian.
Ivana Trump, first wife of Donald Trump, dies at 73. By The Post’s Matt Schudel and Marc Fisher.
Chinese drone maker lobbies to defeat US national security ban. By the Financial Times’s Demetri Sevastopulo.
GTL: Govern, Troll, Legislate | 2022-07-15T11:12:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Seven questions for Frank Lowenstein - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/seven-questions-frank-lowenstein/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/seven-questions-frank-lowenstein/ |
Presbyterian Church vote declaring Israel an apartheid state upsets Jewish groups
The 1.1 million member denomination’s general assembly voted on a resolution that stated ‘Israel’s laws, policies, and practices constitute apartheid against the Palestinian people’
WASHINGTON, D.C. — MARCH 20: National Presbyterian Church on Saturday, March 20, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
On July 8, the 1.1 million member denomination’s general assembly voted 266-to-116 on a resolution that stated: “Israel’s laws, policies, and practices constitute apartheid against the Palestinian people.” It also voted to add May 15 to the church calendar as a day of mourning the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 when Israel was created. The commemoration is often called the Nakba, or catastrophe, in Palestinian communities.
The vote was the latest in a long line of deteriorating relations between traditionally liberal Protestant denominations and the U.S. Jewish establishment, but the Presbyterian Church’s actions may be the most long-standing subject of Jewish organizations’ ire.
The Presbyterian Church’s claims are backed by several human rights groups, including Jewish ones, and in its use of the term apartheid to refer to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report in January describing the Israeli government as overseeing a nondemocratic “apartheid regime.” Human Rights Watch also used the word in a 2021 report accusing Israel of “apartheid and persecution.” Amnesty International followed in February of this year, releasing a report titled “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity.”
But the Presbyterian Church’s criticisms of Israel are part of a two-decade-old decline in relations that seems to have gained momentum of late.
Among those challenges, he cited racism, antisemitism, gun violence, immigration reform and other issues on which American Jews and Presbyterians see eye to eye.
In the United States, views of Israeli government have taken a hit among more liberal groups. Only 51 percent of White nonevangelical Protestants have a very or somewhat favorable view of the Israeli government, according to a recent Pew survey, and that number drops to 43% among Black Protestants.
A Pew Research poll released this week finds views of Israel differ substantially across partisan lines. While 71 percent of Republicans have a favorable opinion of Israel, only 44 percent of Democrats do.
The Presbyterian Church is hardly alone among its fellow mainline Protestant denominations to take a critical stand of Israel’s 54-year occupation of Palestinian lands. Last year, the smaller United Church of Christ resolved that the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people constituted “sin in violation of the message of the biblical prophets and the Gospel.”
Still, the Rev. Todd Stavrakos, who is active with Presbyterians for Middle East Peace, said he believed local churches and synagogues will continue to work together: “On the local level, there’s still strong working relationships between Presbyterian churches and synagogues in their neighborhoods. I don’t think that’s changed.”
The denomination, meeting June 18 to July 9 in Louisville and online, also passed resolutions to divest from five oil companies and to oppose any attempt to reduce, limit or eliminate access to abortion.
The Presbyterian Church resolution had been proposed in 2020 but because of the coronavirus pandemic was delayed. — Religion News Service | 2022-07-15T11:12:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Presbyterian Church vote declaring Israel an apartheid state upsets Jewish groups - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/15/presbyterian-church-vote-declaring-israel-an-apartheid-state-upsets-jewish-groups/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/15/presbyterian-church-vote-declaring-israel-an-apartheid-state-upsets-jewish-groups/ |
Some Muslims, Jews welcome court ruling allowing football coach to pray
Joe Kennedy was a public high school football coach who sued after being suspended from his job for refusing to stop leading prayers on the field. He poses in March at Bremerton Memorial Stadium in Washington. (Meegan M. Reid/USA Today/Reuters)
Conservative Christians cheered the Supreme Court ruling last week that found the Constitution protects a high school football coach’s right to pray at the 50-yard line.
“A MASSIVE win” declared the evangelical ministry, Focus on the Family.
A “rightly determined” ruling, said the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm.
“A major victory for all Americans,” said Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York.
