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For years, Tunisia’s democracy, born of an Arab Spring revolt in 2011, endured as others in the region faded. But in July 2021, President Kais Saied unilaterally fired the country’s prime minister and suspended parliament. Since then, he’s ruled by decree, appointed his own government and sidelined the judiciary. Now he’s asking Tunisians to approve an amended constitution that would permanently dilute the powers of the parliament and judiciary and return the country to the days when authority was concentrated in the hands of the president.
1. What’s the context for the president’s actions?
The coronavirus pandemic has had devastating effects both on Tunisia’s tourism-dependent economy and on its people, causing relatively high human losses on a per capita basis. Last year, the health crisis inflamed public anger at the government, which was already stoked by poor economic returns and a popular belief that the political changes over the past decade had served a nepotistic elite. On July 25, 2021, groups of youths staged demonstrations in several cities and in Siliana they sacked the offices of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that held the most seats in parliament. Later that day, Saied made his move after months of charging the government of Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, a technocrat, with failing to address corruption and economic woes and accusing often unspecified foes of conspiracies to sow discord. Saied cited the constitution, which allows the president to take exceptional measures “to ward off imminent danger threatening the nation’s institutions, security or independence.”
5. How does Saied want to change the constitution?
A panel picked by the president drafted proposed revisions to the 2014 constitution, which was the result of painstaking negotiations among the nation’s myriad factions after the revolution. The changes introduce a national council of regions and provinces to share legislative duties with the parliament, which along with the judiciary is relegated to a status akin to that of the civil service. The president would assume “executive functions” and be “helped” by a government and a prime minister he would name. Tunisians are scheduled to vote on the proposals in a July 25 referendum. | 2022-07-20T14:30:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Understanding the Unraveling of Tunisia’s Revolution - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/understanding-the-unraveling-of-tunisias-revolution/2022/07/20/9dd6f746-0833-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/understanding-the-unraveling-of-tunisias-revolution/2022/07/20/9dd6f746-0833-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Democrats should take yes for an answer on Electoral Count Act reform
Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) talk before a news conference on Capitol Hill on Jan. 22, 2018. (Melina Mara)
Democrats have tried multiple avenues to strengthen voting rights. They tried to block Republican bills to suppress voting or subvert elections. They tried to correct the Supreme Court’s egregious mistake disabling the “preclearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act. They tried to replenish democracy, such as by attempting to end gerrymandering or ban dark money. The Republicans would have none of it.
Nevertheless, a sliver of opportunity remains. Congress now has a chance to correct the legal ambiguities exploited in the coup attempt after the 2020 election. We’re about to find out if even that minimal election reform is possible.
A bipartisan bill negotiated under the leadership of Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) would make some needed changes in the Electoral Count Act, the vague and problematic law that Donald Trump and the defeated former president’s allies tried to exploit to remain in power. The Post reports: “Collins and Manchin’s proposal is expected to set a deadline for when states can change their rules, clarify that states cannot choose their electors after Election Day, create more stringent requirements for Congress to object to the certification of a state’s electors and clarify that the vice president’s role is ceremonial with no power to reject electors.”
It’s fitting that the bipartisan team rolled out their proposal this week, just as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection wraps up its hearings that have exposed Trump’s conspiracy to install phony electors and strong-arm the vice president. The proposal would go a long way to prevent that from happening again. It would also amend rules governing the presidential transition (which Trump delayed as he pursued his scheme to steal the election) and make changes to on how the U.S. Postal Service operates in an election.
There are plenty of other items that should be included, such as robust protections for election workers. But even if the bill contains only the limited provisions listed above, it will be more than worthwhile. As David Becker, executive director of the Election Center for Innovation & Research, tells me, “Anything that strengthens the guardrails of democracy and creates a stable and predictable process is a good thing.”
Some voting rights lawyers are disturbed by the proposal’s provision that would provide an expedited process to resolve disputes in federal courts. But there must be an option for expedited court review somewhere, and disputes would likely wind up in federal court anyway. State court resolution is no panacea.
The sole test for the ECA reform bill should therefore be whether it makes the current system less vulnerable to abuse, fraud and coup plots. By limiting the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes, raising the bar for members of Congress to challenge electors and preventing mischief from state legislators, it meets that test. However, if these items are not in the bill - or if it creates more ambiguities - then the Senate should try again.
That Republicans are willing to entertain this sort of bill speaks volumes about their own concern that Trump might try his tactics again. Democrats would be wise to take yes for an answer - if the bill really is as good as advertised. | 2022-07-20T14:30:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Democrats should take yes for an answer on Electoral Count Act reform - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/electoral-count-act-eca-reform-democrats-should-take-yes-for-answer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/electoral-count-act-eca-reform-democrats-should-take-yes-for-answer/ |
FaZe Clan, the boisterous gaming lifestyle brand, goes public
Esports and content creation collective FaZe Clan is now a publicly traded company, following a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The new company is listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker FAZE. The company opened at around $13 per share.
FaZe Clan first announced its intention to go public in October 2021, with the goal of expanding its revenue sources and international presence. In an interview, Lee Trink, the company’s CEO, said FaZe’s popularity with Gen Z audiences is why it will thrive as a publicly traded company.
“We’ve placed ourselves in the top echelon of a youth culture company,” Trink said. “And now, and not just this minute, we have started to shift our focus to monetizing that massive audience. I think that’s really critical for this moment of going public.”
FaZe began in 2010 as a collective of Call of Duty players who got famous for trickshotting — a style of flashy, difficult shooting that highlights a player’s skill. (For example: spinning 720 degrees in the air before sniping someone in the head without bothering to scope in.) Since then, the brand has burgeoned into a gaming media and esports company, fielding competitive rosters in a range of titles. FaZe’s “Counter-Strike” team is currently the best team on the planet, according to the Counter-Strike news and stats portal HLTV. On July 17, the team won first place at the Intel Extreme Masters tournament, netting the organization $400,000.
Aching wrists, early retirement and the surprising physical toll of esports
FaZe is perhaps best known for its cachet as a lifestyle brand with a vast stable of content creators. The rapper Lil Yachty streams for FaZe (and even made a “Fortnite” song) under the tag FaZe Boat. So does LeBron James Jr. FaZe has done streetwear collaborations with Champion, Disney and famed artist Takashi Murakami. Its members have appeared in a Batman comic. Snoop Dogg rocked a FaZe Clan chain during his Super Bowl LVI halftime performance. He’s also on FaZe’s board of directors.
The company has been exploring a number of ventures beyond video games. Gambling, virtual dining and ghost kitchens, fan clubs and subscription models are some of the potential revenue generators Trink said the company is exploring.
FaZe is also eager to engage with its followers outside of the United States. Trink told The Post that while 50% of the brand’s audience is based outside of the United States, only 5% of its revenue is international.
Trink said FaZe has also discussed possible partnerships with Web3 companies to cut out the middleman of social media platforms. Web3 is a hypothetical concept for a decentralized internet utilizing blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. If this version of the internet comes to pass, Trink hopes it will also lead to FaZe-sponsored play-to-earn games (games where players can earn NFTs or cryptocurrency) and a way to deliver content that bypasses platforms such as YouTube or Instagram.
“Migrating our community to a Web3 community allows us to be directly connected,” Trink said. “It allows us to own the relationship. It allows us to create a bespoke set of engagement around what that relationship is. We can deliver content as we see fit, however we see fit. We can exchange information, we can converse in an environment we see fit and we think serves our community best. We’re enabled to monetize how we see fit, as well.”
FaZe’s efforts to become a publicly traded company have not come without bumps. After announcing a valuation of $1 billion when it first sought to go public, the post-merger value of the company was appraised at $713 million in the initial acquisition filing, and in April, FaZe Clan was valued at $650 million in total equity, as reported by the Sports Business Journal. The company’s financial performance estimates were also revised down due “current market trends,” the company wrote in a filing.
FaZe has also endured some unflattering incidents as it has evolved into its current form. In the past few years, former FaZe member and influencer Alissa Violet sued the company claiming she was owed $300 million in shares. Streamer Turner “Tfue” Tenney also sued FaZe over what his lawyer described as an exploitative contract, a suit that was ultimately settled.
In 2021, former NBA player and FaZe investor Meyers Leonard, who streamed under the name FaZe Hammer, used an antisemitic slur on stream. Shortly after the incident, FaZe announced that it had ended its “public association” with Leonard while maintaining he was never a true member of FaZe.
Asked about how FaZe plans on avoiding future incidents like Leonard’s, Trink pointed to FaZe Academy, a streamer boot camp launched in 2020 for FaZe members.
“We now have a FaZe Academy, which is a precursor to being admitted onto the roster,” Trink said. “That’s done not only to educate our talent around a code of conduct but also to suss out the fit with FaZe.”
The 2010s were a banner decade for big money and tech — and esports reaped the rewards
In the past decade, the esports industry has grown at an astronomical rate, and FaZe has frequently boasted that it is the world’s most recognizable esports brand. Trink described FaZe as “the undisputed leader within gaming.”
But the brand goes public in an increasingly unstable landscape for the industry, marked by shrinking companies and skeptical investors. In July, both TSM and 100 Thieves, esports and lifestyle brands comparable to FaZe, laid off workers. Now, under the looming threat of another recession, FaZe must convince investors that it can transmute its popularity into profitability. | 2022-07-20T14:31:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Faze Clan goes public on Nasdaq exchange - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/esports/2022/07/20/faze-clan-stock-nasdaq/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/esports/2022/07/20/faze-clan-stock-nasdaq/ |
Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks in the House on July 20, 2022, during his last session of Prime Minister’s Questions. ( /AFP/Getty Images)
LONDON — Boris Johnson said a goodbye to the House of Commons — and to his fellow lawmakers who gave him the boot — in a rowdy appearance on Wednesday, marking the near-end of his premiership and this weird, shape-shifting Age of Boris.
Or as Johnson put it, “I want to thank everybody here, and hasta la vista, baby!”
Seriously, those were his final words — a borrowing of the catchphrase popularized by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film “Terminator 2.”
Riffing on President George W. Bush’s premature declaration of victory in Iraq, Johnson declared his legacy: “mission largely accomplished.”
Was it fitting? Was it glib? Was it … genius? Johnson, a serial blusterer who relishes the role of entertaining after-dinner speaker, won the heart of his party and the country with such lines.
And don’t forget, Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, not once but twice.
Johnson is on the way out — the Conservative Party will announce the two finalists to replace him later Wednesday. But many in the halls of Westminster anticipate that Johnson could someday make a comeback.
It was not a somber farewell from him Wednesday, but all surface, all talking points, all greatest hits, delivered with fist pumps and the prime minister’s trademark runaway high-speed elocution.
The House of Commons was packed — and roaring, filled with the usual insults and point scoring, as is typical in the weekly session known as Prime Minister’s Questions, a gladiatorial contest for debaters who graduated from Oxford and Cambridge.
There was braying, there was harrumphing, there was “chuntering from a sedentary position,” a previous legendary speaker of the House once called it.
Johnson on Wednesday stood in the prime minister’s spot at the “despatch box” for what he called “probably, certainly” his last verbal battering.
At the end of his remarks he gave this advice to his successor:
Who will be the next U.K. prime minister? What to know about the candidates.
And also: “Cut taxes and deregulate wherever you can to make this the greatest place to live and invest.”
“Focus on the road ahead but always remember to check the rear view mirror,” the prime minister said.
“And remember, above all, it’s not Twitter that counts. It’s the people that sent us here,” he closed.
Early in the hour, Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, asked Johnson what message the public might take as the contenders for his job “can’t find a single decent thing” to say about the prime minister or his government’s record?
Conservative Party lawmakers are voting Wednesday to determine their two finalists to lead their party and the country. The candidates will then go out on the “hustings” to convince the 200,000 or so dues-paying Tories to vote for them.
A new prime minister is scheduled to be announced in early September.
The next prime minister is now guaranteed to be either from an ethnic minority or to be a woman.
Three candidates were left at the beginning of the day Wednesday, after four rounds of secret balloting by Conservative members of Parliament: former chancellor Rishi Sunak; junior trade minister Penny Mordaunt; and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. | 2022-07-20T14:31:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boris Johnson says ‘hasta la vista, baby!' as party votes for his replacement - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/20/boris-johnson-finalists-uk-prime-minister/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/20/boris-johnson-finalists-uk-prime-minister/ |
Henrik Stenson of Sweden will not be the captain of Europe's Ryder Cup team in 2023. (Andrew Medichini/AP)
The European Ryder Cup team announced Wednesday that it has dropped Henrik Stenson as captain for the 2023 event in Italy.
While nothing official has been announced and the LIV Golf International Series was not mentioned in Ryder Cup Europe’s statement, Stenson is expected to sign on with the Saudi-funded breakaway league and play in its next event, which begins July 29 at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.
“In light of decisions made by Henrik in relation to his personal circumstances, it has become clear that he will not be able to fulfill certain contractual obligations to Ryder Cup Europe that he had committed to prior his announcement as Captain on Tuesday March 15, 2022, and it is therefore not possible for him to continue in the role of Captain,” Ryder Cup Europe said in its statement.
A new captain will be named “in due course,” Ryder Cup Europe said.
Stenson, 46, was set to become the first Ryder Cup captain from Sweden (he had a 10-7-2 match record in five appearances as a player for Team Europe). He’s best known for winning the 2016 British Open in a Sunday duel against Phil Mickelson, another aging player who has joined LIV Golf. Stenson’s 63 in the final round at Royal Troon tied Johnny Miller’s record for the lowest score ever to close a major championship.
Stenson last won a full-field, top-level tournament at the PGA Tour’s Wyndham Championship in 2017 and has fallen to No. 171 in the Official World Golf Ranking. He has missed the cut in his last four major-championship appearances and in seven of his last nine, among them last week’s British Open when he bogeyed Nos. 16 and 17 in the second round to miss the cut by one stroke.
On Tuesday, LIV Golf tweeted out a photo of the 48-golfer field for next week’s tournament in New Jersey, the third of an eight-event schedule in 2022. Three photos were left blank with “TBA” written underneath:
LIV Golf, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has paid players such as Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka hundreds of millions of dollars simply to sign on to the new league, which promises a shorter schedule, no-cut tournaments and guaranteed prize money. The new circuit has been accused of “sportswashing” Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations.
The PGA and European tours have suspended and/or fined their golfers who have joined LIV, though the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly is looking into whether the PGA Tour has engaged in anticompetitive behavior by issuing such bans. Stenson and the other former major champions who have joined LIV likely will be allowed to play in future grand-slam tournaments, which are not operated by the PGA or European tours, but the bulk of LIV’s lineup likely will have to hope that the Official World Golf Ranking starts recognizing LIV tournaments, as world rankings will be the one remaining entry point into the grand slams for most LIV golfers. LIV has applied for OWGR accreditation; without it, the league’s golfers will see their world rankings plummet because they cannot improve their standing via PGA or European tour events.
A major stumbling block for LIV could be the format of its tournaments, which are shorter than normal (54 holes compared with 72 at most PGA Tour events), have significantly smaller fields and no cuts. OWGR guidelines say that tournaments must be four rounds and have at least 75 players to receive full consideration, and that new leagues must adhere to OWGR standards for at least a year before they are admitted into the rankings. The OWGR handbook also says it can reject a league’s application or change its guidelines at its discretion. | 2022-07-20T14:47:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Expected to join LIV Golf, Henrik Stenson out as Euro Ryder Cup captain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/latest-liv-golf-players/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/latest-liv-golf-players/ |
How jailed Hong Kong protesters are subjected to ‘thought work’
By Perry Link
Protesters march on the streets against an extradition bill in Hong Kong in June 2019. (Vincent Yu/AP)
Perry Link is professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Princeton University.
As the political system of the People’s Republic of China continues its takeover in Hong Kong, local officials in the city sometimes seem only too eager to please their Beijing masters. An official in Hong Kong’s Correctional Services Department has recently, and with evident pride, explained how the department uses brainwashing techniques that have long been standard on the mainland.
In the past three decades, the Chinese Communist Party has spent immense sums on “stability maintenance,” a budget item for funding not only police and prisons but also a legion of “thought workers” who blanket the country to nip in the bud any possible threat to CCP authority. A comment that isn’t “correct” can trigger an invitation for a “chat”: Are you sure you want to say that? Wouldn’t your life be better if you did not? You do want your little daughter to get into that neighborhood school, don’t you? And so on.
Mainland dissidents, accustomed to such chats, can become adept at sparring with thought workers. But they need to learn the rules of the game as they go; the regime does not publish them. In Hong Kong, the Correctional Services Department does.
In a budgeting document for the fiscal year ending in 2023, the department describes how prison authorities work on “persons in custody” (abbreviated as “PICs”), who are not famous dissidents but ordinary protesters, most of them young, who have been charged with political offenses.
At the end of 2021, Hong Kong prisons held 1,787 PICs between the ages of 18 and 30 and nearly 200 more under 18. They have been subjected to standard CCP thought-work techniques such as these:
We are pinning a negative but unclear label on you. During huge street demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019, some young protesters began wearing black outfits; this led the Correctional Services Department to inaugurate the term “black-clad violence.” The color black has a storied CCP history. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the most politically despised people were classified into “Five Black Categories.” In 1989, leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations were labeled “black hands.” There are many other examples. And what exactly are “black” characteristics? You needn’t ask. All you need to know is that black = wrong and that you are on the defensive.
If you oppose us, you are by definition a minority. PICs are described in the Correctional Services document as “radical” lawbreakers who are “extreme” in their “anti-social” mind-set. Never mind that they marched in demonstrations that brought more than a quarter of the city’s entire population into the streets. In police rhetoric, they were at the fringes. During the equally immense demonstrations in Beijing in spring 1989, CCP media stalwartly held that “a tiny minority” was causing all the trouble.
The regime occupies the moral center. The question for “extremists” is always whether they will choose to return to the mainstream. It is the right thing to do. Just as the words black and wrong have no specifiable empirical content, the word right has none, either. The Correctional Services Department wishes that young Hong Kongers will take the “right” path and set the “right” goals, but what does right mean? The government knows.
Your family is in the mainstream, not with you. In one sense, there is sometimes truth in this claim. Families, even while privately sympathizing with their PICs, often play it safe. Dissidents in mainland China have often observed that relatives are the first to criticize them, since a brash dissident can endanger an entire family. Accordingly, in Hong Kong, the Correctional Services Department touts special family programs that are aimed to help PICs “form stronger determination to turn over a new leaf through family support.”
You must be clear on history. It is both essential to Marxism-Leninism and deep in Chinese cultural tradition that the legitimacy of a ruler depends upon a correct view of recent history — as determined by officials. The department provides “Virtual Reality history learning activities” for those who need it because a “sense of national identity” helps “build positive values” and will steer PICs “back on the right track.”
Your government is here to help. It knows that PICs have “special rehabilitation needs.” Case managers “adjust [prisoners’] rehabilitation programmes as and when necessary” to account for changing “psychological and emotional disturbances, difficulties in controlling impulsiveness, etc.” Special programs include an Information Literacy Group to teach prisoners “to judge the authenticity of online information”; and a Zen Photography Workshop to “help them think over their problems from a different perspective.”
Government care follows a PIC out of prison. It begins with “Project Landing,” which has a a mission to help them de-radicalise, cultivate multi-perspective thinking, develop empathy skills and rebuild family relationships.” Next comes a police-sponsored “Walk with YOUth Programme” that helps PICs to “re-establish correct values … with a view to reducing ... recidivism.” A psychological service center called “Change Lab” aims to build up “psychological resilience” and help “resist temptations.”
In mainland China, it is well known that punishments are reduced for people who show gratitude for psychological help. Similarly in Hong Kong, according to the Correctional Services Department, “de-radicalisation rehabilitation programmes have received positive and favourable response from participants.” | 2022-07-20T14:51:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How jailed Hong Kong protesters are subjected to ‘thought work’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/brainwashing-jailed-hong-kong-protesters/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/brainwashing-jailed-hong-kong-protesters/ |
Breaking down the House vote to protect same-sex marriage
With the U.S. Capitol in the background, a person waves a rainbow flag as they participant in a rally in support of the LGBTQIA+ community at Freedom Plaza on June 12, 2021, in Washington. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
The text of the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), passed on Tuesday by the House of Representatives, is superficially anodyne. Over the span of a few terse paragraphs, it removes the prohibition on same-sex marriage introduced with the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and stipulates that any individual’s marriage is federally recognized if it is legal in that person’s state.
But, of course, both the subject of same-sex marriage and the context for the introduction of this legislation are not frictionless. Views of same-sex marriage have liberalized remarkably since 1996, but there is still significant opposition. It was only last year, for example, that a majority of Republicans expressed support for same-sex unions in Gallup polling. The legislation was also a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, with the concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas indicating that the court’s legalization of same-sex marriage might be similarly targeted.
So while the vote on RFMA was not close, there was still significant opposition from House Republicans — opposition often couched as objections not to same-sex marriage but to Democrats insisting on the vote in the first place.
The final vote was 267 to 157, with 47 Republicans joining the majority. (No Democrats voted against the bill.) Unsurprisingly, those Republicans that supported the bill tended to be from districts that voted for President Biden or narrowly for Donald Trump in 2020 and came from legislators that rated as less conservative on VoteView’s measure of ideology.
Republicans who voted against the bill came from districts that voted for Trump by a 24-point margin on average, compared to 10 points for those who supported it. The opponents’ DW-NOMINATE scores from VoteView averaged 0.55 (where 1 is the most conservative); supporters’ average score was 0.37.
Thanks to the longevity of service in Congress, a number of legislators who cast votes on RFMA on Tuesday had also been in the House for the 1996 DOMA vote. Of the Democrats who were in the House for both votes, about half had opposed DOMA at the point when it was first passed. Of the Republicans who were present for both, two switched their positions from opposition to same-sex marriage (that is, backing DOMA) to support for the new bill.
What’s interesting about the RFMA vote, of course, is the intentional framing: state determinations, not federal ones, should be the standard the government respects. The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe was championed by the right in part for doing precisely that sort of redelegation of power.
DOMA’s original prioritization of federal authority over state laws, of course, went the other way. It went the same way, in fact, as the response to the 2020 presidential election, in which Republican legislators broadly rejected electors submitted by Arizona and Pennsylvania in a futile effort to block Biden’s inauguration. (This was of a piece with the effort from Republican state attorneys general a few weeks earlier to convince the Supreme Court to reject votes cast in other, swing states.)
More than 100 Republicans both voted against the Respect for Marriage Act and supported efforts to reject those Biden electors. Only about two dozen both supported RFMA and the counting of those electoral votes — among them Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), the two GOP members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The Respect for Marriage Act now heads to the Senate. If it passes, it is expected that Biden will sign it into law. | 2022-07-20T15:08:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Breaking down the House vote to protect same-sex marriage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/breaking-down-house-vote-protect-same-sex-marriage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/breaking-down-house-vote-protect-same-sex-marriage/ |
Kershaw, who allowed a hit and a walk with one strikeout in his single-inning appearance, rose to leave the room after answering a few questions when he was told there was one more. He sat back down and said, “Oh, dude, sorry. Whatcha got?” as Blake Grice, a 10-year-old from Denver, stepped forward.
Grice, who reviews baseball cards on YouTube, had more of a personal message than a question for the longtime Los Angeles Dodger. Grice’s grandfather, Graham, was a Redondo Beach native and Dodgers fan who had put together a bucket list that he was unable to complete before he died of brain cancer seven years ago. | 2022-07-20T15:26:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Clayton Kershaw gave a 10-year-old an all-star moment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/clayton-kershaw-10-year-old/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/clayton-kershaw-10-year-old/ |
Nationals first baseman Josh Bell has grounded into 18 double plays. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Josh Bell was one of the bright spots for the Nationals in the first half of the season. The switch-hitting first baseman leads the team in batting average (.311), total bases (172), hits (106) and doubles (21). He also leads Major League Baseball in a statistic that he would rather not: double plays grounded into.
Bell, who is likely to be dealt before the trade deadline, has grounded into 18 double plays, which is three more than Blue Jays slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and four more than teammate Maikel Franco and Rockies second baseman Brendan Rodgers. He is on pace to ground into 31 double plays, which would tie for the fourth most in a season all-time and set a team record.
The Nationals lead all teams with 94 double plays grounded into, which is 11 more than the Rockies and 30 more than the league average. Washington is on pace to ground into 162 double plays — one per game — and to lead the league in that category for a second consecutive year after grounding into a team record 158 twin killings in 2021. The major league record is 174, set by the 1990 Red Sox. Before last year, the Nationals hadn’t grounded into at least 150 double plays in a season since they totaled 153 in 2008.
Josh Bell has seen his work pay off, even if he's not an all-star
Bell, who grounded into a career high 22 double plays last year, fits the profile of a GIDP leader. He hits the ball hard, strikes out less than average and isn’t the most fleet of foot. He also has more opportunities to ground into double plays than most; only Pete Alonso (202) and Austin Riley (201) have more plate appearances with men on base than Bell’s 198.
While Bell would prefer to have more months like his scorching June, when he didn’t ground into a single double play, there’s impressive company at the top of the all-time single-season GIDP list. Hall of Famer and Red Sox legend Jim Rice grounded into a record 36 double plays in 1984 and another 35 the next year. According to Baseball-Reference.com, Cal Ripken Jr. and Jackie Jensen are two of the five players tied for third on the list with 32.
Bell and Franco aren’t the only Nationals with double-digit double plays this season. Nelson Cruz has grounded into 12, while Juan Soto, who led the National League with 23 last season, has 11. It’s no surprise, then, that Washington ranks last in FanGraphs’ wGDP metric, which is the number of runs above or below average a player has accumulated based on their ability to stay out of double plays. Washington’s team wGDP is -8.9; the A’s are second worst at -4. Only the Cubs hit a higher percentage of groundballs in the first half than the Nationals, who put the ball on the ground 46.9 percent of the time and are averaging the fourth fewest runs per game (3.87).
“We’re hitting into a lot of double plays,” Nationals Manager Dave Martinez said earlier this month. “We got to start getting the ball up in the air in situations, got to start driving in runs with guys on third base with less than two outs.”
Ryan Zimmerman holds the Nationals’ single-season record with 26 double plays grounded into in 2007. Ivan Rodriguez grounded into 25 — in 301 fewer plate appearances than Zimmerman — in 2010, while Yunel Escobar led the league with 24 GIDP in 2015. Frank Howard owns the Washington single-season record with 29 in both 1969 and 1971. Zimmerman grounded into a Nationals record 212 double plays in his career; Howard grounded into 219.
Cardinals veteran Albert Pujols holds the career record with 421 double plays grounded into. The other names atop the list are Ripken (350), Miguel Cabrera (347), Rodriguez (337), Hank Aaron (328), Carl Yastrzemski (323), Dave Winfield (319), Eddie Murray (315) and Rice (315). | 2022-07-20T15:26:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Josh Bell, Nationals are leading MLB in double plays grounded into - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/washington-nationals-double-plays/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/washington-nationals-double-plays/ |
Chipotle shuttered a restaurant in Augusta, Maine, where workers were attempting to unionize. Though the company cited “ongoing staffing challenges” for the decision, union organizers saw it as an attempt to silence workers. (Keith Srakocic/AP)
Chipotle has permanently closed a Maine location where workers were attempting to unionize, drawing criticism from organizers who condemned it as a union-busting tactic.
The store, located in a strip mall just off the highway in Augusta, recently became the first Chipotle location to file union paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board, according to the Associated Press. The matter was scheduled to be taken up at a 10 a.m. hearing Tuesday, but the company informed workers of the closure in a 7:30 a.m. email, according to emails shared with The Washington Post by Jeff Young, an attorney representing the workers.
Young accused the company of illegally retaliating against workers who sought to organize. The union has field an unfair labor practice charge over the issue.
“I call it union-busting 101,” Young said in an email. “This clearly was a signal to [workers] that if you organize you could lose your job.”
Chipotle’s chief corporate affairs officer, Laurie Schalow, cited staffing challenges for the decision. The company went to “extraordinary lengths” to staff the restaurant, which has been closed since June 17, by dedicating two recruiting experts to the location, she said in an emailed statement.
Staffers will receive four weeks of severance pay, according to an email to staff obtained by The Washington Post.
The AFL-CIO, which has been advising the independent Chipotle union on an informal basis, issued a news release proclaiming “shame on Chipotle” for closing the store, noting that a rally had been planned for Tuesday afternoon.
In the release, Chipotle worker Brandi McNease accused the company of trying to “bully, harass and intimidate” workers to stifle their voices and attempts to organize. She said the company is scared of workers’ power, citing organizing efforts that successfully organized dozens of Starbucks locations.
“We are fighting this decision and we are building a movement to transform the fast food industry and ensure the workers who create all the wealth for these corporations are respected and no longer have to struggle to support their families,” McNease said. | 2022-07-20T15:56:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chipotle closes Maine store that sought to unionize - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/20/chipotle-union-maine-store-closure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/20/chipotle-union-maine-store-closure/ |
Turkish strike kills at least 9 Iraqi tourists in northern resort
Medics transport the body of a victim following Turkish shelling in the city of Zakhu in the north of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region on July 20. (Ismael Adnan/AFP/Getty Images)
BAGHDAD — At least nine Iraqis were killed Wednesday in the country’s northern Kurdistan region after Turkish artillery strikes hit a crowded tourist resort, officials said.
Videos from the scene of the attack showed a summertime idyll destroyed. Shortly before the strike, families had been gathered by a pool of clear water, taking a dip or resting in the shade of the trees.
Turkey has been conducting military operations against Kurdish separatists from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Iraq’s northern mountains for years, with neither side offering a clear picture of the consequences, but civilian casualties on this scale are believed to be rare.
Who are the Kurds, and why is Turkey attacking them?
Wednesday’s strike on the Barakh resort area of Zakhu came as thousands of Iraqis took refuge from the summer heat in Kurdistan’s mountains. Many of the dead and wounded were from the country’s federal region, where temperatures reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50C) this week.
In an interview broadcast by the Kurdish Rudaw television network, an eyewitness visiting from the capital, Baghdad, said that tendrils of smoke had been visible further up the mountain from the window of his tourist bus as he arrived to Barakh.
“We asked our tour guide, but they said it was normal,” he said. About 15 minutes later, between four and five strikes landed amid the gathered families, he said. A young boy’s hand was severed. An old man lost two daughters. In addition to the nine dead, at least 22 people were wounded.
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Turkey, where millions of Kurds live in the southeastern part of the country bordering Iraq and Syria, has spent decades fighting a low-level war with the PKK, killing tens of thousands.
Turkey’s Ministry of National Defense did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the alleged Turkish strike in Iraq. On Wednesday evening, the ministry’s Twitter account posted a message saying that “as a result of our determined operations, PKK terrorists continue to surrender, ” adding that two PKK members had surrendered at a border post that connects Duhok province in Iraq with Turkey.
Ankara has pressed Baghdad to uproot the PKK from Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Iraq, in turn, has described Turkish attacks as in breach of its sovereignty.
The Turkish ministry’s message, posted shortly before 6 p.m. local time Wednesday, did not mention civilian casualties from a strike.
Dulsher Abdulsattar, an official from the Zakhu region, said that the area had been shelled seven times in three months, but never near any gatherings of civilians.
“People are terrified, they came for tourism but they were bombed instead,” he said, reached by phone in a hospital as doctors treated the casualties. “Are there PKK in the mountains? Of course. But here they bombed a tourist area.” | 2022-07-20T16:01:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Turkish strike on Zakhu northern Iraq kills 9 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/20/iraq-turkey-strike-tourists/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/20/iraq-turkey-strike-tourists/ |
(Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Estate of Kay Sage/Artists Rights Society (ARS))
The immaculately enigmatic “Quote-Unquote,” at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, is one of the painter’s final works.
In Europe you learn that there is no such thing as innocence (“Nothing so often betrayed could retain a shred of illusion,” wrote James Salter of Rome.) Confusingly, you may also fall in love.
That, anyway, is what happened to Kay Sage.
“Quote-Unquote,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., is one of the last paintings she made. Set in a gray no man’s land, made oppressive by distant haze, it has the austere beauty of an oracular riddle.
It shows … Well, what does it show? A kind of improvised screen made from panels set between tall posts. The structure resembles scaffolding and rises from a floor paved with gray slabs. Some of the panels are as flat and opaque as the slate-colored floor; others ripple with subtly colored fabrics. Over on the right, an obscured walkway leads back toward nothing (nothing visible, anyway).
It’s all intentionally enigmatic. But also terrifyingly vacant. To her great credit, Sage resisted the silliness to which her fellow surrealists succumbed. She had too much taste to populate her ashen landscapes with biomorphic blobs, phallic formations or mythical creatures. Her taste was connected (as good taste often is) to a form of existential dread. And dread is what her painting almost casually communicates.
Born in Albany, N.Y., in 1898, Sage turned 20 the year World War I ended. After studying art in Washington, she decided to continue her studies in Rome. In a letter to a friend, Sage innocently enthused from Europe that she had spent her life looking for “someone who was just as mad as I was, who could understand my fantastic imaginings.” And at last, she announced, she had found him: In 1925 (the year Benito Mussolini became Italy’s dictator) she married a minor aristocrat — a prince, no less — named Ranieri di San Faustino.
Alas, Sage parted ways with the prince 10 years later. She moved to Paris in 1937, where entered the surrealist circle of Andre Breton. She painted in a style influenced by the haunted vacancy and broken symbolism of Giorgio de Chirico and by the grotesque dreamscapes of Yves Tanguy. Tanguy, who had previously been Peggy Guggenheim’s lover, saw her work. They fell in love. And as Europe descended into madness, the couple escaped to New York, where in 1940 they married.
They moved to Woodbury, Conn., the following year. In summer, Woodbury is bewitchingly green. So it’s safe to say that the desert-like mirages Sage depicted in her paintings were not inspired by the local landscape. They come from somewhere deeper — somewhere silent and death-haunted.
“Innocence ends,” wrote Joan Didion, “when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.” Whether Sage had ceased to like herself, it’s safe to say that by the late 1950s, she no longer believed in innocence. Or in Europe.
She had once been an innocent abroad (in Mark Twain’s phrase), an American who had fallen in love first with an Italian prince and then a French surrealist. Europe had proceeded to implode. Sage made “Quote-Unquote” three years after Tanguy died, at 55, of a stroke. His disappearance from her life plunged her into a melancholy made worse by the fact that her eyesight was failing.
Soon after finishing “Quote-Unquote,” in her 60th year, she realized she could paint no more. Instead, she made collages and wrote poetry (she published four volumes between 1957 and 1962), all while undergoing a series of eye operations. And in 1963 — that seemingly innocent year when the Beatles released “Love Me Do,” “All My Loving” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” — she shot herself in the heart.
Quote-Unquote, 1958
Kay Sage (b.1898). At Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. | 2022-07-20T16:01:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Perspective | Kay Sage found love in Europe. So why does death haunt her paintings? - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/kay-sage-quote-unquote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/kay-sage-quote-unquote/ |
When President Joe Biden visits the decommissioned coal-fired Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, on Wednesday afternoon to lay out his planned executive actions on climate, his allies will be looking for bold initiatives. As Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley put it to the Washington Post, the impasse in the Senate created by Senator Joe Manchin’s blocking of his environmental agenda “unchains the president from waiting for Congress to act.”
President Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal for CO2 emissions, which failed to pass the Senate in 2010 (and which then-Senate candidate Manchin also disliked) aimed at a similar target: It put a ceiling on overall carbon pollution and created a market for businesses to trade permits to emit CO2, setting a price which would rise as the number of permits was reduced to zero over time.
Increasing the price of gas is not the same as increasing the price of the CO2 it releases into the atmosphere when burnt, but it’s close enough. The beauty of this moment for the president is that he wouldn’t have to deploy any political capital for this to happen. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine already did the trick — sending the average retail price of gasoline above $5 a gallon in early June. All Biden must do is keep it from falling back.
The climate would thank him.
Cutting back on driving is not easy. People must get to work and school. Not everybody can switch to public transit or buy a Tesla. Still, economists at the Dallas Fed have estimated that the price elasticity of gasoline demand in the short run is around negative 0.37. So a 43% price hike, from $3.5 to $5 a gallon, would cut gas consumption by about 16%.
The savings over an entire year would amount to 21.6 billion gallons of gas. Since burning one gallon emits about 8.1 kilograms of CO2, such a reduction would prevent about 175 million tons of the stuff getting into the air, alongside a bunch of other noxious fumes.
These numbers are rough approximations. Other things happening in the economy can confound the measurement of price elasticities. They change over time. Short-term price increases may have a smaller effect than increases sustained over time, which would encourage the driver of the F-150 to swap into the “Lightning” model that runs on electricity. On the other hand, rising wages would make consumers less and less sensitive to a one-time gas price hike.While consistently high gas prices would encourage more drilling over the long term — not quite the desired outcome from a climate change perspective — imposing a tax to boost the retail price at the pump would eat into consumer demand without incentivizing further supply. Economists Gilbert Metcalf from Tufts and Jason Bordoff from Columbia proposed a tax along these lines in 2007 to stabilize the price of oil. Today, Metcalf argues, “rather than a price-cap on Russian oil, let’s put a $50 tax on it.” Russia would suffer lower revenues, and oil prices would not fall.
To get at this, economists came up with the “Social Cost of Carbon:” the cost that an additional ton of carbon lingering in the atmosphere will impose on the world from here on into forever. They would argue that firms and households should pay exactly this amount — as a fee, a tax or whatever — to cover the damages caused by the additional carbon that, through their day to day activities, they emit into the air.
This social cost is hard to calculate. One must figure out how much the world is warmed by an extra ton of CO2, work out how warming will change the environment and what those changes will cost in terms of flooded homes, declining agricultural yields, pandemics, shrinking life expectancies, dead species and so forth. Then a dollar value must be put on those changes. Critically, one must agree on a discount rate to determine how much is justified to be spent today to prevent damages 50 or 100 years in the future.
It turns out that pushing the price of gas to $5 a gallon may land on the higher end of this debate, but it is very much within bounds. If you think of it as $3.50 plus a $1.50 “Russian invasion penalty,” the penalty works out to just under $200 per ton of CO2 (since burning a gallon of gas releases some 8.1 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere, raising its price by $1.50 per gallon amounts to adding a $200 penalty on each ton of CO2 emitted from burning it).
That is substantially higher than the Obama administration’s central estimate of the social cost of carbon of about $60 per ton of CO2 emitted in 2022, (in 2022 dollars). But subsequent research has suggested that estimate represents a lower bound.
For instance, the Obama administration’s high-risk scenario raised the cost to $180 per ton of CO2. And even that may be low. Notably, it assumes a discount rate of 3%, drawn from the average rate on 10-year Treasury bonds from the 1960s through the early 2000s.
But rates were much lower in the subsequent two decades. And a lower rate would imply a higher present cost. ($1,000 in 100 years is the equivalent of $52 today at a 3% rate but $138 at 2%.)
What can President Biden, deploying his executive powers — especially if he subsequently declares a national emergency on climate — do with all this?
Keeping gas at $5 by presidential fiat is probably more difficult than I imagine. It is not unheard of, however, for governments to impose minimum prices. Consider, for instance, the minimum wage. The European Union for years imposed minimum support prices for farm products, in order to protect farmers incomes. Figuring out the mechanics is beyond my skills. But perhaps there is a method whereby any drop in price automatically triggers an increase in the gas tax, such that the average price to the consumer remains at $5. Maybe he can calibrate it to $4.50, instead.
To counter the inevitable pushback, the president could take an idea put forth by Senators Maria Cantwell from Washington and Susan Collins from Maine during the debate over Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal more than a decade ago: Use the tax revenue to fund rebates for taxpayers. The rebate could be tilted to benefit lower-income Americans, those most hurt by expensive energy, without encouraging them to drive more.
Will the president do anything like this? Given his immediate political prospects, most probably not. Indeed, he has been spending his political and strategic capital (a trip to Saudi Arabia comes to mind) on trying to bring down the price of gasoline. All of which makes one wonder what to make of a president who invokes a climate emergency yet fails to understand climate change.
(Updates with comment from economist Gilbert Metcalf on higher prices’ potential impact on supply in 11th paragraph.) | 2022-07-20T16:01:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Earth Wants Biden to Keep Gas Prices High - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-earth-wants-biden-to-keep-gas-prices-high/2022/07/20/d87bed74-083e-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-earth-wants-biden-to-keep-gas-prices-high/2022/07/20/d87bed74-083e-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Analysis by Teresa Ghilarducci | Bloomberg
Most people budget not for true emergencies — which are, thankfully, rare — but for what we might call predictable surprises. For example, there is no such thing as emergency vehicle or home repair. All cars and homes will require repairs and maintenance, even if you don’t know when. For true car or home emergencies, there’s insurance.
Saving for retirement in America is so difficult in part because the surprises are so unpredictable — not to mention unpleasant: inflation, outliving your money, going to a nursing home. And our insurance — Social Security — is inadequate. The impossible task of retirement planning reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon I cut out and saved for so long it’s turned yellow: One member of a couple looks up triumphantly from a kitchen table covered in papers and says, “If we take a late retirement and an early death, we’ll just squeak by.”
Social Security ought to be a nearly perfect way to manage retirement uncertainty: Social Security pays a benefit no matter how long you live and is adjusted for inflation. But it’s too small to live on, so we must have other sources of income.
Only a few Americans who are very rich or who live on traditional defined-benefit pensions don’t fear running out of money. My mother, for example, lived on less than $25,000 per year. She was so worried about money she avoided visiting her friends. When she died suddenly at age 84, she had plenty left. Seeing all the money she saved for emergencies made me sad.
But of course, none of us know when our time will be up. Retirement planning requires playing the longevity guessing game. Compared with actuarial life tables, males tend to overestimate, and women underestimate, their life expectancy. To more accurately predict the unknowable, you can look at U.S. Vital Statistics: In 2019, a 65-year-old White woman could expect to live an additional 21 years; her Black male counterpart another 17 years. Life expectancy calculations by socioeconomic class are more complicated, but the Brookings Institution provides one of the best. According to them, women born in 1940 in the top 10% of household earnings who lived to age 50 were expected to live another 28.5 years. Women in the bottom 10% who lived to age 50 were expected to live only another 22.2 years. Rich people have more of everything, including life span.
All this uncertainty makes planning for retirement harder. Consider: Someone making average earnings, about $70,000 per year, at 65, needs $750,000 to supplement Social Security to maintain living standards for 25 years. Assuming a life expectancy of 85, not 90, reduces the number to $650,000. That’s a big difference!
You can plan perfectly and still be surprised. I knew one couple, married for 40 years, who worked good professional jobs longer than they had to so they’d be sure they’d have enough. Two months after they left their cold Northern city to spend their golden years in the sunny Southwest, the wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before her diagnosis, longevity tables predicted she would live another 20 years. Instead, she died three years later. They’d followed expert advice to a T. An early death was possible, just not probable or predictable.
What about saving for a nursing home? This is an area where most of us worry more than we should. Only about one-third of Americans currently between the ages of 57 and 61 will spend any money on nursing home care at any point in their lives — and for 43% of people, private or public insurance will pay everything. Only 5% of us will fund long nursing home stays, costing $47,000 or more. (Commercial long-term care insurance is a bad bet for most people.)
Many people are able to save for life’s unpleasant surprises because they’re predictable. With retirement planning, the only thing that’s predictable is that it will be expensive. For decades, personal finance experts have nagged and shamed Americans to save more, but the average retirement account balance of 65-year-olds is just $225,000. About half of people have saved nothing at all. The vast majority of retirees do not have enough, no matter how long they live. We need universal retirement savings accounts, low-cost and inflation-indexed annuities, a strong Social Security system, and Medicare that pays for long-term care.
Because of the do-it-yourself nature of retirement saving, too many people outlive their savings or hoard money they should be spending — and everyone has too much anxiety. To plan correctly in this system, you need to know unknowable things. The US needs better systems to help people cope.
Note: Email me with a financial surprise you’re concerned about, and I’ll write some advice about how to plan around it.
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Teresa Ghilarducci is the Schwartz Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. She’s the co-author of “Rescuing Retirement” and a member of the board of directors of the Economic Policy Institute. | 2022-07-20T16:01:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Retirement Expenses Are Too Hard to Predict - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/retirement-expenses-are-too-hard-to-predict/2022/07/20/d95c9946-083e-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/retirement-expenses-are-too-hard-to-predict/2022/07/20/d95c9946-083e-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
The European Central Bank is trying to prevent a sovereign-debt storm with the promise of a new tool to curb market stress as it raises interest rates for the first time in a decade. The effort gained urgency after the yield on 10-year Italian bonds breached 4% in June, the highest since 2014. Investors see the renewed push to tackle so-called fragmentation as evidence that policy makers are fighting to prevent borrowing costs of euro nations from diverging excessively. That’s a dynamic that threatened to rip the euro zone apart during a crisis a decade ago.
The term refers to a jump in borrowing costs for weaker euro-zone countries relative to stronger ones. While the currency bloc’s 19 economies differ by metrics like inflation, economic growth and debt, policy makers say some market moves don’t reflect these fundamentals and are too rapid. The states with the highest ratios of debt to gross domestic product -- notably Greece and Italy -- had some of the highest bond yields among major nations in June. What’s more, the difference in yield, or spread, above Germany, the continent’s benchmark, had widened. Making matters worse is a government crisis in Italy, which could test the ECB’s resolve.
