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How Taiwan reacted to Pelosi’s visit, from ‘welcome’ to ‘American witch’
People walk past a billboard welcoming U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 3, 2022. (Chiang Ying-Ying/AP)
TAIPEI, Taiwan — There were signs that Taiwanese people were both thrilled and anxious about Nancy Pelosi’s visit during the roughly 18 hours she and other U.S. lawmakers spent on the island.
“The more unhappy the [Chinese Communist Party] is, the happier I am,” Ingrid Ho, 35, a Taipei resident, told The Washington Post on Wednesday. “Pelosi coming may mean all kinds of consequences but in the moment, the excitement outweighs reason.”
Ho, like many of Taiwan’s 23 million citizens, has lived with China’s frequent threats for decades. “Maybe it’s that Taiwanese people are used to being scared,” Ho said. “We are at the center of this conflict, but somehow I still feel like a bystander — just curious how this will turn out.”
Taipei 101, Taiwan’s tallest skyscraper, lit up with a welcome message for Pelosi in English and Chinese.
At Taipei Songshan Airport in Taipei on Tuesday, a small group of supporters waited to greet Pelosi — and the atmosphere felt “like the countdown to the new year,” Lin Ching Yi, a lawmaker from Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, wrote on Facebook.
“I’m very happy that Speaker Pelosi came to show her support,” said Liu Yueh-hsia, 72, holding a banner that read, “Speaker Pelosi, welcome to the Republic of Taiwan.”
Liu, who has been advocating for Taiwan’s formal independence for decades, added: “We have nothing to do with China. We don’t want to be unified with them.”
But elsewhere on the island, small groups of protesters, including those who support unification with China, stomped on American flags and held up signs disparaging Pelosi and urging the U.S. delegation to go home. One held up a sign calling Pelosi an “American witch.”
At a news conference with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday, Pelosi was asked what she could offer Taiwan to offset the possible costs the island would incur — including economic retaliation from China — as a consequence of her visit.
She answered that her visit was part of a broader U.S. effort to have “better economic exchanges” with Taiwan, and she said “significant” Taiwanese businesses “are already planning to invest in manufacturing in the United States.” She also praised “the ingenuity, the entrepreneurial spirit, the brainpower, the intellectual resource that exists in Taiwan,” and called the island’s tech sector “a model.”
White House spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday that “China has positioned itself to take further steps” as a result of Pelosi’s visit — which could include more military drills near Taiwan and “economic coercion” measures, he said. “We expect that they will continue to react over a longer-term horizon,” he added.
Though most Taiwanese believe that war is the last thing China wants, some are still worried.
Zamake Chang, 30, an engineer from Taoyuan said Wednesday that he spent the day looking at flights from Taiwan’s main airport to see whether any have been disrupted. “I’m supposed to travel abroad soon, and I’m quite worried that Chinese military maneuvers will blockade us, and I won’t be able to go,” he said.
“Before the Ukraine war started, people also said Russia won’t invade,” he added. “Historically, there have been many wars that started suddenly. So really, it’s pretty tense now.”
Annabelle Timsit, Vic Chiang and Pei-Lin Wu contributed to this report. | 2022-08-03T14:07:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taiwanese reaction to Nancy Pelosi's visit ranges from excitement to anger - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/nancy-pelosi-taiwan-visit-reaction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/nancy-pelosi-taiwan-visit-reaction/ |
7 LAPVONA (Penguin Press, $27). By Ottessa Moshfegh. A shepherd boy kills the son of a lord, setting off a power struggle among the religious and secular elites of their medieval town.
8 THE HOTEL NANTUCKET (Little, Brown, $29). By Elin Hilderbrand. A newly hired general manager and her staff revive a once-illustrious hotel purchased by a British billionaire.
10 THIS TIME TOMORROW (Riverhead, $28). By Emma Straub. A woman falls asleep on the eve of her 40th birthday and wakes to find herself 16 again.
7 THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVITUDE (Penguin Press, $29). By Mark Leibovich. A journalist chronicles the political enablers who allowed Trump to thrive in a culture of submission.
8 THE 1619 PROJECT (One World, $38). By Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times Magazine. Essays contextualize the history of slavery as part of the founding of the United States.
9 DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS (Bloomsbury, $27.) By Isaac Fitzgerald. A man looks back on his unstable childhood, his trouble-making adolescence and his continued search for self-acceptance.
10 RIVER OF THE GODS (Doubleday, $32.50). By Candice Millard. A chronicle of the search for the head of the Nile by two 19th-century British explorers and their African guide.
Rankings reflect sales for the week ended July 31. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2022 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) | 2022-08-03T14:44:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Post hardcover bestsellers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2022/08/03/2e6aec98-12e0-11ed-a642-b9be12ce0b34_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2022/08/03/2e6aec98-12e0-11ed-a642-b9be12ce0b34_story.html |
For all the flashy deals and big names, A.J. Preller and the San Diego Padres have yet to turn their aggressiveness into postseason achievement. (Derrick Tuskan/AP Photo)
A.J. Preller was hired as general manager of the San Diego Padres in August 2014, and in the years since he joined the organization, it has transformed. The Padres used to have a bottom-five payroll every year, but San Diego’s ownership has since given Preller leeway to build it past $200 million. They used to be non-factors in major free agent dealings and landscape-altering trade deadline moves. Now they are baseball’s most constant and unpredictable talent predators.
But for all the flashy deals and big names, the infusion of star power and the explosion of financial commitments, Preller and the Padres have yet to turn their aggressiveness into postseason achievement. Not only have they failed to make deep runs in the fall, they have made the playoffs only once during his time with the team. They have never won a postseason game.
So while Preller in February 2021 agreed to a promotion and extension that made him GM and president of baseball operations for the Padres through 2026, he nevertheless entered this season under ever-growing scrutiny, if not explicit pressure from the organization that hired him. And with his Padres a dozen games out of first in their division and staring up at the Los Angeles Dodgers once again, Preller doubled down on the thing that made the Padres hand him the reins in the first place: Making the big deal when others — like, possibly even no others — will make it.
In trading for star outfielder Juan Soto, Preller added to a lineup that has underachieved without injured Fernando Tatís Jr., relied heavily on since-cooled Manny Machado early and compiled the lowest OPS of any National League team currently in playoff position. He added to his offense the same way he added to his bullpen the day before, with a splashy deal for the biggest name. In that case, Preller traded his closer, Taylor Rogers, and prospects to the still-contending Milwaukee Brewers in exchange for Josh Hader.
Preller did not navigate the high-priced starting pitching market, which he did not need as desperately. His rotation entered Wednesday’s games pitching to the eighth-best ERA in baseball and generating the eighth-most strikeouts per nine innings. But as he has done over and over, Preller added the big name to the mix instead of the quieter one, went for the market’s biggest prize instead of hunting incremental gains. And he did it by hurling prospects Washington’s way in a return its general manager, Mike Rizzo, said Tuesday “exceeded” the Nationals’ ask — an ask Rizzo suggested was so high no one else would meet it.
Soto will get to play on a loaded roster now, get to shuffle and strut with the swagger of a winning team to back him. He will have better protection in the order. He will have more runners on base in front of him. Soto could, for all those reasons, explode down the stretch.
But he will also be on a team under pressure, one led by one of the game’s most respected managers, surrounded by some of its more prominent and eye-catching stars. So Nationals Manager Dave Martinez added a message to his goodbye Tuesday.
“I wished him the very best and told him how much we appreciate him,” Martinez said. “What I want him to understand is when he goes over here, you make that team play up to you.”
Soto is walking into a far more complex clubhouse than the one he walked into in Washington, let alone the one he walked out of. When the Nationals called him up in May 2018, he was the rookie in a clubhouse that included Max Scherzer, Bryce Harper, Ryan Zimmerman, Trea Turner, Anthony Rendon and more. The hierarchies were established and predictable, built among largely homegrown stars, besides Scherzer, over time.
The Padres, in large part because of the frenetic fearlessness that characterizes Preller’s approach to roster construction, have often been more thrown together with a big deal here and there, rather than the steady rise of a homegrown core.
Tatís signed a massive deal to become the face of the franchise long-term, appeared to sulk somewhat as the Padres struggled down the stretch last year, then was injured in a motorcycle crash that has sidelined him for months. He will likely return shortly after Soto arrives as the newest shiny object, a franchise player in his own right who, as a fellow 23-year-old, somehow has a more impressive résumé than Tatis’s very admirable one.
That clubhouse will just have lost Eric Hosmer, the veteran who has been a consistent, if not overly productive presence since he signed there to help shepherd the Padres young roster into contention. His departure will leave Machado, an MVP candidate in his own right, as the veteran with the big locker who is expected to show others the way.
Besides Nelson Cruz and Josh Bell, Soto had become something like that veteran in Washington. He inherited Ryan Zimmerman’s locker. He was the face of the team. Now, despite being the only position player on the Padres active roster to have won a World Series, he will have to find his place again.
And the Padres will have to find themselves again, too. They will have to incorporate the gravity of a massive star into their orbit, and they will have to patch over the loss of Hosmer as they shift to make room. San Diego knows better than most that postseason success is not always proportional to the sum of a franchise’s star power. But Preller and the Padres seem determined to establish correlation. | 2022-08-03T14:48:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Padres GM A.J. Preller swings big with Juan Soto trade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/aj-preller-juan-soto-trade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/aj-preller-juan-soto-trade/ |
Point guard Melo Trimble headlines a Maryland alumni team, while center Greg Monroe will play for Georgetown's squad. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images and John McDonnell/The Washington Post/TWP)
About a week after he returned home to the D.C. area from Turkey, where he spent the last nine months playing professional basketball, Melo Trimble received a direct message on Instagram from a familiar name.
Terrell Stoglin, who had starred at Maryland a few years before Trimble became the face of the Terrapins in the mid 2010s, was reaching out with word of an exhibition game. Trimble, looking to stay in shape before he makes the move to China for this upcoming season, was intrigued.
“It was my first time ever speaking to him, actually,” Trimble said. “But the moment he mentioned a game, I said I wouldn’t mind playing in something like that.”
On Saturday, Trimble and Stoglin will team up with other recent Maryland players to face a group of Georgetown alumni in the first competition of the Alumni Basketball League, a new summer venture built around college basketball history.
Saturday’s game, scheduled for the pavilion court in Maryland’s Xfinity Center, will feature 18 former Terps and Hoyas, most of whom play overseas. The Maryland team, named “The College Park Boys” is made up of Trimble, Stoglin, Anthony Cowan Jr., Damonte Dodd, Travis Garrison, James Gist, Ekene Ibekwe, Sean Mosley and Byron Mouton. The Georgetown team, known as “DawgTalk,” features Aaron Bowen, Jason Clark, Greg Monroe, Jagan Mosely, Rodney Pryor, Henry Sims, D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera, Greg Whittington and Chris Wright.
General admission tickets are being sold for $15, and various other VIP options are available. The game will not be televised or live-streamed.
Garrison and Wright are serving as the teams’ general managers, meaning they assembled most of their respective rosters.
Each player will receive $2,500 for participating, according to Kareem Rush, the league’s creator. Rush, who played at Missouri and for several NBA teams, came up with the idea when he tried out for the first season of ‘Big3’ and noticed the large turnout at tryouts. He believed there was hidden potential within all the talent just outside the NBA, as most former college stars spent their professional careers far from the fan bases that rooted for them.
“What we noticed was that nobody was really tapping into the college marketplace outside of the NCAA,” Rush said. “We wanted to be the first league that does that.”
In 2018, he helped put on a charity game between Missouri and Kansas, the alma mater of his brother, Brandon Rush. The success of that event inspired him to expand, but the coronavirus pandemic put those plans on the shelf until this summer, when former Tigers teammate Jake Jackson helped him tackle a bigger project.
For now, Jackson, the founder of a venture capital firm, is funding the ABL. Rush said the plan is to use a few games this year as a proof of concept before expanding into a full league in 2023, when he hopes ticket sales, television rights and merchandising can help make the league financially viable.
“If guys are coming back [to the U.S.] and they want to stay in shape, why not play in a league where you make some money and get to play in front of your former fan base,” Rush said. “That’s a good way to stay in shape.”
When another former Tiger, Jason Conley, came on board, he suggested the D.C. area as the perfect place to put together the league’s first game. There was talent available, and there was a mostly dormant rivalry between Maryland and Georgetown.
“You hear it all the time, guys asking what would have happened way back when if Maryland had played Georgetown,” Garrison said. “When we used to see Georgetown guys, we could talk all the trash we wanted because we never played. If we never got to play them, it didn’t matter.”
Now, players will have a chance to back up that trash talk on the court. Their college days may be over, but the rivalry can live on.
“I know neither team wants to lose,” Trimble said. “That alone will make it a good game.” | 2022-08-03T14:49:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland and Georgetown renew rivalry in Alumni Basketball League - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/maryland-georgetown-alumni-basketball-league/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/maryland-georgetown-alumni-basketball-league/ |
Remembering Mark Richards, the dean of D.C. weather observations
Richards, who supervised weather observations at National Airport from 1979 to 2022, died on July 26 while on the job.
Perspective by Keith Allen
Reagan National Airport on May 18, left. Mark Richards, right. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post, left; courtesy Keith Richards, right)
From Jason Samenow, weather editor: I was deeply saddened to learn Mark Richards — who was the supervisor of weather observations at Reagan National Airport — died last week while at his job. Richards always made himself available to the Capital Weather Gang for interviews about D.C. weather observations and even controversies about the airport’s snow measurements. Richards was also profiled by The Post’s John Kelly in 2003: Snow measuring crew won’t give an inch.
I always enjoyed talking to Richards and he could not have been kinder.
As his loss has shaken the local weather community, I reached out to Keith Allen, one of Richards’s close friends and colleagues, to write this remembrance.
Mark Richards was an icon in the Washington, D.C. weather community for 43 years as an observer at Ronald Reagan National Airport. A Vietnam veteran and a larger-than-life figure, he came out of the Air Force to work at National Airport on Sept. 1, 1979. He never missed a day of work until he had a heart attack on the job in March 2014. That sidelined him for a while but he came back to work in August 2014 and resumed his steadfast reliability, never late or absent.
He was at work on July 26 when he had another heart attack and died on his 72nd birthday.
Richards made history when he arrived at the airport in 1979. For the first time since the opening of National Airport in 1941, the weather reports were recorded and transmitted by observers who were not employees of the U.S. government. The National Weather Service had decided to turn these duties over to civilians in an effort to save money.
Richards’s work included taking weather observations to support aviation and forecasting. In addition, his job entailed maintaining daily and monthly climate records, including snowfall measurements, and providing the C & P Telephone Company operators with hourly weather data. This data was brought into the phone company’s weather announcement system, which handled approximately 150,000 calls per day.
The revival of telephone weather forecasts in Washington, D.C.
As the on-site supervisor, Richards’s diligent quality control at the airport resulted in a top ranking and the lowest error rate nationwide frequently during his long tenure. That ranking included not only civilian weather observing stations but also those maintained by the Weather Service.
Richards was a skilled forecaster. He worked with D.C. Weather Services to provide the weather messages for the phone company for over 20 years (at 202.936.1212) and for the vendor that now provides that service (at 202.589.1212).
Richards was a talented musician, singer, entertainer and emcee. He also coached and refereed high school basketball and baseball. Most important, he was a man of outstanding integrity and sincerity, and an old-school good soul who was respected and loved by many.
You can read more about Richards and funeral arrangements at this link: Obituary — Mark Joseph Richards | 2022-08-03T15:24:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Remembering Mark Richards, the dean of D.C. weather observations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/08/03/mark-richards-dc-weather-observer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/08/03/mark-richards-dc-weather-observer/ |
Book club: A girl looks to escape a life of lies in ‘The Last Mapmaker’
Christina Soontornvat’s latest novel is filled with adventure, mystery and family drama.
(Allison Colpoys for The Washington Post)
The Last Mapmaker
By Christina Soontornvat
In the kingdom of Mangkon, where being part of a noble family is the key to success, 12-year-old Sodsai Mudawan feels she must tell a few lies to get where she wants to go.
As the narrator of “The Last Mapmaker,” Sai lets readers know right away that she is not from a wealthy family and that she pretends to be to keep her job assisting Master Paiyoon, the kingdom’s most trusted mapmaker. She also explains how she tries to steer clear of her father, who involves her (and her forgery skills) in his criminal schemes whenever possible. Sai, whose mother died years ago, doesn’t want her father to reveal her true identity and low status.
Master Paiyoon is often grumpy, but he has come to appreciate Sai’s drawing talents and hard work. When an opportunity to escape her father’s orbit presents itself, Sai agrees to help Master Paiyoon on a great voyage of exploration. The leader of the kingdom wants the country’s fleet of ships to chart the southern seas after years of war and perhaps claim a distant, rather mysterious land for Mangkon. Sai is impressed by the ship’s captain and crew and excited by the promise of adventure. But mainly she wants to start a new life in a place far away from her father.
At the center of the fascinating world she has created, author Christina Soontornvat presents a heroine who tells the truth to readers but hides it from almost everyone else. Once aboard the Prosperity, Sai has to figure out whom to trust, whom she has to work against, and the truth of what’s beyond the city where she has lived her whole life. As the cast of characters grows, including a boy who might give away Sai’s secrets and a young stowaway she agrees to help, readers can compare their judgment with Sai’s without facing any of the dangers she faces on the book’s stormy voyage.
Even as it delves into questions about exploration, power and responsibility, “The Last Mapmaker” offers a twisty, entertaining tale of discovery.
In Soontornvat’s previous novel, “A Wish in the Dark,” (ages 9 to 12) a 13-year-old girl searches for a boy who has escaped from the prison in which he was born.
Twelve-year-old Minni, whose family lives in the slums of Mumbai, gets a close-up but dangerous view of her city’s water crisis in “Thirst,” (ages 10 to 12) a new novel by Varsha Bajaj.
KidsPost reader Mary Campbell of Centreville, Virginia, recommends Carrie Firestone’s “Dress Coded,” (ages 9 to 12). It’s a story about a middle school where “teachers prowl the halls scouting for girls in violation of the dress code — a place where girls are treated inequitably," Mary writes. "Molly Frost can’t stand it anymore, but as she begins to speak out she realizes it might not be as easy as she thought.”
Bruno Haggard of McLean, Virginia, suggests that older kids read “Kneel” (ages 13 to 17) by Candace Buford. “It’s a powerful and intense book that serves the purpose of raising awareness about the racial injustices and inequalities faced by people of color in our world, specifically in small Louisiana town,” Bruno writes. “Buford’s novel makes one want to advocate and demand change, and highlights the importance of speaking up for important causes.”
Readers Roisin McAnoy, Lilly Carter, Quinn Mendoza, Tofino Martin, Adeline Gershman, Liam Griffin, Hallie Isler and Estella Weiner of California, Hadley Thompson of New York City, and Harlyn Scott of Ellicott City, Maryland, campaigned for “AfterMath” (ages 10 to 12) by Emily Barth Isler. In the book, a middle-schooler moves to a small town several years after kids her age were killed in a school shooting. “I hear about all of the school shootings, and it is very scary. This book talks about what happens after,” Tofino writes. “If everyone read this book maybe they won’t feel so lonely. Or want to use guns.”
It’s last call for the Summer Book Club, which closes Monday, August 8. The 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/kidspostbookclublaunch2022.) The first 600 kids registered will receive a notebook and pen. To join the club, children must be registered by a parent or guardian. To register, that adult must fill out our form at wapo.st/kidspostbookclub2022. If you have questions, contact kidspost@washpost.com. | 2022-08-03T15:37:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kids book club: In 'The Last Mapmaker,' a girl's talents help her escape a life of lies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/03/kidspost-book-club-last-mapmaker/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/03/kidspost-book-club-last-mapmaker/ |
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on April 26 in Washington. (Bonnie Cash/Pool/AP)
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has suggested that Social Security and Medicare be eliminated as federal entitlement programs, and that they should instead become programs approved by Congress on an annual basis as discretionary spending.
Those who work in the United States pay Social Security and Medicare taxes that go into federal trust funds. Upon retirement, based on a person’s lifetime earnings and other factors, a retiree is eligible to receive monthly Social Security payments. Similarly, Medicare is the federal health insurance program that kicks in for people 65 and older, or for others who have disabilities.
In an interview that aired Tuesday on “The Regular Joe Show” podcast, Johnson, who is seeking a third term in the Senate, lamented that the Social Security and Medicare programs automatically grant benefits to those who meet the qualifications — that is, to those who had been paying into the system over their working life.
“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that more than 70 percent of our federal budget, of our federal spending, is all mandatory spending. It’s on automatic pilot. It never — you just don’t do proper oversight. You don’t get in there and fix the programs going bankrupt. It’s just on automatic pilot.”
Johnson suggested that Social Security and Medicare be transformed into programs whose budgets are appropriated by Congress on an annual basis. He pointed out that budgets for the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments are approved as discretionary spending.
“What we ought to be doing is we ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it’s all evaluated so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt,” Johnson said. “As long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.”
Johnson’s comments prompted criticism from the White House.
“While @POTUS and congressional Democrats fight for the Inflation Reduction Act, which would let Medicare negotiate lower drug prices, congressional Republicans like @SenRonJohnson want to put Medicare on the chopping block,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted Tuesday. “That would devastate families.”
A representative for Johnson’s office did not immediately respond Wednesday to questions sent by email, including a request for more specifics on Johnson would restructure Medicare and Social Security and whether he would propose changing how people qualify for them.
Asked Wednesday whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would support such a plan, a representative for the Kentucky senator pointed to his previous rejection of a proposal by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) that would have similarly upended Social Security and Medicare. In March, Johnson said he supported “most” of Scott’s plan and called it “a positive thing.”
“If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader. I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor,” McConnell told reporters in March. “Let me tell you what would not be a part of our agenda: We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”
Earlier this year, Johnson announced that he would seek reelection in November, despite a previous pledge to retire after two terms. He is widely expected to win his primary election next Tuesday.
Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is running for the Democratic nomination for Senate, criticized his would-be opponent’s remarks on entitlement programs.
“Ron Johnson is threatening to cut Social Security and Medicare,” Barnes tweeted Tuesday. “~surprise surprise~ the self-serving, multimillionaire Senator is trying to strip working people of the Social Security and Medicare benefits they’ve earned over a lifetime of hard work.”
This was not the first time Johnson has made news for a proposal that prompted even other Republicans to distance themselves. In March, Johnson said he wanted to see the GOP repeal the Affordable Care Act if his party won the White House and the House and Senate majorities in 2024, something Republicans failed to do the last time they had majorities in Washington. | 2022-08-03T15:37:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sen. Ron Johnson suggests ending Medicare, Social Security as mandatory spending programs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/ron-johnson-medicare-social-security/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/ron-johnson-medicare-social-security/ |
Payrolls
Are we in a recession? Here’s what the data says.
Kevin Schaul
Aug. 3 at 11:56 a.m.
Last week’s report on economic output recharged speculation about whether the U.S. economy is in a recession. Gross domestic product shrank for the second quarter in a row, a common, but unofficial, definition of a recession.
But GDP isn’t the only measure that matters, especially in the tangled mess of the pandemic economy.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has the final say on whether a period of economic decline is a recession, a determination that can lag for months. They consult a wide range of indicators that suggest this year’s economy stands on sturdier ground than recent recessions.
Americans feel bad about the economy, and there’s no doubt that soaring prices on everyday essentials are making it harder to get by. But a recession isn’t a measure of how hard it is to make ends meet. It is, as defined by NBER, a downturn that is deep, diffused and lasts for at least a few months.
But there is no exact formula for a recession. For instance, two months in early 2020 were declared a recession, despite being so brief, because the economic decline from the pandemic was so drastic and far reaching,
“Every recession is unhappy in its own way,” said David Wilcox, senior economist with the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Bloomberg Economics. “It’s important for the Business Cycle Dating Committee to sift through the indicators and make their decision in a flexible way.”
We took a look at where the indicators used by the decision-makers at NBER stand today compared to recessions over the past 50 years. This year’s economy is far from bulletproof — but it is strikingly different from hard times in the past.
The overall size of the economy
Gross domestic product measures the country’s economic growth by tallying up the value of all its goods and services. It has declined the past two quarters, but GDP often has big revisions after its initial release, averaging a full percentage point of change between the first estimate and its final revision months later.
[Why the U.S. economy shrank]
NBER also takes into account GDP’s less prominent cousin, gross domestic income (GDI), which measures the same thing — economic growth — from a different angle: how much money was earned by making those goods and providing those services.
In practice the measures aren’t quite equal, but this year they’re pointing in opposite directions: GDP says the economy is shrinking, while GDI says it’s growing.
Averaging the GDP and GDI together, as NBER does, suggests the economy has largely stayed the same in the first three months of the year. Gross domestic income for the second quarter has yet to be reported.
Employment shows a much stronger picture, especially when compared to past recessions.
[Where do you stand financially? Get a score on this quiz — and our advice.]
NBER looks at two different measures of employment: payrolls reported by businesses and direct household surveys. Both are a big contrast with the job losses seen in the first six months of most previous recessions.
There are signs that last year’s frenetic labor market is easing: job openings dipped slightly in June after months of record highs, and tech companies are slowing their growth. But unemployment remains at a pandemic low.
“Employment is usually a contemporaneous indicator,” said Wilcox. “If the overall economy was contracting, you’d see it in employment.”
Earning and buying, making and selling
Total income offers an additional angle on employment, because it reflects reductions in working hours that might not result in job losses. And income has largely held steady, even after adjusting for inflation.
[The changing shape of inflation]
Consumer spending remains close to its all-time pandemic highs. Rising prices are putting many households under economic strain, however. Essentials like groceries and gas are taking up a greater part of household budgets, potentially crowding out discretionary spending on goods.
Industry and manufacturing represent only a small part of the economy, but economists consult these measures because they have historically been sensitive to changes in the overall economy.
The Industrial Production Index, which measures the value of items produced in the United States, shows growth far above that of previous recessions.
On the other hand, the inflation-adjusted value of items sold in the United States, measured by real manufacturing and trade sales, has dropped, resembling the patterns of previous recessions. That may be because of how the pandemic reshaped consumer spending: goods spending is starting to cool from its pandemic-fueled frenzy, and service spending has finally risen back to its pre-pandemic levels.
We won’t know for a while whether we are actually in a recession and if so, when it began. But the measures that matter to decision-makers at NBER suggest a different and more complicated picture than previous recessions.
If we are in a recession or enter one soon, it may be unlike the most recent economic downturns we’ve faced.
“All of our thinking is based on the last 20 years of recessions,” said Thomas Coleman, an economist at the University of Chicago. “I’m not sure that’s a good guide.”
The Great Recession and the 2020 recession were both tipped off by crises: a financial meltdown and a pandemic suddenly shutting down the economy.
Without a crisis on a similar scale, Coleman says, the next recession will be more like those from the 1970s to the early 2000s, causing significant pain but not repeating the devastating job losses of the past two recessions.
“The question we need to ask,” said Coleman via email, “is ‘do we feel unlucky?’”
The Post analyzed eight indicators used by NBER to determine when recessions start and end: real personal income less transfers, non-farm payrolls, real personal consumption expenditures, real manufacturing and trade sales, household employment, index of industrial production, real GDP and real GDI. All data is from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Kevin Schaul is a senior graphics reporter for The Washington Post. He holds corporations accountable using data and visuals. Twitter Twitter | 2022-08-03T16:12:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Are we in a recession? Here’s what the data says. - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/are-we-in-recession-data/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/are-we-in-recession-data/ |
Vin Scully delivered a nightly fanfare for the common man
Vin Scully broadcast Dodgers games for 67 seasons. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
He was something that’s pretty much vanished from the American landscape: a genial truthteller, well-liked because he was honest, beloved because he was reliable, trusted because he loathed phonies, frauds and showboats as much as his audience did.
Vin Scully’s act never fell out of fashion because it wasn’t an act and it was never in fashion. What he delivered each night through six decades as the voice of the Dodgers — really, the voice of baseball; no, really, the voice of the nation — was a clear, unvarnished report of what happened, along with plain-spoken pearls of wisdom about what it all meant. He issued each night a fanfare for the common man, an American anthem of constancy that never flinched from controversy but never hyped anything either. His nightly lovesong to his sport and his audience captured the nation’s triumphs and tensions like Aaron Copland’s music did, told the truth as Walter Cronkite did, burst bubbles of pomposity the way Johnny Carson did, and won our hearts the way the pre-scandal Bill Cosby did.
For Scully, who died Tuesday at 94, there was never any fall from grace, never any fade-out into some new technology. He was as loved on his last ballgame as he’d been throughout. “I have said enough for a lifetime,” he said on that final broadcast in 2016, “and for the last time, I wish you all a very pleasant good afternoon.” He never trumpeted his achievements, never hyped the action on the field.
Vin Scully, a Babe Ruth of the broadcast booth, dies at 94
Yet he had an uncanny ability to see big stuff coming. His call of Kirk Gibson’s World Series home run in 1988 is justly famous (“The impossible has happened …”), but it’s what he said before the physically wrecked slugger’s mighty swing that reveals Scully’s magical connection with the game’s big moments:
“All year long, they looked to him to light the fire and all year long, he answered the demands, until he was physically unable to start tonight,” Scully said. And then it happened, and Scully said only what was necessary: “High fly ball into right field. She is gone.”
Baseball, famously dubbed the only game you can see on the radio, was Scully’s canvas, a game whose leisurely pace and bursts of intense action allows the best storytellers to insinuate themselves into listeners’ lives, night after night, summer after summer.
For 67 summers, owners and all-stars and journeymen drifted by, and Scully stayed. His voice was SoCal smooth, unhurried, gentle, with a touch of his native New York. He wrote poetry in the moment. His language was simple, occasionally erudite — he never dumbed it down. If the best description of a play had been coined centuries earlier by Shakespeare or a Greek tragedian, Scully would not shy from quoting the master.
But in the big moments, Scully trusted his own words. This was no Neil Armstrong delivering a well-honed line as he stepped into a new world; this was pure improvisation, a jazz man working the changes in the pocket.
When Sandy Koufax, the Dodger pitcher who inspired some of Scully’s best work, began the ninth inning of his perfect game in 1965, the announcer paused between pitches to name all nine Dodgers on the field, the men Koufax would depend on to ensure his perfection.
“You can almost taste the pressure now,” he said. “There are 29,000 people in the ballpark, and a million butterflies.”
And then, after it was over, after he let the crowd’s roar be its own commentary for the longest time, Scully placed the event in history: “On the scoreboard in right field, it is 9:46 p.m. in the city of the angels, Los Angeles, California. And a crowd of 29,139 just sitting in to see the only pitcher in baseball history to hurl four no-hit, no-run games. He has done it four straight years, and now he capped it: On his fourth no-hitter, he made it a perfect game.”
Scully worked TV for decades — football and golf on CBS in the ’70s and ’80s, then NBC’s baseball game of the week — but the Dodgers were his constant, and radio was his enduring love, his intimate connection with the family in the car, the kid with the transistor radio tucked under his pillow in bed, the people hanging out on the stoop, the Dodger fans in their seats. Radio, he knew, was vastly more intimate than TV; it was where he and the fans could imagine together, Scully painting aural pictures and listeners filling in the colors in their minds.
Scully always left space for that to happen. He endured in good part because of what he did not do: He did not rip the bad guys on the other team. He did not spew gossip. He was no homer — he loved the Dodgers, to be sure, but he was not one of those announcers the team owners love, who find the silver lining in every lousy turn of the home team’s fortunes. Vin Scully told the truth, with empathy, but unvarnished. He never made fans groan.
In his later decades, when he was already a legend, he could at times seem anachronistic. He insisted on working games alone — no jocular jock sidekick, no bantering crosstalk. He made listeners — he addressed them as “Friends” — an honest deal: No blather, no phony yuks, just the straight story, with the lessons of history, the wisdom of someone who had seen it all. When Scully said a young phenom’s swing was reminiscent of Hank Aaron’s, it had nothing to do with anything he’d read or viewed on YouTube: It was because Scully saw them both play and had taken careful note of the alignment.
Scully never put his own views out front, but neither did he shy from making clear what he believed. In 1976, at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, two protesters ran onto the field to set an American flag ablaze, but Dodger outfielder Rick Monday had another idea: “It looks like he’s going to burn a flag,” Scully said, “and Rick Monday runs and takes it away from him. And so Monday — I think the guy was going to set fire to the American flag. Can you imagine that? Monday, when he realized what he was going to do, raced over and took the flag away from him. And Rick will get an ovation and properly so.”
On his final broadcast, Scully told his audience that “You and I have been friends for a long time. But I know in my heart that I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me.” He left them with a prayer, that “God give you for every storm, a rainbow. For every tear, a smile. For every care, a promise, and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life sends, a faithful friend to share.”
Most likely, no latter-day Scully could get hired anymore. Team owners want a PR man more than a storyteller. When Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos sacked the great announcer Jon Miller — a deacon in the Church of Scully — in 1996, he said it was because he wanted “more of an advocate” for the home team.
What the owners and the money men don’t get is that Scully was rich beyond words in the currency they would never understand, the most vital currency of all — trust. He declined to pretend he was just another fan. He valued only his credibility. And fans sensed it, sensed that he represented what we really do have in common. Vin Scully united people, maybe not to fight the big battles, for freedom or democracy, but to be together for the small things. He only told stories about a game, yet he reminded us always of who we are and what we want to be. | 2022-08-03T16:42:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vin Scully was the voice of the Dodgers, baseball and the nation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/vin-scully-death-appreciation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/vin-scully-death-appreciation/ |
(Toledo Museum of Art)
Even in this fragment of Frans Hals’s painting of the Van Campens, it is clear the artist was ahead of his time
This family portrait by the great 17th-century Dutch painter Frans Hals (1582/1583–1666) all but cries out for a 21st-century caption. “Another convention in Amsterdam?” you can imagine the woman thinking. “And you leave tomorrow?” Or more simply: “You want an eighth, did you say? Are you kidding me?”
Just my idle, anachronistic projection, of course, but the woman’s mordant expression does make it tempting.
Hals, who lived in Haarlem, was an astonishingly good painter. He specialized in portraits that captured fleeting expressions — especially laughter. His brisk, loosely brushed manner was so far ahead of its time that only in the 19th century did such Impressionists as Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot catch up with him.
This huge painting (more than 25 square feet) at the Toledo Museum of Art is one of only four family portraits Hals is known to have painted. All four set their subjects within a landscape, an innovation that allowed, or stimulated, a more informal approach. You see that here in the spontaneous-seeming interactions among the individuals and in the painting’s slight air of anarchy — so much truer to family life than what’s conventionally served up in stiffly posed family portraits set in fancy drawings rooms.
Large as “Van Campen Family Portrait in a Landscape” is, it was once even larger but was divided into at least three parts for unknown reasons, most likely sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. The other parts — two, anyway — have survived. Art historians obtained definitive proof that they belonged together in 2016, five years after the Toledo museum purchased this work. One fragment, of three more children and a goat, is in Brussels. Another, depicting a smiling boy, is in a private collection.
That makes a total of 11 children. But, in fact, the Van Campens had three more, and scholars have since uncovered evidence that all 14 — six boys and eight girls — were shown in the painting before it was cut up.
One late addition to the family — the apple-cheeked toddler at bottom left — was painted in by another Haarlem painter, Salomon de Bray, in 1628. De Bray didn’t try to conceal his handiwork. His style is noticeably different, but for the sake of full disclosure, he included his signature on the sole of the infant’s shoe.
Virtual reconstructions of the full composition make you appreciate how brilliantly Hals orchestrated all the figures and the directions of their gazes. But one can regret the painting’s dismemberment without losing any admiration for the sheer vitality and verve in the Toledo fragment.
In those days, the price of a family portrait like this was determined by the number of people depicted. So it’s clear that the Van Campens, who were Catholic (the Brussels fragment includes the spire of a distant church), were not only fertile but also very wealthy. Gijsbert van Campen was a successful cloth merchant.
Hals has captured Gijsbert’s warm eyes and boxer’s nose with terrific panache. The expressions of his wife, Maria, and all the various children are similarly lively and credible, conveyed with visible brushstrokes that give more weight to variations in tone and color than to the outlines of forms.
I particularly love the expressions of the three children on the right (they are near the center of the original composition). Surrounded by a little storm cell of gesturing hands, they have a fluttering, responsive quality that speaks to all the bubbles of intimate rapport that form and re-form within large and happy families, which — despite what Tolstoy wrote — are not actually all alike, are they?
Van Campen Family Portrait in a Landscape, early 1620s
Frans Hals (b. 1582). At Toledo Museum of Art. | 2022-08-03T17:08:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Perspective | This Frans Hals family portrait, in Toledo, was ahead of its time - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/frans-hals-van-campen-family-portrait/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/frans-hals-van-campen-family-portrait/ |
Extensively patented. (Photographer: Bloomberg)
The litigation involved AbbVie Inc. and its wildly successful arthritis drug adalimumab, marketed in the US as Humira. The principal patent on Humira expired in 2016, but AbbVie has obtained some 132 more, of which the great majority were granted in 2014 or later. Most of these newer patents relate to the medication’s formulation or manufacturing process. The last of them expires in 2034.
The practice of adding new patents to an old drug, though common in the pharmaceutical industry, is often derided for creating what critics call a “patent thicket” — which in turn is claimed to have anticompetitive effects. And Humira, with annual sales in excess of $20 billion, has been labeled “the poster child” for patent thicketing. Even the then-acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration was moved to complain last year about Humira’s “vast patent estate.”
The case decided by the 7th Circuit was filed by a group of health plans who argued that by obtaining so many patents, and asserting them in litigation against would-be market entrants, AbbVie violated the Sherman Act. The trial court dismissed the suit and, this week, the 7th Circuit agreed that the dismissal was proper.
The simplest way to understand the plaintiffs’ contention is this: The 132 patents are so daunting that no generic manufacturer has dared enter the market. Even if some of patents might turn out to be declared invalid, no pharmaceutical company wants to spend resources hacking through the thicket they create. (See how the metaphor works?) As a result, even though Humira’s original patent has expired, the drug has no competitors.
Sounds impressive. But Judge Easterbrook, who has long been one of the nation’s most renowned antitrust scholars, makes short work of the plaintiffs’ claims.
In the first place, the thicket might be less daunting than plaintiffs seem to think. Most drugs are what are known as synthetics, and the Food and Drug Administration is required to suspend the approval process if a patent infringement suit is filed against the applicant. But Humira is a biologic, isolated from natural sources. Since 2007, federal law has allowed the FDA to approve biologic applications even if an infringement suit has been filed. Moreover, once the agency gives its blessing to the “biosimilar” drug, the maker has the right to launch “at risk” — that is, to market the biosimilar even as the suit moves forward.
So why haven’t any competitors launched? The plaintiffs assert that other companies have been frightened off by the thicket created by all those patents.
Judge Easterbrook is unpersuaded: “But what’s wrong with having lots of patents? If AbbVie made 132 inventions, why can’t it hold 132 patents?” As long as your patents are valid, he reasons, asserting them in litigation can’t be a violation of antitrust law. Are they valid here? All 132 were approved by the Patent Office, and, as the court reminds us, “every patent comes with a presumption of validity.”
True, a defendant in an infringement suit can challenge the validity of the underlying patents. Why hasn’t that happened here? After all, when each potential competitor approached federal regulators, AbbVie sued immediately. Shouldn’t the defendants have responded by trying to invalidate some or all of those 132 patents?
Maybe. But the lawsuits never reached that point. Instead, AbbVie agreed to settle each of its lawsuits under terms that allow the biosimilars into the market in 2023 — well ahead of the expiration of the last of the patents on Humira.
Such “acceleration clauses” have long been common in settlements of pharmaceutical infringement cases. Often the patent owner will allow entry before the patent expires but pay the generic maker to delay entry for a few more years. Critics contend that such agreements are illegal under the antitrust law, a question the US Supreme Court has left open. Here, however, no money has changed hands. As Easterbrook puts the point, “0 + 0 = 0.”(1)
The 7th Circuit’s reasoning is sufficiently crisp and clear that one is moved to wonder why the lawsuit was filed at all. True, the litigation began before the pandemic, meaning that Big Pharma hadn’t yet developed the Covid vaccines and become a hero.
Or maybe the suit was an effort to lower drug prices by proxy. That would be easy to understand. The prices are often high. But one study after another has found that the social benefits of a successful new drug, even a relatively expensive one, almost always far outweigh the costs.
Even if one is unpersuaded, let’s not forget that Humira’s biosimilar substitutes will be available next year. The short of it is that the federal scheme works. The law promotes competition among drug companies, and there’s no more efficient tool for moderating price.
(1) Most of the litigation over the so-called “reverse payment” settlements involves synthetics, not biologics. The difference matters because the law governing synthetics allows the first generic approved 180 days of market exclusivity, meaning that to delay the first generic is to delay all generics. No such exclusivity is available for biologics. | 2022-08-03T17:08:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This Arthritis Drug Deserves Its Aggressive Patent Protection - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/this-arthritis-drug-deserves-its-aggressive-patent-protection/2022/08/03/27907328-1346-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/this-arthritis-drug-deserves-its-aggressive-patent-protection/2022/08/03/27907328-1346-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
FILE - Leslie Grace arrives at a screening of “In the Heights” during the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival on June 4, 2021. Warner Bros. has axed the $90 million “Batgirl” film planned for HBO Max, according to a person connected with the film who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. The studio decided the film, starring Grace in the title role, didn’t merit either a streaming debut or a theatrical release, and has instead opted to entirely write off the film which also starred Michael Keaton, J.K. Simmons and Brendan Fraser. (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-03T17:08:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Warner Bros. axes 'Batgirl,' won't release $90M HBO Max film - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/warner-bros-axes-batgirl-wont-release-90m-hbo-max-film/2022/08/03/16188622-134a-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/warner-bros-axes-batgirl-wont-release-90m-hbo-max-film/2022/08/03/16188622-134a-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
‘Batgirl’ has been canceled. Here’s what’s lost.
Leslie Grace, seen here attending the premiere of "The Suicide Squad" in August 2021 in Los Angeles, has already filmed "Batgirl," but the movie has been pulled from the Warner Bros. schedule. (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
“Batgirl” looked to be — at least from the few promotional photos — inspired by DC’s “Batgirl of Burnside” comics. It was directed by “Bad Boys For Life” directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, no strangers to directing young actresses of color in a superhero role after their work on “Ms. Marvel” with teenage star Iman Vellani for Marvel Studios and Disney Plus. One of the most dramatic aspects of the Batgirl mythos is that she is the daughter of Gotham City police commissioner Jim Gordon, who in many comic iterations is not aware his daughter is a crime-fighting vigilante. “Batgirl” starred J.K. Simmons as Gordon, continuing a role he began in Zack Snyder’s polarizing “Justice League” movies. Simmons is best known for giving one of the all-time great superhero movie performances in Sam Raimi’s original “Spider-Man” trilogy as Daily Bugle editor in chief J. Jonah Jameson. If Simmons is in your superhero movie, it’s a big deal. | 2022-08-03T17:08:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Batgirl’ has been canceled. Here’s what’s lost. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/08/03/batgirl-canceled-leslie-grace/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/08/03/batgirl-canceled-leslie-grace/ |
A billboard in Taipei welcomes the arrival of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Aug. 2. (Chiang Ying-Ying/AP)
Taiwan welcomed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) this week by lighting up the island democracy’s tallest building with the words: “Thank you.” It is a sentiment that should be echoed by every freedom-loving American.