The majority opinion, penned by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, found that the former football coach, Joseph Kennedy, had a constitutional right to pray after games and that the Bremerton School District in Washington state was wrong to restrict him after he refused to end the practice.
For conservative Christians, who have long criticized the separation of church and state as well the neutrality principle, it was one more in a string of resounding court victories. Many among them believe a public school teacher should be able to exercise their religion freely and openly in public, including in the classroom.
But now, some-minority faith leaders who previously looked to separation of church and state as a judicial concept that can protect their equality, are rethinking their positions.
“Fighting religion altogether and trying to ban it will only make things worse,” said Imam Abdullah Antepli, associate professor of the practice of public policy and interfaith relations at Duke University and Duke Divinity School. “We should own religion and claim it and claim our religious liberties.”
Antepli welcomed the ruling and said it offers an opportunity for minority faiths, such as Islam, to have a “broader conversation about the role of religion in public places and public schools and discuss what it means in a multicultural context.”
Asma Uddin, a visiting law professor at Catholic University who is also Muslim and represents minority faiths in constitutional legal cases, agreed that the Kennedy case helps the cause of religious freedom.
“The win in Kennedy is not just for Christians or evangelicals but for all religious believers (and more broadly, for public employees’ expressive rights),” Uddin wrote in an email. “A great way to counter majoritarian influence on our public schools is for minorities to speak up and utilize religious liberty protections for themselves.”
Elana Stein Hain, a Jewish educator and director of leadership education at the Shalom Hartman Institute, also wondered if the ruling might not empower minority faiths, such as Judaism.
“If you’re a religious minority, is it better to have a public space that is denuded of religion altogether, or is it better to have a public space that allows for religious liberty where you can compete in a marketplace too?” Hain told the Chicago Tribune. “Realistically, you’re not going to be the strongest voice, but maybe it’ll help you down the road for when you want to do something publicly in a religious way.”
Yet many legal scholars are concerned by the ruling and not optimistic it will benefit religious minorities.
“The reality is that it’s not going to be Muslim coaches praying from the field or Jewish teachers reading from the Torah,” said Caroline Mala Corbin, professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law. “The reality is that it’s going to be Christians who take advantage of this ruling and Christianity that is introduced into schools.”
For years, the Supreme Court favored separation between church and state as a way of enforcing a secular order in which the government does not privilege one religion over another but instead maintains neutrality. To many minority faiths and people of no faith, that separation was the mechanism to ensure religious freedom and freedom from religion.
This separation was understood to be rooted in the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion.
Now many secularism experts worry that with government neutrality sidelined, the playing field will no longer be even.
“If an agent of the state can pressure students into a religious ritual, then those students do not have religious freedom,” said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
There’s a power differential at play, said Corbin, noting that Christianity is not only more dominant in U.S. society, it is also a faith that unlike Judaism, for example, seeks to convert everyone else.
Seidel agreed. “This decision is going to embolden adults to see our public schools as a mission field,” he said.
The details in the Kennedy v. Bremerton case were hotly contested, with Gorsuch claiming the coach “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.” In her dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a different set of facts — including a photo of the coach with players surrounding him bowed in prayer. “The record before us,” she wrote, “tells a different story.”
With the Supreme Court now dominated by six conservative Christian justices, scholars wonder whether minority faiths will be able to get a fair shake for their religious liberty claims.
Jacques Berlinerblau, an expert on secularism at Georgetown University, said that it might be arduous.
“These cases don’t exist in a vacuum,” Berlinerblau said. “They exist in a vast, well-funded conservative Christian network that works to get the cases in a certain order and a certain way to the Supreme Court. It doesn’t just happen.”
Kennedy was represented by the First Liberty Institute, a Plano, Tex.-based firm that calls itself “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.” This term, the institute also successfully represented two Maine families that had challenged the state’s tuition-assistance program. The court ruled that Maine must fund religious education at private religious schools.
First Liberty also successfully argued a 2019 case in which the court allowed a 40-foot cross honoring soldiers who died in World War I to remain on state property in suburban Maryland.
But Uddin said the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Muslims. In 2020 it agreed unanimously that three Muslim men who say they were put on the “no fly” list after they refused to become FBI informants can sue the FBI agents who put them there for money damages.
She acknowledged there were real concerns about minority religious believers feeling pressured or coerced to participate in religious exercises by public school teachers or coaches of a different faith.
