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FBI employees and others had argued it was ‘unlawful and unconstitutional’ to require unvaccinated staff get tested weekly
A federal judge in Virginia on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit from a group of employees at the FBI and other national security and defense agencies who argued it was “unlawful and unconstitutional” to require unvaccinated staff get tested weekly for the coronavirus.
U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema agreed with Justice Department lawyers that the federal employees who sued must instead pursue administrative grievances, through a process established by the Civil Service Reform Act.
Employees and contractors at the CIA, in particular, were raising concerns about a “speculative situation,” the judge added, because the CIA never implemented a covid-screening policy it had in the works.
Challenges to the Biden administration’s federal vaccine mandates have sprung up in courts across the country. Other federal courts have issued nationwide injunctions, or injunctions covering certain states, and the administration’s vaccine rules largely have been put on hold while the litigation continues.
Experts said Brinkema’s ruling was significant because it covered coronavirus testing requirements, not vaccination mandates, for employees at the nation’s foremost law enforcement and national security agencies.
“Who are more important agencies than the FBI and CIA?” said Peter Meyers, professor emeritus of law at George Washington University Law School and former director of the school’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, adding that he was not aware of any injunction covering testing mandates, though several courts have weighed in on vaccination mandates.
Brinkema tossed the lawsuit on procedural grounds but also made comments from the bench addressing the merits of the case.
“This is an effort by the agencies involved to keep the workforce safe,” Brinkema said.
The Supreme Court previously ruled that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration could not impose a nationwide vaccine mandate covering all businesses with 100 employees or more. But the high court also has ruled that vaccine mandates could be imposed on hospitals and health-care facilities receiving funds from Medicaid or Medicare.
White House tells agencies to delay vaccine mandate after court win
Against that “confusing” backdrop, Meyers said, Brinkema’s ruling was “extremely important.”
“Even though it’s not on the merits, it’s quite an important decision because it’s dealing with very important agencies, and individuals within those agencies challenging these vaccine and testing mandates, and the court is saying you cannot challenge these policies here,” Meyers said.
Employees at the FBI, CIA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense Education Activity — an agency that operates schools for the children of service members — sued in April, along with some CIA contractors. They were allowed to use “John Doe” and “Jane Doe” pseudonyms in court papers.
The attorneys for the 25 plaintiffs argued “those who remain unvaccinated have been villainized” by the Biden administration since federal vaccine mandates began taking effect in 2021, and that scientific data showed “the unvaccinated are not the source of COVID-19 spread.”
Brinkema said the Supreme Court repeatedly has recognized that the coronavirus pandemic poses a “serious health threat.” The judge referred to an “economic tailspin” and more than 1 million deaths so far in the United States.
She added that the vaccine “certainly decreases the risk of infection,” that getting tested once a week was a “de minimis intrusion,” and that none of the people suing “have had any employment action taken against them.”
Carol A. Thompson, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said after the hearing that the employees would seek to appeal Brinkema’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department declined to comment.
“The COVID-19 pandemic represents the most serious public health crisis in at least a century,” Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing last month, defending the federal law enforcement and national security agencies’ covid-mitigation policies. “More than 4.7 million Americans have been hospitalized, more than a million have died, and tens of thousands of new infections are being reported in the United States every day.”
The Justice Department lawyers added that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, regularly testing unvaccinated people is a “key component to a layered approach to preventing the transmission” of covid-19.
In throwing out a similar lawsuit, a panel of judges on the 4th Circuit ruled in April that employees at the Defense Department and Food and Drug Administration challenging the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate had to file workplace grievances under the Civil Service Reform Act.
Brinkema said it was “very clear” that ruling also applied to the case she dismissed Thursday. | 2022-07-21T22:28:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Judge tosses lawsuit challenging FBI’s covid testing policy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/judge-tosses-lawsuit-fbi-covid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/judge-tosses-lawsuit-fbi-covid/ |
Jan. 6 hearing live updates Panel to focus on Trump’s defiant inaction as mob stormed Capitol
Ga. voter wants to know why Capitol police were unprepared
Analysis: Looking for links between Trump world, militant groups
Garland calls Jan. 6 probe ‘the most important’ in Justice Dept. history
Kinzinger offers a teaser of prime-time taped testimony
Trump White House aide goes on sexist tirade, calls Jan. 6 panel ‘anti-White’
Rep. Luria’s defining moment: Faulting Trump for the violence
Even on Jan. 7, Trump balked at condemning the violence
Will there be more Jan. 6 hearings after Thursday?
What ’187 minutes’ included on the day of the Capitol attack
A visual of President Trump is shown on July 12 as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection holds a public hearing. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol holds a prime-time hearing on Thursday focused on President Donald Trump’s defiant inaction as a mob stormed the Capitol, ransacked the seat of democracy, assaulted law enforcement and sought to carry out Trump’s demand to stop the confirmation of Joe Biden’s electoral college win.
Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Elaine Luria (D-Va.) — two military veterans — are expected to focus on Trump’s inaction and will question two witnesses in person: Sarah Matthews, Trump’s deputy White House press secretary, and Matthew Pottinger, a former National Security Council official. The hearing begins at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
A day after the insurrection, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over.
A watchdog agency learned in February that the Secret Service had purged nearly all cellphone texts from around the time of the attack on the Capitol but chose not to alert Congress.
Watch: The Post’s live coverage of the hearing begins at 7 p.m. Eastern time.
By Mark Shavin6:11 p.m.
Jeanne Dufort will be watching tonight’s hearings carefully.
Dufort, a Madison, Ga., real estate agent active in her local Democratic Party, hopes to learn why there wasn’t better protection for the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“The burning question in my mind, that has not been addressed or answered, is who ordered law enforcement to stand down and leave the Capitol police so unprepared,” Dufort said. “It’s really clear from the hearings that lots of people knew and understood that there was violence planned at the Capitol.”
Dufort, 66, has watched all the hearings so far and even hosted a watch party at a local church the night of the first event. She was impressed with the committee’s presentation then, the way they were “telling the story from the inside out.”
Dufort said she often asks people whether they are watching the hearings and, by and large, she isn’t happy with the responses. “There continues to be a segment of the country, my family and friends, who are so convinced that this is simply a partisan witch hunt without merit. So, they don’t watch,” she said. “They have a preformed conclusion … [and] they’re not willing to test it by watching for an hour or two.”
By Hannah Knowles5:39 p.m.
The hearings have drawn on more than 1,000 interviews to lay out how President Donald Trump and his allies pushed to overturn the 2020 election results and how their false claims animated a violent mob.
Before tonight’s prime-time hearing, which will focus on Trump’s actions during the riot, take our quiz to see whether you remember who was behind the most striking quotes so far.
By Hannah Allam5:30 p.m.
Last week’s hearing was touted as the venue for laying out the committee’s findings on connections between the Trump administration and organized extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
But much of that information reportedly was set aside in favor of what the committee deemed more urgent testimony from White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) told The Hill: “The Cipollone deposition was important. And obviously, it’s just a choice we had to make.”
“It was in the original script, but we pulled some back just because of the timing,” Thompson added, referring to testimony related to potential ties between Trump’s entourage and extremist groups.
As a reporter who covers violent extremism, I’ll be watching to see whether the committee salvages the unused material and is able to make the case that there was some level of coordination between Trump’s inner circle and the militant forces that came prepared to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
By Mark Berman5:24 p.m.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday issued a defense of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and said the probe dealt with a fundamental challenge to “American democracy.”
Garland said the agency’s work was vital because “this represents this effort to upend a legitimate election, transferring power from one administration to another.”
“We have to get this right,” he said.
Garland said the department was working to hold people accountable who were “criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election” and to do so with “integrity and professionalism.”
By John Wagner5:18 p.m.
Ahead of Thursday night’s hearing, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of the House select committee members slated to lead the proceedings, shared video on Twitter teasing taped testimony about what President Donald Trump was doing as the violence escalated at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In snippets, former Trump White House aides indicated that he was watching television in the dining room off the Oval Office.
Those featured in the video include Kayleigh McEnany, former White House press secretary; Keith Kellogg, who was national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence; Molly Michael, a former executive assistant in the White House; and Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel.
Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), the other panel member expected to play a lead role Thursday, also previewed the proceedings.
“In tonight’s @January6thCmte hearing, @RepKinzinger and I will detail Donald J Trump’s dereliction of duty in the 187 minutes from the end of his Ellipse speech at 1:10 PM to the video in the Rose Garden at 4:17 PM when he finally told the mob attacking the Capitol to go home,” Luria wrote on Twitter.
By Carol D. Leonnig and Maria Sacchetti5:15 p.m.
By Adela Suliman5:13 p.m.
Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, revealed on his Telegram page that he appeared Tuesday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Hours later, Ziegler said without evidence that he was being targeted because of his race and posted a lengthy audio file calling the probe “a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign.”
“If you can’t see that, your eyes are freaking closed,” Ziegler said. The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League noted that Ziegler’s words are “often used as a code for Jews.”
By Gillian Brockell5:12 p.m.
The Jan. 6 committee is expected to present evidence Thursday that President Donald Trump enjoyed the sight of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol and that he knew violence had broken out when he sent a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence.
By Meagan Flynn and Jacqueline Alemany5:11 p.m.
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 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: She and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) will detail what 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 to 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 of office. 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 has gotten redder after redistricting.
By Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey and Paul Kane5:10 p.m.
One day after the last rioter had left the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, President 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 call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
By Amy Wang5:08 p.m.
Though Thursday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing has sometimes been referred to as the “final” one, it is not likely to be the committee’s last public hearing.
The committee’s eighth public hearing will cap six weeks of televised testimony — but lawmakers investigating the Capitol attack have been upfront about the probability of future hearings, as additional witnesses come forward with new information.
The committee is actively seeking new testimony and information, just last week issuing a subpoena to the Secret Service after reports of the erasure of text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, after the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General had requested them.
“This investigation is very much ongoing. The fact that series of hearings is going to be concluded this Thursday doesn’t mean that our investigation is over,” committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
Lofgren added that there could be more hearings when the committee publishes a final report later this year.
“Frankly, if the president’s supporters had not engaged in frivolous litigation for months on end, we would be farther along than we are,” she said.
By Amy Wang and Aaron Blake5:06 p.m.
Matthew Pottinger, a former Trump White House aide who resigned on Jan. 6, 2021, as deputy national security adviser, is expected to testify at Thursday’s hearing about President Donald Trump’s actions as the attack on the Capitol unfolded that day.
The Jan. 6 committee has in previous hearings played taped testimony from Pottinger, in which he described Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet accusing Vice President Mike Pence of not having the “courage” to overturn the election results as the moment he decided to resign.
Pottinger was also reportedly involved in discussions over sending in the National Guard; he reportedly visited the Oval Office after 3 p.m. on Jan. 6, after a former colleague told him D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) was inquiring about that subject.
Pottinger had significant stature in the White House and will be difficult for Trump to try to dismiss as an insignificant aide, as Trump did with Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Indeed, Pottinger appears to be the highest-ranking White House official to resign that day, though Cabinet secretaries also resigned in response to Jan. 6.
Pottinger is a former journalist and Marine who has expertise on China.
Past coverage: Matthew Pottinger faced Communist China’s intimidation as a reporter. He’s now at the White House shaping Trump’s hard line policy toward Beijing.
In Thursday’s hearing, the Jan. 6 committee will probably repeatedly refer to Donald Trump standing by for “187 minutes” on the day of the insurrection.
That period of time is based on The Washington Post’s calculation, starting at 1:10 p.m. on the day of the attack, when Trump called on his followers to march on the Capitol, and ending at 4:17 p.m., when he posted a video to Twitter telling his supporters to go home.
In previews of Thursday’s prime-time hearing, Jan. 6 committee members said Trump did “nothing” to stop the riot at the Capitol as it was unfolding, and several have suggested he spent much of that time watching television.
New witnesses scheduled to publicly testify Thursday are expected to fill in the gaps in Trump’s activities that day. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who will help lead the hearing, said the session “is going to open people’s eyes in a big way.”
Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in the Trump White House, is expected to testify in Thursday’s hearing about Donald Trump’s actions as the attack on the Capitol unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Jan. 6 committee has in previous hearings played taped testimony from Matthews in which she described Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet accusing Mike Pence of not having the “courage” to overturn the election results as further inflaming the situation.
“I remember us saying that that [tweet] was the last thing that needed to be tweeted at that moment,” Matthews said in recorded testimony played by the committee. “The situation was already bad. And so, it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.”
A committee member, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), said in a previous hearing that Matthews testified that Trump had been informed of the violence at the Capitol before Trump posted his tweet.
Matthews resigned in the hours after the Capitol attack, issuing a statement saying, “Our nation needs a peaceful transfer of power.” A week later, she told The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker that “seeing people I know, who were scared for their lives, just shook me to my core.” On the first anniversary of the attack, she called it a “coup attempt.”
Recently, Matthews defended Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows who gave bombshell testimony last month about Trump’s alleged rage and inaction on the day of the insurrection, including that she was told the president lunged at his Secret Service detail while inside the presidential limousine because agents would not drive him to the Capitol. | 2022-07-21T22:28:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jan. 6 hearings: Live coverage and latest updates, Day 8 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/jan-6-committee-hearings-live-updates-day-8/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/jan-6-committee-hearings-live-updates-day-8/ |
The court said it will hear the merits of the case in December.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detain a man in Escondido, Calif., in 2019. (Gregory Bull/AP)
The Supreme Court on Thursday refused the Biden administration’s request to reinstate a policy limiting immigration arrests, after a Texas district judge said the guidance to immigration officers violated federal laws.
In September, the Department of Homeland Security directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to prioritize the detention of recent border crossers and immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety, and to consider giving a break to immigrants with mitigating factors, such as farmworkers picking crops and grandmothers caring for American children.
That was the opposite of what a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit found when it considered a nearly identical case filed by Arizona, Montana and Ohio.
Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a Republican appointee, wrote that the DHS policy “does not tie the hands of immigration officers” and that congressional mandates carry some flexibility.
Federal laws require ICE to detain immigrants with serious criminal records and anyone with a final deportation order with the goal of deporting them within 90 days. But such enforcement has never materialized, Sutton wrote. “Which presidential administration since this law came into effect in 1996, it is fair to wonder, has come close to removing all eligible noncitizens within 90 days, whether with respect to statutorily permitted reasons or not?” he wrote.
Sutton wrote that Republican and Democrat administrations have long set their own enforcement priorities. Under Trump, anyone in the United States illegally could be a target for enforcement, while the Obama administration tried to limit removals to “felons, not families.”
The 5th Circuit panel said it was “inclined to agree” with Tipton, and rejected the Biden administration’s request to stay Tipton’s decision wiping out the ICE enforcement priorities.
The Texas case is among a series of lawsuits that have sought to take down Biden’s immigration policies, which he characterized as a more humane approach to enforcement. The president tried to “pause” deportations for 100 days, a policy Tipton also blocked, and he filed a bill that would allow most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants to get on a path to U.S. citizenship. The bill has largely fizzled in a divided Congress.
Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar on July 8 asked the Supreme Court for an emergency stay of the 5th Circuit’s action, writing in a brief that Tipton’s ruling has upended the agency.
“Thousands of DHS employees across the Nation have been told that they must disregard their training and stop considering the Secretary’s instructions,” she wrote in the request. “That judgment is thwarting the Secretary’s direction of the Department he leads and disrupting DHS’s efforts to focus its limited resources on the noncitizens who pose the gravest threat to national security, public safety, and the integrity of our Nation’s borders.”
Mayorkas has said his policy guidelines instructed agents to set priorities just as he did as a U.S. attorney in Los Angeles years ago. He said the agency has limited resources and should use them effectively to make communities and the border more secure.
“Does the grandmother who entered this country 30 years ago, who has cleaned our neighbors’ houses to make a better life for her U.S. citizen grandchildren, does she really pose a public safety threat?” he said in an interview in September when the guidelines were made public.
Texas and Louisiana argue that enforcement has remained low, despite record-high apprehensions at the border that Republicans link to Biden’s more lenient immigration policies. They have challenged the administration’s claim that it lacks sufficient funding to detain and deport immigrants, noting that the president’s budget proposal for next fiscal year calls for a “dramatic reduction” in detention beds from 34,000 to 25,000.
“It would be particularly troubling to allow applicants a free pass to ignore Congress’s commands under current circumstances because the facts show the problem is, at least in part, self-inflicted,” the states wrote to the Supreme Court, opposing the administration’s request for a stay.
Daniel Bible, acting deputy executive associate director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, said in a government affidavit that it would be “impossible” for the agency to detain everyone eligible for deportation. ICE has 6,000 immigration officers, 34,000 detention beds and, as of early June, more than 4 million undocumented immigrants in its caseload, including 327,000 people with criminal histories. | 2022-07-21T22:28:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Court won’t reinstate Biden policy limiting immigration arrests - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/supreme-court-biden-ice-immigration-enforcement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/supreme-court-biden-ice-immigration-enforcement/ |
Residents spray water at fire east of Athens on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)
Many climate activists are often focused on pledges to get to net zero emissions by some distant date or insist that every new energy source must be entirely green.
But the reality is that we need to cut emissions now, not promise to do so by 2030. And the only way to do it now, and at scale, is to make some tough choices and trade-offs. We do not have green technology, like clean nuclear fusion and long-duration battery storage, that can fully replace fossil fuels today. We may get them — in 10 or 15 years, perhaps, if we are very lucky.
But we don’t now, and hoping that we do is part of what has caused an energy crisis around the world. Investment in fossil fuels has plunged over the past decade, while green technology has not been able to fill the gap. Germany cut back on nuclear energy and ended up burning more coal. California is phasing out nuclear and discouraging natural gas but is now confronting a sharp increase in the number of wasteful diesel generators being used for backup power.
Let me suggest a few practical ways to make progress in the next five years with technologies we already have.
We could start by converting the most polluting coal-fired power plants to natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal when combusted. A study surveyed 29,000 power plants around the world and found that 5 percent generate 73 percent of all emissions in the electricity-generation sector. In other words, replacing around 1,500 coal-burning plants would make a huge dent in emissions, a giant cut on par with the boldest plans being discussed today.If the West wants to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, why not put together a coalition that would finance this effort across the planet?
Then there is the problem of methane leakage from natural gas extraction, agriculture and landfills. This can be solved technically and just needs smart, tough regulations.
We should extend the life of nuclear power plants and start building smaller and safer ones. Nuclear energy evokes grim images, but the facts speak for themselves. In the 21st century, just a handful of people have died from nuclear accidents around the world, while more than 1,500 people died in oil and gas extraction in the United States alone from 2008 to 2017. Far more people die each year from lung diseases caused by coal pollution, with some estimates running into the millions — and that’s without even factoring in the climate impacts. We should also keep working on developing new modular reactors that have much safer designs and are far less likely to have the same kind of meltdown problems that others have had in the past. And let me remind you, nuclear power plants produce nearly zero emissions.
Plant 1 trillion trees. The science is simple: Trees absorb carbon dioxide. We are all impressed by Greta Thunberg, but what about Felix Finkbeiner? He’s a young German environmentalist who, at the age of 9, proposed that every country commit to planting 1 million trees and then, at 13, upped the ante and suggested at the United Nations that we target 1 trillion by 2050. Let’s start by curbing deforestation and planting as many trees as we can, as fast as we can.
And yes, all of the solutions have their drawbacks. Planting trees may not do as much good as some scientists initially claimed. Nuclear power is expensive up front. Natural gas does emit some carbon. But the crucial point is that such measures would cut emissions a lot — and we can do them all now. We do not have to make a choice between half-measures now and full measures later when we have the technologies to do so. There are other proven technologies, ranging from weatherizing buildings to electric cars, and we should create incentives for them all.
As the saying goes, the perfect should not become the enemy of the good. That should be the motto of every environmental group that wants to see actual, positive change today. | 2022-07-21T22:29:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | In tackling climate change, don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/practical-steps-fighting-climate-change-heat-wave-nuclear-gas-coal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/practical-steps-fighting-climate-change-heat-wave-nuclear-gas-coal/ |
The pandemic-era federal aid that made school meals free to all public school students regardless of family income levels is ending, raising fears about the effects in the upcoming school year for families already struggling with rising food and fuel costs. (Lisa Rathke/AP)
For many school administrators, providing universal free meals has been a no-brainer.
“The reason we like this program is that it takes all the shame out of all the kids that eat free lunch,” said Donna Martin, a school nutrition director in a rural county in Georgia where kids have had universal free lunch for years under a provision that allows districts with high concentrations of poverty to feed every child for free. “You try not to identify them, but everybody knows who eats free lunch. So, in my community, everybody eats lunch and there's no shame.”
Education reporter Moriah Balingit explains what this program did, and why it’s going away now, despite how popular it is among schools.
“The pandemic became sort-of this policy laboratory to try out things that a lot of progressives have wanted for a long time, like the Child Tax Credit and universal free lunches. And I think there was some hope, some optimism that these programs would continue. But, of course, as we saw with the Child Tax Credit and now we're seeing with the free lunches, they are being allowed to expire because there's not the political will to continue them.”
Inflation is making people homeless
Today on “Post Reports,” how the rising cost of living is pushing many Americans into homelessness, even if they have good jobs. | 2022-07-21T22:29:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The end of universal free school lunch - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-end-of-universal-free-school-lunch/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-end-of-universal-free-school-lunch/ |
Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Samuel A. Alito Jr. testify before a House Appropriations subcommittee in 2019. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
BIG SKY, Mont. — Liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said Thursday that it would be a “dangerous thing” for the court and for democracy if the justices stray too far from public sentiment and lose the confidence of Americans.
Kagan, who dissented when the court last month overturned Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of a constitutional right to abortion, said the court’s legitimacy is threatened when long-standing precedent is discarded and the court’s actions are seen as motivated by personnel changes among the justices.
Speaking before a conference of about 500 mostly judges and lawyers, Kagan emphasized several times that she was not singling out the just completed term. She was on the losing side as the court’s conservative majority threw out Roe, greatly transformed the court’s jurisprudence on the role of religion in public life, expanded gun rights and narrowed the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat climate change.
“I’m not talking about any particular decision or any particular series of decisions. But if, over time, the court loses all connection with the public and the public sentiment, that’s a dangerous thing for democracy,” Kagan said. “We have a court that does important things, and if that connection is lost, that’s a dangerous thing for the democratic system as a whole.”
The public generally approves when the Supreme Court delivers a mixed bag of opinions, some favoring conservatives and others with liberal outcomes. But the addition of three justices nominated by President Donald Trump has installed a six-to-three conservative supermajority, and the court’s jurisprudence has moved steadily to the right.
A Gallup poll showed that the court’s approval ranking is sinking to its lowest level in modern times. Similarly, polling by the Marquette University law school shows a dramatic change: 66 percent of the public approved of the Supreme Court’s work in September 2020, but a poll taken this month showed that that had dropped to 38 percent.
That’s not necessarily the way to judge the court’s work, Kagan said. “By design, the court does things sometimes that the majority of the country doesn’t like,” she said.
But for the public to respect and follow unpopular decisions, she said, the court must earn its legitimacy and the public’s confidence.
“Overall, the way the court retains its legitimacy and fosters public confidence is by acting like a court, is by doing the kind of things that do not seem to people political or partisan, by not behaving as though we are just people with individual political or policy or social preferences,” she said.
Conservatives often charge that liberals’ warnings about the Supreme Court losing its legitimacy are simply a way to preserve liberal precedents of the court.
Kagan, nominated to the court in 2010 by President Barack Obama, acknowledged that “if you look over history, there have been times where judges have been unconstrained and undisciplined, and attempted to basically enact their own policy or political or social preferences. It’s happened on both sides.”
In her view, she said, the court could protect its legitimacy with the public by overturning precedent only in extraordinary circumstances, narrowing decisions to decide only what is necessary in a case and consistently applying methods of deciding cases that “discipline and constrain you.”
While she took pains not to refer to cases of the last term, some of her remarks sounded a bit like the dissents she wrote or joined.
For instance, the court’s conservative supermajority was cemented when Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh took the place of the more moderate retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and when the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
“People are rightly suspicious if one justice leaves the court or dies and another justice takes his or her place and all of sudden the law changes on you,” she said Thursday.
In their dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Kagan and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor sounded a similar note.
Kagan was questioned by two judges and lawyer, and she was not asked about the court’s specific decisions nor her new colleague, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Jackson replaced Breyer, who retired, and joins Kagan and Sotomayor on the court’s left.
The court has been closed to the public since March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic (and now is surrounded by a black security fence because of protests over the abortion ruling). Last term, the court held oral arguments in a courtroom open only to credentialed press and court personnel. The proceedings were live-streamed.
Kagan said the nine justices have not yet discussed whether the live audio will continue when the public is allowed back into the building. She said she hopes that it will and that it has been beneficial.
“But I only get one vote,” she said. | 2022-07-21T22:29:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Elena Kagan says questions of legitimacy risky for Supreme Court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/elena-kagan-supreme-court-legitimacy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/elena-kagan-supreme-court-legitimacy/ |
The 79-year-old president is a litmus for how older, more vulnerable people are faring against more contagious variants in a world without masks
President Biden, who tested positive for covid on Thursday, was photographed behind his desk in the White House residence. Courtesy Twitter President Biden@POTUS/Handout via REUTERS (Handout/Reuters)
The Biden administration’s refrain that fully vaccinated and boosted Americans could safely resume their lives is now being tested on the First Patient, the 79-year-old leader of the free world, who made a point Thursday of publicly working through his illness.
“Folks, I’m doing great,” President Biden tweeted after the White House announced his covid diagnosis, sharing a photo of him behind his desk. “Keeping busy!”
If Biden emerges quickly from his bout with covid, it will be a high-profile demonstration of his broader vow: A return to normalcy is possible thanks to vaccines and treatments, despite surging cases and a never-ending pandemic. But if the president should be sick for an extended period or, worse, fall gravely ill, he’ll join many other Americans who have struggled to remain healthy in a world with scant masking or social distancing, and fuel further criticism that his covid strategy falls short, especially for the most vulnerable.
“I think Biden’s own covid response is what made this [illness] inevitable, really,” said Artie Vierkant, co-host of “Death Panel,” a left-leaning podcast that has blamed the administration for not pursuing a universal mask mandate and paid sick leave for covid-positive people, among other mitigations. “He’s just one of tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are going to test positive for covid today.”
Others see his illness as a function of an ever-more contagious virus, as Americans weigh the trade-offs of social gatherings, wearing masks and other decisions against the prospect of getting sick.
“I think the president’s case says more about covid than about the White House strategy — it’s astonishingly infectious,” countered Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Frieden added that vaccines remain “astonishingly effective” at preventing severe illness, and praised the decision to prescribe paxlovid, an antiviral pill, to reduce the chances that Biden might develop complications.
“It also says a lot about where we are in the pandemic,” Frieden said. “We’re adjusting to covid, and as new variants emerge, we may need to adjust again.”
In interviews, tweets and comments, White House officials stressed that their strategy had prepared them for the president to test positive, with covid coordinator Ashish Jha telling reporters that he wanted to “mark this moment” — where Biden is relying on medical breakthroughs that are broadly available to the general public.
We’ve spent the last 18 months making sure vaccines, treatments, tests and other tools are widely available.
As a result, we can manage COVID-19 and minimize disruptions to daily life. https://t.co/Plyn5HdAun
— Subhan Cheema (@SubhanCheema46) July 21, 2022
“It’s a reminder of the reason that we all work so hard to make sure that every American has the same level of protection that the president has, that every American has the same level of immunity and why we have worked so hard to make sure that people have access to lifesaving treatments like paxlovid,” Jha said at a briefing.
“These are incredibly important things for the president to have. They’re incredibly important things for every American to have.”
Jha declined to answer questions about Biden’s prognosis, saying he wanted to “avoid hypotheticals.”
But the details of Biden’s infection and treatment, made public on Thursday, were immediately scrutinized by doctors, epidemiologists and other experts, some of whom questioned why the president has been so frequently maskless in close conversations with others. And as they pored over the early reports of the nation’s most famous covid case, some faulted the White House for downplaying the risks to the president, rather than spotlighting the ongoing toll of the disease. More than 400 people per day continue to die with the disease, according to The Washington Post’s seven-day average.
“I think this is a moment to reckon with high transmission and that we should aspire to a better normal than this,” said Julia Raifman, a public health professor at Boston University who has called for federal support for mask mandates, holding more gatherings outdoors and other mitigations. “We’ve already lost more than 500,000 people to covid during this administration … This is an opportunity to not minimize or exaggerate the president’s infection — and to acknowledge that it is a serious illness for people who are over 70.”
Experts also stressed that Biden’s case is being handled with a level of caution they believe should be the standard for all Americans.
For instance, the White House said Biden would remain in isolation until he tested negative for covid, going beyond CDC guidance — a move that sparked backlash from some experts who asked why all Americans are not urged to follow those same measures.
“The fact they are overriding CDC recommendations that are flawed, without any evidence to support them, is telling,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “For all of us, not just the president.”
Topol and others have called for all Americans to test negative before leaving isolation, saying the CDC’s failure to recommend such a test result means that many Americans are prematurely leaving isolation and infecting others.
Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who has advised the White House on covid strategy and repeatedly called on officials to go further, said that he wished the administration had more aggressively pushed measures like improving indoor air quality, but said that Biden has confronted widespread resistance to many recommendations.
“What I want the public to do, and what the public will do, are two different things,” Emanuel said.
He added that Biden’s infection, despite the use of testing, screening and masking around him for indoor meetings, underscored that “BA. 5 is really contagious. He’s probably the person in America with the best protections. No one can rest assured that they won’t get infected.”
While Biden is the second president to test positive for coronavirus, the circumstances are far different than his predecessor’s, at least so far. When Donald Trump tested positive in late 2020, before the advent of vaccines, he required hospitalization and aides worried he might die. He got access to antiviral drugs that were not yet authorized by regulators.
In contrast, Biden’s positive test comes after he received two initial doses of the Pfizer vaccine and two booster shots, reducing the risk of severe disease, and also after a slew of senior administration officials have tested positive — including 81-year-old Anthony S. Fauci, who suffered an infection earlier this summer and has returned to work.
“We have said for some time that there was a substantial possibility that the President — like anyone else — could get COVID,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain wrote colleagues on Thursday. Klain also took to Twitter to share commentary that Biden was right to adopt an increasingly visible public role, after spending much of the first year of his presidency physically removed from others.
“Would the country have been better off had Biden remained extremely physically isolated from other people, avoided travel, etc., a la Putin?” asked journalist Nate Silver, in a tweet amplified by Klain. “I tend not to think so.”
That public role has relied on the White House’s vaccination-focused strategy, with Biden initially echoing the assertions of public health experts that the shots also protected against infections — a claim that a then-new delta variant would turn on its head last summer.
“You’re not going to get covid if you have these vaccinations,” Biden said on July 21, 2021, at a CNN town hall — a year to the day before the double-boosted president would test positive himself.
Asked this week about what should be done about the nation’s rising covid cases, the president had a two-word response: Get vaccinated.
“We have the capacity to control it,” Biden said on Wednesday, adding a message for holdouts. “They should get vaccinated now.”
Experts like Boston University’s Raifman contend the White House has remained too focused on vaccinations, even as variants have evolved to dodge some protections — and not enough on mitigations like social distancing and masking.
“This all started with a premature ‘back to normal’ [declaration] that we then didn’t correct when there was a delta surge, or when there was an omicron surge,” said Raifman, referencing the White House celebration last summer. “I’m very worried about not correcting again on new variants,” she added.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton, who co-hosts the Death Panel podcast with Vierkant and who is immunocompromised, said she was concerned by the White House’s message that the president was working through his illness — particularly after her own breakthrough infection last winter left her with complications for three months.
“It contributes to this idea that we are living in a moment where covid is no longer disruptive, which obviously doesn’t match a lot of the day-to-day experiences of working people diagnosed with covid,” she said. | 2022-07-21T22:54:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s bout with covid tests his return-to-normal strategy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/21/biden-covid-return-to-normal-strategy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/21/biden-covid-return-to-normal-strategy/ |
Officers describe assault on Jan. 6 in front of accused attacker
Their testimony, as well as that of a photojournalist, came at what was supposed to be a sentencing for a man who pleaded guilty to assault
Trump supporters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Julio Cortez/AP)
One D.C. police sergeant said his body burned for a week after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. A former officer held back tears as he described being dragged into a mob and beaten on the West Terrace. A photojournalist said he had a hard time eating and sleeping because of neck injuries he sustained while trying to document the events of that day.
The three appeared Thursday in a quiet courtroom less than half a mile away from where a prime-time Jan. 6 congressional hearing was scheduled to take place just hours later. They were there to share their stories with the court, in front the man who prosecutors said had attacked them.
Lucas Denney sat silently through the hearing, not looking at the men who spoke. The 44-year-old, who had pleaded guilty to an assault on law enforcement, was accused of hurling a long plastic pipe in to police lines and acting with the crowd that attacked then-D.C. Officer Michael Fanone. Denney was scheduled to be sentenced Thursday, after the judge heard from those victimized in the attack.
“I do not care how much time Mr. Denney is sentenced to,” Fanone told the federal judge in court Thursday. “I am only interested in what Mr. Denney does with those days, and I hope from the bottom of my heart that he suffers.”
But in an unusual twist, court adjourned Thursday without a prison term for Denney. U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss said that Denney, in a recent court filing, had made statements that were inconsistent with his guilty plea. Moss ordered the defense and prosecution to file a joint status report by July 29 to help determine whether he should hold an evidentiary hearing to revisit the facts of the case. In the plea, Denney admitted to swinging a long plastic pipe at an officer and that the pipe qualified as a dangerous weapon.
Texas man, temporarily lost in system, pleads guilty to assaulting police on Jan. 6
The D.C. police sergeant who suffered injuries from the PVC pipe choked up Thursday as he recounted the bruises from the pipe and the chemical burns from bear spray in his face.
“I normally don’t get emotional, but today is my first time dealing with it,” he told the judge, his voice wavering. “I normally have a tough exterior.”
After he battled rioters for hours, the sergeant said he spent time on a heart monitor because his blood pressure and pulse were high enough to risk a heart attack. The sergeant did not give his name in court, only his initials.
The sergeant said he distinctly remembered that Denney intentionally struck him with a pipe, and that the moment “unfortunately plays over and over in my mind.”
Denney, in a recent court filing, denied intending to injure the officer and said he was attempting to knock out his pepper-spray device.
“The pole was headed for my face and not my crowd-control device he tried to take from me earlier on,” the sergeant said in court Thursday. “It’s clear to me he doesn’t understand his actions that day … and he needs some serious self-reflection.”
In a separate statement, Fanone, who has since retired from the D.C. police force and become an on-air contributor for CNN, walked through the events of Jan. 6 from the perspective of law enforcement on the scene, describing in detail the struggle to protect the West Terrace exit from a barrage of batteries, shoes, flagpoles, hammers and ladders.
“I was dragged from the front of the police line, pulled into the crowd, and violently beaten and electrocuted with a stun gun,” he said. “I was eventually dragged to the police line by demonstrators who intervened on my behalf. It is likely that without the intervention of those demonstrators, I would have lost my life.”
Photojournalist John Harrington, who captured footage of Denney swinging the pipe, said the anxiety from Jan. 6 remains to this day.
Moss said that the statements will “remain with me not just in sentencing but through my remaining days on earth.”
The Thursday hearing was the latest step in a long and contentious legal battle over Denney’s future that began when he was arrested in Texas near the Mexican border on Dec. 13. Prosecutors and courts lost track of him as he moved to a jail in Virginia, which meant he did not have a preliminary hearing nor an indictment within the legally required time frame. He was ultimately indicted March 7 and pleaded guilty to just one count of assault on law enforcement with a dangerous weapon — avoiding the more serious charge of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
Denney, of Mansfield, Tex., created a militia he called “Patriot Boys of North Texas,” which he said aligned with the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence, court records show.
Tom Jackman contributed to this report. | 2022-07-21T22:54:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Officers describe assault on Jan. 6 in front of accused attacker - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/officer-testimony-fanone-lucas-denney/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/officer-testimony-fanone-lucas-denney/ |
D.C. region readies pools, cooling centers as blistering heat descends
Marissa J. Lang
Ryan Bacic
The District is keeping its 34 spray parks and 11 of its public pools open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. during the heat wave this weekend. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post)
The District, snared in the heat wave that began this week for more than 100 million people nationwide, is bracing for temperatures that could hit triple digits for the first time since 2016.
Heat advisories were posted across the region Thursday afternoon as temperatures and humidity spiked the heat index — a measure of how hot it feels — to around 100.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) on Thursday activated the District’s “Heat Emergency Plan,” which extends the operating hours at 11 public pools and opens cooling centers across the city for residents to seek relief. Prince William County opened up its libraries and a Manassas recreation center as cooling resources also.
“For those who don’t have working air conditioning or access to air conditioning, they need to get someplace cold and someplace that does have air conditioning, [because] once it gets this warm, it’s no longer an inconvenience. It’s a danger,” said Matthew Levy, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We worry a lot about sustained and prolonged exposure to heat, particularly in our part of the country, where people are not accustomed to this type of heat.”
Heat is the top weather-related killer in the United States, weather experts say. If you have to be outside, Levy advised hydrating well and limiting time in direct heat. He also suggests wearing sunglasses and a hat to protect your eyes, and sunscreen to protect your skin.
Levy said to look out for the very old, the very young, those with diabetes and other chronic medical conditions, those with a previous history of heat-related illness and those with limited access to spaces where they can cool off. Pets can also be at risk in the heat, he said.
“We want to make sure, as we do throughout our weather-related emergencies, it’s about neighbors looking out for neighbors,” said Christopher Rodriguez, the director of D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.
D.C. Department of Human Services officials said the city will expand the number of beds in homeless shelters to accommodate anyone seeking a cool place to sleep.
“We maximize every available bed within our shelters and work to obtain extra beds as we do in all heat emergencies,” spokesman Kevin Valentine Jr. said in an emailed statement Thursday. Outreach workers will be doing wellness checks and providing water to residents experiencing homelessness on Saturday and Sunday, he said.
D.C. residents should call the shelter hotline if they or anyone they know needs emergency shelter, Valentine said. The number is 202-399-7093.
The city’s 34 spray parks will also be available as cooling stations, city officials said. And though there have been lifeguard shortages across the country, D.C.’s outdoor pools have all opened with normal staffing levels, said Delano Hunter, the director of D.C.’s Department of Parks and Recreation. The city will offer overtime, he said, to persuade lifeguards typically assigned to work indoor pools — which are closed on Sundays — to help out their sweltering outdoor colleagues.
Normally, lifeguards are responsible for dealing with any medical emergencies, including heat illness.
“That does happen quite frequently, to be honest with you,” Hunter said of temperature-related health scares at pools. “Sometimes we get pushback on the 15-minute breaks, but that’s to promote hydration.”
Metro’s rules against drinking onboard were still in place, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said Thursday, because rail temperatures had not reached the 135-degree threshold for heat-related policy changes. Arlington Transit and the Fairfax Connector both announced Thursday that they would allow drinking water on their buses during the heat wave.
Fairfax County Public Schools, citing the National Weather Service’s heat advisory, prohibited “all FCPS school-based outdoor activities on school grounds,” including physical education classes, recess and middle school after-school programs, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Thursday.
In Maryland, Montgomery County issued a hyperthermia alert for 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Friday. Hyperthermia is the medical term for heat-related illness.
MARC commuter trains on the Camden and Brunswick lines ran at slower speeds Thursday afternoon under heat-related restrictions from CSX Transportation, which owns the tracks for those lines. MARC trains on the Penn Line, whose tracks are owned by Amtrak, were not affected. Delays were expected to be 10 to 15 minutes, with express trains that run at higher speeds the most affected, according to the Maryland Transit Administration.
The rising temperatures in the region — coinciding with some of what historically are the hottest days of the summer — will probably fall short of most records, but are still as much as 10 degrees above normal. On average, Washington hits the 100-degree mark a little less than once per year. It has posted 121 days at or above 100 since 1872.
Rodriguez, the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency director, said he and other officials are looking at the extreme heat this week as a sign of things to come.
“With climate change, this is the new normal, and more extreme and prolonged weather is going to impact us here in the District,” he said. “So we have been looking at this for the last couple years now … how we can build more resilient communities and make sure we can bounce back from extreme weather when it does happen?”
Katherine Shaver and Jason Samenow contributed to this report. | 2022-07-21T23:55:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DC readies public pools, spray parks, cooling center amid heat wave - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/dc-heat-wave-pools-cooling/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/dc-heat-wave-pools-cooling/ |
Maryland officer to serve year in jail for arrest that paralyzed man
Bryant Strong, a Prince George’s County police officer, was convicted in May of assault and misconduct in office for his actions during a traffic stop in 2019 that left Demonte Ward-Blake paralyzed from the neck down.
Attorneys William “Billy” Murphy Jr. and Malcolm P. Ruff and the family of Demonte Ward-Blake hold a news conference in Largo, Md., on Feb. 21. Prince George’s County police officer Bryant Strong on July 21 was sentenced to one year in jail and three years of probation for his actions during a 2019 traffic stop that left Ward-Blake paralyzed. (Keith Alexander/The Washington Post)
Prince George’s County police officer Bryant Strong was sentenced Thursday to one year in jail followed by three years of probation for his actions during a traffic stop in 2019 that left Demonte Ward-Blake paralyzed from the neck down.
Strong, 29, was found guilty in May of second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment — all misdemeanors — during a bench trial before Circuit Court Judge DaNeeka V. Cotton.
At Strong’s sentencing hearing Thursday, the courtroom was packed with about 50 people, many of them police employees there to support him. Three Prince George’s officers who had worked alongside Strong and developed friendships with him over the years spoke on his behalf, saying he is collegial, has a strong work ethic and is dedicated to his family and young son.
Maryland officer guilty of assault, misconduct in arrest that paralyzed man
Civil rights attorney Malcolm Ruff spoke on behalf of Ward-Blake’s family, whom he is representing in a federal civil lawsuit against the county and Strong. Ruff told the judge that Ward-Blake was a loved and gregarious 24-year-old before the traffic stop, but his paralysis forced him into a wheelchair and caused agonizing pain.
Ward-Blake died late last year at the age of 26 from injuries he suffered in an unrelated shooting.
Cotton said she had spent a lot of time thinking about Strong’s case and weighing why she had found him guilty. The judge said she considered the nature of the charges and the extent of Ward’s injuries; the impact on his family and the community; and the fact that Strong had no prior criminal history.
“Clearly this is a defendant who has a strong support system,” the judge said.
Cotton acknowledged the “awesome responsibility” law enforcement officers have to keep communities safe. But she said officers also have a duty to protect community trust, and when that trust is broken, “that’s an awesome failure, too.”
The judge sentenced Strong to a total of 20 years with all but one year suspended, meaning he could serve that time at a later date if he’s found in violation of the terms of his probation. Strong’s attorney, Shaun Owens, had asked the judge to defer the officer’s detention during the appeals process. Cotton denied that, as well as a request for home detention.
Ward-Blake’s mother, Rena Ward, bowed her head as she listened in the courtroom beside community organizers and other women impacted by police violence. Ward said she was disappointed Strong hadn’t been given more jail time but that she had to “give it up to God.”
“If he was here,” she said of her son, “[the sentencing] probably would have been stiffer.”
The $75 million wrongful death lawsuit his family filed in February is still pending.
Ward-Blake was pulled over on Oct. 17, 2019, for expired tags. During the stop, a Prince George’s police officer pulled his gun from his holster — which enraged Ward-Blake because his girlfriend’s 6-year-old daughter was in the back seat. Strong was among a group of other officers who soon arrived on scene.
Though Ward-Blake was compliant with all officer commands, including when he was detained, placed in handcuffs and sat on the curb, he verbally berated the officers, according to videos of the traffic stop and testimony during trial.
Because Ward-Blake would not stop yelling, Strong arrested him for disorderly conduct and walked him to the side of his cruiser, where he conducted a body search.
At trial, prosecutors and Strong’s defense attorneys disagreed on what happened next.
Prosecutors argued that Strong, fed up with Ward-Blake’s cursing, snapped and slammed the man headfirst into the concrete in a maneuver called a “takedown.” The state said that action constituted excessive force.
Strong’s defense attorneys, however, said Ward-Blake tried to flee police while Strong was searching him. They argued that the men fell to the ground together in a struggle, and that Ward-Blake’s paralysis was the result of a tragic accident.
At trial, Cotton discounted the defense’s theory and said Strong “did not act as a reasonable officer would.” She called his actions “excessive” and “unjustified.”
She made that argument again during sentencing.
Cotton did not, however, take into account Strong’s history of using force with others. Prosecutors presented evidence during the hearing about a previously undisclosed incident from November 2018 — one year before Ward-Blake was paralyzed — when Strong wrongfully detained someone who matched a robbery suspect description. The man, prosecutors said, protested the arrest. Strong took him to the ground, cuffed him and hit him several times, an action the police department’s internal investigation later found excessive.
Prosecutors argued this showed a pattern of behavior that the judge should consider before sentencing Strong. But Cotton disagreed, saying the matter was administrative, not criminal, and therefore irrelevant.
Strong’s police powers remain suspended until the police department’s internal affairs office completes its own investigation into the traffic stop.
Strong’s supporters watched from the gallery — several, including his father, in tears — as he hugged his attorney and stripped off his suit jacket, tie and button-down shirt. Then a bailiff secured cuffs around his wrists and walked him out of the courtroom. | 2022-07-21T23:55:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland officer to serve year in jail for arrest that paralyzed man - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/maryland-officer-serve-year-jail-arrest-that-paralyzed-man/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/maryland-officer-serve-year-jail-arrest-that-paralyzed-man/ |
For the simplest power plants that draw cooling water directly from rivers and the ocean, heat waves can cause shutdowns. Temperatures around discharge stations are closely monitored to prevent wildlife deaths, algal blooms and other problems, and when they get too high — either because the diluting river water itself is warmer, or because there’s less of it as a result of drought — the discharges have to stop, blacking out the generator in turn.
That’s what we’re seeing happening right now. The heat wave is already hurting the efficiency of Europe’s power plants, with gas and nuclear generators reducing their planned output, according to Lane Clark & Peacock LLP, adding to upward pressure on electricity prices. French atomic plants are relying on waivers to discharge hotter-than-usual water into the rivers.
Fossil power sold itself to such countries on the basis that for all its long-term effects on the global climate, in the short term it would be the only way to provide reliable electricity when it’s most needed. This heat wave is showing that even that promise won’t hold up.
• India’s Heatwaves Are Testing the Limits of Human Survival: Fickling and Pollard
• Feed the World? India Has a Chapati Crisis Brewing at Home: Andy Mukherjee | 2022-07-21T23:59:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Struggling to Stay Cool? So Is the Generator Powering Your Aircon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/struggling-to-staycool-so-is-the-generator-powering-your-aircon/2022/07/21/a7a21028-0949-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/struggling-to-staycool-so-is-the-generator-powering-your-aircon/2022/07/21/a7a21028-0949-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
UDC president, longest-serving in school history, to step down in 2023
Ronald Mason Jr. has been at the helm of the University of the District of Columbia since 2015
The main campus of the University of the District of Columbia in Northwest Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The president of the University of the District of Columbia, the city’s sole public university and community college, will step down in 2023, officials said Thursday.
Ronald Mason Jr. has been at UDC’s helm since 2015, making him the school’s longest-serving president since its founding in 1976.
“It was time,” Mason said in an interview. He arrived at UDC for a three-year term and will have been at the university for eight years by the time his contract ends next June. “The end of the contract seemed like a good time to think about the next adventure,” he said.
Still, the decision to leave the presidency was not one Mason took lightly, he told the campus in a message. When he arrived to UDC, the school was in crisis. An audit in 2014 found school officials had awarded student loans in excess of federal limits and did not to obtain high school transcripts and proof of residency needed for the government’s student aid programs.
In a city dominated by private universities, UDC makes a pitch to District residents: ‘We are affordable and high quality.’
The school set forth a cost-saving plan that called for the elimination of nearly two dozen programs and the addition of majors to better align with the District’s economic priorities. In 2017, city auditors reported the school had cleared the financial aid hurdles, but said the school’s degree offerings were still not aligned with the city’s needs.
Under Mason’s leadership, the school has developed programs that are better suited for the city, he said. After it lost accreditation in 2015, the school’s associate nursing program is now back and fully accredited. UDC has also added a cybersecurity degree, more offerings in information technology, and secured federal funding for a teacher training institute.
School officials are also developing an early college program at Anacostia High School, Mason said.
“All the pieces are here to go to the next level,” Mason said. “I think we’re becoming more and more of an attractive package.”
During Mason’s tenure the school’s research expenditures have nearly tripled and at least 100 new faculty members have been recruited over the past five years, he said. In December, the university landed its largest private donation, a $2.3 million gift that will be used to fund scholarships.
The school, as part of a six-year capital improvement plan, is also preparing to purchase a building in Congress Heights for its workforce development programs and expand the community college campus in Northeast Washington.
The University of the District of Columbia lands a record $2.3 million gift
The next step, Mason said, will be “starting to connect the pipeline” between vocational programs, the community college and four-year university.
Still, there are challenges. UDC, like other campuses throughout the country, has been dealing with an enrollment plunge.
During fall 2010, UDC enrolled 5,855 students in its undergraduate, graduate, law school and community college programs, data from the university show. Just 4,456 students were enrolled in fall 2019.
Mason said one factor affecting enrollment is the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant, a program through which students in the District can receive up to $10,000 per year to go to a public university outside the city or up to $2,500 to enroll at private historically Black college or university, or private campus in the Washington metro area.
Enrollment has continued to slump during the pandemic, as UDC reported 3,953 students during the fall 2020 semester and 3,476 students in fall 2021 — with the community college taking the biggest hit. Across the country, community college head counts have dropped nearly 15 percent between fall 2019 and 2021, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Community colleges in D.C. area and beyond are contending with an enrollment crisis
But, things could be looking up. The number of applications, admitted students and registered students has increased from last year, Mason said.
He said he is still weighing his future but teaching at UDC’s law school, where he is a tenured professor, is an option.