While euro members share a common currency, they implement their own tax and spending policies, leading to divergences that can swell over time even with European Union limits on budget deficits. That’s a unique challenge for the ECB, which joined its peers around the world in buying government bonds to support a recovery after the 2008 global financial crisis. The EU’s founding treaties prohibit the ECB from financing member governments, and broad buying of bonds tests that idea. Germany’s Bundesbank, the central bank that provided the blueprint for the ECB, has historically spoken out about the dangers of such moves. Its president, Joachim Nagel, warned in early July that the use of a new instrument must be limited to “exceptional circumstances,” and that governments will still need incentives to reduce their debt. | 2022-07-20T16:01:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Europe Needs New Tools for Bond ‘Fragmentation’: QuickTake - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-europe-needs-new-tools-for-bond-fragmentation-quicktake/2022/07/19/747694be-0771-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-europe-needs-new-tools-for-bond-fragmentation-quicktake/2022/07/19/747694be-0771-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
A Daily Harvest delivery in Lafayette, Calif., in 2021. (Gado/Getty Images)
Vegan frozen-food delivery service Daily Harvest has identified the ingredient in its French lentil and leek crumble that sickened consumers, leading the company to recall the product last month. Tara flour, which comes from a seed typically grown in Peru and is used as a protein source and thickening agent, is the culprit, the company said in a note to customers on Tuesday.
“Our investigation team will continue working with the FDA, the tara flour producer and others to help determine what specifically made people sick,” the company said, adding that it does not use the ingredient in any other products. Daily Harvest said it has determined that the problems are isolated to the lentil and leek crumble, and that its supply chain and manufacturing processes are safe.
Last month, the company — a celebrity-backed brand that markets itself as being better for consumers and the environment — issued a recall of the crumbles in response to complaints from customers who said they had experienced stomach, liver and gallbladder issues after eating it. It said it had enlisted the Food and Drug Administration as well as “microbiologists, toxin and pathogen experts as well as allergists” to detect problems.
Amid recall and illness claims, Daily Harvest meal service enlists FDA
The FDA on July 14 said its investigation into the problems was ongoing, and said that it had so far received 277 reports of illness related to the crumbles. It urged anyone who had purchased the product to throw it away and anyone who consumed it to be on the lookout for symptoms “including yellowing of the skin and eyes (jaundice), dark urine, itching with no rash, gastrointestinal illness, nausea, fatigue, body aches, severe abdominal pain and/or fever.”
Daily Harvest said on June 24 in a message to customers that it had received about 470 reports of illness or adverse reactions to the crumbles and that the company distributed 28,000 units of them through online and retail sales, as well as some given to customers.
Daily Harvest is already facing lawsuits and public scrutiny over the product. A woman in Tulsa is suing the company after being hospitalized twice, diagnosed with “liver and gallbladder dysfunction” and ultimately having her gallbladder removed. Her attorney, food-safety lawyer Bill Marler, says he represents 230 people sickened by the product and that his firm is conducting its own investigation into the product.
A representative for Daily Harvest did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the litigation or the investigation. | 2022-07-20T16:02:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Daily Harvest identifies ingredient that led to customer sickness and recall - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/07/20/daily-harvest-flour-recall/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/07/20/daily-harvest-flour-recall/ |
Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram is a generational talent — and the ideal bridge between different factions of the blues world
By Carlo Rotella
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram along the Ohio River in Ashland, Ky. (Jay Westcott for The Washington Post)
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram was wailing on guitar. Eyes shut and head thrown back in the emblematic pose of the guitar hero in ecstasy, he wrung screaming bent high notes and dense, fluid runs from his purple-and-black prototype Kingfish-model Fender. Just seconds into “She Calls Me Kingfish,” the opening song of his set at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston in March, fans were already well on their way up the stairway to guitar-solo heaven, nodding and smiling and shaking their heads in that mmh-mmh-mmm way that guitar freaks fall into when potent stuff starts flowing into their systems through their ears. The Berklee College of Music houses one of the planet’s greatest concentrations of high-end guitar freaks, and they were out in force to hear the 23-year-old phenom from the Mississippi Delta widely hailed as “the future of the blues.” The students in attendance made for a considerably younger turnout than a blues show typically draws. Out in the lobby before the show, I had overheard one long-haired dude saying to a fellow cool-nerd, “He’s, like, my age. It’s nuts.”
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Kingfish, who wore faded jeans with colorful patches, a black jacket over a red Big Mad T-shirt, and untied buff-colored work boots, has a round, open face and a disarming stage presence, modest and earnest. The visible pleasure he takes in making music for a living offsets a deep substrate of melancholy, a quality of hurt, in that music. Though guitar heroism often feels cold and self-regarding, obsessed with its own intent to blow you away, Kingfish’s command of tone, touch and phrasing comes across as not just confident but also confiding. Humane emotion suffuses his playing even at its most musically acrobatic, and he’s almost always telling you a story derived from the song’s lyrics, his own love affair with music, the trials and joys of his young life.
Kingfish is not tall, but he’s big, and just a couple of years ago he was even bigger — at least 440 pounds — to the point that it was easy to fear for his well-being when he walked onstage. Hanging by a strap from his shoulder, his guitar looks like a toy. He favors physically heavy guitars and the warm sound of humbucker pickups, but the gear doesn’t matter nearly as much as his pillowy hands, mesmerizingly nimble and strong, which seem to engulf the instrument as they extract an astonishing sound from it.
He showed versatility as the set went on, working in jazzy chromatic flourishes and switching for a couple of songs to Delta-style acoustic guitar, but the crowd went wildest whenever he built to a climax of blues-rock wailing. This happened a dozen or more times over the course of the evening, a recurring sequence that began with him playing straight-up blues, churning out a shuffle groove or picking out sweet single-note licks — his own volume down low, the band on simmer. Then, as the band swelled to full strength behind him, he would step on a pedal and chuck the damped strings with his pick to make a preparatory shooka sound, as if chambering a sonic round, and cut loose at high volume with a barrage of distorted bent notes way up high and spectacular runs up and down the neck. After an extended paroxysm on a cover of Michael Burks’s “Empty Promises,” which at some point stopped being a song and became just an excuse to throw down chorus after chorus of guitar solo while he walked into the crowd and took a seat among them, Kingfish returned to the stage and said, “I’d like to apologize for the flurry of notes on that last one.” This drew a laugh from the audience, most of whom were there for the flurry of notes.
There’s no shortage of guitar hotshots who can blaze in blues-rock fashion. Go to a jam in Boston or Chiang Mai or Sarajevo, call for “Sweet Home Chicago,” and chances are good that somebody can step up and let it rip in blues-rock style: the dramatic high bends, the soaring and plunging runs, the nasty rhythmic figures crunchingly repeated until you give in and go “Whoo!” That style of playing has a specific history, beginning with electric blues virtuosos like Buddy Guy and Albert King and B.B. King, then the classic-rock guitar heroes like Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton who idolized them, then inheritors from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Prince. But at this point it’s practically a human universal.
So why is Kingfish — who has been described by Guy as “the next explosion of the blues” and by Rolling Stone as “one of the most exciting young guitarists in years,” and who appeared simultaneously on the covers of both Guitar World and Downbeat in February 2021 — such a big deal? Why is he already taking on the role of a generational blues talent who will accept the torch from his elders and represent the genre in the mainstream — the anointed ambassador of the blues who, like B.B. King before him, will be showing up everywhere from the White House to “Sesame Street” for decades to come?
First, he’s a bluesman in full, not just another amazing guitar player who can sing a little. He has a deep, soulful voice, a powerful instrument in its own right, which these days he’s working hard to make as limber and expressive as his guitar playing. “I didn’t really work on my singing enough before,” he told me backstage before the show at Berklee. “It was always playing, practicing” — he played air guitar to illustrate — “and I just sang, like, however it came out. But now I’m to the point where I’m concentrating on my voice: increase my range, stay hydrated, do vocal exercises.” He knows that if he’s going to end up as more than just another guitar hero it will be largely on the strength of his singing. He’s also coming along as a songwriter, with a growing feel for overlaying moves borrowed from soul, gospel and other genres onto sure-footed blues grinds.
And, second, as a young Black bluesman from the Mississippi Delta, cradle of the most myth-encrusted and generative blues style, Kingfish is an ideal standard-bearer for the tradition. He can tear it up on guitar in ways that thrill those whose ears were trained by Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top, and yet he has the range to speak to those more inclined to acoustic blues on the order of Son House, gospel a la Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the soul blues of Tyrone Davis, the classic soul of the Isleys, or the lush ballads of Luther Vandross. Because he’s the one getting invited to play on “CBS Saturday Morning” and open for the Rolling Stones, Kingfish makes a point of using his growing celebrity to get other members of his generation of Black blues musicians onstage with him in venues they might not otherwise have a chance to play.
All of this suggests that Kingfish, whose second album, “662,” came out last year, can perhaps become a bridge between blues-rock and the rest of the tradition. And there’s need for such a bridge, because for decades blues-rock has hogged center stage and shoved the rest of the blues to the margins. There are plenty of other styles of blues guitar — Delta, fingerstyle, ragtime, jazz and soul subvariants — and blues doesn’t have to involve a guitar at all, but guitar-based blues-rock has achieved outsize market and aesthetic dominance because it’s favored by the sizable proportion of the blues industry’s paying audience and gatekeepers recruited since the 1960s by classic rock. Rock-trained blues enthusiasts may earnestly want to “keep the blues alive,” an often-repeated preservationist sentiment, but at the same time they’re loving the blues to death by contributing to the guitar’s eclipse of the singer’s voice that has given the genre much of its storytelling power, emotional depth and social insight.
Many of Kingfish’s most ardent admirers love to hear him wail, and he’s great at it. If it makes them and him feel good, satisfies the base and gets him reelected, why not wail all the time? Because this highly specific kind of virtuosity can also become a velvet-lined trap, an ornate dead end that Kingfish is too young and artistically ambitious to accept as the destination toward which he and the blues are heading.
Christone Ingram grew up in Clarksdale, Miss. He told me that his mother, Princess Pride, “listened to the Spinners, the Manhattans, Albert King — she loved Albert King. She was into Bon Jovi and Chicago and Luther Vandross, the Isleys, definitely, and funky gospel groups like the Sensational Skylarks and the Supreme Angels.” She was a cousin of Charley Pride, the country star from the Delta, and there were gospel musicians on her side of the family. Her church, St. Peter Missionary Baptist in Sardis, Miss., provided an early musical crucible for Christone as a singer. Learning to sing in Southern Black church style, which features extensive practice in holding and bending notes with both passion and control, is optimal training for a blues singer. “Church music has always been a big part of my music, part of the flavor of what I do,” he said. “I still take quartet gospel licks and put them on my songs.” His father, Christopher Ingram, also helped build his son’s awareness of both the blues and the cultural reach of Delta musicians by showing him a PBS documentary on Muddy Waters and the “Sanford and Son” episode in which B.B. King appeared.
At the age of 8, Christone found his way to the Delta Blues Museum, a Clarksdale institution dedicated to preserving the local blues tradition that lies at the root of so much rock, pop, R&B, soul and other music, especially via its direct influence on the electric blues that migrants from the Delta like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf created in Chicago. Around the same time, his parents divorced. He told me, “I was dealing with people talking about my parents, and my mother and I had some hard times,” including a brief period of homelessness, “and being at the museum helped me with s---.” His instructors there included Richard “Daddy Rich” Crisman, Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, Lucious Spiller and Bill “Howl-N-Madd” Perry, who nicknamed the boy Kingfish after a character on “The Amos ’n Andy Show.” The name stuck despite the fact that the near-guileless Christone did not remotely resemble the ever-scheming operator on the 1950s TV show. Even more than home and church, the museum was the decisive container into which he poured his music-making impulses. “They weren’t the most technical guys, but they pushed me to play and sing,” he said, “and they taught me the history of the city, the music going back to Big Jack Johnson, the Jelly Roll Kings.”
Kingfish, who had started at the age of 5 as a drummer, wanted to play another instrument but worried that his hands were too big for the guitar, so he took up the bass. He made rapid progress, becoming known around Clarksdale as a reliable gig player when he was still in middle school, but he grew restless with being a sideman-in-training. When he turned to guitar at the age of 12, he proved to be a phenomenally quick study, gaining a reputation in his teens as a blues prodigy. “As time went on and videos got viral,” he said, his peers at school “were like ‘Hey, that’s Kingfish!’ It’s not like I was a rapper or anything, but they were intrigued by the blues part. They saw it as a little weird I was playing grown-up music, so I would be telling them about how it was part of our heritage.”
His mother stepped into the managerial role, booking church and juke joint gigs, calling news outlets. “She would drive us to gigs, she got me on ‘Rachael Ray,’ ‘The Steve Harvey Show,’ ” he said. (His appearance on Harvey’s show featured a health intervention in which a terrifyingly serene motivational expert exhorted him to commit to a weight-loss program.) Princess Pride was a fierce advocate, and the bond between son and mother, who died in 2019 at the age of 49 after an illness, was exceptionally strong. “There was times when she played bodyguard,” he said. “She would go Mama Bear on a club owner or a booker. People in the blues world knew Princess don’t play about Kingfish.”
Kingfish experiences colors when he hears or plays music, a variety of associative synesthesia — when the stimulation of one sense involuntarily inspires a strong feeling related to another sense — known as chromesthesia. An E minor chord may have a “darkish blue” feel for him, “or a major chord might be yellow.” Because of this, his mother accepted as medical fact the suggestion made by a doctor that Christone might have Asperger’s syndrome, which is no longer officially recognized as a diagnosis separate from autism. She regarded Asperger’s as “more positive than negative” in his case because she believed it gave him a special gift for music, and she talked about it freely. As a result, it has been widely reported that he’s on the autism spectrum. When I asked him about it, he said, “No, there was never, like, an official diagnosis from a doctor, but I don’t make a big deal out of it. I can say that’s what opened doors for me to work with organizations for musicians who have special needs, like United by Music North America, to be a mentor.”
When Kingfish first gained fame, his youth and size tended to lower the expectations and win the sympathies of audiences, who would then be floored by his fast, flashy guitar chops. YouTube videos and competition shows like “America’s Got Talent” have turned this species of musical spectacle into a melodramatic trope, rewarding the sort of showing off that causes jaws to drop. Bruce Iglauer, founder and head of Alligator Records, the premier blues label that has put out Kingfish’s two records, says he first saw Kingfish play “when he was probably 14 or 15, on a small stage at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas. I could tell he had talent, but he was playing lots and lots of notes, very busy, and he was playing standards.” While Kingfish had potential as a singer and songwriter, he was developing much faster as a guitar player. Down that path lay a fate as just another guy who could wail on endless choruses of “The Thrill Is Gone.”
But even as a rising guitar whiz, Kingfish knew that singing is the key to being a bluesman. When I asked about the deep urge that drove him to practice long hours and get up in front of people to perform, the inchoate impulse that had to develop and take defined shape for him to become a virtuoso, he said, “I just wanted to be able to do the call and response with the guitar and my voice.” That’s a very Clarksdale version of an inchoate impulse — actually, an already-pretty-choate one — because it describes the crucial dynamic at the center of the blues tradition. Despite the best efforts of rock-influenced guitar heroes to drown out singers, in its essence the blues still takes form around the storytelling human voice raised in song. That’s the genre’s ground line, to which all the other instruments should respond. “For blues you have to have that voice,” Kingfish told me, “so I had to learn how to project, put dynamics in my words,” an effort to make his singing more melodic and less monotonic that continues to this day.
Over the past couple of years Kingfish has absorbed lessons from a copy of “Music Theory for Dummies,” and you can hear it in his playing.
In our conversations, Kingfish cited a dizzying range of influences extending well beyond the blues. As a teenager, in addition to copping licks on YouTube from classic blues players, he studied not only a century’s worth of blues singers but also soul singers like Patti LaBelle, Erykah Badu and the plus-size quiet-storm love god Barry White. “I love heavy vibrato, low, shaky vibrato,” he said. At the same time, as was almost inevitable for a guitar freak, he was exploring the vast cosmic realm of rock guitar, expanding his range of influences to include Hendrix, Ernie Isley, Gary Moore, Prince, Bad Brains, Fishbone, Vernon Reid, Eddie Van Halen and the profoundly unbluesy Swedish metallurge Yngwie Malmsteen. Later he got into the neo-soul jazz pianist Robert Glasper, the gospel guitar sensei Kevin Wilson and Thundercat, the Los Angeles session bassist who used to be in the punk band Suicidal Tendencies. Kingfish also listens to a lot of hip-hop, which he calls “the grandchild of the blues.”
His open-eared curiosity had good effects. Iglauer says that when he saw Kingfish perform again a few years later at the Chicago Blues Festival, in 2018, “I was immediately struck by the maturity of his music. He was still a teenager, but he knew how to sing the story and how to tell the story and touch people with his soloing, and he was starting to play his own songs.” Most important, Iglauer concluded, “You could tell that he knows what the important notes are. Occasionally he’d shred, but he was already choosing not to. He knows that the music isn’t just exciting and technically impressive, that the goal of this music is to communicate to the soul. When I closed my eyes, I heard an old soul.”
On April 2, a few days after he played at Berklee and the day before he would fly to Las Vegas to pick up the best contemporary blues album Grammy Award for “662,” Kingfish opened for Buddy Guy at Capital One Hall in Tysons, Va. Kingfish is already used to headlining, but on this night he ceded primacy to Guy, then 85, the reigning grandmaster of electric blues. Copied by the rock guitar heroes of the British Invasion and venerated by their acolytes, Guy is not only one of the last surviving blues virtuosos of his generation, he’s just about the last surviving major figure on the blues side of the aisle in the marriage of blues and rock. The credentials listed on the back of a T-shirt worn by Guy’s guitar tech as he prepared the great man’s hallowed axes backstage summed up Guy’s status: “8 Time Grammy Winner; Lifetime Achievement Award Winner; Kennedy Center Award Winner; Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer; Blues Legend.”
Guy, who in recent years has become active in mentoring young blues talent, played a pivotal role in advancing Kingfish’s career. Taking notice of the teenage Kingfish when they crossed paths at a blues festival, Guy asked Tom Hambridge, the prolific Nashville-based songwriter and producer who plays drums in Guy’s band, to make sure the young bluesman got into the studio to record. “Write the songs with him, get him in the studio, get musicians, I’ll pay for it,” Guy told Hambridge. The result was Kingfish’s eponymous first album, which won blues awards, was nominated for a Grammy and established him at the tender age of 20 as the next big thing in the blues.
At Capital One Hall, the crowd was dominated by silver-haired boomers, par for the course on the blues concert circuit. After Kingfish played an abbreviated set, Guy took the stage and deployed himself well forward of his band. He didn’t really play with them; rather, they comped along dutifully behind him while he played a lot of fearsomely noisy guitar: jagged licks, crackling thickets of staticky chording, atonal bonks and roars, all of it couched in his distinctively angular and slightly-out-of-time guitar diction. He doesn’t so much play a song as take it apart. He sings maybe a verse and the chorus, enough so that the crowd reacts and starts getting into it, but then he starts messing around with the song, breaking it down and reducing it to a frame to solo and talk over before cutting it off and moving to the next one.
Guy’s set, which mostly consisted of a medley of slow blues tunes and another of up-tempo shuffles, wasn’t all that different from those I heard him play back in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the Checkerboard Lounge, the blues club he used to own on 43rd Street on the South Side of Chicago. But the larger-than-life maestro at the top of his game I encountered back then is now an old man. Occasionally during his set he walked back to an amplifier, on top of which were a mug of hot tea from which he sipped to sustain his voice and a box of tissues he used to wipe his eyes.
While Guy was playing “She’s Nineteen Years Old,” a Muddy Waters tune, Kingfish took up a position off to the side of the stage, a bulky silhouette in the dark. Kingfish takes every opportunity he can to study Guy, who has been a professional bluesman since the 1950s. “Every time I see him play live I learn something new about singing, the dynamics, how he holds a crowd,” Kingfish had told me earlier. “There are certain noises he makes that cue the band, bring in the crowd, just control.” When I mentioned that for 40-plus years I’ve watched Guy execute the rousing shift from muted straight-blues licks down low to cranked-up distorted wailing up high, Kingfish nodded and said, “Oh, yeah, you build and tell a story” — a story that thrills crowds by restaging in capsule form the evolution of blues-rock.
He likes to listen to Guy talk about the old days, bad as well as good. “He’ll talk about what not to do, how to be smart about the business, how they would pay almost nothing for the work.” Kingfish also told me a parable about the relative importance of singing and guitar in the blues today in the form of a story about playing a tribute show for B.B. King with Guy: “They called us all up onstage, and I went up without my guitar. I thought there was enough guitar players up there already and I’d just sing. And Buddy was like, ‘Where’s your guitar? Your guitar is like your American Express card. Don’t leave home without it.’ ”
When Guy called for Kingfish to join him onstage at Capital One Hall, the younger man stepped from the wings with guitar in hand. Guy cued the band to kick off the loping groove of Albert King’s “Drowning on Dry Land,” over which he played some prickly, pointillistic guitar with his volume way down. Then he nodded to Kingfish, who crushed it in familiar fashion. Starting with muted classical blues licks akin to those Guy had just played, but flowingly lyrical in contrast to Guy’s abrupt squiggles of sound, Kingfish built to magisterial full-on wailing, muscular and agile, shot through with references to his mother’s old favorite Albert King as well as surprising tone colors and melodic threads that exploited the minor-blues chord changes of the song. Over the past couple of years Kingfish has taken advantage of the downtime from touring forced by the pandemic to absorb lessons from a copy of “Music Theory for Dummies,” and you can hear it in his playing.
“I want to do more things that showcase my voice. People come to hear shredding guitar, but I also want to do like Barry White, Luther Vandross.”
Guy let Kingfish go long on “Drowning on Dry Land,” and the younger man made clear to all that he can already more than hold his own with Guy as a guitar player. While these days Guy is often running through licks that he’s played 10,000 times before, you can hear Kingfish trying new things, reaching for more, his command of harmony and melody and style growing right there onstage from one chorus to the next. He takes chances in performance, but he’s so fast and precise and resourceful that he never seems to corner himself in a way he can’t elegantly escape. Kingfish has many more musical ideas than Guy, and he’s much more excited about those ideas.
But when Guy stepped to the mic to sing the song, a cautionary tale in which parents advise their son not to rush to be a man, it was also clear that he’s still by far the better blues singer. Though he’s primarily celebrated as a guitar hero, he habitually enlists an audience’s patience and sympathy by singing the hell out of a song before using his guitar to unravel it, and his voice is a wonder: mobile and strident and aggrieved, piercing in its upper registers, grainy and dark when he goes low. There’s a lot Kingfish can learn from Guy about how to be a bluesman.
After Guy finished singing he handed his guitar to an underling and started tossing picks into the first rows like a retiree feeding guitar-freak ducks. That left Kingfish to bring the song home with the band, cleanup duty that allowed him to soak up the end-of-show applause as if he were the true star of the evening. Guy’s gesture felt valedictory: That’s just about it from me; the kid will take it from here.
In 1957, when George “Buddy” Guy was 21 and living in Baton Rouge, there was an obvious move he could make to pursue his burning ambition to play the blues: go to Chicago. That’s where the action was hottest and densest, where he could find all manner of blues-shaped containers into which he could pour his urge: a booming community of fellow migrants from the South with shared musical habits and interests; collaborations with more-seasoned musicians like Muddy Waters and Junior Wells; local labels like Chess and Cobra; a score of clubs, packed with like-minded talent and discerning listeners, in which to hone his craft. In 2022, there’s no analogous well-trodden path of musical development stretching out before Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. He’s going to have to map his own journey, recruit his own models and mentors and peers from all over the place, assemble his own idiosyncratic assortment of containers as he goes along.
Part of that self-fashioning is the time-honored apprentice-work of absorbing lessons from blues elders like Guy. For instance, Kingfish wants to learn everything he can about songwriting and singing from the neotraditionalist Keb’ Mo’, who has won five Grammys himself. “On the song ‘Listen’ on my debut record, listen to Keb’ come in after me,” Kingfish said. “I’m staying on one note, and he’s [singing], ‘I can’t wait for Sunday’ ” — dropping stairstep-fashion in pitch from syllable to syllable. “That’s what I should be doing.”
When I talked to Keb’ Mo’ about the interest he’s taken in Kingfish, he said, “I just wanted to be there for his first album. I crashed the party, wasn’t even invited.” When I asked him if he worried that Kingfish might feel pressured to show off on guitar in ways that would inhibit his development as a bluesman, he said, “Nah, he’s a genius, and he’ll figure it out. He sings, he’s got perfect pitch, he’s got a big vocabulary of styles in his playing. He’s got the real gift of being born on the right dirt, the right amount of church, the right amount of souls around him. Some people you just don’t worry about.”
In questing for a way forward, Kingfish walks the line between figuring out what he wants to become and giving audiences what they want from him right now. “The blues purists will hate you if you play more blues-rock,” he told me, “but the blues-rock people might hate you if you do some smooth R&B.” He can’t please all of them all the time, and he’ll paralyze himself if he tries to.
Instead, he tries to be as musically promiscuous as he can. He has played with the veteran rapper Rakim, the fey rockers Vampire Weekend, the funk bass icon Bootsy Collins, the alt-rock Americana star Jason Isbell. He recently opened for the Rolling Stones in London, he’s made a guest appearance on the superhero show “Luke Cage” and voiced a bluesman character in the video game Red Dead Redemption, and he’s played the national anthem at a Memphis Grizzlies playoff game. He’s on the lookout for more opportunities to team with hip-hop artists, and he has also gone out of his way to make common cause with other Black blues musicians of his generation who don’t share his tendency to rock out, like Jontavious Willis and Marquise Knox. When I asked Willis about Kingfish, he said, “He’s a rocker, but he’s a sensitive rocker. He does everything well. He can play in more traditional styles, he can play soul stuff for a Black audience.”
When I asked Kingfish how he envisions his musical future, he said, “I just want to do more smoothness, you know, but with an unexpected edge,” making a gesture with his hands somewhere between an umpire calling a runner safe and a conductor calling for more from the violins. “I want to do more things that showcase my voice. People come to hear shredding guitar, but I also want to do like Barry White, Luther Vandross.”
One taste of what that might sound like is the recording of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” Kingfish made last year, which you can find on YouTube. The Fender guitar company put together the session, and he plays a lovely 1950s-vintage seafoam-green Stratocaster, but it’s a vocal showcase more than a guitar workout. Wearing a suit, fronting an understated rhythm section, he delivers an affectingly subdued take on the song, the rough edges of his Delta-style delivery smoothed by lounge and soul touches. Hawkins sang the song as a foaming monster who can’t accept the thwarting of his will, but Kingfish just seems sad that it’s not working out despite his best efforts. He takes an extended solo, but tasteful restraint prevails over the imperative to cut loose, producing a grown-up-sounding balance of tension and release that makes a refreshing change of pace from the orgy of release-and-more-release that blues-rock wailing can become. It may be Kingfish’s finest recorded performance as a singer to date.
When I consider his future, I come back to a moment during sound check before his show at the Berklee Performance Center. As he warmed up, he was talking to a luthier about his need for a versatile instrument that can shift between different kinds of sound. “I can do this s--- all day,” Kingfish said, stepping on a pedal and launching into a blizzard of cranked-up distorted high notes. “But I wanted something that can also be like …” and, stepping on the pedal again to restore a clean, clear sound, he went back to weaving a quieter mix of jazzy chords and supple little soul-inflected phrases — an enticing texture of smoothness with here and there an unexpected edge, just waiting for the Barry White of the 21st-century blues to sing over it.
Carlo Rotella is a professor of English, American studies and journalism at Boston College. His most recent book is “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. | 2022-07-20T16:02:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How a 23-Year-Old Phenom Named Kingfish Became the Future of the Blues - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/07/20/kingfish-blues-buddy-guy-guitar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/07/20/kingfish-blues-buddy-guy-guitar/ |
Soledad O’Brien, left, appears with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the Hearst Media Production Group-produced program “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien.” The program averages about 1.08 million viewers each weekend, roughly half the broadcast network panel shows like “Meet the Press” or “This Week” that it was designed to accompany, the Nielsen company said. (Hearst Television via AP) (Uncredited/Hearst Television) | 2022-07-20T16:02:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Soledad O'Brien show makes impression in off-hours time slot - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/soledad-obrien-show-makes-impression-in-off-hours-time-slot/2022/07/20/b5a8fc3a-0841-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/soledad-obrien-show-makes-impression-in-off-hours-time-slot/2022/07/20/b5a8fc3a-0841-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Schumer seeks enough GOP votes to pass same-sex marriage bill
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks with reporters on July 19, 2022. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that he is working to get sufficient Republican support for the Senate to pass a bill that would federally protect same-sex marriages.
Republican support for the measure, whose Senate sponsors include Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), appeared to be growing Wednesday, a day after the House passed a bill with the support of 47 Republicans.
“I was really impressed by how much bipartisan support it got in the House,” Schumer said from the Senate floor. “I want to bring this bill to the floor, and we’re working to get the necessary Senate Republican support to ensure it would pass.”
An aide to Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that he plans to co-sponsor the Senate bill. Meanwhile, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told CNN that he “probably will” support the legislation.
“This legislation would secure marriage equality in the United States. The right to marriage confers vital legal protections, dignity, and full participation in our society. No person should face discrimination because of who they are or whom they love, and every married couple in the United States deserves the security of knowing that their marriage will be defended and respected,” the White House statement says. “H.R. 8404 would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, an unconstitutional and discriminatory law, and would enshrine the right to Federal recognition of marriage for same-sex and interracial couples. This legislation would strengthen civil rights, and ensure that the promise of equality is not denied to families across the country.”
The House voted Tuesday in response to an opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last month in which he openly questioned whether the court “should reconsider” rulings that guaranteed access to birth control and same-sex couples’ right to marriage — two issues that many Americans have viewed as settled law.
Tuesday’s bipartisan vote was a striking evolution on the issue of same-sex marriage for members of both parties. Just a decade ago, Democratic Vice President Joe Biden got castigated for announcing his support for gay marriage before the sitting president, Barack Obama, had announced his own views on the issue. More than a decade before that, Biden helped pass the Defense of Marriage Act in the Senate, while House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) joined 116 Democrats supporting it in the House.
Thomas’s opinion opened the door for Democrats to force Republicans to take a stand on the issue, and Republicans split into competing camps over the onetime hot-button issue as Democrats were completely unified in protecting a right that the Supreme Court had issued seven years ago. While 47 House Republicans voted for the measure, 157 GOP members voted against it, though many said it not due to opposition to the bill, but that Democrats were using it as a wedge issue.
Take a look: Pence ‘should have the courage’ to testify to Jan. 6 panel, former adviser says | 2022-07-20T16:02:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Schumer seeking enough GOP support to move ahead on bill to protect same-sex marriage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/same-sex-marriage-senate-schumer-gop/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/same-sex-marriage-senate-schumer-gop/ |
NTSB: Left side of jet vibrated before landing gear collapsed in Miami
The MD-82 crashed into an equipment shelter and caught fire. Four passengers suffered minor injuries.
A Red Air passenger jet that caught fire after the left landing gear collapsed during the touchdown roll is seen at Miami International Airport on June 21, 2022. The flight began in the Dominican Republic. (Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/AP)
The pilots of a Red Air jet felt increasing vibrations down the plane’s left side before its left landing gear collapsed last month, causing it to veer off a runway at Miami International Airport, the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday.
The board issued a preliminary report that provided new details about the June 21 incident but does not draw conclusions about the cause.
NTSB investigators interviewed the plane’s pilot and first officer, who said the landing initially was smooth, with the right landing gear first touching down on the runway. But the left landing gear collapsed after settling onto the runway, swinging the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 jet to the left and off the runway.
The plane, built in 1992, crashed into a steel and concrete equipment shelter, breaching its fuel tanks, according to the NTSB report. The rest of the landing gear collapsed and one of the plane’s wings caught fire, investigators said.
Plane fire after landing failure forces emergency exit on Miami runway
The 10 crew members and 130 passengers evacuated the plane. Four passengers suffered minor injuries. Videos from the crash showed people screaming as they ran from the fire.
An image from an NTSB drone shows the stricken jet two days later, a wing partially collapsed and a trail of debris from the equipment shelter behind it. Tire marks are visible on the runway.
Red Air is based in the Dominican Republic. The plane was flying from Santo Domingo, the nation’s capital. | 2022-07-20T16:03:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NTSB report details Miami jet landing gear collapse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/20/miami-landing-gear-ntsb/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/20/miami-landing-gear-ntsb/ |
Ukraine’s first lady appeals to Congress for more weapons to counter ‘Russi...
Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska addresses members of Congress at the Capitol in Washington on July 20. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska addressed Congress on Wednesday, making a rare personal appeal as the wife of a foreign leader for the United States to provide Ukraine with air defense systems, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its sixth month.
In a brief but emotional speech, Zelenska spoke about the increasingly dire security, economic and humanitarian conditions on the ground in Ukraine.
“I want to address you not as first lady, but as a daughter and as a mother,” Zelenska said in Ukrainian, as a woman translated her speech to English, their voices breaking at times. “No matter what positions and titles we reach in our lives, first of all, we always remain part of our family. … This is the great truth of our life. Our family represents the whole world for us and we’d do everything to preserve it.”
Ukraine's first lady Olena Zelenska spoke to U.S. lawmakers on July 20 about the conditions in her country, as Russia's war approached its sixth month. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Saul Loeb/The Washington Post)
Zelenska noted she was the first wife of a foreign leader to address Congress, and that first ladies are usually “exclusively engaged in peaceful affairs.”
Russia’s “Hunger Games” were destroying peaceful families and cities in Ukraine, she said, making a reference to the dystopian film series where a group of children must fight to the death — and the devastation would never be broadcast on Russian news, she added.
She closed her speech with an appeal for more weapons, saying the war in Ukraine was not over and that the answer was in Washington, where U.S. lawmakers could indulge in the normalcy of planning months ahead.
“I am asking for weapons — weapons that will not be used to wage a war on somebody else’s land, but to protect one’s home and the right to make up a life in that home,” Zelenska said. “I am asking for air defense systems in order for rockets not to kill children in their strollers … and kill entire families.”
Zelenska received a standing ovation from members of Congress from both sides of the aisle when she took the stage of the main auditorium at the Capitol Visitor Center shortly after 11:10 a.m., as well as when she concluded her remarks about 10 minutes later. It was the same location where her husband’s virtual speech had been streamed to Congress months ago, near the beginning of the war, in which he pleaded with U.S. leaders to help defend not only Ukraine but the very notion of democracy around the world.
At the start of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stressed that his family was a top target for Russian troops. In a rare joint interview with him in May, Zelenska said she and her two children did not see Zelensky for 2½ months after the war started, as they sheltered in an undisclosed location apart from him.
In a letter to Democratic colleagues Tuesday about Zelenska’s upcoming visit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) highlighted the toll on women and girls that the war in Ukraine has taken, a topic she said has been of particular concern to the women in Congress.
“In the course of visits from Ukrainian leaders — from members of parliament to grass-roots heroes — many of us have heard horrific stories about the brutal treatment of women and girls by Russian forces,” Pelosi wrote. “Indeed, we have sufficient evidence of kidnappings and deportations into Russia, rape of women in front of family members and even rape of little girls. … Let me be clear: Rape of children cannot be a weapon of war. It is a war crime!”
On Tuesday, Zelenska visited the new Victims of Communism Museum in Washington to accept a human rights award on behalf of the people of Ukraine. In remarks at the museum, Zelenska noted that there were three photographs of Ukrainian dissidents who had been tortured or sent away for “questioning the cult of Stalin.” She compared those to some of the atrocities Ukrainians had faced in the past five months as a result of Russia’s invasion.
Ukrainians were not only fighting for their freedom today, she added, but “so that Stalin’s great terror will no longer be repeated anywhere, ever, in the civilized world.”
The mention of Joseph Stalin was intentional. In the early 1930s, the Soviet dictator carried out policies that led to mass famine in Ukraine. An estimated 4 million people died during that period, known as the Holodomor, or death by hunger.
On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenska visited the White House, holding a private meeting with first lady Jill Biden and then an expanded one with several U.S. officials. Jill Biden, who met Zelenska over Mother’s Day weekend when she made an unannounced visit to Ukraine, on Tuesday recalled the “sorrow and pain” of the war zone and told Zelenska that her team had been working on ways to help with the mental health of Ukrainian mothers and children forced to flee their homes.
House Jan. 6 committee warned Bannon it might seek charges | 2022-07-20T16:14:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska addresses Congress - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/ukraine-olena-zelenska-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/ukraine-olena-zelenska-congress/ |
Trump’s deluded effort to flip the 2020 results in Wisconsin, explained
In this Dec. 13, 2016, photo, President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center in West Allis, Wis on Dec. 13, 2016. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci File)
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) neatly, if unintentionally, summarized nearly every aspect of Donald Trump’s post-2020 election effort to somehow return to power.
“He would like us to do something different in Wisconsin,” Vos said of Trump, explaining a phone call the former president made to him last week. “I explained that it’s not allowed under the Constitution. He has a different opinion and he put the tweet out.” (It was actually a post on Truth Social, but we’ll get to that.)
His summary makes clear that Vos has now joined former vice president Mike Pence and a battery of other officials across the country: Trump wanted them to do something they had no power to do — and so Trump disparaged them publicly.
The situation in Wisconsin, however, is a bit more complicated than Trump’s other ongoing efforts to somehow reverse the results of an election that’s seen President Biden serve as president for 18 months. It derives from a recent decision from the state’s elected Supreme Court that Trump allies are now presenting as having invalidated the presidential election results in that state.
It does not and it could not and, as Vos notes, this should be obvious to even the most Trump-sympathetic observers.
In early 2020, with the coronavirus beginning to kill thousands of people nationally, the Wisconsin Election Commission issued a rule allowing counties to use ballot drop boxes to collect ballots. The intent, as with changes in other states, was to make it easier to vote without having to crowd into a small polling place and potentially risk infection.
The national effort to increase absentee or early voting quickly became a centerpiece of Trump’s claims about potential voter fraud. Trailing in the polls, he resurrected his 2016-era claims that only fraud would cause him to lose the election, but with a new twist centered on early votes. His rhetoric helped fuel a partisan split in how people voted in the November 2020 general election — a split that ended up helping his efforts to cast absentee votes, votes often counted more slowly, as suspect.
In recent months, the use of drop boxes to collect ballots has come under specific scrutiny, largely because of a roundly debunked film from Dinesh D’Souza alleging a rampant yet somehow undetected scheme involving thousands of people to collect and submit ballots through drop boxes. Reporting from the Associated Press makes clear that there is no evidence of any significant fraud committed through the use of drop boxes. But D’Souza’s film, tailored neatly to argue that the election was stolen from Trump, has spawned a cottage industry focused on drop boxes.
In Wisconsin, D’Souza’s film claims, 14,000 “illegal votes” were cast in drop boxes. Except that, as legislators pointed out during a March hearing in the state, even if D’Souza’s conspiracy theory were true (which is not supported by any evidence) those ballots would have been legally cast since collecting and submitting ballots wasn’t banned at the time. That hearing focused on testimony from True the Vote, the group that provided D’Souza the data for his film, and the group’s head, Catherine Engelbrecht. They stated that they weren’t alleging the ballots were illegal, just that “the process was abused.”
Enter the state Supreme Court. A pair of Wisconsin voters sued the Wisconsin Election Commission, alleging that the commission had no right to allow the use of drop boxes and that its doing so harmed them. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreed.
“[T]housands of votes have been cast via this unlawful method, thereby directly harming the Wisconsin voters,” its opinion read. “The illegality of these drop boxes weakens the people’s faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will.”
This is a remarkable assertion, certainly, suggesting that because drop boxes were allowed and normal Wisconsin voters used them to vote, confidence in the election results were damaged. That decline in confidence, of course, actually stems from the robust after the fact effort to cast dropbox voting as suspicious or prone to fraud, which the evidence simply doesn’t support.
The court’s decision landed in the midst of an already active effort in Wisconsin to somehow unwind the results of the 2020 election — results that, again, have not been shown to have been tainted in any significant way. (Even D’Souza’s entirely invented 14,000-vote number is less than Biden’s margin of victory in the state.) That’s in part because of a Republican-backed “investigation” into the election (helmed by a conservative former member of the state Supreme Court!) that tried to undercut confidence in the results. Its report, released earlier this year, mostly alleged that the results were affected by efforts to increase turnout, a weird reason to try to reject how those voters voted. While the report didn’t call for a “decertification” of the state’s results, the former judge leading the effort, Michael Gableman, did. (Gableman was found to be in contempt in June for not turning over required documents related to his probe.)
So once the Supreme Court decision dropped, there was a quick push to declare a much broader victory over Trump’s opponents. That included Trump trying to convince Assembly Speaker Vos to decertify the election, much as he’d tried to convince Pence to block submitted slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021. And when Vos declined to do so — again, because he had no power to do so — Trump disparaged him on social media.
“Looks like Speaker Robin Vos, a long time professional RINO” — that is, Republican in name only — “always looking to guard his flank, will be doing nothing about the amazing Wisconsin Supreme Court decision stating loud and clear that the impossible to control Ballot ‘Unlock’ Boxes in the State are ILLEGAL,” he wrote on Truth Social. He added that Democrats “would like to sincerely thank Robin, and all of his fellow RINOs, for letting them get away with ‘murder.’ ”
It’s worth considering the logic here. If the Supreme Court were tomorrow to declare that voting in polling places was for some reason unconstitutional, would Trump (or anyone!) argue that votes cast by that method in 2020 should not count? Would the natural response be to recalculate election results to exclude those votes? Or would there be a recognition that most or all of those voters would simply have cast ballots some other way? That’s setting aside the assertion that it’s odd to decry illegal behavior when illegality was asserted only after the fact. If buying alcohol was made illegal tomorrow, the 21st Amendment repealed, would that mean that everyone who’s had a drink since 1933 engaged in criminal activity?
The thing about Vos is that he’s sympathetic to Trump’s position. He’s the one who hired Gableman in the first place! But even if he wanted to do what Trump asks, he can’t.
Even if Wisconsin for some reason did decide to change the 2020 results, so what? Biden would still not only have enough electoral votes to have won, he’s still president. There’s no mechanism besides impeachment or the 25th Amendment for removing him from office. Neither is going to happen.
After Vos revealed Trump’s recent call in which the former president continued to insist on this surreal scenario, Trump again took to his bespoke social media platform to make a political threat.
“So what’s Speaker Robin Vos doing on the Great Wisconsin Supreme Court Ruling declaring hundreds of thousands of Drop Box votes to be illegal? This is not a time for him to hide, but a time to act!” he wrote. “I don’t know his opponent in the upcoming Primary, but feel certain he will do well if Speaker Vos doesn’t move with gusto.”
It is never Trump’s fault. His loss wasn’t his fault, it was fraud. That all of the electoral votes certifying his loss were counted on Jan. 6, 2021 wasn’t Trump’s fault; it was Pence’s. And Trump’s failure to get Vos to do something Vos can’t do isn’t his own fault. Somehow, it’s Vos’s.
The latest: Giuliani ordered to testify before Ga. special grand jury | 2022-07-20T16:49:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump’s deluded effort to flip the 2020 results in Wisconsin, explained - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/trumps-deluded-effort-flip-2020-results-wisconsin-explained/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/trumps-deluded-effort-flip-2020-results-wisconsin-explained/ |
Trump wanted Pence to reject electors. A new bill would prevent that.
The proposed bill, titled the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Act, states that the role of the vice president in counting electoral votes is purely ceremonial.
By Leigh Ann Caldwell
Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), seen here in a file photo, led the effort to draft the legislation. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
A bipartisan group of 16 senators on Wednesday released legislation that would clarify an 1887 law that then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to use as part of their attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
The legislation, which comes after months of negotiations, would attempt to more clearly define the role of states, presidential electors and the vice president in a presidential election in an effort to prevent the events of Jan. 6, 2021 in the future.
While the senators said the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol did not influence their work or impact the timing, the legislation was released as the committee has laid out evidence showing how Trump and his allies tried to exploit the vagueness of the 19th century law, the Electoral Count Act.
Trump pressured Vice President Pence to reject electors from certain states, but Pence disagreed with the idea he had the legal authority to do so and worked to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the election.
All the ways Trump tried to overturn the election — and how it could happen again
The proposal, led by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W. V.) also makes it more difficult for Congress to raise an objection to state results in a presidential election. The 19th century law allows one House member and one senator to raise an objection. The proposal raises the objection threshold to one-fifth of the House and the Senate.
It also clarifies how a presidential candidate can raise concerns about a state’s election by creating a three-judge panel with an expedited path to the Supreme Court, an issue that the senators struggled to come to agreement on.
In a separate piece of legislation, the senators attempt to clarify the presidential transition and deter violence against poll workers by doubling the fines for people who intimidate or threaten election workers. It also attempts to clarify how the Postal Service handles election mail.
To the chagrin of many on the left, the senators did not delve into issues such as voter access, an issue that has become partisan.
“We have developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for President and Vice President,” the bipartisan group of senators said in a statement. "We urge our colleagues in both parties to support these simple, commonsense reforms.”
The proposal would specify that a state can appoint just one set of presidential electors and only the governor — or an official designated in the state’s constitution or laws — could submit the electors to Congress.
After the 2020 election, groups of rogue electors backing Trump in a number of states attempted to submit their slate to Congress to be counted instead of the legitimate electors won by Biden.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have given the bipartisan negotiators a long leash — a sign the legislation is likely to garner the support of leaders in both parties. Collins said she has been in contact with Schumer and McConnell on the bill.
In addition to Collins and Manchin, members of the negotiating group include Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Todd C. Young (R-Ind.), Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S. C) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). | 2022-07-20T17:06:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Electoral Count Act bill introduced in Senate to prevent rejecting electors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/electoral-count-act-bill-senate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/electoral-count-act-bill-senate/ |
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco speaks during a forum at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on May 6. (Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg News)
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco reiterated on Tuesday that regarding the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 investigation, the department will “continue to do our job, to follow the facts wherever they go, no matter where they lead, no matter to what level” — and regardless of whether defeated former president Donald Trump runs for president. She added, “We’re going to continue to investigate what was fundamentally an attack on our democracy.”