Nancy Pelosi: Why I'm leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan
I disagree with Pelosi on almost everything, but she has long been a leader for the cause of freedom in China. In the 1990s, when I worked on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Clinton administration wanted to give Communist China permanent “most favored nation” trade status, which would pave the way for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. My boss at the time, committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) — one of the most conservative members of the Senate — teamed up with Pelosi to fight it.
Even though she was opposing the president of her own party, Pelosi did not mince words. “President [Clinton] is even saying that China is moving toward becoming a thriving democracy,” Pelosi thundered in 1998. “Yet, he ignores the continued pattern of repression … by the Chinese government.” She also accused President Clinton of seeking “special trade status for a nation that proliferates weapons of mass destruction, maintains trade barriers that bar U.S. products from its market, and continues to arrest, detain, exile or harass those who peacefully express their political or religious beliefs.”
The Post's View: The damage from Pelosi's unwise Taiwan visit must be contained
This is why Pelosi’s trip was so important. President Biden has projected weakness on Taiwan. After declaring that the United States would defend Taiwan if Communist China invades, Biden sheepishly backtracked, saying there had been no change in our policy of “strategic ambiguity.” Then, after news of Pelosi’s plans leaked, Biden publicly wrung his hands, musing about how the Pentagon opposed her trip. Sorry, in America the generals don’t get to tell our elected leaders where and when they can travel.
Marc Thiessen: Biden's flip-flop on defending Taiwan makes America look weak | 2022-08-03T17:08:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Pelosi was right to visit Taiwan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/pelosi-taiwan-visit-china-message/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/pelosi-taiwan-visit-china-message/ |
An Israeli soldier stands guard during a demonstration by Palestinian and Israeli peace activists against settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank on July 27. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images)
When I read the headline about the Israeli Supreme Court’s latest decision on West Bank settlement, I was angry — at the court and at myself. The anger at the court was straightforward. A 4-3 majority allowed a settlement to stay on land privately owned by Palestinians, thereby giving judicial approval to theft.
As for being vexed with myself, I realized I had been holding onto a shard of hope that it was possible to fight the settlement enterprise, the core of the occupation, by bringing evidence and reasoning to the nation’s highest court. I’d been naive.
I learned this hope — I’ll say in my defense — from history, and from activists and commentators I respect. In a famous case back in 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that the government was wrong to put a settlement on land that the army had requisitioned, purportedly for military needs. The settlement didn’t serve security needs, the court concluded. And since military occupation was inherently temporary, the government couldn’t take residents’ private property for a permanent settlement. The government was unhappy but moved the settlement.
True, the court avoided ruling — then and ever since — on the overarching question: the illegality of the state settling Israeli citizens in territory under military occupation. Still, a precedent had been set: There were limits to what the state could do in occupied territory. There were laws; there was judicial oversight. If opponents of settlement couldn’t defeat it with one grand judicial decision, they could still wage a legal war of attrition.
In the early aughts, that possibility beckoned. One reason was the audacious illegality of over a hundred small settlements, known as outposts, established after the Oslo accords. Never mind international law; they violated multiple laws under which Israel itself ruled the West Bank — as a government-commissioned report detailed in 2005. Many outposts were on real estate clearly owned by Palestinians, the report showed. Research by the Israeli organization Peace Now showed that older, state-approved settlements stood partly on private Palestinian property. A secret Israeli army database, leaked in 2009, provided more details on land theft.
Such evidence nourished suits before the Supreme Court. In 2006, one case forced the government to raze houses on stolen land at the Amona outpost near Ramallah. A later suit forced evacuation of the entire outpost. Two Israeli human rights groups asked the court to order demolition of nine houses being built on Palestinian property at the older settlement of Ofra. “If this suit succeeds, the ground will shake under Ofra and other settlements,” I wrote optimistically at the time.
After years of wrangling, the court in fact ordered the state to tear down the houses. In these rulings and others concerning settlements, the court seemed to have at least one red line: It would protect Palestinians’ private property rights.
Nonetheless, the ground did not shake in other settlements. Small victories in court did not change larger government policies.
And in the latest decision, handed down last week, the Supreme Court crossed its own red line. The ruling dealt with a West Bank outpost called Mitzpe Kramim, and overturned a previous order to evacuate settlers who built homes on Palestinian property. This time, the court’s majority ruled that a government official had allocated the land to settlers believing “in good faith” that it belonged to the state. Applying a principle from Israeli law, the majority said that the legal owners should get other land as compensation — and the outpost should stay.
Doctoral dissertations will yet be written on the legal acrobatics used to reach this conclusion. In a sense, though, the entire proceeding was stained by bad faith. As an Israeli legal scholar explained to me, the judges applied private law, suitable to disputes within the boundaries of the state, to relations between the occupier and the occupied. Under international law, even if the land in question really was public property, it shouldn’t have been allocated to settlers. The settlement enterprise is built on ignoring that principle.
It makes sense for Israeli activists to continue to fight in court, both to help individual Palestinians and to keep the issues in the public eye. But it’s a mistake to half-consciously treat the Supreme Court as a group of philosopher kings and queens who will reshape national policy in pure pursuit of justice. When dealing with the occupation, they are part of the occupying state. Even when seeking to be most objective, most just, they are shaped by the Israeli public conversation.
Those of us in Israel who see settlement and occupation as both unjust and a danger to the country have to devote much more effort to putting the issue back at the top of the nation’s political agenda. The court we need to convince is the court of public opinion. | 2022-08-03T17:09:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Shame on me for believing courts could stop the Israeli settlement machine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/shame-me-believing-courts-could-stop-israeli-settlement-machine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/shame-me-believing-courts-could-stop-israeli-settlement-machine/ |
BOSTON — The Christian flag that became the focus of a free speech legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court was raised outside Boston City Hall on Wednesday to cheers and songs of praise.
Noted: How Taiwan reacted to Pelosi’s visit, from ‘welcome’ to ‘American witch’ | 2022-08-03T17:09:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Christian flag at center of legal battle flies over Boston - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/christian-flag-at-center-of-legal-battle-flies-over-boston/2022/08/03/d7f6ad34-1348-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/christian-flag-at-center-of-legal-battle-flies-over-boston/2022/08/03/d7f6ad34-1348-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
The ECA reform bill has serious problems. Here’s how to fix them.
Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) complete the work of counting electoral votes after a mob loyal to President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Since a bipartisan group of senators, led by Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), released their compromise proposal to reform the the Electoral Count Act of 1887 last month, legal scholars have identified serious problems with the bill. The bill’s authors should consider them carefully.
As written, the proposal contains of number of useful changes to the statute, but it would not have prevented former president Donald Trump and his shady lawyers from trying to exploit the statute’s ambiguities in 2020. The proposal needs some key fixes.
The Senate Rules Committee heard some of these solutions at a hearing on Wednesday. One witness, Norman Eisen, a Brookings scholar and former co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment hearing, offered critical advice, drawing on input from legal scholars, including Fred Wertheimer, president of the nonprofit Democracy 21, and former federal judge J. Michael Luttig.
Eisen outlined four significant changes to the bill. First, the proposal specifies that states would only be able to delay an election due to “extraordinary and catastrophic events.” Eisen argues that language is open to abuse and must be tightened to “avoid manipulation by the election denying officials now running to take control of the electoral process.” (There are dozens of candidates around the country running for governor, attorney general or secretary of state who would fall into this category.)
Second, the bill proposes a six-day window to resolve legal disputes over a state’s election result, but this is plainly insufficient. If courts are to render a dispositive verdict on the validity of electors, they would need more time (even with expedited appeal to the Supreme Court).
Third, the proposal does nothing to clarify what grounds a member of Congress can object to electoral votes. It states they may do so only if the electors are not “lawfully certified” or “regularly given.” These phrases are still thoroughly vague and could lead to the same sort of shenanigans Republicans attempted when they raised spurious objections to the 2020 electors.
Fourth, there are other confusing or contradictory aspects of the rules governing when members can object to electors. Eisen explains, for example, that the bill still refers to the electoral slates as “purported certificates,” which re-injects the same uncertainly that Trump and John Eastman sought to use to challenge certificates in 2020.
Other election gurus argue the reform bill’s proposed threshold for objecting to electoral votes is too low. The current statute requires one member from each chamber to object, whereas the reform bill would raise that to 20 percent of each chamber. Given how many MAGA lawmakers now sit in Congress, it’s far better to set the bar at 35 or 40 percent rather than 20.
Other scholars have pointed to a fundamental inconsistency with one of the ECA reforms. The proposal seeks to deem the governors’ certification as “conclusive,” but then provides for a federal court review, also intended to create finality. This is followed by the process for members of Congress to raise objections. So who has the last say? Governors, the courts or Congress?
And then there are those alarmed by the possibility that a clever state legislature can still change its election rules after voting takes place if it puts in place a “trigger” that it can activate at will to change the votes. As law professors Laurence H. Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut recently explained in an op-ed for The Post, “An election-denying majority in a battleground state could adopt a law before November 2024 that might empower the legislature or secretary of state to award electors in a manner inconsistent with the popular vote. Eliminating that way of defying the people’s will is imperative.”
The Electoral Count Act was the weak link in our presidential election system that Trump and his cronies sought to weaponize to remain in power. Ultimately, enough officials (e.g., Justice Department attorneys, Vice President Mike Pence, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers) remained devoted to democracy to short-circuit Trump’s preposterous scheme. But the country cannot depend on the good faith of elected officials to preserve our democratic elections, especially as Republicans attempt to install more election deniers in office. Congress has a shot to fix this guardrail; our democracy demands that lawmakers get it right. | 2022-08-03T17:47:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The ECA reform bill has serious problems. Here’s how to fix them. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/eca-reform-bill-serious-problems-heres-how-to-fix-them/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/eca-reform-bill-serious-problems-heres-how-to-fix-them/ |
A Vote No to a Constitutional Amendment on Abortion sign is on display outside a polling station in Olathe, Kansas. (Kyle Rivas/Photographer: Kyle Rivas/Getty I)
Democrats haven’t carried Kansas in a presidential election since 1964 or won a U.S. Senate race since 1932. So, it is nothing short of a revelation that a ballot initiative to remove reproductive rights from the Kansas Constitution failed by 18 points on Tuesday.
Voters in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia enacted similar amendments to their constitutions over the past decade, but that was before the Supreme Court kicked a hornet’s nest and rescinded the federal right to abortion.
Around 900,000 Kansans voted on Tuesday’s ballot question, nearly twice the number who voted in the 2018 primary. In-person early voting was about 250 percent higher, and more than twice as many people voted by mail, as four years ago. Triple-digit heat indexes didn’t deter people from waiting in line at polling places on Election Day. Altogether, about half of eligible voters participated, with an estimated 96 percent of the ballots counted. Women accounted for 70 percent of the surge of new voter registration in Kansas since June 24, evidence that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade shifted the dynamics of the contest.
The suburbs spoke: More than 166,000 of the 534,000 no votes have come from Johnson County, the state’s most populous and which includes affluent suburbs of the Kansas City metro area. Nearly 7 in 10 Johnson County voters opposed the amendment. A sizable number of Republican voters favor reproductive rights, and they crossed over to oppose the amendment in Kansas. These are warning signs for GOP strategists who think the Supreme Court decision will have minimal impact on elections this fall.
Also important to Tuesday’s outcome was that rural counties favored the amendment but did so by much smaller margins than they went for Donald Trump. In Russell County, where former senator Robert J. Dole was born and raised, only 55 percent backed the amendment — compared with 81 percent who voted for Trump in 2020.
The outcome is even more astonishing considering how utterly the deck was stacked in the ballot measure’s favor. Republican legislators used supermajorities in the Kansas statehouse to schedule the vote for Aug. 2 on the expectation that independents — who outnumber registered Democrats — would be less likely to cast ballots.
And because the amendment was considered to be nonpartisan, churches were permitted to engage directly in campaigning. The Catholic Church went all-in: The archdiocese in Kansas City, Kan., donated at least $2.45 million, and Wichita’s chipped in at least $550,000 to the campaign behind it. That doesn’t count any homilies urging parishioners to vote.
Kansas is just the first test of public opposition to outright bans on abortion. A ballot measure in Kentucky, similar to Kansas’s, would amend the constitution there to say there’s no such right. A referendum in Montana would require care for “infants born alive after an abortion.” And Alaska will vote on whether to hold a constitutional convention, which would allow social conservatives to remove a privacy clause that the state Supreme Court has interpreted to protect abortion access.
Most significant is Michigan, where organizers recently submitted 754,000 signatures to put a measure on the ballot that would strike down a 1931 abortion ban which might otherwise soon go into effect. Similar measures preserving choice are on the ballot in California and Vermont. These referendums could significantly juice turnout for Democrats in November.
Referendum politics can scramble election cycles. During George W. Bush’s presidency, Republicans boosted turnout in swing states by placing measures opposing same-sex marriage on the ballot. That brought cultural conservatives out to vote and worked to the GOP’s advantage for a time. More recently, Democrats in Western states have offered measures legalizing marijuana in various ways to lure younger voters to the polls, where they tend to vote Democratic in other contests.
But in most places, abortion will not literally be on the ballot this fall. Democrats need to figure out how to frame races between politicians as referendums on women’s rights. As intuitive as it might seem to the candidates themselves, the linkage isn’t always obvious to voters.
And where it is on the ballot, outcomes might be hard to predict. Latinos, already drifting toward the GOP, tend to be more pro-life than the rest of the Democratic coalition. They could prove decisive in Sun Belt states such as Arizona, Nevada and Colorado.
Progressive forces winning a statewide contest in an August primary does not guarantee a national counterrevolution. But it is an opportunity. Tuesday’s results in Kansas suggest Democrats can press their advantage in a very difficult cycle. And the outcome should give pause to overzealous GOP legislators who are pursuing abortion bans without exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother. | 2022-08-03T17:47:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | After Kansas, Democrats see an opportunity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/kansas-abortion-vote-democrats-opportunity/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/kansas-abortion-vote-democrats-opportunity/ |
The GOP effort at reshaping the nation per Trump’s vision continues apace
Rep. Peter Meijer speaks to guests at his watch party at Social House Kitchen and Bar in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Aug. 2. (Sarah Rice for The Washington Post)
One week after supporters of President Donald Trump fought their way into the U.S. Capitol in an effort to block the finalization of Trump’s election loss, the president was impeached by the House.
There was only one article of impeachment: “incitement of insurrection.” The text of the document noted that Trump had spent months elevating false claims about the security of the election and then, that morning, had called on his supporters to fight and to march to the Capitol. In the months since Jan. 13, 2021, the terse summary in the article has become only more substantiated, from evidence of Trump’s awareness of the threat posed by the crowd to the indictment of riot participants on charges related to sedition.
And yet, on Tuesday night, Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) became the second congressional Republican to lose his primary after voting to impeach Trump. He joins Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), who lost his primary in June. Of the other eight Republicans who backed Trump’s impeachment, half simply declined to run again.
There was some good news for the group Tuesday night. Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) appear to be poised to advance to the general election in November. Rep. David G. Valadao (R-Calif.) already has. But then, those are blue-state Republicans. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot, appears to be unlikely to join them when Wyoming Republicans vote next week.
Meijer’s loss, though, has a slightly different tenor. He’s not from a heavily Republican state but one that tends to lean Democratic. His Trump-endorsed opponent, John Gibbs, received support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with Democrats hoping that Gibbs would be easier to beat in November. But in the end, Gibbs won because Republicans wanted someone who was more loyal to Donald Trump, if not necessarily the Republican Party. Gibbs won because when asked to choose between defending a democratic election or defending a Republican president, Meijer chose the former.
Tuesday night also marked the further spread of a Trump-backed effort to reshape state-level leadership. In Arizona, Trump-endorsed candidates for governor, attorney general and secretary of state all won or are leading. Should they prevail in November, the three state officials most responsible for bolstering the validity of election results in Arizona will be ones who have publicly aligned with Trump’s false claims about election fraud.
In three of the other four swing states where primaries have been held, the results have been broadly similar. In Georgia, Trump’s effort to upend the state’s incumbent leadership failed across the board; Republican voters backed the officials who’d opposed the president’s efforts to undermine their choice in 2020. But in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Republicans have chosen officials who’ve either backed Trump’s false claims about widespread voter fraud in 2020 with gusto or who have elevated some portion of them.
(Michigan Republicans nominated attorney general and secretary of state candidates endorsed by Trump at a meeting in April. They need to be confirmed by another vote at the end of the month, which is expected to happen.)
These are just primary contests, of course. There’s no guarantee that these candidates will ever hold power. But excluding Georgia, the pattern is clear: Republicans continue to seek elected leaders who are willing to go along with Trump’s false claims about election security. In Nevada, for example, the gubernatorial nominee has offered muted agreement with Trump — but also lists “election integrity” as an issue on his website.
Republican primary voters have historically been more conservative than Republicans overall. To some extent, these results likely reflect the direction sought by the party’s more extreme members. But this is not exculpatory: Any Republicans who object to Trump’s claims about the election and his response to the 2020 election have either not turned out to vote as heavily or have simply been outnumbered.
Making the party’s position clear: A willingness to question the results of a heavily scrutinized election is often not disqualifying; holding accountable a president who sought to retain power often is.
In an interview Wednesday morning, Kelli Ward, chair of the Republican Party in Arizona, was interviewed by the right-wing streaming network Real America’s Voice. (A former anchor of Real America’s Voice, Tudor Dixon, was nominated as the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate in Michigan on Tuesday.) The results in Arizona, Ward said, was “an exorcism of John McCain” — the party’s 2008 presidential nominee — “from our state and our country.”
Not a fully incorrect assessment. | 2022-08-03T17:56:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The GOP effort at reshaping the country to Trump’s vision continues apace - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/trump-elections-republicans-impeachment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/trump-elections-republicans-impeachment/ |
Can a pharmacist deny a woman the morning-after pill? A jury will decide.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, rekindling debates over some forms of birth control, jurors in Minnesota are set to decide whether a pharmacist violated a woman’s civil rights when he declined to grant her access to emergency contraceptives.
The pharmacist, George Badeaux, is on trial this week to determine whether he violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act when he refused in 2019 to fill Andrea Anderson’s prescription for a morning-after pill at McGregor Pharmacy in McGregor, Minn., a tiny town about 125 miles from Minneapolis. Badeaux, who is also a pastor, allegedly told Anderson he would not fill her prescription because of his “beliefs,” according to the lawsuit filed in Aitkin County District Court.
A decision is expected by the end of the week.
“No Minnesotan seeking medical care should be denied due to the personal beliefs of their health-care providers,” said Jess Braverman, legal director of Gender Justice, which filed the lawsuit on Anderson’s behalf.
“Pharmacists, like any health-care provider, have a legal and ethical duty to provide their patients the care they need. In this regard, Andrea was failed at every turn, and we intend to ensure that others don’t have to jump the same ridiculous hurdles she did,” Braverman said in a previous statement.
An attorney for Badeaux did not immediately respond Wednesday morning to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
The owner of McGregor Pharmacy did not return phone calls seeking comment.
She needed to fill her prescription for the morning-after pill. The pharmacist refused, she alleges, because of his ‘beliefs.’
In the winter of 2019, Anderson, a mother and foster parent, got a prescription from her doctor for the morning-after pill ella after her primary birth control method, a condom, failed, according to the lawsuit.
Research shows that emergency contraceptives such as ella prevent pregnancy by preventing or delaying ovulation to avoid fertilization. Unlike the drug Mifeprex, these pills do not end a pregnancy, which the scientific community defines as an already fertilized egg that has implanted into the wall of the uterus.
Morning-after pills such as ella and Plan B must be taken within five days of unprotected sex, so Anderson “acted quickly because any delay in obtaining emergency contraception increases the risk of pregnancy,” the lawsuit stated.
Not long after the prescription was called in to McGregor Pharmacy, identified in court records as McGregor Thrifty White pharmacy, the pharmacist called Anderson and allegedly told her that for “personal reasons” he would not fill it, according to the lawsuit. It stated that Anderson first thought the pharmacist meant the prescription would interact with other medications. When she asked for clarification, he allegedly told her that he would not fill the prescription because of his ‘beliefs,’ ” according to the lawsuit. He allegedly told her there would be another pharmacist working the next day but he could not guarantee that pharmacist would help.
Anderson said the pharmacist also discouraged her from trying another local pharmacy and failed to provide any information about how she could obtain the medication, according to the lawsuit.
She finally found a pharmacy 50 miles from her home that was willing to help. After driving for more than three hours through a snowstorm with her 2-year-old son in the car, she made it home with the medication, the lawsuit stated.
The trial in Minnesota comes amid a nationwide debate about contraception that has been gaining steam since the recent Supreme Court decision that reversed federal protections for abortion access. On July 21, the U.S. House voted to pass legislation that, under federal law, would protect people’s right to contraception and ensure that health-care providers are able to prescribe it. It’s unclear whether the bill will pass the U.S. Senate.
Anderson’s attorneys would not comment ahead of the jury’s decision. But in a previous statement they released, Anderson said she was raising awareness so others might not have to face the same roadblocks.
“Like anywhere, there are challenges to living in a rural area,” she said in a 2019 statement from Gender Justice. “But I never expected that they would include the personal beliefs of our local pharmacists, or that they would hold — and wield — such enormous decision-making power over my life.”
“I can only hope that by coming forward and pursuing justice that others don’t have to jump the ridiculous hurdles I did,” she said. | 2022-08-03T18:22:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Minnesota woman sues pharmacist after he denies access to morning-after pill, lawsuit says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/03/minnesota-pharmacist-contraception-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/03/minnesota-pharmacist-contraception-lawsuit/ |
Members of the three St. Louis-area factories had rejected an earlier proposal, citing retirement benefits.
Two Boeing T-X trainer aircraft fly over the St. Louis Gateway Arch. (E.Shindelbower/John Parker)
The St. Louis-area factories are part of Boeing’s Arlington, Va.-based defense, space and security unit, whose work is considered “critical” to national security. They military aircraft including the F-15 Eagle and F-18 Hornet fighter jets, the T-7 Red Hawk training jet and the MQ-25 refueling drone. | 2022-08-03T18:40:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boeing workers at 3 St. Louis-area plants ratify contract, averting strike - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/03/boeing-workers-strike-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/03/boeing-workers-strike-vote/ |
The US drone strike that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul on Sunday caught the Taliban leadership both red-handed and flat-footed. Their promises to prevent the country from once again becoming a terrorist haven have been exposed as lies: The al-Qaeda leader was living in the Afghan capital, reportedly in a house belonging to a top Taliban leader.
Three days after the killing, the Taliban was still struggling to formulate a response. That might be because Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s supreme commander, and his leadership team, recognize both the opportunity and the challenge presented by Zawahiri’s killing.
As the militant group prepares to celebrate the first anniversary of its return to power after the US military pullout last summer, its goal of securing international recognition as Afghanistan’s legitimate rulers remains unfulfilled. Their pariah status makes it nearly impossible for the Taliban government to manage the country’s economy, which was propped up by foreign aid until the US withdrawal last summer.
The economic crisis has only deepened in recent months. Afghanistan is reeling from the effects of its worst drought in two decades. A recent report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reckons 70% of households are “unable to cover basic food and non-food needs.”
If Akhundzada can now restrain his own fighters, as well as al-Qaeda operatives in the country, from responding with violence, it might strengthen the leadership’s claim that that they aren’t the Taliban of old. In turn, this would make it easier for the international community to do business with Afghanistan, smoothing the way for much-needed humanitarian aid and some support for the shattered economy.
But many in the Taliban will view the killing of Zawahiri as a national affront, and the clamor for revenge will likely grow louder in the days ahead. Akhundzada will be especially watchful of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the most powerful of his deputies and al-Qaeda’s main Afghan patron — and owner of the house in which Zawahiri was hiding out.
Probably the most anti-American of all the Taliban’s leaders, Haqqani is designated a terrorist by the US; the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a longstanding $10 million reward “for information leading directly” to his arrest. (The price on Zawahiri’s head was $25 million.) His eponymous network of fighters, the most powerful cohort within the Taliban, is more loyal to him than to the supreme commander.
Reining in his most ferocious attack dogs won’t be easy for Akhundzada. Haqqani may argue that, as Zawahiri’s host, he is obliged to avenge the killing of his guest. (The Taliban leadership puts much store in ancient tribal rules of hospitality: For years, the group cited those traditions when rejecting calls for the expulsion of Osama bin Laden.)
But Akhundzada could counter that custom obliges guests to leave before they become too much of a burden on their hosts. He might even be able to use that argument to serve notice on other al-Qaeda figures currently enjoying his hospitality. He can count on the support of the relatively moderate faction of the Taliban, led by Abdul Ghani Baradar, which has been chafing since being sidelined by Haqqani and his hardliners.
It should be easy enough for Akhundzada to make the case that retaliating for Zawahiri’s killing would be against the interests of Afghanistan. But that is assuming the Taliban’s supreme commander places the welfare of his own people above that of his guests. He and his leadership team must know that Afghan eyes, as well those of the world, are on them.
Zawahiri Killing Was a Great Success of a Bygone Era: Hal Brands
Elimination of al-Qaeda Leader Is a Moment to Celebrate: Editorial
Joe Biden’s $7 Billion Betrayal of Afghanistan: Ruth Pollard | 2022-08-03T18:40:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Zawahiri Killing Gives Afghanistan an Opening With US - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/zawahiri-killing-gives-afghanistan-an-opening-with-us/2022/08/03/518a390e-1358-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/zawahiri-killing-gives-afghanistan-an-opening-with-us/2022/08/03/518a390e-1358-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
The now-vacant site of Casa Ruby’s former shelter for homeless transgender youths on Georgia Avenue NW in Washington, as seen in May. (Annys Shin/The Washington Post /TWP)
A D.C. Superior Court judge has granted D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine’s request to temporarily freeze Casa Ruby’s bank accounts, court documents filed Wednesday show. The ruling follows a Washington Post report that raised questions about possible financial mismanagement at the LGBTQ nonprofit organization.
Racine’s office had asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent Casa Ruby’s founder, Ruby Corado, from making further withdrawals.
Judge Danya A. Dayson held a remote hearing Wednesday to consider the emergency motion. Corado, who told a Telemundo reporter last week that she was in El Salvador, did not appear.
Dayson granted the emergency request and set another hearing for next week to consider the attorney general’s request to appoint a court-supervised official to stabilize and reform the management of the nonprofit. Dayson also granted the attorney general’s office permission to subpoena Corado via email.
The Post’s report last month was based on interviews with former employees, court records, tax filings and thousands of emails to and from officials at the D.C. Department of Human Services that were obtained through a public records request.
Since 2016, Casa Ruby has received $9.6 million in grants from city agencies to serve the needs of the Latino and LGBTQ+ youth communities in the District. The nonprofit reported more than $4.1 million in grants and other revenue on its most recent federal tax filings, which showed that Corado earned $260,000. But employees say they have gone without pay, and at least four landlords have told city agencies that the nonprofit did not pay rent on properties that it leased for its low-barrier shelter and transitional housing programs.
Casa Ruby shut down most of its operations in July.
Corado announced on Facebook last October that she had stepped down. But the attorney general found that Corado is the only current signatory on Casa Ruby’s bank accounts and has retained access to its PayPal account, which processes donations.
Throughout 2021, Racine’s office said, Corado used more than $60,000 from Casa Ruby’s funds to pay bills for a charge card she controlled, and she used the nonprofit’s money to pay for meals and transportation to and in El Salvador. She withdrew at least $604 as recently as July 19, the office found.
Corado has not responded to phone calls or emails from The Post. | 2022-08-03T18:40:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Casa Ruby bank accounts frozen as Karl Racine investigates nonprofit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/casa-ruby-dc-karl-racine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/casa-ruby-dc-karl-racine/ |
An investigation by the Senate Finance Committee blamed the fatalities on errors in screening organs for disease, blood-type mix-ups and other mistakes
A kidney transplant. (Molly Riley/AP)
Seventy people died and 249 developed diseases after mistakes in the screening of organs they received in transplants, a Senate committee reported Wednesday after an investigation that found widespread deficiencies throughout the U.S. organ transplant system.
Testing errors and overlooked communications allowed the transmission of cancer, a rare bacterial infection and other diseases, the Senate Finance Committee found in its review of hundreds of thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents and other material that formed the basis of the two-and-a-half-year investigation.
The errors included failures to identify disease in donor kidneys, hearts and livers, as well as mix-ups in matching blood types and delays in blood and urine tests that were not completed before transplant surgeries occurred, the investigators concluded in a report obtained by The Washington Post.
The Senate committee partly blamed lax oversight of organ procurement organizations (OPOs), the regional nonprofits responsible for collecting donated organs, by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the Richmond-based contractor that oversees the system. It listed as problems careless treatment of donated organs, organs lost in transit, and technological issues.
In 2020, the investigation found, two healthy kidneys were accidentally thrown in the trash in Indiana. In 2015, an airline temporarily lost a donated kidney that was supposed to be shipped from South Carolina to Florida — causing the transplant surgery to be canceled and the organ discarded. In 2017, another kidney was misplaced and missed a flight from South Carolina to California, leading to another canceled transplant, but the organ was used by a local transplant team.
A UNOS spokesman said the organization could not respond to a report that its officials had not yet seen but provided a copy of testimony by UNOS chief executive Brian Shepard prepared for delivery at a Wednesday afternoon hearing of the committee. Shepard is stepping down in September.
“Ours is a complex system; one that is dedicated to continuously improving, monitoring and adapting; one that involves thousands of people coming together every single day across the country in order to save lives,” the testimony said. “It is a system Congress set in motion nearly forty years ago, and which, thanks to the decisions and expertise of those who laid the foundation, allows us to best serve patients in need of a transplant.”
The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations declined to comment.
The review provides a rarely seen level of detail into the operations of a system with seemingly little regulatory oversight, where strict privacy rules and legal restrictions typically limit the amount of information available to outsiders and whose successes largely have been trumpeted since the first successful transplant in 1954.
The Senate report examined 1,118 complaints filed from 2010 to 2020 with UNOS. The death toll from failed organ screenings — detailed in a 2016 UNOS report handed over to Senate investigators — covered a shorter time period, 2008 to mid-2015.
The deaths and illnesses were a tiny fraction of the 174,338 organs transplanted in that seven-year period. But “this data illustrates the lethality of diseases contracted during a transplantation and the need for exacting scrutiny of such transmissions,” the committee wrote in a 60-page memo prepared for the Wednesday afternoon hearing.
The Senate report is the most recent government study to find serious weaknesses in the transplant system, which is funded primarily by fees charged to patients awaiting transplants. A confidential government report by the United States Digital Service, completed 18 months ago, called for the technology that powers the system to be completely overhauled. It cited aged software, periodic system failures, mistakes in programming and overreliance on manual input of data, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
In February, a study by the prestigious National Academies of Sciences and Medicine found the transplant system to be inequitable, with unexplained performance differences across the system. It also said that 1 in 5 procured kidneys is never transplanted.
An estimated 106,000 people are awaiting transplants in the United States. About 22 die every day awaiting a transplant, according to the National Academies. In 2021, 41,354 organs were transplanted, a record.
The committee criticized UNOS for poor oversight of the 57 OPOs. It found that UNOS staff referred 40 percent of the 1,118 patient safety complaints they received between 2010 and 2020 to the organization’s oversight panel, the Membership and Professional Standards committee. Of those, one resulted in probation — a public designation, according to UNOS’s website, that a member of the network is under a corrective action plan “for noncompliance or a serious lapse in patient safety or quality of care.”
Three complaints resulted in a “peer visit”; 63 resulted in letters of warning or reprimand; 298 led to notices of noncompliance or uncontested violation; and 68 were closed with no action.
The complaints covered all parts of the network, not just OPOs. Only the government can revoke an OPO’s right to gather organs, but that has never happened in the history of the transplant system, according to the report.
The OPOs are nonprofit organizations overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Each holds a monopoly to collect organs and human tissue in a specific region of the country, where its employees work with families at hospitals to obtain consent. The OPOs also are responsible for screening organs and, in most cases, arranging to send them to transplant hospitals as quickly as possible.
Kidneys, which make up more than 80 percent of organs transplanted, usually are transported by plane, under controlled conditions. Surgeons will often retrieve hearts, livers, lungs and other less common organs themselves. In 2020, 21.3 percent of procured kidneys were not transplanted, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. The reasons are in dispute, with members of the transplant network often blaming each other.
The Senate committee study recommended that the government create competition for UNOS, which has held the contract to run the transplant network for the entire 36 years of the system’s existence. It also suggested awarding a separate contract for the transplant system’s technology; increasing “transparency and accountability for chain of custody and transportation of organs;” and increasing accountability for lost, damaged and delayed organs.
Among the results of organ mistakes, the documents show, were canceled transplants. In several cases, organs already transplanted had to be removed. Some patients were able to find other organs. The fates of other patients were unknown.
One patient was told in 2020 by a transplant surgeon in Wisconsin that their new heart had come from a donor who had aggressive brain cancer — a diagnosis discovered only after the transplant — so they “likely” would die within the next three years, according to records. The documents do not say what happened to the patient.
In 2018, confusion over one organ donor’s blood type in South Carolina led to four separate transplant surgeries with incompatible recipients, the documents show. The man who received the donor’s lungs died the next day, after his body apparently rejected the organ. Surgeons were forced to remove another patient’s transplanted heart for the same reason. The patient went back on the organ wait list and soon found another heart. Other patients with the donor’s liver and kidney survived. But another kidney and the pancreas were thrown out once the blood mismatch was uncovered.
Matching a donor’s blood type with the recipient’s is often essential for avoiding organ rejection. It is normally a simple test. But blood typing can be complicated by blood transfusions, which are common in donors killed in car crashes or by gunfire.
The South Carolina case involved a donor who died after a motorcycle accident and had received massive blood transfusions. The transplant of her organs was coordinated by We Are Sharing Hope SC, the OPO responsible for most of South Carolina, records show.
A first test failed to pinpoint a blood type, showing signs of both type O and type A. A second test was also indeterminate. But a third test showed signs of type O. A later investigation by UNOS and the OPO found that the indeterminate results were not fully communicated to surgeons who accepted the donor’s organs.
The mistake wasn’t discovered until about nine hours after the donor’s organs had been removed, documents show. A surgeon at another hospital who had received the donor’s pancreas noted the organ was labeled type O, but a blood test run there showed type A. The surgeon was concerned and canceled the pancreas transplant.
But it was too late for the others. The five other organs had already been transplanted. The OPO did not return requests for comment on the case.
A similar problem occurred in December 2020, when a blood-type mismatch with a single donor in California disrupted four transplants, forcing the rushed removal of three organs — including a heart — after they had been implanted.
The confusion about the donor’s blood type was recognized from the beginning, with a transplant worker with Donor Network West — the San Ramon, Calif.-based OPO that handles organ donations in the San Francisco area — even calling UNOS to discuss doubts about the conflicting results, according to call notes.
The UNOS representative tried to be reassuring, adding, “all you can (do) is disclose everything.” In the end, the donor’s blood type officially was labeled O, but the conflicting results were noted in the computer system that coordinates transplants. All of the intended recipients of the organs had type O blood.
The donor’s blood type, however, eventually was determined to be B — but only after the donor’s liver, heart, kidneys and pancreas has been transplanted. All of the transplanted organs had to be removed, except the liver; doctors there had noted the confusion and took extra steps to reduce the risk of rejection.
Janice Whaley, president of Donor Network West, acknowledged in an interview that her OPO’s employees should have asked more questions before proceeding. The organization has changed its policy to use a more sensitive DNA test now if there are questions over blood type.
Undetected infections can affect multiple patients, the review found. In 2017, a kidney transplant recipient in Nevada died from the rare bacterial infection tularemia just days after receiving a new organ. A patient in California who received a kidney from the same donor also was infected but survived.
Tularemia in humans is rare in the United States, with only a couple hundred cases reported in a typical year. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention learned about the outbreak tied to an organ donor, an agency official wrote in an email, “This is obviously a public health emergency” and expressed worry that dozens of health-care workers and transplant patients could be at risk.
Two years later, CDC and university researchers wrote in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that two dead rabbits found near the donor’s home contained the bacteria.
Kelley McClellan, director of community development for Nevada Donor Network, declined to discuss the case until she had seen the full report.
Undetected cancer in a donor led to the discovery in 2019 of a mass on the transplanted liver of a recipient undergoing his one-year follow-up appointment. A biopsy showed the cells had originated with testicular cancer, a diagnosis that had been noted in the organ donor’s autopsy report but overlooked by LifeQuest Organ Recovery Services, the Gainesville, Fla.-based group that handles transplants in the Florida Panhandle.
The recipient underwent chemotherapy and survived, according to a follow-up report.
Kathleen Giery, director of donor program development at LifeQuest acknowledged in an email that the OPO had missed the autopsy finding of cancer. After learning of the diagnosis eight months later, the OPO notified another recipient of organs from that donor, conducted an investigation and established new policies to prevent another incident.
They include having “multiple individuals review the autopsies within 24 hours, as well as any other test results,” she wrote.
In another case, a heart transplant recipient learned in 2020 that staff at the OPO Life Connection of Ohio in Maumee, Ohio, had missed a positive brain cancer biopsy result from the organ’s donor, records show. The donor was a woman who had died after a brain bleed at a hospital in Ohio, according to records. There were signs of a potential brain mass before the transplant. But a formal diagnosis of glioblastoma — a fast-moving and often fatal cancer — did not come until several days after the transplant.
The heart transplant patient was told about the cancer diagnosis nine weeks later by a surgeon in Wisconsin. The patient reported the incident to UNOS, noting the surgeon said they “don’t know how they ‘messed up’ and did not catch this prior to (transplant),” records show.
In an email, Matthew Wadsworth, chief executive of Life Connection of Ohio, said results of a CT scan on the donor did not mention a mass in the brain, which means there was no indication for additional testing. The tumor was found during an autopsy, and the OPO notified UNOS and all hospitals that had accepted organs from the donor, he wrote.
“Life Connection followed its processes when evaluating the patient for donor suitability as well as the process for reporting a patient safety event,” Wadsworth wrote.
A June 2020 incident in which two healthy kidneys were accidentally thrown in the trash at an Indiana hospital resulted in UNOS issuing a noncompliance order to the Indiana Donor Network, which procures organs across the state.
According to documents, a liver that had been removed from the donor was quickly packaged for delivery out of state, but the donor’s kidneys were left on a table in the operating room. The three Indiana Donor Network workers responsible for the organs had left the operating room to make sure the liver departed safely.
When they returned, just six minutes later, and started scrubbing in to deal with the kidneys, they discovered hospital workers “aggressively” cleaning the operating room, according to a summary of events. The workers found the kidneys in the trash. “Hospital staff believed all that was remaining was trimmed fat to be discarded,” read an internal report on the incident.
After talking with a surgeon, the transplant coordinators decided the kidneys couldn’t be used.
The Indiana Donor Network had been cited by UNOS previously for errors. In 2019, it was criticized for failing to complete donor blood tests and then for failing to provide an accurate description of a donated kidney in 2018, records show. In November 2017, the group received a violation notice for late reporting of a positive test for parasitic roundworms in a donor.
The trashed kidneys led to UNOS issuing a new notice of noncompliance and requiring the transplant coordinators to craft a plan to avoid repeating the same mistake.
“Three of the citations you reference were the result of circumstances outside our organization’s control and the result of errors made by others unaffiliated with Indiana Donor Network,” said Mark W. Back, manager of marketing and communication for the OPO. “In each case, we worked quickly and aggressively with our partners to implement new policies and procedures to prevent future errors.” | 2022-08-03T18:40:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate committee releases details of transplant mistakes, deaths - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/03/transplant-deaths-mistakes-senate-finance/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/03/transplant-deaths-mistakes-senate-finance/ |
Robert Simanek, Medal of Honor recipient from Korean War, dies at 92
Robert Simanek and wife Nancy at the 2014 Congressional Medal of Honor Society Convention in Gettysburg, Pa. (Congressional Medal of Honor Society)
Before daybreak on Aug. 17, 1952, six Marines were pinned down on a Korean hilltop after an ambush. Forces from the Chinese-backed government in the north opened up with gunfire. Then came grenades.
One landed near Robert Simanek, a 22-year-old private first class in the Marine Corps. He managed to kick it away, but the blast injured his foot. A second grenade fell to his side.
“I couldn’t move too well. So I just sort of rolled over on top of that grenade,” he later recounted.
Mr. Simanek’s legs and hip took most of the blast and the grenade fragments, leaving the other Marines unharmed. The next year, he was presented with the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military’s highest decoration, citing his “daring initiative and great personal valor in the face of almost certain death.”
Over the decades, Mr. Simanek, who died Aug. 1 in Novi, Mich., at age 92, attended gatherings of Medal of Honor recipients, presidential inaugurations and events honoring veterans of the 1950-53 Korean War and other conflicts. He visited South Korea and was a guest at dinners hosted by Seoul officials.
There was one more honor awaiting. In December, construction began in San Diego on the future USS Robert E. Simanek, an expeditionary sea base vessel. “I didn’t think having a ship named after me would happen,” he told the Detroit News.
Robert Ernest Simanek was born April 26, 1930, in Detroit and worked in auto plants before he joined the Marine Corps in 1951.
In summer 1952, U.S.-led forces clashed with Chinese troops along a series of fronts known as the Korean War’s Battle of Bunker Hill, a pivotal but costly fight that gave allied units under U.N. command control of key front-line defenses.
Mr. Simanek was part of a predawn reconnaissance patrol about a week into the battle. The patrol was heading back to an outpost when the Marines were ambushed near Panmunjom, now in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas.
The Marine patrol splintered, Mr. Simanek recounted to the Lansing State Journal in 1954. He and five other Marines scrambled into a hilltop ditch to take cover. As radio operator for the patrol, Mr. Simanek was able to direct mortar and tank fire on the Chinese positions. But the attack on his group did not let up.
It took five hours to drive back the Chinese and allow help to arrive, he said. Mr. Simanek’s right side absorbed the brunt of the blast he smothered. “It put a good-size hole in my hip,” he later said. At the time, however, he didn’t know the extent of his injuries.
