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This image from a video shows a monkey loitering around a home in Yamaguchi, western Japan, Saturday, July 23, 2022. People in the southwestern Japanese city have come under attack from monkeys that are trying to snatch babies, biting and clawing at flesh, and sneaking into nursery schools. (Anonymous via AP) (Uncredited/Anonymous) | 2022-07-27T09:50:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Japanese city alarmed by biting, clawing, attacking monkeys - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japanese-city-alarmed-by-biting-clawing-attacking-monkeys/2022/07/27/a9e9ddec-0d8c-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japanese-city-alarmed-by-biting-clawing-attacking-monkeys/2022/07/27/a9e9ddec-0d8c-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), accompanied by female House Democrats, speaks at an event ahead of a House vote on the Women's Health Protection Act and the Ensuring Women's Right to Reproductive Freedom Act at the Capitol on July 15. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), angered by the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, laid out his vision for a sweeping Democratic campaign pitch.
“We are the party of freedom,” he tweeted two weeks after the decision. “Freedom to make your own health-care choices. Freedom from your fear of gun violence. Freedom to have your vote counted. Our message is our values. Freedom for all.”
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California aired an ad in Florida on July 4 intended to needle that state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — both men are considered possible presidential contenders in 2024 — that warned, “Freedom, it’s under attack in your state.”
Hours before the House voted to codify same-sex marriage into federal law last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tweeted: “Democrats FIGHT FOR your freedom!”
In the month since the Supreme Court struck down federal abortion rights, Democrats are gravitating toward a freedom-focused message more commonly used as a rallying cry by Republicans. After years of ceding to the right an ideal central to the nation’s identity, Democrats now see an opening to establish their own narrative around personal freedoms. National Democratic strategists are encouraging their candidates to use the Roe decision as a catalyst to frame all issues facing Americans — from economic woes to health care to voting rights — as threats to their freedoms.
“I don’t think you can just run around and say ‘freedom’ as much as possible. … We need a story to tell about the radical extremism of MAGA Republicans and freedom is a great way to tell that story,” Pfeiffer said in an interview. “Republicans view freedom as almost entirely about your ability to buy an assault rifle. Democrats think it means you should have the ability to make decisions about your own body, who you marry and what books you read, and I think we have the high ground in that debate.”
For decades, Republicans have promoted themselves as the standard bearers of American freedom and personal liberty. Their version of it gained renewed prominence during the 2010 rise of the tea party movement, with its “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and tricorn hats. In 2015, a group of far-right Republican members of Congress dubbed themselves the “Freedom Caucus.” The political brand was amplified by former president Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. This summer, Trump has been holding rallies around the country on his “American Freedom Tour” where he takes the stage — as he has for most of his political career — to Lee Greenwood singing: “’Cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal communications consultant, said Democrats can’t politically afford to give away the concept. In her research, she’s found that “freedom” is the top value Americans associate with this country across race, gender and geographic lines.
She pointed to liberal causes over the last half-century that have received public support when framed as protecting or enhancing freedoms, pointing to the Freedom Riders during the 1960s civil rights movement and the “freedom to marry” slogan for same-sex marriage campaigns in the last decade.
“The overarching message is to say … Trump Republicans want to take away freedoms from all who do not work and live and look like them,” Shenker-Osorio said. “They’ve coming for our freedoms from the most basic notion that we decide who represents us to what happens in our bodies and our relationships to our ability to send kids to school and know they will come back home to us safe.”
Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Republican politicians railed against public health restrictions such as business and school closures and mask mandates as examples of Democrats infringing on individuals’ freedoms. Many Republicans then turned their attention to what they framed as parental rights, decrying critical race theory, a term broadly applied to learning about the nation’s history of systemic racism, and the discussion of sexual or gender identity in schools.
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a rising star in the Democratic Party, gained national attention for a viral speech in April rebuking a GOP colleague who accused her of being a “groomer,” a term used to describe people who sexually target children.
“Finally,” McMorrow said in an interview, referencing the Democrats’ embrace of freedom as a political talking point. “For too long Democrats have ceded the ideas of freedom, family, community … the idea of freedom is under attack right now. There’s no denying that the Republican playbook is to tell you what to read, who to love, what you can or can’t do with your body. … I think we absolutely should, we should define what freedom is and take it back.”
Dems fume at Disney’s Hulu for blocking ads on abortion, guns
Even as Democrats increase their use of the word “freedom” in their political messaging, it remains a top talking point for Republicans. In a campaign speech in Arizona last week, former vice president Mike Pence said “freedom” seven times, at one point summing up his remarks saying, “Truthfully, it really is about freedom.” To date, Republicans have talked more about freedom in their campaign messaging. Democratic ads mentioning freedom have aired 28,747 times compared with Republican ads about freedom that have aired 74,067 times, according to an analysis by AdImpact. But since the leak of the draft Roe opinion in May, there’s been a significant uptick in Democrats using “freedom” in their ads, with the highest number of them appearing in the two weeks after the Roe decision, according to the data.
Among them is Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) who is facing a tough reelection fight. She released an ad after the Roe decision promising to protect “our personal freedoms.”
The freedom-focused message is also being echoed by President Biden. At a July Fourth barbecue at the White House, he said, “In recent days, there’s been reason to think that this country is moving backward, that freedom is being reduced, that rights we assumed were protected are no longer.”
Democratic candidates are increasingly using “freedom” to differentiate themselves from their GOP opponents. Joe Cunningham, a former South Carolina congressman and Democratic nominee for governor, said in an interview that freedom is “on the ballot this coming November.”
“We want our freedoms and liberties. We all want the freedom to control our own bodies. We want our veterans to have freedom, when they’ve given so much for our country. We’re going to go across this state with a megaphone, making sure that people know exactly what the governor has done, the freedoms he’s prevented and freedoms he’s taking away,” he said, referring to Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, who signed a law restricting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy that went into effect after Roe was struck down.
In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is running for governor against Doug Mastriano, a far-right Republican who supports a total ban on abortion without exception and continues to spread the falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen.
“He’s coming for our freedoms,” Shapiro said in a recent tweet, “and your vote is how we stop him.”
After the House voted on codifying same-sex marriage and then on making contraception access a right, Democrat Cheri Beasley, who is running for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, blasted her opponent, GOP Rep. Ted Budd, for opposing both. In a statement, she warned that Budd “will stop at nothing to strip North Carolinians of our freedoms.”
Anu Narayanswamy, David Weigel and Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report. | 2022-07-27T10:28:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Eric Swalwell, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats increasingly use the word 'freedom' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/democrats-roe-freedom/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/democrats-roe-freedom/ |
A watchdog lied to get radioactive materials. Terrorists could, too.
A sign warns of radioactive materials at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, N.Y. (Seth Wenig/AP)
Want to make a dirty bomb?
Need radioactive materials, but don’t have the required license?
Don’t worry, maybe you too can fake a document and get the restricted supplies needed for your project.
That’s the scary lesson from congressional watchdog investigators who were able to use bogus documents — twice — to purchase radioactive goods because of weak protections.
The issue is defined in the first line of a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report: “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) current system for verifying licenses does not adequately protect against the purchase of high-risk radioactive materials using a fraudulent license.”
The GAO created phony companies and forged documents to purchase the radioactive supplies from U.S. vendors.
Unlike some folks who could do the same thing for nefarious purposes, the investigators “refused to accept shipment at the point of delivery,” the GAO said, “ensuring that the material was safely and securely returned to the sender.”
That’s good to know, but the next set of forgers might not be so civic-minded.
There have been 34 specific instances of sabotage, theft and vandalism of dangerous radioactive materials since 1990, NRC officials told the GAO, according to the office’s latest report on NRC safety. FBI officials had no comment. There were 4,512 nuclear materials events, including lost or stolen radioactive materials, radioactive leaks, and radiation overexposures from 2011 through 2020, according to the NRC.
It takes only one case to cause havoc — there’s not only the immediate potential consequences of death and injury, but also the longer-term socioeconomic effects, including public fear, disruption and decontamination, that the NRC does not sufficiently consider, according to the report.
A statement by the NRC said the commission is working on the issues identified by the GAO, including “immediately communicating with the manufacturers of these radioactive sources to ensure they are vigilant with sales, especially for new customers or unusual activities.” The NRC also is expediting regulations to tighten license verification, “including consideration of multi-factor authentication,” another GAO recommendation.
The GAO acknowledged that the NRC is strengthening its licensing procedures but said “current gaps will remain unaddressed until at least the end of 2023,” in the meantime risking “the exploitation of those vulnerabilities by a bad actor.”
Radioactive materials have numerous beneficial and legal uses in health care, research and industry, but “in the hands of terrorists,” the GAO warned, “even a small amount could be used to construct a radiological dispersal device, also known as a dirty bomb.”
The NRC requires a license to possess radioactive materials, “but the paper licenses it issues can be altered and used to make illicit purchases of radioactive materials,” the GAO found.
The agency’s protections simply are not strong enough. Its “continued reliance on paper-based licensing is problematic,” the GAO said, pointing to a relic of the pre-digital age.
“GAO’s shell companies were successful in acquiring the material because they are not subjected to more stringent controls required for purchases of larger quantities of material,” the report said. “GAO’s investigation demonstrates that the integrity of NRC’s current license verification processes can be compromised.”
That’s good news for terrorists — foreign or domestic.
This is no idle threat.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who requested the GAO investigation, pointed to the terrorism threat posed by White racist extremists, saying, “This is a clear national security issue that the federal government must remedy.”
The need for a remedy was demonstrated in 2009 when police found radioactive materials that could be used for a dirty bomb in the Belfast, Maine, home of James G. Cummings, described by investigators as a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. Citing a WikiLeaks report, the Bangor Daily News said authorities found literature on building a bomb and a membership application for a neo-Nazi organization. Cummings was fatally shot by his wife, who said he had abused her for years.
In 2021, Jared Trent Atkins was sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing radioactive material that he planned to release in a mall in Scottsdale, Ariz. He pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. “Atkins planned to die by suicide via irradiation, knowing he would harm anyone who tried to stop or arrest him,” a Justice Department statement said.
The GAO focused on a “category 3 quantity of radioactive material.” It is not as dangerous as categories 1 and 2, which have more stringent security requirements, but more hazardous than categories 4 and 5.
The NRC told the GAO that “the consequences stemming from the detonation of a dirty bomb using category 3 radioactive materials would be insufficient to require issuing immediately effective orders” to verify licenses by phone, for example.
The GAO disagreed, saying category 3 materials could “cause hundreds of deaths from evacuations and billions of dollars of socioeconomic effects.” Such socioeconomic effects are illustrated by the $156 million in cleanup and other costs following a 2019 University of Washington accident “involving about 1 curie of cesium-137 — which is less than a category 3 quantity,” the report noted.
Investigators succeeded in beating the NRC’s current precautions, the report said, “because paper licenses can be easily altered. As a result, bad actors could alter or forge valid licenses, bypass current NRC controls, and obtain dangerous quantities of radioactive material.” | 2022-07-27T10:28:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Weak safeguards leave openings for terrorists to get radioactive 'dirty bomb' materials, GAO warns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/gao-nrc-radioactive-materials-report/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/gao-nrc-radioactive-materials-report/ |
Retired barber in Minn. cuts hair for donations to feed the poor in South Africa
In the five years he’s been cutting hair free, Tom Gorzycki has raised more than $10,000 for Arm In Arm in Africa
Tom Gorzycki, 87, has been a barber for more than 70 years. He set up a makeshift barbershop in the basement of his senior living co-op, and he donates all proceeds from his services to Arm in Arm in Africa. (Kiya Edwards)
Tom Gorzycki closed his Minnesota barbershop 23 years ago, but he’s still cutting hair.
Gorzycki, 87, set up a makeshift salon in the basement of his senior living co-op five years ago. He offers free haircuts to residents on Tuesday mornings — with a catch: They are encouraged to contribute what they can to a cause that’s close to Gorzycki’s heart.
“Whatever amount you want to put in the jar is fine by me,” he tells his clients, all of whom are male residents in his community, Applewood Pointe in Minnetonka, Minn.
All donations go to Arm in Arm in Africa — a Minnesota-based organization that Gorzycki and his wife, Mary, have volunteered with for several years. The nonprofit supports poor communities in South Africa by providing food, health care and educational opportunities.
In the five years that he’s been cutting hair free, Gorzycki has raised more than $10,000 for Arm in Arm in Africa.
“I’m gratified by what I do to feed my friends in South Africa,” he said.
Barbering has been Gorzycki’s life for seven decades. He learned how to cut hair when he joined the U.S. Navy in 1952. While on a Navy ship, Gorzycki started watching the barber on board do his job. He was intrigued.
“I would help, and through trial and error, I got pretty good at it,” said Gorzycki, who fought in the Korean War.
He soon became the ship’s barber, and he also ran the ship store, which sold toiletries, cigarettes and confections to military members.
After he left the service in 1956, Gorzycki enrolled in barber school in Minneapolis and subsequently opened a salon called Tom’s Barbershop. From then on, he was known as “Tom the barber.”
“I had my own shop for 36 years,” he said. “It was a neighborhood shop, so I got to know the people. We got to be friends.”
In many cases, he said, he gave kids their first haircut and then, 20 years later, he cut their hair on their wedding day. Watching his clients grow up was his favorite part of the job.
“I love reminiscing now,” Gorzycki said.
In his retirement, he and his wife focused on volunteer efforts to fill their time. Through their church, they learned about Arm in Arm in Africa — which operates in three different areas of South Africa — and they were eager to get involved.
“We hit the ground running,” Gorzycki said.
The couple visited South Africa twice with the organization — in 2012 and 2015 — for three-week volunteering stints in which they helped organize food distributions and other initiatives.
“We would go in there and greet them and spend time just being there with them,” Gorzycki said.
“We were just so impressed with the people, the friendliness, the acceptance,” he added. “We’re all family now.”
What struck Gorzycki most about the South Africans he met, he said, is that “they are the most generous with what little they have.”
More than once, he witnessed people sharing their allotment of food with others who needed it more.
“They are all poor, and yet they are willing to let go of it so somebody else can have it,” said Gorzycki, who said he also grew up in poverty.
His mother, he said, taught him to support others whenever possible.
“I never thought of it at the time, but it was my mother’s influence that instilled me with this capacity to reach out and give,” he said, adding that he also volunteers weekly at the local Veterans Affairs hospital — which he has been doing for nearly two decades. “She was very generous.”
Arm in Arm in Africa is grateful for Gorzycki’s continuous contributions — and touched by his unwavering commitment to the cause, said Pat Dawson, executive director of the organization.
“He has made a huge difference in our development,” Dawson said. “Tom’s personal giving goes far beyond his barbershop giving.”
“Tom is just such a remarkably humble and inspiring guy,” he continued. “He’s been incredibly generous and a model of the kind of person we’d love 10,000 of in our organization.”
Although he’s not traveling to South Africa any more, Gorzycki said he plans to continue supporting the cause he cares deeply about while doing what he loves: cutting hair, helping others and making friends in the process.
John Richards, 71, is a regular client at the basement barbershop, where Gorzycki has set up a chair, a mirror and a small station with his tools as well as a framed photo of South African children and a jar for donations. Richards comes in for a haircut every few weeks and always leaves a $20 bill.
“You get a great world-class haircut from a world-class barber, and you get to help feed people in Africa,” Richards said. “It’s a win-win for everyone.”
“It’s a very popular service,” he added. “Everyone knows his hours. Even people who do not need haircuts will go down there to socialize with everybody.”
Gorzycki offers haircuts every Tuesday between 10 and 11:30 a.m. The same residents routinely appear for a fresh cut, though some new ones trickle in from time to time.
As far as numbers go, “I’ve had anywhere from one to nine,” said Gorzycki, who has six children, four stepchildren, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
He no longer cuts women’s hair, he explained, since it can be more complicated to trim and style.
“Senior men haircuts are easier, because a lot of us don’t have a lot of hair left,” he said with a laugh.
Gorzycki has no plans to halt his haircutting efforts. His basement barbershop, he said, keeps him busy and fulfilled.
“As long as I still have a steady hand, I’ll keep going,” Gorzycki said. | 2022-07-27T10:50:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Retired barber Tom Gorzycki cuts hair to feed the poor in South Africa - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/27/free-haircut-tom-gorzycki-africa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/07/27/free-haircut-tom-gorzycki-africa/ |
Known for her aggressive Twitter comments and brusque treatment of the media, the Florida governor’s press secretary has used taunts to solidify a tough image
(Washington Post illustration; Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images via AP; Tristan Wheelock/BloombergiStock)
When Florida Republicans held their annual conference last week, party leaders decided to bar a large swath of the press corps from the event. While the hosts declined to discuss their reasoning, one unelected official applauded it.
“My message to [journalists] is to try crying about it,” tweeted Christina Pushaw, whose job as spokeswoman for Gov. Ron DeSantis is to communicate with reporters. “Then go to kickboxing and have a margarita.”
The derisive tone was typical of Pushaw, 31, a state employee who earns $120,000 a year. In the 14 months since joining DeSantis’s staff, she has transformed the typically buttoned-down role of gubernatorial press secretary into something like a running public brawl — with Twitter as her blunt-force weapon. Her usual targets: Democrats, the news media and anyone else she deems insufficiently supportive of DeSantis’s agenda and her own conservative politics.
She has knocked The Washington Post as “the Pravda of DC,” implied that Chelsea Clinton is “a grifter,” and referred to President Biden as “a seemingly senile 79-year-old aspiring dictator.” She invoked a notorious antisemitic trope about the Jewish Rothschild family while criticizing pandemic-related restrictions in November. (She deleted that tweet after describing it as “an attempt at sarcasm.”) In January, she questioned whether a neo-Nazi demonstration in Orlando was organized by Democratic staffers. (She walked that one back, too.)
Pushaw’s attacks on national news organizations and reporters can not only be blistering (“slobbering regime sycophants”), but they can also run on for hundreds of tweets and retweets — once prompting Twitter to suspend her account temporarily for “abusive” behavior.
She has also been credited — or blamed — for helping make the incendiary term “groomer” mainstream in GOP circles. In early March, she used the word, once reserved to describe pedophile behavior, to characterize anyone who opposed a DeSantis-favored bill restricting discussions of sexual orientation and gender in schools. “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” she tweeted.
While conspiratorial QAnon followers had previously used the term “groomer” to tar their enemies, its use took off among conservative politicians and pundits after Pushaw’s tweet, and has thereafter been widely used to demonize Democrats and educators who discussed sexuality or gender identity with young children.
None of Pushaw’s public dust-ups seems to have ruffled her boss, DeSantis, who is widely considered a leading contender to challenge former president Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination. On occasion, he has defended Pushaw, who has loyally promoted his agenda, which has included a string of legislative victories on culture-war issues, such as passage of the gender-discussion bill and a ban on teaching critical race theory.
Pushaw not only amplifies DeSantis’s pugnacious public posture, she sometimes takes it further. When the archbishop of Miami rebuked DeSantis in February for a policy affecting shelters for migrant children, Pushaw responded on Twitter: “Lying is a sin.” She tweeted this over a photo of the archbishop and his comment about the shelter policy.
She declined an interview request and suggested to her Twitter followers that The Post was trying to blackmail her by writing this profile, although she ultimately offered limited cooperation with the reporter.
Some think Pushaw’s aggressive persona is strategic, acting as a kind of heat shield for DeSantis. “She’s the Dennis Rodman of Florida politics,” said Peter Schorsch, the publisher of FloridaPolitics.com, referring to the NBA player who taunted his opponents to throw them off their game.
Perhaps predictably, Pushaw has attracted plenty of attention. Since joining DeSantis, her Twitter following has grown more than tenfold, to nearly 177,000 as of this week. That’s a fraction of the 2-million-plus followers that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and DeSantis himself each command, but far more than any other gubernatorial press secretary.
At the same time, Pushaw herself has often become the news, instead of merely being a mouthpiece for the state’s top elected official. Conservative media outlets, in particular, like to highlight her commentary. “DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw blasts CNN anchor for his hit on Florida COVID-19 policy,” read a Fox News headline last month.
Some political observers in Florida think Pushaw’s most important contribution to DeSantis’s team may be in strengthening his connections to stars of the online right — becoming his “right wing whisperer,” as Politico framed it. Earlier this year — Jan. 6 to be exact — she reportedly helped organize a dinner with DeSantis at the governor’s mansion and a night of drinks for nine prominent conservative social media commentators from Florida. The guest list, according to Politico, included several pundits who have downplayed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and promoted the anti-vaccine movement.
Much of the daily output from Pushaw’s office looks like that of any other governor’s press shop. There are the banal news releases about quarterly tourism reports and appointments to the marine fisheries commission. Pushaw also helps stage DeSantis’s news conferences and ceremonial appearances, keeping the spotlight on the boss.
Before Pushaw arrived, Florida reporters say DeSantis regularly replicated Trump’s habit of browbeating the news media. But her hiring signaled a change in tone, from relatively cordial to routinely caustic, they said. She was a surprising choice in any case, considering she had only been working in U.S. politics for a few years as part of a post-collegiate career that also included various jobs in Eastern Europe.
“This governor has used his communications team more like a campaign-style operation than a public-information operation,” said Mary Ellen Klas, a reporter for the Miami Herald who has covered six Florida governors. “They view reporters as their enemies. They are more antagonistic to reporters just by default, and often without cause.”
She went on another tear in April after The Post published a story about a popular right-wing Twitter account called Libs of TikTok. Pushaw tweeted, retweeted and quote-tweeted about the article dozens of times over the next two days, aiming several broadsides at the story’s author.
Pushaw grew up in Malibu, the famed beach community near Los Angeles that she has described as “one of the bluest areas in the country.” She graduated from the University of Southern California in 2012 after briefly studying in Russia. After graduation, she moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, and worked as an academic adviser, consultant and editor. She earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University’s international relations program in 2017.
After graduating from Hopkins, Pushaw appears to have taken on various jobs in two countries.
Her LinkedIn page indicates she worked as a “donor communications manager” for a nonprofit in Washington from mid-2017 to mid-2019. Citing a copy of Pushaw’s résumé, the Tampa Bay Times reported that the organization was Stand Together, a philanthropy funded by conservative megadonor Charles Koch. According to the Times, she said the highlights of her time there included working on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the passage of federal tax cuts in late 2017.
During these years, Pushaw returned periodically to Georgia to advocate for Mikheil Saakashvili, the country’s then-exiled (and now imprisoned) former president, whom she has described as her onetime “boss” and “political inspiration.” She also provided campaign advice to opposition political parties in Georgia, according to her LinkedIn page, and later ran a nongovernmental organization that gave seminars about democracy and civil society to young Georgians.
According to her attorney, Pushaw — who received monetary compensation and a free apartment in Tbilisi — was notified by the Justice Department this year that she was likely required to register as a foreign agent under a federal disclosure law. Pushaw filed for the registration as soon as she was made aware, her attorney said.
Pushaw’s path took a new direction early last year when she wrote a freelance story about Rebekah Jones, a former Florida Department of Health data specialist who was fired and later charged with illegally accessing a government computer. The charge is still pending.
Jones drew national attention in 2020 after claiming the state had manipulated health data early in the pandemic. DeSantis has denied Jones’s allegations, and a state inspector general found insufficient evidence in May to support her accusation that state officials asked her to falsify or misrepresent coronavirus case rates. Jones is a Democratic candidate for the Florida congressional seat held by Republican Matt Gaetz.
“Jones’ story sounds impressive,” Pushaw wrote in the conservative journal Human Events in February 2021. “There’s just one problem: It’s not true,” She defended DeSantis, called Jones a “conspiracy theorist” and mentioned Jones’s previous brushes with the law.
Jones says Pushaw’s actions weren’t confined to print. That April, Jones was granted a temporary restraining order against Pushaw from a district court in Rockville, Md., near Jones’s home at the time. Though temporary orders are routinely granted without extensive review, Jones told The Post that Pushaw had “stalked, harassed and doxed me.” Pushaw has repeatedly denied these claims.
She eventually swore out a criminal complaint alleging that Pushaw had violated the temporary order and unsuccessfully sought a permanent one. The state attorney in Maryland ultimately declined to prosecute a criminal case, and a judge dismissed the action last August.
In the meantime, Pushaw came into DeSantis’s orbit. The Tampa Bay Times reported that Pushaw highlighted her piece on Jones when she applied for a job with the governor early last year. “If there are any openings on the governor’s comms team, I would love to throw my hat in the ring,” she wrote to officials.
In fact, the governor was in the midst of reshuffling his communications staff. In May, he appointed Pushaw as his press secretary.
Pushaw declined a request for an interview for this article. But before responding directly, she posted a screenshot of the reporter’s request on Twitter and asked her followers, “Do you guys think it will be a fair and balanced feature story, or a smear piece?”
In a follow-up response via email, she said The Post had waged “constant attacks” on DeSantis and refused further cooperation. “I do not believe that The Washington Post will tell ‘my’ side of the story,” she wrote.
She nevertheless later answered some questions, and offered to help The Post confirm “any claims about me that you want me to fact-check.” But when a reporter took her up on the offer, Pushaw changed her mind. She posted a screenshot of the request on Twitter and suggested it amounted to “blackmail.”
She also provided The Post with a list of a half-dozen people she said would offer favorable comments. Among those who responded was Garen Koocharian, a friend who has known Pushaw since she was an undergraduate. He called her “genuine … smart, warmhearted and generous” and “much more moderate than people give her credit to be.” Elisabed Sikharulidze, who briefly worked for Pushaw in Georgia, described her as “very friendly, very supportive” and “passionate” in her beliefs. | 2022-07-27T10:50:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who is Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/27/christina-pushaw-desantis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/07/27/christina-pushaw-desantis/ |
A body found in 1948 became an Australian obsession. Now, there’s an ID.
Professor Derek Abbott poses for a photograph, Adelaide, Australia, on July 27, 2022. The University of Adelaide professor says he's identified the so-called Somerton man as Victorian engineer Carl Webb, ending an enduring mystery. (Mark Brake/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
On Dec. 1, 1948, a man’s body was discovered lying against a wall at a beach in Adelaide, Australia. He was wearing a suit, and in his pockets were a pack of cigarettes, a box of matches, a train ticket and small slip of paper with a Persian phrase. The translation: “It is finished.”
An autopsy concluded the man did not die of natural causes. Yet for decades, investigators were stumped in determining exactly how he died and ended up on the beach. He also went unidentified, known only as the “Somerton man,” named for the beach where he was found.
Now, a pair of scientists say they have identified the man as 43-year-old Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker from Melbourne, marking a major breakthrough in one of Australia’s most vexing cold cases.
“He’s the most well-known John Doe … in Australia, the most well-known forensic case — and we solved it,” Colleen Fitzpatrick, a genetic genealogist and founder of Identifinders International, told The Washington Post.
Still unknown is how Webb died and how he arrived on the Somerton beach, Fitzpatrick said. But the identification will lead to other answers, she said.
Using DNA extracted from his hair, Fitzpatrick and Derek Abbott, a professor at the University of Adelaide, were able to narrow down the man’s identity using genetic genealogy, which has helped investigators in recent years identify crime suspects and victims in numerous cold cases.
Last May, the South Australia Police exhumed the Somerton man’s body so it could perform a DNA analysis of its own, but it declined to verify Fitzpatrick’s and Abbott’s findings this week, telling news outlets it would not comment until “results from the testing are received,” CNN reported. The South Australia Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post on Wednesday.
For some seven decades, the Somerton man and the mysterious circumstances of his death have been a source of intense speculation. The unsolved case has been the subject of documentaries and books, as amateur sleuths have poured over the details and raised theories.
“For more than 70 years people have speculated who this man was and how he died,” said Vickie Chapman, who served as South Australia Attorney General when the man’s body was exhumed last year. “It’s [a] story that has captured the imagination of people across the state, and, indeed, across the world."
An autopsy performed after the man’s death determined that he did not die of natural causes, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported. It noted that his stomach was congested with blood and that he died of heart failure, possibly due to poisoning — yet no poison was found in his system.
After opening an investigation, police found a suitcase at a nearby train station that they linked to the man. Aside from some clothing with torn-off labels, it contained a tie with the name “T. Keane” written on it, the ABC reported. Officers also found stenciling equipment.
Police also began studying the slip of paper with the Persian phrase “tamám shud,” meaning “finished” or “it is ended.” Investigators learned the words could found at the end of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” a book of Persian poetry.
Months later, a man came forward saying that he had discovered a copy of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” that he believed had been tossed into his car around the time unidentified man was found, the ABC reported. The ending had been torn from the book, an investigator told the ABC. Also on the back of the book were two phone numbers and a series of scribbled letters thought to be some kind of code.
The rise of consumer genetic tests has provided law enforcement with new tools that have the potential to break open cold cases. (Video: Daron Taylor, Taylor Turner/The Washington Post)
The odd lettering in the book led to speculation that the man was a spy, especially as the Cold War was intensifying. There was also speculation that the man had been a ballet dancer because of his muscular calves.
Now, Fitzpatrick and Abbott have determined that the man was rather an engineer named Webb. They say he was born in Footscray, Victoria, on Nov. 16, 1905, to Richard August Webb and Eliza Amelia Morris Grace and lived in Melbourne around the time of his death.
They also determined that he had a brother-in-law named Thomas Keane, who lived a 20-minute drive away, Abbott told the ABC.
Although Keane is presumably long dead, the researchers say Webb does have living relatives, though none who remember him. Abbott told the ABC he’s spoken to some of those relatives, but they don’t even have photographs.
“I’m hoping, as his name gets out there, there will be somebody that will have an old photo album in a garden shed somewhere,” he said. | 2022-07-27T10:58:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Somerton man’ identified 70 years after his body found in Australia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/somerton-man-identified-webb/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/somerton-man-identified-webb/ |
The city of São Felix do Xingu, in Brazil's Pará state, has been marked by extraordinary deforestation, violence and territorial disputes.
The god of São Félix
He’s been called a deforester and killer. Now he’s called mayor.
Story by Terrence McCoy
Cecília do Lago
Photos and videos by Rafael Vilela
Terrence McCoy, who covers Brazil for The Washington Post, visited a remote, illegally built town within Indigenous territory for this story.
SÃO FÉLIX DO XINGU, Brazil — Word was spreading across the Indigenous territory: The land invaders were preparing to attack. Remote villagers said they were surrounded by armed horsemen. Authorities warned of violence. A neighboring tribe said that “blood could be spilled at any moment.” And in one bitterly disputed stretch, a slight man stood before a wooden house, fearing that such a moment had arrived.
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Kawore Parakanã, a leader of the Parakanã people, had ventured miles into the jungle in May with three warriors to track the invasions that have made this Indigenous land in Pará state one of the Amazon’s most deforested. Up ahead lay an illegal clearing. Beyond it was a wooden shack. Outside the dwelling, a chain saw coughed awake.
“Kawore,” one of the warriors said, “someone is home.”
They considered their options. One was to fight, to take back the land. But they had traveled unarmed, and Kawore believed they’d be killed. Another was to seek help — but from whom? He couldn’t go to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who says restrictions within Indigenous territory have impeded the country’s economic development. He couldn’t go to the surrounding communities, populated by newcomers who eye his territory with avarice.
But most of all, he couldn’t go to the mayor, one of the most powerful and feared men in the Amazon, known by some as “the god of São Félix.”
It’s not just that Mayor João Cleber Torres had aligned himself with the land grabbers. It’s that he has been described — by federal attorneys, police, news reporters, government-funded researchers and a federal judge — as one himself.
Torres moved to São Félix do Xingu in 1981, when it was little more than dense forest. He is then alleged to have built what federal attorneys described in an internal memo as a large criminal organization that butchered the jungle — first extracting its precious wood, then stealing the land and selling it to be cleared for pasture. Torres, attorneys wrote in the memo, orchestrated “dozens of homicides,” assembled a network of 100 gunslingers, and violently seized territory from the weak and the isolated, including in this very Indigenous territory.
Police reports show that he was investigated for homicide in 2002. His criminal file links him to two cases of attempted homicide in 2003 and 2005. Records indicate that he has been charged with illegal deforestation, fined more than $2.4 million for deforestation and accused by federal attorneys, in 2016, of subjecting farmworkers to slavery-like conditions.
The catchphrase that one Brazilian journalist and residents attribute to him: “Either you sell the land to me, or I’ll buy it from your widow.”
Torres, 61, has never been convicted of any crime. He said he opposes illegal deforestation and has always followed environmental laws. He dismissed all allegations of wrongdoing as unproven and said publishing them would potentially be a “criminal act against my honor.”
“In our country, we have a well-structured, well-designed justice system, based on fundamental juridical principles and guided by international human rights,” Torres said in a statement. “No one else is authorized to act as the judiciary, issuing moral convictions against my name, as is happening here, gravely wounding our justice system and my fundamental rights.”
An aerial view of a clearing opened by Erasmino Ferreira do Santos, a non-Indigenous settler who resides inside Apyterewa Indigenous Territory near São Félix do Xingu in Brazil's Pará state, as seen on May 25.
Kawore Parakanã, 33, a leader of the Parakanã people who live in the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory.
Erasmino Ferreira do Santos, 71, a settler in the Apyterewa territory.
TOP: An aerial view of a clearing opened by Erasmino Ferreira do Santos, a non-Indigenous settler who resides inside Apyterewa Indigenous Territory near São Félix do Xingu in Brazil's Pará state, as seen on May 25. LEFT: Kawore Parakanã, 33, a leader of the Parakanã people who live in the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory. RIGHT: Erasmino Ferreira do Santos, 71, a settler in the Apyterewa territory.
In a region where people amass wealth and power through deforestation, and where the local leaders charged with enforcing environmental laws are often the very people alleged to have broken them, Torres is just one of many Amazon officeholders accused of environmental misdeeds. But few command a city as vast or ecologically threatened as São Félix, which routinely posts some of Brazil’s highest deforestation and carbon emission rates.
One of its most endangered forests belongs to the Parakanã in the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, where Kawore stood watching the wooden house.
The only thing he could do, he decided, was flee. It was too dangerous to confront the invader. He also worried about antagonizing Torres. In January, three environmentalists had been killed along a forested patch of the Xingu River that property records show had been claimed by the mayor’s brother. The crime remains unsolved. The Torres brothers have denied involvement, but that hadn’t quieted the suspicions in the community.
Kawore turned to leave. He wouldn’t go to the wooden house. He wouldn’t meet the man who lived there, Erasmino Ferreira do Santos, 71. He wouldn’t hear Ferreira say how he’d come to this land, hacked down the forest to graze cattle and felt no remorse. The settler knew the mayor was on his side.
“The best person,” Ferreira said. “He helps us so much.”
Awapinima Parakanã walks on the Parakanã village trail that passes through several areas of deforestation caused by non-Indigenous occupants of the Apyterewa territory.
‘Why do people vote for them?’
In the Amazon, there is little political cost to destroying the forest. Here, a vice mayor in Mato Grosso is cited three times for deforestation and is reelected the next year. A mayor in Amazonas is arrested and accused by federal police of participating in a protest that destroyed an environmental law enforcement base — and stays in office. The “King of Gold Mining,” as he was dubbed by a national magazine, is sentenced to nearly five years for illegal deforestation — but coasts to reelection as a mayor in Pará.
Such cases are not rare.
A Washington Post analysis of thousands of federal infractions and candidate data in the Amazon has found that accusations of environmental wrongdoing against members of the region’s political class are not an anomaly but a defining characteristic. In recent decades, as deforestation has pushed the biome toward what scientists warn could be its collapse, the very people accused of playing a role in that destruction have come to wield significant political power over it.
The Post found that those accused of wrongdoing by federal environmental law enforcement have pumped tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns in the past two decades and won public office more than 1,900 times. Taken together, the electoral victories and campaign financing have formed a parallel political system, law enforcement officials say, that has undermined attempts to safeguard a natural resource that scientists warn must be preserved to avert catastrophic climate change.
“It has reached such an absurd point that once, during an active investigation in Rorainópolis, in the south of Roraima, the mayor came to the police station with the people we were investigating and asked me to dismiss the case,” he said.
The Post analysis identified 1,189 officeholders over the past 20 years in the Amazon who have been cited for federal environmental infractions. Many won more than one election, and more than 3 in 4 were accused of deforestation or a deforestation-related offense. The examination, which analyzed all environmental infractions in federal databases and anyone who had held municipal, state or gubernatorial office, found that at least one-third of the politicians were cited for environmental abuse while they held office.
Because of data limitations, the findings are almost certainly an undercount.
Many infractions were for minor offenses and resulted in fines of a few thousand dollars. But dozens of elected officials had been fined more than $1 million each — sums assessed for more-serious wrongdoing. The Post found that nearly half of them had also been issued at least one federal embargo, a land-use restriction on illegally deforested or degraded areas. An additional 236 officeholders, The Post discovered, had not been individually accused of environmental wrongdoing but were owners of companies that had been.
The amount of money donated to Amazon political campaigns by people and companies that have been cited for environmental infractions is far more than previously known. More than 1,590 people and 717 companies cited for environmental wrongdoing made at least 5,546 contributions over the past two decades, amounting to nearly $37 million. (In 2015, Brazil prohibited campaign donations by companies.)
The names of the politicians and the cities they have governed provide a road map through the most deforested swaths of the Amazon. Many are within what’s known as the “arc of deforestation,” a section of more-intense deforestation along the forest’s southern sweep. Many cities in this arc — Novo Progresso, Feliz Natal, Cotriguaçu — have repeatedly elected officials accused of environmental wrongdoing.
Most municipalities in the region have sprung into existence in recent years, forged in the fires that razed the forest and populated by those who lit them. The architect of this development plan was Brazil’s military dictatorship, which, worried that the sparsely inhabited region would invite foreign invasions, conceived initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s to stitch the forest to the rest of the country. The national slogan: “Integrate to not surrender.”
Highways punctured the forest. Businesses received tax benefits to relocate. Between 1980 and 1996, the number of cities in Pará state grew from 83 to 143, clustered mostly in the arc of deforestation, where the government put in just enough resources to open up the impenetrable region but not enough to bring order to it. People accrued wealth and power from illicit resource extraction. Public and private lands were invaded and stolen. Slavery-like conditions were imposed on the poor. People disappeared and rural murders were almost never solved.
Vultures circle a cow carcass on a farm on the road to the Apyterewa territory.
A sign on the dirt road between the Parakanã village of Paredão and Vila Renascer carries the phrase “Valley of Peace.”
A fence installed by illegal settlers inside the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory.
TOP: Vultures circle a cow carcass on a farm on the road to the Apyterewa territory. LEFT: A sign on the dirt road between the Parakanã village of Paredão and Vila Renascer carries the phrase “Valley of Peace.” RIGHT: A fence installed by illegal settlers inside the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory.
A new way of life took hold. It was rooted in the belief that the Amazon was to be claimed, not preserved, and embodied by an ascendant political class.
“Why do people vote for them?” asked longtime Amazon journalist Evandro Corrêa. “Why do they vote for people they know are criminals, that they know are deforesters? It’s a question of culture. This is the same story, over and over again. All that changes is the characters.”
One is Antônio Marcos Maciel Fernandes, former mayor of Apuí in Amazonas, who has been cited at least 20 times for environmental wrongdoing and been fined more than $11 million. (In audio messages, he denied any wrongdoing.) Another is Valdinei José Ferreira, the mayor of Trairão in Pará, convicted in July 2020 of running an illegal sawmill, but reelected months later. (He declined to comment.)
Then there is Valmir Climaco de Aguiar, the “King of Gold Mining,” who owns a farm where authorities say they found more than 1,000 pounds of cocaine in 2019, but who was reelected mayor of Itaituba in 2020 with 77 percent of the vote. (He told police the cocaine wasn’t his and wasn’t charged with any crime for lack of evidence.)
But even in such a region, Torres is notorious. So is the fear his name elicits.
Aerial footage shows smoke rising on an illegal property inside Indigenous territory in Brazil.
Fear and death in the forest
Few in São Félix do Xingu want to talk about the mayor’s alleged past. When people hear his name, voices lower, conversations halt, the phone disconnects. “I want to keep living and die of natural causes,” one man said before ending an interview. “Stop asking questions,” another person said. “You live far away from here, and I live here, and who’s going to wind up dead is me.” A local farmer pleaded: “You can’t use my name. These are dangerous people.”
When federal attorney Mário Lúcio Avelar arrived here in 2003, he said, he’d never seen such terror. He’d been sent to investigate the killings of seven rural workers and allegations of slavery in the region. Raised in the wealthy southeastern city of Belo Horizonte, Avelar, still a federal attorney, told The Post he arrived to find “a Brazil completely different than I had known before.”
Avelar and his team traveled to remote farms and settlements to interview workers and residents, asking about life and violence. Some people would meet him only in the middle of the night, he said, in out-of-sight locations and practically hooded, out of fear “they’d be recognized and executed afterward.” He quickly realized that crime in São Félix do Xingu — a vast municipality larger than South Carolina — went far beyond the cases he’d been sent to investigate. He launched a parallel probe into how organized crime had come to dominate the region.
João Cleber Torres, 61, the mayor of São Félix do Xingu, is interviewed by Washington Post journalists in São Félix do Xingu on May 28.
The frontier was in the throes of a “tormented and violent process” that was destroying the Amazon forest to “almost no social or economic benefit,” Avelar wrote in one of several dispatches to superiors in Brasília, obtained by The Post. First had come the miners in the mid-1980s, who built the early roads. Then followed the loggers seeking mahogany. And finally, the land grabbers. For them, São Félix was a jackpot. More than three-fourths of the region was unclaimed public land. “Terra sem dono,” people call it — land without an owner. Easy to occupy, deforest and sell with fraudulent documents.
The region was lawless, but society was structured. On one rung were the “pistoleiros,” Avelar wrote, hired guns who drove poor settlers from land and killed anyone who refused. On another, the paper-pushers, who “legitimized” illegal land seizures through forgery and government corruption. Overseeing it all were the bosses. The most powerful, Avelar and his team found, was João Cleber Torres.
The short and stocky Torres was a son of humble migrants from faraway Rio Grande do Norte, Avelar wrote. One of the first to settle the region, he started early in the wood trade. But as the mahogany dried up, he swiveled to land acquisition — “an enterprise no less lucrative,” Avelar wrote — and came to lead a criminal organization that built a network of 100 pistoleiros. His partner was his brother, Francisco Torres, known as “Torrinho.” The men were seizing land throughout the region, but were particularly active in the Indigenous region of Apyterewa, where Avelar said they owned several farms.
Avelar wrote that he’d looked into Torres’s criminal history, finding two homicide cases that named Torres “as the one who gave the order.” The details and dispositions are not clear. Neither is whether they relate to the homicide and attempted homicide cases found in Torres’s criminal file.
But a 2002 police report obtained by The Post, which recommended homicide charges against Torres, said two men on a motorcycle had fatally shot Herógenes Adilson Lemos outside his house. One man accused in the killing, Leonilson Pereira Gonçalves, told police Torres had ordered the hit. (Efforts to locate Gonçalves were not successful.) A separate police investigation named Torres the following year. Two men, Deusdete Rodrigues dos Santos and Claudio de Deus Freitas, told police that Torres had ordered someone named “Amarair” shot. (Attempts to locate the men were unsuccessful.)
Torres said he’d never heard of any of the men: “I’m stupefied by the attempt to link my name to murder or attempted murders of these people.”
The more Avelar learned, the more he grew afraid of Torres, whose name appeared in other investigative accounts. A 2006 study commissioned by the Brazilian Environment Ministry called him an “entrepreneur of land-grabbing.” The Pastoral Land Commission, an organization that studies rural conflicts, named him “the famous land grabber of São Félix do Xingu.” One of the study’s contributors, Steve Schwartzman, who reported on Torres’s activity within Apyterewa, remembers him well: “Isolated communities were being overrun by people like João Cleber.”
But no one came to understand the region and its criminal players better than Avelar. He knew their euphemism for deforestation: “to clean.” He discovered their preferred method of killing: gunmen on motorcycles. He saw the reach of their power in the city: “The military and civil police are controlled by the loggers.” And he extensively documented the principal figures: Torres and his brother.
“Leaders of an organization that carries out and promotes the invasion, occupation and illegal seizure of public lands,” Avelar wrote in his final report on regional crime. “By the danger they represent, they are extremely feared in the region. … They are responsible for dozens of homicides, many of which were committed [after] they refused to pay their rural workers.”
The mayor’s brother Torrinho contested the assertions: “Nothing was proven against me or my brother.”
Avelar signed the reports and, together with another federal attorney, sent them to law enforcement leadership in Brasília. He urged support. “Violence is pervasive,” he wrote. “This demands the assembly of a permanent task force.”
Charges by federal police involving the rural killings soon followed. Avelar, who’d quickly departed São Félix do Xingu, feared for his life. One of the men accused in the homicides was later charged with making death threats against him. Avelar vowed never to return to the city. He spent years waiting — for the task force to be assembled, for the state to dismantle the criminal structure, for someone to hold Torres to account for all that the federal attorneys alleged he’d done.
None of it happened. His reports have gone missing at the federal attorney’s office, officials said. The homicide and attempted homicide cases naming Torres, state justice officials said, have disappeared from the São Félix court.
No larger investigation ever followed. And in São Félix, Torres set his sights on political office. But the man who would become mayor never lost his interest in the Indigenous territory of Apyterewa.
Aerial views of Renascer village, located inside the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory in Pará state.
An illegal village named ‘Rebirth’
If there’s a shield against deforestation in the Amazon, it’s Indigenous land. Safeguarded by its peoples and under more governmental surveillance than other reserves, the territories are often ecological and humanitarian refuges. They make up more than 13 percent of Brazil, but less than 2 percent of the country’s deforestation is on Indigenous land. This hasn’t been the case for Apyterewa.
Since the beginning, its territorial limits, established by the Justice Ministry in 2001, have been disputed. Farmers and loggers — the first to make official contact with the isolated Parakanã in 1983 — say they have just as much, if not more, claim to the land. A few hundred Indigenous people, they argue, don’t need, deserve or even want so much territory.
It’s a political position that has since been used to justify large-scale invasions, rampant deforestation and, in more recent years, the construction of what officials call Brazil’s largest illegal community in an Indigenous territory, an enclave of non-Indigenous people who have claimed the land as their own.
A Parakanã family fishes on the banks of the São Sebastião River in the village of Paredão in the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory.
A sign at the entrance to Paredão village says it is protected Indigenous land.
Students study Portuguese and mathematics at the community school in Paredão.
TOP: A Parakanã family fishes on the banks of the São Sebastião River in the village of Paredão in the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory. LEFT: A sign at the entrance to Paredão village says it is protected Indigenous land. RIGHT: Students study Portuguese and mathematics at the community school in Paredão.
They call it Vila Renascer: “Rebirth Village.” Its dozens of homes climb a gentle slope along the southeastern lip of Apyterewa, where much of the forest has been destroyed. And its champion is Torres. “I have special affection for its people,” he said in a 2020 political advertisement. “One of the newest communities in the city. It has grown so much.”
His involvement began in 2016. The federal government had just ordered the removal of people who were occupying the Indigenous territory, a decision Torres bitterly opposed. He held urgent meetings with the territory’s farmers, oversaw city efforts to contest the decision and made a trip to visit an encampment. Dozens of families, squatting outside a military base, waited to greet him. Many said they had nowhere else to go.
Torres, accompanied by his brother and a rural farmer later named a suspect in a murder case, looked out at the scene, video shows. He shook his head. “The federal government wants to remove 2,000 families to benefit 300” Indigenous people, he said. “I will fight until the end to reverse this.”
Nalva Santos, 42, the wife of a preacher at an Evangelical church, was one of the first residents of Vila Renascer.
Goods for sale in a small shop on the dirt road between Paredão village and Vila Renascer.
TOP: Land illegally cleared by non-Indigenous farmers is visible in aerial shots of Renascer village. LEFT: Nalva Santos, 42, the wife of a preacher at an Evangelical church, was one of the first residents of Vila Renascer. RIGHT: Goods for sale in a small shop on the dirt road between Paredão village and Vila Renascer.
Nalva Santos, 42, was listening. The wife of a preacher, she had just moved here with her family to establish an Evangelical church. They were the first inhabitants of what would become Vila Renascer. Hearing Torres, Santos said, she felt relief. She’d been worried they were wrong — living inside an Indigenous territory — but felt absolved by his words.
“We believed in him because he was an authority, the mayor,” she said. “And since then, the village has grown so, so much.”
Dozens of blazes burned through the immediate vicinity in the years that followed, according to a University of Maryland fire analysis. Now when Santos walks down the street, she finds not a barren path but a village rising upon the hill. She passes clothing shops, grocers, a butcher’s, restaurants, hotels, a school, and a medical center periodically staffed by city workers. She meets newcomers and sees a future filled with promise — one she believes both neighbors and the mayor will fight to protect.
She witnessed that spirit in November 2020 when, two days after Torres was elected mayor for a second time, dozens of people surrounded and threatened to attack the nearby law enforcement base used to fight deforestation. Then again months later when Torres announced that the city would “come in with construction equipment” and refurbish roads cutting through the territory, over the protests of federal attorneys and without Indigenous consent. And again last August, when federal law enforcement agents stormed Vila Renascer — the “principal support center of land-grabbing and deforestation,” one environmental agent said at the time — and shut down its gas stations and internet connection.
The community didn’t just survive, Santos noticed. It expanded. People of greater ambition were now arriving.
A cow on a dirt road leading to Vila Renascer.
LEFT: A cattle ranch near Renascer village. RIGHT: A cow on a dirt road leading to Vila Renascer.
One stood at the edge of the community, surveying a construction project, wearing a cowboy hat and boots and draped in gold. Bulky gold watch. Gold earrings. Gold initials, dangling from her neck. Her name was Monica Silva. She didn’t want her picture taken. “It will go bad for you,” she warned a reporter.
Silva was building a commercial complex. It was all sketched out: a bar over here, a hotel over there, a shop to sell whatever. People were coming from all over, she said. They wanted to buy land inside the Indigenous territory, and she wanted in on the action. There was money to be made.
“If they want their land deforested, my people will do it for them,” she said. She wasn’t troubled by the law. “You have to knock down trees to be able to raise cattle, because agriculture needs cattle, and the country needs agriculture.” Neither was she bothered by doing it on Indigenous land, whose inhabitants she said didn’t have the “courage” to work — they wanted only government handouts.
“The Indians don’t want this land,” she said. “But if they came and asked for it, I would say, ‘It doesn’t work that way.’ ” She was prepared for violence: “I’d take up my machete, and from there, it’d be worked out.”
Far away, in another part of the reserve, Kawore, leader of the Parakanã, considered the potential of such violence. He was standing at the radio transmitter in the Indigenous village of Paredão, telling leaders what he’d witnessed on the reconnaissance mission: More deforestation. More invaders. More people like Monica Silva. No one said anything. They accepted the news with resignation. No one wanted this fight, and neither did Kawore.
He didn’t want to die like Zé do Lago.
A reporter is shown videos about the life and work of environmentalist Zé do Lago, who was killed in January.
An environmentalist’s final days
Everyone along the river knew Zé. Workers from nearby farms lunched at his home, built on an isolated stretch of the Xingu River. Neighbors hunted and fished with him. Government workers traveling to the nearby Kayapó Indigenous Territory stopped to visit. He led a volunteer initiative to repopulate the Xingu with threatened turtle species. His plan was to open an ecolodge and leave it to his children.
“An environmentalist to the core,” said his daughter, Sara Tyele, 28.
But José Gomes — who went by Zé do Lago — had a problem. He talked about it to friends and family, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety. His land had been claimed by another person. His rustic, dirt-floor house was nestled within the property lines of a cattle ranch owned by the mayor’s brother — Torrinho.
To the Torres family, the land had become increasingly important. The mayor owned an adjacent farm on which he’s been accused of large-scale deforestation. (In an interview, he blamed the fires on Indigenous people.) And he was embroiled in a legal struggle to annex territory in dozens of nearby properties, which would vastly expand his regional holdings.
The Torres brothers were “always” trying to buy do Lago out, one close family member said. But do Lago didn’t want to sell. “The only way I’m leaving is dead,” friends recalled him saying.
Late last year, two friends remembered, he described a confrontation. He explained that a person not affiliated with the Torres brothers — a prominent pastor — had offered to buy his property. Do Lago said he’d been considering the offer when Torrinho found out. A disagreement followed, the friends recalled do Lago saying.
A relative of environmental activist Zé do Lago, after speaking with Washington Post reporters on May 27. The Post is not revealing the identities of do Lago's family members out of concern for their safety.
Relatives of Zé do Lago, after an interview with Post reporters.
A relative of Zé do Lago holds a bird.
TOP: A relative of environmental activist Zé do Lago, after speaking with Washington Post reporters on May 27. The Post is not revealing the identities of do Lago's family members out of concern for their safety. LEFT: Relatives of Zé do Lago, after an interview with Post reporters. RIGHT: A relative of Zé do Lago holds a bird.
“Zé told me Torrinho said, ‘That area is mine. It’s within my land title. You know that this area is mine,’ ” one of the men said. “Zé told me, ‘Man, this guy is crazy to get my land.’ ”
“That was the last time I saw Zé.”
The man, who often spent weekends with do Lago at his house, eating fish and sipping the sugar cane liquor cachaça, next heard his friend’s name on the news. Do Lago, 61, had been shot to death at home. Also killed were his wife, Márcia Nunes, 39, and her daughter, Joane, 17.
A video was going viral. It showed do Lago’s son arriving to retrieve the bodies as a hard rain fell. The camera focuses first on a lifeless form, bobbing in the river’s shallows. “Márcia,” the son says quietly. Then it swivels to the ground, past empty bullet cases, before settling on a motionless girl, lying in mud: “Joane,” he says. The son’s voice catches. His father lies supine on the sodden ground ahead, dead and bloated in the downpour. “My father!” he cries. “My God, my father!”
Nothing was missing from the house. The crime scene didn’t look like a robbery gone wrong.
“It was an execution,” one neighbor said.
More than six months have passed since the killings. No suspects have been named. No charges have been filed. All case files, including autopsy reports, are under seal. Investigating officers did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Torres and his brother dismissed suspicions that their family was tied to the killings. “Unfounded accusations,” Torrinho said. “I never argued with Zé do Lago about his land; he had my permission to stay there.”
“We want the killers and masterminds to be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” the mayor said.
No one in the community interviewed for this report — the victims’ family, neighbors, researchers, police and community leaders — said they believed the case would be thoroughly investigated. Not in São Félix do Xingu, where not one of 62 reported homicides in territorial disputes has ever been solved, according to the Pastoral Land Commission. And not when it involved men as important as Torres and his brother, close political allies of Pará’s governor, Helder Barbalho.
“Torrinho is suspect number one, without doubt,” said a São Félix detective who was not assigned to the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the investigation. “I’ve read the reports. What is happening would almost be a joke if it wasn’t so serious.”
So the family waits. Not for justice. But for more violence.
“I’m under threat,” one close family member said. “I’ve had to flee town.”
Mayor João Cleber Torres poses for a portrait at the office of Rádio Correio in São Félix do Xingu on May 28.
The future, carved from a hard land
The mayor was relaxed, sitting across from the friendly radio host in late May and talking about his closeness to the governor. “He always gives me support,” Torres told his interviewer. “Even when I’m out of government, he gives me support.” But what he now needed as mayor, he said, was a state representative interested in helping the community. He looked to the man at his side. It was his brother.
“So that’s why always I’m saying that, today, Torrinho is running for state office,” the mayor said. “I very much believe in this, to strengthen our region, and strengthen our city.”
Torrinho, the president of the local rural farmers association, called his pre-candidacy a “project.” But he was still waiting on some electoral polls before officially announcing. If he decides to run, political analysts say, he’ll have a strong chance at victory.
Torres and his brother ended the segment and exited the radio booth. The mayor was all smiles and handshakes. Surrounded by handlers and boosters, he felt the success of his life. He said all of it — a declared wealth of $3 million, multiple properties, 11,800 head of cattle — had come to pass only because his family had been committed to building the region, not just a business.
The ferry port of São Félix do Xingu in Pará state. Cargo trucks as well as passenger cars pass through the port toward the municipality's rural zone.
A resident of São Félix do Xingu waits underneath a portrait of Mayor João Cleber Torres outside his office on May 24.
LEFT: The ferry port of São Félix do Xingu in Pará state. Cargo trucks as well as passenger cars pass through the port toward the municipality's rural zone. RIGHT: A resident of São Félix do Xingu waits underneath a portrait of Mayor João Cleber Torres outside his office on May 24.
“This was a frontier town,” he said in a brief interview. “We suffered here. I caught malaria multiple times. I know the difficulties that people have gone through here.” When he worked as a logger, he said, “it was always with a license.” And when he had to deforest, “it was all within the forest code.” The city, he said, is committed to fighting environmental crime: “I’m against illegal deforestation.” No one in the city fears him, he said. Anyone who says otherwise is a political opponent “wanting to denigrate the image of the mayor.”
Then he was leaving the building. He entered one of the two waiting gray Volkswagen pickup trucks. His caravan departed, to take him to the next political event.
They pulled out into a city where the forest felt far away and most voters didn’t seem to be troubled by the allegations in the mayor’s past. They’d heard the stories, but shrugged when reminded: That was then. This was now. And now feels good. The local economy is growing. The city has national chains. Asphalt roads. More than 2.4 million head of cattle, the largest bovine population in a Brazilian municipality. A forest is gone. Indigenous people are fearful of violence. People have been killed and forgotten. But an easier life has finally arrived in this part of the Amazon, carved from an inhospitable terrain and sculpted by men such as Torres.
“It’s a good thing, him being mayor,” said Oscar do Santos, 65. “I would vote for him again.”
“I’ve never doubted my vote,” offered Josemar Pereira da Silva, 41. “It wasn’t he who ordered the killings; it was his brother.”
“I didn’t worry about that history,” said João Caetano, 61. “I want good government.”
The mayor continued down the road, toward a large billboard. It showed him smiling beside the governor. Then beyond was another. This one was of his brother, grinning and standing beside a herd of cattle, heralding the town’s 60-year anniversary, and all that had been accomplished.
“Congratulations, São Félix do Xingu,” the billboard said.
Gabriela Sá Pessoa contributed to this report.
A billboard on the main avenue of São Félix do Xingu features Francisco Torres, known as “Torrinho,” the president of the Union of Rural Producers of Sao Félix do Xingu and a potential candidate for political office.
To determine which politicians and their affiliated companies had ever been cited for environmental infractions, data journalists pulled multiple types of environmental citations and referenced them against names and identification numbers of elected officials in the Amazon.
The Post used environmental inspection and embargo data from Ibama, Brazil’s chief federal environmental authority, and embargo citations from ICMBio, the agency that specifically oversees conservation areas. It limited the scope to people who had been cited for environmental infractions within the nine Amazon states. Nearly every citation is from the mid-1990s through early May. The ICMBio data covers the period from mid-2009 through the first four months of this year.
To identify all politicians elected in municipal, state and gubernatorial races since 2000, The Post used candidate data from the Center for Politics and Economics of the Public Sector (CEPESP) at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, and filtered for winning candidates in the Amazon states.
A taxation ID number known as a CPF — Brazil’s equivalent to a U.S. Social Security number — is included in the elections database for all people who run for public office. The CPF number is also provided, in partially redacted form, in the environmental citations databases. The Post merged the election and environmental citation data and matched both names and partial CPF numbers to ensure exact matches. Any records missing a CPF number were excluded from the analysis.
The Post performed data cleaning, but some matches were not made because of name misspellings and variations. The result is an almost certain undercount of how many office holders have been cited for environmental abuse.
To determine which infractions were deforestation or related to deforestation, The Post consulted with law enforcement and other experts. Within the infraction databases, some offenses are straightforwardly listed as deforestation. In many others, the fines are listed as “infraction of flora,” or are described as involving forest fires, sawmills or illegal gold mining — all infractions that experts say either correspond to deforestation or are related to deforestation.
In its analysis of campaign finance and environmental infractions, The Post used the same methods, but merged citation databases with campaign donation data from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court. Because of similar issues involving missing CPF numbers and alternative name spellings, the findings on financing are also almost certainly an undercount.
Finally, the reporters used federal corporation data from the Receita Federal do Brasil (Brazilian Federal Revenue Service) to yield a list of business owners, then merged it with the electoral and environmental infraction databases to determine which politicians owned companies that had been cited for environmental abuse.
All the dollar amounts in the story have been adjusted for inflation using the DeflateBR package in R statistical software, and then converted to U.S. dollars based on a recent exchange rate of $1 to 4.59 Brazilian real.
Editing by Matthew Hay Brown. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson and Martha Murdock. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Alexa Juliana Ard. Data editing by Meghan Hoyer. Additional data analysis by Reinaldo Chaves. Design and development by Allison Mann. Design editing by Joe Moore. Project management by Jay Wang. | 2022-07-27T11:03:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Brazil's Amazon, there's little political cost to destroying the rainforest - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/brazil-amazon-deforestation-politicians/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/brazil-amazon-deforestation-politicians/ |
Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray has a new contract and some new rules. (Rick Scuteri/AP)
Before Lil’ Kyler Murray gets permission to go outside and toss around the football with his buddies, the Arizona Cardinals have laid down some ground rules.
First, he must complete his homework. Four hours of studying up on the Kansas City Chiefs’ defense ahead of their Sept. 11 opener, just like for every other game this season. And, no, throwing virtual touchdowns to frenemy A.J. Green on Madden won’t count as building up those God-given cognitive skills of his.
Next, he must limit screen time on his tablet. He can’t get sidetracked by unfollowing and scrubbing, then re-following and reposting Cardinals-related posts on Instagram. Even though that’s a thing for “a kid” his age — his words, not a boomer’s — an obsession with social media distracts from the whole, you know, leading-an-NFL-locker-room business.
If he does all of this, then Murray will get extra “credit.” That’s how it reads in the “independent study addendum” clause of his contract extension, which probably was sealed with a pinkie promise.
The Cardinals recently made Murray, 24, the second-highest-paid quarterback in terms of annual salary. And to ensure that their franchise quarterback — until at least 2028 — holds up his end of the bargain, the Cardinals actually had to assign him weekly homework. No word yet if Cardinals executives sweetened the deal by promising to take Murray out for an ice cream sundae after every game, win or lose.
What we do know is when Murray leaves the office, he must “personally study” material provided by the team. And he must do so in “good faith,” which means he can’t watch television or browse the internet while brushing up on the next opponent.
If Murray completes his four hours of study per week, then he’ll get some kind of unknown credit. Maybe it’s driving privileges with Coach Kliff Kingsbury’s car or staying up a whole hour past his bedtime on weekends. But clearly the Cardinals felt their quarterback needed more incentive to do his job. Simply pledging to him $230.5 million wouldn’t be enough — even if this arrangement makes them look like desperate parents raising a precocious child who’s blessed with extraordinary talents but also saddled with attention issues.