Her comments were encouraging for democracy defenders, as were the department’s recent moves to seize the phone of chief coup architect John Eastman and to search the home of Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official Trump wanted to appoint as acting attorney general. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe greeted Monaco’s statement enthusiastically. “Here’s what people have been looking for: It’s as close to a promise as DOJ ever gets: Trump can run, but he can’t hide,” he tweeted. “Deputy AG Monaco speaks for AG Garland on this. They won’t let optics stop them. Nor will they let politics lead them to indict.”
Concerns remain about the department’s sense of urgency to file charges against Trump or his senior aides before Republicans have a chance to regain the majority in the House and gum up the work of the investigation. Norman Eisen, former co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee in Trump’s first impeachment, tells me: “They are building a case at perhaps a leisurely pace. They need to dramatically accelerate.”
The good news is that one prosecutor has gotten on the stick. Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., has sent “target letters” to all 16 Georgia Republicans who affixed their names to the fake “elector certificate” from Georgia and falsely attested that they were duly elected. The DA’s office, in a filing in response to a motion to disqualify Willis as prosecutor, referred to conduct related to “possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 elections in the State of Georgia.”
Eisen, a former criminal defense lawyer, observes that target letters are not just a warning. “They are an invitation to make a deal,” he says. “And the best time to cut a deal is early — before everybody else does.”
A Fulton County special grand jury has already subpoenaed Trump’s top advisers, including Eastman and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, something it seems the Justice Department has not done. Willis is “clearly going after whoever orchestrated the fake electors scheme,” Tribe says. “It looks very much like she’s pursuing the conspiracy to steal Georgia’s 16 electoral votes all the way to the top.”
Willis has been able to move swiftly for several reasons. First, the facts relating to Trump’s pressure campaign in Georgia are more limited than the entire coup plot. Second, she also benefits from the recorded conversation between Trump, some of his cronies and Georgia officials. Third, she has not had to spend months, as Justice Department attorneys have, tracking down and prosecuting hundreds of violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol. Finally, the legal avenues of prosecution she is likely considering (e.g., solicitation or conspiracy to commit election fraud, intentional interference with an election official’s duties) are straightforward.
Fortunately for federal and state prosecutors, Eisen notes that “the [House Jan. 6 select committee] has put forth a shocking amount of evidence of not only federal crimes but also state crimes in Georgia, including evidence Trump was personally involved” in seeking phony electors. The committee may well have lit a fire under the Justice Department and allowed at least one prosecutor to move forward before Trump’s allies in insurgency take control in Congress. | 2022-07-20T17:10:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis zooms ahead of Justice Department in Jan. 6 investigation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/georgia-investigation-jan-6-trump-seems-closer-prosecution/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/georgia-investigation-jan-6-trump-seems-closer-prosecution/ |
“We’re all trying to find ways to close that gap,” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips says of conference lagging well behind SEC, Big Ten in gross revenue. (Nell Redmond/AP)
CHARLOTTE — ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips was roughly halfway through remarks regarding the health of the conference Wednesday morning when he began to address yet another question about the ACC’s significant revenue shortfall as compared to the Big Ten and SEC.
His answer revealed why the conference’s current model may not be viable in the long term amid reports Clemson and Florida State, among other schools, are considering departing for more lucrative deals despite a grant of rights agreement that runs through 2036.
“We understand where those two leagues are,” Phillips said during the start of ACC football media days. “No one is ignoring that. We’re all trying to find ways to close that gap, so I know where our 17 — or our 15 schools are. We are really aligned to try to find some solutions to that revenue gap.”
Phillips’s momentary slip underscored the most pressing concerns facing the embattled ACC, which he indicated is exploring expansion as well as other avenues to boost earnings after the SEC announced it would be adding Texas and Oklahoma in 2025 and the Big Ten gaining UCLA and Southern Cal in 2024.
The ACC distributed more than $578 million during fiscal 2020-21, according to tax documents, an increase of 16.4 percent and a record in gross revenue for the conference thanks in part to the ACC Network. That figure, however, still lags well behind the SEC and Big Ten.
During the same fiscal period the Big Ten generated nearly $680 million while the SEC reported in excess of $833 million, with each conference producing a superior overall football product elevated by more established conference networks.
Apart from Clemson, the ACC’s dearth of representation in the national football landscape has been an albatross, particularly since traditional powers such as Miami and Virginia Tech, each with a new head coach this season, and Florida State have regressed considerably.
Not even the ACC’s long-standing achievements in its other highest grossing sport, men’s basketball, have been enough to quell discussions about the conference’s survival during an unprecedented period of tumult in which it continues to seek a new headquarters in a process that has dragged for a year.
“All metrics, we are one of the leaders in the country in all of those areas I talked about, except the revenue piece of it, and that’s been brought to light with the recent move of USC and UCLA to the Big Ten,” Phillips said, adding the ACC is partnering with revenue consultants to try to increase earnings. “I love our 15 schools, and I’m confident in us staying together.” | 2022-07-20T17:24:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ACC commissioner: League trying to close gap with Big Ten, SEC - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/acc-commissioner-sec-big-ten-expansion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/acc-commissioner-sec-big-ten-expansion/ |
Judges ordered their release from jail. They weren’t let out, lawsuit says.
The Prince George’s County Courthouse. (Jonathan Newton /The Washington Post)
Nine people who were recently detained at the Prince George’s jail allege in a lawsuit that they and potentially hundreds of others were illegally incarcerated for weeks or months before their trials — even after judges ordered or authorized their release.
The nine plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Tuesday, targeting county government employees and judges they say were responsible for their detainment. Their lawyers are seeking class-action certification and said the problems they outlined in the case may have affected hundreds of people who were detained at the jail in the past three years.
“These illegally jailed people number in the hundreds,” the lawsuit reads, “and comprise approximately one-third of the entire population of the Prince George’s County Jail.”
The lawsuit alleges that district and circuit court judges order, or at least permit, those charged with crimes to be released from jail pending trial. But in the process, the suit says, those judges unlawfully defer to the county’s pretrial services officials to determine what level of supervision people should receive — or whether they should be released at all.
In the meantime, the suit alleges, those whose release was ordered by judges languish in jail, waiting for long periods for decisions that are often accompanied with no explanation.
During those periods, plaintiffs lost their homes, missed funerals, were separated from their young children, were unable to care for sick loved ones or contracted covid-19 while locked in the county jail in Upper Marlboro, according to the court filing. Several plaintiffs either were acquitted of the charges against them or saw their charges dropped altogether by the state’s attorney’s office, the lawsuit says.
A spokesperson for the Maryland judiciary said judges do not comment on pending litigation. Separately, a spokesperson for Prince George’s County said in a statement that officials “have been made aware of the allegations and are reviewing them” but that as of Tuesday evening, they had “not yet been served with a lawsuit.”
The plaintiffs are represented by Civil Rights Corps, the WilmerHale law firm and Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Those attorneys worked closely with public defenders as well as Life After Release and Courtwatch PG — community organizations in the county whose volunteers advocate for incarcerated people and observe bail review hearings.
Once jailed, these women now hold courts accountable — with help from students, retirees and Fiona Apple
The lawsuit relies on information gathered by those volunteers, including anecdotes about the habits of the court and data about bail review decisions. After advocating through court motions and letters, court observers and public defenders said they took their concerns to Civil Rights Corps.
“This is an issue that lots of people have been advocating about for a long time,” said Ellora Israni, an attorney with Civil Rights Corps who is working on the case. “We see this as just one piece of the puzzle, and we’re building off the work they have already done.”
Although Civil Rights Corps takes on bail-related cases all the time across the country, Israni said the group has “never seen anything like this” before.
The lawsuit takes direct aim at what it alleges are systemic failures of the pretrial release process in Prince George’s County. That system includes lower-level employees in the county courthouses and department of corrections, as well as elected judges, who collectively determine when and how someone is released while that person awaits trial.
“It’s not that there is one piece of the puzzle that is the problem,” Israni said. “Everyone has bought into this collective abdication of responsibility.”
The county, the leaders of its department of corrections and the 11 Prince George’s County District and Circuit Court judges who oversaw the plaintiff’s bond hearings are named as defendants in the suit, an attempt at achieving direct accountability over the judiciary that is rare in litigation. The judges are LaKeecia Allen, Bryon Bereano, John Bielec, Scott Carrington, Ada Clark-Edwards, Stacey Cobb Smith, Brian Denton, Robert Heffron Jr., Donnaka Lewis, Gregory Powell and Cathy Serrette.
Court watchers, with Fiona Apple’s help, are fighting to keep virtual access beyond the pandemic
After a bond hearing, a judge decides whether the person should be incarcerated, released on their own recognizance or let go with restrictions on their travel or other conditions. People are only supposed to be jailed while awaiting trial if there is no less restrictive alternative that would ensure the community is protected and that a defendant returns to court.
The lawsuit alleges that judges in Prince George’s have “abdicated their constitutional duty” during bail review hearings by transferring decision-making power about pretrial release to “unaccountable non-judicial county officials” within the department of corrections.
If a judge decides that a person meets the requirements to be released pretrial, the lawsuit says, judges will either order a specific level of supervision or authorize the pretrial division to choose whatever level it sees fit.
Prosecutors in Prince George’s will no longer recommend cash bail for defendants
In both circumstances, the lawsuit says, there is no further judicial oversight in the process — which it asserts is illegal. Further deliberation happens behind closed doors among pretrial division employees, and can take weeks or months, because there is a significant backlog of cases.
The suit claims that defense attorneys have struggled to reach the pretrial division for updates on their clients’ cases and are given scant or inconsistent information.
Donnell Davis, a 28-year-old plaintiff in the case, was arrested in October 2020 on charges of first-degree felony assault and second-degree misdemeanor assault. He had no prior convictions or failures to appear in court, according to the lawsuit. His bail review judge ordered him held without bond but gave the pretrial division the option to release him at Level 4 — which is home detention.
Three weeks later, the pretrial division filed a notice with the court saying Davis was not eligible for pretrial release but offered no explanation.
At a hearing one month after his arrest, the state’s attorney’s office dismissed Davis’s felony assault charge. He remained in jail.
In December, desperate for information, Davis began calling the pretrial division himself, but his calls were never returned, the lawsuit says. Davis spent Christmas and the New Year holiday in jail before his trial on Jan. 7, 2021 — three months after his arrest — when he was found not guilty of the misdemeanor charge.
By the time he was released from jail, Davis said he had lost his job, lost friends and developed a deep sense of self-doubt.
“I just feel like that whole three months really took away a lot,” Davis said. “I felt like I lost my self-esteem. I got to questioning myself. It was a whole mind trick for three months.”
In the lawsuit, attorneys tried to quantify the extent of the problem by citing data from the department of corrections. From Dec. 1, 2018, to Feb. 28, 2021, the suit says, 1,208 people were given pretrial referrals — meaning judges said they would permit defendants’ release if officials could determine appropriate conditions — but more than 20 percent of those detainees were not released. Those who were released still had to wait “days, weeks or months” to get out of jail, the suit alleges.
In one snapshot taken in May 2020, attorneys said a review of the jail population found at least 121 of 503 people had been referred for pretrial release but remained incarcerated. Forty-eight of those people had been waiting more than three months to get out.
The promise of pretrial release gives jailed people and their families a sense of “false hope,” the lawsuit says.
That’s what the mother of one 16-year-old boy detained at the Prince George’s jail said she has felt since he was arrested in mid-June. Soon after his arrest, a judge authorized the teenager, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, to be released to his mother on home detention. But he remains in jail.
The teen’s charges are not detailed in the lawsuit, and his attorneys declined to provide them because he is a juvenile. His attorneys and his mother, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to protect her son’s identity, have asked the pretrial office to release the teen or give a reason for his incarceration.
The teen’s mother, who has two 7-year-old daughters, said she is a single parent who worked a full-time and part time job before her son’s arrest. She said she has been able to visit him in-person only once because the jail does not allow children into the jail as visitors and child care for her 7-year-olds is expensive. The teen is allowed out of his cell to make phone calls one hour per day — usually between midnight and 1 a.m., according to his mother and the lawsuit.
“He’s never spent that much time away from me at all,” she said. “That’s my baby in there.”
She is worried for the emotional well-being of her son and the long-term setbacks his continued detention could cause in his education, she said.
“What is the reason of having pretrial if they’re not going to be released before their trial?” she said. “The judge authorized it. So do they not follow the judge’s orders? That’s the question, and I want answers. How does this happen?” | 2022-07-20T17:32:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Officials illegally jailing people approved for release, lawsuit says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/lawsuit-illegal-detainment-pretrial-release/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/lawsuit-illegal-detainment-pretrial-release/ |
Maryland races could take days to call. The election of 1800 was worse.
John Adams, left, and Thomas Jefferson, right, competed in the contentious 1800 election. (A. Tholey/Library of Congress)
Maryland residents voted in statewide primary elections Tuesday, but it could take days — or even weeks — to get final results in all the races. Maryland is the only state that doesn’t allow mail-in ballots to be counted until two days after an election, and the volume of these ballots — expected to be close to half a million — could mean lengthy waits in close contests.
In this modern era of technological expediency and instant gratification, Americans generally expect to know election results within a matter of hours. But it wasn’t always that way.
The United States has a long history of long elections, starting with the first presidential campaign. Though it seemed a foregone conclusion that George Washington would become the nation’s first leader in 1789, it took nearly two months to name him the winner.
Voting was completed Dec. 15, 1788, but the former commander in chief of the Continental Army was not confirmed by electors until Feb. 4, 1789. “It was out of necessity in those days,” said James Roger Sharp, a scholar of early presidential elections and professor emeritus of history at Syracuse University. “The difficulties of travel hampered early elections. It took a lot longer to collect ballots on horseback across muddy trails.”
Closeness often begets delays. In Maryland, the 1904 presidential election was so tight that the state’s winner was not determined for nearly a month. In the end, Theodore Roosevelt wound up taking the state by a mere 51 votes — although by then he already had the electoral votes needed to claim the presidency.
However, the most divisive delay in a presidential election occurred during the 1800 race, when Thomas Jefferson challenged incumbent John Adams. It was the longest election in U.S. history: The winner would not be known for 10 months after the first ballots were cast.
Adams chose a new chief justice just before leaving office. Jefferson was furious.
In those days, states could choose their own election day, so voting across the country took place from April through October 1800. “Elections needed to be spread out over a longer period because of weather,” said Sharp, who wrote the 2010 book “The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance.” “Massachusetts, for example, didn’t want to hold Election Day late in the year, when it could be snowing.”
In 1800, the issue wasn’t which presidential candidate had come out ahead: Jefferson defeated Adams, 73 electoral votes to 65. But political wrangling over who would be the next president pushed the nation to its first constitutional crisis as partisan politics reared its ugly head.
The 1800 election was a showdown between the country’s first two political parties: the Federalists, led by Adams; and the Democratic Republicans, captained by Jefferson. The 1787 Constitutional Convention had not anticipated the rise of parties, which Washington warned in his farewell address in 1796 could allow “unprincipled men” to “subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
This was also the first election when vice presidents were included on the ballot. Previously, the runner-up became vice president — as was Adams to Washington and Jefferson to Adams. That changed in the 1800 race, when Jefferson ran for president with Aaron Burr of New York as his vice-presidential nominee against Adams, who ran with Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina.
Each elector cast two votes, for his preferred presidential and vice-presidential candidates. But that left Jefferson and Burr tied at 73 votes — something the Constitution hadn’t set rules to resolve.
Hijacking the electoral college: The plot to deny JFK the presidency 60 years ago
“The parties didn’t trust each other then,” Sharp said. “Plus, the Democratic Republicans, who could have broken the tie, didn’t want to take votes away from Burr for fear of him leaving the party.”
With a stalemate, the House of Representatives had the responsibility of deciding the winner. However, the Federalists, who still controlled Congress, did not want Jefferson to become president.
On Feb. 11, 1801, members of the House met to try to break the deadlock. For more than a week, they voted on who should be the winner. Each time, with Federalists backing Burr to block Jefferson, the results were the same. Jefferson and Burr were tied after 35 ballots.
Finally, on Feb. 17, the House picked a president on the 36th ballot. Jefferson was named the winner after a group of Federalists led by Rep. James Bayard of Delaware agreed to end the stalemate by withholding their votes, giving Jefferson a plurality of states for the win.
One of the people playing a major role in this decision was Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s treasury secretary and a senior Federalist. Though he despised Jefferson, he believed the Virginia statesman was a better choice than his former friend and now archenemy, Burr.
In a letter to Rep. Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, Hamilton wrote, “In a choice of Evils let them take the least — Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.”
Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, with Burr becoming the vice president — as the electors had intended. Of course, Hamilton’s support for the eventual president would come back to haunt him. Burr mortally wounded Hamilton in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River in New Jersey on July 11, 1804. Burr, still vice president at the time, was vilified for killing Hamilton and would never hold a high office again.
The impeachment trial presided over by Alexander Hamilton’s killer
To avoid future election problems, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1804, stipulating that electors “name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President.”
And to establish uniformity in the election process, Congress passed legislation in 1845 requiring states to select electors on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November — thus establishing the quadrennial presidential Election Day that is in use today.
Over the years, Congress continued to change election laws to ensure speedy and accurate results. However, those efforts were not always successful; the winner of the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was not known for five weeks after Americans cast their votes.
That took a Supreme Court ruling to declare that Bush was the winner, finally ending recounts in Florida.
Sharp thinks it’s not impossible that we could see a repeat of the 1800 fiasco. “Much like 220 years ago, trust is gone between the two parties,” Sharp said. “The situation today is very similar in many ways to what happened then.” | 2022-07-20T17:32:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thomas Jefferson and John Adams deadlocked in heated election of 1800 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/20/election-1800-jefferson-adams-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/20/election-1800-jefferson-adams-maryland/ |
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck attend the Los Angeles Special Screening of "Marry Me" on Feb. 8. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
The most shocking element of the marriage between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck was not that it happened — nearly two decades after they called off their first engagement — but in the casual sign-off to the bride’s announcement to fans.
Pardon? Jennifer who?
Over the past several decades, especially among brides of higher income and education levels, keeping one’s name has come to be understood as a feminist act: a declaration of equality and a repudiation of patriarchal traditions whence the surname-change tradition originated. So for Lopez — highly paid, inordinately successful, a global brand in her own right — not to keep her name seemed like a statement.
But of what?
From the outside, her choice might look like yet another nail in the coffin of a certain #Girlboss-y understanding of female progress — one that defined itself via individualism and autonomy, self-definition and a celebration of one’s solo accomplishments. Or the move could be a further reflection (or maybe verification) of the vibe shift toward gender traditionalism that appears to be bubbling up in the broader cultural landscape.
But Lopez — er, Affleck — is hardly alone. Even in 2022, it’s still commonly expected that a woman will take her husband’s name after marriage, while the reverse remains extremely rare. In a recent survey of 877 married heterosexual men, only about 3 percent took their wife’s name after marriage. Of the 97 percent of men who kept their own surname, 87 percent said their wives took it on, too.
Perhaps JLo’s decision needn’t be read as reactionary or trend-driven. If anything, it reflects a singular security in her own identity.
“Jenny from the Block” has been a top-tier businesswoman and a global icon for decades. After her dozens of films, eight studio albums and iconic appearances in the dress that helped invent Google Search, it’s hard to imagine that anyone encountering her — new last name or not — will become confused about who she is or what she has accomplished.
It is similarly unlikely that Jennifer nee Lopez will be subsumed into her husband’s identity. A singular image from the first iteration of their relationship was of Affleck literally kissing her posterior in one of her music videos. And from the beginning of their rekindled affair — Bennifer 2.0 had been back and flourishing for a year pre-elopement — she has continued to lead the media coverage and set its tone.
After all, the newsletter through which she announced her nuptials, deftly controlling the narrative in a way she wasn’t able to 20 years ago, is still called On the JLo.
In a 2021 op-ed column in the Boston Globe, the lawyer and journalist Kimberly Atkins Stohr argued that taking her husband’s name after marriage was a feminist act in its own right: “The core of feminism is the idea that women ought to have agency over their own lives and make their own decisions based on what is right for them. Everyone, regardless of gender, should be free to make that choice for themselves without judgment. … My name, my choice.”
This approach is appealing. Not necessarily for the decision made — to change or not to change — but for the act of ignoring others’ expectations. Not everything needs to be a statement, and not every moment must be one of public self-definition. Rather than focusing on brand management or signaling, one could simply choose to focus on what a wedding, at its best, is meant to celebrate:
“When love is real, the only thing that matters in marriage is one another and the promise we make to love, care, understand, be patient, loving and good to one another,” Jennifer Lynn Affleck wrote. “We had that. And so much more.” | 2022-07-20T17:33:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Forget the Affleck-Lopez wedding. What about that name change? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/jennifer-lopez-ben-affleck-marriage-name-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/jennifer-lopez-ben-affleck-marriage-name-change/ |
Transcript: The Cosmos with Thomas Zurbuchen, PhD, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, NASA
MR. ACHENBACH: Hello. Welcome to Washington Post Live. My name is Joel Achenbach. I’m a science reporter here at The Washington Post, and I am really excited about today because we are going to be talking about the James Webb Space Telescope which made an amazing splash last week with the release of the first set of images taken by the telescope, which is out there about roughly a million miles from Earth looking at the cosmos at multiple layers, including pretty much all the way back to near the beginning of time itself.
So we have as our guest today, I'm delighted to say, Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, who is the head of Science at NASA and in charge not only of the Webb in that program but of many other programs to come.
And we're going to discuss, I think, mostly the Webb today, Dr. Zurbuchen, but also, feel free to tell us what else NASA has coming along. So welcome to Washington Post Live.
DR. ZURBUCHEN: I'm so excited to be here with you. Thank you so much.
MR. ACHENBACH: So‑‑and it's okay if I call you "Dr. Z"? I know people call you "Dr. Z." You can call me "Mr. A." You know, we'll go A to Z. I hope that's okay.
DR. ZURBUCHEN: [Laughs] That's absolutely great. Absolutely calls me that, absolutely, either that or "Thomas." Either way is just fine.
MR. ACHENBACH: Okay. Well, I want to start with not even a question but really just an exclamation which is "wow." I mean, you know, as a science reporter, this was a really exciting story and I think for everyone across the planet to see those images.
When you and I talked last fall, you were very open about that you were nervous because there were so many things that could go wrong with the mission, and it was just, you know, natural to be nervous. How are you feeling now?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Oh, I'm so relieved, and of course, you know, enormously proud of the team that got us there. I was rightly nervous. You know, it's not the case to happen that I'm a very nervous person, generally speaking. You know, I do many things kind of that are challenging, and that's kind of my job, both here at NASA, but I've always been that way.
But this is the most complex mission we've ever done. There's a thousand ways or more that this could go badly, and one way it could go well, and that's the way this team charted, right? And so, for me, it's just very excited for them, proud of them, that, you know, curious about what we're going to find now.
MR. ACHENBACH: Just for a second, can you summarize why there were so many things that could go wrong? Obviously, it's the biggest, most complex space telescope, but without going through all 344 single‑point failures, just tell the audience why this is so difficult.
DR. ZURBUCHEN: So, Joel, first of all, let's just look at the size of the team. It was interesting. I was in‑‑this week, I was in Athens, and I went and had a tour of the Acropolis, and they basically talked about the size of the team that built that historic monument. The answer was 20,000 people. That's the number of people that built the James Webb Space Telescope. So it's a really historically big team. When you have a team like that, it's really, really hard to do. So that's the first thing you need to recognize, especially because of the fact that these have three space agencies, you know, in many different countries, many states in the U.S., and so forth.
In addition to that, it's a very complex, you know, frankly, mechanical system. So it needs to run really, really cold, and it needs to be very, very big. Those two things together, having to launch, of course, in a rocket‑‑it has to fit in the top of a rocket‑‑makes it enormously hard. It's almost like a transformer of a spacecraft in which you launch something that is shaped one way‑‑and you saw it in the little movie up front, kind of like a little package‑‑and then it folds up into something at the bottom that is the size of a tennis court, right, that sunshield that keeps the telescope cold, the telescope, of course, being 21 feet across, which is much, much bigger than any other telescope we've ever done. The Hubble was only 2.4 meters, kind of a third or so of what Webb is.
MR. ACHENBACH: Well, and also, it has to operate out at L2, which is roughly a million miles from Earth, and you can't send astronauts out there to give it a kick if that sunshield doesn't open up.
So what did you think when you realized that it worked, and when did you realize this thing really does work? And what did you think when you saw those first amazing images? What was your reaction?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: So the first key milestone, where I'm‑‑you know, of course, by the way, I have always hoped and believed that it would work, right? I mean, you‑‑the most important thing we have in our work, besides building the best team we can equip to really do this work, is the hope for success. We always bet on success. I mean, I never bet on failure. I have no contingency plan, right? It's what we had. This has to work.
Same is true, by the way, when we landed on Mars, you know, in February last year. You know, like, it has to work, and frankly, we built the follow‑up mission assuming that it will work. We had no other contingency plan, and so we're always going to do that.
So, when I‑‑you know, first time, I really felt enormously relieved that something like, you know, seven, eight days after, when the whole sunshield was deployed. For me, if you just look at it in terms of complexity, the pulley system, that kind of tennis court‑sized, you know, five‑layer sunshield, once it was deployed, I'm like, wow, this has‑‑you know, we're a long way there.
And I was there for the last deployment of the side, one of the three, you know, mirror sides of the entire mirror that had to be deployed.
And then, of course, once the first images came out, right‑‑there's really two things that‑‑
MR. ACHENBACH: Dr. Z, tell us about the images. Tell us about the images, Dr. Z, if you can. What did you think?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Yeah. I saw the images coming out, and it took my breath away, frankly, initially, because it's incredibly beautiful. And so it's both the amazement of the images, you know, looking at them, but then their beauty of the‑‑you know, the universe, how beautiful it is, how complex it is, but also the pride of the team that got us there.
MR. ACHENBACH: Right. The engineering that went into this mission, we just discussed it. It was amazing, a tremendous feat for NASA and its partners in Europe and Canada and all the contractors, but talk about the science. What is this telescope going to do? What are we going to see out there? Really, just describe what's coming up in the next, hopefully, many years of observing the universe?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: So, first of all, the telescope was built to really look at the universe in its very coldest light, the infrared light. So, if you said, you know, if you have IR, you know, on Earth, how would that feel? Well, it's more like a sensation on your skin, right? So the eye doesn't actually see it, but it's very‑‑it's kind of a signal of heat, so to say, that's coming.
Now, you say, why does that matter? Well, there's at least three reasons you want to see that. First of all, the old universe, because of the expansion of the universe and kind of the‑‑the kind of moving of the farthest reaches of the universe to colder and colder light for that reason, we want to look back in time. So that's the number one reason we want to do that. That was what motivated the scientists even 25 years ago.
The second reason, of course, is when you look at the universe in that light, you see kind of chemistry, kind of the molecules that were breathing out, whether it's CO2 or others. You know, they oscillate as‑‑and they made radiation in that wavelength range.
And the third one is that if you look at infrared‑‑and of course, the military is using that. We're using that when we search for people. Kind of, we can see through, for example, the fog. We can see through dust and look what's behind, looking at the heat signatures, and those three reasons make it an enormously powerful tool, never precedented.
MR. ACHENBACH: Describe just for a second what that big mirror gives us in the way of resolution. I mean, obviously, other telescopes have looked at the universe in the infrared, like the Spitzer Space Telescope, and even the Hubble goes a little bit into the infrared, even though it's mostly in the optical part of the spectrum. But what about the design of the telescope that allows you to see things that other telescopes could not have seen as well?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: So, if you looked at Hubble and Webb at the same wavelength, right, and basically looked at the resolution it has, kind of the parcel in the sky, it can really resolve kind of with clarity.
Basically, what happens is Webb is basically, largely a third better, just based on size, but that would totally understate it because, in addition to that, it's cold. So, basically, what it means is actually that parcel, if you looked at it for one hour on Webb and one hour on Hubble, the Webb would give you something like 10 times or 20 times, depending on, you know, the noise signatures, more clarity, and so, basically, it's both.
And the third piece is you have collection area that is also more so kind of in it. So there's three things that go in the same direction, so high resolution and angle by a factor of three, but much deep, kind of much more collection area and less noise in the system which makes it so much more clear. All these things matter and give us kind of a sensation of probably 10x or so more kind of power in a given picture. Of course, you have to make the scientific and argue about it, but that's the way I would think about it.
MR. ACHENBACH: When I was at NASA last week for the big release, when you were there, one of the engineers said that the Webb is performing so well and so far beyond spec that it should be able to see first light, and I think what he meant by that was not the, you know, the microwave background radiation, which is really the first light, but the first stars in galaxies.
I've heard other scientists say, you know, maybe not. It's tough out there behind redshift 11 or whatever it is. Can you explain that to us? How far back in time and deep in space can this telescope potentially go?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Yeah. So let's just talk about time scale, kind of the beginning of the universe‑‑and of course, John Mather and Riess and others got the Nobel Prize for that‑‑is, you know, 13.8 billion years. That's the beginning of time, kind of the Big Bang, and where the galaxies arise, frankly, is a matter of debate, right? So some people say it's 100 million years later or 300 million years later.
So what we announced last week is that even in a first image, we had light already from 13.1 billion years, which is 700 million years after the Big Bang.
I don't know what you've seen, Joel, but in the archive, there's a first result already submitted as a paper which is 300 million years. So it's already halfway closer to that initial point, and the question really is frankly‑‑there are two questions. When is the‑‑when are the first galaxies and stars? You know, is it closer to 100 or 300? And will we see them?
For me, the first question is frankly the more relevant one because we seem to be getting so close already. This is a week into it, Joel. We're already kind of having, of course, results that need to be confirmed through peer review but are already telling us regarding, as close as many scientists thought, the first galaxies are. So I believe we're going to get awfully close, if not really, you know, getting to the first ones.
MR. ACHENBACH: Thank you. We're going to go to a question from the audience here. This is Johanna from Pennsylvania who asks, what is the most ambitious goal of JWST? What is its life expectancy? How often should we be seeing data and images?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: So I think the most ambitious goals‑‑there's really two. The first one, we just talked about, which is to really image the first galaxies in the universe, which is kind of the earliest page of our picture book of life, right, kind of out there after the Big Bang when, you know, bigger elements that were built out of form in these galaxies.
The other one has to do with really finding planets in our own galaxy that could harbor life. For me, that's an equally ambitious goal and a goal that's a lot more modern in time because, frankly, when Webb was started, that was not a goal that was there.
We'll have, you know‑‑you know, the way we talk about the lifetime of Webb, there's kind of two ways to talk about it. The first one is design life. So everything was tested that it surely will work for five years, but then there's a number of things that need to all work together to basically say how much life you have, and all of that, we're still figuring out. The fuel lifetime, because of the excellent launch that Arianespace gave us, is that 20 years, that there's other lifetimes that matter. You heard about the micrometeoroid that hit us, right? Kind of that rate also matters, as do other, like the lifetime of the cryocoolers, you know, and subsystems.
So I would say between 5 and 20 years, and if we're lucky, even beyond that, and then how often do we see imageries? All the time. You should be waiting for‑‑almost weekly, biweekly, you see new images.
MR. ACHENBACH: Well, you actually just mentioned something, but no, I had not checked the archive. I did not realize that someone had posted a paper showing‑‑was it a galaxy 300 million years after the Big Bang? Is there a galaxy?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Right, exactly right. They saw‑‑they found one that has the spectral signatures of that kind of galaxy, and again, that needs to be confirmed through peer review. But my point is from the beginning, when we announced 3.1 billion, I'm like this is good. We're going to see this record shattered. This would be the oldest galaxy ever observed by any means.
MR. ACHENBACH: The one that just posted?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Exactly right.
MR. ACHENBACH: Okay. So that's a new record. So that's amazing.
One thing that you're pointing out that may not be obvious to everyone is the data are going on to a public site, right? So, if I'm a graduate student in, you know, someplace far away, I can work with that and potentially publish findings about it. Isn't that true?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Exactly right. A significant fraction of the early data, we're going to put out right away for two reasons, for the reasons you said. Frankly, we want citizens from around the world to kind of‑‑who are interested in science to pick up those data and play with them. I think it's just amazing we already see charts that people put out because they do so, people who are not astronomers, and then we also want the astronomy coming in to know what this telescope can do. And we want them to recalibrate their expectations. We want them to be more ambitious, and so for us, that's absolutely critical that that is happening, so really take full advantage of this new capability.
MR. ACHENBACH: When you say be more ambitious, are you implying that maybe a lot of people didn't think it was going to work, you know, the sunshield wouldn't open up, the mirrors wouldn't open up, and that they may have calibrated their ambitions according to some pessimism that the Webb would be able to produce at the level it's producing? Is that what you're saying?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Many of them, of course, thought the telescope would work. That's why they said, "I want to use it," but what they have said, for example, for a given, you know, exoplanet, "I need 10 hours of integration to resolve that exoplanet." What we found in some of our initial data, it only took a third of the time because the telescope is overperforming. So they could do three exoplanets instead of one for that time. You know, so for us, it's really leaning forward into it and use the capability as best as you can.
MR. ACHENBACH: You mentioned a minute ago the micro‑‑I can't say it‑‑the micrometeoroid‑‑
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Yep. That's right.
MR. ACHENBACH: I can't spell it, and I can't say it‑‑impact that happened in late May. Can you explain to the audience, you know, what exactly that meant? I understand it did some damage that cannot be entirely fixed but did not throw the telescope so far out of whack that it made a huge difference. But the concern, as I understand it, is that the model for the amount of dust that's out there at L2, you know, may have been imprecise, because you were expecting this kind of thing to happen maybe once every five years, and in the first five months, you get hit pretty hard. So was the model wrong?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Yeah, exactly right. So kind of one of the things we're always reminded by is that space is not empty. So it's fully of these plasmas, the gases from the Sun, and of course, the telescope is assigned to handle that. But it also has dust in it. You know, part of it are these little grains, the tiny little dust grains, and we've been hit six times already. We expected to be hit every month or so with one of them but a really tiny one.
And there was this bigger one that came‑‑and you just mentioned it‑‑that came too early, and it makes us nervous, right? And so kind of think of it like, you know, if I was into cars and I bought this amazing new car, and it's shiny. It came from the dealership, and somebody smacked their door into my side. So there is a dent in my car. Well, it's still a car, but it has a dent in it. So the way I think about it is that.
We need to understand what the‑‑you know, how abundant these part--you know, these kind of heavier hits are going to be or even heavier than the one that hit us and kind of just say, hey, can we do something to protect the telescope more than we are right now; for example, by, you know, if you want flying back first into the dust streams where we know that most of the dust is coming from. So that's what the team is working on right now.
MR. ACHENBACH: Let me ask you about the name of the telescope. Obviously, there's been controversy about the name, being named after James Webb, the former NASA Administrator during the heyday of the Apollo era, that there has been concern that he was complicit in the repression of the rights of gay and lesbian federal workers back in the 1950s and 1960s, and we heard last week that NASA is still looking at that and is planning to issue some kind of additional report on it. Can you discuss that? When will we see this report? Will it be renamed, and how do you feel about that?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Well, so, first of all, the most important thing I feel about is that gay and lesbian scientists are welcome to work with Webb and our data and our teams, as are everybody else. That's the standard that I want to set both as a leader at NASA, but‑‑and by the way, that's not just for that group. It's also for our colleagues who might be immigrants, people who are‑‑you know, communities that are not generally‑‑have been part of our community. It's absolutely important for us that they're there.
It is true that, you know, NASA is still working, as the archives have opened, and basically looked this and has been working at, you know, really seeing if there's something there. This is handled at the Administrator's office, and we'll see what's coming out of there as we go forward.
Personally, what I'm focusing on and much more than anything else is what I started with here is we want to build an environment in NASA, all NASA science programs, not just this one, where everybody is very much welcomed and basically feels that they are, you know, kind of at home and kind of contribute to these amazing missions that we have.
MR. ACHENBACH: So will you contribute to that decision one way or the other? Will you lend your voice to it?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: I have been engaged in a number of discussions. At the end, the discussion‑‑the decision is not handled by me.
MR. ACHENBACH: Gotcha. I want to go to another question from the audience. This is from Maryann from Pennsylvania who asks, how will all the money spent on space exploration help our planet? And this is a question that I think a lot of people ask, which is, you know, not only with things like the Webb or, you know, the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars and other space science things but also questions about human exploration and going back to the Moon. But talk about the astronomy. Why is this important to people on our planet?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Look, it's important for two reasons. The first one is the technologies that we're developing here, and so often, many of these technologies have imminent applications both here on Earth or in space to look at Earth.
This morning, as we woke up, we looked at weather forecast that benefit from technologies that were developed for previous telescopes that are looking at the Earth, imaging it with different wave bands, including "red" [phonetic] wave bands, and the technologies that we're developing surely is advancing that kind of ability and giving us more data.
Technologies also have very unexpected benefits sometimes. You know, in our own phones that we're carrying around is technology that initially was designed elsewhere. So that's really that kind of application space really, really matters, and especially as it focuses on our planet matters in an existential fashion.
It's also true, though, that‑‑I believe that countries like the United States, you know, have benefited from doing both, kind of dealing with the issues of today but also looking at inspiration of tomorrow and kind of pushing the boundaries. Pushing the boundaries have served us well because problems that we don't yet have today, we're finding solutions to‑‑by doing research today into the tomorrow. So, for me‑‑for me, that kind of aspirational and inspirational part has always been part of the United States, and I surely believe and hope it will be in the future.
MR. ACHENBACH: Let's talk about money at the level that you have to deal with, figuring out which missions are going to get how many dollars, because there's a lot of proposals out there and big dreams for new telescopes and telescopes that can directly see planets in a way that, though, even the Webb can't. The Webb got labeled as the telescope that ate astronomy. I forget what journal said that, but it did cost a lot of money. And I know that there are people who'd say, "Hey, it's worth it. It's spectacular." But are you concerned at all about how much Webb cost, and I guess from a practical standpoint, how can you make sure that you don't have a mission that gobbles up all of the money that could go to other missions?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: So I'm deeply concerned. First of all, I'm a taxpayer. I want the money that I'm giving the government to be spent in a responsible fashion. I want performance of the money that's coming from me, whether I'm in charge of the Science program or somebody else is to be done with the same kind of attention that I expect when I spend money on somebody else, you know, whether it's the car dealer or somebody else. I expect performance, and frankly, that's what the job is of our team here is to do the best job possible in building that.
Now, it's a lot easier to build, you know, the‑‑you know, 100,000th car after you did the others and a first‑of‑a‑kind, and so kind of what we're doing when we're pushing the envelope, it's just harder. But, you know, everybody says, well, it's worth it and people will forget about this. I told my entire team, we will not forget the lessons that we learned, and some of the challenging chapters of this telescope, we will use for every mission that we're doing from now on going forward. That's our job.
MR. ACHENBACH: Do you think the telescope will help us understand life beyond Earth? Obviously, it can take the spectra of exoplanets, but it wasn't designed for that mission, as I understand it. In fact, it was sort of designed before we had really discovered thousands of exoplanets around distant stars. But the whole issue of life beyond Earth is important to people. They think about it all the time. How will the Webb help us understand that?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: So life beyond Earth is one of the top topics in all of NASA Science program. We have many different missions, and we're spending billions of dollars on that because it's such an important question and so much of interest to our citizens in the United States and beyond.
What Webb will do, of course, it will measure, you know, atmospheric signatures of these planets in our own galaxy, and of course, you say, well, does that matter? Well, look at the Earth. When life was arising on the Earth, kind of single‑cell organisms, the entire atmosphere changed, and what we're really excited about is looking at atmospheres, looking at signatures that we believe has to do with habitable planets, kind of signatures of even places where life could arise that shift at the atmosphere and to things that have more CO2, for example, things coming out of our mouth that is, you know, a product of life, or N2, nitrogen and so forth, which we also believe has a lot to do with life by many theories.
So, yes, we seek to learn. Kind of searching for life elsewhere is not a yes/no question. It's a whole set of investigations that together help us to understand how scarce life really is in the universe and how it evolves from kind of a chemical type of environment of stars and stellar regions and planets to something that is truly alive.
MR. ACHENBACH: So we have time for, I think, one more question. This is one that's from our audience. It's from William from California. He says, do you personally believe that humanity will figure out the physics of how to travel across interstellar space? So warp drive, et cetera, is that something we will figure out one of these days?
DR. ZURBUCHEN: I sure hope so because, I mean, for me, you know, if you ask me what's the mission you would really like to do you're not working on right now, it's making progress towards travel to the next star. I mean, for me, you know, Voyager is out there a couple hundred‑‑you know, nearly couple hundred times the Earth's distance, and I'd like to go to a thousand or 10‑‑you know, kind of 10x more at the same, you know, at the same time or so to‑‑kind of to learn how to do that. And there will be progress that comes from propulsion and other technologies, including perhaps the geometry itself, of space itself, which we don't know yet, and I sure hope we're going to do that. For me, when I hear big questions like that, the answer is never no. It's just I don't know when.
MR. ACHENBACH: Dr. Z, this has been really enjoyable. We're out of time. Thank you so much for joining us.
DR. ZURBUCHEN: Really appreciate it, Joel. Really appreciate it.
MR. ACHENBACH: And thank you, the audience, for being here today. If you want to see other programs that are coming up, go to WashingtonPostLive.com and see what’s coming up next.
I'm Joel Achenbach. Thank you so much for joining us. | 2022-07-20T17:34:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: The Cosmos with Thomas Zurbuchen, PhD, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, NASA - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/20/transcript-cosmos-with-thomas-zurbuchen-phd-associate-administrator-science-mission-directorate-nasa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/20/transcript-cosmos-with-thomas-zurbuchen-phd-associate-administrator-science-mission-directorate-nasa/ |
RABAT, Morocco — Mali’s government has given the United Nations mission in Mali spokesman 72 hours to leave the country following a standoff between the West African country and Ivory Coast over the detention of 49 soldiers who came to Mali to support a security group contracted by the U.N. mission. | 2022-07-20T17:34:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mali's government asking UN mission spokesman to leave - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/malis-government-asking-un-mission-spokesman-to-leave/2022/07/20/ecd03746-084b-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/malis-government-asking-un-mission-spokesman-to-leave/2022/07/20/ecd03746-084b-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
The ‘Desus and Mero’ split is a significant loss for late-night
Desus Nice, left, and The Kid Mero laughed their way to Showtime’s first late-night show. (Showtime)
Celebrity breakups can be visceral and wrenching, especially when you don’t see them coming. So it was especially painful on Monday when Showtime announced the abrupt cancellation of “Desus and Mero,” the bold and bawdy late-night show hosted by Desus Nice and The Kid Mero.
The Showtime series represented the love-to-see-it ascent of Desus (born Daniel Baker) and Mero (Joel Martinez), who met as high school students while attending the same summer school. They were just casual acquaintances when they started trading jokes on Twitter in the mid-aughts but their online banter helped shape their charismatic rapport. Complex tapped the pair to do a podcast, “Desus v. Mero,” which led to a web series of the same name and stints on MTV2′s “Guy Code” and Charlamagne Tha God’s weekly show “Uncommon Sense.”
They launched the popular Bodega Boys podcast in 2015, continuing to build a fan base that appreciated their irreverent commentary on sports, pop culture and everything in between. The first iteration of “Desus and Mero” as talk show arrived in 2016 on the now-defunct Viceland, where the hosts got noticed for their unfiltered political insight despite a no-frills aesthetic (the show was filmed in a conference room) and jokes that would fly over the heads of most other late-night audiences. Desus and Mero, both raised in the Bronx by immigrant parents (Desus’s parents are from Jamaica; Mero is Dominican American), spoke to an audience — a generation, really — that had long gone ignored in that realm. Their guests, which ranged from journalists to internet personalities to rappers, tended to be people outside of the late-night circuit. But even when they hosted more mainstream bookings, Desus and Mero asked unanticipated questions (″What hood you reppin?,” they asked MSNBC Rachel Maddow in 2017).
When Showtime announced in 2019 that Desus and Mero were moving to the network, it felt like the culmination of “the brand is strong,” one of many phrases the pair coined and shared over the years with the Bodega Hive, the name for their legion of fans. Bigger budget notwithstanding, Desus and Mero brought the same energy and ethos to premium cable. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a fellow Bronx native, was the show’s inaugural guest; the interview took place in the trio’s home borough. “Desus and Mero” aired twice weekly on Showtime initially, and the duo clocked dozens of interviews that first season, hosting the likes of Stacey Abrams, Anna Kendrick, Issa Rae, Carmelo Anthony, Lil Nas X, the Wu-Tang Clan, Pete Buttigieg, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Zendaya and Spike Lee.
No format, no frills, just unfiltered comedy: Inside Desus and Mero’s late-night insurgency
Throughout it all, they maintained the spirit of the Bodega Boys; the first episode was titled “Series Premiere, Ballbags” in a nod to the glossary of terms the duo has compiled across projects. And while the pandemic threw off many a late-night host in 2020, Desus and Mero seemed to find their footing in a year that saw a global pandemic, widespread racial-injustice protests and a chaotic election. They interviewed rapper Saweetie, chef José Andrés, Anthony Fauci and former president Barack Obama, and maintained a similarly illustrious guest list in the show’s third season. The fourth installment of “Desus and Mero,” which bowed June 23, was just as critically acclaimed as the first few and a fifth season seemed likely. Until …
Rumors of a fallout between the comedy duo had been buzzing around the Hive since last weekend, when a Bodega Boys fan account posted a series of screenshots that appeared to show Desus and Mero subtweeting each other. Fans were hankering for another episode of the Bodega Boys podcast, which hadn’t released new content since last November. When Desus sent a tweet promising the Hive that more was to come, Mero appeared to quickly shut the notion down. “Nah, it’s a wrap brody,” he began before appearing to reference issues on the Bodega Boys tour that brought the pair to Washington (and other cities around the U.S.) in 2017. “I tried y’all,” Desus said. He later tweeted that “the hive deserved better than this ending.”
