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Taylor Fritz, the No. 3 seed and top-ranked American at the Citi Open, wraps his head in ice towels during his match against Britain's Daniel Evans. Fritz retired in the third set. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Short of that, a wide-brimmed hat and water bottle were essential survival gear as temperatures soared above 95 degrees amid a National Weather Service heat advisory, with the afternoon humidity making conditions at Rock Creek Park Tennis Center all the worse.
For players competing on the hard courts, which ratchet up temperatures even more, it was enough to trigger the Women’s Tennis Association’s extreme-heat protocol, which requires giving players a 10-minute break after the second set of a three-set match to exit the court for a change of clothes, quick shower or both.
The cozy confines of the CIti Open bring fans, players together
“I was dreaming about the heat rule,” Liudmila Samsonova said during her on-court interview after dispatching Ajla Tomljanovic, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2, in a sweat-fest that lasted 2 hours 22 minutes.
Their match started at midday on Stadium Court, and temperatures climbed steadily. Samsonova placed an icebag wrapped in a towel on the back of her neck during changeovers. After she claimed the second set to draw even, she got the reprieve for which she had longed. “It helped a lot,” she said of the 10-minute pause. “I took a shower; changed the clothes.”
With heat depleting everyone’s energy, the tournament grounds were oddly subdued. On the black asphalt walkways that wend around the courts, spectators took turns standing in front of the “Power Breezer,” industrial size fan that shoots out a spray of water along with a gush of air — akin to a carwash without suds or bristles.
With virtually every remaining player in action Thursday — including five who were scheduled to compete in both singles and doubles — the trainers who travel the men’s and women’s pro circuit to tape ankles, knead muscles, make initial diagnoses and dispense treatment were kept busy.
Second-seeded Emma Raducanu took on Colombia’s Camila Osorio on Stadium Court in full sun at 2:30 p.m., and the first set alone lasted 79 minutes, littered with service breaks and unforced errors.
Looking on from Raducanu’s box was Dimitry Tursunov, who is coaching the reigning U.S. Open champion for the first time at this tournament on a trial basis. Tursunov spent much of the match keeping his eyes locked on his charge while shrouding his head with a towel.
U.S. Open champ Emma Raducanu is trying to recapture her magic
“I think I died about three times in that match,” Raducanu said on court after her 7-6 (7-5), 7-6 (7-4) victory.
Under the WTA’s extreme heat policy, the chair umpire doesn’t have latitude to extend the time limit between serves, according to WTA supervisor Kerrilyn Cramer. But Raducanu and Osorio got an extra reprieve twice in the second set when each summoned the trainer to tape blisters that worsened amid the heat and sweat.
Osorio needed a big toe taped; Raducanu, her right hand.
The chance to simply sit for the treatment seemed curative in itself as the match passed the two hour, 30-minute mark.
Sweden’s Mikael Ymer said he was grateful to have played on clay last week in Umag, Croatia, where he said it was even hotter and, as a result, helped him acclimate to Washington’s heat.
For top players, doubles is a chance for practice and fun
“Conditions are very tough,” Ymer said after advancing to Friday’s quarterfinals with a 6-3, 6-7 (3-7), 6-4 victory over Emil Ruusuvuori. “I think we are playing one of the toughest sports on this planet because, besides dealing with the heat, you also have to constantly make so many decisions. I run a lot, because my dad was a runner. … When I run in the heat, I can just focus [on the] next step [and] grind it out. But [in tennis], you’re grinding and, at the same time, you have this opponent that you have to beat.”
By late afternoon, the skies above Rock Creek Park Tennis Center darkened, and the first crack of thunder erupted at 6 p.m. just as fourth-seed Reilly Opelka and 2019 Citi Open champion Nick Kyrgios stepped onto court.
Play was suspended 15 minutes later because of lightning.
At that moment, Hyattsville native Frances Tiafoe, 24, was deadlocked in the first set of his match against No. 8 seed Botic Van de Zandschulp.
Tiafoe, who learned to play at College Park’s Junior Tennis Champions Center, is currently ranked 27th in the world, close to his career-high No. 25, and is brimming with confidence after reaching Wimbledon’s fourth round.
He has won just one ATP title during his seven seasons on tour (the 2018 Delray Beach Open) and said earlier this week that he would love to claim his second at Washington’s Citi Open, which he started attending at age 4. He recalled his childhood awe in seeing such tennis greats as Lleyton Hewitt, Andre Agassi and Juan Martin del Potro, among others.
“To win this tournament would mean the world to me,” Tiafoe said after defeating fellow American Chris Eubanks on Wednesday. “ … To have my name around the stadium [where champions’ names are listed] would mean a lot to me.”
A fan favorite with family and lifelong friends in the Washington area, Tiafoe said he and his agent were doing their best to fill 56 requests for tickets.
Earlier Thursday, third-seeded Taylor Fritz, the top-ranked American, retired from his match against Britain’s Dan Evans, trailing 1-4 in the third set.
Conditions promised to fall hardest on those scheduled to play both singles and doubles matches Thursday. That included Tiafoe, Kyrgios, Evans, Van de Zandschulp and, in the women’s event, Xiyu Wang of China.
In such cases, tour policy states that a player does not start his or her second match of the day until “after suitable rest.”
Under WTA rules, Cramer explained in an email, a tour official meets with the player after her singles match to determine whether she needs medical treatment or a meal before resuming play.
In cases of extreme heat, the tour would be a bit more “generous,” Cramer said. But as a rule, a 90-minute break is allotted between matches.
“The ‘heat’ factor might have us extend it out by maybe 15 more minutes but not more,” Cramer wrote. “Players also want to balance if they wait too long, they are here until later today and then need to come back and play the next day. So all these factors are considered.” | 2022-08-05T00:29:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At Citi Open, D.C.'s summer heat makes for a grind - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/04/citi-open-tennis-dc-summer-heat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/04/citi-open-tennis-dc-summer-heat/ |
Two men and two women were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries Thursday evening after an apparent lightning strike in Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, according to D.C. fire officials.
The four adults were found just before 7 p.m. in the center of the park, in a grove of trees about 100 feet southeast of the statue of Andrew Jackson, said fire department spokesman Vito Maggiolo at a news briefing Thursday night. U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Park Police rendered aid to the victims, which fire officials credited to the ability of the victims to initially survive.
“Tree are not safe places,” Maggiolo said. “Anybody that goes to seek shelter under a tree, that’s a very dangerous place to be.”
Washington Monument closed after lightning strike
Chris Vagasky, an analyst for Vaisala, which operates a national lightning network, said in a message that there was a “6 stroke flash near the White House that hit the same point on the ground” at 6:49 p.m. He explained that means six individual surges of electricity hit the same point on the ground within half a second. | 2022-08-05T00:59:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Four critically injured after lightning strike near the White House - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/04/lightning-strike-white-house-injuries/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/04/lightning-strike-white-house-injuries/ |
Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr., was sentenced to more than three years in federal prison
A West Virginia man has been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison for sending threatening emails to Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, and other federal officials, the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday.
Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr., 56, of Snowshoe, W.Va., was sentenced to 37 months in prison along with three years of supervised release for making threats against a federal official, according to a news release.
He admitted to making threats against Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health; Francis Collins, the former director of NIH; Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services; a public health official from Massachusetts; and a religious leader, prosecutors said.
“Everyone has the right to disagree, but you do not have the right to threaten a federal official’s life,” Erek L. Barron, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, said in the release. “Threats like these will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Using an anonymous encrypted email account, Connally sent emails from Dec. 28, 2020, to July 25, 2021, threatening to “harm and/or kill” Fauci and members of his family, including one said they would be “dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire,” according to a plea agreement, the news release said.
Connally also sent emails to Collins on April 24, 2021, threatening the doctor and his family with physical harm and death if he “did not stop speaking about the need for ‘mandatory’ COVID-19 vaccinations,” prosecutors said.
According to the plea agreement, Connally admitted to sending the threats intending to “intimidate or interfere with the performance of their official duties” and to “retaliate” against the doctors for doing their job, “including discussing COVID-19 and its testing and prevention,” prosecutors said.
He was arrested on July 27, 2021, after an investigation linked the email account to him, prosecutors said.
“The public, including public servants, deserve the utmost safety and the assurance that they can perform their duties without interference,” Christian J. Schrank of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General, said in the release. “Our agency, working closely with our law enforcement partners, will continue to bring those who threaten violence to justice.” | 2022-08-05T01:00:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | West Virginia Man sentenced for threats against Fauci, officials - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/04/man-sentenced-threats-fauci-officials/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/04/man-sentenced-threats-fauci-officials/ |
SANTA CRUZ PROVINCE, ARGENTINA - NOVEMBER 30: People hike on the Perito Moreno glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, on November 30, 2015 in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. The Southern Patagonian Ice Field is the third largest ice field in the world. The majority of the almost 50 large glaciers in Los Glaciares National Park have been retreating during the past fifty years due to warming temperatures, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports that over 68 percent of the world’s freshwater supplies are locked in ice caps and glaciers. The United Nations climate change conference began November 30 in Paris. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) (Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images South America) | 2022-08-05T01:08:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Case for Rate Hikes Is Heading For Contested Territory - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-case-for-rate-hikes-is-heading-for-contested-territory/2022/08/04/5ca93df8-1452-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-case-for-rate-hikes-is-heading-for-contested-territory/2022/08/04/5ca93df8-1452-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Signage on a water tower at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, U.S., on Monday, May 17, 2021. AT&T Inc. agreed to spin off its media operations in a deal with Discovery Inc. that will create a new entertainment company, merging assets ranging from CNN and HBO to HGTV and Warner Bros. studio. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Reed Hastings of Netflix can relax a little. HBO Max is about to become a much less aggressive competitor in the streaming market.
That’s the implication of a sweeping strategic shift outlined Thursday evening by top executives at Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., the company formed from the combination in April of Discovery Communications and WarnerMedia, previously owned by AT&T Inc. On a call with Wall Street analysts, Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav and his lieutenants made clear they want to return the Warner business to one focused on making as much money as possible, away from the one run with a consumer-centric philosophy espoused by WarnerMedia’s previous CEO, Jason Kilar. It’s a big risk.
Among other things, the Warner team said it would abandon the idea of making movies just for release on streaming, something Kilar’s team had initiated; abandon the previous management’s strategy of preserving Warner-made content mostly for HBO Max; and bring back the traditional Hollywood focus on “windowing,” the idea of releasing the same movies or shows on different media at different times to maximize revenue. Oh, and Warner confirmed plans to combine HBO Max and Discovery+ into one service, to be launched next summer.
Along the way, they also left little doubt the new service will cost consumers more money. Streaming is “underpriced,” Zaslav said.
His strategy is an enormous step back for consumers — and one that risks backfiring. For decades, television companies operated by ignoring what suited viewers. TV networks jammed so many ads into shows that television became unwatchable. The price of cable and satellite TV rose steadily. A big movie didn’t appear on TV until long after it opened in a theater because studios wanted to cash in by selling DVDs.
That set the scene for Netflix to emerge about 15 years ago offering a more consumer-friendly approach of low-cost, ad-free streaming with a deep mix of original content, including new big-budget movies. This proved enormously popular. Netflix has about 221 million global subscribers, with 73 million in North America. No other service comes close (except possibly Amazon Prime Video, whose video is a feature of Prime).
To be sure, that low-cost streaming model hasn’t proved to be a hugely profitable one yet. Netflix has only recently begun to show that it could make real money — and it did so in part by raising prices to a point that it has lost some subscribers. For Zaslav, who comes out of the old-school TV industry that made a virtue of essentially printing money, it’s understandable the Netflix approach is unappealing. Let’s also not forget that Warner Bros. Discovery is a company with roughly $50 billion in debt and expectations of generating $9 billion to $9.5 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2022. The changes being pursued by Zaslav’s team will help generate badly needed extra revenue. Company executives projected 2023 Ebitda of $12 billion.
The danger is that the strategic shift leaves Warner Bros. Discovery vulnerable to the competition. In the entertainment universe, the power has shifted away from big TV companies and toward viewers more than Zaslav seems to realize. He is operating with a 1990s’ mindset. HBO Max’s competition includes, apart from Netflix, services run by tech companies such as Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video, which could also be said to operate with a consumer-centric philosophy. They also have deep financial resources and don’t rely on making big profits in television, which gives them an advantage over traditional entertainment companies. By raising prices and reducing the amount of truly exclusive content on his streaming services, Zaslav is only giving viewers a reason to switch.
He needs to accept the reality that the old days are gone. Television will never again be a monumentally profitable business. Streaming needs to be profitable enough to draw investment, for sure. But times have changed. There’s no going back.
• Blocking WarnerMedia Deal Won’t Fix Streaming: Tara Lachapelle
• Netflix Is Winning Streaming’s Own ‘Squid Game’: Tara Lachapelle
• Disney Shares Netflix’s Pain on User Sign-Ups: Tara Lachapelle | 2022-08-05T01:08:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Warner Takes Huge Risk by Focusing on Profit Over Users - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/warner-takes-huge-risk-by-focusing-on-profit-over-users/2022/08/04/db63955a-1455-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/warner-takes-huge-risk-by-focusing-on-profit-over-users/2022/08/04/db63955a-1455-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The government of the Solomon Islands has taken tighter control over the nation’s state-owned broadcaster — a move that opponents say is squarely aimed at controlling and censoring the news.
On our radar: Plenty of Republican speakers on Friday afternoon
10:39 PMThe latest: Alex Jones, pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, must pay $4.1 million to Sandy Hook parents | 2022-08-05T01:09:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Solomon Islands takes tighter control over state broadcaster - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/solomon-islands-takes-tighter-control-over-state-broadcaster/2022/08/04/7516a1f8-1454-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/solomon-islands-takes-tighter-control-over-state-broadcaster/2022/08/04/7516a1f8-1454-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
FILE - Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully poses in the pressbox of Dodger Stadium before the start of a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Dodgers on Aug. 1, 2007, in Los Angeles. The Hall of Fame broadcaster, whose dulcet tones provided the soundtrack of summer while entertaining and informing Dodgers fans in Brooklyn and Los Angeles for 67 years, died Tuesday night, Aug. 2, 2022. He was 94. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File) (/250550//AP) | 2022-08-05T01:09:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dodgers to honor Vin Scully in pre-game ceremony - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/dodgers-to-honor-vin-scully-in-pre-game-ceremony/2022/08/04/a8a39ebe-1453-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/dodgers-to-honor-vin-scully-in-pre-game-ceremony/2022/08/04/a8a39ebe-1453-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, explained
An ethnic Armenian soldier stands guard next to Nagorno-Karabakh's flag atop a hill in the separatist region in Azerbaijan in November 2020. (Sergei Grits/AP)
MOSCOW — The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region has simmered for decades. In 2020, the two sides fought a bloody war for territory — one that ended with a fragile Russian-brokered truce.
On Wednesday, tensions flared again in the mountainous enclave, which is located inside Azerbaijan but controlled by ethnic Armenian separatists. Both sides accused each other of breaching the cease-fire and three soldiers, including two from Nagorno-Karabakh and one from Azerbaijan, were killed.
The skirmish prompted international calls to quell the fighting, including from both the Kremlin and U.S. State Department. “We are watching very closely, we are naturally concerned about the situation worsening,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday, Reuters reported.
Here’s what you need to know about the fight over Nagorno-Karabakh, the longest-running conflict in the post-Soviet sphere.
What are the roots of the conflict? | 2022-08-05T01:43:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, explained - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/nagorno-karabakh-conflict-explained/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/nagorno-karabakh-conflict-explained/ |
Jimmy Johnson laughs at Jerry Jones jab over Cowboys’ Ring of Honor snub
Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones enjoyed a moment in September, several weeks after the former joined Jones in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (AP Photo/Ron Jenkins)
If Jimmy Johnson is upset that Jerry Jones suggested the former Dallas coach was “sniveling” about not yet being included in the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor, he didn’t show it Thursday.
Speaking on “The Dan Le Batard Show,” Johnson laughed off recent remarks by Jones that didn’t go over well with a number of Cowboys fans.
“I had to look up that word in the dictionary,” Johnson chuckled. “I don’t know that I’ve ever sniveled. Do you ever remember me sniveling? No way.”
The 79-year-old former Cowboys coach, who guided the Jones-owned team to two straight Super Bowl wins before their rift prompted his stunning departure in 1994, was responding to a question about comments made by Jones several days earlier. In an interview with Dallas-Fort Worth station KXAS-TV, Jones had been asked about the fact that he has not put Johnson in the team’s Ring of Honor — an apparent remnant of their decades-old feud that Jones was told came off as “very petty” to many observers — despite bestowing that degree of franchise immortality upon several other prominent members of Dallas’s 1990s dynasty.
“It’s B.S. for anybody to be making anything [of it]. I’ve said I’m going to put him in,” Jones replied then. “Now, when I put him in, and the circumstances and what I do with that, there’s a lot more than Jimmy to think about here. I’ve got a lot of other lives out here that have laid a lot on the line on the field that need to be in that Ring of Honor, as well. And so how I do that, what I do it with, I get to make that decision.
“It isn’t, at the end of the day, all tailored around whether Jimmy is sniveling or not.”
Johnson’s subsequent appearance on Le Batard’s show came hours before the NFL’s annual Hall of Fame game and a year after the ex-coach enjoyed his own induction in Canton, Ohio. During a Fox Sports pregame show ahead of the Hall of Fame exhibition contest last August, Johnson and Jones sat together on a panel that included Hall of Famer and television personality Terry Bradshaw, who asked Jones when the Cowboys owner would give Johnson the long-awaited team enshrinement. Jones didn’t provide a specific date but confirmed that Johnson “will be in the Ring of Honor.”