“This is not the end, and certainly not goodbye,” he told the campus in a statement. “We still have significant work to do, and I look forward to doing it together — as we always have.” | 2022-07-22T00:00:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UDC President Ronald Mason Jr to step down in 2023 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/21/udc-ronald-mason-president-leaving/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/21/udc-ronald-mason-president-leaving/ |
Woman leaps from burning Boston subway train into river below
None of the about 200 passengers onboard were injured, the transit authority said. The incident illustrates the latest safety issue for the Boston subway system.
A woman jumped from a Boston subway train into the river below after a rail car caught fire on a bridge Thursday, while other passengers leaped out windows onto the tracks, according to authorities.
The woman, who was not identified, jumped more than 30 feet from the railroad bridge into the Mystic River below, said Somerville Fire Chief Charles J. Breen Jr.
The Somerville Fire Marine Unit, which had been training in the river, gave the woman a life jacket after she refused to board their boat and those of other emergency responders, Breen said in an email. The woman swam to shore as emergency responders kept tabs on her, Breen said.
“Once ashore,” Breen wrote, “she refused repeated offers of medical assistance and walked away.”
Most of the fire went out on its own after the electrical system was shut down, he said.
No injuries were reported, said Joe Pesaturo, spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. About 200 people were onboard at the time, the MBTA said.
The incident was the latest safety problem for the Boston subway system. A man died in April after being dragged along a station platform when his arm got caught in a train door, and nine people were injured in September after a station escalator malfunctioned.
In Somerville, Mass., new Union Square stop is a go
In June, the Federal Transit Administration issued a series of “special directives” following an investigation into what it called “long-standing issues with the MBTA’s overall safety program and safety culture.” Problems included delayed critical maintenance, lapses in workers’ safety certifications and an understaffed operations center, the FTA said.
The MBTA said the Orange Line train operator reported flames and smoke coming from the lead car around 6:45 a.m. as it crossed the bridge spanning the river between the line’s Wellington and Assembly stations.
Are free buses a tool for social justice? Boston wants to find out
A video posted on the Boston Globe’s website shows smoke billowing from beneath the front of the train and then several women jumping out a window as another passenger helps them from below. One woman who said she was in the rail car told the Globe she saw flames coming up both sides of the train and that a man kicked out a window after he couldn’t open an emergency exit.
In a tweet, the MBTA said a “preliminary inspection” indicated that part of the train’s metal side panel touched the third rail, which caused the fire.
“We are deeply disappointed that this incident occurred and sincerely apologize to our riders who were on the train, as well as to our ridership as a whole,” the agency tweeted. “With a more extensive inspection already underway, we will take every necessary step to prevent this from happening again.”
We are deeply disappointed that this incident occurred and sincerely apologize to our riders who were on the train, as well as to our ridership as a whole. With a more extensive inspection already underway, we will take every necessary step to prevent this from happening again. | 2022-07-22T00:01:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Woman jumps from Boston MBTA subway train into Mystic River - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/21/boston-subway-woman-jumps-river/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/07/21/boston-subway-woman-jumps-river/ |
Josh Rosen, who spent last season with the Falcons, also has had stints with the Cardinals, Dolphins, Buccaneers and 49ers. (John Bazemore/AP)
While the Cleveland Browns await a ruling on a possible suspension for quarterback Deshaun Watson, they bolstered their depth Thursday by adding a notable name: Josh Rosen.
The 10th pick in the 2018 draft — which saw the Browns use the top choice on quarterback Baker Mayfield — Rosen began to bounce around the league almost right away. Jettisoned after one season by the Arizona Cardinals, who used the first pick in the 2019 draft on Kyler Murray, the 25-year-old Rosen also has spent time with the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, San Francisco 49ers and Atlanta Falcons.
Now Rosen is getting a chance to continue his NFL career in Cleveland. The Browns decided to sign him, per multiple reports, after working out Rosen and free agent AJ McCarron on Thursday.
At the least, Rosen will provide Cleveland with another arm during training camp, which opens at the end of the month. He could take on more importance, however, should Watson receive a lengthy suspension.
The NFL conducted a disciplinary hearing last month for Watson, who was accused by more than 20 women of sexual misconduct during massage therapy sessions while the quarterback was a member of the Houston Texans. The Browns traded for Watson in March and handed him a mammoth contract, but his debut with the team could be delayed. The NFL is pushing for an indefinite suspension of at least one year; the decision will be made by a disciplinary officer jointly appointed by the league and the players union, former federal judge Sue L. Robinson.
In the event of a suspension, the Browns plan to start Jacoby Brissett, whom they signed in the spring. The team subsequently signed Joshua Dobbs, a 27-year-old who previously played for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Jacksonville Jaguars.
More recently, the Browns traded Mayfield to the Carolina Panthers, ending speculation that they might keep their disgruntled former starter and restore his role in the event of a Watson suspension. The Browns previously traded backup Case Keenum to the Buffalo Bills, leaving Watson, Brissett and Dobbs as their quarterback depth chart.
With Dobbs having appeared in just six games over five seasons, including zero starts, Rosen’s greater experience — 16 starts in 24 career appearances — could persuade the Browns to place him next in line behind Brissett. For his career, Rosen has completed 54.0 percent of his passes for 2,864 yards, 12 touchdowns, 21 interceptions and a 61.1 passer rating.
After starring at UCLA, Rosen was considered a contender to be drafted first in 2018. He wound up becoming the fourth quarterback selected, following Mayfield, Sam Darnold (drafted at No. 3 by the New York Jets) and Josh Allen (drafted at No. 7 by the Bills). Rosen took over as Arizona’s starter in the fourth game of that season, but after he struggled to move the offense as the Cardinals went 3-10, they made the unusual decision to cut ties with him very early and traded him to Miami during the 2019 draft following their selection of Murray.
News of Rosen’s signing by the Browns emerged hours after the 24-year-old Murray agreed to a five-year contract extension with Arizona worth $230.5 million, including $160 million in guaranteed money. | 2022-07-22T00:17:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Amid Deshaun Watson uncertainty, Browns reportedly sign Josh Rosen - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/21/josh-rosen-cleveland-browns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/21/josh-rosen-cleveland-browns/ |
National Digest: Dartmouth gets first female president
Dartmouth gets first female president
Dartmouth, founded in 1769, enrolled 6,300 students in fall 2020, including 4,200 undergraduates.
Women have served as president at most of the Ivy League schools. Yale University was led by a pioneering female acting president, Hanna Holborn Gray, in 1977-1978, but it has not had a woman hold the job in a permanent capacity. Columbia University has not yet had a female president.
— Nick Anderson
Woman sentenced in GoFundMe scam
Katelyn McClure, 32, was also ordered to make restitution and serve three years’ supervised release. The Bordentown, N.J., resident and her two accomplices are scheduled to be sentenced on state charges next month.
D’Amico pleaded guilty to federal charges and was sentenced in April to 27 months in prison. He was also ordered to make restitution.
Bobbitt was sentenced to five years’ probation on state charges in 2019.
9 hurt as shuttle bus crashes at Los Angeles airport: Nine people were injured when a shuttle bus crashed into a pole at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday, authorities said. Two of the nine passengers suffered life-threatening injuries, said Margaret Stewart, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Fire Department. There were 23 passengers and the driver aboard the bus. The crash happened just before 12:30 p.m. near an administrative building as the bus was traveling from the taxi and ride-hailing services parking lot on its way back to the main terminal, an airport spokesperson said. | 2022-07-22T00:21:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | National Digest: Dartmouth gets first female president - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-digest-dartmouth-gets-first-female-president/2022/07/21/487f1f04-04ae-11ed-9282-2a7e062f9565_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-digest-dartmouth-gets-first-female-president/2022/07/21/487f1f04-04ae-11ed-9282-2a7e062f9565_story.html |
A man was shot and a woman was arrested Thursday night in a domestic dispute that led to a brief barricade situation at a luxury hotel near the Tidal Basin, D.C. police said.
The incident, at the Mandarin Oriental in the 1300 block of Maryland Avenue SW, began about 7:40 p.m. when at least one shot was fired in a room at the hotel, said Officer Sean Hickman, a police spokesman. When officers arrived, a woman was barricaded in the room with a wounded man, Hickman said.
He said the standoff lasted less than an hour before the woman surrendered and was taken into custody. The man, whom Hickman said was “conscious and breathing,” was taken to a hospital with a non-life-threatening wound. Hickman said police found two handguns in the room.
The names of the two people and the charges against the woman were not immediately available. | 2022-07-22T01:48:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man shot, woman arrested in domestic dispute at D.C. hotel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/dc-barricade-mandarin-oriental/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/21/dc-barricade-mandarin-oriental/ |
Lee Zeldin (Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg)
Rep. Lee Zeldin, the New York Republican gubernatorial nominee, was attacked while speaking at a campaign event on Thursday, according to witnesses and footage of the incident posted on social media.
Video shows a man in a baseball cap and black shorts slowly walking toward Zeldin, who was addressing a small audience while on stage in Monroe County, near the Canadian border. The person then confronts the congressman and the two men get into a tussle. At least three bystanders attempt to get the attacker off Zeldin, according to the footage.
Zeldin was seen being separated from his assailant shortly after.
It was not immediately clear if Zeldin or his attacker was injured.
Zeldin will face Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), who has a substantial lead in the polls, in the November general elections. | 2022-07-22T02:18:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin attacked at Perinton, N.Y., campaign stop - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/lee-zeldin-attack-perinton-new-york/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/lee-zeldin-attack-perinton-new-york/ |
Washington, DC - July 21 : A video of President Donald Trump as he taped his Jan. 7, 2021, remarks about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is shown during the House select committee hearing on July 21. (Tom Brenner for the Washington Post)
He did not call the National Guard, or the FBI, or D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, or anyone else who could have provided aid. He did call senators, urging them to continue objecting to the certification of the vote. He did call Rudy Giuliani. Why? This was his only chance to stop an electoral count declaring him the election’s loser. As Mr. Kinzinger put it in his opening statement, “The mob was accomplishing President Trump’s purpose, so of course he didn’t intervene.”
The presenters argued Thursday that not calling off the assault was a dereliction of duty. That’s certainly true. Yet it was also something worse: an effective endorsement of that day’s horrific events, delivered in the form of all-too-meaningful silence, and punctuated with tweets that made clear exactly what the lame-duck leader was trying to communicate. Most alarmingly: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what was necessary,” Mr. Trump wrote at 2:24 p.m., as his supporters on the National Mall chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” The impact was real: The emboldened mob was threatening enough that some members of the vice president’s security detail asked colleagues to tell their loved ones goodbye.
The new details shared Thursday are damning on their own, but they’re more damning still read alongside everything else the committee has laid out these past several weeks. Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, his top campaign lawyer, his lead data analyst and even his attorney general told him he had lost the election. Instead of abating his efforts to overturn the results, he escalated them. He not only pressured officials to “find” votes for him, or to submit rogue slates of electors, but he also rendered the explosion of Jan. 6 all but inevitable by summoning his followers to Washington and directing them to the Capitol, knowing they would go to extremes for him.
That all this culminated in violence was no surprise, and no accident. Mr. Trump had the power to start what occurred on Jan. 6, and he had the power to stop it. Having exercised the former, he withheld the latter. This was indeed a violation of his oath of office — one that began the moment he realized he had lost the election, and one that continued until the disaster he invited had finally struck. Now the country must figure out what to do about it.
A bill to prevent Trump’s attempted coup is finally ready — and must pass | 2022-07-22T02:45:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Thursday’s Jan. 6 hearing showed the extent of Trump’s inaction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/jan-6-hearing-thursday-trump-inaction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/jan-6-hearing-thursday-trump-inaction/ |
Hawley’s effort to reap political rewards from Jan. 6 scampers off
Given everything that’s happened since, it’s easy to forget the role that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) played in validating Donald Trump’s effort to undermine the 2020 election results.
In the weeks after states submitted their electoral vote slates to Washington on Dec. 14 of that year, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sought to keep his caucus from joining an effort to reject some of those electors. Over on the House side, there was a quick competition to demonstrate loyalty to Trump by announcing plans to object to submitted slates. But contesting electors needed both one member of the House and one member from the Senate to have a shot at success, and McConnell didn’t want that to happen.
It didn’t work. And the first senator to defy McConnell was the junior senator from Missouri.
Hawley was making a calculated political play that, for a year and a half, he’s managed to keep afloat. But one clip that aired during the House select committee hearing on Thursday evening might have made that water-treading impossible.
On Dec. 30, 2020, Hawley’s office released a statement announcing that he would object to the electors submitted by Pennsylvania. He tried to rationalize it by blaming technology companies, a favorite target of his, and raising objections to how votes were cast in the Keystone state, a question that had already been resolved by the state’s courts.
The plan was obvious. Hawley, an ambitious young politician, wanted to be able to be the guy who delivered for Trump’s base. Other senators knew it, too: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), similarly ambitious if less young, quickly came up with a plan for offering his own, slightly different objection. The race was on.
As he entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Hawley gave that infamous fist pump to the crowd of people outside — some eventual rioters among them. In the aftermath of the riot, there was a lot of criticism of Hawley’s gesture of encouragement, serving as it did as a reminder of his role in encouraging rioters to think that the electoral-vote counting should be derailed. After keeping a low profile for a bit, Hawley eventually began selling a mug showing the fist pump — continuing to do so even after the copyright-holder for the photo threatened to sue.
And why not? He’d weathered the immediate negative effects of his involvement in the riot, it seemed. Republican opinions on the day’s events had shifted and loyalty to Trump continued to be valuable currency. Even on the evening of Jan. 6 itself, Hawley was still hoping that eventuality might arrive. While at least one member of the Senate Republican caucus decided not to object to the submitted electors, Hawley didn’t. He still objected. Even after Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) shouted at him, “You have caused this!”, Hawley — standing in front of a fuming Romney — objected to the electoral slate.
This, it seems, was the bet. Hawley bet it would all work out politically, that he could wave away concerns like Romney’s over the short term and be a hero to the base for standing firm for years to come. And until, oh, about 9 p.m. on Thursday, it looked like it could work.
Then committee member Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) turned the hearing’s attention to Hawley’s actions inside the Capitol that day.
She started by showing the fist-pump photo, noting that a Capitol Police officer had expressed frustration at his doing so, since “he was doing it in a safe space, protected by the officers and the barriers.” Then Luria inserted the dagger.
“Later that day, Senator Hawley fled, after those protesters he helped to rile up stormed the Capitol,” she said. “See for yourself.”
Video of Hawley dashing across a hallway aired on a large screen at the front of the hearing room. Then it aired again, this time in slow motion.
The hearing was theoretically predicated on proving Trump had chosen not to act in response to the rioters on that day. This little aside about Hawley did not obviously have anything to do with that. It didn’t help the committee’s case against Trump, certainly. It was at least in part an overt effort to embarrass Hawley, contrasting his proud demonstration of allegiance with the soon-to-be rioters with his eventually becoming just another elected official who suddenly and unexpectedly found himself at the rioters’ mercy.
There is a sense in which airing the Hawley video fit with the committee’s efforts, though. The committee wants to exact a cost for those who sought to upend the results of the 2020 election. They want, if only unofficially, to make it impossible for Trump to be reelected as president. It’s safe to assume they understand the narrow path Hawley has been trying to walk and understood that airing that footage would in no way help him succeed. The senator loves to seem tough. That video seemed anything but.
Hawley wants the visual of his involvement in Jan. 6 to be that fist pump: the guy willing to fight for Trump. Instead, it is now that slow-motion video: the guy who thought he was cleverly leveraging Trump’s base for his own purposes, only to see things suddenly unfold in a dramatically different way. | 2022-07-22T02:49:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hawley’s effort to reap political rewards from Jan. 6 scampers off - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/hawleys-effort-reap-political-rewards-jan-6-scampers-off/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/hawleys-effort-reap-political-rewards-jan-6-scampers-off/ |
Protesters face off with security forces near the Sri Lanka presidential secretariat on July 22. (Rafiq Maqbool/AP)
Sri Lankan security forces raided a protest camp outside the presidential office early Friday, hours after the country’s new leader was sworn in.
“For the first time Sri Lanka’s recent past, citizens have collectively risen up to show we can stand against power,” said Harinda Fonseka, a protester. The raid, he said, suggested authorities felt threatened.
Julie Chung, the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka, tweeted she was “deeply concerned” about the raid. “We urge restraint by authorities & immediate access to medical attention for those injured,” she said. | 2022-07-22T02:53:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sri Lankan troops raid protest camp outside presidential office - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/sri-lanka-protest-raid-president/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/21/sri-lanka-protest-raid-president/ |
Carleton Varney, ‘Mr. Color’ of interior design, dies at 85
His A-list roster of clients included Joan Crawford and President Jimmy Carter
Interior designer Carleton Varney in 2013. (Michel Arnaud/Courtesy of Dorothy Draper & Co.)
Carleton Varney, an interior designer who bathed his spaces in emerald green and melon orange, azalea pink and royal blue, acquiring the moniker “Mr. Color” with a roster of A-list clients including Joan Crawford and Jimmy Carter, died July 14 at a hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 85.
His son Sebastian Varney confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Mr. Varney was the president and owner of the Manhattan-based firm Dorothy Draper & Co., the namesake of the venerable decorator who hired him as a draftsman when he was in his early 20s and schooled him in the unabashedly colorful vision of design that became his calling card.
“Mrs. Draper didn’t like anything that looked like it could be poured over a turkey,” Mr. Varney once told the Houston Chronicle. “No fabrics that look beige, gray or mousy or gravy-like,” he recalled to another interviewer.
Mr. Varney purchased the Draper firm in the mid-1960s. Over nearly six decades, he offered guests at White House state dinners, his marquee private clients, and visitors to resorts including the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. — one of his signature projects — a vibrant antidote to the neutral colors of the modern world.
Pro tip from the Greenbrier’s interior designer: Embrace color and shun beige
Mr. Varney’s stories about his clients were as nearly as colorful as the coverings he ordered up for their walls. Crawford hired him to decorate the apartment she acquired when she could no longer afford the $3,000 monthly upkeep of her previous one.
She called him in tears, Mr. Varney said, when her bill came due and she could not pay because the sale of her penthouse was not yet final. In the end, Mr. Varney said, she paid every penny she owed. She also offered him a job as her “permanent escort,” which he declined.
For Ethel Merman, Mr. Varney designed an apartment in a red, white and blue motif; for the emotionally fragile Judy Garland, he recalled, he “put soft yellow backgrounds in her home … that made her happy.”
His color schemes drew admirers far beyond Hollywood, including in the comparatively staid environs of Washington, where Mr. Varney was a go-to designer for President Jimmy and first lady Rosalynn Carter. With only five days’ notice, The Post reported, he organized a dinner to celebrate the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. Under a yellow, white and orange tent, guests dined at tables bedecked in cloths bearing a forsythia pattern.
The Carters hired Mr. Varney to decorate their home in the Plains, Ga., as well as their second home, a log cabin in the Georgia foothills. In subsequent Republican administrations, Mr. Varney did work for the Reagans and the Quayles, proving that the appeal of bright color transcends party lines.
Mr. Varney oversaw the refurbishment of the Sequoia, the onetime presidential yacht that Carter sold as an “unjustified and unnecessary frill,” as well as official locations including the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
Besides the Greenbrier (whose color palette had been set by Dorothy Draper), the Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, the Colony Palm Beach in Florida and the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan all bear his mark.
That mark was not to everyone’s liking.
“The Greenbrier is anything but subtle,” a Post reporter wrote some years after a $50 million renovation curated by Mr. Varney. “The resort … feels like the aftermath of a paintball game held during a garden party. Whack — mint green. Splat — canary yellow. Oof — teal blue.”
But the style was inimitable, and it was his.
“I have spent 54 years trying to open the windows and doors of America to color,” Mr. Varney said in 2020. “I believe color has a total effect on people’s heads, minds and attitudes. A beautiful sunny room makes people happy. I think children who grow up in rooms that are pretty and colorful and magical are better people.”
Carleton Bates Varney Jr. was born in Lynn, Mass., on Jan. 23, 1937. His father ran a sporting goods store, and his mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Varney was a 1958 graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and received a master’s degree in education from New York University in 1960.
He taught at private schools in New Rochelle, N.Y., and in Manhattan before working briefly in fashion and then embarking on his design career. He had hoped to be a theatrical set designer, he said, but found no such job available without a “connection. ”
When he joined Dorothy Draper’s firm, he “did everything — vacuuming the floor and emptying the wastebasket,” he told the Chronicle in 2018. “In fact, I still do all of that.” Draper died in 1969.
Mr. Varney’s design empire also included the textile and wallcovering company Carleton V Ltd.
He hosted the show “Live Vividly” on the Home Shopping Network and wrote more than three dozen books, among them “There’s No Place Like Home: Confessions of an Interior Designer” (1980), “In the Pink: Dorothy Draper, America’s Most Fabulous Decorator” (2006), “Houses in My Heart: An International Decorator’s Colorful Journey” (2008) and “Mr. Color: The Greenbrier and Other Decorating Adventures” (2011).
Mr. Varney’s marriage to Suzanne Lickdyke ended in divorce. Survivors include their three sons, Nicholas Varney of West Palm Beach, Seamus Varney of Edmeston, N.Y., and Sebastian Varney of Stanfordville, N.Y.; a sister; and a grandson.
Mr. Varney’s taste for bright colors extended to his sartorial choices. He was partial to green pants (green was an “influential color” in his life, he said) and red socks. He wore a scarf as a tie.
“I’m not trying to change the world,” he told the New York Times in 2012, “but I’m trying to make people aware of the one thing I believe most in — that color is magic.” | 2022-07-22T03:11:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carleton Varney, ‘Mr. Color’ of interior design, dies at 85 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/21/carleton-varney-color-interior-design-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/21/carleton-varney-color-interior-design-dead/ |
The hearing was led by committee members Elaine Luria (D-Va.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). Both are veterans — Luria served 20 years in the Navy, Kinzinger was in the Air Force and serves now in the Air National Guard — and both strained to control their visceral outrage at Trump’s inaction.
There should not have been a need for a select committee in the first place. Democrats wanted the Capitol insurrection to be investigated by an independent blue-ribbon commission, as was done following prior national crises such as the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Republicans refused to allow any such thing. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had no choice but to set up a bipartisan panel of House members.
Richard Ben-Veniste: Merrick Garland doesn’t have forever
That turned out to be a huge mistake. Two Republicans with backbone — Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Kinzinger — decided to serve on the committee anyway, putting patriotism above party. And the panel chose to tell the story of Trump’s months-long effort to overturn the election largely through live and videotaped testimony by Republicans, including loyal Trump aides. Trump’s attorney general, his White House counsel and even his oldest daughter told the committee that well before Jan. 6 they had accepted the fact that Joe Biden won.
“There needs to be accountability,” committee chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said tonight in his opening statement, delivered remotely because he had tested positive for the coronavirus. “Accountability under the law. Accountability to the American people.” | 2022-07-22T03:54:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Jan. 6 hearing shows Trump's outrageous behavior during Capitol attack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/jan-6-hearing-trump-behavior/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/jan-6-hearing-trump-behavior/ |
Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, left, and Sarah Matthews, a former White House deputy press secretary, testified on Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Analyzing the House Jan. 6 committee hearings has been a special challenge, considering how far they veer from traditional congressional hearings. Each one has been designed to evoke a visceral response through the use of skillfully edited audio and video packages under the artful direction of a professional network news producer. As such, commenting on them is less like dissecting a congressional hearing and more like reviewing a tightly scripted point-of-view documentary, a la Michael Moore or Oliver Stone.
With that caveat in mind, Thursday’s prime-time spectacle can be summed up as the rare late-entry sequel — the eighth in the series — that surpasses its predecessors, especially measured by its emotional wallop.
While the hearing was, like its predecessors, short on new revelations, this slickly produced drama effectively highlighted Donald Trump’s dereliction of duty, as president, in his nonresponse to the riot at the U.S. Capitol. His negligence was magnified by the perverse pleasure he apparently took in watching his supporters attempt to disrupt a constitutional act being overseen by his own vice president, Mike Pence. Trump’s betrayal of Pence will forever be unconscionable.
Taking their turn narrating the hearing were two committee members, Reps. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). Their teleprompter readings were smooth and professional. More interesting were two former Trump officials who resigned in protest after the Jan. 6 riot. Matthew Pottinger, who served on Trump’s National Security Council, and Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary, were wholly believable as young patriots who could no longer in good conscience serve a reckless president in whom they once believed.
Both cited a Trump tweet attacking Pence as a breaking point. “It was him pouring gasoline on the fire and making it much worse,” said Matthews. Pottinger, explaining his decision to resign, said, “I simply didn’t want to be associated with the events unfolding at the Capitol.”
Still, even a person guilty of some things might not be guilty of everything. Trump deserves fairness and accuracy in how his actions are depicted. Eight hearings have come and gone and we have yet to see played the portion of Trump’s Ellipse remarks when he urged the crowd to march “peacefully” to the Capitol. That’s an unfair omission by the committee.
The notion that Trump had the power to call off the insurrection during its earliest stages is debatable. The rioters were fueled by emotion and were likely surprised that they had so easily tumbled into the halls of Congress. They might well have carried on for the next couple of hours regardless of admonitions from Trump. But the fact remains that Trump had a responsibility to try. He had a duty to strongly condemn the incursion and demand an immediate end to the uprising. Instead, he sat back and enjoyed it, and that’s inexcusable.
If these presentations included any effort at balance, someone might have suggested an alternative to the scenario of a meticulously planned military-style insurrection failing to complete its objective and only dispersing when Trump gave the order. What more likely happened was a raucous, poorly organized demonstration run amok, finally abating when everyone got tired and decided to go home. It was still a shameful attack on democracy.
The hearings’ lack of fairness and complete absence of spontaneity are two reasons they have squandered the opportunity to be taken seriously by anyone not already in the choir. Just as Trump’s rallies are filled with adoring followers who cheer everything he says just because he says it, these hearings have been hailed primarily by those who have little regard for the veracity or relevancy of what is presented as long as it’s critical of Trump.
But the real downside of these presentations — or upside, if you prefer hearings presented showbiz-style — is that if Republicans take over the House next year, as widely predicted, they’ll follow the same template, targeting Democrats with damning Hollywood-style mini-documentaries in the guise of hearings. And, following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lead, they’ll deny committee seats to Democrats they deem potentially disruptive.
But that’s for later. For now, the Jan. 6 select committee is promising more episodes between now and November, a logical scenario because these hearings were always as much about distracting everyone from the many domestic problems plaguing voters, with the midterm elections approaching, as about holding the former president accountable and curtailing his future White House hopes.
Does any of this matter? If Trump runs again and wins the Republican nomination, his chances in the general election will depend much more on where inflation and gas prices are by the fall of 2024 than anything that happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Right or wrong, that’s the harsh reality of the priorities that really decide elections. | 2022-07-22T03:54:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Jan. 6 hearing on Trump's inaction had emotional wallop. Will it matter? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/jan-6-hearing-trump-inaction-will-it-matter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/jan-6-hearing-trump-inaction-will-it-matter/ |
Lyles finished in 19.31 seconds, besting Michael Johnson’s U.S. mark of 19.32
Noah Lyles was unbeatable Thursday night in Eugene, Ore. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
EUGENE, Ore. — Around the turn they came, and suddenly Noah Lyles’s rival changed from the precocious sprinter three lanes over to history. Any question about Lyles’s superiority in the 200 meters yielded to pure clarity. He separated from the fastest runners in the world — and started chasing the fastest of all time.
The track and field universe arrived Thursday night wondering whether Lyles could hold off Erriyon Knighton. It left in awe, armed with the knowledge he had chased down Michael Johnson. At the track and field world championships, as the sunset reflected off the Coburg Hills in the distance beyond Hayward Field, Lyles ran halfway around an oval faster than an any American ever has, faster than any man ever except Jamaicans Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake.
When the former T.C. Williams (now Alexandria City) High star crossed the finish line, an acre between him and American runners-up Kenny Bednarek and Knighton, 19.32 seconds popped up on the clock — the time Johnson etched into the record book at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Lyles’s heart sank. Then he looked again.
“And then that number changed from a 2 to a 1, and my whole mood changed,” Lyles said.
Remember the time: 19.31 seconds. It is the new mark Americans will chase in the 200. After a turbulent Olympic year that culminated with a bronze medal, Lyles reclaimed his place not only atop his event but the entire sport.
He struggled with mental health in 2021, openly discussing the effects of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. He took antidepressants, then came off them because he said they affected his training. He cried after he won bronze, wishing his brother had made the Olympics instead of him. He lacked energy running in an empty stadium in Tokyo.
On Thursday night, Lyles ran to the crowd and hugged his brother, Josephus, and his mother, Keisha Caine Bishop.
“Me and my brother dream about this today, but today is my day,” Lyles said to the crowd. “I knew it was coming. Tokyo was hard. But now I got my whole family. I got a crowd! I got a crowd! I couldn’t have dreamed of this moment any better.”
Bednarek was second in 19.77, and Knighton finished third in 19.80.
Minutes before Lyles and Knighton settled into their blocks, Shericka Jackson of Jamaica showed the conditions could yield an epic time. She won the women’s 200 in 21.45 seconds, the closest any woman has come to Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 21.34, a world record that no longer seems quite so unbreakable. Jackson passed fellow Jamaican and reigning Olympic gold medalist Elaine Thompson-Herah on the all-time list and held off countrywoman Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the ageless legend who added a silver to the 100-meter gold she won earlier in the meet.
Then, as the public address introduced him in the blocks in Lane 6, Lyles lifted his arms over his head and brought them to his chest — then stuck out his tongue and shook his short, gold-dyed braids. Not known for his start, he rocketed out of the blocks, passing the two competitors ahead of him. It was over at the turn. Afterward, Lyles ripped off the top of his singlet and held his gold medal in the air.
The race attracted attention from every corner of the track universe. No less an eminence than John Carlos attended. Carlos watched in person alongside Tommie Smith, who with Carlos raised a gloved fist in protest on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics after winning 200-meter gold and bronze. Carlos weighed in beforehand on another pair of American medalists.
“I like the young fella, Mr. Lyles, because I looked at his career, I looked at his heart, and he’s a fighter,” Carlos said. “I look at the young fella, Erriyon, he reminds me of myself because he is a tall individual but he runs a blazing turn. And I don’t think anybody ran the turn as well as me back in my era. I think Mr. Lyles is going to have to do his greatest race ever in order to beat this young kid.”
Last summer, Knighton became the youngest U.S. track and field Olympian since Jim Ryun in 1964. He claimed fourth in the 200 at 17, and at that remarkable achievement Knighton expressed only disappointment, a signal of his precocious talent and self-belief. For an encore this year, Knighton had added two more milestones. In April, during a small meet at LSU, Knighton sprinted half a lap in 19.49 seconds, which made him the fourth-fastest man ever and shattered Bolt’s junior record. A few weeks later, he graduated from Tampa’s Hillsborough High.
Knighton’s race at LSU nudged him one spot ahead of Lyles on the all-time list, but Lyles had not ceded his place as the American standard. Knighton had still not defeated Lyles head-to-head in a final. He came closest at last month’s U.S. championships, where Lyles chased down Knighton in the final straightaway and beat him by 0.02 seconds, pointing across Knighton’s face at the clock as he broke the tape.
“I know that he’s coming back with a vengeance,” Lyles said this week. “And I’m not going to give him anything less than I have.”
Lyles played down the gesture, explaining that he was celebrating his own race, not taunting Knighton. Afterward, while both waited to, uh, produce at drug testing, Lyles provided the same explanation to Knighton.
“He was like: ‘Bro, you don’t even have to worry about it. I totally get it,’ ” Lyles said. “That was it.”
It may not be heated off the track, but Lyles and Knighton provide the kind of rivalry that track and field produces at its best. Lyles is vibrant and demonstrative, in the prime of his career. Knighton is stoic and determined, at the start of his. They are evenly matched over 200 meters and a contrast elsewhere.
Lyles and Knighton did not have the spotlight to themselves Thursday, because Athing Mu demands attention every time she steps on a track. Mu won two gold medals in Tokyo, setting the American record in the 800 meters at 1 minute 55.21 seconds (which she lowered weeks later to 1:55.04) and running the anchor leg of a dreamy 4x400 relay team that included Sydney McLaughlin, Allyson Felix and Dalilah Muhammad. At 19, she placed herself alongside McLaughlin as the future of American track and field.
On Thursday night, Mu made her world championships debut in an 800-meter heat, controlling pace from the front and winning in 2:01.30. Mu, who skipped May’s Prefontaine Classic while recovering from covid-19 and paused her training for about 10 days, has not dominated this year in the same manner as last year, which demonstrates the height of her standard — she still owns the best time in the world this year at 1:57.01. She received a rare challenge from Ajee’ Wilson, whose American record she seized in Tokyo, at the U.S. championships, outracing her over the final 20 meters.
“Only Lord knows where I would be if I didn’t get covid,” Mu said. “I know me, where I’m at right now, I’m happy. I’m satisfied with it. Knowing that that happened, I’m coming into this meet super level-minded, making sure I don’t take any race for granted.”
Note: U.S. decathlon champion Garrett Scantling, who finished fourth at the Tokyo Olympics, accepted a provisional suspension for a possible anti-doping violation and will not compete at the world championships, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced. Scantling had been left off the decathlon start list for an unexplained reason.
He is not accused of testing positive for a banned substance. Scantling committed possible whereabouts violations and possible tampering during an investigation into those violations, the USADA said. | 2022-07-22T04:16:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Noah Lyles sets American record in 200 meters at world championships - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/07/21/noah-lyles-200-meters-record/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/07/21/noah-lyles-200-meters-record/ |
I didn’t blame these children for hating it. It wasn’t fun for anyone. I do not want to go on this trip this year, and I’d like to find a way to be honest about why, without having them think that we don’t want to spend time with their kids.
I suggested to them that we do a shorter day trip on some easier trails nearby because the kids would enjoy that more. They replied that they wish to teach their kids “stamina” and that we can “give them breaks and they’ll be fine.”
Trying: I can well imagine what this hike to hell and back was like for everyone, and I don’t blame you for not wanting to repeat it.
When my daughter told me that her MIL had invited these extra people, I said no because we were already at maximum capacity. In response, she and my son-in-law became very upset and my son-in-law argued with me.
Setting: I think you’ve done a good job of trying to navigate this.
Dear Amy: I was deeply moved by your response to the letter from the grandmother (” Offended Gran”) whose grandson wore a gown to his prom.
T: We can all hope that younger transgender people don’t feel so alone. | 2022-07-22T04:20:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: I don’t want to go hiking with our friends and their kids - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/22/ask-amy-hiking-young-kids/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/22/ask-amy-hiking-young-kids/ |
Trump ‘chose not to act’ as mob terrorized the Capitol, panel shows
The prime-time hearing of the Jan. 6 committee revealed that the president resisted using the word ‘peaceful’ in a tweet even as his vice president’s Secret Service agents feared for their lives
A video of President Donald Trump is shown during the Jan. 6 House select committee hearing on July 21. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Eleven minutes after he returned to the White House from his speech on the Ellipse urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump learned that the Jan. 6, 2021, protest had turned violent, according to new details presented Thursday by the House committee investigating the attack that day.
But instead of harnessing the power of the Oval Office by ordering military or police intervention or exhorting the rioters to go home, Trump continued to fan the flames of discord — and remained focused on trying to overturn the 2020 election, even as his aides implored him to stop the violence.
He demanded a list of senators’ phone numbers to cajole them not to certify the forthcoming electoral college count. He resisted aides’ entreaties that he make a public statement condemning the insurrection. And at 2:24 p.m., the same moment members of his national security staff were learning how close rioters had come to Vice President Mike Pence, Trump tweeted that his second-in-command was a “coward.”
Thursday’s hearing — the eighth in a series over the past six weeks — featured numerous revelations, including testimony that Trump resisted using the word “peace” in a tweet as the Capitol was assaulted; that in the absence of action from the president, Pence was giving orders to the military to stop the attack; that the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, urged the president to tell rioters to leave; and that when Trump taped a message on Jan. 7 condemning the violence, he refused to say that the election was “over.”
The committee played harrowing audio from the radio exchanges between the Secret Service agents protecting Pence, who was at the Capitol as rioters sought him out and called for him to be hanged.
Pence, as the presiding officer in the Senate, had 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.
A security professional working at the White House told the committee that there were mentions over the radio of “saying goodbye to family members” as the Capitol was breached, then overrun. At another moment, an agent with Pence was heard to say: “We need to move now. If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to do so.”
Around the same time, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House minority leader, called Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. “He told me it was getting really ugly over at the Capitol and said, ‘Please, you know, anything you can do to help, I would appreciate it,’ ” Kushner recalled. “I got the sense that they were scared.”
Trump’s refusal to urge the mob to disperse, his continuing efforts to block the final step of certifying the 2020 result, and his disregard for his vice president’s safety were the focus of the committee’s prime-time presentation as lawmakers sought to persuade the nation that the president’s behavior that day amounted to a dereliction of duty.
Members of the panel said Thursday that the report they plan to issue will tie together the findings of their investigation and underline the former president’s culpability.
“President Trump sat in his dining room and watched the attack on television, while his senior-most staff, closest advisers and family members begged him to do what was expected of any American president,” said Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who led the questioning Thursday along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.).
As the attack unfolded, aide after aide — and family member after family member — were urging Trump to intervene by either telling the rioters to go home or using his own presidential power to send in assistance, according to testimony Thursday. Cipollone said in recorded testimony that he was not aware of Trump calling any of the relevant federal officials who could have sent resources to the Capitol: not the secretary of defense, not the secretary of homeland security, not the attorney general, not the National Guard.
“I’m not aware of that, no,” Cipollone said, noting that he urged Trump to tell rioters to leave.
Instead, Trump sat in an adjacent dining room, transfixed by what he saw on TV, according to testimony. He also continued to press aides to be taken to the Capitol himself, despite the Secret Service’s decision as he left the Ellipse that it was not safe for him to do so. A D.C. police officer on motorcade duty that day testified that Trump’s motorcade stayed in a hold at the White House for 45 minutes to an hour after his return, waiting to see if he would go to the Capitol after all.
That officer, Sgt. Mark Robinson, also relayed in recorded testimony that he heard Secret Service agents describing in radio transmissions that there had been a heated exchange between Trump and the agents in his limousine, when he wanted to be taken to the Capitol but was told no.
“The president was upset and was adamant about going to the Capitol,” Robinson testified. “And there was a heated discussion about that.”
Trump spoke to his top campaign lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, after returning to the White House. And that evening, Giuliani called a long list of Republican allies in Congress — evidence, the committee said, that Trump remained focused on his own political fortunes as the riot unfolded.
Amid Trump’s inaction, Pence stepped in and gave orders to the military to clear the Capitol and stop the violence, according to Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Even after Trump agreed to send out a tweet urging rioters not to resort to violence, he resisted using the word “peace” in his message, Sarah Matthews, former deputy White House press secretary, testified. Matthews said she was told by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany that Trump agreed to use the word only after Ivanka Trump intervened.
Trump’s tweet attacking Pence prompted two White House aides to resign from the administration, they testified Thursday.
“It was essentially him giving the green light to these people, telling them that what they were doing at the steps of the Capitol and entering the Capitol was okay, that they were justified in their anger,” said Matthews “And he shouldn’t have been doing that. He should have been telling these people to go home.”
Matthew Pottinger, the former deputy national security adviser, said he decided to resign as soon as he saw the Trump tweet.
“I was disturbed and worried to see that the president was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty,” Pottinger said. “So the tweet looked to me like the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a de-escalation.”
The hearing also tied together details from prior hearings, including Trump’s efforts to “corrupt” the Justice Department to help him stay in power and his pressure campaign on state and local officials to overturn the result.
Luria and Kinzinger both cited their military service — she is a former Navy commander and he an Air Force veteran — as a way to contrast with what they said was Trump’s dereliction of duty on Jan. 6.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee chairman who attended the hearing remotely after testing positive for the coronavirus earlier this week, called for “stiff consequences” for those responsible for the insurrection.
Trump reluctantly condemned the attack in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7, but only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides informed him that members of his Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
But in an outtake from that video shown Thursday, Trump protested language declaring the election to be over. “I don’t want to say the election’s over,” Trump said, as Ivanka coached him on his words. “I just want to say Congress has certified the results without saying the election’s over.”
Bloodshed: For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watched his supporters attack the Capitol
Thursday’s hearing came at a time of heightened attention to the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the Jan. 6 attack. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the probe dealt with a fundamental challenge to American democracy.
A Trump spokesman on Wednesday 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,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said.
On Tuesday, the former president posted on the 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!”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, said the committee will continue working and is likely to hold more hearings starting in September.
In her closing remarks, Cheney said Trump planned to claim the election was stolen before votes were cast and manipulated his supporters’ love of the United States for his own ends.
Cheney played a recording of former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon from before the election saying Trump would claim the race was stolen if he was behind in the vote tally on election night.
“What the new Steve Bannon audio demonstrates is that Donald Trump’s plan to falsely claim victory in 2020, no matter what the facts actually were, was premeditated,” Cheney said.
“Here’s the worst part,” she said. “Donald Trump knows that millions of Americans who supported him would stand up and defend our nation. Were it threatened, they would put their lives and their freedom at stake to protect her. And he is preying on their patriotism. He is preying on their sense of justice. And on January 6, Donald Trump turned their love of country into a weapon against our Capitol and our Constitution.”
Mark Berman, Aaron Blake, Amy B Wang and Patrick Marley contributed to this report. | 2022-07-22T04:29:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump ‘chose not to act’ as mob terrorized the Capitol, panel shows - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/trump-chose-not-act-mob-terrorized-capitol-panel-shows/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/trump-chose-not-act-mob-terrorized-capitol-panel-shows/ |
“We need to move now,” one Secret Service agent testified. “If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to do so.”
An image of Vice President Mike Pence is shown as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a prime-time hearing on Capitol Hill on July 21. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
For 13 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021, as smoke clouded the air and Vice President Mike Pence hid from rioters in his office adjacent to the Senate chamber, his Secret Service detail scrambled — in increasingly frantic radio messages — to clear a path for Pence to flee the Capitol.
Read our live coverage and analysis of Thursday night's Jan. 6 hearing
An anonymous White House security official told the Jan. 6 select committee Vice President Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail feared for their lives on Jan. 6. (Video: The Washington Post)
Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who co-chaired Thursday’s hearing, said the official’s name was being withheld out of concern that his testimony could draw retaliation.
“It sounds like that we came very close to either, service having to use lethal options, or worse,” the official said. “At that point, I don’t know. Is the VP compromised? Is the detail? I don’t know. ... If they’re screaming and saying things like, ‘say goodbye to the family,’ like the floor needs to know this is going to a whole ’nother level soon.”
Meanwhile, Luria said, Trump “did not call the vice president or anyone in the military, federal law enforcement or D.C. government. Not a single person.” | 2022-07-22T04:29:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mike Pence's Secret Service agents feared for his life and theirs, official says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/mike-pence-secret-service-january-6/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/mike-pence-secret-service-january-6/ |
A video of President Donald Trump as he taped his Jan. 7, 2021, remarks is shown as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol holds a prime-time hearing on July 21. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
“I don’t want to say the election’s over,” Trump said as he recorded the statement on Jan. 7. “I just want to say Congress has certified the results without saying the election is over.”
Trump finally recorded video that included a line urging rioters to go home at 4:03 p.m. The committee revealed for the first time Thursday that his staff prepared remarks for him for this video as well.
Trump’s impromptu remarks instead stressed the falsehood that the election had been stolen. “I know your pain. I know you’re hurt,” Trump said, telling the rioters: “We love you. You’re very special.”
According to committee members, Trump’s staff wanted him to deliver another statement early on the morning of Jan. 7. But Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) said Trump refused for hours, only agreeing to record the remarks that evening, amid concerns from his allies that members of his Cabinet could attempt to invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and remove him from office.
In 2017, when a woman was killed protesting neo-Nazis and white supremacists as they rallied against the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Trump resisted calls to criticize the marchers without caveats. In one news conference, he said he condemned violence — but undercut the sentiment by blaming the violence “on many sides.”
A coterie of White House aides then wrote a new speech for Trump, this one declaring that “racism is evil” and promising that anyone who broke the law in Charlottesville would be held to account. After initially agreeing to give the speech, Trump grew angry, stalked off the stage and watched TV coverage from White House doctor Ronny Jackson’s office, according to a person who witnessed the incident. “He wasn’t unwilling to give the speech, but he wasn’t fully bought in and was scribbling on the paper until the final minutes. You could tell. He was reluctant,” said a former aide with direct knowledge of the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the private scene.
“You know what this is, of course,” Murtaugh wrote. “If he acknowledged the dead cop, he’d be implicitly faulting the mob. And he won’t do that because they’re his people. … No way he acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault. No way.” | 2022-07-22T04:29:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Day after Jan. 6 attack, Trump still couldn’t say the election was over - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/trump-election-is-over/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/trump-election-is-over/ |
Sarah Matthews, former deputy White House press secretary, testifies before the House Jan. 6 select committee on July 21. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
1Trump chose to do nothing.
2Trump put Pence in further peril.
3Trump only grudgingly called on his supporters to go home.
4Republicans can’t live down their conduct.
5There is more to learn — and more to come.
The House select committee, in the last of this series of hearings on the attack of the U.S. Capitol, delivered a stunning account on Thursday of the 187 minutes that passed between Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech on Jan. 6, 2021, and the release of his video telling his supporters to go home.
Multiple people, including the former president’s own family, pleaded with Trump to issue a statement condemning the violence. But as Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the committee, said in opening remarks, Trump “could not be moved.”
Here are the key revelations about Trump’s last-ditch attempt to stop the electoral vote count:
Trump chose to do nothing.
The list of people who Trump did not call as the violence unfolded is telling. It includes the attorney general, the secretary of defense or any leader in the military. Even though he knew within 15 minutes of finishing his speech that a violent mob was attacking the Capitol, he never intervened. The absence of entries in the White House calls logs and the presidential diary — as well as the erasure of texts between Secret Service agents — during those crucial hours suggests a coverup.
Before Thursday’s hearing, there was only speculation that Trump was working through his associates Michael Flynn and Roger Stone to activate the violent mob. However, the committee on Thursday revealed that Trump called his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, at 1:39 p.m., and again just after 2 p.m. Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, previously testified that she had heard mention of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers during planning for Jan. 6 when “when Mr. Giuliani would be around.”
Eugene Robinson: The Jan. 6 committee makes its case. Now, we wait on Garland.
By 1:49 p.m. the mob was massing at the Capitol and Fox News was covering the chaos. Trump tweeted out video of his inflammatory speech. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified that he and others “forcefully” tried to convince Trump to call off the mob. Cipollone said he and others specifically discussed the chants by rioters to “hang Mike Pence,” which Cipollone described as “outrageous.”
This is the sort of evidence the Justice Department will need to demonstrate Trump’s intent in possible charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. It suggests Trump wanted this outcome.
Trump put Pence in further peril.
One unnamed witness described radio communication with the Secret Service detail for Vice President Mike Pence while the Capitol was under siege. The witness revealed that the officers were “starting to fear for their own lives” and that their radio messages were “disturbing. There were calls to say goodbye to family members.” The mob clearly was targeting Pence. It was at that moment Trump chose to pour gasoline on the fire with his 2:24 p.m. tweet claiming that Pence “didn’t have the courage” to halt the vote count. The juxtaposition of the testimony with Trump’s tweet was appalling.
Former national security official Matt Pottinger testified that he was so disturbed by the tweet that he decided then to resign. As he explained, it was “the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a de-escalation. Former deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews also testified that Trump’s tweet was “giving the green light” to the rioters. She added, “I’ve seen the impact his words have on his supporters.” Because she viewed the message as “indefensible,” she quit that night.
Gary Abernathy: This Jan. 6 hearing was the best showbiz yet. Will it matter? Hmm.
What was Trump doing while Pence was in peril? Calling senators to try to delay the vote. Bone-chilling. Galling. However one describes it, it’s clear Trump wanted the violence to continue.
Trump only grudgingly called on his supporters to go home.
Trump refused to call off the mob when it mattered. Frantic texts from Fox News personalities, advisers and Republicans all pleaded for him to make a statement. Cipollone testified that “everyone” on staff wanted Trump to call off the mob. At 2:38 p.m., after pleadings from Ivanka Trump, Trump sent a tweet urging rioters to “stay peaceful,” without any instruction to leave the Capitol. (At that moment, House members were putting on gas masks as tear gas filled the rotunda.)
Trump finally sent out his video telling the mob to leave the Capitol after 4 p.m., when the violence was already starting to wind down. Even then, he went off script to claim the election was stolen and to praise the violent insurrectionists. Pence ordered the Capitol be cleared, and leaders of both parties insisted on completing the count.
The Post's View: How Trump violated his oath on Jan. 6 by doing nothing
Before the day ended, Trump tweeted that the rioters were “patriots.” The next day, while preparing video remarks, Trump still refused to admit the election was over.
Republicans can’t live down their conduct.
Watching the committee’s video compilation of Republicans initially condemning Trump’s behavior — only to later acquit him during his second impeachment and downplay or rationalize the attack — serves as a reminder of the GOP’s moral collapse.
The committee included testimony that Trump sneered at Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) when the House minority leader pleaded with Trump during the attack for help, reportedly telling McCarthy that the rioters must have cared more about the election than he did. We also saw clips of both McCarthy and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declaring that Trump was responsible for the attack shortly after the insurrection. Of course, McCarthy has since reverted to his sniveling obsequiousness.
The committee also took a swing at Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. It first showed the photo of the Republican fist-pumping the crowd outside the Capitol, and included devastating testimony from a Capitol Police officer frustrated by his attempt to rile up the crowd. The committee then showed video of Hawley fleeing from the mob just hours later.
There is more to learn — and more to come.
Thompson said at the beginning of the hearing that “the dam has begun to break.” More witnesses are emerging and new evidence is pouring in, he said, adding that the committee will reassemble in September for more hearings.