Teams routinely introduce a variety of ways to protect their investments, which amounts to controlling the people signing the contracts. And it says as much about the fragility of the athlete as it does the stupidity of the team.
The Boston Red Sox randomly weighed pitcher Curt Schilling during his 2008 season and shoveled a few extra million his way if he made weight. Similarly, the Boston Celtics and Glen “Big Baby” Davis agreed to a contract that would pay him an additional $500,000 if he didn’t tip the scales too much.
It was extreme sports, not extra pounds, that scared the Los Angeles Lakers into stipulating Vladimir Radmanovic stay away from such activities in his five-year, $30.2 million contract. That didn’t stop Radmanovic from going rogue during 2007 NBA All-Star Weekend and injuring his shoulder in a snowboarding accident.
Still, the four-hour study mandate in Murray’s contract goes beyond anything we’ve publicly known about the strings attached to an athlete’s egregious salary. The jokes write themselves. If Murray makes his bed, takes out the trash and remembers to call Grandma on her birthday, then Arizona will give him even more “credit.”
And it’s too bad for the Cardinals. Just when we thought it was safe to start paying attention to this mediocre franchise hidden in the desert, the absurdity of this addendum drags them into the wrong kind of spotlight.
It’s diminishing for both the Cardinals and for Murray.
Why would Arizona elevate Murray’s worth above all other quarterbacks in the league, excluding Aaron Rodgers, if the team can’t even count on him to pursue the most basic preparation skills of an NFL quarterback? And just how immature and cocksure must Murray be to believe he doesn’t need to spend extra time learning about his upcoming opponent or connecting with his receivers?
To be sure, Murray is gifted (and he knows it). After quarterbacking his team to a 42-0 record and three state championships in one of the highest divisions of Texas high school football, Murray went to Texas A&M. He didn’t last long in College Station; reportedly he and the offensive coordinator exchanged words during a game against Alabama, and by the end of the year he decided to take his talents to Oklahoma. There, he won the Heisman Trophy in 2018, but that same season he also served a four-play suspension for being late to practice.
Last year, a New York Times profile about the introverted and instinctive quarterback revealed how Murray spends hours playing video games at home. But not watching game film — he says he doesn’t need to.
In his head, Murray knows it all. But he could still do himself a favor by working on the little things, such as getting on the same page with his top receivers.
In the closing seconds of the Cardinals’ loss at Green Bay last season, Kingsbury called one play, Murray saw something better, then threw a fade to Green in the end zone. One problem: Green had no clue the ball was coming. Packers cornerback Rasul Douglas did and intercepted Murray’s pass. This spring, Green decided to re-sign with Arizona but admitted he and Murray need to improve their communication.
Along with another quarterback who infamously skipped his homework, Johnny Manziel, Murray, at 5-foot-10, has helped resurrect the era of the short signal callers. His style of playground football — improvising and slinging lasers on the run — may not require long bouts of film study. It also may not guarantee wins in the NFL. Just check the track records of Mighty Mouse QBs of this era: Manziel burned out, and Baker Mayfield was booted out of Cleveland.
Murray has had more success: He was the offensive rookie of the year in 2019. Still, in his only playoff appearance, he tossed two interceptions and no touchdowns in a January loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams. There’s no telling if Murray studied hard enough to keep away from Aaron Donald.
The Cardinals were gullible enough to give him more than $230 million anyway. Now they want him to promise to become a better student of the game — more spiral notebooks and fewer spirals thrown on Xbox. They better hope Murray didn’t cross his fingers behind his back when signing the contract. | 2022-07-27T11:24:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kyler Murray's contract includes forced study time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/kyler-murray-contract-film-study/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/kyler-murray-contract-film-study/ |
Human bones, stolen art: Smithsonian tackles its ‘problem’ collections
The Smithsonian’s first update to its collections policy in 20 years proposes ethical returns and shared ownership. But will it bring transformational change?
Visitors at the National Museum of Natural History in D.C. take in the exhibits. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Last month, the Smithsonian deaccessioned 29 exquisite bronze sculptures from the Kingdom of Benin that were looted by the British military in 1897. The attack remains one of the most painful in the long history of colonialism and the return of the priceless objects has become a symbol of the global effort to push museums to face their ugly pasts.
“The Smithsonian needs to lead morally as well as legally,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said on June 13, at a public meeting following the Board of Regents vote to voluntary return the artifacts. “The Benin Bronzes are really the first example of that.”
“Ethical returns and restitution aren’t just about a transfer of ownership. It’s about a reevaluation of authority and our role as a museum,” said National Museum of African Art Director Ngaire Blankenberg, who advocated for the deaccessioning. “It is very important because it’s about really challenging museological practices, which in the past were really justifying a whole bunch of, like, crappy behavior.”
Why the Smithsonian is changing its approach to collecting, starting with the looted Benin treasures
Across the Mall, two 6th Century stone reliefs from the Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan, China are built into the walls of the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened in 1923. The gallery text identifies them as the first artworks purchased by the museum after the death of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, but it doesn’t say they were probably stolen from the remote cave.
“I had to chuckle … that the Smithsonian thinks they’re a leader in this. They are not,” said Tina Marie Osceola, an enrolled member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and director of its Historic Preservation Office, which has been trying for 11 years to get the Natural History Museum to return of the remains of 1,400 ancestors. “They are the best bad example we have in the country.”
Museums and high horses
Coronavirus shutdowns and charges of white supremacy: American art museums are in crisis
‘There’s no tag that says “stolen” ’
U.S. museums are trying to return hundreds of looted Benin treasures
A systematic review of the Natural History Museum’s holdings would be a challenge. With about 147 million items, it is the world’s largest natural history collection and represents more than 90 percent of all Smithsonian holdings, covering archaeology, ethnology, art and science. Its size and diversity create competing priorities, which Johnson cited as one reason he did not remove its Benins until May 18, six months after Blankenberg made international headlines by removing her museum’s works and one day after The Post inquired about them. The museum has not had a curator of African art and ethnology since August of 2019, when Mary Jo Arnoldi retired after 35 years.
“It’s a topic of growing interest and one of the many things we’re tracking,” Johnson✓ said, noting that Nigeria is still developing the capacity to accept returns. The museum hopes to bring any of its Benin works connected to the British raid to the Board of Regents for deaccessioning at its next meeting in October. “The intention remains the same and the outcome is going to be the same.”
There are many other areas of concern. American soldiers that were part of General John J. Pershing’s “punitive expedition” in Mexico in 1916 illegally excavated hundreds of items and shipped them to the Washington institution. And there’s the skeleton of Kennicott, who died in 1866 of mysterious causes, which remains on view despite the new policy explicitly stating that human remains not be “objectified as a scientific resource.” Kennicott’s descendants donated his remains, Johnson said.
‘How do we be inclusive?’ | 2022-07-27T11:25:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Human bones, stolen art: Smithsonian tackles its ‘problem’ collections - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/27/smithsonian-collection-policy-update/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/27/smithsonian-collection-policy-update/ |
For all the talk surrounding the GDP numbers this week, the job market is strong and so are other key indicators
Pedestrians pass the New York Stock Exchange on July 14. U.S. equities indexes are down double digits year to date, but the economy overall shows strength that belies all the talk of a recession. (John Minchillo/AP)
We’ve been hearing a lot about a recession lately, and I’m willing to bet that we’re going to be hearing lots, lots more, starting Thursday morning.
That’s when the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the federal agency that measures the gross domestic product, will release its estimate of second-quarter GDP. And it seems certain that after adjusting for inflation, the GDP will show negative growth.
That would be the second straight quarter that “real GDP” — GDP adjusted for inflation — is negative. And to lots of people, including many of my media colleagues, two straight quarters of negative real GDP growth means we’re in a recession.
However, regardless of the GDP number that we see Thursday, I don’t think we’re in a recession now, and we may end up being lucky enough not to have one at all.
The official arbiter of when recessions begin and end is the Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is part of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
And if you consult the people on the dating committee, you’ll see that six months of declining real GDP does not a recession make.
“To me, the two-quarter criterion is irrelevant,” says Bob Hall, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and Stanford economics professor who has chaired the committee since its inception in 1978.
How do Hall and the rest of the committee define a recession? “In a recession,” Hall told me, “economic activity is significantly depressed and is spread across the economy for more than a few months.”
In an FAQ on its website, the NBER specifically rejects the definition of a recession as two straight down quarters.
“There are several reasons,” the NBER says. “First, we do not identify economic activity solely with real GDP, but consider a range of indicators. Second, we consider the depth of the decline in economic activity. The NBER definition includes the phrase, ‘a significant decline in economic activity.’ Thus real GDP could decline by relatively small amounts in two consecutive quarters without warranting the determination that a peak had occurred.”
Does it look to you like the U.S. economy comes anywhere close to having significantly depressed economic activity that’s been spread across the economy for more than a few months? It doesn’t look like that to me.
For starters, the unemployment rate is hanging in at 3.6 percent, the lowest rate in at least 20 years. And although wages aren’t rising as fast as our highest-in-40-years inflation rate, they’re rising at around 6 percent a year, the highest rate since at least 1998.
I’m reasonably sure they’ll keep rising even after the inflation rate falls, because recent layoff announcements notwithstanding, there are a lot more jobs available than there are people looking for work.
In one crucial economic and social area — gasoline prices — inflation has started to fall. The average national price for a gallon of regular gas on Tuesday was $4.327, according to AAA.
Yes, that’s 37 percent more than a year ago, but it’s down 14 percent from the peak of $5.016 on June 14. So most of the fall since mid-June won’t be recognized in Thursday’s inflation adjustment for GDP in the second quarter, which ended June 30.
Finally, personal spending (as of May, the most recent available date) was at its highest level ever, according to the St. Louis Fed’s FRED, which used data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Put all of this together, and you see why I don’t think we’re in a recession.
The Federal Reserve says the same thing, albeit indirectly. the Fed, which is trying to slow the economy by raising interest rates, says it doesn’t want to touch off a recession.
That means that the Fed thinks we’re not in a recession now.
I think one reason for our recession obsession is that inflation and economic uncertainty are making people far more open to bad news than they’d normally be.
In addition, we have millions of people who are struggling to cover their inflated gasoline and food bills and are understandably scared and upset about prospects for themselves, their families and our country as a whole. You can see why many of them might think that a recession is inevitable, if not already here.
And finally — please forgive my skepticism — talking and writing about a recession, real or imagined, increases readership and viewership for media enterprises and is just more interesting than economic news normally is.
“Recoveries tend to be nice and smooth, and boring from a media point of view,” Hall told me. “Recessions are exciting.”
In addition, there are political advantages to promoting the recession idea. Talking about a recession lets both mega-right-wing Republicans and ultra-left-wing Democrats complain about President Biden supposedly leading the economy off a cliff.
Recession talk gives conservatives a peg to pitch their cut-taxes solution and lets liberals promote their spend-more-and-raise-taxes-on-the-rich solution.
Look, I’m not saying that things are great or that the economy isn’t going to deteriorate. Or that Bob Hall’s committee isn’t going to decide sometime next year that the U.S. economy peaked this summer or fall.
What I am saying is that if you look at what the Business Cycle Dating Committee says a recession is, a definition that’s generally accepted by serious economic thinkers, you’ll see that we’re not in a recession now. Regardless of what we hear Thursday morning. | 2022-07-27T11:25:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Talking about recession doesn't make it so - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/27/when-are-we-in-recession/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/27/when-are-we-in-recession/ |
Do You Think the Fed Hasn’t Done Enough? Think Again
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 22: Jerome Powell, Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee June 22, 2022 in Washington, DC. Powell testified on the Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to Congress during the hearing. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) (Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images North America)
The Federal Reserve is taking a lot of heat over its handling of the highest US inflation in four decades. Critics say that the central bank, which is expected to raise interest rates 75 basis points at its meeting on Wednesday, was too slow to recognize the problem and that it is still not doing enough to fight it. A close look at the record argues against that assessment.
The following table lays out the record going back to the beginning of 2020. It shows year-over-year growth for the consumer price index, the best-known measure of inflation, alongside that of the personal consumption expenditures price index excluding food and energy, the Fed’s preferred inflation tracker. It also shows the five-year breakeven inflation rate, a widely used gauge of expected inflation over the next five years derived from the difference between the yield on plain vanilla and inflation-protected five-year Treasuries. And finally, it shows the federal funds rate, the Fed’s primary tool for fighting inflation, and the yield on two-year Treasuries.
First, and least controversially, I hope, it should be acknowledged that the Fed was right to intervene when Covid-19 shut down the US economy in the spring of 2020. Year-over-year CPI hurtled toward zero and nearly tipped into deflation. The Fed rescue — aided by muscular fiscal stimulus — stabilized inflation, the economy and markets.
Despite record amounts of stimulus, the Fed struggled to raise inflation to its 2% target over the next year. That changed abruptly in March 2021 when CPI rose 2.6% over the prior year and PCE grew 2%. (I will focus on CPI rather than PCE because excluding food and energy overlooks much of the inflation people experience.) While I imagine the Fed was relieved to see inflation returning to more normal levels, it would have been hasty to declare victory based on a single month of data, so it made sense to wait to see whether March was an outlier or the start of a larger trend.
As it turned out, prices continued to rise through the spring of 2021, although it was not clear yet that higher inflation would linger. Historically, there have been many bursts of elevated inflation that lasted a few months and then receded. In addition, higher inflation readings were expected through the spring and early summer of 2021 because prices had been beaten down the previous year. Supply shortages and wild swings in consumer spending — not to mention that no one had ever attempted to shut down and restart the economy — also made it difficult to tell whether higher inflation had truly taken root. The market clearly didn’t think so because the five-year breakeven rate was moored at around 2.5% from March to September 2021, modestly above the Fed’s target.
In October, inflation entered a new phase. Year-over-year CPI began climbing to more worrisome levels, and inflation expectations edged higher. Critics contend that the Fed sat on its hands at the time, but that’s a misreading of the record. While it’s true that the Fed waited several more months to raise the fed funds rate, it didn’t need to raise rates to have an immediate impact.
The fed funds rate is an overnight lending rate between banks, but its power resides in its ability to move short-term interest rates, which influence the entire economy. Central bankers began signaling their intention to fight inflation in the fall of 2021, causing short-term interest rates to move higher in anticipation. The two-year Treasury yield began to rise meaningfully in October 2021 for the first time in many years and has risen every month since. Eventually, the Fed had to raise the fed funds rate to maintain its credibility, which it began to do in March. Markets evidently find the Fed credible because the yield on two-year Treasuries is up to 3% from just 0.4% last October.
It’s too soon to gauge the impact of the Fed’s efforts so far, although there are signs that inflation may be easing. My colleagues Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal cataloged a variety of prices that have declined, including industrial metals, shipping rates, used cars and lumber. Year-over-year PCE peaked in February and has declined every month since. The market is also signaling that inflation has topped. The five-year breakeven rate is back down to 2.6% from a peak of 3.6% in March.
Even so, critics contend the Fed should be more aggressive, but its measured approach now seems prudent. Real gross domestic product contracted 1.6% in the first quarter, and the Atlanta Fed estimates another contraction of 1.6% in the second, so the US may already be in a recession. The fact that it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of people is a testament to the balancing act the Fed has pulled off so far. If the Fed manages to bring down inflation with only a mild recession — a so-called soft landing — it will be a significant coup. More draconian measures may yet be necessary, but given the damage they would do to the economy, it’s sensible to see if a lighter touch is enough.
Nor is it fair to expect the Fed to have seen this bout of inflation coming. No one can reliably predict inflation; if that were possible, inflation wouldn’t be a problem because central bankers would always preempt it. There were numerous predictions after the financial crisis that the trillions of dollars marshaled to revive the financial system would spark runaway inflation, but inflation never came. | 2022-07-27T11:25:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Do You Think the Fed Hasn’t Done Enough? Think Again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/do-you-think-the-fed-hasnt-done-enough-think-again/2022/07/27/e3598540-0d97-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/do-you-think-the-fed-hasnt-done-enough-think-again/2022/07/27/e3598540-0d97-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
Going strong. (Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
When the dollar appreciates, the cost of servicing debt in other countries, particularly emerging markets, can easily become unsustainable because their debts aren’t denominated in their own currencies; instead, they owe in dollars, or in earlier eras, gold or pounds sterling. As those instruments gain in value, crisis and collapse often follow for the debtors, and have for a century-and-a-half.
The economists Barry Eichengreen, Ricardo Hausmann and Ugo Panizza have dubbed this problem “original sin.” In a series of now-famous articles, they showed how the dependency on foreign-currency borrowing — and dollar-denominated debt in particular — have handicapped developing nations, making it next-to-impossible for their domestic policy makers to use monetary and fiscal policy when exchange rates turned against them.
But this had disastrous consequences, particularly for countries in Latin America. For close to a century after 1820, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and others endured financial crises fueled by foreign currency debt. It didn’t matter if these nations developed strong financial institutions and policies. When the exchange rate turned against them, they were often forced to default.
The scale of this borrowing has grown significantly since 2007, when it amounted to less than 10% of the world’s gross domestic product. It’s now in excess of $12 trillion, or 14% of global GDP, and rising. That worked well so long as the dollar remained in the doldrums. But that’s not the case any longer.
• The Rising Dollar Is Wreaking Havoc With US Trade: Gary Shilling
• The Strong Dollar Is a Vote of Confidence in America: Tyler Cowen
• In the Oil Market, the Strong Dollar Is the World’s Problem: Javier Blas | 2022-07-27T11:25:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Strong Dollar Always Clobbers Developing Nations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/strong-dollar-always-clobbers-developing-nations/2022/07/27/1b3115a6-0d9c-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/strong-dollar-always-clobbers-developing-nations/2022/07/27/1b3115a6-0d9c-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
LVMH Is Well Dressed for Our Inflationary Times
LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE hasn’t been immune from lockdowns in China damaging luxury sales. But it is best positioned among bling retailers to navigate what may be a bumpy recovery in the region, as well as growing pressures from soaring inflation and gyrating stock markets in the US.
LVMH’s organic sales — excluding currency movements and merger and acquisition activity — rose 19% in the second quarter, well ahead of the consensus of analysts’ expectations for a 13.5% gain.
The company’s crucial fashion-and-leather-goods division increased organic sales by 19%. That’s a slowdown from the 30% climb in the first quarter of 2022 but is still commendable, particularly given the disruption in China and jolts to consumer confidence elsewhere from equity and crypto market declines and the war in Ukraine.
Less wealthy Americans are reining in spending on discretionary items, prompting a second profit warning on Monday from Walmart Inc. in just over two months. But more affluent shoppers, including US tourists returning to Europe, are continuing to spend, with both sides of the Atlantic enjoying demand for champagne and Christian Dior accessories.
While this may be protecting LVMH from the ravages of inflation, it is only a matter of time before there is some spillover from lower-income and middle-income consumers to the top-end.
More marginal US luxury buyers may already be feeling the pinch. Burberry Group Plc said recently that demand for sneakers had weakened. While this may reflect consumer preferences shifting from casual clothes to more formal outfits, it could also be due to younger shoppers, once flush with stimulus checks and crypto gains, now retrenching.
LVMH said that for the time being, it was enjoying a “good ride” in the US. There was no pushback from consumers after price increases in fashion and leather goods of 3%-7% in the first half.
Nevertheless, sales at all the big luxury goods groups, including LVMH, will now compare with the second half of 2021, when Americans were spending on everything from handbags to high-end jewelry. It is also not clear how swiftly and strongly China will bounce back. After the country’s first lockdowns in 2020, shoppers unleashed a wave of revenge spending. In the wake of repeated outbreaks, they may be less inclined to splash out this time round.
LVMH said that while the latest lockdowns had been “painful,” with second-quarter Chinese sales down by a percentage in the double-digits and store traffic well below the year earlier, it expected demand to rebound as restrictions eased.
The company is also well placed to withstand a more difficult consumer backdrop elsewhere. Names such as Louis Vuitton and Dior remain top of mind for shoppers, while others such as Loewe are gaining ground. If the luxury shopper cuts back — say buying one handbag a year instead of two — they will likely focus on brands with the most cachet. They may even spend more on a single item.
That’s good news for LVMH, Hermes International and privately held Chanel. It is less welcome for Kering SA’s Gucci, which is attempting to pivot from cutting-edge to classic, and groups trying to get more traction in categories such as handbags, including Burberry and Prada SpA.
Don’t forget LVMH’s strong balance sheet — free cash flow was more than 4 billion euros ($4.1 billion) in the first half and borrowings have come down since the Tiffany acquisition at the start of last year — and its diversified portfolio — the wines and spirits division, the second most profitable unit, rose 30% in the second quarter. Both will help the luxury giant defend its business if top-end strength tumbles.
Shares in LVMH have recovered over the past month, but they still trade on only a slim premium to the MSCI World Textiles, Apparel and Luxury Goods Index.
That looks short-sighted given that this bling behemoth is well-dressed for tougher times. | 2022-07-27T11:25:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | LVMH Is Well Dressed for Our Inflationary Times - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/lvmh-is-well-dressed-for-our-inflationarytimes/2022/07/27/ca3e11d6-0d95-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/lvmh-is-well-dressed-for-our-inflationarytimes/2022/07/27/ca3e11d6-0d95-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
With tears, relatives see names of the dead on Korean war memorial.
Forty three thousand names have now been added to memorial on the Mall in Washington.
Marine Corps PFC Walter P. Cribben was frantic. His identical twin, Private James J. Cribben, was with an outfit that had just been overrun by thousands of Chinese soldiers.
It was March, 1953, at a place called Outpost Vegas in the middle of the Korean peninsula. The Cribbens were tough Irish-American kids from Chicago. They were eighteen.
But the fight at the outpost had been a bad one for the Marines. Walter had crawled out toward the front lines to search or his brother, but had been wounded and was sent back.
Later, as a truck filled with dead Marines was being brought in, Walter stopped it at gun point. He said he wanted to look for his brother. He began unzipping body bags.
Walter Cribben never found his brother, James, who remains missing in action, and was tormented by the Korean War almost to the day he died.
Tuesday the name of James J. Cribben was officially unveiled on the new Memorial Wall of Remembrance at the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington.
It was etched in stone along with the names of 36,000 other Americans and 7,100 members of the Korean Augmentation to the the U.S Army (KATUSA.)
“It’s just incredible to know how long that’s going to be there,” James Cribben’s nephew, Jeff Cribben, said tearfully as he stood before his uncle’s name. "It’s good. It’s good stuff.”
Robin Piacine, of Crossville, Tenn., carried a framed photo of her uncle, Sgt. William C. Bradley, an Army medic who had been captured in the war and died of pneumonia in captivity. He, too, is still missing.
“This wall is so important because I don’t want anyone to ever forget the sacrifices all these men made,” she said. “And what it means to the families, as we have maybe the only place in the world to come to, to honor and love a lost loved one."
“I don’t have a marker for him,” she said. “His body isn’t home. So to me, it’s such a hallowed place. And he’s among his comrades.”
The unveiling followed a 3 p.m. ceremony for several hundred relatives and friends of the fallen at the memorial. And as a quintet from the Marine Band played the hymn, “Abide in Me,” family members filed past the wall of names.
The formal dedication of the wall is scheduled for Wednesday. Funding for the $22 million project came from donations from the people of the United States and South Korea, the Park Service and the memorial’s foundation have said.
In the Korean War (1950-1953), forces of the United States, South Korea and their allies fought forces of communist North Korea and China, aided by the Soviet Union.
It was a bitter, back-and-forth struggle that killed people on the ground and in the air. It claimed 36,000 Americans in three years, whereas the Vietnam War claimed 58,000 over a decade.
Seven thousand Americans are still missing in action.
Tuesday’s events took place on a humid afternoon, under gray skies with a sprinkling of rain. Dragon flies flitted over the seated crowd as dignitaries from the U.S. and South Korea spoke. Later, people placed white roses near relatives names on the gray granite of the monument.
Some wore T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with images of youthful soldiers.
The story of the Cribben twins was related by Jeff Cribben, 62, who is Walter’s son and James’ nephew. He lives in San Diego.
“They went over together, and they were fighting in the same battles,” he said. "They would never let my dad and uncle go out on patrol together.”
So when one was ordered on patrol, the twins would flip a coin to see which brother went, he said.
“Who’s gonna know?” he said.
“My uncle had lost the coin flip, so out to the outpost he went,” he said.
James Cribben was among about forty Marines manning Outpost Vegas, in what was called the Nevada complex. It consisted of outposts Reno, Carson and Vegas. They were so named because “it was a real gamble to be there,” Jeff Cribben said.
On March 26, 1953, at about 7 p.m., the Chinese assault came. The fighting went back and forth, and the outpost was pulverized by artillery.
Walter Cribben crawled out to see if he could find his brother, but a piece of shrapnel from a mortar blast hit his hand and he had to retreat.
“They sent him back to the aid station,” Jeff Cribben said. “And when he got there, a transport vehicle [was] coming through loaded with dead Marines. My dad stopped them, with his weapon, and told them he would be looking for his brother.”
“So he spent the next amount of time, unzipping body bags, looking for his brother,” he said. “That’s the horrific part.”
After the war, Jeff Cribben said, his father came home and tried to live a normal life. “He was very smart and successful. And then he would sabotage himself with alcohol and ruin everything. Almost on purpose.”
He had a nervous breakdown in 1969. He was committed to a hospital in San Diego, where he was treated with electroshock therapy. “It didn’t work," his son said. “He came out of there addicted to Librium and ten other medications. They called him cured.”
His life did not improve. In 1992, he was living in a half way house in Arizona and not doing well.
One day a person from the Department of Veterans Affairs came to visit him, and said, “Don’t you know what’s wrong with you?...You’re classic post traumatic stress."
The veterans administration placed him in a program for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was judged 100 percent disabled, his son said.
“So he got injured twice: Once in the hand and once in the head," Jeff Cribben said. "I don’t know who suffered more _ the one who got lost, my uncle, or my dad.”
His father died of lung cancer in 1999. “Never knowing what happened to his brother,” his son said. “And we still don’t.” | 2022-07-27T11:26:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tearful relatives view names of the dead on Korean war memorial. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/27/korean-war-memorial-names/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/27/korean-war-memorial-names/ |
Polish history shows Ukrainians how to avoid a major mistake
As they think about commemorating their struggle against Russia, Ukrainians can’t lose sight of the need to grow
Perspective by Patryk Babiracki
Patryk Babiracki is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington and author of Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin's New Empire. Recently, he was also Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies.
Rescuers clear debris on July 26 from around a cultural center building damaged by shelling in Chuhuiv, Ukraine. (Sergey Kozlov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Fiercely resisting Russian aggression, Ukrainians are also making plans to commemorate their brave struggle and intense suffering. They’re confronting consequential choices about how the world should understand Ukraine after the war. Will Ukrainians define their nation as a community of victims? Or will they choose to see themselves as actors who grow and shape the world by means other than the memory of their own pain?
It may be hard to face these questions now, amid the hissing bullets and the gushing blood. But the stakes of these decisions are high. Modern Polish history illustrates why. Focusing on international aggression and a country’s martyrdom can distract from internal problems and the need to focus on growth.
There are similarities between Ukrainian tragedies in 2022 and Poland’s historical experiences. Poles struggled against Russian imperial domination beginning at the end of the 18th century, when Catherine the Great invited Prussian and Austrian rulers to partition the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into their own empires, erasing it from the European map.
In the 19th century, Poles rose up against Russia twice, and both times the czar brutally quelled the uprisings. More repressiveness followed during the 20th century, starting in 1939, when the Soviets invaded Poland, falsely claiming to liberate Ukrainians from Polish rule. Then they murdered the country’s elites and deported hundreds of thousands of Poles into the depths of the USSR. They also Sovietized Polish institutions, including the infamous Soviet murder of 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners of war, in the Katyn forest in 1940.
After the war, the Kremlin used Red Army troops and secret police to establish a communist government in Poland through violence and deception. In the decades that followed, those who opposed Poland’s communist regime saw their fight as a struggle against the USSR.
How the Poles came to understand the cycle of struggle and repression mattered. In making sense of these historical patterns, they fell back on the tropes of Christ-like martyrdom born during the era of 19th-century romantic nationalism, emphasizing a history of selfless battles on behalf of others, including the United States. “For your freedom and ours,” proclaimed Polish soldiers ready to spill their blood helping Russians and Hungarians fight autocracy and imperial domination in the 19th century.
This emphasis on struggle and sacrifice was useful in mobilizing the nation during war. But in times of peace, this type of national identity proved counterproductive.
For example, in the decades when Poland was independent and sovereign, the focus on heroic struggle and victimhood sidelined discussions about how to overcome the effects of imperial oppression through innovation, hard work and strengthening of the country’s economy. Marshal Jozef Pilsudski successfully challenged the imperial powers who had partitioned his country during World War I, defeated the Bolsheviks in 1920 and led the resurrected Polish state between the two world wars. But in the romantic nationalist tradition, he cultivated the memories of national struggle and sacrifice, while focusing on future threats from Poland’s neighbors, especially the Soviet Russia. Pilsudski’s favorite song (and Poland’s unofficial anthem between the wars), titled “The March of the First Brigade,” told of young men ready to throw their lives into “the pyre” while fighting against the superior forces of the Russian empire for the sacred cause of Polish independence.
But Pilsudski showed little interest in economic issues. When the western Polish city of Poznan staged the Polish Universal Exhibition in 1929, showcasing to the world the growing economic prowess of the newly independent country, Pilsudski chose not to appear once at the five-month event. In so doing, he forfeited opportunities for augmenting the event’s international visibility, attracting foreign investment and promoting to his fellow Poles the notion that in peace time, strength could be achieved through industriousness and hard work.
In the following decades, the historical emphasis on anti-Polish repressions and Polish victimhood made it possible for politicians to distract from abuses of power, mistakes and erosion of democratic norms. For example, in the second half of the 20th century, Poland's communists loudly commemorated German historical atrocities, while censoring the discussions of the numerous crimes against Poles committed by the Soviets.
Polish politicians have continued to use such framing to the current day. High-ranking members of Poland’s ruling right-wing Law and Justice party have used Poles’ suffering at the hands of Germans, Russians and (more recently) the West to deflect criticisms of its own economic policies and to consolidate quasi-authoritarian rule.
For example, without evidence, they accused Russia of causing a 2010 crash of the Polish government plane that killed 96 people, mostly government officials, on their way to commemorate the 1941 Katyn massacre. Playing up the familiar national narrative about centuries-long Polish martyrology made it harder to discuss publicly the errors that the Poles made by putting dozens of high-ranking politicians on one aircraft. Pointing at Russia made it more difficult to talk about the likely reasons behind the disaster, i.e. the pilot’s decision to land in unsafe weather, and the pressure to do so coming from the politically powerful passengers.
Poles have historically suffered at the hands of others, especially Russia and the USSR. But these tragic experiences, often enshrined in quasi-religious language, also made it easier for Poles to see themselves chiefly as victims of the world. This interpretation of history has enabled political manipulation at home and has isolated Poland internationally, weakening Poland and paving way for more historical tragedies.
One can only be humbled by the courage and tenacity with which the Ukrainians defend themselves against the cruel Russian attacks. But once the war is over, a consequential discussion will take place about how Ukraine's difficult past can lift up the spirits of future generations without weighing down on them.
For that reason, how they approach commemorating their deep tragedy in the long run will matter to Ukraine. Understandably, now victimhood and messianism set the tone. In an impassioned speech to Congress on March 16, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that his people “are defending not only Ukraine, we are fighting for the values of Europe and the world.”
Planning of memorials is underway. “We’re going to establish the Battle of Azovstal Memorial Museum in there when this is over,” tweeted Ukrainian journalist Ilya Ponomarenko on May 20, adding a photo of the shattered industrial complex in Mariupol where calculated Russian attacks targeted sheltering Ukrainian civilians. The existing World War II Museum in Kyiv recently organized an exhibition titled “Crucified Ukraine.”
By looking back on that familiar Polish past, Ukrainians can avoid mistakes in the future. For, as the case of Poland shows, in the long run, dwelling on past struggles and victimhood can easily thwart more constructive efforts to rebuild a society ravaged by repeated tragedies. | 2022-07-27T11:26:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Polish history shows Ukrainians how to avoid a major mistake - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/27/polish-history-shows-ukrainians-how-avoid-major-mistake/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/27/polish-history-shows-ukrainians-how-avoid-major-mistake/ |
Racial bias is built into the design of pulse oximeters
Achieving equity in medical care and devices requires intentionality.
Perspective by Simar Bajaj
Simar Bajaj studies the history of science at Harvard University and is a research fellow in cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has previously written for The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and Nature Medicine.
A fingertip pulse oximeter used for measuring oxygen saturation level on blood and also heart rate. (iStock)
One of the most indispensable devices of the coronavirus pandemic is the pulse oximeter, which clips onto a person’s finger, shines out a light and reports back a blood oxygen percentage. Patients use pulse oximeters at home to monitor their conditions, while hospitals use them to identify and prioritize the sickest covid patients. More generally, blood oxygen is known as the fifth vital sign, alongside body temperature, heart rate, breathing rate and blood pressure.
Pulse oximeters, however, don’t work as well in people with darker skin. There’s a risk of “occult hypoxemia,” where the device says that oxygen levels are fine but patients’ actual saturations are dangerously low. Recent medical studies have quantified this bias and the consequences of overestimated oxygen levels. For example, Hispanic and Black patients with the coronavirus were about a fourth less likely to be recognized as eligible for treatment. Obtaining an accurate oxygen reading can literally be a matter of life or death.
Despite the recent surge of attention to this issue, racial bias in pulse oximeters is nothing new; in fact, it was embedded into the very development of this technology. A closer look at the history of oximeters reveals how placing a premium on market expediency over equity allows bias to leach into medicine.
The first oximeters were developed for military, not medical, use. During World War II, fighter pilots were blacking out at high altitudes, so American and German scientists developed oximeters for their respective air forces. These early devices clipped onto pilots’ ears and alerted them when they needed supplemental oxygen.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) went on to develop the ear oximeter for health care in the 1960s and ’70s, with a remarkably liberal, transparent focus on equity. In the October 1976 issue of their journal, for instance, HP acknowledged how oxygen readings were affected by “skin and blood pigments, and the surface characteristics of the skin,” before describing how they designed their own device so that oxygen readings were accurate, irrespective of skin color. HP’s device was also tested on 248 Black patients and could be personally calibrated with a patient’s blood. Yale professor of medicine Meir Kryger — who tested some of the earliest models of the HP oximeter as a pulmonology fellow at the University of Colorado — said that the company “actually took the business about pigments seriously at a time when nobody was.”
But HP’s oximeter was huge and cumbersome to use, not to mention expensive. It cost $13,000 in 1970. The device was thus relegated to a select few research laboratories and understood to be clinically impractical. HP ultimately discontinued its ear oximeter and stopped manufacturing medical devices altogether.
In 1974, however, two Japanese companies took the next leap in oximetry when Nihon Kohden and Minolta independently invented devices that measured oxygen levels via the throbbing of a patient’s arteries. The first “pulse” oximeters had arrived, with both companies filing for patents within a month of each other.
Although electrical engineer Takuo Aoyagi won this patent race for Nihon Kohden, the company didn’t pursue the device because it was just a side project for them. “Aoyagi made a prototype,” Katsuyuki Miyasaka — an anesthesiologist at St. Luke’s International University and a close colleague of Aoyagi’s — explained in an interview, “but there wasn’t much interest in developing it further.”
Minolta kept going and, in 1977, released the OXIMET-Met-1471, probably the first fingertip oximeter ever developed. With fiber-optic cables sending light to and from the clip, the device was technologically advanced but, like HP’s, not clinically practical. It was extremely sensitive to motion, too heavy to be used on patients and often overestimated oxygen levels in very sick patients, although it was fairly accurate otherwise. The device was not tested on any people of color because, in a country as ethnically homogenous as Japan, “skin color may not be a problem,” Miyasaka said.
After being frustrated with a lack of success at home (only 200 devices were ever sold), Minolta tried to market their pulse oximeter in the United States, distributing the device for various American hospitals to evaluate. William New, a former HP electrical engineer and anesthesiologist at Stanford University, soon learned about the Minolta device and saw its shortcomings, but also its great potential.
New and two other colleagues founded the company Nellcor and, in 1981, released their own pulse oximeter: the N-100. The device was designed to be clinically practical. With LED lighting and a flexible paper-like sensor, Nellcor’s oximeter was disposable and largely unaffected by motion. One of the device’s most popular features was how its tone changed based on a patient’s oxygen saturation, enabling easier recognition of low oxygen levels.
Nellcor’s timing was extremely fortuitous. LEDs were becoming increasingly available in the early 1980s, just as a series of malpractice lawsuits were brought against anesthesiologists who were eyeballing oxygen levels during surgery. As Nihon Kohden’s CEO recently wrote, Nellcor “caught the wave of technological innovation and market changes at this time.” The N-100 dominated the market, “selling like hot cakes,” according to Miyasaka. In fact, one Canadian anesthesiologist described how “Nellcor” and “pulse oximeter” became synonymous.
But Nellcor’s device was not an equitable one. The company was so focused on developing an easy-to-use, clinically practical pulse oximeter that it neglected the racial bias built into their devices. In 1987, Kryger compared the N-100 to HP’s oximeter and found that Nellcor’s device was not as accurate or responsive as HP’s.
Racial bias, of course, isn’t unique to Nellcor: Most pulse oximeters have been calibrated in light-skinned individuals alone. And it’s not enough to say that the medical community didn’t know any better: they’ve long understood how yellow skin color from jaundice, blue from sepsis and naturally non-White skin color could lead to “the skin pigmentation effect,” Miyasaka said, “but they thought that, statistically or practically, you can neglect it.” The supposed innocuousness of biased design continues to justify its existence.
HP’s device in the early 1970s was the exception that proves the rule. Although their oximeter was clunky and clinically impractical, it was a paragon for inclusivity because HP engineers made eliminating bias a priority. Racial bias in pulse oximeters, or in any medical device, is never inevitable. Equity requires intentionality. | 2022-07-27T11:26:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Racial bias is built into the design of pulse oximeters - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/27/racial-bias-is-built-into-design-pulse-oximeters/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/27/racial-bias-is-built-into-design-pulse-oximeters/ |
The Weeknd performs at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 24. (Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images)
Yes, “After Hours” was the Weeknd’s emblematic departure from his grittier pop plays to sleek stadium anthems intended for Grammy nods (which didn’t quite pan out as planned). But it wasn’t a sudden shift. Slowly but astutely, he has prodded his ascension into international fame with each record. “Starboy,” while still homing in on darker themes, produced lighter, more radio-friendly hits such as “I Feel It Coming,” which felt like a playful foreshadowing both in name and sonically of what was to come. “After Hours” took that small glimmer of ’80s synth-pop seen in 2016’s “Starboy” and ran the entire field with it. By the time “Dawn FM” was released earlier this year, the Weeknd had completed his pop metamorphosis. Did you ever think you’d see the day when Jim Carrey had a feature on a Weeknd album? I don’t think the “Starboy” Weeknd could have predicted that, either. July 30 at 6:30 p.m. (doors open) at FedEx Field, 1600 FedEx Way, Landover, Md. commanders.com/stadium. $196-$286.
The Weeknd’s decade of dystopia
As the world wiped the sleep from its eyes and began easing back into normal life earlier this year, Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney released his breezy sophomore solo effort, “Magic Sign.” The record is imbued with sunny psychedelic tones as Courtney harks back to simpler times, pre-covid, as a teenager growing up in New Jersey. “In the basement of my mind / I’m on a bike in 1999 / In the basement of my mind / We’re on the phone for the very first time,” he reminisces on “Merlin.” But, amid the moments of bliss, Courtney brings his trip down memory lane down to earth on songs such as “Time To Go”: “Every other house is empty / And the streets are full of sand / Why are we the last to know / When it’s time to go, time to go.” Aug. 3 at 7 p.m. at Songbyrd, 540 Penn St. NE. songbyrddc.com. $18-$20.
In a 2019 interview with The Washington Post, Scarface made a shocking announcement: “Scarface is dead,” the rapper (real name: Brad Jordan) proclaimed, vowing to become a politician instead. It was just a few months after that conversation that he almost died, contracting covid-19 at the start of the pandemic and suffering from kidney failure afterward. The life-altering series of events didn’t change Scarface’s mind about continuing his music career, though, and once shows ramped up again, the rapper set sail on his farewell tour in early July. The tour marks the end of a long, storied career in hip-hop that pioneered and paved the way for his Southern rap contemporaries. Aug. 3 at 8 p.m. at the Howard Theatre, 620 T St. NW. thehowardtheatre.com. $40.
Maren Morris further explores the boundaries of pop and country with her latest album, “Humble Quest.” Songs such as the catchy “Tall Guys” are poised for radio play with rollicking, toe-tapping melodies: “I can wear my heels real high / I’m a lover of all types / But there’s something ’bout tall guys, tall guys.” Morris enlisted the production prowess of sought-after pop producer Greg Kurstin, whose lengthy list of accolades includes a Grammy Award for Adele’s 2015 song “Hello” and a nomination for Kelly Clarkson’s 2011 song “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You).” Still, even with its pop sensibilities, “Humble Quest” feels like a return to form for Morris. Sandwiched in between the lighter pop tracks are reflective country ballads such as “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” in which Morris muses on a Midwest lover: “Shoulda known what I was getting in / Fallin’ for a boy from Michigan.” Aug. 4 at 8 p.m. at Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia, Md. merriweathermusic.com. $45-$125.
Maren Morris on being ‘kind’ and ‘ruthless’ as a country star | 2022-07-27T11:26:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 4 concerts to catch in D.C.: July 29-Aug. 4 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/07/27/concerts-dc-weeknd-maren-morris/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/07/27/concerts-dc-weeknd-maren-morris/ |
Dawn light passes through healthy pine trees in Malheur National Forest, Oregon, on June 28-30. (Eirik Johnson/For The Washington Post)
A group of citizens in southwest Oregon have taken the law into their own hands — literally — apprehending a man suspected of starting wildfires in a forested area, and tying him to a tree when he got “combative,” law enforcement officials said.
He was later identified as Trennon Smith, 33, from Veneta, Or.
Smith was treated by an ambulance crew for some injuries he “apparently received from falling down” but later medically cleared. He is suspected of committing arson and reckless burning, the sheriff said, as legal investigations continue. Court documents did not say if Smith had an attorney, while bond was set at $100,000, the Associated Press reported.
The total area burned was less than one acre, Sheriff Ward said, praising the speedy response.
As of Wednesday morning, there were 11 active fires in Oregon, according to the Oregon Department of Emergency Management. Many Oregonians having been forced to evacuate their homes during the wildfire season this year.
“We need more citizens to be ready to respond like this. Excellent job by all involved!” wrote one person on Facebook responding to the Sheriff’s statement. “Wow I’m a speechless what a great community bringing Justice and safety in our neighborhoods,” added another.
The news comes as record heat continues to make the Pacific Northwest swelter.
Seattle and Portland are both under excessive heat warnings until Thursday evening, with temperatures teetering over triple-digits.
Multnomah County, where Portland is located, issued an emergency declaration earlier this week due to “dangerously hot conditions.” Local officials will open temporary “cooling shelters” and are asking residents to plan ahead and take care of neighbors, especially the elderly.
The heat is originating from a ridge of high pressure, or “heat dome,” which is parked in the northeastern Pacific west of British Columbia.
A dangerous heat wave, with widespread excessive heat warnings and heat advisories, will impact the Northwestern U.S. this week, before some relief by late in the weekend/early next week.
Visit https://t.co/Ynl3VCdFFD for info on how to protect yourself, family, and neighbors. pic.twitter.com/MQJ5IflNgS
On Tuesday, the Biden administration launched a new website (heat.gov) to provide a one stop hub for the public and decision-makers to find “clear, timely and science-based information to understand and reduce the health risks of extreme heat,” as part of wider climate measures.
Extreme heat has been the greatest weather-related cause of death in the United States for the past 30 years, according to the website — surpassing hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding. Extreme heat also disproportionately kills Black and Native American communities, it added.
With many parts of Oregon facing a high heat wave, it is critical that every level of government has the resources they need to help keep Oregonians safe. I have issued a state of emergency in 25 counties to ensure resources are available to respond to the excessive heat. | 2022-07-27T11:27:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oregon man suspected of starting wildfires tied to tree and arrested - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/oregon-man-wildfires-tied-tree/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/oregon-man-wildfires-tied-tree/ |
Here’s the problem with Brad Pitt’s skirt
By Trey Burnette
Brad Pitt attends a screening of “Bullet Train” at Hotel Adlon on July 19 in Berlin. (Gerald Matzka/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)
Trey Burnette is a California-based writer and photographer who has contributed to NBC News, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books and other journals.
In 1993, I was nominated for homecoming queen at my high school in a conservative Southern California city. It wasn’t meant to be a political act. One of my girlfriends had suggested, “Nominate Trey — he’ll do it,” after the girls had agreed none of them wanted to parade around in a rayon dress from Windsor Fashions while being judged.
I was used to this. While most of my peers spent weekends at football games and rodeos, I slipped into black high heels and Russian Red lipstick and drove to Los Angeles, where I snuck into the clubs with my fake ID and innocent smile. That was just me being me.
So I found it off-putting when I saw CNN tease: “Brad Pitt’s linen skirt is drawing attention.” And the fashion editor Merle Ginsberg’s Facebook post: “When Brad Pitt took to the Berlin red carpet for the [premiere] of Bullet Train, he out-styled Harry Styles — by wearing a skirt suit. It’s a thing, people.”
People: There are those who have known, throughout history, that men in skirts “is a thing.”
Here’s another thing: Brad is Brad, and Harry is Harry — rich, famous, untouchable White men. They’re shielded from any dangerous consequences of their expression. I was not.
Shortly after my playful nomination, my school was in an uproar. How dare Trey do something meant for girls? Reporters sped to campus before I could leave, to report on the boy who’d caused a “royal fuss.”
So maybe it’s fun to see famous people do things out of the mainstream norm. And I’m sure the flashy appearances by Pitt et al. give conservatives plenty of meat to chew on. (We don’t even know what a man is anymore!)
But what about the people who can’t go back to safety? What about the little boy who will be thrown into the dirt tomorrow because he’s a tad too fey? Or the butch girl whose breast will be pinched by someone who wants to see if she’s really a girl?
I’m not offended by Pitt and his skirt — which, frankly, wasn’t that interesting or attractive. Slay, girl. Try something “new.”
I’m far more concerned with the treatment of Pitt’s skirt as clickbait and queerbait (the marketing practice used to gain the attention of LGBTQ people by pretending a subject is queer). British GQ came under fire for this after a recent cover shot showing Brad “all dolled up and looking like a freshly-deceased gay elder,” as one critic put it. Styles, who is in a heteronormative relationship, was hailed as “revolutionary” for wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue but won’t commit to a queer label.
Queerness is innate and permanent. It’s not “brave” to put it on for publicity and then donate the clothes to Goodwill.
More than 7 percent of U.S. adults self-identify as “something other than heterosexual,” according to Gallup. After surveying nearly 35,000 queer people ages 13 to 24 last year, the Trevor Project concluded that “the majority of LGBTQ youth (52%) who were enrolled in middle or high school reported being bullied either in person or electronically in the past year.” It also found that 42 percent had “seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.”
As a kid, I was thrilled by what society had deemed feminine. I played with G.I. Joe but also had a Barbie. I was sassy and mannered. I got called “gay,” “fag” and “sissy” — before the fifth grade. I was pushed and hit and, after my homecoming nomination, received death threats, all for transgressing gender boundaries.
At 17, I attempted suicide. I was tired of being harassed and harmed, and my home life was unsafe. My mom had died when I was 16. My father had been absent since I was 3. I lived with a Christian grandmother and a homophobic aunt who were struggling to come to terms with my homosexuality. And no, I couldn’t retreat to the security of a mansion.
Today, I’m a 45-year-old man. I no longer do drag or wear feminine clothing. I’m fit and have facial hair. But I’m still not safe.
Roughly 240 bills targeting the rights of LGBTQ people were proposed by state lawmakers in the first three months of this year, according to a NBC News analysis, and about 670 anti-LGBTQ bills had been filed since 2018. On July 19, the House passed a bill protecting federally recognized same-sex marriage; it’s now with the Senate. Will Pitt’s skirt move senators to vote yes, so President Biden can sign the bill into law?
I’m 100 percent in favor of free and artistic expression. But it’s not daring for a celebrity to take it off and then return to his lush life. Millions of people have broken heteronormative standards, forever, without the safety of a stage or a red carpet. And those people are very much under attack. | 2022-07-27T11:27:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Here's the problem with Brad Pitt’s skirt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/brad-pitt-skirt-harry-styles-celebrity-queerbait/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/brad-pitt-skirt-harry-styles-celebrity-queerbait/ |
By Maddy Butcher
A storm gathers near Mancos, Colo., with New Mexico in the distance. (Beau Gaughran)
Maddy Butcher is the author of “Beasts of Being: Partnerships Unburdened” and director of the Best Horse Practices Summit.
MONTEZUMA COUNTY, Colo. — In “The Homesman,” a 2014 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank, three traumatized pioneer women are transported back East to get help from a women’s relief society. There is no solace in open spaces, we learn. Only devastating isolation and social censure.
While many are working today to change the status quo, echoes of frontier mental health tragedies, like those depicted in the movie, resound in the rural West, where an appointment with a doctor of any kind might entail a two-hour drive one way. That’s if you can find a provider, if you have transportation and, as is often the case with mental health, if you can overcome the stigma surrounding your care.
Rural suicide rates increased 48 percent between 2000 and 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men in rural areas are 40 percent more likely than their urban counterparts to end their lives. Women, universally less prone to suicide, are more likely to do so if they live with the specific challenges of ruralness, including those cited above, and higher poverty rates.
Turns out that the very elements we celebrate as rural Westerners — self-reliance, mental and physical fortitude, and being alone a lot — put our well-being at risk. According to the CDC, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming have the seven highest suicide rates in the country.
In this part of Colorado, Joel Watts runs Integrated Insight Therapy, which employs about 40 therapists for clients in five counties, covering an area the size of New Jersey. (But imagine an early 19th-century New Jersey, with fewer than 240,000 people.) About 90 percent of their clients are on Medicaid.
When Watts considers the challenges to providing mental health services, he names lack of access and “rugged individuality” as big factors, along with some clients’ struggles with the boom-and-bust cycles of the oil, gas and mining industries.
“The mind-set is the biggest hindrance. ‘I can do it on my own. I don’t need help.’ People see it as a sign of weakness to reach out for help,” said Lee Halberg, until recently the director of the Mancos Public Library in Mancos, Colo.
Last summer, he was in his office when 15-year-old Dustin Ford and a young woman walked past the small brick building and toward the nearby Mancos River. Minutes later, a gunshot sounded. Dustin died, and the girl survived with injuries. They had apparently planned on dying together.
For the Mancos high school, which has about 40 students per grade, it was the second suicide in about a year.
Alanda Martin, a counselor at the school, is part of a team trying to help. Each year, they teach students about suicide prevention and distribute suicide screening forms. But 87 percent of the kids don’t complete the forms, she said.
“There is a ton of resistance here, from students and their parents. Accessing mental health services is not something they do,” she said.
Watts maintains a separate office in Delta, Colo., with a discreet alleyway entrance, he said, for “folks who don’t want to be found” seeking treatment.
Retaining staff, who mostly come from somewhere else, is another constant challenge. To be a therapist here means confronting outsider bias (if you’re from away) or insider bias (if you grew up here and have some kind of history or connection with everyone). No wonder clients are discouraged by turnover.
Help for those most at risk is increasing. In Montezuma County, public and private agencies pooled resources to form the Community Intervention Program. Operating from a single, unmarked van, two emergency medical technicians and a social worker responded to nearly 100 calls in CIP’s first two months. Most involve mental health, drug or alcohol addiction, homelessness or a personal crisis, according to Haley Leonard, spokeswoman for the nonprofit Axis Health System, one of the groups involved.
When summer visitors pour into this region, I wonder if they sense the quiet desolation that some of us who live here — no matter how fiercely we love it — must guard against.
In the middle of a snowstorm last winter, I thought of those women who had caught “prairie madness” in “The Homesman.” Squinting through sideways snow, with darkness falling, I struggled with chores. The horses were hungry and skittish when I gave them hay, most of which was taken by the wind. The chickens hunched their shoulders and looked straight ahead as I closed them in their coop.
The temperature dropped below zero. My thoughts ricocheted between concerns over livestock, livelihood, aloneness. As the house rattled and creaked, I considered my willful isolation, with miles of national forest and only a handful of neighbors nearby. The dogs and I slept by the wood stove, as we would for weeks, to keep the fire fed so my small house would stay above 50 degrees.
In the morning, the snow shone blindingly across the high desert, south to New Mexico and west to Utah. On my front stoop sat an ice-encrusted pan of lasagna. I never learned who left it. I hadn’t asked for help, but someone thought I needed it. | 2022-07-27T11:27:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | In the rural West, ‘self-reliance’ can take a heavy toll on mental health - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/mental-health-care-rural-colorado/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/mental-health-care-rural-colorado/ |
As he is referred to in court documents, “C.G.” was in a suburban Denver thrift store trying on stuff, including something that he thought resembled a World War II-era military hat.C.G. posted on Snapchat a picture of a friend wearing it, and C.G. added this caption: “Me and the boys bout [sic] to exterminate the Jews.” This was visible only to Snapchat users connected to C.G., and he deleted it after a few hours and posted this apology: “I’m sorry for that picture it was ment [sic] to be a joke.”
It was absurd for C.G.’s school — whose overreaction to his puerile Snapchat post caused more turmoil than his post did— to believe that the post could cause disruption at the school. The school officials’ contention that C.G.’s post was “hate speech targeting the Jewish community” was as dumb as his joke and confused puerility with animosity.
Unfortunately but actually, no reasonable person thinks that the kind of people running American education today know — or, in the unlikely event that they do know, that they care — what constitutional law says about speech protections. Furthermore, Joe Biden’s Education Department, like Barack Obama’s, is pressuring institutions of higher education — which hardly need pressure — to conduct ersatz courts in which people accused of sexual misbehavior are denied due process rights (e.g., the rights to counsel, to confront their accusers, and to not to be convicted by a mere “preponderance” of evidence rather than evidence beyond a reasonable doubt). | 2022-07-27T11:27:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Now we see the wisdom of the high court’s ‘vulgar cheerleader’ ruling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/schools-violate-student-speech-rights/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/schools-violate-student-speech-rights/ |
A Ukrainian serviceman as seen by a HIMARS vehicle in eastern Ukraine on July 1. (Anastasia Vlasova for The Washington Post)
President Biden is right not to send U.S. forces into direct combat with the Russians, but everything else should be fair game, from ATACMS to F-16s to Abrams tanks. The Soviets didn’t hesitate to supply North Korea and North Vietnam with fighter aircraft to shoot down U.S. warplanes. (Soviet pilots even flew for North Korea.) Why shouldn’t we return the favor?
The war has already proved costly to Russia: It has lost about 1,000 tanks, and roughly 60,000 soldiers have been killed or wounded. There won’t be much left of the Russian military if the Ukrainians are armed with lots more HIMARs and ATACMS, along with tanks and fighter aircraft. The fourth phase of the war could prove decisive — but only if the United States finally makes a commitment to help Ukraine win. | 2022-07-27T11:27:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The U.S. is a lot stronger than Russia. We should act like it. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/ukraine-win-war-us-stronger-weapons-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/ukraine-win-war-us-stronger-weapons-russia/ |
Is the U.S. economy about to slip on a banana?
Thursday’s Commerce Department data might well confirm that gross domestic product shrank for a second straight quarter. In anticipation, the White House issued a statement noting that there is nothing “official” about the oft-cited rule of thumb according to which a two-quarter losing streak defines a recession.
GOP mockery lit up the internet. The Republican State Leadership Committee’s Twitter account accused the Biden administration of “gaslighting Americans and changing the definition of a recession.”
How about we compromise and call the next economic downturn, whenever it comes, a “banana,” in honor of Alfred E. “Fred” Kahn?
Kahn’s quip endures because it implicitly conveyed a nuanced truth: It is wrong for a president to deny obvious reality, but at the same time, and despite the scientific pretensions of economics, there really is no pure, objective definition of “recession.” (When United Fruit Co., complained about “banana,” Kahn switched to “kumquat.”)
Republicans who sanctimoniously accuse Biden of “gaslighting” are therefore forgetting not only Kahn’s sly wisdom but also such recent events as President George W. Bush’s strained use of “period of uncertainty” instead of “recession” in early 2008 — a time when the U.S. economy was already plunging into the worst, er, banana since the 1930s.
Another reason Kahn, who died in 2010 at 93, is relevant today: Once again, inflation threatens a Democratic presidency, and the Biden White House does not have many more effective tools at its disposal than Carter’s did during Kahn’s stint as the hapless chairman of something called the Council on Wage and Price Stability.
As Kahn predicted, it took a sharp — how do you say? — downturn, engineered by Federal Reserve interest rate hikes and marked by unemployment that peaked in 1982 at 10.8 percent, to crush inflation. A similar Fed rate-raising campaign that began in March is why many worry about the risk of a banana now.
While Carter’s inflation-fighting efforts did mostly fail, in one area they did some good. That was the deregulation of passenger airlines, trucking and freight rail, which exposed long-standing government-protected cartels in those industries to competition, resulting in lower costs throughout the economy.
In his first administration job, chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, Kahn spearheaded airline deregulation and later influenced the companion trucking and rail efforts. Both Carter and his eventual rival for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), supported these changes.
There was a time, in other words, when a left-center spectrum of Democrats paid attention to the supply side of the economy, not in the Republican tax-cuts-for-the-rich way, to be sure, but in a pro-consumer sense of enabling efficiency, with the goal of promoting abundance and, eventually, lower prices. Kahn, Kennedy and — yes — Carter deserve credit for this contribution to easing long-range inflationary pressures.
President Biden’s treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, advocates “modern supply side economics,” which, as she put it, “prioritizes labor supply, human capital, public infrastructure, R&D, and investments in a sustainable environment.” She argued that the Build Back Better plan’s “investments” in child care, family leave and the like would have advanced that policy.
Whether all that spending really would have raised productivity — or poured more gas on a raging inflation fire — is a good question, to which we will likely never get the answer since the bill is essentially dead. Meanwhile, the administration should look, as Kahn did, for opportunities to fight inflation by loosening the government’s grip on unduly regulated markets.
One market in dire need of reform is baby formula, where shortages persist. The proximate cause was a safety-related factory shutdown at Abbott Laboratories, the nation’s largest producer, but government policies helped render the supply chain vulnerable to such a shock in the first place.
Those policies include import restrictions and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which provides poor mothers with free formula. Complicated laws designed to help states get more formula for their federal WIC grant dollars have had unintended perverse effects: the rise of state-level monopolies for certain companies and all but impenetrable barriers to potentially innovative new producers.
It’s fair to say that this system would have driven Fred Kahn bananas. | 2022-07-27T11:27:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Is the U.S. economy about to slip on a banana? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/united-states-economy-recession/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/united-states-economy-recession/ |
(Mahé Elipe)
The organization Women Photograph created a series of grants back in 2017 in a much-needed effort to correct the fact that women and nonbinary photographers have been grossly underrepresented. It’s next to impossible to refute that for too long most of the imagery of everyday life has been through the perspective of White males.
It is essential for the photography community to grapple with this and try to find solutions.
This year, Women Photograph partnered with Getty images, Nikon USA and Leica to give out grants that can help women and nonbinary photographers with their work.
Judges Alissa Ambrose, Mona Boshnaq, Victor Caivano, Veronika Châtelain, Brian Frank, Maura Friedman, Lisa Larson-Walker, Candida Ng, Allison Stewart and Danielle Villasana reviewed 1,300 applications from women and nonbinary photographers around the world. Seven were chosen to receive $5,000 Women Photograph Project Grants, and one was chosen as this year’s winner of the Women Photograph + Leica Grant in the amount of $10,000,
We are happy to present this year’s winners:
First up is Rehab Eldalil of Egypt. Here’s a description of the project Eldalil will pursue (the photos displayed here are from previous work ):
“Nesting Birds will follow single women who have successfully been able to adopt children in Egypt. With rising divorce and domestic violence rates, more Egyptian women choose not to get married. Nevertheless, they express a profound desire to have children. Challenging social norms navigating a complex legal framework, more and more single women have succeeded in adopting orphaned children in recent years. Using multimedia and collaborative approaches, Nesting Birds will explore the notion of motherhood through the voices of the adoptive families to create a multilayered story as part of a long term series on motherhood and the maternal lineage.”
Next up is Mahé Elipe, also a $5,000 grantee. Here’s how she describes her project:
“In Mexico, she is the symbol of social struggle, she survives in a country that has taught her to live and survive in resilience. She can be found in the streets, singing feminist hymns, breathing in tear gas, wearing a cross commemorating femicides on her shoulder, or wearing a portrait of one still missing, with their hands in the ground cultivating the future or searching for a loved one. ‘She’ is the woman, the mother, the wife, the sister, the daughter, the friend, the neighbor. There are many of them and they are all united by the same cause: fighting for their rights.”
Following Elipe is Jaimy Gail, another $5,000 grantee. She was awarded the grant for her work “Vrouw zijn (on Being a Woman),” which:
“Explores strong femininity by ridding her from all imposed roles or rules. I let go of the social norms and focus on the implications of sex differences, cross-culturally. What does it mean to be a woman and what does ‘male’ and ‘female’ mean? What are the origins of sex differences and are they biological or are they a social construct? Vrouw zijn aims to seek out and document specific cultural and cross cultural codes for women.”
The next Women Photograph Project grantee is Takako Kido, who offers this description of her project:
“Skinship is a Japanese word that describes the skin-to-skin, heart-to-heart relationship between a mother and a child or family. Skinship includes cuddling, breastfeeding, co-bathing or co-sleeping — which build intimacy. Through an experience of loving touch, a child learns caring for others. Japanese skinship is considered to be important for strengthening the bond of family and also for the child’s healthy development. Because the idea of skinship was perfectly natural to me as a Japanese woman, only after I was arrested in New York because of family snapshots of skinship, did I realize how unique and shocking it could be in other cultural contexts. Living in both Japan and America showed me a cultural comparison and paradox clearly. In Japan, I gave birth to my son in 2012 and started making self-portraits, somehow, in the chaos of everyday life flying by. There seemed no boundary between our bodies, a symbiotic union. ”
Barbara Peacock is another grantee this year. Here’s Peacock’s project description:
“American Bedroom is an unfiltered poetic photographic journey viewing Americans in their most intimate dwelling; the bedroom. When physical bedroom doors are opened to me there is a veil of religion, politics, and ideologies that is mysteriously and magically lifted. What remains is the bare soul of human life, a story, and purity of heart that rises like cream to the top. This is not a look at our differences, although there may be many, it is about our likenesses, our loves, our dreams, and all the threads of commonality that connect us as human beings. My interest lies in the poetic resonance of ordinary subjects. I photograph working-class Americans, often beneath notice, and yet the very fabric of our nation. I am passionate but not sentimental about America. The nature of the project is open and unguarded portraits of individuals, couples, and families that reveal the depth of their character, truth, and spirit.”