“Seems like it’s a wrap, y’all,” Bodega Boys Daily noted. Speculation intensified after Desus and Mero appeared to largely ignore one another while participating in this year’s All-Star celebrity softball game. By Monday evening, Showtime confirmed the bad news: The fourth season of “Desus and Mero” would be its last and the hosts would be going their separate ways.
The show’s end seemed to be just as shocking to its production staff, several of whom took to social media to express gratitude for their time on the series, which helped launch other personalities, including Ziwe, who now has her own Showtime talk show.
Well, friends, it's the end of an era. It takes a village to make a show, and I'm so honored to have been a part of the Desus & Mero village. Truly the most illustrious team in late night! Hire them all!!! I feel so much pride looking back at everything we made. Nothing compares.
— Heben Nigatu (@hebennigatu) July 19, 2022
There is also a bittersweet irony in how things played out, since the idea of Hollywood causing creative tension has long been a running joke between them and their fans. While the Hive is still grappling with what could have possibly caused the rift, fans of “Desus and Mero” are wondering what it means for late night, an industry landscape that has historically favored older White men (especially those named Jimmy) on network television. Where else but “Desus and Mero” could you tune in to see Yo-Yo Ma cover Britney Spears, Sisqo and DMX, all in one place?
It’s unclear where exactly the duo will end up now that they’ve gone their own ways, but their late-night presence isn’t completely gone just yet: Desus is one of the celebs guest-hosting for Jimmy Kimmel this summer.
The brand may be in flux, but the repertoire, at least, is strong. | 2022-07-20T17:58:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The ‘Desus and Mero’ split is a significant loss for late-night - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/20/desus-mero-showtime-canceled-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/20/desus-mero-showtime-canceled-history/ |
President Biden at the White House on February 24. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
President Biden is being pressured to declare a “climate emergency,” which would give him special powers to circumvent Congress and fight climate change. He shouldn’t do it.
Climate policy is a politically contentious matter. While few deny anymore that human behavior is warming the climate, there’s a lot of dispute about everything else. We aren’t sure how quickly the climate is warming or how much it will heat up. The tradeoffs needed to reduce emissions are controversial, and even climate activists argue against some reasonable measures to mitigate the issue. Increasing the use of nuclear power for electricity generation, for example, would dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet most climate activists eschew that approach out of fears of nuclear waste contamination or accidents.
Moreover, climate change does not easily fit the common definition of an emergency. Most people would view an emergency as something that arises quickly, often by surprise. It also has clear objectives, such as delivering aid to an area hit by a hurricane. Finally, and crucially, it is something that can be successfully met with the powers and resources at the government’s disposal.
Climate policy meets none of these tests. We have been aware of the warming climate for decades, yet we haven’t done what climate activists have wanted to address it because the policy tradeoffs required haven’t garnered majority support among Americans. Environmentalists might be happy to raise gas prices, ramp down fossil fuel production and even reduce meat consumption as means to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Most Americans remain unconvinced.
The sheer complexity of fighting climate change also means neither the objective nor the means are clear cut. Virtually every aspect of human behavior creates greenhouse gasses. Deciding which realms of activity should bear which burdens over what period of time would be at the heart of any serious climate policy. That’s qualitatively different from the Federal Emergency Management Agency organizing a coordinated response to a natural catastrophe.
Then there’s the decisive fact that the United States cannot stop climate change alone even if the government does everything climate activists want. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the United States produces only 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration’s ambitious goals would only have reduced annual emissions by 2.5 billion tons by 2030. That would barely offset the global rise in emissions between 2014 and 2018. In other words, the United States would undergo massive economic dislocation and barely make a dent in the ongoing problem.
Fighting climate change effectively and rapidly means doing something that even climate activists often shy away from proposing: starting a global trade war. Emissions in the United States and the European Union are dropping, but standards of living there are being supported by importing products being made more cheaply in other places. This essentially offshores emissions to places with dirtier and cheaper sources of energy, such as coal. That is causing global emissions to rise more quickly than developed countries can cut theirs.
Rapid decreases in global emissions are therefore only possible by reversing this globalization through border carbon adjustments, or tariffs weighted for the carbon input of imported goods. Imposing those adjustments without any concern about how it will affect the economies of developing nations would start a trade war that would make Trump’s tariffs look like child’s play. And bailing out those nations out through international wealth transfers would likely cause a voter revolt of unimaginable magnitude.
Any attempt by Biden to impose such policies under the guise of a climate emergency would be entirely undemocratic. Upending decades of global trade policy, implemented by negotiated multi-lateral international treaties, by presidential fiat would be arrogant and dictatorial. The political backlash globally would be severe. No rational president would do this.
Climate activists are understandably frustrated by Congress’s refusal to pass laws they want. But that’s what happens in a democracy. If they want their way, they need to make their case to the American people. Perhaps they should even be honest with them about the sacrifices they will need to make rather than selling false happy talk about a painless transition to a “green economy.” Convincing voters will take time, but it’s the only way to secure a national commitment to a long-term, multifaceted climate policy.
Presidential invocations of emergency powers are consistent with democracy only in rare cases of genuine, short-term crises. Fighting climate change is not such an event. | 2022-07-20T19:04:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | No, Biden shouldn’t declare a national emergency on climate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/biden-should-not-declare-national-emergency-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/biden-should-not-declare-national-emergency-climate-change/ |
People hold banners and chant slogans as part of a protest at the entrance to a branch of China's central bank in Zhengzhou on July 10. (AP)
Try as they might, the world’s despots can never hide fear of their own people. For all the bluster and displays of power, they panic at the sight of protests. Just look at what happened to demonstrations in recent years in Belarus, Cuba, Myanmar, Russia and China, to name a few places where street protest ended in tears — and prison. Now comes a fresh example of vocal complaints being silenced, in China.
Hundreds of bank depositors in Henan province have been increasingly restive about their accounts being frozen, demanding that provincial authorities help recover savings from at least four small “village” banks. Many small banks in recent years attempted to compete with larger institutions by offering higher interest rates and signing up depositors online from far and wide. The four Henan banks stopped withdrawals April 18. The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission has said a major shareholder of the village banks, Henan New Fortune, was under investigation for financial crimes in the way it raised funds.
Unable to retrieve their money, depositors started to protest online and in person. On May 23, protests broke out before security services stopped them. The leaders of China’s party-state system, obsessed with maintaining social “stability,” reacted with alarm. In June, many jilted depositors from around the country planned to converge on the capital of Henan province, Zhengzhou, in hopes of getting their money back. But before they could travel, they were blocked by software that the government uses to control the spread of covid. The green code on their phones turned red. They could not travel.
Then, on July 10, more protesters from around China came to Zhengzhou, this time with green health codes, and assembled in front of the branch office of the nation’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China. They unfurled banners alleging corruption, including one in English that declared “No deposits. No human rights.” Another banner read, “The Chinese dreams of 400,000 depositors in Henan have been shattered.” According to a report in The Post by Christian Shepherd and Pei-Lin Wu, the demonstrations were met by dozens of uniformed police officers as well as heavyset men mostly wearing white tops. The blue-shirted officers stood by as the burly men in white shirts attacked the crowd. Protesters were dragged down a flight of steps before being carried away. Some were loaded onto buses, bruised from the clashes. A hashtag about the protest gained more than 12 million views on social media site Weibo by midday on July 10 before being deleted by censors, the BBC reported.
Just another day in the life of what China’s government boasts is a “democracy that works.” What does not work is freedom to speak, to assemble, to protest or to change the leadership. Even something as straightforward as a legitimate protest over lost deposits ends with beatings, bruises and arrests.. | 2022-07-20T19:04:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | China's brutal response to mortgage protests reveals the government's fear of the people - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/china-mortgage-protests-government-response-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/china-mortgage-protests-government-response-democracy/ |
By Richard Ben-Veniste
Attorney General Merrick Garland. (Bonnie Cash/Pool via Reuters)
Richard Ben-Veniste was chief of the Watergate Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office. He also served as a member of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.
He will have to be about his work. The Jan. 6 select committee will hold what might be its last public hearing on Thursday evening. The committee, led by its steadfast chair, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), and its implacable vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), has demonstrated a unity of purpose and willingness to put the nation’s interests above personal attention and reward, and produced a factual record that lays the foundational predicate for charging those responsible for organizing the assault on the Capitol.
The toolbox of federal prosecutors is better equipped to ferret out testimony and documents from reluctant witnesses than the investigative powers of congressional committees. The special prosecutor successfully subpoenaed the Nixon tapes, while Congress failed to obtain them. Hostile and dissembling witnesses testified against their superiors under relentless pressure from the prosecutors. And it was the special prosecutor who presented evidence of Richard M. Nixon’s complicity in obstructing the Watergate investigation that convinced the grand jury to vote that he be named as an unindicted co-conspirator. | 2022-07-20T19:04:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Merrick Garland doesn't have forever to investigate Trump, Jan. 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/garland-trump-investigation-jan-6-timing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/garland-trump-investigation-jan-6-timing/ |
(Washington Post illustration; Nintendo; iStock)
Nintendo and Valve have issued warnings to customers regarding overheating hardware as brutal heat waves continue to bake the world.
Advanced electronics such as smartphones and gaming devices don’t do well in high temperatures. Too much exposure risks damaging sensitive internal components. For gamers living well north of the equator, this has generally not been a problem — until recently.
Japan is currently in a power crisis from the record-breaking heat wave engulfing the country. Office workers in the Tokyo metro government are operating in the dark, rivers and dams are drying up, and nearly 5,000 people have been hospitalized during one of the most excruciating heat waves in Japan’s history.
Amid Japan’s latest heat wave, Nintendo tweeted out a diagram of the Nintendo Switch with advisories on how to prevent overheating. The company told players that the Switch should be played in an environment between 41 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit (or 5 to 35 Celsius) and to avoid blocking the device’s rear intake and exhaust vents, as reported and translated by Nintendo Life.
On July 19 — the same day the U.K. saw its hottest day on record at 104.3 degrees Fahrenheit (40.2 Celsius) — Valve also tweeted a warning about the Steam Deck to customers weathering this heat wave, advising them to play at an ambient temperature range between 32 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit (or 0 to 35 Celsius). Using the Steam Deck in an environment with a temperature above that will trigger the device to start shuttering its performance; if it gets too hot, it will shut down altogether. This is a common, intentional fail-safe in most electronic devices to prevent damage.
In the past, console manufacturers rarely had to make public announcements about how to mitigate device damage from overheating. But these warnings are likely to become another new normal as the consequences of climate change continue to affect everything from public infrastructure to gaming. | 2022-07-20T19:06:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck at risk from record heat, devicemakers warn - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/20/nintendo-switch-steam-deck-heat-advisories/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/20/nintendo-switch-steam-deck-heat-advisories/ |
British heat waves used to be a good thing. This one has changed everything.
Trafalgar Square on July 19 in London. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Melissa Harrison writes a monthly Nature Notebook column in the Times of London, and is the author of “Rain: Four Walks in English Weather.”
We’re not cut out for this. Weather in Britain — while nothing like as wet as the popular cliche — is changeable; every hour brings something new, which is why we like to talk about it so much. But despite its ups and downs, it’s always been temperate, and 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) is anything but.
Forecasters had been warning for days of a plume of heat traveling across Europe that was set to reach us on July 18. The Meteorological Office issued its first red “extreme heat” warning for most of England and the U.K. Health Security Agency put out its first Level 4 heat-health alert, meaning danger to life — particularly in cities, including London, Manchester and York.
Even so, when the heat wave hit, it felt shocking and stupefying; not just a few degrees hotter than we’re used to, but a whole new order of things.
Now, we must come to terms with the fact that a heat wave is no longer something to look forward to, but something to fear, and which we must now learn to survive. British Twitter is awash with tips about closing and opening windows and freezing socks. Yet it goes without saying that we’re also bickering about how bad it is, with some sections of the media branding the furor as infantile and hysterical.
It’s a difficult about-face for a sun-loving nation weaned on nostalgia for the “glorious summer of ’76,” where forecasts still talk of rain as “bad weather” and tell us where “the best of the sunshine” might be found. Despite everything we know about the climate breakdown, we won’t be able to change the meaning of a heat wave from good to bad overnight.
I live in East Anglia, England’s breadbasket but also the area with the lowest rainfall and highest levels of water stress. At first, the air was motionless as the sun blazed mercilessly from a hard blue sky, baking the wheat and barley fields, and visibly wilting the leaves on the trees; then a hot wind picked up, like the blast of air from a fan oven when the door is opened.
During daylight hours, I sheltered in place, the rural village I live in newly inimical and unfamiliar; at night my bedroom remained at around 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees Fahrenheit). Forty was breached by day, as had been predicted; not far away, a wheat field, tinder-dry, caught fire and burned. Worse, devastating wildfires destroyed homes around the capital, where the London Fire Brigade had its busiest day since World War II and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, pleaded with people not to light barbecues. The landing strip at Luton Airport, 28 miles north of London, warped and lifted up, and railways saw major disruptions after some steel rails buckled; the rails are stress-tested for heat — but not heat this extreme.
Covid-19 levels are high here at the moment, with estimates of one in 18 currently infected; emergency services, already under pressure, felt the strain, with every ambulance trust in England declaring a critical emergency. The government’s civil contingencies committee, known as COBRA, was convened; British Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose not to attend and went to an air show instead, where he got a fun ride in a plane. Meanwhile, activists with the Extinction Rebellion environmental movement smashed windows at the London headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s news empire to protest tabloid coverage that painted the heat as a good thing and failed to link it to climate change.
I don’t condone it, but I can understand the attraction to that kind of coverage as a way to minimize what’s happening. Living through what we’re living through — seeing it take hold, and not knowing where it will end — isn’t just terrifying, it’s unbearable; turning away from something so overwhelming is an entirely human response. Stopping yourself takes practice, and if you believe the result will be only fear and helplessness, rather than the galvanizing energy many of us feel, it’s not exactly a rewarding habit to put in place.
And there’s something else to the denial many of us feel. I suspect the trauma of recent years — Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, your previous president, our near-constant political chaos and a worsening cost of living crisis — has weakened our emotional resilience. There’s a childish part of me that, despite everything I know, would also like to buy a lolly and enjoy the heat wave as a positive collective experience. God only knows that’s something we need.
In my garden, sparrows shelter in the hedge, their beaks agape; there’s a faint smell of smoke on the breeze. Two hundred miles west, rain falls on a friend’s skylight and, excited, she sends me a picture. Within minutes it’s evaporated, and the sun beats down again. | 2022-07-20T19:17:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Britain's heat wave changed everything - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/britain-heat-wave-climate-change-unbearable/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/britain-heat-wave-climate-change-unbearable/ |
House Democrat Cori Bush tells ‘my abortion story’ in campaign ad
It’s something that voters have rarely heard from a member of Congress, especially in a commercial — blunt talk about her own abortion.
“At 17, I was raped and became pregnant,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) says in a new ad that began running in the St. Louis media market two weeks before her Aug. 2 primary. “That’s the start of my abortion story. Millions more have their own.”
Bush, a first-term Democrat who faces multiple primary challengers next month, was one of 17 members of Congress arrested on Tuesday after a pro-abortion rights protest outside the Supreme Court. She first discussed her own abortion publicly last year, as a witness at a hearing where several members of Congress testified about why they had or had not terminated pregnancies.
“Let me be clear: Forced pregnancy is a crime against humanity,” Bush continues in the 30-second spot. “We will not yield until abortion is legal everywhere, and everyone has reproductive freedom.”
After last month’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Democrats in dozens of races have centered legalizing abortion in their paid messaging. Most have criticized the court’s conservative majority and endorsed codifying the federal right to abortion created by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which Dobbs overturned.
Missouri is one of several Republican-led states where abortion was banned following the June 24 decision.
Bush is one of several Democrats who have talked more personally about the issue. Jamie Cheney, a Democrat running for Congress in New York’s Hudson Valley, released an ad on Monday about her decision to terminate a pregnancy after contracting a “very rare immune disease” that would have meant “significant health impacts to the fetus.”
“I cannot wait to get onto the debate stage and have Marc Molinaro tell me that abortion is not health care,” Cheney says, referring to the likely Republican nominee, who currently serves as the county executive of Duchess County, N.Y., that she will face in November.
Missouri State Sen. Steve Roberts, a Democrat challenging Bush next month, said in a statement to The Post that Bush was an “exceptional activist” and that he applauded her decision to tell the story. He was challenging the first-term incumbent, he said, because she had not been effective in defending the rights she was talking about.
“Legislation to protect reproductive health by codifying it in federal law should have been a priority of hers, and not a reaction,” Roberts said. “Stunts and promises will never replace the courage to pass a bill and get it to the President’s desk.”
Pro-Choice Missouri, which has endorsed Bush, said in a statement that Roberts had not been reliable on the issue, criticizing his 2018 vote in favor of funding for crisis pregnancy centers, where women are urged to seek alternatives to abortion.
Lynese Wallace, a senior adviser to the Bush campaign, said that the abortion issue was “personal” to Bush, and that she had “spent years” fighting for reproductive rights. Bush, who unseated a longtime incumbent in 2020, had entered politics as a health care and police reform activist.
“People are looking for elected leaders who feel the impact of this violation as strongly as a scared 17 year old does today,” Wallace said. “We wish we lived in a world where this ad wasn’t necessary."
Annie Linskey contributed reporting. | 2022-07-20T19:25:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rep. Cori Bush talks about her abortion at age 17 in a new campaign ad - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/cori-bush-abortion-campaign-ad/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/cori-bush-abortion-campaign-ad/ |
Fetterman says he has ‘nothing to hide’ on health, will be back campaigning soon
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, greets supporters at a campaign stop on May 10 in Greensburg, Pa. (Keith Srakocic/AP)
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate who suffered a stroke in May, said he has “nothing to hide” about his health and called the lingering effects of his illness minor and infrequent, as he vowed to be back on the campaign trail “very soon.”
In his first interview since his stroke, Fetterman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he would not risk running against Republican nominee Mehmet Oz if he knew his health would hold him back.
“I would never be in this if we were not absolutely, 100 percent able to run fully and to win — and we believe that we are,” Fetterman said.
Fetterman suffered a stroke in May, days before the primary election, which he won while hospitalized. He has been recovering at home since, taking small steps to return to the campaign that he has been participating in via virtual appearances since the stroke.
Fetterman’s campaign office announced on May 15, two days before the primary, that he had suffered a stroke “caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long.” The doctors worked to “quickly and completely remove the clot, reversing the stroke, they got my heart under control as well,” Fetterman said in the statement released by his campaign. Doctors attached a pacemaker with a defibrillator.
He told the Post-Gazette that he has “no physical limits,” walks four to five miles each day in 90-degree heat, understands words properly and hasn’t lost any of his memory. He said he sometimes struggles with hearing and may “miss a word” or “slur two together,” though he said that doesn’t occur often. He said he is working with a speech therapist.
“I might miss a word every now and then in a conversation, or I might slur two words. Even then, I think that’s infrequent,” Mr. Fetterman continued, “so I feel like we are ready to run, and that’s the only issues I have. That’s the absolute truth, 100 percent.”
Fetterman was scheduled to go to Philadelphia on Wednesday evening for his first in-person fundraiser since the stroke.
The Post-Gazette asked if Fetterman believes he is mentally and physically prepared to run a tough campaign. The Pennsylvania race to fill the seat held by retiring Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R) is considered one of the most competitive in the country, pitting the Democrat against Oz, who has the backing of former president Donald Trump.
“One hundred percent. Physically, I have no limits — and mentally, again, as I mentioned before, the only issue is that my hearing is still a little bit not perfect,” said Fetterman, who said he will be on the campaign trail very soon.
Fetterman appeared on a video call with the reporter from his home in Braddock, Pa.
Fetterman’s campaign spokesman, Joe Calvello, echoed the sentiment in a statement to The Post. Fetterman, he said, is living a “pretty normal life right now,” running errands with his children and going out on dates with his wife, Gisele. | 2022-07-20T19:25:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pa. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman says he has 'nothing to hide' about his health in first interview - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/pennsylvania-senate-fetterman-health/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/pennsylvania-senate-fetterman-health/ |
Universal free school lunch program is set to expire
During the pandemic, Congress expanded the program so that no child had to pay
By Moriah Balingit
During the pandemic, Congress expanded the free school lunch program so that no child had to pay. (Lisa Rathke/AP)
The nation’s first experiment in feeding every public school student free of charge, launched to arrest a burgeoning child hunger crisis in 2020, will come to an abrupt end this summer. Administrators will race to ensure that hungry children still qualify and draft the correct paperwork to receive cafeteria food, even as rising food prices pinch family budgets.
Democrats in Congress are working toward more permanent changes to the Agriculture Department’s child nutrition programs, including additional funding to shore up the school lunch program, though they fall far short of making it universal.
This week, two members plan to introduce a reauthorization that would make more children and families eligible for things like school lunches and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
Drawing on lessons from the coronavirus pandemic, the measure — drafted by Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), the Civil Rights/Human Services subcommittee chair — would make it easier for the USDA to respond to emergencies, giving it authority to lift onerous requirements in times of crisis. One of the key lessons reaffirmed by government agencies’ response to the pandemic, according to Scott, is that investing in child nutrition programs markedly reduces child hunger.
“From January 2021 through April 2021, food shortage rates among households with children fell by more than 40 percent — thanks to the investments in several covid-19 relief packages,” Scott said.
The Child Nutrition Reauthorization is the route to more permanent changes, said Lisa Davis, senior vice president of Share Our Strength, an organization fighting childhood hunger.
“It presents an opportunity to modernize and strengthen child nutrition programs permanently. This is particularly true for the summer meals program, which historically has only reached 1 in 7 eligible kids, those who eat free or reduced-price meals during the school year,” she said. “It’s not okay to stick with the status quo for summer meals when the program isn’t reaching the kids who need it the most.”
The reauthorization would be the first since 2010, when Congress and the Obama administration wrote stricter nutritional standards into the law, and created a provision to allow high-poverty districts, as demonstrated by census data, to automatically provide free meals for all students.
For children in poverty, schools are not just a place to learn but a lifeline. Before the pandemic, more than half of schoolchildren came from households poor enough to qualify for the free and reduced-price meals, and schools served about 20 million free lunches every day.
In 2020, households with children saw a marked increased in food insecurity, with about 1 in 6 reporting that they did not have enough food for every member of the household. In about 7 percent of households, children as well as adults were going hungry. It reversed a more than decade decline in food insecurity. And in a survey of teens conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this year, one-quarter reported food insecurity.
The pandemic-era flexibilities were intended to address concerns over rising childhood hunger, and to keep cafeteria workers out of close contact with children who would normally swipe a card or enter a pin number to show that they qualified for free meals. Many school nutrition directors expected the flexibilities to continue through the next school year. But in March, as Congress prepared to pass an omnibus spending bill, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objected to the extension, and it was set to expire June 30, during the summer food programs.
Less than a week before it expired, President Biden in June signed the Keep Kids Fed Act, which equips schools, summer meal sites and child-care food programs with extra resources to weather rising food and labor costs. But it allows the universal lunch provision to sunset at the start of the coming school year.
School nutrition directors are keenly aware of how childhood hunger affects learning, and they hailed the move to make meals universally available.
Donna Martin, school nutrition director in rural Burke County, Ga., had made the school meals program universal before the pandemic, taking advantage of a provision that allows districts with high concentrations of poverty to feed every child for free. She wishes Congress could have extended universal meal eligibility for all school districts.
“How come books are free … but you have to pay for lunch?” Martin said. “The lunch is just as important as that computer, that book, that bus that gets you to school.”
Jessica Shelly, the school nutrition director for Cincinnati Public Schools, said she is scrambling to get families to fill out applications in her district. To qualify for free meals, households must make less than 130 percent of the federal poverty line. Many of her families are finding that they are barely over that threshold.
“A lot of our families came to rely on the meals, and put their money toward other family needs, such as putting gas in their car, buying clothes or paying bills,” Shelly said. “With the sunsetting of the provisions, our families are having to choose between their students receiving meals and other important expenses.” | 2022-07-20T19:51:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Universal free school lunch program set to expire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/20/universal-free-school-lunch-end/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/20/universal-free-school-lunch-end/ |
Sea turtle released from hospital to participate in turtle ‘race’
Tour de Turtles is an online ‘race’ that follows the long-distance migration of turtles.
Kids say goodbye to Tortie, a green sea turtle, just before the reptile was released into the Atlantic Ocean on Friday in Marathon, Florida. Tortie, who was found sick and was treated in the local Turtle Hospital, will be part of the 15th annual Tour de Turtles, an online "race" that tracks the location of a dozen released turtles for three months. (Andy Newman/AP)
A young green sea turtle that underwent multiple surgeries to remove cauliflower-like tumors was released last week off the Florida Keys with a satellite-tracking transmitter.
“Tortie” was treated at the Keys-based Turtle Hospital after being rescued last December. The turtle was unable to dive and suffering from a serious tumor-causing disease that develops from a virus that affects sea turtle species around the world.
The turtle’s satellite tracker will be monitored as part of the 15th annual Tour de Turtles, an online “race” organized by the Sea Turtle Conservancy that follows the long-distance migration of a group of sea turtles over three months.
Tortie, who was released Friday, is competing in the hard-shell turtles’ division that features about a dozen contestants, with tracking to begin August 1. | 2022-07-20T19:51:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sea turtle released from hospital to participate in turtle race - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/07/20/hospital-turtle-race/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/07/20/hospital-turtle-race/ |
Dawn O'Connell, the assistant HHS secretary for preparedness and response, would lead the new division. (SHAWN THEW (pool)/EPA-EFE)
The Biden administration is reorganizing the federal health department to create an independent division that would lead the nation’s pandemic response, effectively shifting some responsibilities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The move elevates a roughly 1,000-person office within the department — known as the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, or ASPR — into a separate division, charged with coordinating the nation’s response to health emergencies, according to seven people briefed on the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment, and a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
The reorganization allows the division “to mobilize a coordinated national response more quickly and stably during future disasters and emergencies while equipping us with greater hiring and contracting capabilities,” Dawn O’Connell, who leads ASPR and would run the new division, wrote staff on Wednesday afternoon. The emailed memo was shared with The Post.
The creation of the new Administration of Strategic Preparedness and Response, which is expected to be phased in over two years, comes at a time of growing concern about the federal government’s ability to respond to health emergencies — whether to a once-in-a-century pandemic driven by a novel virus like SARS-CoV-2, to an outbreak of a long-identified pathogen such as monkeypox, which has established treatments and vaccines.
The change also comes amid mounting frustrations within the government over bureaucratic delays that officials believe have hindered their work. For instance, Biden health officials seeking to acquire more rapid coronavirus tests as the omicron variant surged last winter ran into challenges setting up the necessary contracts, said a senior administration official not authorized to comment.
The reorganization would allow the office “to mobilize a coordinated national response more quickly and stably during future disasters and emergencies while equipping us with greater hiring and contracting capabilities,” Dawn O’Connell, who leads the emergency-response office and would run the new division, wrote to staff on Wednesday. The emailed memo was shared with The Post.
Officials at CDC said in a statement they were “supportive of Assistant Secretary O’Connell’s vision for ASPR – a critical partner for us in addressing public health threats,” said spokesperson Kevin Griffis. "We will continue to work closely together to advance and protect the health of the American people.”
While the existing ASPR has played a key role in responding to coronavirus and other health care crises, it has frequently been enmeshed in turf wars with other agencies, such as a heated clash with CDC over evacuating coronavirus-infected Americans from Asia in early 2020, as well as other pandemic decisions. The tensions pre-date the pandemic; ASPR oversees the Strategic National Stockpile after a fierce battle with the CDC over which agency would control it. Some Biden officials have privately argued those challenges could be avoided by empowering the office to be on par with CDC and other independent divisions of the Health and Human Services Department, such as the Food and Drug Administration, said the senior administration official.
But some public health experts have cautioned that a critical part of pandemic response is working with state and local health agencies, noting that CDC has a far stronger relationship than ASPR with those frontline teams.
O’Connell on Tuesday called members of Congress to inform them of the administration’s plan, according to people with knowledge of those calls. HHS has the authority to pursue its reorganization without approval from Congress, those people said. However, some senior Biden administration officials said on Wednesday they were unaware of the plan, which has been held close by the health department.
O’Connell has privately championed the plan, saying her office needs more authority to hire staff, oversee contracts and greater flexibility to respond to emerging crises. In addition to its work on the pandemic, the office has helped coordinate Operation Fly Formula, the effort to quickly import baby formula from overseas to address U.S. shortages. O’Connell previously served as a senior Obama health official and as director of U.S. operations for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations.
We continue to make progress with our public and private sector partners importing more infant formula to help American families. By July 17, we will have imported more than 55 million 8-oz bottle equivalents to help restock store shelves. https://t.co/uCANyoczLf pic.twitter.com/C2b76yLRC0
— Dawn O'Connell (@HHS_ASPR) July 11, 2022
ASPR was founded in 2006, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and other disasters that taxed the nation’s emergency response. But the office, which operates out of the federal health department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., has frequently come into conflict with the much larger CDC, which is based in Atlanta, employs about 13,000 people and has historically led the response to coronavirus and other disease outbreaks.
“It’s long overdue,” said Robert Kadlec, who led ASPR during the Trump administration and now advises Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the top Republican on the Senate’s health panel. Kadlec said the change would clarify officials’ responsibilities urgent responses. “I had requested it in my final year. No luck.”
Federal watchdogs have faulted the confusion between ASPR and CDC’s responsibilities, saying that clashes undermined the pandemic response. The Government Accountability Office last year published its probe of one episode — a chaotic effort to return hundreds of Americans to the United States in the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak — warning that infighting between ASPR and other agencies had led to safety breakdowns that put the evacuees, federal officials and even U.S. communities at risk.
“Until HHS revises or develops new plans that clarify agency roles and responsibilities during a repatriation in response to a pandemic, it will be unable to prevent the coordination and health and safety issues it experienced during the COVID-19 repatriation response in future pandemic emergencies,” the GAO concluded.
But other experts have warned that shifting responsibilities to ASPR could undercut the emergency response and noted that it does not address longstanding challenges at CDC.
“This is a strategic mistake and will create more confusion, indecision, and delays in responding to pandemic crises,” said Scott Gottlieb, who served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration and has advised both the Trump and Biden administrations on its coronavirus response. “CDC possesses all the tools of response, and has the expertise. Ultimately CDC needs to own this, and if they cant execute well, that needs to be fixed.” | 2022-07-20T20:00:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Officials reorganize HHS to boost pandemic response - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/20/biden-administration-aspr-independent-division/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/20/biden-administration-aspr-independent-division/ |
Fox News host Tucker Carlson during the National Review Institute's Ideas Summit on March 29, 2019, in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
For decades, Tucker Carlson has cultivated a very specific skill: proving he’s not wrong.
This has taken various forms, including starting a blog and spending innumerable hours arguing on cable television. In recent years, he’s drifted away from having to defend his positions on his show; a New York Times analysis found that he’s decreasingly hosted guests who disagree with him, to the point of near-nonexistence.
On his show Tuesday night, Carlson again turned his attention to trying to prove correct his most controversial assertion: that there’s a deliberate effort underway to replace native-born Americans with immigrants. The outline of his argument was familiar, given that he’s been making it on and off for more than a year now.
But the particular iteration offered on Tuesday was different. It was more direct in mirroring the arguments used and championed by white nationalists, it looped in a common antisemitic assertion — and, critically, it all hinged on Carlson’s willful misrepresentation of how the political left views immigration.
“Sometime around 1965, our leaders stopped trying to make the United States a hospitable place for American citizens, their constituents, to have their own families,” Carlson said. He isolated that year because it saw the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, legislation that reversed decades of strict limits on immigration to the United States, as he then explained. But it’s worth pausing briefly to recognize what Carlson is doing: He’s marking a shift toward welcoming migration as 1) an anti-American failure by political leadership, and 2) an essential element of making America “inhospitable” to citizens.
Since 1965, the country’s population has grown, but this was “not the kind of organic growth that you would see in a healthy society that’s become more prosperous and welcoming of families.” Instead, he insisted, it was “exactly the opposite of that”: growth due to immigration. Let’s set aside that America is appealing to immigrants precisely because it is prosperous, has had a healthy society and was welcoming of families even from other countries. Instead, let’s note that the population growth was primarily a function of immigration only if you count the children and grandchildren of immigrants as also being immigrants, even if they were born in the United States. If you view immigration as something of a stain:
When Carlson’s maternal ancestors came to America from Italy and had native-born kids, that was the building of a great society. When immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Asia come? The exact opposite.
Carlson cast the 1965 law as foundationally naive, quoting Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) defense of it: “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants,” Kennedy said. “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”
But then he criticized political leaders for giving up on meeting the needs of American families and relying on population growth by “import[ing] new people.” So which is it? Were Democrats dumb? Lying? Scheming?
That last option is at the heart of the “great replacement theory,” the racist idea that the left is willfully encouraging immigrants to come to the United States to subvert the native-born population. In Carlson’s framing, that’s manifested most obviously in elections.
“You can’t just replace the electorate because you didn’t like the last election outcomes,” he said Tuesday. “That would be the definition of undermining democracy, changing the voters.” Again, notice the quick interconnection with other right-wing frustrations: The Democrats are the real insurrectionists, because immigration!
But this is also the point at which Carlson’s rhetoric collapses with the loudest thud. He played clips (as he’s done before) of various Democrats talking about how demographic change will prove a boon to Democratic candidates in the future. Never mind that this claim from the left has started to wobble as Hispanic voters start to shift to the right. Carlson takes this claim — if X happens, Y will result — and inverts it: So that Y will result, Democrats are making X happen. First-year logic students can see the flaw here, but Carlson chooses not to.
Nearly half of Republicans agree with ‘great replacement theory’
This is almost certainly a function of his having actively sought to defend his position for the past 14 months. Again, he is experienced at nothing so much as he is trying to prove he’s right. So as outside observers criticized and undermined his argument about an effort to “replace” native-born Americans with immigrants, he redoubled his efforts to prove himself right, pulling these clips that show Democrats nodding at a predicted electoral benefit and pretending it’s proof that this outcome was always intended.
“ ‘The great replacement,’ ” Carlson said, introducing the video snippets. “Yeah. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s their electoral strategy. And we know that because they see it all the time.”
After all, why else would President Biden call immigration a “gift,” as he did on the campaign trail? Well, he said this explicitly because immigrants contribute enormously to the economy. But Carlson framed it differently, because he’s trying to prove he’s not wrong.
Carlson used to not say “great replacement” specifically, since that particular phrase is unmistakably associated with racist anti-immigration rhetoric. Now he uses it casually. Defends it.
Very sensitive to accusations that he himself is sympathetic to white nationalism or harbors racist views, Carlson went to great pains to insist that this had nothing to do with race. It’s just that immigrants don’t speak English and are “functionally illiterate” (since they don’t read English) and “broke our laws to get here” (despite the fact that many didn’t) and they’re being shuttled all over the country — isn’t it terrifying??!
Oh, and you know who’s behind it?
“Fox News is reporting tonight that the administration awarded a $172 million grant to a George Soros-linked organization which exists to, quote, ‘help young border-crossers avoid deportation,’ ” Carlson said. “Now, why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally? That’s the big question.”
This funding was actually first reported months ago, for what it’s worth. What’s more, the organization’s work extends well beyond immigration. But this amplification of the funding from Soros — a prominent Jewish donor — has popped up again in recent days, including on sites associated with white nationalism. In his defense, Carlson did not explicitly say “Jews will not replace us.”
Happily for those evaluating the Fox News host’s claims, there is a simpler explanation for large-scale immigration to the United States. This country still offers enormous economic opportunity and personal safety to its residents, something long seen as being to this nation’s credit. There’s also a legal process in place that allows those seeking asylum to a fair hearing and, at times, to remain in the country while those claims are adjudicated.
Most Americans — not just Democrats — see immigrants as a strength, not a burden. But Carlson is committed to his argument that immigrants are damaging the United States and so he keeps trying to defend it.
Even if it means he convinces himself that explicitly echoing an argument espoused by white nationalists isn’t a big deal at all. | 2022-07-20T20:00:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Tucker Carlson’s recent embrace of ‘great replacement’ is different - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/why-tucker-carlsons-recent-embrace-great-replacement-is-different/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/why-tucker-carlsons-recent-embrace-great-replacement-is-different/ |
Washington Capitals General Manager Brian MacLellan expects a competitive training camp in September. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Capitals General Manager Brian MacLellan anticipates several position battles to unfold when Washington starts training camp in late September, he said Wednesday.
“It's going to be a competitive situation,” MacLellan told reporters Wednesday on a video conference call. “You're going to have a lot of good players vying for ice time playing in the lineup, so I think it's a good situation for everybody.”
To offset significant injuries to winger Tom Wilson and center Nicklas Backstrom, the Capitals bolstered their forward corps, signing Dylan Strome and Connor Brown.
Finding Strome’s ideal place in the lineup appears to be a top preseason priority. Washington will be without Backstrom, who underwent left hip resurfacing surgery in June, for a large part of the season, and Strome, 25, could take over on the top line or serve as center on the second line. He can also play wing.
“He’s a flexible player,” MacLellan said of Strome. “He plays left wing. He plays center. He’s a good power play player. Got a real, real high offensive I.Q. Can play with good players. … I think he adds a lot of flexibility to our lineup. I think the coaches can try different things, different matchups, different combinations of players.”
Brown, 28, is expected to be a first or second line right winger to replace Wilson, who had surgery on his torn ACL in May. Wilson is expected to return sometime in December, and MacLellan said he is on schedule.
Brown will also be a major asset to the penalty kill, where Washington could take advantage of his speed.
Connor McMichael, 21, remains one of Washington’s biggest questions. MacLellan said Wednesday the team is not “guaranteeing young guys spots in the lineup.” The Capitals also re-signed Brett Leason, 23, to a one-way, two-year deal in June. Forward Aliaksei Protas, 21, was also expected to get a shot in the big leagues this season after a solid rookie year.
“I think Connor is going to come in and he’s going to be better than he was last year,” MacLellan said. “It’s going to be, ‘How do we best develop him? How do we do what’s best for our lineup?’ The coaches will balance that out, whether we play him at center, whether we play him at wing, whether we play him higher in the lineup or lower in the lineup. I think he’ll get a shot at all of it.”
MacLellan said he prefers McMichael at the center position — a thought echoed by Capitals Coach Peter Laviolette at the end of the season — but that will complicate Washington’s projected center depth for opening night.
As of Wednesday, the Capitals have at least five players who could be a viable center: Strome, McMichael, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Lars Eller and Nic Dowd. It appears at least one will have to be moved to wing or potentially traded.
Despite McMichael’s unclear status, MacLellan said he was happy with Washington’s moves so far, which included acquiring both Darcy Kuemper and Charlie Lindgren to fill Washington’s needs in net, plus defenseman Erik Gustafsson to help with depth on the blue line.
The Capitals signed defenseman Gabriel Carlsson to a one-year, two-way contract on Wednesday. Carlsson, 25, had two goals and seven assists in 38 games last season with Columbus. Washington also re-signed veteran forward Marcus Johansson to a one-year, $1.1 million contract last week.
“He’s a versatile player,” MacLellan said of Johansson. “I thought he played well for us. I thought he was good defensively. Brought a little offense … with the uncertainly (surrounding) Carl Hagelin we thought we needed one more veteran guy that we could use. He’s a versatile guy. Everybody is familiar with him. The coaches liked him. They liked what he did last year. So we decided to bring him back.” | 2022-07-20T20:26:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Capitals GM Brian MacLellan expects competitive training camp - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/capitals-brian-maclellan-training-camp-free-agency/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/capitals-brian-maclellan-training-camp-free-agency/ |
The money will be used to pay for cost overruns on the rail line, which could begin carrying passengers later this year
The entrance to the Washington Dulles International Airport Station in Virginia earlier this month. The second phase of the Silver Line extension has faced considerable delays but is expected to open this year. (Luz Lazo/The Washington Post)
The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority board on Wednesday approved $250 million in additional funding to pay for cost overruns on the second phase of the Silver Line rail project.
The bulk of the increase, about $188 million, will be paid by Dulles Toll Road users. Other funding sources, including Fairfax and Loudoun counties and MWAA, also will contribute based on a funding formula.
The additional money pushes the price tag for the second phase of the rail line to just over $3 billion. The first phase of the rail line, which began carrying passengers in July 2014, cost nearly $3 billion, bringing the total for both phases to about $6 billion.
“Nobody wants to be over budget,” Jack Potter, chief executive of MWAA, said during the board meeting. “But I’m confident that, in hindsight, we’ll have overwhelming agreement that the Silver Line project has been well worth the investment.”
In an interview after the meeting, MWAA’s Drew Hascall, head of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, added: “Certainly we’re not happy that it’s over budget and four years delayed. But what we really focused on was delivering a safe and quality operating system to Metro that will extend the transit network and connect the nation’s capital to its international airport.”
It will be up to Metro to set an opening date, but transit officials say they hope service will begin this fall.
The overruns are the latest chapter for a project that has been plagued by construction irregularities and political finger-pointing. It’s the first rail extension not built by Metro. Instead, MWAA oversaw construction of the project, which included the rail line and a rail yard near Dulles International Airport. But the arrangement led to tension when the two entities disagreed on elements of the project.
Andrew T. Rountree, MWAA’s chief financial officer, said the budget overage will not affect toll rates on the Dulles Toll Road, which already were expected to rise next year. Over the past three years, the authority has refinanced bonds and restructured debt being used to finance the cost of the rail extension. That savings will provide enough cushion to avoid more toll hikes, Rountree said.
Silver Line's second phase will cost an additional $250 million
MWAA officials blamed the overruns on the project’s complexity, an increase in the cost of building materials, supply chain slowdowns and coronavirus-related restrictions.
Metro took control of the rail extension last month, a milestone that raised the possibility that passenger service could begin this fall. Once open, the rail line will extend Metro service into Loudoun County and include a stop at Dulles Airport.
Hascall said Metro’s recent takeover enabled project officials to begin closing out the project, which is when it became clear more money was needed.
While toll road users will pay for the bulk of the cost overruns, Fairfax County will pay an additional $40 million, Loudoun County an additional $12 million and the MWAA an additional $10 million. Fairfax and Loudoun counties created special tax districts to pay most of the cost of the rail project.
Hascall said the additional funding will cover costs related to the closeout of the rail project, including claims by contractors for compensation tied to delays. It also will include $33 million that Metro can tap to cover expenses for issues that arose during construction, including concerns about track work and defective panels installed at five of the six new stations. Metro has pushed for the creation of such a fund to cover future maintenance and upkeep of the rail line. A similar pool of $15 million was set aside to cover maintenance and upkeep tied to the rail line’s first phase.
Metro confirmed this week that the two agencies reached an agreement on the fund.
MWAA officials had hoped that lessons learned from construction of the project’s first phase would enable them to avoid delays and cost overruns. Initial bids to build the rail line came in below MWAA’s estimates.
Those hopes were quickly dashed when contractors encountered problems. For example, an early decision to comply with new requirements for storm-water management caused a 13-month delay, a decision MWAA’s Potter said Wednesday was “absolutely the right thing to do.” The line originally was scheduled to be completed in 2018.
Silver Line's second phase more problematic than its first?
The project’s first phase, built by Bechtel, was six months late and more than $220 million over budget. It included five stops, including four in Tysons and one in Reston. The second phase will add six more stops to the Metro system.
Bechtel had hoped to win the contract to build the rail line’s second phase, but MWAA turned to Capital Rail Constructors, a joint venture between Bethesda-based Clark Construction Group and Kiewit Infrastructure Group. Hensel Phelps was hired to build the rail yard that also was part of the project. | 2022-07-20T20:30:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Silver Line money: MWAA officials approve $250M in additional funding - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/20/metro-silver-line-money/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/20/metro-silver-line-money/ |
A couple of Oxford PPEists. (Photographer: Jonathan Hordle / ITV via Getty Images)
Britain, and particularly its ruling Conservative party, is growing more diverse. Of that there is no question. But regardless of gender or ethnicity, an aspiring prime minister still must clear certain educational hurdles.
The crowded field of eleven who threw their hats into the ring when Boris Johnson announced his resignation earlier this month included more women than men, and a range of ethnicities — among them they could claim Indian, Iraqi, Nigerian and Pakistani ancestry. And indeed, now that Conservative MPs have whittled the choice down to two, no white man is left standing. The recently resigned Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who is of Indian ancestry, will take on Liz Truss, the current foreign secretary, in a ballot of all the party’s members in the country. This looks like a breakthrough for a more diverse and multicultural Britain — except that both Sunak and Truss did the same course at the same university.
The course is Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and it’s been offered for about 100 years by the University of Oxford. It was designed unapologetically to help train the country’s future leaders, and it appears to have succeeded all too well.
To be clear, I was lucky enough to take the course myself, in the same year as another PPEist, the former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. (Sunak and Truss are both a few years younger.) The degree course is a great training for the mind, but this column, which I wrote back in 2018, makes clear that PPE has come to exert an unhealthy dominance over Britain’s political culture:
Harold Wilson, elected prime minister in 1964, was the first PPEist to top the greasy pole. In this decade, my generation of PPEists took over virtually the entire British establishment — and we have made a total hash of it.