Joseph Clemons Jr., hero of Pork Chop Hill, dies at 90
“I was really more concerned while I was sliding down the hill about the scrapes and cuts I was getting from the barbed wire and shell fragments on the ground,” he told the Lansing newspaper in 1954.
The battles for control of the area continued for weeks, with territory and redoubts often changing hands. In late August, warplanes under the U.N. command conducted the largest air raids of the Korean War in attempts to drive back the Chinese-led forces. In the end, Marines took strategic positions including Bunker Hill, also known as Hill 122, and held them throughout the war, which ended with an armistice but no formal peace treaty. The U.S. military has kept a presence in South Korea ever since.
Along the lines at Bunker Hill, the battlefield price was high with dozens of Marines killed or seriously wounded.
Mr. Simanek spent months under medical treatment on a hospital ship and in Japan before returning for more care in the United States. He walked with a limp for decades.
In October 1953, Mr. Simanek was presented with the Medal of Honor by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a White House ceremony with six other recipients of the decoration, a five-pointed star attached to a blue ribbon.
Mr. Simanek’s other military honors include the Purple Heart. In an Armistice Day parade in November 1953 in Detroit, Mr. Simanek walked alongside Michigan’s governor, G. Mennen Williams, as more than 50,000 people looked on.
Wildlife thrives along Korea's DMZ. But for how long?
The Congressional Medal of Honor Society announced Mr. Simanek’s death but did not cite a cause. There are 65 living Medal of Honor recipients, the society said.
Mr. Simanek received a degree in business management from Wayne State University in Detroit and spent part his career in the auto industry and Small Business Administration.
His wife of 64 years, the former Nancy Middleton, died in 2020. Survivors include a daughter, Ann Clark of Traverse City, Mich.
On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, Mr. Simanek described the veterans of the Cold War conflict as a “quiet” cohort.
“We were the younger brothers and nephews of World War II, which was just over by five years,” he told the Lansing State Journal in 2000. “The Korean veteran was quite quiet because the nation and ourselves were in awe of the sacrifices of World War II veterans.” | 2022-08-03T18:41:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Robert Simanek, Medal of Honor recipient from Korean War, dies at 92 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/03/simanek-korea-grenade-medal-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/03/simanek-korea-grenade-medal-dies/ |
Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks at U.N. headquarters in New York on Aug. 1. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)
The 10th review conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which began Monday at the United Nations, will evoke valid complaints that the treaty’s lofty goals remain unfulfilled, that states equipped with nuclear weapons didn’t do enough to end the arms race. The conference should also remind everyone that the promising age of nuclear arms reductions in the 1980s and 1990s has stalled, while China has rising ambitions. Nuclear arms control negotiations might be moribund, but their necessity is not.
Arms control treaties always depend on the political willpower and trust of those who sign them. The United States and Soviet Union, and later Russian Federation, found such common purpose at the peak of the arms race, and managed to reverse the mountain of stockpiles. No small role in this turnabout was played by leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan, who shared mutual aspirations that a nuclear war could never be won and must never be fought. They saw value in verifiable, legally-binding pacts such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear-armed missiles. Even before that remarkable era of liquidating missiles and warheads, arms control helped reduce risk during the Cold War, when superpower adversaries struck treaties with one another.
But lately has come a retreat. Under President Donald Trump, the INF treaty ended in 2019 with U.S. withdrawal over alleged Russian violations. In 2020, the United States withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, a confidence-building agreement allowing the signatories to conduct short-notice surveillance flights over each other’s territories. The New START strategic nuclear treaty with Russia was extended by President Biden, but it expires in 2026. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruthless war against Ukraine and his reckless nuclear threats at the outset — warning of consequences “never seen in history” — have shattered trust. In the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Russia gave assurances to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons. Mr. Putin simply tore it up in February. It is impossible to imagine any treaty with Mr. Putin that would win Senate ratification.
But the goal of arms control — to reduce risk and make the world safer — is still a valid quest, if a far more difficult one. Hotlines and direct military channels can avoid catastrophic miscalculation and mistaken assumptions. We have long argued it is time to take U.S. and Russian missiles off launch-ready alert — together, and verifiably. New START provides valuable verification and limits, and should be extended. Tactical or short-range nuclear weapons have never been covered by treaty, and should be, as well as new technologies like hypersonic glide vehicles. Most important, despite its reluctance, efforts must be made to bring China into the circle of negotiations.
Mr. Biden’s team has been busy rewriting its National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy in light of the war in Ukraine. This has delayed the expected release of a declassified Nuclear Posture Review, an important declaration of nuclear weapons policy, strategy, capabilities and force posture. It should be released soon. The public debate will be healthy. Nuclear weapons haven’t gone away. | 2022-08-03T18:41:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Nuclear arms control is moribund, but its necessity is not - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/nuclear-arms-control-negotiations-needed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/nuclear-arms-control-negotiations-needed/ |
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats are working to pass through Congress is only incidentally about inflation; mostly it’s a bill addressing climate change and prescription drug prices, with a hodgepodge of provisions on a variety of other issues. But it also takes a few steps toward making our tax system a little more fair.
Naturally, Republicans are outraged at the thought. “Their tax hikes would shatter President Biden’s promise not to impact households earning below $400,000,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), calling the package “a new tax on American jobs.”
You will be shocked to learn that the GOP’s passion for the economic interests of regular folks is less than sincere, and their description of this bill is not quite accurate. Only a bill aimed at the bank accounts of the wealthy and corporations could produce this kind of angry Republican opposition, and that’s exactly what’s happening here.
The Democratic bill contains three key tax provisions. The first narrows the carried interest loophole, which enables hedge fund managers to pay the (lower) capital gains tax rate on the money they make, rather than (higher) ordinary income tax rate. There is no plausible way for any lawmaker to defend this loophole other than saying, “I enjoy collecting large checks from hedge fund managers at their palatial Hamptons estates,” which no one would say out loud.
So instead, they focus on the other two main proposals, especially the attempt to address the fact that corporations find so many ways to avoid paying taxes even when they are making huge profits.
Some time ago, people began to notice that companies would tell Wall Street they were hugely profitable while somehow managing to convince the IRS they should owe little or nothing in taxes. So the bill creates a “book income tax” requiring corporations making more than $1 billion a year in profits to pay at least 15 percent in taxes on profits they report to investors (the corporate tax rate is 21 percent).
This is where things get a little wonky. Republicans requested an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation of this proposal, knowing that the JCT assesses any corporate tax increase with a formula that allocates 25 percent of the increase to labor and 75 percent to capital.
Economists debate whether that’s the proper way to think about it, but it rests on the assumption that if you tax a corporation on its profits, that’s equivalent to taxing both its workers and shareholders. Will making Nike or Archer Daniels Midland pay taxes mean they’ll cut the pay of middle-class employees eventually, or that the dividends they pay their shareholders will be a little smaller?
Maybe, maybe not. But you wouldn’t call that a “middle-class tax increase,” would you?
Republicans would. They’re waving around the JCT analysis as proof — and much of the media is echoing their claim.
Anyone who wants to say corporations are people and should never pay any taxes at all is free to make that argument. But transmuting a corporate tax increase into a direct tax increase on the middle class is profoundly misleading. That’s not to mention that the JCT analysis doesn’t take into account many of the bill’s provisions that will give financial benefits to the middle class.
That brings us to the last major tax provision: a significant boost to funding for the Internal Revenue Service, to allow the agency to rebuild so it can collect the taxes people actually owe.
Republicans have long waged a budgetary war on the IRS, resulting in drastically reduced funding and staffing. Predictably, the agency is struggling to goafter tax cheats, particularly wealthy ones able to hire lawyers and accountants to fight against any effort to make them pay their fair share.
As a ProPublica investigation found, the “campaign to slash the agency’s budget has left it understaffed, hamstrung and operating with archaic equipment. The result: billions less to fund the government.” For all intents and purposes, the GOP’s motto on taxes is “Defund the Police.”
Democrats have wanted for a while to do something about that. They tried to boost IRS funding in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed last year, but Republicans refused to go along, so the idea was dropped.
And now, the prospect that the IRS might actually be able to do its job, particularly when it comes to making the wealthy pay what they owe, has conservatives in a tizzy. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the media’s most zealous advocate for the interests of the put-upon plutocracy, moaned that with this new funding the IRS will go into “Beast Mode,” unleashing a wave of oppression on the American middle class.
This is an important lesson: When conservatives warn that some new proposal will hurt the middle class, take a closer look to see who will really be affected and who they’re really shilling for. It’s almost always the rich and corporations. The angrier they get, the more likely it is that the bill in question is on the right track. | 2022-08-03T18:41:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Republicans are in a panic over Democratic tax proposals. Guess why. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/republicans-democrats-tax-plan-inflation-reduction-act/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/republicans-democrats-tax-plan-inflation-reduction-act/ |
Runners at the start of the 2019 Comrades Marathon in South Africa. For many, destination races serve as an impetus to travel somewhere new. (Rajesh Jantilal/AFP/Getty Images)
In 2012, shortly after crossing the finish line of the Rock ‘n’ Roll New Orleans Half Marathon, Laurel Butterfield filled up on oysters and bloody marys. It was Butterfield’s first out-of-town race — and her first time in the Big Easy — and her strategy was simple: “I’ll commit two hours or less to running around. I’ll get to see interesting parts of the city, and then when I’m done, I will eat everything in the city and have a great time.”
The communications executive, who relocated to Belgium from Chicago during the pandemic, met friends in Valencia, Spain, last year to run the marathon and has plans to run the Marathon du Médoc in September. During a stint in Japan, Butterfield flew to Seoul to run the marathon and spend a long weekend in South Korea.
Runners who love to travel — and travelers who love to run — have been getting passports stamped and bucket lists checked one race at a time. For many, the destination race serves as an impetus to travel somewhere new and stick with a training regimen.
The first time I ever set foot in Vermont was ostensibly to run the 2012 Mad Half, but even though I somehow placed third in my age group (I credit the small field of participants), I didn’t care so much about my performance in the 13.1 miles as I did about visiting the Green Mountain State.
Though I’ve yet to race internationally, since the Vermont half, I’ve run marathons in Duluth, Minn.; Pittsburgh; Los Angeles; and Corning, N.Y., along with roughly 50 half-marathons around the country. For me, post-race indulgence — local beer is almost always on the menu — and bragging rights (after all, it’s kind of cool to run a marathon outside your hometown) were part of the charm, more so when the BQ (Boston qualifier) I’d been chasing eluded me time and time again.
Alisa Cohen, founder of Luxe Traveler Club, a boutique travel agency, said that most of her marathon-traveling clients are novice runners who like the athletic component such a vacation affords. Planning a trip around a destination race “adds to the whole excitement of marathon training,” and is a great way to see a city and build a trip around it, Cohen said, noting that Paris has become a popular destination in this regard.
Spencer Farrar’s first international race, in Scotland in 2006, hooked him on race travel. (“I had a little interest in bagpipes at the time.”) “A lot of my races are quite honestly determined based upon location,” said Farrar, who works for a private equity firm and splits his time between Hawaii and New York City. More and more, he said, the majority of his travel is running-related.
Farrar’s favorite race destination is South Africa, where he has run the Comrades Marathon (an ultra) nine times and is about to run his 10th later this summer. The itinerary changes with each visit, although Farrar said he’s planning to stay in Cape Town again, one of his favorite cities, which he called a “foodie paradise,” before venturing to wine country.
Two of New York attorney Ruth Gursky’s most memorable race travel experiences took place in Sydney and Amsterdam, respectively. As a participant of the Gay Games, a sports and cultural event on a mission to promote equality, Gursky made these events part of a larger plan to discover different cities. “It’s fun to meet other athletes from other countries and visit new countries. I never would have gotten to Sydney, otherwise. It’s a long trip,” Gursky said.
David Killian, officer of site selection for the Federation of Gay Games, said a lot goes into choosing the Games’ location. In addition to ample city support and the ability to put on the games, Killian said, “having the right destination is an important part of it.” Although the organization is not so concerned about whether the location meets the vacation criteria of participants, Killian said, “it’s been pretty hard to get people from all over the world excited about going to a small city.”
Doug Thurston, race director of Big Sur International Marathon, which draws runners from more than two dozen countries and all 50 states, said “building in running as kind of part of your vacation experience is more popular than ever.” Citing the growth of marathons in Southeast Asia, Thurston said that “now you can build an international travel destination bucket list of nothing but cities and marathons in all these cities.”
Most established big-city marathons — New York, Boston, Houston, Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo, London — take participants on a 26.2-mile tour of the city’s streets. Local restaurants will often rally behind runners, offering special pre- or post-race meals, and the communities tend to be supportive, coming out to cheer and hold signs with phrases such as, “Smile. You paid for this,” and, “This is a lot of work for a free banana,” designed to make runners smile through the miles and, often, the pain.
But it’s not just the world’s biggest cities that runners are flocking to. Some of Big Sur’s participants and their accompanying families treat the race, which takes place every April on Highway 1, as their California vacation, injecting “millions and millions of dollars into tourism,” Thurston said. Houston First’s chief executive, Michael Heckman, echoes this sentiment in speaking about the Chevron Houston Marathon: “Signature events like these provide tremendous value to the city and local economy — particularly for nearby hotels, dining and entertainment establishments along the course, and even car-share drivers.”
One of Alaska’s signature events, the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon, propelled Sally Pont to sign up and start training again. The D.C.-based college counselor’s first 26.2 miles was the Philadelphia Marathon in the early aughts. Pont, who was attending graduate school at Penn State, about three hours away, said the race “wasn’t an excursion per se, but the experience of going through the whole city and then ending at the museum made me realize how the marathon was about so much more than running.”
“If I was going to do another marathon, I was going to do something cool,” Pont said of the 2003 marathon in Anchorage, where she tacked on a few extra days to enjoy a blues festival in Denali National Park and a seaplane ride out to a glacier.
Madeleine Fontillas Ronk, a sea glass artist who lives with her family in the Los Angeles area, similarly jumped at the chance to travel to Cuba in 2017 to participate in the Havana Triathlon. “We just thought we should do it now, because who knows?” Fontillas Ronk said, noting that they used a travel agent to make all of the arrangements, given Cuba’s stringent travel restrictions. While Fontillas Ronk and her daughter focused on the prerace activities and the race itself, Fontillas Ronk’s husband joined other runners’ family members on a tour to museums and art galleries.
Cuba isn’t the only destination where using a travel planner’s expertise can help eliminate the stress of planning to run the distance on foreign soil. Since 1979, Marathon Tours & Travel has been partnering with races around the world and assisting runners with land-based logistics, including race registration.
“It’s really morphed into this great group of motivated individuals who, of course, have the passion not only for running, but traveling and visiting different destinations around the globe,” said Karen Hoch, who’s been on staff for more than seven years.
Butterfield calls the race the appetizer of the trip. “Obviously, you can’t explore every single corner and neighborhood of a city, but the race gives you a map of the city,” she said. The course itself gives the seasoned runner an idea of what she wants to explore in the days following the race. The race, Butterfield said, is “the thing that whets your appetite.”
Lastoe is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her website is staceylastoe.com. Find her on Twitter: @stacespeaks. | 2022-08-03T18:42:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Traveling the world for marathons and half-marathons - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/03/marathons-travel-vacation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/03/marathons-travel-vacation/ |
Dallas DA on gun control and diminishing overcrowding in jails
The number of murders and gun assaults in major American cities fell in the first half of 2022, while some cities have seen double-digit increases in robberies and other small crimes. On Wednesday, Aug. 10 at 2:30 p.m. ET, Washington Post criminal justice reporter Tom Jackman speaks with Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot about protecting public safety and keeping low-level offenders out of overcrowded jails.
Dallas County District Attorney | 2022-08-03T18:42:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dallas DA on gun control and diminishing overcrowding in jails - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/10/dallas-da-gun-control-diminishing-overcrowding-jails/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/10/dallas-da-gun-control-diminishing-overcrowding-jails/ |
Pelosi dined with Taiwan computer-chip executives during her brief visit
The encounter was a reminder of how important Taiwan chip production is to U.S. national security
Cate Cadell
Nancy Pelosi at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday. (I-Hwa Cheng/Bloomberg)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had lunch with two top executives from Taiwan’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer during her whistle-stop tour of the island, underscoring how vital computer chips have become to U.S. national security.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said that Pelosi and she attended a lunch with Morris Chang, the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufactuering Company, and its chairman, Mark Liu, as well as Chen Jianzhong, vice chairman of electronics manufacturer Pegatron Corp.
"Everyone exchanged views on the deepening of cooperation between Taiwan and the United States in various fields.... Taiwan and the United States not only share the values of democracy, freedom and human rights, we also continue to work together on economic development and democratic supply chain cooperation," Tsai said.
Taiwanese media, citing comments from a Taiwanese legislator, reported that Pelosi also held a separate conversation with TSMC’s Liu to discuss chips. Pelosi’s office and TSMC didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on that.
The discussions came days after Congress passed the Chips and Science Act, which provides $52 billion in subsidies to incentivize chip manufacturers to build factories in the United States.
TSMC is expected to receive a chunk of those subsidies to help fund manufacturing facilities it is building in Arizona.
TSMC is the world’s biggest chip manufacturer and a vital supplier to the United States and other Western nations. It is by far the largest of Taiwan’s chipmakers, which together produce more than 90 percent of the world’s highest-tech chips, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. The United States uses TSMC-manufactured chips in F-35 fighter jets, Javelin missiles and other military equipment. | 2022-08-03T19:10:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pelosi meets with TSMC in Taiwan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/03/pelosi-tsmc-meeting-lunch-semiconductors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/03/pelosi-tsmc-meeting-lunch-semiconductors/ |
East Main Street in Hindman, Ky. (Arden S. Barnes/For The Washington Post)
HINDMAN, Ky. — Pat Sutton Bradley was clearing out the mud and damaged furniture when she found it: a poem titled “Don’t Quit,” printed on a laminated piece of paper.
Like hundreds of other residents here, Bradley’s small business was decimated by the catastrophic flooding that hit eastern Kentucky last week, leaving more than three dozen dead and millions of dollars in damage. Her business looked like a “wet war zone,” she said.
Bradley attached the missive to a filing cabinet, and found herself looking at it often Tuesday. “Today is the worst day I’ve had,” said Bradley, a retired postmaster and longtime resident. “I’ve picked and flipped and thrown and tossed. I was exhausted. Didn’t sleep well last night. But today, I’m drooped.”
Knott County, where Bradley lives, has much to grieve. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said Monday that 38 people were killed in last week’s overwhelming floods. Many of those deaths — at least 17 — were concentrated here.
“The way that it’s affected each person is just phenomenal,” said Tabatha Mosley, 36, a longtime resident who repairs stringed instruments in Hindman. “There were lives lost, homes lost. Just a total flip.”
The downtown of Hindman, the county seat, has only one intersection with a stoplight. A row of two- and three-story buildings flank both sides of Main Street. Two days ago, the sidewalks were caked with thick mud. On Tuesday, mud-specked debris — arranged in piles a few feet high after being removed from the insides of businesses — waited to be trucked off.
Forested hills surround the town on all sides and Troublesome Creek, which overflowed last week, winds its way by on its way to the Kentucky River. “Country. Mountains,” said Mosley describing the area. “Just a little hometown. If you blink you’ll miss it.”
Near downtown sits the Hindman Settlement School. The school was founded by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1902 to give the children of local coal miners a basic education and knowledge of traditional arts like weaving and woodworking, said Will Anderson, the school’s executive director.
For the past several decades, the settlement school has worked to bridge unmet local educational needs and nurture local authors, Anderson said. The school is also a preserve of Appalachian history. Documents, artifacts and traditional instruments — some more than a century old — were stored in the school’s basement.
Last week, a wall of water blew the heavy doors of the basement off their hinges, smashing glass partitions and threatening a valuable collection of local culture. The large doors narrowly missed staff members who were working frantically in the basement to preserve the collection.
“If they’d been standing a couple feet over, it would have hit them,” Anderson said. “We might have had a fatality.”
Within minutes, the water was chest-deep in the basement. Outside, a dozen vehicles — many of which belonging to participants in a literary workshop the school was hosting — were swept away by a raging current.
The staff’s work on that night and through last week likely saved the majority of the collection, Anderson said. More than 20 antique dulcimers, a stringed instrument native to Appalachia, were largely spared.
After the flood, the school put out a call for help. Volunteers and staff flooded in to “triage” the collection, assessing what was most in need of saving. On Tuesday, tables were full of old photographs — some stained brown and curling at the edges — sitting in neat rows and drying out.
“We had a lot of experts in preservation of documents here, we had probably 50 volunteers,” Anderson said. “There was like a magic window, the first 72 hours after the flood, where we had the best chance of saving these materials. That's when we had this operation.”
Since the flood, the school has also provided shelter to local residents. There are about 100 beds on campus, and 38 were occupied by those who lost their homes. Despite their loss, Anderson said that many of those lodging at the school were eager to help preserve the collection. One woman told Anderson that she wanted to give back because of how much the school helped her.
“Her mobile home got swept away in the flood,” Anderson said. “She got nothing out of it, other than escaping it. And yet here she is trying to work and help us recover.”
That woman was Mosley. She said she lived in the community of Carrie in a trailer. Many of her neighbors were her family. In the middle of the night, the water came fast, Mosley said, and much higher than she’d ever seen. While she escaped to higher ground, the water carried one trailer into another, like dominoes, until eventually demolishing hers.
“It was so loud with all this metal churning and glass breaking,” Mosley said.
Her family escaped with some of their cars and waited with them on higher ground for hours until the water cleared off the roadway enough to drive out, eventually making their way to the school. Facebook friends, she said, found family photos from their trailers downriver in another county.
Rebuilding could take years, Beshear has said. But Bradley said she believes in this community because of how they’ve grown up and grown together.
“We grew up hard,” Bradley said. “From there, we will succeed. We've done it all of our lives. And we'll come out of it.”
The excessive rainfall in eastern Kentucky is consistent with an observed trend toward more extreme precipitation events in the United States in recent decades. Scientists have linked this increase to human-caused climate change as a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavier rainfall.
Water from Troublesome Creek and other usually small streams flooded in places that many locals say they have never seen high water before.
That was the case for Mosley’s home, adding that her landlord did not have flood insurance. She said that the high-water mark of the catastrophe should be considered in the rebuilding process.
“It’s definitely something to pay attention to,” Mosley said. “They don’t call it Troublesome Creek for nothing.” | 2022-08-03T19:36:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After major floods, Kentucky grapples with the damage left behind - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/03/kentuky-floods-rebuilding/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/03/kentuky-floods-rebuilding/ |
Phil Mickelson is among the LIV golfers who have sued the PGA Tour. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Eleven golfers from the fledgling LIV Golf Invitational Series filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour, arguing that their careers were hurt when the Tour suspended them after they joined the Saudi-funded breakaway league. The move has been expected since LIV emerged earlier this year to challenge the PGA Tour’s professional golf supremacy.
Unlike some of the other players who left for LIV Golf, the 11 players who filed the lawsuit — Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford, Matt Jones, Ian Poulter, Abraham Ancer, Carlos Ortiz, Pat Perez, Jason Kokrak and Peter Uihlein — have not forfeited their PGA Tour memberships, meaning they still hoped to play on both tours. But the PGA Tour did not give them permission to play in LIV tournaments and issued multiple-year suspensions after they did so.
The lawsuit alleges that the PGA Tour has not only threatened golfers who sought to play in LIV tournaments, it also “threatened sponsors, vendors, and agents to coerce players to abandon opportunities to play in LIV Golf events”; “orchestrated a per se unlawful group boycott with the European Tour to deny LIV Golf access to their members”; and “leaned on” groups that put on golf’s four major championships, pressuring them into banning LIV golfers from competing in the sport’s most high-profile events.
“The Tour’s conduct serves no purpose other than to cause harm to players and foreclose the entry of the first meaningful competitive threat the Tour has faced in decades,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Mickelson, one of the world’s most beloved golfers and a six-time major winner, has long been a proponent of starting a breakaway league, admitting to a biographer that he had helped pay for attorneys to draw up its operating rules. The lawsuit contends that the PGA Tour suspended Mickelson for at least two months on March 22 for, among other reasons, “attempting to recruit players” to join LIV Golf. (Mickelson’s last PGA Tour event was in late January, before news of his involvement with LIV broke.) It then denied his application for reinstatement on June 20, saying that he violated PGA Tour rules by playing in LIV Golf’s first tournament in London, and suspended him through March 31, 2023. That suspension was lengthened to March 31, 2024, after Mickelson played in LIV’s second tournament in Oregon, the lawsuit contends.
PGA Tour golfers are required to receive permission to play in non-sanctioned tournaments, and traditionally were allowed three such instances each season (usually to play in events on the European tour, which has an operating agreement with the PGA Tour). The lawsuit contends the tour has “weaponized” this “Conflicting Events Regulation” to prevent its golfers from playing in any non-sanctioned tournament, and that this system does not “permit meaningful competition by other tours.”
The U.S. Department of Justice is also investigating the PGA Tour for potential antitrust violations, according to the Wall Street Journal, which is at least the second time federal officials have looked into tour dealings. In 1994, antitrust lawyers at the Federal Trade Commission tried to get the U.S. government to nullify the rule that requires golfers to receive permission to play in conflicting events — and another that said players needed to get permission to appear on television programs not approved by the PGA Tour — because they created possible “unfair methods of competition.”
In the players’ lawsuit, three LIV golfers also are asking for a temporary restraining order that would allow them to play in the season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs, a three-tournament competition that begins next week with an event comprising the top 125 golfers in season-long standings. Golfers compile points based on their performances over the entire season, and the three defectors — Gooch (No. 20 in the FedEx Cup standings), Jones (No. 62) and Swafford (No. 63) — would have been eligible for next week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship had they not been banned by the PGA Tour after playing in LIV Golf events.
There are two FedEx Cup standings pages on the PGA Tour’s website, one with the LIV golfers still included and another with those golfers taken out, and the players below them moved up. The latter will be used to determine the 125-golfer field for next week’s playoff opener, barring a judge’s order.
After the first playoff tournament, the top 70 in the FedEx Cup standings advance to the BMW Championship, with the top 30 after that event competing at the season-ending Tour Championship. The winner of that tournament will receive $18 million, and golfers who finish the season ranked highly in the FedEx Cup points standings generally are admitted to the following year’s major championships. | 2022-08-03T20:02:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Phil Mickelson, other LIV golfers file antitrust suit against PGA Tour - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/mickelson-liv-pga-tour-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/mickelson-liv-pga-tour-lawsuit/ |
Experts say it’s common for trans and nonbinary people to use multiple pronouns, and to interchange pronouns throughout their gender journey
(Michael Tran/AFP/Getty/Washington Post illustration)
Earlier this year, Demi Lovato updated their pronouns on Instagram — a move that went largely under the radar for a global pop star.
“They/them/she/her,” Lovato’s profile has read since April.
This week, the public caught wind of this change after the singer opened up about it during an interview on “Spout Podcast,” an interview series with music artists.
“I’m such a fluid person,” Lovato, who came out as nonbinary in 2021, told host Tamara Dhia when asked about their pronouns. “Recently, I’ve been feeling more feminine, and so I’ve adopted she/her again.”
Across social media, people have reacted to the news with both appreciation and confusion. Some, including Dhia, have criticized the media’s coverage for lacking context on the nuance and complexities of gender identity.
While some outlets’ language suggested Lovato had “gone back” to she/her pronouns, experts say it’s common for trans and nonbinary people to use multiple pronouns, and to interchange pronouns throughout their gender journey.
“Oftentimes, people might cycle through different gender identities, or different language they’re using or different pronouns, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not their true selves,” said Sabra Katz-Wise, an assistant professor in adolescent/young adult medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. “It’s just sort of part of this larger gender journey that people are on.”
Indeed, many on social media reinforced that idea and expressed hope that Lovato’s story would help normalize this experience: “This is a reminder that gender and sexuality can be totally fluid and that’s okay!” one user wrote on Twitter.
And many criticized the media’s portrayal of the news. “The media’s reaction to Demi Lovato using she/they pronouns is why I wish I’d stuck with they/them,” another user wrote. “The second I switched to he/they everyone stopped using they.”
Aaron Williams, 21, has used they/them pronouns for more than a year. But it feels like their gender journey is just beginning, they said.
“I’ve become a lot more understanding and aware of gender as a social construct in only the past few years,” said Williams, who lives in Port Talbot, Wales. “Being autistic, most of us don’t feel that we can relate to social norms and I realized I don’t relate to gender binary norms. It’s a work of progress.”
Cierra “ChiChi” White, a mental health counselor and Twitch streamer in Colorado Springs, said their journey began during childhood after they struggled to connect with feminine labels — particularly as a Black girl in a non-Black community. “My idea of femininity was completely different than that of those around me,” they said.
“For my whole life, I was very comfortable with any pronouns for the most part,” White added. “And then I just decided to go by they/them pronouns exclusively and identify as agender.”
To White, 26, it makes sense that a person’s gender identity and/or pronouns would change over time.
“If you’re constantly having your ideas challenged or meeting new people who maybe help you to change or better construct your own idea of what gender means over time, it’s natural that it would change,” White said. “I don’t know too many people who haven’t experimented with pronouns.“
According to data released from the Pew Research Center in June, about 1.6 percent of the U.S. population identifies as trans or nonbinary. The survey also found that young adults were the most likely to identify this way.
5 percent of young adults identify as trans or nonbinary, survey says
Katz-Wise, whose research examines sexual orientation, gender identity development and sexual fluidity, echoes White’s view on how communities and environmental factors can influence identity. “There are a lot of contextual factors that appear to be related to people experiencing these changes,” she said. “A lot of them are about meeting new people [and] learning about new terms that they hadn’t been exposed to before.”
Amid an onslaught of legislation targeting trans and queer people, many in the LGBTQ community have been especially wary of narratives that can fuel stigmas and misconceptions about queer and gender experiences.
“I think there’s a real fear of transgender and nonbinary rights being removed if there’s a suggestion that gender can be fluid because people might say, ‘Well, if it’s fluid and you can change it, then why don’t you just be cisgender?’ ” Katz-Wise said. “But in reality, people wouldn’t usually describe it as they made that change themselves but rather they experienced that change happening to them.”
Since coming out as nonbinary in May 2021, Lovato has been open about anticipating such changes, telling the 19th at the time that her gender identity would be a “forever” journey. She has also said she identifies as queer and pansexual.
“There might be a time where I identify as nonbinary and gender nonconforming my entire life. Or maybe there’s a period of time when I get older that I identify as a woman,” she said. “I don’t know what that looks like, but for me, in this moment right now, this is how I identify.”
In recent years, other celebrities have come out as nonbinary or transgender. In 2019, singer Sam Smith changed their pronouns to they/them. In 2020, actor Elliot Page came out as transgender and nonbinary. And this year, singer Janelle Monae confirmed she is nonbinary, telling the Los Angeles Times she’ll use both they/them and she/her pronouns.
White is grateful for their stories: “It means a lot for me personally as a transgender and nonbinary person because it helps to normalize conversations about gender and fluidity.”
Williams agrees.
“It’s so important for our communities not to just have allies but to see representation,” they said. “If it wasn’t for social media and the change in conversation in popular culture, I may not know these labels existed.” | 2022-08-03T20:11:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Demi Lovato’s she/they pronouns can help normalize gender fluidity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/03/demi-lovato-pronouns-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/03/demi-lovato-pronouns-change/ |
A giant jet towers above Oklahoma in May 2018. (Chris Holmes) (Chris Holmes)
An ordinary lightning bolt can be startling enough, but researchers are unlocking the secrets behind a rarely-observed species of electrical discharge called “gigantic jets.” These are extraordinary bursts of light from the top of clouds that can brush up as high as the edge of space.
Only five observations of these jets are made in an average year, usually by accident. Sometimes lucky photographers capture them in long-exposure images, and once in a while they’re spotted by weather satellites.
A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances sheds light on the structure and cause of gigantic jets. It analyzed a jet unleashed in Oklahoma on May 14, 2018, which shot up 50 miles above a storm cloud and distributed more charge than 100 traditional lightning bolts. It was the most powerful gigantic jet studied.
Researchers mapped the jet in three dimensions and identified very high frequency sources in greater detail than ever before.
Elusive red sprites, like glowing jellyfish in the night sky, photographed in Oklahoma
The investigation was inspired when Levi Boggs, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and one of the paper’s lead authors, learned about a photograph of the Oklahoma jet by a citizen scientist.
“Kevin Palivec [the photographer] has a l0w-light camera in Central Texas that he sometimes randomly operates, and he had captured this a couple of years ago," Boggs said. "[The picture] was kind of sitting around. I was told about it and I decided to investigate a little bit.”
That’s when Boggs assembled a team that reviewed satellite, radar and radio-wave data to reconstruct what had happened.
The researchers were able to develop a model of the jet in three dimensions since it was seen by two satellite-based optical lightning instruments, including the lightning mapping array on the GOES 15 weather satellite that peers down over the eastern U.S.
“I think it discharged an area approximately 50 kilometers by 50 kilometers within the cloud,” Boggs said. “It transferred that charge to the ionosphere,” the atmospheric layer about 50 to 400 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Steve Cummer, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, was able to extract very high frequency electromagnetic data from a series of nearby antennas in the vicinity of the storm. For the first time, he was able to confirm that the very high frequency signal emitted by lightning can actually be traced back to small tendril-like “streamers” of electricity at the tip of a propagating lightning channel.
Ground-based lightning detection networks also came in handy in investigating the jet, since they informed lightning rates in the storm before it was unleashed.
“We were able to determine the peak currents and type of discharge for the parent storm,” Boggs said.
Strangely, Boggs said, there were no conventional lightning strikes in the immediate region that produced the gigantic jet. He has a theory about it that’s tied to the jets’s most common location: over ocean rather than land.
Thunderstorms typically exhibit a tri-polar electric field, meaning they consist of a positively-charged area near the ground, negatively-charged area near the bottom of the cloud and positively-charged area near the cloud top. The contrast between the negative charge at the bottom of the cloud and positive charge near the ground triggers lightning.
“What happens is there’s a suppression of these cloud to ground discharges,” Boggs said.
This suppression of cloud to ground strikes happens most frequently with ocean storms for reasons scientists still don’t understand, Boggs said.
The researchers found that, in the absence of a charge contrast between the cloud and surface, negative charge builds up in the clouds. Gigantic jets may then relieve that excess negative charge.
Some of the most prolific episodes of gigantic jets have been noted over tropical storms or hurricanes — which are notoriously bereft of ordinary lightning. On Aug. 11 and 12, 2015, Hurricane Hilda produced a barrage of enormous jets as it slipped southeast of Hawaii.
There are still plenty of things that remain undiscovered and unknown in the field of gigantic jets, which falls under the umbrella of TLEs, or Transient Luminous Events — i.e. upper atmospheric lightning.
“We still don’t really know how frequently they occur,” said Boggs. “There are about five detections of gigantic jets per year, but we’re hoping to get maybe tens of thousands.”
To do so, Boggs and his team are working on a machine learning algorithm to integrate into the satellite-based geostationary lightning mapper data.
“We just haven’t seen them because observations are so limited,” said Boggs. “It’s really tough to coordinate with instruments in orbit, so we have a [National Science Foundation] grant that’s coming up soon. That will basically use [satellite data] to hunt for these gigantic jets in huge quantities … hopefully we’ll be able to detect these things across a hemisphere hopefully 24 hours a day.”
#GOESEast's Geostationary Lightning Mapper has captured the first images from space of 'GIGANTIC JET' #lightning - electrical discharges from a thunderstorm that come out the TOP of the storm and reach as high as the ionosphere (50 miles up)! Learn more: https://t.co/V5eXtcHDDK pic.twitter.com/UCQGWFUsvk
— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) March 23, 2018 | 2022-08-03T20:11:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Researchers unlock mysteries of rare 'gigantic jet' lightning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/03/gigantic-jet-lightning-science/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/03/gigantic-jet-lightning-science/ |
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in Brussels on May 17. (Olivier Matthys/AP)
Negotiations over a return to the Iran nuclear deal will resume Thursday in Vienna, with participants expressing little optimism that agreement can be reached on what the European Union facilitator of the talks indicated is a last-chance attempt to finalize a new accord.
The six countries with direct roles in the negotiations — Iran, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, with the United States participating indirectly — will meet to consider a comprehensive text agreement that the E.U. foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, put on the table late last month after concluding “that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted.”
“This text represents the best possible deal that I … see as feasible,” Borrell wrote last week in the Financial Times. “I see no other comprehensive or effective alternative within reach.”
The upcoming meeting represents a change from the past 18 months of start-and-stop negotiations since “we now, unlike in the past, have a text the coordinator says is basically is good as it’s going to get,” according to a senior Biden administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed talks.
“The margins now are very tight in terms of what the scope of the talks could be about,” with “no extraneous issues” to be discussed, the official said. “We’re not going to reinvent the wheel at this point,” and “we should know very quickly” whether agreement is possible.
Although it is not at the negotiating table, the United States is a major player in the talks about returning to the original 2015 deal, under which Iran agreed to strong restraints on its nuclear program and strict international monitoring, in exchange for the lifting of crippling, nuclear-related economic sanctions imposed by the United States, Europe and the United Nations.
The Trump administration withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, restoring the lifted sanctions and adding others. In response, Iran has increased the quality and quantity of its enriched uranium production, far beyond the limits it agreed to in the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. U.S. intelligence now estimates it could have enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon within weeks, compared to a year when the agreement was in force.
Iran has refused to meet directly with the United States since talks about a return to the deal began in April 2021 under the Biden administration. The European participants carry messages back and forth between chief U.S. negotiator Robert Malley and Iran.
Malley said in a tweet on Wednesday that he was traveling to Vienna for the talks on Borrell’s text. “Our expectations are in check,” he wrote, “but the United States welcomes E.U. efforts and is prepared for a good-faith attempt to reach a deal.”
In Tehran, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kan’ani said in a statement that Iranian negotiator Ali Bagheri was departing for the talks, which he described as “a discussion and exchange of views.”
Earlier sessions faltered in part on Iranian demands that the United States lift a foreign terrorist designation President Donald Trump imposed on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a part of the Iranian military, and that President Biden guarantee that no future administration would withdraw from a new agreement. The administration said that the former was outside the scope of the original deal, and the latter was impossible under the U.S. system of government.
During his trip last month to the Middle East, Biden heard opposition from Israel and U.S. partners in the Persian Gulf to signing a new agreement with Iran. “As we continue to work closely with many of you to counter the threats posed to the region by Iran,” he told the Gulf Cooperation Council, “we’re also pursuing diplomacy to return constraints on Iran’s nuclear program.”
“But no matter what, the United States is committed to ensuring that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon,” Biden said. | 2022-08-03T20:11:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iran nuclear talk resume in last-ditch effort to secure deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/iran-nuclear-talks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/iran-nuclear-talks/ |
FILE - This Feb. 5, 2021, photo provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections shows James Coddington. The Oklahoma Board of Pardon and Parole is recommending clemency for death row inmate Coddington. The board voted 3-2 on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022, to recommend Gov. Kevin Stitt grant clemency to Coddington, who was convicted and sentenced to die for killing 73-year-old Albert Hale inside Hale’s home in Choctaw in 1997. (Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP, File) (Uncredited/Oklahoma Department of Corrections) | 2022-08-03T20:12:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Board recommends clemency for Oklahoma death row inmate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/board-recommends-clemency-for-oklahoma-death-row-inmate/2022/08/03/18ce9d7c-135c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/board-recommends-clemency-for-oklahoma-death-row-inmate/2022/08/03/18ce9d7c-135c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Two decades of master photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s work on display now in London
Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1976. (Joel Meyerowitz/Courtesy Huxley-Parlour and Howard Greenberg)
Acclaimed photographer Joel Meyerowitz is exhibiting 13 large-scale photographs at the Huxley-Parlour gallery in London. The work went on display July 20 and will remain up until Aug. 12.
Meyerowitz is one of the most notable American color photographers. Although he began by taking black-and-white photographs in the vein of photographers Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, he eventually moved into making color images and he is now regarded as one of the pioneers of the art form, alongside other greats including William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Ernst Haas.
The Huxley-Parlour exhibit, titled “Between the Dog and the Wolf” brings together some two decades worth of Meyerowitz’s photographs. Meyerowitz originally published a photo book under the same title and this exhibition builds on that with works from some of his other notable projects, including 2016’s “Cape Light” and 2017’s “Towards Colour.”
A statement on the work by the gallery says:
“Originally published as a photobook, Between the Dog and the Wolf captures serene swimming pools girdled by expansive seas and endless, twilight horizons in Cape Cod throughout the 70s and 80s. The contrast between pools and the ocean is not only an aesthetic one, but a philosophical contrast too: the title comes from the French phrase ‘entre chien et loup’, alluding to oncoming twilight. Meyerowitz notes, “It seemed to me that the French liken the twilight to the notion of the tame and the savage, the known and the unknown, where that special moment of the fading of the light offers us an entrance into the place where our senses might fail us slightly, making us vulnerable to the vagaries of our imagination.”
Meyerowitz has achieved great acclaim throughout his decades-long career. He has had over 350 exhibitions and two Guggenheim fellowships and is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities awards. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. Meyerowitz lives and works between New York and Italy.
You can find out more about the exhibition on Huxley-Parlour’s website, here. | 2022-08-03T20:12:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two decades of photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s work on display in London - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/03/two-decades-master-photographer-joel-meyerowitzs-work-display-now-london/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/03/two-decades-master-photographer-joel-meyerowitzs-work-display-now-london/ |
Blizzard cancels World of Warcraft mobile game over financial dispute
Activision Blizzard and NetEase have canceled a joint World of Warcraft mobile game following a dispute over financial terms. The unannounced project, code-named Neptune, was developed in secrecy for three years before being scuttled, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Neptune was intended as a spinoff of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer role-playing game series that has been one of the company’s flagship franchises since the original “World of Warcraft” released in 2004. The title was slated to release as a mobile game set in the Warcraft universe but taking place at a “different time period” from the main games. The World of Warcraft series (which itself is a spinoff of the strategy series Warcraft) is only available on Windows and macOS; an upcoming expansion, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight,” is set to release sometime in late 2022.
Canceled projects are common in the industry. Games get pitched, developed and scrapped within studios all the time. Assets from a canceled productions are often reappropriated for another project. Blizzard’s team-based shooter “Overwatch” was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of project Titan, a clandestine MMORPG project that Blizzard quietly shut down in 2013.
But after Neptune was canceled, NetEase also dissolved a team of over 100 members working on the project, Bloomberg reported. Only some of those employees were offered opportunities elsewhere at NetEase.
Forget next-gen consoles. The biggest gaming platform is already in your pocket.