But she concluded: “I think Kennedy is also an opening for religious minorities — both teachers and students — to feel more comfortable expressing themselves in public school settings.” | 2022-07-15T11:12:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Some Muslims, Jews welcome court ruling allowing football coach to pray - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/15/some-muslims-jews-welcome-court-ruling-allowing-football-coach-pray/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/15/some-muslims-jews-welcome-court-ruling-allowing-football-coach-pray/ |
FILE - Big Jim Thorpe, famed American athlete and former U.S. Olympic great, center, sets a fast pace for some girls during a “junior olympics” event on Chicago’s south side June 6, 1948 sponsored by a V.F.W. post. Jim Thorpe has been reinstated as the sole winner of the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon — nearly 110 years after being stripped of those gold medals for violations of strict amateurism rules of the time. The International Olympic Committee confirmed that an announcement was planned later Friday, July 15, 2022. (AP Photo, File) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-07-15T11:13:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jim Thorpe reinstated as sole winner for 1912 Olympic golds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/jim-thorpe-reinstated-as-sole-winner-for-1912-olympic-golds/2022/07/15/8c9f6892-042c-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/jim-thorpe-reinstated-as-sole-winner-for-1912-olympic-golds/2022/07/15/8c9f6892-042c-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
The practice has a long history of skewing police toward communities of color. But that hasn’t stopped researchers from building crime-predicting tools.
Jeff Brantingham, anthropology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, displays a computer-generated view of “predictive policing” zones at the L.A. Police Department Unified Command Post. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)
In the world of the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” crime is nearly nonexistent. Clairvoyants predict when murders are about to happen, allowing police to swoop in and arrest the soon-to-be felons.
Though Tom Cruise’s all-powerful police force is evidence of a dystopian society, researchers have long chased the tantalizing prospect of being able to predict crime before it happens.
And as the United States faces rising rates of violent crime, another research project emerged: A group of University of Chicago scientists unveiled an algorithm last month, boasting in a news release of its ability to predict crime with “90% accuracy.”
But using artificial intelligence to direct law enforcement rings alarm bells for many social justice scholars and criminologists, who cite a long history of such technology unfairly suggesting increased policing of Black and Latino people. Even one of the study’s authors acknowledges that an algorithm’s ability to predict crime is limited.
“The past does not tell you anything about the future,” said Ishanu Chattopadhyay, a professor from the University of Chicago and lead researcher of the algorithm. “The question is: To what degree does the past actually influence the future? And to what degree are the events spontaneous or truly random? … Our ability to predict is limited by that.”
Over the past 15 years, the country’s largest police departments — such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — started thinking about ways of using artificial intelligence to not just analyze crime but predict it. They often turned to data analytics companies such as PredPol and Palantir, which create software that law enforcement can use to forecast crime.
Predictive policing tools are built by feeding data — such as crime reports, arrest records and license plate images — to an algorithm, which is trained to look for patterns to predict where and when a certain type of crime will occur in the future.
But algorithms are only as good as the data they are fed, which is a problem particularly for people in the United States, said Vincent Southerland, the co-faculty director of New York University’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law.
Historically, police data in the United States is biased, according to Southerland. Cops are more likely to arrest or charge someone with a crime in low-income neighborhoods dominated by people of color, a reality that doesn’t necessarily reflect where crime is happening, but where cops are spending their time.
“You have data that is infected by, or tainted by, some bias — and that bias is going to appear on the other side of the analysis,” he said. “You get out of it, what you put into it.”
The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm’s ties to ICE under attack by employees
In Chicago, the police used predictive policing software from the Illinois Institute of Technology to create a list of people most likely to be involved in a violent crime. A study from RAND and a subsequent investigation from the Chicago Sun-Times showed that the software included every single person arrested or fingerprinted in Chicago since 2013 on the list. The program was scrapped in 2020.
Predictive policing algorithms are “not a crystal ball,” said John S. Hollywood, a senior operations researcher at RAND, who helped audit the Chicago police department’s use of predictive algorithms. “It is better to look more holistically … what is happening in terms of specific things in my community that are leading to crimes right now.”
Chattopadhyay said his team’s software was made knowing the troubled past of algorithms.