“While I’m alive?” Johnson quipped.
On Thursday, Johnson referred to that exchange when asked if he thought Jones would put him in the Ring of Honor before he “passed away.”
“He’s told me a half-dozen times he’ll put me in,” Johnson said of Jones. “That’s why I said, ‘While I’m alive?’ You never can tell. That’s his decision.”
Noting that enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame was the “ultimate” honor he could receive, Johnson added, “I’m happy where I am. I don’t have any deep feelings, like, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta do this, I’ve gotta do that.’ ’’
Amid his display of contentment and good humor over the flaring up of their long-running feud, though, Johnson couldn’t resist a jab at Jones’s well-known fondness for the spotlight.
“The only thing is, if he does it,” the ex-coach said of Jones finally putting him in the team’s Ring of Honor, “everybody’ll stop talking about it.” | 2022-08-05T02:31:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jimmy Johnson laughs at Jerry Jones jab over Cowboys' Ring of Honor snub - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/04/jimmy-johnson-jerry-jones-cowboys-ring-of-honor/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/04/jimmy-johnson-jerry-jones-cowboys-ring-of-honor/ |
Nationals start next chapter as pair of their new acquisitions arrive
Luke Voit hit the ground running with the Nationals, hitting an RBI single in the first inning against the Phillies. (Rich Schultz/Getty Images)
PHILADELPHIA — And so it was at Citizens Bank Park, on a Thursday evening that felt like a bowl of hot soup, that the Washington Nationals took a tiny step forward. And there to nudge them was MacKenzie Gore and Luke Voit, both not so fresh off red-eye flights from the West Coast, having just been traded from a contender to the worst team in baseball.
But for the Nationals, just seeing two of the six players they acquired from the San Diego Padres for Juan Soto and Josh Bell? It was something if not much.
“It was awesome,” Manager Dave Martinez said of his first conversations with Gore and Voit. “Just gave them a little bit of what we are doing here and what we're trying to do. And [told them] how they both fit really nicely.”
Gore, a left-handed starter, is 23 and was a key part of the haul from San Diego. To move Soto, the Nationals were set on receiving him, shortstop C.J. Abrams and outfielders Robert Hassell III and James Wood. General Manager Mike Rizzo called them the “elite four” in a news conference Tuesday. Gore, the sort of potential front line arm Rizzo covets, was an early Rookie of the Year candidate after posting a 1.71 ERA through May. Now he’s on the injured list with elbow inflammation and is not expected to throw for at least another seven to 10 days.
The Nationals are vowing to take it very slow with him. A stake of their rebuild rides on how Gore heals and develops.
“When I was pitching with this, I wasn’t very good,” said Gore, whose ERA spiked to 4.50 after 16 appearances before he hit the shelf. “I need to get better so I can get back to pitching well.”
Voit, on the other hand, was activated Tuesday and immediately became the club’s most accomplished hitter. He wasn’t a major component of the blockbuster deal, yet rounded it out once Eric Hosmer declined to waive his no-trade clause. At 31, he has played for the St. Louis Cardinals, New York Yankees, Padres and now the Nationals, starting at first and batting third against the Phillies and Noah Syndergaard. Martinez plans to split Voit’s regular starts between first and designated hitter.
In the first inning, Voit blooped an RBI single to left, reaching for a low-and-away curve. In the fourth, he punched a single off the right field wall, stopping because it bounced right to Nick Castellanos and Voit isn’t the fastest runner. He is listed at 6-foot-3 and 255 pounds. By his locker in the visitors’ clubhouse, two stalls from where Gore dressed for a workout, Voit promised to meet some new teammates in the weight room.
Despite a few laughs, Voit didn’t appear to be joking, judging by the undone buttons at the top of his snug jersey.
“I know the whole Soto thing’s a big thing and the fans will miss him,” Voit said before helping the Nationals tag Syndergaard for 11 hits. Joining him in that effort were Victor Robles (single, double), Luis García (single), Yadiel Hernandez (two singles), Keibert Ruiz (single), Lane Thomas (single), Maikel Franco (single) and César Hernández (a single that drove in Franco in the second).
When a rain delay began at 8:47 p.m., Washington had just pulled within a run after Voit scored on Syndergaard’s wild pitch.
“But it’s obviously a lot of money left out there for potentially next offseason and signing a bunch of guys instead of just one,” Voit continued. “This is the first time I’ve been on kind of a losing team since I was in college … so it’s a little different.”
Their arrivals are not expected to spark a climb up the standings. That ship sailed long ago for this season. If Voit builds on his strong debut, it would be a bonus for him and a club thin on solid track records. If Gore pitches in the final two months of the year, it would be a great sign for his elbow, especially since Martinez and Rizzo have stressed patience with his rehab.
For one night, though, they didn’t have to rake or have a clean bill of health. They only had to show up. | 2022-08-05T02:31:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nats turn page, welcome Luke Voit and MacKenzie Gore - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/04/nationals-phillies-voit-gore/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/04/nationals-phillies-voit-gore/ |
Sri Lanka’s new president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, will need all the help he can get to stave off an economic collapse. He should be striving to win over his many critics, not to suppress them.
The scale of the crisis confronting Wickremesinghe, a former six-time prime minister, is daunting. Sri Lanka is effectively broke. A series of misguided economic policies — many implemented during the presidencies of brothers Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa — have left the country with unsustainable debts and almost no means of paying: It has $7 billion in debts due this year and barely $2 billion in foreign-exchange reserves.
Imports of fuel and other essential goods have been severely restricted. Inflation is nearing 60%; food prices alone have risen 80%. Economic activity has ground to a halt and most Sri Lankans are cutting back on meals.
Months of demonstrations finally drove Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power in mid-July. Protesters accused the former president, who had packed his cabinet with family members and cronies, of corruption and incompetence. Many are equally suspicious of Wickremesinghe, who is thought to have protected the Rajapaksa family from legal scrutiny in the past. The new president did not help his case for independence by immediately ordering the military to clear the main protest site by force, then appointing a cabinet drawn largely from ruling-party politicians still loyal to the Rajapaksas. This week, Human Rights Watch accused security forces of using emergency regulations to harass and arbitrarily detain activists, lawyers and journalists.
Seeking to crush the opposition would be a deeply short-sighted strategy. The International Monetary Fund, which is finalizing the details of a desperately needed bailout with Sri Lanka, wants to see political stability and a government capable of keeping its promises. Those pledges will have to include painful budget cuts, tax hikes, the lifting of subsidies, and the privatization of state-owned firms. Even if Wickremesinghe is able to quell protests temporarily, they are almost certain to swell again once those reforms begin to bite.
Far better to prepare Sri Lankans for the sacrifices that will be required to emerge from this crisis. Several members of the opposition have, like the new president, long favored more liberal economic policies; Wickremesinghe should be seeking their input and giving them a stake in designing the necessary reforms. The government also needs to be more transparent about talks with the IMF, which have largely been conducted out of the public eye.
Most important, the new president needs to address the protesters’ legitimate demands for political reform. He has promised to roll back at least some of the sweeping powers Gotabaya Rajapaksa had assumed through a constitutional amendment and to restore more authority to parliament. He should make good on that pledge quickly, before the temptations of office weaken his resolve. He should also show he is serious about reining in corruption by supporting an independent anti-bribery commission, police units to investigate financial crimes, and international efforts to recover stolen assets.
Friends of Sri Lanka, including the US, the European Union and India, have worked with Wickremesinghe before and should not be shy about using their leverage with the new government. While they should provide more immediate relief to ease the suffering of ordinary Sri Lankans, they should also coordinate with the IMF to ensure that any long-term bailout plan is contingent on serious political as well as economic reforms. There’s little point in papering over this crisis only to hasten the next one.
• In Sri Lanka, What Comes After People Power?: Ruth Pollard
• Sri Lanka Shows Folly of Economic Fringe Theories: Mihir Sharma
• The Great Chinese White Elephant of Sri Lanka: Andy Mukherjee | 2022-08-05T02:39:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sri Lanka’s New Leader Should Listen to His Critics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sri-lankas-new-leader-should-listen-to-his-critics/2022/08/04/f1716fee-145e-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sri-lankas-new-leader-should-listen-to-his-critics/2022/08/04/f1716fee-145e-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
$6 billion student loan settlement gets preliminary approval
A federal judge on Thursday granted preliminary approval of a $6 billion settlement between the Biden administration and student loan borrowers who say they were defrauded by their schools, despite the objection of some for-profit colleges.
Several schools, including Lincoln Tech and Keiser University, filed motions last month to intervene and object to the settlement, arguing that it failed to assess the validity of the borrowers’ claims and would damage their reputation.
The schools are among 153 institutions — many of which are for-profit colleges — that the Education Department identified as having evidence of “substantial misconduct … whether credibly alleged or in some instances proven.” Former students of those schools who applied for debt relief are entitled to full loan forgiveness under the settlement.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California is giving the for-profit colleges that have raised objections an opportunity to have their say but ultimately moved the deal a step closer to being finalized.
Borrowers involved in the case will have until Sept. 8 to object to the terms of the deal, which Alsup called a “grand slam, home run” for borrowers.
“This settlement … skips over adjudication and just cancels the loan,” Alsup said during a hearing Thursday. “From the point of view of the class, this is certainly a good enough deal to get preliminary approval.”
If granted final approval, the settlement would resolve a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 by people who accused the Education Department of ignoring their applications for loan cancellation through a federal program known as borrower defense to repayment.
The agreement will provide automatic relief, including refunds of money paid to the federal agency and credit repair, to some 200,000 people. Another group of about 64,000 borrowers, who attended schools that are not on the department’s list, will receive decisions on their applications on rolling deadlines.
“Given all of the twists and turns in this case … we are going to have to keep pressing this until the ink is dry on the final approval,” said Eileen Connor, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group representing the borrowers. “I’m wary of people trying to obstruct something that is completely lawful, completely just.”
At Thursday’s hearing, Connor’s colleagues at the Project questioned why the intervening colleges waited until now to show an interest in the case or the claims from their former students. Attorneys for the schools said they should be given a chance to defend themselves against the claims, as is permitted in the Trump administration’s update of the borrower defense rules.
“The parties’ proposed settlement has unfairly impugned the reputations of more than 150 schools, all without the basic procedural fairness to which these schools are entitled under the Department’s own regulations,” said Jason Altmire, president and chief executive of Career Education Colleges and Universities, a lobbying group for for-profit colleges. “We are confident that these schools’ participation in the case will ensure a more just outcome for everyone involved.”
It’s unclear whether Alsup’s tentative ruling on the intervention will have a material impact on the settlement. Although the judge offered the schools a chance to have their say, he questioned the harm posed to the institutions.
“You’ve already gotten the money and spent it,” Alsup told attorneys for the schools. “Unless the U.S. government brings a recoupment [case] against you, you don’t have money to lose.”
In 2020, Alsup rejected an earlier settlement reached with the Trump administration in the case after the Education Department revealed its widespread denials of requests for student debt cancellation. | 2022-08-05T02:39:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | $6 billion student loan settlement gets preliminary approval - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/04/student-loan-settlement-approved/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/04/student-loan-settlement-approved/ |
The agreement led Sinema to offer her support for the measure after days of silence
Updated August 4, 2022 at 10:36 p.m. EDT|Published August 4, 2022 at 9:14 p.m. EDT
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., walks to the Senate floor for a vote on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Aug 04, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) said she would soon be ready to “move forward” on a revised version of Senate Democrats’ health-care, climate and deficit-reduction package, opening the door for party lawmakers to adopt the long-stalled bill as soon as this weekend.
Sinema offered her must-have support after Democratic leaders agreed to scale back some of their original tax proposals, capping days of speculation about her public silence and moving her party one step closer to fulfilling a central element of President Biden’s economic agenda.
The latter set of revisions are likely to benefit some manufacturers, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition anonymity to describe the unreleased details. Many corporate executives, including local Arizona business leaders, had petitioned Sinema to consider the consequences of the tax in recent days.
From here, Sinema said she would await a final review from the chamber’s parliamentarian — a critical step in the process that allows Democrats to move their spending bill — at which point she would “move forward" on the measure known as the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Biden hailed the development, describing it in a statement late Thursday as a “critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America’s families.”
“I look forward to the Senate taking up this legislation and passing it as soon as possible,” the president said.
The changes in total appear to have helped Democratic leaders thread a narrow needle, satisfying Sinema while still preserving the thrust of the deal that Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) worked out with another moderate — Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) — just last week.
Sinema had not been a player in those talks, even though she is a key Democratic swing vote, at times skeptical of her own party’s tax-and-spending ambitions. Her public silence in recent days fueled speculation that she may have harbored serious reservations about the new bill, a successor to the roughly $2 trillion Build Back Better Act that House Democrats adopted last year. Even Republicans at one point sought to seize on the uncertainty, urging Sinema to buck her own party.
In recent days, Manchin had remained steadfast in his support for the deal he struck, the original version of which was expected to generate more than $768 billion in revenue over the next decade. Any change to assuage Sinema threatened to reduce the roughly $300 billion expected to be available for deficit reduction, a major issue for Manchin.
Democrats did not offer a full, new estimate for their revised tax policies late Thursday. In a statement, though, Schumer said he expected it would “receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference.” And he said the bill would still reduce the deficit by $300 billion.
The agreement allows the party to proceed under Schumer’s timeline, beginning debate on the measure with a vote as soon as Saturday. To prevail, Sinema’s vote is crucial: Only by banding together can Democrats overcome a Republican filibuster and adopt their long-stalled economic measure using the process known as reconciliation.
Under the new plan, Democrats now seek to impose a new tax on the money companies spend to purchase back their own stock, the two sources familiar with the matter said. Party lawmakers long have taken issue with such practices, arguing they benefit large firms’ stock prices at the expense of workers and the economy at large.
In adding the new tax, Democrats also appeared to rethink their initial plans to impose a minimum 15 percent tax on corporations. The exact details of the change is not clear, but Sinema said in a statement that her agreement would “protect advanced manufacturing.”
And Democrats removed their proposal to target the taxes that apply to private equity and hedge fund managers, an attempt to close what is known as the “carried interest loophole.”
Initially, the bill sought to change the way these investors are taxed on the fees their clients pay them, subjecting them to higher rates. But they scrapped their original plans in response to Sinema, who said she would work with Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) to address the issue while “protecting investments in America’s economy” and close “the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes.” | 2022-08-05T02:41:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats, Sinema reach deal on new taxes in health and climate bill - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/04/inflation-reduction-act-sinema/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/04/inflation-reduction-act-sinema/ |
Pelosi vows China will not isolate Taiwan amid military exercises
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shakes hands with Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida before their breakfast meeting at Kishida's residence in Tokyo on Friday. (Kyodo/Via Reuters)
TOKYO — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed that China would not succeed in isolating Taiwan, as she capped off her Asia tour on Friday amid a flurry of Chinese military exercises that have sent fears of conflict in the region skyrocketing.
Pelosi’s brief and unannounced trip this week to Taiwan brought to the fore the rising tensions between the United States and China, and the impact of the souring relations on U.S. allies that are economically dependent on China.
Beijing asserts sovereignty over Taiwan, a self-governed democracy of 23 million people, and has sought to exclude the island from global affairs by picking off its diplomatic partners and reacting furiously to exchanges between Taipei and foreign officials.
“They may try to keep Taiwan from visiting or participating in other places but they will not isolate Taiwan," Pelosi said in Tokyo, the last stop of her tour. "They are not doing our traveling schedule, the Chinese government is not doing that.”
Despite Beijing’s insistence that issues with Taiwan are matters of “internal affairs,” Pelosi’s visit underscored broad concern among U.S. allies about conflict in the Taiwan Strait because of their geographic proximity and the passageway’s role as a vital trade route. Japan’s concerns with potential military action by China against Taiwan — which is less than 100 miles from Japan’s westernmost point — have shaped Tokyo’s defense spending and diplomatic calculations.
China’s People’s Liberation Army released video on Aug. 4 of a live-fire missile exercise targeting waters off the coast of Taiwan. (Video: People's Liberation Army)
On Thursday, as a part of the military exercises Beijing announced in response to Pelosi’s visit to Taipei, five of China’s ballistic missiles landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, prompting Tokyo to raise complaints through diplomatic channels.
In Taiwan, meanwhile, Premier Su Tseng-chang on Friday called China an “evil neighbor flexing its muscles on our doorstep” with military exercises that “arbitrarily sabotage” one of the world’s busiest waterways, according to a statement from Taiwan’s Executive Yuan, the executive branch of its government.
The Chinese military maneuvers are expected to continue through the weekend. The exercises, which come closer to Taiwan than in previous cross-strait crises, have heightened fears of a military clash. Taiwan has said the drills, affecting six areas around the island, are tantamount to a sea and air blockade.
Speaking to reporters in New Taipei City, Su added that China’s actions would draw “global condemnation” and said that Taiwan would not give in to pressure and would work with democratic partners to prevent “reckless behavior from authoritarian dictatorships.”
He promised strong government assistance for Taiwanese businesses hit by China’s import bans on citrus, fish and other goods but downplayed the disruption to Taiwan’s economy, saying that many local companies had already soured on the market after realizing how often “politics disrupts economic activity” in China.
Shepherd and Kuo reported from Taipei. | 2022-08-05T03:14:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pelosi vows China will not isolate Taiwan amid military exercises - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/pelosi-taiwan-visit-china-missile-japan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/04/pelosi-taiwan-visit-china-missile-japan/ |
Ask Amy: How to get my husband to care about what’s going on in my life
I have expressed this frustration multiple times, and he may ask once, but he’ll never ask again. I will ask him about his day, and he always says, “the usual.”