China boasts a gargantuan 660 million mobile gamer market. But the conflict between NetEase and Blizzard has cast doubts over future collaborations. NetEase, an internet technology corporation based in Hangzhou, has been Blizzard’s partner in China since 2008. Traditionally, the company’s role has been to steward Blizzard’s games and Battle.net (Blizzard’s digital platform and multiplayer service) in China, but the partnership between the two companies has since evolved into joint development.
“Diablo Immortal,” a mobile game based on Blizzard’s action RPG series Diablo, marked the first time that NetEase and Blizzard developed a title together. The gaming public responded to “Diablo Immortal” with backlash, taking issue with the game’s approach to monetization. That hasn’t stopped “Diablo Immortal” from being a huge earner; the game generated $49 million in its first month.
Despite “Diablo Immortal’s” success, Activision Blizzard’s quarterly earnings, reported Monday, showed drops across revenue, income and monthly active users, among other metrics. The company has also been under intense scrutiny from regulators, the public and its own workers for issues ranging from sexual harassment allegations to the lifting of vaccine mandates. | 2022-08-03T20:13:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World of Warcraft mobile game canceled by Blizzard, NetEase - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/03/world-warcraft-mobile-cancelled-neptune/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/03/world-warcraft-mobile-cancelled-neptune/ |
Vladyslav Atroshenko, the mayor of Chernihiv, Ukraine, stands in front of a damaged building in his city on April 4. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
CHERNIHIV, Ukraine — There has been an unofficial agreement among Ukraine’s raucous and highly competitive politicians since Russia invaded: Put aside old differences and form a unified front against Moscow.
It’s been a remarkable shift in a country plagued by political infighting, corruption and Russian influence since it declared independence from the dissolving Soviet Union in 1991.
Recent frictions between President Volodymyr Zelensky, the highly popular wartime leader, and Ukrainian mayors who are trying to defend or rebuild their devastated cities and towns underscore Ukraine’s mounting internal challenges as it approaches six months of war.
Mayors and analysts told The Washington Post that Zelensky’s government appears to be trying to sideline mayors to maintain control of recovery aid and to weaken any future political rivals. More broadly, several mayors told The Post there is growing concern that amid the war, Zelensky’s administration is backtracking on promises and plans to remove a lingering vestige of the Soviet era by decentralizing power and granting more authority to regional and local governments.
“Autocratic tendencies are beginning to develop in Ukraine during the war,” said Borys Filatov, 50, the powerful mayor of Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine, a city that has become a key conduit for arms and aid to the country’s embattled eastern front. “They are trying to dominate the political field … however, we are not opponents.”
He criticized Zelensky’s government, as did others, with one major caveat: No matter the internal divides, he said, the bigger foe is Russia, and the West must continue to support Ukraine’s defense of its sovereignty.
Filatov, who was reelected in 2020 by a wide majority, has clashed with Zelensky in the past. Recently, Zelensky’s government reportedly threatened to revoke the Ukrainian citizenship of one oligarch close to Filatov because he holds dual nationality, which Ukraine bans. Another oligarch and close confidant, also with dual citizenship, said he was barred last month from returning to the country after a trip.
“It’s a dangerous slope,” said Orysia Lutsevych, a research fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program of the London-based think tank Chatham House. “For Ukraine to win this war, it has to be built off this idea [that] mayors are not competition but viewed as part of the team … where there is central command at the time of war, while at the same local governments can address the problems as they see fit.”
These rifts with local politicians come as Zelensky has made controversial changes within his own cabinet, last month suspending the head of Ukraine’s security services and its prosecutor general as he also announced a widespread investigation into “treason and collaboration activities.”
Ukrainian mayors have traditionally aligned themselves with the ruling national party to gain access, Lutsevych said. Many mayors have supported both former president Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow ally who was ousted in Ukraine’s 2013-14 revolution, and his more reformist successor, Petro Poroshenko. In recent years, some mayors have opted to create their own personal political parties and alliances.
But while the party in power nationally has typically dominated locally, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party faired badly in the 2020 local elections. After having won a majority of seats in the parliamentary election the previous year, the party didn’t win a mayoral seat in any major city: Incumbents beat out Servant of the People candidates in 10 key mayoral elections. In a personal defeat for Zelensky, his party’s candidate for mayor in his hometown of Kryvyi Rih lost in a runoff even after the main opponent dropped out.
The war has boosted Zelensky, who now has wide public support. The president’s nightly addresses from the capital are credited with bolstering Ukraine’s morale, despite a war that has destroyed entire cities and towns across the country and cost countless thousands of lives.
Champion boxer turned Kyiv mayor becomes a rousing wartime leader
Lutsevych said wars tend to bring out “new heroes,” and in Ukraine’s case it’s very likely that some of them will become mayors.
Among the most critical of Zelensky has been Vladyslav Atroshenko, the mayor of Chernihiv, which borders Belarus and was one of the cities near Kyiv most damaged by Russian forces.
Atroshenko, 55, spent the war’s first weeks with his constituents under constant bombardment while rallying global support for Ukraine. But in July, he broke with that national unity and directly criticized Zelensky, accusing the president’s “associates” of trying to remove him from power.
“Today, instead of resisting the attacks of the enemy, the city is forced to endure the attacks of your subordinates,” Atroshenko said in a video posted July 8 on his Facebook page. “Central and local authorities should work together against the enemy, not against each other.”
Six days before Atroshenko posted the video, a Ukrainian border guard prevented him from leaving the country to attend a conference in Switzerland about Ukraine’s recovery. Atroshenko, pacing back and forth in an interview with The Post, said it was the second time in recent weeks that central government agents had barred him from traveling for an aid-related event.
Ukraine has barred all military age men from leaving the country since Russia’s Feb. 24 full-scale invasion. Atroshenko said he needed to travel to raise money for Chernihiv, where he said the heavily damaged heating system needs to be fixed before winter.
After the mayor posted video of the July 2 encounter, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, shot back on Telegram: “I remind those who have forgotten that there is a war going on in Ukraine! This especially applies to the border regions and those that were still very recently occupied. The danger has not passed!”
If the “signal is not clear,” Tymoshenko said, he reminded mayors that their communities could be helped “without you.”
Rivne Mayor Oleksandr Tretyak, 35, has a constituency and concerns that are very different from Atroshenko’s, but he sympathized with his colleague’s frustration.
Atroshenko “is trying to do his best to attract investors, to invite business, to invite other countries to help, to solve the problem,” Tretyak said. “That is a normal thing. I am trying to do the same. … I cannot just sit here in my city and wait for when my central government gives me some help.” | 2022-08-03T20:13:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukrainian political divisions are reemerging as war grinds on - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/ukraine-political-divisions-zelensky-mayors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/ukraine-political-divisions-zelensky-mayors/ |
Rage Against the Machine’s seething poetry now sounds like prophecy
At Capital One Arena on Tuesday, the revolutionary rock band’s decades-old lyrics about resisting capitalism and fighting systemic oppression felt more potent than ever
Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine performs at Capital One Arena on Aug. 2. (Kyle Gustafson for The Washington Post)
As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. For Rage Against the Machine, the violence of history’s rhymes has fueled a fire that now burns anew. Thirty years after the band’s debut, more than 20 years since its last studio album and more than 10 years since the iconoclastic four-piece last joined forces, the rock band brought its urgent, sonic manifesto to Capital One Arena on Tuesday. In a concert landscape marked by cash-grab reunions and mirthless anniversary celebrations, Rage — as it did during its heyday — stood above the rest and proved to be as ferocious and felicitous as ever.
Throughout a 90-minute set, the first performance of a two-night stand in D.C. on their Public Service Announcement Tour, Rage sounded as if no time had passed since the band played arenas regularly. The three members who have remained active, as Audioslave and then as Prophets of Rage, fell right into place, with Tim Commerford’s funk-kissed basslines and Brad Wilk’s powerhouse drumming providing a rhythmic stronghold as Tom Morello squeezed not just riffs but scratches, squeals and sirens from his guitar.
For years, Zack de la Rocha has been the missing piece in the band’s alchemical equation, but even an injury that kept him seated onstage all night could not curtail his vocal attack. While the instrumentation still gets pits circling and heads banging, it is de la Rocha’s lyrics that make Rage seem so vital, especially now.
Heavy with bullets, bombs, caskets and hearses, de la Rocha’s lyrics about resisting capitalism, colonialism and the military- and prison-industrial complexes seem particularly potent these days. Rage warned people to wake up before “woke” was a watchword, and the band’s poetry now reads like prophecy.
In their 1992 track “Killing in the Name,” the refrain, “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses” took a stand against police brutality and connected it to America’s history of racist violence. In 2022, it still resonates: Some of those that work forces also apparently storm the U.S. Capitol — or, as de la Rocha updated the lyric on Tuesday, “Some of those that burn crosses are the same that hold office.”
Prophets of Rage and the trouble with fighting today’s wars using yesterday’s weapons
Rage has always called out hypocrisy and grappled with the dissonance of being a mainstream band that plays in arenas named after banks. On balance, they’ve done more good than bad. They raised more than $345,000 for local charities through ticket sales to the two D.C. shows, and at the concert, they used the arena jumbotron to broadcast images of D.C. residents killed by police. Accompanying messages made the band’s politics even more explicit. “They have declared perpetual war,” one slide read. Another, in all caps: “We must answer with permanent unrest.”
But beyond the T-shirts emblazoned with “Free Mumia” and “Free Ukraine” or “Black Lives Matter” and “Nazi Lives Don’t Matter,” it was unclear how the capacity crowd — almost uniformly White, male and unmasked — had taken Rage’s sermon from the mosh pit to the street. The band has been begging for revolution for three decades. As de la Rocha asked the crowd, “What better place than here? What better time than now?” | 2022-08-03T20:13:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rage Against the Machine’s seething poetry now sounds like prophecy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/03/rage-against-the-machine-capital-one-concert/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/03/rage-against-the-machine-capital-one-concert/ |
In this photo released by the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at right reacts to Chen Chu, the President of the Control Yuan and Chair of the National Human Rights Commission, during a visit to a human rights museum in Taipei, Taiwan on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meeting leaders in Taiwan despite warnings from China, said Wednesday that she and other members of Congress in a visiting delegation are showing they will not abandon their commitment to the self-governing island. (Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs via AP) (Uncredited/Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Noted: Pelosi lunched with computer-chip executives during Taiwan visit
6:22 PMTake a look: What Kansas’s abortion referendum means for the nation | 2022-08-03T20:14:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US-China ties on a precipice after Pelosi visit to Taiwan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-china-ties-on-a-precipice-after-pelosi-visit-to-taiwan/2022/08/03/b2f0528a-135f-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-china-ties-on-a-precipice-after-pelosi-visit-to-taiwan/2022/08/03/b2f0528a-135f-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
The Nationals traded Juan Soto and Josh Bell on Tuesday. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Right after 3 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, the Washington Nationals opened the area by their clubhouse, unleashing maybe the biggest crowd of reporters here since Game 5 of the World Series in 2019. Earlier in the afternoon, two public relations staffers and the club’s head of security kept the hallway clear. Their goal was to give Juan Soto and Josh Bell a quiet exit from the stadium after Washington’s reached a blockbuster trade deal with the San Diego Padres. They wanted a dose of order amid hours of organizational chaos.
But once inside, everyone was greeted with back-of-the-classroom laughs. A big box had replaced Soto in front of the outfielder’s old locker. Joey Meneses and Josh Palacios, a pair of replacements, were greeting new teammates. Goodbyes became hellos.
“Too late!” yelled Victor Robles, referring to how Soto and Bell were on their way to San Diego. “They’re already gone!”
In the hour before the trade was official, the Nationals’ clubhouse seemed filled with an invisible haze. There was laughter. There was frustration. There was more than enough gallows humor to go around. One player said that “there’s no return that will be good enough. It’s Juan f------ Soto.” Another smiled and asked: “Am I going next? Nah … No one wants me.” And without Soto and Bell, who handled a large share of Washington’s media responsibilities, there was a hunt for quotes.
First, the group of cameras and notepads rushed to Alcides Escobar, a veteran shortstop who has five appearances since late June, two of which were as a pitcher in a blowout. From across the room, reliever Andrés Machado wondered: “What in the world are they talking to Esky about?” Then once that scrum broke, it found Meneses, a 30-year-old first baseman who later homered in his major league debut against the New York Mets.
Meneses got the call after spending 12 years in the minors. Having arrived on a morning flight from Columbus, Ohio, luggage tags hung from his bat bag. He field questions around where Trea Turner and Anthony Rendon used to dress for games. Down the row, Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin still have stalls. But in less than three years, most members of the title team are elsewhere.
“All of this feels so crazy,” catcher Tres Barrera said in the tunnel between the clubhouse and dugout. “I have known Juan since he was 17. He was a kid trying to figure it out here. When we were in Hagerstown, before he was fluent in English, we would go to Chipotle and I would help him order. Then we’d chat in English so he could learn more. It was cool, you know?
Barrera trailed off a bit and stared at the rubber floor.
“I don’t know,” he continued. “This is just weird, man.”
Side conversations made one thing very clear Tuesday: This is a distinct case of a front office and clubhouse having misaligned goals. The players and coaches are trying to win the games in front of them. By trading Soto and Bell for shortstop C.J. Abrams, outfielders Robert Hassell III and James Wood, left-handed pitcher MacKenzie Gore, first baseman Luke Voit and right-handed pitcher Jarlin Susana — three of whom have yet to reach the majors — the front office worsened an already dismal present for the chance at a better future.
That’s a disconnect. Soto and Bell are now in the thick of a pennant race. The Nationals’ current roster features zero left-handed relievers and arguably three designated hitters. Meanwhile, Abrams is headed to the Class AAA Rochester Red Wings, Hassell to the high-Class A Wilmington Blue Rocks and Wood to the low-Class A Fredericksburg Nationals. Gore will join the Nationals in Philadelphia on Thursday but is on the 15-day injured list with elbow inflammation. Whenever Voit is activated, he will immediately lead the team with 13 homers.
As the deadline approached Tuesday, a small handful of players were unsure of their fate. Reliever Carl Edwards Jr. walked in from the trainer’s room and glanced at his phone. Then he put it at his side, lifted it, put at his side, lifted it and glanced again. Kyle Finnegan was asked if he had jitters and shrugged. Ultimately, neither Edwards or Finnegan was dealt — nor was anyone else. Yet before they knew that, and because of Soto’s and Bell’s departures, reliever Sean Doolittle admitted the “vibes are going to be weird.”
“Shoot, as you guys are standing here, they’re showing it on the TV behind us on ESPN right now,” Doolittle said, nodding to Soto trade analysis on the TV facing his locker. “It’s very surreal. In this game, you always know that there’s possibilities for trades and for movement like that, and you never really get used to it. Even though there was a chance of this, it seemed like for the last month or so, it still feels a little bit shocking and disorienting.
“I don’t know how I feel about it.” | 2022-08-03T20:15:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the Nats' clubhouse felt after the Juan Soto deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/nationals-clubhouse-juan-soto-trade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/nationals-clubhouse-juan-soto-trade/ |
For Kari Lake, it was a ‘blowout’ win — or maybe it was suspicious
Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake speaks at a campaign event Monday in Phoenix. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Arizona Republicans on Tuesday nominated venture capitalist Blake Masters to be their candidate to oppose Sen. Mark Kelly (D) in November. They also elected secretary of state and attorney general nominees who, like Masters, have been backed by former president Donald Trump. The slate was set.
Well, almost. The party’s nomination for governor is still unclear. At the moment, former television newscaster Kari Lake leads attorney Karrin Taylor Robson by a little over 11,000 votes, with an uncertain number still to count. This is the nature of elections these days, of course: Ballots cast before Election Day in a number of states are tallied slowly, even as day-of ballots might themselves come trickling in.
That Lake now faces this typical uncertainty carries with it some irony. Few candidates for office this year have been as energetic in mirroring and amplifying Trump’s false claims about widespread election fraud and broken electoral systems than Lake. Yet here she is, subject to the same normal process that Trump endured in 2020.
The difference, of course, is that Lake took the lead as votes were counted. Trump lost his lead — and his fraud obsession was born.
Coming into the election, Lake was prepared for the possibility that she might similarly lose due to “fraud,” which is to say that she might similarly lose. She made vague allegations about having detected fraud in the balloting but declined to offer any evidence to support her claim when challenged. It seemed overtly tactical, an effort to till the soil given polling that suggested a close result. But, as with Trump, the practicalities of undermining an election you might lose can overlap with a sincere belief that something sketchy is afoot.
That Lake is still waiting to see if she won and Masters isn’t is in part a function of the field of candidates in each race. Masters benefited from having two strong opponents instead of one. He earned only 39 percent of the vote against his competitors’ 29 percent and 18 percent, but in a first-past-the-post contest, that was enough.
Lake, on the other hand, had only Robson in serious contention with her. So even though she was the choice of more than 46 percent of primary voters — 50,000 more than Masters — Robson’s still hanging around at 44 percent.
Both Lake and Masters fared better in precincts with lower densities of college graduates, reflecting a common pattern since 2016 in which Republicans without degrees were more supportive of Trump and his endorsed candidates. To Lake’s likely detriment, though, she saw a bigger drop-off in better-educated precincts than did Masters.
Still, she seems likely to prevail. Part of the reason that the race hasn’t been called for Lake yet is what vote still needs to be counted. Frustratingly, it’s not clear which votes are outstanding or how many there are. The state has a page tracking that data as submitted by counties, but it’s woefully incomplete. The two counties that have reported outstanding votes are both ones in which Lake is leading.
The state’s website indicates that three other counties haven’t reported all of their precinct results yet, including the most populous county, Maricopa. It is expected to publish more results on Wednesday evening. So far, Robson has earned more votes there, but only barely: she has a 3,000-vote edge. If there are a) a lot of votes to be counted and b) those are mostly early votes, Maricopa could help eat into Lake’s lead. After all, while Lake got 63 percent of the Election Day vote, Robson got nearly half of the early vote (compared to 40 percent earned by Lake).
Again taking a cue from Trump, Lake’s team declared on Twitter that the result “isn’t a win. It’s a blowout.” It’s a bold statement, particularly for a candidate with less than 50 percent of the vote who leads by less than 2 percentage points. But it establishes the idea that the race is hers, setting the stage for the candidate and her team to potentially present that any shift in Robson’s favor as illicit or fraudulent. Never mind that they enthusiastically tracked vote-counting as the margin shifted in her favor. Given Lake’s long-standing rhetoric, it’s easy to predict one possible response to such a change: fraud!
We attribute this tactic to Trump, for good reason, but it predates his 2020 candidacy. In 2018, when then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) was seeking election to the Senate, he accused heavily Democratic counties that were slowly tallying votes of having been tainted by fraud. Subsequent examinations showed that they hadn’t been (just as reviews of 2020 have repeatedly shown no significant fraud), but a pattern was established: offset shifts in vote-counting by casting them as dubious.
Again, Lake’s lead (unlike Scott’s in 2018 or Trump’s deficit in 2020) is probably large enough that she will be certified as the winner. The only significant role voter fraud will have played in her race will have been to elevate her as a favorite of Trump’s and of Trump’s supporters for obsessing over it. But if new vote counting begins to disadvantage her, we can expect that her response will not be quiet acceptance of the same, slow process that currently has her ahead by 11,000 votes. | 2022-08-03T21:21:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | For Kari Lake, it was a ‘blowout’ win — or maybe it was suspicious - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/arizona-governor-kari-lake-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/arizona-governor-kari-lake-trump/ |
The party’s congressional campaign arm spent $435,000 in a GOP primary to promote a candidate challenging Rep. Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump
Rep. Peter Meijer speaks to reporters at his watch party in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Aug. 2. (Sarah Rice for The Washington Post)
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Democrats faced a backlash Wednesday — including from within their own ranks — after inserting themselves into a GOP primary in western Michigan, helping a far-right candidate who has embraced false claims about the 2020 election to topple a Republican who had voted to impeach Donald Trump.
Democrats this year have tried to interfere in multiple GOP primaries, using ads that appear to be attacks on more extreme candidates as a way to subtly promote those contenders. The idea is to line up opponents who the Democrats believe to be more easily beatable in the general election.
Some of the criticism has come from within the party.
“That type of playing the other side stuff is, I think, a very risky proposition,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said Wednesday. “It’s a dangerous proposition for a campaign committee to instead of propelling Democrats, trying to propel a Republican in a primary. Because they actually may win in the end and you’ll have someone who’s even more extreme.”
The second-guessing from Democrats had been building before primary day.
“I’m disgusted that hard-earned money intended to support Democrats is being used to boost Trump-endorsed candidates, particularly the far-right opponent of one of the most honorable Republicans in Congress,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) posted on Twitter last week when the ad debuted.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, told Politico last week: “No race is worth compromising your values in that way.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $435,000 on its ad, which showed a string of images of Gibbs with Trump and called him “too conservative for west Michigan.” Those apparent criticisms may have struck many Republican primary voters as a compliment.
Meijer, who is in his first term, had earned the ire of Trump and many of his supporters by becoming one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach the him after the Capitol insurrection.
“Democrats got the matchup they wanted and in the process threw overboard one of the few members of the House Republican Conference who was willing to stand on principle and stand up for the Constitution. It’s reprehensible,” said Kevin Seifert, a campaign adviser to Meijer.
A couple of hours before conceding the race Tuesday night, Meijer told reporters it was too soon to tell what effect the ad had had. He called the effort a troubling move by a party that has repeatedly warned that Trump and his allies are trying to undermine democracy.
“I know a lot of people — my Democratic colleagues in Washington — have been outraged by just the cynicism and hypocrisy that that represented,” he said at a downtown Grand Rapids bar where his supporters had gathered.
In an essay he posted online on Monday, Meijer accused the Democrats of not just helping Gibbs but “subsidizing his entire campaign” because their ad cost more than Gibbs’s campaign has spent on the race, a figure that campaign finance filings show was $334,000. Meijer noted that he has been censured by Republican Party chapters in his district and called a traitor by some of his onetime allies.
“Watching this unraveling inside my party has been utterly bewildering,” Meijer wrote. “The only thing that has been more nauseating has been the capacity of my Democratic colleagues to sell out any pretense of principle for political expediency — at once decrying the downfall of democracy while rationalizing the use of their hard-raised dollars to prop up the supposed object of their fears.”
Hasen, the UCLA law professor, echoed that sentiment.
“Democracy cannot be sustained by just having one party believing in it and helping to purge the other party of democracy-supporting members,” he said.
As voters went to the polls Tuesday, Gibbs downplayed the role of the ad, arguing that the work of his supporters had given him momentum. He rejected the Democrats’ premise that they could more easily beat him than Meijer in a district that leans slightly Democratic.
“Meijer, first of all, has lost so much Republican support that he would never be able to win that general election in November,” Gibbs told reporters outside a community center in the Grand Rapids suburb Byron Center after casting his ballot. “Many Republicans will stay home or skip over his selection on the ballot because of the way he betrayed Republican voters. So he’s completely unelectable in a general.”
Gibbs in November will face Democrat Hillary Scholten, who was unopposed in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Scholten lost to Meijer by six points in 2020, but since then, the district has been redrawn to favor Democrats.
Terri Itter, a sterilization technician in a dentist’s office, cast her ballot for Gibbs on Tuesday at a fire station in Alpine Township, north of Grand Rapids. She said she was bothered by Meijer’s impeachment vote because she didn’t think anyone had done anything wrong on Jan. 6
As for Gibbs, she said she received a mailer criticizing him for his support for Trump, but she considered that trait an asset. “I know that they think that he’s too conservative,” Itter, 59, said of Gibbs.
Other voters said Trump’s endorsement had the opposite of its intended effect.
“I’m not a Trump fan,” said Jessica Morgan, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom who considers herself a libertarian.
Gibbs “was very heavily endorsed and very firmly believes that everything is corrupt and we have to hate our government as it is,” Morgan said. “And I like to have more faith than that, so Peter Meijer was the safer bet.”
Kris Trevino, who voted in the Democratic primary, said he didn’t agree with Meijer on many issues but respected his vote to impeach Trump. He had hoped to see Meijer beat Gibbs, and said he thought Democrats should have focused on their own contests instead of helping a candidate they view as willing to usurp democracy.
“I personally don’t want anybody who’s endorsed by Trump just because I don’t believe the whole election lie stuff,” said Trevino, 29, who works in cybersecurity. “And so anybody that has anything to do with election denial, I just want them out.” | 2022-08-03T21:21:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats face blowback after boosting far-right Michigan candidate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/democrats-face-blowback-after-boosting-far-right-michigan-candidate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/democrats-face-blowback-after-boosting-far-right-michigan-candidate/ |
Rep. Jackie Walorski, two staff members killed in Indiana car crash
Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) speaks as then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar testifies on Capitol Hill on Oct. 2, 2020. (J. Scott Applewhite/Pool/AP)
Rep. Jackie Walorski (R- Ind.) and two of her staff members were killed in a car crash Wednesday afternoon, according to the Elkhart County, Ind., Sheriff’s Office.
“It is with a heavy heart that I am sharing this statement from the Office of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an announcement on Twitter, posting a picture that included the following text:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered the flags at the U.S. Capitol to be flown at half-staff in memory of Walorski.
Walorski was involved in a two-vehicle accident on SR 19 south of SR 119, according to the sheriff’s office. The driver of a northbound vehicle traveled left of the centerline and collided head-on with the sport-utility vehicle carrying Walorski and staffers Zachery Potts, 27, and Emma Thomson, 28. All three occupants in the southbound vehicle died as a result of their injuries. Edith Schmucker, 56, was the sole occupant of the other vehicle involved in the crash. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Walorski, 58, had served in Congress since 2013 representing the 2nd Congressional District. She was the top Republican on the House Ethics Committee and was a member of the House Ways and Means Committee.
McCarthy appointed her to the ranking Republican spot on the sensitive House Ethics Committee in early 2021, an evenly divided panel that has handled several investigations of lawmakers.
“I’m honored to take on the important responsibility of holding members of the House to the highest standards of transparency, accountability, and ethical conduct,” she said in a statement upon receiving that appointment.
House GOP women are a crucial piece of party’s next move on abortion
Fellow Republicans expressed grief Wednesday shortly after news of Walorski’s death was made public.
“Jackie loved Hoosiers and devoted her life to fighting for them,” he tweeted. “I’ll never forget her spirit, her positive attitude, and most importantly her friendship.”
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tweeted that he was praying for the families of Walorski and her staffers.
“Devastated to hear the horrible news of the passing of Jackie Walorski and her two staffers,” the Louisiana lawmaker tweeted. “She was a dear friend who loved serving the people of Indiana in Congress.”
In the event of a Republican takeover of the House after the November midterm elections, she would have been on track to chair the Ways and Means worker and family support subcommittee. Walorski voted against certifying President Biden’s victories in both Arizona and Pennsylvania after the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol that left more than 100 law enforcement officers injured. | 2022-08-03T21:21:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rep. Jackie Walorski, Indiana Republican, killed in car accident - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/rep-jackie-walorski-indiana-republican-killed-car-accident/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/rep-jackie-walorski-indiana-republican-killed-car-accident/ |
Men's Bracket
Women's Bracket
Injuries have limited U-Conn.'s Paige Bueckers since her breakout freshman season. (Eric Gay/AP)
Connecticut star Paige Bueckers will miss the upcoming college basketball season after suffering a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee earlier this week, the university announced Wednesday.
Bueckers, who missed nearly three months following an injury to the same knee last season, suffered her most recent injury during a pickup basketball game, the school said. The junior guard underwent an MRI on Monday and is scheduled to undergo surgery Friday.
“We’re all devastated for Paige. She’s worked really hard to get stronger and healthier this offseason, and this is an unfortunate setback,” U-Conn. Coach Geno Auriemma said in a statement. “Paige is obviously an amazing basketball player but she’s a better person and teammate and it’s really unfortunate that this has happened to her. We’ll miss her presence on the court, but she’ll do everything she can to still lead and help her teammates this season. Our program will support Paige through her healing process to help her come back better and stronger.”
After bursting onto the college basketball scene as a freshman in 2020, Bueckers quickly established herself as one of the best players in the women’s game, earning all-American and national player of the year honors en route to a Final Four appearance that season.
From the archives: How Connecticut freshman Paige Bueckers is breaking college basketball
But injuries, which occasionally sidelined Bueckers during her high school career, have become more disruptive during her time at U-Conn.
Bueckers had surgery on her right ankle in May 2021 to repair an osteochondral defect but returned in time for the start of last season, during which she led the team in points, assists, steals and minutes per game through the first month of the season.
On Dec. 5, Bueckers injured her left knee while dribbling up the court in the waning moments of a blowout win over Notre Dame. MRI and CT scans later revealed a tibial plateau fracture that ultimately sidelined her for close to three months. Bueckers returned in late February and led the Huskies to the national championship game, scoring 14 points in a loss to South Carolina. She finished the year with 14.6 points, 4.0 rebounds and 3.9 assists per game. | 2022-08-03T21:34:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U-Conn. star Paige Bueckers to miss upcoming season after tearing ACL - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/paige-bueckers-torn-acl/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/paige-bueckers-torn-acl/ |
Visiting the world’s tallest tree could lead to big fine, jail time
California’s 380-foot tree, nicknamed Hyperion, has been damaged by visitors to California’s Redwood National Park.
The 380-foot coast redwood tree named Hyperion in California's Redwood National Park Tree will be off-limits to hikers, the National Park Service announced this week. The Park Service said visitors have damaged the tree and the surrounding area. (AP)
The tree, a 380-foot coast redwood, is in a remote area of Redwood National Park and is not accessible by any trail. But that hasn’t stopped visitors from hiking to the tree, said Leonel Arguello, the park’s manager for natural resources.
Arguello said the tree, known as Hyperion, was “discovered” by two amateur naturalists in 2006. By 2010, visitors started trekking to see the tall, skinny redwood after bloggers, travel writers and others shared its location online. In 2019, Guinness World Records declared the tree, estimated to be between 600 and 800 years old, the tallest in the world.
The area has no cellphone reception and if someone were to get hurt, it would take a lot of time and resources to rescue that person. That, paired with the trampling of the tree’s base and the forest, led officials to declare the area closed. They have imposed a $5,000 fine and up to six months in jail for those who hike there, he said.
Arguello said that Hyperion visitors may be disappointed to realize that the tree is not really that much to look at because, from its base, all they can see are branches. | 2022-08-03T21:43:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World's tallest tree, Hyperion, will be off-limits to hikers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/03/worlds-tallest-tree-off-limits/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/03/worlds-tallest-tree-off-limits/ |
Sadr orders followers to continue protest
Influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr told followers Wednesday to continue their sit-in inside Iraq’s government zone and called for the dissolution of the parliament and for early elections, signaling a deepening power struggle with his rivals.
Speaking for the first time since thousands of his followers stormed the parliament in Baghdad on Saturday, Sadr said the “revolutionaries” must continue their sit-in. He dismissed the option of engaging in dialogue with his opponents in the Coordination Framework, an alliance of mostly Iran-backed parties, saying that had not borne fruit in the past.
Sadr directed his followers to vacate the parliament Tuesday but to remain in its vicinity. A mass prayer has been called for Friday inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, a heavily fortified district where the parliament and other government buildings are located.
Sadr’s movement won the largest share of seats in federal elections in October. The cleric, along with his Kurdish and Sunni allies, called for a majority government that would exclude the Coordination Framework. But he was unable to corral enough lawmakers to push ahead with the vote to elect a president, a key step before naming a prime minister. Out of frustration, he ordered his 73 parliament members to resign in June.
U.N. spokesman told to leave amid tensions
The Democratic Republic of Congo has requested that the spokesman for the United Nations mission in the country leave, saying he has made inappropriate statements amid demonstrations against the presence of the U.N. peacekeepers.
Foreign Minister Christophe Lutundula wrote to the U.N. mission, known as MONUSCO, that the tensions between the two sides are due to what he called U.N. spokesman Mathias Gillman’s indelicate and inopportune statements.
The government did not point to specific statements made by Gillman, but during a news conference last month, he mentioned that MONUSCO and the Congolese army have limited means to deal with several fronts of attacks, in particular those by the M23 rebel group.
The government held a meeting this week to reassess the presence of the peacekeepers after protests over the force killed at least 36 people and injured more than 170.
Azerbaijan says it crushed Armenia attack near enclave: Azerbaijan said its forces crushed an Armenian attack near the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said Armenia had violated a cease-fire with an act of sabotage that killed one soldier. In addition, Azerbaijan said its forces had beat back an Armenian attempt to capture a hill in an area controlled by Russian peacekeepers. In response, Armenia's Foreign Ministry said Azerbaijan had violated the cease-fire by launching an attack in areas controlled by the peacekeepers.
2 dead in Gambia's heaviest rainfall in decades: Gambia recorded its heaviest rainfall in over 30 years last weekend, which caused widespread flooding and at least two deaths, the government said Wednesday, blaming climate change for the extreme weather. Torrential rain started Saturday morning and continued for over 20 hours in parts of the West African country, the Department of Water Resources said. The highest rainfall measured in that period was 10.87 inches at Banjul airport, beating a 1998 record of almost 7 inches, it said.
European court refuses to hear British boy's life-support case: The European Court of Human Rights refused a request from the family of a comatose British boy to prevent his life-support treatment from being ended. Archie Battersbee, 12, was found unconscious at home with a ligature over his head on April 7. His parents believe he may have been taking part in an online challenge that went wrong. Doctors say that Archie is brain-stem dead and that continued treatment is not in his interest. His parents fought unsuccessfully to get British courts to block the turning off of the boy's ventilator. | 2022-08-03T21:44:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 3, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-3-2022/2022/08/03/517190aa-1337-11ed-b403-f31960ffb1d0_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-3-2022/2022/08/03/517190aa-1337-11ed-b403-f31960ffb1d0_story.html |
Mark Finchem, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, waves to the crowd as he arrives to speak at a Save America rally in Prescott, Ariz., on July 22. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem is one of the last people you’d want administering elections in a presidential battleground, yet Republicans nominated him Tuesday to be Arizona’s secretary of state, in another victory for denialists backed by former president Donald Trump.
Two years after Mr. Trump lost Arizona by more than 10,000 votes, Mr. Finchem continues to agitate for Arizona to decertify its results — never mind that it isn’t legally possible. He is a member of the Oath Keepers and was photographed outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He championed the bizarre “audit” of Maricopa County’s results by the self-described Cyber Ninjas.
With the race too close to call, another outspoken proponent of the “big lie,” Kari Lake, narrowly leads in the primary for governor. Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem, working with “My Pillow guy” Mike Lindell, have filed a lawsuit in federal court aimed at blocking Arizona from using vote-counting machines. Their suit is meritless, but they would acquire power to meddle dramatically with voting systems if they win in November.
Mr. Finchem is part of a coalition of far-right extremists who are trying to seize control of the levers of vote-counting. In the neighboring swing state of Nevada in June, Republicans nominated former state lawmaker Jim Marchant — another election denier — for secretary of state. Ms. Lake said she wouldn’t have fulfilled her legal duty to certify Arizona’s results in 2020 and attacks Gov. Doug Ducey (R) for doing so. The possibility that she and Mr. Finchem could be in these jobs two years from now underscores the urgency of passing proposed reforms to the Electoral Count Act that would make it harder for bad actors to subvert democracy in a presidential election.
If Ms. Lake’s narrow lead holds, it will tee up a dramatic showdown in November against Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who won the Democratic primary for governor on Tuesday and has fought tirelessly to preserve the integrity of Arizona’s elections. Arizona Republicans also nominated venture capitalist Blake Masters as their challenger to Sen. Mark Kelly (D). Masters claims he thinks Mr. Trump won in 2020 and has even suggested that Jan. 6 was a “false-flag” operation.
Alas, this problem is not isolated to the Grand Canyon State: The “big lie” continues to find purchase elsewhere. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year, was defeated by election-denier John Gibbs in his primary. Mr. Trump cheered that news on Wednesday, as well as the loss of Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R). Mr. Bowers evinced a profile in courage by refusing Mr. Trump’s demands to help overturn the Arizona results. Last month, he testified about the pressure he faced before the select congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.
At a hearing in June, Mr. Bowers recalled asking Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for evidence to substantiate allegations of voter fraud. “We’ve got lots of theories,” he said Mr. Giuliani told him. “We just don’t have the evidence.” That sums up the credo of the GOP ticket in Arizona. | 2022-08-03T21:44:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Arizona’s dangerous Republican ticket threatens democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/arizona-republicans-finchem-lake-dangerous/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/arizona-republicans-finchem-lake-dangerous/ |
George Washington had it right
In the July 30 news article “Pa. governor nominee under fire for link to white-nationalist site,” we read that another ill-informed American, Andrew Torba of the far-right social media site Gab, stated that the United States is a Christian nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Though I am not an originalist when it comes to the Constitution, I do believe in the truth of the many statements made by the Founding Fathers, especially George Washington and John Adams when they were president, that the United States is not a Christian nation. To state otherwise is un-American.
Kenneth W. Hopper, Alexandria | 2022-08-03T21:44:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | George Washington had it right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/george-washington-had-it-right/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/george-washington-had-it-right/ |
Getting lead out of drinking water is too important to be left out
The Flint, Mich., water plant tower on Jan. 6, (Carlos Osorio/Associated Press)
Regarding the July 29 news article “What’s in the Schumer-Manchin breakthrough deal?”:
Though the “What’s missing?” section correctly highlighted a few of the climate, tax and health-care policies initially included in the Build Back Better Act, the more than $15 billion in dedicated funding and an additional $60 billiion in available funding to protect vulnerable children and their families from lead exposure in assisted housing was omitted. Eight years after the Flint, Mich., water crisis began and 21 years since the D.C. water crisis began, 62,000 public housing units still need lead abatement, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
In April, two identical bipartisan bills — the Get the Lead Out of Assisted Housing Act of 2022 — were introduced and stalled in the Senate and the House. Among other protections, the bills would require HUD to improve lead drinking water testing standards for public housing inspections, and commence a new grant program focused on identifying, mitigating and remediating lead in public housing drinking water. Congress should take the proposed $75 billion from the Build Back Better Act to fund and pass the Get the Lead Out of Assisted Housing Act to protect the health of our children.
Olena Lloyd, Stafford, Va. | 2022-08-03T21:44:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Getting lead out of drinking water is too important to be left out - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/getting-lead-out-drinking-water-is-too-important-be-left-out/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/getting-lead-out-drinking-water-is-too-important-be-left-out/ |
Supporters and opponents of abortion rights near a polling place in Overland Park, Kan., on Aug. 1. (Christopher Smith For The Washington Post)
The message sent by voters in Kansas on Tuesday was loud and clear. Rejecting a ballot measure that would have allowed the Republican-controlled legislature to tighten abortion restrictions or even ban the procedure outright, voters in one of the most conservative states in the country demonstrated their support for reproductive rights. Let’s hope Congress takes a cue and embeds access to abortion in federal law.
The Kansas vote on an amendment that would have removed the right to an abortion from the state constitution was the first test of voter sentiment since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June overturning Roe v. Wade. The results could not have been more stunning. Despite Republicans far outnumbering Democrats, and despite the state’s ties to the antiabortion movement, voters decided overwhelmingly to retain the constitutional protections. Making the outcome all the more astonishing, as The Post’s James Hohmann observed, were the steps Republicans had taken to tilt the result, such as scheduling the vote for an August primary with the expectation independents wouldn’t turn out. The language of the ballot question was purposely confusing, and the day before the vote, a Republican-aligned firm intentionally sent out misleading text messages.
That Kansans saw through the political gamesmanship was rightly celebrated. “It’s just amazing. It’s breathtaking that women’s voices were heard and [that] we care about women’s health,” Kansas state Sen. Dinah Sykes (D) said when the result was announced. Still, weighing against elation over the surprise victory is the reality that the loss of access to abortions has created untold hardship and placed in jeopardy the health of those who can get pregnant across the country. At least 10 states have banned the medical procedure. Another four states prohibit it at six weeks of pregnancy, and more states are expected to enact bans in the coming weeks. Some measures are so extreme as to not provide for exceptions in cases of rape or incest or even when a pregnant person’s life or health is endangered. The same day of the Kansas vote, the Justice Department filed its first suit on abortion access, arguing that Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion violates federal law requiring doctors to provide medical care when a person’s life or health is at stake.
It’s encouraging that the Justice Department is aggressive in its effort to protect women’s lives, but its lawsuit, if successful, would affect a relatively small number of cases. More action is needed to undo the damage caused by the court’s overturning of Roe. Congress, as President Biden said in response to the Kansas vote, needs to restore Roe’s protections as federal law. Democrats in May tried to advance a sweeping bill that would have invalidated nearly all abortion restrictions nationwide, but it didn’t get the necessary 60 votes; Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia voted against it.
Now, though, a bipartisan group of senators — led by Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — has introduced a more modest measure that would codify federal abortion protections formerly provided by Roe. It would invalidate state abortion bans and the toughest abortion restrictions. But it has been assailed by abortion rights advocates as not going far enough and is given little chance of getting the 10 Republican votes needed to overcome a filibuster. We urge Democrats to get behind this bipartisan effort. And Republicans should ask themselves if they want to face voters in three months having opposed abortions rights that — as was demonstrated in Kansas — are strongly supported by most Americans.
After the abortion ruling, digital privacy is more important than ever | 2022-08-03T21:44:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Kansas voters sent a message. Will Congress listen? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/kansas-abortion-vote-congress-message/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/kansas-abortion-vote-congress-message/ |
The pope, Canada and criticism
Pope Francis reacts during a news conference aboard the papal plane on his flight back after visiting Canada on July 29. (Guglielmo Mangiapane/AFP/Getty Images)
It was probably to be expected that Pope Francis’s “pilgrimage of penance” to Canada would elicit more criticism than forgiveness, but this pope’s commitment to pastoralism is such that he undertook it anyway, in the interests of Canadian Catholics who largely share his revulsion at the unspeakable crimes and sins that very many Catholic teachers and administrators committed in the name of the church, against a very large number of Indigenous children and their families.
Many of Pope Francis’s critics will never accept that the Doctrine of Discovery, grasping and encompassing though it was, did not actually justify the abuse and the terror present in Catholic schools that Indigenous children were forced to attend. Theological distinctions pall in the face of the brutality that had been carried out, however, and it is not difficult to sympathize with those who were disappointed in the pope’s words, which were intended both to show contrition for what was done and to embrace those members of the Indigenous community who understood his mission and welcomed him into their family.
John C. Hirsh, Washington | 2022-08-03T21:45:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The pope, Canada and criticism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/pope-canada-criticism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/03/pope-canada-criticism/ |
Commanders safety Percy Butler, a fourth-round pick in 2022, followed a similar path to the NFL as Washington great Brian Mitchell. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Shortly after he received a call from the Commanders on April 30 and learned they’d picked him in the fourth round of the NFL draft, Percy Butler’s phone rang again. This time, it was a familiar name.
Washington great Brian Mitchell was calling to check in on Butler and to tell him he has a friend and confidant should he ever need one in Ashburn.