Among the issues left to examine is the full-blown scandal concerning the Secret Service’s deletion of texts from Jan. 5 and 6. (To no one’s surprise, the Secret Service agents that promised to refute testimony from Hutchinson have not shown up. They have retained their own lawyers.)
In any case, the series of Trump advisers and allies expressing disgust at his actions should convince all but the most delusional cultists that Trump should never be trusted with power again. As Pottinger said, Trump gave America’s enemies ammunition to claim our nation was in “decline” and that democracy doesn’t work.
In an eloquent summation, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) reminded the country that “we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.” Her message was clear: Trump’s return to power would be unimaginable. | 2022-07-22T04:33:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Revelations from Thursday’s Jan. 6 hearing on Trump’s inaction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/jan-6-hearing-revelations-trump-inaction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/jan-6-hearing-revelations-trump-inaction/ |
The Jan. 6 hearings on Thursday night finally dealt with one of the most central but least-understood aspects of that day: what President Donald Trump was up to while his supporters waged an attack on the U.S. Capitol in his name, seeking to return him to office by force.
The hearing featured live testimony from former White House aides Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, along with further details of former White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s videotaped testimony.
Below, some takeaways.
1. Cipollone’s significant timeline
Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified to the Jan. 6 select committee that President Donald Trump waited hours to call off rioters on Jan. 6. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
We received the long-awaited, more detailed testimony from Cipollone, and it didn’t disappoint.
Cipollone offered a timeline of events that day that, at the least, reinforces just how derelict Trump was.
Because the White House itself has been something of a black box, there have been questions about just how quickly Trump appreciated the gravity of the situation on Jan. 6 — particularly how much he knew about the violence when he tweeted attacking Vice President Mike Pence at 2:24 p.m., while rioters were in the Capitol.
Cipollone said he personally learned the gravity of the situation before rioters had entered the Capitol — something that transpired around 2:15 p.m. Crucially, he said his and other staffers’ push for a strong statement to quell the violence began as early as around 2 p.m.
He declined to comment on conversations with Trump, citing executive privilege, but said he repeatedly and forcefully pushed for this inside the White House.
“I think I was pretty clear there needed to be an immediate and forceful response — statement, public statement — that people need to leave the Capitol,” Cipollone said.
His timeline would mean that two or more hours passed before Trump’s 4:17 p.m. video telling people to go home. And it places the consternation before many of the text messages we’ve seen from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s phone.
And Cipollone repeatedly sought to emphasize he wasn’t the only one making the case in the intervening two hours.
“Just to be clear, many people suggested it — not just me,” he said. “Many people felt the same way.”
He confirmed they included Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and Meadows.
The committee also cited an unnamed witness who said Trump knew about the violence even earlier — 11 minutes after his speech on the Ellipse. But Cipollone might be the best evidence yet that people were calling for action extremely early in the insurrection.
2. Cipollone’s striking, strained no comment
Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone said he couldn't reveal privileged communications when asked if President Donald Trump wanted Jan. 6 rioters to leave. (Video: The Washington Post)
While that Cipollone testimony was perhaps more explicitly damaging, another portion of his testimony arguably spoke louder — with his struggling silence.
At one point, Cipollone was asked if anyone on White House staff didn’t want the rioters to go home. “On the staff?” he responded. Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she wanted to know about anybody “in the White House.” Cipollone said he couldn’t “think of anybody” who didn’t want that. Then the committee members asked him about one other person: Trump himself.
Then came the awkwardness.
Cipollone said he understood the question to be about White House staff, which it initially was, but Cheney indeed clarified it was about anybody in the White House. He was then asked directly about Trump. Cipollone hemmed and hawed, unsure of answering the question. He talked about whether it might be privileged, conferring with his lawyer. He seemed to want to give his view — but struggled with whether to do it. “I can’t reveal communications,” he said, “but obviously I think in my …” he paused, looking toward his counsel again. Not appearing to get any verbal guidance, he concluded, “Yeah.”
It would seem relatively straightforward for Cipollone to give his perception of Trump’s feelings, leaving any personal conversations aside. And he seemed to genuinely want to. He also could have said his perception was that Trump didn’t like the riot.
But he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — say it.
3. Trump wouldn’t give in, even on Jan. 7
The committee played new evidence — previewed by The Washington Post this week — that even the day after the riot, Trump pointedly declined to admit his loss.
In new outtakes of a video Trump recorded on Jan. 7, he read a script that said “this election is now over.” But he said he preferred to merely say the election had been certified by Congress.
“I don’t want to say the election’s over,” Trump said. “I just want to say Congress has certified the results, without saying the election’s over, okay?”
Ivanka Trump cut in to suggest that Congress certifying the results meant it was indeed over.
Trump’s actions in the 4:17 p.m. video released on Jan. 6 — and even that night — made clear he wasn’t going to completely let go of his stolen-election talk. He tweeted about 6 p.m. saying, “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.”
But this footage shows him just a day after the carnage on Jan. 6, when the dust had settled, balking at explicitly admitting the election had ended.
Similarly, Matthews testified that White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told her Trump “did not want to include any sort of mention of peace” in a tweet Trump was being urged to send the afternoon of Jan. 6. She said Ivanka Trump prevailed upon him to include “Stay peaceful.”
Certainly, it all underscores that Trump simply didn’t view what happened that day in the way that virtually everyone else did.
4. Driving it home with McCarthy and McConnell
The witnesses Thursday night were Pottinger and Matthews. But throughout the hearing, two other Republicans unwittingly played prominent roles. And they happened to be the GOP leaders of the House and Senate.
Cheney began the hearing by noting — correctly — that in the days after Jan. 6, virtually no Republicans actually defended Trump. In fact, even many who voted against impeachment sharply criticized Trump.
And videos of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) were played to drive that home. Both faulted Trump for failing to quell the violence when it began. McCarthy said, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters” because he didn’t act “immediately.” McConnell said, “It was obvious that only President Trump could end this” because people were acting on Trump’s behalf. (McConnell also faulted Trump for inflaming supporters with false voter-fraud claims.)
Cheney summarized that “McConnell reached those conclusions based on what he knew then, without any of the much more detailed evidence you will see today.” She added of McCarthy, perhaps needling the guy who helped push her out of GOP leadership for criticizing Trump over Jan. 6: “Their own Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, was scared.”
The committee would repeatedly return to the words of both Republican leaders, who roundly criticized Trump on the floors of their respective chambers.
This whole sequence reinforced how Republicans turned on a dime. It can be easy to forget just how strongly the GOP lawmakers (if not the party base) criticized Trump. As the committee got around to describing Trump’s actions that day, it sought to emphasize that GOP leaders saw the matter as pretty cut-and-dried a year and a half ago — when we knew considerably less. | 2022-07-22T04:34:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 4 takeaways from the Jan. 6 hearing on Trump’s actions — and inaction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/takeaways-hearing-trump-actions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/takeaways-hearing-trump-actions/ |
UNITED NATIONS — Russia defended its veto of a U.N. resolution that would have extended humanitarian aid deliveries to 4.1 million Syrians in the rebel-held northwest from Turkey for a year, insisting that its demand for only a six-month extension was essential and accusing Western nations of using “sly” tactics and trying “to govern the world.” | 2022-07-22T04:34:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia defends veto of aid to northwest Syria for one year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-defends-veto-of-aid-to-northwest-syria-for-one-year/2022/07/21/9a144164-096d-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-defends-veto-of-aid-to-northwest-syria-for-one-year/2022/07/21/9a144164-096d-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
For those outside of Italian circles, the move came as a shocker — a political storm in the midst of a war and just hours before a crucial European Central Bank meeting. It will be increasingly hard to shield the country from market shocks of its own making. The crisis started with Giuseppe Conte, the leader of the Five Star party, who precipitated the breakup of the coalition; Matteo Salvini of the League then finished it off by walking out of the confidence vote that would have allowed Draghi to stay in office until the spring.
The irony is that both men were part of the so-called Governo del Cambiamento, the coalition that brought together the League and the Five Star in 2018, which promised to reinvigorate politics. That experiment failed miserably. Italians must understand now that bringing extremes into their core institutions is no better or more efficient than establishment politics. And there needs to some soul searching into what went wrong — and why — before the next election perpetuates bad politics for longer.
There is no denying that the legislature about to end has been beset by constant infighting, backstabbing and personal machinations of the same people that promised to put the nation’s interest before party politics in 2018. The past four years have seen huge ideological swings, enough to anger and confuse Italian voters at each turn.
Draghi offered a short break from the instability, and a vision needed to push through reforms. But the bad politics unleashed by populism runs deep. We’re now in for a brutal election campaign.
It will be an interesting one, though. For once, Italy has no one to blame for the convulsions to come but itself. There is no external enemy to point the finger to. The European Commission has signaled it is willing to work with whatever government comes out of the autumn election. Brussels has also changed since the euro crisis — contrary to what critics argue, policy makers have grown closer. The goodwill from Rome has come a long way, and the constant (largely stereotypical) pontification about Europe’s south has softened. This winter it may be Germany that asks for solidarity to secure energy supplies. How the tables have turned.
Meanwhile, the ECB has shown its willingness and ability to act vigorously to protect the single currency. For all its faults, Italy, a founding member of the euro and the bloc’s third-largest economy, will remain a key part of the monetary puzzle Frankfurt has to work with.
If polls are correct, the next government will likely bring together a right-wing coalition to Palazzo Chigi, the home of the prime minister, led by Brothers of Italy, the League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which is still hanging around.
One thing to know about Giorgia Meloni, the head of Brothers of Italy, is that her political capital stems from being a force of opposition. She’s popular these days because opposing policy is easier than making tough choices in government. As often happens in politics, once you actually have to make policy, public support dissipates quickly.
Italy also has an extraordinary ability to build and burn politicians. In fact, for Meloni, becoming the next premier — if that were indeed to happen — may prove a poisoned chalice. Her rivals are very aware of this.
In times of political and market stress, it is easy for investors to get agitated. Who can blame them after the latest drama? But it is important to keep in mind that for all the histrionics, Italian institutions have a remarkable ability to adjust, cut losses and save face. To say Italy will crumble or bring back Italexit, crashing the country out of the euro back to the lira, is too simplistic a narrative when times get tough. Indeed, it ignores how much the system — and the Italian business class — work against such an outcome.
Sooner rather than later, Italy will have to ditch the fireworks and focus on the economy. But that will only happen if Italians make it clear with their vote that the populist experiment is over and the country requires serious government. You can’t give carte blanche to the same politicians that brought Italy here.
• Draghi Has Entrenched His Influence Even If Coalition Falls: Rachel Sanderson | 2022-07-22T06:05:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Populist Experiment in Italy Has Failed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-populist-experiment-in-italy-has-failed/2022/07/22/f7be3f28-097b-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-populist-experiment-in-italy-has-failed/2022/07/22/f7be3f28-097b-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
— President Biden, in a statement on health-care provisions in pending Senate bill, July 15
After months of negotiations, the president’s expansive “Build Back Better” plan has shrunk to a handful of items, principally in the area of health care. In particular, the emerging bill would achieve a long-sought Democratic goal of allowing Medicare to begin to negotiate the price of certain prescription drugs.
With overall inflation raging at 9 percent, the White House is eager to portray any action as an element to bring price inflation down. But how likely is it that the prescription-drug provision in this bill will make a difference?
It’s a surprisingly complicated question. Let’s take a look.
On the face of it, the latest U.S. government report would suggest prescription-drug costs are not a big part of the inflation problem.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the consumer price index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 1.3 percent in June — and over the last 12 months, the all-items index increased 9.1 percent.
Buried in the report it shows the index for prescription drug prices grew just 0.1 percent in June and 2.5 percent over the last 12 months. That’s much lower than the overall inflation rate.
These numbers reflect the fact that generic drugs now make up 90 percent of the prescriptions in the United States, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Brand-name drugs — with no generic equivalent — make up a significant portion of the spending.
In Medicare Part D, which helps cover cost of prescription drugs, the 250 top-selling drugs with one manufacturer and no generic competition amount to only 7 percent of the covered drugs but 60 percent of net total spending, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Meanwhile, in Medicare Part B, which provides medical insurance, the top 50 drugs covered under Medicare Part B represent 8.5 percent of covered drug but 80 percent of Part B drug spending, the analysis said.
A separate KFF study released in February found that one-third of Medicare-covered drugs had price increases of 7.5 percent or more — which at the time was the annual inflation rate.
“Generic prices are low and falling, and brand-name prices are high and rising,” said Benjamin Rome, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and who recently co-authored a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on prescription drug costs. “The combination of these two trends means that overall drug inflation is low.”
The JAMA study examined 95 percent of the drugs first marketed in the United States between 2008 to 2021 — a total of 548 — and found that average prices grew by 20 percent per year. “Prices increased by 11 percent per year even after adjusting for estimated manufacturer discounts and changes in certain drug characteristics, such as more oncology and specialty drugs (eg, injectables, biologics) introduced in recent years,” the study said.
There’s often a big difference between a drug’s list (gross) price and a drug’s net price. That’s because of a variety of rebates to commercial payers, Medicare and Medicaid, discounts provided to hospitals because of the 340B Drug Pricing Program and manufacturers’ payments to pharmacy benefit managers and so forth.
Brian Newell, a spokesman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), pointed to data on net prices by a variety of organizations to argue “the trend on drug prices is not skyrocketing.” For instance, SSR Health, an independent organization that collects and reports data on pharmaceutical prices, found that brand medicine net prices fell 0.7 percent between the first quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. And, he said, in 2020, CVS reported net drug prices grew just 1.2 percent in 2020 for their commercial clients.
Newell said there were “significant flaws” in the JAMA study, including an “apples to oranges” comparison of medicines launched recently versus those launched more than a decade ago. He said study “completely ignores savings that are generated within the system as a branded medicine overtime become generic or biosimilar products that lead to lower costs for patients and society.” (PhRMA’s full critique can be found at this link.)
“The problem is that PhRMA is using generic/biosimilar savings to defend price increases on new brand-name products,” Rome responded in an email. “But the generic savings only occur after drugs have period of market exclusivity. The fact that we pay less for statins and blood pressure medications now than we did in the 1990s and 2000s really has nothing to do with the brand-name price trends.”
The Senate version of the bill backed by Biden contains two elements designed to stem price inflation by brand-name drugs. One empowers the Health and Human Services secretary to negotiate prices for selected drugs — 10 at first, with the number growing to 20 over time — that have little competition and account for substantial spending. So that likely would not have much of an impact on prices now, especially since government negotiation could take two years with manufacturers and negotiated prices would not begin until 2026.
Separately, the bill would require drug manufacturers to pay a rebate to Medicare for a drug if the price increased faster than the rate of inflation (CPI-U). The measure would apply to drugs covered under Medicare Parts B and D, and to private insurance. This would take effect in 2023.
That “could potentially dampen drug price increases starting next year,” said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president of KFF and executive director of KFF’s Program on Medicare Policy.
One wrinkle is that inflation is already pretty high. The KFF study on Medicare drug prices found that only 17 percent had price increases that exceeded 7.5 percent. So if inflation remains as high as 9 percent, not many rebates may be offered.
“Reducing drug costs helps with inflation in two ways,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “At the microeconomic level, it directly reduces the prices in the economy. And at the macrolevel, it reduces total spending in the economy. Both effects should be disinflationary.”
He acknowledged that “not much of the effects of this particular bill take effect in the near-term. So over the next couple of years, it’s probably doing more to help prevent inflation from bleeding into drug prices (and then bleeding back into inflation) than from cutting inflation outright.” Over time, he added, the bill “will modestly reduce the risk of persistent inflation.”
The Senate bill also would eliminate the 5 percent coinsurance for people on Medicare with very high drug costs after they reach a certain threshold in 2024. It would provide a $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket spending for Medicare Part D enrollees starting in 2025. The CBO projects the package would modestly reduce the federal budget deficit, which could also mitigate inflation.
“President Biden supports empowering Medicare to negotiate down the cost of drugs with big pharmaceutical companies," said White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates. "His biggest priority is to lower costs for families, and Americans are often paying 2 to 3 times as much as their peers in other countries for medicines. Undoing this special protection for Pharma would not only save consumers money, but taxpayers as well – reducing the deficit, which helps to counter inflationary pressures.”
Inflation is a top concern of Americans these days and the Biden administration is eager to show it is addressing the problem. At least one provision of this bill might begin to lower the cost of some expensive drugs next year, but a plan for the government to directly negotiate prices of some drugs will not begin until midway through the next presidential term. Given the complex debate over whether drugs costs are climbing as much as many believe, we will leave this unrated. But readers should be aware that any inflation impact of this bill would not be instantaneous. | 2022-07-22T07:23:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s claim that the drug-price bill will ‘help fight inflation’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/bidens-claim-that-drug-price-bill-will-help-fight-inflation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/bidens-claim-that-drug-price-bill-will-help-fight-inflation/ |
Thousands of frogs are dying in Australia. Scientists aren’t sure why.
In a handout photo, a green tree frog, a common sight across the northeast of Australia, is seen. (Jodi Rowley)
MELBOURNE, Australia — Jodi Rowley squelched through a pond in rain boots, her headlamp piercing the blackness of the winter night. Following the sound of croaks, she and her three colleagues scanned the water for signs of life.
“It is a really complicated murder mystery,” Rowley said.
Across Australia, dead frogs are turning up in their thousands — and no one knows why.
A team of scientists led by Jodi Rowley undertook fieldwork in New South Wales on July 6 to gather data about a mysterious affliction killing Australian frogs. (Video: Jodi Rowley)
It started last winter, when Rowley, a herpetologist, noticed increased social media reports of frog carcasses in backyards and local creeks. She was concerned, but knew that amphibians’ immune systems slow down in the cold — and it was a cold year.
But a call-out for citizen data brought in a flood of dead-frog sightings far beyond normal winter losses. Frogs, which usually bunker down during cooler weather — the middle of the year in Australia — were apparently wandering out into the open, sitting down, and dying en masse.
“Property holders were saying that they’ve never seen this, but there’s dozens of dead frogs all over their house,” said Rowley, herpetology department lead at the Australian Museum and University of New South Wales. More than 1,600 reports came in, covering more than 40 species around the country, many detailing multiple deaths.
“I was bracing myself for the possibility it would happen again,” Rowley said. “And unfortunately, it does look like it.”
Australia is home to more than 240 native species of frog. They include such delights as the pobblebonk, named onomatopoeically, and the tiny assa wollumbin, found on one mountain, with males that carry tadpoles in kangaroo-style pouches. They come in black-and-yellow stripes, spooky ghost-white, and for the most ubiquitous species — the green tree frog — the color of the rainforest. They are everywhere, from the desert to the snowy Australian Alps, often heard but not seen.
“They’re cryptic, and they hide, but they’re out there in really huge numbers,” said Karrie Rose, manager of the Taronga Conservation Society’s Australian Registry of Wildlife Health. “If their populations change, there will be ripples throughout the food web.”
Rose, a veterinary pathologist, is working with Rowley to study the frogs’ demise.
The lead suspect is a killer that attacks by smothering its victim’s skin.
Chytrid fungus — batrachochytrium dendrobatidis — has ripped through amphibian populations since the latter part of last century. Scientists believe it originated on the Korean Peninsula and spread worldwide through trade. The fungus, which feeds on the keratin in frogs’ outer layer, threatens the survival of more than 500 types of amphibian, a 2019 study found. It is thought to be responsible for 90 extinctions since the 1970s, making it a more destructive invasive species than rats or cats.
Rowley and Rose believe the fungus is probably playing a role in the inexplicable die-off. But they doubt it’s the whole story. The fungus has been present in Australia for decades, Rose said. And some autopsies revealed internal lesions on the frogs’ nervous systems and hearts, which is not a usual symptom of fungal infection. Something in the environment must have changed.
“There's been good evidence of widespread chytrid fungus infection since about the mid-1980s. So why are we seeing such a high mortality now?” she said.
Of the hundreds of frozen frog carcasses her lab has analyzed, about 75 percent were infected with chytrid fungus. But that couldn’t explain the fate of the other 25 percent.
The scientists are exploring several theories. One could be eastern Australia’s rainy weather over the past two years, which is conducive to both fungi and frogs. A secondary disease, parasite, environmental toxin, or stressors from successive drought, fires and floods could also play a role.
She hopes a combination of institutional and citizen science will gather the data that will unlock the puzzle. Australians are being asked to record frog sounds and take pictures in their neighborhoods, using the Australian Museum’s FrogID app. “We do really need everyone’s help, because it’s a huge problem and it spans the entire continent,” Rowley added.
Rowley, 42, has been specializing in the study of frogs since she was 18. She recalls the moment she “personally fell in love” with amphibians — “these beautiful, amazing, precious creatures that I almost couldn’t believe were real when I first ventured out into Australia at night.”
Now, the frogs’ long-term prospects could hinge on Rowley solving the mystery of their mass deaths.
“If this keeps happening, if it does what it did last year this winter, then there could be really dire consequences for our amazing frogs,” she said. | 2022-07-22T07:37:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thousands of dead and dying frogs found across Australia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/australia-dead-frogs-environment-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/australia-dead-frogs-environment-climate-change/ |
The raid is one of the deadliest in the city’s history
Police officers drive past people carrying a dead body during a police operation against drug gangs in Alemao slums complex, in Rio de Janeiro, July 21. (Ricardo Moraes/Reuters)
A police raid on a Brazilian slum killed 18 people on Thursday, one of the bloodiest assaults targeting drug traffickers in Rio’s low-income neighborhoods.
As bullets sprayed from helicopters above, 400 heavily armed officers swarmed Complexo do Alemao, a dense Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. The operation, which started in the early hours of Thursday and lasted for 12 hours, killed at least 18 people, including one police officer and a bystander. Backed by 10 armored vehicles and four helicopters, the officers were hunting a criminal gang suspected of robbing banks and cargo, police said in a statement.
“There are signs of major human rights violations, and the possibility of this being one of the operations with the highest number of deaths in Rio de Janeiro,” the state’s public defense office said in a statement.
Brazil shocked by warlike police raid that leaves 25 dead in Rio de Janeiro favela
Residents carried bloody bodies on sheets following the raid, shouting “justice, peace.” Photos on social media showed burst pipes, pockmarked buildings, and debris across the neighborhood of 70,000 people on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil’s police forces are some of the deadliest in the world, killing six times more civilians per year than their U.S. counterparts despite having just two-thirds the population, according to the Igarape Institute, a think tank based in Rio. Raids have become increasingly lethal.
In May, a police raid on another Rio de Janeiro favela killed 23 people, and last year, a shootout in a third slum left at least 29 people dead.
The police defended Thursday’s killings, saying they were attacked from the start of the operation.
“We chose the day and time to try our best and avoid conflict,” Ronaldo Oliveira, who handles operations for Rio police, said at a news conference. “The reaction of the police is a response to the actions of the criminals.”
According to police, the suspects, dressed in military uniforms to confound officers during the raid, erected blockades along the roads and used residents as human shields.
Violence and police brutality have emerged as hot-button issues ahead of the country’s presidential election this October. Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking a second term, has said that criminals should “die like roaches.” Catering to his tough-on-crime base, he introduced bills that would expand protections for police officers who kill on the job. But the president is up against the Supreme Court and human rights groups.
In February, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the state of Rio de Janeiro to present a plan to reduce police lethality during raids and curb human rights violations by security forces. The court ruled that home raids can only happen during the day and must be justified and limited.
Following Thursday’s police raid, Bolsonaro criticized the Supreme Court’s orders in a Facebook Live address, saying it hamstrings officers in the middle of battle, giving criminals an advantage.
“They are protected by the decision of the Supreme Court. The more they are protected, the better armed they become,” said Bolsonaro, who is trailing electoral rival, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva by double digits in the polls.
Earlier on Thursday, the Brazilian Workers’ Party officially nominated Lula as their candidate for the election. Lula, who led Brazil from 2003-2010 spent almost two years behind bars for a corruption conviction that was later annulled.
Lula has said he wants to redefine the police’s role in Brazilian slums, saying they often make matters worse in already violent neighborhoods.
“Many times, when police go there, they don’t go to solve violence,” he said at a meeting with low-income community leaders last year. “They contribute, they bring in violence as well.” | 2022-07-22T07:37:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brazilian police raid on Rio de Janeiro favelas kills 18 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/brazil-rio-police-raid-favela-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/brazil-rio-police-raid-favela-dead/ |
“I’m not sure if everyone in America loves me, but all I can do is give it my all and play and leave it all on the field and hopefully the people that are watching get inspired,” Shohei Ohtani told reporters this week. (Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES — Not long after Denzel Washington read a tribute to Jackie Robinson and just before Clayton Kershaw delivered the first pitch of a sentimental All-Star Game in his home park, all eyes were locked on the big screen at Dodger Stadium, watching Shohei Ohtani.
A packed stadium and a national television audience waited to hear what Ohtani would say during a quick pregame interview. No one can blame the Los Angeles Angels star for his reticence to speak his mind in a second language to what can be an unforgiving media cohort. But everyone — from fans to opposing players — was rapt at the chance to hear him say anything at all.
“First pitch, full swing. That’s it,” Ohtani said with a smile, six words that were notable because of what he did next: first pitch, full swing, base hit up the middle — a called shot like the one entrenched in the legend of the two-way star of the 20th century, Babe Ruth.
Ohtani is so good, so distinct and so legendary that people in his camp and in the industry wonder whether he is appreciated enough. They wonder whether his tenure in baseball purgatory with the Angels is ruining the sport’s chances of having a mainstream star like it hasn’t had in decades at a time they think it most needs one.
As Major League Baseball returns from the all-star break, it does so in a prolonged state of worrying — about what it once was and what it should be, about what it is not now and what it should become. Staging the first night of the draft in downtown Los Angeles was an attempt to mirror the scale of the NBA and NFL versions. New rules, such as a pitch clock, are on the way. Old, unwritten rules, such as those that discourage exuberance on the field, are slowly being phased out of a crotchety collective conscience.
Attendance is down. Television ratings for the All-Star Game were historically low, though Sports Media Watch reported it was the most-watched television event since the NBA Finals ended. The baseball industry remains consumed by comparisons — to the NFL, to the NBA and less favorably to the NHL — though it leads all competitors in frenetic self-deprecation. Baseball hasn’t had a LeBron James or a Michael Jordan, at least not this century. It hasn’t had a Tom Brady. (Well, technically, it briefly had that Tom Brady, a Montreal Expos draft pick.) Mike Trout and Aaron Judge are stars in the baseball world but not necessarily staples of cultural consciousness.
Yet as the sport continues its anxious, self-imposed search for a star big enough to yank it back into the mainstream cultural zeitgeist, it may be missing the fact that it has one. Superstardom and mainstream relevance are hard things to measure, but Ohtani seems to be climbing his way into both.
His appeal could be measured in cameras — the 28-year-old is surrounded by them at every turn. Viewership of MLB games on Japanese TV network NHK BS1 is up 422 percent since Ohtani came to the United States, according to MLB data.
As every all-star met with the media Monday, Washington Nationals outfielder Juan Soto, whose uncertain future made him the focus this week, was surrounded by three or four cameras and a semicircle of reporters two or three rows deep. Ohtani was surrounded by a semicircle of cameras two or three rows deep — not to mention the reporters clinging to the outskirts.
The Shohei Ohtani experience pic.twitter.com/UXnKKW0ouw
A snake of humanity and technology followed Ohtani around the field at Dodger Stadium, forcing some of the game’s other stars to dance out of the way. Many baseball players have been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated over the years. Ohtani got the cover of GQ, the first baseball player to do so in more than a decade. In April, he was on the cover of Time.
“I’m not sure if everyone in America loves me, but all I can do is give it my all and play and leave it all on the field, and hopefully the people that are watching get inspired,” Ohtani told reporters this week.
Ohtani’s agent, Nez Balelo, measures his client’s stardom in the number of requests he cannot take, the number of interviews Ohtani does not do and the number of advertising opportunities he politely declines.
He is featured in a cryptocurrency commercial and ads for Seiko watches, among other products. According to data accumulated by Forbes, Ohtani’s endorsement haul tripled from 2021 to 2022; he now leads all major leaguers by nearly 300 percent at $22 million this year.
“We’ve had some big stars, but Shohei is different,” said Balelo, whose agency has handled baseball phenomena as varied as Yoenis Cespedes and Tim Tebow.
Buckner: Derek Jeter remains ‘The Captain’ of his narrative
Ohtani came along in 2018, just as many of Balelo’s most prominent players were wrapping up their careers. So with clients off the books and time to spare, Balelo went all-in on Ohtani, taking a more hands-on approach than ever with a star whose relative profile required it.
Balelo hears that people don’t think they know Ohtani because he doesn’t do enough interviews with English-speaking journalists, that he might be bigger if he did. But that, Balelo said, is “by design.”
“He’s a private person and extremely focused,” he said. “Sometimes he just doesn’t quite understand why he has to do interview after interview. He thinks, ‘This is who I am.’ And I think it’s created a little mystery, and five years in we look up and think, ‘This is kind of all right.’ ”
Everywhere they go, Ohtani’s teammates answer questions about him, filling in gaps he doesn’t like to fill himself. Baseball players are not always overjoyed to be peppered with questions about their teammates’ achievements, particularly day after day. But Angels players and staffers say no one minds.
“I don’t get sick of it,” Trout said, “because I like Shohei. He’s a great guy.”
But what they know is that to know the baseball side of Ohtani is to know Ohtani. He is obsessed with the game and his routine. He told Japanese outlet NHK that he thinks he makes more omelets than anyone in baseball because, when he doesn’t eat at the team facility, he goes home and cooks for himself, rests, then does it all again — a simple life, consumed by preparation for a workload no other player handles.
“A normal player has a little more freedom, a little more time on his hands to do different things. People ask to do exclusive interviews or production days on his days off. But days off are sacred,” Balelo said. “He is so committed to his rest and making sure he sticks to his routine. Nothing gets in the way of that for him. That is his priority.”
\Svrluga: Juan Soto is at the center of baseball’s swirl. That’s not going away soon.
The easiest measure of Ohtani’s relative stardom: the statistics that routine has yielded. Since the start of the 2021 season, only Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Judge have more home runs. Only five starters who have thrown at least 200 innings in that span — Dylan Cease, Corbin Burnes, Carlos Rodón, Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer — have struck out more batters per nine innings. If he were just a hitter, Ohtani would be one of the game’s best sluggers. If he were just a pitcher, Ohtani would be one of the game’s best starters.
He enters his start at the Atlanta Braves on Friday night having allowed just three runs (two earned) and 20 hits in 39⅔ innings with 58 strikeouts over his past six outings. His ERA for the season is 2.38.
“We need to make sure his story is as big as he is,” said Karin Timpone, MLB’s head of marketing. “We’re kind of catching up to his greatness, I think, sharing that story.”
Timpone talks about Ohtani’s stardom in terms of clicks, among other things. MLB helped Ohtani start his Instagram account two years ago, and he is already its fourth-most-followed star, per MLB data. When MLB posts about Ohtani on Twitter, those posts get shared more than posts about any other player.
But social media numbers also dispute the premise that Ohtani has reached unprecedented stardom. He has 1.4 million followers on Instagram. James has more than 128 million. Brady has 12.4 million. Those numbers are evidence of the gap some in baseball want to close with football and basketball, a gap they believe has grown in recent years.
Timpone has worked for the NFL, too, and she said she sees the sports less as direct competitors and more like different musical genres.
“They’re all excellent in their areas, but it’s a different vibe in each one,” she said. “And as we know, people can enjoy different genres and different forms.”
Among the elite in the baseball genre, Ohtani is as big of a fascination as has ever been.
“I think maybe casual fans don’t understand it, but the deep-down fans get it,” Boston Red Sox slugger J.D. Martinez said. “He impresses all players. We talk about him all the time in the clubhouse — we don’t know how he does it.”
At all-star media day, almost every player who was asked said he was more excited to see Ohtani play in person than anyone else. Players’ children clamor for pictures with him. Opposing managers nod to him before he takes his first at-bat.
And after this year’s pregame all-star festivities, it was Ohtani whom everyone wanted to see. It was Ohtani whom Kershaw wanted to challenge with a fastball. It was Ohtani who stopped everybody in their tracks as so few players have or will again — a star like no other, still on the rise. | 2022-07-22T08:24:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Could Shohei Ohtani be a bigger baseball star? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/shohei-ohtani-mlb-star/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/shohei-ohtani-mlb-star/ |
Michael Fanone on Capitol Hill in July. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and was beaten by a mob during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, was heckled Thursday night by protesters near the Capitol. He had been attending a hearing by the House select Committee investigating last year’s riot.
Then a man wearing a black hat and holding a large banner with an image of former president Donald Trump and the words “toxic loser” uses the banner to separate Fanone from the people following him. Shortly after, a man in dark-colored shorts falls over, screaming. He tells nearby police officers that the man with the anti-Trump banner “just hit me with his pole.”
As he was leaving the hearing, Fanone sharply criticized Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), using colorful language while speaking to a reporter. Hawley’s actions on the day of the insurrection were a focal point of Thursday’s hearing; he had raised a fist of support to the crowd, which included some eventual insurrectionists, outside the Capitol, and footage later showed him fleeing the eventual riot. | 2022-07-22T08:59:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jan. 6 hearing protesters hassle ex-police officer Michael Fanone - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/jan-6-hearing-officer-michael-fanone/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/jan-6-hearing-officer-michael-fanone/ |
Bannon closings arguments Friday, jury deliberations likely to follow
The outspoken Trump loyalist is accused of willfully flouting a subpoena from the House panel investigating Jan. 6
Stephen K. Bannon speaks to crowds outside of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)
Closing arguments are scheduled for Friday in the contempt of Congress case of Stephen K. Bannon, the pugilistic former Trump adviser who spurned a request for information from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6. 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
After that, the case would probably go to the jury.
U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols said Thursday that he expects to work through remaining legal issues between prosecutors and defense attorneys starting at about 9 a.m. If that goes smoothly and as planned, the judge said he would take about 15 minutes to read jury instructions before the two sides deliver closing arguments of about 45 minutes each.
Prosecutors alleged that Bannon “chose to show contempt” and “decided he was above the law,” by not responding to the committee. Bannon’s attorneys argued that their client did not “ignore” the committee’s formal request but was in negotiations with the panel.
Analysis: Bannon's Jan. 6 rhetoric walks thin line between revolutionary rhetoric and revolution
The jury is expected to start weighing Bannon’s case one day after the very panel he is accused of rebuffing met for a prime-time hearing focused on President Donald Trump’s actions during and after the Capitol riot.
If convicted, Bannon faces at least 30 days and up to one year in jail for each of the two misdemeanor charges. But it is exceedingly rare for someone to serve time in jail for contempt of Congress; that hasn’t happened since the 1950s.
Nichols had earlier rejected a host of Bannon’s potential defenses, including his contention that Donald Trump had claimed executive privilege over his testimony and documents. Nichols, a 2019 Trump appointee who served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department from 2005 to 2009, narrowed Bannon’s defenses at trial mainly to whether he understood the deadlines for answering lawmakers’ demands. The judge also said Bannon could argue whether he thought the window for compliance remained open.
In presenting their case, prosecutors called two witnesses: Kristin Amerling, the Jan. 6 panel’s chief counsel, who described how Bannon did not engage with the committee until after he had missed the first response deadline; and FBI Special Agent Stephen Hart, who talked about his conversation with a lawyer who represented Bannon in his dealings with the committee, as well as postings made by one of Bannon’s official social media accounts after he was subpoenaed.
Bannon did not present any defense witnesses. The defense made their motion to dismiss the charges, arguing that the government had not proved its case — a fairly common move by defense attorneys at the end of a trial, and one that rarely succeeds.
Trump's choices escalated tensions, set U.S. on path to Jan. 6, panel finds
Bannon is one of two former Trump aides to face criminal charges in connection with rebuffing the committee, along with former White House trade adviser Peter K. Navarro. The Justice Department has said it would not charge former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications chief Daniel Scavino Jr., who also were referred by Congress for potential criminal prosecution.
This is a developing story. It will update. | 2022-07-22T08:59:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Closing arguments for Bannon Friday; jury deliberations likely to follow - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/bannon-january-6-trial-friday/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/bannon-january-6-trial-friday/ |
Job growth is slowing, vacancies are down and unemployment claims are ticking up.
Ford Motor Co. is laying off 8,000 workers to focus on electric vehicles, according to a Bloomberg report. (Carlos Osorio/AP)
Business at the Pennsylvania art industry firm where he worked had been brisk up until a few months ago. But lately jitters about the crashing stock market and a possible recession had many regulars tapping the brakes on new purchases.
“Over the last 3 months, sales dropped 50 percent, then 50 percent again, until they were basically at zero,” said Miller, 32, who is worried about future job prospects. “Most of our clients were in real estate or tech, and they’ve just disappeared. They don’t want to spend $10,000 on a painting if they’re worried things are going to crash in a few months.”
Job growth is slowing, unemployment claims are ticking up and several big companies, including Apple and Meta, are putting hiring plans on hold. There are signs that more firms are slashing jobs in industries as varied as tech, advertising, health care, finance and law.
Convenience store chain 7-Eleven laid off 880 corporate workers in Texas and Ohio, following its purchase of a rival chain, a company spokesperson said an email. Ford Motor Co. is planning to cut 8,000 positions in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, electric carmaker Rivian is cutting 700 positions, delivery start-up Gopuff is laying off 1,500, and mortgage lender LoanDepot is slashing 4,800 jobs this year, according to reports.
“What had been universally positive labor market news is certainly less so now,” said Liz Ann Sonders, managing director and chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “The anecdotes are starting to stack up of companies laying off workers or freezing hiring or limiting job postings.”
Meanwhile, first-time filings for unemployment benefits rose by 7,000 last week and are up 51 percent from mid-March, although they are still near historic lows, Labor Department data show.
The cooling of the hot labor market is, in many ways, exactly what policymakers have been trying to engineer. Next week, the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates for the fourth time this year in hopes of slowing the economy enough to control inflation without leading to widespread job losses or recession. The Fed expects the unemployment rate to gradually rise from a near 50-year low of 3.6 percent to 4.1 percent by 2024 — with the hope that most of the slowdown comes in the form of fewer job postings and hirings instead of job cuts and layoffs.
“Things have slowed down — in some places, pretty sharply,” said Guy Berger, principal economist at LinkedIn. “There’s nothing right now that looks like we’re experiencing a recession, but at some point we can easily tip into rising layoffs and unemployment. The range of [layoff] anecdotes and where they’re coming from is getting broader.”
This latest reckoning follows two years of torrid jobs growth, marking the fastest labor market recovery in history. Nearly all of the 20 million jobs lost in the early weeks of the pandemic have been recovered. U.S. employers created more than 6 million jobs in the past year alone, and job openings continued to outpace job-seekers by nearly two to one in May.
The most pronounced cool-down, Berger said, has been in the tech industry which experienced rapid growth during the pandemic. Tech hiring has fallen 9.1 percent in the past month, compared to 5.4 percent dip in hiring across all industries, according to data from LinkedIn.
The number of tech firms and start-ups laying off workers has picked up in recent weeks. Netflix, Tesla and Coinbase have all announced job cuts or hiring freezes. Vimeo, the online video platform and one-time tech darling, announced this week it was laying off 6 percent of its staff.
“We are making this decision in order to ensure we come out of this economic downturn a stronger company,” Anjali Sud, the company’s chief executive, said in a memo to employees. “The reality is that the challenging economic conditions around us have impacted our business. We must assume that these conditions will remain challenged for the foreseeable future, and that we aren’t immune.”
Recession fears can be self-fulfilling: If families and businesses begin pulling back because they’re nervous about their financial futures, that can be enough to trigger a downturn. Until now, Americans have continued to spend heavily, particularly on services as well as food, gas and other necessities, even as prices go up. But economists warn that could quickly change if job losses pick up — or Americans begin to cut spending because they worry they could lose their jobs.
Neal Kemmerer lost his job at a robotics company in Lafayette, Ind., four weeks ago. Since then, he’s applied for at least 300 jobs — and gotten one interview.
Far more frequently, he’s notified that positions he’d applied to have been suspended or closed, he said. It’s a far cry from January, when he had his pick of four job offers.
He was making $60,000 a year as a site leader for Starship Technologies, which makes food-delivery robots. But most of the openings he’s finding now are in manufacturing for companies like Subaru and Caterpillar, and the wages max out at $19 an hour, or less than $40,000 a year, Kemmerer said.
During the pandemic, many workers saw their earnings rise for the first time in years. However wage growth is beginning to taper off, particularly with rising inflation factored in. Average hourly earnings have risen more than 9 percent in the last two years, while prices are up about 15 percent in that same period.
“The waters are pretty steady right now but there is a bit of churn up ahead,” said Nick Bunker, director of economic research at Indeed’s Hiring Lab. “The Fed is still hiking interest rates. It’s unclear how unsteady the ride might get.”
Katherine Loanzon, a legal recruiter in New York City, says there’s been a marked slowdown in hiring, especially among firms that specialize in corporate law. Mergers and acquisitions are down, as are initial public offerings.
Some major law firms, she said, have frozen hiring even though they continue to list postings on their websites. Others are suspending pay raises and taking much longer to hire attorneys.
Seven ways you can financially prepare for a recession
Pete Basgen was happily employed at a tech firm last fall when he was approached by recruiters at a live-stream software firm with a 40 percent pay increase and the promise of building his own creative strategy team. He took the position in November and managed to hire a handful of employees before he — along with most of his team — was laid off last month. Executives at the San Francisco firm were worried that business would quickly dry up if there was a recession, he was told.
On Tuesday, he signed up to become an Amazon delivery driver. If he gets the job, it’ll come with a 30 percent pay cut. | 2022-07-22T10:04:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Unemployment claims tick up as job market cools down - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/job-market-slowing-down/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/job-market-slowing-down/ |
Juan Soto probably would yield a record haul in a trade — which is part of the challenge. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
In talking to executives and agents over the past week, that group would include the Dodgers, the New York Yankees, perhaps the New York Mets, the San Diego Padres and … who else, really? Maybe there’s a sleeper such as Tampa Bay, which never could land a player of Soto’s pedigree in free agency but might like him on a short-term deal. But even if three such mystery landing spots exist, the list is short. | 2022-07-22T10:34:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A Juan Soto trade will be tough for Washington Nationals to pull off - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/juan-soto-washington-nationals-trade-options/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/juan-soto-washington-nationals-trade-options/ |
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood in “Nope.” (Universal Pictures/AP)
Keke Palmer doesn’t want to be “one-note.”
It makes sense: In two decades in Hollywood, she’s played everything including a spelling bee champion, a stripper, an enslaved woman and the first Black Cinderella on Broadway. In her next film, “Nope,” out Friday, she’s taking on the role of a Hollywood horse trainer confronting potentially deadly invaders. Naturally.
Since her big break as Queen Latifah’s niece in the 2004 comedy film “Barbershop 2: Back in Business,” Palmer, 28, has captivated audiences in movies, on television shows, through albums and EPs, and with live musical performances. At 20 years old, she became the youngest talk-show host in television history with the premiere of “Just Keke.”
Her likability has also made her particularly ubiquitous on the internet. A sound bite of her greeting Megan Thee Stallion at last year’s Met Gala — where Palmer was hosting red carpet coverage for Vogue — became the backdrop of a trendy TikTok melody. And the Emmy-winning actress saying “Sorry to this man” when she didn’t recognize a picture of former vice president Dick Cheney during a 2019 lie detector test with Vanity Fair has become a social media meme staple.
Whether on set or online, Palmer’s persona is infectious, as seen in her performance in “Nope,” which has been met with glowing reviews and gleeful anticipation.
Palmer plays the spunky and enterprising Emerald Haywood, the inquisitive sister to Daniel Kaluuya’s more silent and serious character, OJ, in the latest movie written, directed and co-produced by “Get Out” filmmaker Jordan Peele. The horror flick follows the duo as they attempt to capture evidence — and monetize on their discovery — of a mysterious flying object that has terrorized their family horse ranch. To do so, the siblings must put aside their conflicting demeanors and get help from electronics store employee Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) and cameraman Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott).
Review: Say yes to ‘Nope,’ Jordan Peele’s alien-invasion western
A: Emerald exists in life. I think it’s so important to show diverse Black female characters. In my life, I’m also the kind of female who wavers both on masculine and feminine energy. I pull from both ends, and I think most of us are that way in life no matter what gender we are. That’s also really important to showcase in film and television. I really love having a character that redefines what people think about women.
That also played into my balance of what strength looked like for Emerald, because she’s not just strong. She’s soft. I think that’s also important as a Black woman; I don’t want to be one-note and be strapped, because that’s an annoying stereotype.
Q: You’ve also previously talked about colorism in the entertainment industry. What does an opportunity of this scale mean to you?
A: I’m not the first or the only dark-skinned woman that’s received opportunities on this scale, but I think this just continues to redefine the concepts of what beauty is, what power is, and what it means to be a leading lady and somebody that is seen as a fierce leader.
All these different levels of representation are important. People see themselves on-screen or see people that relate to them, and it continues to give positive reinforcement. It doesn’t mean every single [story] has to be that way. But I think when it comes to something like this, we have a lot less of it than I think we should and we could, so I’m just grateful to be a part of it, to be able to play in that space.
Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea star in Jordan Peele’s alien-invasion western. (Video: Universal Pictures)
A: He’s just so thoughtful, and he has something to say. I really connect with Peele’s films: His approach to filmmaking is very much like an artist, like somebody who’s done a painting or sculptures. It’s very open-ended, but it has a direct view. It’s specific. When you really take a deep dive into it, you’ll realize that every stroke was connected to the next. And even still, within that, it’s up for your interpretation. That is just so unique.
I can be very journalistic and observational. I think there was half of me that was really watching, learning and creating the space for mentorship to learn from the relationship that Jordan had with his producers and … actors. I felt like I was going to an art school, and I got an internship to watch Jordan Peele film a movie.
He empowers the other people on set. He has a clear vision, but he also trusts the people that he’s hired. As an actor, I just wanted to make sure that I was listening and making sure that I could tell his story, because I also really believed in what he was trying to do. It’s just a very cool and genuinely collaborative process.
A: There’s a lot. I would love [for people] to take away the brother and sister relationship, and just how beautiful some of these platonic relationships are in our lives: the ones that we take for granted, the ones that we don’t necessarily call on until you really, really need them; the people that really know us and see us.
I want people to see the value in that instead of the value that we put on being validated, or being popular or creating a moment for ourselves. The kind of seeing we actually want doesn’t come from popularity. It comes in genuine connections.
And then [I want people to] know how exploitation is not great. We need to be more conscious of what our intentions are as it pertains to things that are captivating us and the way we are interacting with it. What does it actually say about you? To see something — whether it be beautiful, scary, miraculous or intriguing — what does it say about you for your first step to be to exploit it?
Q: You’re multitalented and wear many hats. You’re an actress (“Lightyear”), producer (“Alice”), show host (“Password”) and competition show judge (“Legendary”). What would you say is your favorite right now?
A: I love that you said “right now,” because that’s exactly how it is. I’m really feeling personality-hosting and producing, because I’m really feeling me and myself more than portraying someone else. Even though my personality in hosting is still a performative aspect of who I am, it’s a little bit closer to who I am than playing a character or a role.
The producing aspect really allows me to be a more [toned]-down version of myself, which also is awesome. I’m in a regeneration stage of trying to rejuvenate myself and prepare for whatever that next challenging thing could possibly be on camera, and stretching my skill set in other areas. Because I know that’s only going to make me a better artist all around. | 2022-07-22T10:39:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Keke Palmer on ‘Nope,’ Jordan Peele and the appeal of being herself - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/22/keke-palmer-nope-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/22/keke-palmer-nope-interview/ |
Rodin never visited America, but he still seduced its art lovers
The French sculptor is the subject of a major show at the Clark Art Institute that focuses on how he came to grow his reputation in the U.S.
Rodin's “Cupid and Psyche.” (Bruce White/Clark Art Institute)
America’s great museums groan with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, the French artist who, more powerfully than anyone since Michelangelo, dramatized our struggle with our physical, sexual natures. Plunging us deep into the mystery of mortality and into the bliss and torment of our erotic drives, Rodin’s work suggests the countless ways in which instinctual life is clogged up by the brain.
No wonder, you might say, that Rodin’s rippling, tactile works have a large room to themselves at the National Gallery of Art or that they’re strewn all over the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. You’ll see them in abundance, too, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center. And of course, Philadelphia has its own Rodin Museum, established just 10 years after the beloved Rodin Museum in Paris.
But we shouldn’t take Rodin’s ubiquity in America for granted. It so easily could have gone the other way.
This summer, Rodin is the subject of a major show at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. The exhibition, “Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern,” organized by visiting curator Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, focuses on the American reception of Rodin.
During his lifetime (1840-1917) many of his works were considered too in-your-face, too sexed-up to speak about in polite American company. That early prudishness proved surprisingly resilient in the 20th century. When a leading Boston collector gave the MFA Boston a bronze of Rodin’s “Iris, Messenger of the Gods” — a headless, one-armed female figure with her legs spread — the work was deemed unexhibitable, consigned to storage and later deaccessioned.
That was in 1953, by which time Rodin’s reputation in America was pretty much underwater after a couple of decades of neglect. So no one cared that a major museum, embarrassed by a dearth of fig leaves, was selling his works.
But the very next year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art was gifted a large bronze version of Rodin’s “Monument to Balzac” in memory of the art dealer Curt Valentin. The museum’s director, Alfred Barr, described the work — which Rodin himself had called “the result of my entire life” — as one of the greatest sculptures in the history of Western art. From that point on, everything began to change.
Rodin finally came into focus as the genius and innovator that he was, an artist whose processes, strategies and expressive prowess linked him more with 20th-century sensibilities and methods than with the greats who preceded him. By 1981, his work was so popular that the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition “Rodin Rediscovered” was mobbed. More than a million people saw the show, which had to be extended by three months.
The Clark exhibition has all the greatest hits, with versions of “The Thinker,” “Monument to Balzac,” “The Prodigal Son,” “Iris” and “The Kiss.” There are works in bronze, marble, terracotta and plaster, and one remarkable mask of Rodin’s lifelong partner, Rose Beuret, in pate de verre (a paste of ground glass brushed into a mold and then fired).