Bewildered: Most of us learn our communication styles from our family of origin. Your husband may have learned very early on that staying quiet was the best course for him.
Just because you love and care about each other doesn’t mean that you can read one another’s minds. Speaking really needs to happen.
If your husband always answers: “ … the usual” when you ask him about his day, he’s not providing any information for you two to engage in a conversation.
There is evidence that the presence of a cellphone (even facedown on the table) suppresses communication.
Well-known relationship researcher Gottman has done important work in decoding how people make “bids” for connection. Once you recognize communication patterns, you can begin to change the way you interact, which will influence others.
Hurt: Depending on where you reside, emergency contacts are registered on a state-run “emergency contact” database/website. This way, these contacts are quickly accessible to law enforcement, and also easily updated.
All the same, I think you might be overreacting. Depending on how healthy your relationship is, this seems more a curious choice than a deliberately hurtful one.
Just looking at it from a monetary perspective, if the cousin spent only 40 hours a week at minimum wage, she should have been paid $1,160 per month. But, I assume she took care of the mother 24/7!
Betrayed needs to “forgive” herself and thank her cousin.
Took Care: “Betrayed” made other accusations against her cousin, but I agree that from a monetary point of view, the cousin absolutely should have been compensated for her service. | 2022-08-05T04:11:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: How to get my husband to care about what’s going on in my life - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/05/ask-amy-husband-no-interest/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/05/ask-amy-husband-no-interest/ |
Singapore is reviewing a colonial-era rule that criminalizes sex between men while trying to protect a law that prevents same-sex marriages. Here’s where things stand:
Any discussion on changing 377A raises concerns, especially from religious groups, that it would be followed by court cases that could lead to recognizing same-sex marriages. Under Singapore law, a marriage can only take place between a man and a woman. The government is “considering how we can safeguard the current legal position on marriage from being challenged in the Courts, so that it does not get challenged like the way Section 377A was in a series of cases,” Shanmugam said. A poll by a local think-tank, the Institute of Policy Studies, conducted in late 2018 indicated that the proportion of residents who felt same-sex marriage was always wrong or almost always wrong had dropped to 60% from 74% in 2013.
Singapore’s Catholic Church said it respects the dignity of LGBTQ community, but asked for the right to maintain the position on marriage. About 19% of Singaporeans identify as Christian, while Buddhism is the largest religious group with 31%. The local LGBTQ community has no immediate plans to mount legal challenges to redefine marriage, Leow Yangfa, executive director of rights group Oogachaga, was cited in Singapore’s Today newspaper as saying.
Repealing section 377A could help further change social attitudes that have traditionally been resistant to accepting the LGBTQ community, and make the island nation more attractive to progressive-minded workers from abroad. The country, a major financial center, hosts some 37,400 international companies and has a large cohort of expats to supplement the local workforce as it grapples with the effects of an aging population. An online survey between May and June by Ipsos showed that the proportion of residents who remain supportive of Section 377A had dropped to 44%, from 55% in 2018. There’s also been criticism of 377A from some prominent Singaporeans, including former ambassador to the US Tommy Koh, suggesting the law is unjust and even possibly unconstitutional. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August called on businesses in Singapore to support LGBTQ groups, which drew a reminder from the government that foreign firms in the country should be careful about advocacy on issues that could be socially divisive. | 2022-08-05T04:11:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Singapore Could Decriminalize Sex Between Men - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-singapore-could-decriminalize-sex-between-men/2022/08/04/7a5bdade-1472-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-singapore-could-decriminalize-sex-between-men/2022/08/04/7a5bdade-1472-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Aung Naing Soe
Myanmar political prisoner Kyaw Min Yu, also known as Ko Jimmy, and his wife, Nilar Thein, who is holding their child, celebrate upon their arrival at Yangon International Airport after their release from detention in January 2012. Ko Jimmy was arrested again in October after the military seized power in February 2021. (Soe Than Win/AFP/Getty Images)
SINGAPORE — It started with a letter, tightly folded and delivered in secret.
She was 24, imprisoned in Myanmar for attending protests against the military’s authoritarian regime. He was 25, a third of his way through a 20-year sentence for mobilizing student activists against the junta. He wrote to her first, saying he admired her refusal to sign a letter vowing obedience to the military in exchange for her freedom. She responded in kind, saying she had liked a political speech he’d delivered in the city of Yangon. They courted through poems and glances stolen during chance meetings in the visiting room. In between stints in and out of prison, they married and had a daughter.
The romance that Nilar Thein had with her husband, Kyaw Min Yu, who is also known as Ko Jimmy, persisted through coups and revolutions, death threats and periods of separation, she told The Washington Post. It lasted 26 years until last week, when the Myanmar military executed Ko Jimmy alongside three other pro-democracy activists. He was 51.
The executions, which mark the first time in more than 30 years that Myanmar carried out the death penalty, has sent human rights activists reeling, elicited international condemnation and dramatically escalated tensions in the country’s ongoing civil war, advocates say. But the loss of Ko Jimmy, announced in four paragraphs in a state-run newspaper, also cut short a love story that had endured decades of political strife — a relationship that had been intertwined from the start with the ebbs and flows of Myanmar’s faltering democracy effort.
Myanmar’s junta can’t win the civil war it started
“What this regime did, their brutality — I can’t describe it. Ko Jimmy’s case was only one of many.”
Once heralded as an example of democratic progress, Myanmar has slid back into crisis since the military violently seized power in February 2021. Veteran activists who helped to push for the country’s brief period of liberalization under Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi have found themselves back in hiding or behind bars.
More than a thousand people have been arrested over the last two years, and at least a hundred have been sentenced to death in closed-door trials, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Myanmar nonprofit that tracks these figures. Seventy-six of those on death row are in military custody and the vast majority are young civilians who attended anti-military demonstrations, according to the AAPP.
Junta leaders put out an arrest warrant for Ko Jimmy, one of Myanmar’s most prominent pro-democracy activists, weeks after deposing the democratically elected government. Accused of threatening “public tranquility” with his criticism of the military, Ko Jimmy escaped arrest until October, when he was caught while scaling a fence topped with barbed wire, Nilar Thein said.
Ko Jimmy was arrested soon after that day. Nilar Thein said she didn’t hear from him again until she landed in prison herself and received his note, slipped to her through a network of allies. Over nine years and hundreds of letters, he told her about the place where he grew up, near a huge lake in the Shan Hills, and about the banned-book club that he was organizing from his cell. He wrote her postmodern poems — written in free verse, which she had never read before — and taught her how to write her own. One day, he pleaded with prison guards for a few moments with her in person so he could bring her medicine, food, books — and ask her to marry him.
In 2005, after being released early from prison, the couple got married, had a daughter and called her Sunshine. But when Sunshine was 4-months-old, Ko Jimmy was arrested again. Nilar Thein went into hiding, hopping from one dingy apartment to another with her infant. Within a few months, said Nilar Thein, officials had found and arrested her, separating her from her daughter.
She will be crying, quiet and hard
Tears falling out of the sight of anyone
Like an ordinary woman
I know, know in my heart
She will be missing me and our daughter
Digging into the past, yearning
For maybe the happiness of a mountain or
Maybe the happiness of an ocean
— English translation of "Fleur-de-lis," a poem Ko Jimmy wrote from prison for Nilar Thein when he was imprisoned for the second time in 2007
In 2012, both Nilar Thein and Ko Jimmy were released as part of amnesties granted to veterans of the 1988 student activist movement, which had helped to spur a nationwide campaign against the military in the 1990s. This marked the start of the couple’s longest stretch of freedom together, though as Myanmar began to liberalize, their activism drew them to different parts of the country and kept them apart for long periods of time.
In March 2021, Nilar Thein was volunteering at a covid-19 clinic for Buddhist monks when Ko Jimmy paid her a visit. The country was on edge. Just days earlier, a 19-year-old girl had been shot in the head while attending a protest in the central city of Mandalay. Ko Jimmy, who had already been on the lam for a few weeks, told his wife the situation was only going to worsen. They agreed they wouldn’t leave Myanmar but stay, as they always had, and fight. They also made a pact, Nilar Thein recounted: If they were to be arrested again, they’d try to die by suicide before being tortured. It would be their last protest against the military, they said.
As Myanmar death toll climbs, a soldier’s wife is caught between protesters and military
“He told me, ‘Look, these young people are sacrificing their lives. I’ve already lived for more than 50 years. That’s more than enough,’ ” Nilar Thein remembered. “’I don’t mind to die’ — that’s what he told me.”
The next time she saw her husband, it was in a mug shot released by the military. He was in a pale blue prison uniform, his arms limp by his side and his face gaunt. She wept when she saw the image, she said.
More than a week after the executions, prison officials still have not allowed family members to see the bodies or the remains of the four men who were killed. Until they do so, Nilar Thein said, she won’t hold a funeral for her husband or completely accept that he’s gone. This comes from a distrust of the military and not from blind faith, she said. Nonetheless, it ekes open a door for her to hope.
Aung Naing Soe reported from Thailand. | 2022-08-05T05:08:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Myanmar executions end activists Ko Jimmy and Nilar Thein's love story - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/myanmar-military-executions-ko-jimmy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/myanmar-military-executions-ko-jimmy/ |
The Bank at Pooh Corner
One of Britain’s most memorable characters is Eeyore, the perpetually melancholy donkey from A.A. Milne’s stories of Winnie the Pooh. Sitting on his own at his house on Pooh corner, his attitude more or less condemned him to continued misery. Perhaps the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, missed an opportunity when he didn’t channel his inner Eeyore to greet journalists at his press conference with a cheery: “Good morning. If it is a good morning. Which I doubt.”
It’s hard not to think of Eeyore when reading the commentary that the Bank published Thursday, in conjunction with the announcement that it would be raising rates by 50 basis points, the biggest increase since 1995 (and the biggest ever since the BoE gained its independence under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997). This is what it had to say about future prospects:
Despite being so negative about the economy, the BoE still felt obliged to hike rates because the inflationary pressure is so great. And bear in mind that the UK is less exposed to natural gas prices than several of the bigger EU economies, such as Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.
To see its Eeyore-like pessimism in handy graphical terms, here is an illustration of how their forecasts have changed since May, compiled by Societe Generale SA. The transformation in its expectations for inflation over the last 18 months is awe-inspiring to behold:
To show the scale of the long-term damage that has already accumulated, and which the central bank believes is about to be further compounded, this chart from BNP Paribas shows the current forecast compared to the trends before the Global Financial Crisis, and the comparison to the trend of growth between the GFC and the pandemic. If the BoE proves right, then British gross domestic product in 2025 will be a third less than it was reasonable to expect given the growth rate before the financial crisis:
It’s not big news that a group of well-informed economists, such as the team at the BoE, would conclude that the UK outlook was this bad. It’s not even that big news that the central bank is admitting it was wrong. Plenty have had to do that in recent months. It’s the candor and honesty with which it is laying out such a severe inflation forecast, while predicting that a severe recession will be needed to deal with it, that takes the breath away. I cannot remember a central bank of a large industrialized country being this negative about its own economy.
The sheer bearishness of the outlook is a big deal. Many of us spend our time demanding more in the way of brutal honesty from central banks. This is what it feels like when we get it. I agree with the verdict of Ross Walker, chief UK economist at NatWest Markets:
The immediate inflation outlook is now so dire that the MPC feels it has no option but to engineer a more severe economic downturn in order to bring inflation down. There is no longer any meaningful ‘trade-off’... no ifs, no buts... a recession is unavoidable. Today marks a deeply sobering shift in policy.
Can we use Britain’s problems to project developments elsewhere? Only to a limited extent. It has problems with labor shortages that nobody else can match. At the risk of reopening political wounds, this is probably because of Brexit, which has made it less attractive for foreign migrant workers to come to the country. The regular survey of employers complaining of labor shortages, carried out by the Confederation of British Industry, suggests that the national labor shortage is now acute, and that this is likely to lead to more inflation. This chart from Ian Harnett of Absolute Strategy Research illustrates the phenomenon beautifully:
As a relatively open economy when compared with the US (imports are 28% of GDP, compared to 13% in the US, according to the World Bank), the UK is also more prone to suffer a pass-through from a weakening currency into higher inflation. But note that most of the big European economies are even more exposed to imports. The country doesn’t derive much export revenue from natural resources any longer, and natural gas promises to be a more acute problem this winter than in the US (although less than in continental Europe).
The Bank of England also has a problem with obdurately strong demand for gilts (in part due to enlightened reforms that forced Britain’s pension funds to buy bonds to cover their liabilities). This makes it hard to push rates up to levels where they really depress demand. Before the financial crisis, gilt and Treasury real yields tended to trade together. They parted company in 2013 (the year of the Taper Tantrum in the US) and widened significantly after the Brexit referendum in 2016. While US 10-year yields are now slightly negative, equivalent real gilt yields are two percentage points below zero. That makes it harder to tighten financial conditions:
So Britain is to some extent a special case that we would expect to have a more serious inflation issue than other countries. But everyone needs to heed the bottom line that its central bank is now prepared to say in as many words that inflation is going to hit double digits for a while, and that the country will spend more than a year in recession. Governors of the Federal Reserve have been sounding hawkish this week, but they haven’t gone to the lengths of predicting a recession. That moment will probably come, and it will hurt when it does.
Or will it? These epochal developments slipped through the market like water off a duck’s back. Gilt yields responded to the news of rate hikes and higher inflation ahead by falling. In this case, the bearishness of the forecasts might reasonably offset the higher interest rates. But UK stocks also managed to avoid falls. The FTSE-100 — which includes many multinationals not greatly exposed to the British economy — was flat, gaining 0.03%. But the FTSE-250, including the kind of domestically focused companies that would have found the BoE’s announcement poisonous, put in a gain of 0.68%. That seems to be taking the British stiff upper lip too far. Lower bond yields in their own right justify paying more for stocks; promises by the central bank to crash the economy, all other things being equal, suggest share prices should go down. There’s an unwelcome whiff of denial in this, and it’s not restricted to Britain.
All of this plus a historic heatwave, and a summer-long contest to find a new prime minister to replace the inveterate liar who’s just been forced to stand down. It’s really not a good look. But on the more positive side, as Eeyore once pointed out, there hasn’t been an earthquake recently.
Quantifying Rates and Stocks
In a market downturn, it’s challenging to find anywhere to invest. But beginning last year, one vehicle may be worth considering: active quantitative equity funds. Since the pandemic, systemic active funds have outperformed their benchmarks after three dismal years of performance from 2018 to 2020.
Joseph Mezrich, head of quantitative strategy at Nomura Securities International, and his colleagues, Lai Wei and Thelonious Jensen, credit the success of equity quant funds over the last two years largely to the upward trend of long-term interest rates. It’s a pattern. Since 2010, they found that equity quant funds have performed well when rates have risen and poorly when rates have dropped. The persistent low rates of that era were a problem for them — and rising rates, if they persist, will be just what they need.
Actively managed equity funds run with the benefit of human discretion, in contrast, have underperformed their benchmarks after fees even more severely over the past two years than they did over the previous decade:
“It is no coincidence that value investing has made a remarkable recovery as equity quants have rebounded,” they wrote in a note Thursday. “It is also no coincidence that equity quants and value investing both recovered as interest rates powered higher after bottoming on August 4, 2020. In fact, the continued success of both quant and value depends on the direction of interest rates.”
In 2021, almost 67% of quant funds outperformed and in the first half of 2022, 60% outperformed on asset-weighted basis — and these figures are after fees have been taken into account:
The trio offer two reasons why the success of quant equity funds is linked to the direction of interest rates. First, US large-cap quant funds, in aggregate, have a consistent value bias. “Value has been driven by the direction of rates for more than a decade,” Mezrich said. “Since quant equity funds have consistent and substantial value exposure (but varying and sometimes near-zero momentum exposure), their success has been similarly influenced by the direction of long-term rates.”
Beyond that, funds usually deploy many factors, even though they tend to value-heavy. They tend to be least diverse, and therefore most value-heavy, however, when rates have fallen — which has the effect of intensifying their exposure to value. Diversity then tends to increase — generally a good thing for performance — as rates rise.
As the chart shows, the value-rates connection emerged in 2010, after the GFC. Zooming in, Mezrich notes that this became even tighter after 2018:
What happened then? Post-GFC, rates have been unremittingly low, with the 10-year Treasury yield only rarely breaking 3%. That’s changed corporate behavior in a way that shifted the balance between growth and value companies>?
“This environment of historically low rates has led to corporate borrowing with very different debt profiles between growth and value companies. Very low rates have made borrowing attractive and growth companies have relied more on long-term debt than value companies. Before 2010, the percentage of corporate debt that was long-term was basically the same for growth and value companies. Since then, growth company debt has been skewed more to longer maturities than value company debt... One could then argue that this gave rise to the relationship between long-term interest rates (as represented by 10-year Treasury yield) and the performance of value vs. growth.”
The big question now is: Can good quant performance continue? As so often these days, it all depends on the macro:
“If the market continues to price a slowing economy, a replay of the upward movement of rates that powered the recovery of value and equity quants is unlikely. But the path of interest rates can surprise. Can value and quants continue to win? That depends on the direction of rates.”
Add quants to the ranks of those fervently hoping that the Bank of England has it wrong.
Andrew Bailey of the BoE was channeling a long and distinguished British tradition of curmudgeonliness. Perhaps the greatest example is the Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch (seen here in an early version, and here in its finally evolved form) which is, as all readers should know, a high point in western civilization. If you don’t already know it by heart, here’s the script.