David Cameron, who called the Brexit referendum, is my direct contemporary as a PPEist. Another eight PPEists were among ministers at his Cabinet meetings. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader whose defeat to Cameron ensured that the Brexit vote would happen, and whose rewriting of his party’s leadership election rules opened the way for Jeremy Corbyn, is another contemporary PPEist. So were two of his opponents for the job, including Miliband’s brother, David. Corbyn is not an Oxonian (which might explain why the media are scared of him), but his chief adviser, Seumas Milne, has a degree in PPE.
In media, many top jobs at the BBC are held by PPEists. The editor of The Economist is another direct contemporary as a PPEist. At the Financial Times, where I spent much of my career, I worked alongside five others who had overlapped with me taking PPE at the same college. (Only about 10 of us took the course at that college each year.)
Since then, two prime ministers have resigned, the country has been through a general election, and the UK has finally got Brexit done and left the European Union — albeit on terms that many in the current government now want to change. But the dominance of Oxford graduates, and particularly PPE, remains unabated.
Boris Johnson, a classicist, did manage to see off his Oxford contemporary Jeremy Hunt, a PPEist, in the Conservative leadership election of 2019. But now, a new generation has produced a choice between two PPEists. Oxford has steadily become a more open place, which helps explain why it has produced both Britain’s female prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
In theory, greater diversity in backgrounds should lead to broader diversity of ideas and flexibility of thought in government. However, this will inevitably be narrowed, and the risk of groupthink will rise greatly, if everyone in government has been through the same training program. In that 2018 column, I inveighed against:
… the way we learned to behave at Oxford. Ambitious young PPEists spent their lives playing at politics or journalism, making the connections that would see them through life, and engaging in the kind of nasty interpersonal rivalries and highjinks that the world is now watching at Westminster.
The way PPE is taught encouraged this behavior. Your degree is entirely dependent on a week-long series of three-hour exams taken at the end of your final term. Up until that point, your only academic commitments are one or two weekly one-hour tutorials with professors. Survive your first-year exams and pass muster in your tutorials, and you could build your CV almost full-time before some desperate studying at the very end.
Ed Luce of the Financial Times, a fellow PPEist, calls us the “essay crisis” generation: “people who mastered the art of delivering their assignments in limpid prose that they had only started working on overnight.” He adds, “If you learn young how to slip past Oxford’s best scholars, the rest of life ought to be a doddle.”
Added to this, the sheer range of subject matter that we covered in only three years tended to inculcate a habit of skating over the surface of profound subjects, and coming up with a superficial view that is just about good enough to pass muster when reading an essay to your tutor or taking an exam. That is, regrettably, great training for politics as it is currently practiced, but it’s not great training for the clear-eyed and dispassionate handling of details that we would like to see in politicians.
Oxford politics, famously nasty, led to to feuds that reverberated decades later in Westminster. In this great piece for the New Statesman, Simon Kuper went through the relationship between Johnson and Michael Gove, who met in the bar of the Oxford Union in 1985. Two weeks ago, Johnson’s late-night decision to fire Gove proved to be his last significant act before resigning.
None of this means that it’s not encouraging that the contest comes down to a competition between a man of color and a woman. But it’s discouraging that somehow or other the nation still cannot stop itself from outsourcing the task of vetting and training its leaders to the PPE faculty at Oxford University. There is opportunity in Britain, but it still seems to depend on getting in to Oxford.
Ironically, Penny Mordaunt, squeezed into third place by Truss having been second in all the earlier rounds of voting, would in a way have represented a more direct split from the past. She would have been the first-ever prime minister to get an undergraduate degree from an English university other than Oxford or Cambridge; she has a degree in philosophy (but not politics and economics) from the University of Reading. But the habit of trusting Oxford continues. Thus, my conclusion from four years ago now looks as though it has proved decisively wrong:
I would not blame the country if it decided it was time for PPExit. Like most alumni I love my alma mater, but the dominance of Oxford, and of the PPE course, is plainly doing the country no good. We should be compelled to cast a wider net when looking for our leaders.
PPExit must now wait at least until the next general election, due by the end of 2024.
• The Cruelest Cut in the Tory Leadership Race: Therese Raphael
• Why the Tories are the Party of Diversity: Adrian Wooldridge | 2022-07-20T20:35:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Britain Still Can’t Look Beyond Oxford for Its Leader - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britain-still-cant-look-beyond-oxford-for-its-leader/2022/07/20/772e1532-0862-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britain-still-cant-look-beyond-oxford-for-its-leader/2022/07/20/772e1532-0862-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
In this image taken from police bodycam video on July 11, 2022 and provided by the Lafayette, Ind., Police Department, Nick Bostic, 25, of Lafayette rescues a 6-year-old girl from a house fire in Lafayette, Ind. Bostic punched out a second-floor window and jumped out with the girl in his arms, sustaining multiple injuries, while the girl suffered a minor cut to her foot. He rescued four others from the house before that. (Lafayette Police Department via AP) (Uncredited/Lafayette Police Department) | 2022-07-20T20:35:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man saves 5 from house fire; jumps out window to save girl - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/man-saves-5-from-house-fire-jumps-out-window-to-save-baby/2022/07/20/ed5cbca2-0864-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/man-saves-5-from-house-fire-jumps-out-window-to-save-baby/2022/07/20/ed5cbca2-0864-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Visitors on July 12 walk past a makeshift memorial honoring those killed during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Tex., in May. (Eric Gay, AP)
The report by a special Texas House committee on the police response to the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., opens with remembrances of the children and teachers who were killed. The portraits of lost lives — including Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, “a playful girl who put a smile on the faces of everyone around her”; Xavier James Lopez, “lively, energetic, and always eager to dance, especially the cumbia with his grandmother”; and Irma Garcia, “courageous and selfless … a 23-year-teacher [who] died protecting her students” — provide gut-wrenching context to the abject failures of systems and individuals that contributed to tragedy.
The 77-page preliminary report released Sunday chronicled, with damning new detail, the missteps, communication breakdowns and void in leadership of law enforcement on all levels — federal, state and local — in responding to the deadly shooting. Nearly 400 heavily armed officers were at the scene, but none took the initiative to challenge the gunman, who killed 19 children and two teachers inside two fourth-grade classrooms at the elementary school. Instead — and contrary to their training — officers prioritized their own safety over the lives of students and teachers. More than an hour passed before the gunman was finally confronted and killed.
The report said it was not clear whether lives could have been saved with a quicker response, but it left open the possibility. Other than the gunman — who pointedly was unnamed in the report — the committee said it did not find any “villains” to whom it could attribute malice or ill motives. “Instead,” the committee wrote, “we found systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making.”
Richard Parker: I’m a Texas gun owner. The Texas way of guns is an American failure.
The report offered an exhaustive accounting of the police response after weeks of conflicting and misleading reports , but it also cited failures by others. School officials had become complacent about security, neglecting repairs to door locks and not complying with safety policies. The committee uncovered disturbing information about the gunman, who for years had struggled in school but never received meaningful help before he was voluntarily withdrawn for poor academic performance and excessive absences. Friends and acquaintances received messages from him related to guns — even referring to attacking a school — but they never sounded the alarm.
Details about how he purchased the weapons and ammunition used in the attack bring into stark relief the madness of our gun laws. As soon as he turned 18 — a week before the attack — he started amassing his arsenal: two AR-15 style rifles, 60 magazines, more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition. He legally qualified for the purchases, and the multiple gun sales within such a short period of time were reported to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. But the law only requires purchases of handguns to be reported to the local sheriff, so the information remained isolated in federal hands.
It will be up to the various law enforcement agencies to conduct their own investigations and determine whether further action is to be taken. It’s important that the systemic failures be addressed and individuals be held accountable. But it must also be recognized that the best way to help police and educators avoid more Uvaldes is to put in place sensible gun-safety laws that prevent troubled young men from obtaining the means to commit mass murder. | 2022-07-20T20:36:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Uvalde school shooting failures include gun laws - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/uvalde-school-shooting-failures-gun-laws/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/uvalde-school-shooting-failures-gun-laws/ |
Marlena Stell, a woman living near Houston, said she was was required to get a second ultrasound despite her miscarriage in order to receive treatment. (Video: Marlena Stell/YouTube)
Marlena Stell’s happiness turned to heartbreak after she found out about 9½ weeks into her pregnancy that she had suffered a miscarriage.
After she was told last year that the fetus did not have a heartbeat and she no longer had a viable pregnancy, the Texas woman asked her doctor to perform a dilation and curettage, or D and C — a standard procedure to remove the fetus following a miscarriage to help prevent infection or long-term health problems. Stell had the procedure after her first miscarriage in 2018 in Washington state, when she felt so much pain that she could not walk, and she wanted to go through with it again before trying again for a second child, she told The Washington Post.
But Stell was even more devastated to learn that since the procedure was the same one used during abortions, Texas law prohibited abortion after six weeks. She would be forced to carry her dead fetus for two weeks before she could find a provider to give her the medical intervention that physicians had denied her.
“My doctor had said that since the heartbeat bill had just passed, she didn’t want me to do a D and C. And she asked that I tried to miscarry at home,” said Stell, 42, of Conroe, Tex. “It just was emotionally difficult walking around knowing that I had a dead fetus inside.”
Stell, a beauty influencer with 1.5 million YouTube subscribers, is sharing her story in the weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade as a reminder that the restrictive abortion laws adopted by states such as Texas could affect those who have suffered miscarriages.
“People need to understand how these laws affect all women, even cases like mine,” she said. “I feel like it’s very dangerous for government of any type to be intervening in a woman’s care because there’s multiple reasons of why she may need a procedure.”
Her story is an example of what physicians and patients could face when it comes to care for miscarriages and maternal health almost a month after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
As The Post recently reported, doctors in multiple states say miscarriages, as well as ectopic pregnancies and other common complications, are being scrutinized, delayed, or even denied. In Texas — where Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing the Biden administration over federal rules requiring abortions to be provided in medical emergencies to save the life of the mother — some doctors are reporting that pharmacists have begun questioning patients who they suspect could be using their miscarriage medications for abortions.
“It is traumatizing to stand in a pharmacy and have to tell them publicly that you are having a miscarriage, that there is not a heartbeat,” Rashmi Kudesia, a fertility specialist in Houston, told The Post on Saturday.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists estimates that more than 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, the spontaneous demise of a fetus that commonly happen because of chromosomal abnormalities.
The methods of treatment for miscarriage and abortion are the same. A miscarriage can be treated using a mix of drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol, or through a D and C, which includes dilating the cervix and clearing tissue from the uterus.
After her initial miscarriage in 2018, Stell and her husband had their first child, a daughter, in April 2020. When the couple moved from Washington state to Texas in 2021, they were trying to have a second child, Stell said, even though she knew she was at high risk because of her age, previous health problems and miscarriage. So when she found a doctor who specialized in high-risk pregnancies last summer, she was thrilled to find out that the early weeks of her pregnancy looked promising.
“I was about 7½ weeks pregnant, and everything looked great,” Stell said. “The doctor said there was some movements and fluttering, but everything with the pregnancy looked normal.”
Because she was high risk, Stell was asked to come back about two weeks later for a follow-up appointment in late September 2021. Since her husband was not allowed inside due to coronavirus-related guidelines, she planned to record on her cellphone what the doctor had to say about the ultrasound so it would be like her partner was in the room.
“I’m getting ready to record because I’m excited,” Stell recalled. “But as soon as she started the ultrasound, [the doctor] got really silent, and was just looking and looking and didn’t see the fluttering or the movement or anything.”
Stell got the news she feared: She had lost the pregnancy. She was told she had a blighted ovum, which is when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus but does not develop into an embryo.
She was shocked to learn that the common procedure she got so easily in Washington state was anything but that in Texas. She said she was told she needed additional proof, or multiple ultrasounds, showing that her pregnancy was not viable before she could get a D and C. Nine days into carrying her dead fetus, the sorrow of her first miscarriage had returned.
“I felt like a walking coffin,” she said, fighting through tears. “You’re just walking around knowing that you have something that you hoped was going to be a baby for you, and it’s gone. And you’re just walking around carrying it.”
This is the last screen I saw right before they pulled up the ultrasound showing my loss. I deleted the final ultrasound images because it was too painful to see yet I was forced to have 3 ultrasounds and see that same screen over and over just to get my D&C. This is 2022 in USA. pic.twitter.com/gfr5SpoxuK
— Marlena Stell (@MarlenaStell) July 19, 2022
Stell eventually found an abortion services provider in downtown Houston who would give her the D and C on Oct. 4, 2021. After she was met by antiabortion protesters, Stell opened up about the experience on her YouTube channel. While Stell, a cosmetic brand owner and CEO, usually talks about makeup education and other beauty and lifestyle content, the influencer’s video on her miscarriage showed a different side.
“I get so angry that I was treated this way because of laws that were passed by men who have never been pregnant and never will be,” Stell told her followers at the time. “I’m frustrated, I’m angry, and I feel like the women here deserve better than that. It doesn’t matter what side of the fence that you want to sit on, laws like this affect all women regardless of what situation you’re in and it’s not right.”
When Roe was overturned last month, Stell said it was her duty to share her story to those who might have similar experiences. After Stell told her story to CNN this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was among those to cite her as an example of how “Republican politicians are risking women’s health and safety.”
Stell said on Twitter this week that the experience almost 10 months ago is the reason she and her husband have decided that they would not try to have additional children in Texas. She told The Post that her two miscarriages put her at higher risk for a third.
“Our fear is that if I get pregnant and miscarry again that something will happen,” she said. “We just do not feel confident at all that we’ll get the care that we need in Texas if something were to happen.”
If the miscarriage hadn’t happened, Stell and her husband would have had a boy in May. They would have named him Milan. She thinks about what could have been when she reflects on her own story, and how she said she was made to feel like she had done something wrong when she was already grieving.
“It’s added trauma on top of trauma,” she said. “It’s important to share this story so people know how these laws affect all women.”
Frances Stead Sellers and Fenit Nirappil contributed to this report. | 2022-07-20T20:36:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Texas abortion law forced Marlena Stell to carry dead fetus for 2 weeks after miscarriage, she says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/abortion-miscarriage-texas-fetus-stell/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/abortion-miscarriage-texas-fetus-stell/ |
Mourners gather to remember Ivana Trump, first wife of former president
Former president Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump arrive at the funeral Ivana Trump on July 20 in New York. (David Dee Delgado/Bloomberg)
Mourners filled New York City’s St. Vincent Ferrer Church on Wednesday to remember Ivana Trump, first wife of Donald Trump, who is partly credited with elevating the businessman’s profile to a status that helped pave the way for his presidency.
Donald and Ivana Trump’s children — Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric — and their spouses and significant others were in attendance. Also present was Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, and their daughter, Tiffany; as was Trump’s third son, Barron, whose mother is Melania.
Donald and Ivana Trump rose to prominence in the 1980s, frequent headliners on New York social pages. Besides being married, they were also business partners; she helped managed some of the Trump hotels and casinos. Their divorce in 1992 was spread across the front of city’s tabloids.
Ivana Trump died of ‘blunt impact injuries,’ medical examiner says
Her ambition and commitment to being seen in a city where competition for the spotlight is vast are partly credited with introducing millions to her ex-husband, then a real estate developer who sometimes waded into local and national politics. Together, they worked on iconic projects like Fifth Avenue’s Trump Tower and collaborated on their well-publicized casino endeavors in Atlantic City.
A native of Czechoslovakia, Ivana, an avid skier, immigrated to Canada in the 1970s where she worked as a ski instructor and model. While in New York City in 1976, Ivana Trump met Donald and married him the following year. She was the mother of this three eldest children, whom she wrote about in 2017 in her memoir “Raising Trump.”
The marriage lasted 15 years before ending in 1992. She went on to remarry — and divorce — twice but continued to be best known for her relationship with the former president, who announced her death on Truth Social, the social media outlet he launched.
Jury hears of Bannon’s offer to cooperate, days before his trial | 2022-07-20T20:36:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Family and friends gather to remember Ivana Trump at her funeral - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/ivana-trump-funeral/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/ivana-trump-funeral/ |
MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — Los Angeles County officials on Wednesday presented the deed to prime California oceanfront property the heirs of a Black couple who built a beach resort for African Americans but were harassed and finally stripped of the land nearly a century ago.
Analysis: How views on same-sex marriage have changed in the House | 2022-07-20T20:36:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California beachfront taken from Black couple given to heirs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/california-beachfront-taken-from-black-couple-given-to-heirs/2022/07/20/e1e88230-0863-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/california-beachfront-taken-from-black-couple-given-to-heirs/2022/07/20/e1e88230-0863-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
A bill to prevent Trump’s attempted coup is finally ready — and must pass.
A joint session of the House and Senate convenes on Jan. 6, 2021, to confirm the electoral college votes cast in the 2020 election. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)
That President Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 election is scary enough; that he or another candidate could steal it next time around remains a terrifying threat. This is what makes the passage of a just-introduced bipartisan proposal to reform the Electoral Count Act so essential.
Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) have been laboring for months to overhaul the country’s arcane system of counting and certifying votes for president and vice president. Finally, they’ve released a product — and it’s a fine one. Their bill not only guards against the gambits the lame duck White House attempted in 2020, but it also limits the potential for other nefariousness by a future candidate. A companion bill addresses the security of election workers and the U.S. Postal Service and reauthorizes the Election Assistance Commission.
The Electoral Count Act as it stands is full of ambiguities. According to one scholarly study, the losing party in nine of the past 34 presidential elections could have exploited gaping holes in the law to overrule the people’s decision. So far, enough has stood in the way — sometimes a general respect for norms, sometimes particular political courage — to prevent disaster. But the events following the 2020 election, including the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, made clear that the danger of a constitutional coup is real, and growing.
The bill introduced this week would create blocks against the specific maneuvers attempted by Mr. Trump. It would clarify that the vice president’s role in certifying electoral votes is “solely ministerial”; that speaks to the former president’s efforts to coerce Mike Pence — with the help of a mob — into rejecting the votes of several states. It would raise the threshold for Congress to challenge a state’s submitted results from a single member of both chambers to at least one-fifth of members; that answers last year’s frivolous objections from six GOP senators and more than 100 representatives.
Perhaps most important are changes that would impede state-level mischief. By identifying governors as responsible for submitting a slate of electors, appointed according to rules in place before election day, the legislation would exclude competing lists from other officials. Better yet is a process to counter a rogue governor who lodges an illegitimate submission for approval by a friendly House or Senate. Under the reformed act, any such attempt could be challenged by a vice-presidential or presidential candidate in federal courts, to whose judgment Congress would be bound. Finally, the bill would ensure that state legislatures can’t simply override the popular vote by calling it a “failed election.”
The Electoral Count Reform Act will not fix everything, because it can’t fix everything: Some additional protections can be provided only by the states; others, including enhancements to the Voting Rights Act desired by Democrats, aren’t politically possible. Even now, the electoral reform portion of the Collins-Manchin package has only nine of the 10 Republican votes needed to surmount a filibuster. Democrats are right to dream of even more than is on offer today, and they’re right to push hard as they investigate the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. But they would also be wrong to say no to what they might be able to get from this legislation. | 2022-07-20T20:52:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Electoral Count Reform Act must pass - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/electoral-count-reform-act-must-pass/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/electoral-count-reform-act-must-pass/ |
Deshazor Everett, a former safety for the Washington Commanders, pleaded guilty Tuesday to reckless driving in connection with a car crash that killed Oliva S. Peters, his longtime girlfriend.
Everett, 30, who was initially charged with involuntary manslaughter in the Dec. 23 crash, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of reckless driving in a deal with the commonwealth’s attorney’s office in Loudoun County, Va., according to his lawyer, Kaveh Noorishad. Reckless driving, a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to a year in jail in Virginia.
Kendra Glover, a spokeswoman for the commonwealth’s attorney, did not return messages seeking comment on the plea bargain.
911 call provides details from fatal crash involving Everett
Everett, who was cut by the Commanders in March, was the driver of a 2010 Nissan GT-R that was traveling north on Gum Spring Road in Loudoun about 9:15 p.m. when the car veered off the road, according to the county sheriff’s office. Everett was seriously when the vehicle struck several trees and rolled over, authorities said.
His passenger, Peters, 29, an occupational therapist from Montgomery County, Md., suffered fatal injuries. An investigation found that the Nissan was traveling more than twice the 45 mph speed limit when the crash occurred, the sheriff’s office said.
A seven-year NFL veteran, Everett signed with Washington in 2015 and soon became a key reserve at safety. He had one year remaining on his contract when the team cut him.
He is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 8 in Loudoun General District Court.
Justin Jouvenal contributed to this report. | 2022-07-20T21:01:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Commanders safety Deshazor Everett pleads guilty in fatal crash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/former-commanders-player-guilty-fatal-crash/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/former-commanders-player-guilty-fatal-crash/ |
PM Update: Heat advisory for parts of the area Thursday as temperatures rise
Heat indexes are around 100 along and west of I-95, and nearer 105 east of the city
Evening soccer at D.C.'s Stead Park. (Joe Flood/Flickr)
* Heat advisory for areas east of D.C., 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday *
We’ve finally got our first three-day stretch of 90s this year, which is often referred to as a heat wave. It comes about a month later than average. This heat wave is still in its early phase as temperature rise further tomorrow and into the weekend. We’re starting to get into territory where the heat can be dangerous, particularly for vulnerable populations. You’ll definitely want to take it easy and shift as many outdoor activities to the morning or evening as possible.
Through Tonight: Skies are mainly clear through the night. Lows range from the mid-70s to near 80. Winds blow from the south around five to 10 mph.
Tomorrow (Thursday): It’s a soupy start to a scorching day. Partly cloudy skies rule in the midday and afternoon. Highs are mainly in the mid-90s, but it feels more like 100 to 105 or greater in many spots during the afternoon. Winds are from the west around 10 mph, with higher gusts. There’s a slight chance of a late-day storm, mainly south of the area.
Pollen update: Mold spores are moderate/high. Tree pollen is low/moderate. Grass and weed pollen are low.
Heat advisory: The National Weather Service has hoisted a heat advisory for eastern portions of our area Thursday as heat indexes head into dangerous territory.
“It will be very hot, with temperatures in the mid- to upper 90s, and dew points in the mid-60s to mid-70s,” they wrote in an afternoon discussion. The combination of heat and humidity will make it feel like 105-plus during the midday and afternoon along and east of Interstate 95. Even in the city, we should be close, so it’s not impossible the advisory is expanded in future updates. Heat indexes topping 100 are also possible west of the city.
During very hot days, limit outdoor activity, particularly in the midday and afternoon. Stay hydrated and check on any neighbors who may require assistance.
A Heat Advisory has been issued from King George County northeastward across the Baltimore metro area into Cecil County. This is in effect from 11 AM-8 PM on Thursday. Heat indices of 105-109 are expected, with the highest values over southern MD. #VAwx #MDwx pic.twitter.com/h6edYetOlm | 2022-07-20T21:10:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | PM Update: Heat advisory for parts of the area Thursday as temperatures rise - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/07/20/dc-area-forecast-heat-wave/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/07/20/dc-area-forecast-heat-wave/ |
Real stuff matters, because real stuff happens
A farmer harvests wheat in Culver, Kan., on June 29. (Arin Yoon/Bloomberg News)
Here’s a revealing economic fact from the astute market analysts at JPMorgan Asset Management: If you had invested $1,000 in a portfolio of “digital world” stocks — ride sharing, gaming, cybersecurity, crypto and the like — in June 2019, you’d have had $900 as of June 2022. That’s a 10 percent loss. By contrast, $1,000 invested in “real world” equities — oil and gas, minerals and agricultural products — would have turned into $1,700, a 70 percent gain.
Your digital-world equities would have thrilled you by more than doubling during the second half of 2020, as stock markets feasted on cheap money supplied by the Federal Reserve Board, remained at that level through 2021, and then plunged over the past six months as stimulus subsided. Meanwhile, the “real world” assets marched steadily upward, beating the broader market’s performance by a significant margin.
Advantage, stuff. Financial markets have “re-priced” assets to reflect both the insubstantiality of the many highflying business plans they were previously willing to fund and the indispensability of basic supplies, such as food and energy.
The lesson here is that stuff matters because stuff happens. Human beings have a hierarchy of needs, at the top of which are eating and staying warm, with internet gambling and video streaming a lot lower on the list. In a world of supply chains disrupted by unexpected events — the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — making stuff people can’t do without is good business.
There’s a corollary for countries and governments: It is wise policy to maintain a healthy margin of self-sufficiency in food and energy. Reliance on imports creates, as the author of the JPMorgan Asset Management report, Michael Cembalest, notes, “supply, price, currency stability and national security risk.”
Certainly, Vladimir Putin is banking on stuff — specifically, continued exports of oil, gas, grain and fertilizer — to sustain Russia despite efforts by the United States and Europe to cripple the Russian economy through sweeping trade and financial sanctions. The jury is still out on Putin’s strategy; for him, though, the inconclusive situation is already a victory of sorts, given the initial Western confidence that his regime would not be able to cope.
In fact, though Europe is trying to limit Russian oil and gas imports, its inability to do without them in the short run has turned into a significant weakness for countries such as Germany and Italy, and a source of leverage for Moscow. So has the dependence on Russian goods of Brazil (fertilizer) and South Africa (wheat) in the global south. India imports all of the above from Russia, as well as the ultimate tangible product: military weapons.
President Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, including his cringeworthy fist bump with that country’s dictator, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also exemplifies the power of stuff, in this case crude oil, of which the Saudis have the second-largest proven reserves in the world. Biden’s attempt to curry favor with a regime he once pledged to isolate shows what can happen, geopolitically, when a democratic country’s voters are unable to get their hands on a basic necessity — gasoline — at a price they can afford.
Nevertheless, the United States, for all its economic woes, is relatively well-positioned to weather the current crisis because it is generally more self-sufficient in food and energy than its peer nations.
This country remains the world’s tech, entertainment and finance leader. The collapse of “unicorns” and other speculative investment vehicles, while indicative of market froth, doesn’t negate all the goods and services of real value that Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street do create. The U.S. government provides one intangible — the world’s reserve currency — without which other countries find it hard to get along, as the dollar’s growing strength on foreign exchange markets suggests.
Speaking of control over stuff, and the political power it can confer: In the United States, food, energy and minerals originate disproportionately from red America, as the JPMorgan team illustrated with a map depicting all 50 states resized according to their respective 2021 production of these goods, upon which Blue American cities depend. Coal- and gas-rich West Virginia, home to Sen. Joe Manchin III (D), looks twice as big as New York; Texas swells to about triple California.
Accelerating the transition to greener energy remains crucial. Even so, the importance of stuff will not soon diminish. Indeed, green technology requires mineral inputs — such as lithium and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries. Much of that must be imported. Lithium is available from South America and Australia. Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the conflict-plagued Democratic Republic of Congo, often mined using child labor. Russia is the second-largest producer.
This country needs a strategy for a world in which geopolitics, as opposed to the free market, might increasingly determine how, and where, we and our democratic allies gain access to strategic materials. It’s time to get our stuff together. | 2022-07-20T21:31:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Real stuff matters, because real stuff happens - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/digital-assets-down-tangible-assets-up/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/digital-assets-down-tangible-assets-up/ |
Firefighters work to extinguish a blaze caused by Russian shelling near a monument to Ukraine's air force in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, on July 14. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)
Senior U.S. officials acknowledged Wednesday that the United States and its allies are considering whether to provide Ukraine with new fighter jets and the training needed to operate them, a move that would dramatically expand Western involvement in the war with Russia.
Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, said that although he would not speculate what type of aircraft might be transferred, discussions are ongoing about how to reinforce Ukraine’s fleet, including with new planes. The Ukrainian air force has been outgunned by Russia since the invasion began Feb. 24, sparingly flying an assortment of MiG jets and other Cold War-era planes.
“It’ll be something non-Russian, I can probably tell you that,” Brown said during an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “But I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be.”
The discussion marks a departure from earlier in the war, when the Biden administration ruled out facilitating a deal what would have sent some of Poland’s MiG fighters to Ukraine in exchange for U.S.-manufactured F-16s. Pentagon officials said in March that such a proposal was not “tenable” and raised the possibility that participating in the swap could exacerbate tensions. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that European allies had a “green light” to send planes to Ukraine, but that the United States wanted to avoid direct conflict with Russia.
“There’s been no decisions on any of that,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday during a news conference alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “But we do examine a wide variety of options, to include pilot training.”
Austin and Milley spoke with reporters following the latest meeting of international military leaders working to bolster Ukraine’s defenses, both in the near term and for what many foresee will be a years-long standoff with Russia. Austin indicated that, for now, the Biden administration’s priority remains the artillery war Ukraine’s troops are waging in the country’s east.
“Right now, we’re focused on helping them to be successful in the fight that they’re in, and employing the weapons systems they’re going to need to be successful in that fight,” he said. “In terms of predicting where we’re going to be with pilot training in months or years, I won’t venture to do that.”
Adding any modern fighter jets to Ukraine’s military would mark a massive upgrade. Ukrainian officials have, for months, sought ways to bolster the country’s air force, which has flown sparingly during the war and must maneuver around Russian surface-to-air missiles.
Brown, the top U.S. Air Force general, said the discussion is partly about “understanding where Ukraine wants to go and how we meet them where they are.” | 2022-07-20T21:36:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S., allies weigh providing Ukraine fighter jets to counter Russia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/ukraine-fighter-jets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/ukraine-fighter-jets/ |
Elrich, Blair again locked in battle for Montgomery County executive
The count of mail-in ballots goes on in the Democratic primary election for Montgomery County executive, which is shaping up to be a race between incumbent Marc Elrich, left, and Potomac businessman David Blair, right. (From left: Sarah L. Voisin; Katherine Frey//The Washington Post)
As a blistering rematch for Montgomery County executive between incumbent Marc Elrich and Potomac businessman David Blair winds down this week, the Democratic primary candidates are again stuck where they were four years ago: watching and waiting.
Elrich eked out a 77-vote win in 2018, looking to make his mark as the leader of the deep-blue county, where the primary victor typically prevails in November. This time he had a track record as executive to defend, and repeatedly found himself on the ropes in a contest that became increasingly negative as the July 19 primary election neared.
Blair had a slight edge Wednesday afternoon, but with tens of thousands mail-in ballots left to count, it will likely be days — if not weeks — before a winner is officially named.
“You just wait. Just kinda like last time, a lot of waiting,” Elrich said, “and a lot of small movements.”
Issues of affordable housing, development and land use animated the heavily funded race in Maryland’s most populous county, where residents divided over how growth should unfold faced competing visions of progress. The choice between Elrich, Blair and term-limited County Council member Hans Riemer (D-At Large) — whose policy platforms overlapped on many issues — largely centered on differing blueprints for development.
After early in-person voting and the tabulation of most Election Day ballots, Riemer was trailing his competitors, including robotics company executive Peter James, who’s earned only a small percentage of the vote. The winner of the primary will appear on the November ballot along with Republican primary winner Reardon Sullivan.
In 2018, it took nearly two weeks and a recount to declare Elrich the winner. An extended wait is again likely, thanks to a surge of mail-in votes that under Maryland law elections offices cannot begin counting until Thursday.
“This time around, the big difference is we have literally tens and tens of thousands of mail-in votes to count,” Blair said.
Elections workers at 10 a.m. Thursday will begin counting a volume of mail-in ballots that was nearly three times the roughly 10,000 received in 2018, as of Tuesday, Maryland State Board of Elections data shows.
Maryland accepts mail-in votes for 10 days after Tuesday, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Montgomery County voters requested nearly 115,000 mail-in ballots ahead of the primary.
“It’s almost deja vu,” Elrich said in a news conference Wednesday. “Except it’s not one night of counting. This is going to be, probably, 10 days or more before we actually know results.”
Montgomery County Board of Elections spokesman Gilberto Zelaya said thousands of additional ballots were collected Tuesday from the 55 ballot boxes around the county. He expected results would not be clear until next week — at the earliest.
“You know you don’t rush a heart surgeon while they’re operating. So we would do our due diligence to count our ballots,” Zelaya said. “The buzzword for the next two to three weeks is patience.”
Elrich won the county’s top elected position in 2018 in part because of the popularity of his wariness to rapid, widespread development, instead supporting slow growth to offset school overcrowding and traffic congestion. He emerged as the winner in the race between six Democrats, including Blair, and received just under 30 percent of the vote.
A former elementary school teacher, Elrich made his political debut on the Takoma Park City Council in 1987 before serving on the County Council for 12 years. He drove the county’s adoption of the $15 minimum wage — gaining him support from dozens of labor unions and organizations — and he’s been lauded by supporters for his leadership and response during the coronavirus pandemic, when Montgomery County became a leader in the country for its vaccination rates.
But Elrich has also been a divisive figure — drawing critics who say he’s stunting the county’s growth, especially with his positions on affordable housing and development. And many of his opponents turned to Blair’s private-sector experience for a fresh perspective. Blair said he learned from the 2018 race, started campaigning earlier this cycle and feels confident about the remaining results.
“We announced nine months before the election. This time, we were out significantly more,” Blair said. “We’ve had hundreds of meet-and-greets, and dozens and dozens of walking tours and coffees and conversations and your 40 different forms. And so we’ve been able to get out in front of the voters in a much bigger way than we did last time.”
Blair, who made millions by founding and running a prescription-benefits company, cast himself in the race as the pro-development candidate who “gets things done.” He’s pointed to his credentials as a former business executive and head of a nonprofit, which he founded in 2019 after his narrow loss to Elrich.
Blair also drew critics in both cycles for reaching into his own, deep pockets to fund his campaign. According to the most recent campaign finance reports, Blair has loaned his campaign a total of $4.8 million. He poured $5.4 million into his 2018 campaign.
Elrich raised over $1 million through the county’s public financing program, which allows candidates to receive matching funds for donations of $250 or less from county residents.
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the competition in the county executive and council races grew increasingly heated. At least two super PACs popped up to influence the race — one focused on affordable housing and aimed at driving votes away from Elrich, and another financially backed by real estate and development groups, which endorsed Blair along with a slate of council candidates.
The attacks in the race drew criticism from leaders and voters who said the influence of money added unnecessary confusion and intensity to the local races.
“Not much you can do when they’ve got that much money. That is a fundamental problem with politics when money becomes speech,” Elrich said in the conference, where he defended his record and said he felt confident about additional support coming from mail-in votes.
“I’m proud of the way I campaigned. I stayed out of the mud. It is what it is.” | 2022-07-20T22:02:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | David Blair, Marc Elrich again wait to see who'll lead Montgomery County - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/elrich-blair-primary-wait/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/elrich-blair-primary-wait/ |
Man charged with murder in 2021 Pr. George’s triple shooting
Two other victims were shot and survived their injuries, police said
A 37-year-old man has been charged with murder in a triple shooting from July 2021 in the Lewisdale area, Prince George’s County police said.
Reginald Howell Jr., of Silver Spring, is charged with first- and second-degree murder and related charges in the killing of Angel Olivares, 44, of Capitol Heights, police said. He is also charged with two counts each of attempted first- and second-degree murder in the shooting, according to online court records.
Howell is being held without bond at the county Department of Corrections, police said.
Police said that on July 31, 2021, officers found a crashed van about 3:20 a.m. in the 6700 block of 22nd Place. Olivares was in the driver’s seat with gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Two teens among six dead in weekend violence in Prince George’s
Two women also were found shot in the van and survived their injuries, police said.
Howell and the victims did not know each other and the motive is under investigation, police said.
It was not immediately clear whether Howell has an attorney. | 2022-07-20T22:02:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man charged with murder in 2021 Prince George's triple shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/man-charged-murder-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/man-charged-murder-prince-georges/ |
A team in Baltimore was responsible for the words that made the stunning photos accessible to everyone
This image released by NASA on July 12 was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (AP)
In the days since NASA publicly shared stunning images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, people have oohed and aahed. They have marveled at the breathtaking beauty of those photos and the significant lessons about the universe that might exist in those crisp cosmic details.
But it’s not only the photos that have wowed people.
Many have also been struck by the thoughtful descriptions that have accompanied them.
“If anyone ever tells you alt text isn’t important, show them @NASA’s alt text for the #WebbSpaceTelescope images,” Kate Meyers Emery tweeted. “They are able to convey the wonders and beauty of these in words, making these breathtaking views accessible.”
“This isn’t just a stunning picture from @NASA, it’s a brilliant example of how to use alt text,” the Royal National Institute of Blind People tweeted. “Do you agree?”
“It’s clear that the NASA digital team put a lot of thought and care into how they described the Webb Telescope images, and their descriptions feel like a love letter to space exploration and the infinite marvels of the universe,” Alexa Heinrich, of Accessible Social, wrote in an emailed newsletter. “Accessibility expands the world for everyone, making even distant stars attainable. It’s a beautiful thing indeed.”
The alt text feature on social media platforms allows a person to describe through words an image so that someone who is blind or visually impaired can use screen-reader technology to know what is being shown. In other words, it makes an image accessible to everyone. And in the case of the recent photos shared by NASA, it allowed everyone to know they were looking at celestial scenes bursting with colors and shapes.
NASA, of course, should have included those descriptions with its photos. That it did was not surprising. What proved unexpected was how poetically striking and scientifically accurate those descriptions ended up being.
“The image is divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion,” reads one. “Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest of these appear larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved with 8-point diffraction spikes. The upper portion of the image is bluish, and has wispy translucent cloudlike streaks rising from the nebula below.”
That description can be appreciated by someone who is blind or someone who wants to know more about astronomy or anyone who appreciates the care that goes into choosing just the right word.
If you don’t need alt text to interpret an image, it’s easy to look past that feature. But the conversations that the NASA photos have encouraged are important, because they show how little it takes to bring more people into an experience.
They are deaf and blind, and social distancing has now taken their ability to touch
The team that produced those descriptions works for the Space Telescope Science Institute out of Baltimore, and they have been paying attention to the response.
“It’s been really heartening to see how much this has touched people,” said Tim Rhue II, the principal informal education specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “It’s something that’s deeply personal to so many people. On top of that, we do it because we want to make astronomy accessible to everyone. It’s astronomy and dinosaurs that are gateways to science for so many people.”
A team that included writers, designers, scientists and educators worked together to put together the package of images the public saw, and the alt text was not an afterthought, Rhue said. He said the team had a relatively short period of time to produce those descriptions. He only saw the photos a week before the public did. But they had spent the previous two years discussing accessibility and working with a consulting agency to create an alt text stylebook. During that process, they practiced writing descriptions and learned what didn’t work.
“I had thought that brevity was a really important thing. That’s a common misconception,” Rhue said. He pointed to the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” and said the recent images required more words than that to fully capture them. “There were more than 1,000 words written about each of those pictures, and we could keep going.”
The extended descriptions and alt text for the images can be found by clicking on the gallery on the Webb Space Telescope website. One alt text begins: “Two views of the same object, the Southern Ring Nebula, are shown side by side. Both feature black backgrounds speckled with tiny bright stars and distant galaxies. Both show the planetary nebula as a misshapen oval that is slightly angled from top left to bottom right.”
Rhue said that the team has heard from the public through email, social media and the website, and that for him, the personal stories have been the most powerful.
👋 The alt text on the recent @NASAWebb first images posts were written by a small team at @stsci, including myself and @timrhueii. It was a collaboration between SMEs, scientists who focus on outreach, education specialists, and professional science writers.
— Kelly Lepo (@KellyLepo) July 13, 2022
“As a blind person who has had dreams of doing astronomy since I was 6 … thank you to whoever not only remembered to write alt text for this — but did so in such a beautiful way,” software developer and accessibility activist Katie Durden wrote on Twitter. “I’ll likely never know who you are. But you touched my heart this day, alt-text writer.”
After Kelly Lepo tweeted that she was a member of the “small team” at the Space Telescope Science Institute who created the alt text, Durden shared that tweet and wrote of having dreamed since childhood of being able to see the stars.
“Y’all brought me closer to that dream than ever with your alt text,” Durden wrote. “I don’t have the words to say thank you.” | 2022-07-20T22:02:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alt text proved unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/nasa-images-accessible-text/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/nasa-images-accessible-text/ |
NEW YORK — High diesel prices are driving up the cost of everything, from groceries to Amazon orders and furniture. That’s because nearly everything that’s delivered, whether by truck, rail or ship, uses diesel fuel. Truckers are turning down hauling jobs in the states with the most expensive diesel. They’re choosing lighter loads and in some cases working longer hours to make up for the money lost on fuel. Farmers harvesting hay and planting corn with diesel-fired tractors are taking a hit of thousands of dollars per week. And many of these high costs are passed down to consumers.
NEW YORK — Wall Street tacked more onto its big gains from a day earlier Wednesday, as more profit reports rolled in from U.S. companies. The S&P 500 rose 0.6%, a day after soaring 2.8% for its best day in weeks. The Nasdaq led the market with a 1.6% gain. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added a more modest 0.2%. Profit reporting season is ramping up for big companies, with more types of industries offering details about how high inflation and a possible recession are affecting their customers. A lot is riding on whether they can continue to deliver healthy profits.
DELTA, Utah — Developers in rural Utah who want to create big underground caverns to store hydrogen fuel won approval for a $504 million federal loan this spring. They plan to convert the site of a 40-year-old coal plant to cleanly made hydrogen by 2045. The seasonal storage project is one of of several undertakings that could help determine how big a role hydrogen will play in providing reliable, carbon-free energy in the future. In Utah, it’s won support across the political spectrum. Officials hope efforts to transition the power plant to cleanly-made hydrogen could offset job loss in the declining coal industry.
CHICAGO — United Airlines says its latest quarterly profit is $329 million, thanks to summer vacationers who are packing airplanes. But United’s second-quarter profit fell short of Wall Street expectations. The airline is blaming the miss on jet fuel prices, which were higher than it was expecting. United says strong revenue trends are carrying over into the third quarter, with figures indicating higher average fares. United says it earned $1.43 per share in the second quarter. Analysts were looking for $1.85 per share.
OMAHA, Neb. — CSX delivered slightly better profit in the second quarter. That’s even though volume was flat and the railroad still struggled to handle all the goods companies wanted to ship because it is having a hard time hiring. The Jacksonville, Florida-based railroad said its profits grew 5% to $1.18 billion, or 54 cents per share. That’s up from $1.17 billion, or 52 cents per share, a year ago. Without a one-time gain, the railroad earned 50 cents per share. The results beat Wall Street expectations. CEO Jim Foote said CSX hasn’t been able to keep up with all the demand for shipments because it needs more employees, but hiring is difficult. | 2022-07-20T22:06:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: High diesel prices, Tesla profits - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-high-diesel-prices-tesla-profits/2022/07/20/3f549db8-0874-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-high-diesel-prices-tesla-profits/2022/07/20/3f549db8-0874-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Taj Gibson has 13 seasons of NBA knowledge to pass on. (Nam Y. Huh/AP)
“My role at this stage in my career is just always stay ready, but at the same time be a great teammate, be a mentor,” he said in a teleconference Wednesday. “I’m just a team-first guy — I put the team first, and I’m really unselfish. I’m just looking forward to being around the guys, trying to give forth whatever I can to help a team be successful and win.”
But in Washington, he felt there was an opportunity to help nurture a roster still searching for consistency. Gibson will be the Wizards’ oldest player by more than five years, and he has 13 seasons of lessons to pass on. His career started with a hot season with the Bulls that landed him on the all-rookie first team in 2010. He’s played for four different organizations. He’s started, he’s come off the bench, he’s been traded and morphed into a locker room stalwart in his later years. He’s seen how Team USA prepares for the Olympics as a member of the national select team — the equivalent of the practice squad — before the London 2012 Games.
“What made me join the Wizards was … understanding they have a lot of talent, understanding it’s a young team still trying to figure out how to win games,” Gibson said. “I felt it was a good opportunity to go around some young guys that are talented, have a chance to actually do something in this league. It was a no-brainer.”
“Porzingis is a talent, and you’ve got Gafford — he’s a super young, athletic talent I’ve been watching since Arkansas,” Gibson said. “So just coming around those two guys, I’m not trying to tweak anything, really. I’m trying to come give that support, but at the same time, try to help them any way I can.” | 2022-07-20T22:08:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taj Gibson here to be mentor, help nurture younger Wizards - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/taj-gibson-wizards-mentor/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/taj-gibson-wizards-mentor/ |
Mural of Brittney Griner, other detained Americans unveiled in Georgetown
A new mural in Georgetown features Brittney Griner and other Americans detained abroad. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
A larger-than-life, black-and-white image of Brittney Griner, the WNBA and Team USA star, is part of a new mural that depicts Americans wrongfully detained around the world.
On Wednesday in Georgetown, the Bring Our Families Home Campaign unveiled the project, which highlights 18 U.S. citizens who are illegally detained by foreign governments. The project, designed by Ottumwa, Iowa, artist Isaac Campbell, spans the length of an alley off M Street NW near Wisconsin Avenue NW.
At the entrance of the alley is Griner, pictured with a soft smile meant to draw the viewer’s eye to the rest of the work. Wednesday marked 153 days that she has been detained in Russia on drug charges.
The unveiling came a day after President Biden signed an executive order declaring “hostage-taking and the wrongful detention of United States nationals and other persons abroad” a national emergency.
“I can never just see Brittney anymore,” Campbell said of the basketball star’s image being included with other detainees. The artist, 30, had been working on the project alongside the detainees’ families for about three months from his Iowa studio, but he first laid eyes on his wall canvas when he arrived in Washington on Sunday. That Griner’s smile and gaze are directed toward the rest of the group is by design, he said.
A new mural in Washington DC featuring @TheWNBPA member, @brittneygriner, has been unveiled by the @BOFHcampaign ❤️ #WeAreBG pic.twitter.com/G9ZP327un7
“I hope that the world will see them as a collective, rather than just as individuals,” he added.