Mitchell, the former NFL running back and Washington’s all-time leading returner, knew Butler’s path all too well. Both players starred at Plaquemine High in Louisiana. Both went on to play at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (called the University of Southwestern Louisiana when Mitchell was there). Both were drafted by Washington. And to top it off, both became fathers just before their rookie NFL seasons.
“The whole time I was in high school, the whole time I was in college, everybody used to always ask me about B-Mitch because we’re from Plaquemine and we had the same journey,” Butler said. “So I always knew of him.”
Plaquemine, Louisiana, a town some 17 miles south of Baton Rouge, has only about 6,300 residents, according to the 2020 census. That’s less than a third of the total enrollment at Louisiana-Lafayette. So for Plaquemine to produce two NFL players who attended the same college and were drafted by the same NFL team is, well, unique.
Like many small towns, the community is close-knit, as evidenced by Mitchell’s longtime relationship with Butler’s grandfather, Tip Butler, whom the rookie safety has cited as one of his mentors. And though their relationship has been brief, Mitchell and Butler describe themselves as close friends due to their shared journey to the NFL.
“Once he got to my college, I started following him a lot, and then when Washington drafted him, I started thinking about that path,” Mitchell said.
The two never met when Butler was in high school, and they didn’t meet when he was at Louisiana-Lafayette. But Mitchell knew of Butler once he got to college, and since the draft, the two have had multiple conversations.
“We have a very good connection with people down South, especially from my hometown,” Michell said. “So I wanted to make sure he had someone he could lean on.”
Added Butler: “I know if I need anything, I can reach out to him. We got that from home, like, we just close friends, so I can always call if I need anything.”
Up until 11th grade, Butler was a multisport athlete, starring on the football field, the track and the baseball diamond. He technically played shortstop and center field for the Green Devils baseball team, but he humbly admits he played “the whole outfield.”
So it shouldn’t surprise, then, that some analysts, like Chris Simms, viewed Butler as the best “pure safety” in the 2022 draft class, with a long range in center field, a rare speed and an eagerness to hit.
Percy Butler’s life changed in a flash. Now he’s ready to get to work.
Butler’s ability to play safety and the nickel in subpackages drew Washington to the 22-year-old. And so far in training camp, he’s proven a standout in more ways than one.
During the first weeks, Butler was all over the field, deflecting and intercepting passes. His teammates, including the receivers who went against him, lauded him as a young player who has impressed.
“I want to prove that I can come in and learn, and I can play,” Butler said. “A lot of people were talking about special teams coming in. I can do everything at a high level.”
Defensive backs coach Chris Harris describes Butler as “football smart,” with the savvy to fully understand the game and be able to pick up the scheme quickly. He noted Butler’s speed (he ran a 4.36-second 40-yard dash at the NFL combine) and physicality, two traits the Commanders seek in their defense.
“Especially from the safety role and our back end, [we want] guys that can come up, guys that can cover, guys that can run,” Harris added. “The traditional safety, like myself when I was playing, those days are gone and out the window. And so guys got to be able to run. You got to be able to match. You may not be able to cover all wide receivers, but you need to be able to match up and cover some receivers in the slot, and that makes you a little bit more versatile. And so he has those traits that we like in our safety spot.”
Butler also has the experience on special teams that the Commanders, like many NFL teams, covet. Special teams has often been a path onto 53-man rosters for younger players, especially those in crowded positions. Those like Hall of Fame running back Terrell Davis. Those like Super Bowl-winning cornerback Chris Harris Jr. And those like Mitchell, who was a fifth-round pick in 1990 — and a quarterback, no less — out of Louisiana.
Mitchell finished his career with at least 20 NFL records and is second all-time in yards gained, behind Jerry Rice.
His success, and the hometown connection, has fueled Butler even more.
“It definitely just made me want to go harder to put more history into it for Plaquemine,” Butler said. | 2022-08-03T21:46:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders rookie Percy Butler followed similar path as Brian Mitchell - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/percy-butler-brian-mitchell/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/percy-butler-brian-mitchell/ |
Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul
Residents collect water from a tanker truck in Mexico's Garcia municipality, northwest of Monterrey, Nuevo León. (Julio Cesar Aguilar/AFP/Getty Images)
He goes from paid dispenser to paid dispenser, seeking one that hasn’t run dry.
The 43-year-old systems engineer lives with his brother and mother in Colinas de Valle Verde, a neighborhood in Monterrey, the capital city of northern Mexico’s Nuevo Leon, where purified-water vending machines are common.
For months, the family’s taps, like many others across much of the country, have produced little water — a result of an intensifying heat wave and drought, affecting more than half the country. Most days, temperatures have peaked at 100 degrees.
Previous years have brought temporary shortages, but this time is worse, Hidrogo Tristán said, adding that he still pays nearly $5 a month in water bills, even though the water doesn’t reach his house.
In northern Mexico, reservoirs that typically supply water to the region’s 5 million people are low or dry. Experts say a confluence of factors are to blame, including population growth, increasing demand for water, poor infrastructure and soaring temperatures. Over the long term, climate change as a result of human activity will probably drive up the frequency and severity of such changes in weather, including heat waves and droughts.
Since the start of the year, Mexican authorities have periodically halted water supply to households, to manage the drought-driven shortage. In Monterrey, the government has scheduled water stoppages by zone, telling residents that they would be given advance notice. But according to Hidrogo Tristán, the government has not delivered on its promises.
“When we have water, we let people know via a WhatsApp group: Come for a bucket, two buckets, take it,” he said.
According to Roberto Ponce-Lopez, an urban studies professor at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, communication on the part of the government is just a small part of a larger and persistent problem. He said that bad water management existed long before the current crisis, under multiple administrations, and although there have been efforts to relieve water shortages by constructing more dams, these plans have fallen through the cracks. He added that proposals to dig new water holes only materialized two months ago.
“The current infrastructure can’t meet the demands of urban growth,” he said. “It’s made the perfect crisis.”
Last month, Mexico’s national water authority declared a state of emergency in four northern states. Several weeks later, officials announced that the water shortage in Nuevo Leon was a matter of “national security.”
Home to more than 40 percent of the world’s largest manufacturers in fields including aerospace, electronics and beverages, Monterrey has the highest per capita income in the country and is known as Mexico’s industrial center. Since 1990, Monterrey’s urban population has doubled, largely because of an uptick in residential development that has taken over the cityscape, which experts say has placed further strain on water supplies.
Water “consumption for operations and production is from water rights which are paid for and used under monitoring and strict guidelines from the government authorities,” read a joint statement to The Washington Post from Coca-Cola Mexico and its bottler, Arca Continental. However, under new guidelines from the government to prioritize available water to the public, Coca-Cola has temporarily ceded water rights and its use of wells. “We are aware of the long-term actions and investments that are necessary to continue operating in a sustainable way,” the statement read.
Monterrey’s growth, paired with a dire drought, has hit poorer communities harder than others. For low-income residents, purchasing purified water for $15 to $20 a jug is not an option. Getting tap water for household purposes is not easy, either. Some people have resorted to stealing.
“I know you’ve made a great effort,” Samuel García, Nuevo León’s governor, said in a public statement on Instagram, where he asked for the industry’s support. “I ask you to give the last push.”
“This is not taking your rights from you, this is not taking water from you; it is a provisional measure just for this summer to come out from this crisis.” A day later, in a different video published on his Instagram account, García announced that the government would build an aqueduct.
“The challenge is enormous,” said Jesús González Ramírez, a local official in Monterrey whose department helps resolve neighborhood conflicts. To manage the unrest, González Ramírez’s team began attending the protests, to learn what attendees say they need.
“Sometimes there are emergencies involving senior citizens or children,” he said. “Or broken water pumps in the areas high up the hills.”
“In 20 years, I had never lived through something like this,” said Valdés Salinas, Monterrey’s secretary of public services. “We have so much work every day.” | 2022-08-03T22:17:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Drought in Mexico leads to water rationing, theft - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/mexico-drought-water-shortages-theft-rationing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/mexico-drought-water-shortages-theft-rationing/ |
The report’s findings that vehicles are speeding through school zones would be concerning, if so many people weren’t already concerned
People advocated for safer streets at a ‘Chalk In’ in honor of Allison Hart, who was 5 when she was killed while riding her bike in a crosswalk. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)
They didn’t need a study.
Parents whose children have been hit by cars, almost hit by cars or fear being hit by cars while walking or biking through D.C. knew even before a study garnered news coverage this week that drivers often disregard speed limit signs.
They knew that many drivers don’t slow down enough when they enter a school zone.
They knew that many drivers don’t care enough to step on the brake even during those before-school hours when students fill sidewalks and roads.
The study, which my colleague Luz Lazo wrote about on Tuesday, would be concerning, if so many people weren’t already concerned.
As Lazo reported, the analytics firm INRIX reviewed traffic data around 27 schools across the city’s four quadrants. It found that drivers — despite signs indicating they should slow down and watch out for children — were speeding and getting into crashes in school zones at about the same rate as along other roads.
It showed drivers not caring enough to go the speed limit near schools, and especially not caring enough to hit the brakes when near schools in low-income neighborhoods.
The study found that drivers were more likely to speed in Southeast and Southwest Washington, where a higher concentration of low-income students live. One finding: 22 percent of drivers in Southeast, compared with 14 percent in Northeast, travel at least 10 mph above the school zone speed limit. Two other findings: Near one Southeast school, more than 30 percent of drivers go faster than 25 mph during the hours when students would be arriving at school, and in a block south of the school, 55 percent of the drivers travel faster than 25 mph.
Consider what that means for children growing up in those neglected neighborhoods. They are already being asked more often than their wealthier peers to dodge bullets, and now, we’re also expecting them to more frequently dodge thousands of pounds of speeding metal.
Too often when road safety is discussed, the conversation pits drivers against cyclists and pedestrians. It becomes a finger-pointing exercise. But it benefits everyone on the roads if D.C. reaches its Vision Zero goal of ending traffic deaths in the city by 2024. I say this as someone who drives often through the region for my job. I would welcome measures that might make my trip slower if they would help prevent me from hitting a child, or having to write about another person who has been injured or killed while cycling or walking in the city.
Last year, I told you about several concerning incidents involving children who were crossing city roads. In a column I wrote about the life of Allison Hart, who was 5 when she was killed in a crosswalk, I shared how her mother had posted videos of vehicles speeding past a stop sign in front of her child’s visible sidewalk memorial. Those videos showed vehicles zooming by bouquets of flowers and a white ghost bike with training wheels. If ever there was something to make a driver slow down, it should have been that. Instead one video showed a bus speeding by with a message from Police Chief Robert J. Contee III on the side: “Help Us End Dangerous Driving in the District.”
Too many children have already been injured or killed on the city’s roads — and with the school year about to start again, we know more will happen if officials do not move quickly to put in place proven safety measures. We know that not just because of that study. We know that because of what recent years have shown us.
Last year, the city saw the highest number of traffic deaths in 14 years. One of those victims was 4-year-old Zy’aire Joshua, who was fatally hit by a vehicle while crossing a road with his family. Another child, 9-year-old Kaidyn Green, was struck outside his school in Southeast Washington in December and left paralyzed from the neck down. He died in June. Many other children have experienced close calls.
“It’s clear that just hoping that drivers will slow down near schools does not work,” D.C. Council Member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) tweeted on Tuesday, repeating what she had told The Washington Post. In a series of tweets, she addressed the Safe Routes to School Act, which she introduced and which the council is expected to vote on. It calls for the city to put in place traffic safety infrastructure, including raised crosswalks, speed bumps and curb extensions, at intersections adjacent to schools and increase traffic enforcement in school zones.
Acknowledging that speeding in school zones and traffic fatalities happen more often in lower-income areas, Lewis George wrote, “the bill prioritizes improvements for schools in communities that have been left behind.”
That bill and the Walk Without Worry Act, which was introduced by council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1) and would standardize the installation of safe street designs, have received the support from advisory neighborhood commissioners across the city. Last week, a letter signed by 35 of them and addressed to DC. Council leadership was shared with me.
“We are often the first asked by grieving relatives to explain how these tragedies could have occurred, and what we are doing to make sure these tragedies aren’t repeated,” the letter reads. “These painful conversations and memorials are no substitute for effective policy responses. We are committed to ensuring that every DC citizen, from school student to senior, can cross our streets without fearing for their lives and safety. We urge the Council to fast track two of several innovative bills pending, to signal that DC is making pedestrian safety an urgent priority.”
The letter told of the four people (three cyclists and a pedestrian) who had been killed in July, and described the city’s record as “a mockery” of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s Vision Zero pledge made to end traffic deaths.
“We can and must do better,” the letter reads, “our constituents deserve safe streets.”
It shouldn’t just fall to grieving parents and fearful cyclists and pedestrians to put pressure on city officials to make the roads safer. Drivers also need to be part of that effort. They need to start caring more about this issue and recognizing that their lives stand to be altered in horrific ways if more isn’t done to encourage or force more drivers to slow down in school zones. As a parent of two elementary-aged children, I am hyper aware of school zones. But in my 20s, I have no doubt that a speed bump or a stop sign caused me to slow down when my good sense didn’t.
A child on a bike was struck in a D.C. crosswalk — again
The advisory neighborhood commissioner who drafted that letter, Meg Roggensack, serves the area where Nathan Ballard-Means lives. I told you about the 4-year-old last year. He was riding his bike with his mother when he was hit by a vehicle and thrown backward in a way that left his bike twisted and his body, thankfully, mostly uninjured.
Afterward, his father shared with me how every time they left the house Nathan would ask to be assured that he wouldn’t get hit by a car again.
His dad knew he couldn’t make that promise.
He knew that even before a study confirmed it.
Teachers at a Maryland school fight to keep a longtime educator
A dad climbed a bridge to protest the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling | 2022-08-03T22:35:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Study confirms fears of D.C. parents: Drivers don’t care - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/drivers-speeding-school-zones/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/drivers-speeding-school-zones/ |
Seven more NATO countries must give green light to the expansion of the alliance, which was spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Swedish Ambassador Karin Ulrika Olofsdotter, center, and Finnish diplomat Paivi Nevala, left, meet with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), ahead of the Senate's vote to ratify NATO membership for Sweden and Finland on Wednesday. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to admit Sweden and Finland into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, endorsing an expansion of the alliance that supporters believe would send a message condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The 95-1 vote made the United States the 23rd of NATO’s 30 members to ratify the proposed addition, which leaders in Helsinki and Stockholm began to contemplate this spring in response to Russia’s aggressive cross-border campaign.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the vote “a signal to Russia: they cannot intimidate America or Europe.”
The accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, which still must be finalized by several other member nations, would boost the alliance’s military assets, especially since the two countries’ considerable arsenals of artillery, war planes and naval weapons are already compatible with NATO systems.
The expansion — adding Finland would more than double the amount of the organization’s territory directly bordering Russia — “is exactly the opposite of what Putin envisioned when he ordered his tanks to invade Ukraine,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said.
As war grinds on, old political divisions reemerge in Ukraine
According to Article 10 of the NATO charter, additional European countries can only be added to the ranks “by unanimous agreement." The seven countries that have yet to ratify Sweden and Finland’s membership include some where opposition could pose a hurdle, like Hungary and Turkey.
After initially raising objections to the bid, Turkey struck a deal in late June in which it would drop its opposition to the addition of Finland and Sweden if they agreed to shut down recruiting and financial networks of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and address Ankara’s requests to deport certain affiliated individuals.
At the time, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested that Sweden and Finland would have to “fulfill their duties” before the Turkish parliament would consider ratifying their bids for NATO accession. And in the weeks since, he has warned that Turkey could still “freeze” the process in its tracks, hinting he was dissatisfied at their progress on the terms of the deal.
Erdogan warns Sweden and Finland to 'fulfill' duties under NATO deal
Meanwhile Hungary, whose authoritarian right-wing leader Viktor Orban is expected to address the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Texas this week, maintains an enigmatic stance on how it will handle Sweden and Finland’s bid for accession.
Even in the United States, there is a small but vocal contingent opposing NATO’s expansion. In a defiant speech ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) argued that allowing Finland and Sweden into NATO would be contrary to United States interests because “expanding NATO will require more United States forces in Europe, more manpower, more firepower, more resources, more spending, and not just now but over the long haul.”
“Our greatest foreign adversary is not in Europe, our greatest foreign adversary is in Asia,” he insisted.
Hawley’s opposition was strongly decried by members of his own party.
“Closer cooperation with these partners will help us counter Russia and China,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the floor, calling accession a “slam dunk for national security.”
Democrats emboldened after Kansas abortion vote
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), meanwhile, pointed out that it would be “strange indeed” for senators who voted for North Macedonia’s 2019 accession into NATO — a group that includes Hawley — to suddenly oppose Finland and Sweden’s candidacy.
Hawley’s opposition was all the more striking given that Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who opposed North Macedonia’s membership in 2019 and Macedonia’s membership in 2017, voted in favor of allowing Finland and Sweden into NATO.
The Senate rejected Paul’s efforts to attach an amendment to the ratification that would explicitly state the United States’ Article V obligations would not supersede Congress’s constitutional right to authorize the use of military force.
The Senate approved by voice vote an amendment stating its expectation that all NATO members spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. | 2022-08-03T22:43:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate votes to approve NATO membership for Sweden and Finland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/senate-nato-sweden-finland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/senate-nato-sweden-finland/ |
Over 1,000 election-worker threats reported in past year, official says
Witnesses at a Senate judiciary hearing Wednesday said the threats could deter workers who are needed to keep elections functioning
Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, left, and Kim Wyman, a senior election security adviser with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, are sworn in prior to testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 3. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
The Justice Department has reviewed more than 1,000 hostile threats against election workers over the past year, leading to federal charges in five cases and one conviction, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Polite, who heads the department’s criminal division, described an increasingly rampant problem across the country, detailing for lawmakers repeated and often graphically violent threats that have targeted election officials in Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and other states.
Analysis: Threats against election workers could have bad consequences
“The trauma experienced in this community,” Polite said, “is profound and unprecedented.”
Federal officials secured their lone conviction in June, when 42 year-old Travis Ford pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) on Instagram last year. Ford, who lives in Nebraska, is expected to be sentenced Oct. 6, according to the Justice Department.
Wednesday’s hearing — led by the committee’s chair, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) — highlighted the sharp political divides surrounding the perception of election fraud and threats against workers.
Kim Wyman, a senior election security adviser for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, grew emotional as she detailed the importance of election workers and the challenges they face. New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver (D) testified that many people no longer want to be election workers and said she fears some states won’t have enough poll workers to run a fair election in the upcoming cycles.
But Republican senators on the committee asked the witnesses few questions about election workers and instead cited rising violent crime rates in the country, questioning why the Justice Department isn’t focused more on that issue. Multiple senators also asked Polite why the federal officials were not more aggressively trying to prosecute protesters who have been rallying in front of the suburban Maryland homes of Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“DOJ is not choosing what to convene task forces on by the level of violence,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the committee. “They’re choosing by the political message.”
Polite said the federal government is closely focused on violent crime and is not ignoring threats against judges. He noted that prosecutors in Maryland have charged 26-year-old Nicholas Roske with a single count of attempting to assassinate Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh in June.
Man accused in plot to kill Kavanaugh eyed other justices, FBI says
“The fact of the matter is that it does not require a task force for these type of cases to be priorities for us,” Polite said.
Elizabeth Howard, senior counsel in the elections and government program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center, called the Justice Department data on elections threats “shocking” but also said the number was probably understated.
The Brennan Center conducted a survey this year that found that less than half of election officials receiving threats had reported them to law enforcement, and that only 20 percent reported threats to federal agencies.
“There is more work to do,” Howard said in an interview. “The numbers are not surprising to us, given the conversations we are having with election officials.”
Polite said at the hearing that underreporting is always a concern.
The high-profile Jan. 6 congressional hearings on the planning of the attack on the U.S. Capitol also have spotlighted the harassment that poll workers faced in the wake of the 2020 election. Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) declined to support Trump’s false claims that he had won Arizona’s electoral votes and said Trump supporters now gather in front of his home, playing videos proclaiming him to be a pedophile.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) said her family has faced so many threats that her 6-year-old son recently picked up a stick in front of their home and said he would use it to protect his family.
Oliver, New Mexico’s secretary of state, also detailed threats that rank-and-file poll workers are experiencing, warning lawmakers that many feel it is no longer safe to work at polling locations.
“Without them, we simply do not have a democracy and we will not have a democratic process,” Oliver said. “We are on the verge of not having that process anymore, because we are not going to have enough committed citizen individuals if these threats and the ‘big lie’ that is driving them continues.” | 2022-08-03T23:01:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Election-worker threats debated at Senate Judiciary Committee - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/election-worker-threats-judiciary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/election-worker-threats-judiciary/ |
A city beset by violence seeks solutions — from those in jail over it
D.C. runs a program asking those behind bars to propose ways to stem crime in the city
Sylvester Jones, 42, takes a moment to feel the sun on his face before presenting his team’s project to help stem gun violence. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
From behind bars at the D.C. jail, Sylvester Jones could sense that the streets in his city were even more dangerous than when he was picked up on a gun possession charge in January.
He had read about the especially violent past week in the District — when at least three dozen people were shot in incidents across the city — and he had an idea about how to help.
D.C. should create an incentive program, he told a crowd at the jail Wednesday, in which community members get music studio time in exchange for turning in weapons. That way, he said, officials could steer the community away from music that glorifies guns and shootings.
“They’re killing each other for sport, and it’s motivated by music,” said Jones, 42, standing beside a poster board that said “SOLUTION” in capital letters.
Around him in the Correctional Treatment Facility in Southeast D.C., other incarcerated people shared their suggestions about how to stop the type of behavior that landed many of them in handcuffs. As part of an educational program called LEAD Up!, the men spent 10 weeks this summer considering what resources could help keep D.C. residents safe.
A 22-year-old charged with murder proposed more mentorship for young people. A 19-year-old found guilty of carjacking said the city needs more job programs. Another group of incarcerated men said the District needs an entirely new agency to “treat gun violence as a public health emergency.”
Listening were local officials and academics involved in anti-violence work in D.C., which has struggled with rising killings despite providing a deluge of programs aimed at reducing gunfire. Homicides are up 11 percent compared with the same time last year, putting the city on track to reach a 19-year high.
“There are a lot of subject matter experts in here,” one correctional officer said to D.C. Director of Gun Violence Prevention Linda K. Harllee Harper, standing in the gymnasium at the Correctional Treatment Facility.
“That is where the answers will come from,” Harllee Harper replied.
The District has already implemented many of the ideas that the students proposed Wednesday. Most groups wanted to see more mentorship opportunities, which the city provides through at least three agencies. Some wanted to see investment in activities for young people; the mayor just invested $13.5 million to expand recreation services. There is even an initiative similar to the music program suggested by Jones run out of the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement.
Harllee Harper said the presentations revealed a flaw in the city’s efforts to reduce violence: Those behind bars don’t seem to know what the city is doing already. “There is a communication breakdown that we need to work on,” she said.
Still, there were some new ideas that surprised city officials and academics attending the showcase. One group, for example, proposed creating a new city agency called the Department of Violence Prevention and Firearm Education, which would include many of the same functions as the Office of Gun Violence Prevention but focus more on firearm safety. Those who came up with it suggested asking the National Rifle Association to build a shooting range for underserved communities to teach residents how to legally obtain and safely operate a gun.
Isaiah Murchison, 22, wants to see the city build additional resource centers in every ward where community leaders, religious organizations, violence interrupters and counselors gather to make themselves available to neighborhood youths. He said that type of investment is necessary to change the conditions that have driven many people, including himself, to violence.
“I feel like if I was brought up in a different environment, I wouldn’t be here,” said Murchison, who is facing a murder charge in the fatal shooting of 10-year-old Makiyah Wilson, who was killed in 2018 when men opened fire with assault rifles in a Northeast Washington neighborhood. He is still awaiting trial.
Amy Lopez, who designed and oversees LEAD Up!, said a primary function of the program is to make people like Murchison and Jones feel as though they can create positive change from behind bars.
“The goal is for them to feel less disenfranchised, like they are actually a part of the community,” she said. “And the flip side of that is humanizing their situations.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui, who listened to each group present, said he was moved to see how much time and effort the participants had poured into considering how to keep D.C. residents safe.
“It’s exceptionally challenging to detain people in court, but that is why I am happy to be here,” Faruqui said, adding that he had run into a participant whom he had ordered held in the jail. “I am still involved in their lives.”
Jones, who is awaiting trial, said he cannot wait for the day when he can see the new movie “Thor: Love and Thunder” with his 16-year-old son. That future motivates him not only to stay out of trouble, Jones said, but also to help make the city a safer place to grow up.
“One of my kids getting hit by a stray bullet,” he said. “That is the scariest thing.” | 2022-08-03T23:05:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. asks those in jail to propose ways to stem violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/dc-violence-jail-solutions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/dc-violence-jail-solutions/ |
D.C. woman charged with child abuse after child found dead in Virginia
HANDOUT — Fabio E. Andrade, Jr. with his daughter, Lanoix Andrade, 2, in an undated family photograph. Police say Lanoix was found dead in a hotel room in Virginia Beach on Monday, Aug. 1, 2022. Police in Virginia Beach have charged her mother Leandra Andrade, 38, with child abuse neglect, serious injury. (Family photo) (Family photo)
The mother of a 2-year-old girl from the District has been charged with child abuse after the toddler was found dead Monday in a hotel room in Virginia Beach, according to police and prosecutors.
Leandra Andrade, 38, is being held pending a bond hearing Thursday. She is charged with child abuse with serious injury, according to jail records and a spokeswoman for the Commonwealth Attorney for the City of Virginia Beach.
Officials said she is being represented by the public defender’s office, which did not return a phone call or an email seeking comment.
D.C. police said Andrade left the District with the toddler, identified by her father as Lanoix, this past weekend following a custody hearing in D.C. Superior Court. Police said Andrade was found early Monday critically ill in the hotel room near the Virginia Beach oceanfront. Police said the child was found dead in the room.
Police in Virginia Beach said the results of an autopsy are pending and they are awaiting a ruling on how the child died. They said they are also trying to determine how her mother became ill.
Court records show a D.C. Superior Court judge on Friday awarded temporary sole legal custody of Lanoix to her father, Fabio Enrique Andrade Jr., allowing him the right to make decisions on her behalf, such as for medical care and school. The judge awarded the Andrades temporary joint physical custody, which allowed Lanoix to be with her mother this past weekend.
A full custody hearing had been scheduled for November.
The girl’s identity has not been released publicly by officials in Virginia Beach. But on Wednesday, Fabio Andrade issued a statement through his attorney, Matt Andelman.
“My daughter Lanoix loved life and loved to make her friends and family smile,” the statement reads. “I am devastated that the opportunity for Lanoix to continue living a happy and loving life was senselessly taken from her. ”
Fabio Andrade said in the statement he has been fighting for months for full custody of Lanoix “in order to provide my daughter the life she deserved.” | 2022-08-03T23:05:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. woman charged with child abuse after infant found dead in Virginia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/infant-death-dc-virginia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/infant-death-dc-virginia/ |
Maryland quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa should lead an explosive offense with coordinator Dan Enos. (Steve Ruark/AP)
Michael Locksley is no longer the coach of a Maryland football program that’s wading through the early stages of a difficult rebuilding project. This is Year 4. References to key cultural change and the need for years-long development have drifted into the past. Locksley is in charge of a team constructed with his vision. And the Terrapins have improved each season, evolving from a Big Ten bottom-feeder to a bowl-eligible squad with a winning record.
As this program has developed, so has quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa, who has fueled Maryland’s rise while becoming more than just “Tua’s brother.” Rather than quarterback questions and concerns, Locksley has a talented offensive leader poised to break more school records.
So as Locksley’s team opened preseason camp Wednesday, the coach was comfortable saying, “We’ve got really high expectations for ourselves entering this ’22 season.” Some players have shared their ambitions for this year and beyond — competing for Big Ten championships — but Locksley wouldn’t elaborate on specific benchmarks. The ultimate measure, though, is always wins. Last year, Maryland finished 7-6, the team’s best mark since 2014. This season, the Terps have a chance to show they can achieve more.
Maryland’s Michael Locksley gets pay raise, extension through 2026
That starts with Tagovailoa. He gives Maryland stability every coach and fan base would embrace. The bright moments from Tagovailoa and his key receivers, who all return for 2022, offer promise that can overshadow preseason worries — the mostly untested running back group or the losses on defense, for instance.
Maryland’s entire group of starting offensive linemen return from last season, and offensive coordinator Dan Enos said: “We feel like not only do we have a group that can play at a very high level, but we feel like we have very capable backups and young players that are going to be progressing into the future of the offensive line.” That should help Tagovailoa thrive.
Last season, Tagovailoa threw for 3,860 yards, breaking the program’s single-season passing record. If he replicates that performance this year, he’ll cruise past the school’s career passing record (7,301 yards from Scott Milanovich in the 1992-1995 seasons) and help the Terps generate an explosive offense.
Locksley believes Tagovailoa is an underappreciated quarterback — primarily because some outsiders formed their opinion on him based on his poor performance under the spotlight against Iowa last season — and this year, he said he wants the redshirt junior to continue to “emotionally mature.” Last season, Tagovailoa threw 26 touchdowns and 11 interceptions, but five of those picks came in the Iowa game.
“Sometimes when he’s a little bit maybe indecisive, he’s not quite as good,” Enos said. “The process of getting him to where he is very decisive on everything we’re doing, I think we’ll be able to eliminate a lot of the mistakes.”
Here’s what else to know about Maryland football heading into preseason camp:
Healthy receivers
The Terps lost a pair of standout receivers, Dontay Demus Jr. and Jeshaun Jones, to major knee injuries last season. Demus led the Big Ten in receiving yards before he tore his ACL in the fifth game. Both participated in the first official practice of the preseason.
Demus decided to put his NFL dreams on hold to return to Maryland, and even after dealing with a bone bruise in his foot in addition to the knee injury, he was surprised by the speed of his recovery.
“I’m pretty much doing everything except for a little less contact,” said Demus, a senior. “I feel like everything’s pretty 100 percent, to be honest.”
Jones, in his fifth season as a Terp, tore his other ACL in 2019 and said his most recent recovery process was “a lot smoother than my first time.” Jones and Demus join junior star Rakim Jarrett (829 receiving yards last season) and Florida transfer Jacob Copeland (642 yards in 2021) to form a formidable unit.
“I think it could be scary with all the weapons we have outside, with Lia in the pocket, the line up front, the backs we’ve got,” Jones said. “I think the pass game could really open up for us.”
In Maryland’s spring game, offensive flashes, defensive concerns
Inexperienced safeties
The Terps lost both starting safeties from last season, Jordan Mosley and Nick Cross. Mosley had been a regular starter for three seasons, and Cross developed into a third-round NFL draft pick. Their absences left questions about the position group.
Dante Trader Jr., a sophomore and projected starter, talked to his coaches about how Mosley and Cross left big shoes to fill. Trader said his coaches told him: “Don’t even look at it like that. It’s a whole new team, a whole new feel. You’ve got to set another standard.” Trader appeared in 12 games last season and could play alongside Beau Brade, a junior who would also be a first-time starter.
“We feel like we’re the most underrated position group on the team,” Trader said. “And we love it. As we should be, because we don’t have the guys that have been playing all the time. … We’ve got a lot to prove this year. We just want to let them know we’re a bunch of dogs.”
Young running backs
Maryland needs to identify reliable running backs for this season and will mostly lean on a group of young players: sophomore Colby McDonald, redshirt freshman Roman Hemby, redshirt freshman Antwain Littleton II and freshman Ramon Brown. Challen Faamatau, a junior college transfer who earned a scholarship before last season, could also be an option.
Enos said the staff is excited about the young backs. Littleton, McDonald and Hemby flashed their potential in Maryland’s bowl game last year, each scoring a touchdown. But they’re still an untested group entering this season.
A new kicker
Chad Ryland will take over kicking duties for the Terps, filling the position previously held by Joseph Petrino for four seasons. Ryland, a four-year starter at Eastern Michigan, transferred to Maryland after setting the Eagles’ single-season record for points (104) in 2021. He kicked a career-long 55-yard field goal late in the season, and soon after, made the jump to a Power Five program, using an extra season of eligibility granted to athletes because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Deep down, every kid’s dream is to go as big as possible and make kicks on the biggest stage, which I’m obviously going to have a chance to do this year walking into Penn State, Michigan, Wisconsin,” Ryland said. “I’m fired up about that, and that’s something that contributed to my choice to come here.”
Maryland basketball gets commitment from Baltimore’s Jahnathan Lamothe | 2022-08-03T23:05:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taulia Tagovailoa fuels Maryland football hopes as camp opens - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/taulia-tagovailoa-maryland-football-camp/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/taulia-tagovailoa-maryland-football-camp/ |
Suspect in Ill. parade shooting pleads not guilty
Parade attack suspect pleads not guilty
The man accused of shooting into a Fourth of July crowd in Highland Park, Ill., pleaded not guilty before a Lake County judge on Wednesday.
Robert Crimo III is accused of killing seven and wounding dozens more in the mass shooting in the tightknit Chicago suburb. Authorities have said the suspect confessed to the deadly attack and considered committing a similar shooting in Wisconsin later that same day.
A grand jury indicted Crimo last week on 117 counts — 21 counts of first-degree murder, 48 counts of attempted murder and 48 counts of aggravated battery representing those killed and wounded — presented by State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart.
On Wednesday, Crimo was handcuffed and wearing a mask as he sat straight in a chair and clearly told the judge that he understood the charges. His parents attended the hearing.
— Susan Berger
Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pleaded not guilty Wednesday to misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence stemming from a May car crash in Northern California.
Pelosi, 82, was arrested in Napa County on May 28 on a DUI charge. Records show he was booked on one count of driving under the influence of alcohol causing injury and one count of driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.08 or higher causing injury.
Bevins said the court ordered that Pelosi remain free on his own recognizance.
The May 28 crash occurred in California’s wine country, near state Route 29 and Oakville Cross Road, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Fox News. Officers at the scene said Pelosi was found in the driver’s seat of his Porsche, while the male driver of an SUV was standing outside his vehicle; both autos sustained “major collision damage,” according to the complaint.
The complaint alleges that Pelosi had red and watery eyes, slurred speech, a strong odor of alcohol on his breath, and that he showed “signs of impairment” in field sobriety tests.
Nancy Pelosi was traveling on the East Coast to deliver a commencement address at Brown University when her husband was arrested, her office said then. This week, the House speaker is leading a congressional delegation to Asia, including a much-scrutinized stop in Taiwan.
— Amy B Wang | 2022-08-03T23:10:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Suspect in Ill. parade shooting pleads not guilty - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/suspect-in-ill-parade-shooting-pleads-not-guilty/2022/08/03/459ffd1e-0fb5-11ed-ab50-5d9e73892397_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/suspect-in-ill-parade-shooting-pleads-not-guilty/2022/08/03/459ffd1e-0fb5-11ed-ab50-5d9e73892397_story.html |
Robinhood slashing 23 percent of its workforce amid crypto meltdown
It’s the app’s second big layoff announcement since April amid declines in trading activity and revenue.
Electronic screens in New York's Times Square announce the Robinhood IPO, Thursday, July 29, 2021. The trading app announced it would slash nearly a quarter of its workforce. (Mark Lennihan/AP)
Robinhood, the trading app that gained popularity for its intuitive stock and cryptocurrency functions, is slashing nearly a quarter of its workforce amid declines in revenue and cryptocurrency values.
Chief executive Vlad Tenev outlined plans to cut 23 percent of the staff during a companywide meeting on Tuesday. This follows a 9 percent reduction in April that, Tenev said in a statement, “did not go far enough.”
Tenev said the company operated with “more staffing than appropriate” in 2021 under the assumption that heightened consumer interest in cryptocurrency and stock trading would persist. The company had increased its head count by 700 employees, or more than 20 percent, financial documents show. Robinhood, which had 3,900 full-time staffers at the time of the April announcement, estimates the two rounds of layoffs will affect more than 1,100 people, mostly in operations, marketing and program management functions.
But a deteriorating economic climate forced the company to rethink its structure. Tenev cited decades-high inflation — which soared 9.1 percent in June, year over year — as well as the crypto market meltdown, for the cutbacks. The value of bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, has plunged since eclipsing $66,000 in late 2021. It was trading below $20,000 in early July but has since bounced back to around $23,000.
Wall Street, meanwhile, limped through its worst January-to-June stretch since 1970 as inflation-driven upheaval spread across nearly every part of the economy. Even the mighty tech giants, which enriched investors during the early phase of the pandemic with soaring share prices, were been brought low, performing worse than the market.
As a result, trading activity dropped a Robinhood, as have assets under the company’s management.
Technology companies have been recalibrating their hiring plans as growing economic head winds heightened recession fears, prompting layoffs and hiring freezes. Those trends were even more pronounced in the crypto-verse: In June, prominent cryptocurrency companies including Coinbase, BlockFi and Gemini cut their workforce by the thousands.
Robinhood’s second-quarter earning report showed a 74 percent reduction in marketing expenses and a 56 percent more spending in technology and development. “This, along with the firm’s public statements, shows that Robinhood’s focus is shifting away from retaining users,” said Collin Bogie, senior business associate at fintech start-up Zingeroo.
With a mission to “democratize finance for all,” Robinhood was founded in 2013 by Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, who stepped down as CEO in 2020. The company helped pioneer the fractional investing model where investors can buy partial shares of equities and cryptocurrencies without commission fees.
Shares by the slice: Fractional investing sparks a stock market stampede
In 2021, it generated $1.82 billion in net revenue, an 89 percent jump from the year before, and reported as many as 18.9 million monthly active users.
As of June, it was down to 14 million monthly active users, according to its second-quarter financial results released Tuesday. It had $318 million in revenue, down 44 percent from the $565 million reported during the same three months of 2021.
Many of Robinhood’s clientele relied on optimal market conditions, said Dennis Kelleher, co-founder of Better Markets, a nonprofit that advocates for financial reform.
“Robinhood is unique in some ways for having the perfect combination of a successful predatory business model at a time when retail investors’ appetite for participating in the markets was at an all-time high,” said Kelleher. “History has shown that retail traders increase their participation in bull markets and decrease their participation in down markets.”
The S&P 500 slipped into a bear market — meaning the index has lost 20 percent of its value since its most recent peak — in June. A July rally that has stretched into August has cut the index’s 2022 losses to 12.8 percent.
But Robinhood faces other challenges, including heightened scrutiny from both users and lawmakers.
The New York State Department of Financial Services on Tuesday imposed a $30 million fine on Robinhood’s cryptocurrency unit, citing failures in its transaction monitoring system and cybersecurity system. The penalty marked the first sanction on cryptocurrency activities in the United States.
Robinhood also came under scrutiny after the GameStop frenzy in early 2021, where retail investors from online communities like Reddit drove up the price of so-called meme stocks. The company froze trading of GameStop shares, citing market volatility. New York and Texas state attorneys general, as well as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, were among the agencies that investigated Robinhood’s actions. The company also reached a $65 million settlement with the SEC in December 2020 to settle charges of misleading customers | 2022-08-03T23:14:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Robinhood slashing 23 percent of its workforce amid crypto meltdown - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/03/robinhood-slashing-23-percent-its-workforce-amid-crypto-meltdown/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/03/robinhood-slashing-23-percent-its-workforce-amid-crypto-meltdown/ |
East Japan Railway Co. says revenue from its bullet trains, which includes the Tohoku Shinkansen route between Tokyo and Moriroka used in Isaka’s original novel, is less than 60% of pre-Covid times, and expects that figure will still be 10% below 2019 levels at the end of its fiscal year next March. On the more famous Tokyo-Osaka route, operated by JR Central and featured in the movie version of “Bullet Train,” ridership remains at just 70% of pre-pandemic levels. | 2022-08-03T23:14:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Forget Brad Pitt. The Bullet Train Is the Real Star - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/forget-brad-pitt-the-bullet-train-isthe-real-star/2022/08/03/709b01be-1378-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/forget-brad-pitt-the-bullet-train-isthe-real-star/2022/08/03/709b01be-1378-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Bloomberg (Fitch Ratings)
China’s industrial policy seems to have fans across the Pacific. The US’s $280 billion Chips and Science Act is a direct response from the Biden administration to Beijing’s spending to help key industries. But just as the likes of Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. jostle for a slice of US government support, the perils of relying upon public money are sending shock waves through China’s chip industry.
In recent days, corruption investigations have engulfed top officials in a sector that is integral to President Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” ambitions. At least three senior executives from a $20 billion state-owned private equity fund, set up in 2014 to invest mainly in chip manufacturing, were detained; so was Xiao Yaqing, the head of the agency in charge of the nation’s industrial policy and the most senior sitting cabinet official ensnared in a disciplinary probe in almost four years.
It’s intriguing that the anti-corruption agency is looking into a top venture capital fund that has yielded substantial results. Phase 1 of the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund raised billions from the Ministry of Finance and China Development Bank Capital. Between 2014 and 2019, the so-called Big Fund invested in 23 chip companies, churning out one national champion after another. It backed Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., whose advanced chipmaking abilities may put it ahead of its US peers. It also seeded Tsinghua Unigroup Co. subsidiary Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., China’s best bet in NAND flash memory manufacturing.
The Big Fund and thousands of so-called government guidance funds are designed to mimic venture capital. The ultimate investors — for instance, the Ministry of Finance in the case of the Big Fund — are not involved in daily fund operations or investment decisions. And the funds themselves are largely passive stakeholders in the companies they seed.
This model was intended to encourage best practices in corporate governance. After all, what do bureaucrats know about running companies? However, with government investment — and the prestige that comes with it — the portfolio companies can easily go haywire. That guidance fund’s prestige opens doors to loans but can lead to excessive borrowing.
Big Fund’s entanglement with Unigroup ended in tears. At its peak, Unigroup’s empire had close to 300 billion yuan in assets and 286 consolidated subsidiaries. But it also touted a net debt-to-equity ratio of 125%, defaulted in 2020 and then went into a bankruptcy restructuring. Its long-time chairman Zhao Weiguo was detained in mid-July, possibly for investigations into related-party transactions, reported financial media outlet Caixin.
Guidance funds are known for the use of their reputation as leverage. An initial contribution from the government - often seen as a stamp of approval - can attract many multiples of the sum from other investors, the thinking goes.
Gavekal Research gave a good example: the massive Yangtze River Industry Fund that Hubei province established in 2015. The provincial government initially injected 40 billion yuan into the parent fund, with the aim of raising 200 billion for a group of sub-funds. These sub-funds, in turn, aspired to catalyze 1 trillion yuan of additional capital, the equivalent of almost one-third of Hubei’s annual economic output.
But who are the co-investors? A sizeable chunk came from banks’ wealth-management products, a form of shadow financing. Local governments’ financing vehicles, which are largely shell companies funded by loans, are big participants, too.