In making the algorithm, Chattopadhyay’s team segmented major cities into 1,000 square foot city blocks and used city crime data from the last three to five years to train it. The algorithm spits out whether there is a high or low risk of crime happening in a segment at a certain time, up to one week into the future.
But the main point of the study, he said, was to use the algorithm to interrogate how police are biased. His team compared arrest data from neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic levels. They found crime that happened in wealthier areas led to more arrests, whereas in poorer neighborhoods, crime didn’t always have the same effect, showing a discrepancy in enforcement.
Chattopadhyay said these results help provide evidence to people who complain that law enforcement ignores poorer neighborhoods when there’s a spike in violent or property crime. “This allows you to quantify that,” he said. “To show the evidence.”
Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, said the study’s news release and news articles about it did not focus enough on the study’s attempt to investigate biases in police crime enforcement and overemphasized the algorithms’ accuracy claims.
“For predictive policing, a single accuracy … figure is totally insufficient to assess whether a tool is useful or just,” he said. “Crime is rare, so it’s probable that most predictions of crime are false positives.”
There’s racial bias in our police systems. Here’s the proof.
“They have seen data misused against them in court. They’ve seen it to use to profile individuals,” he said. “So, if somebody rolls up like me and says, ‘Hey, we want to help you use data.’ It’s not an immediate like, ‘Oh my God, thank you.’ It’s like, ‘What data are you using?’ ”
“[Algorithms] are a bright, shiny object,” he said. “These things tend to be distractions.” | 2022-07-15T11:13:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | AI fails to predict crime. But researchers won't stop trying to. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/15/predictive-policing-algorithms-fail/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/15/predictive-policing-algorithms-fail/ |
Friday briefing: Secret Service’s Jan. 6 texts; Sen. Joe Manchin; new suicide hotline; van Gogh self-portrait; and more
The Secret Service was accused of erasing texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021.
What happened? Messages from the time of the Capitol attack vanished after a government watchdog asked to see them, an official said this week.
Why it matters: The texts could have shed light on the agency’s actions and possibly those of President Donald Trump.
What we do know: A former White House aide said last month that Trump lunged at a Secret Service agent who stopped him from leading supporters to the Capitol.
Democrats are still struggling to pass a major economic package.
The latest: Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, said yesterday that he won’t vote for any new money for climate change action or tax increases on the wealthy.
Sound familiar? Manchin blocked President Biden’s big spending plan last winter, too. Democrats can’t do much without him because the Senate is split 50-50.
A Russian missile attack in Ukraine left at least 23 people dead yesterday.
Where? A business complex in the central city of Vinnytsia. Three children were among those killed, 71 people were hospitalized and 29 others are missing.
What else to know: Russian troops in eastern Ukraine launched new attacks; WNBA star Brittney Griner, facing drug charges in Russia, was back in court today.
Texas sued the Biden administration yesterday over new abortion guidance.
What guidance? That states are required to provide abortions in emergencies to save a mother’s life, even if those states have near-total bans, under an existing federal law.
What else to know: The case of a 10-year-old Ohio girl’s rape and abortion continues to make headlines. Here’s the latest.
Starting tomorrow, you can text or call 988 for mental health help.
The details: The national suicide hotline is switching numbers, with the goal of becoming a standard 911-like system.
However, that may take time: The network is made up of locally funded call centers, and many don’t have the resources they need yet.
Why this matters: Help lines are highly effective, and the pandemic has created a growing number of people, especially LGBTQ youths, in need of help.
Last month was one the warmest Junes ever recorded.
How hot was it? Global temperatures were around 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than an average June in the late 1800s, according to NASA data.
What scientists want you to know: This fits in with long-term trends that the world is getting hotter because of human-caused climate change.
A secret van Gogh portrait was discovered under another painting.
How? A gallery in Scotland was X-raying the artwork, another van Gogh, ahead of an art show. It’s looking for a way to uncover the self-portrait without damaging either work.
How did it get there? Van Gogh often re-used canvasses to save money. Cardboard was glued to the back of this canvas at some point, hiding the portrait until now.