No members of Griner’s family attended the unveiling — they were set to be honored at the ESPY awards in Los Angeles on Wednesday night — but the WNBA still made its presence felt. In town to play the Washington Mystics on Thursday, New York Liberty Coach Sandy Brondello and players Stefanie Dolson, Rebecca Allen, Sami Whitcomb, Jocelyn Willoughby and Marine Johannes were in attendance and stood with the families of the detainees.
The detainees’ families spent 11 hours Tuesday helping Campbell place the images on the wall. The Mystics’ Natasha Cloud and Elizabeth Williams were there to lend a hand.
“It’s unfortunate because [Griner] never should have been detained in the first place,” Bring Our Families Home Campaign spokesman Jonathan Franks said. “But there’s no question in my mind her detention has been game-changing for this issue, and it’s raised the profile.”
Speakers at the unveiling included Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger D. Carstens and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), whose constituent, businessman Kai Li, has been wrongfully detained by the Chinese government since 2016. Every family present was allowed to speak, including Roger Rusesabagina; his father, Paul, was the subject of the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda,” which explored the 1994 genocide in the country.
Paul Rusesabagina, a U.S. citizen, has been detained in the Rwandan capital of Kigali since August 2020 on terrorism charges stemming from his opposition to the government of President Paul Kagame. His image bookends the mural, on the other side of the wall from Griner’s.
“Why we have this mural here is just to keep [Paul’s] name in the news and everyone’s name in the news ... so that we can hopefully get our government officials and government to act and get everyone home,” Roger Rusesabagina said. | 2022-07-20T22:10:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brittney Griner mural highlights Americans wrongfully detained abroad - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/brittney-griner-mural-washington/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/brittney-griner-mural-washington/ |
Sept. 27 state funeral planned for Shinzo Abe
Japan is looking to hold a state funeral on Sept. 27 to honor former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated this month, Japanese news outlets reported Wednesday.
The event is expected to be a major gathering of current and former world leaders. Abe worked to increase Japan’s image and influence globally, and was the country’s longest-serving and most recognizable leader of the modern era.
It would be the second state funeral in postwar Japan since the 1967 death of Shigeru Yoshida and a break from past practice, in which ceremonies for former leaders have been jointly funded by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the Japanese cabinet. A state funeral would be fully taxpayer-funded.
Abe was killed July 8 after a man armed with a homemade weapon fired twice at him at a rally in Nara, near Osaka, ahead of this month’s upper house election.
The suspect, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, told law enforcement that he had a grudge against Abe and believed the former leader was connected to a religious organization to which Yamagami’s mother had donated much of her money. Later, the Unification Church confirmed his mother was a member.
— Michelle Ye Hee Lee
Oil exports resume after a lengthy hiatus
The resumption came after the country restarted production at oil fields following the firing of the chairman of the state-run oil corporation by one of Libya’s two rival governments.
A Malta-flagged tanker docked at the al-Sidra terminal to ship 1 million barrels of crude oil, the new leadership of the National Oil Corp. said. The vessel will then head to Italy, it said.
Last week, the NOC lifted a force majeure that was declared in April at several oil facilities after tribal leaders, aligned with powerful eastern-based commander Khalifa Hifter, shut them down. A force majeure is a legal maneuver that enables a company to get out of its contract obligations because of extraordinary circumstances.
Production was resumed Tuesday at several fields, including the country’s largest, after three months of closure, the NOC said.
Abdulhamid Dbeibah, prime minister of the Tripoli-based government, announced last week the sacking of the NOC chairman. He appointed Farhat Bengdara, a former governor of Libya’s central bank, to head the oil company.
Bengdara is known for his strong ties with Hifter, whose forces control Libya’s eastern and much of southern areas.
The appointment was seen as a move by Dbeibah to gain control over oil revenue and Hifter’s support in his rivalry with Fathi Bashagha, who was appointed prime minister by the east-based parliament in February.
Indian journalist released from jail: Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the Indian fact-checking website Alt News, was granted bail and released from jail more than three weeks after being detained for allegedly hurting religious sentiments through his tweets. Zubair was arrested last month by Delhi police over a 2018 tweet on charges of insulting Hindu religious beliefs. Police in Uttar Pradesh state later charged him in a separate case for using the term "hatemongers" for three Hindu monks who made inflammatory comments about Muslims. Zubair's arrest came after he highlighted comments by a now-suspended spokeswoman for the ruling national party about Islam's prophet Muhammad.
Mali expels U.N. spokesman: Mali's military government has given the spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping MINUSMA mission 72 hours to leave the country amid a standoff between the West African nation and Ivory Coast over the detention of 49 troops who came to Mali to support a security group contracted by the U.N. mission. Mali said the soldiers had arrived without permission. Ivory Coast said Mali had been informed. Mali has since suspended rotations for U.N. missions.
2 arrested in U.S. woman's gang rape in Pakistan: Pakistan's police arrested at least two people after a 21-year-old American woman reported she was gang-raped at a hotel in the eastern Punjab province, officials said. The detainees included the woman's host. Police said that the woman had arrived in Pakistan three weeks ago and that they are trying to determine how she was lured and taken to the hotel. The woman earlier stayed at the home of one of the alleged attackers for five days. | 2022-07-20T22:10:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: July 20, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-july-20-2022/2022/07/20/c3bc3450-0836-11ed-911b-f04803b1891b_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-july-20-2022/2022/07/20/c3bc3450-0836-11ed-911b-f04803b1891b_story.html |
Jimmy Garoppolo (10) has permission to seek a trade from the 49ers. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
The San Francisco 49ers have granted quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo’s representatives permission to explore trade possibilities, according to a person familiar with the situation.
When the Cleveland Browns traded quarterback Baker Mayfield to the Carolina Panthers earlier this month, Mayfield agreed to reduce his $18.858 million salary for the 2022 season by about $3.5 million. The Browns will pay about $10.5 million of Mayfield’s remaining salary, while the Panthers will pay approximately $5 million.
The Browns received a conditional fifth-round choice in the 2024 draft in the Mayfield trade. That pick can become a fourth-rounder based on Mayfield’s playing time with the Panthers. The 49ers may have to keep their expectations for a trade return for Garoppolo similarly modest.
“Jimmy G has been available for trade acquisition for the past six months,” former Green Bay Packers executive Andrew Brandt wrote Wednesday on Twitter after ESPN first reported the 49ers’ decision to grant permission for Garoppolo to seek a trade. “Hard to believe the 49ers think they can now get something for him that they couldn’t before.”
The Seattle Seahawks could still be in the market for a veteran quarterback after trading Russell Wilson to the Denver Broncos this offseason. They were linked to Mayfield in trade speculation before the Browns’ deal with the Panthers. But the 49ers might be wary of making a trade with an NFC West foe.
Jimmy G has been available for trade acquisition for the past six months.
Hard to believe the 49ers think they can now get something for him that they couldn't before.
The Browns already traded for Deshaun Watson this offseason, but he is facing a potential suspension under the NFL’s personal conduct policy. Cleveland added veteran quarterback Jacoby Brissett in March as a backup to Watson but could still need help at the position.
Garoppolo, 30, may be headed to his third team following stints with the New England Patriots and the 49ers. The 49ers traded up for the third overall selection in the 2021 draft and used it on Lance, but the rookie mostly remained on the sideline last season while Garoppolo retained the starting job. The 49ers reached the NFC title game before losing to the Los Angeles Rams.
The 49ers have played in two of the last three NFC championship games, reaching the Super Bowl in the 2019 season before losing to the Kansas City Chiefs. They have won 31 of the 45 regular season games that Garoppolo has started.
— Joe Banner (@JoeBanner13) July 20, 2022
Joe Banner, a former executive for the Browns and Philadelphia Eagles, wrote Wednesday on Twitter that there is “zero chance” of any team paying Garoppolo close to $25 million for this season, but added: “If he can stay healthy he will be a great acquisition for the right team.” | 2022-07-20T22:41:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 49ers give quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo permission to seek trade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/jimmy-garoppolo-49ers-trade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/20/jimmy-garoppolo-49ers-trade/ |
Silver Spring man charged with murder in 2021 shooting
A 37-year-old Silver Spring man has been charged with murder in the shooting of a man in Prince George’s County last summer.
County police announced Wednesday that they had arrested Reginald Howell Jr. and charged him with first- and second-degree murder and other charges. Howell is being held without bond at the county jail, police said.
Howell is accused of killing 44-year-old Angel Olivares of Capitol Heights on July 31, 2021.
Olivares died after he was found with a gunshot wound in the driver’s seat of a crashed van in the 6700 block of 22nd Place in Lewisdale, police said. Two other people in the van had also been shot but survived their injuries.
Detectives do not think Howell knew Olivares or the other two people who were shot, police said. | 2022-07-20T22:50:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Silver Spring man charged with murder in 2021 shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/silver-spring-man-charged-with-murder-2021-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/silver-spring-man-charged-with-murder-2021-shooting/ |
In little more than a day of testimony, the government called just two witnesses: a congressional staffer and an FBI agent
A clip of former president Donald Trump is played during a June hearing of the House’s Jan. 6 committee. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
The government rested its contempt of Congress case Wednesday against former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon after calling just two witnesses — a congressional staffer and an FBI agent — to describe the tough-talking podcaster’s alleged refusal to provide documents or testimony to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
Bannon’s legal team countered Wednesday by asking about a series of letters, some as recent as a week ago, between Bannon’s lawyer and the committee in which the prospect of his testimony was still discussed. The defense is trying to show that he didn’t refuse to cooperate, he was just negotiating.
Prosecutor: Bannon thumbed his nose at Congress, the law
M. Evan Corcoran, one of Bannon’s lawyers, also suggested that Bannon had been told by Donald Trump that the former president had invoked executive privilege — a legal claim meant to shield some of the president’s conversations from congressional inquiries.
But Amerling said both of those claims were specious, based on a mischaracterization of what executive privilege is, and how it works. “The president had not formally or informally invoked the privilege, even if you accept the premise that the privilege applied,” she testified.
U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols has previously said that it’s unclear if Trump ever invoked executive privilege. Also uncertain is whether a former president can claim such a privilege, let alone whether it would cover conversations with a non-government employee like Bannon.
In any case, Nichols has ruled that the privilege is not a valid defense for Bannon, unless he can show it caused him to misunderstand the subpoena’s October 2021 compliance deadlines.
Bannon’s defense strategy became clearer Wednesday, as his lawyers repeatedly suggested he and the committee were negotiating in late 2021 about information he might provide and continued to do so as recently as a week ago. The defense team also tried to show that the committee’s Democratic chairman, Bennie G. Thompson (Miss.), played a key — and political — role in the pursuit of Bannon.
On at least 15 occasions, Trump's choices escalated tensions that culminated in Capitol riot
Corcoran grilled Amerling over the process by which the subpoenas were served and the letters created, asking specifically which parts of the letters were penned by Thompson. Amerling said she couldn’t remember that level of detail, and that such letters were generally drafted by staff before being reviewed and signed by lawmakers.
“So you’re in a book club with the prosecutor in this case?” asked Corcoran. “We are,” replied Amerling, though she said hadn’t attended one of the gatherings in more than a year, and didn’t think she’d seen Gaston at a book club meeting in years.
Asked whether the book club talked about politics, Amerling replied, “The conversations cover a whole variety of topics. … It’s not unusual that we would talk about politics in some way or another.”
Amerling said under reexamination by prosecutors that she had never discussed Bannon’s case with Gaston and their acquaintance had no bearing on the committee’s action or the U.S. prosecution.
Prosecutors also called FBI special agent Stephen Hart to the stand to discuss his conversation in November 2021 with Costello, the lawyer who represented Bannon in his dealings with the committee, who may testify as a defense witness. | 2022-07-20T23:07:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bannon trial Wednesday: Prosecution calls FBI agent, Hill staffer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/bannon-witnesses-wednesday-trial/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/bannon-witnesses-wednesday-trial/ |
The move to enshrine protection for same-sex marriage offers an early window into how Democrats plan to solidify individual rights in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn abortion rights protections
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) walks in the New York City Pride March on June 26. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Senate Democrats on Wednesday signaled an eagerness to swiftly vote on legislation that would protect same-sex marriage, offering an early window into the party’s plans to solidify individual rights in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
The shifting terrain — with several Senate Republicans voicing support for the legislation a day after the House passed a similar bill with the support of 47 Republicans — came as a surprise to members of both parties and seemed to offer a rare pocket of bipartisan support in a political arena increasingly polarized on social issues.
White House officials suddenly saw an area where they could demonstrate action to a base that is frustrated and at times demoralized. After decades of not legislatively protecting federal abortion rights — saying the issue was a settled matter already decided by the courts — Democrats now see a way to protect same-sex marriage from potential legal challenges.
Republicans, on the other hand, have become increasingly animated around social and cultural issues — with extended debates over Dr. Seuss books and Mr. Potato Head, false claims of “grooming,” and legislation around bathrooms and school curriculum — but a portion of the party has determined that same-sex marriage is a rite that required defending.
It marks a shift for many in a party that has gone from staunch opponents to same-sex marriage in the early 2000s to indifference by the time it became law in 2015 to now outright supporters.
While the timing remains unclear, and prospects of passage are far from certain, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Wednesday that he is working to get enough Republicans to bring the legislation to the Senate floor. The Respect for Marriage Act, in addition to protecting the right of same-sex couples to marry, would also protect interracial marriage and repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman.
“This legislation was so important,” Schumer said in a Wednesday morning speech. “I was really impressed by how much bipartisan support it got in the House.”
While there is still opposition — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said it’s a “nonissue” — several Republican senators said they supported the effort and were working to convince their colleagues.
“I think it’s important,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who is retiring at the end of this term. In March 2013, Portman announced he supported same-sex marriage, a surprise decision that he reached two years after his son, Will, told him that he was gay.
“It’s the right policy, and I think it’s an important message to send,” Portman added. “I’ve been told by some of my Republican colleagues this morning, ‘It’s just a message bill.’ I said, ‘But it’s an important message.’ ”
Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) also indicated they would probably support the legislation, which was already co-sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). The four Republican senators speaking in support means Democrats would need six more to meet the 60-vote threshold required to avoid a filibuster, assuming all 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats vote in favor, as expected.
But it was clear on Wednesday that neither party was particularly prepared for the shifts in the debate, with both sides surprised at the level of Republican support in the House on Tuesday evening. For Democrats, it meant a chance at actually codifying same-sex marriage protections into law and not just having a political albatross to hang on Republicans.
For Republicans in the Senate, it meant a degree of scrambling to come up with a unified strategy.
They had initially thought they could simply dismiss the matter as a political exercise, but the 47 House Republicans — some from swing districts, others who rarely cross party lines — illustrated the political risks of not supporting an issue that has public opinion firmly on its side.
Some had also previously argued that legislative protections for same-sex marriage were unnecessary because it was settled law. But Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence to the ruling that overturned federal abortion protections in Roe v. Wade, wrote that there were future cases in which the court had a “duty to correct the error” of previous rulings, citing same-sex marriage among them. Those views were reinforced in recent days by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“He’s opened a lot of doors that no other justice has walked through,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said of the Thomas opinion.
Romney, who was governor of Massachusetts when the state became the first to legalize same-sex marriage even though he opposed the decision, said he hadn’t decided if he would support the Senate legislation.
“Clearly the legislation from the House is unnecessary given that fact that the law is the same,” he said. “We will take a look at it as it comes our way.”
Several Republicans asserted they had not yet read the legislation or claimed to be unaware of the House’s actions.
“I haven’t looked at it yet,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said.
“Did it pass? I haven’t even seen it yet,” Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) said.
Asked whether she supports same-sex marriage in general, Lummis said, “I haven’t seen the bill yet. I’m going to see what the bill says.”
Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb) said, “I haven’t looked at it,” when asked for any initial thoughts on the bill.
The House vote on same-sex marriage was the latest response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade amid heightened concern that other rights could also be restricted. The House last week codified access to reproductive rights protections that were delineated in Roe, and also granted protections to those who travel out of state to obtain an abortion. That measure only gained support from three Republicans.
The House on Thursday is scheduled to vote on the Right to Contraception Act, which would “protect a person’s ability to access contraceptives and to engage in contraception, and to protect a health care provider’s ability to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information related to contraception.”
House Republicans expect fewer from their caucus to support that legislation, with party leadership arguing that Democrats have crafted a bill that is too broad and rushed it to the floor.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — unlike other women in her party who have said such decisions should be left up to states — argued that the rollback of Roe v. Wade opens the door for Congress to consider questions about marriage equality and contraception.
“Those are things we should be protecting. We have an opportunity to, and we should be doing that because when you overturn a case like Roe v. Wade and look at the role of federalism, there is a role for Congress and the states,” she said about this week’s votes.
Mace voted in support of marriage equality Tuesday and hopes to vote in support of the contraception bill Thursday if the legislation doesn’t have “poison pills in it.”
The White House has been closely following the congressional actions and was tracking the positions of individual Senate Republicans on the same-sex marriage legislation. But White House officials were still trying to calibrate how much to get involved publicly, attempting to determine whether public pressure from President Biden would be an asset or a hindrance in securing more Republican votes.
“He is a proud champion for the right for people to marry whom they love and is grateful to see bipartisan support for that right,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. “He believes it is non-negotiable and the Senate should act swiftly to get this to the president’s desk. He wants to sign this. So we need this legislation, and we urge Congress to move as quickly as possible.”
She declined to say whether Biden was personally involved or would call senators and urge them to support the legislation.
But White House officials say same-sex marriage is a unique area among modern social-issue politics, one where Republicans are willing to move but not as an indication of other shifts.
In surveys done by Gallup, which has long tracked public opinion on same-sex marriage, support hit a new high this year, with 71 percent saying same-sex marriage should be recognized by the law as valid. In 1996, 27 percent said same-sex marriage should be recognized by the law as valid, and support has steadily climbed since.
Republican support for same-sex marriage has roughly doubled over the past decade in Gallup polls, reaching 55 percent in May. Support among those over age 65 — typically a group of reliable voters — has also increased significantly, from 39 percent in 2011 to 58 percent this year.
But on abortion rights, the trends have been far more consistent, with support still in the majority but not shifting dramatically.
This year, for example, Gallup found that 58 percent of Americans said they would not like to see Roe overturned — the same share that had that opinion in 1989.
In an annual measure that Gallup does on matters that Americans believe are “morally acceptable,” 92 percent in its most recent survey said birth control was morally acceptable, including 98 percent of liberals and 88 percent of conservatives. When Gallup first asked about the morality of birth control in 2012, 89 percent said it was morally acceptable.
Following the vote on Tuesday, several House Republicans explained their decisions in more detail.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) reflected on some of the shifts within both parties. As a state lawmaker in New York, she had voted against a bill legalizing same-sex marriage — a vote she came to regret.
“Over the past decade, I have attended two weddings of couples who deserve equal recognition and protection under the law,” she said, in explaining her decision to vote in favor of codifying same-sex marriage into federal law.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) defended his vote, saying he wanted to protect interracial marriages and alluding to problems that could come if marriages were nullified.
“Agree or disagree with same-sex marriage, my vote affirmed my long-held belief that Americans who enter into legal agreements deserve to live their lives without the threat that our federal government will dissolve what they‘ve built,” he said.
Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who voted in favor of protecting same-sex marriage but also criticized Democrats for rushing the legislation, put it more bluntly.
“I could give a rat’s caboose who somebody marries, relates with, falls in love with, anything else as a piece of it, their gender or anything else,” he said. “I wasn’t going to get mixed up in the politics of it.”
Emily Guskin and Scott Clement contributed to this report.
This just in: Ga. law banning most abortions in effect earlier than expected
9:18 PMThis just in: Jan. 6 committee chairs suggest Secret Service may have violated Federal Records Act | 2022-07-20T23:07:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate Democrats see hope for same-sex marriage vote - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/same-sex-marriage-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/20/same-sex-marriage-vote/ |
A traffic camera captures traffic at an intersection along Martin Luther King Jr. SE in D.C. on July 21, 2021. (Michael Blackshire/The Washington Post)
I could not agree more with the July 16 editorial “Making city streets unsafe.”
What seems to have been lost in the dialogue focusing on racial equity is the fact that driving a motor vehicle on public streets has always been a privilege — not a right. One has to be of a certain age and pass written and/or road tests before earning the privilege to operate a motor vehicle. The disadvantaged should not be given a pass when public safety is at issue.
John Perazich, Washington
Three cheers for the editorial, “Making city streets unsafe,” calling on D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to veto the unanimously approved though thoroughly ill-conceived legislation that would end the practice of preventing residents from renewing driver’s licenses if they owe more than $100 in unpaid fines.
I understand the council’s “thinking” that the financial burden of fines falls more heavily on our least-well-off neighbors. But instead of making the streets unsafe for all with the charming goal of alleviating income inequality, how about this: After three moving violations, the driver’s license is suspended, whether he or she pays the fine. (Take that, rich people!) And, if the driver is caught driving with a suspended license, then the car is impounded and sold.
As the father of a son who was killed by a negligent driver who had numerous traffic violations on his record, I can assure you that paying fines, or not, does not make someone a more careful driver.
Please, Ms. Bowser, follow the editorial’s advice.
Kevin McCormally, Washington | 2022-07-20T23:20:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Driving is a privilege, not a right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/driving-is-privilege-not-right/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/driving-is-privilege-not-right/ |
The ugliness of our border arrives in D.C.
U.S. Border Patrol agents process migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on June 24, in Yuma, Ariz. (Eric Thayer for The Washington Post)
Regarding “Months of sending migrant buses to D.C. is a cruel, political stunt,” Petula Dvorak’s July 15 Metro column about the terrible situation that illegal immigrants are enduring in D.C. once they arrive on buses from Texas and Arizona:
The situation of those illegal immigrants is exactly the same situation of the illegal immigrants who remained in Texas. The only difference is that we, who do not live in a border state, are now getting a taste of what the Americans who live in border states have been experiencing for a year: the scramble to help these people, the scramble to find shelter for them, to feed and clothe them, to find work for them, and then the cost of it all.
The cruel, political stunt is not the bus ride to D.C. but the fact that our government is allowing all these people who have crossed illegally into the United States to believe they will be taken care of. That is the ugliness of our border. Most of these people will not find the work they want or the safety they believe the United States will provide. They will live in the shadows and, with our economy heading downward, the work they want won’t be there for them.
What the Biden administrationis doing is not kind or compassionate but uncaring and heartless.
Marie Miller, Centreville
The hardships of immigration | 2022-07-20T23:20:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The ugliness of our border arrives in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/hardships-immigration/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/hardships-immigration/ |
Manchin’s interests run deep
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) speaks at the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies on June 7 on Capitol Hill. (Oliver Contreras for The Washington Post)
Regarding the July 17 news article “White House sidelined as Manchin again crushes Biden’s policy ambitions”:
As Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) single-handedly trashes congressional efforts to save the planet, there’s only one thing Americans need to know about him. He has one issue: protecting the interests of climate-busting coal and preserving his personal wealth. Between 2011 and 2020, Mr. Manchin made about $5 million from coal-related enterprises. He might raise other issues, such as “taxes” and “inflation,” to make himself look reasonable and cover up his singular focus on coal.
Sorry, Senator, you don’t get to decide for all of the American people that inflation, a worldwide phenomenon, is more important than taking the necessary steps to save a threatened planet.
If he wants to run the country, he should run for president. But then voters would find out he’s a coal baron, a one-hit wonder who is interested only in himself.
Donna Halvorsen, South Portland, Maine
Absent from the discussion on Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (D-W.Va.) opposition to legislation addressing climate change is the stunning reality that not one Republican senator of 50 has the courage to buck party discipline to save the planet.
In a cruel juxtaposition, prominent on the July 15 front page was an article about how thousands of tree and plant species face extinction from climate change [“Tree’s decline feared to be a climate omen”]. The mindless, irresponsible opposition of the Republican Party to fighting climate change is so accepted that it is not even discussed. Fine to write about that one Democratic senator who cannot be persuaded. But at the same time, don’t give a pass to the 50 Republicans who empower that one senator. How about an article asking each of the 50 Republicans to explain to their grandchildren how they can be so reckless?
Kenneth Gubin, Herndon | 2022-07-20T23:20:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Manchin’s interests run deep - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/manchins-interests-run-deep/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/manchins-interests-run-deep/ |
Only banks and certain financial firms subject to oversight could issue the digital tokens under a proposal that could get a House Financial Services committee vote as soon as next week.
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) listen at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in June. (Reuters/Mary F. Calvert)
Top House lawmakers are nearing bipartisan agreement on a proposal to regulate stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency frequently pegged to the dollar and the subject of intense scrutiny in Washington since last year.
The bill — the product of negotiations between House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the panel’s top Republican — would limit issuers of the digital tokens to banks and certain other financial firms that submit to federal oversight, according to people familiar with the process.
Those companies would need to need to fully back their stablecoins with highly liquid assets, such as cash or short-term government debt. And commercial firms would be barred from issuing stablecoins — a prohibition aimed at shutting down attempts to offer financial services by companies such as Facebook, which spent years trying to win regulatory approval for its own digital currency.
The bill’s text could be unveiled as soon as this week, and leaders are considering a July 27 markup, the people familiar with the process said. Spokespeople for Waters and McHenry did not respond to requests for comment.
In broad terms, the bill appears primed to follow the thrust of a Treasury Department report last fall recommending that bank regulators oversee stablecoin issuers, as opposed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices markets.
Biden administration calls on Congress to take the lead regulating stablecoins
But some advocates of stricter financial regulation said they are concerned about the emerging proposal. Steven Kelly, a research associate at the Yale Program on Financial Stability, said he is skeptical non-bank financial firms can safely issue the digital tokens, even if they are subject to federal supervision and required to maintain a capital cushion to protect against sudden shocks. “It’s either bank regulation or it isn’t,” he said. “If you’re calling regulations bank-like, you might as well say they’re bank-light.”
For now, stablecoins are used primarily by crypto investors to facilitate trades between digital currencies because they cut down on transaction times and costs. Regulators zeroed in on the tokens last year as their circulation climbed steeply, from $29 billion in circulation at the beginning of 2021 to roughly five times that amount by the end of the year. The trajectory suggested the digital tokens could one day pose a risk to the stability of the wider financial system, especially if the reserves backing them were too thin or illiquid to meet a sudden demand for redemptions.
The collapse of the stablecoin Terra in May helped crystallize those fears. The token — a so-called algorithmic stablecoin, because it relied on complex financial engineering rather than reserves of real-world assets to maintain its peg to the dollar — saw $40 billion worth of value vaporize in a matter of days, taking the savings of an untold number of retail investors along with it. It also set off a chain-reaction across the crypto economy that has prompted a series of failures of once high-flying firms. | 2022-07-20T23:37:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stablecoins would get federal supervision under emerging House deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/20/stablecoin-bill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/20/stablecoin-bill/ |
Survey finds nurses are leaving over coronavirus stress
Nurses leaving over coronavirus stress
A survey of 2,500 nurses released Wednesday found that 64 percent are looking to leave the health-care profession, a nearly 40 percent increase from a similar survey a year ago. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they have experienced burnout since the coronavirus pandemic began, and half said they had suffered feelings of trauma, extreme stress or post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Our nurses are the backbone of our health system,” said Dani Bowie, vice president of clinical strategy and transformation at Trusted Health, a health-care advocacy group that released the survey. “So, if they’re not operating out of their best state, it’s very detrimental to the well-being of our community and our patients.”
The pandemic has worsened the U.S. nursing shortage as overworked and ill-treated health-care workers have quit en masse. Half the nurses surveyed said they had been verbally attacked by patients or their family members; almost a quarter said they’d been physically assaulted.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts an annual average of 194,500 openings for registered nurses through 2030.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul (D) filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to force nearly 20 companies that he alleges contaminated the environment with chemicals known as PFAS to reimburse the state for investigations and cleanup efforts.
The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court, names 18 companies as defendants, including 3M, Tyco Fire Products and BASF.
The filing alleges the defendants knew or should have known that their products would have a dangerous impact on the public’s health and the environment.
3M communications manager Sean Lynch said in a statement that the company acted responsibly and will “vigorously defend its record of environmental stewardship.”
PFAS is an abbreviation for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The chemicals were developed as coatings to protect consumer goods from stains, water and corrosion.
Nonstick cookware, carpets and food packaging are among items that contain the chemicals. They also are an ingredient in firefighting foams.
Consumers rein in home-care purchases
Higher prices for personal and home-care items are finally driving consumers to buy less.
U.S. retail unit sales for items such as laundry detergent, shampoo and diapers fell in the three months through July 10 compared with a year earlier, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report citing data from the market researcher IRI. Volume declined for seven out of the nine categories tracked, with facial cosmetics and adult incontinence products being the only exceptions.
Consumer-goods giants including Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark have raised prices to counter higher costs for freight, labor and raw materials such as the pulp that goes into toilet paper.
Shoppers continue to spend, but the highest inflation since 1981 is making it harder to keep up.
Protests against a new California labor law that makes it harder for independent truckers to operate ground operations at the state’s third-busiest seaport to a virtual halt Wednesday, crimping a major artery in the U.S. supply chain. SSA Marine, which manages the largest terminal at the Port of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area, decided to close operations due to the independent trucker protest, port spokesman Robert Bernardo told Reuters. The other marine terminals are effectively shut down for trucks, said Bernardo, adding that some vessel labor operations are underway. The law, AB5, also known as the “gig worker” law, sets tougher standards for classifying workers as independent contractors. | 2022-07-20T23:38:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Survey finds nurses are leaving over coronavirus stress - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2022/07/20/e16d47bc-083d-11ed-9a88-9b2bc12f7753_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2022/07/20/e16d47bc-083d-11ed-9a88-9b2bc12f7753_story.html |
This encapsulates the dilemma for the Chinese government in coming to the aid of buyers in stalled housing projects. An effort to short-circuit the spread of mortgage boycotts risks fueling exactly the behavior it is trying to prevent. Authorities had little choice but to do something, given the rising market alarm, and their intervention sparked a relief rally in property and bank stocks Monday. Whether this marks a turning point or merely a pause before the next leg down in the real estate crisis remains to be seen.
The figures, on the face of things, suggest limited cause for concern. Affected loans amount to less than 0.01% of outstanding residential mortgages at most Chinese banks, according to Fitch Ratings. As much as 2 trillion yuan ($297 billion) of advances could be impacted, Bloomberg News reported GF Securities Co. as saying. Even that, which is a measure of assets rather than potential losses, is barely 5% of China’s 38.8 trillion yuan of total outstanding mortgages. If every buyer defaulted it would lead to a 388 billion yuan increase in nonperforming loans, Jefferies estimates.
That’s not to say the angst is misplaced. Anything but. After more than two years of living with the pandemic, everyone is more familiar with the implications of exponential growth rates. The mortgage boycott started in late June with a single China Evergrande Group project in the city of Jingdezhen. That became 28, then 58, then at least 100 developments in more than 50 cities by July 13. As of Sunday, the tally was at least 301 projects in about 91 cities. Capital Economics estimates that construction has been halted on around 13 million apartments in the past year, potentially affecting more than 4 trillion yuan in mortgage debt. Even if all this could be backstopped, there is no telling how such a loss of confidence might mutate and infect other parts of the financial system.
Just as troubling is the emergence of such non-payment tactics in the first place, a strain of behavior hitherto unknown in China. The country has long been assumed to be immune from the type of self-feeding mortgage spiral that drove the US subprime crisis. When you’re a fruit picker loaned 50 times your salary to buy a $750,000 house with no money down, it’s little trouble to walk away if the market turns south. The Chinese property market is a very different animal, with first-time buyers required to front 30% of the purchase price, at least until regulations were relaxed earlier this year.
When homeowners are laying out that much of their wealth to obtain a loan, it takes something catastrophic to get them to give up. In Hong Kong, which had similarly onerous down-payment rules prior to the Asian financial crisis, mortgage defaults stayed low even as home prices slumped by more than 60% starting in late 1997, with the delinquency rate peaking at 1.43% in 2001. In China’s second-tier cities, where the mortgage boycotts have been concentrated, prices of newly built homes are showing nothing like that scale of decline, though the trend is clearly negative.
Of course, the concern for the mortgage strikers isn’t the falling value of their investment but whether they will receive what they’ve paid for at all. With a record wave of developer defaults and home sales stuck in a prolonged slump, that’s a tangible fear. It’s hard to blame them for taking such a hardball approach. Beyond the desire to cut their losses or put pressure on property companies to deliver, some buyers may have their own cash-flow problems amid the economic downturn, said David Qu, a Hong Kong-based economist with Bloomberg Economics.
The wider behavioral consequences of the homebuyers’ revolt can only be guessed at. Property is by far the most important store of wealth for most Chinese owners and is central to the unwritten social contract that the Communist Party will guarantee ever-rising living standards in return for acquiescence to its rule. In the past, homeowners who bought in the earlier batches of a new project have been known to turn up and trash the sales office after the developer cuts prices for later tranches.
This is the paradox of this latest rescue measure. The financial distress afflicting the property market is a result of the government’s attempt to impose greater market discipline on developers and arrest the relentless buildup of leverage. Even if the victims may be deserving this time, intervention keeps China locked into a pattern of protecting investors from the consequences of market failure. That’s probably still better than letting their faith in the system implode.
• This Potemkin Property Tax Isn’t Going Anywhere: Matthew Brooker | 2022-07-20T23:38:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Property Crisis Traps China in a Market Paradox - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/property-crisis-traps-china-ina-market-paradox/2022/07/20/7dd95a7c-0880-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/property-crisis-traps-china-ina-market-paradox/2022/07/20/7dd95a7c-0880-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
NASA sets dates for return to the moon
NASA is planning to take the first step in its return to the moon in late August or early September with the launch of its Orion spacecraft to orbit around the moon, agency officials said Wednesday.
— Christian Davenport
Giuliani ordered to go before grand jury
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who became President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, was ordered to appear next month before a special grand jury investigating potential interference in Georgia’s 2020 election, according to a court filing.
Lawyers for Giuliani did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Fulton County district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
— Matthew Brown
Court allows abortion law to take effect
A federal appeals court overturned a lower-court ruling and allowed Georgia’s restrictive 2019 abortion law to take effect immediately Wednesday. The decision was expected after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to an abortion.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit said that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Mississippi case that overturned Roe v. Wade allows the law to take effect. U.S. Appeals Court Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr. wrote that the ruling in that case “makes clear no right to abortion exists under the Constitution, so Georgia may prohibit them.”
The National Abortion Federation listed 10 clinics that were providing surgical abortions in Georgia before the ruling. At least one clinic, in Savannah, had already closed following the Supreme Court ruling. | 2022-07-20T23:38:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NASA sets dates for return to the moon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2022/07/20/22f797d4-04ae-11ed-9282-2a7e062f9565_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2022/07/20/22f797d4-04ae-11ed-9282-2a7e062f9565_story.html |
FARGO, N.D. — A motion seeking to block enforcement of a so-called trigger law that would shut down North Dakota's lone abortion clinic should be denied because the law was administered properly and the lawsuit on the constitutionality of the ban is unlikely to succeed, the state attorney general’s office says. | 2022-07-20T23:39:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | North Dakota's lawyers say July 28 abortion ban should stick - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/north-dakotas-lawyers-say-july-28-abortion-ban-should-stick/2022/07/20/06010a56-0879-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/north-dakotas-lawyers-say-july-28-abortion-ban-should-stick/2022/07/20/06010a56-0879-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
The House committee investigating the Capitol attack expects to show portions of outtakes Thursday from remarks Trump delivered Jan. 7, when aides pressed him to repudiate the riot.
A clip of former president Donald Trump is played during a June hearing of the House’s Jan. 6 committee. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
One day after the last rioter had left the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s advisers urged him to give an address to the nation to condemn the violence, demand accountability for those who had stormed the halls of Congress and declare the 2020 election to be decided.
He struggled to do it. Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to called them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the committee’s work.
The public could get its first glimpse of outtakes from that recording Thursday night, when the Jan. 6 committee plans to offer a bold conclusion in its eighth hearing: Not only did Trump do nothing despite repeated entreaties by senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching it. He reluctantly condemned it — in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 — only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides told him that members of his own Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Committee aides on Wednesday dubbed the prime-time presentation the “187-minute hearing,” a reference to the period between Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 before protesters marched to the Capitol and his remarks late that afternoon from the Rose Garden urging the rioters to go home. The hearing will focus heavily on Trump’s inaction in the White House during that time, the aides said on a background call with reporters.
“The president didn’t tell his supporters to leave the Capitol and go home until 4:17 p.m.,” said one of the aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “We are going to remind people that there was this inaction at the White House.”
The hearing, whose chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), will attend remotely due to his recent covid diagnosis, is expected to clock in at just under two hours, the aide said.
The hearing is also expected to tie together details from prior hearings, including the inflammatory presidential rhetoric that drew thousands to Washington that day, Trump’s willingness to grant audiences to fringe figures peddling fabulist and unconstitutional theories on how he could keep hold of the presidency and the many times he was urged to intervene during the violence but refused to do so.
All of it points to one conclusion, which the committee plans to argue Thursday: Trump wanted the violence, he is responsible for it and his unwillingness to help end it amounts to a dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath of office.
“It’s very clear that watching this violence was part of the plan,” Luria said. “He wanted to see it unfold. And it wasn’t until he realized that it was not going to be successful that he finally stood up and said something.”
A Trump spokesman called the Jan. 6 investigation a “distraction” from Democrats’ “failures.”
“November is coming, and all the Democrats will have to show for their short term with a congressional majority is another investigation to nowhere, while the world burned,” said Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich.
On Tuesday, the former president posted on social media platform Truth Social that the committee — composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans — “is a Fraud and a disgrace to America. No due process, no cross examinations, no opposing witnesses, no nothing!”
But more recently, he has taken to speaking out on behalf of those arrested for involvement in the riot, bemoaning the “appalling persecution of political prisoners.”
Two live witnesses are planned for Thursday’s hearing: former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews and former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger. Both resigned following the events of Jan. 6, and both are expected to explain why. In addition, Matthews is expected to provide details of what she saw in the West Wing that day, including whether Trump knew the violence had broken out when he attacked his vice president, Mike Pence, in a 2:24 p.m. tweet.
Pence, as presiding officer in the Senate, refused Trump’s demands to reject the counting of the electoral college votes that day, arguing he was not empowered to do anything other than accept the votes of electors appointed by the states.
The committee will also show new clips of recorded testimony from Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel who made his first recorded appearance at last week’s hearing. Cipollone is expected to be shown saying he was among the White House aides who pushed back strenuously against unfounded theories of election fraud.
The committee plans to play recorded testimony of Cipollone describing his thoughts about Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6 as well as his dismay over Trump’s taped statement after the violence had begun to subside. In those comments, the president refused to read from prepared remarks but instead said to the rioters, after urging them to go home, “We love you. You’re very special.”
The committee is expected to show some of the entreaties in which he was begged him to act, and have witnesses describe others, people familiar with the matter said.
The committee also is planning to reveal that a significant period of time elapsed from the moment aides were instructed to set up a camera and microphone for those remarks to the time Trump actually spoke. The hearing will explore what happened at the White House later in the evening of Jan. 6, including Trump’s 6:01 p.m. tweet in which he expressed no remorse for the day’s violence.
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
The committee continues to address security concerns for both members and witnesses. Last week, Capitol Police began stationing officers outside the offices of all panel members. Committee staff remains concerned about the prospect of threats and intimidation aimed at witnesses, an aide told reporters Wednesday.
Luria and Kinzinger, both military veterans, will describe their loyalty to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, multiple individuals familiar with the committee’s work said. The commander in chief is obligated under the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — and Trump failed to do that, they expect to say.
Committee members have billed Thursday’s long-anticipated hearing — the second scheduled for prime time — as a finale of sorts that would pull together the evidence of the seven prior hearings to show how Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 result led to violence.
But with new evidence continuing to surface — and fresh investigation targets — committee members said this week that there are likely to be more hearings later this year. The committee is likely to focus intensely on the U.S. Secret Service’s apparent deletion of text messages on Jan. 6, the individuals said.
On Wednesday, committee leaders Thompson and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) issued a joint statement suggesting that the Secret Service may have violated the Federal Records Act by failing to preserve text messages from Jan. 6 during a system migration last year. “Every effort must be made to retrieve the lost data,” they said.
The question of how much Trump and his allies have fundraised off of — and profited from — election denialism is under discussion for its own hearing.
“There is no reason to assume this will be the final hearing,” one committee aide told reporters Wednesday.
Already, committee members are beginning to discuss what kinds of recommendations to prevent a recurrence of Jan. 6 will emerge from an investigation that has stretched over a year.
Among the possible recommendations, according to people with knowledge of those discussions: proposed changes to the Electoral Count Act, which a bipartisan group of senators has been negotiating for months, to remove ambiguity about the role of Congress or the vice president in counting electoral college votes; passing a law implementing the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment, which could pave the way to attempting to bar Trump from office in the future; new guidelines for emergency response in Washington; and stronger laws to police domestic terrorism and online behavior that induces violence. | 2022-07-20T23:59:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Even a day after Jan. 6, Trump balked at condemning the violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/even-day-after-jan-6-trump-balked-condemning-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/even-day-after-jan-6-trump-balked-condemning-violence/ |
Just as he’s weighing a bid for the presidency, Maryland primary voters sided with Trump and nominated someone who repudiates the governor’s brand of conservatism
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan arrived to vote early in the Maryland primary at Annapolis Middle School on July 7. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Wednesday morning was grim in Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s orbit.
As he travels the country to test his chances as a presidential contender who could lead the Republican Party in a more inclusive direction, voters in his home state repudiated the pragmatic conservatism Hogan is trying to sell. Instead of electing his handpicked protege, who espoused the themes he cherishes, they handed victory to Del. Dan Cox, a far-right candidate backed by former president Donald Trump whom Hogan labeled “a QAnon whack job.”
Cox, who questioned whether there was an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and has called public schools “indoctrination centers,” represents everything Hogan has railed against in his dozens of TV appearances positioning himself as a Republican alternative to Trump.
Maryland Republicans and national strategists described it as tough loss, evidence that Hogan’s influence may be waning in the party. That is, unless you’re talking to Larry Hogan himself, who doesn’t see a loss at all.
“There was no repudiation,” Hogan said in an interview. “I mean, I think I’m stronger than ever,” said noting recent polling that gave him high popularity in the state.
Republican strategist Bill Kristol, who once encouraged the second-term governor to challenge Trump in the 2020 primary, agreed that “Hogan is popular in Maryland.”
But he added, “Hoganism, I’m afraid, as of now, is not very popular within the Republican Party in Maryland. And frankly, it’s not popular across the country right now.”
If Hogan couldn’t convince primary voters who know him and like him to embrace his vision of appealing to moderates and independents to grow the Republican Party, strategists asked, how could he sell that to GOP primary voters who never met him?
Maryland House Minority Whip Haven N. Shoemaker Jr. (R-Carroll) said Hogan’s reign over Maryland Republicans seemed to end Tuesday.
“What we saw from the results yesterday is that there’s considerable Hogan fatigue amongst Republican primary voters in Maryland,” Shoemaker said. “A lot of it is vitriol that stems from the lockdowns that we saw during the global pandemic, and a lot of it stems from the invective that the governor directed at President Trump. You can’t win a Republican primary running from the left. And I think the results yesterday demonstrated that fact.”
Primary voters overlooked Hogan’s political mentee — former state commerce secretary Kelly Schulz — and instead elevated someone the governor has openly called “crazy”: Cox. The state lawmaker attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol and once called former vice president Mike Pence “a traitor” (though he later expressed regret for his language).
Cox tried to impeach Hogan over coronavirus restrictions and campaigned on auditing the 2020 presidential election, restricting abortion rights, excluding transgender athletes in female sports, and enhancing parental control over sex education and the teaching of race in public schools.
Hogan argued for Schulz, a longtime friend who hewed to Hogan’s electoral playbook of emphasizing crime reduction and pocketbook issues, saying Cox was certain to lose the governor’s mansion in November to Democrats in a deep-blue state only a moderate Republican could win.
Maryland Republicans picked Cox anyway, handing Hogan a loss in what was widely viewed as a proxy war between his vision of the party and Trump’s. When Trump rallied Cox supporters earlier this month, his pitch was that Hogan was “a lousy governor” and that “anybody he wants, frankly, I’d be against just on that basis alone.”
Kristol, as with other admirers of Hogan, said that “I don’t think last night was a disaster.” But he added: “I don’t think enough of the party is where he is right now. I don’t know if that changes in the future.”
Hogan said he hopes the party adapts. He cast Cox’s win as something of a partisan swindle pulled off by Democrats, who he said put their thumbs on the scale to elevate a fringe candidate who has no shot of winning in November.
“The far left was spending millions of dollars to promote, you know, conspiracy-theory-believing insurrectionists. That’s what happened,” he said, adding that his own name was not on the ballot.
“It really didn’t have much to do with me,” Hogan said. “It’s a huge loss for Maryland and the Republican Party and a big win for, you know, the national Democrats and the Democratic Governors Association.”
The DGA spent $2 million on television and mailers in the state promoting Cox’s ties to Trump — more than either GOP candidate spent. The DGA openly conceded it sees Maryland as its best shot to flip a governor’s mansion this year.
But Hogan’s argument isn’t holding water with everyone.
“I don’t really buy that,” Kristol said. “The main thing is that Trump endorsed Cox; let’s be real. … The ad’s pretty honest, and the ad says this guy, Cox, is a Trump supporter. If that’s what appeals to the Republican primary voters in Maryland, that’s what appeals to them.”
The other candidate Hogan enthusiastically endorsed, his daughter Jaymi Sterling, won her primary race for state’s attorney in St. Mary’s County, which voted for Trump by large margins in 2020. A mix of Hogan-endorsed and Trump-endorsed candidates won in down-ballot primaries across the state, including for congressional seats.