The 1960 ground-breaking satire “Beyond the Fringe” offered the Aftermyth of War and also this take on the End of the World, in which a young Peter Cook predicted a “mighty wind” that will not be so mighty as to blow down the mountaintop on which he’s hiding. His listeners included Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. And then Tony Hancock made a career from extracting comedy from utter misery and boredom as in this brilliantly lip-synced version of his sketch about a dull Sunday afternoon. It’s an appallingly boring Sunday, and it’s hilarious. You can listen to the full audio here; you could also try The Radio Ham, which was reconstructed decades later by Paul Merton.
Or if you want more recent grumpy old men, try Jack Dee on electricity prices (more topical now than when he recorded it), or Les Dawson on life. And if you want something musical, back when I was a student we were all into this band that sang about nothing except how miserable and unhappy they were. And it was great. Have a good weekend everyone, and try not to worry about non-farm payrolls.
• Germany’s Switch to Diesel Comes at a Cost: Javier Blas
• This $200 Billion Bubble Stock Is No GameStop: Matthew Brooker
• BOE Gives a Lesson in Honest Central Banking: Mohamed El-Erian | 2022-08-05T05:42:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Bank of Eeyore Grumbles the Truth. Who’s Next? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-bank-of-eeyore-grumbles-thetruth-whos-next/2022/08/05/f6e28a1c-147c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-bank-of-eeyore-grumbles-thetruth-whos-next/2022/08/05/f6e28a1c-147c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
WARRINGTON, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 10: Britain’s Prime Minister and Conservative party leader Boris Johnson (L) is shown around by company founder Matthew Moulding (R) during a visit to a fulfillment centre for The Hut Group (THG) during a general election campaign event on December 10, 2019 in Warrington, United Kingdom. The U.K will go to the polls in a general election on December 12. (Photo by Ben Stansall - WPA Pool / Getty Images) (Photographer: WPA Pool/Getty Images Europe)
THG Plc, formerly known as The Hut, just missed out on a $1.6 billion investment from SoftBank Group Corp. It’s not easy to see how the e-commerce retailer, led by Matthew Moulding, will be able to replace that injection. THG will have to live within its means for the next few years.
To recap: In May 2021, THG announced a $2.3 billion deal with SoftBank. Masayoshi Son’s venture capital firm became a cornerstone investor in the Manchester-based company, and agreed to work with it, for example on robotic warehouses. But the most eye-catching element was a $1.6 billion option for SoftBank to acquire a 20% stake in Ingenuity, the THG business that helps consumer companies sell directly to their customers via the web.
With the value of the whole of the company falling well below the option price — and SoftBank having its own problems — it looked increasingly unlikely that SoftBank would exercise it. While the Japanese company remains one of THG’s biggest shareholders, the Ingenuity option agreement was terminated last week.
It’ll be tricky for THG to find a similar deal, or raise funds from other investors — especially with the shares of Moulding’s company having fallen 90% from their peak of almost £8 ($9.66) in January 2021. The broader tech sell-off doesn’t help, neither does the fact that online retail is losing steam as economies reopen. The $1.6 billion was earmarked for Ingenuity, but there might have been a way for the capital to benefit the broader THG conglomerate, which includes arms that sell beauty and nutrition products online.
There’s no immediate need for funding. The group had gross cash of £537 million at the end of 2021, and an undrawn revolving credit facility of £170 million. Meanwhile, THG’s already completed a good chunk of the investment needed to kickstart Ingenuity.
But analysts at Barclays estimate that THG will have annual free cash outflows until 2025, when it is expected to turn positive as profit improves at the online businesses and Ingenuity gains scale. Consequently, they predict that gross cash will fall to about £100 million by the end of 2025. In a recent note, Barclays said that while it didn’t think that THG needed to raise capital, preserving it would be important.
It’s hard to see Moulding being as aggressive on deals as he has been in the past. That may not be a bad thing. The company will have to concentrate on generating growth from its three existing divisions. If it is successful, that could help reassure investors.
But a focus on underlying performance comes at a delicate time. Consumers are shifting away from purchasing via the click of a mouse or tap of a smartphone to shopping in physical stores. And with tech valuations having come down, it also means that Moulding will likely miss out on attractively priced opportunities.
THG may have some other options. The company announced last week, alongside the termination of the SoftBank option agreement, that it had completed the internal separation of the three divisions. That could make it easier to seek investments for each unit individually. Given current market conditions, a planned listing of the beauty arm looks unlikely. But THG’s nutrition business could be more interesting. The big consumer goods conglomerates are looking for ways to accelerate sales growth with more sought-after categories. Nutrition, with products from vitamins and supplements to snacks, could be worth more to them than THG investors. Barclays recently put the value of the division at £320 million.
However, Moulding may be reluctant to part with the nutrition unit because it is estimated to be more profitable than beauty, and because of the slump in tech valuations.
Earlier this summer, THG rejected a £2.1 billion proposal for the entire company from a consortium of Belerion Capital and hedge fund King Street Capital Management. Property entrepreneur Nick Candy’s Candy Ventures also walked away.
So, the company has little option but to try to grind out growth from its online businesses and Ingenuity. Unless Moulding, who owns about 20% of THG, were to take it private.
That wouldn’t be so straightforward either. With such wild swings in the stock price, determining the buyout level is tricky. The shares are trading at about 68 pence, valuing the company about £850 million. That makes the cost for Moulding smaller — but shareholders who bought into the company’s initial public offering in September 2020 at £5 will be reluctant to exit for a pittance. And there’s the small matter of Moulding’s recent statement that he thought the business was worth more than £2.1 billion.
SoftBank’s investment was a neat solution. Adapting to reality without it looks less tidy.
The Hut Needs to Step Up Its Makeover, and Fast: Andrea Felsted
Private Equity Can Lap Up British Businesses Again: Chris Hughes | 2022-08-05T05:42:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What to Do When SoftBank Says ‘Not for Us!’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-to-do-when-softbank-says-not-for-us/2022/08/05/4766c01c-147c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-to-do-when-softbank-says-not-for-us/2022/08/05/4766c01c-147c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
RETRANSMISSION TO CORRECT STATE - This photo provided by the Washington State Department of Transportation shows smoke from a wildfire burning south of Lind, Wash. on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. Sheriff’s officials are telling residents in the town of Lind in eastern Washington to evacuate because of a growing wildfire south of town that was burning homes. (Washington State Department of Transportation via AP) (Uncredited/Washington State Department of Transportation)
LIND, Wash. — A small town in Washington state was evacuated due to a fast-moving fire that burned a half-dozen homes, as crews in California made progress against the state’s deadliest and largest wildfire of the year. | 2022-08-05T05:43:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington town evacuated, some homes burned in wildfire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/washington-town-evacuated-some-homes-burned-in-wildfire/2022/08/05/2a3a0630-1476-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/washington-town-evacuated-some-homes-burned-in-wildfire/2022/08/05/2a3a0630-1476-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
After a decade of economic turmoil, not everyone can agree about how to spread the pain of climate and energy savings
Elinda Labropoulou
Air-conditioning units hang in the lightwell that runs through the center of the Hotel Attalos, run by Melina Zisi and her family in Athens. (Myrto Papadopoulos/FTWP)
“It’s very difficult. This is a cultural change,” said Katsiotis, whose office in Keratsini, a port just outside Athens, is plastered with posters of fish species and watercolors of Greek village streets.
Germany is turning off streetlights and telling its citizens to take shorter showers. French citizens have been asked to unplug WiFi routers when they leave the house. And Greece, Spain and Italy — all southern European countries contending with heat waves — are trying to dial back their air conditioning and bear with the heat. European leaders agreed last week to slash gas use by 15 percent ahead of the cold season. If they don’t, leaders warn, some countries could run out of energy for heat and factories.
Greece relies on Russia for about 40 percent of its natural gas, most of which is used to generate electricity. The country does have other choices — a new pipeline for natural gas from Azerbaijan opened last month, and Greece also has a terminal for liquefied natural gas that can come from the United States, Qatar and elsewhere. But with all of Europe’s alternative pathways for gas operating at full capacity, anything saved now can help a neighbor later.
In Greece, leaders this summer announced plans for the state to cut its energy use by 10 percent now, and 30 percent by 2030. In addition to the air-conditioning cuts, workers are being asked to save on lights and to make sure to turn off their computers at the end of the workday. The government announced a $648 million effort to make public buildings more energy efficient, but that won’t be done fast enough to make the difference this winter, officials said.
But Greece also has faced a dilemma about how to spread the pain of the cuts. Ordinary Greeks faced crippling unemployment that peaked at 28 percent during the height of their decade-long depression that ended just before the pandemic. That era, sparked by the global financial crisis and Greek government debt, nearly led to Greece’s being ejected from the euro zone and left a generation impoverished.
She said her energy costs have spiked by 40 percent compared with right before the pandemic, and food costs have increased by 56 percent in the past year alone. But she hasn’t been able to raise her rates to match it.
Photos: Here's how Europe is dealing with extreme heat
Even Greeks who don’t use any air conditioning at all are facing painful bills. Last month, electricity costs were up 80 percent compared with a year ago — and then power companies announced price increased of an additional 55 percent this month, meaning that power bills have quadrupled since last year. Greek leaders announced subsidies to offset most of the latest price increase, but it’s not clear how long they can sustain them. | 2022-08-05T07:14:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Greece turns down AC to use less Russian energy, help Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/greece-air-conditioning-russian-energy-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/greece-air-conditioning-russian-energy-ukraine/ |
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, greets Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting last month at the Astana Trilateral Summit in Tehran. (Mustafa Kamaci/Turkish Presidential Press Service/AFP/Getty Images)
Russia is turning to Turkey and other potential new trading partners as it tries to circumvent Western sanctions that are starting to bite even deeper into its economy following its invasion of Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Sochi on Friday, and the meeting — the leaders’ second in just over two weeks — is setting off alarms that the Kremlin could strengthen economic ties with a NATO nation that has not joined in imposing sanctions on Moscow.
A Russian proposal intercepted ahead of the meeting indicates Russia hopes Turkey will agree to new channels to help it avoid those restrictions on its banking, energy and industrial sectors.
The proposal, which this week was shared with The Washington Post by Ukrainian intelligence, calls for Erdogan’s government to permit Russia to buy stakes in Turkish oil refineries, oil terminals and reservoirs — a move that economists say could help disguise the origin of its exports after the European Union’s oil embargo kicks in fully next year. Russia also is requesting that several state-owned Turkish banks allow correspondent accounts for Russia’s biggest banks, which economists and sanctions experts say would be a flagrant breach of Western sanctions, and that Russian industrial producers be allowed to operate out of free economic zones in Turkey.
There is no indication that Turkey would support these arrangements since they would leave the country’s own banks and companies at risk of secondary sanctions and cut off their access to Western markets. Neither the Turkish government nor Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to requests for comment. The Kremlin previously described the Putin-Erdogan meeting as focused on military-technical cooperation.
Western government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, told The Post that they were not aware of the intercepted proposal but knew Russia is seeking ways to circumvent the war-related sanctions and their growing economic damage. Russian officials are traveling the world trying to find people who would be willing to do business with their financial institutions, they say, noting that Turkey is among a group of jurisdictions being approached because of their lax regard to enforcement.
Russians face prospect of Soviet-style shortages as sanctions bite
With Russia cut off from much of the global economy, such overtures are a sign of the regime’s increasing worries, those Western officials and economists say. Putin has derided Western sanctions as a failure — a steady stream of revenue from energy sales have propped up the Russian ruble and the country’s financial system — and the International Monetary Fund now forecasts Russia’s economy to fall only 6 percent this year.
But economists say headline numbers mask a collapse across a large swath of Russian manufacturing and call the banking sector a “zombie system,” with withdrawal of hard-currency deposits banned. Though Russia has sought to divert trade flows through countries like India and China, the Western-imposed block on imports of high-tech components has brought some industries to a standstill.
“The situation will be darker next year,” said Sergei Guriev, professor at France’s Sciences Po and former chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “No one knows how things are going to function when the European oil embargo kicks in. We’re in unchartered territory.”
New figures released last week by Russia’s state statistics agency Rosstat show how hard some sectors have been hit. Car production, the industry most dependent on foreign components, was down 89 percent in June year on year, while production of computers and semiconductors was down 40 percent year on year and that of washing machines nearly 59 percent lower.
“It’s clear things are going to get tougher and tougher,” said Maxim Mironov, professor of finance at the IE Business School in Madrid. The announcement this week that one of the main auto plants of state-owned AvtoVAZ would reduce its workforce signals a lack of other options for the company — and the government, he noted. “Cutbacks are beginning and it could lead to social tension.”
Other high-tech sectors such as pharmaceutical production are also floundering. A Central Bank of Russia survey last month found that 40 percent of pharmaceutical producers had failed to find replacements for imports of ingredients and equipment. “Russia has been trying to onshore pharmaceutical production, but it clearly hasn’t been successful,” said Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the Washington-based Institute of International Finance. “Sometimes the overall data doesn’t cover all the nuance,” she said, with aluminum producers facing choke points on vital chemical supplies.
Sergei Aleksashenko, a former deputy Central Bank chairman now in exile in the United States, said it’s imperative for Russia to find alternative financial channels for its banks. “It is a question of money,” he said, pointing out that Iran, with help from Russia and Turkey, had previously managed to get around Western sanctions. “If you pay a lot, there will be some banks ready to take the risk.”
Historic sanctions on Russia had roots in emotional appeal from Zelensky
The Putin regime had previously hoped to bypass the current sanctions by creating alternative payment systems through Chinese banks, according to a well-connected Russian state official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution. Yet Chinese banks have balked at taking on that role because of the risk of secondary sanctions. And despite the country’s increasing imports of Russian oil and gas, it cannot replace all of Russia’s equipment needs.
A study by the Green Finance & Development Center at Shanghai’s Fudan University concluded that sanctions fears prompted China to abandon new investments in Russia this year as part of its Belt and Road initiative. The Western officials said it had become clear that China was not an adequate channel for Russia to mitigate the impact of sanctions, forcing the Kremlin to desperately look for other partners.
In Erdogan’s complicated relationship with Putin — marked by periods of conflict and cooperation — Russia had significant past leverage and showed its displeasure by cutting off the flow of tourists to Turkey or banning the import of Turkish agricultural products. For its part, Turkey has cast its long-standing refusal to join sanctions against countries like Russia and Iran as a matter of principle. Since the start of the Ukrainian war, it has positioned itself as a mediator between Moscow and Kyiv — a role that appeared to pay dividends last month when Turkey and the United Nations brokered an agreement to resume grain shipments from blockaded Ukrainian ports.
Erdogan wants Putin’s acquiescence for a planned Turkish military operation against Kurdish forces in northern Syria. Russia maintains troops in the area as part of its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
According to two Moscow businessmen, retail supply chains are already being rebuilt in Russia with Turkey’s help. The owner of a major retail chain said his outlets had completely reorganized supplies through new hubs in Turkey, Israel, China and Azerbaijan. Recent trade data from Turkish Statistical Institute, Ankara’s statistics office also known as Turkstat, shows monthly Turkish exports to Russia surged by about $400 million between February and June.
But consumer goods aside, sanctions experts and Western officials doubt Turkey could become a hub for vitally needed equipment supplies without facing the risk of crippling secondary sanctions. Those officials said the country now has to make a choice, knowing that any business it does with Russia risks casting a pall over its economy and financial sector and will make it harder to do business with the rest of the world. | 2022-08-05T07:14:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin-Erdogan meeting could deepen economic ties despite war sanctions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/russia-turkey-war-sanctions-trade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/russia-turkey-war-sanctions-trade/ |
Co-op apartment at 2101 Connecticut for sale for $2 million
The four-bedroom, four-bathroom, 3,200-square-foot unit was renovated by Landis Architects-Builders
The second-floor corner apartment was renovated by Landis Architects-Builders. It has nine-foot ceilings, oak flooring and light from northern, eastern and southern exposures. (Derek and Victoria Miller)
The co-op apartment building at 2101 Connecticut Ave. NW in D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood has been home to ambassadors, military officers, congressmen and senators, a Supreme Court justice, and a vice president.
Ymelda Dixon often wrote about the building in her Washington Star column, calling it “the bastion of the rich retired” and — because it seemed to attract members of the armed forces in particular — “practically a club for retired top brass.”
Monali Chowdhurie, who acquired this second-floor corner apartment in an estate sale in 2013, described it as a “sociological treatise on how Washingtonians lived once upon a time.”
“It was just fascinating,” Chowdhurie said. “It was quite amusing the way they must have lived and the way we live now.”
2101 Connecticut Ave. NW | The co-op apartment building at 2101 Connecticut Ave. NW in D.C.'s Kalorama neighborhood was designed by Joseph Abel and George T. Santmyers. Apartment 22 is listed at just under $2 million. (Derek and Victoria Miller)
James M. Goode, in his 1988 book, “Best Addresses,” about Washington’s distinguished apartment buildings, called 2101 Connecticut the “finest apartment house to appear in Washington between the two World Wars.”
Designed by Joseph Abel and George T. Santmyers, the building opened as rental apartments in 1928. The layout resembled two Hs — H-H — giving each apartment three exposures to natural light. The striking facade has elements taken from Gothic, Moorish and Spanish Colonial architecture. Terra cotta grotesques add a bit of whimsy to the roof. The building converted to a co-op in 1976.
Condo vs. co-op: Know the differences before buying one
Douglas MacArthur II, who was named for his uncle, the famous general, was among the luminaries who called 2101 Connecticut home. He was a career diplomat and served as U.S. ambassador to Japan and Belgium. His wife, Laura, had resided in the building with her parents, Alben and Dorothy Barkley. Alben Barkley lived here while serving as Harry Truman’s vice president. (Vice presidents did not have an official residence until 1977 when Walter Mondale moved into One Observatory Circle.)