The show also boasts a single sculpture by his student and lover, the formidable Camille Claudel, and dozens of Rodin’s drawings, which in quantity (about 9,000) equal his sculptural production. These drawings — some of them made without looking at the page, others made with glue and scissors — are full of experimental zest and a propulsive, fluttery energy.
As his career progressed, Rodin was less and less interested in the idea of “finish.” He preferred to think his work was in a state of constant evolution. His figures’ poses were potentially infinite and always in flux, like the rolling, non-hierarchic movements of a gesturing hand.
He didn’t try to conceal his processes. He left the seams of his plasters in place so they remained visible in subsequent bronze casts. In the case of his marble works, which were carved not by Rodin himself but by expert carvers copying his clay or plaster models, he insisted that large parts remain rough and formless, in the manner of late Michelangelo.
Anticipating the strategy of assemblage that came to dominate sculpture in the 20th century, Rodin stockpiled work in his studio so he could recombine figures and amputate body parts to create new works as the whim suited him. He wanted to honor both the coming-into-being of his works, before they took on any “final form,” and suggest their afterlife.
The show’s catalogue, with essays by (among others) Le Normand-Romain, Laure de Margerie, Christina Buley-Uribe and Véronique Mattiussi, is a trove of information. Le Normand-Romain reminds us that Rodin’s American afterlife has often been tied to violence and mortality. In 1970, Vietnam War protesters used dynamite to blow up a version of “The Thinker” in Cleveland. And in 2001, many Rodin sculptures were found in the wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center. (The financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald reportedly had a gallery on the 105th floor of the North Tower with about 300 of them.) In both cases, the broken and recovered fragments were not repaired but left as they were, just as one suspects Rodin would have wanted.
When you look at the rippling musculature of a figure by Rodin — at the astonishing torso of “The Prodigal Son,” for instance — you are looking not only at a rendering of human anatomy, but also at the traces of someone touching and shaping that anatomy. This is true for all sculptors who model figures, but it is especially true of Rodin, who wanted us to perceive his touch, to make it and the emotions it arouses synonymous with the sculpture. So his work (and this is particularly true of his bronzes and plasters) is always implying the intimate pressure of a second presence, someone other than the model.
This 1911 Matisse masterpiece has had a very unusual afterlife
Rodin never visited America. But beginning in the 1890s, he seduced its art lovers — and not always just figuratively. He had help from a fascinating cast of fellow artists (some of them students and/or lovers), collectors, dancers and museum curators. The two key figures were Truman H. Bartlett, an American sculptor who published 10 influential articles on Rodin in a Boston magazine after interviewing the sculptor in Paris in 1887-1888, and Claire Coudert, the daughter of a New York lawyer of French background.
Coudert, who was married to the Duc de Choiseul, met Rodin in London in 1904. The sculptor was about 25 years her senior but they became lovers in 1906. Coudert used her formidable social skills and extensive address book to promote Rodin’s market in America, raising his prices and generally sharpening his image. When the relationship was over, her work had had its effect, and Rodin’s reputation appeared secure.
Other important figures who played their part included Loie Fuller, the actor and modern dance pioneer who organized Rodin exhibitions and acted for a while as his unofficial agent; the photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen; the San Francisco sugar heiress and art collector Alma de Bretteville Spreckels; and the New Yorker Katherine Seney Simpson.
Eugene Meyer, the future owner of The Washington Post, ordered a marble version of an 1888 model of “The Sphinx,” a woman leaning forward with an upturned head. His wife, Agnes Ernst Meyer, a journalist who loved modern art, had met Rodin in 1909 while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. They became friendly. There was genuine warmth between them, but she had to rebuff Rodin’s advances more than once. “The Sphinx” was duly carved and sent to New York. It was waiting for the Meyers when they returned from their honeymoon.
“I wish to send … greetings to all my friends in America,” Rodin once wrote, “and to express my profound gratitude for their sympathetic appreciation of my art; it has been a great encouragement to me. I sincerely admire your young country, which possesses a veritable thirst for the beautiful, and which will in time grasp and comprehend all that is greatest in art.”
If you smell a bit of condescension here, you’re no doubt right. French assumptions of cultural superiority can be insufferable. But Rodin was trying to remind those who found his work ugly, rough and uncomfortably explicit that there is more to great art than beauty, fluency and grace. He knew his work’s continued good reception depended on people recognizing that great art might also be ugly, thwarted and blocked.
Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern Through Sept. 18 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. clarkart.edu. | 2022-07-22T10:39:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Clark Art Institute Rodin show focuses on his reputation in America - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/22/rodin-america-clark-exhibit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/22/rodin-america-clark-exhibit/ |
Historical Howard County, Md., farm lists for $4 million
Richland Farm, which has remained in the same extended family since 1722, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
Parts of the six-bedroom, five-bathroom, 6,700-square-foot house date to 1781. (HomeVisit)
Richland Farm, a 133-acre property between Clarksville and Glenelg in west-central Howard County, Md., has remained in the same extended family for 300 years. It is on the market for $4 million.
Thomas Worthington received a title to 1,200 acres from Lord Baltimore in 1722. Worthington died in 1753, and his daughter Ariana inherited 363 acres. She and her husband, Nicolas Watkins, farmed the land. Following Ariana’s death, her son Gassaway Watkins took over the farm.
After serving in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, Gassaway Watkins returned to the farm and built a log cabin circa 1781. He built another house, Walnut Grove, in 1785 and lived there with his wife while continuing to farm at Richland Farm, using enslaved labor.
Richland Farm | Richland Farm, which has remained in the same extended family since 1722, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is listed at $4 million. (HomeVisit)
Gassaway’s son William, who would become a Maryland delegate, a state senator and clerk of the circuit court, expanded the house. In addition to growing crops, William raised hogs on the farm.
Following William’s death, the farm went to his son-in-law Joshua W. Dorsey in 1880. Dorsey owned a farm implement and hardware business in Ellicott City, Md. His daughter Achsah Dorsey Serpell took possession of the farm after his death. She hired prominent Baltimore architect Bayard Turnbull to renovate and enlarge the house in 1919.
Richland Farm was primarily a summer house for the family for much of the 20th century with the farming handled by a superintendent. Melanie Dorsey, who inherited the farm from her uncle in 2005, remembers her father speaking fondly of summers spent on the farm.
The six-bedroom, five-bathroom, 6,700-square-foot house had been rented out for several years before Dorsey took possession. She hired builder Ken Mauck to restore it to its former glory.
“Oh my gosh, what a gifted man he is,” Dorsey said. “It was a very intimidating project.”
Before they could start, the house had to be cleared out. Hundreds of years of furniture and castoffs had accumulated. The attic held 300 chairs, Dorsey said.
“We kept thinking, we’re going to find something, the treasure,” she said. But the only noteworthy item they found was a chamber pot.
“That we managed to find, but that was not a treasure,” Dorsey said.
While renovating the house, authenticity was important. Amish builders from Pennsylvania were brought in to make the horsehair plaster for the walls. Reclaimed wood and period-appropriate fixtures were used.
“They went to a lot of trouble to try to get things as original as they could,” Dorsey said.
Like much of her family, Dorsey did not live at the farm. Her job required her to be close to Washington. But she did enjoy spending weekends, holidays and special occasions there.
“For Thanksgiving, instead of going away, we go to the farm,” she said. “I wanted it to be my house for when I wanted it to be my house.”
The dining room, part of the original log cabin, proved to be not only a wonderful setting for Easter dinner but also a good place for an Easter egg hunt, Dorsey said.
The house is not the only structure on the farm that contributes to its historical designation. According to the document filed with the National Register of Historic Places, “Richland Farm has one of the most extensive collections of farm outbuildings that survive in Howard County.” The property includes a smokehouse, bank barn, stable, corn crib and two-story staff quarters. The fields remain under cultivation, growing winter wheat, feed corn and soybeans. A small stream runs through the property.
Dorsey particularly liked that she was out in the country but still minutes away from a grocery store and a coffee shop.
“When I open the gate and go in — this sounds corny — but it’s like a different world,” Dorsey said. “It’s like a nature center almost.”
4730 Sheppard Lane, Clarksville, Md.
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 6/5 (main house)
Approximate square-footage: 6,700 (main house)
Features: The property, known as Richland Farm, has remained in the same extended family for 300 years. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which notes that the farm “has one of the most extensive collections of farm outbuildings that survive in Howard County.” The house was renovated by Ken Mauck Construction and Renovations in 2005. The fields remain under cultivation, growing winter wheat, feed corn and soybeans.
Listing agent: Richard Watson, Long & Foster | 2022-07-22T10:39:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Historical Howard County, Md., farm lists for $4 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/howard-county-farm-for-sale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/howard-county-farm-for-sale/ |
State laws on reproductive rights are a sudden new variable for students mulling where to apply
Rice University in Houston says it is exploring how to respond to an abortion ban in Texas. (Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)
“It’s so incredibly disheartening,” Charlotte Hawthorn said. The 17-year-old from Orinda, Calif., doesn’t want to rule out colleges based on regional politics. She cares about weather — “I want somewhere that isn’t Arctically cold,” she said — and wants a place that will challenge her liberal beliefs. Ideally, she said, it would be a school “that isn’t just a bunch of super-politically-correct California kids.”
But the Supreme Court decision last month that overturned Roe v. Wade, erasing the constitutional right to abortion, scrambled her calculations. Upset over the ruling, she is torn over whether to apply to a well-known university in a state that is moving to ban most abortions. She finds strict antiabortion laws disturbing. “It’s really hard to ignore,” she said.
In Texas, leaders of Rice University wrote last month that the court’s ruling “has serious consequences for women,” imposing new hurdles to the effective management of reproductive health. The state has banned abortion, with narrow exceptions.
“The added burdens, including out of state travel for those seeking abortion services, will fall most harshly on the least economically advantaged,” the university’s outgoing president, David W. Leebron, and provost (now president), Reginald DesRoches, wrote to their community on June 28. “Rice is committed to gender equality and to supporting our faculty, staff, and students. We are exploring how we can best continue to appropriately support the reproductive rights of our community, including access to abortion services.”
A Washington Post analysis of federal enrollment data for fall 2020 found that 25 percent of incoming freshmen at Rice were from California, New York, Illinois and other states where abortion is legal and likely to remain protected. Forty percent hailed from Texas, and another 12 percent from other states where abortion bans are in place or imminent. The rest were mostly from overseas or states where abortion is legal now.
Of course, the laws of any given state do not determine how individuals who live there feel about abortion. But the geographic divides on the issue underscore unique tensions for colleges and universities in abortion-banning states. These schools are often recruiting far beyond state lines, and they don’t want to turn off potential students or families.
Heather Burke said her teenage daughter, now in high school, plans to look out of state for college because Georgia has banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. After the court ruling, Burke and her daughter remapped a trip planned for this summer. Originally, they were going to fly to Baltimore and then drive through Pennsylvania and Ohio to check out liberal arts colleges and midsized universities. But Ohio’s six-week abortion ban, and the uncertainties of politics in Pennsylvania — where abortion is legal for now — led Burke to switch their travel to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and California.
Burke said she wants her daughter to be able to focus on learning in college, not on the distractions likely to arise if she or someone she knows faced an unwanted pregnancy without the option of abortion. “I don’t want my kid to be panic-stricken,” Burke said.
Many people believe students who want an abortion could travel to get one. Burke questions that assumption. “What if it becomes a situation where you can’t travel?” she said. “Where do you go from there?”
But Burke also worries about the cost of restricting her daughter’s college search. What if her daughter fails to apply to a college in an abortion-banning state that would have offered a generous scholarship? The court ruling “was a huge curveball,” she said. “I feel like our options have become much more limited.”
A race to teach abortion procedures, before the bans begin
At Oberlin College, a private liberal arts school in Ohio with 2,700 students and a left-leaning reputation, the out-of-state share is larger. About 5 percent of its 2020 freshmen were from Ohio. More than half of its incoming students came from states that protect abortion, The Post’s analysis found, including 9 percent from California and 12 percent from New York.
“As our understanding of this new post-Roe world emerges, Oberlin will evaluate the ways we are able to continue offering our community the best possible access to reproductive health care,” the college’s president, Carmen Twillie Ambar, said in a June 25 statement.
Washington University in St. Louis, another private institution with national reach, must reckon with Missouri’s abortion ban. But just across the Mississippi River lies an abortion-protecting state.
“Students coming to WashU have access to reproductive health care through the resources that are legally available in Missouri and our neighboring state of Illinois,” Ronné P. Turner, the university’s vice provost for admissions and financial aid, said in a statement. About half of its 2020 freshmen came from abortion-protecting states, The Post found. The university has about 7,700 undergraduates.
“Interest in Vanderbilt remains strong,” the private university in Nashville said in a statement. With about 7,000 undergraduates, the university draws about 34 percent from Tennessee and other states with current or imminent abortion bans. More than 40 percent come from states likely to protect abortion.
Public universities are often cautious in what they say about abortion, fearful of rousing the wrath of lawmakers and governors who control their funding. Clemson University in South Carolina, Georgia Tech and the universities of Alabama, Georgia and Texas — all public — declined or did not respond to requests for interviews about the potential impact of state abortion restrictions on out-of-state recruiting.
UT-Austin said in a statement that it offers “a variety of reproductive health care services,” including wellness exams, pregnancy testing and information on contraceptives. But it said the university’s health services do not “dispense abortive medications” or “provide abortion services.”
By contrast, California’s public universities are preparing to follow a state law that will require student health centers to offer access to abortion pills — a method of terminating early pregnancies without an abortion provider inserting tools into the uterus.
“We can talk about states that respect the rights of all its residents and all its citizens,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University. “Kids who are smart enough will figure it out.” Most of Oregon State’s 26,000 undergraduates come from Oregon, but the university is pushing to expand its reach in states such as Idaho, Utah and Texas.
Boeckenstedt said he believes political climate, including state abortion laws, “will have some effect around the edges” on recruiting. “We’re talking about students who have the luxury of crossing state lines to go to college,” he said.
The fight to overturn Roe v. Wade energized her, Smethers said, and she wants to continue her activism in college. She finds Michigan appealing because the state appears to be a battleground in the quest to make abortion illegal. “Over the last two years, I’ve been so involved in pro-life politics,” she said. “I’ve never been in a state where I have not had to fight for pro-life laws.”
Colleges scramble to recruit students as nationwide enrollment plunges
Sophie Anderson-Haynie, 18, of Albuquerque, said she is about to enter Agnes Scott College in Georgia. She called her mother, Aeron Haynie, an associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico, on June 24 to commiserate over the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The two of them knew that Anderson-Haynie’s journey to the 1,100-student women’s college would take her from a place where abortion is protected to one where it is mostly banned.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” Anderson-Haynie told The Post. “I still want to go there. In fact, I think I want to go there even more now there are women who aren’t going to have access to abortion the same way we have it here in New Mexico.” Anderson-Haynie aims to get involved in movements to change Georgia. “If there’s a chance I could make a difference, I would want to,” she said.
Admission experts say it’s unlikely the Dobbs decision will lead many students who just graduated from high school to forfeit deposits paid to start college in the fall. That entering class appears mostly set.
One Alabama mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter’s privacy, said she offered to help engineer a last-minute switch to a university in abortion-protecting Colorado if the daughter wanted to renege on a commitment to a school in Georgia. But the daughter stuck with her plan. “She’s got a roommate, done the orientation,” this mother said. “It would just be heart-wrenching to abandon it.”
Future classes are another matter. Agitated parents are pressing children to think twice about applying to schools in abortion-ban states. Carissa Hawthorn said she tore into a list that a counselor suggested for her daughter Charlotte: “Tennessee? … That’s a no-go. … Ohio? No, thank you. … Louisiana? No, thank you. … St. Louis? I’m not giving money to a state that doesn’t think she’s an equal member of society.”
But Hawthorn acknowledged Charlotte’s enduring curiosity about a certain university in a southern state with an abortion ban. “Yes. She is interested … ugh,” the mother wrote. “We would have to have long talk about it.” | 2022-07-22T10:39:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Abortion laws could be a factor for students choosing college - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/22/state-abortion-access-college-decision/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/22/state-abortion-access-college-decision/ |
Crystal Dunn was determined to pay it forward, she said, “because I know what it’s like to struggle.”
On July 7, Crystal Dunn of Louisville, Ky., won the Kentucky Lottery, earning $146,351.74. After depositing her check, she shared her windfall with strangers at a local supermarket. (Courtesy of Kentucky Lottery)
Crystal Dunn knew the odds of winning the Lottery jackpot were one in 250,000.
But as Dunn sat in her Louisville, Ky., home on the evening of July 7, she kept one eye on the television show she was watching and the other on the computer. She had half-heartedly wagered $20 in a Kentucky Lottery online game — the Bank Buster Jackpot Instant Play — which she does for fun from time to time.
Moments after placing her bet, an unexpected message appeared on Dunn’s computer screen: “JACKPOT WINNER! $146,351.74.”
“No way, no way!” Dunn, 42, a single mother of three sons, recalled hollering to her kids. “That’s not possible.”
She went to the Kentucky Lottery office the next morning to collect her winnings. As she drove home with her check — $103,909.73 after taxes — “I was thinking about the first thing I want to do with it.”
Before considering how she would spend the windfall on herself or her family, Dunn said, “I thought, I want to share this with others in some way.”
“I just received this amazing gift, and I wanted to share that,” she decided.
She stopped at her local Meijer grocery store and purchased 20 $100 gift cards and then proceeded to hand them out to random shoppers in the store — none of whom she knew. The 20 lucky recipients were stunned by the surprising gesture.
“A lot of people were in disbelief,” said Dunn, adding that many of the strangers asked to give her a hug.
Before handing them out to shoppers, she asked store managers if it was all right. “They all helped me,” Dunn said of the store employees.
Dunn was determined to pay it forward, she said, “because I know what it’s like to struggle.”
“I had a very hard childhood,” explained Dunn, who, from the age of 9, moved from foster home to foster home. She ran away at 16 and has taken care of herself since.
“I went through a lot of things that kids should never go through,” she said, adding, “I have gone without many things.”
Despite her difficult upbringing, Dunn was determined to pave a better path forward. She put herself through college and found a stable job at the same health insurance company where she still works today.
“No matter what life you have, you do have a choice, and you can make decisions to make it better and to make a positive impact on others’ lives,” she said. “You just have to push forward.”
Dunn said she is proud of the life she has built for herself — and she hopes her story will uplift others, especially children, who find themselves in similar challenging circumstances.
“When I won the money, in a way I wished it was someone else, because I do okay. I can take care of myself,” Dunn said. “I never expected this in my wildest dreams to happen, nor did I expect to be all over the news.”
In fact, Dunn initially declined interview requests from journalists.
“My first thought was to turn them down,” she said. “Then, I got to thinking about why this news spread.”
Dunn realized that she was presented with a rare opportunity to send out some positivity.
“The news is filled with stories of people doing horrible things to one another, and this causes us all to lose hope," she said.
Staff at Kentucky Lottery said they were touched by Dunn’s decision to share a portion of her pay-out with strangers.
“It wasn’t like she won millions of dollars,” said Chip Polston, the senior vice president of communications for Kentucky Lottery. “She had the foresight to take $2,000 and just go make the day of 20 random people in this grocery store.”
For most lottery winners, Polston said, “it’s really not the material things that have brought them the most joy, it’s what they were able to do for other people.”
That’s true for Dunn, who said she will use the remaining funds for things she was already saving up for, such as a new car, and perhaps some home improvements. She estimates her actual payout will be about $75,000 once further taxes are taken out.
What will always resonate with her most about her win, she said, is that she shared a little bit of her luck.
“I believe in trying to help others," she said. | 2022-07-22T10:40:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Crystal Dunn won the Lottery. She shared her windfall with strangers. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/22/crystal-dunn-lottery-windfall-strangers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/22/crystal-dunn-lottery-windfall-strangers/ |
What conservative Supreme Court justices get wrong about the Founders
Originalism makes fulfilling the Founders’ constitutional vision hard.
Perspective by Timothy C. Leech
Timothy C. Leech is a freelance writer and historical consultant. He undertook preliminary graduate studies at Harvard, before completing his PhD at The Ohio State University in 2017. He is currently writing a book on the politics of the American Revolution.
Ella Hall, a specialist in Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby's, in New York, holds a 1787 printed copy of the U.S. Constitution, Friday, Sept. 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Several of the Supreme Court’s blockbuster end-of-term decisions, which cheered conservatives and horrified liberals, were largely based on “originalist” or “textualist” readings of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, the justices based their majority opinions on what they thought the Constitution meant at the time the Founders wrote it.
But there is an inherent problem with this philosophy: the Founders expected the document to grow and change over time, guided by new and better understandings of the world. Originalism makes achieving this vision far more difficult — if not impossible — in a polarized America.
In his 1932 book, “The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers,” historian Carl Lotus Becker argued that every historical era has a specific “climate of opinion” — or underlying framework that shapes how people see the world. For the Founders, it was the Age of Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason).
Enlightenment thinkers knew that people (including themselves) were flawed, and therefore that it was absurd to think they could establish a perfect government. Yet, they were also confident that rational processes could improve humanity. The logical, reasoned use of evidence in arguments and decision-making was critical. They sought to understand the absolute laws that governed both the natural world and ethical behavior within human society. Scientific, technological and social advances gave them cause for optimism.
A combination of concerted effort, study, critical examination of evidence and logical reasoning could improve humanity over time. As humanity improved itself, it would gradually and inevitably reach closer toward perfection. As Becker observed, Enlightenment thinkers, “denied that miracles ever happened, but believed in the perfectibility of the human race.” Increased knowledge would necessitate human societies continually remaking their governmental structures and institutions to reach closer to perfection.
This sense of the world framed how the men who came to Philadelphia in 1787 — and their friends and colleagues who influenced their ideas — approached writing the Constitution.
James Madison — subsequently lauded as the “father of the Constitution” — bore the greatest responsibility for actually designing and writing the document. Still, he insisted it was not, “the off-spring of a single brain,” but “the work of many heads and many hands.”
Alexander Hamilton — who advocated for an even stronger central government than his peers were willing to accept at the convention — played a minor role in drafting the final document, but joined Madison (and John Jay) in writing the Federalist Papers. These 85 essays, 51 of which Hamilton wrote, were published throughout 1787 and 1788 and strongly supported ratification of the Constitution by providing detailed justifications for all of its provisions. In the concluding essay (Federalist 85) Hamilton clearly stated that the Constitution was not perfect, but it needed to be ratified anyway to address the urgent needs of the new nation. He argued that it would be easier to pass individual amendments than to resume wrangling over the entire text.
Thomas Jefferson, who missed the constitutional convention because he was serving as a diplomatic minister in France at the time, most clearly expressed the belief that governing systems should necessarily change over time. He responded to both the new Constitution, as well as ongoing efforts by the French to change their government, on Sep. 6, 1789, in a letter to Madison. Jefferson argued that no group of people had the right to establish a system of government that would then be imposed upon future generations, writing that “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.”
Even Madison, the guiding voice behind the Constitution, understood it would need to change. In fact, while drafting the Constitution, Madison had opposed the idea of including a declaration of individual rights, but as he participated in the debates over ratification, he came to see that it was needed. Thus, he shepherded amendments through the First Congress, in 1789, and three-fourths of the states ratified 10 of them, creating the Bill of Rights.
The immediate use of the amendment process demonstrated the Founders’ intent that the Constitution be a living, not static, document — as does the very language they embedded into the document itself. They concisely introduced their framework for the American republic with stirring phrases, such as: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ….” “More” was an important word choice. The Founders understood that their previous attempt, the Articles of Confederation, was a deeply flawed and insufficient document to meet the needs of the new nation. They also understood that while they needed to make improvements, they were incapable of creating perfection.
In fact, George Washington — whose presence in Philadelphia lent legitimacy to the convention and made the drafting of the new Constitution possible — reportedly told a colleague from Georgia that he doubted it would last for 20 years, certainly not in its original form and meaning.
The Founders knew that both they and their document were imperfect — after all, to ratify it, they needed to promise to revise it immediately with amendments ensuring individual rights. They also made numerous compromises and concessions to construct a document that all 13 colonies would support, most especially counting enslaved people toward representation and prohibiting Congress from banning the importation of enslaved people for 20 years to appease North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The handful of anti-slavery delegates at the convention made the best compromises they could manage and held on to the hope that the nation would eventually embrace freedom for all people.
Their fellow delegates shared their hope and expectation that future generations would surpass them on the road toward perfection and would thus re-create the Constitution to be better than it was in their own time. They intended for some of that change to happen through the amendment process. But since enactment of the first 12 amendments in the Constitution’s first 17 years, it has generally proved to be extremely difficult to ratify additional amendments — with only two ratified in the last 50 years. Even the pivotal post-Civil War amendments were only possible because the South had seceded, creating an opening for passage either without Southern assent or as a condition of readmission to the Union. Some view this as a strength of the Constitution, but others see it as a weakness.
But the Founders also didn’t expect that all change would come from the amendment process. Instead, they included elastic terms and provisions whose meaning would change with time and provide flexibility to all three branches of government in the future. Given their subscription to enlightenment ideas, they would have expected that with time, Americans would have a better understanding of the world and the needs of society, and would apply that knowledge to the document they had created.
Those notions are antithetical to originalism, which applies the Constitution as it was in 1787 to the present. It makes a living Constitution far more difficult to achieve, especially in a polarized America where achieving the support of three-quarters of the states necessary to ratify an amendment is an exceedingly high bar. This hampers the growth that the Founders envisioned for the U.S. and threatens the vitality of the Constitution. | 2022-07-22T10:40:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What conservative Supreme Court justices get wrong about the Founders - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/22/what-conservative-supreme-court-justices-get-wrong-about-founders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/22/what-conservative-supreme-court-justices-get-wrong-about-founders/ |
Pat Benatar performs in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 2012. (Invision/AP)
The lyrics to Pat Benatar’s most famous song have taken on troubling new meaning to the rock star in the wake of unrelenting gun violence across the country — and she says she doesn’t care if fans are disappointed that she won’t be performing it.
“I’m not going to sing it. Tough,” Benatar told USA Today in an interview published Thursday.
Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” has become a staple in karaoke bars, sports stadiums and movies since it hit the airwaves in 1980. From there, the song about daring “a real tough cookie with a long history of breaking little hearts” to fire away has become synonymous with the decade known for its neon colors, glam metal bands and aerobics classes.
At its core, “it’s a song saying ‘no matter what you throw at me, I can handle it, I can play in your league,’” the song’s writer, Eddie Schwartz, has said. But even if the reference to guns is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, Benatar said “you have to draw the line” — especially amid the spate of deadly shootings that have thrust the nation into collective grief.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, the country has been rocked by 357 mass shootings in 2022 — including those in Uvalde, Tex., one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, and in Highland Park, Ill., where Fourth of July parade-goers were attacked.
At this rate, the pace is comparable to last year’s, which was marked by nearly 700 mass shootings — a significant uptick from the 611 in 2020 and the 417 in 2019. At least 371 people have been killed so far this year in those mass shootings and another 1,557 have been injured, according to Gun Violence Archive data.
For Benatar, it’s thinking of those victims’ families that has stopped her from singing “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” she told USA Today. But it’s also “my small contribution to protesting,” she told the outlet.
The soon-to-be Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee isn’t the only celebrity bringing awareness to the epidemic of gun violence. Hours after the Uvalde shooting, Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr implored senators to put “the lives of our children, our elderly and our churchgoers” ahead of their own desire for power. Days later, actor Matthew McConaughey made an impassioned plea for action from the White House briefing room, at one point showing a pair of green Converse sneakers that belonged to a 10-year-old victim.
And Florida Gators quarterback Anthony Richardson announced this week that he will no longer use the nickname “AR-15” — based on his initials and jersey number — because of its association to the semiautomatic rifle used in a slew of shootings.
Fans, however, don’t seem too pleased with Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” boycott. They “are having a heart attack” that it won’t be included in set lists with her other power ballads, like “We Belong” and “Heartbreaker,” the singer told USA Today.
A Piece Of the Rock
Schwartz, the songwriter, first recorded “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” on a four-track demo when he was in his mid-20s. The music publishing company “hated it” and ended up erasing the recordings, Schwartz told Songfacts. However, one engineer saved a copy of the demo for Schwartz, who sent it to another producer.
“And sure enough, he liked it, and he kept playing it over and over again,” Schwartz told Songfacts. “And the story I heard — I wasn’t there — was Pat Benatar took a meeting in the office next door and heard it through the wall, got excited about it.”
A year later, Benatar’s version of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was her first top 10 hit.
Since then, the song has cemented its status as a classic, and fans expect to hear it at her shows. But Benatar is giving them something different on this tour — she’s playing The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” which, curiously enough, is also associated with a violent episode in American history: the Charles Manson murders of 1969. | 2022-07-22T10:40:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pat Benatar won't play ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot’ amid gun violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/22/pat-benatar-mass-shootings-song/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/22/pat-benatar-mass-shootings-song/ |
Kiana Hayeri from the series “Promises Written on the Ice, Left in the Sun” (Kiana Hayeri/LOBA 2022)
Way back when I worked as a photographer, I was always keen on checking out what other photographers were up to. My friends and I would race to the newsstand to grab the latest news magazines to see who was doing what and how well. We’d also hungrily go over contest results to see a broad range of work and decide how we were stacking up.
While the internet was certainly around, it wasn’t as it is nowadays. Not everyone had a computer, and smartphones didn’t exist. People weren’t tethered to technology as they are today.
Those were heady days, full of inspiration and ambition.
One contest that we looked forward to every year was for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. Winners often went on to have very successful, high-profile careers. And the kind of work that was honored always seemed to be very progressive — maybe even more so than in a lot of the other well-known contests.
I’m not a photographer anymore — I traded in my Leicas (I did, indeed, use Leicas back then) and walking shoes for life behind the desk. And, while my drive to make photographs has ebbed, my enthusiasm for the craft has never waned.
I’m still thrilled to see what work is unearthed and elevated by the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
The awards have yet to be announced, but five judges came together earlier in the year and created a shortlist of photographers who will be competing for the top honor. The judges screened proposals submitted by more than 60 photography experts.
We’re excited to give you a look at this year’s shortlisted contenders for the 2022 Leica Oskar Barnack Award below. The contest provided the descriptions, which have been lightly edited for clarity.
Lynsey Addario: ‘Women on the Frontline of Climate Change’
The American photojournalist (born 1973) presents four perspectives on the consequences of climate change: women firefighters in Northern California; Indigenous women in the Brazilian Amazon fighting slash-and-burn practices and land appropriation; women from flooded areas in southern Sudan; and women in the drought-plagued regions of Ethiopia. Visually striking images illustrate how the advance of climate change is threatening or destroying every aspect of life, be it in Africa or North or South America.
Irene Barlian: ‘Land of the Sea’
As the largest island nation on the planet, Indonesia is acutely affected by climate change. It threatens the livelihoods of millions of people; their displacement has long become a reality. The capital of Jakarta is already known as the fastest-sinking metropolis in the world. This is a wake-up call in the form of photography: In this series, the Indonesian photographer (born in 1989) documents a humanitarian crisis and the effects of flooding along the coastal regions.
Alessandro Cinque: ‘Peru, a Toxic State’
Even today, Peruvian mining is defined by neocolonial structures. This black-and-white series, taken over the past five years or so by the Italian photojournalist (born 1988), documents the serious ramifications of unrestrained mining for the local populace. Peru has always been rich in mineral wealth; consequently, mining is an important economic asset for the country. Even so, the Indigenous communities have remained impoverished and suffer greatly from the destruction of their vital resources.
DOCKS Collective: ‘The Flood in Western Germany’
In July 2021, entire areas of Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia were devastated by unusually heavy rainfall and resulting floods. For months, the German photography collective DOCKS documented the destruction and suffering, as well as the reconstruction efforts. The group founded in 2018 includes Aliona Kardash (born 1990), Maximilian Mann (born 1992), Ingmar Björn Nolting (born 1995), Arne Piepke (born 1991) and Fabian Ritter (born 1992).
Valentin Goppel: ‘Between the Years’
The German photographer (born 2000) traces the effects of the pandemic on his generation. He, too, experienced the sudden breakdown of old habits and the feeling of insecurity, which seemed to determine every plan for the future. Coronavirus appears to be a catalyst for ongoing disorientation. Photography, however, presented a tool with which to better understand his thoughts and fears, and to find images for the sense of forlornness.
Kiana Hayeri: ‘Promises Written on the Ice, Left in the Sun’
After the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, it became clear within days that the Taliban would work to destroy what had been achieved concerning freedom of expression, women’s rights and education, replacing them with renewed fear and insecurity. Born in Iran in 1988, the photographer grew up in Canada and has been living in Afghanistan for more than seven years; time and again, her work focuses in particular on the difficult living situations for women.
Nanna Heitmann: ‘Protectors of Congo’s Peatland’
Active local climate protection with global repercussions: In this series, the German photographer (born 1994) introduces the inhabitants of Lokolama, a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are determined to defend their vast, and hitherto untouched, peatlands against the threat of deforestation and resource extraction. Enormously important to the global climate, the area represents one of the largest tropical peatlands on the planet — an ecological marvel that stores many billions of tons of carbon.
M’hammed Kilito: ‘Before It’s Gone’
Oases are an important ecological buffer against desertification, and they represent places of biological diversity. In addition to abundant water and improved soil quality, oases hold date palms. The Moroccan photographer (born 1981) provides insight, not only into this sensitive ecosystem but also into the intangible heritage of the nomadic cultures of his home country.
Léonard Pongo: ‘Primordial Earth’
Inspired by the country’s traditions, craftsmanship and mythologies, this series is dedicated to the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The approach of the Belgian photographer and visual artist (born 1988) is highly subjective. Transgressing the material limits of photography, themes of emergence, apocalypse and eternal recurrence become an allegorical narrative about the history of humanity and the planet, with Congo at its center.
Victoria Razo: ‘Haitian Migration Crisis’
This series focuses on the Dorjean-Desmornes family, whom the Mexican photographer (born 1994) accompanied for 2½ months during their migration to the United States. The family came originally from Haiti, and they are among the thousands of people who tried to reach the United States via Mexico in September 2021. Their fate is representative of those who hope for a better life by migrating, despite a journey representing years of hardship and great risk.
Felipe Romero Beltrán: ‘Bravo’
In this photographic essay, the Colombian photographer, born in 1992 and now residing in Spain, places the border region between the United States and northern Mexico at the center of his observations. The Rio Bravo is defined by its status as both a river and the borderline. The project, which is still in progress, was begun on the river’s Mexican banks. Everything there seems to be in limbo, be it people, objects or architecture. Everything is defined by the border situation.
Rafael Vilela: ‘Forest Ruins: Indigenous Way of Life and Environmental Crisis in the Americas’ Largest City’
The largest city in the Americas stands on former forestlands, a large region along the Brazilian coast, once inhabited by the Indigenous Guarani people. One of the few pockets remaining today in the São Paulo area consists of six villages with about 700 Guarani Mbyá, and is the smallest demarcated Indigenous land in Brazil. The Brazilian photographer (born 1989) dedicated himself to this Indigenous community and questions the standard urban development model in times of climate change.
As you can see, the breadth of work on this year’s shortlist is extraordinarily compelling. One of this year’s judges, Karin Rehn-Kaufmann, art director and chief representative of Leica Galleries International (Austria), said of the entries:
“Once again this year, we were impressed by the diversity and high quality of the series submitted; it was particularly delightful to see the many young participants, as well as the higher proportion of women photographers. The fact that we live in challenging times, defined by climate change and global crises, has also left its mark on this LOBA year. Supporting the work and commitment of photographers around the globe is an increasingly important and meaningful task, which Leica Camera AG is happy to take on.”
Other judges for this year’s shortlist are Alessia Glaviano, head of Global PhotoVogue and director of the PhotoVogue Festival (Italy); Natalia Jiménez-Stuard, photo editor at The Washington Post; and Azu Nwagbogu, founder and director of the African Artists’ Foundation and the LagosPhoto Festival (Nigeria).
You can find out more about the awards and see all of the photos from the shortlisted projects here. | 2022-07-22T10:40:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 2022 Leica Oskar Award shortlist - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/22/here-is-shortlist-2022-leica-oskar-barnack-award/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/22/here-is-shortlist-2022-leica-oskar-barnack-award/ |
How many Ukrainian refugees have been trafficked? We won’t know for years.
Their fates will depend in part on which country they’ve landed in – and whether that country has comprehensive policies and services
Analysis by Laura A. Dean
Volunteers give out food and other provisions to displaced Ukrainians on arrival at the Berlin Central railway station in Germany on March 9. (Jacobia Dahm/Bloomberg News)
Since Russia escalated its war in Ukraine in February, aid workers and volunteers have been reporting instances of human trafficking on Ukraine’s borders. While people are often captured and sold during conflict, the unprecedented speed and scope of Ukrainians displaced and dispersed across Europe makes this situation worse. While we don’t yet know how much human trafficking Russia’s war in Ukraine has spawned, my trafficking research finds that some countries are better prepared than others to assist and rehabilitate victims.
Stereotypes of trafficking victims shape policy response
The first human trafficking reports out of Ukraine suggested that the war’s trafficking victims aren’t the usual ones. Worldwide, women and girls make up 72 percent of global human trafficking victims, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. However, since 2015, nearly 50 percent of identified trafficking victims from Ukraine have been men and boys.
My book “Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia” shows how stereotypes about trafficking victims can undermine efforts to help victims. For example, because many policies do not recognize men as trafficking victims, most early efforts to interrupt the crime did not help stop refugees from being forced to work without pay in non-sex industries such as construction and agriculture.
I found two reasons anti-trafficking policies often leave men out. First, anti-immigration attitudes lead people to view men as economic migrants and not possible trafficking victims, and so they’re simply not identified. Second, female sex trafficking is a prominent policy issue because many people see female victims as more worthy of government assistance than men.
Ukraine’s anti-trafficking policy
In 1998, Ukraine became one of the first countries in the world, and the first in Eurasia, to pass any form of anti-trafficking policy — almost two years before U.N. countries finished negotiating and began signing onto the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, commonly known as the Palermo protocol.
The countries bordering Ukraine have extremely different kinds of human trafficking policies. For example, Russia offers no rehabilitation programs or shelters for foreign victims, and often charges them with immigration violations. Belarus uses trafficking policy — masked in the language of international human rights norms — to monitor and control citizens. Eurasian countries’ sentencing guidelines for trafficking of a child range from a fine to 25 years in jail.
Ukraine has consistently ranked at the top of my Human Trafficking Policy Index, which measures the scope of human trafficking policies from a human rights perspective. That’s in part because it had all four types of human trafficking policy, including listing trafficking in the criminal code, having a national action plan and a national law and government decrees.
Americans see Afghan and Ukrainian refugees very differently. Why?
The war has derailed Ukraine’s anti-trafficking efforts
This suggests that no matter how encompassing a country’s human trafficking policies may be, fighting a war and enduring large-scale displacement can reverse those efforts.
My research found similar backpedaling in 2014, when Russia first started fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region and annexed Crimea. That stage of the war was limited to a single region, of course, and roughly 2.5 million resulting displaced people fled elsewhere within Ukraine in the first two years of the war. In undertaking this research, I interviewed 59 people, including government representatives and stakeholders from key ministries, local civil society organizations, academics or journalists, and international organizations working in Ukraine. Most interviews were conducted in person in 12 of the 24 regions, including in the now annexed Autonomous Republic of Crimea of Ukraine.
My interviews found that it normally takes some time, after war, for human trafficking to come to light, because people remain exploited for some time. Other forms of gender-based violence in war, like rape, occur quickly; trafficking victims may be held for a few weeks and sometimes years. In fact, many victims do not recognize they’ve been exploited and take time to come forward — especially men who’ve been forced into unpaid labor.
The UK wants to send refugees to Rwanda. That's become a trend.
Ukraine’s reported numbers of trafficking victims decreased from 932 in 2013 to 742 in 2015, the lowest number of identified victims since 2004 — which reveals that identifying victims after the war started in 2014 took some time, even though people were displaced mainly within the country.
So how much trafficking is now underway? We probably won’t know until years from now, given how refugees have dispersed across numerous countries. Many human trafficking victims don’t know where to seek assistance, especially in unfamiliar countries — making referral mechanisms, awareness, training and outreach campaigns vital. | 2022-07-22T10:40:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How many Ukrainian refugees have been trafficked? We won’t know for years. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/how-many-ukrainian-refugees-have-been-trafficked-we-wont-know-years/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/how-many-ukrainian-refugees-have-been-trafficked-we-wont-know-years/ |
The curtain’s up on a Broadway hotel where the set designer’s the star
A new 27-story hotel, the Civilian, immerses its guests in theater sets, art, photos, costumes and props
Set (and hotel) designer David Rockwell in the Blue Room of the newly opened Civilian Hotel in New York. (Melanie Landsman for The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — In the stylish Blue Room, you can sip a cosmo while surrounded by display cases containing Evan Hansen’s shirt, King George III’s crown, the knee-high red boots from “Kinky Boots.” In the airy restaurant, you’ll dine under sconces illuminated with etched drawings of the 41 Broadway theaters. Even in the elevators, you’re enclosed by walls covered in the drawings of costumes from “Hamilton,” “Chicago” and “After Midnight.”
All through the hallways and suites and lounges of the Civilian, a new 27-story, 203-room hotel a block from Times Square, guests can face everything about Broadway except the music. (Although one easily imagines a concert or cabaret singer headlining there, too.) It’s a veritable shrine to Broadway design, spearheaded by innovative set designer David Rockwell.
What’s unique about the Civilian — which started receiving guests in November but is still completing some dining spaces — is not that it uses its proximity to Broadway as a thematic springboard. The originality resides in the array of talented artists who’ve been brought in to consult on and contribute to a hostelry that owes almost as much to curation as commercialism. Tony Award-winning set, costume and lighting designers such as Rachel Hauck (“Hadestown”), Christine Jones (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”), Paul Tazewell (“Hamilton”), Clint Ramos (“Eclipsed”) and Jules Fisher (“Pippin” and eight others) are among those whom Rockwell (“Hairspray,” “Into the Woods”) recruited for the project.
Broadway has an "Into the Woods" for the ages
A hotel and restaurant designer as well — the interior of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe was one of the projects of his firm, the Rockwell Group — Rockwell speaks of the artwork, props and models of sets he has gathered in the Civilian as if he’s the caretaker of an underappreciated legacy. (The building itself is by the New York firm Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman Architects.) “The collection is dedicated to taking a world that’s ephemeral,” Rockwell said, “and giving it a sense of permanence.”
Broadway has venerable watering holes such as Joe Allen, the West 46th Street restaurant adorned with posters from storied flops, and Sardi’s, the historic spot on West 44th festooned with the caricatures of Broadway luminaries. But the Civilian raises the bar for Times Square gathering places bathed in a theatrical aesthetic. An example is its “Company Wall” — an exhibit of paintings and photographs by artists, theater professionals and students that evoke a lyric from Stephen Sondheim’s score for “Company.” “It’s a city of strangers, some come to work, some to play,” begins the inscription, taken from the song “Another Hundred People.”
On the wall above are depictions of New York street scenes as well as more abstract notions of the teeming and isolating qualities of city life. Among them are drawings by Boris Aronson of the set for the original 1970 production of “Company,” a stark cityscape of scaffolding and elevators that is regarded as a giant leap forward for modern set design.
“I am completely enchanted by the place,” Christine Jones said by Zoom from Chicago, where she’s fine-tuning the set of the Broadway-bound musical version of “The Devil Wears Prada.” She added that it was particularly touching that work by Tony Walton, the revered Broadway set designer who died in March, appears in the hotel. “It’s really moving to walk upstairs and see his drawings on the wall,” Jones observed. “And for it to happen in a setting that isn’t a museum. It is a place where we will come and we will have drinks after our shows.”
The Civilian, located on West 48th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, is a venture by hotelier Jason Pomeranc, who sees it as place in which theater folk and theatergoers can mingle. (Rooms at the Civilian range from $239 to $409 a night on weekends, and weekdays start at $179.) “It’s not just the before- and after-theater dinners, but it’s actually the creatives hanging out there, making it their place and instilling the building with energy,” Pomeranc said.
The theatrical vibe begins streetside, as you gaze up at an arched facade of reclaimed brick — an homage, according to Rockwell, to the exterior of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre (formerly the Martin Beck) three blocks away.
“It’s a hotel that’s about a community,” Rockwell said as he led me on a tour of dining areas, bars, guest rooms — and the objects in what has been termed the Olio Collection. “Community” indeed: The Broadway production of “Take Me Out” held its cast party at the Civilian; Julianne Hough of “POTUS” threw a birthday bash, and to mark the end of his run in the off-Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors,” actor Skylar Astin celebrated there with his co-stars.
The narrow lobby is illuminated by rows of lightbulbs in the ceiling, conveying the sensation of walking under a theater marquee; a bank of wooden seats rescued from an old theater in Buffalo lines a wall across from a reception desk.
Photos hang everywhere: in the restaurant, in the bar, in the guest room corridors, by Broadway photographers including Bruce Glikas and Sara Krulwich, of Audra McDonald, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, and on and on. Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, stars of a celebrated “Cabaret” revival directed by Sam Mendes in 1998, peer out in one picture; Judy Garland seated in an audience gazes out in another.
Costume designer Clint Ramos stepped out of his comfort zone to participate in the project, drawing three Broadway theaters for the gallery of sconces. “I love his kind of maverick way, his sort of very individual brand of advocacy and activism,” Ramos said of Rockwell. His pencil portraits of the exteriors of two theaters, the Hudson and the Barrymore, and the interior of a third, Circle in the Square, are etched into fixtures alongside those by set designers including Scott Pask, Mimi Lien and Neil Patel. Nearby is the theater that Hauck chose to draw, the Walter Kerr, for the simple reason that her multifaceted, swirling set for “Hadestown” sits on its stage.
“I felt a little intimidated, because of course my primary medium is model, not sketch,” Hauck said. “So I was like, I can do one and it’s this one that means the whole world to me, this theater.”
Rockwell asked Tazewell, Oscar-nominated for his costumes for the film remake of “West Side Story,” to curate with him the items in the glass cases in the Blue Room — a cozy space in medium-dark blue with leather and velvet banquettes and satin finishes, that now is home to pieces of Rafiki’s costume from “The Lion King” and perfume bottles from “She Loves Me.”
“Most people who go to see Broadway shows, they don’t think much about what happens to these pieces after a show has closed or a performer has left a production,” Tazewell said. “It’s like for ‘Hamilton,’ we’ve got a huge warehouse that has all of the clothes from different productions. But then there are those pieces that you really want to hold and raise up.”
Lighting designer Jules Fisher has extensive collections of scenic designs; he loaned to the Civilian three drawings by Walton and two by Aronson. He bemoans the favoring in many design studios these days of the iPad over the drawing table: “There’s no human touch, no human hand,” he said.
Perhaps the Civilian and Rockwell will remind people of the traditions of Broadway design?
“The fact that this hotel is featuring theater craft is unusual,” Fisher said. “David is a persuasive person.”
That persuasiveness extended to the American Theatre Wing, a philanthropic organization that advances theater education (and operates the Tony Awards with the Broadway League). With Rockwell’s encouragement, the Wing became a promotional partner, an arrangement that led to an unusual financial bonus for the nonprofit: With every guest booking of a deluxe room, the Wing receives a small percentage of the revenue.
“It’s a match made in heaven in terms of a partnership,” said Heather Hitchens, the Wing’s president and chief executive.
“These are things that you’re not just going to see anywhere, for people who love the behind the scenes,” she said of the Civilian’s immersion in design. “For somebody who loves the theater, it’s a really unintimidating way to immerse yourself. Because audiences are hungry for more than just going to the show and coming back.” | 2022-07-22T10:41:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The curtain’s up on a Broadway hotel where the set designer’s the star - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/07/22/broadway-hotel-civilian-rockwell-tazewell/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/07/22/broadway-hotel-civilian-rockwell-tazewell/ |
More states could follow, setting up a battle over the future of online speech across the country.
Abortion rights activist and antiabortion activists protest outside the Supreme Court. (Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
As the fall of Roe v. Wade triggers a flood of new legislation, an adjacent battleground is emerging over the future of internet freedoms and privacy in states across the country — one, experts say, could have a chilling impact on First Amendment-protected speech.
“These are not going to be one-offs,” said Michelle Goodwin, the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California at Irvine Law School. “These are going to be laws that spread like wildfire through states that have shown hostility to abortion.”
Goodwin called the South Carolina bill “unconstitutional.” But she warned it’s unclear how courts might respond after “turning a blind eye” to antiabortion laws even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
Many conservative states’ legislative sessions ended before the Supreme Court’s decision, and won’t resume until next year, making South Carolina’s bill an anomality. But some tech lobbyists say the industry needs to be proactive and prepared to fight bills with communications restrictions that may have complicated ramifications for companies.
“If tech sits out this debate, services are going to be held liable for providing basic reproductive health care for women,” Adam Kovacevich, the founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress, which receives funding from companies including Google and Facebook, said.
For the NRLC, which wrote the model legislation, limiting communication is a key part of the strategy to aggressively enforce laws restricting abortion. “The whole criminal enterprise needs to be dealt with to effectively prevent criminal activity,” Jim Bopp, the group’s general counsel, wrote in a July 4 memo, comparing the group’s efforts to fighting organized crime.
The group “tried to be very careful in vetting this so it doesn’t impinge on First Amendment rights,” he added. He said the provision was intended to limit the trafficking of abortion-inducing drugs, which throughout the interview he compared to the trafficking of fentanyl.
“Just because the Supreme Court has decided to strip us of the fundamental right to choose what do to with our bodies, doesn’t mean California will stand back and allow others to use our systems to obtain information to hurt people who are exercising a fundamental right here in California,” Bonta said.
Period apps gather intimate data. A new bill aims to curb mass collection.
Democrats in Congress have also introduced the “My Body, My Data Act,” which would create new privacy protections for reproductive health data. The bill has little chance of becoming law in a narrowly divided Congress, but Rep. Sara Jacobs, the legislation’s architect, previously told The Post that she wants states to replicate the bill.