Despite winning two terms in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, Hogan has not demonstrated coattails. When he won reelection by 12 percentage points in 2018, the GOP lost three key county executive races and at least eight competitive General Assembly seats.
The Cook Political Report, which assess political races, reclassified the gubernatorial contest from “leans Democrat” to “solid Democrat,” after Cox’s win, skipping over the intermediate assessment of “likely Democrat.” And that’s without a definitive Democratic nominee. The race on that side is still too close to call among political newcomer Wes Moore, former U.S. labor secretary Tom Perez and Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot.
“It’s been proven time and time again. The way that Republicans can win in blue states is with moderate Republicans, not Trump-style Republicans in a state that the former president lost by 33 points,” said Jessica Taylor, an editor with Cook.
After Cox won, the DGA put out an advertisement using footage of Hogan’s sharp critiques of Cox to attack the new GOP nominee.
“I guess they must think I’m still pretty influential,” Hogan deadpanned.
Hogan said he will not support Cox in November, though pointedly said “no,” he would not campaign for the Democratic nominee instead.
Cox was not surprised.
“I would hope he would do his adult duty and support his Party’s nominee, but sadly we haven’t seen anything from him except false statements and comments that he feels alone in a lifeboat,” Cox said in a statement.
Doug Mayer, who was a deputy campaign manager for Hogan and a senior adviser to the Schulz campaign, deflected the implications of Cox’s win.
“It has nothing to do with Larry Hogan’s political future. At the end of the day, the governor will be proven 100 percent correct when Dan Cox loses in historic fashion. It’s as simple as that,” Mayer said. “There’s a decent amount of Maryland Republicans who don’t understand there’s a tidal wave of liberal insanity heading at them. And instead of battening down the hatches, they opened the front door.”
Hogan said he’s not deterred from his effort to persuade Republicans to emulate the party of Reagan. He still has stops in Iowa on his calendar for next month, though he has said he will not make a decision about running for president until after he leaves office in January.
“I’ve said for a long time there’s a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” Hogan said. “That battle is going to continue to go on for another couple of years. … And I, for one, am not going to stop.” | 2022-07-21T00:26:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hogan's GOP brand lost to Trump-style politics. He doesn't see defeat. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/larry-hogan-future-dan-cox/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/larry-hogan-future-dan-cox/ |
Man fatally shot in Prince George’s, police say
A man was fatally shot Wednesday morning in Prince George’s County, police said.
Officers responded about 10 a.m. for a reported shooting in the 3300 block of Walters Lane, located in the District Heights area, police said. A man was found with a gunshot wound and taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
No further details were immediately available Wednesday afternoon. An investigation is ongoing, police said. | 2022-07-21T00:26:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man fatally shot in Prince George's, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/man-fatal-shooting-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/man-fatal-shooting-prince-georges/ |
From just a handful of cases in Europe in early May, almost 15,000 cases, mostly in men, were reported across dozens of countries by mid-July, according to data collated by global.health. The WHO said five fatal cases have been reported, all in Africa. Experts told a WHO meeting that monkeypox had been circulating undetected in Europe since at least April. Preliminary research estimates that among cases who identify as men who have sex with men, the virus has a reproduction number greater than 1, which means more than one new infection is estimated to stem from a single case. A UK study found anonymous sex has proved to be a barrier to effective contact tracing, with only 28% of men able to provide the names of all recent sexual contacts. Data from outbreaks in Canada, Spain, Portugal, and the UK suggest venues where men have sex with multiple partners are helping to drive spread.
(Updates number of cases and deaths in section 5, need for wider vaccination in section 7.) | 2022-07-21T01:09:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Understanding Monkeypox and How Outbreaks Spread - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/understanding-monkeypox-and-how-outbreaks-spread/2022/07/20/d265a2b2-088f-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/understanding-monkeypox-and-how-outbreaks-spread/2022/07/20/d265a2b2-088f-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Prosecutor: Video evidence links teen to murder of man in wheelchair
The prosecutor played a clip in court that shows a gun being pointed out a vehicle’s window before the sound of gunfire. Defense attorneys argued it did not clearly connect the teen to the killing.
A D.C. prosecutor played a chilling cellphone video in court Wednesday that she argued shows a 15-year-old pointing a gun out the window of a stolen car just before he fatally shot a man sitting in a wheelchair outside his Northeast Washington home.
The video is key to prosecutors’ case against the teen, who was arrested and charged Tuesday with first-degree murder while armed and more than a half-dozen other criminal offenses in connection with the Jan. 18 fatal shooting of 19-year-old Devin Brewer. The new evidence emerged during a more than three-hour hearing in which prosecutors and defense attorneys sparred over the strength of the case.
Though defense attorneys argued the video did not clearly show the 15-year-old — and that it came from a shared cellphone — D.C. Superior Court Judge Sherri Beatty-Arthur ordered the teenager to be committed to the city’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Through his defense attorney, public defender Taylor Dodson, the teen entered a plea of “not involved.”
The Washington Post generally does not identify juveniles charged with crimes unless they are charged in adult court, and The Post was permitted to attend the hearing virtually on the condition that the identity of the teen — who is charged as a juvenile — was not made public.
The video, which lasted just over two minutes, was played twice for the judge. D.C. police detective Kiernan Speight testified that it had been retrieved from the teen’s cellphone, though the teen’s defense said that was far from proven.
During the video recording, the cellphone appears to be placed in the passenger seat and is recording the driver. Speight said that driver was the teen, talking to himself.
“Got them Heights. Spinning in the Heights,” the driver says. Speight told the judge that ‘Heights’ is jargon for the Lincoln Heights neighborhood, where Brewer was killed. Police believe the teen was in an ongoing feud with gangs in that area.
At one point in the video, the camera shows the dashboard and a clock displaying the time 7:58 p.m.
Seconds later, a black gun is pointed through the passenger window, and two muffled gunshots can be heard — though the camera at that point is not on the weapon. The detective testified that the city’s ShotSpotter recorded the gunshots at 7:59 p.m.
Someone then grabs the camera and looks into the phone, his masked face captured on a frame that freezes. Only the person’s eyes and lower forehead are visible. Speight said detectives believe that person is the teen.
Speight testified the teen’s eyes and eyebrows were distinctive, and the judge seemed to agree.
“To me as I sit here, there are distinctive characteristics about the eyebrow,” the judge said.
The detective said police also found in the phone text messages, which they believe show the teen bragging about the killing to a young girl. In one message, the teen says he “bagged” Brewer, using a nickname for him. When the girl asks how, the youth writes that he “shot” him, the messages show.
“He was driving around slowly, looking for a target,” prosecutor Stephanie Daigle said. “And then after the shooting, he began bragging, looking for some glory.”
Dodson, the teen’s defense attorney, argued there were no eyewitnesses or DNA evidence connecting the teen to Brewer’s killing, and two of police’s key cooperators had their own criminal cases in which they are seeking leniency in exchange for information.
She argued that at least two other people had access to the teen’s cellphone.
Beatty-Arthur acknowledged there were some “challenges” with the credibility of the two people who told police the teen killed Brewer, and conceded that other individuals could have had access to the teen’s cellphone. But she credited the cellphone video and the text message evidence in ordering the teen detained.
Law enforcement officials have told The Post that police also suspect the teen in the fatal shooting of 39-year-old Timothy Stewart, who was killed four days after Brewer as he was walking to a store in Northeast Washington.
The youth has not been charged in Stewart’s slaying, and it was not mentioned at the hearing Wednesday. Prosecutors have asked police to find additional evidence, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The teen was charged in June with 14 offenses not connected to the killings, including armed carjacking, armed robbery and receiving stolen property, and later pleaded guilty to lesser charges, including robbery, assault with a dangerous weapon and carrying a pistol without a license, according to information reviewed by The Post.
The teen is scheduled to be sentenced in that case on July 28. | 2022-07-21T01:09:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Prosecutor: Video evidence links teen to murder of man in wheelchair - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/video-teen-wheelchair-killing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/video-teen-wheelchair-killing/ |
Parents of Oxford school shooter seek to have case tossed
Jennifer and James Crumbley appear in court in February, charged with involuntary manslaughter after their son Ethan Crumbley allegedly killed four people at his school in November. (Paul Sancya/AP)
The parents of the alleged Oxford, Mich., school shooter want the state appeals court to throw out the criminal case against them, arguing that they never should have been charged because their son is the sole person responsible for killing four people.
Attorneys for James and Jennifer Crumbly filed a joint motion late Monday to the Michigan Court of Appeals to say prosecutors overreached by charging them with four counts each of involuntary manslaughter when they did not participate in the Nov. 30 shooting at Oxford High School that killed four people and injured seven. Their son Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time, is charged as an adult with murder and terrorism after the massacre at his school.
“If the prosecution could directly link Mr. or Mrs. Crumbley to the mass shooting, they would be prosecuted for first-degree murder as if they had directly committed the offense,” the motion read. “However, because the prosecution cannot support such a claim, they are left attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole.”
In addition to appealing their charges, the Crumbley’s lawyers filed to bar their son Ethan’s text messages, journals and emails from evidence should their case go to trial.
Ethan Crumbley’s parents quickly came under scrutiny as reports emerged of teen using a handgun his parents had purchased for him as an early Christmas gift, four days before the shooting. Social media posts showed that Jennifer Crumbley had recently taken her son to a shooting range.
Outrage at the Crumbleys grew in and around Oxford as investigators revealed other details, alleging that the gun had been stored in an unlocked drawer of their bedroom and that a day before the fatal shooting, a teacher spotted the teenage Crumbley using his cellphone to search for information on ammunition for a gun.
Jennifer Crumbley did not respond when the school left a via voice mail about her son’s “inappropriate” search, prosecutors said. Instead, she texted her son, “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”
Neither Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald’s office nor the defendants’ attorneys are allowed to comment on the case after the presiding judge issued a gag order last week.
After Michigan school shooting, experts question what could have prevented it
But the flurry of court filings since the Crumbleys were arrested in December already made each side’s arguments clear: Prosecutors say that the Crumbley’s behavior crossed the line of poor parenting into “gross negligence,” and that they did not secure the gun in their home and ignored chances to intervene in their son’s behavior. The defense says prosecutors are unfairly trying to make an example of parents who did not participate in their son’s alleged crime.
“It begs the question of when a parent will cross the subjective line of ‘good parenting’ and render himself or herself criminally liable for the independent acts of a teenager,” the Crumbleys’ motion read.
The defense cites a 1961 Michigan case in which a man gave his car keys to a friend he knew was drunk and the friend later crashed, killing himself and another driver. The Michigan Supreme Court ultimately reversed the defendant’s involuntary manslaughter conviction.
Why is it rare for parents of school shooting suspects to face charges? It’s ‘really hard,’ experts say.
The case against the Crumbleys has largely overshadowed the murder and terrorism case against their now-16-year-old son, who is being charged as an adult because of how unusual it is for parents or guardians of mass shooters to face charges.
“It’s really hard to show that parents have a disregard for human life, and that they could actually foresee their child doing this,” Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan who focuses on criminal procedure, told The Washington Post last year. “That’s why these charges are so rare.”
None has been criminally convicted in the United States, though victims may have better odds of seeking relief in civil court, where the standard of proof is lower. The Crumbleys are the subject of a lawsuit brought by victims’ families that includes their son, school district officials and teachers, according to the Oakland Press.
If the Michigan Court of Appeals takes no action on the motion, the couple’s case will head to trial on Oct. 24. The couple had unsuccessfully filed for a reduction in their $500,000 bond and a change of venue. | 2022-07-21T01:09:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | James and Jennifer Crumbley say involuntary manslaughter case should be tossed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/20/crumbley-parents-appeal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/20/crumbley-parents-appeal/ |
“La Venus,” one of more than 11,000 photos that Lourdes Grobet took of Mexico's lucha libre wrestling scene. The picture is from her 1981-2005 series “La Doble Lucha,” “The Double Struggle.” (Lourdes Grobet/Hammer Museum)
“Here I saw what I thought was real Mexican culture,” she recalled in an interview last year with AWARE, a Paris nonprofit that promotes female artists. “At this point in my photographs I didn’t want to depict a tedious, overdone vision of Mexico. But there, in the wrestling ring, I found the real Mexico. The organizers of the fights were annoyed with me at first, because they had never had a woman photographer doing what I was doing. But I told them how much I wanted and needed to be there, and eventually they understood and gave me a special permit.”
“I acted on impulse,” she explained, “and felt liberated by it afterwards.” | 2022-07-21T01:48:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lourdes Grobet, photographer of lucha libre’s masked stars, dies at 81 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/20/lucha-libre-photographer-lourdes-grobet-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/20/lucha-libre-photographer-lourdes-grobet-dead/ |
Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) listens as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol on July 12 (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The purged texts of Secret Service agents — some of whom planned President Donald Trump’s movements on Jan. 6 and shadowed Trump as he sought to overturn the election results — could shed light on what Trump was planning and saying.
On Wednesday, Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack issued a joint statement expressing concerns that the Secret Service phone system update led to the “erasure” of records — a possible violation of federal law — and that “every effort must be made to retrieve the lost data.”
“The U.S. Secret Service system migration process went forward on January 27, 2021, just three weeks after the attack on the Capitol in which the Vice President of the United States while under the protection of the Secret Service, was steps from a violent mob hunting for him,” the lawmakers said.
Agency officials said they found one text message, a call for help from U.S. Capitol Police to the Secret Service as Trump’s supporters ransacked the Capitol that day.
In the five-page letter, Secret Service Assistant Director Ronald L. Rowe Jr. told the committee that the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General in June 2021 asked them for text messages sent and received by 24 Secret Service officials around that time and that they “are currently unaware” of any lost texts. He wrote that officials are scrambling to find out if that is true, making “extensive efforts” to determine if the messages had been lost and “if so, whether such texts are recoverable.”
Officials are pulling “any available metadata” to determine what text messages the 24 employees, who have not been publicly identified, sent on Jan. 5 or 6, 2021, conducting “forensic examinations of any available devices” they used and interviewing them to see if the messages were stored somewhere the Secret Service hadn’t searched.
The Secret Service’s letter said it has, however, “disclosed voluminous amounts” of records to the OIG’s office.
The agency said it issued instructions to employees to preserve content on their phones and began the “migration” process two days later, on Jan. 27. The migration ended on April 1, 2021. But individual agents were allowed to decide which texts should be preserved, and the rest were wiped.
Even the accidental loss of information “should still be treated as a serious matter,” he said.
“These records are the story of the nation,” he said. “That’s the point of the Federal Records Act.”
The Secret Service’s claim that it can no longer recover reams of text messages agents exchanged days before and on the day of one of the most chilling attacks on democracy in American history has spurred a legion of information technology gurus and amateur sleuths to action. Some have taken to social media to dispute the Secret Service’s claim that the texts are forever lost — and are busy postulating about the potential ways to recover the lost texts. | 2022-07-21T01:57:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Secret Service text messages missing, but not forgotten - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/secret-service-national-archives/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/secret-service-national-archives/ |
Texas congressman faces blowback over blogger’s ‘Miss Frijoles’ attacks
Rep. Mayra Flores (R-Tex.) listens during a House committee hearing on threats to election security on Wednesday, July 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades)
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Tex.) is under fire after a political blogger who was paid for running ads for his campaign launched a series of racist attacks on his opponent, the first woman born in Mexico to be elected to Congress.
In numerous posts, Texas political blogger Jerry McHale called Rep. Mayra Flores (R-Tex.) “Miss Frijoles” and “Miss Enchiladas.” He also questioned claims that she worked in cotton fields with her Mexican immigrant parents as a child, calling her a “cotton pickin’ liar.”
The controversy draws attention to a contentious and Latino-heavy race for Texas’s 34th Congressional District, a majority-Hispanic seat along the border with Mexico where the GOP has made recent electoral gains in the historically blue region.
This comes as Republicans step up outreach efforts to court the Hispanic vote, with a growing number of Latino voters shifting to the right across the country, some experts say.
“This is about Texas becoming a more electoral competitive environment,” said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. With a national spotlight on Texas ahead of the midterm elections, both political parties will try to use “explosive moments” like this to their advantage, he added.
In a statement shared Tuesday on Twitter, Flores said she was “disgusted” that Gonzalez had hired “a ‘creepy blogger’ to run hateful & racist ads against me,” and to attack her “Mexican heritage and sexually degrade” her.
Gonzalez said in a statement to The Washington Post that his team “advertises on many platforms and have no control” over their editorial content.
“We do not pay for political attacks, and we will not be advertising on this platform again,” he said, adding that he condemned “the offensive remarks” on the platform, just as he has condemned Trump’s “racist rants calling Mexican rapists and murderers.”
“If only Rep. Flores had the courage to do the same,” he said.
NBC News first reported that Gonzalez’s campaign gave the McHale Report $1,200 in June for “advertising services,” according to the Federal Election Commission, as well as $1,000 in October last year.
McHale could not be reached immediately for comment Tuesday, but he defended his inflammatory rhetoric in a post Monday, when he suggested his remarks were “political satire” and questioned “when did frijoles became the equivalent of the ‘N’ word?”
Flores became the first Latina Republican sent to Congress from Texas after winning a special election last month, flipping the congressional seat from blue to red. She was elected to serve the remaining six months of retired Democratic congressman Filemon Vela’s term, and is now running in November against Gonzalez, a popular incumbent, for a full term.
Born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, Flores moved to Texas when she was a child. With a campaign slogan of “God, family, country,” she ran on a platform aimed at socially conservative Hispanics in the border city of Brownsville, including a tough stance on immigration, “securing the border” and lowering taxes.
A staunch supporter of former president Donald Trump, Flores has repeatedly blamed the Democratic Party for taking Hispanic voters for granted, and has gone as far as calling Democrats the “greatest threat America faces.”
She has also called for President Biden’s impeachment and has posted several tweets using the hashtag #QAnon, but she has denied ever supporting the conspiracy theory that says that the government and the media are led by Satan-worshiping elites who run a child-sex ring.
Flores fielded McHale’s attacks by drawing a comparison to first lady Jill Biden’s comments last week in which she said the Latino community of San Antonio was “unique as breakfast tacos.” The remarks prompted fierce backlash from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and others, who responded: “We are not tacos.”
Flores’s victory, along with candidacies of other right-wing Hispanic women running for Congress across the state’s four House districts that border Mexico, signals both a concerted effort by the Republican Party to make gains among Hispanic voters in this area and a growing trend of Latino voters shifting to the right in these southern districts, experts say.
“The Republicans have made an effort to change the narrative that they are not welcoming to the Hispanic vote in these districts,” said Blank.
But while the GOP has made real gains and increased its presence in the region, thanks in part to its efforts to recruit candidates like Flores, Blank argued that these voters represent a small percentage of the overall state Hispanic vote, which remains largely Democratic.
The controversy reflects the “wild and contentious” politics of Texas, said Cal Jilson, professor of political science at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In the 34th district, campaigns often “try to reduce their opponent to a laugh line,” he said.
“It’s all part of the serve-and-volley play of politics,” Jilson said. “The question is who serves next?” | 2022-07-21T02:05:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mayra Flores is accusing Rep. Vicente Gonzalez of funding racist ads - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/20/mayra-flores-mchale-report-racist/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/20/mayra-flores-mchale-report-racist/ |
The Virginia Democrat has her defining moment on the committee as she faces her toughest election yet
Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va), departs after speaking at a Nuclear Fuel Supply Forum on July 19 in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
It was the moment Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) evacuated her office on Jan. 6, 2021, after police found pipe bombs on Capitol Hill. A year later, on Jan. 6, 2022, it was the exact same time Luria announced her reelection campaign — unmistakably linking her bid for a third term representing a swing district on the Virginia coast to her service on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
Now, Luria is preparing for her most defining moment on the committee yet: At the committee’s finale of this summer’s series of hearings, she and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) will detail what former president Donald Trump did and didn’t do over 187 minutes as the U.S. Capitol was under attack, and as Luria and hundreds of colleagues took cover.
Their presentation is expected to squarely place the blame for the violence on Trump after his months of false claims of voter fraud and will examine his reluctance to condemn the attack — culminating in what the panel plans to describe as a dereliction of duty and violation of his oath. It’s an assignment that people involved with the committee’s work say Luria specifically sought — even as she gears up for her toughest reelection campaign yet in a district that got redder after redistricting.
Trump’s choices escalated tensions and set U.S. on path to Jan. 6, panel finds
But with an air of defiance, the former Navy commander has said she is unconcerned about any potential political consequences that her role in unspooling the former president’s inaction on Jan. 6 could have in her own political future — a message that, rather than whispered to confidants, she has put front and center in her campaign.
“Getting this right, getting the facts out there and making some change in the future so that this doesn’t happen again, it’s so much bigger than whether you’re reelected or not,” Luria said in an interview. “I don’t want to make my bid for reelection seem petty, but that’s inconsequential. Does that make sense? And if I win, it will be a very strong statement about the work of the committee.”
In a sense, Luria has positioned her campaign as a referendum on the committee’s work, almost daring Republicans to attack her over it — even though it’s unclear it’s a motivating issue for many voters in her district. This year’s midterm elections are more often viewed as a referendum on Democrats and President Biden, a political environment that bodes well for Luria’s Republican challenger, state Sen. Jen Kiggans (R-Virginia Beach) — who has sought to paint Luria as “out of touch” with voters for focusing on the Jan. 6 investigation.
Those dynamics make Luria somewhat of the Democratic version of fellow committee member Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) — at least without the abuse from her own party or the national star power.
With the exception of her looming prime-time role, Luria by contrast has largely done the grinding work of the committee from behind the scenes. Luria, who spent 20 years in the Navy, is more known in Congress for her tough questioning of Defense Department leaders on the House Armed Services Committee and her vast — at times head-spinning — knowledge of naval shipbuilding and capabilities, often joining Republicans to call for more top-line military spending. She was one of the first women in the Navy’s nuclear power program, a military career that Luria leveraged to win a race against former Republican congressman and Navy SEAL Scott Taylor to flip the seat blue in 2018.
Since then, Luria has largely stayed out of high-profile political spats, known as a lawmaker who eschews the kind of firebrand partisanship that has turned other lawmakers into viral sensations. In fact, her former two-time political rival, Taylor, described her persona as “bland” — and said that’s in part what made her a tougher competitor. “You’re like, what do you attack her for?” he said, recalling his first race against her in 2018; he lost a rematch in 2020.
“Elaine — how do I say it? — she’s not going to get on TV and say crazy stuff. She’s not like that. She’s quiet. She doesn’t get in trouble,” he said, noting the exception when she called a proposed stock-trading ban pushed by bipartisan lawmakers “bull----” earlier this year. But usually, “she’s fine. So I think that can be a strength for her.”
It was that same restrained demeanor that Luria’s colleagues, friends and others said they thought made Luria an ideal member of the committee investigating Jan. 6.
“She is the soul of reasonableness and moderation in all things, and I think she’s someone that the committee looks to as a voice for how what we’re doing will be experienced outside of the big metropolitan areas,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a fellow member of the committee. “She of course has this distinguished military background, and just a very quiet but fierce sense of patriotism and duty about what she does.”
Luria’s interest in serving on the committee is rooted in her service in the Navy, and she frequently connects her role to the oath she took in the military and as a member of Congress. It’s something she and her co-pilot in the hearing, Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran, share in common.
After the attack, as she considered seeking a spot on the committee, Luria said, “I thought to myself, you know, I was in the Navy for 20 years and you think about the oath, and it’s against all enemies foreign and domestic. And you think to yourself, you never really think that the domestic part — you never really think that you would have something like that in our own borders within our country.”
On the committee, Luria has become known for staking out one of the most aggressive postures toward Trump. And she has repeatedly noted the committee has a responsibility to refer criminal activity to the Justice Department if the evidence supports charges. Raskin said he was reticent at first to broach the possibility of criminal activity, noting the committee is not a prosecuting agency, which Luria has echoed. But he started to “feel persuaded by Elaine’s view that we should not be shy about stating the obvious when crimes are being revealed in our investigation — by whomever.”
“She was one of the first ones, really, to be so outspoken about it — as the weight of the evidence has become overwhelming, I think more and more of us have been speaking out,” he said.
Rosalin Mandelberg, Luria’s rabbi at Ohef Sholom Temple, said Luria’s decision to pursue a spot on the Jan. 6 committee reminded her of the stand Luria took in support of Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 despite possible political consequences — something Luria said was in part driven by her Jewish faith.
Luria had joined a group national-security-minded Democratic women to pen an op-ed calling for Trump’s impeachment. At the time, few Democrats — let alone Democrats in competitive districts — were going that far. Soon after, Luria appeared at a town hall in Virginia Beach and faced scrutiny over her decision, especially from Republicans in her district.
“People may say, ‘Why would you do that? You might not get reelected,’ ” Luria told the audience. “I don’t care. Because I did the right thing.”
Luria’s similar approach to joining the Jan. 6 committee “didn’t surprise me at all,” Mandelberg said. “She’s a true leader, but she’s also very, very much informed by her Jewish values. Her motto was something like, work hard, do the right thing — her whole being is that way.”
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), who attended the Naval Academy with Luria and joined the 2019 op-ed, said her colleague “feels strongly that they’re doing good work that’s going to keep this nation strong and make our democracy more resilient, and it’s really her duty, really, under the Constitution to do exactly what she’s doing.”
But Republicans in her district aren’t all likely to see it that way — if they are even watching the hearings.
Despite her prime-time role, Luria has yet to attract Trump’s wrath, something that political strategists say wouldn’t necessarily help the GOP in the military-heavy district that’s full of independents and swing voters.
The Virginia Beach-anchored district now tilts two points in the GOP’s favor after its boundaries were redrawn at the end of last year, according to analysis from the Cook Political Report. Biden just barely eked out a win in 2020, while Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) won it by double-digits last year.
Like Youngkin, Kiggans, Luria’s opponent, has appeared to tow a line between appeasing Trump’s base — she was among just a handful of Republicans in the state Senate to support an unsuccessful $70 million audit of the 2020 election, for example — but not beating the “stolen election” drum like more boisterous Trump allies, including the GOP primary opponent she trounced. Still, Kiggans avoids acknowledging Biden as a legitimate president, something Luria has seized on to attack Kiggans as an “election denier.”
When The Post first asked Kiggans in July 2021 if she thought Biden was legitimately elected, a spokesman called the question “insulting” and said Kiggans had acknowledged he was legitimately elected. More recently Kiggans has taken to saying that Biden “lives in the White House and I wish that he didn’t” — a statement she reiterated when asked in an interview to clarify if she believed Biden was legitimately elected. When asked in an interview late last month for a yes or no answer, she would not give one.
Trump's influence casts shadows in Virginia's 2nd district GOP race
She portrayed Luria’s work on the committee as a distraction, noting that inflation and gas prices have dominated her conversations with voters, not the Jan. 6 investigation. Indeed, at the polls on primary day last month, numerous Republican voters told The Post they did not realize Luria was on the committee or weren’t watching the hearings.
“I have said and will always say that those who broke the law on Jan. 6 should be held accountable, but I feel like this committee is really one-sided and is not focused on the economic crisis, which is what we have at hand,” Kiggans said. “The Democrats are trying to use shiny objects that are distractions from what every American — Democrats, Republicans, independents — are feeling in their pocketbooks.”
Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst at the Cook Political Report, doubted voters would be predicating their decisions to vote for or against Luria based on her service on the committee. If anything, he said, the impact on the race would likely be indirect.
“The reality is her service on the January 6 committee is unlikely to determine the outcome of the race,” Wasserman said. “Fundamentally, there is one base of voters watching the proceedings, and that is base Democrats. But her service raises her profile a little bit nationally in a way that could allow her to raise more money, and in turn that money can be used to beat Jen Kiggans on the airwaves.”
Luria has highlighted her service on the committee in fundraising emails — something national Republicans have attacked her for — and has raised nearly $6 million. In her first major ad of the general election, her service on the Jan. 6 committee was front and center.
The ad starts with clips of Luria taking the oath, for the first time as a 17-year-old entering the Navy, and closes with a scene from that 2019 town hall over Trump’s impeachment — recasting her defiant statement that she did not care about political consequences for her new role on the committee.
“Do you put our democracy before politics?” a closing message on the screen asked viewers.
The day before the hearing, Luria settled into her office and prepared for a rehearsal. She tried to remove herself, reading her prepared remarks as if for the first time, as somebody who might question why she was revisiting in such detail an event now a year and seven months in the past.
“The bottom line is the threat is still there, and I think of the committee as forward looking,” she said, adding that its goal “is to prevent this from happening in the future.”
When she makes that case on Thursday night, she said, her 12-year-old daughter will be watching.
Jim Morrison contributed to this report. | 2022-07-21T02:05:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rep. Elaine Luria prepares to lead Jan. 6 hearing blaming Trump for violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/elaine-luria-jan-6/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/elaine-luria-jan-6/ |
Concerned: You are right to understand how important it is to connect verbally with babies. Narrating your activities will acquaint your child with human speech and language. It’s also a good way to get through days that can be long and tiring.
I highly recommend the work of T. Berry Brazelton, whose compassionate and common-sense advice has influenced generations of thoughtful parents. Check him out on YouTube, and read his book: “Touchpoints-Birth to Three,” written with co-author Joshua Sparrow (2006, De Capo Lifelong Books).
Our 30-year-old son has been dating a lovely woman for three years and they are engaged to be married. We are a close-knit family.
Part of me worries that she is only making the effort to get to know me now — before they are married, so she can prove to our son that she is worthy. We are already so tired of hearing all about this wedding … this seems to be the biggest topic of conversation for her!
MOG: The way to be a good mother-in-law is to be understanding, nonjudgmental and open-minded. You should try to be available when asked, but not interfere.
Asking: It takes a level of bravery to be deeply honest, especially when you know you will upset someone you care about. I admire this kind of honesty. | 2022-07-21T04:11:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My partner mostly makes ‘nonsense sounds’ with our baby - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/21/ask-amy-baby-talk-language/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/21/ask-amy-baby-talk-language/ |
Hi Carolyn: My husband told me this week, in passing, that he had stopped taking his psychiatric medications. I was shocked. When I asked him about it, he said he had stopped taking them “some time ago,” and he didn’t really respond when I said that I would have liked to know.
He stopped taking them at his instigation but under the guidance of his psychiatrist, he says. He doesn’t understand why I’m upset or think I needed to know about this — to me, massive — change. I feel completely blindsided. How could one partner doing something like this NOT affect the other partner?!
I know his private medical information is his business, but I feel as if this should have been a topic of conversation between us when he made the decision. I should have been able to ask questions about what the side effects of this decision might be and what the end result was hoped to be, and I should have been kept in the loop. I feel utterly betrayed, but he seems to feel as if I had no right to expect him to share this information. How much of his business is my business? Am I overreacting?
— Shocked
Shocked: No. Oh my. His decision could have a significant effect on your life, not just his. You are also the person in the best position to keep an eye on any day-to-day developments with his health as a result — good or bad.
Take the health element out of it, and you still have a cool and dismissive blow to the intimacy of your marriage. If you’re arguing over “private medical information” and “no right to expect,” you’re talking like business partners, not life partners. Mayday, mayday.
I wish I had useful suggestions beyond, “Take this seriously,” but unfortunately, that’s the nature of acting unilaterally and withholding information from a spouse: It’s a power move that leaves the spouse on the outs. Ask him whether he did this out of frustration, because he felt better (i.e., the meds were working), or … ?
If he won’t engage, then cut right to counseling — solo, if you must. The National Alliance on Mental Illness can help, too, starting with its HelpLine, at nami.org.
Re: Meds: My significant other stopped taking their anti-depression medication without telling me. I found out because, after a rough few weeks, I gently suggested a dosage adjustment.
I got some guff about it being their choice, and I said: “But I also have choices, and I do not choose to live with untreated mental illness, so what’s next? Back on the meds? More exercise? A therapist?”
It wasn’t quite that cold, but we partners have choices, too. They picked exercise, which was fine. It was “doing nothing” that I couldn’t accept after having already logged a decade living alongside untreated depression.
— Partner
Partner: This is excellent, thank you. Though it means being ready for the “I do not choose to live with” part to have teeth.
More readers’ thoughts:
· The writer could call the psychiatrist: “Hubby just told me you took him off his meds. Obviously doctor-patient confidentiality prevents you from confirming, but I wanted to make you aware in case he had done it without your knowledge.”
· A friend went off his meds and didn’t tell his husband, who only fully realized the problem six months later, after my friend had blown through most of his money in a slow-motion mental health meltdown. My friend attempted suicide before finally getting medical help. It’s quite serious to go off meds, even when under a psychiatrist’s care, and a spouse definitely needs to know. | 2022-07-21T04:12:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Should he have told his spouse he stopped his psych meds? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/21/carolyn-hax-husband-stopped-medication/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/21/carolyn-hax-husband-stopped-medication/ |
It has been nearly 18 months since the Myanmar’s junta snuffed out its country’s fledgling democracy. The Feb. 1, 2021, military coup staged by Gen. Min Aung Hlaing led to the arrests and detention of hundreds of elected politicians, including the country’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. She remains jailed, and a nonviolent, pro-democracy protest movement that rose up in the wake of the military’s takeover has been battered down by security forces.
What has emerged since is all the more dangerous. The junta’s troops find themselves locked in battles with an array of ethnic militias that have long warred with Myanmar’s military, as well as the roughly 60,000 fighters of the People’s Defense Force (PDF), armed groups affiliated with the underground opposition National Unity Government. Analysts believe the coup-plotting regime is under duress, short on fresh recruits and unable to quell the rebellion it started after so abruptly halting the country’s democratic transition last year.
The fighting ebbs and flows on many fronts, ranging from Myanmar’s insurgency-riven borderlands to the rural heartland of the Bamar people — the country’s ethnic majority. It involves what analysts have cast as at least seven discrete conflicts that pit a thicket of factions against each other, from the junta’s army to well-equipped rebel ethnic militias to ragtag resistance guerrillas to pro-regime Buddhist extremist vigilantes.
Casualty counts are somewhat unclear, with independent access to much of the country impossible. U.N. officials believe that the junta has killed more than 2,000 civilians and arrested more than 14,000. Anti-regime forces have also allegedly carried out attacks on civilians believed to be abetting the military. The United Nations estimated last month that more than 700,000 people have been displaced since February 2021, adding to a population of nearly 350,000 people displaced before the coup.
How Myanmar’s military terrorized its people with weapons of war
The ongoing conflict in #Myanmar is best understood according to six warscapes, each with distinct power dynamics.
Find out more about the IISS Myanmar Conflict Map: https://t.co/PCJDok89qG pic.twitter.com/bvHMebHQIK
— IISS News (@IISS_org) June 26, 2022
Myanmar’s military has decades of experience fighting and suppressing insurgencies. But it is struggling to conduct a campaign against a shifting enemy, which in many instances has resorted to guerrilla tactics. In some areas of the country, the regime maintains little to no control beyond major provincial centers. The regime’s ranks are being thinned by defections and a paucity of fresh recruits.
The junta has deployed brutal, time-tested methods, noted Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations, including “archaic tactics of bombing villages, massacring civilians, and burning towns altogether all over the country” to flush out resistance. But, Kurlantzick added, “this hammer approach is not stopping the rebel groups. It has failed to overwhelm the PDF forces when it can, giving them further hope.”
This week, Amnesty International reported that the military had laid land mines around at least 20 villages in Kayah, a war-torn state near the border with Thailand where ethnic Karenni fighters have clashed with government troops. In a statement, the rights group called on the world to cut off the flow of weapons to the junta and described its actions as “abhorrent and cruel.”
They don’t seem to be effective, either. The generals “have certainly misjudged their own ability to resolve this; they are unable to consolidate power and have proven themselves inept at managing the economy and basic state functions,” Pete Vowles, Britain’s outgoing ambassador in Myanmar, told a local English-language publication last week, referring to the junta. “And it appears that they are more unpopular than ever.”
Myanmar junta vows to execute pro-democracy activists
The anti-regime forces are not exactly in the ascendancy, either. There’s minimal strategic coordination between the irregular PDF units out in the countryside, and a hodgepodge of local alliances between various anti-regime groups and the ethnic militias, some of whom are less invested in throwing the junta out of power than others.
“While they have no lack of enthusiastic recruits, [the PDF] have been unable to move beyond rural guerilla tactics,” wrote Ye Myo Hein and Lucas Myers of the Wilson Center. “The ethnic armies, with their better equipment and more reliable access to arms have performed somewhat better against junta offensives.”
In an interview this week, Duwa Lashi La, the acting president of the opposition National Unity Government, pointed to the gap between global solidarity for Ukraine and what has been mustered internationally for Myanmar’s pro-democracy rebellion, not least as the Kremlin also helps prop up the junta’s military.
“The world can clearly do more to support the people to defend themselves from atrocities and isolate the junta,” he told Asian geopolitical publication the Diplomat. “Just a small fraction of the support Ukraine has received would be an investment in us. That would help us end atrocities quickly, save many thousands of lives and bring forth a democratic Myanmar.”
According to the assessments of some representatives of anti-regime movements, it would not take much to definitively turn the tide of battle. “A supply of 50—100 Stinger-like missiles and a few thousand military-grade M4 automatic rifles would be enough for them to overthrow the military junta,” wrote Michael Martin, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Depending on which [ethnic militias] and PDFs were supplied weapons, the total cost could be well below $1 billion — a small fraction of the military aid the Biden administration is currently supplying Ukraine,” he said.
But there’s little international appetite to pump in more arms into an already dizzyingly complicated battlefield. Foreign officials who have recently traveled to the region, including Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have all urged cessation of hostilities and political dialogue.
“It’s unfortunately safe to say that we’ve seen no positive movement and on the contrary, we continue to see the repression of the Burmese people,” Blinken told reporters in Bangkok last week, using Myanmar’s former name of Burma. “We will continue to look for ways that we can, and other countries can, effectively put pressure on them to move back to the democratic path.” | 2022-07-21T04:12:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Myanmar’s military junta can’t win the civil war it started - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/mynanmar-junta-military-civil-war-coup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/mynanmar-junta-military-civil-war-coup/ |
Service members at a U.S. Army-organized exercise in Grafenwoehr, Germany. (Andreas Gebert/Reuters)
One soldier was killed and nine service members injured after a lightning strike at a military base in Georgia on Wednesday morning, a base spokeswoman said.
The incident occurred at around 11:10 a.m., when the service members were conducting a field training exercise, said Anne Bowman, a public affairs officer for Fort Gordon. It wasn’t immediately clear if the troops were directly struck by lightning, or if lightning had struck a nearby generator, she said, adding that there were other possibilities. Weather data suggest it was probably raining or cloudy at the time of the incident.
The personnel were treated at the Eisenhower Army Medical Center and one of the soldiers later died. The medical center declined to comment and Bowman said she couldn’t release the names or units of the involved service members. The Army has a policy of not releasing casualty details to the public until a soldier’s family has been notified.
“Hopefully by noon tomorrow we’ll have more information,” Bowman said on the phone.
Fort Gordon is located about ten miles west of downtown Augusta, Ga., which is near the border with South Carolina. It largely houses Army units, and hosts some 80,000 people, including 16,000 service members.
The military has lightning safety precautions in place. For instance, soldiers may be asked to remove tactical gear, to leave weapons on the ground and to maintain distances of up to 15 feet. Army manuals advise soldiers to remove objects that may “produce a metallic upward projection, such as a radio or rifle,” and to disperse to minimize the chances of multiple injuries from a strike.
But risk of lightning injury remains. In August 2015, the Army Ranger School was conducting the swamp phase of its training in Florida, with lightning lockdown procedures in place. But when a bolt struck a tree, spreading electrical currents throughout the wooded area, dozens of soldiers were injured, with 18 soldiers losing consciousness, according to a 2017 study published in the journal Military Medicine.
Don’t rely on folklore for lightning safety
The odds of getting hit by lightning in any given year are less than one in a million in the United States and the vast majority of people survive such strikes. But many service members spend more time outdoors than the general public and lightning fatalities are more common in the southeastern United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Florida, which the CDC calls America’s “lightning capital,” logged 79 strike-related deaths in the 2006-2021 period. Georgia has one of the highest lightning fatality tolls in the country, with 16 deaths during that period. July is the most dangerous month for lightning strikes in the United States. | 2022-07-21T04:42:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fort Gordon lightning strike leaves one soldier dead, others injured - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/fort-gordon-georgia-lightning-strike-soldier-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/fort-gordon-georgia-lightning-strike-soldier-dead/ |
Noah Lyles will attempt to defend his world title Tuesday night. (Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
EUGENE, Ore. — At the start line of his first race at the track and field world championships, on the night he turned 25, Noah Lyles placed his hand to his ear, demanding more noise from the Hayward Field crowd. He spun and waved his arms for fans to cheer louder. He screamed and flexed his muscles. About 20 seconds later, when he cruised over the finish line first in his heat, Lyles mimicked a crossover dribble and shot an imaginary finger roll at an imaginary basketball hoop.
“At the end of the day, I’m a performer,” Lyles said. “I like to have fun.”
After a tumultuous Olympic year that ended with a bronze medal he called “boring,” Lyles is having fun again. He arrived in Eugene as the defending world champion and, in his words, “the most me I’ve been in years.” The stadium is full; his brother, Josephus, is on the U.S. team; his mental outlook is brighter — and he has a new rival close on his heels.
Thursday night’s 200-meter showdown between Lyles, who attended T.C. Williams (now Alexandria City) High, and 18-year-old phenom Erriyon Knighton may be the most anticipated event of this meet. In April, a few months before he graduated high school, Knighton ran 200 meters in 19.49 seconds, which made him the fourth-fastest man ever and surpassed Lyles’s best time by 0.01 seconds. Last month, Lyles chased down Knighton at the U.S. championships and, as he edged him at the line, pointed across Knighton’s face at the clock — 19.67 for Lyles, 19.69 for Knighton.
Afterward, Lyles and Knighton stood shoulder-to-shoulder for an on-track interview with NBC.
“Job’s not finished,” Knighton said, stomping away. “It’s never finished.”
Lyles shouted in his direction, “Never finished!”
“I’m always here for competition,” Lyles said this week. “The fact that somebody has beaten my PR, no matter by how little margin, it gives me an incentive to step up. I’ve been waiting for the day when somebody has come to push me. We’re there. It’s happening.”
Ever the showman, Lyles embraces the rivalry with Knighton — but only for about 19½ seconds at a time. They both run for Adidas. At national meets, Lyles has offered Knighton advice about the business of track and field.
“It’s real chill,” Knighton said. “There’s no beef or nothing.”
“He’s got no weight to him yet, no pressure,” Lyles said last month. “It’s fun to race against somebody who doesn’t have pressure on their back yet. I remember those days. They were fun. … Now I have a world championship on my back and even an Olympic medal on my back. So I’m always going to be a target. It’s something I’ve got to deal with.”
It is possible Knighton’s presence has pushed Lyles. The latter won his semifinal Tuesday in 19.62 seconds, a surprising time for a preliminary round. It is more likely that Lyles’s recent excellence owes to the difference in this year and last.
As he prepared for Tokyo, Lyles opened up about his mental health struggles in the wake of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. He took antidepressants that affected his training. At the Olympics, he traveled without his support staff and lacked energy in an empty stadium — he loves to perform, but he had nobody to perform for. He entered as the favorite but finished third after barely making the final. Afterward, in an emotional outpouring, he cried as he said he wished Josephus had made the Olympics instead of him.
How Noah Lyles found peace after emotional Olympics
This year is “completely different,” Lyles said. He winnowed his inner circle, bringing the people he needed closer and pushing others out. Working with his therapist, he rediscovered his motivation. Rather than focusing on victory, he wants foremost to entertain.
“Just finding myself again,” he said. “Running for the reasons I wanted to run.”
At a U.S. relay camp last week, Lyles was eating lunch with Josephus. They turned professional together coming out of high school, a rare step for sprinters, and dreamed of competing on the same U.S. team. Lyles reflected on lonely meals in his sterile dorm room in Tokyo. “Dang, bro,” Noah told Josephus. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“It’s always better to have your brother there, your best friend,” Lyles said. “To everything he’s accomplished already, to be honest, it’s exactly what we’ve been waiting to see since we first turned pro.”
Elsewhere in Eugene, Wednesday night brought disappointment for a pair of U.S. champions. Reigning Olympic gold medalist Valarie Allman lost her grip on discus dominance to China’s Bin Feng, settling for bronze despite entering as the heavy favorite.
Allman became the first American woman to win a discus medal at a world championships, but three feet separated her from the prize she expected to win.
“It’s easy to lose perspective,” she said. “It’s an honor. ... It was bittersweet today. I feel that I had so much I could have shown today, and it would have been special to do it here at home.”
Donavan Brazier’s reign as the men’s 800-meter world champion ended as he faded to sixth in his preliminary heat during his attempt to atone for his stunning last-place finish at last summer’s Olympic trials.
Brazier deserved a gold medal for accountability. He was one of the most dominant athletes in the sport in 2019 and 2020, setting the American record at the 2019 world championships. Nagging injuries have derailed a career once headed for all-time status. He will undergo surgery to repair microtears in his Achilles’ tendon and shave down bone spurs in his heel.
“That’s no f---ing excuse for what happened out there,” Brazier said. “ … I looked terrible. It’s been two years since I looked halfway decent. Don’t by any means think I’m trying to blame it on that, because I’m not. Those guys were out there today are just better than me. There’s no other answer besides that. … I want to be the USA runner. I want to be the Allyson Felix, the Dalilah Muhammad — all them legendary athletes. I’m doing a poor job of that right now.”
To make matters worse, U.S. champion Bryce Hoppel finished fifth in his heat, and Jonah Koech was disqualified for jostling, leaving the United States with no runners in the final.