Adm. John McCain and his wife, Betty, the parents of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, were among the many military couples who settled here. Lt Gen. Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb, was a resident as were Gen. William Quinn and his wife, Betty, the parents of Sally Quinn, the author and journalist.
Bill Maillard, a congressman from California and ambassador to the Organization of American States, and his wife were known for their July Fourth fireworks-watching party at the building. Other notables who lodged at 2101 Connecticut were U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Rep. H. Malcolm Baldridge of Nebraska, whose daughter Letitia served as first lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s social secretary.
Chowdhurie doesn’t know who the previous residents of her apartment were. She and her husband were drawn to it mainly for its proximity to Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle and Rock Creek Park.
“Even though we liked the outside of the building, we’re very into minimalism, elegant straight lines, not too many of those curlicues that they had,” she said. “It was actually quite difficult thinking about how to renovate it because we’re very different people.”
Because Chowdhurie and her husband had remodeled two previous homes, this project did not intimidate them. But modernizing the apartment, which hadn’t been updated recently, was a challenge.
“For some time, we were stumped,” she said. “We spent a lot of time just thinking about how to do it before we started the renovation.”
The couple hired Armin Bondoc of Landis Architects-Builders, who had worked with them on previous projects. One of the biggest challenges was adding a powder room.
“I kept thinking, ‘How on earth are we going to do this?’ Because the plumber kept saying no,” Chowdhurie said. “What I did was I went and looked at other apartments — people are very nice — and then I found someone who had a powder room. I asked them how they managed to put it there.”
Chowdhurie also hired EcoNize Closets to install more closets.
“I’m closet crazy,” she said. “I like where I live to be neat, and I don’t want to cram things into closets so I always joke that I create closets out of nowhere.”
When enlarging the kitchen, Chowdhurie had a request. She wanted the countertops on one side to be lower than the other.
“Women are shorter than men,” she said. “Nobody takes that into account.”
Now when she wet grinds spices on a flat stone, Chowdhurie can use more of her upper body strength to push down on the cylindrical pestle.
The couple was thoughtful about how artwork would be displayed throughout the home. They designed the alcoves at the end of the gallery for vases made of Makrana marble, lighting them from above and below. Because the marble, which was used in building the Taj Mahal, is translucent, light passes through the vases.
The four-bedroom, four-bathroom, 3,200-square-foot co-op apartment is listed at just under $2 million. The monthly co-op fees are $4,407.
2101 Connecticut Ave. NW, Apt. 22, Washington, D.C.
Co-op fee: $4,407 monthly
Features: The co-op apartment was renovated by Landis Architects-Builders. It has nine-foot ceilings, oak flooring, and light from northern, eastern and southern exposures. The kitchen has black granite countertops. The walk-in pantry has a second full-size refrigerator. The building has a 24-hour concierge desk, doorman service, a gym, wine storage, a meeting room, and an expansive roof deck with grills, D.C. monument views and dining spaces. One parking space and two storage units convey.
Listing agent: Christopher Burns, TTR Sotheby’s International Realty | 2022-08-05T10:08:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Co-op apartment at 2101 Connecticut for sale for $2 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/2101-connecticut-avenue-apartment-for-sale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/2101-connecticut-avenue-apartment-for-sale/ |
We drew the ultimate map of Southern culture
Hundreds of thousands of Airbnb listings allowed us to map and calculate how the American South describes itself
Mike the Tiger entertains the crowd during a game between the Louisiana State Tigers and the Auburn Tigers at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. (Icon Sportswire/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
If you wish to calculate the most Southern things on Earth, you must first draw a line around “the South.”
It’s hard!
The South isn’t just geographic. Plenty of states in the southern half of the United States aren’t even remotely Southern. It’s not entirely historical — it probably goes beyond the boundaries of the Confederate States of America, but doesn’t encompass every former slave state on the Union side. It’s entirely cultural. And culture is notoriously hard to measure.
Normally, an argument like this would be settled by the Census Bureau, the ultimate arbiter of all things dweeb. But the Census definition of the South seems wildly generous, sweeping up every state from Delaware in the East to Oklahoma in the West.
Data journalists have raced to fill the breach. As we noted in last week’s column about the American Midwest, defining regions like the South has been something of a rite of passage in the industry, with folks like Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight and Soo Oh at Vox taking smart, data-driven swings.
But a final answer remained elusive until we noticed just how many places on Airbnb advertise their “Southern hospitality” or their “Midwestern charm.”
All those Airbnb hosts were, we realized, creating a one-of-a-kind map of America’s true cultural boundaries. Airbnb listings represent hundreds of thousands of pages of text capturing exactly how Americans describe their home regions to outsiders, and every single word of it has a geographic location attached.
That little insight would eventually lead to a database of more than half a million listings. With it, we could calculate what words and ideas made Southern culture unique. But first we’d have to define “the South.”
It wasn’t as simple as searching listings for the word “Southern” — too many people say they’re in “Southern Oregon” or advertise their home’s “Southern exposure.” But we soon found that searching for phrases such as “Southern charm” or “Southern hospitality” would limit the results to true Southerners.
By that measure, the South’s heartland lies in the Deep South strip of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Their northern neighbors — Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas and Virginia — are also relatively easy inclusions.
From there it gets dicier: West Virginia, Florida, Texas and D.C. are on the bubble. By our reckoning, hosts in those places are only about a tenth as likely to name-drop the South in their listings as are their friends in Mississippi, the most Southern state of them all.
But they’re also substantially more Southern than the rest of the country, and our data show they include major regions with strong Southern culture — think East Texas or the Florida Panhandle — so it made sense to include them.
To be sure, this version of the South includes areas that were more or less loyal to the Union during the Civil War (it’s complicated). Kentucky and West Virginia were slave states with substantial pockets of rebel sympathizers, while D.C. — also home to enslavers until emancipation in 1862 — experienced a decisive infusion of Southern culture in the mid-20th century, when Black men and women from farther south flooded there in search of economic opportunity amid the Great Migration.
With the outline of the South firmly drawn, we can calculate the most Southern things. To meet our criteria, something had to be mentioned in at least 200 listings. We removed place names and anything that got more than a third of its listings from a single state — they represent a state, not a region.
The result shows a South still defined by the legacy of slavery. The two most Southern words in our entire database are “antebellum” and “plantation,” words deeply tied to the Confederacy and a romanticized vision of an era defined by the mass enslavement of Black people. (“Confederate” also ranks among the top 15 most Southern words.)
But it also shows a place that’s unique ecologically, with alligators, dolphins, armadillos, shrimp and redfish all being among the most Southern words in the database. Southern trees like crape myrtle and longleaf pine didn’t have enough mentions to make the final cut but would have been among the most-Southern things in the entire database. The same goes for the daiquiri.
Many other entries point to classic touchstones of Southern culture, such as the second-person plural pronoun “y’all,” Mississippi-born crossover artist and pompadour popularizer Elvis Presley and that most hallowed Southern holiday, “game day.”
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The least diverse cities, most common statues and more! | 2022-08-05T10:16:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The most Southern things on the planet, according to data - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/airbnb-south-map-and-culture/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/airbnb-south-map-and-culture/ |
Businesses and advocates are buying ads and calling lawmakers as the Senate moves toward considering climate, health care and tax legislation
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) walks to the Senate floor for a vote on Aug. 4. Lobbyists and advocates from Arizona and other states are contacting Sinema and other lawmakers as the Senate prepares to consider a sweeping climate, health-care and tax bill. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
As Democrats hurry to finalize $739 billion climate, health-care and tax legislation that was revived last week to the surprise of most Washington insiders, business lobbyists and issue advocates are working to support, tweak or derail the bill entirely.
Much of the fiercest lobbying has focused on the bill’s health-care provisions.
“Clearly the pace of spending picked up in the last month or so,” said David Mitchell, president of Patients for Affordable Drugs Now. “They have spent a boatload of money to try and stop this reform.”
Some of the pharmaceutical lobby ads tracked by Mitchell’s group include one running in July and August that argues Medicare “price-setting” — the government negotiating with manufacturers over drug prices, as the bill allows — would interfere with seniors’ ability to get the medication they need. That ad ran in Washington, Georgia, Nevada, West Virginia and other markets, according to the research.
The ad was put out by the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, a nonprofit group that has run other ads opposing Medicare negotiation. A spokeswoman, Jennifer Burke, said current proposals “will ultimately create an even greater burden for our already ailing health-care system.”
A targeted ad from the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease tells Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) that “Medicare price setting is the wrong prescription." (Video: Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease)
On the other side of that policy, an array of groups that see it as a way to lower health-care costs for Americans are supporting the measure, including AARP, which launched a new ad buy on Thursday in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia set to run through Monday and totaling around $700,000. The group also has a $3 million ad buy running in the D.C. area and on national cable, urging senators to stand up to Big Pharma.
AARP members across the country are contacting their legislators to urge them to support the package, and the group is scheduling meetings with senators and their staff to make the case, said Bill Sweeney, the group’s senior vice president of government affairs.
“This is common sense,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “Our AARP members are fired up about this, and they’re ready.”
The Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA), which issued a statement last week urging passage of the bill, is asking senators to consider extending the deadlines by a year or more to make it easier for companies to comply, said Joe Britton, ZETA’s executive director.
In a Tuesday news conference, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a crucial player in the Democrats’ deal, signaled that he was not open to flexibility on the provision.
“Tell them to get aggressive and make sure we’re extracting in North America, we’re processing in North America, and we quit relying on China,” Manchin said. “I’ve been very, very adamant that I don’t believe we should be building this transportation mode on the backs of foreign supply chains, and I’m not going to do it.”
The bill also places price limits of between $55,000 and $80,000 on the electric vehicles for which the tax credit can be used. Rivian, a manufacturer of electric pickup trucks and SUVs, is asking legislators for a tweak that would effectively give it and some other manufacturers a two-year transition period before those limits would apply, said James Chen, the company’s vice president for public policy.
While many of Rivian’s vehicles start at prices below the threshold, they are “right on the cusp” and could easily go over when options are added, Chen said. The company has contacted Senate leadership as well as senators in states where it has operations or has planned a future factory, including Michigan, Georgia and California, he said.
Meanwhile, some business and GOP groups are focused on derailing key tax measures in the bill, targeting moderate Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) with their outreach. Sinema announced only Thursday night that she would vote for the bill, after Democrats agreed to some changes in the tax provisions.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, took out a full-page ad in Arizona newspapers blasting the initial tax provisions. In recent days, Sinema has also heard an earful from Arizona businesses, many of which have called on her to oppose the legislation’s minimum corporate tax.
The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, for example, delivered its message directly during a Zoom call Tuesday afternoon. Business leaders in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and energy — flanked digitally by their top lobbyists — implored Sinema to reject policies including a proposed minimum 15 percent tax on corporations. That provision as initially written would raise $315 billion, a good chunk of the bill’s total revenue.
Danny Seiden, the president of the local chamber, said Sinema “wanted to know from us [if] this bill was written in a way that had negative impacts on business,” adding: “She wanted as much information as she can get.”
Seiden said the companies essentially told Sinema that the policy would crimp capital investment, constraining domestic supply chains. But he said Sinema did not “give us any indication” of her views during the Zoom.
Meanwhile, the America First Policy Institute, a group founded by former economic aides to President Donald Trump, brought together 75 conservative organizations for a conference call on Wednesday night to strategize about how to stop the bill. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which is focused on Arizona, is running advertisements questioning spending items such as retrofitting Postal Service trucks, said Stephen Moore, a former Trump adviser who sits on the group’s board.
Moore said GOP donors are “fired up” about the bill and determined in particular to oppose increasing the IRS budget.
“We’re scrambling to put together to put a campaign that’s effective,” Moore said. “We’re trying to figure out what’s the major vulnerability here, what’s the least popular part in this bill. … This line that now is not a good time to raise taxes generally resonates with people. The truth is we don’t have a silver bullet and are looking for one.”
But one K Street lobbyist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive talks, said the opposition among industry groups was muted in part because they had just last year been bracing for multitrillion-dollar tax hikes — rather than the diminished measures that have emerged. Small businesses successfully stripped higher taxes on pass-through entities, while bigger firms succeeded in keeping the corporate rate at 21 percent.
Democrats had pushed to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent — which would have hit far more firms than their ultimate plan to impose a minimum tax that will only fall on corporations now paying below 15 percent.
“If you told people a year ago they’d have to settle for a minimum tax, that sucks, but it’s definitely a mitigated outcome,” the lobbyist said. “I think a year ago, people would have taken that in a heartbeat.”
“My impression anecdotally is there is not going to be a big push against this from the business community, and there are a few pieces that are arguably good for business,” the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a White House economist under President George W. Bush, said Republicans are prepared to attack “everything” in the bill if it passes. If the GOP retakes Congress in this fall’s midterm elections, they may make a push to kill the 95 percent excise tax on the pharmaceutical industry, believing that will force the rest of Democrats’ attempt to overhaul drug prices to collapse.
“Once that goes, the whole thing falls apart,” Holtz-Eakin said. “If you choose to use reconciliation to pass something on party lines, then immaterial of the merits, it becomes a political target — the [Affordable Care Act] was a political target; the 2017 tax law was a political target; this will become a target, too.” | 2022-08-05T10:16:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lobbyists are rushing to influence the Inflation Reduction Act - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/inflation-reduction-act-lobbyists/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/inflation-reduction-act-lobbyists/ |
How Russia’s Ukraine War Is Stoking Tension in Kosovo
Analysis by Misha Savic | Bloomberg
Three decades after the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, the ethnic hostilities that ignited the conflict linger on. Kosovo declared its independence from former Yugoslav republic Serbia in 2008, but Serbia refuses to let it go. There was a flare-up in the dispute in mid-2022 that raised fears of violence on the European Union’s southeastern frontier before the situation was defused. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added a new dimension to the standoff, with Serbia coming under pressure from the EU to cut ties with Moscow.
1. What was the latest argument about?
Kosovo has a predominantly ethnic Albanian population of 1.8 million, but it includes more than 100,000 Serbs. Tensions grew in August when the Kosovo authorities sought to force the minority Serbs to swap their existing identity documents and car plates to conform with the rest of the population. Many ethnic Serbs viewed the administrative order as an affront, and a threat to their identity. The directive was later put on hold pending EU-mediated talks later in the month.
2. What are the origins of the dispute?
Protests erupted in Kosovo in 1981 following the death of Yugoslavia’s long-ruling Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito. An initial demand by ethnic Albanians that Kosovo be upgraded from a province within Serbia to a federal republic within Yugoslavia triggered Serbian nationalism and helped propel Slobodan Milosevic to power in Serbia in 1987 as he vowed to stem the separatism. His crackdown, however, escalated demands by Kosovo’s majority to seek full independence. War over the territory broke out in 1998, killing more than 10,000 people. The fighting ended in 1999 when bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forced Serb troops out of Kosovo, and an estimated 200,000 Serb civilians fled as well. Serbia has vowed never to agree to the secession of what it considers its historic heartland, a stance backed by Russia, China and even five EU states.
3. What’s been the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine?
Geopolitical divisions over Kosovo have become more acute after the attack on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, an outspoken Serbia supporter. Putin has criticized the West for what he says are double standards. He has compared the cause of Kosovo -- which has been recognized by most of the western world -- to that of two regions in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. In turn, the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo have used the war in Ukraine to intensify their rhetoric. There’s a risk that an escalation could spill over to other parts of the volatile Western Balkans, including Bosnia-Herzegovina. Still, a NATO-led peace force of nearly 3,800 troops has helped keep peace in Kosovo for years and it has said it is prepared to intervene if stability is threatened.
Kosovo Premier Albin Kurti has accused Serbia of serving Russian interests, while Serb President Aleksandar Vucic said Kosovo officials are trying to exploit alarm over Ukraine for their own purposes. Both have opponents at home who question their handling of the recurring tensions, but their populations remain largely entrenched in rival nationalism. The US generally wields more influence than the EU over Kosovo’s leadership, while Serbia seeks support from Moscow as well as from Washington and Brussels in handling the dispute. Vucic has condemned the invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations while stopping short of adopting EU sanctions against Russia. In 2022, Vucic secured five more years as president, with his party holding a majority in parliament. Kurti’s refusal to make any concessions to Serbia has further complicated any talks with the neighboring nation.
5. What about the EU’s relationship with Serbia and Kosovo?
Serbia and Kosovo signed an EU-brokered agreement in 2013 on trade, energy and communications, and which envisioned giving Kosovo Serbs some self-rule. Kosovo later said it wouldn’t give autonomy to the minority population and demanded Serbia’s full recognition before any further consideration. While the EU remains the key investor in both nations, progress in their efforts to join the bloc has been slow. Serbia is negotiating its entry and is further ahead in the process than Kosovo, which has yet to become an official candidate. The EU has made resolving the standoff between them a condition for accession. Disillusion with the bloc is growing in Serbia, where the EU is seen as increasingly distant and preoccupied with its own issues. | 2022-08-05T10:17:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Russia’s Ukraine War Is Stoking Tension in Kosovo - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-russias-ukraine-war-is-stoking-tension-in-kosovo/2022/08/05/28c79ff0-149f-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-russias-ukraine-war-is-stoking-tension-in-kosovo/2022/08/05/28c79ff0-149f-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
They overcame poverty to get to college. Then they saw the housing costs.
A Virginia nonprofit is helping students at a time when many need a lot more than just tuition
Sophia Manera has lived through homelessness and foster homes. Now as a student at Aurora University, near Chicago, her own apartment is the next step to a sustainable college life. (Horatio Alger Association)
Hanging the shower curtains made her a little nervous. Just a bit.
She was, after all, a 17-year-old who had endured living out of cars and, later, foster homes. She had entered her junior year of high school at a 7th-grade reading level and caught up enough to be accepted into college. She had, almost as a rebellion against what everyone in her early life expected of her, decided she would thrive academically and otherwise.