Privacy and tech advocacy groups are trying to gear up for the post-Dobbs battles. The Center for Democracy and Technology on Tuesday announced a new task force focused on protecting reproductive health information, which convened academics, civil rights groups and privacy organizations.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, expressed support for the California privacy bill and is reviewing the South Carolina legislation. Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist at EFF and a former Post reporter, said the South Carolina bill has “serious problems.”
She’s anticipating that tech companies and their trade associations will be ramping up their lobbying efforts at the state level, especially early next year, when many states resume their legislative calendars.
“For tech companies and for folks interested in digital rights, it’s going to be a wild ride in the next few years,” she said. | 2022-07-22T11:22:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | South Carolina bill outlaws websites that tell how to get an abortion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/22/south-carolina-bill-abortion-websites/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/22/south-carolina-bill-abortion-websites/ |
Why Amazon is buying a little-known medical provider for $3.9 billion
The e-commerce giant’s plan to buy One Medical for $18 per share gives it a firm foothold in the health-care sector
Amazon will acquire One Medical and its 188 U.S. offices, including this one in San Rafael, Calif., under an all-cash $3.9 billion deal. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Amazon will dramatically expand its health-care reach with its planned $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical, a primary care provider with 188 offices in 25 markets nationwide.
The e-commerce giant went big: It offered $18 a share for One Medical’s parent company, 1Life Healthcare — 77 percent higher than the previous day’s closing price. Sparks flew on Wall Street after Thursday’s announcement, powering the stock up nearly 70 percent.
And though it has grown quickly, One Medical has yet to turn a profit since going public in 2020. In the first three months of 2022, losses topped $90 million.
So, why is Amazon buying One Medical? Here’s a brief guide:
What does One Medical do?
One Medical is a subscription-based primary care provider that leans into technology to build what it calls “a seamless combination of in-person, digital, and virtual care services that are convenient to where people work, shop, and live.” Headquartered in San Francisco, it operates in major metro areas like Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and the District.
How does One Medical work?
At its core is an app and website that members can use to book appointments, track health records and renew prescriptions. Patients who sign up on their own are charged an annual fee of $199 for a suite of services that include on-demand video health consultations available at all hours and other benefits.
Observers drew immediate comparisons between Prime, Amazon’s retail membership system, with the sort of all-encompassing health-care platform offered by One Medical.
Amazon spokeswoman Angie Quennell declined to comment on whether One Medical’s services will be integrated with any of Amazon’s other services, such as Prime, Pharmacy or Care.
Why is Amazon spending so much?
In a news release announcing the acquisition, Amazon senior vice president Neil Lindsay said health care is “high on the list of experiences that need reinvention.” The Seattle-based tech giant believes it can expand and improve health care through a “human-centered and technology-powered approach,” he said.
“Booking an appointment, waiting weeks or even months to be seen, taking time off work, driving to a clinic, finding a parking spot, waiting in the waiting room then the exam room for what is too often a rushed few minutes with a doctor, then making another trip to a pharmacy — we see lots of opportunity to both improve the quality of the experience and give people back valuable time in their days,” Lindsay said in a statement.
Though One Medical is losing money — not uncommon for a start-up — it’s growing quickly: It captured a total revenue of $254 million in the first three months of 2022, a roughly 110 percent jump over the $121 million recorded in the year-ago period.
What does Amazon know about health care?
The acquisition is part of Amazon’s years-long push into health care, though none of its previous moves carried as much financial firepower.
Amazon bought online pharmacy PillPack for $753 million in 2018, which turned into Amazon Pharmacy two years later. It built Amazon Care with the help of another acquisition, the medical tech start-up, Health Navigator. The service offers telehealth visits and in-home visits for employees of certain companies, including Hilton, in some cities.
In leaked audio of an all-hands meeting in November, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told staff that Amazon Care is one of the company’s top innovations, highlighting that the division is aiming to expand through partnerships and new services, Insider reported this year.
The company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, offers specific products for health care and a health-care accelerator for start-ups. The company has also used its Amazon Business e-commerce offering to target hospitals, according to reports.
One of its first big moves floundered, however. Known as Haven, it was an ambitious effort undertaken in partnership with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to address soaring health-care costs and improve patient outcomes. But it shuttered last year after only two years.
What does this mean for patient data?
Quennell said the acquisition doesn’t change the fact that both companies “have stringent policies protecting customer privacy in accordance with HIPAA and all other applicable privacy laws and regulations.”
Still, the deal quickly drew scrutiny from some critics, many of whom are wary of Amazon’s control over numerous consumer-facing businesses. The company that got its start as an online bookseller nearly three decades ago has grown its business to encompass a delivery network roughly the size of UPS, a dominant cloud provider that allows companies to store data remotely and a vast ecosystem of Alexa-powered devices. And it has grown its Prime membership program to more than 200 million globally.
Others raised privacy concerns, pointing out that monetizing consumer data is an important part of Amazon’s other operations.
“Amazon’s takeover of One Medical is the latest shot in a terrifying new stage in the business model of the world’s largest corporations,” said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the left-leaning Open Markets Institute.
Lynn said he thinks the deal will expand Amazon’s ability to collect “the most intimate and personal information about individuals, in order to track, target, manipulate, and exploit people in ever more intrusive ways.”
Krista Brown, a senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports antitrust causes, called the acquisition “terrifying” in a statement.
“Acquiring One Medical will entrench Amazon’s growing presence in the health care industry, undermining competition.” Brown said. “It will also pose serious risks to patients whose sensitive data will be captured by a firm whose own Chief Information Security Office once described access to customer data as ‘a free-for-all.’” | 2022-07-22T11:48:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FAQ: Why Amazon is buying One Medical for $3.9 billion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/amazon-one-medical-faq/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/amazon-one-medical-faq/ |
The crypto investment platform promised investors returns of at least 5 percent every week. A court-appointed receiver couldn’t find investing activity to support such returns.
Cryptocurrency schemes continue to attract many investors who are lured by the promises of striking it rich. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
Scammers are capitalizing on the crypto craze big time. Since the start of 2021, Americans have lost more than $1 billion to cryptocurrency scams, nearly 60 times the losses reported in 2018, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Former Coinbase manager arrested on charges of insider trading
The Justice Department and Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleged that EminiFX, owned by Eddy Alexandre of New York, was a Ponzi-like scheme that promised participants guaranteed returns of at least 5 percent every single week.
Castleman said his investigation found that $250 million was collected from investors from September 2021 until May 2022 and that there were 62,000 EminiFX user accounts. Emil Bove, an attorney for Alexandre, did not respond to requests for comment. Alexandre entered a plea of not guilty, according to the Justice Department.
This is like no other case I’ve followed. Thousands of investors, many from Haiti, are standing behind Alexandre. Close to 14,000 EminiFX investors have already signed a change.org petition in support of the Haitian-born Alexandre, who many believe is a victim of racist prosecution.
“Together we will fight this,” one petition signer wrote. “When will we get a break with this discrimination? I’m sure things would have been way different if we were from a different race.” Another wrote, “The system is basically telling us (Black people) to stick to basketball, football and rap music if we ever want to get out of poverty.”
FBI says he ran a crypto Ponzi scheme. Investors refuse to believe it.
Several investors I interviewed are convinced the profits they saw in their online accounts from Alexandre were real. “He gave it to you every week,” said Markens Nicolas, who helped start the change.org petition. “So that makes it more believable.”
Here is how the platform worked, according to the investigation. EminiFX users deposited cash or cryptocurrency into the system. There was a multilevel marketing aspect of the platform where people could earn bonuses for recruiting others. Account balances were shown in U.S. dollars. Investors maintained funds in their “e-wallets” used for deposits or “trading wallets.”
“Every Friday, a weekly “ROI” or return on investment of between 5 percent and 9.99 percent was applied to every EminiFX user’s account balance, the same ROI for all users,” the report said.
Information from the EminiFX system showed positive returns every week, from a low of 5.01 percent to a high of 9.99 percent. “I haven’t found any investing activity to support those returns,” Castleman said in an interview.
An investor who deposited $10,000 in cash on Oct. 15, and elected to reinvest the supposed returns into a trading wallet, would have seen an account balance of over $77,000 by the time the company was shut down in May 2022, Castleman’s report indicated. That would have been an extraordinary and highly improbable return in such a short time frame.
Six signs cryptocurrency investment is just a classic Ponzi scheme
Castleman’s investigation found over 22,000 withdrawal transactions from the EminiFX platform totaling nearly $35 million between November 2021 and May 2022. However, much more money was flowing into the operation. If the company took in more than $250 million, this could explain how investors never realized their gains weren’t real.
“Many users appear to never have withdrawn or redeemed funds,” according to Castleman’s report to the court. Generally, a Ponzi scheme involves people being paid not from investment returns but from money collected from other investors.
After investigating all possible investing activities, Castleman said he couldn’t trace how the weekly returns that were applied to EminiFX user accounts were generated. He was unable to locate any evidence for the existence of the proprietary trading system referred to as a Robo Assisted Adviser Account, or RA3, in any EminiFX file or anywhere in the code base.
The report said that none of the former employees understood how the weekly return on investments was earned, what the RA3 was, or how it worked. By the time Castleman took over the platform, the total balances of all the trading wallets were reportedly about $512 million.
But he could only find assets worth about $170 million. Included in that total are more than 3,650 bitcoins located in an Estonia cryptocurrency exchange valued at more than $85 million based on the July 20 trading price.
Cryptocurrency collapse erases more than $1 trillion in wealth
However, bitcoin’s price volatility from November 2021 to May 2022 could not have resulted in the consistently positive weekly returns that were being applied to the EminiFX user accounts. The price of bitcoin was falling sharply amid a sell-off in the stock market.
There was some trading going on, but it was in Alexandre’s personal brokerage account. The records show Alexandre invested $9 million, “almost exclusively in funds that are clearly traceable to EminiFX corporate accounts,” Castleman reported. And even then, Alexandre’s personal trading resulted in over $7 million in losses — not the healthy profits he kept claiming — by the time a receiver was appointed.
The receiver has shut down the EminiFX website and operations and has been searching for any and all assets. A dedicated website, eminifxreceivership.com, which is in English and French, has been set up to keep investors informed and eventually set up a claims process.
Although Alexandre has yet to go to trial, for the tens of thousands of people who put their faith in him, the hope of becoming wealthy by investing with EminiFX is not going to happen. | 2022-07-22T11:48:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FBI says he ran a $59 million crypto Ponzi scam. It was much larger. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/crypto-ponzi-scheme-eminifx/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/crypto-ponzi-scheme-eminifx/ |
What to watch with your kids: ‘Nope’ and more
Brilliantly crafted sci-fi horror tale has gore, swearing.
“Nope” is a horror/sci-fi comedy from writer-director Jordan Peele about humans and their fraught relationships with other species. It may not live up to Peele’s previous films “Get Out” or “Us” in terms of cultural impact, but it’s a diverse, well-made, spectacularly entertaining movie that’s highly recommended for mature horror fans. Be ready for some shocking violence: A blood-covered chimp goes on a rampage, pummeling a young girl off-screen and threatening a young boy. A character is killed after a projectile hits him in the eye in a pretty gory way. There’s lots of blood overall: smears, spurts and raining on a house, pouring down the windows. You can also expect disturbing noises, scary stuff and jump scares. Language includes many uses of “f---” and “s---” and more. Characters vape, smoke pot and drink. Alongside the horror elements are themes related to teamwork, inclusiveness and problem-solving in the face of impossible odds. (131 minutes)
Zombies 3 (TV-G)
Positive messages, diversity in fun, campy sequel.
“Zombies 3” continues the franchise’s message of accepting others, differences and all. The film is wholesome, with dancing and singing, emerging feelings, minimal kissing, no strong language and violence that’s not meant to be very scary. Zombies wear “Z-packs” that infuse their veins with blood and give them powers; they can sometimes turn into monsters. Werewolves howl and snarl at times, baring their claws, with their eyes turning a creepy yellow. In terms of representation, a character who uses “they” pronouns has crushes on both a boy and a girl, and lead characters of diverse races treat each other with empathy and kindness — their motto is, “We are better together.” One character will be the first of his species to go to college and thus open that path for others. The movie has environmental messages about saving planets from destruction and pollution. (90 minutes)
Anything’s Possible (PG-13)
Trans girl comes into her own; language, drinking.
“Anything’s Possible” makes the point that surviving high school is difficult for everyone — and even more so for trans students. The film presents suburban upper-middle-class parents and kids learning about different ways of being authentic, accepting differences and experiencing love. Some students hurtfully refer to being trans as a mental disease, while others fully support their trans classmates. A boy tells his trans girlfriend that he’s attracted to “all” of her. A girl says she was assaulted but later admits it was a false accusation. Two former best friends get into a fistfight. Language includes “f---,” “s---,” “b----,” “d--k,” “a--,” “hell” and “suck off.” Teens drink alcohol. (95 minutes)
The Summer I Turned Pretty (16+)
Y.A. romance turned show is sweet, summery, totally relatable.
“The Summer I Turned Pretty” is based on the same-named book by Jenny Han. Like the book, the show is primarily concerned with romance, especially a love triangle between a teen girl and two brothers. Expect lots of talk of boyfriends and girlfriends, flirting, dating and kissing. Dialogue can sometimes veer toward the frank, like when one girl teasingly calls another a “dirty little slut” for wanting a “hot make-out session.” Adults are also involved in romantic complications, with a recently divorced woman meeting someone she becomes interested in. In several scenes, characters smoke pot alone or share a joint; characters also drink at parties, and it’s not always clear whether all the drinkers are of legal age. Characters drink too much, slur their words and act sloppy. Several main characters are of Asian heritage, though that isn’t mentioned as frequently as their relatively poor financial status in the wealthy beach town they visit. Cursing includes “f---,” “s---” and “a--hole.” A young girl is at the center of the action; her romantic and sexual maturation reads as realistic and moving instead of exploitative. (Seven roughly 45- minute episodes) | 2022-07-22T11:57:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Common Sense Media’s weekly recommendations. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/22/common-sense-media-july-22/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/22/common-sense-media-july-22/ |
‘The Poet’s House’ is a novel with a joyful, hopeful spirit
Review by Ellen Akins
It might well be a writer’s dream that a bright young woman with a learning disability (a learning difference, as her mother insists) would possess the soul of a poet — that, upon hearing the music of poetry, the largely unlettered innocent would naturally know its song. That’s the premise underlying Jean Thompson’s novel “The Poet’s House,” which partakes of the charm, if not the sting, of the fairy tales the author updated in her 2014 book of stories, “The Witch: And Other Tales Re-Told.”
Carla, who narrates the novel, has just turned 21, lives with her boyfriend Aaron, an IT guy (and “total sweetie”) in the San Francisco Bay area, and is working for a landscaping service, delivering nursery stock, when she first enters the magical realm of the titular poet’s house. She even accepts a drink from the poet — an older woman called Viridian with long silver-and-gray hair that stands out like a lion’s mane, bare feet and an outfit “equal parts yoga practice and Star Wars costuming” — and falls asleep, waking to find the day waning, her work unfinished.
Before she met Viridian, Carla tells us, she didn’t know any real poets. But through her yardwork at Viridian’s ramshackle house in the wooded hills, and then serendipitous encounters with the characters who cluster there, she soon finds herself in a world of poets. This world is a Wonderland where Carla is Alice and, as Viridian suggests, after Lewis Carroll is cited and playfully debated, “Well, the White Queen has untidy hair, so I guess that’s me.”
The others in her magical circle concur. “Viridian’s the one they’ll be talking about a hundred years from now. . . . She’s the queen.” Which is amusing, because it’s hard to imagine, however much one might like to, that there’s a practicing poet who’ll be much talked about a hundred years hence. Sadly enough, Aaron probably speaks for the world at large when he says of Carla’s new friends, “I don’t understand why you want to hang around with some of these characters who crack jokes nobody else gets and look like they belong in the hippie museum.”
“I think I might have a calling for it,” Carla tells him. “Not writing poems but getting inside them. Understanding how they’re put together and how somebody’s mind works and how once in a while they make you feel like you grabbed onto a live electric wire.”
Carla is, you might say, a quick study. In her youth, spirited interest and inclination (and even her appearance: “Look at her, she’s perfect,” one of the poets says. “She’s like something out of a Thomas Hart Benton mural.”), she proves as irresistible to Viridian and her people as they are to her. And within weeks, along with tending the garden around the poet’s house, she is attending their parties, interning at a premiere literary magazine (“Everybody wants to be in Compass Points.”) and drafted to work at a storied writing conference at a rustic outpost in the California hills, which unfolds with all the lofty aspirations, literary jockeying and juvenile intrigue that will be entertainingly familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a writing workshop.
Meanwhile Viridian’s semi-estranged son begins pressing Carla to use her influence on his mother, who’s supposedly holding a missing, mythical batch of poems by her former lover, who burned what was believed to be the only copy at a reading shortly before his suicide.
That long-ago lover, Mathias, was “only the most famous, brilliant poet of his era,” as someone has to explain to Carla, who, having been in the real world till recently, “hadn’t heard of him.” And those missing poems of his, we’re meant to believe, would be a literary and financial coup for anyone who might get his hands on them.
What happened between Viridian and Mathias is a mystery at the heart of “The Poet’s House,” which is as much about women’s power in the world, poetic or otherwise, as it is about the power of poetry. And in the novel the power of poetry speaks for itself, in offhand and formal quotes from Shakespeare, the Bible, Byron and Yeats, among others, and in the reading and reciting of some quite wonderful poems with which Thompson supplies her “pew-ets,” as Aaron affectionately refers to them.
12 notable books that come out in July and August
“The body is a house. Who lives within?” as one poem has it, echoing 2 Corinthians 5: “Our body is the house in which our spirit lives here on earth.” There’s no doubting and no escaping the joyful, hopeful spirit that inhabits “The Poet’s House” — the spirit of poetry that by the end of this charming novel Carla so clearly embodies — and the irrepressible Jean Thompson so smartly imparts.
Ellen Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, “World Like a Knife.”
By Jean Thompson
Algonquin. 320 pp. $27 | 2022-07-22T12:10:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Poet's House by Jean Thompson book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/07/22/poets-house-jean-thompson-book-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/07/22/poets-house-jean-thompson-book-review/ |
Video evidence (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg)
Donald Trump sat on his hands for more than three hours while rioters attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — endangering civilians, police, members of Congress and democracy. As the eighth hearing overseen by the bipartisan congressional committee investigating the insurrection demonstrated, Trump was unmoved as he watched the violence unfold on a TV in his White House dining room.
All of this was firmly in character. Nobody should be surprised that Trump, after losing his re-election bid, tried to burn things down rather than act as a responsible steward of the presidency and the public interest. But a weary familiarity with Trump’s penchant for violence and revenge shouldn’t prevent anyone from recognizing the savagery of what he tried to engineer on Jan. 6. It also shouldn’t distract the Justice Department from holding him accountable for the various crimes he committed when he tried to stage a coup.
Trump spent decades warming up for Jan. 6.
He was never a gifted or responsible operator of the collection of casinos he assembled in Atlantic City in his younger days. When the business unspooled beneath a pile of debt and eventually teetered into bankruptcy, he showed little sympathy for the investors, employees, vendors and local residents pummeled by the collapse.
In 1989, he took out ads in New York City newspapers that condemned Black and Latino teenagers accused of assaulting a White jogger in Central Park — in order to stoke racial divisions and keep himself in the media spotlight. He showed little interest in or sympathy for the teenagers; long after they were exonerated, he continued to insist on their guilt.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump staged a series of rallies peppered with calls for violence. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Trump said of one person disrupting one of his appearances. “In the old days,” protesters would have been “carried out on stretchers,” he lamented. Trump never hesitated to stir up the crowds. Violence spiked in the cities where Trump and his supporters gathered, but he didn’t back off. He reveled in the danger he unleashed.
In 2018, after a Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to CNN and a handful of the former president’s Democratic political opponents, Trump couldn’t bring himself to condemn the violence or sympathize with the targets. Instead, he bemoaned that the “bomb stuff” may have disrupted his political momentum.
Trump’s White House stay was littered with episodes in which he acted recklessly or irresponsibly but failed to show sympathy for those sideswiped in the process. Perhaps no event prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection captured Trump’s willingness to let others suffer in the service of his own ambitions quite as much as did the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“President Trump has never publicly acknowledged his responsibility for the attack,” noted Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat on the Jan. 6 committee, during Thursday’s hearing. “There is something else President Trump has never acknowledged: the names and the memories of the officers who died following the attack on the Capitol.”
What separates Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 from his previous derelictions is that there is a clear line connecting what he said to the ensuing violence — and to his failure to stem the violence, even though he was surrounded by advisers asking him to stop it. What’s unknown is whether he will be held accountable.
This is why every Jan. 6 hearing has included pointed statements about the rule of law. The committee members know that if Trump is to be held accountable for an attempted coup and for standing by while the Capitol was attacked, the Justice Department will have to prosecute. Thursday’s hearing was just the latest reminder.
• Even Republicans Are Now Tiring of Trump: Julianna Goldman
• Republican Boycott of Jan. 6 Panel Backfires: Jonathan Bernstein
• Donald Trump Knew Exactly What He Was Doing on Jan. 6: Editorial
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” | 2022-07-22T12:10:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Prosecuting Trump Has Only Become More Urgent - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/prosecuting-trump-has-only-become-more-urgent/2022/07/22/3dd41410-09ae-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/prosecuting-trump-has-only-become-more-urgent/2022/07/22/3dd41410-09ae-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
In booming N.Va., hotel union tries a new message: No more new hotels
Labor organizers are trying to stake a claim in development-friendly Alexandria, but the city’s all-Democratic council says it can’t legally meet their demands
Ismail Ahmed, 39, a member of the Unite Here labor union, canvasses a neighborhood in the Old Town area of Alexandria with fliers in April. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Ismail Ahmed had spent last fall canvassing for Democratic candidates in Alexandria, but now he was speaking up against them.
Lawmakers in this D.C. suburb were getting ready to vote on a major riverfront redevelopment project, and Ahmed wanted them to ensure service jobs at the site would pay well — better than the $11-an-hour, part-time gig as a hotel shuttle driver that he quit in 2020.
With that goal looking increasingly tenuous, the 39-year-old Ethiopian immigrant made his final pitch at a city council meeting earlier this month: “We don’t have any good-paying jobs in Alexandria,” he said. And if an on-site hotel couldn’t offer high wages, then city lawmakers should bar any kind of hotel there.
That is the unusual message his labor union, Unite Here, has been pushing as it tries to make inroads into local politics in Northern Virginia — the most liberal pocket of a state long known for its hostility to organized labor.
Facing gridlock in a divided General Assembly, Ahmed and other union members have instead looked to the entirely Democratic Alexandria City Council, pressuring lawmakers to require higher wages at new hotels popping up in their city — or to keep those hotels from popping up at all.
Forgotten tipped workers like hotel maids and airport skycaps were already hit hard by a cashless economy. Then came the pandemic.
For an aggressive union that is putting more of its resources south of the Potomac River, it’s a stark change in strategy — one meant to benefit from the development booming across Northern Virginia.
And for Alexandria’s city lawmakers, all proud liberals who have fashioned themselves as champions of organized labor, it’s one that has put them in the awkward position of sparring with a union over what, exactly, the city can do.
“They want us to set up scenarios where unionization can be guaranteed, and that’s hard,” Mayor Justin Wilson (D) said. “This is all new for everybody. Most Northern Virginia jurisdictions will tell you that [greater involvement] is a positive, but it doesn’t come without speed bumps and tension at times.”
Twice this year, Unite Here has lobbied Wilson and the council on major projects: first, a luxury hotel in the heart of the city’s Old Town, and then earlier this month on the former GenOn coal plant, which is being redeveloped into a mixed-use arts district that could include a hotel.
As city lawmakers insisted they could not legally impose labor standards on developers through land-use approvals, the union called on the council to delay votes — or outright vote no.
“Decision-makers need to use their discretionary power to get better deals for their communities,” said Paul Schwalb, the executive secretary-treasurer of Unite Here Local 25, which represents D.C.-area hotels, restaurant and casino workers. “If certain conditions aren’t met, they shouldn’t move forward with development.”
Yet both efforts passed anyway, pointing to the uphill battle the union is facing in Northern Virginia. Even amid the backdrop of a flourishing labor movement, in a solidly Democratic region that has only grown bluer, it is confronting the realities of a state where organized labor has never had much of a seat at the table.
A growing labor movement
When Democrats gained control of the General Assembly in 2019, they made it a priority to chip away at Virginia’s antilabor reputation.
State lawmakers passed a prevailing wage provision, which requires that construction workers on any large public-works projects must be paid at rates competitive with the private sector, and gave local governments like Alexandria’s the option to follow suit.
For the first time in nearly a half-century, localities also gained the option to recognize collective bargaining rights for their public-sector employees, such as teachers, police officers and firefighters. Alexandria raced to become the first locality in the commonwealth to opt into the practice.
All the while, amid a nationwide wave of labor organizing, Alexandria’s elected officials repeatedly spoke up for unions and unionization efforts: at three Starbucks stores nearby; for custodial workers in city schools; at a new graduate campus coming to the city; and even among the city’s own public bus operators.
Arlington approves collective bargaining for county employees, marking shifting tides on labor in Virginia
Those changing tides drew Unite Here to get involved, too. While the union had generally focused on lobbying in D.C. or Annapolis, members joined Democrats’ efforts to raise the minimum wage in the state to $15 an hour. Ahead of competitive statewide elections last fall, the group hired 200 laid-off hotel workers, including Ahmed, to work as canvassers for the Democratic ticket.
In some sense, the effort was about dedicating resources closer to its membership. Of about 13,000 Unite Here members in the D.C. area, about 8,000 live in Northern Virginia — though far fewer actually work there.
Schwalb, the local’s executive secretary, acknowledged that his group was also pushing into the region because of Northern Virginia’s building boom.
“We think that’s where hotel development is going to happen,” he said. “In order to protect the contract our members have, we need to make sure we grow our market share.”
Just four hotels in Northern Virginia are unionized. In addition to the two Alexandria projects, Unite Here organizers have started eyeing possible hotels at a Brookfield property near Amazon’s new Arlington County headquarters and at an indoor ski resort in Lorton. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
After Republicans gained control of the governor’s mansion and the state House of Delegates last fall, organized labor lost its hopes to keep pushing liberal labor legislation in Richmond. And so Unite Here turned to elected officials in Alexandria.
What can Alexandria officials actually do?
That is how Ahmed ended up going door to door around Old Town on a sunny Saturday this spring, urging other Alexandria residents to join him in pushing back against a council that insisted its hands were tied.
“They promise they’re on the side of immigrant people,” he told one man, standing outside a brick rowhouse in Old Town. “They said they’d create good-paying jobs and affordable housing.”
But so far, he explained, those promises had fallen short: As plans for the luxury Hotel Heron in Old Town came up for a vote in January, the council members shot down Unite Here’s request that they require a “labor peace agreement,” which would make it easier for workers there to unionize.
Wilson, the mayor, questioned whether those additional standards would make the project no longer economically viable. “Yes, we want to create jobs and we want to create good jobs that support families in our community,” he said, “but you can’t push that envelope so far that nothing happens.”
Stephanie Landrum, president and chief executive of the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership, said the union’s subsequent demand — to reject putting city dollars toward the hotel entirely — ignored the development’s many benefits: It would generate tax revenue, require few city services and create some of the highest-paying hospitality jobs in Alexandria.
It passed the council 4-3 — much to the chagrin of organizers, who said those part-time jobs would still make it hard to afford rent in a costly city like Alexandria.
And so Ahmed went door to door to door later in the spring, pushing his message. A father of two, he was struggling to pay rent for his two-bedroom apartment on the city’s West End, while juggling a few low-paid, part-time gigs as a parking attendant and driving for Uber Eats.
“I want to work where I live in Alexandria,” he said at one door. “The minimum wage is too low, and we need an opportunity to have jobs that have enough money.”
This time, Unite Here was organizing around another major project that had come through the development pipeline to council. The developer Hilco Redevelopment Partners was looking to transform a former power plant in Old Town North, seeking zoning changes that could allow the construction of a 300-bed hotel.
Unite Here joined with environmental groups and housing advocates to pressure Alexandria council members to ask the developer for more: More units of more deeply affordable housing. Higher energy efficiency performance targets. Apprenticeship programs and higher wages, closer to the $25-an-hour rate at union hotels in D.C.
Schwalb, of Unite Here, noted that city lawmakers in Boston had included labor unions in discussions on a similar Hilco project from the get-go, resulting in a strong set of labor standards.
But because no Alexandria money was used in this case, elected officials insisted they had less leverage. City Council has deferred to a Virginia law that bars lawmakers from imposing land-use requirements that would negatively affect hiring practices or a developer’s business. Hilco did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A coal power plant was shuttered for nearly a decade. Hundreds of residents are getting a peek at its future.
The council approved the zoning changes in a 6-1 vote on July 5. “I’m not about to kill a project that will not only clean up the site, which is sorely needed, but also be an economic driver for the city,” said Councilman Canek Aguirre (D), who voted “yes.”
With more hotels likely being built soon, Unite Here organizers said they plan to continue lobbying in Alexandria and deeper in Northern Virginia.
But the tensions so far in Alexandria point to the work they say is left to be done — even and especially in a liberal city that otherwise has supported organized labor.
“These city council folks want to do the right thing,” said Slaiman, of the Alexandria Democrats’ Labor Caucus. “We just have to help prepare them do the right thing.” | 2022-07-22T12:11:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hotel unions push for better wages — or no new hotels — in Alexandria - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/hotel-union-jobs-workers-alexandria/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/hotel-union-jobs-workers-alexandria/ |
Why Europe is tougher than you thought
By Max Bergmann
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks at a news conference in Brussels on July 20. (Stephanie Lecocq/ EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) (John Thys/AFP/Getty Images)
Max Bergmann is the director for Europe at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Europeans may be baking in an epic heat wave, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in focusing their thoughts on the coming winter. By temporarily shutting down a crucial pipeline in the past few days, Russia has signaled that it is prepared to cut off its natural gas supply, leaving a gas-dependent continent without enough energy to meet winter energy demands. Factories may be forced to close, consumers may have to ration heating and a recession is likely.
But if Putin thinks Europe will buckle, he’s wrong. Europe will do what it takes to get through the crisis and will come out stronger because of it.
Europe is paying for a catastrophic German policy choice. During the 16 years of Angela Merkel’s tenure as chancellor, Germany doubled down on its dependence on Russian fossil fuels. The abundance of cheap Russian gas has fueled Germany’s export economy and also enabled Merkel’s decision to close Germany’s nuclear power plants after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Rarely has a policy choice had such direct, catastrophic consequences. If the gas is turned off, the German economy — and the European Union’s — is going to suffer severely.
Russia is feeling the bite of sanctions imposed by the West after the invasion of Ukraine. Putin hopes that turning off the flow of gas will make Europe back down. He is probably expecting howls of pain from business communities and ordinary voters to push politicians into providing sanctions relief in exchange for opening up the gas taps. Many analysts in the United States and Europe fear a collapse of political will in Europe. “Russia is blackmailing us,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday.
But shutting off the gas to Europe won’t cause Europe to buckle. Over the past decade, Europe has shown time and time again that it is not soft. No, the E.U. will in fact do whatever it takes to get through this crisis.
When the euro was on the verge of collapse, then-European Central Bank President Mario Draghi vowed to “do whatever it takes” to save the currency. After populism surged in response to the migration crisis, the E.U. adopted a hard-line stance, cutting a deal to buy off Turkey to keep migrants and creating an armed border guard service. When migrants were forcibly being kept out of the E.U. in Greece and Poland, resulting in deaths, von der Leyen flew in not to condemn the response but to show solidarity. When covid struck, the economic hit was predicted to destroy the E.U. Instead, Brussels borrowed money for the first time, bought vaccines and came out stronger. After Russia invaded Ukraine, threatening Europe’s security, the E.U. shocked the world with the strength of its sanctions, increases in defense spending and the willingness to provide lethal weapons. Europe protects its union.
Instead of weakening Europe’s resolve to stand by Ukraine, cutting off gas will reinforce it. European leaders will not be caught off guard. They believe that Russia will cut off the gas and are making it clear that Putin is to blame. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky harshly criticized an agreement between Europe and Canada to export a gas turbine to Russian energy giant Gazprom to upgrade the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, but that was actually a deft political move. German politicians are making it clear to their publics that they want the gas to flow, and if it stops it is because Putin cut it off. Putin will be the one causing this hardship, not Europe. A recent poll shows that an overwhelming 70 percent of Germans want to continue backing Ukraine. Cutting off gas will not soften, but harden, European attitudes toward Russia.
Meanwhile, the E.U. is putting itself on an (energy) war footing. On Wednesday, von der Leyen announced that the E.U. states may have to ration their gas use by 15 percent. The E.U. has also pushed bold proposals to reduce reliance on Russia. Germany’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, trusted by climate activists and the business community, is leading the way. His willingness to build new energy links and infrastructure, to open new LNG terminals, to travel to Qatar to buy gas, and even to expand coal use has demonstrated that he is willing to do whatever it takes to get through the crisis.
Europe’s focus on getting through the winter has led to concerns that the climate agenda has been abandoned. On the contrary, Europe is also accelerating the clean transition and acting with a degree of urgency not thought possible. Europeans, desperately in need of new energy sources, are ramming through projects that might otherwise take years to receive approval. While emissions may increase in the next few years due to increased coal use, the E.U. is likely to dramatically reduce its carbon output in the years to follow. In stark contrast to the United States, the E.U. is positioning itself to show the world how an economy can rapidly decarbonize.
Crises strengthen, not weaken, Europe’s union. Time and time again, Europeans unify in response to a crisis. Even if Europe faces a cold winter, there is no reason to think this time will be any different. | 2022-07-22T12:11:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why Europe will stand up to Russia's natural gas blackmail - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/europe-will-stand-up-russia-natural-gas-blackmail/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/europe-will-stand-up-russia-natural-gas-blackmail/ |
Lis Smith (n/a/N/A)
Politico has always had a nose for the provocative, so it’s no wonder that it recently published a book excerpt from Democratic operative Lis Smith with this comment about the political death of a certain former New York governor: “Say what you will about Andrew Cuomo, but he died as he lived: with zero regard for the people around him and the impact his actions would have on them.”
Now there’s some heat.
Considerably more tepid is the evaluation that Smith provided a year ago to investigators working for the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James regarding sexual harassment charges against Cuomo: “He’s been a pretty good boss,” Smith testified.
The gulf between Smith’s assessment of Cuomo in her book, “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story,” and her assessment to the attorney general investigators shows what happens when a spinmeister gets control of the printing press. With the help of a nifty narrative or two, Smith manages to eviscerate the politician she once assisted and attempts to take a place among his most vocal #MeToo critics — all without having to indicate whether she believes his accusers.
It’s a brilliantly fashioned escape from a dubious career decision, one that gets an assist from Politico, which allowed the story to unfurl without much editorial intervention.
By her own account, Smith has emerged as “one of the top communications aides in the Democratic Party.” Over 17 years and 20 campaigns, she has injected spunk, edge and media savvy into political messaging — a run that included a high-profile role as senior adviser for the 2020 presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg. She’d also assisted Cuomo on his 2018 reelection campaign. One of her peers called her an “extraordinary rapid response practitioner.”
Rapid-response skills roared into demand last year as Cuomo faced a series of sexual harassment allegations. The timeline is central to Smith’s excerpt in Politico: Allegations emerged in December 2020, when former aide Lindsey Boylan first accused the governor of sexual harassment. More claims surfaced in February, March and April of 2021, with reports of inappropriate office banter, unwanted touching and kissing as well as groping: A former executive assistant, Brittany Commisso, accused the governor of fondling her breasts. The Times Union of Albany broke that story on March 9, 2021, though it didn’t name Commisso at that time.
As those allegations mounted, so did Smith’s disenchantment, she writes in the book, as excerpted by Politico. Her central gripe is that Cuomo failed to level with his advisers. In late February 2021, after Boylan published on Medium an essay containing details about the alleged sexual harassment, “Cuomo swore to the crowd advising him that nothing, nothing else would come out. It didn’t take long for us to see that he wasn’t being completely truthful,” Smith writes.
Within days, an allegation from former aide Charlotte Bennett appeared in the New York Times. “Fool me once, shame on you,” Smith writes in italics.
Except the investigative record tells a competing story. After Boylan came forward with her sexual-harassment allegation in December, the Cuomo executive suite was awash in discussions that Bennett might take her story public. Judith Mogul, special counsel to Cuomo, testified to AG investigators that she’d discussed Bennett and other possible accusers with fellow aides in December 2020. Josh Vlasto, a member of the Cuomo pushback squad, provided a similar account. Whereas Smith’s book suggests that the Cuomo team was blindsided by Bennett’s allegations, it was actually bracing for them.
The same fool-me rigmarole repeated itself shortly thereafter, Smith writes. Cuomo again said no other women would come forward. Then came the groping claim on March 9. As Smith tells it, the women who were advising the governor felt burned: “It started to feel like we were being manipulated — used because of our gender to cover and lie for Cuomo,” she writes.
In a moment of professional introspection, Smith notes that others asked her why she kept advising Cuomo after these experiences. “I wanted to believe Cuomo, I had to,” she writes. “To me, the other option was unfathomable: that so much of what I’d done in politics, everything I’d done for Cuomo, was in vain.” She writes that she should have “ruminated” more on whether she should have defended Cuomo, as opposed to thinking about how to defend him.
On July 5, 2021 — months after the plume of claims against Cuomo billowed — Smith spoke under oath with investigators working for the New York AG. When asked about Commisso’s breast-groping claim, Smith said that it “would have been extremely out of character for the governor.” When asked about one of Bennett’s allegations, she also said it would “not be in character” for the governor. When asked whether it mattered if Bennett’s claims were true, she responded, “What matters to me is whether I believed ... the governor acted in an inappropriate manner in the workplace, and I do not believe he did that.” And when asked whether Cuomo had ever treated her harshly, Smith replied with her comment about his being a “pretty good boss,” further specifying that she would “put him on the spectrum of treating me with more respect and someone who’s been supportive of my career as well.”
According to Smith’s book excerpt, more gubernatorial betrayal followed Cuomo’s own session with the AG investigators. He assured his advisers that the investigators had nothing new, yet when the AG’s report dropped on Aug. 3, 2021, it contained a “bombshell” about the governor’s treatment of a female state trooper assigned to his security detail. “For me, the AG’s report was the last in the line of crushing blows,” Smith writes.
Based on that commentary, you might suppose that Smith sided with the AG over Cuomo. Such a posture was nowhere in evidence a few months after the release of the AG report, when an attempt to prosecute Cuomo for the groping allegations suffered a setback. Smith taunted James, who had recently announced a run for governor:
Tish James, call your office.
Hard to imagine a worse launch or worse week of press than she’s received over the last 7 days. https://t.co/00Ea7vz7aF
— Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith) November 5, 2021
Apparently determined to bury her “pretty good boss,” Smith neglects to mention any mitigating considerations relating to Cuomo’s slow-motion demise. For instance, her Politico excerpt properly credits the Times Union for breaking the story of Commisso’s groping allegation. It never mentions, however, that after the AG report, Cuomo lawyer Rita Glavin raised a series of questions about key details of that story.
Like, on what day did it happen? Though Commisso had told the Times Union she didn’t recall the exact date, she’d told the AG’s investigators in an informal session that it was Nov. 19, 2020, then later told the Times Union it could have been during Thanksgiving week. Electronic records gathered by authorities indicated that she’d been alone with the governor on Dec. 7. The Times Union considered the confusion compelling enough to publish a follow-up story in January 2022; it reported that Commisso’s “conflicting statements” helped persuade Albany County prosecutors to drop a misdemeanor charge against Cuomo.
The point here is that Smith eviscerates Cuomo for failing to give his team a heads-up about the Commisso incident. Fairness requires stipulating that the allegation’s fundamentals aren’t as solid now as they appeared in March 2021.
Another wrinkle absent from Smith’s recounting is how incurious the media and the AG were about Bennett’s past as an accuser.
Nor is there any indication that Smith or Politico sought comment from Cuomo. Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the former governor, confirms to the Erik Wemple Blog that there was no such outreach. That may be just fine for a political operative like Smith, but does Politico have any standards for essays that appear under its banner? Even if it is a book excerpt — that is, not its original reporting? And did Politico examine Smith’s AG transcript as it considered whether to publish the excerpt?
“The Lis Smith book excerpt was an insider account of the fall of one of the best-known politicians in America, whose offenses were the subject of state investigations, massive media coverage, and voter outrage,” responds Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring. “Readers understand that as a book excerpt, the content represents Lis Smith’s perspective and experience, and that the portrait that it paints of Andrew Cuomo is hers.”
None of this exonerates Cuomo from allegations that he ran a toxic workplace, felt at liberty to touch people inappropriately and engaged in some of the creepiest repartee in modern political history. (Azzopardi responds that the work environment was “demanding and expectations were high”; Cuomo has claimed that hugging and embracing are part of his MO and that some of his conversations with female staffers were misinterpreted.) When the claims against Cuomo were emerging, Smith defended him in clashes with the New York press corps, often from the shadows of anonymity: “Any mention of my name would bring scrutiny upon me, and generally I prefer — less scrutiny is better, I think,” she told AG investigators, in a candid remark that reporters should remember when they let their subjects go off the record.
This work she performed with gusto: “Can i take a f---ing run at him,” Smith wrote to her fellow advisers as she requested permission to engage with Matt Flegenheimer, a reporter from the New York Times. After their call, she emailed her colleagues that she’d called Flegenheimer’s story “pathetic and an embarrassment to the times” and that she “especially looked forward to mocking it and him on twitter.”
Sounds as though Smith enjoyed rolling with a political operation known for its bullying ways.
Impressed with Smith’s revisionist bravado, we sent her a number of specific questions about the excerpt. Like a seasoned operative, she replied not with a list of answers but with a statement: “‘Any Given Tuesday’ tries to capture how politics can be both extremely rewarding and very challenging and how even some of the most inspiring leaders can elevate you one minute and then frustrate, disappoint, and mislead you the next. In writing the book, I tried to faithfully describe the details of specific events and the full range of my emotions from my political career — feelings which can change and evolve over time. Following the Governor’s resignation, I had a difficult reckoning with myself about everything that had transpired, and I hope that people can benefit from the lessons I shared.”
Perhaps Smith did indeed experience an epiphany between November and her book deadline, though her readers are entitled to doubt its authenticity. It is, after all, a résumé-cleansing epiphany in a world where performing pit-bull PR work for a #MeToo casualty isn’t a sought-after credential. | 2022-07-22T12:11:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | In book excerpt, Lis Smith trashes Andrew Cuomo. In testimony, she called him a 'pretty good boss' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/lis-smith-book-andrew-cuomo-discrepancies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/lis-smith-book-andrew-cuomo-discrepancies/ |
Review by Angela Stent
In his biography of Vladimir Putin, British journalist Philip Short argues that the West has demonized Russia and its president for too long. (Sergei Savostyanov/Pool/Sputnik/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
This portrait of Putin is more sympathetic than others. Short clearly respects Putin and what he has accomplished, and gives him the benefit of the doubt on many questions where we may never know the answer. Short blames the United States and, to a lesser degree Europe, for what has happened in Russia and for the breakdown in relations. He discusses Putin’s crimes but says the West has demonized Putin and Russia for too long. He also claims that Russia’s domestic policy has been heavily influenced by ties with the West, implying that the West is somehow guilty by association — but he never spells out how the West has affected those policies. In reality, the West has had very limited influence over Russian domestic politics since the Soviet collapse.
Throughout the nearly 700 pages of text, Short asserts what Putin was thinking without saying what his sources are. For instance, he declares that Putin felt he had put himself out to support the United States after the 9/11 attacks and had received nothing in return. What Putin wanted was U.S. recognition of Russia’s right to a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space, which the United States was not prepared to concede. Nonetheless, by defeating the Taliban in the fall of 2001, the United States did Moscow a great service by eliminating a threat to Russia in its own backyard, and the United States offered Russia a number of economic and other opportunities for cooperation. At the time Putin appeared to welcome these quid pro quos.
Angela Stent is a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.”
Henry Holt. 854 pp. $40 | 2022-07-22T12:11:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of Putin by Philip Short - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/biography-that-gives-vladimir-putin-benefit-doubt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/biography-that-gives-vladimir-putin-benefit-doubt/ |
A (dubious) suicide, a (possible) mole and an enduring CIA mystery
Review by Joseph Kanon
CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. “The Spy Who Knew Too Much” tells the story of one former officer's search for what he feared was a high-level mole at the agency. (Susan Walsh/AP)
On Sept. 25, 1978, an unmanned sailboat ran aground on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The cabin was in disarray, and papers marked “Top Secret” were found, along with a phone directory filled with 351-prefix numbers, a classified CIA exchange. As veteran investigative reporter Howard Blum tells it in his intriguing new book, “The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal,” things then moved quickly. The boat’s owner turned out to be John Arthur Paisley, later described by the agency as a “low-level analyst.”
A week later a corpse was discovered floating in the bay, identified by the chief medical examiner as Paisley. Cause of death: suicide. Never mind that the examiner’s office did not receive the corpse until the day after his report. Never mind that the autopsy listed a 5-foot-7, 144-pound male, while Paisley’s Merchant Marine records had him as 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds. Never mind that the fatal gunshot wound was behind the left ear and Paisley was right-handed. Never mind that the FBI and the CIA claimed to have no fingerprints on file (of a CIA employee). A few days later, the body was cremated, before Paisley’s wife viewed it. And that was that.
Or it would have been if an enterprising reporter from Wilmington, Del., hadn’t followed up and broken the story, with all its inconsistencies, which in turn was picked up — and picked apart — by the national press. Official explanations went from evasive to far-fetched. The corpse had been wrapped in diving belts weighing 38 pounds. The Maryland State Police theorized that Paisley had wrapped himself in the belts, then leaped from the side of the boat, reaching across his chest while in midair and shooting himself.
Not surprisingly, the story refused to go away. Had Paisley been murdered, or had he taken his own life, or had he simply gone to ground somewhere (and why)? The Senate Intelligence Committee conducted an inquiry and in 1980 said it had found “no information which would detract from [Paisley’s] record of outstanding performance in faithful service to his country,” then promptly classified the full report. The committee’s counsel, who had directed the investigation, said: “Chances are we will never understand the outcome of the case. It is a mystery.” And that was (and officially is) that.
Or it would have been if Pete Bagley, one of Paisley’s old CIA colleagues, hadn’t found in this mystery a possible puzzle piece to a larger mystery he was trying to solve. Retired in Brussels, where he had been station chief, and operating without official sanction, he went on a paper chase to find not only the truth about Paisley but how it might fit into his deepest fear: that the agency had been penetrated by a high-level mole.
Too many things had gone wrong over the years. Just a year before Paisley’s disappearance, an operation in Moscow was blown in what Bagley considered highly suspicious circumstances, another jigsaw piece perhaps. “The Spy Who Knew Too Much” is the story of that chase, going all the way back to the beginning, the 1962 defection by Yuri Nosenko, who Bagley became convinced was a KGB plant and in whose exhaustive debriefing (all two years of it) Bagley hoped to find the Rosetta stone, the clue that would explain everything. He didn’t, and the attempt damaged his career.
Bagley was one of the agency’s postwar gentleman spies (his uncle, Fleet Adm. Bill Leahy, one of the founding fathers of the Central Intelligence Group, the CIA’s predecessor, made the recommendation call to his friend Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, then CIA director, and Pete was approved) and had been a protege of James Angleton, whose own reputation for tenacious suspicion, if not paranoia, became legendary. The relentlessness of their pursuit of Nosenko drove a wedge through the agency — those who believed in the Master Plot (Nosenko as plant) and those who took to calling it the Monster Plot. Bagley is the hero of Blum’s book, but he may not be everyone’s hero — Nosenko’s brutal debriefing, for instance, can make for queasy reading. But his Ahab-like quest is certainly the driving force here. No need for car chases; there is enough suspense in poring over transcripts, finding a discrepancy of dates, the inevitable slip that will trap the enemy.
If he is the enemy. I wouldn’t presume to spoil Blum’s carefully woven narrative by revealing what Bagley finds — except to say it’s all plausible and persuasive, though the CIA probably wouldn’t agree. Conclusive proof may not be possible anymore. Much is made, rightly, of Bagley’s meetings with former KGB officers after the Berlin Wall came down in ’89, long evenings with old war stories and reminiscences, some of them useful and confirming. And, after all, the KGB should know. But they’re the KGB, and before you know it, you find yourself — in Angleton’s phrase, borrowed from T.S. Eliot — “in a wilderness of mirrors.”
Still, the real pleasure of this book is not the solution but the puzzle. By going back and forth in time, Blum cleverly makes his pieces part of agency folklore, terrific stories in their own right. This is the Cold War at high noon, missiles loaded, when spies were the front-line troops. If you have even a passing interest in the period, the book will be catnip. It’s all here: the dead drops, the surveillance, the honey traps, the disillusioned Joes, the office politics, the martinis. The period details are so atmospheric and rich that it would be no surprise to see Kim Philby make a guest appearance. There is even a recruitment scene in a steam bath in Bogotá (what novelist would dare?). It would be easy to get lost in all this, but Blum lays out his pieces clearly, and entertainingly. He has important background matters on his mind — the self-protective culture of the agency, for instance — but, like Bagley, he never loses sight of the main story. Let’s go back to the transcript. Who was Paisley? Start there.
Joseph Kanon is the author of 10 espionage thrillers, including most recently “The Berlin Exchange.”