In other words, these state-sponsored venture capital funds enabled China’s already indebted corporates to borrow even more. Guidance funds’ investments, including those in strategic emerging sectors, are expected to slow this year, according to Fitch Ratings.
Upon the passage of the Chips act, there’s still nagging debate as to whether the US government is doing enough. The legislation includes $52 billion of grants to support advanced chip manufacturing as well as research and development in the US. That’s not much for cutting-edge manufacturing plants that cost more than $10 billion to build. And its scale matches only the Big Fund and its co-investors, which collectively expanded China’s chip manufacturing capacity by $70 billion in the five years between 2014 and 2019. There were thousands of other Chinese guidance funds out there, propping up nascent industrial technology firms.
But that debate is misguided once we dig deeper into China’s state-directed industrial model. Yes, China has leapfrogged competitors in some strategic technologies. But behind every success are many more stories of waste, broken promises, corruption scandals and misuse of capital — while adding to a troublesome pile of corporate debt. Is the US willing to borrow billions more for projects that can easily go sour, just to reclaim its manufacturing glory back from China?
• How China Copied South Korea All Wrong: Shuli Ren | 2022-08-03T23:14:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Xi Jinping’s $920 Billion Venture Capital Push Has a Dark Side - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/xi-jinpings-920-billion-venture-capital-push-has-a-dark-side/2022/08/03/d122e422-1380-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/xi-jinpings-920-billion-venture-capital-push-has-a-dark-side/2022/08/03/d122e422-1380-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
After a deadly 2009 attack, the CIA’s hunt for Zawahiri became personal
Years before the CIA strike that ended his life, Zawahiri played a key part in the deaths of American operatives
Ayman al-Zawahri, left, listens during a news conference with Osama bin Laden in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998. (Mazhar Ali Khan/AP)
It was one of the darkest days in CIA history: Seven operatives killed after being lured by a rogue informant into a deadly trap. In the years since, memories of the 2009 disaster in eastern Afghanistan helped to animate the intelligence agency’s global search for an elusive terrorist believed to have played a key role in the officers’ deaths.
That terrorist was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader killed on Saturday, in a strike carried out by the CIA. Nothing in official U.S. statements describe Zawahiri’s death as payback for the American losses in Khost, Afghanistan, some 12 years earlier. But many former and current intelligence officers say that’s exactly how it felt.
The CIA, per usual practice, has not publicly acknowledged any part in firing the missile that struck Zawahiri as he stood on his balcony in an apartment building in Kabul, the Afghan capital. But since Monday, confirmation of the 71-year-old Egyptian’s death has triggered an emotional response within the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters, and also with former colleagues, friends and family members of those who were killed or wounded in 2009.
“This is an incredibly personal moment,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former official with the CIA’s operations division who served with several of the five men and two women from the agency killed at Camp Chapman, a CIA base on the outskirts of Khost from which the agency ran clandestine missions against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. In addition to the seven CIA operatives, a senior Jordanian intelligence officer and an Afghan driver were also killed.
Polymeropoulos described the deaths at Camp Chapman as “the most stark example of the tragic costs of the fight against terrorism.”
Numerous current and former CIA officials marked the news of Zawahiri’s death with social media posts paying tribute to the CIA officers and security team officials who died in the Khost attack, the deadliest against the CIA since eight employees were killed in a bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983.
“Just remember. They are heroes,” former CIA director and retired Gen. Michael N. Hayden wrote in a Twitter post. In an interview, Hayden recalled working with two of the slain officers, Khost base chief Jennifer Matthews and Elizabeth Hanson, and learning about their deaths while at CIA headquarters on the day of the attack.
“I went outside to my car and cried,” Hayden said.
CIA Director William J. Burns, in response to a query from The Washington Post, did not comment on details of the operation against Zawahiri but said the events were “deeply personal for CIA.”
Zawahiri appeared on his balcony. The CIA was ready to kill him.
“In the hunt for Ayman al-Zawahiri, a brutal attack took the lives of seven CIA officers in Khost in 2009,” Burns said. “While terrorism remains a very real challenge, Zawahiri’s removal diminishes that threat and offers a measure of justice.”
Zawahiri role in al-Qaeda’s astonishingly complex operation against the CIA base was chronicled in a 2009 book and also described in articles and essays about the attack. The key figure was a Jordanian national, Humam al-Balawi, a physician who got into trouble in his home country for posting pro-al-Qaeda messages on social media. After being interrogated by Jordan’s intelligence service, he was persuaded to become a counterterrorism informant. Ultimately, Balawi agreed to travel to Pakistan to gather information that might aid the CIA’s search for Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
As proof, Balawi began supplying evidence of his interactions — including cellphone videos of senior al-Qaeda leaders — to his Jordanian handlers, who passed the information to the CIA. Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate regularly works with U.S. counterparts in tracking and foiling terrorist operations around the world, and the two countries conferred closely on the Balawi case.
By late December 2009, the CIA was anxious to meet with the Jordanian spy, sensing a potential breakthrough in the agency’s long-dormant search for bin Laden and other terrorist leaders behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. With seeming reluctance, Balawi agreed to a meeting at the CIA base in Khost. Then, in a move that ensured an enthusiastic reception from the Americans, he dangled a particularly tantalizing new detail: the physician was providing medical care for Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s No. 2.
Balawi shared obscure details about Zawahiri’s physical condition, including his various chronic maladies and his scars from years of torture in Egyptian prisons. The details matched what the CIA already knew about Zawahiri, and seemed to confirm that Balawi was indeed in close contact with the al-Qaeda deputy.
The meeting was set for Dec. 30, 2009, with numerous CIA counterterrorism experts planning to attend. Balawi arrived by car and, because of the extreme sensitivity surrounding the meeting, the CIA deferred any physical searches of the informant until he was well inside the agency’s compound.
The attack led to an extensive investigation and prompted numerous operational changes, including a strengthening of counterintelligence safeguards. Agency officials were unable to determine the full extent of Zawahiri’s involvement in planning the 2009 attack, but at the very least he allowed himself to be bait for a sophisticated operation that enabled a suicide bomber to penetrate an ultra-secure and highly secretive CIA facility, current and former officials said.
Zawahiri's path to a global terrorist leader
It’s why many in the CIA saw Zawahiri’s death as justice delivered, after years of waiting. On Tuesday, a printed copy of a Washington Post article was placed on the grave of Matthews, the Khost base chief killed in 2009. “U.S. kills al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in drone strike in Kabul,” the headline read.
“Be at peace, sister,” the tweet reads. | 2022-08-03T23:14:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After a deadly 2009 attack, the CIA’s hunt for Zawahiri became personal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/zawahiri-khost-cia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/zawahiri-khost-cia/ |
The committee heard testimony that the transplant system’s shortcomings fall hardest on the poor, rural communities and minority patients
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) speaks at the Aug. 3 hearing on the U.S. transplant system. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Members of a Senate committee blistered the top executive of the nonprofit organization that runs the U.S. transplant system Wednesday, asserting in questions and comments that its deficiencies are causing needless deaths and patient suffering.
Over about two hours, senators on the Finance Committee said the technology that runs the complex system is woefully inadequate, transportation problems involving organs are numerous, accountability is nonexistent, and mistakes — some resulting in death — are far too common.
They and several witnesses laid those problems at the feet of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit agency that has run the U.S. transplant system for 36 years under a contract with the government that is worth about $64 million a year. Its executive director, Brian Shepard, was on hand to hear the condemnation and defend against it.
“You should lose this contract,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told Shepard. “You should not be allowed anywhere near the organ transplant system in this country.”
The hearing followed the committee’s 2½-year investigation of the transplant system’s problems, which found considerable evidence of the deficiencies raised by the lawmakers, including a UNOS report that 70 people had died after contracting diseases from transplanted organs.
“It’s obvious there are serious problems in the organ procurement and transplant system and it’s not keeping up,” the panel’s chairman, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore), told Shepard. “Patients die every day while they wait.”
Researchers, activists and others have insisted for years that the system could do much better if the myriad problems were addressed and the 57 organizations that procure organs from dead patients were held to account for poor performance. UNOS has largely abdicated that responsibility; Shepard said Wednesday that its “peer review” function makes it more of a coach that helps those organizations and transplant centers improve than a regulator.
After years of controversy, the government took steps in 2019 to hold the worst of the procurement groups accountable. According to statements at Wednesday’s hearing, 22 organ procurement organizations — more than a third of the total — are failing.
The committee heard testimony from witnesses that the transplant system’s shortcomings fall hardest on poor, rural and minority recipients, some of whom do not make the waiting list because of inadequate care or difficulty competing with more affluent patients. Patients with resources can be listed at numerous transplant centers, while those on Medicaid are funded for transplants only in their home states.
“Black people and people of color are less likely to receive transplants,” said Calvin Henry, a double-lung transplant recipient who serves on a UNOS patient committee.
She described UNOS’s leadership as an “insular club” and said she and others have been subjected to “intimidation” after calling for Shepard’s resignation earlier this year. Shepard is stepping down at the end of September, when his current contract ends.
Shepard said UNOS disagrees with a 2021 assessment by the U.S. Digital Service that found his group’s technology out of date and vulnerable to hacking. He said the system repels hacking attempts every day. He strongly denied an assertion in the Digital Service’s report that UNOS has threatened to take the technology and run it on its own, even without a government contract. | 2022-08-03T23:16:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senators slam UNOS for transplant system shortcomings at hearing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/03/unos-transplants-shepard-senate-hearing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/03/unos-transplants-shepard-senate-hearing/ |
Anatoly Chubais, center, attends the inauguration of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on May 7, 2018. (Grigory Sysoyev/AP)
Authorities in Italy are examining the case of a former senior Russian official who was hospitalized in Sardinia this week after suffering neurological symptoms, Italian media reported Wednesday.
Anatoly Chubais, who resigned as the Kremlin’s climate envoy soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, was in intensive care after suddenly falling ill at a resort on the island.
According to Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian TV personality identified by the Associated Press as a family friend, Chubais was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy nerves.
Symptoms include tingling in the feet or hands, muscle weakness and difficulty with vision, speaking or eating. Italian authorities, however, including Sardinia’s public prosecutor, are awaiting test results in order to definitively rule out poisoning, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.
Chubais’s symptoms include partial facial paralysis and a loss of feeling in his arms and legs, Sobchak wrote in a Telegram post Wednesday that featured a photo of the 67-year-old in a hospital bed.
The prosecutor’s office and Mater Olbia Hospital where he is being treated did not immediately respond to requests for comment. There is no clear public evidence that Chubais was poisoned — and Kobchak, the daughter of a former mentor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has dismissed the reports as speculation.
But his sudden symptoms recalled several instances where former Russian spies or prominent dissidents abruptly fell ill — and were later found to have ingested radioactive material or a military-grade nerve agent.
Who is Anatoly Chubais, the highest official to cut Kremlin ties since Ukraine invasion?
U.N. experts last year blamed Russia’s government for the near-fatal poisoning of leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday called Chubais’s hospitalization “sad news” and said the Kremlin did not have details about what happened.
In March, Chubais became the most senior official to cut ties with the Kremlin after the invasion of Ukraine. He quit his post and reports at the time indicated he fled the country.
A member of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet after the fall of the Soviet Union, Chubais is known as one of the few Russian reformers from the 1990s who remained in politics through Putin’s presidency, although he was not considered to be a part of Putin’s inner circle.
He became unpopular among Russians for championing the “loans-for-shares” privatization deal in the mid-1990s that gave rise to Russia’s oligarchs. Chubais also reportedly supported the development of Putin’s career, and Putin gave him a position as an adviser on sustainable development after he was dismissed from a state nanotechnology firm in December 2020.
In late February, Chubais turned to Facebook to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of pro-democracy politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot in 2015 after criticizing Putin’s annexation of Crimea. Avdotya Smirnova, Chubais’s wife, signed an open letter from philanthropists to Putin that month opposing the war in Ukraine.
Robyn Dixon and Mary Ilyushina contributed to this report. | 2022-08-03T23:49:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ex-Putin adviser Anatoly Chubais hospitalized in Italy with neurological symptoms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/russia-anatoly-chubais-hospitalized-italy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/russia-anatoly-chubais-hospitalized-italy/ |
Gail Rowland carries signs at the Johnson County Democratic Party headquarters on July 18 to encourage voters to vote “no” against a state constitutional amendment that would further restrict abortion access in Kansas. (Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — When abortion rights organizer Jae Gray sent canvassers out into the Kansas City suburbs for the state’s upcoming referendum, they armed them with talking points aimed at all voters — not just liberals.
“We definitely used messaging strategies that would work regardless of party affiliation,” said Gray, a field organizer for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom. “We believe every Kansan has a right to make personal health-care decisions without government overreach — that’s obviously a conservative-friendly talking point. We were not just talking to Democrats.”
The effort paid off. On Tuesday, Kansas voters decisively defeated a ballot measure that would have set aside abortion protections in the state’s constitution, paving the way for additional restrictions or even a total ban. That victory was fueled by an opposition coalition that mobilized a large swath of the state’s electorate — including Republican and independent voters — to turn out in historic numbers.
Sweet said she hopes the campaign’s victory will be a ballast for abortion rights groups in other states with ballot initiatives this fall. In California, Vermont and Michigan, voters are being asked whether to enshrine abortion protections in their constitutions. In Kentucky and Pennsylvania, voters are considering whether protections should be rolled back.
Sweet said that organizers mobilized Republican and nonaffiliated voters through partnerships with groups like Mainstream Coalition, a nonpartisan advocacy group based in Johnson County, Kan., a populous Kansas City suburb that turned blue for the first time in the 2020 presidential contest. About 1 in 5 Republican primary voters turned out in favor of abortion rights, a Washington Post analysis shows.
“It’s a referendum on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and as a society we don’t want to go backwards with our laws,” said Mandi Hunter, 46, a Republican attorney from Johnson County who voted “no” to the amendment. “People don’t want the government in charge or ruling on their personal lives.”
Hunter said she was skeptical of Republican state legislators, who argued the amendment would not necessarily lead to a total ban, even though some had previously stated that they were ready with legislation proposing an all-out ban on the procedure for their legislative session in January.
Kansans for Constitutional Freedom also reached out to voters in more rural and conservative areas of the state, Sweet said. An abortion rights rally in western Kansas earlier this week featured horses, a Dolly Parton playlist and T-shirts with a pink uterus in a cowboy hat. The slogan? “Vote Neigh.”
Alejandro Rangel-Lopez, 21, a Dodge City resident and the event’s organizer, said that the Vote Neigh campaign was designed as a fun way to reach younger, rural voters. They did well, he said. “No” voters won the state’s populated urban counties, but also some smaller rural counties such as Saline and Geary as well, results showed.
“These victories happen because young people are motivated and tired of seeing the same thing over and over again,” he said. “When you give us a shot at shaping what our campaigns look like and have fun and move away from traditional rhetoric — we’ll deliver results.”
University of Kansas law professor Stephen McAllister, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who served as the U.S. attorney for Kansas after being appointed by President Donald Trump, said that antiabortion activism in Kansas began in earnest in the 1991, during the Summer of Mercy protests in Wichita. At the same time that protesters were lying in the streets, chaining themselves to fences and getting arrested in front of abortion clinics, the movement was also recruiting Republican candidates, he said.
In the coming years, antiabortion advocates won several victories in the Kansas state legislature, including a 24-waiting period, parental notification law and restrictions on late-term abortions.
“That was the birth of an interest group that captured the Republican Party in a way that never reflected the view of a majority of Kansans,” McAllister said. “Now that the populism of Kansas has been given a chance to express itself, it made clear that the will of the people has been captured by a single-minded interest of the Republican legislature. There is a disconnect between the majority will and party position.”
In 2019, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Kansas Constitution protects the “right of personal autonomy” that “allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation and family life — decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy.” Abortion in Kansas is currently legal in the first 22 weeks of pregnancy.
Republicans in the state legislature originally attempted to put a constitutional amendment that would void these protections on the ballot in 2020. When they were finally successful last year, the abortion rights organizers were prepared, according to Cassie Woolworth, 57, the president of the Johnson County Democratic Woman South chapter. Her group began warning voters of the coming ballot initiative even during the election cycle last year.
In the year-long campaign over the amendment, both sides have accused each other of misinformation — with the “Vote No” Kansans for Constitutional Freedom alleging in street signs and messaging that the amendment would lead to a total ban on abortion (state legislators would have had to pass a law banning abortion). The “Vote Yes” Value Them Both coalition alleged that the laws they worked to pass have been nullified by the 2019 Supreme Court ruling (also not technically true, according to McAllister.)
A misleading text sent by a political action committee led by Tim Huelskamp, a former Republican congressman for Kansas, further inflamed the race.
Both sides spent roughly the same amount on airwaves and social media for a combined total of $11 million, according to reports filed with the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. The Catholic Church has spent nearly $2.5 million in support of Value Them Both, while Planned Parenthood spent $1.4 million opposing it.
Kansans for Constitutional Freedom were also backed by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, its largest donor, which donated $1.38 million. Sixteen Thirty has emerged in recent years as a powerful hub for left-leaning causes. Organized as a nonprofit, meaning it is exempt from disclosing its donors, the fund spent $410 million across the country in 2020, the last year for which a tax filing is available.
The fund, administered by the for-profit consulting firm Arabella Advisers, says it advocates for causes such as voter access, pay equity, health care and gun control. In 2020, it was one of the top donors to outside spending groups trained on defeating Donald Trump. Its spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Even as abortion rights forces popped their champagne at the victory party Tuesday, the Value Them Both coalition called the outcome a “temporary setback” in a statement on Twitter, signaling that the battle was far from over. The group blamed an “onslaught of misinformation from the radical left organizations that spent millions of out-of-state dollars to spread lies about the Value Them Both Amendment.”
“Our dedicated fight to value women and babies is far from over,” the group’s statement said, promising “we will be back.”
Scott Clement and Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed to this report. | 2022-08-04T00:02:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Kansas organizers beat the abortion referendum - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/03/kansas-abortion-amendment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/03/kansas-abortion-amendment/ |
Emma Raducanu won her first-round Citi Open match against Louisa Chirico. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
It’s closing on midnight, nearly an hour and a half after her opening-round match ended, when Emma Raducanu arrives for her post-match interview at Washington’s Citi Open.
The delay, she explains, was because she needed to see the athletic trainer, have two blisters popped, and take a shower “to look nice for you guys!”
So much is expected of the U.S. Open’s reigning champion who, at 19, is the world’s 10th-ranked tennis player and top-ranked in Britain, where heroine-hungry media chronicle her every move.
Raducanu is also a global ambassador for Tiffany & Co., which accounts for the brilliant diamond jewelry she wears to the news conference, Dior and Porsche, among other high-end companies. Needless to say, it wouldn’t do if the public face of these luxe brands showed up for interviews drenched in sweat, hair matted to her head.
But Raducanu is also a whip smart bookworm who just over a year ago graduated from a British boarding school and was sitting for her A level exams in English and math. She is a teen, in many respects, like other teens, albeit with intense inner drive.
That reminder comes shortly after she uses the word “wizard” in describing her performance, as in, “I didn’t necessarily play like a wizard today, but I got through it and I fought, and that’s all that matters.”
That led to a follow-up question about Harry Potter. Specifically, what Hogwarts House would she be in?
Raducanu lights up, as if suddenly plugged into a socket of delight.
“I’d be in Slytherin, for sure!” she exulted, only too happy to elaborate. “They haven’t got a great rep, but I just think they are really, hmm, cool … They’re pretty, in a way, brutal … They have got a just mysterious sort of side to them, and I like that.”
Though fleeting, it appeared a welcome line of questioning amid what has been a tough slog in her first full season on the pro tour.
Raducanu’s 6-4, 6-2 victory Tuesday over qualifier Louisa Chirico was her first singles match since June 29, when she lost in the second round at Wimbledon. It was also just the ninth match she has won all season, bringing her 2022 record to 10-12 after injuries and yet another coaching change.
At the Citi Open, where she is competing for the first time, Raducanu is working on a trial basis with former pro Dmitry Tursunov, who reached No. 20 in the world in 2006 and has found post-retirement success as a coach, helping Aryna Sabalenka and Anett Kontaveit to top-10 rankings.
Tursunov, 39, who left his native Russia to train in America at age 12, succeeds Torben Beltz, with whom Raducanu split in April after a five-month collaboration. Beltz, who had previously coached fellow German Angelique Kerber to the 2016 Australian and U.S. Open titles, had been brought in to replace Raducanu’s youth coach, Andrew Richardson, who led her to the unprecedented achievement of winning the U.S. Open as a qualifier, without conceding a set.
While the alliance with Tursunov is, for now, an experiment, Raducanu said she feels he has already helped after two weeks of training in advance of the Citi Open, which marks the start of the North American hard court swing that leads to the U.S. Open.
“He’s definitely trying to make me take things easier on myself,” Raducanu said. “I put a lot of emphasis on everything I do, and I want to do it the best of my abilities all the time. He’s just slowly trying to shift me towards, ‘If it's not perfect, it's okay.’ Like, ‘If you shank one, it's okay.’ Just these sorts of things and being more accepting of that.”
For a straight-A student, being less than perfect can be among life’s more difficult lessons.
That is the lesson the pro tour is teaching Raducanu just now.
“I’ve learnt that I’m pretty resilient,” Raducanu said, reflecting on her results this season. “I’ve pretty much been knocked down every single week — literally in front of everyone. Get back up every single time.
In the 11 WTA tournaments she has entered this year, she has advanced past the second round just twice — on the clay in Stuttgart, Germany, where she fell in the quarterfinals to world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, and in Madrid, where she fell in the third round. The three majors since her U.S. Open triumph — this year’s Australian, French and Wimbledon — all ended with second-round defeats.
In the experience of Pam Shriver and Rennae Stubbs, who won 22 and six Grand Slam doubles and mixed doubles titles, respectively, the trials Raducanu is undergoing are understandable and no cause for alarm.
“If we could lift that magical three weeks out of résumé and look at the rest of her progression, it would actually be quite normal,” Shriver said in a telephone interview. “She is a top prospect who had a magical run. That’s not to say she’s going to be one-Slam-and-done. It’s more that she is now back on somewhat of a normal trajectory. And I think after this U.S. Open, it will be even more normal.”
Shriver, 60, forged her Hall of Fame career in doubles. But at 16, she reached the final of the U.S. Open and became an overnight sensation.
“Of course I lost to Chrissie [Evert],” Shriver said. “But it was a very high-profile situation. Then, I went the next 12 months hardly winning a match. After a year, I started to reset and rebuild and get myself in the top 10 for the next eight years. But based on the year following that 1978 U.S. Open, it was terrible.”
Stubbs noted that no one in tennis expects “week-to-week moments of greatness” from 19-year-old pros, however gifted.
“The bottom line is that she is learning every single week about the tour and how she stacks up against players of similar caliber,” Stubbs said. “Obviously winning the U.S. Open last year was an incredible moment. It was a fairy-tale story we couldn’t have predicted.
“… This is all now a learning experience — not only dealing with the week-in, week-out pressure of professional tennis, but doing it with the glare of the world spotlight on her. It’s hard enough to do it without being famous. And now she is famous.” | 2022-08-04T00:15:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. Open champ Emma Raducanu trying to recapture her magic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/emma-raducanu-citi-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/emma-raducanu-citi-open/ |
Nationals center fielder Victor Robles watches Pete Alonso's two-run home run clear the wall at Nationals Park during Wednesday's 9-5 Mets win. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Josh Palacios, Ildemaro Vargas and Joey Meneses weren’t on the Washington Nationals’ roster Sunday; that day, the trio made up the top three spots in the batting order for the Rochester Red Wings, the Washington Nationals’ Class AAA affiliate.
Three days later, on a steamy Wednesday afternoon at Nationals Park, they all started for the home team in a 9-5 loss to the New York Mets. Meneses, a first baseman playing his second game in the majors, hit in the cleanup spot after blasting a home run in his debut. Palacios batted eighth and manned right field, the real estate occupied by Juan Soto as recently as two days ago. Vargas followed Palacios and played at third.
Vargas singled in all four of his at-bats and Palacios added a pair of singles. Meneses went 0-for-4. The Nationals scored five runs in the ninth, but eight flat innings prior was a reminder of how painful Washington’s rebuild could look in the immediate aftermath of the Tuesday’s trade of Juan Soto and Josh Bell to the San Diego Padres.
The Nationals — who dropped to 36-70 and 31 games back of the first-place Mets (66-38) after Wednesday’s loss — acquired six players in return, a large bet on potential. But a day after seismic trade, none of those players were ready to make immediate contributions.
“They’re not going to quit. They’re going to play through the last out and we end up scoring five runs,” Manager Dave Martinez said. “We made it exciting at the end, but obviously it wasn’t enough.”
Luke Voit figures to be the player who makes an impact the soonest. He and left-handed pitcher MacKenzie Gore will join the team in Philadelphia on Thursday. Gore, 23, has been on the 15-day injured list since July 26 with elbow inflammation in his throwing arm; GM Mike Rizzo said Tuesday that the team would take it slow with Gore when he arrives.
Voit will be a middle-of-the-order bat; he has hit 13 home runs this season. That’s four more than Lane Thomas, who leads the team in homers hit as a National after the departures of Soto (21 homers) and Bells (14). Voit will play first base and designated hitter. Nelson Cruz, the team’s DH for most of the season, missed Wednesday’s game with neck stiffness and was replaced by Yadiel Hernandez.
Infielder C.J. Abrams 21, is the closest to the majors outside of Voit and Gore; he’s already played 46 games for the Padres this season. Martinez said the team wants him to go to Class AAA Rochester to acclimate to the East Coast and get some at-bats, like the team did with Keibert Ruiz after last year’s deadline.
The prospects with perhaps the most upside are still a ways away. Outfielder Robert Hassell III, 20, now the No. 1 prospect in the Nationals’ system according to MLB Pipeline, will head to Class A Wilmington. James Wood, 19 and ranked No. 4 on the team’s prospect list, was assigned to Class A Fredericksburg. Jarlin Susana, an 18-year old pitcher and now the team’s No. 10 prospect, will head to the Florida Complex League before joining Wood in Fredericksburg.
The move may have brightened the Nationals’ future, but it did little for their present against Mets starter Chris Bassitt, who pitched seven scoreless innings.
The offense looked lifeless until Ruiz and Thomas hit solo homers in the ninth. Then, with two outs, Victor Robles added an RBI single and Luis García hit a two-run single to trim the Mets’ lead before Hernandez popped out to left.
“That last inning, they really started using the middle of the field,” Martinez said. “If we could’ve done that earlier, things would’ve been a little different.”
How did the Mets score on Thursday? Pete Alonso hit a two-run, two-out homer off Aníbal Sánchez in the third inning. Sánchez only lasted 4⅓ innings and allowed five runs (four earned) on 97 pitches, raising his season ERA to 7.65 through four starts.
Sánchez didn’t get any help from Vargas in the fifth when Vargas dropped a line drive from Starling Marte trying to transfer the ball from his glove to his throwing hand. Then, he threw the ball into right field, allowing the runners to advance to second and third.
Francisco Lindor popped out and Martinez intentionally walked Alonso to load the bases for Daniel Vogelbach. He pulled Sánchez in favor of Jordan Weems, who then left a fastball over the inside part of the plate that Vogelbach sent out to right for a grand slam that pushed the Mets’ lead to 6-0.
The Mets scored two more runs off Weems in the sixth when Tomas Nido hit an RBI double and Marte hit into a fielder’s choice that scored Nido. Luis Guillorme added a run-scoring fielder’s choice in the ninth.
What’s the latest on Tanner Rainey? Rainey had Tommy John surgery Wednesday. Martinez didn’t have any updates on how the surgery went before the game or a timetable for when Rainey would return, though typically the recovery time is around 12 months. Martinez expects Rainey to come back to D.C. to check in with team doctors during the Nationals’ next homestand.
Rainey, 29, was placed on the 60-day disabled list on July 13 with a UCL sprain. Rainey had a team-high 12 saves in 17 opportunities and a 3.30 ERA.
How did the Nationals honor the late Vin Scully? Before Wednesday’s game, Washington played some of Scully’s old calls on the video board. Then, the Nationals held a moment of silence, flashing his name with a microphone under it. Scully passed away Tuesday night at 94.
Have we seen the last of Alcides Escobar? In a Nationals uniform, quite likely. The team requested unconditional release waivers on Escobar after the game. The move clears an active roster spot for Voit, who is expected to join the roster tomorrow. Escobar was the team’s everyday shortstop until May 31 when he suffered a hamstring injury. He accepted a backup role behind García when he returned but only appeared in seven games — including two pitching appearances — after he returned. He had a .218 batting average in 40 games. | 2022-08-04T00:37:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nationals have a new look, but results are similar in loss to Mets - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/nationals-mets-after-juan-soto/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/nationals-mets-after-juan-soto/ |
Man accused of leaving loaded gun on Capitol grounds during Jan. 6 riot
Trump supporters battle with police and security forces as they storm the Capitol building in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)
A Missouri man left a loaded 9mm semiautomatic pistol on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to prosecutors.
Jerod Thomas Bargar, 36, of Centralia, Mo., was arrested Wednesday; he is one of a small group of people accused of illegally carrying guns during the riot that forced a delay in certifying the results of the 2020 election.
Lawmakers investigating the attack revealed recently that then-President Donald Trump knew some members of the crowd were armed and said they should be let through security regardless. Only four other people have been charged with taking guns onto the Capitol grounds that day. But police have said they understood many more in the crowd to be armed. One defendant, Guy Reffitt, said in a video played at trial that from the front of the crowd, he could see eight firearms carried by five people. Reffitt, a Texas man who was the first Jan. 6 defendant to be convicted at trial, received a sentence of more than seven years for five felonies that included carrying a firearm to a riot — the stiffest punishment in the Capitol attack investigation so far.
First Jan. 6 defendant convicted at trial receives longest sentence of 7 years
In the case against Bargar, D.C. police officers found the gun on the ground amid rioters at about 2:30 p.m., according to an FBI agent’s affidavit, but did not know to whom it belonged. The pistol was in a distinctive holster depicting the American flag and the words “We the People.” There was one cartridge in the chamber and 15 in the magazine.
Bargar was first identified through an anonymous tip and interviewed by the FBI on Jan. 18, 2021, according to the court record. He said he came to D.C. with a friend but did not enter the Capitol or do anything illegal in the “chaos” because he knew where the “line” was, according to the affidavit.
At the time, the agents did not know Bargar had brought a gun. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives subsequently found that the gun had been owned by an individual who pawned it in Missouri, where it was bought by Bargar’s stepfather. In a subsequent interview, according to the affidavit, Bargar said he lost the gun when trying to help a woman who had been knocked to the ground. Bargar added that he wanted to be armed when he went to the “belly of the beast” for his own “self-protection.”
D.C. law bars concealed carrying of firearms without a permit and open carrying; no guns are allowed on the Capitol grounds. Bargar told the FBI he was unaware of those laws at the time of the riot.
A public defender who represented Bargar at his initial appearance declined to comment. | 2022-08-04T00:37:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jerod Bargar accused of bringing gun to Capitol on Jan. 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/jerod-bargar-capitol-gun/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/jerod-bargar-capitol-gun/ |
Arizona Republican slate packed with Trump-backed election deniers
Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake holds up a sledgehammer while speaking to supporters during her primary election night gathering Aug. 3 in Scottsdale, Ariz. She is in a tight race with challenger Karrin Taylor Robson for the GOP nomination. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
PHOENIX — Arizona Republican voters embraced the baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election in Tuesday’s primary and nominated a secretary of state candidate who wants to decertify the 2020 election results; a U.S. Senate candidate who said in an ad, “I think Trump won”; and at least seven U.S. House candidates who have spread falsehoods about the election.
And while it was too early to call the Republican gubernatorial primary on Wednesday evening, the leading candidate is running as a full-throated election denier intent on validating former president Donald Trump’s phony claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the election. The Associated Press estimated Wednesday that about one-fifth of primary ballots had yet to be counted.
Dozens of candidates who refuse to acknowledge President Biden as the legitimate winner in 2020 have won GOP primaries across the country this year, leading GOP tickets in key swing states from Pennsylvania to Nevada. Next week, several more are on the Republican primary ballot in Wisconsin. Denying the election results has become the defining litmus test for Trump and his supporters and, among Republican voters in many states, a winning strategy.
But the Arizona outcome is especially consequential given the huge role the state played in the 2020 election and its aftermath. Voters narrowly chose Biden over Trump — the first time since 1996 a Democrat won the state — making it ripe for attempts to litigate and overturn the results. If the Arizona Republican nominees win those top jobs this year, they could wield tremendous power over the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
“To the extent that happens, Arizona really is ground zero for the threat to American democracy,” said Larry J. Sabato, a longtime political scientist who directs the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
One of those candidates: Mark Finchem — a state lawmaker who was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, before rioters stormed the building in a deadly attack and who has self-identified with the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group and self-styled militia — has said he would decertify Arizona’s 2020 election results if he had the power to do so. Now, he’s one election away from overseeing voting in Arizona as the GOP nominee for secretary of state, a position that would make him the state’s top elections official. He said Tuesday that a top priority, if he wins, would be purging voter rolls and eliminating early voting.
For the U.S. Senate, Arizona Republicans chose Blake Masters, a young venture capitalist who mimics Trump’s baseless election claims and traffics in the culture wars that have become central in the far-right discourse. Masters will face incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D) in one of the handful of races that could determine the balance of partisan power in the U.S. Senate.
Arizona Senate candidate embraces Trump’s extreme style
Ahead in the race for governor is Kari Lake, a former local TV news anchor turned Trump booster, who has said she would try to replace vote-counting machines with workers and end the state’s vote-by-mail option.
Even as Lake held the edge Wednesday afternoon by two percentage points over Karrin Taylor Robson in their primary, she suggested the election had “a lot of issues, irregularities and problems, so we’re going to address them.” Lake said she would continue to run on the election integrity platform she espoused during the primary, including her focus on the 2020 election.
“We outvoted the fraud. We didn’t listen to what the fake news had to say. The MAGA movement rose up,” she said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
Lake, Masters and Finchem all have Trump’s endorsement.
Some Republicans in the state warn that nominating far-right candidates aligned with Trump may turn off independent and swing voters in November in a state once known for mavericks such as the late senator John McCain and former senator Jeff Flake, who were politically conservative but disavowed Trump’s takeover of the GOP.
“I don’t think a winning strategy is to focus on the past,” said Ben Quayle, an Arizona GOP consultant and son of former GOP vice president Dan Quayle. “Focus on where we can go as a state and a country, but I think focusing on 2020 is a losing message and it’s just not the right message either, because Trump lost.”
Paul Bentz, an Arizona GOP consultant and pollster, said most primary-voting Republicans here tend to believe there was widespread fraud that affected the results of the 2020 election and that running on an election-denying platform was an effective primary strategy. But he agreed that it’s not a winning general-election message.
“They’re going to be significantly challenged to win the general election, because you can see that there are portions of their party who don’t believe in this and then we know significant portions of independents don’t believe, either,” he said.
Election deniers have lost voters such as Maria Kupillas, an independent from Scottsdale, who considers herself a moderate and stopped identifying as a Republican after Trump became the party’s presidential nominee in 2016.
“The choices were bad to worse, so it didn’t give me a lot of hope for who’s actually going to be elected in November,” said Kupillas, a trial attorney, after voting on the GOP ballot on Tuesday.
“I used to be a Republican, but I’m not a far right-wing Republican,” she said. “I feel like Arizona, sadly, is going in the far-right direction … When I moved here I thought Arizona was purple and moderate and John McCain, Sandra Day O’Connor. And we’re actually not that; we’re Paul Gosar and that ilk. It’s a little depressing.”
Longtime Republican voter Linda Swenson, 72, said she likes Lake’s “new blood” and fresh perspectives and wants her to turn around the economy, crack down on illegal immigration and overhaul the state’s elections.
“I voted all my life — for 50 years — and you never had these things, corruption and stealing votes, all the way back to the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s,” she said. “And suddenly now we have it. I cannot grasp it.”
Swenson, of Sun City, thinks Trump won the 2020 election but doesn’t think Lake can do much about that now. She does want her to do whatever she can to ensure everyone’s votes are counted moving forward. There is no evidence that people’s votes weren’t counted.
Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) represents the extreme wing of the party and has been at the forefront of spreading false claims about election fraud in 2020. He was censured by the U.S. House last year after posting on social media a violent anime video that depicted him attacking Biden and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Gosar won his primary on Tuesday night.
Election deniers also won down-ballot in Arizona. Trump-backed Abe Hamadeh locked down the GOP nomination for state attorney general, a position crucial to certifying elections and representing the state on election-related legal issues. Hamadeh has claimed, without evidence, that the U.S. elections “have been hijacked.”
Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, paid a price for resisting efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the state’s election results in 2020. In June, he told his story to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Rusty Bowers testified in D.C. Now he might lose his primary in Arizona.
Bowers, who was term-limited in his current position, lost an election for the state Senate to former state senator David Farnsworth (R), a Trump-endorsed election-denier who wanted Congress to accept alternate pro-Trump electors for Arizona.
“There is a residual pain at the bottom, but more, I feel bad that across the state this is happening as far as the Republican Party,” Bowers told The Washington Post on Wednesday. “They’ve made their choice, but I think the state of Arizona will have different thoughts” in November, he said.
Several GOP candidates for the Arizona state legislature who have spent the past two years spreading election lies also won their primaries, setting the stage for a state House and Senate that is even further to the right next year.
They include former state lawmaker Anthony Kern, who declared himself an alternate elector and was in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, and state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a far-right conspiracy theorist who was censured by her chamber for her discriminatory comments at a white-nationalist conference and used her extreme rhetoric to raise money. State Rep. Jake Hoffman (R), another alternate elector, won his race for the state Senate unchallenged. He does not face a general-election opponent.
Itkowitz reported from Washington. | 2022-08-04T00:37:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Arizona Republican slate packed with Trump-backed election deniers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/arizona-election-deniers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/arizona-election-deniers/ |
Maria Sacchetti
The Homeland Security watchdog now under scrutiny for his handling of deleted Secret Service text messages from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack previously was accused of misleading Justice Department investigators and running “afoul” of ethics regulations while he was a federal agent in charge of a DOJ inspector general field office in Tucson, according to a newly disclosed government report.
In the 2013 report from Justice Department’s inspector general, which was never publicly released, investigators said they did “not believe” Joseph V. Cuffari’s explanation for why he failed to inform his supervisors — against federal rules — about his testimony in a lawsuit brought by a federal prisoner.
Separately, they found that he broke ethics rules by referring law firms to the prisoner’s family, including firms where some of his close friends worked. “We concluded Cuffari’s actions violated the IG manual’s prohibition on unethical conduct,” said the report, which also noted that he may have violated guidelines by using his government email to lobby for a position as inspector general for the Arizona National Guard, among other issues.
An internal team recommended referring Cuffari to the Office of Inspector General’s investigations unit for a deeper review of his actions, the report said — but Cuffari quickly retired and later worked for the office of then-Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R).
A spokesperson for Cuffari’s office issued a statement via email Wednesday, noting that Cuffari had been fully vetted by FBI, the White House and the Senate during the nomination process. The Senate unanimously confirmed his appointment. Regarding the report, the spokesperson said Cuffari “has not received nor seen the report to which you refer.”
Cuffari said he was proud of his record in the Air Force and in the Justice Department’s inspector general office, where he said he probed alleged violations of federal prisoners’ civil rights. The spokesperson, who was not identified, also said that Cuffari received numerous awards and “retired with a spotless record from DOJ OIG.”
Cuffari’s three years as inspector general have been marked by numerous allegations of partisan decision-making and investigative failures — most recently, his decision in February to scrap efforts by his department to recover Secret Service texts sent during the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Defense Department’s inspector general office has also been investigating allegations for more than a year that Cuffari retaliated against several whistleblowers on his staff, according to individuals familiar with the case.
Cuffari’s nomination sailed through a committee of federal inspectors general that interviewed him for less than an hour and recommended his candidacy to the Trump White House.
“Honesty and integrity are nonnegotiable in watchdogs,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator with the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight, which this week called on President Biden to fire Cuffari. “How can Congress, the White House and the public trust him on matters of grave public importance?”
House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), in a statement, said the report “raises yet more questions” about whether Cuffari can complete an investigation into the missing Secret Service text messages “with impartiality and integrity as Inspector General.” | 2022-08-04T00:37:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Homeland Security watchdog Joseph Cuffari previously accused of misleading investigators - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/homeland-security-joseph-cuffari-watchdog-report/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/03/homeland-security-joseph-cuffari-watchdog-report/ |
FILE - Elon Musk attends The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit gala on May 2, 2022, in New York. A judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s answer to Twitter’s lawsuit over his attempt to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the social media company will be made public by Friday, Aug. 5, 2022 at the latest. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-04T00:45:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Musk response to Twitter lawsuit to be made public by Friday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/musk-response-to-twitter-lawsuit-to-be-made-public-by-friday/2022/08/03/ec34cf24-1389-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/musk-response-to-twitter-lawsuit-to-be-made-public-by-friday/2022/08/03/ec34cf24-1389-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Man stabbed in Northwest D.C., police say
A D.C. police car. (Peter Hermann/The Washington Post)
D.C. police are investigating a stabbing Wednesday evening in Northwest Washington.
The incident was reported about 7:27 p.m. in the 1600 block of I Street NW, said Officer Hugh Carew, a police spokesman. A man was taken to a hospital conscious and breathing, Carew said.
The block is located by Black Lives Matter Plaza, a few blocks away from the White House. | 2022-08-04T01:25:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man stabbed in Northwest Washington, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/man-stabbing-northwest-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/03/man-stabbing-northwest-dc/ |
Outfielder Juan Soto made his Padres debut Wednesday. (Gregory Bull/AP)
SAN DIEGO — Juan Soto sat in a rolling chair with the San Diego Padres logo on it and held up his leg, high enough so that Fernando Tatis Jr. could see his red and white cleats from his chair a few lockers away.
“Look at these!” Soto said, and Tatis chuckled at the combination of the red with Soto’s fresh brown socks. Brown and gold cleats are expected soon. But the first day of the rest of Juan Soto’s career will include a reminder of all those other days spent in Washington, a baseball world away.
“I never thought they would do it. I was thinking they would try to keep me and try to rebuild the team with me in it. It caught me by surprise,” Soto said in the Padres clubhouse as he laced up the other cleat. The New York Mets beat up on the Nationals on a television hanging a few yards away. “Deep in my heart, I was thinking they wouldn’t do it.”
That Soto found himself there, joking with friend and fellow young superstar Tatis Jr., introducing himself to infielder Ha-Seong Kim with a “good to meet you,” talking Max Scherzer’s repertoire with catcher Austin Nola, is a transformative development for both the team he left and the team he joined. It may prove transformative for Soto and Josh Bell, too.