And now … what to watch this weekend: Whodunit/romance “Where the Crawdads Sing” is in theaters. And, if you’re in a reading slump: Here’s how to get out of it. | 2022-07-15T11:13:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Friday, July 15 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/07/15/what-to-know-for-july-15/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/07/15/what-to-know-for-july-15/ |
German soldier who posed as a refugee found guilty of attack plot
The right-wing extremist was convicted of a prepping a ‘serious act of violence endangering the state’
Defendant Franco A, a German army officer reacts to a judicial guard upon arrival for his trial at a Regional Court in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on July 15. (Boris Roessler/AFP/Getty Images)
BERLIN — A German soldier who registered as a Syrian asylum seeker was convicted of preparing a “serious act of violence endangering the state,” according to German media, in one of the country’s most prominent cases of right-wing extremism in recent years.
A 33-year-old lieutenant in the German military, identified by the court as Franco A. but widely named in the media as Franco Albrecht, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail, according to German press present in the courtroom in Frankfurt as the verdict was read out.
The extraordinary case unfolded like a movie plot when Albrecht was arrested in 2017 after trying to retrieve a loaded pistol from a bathroom in the Vienna airport. The gun had been discovered and reported by a cleaning lady, and police then lay in wait for someone to retrieve it.
German commando unit disbanded over suspected far-right links within ranks
A run of Albrecht’s fingerprints revealed that he had been leading a double life: the officer in the German military was also registered in Bavaria as a Syrian refugee named as Benjamin David.
Prosecutors accused him of posing as a Syrian to carry out the attacks to make them appear like “radical Islamist acts of terrorism.” He had been plotting his actions since 2015, during the thick of the so-called migrant crisis, when more than a million refugees — largely from war-torn Syria — were arriving in Germany.
But while he was convicted of planning an attack, the court said it could not establish whether his intention was to blame it on the refugee population. The defendant had maintained he had registered as a refugee to expose what he saw as problems with the asylum system.
The court found that he had “nationalist, right-wing extremist sentiments,” according to the German news agency DPA.
He was found guilty on firearms charges after being accused of hoarding weapons of war, including a semiautomatic rifle and two semiautomatic pistols, over 1,000 rounds of ammunition and more than 50 explosive devices. Some of the explosives and ammunition had been stolen from German military stocks, prosecutors said.
Defense lawyers had argued that there was insufficient evidence he was planning an attack. While the father of three had admitted stockpiling weapons, his lawyers said they were for defense in case of a collapse of the state.
In another twist earlier this year, Albrecht, who had not be held in detention while on trial, was arrested again in February on his way back from the French city of Strasbourg. A police search found him to be in possession of a box full of Nazi memorabilia and notes that described the threats to the German nation from migration and intermarriage. | 2022-07-15T11:13:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Franco, German far-right extremist soldier, convicted of plotting attack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/germany-extremist-soldier-syrian/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/15/germany-extremist-soldier-syrian/ |
MADRID — Spain’s lower house of parliament has approved a new historical memory law that declares illegal the regime of former dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and makes the central government responsible for the recovery of the bodies of tens of thousands of people missing from the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship. | 2022-07-15T11:13:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Spain rules Franco regime "illegal" in new memory law - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/spain-rules-franco-regime-illegal-in-new-memory-law/2022/07/15/2425a5fe-0424-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/spain-rules-franco-regime-illegal-in-new-memory-law/2022/07/15/2425a5fe-0424-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html |
Post Politics Now Biden set to meet Saudi crown prince amid controversy
This just in: House committee to take up assault weapons ban next week
The latest: Manchin deals Democratic leaders setback in economic talks
Take a look: Biden’s first Mideast trip as president
The latest: Trump called member of White House support staff amid Jan. 6 probe
The latest: Secret Service erased texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, official says
President Biden delivers statements to the media with the Palestinian president after their meeting Friday in the city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Today, President Biden is set to meet with leaders of Saudi Arabia, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto leader, who U.S. intelligence officials say ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. During a news conference in Israel on Thursday, Biden defended plans to visit the country, saying it was part of an effort to “reassert our influence in the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic-led House is poised to pass legislation that seeks to protect access to reproductive health care, including the ability to travel across state lines for an abortion, in response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last month. The bills face long odds in the evenly divided Senate, where 60 votes are required to advance most legislation.
10:25 a.m. Eastern: Biden leaves Tel Aviv for Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.