The next photographer to be awarded a $5,000 grant is Ana Elisa Sotelo. Sotelo’s project description says:
“Las Truchas is a group of women wild swimmers that formed in Lima, Peru, to cope with the stress and trauma derived from the pandemic. As a Trucha, I witnessed firsthand the transformative power of sisterhood and the importance of connecting with nature and began to document our experience in my series Las Truchas. Cardumen de Mujeres (Schools of Women) is the continuation of this body of work. Over the next months, I will document groups of women who have found resilience in swimming together and expand my work to other bodies of water in Latin America. Through these images I plan to share the stories of women who turn to oceans and lakes to connect with each other, nature, and with adversity.”
Last, but not least, on this list of Women Photograph Project grantees is photographer Cansu Yildiran. And this is Yildiran’s project description:
“Deep in a valley of the Kusmer Highlands, in the Black Sea region of Turkey, lies the village and my ancestral homeland: Caykara. Tradition decrees that the women of this village cannot own the homes they live in or the land they live on — that right belongs to men, exclusively. I photographed this landscape, and the women who inhabit it, a personal investigation into identity, belonging, and what it means when neither of those are certain. I spent most of my childhood summers in Caykara, although it was only as an adult that I came to understand why my mother, and all of the women of the village, could never feel a true sense of ownership for this land. The struggle between attaining identity and the tension between these two opposing forces has always been a point of contention for me.”
This year’s $10,000 Women Photograph + Leica Grant goes to photographer Greta Rico. And without further ado, here’s Rico’s project description:
“In November 2017, my cousin Fernanda became a victim of feminicide, discovered on the street in a garbage bag. This documentary project springs from the most intimate experiences within my own family and tells the story of my cousin Siomara, who became a substitute mother of her then 3-year-old niece Nicole, after Nicole’s mother was murdered. Ten women are murdered daily in Mexico, leaving around 38,138 orphaned girls, boys and adolescents behind just between January 2017 (the year my cousin was murdered) and April 2022. This project shows how feminicide does not end with murder, but has psychosocial impacts that cause trauma in orphaned children, as well as with the mothers, sisters, grandmothers, and aunts who become substitute mothers because of gender violence in Mexico. Roughly 98% of the caregivers who are left in charge of these childhoods are women and they do not have access to any legal recognition or support.”
You can find out more about Women Photograph and its annual grants on its website, here. | 2022-07-27T11:27:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Women Photograph grantees - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/27/here-are-winners-this-years-women-photograph-grants/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/07/27/here-are-winners-this-years-women-photograph-grants/ |
Shinzo Abe’s death reveals complex story of discrimination and xenophobia
In forging a new Japanese identity after the war, the government excluded some groups — and embraced conservative religious organizations
Analysis by Michael Orlando Sharpe
A makeshift memorial for former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is seen at the Liberal Democratic Party in Tokyo on July 11. (Soichiro Koriyama/Bloomberg News)
The July 8th assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe came as a huge shock to Japan, a country with a particularly low incidence of gun violence. Abe was campaigning on behalf of a fellow Liberal Democratic Party politician in the city of Nara ahead of the July 10 House of Councillors elections.
Abe has been internationally lauded for his statesmanship and economic and foreign policy achievements. But political retrospectives have given far less attention to Abe’s ultranationalist agenda and reported connections to far-right and conservative religious groups.
What have we learned about Tetsuya Yamagami, the unemployed man who reportedly confessed to the shooting? Media accounts center on Yamagami’s confession to police that he killed Abe with a handmade weapon — and his claims that there was no political motivation for the assassination. The media portrayal of the 41-year-old from Nara reflects cautious cooperation in that they did not reveal his ultimate target.
Initial reports stated that Yamagami resented an “unnamed” religious organization — and was upset that his family became bankrupt after his mother made large donations to the group. Yamagami, apparently convinced that Abe was linked to the group, reportedly targeted the Japanese politician after the religious group’s leadership proved difficult to access.
Abe’s assassination has now turned a spotlight on some of the darker corners and surprising connections between Japanese politics and religious groups. My research helps explain how these came about, as Japan’s postwar effort to construct homogeneity from a diverse population created unexpected affiliations.
How did Japan construct homogeneity?
Abe’s party has dominated postwar Japan and maintains official rhetoric and notions of unique homogeneity where concepts of nation, language, race and culture are near-synonymous. Japan has pursued a modern narrative of an ethnically homogenous nation in an effort to bond a disparate populace.
This vision belies the presence of Japan’s historic minorities and increasing diversity from foreign residents. “Invisible” minorities include approximately 24,000 Indigenous Ainu, 1 million Okinawans, 3 million Burakumin (descendants of feudal-era outcast groups) and 600,000 Zainichi Koreans (descendants of Japan’s colonial annexation). In 2019, Japan had 281,266 special permanent residents with Korean nationality, as well as Taiwanese former imperial subjects and their descendants.
A modernizing Japan in the 19th century regarded Indigenous peoples and outcasts as premodern and subordinate. Expansionism promoted a multiethnic empire with Japanese people as hierarchically superior, while denigrating other Asians as inferior. With Japan’s World War II defeat and the end of the empire, and the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan began to “unmix” and deprived former colonial subjects of Japanese nationality. The country reembraced the idea of Japanese homogeneity. And both U.S. and Japanese authorities encouraged strict border controls to thwart the perceived communist threat from Korea and China.
From 1990 to 2019, Japan created immigration “side doors” for officially banned unskilled foreign labor. The country added heterogeneity with visible “newcomers” from Asia, Latin America and Africa — including often-exploited “trainee” laborers, co-ethnics, asylum seekers and the undocumented.
In 2018, Abe announced plans to dramatically increase unskilled foreign workers, yet declared this move was not an immigration policy. The foreign-resident population in 2019 was 2.32 percent, with growing numbers of international marriages and mixed-race Japanese children. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, appears likely to continue to expand Japan’s immigration regime but it’s unclear whether the government has a robust plan to more fully incorporate and include migrants in Japanese society.
How the Unification Church fits into the picture
As the questions continued over Abe’s assassination, government sources bowed to pressure from Japanese tabloids and foreign media. Sources named the Unification Church as the group in question — and the church confirmed the member ship of Yamagami’s mother. Media accounts continue to characterize Yamagami as an ordinary Japanese, an ex-soldier and an unemployed, frustrated loner.
But some dubbed Yamagami a second-generation victim of a new religion and its outsized influence. The Unification Church was founded in South Korea in 1954 by the fervently anti-communist Sun Myung Moon, who saw himself as the new messiah. The church’s alliances with Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party — including Abe’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke — began in the 1950s during the regional fight against communism. Japanese financial and political support increased as the Unification Church expanded.
Abe does not appear to have been a member of the Unification Church, although he did give a prerecorded speech last September at a church-related event and has praised the organization’s Korean Peninsula peace efforts and “family values.” Promoting ultranationalistic anti-Korean sentiment while simultaneously supporting the Korea-based Unification Church might seem an odd mix. But despite the Unification Church’s waning influence, conservative politicians in Japan have used it and other religious groups to mobilize consensus on conservative values, invoking themes of xenophobia and racism.
Japan has a discrimination problem
Japan’s homogeneity narrative leaves little room for minorities or difference — yet the country maintains that discrimination is not a serious problem. Article 14 of the Japanese constitution prohibits discrimination based on race, creed, sex, social status or family origin, but nothing in Japanese law makes discrimination illegal. Following the United States, in 1995 Japan became a signatory to the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Although the government officially recognized the Ainu people in 2008, the Ainu and other historically sidelined groups continue to face social and economic marginalization. A 2006 United Nations report on racism and discrimination in Japan was largely ignored by the Japanese media and faced harsh criticism from Japan’s right wing. In 2017, Japan’s first national survey of foreign residents’ human rights reported discrimination in employment and housing, racist taunts, hate speech and Japanese-only recruitment. Since the mid-2000s, contentious demonstrations occur between far-right anti-Korean and anti-racist pro-Korean movements. Hate speech has become prominent on social media, targeting both older and newer groups.
One irony of Abe’s and LDP tenure, despite their mobilization of anti-Korean ultranationalism, is that they were quiet allies with the Korea-based Unification Church. Those ties may have cost Abe his life, and now bring inadvertent public attention to his party’s unusual alliances.
Xenophobic nationalism can help win elections, but can also undermine democratic values and promote discrimination. In that sense, Abe’s assassination may become a weather vane for Japan. The coming weeks and months will show whether the political winds blow toward more transparent and inclusive liberal democracy, or opaque and illiberal exclusionism.
Michael Orlando Sharpe is an associate professor of political science at York College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an adjunct research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of “Postcolonial Citizens and Ethnic Migration: the Netherlands and Japan in the Age of Globalization” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and “The Politics of Racism and Antiracism in Japan” (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). | 2022-07-27T11:27:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shinzo Abe's ties to the Unification Church may have cost him his life - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/abe-japan-unification-church-ultranationalism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/abe-japan-unification-church-ultranationalism/ |
A quick succession of new features and tests has left even the app’s most loyal users, including Kim Kardashian, wondering what Instagram is for
(Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Shutterstock)
On Tuesday morning, Instagram head Adam Mosseri appeared in full damage control mode. Facing the camera and wearing a bright yellow sweater, he attempted to quash a growing revolt from some of Instagram’s most prominent users.
In a video posted to his Instagram account, Mosseri acknowledged the app was in transition, but clarified that some things users might encounter, like a full-screen feed, were just tests.
“There’s a lot going on on Instagram right now,” he said. “We’re experimenting with a number of different changes to the app and so we’re hearing a lot of concerns from all of you.”
“Instagram has become overcrowded with so many different types of content happening at the same time,” Bruening said. “Everyone has been feeling the same thing at the same time but a lot of people have been too afraid to say anything.”
While Instagram — which boasts roughly 1 billion monthly active users as of 2021 — still exceeds TikTok’s base, it faces an increasing threat as use of the short-form video app has skyrocketed. In 2020, TikTok became the most-downloaded app in the world and its young user base began spending more time on it than Instagram and Facebook. Instagram parent company Meta’s earnings report, set to be released Wednesday, will show whether TikTok has eaten into its market share.
Sarah Chappell, an online business strategist and creator coach in New York City, said the outcry reflects a broad understanding among power users that the app isn’t meeting their needs, whether they’re content creators, small businesses, or average account-holders.
“There’s just a level of eroded trust at this point, where people aren’t willing to invest their energy or labor into whatever Meta is testing this week,” she said. “Instagram is trying to be too many different things and the constant need they feel to take from other apps leads to ongoing confusion for creators and consumers, and confusion does not lead to adoption.”
But the company is aiming to move closer to the entertainment industry. Instagram owner Meta is forming an advisory board composed of top entertainment executives, managers and publicists, according to a person familiar with the subject who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The effort has been in the works for over a year, but outreach to prospective members of the board began this week. The board will not advise on specific product changes, but will instead focus on how Meta can work more closely with the entertainment industry.
To some observers, the fact that Instagram is working so hard to upend its core function of connecting with friends and family speaks to how drastically social media has changed. “Making that content harder to access shows the competitive landscape they’re in right now,” said Matt Perault, director of the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill. “It might be totally necessary that they pivot but that doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed in this new world.”
To ride out the storm, Instagram will have to listen to the right voices and navigate the backlash from either side. “There’s a war between people who want Instagram to be more like Snapchat and people who want it to be more TikTok,” Woodbury said, “Right now the former group is larger and louder.” | 2022-07-27T11:28:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Instagram is shifting to videos. Users, including the Kardashians, aren't happy. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagram-video-shift-kardashian/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagram-video-shift-kardashian/ |
Wednesday briefing: Another interest rate hike; the Justice Dept.’s Jan. 6 investigation; coronavirus; Choco Tacos; and more
The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 actions.
What we know: Investigators are asking about his conversations and have seized phone records of top aides, The Post reported last night.
Why it matters: It’s the first indication that prosecutors are looking at Trump’s involvement in trying to overturn the 2020 election, and not just his inner circle, as they weigh charges.
The bigger picture: More than 840 suspects have been charged so far in the investigation. We’re tracking those cases here.
The Fed is expected to raise interest rates today for the fourth time this year.
Why? The nation’s central bank is still trying to get rising prices under control — without causing a recession — using one of the only tools it can.
What does a rate hike do? It makes borrowing money more expensive, which affects car loans, mortgages and more. In theory, that discourages people from making big purchases, which would lower demand and let prices fall.
Two former officers will be sentenced today for violating George Floyd’s rights.
What to know: J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao didn’t intervene while another Minneapolis officer knelt on the 46-year-old Black man’s neck, eventually killing him in May 2020.
A third ex-officer, Thomas Lane, was sentenced to 30 months in prison last week. He had been holding Floyd’s legs. All three were convicted in February.
Russia has decided to pull out of the International Space Station.
What’s happening? It will leave the aging project after 2024, the country announced yesterday, and plans to develop its own.
Why this matters: The space station is run by both Russia and the U.S., one of the last areas of cooperation between the two countries. It’s not clear that it can continue operating if one side quits.
Scientists are closing in on the coronavirus’s origins.
The latest: The pandemic began with multiple viral spillovers from animals sold and butchered at a seafood market in Wuhan, China, two new studies argued.
What they still don’t know: Which animals were involved or where they came from. The scientists also said they can’t prove that the virus didn’t originate in a lab.
The state of the pandemic: BA.5, an offshoot of the omicron variant, is driving the latest wave. Check your state’s numbers here.
Climate change is forcing Maine to revolutionize its fishing industry.
Why? Maine’s waters are warming faster than 96% of the world’s oceans, forcing lobsters, the state’s iconic staple, to move north.
Enter an unlikely hero: Seaweed, a climate-friendly crop that absorbs carbon and nitrogen from the water. Fishermen are growing it, and it’s turning into a new cash crop sold across the country.
Klondike is discontinuing the classic Choco Taco.
Why? We should blame the pandemic, the company said. Demand for Klondike products has spiked, and it’s struggling to keep up.
The Choco Taco has been around for nearly four decades and was invented by someone at a Philadelphia ice cream company.
And now … your boss might be reading your work messages: Here’s how to stop that. | 2022-07-27T11:28:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Wednesday, July 27 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/07/27/what-to-know-for-july-27/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/07/27/what-to-know-for-july-27/ |
Even if gross domestic product figures show a shrinking economy, a recession won’t officially have begun unless the National Bureau of Economic Research says so
President Biden said he doesn't think the U.S. economy is in a recession, ahead of Thursday's release of gross domestic product figures. (Jemal Countess/Bloomberg News)
Democrats and Republicans have begun arguing over whether the U.S. economy is in a recession ahead of a key data release on Thursday. But the official pronouncement will ultimately come down to a little-known group of economists selected by the National Bureau of Economic Research called the “Business Cycle Dating Committee,” which stubbornly takes its time and tries to wall itself off from political interference or attempts to spin its findings.
The stakes for the group are high, in part because of the extraordinarily unusual economic conditions two years after the last recession, early in the coronavirus pandemic. The economy contracted in the first quarter of the year, and many Republicans say a recession is here already, with Thursday’s release expected by many analysts to show a second consecutive quarter of negative growth. But from President Biden down, administration officials are instead pointing to other indicators showing the economy remains strong and insisting the committee would be wrong to declare a recession.
The political haggling is not supposed to matter to the eight economists who rule on when recessions start. Their decision is almost certainly months away, if it comes at all: The committee typically waits long after a recession has begun to declare it, only acting when the evidence has become overwhelming, sometimes even after the recession is already over. That puts the pressure bearing down on the organization from the outside — to promptly render a verdict on one of the most important matters facing economic policymakers — directly at odds with its mission to provide unassailable empirical decisions.
As a result, what seems like a straightforward question — is the U.S. economy in a recession? — is in part decided on a subjective basis at a later date, sometimes when it no longer appears pertinent, by experts in closed-door meetings of a privately selected committee.
“By far, the most important thing to try to convey is that the committee is not trying to do real-time dating of whether we’re in a recession,” said MIT economics professor James Poterba, the NBER president and a member of the committee, in an interview. “There’s often enormous amount of interest in that question and what many people are hoping for, but the committee’s task is to create a consistent historical record of the turning points — the peaks and the troughs in the U.S. economy.”
The group’s calculus could become increasingly fraught in the following months, amid puzzling economic conditions that defy easy characterization. The political consequences for the committee could be significant, as the Biden administration faces growing public anger over high inflation and its economic stewardship. Congressional Republicans will also be eager to seize on a ruling that the economy is in a recession, trying to capitalize on voter discontent ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
Asked about the upcoming economic numbers, Biden on Monday disputed the notion that a recession was imminent. That is part of a broader administration campaign in recent weeks to rebut GOP claims that a recession has already begun. Top economic officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, appeared on cable TV news Sunday and Monday to reiterate their view that the U.S. economy is not technically in recession — and wouldn’t be even if the GDP numbers show a second consecutive quarter of contraction.
This strategy has its risks, though, because if the United States does enter a recession later, their current assurances will look misguided — particularly after the administration already incorrectly dismissed the threat of inflation last year.
U.S. policymakers dismissed inflation threat until it was too late
“We’re not going to be in a recession, in my view. The [unemployment] rate is still one of the lowest we’ve had in history,” Biden said on Monday. “My hope is we go from this rapid growth to steady growth.”
At the core of the challenge facing the committee of economists is that it relies on more than a half-dozen criteria to measure when a recession has begun. The general impression many Americans — and some commentators — have is that a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. But that is not how the NBER, or most economists, think of it. Instead, the committee weighs factors such as payroll levels, retail sales, industrial production and personal income when making a comprehensive assessment about whether the economy is in recession. The committee stresses on its website that “there is no fixed rule about what measures contribute information to the process or how they are weighted in our decisions.”
As Deese told CNN: “In terms of the technical definition, it’s not a recession — the technical definition considers a much broader spectrum of data points.”
Traditionally, all these various economic metrics move in tandem, making the committee’s job easier. Usually, when growth declines, so do employment, consumer activity and the other measures of economic health. But the economy since the start of the pandemic has confounded prior models and may do so again. Economic growth may end up declining for two consecutive quarters — although the first quarter in the United States was negative due largely to technical factors, such as a temporary uptick in overall imports — even as unemployment remains among the lowest levels in American history. Consumer spending has remained strong, too, in a way at odds with a typical recession. If unemployment remains low even as growth contracts, the NBER economists could face a vexing challenge in deciding how to categorize the situation.
Predicting the committee’s decision is made more difficult by the way in which it operates. As part of the NBER, the Business Cycle Dating Committee is run by a private nonprofit group — not the federal government or a state statistical agency. Its membership is selected by the president of the NBER “in consultation” with the committee chair, according to Poterba.
The committee’s meetings are not publicized. They’re held in a closed-door conference room on the third floor of the Cambridge, Mass., office building where NBER is headquartered. They don’t meet on a fixed schedule: Board Chairman and Stanford economist Bob Hall is responsible for calling the meetings. During long periods of consistent economic growth, the board can go years without having anything to discuss, and therefore, it might hold no meetings. It wouldn’t even confirm when past meetings have happened.
“The committee does not announce its meeting schedule, and that’s something we don’t talk about,” Poterba said.
Its last public pronouncement came on July 19, 2021 — when the committee declared that there had been a recession between February and April 2020, the shortest one in U.S. history.
The eight economists on the committee are among the most respected in their field. Some have served in Democratic administrations, but past members have also included GOP appointees. In addition to Poterba and Hall, the members are Christina Romer and David Romer of the University of California at Berkeley; James Stock, of Harvard; Robert Gordon, of Northwestern; Valerie Ramey, of the University of California at San Diego; and Mark Watson, of Princeton.
The NBER has its roots in the period following World War I, after a Columbia-trained economist who worked for labor and trade organizations and the chief statistician at AT&T formed a new organization after realizing they had little shared empirical data with which to conduct policy debates. In the early 1960s, the Commerce Department began publishing a digest on business conditions that cited the NBER’s work on the ups and downs of the business cycle, giving it a kind of federal imprimatur, according to Poterba.
Poterba stressed that the board is aware of public hunger for guidance about a recession but does not let it dictate their decisions. Economic data is often later revised, and the committee is careful not to announce a verdict that is contingent on data that could later be changed.
“The NBER is really trying to provide guideposts for researchers; it’s not trying to provide short-term political talking points for either party,” said Steve Miran, who served as a senior official in the Treasury Department under Donald Trump’s administration and is the co-founder of Amberwave Partners, an investment fund. “We’d all like it to be binary — 0 to 1, recession or not — but the truth is it’s much more of continuum. It requires interpretation of the length, depth and speed of the contraction, as well as which sectors of the economy are contracting and why. … And that requires an element of judgment.”
Still, that does not mean the board’s members are always in agreement. Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel, who served as a member of the committee for roughly 25 years, said there is usually unanimity about the broad questions of whether a recession is beginning or ending, but differences can emerge about precisely what month a recession began or ended.
“There are times when the right answer is not clear, and the kind of thing there may be disagreement about is someone wanting more data — like revisions to the [gross domestic product], for instance — and someone else saying, ‘It’s already been 11 months, and if we wait longer people will think the news will be too stale,’ ” Frankel said. “That tension is always an issue.” | 2022-07-27T11:28:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 8 economists who decide if the U.S. is in a recession - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/27/who-decides-recession/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/27/who-decides-recession/ |
1 WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Putnam, $18.) By Delia Owens. A young outcast finds herself at the center of a local murder trial.
2 THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO (Washington Square Press, $17.) By Taylor Jenkins Reid. A Hollywood icon recounts the story of her glamorous life to a young reporter, and both discover the cost of fame.
3 BOOK LOVERS (Berkley, $17.) By Emily Henry. Two adversarial book professionals from New York keep running into each other during a small-town vacation.
4 VERITY (Grand Central, $16.99.) By Colleen Hoover. A writer hired to complete an incapacitated best-selling author’s manuscript learns disturbing secrets.
5 IT ENDS WITH US (Atria, $16.99.) By Colleen Hoover. A woman questions her relationship with a commitment-phobic partner when her old flame appears.
6 UGLY LOVE (Atria, $16.99.) By Colleen Hoover. A mutual attraction between two young adults leads to a casual relationship with no commitment, but emotions get in the way.
7 PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION (Berkley, $16.) By Emily Henry. Two college best friends who had a falling out reunite for one more vacation together.
8 BEACH READ (Berkley, $16.) By Emily Henry. Two writers who are summer neighbors challenge each other to write novels in each other’s genres.
9 MALIBU RISING (Ballantine, $18.) By Taylor Jenkins Reid. An end-of-summer party is the backdrop for the story of four famous siblings trying to reckon with their upbringing.
10 CIRCE (Back Bay, $16.99.) By Madeline Miller. This follow-up to “The Song of Achilles” is about the goddess who turns Odysseus’s men to swine.
6 THIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTS (Penguin, $18.) By Michael Pollan. The “Omnivore’s Dilemma” author explores the cultural and scientific impacts of plant-based drugs opium, caffeine and mescaline.
8 DO THE WORK!: AN ANTIRACIST ACTIVITY BOOK (Workman, $22.95.) By W. Kamau Bell, Kate Schatz. A workbook with games, activities and illustrations that shed light on systemic racism and offer tips on what people can do about it.
10 TALKING TO STRANGERS (Back Bay, $18.99). By Malcolm Gladwell. An examination of why humans are so bad at recognizing liars and lies.
3 WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Putnam, $9.99) By Delia Owens. A young outcast finds herself at the center of a local murder trial.
10 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL (Bantam, $7.95). By Anne Frank. The diary of a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl as she hides from the Nazis in an attic during World War II. | 2022-07-27T12:25:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Post paperback bestsellers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-paperback-bestsellers/2022/07/27/6ceea776-0d58-11ed-ab50-5d9e73892397_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-paperback-bestsellers/2022/07/27/6ceea776-0d58-11ed-ab50-5d9e73892397_story.html |
A year later, Trea Turner reflects on being traded by the Nationals
Trea Turner has some advice for Juan Soto as the Nationals' star outfielder deals with uncertainty about his future. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
LOS ANGELES — Trea Turner is happy with the Los Angeles Dodgers. On Monday, in a conversation about being traded by the Washington Nationals last July, the all-star shortstop wanted that to be known. But asked if a full year has changed his feelings at all, Turner looked down and grinned in the home dugout at Dodger Stadium.
The short answer was no. The longer answers once again showed that Turner felt wronged by the Nationals organization.
“It’s just that communication is key and I don’t think the communication was good,” Turner told The Washington Post. “I know things change and whatnot, but I just never thought it was communicated how things had changed, you know what I mean? When the spring started over there last season, they were telling me they wanted to build around me. It seems like the same stuff is happening with Juan right now.
“It is what it is, but it’s the truth. I can accept the business side of it. I just wanted it to be fair.”
Turner, 29, played in Washington for parts of seven seasons. He was and remains one of the best shortstops in the majors. He led the National League in hits, stolen bases and batting average in 2021. After this year, he can become a free agent and find out how multiple teams value him.
That’s a common discussion around the Nationals these days. And by bringing up Soto on his own, Turner opened himself up to more questions about his former teammate. Turner joked that he’s been talking about the 23-year-old star for two weeks. Soto, like Turner before him, could be dealt this month because the front office doesn’t foresee signing him long-term. Turner can empathize with how Soto’s public message — that he would like to stay in Washington — might clash with the reality of negotiations.
“It can be hard to separate what you want and the money. When you talk to a team you could sign an extension with, you really have to consider both,” Turner explained. “When fans see what’s happening, when front offices see what is happening, it’s hard to separate that the money and where a guy wants to play may be competing with each other. Juan wants his worth, which he should. But I also don’t think he’s lying when he says he wants to be in Washington. So it’s hard to get both things, when you say you want to stay there and they say: ‘Well how bad do you want to stay here?’ That’s kind of what he’s going through right now. That’s what I went through.”
Soto recently turned down a 15-year, $440 million offer that did not include payment deferrals, according to multiple people familiar with the terms. The average annual value of $29.3 would have ranked 20th in history, not nearly high enough for him or agent Scott Boras. And while urging any team to empty the bank for Soto, Turner offered more candid thoughts on the Nationals and how he used to see his future.
“I ended up betting on myself every step of the way,” he said. “I got offered multiple contract extensions while with the Nationals, and with both of them I thought I still had better baseball to play. I thought I proved that. I don’t know if I played too well or something. I don’t know what happened. But I wanted to play for them the rest of my career. If they offered something even close to what I thought was my worth, I probably would have took it and I’d still be there. But they obviously didn’t do that.”
One of those offers was in the neighborhood of six years and $100 million, according to multiple people with knowledge of past discussions. But after the New York Mets signed shortstop Francisco Lindor for 10 years and $341 million in the spring of 2021, Turner’s agents wanted a similar deal for their client.
Turner is only five months older than Lindor and had comparable career numbers. Since Lindor was locked up — a deal that happened, funny enough, while the Mets were in D.C. — Turner has been far and away more productive. The Nationals didn’t make another offer, though, according to multiple people familiar with the situation. And soon Turner could see what two more great years could do for his bottom line.
The truth is that, in a perfect world, he never wanted to become a free agent. Yet unless the Dodgers extend him in next three months, Turner will hit the open market ahead of his 30th birthday. It would feel fitting in a sense.
“What I’ve learned in the process is if you think you have better baseball to play, then wait,” Turner said. “And if you play your best baseball, and you’re content with whatever is offered, then maybe you consider taking a deal. It’s always going to be tricky. You can only trust yourself.” | 2022-07-27T12:30:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trea Turner reflects on last year's traded from the Nationals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/nationals-trea-turner-trade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/nationals-trea-turner-trade/ |
France’s mustard shortage fuels drama and panic in grocery stores
These mustard pots, pictured on Paris supermarket shelves in July, may not have been there for long. (Abaca Press/Sipa USA/AP)
PARIS — It was the local egg delivery man who spread the spiciest gossip about the mustard shortage.
Someone in a small French town had found a way to buy two jars at the grocery store — despite the one-mustard cap imposed by many shops as the country faces a shortage of its beloved condiment.
“The audacity!” said Claire Dinhut, who heard about the local mustard scandal from the egg courier while at her family home south of Tours, in west-central France, as she shared the “town drama” in a TikTok video that has been viewed more than 600,000 times. How the mustard bandit did it: He left the store with one jar, and sneaked back in for a second by checking out with a different salesperson.
Just as summer barbecues — and extra demand for the tangy condiment — reach their peak, France is in the throes of a weeks-long shortage of mustard.
For some, it feels dire — a personal consequence of extreme weather that decimated mustard seed supply in and outside France, and the supply chain disruptions still reverberating around the globe as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The shortage is sparking calls to bring home the production of mustard seeds to rely less on other countries.
The Washington Post visited four grocery stores in western Paris this week that either had no mustard for sale or were out of two common mustard brands — Maille and Amora, which are part of the same company owned by Unilever.
“I haven’t had mustard in three months. You won’t find any [elsewhere either],” said Hassan Talbi, owner of a bodega on Rue de Courcelles. Talbi says his supplier, French retailer Carrefour, sent him one shipment of mustard jars about two months ago — and since then, nothing. No word on when he might get more.
Mustard is a staple of most French diets — adding a kick to fries and sandwiches — and a key ingredient in iconic dishes like steak tartare. It’s also a source of national pride: The production of mustard was regulated in France as early as the Middle Ages, and the world-famous Dijon mustard comes from the Burgundy region. While historians say mustard wasn’t invented in France, many French people claim it as their own.
“This is a sauce that’s loved all over the world — and it’s ours,” Dinhut told The Post.
Yet despite being the largest consumer of mustard worldwide, France only has about 4,500 hectares (around 11,000 acres) of mustard seed crops — the bulk of it in Burgundy, home to the city of Dijon.
Droughts and heat waves that occurred last year in Canada — the source of roughly 80 percent of France’s mustard seed imports — severely disrupted global supply. Containers to transport foodstuffs are hard to come by, and the high cost of fuel has made shipping costs skyrocket. French producers say mustard-seed-eating insects, which thrive in warmer temperatures, are also foiling crops.
All this has caused some serious soul-searching among farmers and French mustard lovers about how they got to this point. The shortage could be “a tremendous accelerator” for the industry to repatriate production of mustard seeds, Paul-Olivier Claudepierre, co-owner of Martin-Pouret, a French agri-food business, told French newspaper Le Monde.
A Little Dijon on the Side: French City Is About More Than Mustard
People are also blaming the mustard hoarders: French people who read about the shortage and decided to stock up on extra mustard may be fueling the problem, producers say.
On TikTok, French people have posted instructions on how to make mustard at home. Conspiracy theories also abound online, with some users sharing videos purporting to show stockpiles of mustard in supermarket warehouses, and speculating that companies have been hoarding the condiment to artificially drive up prices. Those videos have been debunked, and retailers like Carrefour have said they are getting mustard onto shelves as quickly as possible.
Hubert Guillaume and Naël Bernard, who work in Paris at a Monoprix, a supermarket chain, said they were relieved when they got a shipment of mustard last week — after a month without. “People came in droves to ask us and there was nothing,” said Guillaume. Some would come every day, Bernard said, hoping mustard had arrived. Every day, he had to turn them away.
This is quite literally, the talk of the town. Where Dinhut’s dad lives in west-central France — and in other small towns just like it — “If you’re checking out at a grocery store for example, you’re like ‘Ah, still no mustard!’ It’s like talking about the weather,” she said.
Comedians from France and other countries have seized on the shortage to poke fun at the French for their dramatic reactions.
The shortage began in Canada, where unusually dry, hot weather in the regions of Alberta and Saskatchewan last year led to reduced crop yields. The country is the largest exporter of mustard seeds in the world, accounting for 31 percent of global exports, according to the market research firm Tridge. France is the second-largest importer of mustard seeds, which are used to make the creamy yellow condiment.
Meanwhile, crops of mustard seeds grown in France were hit hard by insects this year, says Paul Delacour, who works on his parents’ farm northwest of Paris, which produces the seeds locally.
Delacour and other producers say French and European restrictions on certain harmful pesticides can make it more difficult for them to respond.
Climate change has also played a role, according to Fabrice Genin, president of the Association of Mustard Seed Producers of Burgundy, who says milder winters have been more favorable to insects.
“From 12,000 tons [of mustard seed produced] in 2016 we went down to 4,000 tons in 2021. It’s simple, we can no longer manage the pests,” Genin told French newspaper Liberation. “There is a climate effect, that is obvious.”
It’s not just supply: When there is mustard to be found, it’s pricier. The low supply from Canada, combined with inflation worldwide and the increased cost of shipping, energy and raw materials for packaging, has contributed to a rise in the price of mustard in France — at least 13 percent year-on-year in June, according to the French retail data firm IRi.
Marc Désarménien, the general manager of Edmond Fallot, a family-run mustard producer based in Burgundy, says the price of his products rose 9 percent on average at the start of the year, and will rise again next year to keep up with inflation. But he believes if Canadian mustard seeds become more expensive, and shortages continue to plague French producers, domestic production will increase.
In Burgundy, where producers agree on a price per ton of seed for the year ahead of time, next year’s price has been set at 2,000 euros ($2,029) for the 2023 harvest, reports the local newspaper Ouest France — a 48 percent increase from this year’s price of about 1,350 euros ($1,370). Groups of mustard producers in Burgundy believe this could make local production more profitable. Until now, importing seeds from Canada was 15 to 20 percent less expensive than sowing and harvesting them in France, according to Désarménien.
“This is an opportunity for the agricultural sector to relocate production,” Claudepierre, of the agri-food company Martin-Pouret, told Le Monde — “and for the public to realize the absurdity of the situation: We cultivate a seed thousands of kilometers away that we will harvest, bring to the port, to cross the ocean in a container, and end up transforming it at home.” It’s “expensive,” he said, and bad for the environment.
But even if the shortage leads to a change in how mustard is made in France, the process will “take a little time,” Désarménien said. And many producers don’t expect the shortage to correct itself soon.
“I’m afraid it will take a while longer before we can restock,” Luc Vandermaesen, president of the industry group Mustard of Burgundy, told Le Monde this month. “It will be tense until 2024.”
If the French can wait that long. | 2022-07-27T12:34:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | France’s mustard shortage spreads panic, calls to ‘repatriate’ seeds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/france-mustard-shortage-canada-seeds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/france-mustard-shortage-canada-seeds/ |
Magnitude-7.3 earthquake hits Philippines
Damaged buildings after an earthquake in Santiago, in the Ilocos region of the Philippines, on July 27. (Bureau of Fire Protection/Reuters)
MANILA — A major earthquake struck the northern Philippines on Wednesday morning, killing at least four, injuring dozens, and damaging over a hundred buildings across the region.
The 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck the province of Abra at 8:43 a.m. local time, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. The United States Geological Survey listed the earthquake magnitude at 7 and its depth at 10 kilometers (six miles).
Landslides and power interruptions were reported across the northern island of Luzon. About 15 cities and 280 towns felt the quake, and several roads were rendered impassable.
A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the northern Philippines on July 27, downing buildings and injuring dozens. (Video: The Washington Post)
The quake was felt in the capital, Manila, but was stronger in the north, affecting the northwestern region of Ilocos and Mountain Province, north of the tourist city of Baguio. Churches and historical buildings were damaged.
In a viral video, parts of the centuries-old Bantay Bell Tower in Vigan City, capital of Ilocos Sur, fell as onlookers in an adjacent park ran.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said he plans to visit affected sites on Thursday. “We are making sure there is adequate response to the needs of our countrymen affected by this disaster,” he said in a statement.
The Philippines is located along the Ring of Fire, a path that has earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean also is frequented by typhoons.
According to the USGS, 11 other earthquakes magnitude 6.5 or higher have taken place within 250 kilometers (155 miles) of the current quake. The deadliest of these was a 7.7-magnitude earthquake in 1990 that killed over 1,600 and injured 3,000.
The country is also anticipating a 7.2-magnitude earthquake, known locally as “the Big One,” when a 100-kilometer (62-mile) fault line cutting across the Manila region shifts. Authorities say the fault last moved in 1658, and it could cause “great devastation” in the capital region when it moves again.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, Marcos said that he would support the creation of a new department for disaster resilience. “I don’t like to say it, but it looks like this will be more frequent,” he said, referring to disasters and extreme weather events. “We need more capability than we have now.” | 2022-07-27T12:34:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Philippines earthquake kills four and injures dozens - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/philippines-earthquake-luzon-abra/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/philippines-earthquake-luzon-abra/ |
Residents find plenty of reasons to stay in Kings Park
The Springfield, Va., community, which is a draw for military families, is prized for its walkability
By Laura Scudder
Ruth Wong, 87, cuts flowers off the bushes outside her home in the Kings Park neighborhood of Springfield, Va. She moved to the neighborhood with her husband in 1963 and is the original owner of her house. She raised her children there and spends time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the home today. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
Marie Cullerton, who will be 80 this year, moved to Kings Park in Springfield, Va., with her husband in 1973 — not long after the houses off Braddock Road were built. The city lovers, a military family, thought they would leave the neighborhood after awhile for somewhere in Alexandria, but Kings Park compelled them to stay.
“We weren’t going to stay that long; we were only going to stay for two years. And we got involved with the community and couldn’t leave it. It became home for us. So we stayed, and I’m still here,” Cullerton said.
Her husband died six years ago, but she said she doesn’t feel alone thanks to her neighbors and church, which has a group of widows who gather for a weekly dinner.
“I enjoy talking to the neighbors, especially Leann next door and her husband. I was having a problem with my car, and I think he jumped it every day for me,” she said. “I mean, unbelievable — that’s dedication to a neighbor. I said, ‘What would I do without Brian?’”
Aside from the people and neighborhood celebrations, the amenities and surrounding businesses have also compelled residents to stay in the area. Charlotte Hannagan, a resident since 2014 and Kings Park Civic Association vice president of social outreach, noted that there’s so much within walking distance of the neighborhood.
“What I really like about Kings Park is that you can walk to the elementary school, you can walk to the community pool, you can walk to the Giant, and there's a couple of restaurants, and the CVS. And then there's a library that you can walk to,” she said. “We live across from the park — the playground — so that was a huge, huge draw for me: to be able to walk places.”
Beverly Boschert, a former Fairfax County Public Schools teacher and, like Hannagan, a military spouse, also has fond memories of walking in Kings Park when her son was young. She said the walkable activities Hannagan enjoys are the reasons her own family has stayed in the neighborhood, where she has lived since 1977.
“The convenience and the friendly atmosphere are the main attractions, and the reasons we’ve remodeled and worked on the house rather than move,” she said. “We were happy here, so we’ve done what we needed to be able to stay here.”
Boschert said the neighborhood’s makeup has become more racially and ethnically diverse over the years and now has a mix of young families and retired couples.
Hannagan, 33, is part of one such family with younger children. They often get together with other military families in the neighborhood.
“My kids are able to just walk out of the door and they have a bunch of friends that are neighbors that they can go play with. I know we can get that in many places, but I've just been very happy with how the people are,” she said. “A lot of them are in the same boat as us with two working parents, with deployments. We’re just there for each other, which has been wonderful.”
Cullerton’s children and grandchildren are now spread across the country, but she’s found a different sort of family in Kings Park. A free, recurring senior luncheon hosted at Hunan West, a Chinese restaurant in Kings Park Shopping Center, is how she connected with others in the neighborhood pre-pandemic.
“You build up a sense of community here with the businesses, and they treat you well. We’ve always tried to go back to that restaurant all the time. I’ll go back, and they know me now,” she said. Cullerton noted that the neighborhood recognized the restaurant a plaque, which hangs on its wall.
The Kings Park Gazette, a neighborhood newsletter published quarterly, details events, updates and musings from residents.
Living there: Kings Park is bounded by Burke Lake Road, Rolling Road and Braddock Road and Lake Accotink Park. The community has 1,152 homes. Two homes are on the market and three are under contract, according to Susan Metcalf, a real estate agent with AveryHess. Fourteen homes have sold this year.
Last year, the most expensive home sold was a four-bedroom, three-bathroom rambler for $815,000, Metcalf said. The least expensive was a four-bedroom, three-bathroom split-foyer home for $550,000. The average listing price is $773,000, and rentals range between $2,800 and $3,500 a month in the Springfield community, according to Metcalf.
Schools: Kings Park Elementary (grades K-3), Kings Glen Elementary (grades 4-6) and Lake Braddock Secondary (grades 7-12).
Transit: Metrobus and Fairfax Connector routes serve the neighborhood. The closest Metro station, Franconia-Springfield (Blue Line), is a 15-minute drive away. The Rolling Road Station for the Virginia Railway Express is a five-minute drive. | 2022-07-27T12:47:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Neighborhood profile Kings Park in Springfield, Va. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/27/where-we-live-kings-park/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/27/where-we-live-kings-park/ |
Junior Bankers Deserve Their Bonuses. Really.
A few more of these go a long way. (Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America)
Bonuses for junior bankers are a little smaller than they were last year, the mostly anonymous banking discussion board Wall Street Oasis revealed last week, and the junior bankers are not too happy about it. I worked on Wall Street for seven years, and I have observed many cycles in compensation. While the media is usually eager to report with some relish on declining pay — bankers are typically unsympathetic characters for much of America — the complaints from the young men and women who manipulate spreadsheets and do much of the manual labor in investment banking shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
Ordinarily a job with high prestige and high pay would result in a comfortable standard of living. And for sure, the pay is high — there are not many jobs out there that pay $200,000 a year for people in their 20s. But average rent has risen to $5,000 a month in Manhattan, and it’s difficult to find an apartment for less than that with anything in the way of amenities. That $60,000 in annual rent eats up about 30% of the typical paycheck, a lot goes to taxes, and there is not much left in the way of savings. I could make the argument that one of these bankers could work in say, South Carolina, make $60,000 a year, and enjoy a higher standard of living, but there would be a loss of prestige.
Young people work at banks and accept being underpaid because there is the promise of becoming an old person at a bank and being overpaid. And even if that doesn’t come to pass, a banking analyst has a few good years of experience that can be a launchpad to something better. In 2001, Lehman Brothers hired 12 associates into equities, including me. Seven years later, I was the only one left. But nearly everyone went on to bigger and better things. An investment bank is an unparalleled finishing school in the business world. You learn skills (and build character) that lasts a lifetime. But the first few years are the toughest. I started out making $135,000 a year, and it was five years before my compensation went above $300,000. I didn’t feel rich, and it was a while before I did.
The reason that banker pay hasn’t risen, and in some cases is even declining, is because of an imbalance of supply and demand for labor. In bear markets, banks can pay less because they know there are fewer other opportunities and people won’t leave. The tech industry is in shambles right now, and private equity is facing a rising interest rate environment that will most likely crimp its business. In bull markets, when the deal calendar is bursting at the seams, banks must compete for a shrinking pool of available labor, and salaries and bonuses rise.
Junior bankers are typically willing to accept less compensation in exchange for prestige, even though the conditions are strenuous. There is social currency in being able to name-drop your firm at cocktail parties. But inflation is eroding the real value of a bonus. With inflation at 9.1% a year, a drop in compensation is acutely painful when rent is rising by 30% or more. This is prompting an existential crisis among some young bankers who ask, “Why am I doing this?”
I know what it is like to be disappointed with compensation. I had some good years and some bad ones. Banking is filled with disappointment. It is demoralizing to work 100-hour weeks and sacrifice physical and mental health only to make no progress at all. In fact, the best reason for banks to maintain at least a somewhat generous level of compensation is for morale. Happy employees are more productive employees. And the amazing thing is that it doesn’t take much — an extra $20,000 goes a long way and provides a lot of breathing room with expenses. There are plenty of ways for a bank to lower expenses, but cutting the bonuses of junior employees is practically the worst place to do it.
• Drought for Rainmakers Threatens Banker Job Cuts: Paul J. Davies
• Tech Is Crashing, So Kiss Your Bonus Goodbye: Chris Bryant | 2022-07-27T12:56:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Junior Bankers Deserve Their Bonuses. Really. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/junior-bankers-deserve-their-bonuses-really/2022/07/27/48d790a8-0da0-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/junior-bankers-deserve-their-bonuses-really/2022/07/27/48d790a8-0da0-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
Out of focus. (Photographer: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Two political forecasting models delivered the perfect assessment of state of the 2022 midterm contests on Tuesday. In the morning, the Decision Desk model for Senate elections tipped in favor of Republicans capturing a majority in that chamber. Later in the day, the FiveThirtyEight model tipped in the opposite direction for the first time, giving Democrats a tiny edge. Why is that perfect? Because economic performance metrics and political indicators are throwing up a mess of contradictory signals, making any analysis of what’s going to happen, or even what’s happening now, unusually difficult.
The basics haven’t changed since Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. From that point on, 2022 was likely to be a good year for Republicans simply because presidents’ parties usually lose congressional seats in midterm elections. Given the narrow majorities Democrats hold in both the Senate and House of Representatives, it seemed reasonable to expect Republicans to gain majorities in one or both chambers.
The other basic circumstance, however, was that the particular Senate seats up for election this November gave Democrats a fighting chance of holding on, or even gaining a seat or two, even in a good year for Republicans. All of that is still true, and it’s the context surrounding the uncertainty that remains; that is, the big questions are about just how well Republicans will do.
To answer, begin with what the numbers maven Nate Silver tweeted about recent shifts in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. He mentions the Supreme Court decision in June to overturn its landmark 1973 abortion rights precedent, and adds:
Gas prices are down. Trump is back in the news because of the Jan. 6 hearings and for other reasons. COVID deaths remain toward the lower end since the pandemic began. Wacky GOP candidates are winning primaries.
Here’s the problem: Just as each of those factors are breaking well for Democrats, Biden’s approval ratings continue their steady march south, reaching a new low of 37.5% last week before a mild recovery to 38%. Perhaps a few more weeks of relatively good news for Democrats will reverse the long decline, but perhaps not. And it’s hard to believe that a nation so down on its president will do anything other than severely punish his party in the midterms.
But it also seems that the range of plausible news environments that could emerge during the final weeks of the campaign is unusually wide.
Take economic news. By mid-October, it’s not hard to imagine gas prices falling further; a general sense that inflation has peaked; job creation continuing, giving Biden bragging rights to a low unemployment rate and two years of unusually good employment growth; and an overall economy that hasn’t tipped into recession and appears to be still going strong. It’s also not hard to imagine gas prices rising again, inflation defying predictions that it will reverse course; job losses; and economists declaring that a recession has begun. That’s an incredibly broad range of possibilities for 11 or 12 weeks from now.
There’s also the unknown course of the coronavirus. New cases seem to be pretty high (although no one seems to have a good estimate of exactly how high), but as Silver points out, the death rate has stayed relatively low during the current wave. Admissions to hospital intensive care units, too, have been moderate since spring. So even the current situation isn’t easy to assess. As for what comes next, once again it’s easy to imagine a wide range of how things will look by mid-October.
The political tea leaves, too, are harder to read than usual. By this point in most election cycles that end in landslides, the party that eventually won big had major advantages in resources — way fewer retirements, better candidate recruitment, better fundraising. There’s some of that during this cycle, but a lot less than one might have expected. Part of that is about those “wacky” Republican candidates, winning nominations at all levels, not just for Senate seats. Part of it may just be that during this era of campaign-finance abundance, even parties destined to lose could still have huge war chests.
There’s another significant oddity. Normally, policy moves toward the preferences of the president’s party, especially when it has majorities in both chambers of Congress, as Democrats have since 2021. Consequently, public opinion about policy tends to swing towards the positions of the out-party; indeed, that may be a big part of why out-parties do well in midterm elections.
But this time, not only have Democrats suffered defeats for many of their partisan initiatives in the Senate, but high-profile Supreme Court decisions have moved policy outcomes away from Democratic preferences, perhaps enough to affect public opinion and, subsequently, election results. The problem is that this circumstance is so unusual that expectations about the effects are just guesses. Which adds to the overall uncertainty of a peculiar midterm-election environment.
Barring something startling, Biden won’t be popular on Nov. 8, even if his approval ratings begin to reverse course soon. On the other hand, he appears to be leading former President Donald Trump in polling about the 2024 contest. Normally I’d say that test ballots matching a president against potential opponents in an election two years away provide no useful information, but, yeah, Trump isn’t exactly a normal potential nominee.
All this confusion comes in the context of what should be a good year for Republicans, which means that the probabilities range from a huge Republican landslide to a more-or-less break-even year (although I find it hard to believe that the Democrats really have the 16% chance of holding their House majority that the FiveThirtyEight House model suggests). But within that range? I’m just not going to be surprised. | 2022-07-27T12:56:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Midterm Guessing Game Just Keeps Getting Weirder - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-midterm-guessing-game-just-keeps-getting-weirder/2022/07/27/a7d6bc02-0da8-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-midterm-guessing-game-just-keeps-getting-weirder/2022/07/27/a7d6bc02-0da8-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
Transcript: Across the Aisle with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.)
MS. CALDWELL: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. My name is Leigh Ann Caldwell. I’m an anchor here at Washington Post Live and also coauthor of the Early 202 newsletter.
In today's edition of Across the Aisle, we are speaking with two key Senators who worked for a very long time and very hard on legislation regarding chips manufacturing, science, and technology. That legislation just passed a key procedural vote in the Senate this morning, and today we are joined by Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema and Indiana Republican Senator Todd Young.
Senators, thank so much for joining us today.
SEN. YOUNG: Thanks for having us.
MS. CALDWELL: So, as I just mentioned, this legislation advanced cloture vote, a procedural vote, with the support of 17 Republicans and all but one Democrat or Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats, who is, of course, an independent.
So I'm going to start with you, Senator Young, on a very, very basic question. There's a lot of people around the country who do not know what chips or microchips is. The core of this legislation spends $52 billion providing subsidies to companies to manufacture microchips in the United States. Can you just explain why this is necessary?
SEN. YOUNG: Sure. Microchips, basically, they are the‑‑they're the secret sauce. The internal components that help anything with an on/off switch work these days. Our cars are essentially bundles of microchips with tires on them these days. Our missile systems wouldn't run effectively if it weren't for the microchips within them.
The United States of America needs not only a secure supply of these microchips to make our modern economy work, but we also need to have the manufacturing capacity to produce the highest in chips for national security purposes because we cannot be dependent on countries like Taiwan or South Korea or even Communist China on account of the vulnerabilities associated with their distance from us, and also, in the case of the Communist Chinese, the possibility they might actually interrupt these supplies in the future. So this legislation, the semiconductor component to it, will ensure that we can not only perform high‑end, cutting‑edge research as it relates to semiconductors or the production of microchips, but we also have the ability to design and manufacture the most sophisticated chips right here in the United States.
MS. CALDWELL: Senator Sinema, I mentioned the $52 billion. There's also tax credits for the expansion and the improvement of some of these production facilities. So, after this legislation goes into effect, over the years, how many new production facilities do you think will be built in this country? How big will the percentage of microchip manufacturing around the world be here in the United States?
SEN. SINEMA: You know, I think that's really an important question because the reason we've chosen to do this legislation is to ensure that the United States can control its own domestic supply throughout the entire supply chain of creating these microchips.
So, as Todd was saying, these are like the little brains that live inside of our cars and our phones and our computers and pretty much anything that works with technology, and right now, we have to depend on other foreign sources for some of those microchips, including countries like China, which may not have the same values or even qualities of processing that we have. So shortening that supply chain, ensuring that we're making them here in the United States is really important.
So our bill in addition to creating these tax credits to incentivize more of the production in the U.S., we also create additional tax credits, again, to keep that supply chain within the U.S., and we know it's already making a marketable difference.
For instance, after the chips portion of our bill passed the Senate about a year and a half ago, Intel announced a $20 billion expansion of microchip processing in Arizona. Shortly thereafter, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced a $35 billion investment, and those are just two in Arizona.
We know that the same investment is happening in states like Ohio and Texas and other parts of the country. So bringing that manufacturing back to the U.S. is good for us not just from a supply chain issue, but it's more important in reality to ensure that we're actually controlling these little brains for the future for our own country and that we're not allowing another country to control those microchips or to control how they're made or the quality of the manufacturing or even some of the national security aspects that go along with that.
So, while we can't tell you an exact number of what that production will look like in the future in the U.S., I can tell you that this piece of legislation is the largest investment in our country's history in ensuring that we are taking control of domestic manufacturing and ensuring our national security interests.
MS. CALDWELL: Senator Sinema, Senator Bernie Sanders is someone who thinks that this is just a major giveaway to already wealthy corporations that don't need the money. What is your response to that?
SEN. SINEMA: Well, the reality is that these international corporations can build their microchip processing factories in any part of the world that they want, and we know that both for domestic and economic reasons, it makes sense to do that in the U.S. But we also know that for national security reasons, it needs to happen in the U.S. so that we can control that entire supply chain from the beginning until the time that that microchip ends up in your phone or in your microwave or in your car or in your computer, and we don't want to lend that opportunity to other foreign sources that may not have our best interest at heart to control that process. So it actually makes economic and defense sense to do that work right here in the U.S.
MS. CALDWELL: Senator Young, same question to you. It's not just Senator Sanders on the left. There are some on the right who say that this is not a free market piece of legislation, that the government is too involved in it, and also that it is just too expensive for the government to do. What's your reaction?
SEN. YOUNG: Well, let me challenge all of those points. I'm grateful for your bringing this up.
So, as it relates to the expense, I'll begin with that. I follow Ronald Reagan's adage, and this is a national security investment, as we've already established, and Ronald Reagan used to say often that defense is not a budgetary issue. You spend what you need, and if this economy during the course of the pandemic until the present day has demonstrated anything, it's that we need an economy that is more resilient.
Fort Wayne, Indiana, is home to a large Ford assembly plant. We have several auto assembly plants in the state of Indiana. That one plant alone had idled on two different occasions just in the last year because there's not a sufficient supply of chips. That company, Ford Motor Company, very important to the nation's economy and the economy of Indiana, just one example, has seen profits go down 40 percent in recent months on account of, in large measure because of this chip shortage.
So this is impacting really every facet of our highly technical and automated economy, and we can't ignore this problem. We need to have some domestic sourcing, and that won't happen by itself.
The point about allowing the market to work, well, the market is being intervened with by every large economy country. There are incentives offered by Japan, by the European nations, by the South Koreans, and now by the Chinese Community Party to locate these chip fabricating plants on their own soil. Like a governor needs to entice businesses into his or her own state, we need to entice these companies to invest their profits into the United States of America if we're going to have access to these mission‑critical components.
I wish the market were allowed to operate freely, but it's never operated entirely freely, and it's our job as policymakers not to apply an idealistic textbook economic model but instead to look at the world as it is, to develop policy around that real world, and in this case, we've sort of laid out why it's necessary to incentivize companies to invest in semiconductor fabrication here on American soil.
MS. CALDWELL: Senator Sinema, there's been a rush in part to do this because of national security, which you both have indicated, but there's new concerns that‑‑by the administration that perhaps China is advancing plans to invade Taiwan. Of course, Taiwan is a key manufacturer of semiconductors. Was this part of the briefings that you received from the administration or the rationale from the administration that you have heard as a reason why this needs to be moved expeditiously?
SEN. SINEMA: Well, I first want to challenge the allegation that this was‑‑has been rushed because‑‑[laughs] ‑‑as Todd and I can tell you, we've been working on this for over two years. So, actually, he and I both have expressed some frustration about how long it's taken.
You know, the Senate passed the original chips piece of legislation quite sometime ago and then followed it up with the Endless Frontier legislation, which, of course, Todd was the key sponsor on and I have been strongly supportive and a cosponsor of both of those bills.
The reality is that our legislation was holed up in a conference committee where it languished, and even before that, it was waiting in the House for action. And so the reality is that this has actually taken a really long time, and what we did last week when Todd and I joined together and rallied our colleagues in the United States Senate to move this bill quickly was not responding to a rush but instead addressing the fact that the bill has languished for sometime, and that, unfortunately, petty partisan politics were slowing down this incredibly important piece of legislation that's important, again, for domestic economic issues but also for national security issues.
And so we don't feel like this was rushed. We feel like this was long overdue.
MS. CALDWELL: Well, right. Yeah. No, and I totally get that. I just mean in the past couple months, because it has been such a long process‑‑so let me clarify, because it has been going on for so long, the administration has really urged Congress to kind of get their act together, which I'm going to ask you about a little bit later on and how it finally came together in the last few weeks, but to get this done because there is such an urgent national security component to it.
I know Senator Schumer organized an all‑Senator briefing a couple weeks ago to home in on that message, and so is the concern of, you know, the tensions with China part of the equation here?
SEN. SINEMA: Well, certainly, whenever you're talking about shortening your supply chain and addressing your own needs in a domestic level, that usually comes from two, two distinct purposes. One is to shore up your own economic security and independence, which we do need to do, and second is to ensure that we are no longer reliant on foreign sources that may not have the same interests that we do geopolitically. And, of course, we face that not just in a semiconductor space but in other spaces as well.
It is true that, as you mentioned, Senator Schumer and Senator Cantwell brought us all together for a classified briefing several weeks ago. During that briefing, we learned about some of the geopolitical concerns and threats that we are facing, and it helped create a greater sense of urgency, I hope, in both the House and the Senate to do what Todd and I have been working on for a couple years, which is to help everyone see how important and how urgent this is.
The good news is that we were able to respond to that quickly, and I expect by the end of the week, our bill is going to be on the president's desk.
MS. CALDWELL: Great. Senator‑‑
SEN. YOUNG: I think‑‑Leigh Ann, if I could just chime in?
MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. Go for it.
SEN. YOUNG: And I think Kyrsten did a great job, as she has throughout this effort, communicating the importance of getting this done.
I think so many of our colleagues had internalized from business people and from many of their employees the importance of making these investments. I know that every legislator in the state of Indiana has heard from the GM employees and management, I mentioned earlier. I may have said Ford, so my apologies to those good workers.
But listen, I think the thing that had not been emphasized enough‑‑and we got in this classified briefing‑‑was just how mission critical this is to our national security, to our weapons systems, to making sure that, you know, the Chinese government doesn't make a march on Taiwan or otherwise try and distort the free market in this sector as they have others so that they would put any chip makers located here in the U.S. out of business.
They came to understand in recent weeks, because these classified briefings were held, that this is a national security imperative.
MS. CALDWELL: Great. Senator Young, I want to follow up with an audience question from Jerry Vaillancourt from Connecticut who asks "The Chinese government opposes CHIPS." This legislation, I think this person is referring to. "What retaliation would you expect from Beijing, and might it escalate into a Cold War‑like arms race?" Is there any concern about that? Senator Young?
SEN. YOUNG: Well, I can say that we've known for a number of months, really for about a year, that the Chinese Community Party officially opposes this legislation. Don't take it from me. The Chinese embassy here in Washington sent letters out to American business executives indicating that they should lobby against this legislation because it could hurt their future business interest. So there have been some not‑too‑veiled business threats targeted at American businesses.
It's unclear exactly what‑‑you know, what the Chinese government might do. It's hard to imagine it could be much worse than the status quo, though. The Chinese government has been stealing intellectual property, forcing technology transfer, distorting markets, and really undermining our national economic interest for some period of time, and this is something that in concert with our partners and allies around the world will be a multigenerational product trying to‑‑project trying to bring the Chinese Community Party through their state capitalist system into a position of better behavior.
MS. CALDWELL: Mm‑hmm. Senator Sinema‑‑
SEN. SINEMA: I think also a point‑‑
MS. CALDWELL: ‑‑this legislation‑‑I want to move on briefly unless you really want to‑‑you can address the last question after this one, if you don't mind. This bill does a lot more than just chips manufacturing. There's a science component, tens of billions of dollars for science and technology.
One thing that you were instrumental on was the space component, including longevity in the international space program. There's news today that Russia is backing out of its partnership with the United States on the international space program in 2024. Does this legislation enable the United States to movie forward with the international space program, even if our partners like Russia really do back out?
SEN. SINEMA: I'm really glad that you've mentioned the other elements of the bill because Todd and I really worked hand in hand to ensure that this legislation was as robust as possible to address all of our national security needs, that we were available‑‑that were available to be addressed in this legislation.
So, as some folks know, in the last Congress, I served as the Ranking Democrat on the Space and Aviation Subcommittee, and we worked carefully‑‑Senator Cruz and I and others worked carefully to reauthorize NASA and to ensure that the mission of space exploration continued, so that the U.S. continued to be a dominant figure in space exploration and the future of space.
So the good news is that this legislation does include that reauthorization and does enable NASA and our private partners in the domestic community to continue working to ensure that we are not only maintaining our foothold in space but expanding that foothold as we move to the future.
And, Leigh Ann, I also want to note that the legislation also includes major investments in STEM research through the National Science Foundation, through creation of 10 tech hubs throughout the country, so we can move into tomorrow's technology to make us more competitive, not just domestically but globally, and that includes, of course, continuing research into the work we're doing in space.
So making sure that this legislation not only ensured that we were creating those investments in microchips and semiconductor processing but also seeing the holistic view of moving forward with technology and science to ensure that we are competitive domestically and globally for the future is really, really critical.
So I feel confident that we'll be able to move forward with our space work in a really progressive and an aggressive way with many partners that we share around the globe.
MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. You mentioned the tech hubs, those 10 tech hubs that are going to be built around the country, and from what Schumer said today at his press conference, it's not going to be Los Angeles or San Francisco. They're going to be other parts of the country. Do either of you expect to have one of those tech hubs in your state?
SEN. SINEMA: I sure hope so.
MS. CALDWELL: Senator Sinema, let's start with you first.
SEN. SINEMA: I sure hope so. You know, Arizona is well poised to be a place for a tech hub. We are already home to, in addition, Arizona State, NAU, and UofA, which are all doing incredible work around technology and science. We're home to some major corporations that are doing really innovative work around technology. So we'll be working hard to get one of those tech hubs in Arizona, and I think it's a good fit based on the work we're already doing in the state.
MS. CALDWELL: Senator Young, what about you? Do you expect one in Indiana?
SEN. YOUNG: Oh, absolutely. I think we ought to be a top‑tier contender for one of those tech hubs. I'm really excited to see what the applications look like. I know our state is already hitting the ground running as it relates to applying for such designation. Maybe it will be in hypersonics. Maybe it will be in synthetic biology. We have a lot of resident expertise there between ag and pharma life sciences. Perhaps it will be autonomous systems, utilizing the expertise that we've gotten with the constellation of businesses located around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. So the possibilities are really exciting to me and should be to so many Hoosiers.