The Spy Who Knew Too Much
An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal
By Howard Blum
Harper. 352pp. $28.99. | 2022-07-22T12:11:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal," by Howard Blum - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/dubious-suicide-possible-mole-an-enduring-cia-mystery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/dubious-suicide-possible-mole-an-enduring-cia-mystery/ |
Fear, biases and brinkmanship: A psychological history of the Cold War
Review by Evan Thomas
Soviet troops in Moscow in 1986. Fearmongering and wishful thinking marked the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, writes Martin Sixsmith. (Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images)
In June 1987, while eating dinner at a hotel on Red Square in Moscow, I was approached by Georgy Arbatov, the head of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, widely regarded by reporters at the time as the chief explainer of the West to the leaders in the Kremlin. He said he had read “The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made,” a book I had recently written with Walter Isaacson about the East Coast foreign policy establishment at the beginning of the Cold War. “It is as we have always thought,” Arbatov exclaimed, “Groton school and Skull and Bones!”
Arbatov was joshing, sort of. Taken literally, however, his reaction might be described as evidence of the psychological phenomenon, common to Cold Warriors on both sides, known as confirmation bias. It was conventional wisdom among the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninists that the United States was not really a free democracy but rather an oligarchy controlled by industrialists and patrician grandees like Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman (graduates of Groton, the New England prep school, and members of Yale secret societies). The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was run by a tight cabal; ergo, America must have been as well.
This very human tendency to project one’s own views and experience onto the mind-set of others — and to engage in both fearmongering and wishful thinking — is at the heart of Martin Sixsmith’s fascinating psychological history of the Cold War, “The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind.” A former BBC reporter who spent many years in Russia, Sixsmith traces a series of misunderstandings that fueled an arms race and might have doomed us all (and still might). His book is jam-packed with examples of wrongheadedness, some amusing, some hair-raising, and it serves as a useful cautionary tale as America once again faces off with secretive and suspicious great-power rivals.
Because neither side wanted to use nuclear weapons or start a conventional war that might spiral out of control, each resorted to psychological warfare. Fake news is nothing new; in the Cold War, it was called disinformation. The Russians were especially devious. “On 31 October 1986, Pravda carried a cartoon of a shifty-looking scientist and a grinning American military officer exchanging a test tube for a fistful of dollars. The vial is labelled ‘AIDS virus’ and is full of Swastika-shaped bacteria,” writes Sixsmith. The disinformation was part of the KGB’s “Operation Infektion,” and it would be spread in 30 languages in the newspapers of 80 countries. The false rumor of a Pentagon plot to poison African Americans, Arabs, Asians and other minorities in the United States with AIDS still has currency in conspiratorial corners of the web.
The CIA was usually more high-minded, funding Western European operas and magazines (including the Paris Review) in an effort to show that “West is Best.” But Americans nurtured their own conspiracy theories and hyped the Soviet threat, warning of a fictional “bomber gap” and “missile gap” and even a “muscle gap” — Soviet youth were supposedly more fit. Both sides bluffed with nuclear weapons. Brinkmanship — trying to maneuver the other side onto a slippery slope — was a dangerous game. During the Cuban missile crisis, a Soviet submarine captain came close to launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American warship, and on several occasions, false warnings of incoming missiles nearly pushed the superpowers into nuclear conflict.
To persuade Americans to pay for their own defense, it was sometimes necessary to make assertions that were “clearer than truth,” Acheson said. Upon his election in 1980, seeking to corner the Russians by outspending them, President Ronald Reagan ramped up defense spending. He wanted to scare the American people about the Soviet threat, but he ended up scaring the Russians as well.
The Kremlin was “haunted” by the fear of a preemptive nuclear strike by the Americans. The KGB launched Operation RYaN, an acronym for the Russian words for “nuclear missile attack.” “Soviet agents were instructed to gather intelligence that might give Moscow a moment of warning,” Sixsmith writes. “Some were told to befriend western bankers, hoping they might have inside information on the build-up to war. Others monitored US blood banks to see if they were boosting their supplies.” The paranoia was bureaucratically self-reinforcing. “Because the political leadership was expecting to hear that the West was becoming more aggressive, more threatening and better armed, the KGB was obedient and reported: Yes, the West was arming. … The Centre was duly alarmed by what they reported — and wanted more,” said Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB agent who later defected to the West.
A series of U.S. psyop maneuvers, probes by American warplanes, ships and submarines, “set alarm bells ringing in the Kremlin,” Sixsmith writes. At one harrowing moment in 1983, the Soviets came close to responding to a false warning of an American missile launch with a retaliatory strike. The report of an apocalypse near miss came as a wake-up call to Reagan. “He later admitted that only in 1984 did he realize ‘something surprising about the Russians. [That] many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were generally afraid of America and the Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.’”
In 1985, Reagan wisely began to reach out to the new — and fortunately far less paranoid — Soviet boss, Mikhail Gorbachev. By meeting face-to-face, the American president and the Kremlin leader were able to cut through institutional and cultural misunderstandings and move the world away from hair-trigger mutually assured destruction.
Of course, history did not end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, President George H.W. Bush did tell his lieutenants not to gloat, but Sixsmith, somewhat begrudgingly, gives him no credit. He accuses American leaders, including Bush, of relapsing into harmful magical thinking about Russia: that Russians could be made into “good capitalists ‘like us,’” Sixsmith writes. “But the Russian psyche, forged through centuries of abuse by the country’s rulers and enemies alike, is not ‘like us.’” It did not help, he goes on to say, that “in the years following 1991, [the West] trod on every one of [Russia’s] exposed nerves.” And Russia, Sixsmith does not need to remind us, still has thousands of nuclear weapons.
Evan Thomas is a co-author, with Walter Isaacson, of “The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made” and the author of “Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.”
The War of Nerves
Inside the Cold War Mind
By Martin Sixsmith
Pegasus. 577 pp. $35 | 2022-07-22T12:11:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind by Martin Sixsmith - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/fear-biases-brinkmanship-psychological-history-cold-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/fear-biases-brinkmanship-psychological-history-cold-war/ |
If plants, animals and machines are intelligent, what does it mean for us?
Review by Brenna Maloney
If you plan on reading James Bridle’s “Ways of Being” — and I cannot recommend highly enough that you do — you might consider forming a support group first. The ideas in this book are so big, so fascinating and yes, so foreign, you are going to need people to talk to about them. Have your people on speed dial, ready to go. And make sure you set aside a good amount of time for reading. You probably won’t be reading this book once. You’ll want to read it several times. This book is going to stretch you.
Bridle’s opening question to us is: What does it mean to be intelligent? There are many qualities we might list to describe intelligence: the capacity for logic, reasoning and comprehension; the ability to plan; problem-solving; emotional understanding; creativity. But one of the most significant definitions of intelligence is: what humans do. When we speak of something being intelligent, we typically mean something that operates at the same level and in the same manner as we do. We tend to think that humans are the sole possessors of intelligence. It is what separates us from “lower” beings.
That’s the first hurdle you have to get over. Bridle steadily makes the case that what you thought about intelligence may not be exactly right, and who you thought was intelligent might not be right, either. No, we aren’t talking about that co-worker who isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. We aren’t talking about humans at all. Bridle wants us to consider the intelligence of animals. Of plants. Of machines.
To do this, we must be open to the idea of a “more-than-human world.” This is a world in which we do not separate ourselves from nature. We do not look at the world as being full of lesser creatures. Bridle tells us: “The world is made up of subjects, not objects. Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view and forms of life.”
We are introduced to the concept of “umwelt.” It comes from the 20th-century German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. The word translates to “environment” or “surroundings,” but it refers to “the particular perspective of a particular organism: its internal model of the world, composed of its knowledge and perceptions.”
Bridle gives us the example of a parasitic tick. The umwelt of the tick is concerned with three factors: the smell of butyric acid, which indicates to the tick there is an animal nearby to feed from; a temperature of 98.6 degrees, which indicates the presence of warm blood; and the hairiness of mammals, which the tick must navigate to reach its meal. These three specific things make up the tick’s universe.
Bridle says: “Crucially, an organism creates its own umwelt, but also continuously reshapes it in its encounter with the world. . . . Everything is unique and entangled. Of course, in a more-than-human world, it’s not only organisms which have an umwelt — everything does.”
So, the tick’s world revolves around those three things, and it acts accordingly. Does that make it intelligent? It rather depends on the yardstick you are using to measure intelligence.
Humans are so human-centric, we don’t always ask the right questions. A classic intelligence test is to see if a subject can solve a problem by using a tool. A tempting piece of food might be attached to a string and placed just out of an animal’s reach. By pulling on the string and drawing the food near, the animal demonstrates the ability to recognize a problem, think it through, make a plan and carry it out. The animal has demonstrated its intelligence.
Researchers have been playing this game with chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans for decades. But early tests on gibbons, another primate, failed miserably. The gibbons made no effort to retrieve the food. So … gibbons are stupid? Not exactly. Gibbons are arboreal. They live in trees. To make climbing and swinging easier, gibbons have elongated fingers. This makes it harder for them to pick up objects lying on flat surfaces. Dragging food across the ground by a string isn’t a natural gibbon scenario. Researchers tried again. This time, they hung the food from the ceiling with strings. Only then did the gibbons recognize a familiar problem — finding food in trees where they live — and they tugged on the strings to retrieve the food. The gibbons didn’t suddenly become intelligent. The original test missed out on what makes them smart.
Bridle tells us clearly: “Intelligence . . . is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes. The task is to figure out how to become aware of it, to associate with it, to make it manifest. This process is itself one of entanglement, of opening ourselves to forms of communication and interaction with the totality of the more-than-human world. . . . It involves changing ourselves, and our own attitudes and behaviors, rather than altering the conditions of our non-human communicants.”
Bridle will tell you that plants have an umwelt of their own. What’s more, plants can hear, the author says. You read that right. Bridle will tell you that plants have the ability to remember things, too. I can’t do justice to the book’s explanation in this short review, but trust me, you will believe it. You will believe what Bridle has to say about machines and artificial intelligence, too.
You soon come to understand, as Bridle argues, “everything is intelligent, and therefore — along with many other reasons — is worthy of our care and conscious attention.” In the author’s view, intelligence is relational, and all organisms are interconnected. We share this world. You, me, your dog, ticks. Bridle writes: “What matters resides in relationships rather than things — between us, rather than within us. … Intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity. By rethinking intelligence, and the forms in which it appears in other beings, we will begin to break down some of the barriers and false hierarchies that separate us from other species and the world.”
In this book, Bridle has created a new way of thinking about our world, about being. How would we live our lives and change our world if we embraced this thinking? If we did not place ourselves at the center of everything? Please read this important book. Read it twice. Talk about it. Tell everyone you know.
Brenna Maloney is an editor for the National Geographic Society and the author of “Buzzkill: A Wild Wander Through the Weird and Threatened World of Bugs,” which will be published in October.
Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence | 2022-07-22T12:12:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of Ways of Being Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/if-plants-animals-machines-are-intelligent-what-does-it-mean-us/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/if-plants-animals-machines-are-intelligent-what-does-it-mean-us/ |
Lesser-known villains of the opioid crisis: ‘Dealers dressed in suits’
Review by Bethany McLean
Joe Rannazzisi served as the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Diversion Control, and under his leadership, the agency began to go after the opioid industry. Then, under pressure from the drug companies, he was forced out of his job. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
At the end of their powerful book, “American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry,” Washington Post reporters Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz quote a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent explaining why no one stopped the companies — from the drug manufacturers to the distributors — that were profiting from the opioid business. “It’s all about money,” he says.
Of course that’s a cliche. But, as the book shows, it’s a cliche for a reason: It happens to be true.
For many people, the Sackler family, which made its multibillion-dollar fortune by peddling OxyContin, is the head villain of the opioid crisis that’s still devouring America. Maybe that’s true, in that if Purdue Pharma, the family’s company, hadn’t aggressively marketed OxyContin as a purportedly nonaddictive solution to pain of any sort, history might have been different. But that narrative has allowed the rest of the cartel — the rest of the “drug dealers dressed in suits,” as another DEA agent calls them: manufacturers, pharmacies, distributors — to escape public opprobrium.
And so, despite everything that’s been written about the crisis, the perspective that Horwitz and Higham bring is fresh and important. They mainly focus on the big drug distributors — Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen — that transport more than 95 percent of all pharmaceuticals in the United States between manufacturers and pharmacies. “The Big Three,” as they’re known, “saturated the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 to 2012 as the nation’s deadliest drug epidemic spun out of control,” as Higham, Horwitz and their Washington Post colleague Steven Rich wrote in a 2019 piece. Not surprisingly, death rates soared in the areas that were most heavily saturated.
On one level, the wrongdoing by those involved is obvious and shocking. It’s been known for centuries that opioids are dangerously addictive. In modern America, it was equally well known that the resulting addiction was killing people: In 2013, for instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one person was dying every 19 minutes from prescription drug overdoses. And yet, in the face of these facts, the distributors continued to ship mammoth quantities of pills to areas that simply couldn’t absorb them — unless the pills were diverted to the black market. For instance, McKesson shipped 2 million tablets of hydrocodone to six small drugstores in Tampa over an 11-day period; Cardinal sent 3.1 million tablets of oxycodone to a small Florida town in 2011, enough to supply every man, woman and child in the city with 58 doses; and on, and on.
But the wrongdoing isn’t necessarily punishable, because the letter of the law can be used to obscure what’s morally obvious. The companies have argued that yes, they were supposed to flag suspicious orders, but if they did so, legitimate customers might be deprived of their pain meds. They’ve argued that they didn’t have access to the DEA database that showed where all the pills were going, even though the information in that database came from the companies themselves. They’ve argued that they are just logistics companies and that fixing the problem was someone else’s responsibility. One of the beauties of the modern legal corporate complex is that there’s always a reason the company isn’t to blame.
And if the companies couldn’t wiggle their way out, well, they just paid fines and continued to do what they’d been doing. For instance, McKesson paid a mere $150 million of shareholders’ money to settle one case against it, which as Higham and Horwitz point out was just $50 million more than the annual compensation package of chief executive John Hammergren.
The people who did try to stop what was happening didn’t fare so well. One of the heroes of the book is a former DEA agent named Joe Rannazzisi, a “muscled tough-talking New Yorker who had spent a storied thirty years bringing down bad guys.” Rannazzisi was the head of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, and under his leadership, the agency began to go after the opioid dealers that were dressed up as Fortune 500 companies.
But that went as it so often does in America. The more money there was, the more the industry wanted, and the more viciously protective of their profits the companies became. Through their lobbying group, the shadowy Healthcare Distribution Alliance, they came up with a plan for eviscerating their critics. What happened to Rannazzisi was chilling, as it was meant to be. He was pushed out of his job and moved to a “dark office with no people, the equivalent of bureaucratic exile, in the expectation that he would give up and retire.” And eventually, he did.
Meanwhile, various members of Congress, including Marsha Blackburn, Orrin Hatch and Tom Marino, took money from the industry and pushed through a law in 2016 that dramatically weakened the DEA’s powers. Our supposed representatives were purchased, as they so often are, but in this case, the trade seems to have been particularly ugly: campaign contributions in exchange for people’s lives.
By the middle of the decade, some bold prosecutors began taking on the industry. The plaintiffs’ bar started to bring civil suits in towns and cities around the country, often based on public-nuisance laws, which confer broad powers on counties to eliminate hazards to public health. The hero, of sorts, of the second part of the book is Paul Farrell, a West Virginia lawyer who starts to fight the industry after reading a story in the Charleston Gazette-Mail about how drug companies had sent 780 million prescription pain pills to West Virginia in a six-year period, enough to supply 433 pills to every man, woman and child in the state.
Many of the cases against the industry were consolidated into a “multidistrict litigation,” which is what happens when there are so many lawsuits that they threaten to overwhelm the system. In the fall of 2019, just before the trial was due to start, the two sides announced a settlement in the cases against manufacturers. As this review goes to press, plaintiffs’ lawyers are finalizing the terms of a separate, $26 billion global deal with the Big Three distributors and Johnson and Johnson. But in the case that Farrell brought against the distributors in West Virginia, a federal judge ruled this month that they bore no responsibility for the flood of opioids and the harm it caused.
In part because the end of the story has yet to be written, the book is less satisfying than it could be. In addition, the writing often bogs down in a morass of detail. Too often, Higham and Horwitz transcribe courtroom exchanges word for word for page after page instead of stepping back and explaining why one particular exchange might be pivotal. You won’t come out of the book with a clear sense of where things stand or why, or which of the industry’s arguments has mattered most in the eyes of the law.
But you will come away with a renewed appreciation for all that money can buy, as well as another realization that is also as obvious as it is shocking: No one is ever going to say they’re sorry.
Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of “Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World.”
American Cartel
Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry
By Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz
Twelve. 416 pp. $30. | 2022-07-22T12:12:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry," by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/lesser-known-villains-opioid-crisis-dealers-dressed-suits/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/22/lesser-known-villains-opioid-crisis-dealers-dressed-suits/ |
What the Jan. 6 hearings did and didn’t say about the military
The U.S. military has a strong tradition of staying out of politics. And that’s a good thing.
Analysis by Carrie A. Lee
Members of the Michigan National Guard and the U.S. Capitol Police keep watch on March 2, 2021, amid heightened security in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attacks. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The Jan. 6 commission’s hearings over the past month have investigated the role of President Donald Trump in inciting the riot that took over the U.S. Capitol in early 2021. The hearings featured some previously recorded testimony from U.S. defense officials, including Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, but largely focused on people in Trump’s inner circle who attempted to subvert the election ratification process.
However, despite the initial lack of attention on the Department of Defense during these hearings, the U.S. military is back in the spotlight. What’s more, national security credentials became critical to the commission’s argument. This could cause problems between the military and America’s civilian-led government — an area of study better known as civil-military relations.
The military isn’t involved in U.S. domestic politics
The U.S. military has a strong tradition of staying out of U.S. politics, especially power transitions between elected leaders. There’s a reason for that. After all, the military is the profession responsible for what political scientist Samuel Huntington called the “management of violence.”
Most scholars agree that the military has a special obligation to refrain from acting as an arbiter in U.S. domestic politics. To do otherwise risks instigating the very thing that could most threaten U.S. democracy: a coup. Milley himself has been clear on this point, declaring in August 2020 that the U.S. military plays “no role” in elections.
Yet the military still looms large. The two congressional leaders of last night’s hearings have burnished their credentials as veterans and highlighted witnesses’ military backgrounds. Also, testimony that Trump wanted to use the military to seize voting machines — and that he refused to call out the National Guard to quell the riot — prompted a number of retired military officers to publicly declare that he was derelict in his duty.
Trump’s moves reinforced the (false) notion that the military has the obligation and ability to intervene in U.S. domestic politics. However, both history and contemporary research show that military involvement in a country’s electoral politics almost always does more harm to the democratic processes than good — and such trends are difficult to stem.
What happened to the National Guard that day?
The testimony during last night’s hearings sought to answer the big question: What happened during the three hours it took for the National Guard to arrive on the scene and secure the building. Crucial to this question is the complex arrangement around the status of the District of Columbia and the potential for the overt politicization of the D.C. National Guard by federal officials. Indeed, while the National Guard is often placed on standby during events that have the potential to turn violent — whether in D.C. or elsewhere — that wasn’t the case early on Jan. 6, when only a few hundred guard members were deployed to assist with traffic.
The National Guard was called out in Washington, D.C. Here’s what you need to know.
This is significant because unlike state governors, the D.C. mayor does not have control of the D.C. National Guard. Instead, these troops are under the control of the president, who traditionally has delegated that authority to the secretary of the army. While this arrangement has not historically been problematic, Trump’s willingness to use the military to stay in power generated additional concerns that he would abuse the D.C. guard, as well. And, as the case for D.C. statehood continues to gain traction, this already complex issue will probably become even more politicized between the parties.
Jan. 6 highlighted worrying trends
The hearings also detailed troubling trends about the relationship between the military, veterans and American society. Last week’s testimony and evidence revealed that militia-like groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers maintained close ties to top Trump allies seeking to overturn the election. What’s more, it appears that senior members of these groups expected Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — an early-republic statute that allows a president to use federal forces to suppress domestic unrest — in defense of the mob.
U.S. paramilitary groups pose a challenge for civil-military relations because they often recruit explicitly from veteran populations, seek out and provide military training, and advertise their close ties to the military and law enforcement. These groups intentionally blur the line between active-duty and veteran status for the sake of prestige — while encouraging extremism within the militias themselves.
This blurs the line between military service and political extremism — a process known as politicization — and it causes three problems. First, politicization harms military effectiveness. Soldiers are taught that a politicized military has a harder time offering effective military advice that will be weighed seriously by elected officials, regardless of party. When civilian leaders become more likely to view advice through a partisan lens, that erodes trust in the civil-military relationship. Without trust, neither side can effectively communicate and bargain in the ways necessary for good strategy-making. And without good strategy, military effectiveness in both war and peace will suffer.
Second, Congress will probably find it tougher to deal with a politicized military, complicating even routine tasks. As the military becomes increasingly identified with partisan political issues — from critical race theory to “woke-ism” to extremist groups — it becomes harder for Congress to pass bipartisan defense budgets, perform meaningful oversight and otherwise pursue a healthy civil-military relationship.
Lt. Col. Vindman’s retirement will hurt military effectiveness. This is why.
Third, politicization hurts public confidence in the military, which in turn hurts recruiting and retention. As I’ve written before here in TMC, when the military becomes politicized, its ability to retain top talent is directly affected. In particular, politicization reduces the military’s ability to recruit service members from all cross-sections of society, leading to a smaller talent pool and long-term problems for the legitimacy and effectiveness of the institution.
The Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol represented a dark point in the nation’s history and required exceptional judgment and patriotism by civilian and military leaders. However, the hearings reveal not just a one-time issue but troubling trends in civil-military relations that may stay with the country for years to come.
Carrie A. Lee (@CarrieALee1) is the chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Army War College, Department of the Army or Department of Defense. | 2022-07-22T12:12:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Would Trump have used the military to overturn the election? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/jan6-military-national-guard/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/jan6-military-national-guard/ |
Brent Pry begins his first season as a head coach at Virginia Tech, where he was a graduate assistant and defensive line coach from 1995 to 1997. (Nell Redmond/AP)
CHARLOTTE — Virginia Tech’s Dax Hollifield was speaking in glowing terms about Hokies first-year football coach Brent Pry on Thursday afternoon when the senior linebacker compared him to Bud Foster, the program’s former longtime defensive coordinator.
Pry, who served under Foster at Virginia Tech as a graduate assistant and defensive line coach from 1995 to 1997, smiled broadly in addressing the significance of having the Hokies’ leader on and off the field mention him in the same breath as a legend who remains beloved in Blacksburg.
“It’s a great compliment, and it’s not by accident, right?” Pry said during his first ACC media day. “As far as defensive coach and mind-set and coaching mentality and all those things, I learned so much from Bud those three years. Three years is a pretty good run, especially when you’re a sponge and you’re a young coach and you’re just soaking up everything.”
Pry parlayed the knowledge he gained from Foster into a successful career as an assistant, most recently serving as Penn State’s defensive coordinator since 2014 before undertaking the assignment of overhauling the program at Virginia Tech on the heels of Justin Fuente’s departure.
Unlike his predecessor, Pry has made himself accessible in the community, following the model established under Frank Beamer, the program architect who turned Virginia Tech into a national power. Beamer remains extremely visible, often walking around campus engaging with fans and students.
Pry has put himself out there as well in a bid to reignite a fan base that had grown weary amid losing records over the past few years. The Hokies finished below .500 in each of the previous two seasons for the first time since 1991 and 1992, when Beamer was in the early stages of constructing the program.
Almost immediately after his hiring, Pry seized upon the winning tradition Beamer had put in place over his Hall of Fame career, telling his charges during his first team meeting that they didn’t come to Virginia Tech to go 6-7. Players since have recalled that introduction to Pry as inspiration for this season and beyond.
“That’s kind of the first thing that bridged the gap for us as players with a new coach,” wide receiver Kaleb Smith said. “Having somebody who knows the Virginia Tech traditions, knows what it means to be a Hokie — because that’s something we all share and hold deep in our hearts.”
The unbridled enthusiasm Pry brings to the job surfaced during his opening remarks Thursday, when he paused to look at his cellphone and revealed Virginia Tech had just added another commitment. Pry, wearing a suit and tie in Hokies colors, then turned to the three players who accompanied him to the event and told them, “Virginia Tech just got better.”
Offensive lineman Silas Dzansi later recounted a story of how Pry’s ebullient demeanor has lifted the spirits not just within the locker room but also throughout Blacksburg. The redshirt senior from Woodbridge used to get asked when strolling through campus or nearby neighborhoods how relatable Fuente was to his players, with fans expressing their distaste for the former coach.
“That’s one thing I thought was crazy because last year, the year before, we would walk around, and people would be like: ‘Do you like Fuente? Because I don’t,’ ” Dzansi said. “And now it’s like: ‘Oh, how do you like Coach Pry? Because we love him.’ It’s so different. It’s such a big turnaround.”
But it hasn’t been only Pry’s vibrant personality that has energized the Hokies, who last season finished 12th out of 14 schools in the ACC in total offense (361.6 yards per game) and second to last in scoring (23.7 points) as well as losing three straight games at Lane Stadium for the third time in four years.
He also brings credentials that include directing the Nittany Lions to a national ranking of sixth in scoring defense (17.3 points per game) and third in the red zone (66.7 percent) last year. Pry was nominated last season for the Frank Broyles Award as the top assistant coach in college football.
He inherits a unit that finished eighth in the ACC in total defense (392 yards per game) in 2021 and fifth in scoring (25.3 points).
“I remember Coach Foster, he would just teach it all over again and do these basic drills,” Hollifield said in elaborating on the similarities between Pry and Foster. “It really speaks to how easy football is when you actually understand what you’re trying to do. Learning the technique the proper way and applying it on the field make a world of difference, and that was [Pry’s] initial message: ‘We’re going to get the fundamentals down, and from that we’re going to start building.’ ” | 2022-07-22T12:12:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brent Pry working to get Virginia Tech back to top of ACC - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/brent-pry-virginia-tech-winning-tradition/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/brent-pry-virginia-tech-winning-tradition/ |
Who’s No. 1? We pick the top high school programs across all sports.
Michael Errigo
St. John's football won a championship in the fall, and the Cadets kept rolling in other sports, too. (Scott Taetsch/For The Washington Post)
The 2021-22 high school sports season meant more to student-athletes and coaches than usual. After the previous two campaigns were canceled or shortened because of the pandemic, this past school year allowed many teenagers to fully explore their passions, return to normalcy and, in some cases, compete for championships.
To celebrate the D.C. area’s first full year of competition since 2018-19, The Washington Post gathered data from every sport to determine the most successful athletic programs. Assessing championship wins and appearances, All-Met teams, rankings, records, strength of competition and more, The Post tracked the top all-around athletic program from the area in five categories:
D.C. public school
Maryland public school
Virginia public school
Private school (boys)
Private school (girls)
D.C. public school: Jackson-Reed
The Jackson-Reed Tigers, previously known as Wilson, have long been the public program to beat in the nation’s capital. This past school year was no different; the Tenleytown school earned double-digit conference titles in the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association. Among the highlights were the softball team’s 100th straight conference win in the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association championship game, the boys’ basketball program producing All-Met Player of the Year and Virginia Tech signee Darren Buchanan Jr. and the boys’ rowing team traveling to the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta in England after scoring victories at the Stotesbury Cup and Scholastic Rowing Association of America nationals.
Honorable mention: Bell, Dunbar, School Without Walls, Theodore Roosevelt
Maryland public school: Severna Park
The Anne Arundel County powerhouse claimed state championships in boys’ cross-country, field hockey, boys’ indoor and outdoor track and field and boys’ lacrosse. The Falcons were the state runner-up in baseball, girls’ lacrosse and softball. All of their titles came in 4A or 3A, Maryland’s highest classifications, and capped dominant seasons. In the state cross-country and indoor and outdoor track meets, Severna Park defeated the runner-up by double digits, including a 39-point differential in the 4A cross-country final. In field hockey, the Falcons claimed their Maryland record 25th title by outscoring their six postseason opponents 25-1. Severna Park also continued to make history in boys’ lacrosse, securing its sixth consecutive state crown.
Honorable mention: Churchill, Glenelg, Northern, Poolesville
Virginia public school: Madison
June 11 was the final day of the spring sports calendar in Virginia, and for the Madison Warhawks, it provided an exclamation point to an impressive school year. The boys’ lacrosse and softball teams earned Class 6 championships that day, adding more hardware to an overstuffed trophy case. Junior Simone Bergeron also earned the Class 6 singles title in girls’ tennis in the spring. In the winter, the girls’ basketball program completed a state championship three-peat behind first-team All-Met twins Alayna and Grace Arnolie. Before any of those feats, the football team emerged from a crowded and talented field of local contenders to finish as the runner-up in Class 6.
Honorable mention: Battlefield, Langley, Riverside, Stone Bridge, Yorktown
Private school (girls): Sidwell Friends
Sidwell Friends leveled up this school year, progressing from a consistently good athletic program to one that deserved and received national attention. A lot of that momentum came from the girls’ basketball team, which spent much of the winter ranked as the top team in the country. The Quakers lived up to that reputation at home and abroad, winning their conference and state titles before traveling to Florida to win the inaugural State Champions Invitational, capping a 30-0 campaign. Guard Kiki Rice, who will play at UCLA in the winter, won All-Met Player of the Year honors and multiple national player of the year accolades. Joining the basketball squad in success was the girls’ soccer team, which Rice helped to a D.C. State Athletic Association title in the fall. The girls’ tennis program also won the Independent School League.
Honorable mention: Archbishop Spalding, Bishop O’Connell, Georgetown Visitation, St. John’s
Private school (boys): St. John’s
The Cadets contended in almost every sport in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference while winning five boys’ championships in the high-powered league. The Northwest Washington school also added four titles in statewide tournaments. The highlights of those successes were undefeated football and lacrosse teams. In the fall, the football team finished 11-0 while beating opponents in one of the country’s most competitive leagues by an average of 17 points. Four football players earned first-team All-Met honors. In the spring, the lacrosse team was ranked No. 1 in the country by multiple national polls after capping a 19-0 season with its second WCAC crown. That squad generated three first-team All-Met players. The Cadets also finished atop The Post’s local rankings in hockey. They claimed the WCAC and Mid-Atlantic Prep Hockey League titles, and senior Andrew Kurowski was named All-Met Player of the Year. In cross-country, St. John’s won the WCAC and DCSAA titles by at least 22 points. The Cadets added DCSAA crowns in indoor and outdoor track and field led by Joshua Thompson, a Stanford football signee who received first-team All-Met honors in football, indoor track and outdoor track.
Honorable mention: Georgetown Prep, Gonzaga, Sidwell Friends, St. Albans | 2022-07-22T12:12:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who’s No. 1? We pick the top high school programs across all sports. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/whos-no-1-we-pick-top-high-school-programs-across-all-sports/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/whos-no-1-we-pick-top-high-school-programs-across-all-sports/ |
Rescuers from the White Helmets, a local first responder group, search for victims amid the rubble following airstrikes on a countryside area, in Jisr al-Shughur, in Idlib province, Syria, in this image released on July 22. (White Helmets/Reuters)
BEIRUT — At least 10 people were killed in Syria overnight and this morning, following Israeli strikes on the capital in the south and Russian strikes in the northwest of the country.
Syrian state news SANA reported Israeli strikes coming from the disputed Golan Heights shortly after midnight Friday, killing three soldiers, wounding seven others and causing material damage.
Jordanian state television later reported that the toll of Syrian soldiers rose to five.
Israeli airstrikes in Syria targeted chemical weapons facilities, officials say
Syria regularly reports airstrikes from southern neighbor Israel, its long-standing sworn enemy. The strikes, rarely acknowledged by Israel, typically target military installations, arms depots, and other locations that are under the control of Iran-aligned groups.
Last month, airstrikes that the government attributed to Israel hit Syria’s main airport in capital Damascus, heavily damaging runways and at least one hall in the airport’s terminal.
The full extent of the damage and casualties caused by such strikes cannot be verified.
On the other side of the country in the northwestern Idlib countryside, Russian airstrikes killed seven civilians, according to local first responder group the White Helmets. One strike leveled a modest building in an olive grove that was formerly a chicken farm, the White Helmets media office told The Washington Post, killing four children from one family. Another strike killed two men who had approached the scene after the initial attack.
Photos published by the group show a gutted building with rubble and colorful blankets and pillows spilling out. One showed the corpse of a young girl, half her body sticking out from under the rubble, her wrist adorned with gold bracelets. Another was of her bloodied uncle, sitting barefoot and cross-legged, watching the civil defense members carry out their job.
The children’s father and mother are being treated in a hospital, the White Helmets said, who identified the family as displaced from a village in northeast Aleppo countryside.
Another attack struck civilian residence nearby, killing a man on a motorcycle, the group said.
Russia is a staunch supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose brutal crackdown on popular protests that erupted in 2011 largely made him a global pariah. Russia’s military intervention in 2015 was a lifeline for Assad, who at the time had lost large swaths of Syria to various rebel and extremist groups.
Russia and Syria conducted dozens of illegal ‘double tap’ strikes, report says
Assad has since gained back much of the territory he had lost, and as his troops, backed by Iranian-aligned groups and Russian air power, won back territory, his government loaded green buses with former rebels, their families and supporters and sent them to the northwest of the country.
The enclave, which sprawls across Idlib governorate and surrounding areas, is host to roughly 4.5 million people, many of them displaced multiple times by the war. The area is controlled by opposition militant groups, and worsening overall living conditions have left 4.1 million in need of humanitarian assistance.
Airstrikes have become a tragic norm for Syrians living in the area: young children who grew up in the decade-long war are able to identify planes and the level of impact their strike will have. But Idlib had gone through a period of relative calm in the last few months, following a raid in February by U.S. commandos on the home of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group.
The last Russian strike had been 10 days earlier, hitting military targets that had exchanged artillery and missile fire with Syrian government troops.
According to findings by a Syria-focused rights group this week, Russian and Syrian governments have carried out dozens of “double tap” airstrikes on civilians and humanitarian workers in Syria since 2013 — a pattern of illegal attacks in which Russia and Syria shell or strike a spot where paramedics, such as the White Helmets, and civilians gather to help victims of an initial attack. | 2022-07-22T12:13:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russian, Israeli plans hit Syria in separate strikes, killing at least 10 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/syria-russia-israel-airstrike/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/syria-russia-israel-airstrike/ |
The social media platform blames economic headwinds and the Tesla billionaire’s efforts to walk away from their acquisition deal
(Gregory Bull/AP)
Twitter on Friday reported a surprise revenue decline and steep losses in the second quarter, citing the tough economic environment and its battles with Elon Musk.
The company said it brought in $1.18 billion in revenue ― a 1 percent year-over-year drop that falls short of Wall Street’s $1.32 billion expectation ― even as the number of daily active users swelled 16.6 percent to 237.8 million. It ran a net loss of $270 million.
In Friday’s earnings release, the company said its revenue decline reflected “advertising industry headwinds associated with the macroenvironment as well as uncertainty related to the pending acquisition of Twitter by an affiliate of Elon Musk.”
The company did not hold a customary conference call with analysts because of ongoing litigation related to the Musk deal. Its stock fell 1.5 percent in premarket trading on the news. It had closed on Thursday at $39.52.
Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, agreed to take over Twitter for $54.20 per share earlier this year. But in subsequent months, he feuded with the company’s executives, pressured the company over the number of fake users on its platform, and recently attempted to back out of the deal.
Twitter is now suing Musk to complete the acquisition. The company argues that Musk’s attempt to back out of the deal “is invalid and wrongful, and the merger agreement remains in effect.” The company’s request for an expedited trial was granted and a trial is scheduled for October 2022, according to Friday’s release.
The drawn out process appears to have taken a toll on Twitter. On Friday, the company reported $33 million in costs “related to the pending acquisition.”
Wedbush senior analyst Dan Ives said Twitter’s reported results are actually good news for the tech industry at large. While the 1 percent decline was unexpected, “it shows digital ad spending is not falling off a cliff like feared which is a positive for others in the space such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Google,” Ives said.
He added that investors are factoring in a positive result for Twitter in its court case with Musk. “We believe Twitter has a clear upper hand legally speaking as the Street is now factoring in at a minimum a major cash settlement from Musk ($5 billion-$10 billion range) or potentially Musk ultimately still buying Twitter,” Ives said in a note to investors. | 2022-07-22T13:42:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Twitter posts surprise drop in revenue amid battle with Elon Musk - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/twitter-earnings-elon-musk/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/22/twitter-earnings-elon-musk/ |
The National Players bring a free, outdoor production of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" at Olney Theatre's Root Family Stage on July 22 and 23. (Zachary Gross)
The Playhouse inside the National Building Museum makes an impressive backdrop for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but it isn’t the only place to see Shakespeare this summer -- in fact, you have three chances to see the Bard’s work performed outdoors this weekend.
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ becomes reality, at last, at the National Building Museum
Free Summer Shakespeare returns to Olney Theatre Center’s Root Family Stage on Friday and Saturday, with a pair of evening performances of “Much Ado About Nothing.” Tickets are pay-what-you-can, with seating on a first-come, first-served basis beginning 30 minutes before the performance. Bring picnic blankets and chairs, though the theater has bleachers and seats available. The production moves inside in case of rain. Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Free.
The Prince George’s Shakespeare in the Parks series wraps up its touring production of “Macbeth” this weekend with free performances at Meadowside Nature Center in Rockville and the Prince George’s Publick Playhouse in Hyattsville. The rollicking, 90-minute adaptation is set in the 1850s and inspired by Martin Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York.” Sunday’s performance will be inside. Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Free.
Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s summer productions are staged in the ruins of the 19th-century Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott City, which provide a dramatic, atmospheric setting. The audience watches “Much Ado About Nothing” — reimagined in the French countryside after World War II — from chairs, blankets and picnic tables. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 6 p.m. $24-$54; two children age 18 and under admitted free with each adult ticket. | 2022-07-22T13:42:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where to see Shakespeare outdoors in the Washington D.C. area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/shakespeare-outdoors-parks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/shakespeare-outdoors-parks/ |
Two key senators on their legislation to help the U.S. semiconductor sector
The U.S. semiconductor industry is trying to become more competitive with China and bring chip manufacturing back to the United States. As new legislation advances through Congress, two key senators are pushing for Congress to act now. Join Washington Post Live on Tuesday, July 26 at 4:10 p.m. ET to hear how Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) hope to help American businesses with manufacturing and advanced technologies, bolster national security and get their bill to President Biden soon for his signature.
(D-Ariz.)
(R-Ind.) | 2022-07-22T13:43:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two key senators on their legislation to help the U.S. semiconductor sector - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/26/two-key-senators-their-legislation-help-us-semiconductor-sector/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/26/two-key-senators-their-legislation-help-us-semiconductor-sector/ |
A recovered piece of fresco from the ancient town of Herculaneum is displayed during a ceremony in New York on July 20. (Seth Wenig/AP)
Dozens of looted artifacts, some dating to the 4th century B.C., made their way to a museum for rescued art in Rome after New York investigators seized the pieces and returned them to Italy this week.
Among 142 antiquities recovered in a criminal investigation is a fresco dating to A.D. 50 and coming from an ancient town that was buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted.
The painting was looted in 1995 from a villa in the Herculaneum archaeological site, and the hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt, a prolific collector of art, bought it for $650,000 that year, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
The Ercolano Fresco, showing an infant Hercules strangling a snake, is valued at $1 million and is part of the collection of recovered items worth around $14 million.
The pieces include a storage jar from 700 B.C. and three pieces of fresco dating to the 4th century and depicting mourning women. The frescos came from an ancient Greek city in southern Italy. Thieves hacked the paintings from the wall of a tomb, New York officials said.
The items will find a new home at the Museum of Rescued Art in Rome, which opened last month in the Italian capital to display recovered artifacts before their return to the regions where they were plundered or lost.
After Italian and U.S. investigators traced trafficked art back to Steinhardt’s collection, he gave up 180 items, including the sections of fresco, late last year and agreed to a lifetime ban on buying antiquities.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said that 48 of the artifacts handed back to Italy at a ceremony in New York on Wednesday came from Steinhardt and that 60 others were recovered from the New York art dealership Royal-Athena Galleries.
“These artifacts deserve a place in their homeland, where the people of Italy can jointly appreciate the marvels of their country’s past,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. | 2022-07-22T13:43:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 142 looted artifacts expatriated to Italy after New York investigation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/new-york-italy-looted-artifacts-returned/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/new-york-italy-looted-artifacts-returned/ |
CAIRO — One of Libya’s rival governments on Friday called on militias to stop fighting, after clashes broke out overnight in the country’s capital, Tripoli, killing at least one civilian and forcing around 200 people to flee the area.
Malek Merset, a spokesman for Tripoli’s emergency services, said at least one civilian had died as a result of the clashes. He said roughly 200 people had been evacuated through a corridor the emergency service set up in the early hours of Friday. He called for calm so that more could be allowed to leave. | 2022-07-22T13:43:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Libya's west-based govt calls for stop to Tripoli clashes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/libyas-west-based-govt-calls-for-stop-to-tripoli-clashes/2022/07/22/0b2b65d8-09bb-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/libyas-west-based-govt-calls-for-stop-to-tripoli-clashes/2022/07/22/0b2b65d8-09bb-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
Teen with toy water gun in TikTok trend killed by off-duty jail officer, police say
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company's U.S. head office in Culver City, Calif., on Sept. 15, 2020. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
A New York corrections officer has been charged in the killing of a Bronx teen, who was shot in the face in an incident where a toy gun featured in a recent TikTok trend may have played a role in his death.
Raymond Chaluisant, 18, was found unconscious and unresponsive with a gunshot wound to the face from a weapon fired by Dion Middleton, who was off duty, in the Bronx near the intersection of the Cross Bronx Expressway and Morris Avenue at around 1:35 a.m. on Thursday, a New York Police Department spokesperson told The Washington Post.
After police found him in a friend’s car about a half-mile away from the scene of the shooting, Chaluisant was transferred to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Middleton, 45, was arrested and charged with murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.
A spokesperson with the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, the union that represents him, did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday. It’s unclear whether Middleton has an attorney.
Correction Commissioner Louis A. Molina said in a statement to The Post that Middleton has been suspended without pay and faces termination if he’s convicted. Middleton has been with the New York City Department of Correction since 2013, according to the agency, and works at the firing range that’s part of the department’s academy.
“These very serious charges are in no way a reflection of the officers who work to keep our city safe every day,” Molina said. He added that the incident is under investigation.
While authorities have not said what they think the motive might be, investigators said they were looking into whether a bead blaster gun that was found on Chaluisant contributed to the fatal shooting. The toy gun shoots water gel pellets.
There was no evidence as of early Friday that Chaluisant fired or aimed the toy gun at Middleton before the corrections officer shot and killed the teen, authorities said.
Chaluisant’s older sister, Jiraida Esquilin, told the New York Daily News that her brother was taking part in a water gun fight with some friends on a hot summer night.
“They were just having fun,” said Esquilin, 29. “It’s a new nerf gun that shoots water. The whole neighborhood was having a water gun fight. It was 90 degrees.”
The amped-up toy water guns have been popular in recent months thanks to the “Orbeez Challenge” on TikTok, which encourages users to buy Orbeez soft gel or water balls, load them in airsoft guns and fire them at people when they least expect it. Some of the videos posted to TikTok and YouTube since the spring, which have gotten millions of views, show young people firing the toy guns from moving vehicles.
Though the toy water gun is believed to be safer than airsoft guns that fire plastic pellets, police have cracked down on teens participating in Orbeez shootings that authorities say caused serious injuries. Dozens of arrests related to toy gun shootings have been reported across the United States, stretching from Florida to Utah.
The toy water gun trend also recently turned deadly. In Akron, Ohio, 17-year-old Ethan Liming was killed in a fight last month after the teen and a few of his friends fired a toy SplatRBall water-bead gel gun at a group of four people playing basketball outside NBA superstar LeBron James’ I Promise School, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.
Hours after Chaluisant was killed, the NYPD tweeted a warning regarding the use of the bead blaster guns.
“Bead Blasters shoot gel water beads propelled by a spring-loaded air pump, making them an air rifle. Air rifles are a violation in NYC and are unlawful to possess,” the department wrote. “Violators found in possession of these will be issued a criminal summons and the weapon will be confiscated.”
Esquilin told the Daily News that the family was still grieving the loss of her father, who died just five months ago. She remembered her brother as someone who was well-known and well-liked in their Bronx neighborhood who was “just hanging out and having a good time” before he was killed.
“I can’t believe a corrections officer killed my brother,” Esquilin said. “Everything nowadays is a rage thing.” | 2022-07-22T14:08:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New York teen Raymond Chaluisant, with toy water gun big on TikTok, killed by off-duty corrections officer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/22/nyc-toy-water-gun-tiktok-raymond-chaluisant/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/22/nyc-toy-water-gun-tiktok-raymond-chaluisant/ |
Prince George sits between his parents — Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince William — in the royal box at the Wimbledon men's tennis final on July 10, 2022. (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
LONDON — The 9th birthday of Britain’s Prince George was celebrated Friday with the release of a new photo showing the young royal wearing baby blue and beaming ear-to-ear.
The photo of the prince was taken earlier this month, according to Kensington Palace, at an undisclosed beach in Norfolk, eastern England, where his parents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, have a home as part of Queen Elizabeth II’s sprawling Sandringham estate.
George, who is third in line to Britain’s throne, is seen with a toothy grin in the image taken by his mother, Catherine.
It has become an annual tradition for the birthdays of the children of William and Catherine to be marked by the public release of photographs, normally taken by the duchess.
The young royals are generally kept out of the public eye, but this year, as the nation celebrated their great-grandmother’s Platinum Jubilee in June marking 70 years of her reign, they attended a series of public events.
George’s younger brother, Prince Louis, captured hearts and international headlines after his emotional display on the balcony of Buckingham Palace amid the pomp. Spawning memes and online parodies, young Louis was seen cheekily pulling faces, clasping his hands over his ears, waving and yawning as his mother tried to administer order.
Prince George was born to much fanfare on July 22, 2013, as reporters and pundits waited outside London’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington to catch a glimpse of the royal couple’s firstborn child and heir.
Christened a few months later as George Alexander Louis, he is formally known as Prince George of Cambridge. He became a brother in 2015 with the birth of Princess Charlotte and then Louis in 2018.
George was most recently seen attending the men’s Wimbledon tennis final in July, when he watched from the royal box with his parents as Novak Djokovic of Serbia beat Australia’s Nick Kyrgios at the southwest London club.
George’s birthday was celebrated on the front page of many British newspapers — but a more controversial royal story about his late grandmother, Princess Diana, also dominated Friday’s coverage.
The BBC said Thursday it would pay “substantial damages” to the former nanny of William and Prince Harry, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, now known as Alexandra Pettifer, over “false and malicious” claims made against her, including that she had an affair with Prince Charles and an abortion, as part of BBC journalist Martin Bashir’s attempt to obtain an exclusive interview.
The explosive BBC interview, which aired in 1995, stunned the world for its candor and insight into Diana’s miserable marriage with Prince Charles. In the interview, Diana told a television audience that “there were three of us in this marriage” — referring to Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles, now his wife. Years later, an independent investigation concluded that Bashir had used fake documents and “deceitful behaviour” in engineering a crucial meeting that led to the interview.
The interview has been publicly criticized by William and Harry, while Bashir has since left the BBC on health grounds.
BBC reporter used 'deceitful behaviour' to secure 1995 Princess Diana interview, investigation concludes
Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, welcomed Thursday’s news, tweeting: “While I’m delighted to see that another innocent victim of this appalling scandal is being vindicated, it’s amazing to me that no criminal charges have been levelled against those responsible, yet.”
The interview was “a result of the deceitful tactics used by the BBC,” a statement from BBC director General Tim Davie acknowledged Thursday. “I would like to take this opportunity to apologise publicly to her, to The Prince of Wales, and to the Dukes of Cambridge and Sussex, for the way in which Princess Diana was deceived and the subsequent impact on all their lives.”
Davie said the BBC had let Diana, the royal family and audiences down. As a result, he added, “I have decided that the BBC will never show the programme again; nor will we license it in whole or part to other broadcasters.” | 2022-07-22T14:25:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Prince George turns 9 with new photo from UK royal family - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/prince-george-new-photo-ninth-birthday/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/prince-george-new-photo-ninth-birthday/ |
Errick Flowers teaches Alfreda Hughes and Annie Miller how to use tablets and smartphones July 12 at the Benning/Dorothy I. Height Neighborhood Library in D.C. (Daniel Wu/The Washington Post)
Annie Miller beamed with excitement as she pointed to the tiles on her iPhone screen, eager to share what she’d just learned.
“These are all apps!” she said. “Nobody’s ever told me that.”
Miller, 74, has balked at computers and phones since floppy disks were around — “I took a computer class and I just hated it,” she said. But now cabdrivers text her to pick her up for a trip to the hospital. Friends send her photos, and she doesn’t know how to reply. Miller realized that she can’t avoid today’s technology forever.
That’s why she went eagerly with her friends to the Benning/Dorothy I. Height Neighborhood Library on a recent Tuesday to learn how to send texts, enlarge photos and mute Zoom calls on her phone. The class was the third session in a five-week series of “Tech 101” workshops launched by the District’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer this summer to teach residents basic tech skills, which are becoming increasingly necessary for the more than 80,000 people age 65 or older in D.C.
“With seniors, we don’t like change,” Miller said. “But we’d better learn to get with the change.”
For Miller and the city’s seniors, decades older than the first smartphone and any of the dizzying parade of devices that have followed, gaps in technological literacy can disrupt their daily lives in countless ways.
Louise Price, 87, answered a phone call from scammers who claimed her son was in the hospital. Ruth Paige, 94, still struggles to work the buttons to toggle airplane mode on her flip phone. Sometimes, when she can’t turn it back off, she’s stuck without a connection.
“Then I don’t use it for two to three days until I get a chance to go up to T-Mobile,” Paige said.
Adrian Sutton, a digital inclusion instructor and outreach coordinator with the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, saw the need for programming to help seniors get up to speed in his previous role as Ward 7 liaison for Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). In 2018, he launched a first iteration of workshops to tackle the misconceptions keeping D.C.’s seniors disconnected.
“A lot of seniors ran away from computers and the internet when it was coming,” Sutton said. “A lot of seniors are just scared of it. They think the internet is [all] Facebook, and if they go on the internet, then all of their business will just automatically be on there.”