But as Sophia Manera, a soon-to-be sophomore at Aurora University outside Chicago, prepared to move into her first apartment this week — the first space she could call her own, the first place where she set the rules — she realized her life had not prepared her yet for the domestic basics.
“I grew up so unstable. We lived out of the car, in a motel or at random people’s houses,” she said. “There was never a point where people were doing regular life things like putting up shower curtains. It is nerve-racking.”
Surviving inflation one plasma donation at a time
But she also had learned how a stable space of her own was an essential ingredient for academic success.
“You can’t focus on your studies when you are at school because you are worried about where you are going to sleep at night and where you are going to get food,” she said.
Manera, like thousands of other students across the country, has gotten support from the Horatio Alger Association, an Alexandria-based nonprofit that provides $17 million in scholarships each year to college students from difficult backgrounds. It has given out $245 million to students in all since 1984.
But the social and economic aftershocks of the pandemic have put new demands on philanthropy. Horatio Alger has begun extending the reach of its support to help students cover basic needs such as shelter. The new direction spotlights the growing difficultly many disadvantaged students face completing their higher education as housing costs balloon.
“During the pandemic, many of them didn’t have a place to stay because school was closed,” said David Sokol, Horatio Alger’s chairman emeritus.
In response, members of the association pooled together an emergency quick-relief fund for scholars. Since March, that fund has given out more than $200,000 to 400 students already supported by the nonprofit.
“Maybe it’s just a month’s rent. Maybe it’s just a computer charger they need, but this was just to these folks when they called, no approval needed,” Sokol said.
Since 2015, the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice has surveyed students both at two-year and four-year colleges and universities about their basic needs. The latest report, covering 2020, found that 3 out of 5 of the nearly 200,000 students surveyed struggled with food, housing or bills.
The percentage of students facing housing issues also rose. According to the report, 43 percent of four-year students experienced housing insecurity in 2020, up from 35 percent in 2019. At both four- and two-year colleges, 14 percent of students said they experienced homelessness — the first time in the survey’s history that both groups were facing the same level of homelessness.
Low-income students “have survived through high school by creating a cocoon around themselves of guidance counselors, teachers or grandparents,” Sokol said. “All of a sudden, when they go to college, that cocoon is gone.”
Even among students who have their housing covered by Horatio Alger and other scholarships, the prospect of stable housing is still important.
Ninah Jackson, 19, a Bucknell University student originally from Prince George’s County has not experienced housing displacement personally but says the association’s financial support gives her a buffer from concerns that would take her away from her school work in Africana studies and education.
“This way I don’t have to hustle and bustle with three jobs to pay for school,” she said. “Now maybe I only need to work one.”
Others, like Angel Vigil, 19, were facing a choice between work and class. A student at Arizona State University majoring in medical sciences, Vigil spent his childhood shuttling between family and foster homes both in the United States and in Mexico. A serious medical experience during that time pushed him to want to become a surgeon.
But Vigil’s need to pay for housing meant he had to clock in regularly for shifts behind a grocery store’s meat counter his freshman year.
Horatio Alger’s new emergency fund has allowed him to return to the books. “I did not have enough money on my own to make it through school,” he said.
In high school, Manera found that school provided her with consistency after living on the streets and landing in foster care. She worked to catch up by taking extra time with a reading specialist and listening to audiobooks to understand how words were pronounced.
But college at Aurora, where she plans to double-major in social work and criminal justice, requires an additional level of focus.
“You want to absorb as much as you can in class,” Manera said. “But if you are constantly working, you don’t have the time for that, or your mind is constantly wondering how you are going to survive and get basic needs when you are in class.”
Her new apartment will ensure she has that space.
“It’s a huge relief,” she said, “to know that I have somewhere to study, somewhere to just be, and I know it won’t be absolute chaos.” | 2022-08-05T10:17:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Horatio Alger Association helps students as college housing costs rise - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/college-housing-horatio-alger/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/college-housing-horatio-alger/ |
4 spots where your kids can pretend they’re in Jurassic Park
A boy looks inside the jaws of Mr. Bones the Tyrannosaurus rex before the official opening of the fossil hall at the National Museum of Natural History in June 2019. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
It’s pretty obvious if your kid is a dinosaur fan. At bath time, they line the rim of the tub with legions of little plastic creatures. They watch anything with “Jurassic” in the title over and over and over again. And they will randomly drop deep knowledge about Tyrannosaurus rex, stegosaurus and triceratops that will blow your mind. (Where did they learn everything? How did they remember all that information? How is it possible they are so young and already so much smarter than me?)
The David H. Koch Hall of Fossils at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
The sprawling “Deep Time” exhibition urges visitors to rethink their conception of dinosaurs. “They mostly didn’t run around screaming and killing each other all day long, but you get a sense in movies and elsewhere it was a battle royal every minute of the day,” says Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosauria (best job title ever?) at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “This exhibit contextualizes dinosaurs within the story of life on Earth from its origins to today and tells the story of why this is important.” Expect to find over 700 fossil specimens, including a T. rex, woolly mammoth and American mastodon. Look for info-rich deep dives throughout the 31,000-square-foot exhibit, including how the prehistoric creatures chewed their food and how birds evolved from them. One of the highlights is the opportunity to watch scientists working on fossils, including a live view of what they’re seeing underneath their microscopes.
Open daily. 1000 Madison Drive NW. naturalhistory.si.edu. Free.
A savage T. rex, giant insects and death from outer space: What to expect at the Smithsonian’s fossil hall
Have you ever wanted to pretend you were Jurassic Park’s Alan Grant by hunting for dinosaur bones? Now you can, twice a month, in Laurel, Md., at this publicly accessible fossil site, aged somewhere between 112 million and 115 million years old. After a 15-minute orientation, you’ll walk across a marked-off area, looking on the ground for fossils that are naturally exposed by rain and the elements. Over 3,000 have been found. Many of the best specimens were discovered by small children since they are close to the ground and generally have good eyesight. At a recent dig, a 5-year-old found a giant crocodile tooth. The park keeps all finds, but the discoverer is credited. “There are fossils from this area going back to the 1800s, and the names of their collectors are with those fossils to this day,” says John-Paul Hodnett, Dinosaur Park’s paleontologist and program coordinator. “They become a piece of history, too.” After the hunt, kids can clamber on the sculptures of a T. rex skeleton and dinosaur eggs in the park’s play area.
There’s no missing this kitschy roadside attraction in Clarke County, Va., home to more than 50 giant fiberglass dinosaur statues. The figures don’t look at all real, but that’s part of the cheese ball charm of the quirky theme park. Dinosaur Land began as a mere gift shop in the early 1960s, but while owner Joseph Geraci was vacationing in Florida, he saw dinosaur statues at a mini golf course. The handmade beasts seemed like just the thing to draw visitors to his shop, so he commissioned five from the artist, Jim Sidwell, who crafted a number more until Mark Kline of Lexington, Va., took over dino-making duties. Come prepared to take lots of selfies with the Jurassic creatures, so you can act like you’re starring in an old-school B-movie. (Just don’t pretend to ride any of the dinosaurs — climbing on the statues isn’t allowed.) The gift shop component of the enterprise endures, so you can stock up on dinosaur-related tchotchkes before you head home.
In Virginia, the dinosaurs still roam — sort of
Over 215 million years ago, the area that is now Culpeper, Va., was on the shores of a gigantic freshwater lake where dinosaurs came to drink. The prehistoric creatures left their footprints in the mud, where they eventually became fossils. In 1989, nearly 5,000 fossilized tracks were discovered (the largest find of its kind at that time), mostly from Anchisauripus parallellus, a four-legged carnivore and raptor ancestor. The museum’s gallery exhibit features a pair of those tracks accompanied by the stories of how they got there and were discovered, along with other fossils from the same time period discovered elsewhere. John Christiansen, executive director of the museum, stresses that our understanding of dinosaurs is in a constant process of evolution and change. “We tend to think with science and history, the things we learn are hard truths that are always going to be the case,” he says, “but these things are subject to change due to new discoveries or understandings.” Every year, the museum hosts a Dino Walk at nearby Luck Stone Quarry, where the dinosaur tracks were discovered, so visitors can get up close and personal with them. (Buy your tickets early, as they go quickly; this year’s event on Sept. 24 is already sold out.) | 2022-08-05T10:17:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where to find dinosaurs in the D.C. area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/dinosaurs-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/dinosaurs-dc/ |
Signs along the roads near Bent Mountain, Va., protest against the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
The deal this week that secured the support of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) for major economic legislation contained a small provision that could have an outsized impact in federal courts.
In an early version of the talks, Democratic leaders agreed on a proposal that would move future litigation involving a particular natural gas pipeline proposed in Manchin’s state to be heard by the U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit and that judges weighing the cases would be randomly assigned. Experts say the ramifications of such a deal would go beyond the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline project that has long been stalled by the courts over environmental concerns.
“It would create a new pathway for lobbyists” to demand “congressional forum-shopping” for pet concerns, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia University, on the grounds that “'Joe Manchin did it for them; why can’t you do it for me?'”
The word “practicable” leaves plenty of wiggle room for courts to assign cases as they see fit.
The idea of legislation that affects only Mountain Valley Pipeline is raising hackles, but anything written broadly enough to include other projects might garner resistance from companies satisfied with their local appellate courts. People involved in the negotiations said the draft is changing constantly and will not be final until a vote in late September; a spokeswoman for Manchin called this draft “outdated and incomplete.”
As its name suggests, the pipeline first proposed in 2014 goes high and low in its 303-mile path through West Virginia and Virginia. From its inception, environmentalists have fought the plan as polluting waterways and damaging rock; landowners have protested the use of eminent domain to seize their property. After numerous legal battles, including one that ended in a consent decree over violations of Virginia law, the pipeline is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
A spokeswoman for the company did not return a request for comment but told the Virginia Mercury that “MVP is being recognized as a critical infrastructure project that is essential for our nation’s energy security, energy reliability, and ability to effectively transition to a lower-carbon future.”
Federal courts make their own rules regarding assignment of judges to cases. In the Fourth Circuit, as in most federal courts, cases are initially assigned randomly, but related litigation is often given to the judges who have become familiar with the facts and legal issues involved.
The same three-judge panel has heard most of the Fourth Circuit cases involving the Mountain Valley Pipeline — Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory, who was given a recess appointment by President Clinton before his nomination by George W. Bush, and Judges Stephanie D. Thacker and James A. Wynn Jr., both Obama appointees. The Fourth Circuit has ruled that federal agencies failed to consider erosion, construction runoff or the impact on endangered fish species when approving permits and that the company would not complete work crossing streams quickly enough.
It’s not clear that the D.C. Circuit would rule differently if new permits are issued and challenged, but the company behind Mountain Valley Pipeline has made clear it blames these particular judges for its woes. Their lawyers recently took the unusual step of demanding a new set of judges, saying that repeated adverse rulings from the same panel has created “the perception of a deck stacked against large infrastructure projects generally and one private party specifically.”
Noting that the same judges had ruled in favor of the pipeline on other issues, the project’s opponents responded in a filing that “MVP’s track record in permit challenges reflects systemic flaws in the permitting of MVP’s pipeline, rather than ‘a deck stacked against’ it.”
The court denied the request for a new panel, and the full Fourth Circuit declined to reconsider the panel’s judgments.
A majority of active judges on the D.C. Circuit are Democratic nominees, although including senior judges who also hear cases makes the court evenly divided. On the Fourth Circuit, Democratic nominees are the majority on both the active and senior bench.
Joe Lovett, executive director of Appalachian Mountain Advocates, one of the group’s challenging the pipeline in court, called the potential agreement to move all future litigation to the D.C. Circuit “crazy.”
“It would call into question the legitimacy of our federal courts, even as that legitimacy is being questioned on issues like abortion and voting rights,” he said. “To preserve the integrity of the courts, I hope this effort fails.”
There are other provisions in the circulated draft that could help Mountain Valley Pipeline “as well as hundreds of other renewable energy, transmission and highway projects dealing with the same permit approval delays due to confusing overlapping requirements,” said Alex Herrgott, president of the nonprofit Permitting Institute and an infrastructure official under President Donald Trump. But the words “Mountain Valley Pipeline” do not appear.
Sam Sankar of Earthjustice, a law firm that works on environmental advocacy, said directly requiring new judges review the Mountain Valley litigation would be seen as “improper and potentially illegal interference in an ongoing case.” So the draft “might be a hint or viewed or thought of as a hint to this panel or the Fourth Circuit more broadly to reassign those cases. It does not strike me that its likely to have much of a direct effect. Those judges will make their own decisions.” | 2022-08-05T10:17:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Manchin economic package talks included moving Mountain Valley Pipeline cases to a different court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/mountain-valley-manchin-deal-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/mountain-valley-manchin-deal-court/ |
From ‘Oregon Trail’ to ‘Uncharted,’ video games make history fun
The history of history in video games
Perspective by Julio Capó Jr.
Julio Capó, Jr.
The “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” video game for Xbox One.
The success of this year’s “Uncharted,” a film starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg and based on characters and themes from the popular video games series, has brought new attention to how historical themes and concepts can reach broad audiences. Like many other video games, “Uncharted” uses fragments of history to advance its user-interactive storyline. The Uncharted video game franchise, which now has seven iterations, began in 2007 with a plotline centered on a man named Nathan “Nate” Drake who claims to be a descendant of privateer Sir Francis Drake. While on his quest to find the lost treasure of El Dorado, he finds himself embroiled with Nazis who sought the same treasure during World War II.
Video game designers and players have long been fascinated and inspired by historical narratives and figures. Delving into the history of how video games have utilized — and distorted — stories of the past reveals a persistent demand for historical education through entertainment, a reminder that people are constantly searching for new ways to engage and find meaning in the past.
Efforts to educate through video games began with computers. In 1973, for example, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, which worked with the state university system and Minnesota’s Department of Education, started using computer technologies to improve student learning. A decade later, Minnesota boasted of having 10,000 computers in its public schools, with a ratio of 73 students per computer — reported to be the highest ratio in the country at the time.
The consortium also led the way in creating computer-based courseware, including its most famous release: “The Oregon Trail.” Originally a text-based game for school use, “The Oregon Trail” was released to students and teachers throughout Minnesota in 1975. The game, which later saw release through Apple, Microsoft and others, is a strategy video game where the user embodies a wagon leader shepherding settlers across the frontier during the 1840s. The player is tasked with making important decisions along the way, including choosing the best path, when to hunt and how to avoid illnesses such as dysentery. Designed to encourage skills such as planning, strategy and memory, the game was a success.
Such nostalgia sold well in the 1970s, when in anticipation of the country’s bicentennial and social, economic and political unrest, many Americans looked to the past in new, engaging ways. As Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has argued, it was in the 1970s that history “became as much about feeling as about thinking, about being inside the past instead of looking upon it.” Immersive video games helped history come alive in the 1970s, much like new period-piece TV shows, historical reenactments, oral history projects and museum exhibitions did.
While Atari and its groundbreaking 1975 game “Pong,” a virtual simulation of a game of table tennis, showed the potential market for home video games, commercial sales were checkered over the next decade. Then, in 1985, Japan’s Nintendo released its Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States. That release soon marked the success of now-classic games such as “Super Mario Brothers” (1985) and “The Legend of Zelda” (1987). By 1990, Nintendo represented 90 percent of the United States’ $3 billion spending on video gaming, with a survey suggesting that its lead character Mario had become more recognizable to U.S. children than Mickey Mouse. These commercial successes also meant that educational gaming would, no doubt, take a back seat to entertainment.
As new consoles entered American homes, including 1989’s Sega Genesis, many games emerged, some of which sought to link historical themes of conquest and empire-building to modern-day skills of success and work ethic. For example, Nintendo released the military strategy game “Genghis Khan” in 1990. The game allowed up to four players to create a conquest strategy on behalf of England, the Byzantine Empire, the Mongol Empire or Japan — all while facing challenges along the way. As a 1989 review of the game’s computer release noted, “Conquerors need to be calculating, charismatic, and cunning, as well as courageous,” and this video game promised its players such lessons.
Similarly, players of 1991’s “Civilization” (originally on MS-DOS, but then released through several other platforms and consoles) were asked to build and grow an empire across thousands of years, seeing the civilization through military engagements, urban growth and settlement. Players-turned-imperialists were sometimes met with oppositional civilizations they might have read about in their history textbooks, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon Bonaparte. These games rewarded players for their persistence and determination to conquer and colonize.
By the 1990s, another video game genre was also firmly established: World War II. In the United States and elsewhere, such attention to war further entrenched a nationalist memory of the battlefield that emphasized the role of individual combat and violence. Frequently, this occurred through the lens of the first-person shooter, who is often divorced from the broader strategy of warfare. For many of these games, the history was often more of a backdrop or setting than a source of education. The focus on entertainment was similarly reflected in the original releases of the successful games “The Medal of Honor” (1999) and “Call of Duty” (2003) and their many sequels and imitations.
The ability to weave a strong nationalist story in video games is by no means unique to the United States or limited to the historical backdrop of World War II. In 2012, the Cuban government released “Gesta Final” to help teach Cuban youths about the Cuban Revolution of 1959. This game also adopts the first-person shooter format to tell a state-approved story about the origins of the revolution and the successes of its people.
In short, video games reveal much about our culture — whether educational initiatives or political agendas. They also have become a way for gamers to engage with important questions about public history and a shared past — albeit, one created for the game itself. Game designers and programmers often use a generic or fictional museum or heritage site, for example, to allow the player an opportunity to learn a particular past necessary to advance the character’s storyline. In this way, while primarily a form of escapism, these features can function much like a museum in the non-virtual world where visitors take away fragments of the past to shape ideas of who they are as a people.