That certainly won’t be the case in the 200, even with Fred Kerley, who topped the 100-meter podium next to teammates Marvin Bracy-Williams and Trayvon Bromell, failing to qualify for the final after a quadriceps injury in his semifinal Tuesday; his agent said Wednesday that he won’t compete again at worlds. But Olympic silver medalist Kenny Bednarek qualified with the third-fastest time of the preliminary rounds. Reigning Olympic champion Andre De Grasse of Canada pulled out, owing to a slow recovery from a recent bout with the coronavirus.
Once the 200 ends, Lyles and Knighton are likely to join forces. Both could be chosen for the 4x100 relay, which the United States won at the previous world championships. The Americans also added to their slapstick Olympic history in Tokyo, dropping the baton in the qualifying round. The miscue probably cost Lyles, who would have run in the final, another Olympic medal.
Lyles may be back to running for reasons other than medals. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about them.
“All I’m going to say is — I’ve been saying this for years — when I’m on the relay, we ain’t losing. Point blank,” Lyles said. “And we might break the world record. Just saying.” | 2022-07-21T04:46:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Noah Lyles meets Erriyon Knighton in 200 meters at world championships - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/07/21/noah-lyles-200-erriyon-knighton-world-championships/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/07/21/noah-lyles-200-erriyon-knighton-world-championships/ |
Female cyclist fatally struck in Northwest Washington, police say
Shawn O’Donnell, 40, worked for the U.S. State Department and loved to travel, according to her mother
Shawn O'Donnell at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. (Courtesy of Mary O'Donnell)
When two uniformed police officers arrived at Mary O’Donnell’s door in Danville, Calif., on Wednesday, she said she knew what news they would bring, having served for 31 years in the military. She had seen a video of her daughter’s crushed bicycle stuck underneath a truck in Northwest Washington.
“Her bicycle looked like someone took tin foil and just crumbled it,” Mary O’Donnell said. “That is in my mind now, forever wondering — did my daughter know she was dying?”
Police said a truck driver struck and killed Shawn O’Donnell, 40, early Wednesday in Northwest Washington.
Mary O’Donnell said her daughter was on her routine bike ride to work at the U.S. State Department when she was killed.
The incident was reported about 8:09 a.m. at the intersection of 21st and I streets NW, in the area of George Washington University, police said. The driver of a Mack truck was traveling southbound in the 900 block of 21st Street NW, a one-way travel lane, and Shawn O’Donnell also was traveling southbound on the right side of the truck, according to police.
Police said when the driver of the Mack truck began to turn right onto I Street NW, Shawn O’Donnell “attempted to ride ahead” and was struck by the front passenger side of the truck. She suffered critical injuries and was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
The driver remained at the scene, said Officer Hugh Carew, a D.C. police spokesman. It was not immediately clear whether the driver would face charges.
Shawn O’Donnell grew up in Danville, a small town in Northern California, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she was an avid rower, her mother said.
She worked at Google before leaving to “make a difference” in the world through service, dedicating her time to working with refugees seeking asylum as a refugee officer with the Department of Homeland Security, Mary O’Donnell said.
She currently worked at the U.S. State Department as a Foreign Service officer, befitting of her passion for foreign languages, service and travel. She spoke Spanish, Arabic and Turkish.
Shawn O’Donnell had recently celebrated her 40th birthday on July 7, summitting Mount Kilimanjaro as part of her bucket list, her mother said. Mary O’Donnell said the two of them, alongside sister Shannon O’Donnell, were the “Three Musketeers” and loved to travel the world together.
Her death brings the total to at least three bicyclists killed in the District this year, according to city data. Last week, a bicyclist, 65-year-old Michael Gordon, was killed in a crash in the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest.
Mary O’Donnell said she will miss her daughter’s handmade Mother’s Day cards. She was her dancing partner and “selfless girl,” she said.
“The world lost out on Shawn because she was a bright light who had so much more to give and so much more to live,” she said. | 2022-07-21T05:38:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Female cyclist fatally struck in Northwest Washington - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/cyclist-dies-crash-northwest-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/cyclist-dies-crash-northwest-dc/ |
HARROGATE, ENGLAND - JULY 19: The dried out bed and reduced water levels in the Thruscross reservoir are partially depleted in the heatwave on July 19, 2022 in Harrogate, England. Yorkshire Water, the regional utility, warned residents to use water wisely during the heatwave, adding that the area has had below average rainfall since last autumn. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) (Photographer: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Europe)
What makes our current situation so unnerving is an outbreak of “non-simultaneity.” At least that’s what I recently heard Robert Habeck, Germany’s energy and commerce minister, tell a gathering of German industrialists.
At the exact same time, people like Habeck are trying to prepare Europeans for the opposite scenario in the winter months, when they’ll probably have to shiver in cooler homes and offices, because the whole continent will have to conserve natural gas that Russia, as part of its economic warfare, will no longer deliver.
In a circuitous way, these problems are connected. The heat waves are a consequence of climate change, which is caused by the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. That same dependence on oil, gas and coal also explains Europe’s vulnerability to Russia under its belligerent tyrant, President Vladimir Putin. For decades, he’s been building an infrastructure of pipelines so that Russia can, in terms of energy, take central and eastern Europe hostage.
Hence the tightening vise of non-simultaneity Habeck is now groaning about. He and his Greens campaigned for a radically accelerated exit from coal, oil and gas and a simultaneous gallop toward renewable energy sources. In their minds, they joined the government to save the planet.
Instead, Habeck is spending his first year in office negotiating with countries from Canada to Qatar to get more liquefied natural gas to replace the piped Russian sort. He’s commissioning floating LNG terminals to be ready by winter, and fixed ones on dry land for the longer term.
Habeck is also yelping from the unkindest cut of all. To get through this coming winter of energy shortages, he’s having to re-start the dirtiest power plants — those fired by coal.
So there it is, the nonsynchronous logic of 2022, embodied in one minister. The man wants to slow global warming but is dealing with local scorching and freezing now. He wants to get rid of coal but is instead firing up the old ovens now.
In the 1930s, having emigrated, Bloch tried to explain the rise of Nazism. Germany, he concluded, was a “classical land of non-simultaneity,” in which atavistic feudal traditions among the peasantry and former aristocracy continued to coexist with the capitalist institutions of the industrial age.
Because Germany had never had a successful revolution, Bloch thought, attitudes, worldviews and narratives from different eras lingered, causing confusion and mythmaking in the present. As he put it, “Not all people exist in the same Now.”
Whether the context is Bloch’s, Gibson’s or Habeck’s, non-simultaneity would appear to explain a lot about a lot these days. Take Russia and the European Union.
In the EU’s Now, international relations are today orderly and generally polite, hewing to post-modern and even post-national standards about respecting borders and rules. Putin’s Now is located in the 18th century, when imperialist tsars conquered as they could and might made right.
In today’s other Nows, there are people who believe that what matters is soft power, creativity, ideas and intangibles — while others are convinced the relevant measures are territory, guns and soldiers. There are those who want to save humanity from ecological suicide, while others deny the very science that tells us we have a problem.
Among New Age types, it’s become fashionable to swear by “The Power of Now,” as one bestselling title puts it. The past and future, the theory goes, are distractions our minds create to torment us. The path toward enlightenment is to recognize instead that the only thing real is the present moment.
That may work during meditation. The rest of the time, reality is messing with us by mixing pasts, futures and presents until we can’t agree on anything at all, except that there’s a lot to worry about. Who’s to blame for climate change, war, famine, even the pandemic? Where are we heading? And what do we do Now?
• When Jet and Gulf Streams Run Amok, We’re In For It: Andreas Kluth | 2022-07-21T05:43:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sweating While Worrying About Shivering - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/sweating-while-worrying-about-shivering/2022/07/21/cb0969fe-08b2-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/sweating-while-worrying-about-shivering/2022/07/21/cb0969fe-08b2-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Bloomberg Best of the Year 2019: Christine Lagarde, former managing director of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and incoming president of the European Central Bank (ECB), left, embraces Mario Draghi, outgoing president of the European Central Bank (ECB), during Drahgi’s farewell ceremony in Frankfurt, Germany, on Monday, Oct. 28, 2019. (Bloomberg)
It’s Hard To Be Lagarde...
Thursday brings the spotlight to Europe, and what could be a historically consequential meeting on monetary policy by the European Central Bank. It’s going to raise rates. But there is now some question over how much — 25 or 50 basis points? And the constraints have never looked tighter.
We all know that the world as a whole suffered from a pandemic, and is now suffering inflation in its aftermath. But the ECB has to deal with three pressures that don’t affect the Federal Reserve.
Italy and the Risk of Fragmentation
As of Wednesday, it appears that the resignation of Mario Draghi as Italy’s prime minister is at last a done deal. That amps up uncertainty, which in turn tends to amplify the spread between the yields on Italian and German bonds. This is a key measure of political risk, or specifically of the risk that the eurozone begins to fragment. The more aggressively the ECB chooses to hike, the greater the concerns over the Italian economy, so Italian yields rise by even more, taking the spread even higher. Italian political drama on the eve of a rate decision is thus as unwelcome a development as bank President Christine Lagarde and her colleagues could possibly imagine.
Whatever the ECB chooses to do, it’s going to have to produce good and convincing details on how it can stop this spread widening further. If there was any doubt over this, Italy’s latest political crisis has removed it.
Europe’s Banking System
Unlike the Fed, whose decisions on credit are generally refracted through markets, the ECB must contend primarily with the banking system. That’s a problem because Europe’s banks have been far weaker than those of the US ever since the Global Financial Crisis. And the latest edition of the ECB’s quarterly survey of senior lending officers at eurozone banks show that both the supply and the demand for credit are falling rapidly.
Most awkwardly for the ECB, the health of the banks tends to accentuate the fragmentation risks within the eurozone. This is the assessment by economists at Barclays Plc:
Credit conditions have continued tightening, and incrementally so in peripheral economies. The tightening in credit standards — now at their tightest level since 2012 — has been driven by increased risk-aversion, due to elevated uncertainty, and lower risk-tolerance as economic conditions are on a worsening trajectory. Across countries, credit standards have deteriorated in Italy, France, and Spain, while remaining unchanged in Germany. The results of the BLS provide further confirmation..: We expect a reversal of the decade-long monetary policy easiness to have an asymmetric impact across countries, especially acute in countries where the sovereign-debt nexus is strong (eg, Italy and Spain).
This chart from Barclays shows the pattern clearly. A rise means that credit standards have tightened (meaning the credit is harder to come by), and the chart also shows the different reasons given by banks for why they thought credit was tightening:
On top of all this, the ECB wants to start withdrawing its support for the banking system through the “TLTRO” (targeted longer-term refinancing operations) loans, with which it has been easing pressure on banks. The terms are generous and this makes sense — but again, Barclays warns that it could have greater impact in peripheral economies. In short, the banking system could multiply any monetary tightening to take it to a dangerous level.
Europe is not just waiting for the ECB to announce new interest rates; Thursday should also give some formal indication of how much energy Russia is prepared to provide, as maintenance work on the crucial Baltic Nord Stream pipeline is due to be completed. This is what has happened to the forward price of natural gas in Germany over the last two years:
The latest words as of Wednesday were not encouraging. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said the pipeline was reopening, but with conditions. As Bloomberg reported:
Putin made clear that if a pipeline part that was caught up in sanctions isn’t returned to Russia, then the link will only work at 20% of capacity as soon as next week — as that’s when another part that’s now in Russia needs to go for maintenance. After frantic diplomatic efforts by Germany, the turbine is on its way home from Canada.
The stakes are high. According to the International Monetary Fund, cutting off Russian energy could on its own cause the German economy to shrink by almost 5%. In a genuine cliffhanger, we must await dawn in central Europe on Thursday — roughly when this newsletter should be reaching you — to see how much gas is actually getting through. Late Wednesday, the head of Germany’s grid said that Russia had arranged for the pipeline to work at 30% capacity. Within a few hours of the pipeline moment of truth, the ECB will need to say what it’s doing about monetary policy.
Despite all of these constraints, the market, as measured by Bloomberg’s World Interest Rate Probabilities function, does see a very slight chance of a 50-basis-points hike in July, which would bring the ECB’s target rate up the heady heights of 0%. Meanwhile, the last week or so has seen a hardening in the belief that the rate will have risen beyond 1% by year’s end:
If the ECB really does go full hawk and hike by 50 basis points, we can expect the euro to surge well above parity with the dollar. If it doesn’t, and fails to offer a convincing plan to stop eurozone fragmentation, a dollar could be worth more than a euro for a while. It must be very hard to be Christine Lagarde.
Stocks have suffered a dreadful first half of the year, even though the US economy remains robust for now, and in recent days share prices have begun to show signs of life. That leads to the question that the kids tend to ask from about the second they get into the car: “Are we there yet?” I think the answer is: “Probably not, unless things break much better for the economy than seems likely at present.” But that hasn’t stopped any number of technical analysts and strategists weighing in on the issue over the last few days. Isabelle Lee has collected some of the more interesting prognoses:
Bespoke Financial:
One matter of excitement for technical analysts is that the S&P 500 has just broken its longest streak below its 50-day moving average since the GFC. Long streaks of trending downward used to be common — but not in the QE-dominated decade after the crisis:
How much significance should we attach to this? Some, but not that much. This is Bespoke’s conclusion:
For the S&P 500, the streak ending at 60 trading days was the longest since the 72-day streak ending all the way back in 2008, and it was just the 19th streak of 60 or more trading days in the post-WWII period. Now the S&P 500 just needs to work up enough strength to get back to its 200-DMA which is still 10.7% above yesterday’s close.
So the way a technician looks at this, the brutal headlong descent may have ended, but the market is still a long way from establishing a clear new upward trend.
Ned Davis Research:
Exploring whether stocks are now cheap enough to justify buying, Ned Davis comes up with a resounding “perhaps”:
Based on earnings yields alone, valuations have improved. As shown above, the trailing earnings yield for the All Country World Index has risen from a low of 3.3% to its current level of 6.1% while the ACWI’s forward earnings yield has risen from 4.8% to 7.1%. Both are above their medians since 2003, as shown in the chart’s box. While the improvement is encouraging, it may not be enough if it becomes increasingly evident that a global recession is developing.
Improvement is also evident when comparing earnings yields and bond yields, a relative valuation assessment indicating that equities are better valued. Among 41 MSCI indices, the median spread between a country’s earnings yield and its 10-year government bond yield is four percentage points. Up from a low of 2.1 percentage points last year, the spread has widened despite the bond yield uptrend over the period.This has been another hopeful development, especially now that bond yields have turned downward. But as with earnings yields alone, the improvement may not be enough if we’re entering a severe global recession, considering that the spread exceeded six percentage points at its extreme in 2020 and was more than eight percentage points at its high in 2009
Stocks are an undeniably better buy than they were. Unless you’re confident you can gauge the extent of the economic damage, however, they’re still not a clear buy.
There has been great excitement about market “breadth”; broad-based advances including the great majority of stocks inspire greater confidence than narrower advances. And this week saw the broadest advance for the S&P 500 (defined as the number of advancing stocks minus the number of decliners) since the day after Christmas in 2018, when there had just been a spectacular selloff:
Back at the end of 2018, the day of exceptional breadth proved to be a watershed, and the stock market went on a new rally. But LPL Financial prodded the breadth data a little more, and suggested that we need far more evidence before declaring a turn:
The next stage we would like to see would be some real signs of investor enthusiasm for buying stocks. For the most part over the past month, the data there has been lackluster. The best performing areas of the market have been oversold growth sectors, such as discretionary and technology, but defensives are close behind and cyclical value has been flat to lower over the time. In fact, 25% of stocks in the S&P 500 are actually lower than they were a month ago, and the percent of stocks up above their respective 200-day moving average has only nudged up slightly, from 13% then to 18% as of Monday. Not exactly impressive.
Analyzing their data on investors’ exposures, BofA found that large speculators had “their most aggressive, or contrarian bullish, net short in SPX futures as a percentage of open interest since the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic.” That means that the conditions are in place for a big rally if those speculators are given a good reason to think that they should get out of those positions. As BofA added:
Other major lows for this indicator occurred in late 2015/early 2016 and late 2011, which were near important market lows. The asset manager net long in SPX e-mini reached the lowest levels since 2016, 2015 and 2011 in late June.
So to summarize — the direction of the market, and its breadth, are both consistent with what we might expect to see if a major low were near, while the extreme negativity, shown in surveys as well as in positioning data, provides the fuel for a big bear market rally. But none of this is compelling enough to justify diving into the market with so much economic and geopolitical uncertainty around. The initial vertiginous phase of this bear market is over; we need far more evidence from the real world before we can tell whether the bear market itself is over.
In Britain, Conservative MPs have somehow managed to narrow their field down to two prime ministerial candidates who served at the top of Boris Johnson’s cabinet and who both did the same degree at the same university. While diverse in other important ways, this doesn’t augur well for avoiding groupthink in government, as I wrote here.
However, very strangely, this election looks as though it will end up being a crucial debate over how to run the economy, with a deep philosophical difference between Rishi Sunak — in favor of balancing the books, with tax hikes if necessary — and Liz Truss, who favors big spending and tax cuts combined with what she appears to suggest will be a much more hawkish monetary policy. This is the big differentiator between them, and it concerns by far the most important issue facing the country, so the British are likely to spend the rest of this hot summer watching a classic debate over the core principles of how to run an economy.
This is important. Economics always matters, but when it comes to political outcomes in recent decades other issues have tended to get in the way. The choices between Biden and Trump or Macron and Le Pen were far more dominated by cultural issues such as immigration than they were by economics. British politics for decades has been about Europe writ large. Now, we get to find out whether the 200,000 or so members of Britain’s Conservative Party, who tend also to be personally conservative, are more attracted by a bold libertarian expansion (a la Truss) which implicitly incorporates a Keynesian belief in spending money, or a traditional conservative attempt to avoid deficits.
Austerity, pursued with great enthusiasm in Britain under David Cameron, has been widely pilloried. Could this be the point when a long-brewing political transition is completed and a “left-wing” economic policy becomes the doctrine of a “right-wing” party? Republicans under Donald Trump did something similar to what Truss is suggesting by passing huge unfunded tax cuts (with the significant difference that monetary policy got very easy once things grew difficult). If Britain’s Conservatives also throw their weight in with this approach, it will begin to look as though the prevailing economic philosophy of the last four decades suddenly has no significant politicians ready to argue for it. It matters a lot.
Returning to British politics, it often makes me want to scream with frustration, but it’s always entertaining. This leadership campaign is already up there with such fictional excitements as Jim Hacker’s riding into Number 10 on the back of the British sausage in Yes, Prime Minister, or Malcolm Tucker’s profane delight in bringing down party leader Nicola Murray, and the departure of adviser Stewart Pearson in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant The Thick Of It. And then there was the original “House of Cards,” featuring a chief whip, Francis Urquhart, who was even nastier than Frank Underwood. Enjoy — British politicians are going to give us some light relief in a hot summer. More From Other Writers at Bloomberg:
• Property Crisis Traps China in a Market Paradox: Matthew Brooker
• Netflix Shouldn’t Take a Victory Lap Just Yet: Martin Peers | 2022-07-21T05:43:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The ECB Has More at Play — and Risk — Than the Fed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-ecb-has-more-at-play-and-risk-than-the-fed/2022/07/21/7eca86c6-08b3-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-ecb-has-more-at-play-and-risk-than-the-fed/2022/07/21/7eca86c6-08b3-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
People offer flowers at Tokyo’s Zojo-ji Temple, where the funeral of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was held July 12. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)
TOKYO — Since moving to Japan a year ago, I’ve stopped scanning large rooms the moment I enter to mentally devise an escape route in case of a shooting.
It’s a habit I developed living in the United States, where more than 20,000 people were killed by guns in 2021 — and one I’ve unlearned in Japan, a country of 125 million where just one person was killed in a shooting in 2021.
So when I saw an alert on my phone on July 8 while on my way to lunch that former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe had collapsed after two loud bangs were heard, my mind struggled to find an explanation. “Surely, it couldn’t have been a shooting,” I thought. “Maybe someone set off fireworks and he had a heart attack.” But then came alerts of bleeding and a gunman.
As I witnessed Japan grapple with the decidedly un-Japanese horror of a gunman’s attack, I realized how much my exposure to gun violence had colored my expectations of a country’s response to a shooting. The muscle memories from U.S. shootings kicked in, but I quickly learned they don’t quite apply on the other end of the spectrum of gun violence — the side where it almost never happens.
A decade ago was the first time I changed my plans because of a shooting. A gunman shot up a Colorado movie theater in 2012 during a midnight screening of the film “The Dark Knight Rises.” I had been looking forward to watching the movie in the theater but decided against it after that.
Later that year, a gunman killed elementary school students in Connecticut. Then a gunman opened fire in a church. A nightclub. A concert. A Walmart. A newsroom. Nowhere seemed safe anymore.
After extensive research, I mentally planned how I might flee a shooting. I have weighed the risks of playing dead and decided against it. I have decided I am neither brave nor strong enough to stop a gunman.
But Japan has one of the world’s lowest homicide rates. When high-profile violent attacks occur, they usually come in the form of stabbings and arson. Strict gun laws make it difficult to own and use a firearm. Ten people were shot in 2021, and eight of them were associated with the yakuza, the Japanese criminal syndicate. One person died in 2021 of a gun wound that was not self-inflicted, according to Japan’s National Police Agency. The same year in the United States, there were 20,957 people whose cause of death was homicide by firearm, according to provisional mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On top of that, there is a social contract built on the understanding that what you do affects another person, which shapes daily behaviors. Cabdrivers in Tokyo frequently warn me before they make a U-turn. I once saw a man pick up his dog’s poop, then crouch down to spray the area with a cleaner and wipe it down with a paper towel.
It doesn’t mean Japan is totally safe or pleasant, especially for women, girls and people in the LGBTQ community, who face sexual violence, harassment and discrimination. But the culture and low crime rate instill a sense of safety — especially for someone newly arrived from a country with a now-familiar cadence of mass shootings and a rise in violent attacks on Asian Americans.
The day Abe was assassinated, I learned how a country reacts when people are not constantly anticipating a shooting.
When the former leader was taken to the hospital without vital signs, I recalled covering the 2011 assassination attempt of then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot in the head at a constituent event. Japanese media were using a term that indicated Abe had little chance of survival. But I was hopeful, remembering inaccurate initial reports that Giffords had died.
But Giffords survived after she was treated by a uniquely qualified surgeon who specialized in trauma care, particularly in treating gun wounds. The chances of finding a doctor with such experience at the Nara Medical University Hospital were probably near zero.
Abe was pronounced dead that afternoon, and the hospital scheduled a news conference. In the United States, it would be typical for doctors or medical examiners to detail entry and exit wounds and the bullet’s trajectory.
But at the hospital, officials struggled to describe the cause of Abe’s heart failure. One of the doctors repeatedly said the wound reached the heart, which reporters eventually deciphered was a reference to a bullet hitting a main artery in his heart, leading to massive blood loss. I wondered when the staff there had last encountered a bullet wound, and how difficult that moment must have been for them, under the pressure of the national spotlight.
In the United States, there is usually a rush to find out whether active shooter protocols were followed, which inevitably turns into a debate over gun rights and control. But because the suspect in Abe’s killing used a homemade gun, there weren’t questions about proper permits. It was clear he was an outlier in a country where there are about 192,000 licensed firearms, or one for every 651 people.
In Japan, security around politicians is relaxed because of the relative safety. Events are often held in public spaces with minimal barriers. A day before his death, Abe had attended a campaign event where he made his way through a crowd, fist-bumping and taking selfies with constituents.
Nara police admitted there were security lapses, a focus of their investigation. But what are the appropriate active shooter prevention protocols in a country where such a threat is nearly nonexistent?
In America, news outlets are often criticized for moving on too quickly or triaging coverage because there are so many shootings. Last year, a few days after I landed in Atlanta to cover the aftermath of a gunman’s attack on Asian-owned spas, the news cycle moved on to a supermarket shooting in Colorado.
While Japanese mainstream media was quick to move on the next day out of concerns that coverage of Abe’s shooting at a political rally may influence the upcoming election, there has been extensive coverage since about the shooter’s motives. More than a week later, there is still social media chatter about the collective shock.
The day after the attack, as I watched Prime Minister Fumio Kishida deliver a speech at a political rally while barricaded from constituents, I wondered whether the precautions would last. An act by a lone gunman with a personal grudge does not necessarily portend a rise in gun violence in Japan. I wondered if I would feel less safe here; although I have lost my instinct to search for an exit, I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to live in a country where anywhere could be unsafe at any time.
A week after the shooting, I took a stroll through Shibuya Scramble, one of Tokyo’s most crowded shopping areas. In perhaps a sign of Japan’s enduring perception of safety, it didn’t even cross my mind to scan for a potential attacker.
Andrew Ba Tran contributed to this report. | 2022-07-21T07:15:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Watching Japan reckon with Shinzo Abe’s shooting as an American - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/japan-mass-shootings-shinzo-abe-gun-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/japan-mass-shootings-shinzo-abe-gun-violence/ |
Biden: U.S. military does not support Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan
President Biden arrives at the White House on July 20. (Oliver Contreras/AFP/Getty Images)
President Biden said the U.S. military does not support House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan this summer.
Stepping off Air Force One late Wednesday, Biden was asked about the possibility of a Pelosi trip, which has not been confirmed by the State Department or her office.
Biden said “the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now” but noted he wasn’t sure “what the status of it is.”
Pelosi’s office told The Washington Post earlier this week: “We do not confirm or deny international travel in advance due to long-standing security protocols.” The Financial Times first reported news of Pelosi’s trip, stating that she would visit Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Pelosi had planned to lead a congressional delegation to Taiwan in April but delayed her trip after contracting the coronavirus. A visit this summer would make her one of the most senior U.S. politicians to travel to Taiwan in recent years and the first House speaker to go there since Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) did so in 1997.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said this week the trip had not been announced and remained “hypothetical.”
Biden also told reporters that he expected to speak to China’s president, Xi Jinping, “within the next 10 days.” He demurred on whether he would raise the issue of tariffs and trade with the leader of the world’s second-largest economy, amid rising inflation in the United States.
Chinese-U.S. relations remain tense — and Taiwan is a sensitive issue.
“If the United States insists on going ahead, China will have to take firm and forceful measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Tuesday. Such a trip would cause “grave harm,” he added, and “seriously impact the political foundations of China-U.S. relations.”
Pelosi, who has been critical of China over its stance on Taiwan, met virtually in January with Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te, when he was in the United States. He thanked Pelosi for championing human rights and called her a “true friend” of Taiwan.
Beijing claims Taiwan as its own and has pledged to achieve what it calls “reunification,” threatening, if necessary, to use force to take control of the self-ruled island. The United States has for decades walked a fine line, not taking a position on the status of Taiwan’s sovereignty but asserting repeatedly that it opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo.
During his first trip to Asia as president in May, Biden signaled a more confrontational approach toward China and issued a sharp warning against any potential attack on Taiwan.
Asked at the time whether the United States would defend Taiwan militarily if it is attacked by Beijing, Biden said: “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.” His comment represented a departure from the usual U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity on the subject and was swiftly walked back by aides and criticized by Beijing at the time.
Taiwan has lived under military threat from Beijing since Communist forces defeated the Nationalists in the Chinese civil war in 1949, prompting the Nationalists to flee to Taiwan and set up a rival government.
Christian Shepherd and Missy Khamvongsa contributed to this report. | 2022-07-21T08:42:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden: U.S. military opposes Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/biden-china-nancy-pelosi-taiwan-military/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/biden-china-nancy-pelosi-taiwan-military/ |
Venus Williams, who played mixed doubles at Wimbledon this month, will compete in the Citi Open. (Alastair Grant/AP)
Seven-time Grand Slam champion Venus Williams chose Washington’s Citi Open to launch her return to singles competition after nearly a year’s hiatus, tournament organizers announced Thursday.
Williams, 42, who made her debut at No. 1 in the world in February 2002 at 21, will be making her debut in the Citi Open women’s event, which returns this summer after a three-year absence. It will be staged at Rock Creek Park Tennis Center alongside the Citi Open’s long-running men’s tournament July 30 to Aug. 7.
“I love Washington, D.C., and returning to the nation’s capital to play in front of a community that has supported me so strongly feels like a homecoming,” Williams, who competed for the Washington Kastles in World Team Tennis for nine seasons, said in a statement released by tournament officials. “I am looking forward to being back on the courts and competing in D.C. soon.”
Citi Open chairman Mark Ein said it was “a huge thrill” to welcome Williams to the tournament one year after Rafael Nadal made his Citi Open debut.
“Venus is obviously a tremendous champion who transcends tennis and even sports and a role model who touches a lot of people, especially in Washington,” Ein said. “Giving our fans a chance to see her live and in person in a tournament for the first time in Washington is a great thrill.”
After taking nearly a year off following a first-round defeat at a WTA event in Chicago last August, Williams returned to competition this month in mixed doubles, pairing with Jamie Murray at Wimbledon. Williams joins an impressive field for the Citi Open women’s event that includes reigning U.S. Open champion Emma Raducanu, American Jessica Pegula, 2017 U.S. Open champion Sloane Stephens and former top-ranked players Simona Halep and Victoria Azarenka.
Because the draw for the 32-player women’s field is closed, Williams was granted a wild-card entry. The following week, she plans to join sister Serena in the singles draw of the National Bank Open in Toronto (Aug. 6-14), the WTA announced Wednesday.
The Citi Open is the first ATP 500-level hard-court event contested in North America after Wimbledon, making it a popular event for top touring pros as they transition from grass to hard courts in advance of the U.S. Open, the season’s final Grand Slam event.
This year’s combined men’s and women’s Citi Open tournaments will include four former top-ranked players, seven Grand Slam champions and 10 players ranked in the world’s top 20.
The 48-player men’s field is headlined by former No. 1 Andy Murray, a three-time Grand Slam champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist; recent Wimbledon finalist Nick Kyrgios; eighth-ranked Andrey Rublev of Russia; the top-ranked American, No. 13 Taylor Fritz; No. 17 Reilly Opelka; and Hyattsville native Frances Tiafoe, who is ranked 29th.
The Citi Open women’s tournament will be held in conjunction with the men’s, with first-round matches getting underway Aug. 1 and both finals held Aug. 7.
The men’s tournament is a rung higher than the women’s event (a WTA 250) in terms of the size of its field and the ranking points and prize money at stake. But over the decade in which the Citi Open hosted a companion women’s event, before it was relocated, it drew strong fan support and attracted prominent fields.
Elena Rybakina, Wimbledon’s reigning champion, withdrew from the Citi Open, as have Canada’s Eugenie Bouchard and Kei Nishikori of Japan. | 2022-07-21T09:20:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Venus Williams to compete in Citi Open for first time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/21/venus-williams-citi-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/21/venus-williams-citi-open/ |
Susan Clark knew that print newspapers had lost ground to the Internet. But in her Connecticut hometown, “we just desperately needed a paper."
The second issue of Connecticut's Redding Sentinel is seen stacked on a newsstand. (Mark Rosenbloom)
Beware partisan ‘pink slime’ sites that pose as local news
“I wanted to see if the town would rally round a newspaper,” she said. The answer came back loud and clear: Yes, it would, even if the cover price was a hefty $3. (Part of her business model, she noted, is “not being afraid to charge a fair price.”) Subscribers and donors will cover 25 percent of the cost of publication; the rest will come from advertising. The Sentinel is delivered via the U.S. Mail.
Given the challenges, I asked Clark if she would encourage other would-be entrepreneurs to follow her lead.
“Absolutely, yes,” she told me, and then quickly qualified that. “If the conditions are right.” That’s a complex calculation: Are there enough advertisers? Is there a clearly perceived need in a community? Are freelancers available? Are you willing to be nonpartisan?
But she views what she is doing as a civic duty: the equivalent of serving on a town finance board or planning commission, both of which she did in the past.
And in the end, starting the Sentinel was a simple decision: “My hometown needed a newspaper, one that would provide a common set of facts and a ‘grounding’ of information specific to our town, so that we could make informed decisions.” | 2022-07-21T09:33:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Newspapers are dying? This digital media veteran launched one anyway. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/21/redding-sentinel-print-newspaper-media-future/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/21/redding-sentinel-print-newspaper-media-future/ |
The Didi on a smartphone in Shanghai. The ride-hailing giant has been fined more than $1 billion by Chinese regulators for data-security breaches. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)
China’s cybersecurity regulator fined ride-hailing juggernaut Didi Global $1.2 billion after a year-long probe, saying it had violated data security and personal information protection laws.
The Cyberspace Administration of China said Thursday that Didi illegally collected 12 million pieces of “screenshot information” from users’ mobile photo albums, excessively collected 107 million pieces of passenger facial recognition information and 1.4 million pieces of family relationship information, among other violations.
The regulator also said there were “severe security risks” in Didi’s data-processing methods, which would not be detailed because it related to national security.
“The evidence is conclusive,” the regulator said in a statement published online. “The circumstances are serious, the nature is immoral, and the punishment should be severe.”
China's Didi to delist from U.S. just months after ride-hailing firm's $4.4 billion offering
In addition to the fines on the company, Didi’s chairman Cheng Wei and president Jean Liu were each fined $148,000. Didi issued a statement on Thursday saying it accepted the judgment and would strengthen its protection of personal information, while stopping short of apologizing to customers or sharing details on what changes it would make.
“We sincerely thank the competent authorities for their inspection and guidance, and the public for their criticism and supervision,” Didi said.
The crackdown on Didi reflects Beijing’s alarm at the vast troves of personal data that internet companies are gathering, and the risk that it could leak overseas and undermine national security. Other Chinese internet giants have also come under official scrutiny, including Alibaba’s Ant Group, which saw its plans for a record IPO abruptly canceled in 2020.
Analysts say Chinese officials have been concerned that in Didi’s case, sensitive locations and personal information of important individuals could be leaked from its databases.
Such concerns are not without basis. Earlier this month, hackers claimed to have breached a Shanghai police database containing personal data of 1 billion people, which would be one of the largest such exposures in history if confirmed. The unnamed poster claimed the database was hosted by AliCloud, a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In China, escalating cost of business sends some companies to the exits
China’s personal information protection law also went into effect in November, shoring up the rights of Chinese consumers against excessive corporate tracking.
The trouble began for Didi a year ago. Just days after the company’s IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, China’s cyberspace administration announced a probe, saying the company “illegally collected and used users’ personal information.” The regulator ordered Didi’s ride-hailing app to be removed from Chinese app stores. Existing users could continue using the app, but the move torpedoed the company’s prospects for growth.
Didi’s American depositary shares closed at $3.49 on Wednesday, having slumped 79 percent from its opening price on its listing day. The company offers a ride-sharing platform similar to Uber, with the difference that riders can also use it to book regular taxis.
Didi’s investors voted in May to delist from the New York Stock Exchange, in hopes that a return home would help mollify Beijing regulators.
In its statement on Thursday, China’s Cyberspace Administration said Didi had illegally processed 64.7 billion pieces of personal information since its first violation in 2015. This included users’ age group information, home addresses, locations, driver education, and other data. | 2022-07-21T10:04:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China fines Didi $1.2 billion for illegally collecting app users' data - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/china-didi-fine-data-security/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/china-didi-fine-data-security/ |
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Want to curb traffic? Build homes near jobs and transit, COG leader says.
The director of the D.C. region’s council of governments says lower-income residents need more help to live near, and walk and cycle to, transit stations.
Chuck Bean, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), recently announced he plans to leave the position in February after more than 10 years. (Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments)
Chuck Bean has spent 10 years leading the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) as it has addressed safety problems on Metrorail, diversified the regional economy beyond a “government town” and endured a global pandemic.
Bean, 58, recently announced he will leave his position as COG’s executive director in February 2023 to travel with his wife, Betsy Howes-Bean, and volunteer.
Bean, who lives in Arlington, is unknown to many D.C.-area residents, but as liaison between COG’s 125 staffers and public officials representing 24 counties and cities, he has played a lead role in coordinating regional planning to improve transportation, combat climate change and encourage more housing construction.
He spoke with The Washington Post about how the region can help its transit systems recover from the pandemic, help residents in historically underserved communities better reach jobs and build an integrated network of electric vehicle charging stations. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’ve said Metrorail experienced serious safety problems shortly after you started at COG, such as frequent track fires, that led to the major SafeTrack rehabilitation program in 2016. Where do you think Metro stands now on safety issues?
Bean: I’m hopeful that in the next few months, by the time we get into the fall, we’ll have the 7000-series car problem resolved, the Silver Line’s Phase 2 will be open, and we’ll have new energy and synergy between the [Metro] board and the new general manager. All of those things are going in the right direction. One thing we did not have [before] was the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission. The idea of an independent safety oversight entity had floated around. One day I got a letter from the secretaries of transportation for Maryland and Virginia and the D.C. transportation director asking if we would use federal funding to create a safety commission. I think that’s one of my proudest achievements that COG realized during the last 10 years. I think we’re hearing more about safety, in part, because of the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission. I’m hopeful there will be good working relationships between the [commission] and Metro that will continue to improve safety in the next few years. Getting dedicated funding for Metro’s capital needs and creating the safety commission put Metro in a better place. It’s not entirely there yet, but Metro is in a much better place than even five years ago.
Q: How do you see the region’s transportation network, especially transit systems, recovering from the pandemic?
Bean: That’s the question for the 2020s. That’s the post-pandemic pivot. I think that question begins with an analysis of what are the implications of this much higher rate of people working from home? The question is, will these higher rates persist? … We have about 3.2 million jobs in the region. A little more than half of all these jobs are telework-ready, so that ballparks to 1.6 million workers in the region [who can telework] and now commute in two or three days a week. There’s less gravitational pull to the center core for these 1.6 million workers [who can move farther out]. … Metrorail ridership is coming back more slowly than many of us might have hoped for, but I think we’re now back to the highest rate, compared with pre-pandemic. Suburban transit ridership is going up at a much faster pace.
The uneven recovery of transportation modes in the Washington region
Q: Metrorail’s weekday ridership is still at about 42 percent of pre-pandemic levels. How do you see that recovering, or not?
Bean: I think the three things Metrorail can control that will contribute to its future are the return of the 7000 [series] cars, the completion of the Silver Line’s Phase 2 and a strong working relationship between the GM, Metro board and WMATA employees. The thing that’s beyond Metro’s control is the return of the commuter, because that’s what Metrorail focuses its bigger numbers on, specifically the return of the federal workforce. I don’t have an answer for how that’s going to play out. … I empathize with the federal government because I might talk about the post-pandemic pivot, but there are still unknowns that I think the federal government is trying to figure out.
With more workers on hybrid schedules, the pandemic-era commute might be changed forever
Q: COG has focused a lot during your tenure on increasing the supply of affordable housing. How does the region’s lack of affordable housing contribute to its traffic congestion?
Bean: A few years ago, we modeled various things that could be done to improve transportation and congestion. One of the things was to build more housing closer to jobs so that there’s more within a half-hour commute, rather than a two-hour commute. So if you want to improve transportation, one way is to improve the housing supply and the location of that housing. We’re essentially in a housing shortage right now. In the last few years, the region has not created enough housing for the increased population from the increase in jobs. There’s not enough housing within a half-hour commute, whether that’s by car or by transit, so people have to [live] further and further out. That just creates longer commutes and more congestion.
As workers make fewer trips to the office, commuter rail systems struggle to fill seats
Q: Last year, the COG board made its first regional commitment to prioritize equity in planning and investment decisions on issues like affordable housing, economic development and transportation. When and how did the greater focus on equity come about?
Bean: Our unified planning framework has a focus on housing, greenhouse gas emissions and optimizing transit. The fourth prong is equity, specifically equity emphasis areas. We looked at all 1,222 census tracts in the region to find concentrations of low-income communities and/or concentrations of communities of color. We came to focus on about 350 census tracts and developed a commitment that they needed to be emphasized and prioritized. We were doing that analysis. I would say it was galvanized by the racial reckoning of 2020, and a focus on equity came to the forefront. … These census tracts occupy just 10 percent of the region’s land mass — they’re a little bit more dense than the average census tract — but contain 30 percent of the region’s population. About 1.5 million people are in these census tracts. They’re like an acupuncture chart on equity. We need to focus on these areas and connect them.
D.C.-area leaders prioritize equity in transit, land use and housing decisions
Q: You’ve said before that to address equity, you also need to make it easier for people to reach transit stations. Can you elaborate on the connection between equity and access to mass transit?
Bean: It’s really focused on optimizing the land use so as many people can get on transit as possible. There will be 225 high-capacity transit station areas by 2030. There are 150 of them now, and 75 will be added by 2030. I don’t think any other region in the entire country is making those kind of strides in the next decade. These also are just 10 percent of the region’s land mass, but 55 percent of the future job growth will be in these nodes. … We’ll also need an array of housing at different price points.
As workers return to the office, experts see early signs of more driving
Q: What would you still like to see the region accomplish in your remaining seven months?
Bean: I’d like to work toward a regional approach to [expanding] electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Rather than County X having its plan and County Y having its plan maybe with a different vendor, it would be better if we all did it together. So many trips cross different jurisdictions. It’s going to be complicated. … There are big procurements for this charging infrastructure, so there’s potentially massive buying power by procuring them together rather than separately. This is all precipitated by a major influx of federal funding for [electric vehicle] charging infrastructure. This is something we can focus on in the next six, 12 or 24 months. How can we all work together?
Board's reversal revives Maryland plan for toll lanes on Beltway, I-270 | 2022-07-21T10:13:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Want to curb traffic? Build homes near jobs and transit, COG leader says. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/21/chuck-bean-leaving-cog/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/21/chuck-bean-leaving-cog/ |
Whistleblower reveals half-billion in uncollected U.S. debts
A whistleblower's complaint uncovered nearly half a billion dollars in uncollected fines to the government, a new audit found. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
A Labor Department employee uncovered almost a half-billion dollars in federal government waste.
Now, it’s clear the glitch created a much larger problem than anyone — including the anonymous whistleblower — realized.
As a result of his complaint to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a new audit has found that the government didn’t collect almost $473 million owed to 28 federal offices, including the House, through June 27.
Problems apparently began in October 2017, when Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service installed “a commercial off-the-shelf” computer program for government-wide debt collection, according to July 7 report from the Bureau. This new system was unable to initiate collection requests from agencies “due to a software error primarily occurring when a business address was provided instead of a primary address,” the report explained. That meant “demand letters … could not be sent because of the missing or incorrect address information.”
This was fixed by January 2020 — but still, not much of the missing money has been collected. As of June 27, the report said, only 10 percent of the $96.9 million owed to OSHA was collected. The problem for the other agencies is much worse. They have collected just $3.2 million, less than 1 percent of the $376 million due.
“This is certainly one of the largest, if not the largest, dollar amounts referenced in a disclosure matter referred by OSC,” Special Counsel Henry J. Kerner told The Washington Post. “It is by far the largest sum of money uncovered by a whistleblower during my tenure.”
Kerner’s office is not to be confused with special counsels who are appointed on a temporary basis to investigate potential corruption. Instead, it’s an independent agency that enforces federal whistleblower protections and civil service laws among other things.
Kerner honored the whistleblower in September with the 2021 Special Counsel Public Service Award. “The whistleblower's allegations in this case were substantiated,” Kerner said at the time, before problems extending far beyond OSHA were documented, adding the action resulted “in significant corrective action to fix the software problem and recoup funds owed to the government.”
“These employees come forward to voice concern about their agencies and are integral to ensuring government accountability,” said Zachary Kurz, OSC’s communications director. “Unlike with the SEC, our whistleblowers generally understand this is not a financial reward process — most make a disclosure because they want to correct some wrongdoing as part of their public service.”
“I’m not driven by money,” said the OSC whistleblower, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for his former colleagues still in the department. “I’m an honest person … I’ve always wanted to do right, regardless of the consequences or whether it ruffles feathers or what have you.”
Following the whistleblower’s allegations, Kerner sent a September 2019 letter to Labor and Treasury that concluded that “there is a substantial likelihood that the information provided to OSC discloses a violation of law, rule, or regulation; gross mismanagement; and a gross waste of funds.”
“It is certainly gross mismanagement,” Kerner said. “Although they were aware of the software problem, neither Treasury nor OSHA officials took prompt action to correct it, prompting the whistleblower to come to OSC. Treasury’s initial report also indicated that uncollected debts pose a potential waste of funds, because as debts age they become more difficult to collect.”
An OSHA statement said its inspector general “concluded OSHA complied” with federal debt collection guidance. Treasury said the software error “did not result in the loss of the Government’s legal rights to pursue the debts, and the majority of the debts continue to be collected through our normal collection processes.” | 2022-07-21T10:17:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Treasury whistleblower revealed half-billion dollars in uncollected U.S. debts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/treasury-whistleblower-osc-debts-uncollected/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/treasury-whistleblower-osc-debts-uncollected/ |
Compared to historical levels, median home prices in 560 of the 575 counties analyzed in the second quarter of 2022 are less affordable than in the past to the average wage earners in those counties. (Robert Galbraith/REUTERS)
The combination of rapidly rising mortgage rates and double-digit increases in home prices led to an easily predictable consequence during the second quarter of 2022: The median home is less affordable to median wage earners in 97 percent of counties in the U.S. compared to historic averages.
ATTOM analyzes average wages and the mortgage, property taxes and insurance required for a median-priced single-family home in each county to determine affordability. The analysts assume buyers would make a 20 percent down payment and would spend a maximum of 28 percent of their gross monthly income on their housing payment.
However, the typical down payment for first-time buyers is between 6 and 7 percent, according to the National Association of Realtors. For repeat buyers, the typical down payment is 17 percent. A lower down payment would require buyers to borrow more money, which would make their monthly housing payments even higher and therefore less affordable. | 2022-07-21T10:17:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Report: Homes deemed unaffordable in most U.S. counties - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/21/report-homes-deemed-unaffordable-most-us-counties/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/21/report-homes-deemed-unaffordable-most-us-counties/ |
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