Not 24 hours after they boarded a private San Diego-bound plane paid for by the Padres, Soto and Bell found themselves sandwiching superstar Manny Machado in a contending team’s lineup under the California sun.
“Go from a team that has no chance to come all the way here, it’s a great feeling,” Soto said. “It’s a new start for me. This year, it’s just a new start, a new feeling to go out there and give more that I have.”
Before either man could worry about going out there at all, both were shuttled through Petco Park for social media shoots and introductory interviews, sitting alongside Padres General Manager A.J. Preller and owner Peter Seidler.
Preller introduced Soto with a story about the time a Padres’ assistant general manager learned the young star was hitting in Point Loma, not far away. He had flown there after his successful rookie season to work with a hitting coach during the offseason, “working on his craft,” Preller said. Preller remembered the team’s pursuit of Soto as a teenager in the Dominican Republic — a pursuit that ended, he joked, with Preller rating someone else ahead of him. But Preller pointed to that January hitting session as a moment when his decided it would do its best to get him if he could.
Analysis: Padres GM A.J. Preller, master of the big swing, just took his biggest swing yet
The Padres GM also joked that Bell — the slugging switch hitter with the .877 OPS — was “not bad for a throw-in,” before clarifying that Bell was far more than that. From then on, Soto’s smile stole the afternoon. He flashed it when asked about the Padres lineup, which is still waiting for Tatis to come back from injury and still waiting for Machado to get hot again.
“I wish good luck to the other pitchers,” Soto said with a chuckle.
He flashed it again when he explained that Nick Martinez, who wore No. 22 with the Padres until a few hours ago, asked him for a fishing boat in exchange for the number.
“He really surprised me. I had never seen something like that. I’d seen a couple guys trying to get numbers and what they had given away. But when he asked me for a boat I was really shocked and surprised,” Soto said. “I thought that was kind of too much, but I tried to explain to him I will try to get him a really nice watch and he accepted.”
The implications of Soto finding himself in this lineup after a calendar year of being the primary focus of every opponent’s game plan could extend much further than a few more smiles. His new manager, Bob Melvin, said he isn’t positive what order he will hit Soto, Machado, and Bell — but does expect Soto and Bell to feel a difference immediately Wednesday night, not simply because of the bats around them, but also because of the energy they will feel in Petco Park.
“I am going to keep taking my walks. I won’t try to be a superhero,” Soto said. “But definitely it’s going to be more exciting. It’s going to be more opportunities to bring guys home. I’ll have more chances to win games.”
A person close to Soto said he was growing demoralized at times with the Nationals, worried that a frustrating first half (he was hitting only .246 at the time of the trade — nearly 50 points shy of his career average) would only get more frustrating if Washington traded away everyone else but kept him there. After the trade, he expressed his excitement about the chance to play “real baseball” again, that person said. Soto’s swagger never exactly wavered. But here, with talent and energy around him again, it just might soar.
“We talked about it when I was talking to these guys, they’re going to feel the excitement in this ballpark,” Melvin said. “It’s always exciting, but it’s probably going to be taken to another level today. We’ll all feel that.”
Could the Nats have avoided trading Juan Soto? Your questions, answered.
Soto has never played for a big league manager not named Dave Martinez, and he will notice that, too. He admitted that saying goodbye to Martinez just before he left Nationals Park on Tuesday afternoon was one of the hardest parts of a long day that began with him waking up to a call from Scott Boras telling him a trade was actually likely this time. Nationals GM Mike Rizzo called him, too, told him nothing was official, but something was in the works. He said he was still surprised when it happened, even though Boras had explained to him the business rationale for a deal, even though he had come to understand over the past few months that no one is immune to the business side of baseball.
Things we can get used to:
1. This pic.twitter.com/uthPlX87VF
“I have no hard feelings to those guys. I still feel good about what they did for me. That’s the first team, my first team, the team that make me a professional player,” Soto said. “They gave me the chance to come to the big leagues. They made me a big leaguer. I’m always going to be thankful for that. No hard feelings for all this.”
Soto hopes some brown and gold cleats and gear will arrive soon. In the meantime, he pounded around the clubhouse in those red and white ones, shaking hands with new teammates. At one point he paused and look to his right, noticing Bell’s new locker across the clubhouse.
“JB!” he said as he walked by, taking a slightly more circuitous route back to his own locker than he probably will a week from now. Then, finally, it was time to hit, to take batting practice before a game that really meant something, to swing for the playoffs and for a packed stadium once again. Back in an environment like that, in a lineup like that, the Padres hope Soto will take off and fly. | 2022-08-04T02:08:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Juan Soto makes his San Diego Padres debut - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/juan-soto-san-diego-padres-debut/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/03/juan-soto-san-diego-padres-debut/ |
Buildings are illuminated at dusk in the central business district (CBD) of Singapore, on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021. HSBC Holdings Plc plans to accelerate its expansion across Asia in its imminent strategy refresh, Chairman Mark Tucker told the virtual Asian Financial Forum last week. (Bloomberg)
The battle for Asia’s preeminent financial institution will be fought with the Federal Reserve providing ammunition — to both sides. Just how much profit each can squeeze out of US monetary tightening may end up deciding if Hong Kong’s biggest bank, HSBC Holdings Plc, stays whole and dominant. Or if Singapore’s largest lender, DBS Group Holdings Ltd., gets a shot at staging an upset.
Rising interest rates are shoring up net interest margins for banks everywhere. For the June quarter, Singapore’s DBS reported a better-than expected 7% jump from a year earlier in net income to S$1.82 billion ($1.3 billion) on Thursday, with Chief Executive Piyush Gupta garnering a return on equity of 13.4%. Noel Quinn, his counterpart at HSBC, is only targeting 12%-plus return on tangible equity by next year.(1) While that would be the best performance for the London-headquartered lender since 2011, it may not be enough to quell demands by its largest shareholder, Ping An Insurance Group Co., to split off the Asian operations.
The call is finding increasing support among Hong Kong’s mom-and-pop shareholders, who’re upset with dividends that are just half what they were in 2018 — after they were scrapped for a year under UK regulatory instructions in 2020 when the pandemic hit. Any breakup of the bank would put at risk the $1.1 billion of first-half revenue that came from global banking and markets clients in Europe and America but was booked in Asia. Not only is this amount a chunky 14% of the division, it’s grown twice as fast as the overall pie, according to Quinn’s presentation.
Which is why it’s important for him to hit next year’s target of $37 billion in net interest income, up from $26.5 billion last year. Practically the entire increase is expected to come from margin improvements: HSBC needs the Fed’s help to earn more, reinstate its quarterly dividend and raise the payout ratio to 50% to pacify investors. DBS will also benefit from higher rates, but Gupta has one added advantage. His home market of Singapore — especially the buoyant property market — is less at risk from higher interest burden on homebuyers. Hong Kong’s real-estate sentiment is much weaker, while exposure to commercial real estate of mainland Chinese developers is a big threat to lenders.
In other words, the relative fortunes of HSBC and DBS may come down to what the global interest-rate cycle does to the two rival Asian financial centers that have powered their rise. “Credit charges are most likely to swell for the Hong Kong banks we cover” in the second half of 2022, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Francis Chan. With the Hong Kong economy headed for its third contraction in four years, mortgage demand and wealth-management fees could disappoint, even as higher interest rates lead to markdowns on insurance and bond portfolios. “Weaker-than-expected growth in lending and non-interest income may offset our optimistic assumptions for margins,” Chan writes.
DBS, too, has exposure to Hong Kong and China, and its wealth management fees also slumped in the first half of 2022 because of subdued markets. But it has a sizeable loan-loss cushion. More importantly, it will be a net gainer from being the No. 1 bank in Singapore. When it comes to drawing in capital, talent and trade, the city-state’s rapid post-pandemic reopening has placed it at a far more advantageous position than its rival. Even before Covid-19, Hong Kong — and HSBC — found themselves in the crossfires of the U.S.-China cold war. Now it’s the Chinese special administrative region’s isolationist travel restrictions that are forcing it to abdicate its historical role as a global financial center. This shift alone may be powerful enough to alter the pecking order of Asian banking.
Does DBS need a footprint outside Asia to challenge HSBC, which is almost six times bigger by total assets? Not really, especially if the latter itself capitulates to pressure from Ping An and decides to deglobalize and split up. DBS is bulking up within the region: Citigroup Inc.’s exit from retail operations in Asia outside Singapore and Hong Kong has already given Gupta the keys to the Taiwan consumer bank he wanted to buy. When the integration is complete, a greater China loan book approaching $100 billion would give the Singaporean lender significant heft in North Asia, complementing its already solid presence in Southeast Asia and India.
Still, it’s entirely possible that aggressive Fed action will spoil the party for both HSBC and DBS. Gupta’s post-earnings presentation was cautious. His base case is for US interest rates to peak at 3.5%-4%, tempering inflation and causing only a mild recession. Ripple effects on Asia will likely be contained, he says, with manageable depreciation in local currencies. Those assumptions are all up for grabs — as is the contest for Asia’s banking supremacy.
• HSBC’s Promises Are Unlikely to Satisfy Ping An: Paul J. Davies
(1) For both banks, the return on tangible equity has been roughly 1 percentage point higher than the return on common equity in the recent past. | 2022-08-04T03:44:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DBS Can Challenge a Smaller HSBC — With the Fed’s Help - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dbs-can-challenge-a-smaller-hsbc-with-the-feds-help/2022/08/03/a6316efc-13a1-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dbs-can-challenge-a-smaller-hsbc-with-the-feds-help/2022/08/03/a6316efc-13a1-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
East Japan Railway Co. says revenue from its bullet trains, which includes the Tohoku Shinkansen route between Tokyo and Morioka used in Isaka’s original novel, is less than 60% of pre-Covid times, and expects that figure will still be 10% below 2019 levels at the end of its fiscal year next March. On the more famous Tokyo-Osaka route, operated by JR Central and featured in the movie version of “Bullet Train,” ridership remains at just 70% of pre-pandemic levels.
(Corrects the spelling of Morioka in the fourth paragraph.) | 2022-08-04T03:44:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Forget Brad Pitt. The Bullet Train Is the Real Star - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/forget-brad-pitt-the-bullet-train-isthe-real-star/2022/08/03/59d770be-13a2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/forget-brad-pitt-the-bullet-train-isthe-real-star/2022/08/03/59d770be-13a2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
The White House appointed Robert Fenton in August to coordinate the US government’s response and increase equitable access to tests, vaccines and treatments. But former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in mid-July that the window for controlling the US outbreak had “probably closed,” with only a small fraction of the cases in the country reported. A case in a pregnant woman was reported in the US, where pediatric infections have also occurred. In the Netherlands, doctors reported a case in a boy under 10 with an immune impairment. Unable to identify how he was infected, they speculate that the virus may be present in the general population and that respiratory transmission may have played a role. Tedros warned that in some countries, the communities affected face life-threatening discrimination and so may not seek help, “making the outbreak much harder to track, and to stop.”
(Updates with details from WHO Aug. 3 report, White House monkepox coordinator) | 2022-08-04T03:44:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Understanding Monkeypox and How Outbreaks Spread - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/understanding-monkeypox-and-how-outbreaks-spread/2022/08/03/70768b98-139d-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/understanding-monkeypox-and-how-outbreaks-spread/2022/08/03/70768b98-139d-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
For many in Washington, it was a dangerous and pointless trip. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic lawmakers spent only 18 hours in Taiwan, but in doing so they managed to upend a long-standing U.S. diplomatic taboo and prompt large-scale military exercises from China that broached the self-governing island’s territorial waters.
“Nothing good will come of it,” the New York Times’ Tom Friedman wrote in an opinion column that ran Tuesday, hours before Pelosi’s arrival. Friedman linked Pelosi’s trip to the war in Ukraine, added to the reporting that the Biden administration opposed the trip and argued that the Democrat’s itinerary put Taiwan’s leaders in an awkward position too.
“I seriously doubt that Taiwan’s current leadership, in its heart of hearts, wants this Pelosi visit now,” Friedman wrote.
But do we know what those actually in Taiwan thought of Pelosi’s trip? If the risk of conflict created by the trip was so high, with so little potential gain to show for it, the Taiwanese government’s extremely welcoming public reaction has been curious. The exuberant reaction of the Taiwanese public to the speaker’s visit, dubbed by the BBC a “Pelosi lovefest,” is stranger still, given the supposed risk of World War III on their doorstep.
On Wednesday, representatives of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington, sent an email to journalists with records of the island’s warm welcome to Pelosi. Despite their foundational political differences, major parties in Taiwan publicly welcomed Pelosi’s arrival — including both President Tsai Ing-wen’s pro-status quo Democratic Progressive Party and its main rival, the more Beijing-friendly Kuomintang.
There was little sense of danger in the official remarks. Over Twitter, Tsai later shared a photograph of the welcome Pelosi received in Taiwan, which notably included her beloved chocolate ice cream.
That sweet message seems a million miles away from the threat of war. Moments after Pelosi arrived in Taiwan on Tuesday night, China’s military announced that it would begin “a series of joint military operations around the island,” including an exercise using long-range live ammunition in the Taiwan Strait.
At least some of the exercise areas announced Tuesday appeared to overlap with Taiwan’s territorial water — a break with the live-fire zones during Chinese military drills in 1995 and 1996, during what was known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry described them as an attempt to “threaten our important ports and urban areas, and unilaterally undermine regional and stability.”
There were some protests against Pelosi’s visit this week. An island of 23 million citizens can hardly be a monolith. But most accounts suggested that more common reactions were celebration or, at worst, bemusement.
When The Washington Post’s Lily Kuo ventured out in Taipei to speak to local residents, positive reactions were not hard to find. “The more unhappy the [Chinese Communist Party] is, the happier I am,” one 35-year-old resident named Ingrid Ho, 35, told The Post. “Pelosi coming may mean all kinds of consequences but in the moment, the excitement outweighs reason.”
For many, the visit itself was barely a blip. “The biggest drama in my Taiwanese family’s group chat currently is how I missed my car’s annual smog check appointment and how a cockroach infestation has sprung up in my Taipei bedroom while I’ve been away on vacation,” American-Taiwanese journalist Clarissa Wei wrote for CNN.
Among analysts in Taiwan, there was clearly some level of mixed feelings about the cyclical interest in Taiwan’s geopolitical situation. “While much of the world seemed to be thinking that Taiwanese must be freaking out and running into bunkers and the like, I think many were entirely unaware of the visit or its significance until very shortly beforehand,” Taiwan-based writer Brian Hioe wrote for Popula.
“Even in the coverage of this Pelosi situation, which has brought so much attention to Taiwan, there’s just very little about what the actors in Taiwan are actually thinking. The narrative is, still, you need the U.S. to come in and save Taiwan,” Albert Wu, a Taiwanese-American historian based in Taipei, told the Guardian.
The shadow of the war in Ukraine hung over Pelosi’s time in Taiwan. Ukraine, like Taiwan, has spent decades stuck under the microscope of great power politics. Even the constant threat of global conflict can become boring when you spend every day in the middle of it. As Washington declared that a military offensive was imminent in late February, life in Kyiv continued as normal.
Ukrainian officials were even kind of annoyed by the warnings. President Volodymyr Zelensky said in January that the “destabilization of the situation inside the country” was the biggest threat to Ukraine. “There are signals even from respected leaders of states, they just say that tomorrow there will be war. This is panic — how much does it cost for our state?” he told a news conference in Kyiv.
Tsai has no doubt watched the situation in Ukraine and learned lessons from it. Likely one lesson is key: Stay close to the United States. Though Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan may have created problems for her government, the problems might have been worse if Pelosi had canceled her visit — especially after she canceled an earlier trip to Taiwan after testing positive for the coronavirus in April.
Taiwanese officials have grown frustrated with their informal and purposefully ambiguous relationship with the United States over recent years. “We need some degree of clarity,” de facto Ambassador Hsiao Bi-khim told Today’s WorldView in October 2020. Taiwan had by then seen almost four years of unpredictable relations during the Trump administration.
Polls conducted by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation found that last October, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, almost two-thirds of Taiwanese thought that the United States would send troops to protect the island if China invaded. That percentage dropped sharply in March 2022 to 34.5 percent, even as the belief that China could launch an invasion of Ukraine increased.
Pelosi’s visit has brought Taiwan to the top level of attention in the United States and shown the high levels of bipartisan support for Taiwan. And while it has provoked some saber-rattling from China, that is only likely to further drive away the Taiwanese people (some polls already show a shift away from support for the status quo toward a move for full independence) and put pressure on the Kuomintang ahead of local elections later this year.
Perhaps for Tsai’s government, that isn’t so pointless. | 2022-08-04T04:23:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pelosi’s Taiwan trip was more controversial in Washington than Taipei - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/pelosi-washington-controversial-reaction-taiwan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/pelosi-washington-controversial-reaction-taiwan/ |
She drinks way too much — every day — and sleeps with strangers she meets in bars. The problem then becomes that she thinks she is in a relationship with them, and is then crushed when things don't work out. And they never work out. I'm not exaggerating.
She is extremely sexual and is very vulnerable. She is desperate for an authentic and loving relationship, but men have used, abused and taken advantage of her. Charlene has behaved this way since the day we met.
I try to be supportive and nonjudgmental because she really is a beautiful person. She has been there for me through some tough times, but this friendship has become draining and I feel terrible.
She wants me to drink with her, but I won’t, because she has a problem. She is in counseling but constantly uses me to vent and cry to. I love her dearly, but I don’t want to be that listening ear anymore.
It’s exhausting, but I feel guilty and terrible for feeling this way. Am I a bad friend?
Bad Friend: The only “bad” thing you’ve done is to possibly delay “Charlene’s” recovery by offering advice, but not giving her the unvarnished truth.
Understand that as long as she has you as her soft and nonjudgmental place to fall, she doesn’t need to face the underlying source of her drama.
Try some nonjudgmental honesty: “I’m exhausted by this drama. I’ve tried to help you, but I’ve failed. At this point, I just hope that when you’re ready to change, you will.”
Worried: Some “charities” (and I use that term loosely) seem to exist mainly to hook generous and concerned older people into the cycle you describe.
I urge all of you to keep your giving local! Your local animal shelter, cultural institutions, library and children’s after-school programs would all appreciate a boost. Your mother-in-law’s donation would go much further, and she would have a personal connection to the institution receiving it.
Single Parent: I appreciated “Casual’s” honesty regarding this situation. | 2022-08-04T05:20:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: Our friendship has become draining, and I can't take it anymore - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/04/ask-amy-friend-drinking-venting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/04/ask-amy-friend-drinking-venting/ |
Dear Carolyn: I have a job I love, but it’s unfortunately way, away from all my family. My parents are getting older and my sibling and family are close to them. It’s actually been killing me a bit to be so far in the midst of all this chaos.
At the same time, I’ve built a pretty good life here and it would be a massive change. The jobs I’m looking at are good, interesting, but just … not quite the same. I’m also single, and it takes a little while to build friends, so a big change would be a big change.
It feels like a whiny problem to have, but I’m trying to get to a point when I’m not second-guessing myself all the time. Any suggestions?
— Upheaval
Upheaval: What is “whiny” about missing your family but also not wanting to uproot a happy, well-established life? Doesn’t your situation get at the reasons life is worth living?
So, sure, you can say you have an embarrassment of riches, with a good job and root system and also tight bonds with your family. But even then, your circumstances are such that committing yourself fully to one costs you dearly with the other.
I wish I could offer you a better answer than just restating your problem, but I think we all know I’m in no position to tell you “stay” or “go.” All I can do is urge you to stop the self-flagellation. You’re facing something hard, and you’re not likely to come up with any decision that checks all the boxes you want it to.
Taking yourself seriously at least is a way to get at what you really want here. You haven’t jumped on any of the jobs you’ve found near your parents, so, okay — that’s telling you something. You don’t want to go. Or, other version, you haven’t yet come across or created the circumstances that would move you to uproot. That’s an answer in itself.
And, likewise, you’re still looking (right?), which is also an answer: You haven’t met the terms required for leaving, but you’re still open to the possibility that certain terms would be good enough to move for.
And so on. Instead of the Big Decision, you are making small decisions, to the best of your ability. That’s fine. Really. And you can even make the small decision to suspend your job search temporarily to give yourself a mental break from it. Six months, say, no searching. Answers can come to you during that break, too.
You can also look into ways to be more present for your parents without uprooting completely — frequent visits, or remote work that allows you to stay in your current city but work from your parents’ area for spells, or a temporary relocation for school or training, or planning with them and your sibling to be involved from afar, etc. Obviously this depends on the type of work you do, but if it’s not compatible, then maybe that’s a more appealing way to make a change than geographic.
Short answer, to prove I know what one is: Take enough pressure off yourself to give your mind room to think. | 2022-08-04T05:20:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Torn between ‘pretty good life' and moving near family - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/04/carolyn-hax-move-near-family/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/04/carolyn-hax-move-near-family/ |
Across Germany, executives have spent the last few months war gaming how to respond if Russian President Vladimir Putin cuts off gas supplies. And many, from tiny companies to global behemoths, have arrived at the same solution: switch to oil.
In Munich, the municipal utility has converted two gas-fired boilers to run on diesel. Further South, in the German Alps, the Berchtesgadener Land farming cooperative has sent two milk-truck drivers to learn how to handle an oil-delivery rig, just in case they need to buy. To the North, the Veltins beer brewery near Dusseldorf has stockpiled five weeks’ worth of diesel to prepare for an emergency shift away from gas.
In some cases, it’s about burning fuel-oil in boilers and steam generators previously fired with natural gas; in others, it’s about running diesel generators to avoid electricity blackouts.
Berlin is quietly encouraging the shift. Wiegand-Glas, which produces glass bottles, was able to get the paperwork needed to prepare its furnaces to run using heating oil rather than gas in days, for example. “I have promised to reduce the bureaucracy when converting systems to an absolute minimum,” Anja Siegesmund, the regional environmental minister, said.
Privately, oil traders say they are getting inquiries from German companies that either haven’t previously bought fuel-oil or diesel, or abandoned the practice many years, or even, decades ago.
Take Covestro AG, a chemicals company that produces the building blocks of plastics. For years, it has relied on natural gas. But earlier this week, it told investors during its second-quarter results presentation that it was “initiating various measures to reduce its gas requirements in Germany in the short term, such as by switching to oil-based steam generators.”
The incentive to reduce gas consumption is huge after Putin reduced supplies to Germany via the Nord Steam 1 pipeline. The Dutch TTF gas contract, a European benchmark, is trading above 205 euros ($209) per megawatt hour, 10 times its average in the decade through 2020 and equivalent to about $350 per barrel of oil. Meanwhile, Brent crude is hovering around $100 per barrel. Hans-Ulrich Engel, BASF SE’s chief financial officer, did the math earlier this month: at prevailing prices, “it may actually be cheaper to use, as an example, heating oil to produce your steam, than use very expensive natural gas,” he said.
The consequences are twofold. German industry, long used to running on cheap Russian energy supplies, may be able to reduce its reliance on gas by more than previously thought without having to shut down completely. German gas demand is already running well below its five-year average for this time of year. Morgan Stanley reckons that German industrial gas consumption fell 24% in July from the same month in 2021. If the trend continues, European gas prices may not rise as much as feared, even if Putin completely shuts down exports later this year. The worst-case scenario, with TTF prices surging above 300 euros or even 400 euros, may be avoided. But the corollary may be a surge in German oil demand this winter well above anything currently estimated, potentially boosting global petroleum prices.
The size of the potential for incremental oil consumption is hotly debated, with bears and bulls offering good reasons for optimism and pessimism. Last year, oil bulls anticipated a significant demand boost from fuel-oil fired power plants that never materialized. Nonetheless, Energy Aspects Ltd., a consultant, estimates that if all of Europe’s oil-fired electricity plants operate this winter, it would add an extra 340,000 barrels per day to the continent’s demand. To put that into context, it’s larger than the 200,000 barrels per day increase in European oil demand anticipated by the International Energy Agency for 2023.
Moreover, those numbers don’t take into account the potential explosion in the use of diesel-fired generators and the use of heating oil and fuel-oil in industrial boilers and steam generators. With little hard data about how many companies have refurbished their boilers to run on oil, and how many others have purchased emergency power generators, any estimate is more conjecture than forecast. Still, some oil traders and consultants are penciling in a further 200,000 barrels a day in Germany and neighboring nations.
The gas-to-oil switch faces enormous obstacles, however. BASF, the German chemical behemoth, is paradigmatic of the difficulties. In a presentation to investors last week, the company said that preparations to substitute natural gas with, for example, fuel oil, were “progressing well,” echoing what other German companies have said in the last few weeks. But it included a big caveat in a tiny footnote: “Precondition is the sufficient availability of fuel oil.”
If companies in Europe’s biggest economy switch to oil from gas simultaneously this winter, it could potentially just trade one problem — gas shortages — for a second issue — a tighter market for diesel.
For now, European diesel has stabilized at around $1,000 per metric ton, down from a record of about $1,500 in early March, days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet the market will have to contend with the coming ban on Russian refined products, which will be fully effective by early February and will reduce diesel supply into Europe just when purchases may be peaking.
Diesel is the workhorse of the global economy. Since the beginning of the crisis, it has been the hottest refined product, even if it’s often overshadowed by US gasoline prices. As German industry prepares to wean itself off Russian gas in the coming months, diesel prices may start to dominate the headlines — for all the wrong reasons. | 2022-08-04T05:20:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Germany’s Switch to Diesel From Gas Comes at a Cost - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/germanys-switch-to-diesel-from-gas-comes-at-a-cost/2022/08/04/1ea21844-13b3-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/germanys-switch-to-diesel-from-gas-comes-at-a-cost/2022/08/04/1ea21844-13b3-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
That question became relevant with the launch this week of an innovative scheme to allow grain shipments to be exported from Ukrainian ports. Already, the prospects of food scarcity and political unrest, particularly in hungry nations in North Africa and the Middle East, have eased somewhat. But the maritime procedures are far from settled, and for the first few ships sailing outbound, the challenges are daunting.
Consider the frightening situation faced by masters of merchant ships like the Sierra Leone-flagged Razoni, which on Monday sailed out of Odesa headed for Lebanon with 27,000 tons of corn. Often, the first inkling of mines in the water is, unfortunately, an explosion. As the master of the Razoni got underway from port, he was no doubt on the bridge moving from side to side, peering anxiously over both the port and starboard bridge wings.
I’ve sailed through minefields, and it is a white-knuckle ride for even the most experienced of mariners. In the 1980s, the US Navy faced Iranian efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz as a part of the so-called Tanker War between the Arab nations and Tehran. In April 1988, the guided-missile frigate Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine and was almost sunk, saved by heroic damage control on the part of her highly trained crew.
Ideally, one sails through corridors that are not just clearly marked on charts, but also have been verified by a minesweeping vessel. The US operates very capable minesweeping ships that can clear such lanes or confirm they have already been cleared. And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has a standing minesweeping force that consistently trains and exercises as a team. In 2021, the UK agreed to provide the Ukrainian navy with two such ships, but the war interrupted that plan.
These unfamiliar procedures will be going through the mind of any merchant ship’s master, as his knuckles go white squeezing the bridge railings.
Perhaps some of these precautionary procedures will be tested in the days ahead, organized by the Joint Coordination Centre established under United Nations authority by Turkey, Russia and Ukraine. Every vessel attempting to clear the three Ukrainian ports overseen by this joint effort — Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny — will be inspected and monitored in transit.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to this export plan under duress, fearing that if he does not compromise on releasing the grain, NATO will simply do it by force, escorting the shipments with warships. He may try to subvert the scheme through a “false flag” operation he can blame on Ukraine or some other covert means. For now, the Western allies should do what they can to support the brave civilian mariners who are sailing into harm’s way.
• How to Break Russia’s Blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea Ports: James Stavridis
• Europe Shouldn’t Let Ukraine Go Into Default: Maria Tadeo | 2022-08-04T05:20:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Getting Grain Out of Ukraine Is Literally a Minefield - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/getting-grain-out-of-ukraine-is-literally-a-minefield/2022/08/04/1f7d39ba-13b3-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/getting-grain-out-of-ukraine-is-literally-a-minefield/2022/08/04/1f7d39ba-13b3-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Analysis by Mike Cohen and David Malingha | Bloomberg
Outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta invested heavily in new rail links and other infrastructure, which helped shore up East Africa’s largest economy but also resulted in state debt jumping more than five-fold since he took office. The International Monetary Fund sees Kenya at high risk of debt distress. Inflation has been fueled by rising energy and grain prices stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the worst drought in at least four decades. Thousands of farmers have lost their crops and animals, and the United Nations estimates almost 3 million people are in urgent need of aid.
Ruto, 55, started out in business by selling live chickens on a roadside, went on to own one of the country’s biggest poultry farms and expanded into hospitality and real estate. He entered politics in his 20s, securing a parliamentary seat in 1997. Ruto and Kenyatta were on opposing sides in a disputed 2007 vote that triggered ethnic fighting and the International Criminal Court charged them with crimes against humanity. Both men denied wrongdoing and the cases were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence. Ruto then backed Kenyatta in the 2013 and 2017 elections on the understanding there would be a quid pro quo after the incumbent stepped down. But the two fell out in 2018 after Kenyatta switched allegiance to Odinga, 77. Odinga already came close to the presidency in 2007, when he and many observers maintained that he secured the most votes even though Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner. Odinga eventually agreed to become Kibaki’s prime minister under a power-sharing deal that helped to end two months of violence. Prior to going into politics, Odinga studied and taught engineering, and co-founded his own firm. Kenyatta, who is stepping down after serving the maximum two terms, remains a key power broker -- in part due to the influence he wields in his Kikuyu community, the largest of more than 40 ethnic groups in Kenya.
3. What are the candidates promising?
Ruto has pledged to channel more money into industries that have the potential to create jobs for the 5 million young Kenyans he says aren’t working or studying, including investing at least 500 billion shillings ($4.2 billion) in farming and in small businesses. He’s ruled out restructuring Kenya’s debt -- which Odinga plans to do to free up resources for development. Odinga’s other pledges include increasing social spending, delivering double-digit economic growth and paying 6,000 shilling monthly stipends to the country’s poorest households. Gender equality has been a key election campaign issue. Odinga picked former Justice Minister Martha Karua as his running mate, and she could potentially become the nation’s first female deputy president. Ruto has said half of the positions in his cabinet will be assigned to women if he wins.
The electoral commission is adamant that problems experienced during previous votes have been ironed out. But campaign officials fear that replicas of booklets that are used to record voting tallies could be used to fabricate results -- a concern the commission says it has addressed. The commission meanwhile accused the police of interference after they arrested three people who were entering the country carrying voting material, but later said the issue had been resolved.
5. Could there be violence?
While tensions have risen in the lead-up to the vote, there are no discernible signs that the contest could degenerate into widespread violence, and most analysts see a low risk of that happening. The unrest that followed the 2007 election showed just how ugly the situation can get: At least 1,100 people died and about 350,000 were forced to flee their homes. The economy also took a hammering, with the growth rate slumping to 1.7% in 2008 from 7.1% a year earlier. Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group, has warned that a failure to hold the police accountable for rights violations committed during previous votes makes a recurrence of such abuses more likely.
The president and his deputy are elected on the same ticket for a five-year term. A candidate must win an absolute majority of the popular vote and at least a quarter of ballots cast in more than half of the nation’s 47 counties to avoid a run-off. The contest runs concurrently with the election of 47 governors, 47 senators and 290 members of the National Assembly. The final outcome must be announced within seven days of the vote. | 2022-08-04T05:20:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kenya Vote Backdrop Is Anger Over Living Costs, Debt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/kenya-vote-backdrop-is-anger-over-living-costs-debt/2022/08/04/125e2762-13b3-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/kenya-vote-backdrop-is-anger-over-living-costs-debt/2022/08/04/125e2762-13b3-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Imports from Russia are up sharply and come on top of record shipments to India of discounted Russian oil
NEW DELHI — India has dramatically increased its imports of fertilizer from Russia in recent months, demonstrating the difficulties the United States and its allies face in isolating Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine.
From April to June, India imported 7.74 million tons of Russian fertilizer, a figure representing about two-thirds of all its fertilizer imports from Russia last year, making the country India’s top supplier, according to information provided in Parliament by the minister of chemicals and fertilizers, Mansukh Mandaviya.
These shipments, including urea and nitrogen-based fertilizers, come on top of record imports of discounted Russian oil. Although Persian Gulf countries remain India’s top suppliers of crude oil, India in July bought about 1 million barrels a day from Russia, a sharp increase since the beginning of the year, according to Bloomberg News. Government data shows that India spent $3.7 billion on Russian oil between January and May, up more than 350 percent from the same period last year.
As sanctions over Ukraine war mount, Russia turns to India to buy oil and arms
As the war in Ukraine continues, so does the challenge Western countries face in seeking to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military campaign without hurting the poorest in the world. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres recently warned that vulnerable countries would be on the verge of famine without Russian food and fertilizers.
“There is no option,” agriculture expert Devinder Sharma said of India’s increased fertilizer imports from Russia. “Agricultural production will come under stress without adequate fertilizer supplies.”
Unlike oil, fertilizer is not included in the U.S. sanctions placed on Russia because of the invasion.
For India, this year’s monsoon-season rice crop is crucial after a scorching heat wave in March damaged the country’s staple wheat crop and reduced yields. With food stocks depleted and the climate uncertain, India banned wheat exports this year, saying its food security was “at risk.”
The country has shied away from joining the Western coalition arrayed against Russia, initially because of its dependence on Moscow for weaponry and now because of concerns over energy and food security.
India’s imports of Russian coal and sunflower oil also have jumped. Overall, Russia has become the 10th-largest source of imports to India, according to data from the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry, ranking much higher than in previous years. Through May, India imported goods worth $8.3 billion from Russia, nearly triple the value for the same period last year.
Indian officials have slammed what they describe as the West’s doublespeak about doing business with Russia, noting that Europe continues to purchase crude oil and natural gas from Moscow. “The new package of [European] sanctions is designed in a way where consideration has been given to the welfare of its population,” said Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar in June. “People need to understand that if you can be considerate to yourself, surely you can be considerate to others.”
Although the local production of urea, India’s most widely used fertilizer, is able to meet most of India’s needs, the country relies on imports of raw materials for potassium-, nitrogen- and phosphate-based fertilizers. India turned to Russian shipments after its top fertilizer supplier, China, imposed curbs last year on fertilizer exports to protect its own farmers amid soaring domestic prices.
Russia also has limited its overall fertilizer exports since last year but has continued to supply India. A report in the Indian Express newspaper suggested that Russian fertilizer was available at cheaper rates than the market prices. Officials from the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers did not respond to a request for comment.
The challenge for authorities in India is twofold: to ensure adequate supplies for farmers and to keep fertilizer affordable. An industry expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter said fertilizer on the open market was trading at three times its price last year.
Fertilizer crisis delivers profits and pain as Ukraine fallout broadens
India is in a difficult position because it relies on fertilizer imports at a time of high global prices, said Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow for South Asia at the Council on Foreign Affairs.
She said that the Biden administration has, so far, been “remarkably understanding” of India’s position on oil and other imports from Russia and that the issue was not likely to damage the relationship between the countries. “In the long run, it will depend on how the Ukraine crisis plays out, and whether India and the United States both decide that the costs of deepening their partnership is too high. But that seems unlikely,” she said.
India is not the only developing country facing such difficult choices. Brazil relies on fertilizer imports for its valuable soy crop, and one-fifth of its supplies come from Russia, according to the publication Quartz.
The Brazilian ambassador to Russia said that the two countries had managed to circumvent the logistical and payment difficulties posed by sanctions and that Brazil was receiving deliveries of Russian fertilizers, according to a report in June by the Russian news agency Tass.
“Since we have excellent relations with Russia in the trade sphere and supplies [of fertilizers] continue, I do not see reasons to look for them in a different place. We continue receiving fertilizers from Russia,” said the ambassador, Rodrigo de Lima Baena Soares, according to the Tass report.
Russia holding 400 passenger jets hostage in global sanctions fight
Sanctions researcher Edoardo Saravalle, formerly of the Center for a New American Security, said it would be necessary to provide alternative sources of imports if countries including India are not to turn to Russia.
Even as some countries have continued to trade with Russia, the economic isolation has taken a toll on it. A recent study by Yale University researchers, using trade and shipping data, suggests that international sanctions and the withdrawal of businesses from Russia have gravely hurt the country’s economy.
Russia’s position as a commodities exporter has “irrevocably deteriorated,” it is struggling to import parts and technology from “hesitant trade partners,” and domestic production has come to a “complete standstill,” the study concludes.
Saravalle said sanctions have been effective in imposing pain on Russia even if they have not brought its war in Ukraine to a stop.
“You’re never going to achieve a full blockade,” Saravalle said. “We’re still in the early stages of this conflict. Iran sanctions were the product of years of buildup.” | 2022-08-04T06:07:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Despite Ukraine invasion, Indian imports of Russian fertilizer up sharply - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/india-russia-fertilizer-oil-imports/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/india-russia-fertilizer-oil-imports/ |
UNITED NATIONS — The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations headed to Africa on Wednesday, saying she was going to focus on how the United State can help Uganda, Ghana and Cape Verde deal with the food crisis that has hit the continent particularly hard — not to compete with China and Russia. | 2022-08-04T06:48:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US envoy: Africa trip isn't to compete with Russia, China - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-envoy-africa-trip-isnt-to-compete-with-russia-china/2022/08/04/27711532-13b4-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-envoy-africa-trip-isnt-to-compete-with-russia-china/2022/08/04/27711532-13b4-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Ukraine Live Briefing: Brittney Griner trial nears end; Sweden, Finland’s N...
In Washington and Kyiv, critics of the Biden administration’s response say the president and his advisers appear largely unfazed by the Kremlin’s pronouncements
Russia’s vow to annex pockets of occupied Ukraine has presented the United States and its partners with a pressing dilemma, as trepidation grows in Washington and Kyiv over whether the West is positioned to avert a pivotal shift in the war.
Russian leaders have signaled they could hold votes in the country’s east and south on Sept. 11, alongside regional elections already scheduled to take place. And while Secretary of State Antony Blinken and senior White House officials have warned that any attempted land grab through “sham” referendums would bring “additional costs imposed upon Russia,” critics of the Biden administration’s response thus far — including some Democrats — contend that the president and his advisers appear largely unfazed by the Kremlin’s pronouncements.
The impending deadline is raising fears that if Russia declares sovereignty over the occupied areas, it could use the ensuing months — when the pace of battlefield maneuvering is expected to slow with the arrival of fall and winter weather — to solidify its hold and leave the Ukrainians unable to wrest back what they and the West say is rightfully theirs.
“Time is on Putin’s side,” said Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), referring to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Waltz in late July was part of a congressional delegation that toured the war-ravaged cities of Irpin and Bucha, and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. Waltz noted that in occupied areas, Moscow is already installing government offices, replacing the Ukrainian hryvnia with the Russian ruble as currency, handing out Russian passports and flooding the airwaves with pro-Kremlin media.
“The more time [Putin] gets to put his people in place,” Waltz said, “those occupied areas become more and more a new normal, a fait accompli, of being a part of Russia.”
How Russia is laying the groundwork for its annexation of Ukraine
The Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. The country’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said Moscow intends to protect areas “that want to determine their destiny independently.”
The specter of effectively losing tens of thousands of square miles to Russia has put fresh urgency behind the Ukrainian military’s attempt to stage a successful counteroffensive, with near-term plans to push for retaking the southern port city of Kherson. The government in Kyiv has mounted a fervent and at times public appeal for more security assistance, with Zelensky warning that only a few weeks remain to shift the momentum.
Biden administration officials insist they are exploring ways to respond to multiple contingencies, including annexation. There are, however, few signs they believe Russia asserting sovereignty over Ukrainian territory would demonstrably reshape the war — or that the threat alone should justify a dramatic escalation of military aid.
In more than a dozen interviews and briefings, officials from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community defended allied efforts to funnel weapons to Ukraine as sufficient to address Kyiv’s needs. These officials downplayed the prospect that a Russian land grab would mark a significant turning point and exuded confidence that plans to continue helping Ukraine defend itself in the long term will enable Zelensky to achieve his objectives.
“If Russia makes the mistake of seeking to annex Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainian military will seek to retake that territory, and it will have the support of the United States and the international community,” said Pentagon spokesman Todd Breasseale.
Yet to date, there is no indication the Biden administration intends to lift restrictions barring Ukraine from firing U.S.-provided weapons into Russian territory, even when fired upon from that side of the border, or supply the longest-range ammunition with which Ukrainian artillery crews might be able to reach such targets.
Similarly, there is no apparent rush to send Ukraine fighter jets, even though some senior U.S. officials have said that doing so is under consideration. Zelensky’s advisers have been adamant that if the war is to be won, Ukraine needs more firepower — and fast.
“When we get more HIMARS and hopefully combat aircraft, this is when we will be even more efficient with our military objectives and liberating Ukraine,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukrainian defense minister Oleksii Reznikov, said in an interview.
Since Russia invaded in late February, the United States has taken consistent steps to help Ukraine defend its territory, including land behind enemy lines. Earlier this year, for instance, the U.S. intelligence community changed its long-standing guidance against sharing information about the locations of Russian forces and materiel in Ukraine’s occupied areas, and now provides those details to Ukrainian counterparts in real time, officials say.
The intelligence — including satellite imagery, reports from intercepted communications and insights into Russian military activities in the Crimean peninsula, which it seized in 2014 — has proven vital to Ukraine’s military gains, according to officials familiar with the information sharing. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about U.S. support for the war.
But there is deep concern in some circles that while Western allies say they are with Ukraine for the long haul, their actions haven’t been aggressive enough.
“We have a real deadline, and we need to meet that deadline,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), who was part of the congressional delegation that visited Ukraine last month. “You can’t half-ass a war. You can’t put Ukraine in a position where they aren’t fully positioned to meet the challenge.”
Ukraine wants more 'game-changer' HIMARS. The U.S. says it's complicated.
In Europe, whose military contributions to Ukraine have lagged behind those of the United States, there are signs a shift could be underway. The European Commission on Monday said it had begun to disburse the first 1 billion euros in a 9 billion euro assistance package for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Germany, Europe’s wealthiest country, late last month approved the production of 100 self-propelled howitzers for Ukraine’s army, and this week confirmed delivery of multiple-launch rocket systems to the country.
Some have pointed to these steps as an indicator of Germany’s “long-term support” for Ukraine, according to Rafael Loss, a Berlin-based analyst at the European Centre on Foreign Relations. Internal debates over whether Germany should back offensive operations, such as Ukraine’s bid to retake Kherson, in addition to defensive operations seem to have died down as the pace of heavy weapons deliveries has picked up.