Whether fictional or not, the inclusion of museums and historical and archaeological sites in video games can also tell us something important about changing attitudes toward the accessibility and the gatekeeping of history. While museums have become spaces of reverence and exclusion, their virtual manifestations have provided players a different experience. Countless video games, including 2019’s “World War Z” about fighting zombies, require standoffs at museums or cemeteries that even lead to the full destruction of those virtual settings.
Many museums today have taken a page from video games’ successes to better engage their audiences, especially younger crowds, with interactive and sensory experiences. In 2016, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled “MicroRangers,” an app game that interfaces with the museum’s exhibitions to help children learn.
Video games may make history more accessible, but there is a downside because these historical experiences are often presented without a critical or analytical lens or guidance. Just the same, we might question whether the consumption of alternate and imaginary pasts in the virtual world may serve — even inadvertently — as a decoy or distraction to facing and reckoning with the horrors and inequities cemented in our histories.
Some data suggests something more optimistic, however. A 2020 survey revealed that 93 percent of historical video game players had felt inspired to learn more about a particular event or person in history while 90 percent thought that video games had the power to change people’s perspectives on a historical event.
As the market for video games continues to grow and advance, so too can its ability to create and disperse knowledge of the past. Those who study history would be wise to heed the call. | 2022-08-05T10:17:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | From ‘Oregon Trail’ to ‘Uncharted,’ video games make history fun - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/05/oregon-trail-uncharted-video-games-make-history-fun/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/05/oregon-trail-uncharted-video-games-make-history-fun/ |
The revolutionary roots of satanic panic still invoked in American politics
The devil has long been part of American political culture.
Perspective by Zara Anishanslin
Zara Anishanslin is an associate professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware, and author of "Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World." In 2020-21, she will be a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.
WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 26: U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) (C-L) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) (C-R) pray with other lawmakers and audience members at the America First Agenda Summit, at the Marriott Marquis hotel July 26, 2022 in Washington, DC. Former U.S. President Donald Trump returned to Washington today to deliver the keynote closing address at the summit. The America First Agenda Summit is put on by the American First Policy Institute, a conservative think-tank founded in 2021 by Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow, both former advisors to former President Trump. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The devil is popular in the political culture of 2022. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claimed in April that Satan controlled the Roman Catholic Church and that abortion was “a lie that Satan sells to women.” In May, Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor announced that she was “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” That same month, QAnon popularized ideas about the return of the 1980s “satanic panic,” a moral uproar over unsubstantiated reports of satanic ritual child abuse. “Satanic panic” also trended on Twitter in July in reaction to season four of the Netflix show “Stranger Things,” which includes a plotline about “The Hellfire Club” that plays Dungeons & Dragons and is set, like the original satanic panic, in the 1980s.
But the roots of Americans invoking the devil for political purposes go far deeper than the 1980s. They reach all the way back to the American Revolution. Understanding this history broadens our comprehension not just of the revolutionary era, but of how and why connections between religion and politics persist to this day in a nation in which church and state are ostensibly separated. The history of revolutionary era patriot use of the devil as a political device also helps make sense of why the devil remains a popular tool among contemporary politicians with a White Christian Nationalist agenda.
By the time the war for independence began, fascination and familiarity with the devil was widespread, fostered first by Puritanism and then the first Great Awakening. From the early days of European settlement in New England, Christian ideas about the devil fed bigoted stereotypes about Indigenous Americans, entwining fear of the devil with Americans’ sense of their own identity, both as Christians and as settlers. For instance, Cotton Mather proclaimed in 1693 that, “The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories.” Later, Jonathan Edwards’s famous 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” warned colonists that “The Devil stands ready to fall upon them and seize them as his own.”
Outside of New England, the devil was important to German pietist sects in Pennsylvania like the Moravians, while evangelical leaders in the South agonized over how to use widespread fascination with Satan to their advantage. The devil was a common, shared symbol across diverse peoples, religions and geographies of colonial American settlers.
And colonists did not have to be evangelical, or even religious, to be familiar with the devil. Satan inspired lowbrow humor as well as fear of hellfire, and he held widespread popular fascination, appearing in folk tales and ministers’ sermons alike.
The devil was omnipresent in anti-Catholic Pope’s Night celebrations in colonial Boston and elsewhere. Pope’s Night (or Pope’s Day) celebrations were colonial versions of celebrations of Guy Fawkes Night, an English holiday celebrating the thwarting of the Catholic “Gunpowder Plot” to blow up the (Protestant) king and parliament. In New England, it was a raucous, alcohol-fueled event. Men paraded in the streets with effigies of the “Pope” alongside that of the devil (who was often tarred and feathered) before being ritualistically burned.
When protests against the British intensified in the 1760s, Pope’s Night celebrations took on new meaning. Now, they were used to broadcast Patriot politics as well as anti-Catholicism. The processions singled out local merchants who refused to boycott British goods, Loyalist colonial officials and British ministers. No matter the shift in politics, the devil remained a constant.
But although a constant, the devil played multiple roles and took many forms in the revolutionary era.
In addition to parading on the streets as an effigy whose destruction delighted audiences, he leered from political cartoons and prints. He showed up in woodcut illustrations in almanacs and newspapers and sensationalist fiction. He was everywhere, in part because he was an easy conduit for articulating political ideology in emotionally stirring ways. Patriots used him to spread their political message of preserving republican liberty from corrupt politicians and tyrannical rulers, depicting the latter as akin to devils.
During the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-66, a representation of the devil hung on what became known as Boston’s “Liberty Tree,” next to an effigy of Stamp Tax collector Andrew Oliver, who represented British tyranny. In Lebanon, Conn., as the local press reported, the devil “turned up his breech and discharged fire, brimstone and tar” onto another effigy of a stamp collector. In South Carolina, he “appeared suspended, on a gallows seventy feet high” to the right of another stamp collector’s effigy. And in New York, protesters hanged an effigy of the Lieutenant Governor alongside the devil before burning it on the Bowling Green.
During the war itself, the devil appeared when Benedict Arnold’s treason came to light. In Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale designed an effigy of a two-faced Arnold that paraded through the city accompanied by the devil. Pennsylvanians bought prints of the procession for display in their homes, while others viewed images of it in the pages of a German-language almanac. Images of the devil united German- and English-speaking Pennsylvanians in a shared popular culture of revolution.
The common presence of the devil in popular protest, as well as in the visual, literary and material culture of the revolutionary era, reflects how evangelical Christianity suffused revolutionary politics even though many elite leaders and important thinkers of the American Revolution — men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Thomas Paine — were not themselves evangelicals.
Part of the devil’s widespread appeal came from the fact that in addition to his long-standing theological associations, he also was regularly associated with efforts to “enslave Americans.”
He regularly showed up in print culture as the emblem of the “badge of slavery,” an image of the devil holding a noose. Colonists’ fears that legislation like the Stamp Act were meant to deprive White Americans of their natural rights — to “enslave” them — manifested especially in images of the devil.
How the devil looked was important. And in colonial and revolutionary era America, the devil was often portrayed as a Black man. Illustrations of the devil in Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem Witch Trials and Paul Revere’s prints alike both showed the devil with Black skin. Such depictions played into the racism and fear of slave revolt that undergirded much of the revolution. It also made it clear that the devil’s use in revolutionary popular culture was about more than religious culture. The use of black devils in prints and effigies evoked a manufactured fear of Black people that White Americans used for political purposes before, during and after the revolution.
The devils whose effigies were star players in protests from north to south did not survive the revolutionary era; their physical destruction was the endgame of such protests. And the many images of the devil published in revolutionary era newspapers or printed in almanacs are often marginalized as bad art. But these representations, however fleeting, hold historical importance. An emotionally powerful popular culture that put the devil front and center helped mobilize people into protest and war. The devil was therefore a founding figure in the American political lexicon.
Supernatural figures like devils or ghosts often become popular cultural touchstones at times of social crisis or upheaval like revolutions and civil unrest. They are ready mechanisms for transforming fear — of change, of loss, of safety — into collective political response. This is what happened in the 1980s, when a modern satanic panic surged in response to social and political transformations not all Americans agreed with. The devil was a convenient stand-in for villains of all sorts in the 1980s, just as he was during the revolutionary era.
Similarly, today, his popularity as a talking point among White Christian Nationalists seeking electoral office points to how the devil continues to work as a political tool to announce both “Patriot” support of “liberty” and a racist agenda in a time of partisan divide. The devil, it seems, continues to have his day. | 2022-08-05T10:17:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The revolutionary roots of satanic panic still invoked in American politics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/05/revolutionary-roots-satanic-panic-still-invoked-american-politics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/05/revolutionary-roots-satanic-panic-still-invoked-american-politics/ |
How a Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
MoFi Records claimed its expensive reissues were purely analog reproductions. It had been deceiving its customer base for years.
By Geoff Edgers
Mike Esposito works at his record store, the ‘In’ Groove, in Phoenix. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)
Mike Esposito still won’t say who gave him the tip about the records. But on July 14, he went public with an explosive claim.
In a sometimes halting video posted to the YouTube channel of his Phoenix record shop, the ‘In’ Groove, Esposito said that “pretty reliable sources” told him that MoFi (Mobile Fidelity), the Sebastopol, Calif., company that has prided itself on using original master tapes for its pricey reissues, had actually been using digital files in its production chain. In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy. And using digital while claiming not to is the gravest sin a manufacturer can commit.
There was immediate pushback to Esposito’s video, including from some of the bigger names in the passionate audio community.
Shane Buettner, owner of Intervention Records, another company in the reissue business, defended MoFi on the popular message board moderated by mastering engineer Steve Hoffman. He remembered running into one of the company’s engineers at a recording studio working with a master tape. “I know their process and it’s legit,” he wrote. Michael Fremer, the dean of audiophile writing, was less measured. He slammed Esposito for irresponsibly spreading rumors and said his own unnamed source told him the record store owner was wrong. “Will speculative click bait YouTube videos claiming otherwise be taken down after reading this?” he tweeted.
But at MoFi’s headquarters in Sebastopol, John Wood knew the truth. The company’s executive vice president of product development felt crushed as he watched Esposito’s video. He has worked at the company for more than 26 years and, like most of his colleagues, championed its much lauded direct-from-master chain. Wood could hear the disappointment as Esposito, while delivering his report, also said that some of MoFi’s albums were among his favorites. So Wood picked up the phone, called Esposito and suggested he fly to California for a tour. It’s an invite he would later regret.
That visit resulted in a second video, published July 20, in which MoFi’s engineers confirmed, with a kind of awkward casualness, that Esposito was correct with his claims. The company that made its name on authenticity had been deceptive about its practices. The episode is part of a crisis MoFi now concedes was mishandled.
“It’s the biggest debacle I’ve ever seen in the vinyl realm,” says Kevin Gray, a mastering engineer who has not worked with MoFi but has produced reissues of everyone from John Coltrane to Marvin Gaye.
“They were completely deceitful,” says Richard Drutman, 50, a New York City filmmaker who has purchased more than 50 of MoFi’s albums over the years. “I never would have ordered a single Mobile Fidelity product if I had known it was sourced from a digital master.”
Record labels use digital files to make albums all the time: It’s been the industry norm for more than a decade. But a few specialty houses — the Kansas-based Analogue Productions, London’s Electric Recording Co. and MoFi among them — have long advocated for the warmth of analog.
“Not that you can’t make good records with digital, but it just isn’t as natural as when you use the original tape,” says Bernie Grundman, 78, the mastering engineer who worked on the original recordings of Steely Dan’s “Aja,” Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.”
Mobile Fidelity and its parent company, Music Direct, were slow to respond to the revelation. But last week, the company began updating the sourcing information on its website and also agreed to its first interview, with The Washington Post. The company says it first used DSD, or Direct Stream Digital technology, on a 2011 reissue of Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” By the end of 2011, 60 percent of its vinyl releases incorporated DSD. All but one of the reissues as part of its One-Step series, which include $125 box set editions of Santana, Carole King and the Eagles, have used that technology. Going forward, all MoFi cutting will incorporate DSD.
Syd Schwartz, Mobile Fidelity’s chief marketing officer, made an apology.
“Mobile Fidelity makes great records, the best-sounding records that you can buy,” he said. “There had been choices made over the years and choices in marketing that have led to confusion and anger and a lot of questions, and there were narratives that had been propagating for a while that were untrue or false or myths. We were wrong not to have addressed this sooner.”
Mastering engineer Brad Miller founded MoFi in 1977 to cater largely to audiophiles. The company boomed during the 1980s, but by 1999, with vinyl sales plummeting, the company declared bankruptcy. Jim Davis, owner of the Chicago-based Music Direct, a company that specializes in audio equipment, purchased the label and revived MoFi. During the recent vinyl resurgence (vinyl sales in 2021 hit their highest mark in 30 years), MoFi’s specialty releases sell out quickly and can be found on secondary markets at much higher prices.
Marketing has been a key element of the MoFi model. Most releases include a banner on the album cover proclaiming it the “Original Master Recording.” And every One-Step, which cut out parts of the production process to supposedly get closer to the original tape, includes a thick explainer sheet in which the company outlines in exacting detail how it creates its records. But there has been one very important item missing: any mention of a digital step.
The company has obscured the truth in other ways. MoFi employees have done interviews for years without mentioning digital. In 2020, Grant McLean, a Canadian customer, got into a debate with a friend about MoFi’s sourcing. McLean believed in the company and wrote to confirm that he was right. In a response he provided to The Post, a customer service representative wrote McLean that “there is no analog to digital conversion in our vinyl cutting process.”
Earlier this year, MoFi announced an upcoming reissue of Jackson’s 1982 smash “Thriller” as a One-Step. The news release said the original master tape would be used for the repressing, which would have a run of 40,000 copies. That’s a substantially bigger number than the usual for a One-Step, which is typically limited to between 3,500 and 7,500 copies.
Michael Ludvig, a German record enthusiast with a YouTube channel, 45 RPM Audiophile, questioned how this could be possible. Because of the One-Step process, an original master tape would need to be run dozens of times to make that many records. Why would Sony Music Entertainment allow that?
“That’s the kind of thing that deteriorates tape,” says Grundman.
“That’s the one where I think everyone started going, ‘Huh?’” says Ryan K. Smith, a mastering engineer at Sterling Sound in Nashville.
The MoFi controversy has not just exposed tensions between rival record makers. It’s heightened a rift between Fremer and Esposito.
For decades, as LPs were replaced by CDs and iPods, Fremer, now 75, was a lonely voice pushing to keep them alive.
“Michael’s considered the guy, like the guru, so to speak,” says Dale Clark, 54, a photographer and longtime record collector in Ohio.
But Fremer, now a writer for the online magazine the Tracking Angle, has been bickering with Esposito for months. He was furious that MoFi invited Esposito to Sebastopol and wrote an email to Jim Davis on July 17 to protest.
“You have lost your minds,” Fremer wrote. “Mistakes happen that can be corrected. In this case you have chosen to elevate [an inexperienced non-journalist] to work your way out of a predicament instead of a seasoned journalist and I’m not referring necessarily to me. I could name a half dozen others.”
Esposito never claimed to be a journalist.
He’s a record geek who grew up in foster homes after his father was murdered when he was 11. (His mother, he says, has had drug and alcohol problems.) Over the years, Esposito, who didn’t finish high school, has sold sports collectibles and started a chain of mattress stores. In 2015, he opened the ‘In’ Groove in Phoenix. His regular videos, in which he unboxes reissues and ranks different pressings, have made him a popular YouTube presence with almost 40,000 subscribers. He says he felt he owed it to his customers to pursue the MoFi tip.
“I sell to the people I sell to because they trust me,” Esposito, 38, told The Post. “And if they don’t trust me, they can go anywhere else and buy those records.”
Esposito wants record companies to do a better job labeling recording sources. Some already do. Intervention and Analogue Productions provide details on records or their websites; so does Neil Young.
“The problem is ‘analog’ has become a hype word, and most people don’t know how records are made,” says Esposito. “And you can very factually say this record was sourced from the original analog master tape and you’re not lying. But that doesn’t disclose to the consumer what’s going on between the beginning of it and the final product.”
There were no ground rules laid out for Esposito’s July 19 visit. He paid his airfare, and Wood met him at the airport. In the car, Wood confirmed what Esposito had reported in his video.
“They didn’t come off to me as if they were trying to hide anything,” Esposito said.
At MoFi’s headquarters, Esposito looked at tapes and machinery the company uses to master its records. He also saw vintage packaging and advertising materials for past releases, including mock-ups for Beatles reissues. Then he took out his Panasonic camcorder and asked Wood if it was okay for him to set up and do an interview with the three mastering engineers he had met. No problem, they said.
The result is an hour-long conversation that is equally fascinating and confusing. Esposito is not a trained interviewer, and engineers Shawn Britton, Krieg Wunderlich and Rob LoVerde are not trained interviewees. At times, the conversation is stilted and meandering. There are also occasional moments of charm as they connect about their shared passion for music.
Whatever Esposito’s approach, there is no doubt that without him, MoFi’s process would have remained a secret. The engineers, who had stressed the use of tape and working “all analog” in the past, didn’t hesitate to reference the company’s embrace of Direct Stream Digital technology.
Davis, the owner, not only didn’t invite Esposito but also didn’t learn about the visit until after Wood had extended the invitation. He tried to get to Sebastopol for the tour but said that a long line at a rental car check-in left him arriving at MoFi headquarters only after Esposito was finished.
By then, the damage was done. Last week, Wood was asked whether he regretted the interview with the engineers. He broke down.
“I regret everything, man,” he said.