Jessica Smith, interim director of the D.C. Department of Aging and Community Living, said in an email that the pandemic forced even more services for seniors online as the department tried to provide socializing opportunities for residents isolated at home and longing for human connection.
“To date, we’ve hosted more than 360 virtual community outreach events, in addition to hundreds of online workouts and interactive activities,” she wrote.
Working groups led by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer found in 2021 that, besides misconceptions about technology, the costs of smart devices and in-home internet were keeping many seniors disconnected. During the pandemic, the Department of Aging and Community Living worked with a nonprofit to provide iPads to 800 seniors who lacked computers in their homes.
That’s all amounted to more seniors that Sutton needs to train.
He previously ran his workshops himself, but this summer he has found help. Students from the Marion S. Barry Youth Summer Employment Program joined him on a recently at the library to work with a handful of seniors. It’s an encouraging step forward for Sutton, who knows he can only help so many residents when most tech headaches are best solved one-on-one.
“I think every senior just needs a neighborhood grandson, just like every young person needs a neighborhood grandma,” Sutton said.
Errick Lewis, 16, joined the program at the recommendation of his engineering teacher at Dunbar High School. He sat with Miller, walking her through the process of sending a photo by text.
“I can see myself doing this in the future,” said Lewis, who wants to work in IT.
Sutton’s workshops will run every Tuesday and Thursday at different libraries for another two weeks, and he’s planning more programs to help other communities affected by digital literacy issues. In August, he’ll work with the Department on Disability Services to host four similar workshops for residents with disabilities. He also hopes to put on workshops to support citizens released from incarceration in the future.
“I have a friend ... he came home in [20]15, and he just missed the iPod. He’d never touched an iPod,” Sutton said.
By noon, Miller and Paige were still asking questions, Miller taking tidy notes in a small notebook. “It helps a little,” Paige said of the workshop, though she was nervous about remembering everything from the day. Miller agreed that she would welcome more regular lessons to help repeat the skills they were still learning.
But the two left the library proud that they were taking matters into their own hands after years of their families managing their devices for them. Paige planned to go to Target to replace her flip phone with an iPhone 8. Before leaving, Miller carefully followed her notes to text a photo of her grandsons to a friend in New York.
“I know more now,” she said. “I’m grateful for this program.”
D.C.’s Tech 101 workshops are free and run on Tuesdays and Thursdays through Aug. 4 at various public libraries in the city. A schedule can be found here, and translators can be provided upon emailed request to techtogether@dc.gov. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer plans to offer more classes throughout the year, and schedules will be available at techtogetherdc.com. | 2022-07-22T14:30:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. teens are helping seniors build confidence, tech skills - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/dc-seniors-tech-workshops/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/dc-seniors-tech-workshops/ |
The distant Boston skyline from the islands. (Shutterstock )
When I, a native New Yorker, suggested to my husband, a born-and-bred Bostonian, that we take the kids on a day trip to the Boston Harbor Islands, he told me in his rich accent that he’d “nevah heahd” of them. That was 10 years ago, when our kids were ages 7 (twins) and 4, and since then, our family has made almost yearly visits to these little-known yet fascinating islands.
“I have always blamed that [lack of awareness] on the topography of our city,” said Kathy Abbott, president and CEO of Boston Harbor Now. “Unless you’re lucky enough to be working in one of the high-rise buildings on the southeast corner” of the city, you don’t see the islands.
The Boston Harbor Islands consist of 34 islands and peninsulas, seven of them usually accessible by two three-deck passenger public ferries that make several rounds a day. You can purchase a ferry ticket (online or at the terminals in Boston or Hingham) that allows you to hop on and off as much as you like for one day. Because of the pandemic, the ferry schedule has been modified this year, and they stop only at Spectacle, Georges, Peddocks and Thompson islands — three times a day at Spectacle and Georges, six times a day at Peddocks, and once a day at Thompson. (If you have a private boat or kayak, there are public moorings available at Peddocks, Spectacle, Georges and Gallops islands.) You can hike, swim, attend special events and experience history on the islands; four of them — Bumpkin, Grape, Lovells and Peddocks — have campgrounds. (Only Peddocks is open for camping.)
This year, the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park is celebrating its 25th anniversary as a national park and 50th anniversary as a state park. It awarded grants to 12 nonprofits to create meaningful events for the community; you can check the calendar at bostonharborislands.org/calendar before visiting.
Each island has its own personality. “Every one of them has a different story and a different feel,” Abbott said. Three of our family of five’s favorite islands are Bumpkin, Georges and Peddocks, because these islands enable us to have an adventure, explore history and have a spooky experience. Before we visit the islands, I always double-check the schedule at each stop to avoid getting stranded. Before the pandemic, we could visit three islands in one day.
Bumpkin Island is small but has a rustic and adventurous feel. Instead of taking the ferry, some people kayak there from the nearby town of Hull. We appreciate the crowd-free, serene setting. When we visit, we bring either breakfast or lunch and have a peaceful picnic at one of the tables there. We love the matted-grass trails that are wide and enable us to easily stroll by the staghorn sumac shrubs and successional trees. Butterflies usually fly around us as we follow the wildflower-dotted path around the island. At the highest point of 70 feet elevation, we can always see the skyline of Boston, about 10 miles from Bumpkin.
When we visit, we always go to the island’s main attraction, the remains of a stone house, and pose for a picture underneath the archway. According to the self-guided pamphlet provided by a park ranger at the entrance, the structure dates to the early 19th century. After its use as a house, it became a heating plant for a children’s hospital. There are remnants nearby of the hospital, which was leased by a local philanthropist from Harvard University for children who had severe physical disabilities. During World War I, the U.S. Navy used the hospital as a training station, abandoning it at the end of the war. It reopened briefly in the 1940s and later burned down.
Georges and Spectacle are the two most popular islands among tourists and Bostonians. We always take the ferry from Hingham, which is closer to Georges, so we usually visit that island. But one time we did make the longer trek to Spectacle to check it out. Spectacle is only about 30 minutes by ferry from downtown Boston, and visitors can appreciate the beach and five miles of trails with views of the Boston skyline. Every Sunday in July and August, Spectacle hosts bands for the “Jazz on the Porch” series, held at the visitors center. “You can spend an afternoon sitting in the Adirondack chairs on the porch on Sundays and listen to live jazz,” Abbott said.
However, if you go to Georges Island, “then you have a day of history,” Abbott said. The main attraction here is Fort Warren, which held Confederate prisoners and was a training facility. She cited Fort Warren’s importance as a military installation that was actively engaged in the Civil War.
When we visit Georges, we try to allow at least two hours on the island, so we have time to explore the prison cells, cannons and lookout tower. Even though we are familiar with the story, we enjoy reading about the Lady in Black, the ghost of Melanie Lanier, who tried to free her imprisoned Confederate husband but was caught and killed, and is said to haunt the fort. The dark tunnels in the enormous stone buildings of the fort always give us a creepy and haunting vibe, but the kids love it.
Peddocks Island is celebrated for its biodiversity. The habitats on Peddocks include closed canopy forests, woodlands, shrub thickets, old fields, salt marsh and a brackish pond, and we enjoy walking around and noticing as the habitats change. The island supports about 220 plant species, including more than 100 each of native and exotic species.
Being in the middle of the Boston Harbor Islands, Peddocks also is a crossroads for many of the animal species that use the islands, such as deer and coyote that swim between the mainland and other islands. Birds that use the island as a stopover include the American oystercatcher, for which the Boston Harbor Islands are one of their northernmost breeding sites, and the islands host several colonial nesting species, such as the least tern. More than 2,000 species of insects and terrestrial invertebrates have been documented across the islands, as well as 451 intertidal and marine species, and more than 200 bird species.
On this island, you can bring your own tent and camp overnight or rent a yurt. But plan ahead: The yurts are so popular that they book up quickly, and even if you bring your own tent, you must first make a reservation.
The most famous aspect of this island is that some scenes of the 2010 movie thriller “Shutter Island” were filmed there. Look for Peddocks in the movie’s opening scene. The author of the book that inspired the movie, Dennis Lehane, based the novel on his childhood visits to Long Island, a Boston Harbor Island that is now restricted from visitors.
When we visit, we explore the fort and scenic hiking trails. The boarded-up structures and overgrown vegetation give the spooky impression that Martin Scorsese was probably hoping for in the movie.
Abbott said that when tourists come to Boston, she hopes they’ll think of the islands as well as the Red Sox, Fenway Park and the Freedom Trail.
“Our vision is for a vibrant, welcoming, resilient harbor that benefits everyone,” Abbott said.
Maguire is a writer based in Massachusetts. Find her on Twitter: @CherylMaguire05.
Get to the Boston Harbor Islands from ferry terminals in Boston (66 Long Wharf) and Hingham (28 Shipyard Dr.). Costs $24.95 per adult; $17.95 per child; $22.95 for seniors, students and military; and free for children under 3. Visit bit.ly/boston-islands-ferry for schedules.
Peddocks Island
bit.ly/peddocks-camping
Camping is available Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights through Labor Day weekend. Bring your own tent and camp overnight or rent a yurt. Advance reservations required. Campsite fees at Boston Harbor Islands are $8 for Massachusetts residents, $20 nonresidents; yurts $55 for residents, $140 nonresidents. There is also a $4.50 reservation charge.
“Be a Junior Ranger” program
bit.ly/junior-ranger-nps
Before your trip, download a booklet with activities for children to complete to become a junior ranger. Once there, rangers also lead programs, which include guided tours, arts and crafts, and more. Free.
“Jazz on the Porch”
bit.ly/jazz-spectacle
This series is held on Spectacle Island and runs on Sundays in July and August. Free. The other islands also host events, which can be found at bostonharborislands.org/calendar.
bostonharborislands.org/volunteer
People can volunteer to maintain island trails and habitat areas, or to welcome visitors and answer questions. Check website for opportunities.
bostonharborislands.org | 2022-07-22T14:34:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to visit the Boston Harbor Islands and what to do - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/22/boston-harbor-islands-visit-activities/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/22/boston-harbor-islands-visit-activities/ |
By Erica Ahdoot
Shandell Richards
Brad Sickels
The Holiday Market in Southeast D.C. is protected by bulletproof glass. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Erica Ahdoot is executive director of Horton’s Kids. Shandell Richards is senior director of strategic initiatives and partnerships at Horton’s Kids. Brad Sickels is communications director of Horton’s Kids.
Gun violence in this country is constant and devastating. In addition to the high-profile national tragedies, we have seen a troubling increase in instances of local, often unreported, community violence many people live with every day.
Our communities, our families and our hearts cannot sustain this.
We must address the systemic causes of gun violence before the problem is too huge to solve or, even worse, we become more numb to it.
Gun violence is a public health emergency, and D.C. needs a citywide strategy that focuses on intentional, structured and intensive intervention efforts toward individuals at high risk for gun violence. The violence is a terrifying symptom of the underlying and systemic conditions of inequality, poverty and racism.
Ward 8 is home to vibrant and resilient communities. Residents have big dreams and the potential to achieve them, but they face undue barriers. Schools are historically underperforming, and after-school programs are difficult to find. Access to quality food, education and employment opportunities is limited. Twenty-three percent of children in Ward 8 live below the federal poverty line and severely lack the resources they need to succeed.
For 33 years, Horton’s Kids has been a trusted partner to families in two of D.C.’s most underserved neighborhoods in Ward 8: Wellington Park and Stanton Oaks. Decades of chronic disinvestment and systemic racism have resulted in endemic gun violence in these and neighboring communities. Ward 8 accounted for 62 percent of all reported homicides in D.C. last year and 23 percent of all violent crimes. In D.C., most gun violence is tightly concentrated among a small number of very high-risk individuals who share a common set of risk factors. Chief among them are poverty and the lack of a social safety net.
As an organization that supports the physical, educational and social-emotional development of more than 600 children and families, Horton’s Kids is uniquely attuned to the barriers faced by residents of Southeast. We operate two Community Resource Centers embedded directly within the housing communities, which has allowed us to build deep and trusting relationships with our neighbors.
We recently purchased a community church with 19,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space that is being renovated into “Horton’s Hub." This new space will expand the operations of our other two place-based centers and provide much-needed space for older youths, parents and caregivers to access expanded opportunities for college and career. Considered “neutral” territory, the Hub is only a half-mile from our other two centers.
Community members often share with us feelings of frustration, stress and hopelessness. Though certain resources and programs are available, residents encounter a variety of barriers that make it difficult to access those resources. Extra loopholes make the path to economic mobility and household stability less attainable. Residents in Southeast are also acutely aware that interrupting the cycle of violence isn’t accomplished by expanding policing but by providing families pathways to success with fewer obstacles.
With gun violence persistently plaguing our communities, Horton’s Kids has been meeting with other local partners and stakeholders in recent weeks to explore new tactics to combat gun violence east of the river.
In a recent town hall in partnership with the D.C. police, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, the mayor’s office, Ward 8′s Council member, an advisory neighborhood commissioner and others, representatives shared information about programs and services available for residents — including how to promote awareness of these services and safely access them across neighborhoods in Southeast. This dialogue also affirmed the importance of comprehensive youth development programs that help create clearer career paths to success for young adults. Preliminary discussions were had about how to build better relationships with local police officers as well as how to employ, train and educate community members on how to become violence interrupters and self-police.
We must continue to strengthen connections across community organizations to bring additional resources and targeted programs to the communities that need them most. Though the city’s focus has been on narrowing the equity gap for families east of the river, these investments have not yet made their way to those who have advocated strongly for them. This community dialogue is the first step in addressing gun violence in underserved communities.
Horton’s Kids will continue to leverage its position to elevate community voices and ensure that Ward 8 residents remain a critical part of this work. | 2022-07-22T15:00:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | To stop gun violence, we need to fight systemic injustice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/stop-gun-violence-we-need-fight-systemic-injustice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/stop-gun-violence-we-need-fight-systemic-injustice/ |
Girl Scouts should not sell a Maryland forest to developers
By Janet Gingold
Jug Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, near a forest that is threatened by development. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Janet Gingold is chair of the Prince George’s Sierra Club and served on the county’s Climate Action Commission to develop a Climate Action Plan for Prince George’s County. She is a former Girl Scout and Girl Scout leader.
How sad that the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital plans to sell off hundreds of acres of forested land in eastern Prince George’s County to the highest bidder. Is that really the best it can do?
With accelerating climate change, we urgently need to conserve our remaining forests for carbon sequestration, heat mitigation and absorption of storm water. Sprawling residential development increases greenhouse gas emissions, with bigger houses to heat and cool, bigger lawns to mow, bigger appliances and longer commutes in bigger cars. Despite long-range plans that call for focusing new residential development in already developed areas served by public transit, Prince George’s County’s open space dwindles as farms and forested land are converted into housing developments.
In 2019, developers donated a 633-acre parcel of forest east of Marlton at the headwaters of Jug Bay to the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital. It seemed that this swath of biodiversity might be spared. However, the GSCNC never intended to conserve the land or to use it as outdoor space for Girl Scout activities. Instead, it saw the land as an asset to be sold to generate funds for Girl Scout operations.
Even though the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission expressed interest in buying the land to conserve the forest and create a park, the GSCNC looked instead for a buyer who would put more dollars into its depleted coffers. Recently, the county approved a three-year extension for a Preliminary Plan of Subdivision granted in 1993, resurrecting a plan to build 572 housing units on those forested acres.
Funding for scouting is important. With the urgent need to address the intertwined problems of glaring social inequities and global climate change, the values I learned as a scout and taught as a scout leader take on greater importance. More than ever, we need girls who live by the Girl Scout Law: “I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout.”
We need girls to learn to think globally and to take responsibility for actions that affect not only fellow scouts in the national capital area but also their sisters around the world. Reading about scouts who took action during a recent train derailment, we see how much we need strong, courageous young people who are ready to help where they are needed when disaster strikes.
However, in this imperiled world, what is the wisest use of this resource of 633 acres of forest in Prince George’s County? Will it really make the world a better place to replace this verdant habitat of towering trees with houses and townhouses miles away from transit, employment and shopping opportunities? Is it fair, considerate and caring to perpetuate a system in which those who contribute the least to climate change suffer its greatest impacts?
Sister scouts across the United States and around the world have suffered historic heat waves, wildfires and floods. Already, in Prince George’s County, we have too many days each year when it is too hot to play or work outside and playground equipment is too hot to touch. Wouldn’t it be better to let that forest continue to pull carbon dioxide from the air, provide cooling, take up pollutants, modulate the water cycle and provide space for people to connect with nature?
Human health requires functioning forests and farmland to safeguard our air, our water and our food supply. Still, land-use decisions in Prince George’s County continue to undermine planning for a sustainable future, converting more of our open spaces to a built environment that accelerates climate change. Too often, we feel powerless to stop forces beyond our control, as if our individual actions are too small to make a difference. But many small changes can make a big difference. Individual decisions matter.
And 633 acres? That’s no small change. When we have the responsibility to care for a living being, what do we do if we cannot care for it ourselves? Do we find someone else who can meet its needs and help it grow and thrive? Or do we hand it off for maximum profit to someone who will exploit and destroy it?
I hope the GSCNC will find a way to be strong, courageous and responsible for what it does to the land that is under its stewardship. I hope it will do all in its power to ensure that the living, breathing Marlton Forest is conserved for generations to come. | 2022-07-22T15:09:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Girl Scouts should not sell a Maryland forest to developers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/girl-scouts-should-not-sell-maryland-forest-developers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/girl-scouts-should-not-sell-maryland-forest-developers/ |
By Peter Galuszka
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on July 9 at the Nebraska GOP state convention in Kearney, Neb. (Gregory Schneider/The Washington Post)
Peter Galuszka is a Chesterfield, Va.,-based freelance writer.
It has been more than six months since Republican private equity executive Glenn Youngkin took over as Virginia’s governor. The tall, telegenic man dubbed a “mystery date” in the media is already making a stir for a presidential run in 2024.
He has visited places such as Nebraska to drum up support for a presidential try and has a political action committee that has raised at least $1.5 million for the cause. He has been a regular on national talk shows and has garnered positive print coverage as a conservative who can galvanize Donald Trump’s base without the crude style of the former president.
But if one looks at whom he chooses as his advisers, it’s enough to give anyone pause. They tend to be highly partisan, driven by hard-right ideology and given to a lot of gaffes.
One example is Colin Greene, whom Youngkin nominated as health commissioner. Greene has been known for making jarring statements that the state’s health care is bereft of systemic racism. The diminished health-care prospects for lower-income minorities have more to do with lifestyles than income levels or discrimination, he claimed.
His views were too much for the state Board of Health, which last month reprimanded him. Backing down, a contrite Greene apologized, saying, “Let me be clear: I am fully aware that racism at many levels is a factor in a wide range of public health outcomes and disparities across the Commonwealth and the United States.”
Another controversial appointee is Andrew Wheeler, whom Youngkin picked as his nominee for secretary of natural and historic resources. Wheeler had been a lobbyist for Murray Energy, a controversial coal firm in Appalachia, and was the Trump administration’s regulation-busting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
His nomination was a direct rebuke of efforts by the General Assembly to modernize its energy and environmental policies, especially in reducing carbon pollution through regional compacts and expanded renewable energy, such as offshore wind.
The General Assembly rejected him for the Cabinet post. Then Youngkin appointed him as a senior adviser and, later, as his point man for a policy initiative to reduce state regulation by 25 percent.
Virginia has been torn over the past several years about rethinking its Confederate past. Many memorials to Southern generals have been torn down. One would think that if Youngkin were to pick a state official to deal with these issues, it would be a person sensitive to the deep emotions and historical nuances involved.
Instead, he chose Ann Hunter McLean, a Richmond educator and historian, for the state Board of Historic Resources, which deals with such matters. McLean is on the board of the Jefferson Council, a group that tries to push its positive version of Thomas Jefferson. In her writing, she has blasted critics of displays of Confederate generals as “cultural Marxists.”
Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) said, “If there was any doubt that Governor Youngkin is an extremist, right-wing politician, here is another example of his inflammatory priorities in action.”
Gay rights are a sensitive topic for Youngkin, especially in light of how the Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion rights might affect same-sex marriage. He has waffled on the issue.
Youngkin had picked Casey Flores for the LGBTQ+ Advisory Board. He’s a member of the Log Cabin Republicans of Richmond. Flores was criticized for making sexual jokes on social media, notably about Vice President Harris. He promised not to do so anymore and then dropped out of the position. When Youngkin wanted to explore new legislation that would restrict abortion, he picked a like-minded Republican team.
For decades, Virginia had a go-along-to-get-along stance when it came to gubernatorial appointments. Less controversial people were appointed, and the General Assembly acquiesced, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington.
“What Youngkin is doing is very combative,” he said, noting that much of it is designed to get national attention and spots on Fox News. He describes it as “Washington’s invasion of Virginia politics.”
What’s curious is how Youngkin’s persona is unfolding. A little more than a year ago, he was an unknown entity with zero political experience. For years, he had been an executive at the Carlyle Group, a powerful Washington-based private equity firm.
In last year’s campaign, he played it both ways — pro- and anti-Trump. Now, he seems to be dashing very quickly to becoming a national player. That raises an important question: Who’s really behind him? | 2022-07-22T15:09:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Youngkin’s appointments raise questions about his ‘moderate’ label - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/youngkins-appointments-raise-questions-about-his-moderate-label/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/youngkins-appointments-raise-questions-about-his-moderate-label/ |
Michelle Childs confirmed to seat on D.C. Circuit
Judge J. Michelle Childs during a hearing in 2010. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
J. Michelle Childs was confirmed by the U.S. Senate this week to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Childs, a district court judge in South Carolina, will be the only appointee of President Biden on the influential appeals court — but likely not for long. Florence Pan, who sits on the U.S. District Court for D.C., had a confirmation hearing in June. Bradley Garcia, another Biden nominee, is awaiting his hearing.
Childs has been outspoken about racial bias in court, diversity in the judiciary and the impact of gun violence on children. As a federal judge, she ruled on same-sex marriage, coronavirus mandates and absentee voting.
Biden’s first nominee to the D.C. Circuit, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, has since moved up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Childs was also considered for that seat. She had the backing of powerful House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), but she was opposed by some liberal groups who question her record as a corporate lawyer. Childs was the first Black woman partner at a major South Carolina law firm, where she was part of the employment law team. She then worked in South Carolina government and state court before becoming a federal judge.
In a statement announcing her confirmation on Tuesday, U.S. Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Childs is “exceptionally qualified to serve” on the D.C. Circuit. She was confirmed by a vote of 64-34.
“With her extensive judicial service at the state and federal level, her experience administering state and federal programs, and her historic career in private practice, Judge Childs will be ready to serve the D.C. Circuit with distinction on day one,” Durbin said in the statement. | 2022-07-22T15:13:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michelle Childs confirmed as Court of Appeals for D.C. Circuit judge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/michelle-childs-judge-dc-circuit-appeals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/22/michelle-childs-judge-dc-circuit-appeals/ |
Miami-Dade rejects sex-ed textbook in test of state’s anti-LGBTQ law
The decision could leave the state’s largest district without a sex education curriculum for much of the upcoming school year
Officials representing the largest school district in Florida voted this week to reject a previously approved sex education textbook, a decision that could leave the fourth-largest school district in the country without a sex-ed curriculum for much of the school year. The Miami-Dade County School Board voted by a 5-4 split on Wednesday to discard the textbook after a months-long campaign from some parents and community members, who said the book, which included topics like abortion and birth control, was not age appropriate and violated their parental rights.
Some see the school board’s reversal as the first test case of Florida’s controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, which went into effect July 1 and was invoked by opponents of the new sex education textbook. The law, which critics have dubbed “don’t say gay,” bans educators from talking about sexuality and gender with students from kindergarten through third grade and gives parents broad rights to challenge material they don’t consider developmentally appropriate for their children.
Educators, public health experts and student advocates argue that denying kids a sex education curriculum could harm the health and safety of the very students parents and community members say they want to protect. Florida, like many other states, allows parents to opt their children out of sex education courses if they disagree with the material. Critics of the school board’s decision say that a minority of parents have effectively opted hundreds of thousands of kids out of important and potentially lifesaving education.
The school board’s decision was “heartbreaking and, quite honestly, infuriating,” said Brittany McBride, associate director of sex education and training for Advocates for Youth, a sex education advocacy group. “Young people deserve and have a right to a complete and honest education.”
Because comprehensive sex education helps reduce sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy, Leslie Kantor, a professor who leads the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at Rutgers University, said she considers laws like Florida’s a public health issue: “Young people’s health is being sacrificed while the adults are arguing.”
The Miami Herald reports that Wednesday’s vote followed “an emotionally charged public comment period,” which included the filing of 278 petitions objecting to the proposed textbook (there are more than 330,000 students enrolled in Miami-Dade public schools). The Miami-Dade County School Board previously voted to accept a middle school and a high school version of the textbook, “Comprehensive Health Skills,” in April, and a follow-up hearing reviewing the material resulted in a recommendation to deny the petitions and adopt the text.
But with the latest school board decision, Miami-Dade’s public school students will go without any sex education curriculum for at least four to eight months, according to the Herald.
School board members who rejected the textbook said they received numerous emails from people who were against it. Board member Mari Tere Rojas, who voted against the books, said she found some chapters “extremely troublesome,” Politico reports.
“I do not consider them to be age appropriate,” Rojas said. “In my opinion, they go beyond what the state standards are.”
But School Board Vice Chair Steve Gallon III, who voted to adopt the textbook, said that out of more than 40 people who signed up to speak at the board’s meeting on Wednesday, 38 were in support of the sex education materials, while only four opposed, the Herald reports.
The “Comprehensive Health Skills” high school version includes chapters on developing interpersonal skills, managing stress, having a healthy body image, preventing violence and understanding sexually transmitted infections and communicable diseases. School board members had already decided in April, when they approved the textbooks, to strike out a chapter called “Understanding Sexuality,” which covered gender identity and sexual orientation, the Herald reports.
Given how influential Florida’s law has been — more than a dozen states have introduced similar legislation since it was passed in March — sex education advocates worry that Miami-Dade County Public Schools could signal what’s to come in other parts of the country.
Democrats want to teach kids sex education. Republicans want to teach them patriotism.
Education and public health experts say the benefits of comprehensive and inclusive sex education are myriad for students of all backgrounds and grade levels, and some research has found that a large majority of parents across the political spectrum support sex education in middle and high school.
“Public schools do have a critical role to play in providing key health education,” Kantor said. “The fact is, most parents want schools to be partners in providing that information.”
Eva Goldfarb and Lisa Lieberman, public health professors at Montclair State University, say their research has found that comprehensive sex education beginning in early grades begets positive, “powerful” outcomes. This education focuses on healthy interpersonal relationships, said Goldfarb: for example, how to treat others with respect, how to ask permission to touch someone (and how to respond if someone refuses). In later grades, students build on those concepts to understand consent, bodily autonomy and having healthy relationships, Goldfarb added.
Lieberman said that besides reducing teen pregnancy rates, a good sex education curriculum has broad impacts on young people’s safety and life skills: It can also reduce homophobic bullying, help students feel more comfortable with their gender, improve young people’s communication skills, empower them to report child sex abuse and more.
Terri Powell, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, put it this way: “We’ve seen that, when armed with information and access (to contraception), young people make really good decisions.”
This type of education is even more crucial in a post-Roe landscape, sex education advocates say. In Florida, a 15-week abortion ban has already taken effect.
Opponents of the proposed Miami-Dade sex-ed textbook said they were not against sexual education, generally.
Alex Serrano, county director for County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian organization that “empowers citizens to defend their freedom and liberty,” told reporters Wednesday in Miami that he was against the textbook’s content because it was either inappropriate or “not scientifically factual” — like the book’s statement that vaccinations are the only proven method preventing viral disease, the Herald reports.
“We are not against sexual education or human reproduction and sexual education books,” Serrano said. “We are for statutory compliance and age appropriateness in the content ... and compliance with parental rights law.” Serrano added that he thinks gender “ideology” does not belong in these educational materials.
Public health experts see these arguments as part of a national, politically driven scare campaign targeting parents, and argue that the impact on students will lead to greater disparities and harm.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools is a majority-minority school district, where 90 percent of the student population are students of color (Latino/Hispanic students make up nearly three-quarters of all K-12 students, with Black students comprising another 19 percent). More than half of all Miami-Dade students are considered economically disadvantaged.
Because of the pandemic, many students across the country lost access to important sex education as schools went remote, Goldfarb said. A lack of sex education will further hurt LGBTQ youths who do not have support at home, Goldfarb said, as well as young people of color and children from poor families, who tend to be disproportionately impacted by changes in health policies because of systemic issues, such as a lack of information and access to contraception. It could also prevent young victims of sexual assault and violence from getting the information and help they need to reckon with their abuse, she added.
Zoey Brewer, a student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and intern at the survivor advocacy group Know Your IX, said withholding sex education means preventing students from having a “real understandings of boundaries, healthy relationships and bodily autonomy.”
A survivor herself, Brewer noted that students “are already experiencing [sexual] violence on campuses.” According to Brewer, who coordinates student-led sex education trainings, many students what more comprehensive sex education, particularly centered on learning about consent.
“I think a lot of parents minimize what students want to learn about and believe that it’s an attack on your [kids] who learn about these things or it’s an attack on your parental rights,” she said. But by denying their children sex education, parents may be making their kid more vulnerable to violence, particularly in intimate relationships, Brewer said.
“Have they ever even asked a student what they want or what they need?” Brewer said of sex education critics. “If you went to the students of the school district and said, ‘What do you want out of your sex education?’ You would probably get a response that would be in stark contrast to what their parents said in that meeting.” | 2022-07-22T15:13:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miami-Dade rejects sex-ed textbook in test of ‘don’t say gay’ law - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/22/miami-dade-sex-ed-textbook/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/22/miami-dade-sex-ed-textbook/ |
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — A fire on a Boston-area public transit train that prompted one passenger to jump into a river and others to scramble out of windows appears to have been caused by a metal panel on the train’s base that came loose and touched the electrified third rail, the system’s general manager said. | 2022-07-22T15:13:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Investigation: Boston train fire caused by loose metal panel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/investigation-boston-train-fire-caused-by-loose-metal-panel/2022/07/22/d6e1f6e2-09ca-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/investigation-boston-train-fire-caused-by-loose-metal-panel/2022/07/22/d6e1f6e2-09ca-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
The former president threw gasoline on the flames at the Capitol rather than call for an end to the fire. And he couldn’t bring himself to say the election was over. He still can’t
Thursday night’s hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was billed as a session that would describe in detail what then-President Trump did not do during a day of violence and mayhem.
More revealing — and damning — was what he did do.
The hearing was a revelation of character, and no more so than the outtakes of a taping the day after the attack and after Congress had certified President Biden’s victory. Trump was in a dark place, according to the testimony, and his aides had prepared a script for him for a video message to the nation. As he read it, he scowled and stopped, rejecting the words he was to read. “I don’t want to say the election’s over,” he said peevishly.
Trump still won’t say the 2020 election is over, nearly 19 months later. The odious legacy of that resistance continues to infect the Republican Party and the politics of the country. Election denying has become a core belief of a broad swath of the Republican Party.
Many Republicans will not acknowledge Biden’s victory and choose to see the president as an illegitimate leader. Meanwhile, Trump continues to stir this mythology, never willing to let go of the fantasy that the election was stolen, content to continue to spread the lie that Biden’s victory came only because of massive fraud, evidence for which does not exist.
Read The Post's live coverage from Thursday's hearing
His performance was, as committee members said, a dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath to defend the Constitution. Whether it was a crime will be up to the Justice Department — and if it gets that far, a jury.
What did Trump do and not do on Jan. 6?
He did not call then-Vice President Mike Pence, who was in hiding at the Capitol and whose Secret Service detail had made calls to loved ones, fearful they might not survive the attacks. He did not call the Pentagon to order military support to put down the insurrection. He did not call the Department of Homeland Security. He did not seek any law enforcement support.
Who did what the president should have done? Pence, according to testimony presented. The vice president called the Pentagon and in no uncertain terms called for reinforcements to put down the attack.
What Trump did do as the Capitol was being sacked and as some rioters were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence,” was to send out a tweet at 2:24 p.m. condemning his own vice president as a coward for not blocking the certification process, saying Pence didn’t have the courage to try to overturn the election. It is worth pausing on that. At a time when he could have sought to deescalate the violence, he did the opposite, adding fuel to the fire raging at the Capitol that had been sparked by his own lies.
There was no evidence that Trump called anyone to stop the violence that afternoon, but he did call Rudolph Giuliani, his personal lawyer who was in the forefront of spreading wild conspiracy theories about the election. He called Giuliani later, too, and Giuliani was calling senators that evening, hoping to persuade someone to slow down the process of certification in a last desperate effort to overturn the election.
Trump sat little more than a minute’s walk from where he watched television to the White House briefing room, where television cameras are always at the ready to broadcast a presidential address to the nation. He could have made a statement that might have halted the violence. He did not do it, even as call after calls and tweets poured into the White House from allies pleading for him to do something. Instead he resisted saying anything on camera for more than three hours. He also resisted using any mention of peace in a tweet aimed at the rioters until he was persuaded to do so by his daughter Ivanka.
The evidence presented on Thursday, as in previous hearings by the committee, was an as-told-by story from a galaxy of Republican officials — people who voted for Trump, worked for him and were personally invested in his success, but who, as Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who co-led the hearing along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), said had reached a breaking point. When called to do so, they told the truth to the committee and the country. These were not political enemies or adversaries of the president but people who served him loyally.
Trump has complained privately that he has had no defenders on the committee, but Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee vice chair, brushed aside that notion that the committee’s work would fall apart if challenged. “Do you really think Bill Barr is such a delicate flower that he would wilt under cross examination?” she asked. “Pat Cipollone? Eric Herschmann? Jeff Rosen? Richard Donoghue? Of course they aren’t. None of our witnesses are.”
The House committee’s work is not finished. They continue to dig and take testimony. More hearings are promised for later and a full report will be issued. But their principal contribution is already evident. The summer hearings have significantly added to the pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland, who must decide whether to bring criminal charges against a former president for the first time in the nation’s history.
Garland said again last week that no one in this country is above the law. But getting to a decision of whether to indict or not remains perilous, what has been described as one of the most difficult and consequential decision any attorney general has faced.
The committee has produced a compelling narrative of events, with much new information and with Trump squarely in the middle. But their work has not been tested in legal terms, their evidence not subjected to cross examination, their case not hindered by procedural challenges that a criminal case would bring.
Whatever Garland decides — indictment or no indictment — will rile the country, which is already in flames over the former president’s conduct in office. For the attorney general, there is no safe harbor. Indictment would not guarantee conviction and conviction would not bring peace to the country, as satisfying as criminal charges would be to those who believe that the evidence against Trump is so convincing that they must be brought.
No matter what the Justice Department does, the committee has produced a body of information beyond what many had questioned was possible. They have plowed ground that had been plowed before and unearthed new revelation after new revelation. Each hearing has delivered more than promised — and with that, the legacy of the Trump presidency has taken a beating.
None of that has quieted the former president, who has indicated he is likely to run again in a 2024 revenge campaign. Just recently he was on the phone with Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, again seeking to overturn the 2020 election results in that state. Vos says that isn’t possible, which matters little to Trump. The call reflects the mindset of a man without contrition who cannot let go, and because of that, neither can many of his followers.
It was that hold on people that caused the attack on the Capitol. Trump was the man who, as Cheney has said, summoned the mob and lit the flame. Because he won’t let that go, the country continues to live with the consequences of that dark day in January 2021.
At the close of the hearing, Cheney posed this question: “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”
The committee members, through these hearings, have shown their answer. In two years, the voters of this country, especially those who backed him in the past, could be asked to answer it for themselves.
Analysis: Trump as you’ve never seen him before | 2022-07-22T15:14:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | It’s not only what Trump didn’t do on Jan. 6. It’s also what he did do. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/its-not-what-trump-didnt-do-jan-6-its-also-what-he-did-do/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/its-not-what-trump-didnt-do-jan-6-its-also-what-he-did-do/ |
Cardinal Wilton Gregory issued guidelines July 22 banning celebration of the Latin Mass in parishes in the Archdiocese of Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington will ban the celebration of the old Latin Mass in parishes beginning this fall — a move meant to align the region with the pope’s wishes on an issue dividing the Church along ideological lines.
In a decree published Friday, Cardinal Wilton Gregory mandated that beginning Sept. 21, Sunday Mass can only be said using the old rite at three nonparochial churches. Priests who want to celebrate the Latin Mass have to request permission in writing and affirm the validity of the reforms implemented during the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965.
As a result, hundreds of Catholics who attend the Latin Mass at roughly six parishes in one of the nation’s most visible archdioceses will be forced to either worship differently or find a new place to do so.
“I have discovered that the majority of the faithful who participate in these liturgical celebrations in the Archdiocese of Washington are sincere, faith-filled and well-meaning,” he wrote. “Likewise, the majority of priests who celebrate these liturgies are doing their very best to respond pastorally to the needs of the faithful.”
The new guidelines are an attempt to abide by Francis’s ruling while continuing to provide for Catholics who find beauty and tradition in the old form of the Mass, Gregory said.
Many of those Catholics, however, view the decision as a slap in the face. Kenneth Wolfe, who has attended the Latin Mass in Washington for more than two decades, said Gregory’s decision does nothing to bring together the region’s faithful.
“There can be no unity when the cardinal fires the first shot and everybody then is expected to drive from wherever they were, at a parish, to a location that’s nowhere near them,” he said before the decree was released. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
These Americans are devoted to the old Latin Mass. They are also at odds with Pope Francis.
For some, celebrating the old rite is a form of protesting what they see as the Church’s liberalization since the Second Vatican Council and particularly during Francis’s papacy. Others say they find the Latin Mass rich and are drawn to its history over more than a millennium.
Gregory said he listened to the concerns of Catholics who attend the Latin Mass during listening sessions for the Church’s worldwide synod over the past several months and has asked archdiocesan offices to provide pastoral outreach to them. He noted that those Catholics can attend Masses in the modern rite that incorporate elements common to the Latin Mass, including Gregorian chant, incense and long periods of silence. | 2022-07-22T15:14:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Catholic Archdiocese of Washington to ban Latin Mass in parishes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/22/catholic-latin-mass-washington-archdiocese/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/07/22/catholic-latin-mass-washington-archdiocese/ |
Mark Lerner, second from left, celebrates after the Nationals clinched the World Series in 2019. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Washington Nationals managing principal owner Mark Lerner, Olympic middle distance runner Alan Webb and Maryland basketball greats Len Elmore and Christy Winters Scott are among the members of the D.C. Sports Hall of Fame’s 2022 class. The group of honorees announced Thursday also includes high school basketball promoter Bob Geoghan, boxer Mark “Too Sharp” Johnson and the 2021 NWSL champion Washington Spirit.
“This distinguished group of honorees elevates the honor roll of the D.C. Sports Hall of Fame,” selection committee chairman Bobby Goldwater said in a statement. “ … Individually and together, they represent excellence in sports in the nation’s capital.”
The mood of the pregame induction ceremony at Nationals Park on July 31 could depend on whether Juan Soto, the subject of rampant trade speculation ahead of the Aug. 2 deadline, is still in the home dugout. The Lerner family, which bought the Nationals from Major League Baseball in 2006 and helped bring a World Series title to D.C. in 2019, is exploring a sale of the team.
Webb, the first track athlete to be inducted, broke Jim Ryun’s 36-year-old national high school record in the mile as a senior at South Lakes in 2001. The former Michigan standout and 2004 Olympian has held the American record in the mile (3:46.91) since 2007.
Elmore, who earned first-team all-ACC honors as a senior in 1974, remains Maryland’s all-time leading rebounder. Winters Scott, who now serves as a Mystics and Wizards analyst for NBC Sports Washington, starred for the Terps after leading South Lakes to an undefeated season and the Virginia AAA state title in 1986.
Geoghan, who died in February at 87, “did more for basketball in this area than any single coach or anyone for helping the young people,” according to his longtime friend, Red Jenkins. In 1974, Geoghan created the Capital Classic, an all-star game that pitted D.C.'s best against top high school basketball players from across the country. A Gonzaga graduate, Geoghan co-founded the McDonald’s All-American Games in 1978 and helped start the Jordan Brand Classic in 2002.
Johnson, 50, in 1966 became the first African American to win a world flyweight title. The three-time world champion became the first fighter born and raised in D.C. to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2012, an honor he called a “dream come true.”
The Spirit are being recognized as a “Team of Distinction,” following in the title-winning footsteps of the 2018 Capitals and 2019 Nationals and Mystics. Kelley O’Hara’s goal in extra time gave the Spirit a 2-1 win over the Chicago Red Stars in the 2021 NWSL championship game. The triumph capped an improbable 9-0-3 run to close the season under interim coach Kris Ward after coach Richie Burke stepped down in early August and was subsequently fired after The Washington Post detailed allegations against him of verbal and emotional abuse.
“People have no idea what we’ve all gone through, and the resiliency and perseverance of every single player is pretty incredible,” O’Hara said.
The D.C. Sports Hall of Fame was established in 1980 but went dormant for about a decade starting around 2001. Nominees for inclusion, as determined by a 14-member selection committee, must have “gained prominence” in the greater D.C. area through their achievements in professional, intercollegiate, amateur or high school sports as an athlete, coach, owner, executive, member of the media or contributor. Honorees’ names are displayed on a sign hanging beyond the outfield at Nationals Park. | 2022-07-22T15:14:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Sports Hall of Fame announces 2022 class - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/dc-sports-hof-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/dc-sports-hof-2022/ |
The decision paves the way for hearings that will examine evidence of alleged atrocities
Pro-Rohingya demonstrators step on an image of Myanmar's military ruler, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, outside the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Friday, July 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
The case is only the third of its kind in U.N. history and marks the first international reckoning with Myanmar’s alleged atrocities, which include indiscriminate killings, torture and mass rape.
The International Court of Justice’s decision coincides with deepening instability in Myanmar, a country once heralded for its progress toward democracy. In February 2021, military leaders seized power, jailing members of the elected National League for Democracy and crushing resistance. In consolidating control, the military used many of the same strategies honed in its decades-long campaign against ethnic minorities such as the Rohingya.
Joan E. Donoghue, the ICJ’s presiding judge, said the court rejected all four of Myanmar’s preliminary opposition motions. Among them was its claim that the court does not have jurisdiction because the case was brought by Gambia, a small African nation, on behalf of the Rohingya. Judge Xue Hanqin of China cast the only dissenting vote.
The case will now move on to assess the allegations of genocide, starting with written arguments from both parties and proceeding to oral arguments.
The ruling “shows that Myanmar cannot escape accountability for its crimes,” said Suleman. “It shows that under the genocide convention, states can hold other states to account for their violations.”
Myanmar sought to dismiss the ICJ case even before last year’s coup, when Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi defended the country at The Hague, eliciting condemnation from international human rights activists and former allies.
Following the coup, military leaders have maintained that the case is illegitimate. But the opposition’s shadow administration operating largely in exile has withdrawn its opposition to the case and said it accepts the ICJ’s jurisdiction to hear arguments on whether the country violated terms of the 1948 genocide convention. It has also urged the United Nations not to recognize the junta’s representatives to the ICJ, arguing that doing so grants them legitimacy on the global stage.
Friday’s ruling brings relief and hope to many of the Rohingya, who fled Myanmar five years ago amid a drastic rise in military violence. But it should also serve as a “slap in the face” to powerful governments, including the United States, that did not act earlier to prevent or redress the suffering of the Rohingya, said Wai Wai Nu, a pro-democracy Rohingya activist and founder of the Women’s Peace Network in Myanmar. Persecution of the Rohingya has been widely documented, including in a U.N. probe, she noted.
“This case should bring shame to powerful countries. It should show the international community how it failed — how it continues to fail — the Rohingya,” Wai Wai Nu said from Washington. Several of her family members are among the 900,000 Rohingya who have been living in squalid refugee camps in Bangladesh, where food insecurity and crime reportedly have surged since the start of the pandemic.
“The crimes that have happened need to be exposed on the global stage,” said Andrea Gittleman, senior program manager for the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, which was among the first American institutions to designate the treatment of the Rohingya as genocide.
“But it’s also not enough,” Gittleman added. Greater accountability is needed, including within Myanmar and neighboring countries, where the majority of the Rohingya continue to reside, she said.
Cape Diamond in Yangon, Myanmar, contributed reporting to this report. | 2022-07-22T15:14:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UN court strikes down Myanmar opposition in Rohingya genocide case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/myanmar-genocide-rohingya-un-icj-gambia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/myanmar-genocide-rohingya-un-icj-gambia/ |
U.N. Secretar General António Guterres, Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar attend a signing ceremony in Istanbul July 22. (Umit Bektas/Reuters)
ISTANBUL — Russia and Ukraine agreed Friday to restart shipments of blockaded grain, in a step toward easing a global crisis that has exposed tens of millions of people, especially in Africa and the Middle East, to the threat of acute hunger, the United Nations secretary general announced.
One of the two agreements signed Friday in Istanbul guarantees the safe passage of commercial ships from the Ukrainian port of Odessa and two other ports, which are currently cut off by a Russian naval blockade, U.N. officials said before the signing. A parallel agreement is supposed to facilitate Russian grain and fertilizer exports, they said.
The agreements are in force for a period of 120 days, and are renewable, officials said.
For all the complexity involved in the negotiations, the grain agreement appeared to depend on goodwill that is in short supply, resting in large part on Russian assurances it would not attack merchant ships or port facilities involved in the initiative. Even so, officials expressed optimism.
“Today, there is a beacon on the Black Sea,” Guterres said at a ceremony for the initiative. “A beacon of hope, a beacon of possibility, a beacon of relief, in a world that needs it more than ever.”
“It will bring relief for developing countries on the edge of bankruptcy and the most vulnerable people on the edge of famine,” he added.
Andrii Sybiha, the deputy head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, called the initiative “an important step to avoid the global food crisis,” in a message posted on Twitter.
The agreements were the fruit of conversations Guterres had with the leaders of Ukraine and Russia in April to solve the spiraling food crisis. Turkey, which maintains good ties with both countries and controls passage through the Bosporus, the entrance to the Black Sea, took an active mediating role.
For months the discussions stumbled, in a sign of absent trust between the warring parties. Ukrainian diplomats complained that their security concerns were not being acknowledged, as Russia downplayed the scope of the global food crisis. Ship insurance underwriters had to be assured that vessels would not be attacked, struck by mines or face other hazards in an active war zone.
The text of the agreements was not immediately released. U.N. officials said the deal over Ukrainian grain shipments rests on a complex regime that establishes safe channels through the Black Sea and inspections to ensure that weapons are not sent to Ukraine through those channels. Despite early speculation, there is to be no large-scale demining of Ukraine’s ports, a process that was considered too time consuming. Ukrainian pilots will guide commercial vessels from the ports. Minesweepers will be used as needed, officials said.
There would be no military escorts of the ships, whose passage will be monitored from a coordination center in Istanbul staffed by representatives of the parties to the agreements. In addition to Odessa, the agreement covers shipments from the ports of Chernomorsk and Yuzhny, Guterres said.
A parallel agreement is supposed to facilitate the export of grain and fertilizers from Russia, though its utility was unclear: those commodities are not subject to United States or European Union sanctions. A second U.N. official said they hoped it would help bring down soaring costs of fertilizers that could impact yields for the next harvest. Both U.N. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because when they spoke the agreements had not yet been signed.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said on Twitter message posted Friday afternoon that Ukraine was not signing a direct agreement with Russia, but rather with Turkey and the United Nations. Russia would sign a “mirror” agreement, he said.
And there would be “no presence” of Russian representatives in Ukrainian ports he said. “In case of provocations,” he added, “an immediate military response.” | 2022-07-22T15:14:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia, Ukraine sign deal in Turkey to export grain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/ukraine-grain-deal-turkey-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/22/ukraine-grain-deal-turkey-russia/ |
The Thursday hearing’s central point: Trump was never chastened
This image from video, released July 21, 2022, by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, shows President Donald Trump recording a video statement at the White House on Jan. 7, 2021. (House Select Committee/AP)
Seven years into Donald Trump’s career in politics and decades into his tenure as an American public figure, you do not expect suddenly to see a Trump you’ve never seen before.
But in a video shown during Thursday night’s hearing of the House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, a version of Trump was presented that is usually kept behind closed doors. The video included clips of remarks Trump made on the day after the riot, Jan. 7, 2021, that were not included in the final version. And in these outtakes, Trump was shown twice reacting with obvious anger at the script.
“My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote,” he said — and then a flash of fury. A face at odds with Trump’s public persona, even when he’s trying to convey his frustrations. It was one of the few moments in which we got to see both Trump’s temper and the extent of his frustration that the presidency was slipping away from him.
Revealing — but not as important as another clip from those outtakes.
“This election is now over,” Trump said at one point in the portions shown on Thursday night. Reading from a teleprompter, he continued: “Congress has certified the results.”
He stopped.
“I don’t want to say the election is over,” he said to his staff, assembled behind the camera. “I just want to say … Congress has certified the results without saying the election is over, okay?”
His daughter Ivanka chimed in. Maybe, “But Congress has certified”? No, better: “Now, Congress has certified.”
“Yeah, right,” Trump added. The adjustments were made. “I didn’t say over. So now let me see. Go to the paragraph before.”
The taping continued. The admission that the election had been settled was excised. “Now, Congress has certified the results” was the line included in the speech.
One can read this as petulance. The president, so desperate to avoid the perception that he was unpopular or a loser that he concocted a sweeping, dishonest counternarrative about fraud, remained unable to concede his own failure: He knew it was over but didn’t want to say it. And that may, in fact, have been the case.
It is more likely, though, that Trump believed the fight might somehow go on — that, with 13 days left in his tenure, there still might be some crack in the system to be pried open, some mechanism by which the moving trucks could be kept at bay. He had refused for two months to say he had lost, hoping that his supporters would believe him, and it worked. They believed him so much that they beat up police officers and forced members of Congress into hiding as they rampaged through the Capitol on Jan. 6. So, who knows? Release a video to calm the hand-wringers worried about the riot and then press on with the fight, just as he had released a video in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape in October 2016 before quickly going back on the offensive.