I do think it's really important to emphasize, because we're running out of time here, that we would not have a plus to the CHIPS‑Plus larger innovation package if it weren't for the efforts of my Democratic colleague here. Kyrsten Sinema is someone I approached. I knew she believed in this vision. I knew it was very important to her, to the country, and to the state, and so I approached her. I knew I could count on Kyrsten to help me line up the votes and get this across the line, and we're headed for success here in coming days.
SEN. SINEMA: Thanks, Todd.
MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. Because I want to also take a step back about that bigger picture because, you know, really briefly, Senator Young, because we are running out of time, but this bill was headed in the traditional route, old‑school Congress legislating. The Senate passed their bill; the House passed their bill. It was different. House and Senate came together in a conference committee to work out the differences, but at that point, the process fell apart. Why did that happen? Briefly, please.
SEN. YOUNG: Listen, we were running out of time. The Republican side through leadership was looking to work the clock as we ran out the time, understandably. Both sides do it. Senator Schumer who is the other primary sponsor, introducer of this legislation knew that he wanted to get something done. So he became, I think, understandably a little anxious as we approached the finish line. I reassured him that we can get the Republican votes. He asked for a firm commitment of 20 votes. Kyrsten and I were able to whittle that down to 15. I actually give Kyrsten all the credit there, and we went around and held a series of meetings, conversations, text messages, late nights, early mornings, and Kyrsten and I got the votes.
MS. CALDWELL: Mm‑hmm.
SEN. SINEMA: Yep.
SEN. YOUNG: We delivered them on a silver platter to the Senate Majority Leader, and this is why we have major investments not just in chips but in this panoply of other technologies that will be essential to our national security and to the economy in the 21st century.
MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. For a minute there, this legislation had been whittled down to just a $52 billion chips program with some tax credits, and now, as you mention, it's about a $280 billion program with all the science and technology components as well.
Since we only have two minutes left and I have you both here, I have to ask about another topic that you are also working on, Senator Sinema, which is the marriage equality legislation. You are working to find enough votes to get 60 votes in the Senate to pass that. Senator Schumer said just, you know, moments ago that they don't seem to have the votes because of absences due to COVID. Is he suggesting that if everyone was present and in the Senate that there would, in fact, be 60 votes? You are counting those votes right now. What's the status?
SEN. SINEMA: Well, that's a question for Leader Schumer because I didn't say that. So you'll have to ask him what he meant.
What I can tell you is I'm working closely with Senator Portman and Senator Tillis, and we are working to earn the votes to pass this legislation because we believe this is a settled issue for Americans across the country. And we'd like to see Congress settle it and move on and get back to the work of ensuring that we are preparing our country for a strong economy and that we are prepared globally to be competitive.
So we continue to work, and when we've got the votes, we'll be sure to tell folks.
MS. CALDWELL: How close are you?
SEN. SINEMA: I'm not going to tell you that.
MS. CALDWELL: [Laughs] Senator Young, the next question is to you on the same topic, though. Is this something that you could support?
SEN. YOUNG: Yeah, I think‑‑
MS. CALDWELL: Has Senator Sinema approached you about your vote?
SEN. SINEMA: I think we might be out of time, Leigh Ann. [Laughs]
SEN. YOUNG: So I've had great conversations with Kyrsten, with Rob Portman, and frankly with a lot of my constituents on both sides of this issue. You know, I will volunteer to anyone who might be listening that the fact that we have government, you know, our federal government sanctioning some marriages and not others and frankly sanctioning marriage altogether, I don't think is an optimal situation. So my preference is to find some sort of third way. Absent that, it appears I'll have to be weighing in one way or the other, and I have a long track record of communicating my views on this issue. So they're a source of public record, and I will be studying the legislation in detail as soon as it comes before the Senate and the House for consideration.
But right now, we've got to get this innovation bill across the finish line, and I'm just doing everything I can to make sure that the ball goes into the end zone from the one‑yard line.
SEN. SINEMA: That's right.
MS. CALDWELL: Senator Sinema, Senator Young, as you both mentioned, this legislation could be on the president's desk by the end of the week. One more vote in the Senate, final passage likely tomorrow.
Thank you so much for joining us today to talk about this legislation that is hopefully much clearer and people can understand it a lot more after our conversation. Really appreciate it.
SEN. SINEMA: Thanks much.
SEN. YOUNG: Thank you.
MS. CALDWELL: And thank you for joining us on Washington Post Live, “Across the Aisle.” You can view this entire program or read the transcripts on WashingtonPostLive.com, and you can look out for our other programs as well. Thanks for joining us. | 2022-07-27T12:57:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Across the Aisle with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/27/transcript-across-aisle-with-sens-kyrsten-sinema-d-ariz-todd-young-r-ind/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/27/transcript-across-aisle-with-sens-kyrsten-sinema-d-ariz-todd-young-r-ind/ |
Transcript: Ken Auletta, Journalist & Author, “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence"
MS. ELLISON: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Sarah Ellison, a reporter here at The Post.
Without the fall of Harvey Weinstein, we may not have had a MeToo reckoning. My guest today was early to the idea that Weinstein was a serial predator, but his 2002 New Yorker profile didn't cross the threshold to fully bring to light the depths of Weinstein's predation.
I am pleased today to be joined by Ken Auletta whose new book, "Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence," goes back to the beginning of Weinstein's story to help us understand the making of the now infamous former producer.
Welcome, Ken. Thank you for joining us.
MR. AULETTA: Thanks, Sarah.
MS. ELLISON: I want to start off by asking you a simple question, which is that if you had to pick one word to describe Weinstein, what would it be?
MR. AULETTA: I’d come up with two words, “impulse control problems” -- or three, really, but “volatile,” “out of control” are certainly words that -- “volatile” would be a word, a single word.
MS. ELLISON: I mean, you say in the book that he -- that self-control was -- he was a man of little self-control, and you go on to describe that in such detail. When did you first sniff out that that was part of his personality and also that paved the way for him to assert his power over other people?
MR. AULETTA: Well, when I profiled him in 2002, it was apparent to me that the portrait I portrayed, I painted of Harvey back in 2002, was of a volatile, out of control man who couldn't control his appetite, couldn't control his temper, couldn't control I mean, if he got a pack of cigarettes, he would rip off the top because he didn't have the patience to pick out a single cigarette or take the cellophane off the wrapper. He would insist that three Diet Cokes be placed in front of him, even though he drank one at a time, because he was afraid that the second one wouldn't be available when he finished the first.
He was just basically a big brute but also a very talented brute, and I portrayed him in that profile as both a monster in terms of the way he dealt with people but also an incredible talent. I mean, you think about the movies that he and Miramax pioneered, "Shakespeare in Love," "My Left Foot," "Pulp Fiction," "The Crying Game," "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," I mean, the list goes on and on, a quite extraordinary list of movies. So Harvey was a man, despite his appetite, despite his volatility, of great talent.
MS. ELLISON: I want to talk a little bit --out-of-control you make clear in the book that Harvey’s proclivities were not about sex but about power, and we all know by now that he was -- you know, some of his proclivities were the worst kept secret in Hollywood, and yet he remained untouchable for the majority of his career, never facing repercussions. Can you set the record straight for us what factors enabled him to suppress all the damage behind his abuses of power?
MR. AULETTA: Well, his power -- and he believed, as Donald Trump believes, that a key to power is people must fear you, and people feared Harvey. They feared his ability to get stories in the press that may be negative stories about you. They feared his money, that he would challenge you in court, and you couldn’t afford to go up against him. They feared that he would keep you out of roles and movies that you may have wanted. They feared how he might harm you, and that was very real. And he knew that, and he used that power to scare people and keep them quiet.
MS. ELLISON: Let's talk about the dynamic between the two Weinstein brothers, which is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book in my view. You worked with Bob Weinstein throughout your reporting, and Bob famously turned on his older brother, as you write. He's on the record for saying that there is no real human being there, referring to Harvey. Talk to us about their fallout and what it illustrates in the macro sense about Harvey's fall from grace.
MS. ELLISON: Well, here, Bob and Harvey shared a bedroom in Flushing, Queens, growing up. Bob was his equal copartner at Miramax and at The Weinstein Company. They were best friends. Bob was the best man at Harvey's first wedding, though interestingly not at his second wedding in this century, earlier in this century.
But Bob constantly was frustrated that Harvey was too much of a narcissist, that he was out promoting himself and not promoting the movies, that his attention was being diverted by talk books and talk magazine and the fashion business and buying Halston and all these other companies that were not central to the movie business, and frustrated that Harvey was out of control in his spending. I mean, he was making movies for much more money than he was supposed to be making them for, and he was spending money on private planes and picking up meals for people and buying his second wife Georgina Chapman's -- you know, her fashion dresses for people he wanted to invest in his company.
So Bob, as a businessman, was growing increasingly frustrated by his brother’s behavior, and yet he felt that Harvey was central to the success of the company. So he didn’t want to act against his brother, and he kept on hoping. It was like a bad marriage. He kept on hoping that the marriage would get better tomorrow, but it didn’t get better. And in the end, in the end, Bob voted with the board -- and his vote was critical -- to remove Harvey and basically fire Harvey from The Weinstein Company.
MS. ELLISON: I'd like for you to talk about the revelations you made in your reporting about their mother, whom you call "Momma Portnoy," Miriam Weinstein. You said that Harvey and Bob appear to have been raised by wolves. Bob confirmed some of these characterizations by revealing stories of their childhood to you. How did the vestiges of their mother's temperament set Harvey up for his brash and sort of grotesque behavior that he's known for?
MR. AULETTA: Miriam was a very dominant person. Now, Max, the father, was a diamond cutter. He’d often come home late. Miriam would have dinner with the two boys alone, usually. She would — she yelled so frequently, “Harvey, you’re too fat. Harvey, why are you doing that? Harvey, shut up. Don’t do this,” yelled so much that the friends, Harvey’s friends -- they played poker every weekend, but the friends refused to play poker at the Weinstein house. Why? Because they said Miriam yelled too much; it was too uncomfortable.
And Harvey was the one who called her 'Momma Portnoy," yet he was devoted to her, as Bob was devoted to her. Yet when I asked Bob once in the book, I said, “Bob, what do you see of your father, Max, in Harvey?” and without hesitation, Bob said, “I don’t see Max in my -- in Harvey. I see my mother in Harvey,” and the mother -- that yelling that she did was very much a reflection of how the Miramax offices were run. Harvey and his brother, Bob, were constantly yelling at people in those days and abusing people verbally, and that was very much a reflection of Miriam.
But you can’t blame Miriam for his sexual behavior. You can blame her for yelling and for Harvey -- allowing Harvey to think that yelling was normal.
MS. ELLISON: What separated Harvey from Bob's personality and prevented Bob from taking advantage of his own power?
MR. AULETTA: Well, Bob was a difficult person initially, as was Harvey running, and people were afraid of Bob. But Bob was a better human being than Harvey, and Bob was an alcoholic at one point who went through therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, and righted his ship and basically became a very reflective, looking at yourself, accepting responsibility for your bad behavior kind of a person. And his brother, he discovered was not.
I tell the story of they go to lunch one day with David Boies, their attorney, and he coaxed David Boies to speak to Harvey about how proud David Boies was for the success he had had, a farm boy growing up and becoming the successful lawyer that he was. And he hoped that David talking about that would allow Harvey maybe to look inside himself and take some pride and smell the roses a little more, and David Boies talked about how proud he was of his life and how his parents would be so proud of the success he had. And at the end of the story, Bob had tears rolling down his cheeks, and Harvey looked at David Boies and at Bob and said, "Why are you telling me that? What's this all about?" He couldn't relate.
And one of the ways I ended the book, I ended the book with a quote from Bob talking about his brother, talking about Harvey, saying, “I learned -- one of the things I learned about my brother, there’s no human being there. There’s not a person who has the ability to look inside himself, to acknowledge mistakes, to say, reflectively, I want to be a better person.”
MS. ELLISON: You write about Harvey's insecurities about his weight growing up, and I wonder, was he compensating for that? Does that play at all into the way he acted later in life?
MR. AULETTA: Well, there’s no question that he was very self-conscious about his weight, and there’s an anecdote in the book, which I borrow from Jodi Kantor and Meg Twohey of the Times who wrote in their book. Harvey assaulted this attractive model at the Cannes Film Festival in the South of France, and she raced into the bathroom and closed the -- locked the door and started screaming at Harvey, “You coward,” in the -- outside the door, outside. Finally, she came out and went to the front door to exit the hotel suite, and he said to her as she’s exiting, “You don’t like me because I’m fat.” Clearly, he was very self-conscious about his weight and about his looks, and that’s just a reflection of it.
So Harvey would, surprisingly, when he stayed at hotel suites, he'd go out to dinner. His assistant would stay in the suite waiting for him to come back. He'd enter the suite, and oftentimes, he would just peel off all of his clothes and walk around the room naked. And Zelda Perkins, when she first started working as his London assistant, said, "Harvey, what are you doing? Why are you taking off your clothes?" and he says, "Oh, Zelda, this is normal. I'm hot. It's okay. Don't be a square." And Harvey would constantly try and normalize his abnormal behavior.
MS. ELLISON: You write so clearly about how he was not a savvy businessman. He famously passed on acquiring Marvel. What characteristics pulled him to the higher echelons of power without that kind of business acumen?
MR. AULETTA: I think Harvey’s narcissism got the best of him. He wanted to be Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, John Malone, Bill Gates. He wanted to be a mogul, and so he took his eye off the movie ball and started buying companies, the fashion business, which his second wife was in, and he buys Halston. He goes in the TV business. He’s trying — he goes in talk books, talk magazine. Harvey wanted to become a mogul, and inevitably, when he did that, he took his eye off the movie ball and began to overspend and not make the kind of successful movies he had made that won him so many Academy Awards.
MS. ELLISON: What was important to you personally to write this book, which looks at Harvey the person and the creation of the monster?
MR. AULETTA: I was interested -- the reason I wanted to do a biography of him and thought there was a route to do it, there were mysteries that I wanted to explore. Why did Harvey become the monster that he became? Why did so many people enable his behavior for more than four decades by keeping their mouths shut? How did he use and abuse his power, which was part of getting away with this for so long? And then the mystery of the relationship between the two brothers, “Young Bobby,” as he was called, much to his chagrin when he was young, and Harvey were inseparable, and yet in the end, Harvey sucker punched his brother Bob, breaking his nose. And in the end, as I mentioned earlier, Bob provides the pivotal vote to fire Harvey.
MS. ELLISON: Your 2002 profile in The New Yorker came so close to revealing Weinstein's sexual misconduct, but it was just in the literal last minutes before the piece hit its deadline, you pulled back on some of the reporting. Take us back to that moment and what it was like to pull the plug on that element of your piece.
MR. AULETTA: I had I had heard from now I can identify her as I do in the book Donna Gigliotti, who was the producer, one of the producers of "Shakespeare in Love," that Harvey allegedly had raped Rowena Chiu and got into a contretemps with is London assistant who defended Rowena Chiu, Zelda Perkins, at the 1998 Venice Film Festival when they were promoting "Shakespeare in Love."
But I couldn't get the woman to speak. I couldn't find Rowena. She was somewhere in Asia. I tracked down Zelda Perkins to Guatemala where she was raising horses, and she refused to speak to me and hung up the phone.
And they -- I knew they had signed nondisclosure agreements and been paid, I was told, almost $500,000 between the two of them to keep quiet.
I confronted Harvey in my final interview with him, and it was just the two of us in a conference room. And I said, "Harvey, tell me about what you did with Rowena Chiu and Zelda Perkins at the 1998 Venice Film Festival." Harvey stood up, stood over me, clenched his fist, and he's standing. I'm seated. His fists are clenched. His lip is trembling, and he says, "If you write that, it will destroy my marriage and destroy the lives of my three teenager daughters." With him standing up and me sitting, I said I'm an easy prey for a sucker punch. So I stood up and faced him face to face. The moment I stood up, Harvey did something really surprising. He started to cry, and I don't mean a tear trickling down his cheek. I mean bawling, crying out loud. "It will destroy my marriage," et cetera, et cetera.
But I was convinced he did it, but I didn't have I had his denial, and I had no evidence from women on the record saying, in fact, he was guilty of that.
But then he's worried they were going to run it in The New Yorker. He calls up David Remnick, the editor, and asks if he can have a summit meeting with me and Remnick. He comes to the meeting, and I came up with a strategy that maybe I could get this story out without getting the women to talk to me if I find out how he paid the almost $500,000. Did Disney, his parent company, pay? Did Miramax, his company, pay? And if either one was true, someone is probably going to jail, and I get my story. I don't need the women to confirm anything if the company paid for the nondisclosure agreements.
So I said, "Harvey, I need to see you tomorrow. It was a Tuesday. Tomorrow is Wednesday. The piece closes on Thursday. I need to see the canceled checks," and he rebelled. He said, "I can't do that." Anyway, I said, "Tomorrow."
He came back tomorrow with his brother, Bob, now and slid across the table two canceled checks from brother, Bob, personal checks. That's how the money was paid. So I didn't have my story, and basically, it was confirming what Bob was saying was that I paid this money because I was saving my brother's marriage, which is the claim that Harvey was making, and we didn't have anyone so Harvey then was still worried we would run it. David Remnick and I talked. He made the decision, which I totally backed. He said, "Ken, we can't run this story. We're not the National Enquirer. We don't have any woman on the record saying that Harvey is guilty of this, and we have him denying that he was guilty of it, saying it was a consensual affair. How do we run this story?" And I agreed with him, and we couldn't run the story. So that's how close I came in 2002 but no cigar.
MS. ELLISON: And if you had gotten it across the threshold in 2002, what do you think the impact would have been? Do you think society would have reacted in the same way that it did 15 years later?
MR. AULETTA: Probably, it would not have reacted in the same way, but I think there would have been a reaction where Harvey would have been shamed. Harvey would have been vilified. Harvey may have lost his job. I mean, this is rape we're talking about or attempted rape.
Actually, one of the things I found and I’m -- another reason I’m glad I didn’t write this story then I was told that he had raped Rowena Chiu. When I interviewed Rowena Chiu for the book, I found out she was not raped. He attempted to rape her, and she escaped. So, if I printed that she was raped, it would have been a false story right there.
But, nevertheless, that kind of behavior, even back in 2002, would not have been easily acceptable. Now, would he have been fired the way he was in 2017? Maybe not, but it clearly, I think, would have prevented some other women from being Harvey's victims over the years.
MS. ELLISON: So let's fast forward to the MeToo moment. What was your personal reaction to learning of Ronan Farrow's reporting and watching the media storm after?
MR. AULETTA: I was thrilled. I thought this beast has been exposed.
I was not competing with Ronan Farrow or the two New York Times -- of course, I was opening a book on something else. So I had no competitive juices flowing here. I mean, I just had -- thrilled that these three reporters, Ronan and the two Times reporters, had cracked the case and figured out a way to make women comfortable enough, which I couldn’t do in 2002, and I wasn’t -- other reporters, a couple other reporters who tried over the years, couldn’t get women to feel comfortable enough.
One of the things they successfully did, which was quite brilliant, they got women to come together in groups. So they weren't a solitary figure saying, "Harvey did this to me." "Harvey did this to us," and it made them comfortable. That's an extraordinary talent.
So, when people say to me, well, you know, the times had changed, the Times reporters wouldn't have had the story. Ronan wouldn't have had the story if the times hadn't changed. I think that's baloney. I think they made the times change, and they got women to talk, and they deserve the credit for that.
MS. ELLISON: And how much of the writing of the book was catharsis for you, having been on this story one way or another since 2002?
MR. AULETTA: "Catharsis" is not the word that springs to my mind. I think "pain" was the word that comes to my mind. I'm writing a book about a guy who I think is a monster, and yet I also have to have the discipline to be able to describe his whole life. And his whole life is not a stick figure, a monster figure. He made some amazing movies. He did some amazing things. He made some amazing movies. He did some amazing things. He was very philanthropic. He was actually a pretty good father, despite being a lousy husband.
And so you have -- in a biography, you have to tell the whole life, and sometimes it was a struggle because this was not a man I liked and a man I respected, and yet he’s a human being and he has -- and his life is not just one little side. And I’m not writing a prosecution brief. I’m writing about a person, and sometimes it was a struggle to do that because I really didn’t like him. And I’m really glad I’m done with Harvey Weinstein now, but I had a chore to perform and to write a biography of an entire person.
MS. ELLISON: And do you have any -- you know, what’s your feeling? Is it remorse? Is it regret? Is it something else for, you know, having these instances of abuse that happened to women after your story ran in 2002?
MR. AULETTA: Well, I have remorse, regret that I and other people were not able to expose him and maybe prevent that behavior.
I have no regret or remorse for not writing the story as I knew it in 2002. I think that David Remnick made the right decision, which I approved at the time. We didn't have the goods, and we're journalists. We have to be able to prove things, not assert things, and it would have just been an assertion had I run the story at the time.
On the other hand, if I was able to prove it at the time, I have no doubt that we could have -- it would have prevented some women from being raped by Harvey Weinstein.
MS. ELLISON: And in your view, what about society has changed between 2002 and 2017 and today?
MR. AULETTA: Well, just think about it, Sarah. You have in 2016, Bill Cosby is indicted and brought to trial. Roger Ailes in the summer of 2016 is fired for sexual misbehavior at Fox News. In the spring of 2017, eight months or so before Harvey is exposed, Bill O'Reilly is exposed and fired from Fox News for abusing women. So things were changing, clearly were changing, and that's, you know, a positive thing.
But I still go back to the point I tried to make before, which is that despite the cultural changes in our society, the growth of feminism, Harvey the work that those three reporters did in getting women to speak out and expose Harvey, which triggered the MeToo movement and which also triggered the downfall of so many men who abuse women, who came out in cases, Matt Lauer, Les Moonves, Mario Batali, the list goes on and on.
MS. ELLISON: We have an audience question here. Lisa from Texas asks: Should those around Weinstein who enabled him be brought to justice?
MR. AULETTA: Well, the question is how do you — what’s the crime they committed? is the question a lawyer would ask. If they claim they didn’t know and I claim, well, they should have known, should have known is not did know, and so it’s not clear. I mean, I don’t know how you bring them to justice except what you do is you shame them. You say, “Why didn’t you speak out?” and people should be embarrassed, those who knew.
In the book, I describe some of those who did know who should be shamed and embarrassed by it, and then the question of the people who knew he was cheating on his wife but claim they didn't know he was sexually assaulting women. And maybe many of them, I'm sure, are telling the truth in that, but is that because they didn't want to know, and should they not have known? Should they not have poked and asked more questions, and were they selfish by not doing it, preserving themselves, and had they poked into this more, might they have prevented what hopefully I could have in 2002, Harvey's behavior and molestation of women?
MS. ELLISON: Talk to us, as you do in the book about a few of those people who either were trying not to know or went from denial to complicity. Who else is on that list of people who didn't want to know and looked the other way?
MR. AULETTA: Well, I mean, there were people who suspected or knew, and I quote Mark Gill, for instance, who was the president of Miramax at one point, and he said to me in the book, he said, "Any attractive woman who worked for me, I would not allow them to meet alone with Harvey Weinstein." Now, why? I mean, what did he suspect would happen? Clearly, he knew something. Amy Israel, other people I quote saying the same thing as Mark did, they wanted to protect their employees. Well, you know, is there a point at which you blow the whistle and so you're protecting more than your employees? And that's one of the questions.
But, you know, many of these are good people. They’re not criminals, and -- but do I believe that many more people should have come forward? And then there are people Barbara Schneeweiss was a name that kept popping up in the trial, which I attended every day. I mean, she was basically dealing with the people Harvey was having affairs with in many cases and trying to keep them on the reservation and not getting angry, pretending that they could have roles in movies when the roles were already given to some other actors. And that her complicity and enabling complicity is clear throughout the trial.
Steve Hutensky, who was Harvey's business affairs representative, who was a person who went over to try and deal with Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu in 1998 in the Venice Film Festival, his name is on the nondisclosed agreement, which I publish in the book. If you want anything from The Weinstein Company, if you want a reference, go to Steve Hutensky. His name is mentioned twice in those NDAs, and I confronted him. You know, he claims, "I was not the lawyer," you know, but, you know, he was his business affairs guy, and he was in every meeting.
MS. ELLISON: Ken, I wish we could go on more, but I'm afraid we have to leave it there. We are out of time. Journalist and author Ken Auletta, thank you so much for joining us.
MR. AULETTA: Thank you, Sarah.
MS. ELLISON: And thanks to all of you for joining us as well. To keep up with the rest of our programming, please visit WashingtonPostLive.com to determine the rest of the programming that we have coming up and register for future events.
I'm Sarah Ellison. Thank you for joining us. | 2022-07-27T12:57:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Ken Auletta, Journalist & Author, “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence" - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/27/transcript-ken-auletta-journalist-author-hollywood-ending-harvey-weinstein-culture-silence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/27/transcript-ken-auletta-journalist-author-hollywood-ending-harvey-weinstein-culture-silence/ |
Q: I am the grandmother of two: a girl, 8, and a boy, 10. The girl was recently diagnosed with dyslexia, and the boy has several learning disabilities. I recently retired and relocated to my daughter’s home in Canada to care for the children during the summer. My daughter is a loving mother and always tries to meet the children’s needs.
I am writing about their bedtime routine. The children sleep with their mother, who starts their routine around 9:30. There is a lot of talking and sometimes fighting, so no one settles until around 11:30, sometimes as late as 12:30. My daughter gets up around 8, and the children shortly afterward. My room is on a separate floor, and I do not get involved in the bedtime routine.
I have two concerns: one is the lack of privacy around bedtime for my daughter, and the other is the lack of sleep for the children. They both seem tired during the day. They are not in school, and although we have access to a neighborhood pool, they frequently spend most of the day on devices.
My plan in being here was to help my daughter and accept things as they are, and to establish a trusting relationship with the children. Their father sees them often but uses drugs and is erratic. Child support is garnished. My daughter was out of work for seven months but now has an excellent job with a company in Berlin, so she works from home. She can go to the office, but it’s far from her home. I am frightened.
A: Your daughter and grandchildren are very fortunate to have you for the summer. The most hopeful statement in this letter is, “My plan in being here was to help my daughter and accept things as they are, and to establish a trusting relationship with the children.” That is a worthy goal, and if you can do that in your time there, that’s enough. In fact, accepting things as they are is one of the most powerful ideas a person can aspire to: to not be feckless, but to understand how little we have control over. Keeping a stance of humility is the best way to be of true assistance. You won’t force your notions, opinions or judgments upon your daughter and grandchildren, and instead will be of true service.
Where to begin? Yes, bedtime sounds like the hottest of messes, but don’t get involved. I have an idea that may kill two birds with one stone.
You mention that your daughter is working from home, and there is a pool available, so start there. Every day that it isn’t raining, go to the pool. If the spot offers swim lessons and money is available, sign your grandchildren up. Bring snacks, and hand them out freely to your grandchildren and any others who stop by. My hope is that, if there are many children there, they can share snacks and become “pool friends” who will be great for your grandchildren to play with. You can also bring Uno, books, a tablet, audiobooks and more, and create a schedule: swim, diving board competition with each other or friends, lunch, rest, swim, tablet and snacks, shower and go home. (It may be easier to shower there, but if neurodivergent needs are too great in the locker rooms, which can often be loud and chaotic, do it at home.)
My hope is that, by having the children in the fresh air and using their bodies all day, bedtime will become naturally easier for your daughter and the children. As you know, screens make children wired and tired. Their brains are overstimulated, and their bodies are under-exercised, leading to an inability to settle and rest. I’m also hoping that, because your daughter will be able to work in peace, she will be more calm and patient in the evenings. This will also give her more privacy, which you said she needs.
You mention being frightened. Is there something abusive going on? Is someone in emotional or physical danger? If so, that is a bigger issue. But if you are frightened because you are worried about the lack of privacy only, just continue supporting your daughter in finding and keeping the boundaries that feel right for her.
As for the children’s father, we know that a parent in the throes of addiction can be full of love and good intentions, but may struggle to follow through on those good intentions, leaving children confused, disappointed and angry. You cannot do anything about this addiction, but you can provide stability and a safe place to land (emotionally speaking) for your grandchildren. You can listen, help them process their feelings and love them. This kind of relationship, one of a warm and doting grandmother, can provide true comfort to your grandchildren, so don’t underestimate your importance. And by loving your grandchildren, you are always loving and supporting your daughter. Good luck. | 2022-07-27T12:57:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Grandma wants to know: How can she help grandchildren sleep better? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/07/27/grandmas-helping-with-grandchildren-doesnt-like-what-she-sees/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/07/27/grandmas-helping-with-grandchildren-doesnt-like-what-she-sees/ |
Sen. Wyden tees up bill to protect grasslands amid drought, wildfires
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! ICYMI, our colleague Jason Samenow spoke with Resources for the Future about why it's important to mention climate change when reporting on extreme weather. You can listen to the full podcast here. But first:
Exclusive: Sen. Wyden introduces bill to conserve threatened grassland ecosystems
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) will introduce legislation on Wednesday to establish the first-ever strategy for the protection, restoration and management of grassland ecosystems across North America, according to bill text and a summary shared exclusively with The Climate 202.
The North American Grasslands Conservation Act seeks to empower farmers, ranchers, Native American tribes and rural communities to conserve some of the continent’s most imperiled ecosystems while combating the climate crisis.
“With grasslands, you’ve got millions of acres of land that are currently not part of the climate solution,” Wyden said in an interview. “This bill changes that for the first time.”
Grasslands are among the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world. Over the last decade, millions of acres of grasslands have been lost to wildfires, extreme drought, fragmentation, commercial development, invasive species and other threats.
While forests mostly store carbon in woody biomass and leaves, grasslands sequester most of their carbon in their roots underground. That makes grasslands a more reliable carbon sink than forests, which release their sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere when wildfires cause trees to go up in flames, according to a 2018 study from the University of California at Davis.
The North American Grasslands Conservation Act is co-sponsored by Sens. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). It does not have any Republican co-sponsors so far, despite efforts to drum up GOP support.
“We’re talking to Republicans; I always try to find common ground,” Wyden said. “I’m not talking about Democratic grasslands or Republican grasslands.”
Roughly 85 percent of grasslands are privately owned. To that end, the Wyden legislation would establish the following programs aimed at empowering farmers, ranchers and tribes to conserve grasslands and the wildlife species that depend on them:
A North American Grassland Conservation Strategy for the protection, restoration and management of grassland ecosystems.
A Grassland Conservation Grant Program for voluntary, incentive-based conservation of grasslands, including projects to restore degraded grasslands, increase carbon sequestration, mitigate the threats of wildfire and drought, improve biodiversity and support habitat connectivity. (The Fish and Wildlife Service would have $290 million annually to carry out the grant program from fiscal years 2022 through 2026.)
National and Regional Grassland Conservation Councils to recommend and approve grassland conservation projects to be funded under the grant program.
Research initiatives on native seed crop systems and regenerative grazing practices.
“Grasslands are North America’s most imperiled ecosystem and without urgent, collaborative, conservation efforts, this essential habitat and the lives and livelihoods it supports are at risk,” Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said in a statement.
“Just as we’ve restored millions of acres of wetlands through the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and the Duck Stamp, the North American Grasslands Act will mark a sea change in how we conserve, restore, and revitalize our prairies for ranchers, hunters, and wildlife alike,” O'Mara said. “Congress should take up this landmark bill as soon as possible.”
A Wyden aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, acknowledged that the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate as a stand-alone measure.
However, the legislation could hitch a ride on a broader package that advances out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee or the Environment and Public Works Committee, the aide said.
The grasslands legislation comes after Democrats dropped the climate provisions from their signature spending bill because of opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a conservative Democrat. Wyden chairs the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over the clean energy tax credits that formed the centerpiece of the climate package.
“We’re not in any way, shape or form giving up on” the clean energy incentives, Wyden said, adding that he is still “looking for a way to advance” the credits, despite Manchin’s resistance to new spending amid inflationary pressures.
Biden administration launches website on extreme heat
The Biden administration on Tuesday launched the website heat.gov to provide local officials and the public with information and tools for responding to extreme heat, which ranks as the leading weather-related cause of death in the country.
The website came as nearly 40 million Americans were under heat alerts on Tuesday, Matthew Cappucci reports for The Washington Post. Throughout the Pacific Northwest, temperatures are expected to be the highest of the summer this week. Seattle may see temperatures of 90 degrees on four consecutive days through Friday, while Portland, Ore., may get afternoon temperatures near 100.
The new site will “reach people where they are and give them the information that they need to adapt in real time,” Ali Zaidi, the deputy White House national climate adviser, said on a call with reporters Tuesday.
Other speakers on the call included Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Leaders in the Amazon should enforce environmental laws. They often break them.
While deforestation is pushing the Amazon toward a tipping point, the very people accused of playing a role in that destruction have gained political power over it, according to an investigation by our colleague Terrence McCoy as part of The Washington Post's “The Amazon, Undone” series.
Inside the Amazon, which is imperiled by climate change, the local leaders charged with enforcing environmental laws are typically the very people alleged to have broken them as a shortcut to obtain wealth and power, according to an analysis of thousands of federal infractions and candidate data in the Amazon.
The Post found that many of the people and companies accused of wrongdoing by federal environmental law enforcement authorities have also pumped tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns in the past two decades and won public office more than 1,900 times. Taken together, the electoral victories and campaign finances have formed a parallel political system.
Law enforcement officials say this trend has helped undermine attempts to safeguard the natural resource that scientists warn must be preserved to avert catastrophic global warming.
Europe agrees to curb gas consumption as Russia threatens supply cutoffs
The European Union on Tuesday struck a deal on cuts to natural gas consumption as the threat of a Russian supply cutoff mounted amid Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine, Kim Mackrael and Joe Wallace report for the Wall Street Journal.
The long-awaited agreement calls for member countries to voluntarily slash their gas use by 15 percent beginning in August. While the target could become mandatory in an emergency, an E.U. official said Tuesday that country delegates didn’t discuss possible sanctions for members that decline to participate.
The deal also includes carve-outs that exclude certain areas from the reductions, including island countries that are not connected to other E.U. nations’ gas networks and Baltic countries whose electricity systems are not linked to the rest of the continent.
The agreement comes just one day before exports of Russian natural gas through Nord Stream 1 are expected to fall to one-fifth of the pipeline’s capacity, meaning the bloc will face an even more challenging road ahead as it scrambles to fill storage tanks with gas supplies before the winter.
Drastic flooding inundates parts of St. Louis, kills at least 1
Unprecedented flooding sparked by torrential rainfall in St. Louis on Tuesday killed at least one person and stranded residents in their cars and homes, with some parts of the city receiving more than 7.68 inches of rain in six hours overnight, Jason Samenow and Marisa Iati report for The Post.
The severe downpour had less than a 1-in-1,000 chance of happening in a given year, according to the National Weather Service. Extreme precipitation events have become more frequent in the past century and are tied to human-caused global warming. The heaviest such events increased by 42 percent in the Midwest between 1901 and 2016, with additional increases expected as the planet continues to warm, according to the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment.
The rain in St. Louis prompted the National Weather Service to warn of “life-threatening flooding” and later declare a flash flood emergency — its most serious flood alert. The risk is forecast to shift from southeast Missouri through West Virginia on Wednesday and Thursday.
The record-breaking triple-digit heat in Britain last week could trigger drought and more wildfires if it does not relent, according to the U.K. Environment Agency, Ellen Francis reports for The Post.
Already, rivers and reservoirs in the United Kingdom are depleted from prolonged dry weather, threatening crop harvests and fish. Scientists have linked climate change to the brutal hot spell.
While fire departments prepare for a worsening fire season, local water companies have also indicated they are considering new restrictions and conservation measures to maintain water supply.
Third set of human remains recovered at shrinking Lake Mead, park says — Timothy Bella reports for The Post
U.S. to sell additional 20 million barrels of oil from strategic reserve — Timothy Gardner for Reuters
Supreme Court rebuke weighs against Clean Air Act as climate law — Jennifer Hijazi for Bloomberg Law
This is us at parties: 😂
The latest: Trump dismisses Justice investigation as ‘more disinformation from Democrats’ | 2022-07-27T12:58:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sen. Wyden tees up bill to protect grasslands amid drought, wildfires - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/sen-wyden-tees-up-bill-protect-grasslands-amid-drought-wildfires/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/sen-wyden-tees-up-bill-protect-grasslands-amid-drought-wildfires/ |
After the most recent US inflation report again exceeded expectations, with prices surging 9.1% in the year to June, investors have been wondering whether the Federal Reserve would accelerate its monetary tightening for a second time on Wednesday — raising its policy rate not by the previously indicated 75 basis points, but by a full percentage point.
Expectations seem to have settled on the smaller number for now, with more to come later. But it’s a pity discussion still dwells on the path of future rates. This obscures what’s most important. The economic outlook has rarely been as puzzling as it is now, and the Fed needs to be more flexible than usual. Whatever this week’s interest-rate decision, officials should be careful not to box themselves in.
Forward guidance is evidently a hard habit to break. For years, with the policy rate stuck at zero, the central bank had only two ways of easing any further. One was to promise that rates would stay at zero beyond the point at which it might ordinarily raise them — a commitment to “lower for longer.” The other was to adopt a new schedule of bond purchases, or quantitative easing, to press down on long-term rates. In effect, the Fed had to tie its own hands.
This makes its initial reluctance to raise rates when inflation took off last year easier to understand. But now that the policy rate is back above zero, the central bank needs to be more agile. Setting out paths for interest rates and quantitative easing has become counterproductive.
This would be true even if the outlook were well understood, but it isn’t. Although inflation is high and the labor market is tight, output fell in the first quarter. Thursday’s advance estimate of second-quarter gross domestic product might show another decline. As a rule, you’d call two consecutive quarters of negative growth a recession — and it would be strange to raise interest rates if the economy were shrinking.
Yet who knows? The combination of the pandemic and the supply shocks induced by Russia’s war on Ukraine has scrambled every kind of macroeconomic indicator. The downturn in growth might be an illusion: Even in normal times, the figures can be heavily revised, and other measures are telling a more upbeat story. Pointing the other way, today’s low unemployment could itself be misleading. If the cause is a temporary contraction in the labor force, an extended period of high demand might not cause further overheating. Anyway, some of the recent inflation spike is indeed temporary, and monetary tightening can’t address supply-side disruptions.
Given all this, anything resembling a plan for interest-rate changes through this year and next is absurd. A rise this week is warranted, to be sure, because the current policy rate of 1.5% to 1.75% is very low in inflation-adjusted terms and would be adding to demand even if inflation were back on target. A rate of 2.25% to 2.5% would be closer to the so-called neutral rate. Without clear evidence that aggregate demand is stalling, anything lower is hard to justify.
But here’s the main thing: After this week, rates might need to go up further or be pushed back down, depending on what happens next. The best the Fed can do is make this clear to financial markets, closely watch the trend of demand, and keep an open mind. | 2022-07-27T14:28:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the Fed Should Keep an Open Mind - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-the-fed-should-keep-an-open-mind/2022/07/27/d90fd73c-0dac-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-the-fed-should-keep-an-open-mind/2022/07/27/d90fd73c-0dac-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
Meet three of the candidates who are part of a historic wave in 2022
From left to right: Mauree Turner, Leigh Finke, Zooey Zephyr. (Qazi Islam; August Schultz; courtesy of Zooey Zephyr; iStock/Washington Post illustration)
In 2017, former journalist Danica Roem made history when she was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, making her the first out transgender state legislator in the United States. But Roem was part of a bigger, if still relatively small, wave of trans candidates: At least 20 in all, enough for the Victory Fund, an LGBTQ political advocacy organization, to dub 2017 “the year of the trans candidate.”
Five years later, a record number of trans and nonbinary candidates are vying for public office, according to data compiled by the Victory Fund.
As of July, the Victory Fund reports that there are 55 trans candidates running for office, alongside 20 gender nonconforming candidates, 18 nonbinary candidates and four Two-Spirit candidates.
This new wave of candidates comes at a precarious time for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Across the country’s statehouses, an unprecedented amount of anti-LGBTQ measures have been introduced, with most bills aimed at curbing the rights of trans children and their families.
Sean Meloy, vice president of political programs at the Victory Fund, believes the record number of trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming candidates are a response to this rash of anti-LGBTQ animus.
“They know that our rights continue to be on the ballot and that we are under attack,” Meloy said.
They’re also setting their sights on state legislatures — the place where most anti-LGBTQ policies have been introduced. Among LGBTQ candidates broadly, the majority (41 percent) are running for state office.
The Washington Post spoke to three trans and nonbinary candidates about why they’re running — and why it matters.
‘Our communities want us’
For Zooey Zephyr of Missoula, Mont., the tipping point came in 2021 — the year the state legislature passed three anti-LGBTQ bills in a single week. Those laws included one that explicitly bans trans girls from competing on female sports teams and another that prevents trans people from correcting their birth certificates if they have not undergone gender-affirming surgery.
The latter bill, which originated in the state Senate, narrowly passed that chamber — by a vote of 26-24.
“I remember thinking, if I were in that room, I could have changed that heart. I could have been the difference there,” said Zephyr, a 33-year-old trans woman who manages the curriculum and program review process at the University of Montana.
“I grumpily tweeted that I was going to run for office that day when I saw that go through,” she said.
After the legislative session ended, a conversation with a state senator helped solidify Zephyr’s resolve, she said. Zephyr is now the Democratic candidate for Montana’s House District 100.
The anti-trans legislation that was pushed through Montana’s statehouse in 2021 does not reflect Zephyr’s own daily experience in Missoula, where she has been embraced by her community, she said. She teaches the Lindy Hop, a swing-era dance, in town, and when she played on intramural soccer teams at the university, “no one batted an eye,” Zephyr said.
“[Missoula] took care of me when I was going through my transition,” she said. “The sense of community here is magical.”
Although Zephyr hopes to sway the state’s lawmakers from passing more anti-trans bills, she also wants to do more than play defense in the statehouse. The biggest issue facing people in Missoula, she said, is its housing crisis. KPAX Missoula reports that a 2022 housing report found that the median price for a home in the area is now $500,000. The median income in Missoula County in 2020 was $56,257, according to the U.S. census.
If Zephyr wins in November, she would be the first trans person ever elected to Montana’s state legislature. It would send an important message to other lawmakers, as well as those in the trans community, Zephyr said:
“It is important to recognize, one, we’re here. And two, our communities want us and our communities care about us.”
It would mean, Zephyr continued, “there are 20,000 people out here in Missoula who thought, ‘We want trans people. We care about them and we want them representing us.’”
‘We deserve someone worth voting for’
Tucked into Oklahoma state Rep. Mauree Turner’s backpack is a copy of one of the first pieces of legislation they drafted. According to Turner, when they presented the bill to one of their colleagues in the statehouse, he returned it to Turner with “some suggestions.”
Across the document, Turner’s colleague had simply written, “kill,” they said.
“I take it with me everywhere I go, because it serves as a reminder that for 2SLGBTQ+ folks, being in office is not just about the policy that we get passed, but it’s also about the representation that we provide,” Turner said. “It’s also about being here at a time when the Oklahoma legislature continuously tries to tell us that we don’t have a place here.” (Advocates in Oklahoma have moved to adopt the 2SLGBTQ+ acronym, which is inclusive of Indigenous Two-Spirit identities.)
The last two years in the Oklahoma Capitol have been a “wild ride” for Turner, a Democratic state representative who made history on multiple counts when they were elected in 2020: They were the first Muslim elected to state office, and the first out nonbinary legislator in the entire country.
But being a historic first can feel like “trying to hold back this avalanche [of bigotry] while also trying to pull a community with us,” said Turner, a criminal justice advocate representing Oklahoma’s 88th District.
There were times when Turner doubted whether they were doing the right thing being a state lawmaker. This year, the statehouse passed a law banning nonbinary gender markers on birth certificates. The year before, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) issued an executive order barring trans residents from changing their gender on those documents.
“I believe that people are created by God to be male or female,” Stitt said when he issued the executive order. “There is no such thing as nonbinary sex.”
Okla. stakes out new battleground on LGBTQ rights: Birth certificates
Turner called it “a dark time,” and even wondered whether they had anything to do with the gender marker law being proposed: “If I wasn’t here, would this be an issue?”
But the millennial lawmaker has been buoyed by their supporters within their community — and outside it: Turner said they’ve heard from LGBTQ people who have left Oklahoma and feel a newfound hope for their home state because Turner is in the legislature.
If reelected, Turner plans to continue their work “reimagining and rebuilding” the state’s criminal justice system and advocating for affordable housing. But the last two years have also taught the junior representative how to pivot, how to always be ready for the unexpected, Turner said.
The slogan for Turner’s 2022 campaign is a phrase popularized by disability activists: “Nothing about us without us,” which speaks to the idea that policy should be decided by the people most impacted by it. It’s the kind of community-focused approach to government that Turner believes will lead to real change.
“We deserve to see ourselves in politics,” Turner said. “We deserve to have someone worth voting for.”
‘Every issue is a trans issue’
Leigh Finke, 41, had already decided to run for office when she heard about the baseless claims coming from some Minnesota Republicans this past April.
As the Minnesota Reformer reports, a handful of state lawmakers shared debunked stories about schools providing litter boxes for “students who identify as cats” during a floor debate over an education bill. Conservative lawmakers argued that a student survey that included questions about gender and sexuality were “absurd” and had gone too far.
“It was extremely alarming,” Finke said about the rhetoric, which LGBTQ and education advocates said dehumanized and mocked trans and nonbinary kids. “It creates an extreme sense of urgency in my community for things to change.”
Finke, a multimedia storyteller with the ACLU of Minnesota, is running to represent District 66 in the Minnesota House of Representatives. If elected, she would be the first out trans state legislator in Minnesota, a state widely considered among the most LGBTQ-friendly in the Midwest. In 1993, it was the first state in the country to enact a law banning discrimination against trans people.
But the state isn’t as liberal as it might appear on the outside, according to Finke.
“I think that we’re one bad election from being a state like Wisconsin,” which has been marked by deep political divisions, she said.
While Finke believes Minnesota has done a good job on some policies — such as enacting robust anti-discrimination laws around housing and employment — there is still a lot of work needed to be done, she said. She would like to help the state pass more protections for trans people using gendered facilities, like bathrooms, and help remove obstacles to gender-affirming care.
“Accessing trans health care is extremely difficult,” Finke said. “People don’t really have any idea how hard it is.”
But it’s also important to remember that policies not explicitly directed at trans and nonbinary people will impact those communities, Finke said. And in many instances, they are most impacted by these policies: Gun rights advocates have noted, for example, that LGBTQ people are more than twice as likely to be the victim of gun violence than their straight, cisgender peers.
“The trans community is ingrained in all communities,” she said. “Every issue is a trans issue.” | 2022-07-27T14:28:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Record number of trans and nonbinary people run for office in 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/trans-nonbinary-candidates-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/trans-nonbinary-candidates-2022/ |
Abortion-rights supporters protest at the Indiana state Capitol in Indianapolis on July 25. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
No health-care provider or researcher on maternal health would ever use the term “pro-life” in reference to the forced-birth movement. We know with great certainty that abortion bans present a serious threat to the lives of women.
Indeed, a 2012 study calculated that the risk of death from pregnancy is 14 times that of abortions, which are exceptionally safe thanks to advances in medicine. We also know the risk of death from pregnancy is also three to four times greater for Black women, because of higher rates of poor health and poverty, more limited access to health care and discrimination by health-care providers.
The Texas Tribune recently reported that “[because] of high chronic stress and race-based trauma and fear, the majority of Black women produce about 15% more cortisol, a stress hormone, than white women, which in turn raises the risk of pregnancy complications, according to the National Library of Medicine.” Among the Black women who want an abortion but are forced to give birth, the Tribune reports, many “will be left permanently disabled or sick long enough that they will lose their jobs, which will make caring for their families much more difficult.” For Black families in which a woman is the only source of income, the “ripple” effect of a forced birth, both on her family and the greater community, can be profound.
Amanda Stevenson, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a leading researcher on abortion bans, projected in a study published last year, based on 2017 data, that if the United States had a nationwide abortion ban, there would be a 21 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths. Deaths among non-Hispanic Black people would increase 33 percent. In fact, Stevenson shared with me a pre-print version of an update to that study with 2020 data, which shows even worse numbers: A national ban would result in a 24 percent increase in deaths for all women and a 39 percent for non-Hispanic Black women.
The reasons for the increases in death arise primarily from two factors. First, with more births, we will get more maternal deaths. Second, the composition of the population of women giving birth will include more Black women, who are disproportionately represented in the population of patients seeking an abortion and who are more likely to die from pregnancy.
Moreover, the states that seek to ban abortion are the same that rank among the worst in a slew of health indicators — overall health, infant mortality, rates of insurance among low income women and disparity in health between Blacks and Whites. Many of these states have not expanded Medicaid. In other words, states looking to force women to have birth have the sickest women and worst health outcomes.
The bans will also contribute to more deaths in other ways. If doctors feel compelled to wait until a woman is at immediate risk of death before performing an abortion (e.g., in cases of ectopic pregnancies or a membrane rupture), there will be more “near misses.” Accordingly, there will more deaths, Stevenson tells me.
Even among women not seeking abortions, the risk of death will increase. The Texas Tribune reports: “Abortion-inducing medication is the most common method used by Texans to terminate pregnancies, according to Texas Health and Human Services. But it also has a broad range of other uses in obstetrics and gynecology, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, including medical management of miscarriage, induction of labor, cervical dilation before surgical procedures, and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage.” To the extent doctors worried about criminal liability hesitate to use these drugs, women’s health and lives will be at risk.
In sum, when courts decide that women cannot make critical decisions for themselves and that the impact of abortion on their lives doesn’t matter, they become not only second-class citizens but are also at greater risk of death. Call it anti-woman or pro-maternal death, but please don’t call the forced-birth movement “pro-life.” | 2022-07-27T14:28:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The math is clear: Forced-birth laws will kill more women - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/science-is-clear-abortion-ban-forced-birth-laws-will-kill-more-women/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/science-is-clear-abortion-ban-forced-birth-laws-will-kill-more-women/ |
Doctor in 10-year-old rape victim’s abortion faces AG inquiry, threats
Caitlin Bernard, a reproductive health-care provider, speaks during an abortion rights rally on June 25 at the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis. (Jenna Watson/Indianapolis Star/AP)
The Indianapolis doctor who helped a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim obtain an abortion is being investigated by the state’s attorney general as the physician says she and her family have faced harassment in the weeks since she shared a story that’s garnered worldwide attention.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) sent a notice to the legal team for Caitlin Bernard on Tuesday advising it that the doctor is under investigation for how she had reported the procedure to state officials, as required by law, her attorney Kathleen DeLaney told The Washington Post. Attorneys for Bernard recently took the first legal step in a possible defamation lawsuit against Rokita for what they say were “false and misleading statements” about the obstetrician/gynecologist in the days after she talked about helping the child, who traveled to Indiana for an abortion.
“We are in the process of reviewing this information,” DeLaney said in a statement Wednesday, adding the inquiry appears to have just been launched. “It’s unclear to us what is the nature of the investigation and what authority he has to investigate Dr. Bernard.”
Rokita and his office have repeatedly questioned whether Bernard reported the procedure to the state, even as records obtained by The Post show that the physician reported the girl’s abortion to the relevant agencies before the legally mandated deadline to do so. The attorney general has continued to cast doubt on the physician, despite Gerson Fuentes, 27, being charged with rape in the child’s case earlier this month.
In a Tuesday interview with NPR, Bernard that she has felt threatened since she shared the story of the 10-year-old rape victim’s abortion. Bernard’s representative previously acknowledged to The Post that the physician has faced harassment in the past, including being labeled a “local abortion threat” by an antiabortion group and forced to stop offering services at a clinic in 2020 after she was alerted of a kidnapping threat against her daughter.
“It’s honestly been very hard for me, for my family,” said Bernard, 37. “It’s hard to understand why a political figure, a prominent figure in the state, would want to come after physicians who are helping patients every single day in their state.”
She also fired back at the Republican politicians, conservative television pundits and media outlets that rode a wave of skepticism about whether the story of the child rape victim was true. (The Post also published a Fact Checker analysis that initially concluded that the report about the girl was a “very difficult story to check.”) Bernard challenged those who doubted the veracity of her story on “CBS Evening News.”
“Come spend a day in my clinic. Come see the care that we provide every single day,” Bernard told anchor Norah O’Donnell. “The situations that people find themselves in, and in need of abortion care are some of the most difficult that you could imagine. And that’s why we, as physicians, need to be able to provide that care unhindered, that medical decisions need to be made between a physician and their patients.”
She added, “I’m not the only provider who has taken care of young children needing abortion care.”
In a statement to The Post, Rokita accused Bernard of using “a 10-year-old girl — a child rape victim’s personal trauma — to push her political ideology.”
“As the Attorney General, I’m dutybound to investigate issues brought to my attention over which I have authority, especially when they involve children," said Rokita, noting that his “heart breaks” for the 10-year-old rape victim. “And as I said originally, we will see this duty through to verify that all of the relevant reporting and privacy laws were followed by all relevant parties.”
The investigation into Bernard comes nearly four weeks after she told the Indianapolis Star in an article published July 1 that she had been called by a doctor in Ohio about a young patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant following a rape. The girl had an abortion at an Indianapolis clinic on June 30, almost a week after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Bernard’s account, which was decried by President Biden, was corroborated on July 13 when Fuentes was charged after authorities said he confessed that he had raped the 10-year-old on at least two occasions. If he is convicted of first-degree felony rape, Fuentes, who is being held on a $2 million bond, could face life in prison.
Since the charges were brought against Fuentes, Rokita has shifted his attention toward whether Bernard followed the appropriate protocols for reporting the abortion. In addition to documents showing that she did, officials with Indiana University Health told The Post that Bernard did not violate any privacy laws when she shared an anecdote with the media about the 10-year-old rape victim needing an abortion.
In the letter filed this month to Rokita and Indiana state officials, DeLaney wrote that the attorney general has limited authority to investigate complaints against professionals in certain fields, such as physicians. Bernard’s attorney wrote in the notice that Rokita’s goal was to “heighten public condemnation” of the doctor. Kelly Stevenson, a spokesperson with the attorney general’s office, told The Post last week how Rokita and his office would fight the “baseless claims” of any potential lawsuit that is “part of a divisive narrative and an attempt to distract from the important work of the office.”
While performing an abortion after six weeks remains legal in Indiana, lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature are considering further restrictions that would prohibit almost all abortions except in special cases such as rape, incest or times when a pregnant woman’s life is endangered.
Bernard told CBS on Tuesday that her sharing the story of the child rape victim was needed to raise awareness around “what the real-life implications are for people who need abortion care.”
“Unfortunately, sexual assault in children is not uncommon,” she said.
In the weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Bernard said the ramifications of the high court’s decision has proven that it will affect reproductive health care, not just abortions, that potentially put a woman’s life at risk.
“I think we’re at a time in our country where people are starting to realize the impact of these antiabortion laws,” she told O’Donnell. “And now when it’s finally become impossible for some people, I think people realize that is actually not what they intended, that is not what they want for children, for women, to be put in these situations of life-threatening conditions of traumatic pregnancies.”
The physician also said Tuesday to CBS that Vice President Harris recently called her to thank her “for speaking out, for bringing this issue up.”
Bernard, who has become perhaps the most recognizable physician providing abortions in the country, declined to say to NPR whether she regretted speaking out, or if she would have handled the situation differently knowing what she knows now. But she said she remained grateful for the “immense outpouring” of support she’s received this month.
“I think people realize how important our voice as physicians as advocates for access to care can be,” she said. “I hope it will be inspiring and not deterring.” | 2022-07-27T14:29:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Caitlin Bernard, doctor in 10-year-old rape victim's abortion, faces Indiana AG's investigation, threats, she says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/abortion-doctor-girl-rape-caitlin-bernard-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/abortion-doctor-girl-rape-caitlin-bernard-investigation/ |
Senate poised to pass bill to subsidize U.S.-made semiconductor chips
Semiconductor chips are manufactured in highly clean facilities, shown June 10, 2021, at GlobalFoundries Fab 8 in Malta, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz/For The Washington Post)
The legislation — which has had many nicknames but which Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) dubbed the “Chips and Science” bill — was nearly two years in the making. It resembles the sprawling United States Innovation and Competition Act, the original form of the bill, which cleared the Senate last year but ran aground in the House.
If the Senate passes the legislation Wednesday as expected, it would move to the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said it has the support for passage. Key members of Congress have said they could have the bill on President Biden’s desk by the end of the week.
“It’s a major step forward for our economic security, our national security, our supply chains and, as I said, America’s future,” Schumer said Tuesday. “I feel this bill so passionately. It’s not one of these things that, you know, people immediately say, ‘Oh, yes, we must have that done.’ But it is something we must have done.”
Three months, 700 steps: Why producing a computer chip takes so long
Much of the $52 billion would go to microchip manufacturers to incentivize construction of domestic semiconductor fabrication plants — or “fabs” — to make the chips, which are used in a wide variety of products including motor vehicles, cellphones, medical equipment and military weapons. A shortage of semiconductor chips during the coronavirus pandemic has caused price hikes and supply-chain disruptions in several industries.
“We’re close. We’re close,” Biden said Monday. “So, let’s get it done. So much depends on it.”
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who has been spearheading the White House’s efforts to lobby for the bill, noted Monday in a White House meeting with business and labor leaders that the United States used to make 40 percent of the world’s chips but now makes about 12 percent — and “essentially none of the leading-edge chips,” which come almost entirely from Taiwan.
The White House has also pointed to the semiconductor chip shortage as a national security issue. In an interview Tuesday with Washington Post Live, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), an original co-sponsor of the bill, said that some senators joined a classified briefing a few weeks ago at which they learned about some of the geopolitical concerns the United States is facing.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted 64 to 32 to limit debate and move the “Chips and Science” bill toward a final vote. The Senate’s advancement of the bill Tuesday came after months of debate and setbacks, and the measure was nearly hindered further by weather delays and the absence of several senators who tested positive for the coronavirus recently.
Although there was bipartisan support in the Senate to advance the bill, several key Republican senators voted no. Those opposed include retiring Sens. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.) and Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.). Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) also opposed advancing the bill, despite Lockheed Martin chief executive Jim Taiclet’s wholeheartedly endorsing the legislation in his meeting with Biden the day before, emphasizing that semiconductor chips are a critical component of Javelin missiles, which are manufactured in Alabama.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who expressed opposition to the bill leading up to Tuesday’s vote, also voted against advancing the legislation. Sanders has criticized the bill as one that would give “blank checks to profitable microchip companies.”
Sen. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.), a co-sponsor of the legislation, pushed back on that notion, arguing that he saw the bill as a national security investment.
“Ronald Reagan used to say often that defense is not a budgetary issue,” Young said in a Washington Post Live interview. “You spend what you need, and if this economy during the course of the pandemic until the present day has demonstrated anything, it’s that we need an economy that is more resilient.”
Pelosi has vowed to move quickly on the bill once it arrives in the House. At an event in Michigan on Friday with labor leaders and the state’s congressional delegation, she said there was some support for the bill among GOP lawmakers in the House. | 2022-07-27T14:29:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate poised to pass bill to subsidize U.S.-made semiconductor chips - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/senate-chips-funding-bill-pass/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/senate-chips-funding-bill-pass/ |
Former president Donald Trump mimics a female weightlifter as he delivers remarks during the America First Agenda Summit in Washington on July 26, 2022. (Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
To hear former president Donald Trump talk about crime during his speech in Washington on Tuesday, you’d think he’d never been to the capital city before.
Trump’s address to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) — his officially sanctioned repository for think tank-like activity — was predicated on presenting policy proposals aimed at addressing crime and violence in the United States. The speech meandered pretty significantly, as might have been predicted, with an extended riff on transgender athletes after the crowd expressed its robust approval of his stance. But he came there to make a pitch on crime, and he made it.
It just happens to be the same pitch he made when he was first running for president in 2015. That Trump repeatedly elevated the same issues and the same solutions might leave an uninformed observer wondering who, exactly, had been president for much of the intervening period without fixing the purported problems.
“Our country is now a cesspool of crime,” Trump said in his AFPI speech, an obvious preview of a likely 2024 campaign. “We have blood, death and suffering on a scale once unthinkable because of the Democrat Party’s effort to destroy and dismantle law enforcement all throughout America.”
This echoed his speech at the Republican convention in 2016. Then, he declared, “Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims.”
He made a promise: “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon — and I mean very soon — come to an end. Beginning on January 20th, 2017” — that is, upon his inauguration — “safety will be restored.”
Violent crime did drop for a bit during his presidency, but not to the point seen in 2014. In 2020, it was higher than it had been in 2016. Even as president at the time, he blamed the rise on Democrats.
His framing of the increase in crime as being a function of Democratic attacks on law enforcement (who, he said, were only attacked and never supported) is itself not a recent addition, although the thrust has shifted. In 2016, he accused the left of fostering a “dangerous anti-police atmosphere” in the country — the “Ferguson effect.”
In his two presidential campaigns, though, he more often simply blamed Democrats because they were the leaders of the cities where most of the crime occurs. (It’s true that there are more criminal acts in places with more people, but rural areas, less commonly led by Democrats, have seen surges in crime as well.)
“Many of our once-great cities, from New York to Chicago to L.A., where the middle class used to flock to live the American Dream, are now war zones, literal war zones,” he said Tuesday. Just as they have been since September 2016, when he said that “in many cases, you have cities, inner cities that are worse than war zones and more dangerous than some war zones.”
Among the solutions he offered was to bring back “stop-and-frisk,” a New York City policy shown to have been disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic residents. On Tuesday, he declared that “we need to return to stop-and-frisk policies and cities and not shy away from it” — just as in the first presidential debate in 2016, when he said that “you have to have stop-and-frisk.”
Another solution was to impose the death penalty for drug dealers, something he first floated back in 2018. Then, though, he asserted without evidence that “if you ever did an average, a drug dealer will kill thousands of people” by distributing drugs. (This came from a presidential speech on “tax reform.”) On Tuesday, he scaled that average downward to 50 deaths, although he provided exactly the same evidence: none.
He also, predictably, spent a large chunk of his speech railing against immigration.
“Our open borders are a gaping wound, allowing drugs, gangs, child traffickers, human smugglers and tens of thousands of dangerous criminals to pour into our country,” he said Tuesday. Just as in August 2016 he declared that “our open border has allowed drugs and crime and gangs to pour into our country and our communities.” It was a consistent complaint in a speech in which Trump touted the miles of border wall constructed during his administration.
Other countries, Trump said Tuesday, were “emptying their jails into the United States. We’re like a dumping ground. We’re not going to allow that to happen.” This, of course, was the specific claim that Trump infamously made in announcing his campaign in 2015: that “they are sending people that they don’t want. The United States is becoming a dumping ground for the world.”