Critics note that Berlin’s military-aid budget for Ukraine is dwarfed by what it spends on energy supplies from Russia. Recent cuts, including Moscow’s decision to slash the amount of gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, are unlikely to shift that balance in the short term, leaving Russia with potential leverage or a means to retaliate against Europe for aiding Ukraine.
Facing the potential for an even tighter squeeze, the European Union last week agreed to reduce natural gas consumption over the winter months by 15 percent, or institute cuts if that benchmark cannot be met. The E.U. sanctioned Russian oil and coal, but not its natural gas, earlier in the conflict.
Following annexation, analysts say, Russia could point to any European-backed Ukrainian counteroffensives as a pretext to further choke off energy supplies in retaliation. Such economic pressure could test the Europeans’ resolve, said Sam Charap, a Russia specialist and political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
“They’re talking about gas rationing in Germany,” he said. “It’s getting pretty serious.”
Latvia’s foreign minister, Edgars Rinkevics, acknowledged that annexing Ukrainian territory would force Russia to defend it at all costs. But he dismissed conjecture that Putin had the capacity to lash out beyond Ukraine, warning that Russia’s resources are too beleaguered to engage in any credible fearmongering.
If the Russians “were able to be more aggressive, they would be more aggressive as we speak. Or weeks ago,” Rinkevics said in an interview. “It seems they have no more capability except for the nuclear one, and it seems they cannot use it for many reasons.”
Early in the conflict, Putin caused a stir by announcing that he was putting Russia’s nuclear arsenal on heightened alert. Western officials say the threat has yet to yield any tangible change in Russia’s nuclear posture, leading to a shared sense among the United States and its allies that any threat it issues, including a threat to annex territory, could be a bluff.
Sak, the aide to Ukraine’s defense minister, praised Ukraine’s success thus far in wearing down Russian forces, destroying their equipment and bashing troops’ morale. But Russia, he said, had committed so many atrocities and violations of international law that neither annexation nor any campaign to enforce it could be casually dismissed.
“We need to hope for the best but prepare for the worst,” Sak said. “And we understand Russia only responds to force.”
Birnbaum reported from Athens. Morris reported from Berlin. Shane Harris in Washington and Florian Neuhof in Berlin contributed to this report. | 2022-08-04T08:23:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia’s vow to annex occupied Ukraine sparks divisions, pleas for aid - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/04/russia-annexation-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/04/russia-annexation-ukraine/ |
FILE - Los Angeles Raiders wide receiver Cliff Branch, right, catches a pass from quarterback Jim Plunkett for a 64-yard gain as Cleveland Browns’ Hanford Dixon defends during the first quarter of an NFL football playoff game in Los Angeles, on Jan. 8, 1983. Branch was one of the best deep threats of his era to earn a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (AP Photo/File) (Anonymous/AP) | 2022-08-04T08:23:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cliff Branch's speed led to Hall of Fame after long wait - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/cliff-branchs-speed-led-to-hall-of-fame-after-long-wait/2022/08/04/c493a808-13c2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/cliff-branchs-speed-led-to-hall-of-fame-after-long-wait/2022/08/04/c493a808-13c2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Schools of fish in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef in 2017. (J. Sumerling/AP)
Marine scientists have found that parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest levels of coral cover since monitoring began nearly four decades ago, although they warn the reef’s recovery could be swiftly undone by global warming.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science, a government agency, began monitoring Earth’s largest reef system 36 years ago. Its latest report indicates that the northern and central parts of the reef are on the mend after an “extensive bout” of disturbances over the past decade, said Mike Emslie, a senior research scientist at the institute.
The results of the institute’s annual survey show that the reef “is still vibrant and still resilient, and it can bounce back from disturbances if it gets the chance,” Emslie said in an interview Thursday.
The Great Barrier Reef has been hit hard by rising temperatures in recent years. In 2016 and 2017, underwater heat waves triggered coral bleaching events so severe that scientists worried the reef would never look the same again.
UNESCO, the United Nations’ educational, scientific and cultural agency, threatened last year to add the Great Barrier Reef to a list of world heritage sites that are “in danger.” A June meeting to discuss the status of the reef was canceled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef should be listed as ‘in danger,’ U.N. body says
News of the recovery in the reef’s northern and central parts was partly offset by the report’s finding that there was a loss of coral cover in the southern region. There, the reef fell prey to an outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish, which feed exclusively on live coral, the scientists said.
About half of the reefs were surveyed before the most recent coral bleaching event in February and March. Emslie said researchers won’t know the full extent of the coral cover lost from that event until next year. The sheer size of the Great Barrier Reef system — it spans some 1,700 miles and is so large it can easily be spotted from space — means the survey is staggered over seven or eight months of the year.
Among the 87 reefs surveyed for the latest report, average hard coral cover in the north increased to 36 percent, up from 27 percent in 2021, and to 33 percent in the central Great Barrier Reef from 26 percent last year. Average coral cover in the southern region decreased from 38 percent in 2021 to 34 percent this year.
Much of the recent reef recovery was driven by the fast-growing Acropora species — whose delicate branching and table corals have adorned countless postcards for tourists.
Marine scientists worry that these corals are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming, including marine heat waves, coral bleaching and damaging waves, such as those generated during tropical cyclones.
“They’re susceptible to thermal stress and mass coral bleaching. They’re a preferred prey of crown-of-thorns starfish. And, they are easily toppled over and broken up by large storms,” said Emslie, the research scientist. He noted that Tropical Cyclone Yasi — the worst storm to hit the area in recent years — destroyed vast swaths of coral in a matter of hours in 2011.
Zoe Richards, a senior research fellow who leads the Coral Conservation and Research Group at Curtin University, said the report’s findings were “good news because the corals provide habitat for thousands of other plants and animals.”
However, she noted that the recovery was driven by a species that often grows in a “boom-and-bust pattern” and is vulnerable to thermal stress, as the report’s authors also detailed.
Some models on the effects of global warming predict there will be more severe cyclones as the planet heats up, along with more frequent and severe marine heat waves.
“Even though it’s promising this year, we’re probably only one bad summer away from a reversal of what we’ve seen, unfortunately,” Emslie said. | 2022-08-04T08:23:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Great Barrier Reef coral bounces back, but global warming still a risk - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/great-barrier-reef-coral-recovery-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/great-barrier-reef-coral-recovery-climate-change/ |
The president noted that the constitution cannot be changed during wartime
People take part in an annual Pride parade in Kyiv, Ukraine, in September 2021. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky floated “civil partnerships” as a potential answer to calls for the legalization of same-sex marriage, a step he said would not be possible during the war — though Russia’s invasion has reinvigorated the push for marriage equality.
More than 28,000 people signed a petition urging Zelensky to legalize same-sex marriage, arguing that gay couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. The war has injected additional urgency to that effort, with some gay couples concerned that the partner of a deceased soldier would not have the same visitation rights or benefits as they would if they were in a heterosexual relationship.
“At this time, every day can be the last,” the petition said. “Let the people of the same sex get the opportunity to start a family and have an official document to prove it.”
Responding to the petition on Tuesday, Zelensky — who has framed Ukraine’s defense against Russia as a fight for democracy and Western values — said that “in the modern world, the level of democracy in a society is measured, among other things, by the state policy aimed at ensuring equal rights for all citizens.”
However, he noted that the Ukrainian constitution, which defines marriage “based on the free consent of a woman and a man,” could not be changed during wartime, a rule stipulated by the constitution itself. He suggested the possibility of civil partnerships, which Ukraine has already “worked out options for,” he said, as it positions itself for its desired accession to the European Union, which has stronger protections for LGBTQ rights. Zelensky said he had asked the prime minister to look into the matter and report back to him with his findings.
Ukraine, a heavily Eastern Orthodox country, has had a less favorable societal attitude toward the LGBTQ community than in other parts of Europe. In Spain, 89 percent of people said homosexuality should be accepted by society, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. That figure was 86 percent in France and Germany, but only 14 percent in Ukraine, where 69 percent said homosexuality should not be accepted.
It’s unclear whether those views have significantly changed since then, but the war has created unlikely alliances between the LGBTQ community and other sections of society as the invasion has united Ukrainians from all walks of life.
Ukraine’s LGBTQ rights movement contends with war’s mixed impact
With the world’s gaze on Ukraine and its president, who has been largely heralded by the international community for his leadership during the war, Zelensky’s comments also come amid a push in some countries to further LGBTQ rights. In the United States, the House passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, spurred by fears that current protections could disappear if the Supreme Court overturned its landmark 2015 ruling. (The bill’s viability in the Senate is unclear, as it would require Republican support.) | 2022-08-04T08:23:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Zelensky floats civil unions amid gay marriage push in Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/ukraine-zelensky-gay-marriage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/ukraine-zelensky-gay-marriage/ |
Experts could have recommended funding for closing costs and advised against disqualifying debt-to-income ratio.
Down Payment Resource, a national database that connects homebuyers to tools and services, found that one-third of declined loan applications could have been prevented with a home buyers assistance program. (John Raoux/AP)
A recent analysis by Down Payment Resource of declined mortgage applications found that one-third of those loans were rejected for reasons that might have been resolved with the help of a home buyer assistance program.
Down Payment Resource, which is a national database for home buyer assistance programs, found that 33 percent of declined loan applications were rejected because of insufficient closing cost funds or a disqualifying debt-to-income ratio.
Your debt-to-income ratio compares the minimum payment on all recurring debt such as student loans, car payments and credit card debt, with your gross monthly income. The debt also includes your monthly housing costs, including your principal and interest on your mortgage, your property taxes and homeowner’s insurance premium. The maximum allowable debt-to-income ratio depends on each lender and loan program as well as your other credit qualifications, and generally ranges from 43 percent to as much as 50 percent.
Down payment assistance programs are available to buyers based on different guidelines that sometimes include income limits, a maximum loan amount and, in some cases, are limited to first-time purchasers.
Down Payment Resource used loan application data, including the location of the property, the home price, loan amount, income and homeownership history to run the information through its database. That analysis found that 33 percent of declined loans were eligible for homeowner assistance that would have reduced the loan-to-value by an average of 5.85 percent. The loan-to-value on a purchase loan is the amount borrowed compared to the home price.
Many loan programs allow borrowers to make a down payment of as low as three to five percent, but they must pay mortgage insurance to the lender. Increasing the amount of cash for a down payment lowers the mortgage balance and may reduce the mortgage insurance premiums and interest rate.
The analysis by Down Payment Resource found that most declined loan applications were eligible for several home buyer assistance programs. On average, the applicants were eligible for 10 home buyer assistance programs.
For example, home buyers in D.C. may be eligible for assistance through the DC Open Doors program and the Home Purchase Assistance Program (HPAP). Earlier this summer, the DC Housing Finance Agency brought back its Mortgage Credit Certificate (MCC) program, which is available for first-time buyers and can be used with other buyer assistance programs.
The MCC allows borrowers to claim a federal tax credit for 20 percent of the interest they pay on their mortgage, which reduces their tax burden more than a tax deduction. The remaining 80 percent of their mortgage interest can be taken as a tax deduction.
For more information about the D.C. financial assistance programs, click here. Similar programs are available through state and local jurisdictions and can be searched at www.DownPaymentResource.com. | 2022-08-04T09:54:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Study: Programs could have prevented mortgage application rejection - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/04/study-programs-could-have-prevented-mortgage-application-rejection/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/04/study-programs-could-have-prevented-mortgage-application-rejection/ |
Morgan Coates
People photograph the lava flowing from the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland on Aug. 3. (Marco Di Marco/AP)
A massive volcano erupting close to a global travel hub, Iceland’s Keflavik Airport, led to close monitoring by officials and sparked fascination from people who ventured near the bright orange lava flows despite warnings.
The Fagradalsfjall volcano in southwest Iceland erupted Wednesday at 1:18 p.m. local time, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office, which urged people to stay away from the sparsely populated area on the Reykjanes peninsula — though some still went up close to snap photographs with their children and fly drones.
The eruption, a volcanic fissure, is occurring about 10 miles from Keflavik International Airport and about 20 miles from the country’s capital, Reykjavik. As of Thursday morning, the airport — which has flights from Seattle, London and Frankfurt — remained open and operational.
International travelers will recall the 2010 eruption of the country’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge ash clouds into the atmosphere, grounding air traffic and leaving millions stranded.
“What we know so far is that the eruption does not pose any risk to populated areas or critical infrastructure,” Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir said in a statement. “We will of course continue to monitor the situation closely.”
“The eruption follows intense seismic activity over the past few days. It is considered to be relatively small and due to its location, there is low threat to populated areas or critical infrastructure,” the Foreign Ministry said.
The exact location of the eruption is in Meradalir, about 1 mile north of Mt. Stori-Hrutur, according to the Icelandic Met Office.
The area has experienced “strong earthquakes” in recent days ahead of the eruption, it added, and warned of ongoing tremors, rocks falling and gas pollution. The same volcano also erupted last year, it said, and lasted about six months.
Iceland’s new driving route explores the remote north
However, the same geological activity is also responsible for some of the country’s most dramatic natural features such as black sand beaches and geothermal lagoons, which draw in millions of foreign tourists.
Volcanic eruption has started in SW Iceland🌋
Risk to populated areas & critical infrastructure is considered very low and there have been no disruptions to flights.
Follow @Vedurstofan for updates and check out this live stream from @mblfrettirhttps://t.co/ChoNxnR2Vp
— MFA Iceland 🇮🇸 (@MFAIceland) August 3, 2022
The current volcanic response is being led by Iceland’s department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management alongside the Meteorological Office and University of Iceland. Scientists are also in the area with Coast Guard helicopters to assess the situation, the government said. | 2022-08-04T09:54:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iceland volcano eruption sparks travel fears, risky photo shoots - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/iceland-volcano-erupt-airport/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/iceland-volcano-erupt-airport/ |
A $90 million project would add educational and recreational space atop piers and pilings from the old 11th Street Bridge
Scott Kratz, left, vice president of Building Bridges Across the River, leads residents on a tour of the planned park along the Anacostia River in Washington. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
When the 11th Street bridges were being reconstructed, Harriet Tregoning, the District’s then-director of planning, sought to save the piers and pilings of one of the old bridges. It reduced demolition costs and left open the possibility of one day repurposing the infrastructure.
More than a decade later, her vision is coming together as D.C. wraps up a $90 million plan to mount a new deck over those pilings and piers, where the city plans to build gardens, public art space and a platform for community events with views of the Anacostia River. It would be the first elevated park in the nation’s capital, owned by the District and managed by Ward 8-based nonprofit Building Bridges Across the River.
The design for the 11th Street Bridge Park is nearly complete, a milestone for an atypical transportation project that will link the District’s poorest ward to one of its wealthiest, and one that city leaders and supporters say would spur economic growth east of the river. While discussions are underway in several cities to link communities separated by highways, the D.C. project is unusual in that it aims to connect neighborhoods above a natural river.
“I couldn’t be happier that it’s going to be realized,” said Tregoning, a D.C. resident who has followed the progress in the past decade. But the credit isn’t hers, she said. “Lots of people have ideas. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is getting something as wonderful and complicated and difficult as this to happen.”
Early in the process, Tregoning asked Scott Kratz, who was working as a museum educator at the time, to help explore the possibilities of reusing the old bridge piers. The city had considered adding a new trail or streetcar route atop the piers. Those concepts faded quickly, but Kratz said the community became more enthusiastic about a park to create a communal space between the Navy Yard and Anacostia neighborhoods.
“These communities are separated by 900 feet of water. They have been divided for generations,” Kratz said. The park, he said, could bring residents on both sides together while serving as “an anchor for economic and environmental justice.”
Kratz volunteered to run community meetings about park planning until he joined Building Bridges in 2014, leading the effort through an organization with Southeast D.C. roots. The park, however, turned out to be only a piece of the project.
In 10 years, Building Bridges has raised $122 million from corporations, foundations, private donors and federal grants. The District is putting $45 million toward the park construction using general funds. Building Bridges is paying the other half and is about $9 million away from its fundraising goal, Kratz said.
Most of the money that Building Bridges raised, $85.4 million, has gone to support residents east of the river as part of an anti-displacement program. An economic analysis showed the project’s potential to create jobs and jump-start development, but also warned of likely increases to property values and risks of displacing residents.
After 10 years of flunking, Anacostia River passes annual health-check with D rating
“We’ve seen these kind of parks around the country can generate a tremendous amount of value, and oftentimes that value is extricated from the community,” Kratz said. “The last thing we’d want to do is that the same residents who helped shape this park for the last 10 years are unintentionally displaced. We saw this real unique opportunity to get ahead of that.”
Several programs are in place to assist the community, said Vaughn Perry, the nonprofit’s director of equity. He said more than 150 residents have secured jobs through a construction training program, and some of the graduates are expected to help build the park. Down-payment assistance has gone to more than 100 Ward 8 renters to help them become homeowners. Black-owned businesses have received technical support, low-cost loans and grants.
“It has been really important for us to make sure that local residents are part of the process at the park,” Perry recently told residents touring the banks of the Anacostia.
Other cities that are planning similar parks are looking at the D.C. project as a model, said Kratz, who has advised officials in Los Angeles, Dallas and Buffalo on anti-displacement strategies.
The new park, to be built adjacent to the westernmost of the three 11th Street bridges, was inspired by projects such as New York’s High Line, an elevated railway line remade as a garden promenade. The D.C. project will be an X-shaped ribbon of green above the Anacostia, featuring an open plaza, amphitheater, play areas for children and a solar-powered environmental education center staffed by the Anacostia Watershed Society.
With most of the construction funding secured, the District Department of Transportation is planning to put the project out to bid this fall, meaning construction could begin next year with an opening in 2025. The project is expected to receive final clearance this fall from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, which have review oversight.
Project officials say they are also creating artwork on both sides of the bridge to reduce the impact of highways that have separated the communities. In addition to the local traffic on the 11th Street Bridge, two Southeast Freeway spans cut through the area.
The District replaced the two 11th Street bridges with three spans to ease traffic flow across the river, adding ramps and interchanges with the Anacostia Freeway. The project was designed to create a separate crossing for local traffic, carrying drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, to connect to neighborhoods on both sides of the river while providing a better link for highway commuters.
When the park opens, residents could gather at a cafe, children could learn about the river at the environmental education center and visitors could launch kayaks and canoes into the river. A 250-person outdoor amphitheater would host local performers, while the park would house the work of artists near a grove where visitors could enjoy views of the city and the river. It also will include a sculpture of the Anacostia River’s native plants.
Ahmad Woodard, 24, an artist who grew up in Anacostia and still lives in the area, helped to curate art that will go into the park. He said local artists will have a platform to perform and display their work while the amphitheater will host performances and festivals that would put Anacostia on the map for people in the region who have never visited.
“I see a lot of people connecting through this bridge in a great way,” Woodard said.
Tregoning said she hopes the result will be what was envisioned a decade ago: “a space where people who wouldn’t otherwise be in the same place would be able to mingle and do things together.” | 2022-08-04T10:16:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anacostia River park: D.C.'s first elevated park will link neighborhoods - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/04/dc-anacostia-river-park-bridge/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/04/dc-anacostia-river-park-bridge/ |
Turns out, visiting the International Space Station is a lot more work than people expect
Michael Lopez-Alegria and Larry Connor during SpaceX training. (Axiom Space)
Space: It’s not for amateurs. At least not in the International Space Station. If you want to visit the orbiting laboratory, NASA now says you must be escorted by a former NASA astronaut, someone who can guide you through the dizzying, disorienting wonders of weightlessness and make sure your presence at the station isn’t a burden.
The move comes as a number of private citizens are flying to space, changing the definition of what an astronaut is and who gets to be one.
Private companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX have sent crews comprised entirely of private citizens to space. (Blue Origin is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.) And NASA has sought to capitalize on the growth of the commercial space sector, announcing in 2019 that it would finally allow private citizens to visit, something Russia had been doing for years.
The new rules come a few months after the first private astronaut mission to the ISS from the United States in a flight arranged by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is working to build a space station of its own. Three paying customers flew in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now is an executive at the company. Axiom is planning another mission, which will also have a former NASA veteran onboard, Peggy Whitson.
The company had been planning on future missions to fly crews without a guide. But in a notice this week, first reported by SpaceNews, the space agency said that “a former NASA astronaut provides experienced guidance for the private astronauts during preflight preparation through mission execution,” as well as acting as a liaison between the private crew and the professionals onboard the station. Having a former NASA astronaut along “reduces risk to ISS operations,” the space agency said.
In an interview, Lopez-Alegria said he agrees with the changes. “It’s a good idea,” he said, adding that it was “a fundamentally sound policy.” But he said he hopes that over time NASA will allow civilians to fly unaccompanied, as training improves and more people visit the station.
“I do think that there is a possibility that should be considered — that at some point we can wean ourselves from this after we have enough experience,” he said. “It’s no secret that the more seats we sell, the more revenue we get. So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that at some point we’d like to transition to a model where we don’t have a previously flown astronaut.”
The mission pilot, Larry Connor, the founder and managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio, agreed. Because the visitors spent a lot of time conducting research and were the first all-private crew to call on the station, “I think having a proven NASA commander like Mike L.A. was really key,” he said. “We were the first ones. We had to get it right. We had to meet or exceed all of the appropriate NASA standards, which we did.”
During the Axiom flight, Lopez-Alegria was busy, he said, making sure the visitors got the most out of their experience. While they prepared diligently for the flight, training for hundreds of hours at SpaceX outside Los Angeles and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, arriving in space still required a significant adjustment.
Many astronauts get sick when in space, a condition known as space adaptation syndrome. Some find that with no up or down in a weightless environment, they get nauseous, like a heavy car sickness. Lopez-Alegria said the three he traveled with did not suffer any illness: “It was remarkable how well we all felt.”
Connor said that as soon as he floated into the space station, “I’m like, ‘When do we eat?’ By day two or three I was super comfortable in zero-G floating around sleeping. Like so many things it comes down to the individual.”
Still, learning how to move in a weightless environment can be jarring. Rookie astronauts bang their heads, crash into walls or instrumentation. They have difficulty finding toeholds to keep them in place. Anything not tethered down floats away.
“The problem is when you get to the space station everything becomes more difficult,” said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who helped prepare one of the crew members, Eytan Stibbe, for the flight. “Simple daily tasks like brushing your teeth become complicated. … Everything takes a lot longer than you anticipate, and I’m not even going to get into bathroom operations. That’s the worst of all.”
The Axiom-1 crew included Connor, Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot, and Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm. Instead of going on a pure joyride, they conducted research and science experiments in space, and were a bit too ambitious with the amount of work they set out to accomplish, Lopez-Alegria said.
“We got up there and, boy, we were overwhelmed,” he said during a conference last week. “Getting used to zero gravity is not an overnight thing.”
For the next private astronaut flight, he said in the interview, “the timelines will be more relaxed. We will have more free time. And we will give ourselves ample time to acclimate to the zero-G environment.” | 2022-08-04T10:55:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NASA will require visitors to the space station to have an astronaut escort - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/04/nasa-space-station-visitors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/04/nasa-space-station-visitors/ |
Donovan Johnson in 2019. (Irina Danilova/AP)
Johnson is now suing those officers and their town outside of Boston, alleging they used excessive force and unlawfully searched and detained him — a result of biased policing, the lawsuit says. It demands unspecified damages and training for Arlington police on implicit bias, appropriate escalation and interactions with bystanders.
“The Arlington Police Department had no evidence that Mr. Johnson was involved in a crime, in fact to the contrary, witnesses informed the police that he was not involved,” one of Johnson’s lawyers, Mirian Albert, told The Washington Post. “Yet at the end of the day, he was humiliated and physically violated.”
Conroy did not respond to a request for comment from The Post late Wednesday. The Arlington Police Department also did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. In a statement to the Associated Press, Police Chief Juliann Flaherty said the department hadn’t yet been served with the lawsuit and could not comment.
On Feb. 10, 2021, a manager at a Homewood Suites hotel in Arlington called police because a White man who had been banned from the premises was in one of the rooms. The man, identified in the lawsuit as “Kyle T.,” had been suspected of stealing hotel televisions and using a room for “human trafficking,” the lawsuit says, adding that he was known to police.
When officers arrived, they showed a photo of Kyle T. to a front-desk clerk, who said he believed the man was staying with a female hotel guest, according to the lawsuit. When Conroy knocked on the room door, he heard a window open and suspected that Kyle T. had escaped from one of the windows. Conroy ran out of the hotel, saw footprints in the snow and followed them, beginning a chase that led into nearby Somerville, where Johnson lived, the lawsuit says.
Johnson was walking home from his job at a hospital and had stopped at a CVS. After leaving the store, he saw a man run by and Conroy approach, according to the lawsuit. Johnson asked what was happening, and the police officer told him to get on the ground, the lawsuit says.
“Still unaware as to why Defendant Conroy was yelling at him, Mr. Johnson froze in place,” the lawsuit says.
“I didn’t do anything,” Johnson said, according to the lawsuit.
That’s when Conroy, using a “takedown maneuver,” threw Johnson face-first onto the concrete, the lawsuit states. Conroy put his knee on Johnson’s neck, keeping it there even as Johnson said “I can’t breathe,” the lawsuit says.
Meanwhile, Kyle T., who had dropped to the ground, was “left unattended,” the lawsuit states. Another officer eventually arrived and detained Kyle T., who said he did not know Johnson.
A third officer arrived and jumped on Johnson, helping Conroy handcuff him, according to the lawsuit. As Johnson pleaded to be let go, that officer pulled down Johnson’s mask and then stuffed it in his mouth to silence him, the lawsuit alleges.
The officers then searched Johnson, removing items from his pockets, including a PlayStation controller, which was thrown onto the sidewalk. Even after Johnson insisted he did not know Kyle T., the officers allegedly drove Johnson to the Homewood Suites hotel and questioned the staff about whether they recognized him. When the staff members said they’d never seen Johnson, the officers let the 20-year-old go, the lawsuit states. Johnson said he had to find his own way home following the 45-minute detainment.
“Our client’s rights were violated within view of his own home,” Albert, Johnson’s attorney, told The Post. “This type of police misconduct is precisely what fuels mistrust between communities of color and law enforcement.” | 2022-08-04T11:04:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police pursuing a White suspect detained a Black man instead, lawsuit says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/04/arlington-massachusetts-police-lawsuit-johnson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/04/arlington-massachusetts-police-lawsuit-johnson/ |
Assistant Public Defender Tamara Curtis wipes her eyes during testimony from victims' families in the sentencing phase of Parkland, Fla., school shooter Nikolas Cruz's trial on Aug. 1. (Amy Beth Bennett/Pool /Reuters)
The last thing Fred Guttenberg told his 14-year-old daughter was that it was time for her to go, that she was going to be late. Hours after rushing his two children to school that Valentine’s Day morning in 2018, a shooter unleashed a barrage of gunshots inside a Parkland, Fla., high school — killing 17 people, including Jaime Guttenberg.
During Tuesday’s sentencing proceedings for the convicted shooter, Nikolas Cruz, Guttenberg’s voice broke while he talked of the imagined future he had for Jaime, one that never came to be. But his were not the only tears falling in court — members of Cruz’s defense team were also crying, videos show.
“I cannot recall if I actually ever did tell Jaime that day how much I loved her. I never knew that I would lose the chance to say it over and over and over again,” Guttenberg said as public defender Nawal Najet Bashiman dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Two others on Cruz’s team also shed tears during testimony Tuesday.
Jurors have heard testimonies from teachers, survivors and families whose lives were upended by the massacre since the trial began July 18. They’ve seen videos of students fleeing for their lives and listened to the screams and loud bangs that rang through the air that day — all to determine if Cruz, who pleaded guilty in October, should be sentenced to death or to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Prosecutors making the case for the death penalty are basing their arguments on seven of the aggravating factors established in state law, including that Cruz’s acts were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.”
“Those actions, killing 14 children, the athletic director, coach and a teacher, is why we’re here today — cold, calculative, manipulative and deadly,” Broward County State Attorney Michael Satz said in his opening statement.
In Florida, a death sentence requires a unanimous recommendation by the jury. If he’s punished with death, Cruz, now 23, would be one of the youngest people to receive that sentence in recent decades.
Cruz’s defense attorneys — who had proposed a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence — have previously painted a picture of a troubled young man who has shown signs of remorse after struggling with mental health issues and a difficult childhood. However, they announced on July 18 that they wouldn’t give an opening statement until it’s time to present their case in the following weeks.
Four years after Parkland school massacre, parents of victims protest and mourn
In the meantime, however, the proceedings have been filled with testimony from parents relaying heartbreak after heartbreak — stirring emotions even for those who are working to save Cruz’s life.
It’s rare for attorneys to cry in the courtroom — especially “based on something the other side has said,” said Keith Swisher, a professor of legal ethics at University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law.
With this being “an incredibly overwhelming, heated, and atypical case,” it’s unlikely to bring negative consequences upon the attorneys, he said. It could lead Cruz to seek new counsel though, he added.
“In a typical legal case … the client would likely feel betrayed and perhaps the wrong signal would be sent to the judge or jury if the client’s own attorney cried based on the opposing side’s evidence or arguments,” Swisher said. “If the crying, or other visible signals, possibly bias the jury against the defendant, the defendant might have a basis to appeal.”
On Tuesday, Thomas and Gena Hoyer described how the loss of their 15-year-old son, Luke — called affectionately by his mother as “Lukey Bear” — had irreparably broken what had been “a family unit of five always trying to fit into a world set up for even numbers,” Thomas Hoyer said.
Luke had been a “surprise baby,” coming along several years after his older siblings. That Feb. 14 morning, he had woken up to a bag of Skittles and a card from his mother. His father, on his way to work, yelled “Have a good day” from downstairs without seeing Luke’s face — in “the kind of casual exchange you have when you think you have forever together,” Hoyer said, “and then we didn’t.”
During the Hoyers’ victim impact statement, public defenders Bashiman and Tamara Curtis couldn’t hold back tears. Chief Public Defender Melisa McNeill wiped hers away. Cruz sat expressionless.
Soon after, Judge Elizabeth Scherer called for a 10-minute break.
As the courtgoers stood up and began clearing the room, crumpled tissues could be seen on the table where the defense team sat — they’d be used again. | 2022-08-04T11:04:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lawyers for Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz cry during sentencing trial - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/04/parkland-shooting-trial-attorney-cry/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/04/parkland-shooting-trial-attorney-cry/ |
PetSmart requires employees to pay for dog grooming training and tools by taking on debt to the company, a California lawsuit alleges. The full debt is forgiven only if the employee stays at PetSmart for at least two years.
Sisi, a dog up for adoption, at a Los Angeles-area PetSmart for grooming in 2015. (Jeff Lewis/AP Images for PetSmart)
BreAnn Scally started working at PetSmart because she thought it would help her build the skills she needed to one day open an animal rescue, her childhood dream. Growing up, she used to spend her days walking her nana’s dogs, sometimes dragging her blanket into their kennel to snuggle.
Scally, 24, got a job in February 2021 as a “bather” at a PetSmart in Salinas, Calif., hoping to become eligible for “Grooming Academy.” PetSmart’s website touts the “free paid training” as a part of a “career glow up,” with 800 hours of hands-on, supervised training “valued up to $6,000!”
She didn’t realize until months later, she says, that the papers she’d signed to start Grooming Academy and receive grooming tools had locked her into an agreement to stay with the company for two years, or else repay the entire cost of the “free” training.
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Now Scally is suing the country’s largest pet retailer, in a complaint that alleges PetSmart traps aspiring groomers in an unfair arrangement that allows the company to profit off training and uses debt to discourage workers from leaving their jobs.
“The financial goals that I had, that I was so close to, they’ve become further and further from my reach because of this,” Scally said.
PetSmart said that it does not comment on pending litigation, but that it is “committed to supporting the professional development of our associates.”
“Other training programs in the industry can cost more than $10,000,” the company said in a statement. “We are proud that PetSmart’s on-the-job training program offers a rewarding career path without the out-of-pocket costs associated with other training programs.”
The complaint alleges that instead of the free training and grooming tools promised, PetSmart keeps workers on the hook for $5,000 — or $5,500 should they accept a grooming tool kit — if they are fired or quit before two years.
This practice violates a core tenet of labor and employment law that the employer pay for the cost of doing business, according to Rachel Dempsey of Towards Justice, a nonprofit that represents workers in litigation, who is one of Scally’s attorneys. With Grooming Academy, PetSmart is effectively charging its workers for training while making money off the grooming jobs they complete in the process, Dempsey argues.
Under California law, there is no regulatory requirement for grooming certification. In the absence of such requirement, the law says employers are responsible for the cost of required training that is incurred for the employer’s benefit, the complaint says.
“No matter how you characterize the training … PetSmart is doing something illegal,” Dempsey said. “You cannot make employees pay for their own training or pay to work for you.”
David Seligman, executive director at Towards Justice and another attorney for Scally, said that, broadly speaking, restrictive agreements like the one PetSmart requires for its groomers allow employers to pay workers less and provide fewer benefits, “because they don’t have to worry about one of the primary ways employees exercise their power which is by quitting and finding a better job.”
Many PetSmart groomers make barely above minimum wage, the complaint notes. Scally was making $15 an hour at PetSmart.
“For these workers, $5,500 could be more than two months of pay. As a result, leaving their jobs in search of higher wages could lead to difficulty paying rent or putting food on the table,” the complaint alleges.
Michael Rubin, an employment lawyer with Altshuler Berzon in San Francisco, argues that the debt “can be used to ensure a workforce that is more compliant” and “far more fearful” about speaking up.
“The fact that someone has gone through PetSmart Grooming Academy isn’t going to enhance that person’s ability to get another job in the field,” Rubin said. “It really maximizes their chances of sticking around PetSmart long enough that the debt is paid off.”
PetSmart has faced criticism over conditions in its salons before: A 2018 investigation by NJ Advance Media found that at least 32 dogs had died “during or within days” of grooming at PetSmart since 2015, when the company was purchased by the private equity firm BC Partners.
PetSmart said in a statement that its academy-trained groomers receive more than 800 hours of instruction, “significantly more than any state licensing program.”
“We love and care for the pets in our care as if they are our own,” the statement said. “We perform more than 13 million grooming appointments per year, and we will never waver on our industry leading standards that millions of pet parents entrust us to uphold.”
Former employees told NJ Advance Media that the company’s groomer training “can fall short of what’s advertised.” Workers said that they “have seen unprepared trainees rushed into stores because of short-staffing” and that “many felt either ignored or retaliated against when they spoke up about safety concerns or wrongdoing by colleagues,” according to the investigation.
Jenna Wait, PetSmart’s quality and education leader in California, has been with the company since 2008. She started out as a bather and worked her way through Grooming Academy before serving as a district trainer for eight years.
“Grooming is a skill and it takes time to master,” Wait said. “There’s so much more than people think.”
“One of our strongest features is the amount of time that we spend working hands-on with our groomers,” Wait said.
The salon manager responsible for Scally’s one-on-one training was also supervising several other groomers and bathers while maintaining her own schedule of grooms. Scally said she learned by watching other groomers and working through training exercises on her own, when she wasn’t answering phones, checking out customers, scheduling appointments and keeping the salon clean. Sometimes she and the other workers were so busy they’d go a whole shift without a break or meal, according to the complaint.
How to create a pet-friendly office that everyone can tolerate
Scally loved working with dogs despite the challenging environment, but after seven months of struggling to get by, she was forced to accept that she couldn’t support herself (and her three cats and dog) while working at PetSmart.
“I was basically just scraping up dollars every week to make it to my next check and get a couple gallons of gas to get home,” Scally said.
It was only when Scally tried to leave that she realized her “free paid training” had left her with a $5,500 debt to PetSmart. Scally said that when she approached her manager, she was told PetSmart was unlikely to try to collect if she could sell enough products and groom enough dogs to make the money back before quitting. So she said she kept track of the revenue she brought in and didn’t quit until September 2021, when she thought she’d made enough.
But in January, with no warning, a collection notice appeared on Scally’s credit report for $5,500. She said the debt made a huge dent in her credit score, preventing her from co-signing a lease on an apartment with her partner. She put off her plans to return to veterinary school because she didn’t want to take on more loans with a lower credit score.
“For me to have this financial burden of paying back $5,500, it’s disheartening because I could have done something else,” Scally said. “I could have possibly paid an online grooming academy $500 for probably more than what I got for what PetSmart charged me.” | 2022-08-04T11:25:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lawsuit: PetSmart’s ‘free paid training’ leaves dog groomers with debt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/04/petsmart-dog-grooming-training-labor-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/04/petsmart-dog-grooming-training-labor-lawsuit/ |
The journey to convert a vintage carriage house into a modern classic
To get their dream home, Montgomery County family had to partially demolish and rebuild 1909 structure
The homeowners wanted an L-shaped house, which includes a central courtyard. (Jennifer Hughes)
Ten years ago, Lee and Jen Odess bought a 1970s-era rambler with a leaky basement in the special taxing district known as the town of Oakmont, which is off Georgetown Road in Bethesda.
They sold the house in 2015 and moved to Florida for a job opportunity but Oakmont called them back home. The complicated journey took a while but eventually landed them in a modern home that started its life as 1909 vintage carriage house.
The family, which includes two children, moved back to Bethesda in 2018 and began looking for something to buy. “We spent six months in a rental looking at houses,” says Jen, 42. “I knew I wanted an L-shaped house, and I knew I wanted super modern.” The family considered buying a mid-century modern home shaped like an “L” while in Florida and the idea stuck. She and her husband Lee, 45, both work as technology executives.
The chances of finding a modern L-shaped house in Bethesda seemed remote, so the family called in Colleen Healey, principal of Colleen Healey Architecture based in D.C, to start looking at teardown possibilities. Healey had known the homeowners personally for years and was frank with them about their limited options. “I told them, ‘Given your budget we’re going to have to find a lot that nobody else wants, get a deal on it and then figure out how to be creative,’ ” Healey says.
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While scrolling through listings, Jen landed on a possibility. “The house was stuck in time on a funky shaped lot and the price was low,” she says. The lot hosted a carriage house that years earlier had been converted into living space via an addition off the back. It sits off the street slightly behind what used to be the main house on the estate and is bordered by seven surrounding properties. Healey gave the thumbs-up and the purchase was made in 2019 for $615,000.
The town of Oakmont was formed in 1918 by three neighbors who wanted municipal services brought to what was then a remote section of Montgomery County. Oliver Owen Kuhn, the managing editor of the Evening Star, was one of the founders. Walter “Big Train” Johnson, the ace pitcher of the Washington Senators, lived nearby, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had friends in the neighborhood. The town is two streets long and includes about 60 homes spread over 18½ acres. The town has a design review board that discourages “mansionization,” but found no issues with the Odess family’s unconventional plans.
The design was hatched quickly in about six months as Healey and Jen decided to preserve a red maple tree on the side of the property and three walls of the carriage house. The addition would be torn down and rebuilt. A “galley” shoots off at a 90-degree angle and connects a new section. The L-shape creates a courtyard used as an outside entertainment space and a playground for the kids.
Demolition began in September 2019 as the family planned on being in their new home before their two-year lease was up on the rental. Six months later, the pandemic hit. Principals of Cabin John Builders, based in Cabin John, Md., who are also friends of the homeowners, signed on as the crew and quickly began ascending the learning curve associated with modern design. “Modern detailing has to be done at the framing level before you get to the finishes,” says Healey.
Delays began to affect the project and living arrangements as the family realized they were going to have to vacate the rental before the new house was finished. They moved in with Lee’s parents for a while, then packed up the family vehicle and began a road trip to Florida, stopping at Airbnbs so the kids could attend online classes. Life on the road lasted about eight weeks until the builders and homeowners agreed the house was finished enough to occupy.
The driveway runs to the side of what used to be the estate’s main house and ends at what used to be the front of the carriage house. The circular porthole window was part of the existing structure. The large window that looks into the kitchen used to be a horse-size entrance. Although the carriage house could have been knocked down, there was a strategy for leaving it in place.
“People probably thought we were crazy for keeping any of it,” says Healey. “For zoning reasons, we were able to stay further forward, by about four feet, because we preserved parts of it.” One wall of the carriage house was removed and replaced with a window wall looking out onto the courtyard. The roof was popped up and pitched to a shed configuration, which made room for clerestory windows.
In Great Falls, a family estate rises with a team effort
The home’s front door is off to the side of the driveway and opens into a foyer. There’s a mud room off to the right and a small study to the left. The great room is straight ahead. Initially the family planned on separating the living area of the space and the dining area and kitchen with a slatted wooden divider, but the plans changed. The kitchen is to the right with the butler’s pantry tucked behind the kitchen’s rear wall.
The main living area sits inside the original walls of the carriage house. The space that used to be the addition was rebuilt into two kids’ rooms, each with its own full bath. There’s also a hangout space and a powder room. The floors in the old section are all poured concrete.
The kitchen is defined by an island with seating for three and gray, lacquered base cabinetry below. The range and refrigerator, both from Jenn Air, are framed into a built-in wall unit that includes a line of upper cabinets. The sink faces the outside wall, which is lined with a row of whitewashed oak base cabinetry. All the cabinets came from Downsview Kitchens, based in Ontario, Canada. The island and countertops are a mix of honed black granite and white Corian.
The far wall of the great room is trimmed with slatted wood that leads guests into the gallery, which functions as a hallway leading to the new section of the house. Early in the design phase the gallery was going to be all glass, but plans were scaled back, and it is now lined with slatted wood. The new section is on two levels, with the lower level dedicated to a guest suite. Upstairs is the main suite, which includes an office, bedroom and a walk-through closet leading to the main bath. The main bath has a separate water closet and a curbless shower with three heads. An overhead skylight illuminates the space.
The main suite offers a quiet respite and an excellent view of the red maple tree that survived the renovation process. The exterior color selections are a mix of bold hues and black, which caused one of the neighbors to ask the homeowners if they were building a funeral parlor. Not counting the snarky comment, the quirky neighborhood that once turned on the streetlights with a switch on one of the original resident’s front porch has accepted the new arrival.
“It’s unexpected. It looks like a very small space and then it opens up to you,” says Healey.
“It’s so different for the neighborhood. They can see there are different ways of renovating and different ways of upgrading. There are other answers and other ways of living.”
The homeowners chose not to disclose the renovation costs and concede that their price per square foot is high as compared with other homes in the area — but is offset by the home’s modest 3,300 square foot size.
Resale at this point isn’t an issue, even if another job opportunity in Florida materializes. “We don’t care because we’re not moving,” says Jen. “If we were moving, we’d keep the house. It’s not very big but it’s dialed in to exactly what we want.”
The experience became life-affirming for the homeowners, says Jen. “Facing the unknown was a challenge but I love the story. We repurposed parts of the house and it was fun doing it with close friends. It was meaningful for us.” | 2022-08-04T11:25:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The journey to convert a vintage carriage house into a modern classic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/04/vintage-carriage-house-gets-modern-update-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/04/vintage-carriage-house-gets-modern-update-maryland/ |
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