Consider another revelation from Thursday’s hearing: that his last comment on leaving the Oval Office on the evening of Jan. 6 was a lamentation not about the day’s violence but about Vice President Mike Pence having let him down. He went to bed that night thinking not about the violence he had brought on the country but about how he’d been wronged. He got up the next morning, put on his tie and began taping a video in which he declined to say the election was over.
His next words after “Congress has certified” were that “a new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th,” but this is what he knew he needed to say in that video in that moment. What he didn’t say was that he lost fairly and that the election had been settled once and for all. So, in short order, he began once again trying to convince the country that 2020 vote had not been settled. He has continued trying to do so, just last week pressing a Wisconsin legislator to act to reverse an election decided 20 months ago.
This was one point raised by Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) in his comments at the end of Thursday’s hearing.
“The forces Donald Trump ignited that day have not gone away,” Kinzinger said. “The militant, intolerant ideologies, the militias, the alienation and the disaffection, the weird fantasies and disinformation: They’re all still out there, ready to go. That’s the elephant in the room.”
Not only have the forces that Trump stoked and summoned not gone away, but Trump also continues to stoke them and summon them. On Jan. 6 itself, he refused to leverage his power against the rioters, and he praised and coddled them in his public statements. Then, in the new light of the following day, he refused to say that his crusade had come to an end. Trump’s acknowledgment of an incoming Biden administration was a statement of fact, not a declaration of surrender, and Trump has spent every day since that speech trying to get Biden out of the White House. Jan. 6 chastened much of the country. It did not chasten Trump.
But, you know. His goal had simply been to ensure the integrity of the vote.
Noted: Rep. Kinzinger mocks Sen. Hawley as ‘Fistpump McRunpants’ | 2022-07-22T15:39:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Thursday hearing’s central point: Trump was never chastened - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/thursday-hearings-central-point-trump-was-never-chastened/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/thursday-hearings-central-point-trump-was-never-chastened/ |
It was clear even on Jan. 6, 2021, that then-President Trump wasn’t interested in expeditiously calling off his supporters as they waged a historic attack on the U.S. Capitol. And that’s only become clearer through the texts, testimony and public comments of his allies who pleaded for more, sooner — and didn’t get it.
But in Thursday night’s hearing, the Jan. 6 committee drove home what did interest Trump: that, at the time, the former president appeared wholly preoccupied with other things besides leading the country through that ugly chapter, and that this persisted even in the days afterward. The evidence indicated Trump was more focused on continuing his crusade to overturn the election and even exploiting the events to that end, and that he was quite focused on covering his backside at the expense of healing the wounds of that day.
And his aides noticed.
One of the most vivid disclosures Thursday came when the committee played outtakes of a video Trump recorded on Jan. 7. Trump read from a script that said “this election is now over,” but balked. He didn’t want to say it.
Even after everything that had happened the day prior, he would only say that Congress had certified the election. Whether he held out some kind of hope for a nonexistent legal path to retaining office, or merely didn’t want to admit he actually lost, the practical effect was Trump still refusing to provide complete closure, despite seeing the stark costs of his resistance.
In the days that followed, Trump would also decline to note the death of a Capitol Police officer, Brian D. Sicknick, or lower the flags to half-staff at federal buildings — to the point where Trump campaign aides privately texted about how awful that posture was.
One of them, Tim Murtaugh, on Jan. 9 labeled the lack of acknowledgment “s-----.” Matthew Wolking responded that it was “enraging” and declared, “Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie.”
"Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie"
Jan. 6 committee posts text messages between Trump's campaign aides Tim Murtaugh and Matt Wolking on 1/9 pic.twitter.com/kntbPYHUyx
Then Murtaugh offered a theory: Trump was just worried about himself.
“You know what that is, of course, if he acknowledged the dead cop, he’d be implicitly faulting the mob,” Murtaugh said. “And he won’t do that, because they’re his people. And he would also be close to acknowledging that what he lit at the rally got out of control. No way he acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault. No way.”
It’s all a remarkable way to talk about one’s boss — that he was more concerned about this than doing the right thing, even three days later, after multiple people had died.
The story was similar with deliberations over a tweet Trump would send during the riot. Then-deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews testified that press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told her Trump hadn’t wanted to include the word “peace” in a 2:38 p.m. tweet.
“So she looked directly at me and, in a hushed tone, shared with me that the president did not want to include any sort of mention of peace in that tweet, and that it took some convincing on their part — those who were in the room,” Matthews testified. “And she said that there was a back-and-forth, going over different phrases to find something that he was comfortable with. And it wasn’t until Ivanka Trump suggested the phrase ‘stay peaceful’ that he finally agreed to include it.”
Why not mention peace? The worst explanation would be that Trump didn’t want peace — that he believe this angry outburst was warranted or even advantageous in some way, a direction suggested by multiple later Trump comments and further evidence. And notably, Trump allegedly resisted using the word “peace” in a tweet that came shortly after a 2:26 p.m. call in which Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told him Vice President Pence had to be evacuated from the Senate chamber. (It’s not clear when the deliberations actually occurred, but things were moving quickly at this point.)
As the committee peered into the black box of what Trump was actually doing during the insurrection, they also played testimony from multiple witnesses who said they never witnessed Trump reaching out to law enforcement.
What was he doing instead? According to McEnany’s testimony, Trump returned to the White House after his speech on the Ellipse and, even as the violence was jumping off, summoned a list of senators to call — apparently about overturning the results in Congress.
Asked by a committee lawyer if she knew which senators he called, McEnany replied: “To the best of my recollection, no. As I say in my notes, he wanted a list of the senators. And you know, I left them at that point.”
While the White House call logs feature an hours-long gap at this crucial juncture, we do know Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani called multiple GOP lawmakers who spearheaded the effort to overturn the election. Exactly how many he proceeded to actually call isn’t known from McEnany’s testimony, of which only a brief clip was played.
But there could only have been one purpose for that list. And next to his calls to Tuberville and others including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — in which he allegedly said, “Well Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are” — and next to all the other evidence, including about what Trump’s own public statements, it’s clear what Trump was preoccupied with: Trump. | 2022-07-22T15:39:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump was preoccupied with himself on Jan. 6 — and afterward, evidence shows - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/trump-evidence-preoccupied/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/22/trump-evidence-preoccupied/ |
Former MLB and NFL star Bo Jackson revealed this week that he helped cover $170,00 worth of funeral costs for victims of May's mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. (Brynn Anderson/AP File)
Former NFL and MLB star Bo Jackson revealed himself this week as having anonymously donated $170,000 to help cover funeral costs for the 21 people killed in May’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The 59-year-old Jackson told the Associated Press, “I was just trying (with the donation) to put a little sunshine in someone’s cloud, a very dark cloud.”
The classroom shooting, one of the deadliest in U.S. history, claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers. Three days after it occurred, Jackson and a friend flew to Uvalde and personally made the previously-anonymous donation during a short meeting with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
“It’s just not right for parents to bury their kids,” Jackson lamented. “It’s just not right.”
Jackson told the AP of a personal connection with Uvalde, a town he’s passed through and stopped in multiple times and called a place that “sticks in your mind.”
Jackson said he does not want to “turn this into anything (but) what it is.” But the Heisman Trophy winner also noted the increased frequency of school shootings in the United States.
“The last thing you want to hear is there’s an active shooter in your child’s school,” Jackson said. “It’s happening everywhere now.”
On the day of the shooting, Jackson posted a tweet mourning the victims of the deadly attack that concluded with, “This cannot continue.”
“America … let’s please stop all the nonsense. Please pray for all victims. If you hear something, say something. We aren’t supposed to bury our children. I’m praying for all of the families around the country who have lost loved ones to senseless shootings. This cannot continue,” he wrote.
Later that day, before Game 4 of the 2022 NBA Western Conference Finals, Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr used a pregame news conference to criticize congressional leaders for inaction on gun control, urging the Senate to pass H.R. 8, a bill that would require background checks before all gun sales. Notably, Kerr’s father, Malcolm H. Kerr, was serving as the president of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon when he was murdered outside his office in 1984.
On May 25, Jackson retweeted a video of the news conference, writing, “I stand with Steve Kerr.”
I stand with Steve Kerr. https://t.co/xt8RNqsXGH
Jackson’s donation marks the latest example of his charitable efforts. He runs the annual “Bo Bikes Bama” event, a bike ride raising money for the Governor’s Emergency Relief Fund in Alabama. And his Give Me A Chance Foundation hosts youth sports camps and leagues across the country.
“In a truly selfless act, Bo covered all funeral expenses for the victims’ families so they would have one less thing to worry about as they grieved,” Abbott said. | 2022-07-22T15:56:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bo Jackson reveals he helped pay for funerals of Uvalde shooting victims - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/bo-jackson-uvalde-victims-funerals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/22/bo-jackson-uvalde-victims-funerals/ |
Sri Lanka’s former president must be investigated for war crimes
By Meenakshi Ganguly
Mahinda Rajapaksa, left, and his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa waving to supporters in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2019. (Eranga Jayawardena/AP)
Meenakshi Ganguly is South Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — There was satisfaction, and even glee, among many Sri Lankans when Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the widely unpopular president, fled the country by military jet in the dead of the night on July 13, following months of protests. Apparently fearing arrest while he searched for a safe haven, he didn’t resign until late the following day.
Now, however, Rajapaksa no longer has sovereign immunity from prosecution for grave international crimes in which he is implicated, including war crimes and the alleged murder, torture and enforced disappearance of his critics and opponents, or for the grand corruption that flourished under his family’s rule.
Years of abusive misrule by the Rajapaksa family have devastated Sri Lanka. Today, fuel, for cooking or transportation, is practically unobtainable. There are warnings over hunger and food scarcity with soaring inflation. The country has defaulted on its foreign debts for the first time and is attempting to negotiate a bailout with the International Monetary Fund.
From 2005 to 2015, Rajapaksa’s brother Mahinda was president and Rajapaksa was defense secretary, known to family and foes alike as “the Terminator.” They came to power during a four-year cease-fire in the long civil war between the government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that began in 1983.
Full-fledged fighting resumed in mid-2006. Major military operations that began in 2008 led eventually to the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009. In the last months of the fighting, Sri Lankan armed forces pounded their self-declared “no-fire zones” with artillery and air power, killing thousands of ethnic Tamil civilians whom the LTTE was using as human shields, according to a study by a United Nations panel of experts.
The government claimed it pursued a policy of “zero civilian casualties” and characterized its operations as a humanitarian “hostage rescue” mission. But the U.N. experts found that “throughout the final stages of the war, virtually every hospital in the Vanni [conflict area], whether permanent or makeshift, was hit by artillery.”
At the war’s end, almost the entire LTTE leadership was killed, either in the fighting or by summary execution. Photographs and mobile phone videos, seemingly made as trophies by victorious soldiers, show executions of captured LTTE fighters and suggest large-scale sexual violence against Tamil women who surrendered to the army. Thousands of civilians who emerged from the conflict zone were detained in camps where the security forces committed torture, rape and enforced disappearances.
As defense secretary, Rajapaksa was in command of Sri Lankan security forces throughout this period. Even after the fighting, thousands of young Tamil men who were suspected LTTE fighters or supporters, as well as journalists, activists and others deemed political opponents, were abducted. Many have never been heard from again.
In March 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Council called for an investigation. The resulting report found that both sides committed wartime atrocities and concluded that “for accountability to be achieved in Sri Lanka, it will require more than a domestic mechanism.”
In 2015, Rajapaksa’s brother lost a presidential election, and the family was politically sidelined for four years. Rajapaksa was elected president in November 2019, riding a wave of nationalist anxiety following a series of bombings that killed about 260 people in churches and hotels on Easter Sunday earlier that year. The attack was carried out by Islamist suicide bombers, but Sri Lanka’s top police investigator later gave evidence to the Supreme Court that implicated elements within Sri Lankan military intelligence in the attacks.
After rising to the presidency, Rajapaksa pursued policies hostile to ethnic and religious minorities, and repressed those seeking justice for abuses committed during the civil war. He used “counterterrorism” as a pretext for abusive and draconian security policies, and blocked investigations into emblematic cases of serious human rights violations.
A woman whose son was “disappeared” in 2009 told Human Rights Watch in 2020 that since Rajapaksa’s election, the police had repeatedly visited her. “These are children who were taken by white vans from our houses or who surrendered [to the army]. … I want to know what happened to my son — whether he is dead or alive, and if he is not alive, what happened to him and who did it,” she said.
Now Rajapaksa has fled to Singapore via the Maldives. He is believed to be seeking a final destination where he will be safe from arrest and prosecution.
He should not succeed. Judicial authorities where laws permit should investigate him under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows for the prosecution of serious international crimes even if they were not committed on the country’s territory. Universal jurisdiction cases are an increasingly important part of international efforts to provide justice to victims and their families who have nowhere else to turn.
Over several decades, successive Sri Lankan governments have not provided victims of grave abuses with genuine avenues for justice. There is little reason to believe the next administration — led by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was backed by the now-deposed Rajapaksa family — will be better in this regard, considering Wickremesinghe’s prompt crackdown on the protesters. It’s therefore critical for foreign governments to pick up the slack where possible. Rajapaksa’s departure from Sri Lanka might have opened new possibilities for justice. | 2022-07-22T16:36:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Gotabaya Rajapaksa must be investigated for war crimes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/gotabaya-rajapaksa-former-sri-lanka-president-must-face-war-crimes-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/gotabaya-rajapaksa-former-sri-lanka-president-must-face-war-crimes-investigation/ |
DOJ launches environmental justice investigation in Houston over dumping
Black and Latino neighborhoods are unfairly used as depositories for furniture, tires, medical waste, dead animals -- even human bodies, officials said
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke speaks at a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, on Aug. 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
The Justice Department on Friday opened an environmental justice investigation into allegations that the city of Houston has failed to respond equitably to reports of illegal dumping in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who heads the civil rights division, said the probe will focus primarily on the northeast section of the nation’s fourth-largest city, including the neighborhoods of Trinity and Houston Gardens. Residents in those communities have voiced longstanding concerns over the dumping of furniture, tires, medical waste, automated bank teller machines, dead animals and even human bodies, officials said.
Since his appointment last year as the nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Merrick Garland has sought to prioritize issues around environmental justice, announcing the creation in May of a new Justice Department office to help coordinate the federal government’s legal strategy. The Houston case, officials said, was prompted by a complaint from Lone Star Legal Aid, which alleged that the city has denied services and failed to enforce municipal codes in some neighborhoods.
'Environmental racism': How a protest in North Carolina nearly 40 years ago sparked a national movement
Justice officials said investigators have requested data from Houston’s 311 city services center to determine whether there has been a pattern of neglect to calls from certain sections of the city. The probe will focus on the city’s Department of Neighborhoods, the police department and the solid waste management division, all of which receive federal funding.
Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, jurisdictions that receive federal funding are barred from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin.
Clarke said illegal dumping can disadvantage neighborhoods in multiple ways, including attracting rodents and mosquitoes, lowering property values, causing illness, affecting sewer drainage and contaminating drinking water.
“In America, your Zip code often is a key determinant of your cancer risk … and even your expected life span,” said Todd S. Kim, assistant attorney general for Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “It’s true that any of us could be exposed to environmental contamination, but it’s also true that communities of color, low-income communities and tribal communities bear these hardships disproportionately.”
Clarke said the Justice Department would seek to work collaboratively with Houston officials to develop a voluntary compliance plan to address any violations uncovered in the investigation. | 2022-07-22T16:41:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DOJ launches environmental justice investigation in Houston over dumping - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/houston-dumping-justice-black-latino/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/22/houston-dumping-justice-black-latino/ |
“I wanted to do something that was just stupid and over the top and really self-indulgent,” says the game’s creator.
(Washington Post illustration; Courtesy of Ben Esposito; Annapurna Interactive)
Leap. Dash. Shuffle. Bounce off an inky balloon-shaped demon, and leap again. Plummet. Grapple. And of course, shoot. These are the verbs animating “Neon White,” a fast-paced, first-person shooter that wants to make speed runners out of all of us, and the latest genre-bending title from the mind of Los Angeles-based indie developer Ben Esposito.
After working at developer Giant Sparrow on indie darlings such as “The Unfinished Swan” and “What Remains of Edith Finch,” Esposito would go on to create “Donut County,” an indie success story if ever there was one. Released by arthouse indie game publisher Annapurna Interactive in 2018, the game about raccoon app developers swallowing up Los Angeles with a hole in the ground caught the current of mainstream success.
While Esposito had been the sole developer of a few interactive music videos and saw some success with his 2016 Furby survival horror game “Tattletail,” “Donut County” was different. Esposito was the sole name behind a game that would break out of the indie sphere and into the spotlight of the larger gaming world. Its single mechanic, moving around an ever-growing hole, coupled with a charming, lo-fi art style, made the game approachable and easily adaptable across devices.
“Neon White” isn’t trying to copy that success. It’s not even trying to appeal to everyone. It’s a hyper specific yet hard-to-categorize project that struts around, wearing its inspirations on its sleeve. Don’t like it? Too bad.
In “Neon White,” you play as a damned soul, White, competing with your fellow hell spawn for a chance at penance. White is joined by some old friends, members of a mercenary group who died in a heist-gone-wrong. Together again, they can fight through heaven, slashing and shooting the demons infesting it (and trying to kill each other again) at breakneck speeds.
Upon beating a level, you’re awarded a medal ranging from bronze to ace. Achieve an ace runtime, and you’ll unlock a leaderboard of the fastest times of other players. Maybe someone got the jump a half second before you could, or maybe someone’s halved your time with a shortcut you didn’t know about. Beat a level fast enough, and you may unlock the secret red ace medal. That feeling of wanting to shave fractions of a second off your time is the game’s real origin.
Building “Neon White’s” first prototype was a reprieve for the developer, something he said he just had to get out of his system in 2017 while working on “Donut County’s” more casual, puzzle-focused gameplay. After that title shipped, Esposito returned to the shelved “Neon White” prototype with fresh eyes. The roguelike deck-builder “Slay the Spire” released around that time, inspiring a wave of indie developers to mix card-based mechanics with other genres, leading to previously unheard of combinations. Esposito was among that crowd, but it took a while to strike gold.
“I was working on that for a month or so, then I almost gave up on it,” he said. “Randomly getting weapons dealt to you is not fun at all, it turns out.”
What saved the project was competition. Esposito dropped the randomized deck approach in favor of looting enemies for cards, which opened up new possibilities for level design. In “Neon White,” each card represents a weapon that, when discarded, activates a movement ability: double jump, dash, grapple and so on. Stringing these together in succession while picking up new cards from fallen foes is the second-to-second objective of any given level. Building levels around specific cards and combos allowed for more interesting challenges for both developer and player, but what really kept Esposito engaged was a message from a friend who demoed the project: “Here’s how long it took me to beat this level.”
“Pfft,” Esposito thought, “I could do better than that.”
Development picked up in earnest in 2019, and this time around, Esposito wasn’t going it alone. Working with a group of indie developers gathered under the name Angel Matrix (the first of many nods to ‘90s anime), Esposito and his team began work on what would become over 100 levels of platforming, shooting and storytelling.
Behold the birth, and resonance, of walking simulators
Going into development for “Neon White,” Esposito decided to forgo any assumptions about what a good fast-paced first-person shooter could be. That approach would lead to a tangle of design decisions that, together, created the genre-defying experience at the core of “Neon White.”
For instance, including a player’s gun in the on-screen user interface wasn’t essential to “Neon White’s” gameplay, so they got rid of it — just one break with convention that had cascading effects. With no physical presence of the player character’s body onscreen, the developers found there was no concept of actions taking time through animations. When players lacked that reference point, the idea of carrying three of the same light machine guns as you jumped off a waterfall didn’t seem quite so bizarre.
“Those early choices to not be beholden to FPS conventions, those are the things that I learned early on that I was able to bring to this and make something that was weird and counterintuitive,” Esposito said.
“Neon White” doesn’t share many similarities with the most popular games in Esposito’s portfolio. Games like “What Remains of Edith Finch” are labeled “walking simulators” (with both affection and derision) for their slow pace, with a narrative experience unfolding largely around the player. Walking is slow. “Neon White” wants you to be constantly thinking of how to be faster.
But Esposito explained that “fast” is a relative feeling, ultimately an effect of what the player has the options to do. In “Neon White,” each level has an obvious path available to players. But to improve their runtimes, players are encouraged to “break” the level in the same way that speed runners do, finding new routes or using the cards they’re dealt in seemingly unintuitive ways.
“It’s not about moments of extremely high speeds, it’s about feeling like you can always be going a little bit faster at any given point in the level,” he said.
Speedrunning’s starting line: An intro guide to gaming’s seemingly intimidating subculture
Though “Neon White” has been a critical success, many have recoiled at its bombastic and hypersexual writing. But Esposito said he just didn’t want to do “a wholesome thing” again: “I wanted to do something that was just stupid and over the top and really self-indulgent.”
Luckily he had some of the best people on-hand to make an uncouth, anime-fueled assault on all things holy: visual novel developer Aevee Bee (“We Know the Devil”), animator Ryann Shannon (storyboard artist on “Infinity Train”) and Geneva Hodgson (“Trick Moon”), character designer, co-creator and Esposito’s wife. Together, the group made a character-driven crime drama about explosions, sex and dead gods.
“Its wacky,” he acknowledged with a laugh.
The story breaks also serve as a reprieve from the game itself, a chance to slow down and recoup before setting off again on another string of levels at ever faster speeds. That juxtaposition is stark — and intentionally so — something Esposito said he learned from “late ‘90s Japanese import games that had pre-rendered cutscenes and fast video game[play].”
Ultimately though, Esposito wasn’t concerned about cohesion between the story and gameplay. “Ludonarrative dissonance?” he said, referring to a line of critique in games studies that highlights gaps between gameplay and narrative. “Awesome, I don’t give a s---.”
“Neon White’s” popularity came as a surprise to the team. The game is a pastiche of early 2000′s video games and anime, featuring the voice of Steve Blum, best known for his portrayal of Spike Lee in the English dub of “Cowboy Bebop,” a staple of Adult Swim and its Toonami programming block since the series premiered in the U.S. in 2001. If you weren’t there, or haven’t read-up on the lineage of “Counter Strike: Source” and “Trigun’s” influence, “Neon White” can appear inimical.
Esposito gets that: “Sometimes when people don’t get what we’re trying to do, I just think, ‘Oh you haven’t played enough localized, mid-budget PS Vita games.’ ”
The team steeled itself for rejection.
“We thought we were like ‘screw the awards,' we’re just going to make something that feels cool and fun,” Esposito said. “But it was totally the opposite. People get it. They talk about the ways that — even though it’s counterintuitive — it works together. So we’re just shocked to be honest. It’s very cool.”
Unlike White, Esposito isn’t trying to come off as a suave action hero. You don’t get a game like “Neon White” by trying to be cool — or trying to design something with the goal of making it “cool.” It’s a passion project through and through, from level design to character writing to thematic through lines.
As Esposito would put it: It’s “purely vibes-based, ultimately.”
Autumn Wright is a freelance games critic and anime journalist. Find their latest writing at @TheAutumnWright. | 2022-07-22T16:43:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the Neon White devs made their 'stupid,' 'really self-indulgent' game - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/22/neon-white-ben-esposito-profile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/22/neon-white-ben-esposito-profile/ |
In this photo provided by Israel Fire and Rescue Services, Israeli firemen and rescuers work in a sinkhole formed in a swimming pool in Karmi Yosef, Israel, Thursday, July 21, 2022. Israeli police say they placed a couple under house arrest, a day after a man attending a party at their villa died after being sucked into a sinkhole that formed at the bottom of their swimming pool. The incident happened during a private party the couple hosted at their house in the town of Karmi Yosef, 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of Tel Aviv. (Israeli Fire and Rescue Services via AP) (Uncredited/Israel Fire and Rescue Services) | 2022-07-22T16:43:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Israeli couple arrested after man dies in pool sinkhole - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-couple-arrested-after-man-dies-in-pool-sinkhole/2022/07/22/9df85704-09d9-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-couple-arrested-after-man-dies-in-pool-sinkhole/2022/07/22/9df85704-09d9-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html |
By Asli Aydintasbas
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 19 in Tehran. (Mustafa Kamaci/Turkish Presidential Press Service/AFP via Getty Images)
On Friday, the United Nations secretary general announced that Russia and Ukraine agreed to restart shipments of blockaded grain, a move intended to ease a crisis that has exposed tens of millions of people, especially in Africa and the Middle East, to the threat of famine. The deal, signed in Istanbul, was a diplomatic victory for Turkey.
Earlier in the week in Iran, we saw Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin smile for the cameras in what was Putin’s first major overseas summit since the start of the Ukraine war. “I want to thank you for your mediation efforts,” Putin told Erdogan, according to the Kremlin.
The agreement will keep raising questions about the relationship between Erdogan and Putin. Is there a mutual admiration — do they have a type of reflexive strongman empathy for one another? Or are they adversaries looking after their own interests?
A bit of both.
The deal created an export mechanism for Ukrainian grain — that is, what is not stolen by Russian forces in occupied territories — across the Black Sea, through safe corridors. Security would be provided by a Turkey-led naval mission, and Ukraine is willing to provide coordinates for narrow pathways off the port of Odessa, which has been mined to prevent a Russian assault, and two other ports currently cut off by a Russian naval blockade, U.N. officials said. A parallel agreement is supposed to facilitate Russian grain and fertilizer exports.
Ukraine desperately needs the grain income and also wants to empty its silos and storage facilities to make room for this year’s harvest. But Kyiv also needs to be certain that the corridors for export vessels are not going to be used later for an attack on Odessa. It will be up to the United Nations and Turkey to make sure Ukraine’s goodwill is not abused.
Let’s hope this works. Food shortages have been driving up prices across the Middle East and Africa, and this is a way to prevent the “hunger catastrophe” that the U.N. World Food Program has been warning about.
But the deal also highlights Erdogan’s unique way of dealing with Putin — he avoids the moral “trappings” of Western leaders, but with results that affect millions. Both men are transactional and cynical and have disdain for liberal norms. They fight on opposite ends but manage to sit and negotiate for quick results — as in cease-fires in Syria and Libya.
This fascinating relationship calls for both competition and camaraderie — and often comes at the expense of Western influence.
Ottomans and Russia fought different wars for several centuries, even over parts of modern Ukraine. Turkey and Russia ended up on different sides of the Cold War. But over the past decade, the two countries have grown closer, with Turkey commissioning Russia to build its first nuclear reactor and purchasing an advanced Russian S-400 missile defense system, even at the risk of facing U.S. sanctions. Turkey has refused to go along with Western sanctions on Russia, and the daily Turkish Airlines flights to Russian cities provide an economic lifeline for the country. Not surprisingly, Russia’s oligarchs have been favoring the Turkish Riviera for their yachts this summer.
At the same time, Turkey and Russia have engaged in confrontation in Libya and Syria, with Turkish drones destroying Russian Pantsir missile systems as their proxies fight on the battlefield. Moscow was directly involved in an air attack on Turkish troops in Syria in 2020. Turkey downed a Russian warplane in 2015. In Ukraine, despite a cautious balancing act not to antagonize the Kremlin, Ankara has been steadily supplying Kyiv with TB2 drones to use against Russian forces. Turkey has also closed off the Turkish Straits to the Russian navy. These actions have been critical for Ukrainian defense.
But it is not hard to see why both leaders might want this deal to work. Turkey and Russia are both revisionist powers that want a greater role on the world stage and, despite their differences, have managed to expand each other’s zone of influence.
This relationship is not one that any Western leader could — or would want to — replicate. It may help project power and polish their image at home, something that Erdogan certainly needs ahead of 2023 elections. But at its core, the Erdogan-Putin relationship stems from the possibilities that are afforded to these men by virtue of running authoritarian systems and their willingness to put boots on the ground. The democratic world must see through their calculations and ambitions.
But if this grain deal goes through, somehow this peculiar relationship will end up benefiting Ukraine, Ukrainian farmers and millions facing food shortages. It will help Erdogan and Putin, both domestically and in terms of their global image. And it will also demonstrate that Western influence in Ukraine and beyond still has very real limits. | 2022-07-22T17:15:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Grain deal highlights the peculiar Erdogan-Putin relationship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/erdogan-putin-grain-deal-ukraine-peculiar-relationship-limits-of-the-west/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/22/erdogan-putin-grain-deal-ukraine-peculiar-relationship-limits-of-the-west/ |
Perspective by Tamar Haspel
If you’ve heard one thing about cutting your diet’s impact on climate, it’s this: Eat less meat.
And it’s true. Animal foods are the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, by a long shot. Depending on whom you ask, and how you count, animal foods make up well over half of our global diet’s climate impact.
But there’s meat, and then there’s beef.
Despite the social media meat wars, there’s no getting around the fact that beef is the single biggest dietary contributor to climate change. According to the World Resources Institute, if cattle were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter, behind only China and the United States (although I suspect they would have a functioning government). And global beef demand is projected to almost double by 2050, according to the nonprofit research group.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that cattle have many good points, as well: They can turn grass into high-quality human food; they are often the best way to get food out of land unsuitable for crops; when their grazing is well-managed, they can improve soil health and even sequester some carbon. But they can’t sequester enough carbon to make up for what their digestive systems emit and the greenhouse gas cost of the deforestation that is driven primarily by that increasing demand for beef.
I’m not anti-beef; I think there’s a place for it in our food system, and there are places in the developing world where it can help fight protein deficiency. But when it comes to climate-friendly (or -friendlier) meat, I’m going to make the case that pigs have it all over cows.
How are pigs better? I will count the ways.
1. They’re not ruminants. (They’re monogastrics, which means they have only one stomach.) They don’t burp up methane when they digest their feed.
2. They are extremely good at turning feed into meat, a trait that’s measured by the feed conversion factor. It takes 55 pounds of feed (that’s just the dry matter, minus the water) to make 2.2 pounds of beef. For 2.2 pounds of pork, it’s only 14 pounds of feed. (For chickens, it’s only 7.3 pounds; more on that later.)
3. They are very fertile. A cow can have one calf a year, which means an entire year of the mother’s life has to be factored into the environmental impact of a steer or heifer. A sow can have well over 20 piglets in a year.
All this adds up to a much lower environmental footprint. According to Our World in Data, 1 calorie of pork has about one-seventh the climate impact of 1 calorie of beef.
Let’s be clear: Pork ain’t lentils. Legumes are one-tenth the impact of pork, and if you’re concerned about the climate impact of your diet, amping up the beans is the way to do it. But I know, from many years of lentil advocacy and also data, that beans are a tough sell.
So here’s what I’m thinking. People aren’t going to switch from beef to beans, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll switch some of their beef — let’s say half — to pork. Pork is meat. Pork is way more climate-friendly than beef. And pork is also bacon.
There is, however, a catch. It’s the pigs, and the lives they lead in our industrialized meat-production system.
I eat meat, and I care about the lives of my livestock. I’ve raised a lot of my own — chickens, ducks, turkeys and, yes, pigs. And when I’m not eating my animals, I try to source meat from people who are giving animals decent lives.
One of those people is David Newman.
Our acquaintanceship didn’t start on a promising note. I was in Des Moines visiting farms a few years back, and I had an early flight out. I stumbled into a cab, bleary-eyed, coffee in hand, at something like 4:30 a.m. There was another guest going to the airport, so we shared the cab.
My cabmate wasn’t nearly as bleary as I was. He was wide awake and friendly, and we started talking about what brought us to Des Moines. My heart sank when he told me he was there for a meeting of the National Pork Board.
Did I really want to start a conversation about the animal welfare issues that concern me about keeping pigs in crowded, indoor, unenriched environments? No, I did not.
But he did. Turns out, he raises Berkshire hogs, outdoors, and has some of the same issues I do. His farm’s ethos, he told me recently, is “to be as good to the animals as we possibly can be.”
I have since been to his farm (and he’s been to mine), and seen the ethos in action. Sows each have their own little hut, and the huts are scattered around a pasture. Each hut has a small courtyard with a wall around it, just high enough to keep piglets in when they’re very small. When they grow big enough to climb over the wall, that’s exactly what they do, and the pasture in Myrtle, Mo., is populated with piglets running amok.
The pigs get finished in a hoop barn with outdoor access and deep bedding. The deep straw — no concrete — lets the pigs express their natural rooting behavior. Newman also wants the animals to have plenty of room: “We give them a crazy amount of space.”
Raising pigs this way has a couple of consequences we have to take into account. First, it’s going to increase the climate impact because it’s less efficient; Newman’s pigs take seven months, rather than the usual six, to get to slaughter weight. I would love for someone to do a life-cycle analysis to take into account issues like land use and manure management, but I don’t have that, so “somewhat more” climate impact is the best I can do.
Second, this pork costs more. I asked Newman how much more he needs to get for his pork to make a living. “About 30 percent,” he told me. How this translates to grocery store prices is hard to say, but I recently bought a pound of ground pork from sustainable grower Niman Ranch for $5.99 at my local Stop & Shop, more than the conventional pork, but less than most of the ground beef.
If you sub in pork for half your beef, you can cut the carbon impact of your diet by about 23 percent. If it’s well-raised pork, that number drops, but is still substantial. If you sub in chicken, you do even better, but I prefer pork because you have to kill fewer animals. Also, bacon.
In case this column triggers a stampede to the well-raised pork producers, I should note that there won’t be enough for everyone. For that, we have to change our pork-producing ways — but a tsunami of demand might be just the way to get that done.
I don’t think subbing in pork for half your beef is a big ask. I mean, you must love barbecue, or sausages, or spare ribs. Also, bacon. C’mon, is it really so hard?
Hey, at least I’m not asking you to eat insects.
More food-policy commentary
5 reasons to grow a vegetable garden, beyond the vegetables
Food label translator: What ‘less processed’ and ‘multigrain’ actually mean
Is moderate drinking good for you? Despite what you’ve read, probably not. | 2022-07-22T17:54:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How subbing pork for half the beef you eat can cut your climate impact - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/07/22/pork-swap-beef-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/07/22/pork-swap-beef-climate/ |
Black maternal mortality may worsen post-Roe. This doc shows the effects.
‘Aftershock’ follows the families of two young Black women who died after giving birth
A still from “Aftershock,” a new documentary about the aftermath of Black maternal mortality. (Courtesy of Onyx Collective)
In “Aftershock,” a new documentary now streaming on Hulu that spotlights the Black maternal mortality crisis in America, Felicia Ellis, a pregnant Black woman in Oklahoma, makes a chilling analogy as she prepares for childbirth.
“A Black woman having a baby is like a Black man at a traffic stop with the police,” Ellis says. “You have to really pay attention to what’s going on every step of the way.”
Indeed, the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of all industrialized nations, with 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, and Black women are three times more likely to die than White women during or after pregnancy, according to 2020 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, and the racial disparities result from structural racism and implicit bias, along with underlying chronic conditions and disparities in access to quality health care, the CDC reports.
After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last month, public health experts say those rates are likely to get worse. A study published last year in the journal Demography estimated that a nationwide abortion ban would increase pregnancy-related deaths by 21 percent over time, and by 33 percent over time for Black people.
“Aftershock,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and was co-directed by Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee, primarily follows the families of two young Black women who died after giving birth in New York City only six months apart: Shamony Makeba Gibson, 30, died of a pulmonary embolism in October 2019 two weeks after giving birth to her son, Khari, at Brooklyn’s Woodhull Hospital, and Amber Rose Isaac, 26, died in April 2020 after an emergency C-section to give birth to her son, Elias, at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
The film’s focus on the victims’ families shows the “aftershock” of maternal mortality, Eiselt said: “There are ripple effects … to, of course, the fathers, to the family, to the community and to the country.”
The film also charts the history of how Black women have been mistreated in U.S. health care, and highlights efforts underway — stemming from midwives, doulas and birthing centers — to reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality and give pregnant people more agency in their birth experiences.
Q: We’re now almost a month out from the Dobbs decision. Experts have said that maternal mortality rates will likely worsen in light of state abortion bans, and maternal mortality rates are highest in states where abortion bans have already taken effect. What kind of added resonance do you think the film takes on in this new reality?
Paula Eiselt: When we talk about maternal health, maternal health is abortion care is health care — it’s all one conversation. A lot of time, unfortunately, it gets bifurcated: We talk about birth, and we talk about abortion as if they’re two completely separate things, but as we know, they’re so intertwined.
It’s a human right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy, and if one chooses to carry that pregnancy, it’s a human right to not only survive, but have a safe and dignified birth, and none of those things are happening in this country.
Tonya Lewis Lee: Overall maternal health care, overall women’s health care, needs to be just generally improved. I do think that, as we talk about in the film, the integration of midwives into women’s health care, for example … would help a great deal in outcomes across the board. Midwives are not there just to catch babies, they can help a woman throughout her life cycle.
I think, in general, communication with health-care providers, between health-care providers, is another one — really listening to women, seeing and hearing them. As Dr. Neel Shah says in the film, it’s not a luxury, it’s the key to saving lives.
Eiselt: The historical part was something we absolutely had to have in there, because the maternal mortality crisis didn’t just pop up out of nowhere — it’s part of a historical continuum that has devalued and dehumanized Black women from 1619, since the times of slavery. And that has continued post-slavery, with the turn of the 20th century, when White men came and really and took over the profession of birthing and eradicated midwifery. And that was a racist campaign — it was really geared towards Black midwives.
That eradication of [Black] midwives, and that stigma, that was a very successful marketing campaign, because you talk about midwives today and people are like, ‘You're crazy,’ or ‘You’re gonna die, your baby’s gonna die, they’re not professional, you need to be in the hospital, they don't know what they’re doing.’ They’re so stigmatized, and that racist campaign affected, of course, not just the Black midwives and the communities they were serving, but our entire country … because we don’t have integrated midwifery because of that, and that’s where we went off the tracks.
Some hospitals, depending on the state, are welcoming to midwives, but not many, and they don’t have the same privileges as doctors. … So our system is completely different, and it’s because of that history that is told in our film, that’s how we got here. And if we don’t know how we got here, we don’t know how to fix it.
Eiselt: It really shows the promise of what birthing can be when a woman is empowered, when they’re in control of their choices, when they have choices.
When we first met Felicia, she was going to have a hospital birth. At about 35 weeks, she decided that, you know what, she wants to [give] birth in a birthing center. She made that pivot, she switched, and we were like, ‘We’re with you, we’re going to follow that.’ … She chose that new path, she had an amazing doula, and she had this beautiful, empowering birth.
We really wanted to show what real birth and labor could be [in the film]. It’s a long scene, you’re really there with [Felicia]. We wanted to reclaim that, because it’s not something the media shows you, in terms of how we are in birth. It was very important to really sit there for those minutes and be with her, even though it could be uncomfortable for viewers who have not seen that before. It was so important to show what it’s really like and how magical it could be, if that’s what you choose.
Q: Why do you think this crisis hasn’t yet galvanized Americans in the way that police brutality against Black people has in the last few years? Do you think the tide is turning?
Lewis Lee: I think part of the reason why, for example, police brutality gets more attention is that people are filming [police encounters]. People have cameras, they can see what’s happening.
With Black women in particular in the health-care system, often [something] happens and we may talk about it amongst ourselves, and then we question ourselves about something that’s a broader issue. What’s so wonderful about this film is that it is allowing people to be validated. … So many people have birth trauma stories. They may have survived it, but a doctor didn’t listen, someone didn’t pay attention, you had to demand something, you were treated in such a way, dismissed, talked down to as a woman.
I think maybe the tide is changing. People will be more open now to sharing their stories, not feel that they’re responsible for what’s happening to them, and understand that they are a part of a system. | 2022-07-22T17:54:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Aftershock,’ a film about Black maternal mortality, relevant post-Roe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/22/aftershock-documentary-black-maternal-mortality/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/22/aftershock-documentary-black-maternal-mortality/ |
Photojournalists capture moments from Thursday night's hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By their nature, congressional hearings are boring. Politicians speechify. The pace is slow and halting. If anyone manages to say anything important, it’s drowned in a sea of bloviation.
But the eight Jan. 6 select committee hearings have been riveting to watch — and even more remarkably, they have captured the daily news cycle again and again, not only finding substantial TV and streaming audiences as they aired but also consistently landing at the top of broadcast and cable news reports and of newspaper front pages. This was far from a sure thing, given how much news coverage the Capitol riot already received over the past year and a half.
Thursday night’s hearing — the season finale, as it’s been dubbed — was no exception.
The New York Times led its website Friday morning with this headline: “Jan. 6 Panel Presents Evidence of Trump’s Refusal to Stop the Capitol Riot.” The Washington Post took its hearings headline across five of the six possible front-page columns in print — “Trump ignored many pleas to act” — with two additional related stories nearby. CNN spent nearly as much time recapping and analyzing afterward as the hearing itself had consumed. Nearly every other major media outlet — with the obvious exception of Fox News — gave the hearing an equivalent treatment.
“It’s surprising — certainly not what I would have predicted — the way these hearings have broken through and captured the news cycle again and again,” said Tom Bettag, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.
Bettag was a longtime executive producer of the CBS “Evening News” and ABC’s “Nightline” whom I’ve found to be a savvy media observer, so I was eager to talk to him about how these hearings have managed to command the news cycle. Here are a few theories.
1. Newsworthiness. Each hearing has produced at least one legitimate nugget of actual news, and sometimes more than one. Bettag theorizes that this has made it easier for the broadcast networks to overcome their concerns of looking like a cheering squad for anti-Trump forces.
“They ask themselves, ‘was there anything new?’ and if they can answer yes, it gives them a reason to overcome the worry about partisanship,” he told me.
For example, the first prime time hearing, which aired in early June, provided a video clip of former attorney general William P. Barr’s candidly expressed testimony about Trump’s claims that the election was stolen: “I told the president it was bullshit.” Vivid stuff that also suggested Trump knew he lost but lied to the American public about it anyway.
In a subsequent hearing, White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson made headlines with her shocking account of how the president tangled angrily with his own Secret Service detail as he tried to insist on going to the Capitol with the mob, apparently to try to overturn the election.
2. Pace. Although somber and unflashy in tone, the hearings have been characterized by something almost unheard of in this kind of congressional forum: briskness. They move expeditiously from brief opening statements to video or live testimony. There have been no extemporaneous speeches, no tedious delays, no “look at me” displays.
“They cut that out completely,” Bettag said. “It’s shocking that they have had that degree of discipline.” Rather than crediting former ABC News president James Goldston, who served as a consultant to the committee, Bettag thinks it’s more likely that the efficiency resulted from excellent work by congressional staff.
The liveliness kept the general public tuned in — and that public interest, in turn, probably affected the amount of news coverage that editors and media executives decided it warranted.
3. A compelling central character. Liz Cheney, with her steely resolve and understated intensity, is hard to look away from, especially when you know the backstory of the committee’s vice chairwoman: her conservative views and voting record, how the Wyoming Republican has been drummed out of her leadership role, and the very real possibility that her political career will end as a result of what she’s doing.
“She is breathtakingly different and is the person driving this whole operation in a totally unexpected way,” Bettag said. “She has become the embodiment of the notion that the sworn allegiance to the Constitution comes before politics.”
As Cheney recently told Peter Baker of the New York Times, “I believe this is the most important thing I’ve ever done professionally, and maybe the most important thing I ever do.”
The clarity and moral force behind that sentiment comes across in her demeanor, and whatever you think of her politics, it’s admirable.
There are plenty of other interesting characters — Trump lawyer Pat Cipollone, with his matter-of-fact tone and devastating answers; or the young Capitol police officer, Caroline Edwards, who stirred emotions as she recounted the chaotic scene at the Capitol and “slipping in people’s blood.”
But it’s Cheney, undoubtedly, who is the heart and soul of the hearings. And news coverage — never averse to drama and personality — has reacted accordingly.
Chris Stirewalt lost his job at Fox News. But he knows he was right.
4. “Dumb luck.” That’s how Bettag characterizes the simple fact that the other major news story of recent months — the heartbreaking spate of deadly mass shootings in Highland Park, Uvalde, Buffalo and elsewhere — have not occurred on the same dates as the hearings themselves. (Two were in May, before the hearings began; the Highland Park tragedy was on the Fourth of July.)
As a result, with very few exceptions, the three broadcast networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — have led their half-hour evening newscasts with what happened at each of the eight hearings and often given them unusually big chunks of time.
Meanwhile, the intense interest by news consumers in the Russian invasion of Ukraine had waned somewhat. And so, other than a heat wave and a new coronavirus variant on the rise, there wasn’t all that much to compete with the hearings as a news story.
The news gods thus smiled upon the hearings and cleared a path for them to dominate. And that they certainly have done. | 2022-07-22T17:54:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Four reasons the Jan. 6 hearings have conquered the news cycle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/22/jan6-hearings-news-cycle-media/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/22/jan6-hearings-news-cycle-media/ |
Numerous records in the Plains date back to the U.S. Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
A farmer’s son wipes off dust from his face in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, in April 1936. (Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)
A record-shattering heat wave in Europe brought readings topping 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the event, and five countries — Wales, England, Ireland, Scotland and Germany — set new all-time national heat records. In the United States, an even hotter bout of heat has been baking the Great Plains, with temperatures reaching 115 degrees in Oklahoma and Texas.
But while cities like Dallas, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Wichita are anticipated to have triple-digit highs essentially until further notice — with heat advisories blanketing the nation’s heartland — there’s a stand out difference in the U.S. event: In the Plains, where much of the heat was concentrated, no state records have been broken so far, while the European heat waves set all-time records. In fact, even the hottest U.S. locations stayed 5 degrees shy of all-time state record temperatures largely set during a multiyear drought more than eight decades ago.
It’s well-known that greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere, helping tip the scales toward exceptional heat events. Climate change is also contributing to an uptick in flooding, stronger hurricanes and more prolonged droughts.
But even in an era marked by the effects of climate change, it’s been so far seemingly difficult to set new all-time records across the U.S. Plains.
When the U.S. set the most temperature records
If you glance at long-standing records across the Plains, something becomes apparent pretty quickly: A lot of the extant records date back to the 1930s — and, despite decades of warming, they haven’t been surpassed since.
Oklahoma: Altus, Okla., hit 120 degrees on Aug. 12, 1936.
Kansas: Alton, Kansas, hit 121 degrees on July 24, 1936.
Nebraska: Minden, Neb., spiked to 118 degrees on July 24, 1936.
South Dakota: Fort Pierre, S.D., made it to 120 degrees on July 15, 2006.
North Dakota: Steele, N.D., jumped to 121 degrees on July 6, 1936.
Minnesota: Beardsley, Minn., got to 115 degrees on July 29, 1917.
Wisconsin: Wisconsin Dells, Wis., logged a 114 degree reading on July 13, 1936.
Iowa: Keokuk, Iowa, climbed to 118 degrees on July 20, 1934.
In fact, 23 states and the District of Columbia are still holding onto their all-time records set back in the 1930s.
I guess not everything is bigger in TX! Surprise - the all time high of 120 degrees for the state of WA is the SAME as the Lone Star State! What's the hottest temerature your state has ever reached? @foxweather pic.twitter.com/kA4KLhr9us
What was the Dust Bowl?
So what was going on in the 30s? Something called the Dust Bowl — a years long drought punctuated by sprawling dust storms that transformed parts of the Plains into a wasteland.
A few Oklahoma locations flirted with 115° this afternoon. The all-time OK record high temperature goes all the way back to the Dust Bowl era (1930s) when it hit 120° twice pic.twitter.com/CBicolwoO1
— Bill Karins (@BillKarins) July 19, 2022
Hottest day is Tuesday for Oklahoma City at 108°F 📈 and that's not even a record. Ouch.
The daily record is 109°F from Dust Bowl in 1936.
111°F to 113°F maximum in KS/OK/TX 🌡 pic.twitter.com/wEk7OpUyv3
The lack of moisture meant the air had a low specific heat capacity; in other words, it didn’t require much thermal energy to heat up, and could cool down quickly at night. That allowed temperatures to soar to inconceivable levels — hence the numerous states that made it to 120 degrees during the Dust Bowl.
Officially, the Dust Bowl spanned from 1930 to 1939, but it peaked in 1936 — the year 13 states recorded their all-time record highs. (The hot temperatures more efficiently evaporated what little moisture remained in the soil, desiccating the landscape even more and reinforcing the process).
Why the Dust Bowl doesn’t disprove climate change
Since the event, the United States has warmed about a degree and a half due to human-induced climate change — but the Dust Bowl remains a favorite anecdote for some who deny climate science.
Steve Milloy, an outspoken opponent of climate scientist and former member of President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, frequently cites Dust Bowl-era observations in efforts to undermine recent climate warming.
“July 20, 2022 was hot in the US for sure. But not nearly as hot as July 20, 1934,” he tweeted on Tuesday, the same day that both Mangum, Okla. and Wichita Falls, Tex. hit 115 degrees.
Atmospheric scientist, including many PhD researchers who have published peer-reviewed studies, assert that comparing the events is like comparing apples to oranges.
“For me, the main issue with the ’1930s were hot’ meme is that a global perspective shows that the very hot part of the planet was quite small,” wrote Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M, in an email. He shared a plot of temperature anomalies during 1936, noting the greatest departure from average was localized only to the Plains and the Canadian Prairie.
“I think the warmth of the very small region in the middle of the U.S. in the 1930s (mainly 1936) is mainly just random climate variability, but enhanced by farming practices that aridified the region,” he wrote.
The Earth’s atmosphere is irrefutably warming; all seven of the top seven hottest years on record have occurred since 2015, though reliable global records date back to the 1880s. Last year was the warmest on record for a fifth of Earth’s land surface.
The U.K. Met Office noted that the recently-concluded historic heat wave in Europe may have been made 10 times more likely thanks to the effects of climate change. The intensity, duration and impact of heat waves is growing due to the effects of human-induced climate change — and a spate of hot, dry weather that occurred back in the 1930s doesn’t change that. | 2022-07-22T18:11:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the 1930s Dust Bowl made the Plains hotter than this week's heat wave - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/22/climate-change-dustbowl-heat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/22/climate-change-dustbowl-heat/ |
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