He also claimed that local police know who the immigrant criminals in their communities are but are hamstrung in arresting them.
“The police officers know their names,” Trump said on Tuesday. “The problem is they’re not allowed to do anything about it.” Just as he said in August 2016 that “police and law enforcement, they know who these people are. They live with these people. They get mocked by these people. They can’t do anything about these people, and they want to. They know who these people are.”
“Day one, my first hour in office,” he promised — “those people are gone.”
It’s not as though there were no updates to Trump’s shtick since his two campaigns for president. His speech Tuesday followed a very familiar pattern — vague, sweeping claims based on dubious statistics buttressed with gruesome anecdotes about individual crimes — but included some new points.
For example, he declared that the federal government should have the ability to unilaterally send the National Guard into states to deal with perceived dangers, a lesson he adopted after protests in Minnesota. That’s explicitly not how the National Guard works, with governors having joint authority on their deployment as a hedge against a president who might want to make a political statement by sending armed forces into the streets. A president, say, who had said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
In his new speech, Trump integrated a lesson he learned in 2020: that his perceived toughness could be boosted by posturing about things he’d learned as president. He now has a better sense of the ways in which he can talk about that to boost the image he seeks to project.
This is not to diminish Trump’s very real interest in being able to use the military as national police. Trump is running explicitly on the idea that he be able to deploy military power in that way. Which is the point: Yes, the rhetoric was the same as in 2016 and the problems the same despite four years of President Donald Trump. But now he’s also running explicitly on setting aside the safeguards he learned about only once he was in office.
“We need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America,” Trump said Tuesday. “And strongly defeat it. And be tough and be nasty and be mean if we have to.” | 2022-07-27T14:29:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump’s 2022 pitch on crime sounds just like his 2015 one - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/trumps-2022-pitch-crime-sounds-just-like-his-2015-one/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/trumps-2022-pitch-crime-sounds-just-like-his-2015-one/ |
The man is among a handful who have gone into remission after the procedure, but it is not an option for most people with the virus
An electron microscope image shows a human T cell, in blue, under attack by the HIV virus, in yellow. (Seth Pincus, Elizabeth Fischer, Austin Athman/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/NIH/AP)
A 66-year-old man with HIV is in long-term remission after receiving a transplant of blood stem cells containing a rare mutation, raising the prospect that doctors may someday be able to use gene editing to re-create the mutation and cure patients of the virus that causes AIDS, a medical team announced Wednesday.
For now, the crucial virus-defeating mutation is rare, leaving the treatment unavailable to the vast majority of the 38 million patients living with HIV, including over 1.2 million in the United States. Bone marrow transplants also carry significant risk and have been used only on HIV patients who have developed cancer.
The patient, who had lived more than half his life with the virus, is among a handful of people who went into remission after receiving stem cells from a donor with the rare mutation, said doctors from City of Hope, a cancer and research center in Duarte, Calif., who treated him.
“This is one step in the long road to cure,” said William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor, who founded the university’s cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments. Haseltine, now chairman and president of the nonprofit think tank Access Health International, was not involved in the City of Hope case.
While the announcement at the 24th International AIDS Conference in Montreal does not have immediate implications for most people living with HIV, it continues the long, slow progression of treatment that began with federal approval of the drug AZT in 1987, advanced a decade later with the use of protease inhibitors to reduce the virus in the body, and went further in 2012, with the approval of PrEP, which protects healthy people from becoming infected.
As a result of those developments, an HIV patient diagnosed at around age 20 today can receive antiretroviral therapy and live another 54 years, according to a 2017 study in the journal AIDS.
“When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, like many others, I thought it was a death sentence,” said the City of Hope patient, who asked not to be identified, in a statement shared by the hospital. “I never thought I would live to see the day that I no longer have HIV.”
The man received the transplant in early 2019, but continued taking antiretroviral therapy until he had been vaccinated against covid-19. He has been in remission for almost a year and a half.
“He’s doing great,” said Jana T. Dickter, an associate clinical professor in the division of infectious diseases at City of Hope, who presented the data at the conference. “He’s in remission for HIV.”
Dickter said the patient is being treated for painful ulcers in his mouth caused by the donor’s stem cells attacking his tissue.
The patient received the transplant from an unrelated donor in 2019, after being diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. His doctor at City of Hope chose donor stem cells that had a genetic mutation found in about 1 in 100 people of northern European descent.
Those having the mutation, known as CCR5- delta 32, cannot be infected by HIV because it slams shut the doorway used by the virus to enter and attack the immune system. That doorway is the cell receptor CCR5, which the virus uses to enter white blood cells that form an important part of the body’s defense against disease.
The City of Hope patient is among a small, select group of HIV patients to go into remission after receiving such a transplant.
“This is probably the fifth case in which this type of transplant appeared to cure someone. This approach clearly works. It’s curative and we know the mechanism,” said Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, who cared for the first such patient, Timothy Ray Brown. In 2007, Brown was cured by a medical team in Berlin using a transplant from someone who had the same mutation.
Following the transplant, Brown no longer had a detectable level of HIV in his blood. He was known as “the Berlin patient” until he released his name in 2010 and moved to San Francisco.
“I will not stop until HIV is cured,” Brown vowed in a 2015 essay in the journal AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses. Brown died in September 2020 of leukemia unrelated to his HIV. He was 54.
Similar successes followed in patients in London, Düsseldorf, Germany and New York.
“It is yet another case that resembles Timothy Brown from years ago,” emailed David D. Ho, one of the world’s leading AIDS researchers and director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University. “There are several others as well, each using approaches that are not feasible for most infected patients.”
The other patients also received bone marrow transplants, a relatively risky procedure that involves wiping out the patient’s immune system with chemotherapy drugs. Chemotherapy destroys remaining cancer cells, makes room in the marrow for the donor cells and reduces the likelihood that they will come under attack from the immune system. The transplanted blood stem cells are then injected into the bloodstream and make their way to the marrow, where — ideally — they begin producing new, healthy blood cells.
Although the survival rate for bone marrow transplant recipients has risen significantly, 30 percent of the patients die within a year of the procedure.
“I think it’s highly feasible to identify appropriate donors — in particular when more people register as bone marrow donors, with more representation of different racial and ethnic backgrounds,” said Eileen Scully, associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “That will enable this type of approach to be used for more people.”
But she added that “bone marrow transplantation is a significant medical procedure that carries its own risks.”
Doctors at City of Hope said they prepared the HIV patient for the transplant by giving him a lower-intensity regimen of chemotherapy developed by the cancer center and used with older patients.
HIV patients in wealthy countries like the United States, where antiretrovirals are widely available, live longer, but they also run a higher risk of developing certain cancers such as leukemia. In addition, they have a higher risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and even some brain conditions.
Dickter said that when the City of Hope patient was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia in 2019, his doctors searched for a bone marrow match that contained the HIV-resistant mutation.
The nonprofit National Marrow Donor Program, now routinely screens donors to learn whether they have the CCR5- delta 32 mutation, said Joseph Alvarnas, a City of Hope hematologist-oncologist and a co-author of the abstract.
The possibility of someday being able to effectively cure much large numbers of people by using gene-editing techniques to generate the mutation may be a decade off, Deeks said.
Deeks said he is working with a San Francisco-based company called Excision BioTherapeutics to develop the first-in-human trials that would involve editing the genes of patients with HIV. Studies have shown some success in editing genes inside mice and monkeys infected with HIV.
Deeks said that it is not hard in the lab to use a gene-editing tool to knock out the receptor that allows HIV to invade the immune system. Carrying out that task inside the body of a human patient is where the work gets complex.
“That’s the challenge — to do that effectively and safely,” Deeks said. “And that’s a whole can of worms.”
Haseltine said that researchers must figure out how to reach enough of the right cells inside the body. At the same time, they must ensure the treatment does not cause unwanted effects to other genes.
“The message to people living with HIV is that this is a signal of hope,” said Scully of Johns Hopkins. “It is feasible. It has been replicated again. It’s also a signal that the scientific community is really engaged with trying to solve this puzzle.” | 2022-07-27T14:30:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Longtime HIV patient is effectively cured after stem cell transplant - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/07/27/hiv-remission-stem-cell-transplant-city-of-hope/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/07/27/hiv-remission-stem-cell-transplant-city-of-hope/ |
Emu and chef help stop a driver fleeing hit-and-run crash site
Portrait of an emu. (Not the emu that helped catch the driver.) (iStock)
LONDON — England has two new, unexpected celebrities — a 42-year-old chef and a massive emu, who inadvertently teamed up to help catch a driver in a hit-and-run who fled a crash scene after narrowly missing pedestrians and causing extensive damage.
Dean Wade said he heard a loud “screeching noise” near his workplace in Wiltshire, southwest England, on Monday and raced out to see a jeep careening from side to side before smashing into the front of an empty shop close by.
In an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Wade, who has been working at the Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury for only two weeks, said he could see the driver, who “appeared drunk,” was getting ready to back away from the scene. A female passenger had also left the vehicle.
“There’s no way you’re going anywhere,” Wade told the man, who he said was “swaying” and “staggering” all over the place. But the man, though unable to run fast due to his physical state, was determined to escape, heading off on foot.
Wearing his slip-resistant rubber kitchen clogs and chef’s overalls, Wade chased the driver for 15 to 20 minutes, through bushes, allotments and gardens before the pair ended up at an animal sanctuary.
“I could see this massive emu,” Wade said. “I’m six foot tall and it was bigger than me.”
Wade said he could tell the bird, which was surrounded by its offspring, was likely to spring into defense mode if anyone intruded on its enclosure.
“Mate, don’t go in there,” Wade warned the man, who he said ignored his advice, replying: “I can fight emus” before heading into the animal’s pen — where he was repeatedly pecked.
“It was stabbing his body all over,” Wade said, causing the man to curse and unsuccessfully attempt to “kung-fu-kick” the animal away.
Wiltshire police confirmed Monday they were dealing with a “minor injury” and “extensive damage” following the collision that forced the road to close as emergency services attended the scene.
Following “an extensive search of the area,” officials said, one person had been arrested after driving drunk. They did not name the person.
Wade told The Post that he had just relocated from the sprawling city of Leeds to the picturesque village of Malmesbury for his new job at the Old Bell Hotel, which claims to be England’s oldest hotel. According to its website, the venue has served travelers since the year 1220.
“In Leeds we don’t stand by and do nothing,” Wade said, crediting his home city in West Yorkshire and his passion for justice for providing him with the instinct to chase after the driver.
Emus are classified as one of the world’s biggest birds, according to National Geographic. The animals can weigh up to 97 pounds and grow over six feet tall. While they cannot fly, they have “long powerful legs” that they often use to kick predators that come too close.
Wade was keen to stress that he did not consider the birds aggressive but, rather, “curious creatures” that are determined to protect their young.
“I know what female birds are like,” he said, adding that he has encountered angry swans seeking to protect their chicks.
Wade admitted his new life and job in Malmesbury had so far surpassed all expectations: uniting with an emu on Monday to solve crime, being invited to appear on national radio and TV in the U.K., and fielding interview requests while on a roadside attempting to fix a punctured tire, although that incident is not believed to be bird related.
The emu, despite its newfound fame, has retained a lower profile, with the wildlife sanctuary declining interviews, but telling national broadcaster BBC that all its emus were unharmed and that they are “wonderful creatures.”
And, following Wade and the emu’s successful partnership, the hotel and the animal sanctuary have also teamed up — striking a deal that sees staff deliver bucket-loads of vegetable peelings from the kitchen to the animals each day in a bid to reduce food waste. | 2022-07-27T15:37:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Emu, hotel chef thwart driver fleeing hit and run crash in Malmesbury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/uk-emu-fleeing-driver-chef-hotel/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/uk-emu-fleeing-driver-chef-hotel/ |
Woman believed to have been kidnapped from D.C. apartment complex
D.C. police are searching for a woman they say may have been kidnapped by her armed boyfriend, who they say forced her into a vehicle early Wednesday in the Van Ness area of Northwest Washington.
Police said the vehicle has been found, but the woman and her boyfriend are still missing.
The incident occurred about 3:40 a.m. at an apartment building in the 2900 block of Van Ness Street NW, just off Connecticut Avenue and near the University of the District of Columbia.
Police identified the missing woman as Selita Tashaun Lee, 30, and they released a photo of her. Police also identified the man they described as her boyfriend, 44-year-old Marquez Parker, who authorities said is also being sought.
Police on Twitter described the incident as an “armed kidnapping” but did not provide further details. Authorities have planned a news conference for later Wednesday morning.
This developing story has been updated. | 2022-07-27T15:37:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Woman believed to have been kidnapped from D.C. apartment complex - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/dc-police-kidnapping-van-ness/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/dc-police-kidnapping-van-ness/ |
General Manager Mike Rizzo and the Nationals face a difficult trade deadline. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
As Mike Rizzo, the Washington Nationals’ general manager and president of baseball operations, made his radio appearance on The Junkies on 106.7 the Fan on Wednesday morning, he did so with the baseball world listening far more closely than usual.
Less than a week from now, the trade deadline will have come and gone and Rizzo’s Nationals will have traded away a 23-year-old generational talent or not, will have shaken up the baseball world or not. Every word could offer a clue, some kind of indication of which way he and the Nationals will go.
And while Rizzo carefully avoided offering any such prognostication, he did make clear that one line of Soto trade speculation — that the Nationals might use a Soto deal to try to offload big contracts, like pitcher Patrick Corbin’s deal, was not part of the organization’s plans.
“We’ve never contacted a team and talked about Juan Soto and attaching any contract to any player. We’re not going to dilute a return for any player by adding a bad contract. That’s not where we’re at in our organization at this time,” Rizzo said. “We want to get the most for each and every trade that we do. So we’re certainly not going to tack on anyone’s contract to anybody’s deal including Juan Soto or Josh Bell or anybody’s.”
If the Nationals hold that line, that means interested parties will need to package numerous top prospects or big league-ready youngsters to pull Soto from Washington, that they won’t be able to mitigate the prospect loss by simply handing over money. Very few teams, if any, have enough of a surplus of prospects and young big leaguers to make a deal like that. And those that do may not feel the need to do so at this moment, particularly if a new ownership group makes Soto is available again this winter.
“We’re in conversations with Juan Soto with several teams that I think have real interest in him,” said Rizzo, who declined to handicap the odds of the Nationals trading the star outfielder.
“I will say this: We’re going to have to get the deal that we want that makes the most sense that gets us an opportunity to become a championship organization than not trading him,” Rizzo said. “That’s it in a nutshell.”
That Soto became the center of attention for this year’s trade deadline is in large part the result of a now-infamous leak: A week and a half ago, Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic reported that Soto had declined what would have been the most guaranteed money in league history, $440 million over 15 years, and that the Nationals would therefore have to consider trading him.
Speculation flew about the source of the leak, since Soto was visibly upset after the information became public. Had the Nationals leaked the details so as to signal that Soto was available and make clear they had really, seriously tried to sign him?
“Leaks are so difficult. In this age of social media, who knows where some of these things come from. All I can tell you is unequivocally did not come from me for sure, 100 percent for sure, or from our front office. That much I know for sure,” Rizzo said. “We had this information three weeks before it leaked out. We had ample time to leak it out if we wanted to leak it out. Leaks never ever help the situation. It was disappointing to me.”
Rizzo, who in June told the Junkies that the Nationals wouldn’t be trading Soto, went on to add that the now-public information about the negotiations caused problems for Washington in the aftermath.
“It did not help us in anything we were trying to do. It didn’t help us in keeping a good relationship with Juan and it didn’t help us in any kind of leverage at the trade deadline,” Rizzo said. “It really didn’t help us. It hurt us that the details got out.”
The source remains unclear. The Post confirmed the details of the discussions, and Soto has said he was disappointed that they came out, suggesting he wouldn’t have directed anyone in his camp to make them public. Ahead of the All-Star Game in Los Angeles, he answered questions about his future with his agent, Scott Boras, by his side, his Home Run Derby title overshadowed by the notion that the Nationals might be considering a nearly unprecedented deal for him. He suggested he didn’t know what to trust in the organization, since the situation had changed so dramatically.
“With his agent’s knowledge, we told him, when the deal was turned down, we said ‘We’re going to have to explore all our options.’ And that’s all we’ve ever said,” Rizzo said. “I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t explore all the options that now present us. We’ve got a pretty good option: We’ve got a talented Juan Soto for two and a half more seasons. That’s option A, that’s a good one. But we also have to think about options B and C.”
My job is to make this organization a consummate winner again, like we did from 2012 to 2019, being a consistent winner,” Rizzo added. “I have to figure out ways as the caretaker of this franchise to make us a championship organization for a long time to come.” | 2022-07-27T15:41:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mike Rizzo discusses potential Juan Soto deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/mike-rizzo-juan-soto-trade-deadline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/mike-rizzo-juan-soto-trade-deadline/ |
Josue Hercules, now 17, was hit by a stray bullet while he played outside with his little sister in California in 2009. (Photographs by Barbara Davidson)
The Scars of Gun Violence, Seen and Unseen: A Photo Essay
From mass shootings that garner headlines to daily attacks that receive little attention, gun violence takes many forms
By Barbara Davidson
Deniya Irving was 7 when a gunman in St. Louis shot her in the head while she hid in the back seat of her parents’ car in 2017. She was lying on top of her 5-year-old sister, Deaira, to protect her. The shooter had already killed her parents. No motive was ever discovered.
Damon Young: Terrified my son will get shot, also terrified he’ll be the shooter
Retired Army Sgt. Patrick Zeigler, who served two tours of duty in Iraq, was one of more than 30 people injured in a mass shooting at Fort Hood near Killeen, Tex., in 2009. Thirteen people were killed, making it the deadliest mass shooting ever on an American military base. Zeigler, now 41, was awarded a Purple Heart after surviving the massacre.
Deserae Turner was 14 when a classmate shot her in the back of the head and left her for dead in a ditch in Smithfield, Utah, in 2017. At 17 she was honored as the prom queen at her high school. To date, Turner, now 20, has had over 25 surgeries.
Gun violence in the United States is a growing public health epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. And, from mass shootings to everyday attacks, this violence takes many forms. Mass shootings — often carried out with AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles — get most of the attention. Largely overlooked are the day-to-day handgun deaths attributable to domestic violence, crossfire from stray bullets, criminal acts, gang wars, personal disputes and, in many cases, suicides.
As a Canadian living in Los Angeles, I find the gun violence in this country incomprehensible. At the beginning of my career, I spent a lot of time overseas covering wars in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. America may not be a war zone, but the stories of gun violence here seem endless.
The list of shootings goes on, inexorably: In 2019, a transgender woman, Candice Elease Pinky, was shot five times in broad daylight at a gas station in Houston. She survived. Last year was the deadliest year on record for anti-trans violence in the nation, with at least 57 people killed, according to Human Rights Watch.
Sean Reynolds was 17 when he was shot in the hip last year in South Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood by a 14-year-old who wanted to rob him of his PlayStation 5. This year, also in Watts, a stray bullet tore through the cheek of Jose Portillo, 25 — traveling to the edge of his neck, where doctors say it’s too dangerous to try to take out. His face remains partially paralyzed.
“The epidemic of gun violence today in America tells the rest of the world that we value guns over human life, even children. It feels as if everyone has a gun,” Lara Drino, director of child abuse policy and prevention for the Los Angeles city attorney, told me. “The proliferation of guns in our society has caused people who may have once resolved a conflict with words or even a fistfight to now use guns with no thought as to the consequences on the victim, the victim’s family and their own loved ones.”
Often lost in Second Amendment debates are the survivors who shoulder the burden of unimaginable pain and repercussions from being shot. They are the walking wounded among us. Zeigler says the Fort Hood shooting left him feeling isolated: “People don’t want to hear about my story. It’s a downer for them.”
In 2019, I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and I crisscrossed the nation in my old Toyota Matrix to make portraits of survivors of different types of gun violence. I used an Arca-Swiss 8x10 negative film camera. My hope is that viewers will see themselves in these images, or someone who looks like a family member or a friend — and understand that this violence can happen to anyone.
“We only care about certain shootings, ones that are newsworthy. Shootings that take place in poor and gang-controlled communities are mostly ignored because there is a feeling that it is expected to happen and it is just a part of living there,” Jacob Rice, lead community police officer at the Jordan Downs housing development in Watts, told me.
Deniya Irving is now 12 and in the sixth grade. She and her sister, Deaira, are being raised by their grandmother. Deserae Turner was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is seeing a counselor to help manage the trauma from being shot. “Even last night I had a terrible nightmare — but I choose life and happiness,” she says. “I create joy in my life. I find what makes me happy, and do it often.”
Barbara Davidson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer based in Los Angeles. | 2022-07-27T15:59:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Scars of Gun Violence, Seen and Unseen: A Photo Essay - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/07/27/gun-violence-scars/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/07/27/gun-violence-scars/ |
FILE - Track and field runner Allyson Felix arrives at the ESPY Awards, July 20, 2022, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. American sprint great Allyson Felix and a refugee cyclist originally from Afghanistan have joined the International Olympic Committee’s athletes’ commission, it was announced Wednesday, July 27, 2022. Felix is a seven-time Olympic champion. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, file) | 2022-07-27T16:00:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US sprint great Allyson Felix joins IOC athletes' commission - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/us-sprint-great-allyson-felix-joins-ioc-athletes-commission/2022/07/27/145c100a-0dba-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/us-sprint-great-allyson-felix-joins-ioc-athletes-commission/2022/07/27/145c100a-0dba-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
A sign on Ermineskin Reserve 138 in Maskwacîs, Alberta, tells motorists to stop in both English and Cree. (Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images)
MASKWACÎS, Alberta — Lucy Johnson never spoke the Cree language when she was growing up. Her father wouldn’t allow it. He called it “jungle talk.”
He didn’t elaborate much until he was weeks away from dying of alcoholism. Then he told his children that he associated the language with his experience at Ermineskin residential school. When he tried to speak Cree there, he said, a priest sexually abused him.
“The more he spoke, the more punishment he received,” Johnson said.
It’s a legacy of Ermineskin that Johnson, now 55 and a paralegal, can’t speak the language of her people. Nor can her six siblings. Across Canada, the often brutal residential school system, designed to assimilate Indigenous people into White, European culture, succeeded in breaking the tradition of passing on languages from generation to generation — and put the survival of some in jeopardy.
But now, 25 years after the last residential school was shuttered, some Indigenous communities — including the one here that Pope Francis visited Monday — are reviving and relearning their native languages. It’s a movement fueled by a desire to recover what has been lost, and by a sense that progress is possible. The youngest Cree didn’t attend residential schools. Unlike their parents or grandparents, they didn’t internalize the idea that speaking their language might be wrong.
Isaiah Swampy Omeasoo, 20, studied and made himself fluent in Cree. His wife is expecting a child in February, he said, and he’ll speak to his son or daughter in the language.
“I wanted to change the pattern,” he said. “It’s not going to skip another generation.”
‘There are no words’: As coronavirus kills Indigenous elders, endangered languages face extinction
In Maskwacîs — an area with four First Nations reserves on the Alberta prairie between Edmonton and Calgary — Cree, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Canada, can be found written on stop signs, municipal buildings and emergency vehicles. A local radio station has Cree-speaking DJs. The school district says its mission is about “embedding” Cree culture and language into education — a direct response to the damage wrought by residential schools.
But restoring a language isn’t easy. Steve Wood, the vice principal at the high school, said only six of 54 staff members can speak Cree fluently. Many in the community aren’t conversational. Robert Ward Jr., the radio station manager, says he sometimes runs into ideas on air that he can’t express because he lacks the vocabulary. He’ll admit as much on live radio, he says, with the hope that an elder will call in and help him.
“This is a language that’s been taken from us,” he said.
For the bulk of the 20th century, Indigenous children in Canada were forcibly removed from their families to be placed in residential schools — often hundreds of miles from their communities — where they were forbidden to speak their native languages or practice cultural traditions. Some were physically and sexually abused.
The United States also ran what were called Indian boarding schools through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Interior Department is now investigating abuses in that system.
In Canada, a majority of the schools were run by Catholic entities. When Francis delivered his apology here Monday, he noted how Indigenous languages and cultures had been “denigrated and suppressed.” Many in Maskwacîs felt the pope’s apology was necessary and helpful. But they also noted that in delivering his words in his native Spanish, he was exercising a privilege that they were denied.
“If you look at the pope, he was speaking in his language,” Johnson said. “How come my father couldn’t speak in his own language?”
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools reported on the many punishments to which children were subjected for trying to speak their languages. One former student testified about being given a close haircut. Others said they were beaten with straps, or had their mouths washed out with soap.
Many arrived at the schools knowing little or no English or French, triggering the wrath of nuns who expected them to understand instructions. Over time, some children forgot their own languages or suppressed them, to return home and struggle to communicate with their parents.
More than 70 Indigenous languages are spoken in Canada, but they’re far less prevalent in everyday life than English and French — Canada’s two official languages — or even languages spoken by many of the country’s immigrant groups.
It wasn’t until 2019 that simultaneous translation services for an Indigenous language were available in Parliament. That year, for the first time, a National Hockey League game was broadcast in Plains Cree. Elections Canada offers information guides in 16 Indigenous languages, but ballots are in English and French.
The share of the Indigenous population with the ability to speak an Indigenous language well enough to have a conversation declined from 22 percent in 2006 to 16 percent in 2016, according to the federal census. On the bright side, the proportion of people who learned an Indigenous language as a second language increased from 18 percent in 1996 to 26 percent in 2016.
UNESCO in 2010 recognized 86 Indigenous languages in Canada, but warned that 32 of them were “critically endangered,” meaning they were “used mostly by very few speakers, of the great-grandparental generation.”
U.S. missionaries have long tried to convert the ‘unreached’ in the Amazon. Now Indigenous groups are fighting back.
Several of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action centered on language and culture. They included recommendations that the federal government recognize that Indigenous rights include language rights and that universities offer degree programs in Indigenous languages. Several now do.
Parliament passed legislation in 2019 to provide long-term funding to reclaim and strengthen Indigenous languages and to establish a commissioner of Indigenous languages who must report on progress annually. The first commissioner was appointed last year.
And after Indigenous groups said last year that ground-penetrating radar had uncovered evidence of unmarked graves near the sites of several former residential schools, the government announced it would allow Indigenous people to reclaim their traditional names — often changed at the schools — on government identification for free until 2026.
Lorna Williams, an associate professor emeritus of Indigenous education at the University of Victoria, said the 2019 legislation was “important in giving the message that Canada itself now finally gives some importance to Indigenous languages, and that makes a huge difference.”
But “what has made a difference, really up until now,” she added, “has been the efforts of the people themselves in the Indigenous-language communities.”
Though most education in Canada is administered by the provinces and territories, on First Nations reserves, it’s funded by the federal government. Critics say the chronic underfunding of reserve schools has effectively institutionalized inequalities.
Canada pays tribute to Indigenous people before hockey games and school days. Some complain it rings hollow.
In 2018, the four First Nations in Maskwacîs signed an agreement with the federal government that gave them far greater control over education, allowing them to offer and design a curriculum infused with the Cree language, culture and traditions.
Brian Wildcat, the superintendent of the Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission, said educators are planning to pilot a new curriculum in the fall with a heavy focus on the Cree language, identity and way of life. He hopes it eventually will replace the district’s current curriculum, which was written by the province.
Wildcat’s mother was a teacher who brought language and culture into her classrooms.
“The residential schools were weapons used against the community to destroy families, destroy the community and get rid of the identity of the Cree people,” he said. “Our schools today are the tool for hope and change that are based on what the community wants.”
Wood, the vice principal, called restoring the language a “monumental effort” — and one that requires immersion. So he tries to use Cree as much as he can: when ordering a sandwich at the local Subway or filling his car up at the gas station. “The language has to be heard for people to pick it up,” he said.
It’s with the young people, he said, where he sees progress.
“We have kids that come home from our kindergarten schools who know more Cree than their parents,” Wood said. “It’s a product of what transpired.” | 2022-07-27T17:08:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Canada's residential schools banned native languages. The Cree are trying to get theirs back. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/canada-first-nations-indigenous-language-cree/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/canada-first-nations-indigenous-language-cree/ |
The tributes pour in as the legendary TV producer and activist celebrates a century on Wednesday
Norman Lear onstage at a 2019 awards ceremony in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for SAG-AFTRA Foundation)
What is left to ask Norman Lear?
The living legend of television has spent his life doling out lessons, so when granted the opportunity to converse with him via email ahead of his 100th birthday, what was there to ask?
Does he know the meaning of life? “Yes, the meaning of life can be expressed in one word: tomorrow.” What pieces of advice does he have that stand out above the rest? “There are two little words we don’t pay enough attention to: over and next. When something is over, it is over and we are on to next. Between those words, we live in the moment, make the most of them.” Does he consider a hot dog to be a sandwich? “I consider a hot dog to be a personal delight.”
His birthday is Wednesday. He planned to spend it in Vermont “at what I call our Yiddish Hyannis Port with all my kids and grandkids. At the moment, I feel like I could do a second 100.” ABC will honor Lear on Thursday night with what it promises will be a “star-studded” special titled, “Norman Lear: 100 Years of Music and Laughter.”
A second 100 would certainly be welcome. At the very least, as actress Rita Moreno suggests, when asked this week to talk about Lear’s milestone birthday, “I wish there was a way that they could make copies of him. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? … What a super, super addition to the human race he is.”
Norman Lear put his foot down — and Trump’s White House flinched
Or, as his longtime friend Mel Brooks put it, via email: “Norman has so much to give us, I don’t think 100 is nearly enough.”
By all accounts, he is one of the most important figures in modern pop culture — so much so that by now, you probably already know everything you should about Norman Lear.
You probably know of his tremendously prolific spell creating and producing some of the most vital TV sitcoms in the 1970s such as “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons,” “One Day at a Time” and “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” And you’re probably familiar with the fact that he and his colleagues received praise for addressing hot-button issues in those shows, including racism and abortion, using humor and the humanity of his characters to expose and explore what he considered the “the foolishness of the human condition.” Not to mention the fact, as Moreno points out, that he would often have the very targets of his criticism “laughing their asses off.”
“I have no idea how he did it,” she adds.
You’ve no doubt heard of his political activism, which spread far beyond the humanistic messages baked into his shows. In 1981, he founded People for the American Way, a nonprofit aimed to challenged the agenda of the Moral Majority and eventually became a political action committee. In 2004, he founded Declare Yourself, a campaign to urge young people to vote. He remains a true believer that the best of the country’s citizens will save it, should it need saving.
Norman Lear's crusade widens
“America has never been in more need of its solid, caring citizens,” Lear says. “At 100, we are a long way from the America I believe I was born into. I don’t want to wake up in the morning without hope so I have the faith that enough caring, sensible Americans are fully dedicated to the rights the Constitution guarantees us all and will find their way.”
To summarize Lear’s 100 years is a nearly impossible task, but Rich West, a professor of family communication at Emerson College who has taught a course on Lear’s career, offers a thoughtful framing, calling Lear “an electronic therapist.”
His shows “forced people to confront their own values, their own prejudices, their own beliefs. And really, therapists are the ones that facilitate that.”
“He was committed, unabashedly, to putting these provocative topics on television,” West says, citing “Maude’s Dilemma,” a two-part episode of “Maude” finding Bea Arthur’s Maude Findlay contemplating — and ultimately getting — an abortion. The highly controversial episode aired two months before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. And that’s just one of the many, many times Lear’s sitcoms grappled with difficult topics.
“You think of rape and you think of mental health and you think of inflation, you think of alcoholism, you think of domestic violence and poverty. And guess what? All of those are resonating today in 2022,” West says. “That’s why I believe he’s an icon. It’s not because of what he wrote, but because his themes are sustained today. And we have conversations today about the same things that he was writing about in the 1970s.”
His shows “made you feel uncomfortable. They made you feel confused. They made you feel happy and sad. But they always prompted some reflection long past the credits of the show, if you were willing to go there,” adds West. “And I think that’s where the critical part of his influence is.”
Justina Machado, who starred as Penelope Alvarez in the 2017 Netflix reboot of “One Day at a Time,” which Lear executive-produced, calls him as “an American hero,” “a true friend” and a “genius.” “Getting to know Norman and working with him is a highlight of my life and my career,” Machado says via email. Brent Miller, the president of production for Lear’s Act III Productions, calls him a “mentor in life and career,” “a friend,” “a partner” and a “daily inspiration.”
Norman Lear is back on TV with ‘One Day at a Time.’ But his influence never left.
Moreno, who turned 90 last year, co-starred in the updated “One Day at a Time.” She and Lear have become close friends; they like to cut up in public appearances, pretending like they are lovers having a spat. It makes her laugh.
“It’s incredible because to some extent, he’s never changed in the most important ways,” she says. “You know, his politics have not changed. If anything, they might have gotten maybe just a touch more radical. But, you know, they were already radical in the first place.”
Is he a genius? “The only reason I haven’t used the word is that I’m sure everybody is using it. It would be nice to be a little bit original,” Moreno says. “His sense of humor is divine.” | 2022-07-27T17:30:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Norman Lear turns 100 and shares the meaning of life - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/27/norman-lear-100-birthday/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/27/norman-lear-100-birthday/ |
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fenollosa-Weld Collection)
The Japanese scroll “Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace” masterfully shows the anarchy of war
Real violence — not the movie kind — is terrible and precipitous. It sweeps all before it, leaving chaos in its wake. A trifling example, but I remember seeing a brawl break out in a crowded pool room. A man had smashed a glass and thrust it at someone’s face, causing blood to spatter onto the green baize. Within seconds, about 10 men had surrounded the combatants. Some tried to pry them apart, but others threw sickening punches at people’s heads or brandished pool cues with stunning force. What was seared into my memory was less these details than the terrifying impression made by a mass of bodies accelerating along the edge of the pool table toward me.
Western art’s most famous images of war describe the brutality of the fall of Troy or the Peninsula War or the devastation of World War I. But the most celebrated Japanese battle scene — and arguably the most famous work of Japanese art outside of Japan — is “Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace,” a scroll made by unknown artists in the third quarter of the 13th century.
“Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace” (detail). Japanese, Kamakura period, third quarter of the 13th century. Handscroll; ink and color on paper. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fenollosa-Weld Collection./Photograph copyright Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Because it is fragile, this masterpiece — ink and color applied to a length of paper 23-feet wide and just 16¼ inches high — spends most of the time in storage at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I was lucky to see it when it toured Japan in 2013, and I’ll never forget it.
“Night Attack” describes an incident that took place during the Heiji Rebellion, a much written about phase of the civil wars between two clans, the Taira and the Minamoto. One December night in 1159, the combined forces of Fujiwara Nobuyori and Minamoto Yoshitomo attempted a coup. On a flimsy pretext (Nobuyori alleged that he had discovered a plot against his life), they stormed the Sanjo Palace with several hundred mounted warriors, abducting the retired (but still powerful) emperor Go-Shirakawa and his young sister.
The full story, told in “Heiji monogatari” (“Tale of the Disturbance at Heiji”), is complicated, and this scroll is just one of 15 narrative depictions of the broader conflict. Only three survive. But “Night Attack,” the first in the series, holds enough drama to sustain a lifetime’s interest.
The scroll is designed to be held in the hands and unrolled sequentially like a comic strip, but moving from right to left. In fact, such is the power of “Night Attack” that it almost appears animated. It’s hard to stop your eyes darting from one detail to the next, and you’re involuntarily swept up in the atmosphere of emergency.
The opening section, at far right, shows a crowd of courtiers and city residents rushing toward the palace, desperate to find out what has happened. It’s a brilliant conceit: from the start, we are placed in the same position as the adrenalized crowd.
In the next section, we see the attackers inside the palace walls jostling the emperor and his sister into an ox-drawn carriage. Further to their left, we see that the palace is on fire. The mountainous flames are speckled with orange dots — flying cinders; the rolling smoke is thick and black.
The attackers are not only torching the palace, but ripping the clothes off women and shooting with arrows or hacking to death everyone who tries to escape. One man’s throat is being slit by a warrior whose helmeted head is not human but animal (Francisco Goya would have admired this touch). Nearby, women are jumping into a well to escape rape and death. The Japanese text introducing the scroll at far right describes how those at the bottom of the well drowned, those in the middle suffocated and those at the top burned to death. In the final sections we see the warriors making off with the abducted emperor.
On one hand, the whole thing is lucid and legible: humans and horses are individuated, not blurred together. At the same time, there’s an astonishing volatility to every part of the picture, from the rushing crowd to the roiling flames, the charging horses and the massed warriors with their bows jutting out of the fray at various angles.
The whole thing expresses an awareness of transience and precariousness (such things can happen in an instant, to your home, to an imperial palace, to the U.S. Capitol) that aligns with the precepts of Zen Buddhism, then burgeoning in Japan. The action swarms and surges, but it’s not intended to titillate. It’s heavy and terrible and you are made to understand that the upshot, when the chaos has rolled through, will be smoking ruins, hideous pain, inconsolable grief.
Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace, 13th century
Illustrated Scrolls of the Events of the Heiji Era. At Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. | 2022-07-27T17:30:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Perspective | This Japanese scroll describes the horror of war over 23 incredible feet - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/heiji-night-attack-sanjo-palace/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/heiji-night-attack-sanjo-palace/ |
Co-defendant in Jan. 6 Sicknick assault case set to plead guilty
George Tanios, of Morgantown, W.V., to plead to reduced charges Wednesday in case of police officer who died day after Capitol attack
U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, 42. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
One of two men charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, chemical-spray assault on three police officers at the U.S. Capitol, including Brian D. Sicknick, is set to plead guilty to reduced charges Wednesday, court filings show.
West Virginia sandwich shop owner George Tanios was charged by criminal information Wednesday morning with two counts of misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct on restricted Capitol grounds, a reduction from an earlier 10-count indictment that included felony charges of rioting, assaulting law enforcement officers and obstructing of Congress’s certification of President Biden’s 2020 election victory.
A plea hearing for Tanios was set Wednesday for 2 p.m. in federal court in Washington. A plea is not final until it is accepted by a judge, and Tanios can change his mind at anytime until then.
The case of Tanios and his co-defendant Julian Elie Khater is among the more high-profile Jan. 6 prosecutions, as both men were accused of assaulting Capitol police officer Sicknick, 42. Sicknick was injured while attempting to hold back a violent crowd on the west terrace of the Capitol, collapsing hours later and dying the next day of natural causes, officials said. Neither Tanios or Khater is alleged to have caused Sicknick’s death.
It could not immediately be determined whether Tanios would be pleading guilty in a cooperation deal with prosecutors. In April, defense attorneys for both co-defendants said they were working toward plea deals with the government in successfully asking U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan to postpone a July trial to allow more time for talks.
Khater remains set for trial Oct. 5.
Attorneys for Tanios, of Morgantown, W.Va., and for Khater, of State College, Pa., did not immediately comment.
“We typically do not comment beyond public filings and statements to the Court and have no comment,” said Bill Miller, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for Washington, which is overseeing the prosecution of Capitol riot cases.
Khater and Tanios, who ran smoothie and sandwich shops in their respective college towns, were arrested in March 2021 and pleaded not guilty to the assaults on Sicknick, a fellow Capitol Police officer and a D.C. officer.
Khater has been jailed since then, but an appeals court in August ordered Tanios to be released, saying that he had “no past felony convictions, no ties to any extremist organizations, and no post-January 6 criminal behavior that would otherwise show him to pose a danger to the community.”
Battle for the West Terrace: Capitol riot charges reveal details of police attacks on Jan. 6
Hogan had earlier ordered both men held pending trial, saying government videos of the assaults on the three officers showed a degree of premeditation and future dangerousness.
“These two gentlemen are law-abiding, respected individuals in the community, and it makes it very difficult for the court to make this conclusion, but they still committed this attack on uniformed police officers. I don’t find a way around that,” Hogan said at the time.
Prosecutors in detention hearings alleged that Khater sprayed a canister Tanios had purchased and carried to the Capitol in his backpack, deploying it at close range against Sicknick, U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, and a D.C. police officer identified as B. Chapman from the police line, incapacitating them.
“Give me that bear sh--,” Khater allegedly told Tanios on video recorded nine minutes earlier, at 2:14 p.m. at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol, where Sicknick and other officers were standing guard behind metal bicycle racks, according to charging papers.
“Hold on, hold on, not yet, not yet … it’s still early,” Tanios allegedly replied.
Tanios attorney Elizabeth Gross has argued that he was 30 feet away from Khater when he sprayed the officers and did not aid or abet any crime.
Sicknick had two strokes after his time at the Capitol that day, officials said. The medical examiner said an autopsy found no evidence Sicknick suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants. There was also no evidence of internal or external injuries, the medical examiner said. | 2022-07-27T17:30:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man charged in assault of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick set to plead guilty - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/sicknick-jan6-tanios-plea/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/sicknick-jan6-tanios-plea/ |
An image of a mock gallows on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is shown as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol holds a hearing on June 9. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
What did Attorney General Merrick Garland tell NBC News that was new about the Department of Justice’s investigation into the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election?
His interview with the network’s Lester Holt saw Garland once again offering familiar descriptions of his department’s work.
“We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding Jan. 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable,” Garland said. “That’s what we do. We don’t pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.”
The inclusion of “lawful transfer of power” alongside “the events surrounding Jan. 6” was highlighted by Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the members of the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot … and, more broadly, the threat to that lawful transfer. In an interview on MSNBC, Schiff said he “perceived a difference in what [Garland] had been saying earlier about focusing on all those involved in the attack on January 6th and now talking more broadly about the overall plot to overturn the election.” In other words: that Justice was now looking at more than just the riot.
There’s no doubt that Garland was deliberate in his choice of words, but it was not the first time he has mentioned the riot and the “transfer of power” in concert. In a speech commemorating the anniversary of the attack, Garland similarly linked them. The riot, he said then, interrupted “the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.” Then, he added, “those involved must be held accountable” — a phrasing that might itself have looped in Donald Trump.
So is what he said to Holt new? Simply another variation of what he said in January? What did he mean?
We ask these questions because we are arguing over the pattern formed by the tea leaves. Seeing the House committee’s work progress forward, exposed to the public, we wonder what’s going on behind closed doors at Justice.
What we know, though, hasn’t changed that much: There are two federal investigations into what happened after the 2020 election, one political and one criminal. One is centered on imposing a political cost on Trump — eroding his support for reelection — and the other is aimed at evaluating the viability of a case for criminal prosecution. One centers on Trump and works outward; the other, it seems, is starting at the bottom and working its way up. But the two are operating in parallel — and at times, in concert.
“The Justice Department has been doing the most wide-ranging investigation in its history and the committee is doing an enormously wide-ranging investigation as well,” Garland said in the NBC interview. “It is inevitable that there will be things that they find before we have found them. And it’s inevitable that there will be things we find that they haven’t found. That’s what happens when you have two wide-ranging investigations going on at the same time.”
This, too, is a familiar refrain. Garland has said before that he and his team are watching the hearings. It has even demanded information from the committee’s probes, information it didn’t have. There are good indications that the Justice Department’s recent moves — ones that have increasingly focused on questions about Trump’s own activity, according to a Washington Post report — are influenced by the committee’s work.
After White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s eye-opening testimony to the committee earlier this month, the New York Times reported that officials at the Justice Department discussed the new pressure to focus on Trump’s role. On Wednesday, ABC News reported that Hutchinson was cooperating with the Justice Department’s probe. But even before the committee’s public hearings began, the department was already gathering information and evidence such as phone records — quietly.
Many of those seeking accountability for the effort to overturn the election have wondered why the Jan. 6 committee was seeming to move so quickly in presenting its case against Trump while the Justice Department was mostly mum. The frustration was compounded by the committee’s ruminations about making a criminal referral to Justice, a recommendation of charges. The committee, it seemed, was doing Garland’s job!
This, of course, was not the case. It has been following a number of different threads linked to Trump’s effort to retain power, as journalist Marcy Wheeler has documented.
More fundamentally, the two probes seem to be operating in opposite directions. Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who was part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, argued this month that Garland’s investigation should look more like the House committee’s: starting from Trump and moving outward along the various paths Trump took to upend Joe Biden’s election victory. This was a “hub-and-spoke” style of investigation, rather than the bottom-up one he argued that Justice had been conducting.
Garland’s team has been heavily focused on lower-level actors. More than 840 people have been arrested for participating in the riot, and the federal government has filed charges alleging several specific threads of seditious conspiracy. Members of extremist groups involved in alleged conspiracies have been asked about ties to people close to Trump. Advisers like John Eastman and Peter Navarro have been targeted with federal subpoenas or had devices seized. People involved in fake-elector plots in swing states have been subpoenaed.
Deferring to Weissmann’s expertise on how best to build a criminal case against Trump, it’s clear why the House committee has started from Trump and worked out. While most or all of its members would no doubt be unfazed about proving a prosecutable criminal case against the former president, they also have the transparent goal of blocking Trump’s path back to power.
“Every American must consider this,” Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said during last week’s hearing: “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6th ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”
The House committee is starting from Trump and working out because their primary (though not sole) target is Trump. Garland’s mandate is broader, gathering evidence to prosecute any criminal activity. Snatching lower-level actors first then makes it possible to apply pressure up the food chain.
It’s easy to see how the twin efforts — one political, one criminal — might each find the other frustrating. Members of the House committee, like many in the public, would like to see formal accountability for Trump. The Justice Department would rather do its work without that sort of pressure. After all, the criminal probe is itself deeply political; if Justice finds enough evidence to suggest that Trump might be convicted of a crime, Garland has a very fraught decision to make about leveling charges against a former president — and, potentially, a presidential candidate.
The House committee is not similarly burdened. If anything, its incentives point in the other direction: making the case loudly, immediately and without qualification.
Different probes, different processes, different visibility. But linked together in both practical and ideological ways.
Analysis: The dicey ethics of Democratic primary meddling | 2022-07-27T17:31:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the political probe of Trump intertwines with a likely criminal one - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/how-political-probe-trump-intertwines-with-likely-criminal-one/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/how-political-probe-trump-intertwines-with-likely-criminal-one/ |
Nationals infielder Alcides Escobar pitches against the Braves on July 8. (Brett Davis/Getty Images)
Pittsburgh Pirates TV play-by-play man Greg Brown didn’t hide his disdain earlier this month after Pirates Manager Derek Shelton, with his bullpen overworked and his team in the midst of a stretch of 14 games in 13 days, called upon second baseman Josh VanMeter to pitch the ninth inning of a blowout loss to the New York Yankees.
“It’s a joke,” Brown said after VanMeter allowed back-to-back home runs to Aaron Hicks and Giancarlo Stanton in New York’s 16-0 rout. “This is Major League Baseball? It’s a joke. They gotta quit doing this.”
Jokes generally aren’t as funny the second, third and fourth time you hear them, which is why a position player pitching — a rarity as recently as a decade ago — has become an increasingly tired act. Brown made it clear during the broadcast that his ire wasn’t directed solely at the Pirates, who have accounted for five of the 71 instances of position players pitching this season. Excluding Los Angeles Angels’ two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani’s 16 starts, the league is on pace to blow past last year’s total of 89 pitching appearances by position players and shatter the record of 90 set in 2019.
Of the 524 pitching appearances by position players from the start of the 2005 season through Tuesday, 350 (67 percent) have occurred since Opening Day 2018. An increase in reliever usage and a new rule limiting the number of pitchers on the active roster have contributed to the increase. Teams have averaged 17 position player pitching appearances since 2005, with the Chicago Cubs accounting for the most (33) and the Colorado Rockies accounting for the fewest (5).
‘It’s never something you want to do’
The Nationals present a perfect illustration of the leaguewide trend. After no Washington position player pitched in a game from the team’s inaugural season in 2005 through 2014, the Nationals have sent a position player to the mound 13 times since, with outfielder Clint Robinson becoming the first in a 14-6 loss at Arizona on May 12, 2015.
“It’s obviously not a good thing whenever a position player has to pitch because it means you’re losing the game,” said Robinson, who notched a strikeout in a scoreless inning, much to the delight of teammate Max Scherzer.
“It’s never something you want to do,” manager Matt Williams added. “But in games like this, we just can’t stretch our bullpen any further.”
Williams called upon another position player — Tyler Moore — to give his bullpen a break in an 11-4 loss to the Diamondbacks three months later.
Nationals position players Gerardo Parra and Brian Dozier pitched in the same inning in 2019, while utility player Brock Holt made two pitching appearances for Washington during the coronavirus-shortened 2020 season. Nationals position players have been tasked with mop-up duty four times already this year, a single season team record, with Dee Strange-Gordon and Ehire Adrianza preceding a pair of relief outings by Alcides Escobar. Escobar has as many pitching appearances as starts at shortstop since being reinstated from the injured list in late June.
“It’s all about saving an arm for your bullpen, right?” Nationals Manager Dave Martinez said last week. “Honestly, I really don’t like doing it. I really don’t. But sometimes you got to think about the next day or the next two days and try to save that one arm, just in case something happens.”
Martinez, who said his biggest worry about having position players pitch is that they’ll get injured, made two pitching appearances during his 16-year playing career as an outfielder and first baseman. The first came with the Montreal Expos on July 20, 1990, in a 12-6 loss at Houston. Martinez retired Javier Ortiz on a flyball to left and blew two 87 mph fastballs by pinch-hitter Terry Puhl before allowing two runs on two hits and a pair of walks. Infielder Junior Noboa relieved Martinez and recorded the final two outs of the inning.
Afterward, Martinez was the talk of the Astros’ clubhouse.
“Martinez will be ready to go tomorrow,” Astros reliever Larry Andersen said when asked if Montreal’s bullpen had been exposed. “Damn, that kid was pumping. I wish I had his fastball.”
“I was going to throw as hard as I could and see what happens,” Martinez recalled last week. “It wasn’t hard enough, obviously.”
On Aug. 4, 1995, Martinez was called upon to pitch by Chicago White Sox interim manager Joe Nossek in a blowout loss at Cleveland. Nossek was filling in for Terry Bevington, who was serving the final game of a four-game suspension for fighting Milwaukee Brewers manager Phil Garner.
“I just wanted to hurry up, get three outs and come back in the dugout,” said Martinez, who walked two, but didn’t allow a hit in a scoreless eighth inning. “I pitched in high school and was pretty good, if I do say so myself. It’s tough to have fun when you’re down 10 runs, but this was fun.”
Bevington returned from his suspension the next day and defended Nossek’s decision to use Martinez.
“That’s something that happens one inning a year,” he said. “Joe was doing what was best for the team. He was not thinking from a media standpoint — what it’s going to appear like on the talk shows.”
Bevington wasn’t exaggerating about the rarity of position players pitching; Martinez’s outing was one of two by a non-pitcher during the 1995 season.
A farcical history
One of the first instances of a position player pitching in D.C.’s baseball history came in the second game of the Washington Senators’ doubleheader against the New York Highlanders on Aug. 31, 1906. After losing the first game 7-5, Washington dropped the nightcap 20-5, with outfielder Joe Stanley pitching the final three innings of the shortened game. Reporters had a laugh at the Senators’ expense.
“It was one of the most remarkable base ball matinees in the history of the local diamond,” the Washington Evening Star reported. “The opening contest was as stubborn a fight as one often sees; the second was something worse than a bad joke. Nothing less than criminal was the fashion in which those Highland boys pounded three Capitoline twirlers all over the suburbs.”
Umpire Francis “Silk” O’Loughlin “called the farce off” after six innings, the Evening Star reported, and “it was not on account of darkness, as he officially announced despite ample light for at least another inning, but because everybody was calling him and dinners were growing cold.”
The final game of the Senators’ 1913 season, a 10-9 win over Boston on Oct. 4, was even more ridiculous. With his team leading 10-3, Washington’s 43-year-old manager, Clark Griffith, made his only appearance of the year and pitched a scoreless eighth inning. It took three Washington position players to record the final three outs, but not before the Red Sox scored six runs, including two charged to ace Walter Johnson — the only actual pitcher to toe the rubber for the Senators in the ninth.
“From beginning to end this contest was a joke,” The Washington Post’s Stanley T. Milliken wrote, “but it served to amuse the crowd more than any other engagement staged here this year. … It was a nine-inning farce. That is the best way to express it.”
“The performance was probably the most farcical of the National game that was ever staged,” the Boston Globe reported after utility man Germany Schaefer, catcher Eddie Ainsmith and third baseman Joe Gedeon took the mound for Washington.
Several other non-pitchers made appearances for the original Washington Senators over the next 47 years, including Junior Wooten, Bobby Kline and Julio Bécquer. The expansion Senators didn’t have a single position player pitch during their 11 seasons in D.C.; the team the Senators became in 1972, the Texas Rangers, didn’t send a position player to the mound until Aug. 31, 1988.
“At least the fans got excited about something,” then-Rangers manager Bobby Valentine said after shortstop Jeff Kunkel received a standing ovation from the remaining crowd before and after throwing a scoreless ninth inning in a 10-1 loss to the Minnesota Twins.
The Rangers have had 22 additional such outings since then; the next one doesn’t figure to be as exciting — or funny — as the first.
Jesse Dougherty contributed to this report. | 2022-07-27T17:32:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 100-plus-year history of Washington position players pitching - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/baseball-position-players-pitching/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/baseball-position-players-pitching/ |
FILE - Borussia Dortmund fans stand singing on the southern tribune “yellow wall” prior to the German Bundesliga soccer match between Borussia Dortmund and FC Augsburg in Dortmund, Germany, on Oct. 2, 2021. UEFA said on July 27, 2022, that safe-standing areas will be allowed on a trial basis at European club games involving teams from England, Germany and France during 2022-2023 season. European soccer’s governing body says it will assess the findings of what it calls an “observer program” at the end of the season and decide whether to continue or expand it. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File). (Martin Meissner/AP) | 2022-07-27T17:32:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Safe-standing areas to be allowed in some European games - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/safe-standing-areas-to-be-allowed-in-some-european-games/2022/07/27/7757755a-0dc4-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/safe-standing-areas-to-be-allowed-in-some-european-games/2022/07/27/7757755a-0dc4-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
A pair of bipartisan bills would expand federal safeguards for activities on digital platforms, the first major attempt in more than two decades
(Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg)
Senators took their first step toward increasing protections for children and teens online on Wednesday, advancing a pair of bipartisan bills that would expand federal safeguards for their personal information and activities on digital platforms.
The push gained momentum on Capitol Hill last year after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen disclosed internal research suggesting that the company’s products at times exacerbated mental health issues for some teens. The revelations spawned a series of hearings in the Senate and bolstered calls for Congress to take action.
Led by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the Kids Online Safety Act would give parents greater control over their children’s online activity and require that platforms give kids the option to opt out of algorithmic recommendations and other potentially harmful features. The bill would also require that companies vet their products for risks to children and take steps to address them.
The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, led by Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), would expand existing protections for children’s privacy by banning companies from collecting the data of users 13 to 16 years old without their consent and creating an “eraser” button allowing children to remove their data from digital services.
The Senate Commerce Committee advanced both of the bills during a markup Wednesday.
“By the end of this year, we have to have protections for the children in our country, at a minimum,” Markey told reporters after the session.
Congress has not updated those protections since its passage of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, in 1998, long before the creation of popular social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The law restricts the tracking and targeting of those younger than 13. For years, lawmakers have pushed to expand those protections to teenagers and to account for concerns prompted by new technologies, including social media.
Sex, drugs, and self-harm: Where 20 years of child online protection law went wrong
The move was hailed by children’s safety advocates.
“This is an important step toward creating a safer and less exploitative internet for children and teens,” Josh Golin, executive director of the advocacy group Fairplay, said in a statement.
The fate of the legislation is uncertain because of disagreements between the House and Senate, however.
House lawmakers earlier this month advanced a separate proposal that would boost data privacy protections for all consumers and create heightened protections for children and teens. But the House and Senate will need to reconcile their different approaches to get a bill signed into law.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who is leading a companion to the House privacy bill, said Wednesday that he could not support the Markey-led children’s privacy proposal because the committee should be focused on passing data protections for all users, not just kids.
“The need for a national law that provides data protections for everyone must be this committee’s priority,” Wicker, the panel’s top Republican, said in his opening remarks.
The move comes amid a broader concern that existing laws have failed to adequately protect children from social media addiction and commercial tracking by major tech companies.
During his State of the Union address in March, President Biden called on Congress to “strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children [and] demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children.” | 2022-07-27T17:32:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate panel advances bills to boost children’s safety online - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/senate-child-safety-bill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/senate-child-safety-bill/ |
The airline’s mistake separated the cats from their owner for nearly 16 hours
Abbas Zoeb's cats, Mimi and Bubba. (Abbas Zoeb)
Abbas Zoeb and his cats, Mimi and Bubba, were setting off on a new adventure earlier this month: a flight from Toronto to San Francisco for a move to the United States.
But after Zoeb encountered delays at the airport, Air Canada sent the felines on the trip without him. He was left to fret in Canada, and he tried to track them down until they were reunited nearly 16 hours later.
“The moment I saw the cage, the first instinct wasn’t happy,” Zoeb said. “It was: ‘I’m worried if they’re alive or not,’ honestly.”
Air Canada declined to discuss the situation, but said that “our customer service team remains in contact with the customer about their case.” A screenshot of an email reviewed by The Washington Post shows an Air Canada representative apologizing to Zoeb for the incident.
The airline says on its website that it is not accepting new requests for pets to travel in the baggage compartment through Sept. 12 “due to longer than usual airport delays, and for the safety and comfort of your pet.”
Zoeb, a Canadian citizen who lives in Toronto, said his ordeal unfolded on July 6, when customs officials had questions about the dates on his visa. They took him to an office to get more information, he said, and the process took so long he realized he would miss the flight.
He said a representative from Air Canada who came to the office told him they would take care of his baggage. When he told them he had pets, they said that would also be taken care of. He said he was told no pets could board if the passenger wasn’t flying.
Everything to know about flying with pets, from people who do it most
What followed, Zoeb said, was a full day at the airport waiting in line at check-in counters and baggage claim, asking workers about the whereabouts of his pets. He was assured that the cats — a brother and sister who are a year and seven months old — couldn’t fly without him.
“I was completely lost because everyone did say the pets are there, but I didn’t see the pets,” he said. “I just had a bad feeling that something has happened because they are just too nonchalant about this.”
Finally, he said, someone from the airline called with bad news: Mimi and Bubba had mistakenly ended up on the plane without him — though his luggage had been taken off.
“I did say that, yeah, this is obviously stupid, but I don’t really care about complaining and stuff right now, because all I care about is the cats,” Zoeb said. Air Canada told him he could go to San Francisco and retrieve the cats, he said, or have someone else pick them up there. Either way, they would be unattended for hours.
Zoeb said he asked the airline if they could return Mimi and Bubba to Toronto; finally, an employee told him they would be placed on a return flight and arrive late that evening.
The three were finally reunited about 11:45 p.m. Mimi and Bubba survived but appeared unwell to their owner. Zoeb said the cats looked tired, were not playful and were sneezing for about a week.
An overweight cat was denied by a Russian airline. His owner hatched an elaborate scheme using an impostor.
He said that someone from the airline initially said they would look into what happened. Zoeb eventually contacted a reporter from Business Insider, which published a story about the situation on Saturday. He communicated with a customer service representative Monday, though he said he felt their response was lacking.
The airline told him that it was refunding the ticket, pet fees, baggage and other fees for the missed flight and offered 200 Canadian dollars ($155 in U.S. currency) to use toward a future flight.
“I sincerely apologize that we were unable to retrieve your two cats to you in time when you were unable to travel to San Francisco as originally planned,” said an email screenshot reviewed by The Washington Post. “I do wish the best in health for you and your cats.”
Zoeb said he thinks the airline owes him a more proper, public apology and heftier compensation. He is considering whether he can find help to take legal action to hold the airline accountable. Air passenger protections in Canada say airlines must compensate travelers up to $2,300 to replace items lost or damaged while in the carrier’s control. If a bag is delayed, they must provide up to the same amount for items the traveler may need until the bag is returned.
“$200 is totally insignificant for how much I’ve been going through and how much time I’ve put towards this and what my pets have gone through,” he said. “I did let them know that that is not an acceptable apology or not an acceptable amount if they want to rectify anything....They said that’s the most they can do.”
Zoeb is still moving to the United States — Wednesday, in fact. But the cats are staying with his parents until he can figure out a ground transportation solution.
“I learned from my mistake,” he said. | 2022-07-27T17:32:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Air Canada flew cats to California after owner missed flight - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/27/air-canada-cats-fly-alone/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/27/air-canada-cats-fly-alone/ |
Credit card chargebacks can fix travel problems. But there are limits.
Credit card chargebacks are an increasingly popular way to resolve travel disputes — but experts say you should use them sparingly. (iStock)
When Jeff Campbell checked in at the Austin airport for a spring break vacation, the last thing on his mind was a credit card chargeback. Instead, he was thinking about the fun he’d have with his three daughters at Universal Orlando Resort that week.
“Literally at the gate, my airline canceled the flight,” he says. “An agent said they would refund that specific flight, but then just handed me a business card to call and talk to someone about it.”
His only option was a pricey car rental and about a 17-hour drive to Orlando. He didn’t even bother asking his airline for a refund when he decided to drive home.
“I disputed the entire charge on my credit card,” he says.
Campbell, a personal finance expert who blogs at Middle Class Dad Money, joined the many other travelers who turn to credit card chargebacks when something goes wrong on a trip.
Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, consumers can dispute a credit card charge for goods and services they did not receive or accept. Your bank will investigate, and, if it sides with you, you will get a refund.
Monica Eaton-Cardone, chief operating officer of Chargebacks911, a company that protects businesses from fraudulent chargebacks, says it has become more commonplace for consumers to actively dispute credit card payments and demand refunds from their banks. According to research by the company, the number of such disputes has risen by 25 percent since the start of the pandemic.
Experts thought things would return to normal after the pandemic triggered an initial round of disputes for canceled vacations. Then came another wave from travelers who didn’t want to accept airline vouchers or cruise credits. Now, industry watchers say chargebacks are increasingly seen as a preferred tool for getting refunds from travel companies.
Take Campbell’s case, for instance. As a personal finance expert, he knows how chargebacks work and the limits of the Fair Credit Billing Act. (I’ll get to those in a moment.) But he didn’t want to bother asking his airline for a refund. He just wanted his $2,300 back. Two months later, his bank returned the money.
The dispute process wasn’t harder than in the past, he says. “But it took much longer to get a resolution.”
How bad has it gotten? Stephen Fofanoff, general manager of Domaine Madeleine, a small inn in Port Angeles, Wash., says he has noticed a significant increase in credit card disputes since the pandemic started. They follow a similar pattern: Guests book the cheapest nonrefundable rooms, skip the travel insurance, then demand a refund when their plans change.
“If we don’t give them a refund, they threaten us with bad reviews and then file a chargeback with their credit card,” he says.
But a chargeback isn’t a magic bullet for travelers who want a refund. For starters, it only applies to credit cards. If you pay with cash, debit or wire transfer, you can’t get a chargeback.