12:30 p.m. Eastern: Biden arrives in Jiddah.
1:15 p.m. Eastern: Biden participates in a bilateral meeting with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud.
1:45 p.m. Eastern: Biden participates in a working session with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi ministers.
President Biden devoted the last hours of his Israeli visit to restoring the ties with Palestinians severed by his predecessor, visiting a Palestinian hospital Friday in East Jerusalem and crossing an Israeli military checkpoint to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem.
Reporting from Jerusalem, The Post’s Steve Hendrix writes that Biden also called for a full accounting of the May killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during an Israeli raid in the West Bank, the first time he has publicly mentioned the incident during his visit. More from Steve:
Biden’s two events produced no progress toward renewed talks in the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but the White House did announce a range of measures meant to improve the situation at a time “when Palestinians are hurting,” as Biden said after his meeting with Abbas.
The administration approved $316 million in new aid for Palestinians, including $100 million for a hospital network that serves patients from the West Bank and Gaza. Another $200 million will go to the United Nations agency that supports Palestinian refugees, funding that was largely eliminated by the Trump administration. Biden, who has pledged to renew support for Palestinians, began restoring Washington’s contribution soon after taking office.
The administration also announced $15 million in emergency aid to help the territories during grain shortages caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as an initiative to speed the rollout of 4G technology in the West Bank and Gaza. The White House said it was pressing Israel to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians by streamlining the crossing between the West Bank and Jordan.
The House Judiciary Committee plans to advance a bill next week that would ban assault weapons, a measure highly unlikely to clear the Senate but that sends a signal that Democrats who control the House want to do more to respond to the recent spate of mass shootings.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the committee’s chairman, said in a statement that his panel would mark up the legislation on Wednesday, the first time in two decades such a step has been taken.
“Over the past several decades, our country has witnessed senseless killing after senseless kill, and each time one fact has remained remarkably consistent — the weapon of choice for mass slaughter is a high-powered assault weapon,” Nadler said. “This markup is another step in our efforts to make our communities safer. I look forward to moving this legislation through the Judiciary Committee next week and onto the House floor.”
Congress last enacted an assault weapons ban in 1994. It expired a decade later and has not been renewed.
The legislation that will be considered next week is sponsored by Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) and co-sponsored by 211 House members.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) told Democratic leaders Thursday he would not support an economic package that contains new spending on climate change or new tax increases targeting wealthy individuals and corporations, marking a massive setback for party lawmakers who had hoped to advance a central element of their agenda before the midterm elections this fall.
The Post’s Tony Romm and Jeff Stein report that the major shift in negotiations — confirmed by two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the talks — threatened to upend the delicate process to adopt the party’s signature economic package seven months after Manchin scuttled the original, roughly $2 trillion Build Back Better Act, which President Biden had endorsed.
More from Tony and Jeff:
Manchin told Democratic leaders he is open to provisions that aim to lower prescription drug costs for seniors, the two people said. And the West Virginia moderate expressed support with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the party’s chief negotiator, for extending subsidies that could help keep health insurance costs down for millions of Americans, one of the sources said.
“Political headlines are of no value to the millions of Americans struggling to afford groceries and gas as inflation soars to 9.1 percent,” said Sam Runyon, a spokeswoman for Manchin. “Senator Manchin believes it’s time for leaders to put political agendas aside, reevaluate and adjust to the economic realities the country faces to avoid taking steps that add fuel to the inflation fire.”
With Biden on his first trip to the Middle East as president, The Post’s photo editors have pulled together a gallery of some of the most striking images of his visit, starting with his arrival Wednesday in Israel. You can take a look at the compete gallery here.
Former president Donald Trump attempted to call a member of the White House support staff who has been in talks with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, according to people with knowledge of the attempt.
The Post’s Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey have details:
The Post’s Maria Sacchetti and Carol D. Leonnig report that Joseph V. Cuffari, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, wrote to the leaders of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees indicating that the text messages have vanished and that efforts to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack were being hindered.
More from Maria and Carol: | 2022-07-15T11:41:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden set to meet crown prince, other Saudi leaders, amid controversy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/biden-saudi-arabia-mbs-house-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/biden-saudi-arabia-mbs-house-abortion/ |
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