The Fair Credit Billing Act protects purchases where the date is wrong. (For example, you booked an airline ticket for the 23rd of the month, but you received a ticket for the 25th.) It also applies to receiving the wrong number of goods or services (you booked one rental car but were charged for two) and math errors, such as a decimal-point mix-up that turns your $4 latte into a $4,000 cup of joe.
You have 60 days after receiving the first statement containing the disputed transaction to file a chargeback.
If you have a complaint about the quality of a travel product, as opposed to failure to provide a service, the threshold is even higher for credit card disputes. The law requires that the business must be in your home state or within 100 miles of your current billing address, and that the purchase must be for more than $50. You must also make a “good faith effort” to resolve the problem with the seller first.
A credit card chargeback is almost never the fastest or easiest way to get a refund. Even if you’re successful, a chargeback is long process, and the merchant could still send you to a collection agency or add you to its “Do Not Rent” list. It’s far better to work with the airline, car rental company or hotel to get your money back.
So when should you immediately file a chargeback? Only when a travel company charges you fraudulently. Be patient with any other dispute. If, for example, a company promises a refund and doesn’t send it, you should talk to your bank. (Don’t forget the 60-day limit.)
“Don’t use a chargeback as a weapon,” advises Y. Murat Ozguc, managing partner of Turkish tour operator Travel Atelier. He frequently deals with chargebacks from customers who don’t recognize the name of his company on their credit card bills. Instead of calling to ask about their bill, they file a chargeback. They don’t win the dispute, but it makes life complicated for everyone.
Read the fine print before you call your bank or credit card. Brandon Barron thought he could use a credit card dispute to get a refund from Aeroflot after the airline canceled his flight from Washington, D.C., to Kemerovo, Russia, this summer. But the airline couldn’t refund the money, because it was affected by U.S. sanctions. Then he realized he booked the tickets with a debit card.
“Rookie mistake,” says Barron, who works for a timeshare company in Charlotte. “I’m not very hopeful that I will ever see a penny back of what amounts to nearly $5,000.”
The takeaway: Credit card chargebacks can be a powerful tool for recovering your money from a travel company. But use them sparingly, and only after you’ve exhausted all other measures. | 2022-07-27T17:32:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The do's and don'ts of credit card chargebacks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/27/credit-card-chargeback-travel/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/27/credit-card-chargeback-travel/ |
LIV Golf players Pat Perez, Talor Gooch, Dustin Johnson and Patrick Reed after the circuit's first event in the United States. (Steve Dykes/Getty Images)
LIV Golf’s third tournament — at a Donald Trump-owned course in New Jersey — will feature a 48-player field of golfers who have decided to give the Saudi-funded breakaway circuit a chance. Some of these players are well known, while others are familiar only to the world’s true golf fanatics. According to CEO Greg Norman, LIV is finished adding golfers this year, so this lineup will presumably comprise the fields for the five remaining tournaments on the schedule.
Nine of the top 50 players in the Official World Golf Ranking have joined the LIV Golf Invitational Series, though only one of those golfers still is in his 20s (Bryson DeChambeau). The 48 players in the field at Bedminster can be roughly divided into four categories: golfers who still were relevant on the PGA or European tours when they joined LIV; those whose best years are behind them; grinders who have been plying their trade anonymously around the world; and younger players who are getting their first real taste of professional golf with LIV.
World rankings and ages are as of July 24, 2022. Wins came on either the PGA Tour, the European tour, in WGC events or at majors.
STILL RELEVANT
Career top-level wins: 31
Most recent top-level win: 2021
The two-time major champion is LIV’s highest-ranked golfer, though he hasn’t won anything in 17 months.
Career top-level wins: 1
Ancer has finished tied for 11th and tied for ninth in the last two major championships, but he only had three top 10s this season before departing for LIV.
The former world No. 1 won four of eight majors played between the 2017 U.S. Open and 2019 PGA Championship, but injuries have slowed him down.
The 2010 British Open winner finished second or third at the final three majors in 2021; this year’s results haven’t been as good.
The brainy, beefy big hitter ran away with the 2020 U.S. Open before dealing with a host of injuries.
Na went seven years between victories before a career resurgence in his late 30s.
Kokrak is playing in his first LIV tournament in Bedminster; he doesn’t have a top-10 finish since winning in Houston in November.
Gooch earned a spot in all four majors for the first time this year but finished no better than 14th, with one missed cut.
Reed won the 2018 Masters but has dealt with on- and off-course controversies over the years.
Only Ben Crenshaw, Tiger Woods and Wolff have won an NCAA championship and a PGA Tour event in the same calendar year.
Grace won the second LIV Golf tournament in Oregon in early July.
ON THE DOWNSWING
One of the better LIV players to never win a major; 16 of his 18 career top-level wins were from 2015 or earlier.
Garcia has only one win since his 2017 Masters title and has seen his world ranking steadily decline.
The journeyman scored his only pro win last year at the age of 48, when he also cracked the world top 100 for the first time.
Westwood, a former world No. 1, has 19 top-10 major finishes without a win.
Once one of the sport’s most beloved players, the six-time major winner decided to spend his twilight golf years playing for LIV.
World ranking: 107th
All but one of the Englishman’s victories came in 2012 or earlier. Known more for his Ryder Cup prowess.
Schwartzel’s final-round 66 at the 2011 Masters was memorable, but the bulk of his success has been in Europe.
The PGA Tour veteran has earned millions over a lengthy pro career despite not winning all that often.
Stenson, who won the 2016 British Open, was removed as European Ryder Cup captain after joining LIV.
Perez once was No. 18 in the world, but now is known more for his collection of Jordans sneakers than his golf game.
Most recent top-level win: N/A.
Tanihara has won 16 times on the Japanese tour and twice more on the Asian tour.
Kaymer’s three wins on U.S. soil were all impressive — two majors and the 2014 Players Championship — but he hasn’t been relevant in years.
Ormsby has split his time between the European, Asian and Australian tours, never making much of an impact.
McDowell won the 2010 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, but his best years are well behind him.
ANONYMOUS JOURNEYMEN
Most recent top-level win: N/A
Inamori has won four times on the Japanese tour, with two victories this year.
The Australian’s two PGA Tour victories came nearly seven years apart, in 2014 and 2021.
Norris has played much of his career in Asia, Africa and Australia, but he won a European tour event in March.
Vincent, from Zimbabwe, has won four times on various Asian tours since August 2021.
Kinoshita’s experience is mostly limited to the Japanese tour, where he’s won twice
After winning in January, Swafford missed seven cuts in 12 PGA Tour events before leaving for LIV.
The Austrian has just one top-10 finish this year and finished near the bottom of the leader board at the first two LIV events.
Kozuma has two wins on the Japanese tour, most recently in April
The South African has fallen down the rankings after cracking the world top 100 in 2018 and 2019.
With his win in Houston in 2020, Ortiz became only the third Mexican golfer to win on the PGA Tour and the first since 1978.
The Englishman has nine career top-10 finishes, all since 2019 and all on the European tour.
Uihlein never lived up to his billing after becoming one of the world’s top amateurs earlier this century.
Smyth’s lone professional win came in his first pro event, a PGA Tour of Australasia tournament in 2017.
World ranking: 1,712
Brooks’s younger brother missed the cut in seven of his previous nine tournaments before joining LIV.
The budding English star won in Belgium earlier this year but missed the cut in all three major appearances in 2022.
The young Thai golfer won an Asian Tour event earlier this year, his second on that circuit.
The South African finished second at the inaugural LIV Golf tournament in London earlier this year.
Another up-and-coming Thai golfer, Khongwatmai won an Asian Tour event in December.
Morgan won a PGA Tour of Australasia event in January in only his fourth professional tournament.
Pettit won the 2021 NCAA championship at Clemson. He finished 45th and 46th out of 48 at the first two LIV tournaments.
Piot turned pro in May and almost immediately jumped to LIV after missing the cut at all six PGA Tour events he played.
Still an amateur, Puig has found great success at Arizona State.
The Spaniard left Oklahoma State, where he was a first-team all-American, early to join LIV. | 2022-07-27T17:39:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The latest players to join LIV Golf: A list of the breakaway golfers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/liv-golfers-list/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/liv-golfers-list/ |
Satellite imagery reveals a superheated planet that’s ablaze, swamped and dessicated.
The Oak Fire as seen from space on July 23. (Obtained and processed by Tom Yulsman from Landsat data using Sentinel Hub EO Browser) (Tom Yulsman)
If you’re looking to gain a holistic perspective on a problem, it can help to step back for a wider view. Satellite imagery — showing scenes of extreme weather from space — reveals a superheated planet that’s ablaze, dessicated and swamped in different areas all at the same time.
Weather satellites are constantly peering down on Earth, sending back high-resolution images to provide a real-time view of what’s going on. Some are “polar orbiting,” zipping around Earth in orbits that take them over both the north and south poles as they trace lines of longitude. Others orbit Earth in sync with its rotation, with sensors locked on the same patch of real estate. These ones, 22,236 miles above the Earth, are known as “geostationary.”
The past month has featured scores of fires, floods, droughts, heat waves and other calamitous meteorological occurrences, which have been intensified by human-caused climate change. Atmospheric scientists have relied on data from satellites to help them issue forecasts and warnings, while also keeping abreast of the atmosphere’s long-term temperament.
Here we take a look at some of the most striking images shared from weather satellites in recent weeks.
Plummeting water levels in Lake Meade
Lake Meade, located in southern Nevada and northern Arizona, is the largest reservoir in the United States, forming after the construction of the Hoover Dam in the late 1920s an 1930s. Some 20 million Americans depend on its water — most notably in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
Since 1983, a combination of increased water demand and persistent drought have kept the reservoir below its capacity; nowadays, it’s sitting at record-low levels. NASA writes that, at full capacity, water levels would stand at 1,220 feet where the man-made lake meets the Hoover Dam. Instead, that level currently stands at 1,040.65 feet. Last year at this time, it was 1,068 feet, and a year before, 1,085 feet.
“About 10 percent of the water in Lake Mead comes from local precipitation and groundwater each year,” wrote NASA, “with the rest coming from snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains that flows down the Colorado River watershed through Lake Powell, Glen Canyon, and the Grand Canyon.”
That means Lake Meade isn’t just a barometer of how much rain has fallen. It’s an indicator of the West’s greater water supply as a whole, much of which is stored in the wintertime snowpack. North of Lake Meade, Lake Powell is only at 27 percent capacity according to NASA, and the entire Colorado River system is at 35 percent.
More than a third of the western U.S. is listed as being within an “extreme” or “exceptional” drought — the two most severe tiers on the U.S. Drought Monitor’s scale — with southern Nevada solidly in the exceptional shading.
“Reservoir levels are extremely low,” wrote the Drought Monitor. “Hydropower production is limited, alternative power is expensive; groundwater decreases; water allotments to farmers and ranchers are curtailed.” It also notes that “ecosystem viability is threatened.”
Many climate change experts expect the drought engulfing the West will only continue to worsen in the years ahead.
Explosive California wildfires
The drought has fostered conditions ripe for explosive wildfire development and extreme fire behavior, both of which have been manifest in recent weeks across the Golden State. Fires in California are burning precariously close to Yosemite National Park, including the Oak Fire, which erupted on Friday.
So far, the Oak Fire has torched 18,532 acres in Mariposa County in the vicinity of Highway 140 and Carstens Road. It’s 26 percent contained.
“Although good progress continues on the fire, there is much work to be done,” wrote CalFire, the agency responsible for overseeing combating of the blaze.
Tom Yulsman, director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado and contributor to Discover Magazine, used imagery from the Landsat satellite to produce the three-dimensional flyover above.
Eighteen of the top 20 largest wildfires in California state history have occurred since 2003. Human-caused climate change is amplifying drought and excessive heat which supports more extreme wildfires.
Wildfires in Portugal, Spain and France
More than 1,000 people died amid an extreme record-breaking heat wave that brought searing temperatures to western Europe one to two weeks ago and prompted the U.K.'s first “red warning” for heat ever issued. Temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time on record there, with nearly three dozen weather stations shattering the U.K.'s previous all-time record of 38.7 Celsius (101.7 Fahrenheit).
Forty thousand residents of France were evacuated due to wildfires, and a number of other blazes torched the landscape in Portugal and Spain. Climate change helped push the already-toasty air mass into record territory, which more efficiently evaporated moisture from the ground, desiccating the landscape.
“In Portugal, temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 13 in the town of Leiria, where more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) had burned,” wrote NASA. “More than half of the country was on red alert as firefighters battled 14 active fires.”
The Suomi NPP/VIIRS satellite’s day/night band captured the signatures of wildfires burning on the night of July 12. Visible west of Madrid is a fire that burned 3,700 acres.
Extreme flooding in St. Louis
Yesterday, #GOESEast captured imagery of storms that brought record rainfall and historic flooding to St. Louis, Missouri and surrounding areas. The storms resulted in at least one fatality and widespread damage. pic.twitter.com/HOoK92tB0Q
The effects of human-caused climate change can exacerbate both flooding and drought extremes. The reason is simple: a warmer atmosphere speeds up evaporation of water. Where storm fronts are present, such as in the Midwestern U.S. at the moment, the extra water in the atmosphere means heavier downpours. But in much of the western U.S., where there are no such fronts, the warmed atmosphere more efficiently extracts what little moisture there is from vegetation and the soil, reinforcing drought.
On Monday, residents of St. Louis woke up to a flash flood emergency, with a number of water rescues conducted as hours of torrential downpours deluged the city. A staggering 7.78 inches of rain came down in six hours’ time, most of which fell before sunrise. The day logged a total of 8.64 inches at St. Louis International Airport — about a quarter of the city’s average annual rainfall. The historic drenching, which has just a 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year, was the most extreme on record for the city. St. Peters, Mo., northwest of St. Louis, had close to 13 inches by 4 p.m.
Instigating the flooding was a stationary front draped across the metro region, which acted as train tracks for heavy thunderstorm cells to ride along. Record moisture was in place too.
Heavy downpours are becoming more frequent in St. Louis. Since World War II, days with 1.5 inches of rain have become about 30 to 40 percent more common; there has also been an uptick in average annual precipitation in St. Louis, with data suggesting a jump from about 34 inches in the 1940s to 43 inches nowadays. | 2022-07-27T17:43:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Satellites see extreme weather: fires, floods and drought from space - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/27/extreme-weather-space-fires-floods/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/27/extreme-weather-space-fires-floods/ |
Greg Scruggs
Cynthia Berry, a program coordinator at Arches, a housing program for homeless people, hands out water and sunscreen to Tesla Burr, left, and Laurie Schaven at Geer Park during a heat wave in Salem, Ore., on Tuesday. (Brian Hayes/Statesman-Journal/AP)
SALEM, Ore. — Even in the evening Tuesday, people took their smoke breaks in the shade. By 6 p.m. outside the Recovery Outreach Community Center in Salem, Ore., the temperatures were still hovering near 100 degrees on the second day of what was expected to be an unusually long heat wave in the Pacific Northwest.
Typically, this recovery center is a hub for community members grappling with substance-use disorders and housing insecurity in Salem, a city of about 170,000. But Tuesday, the center doubled as a cooling center — one of about 20 open to the public in Marion County — as part of a broad effort across the Pacific Northwest to protect residents from intense and sometimes deadly heat waves.
One year after the worst Pacific Northwest heat wave on record left hundreds dead, the region finds itself better prepared, even as it continues to grapple with the challenges that come with periods of extreme weather
This week’s heat event already broke daily records across Oregon and Washington state on Tuesday: In Salem, the temperature reached a zenith of 103 degrees, tying a previous record set in 1939. Another record high of 102 was set in Portland. Seattle soared to a record 94.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) declared a state of emergency Tuesday in 25 counties, lasting until Sunday, and ordered the state’s emergency management department to coordinate a response. Almost the entire region, including parts of Northern California, Nevada and Idaho were under heat advisories or excessive heat warnings from the National Weather Service. Some areas of eastern Washington state and interior Oregon could see temperatures eclipse 110 degrees this week.
The heat is not predicted to ease until the weekend. Portland and Seattle, both under excessive warnings until Thursday, are forecast to endure historically long streaks of temperatures above 95 and 90 degrees, respectively.
In Salem, this is the second year in a row that Recovery has offered its space as a cooling center. The first time was during last year’s heat wave in which at least 54 people died in Portland alone, according to officials, the victims disproportionately older and living alone. Advocates say low-income renters, who may be unable to install or pay for air-cooling devices themselves, are particularly at risk of suffering from heat-related illness during heat waves.
That disaster spurred a reevaluation for the historically temperate region as climate change fuels intensified heat waves. Since then, local governments and nonprofits have ramped up emergency heat relief efforts, tapping into grants and building partnerships to do so.
“Last year was definitely a wake-up call for Oregon,” said Candace Avalos, executive director of Verde, an environmental justice nonprofit in Portland.
In Oregon’s Multnomah County, which includes the city of Portland, there were four overnight cooling centers Tuesday, along with a daytime center, misting stations and “splash pads” throughout the city. Public transit buses offered free rides to cool locations.
Similar efforts are underway in Washington state. In King County, which includes Seattle, a slew of cooling centers have been opened. The city remains the least air-conditioned major metropolitan area in the country: Just 44 percent of homes include some form of air conditioning, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. But that figure doesn’t reflect the surge in air conditioning purchases in the wake of last year’s blistering weather. In September, the Washington Department of Commerce began accepting applications for the first time for subsidized air conditioners through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
While memories linger from last year’s record-breaking heat dome, the general public’s response to the current heat has appeared less frenzied than last year. Temperatures are expected to crest in the low 90s — and while those temperatures are not unheard of in Seattle, the heat wave’s anticipated duration of five days is unusual. Heat will accumulate in residences by the end of the week, which can make sleeping difficult and increase the risk of heat-related illnesses.
Historic flooding kills at least 1, strands St. Louis residents in cars
The city has launched its standard heat-wave response plan, which includes cooling centers at libraries, senior centers and community centers. For those who work outdoors, meanwhile, the state announced emergency heat regulations that went into effect mid-June. When the temperature reaches 89 degrees, employers must provide workers with at least a quart of cool water per hour and provide at least a 10-minute, paid cool-down break every two hours. While heat regulations for outdoor workers have been in place for more than a dozen years, Washington’s department of labor and industries has issued emergency regulations for the last three summers while permanent rule changes are under negotiation.
King County also announced the development of its first-ever extreme heat-mitigation strategy last month, a direct response to last year’s heat wave that killed over 30 county residents. The county government applied for a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, noting that the agency does not historically give hazard-mitigation grants for extreme heat.
“Last year we experienced the single most deadly climate event in our history, and these events are expected to be longer in duration, and more intense going forward,” said Jeff Duchin, health officer for Seattle and King County, in a statement. “We must prepare both for the inevitable heat events that will continue to challenge us, and also do what we can to minimize the risk for these becoming even more catastrophic in the future.”
State and local governments in the Pacific Northwest are also working toward long-term efforts to adapt to extreme heat.
In March, Oregon lawmakers passed a bill committing millions of dollars toward air conditioners and cooling systems for residents who can’t afford them, while funding emergency heat shelters like the ones operating across the state this week. The law also protects tenants installing some air-cooling devices from retaliation from landlords.
In Portland, officials aim to install between 12,000 and 15,000 cooling units and portable heat pumps in low-income households over the next five years. Verde, the Portland nonprofit group, is helping coordinate a separate program providing air conditioners to low-income residents. Avalos said there’s an “overwhelming” demand for the program.
Parrish, the assistant manager at Recovery Outreach, said he’s noticed more cohesion and organization in the region’s response to this heat wave.
At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, the temperature dipped below 95 degrees, the point when the Salem cooling center closes to the public. Parrish replaced a large water jug drained by thirsty visitors while support staff warned their clients about the consistent heat. He expects the cooling center to operate all week.
Scruggs reported from Seattle. Jason Samenow in D.C. contributed to this report. | 2022-07-27T17:47:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oregon, Washington grapple with Pacific Northwest heat wave - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/27/oregon-washington-heatwave-pacific-northwest/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/27/oregon-washington-heatwave-pacific-northwest/ |
With NCAA silent on abortion bans, college sports face confusion
By Molly Hensley-Clancy
(Irene Rinaldi for The Washington Post)
When a college athlete gets pregnant, school officials can turn to a “pregnancy tool kit,” provided by the NCAA, where a simple flowchart lays out how to respond.
After multiple positive pregnancy tests, the flowchart says, the athletic department should assemble a “decision-making team” of coaches, team doctors, athletic officials, family members, faith leaders and counselors. Then there is a choice, the flowchart says: The athlete can “elect to carry,” deliver the baby and eventually return to training after six to eight weeks. Or the athlete “elects to abort” and “returns to sport.” End of flowchart.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, leading to abortion bans in 20 states and threatening abortion access in many more, that choice may have disappeared for many athletes, including many elite athletes in top programs, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.
The moment feels urgent for some coaches and athletic directors in states where abortion access is threatened. In interviews, they said the overturning of Roe has left them with little information about how to advise the young people in whose lives and health decisions they are expected to play significant roles. Some worry about recruiting women athletes to states where their reproductive rights have been curtailed.
“No one’s talking about this yet, but it has the potential to be a real issue,” said Jacquie Joseph, assistant athletic director and former softball coach at Michigan State, where a 1931 ban on abortion is currently blocked by the state’s court. “We’re going to get there come this fall.”
But the end of Roe has been met with silence from most of the college sports world, including the NCAA. Inside athletic departments dominated by men, three Division I coaches in states with abortion restrictions told The Post they were afraid to speak publicly in support of abortion rights, worried they could be targeted by their bosses, politicians or the public.
NCAA women’s sports in post-Roe America
Top programs in the most popular women's sports are concentrated in states with abortion bans, or where the future of abortion is uncertain.
Schools in states where abortion is…
Banned
or mostly
Legal and
likely to be
Likely
to ban
Legal
and field
States ban status as of July 27th
Source: NCAA, Guttmacher Institute, Center for Reproductive Rights, Post reporting
Top programs in the most popular women's sports
are concentrated in states with abortion bans,
or where the future of abortion is uncertain.
Banned or
mostly banned
Legal and likely
to be protected
University of Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh, who is opposed to abortion, has been the only prominent college coach to speak about the issue. After he was quoted speaking at an antiabortion charity event this month, Harbaugh told ESPN that he saw abortion as an issue “that’s so big that it needs to be talked about. It needs serious conversation.”
Harbaugh said he would encourage Michigan players and staff members dealing with unplanned pregnancies to “go through with it.” If that person didn’t want to raise their child, Harbaugh said of himself and his wife, “Sarah and I will take that baby.”
Joseph said it wasn’t clear how it would be handled when a woman came into the athletic department with a pregnancy — or when a male athlete disclosed a pregnant partner.
“In the past, we’ve looked at pregnancy as health care — we’ve had women get pregnant, and we’ve had players have babies, and we’ve helped players make a different choice from a medical standpoint,” she said. “Now what are we going to do?”
The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has sparked confusion and anxiety on many college campuses, not just in sports. But as the NCAA spells out, coaches and other athletic department officials are involved in the lives and health care of college athletes in a way that gives the issue extra weight — and extra risk. College athletes are asked to waive privacy rights for some of their medical data, providing records to coaches, trainers and athletic departments.
“We’re intimately involved in their health decisions,” said a top athletic department official at a Division I school in a state with an abortion ban, who, fearing professional repercussions, spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s not like we make the decision, but we know about it. As an administrator, coach, athletic trainer — athletes have to disclose pregnancy because it’s going to impact their participation.”
“These conversations could come up, will come up, and there’s nothing I can say to them,” she said.
‘A full range of choices’
The NCAA’s “model policy for pregnant and parenting athletes” is 107 pages long, with detailed best practices that go far beyond the flowchart. There are statistics on the large numbers of athletes who are sexually active in college and case studies of pregnant athletes, including “worst-case scenarios” where athletes they felt forced to have abortions. A model dialogue lays out how athletic trainers “confronted with pregnancy” should interact with athletes, asking questions such as: “Is Coach aware of the situation? How do you feel about talking about it with her/him?”
The NCAA discourages athletic departments from requiring athletes to disclose pregnancies, saying they should create an environment that “encourages” athletes to reveal their pregnancies voluntarily instead. But it also permits athletic officials to report to team doctors or university representatives when they suspect an athlete is pregnant.
“A student-athlete should have a full range of choices,” the policy says, “including abortion or having the child, and withdrawing from or staying on the team.”
The organization did not put out a statement after the overturning of Roe — a contrast to last year, when many states sought to ban transgender athletes from competition. Though the number of transgender athletes participating in college sports remains low, the governing body put out a statement saying it “firmly and unequivocally supports” transgender athletes’ ability to compete.
In a recent statement to The Washington Post, the organization said: “The NCAA continues to evaluate the potential impact of the Supreme Court’s abortion care decision on student-athletes. The implementation of student-athlete healthcare takes place at the local level, therefore each school should develop policies that support its student-athletes while complying with both state and federal laws.”
Some college coaches and officials told The Post that they were concerned by how little the end of Roe was spoken about, even after a leaked draft of the court’s opinion offered weeks of warning.
“It hasn’t been addressed at all in our athletic department,” said one Division I women’s soccer coach who’s in a state where abortion is now banned. When it comes to handling athlete pregnancies, she said: “I don’t think there’s enough information. If there is, I haven’t been able to find it.”
Access to that information is critical for any student. But advocates have painted abortion rights as especially vital for young athletes, whose chances at a college education or a professional career depend on their bodies — which are changed significantly by pregnancies.
“College athletes are front and center to this issue to the extent that, for many women, their athletic prowess is their ticket to higher education,” said Joanna Wright, a partner at law firm Boies Schiller Flexner who wrote an amicus brief opposing the overturning of Roe that was signed by hundreds of female athletes. “Athletic success is dependent on bodily integrity and the ability to hone and control your own body.”
A new calculation
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, as state lawmakers across the country scramble to erase or protect abortion rights, those rights are currently expected to be protected in 20 states and the District of Columbia. But the power centers of elite women’s college sports are disproportionately in states where abortion access is likely to be restricted or banned altogether.
Many of the country’s most popular and highly watched women’s college sports events are held in states with some of the strictest abortion laws. The Women’s College World Series, which peaked at 2.1 million viewers in this year’s final, is hosted every year in Oklahoma City; the gymnastics final, which drew more than 1 million viewers, has been held in Fort Worth since 2019. The next four Women’s Final Fours are set in states where restrictions are in place or expected.
According to data compiled by The Post, many elite women’s college sports programs are also disproportionately concentrated in states with abortion bans and expected bans, or where the future of abortion rights is uncertain. It’s a dynamic that could restrict college choices for some top women’s athletes in the most popular sports.
Top-ranked NCAA women's programs in states with abortion bans
In softball, gymnastics, basketball and volleyball, the highest ranked programs are in states where abortion is now illegal.
Likely to ban
Banned or mostly banned
Legal for now
Legal and likely to be protected
In volleyball, just one of last season’s top 10 programs was in a state with abortion protections in place. In both women’s basketball and softball, just four of the top 25 programs were in states with abortion protections, and 15 were in states with abortion bans or where bans are likely. And in women’s soccer, where top programs are the main feeders into professional leagues, 11 of the top 25 programs are in states with bans or expected bans, and another seven are in states where the future of abortion is uncertain.
Sophie Adler left the D.C. area for Texas to play soccer at SMU, which is among the top 25 women’s programs. She graduated last year but said she questioned whether she would have made the same decision had Texas’s abortion ban been in effect.
“When you’re looking for where you’re going to spend the next four years, a big part of it is where you feel safe. I went to the campus of SMU, and I felt safe. But looking back now — I don’t know if it would have been the end-all-be-all for me, but I think it would have been an issue,” she said. “Would I have even looked in Texas? I don’t know.”
Some coaches said it was too early to tell whether abortion rights would affect where young women and other athletes attend college. But others said that as time went on, they expected that abortion restrictions would affect their schools’ ability to draw top women’s athletes.
“In terms of recruiting, I think it absolutely will make a difference,” said the athletic department official from a state with an abortion ban. At the private university where she works, she said: “The general student body here has enough money to get out of state if they need to. Our student-athletes don’t necessarily have that money. If they’re not thinking about it, they should be.”
‘This is a right’
Nell Fortner, a prominent women’s basketball coach who is now at Georgia Tech, said that in June, shortly after Roe was overturned, she found herself in an office with several of her youngest players and asked what they thought about the end of Roe. She discovered they knew nothing about it — or about Title IX, the 1972 civil rights law that was likely the reason they were able to play college sports.
“My biggest message with my kids here is that we as women had a fundamental right that’s been taken away from us,” Fortner said. “Whether you believe in it or not, whether you think it’s right or wrong, this is a lawful right that we do not have anymore.”
Title IX’s 50th anniversary, which was June 23, was celebrated across the sports world, with the NCAA, colleges and many professional teams marking the step toward equality. Roe, which would have celebrated its own 50th anniversary in January, was reversed June 24.
For some officials upset over the end of Roe, the contrast was clear. And it was linked, some said, to the stark gender imbalance among college sports leaders: 75 percent of NCAA coaches and athletic directors are men, according to NCAA data.
“It’s not lost on any of us that we celebrated Title IX and then the next day this came out,” the Division I athletic department official said. “You heard something from female figures in sports, but this is still a male-dominated industry, and we haven’t broken out of that, no matter how many people tell you it’s changing. A lot of males failed to even see the connection.”
Joseph, the assistant athletic director at Michigan State, hopes to get more college sports figures to care about Roe by framing the decision in terms of how it will affect the lives and careers of male athletes, too.
“There are going to be unplanned pregnancies,” Joseph said. “It does disproportionately impact women, but what are we going to do to hold the [men] accountable? Should he get to play when she doesn’t? If she’s forced to have a pregnancy, should he have a season? To me, that has to be part of it, too. This is an issue for both men and women.”
Randy Lane, the women’s gymnastics coach at Long Island, was one of only a few Division I coaches to speak up against the overturning of Roe, putting out a statement in June saying he was “horrified” by the decision.
“One out of every four women will have an abortion in her lifetime. That includes NCAA athletes,” Lane wrote. “You, as gymnasts, should have full control over your own bodies, choices, and health.”
Lane told The Post that he had been thinking about what to say since May, when the draft opinion was leaked, feeling a responsibility partly because of how the abuses of former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State doctor Larry Nassar tarnished his sport’s image.
“I was very certain I wanted to give a statement,” he said. “I cried several times thinking about not only my friends having this freedom taken away but all the women I coach, the women in my sport that I’ve recruited that don’t go to my school but go to a school in a state that doesn’t allow this.”
In gymnastics, which is among the most popular NCAA sports for women, more than half of the top 25 programs are in states with abortion bans, including four of the top five. Lane said he had little hope that the NCAA would make a statement about Roe, but he turned to other coaches and gymnastics leaders in hopes that they might choose to make statements of their own. Ultimately, he said, no one did.
At a coches’ convention in May, Lane said: “I spoke to probably eight to 10 coaches. Once we got home, we stopped talking about it. I was hoping to get people to step up and make a statement, but it hasn’t happened for whatever reason. It’s at the point now where I’m thinking I’m going to send my statement again and say, ‘What are your thoughts?’ ” | 2022-07-27T18:22:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With NCAA silent on abortion bans, confusion consumes college sports - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/college-sports-ncaa-abortion-bans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/college-sports-ncaa-abortion-bans/ |
Victor Pálsson made 28 starts last season for Schalke, which earned promotion to the German Bundesliga. (Jürgen Fromme/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)
D.C. United on Wednesday used one of its two remaining designated player roster slots on Victor Pálsson, an Icelandic defensive midfielder who helped Schalke earn promotion to the German Bundesliga last season.
United paid an undisclosed transfer fee for Pálsson, 31, who attended Saturday’s match against CF Montreal at Audi Field but returned to Germany on Tuesday to await a work visa. That process is expected to take about two weeks.
Pálsson has made 29 appearances for the Icelandic national team since 2014. He played in six 2022 World Cup qualifiers (five starts) and scored once.
“His leadership qualities and ability both on and off the ball will bolster the spine of our squad and improve those around him,” Dave Kasper, United’s president of soccer operations, said in a statement. “He’s an exciting signing for the club and will play an important role for how we expect to play moving forward under head coach Wayne Rooney.”
Pálsson’s contract will run through the 2024 season, with a club-held option in 2025. As a designated player, Pálsson will have a salary of at least $612,500, but because he is a midseason acquisition, $306,250 will apply to United’s salary budget this year.
Starting next season, United will look to apply MLS allocation money to his contract and use that designated player slot on someone else, a person close to the negotiations said.
United’s other designated player is Greek attacker Taxi Fountas, the team’s leading scorer. The club is aiming to fill the last DP slot before the transfer and trade window closes Aug. 4.
Elijah Adebayo, a high-scoring striker for Luton Town in England’s second division, is apparently at the top of D.C.'s wish list, but people familiar with the efforts said United will need to increase its $5 million transfer offer to have any shot at the 6-foot-4 player. The club is weighing several other transfer and trade options, as well.
Pálsson is the third acquisition this summer as United revamps the roster amid a 5-12-3 season that has left the club at the bottom of MLS’s 28-team overall standings. Chilean left wing Martín Rodríguez debuted last weekend and English-Jamaican attacking midfielder Ravel Morrison, who played for Rooney at England’s Derby County, is awaiting a work visa.
Pálsson is no stranger to MLS, having played for the New York Red Bulls in 2012. He then moved to clubs in the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark before joining Darmstadt in Germany’s second division in 2019. In his one season with Schalke, Pálsson appeared in 28 of 34 league matches, started 21 and was a co-captain.
Eyeing a ball-winner with a physical presence in midfield, D.C. tried acquiring Pálsson in MLS’s first transfer and trade window early this year. However, Schalke’s pursuit of promotion to the Bundesliga after one year in the second tier put the potential move on hold.
Pálsson’s arrival seems certain to bump Russell Canouse, Chris Durkin, Drew Skundrich and Moses Nyeman down the depth chart in defensive midfield. | 2022-07-27T18:22:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. United acquires Victor Pálsson - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/dc-united-acquires-victor-palsson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/dc-united-acquires-victor-palsson/ |
Women’s Euro live updates Germany takes on France in semifinal match
How they got here: Germany
Germany’s Klara Bühl to miss semifinal vs. France
Striker Lina Magull (R) and the rest of Germany's team has been spotless thus far at Women's Euro 2022. (Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)
Wednesday marks the second semifinal match in Women’s Euro 2022, with Germany taking on France at Stadium MK in Milton Keynes, England. The winner will take on England in Sunday’s final at Wembley Stadium in London, and Germany has emerged as a slight favorite, per DraftKings.
Germany has taken a spotless road to reach this point, winning its first four games of the tournament by a combined score of 11-0, the latest victory coming over Austria in the quarterfinals by a score of 2-0. But it will be without midfielder Klara Bühl, whose positive coronavirus test will keep her out of the match.
France’s path to this match has been a little less clean. The French didn’t win out in group play, mixing a draw against Iceland in with victories over Italy and Belgium. France then needed a penalty shot tally in extra time from Ève Périsset to edge past the Netherlands in the quarters.
Follow along for live updates from the second Women’s Euro 2022 semifinal.
Germany has won this tournament eight of the 12 times it’s been played, going as far back as 1989 when it was known as West Germany. France’s history in the Women’s Euros couldn’t be more different; this is the first semifinal appearance in the tournament for the French.
German World Cup captain Alexandra Popp has four goals in the tournament, splitting them evenly among her team’s four matches. And Germany goalkeeper Merle Frohms has been perfect headed into Wednesday’s game. France lost striker Marie-Antoinette Katoto to injury during the group stage, but still has a strong attack that features midfielder Grace Geyoro, who netted a hat trick its win over Italy.
Wednesday night’s forecast in Milton Keynes looks just about perfect, with temperatures falling to the high 50s and winds out of the south to southeast at seven mph. The game, which begins at 3 p.m. Eastern, will be televised on ESPN2 and streamed on ESPN’s app and ESPN.com.
Germany swept through the group stage, topping Denmark, Spain and Finland by a cumulative 9-0 margin. The most dominant country in women’s Euros history has yet to surrender a goal during this year’s competition after beating Austria 2-0 in the quarterfinal.
Lina Magull put Germany ahead against Austria when she capped a pretty 25th-minute sequence that started when Klara Bühl initiated a counterattack near midfield. The ball eventually found its way into the box, where Magull finished with a low kick into the corner of the net. Alexandra Popp sealed the victory when she capitalized on the goalkeeper’s 90th-minute mistake and netted her fourth goal of the competition.
Germany will face France in Wednesday’s semifinal without forward Klara Bühl, who tested positive for the coronavirus, the team announced Tuesday. Bühl has scored one goal in four appearances during the tournament. She also has an assist.
Bühl helped send Germany through to the semifinal last Thursday when she headed the ball far downfield in the 25th minute, setting up the sequence that enabled Lina Magull to score the opening goal. Bühl missed a late tap-in in front of an open goal that could have secured the victory, but Germany later capitalized on a 90th-minute mistake by Austrian goalkeeper Manuela Zinsberger to put the game out of reach. | 2022-07-27T18:23:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Women's Euro live score and updates: Germany vs. France - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/germany-france-score/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/germany-france-score/ |
‘Nope’ is one of the weirdest films this year. It just might inspire you.
Keys and nickels raining from the sky. A naked man with twigs growing out of his face and body. A giant everything bagel exerting an unnerving gravitational field that just might consume everything in the known universe.
These are some of the strangest images I’ve seen at the movies this year — and they don’t even begin to capture the oddness of the movies themselves. Days, even months, later I’m still pondering the multiverse family drama “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the eerie parable “Men” and, most recently, Jordan Peele’s sci-fi Western “Nope.” Each is so distinct that the question of whether I liked them seems beside the point: They upset me, they prodded me, they showed me something I’d never seen before.
One thing’s for sure: Movies like these are a testament to the value of having your mind blown once in a while — and not just at the multiplex.
Lately it can feel like we’re stuck in a state of frog-boiling stagnation, in culture and politics. Marvel Studios recently announced that its long-running Cinematic Universe will continue at least through 2025. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is holding up climate legislation in the middle of catastrophic flooding and a nationwide heat wave. TV shows including “Family Feud” and the “Law & Order” franchise are stumbling along zombielike. And a conservative majority on the Supreme Court is rousing the Founding Fathers from the grave to roll back the clock on abortion rights and the regulatory power of the federal government.
These doldrums are mutually reinforcing: If the people governing the world are content to let it descend into hell, why not recycle the same old superhero stories and binge watchable comfort shows to cushion the fall?
There’s room for comfort food in pop culture, of course. But too much sameness can make the world seem stiflingly small.
This is not to say that “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Men” and “Nope” are road maps for passing legislation or anything else so prosaic. Instead, their common gift is to surprise us with arresting images and daring, even shocking ideas. Each wrenches open the padlocked doors of perception and reminds us that the world has the capacity to be bigger, wilder and more freighted with possibility than it so often seems.
That’s the very premise of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Dissatisfied and detached laundromat co-owner Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) discovers there is a multiverse full of other versions of herself. She can access their abilities — but only by doing the most unexpected thing in any given scenario.
The results are almost too silly and glorious to be plausibly described in print. Let’s just say the action involves a raccoon controlling a teppanyaki chef, Hong Kong-style martial arts stardom and a universe where people have hot dogs for fingers. But however bizarre and ambitious Evelyn’s journey, her destination is familiar. In breaking out of her old patterns and assumptions, she injects new life into her marriage and salvages her failing relationship with her daughter.
The characters in “Nope” have no way of tapping into unusual abilities. When a flying saucer appears over the canyon where they live, hoovering up people and horses and belching out metal and occasional torrents of blood, their only weapon is their ingenuity.
What initially seems a mismatch between a malign creature and some puny humans freaking out turns into an opportunity for inventiveness that’s exciting, even invigorating, to watch. When the creature shorts out electronic equipment, the humans rig up a field of tube dancers to act as an early warning system and deploy old-fashioned film cameras to document its existence. These may be hustlers seeking to exploit the scoop of the century, but they bring nerve and creativity to the task rather than succumbing to despair.
Harper, the main character in “Men,” squares off with an enemy on the ground — a mutating monster that stalks and torments her by giving birth to a series of men with the same face, through a succession of spontaneous pregnancies and bloody deliveries. It’s an image of misogyny as a twisted, self-replicating force. “Men” was released before it became clear the Supreme Court intended to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the film eerily presaged the arrival of body horror at the center of the national conversation.
In “Men,” Harper must try to survive less through cunning than through violent persistence. And the movie ends on an ambiguous note, not the triumphal one we might find in a traditional movie about sexism: Harper may beat her foes, but doing so requires terrible deeds.
All these movies are unsettling — and that’s exactly what makes them unforgettable. In this moment of defeatism and drift, we need a push in a new direction anyplace we can get it. | 2022-07-27T18:35:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | ‘Nope’ is downright weird. It just might inspire you. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/nope-men-everything-everywhere-weird-movies-inspiring/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/nope-men-everything-everywhere-weird-movies-inspiring/ |
The U.S. must end Israel’s impunity and investigate my aunt’s killing
By Lina Abu Akleh
A relative of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh wears a button with her image after meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on July 26. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)
Lina Abu Akleh is Shireen Abu Akleh’s niece.
Earlier this year, I began planning a summer trip from Jerusalem to the United States with my aunt. I was excited for her to show me cities she knew well and loved, including Washington.
I am now in Washington, but without my aunt, the renowned Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. All evidence indicates she was killed by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin on May 11, just after she arrived to report on an Israeli military incursion. Instead of visiting monuments and museums with my aunt, I am in D.C. calling for justice and accountability for her death.
Since that horrible day when Shireen was shot in the space between her protective helmet and bulletproof vest clearly marked as PRESS, my family has called on the U.S. government to conduct an independent, thorough and transparent investigation into the killing. It is a testament to Shireen’s impact and inspiration as an iconic and groundbreaking journalist that dozens of members of Congress have asked for the same. Yet until now, the Biden administration has refused. After meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, we hope President Biden will reconsider and finally act.
There have been multiple investigations by the United Nations, human rights organizations and major international news organizations, all concluding that Shireen was almost certainly killed by an Israeli sniper, and that the entrance of the Jenin refugee camp was quiet when she was shot.
Yet I read with bewilderment a statement that the Biden administration issued on July 4. Based on reviewing and summarizing the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority’s investigations, the United States concluded that Israel was likely responsible for my aunt’s killing, but that there was no reason to believe that it was intentional.
I was alarmed. Why was the Biden administration repeating Israel’s spin, given the lengths that the Israel military has gone to manipulate the events around Shireen’s killing? Israel initially blamed Palestinians, circulating a misleading video that human rights organizations quickly debunked. Then, an Israeli military spokesman went so far as to suggest that journalists such as Shireen are “armed” with cameras. The Israeli army eventually had to backtrack and conceded that it was possible that an Israeli sniper could have been responsible.
Yet the Biden administration continues to stand by its July 4 statement, blindly accepting Israel’s incomplete version of events despite a long history of sweeping crimes by its soldiers under the rug.
We wanted to sit down with Biden to discuss this during his recent trip to Israel and the West Bank, and were disappointed when he did not meet with us. So instead, my family traveled to Washington and were encouraged when Blinken agreed to meet with us.
At the meeting, my family reiterated our demand that the United States conduct its own investigation into what happened to Shireen, retract its statement from July 4, and be more open and transparent with us. We also expressed how important it is for us to meet with Biden himself so he can demonstrate that Shireen’s case is a priority for his administration. Blinken acknowledged that the U.S. government has a duty to protect every American citizen and said he was committed to transparency with the family moving forward, but stopped short of committing to opening an investigation or agreeing to our meeting with Biden.
We are not naive; we know that the United States has failed to conduct its own investigations into previous killings of American citizens by Israeli soldiers and that the U.S. government has helped Israel avoid accountability for decades of grave, systematic human rights abuses and violations of international law.
There was no U.S. investigation when an Israeli soldier drove a bulldozer over American peace activist Rachel Corrie, crushing her to death in 2003, as she tried to protect a Palestinian family’s home in Gaza. Israel faced no consequences from the United States when Israeli soldiers raided a ship delivering humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, killing nine humanitarian activists, including 18-year-old Turkish American Furkan Dogan. There has been no accountability for Omar Assad, a 78-year-old Palestinian American who was dragged from his car in the bitter cold of a predawn morning earlier this year by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, bound, gagged and left in an exposed construction site, where he was later discovered dead.
We fully understand the U.S. government’s role in fueling the belief of Israeli leaders and soldiers that they enjoy impunity for their actions. Yet this is why it is all the more urgent for my family to impress this message upon the administration: Biden can stop this pattern. He can pledge to pursue meaningful accountability for my aunt, starting with a commitment to conduct an independent U.S. investigation in Shireen’s case. | 2022-07-27T18:36:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The U.S. must end Israel’s impunity and investigate my aunt’s killing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/shireen-abu-akleh-israel-the-us-must-investigate-my-aunts-killing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/shireen-abu-akleh-israel-the-us-must-investigate-my-aunts-killing/ |
By Keith B. Richburg
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted in 2021 in two separate cases. He was sentenced to jail but is appealing. (Michel Euler/AP)
Now that the House Jan. 6 select committee has laid out extensive evidence of Donald Trump’s malfeasance in spreading the “big lie” and inciting his supporters to insurrection, the key question is whether the former president will face criminal charges for his actions.
The apparent caution by the Justice Department and even some Trump critics to see the former president indicted mostly revolve around the optics and the experiences of other countries; we don’t want to be “mimicking banana republics” that prosecute their former leaders, and where election winners retaliate against the losers. According to this view, our democratic institutions might not survive the trauma of trying a former president who still has millions of loyal followers.
Chirac’s successor and onetime protege, Nicolas Sarkozy, served a single term that ended in 2012, and was convicted in 2021 in two separate cases — one involving illicit wiretapping and the other for illegal expenditure of campaign contributions. He was sentenced to jail but is appealing.
Democracies in Asia have more of a penchant for holding their former leaders legally accountable when out of office. The results have been mixed for the leaders — most have avoided lengthy prison time — but not for the countries’ democratic institutions.
South Korea has seen no fewer than four former presidents charged and convicted after leaving office. The most recent was Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female president who was impeached and later arrested in 2017 for corruption and abuse of power. She was originally sentenced to 25 years, later reduced to 20 years in a retrial, before being pardoned by President Moon Jae-in.
Park’s predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 17 years in prison for bribery and tax evasion, and his conviction was upheld by the country’s Supreme Court in 2020. Two other former presidents, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, were indicted and arrested for corruption after leaving office. Chun, a military dictator, was also charged and convicted of leading a 1979 insurrection.
In the Philippines, former president Joseph Estrada, a popular former action movie hero, was ousted from the presidency in a 2001 uprising, and was later tried and convicted of embezzling $80 million from government coffers. Only after his conviction was he granted a pardon by the vice president who had replaced him, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
Arroyo served until 2010, and she herself was arrested after leaving office, first for “electoral sabotage” and again for misuse of state lottery funds. The first charge was dropped for lack of evidence, and the state’s Supreme Court acquitted her on the latter charge by a vote of 11 to 4.
Estrada and Arroyo also showed that there can still be political life after a conviction, at least in the Philippines. Estrada ran unsuccessfully for another term as president, but he did end up serving two terms as mayor of Manila. Arroyo, meanwhile, was elected to congress even while in detention and later became the Philippines’ first female House speaker.
In Taiwan, former president Chen Shui-bian was found guilty of embezzling diplomatic funds and spent several years in prison before being granted a medical parole in 2015. His supporters staged protests against a case they saw as politically motivated.
South Korea, Taiwan and France are considered free and full democracies on a par with the United States, and the Philippines is listed as a “flawed democracy,” or partially free. Their prosecutions of former presidents hardly dented their democratic standing.
Equally instructive is Malaysia. Former prime minister Najib Razak was convicted and sentenced to a dozen years in prison for massive fraud from a scandal involving a government-backed sovereign wealth fund. Razak, still popular, is out of prison now, campaigning vigorously for candidates around the country and pushing for early elections that would allow him to stage a comeback as prime minister — and importantly stay out of jail.
Malaysia’s democracy looks much weaker and its legal system in question with Razak still a contender for the leadership.
So it’s not the “banana republics” that hold former leaders to account. Stable democracies have indicted and tried former leaders with crimes, and their institutions have proved more resilient for it.
The United States might want to learn from the experience elsewhere and get over its aversion to prosecuting a former president. The case of Trump might be a good place to start. | 2022-07-27T18:36:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Holding presidents accountable for their crimes is what democracies do - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/trump-hold-presidents-accountable-democracies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/trump-hold-presidents-accountable-democracies/ |
Hungary’s Viktor Orban faces outrage after saying Europeans shouldn’t become ‘mixed-race’
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at CPAC. (Valeria Mongelli/Bloomberg)
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is facing backlash after a speech arguing that Europeans should not “become peoples of mixed race,” although the far-right leader is still slated to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas next week.
In the same speech, Orban also appeared to joke about Nazi gas chambers, saying in the context of a European Union proposal to ration natural gas: “the past shows us German know-how on that.”
The comments, made by Orban during an annual address to members of the Hungarian minority in Romania on Saturday, prompted immediate outrage among his critics and unease among some of his supporters. The most consequential fallout so far came on Tuesday, when Zsuzsa Hegedüs, a sociologist and longtime adviser to Orban, submitted a public resignation letter.
The Orbanization of America: How to capture a democracy
“After such a speech, which contradicts all my basic values, I was left with no other choice,” Hegedüs, who is Jewish, wrote to Orban in a letter published by the hvg.hu news site.
Orban’s views on immigration and multicultural societies were no secret: He said in 2015 that Muslims threaten Europe’s Christian identity, and in 2017 his government erected a border fence to keep Syrians and other immigrants out.
But his latest provocation appeared to have hit a nerve in a way it rarely did even at the height of the 2015 immigration influx into Europe.
Hegedüs characterized Orban’s speech as “a pure Nazi text worthy of Goebbels,” and the “racist” culmination of an increasingly “illiberal turn.”
A Hungarian government spokesman denied those accusations, accusing “the mainstream media elite” of “hyperventilating about a couple of tough lines about immigration and assimilation.”
Orban directly addressed Hegedüs in a response, writing: “You can’t be serious about accusing me of racism after 20 years of working together.” He added that his government “follows a zero-tolerance policy on both antisemitism and racism.”
As of Wednesday, Orban was still expected to be a keynote speaker at CPAC.
“Let’s listen to the man speak,” conference organizer Matt Schlapp told Bloomberg, even as criticism of the Hungarian leader mounted.
The International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust survivors was among the organizations that demanded consequences. It criticized Orban’s remarks as “stupid and dangerous” and called on other E.U. leaders to “make it clear to the world that a Mr. Orban has no future in Europe.”
Orban still maintains a tight grip on politics in Hungary, where he was reelected for a fourth consecutive term in April. But his government is increasingly isolated within the E.U., the bloc of 27 member states of which his country is a member.
Hungary has been a major beneficiary of E.U. subsidies, which have continued despite concerns over efforts to undermine independent judges, a free press, political opposition and civil society under Orban’s government. But Brussels has signaled that it plans to take a tougher stance going forward. The E.U. has withheld some payments to the country from a pandemic recovery fund, and a court ruled earlier this year that the bloc can legally withhold broader subsidies if Hungary is found to have violated the rule of law.
Top E.U. court says bloc can withhold billions of euros from Hungary and Poland for violating rule of law
“How long till we cut his funding and power?,” Guy Verhofstadt, an influential Belgian member of the European Parliament, said in response to Orban’s speech.
The foreign minister of Romania, home to a large Hungarian minority, also condemned Orban’s remarks, and European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans tweeted — without naming the Hungarian leader — that “racism is a poisonous political invention.”
Even the countries or leaders that in the past would have jumped to Orban’s defense, including Poland’s main right-wing ruling party, remained silent in the wake of his comments.
The Polish government — once a reliable ally for Orban due to their shared E.U. skepticism — has been increasingly at odds with the Hungarian leader over his stance on the war in Ukraine. Whereas Poland has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine, supplying heavy weapons and hosting millions of Ukrainian refugees, Orban has upheld close ties to Russia.
As most of Europe is rushing to wean itself off Russian natural gas supplies, Orban’s government wants to purchase more of it. Hungary was the only E.U. country to vote against the bloc’s rationing plan on Tuesday, two European officials told The Washington Post. | 2022-07-27T18:40:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Viktor Orban's 'mixed race' comment sparks outrage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/viktor-orban-mixed-race-cpac/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/viktor-orban-mixed-race-cpac/ |
‘Vengeance’ is a startlingly good first film from B.J. Novak
The multi-hyphenate produced, wrote, directed and stars in this sharp black comedy
Boyd Holbrook, left, and B.J. Novak in “Vengeance.” (Patti Perret/Focus Features)
The movie “Vengeance” — a black comedy about cultural arrogance, the opioid crisis, guns, storytelling and the need to, well, get even — marks the feature debut of writer-director-producer B.J. Novak (best known as a writer, director, producer and ensemble cast member of “The Office”). To call Novak’s first feature auspicious would not be wrong, but it’s more than that. “Vengeance” is an arrestingly smart, funny and affecting take on a slice of the American zeitgeist, one in which both the divisions between and connections with our fellow citizens are brought into sharp relief. It’s a terrific yarn, both provocative and entertaining, which might only surprise those who aren’t familiar with Novak’s best-selling children’s book, “The Book With No Pictures.”
Novak also stars here, as journalist Ben Manalowitz, a sometime New Yorker magazine writer and podcaster for the “This American Life”-esque “American Moment,” with a Manhattan-centric view of flyover country to rival the geographic myopia satirized by illustrator Saul Steinberg in his famous 1976 cover for that magazine, “View of the World From 9th Avenue.” When Ben gets a call from the brother of Abby Shaw — an aspiring singer Ben “hooked up” with a few times, in his words — telling him that she has died of an overdose of OxyContin and insisting — inexplicably to Ben — that Abby (short for Abilene) would have wanted her “boyfriend” to attend the funeral, he is given no choice but to agree. Once Ben reluctantly flies out to West Texas and the brother, Ty (Boyd Holbrook), informs Ben that he believes Abby’s death was murder and that the two of them should collaborate to avenge it, violently, Ben hits upon an idea, but only after pitching it to his podcast editor back home (Issa Rae).
Ben will do some interviews and put together a story: perhaps not the kind of investigative exposé Ty expects, but one that looks at Texas, and Abby (Lio Tipton, seen in cellphone video clips and recorded music performances), as symptoms of a deeper malaise. Ty calls that an acceptable compromise. “Once the people on Reddit find out” who the murderer is, he says, “they’ll kill him for us.” But all that Ben has really promised, in his cagey way, is this: to find the person — or, as he carefully puts it, “the generalized societal force” — responsible for Abby’s death, and to “define” it.
It’s a slippery vow, and it suggests, for obvious reasons, that what follows is going to involve an unfairly patronizing caricature of rural American life and the Shaws, including Granny Carole (Louanne Stephens), mom Sharon (J. Smith-Cameron), sisters Paris and Kansas City (Isabella Amara and Dove Cameron), and little brother Mason, a.k.a. El Stupido (Eli Abrams Bickel).
But Novak is too smart for that, and if anyone comes across badly here, it’s Ben, whom Novak is big enough and self-effacing enough to gently ridicule. The supporting cast gets off relatively easy, and includes a remarkable performance by Ashton Kutcher as Abby’s slick and silver-tongued record producer, Quentin Sellers. Quentin is a kind of cowboy poet/philosopher in a 10-gallon hat and embroidered white suit that looks like something made by the late tailor-to-the-country-western-stars Nudie Cohn. Under Novak’s low-key direction, Kutcher never pushes the performance too far. Like the narrative itself, which zigs when you expect it to zag, Quentin is full of surprises.
Superficially, “Vengeance” is a murder mystery, with its share of red herrings, a password-protected cellphone belonging to the victim and a Suspect No. 1: drug dealer Sancholo (Zach Villa), who also turns out to be something other than expected.
If “Vengeance” has a weakness, it’s that it sometimes comes across as a little too written, for lack of a better word. Too often, characters talk in a way that sounds less like themselves than like a guy at the keyboard of a laptop: a little bit Ben Manalowitz and a little bit B.J. Novak.
It’s a small quibble. This is a movie worth seeing, and listening to its unpredictable insights. There’s a running joke in the film: Ben signals his assent, over and over, with the hyperbolic catchphrase “a hundred percent.” Is “Vengeance” a flawless movie? No, but it’s 90 percent perfect.
R. At area theaters. Contains coarse language, drug use and brief violence. 107 minutes. | 2022-07-27T18:53:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Vengeance' is a near-perfect first film by B.J. Novak - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/27/vengeance-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/27/vengeance-movie-review/ |
‘I’ve never cried sitting on a toilet in my entire life’: Access to testing, vaccines and treatment is a challenge for the disadvantaged
People protest during July 2022 in New York City, calling for more government action to combat the spread of monkeypox. (Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)
Two gay friends in New York infected with monkeypox in July fought to get limited antiviral medication to relieve excruciating pain caused by anal-rectal lesions. Sebastian Kohn, who works in health-care philanthropy, prevailed in four days after haranguing his doctor’s office and the local health department.
But his friend Khori Anderson, an undocumented immigrant from Jamaica, gave up after an agonizing week, unable to obtain the drugs because official test results from the city health department were delayed.
“I’ve never cried sitting on a toilet in my entire life. I cried so many tears, I was wailing,” said Anderson, a bartender without health insurance who relies on free clinics. “It’s another reminder of inequities of the health-care system.”
The struggle for limited resources as tens of thousands of at-risk gay and bisexual men try to get vaccinated, tested and treated during the growing monkeypox outbreak has exposed deep disparities in the gay community. While urban professionals scramble to protect themselves from a disease that can cause searing symptoms and force weeks of isolation, people of color, lower-income individuals and those living outside large cities face even greater challenges accessing care for the latest viral threat hanging over gay life.
Monkeypox is the latest global emergency. Here's what you need to know
The Biden administration is weighing whether to declare a public health emergency now that the World Health Organization has deemed monkeypox a global emergency. Anyone can contract the virus, which spreads through close contact, including during sex. But the outbreak, which has infected more than 3,500 Americans, is overwhelmingly concentrated in men who have sex with men, a group that has long endured discrimination by the health-care system.
Some advocates and experts worry that the suffering of gay men, who were stigmatized for their sexual activity and denied treatment during the AIDS epidemic, is once again being dismissed.
Testing was especially limited early in the outbreak, largely dependent upon physicians’ willingness to undergo lengthy consultations with health authorities.
TPoxx, the only antiviral available to treat this disease, is prescribed under limited circumstances because it is not approved for monkeypox. Experts worry that doctors in underserved areas are not equipped to handle the stringent protocols to provide the drug, even after federal officials eased requirements.
And as the country awaits millions of vaccine doses the federal government expects to arrive in coming months, there are not enough shots to protect all sexually active gay and bisexual men with the Jynneos vaccine, believed to work before and after exposure to the virus.
“We are essentially rationing health care,” said Anthony Fortenberry, chief nursing officer at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an LGBT provider in New York City. “Those that are most connected and privileged are able to access those resources.”
Monkeypox dilemma: How to warn gay men without fueling stigma
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has limited visibility into the racial disparities in the monkeypox response, with only a portion of states and cities reporting demographics for cases, testing and vaccinations. Most monkeypox patients are people of color in a sampling of cases where race and ethnicity are known, a CDC official told clinicians Tuesday, with 38 percent White, 32 percent Latino and 26 percent Black.
Black people account for just 17 percent of the 233 patients who received TPoxx, a subset of all recipients where demographic data is available.
Monkeypox causes an illness that lasts several weeks with flu-like symptoms, swollen lymph nodes and a rash that spreads throughout the body. While no fatalities have been reported in the United States, some patients have been hospitalized to manage pain from lesions around the genitals. Experts expect the virus to circulate outside the gay community, noting it can spread inside households and through non-sexual skin-to-skin contact while dancing or cuddling or by sharing contaminated clothing or bedding.
Activists say focusing on equity early on is essential, because they worry pressure on government health agencies to act will wane as the most privileged members of the gay community get vaccinated or treated.
“When the White gays are no longer paying attention to it, they move along because they got theirs,” said Matthew Rose, an HIV activist in D.C. who is Black and gay. “The attention has moved along, the resources moved along.”
As of July 14, Whites in D.C. made up 65 percent of monkeypox cases and 76 percent of the vaccinated.
D.C. shifts monkeypox vaccine strategy to focus on first dose
Gay and bisexual men in most of the country are still waiting to sign up for shots, with only 300,000 doses shipped to states so far. Nearly two dozen states have received fewer than 1,000 vaccine doses from the federal government, and some large cities have received tiny allotments, including 200 in Baltimore.
In Pittsburgh, Nathan Malachowski, a 30-year-old nursing student, worried about contracting monkeypox and having to miss weeks of school and clinical training, along with his bartending income.
But when he tried to learn more about the vaccine, he saw no information on the Allegheny County Health Department website. He called the county immunization clinic July 14, only to be referred to the health department, which, in a dizzying carousel, referred him back to the vaccine clinic.
“My interest was getting ahead of the game. I don’t want to be exposed to it and deal with the pain and associated problems,” said Malachowski, who is White and identifies as queer.
Allegheny County health department officials said they were able to successfully field hundreds of other calls asking for monkeypox information. The department recently launched a webpage about monkeypox and has retrained staff to prevent others from experiencing the runaround Malachowski endured. Malachowski called back and on Monday was among the first to get one of the limited vaccine doses available to those without a confirmed exposure.
Health officials acknowledge parts of the monkeypox response have been inequitable and are trying to dramatically ramp up testing and vaccination and increase access to therapeutics for disadvantaged populations.
“We are moving quickly, but the criticism is important and we need to hear it,” said Demetre Daskalakis, a CDC official who has been coordinating with LGBT groups on the monkeypox outbreak. “All equity concerns are completely valid.”
Biden monkeypox response mirrors early coronavirus missteps
Even those with access to money and health care have felt abandoned during the outbreak, contending government and health officials have failed to respond to the suffering of gay men with urgency.
Aaron Backman, a White 33-year-old San Francisco tech recruiter, said he has struggled to get doctors to take his monkeypox case seriously even though he developed throat lesions that made eating even a piece of banana feel like razor blades slicing his throat. He said he received conflicting information from his doctor’s office and local health officials about whether he would qualify for treatment, which he never received.
“I feel like public health doesn’t really care if gay men die or not,” Backman said.
In North Carolina, a White Durham resident said a doctor who examined lesions around his mouth in early July quickly dismissed monkeypox as a potential diagnosis even though he had risk factors as a gay man with recent travel and high-risk sexual activity in Europe, where the outbreak started.
The 29-year-old university researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his medical privacy, said he had to call state and local health officials to pressure them to authorize a monkeypox test, which came back positive.
He called the state’s top public health official, Kody Kinsley, to share his frustrations about his ordeal and press him on how less-savvy patients could advocate for themselves.
“It’s the folks with lack of access and lack of experience and lack of chutzpah perhaps that always fall off the margins, and that is the kind of cornerstone battle of health equity we are always fighting,” Kinsley told the patient, who provided a recording of the call to The Washington Post.
In an interview, Kinsley said North Carolina’s monkeypox cases are disproportionately among Black men who have sex with men. As the state receives more monkeypox vaccine doses, officials plan to set up clinics at historically Black colleges and universities. “We need to make sure those vaccines are getting in the arms of people most at risk,” Kinsley said.
First cases of monkeypox reported in U.S. children
Local leaders in early monkeypox hot spots with large gay populations, including New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D), have been placing pressure on the Biden administration to provide more monkeypox vaccine doses, in a testament to the growing political power of the LGBT community.
The United States lagged behind other countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, in proactively vaccinating gay and bisexual men against monkeypox.
The first 300 appointments for vaccine doses in D.C. were booked in less than 15 minutes after the online portal went live in late June. A San Francisco LGBT organization had nearly 2,000 eligible people on its waitlist in early July, when it had only 90 doses from the federal government. Los Angeles has restricted eligibility for vaccine doses to those who are taking daily medication to prevent HIV, have been diagnosed with gonorrhea or early syphilis within the past year, or recently had sex at a public venue.
New York City was the first city to allow sexually active gay and bisexual men, not just those with confirmed exposures, to sign up for vaccination appointments ahead of the city’s Pride celebration in late June. Some advocates criticized the approach as favoring the privileged who were able to wait in line for hours in the middle of the workday on the first day shots became available at a clinic in Chelsea, an upscale historically gay neighborhood in Manhattan, or spending hours on overloaded websites and on hold with clinics trying to book an appointment. City health officials have since set aside appointments for referrals from providers caring for high-risk patients in an attempt to vaccinate more people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Henry Philyaw, a 42-year-old Black bartender and freelancer writer in Brooklyn, turned to what he described as a “Black queer underground railroad of assistance,” an informal network of men sharing leads about how to get shots. He was able to schedule his vaccination at a Harlem clinic after getting the direct phone number of a person booking appointments. When he arrived for his first dose in mid-July, Philyaw found a striking contrast between the staff administering the shots, who appeared to be exclusively people of color, and the people getting the shots, who looked mostly White.
Philyaw said he’s trying to help close that gap by directly messaging dozens of queer Twitter followers of color to help them score appointments, too.
“Me working with a network of other people of color to get vaccination appointments is working, but it really sucks we have to do that,” said Philyaw, who is also at higher risk for serious complications from monkeypox because of a weakened immune system from HIV.
Nearly 800,000 monkeypox vaccine doses on track to arrive by end of July
Health providers in other parts of the United States are looking to avoid what they saw as an inequitable rollout of the vaccine in New York.
Seeing the reports of heavily White crowds in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods in New York, a major AIDS services organization in the Atlanta area decided to prioritize its existing patients, who are mostly Black and Latino, for its first vaccine clinics over the broader public. Local data had shown monkeypox cases in Georgia were disproportionately among people living with HIV.
“Not everyone shares the same level of vulnerability, at least at this point,” said Justin Smith, who oversees the monkeypox vaccination efforts for Georgia’s Positive Impact Health Centers, “so we have to think about who has the most potential to be experiencing harm.”
Jenna Portnoy and Dan Diamond contributed to this report. | 2022-07-27T19:02:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Monkeypox exposes inequities within gay community in vaccine access - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/27/monkeypox-gay-men-vaccine-treatment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/27/monkeypox-gay-men-vaccine-treatment/ |
Coronavirus vaccination record cards in Philadelphia on Dec. 16, 2020. (Rachel Wisniewski for the Washington Post)
It can’t be emphasized often enough that the vaccines against the coronavirus pandemic, in particular the mRNA vaccines, proved a triumph over adversity that saved millions of lives, thanks to years of investment in basic research, advances in genomics and other disciplines, massive federal aid, and productive cooperation among policymakers, scientists and the private sector. That feat was completed not long ago — but we need to do it again.
As professor Eric Topol at Scripps Research pointed out, the virus that the vaccines targeted in December 2020 is not the one we face today. At the outset, vaccines were highly efficacious, breakthrough infections or reinfections were rare, and the virus didn’t seem to be gaining more immune evasion or transmissibility. “We were prevailing over the virus,” he said. But mutations brought omicron, including the present subvariant, BA. 5, with the “highest fitness, growth advantage, and immune evasion since the pandemic began.” While vaccines plus boosters offer protection against serious illness and death, the evolving virus seems to be one step ahead of the sheriff. Simply chasing each new variant with a booster is not a smart or sustainable strategy.
What’s needed are next-generation vaccines that induce broader and more durable protection against known variants and the unknown. President Biden, quite optimistically, promised in his State of the Union address this year to be ready to deploy a new vaccine against a new variant in 100 days. Though Operation Warp Speed, under President Donald Trump, took less than a year to produce the first vaccines, the long and difficult history of vaccine development suggests humility is in order. But a discussion at the July 26 White House summit on next-generation vaccines offered a window into the future.
Even as viruses mutate, they often have a “conserved” region, a spot that remains the same. This is a promising target; a vaccine that effectively hits it will continue to work against future variants. Another approach is to build a vaccine that can induce an immune response against the virus even as its spike characteristics evolve. Anthony S. Fauci said the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he leads, has awarded some $42.8 million to four academic institutions to advance broadly protective vaccines.
While vaccine injections provide a strong overall protection, there are tantalizing alternatives. The advantage of a next-generation inhalable vaccine would be to set up a nasal barrier blocking transmission where the vaccine particles enter the body. Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale biology professor, told the summit, “This is akin to putting a guard outside of the house in order to patrol for invaders, compared to putting the guards in the hallway of a building in the hope that they would capture the invader.” Yet another technology described to the summit is a patch with very tiny needles that deliver the vaccine efficiently without pain.
The new ideas face scientific, developmental, manufacturing, financial and regulatory hurdles, and must clear clinical trials. But the government would be wise to do everything possible to help. The Fauci “ouchie” was just short of a miracle. Now we need another. | 2022-07-27T19:02:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Coronavirus vaccines were a near miracle. We need another. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/covid-vaccines-next-generation-needed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/covid-vaccines-next-generation-needed/ |
A gun industry insider’s powerful testimony is cause for despair
At a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, Ryan Busse, a former gun industry insider who regularly speaks out about the decisions and tactics that flooded America with military-style rifles, put up a photo of a banner from a recent gun show.
It depicted a Revolutionary War soldier firing an AR-15. The caption read, “Gear for your daily gunfight.”
It is this kind of marketing that turned the AR-15 into an enormous cash cow for the industry. As a new report from the committee demonstrates, this weaponry is generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales, with marketing tactics aimed at young men anxious about their masculinity.
Busse’s testimony and the information the committee gathered showed just how committed the gun industry — and the Republican Party — have become to putting military-style weapons into civilian hands, no matter how many lives it costs. But they also showed that undoing what has been done, or even stopping it from getting worse, will be next to impossible.
Right now a bill to outlaw new sales of military-style weapons is moving through the House; the Judiciary Committee approved it on a party-line vote last week. President Biden endorsed a ban.
As Busse testified, the industry markets AR-15s by telling people they can “use what the special forces guys use,” and by getting guns featured in movies and first-person shooter video games. Busse said: “The industry condones frightening marketing that openly partners with domestic terror orgs like the Boogaloo Bois, a group that hopes for race wars and wears Hawaiian shirts."
And the committee’s report does show how one company sells an AR-15 adorned in a Hawaiian shirt pattern, called the “Big Igloo Aloha” rifle. “Big Igloo” is a social media variation of “Boogaloo."
Given that the idea of an assault weapons ban is quite popular, one might think it would have a chance of being enacted, especially considering the endless AR-15 mass shootings. But even if it could pass Congress — a difficult proposition at best given lock-step Republican opposition — the industry and its GOP allies have an insurance policy.
To people throughout most of the world, the idea that in America almost anyone can walk into a store and walk out with a military-style rifle is insane. But gun advocates have created facts on the ground ensuring that this reality cannot be undone.
First, consider the politics. As Busse noted, it was only after the assault weapons ban included in the 1994 crime bill expired in 2004 that gun manufacturers realized the riches that awaited them if they got into the AR-15 business. While before only a few companies produced these guns, today around 500 such companies do. By some estimates as many as 24 million AR-15-type weapons are now in circulation.
Which means a ban on new manufacturing and sales would have a limited effect — and you can forget about confiscating ones people already own. The industry used its marketing and sales acumen to create an AR-15 constituency where one hadn’t existed before.
In D.C. v. Heller, the 2008 case that created an individual right to own guns, Justice Antonin Scalia homed in on a single line from a 1939 case about Revolution-era militia members having weapons “in common use at the time.” Scalia elevated this to a standard for use in the future to judge whether a particular weapon must be protected, even though military-style weapons were not at issue in that case.
Nor were they at issue in the recent Bruen decision that struck down laws restricting people carrying guns outside the home. But Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision mentioned the “common use” phrase seven separate times.
This is how the facts on the ground now work. The gun industry has made the AR-15 “common." Therefore, no matter how many children are slaughtered with it, that means it must enjoy constitutional protection.
One hears this argument often within the gun world. You see it in an exchange during a Judiciary Committee debate over the assault weapons ban. “Would anyone on the other side dispute that this bill would ban weapons that are in common use in the United States today?” asked Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “That’s the point of the bill,” answered the chair, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.). “The problem is they’re in common use.”
To gun advocates, that’s case closed: AR-15s are common, so they can’t be banned. While the Supreme Court’s conservatives have yet to apply this interpretation of the Second Amendment to AR-15s specifically, the gun industry and its allies clearly think that’s where they’ll come down.
“No one from the industry is going to stop it," Busse testified. "And it’s going to get much worse.” | 2022-07-27T19:02:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Gun industry whistleblower's testimony is cause for despair - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/gun-industry-whistleblower-testimony-despair/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/27/gun-industry-whistleblower-testimony-despair/ |
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A Maryland state legislator who recently lost his primary for reelection has been charged with felony theft and other charges related to the misuse of state funds, officials said Wednesday.
Impallaria facilitated rental payments from the Maryland General Assembly to his personal landlord using funds for a “district office” that was actually a building outside of his district, officials said. The building, which was used to store the delegate’s personal items, was located next door to his personal cottage and shared the same owners, the prosecutor’s office said.
The legislature paid double the amount of rent for Impallaria’s “district office” than any other tenant in the community on average, the prosecutor’s office said.
From July 2012 through May 31, 2022, the state paid $92,800 in rent for the “district office,” according to the prosecutor. During that time, Impallaria didn’t pay rent for his neighboring cottage that shared the same landlords, prosecutors said.
“Elected officials are expected to be good stewards of the State’s resources,” Howard said in a news release. “Any official who abuses the public trust for personal gain must be held accountable.” | 2022-07-27T19:02:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland lawmaker charged with felony theft, other charges - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryland-lawmaker-charged-with-felony-theft-other-charges/2022/07/27/3f5b2a04-0ddb-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryland-lawmaker-charged-with-felony-theft-other-charges/2022/07/27/3f5b2a04-0ddb-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
Washington Commanders QB Carson Wentz, right, greets WR Terry McLaurin on the first day of training camp on July 27, 2022. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Carson Wentz got an early jump on it during organized team activities and minicamp, and he got an even better feel for it during a brief trip to California earlier this month.
“Early on for me, it’s just finding that timing and chemistry with guys,” Wentz said. “You get a little bit of it in the spring, you get a little bit of it in the summer on your own. But now that you’re out here against the defense … just understanding guys and how they get in and out of breaks, in and out of cuts, finding that chemistry so I can get the ball out on time where it needs to be and just start working that chemistry with these guys — that’s really the focal point for me early on. But then also just building that culture, that chemistry, with all the guys both on and off the field.”
“What he does on a day-to-day basis will tell me everything I need to know about him,” defensive tackle Jonathan Allen, a team captain, said. “He came in, he worked, he involved himself with the team, and he’s exactly what we want from a quarterback. So I have no questions. … He’s given me no reason to doubt him at all.”
Why Ron Rivera believes Carson Wentz can be Commanders’ long-term answer
But among Wentz’s biggest tests, largely because of his past, will be building that connection with his players — on the field and off.
“For me, this is year seven. Things are different,” Wentz said. “I’m a little older and have a little different perspective, and [it’s a] relatively younger team, younger locker room. So just how do you build relationships? … Every locker room looks different, but you just have to be intentional and build that chemistry and that relationship in time. There’s a lot of good dudes in there, and it’s been fun getting to know them.”
“We're not going to throw him out right away and have something happen,” the coach said. “We want to make sure there's nothing lingering. So I'd almost call that an abundance of caution.” | 2022-07-27T19:03:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carson Wentz, Commanders' new QB1, settles in at start of training camp - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/carson-wentz-commanders-camp/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/carson-wentz-commanders-camp/ |
Toronto’s Caribbean Carnival enters its 55th year with masquerade parades, steel-pan drums and street food
By Natalie Preddie
Masqueraders at Toronto's Caribbean Carnival festival in 2019. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press/AP)
Since its beginnings as a small parade in 1967, Toronto’s Caribbean Carnival has become one of the world’s largest celebrations of Caribbean culture. Titled Caribana until 2010, it annually attracts more than a million spectators with island-style parades, parties, food and music. Beyond the annual long weekend, which starts Thursday, there is now a month full of activities.
Carnivals are celebrated throughout the Caribbean on Emancipation Day Weekend (typically the first weekend in August) to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. In Toronto, it provides both a cultural and artistic connection between Canadians and Caribbean culture.
A local's guide to Toronto
My father, Russell Preddie, smiles when he thinks back to attending the first Caribana in Toronto. As a Jamaican immigrant, seeing so many Caribbean people in one place gave him a sense of identity and validation. At that time in Canada, he said, “you didn’t hear this music on the radio. You didn’t have this food in the store. All of the islands came together. It was a transportation of culture and a relief from the discrimination that made us feel invisible.”
Ontario is home to more than half of Canada’s Black African and Caribbean population, and 37 percent live in the province’s capital of Toronto. Although some immigration took place in the late 1700s, most of the people who left the Caribbean for Canada arrived in the latter half of the 20th century.
Between 1955 and 1967, the West Indian Domestic Scheme brought more than 3,000 young Caribbean women to Canada. The program was created to fill the domestic void left by women entering the workforce. After one year of domestic work, Caribbean immigrants were eligible to sponsor their family’s emigration.
These women suffered low pay, long hours and strenuous work to eventually receive citizenship. They faced hostility and racism as they attempted to find housing, further their education or change jobs. Race-based immigration laws changed in the 1970s, allowing many more West Indians to immigrate to Canada. These migrants established Caribbean communities, predominantly within Toronto and Montreal, and changed the shape of these cities forever.
“All of the islands came together. It was a transportation of culture and a relief from the discrimination that made us feel invisible.”
— Russell Preddie on attending the inaugural Caribana in 1967
In its 55th year, North America’s largest Caribbean Carnival continues to celebrate Canada’s strong connection with the Caribbean diaspora. “Now more than ever, we need a place to honor diversity, celebrate emancipation and self-expression, and to be together again,” said Laverne Garcia, the executive chair of the Toronto Caribbean Carnival,
This year’s theme is ‘Embrace the Carnival in you,’ inviting attendees to don colorful costumes, dance to steel-pan bands, and indulge in jerk chicken, fried festivals, patties, and Trini doubles. There are also nighttime cruises, dancehall club nights and family-friendly zones where kids can enjoy the party.
What to see at Toronto’s Caribbean Carnival
Kiddies For Mas
Carnival kicked off earlier this month with the Junior King & Queen showcase: Kids 12-and-under show off colorful costumes in the hopes of being crowned. The children’s parade is a week later, filling the streets of East Toronto with music, kids in exciting costumes and the debut of the junior royals.
King and Queen Showcase
On Thursday, this quest for the Carnival crown is a spectacular display of imagination and pageantry with more than 50 costumes, all different interpretations of the Carnival theme. Unique headdresses made of jewels and feathers, bejeweled bras that snake around the body, sparkling bangles and colorful feathered wings will parade past a panel of judges and a cheering crowd. Male and female competitors are judged on the detail of their costumes, their creativity and how that costume represents the Carnival theme. At the end of the night, the King and Queen are crowned. They will lead the Mas band in the Grand Parade on Saturday.
This is the magical main event. On Saturday, along Lakeshore Avenue West, sprawling Exhibition Place will fill with more than 10,000 masqueraders in vivacious costumes, drumming, DJs and dancing. From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. along Toronto’s waterfront, you can enjoy Caribbean foods, delicious drinks and stages hosting more live musical performances.
Carnival Flavours
This Sunday celebration is new to the Toronto Carnival roster. Held on the Toronto Exhibition grounds, the event will have every type of Caribbean dish you could dream of, including oxtail, chicken roti, rice and peas, and sahenna (spinach fritters). There will also be live music and vendors selling Toronto Carnival souvenirs. Prepare to indulge.
OSA: Pan Alive
Steel pan is a musical tradition associated with the islands, particularly Trinidad and Tobago. These pans, initially created from oil drums, dustbin lids and frying pans, represent a resistance against colonial powers that attempted to restrict aspects of the island’s Carnival celebration in the early 20th century. On Friday, the Ontario Steel Pan Association will host a night filled with live performances that showcase the instrument’s many rhythms.
Daylit at Cabana Pool Bar
Every year, Toronto’s largest patio and pool bar throws one of the festival’s best parties. Previous artists have included DJ Khaled and French Montana, and the former has already been spotted in the city.
Friday, July 29, 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Set It Off at Roy Thomson Hall
Hosted by BET and NYC radio station Power 105.1, this party kicks off the weekend with the best in hip-hop, reggae, soca, R&B and trap.
Friday, July 29, 10 p.m. to close
Toronto Caribana Boat Party at Queens Quay
This boat cruise is for you and 1,000 of your closest friends. Every year, this massive party cruise plays club anthems, hip-hop, dancehall, and mash-ups. Both events always sell out, with tickets starting from $47 ($60 CAD).
Friday, July 29, 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.; Saturday, July 30, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Elite on the water at Empress of Canada
This night cruise has sold out 8 years in a row, and this year will be no different. Playing hip-hop, R&B, reggae and soca on Lake Ontario, take in the beautiful Toronto skyline while you wine your waist.
Sunday, July 31, 9:30 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Young Money Reunion at Budweiser Stage
Toronto rap superstar Drake will perform with Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj in the finale of three shows for October World Weekend. He’s promoting the festival as the “Road to OVO Fest Tour,” which he used to regularly host during Carnival weekend. The festival includes a Thursday group show at the History venue for “All Canadian North Stars” of hip-hop and a Friday show at the Budweiser Stage with Chris Brown and Lil Baby.
Monday, Aug. 1, 7 p.m.
Where to find Caribbean culture year-round
When Caribbean migrants arrived in Toronto, many settled in the Eglinton Avenue West area, and it soon gained the title ‘Little Jamaica.’
The ’80s were the community’s glory years: Reggae and soca filled the streets, grocery stores carried yams, plantains and bammy from home, and you could get hair products that were unavailable elsewhere in the city. Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff are among the famous musicians that have visited here, strolling what is now called “Reggae Lane.”
Last year, the area was designated an Ontario Heritage Site, which means that many of the stores, restaurants and businesses will get support to help curb the effects of gentrification and the pandemic.
This community is still very much alive. Monica’s Beauty Salon has been the place to buy cosmetics and hair products since the ’80s, and the team at Ther’s Salon are the best at cold straightening and braids.
Cafes and restaurants, such as Treajah Isle and Judy’s Island Grill, and barbershops including the Barbers of Eglinton continue to host classic reggae nights, show live music, and provide venues for community discussions and workshops. You can get some late-night jerk chicken at Rap’s restaurant, a Toronto institution.
From Aug. 26-28, Little Jamaica will present Sinting Fest, a family-friendly celebration of Jamaican music, vendors, dance and, of course, food. This electric avenue is the essential Toronto destination for a taste of the islands.
CaribbeanTales Film Festival
This Black-owned and led registered charity has been working toward inclusivity in Canadian media for over 16 years. It focuses on connecting multiethnic communities through education and workshops, running a Creators of Colour Incubator, and providing a platform to showcase Black filmmakers. It also manages international distribution for Black films and has recently launched its own production arm.
The CaribbeanTales Film Festival takes place every September and celebrates the talents of Black filmmakers of African and Caribbean descent. This year, CTFF takes place Sept. 7-23.
Toronto Black Film Festival
The Toronto Black Film Festival is held every February as a part of Black History Month activities. The festival highlights the best in Black filmmaking and creates a space to discuss cultural, social and socioeconomic issues. Here, unique voices within the independent film industry can explore their own culture while educating the wider Canadian community. The program features filmmakers of African, Caribbean and African Canadian descent. | 2022-07-27T19:04:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Caribbean Carnival 2022: Where to dance, party and eat in Toronto - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/27/toronto-caribbean-carnival-guide-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/07/27/toronto-caribbean-carnival-guide-history/ |
As a cancer patient, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ frees me from my mental prison
Perspective by Gene Park
(Washington Post illustration; CD Projekt RED)
I was diagnosed with cancer in early June. For some reason, since then, I haven’t been able to stop playing CD Projekt Red’s “Cyberpunk 2077,” a story about how you must navigate or defy terminal illness.
The terminal illness facing V, the game’s protagonist, is the all-but-certain erasure of their soul. Their personality, memories and cognitive functions are being overwritten by an artificial intelligence, Johnny Silverhand, a rocker and branded terrorist brought to virtual life by Keanu Reeves. They can only deny or accept their fate; either grasp at some way to sever their connection as Silverhand takes over, or leave this world on their own terms.
But V isn’t a real person. They’re just a video game character, and I, as the player, choose their fate — not the game’s script and code, and certainly not Keanu Reeves. Since my cancer diagnosis, my male V (you can choose the protagonist’s gender) has roamed the streets of “Cyberpunk 2077′s” Night City, carefree and blissful, willfully ignorant — by my choice — of his death sentence.
It wasn’t always this easy to be carefree in Night City. The game’s infamous release in December 2020 redefined the term “cyberpunk” to mean “unfinished, buggy and unplayable video game.” As I wrote in my final review of the game in 2021, “Cyberpunk 2077” used to barrage the player with phone calls and notifications about new activities, with the resulting information overload destroying any sense of spatial immersion, and strangling the pace of the game’s otherwise compelling narrative arc.
Report: Video games keep getting longer. It’s all about time and money.
This older, more unpleasant version of “Cyberpunk 2077” reminds me of my current situation. My phone is constantly buzzing with concerned texts and phone calls from friends, family, ex-girlfriends, former co-workers and long lost acquaintances. Everyone talks about the myriad challenges of cancer, but one of the least discussed is the emotional burden placed on the patient as they navigate, soothe and buckle under the overwhelming grief projected by their loved ones. I value and often need the support and concern from my family and friends, but there’s the lingering sense that none of this would need to be said if not for my cancer. Words meant to soothe me often just remind me that I’m fighting for my life.
Five months ago, developer CD Projekt Red released its 1.5 update, which brought along a host of stabilization fixes, new features, and most importantly to me, the ability to ignore those carping in-game texts and phone calls. The promise of a streamlined experience after the 1.5 patch, paired with my excitement over Netflix’s “Cyberpunk Edgerunners” anime series in September, invited me back to the experience. In the days leading up to my first chemotherapy session, my mind was an anxiety-ridden mess. But now I’ve learned to accept turning my phone on silent and keeping the screen face down as I play “Cyberpunk 2077” for hours a day, a sort of 1.5 patch on my own life.
Today, I face the relentlessly exhausting reality of battling cancer, a fight that consumes every hour, if not every minute of my day. As a cancer patient, I feel pulled in so many directions that I’m hardly in control of my life: doctors constantly filling my schedule with appointments, checkups and follow-ups; a home care nurse who visits me twice a week; my family asking for updates, and grappling with their own trauma since my diagnosis; and hundreds of friends offering to help while feeling and (let’s face it) being helpless.
But in “Cyberpunk 2077,” I can ignore my character’s death sentence. As in other open-world games, there’s no “Game Over” screen for ignoring the main campaign. I can play how I like, ignoring the corruption trying to kill my character from the inside, while remaining immune to any fallout from that decision.
Critiques of the narrative correctly chide “Cyberpunk 2077” for failing to establish any strong motivation for its protagonist to engage in anything else but saving their own life. Why is V helping police stop gang activity when they need to save themselves instead? What’s the point of all this money being collected? Why buy a new car when any day could be their last?
Why put off responding to a loved one’s desperate and pleading text as if tomorrow is promised?
It’s when I asked myself this question that I grew to appreciate V’s disregard toward saving his life. With nothing more than existence at stake, my V lives every day stubbornly refusing to engage with the fact that it may be their last — a waking daydream of chasing ever more dreams. It’s this context that helps me, a possibly dying man as well, appreciate “Cyberpunk 2077” more than any other open-world game when it comes to achieving my specific power fantasy.
In real life, ignoring my diagnosis is not a luxury I can afford. My cancer is aggressive, and I will be aggressively fighting back over the next few months. I pray that I can be rid of it by the end of 2022. I’m only at the beginning of the nightmare; it’ll be some time before I can wake up to any semblance of a normal life.
Even after dozens of hours of playing “Cyberpunk 2077” since my diagnosis, and several drafts of this essay, I am not much closer to understanding my sudden fascination with this title given my current predicament. I should be triggered by this game. It’s an aggressive reminder of terminal illness.
Yet this game compels me in ways it never did before — and in ways no other game has been able to in 2022. This compulsion extends beyond my playtime: I have bought the “Cyberpunk 2077” Secret Lab gamer chair, the “Cyberpunk 2077” soundtrack on Apple Music, the “Cyberpunk 2077” art book and comics, and two Dark Horse “Cyberpunk 2077” action figures. I never felt caught up in the nine-year marketing hype cycle for this game. Yet here I am, a few years out from release, spending money on the brand like an uncritical fan.
Even my text alert sounds and ringtones are ripped straight from “Cyberpunk 2077.” Creating them for iPhone was a first for me: It meant learning to use GarageBand just to satisfy this strange and all-encompassing desire to live in the world of “Cyberpunk 2077.”
Maybe it really is all the little improvements CD Projekt Red made to the game for its 1.5 update, which include: Cars that react to real-time events and feature suspension, giving them a sense of real weight in this virtual world; side quests that offer so many rewarding short stories, letting me live through an electronic cyberpunk-version of “One Thousand and One Nights”; a reworked skill system that makes character evolution more meaningful; and deeper interactions through friendships, which can be ignored but are there if I need them.
Perhaps it’s the way “Cyberpunk 2077,” whether intentionally or not, leans into genre tropes, so effortlessly echoing famous boyhood works of art from the ’80s and ’90s like the groundbreaking anime “Akira,” or David Fincher’s “Fight Club.” After all, V is essentially the “Fight Club” protagonist who’s aware of his Tyler Durden (now played by Keanu Reeves rather than Brad Pitt, however).
Here’s a confession: I often fall asleep to old presentations by Steve Jobs, as he announces industry-changing products like the iPod, iPhone, iPad or iCloud. He’s a skilled marketer, in that many people believed in his conviction that these technologies would change the world. It’s easy to see in hindsight how much that change has come to both help and hurt, but the innocence of that early faith comforts me and lulls me to sleep.
“Cyberpunk 2077” is often criticized as not really offering any real vision of the future, but now I understand that it was never meant to represent any sort of future. “Cyberpunk 2077” is the future as it was seen from our past. It’s when we still believed flying cars were a possibility.
Maybe I, as a 40-year-old man, take comfort in how modern technology is repackaging a catalogue of old and outdated counterculture, all from my youth, a time of my life when I truly felt immortal and ageless, when tomorrow felt guaranteed — even if that, too, was just a dream.
Why do we enjoy games that make us work? Proficiency, control, fairness, escape.
None of this is to say that I am giving CD Projekt Red a belated pass on how the company mishandled this game’s launch. Most egregious are the attempts at deceiving consumers and journalists, withholding the nigh-unplayable PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game until after release. I still stand by what I wrote last year: CD Projekt Red’s marketing of the game, and the final release, turned them from industry darlings to its most renowned liars. The studio promised a “dream game,” an experience that would fulfill so many fantasies for so many people. That’s not what they released.
But in 2022, I would be the liar if I said I wasn’t enjoying wrapping myself in CD Projekt Red’s messy, juvenile electric dream. It fulfills the ultimate promise of the video game medium, the power fantasy of overcoming challenges and achieving some kind of emotional, tangential fulfillment, all without serious consequence. “Cyberpunk 2077” is helping me create the most valuable memories I can from this awful moment in my life.
“Cyberpunk 2077” is not a dream game, but it’s an experience that still feels like some kind of dream, even if I can’t fully understand or explain it. For me, that’s all a video game ever needs to be. | 2022-07-27T19:04:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As a cancer patient, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ frees me from my mental prison - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/27/cyberpunk2077-cancer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/07/27/cyberpunk2077-cancer/ |
Son said he wants another man to be his dad. Carolyn Hax readers give advice.
Carolyn Hax (The Washington Post)
Dear Carolyn: I divorced my ex-husband because he was unwilling to co-parent in any way, even though when we were engaged he always said how much he was looking forward to being a dad. When our oldest was born, the child-rearing was 75 percent on me, and that went to 100 percent after our twins came along and I stopped working full-time.
When he wasn’t golfing or playing softball, my ex spent his time at home watching TV while I was taking care of everything child-related. I felt better after the divorce since at least I didn’t have to be confronted daily by his neglect of our children. Recently, though, I’ve been seeing a man who has two young children, and though we haven’t met each other’s children yet, when I hear about how involved a dad he is, I feel sad that my children will never have a dad who builds blanket forts with them, reads to them, or even takes them out to toss a football around. But my friend once told me this is “their normal,” so they don’t really know what they’re missing. Turns out — not true.
The other day, our neighbor who does after-school care for my kids called to ask me if everything was okay between them and my ex. My 7-year-old son had told her that he wished her husband was his dad and asked her if there was any way that could happen. I feel so bad for him, but I don’t know what to do. Do I need to get my son, or maybe all three children, into therapy? Should I try talking to my ex about this? Push for family therapy? What’s my next move?
Concerned Parent: I’m so sorry that your ex-husband had a very different idea of being a father than what he led you to believe when you were engaged. Unfortunately, his behavior seems to indicate that reaching out to him wouldn’t be productive; he went through a whole divorce rather than step up.
Your family therapy idea is sound, since at least one of your children is aware that his father has rejected the family. They deserve to feel seen and heard in a constructive environment, and you all deserve help in finding a way forward together after this man chose to opt out of your lives. Even after therapy, “their normal” might not be precisely what they wanted, but you can craft a new normal with them that reassures them that they are so loved even though their father is mostly out of the picture.
I hope you might also consider solo therapy, so that you will have the tools to ensure that future romantic relationships you have will be a positive addition to your children’s lives, should you reach the point of introducing them.
Concerned Parent: As truly difficult as this is, this seems “normal” for a child your son’s age who has experienced something like this. Just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s okay or easy, but given what you’ve shared, I don’t think you need to be alarmed. You can say something empathetic like “Joe is a really nice guy and it makes sense you would want someone like that in your life. It’s okay to feel sad that your dad isn’t in your life.” You can empathize without making any promises or working on solutions, since I’m guessing just validation would go a long way.
You can ask your son if he would like to be in therapy for a place to talk about these feelings, but please don’t force him if he doesn’t want to go. I work with a lot of kids who were forced to be in therapy and later avoid therapy as adults because they had such a bad experience as a kid (yes, kids that young can not want to be in therapy). Therapy for you could be helpful if you’d like support navigating these conversations. You also have a lot of feelings (of course you do! You’ve been really strong in a hard situation) and a therapist could give you space for this as well. Wishing you the best!
— Sending good thoughts your way
Concerned Parent: Lots of kids wish their parents were different in some way, so this is a great opportunity to start a conversation with your son to ask him what he’s thinking. You may find that there are some things on his wish list that can be fulfilled by you or another caring family member, friend, coach, etc. Of course, there’s no substitute for his father’s attention, but you can’t change your ex’s behavior. Demonstrating care for your son’s feelings sends a powerful and lasting message that his feelings are important to you.
— Silver Spring Mom
Concerned Parent: Unfortunately, I can relate to your children. I also have a dad who is uninterested in any sort of parenting or involvement in my life. I think you have already taken some amazing steps toward advocating for your children. You left him, and that shows them that his behavior was unacceptable. I would suggest the next step is to talk to them about it. Ask them how they feel, and acknowledge and validate their feelings. Verbalize that they deserve a dad who is able to show up for them, AND that they can count on you to show up for them. And part of your non-negotiables for a future partner can include a dedicated parent. Regardless of biology, the person that consistently loves and shows up (physically, mentally, emotionally) for the children is the person they consider their parent.
I would advise against pushing your ex to spend time with them. As someone whose mom consistently pushed my dad to spend time with me, even as a child I could tell, and his lack of interest was obvious and ultimately hurtful. | 2022-07-27T20:02:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Son said he wants another man to be his dad - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/27/carolyn-hax-son-another-man-dad/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/07/27/carolyn-hax-son-another-man-dad/ |
Berkshire Hathaway-owned lender settles redlining case for $24 million
The Department of Justice says the agreement with Philadelphia-based Trident Mortgage resolves discrimination claims in three states
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, left, greets Jacqueline C. Romero, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, before a news conference on July 27 regarding Trident Mortgage Co. Trident discriminated against potential home buyers of color in the Philadelphia area, the Department of Justice said. (Alejandro A. Alvarez/AP)
A Philadelphia mortgage lender owned by Berkshire Hathaway has agreed to pay $24 million to resolve lending discrimination claims in three states, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday, in what prosecutors have called the second-largest “redlining” settlement in the agency’s history.
Trident Mortgage Co. failed to provide mortgage lending services to neighborhoods of color in the Philadelphia metro area, which includes neighborhoods in Camden, N.J., and Wilmington, Del., from at least 2015 to 2019, federal officials said. The company engaged in a host of discriminatory practices, such as concentrating offices in majority-White neighborhoods and excluding qualified families from receiving credit. The complaint alleged that loan officers and other employees sent and received work emails containing racial slurs and demeaning references to communities of color, the department said.
“This settlement is a stark reminder that redlining is not a problem from a bygone era,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the department’s civil rights division, in a statement Wednesday announcing the agreement. “Trident’s unlawful redlining activity denied communities of color equal access to residential mortgages, stripped them of the opportunity to build wealth, and devalued properties in their neighborhoods,”
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, Trident’s parent company, said in a statement that it strongly disagrees with the agencies’ interpretation of Trident’s prior lending practices. “Trident and any affiliated companies have never denied or discouraged access to mortgage loans or other services based on race,” the company said, adding that it is committed to serving home buyers in every community where it operates.
Redlining means 45 million Americans are breathing dirtier air, 50 years after it ended
Redlining is an illegal practice used to deny equal access to home loans, often because of the racial characteristics of an applicant’s neighborhood. In the 1930s, government surveyors graded neighborhoods in more than 200 cities, color-coding them green for “best,” blue for “still desirable,” yellow for “definitely declining” and red for “hazardous.” The “redlined” areas were the ones local lenders discounted as credit risks, in large part because of the residents’ racial and ethnic demographics. Though outlawed more than 50 years ago, studies show its consequences have been far-reaching, from depressing home values to spurring poverty and to exposing marginalized residents to higher levels of pollution.
As part of the agreement to resolve the allegations, Trident will invest more than $20 million to increase credit opportunities in neighborhoods of color in the region, the department said. Because the company no longer operates a lending business, it will contract with another company to provide loan subsidies and services to the affected communities in and around Philadelphia, Camden and Wilmington. Trident also agreed to pay a $4 million civil penalty.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland created an initiative within the Justice Department last year to combat redlining, joining with other agencies to tackle new iterations of housing discrimination.
Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It’s still hurting minorities today.
The DOJ and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau conducted a joint investigation of Trident’s practices, with help from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and in coordination with the attorneys general of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
One of the largest public companies in the world, Berkshire Hathaway is led by investor Warren Buffett, whose acquisitions and investment strategies have long been studied by corporate executives and market observers. The Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index puts his personal fortune north of $99 billion. | 2022-07-27T20:11:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Berkshire Hathaway-owned lender settles redlining case with DOJ for $24 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/27/berkshire-hathaway-trident-redlining/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/27/berkshire-hathaway-trident-redlining/ |
An Afghan woman with a child begs for alms on a roadside in Kabul on July 27. (EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Women in Afghanistan have faced an onslaught of violence and human rights abuses since the Taliban’s return to national power less than a year ago — and the “scope, magnitude and severity” of violations are “increasing month to month,” according to a new report by Amnesty International.
The 98-page report was released Wednesday and relies on interviews with more than 100 women, girls, staff members at detention centers, experts and journalists, collected by researchers abroad and on the ground over nine months. The report reveals the extent to which the Taliban has limited the freedoms of women and girls by imposing harsh, arbitrary, punishments — from forcibly detaining women for appearing in public without a male chaperone, to physical and psychological torture in confinement.
The rights group documented accounts indicating a dramatic increase in child marriages and marital rape since the Taliban’s takeover. In some cases, the report says, the Taliban told survivors of domestic violence they would be sent to shelters, but imprisoned them instead.
“Once you go to the prison, it’s a big deal,” she said. “You have no dignity afterward because everyone will say you were raped.”
The Taliban’s “draconian policies are depriving millions of women and girls of their right to lead safe, free and fulfilling lives,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in the report.
Upon seizing the capitol, the Taliban were quick to shutter schools for girls. Although they were meant to reopen in March, the Taliban’s Ministry of Education issued a last-minute reversal that banned girls beyond the sixth grade from returning. Images and videos of young women and girls crying outside their schools circulated on social media and local television.
“Taken together, these policies form a system of repression that discriminates against women and girls in almost every aspect of their lives,” Callamard said. “Every daily detail — whether they go to school, if and how they work, if and how they leave the house — is controlled and heavily restricted.”
Since taking de facto authority, the Taliban has imprisoned dozens of women’s rights activists, restricted access to education for women and girls and barred women from going to work because of their potential proximity to men.
Amnesty International interviewed witnesses in Afghanistan who said that women who peacefully protested the discrimination were met with harassment and beaten — in apparent violation of international law, the group alleges.
Afghanistan is enduring a grinding humanitarian crisis, compounded by the Taliban’s rise to power last summer. The majority of the world cut formal diplomatic ties and slashed international aid, plunging millions of Afghans deeper into poverty and hunger. Last month, a devastating earthquake struck a remote region in the country’s east, killing more than 1,000 people and displacing many more. | 2022-07-27T20:11:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Violence against Afghan women rampant under Taliban, new report finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/afghanistan-women-taliban-rights-violence-amnesty-international/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/afghanistan-women-taliban-rights-violence-amnesty-international/ |
Financial security remains elusive for too many disabled people
Maryland resident Aaron Kaufman is a disability rights advocate who has been trying to change that
Sometimes people speak to Aaron Kaufman as if he were a child.
The pitch of their voices rise, and they slow their words to make sure he understands them.
“Are you helping Mommy get bread today?” a grocery store clerk once asked him.
At the time, Kaufman was in his 20s and attending the University of Maryland. The question annoyed him but didn’t surprise him.
“People automatically assume when you have cerebral palsy that you have an intellectual disability,” Kaufman, who is now 35, said. “I often have to gently educate people.”
In Washington, when legislation moves forward, it is usually lawmakers who get quoted. They get the credit. But anyone who has ever paid close attention to the legislative process knows there are many hidden figures behind each advancement. There are people who have participated in formal and informal meetings, and shared their stories over and over, to help individuals who hold the power to enact change understand the need for it.
Kaufman is one of those people. For years, the Maryland native has been working behind the scenes to push for legislation that will offer more financial security to people with disabilities.
“Sometimes when I go to Capitol Hill, people get really big eyes,” he said. “They’re shocked to see someone in a walker, because there is a societal perception that people with disabilities can only achieve the four F’s — food, flowers, filing and filth.”
To change stigmas and stereotypes, he said, people “need tools and support to help them flourish, and that’s what I do every day — advocate for the tools.”
This week, the country celebrated the 32nd anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Across social media platforms, people shared encouraging posts about how they have benefited from the ADA. Many also noted that there was much more work to do.
It just takes talking with Kaufman to see that disability rights go far beyond the physical accessibility issues many people associate with the ADA. It’s easy to see how a lack of ramps or broken elevators keep disabled people from accessing a space. More complicated are the ways systems have been designed to keep them from earning and saving enough money so that they can live more independent lives.
I write often about disabilities and poverty, and that has placed me in the unique position of witnessing time and again those two issues overlap. Being born with a disability should not condemn a person to a life of begging for services and worrying about how much they can save before those services are taken away — but too often it does. Disabilities also grow from poverty. I have interviewed more than a few parents whose children developed disabilities from housing conditions they couldn’t afford to escape.
When I spoke to Kaufman, he reminded me of a statistic I had heard before: Disabled Americans are twice as likely to be poor as those without disabilities. But he also offered reason for optimism.
One piece of legislation that he and other disability rights advocates have been pushing for — the ABLE Age Adjustment Act — recently saw a significant victory. For the first time since it was introduced in 2016, the act passed through a congressional committee. The Senate Finance Committee voted unanimously for it June 22, bringing it closer to becoming law.
The legislation, introduced by Sens. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan), would allow more than 6.1 million Americans with disabilities, including 1 million veterans, to open ABLE — which stands for “Achieving a Better Life Experience” — accounts that offer them a way to save money without losing vital federal disability benefits.
“This will remove barriers to economic independence for millions of Americans, giving people the option to open their own businesses, save for retirement, purchase the technology they need and so much more,” Casey said in a statement after the committee vote.
Kaufman pushed for the legislation as the senior manager of Legislative Affairs at Jewish Federations of North America. But for him, the issue is also personal.
Both he and his brother, who has a disability and lives in a group home, have ABLE accounts.
They were able to open them after the ABLE Act passed in 2014, allowing people who acquired their disability before the age of 26 to open an account. The ABLE Age Adjustment Act would extend that age to 46.
“The way the law is written is if you get diagnosed after your 26th birthday, you’re out of luck,” Kaufman said. “You step on an IED in Afghanistan, and all of a sudden you’re in a wheelchair. How are you going to pay for that?”
A person’s insurance may cover some items, such as a wheelchair, but not all the repairs for that chair or a wheelchair-accessible van or extra physical therapy, he said. “It’s so expensive to live with a disability,” he said.
He doesn’t receive Supplemental Security Income, but his brother is among the millions of disabled Americans who do, and Kaufman has been advocating for them on another issue that was recently introduced as legislation. In May, Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced the Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would allow people who receive Supplemental Security Income to increase their savings without affecting their disability benefits.
“If you are a single person on SSI, you cannot have more than $2,000 in your bank account, and if you’re married person on SSI, you cannot have more than $3,000,” Kaufman said. That amount has not been updated since the 1980s, when he was a child. “What it does is it traps people in poverty.”
Virginia is still failing people with disabilities, say families who are pleading for lawmakers to ‘see’ them
It also keeps qualified people out of the workforce. Kaufman said he has a friend who has a bachelor’s degree but is not working because she is worried her savings account will surpass $2,001 and she will lose needed disabilities services.
The act would increase the asset limit to $10,000 for a single person and $20,000 for a married couple.
Kaufman knows that most people would rather avoid thinking about the financial security issues he spends his days focused on. But he also knows the stakes, and he hopes people will keep pressure on legislators to pass these measures and more.
Fixing broken elevators is not enough. Fixing broken systems is also needed. | 2022-07-27T20:24:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Financial security remains elusive for many disabled people - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/disability-rights-financial-security/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/disability-rights-financial-security/ |
She was 12 and behind the wheel before a fatal crash. Her family asks why.
Josseline Molina Rivas, 12, was in the fifth grade, her family said. (Stephano Rivas)
After news emerged that a 12-year-old was behind the wheel of a car before a crash that left the girl dead and her stepfather in the hospital, the case immediately raised questions about why the fifth-grader left home around 2 a.m. and was even driving a car at all. It’s a mystery that the family of Josseline Molina Rivas continues to grapple with as they mourn the girl.
“At no time did it cross my mind that the girl could be driving a car,” said Stephano Jese Rivas, 30, Josseline’s uncle, in Spanish. “She was a 12-year-old student without experience driving. It’s so sad.”
The girl was driving at about 2:08 a.m. on Broken Land Parkway, south of Cradlerock Way in the Columbia, Md., area with her stepfather Mario Arturo Artiga, 36, in the passenger seat of a Toyota Corolla, according to Howard County police and her family.
The car went off the road “for an unknown reason” and crashed into a tree, police said in a statement.
Josseline was pronounced dead at the scene. Her stepfather was taken to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center in critical condition, according to police.
Her uncle said the family is still trying to understand how and why his niece was driving the car.
Rivas said police told them the car lost control. Arturo Artiga lived in an apartment with Josseline and her mother along with another uncle in Columbia, according to Rivas.
The girl and her mother moved from El Salvador several years ago, Rivas said. Josseline was very close to her younger cousins and they played together often, her uncle said.
“Almost every weekend we would gather together as a family. My father raised us to stay together,” Rivas said. “My little niece really loved my daughters. She was very fun, she would play with my daughters. She was a funny, cheerful and an intelligent person.”
The tragedy took the family both in the United States and El Salvador by surprise.
“We are immigrants and we weren’t prepared for this kind of pain. Our family here and our family there is suffering after hearing the tragic news,” Rivas said.
Authorities are investigating whether drugs or alcohol were involved in the case, police said. They believe speed was a factor in the fatal crash.
As of Tuesday evening, police have not filed charges in the case, Howard County Police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn said in an email. An investigation is ongoing.
Josseline’s mother, who has high blood pressure, was unable to speak on the phone, Rivas said.
“There is little that she can say,” said Rivas. “She’s been passing out throughout the day after hearing about the tragedy.”
Grecia Maria Rivas told Telemundo 44 on Monday that she was sleeping when she noticed her daughter, who was sleeping by her side, was gone along with her car keys. Rivas told the station she doesn’t know where they were going and why.
As they wait for the autopsy results, the family is financially struggling to cover the funeral expenses that they estimate will be about $20,000.
“We don’t have the money to give our niece a decent burial,” Rivas said. | 2022-07-27T20:24:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Josseline Molina Rivas, 12, was driving before a fatal crash left her dead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/girl-12-crashes-car-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/girl-12-crashes-car-maryland/ |
This illustration photo shows a Mega Millions lottery ticket in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)
Who will win the $1 billion Mega Millions jackpot?
It’s one of the biggest questions in America after a winning ticket with all six numbers was not sold for Tuesday night’s $830 million drawing, increasing the next jackpot Friday to an estimated $1.025 billion, the third-highest total in the game’s history. The Friday jackpot has an estimated cash payout of $602.5 million, according to Mega Millions, after 29 consecutive draws have come and gone without a winner matching all six numbers since April 15. The nationwide interest surrounding the 10-figure jackpot even crashed Mega Millions’ website for more than two hours Tuesday night.
“We look with anticipation on the growing jackpot,” Ohio Lottery Director Pat McDonald, the current lead director of the Mega Millions consortium, said in a Wednesday news release. “Seeing the jackpot build over a period of months and reaching the billion-dollar mark is truly breathtaking. We encourage customers to keep play in balance and enjoy the ride.”
McDonald added, “Someone is going to win.”
But as players rush to pick up their Mega Millions tickets and dream big — the odds of matching all six numbers are roughly 1 in 330 million — another popular question is again front and center for those already making unrealistic plans for their hypothetical $1 billion victory: What would you do if you won the lottery?
A history of past lottery winners shows a wide range of what players do with their winnings. Many have paid off debts, bought homes and invested their money, while others have put the cash toward building water parks, gambling in Atlantic City or starting women’s professional wrestling organizations. Some adjusted to life as a multimillionaire. Others say the joy and thrill that came from the unexpected sudden wealth soon turned to bad choices and sadness — and ruined their lives.
“When you immediately realize you’ve won, you’re filled with excitement. You’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing, my life is going to change,’ ” said Robert Pagliarini, who is president of California-based Pacifica Wealth Advisors, and has worked with lottery winners. “That’s immediately followed by anxiety and fear — ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing? How will I handle this? My life may change and maybe not in a good way.’ ”
Friday’s jackpot is just shy of last year’s $1.05 billion Mega Millions jackpot won by a single ticket shared by four members of a suburban Detroit lottery club. If no winning ticket is selected Friday, the Mega Millions jackpot will inch closer to the record $1.5 billion prize that a South Carolina player won in 2018. The player, who also chose to remain anonymous, opted for the lump sum of more than $877 million, according to the South Carolina Education Lottery Commission.
Millions of players are expected to buy $2 tickets for this week’s Mega Millions, which is played in 45 states plus Washington and the U.S. Virgin Islands. There were more than 6.7 million winning tickets at all levels for Tuesday’s drawing, according to Mega Millions, including nine tickets with winnings ranging between $1 million to $3 million each.
With the increased interest in the $1 billion jackpot and the spike in tickets sold, it will become more likely that one person, or multiple people, will have a winning ticket after Friday’s drawing, said Mark Glickman, a senior lecturer of statistics at Harvard University.
“The big difference is when these jackpots get to be larger and larger, more people will play so there’s more of a chance someone is going to win,” Glickman said. “But that’s not to say any individual person will have an improved chance. Once the pot gets up to this range, there are enough people playing that odds are someone is going to pick the right number.”
When players have picked the right lottery numbers, mostly all of them pay off their debts or look to buy homes for themselves or their loved ones, Pagliarini said. He recalled one client his splurging on a new home in the Malibu area that overlooked the Pacific Ocean.
Some have celebrated their wealth through investments and nontraditional purchases or donations. In 2011, John Kutey and his wife, Linda, used some of his $28.7 million share from the winning Mega Millions ticket of $319 million he bought with co-workers to put toward building a water park in Green Island, N.Y., in honor of their parents, according to the Albany Times Union. Louise White won a Powerball jackpot in Rhode Island of more than $336 million after she had purchased a rainbow sherbet in 2012, and started a trust for her family named after the dessert, “The Rainbow Sherbet Trust,” ABC News reported.
Just this month, Crystal Dunn took her smaller winnings of more than $146,000 from a Kentucky Lottery online game and gave some of it away to strangers in the form $100 grocery-store gift cards.
But for every feel-good story of unlikely lottery triumph, there are other experiences that highlight why it matters to have a financial adviser and attorney ready to help if someone does win the big one, Pagliarini said.
“There are so many stories of these lottery winners who end up with less money than when they started,” he said. “The big question, and fear, is, ‘Am I going to blow it all?’ And they still just might blow it all.”
After Evelyn Adams improbably won the New Jersey Lottery in both 1985 and 1986, winning more than $5.4 million total, her winnings were completely spent by 2012 because of gambling in Atlantic City and investment mistakes, according to Forbes. South Carolina native Jonathan Vargas, who was just 19 when he won a $35.3 million Powerball prize in 2008, put his winnings toward Wrestlicious, a women’s professional wrestling promotion that he founded. The show, which featured scantily-clad performers who also did sketch comedy, lasted just one season and cost Vargas almost $500,000, according to CBS News.
“If I had to do it all over again, I would recommend people just sit on it for a year,” he said in 2016. “Really decide what they want to do with it.”
While stories of lottery luck have been well-documented over the years, the endings to those tales have varied.
He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
Not long after William “Bud” Post won a Pennsylvania Lottery jackpot of $16.2 million in 1988, his brother was arrested for hiring a hit man to kill him for the inheritance. Post was later successfully sued by an ex-girlfriend for a share of the winnings, and was $1 million in debt by the time he died in 2006.
“Everybody dreams of winning money, but nobody realizes the nightmares that come out of the woodwork, or the problems,” he said in 1993.
In the case of Ronnie Music Jr., the $3 million that he won from a Georgia Lottery scratch-off game in 2015 was put toward purchasing and distributing crystal meth. He pleaded guilty in 2016 to investing in a drug ring and was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
Despite the unlikelihood of winning this week’s $1 billion jackpot, and the history connected to some winners who’ve cashed in, it isn’t stopping people from wondering “what if?” Pagliarini is planning on going to the store to get two tickets for him and his daughter, while Glickman, the Harvard professor, will keep using his strategy of picking Mega Millions numbers entirely at random.
If he were to win, Glickman said he’d like to buy a vacation home in La Jolla, Calif., where he just returned from vacation. But Glickman is honest in recognizing his history of playing the game means that he, like millions of others, will have to hold off on those lottery dreams a bit longer.
“When I played last week, I had one ticket that I think cashed in at $10 — and that’s the most I’ve ever won,” he said. “I go into this knowing full well that luck will not shine on me.” | 2022-07-27T20:29:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As Mega Millions hits $1 billion, past lottery winners show the money can bring heartache and pain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/mega-millions-billion-jackpot-winners-happiness/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/27/mega-millions-billion-jackpot-winners-happiness/ |
Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik were named permanent "Jeopardy!" co-hosts on Wednesday. (AP)
According to a statement from executive producer Michael Davies, viewership numbers were up with Bialik and Jennings as hosts; more than 27 million viewers tuned in each week. “When you consider that almost every other show in broadcast television and syndication is declining, this has been a quite remarkable season: we’re the most-watched entertainment show on all of television," Davies wrote.
Jennings is set to host from September’s Season 39 premiere through December, during which time Bialik will host “Celebrity Jeopardy!” on ABC. She will take over for Jennings beginning in January. Both will host additional “Jeopardy!” content as well: the first-ever Second Chance competition and the Tournament of Champions for Jennings, and “Jeopardy! National College Championship” and other new tournaments for Bialik.
Confounded by all the ‘Jeopardy!’ winning streaks? You’re not alone.
Bialik and Jennings were announced as temporary “Jeopardy!” hosts in September after former executive producer Mike Richards stepped down in response to controversy over his past offensive comments. | 2022-07-27T20:33:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings named permanent ‘Jeopardy!’ hosts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/27/jeopardy-mayim-bialik-ken-jennings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/07/27/jeopardy-mayim-bialik-ken-jennings/ |
Justice Thomas bows out of teaching fall seminar at GWU law school
Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at a Heritage Foundation event Oct. 21, 2021, in Washington. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas has canceled plans to teach a seminar this fall at George Washington University’s law school, a few weeks after the private university in the nation’s capital had defended the conservative jurist’s position on its faculty.
The GW Hatchet, a student newspaper, first reported Thomas’s withdrawal from the fall teaching assignment Wednesday, citing an email that his longtime co-teacher, Judge Gregory E. Maggs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, sent to students enrolled in the class.
“Unfortunately, I am writing with some sad news: Justice Thomas has informed me that he is unavailable to co-teach the seminar this fall,” Maggs wrote, according to the Hatchet. “I know that this is disappointing. I am very sorry.”
The university confirmed the report. “Justice Thomas informed GW Law that he is unavailable to co-teach a Constitutional Law Seminar this fall,” a university spokesperson said. “The students were promptly informed of Justice Thomas’ decision by his co-instructor who will continue to offer the seminar this fall.”
Maggs, through an assistant, referred questions to the university. Thomas did not immediately respond to messages left with the Supreme Court’s public information office.
Thomas, on the high court for more than 30 years, has taught at the D.C. law school since 2011. His position there as a lecturer drew controversy this summer after the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that had established a constitutional right to abortion.
Thomas joined with the majority in the June 24 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. He also wrote a concurring opinion that the court should reconsider past rulings grounded in legal reasoning similar to what the court developed in Roe, including decisions protecting rights to same-sex marriage and access to contraception.
Afterward, thousands signed a petition that called for Thomas to be removed from the law school faculty.
University leaders resisted those demands, saying June 28 that they “steadfastly support the robust exchange of ideas and deliberation” and that “the university will neither terminate Justice Thomas’ employment nor cancel his class in response to his legal opinions.”
GWU defends Thomas appointment amid calls for removal from law school
But one GWU law professor, Jonathan Turley, called Wednesday’s development “deeply concerning.” Turley lamented what he called a “cancel campaign” at the university.
Maggs, a former clerk for Thomas and for retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, has told students the class will go forward. “The seminar has not been canceled but I will now be the sole instructor,” Maggs said in the email the Hatchet obtained. “For those of you still interested in taking the course, I assure you that we will make the best of the new situation.” | 2022-07-27T20:33:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Clarence Thomas won't teach at George Washington University in fall - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/27/clarence-thomas-gwu-law-seminar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/07/27/clarence-thomas-gwu-law-seminar/ |
‘Anonymous Club’ takes a peek inside the mind of Courtney Barnett
The Australian singer-songwriter is the more-than-slightly-reluctant subject of Danny Cohen’s documentary
Courtney Barnett in “Anonymous Club.” (Oscilloscope/Film Camp)
The low-key music documentary “Anonymous Club” — ostensibly a portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett — kind of feels like a movie about someone who doesn’t really want to be in a movie. This is fine, and probably appropriate. Barnett is known to be publicity-shy, to put it euphemistically, so it’s no surprise there aren’t many moments when she sits down in front of filmmaker Danny Cohen’s camera and answers questions. There are, however, snippets here and there of interviews she has given to, say, a radio station or some other media outlet. (Cohen, a friend of the musician, has shot some of Barnett’s music videos and seems to know her well — well enough to have had the good idea to give her a voice recorder on which Barnett maintains a kind of audio diary over the three years during which the film was shot.)
The bulk of the film, which is divided into chapters with such wry titles as “You Must Be Having So Much Fun” and “I Just Can’t Yell Anymore,” consists of Barnett traveling, performing, interacting with fans, working on songs and engaging in such downtime activities as visiting a guitar maker’s studio. She doesn’t talk about relationships at all, or her hopes and dreams all that much, although there are times when someone asks her about, for example, her experience of panic attacks and depression.
Mostly, the insight the film provides into those things comes from her songs, of which there are — blissfully, for her many fans — plentiful examples. At one point, Barnett reads from her website, on which she had invited the public to post how they feel. (Her second studio album is called “Tell Me How You Really Feel” and includes tracks that range from the self-explanatory “Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence” to the deceptively upbeat “City Looks Pretty.”) A lot of the respondents comment that they feel alone, Barnett notes, adding, with her signature sense of delicious irony, “Maybe they’re not so alone.”
And that’s one of several points in “Anonymous Club” when Barnett’s art shines for what it is: a kind of mirror held up to people who, from time to time, may feel the kind of blues she does and who find, in the singer’s punky poetry, something that reminds them they are part of a large but anonymous club.
Unrated. At the Bryant Street Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Contains some coarse language and mature thematic material. 83 minutes. | 2022-07-27T20:33:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Anonymous Club': A portrait of singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/27/anonymous-club-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/07/27/anonymous-club-movie-review/ |
Christopher Shea, Washington Post editor, dies at 53
At The Post, he assigned and edited hundreds of pieces that reflected his voracious consumption of politics, social science and popular culture
Christopher Shea in 2018. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Christopher Shea, a Washington Post editor who specialized in assigning and editing news essays and analysis for the Outlook section in print and PostEverything section online, died July 24 at a hospital in Washington. He was 53 and a resident of Silver Spring, Md.
His sister, Nancy O’Driscoll, said he had depression and died by suicide.
Mr. Shea was described by his sister as an intellectual who was drawn to books and ideas and was less animated by the prospect of traditional beat reporting. He joined The Post in 2018 after a year running the Perspectives section at Vox.com in Washington and an earlier career contributing to the opinion and reviews sections of the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal.
At The Post, he assigned and edited hundreds of pieces that reflected his voracious consumption of politics, social science and popular culture.
“A favorite of his, after Trump impeachment defenders said attempting a crime is itself no crime, was a remembrance by the former ‘Simpsons’ show-runner who had famously skewered this notion in the voice of Sideshow Bob,” former Outlook editor Adam Kushner wrote in a tribute. “He routinely asked people with whom he disagreed to write for Outlook. At every meeting, he had ideas about who would enliven the coverage — a parent who smoked pot with her teenage son, a musicologist who dove deep into Lou Reed.”
Mr. Shea scoured academic journals, obscure blogs and publishers’ seasonal book list while on the hunt for lesser-known but intriguing writers who might contribute essays. Kushner noted that Mr. Shea was generous in time spent elevating novice prose and detangling technical jargon from experts unaccustomed to writing for a mainstream publication — but that even he had his limits when it came to hopelessly elliptical writing.
“That submission,” he once tartly noted of a piece, “is more artful than readable.”
Christopher Thomas Shea was born in Hartford, Conn., on Jan. 26, 1969, and grew up in Simsbury, Conn. His parents worked at Cigna insurance, his mother in the compensation department and his father as chief legal counsel in the retirement and investment division.
After interning at the Philadelphia Inquirer and graduating in 1991 from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in English, Mr. Shea spent six years as a writer and editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education. He was later a contributing editor at Lingua Franca, a now-defunct publication about academic life, among other jobs.
His marriage to Rachel Hartigan ended in divorce. In addition to his sister, of Newton, Mass., survivors include his companion of three years, Amanda Perez of Falls Church, Va.; a son from his marriage, Will Shea of Silver Spring and Takoma Park, Md.; and his parents, Judith Shea of Haverford, Pa.; and Thomas Shea of Simsbury. | 2022-07-27T20:34:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Post editor Christopher Shea dies at 53 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/27/christopher-shea-washington-post-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/27/christopher-shea-washington-post-dies/ |
The sitcom, which depicted an idyllic suburban American household, became a cultural touchstone of the baby-boom generation
Tony Dow in the late 1950s.
“Leave It to Beaver,” airing from 1957 to 1963, depicted an idyllic suburban postwar American household and became a cultural touchstone of the baby-boom generation. Hugh Beaumont was the handsome, ever-patient father, Ward Cleaver, and Barbara Billingsley played the glamorous and understanding matriarch, June, who vacuumed in high heels and always tucked her boys into their beds.
The sitcom began on CBS but appeared for most of its run on the third-place ABC network and never was a big ratings success. But thanks to its gentle, wry humor and an appealing ensemble cast, it thrived in syndication far longer than more popular family sitcoms of that era, including “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best” and “The Donna Reed Show,” TV scholar Robert Thompson has noted.
With his light-brown hair, electric-blue eyes and the athletic build of a championship diver — which he was before joining the show — Mr. Dow was promoted as a teen heartthrob and received more than 1,000 fan letters a week at the sitcom’s peak. Years later, Mathers recalled Mr. Dow was much like his “cool” character: soft-spoken, suave and possessed of gymnastics skills that he showed off by walking up and down a flight of stairs on his hands.
Finding that options for a former child actor were limited, Mr. Dow was making a living on the dinner-theater circuit in the 1970s. One producer, mounting a Kansas City, Mo., production of the swinging-bachelor farce “Boeing, Boeing,” had the idea of reuniting Mr. Dow and Mathers. To their shock, they met with packed and wildly enthusiastic audiences for weeks.
Anthony Lee Dow was born in Hollywood on April 13, 1945, and grew up in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles. His mother was a onetime Mack Sennett “Bathing Beauty” who became a body double for silent-movie star Clara Bow and, briefly, a stuntwoman in westerns. His father designed, built and remodeled houses.
After production of “Leave It to Beaver” ended, Mr. Dow studied painting and psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, played dramatic and comedic guest parts on various TV series, and appeared on a daytime teenage soap opera called “Never Too Young.” But after he joined the National Guard in the mid-1960s, he said, his career stalled. Not knowing when he might be ordered to report for active duty made it almost impossible to make acting commitments.
Referring to a popular police show, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I did one ‘Adam-12’ — I think because I was the only actor in town at that time with short hair.”
Turning away from acting to focus on other art forms also helped. He had modest success as a sculptor, with work appearing in galleries and international exhibitions. Starting with “The New Leave It to Beaver” in 1988, Mr. Dow also began a career as a TV director, and his credits included episodes of “Babylon 5” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”
“I could never understand the reaction that Jerry or I would get from people,” Mr. Dow told the Kansas City Star in 2003. “Then I was on a plane once and I walked by this guy, and he looked really familiar to me. I asked a stewardess, ‘Who’s that guy?’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s [Harlem Globetrotter] Meadowlark Lemon.’ And the biggest smile came across my face.
“All of a sudden I realized what it is,” he continued. “I mean, I don’t know what it is — but it happened to me. I just got that warm feeling and smiled and thought, ‘You know, that’s really cool.’ ” | 2022-07-27T20:34:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tony Dow, the all-American Wally on ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ dies at 77 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/27/tony-dow-leave-to-beaver-wally-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/27/tony-dow-leave-to-beaver-wally-dead/ |
Eight Jan. 6 hearings later, Republicans still mostly just shrug
Rioters breach the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (John Minchillo/AP)
It’s rare for the American public to be exposed to as lengthy and detailed an investigation into a political actor as it has been during the hearings held by the House select committee probing the Capitol attack. Over the span of more than 16 hours of hearings this year, evidence has been presented of a broad effort by the sitting president of the United States to retain power. That effort culminated in the Jan. 6 attack, but the riot was not its sole component, as the committee has shown through documentary evidence and testimony.
The question all along was the extent to which the public’s views of Donald Trump’s effort to stay president would be changed by the committee’s work. Might the committee be able to convince non-Democrats of Trump’s culpability for the worst elements of that day? Could it persuade Republicans to see Trump’s efforts as unacceptable?
New polling from CNN, conducted by SSRS, suggests that views of Trump within his party have eroded a bit since the hearings began. Overall, though, many Republicans don’t see Trump as having done anything wrong — and a plurality still somehow believe the purported predicate for Trump’s objections, that there’s solid evidence the 2020 election was stolen.
There does appear to be some anecdotal evidence that Republican primary voters are wary of chaining themselves to another Trump candidacy. In CNN’s poll, about 1 in 10 of those who didn’t want to see the party nominate Trump again said it was because he was so divisive or controversial. That group grew from 49 percent of Republican primary voters (Republicans and Republican-leaning independents) in a February CNN poll to 55 percent in the new one. In other words, Republican primary voters went from being split on having Trump as their candidate to preferring someone else by an 11-point margin.
A decline! But one worth considering in the context of how Democratic primary voters shifted on President Biden.
Compared with Biden, Trump’s still wildly popular with his party.
In addition to working toward eroding his political support, the Jan. 6 committee has been trying to make a case that Trump violated the law in his efforts to retain power. In CNN’s poll, just under half of Americans think Trump acted illegally in his effort to retain power. More than three-quarters say he acted either illegally or at least unethically. Forty-five percent of Republicans, though, think he did nothing wrong.
Of course, Republicans are also less likely to say they’re tracking the Jan. 6 hearings closely, as the CNN poll reinforces. (Fox News has declined to broadcast the two that were held in prime-time and often blanketed coverage about the hearings with Trump-friendly conversation.) So, asked if Trump could have done more to curtail the violence on Jan. 6, the subject of the most recent hearing, 55 percent of Republicans said he could, compared with 77 percent of Americans overall.
Republicans are also sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen. While the percentage of Republicans saying there’s solid evidence that Biden didn’t win in 2020 has dropped significantly since CNN’s poll in September, a plurality still hold that position. Only about a third think Biden legitimately won.
This has been a common defense of Trump: If he really thought the election was stolen, why shouldn’t he try to retain power? The answer isn’t complicated — there was no reason for him to think that — but the former president was very effective at inculcating with his party the idea that perhaps it was. His incessant efforts to present the results as suspect are at this point close to GOP orthodoxy.
Asked if the Republican Party should be accepting of a candidate who believes the election was stolen, just under three-quarters of Republicans (and Republican leaners) said the party should be accepting of them. That was a higher percentage than the group that said the party should be accepting of candidate who said the election was legitimate.
In other words, respondents were more likely to suggest that the GOP should embrace those who deny the reality of the election than those who accept it.
None of this is to say that the hearings have had no effect. More Democrats and independents see American democracy as being on shaky ground since the hearings began, perhaps a function of the committee’s casting the effort to oppose election results as an ongoing threat.
Republicans, though, are much less likely to express concern about the threat to democracy than they were in February. Where they exist, those concerns have generally been centered on election security, not on Trump’s behavior.
At some point in the next few months, it’s expected that Trump will announce a bid for the 2024 Republican nomination. It’s possible that his candidacy will do what he’s so far been able to avoid: spur members of his own party and of the right-wing media universe to criticize him openly for his post-election behavior.
It is also possible that, upon his announcement, he’ll be the front-runner, and his opponents will be wary of criticizing him at risk of alienating his base. This has been Trump’s successful strategy for avoiding criticism from his party since 2015. As this poll shows, it promises to be a successful strategy moving forward. | 2022-07-27T20:34:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Eight Jan. 6 hearings later, Republicans still mostly just shrug - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/eight-jan-6-hearings-later-republicans-still-mostly-just-shrug/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/eight-jan-6-hearings-later-republicans-still-mostly-just-shrug/ |
First Snooki, now Little Steven: Fetterman trolls Oz with N.J. celebrities
Mehmet Oz, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, speaks at a primary night election gathering in Newtown, Pa., on May 17. (Ted Shaffrey/AP)
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, is using some of New Jersey’s most popular names to troll his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz, who is better known as a Garden State resident.
Oz has reportedly lived in New Jersey for three decades and primarily resides in a mansion overlooking the Hudson River in the affluent town of Cliffside Park. Fetterman is intent on making sure as many Pennsylvania voters as possible are aware of this.
The lieutenant governor released an ad Wednesday featuring musician Steven Van Zandt, a guitarist in the famed Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and the character Silvio Dante in HBO’s award-winning, New Jersey-based series “The Sopranos.” In the ad, Van Zandt warns Oz that he does not want to mess around with Fetterman and should come back to his home state.
“Whaddaya doing in Pennsylvania?” he asks. “Everybody knows you live in New Jersey. And you’re just using your in-law’s address over there.”
“So come on back to Jersey where you belong,” Van Zandt adds. “And we’ll have some fun, eh?”
Earlier this month, Fetterman released an ad featuring reality star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” jabbing at Oz for leaving his “home” in New Jersey. Fetterman tweeted the ad with the words “Jersey will not forget you!”
“Personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to leave Jersey because it’s, like, the best place ever,” Polizzi said in the clip. “And we’re all hot messes.”
The Oz campaign had no immediate reaction to the latest ad. | 2022-07-27T20:34:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | First Snooki, now Little Steven: Fetterman trolls Oz with N.J. celebrities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/fetterman-ad-new-jersey/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/27/fetterman-ad-new-jersey/ |
Commanders head coach Ron Rivera began his third training camp with the franchise on Wednesday after a summer of off-field controversies for Washington. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
As the clock passed 8:15 on Wednesday morning and players trickled onto the field, rays of sun began burning off the clouds. It had been another dark and stormy offseason for the Washington Commanders, but with the addition of a few key pieces and a pretty friendly schedule, some on the football side of the organization harbored cautious optimism.
The opening of this year’s training camp felt different from those in the past. The team has a new name, logo and quarterback, and for the first time since 2013, it is at home in Ashburn rather than at the facility in Richmond. Coach Ron Rivera held his pre-practice rightsholder radio interview with an iHeartMedia classic-rock station, WBIG BIG 100, instead of the sports-talk hub WTEM The Team 980. The crowd of fans was smaller, and it lacked the grinning rogues of Richmond who roamed the sideline wearing Eagles and Cowboys jerseys while basking in the boos.
Instead, the Commanders’ first preseason practice was relatively short and low-key. The session started a countdown to the critical third year of Rivera’s tenure — 47 days until Week 1 — but everyone, perhaps especially the coach, seemed excited just to get back to football. The franchise had spent all spring and summer in controversy quicksand as stadium legislation failed to pass in Virginia, defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio called the Jan. 6 insurrection a “dust-up,” and owner Daniel Snyder’s bitter battle with Congress dragged on.
The night before camp, Rivera was asked how he’d dealt with a third straight summer being swamped by bad news.
“If I’m not here, I ain’t worried about it,” he quipped. “I’ll tell you that right now.”
But then his tone grew a little weary. “It’s almost to be expected, to be honest with you,” he added. “It goes in cycles.”
Rivera’s words and shrugging shoulders seemed to be a glimpse of how the constant strain has worn on him. He tried one of his favorite phrases to explain how he deals with the team’s problems — “don’t focus on what’s interesting; focus on what’s important” — but this time, it didn’t feel quite right. These investigations and allegations are important, he said, and he didn’t want anyone to think he was being dismissive. But at the same time, he cannot control Congress or Snyder.
“To me, the important thing is football,” Rivera said. “I’m here to be judged on that, okay? The judgment starts with winning or losing. … Does [the controversy] make what I do harder? Yeah, it really does.”
“As a football coach, what I have to do is I’ve got to make this team presentable as a football team on the football field and in the community,” he continued. “The players and coaches, we have to have success. We have to go out and play. Why? Because we need the fans behind us. The fans get behind us, give us support, help build this up, get some momentum going, and some good things can happen. I believe that because I know what this area is capable of.”
Rivera, a linebacker for the Chicago Bears from 1984 to 1992, reminisced about how raucous the fans used to get at RFK Stadium.
“I want to get the fan base back,” he said. “I don’t want people mixing up what happened back then [in previous scandals] with what we’re trying to do as a football team, okay? Appreciate us for being the football team — and the other stuff is over there. That’s what I’m hoping.”
Out on the field, Rivera surveyed his progress. He greeted players with fist-bumps and handshakes and listened to his coaches coach. (“This is how you read a release,” barked assistant defensive backs coach Richard Rodgers.) He watched offensive coordinator Scott Turner direct the retooled offense, and when quarterback Carson Wentz connected on a deep throw to star wideout Terry McLaurin, Rivera remarked, “If anybody’s wondering why we did [his contract], that, to me, is the perfect example.”
In some ways, Wentz’s fortunes parallel Rivera’s as both try to emerge from two years of turbulence to reclaim a measure of stability and respectability.
“One year you’re here, one year you’re there, and you try to have your sights set on [the] long-term wherever you are,” Wentz said. “But God has different plans sometimes. I try and make the most of it and just keep plugging along. … [We’ll be here] for, God willing, hopefully a long time.”
Defensive tackle Jonathan Allen is one of the few players who’s given the franchise stability since before the Rivera era. He’s always said the team’s off-field troubles don’t affect his play, and though he understands they weigh on Rivera, he doesn’t feel as impacted.
“I get asked questions about [controversies], but I can always defer, and I can always move on,” he said. “Coach [Rivera] doesn’t have that ability. He has to answer, and he has to take these problems head-on, so when outside noise does happen, it does affect him more. But when I get criticized on Twitter, or when [the media] bring it to me, it’s in one ear, out the other. I don’t care. I’m here to play football.”
After practice, reporters asked Rivera football questions. How was Wentz? What about defensive end Montez Sweat? How does rookie running back Brian Robinson Jr. fit into the game plan?
It was a welcome return to normal. Overall, Rivera said, he liked to see his players so enthusiastic.
“The first day’s always fun,” he said. “Like I said, optimism is high.” | 2022-07-27T20:35:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Commanders get back to football after turbulent offseason - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/washington-commanders-training-camp/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/washington-commanders-training-camp/ |
The space agency’s public position is that Russia’s announcement isn’t official, so it’s business as usual in space
FILE PHOTO: The International Space Station (ISS) photographed by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking, October 4, 2018. NASA/Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo (Handout/Reuters)
There was a lot of consternation at the announcement — handwringing over the declaration by the newly appointed head of Russia’s space agency that Russia would depart the International Space Station partnership after 2024 and develop a space station of its own.
But since then, the reaction from NASA has been something resembling a yawn.
Russia has been NASA’s main partner on the space station for more than 20 years, but after years of frequent bluster from Russia, NASA officials have basically shrugged off the latest statement from Moscow and said they would continue to operate as if nothing has changed.
Because, in a way, nothing has. Russia has not formerly notified the space station partners that it is leaving, something it’s required to do a year before departing. Without that, everything else, the agency seems to say, is noise.
On Tuesday, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, published a lengthy interview with one of its top officials, who said the first segment of the station Russia would like to build wouldn’t launch until 2028, a date some industry officials think would delay any disengagement from ISS.
“We are staying the course,” NASA associate administrator Bob Cabana said Wednesday at a conference in Washington dedicated to the orbiting laboratory. “We are working to extend the International Space Station to 2030. It’s got good years left, and as you’ve heard today, it’s extremely busy right now, and we have much more we can do.”
Many space officials privately rolled their eyes at Russia’s latest announcement. Russia had threatened before to leave after the current agreement expires at the end of 2024 and had been doing that with more gusto ever since the invasion of Ukraine prompted more U.S. sanctions. And they pointed to the fact that Russia’s latest missive said they would leave sometime after 2024, which could be 2025, or 2026 — or later. There is no way to know.
It’s not like the Russia segment of the station could be disconnected from the American side with the push of a button. The station took years to assemble and would require a lot of work, and spacewalks, to separate the modules — if that were ever to happen.
Instead of moving toward disengagement, Russia’s recent actions have pointed in the opposite direction. Russia recently announced it would proceed with a series of crew swaps, sending American astronauts on Russian spacecraft, and Russian cosmonauts on American spacecraft.
Work continues on board the orbiting laboratory as it does every day. On Tuesday, the day Russia announced it was leaving the station, Russia’s Oleg Artemyev, the current space station commander, was working on a cardiac research study designed to help doctors learn how to keep astronauts safe on long-duration space missions. Along with fellow cosmonaut Denis Matveev, he helped put away the tools used in a spacewalk last week while the third cosmonaut on the station, Sergey Korsakov, was checking the robotic arm on the Russian side of the station.
“We’ve seen this story many times before," Casey Drier, senior space policy adviser at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit advocacy firm, wrote on Twitter. “Color me skeptical of any immediate changes.”
The Europeans are shrugging off Russia’s statement as well. In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for the European Space Agency said that “the news of Russia leaving the Space Station after 2024 and building its own infrastructure is not new and was mentioned before.”
Behind the scenes, NASA is scrambling to figure out how best to proceed if Russia does pull out. “We are exploring options to mitigate any potential impacts on the International Space Station beyond 2024 if in fact Russia withdraws,” John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said. “That’s the responsible thing to do.”
A public stance of acting non-plussed may appear to be the sort of manufactured calm top governments have to project when dealing with a fickle partner. But it also is a strategic one. NASA desperately wants to keep the space station going. It is the lynchpin of the nation’s human exploration program. The station is also a tool of diplomacy, a lab that produces science, a test bed for future commercially built stations and, at the moment, the only destination NASA has for its astronauts.
Without the station, NASA’s astronauts have nowhere to go. While NASA plans a return to the moon, a human landing is set for 2025 — at the earliest. The station is also a key driver for the growing commercial space industry. NASA has invested billions of dollars in SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft capable to ferrying cargo and astronauts to the station — and NASA wants to see that investment endure.
NASA, of course, is aware that the station is aging and can’t stay up forever. It has invested hundreds of millions of dollars, with more to come, in companies planning commercial space stations that would replace the ISS. But those platforms are years away from being operational, and many fear that if the station is retired before they are ready, there will be a gap.
All of which is why NASA officials at the space station conference this week waxed poetically about the football-field-sized station.
“We’re just getting into our stride on what we’ve been able to accomplish on the International Space Station,” Cabana said. “And it’s only going to get better. It is so critical to our future from a science point of view, from an exploration point of view and from developing commercial operations.” | 2022-07-27T20:36:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NASA hopes to keep ISS operating despite Russia pullout threat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/nasa-space-station-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/nasa-space-station-russia/ |
Transcript: ‘Capehart’ with Jason Kander, President, National Expansion, Veterans Community Project, Author, “Invisible Storm”
MR. CAPEHART: Good afternoon, and welcome to the ‘Capehart’ podcast on Washington Post Live. I am Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. Jason Kander was a rising star in the Democratic Party. The Afghanistan war veteran won statewide office in Missouri in 2012, launched a U.S. Senate bid by 2016. There was even exploration of a presidential bid, and then he left the scene. In his new book, “Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD,” Kander opens up about his struggle with his mental health, his quest to address it, and be a beacon for others.
Joining me now is Jason Kander. Jason, welcoming to Capehart on Washington Post Live.
MR. KANDER: Thank you, Jonathan, I appreciate it. I'm a fan and we have the Metzl family in common of Kansas City. I know you've done some--I mean, there's, like, all these--we could do a whole show on how many great Metzls there are running around the world, but I know you've worked with one of them. And so, I have heard great things about you, as well as being a fan. So, I'm pleased to be with you.
MR. CAPEHART: Oh, well, thank you. And the great Jonathan Metzl--and he's not just great because we share a first name.
Jason, we have a lot to cover, but I want to start with your military service. You served in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer. What was going on in the war at that point, and what exactly was your role?
MR. KANDER: Sure. So, I got there in October of '06. So, at that point--which was a long time ago, now. And so, the going theory of the war at that point was, unlike Iraq, where the conversation was about winning hearts and minds, the overall feeling in Afghanistan was that the hearts and minds had been won in the sense that the vast majority of the population wanted to see the coalition led by the United States succeed.
The issue was winning the confidence of the people and making people really believe that they could invest in the idea that the Government of Afghanistan was going to be successful and not--the idea that supporting the Government of Afghanistan, supporting the coalition was not going to get you killed with Taliban reprisal. And so, a big part of that was making sure that that Government of Afghanistan could be competent and wasn't overly corrupt. I say "overly," because frankly, there was a certain level of corruption that was just baked in to the work of running the country of Afghanistan, I suppose, and has been for a long time.
My role, when I got there, the role that I ended up in was one of internal stability. And there's a bunch of fancy terms for what I did, but basically, I was an intelligence officer who was tasked with going out and developing information, collecting intelligence about the level of corruption and the nature of corruption of the people that we were dealing with. So, the general in charge of U.S. forces, the ambassador, subordinate commanders all the way down the chain of command, they were dealing with members of the Afghan Government, whether they be military or ministers, whatever, and they needed to know what their extracurricular activities were. In some cases, they were involved in narco trafficking. In other cases, they were double dealing with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. So, it was my job to go out with my translator and as my boss at the time, my colonel put it, conduct thug intelligence, which was a made-up term to mean, go develop relationships with thugs, with potential bad guys so that they will give us information about other bad guys so that we can know really who we were dealing with.
MR. CAPEHART: And just to put an even finer point on it, because you write later on in the book--just for anyone who thinks that an intelligence officer is just somebody in an office, your clinical social worker impressed upon you that your work was just as dangerous as the frontline soldiers who were out there with other soldiers.
She said to you--you write, "Your meetings in Afghanistan, on the other hand, meant you and your translator went out more or less alone with no backup, no one even knowing where you were, totally vulnerable for hours at a time, in the most dangerous place on earth, to sit with people who might want to kill you." When I read that line, I mean, that to me totally put into perspective the work that you were doing over there in Afghanistan. So, you got there in 2006. When did you come back?
MR. KANDER: I came back in early February of 2007. So, that was another thing for me, is I was only there four months. So, the story I then proceeded to tell myself when I came home was, look, I did one tour, it was four months, and I never fired my weapon. So, that cannot possibly be traumatic. That is what I was telling myself for a very long time.
MR. CAPEHART: And so, when you returned, then, what was your adjustment like? Like you said, you were only there for four months, not over several tours of duty, as even by 2006, we had heard about soldiers going through that.
So, then, what was your initial adjustment like, when you got home?
MR. KANDER: Well, it was abrupt. You know, I was what's called an individual augmentee, which is to say I didn't go over with, like, a full unit, where we went over and then we came back together, right? I had volunteered to go, and so I was accepted to go fill a spot, like, a slot that needed to be filled for the period of time it needed to be filled.
And so, as a result, like, when I came home, I came home just me, and I was, in civilian life--you know, in the Army, I was an intelligence officer. In civilian life, I was a brand-new lawyer, right out of law school. So, I came back home and I went and I like signed some paperwork saying, okay, I'm leaving active duty. I drove up to Fort Leavenworth here in the Kansas City area. And then, within two weeks, I was back at my desk and my law firm in Kansas City. And you know, there was nobody that I was hanging out with on a daily basis who had served, and it was--I didn't realize it at the time, it was a pretty isolating and abrupt experience.
At the time, you know, I thought, well, I'm home now. I should just go back to how things were. And I really should just be happy that I'm home. But meanwhile, I was beginning to struggle with some things that were minor, like, I had a twitch in my left eyelid that had started as soon as I actually landed in Qatar, leaving Afghanistan. And that lasted for about six months, and I started to have some nightmares. I really struggled with getting in a vehicle, at first. I got better at that because I just did it so much. But I would get into a car and my heart would start racing, but even then, I knew what that was. I was like, okay, every time for the last few months that I've gotten in a vehicle, I've been preparing myself mentally to take a life or to be in a fight. And so, I was able to understand that at the time, but a lot of other stuff I was dismissive of.
MR. CAPEHART: So, then, what got you into--so, you just said you come back and you're a brand-new lawyer at a law firm. At what point did the political bug bite you and you ran for a statewide office, secretary of state, which, at the time, in 2012, nobody knew really what that job was. Thanks to Donald Trump, we now know that is one of the most important statewide elected officials in any given state.
So, what made you want to run for that statewide office?
MR. KANDER: Well, first, I got to back up a little, because I don't want to give myself too much credit as if--you know, every politician likes to have this origin story that, you know, I was never going to run for office but then this thing happened and I was just caught--no, like, I was a political science nerd. I went to school in D.C. and I knew I wanted to be in politics. I just didn't know what that meant, really. But I had my designs on a state house seat before I deployed. And when I came home, it wasn't very long, it was a few months before I got actually actively into running for it.
But then, I served two terms in the state house, and that was the beginning of me really chasing what I now realize was, you know, one, I was trying to do good things for my state and my community; but also, some sense of redemption, for feeling I hadn't done enough in Afghanistan. And then, I go to run for secretary of state and, like you said, people didn't know what the heck the secretary of state was. I remember talking to people who would say, so, you're going to be in charge of, like, foreign relations? And I always would joke that, yeah, I'm just going to keep the peace with Iowa. That's my job.
But so, I ran and I was 31, I think, when I was elected secretary of state, and I was the first Millennial ever elected to an American statewide office, and a big part of it was explaining to people what the secretary of state did. Like, that campaign ended up being in 2012 really just about photo ID, because that's what Republicans wanted to make the campaign about.
And at that time, because people weren't as familiar with these issues, I opposed the idea of having a photo ID law, but I had to contend with the fact that the majority of Democrats thought that you should have to have a photo ID in order to vote at that time. And so, there was a lot of--in that campaign, the thing that is the last thing that you ever want to have to do in politics, which is educating. You know, they say once you're explaining, you're losing, but we were able to take it head on and kind of go on offense on the issue and just barely win in what is obviously a tough state for a young progressive from an urban area.
MR. CAPEHART: I'm going to speed through your electoral success. So, you win the race and now you are getting national attention. Now, you are running for Senate. And I want boil down your entire Senate campaign into one ad, but I want to show folks this spectacularly memorable ad you did for your 2016 Senate campaign.
MR. CAPEHART: I mean, that--now folks know why I called that a spectacularly memorable ad. [Audio distortion] of your Senate campaign, you did not win that race, but you did better than Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign in your state. And I'm just wondering, what was happening inside, as all this newfound fame and attention and expectation began to take shape.
I also forgot to mention that you met with President Barack Obama in that time. What was going on inside you as the nation was starting to get to know you and clamor for you?
MR. KANDER: Yeah, it was--the analogy I use is that it was like emerging from a bunker after nuclear annihilation. My party had just been pretty well wiped out in the 2016 election, and I had lost my race. And it was like coming out of the bunker with a few survivors and taking some weird solace in the idea that the other survivors seem to be turning to you and being like, I think maybe you're in charge. We're not sure.
And because what had happened was, as you mentioned, I had outperformed the top of the ticket by about 16 points, which meant there were like over 100,000 voters who had voted for Donald Trump and voted for me on the same day, and it's not like I had run as if I was a pretend Republican or something. You know, I'm a progressive, and so a lot of people were like, okay, how did you do that. And President Obama was saying nice things, eventually invited me out, as you said. And we had a conversation where he was encouraging of the idea of my running for president which, by that point, in early 2018, I was very much thinking I was going to do.
And what was going on inside is that trauma doesn't get better with age; it's not like wine. It just gets worse. So, now, at this point, I've gone from having night terrors every night, to having night terrors every night, all night. And my other symptoms are getting worse, like, what I now know is referred to as hypervigilance, which is to say I felt like I and my family were in danger all the time, and it was exhausting. I was constantly trying to thwart and prevent and control threats, control situations, and a lot of threats that weren't real threats but that they were very real to me.
I had become a father in that time.
MR. CAPEHART: There was one--
MR. KANDER: Go ahead.
MR. CAPEHART: Jason, actually, to that point about threats that weren't really threats, you write about one situation at a gas station when you and your family were out for a drive and your wife, Diana, and your son, True, were inside the little convenience story. And a young guy approaches you with a gas can and--finish the story.
MR. KANDER: Yeah, and in my mind--and this was the kind of thing that happened all the time. I just kind of chose that example in the book to illustrate it. In my mind, this was a trap. It was, you know--this was a dangerous situation and I needed to take immediate action. So, I went inside and I was very abrupt with my wife, and she was like, well, we're going to the bathroom. I was like, no, we're getting in the car right now. And we got out of there, and it was after 45 minutes or so that she convinces me that it probably was just a guy had run out of gas.
But that's not how my brain worked for all those years. It was every time something bad didn't happen, in my mind, we had just averted a close call, because what I later learned in therapy is that my brain got stuck in that simpler combat environment and didn't really trust the idea that I was out of danger. And so, you know, I had gone from a world where, for those four months, I had learned, always know where the exits are; face them if you can; know how many people there are between you and your vehicle; know everything you can about the people in this room and be prepared to start shooting if you're going to need to do that to get yourself out so that I got to the point where if anything was out of place, if I didn't have control over something, my brain couldn't triage that between, hey, you know, you left the light on when you left the house, and, there's someone in the house and they're here to kill you.
And so, that--while you are pursuing the presidency, is pretty exhausting to be just playing whack-a-mole with your emotions all the time, which is what I was doing. I was using my very ambitious and very active career to avoid myself.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, you write in your book, for those of you who have the book, it's page 139 and it's the very first sentence where he writes--where Jason writes, "You have to be a little crazy to be in politics, but what you cannot be is mentally ill."
And you go on to write about all the emotions that you were feeling, your wife was feeling. And Jason, one of the really powerful things you do in your book is that you give space--you don't write about what your wife, Diana, was thinking or feeling. You give her room in the book. It's italicized, and it's just marked "Diana." And we get to hear from her, her feelings and her thoughts at the time concurrent with what you're writing about in the book.
Why did you feel it was important to give not only Diana space, but to have her voice be a part of your book?
MR. KANDER: Yeah, I appreciate you asking about that, Jonathan, because that's--those are my favorite passages in the book.
I did it for a few reasons. I'd say we did it for a few reasons. We really created this together. One, I'm not the only bestselling author in my family; my wife is, as well. So, she's very good at this, and I wanted her voice to be in there; that's one reason. Another reason is--and I'm sort of building in importance, right--the second most important reason would be one of the important devices in the book that I used in writing it, that was very difficult, was I tried to, as I was writing it chronologically, to return myself--to return to my mindset at the time. Because what I didn't want to do was I didn't want to avail myself of the language I had gained in therapy before we're at the point in the story where I'm in therapy. I want to relate what was going on with me using only the knowledge that I had at the time. And the reason for that is, one, I think it allows the reader to go on the journey with you; but two, I wanted people who were reading the book who maybe hadn't had treatment before but might need it or suspected they did or knew someone who was going through some similar things and wanted to understand them. If I talked about it in terms of things like hypervigilance, well, that's not--you can't relate to that.
But if I explain, look, the world is a very dangerous place and there's danger around me, well, someone might connect with that who wouldn't otherwise. But the shortcoming of that is you're only getting the perspective of someone who's perspective is a bit warped, right? And so, it's important to have another narrator who could come in and say, well, here's what I was observing in Jason at the time. Here's what was changing about him, from what I was seeing.
And then, the last reason is, and this is the most important, is when I went to therapy, I learned, and then Diana learned, about post--secondary post-traumatic stress, which we had not known was a thing, but Diana had been experiencing anxiety. She'd been experiencing some of my symptoms despite not having my underlying trauma, not having gone to Afghanistan with me. And we wanted to make sure that people were clued in about that much earlier than we ever were so that they could also be on the lookout for it and understand that we went through that journey together.
What's the reason I think I love it so much, in addition--those passages, in addition to the fact that I love my wife and I think she's brilliant and funny and amazing is that it ends up coming out in the book as--really, it's a love story throughout the book. It really ends up being a story of our marriage and of getting through this difficult time.
MR. CAPEHART: Right. And in a lot of her passages, I mean, she's not--she doesn't hold back in terms of writing about the terror that she felt and the concern that she felt.
And I'm glad you brought up secondary PTSD, because I was going to ask you about that. But so, how do you treat that? What is your treatment like? And is anyone ever cured of PTSD?
MR. KANDER: Yeah, well, those are both great questions. Let me take them in reverse. You don't get cured of PTSD. It's an important point. And the reason for that is simply that PTSD is an injury that's based on memories. And if you don't wipe away the memory, then you're not going to cure PTSD.
However, it's just--it's an injury and it's no different than any other injury. I talk about in the book early on about getting a really bad knee injury and having to have surgery in order to go into the Army. So, I went through surgery; I went through physical therapy. Well, I compare PTSD to my knee injury. I had that surgery all those years ago. I still--my knee still hurts sometimes, but I can run. I'm actually a pretty decent runner. But I know that, like, I'm going to ice it. I know that my knee feels better if I run on the nice, cushy track near our house as opposed to just running on the road, but I can run. And PTSD is a similar thing. It is an injury to the brain. You go through therapy to deal with the underlying trauma, and then you learn how to manage it. It's little things like, when my mind wants to tell me something hypervigilant like, no, True--my son--has to wear a helmet whenever he's on his little foot scooter, I'm able to go, wait a minute, he really doesn't need to. He needs to wear one when he rides his bike. That's hypervigilance; that's PTSD. I'm able to go, okay, I know what that is, right? If I'm going through a stressful period and I start to have some nightmares, I know, oh, you know what I've been doing during the day? I didn't know this before, but now I know I've been avoiding these thoughts and intrusive memories from Afghanistan or some other issue, I need to go ahead and embrace it. I need to go ahead and read some news articles about it. I need to stop and think about it during the day so that my subconscious won't decide to deal with it at night because I've been avoiding it, and then I don't have the nightmares.
For Diana, you know, her treatment--she ended up doing a slightly different kind of therapy, but basically you treat PTSD the way you treat PTSD. I mean, she went through what was basically talk therapy. She also did this thing, somatic experience therapy. There's just different kinds and different people respond to different kinds of therapies. But the thing about secondary post-traumatic stress is it's PTSD. It's just without the underlying trauma. And so, a lot of the treatment really is very similar.
MR. CAPEHART: And so, you went and got treatment through the VA, but it was labyrinthian--I don't even know if that is even a word, but you went to the Veterans Community Project, which you toured as a candidate, and then I think it was like six weeks after you ended--I think it was your mayoral campaign--you went there seeking help.
Talk about the Veterans Community Project and why--I think I read either in the book or maybe it was in the intro video, that your work there has been, you know, more fulfilling than your elected office or even running for higher office.
MR. KANDER: Yeah, no, I really appreciate you asking about this. It's actually--my royalties from the book go to the Veterans Community Project. So, any opportunity to talk about it is something I really appreciate.
So, Veterans Community Project, VCP, was started by a handful of combat veterans in Kansas City; this is my prior to coming along--who said, you know what? We can do--we can save people from falling through some of these cracks of the VA system.
Now, I want to pause here and footnote this to say, like, I try not to say anything that's going to discourage people from going to the VA. I went to the VA. I get all of my medical care through the VA now. It's an outstanding experience. Now, with that said, we can all acknowledge that sometimes getting into the VA and getting the process started can be difficult. And that's not the fault of the people at the VA; that's from stuff that's happened in Washington.
But with that said, the folks at Veterans Community Project said, hey, what if we could anything for our fellow vets? And they said, okay, what if we had a walk-in center that any vet who came in, we can deal with any issue that is confronting them and we didn't have to worry about, you know, what was their discharge status? How long did they serve? All these different questions and the chutes-and-ladders thing that the VA is required to do by the laws that have been set up by Congress. And so, they opened that and they were treating thousands of vets a year and making a huge difference.
Then, the other piece, and what we're much better known for, is they said, well, what if we were to attack veterans' homelessness in a way that just made a lot of sense? And what they did is they created a village of tiny houses with wraparound case management services and basically recreated base housing to put people back in their most recent, stable, and successful place where they were in their life, and then restarted the military-to-civilian transition back at day one. And so, whereas most transitional housing for homelessness programs, if they can reach a 40-percent rate of getting people transitioned back into the community and permanent housing, that's considered really good. VCP operates at an unprecedented 85-percent success rate of doing that.
And so, I got involved because I was finding that, despite having a lot of connections and that kind of thing, I wasn't sure how to get--because the thing is, when you first go to the VA, oftentimes particularly if it's for mental health, you're not in the best place to navigate a difficult system, and I wasn't. And so, I called VCP, who I had just toured six weeks earlier. They said, come on down. I went through the outreach center, no different than of the thousands of Kansas City vets who had done the same. They helped me with my paperwork and, a week later, I got my first therapy appointment at the VA instead of months, which is what it was looking like it was going to be. And then, I started hanging around. I created a national organization before. They'd been so successful in Kansas City that communities around the country were reaching out and saying, hey, can you do it here? I was kind of giving some advice to the cofounders on that. And finally, they were like, hey, man, you seem to be doing pretty well with therapy; you're not working; you're here a lot. You want to just come down and work full time? And I did. So, the last three years, I've been the president of national expansion. In that time, we've expanded our operations into the Denver area, the St. Louis area, Sioux Falls area in South Dakota. And then, we've now just purchased property in Oklahoma City. We're going to start building there and then we've got a couple other cities coming soon.
MR. CAPEHART: Jason, we are basically out of time, but I've got to get you on one more thing before I let you go. Also, I learned, from reading your book, in terms of VCP and basically the village that they set up for veterans, I learned that one of the reasons--or probably the primary reason homeless veterans don't go into shelters is because of it--not comfortable sleeping around strangers, which helped me to understand why, when you're looking at homeless population, a lot of veterans make up homeless population. So, that was an incredible thing for me to learn.
But I got to get you on one more thing, and that is the issue of masculinity. And you discuss conceptions of modern masculinity and how they can complicate efforts to seek mental health treatment. I'm bringing this up, because Senator Josh Hawley has a book coming out on masculinity next year, in 2023. It's not out, yet, but he seems to have made modern masculinity and its apparent collapse an integral campaign of his.
At the National Conservative Conference, he blamed the left for their mental health problems, joblessness, obsession with video games, and hours spent watching porn. He says, the crisis of American men is a crisis for the American republic. Now, in light of the viral video of Senator Hawley running from the rioters on January 6th, I was wondering if you could speak to his conception of masculinity and what he might be missing from it?
MR. KANDER: Yeah, I actually learned that this book was coming out this morning, and my first thought was, this is like me writing a cookbook. I mean, it's like I don't know how to cook.
So, look, I make fun of it; it's easy to make fun of it. Here's what I think is really important to understand about that, is that Josh Hawley, for as devious of a person as he is, and he is the most devious, he is also very smart, and this is what Josh Hawley is doing: He is positioning himself and therefore his movement, his far-right, White-guy movement, as if you're a man, then you believe in these things, this lack of tolerance. You believe in these things. He's positioning. It's a very smart thing to do. He is positioning his political beliefs which, woven within them and hidden underneath very careful, delicate wrapping is, you know, opposing working people getting a decent wage, opposing working people being able to organize, opposing women having any autonomy over their own body, and all sorts of things. What he's doing is he's positioning that as masculine, which is complete BS, but it's also very smart. And so, I want to say how--look, this is ridiculous, but it is also extremely effective. And so, we have to take this very seriously. We cannot be dismissive of this. What we have to do is we have to offer is an alternative and more, I think, helpful version of what masculinity is. Masculinity is not being exclusive. Masculinity is not telling people that we sit in judgment of them, and this is a real problem for Josh Hawley, because Josh Hawley wants two different groups when he eventually runs for president, which I think he thinks is, like, already started. He wants two different groups.
He wants people two generations up from him and I, and he wants those people to look at him and say, now, there's a nice young man that understands that what a man does is he gets married and he doesn't smoke pot or whatever the heck he's talking about and he doesn't play videogames. He wants those voters. But Josh Hawley also wants people who watch the UFC and who have a friend who acknowledges they had an abortion and work with a gay person, who they happen to really like. But you know what, they also like--they're White dudes, and they feel that, because they've been told over and over and over again that there's not a place for them the way that there used to be, he wants to get both of those people. And we have to make that appropriately difficult for Josh Hawley to do, because we have to make it clear that what Josh Hawley is talking about is not masculinity. It's intolerance, and it's judgment of them and their way of life, which is a much more tolerant--even though it doesn't seem like it, it is compared to the first group that he's going after, a much more "live and let live" group of people.
MR. CAPEHART: Wow. An incredible message to end this already overtime interview on Jason Kander, author of, "Invisible Storm: A Soldier's Memoire of Politics and PTSD."
Thank you so much for coming to "Capehart" on Washington Post Live.
MR. KANDER: Thank you, Jonathan. I appreciate it very much.
MR. CAPEHART: And thank you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, go to WashingtonPostLive.com.
Once again, I'm Jonathan Capehart, associate editor for The Washington Post. Thanks for watching "Capehart" on Washington Post Live. | 2022-07-27T20:36:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: ‘Capehart’ with Jason Kander, President, National Expansion, Veterans Community Project, Author, “Invisible Storm” - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/27/transcript-capehart-with-jason-kander-president-national-expansion-veterans-community-project-author-invisible-storm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/07/27/transcript-capehart-with-jason-kander-president-national-expansion-veterans-community-project-author-invisible-storm/ |
Ahead of the deadline, the Orioles have emerged as a team worth rooting for. (Julio Cortez/AP Photo)
BALTIMORE — The defining characters in the 2022 Baltimore Orioles clubhouse are not well-known to those outside it. Many of the central figures in this year’s unexpected revival will probably be gone by the time the Orioles make the playoffs again. Some might be gone by Tuesday’s trade deadline, if General Manager Mike Elias decides being a postseason long shot this year isn’t worth missing the chance to add talent for a more promising future.
But that group, whatever happens to it, has exceeded expectations so completely, coalesced so effectively, that it has managed to make that deadline more complicated, at least emotionally, than anyone could have expected. Somewhere along the way, these Orioles became greater than the sum of their parts, a team with a knack for magic and unmistakable personality — the kind of team worth rooting for, really, for the first time in quite some time.
The Orioles began play Thursday three games out of the third Wild Card spot, ahead of the $200 million Boston Red Sox in the American League East, with a record that would be good enough for at least third in every division but theirs and the National League East. They have restored energy to Camden Yards and brought hope back to Baltimore.
Yet they are not quite good enough, not quite close enough, to justify trading prospects for established players at the deadline — or even, perhaps, to justify not trading established players for prospects. So a team that has endeared itself to a desperate baseball city is likely on the verge of changes to that clubhouse, where a telling image of this 2022 team materialized last week.
These Orioles grew around an unlikely veteran leadership council, the bulk of which was seated at a table in the middle of the clubhouse Monday afternoon before the Orioles started their four-game series with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Rougned Odor and Robinson Chirinos sat across from one another, divvying up poker chips. Jordan Lyles, the 31-year-old journeyman with a 5.17 career ERA who the Orioles’ young pitchers refer to as “Dad” hovered nearby. Jovial slugger Anthony Santander sat there with them. Shortstop Jorge Mateo sat down, too. Before long, Ryan Mountcastle joined them.
Odor, Chirinos and Lyles did not attract headlines as free agents this winter, but they have attracted the respect of their young teammates, who flock to them now, eager for the guidance of players who have done something very few of the young Orioles have ever done before: Win in the big leagues.
At the other end of that table, Trey Mancini bent over a piece of paper with a pen in his hand, sheepishly self-reporting to the team’s Kangaroo Court. Mancini is as close to a bona fide star as these Orioles had for the last half decade, a steady presence who helped shape the laid-back, low-key atmosphere that exists there now.
But leader or not, relative veteran or not, Mancini was blushing he wrote down the details. He had missed the brief hitter’s meeting the Orioles have at the start of every series, and his teammates were heckling him for it.
All of them were smiling. They knew the 30-year-old had merely succumbed to his manners, too polite to shoo away the line of reporters asking about whether he will be traded at next week’s deadline or how the team he helped shepherd through the bleakest of years is finally turning things around. The Orioles aren’t made up of the kind of stars to whom the schedules don’t apply, don’t have the kind of big names that anyone would be above the clubhouse law or overly eager to enforce it.
Mancini is a perfect example of the kind of difficult deadline decision these Orioles have played themselves into, the kind of transitional figure they will remember if they become annual contenders — the kind of guy whose last act of service to the only team he has ever known may be to yield a few more young players to put them over the top.
The Orioles do not have to trade him. Mancini has a mutual option for next season, so the Orioles could keep him and his .270 career batting average, .796 career on-base-plus-slugging percentage and beloved character if they want to.
But without Mancini rotating at first base and in right field or taking at-bats at designated hitter, the Orioles would have more at-bats to give to younger players like Adley Rutschman, Mountcastle, Austin Hays and those prospects on the way. Without his deal on the payroll, the Orioles will shed one of their most expensive players. Trading Mancini now may also mean losing a few more games this season than the Orioles would with him. But not trading him may mean missing the chance to acquire talent that can help when they are a game out of first sometime in the future, not a game out of last place in the division in 2022.
The same calculus could be applied to Santander, who leads the Orioles with 17 homers and has been known to win a half dozen straight games of pool in the clubhouse before his teammates stop trying. Santander is as gregarious as they come in there.
But the 27-year-old is arbitration eligible next year, meaning he will be more expensive than younger players who may be on the way behind him — but slightly more appealing to teams looking to get more than one season’s worth of production out of a deadline acquisition. Perhaps they can replace his production with someone younger. Then again, some day soon, the Orioles might find themselves past the point of adding by subtracting.
Their all-star closer Jorge Lopez, a breakout star at 29, will be appealing to the many teams seeking bullpen help, too. But he has been the staple of an Orioles bullpen that is third in the majors with a 3.06 ERA, a conglomeration of waiver-wire reclamation projects and homegrown arms that has been crucial to the Orioles success this year. Certainly, the Orioles could probably get some talent for Lopez.
Elias has been uniquely disciplined in his approach to this rebuild, more patient than just about anyone in baseball with a rebuild that has taken his Orioles to the depths of the majors for most of his tenure.
From the archives: A year into a rebuild, the Orioles have been shaken up and (they hope) straightened out
Four seasons ago, the Orioles won 47 games. Last year, they won 52. They have won 28 games in which they trailed, which means they have three more come-from-behind wins this year than they had wins of any kind in 2020. They are over .500 on July 27 for the first time since 2016, this time without the brand-name stars like Manny Machado and Adam Jones.
Maybe some of these Orioles will grow into stars like those, the next core. The franchise seems to be counting on it — and determined to wait for it, even if it means jettisoning those who helped hasten progress this year. Perhaps, in hindsight, this deadline will be a pivotal one to vaulting the Orioles out of their rebuild and into annual contention. Perhaps, someday, this 2022 team will seem quaint by comparison to the rollicking annual winners Elias hopes to generate here. But now, in late July, this team may just be the most treasured .500 team the sport has seen in quite some time, one no one in that clubhouse will soon forget. | 2022-07-27T21:21:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Baltimore Orioles are surging ahead of trade deadline - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/baltimore-orioles-trade-deadline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/07/27/baltimore-orioles-trade-deadline/ |
FBI asking about source of sex-assault claims against former Va. Lt. Gov.
Then-Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax in 2019. (Steve Helber/AP)
RICHMOND — The FBI has been asking questions about the origins of two sexual assault allegations made 3½ years ago against then-Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, according to the Democrat and four other people who said they were contacted recently by a Richmond-based FBI agent.
In February 2019, two women publicly claimed that Fairfax had sexually assaulted them many years earlier. Fairfax has said the encounters were consensual and since the earliest days of the scandal has publicly urged federal and local law enforcement agencies to investigate what he’s called a politically motivated “smear” campaign.
Until now, there has been no public indication of any inquiries into the matter by law enforcement. It is not clear whether the FBI has turned up any evidence of wrongdoing, or what will come of the agency’s questioning. Dee Rybiski, public affairs specialist for the FBI’s Richmond office, declined to comment, saying that as a matter of policy, the bureau does not confirm or deny the existence of ongoing investigations.
Fairfax and Tommy R. Bennett, president of the Danville branch of the NAACP, told The Washington Post that the FBI separately reached out to them to ask what they knew about the source of the allegations.
Three other people also were contacted by the FBI, the three told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be publicly linked to the controversy. All three are Democratic activists. One has been a supporter of Fairfax’s, while another has campaigned for one of Fairfax’s Democratic rivals. The third said he has never met Fairfax and has been neutral in intraparty contests.
Fairfax, Bennett and two of the others provided The Post with records — copies of text messages, emails and, in one case, a voice mail — showing the FBI agent arranging in-person interviews with them, although the subject of the meetings is not specified. One person, who said the FBI interviewed him by phone, did not provide documentation.
Why Justin Fairfax keeps talking about the sex assault claims against him
At the FBI’s invitation, Fairfax said he sat down with several agents in the Richmond office in early June. He said he attended without a lawyer and talked with the agents for nearly three hours, recounting his claims that the allegations were false and designed to cut short his once-promising political career.
“I’ve been reaching out to the FBI since Day One,” he said. “This is the first time they asked to sit down and meet.”
Debra Katz, the attorney for one of Fairfax’s accusers, called the FBI’s activity “frivolous.”
“I have no idea why the FBI would investigate this when there is not one iota of evidence that either of the women came forward at the instigation of anyone else and for improper reasons,” said Katz, whose client, Vanessa Tyson, has accused Fairfax of assaulting her at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, an allegation Fairfax denies. “We’re baffled by this, particularly in light of the fact that the FBI has not come to us to inform us an investigation has been initiated or to seek evidence from Dr. Tyson.”
Nancy Erika Smith, the lawyer for Fairfax’s second accuser, Meredith Watson, did not respond to messages from The Washington Post seeking comment. Watson has said Fairfax sexually assaulted her in 2000 when they were undergraduates at Duke University in Durham, N.C., which Fairfax has denied.
“If it is true that the FBI is actually investigating two victims of Justin Fairfax, shame on the FBI,” Smith said in a statement to the Intercept, which published an article Monday on the FBI’s inquiries. “This latest abuse is obviously at the urging of Fairfax and his political benefactors and PR team.”
The claims surfaced in 2019 as Fairfax seemed on the verge of assuming the Executive Mansion from then-Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who was under intense pressure to resign after a racist photo surfaced in his 1984 medical school yearbook.
Northam ultimately remained in office and largely recovered from the episode, but the damage to Fairfax was more lasting. Once widely seen as the front-runner to succeed Northam, Fairfax finished a distant fourth in his party’s five-way gubernatorial primary last year, netting less than 4 percent of the vote.
Bennett — who earned just under $24,000 working on Fairfax’s 2017 bid for lieutenant governor but did no paid work for Fairfax’s failed gubernatorial bid last year — said he was startled when a woman identifying herself as an FBI agent phoned in June, asking to interview him about an unspecified matter.
“When they identified themselves I was, like, ‘What the hell?’ I know my life, and I know that Tommy Bennett hadn’t done anything but beat up a little boy in the fourth grade with my Cinderella lunch box,” he said, referencing how he once responded to anti-gay bullying. “She said, ‘I am from the FBI, but you’re not in any trouble.' And I was like, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ ”
A few days later, on June 15, the Richmond-based agent traveled to Danville along with an agent from Lynchburg to meet with Bennett at a downtown bakery, Ma’s Cakes, according to Bennett, who provided copies of two text messages from the Richmond agent — one saying they had arrived and the other saying they were seated inside the “cake place.”
At that meeting, Bennett said he finally learned what the FBI was looking for: information about the allegations against Fairfax.
“She said … ‘We’re looking into this and we’re trying to get anybody we know that would know anything,’ ” Bennett said. “They didn’t call any names, just wanted to see if I knew anything about anybody doing anything against Justin.”
Bennett said he told the agents that he would be willing to discuss the matter, but not without a lawyer present. He provided a copy of a follow-up message from the agent dated July 6, asking if he had an attorney she could contact to schedule a second meeting.
Bennett said this week that he had not yet scheduled that meeting but remains willing to do so.
Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report. | 2022-07-27T21:34:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FBI asking about source of sex-assault claims against former Va. Lt. Gov. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/fbi-question-source-allegations-fairfax-virginia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/fbi-question-source-allegations-fairfax-virginia/ |
Maryland Del. Impallaria charged with theft, misconduct in office
Maryland Del. Richard K. Impallaria in 2006. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
A veteran Maryland lawmaker has been charged with theft, embezzlement and multiple counts of misconduct in office, according to charging documents filed by the state prosecutor’s office Wednesday.
Republican Del. Richard K. Impallaria of Harford County, who has served in the General Assembly for two decades, faces seven counts stemming from his alleged illegal use of state money to pay for a “district office” in Essex, Md., outside of his district’s boundaries, and a “personal cottage” next door.
Impallaria is charged with stealing $44,100 from Maryland in the form of the monthly rental payments and with committing fraud by using $92,800 in state funds to pay for the “district office.”
Impallaria, who lost the Republican primary on July 19, did not immediately respond to an email and a phone call seeking comment. His attorney, Steve Silverman, said Impallaria has been aware of the allegations “for some time” and denies wrongdoing.
"Having investigated the State Prosecutor’s version of facts as alleged ... along with interviewing over a dozen witnesses and relevant documents, I can say in no uncertain terms that Delegate Impallaria has not violated either the letter or spirit of the law,” Silverman said in a statement Wednesday.
According to the charging document, filed Wednesday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, prosecutors allege that “the state of Maryland paid $92,800 in rent for the ‘district office’ at 4 Punte Lane" over the course of 10 years — twice as much rent as other units in the same community. “During that same time,” prosecutors allege, Impallaria “paid $0.00 in rent for his neighboring cottage.”
Prosecutors say that Impallaria was using the purported district office to store personal items, including bedroom furniture, pellet rifles and ammunition, clothing, building materials, campaign materials, skis and coolers.
The state prosecutor also alleges that Impallaria fabricated invoices, submitting reimbursements for items, including furniture and office supplies, that were never ordered. According to the charging document, Impallaria allegedly devised a scheme that allowed him to receive a check for $2,405.03 from the General Assembly for furniture he never ordered and a credit for the same amount from a vendor. Later, according to the charging document, the vendor created campaign letters and fundraising materials and Impallaria used the credit to help pay the bill.
“Elected officials are expected to be good stewards of the State’s resources,” state prosecutor Charlton T. Howard III said in a statement. “Any official who abuses the public trust for personal gain must be held accountable.”
Jeremy Baker, chief of staff to House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County), said he could not comment on the ongoing case, “but Speaker Jones expects every member of the House of Delegates to uphold the law and be honest stewards of taxpayer dollars. The misuse of state funds is an issue we take seriously.”
Impallaria, a polarizing figure and long-standing conservative in Annapolis, Md., has served on the House Economic Matters Committee since he first began serving as a delegate in 2003. In the last four years, he has sponsored 13 pieces of legislation, several of which were local alcohol bills.
Impallaria has been at odds at times with members of his own party; in 2019, a judge dismissed a defamation suit he filed against four Republican party officials, whom he accused of talking about him during a meeting, the Baltimore Sun has reported.
In 2017, he served two days in jail for drunken driving, after he was convicted of driving while intoxicated during the annual Maryland Association of Counties summer conference in Ocean City. | 2022-07-27T21:56:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland lawmaker charged with theft and misconduct in office - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/maryland-delegate-impallaria-charged-theft/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/27/maryland-delegate-impallaria-charged-theft/ |
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by a hefty three-quarters of a point for a second straight time in its most aggressive drive in three decades to tame high inflation. The Fed’s move will raise its key rate, which affects many consumer and business loans, to its highest level since 2018. The central bank’s decision follows a jump in inflation to 9.1%, the fastest annual rate in 41 years. By raising borrowing rates, the Fed makes it costlier to take out a mortgage or an auto or business loan. Consumers and businesses then presumably borrow and spend less, cooling the economy and slowing inflation.
NEW YORK — Stocks jumped on Wall Street Wednesday after the Federal Reserve ratcheted up its campaign against surging inflation by raising its key interest rate three-quarters of a point. The Fed’s latest hike lifts the benchmark short-term rate to its highest level since 2018. The S&P 500 gained 2.6% and the technology heavy Nasdaq jumped by the most in over two years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also closed higher. Strong earnings from Google’s owner Alphabet, Microsoft and other companies helped lift investors’ mood.
NEW YORK — Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines agreed Wednesday to abandon their merger proposal, opening the way for JetBlue Airways to acquire Spirit. Spirit, the largest budget carrier in the United States, said it was still in discussions with JetBlue “and expects to provide a further update in the near future.” The decision by Spirit and Frontier to terminate their deal was announced while Spirit shareholders were still voting on the proposal. It was apparent that despite the support of Spirit’s board, shareholders were prepared to reject the Frontier deal. The Frontier offer was worth more than $2.6 billion in cash and stock, far short of JetBlue’s all-cash bid of $3.7 billion.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy is caught in an awkward, painful place. A confusing one, too. Growth appears to be sputtering, home sales are tumbling and economists warn of a potential recession ahead. But consumers keep spending, businesses keep posting profits and the economy keeps adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. In the midst of it all, prices have accelerated to four-decade highs, and the Federal Reserve is desperately trying to douse the inflationary flames with higher interest rates. That’s making borrowing more expensive for households and businesses. The Fed hopes to pull off the triple axel of central banking: Slow the economy just enough to curb inflation without causing a recession.
WASHINGTON — The Congressional Budget Office says the end of pandemic-era spending, fast economic growth and higher tax revenues have caused the federal debt this year to be lower than forecast. But the non-partisan office also includes a warning in its 30-year outlook. Debt will soon spiral upward to new highs that could ultimately imperil the U.S. economy. Accumulated debt held by the public will be equal to 98% of U.S. gross domestic product this year. That’s four points lower than the 2021 forecast. But this would be a brief respite from rising levels of debt that will surpass the historical high in 2031 and climb by 2052 to 185% of GDP.
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta posted its first revenue decline in history Thursday, dragged by a drop in ad spending as the economy falters — and as competition from rival TikTok intensifies. The company earned $6.69 billion, or $2.46 per share, in the April-June period. That’s down 36% from $10.39 billion, or $3.61 per share, in the same period a year ago. Revenue was $28.82 billion, down 1% from $29.08 billion a year earlier. The results were below Wall Street’s expectations and Meta’s stock fell after-hours.
NEW YORK — The Justice Department says a Pennsylvania mortgage company owned by billionaire businessman Warren Buffett’s company discriminated against potential Black and Latino homebuyers in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware. Officials are calling it the second-largest redlining settlement in history. Trident Mortgage Co. deliberately avoided writing mortgages in minority-majority neighborhoods in West Philadelphia, Camden, New Jersey and in Wilmington, Delaware. That’s according to a Justice Department Consumer Financial Protection Bureau settlement with Trident. As part of the agreement with the government agencies, Trident will have to set aside $20 million to make loans in underserved neighborhoods.
WASHINGTON — The Senate has passed a bill that’s designed to encourage more semiconductor companies to build chip plants in the United States. The $280 billion measure, which awaits a House vote, includes federal grants and tax breaks for companies that construct their chip facilities in the U.S. It also directs Congress to significantly increase spending on high-tech research programs that lawmakers say will help the country stay economically competitive in the decades ahead. Senate passage came by a 64-33 vote Wednesday. The House vote is expected later this week as lawmakers try to wrap up business before returning to their home states and districts in August.
DETROIT — Ford Motor Co.’s net income rose 19% in the second quarter as the company pulled together enough computer chips to boost factory output and sales. The Dearborn, Michigan, automaker said it made $667 million from April through June. Adjusted earnings per share were 68 cents, beating Wall Street estimates of 45 cents, according to FactSet. Revenue was $40.19 billion, also beating analyst estimates of $36.87 billion. The company stuck with its full-year outlook for pretax earnings of $11.5 billion to $12.5 billion. The company still expects 10% to 15% growth in vehicle sales to dealers for the full year. It made $561 million in the second quarter of last year. | 2022-07-27T22:04:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Fed rate hike, Sprint-Frontier deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-fed-rate-hike-sprint-frontier-deal/2022/07/27/d0e0dcda-0df4-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-fed-rate-hike-sprint-frontier-deal/2022/07/27/d0e0dcda-0df4-11ed-88e8-c58dc3dbaee2_story.html |
Book Club: In ‘Evan Pao,’ boy senses lies but must dig for the truth
Wendy Wan-Long Shang’s new novel features a boy who moves across the country and is the only Asian American kid at his new school.
By Abby McGanney Nolan
Ever since he had a baseball coach who tried to hide how much he wanted his team to win, Evan Pao has had a sense for when people aren’t quite telling the truth.
The 12-year-old has just moved with his mother and sister from California to the town of Haddington, Virginia, and he can tell if what people say matches what they’re feeling. It’s a useful skill when you’re coming into sixth grade near the end of the school year and don’t know anybody.
Evan has a lot to figure out, including a mystery concerning his father, but it’s his fellow students who take up most of his attention. He also tries to persuade his mother to get the family a dog.
With the help of his mother’s brother (who has lived in Haddington for eight years), a friendly boy named Max (who has lived there his whole life) and a dog who seems to have no home, Evan slowly gets used to his new town. Through computer searches at the local library, he even finds a meaningful way to take part in his school’s Battlefield Day, which commemorates the Civil War, as well as his town’s discussion of the Confederate statue erected there more than a century ago.
As the only Asian American in his school, Evan brings out curiosity in some people and hostility in others. He hadn’t faced any of that in his old school. And when a classmate admits to shooting a bullet at his house, Evan, his mother, and his 15-year-old sister are shocked and upset. They wonder why the police aren’t taking the incident more seriously. Although Evan can sense when someone is lying, it’s hard for him to see what the full truth is or why his classmate is acting like a bully.
Wendy Wan-Long Shang presents the book’s chapters from a variety of viewpoints, but Evan is central to the fast-paced story. He is thoughtful and likable, and his ability to see through insincerity will have you thinking about your own instincts. As eventful as “The Secret Battle of Evan Pao” is, it’s also a good reminder that everyone has inner battles that we can’t see or easily understand.
“The Great Wall of Lucy Wu” (ages 8 to 12), Wendy Wan-Long Shang’s first novel features another sixth-grader who must deal with surprising challenges.
In Melissa Dassori’s “J.R. Silver Writes Her World” (ages 8 to 12), a sixth-grade girl discovers she has a magical power when the short stories she writes come true.
KidsPost reader Edith Dawson of Mount Vernon, Iowa, recommends “On My Honor” (ages 9 to 12) by Marion Dane Bauer. It’s a Newbery Honor-winning story about a tragedy that happens when two friends swim in a dangerous river. “It uses realistic characters with relatable struggles to teach kids that it is their duty to tell the truth and that they must move on from the guilt of mistakes that aren’t entirely their fault.”
The Last Mapmaker
By Christina Soontornvat
In the kingdom of Mangkon, 12-year-old Sai is trying to make it on her own. Her mother died years ago, and her father survives by criminal deeds that sometimes get him put in jail. Sai has worked on her penmanship and blending in with regular society, and she has been lucky to get a job helping the kingdom’s preeminent mapmaker. When the opportunity arrives to escape her father’s shady schemes, Sai goes on a great voyage of exploration. Once onboard, she will have to figure out whom to trust and the truth of what’s beyond the known world.
The Summer Book Club is open to kids ages 6 to 14. They may read some or all of the books on our list. (Find a blurb for each book at wapo.st/kidspostbookclub launch2022.) The first 600 kids registered will receive a notebook and pen. To join the club, children must be registered by a parent or guardian by August 8. To register, that adult must fill out our form at wapo.st/kidspostbookclub2022. If you have questions, contact kidspost@washpost.com.
The 2022 KidsPost Summer Book Club has the theme “Speaking Truth,” and we would like to know your favorite books that relate to the theme. Kids ages 6 to 14 are eligible to participate; one entry per person. Have a parent or guardian fill out the top part of the form at wapo.st/kidspostYMAL and then share your suggestions by Thursday. We may include your favorites in KidsPost. At the end of the summer, we will send a selection of books to three randomly selected kids who sent in suggestions. Winners will be notified by August 30. | 2022-07-27T22:05:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kids book club: - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/07/27/kidspost-book-club-evan-pao/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/07/27/kidspost-book-club-evan-pao/ |
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