Davis also did not appreciate the interview. Music Direct’s stereo equipment business brings in revenue of more than $40 million a year, and MoFi earned about $9 million last year. But the record company has just a handful of full-time staffers and no crisis-management plan. He doesn’t blame the engineers for what happened
“I mean, it was not a well-thought-out plan,” says Davis. “Let’s put it that way.”
The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good they can fool even the best ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and Esposito’s own lists of the best sounding analog albums.
Jamie Howarth, whose Plangent Processes uses digital technology to restore sound and whose work has earned praise for Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen reissues, wishes MoFi had come clean years ago and proudly told its customers that their prized records sounded best because of the digital step. He understands why it didn’t. It was terrified of being attacked by analog-or-bust audiophiles.
“One of the reasons they want to excoriate MoFi is for lying,” says Howarth. “The other part that bothers them is that they’ve been listening to digital all along and they’re highly invested in believing that any digital step will destroy their experience. And they’re wrong.”
Wood says that MoFi decided to add DSD not for convenience but because its engineers felt they could help improve their records. He remembers hearing MoFi’s reissue of Santana’s “Abraxas” in 2016. “My mind was blown when we got the test pressings back,” he said.
Wood says MoFi takes great care in capturing the digital file. It won’t simply accept a link from a record company. If a master tape can’t be couriered to Sebastopol, MoFi will send engineers with their equipment to capture it. Having a file allows them to tinker with the recordings if they’re not pleased with a test pressing and make another. He says he is disappointed in himself for not being upfront but that, from here on out, MoFi will properly label its recordings. A revised One-Step card has already been crafted for upcoming releases featuring Van Halen, Cannonball Adderley and the Eagles.
And Randy Braun, a music lover, Hoffman message board member and lawyer in New York, hopes that, in the end, the MoFi revelation will prove what he’s been saying for years, that the anti-digital crowd has been lying to itself: “These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.” | 2022-08-05T10:18:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MoFi Records has been using digital all along, a scandal in the audio community - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/08/05/mofi-records-analog-digital-scandal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/08/05/mofi-records-analog-digital-scandal/ |
He started a movement to help drug users. He couldn’t save himself.
Jesse Harvey, pictured here, was the founder of the Church of Safe Injection. (Sophie Park/For The Washington Post)
PORTLAND, Maine — The opioid crisis was getting worse and Jesse Harvey was sick of people dying, so he began asking a pointed question: What would Jesus do?
For Harvey, a young activist who had struggled with addiction, the answer was increasingly clear.
He decided to start a church. Its core belief, Harvey said, was that people who use drugs do not deserve to die.
The group was called the Church of Safe Injection. It distributed clean syringes, fentanyl test strips and doses of naloxone, an opioid overdose antidote, mostly from the back of Harvey’s red Honda hatchback.
Such efforts were partly illegal in Maine, but for Harvey they were a moral imperative. “Some people say that what I’m doing is too radical,” he told an interviewer in 2019. “And I think my answer to that would be, isn’t it time for radical solutions?”
Harvey was a fervent believer in reducing harm to drug users, a once-controversial approach that has gained support from policymakers, including the Biden administration, as overdose deaths have spiraled.
In the shadow of the pandemic, the opioid crisis reached a grim record. Last year, drug overdoses killed more than 100,000 people in the United States, a 50 percent increase since 2019. At least 80,000 of those deaths involved opioids.
The increasing lethality is driven by the nationwide spread of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that is also found mixed with other illicit drugs. “This is, right now, the most dangerous time to be a person taking drugs,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Some people say that what I’m doing is too radical. And I think my answer to that would be, isn’t it time for radical solutions?
— Jesse Harvey, in a 2019 interview
The story of Harvey and the group he founded shows the depths of the challenges facing those on the front lines of an emergency that is both unrelenting and under-resourced, one where the most difficult work is sometimes done by recovering drug users themselves.
For Harvey and his closest colleague, Kari Morissette, preventing overdose deaths was intensely personal work. Both felt that harm reduction efforts had saved their own lives, and helping others was a source of hope at a time that too often could feel despairing.
As the pandemic took hold, the duo continued to hand out sterile supplies to drug users in Maine. But Harvey’s own recovery began to unravel. Morissette grew deeply worried about the person she considered her mentor and one of her best friends.
In mid-2020, Harvey wrote to a friend that the work gave him a “sense of purpose and direction, rather than shame and despondency.”
‘Dead people can’t recover’
Harvey arrived in Portland in 2015 after finishing college. Newly sober and full of energy, he became a vocal advocate in the recovery community, always carrying a tiny notebook in his pocket to record ideas.
He began working for Greater Portland Health doing outreach to marginalized groups and developed a special closeness with the city’s homeless population. Friends said it was a question of temperament: He never judged and always made people laugh.
Harvey was born in Massachusetts but spent much of his childhood in Africa and South Asia, where his parents worked in international development.
After the family returned to the United States, Harvey started middle school and his parents divorced. When his new classmates asked him where he was from, “he would have to say Kathmandu,” recalled Catherine Nash, Harvey’s mother. “The kids were like, ‘Where’s that?’ ”
Harvey combined a sharp intelligence — “smarter than a lot of his teachers,” recalled Mollie Kravitz, a friend who met him in seventh grade — with a goofy sense of humor. In high school, he was prescribed an anti-anxiety medication, which his mother believes started his path to addiction.
One day in 11th grade during a psychology class, Kravitz saw Harvey crush a pill and snort it off his desk. Alarmed, she told a teacher, and Harvey was summoned to see the principal.
Harvey’s struggle with substance abuse — including alcohol, meth and, at times, opioids — deepened during college, his mother said. He ultimately graduated summa cum laude from King’s College in Pennsylvania, but those years were punctuated by trips to the emergency room, treatment programs and several court-ordered commitments, she said.
After he stopped using drugs and moved to Maine, Harvey threw himself into activism. He started Journey House, a group of recovery residences. He also founded the Portland Overdose Prevention Society, whose goal was to push the city to establish a supervised injection site.
But none of this felt like enough to Harvey, his friends said.
Ryan Hampton, a well-known recovery advocate and author of two books on the opioid epidemic, crossed paths with Harvey in 2017, and the two became close. They were both young and a couple of years into their sobriety; they loved to think up revolutionary solutions to big problems.
Hampton remembers being at a conference where he and Harvey were “spitballing ideas left and right” as the “older, more, quote-unquote, experienced people” sitting at the table tried to tamp down their exuberance.
Unlike some experts, the pair believed that abstinence was not the only path toward recovery. Harvey once said that his route out of addiction was not evidence-based, but instead “evidence-hostile.”
Both Hampton and Harvey believed that people in recovery needed a greater say in policy decisions, instead of being told what to do by doctors and scientists. Both were inspired by the work of gay activists in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
They embraced harm reduction, a strategy whose tenets include widespread distribution of naloxone, a drug that can immediately reverse opioid overdoses and goes by the brand name Narcan; providing drug users with clean needles; and opening supervised consumption sites where drug users can be monitored.
(There are only two authorized supervised injection sites in the country, both in New York. The Biden administration has not endorsed the concept.)
The approach remains politically contentious, with critics saying it enables drug use and fails to tackle the problem of addiction on a wider scale.
But research has consistently shown that naloxone and needle exchanges save lives and reduce the transmission of HIV and hepatitis. The studies of overdose prevention sites also point to lifesaving impacts.
“Dead people can’t recover,” said Chelsea Shover, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “You have to meet people where they’re at.”
Harvey said his own life demonstrated the importance of this approach. Once, during a relapse, he injected drugs at an underground safe consumption site and experienced a fentanyl overdose. He was revived with four doses of naloxone, he told a friend in an email. If he hadn’t been supervised, he said, “I’d be dead right now.”
‘There’s no way we can’t do this’
One night in 2018, Harvey called Hampton to share his latest big idea: a church that would combat overdose deaths.
Instead of talking about distributing sterile syringes and naloxone, Harvey decided to do it himself under the auspices of an interfaith church that he registered as a nonprofit organization. Hampton remembers thinking it was a brilliant idea but didn’t believe Harvey would make it happen.
Harvey was raised in the Christian tradition but wasn’t particularly religious. He became ordained on the internet and made business cards for the Church of Safe Injection, complete with a quote from the Book of Matthew (“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness …”).
Together with a group of roving volunteers, Harvey distributed clean syringes, doses of naloxone, condoms and other sterile supplies on the streets of communities such as Portland, Lewiston and Auburn.
At the time, it was illegal in Maine for an individual to possess more than 10 hypodermic syringes, which meant a key part of the church’s activities was a crime. Harvey believed his work could be legally protected as an exercise of religious freedom, but the argument was never tested.
The concept caught fire. Chapters of the Church of Safe Injection sprang up in West Virginia, Connecticut, Arizona, Montana and Tennessee, as well as in other parts of Maine. For Harvey, it meant a growing amount of media attention and police scrutiny.
On a cold afternoon in April 2019, Harvey set up a small table in the parking lot of a Unitarian Universalist church in Auburn, a city in southern Maine. Arrayed on a brightly colored tablecloth were alcohol wipes, condoms, snacks, fentanyl test strips, doses of naloxone and a plastic container for used syringes.
The Auburn police chief told Harvey that if he gave drug users clean needles in exchange for dirty ones, he would face criminal charges under state law.
In a video of the exchange, Harvey, then 27, nodded, his face serious. “But under, you know, notions of righteousness and justice and health equity,” he said, “there’s no way we can’t do this.”
Harvey worked constantly, friends said, and could be found writing grants at 2 a.m. Along with running the Church of Safe Injection, he was studying full time for a master’s degree at the University of Southern Maine while juggling other projects.
It was “hard for him to find balance,” said Eric Skillings, a friend who helped start Journey House. “Which is like most people with substance use disorder — that’s how we are, all or nothing.”
By mid-2019, Harvey had begun using drugs again. In August, he was involved in a minor car accident and charged with driving under the influence. He was also charged with assault and drug trafficking after a nurse at a hospital found him in a bathroom and alleged that he squirted her with a syringe of meth.
Harvey later wrote that what happened that day was a “horrific accident” and expressed “extreme regret” for the incident. “There are so many things I would go back and change, if I could, to lessen the hurt I caused others.”
His public relapse was devastating, said his close friend Morissette, a Maine native who joined the Church of Safe Injection in early 2020. “He had spent so long being this person held up on a pedestal,” Morissette said, and “ended up getting vilified.”
People he had worked with closely distanced themselves. He resigned from Journey House, the organization he founded.
Harvey felt the media coverage of his relapse and arrest had turned him into someone unrecognizable: a violent criminal. The result was a kind of “stigmatization and ostracization more damaging that any I had previously known,” he later wrote in a piece he shared with a friend.
At the start of 2020, Harvey was placed in a court-ordered treatment program in Massachusetts that was housed in a prison. While a prior stay in a similar setting had helped him get sober, this one was disastrous. Harvey said the authorities kept him longer than necessary, jeopardizing his graduate studies. He went on a hunger strike.
When he was released after five weeks, Harvey said he planned to write a book about the failures of the treatment system. He was consumed with the criminal charges pending against him. His lawyer attempted to reach a plea bargain with prosecutors that would avoid time in prison.
At a recovery meeting in Portland in February, Harvey met Morissette for the first time. Vivacious and outspoken, Morissette had recently returned to Maine from Florida. For a decade, she had used drugs and done sex work while living on the streets of Miami, sometimes feeling so desolate that she believed death would come as a relief.
She knew how life-changing harm reduction could be. A year or two before she stopped using drugs, a group of volunteers began coming around her neighborhood offering access to treatment services and handing out clean needles.
“I can’t tell you the relief that it brings somebody,” she told a podcast in 2021, to hear someone say, “If you’re ready, I am here, but while you’re not ready, let me help you to be safe.”
When Morissette met Harvey, she was working at Dunkin’ and feeling profoundly adrift. She told him she was looking for a sense of purpose. He offered to show her one.
The two became inseparable. They spent hours together packing hundreds of kits to hand out to drug users, whether for administering naloxone or caring for needle wounds. Morissette quickly joined the board of the Church of Safe Injection.
“I get to help people in situations that I literally just got out of a few months ago,” Morissette told Molly Whyte, her best friend.
Harvey and Morissette continued their work after the pandemic started, knowing that the vulnerable people they served would have even fewer options to get clean supplies or access treatment.
One person who helped them: Zoe Brokos, the head of Portland’s certified needle exchange program who had known Harvey for years. Brokos said that in the early part of the pandemic, the pair would sometimes arrive to exchange garbage bags full of used needles for clean ones.
But by summer 2020, Harvey’s life was beginning to fall apart. Friends described him as ashamed and often depressed. He was “just a shell of a person compared to when he was sober,” Skillings said. Morissette checked in on Harvey constantly, but he began to withdraw from nearly everyone.
The last time Brokos saw Harvey was in August 2020. He had been sleeping outdoors, she said, and just feeling “so awful.” She told him she loved him and was glad to see him.
On Sept. 7, Harvey died of an accidental overdose at age 28. Alcohol, fentanyl and heroin were found in his system.
There was a flood of grief. Hundreds of people gathered for a memorial held on a grassy slope at Portland’s Eastern Promenade, a large park overlooking the deep blue waters of Casco Bay. Tributes flowed in from friends, colleagues, even elected officials. Some said Harvey had saved their lives. One friend contrasted the compassion Harvey extended to everyone he met with the lack of it in his final days, quoting a poem by Rumi:
Since you will come
And throw kisses
At my tombstone later
Why not give them to me now
That same person
‘I am sorry for anyone that I disappointed’
After Harvey died, Morissette was crushed. She never fully forgave herself for not being there to help him. She had his name and the date of his death tattooed on her forearm and resolved to continue his work.
She proved a formidable organizer in her own right. Last year, under Morissette’s leadership, the Church of Safe Injection successfully applied to become a certified needle exchange in Maine, a status that came with $50,000 in state funding.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers have passed legislation that support the group’s mission. Officials repealed the law that made it illegal to possess more than 10 hypodermic syringes, the statute that police had cited to threaten Harvey with arrest. They also expanded Maine’s “good Samaritan” law, which shields people seeking help with overdoses from arrest or prosecution.
Each time there was a small policy victory, Morissette said she wished Harvey had been there to see it.
Earlier this year, the Church of Safe Injection, known as CoSI, reached a milestone. It opened its first brick-and-mortar location on the main street of Lewiston, a gritty city of 36,000 people about 40 miles from Portland.
The choice of Lewiston was a tribute to Harvey, Morissette said. He had distributed sterile syringes in the city while under surveillance by police at a time when drug users there had no authorized source of clean supplies.
CoSI opened six days a week thanks to a rotation of devoted staff, most of them volunteers. Morissette spoke with passion about making the premises a welcoming place free of stigma. There are comfortable couches, vases of fresh flowers and, against one wall, a discreet array of storage bins holding everything from naloxone to syringes to wound kits to toothpaste.
Drug users can come inside, exchange used needles and receive supplies, some of which are already packed into small brown paper bags.
Since CoSI opened its doors, Morissette said, it had served more than 650 people. It had exchanged 97,000 used syringes and provided connections to treatment services to any drug users who wanted them.
Morissette would often drive the streets of Lewiston after midnight, trying to track down drug users she was worried about, said Whyte, her friend, who also works at CoSI.
In an interview earlier this year, Morissette was excited to talk about Harvey’s legacy and CoSI’s plans. The state had recently increased its funding to the group, which would allow it to expand to four other locations.
Behind the enthusiasm, however, she was struggling. In May, she revealed on Facebook that she was “mentally deteriorating” and had repeatedly attempted to take her own life. A friend had revived her using naloxone.
“I thought that if I was open about my struggles that it would make me ‘less qualified’ to be a person people can call, that people can count on,” Morissette wrote. “I am sorry for anyone that I disappointed.”
A week later, Morissette died of an accidental overdose. She was 33.
On a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon at the end of May, Morissette’s friends and family gathered at the Eastern Promenade in Portland, the same spot where Harvey’s memorial was held in 2020. Friends dressed in bright colors to honor Morissette’s unapologetically bold fashion sense. They read poems and blew giant bubbles and threw flower petals into the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Nash, Harvey’s mother, was there, as was Kravitz, Harvey’s childhood friend.
This is “a hard day in an endless string of hard days,” said Jodi Cohen Hayashida, a pastor who was close to both Harvey and Morissette. She spoke of the “wider grief of having to say goodbye over and over.”
In Lewiston, CoSI closed for the month of June to mourn. At the start of July, it reopened its doors with a fresh influx of volunteers. | 2022-08-05T10:18:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jesse Harvey helped opioid users. Then his addiction recovery crumbled. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/jesse-harvey-opioids-addiction-maine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/jesse-harvey-opioids-addiction-maine/ |
Investigators say that gunfire played a role and that foul play is suspected
Barricades block off a street in Laurel, Neb., on Aug. 4 after four people died in two fires. Police say investigators believe that accelerants may have been used and that the perpetrator or perpetrators may have burn injuries. (Riley Tolan-Keig/Norfolk Daily News/AP)
The first fire in Laurel, Neb., was reported just after 3 a.m. Thursday at a home on a quiet residential block. The blaze, authorities said, followed an explosion, and when firefighters responded, they found one person dead inside.
Then, as investigators inspected the first scene, a second fire was reported three blocks away. At that residence, first responders found three more people dead.
Authorities are now searching for a perpetrator, as “foul play is suspected,” Col. John Bolduc, with the Nebraska State Patrol, told reporters Thursday afternoon. He declined to identify the four people and said investigators could not say how they died until autopsies are completed.
The agency said in a news release later Thursday that “gunfire is suspected to have played a part in the incidents at both homes.”
About 40 miles west of Sioux City, Iowa, Laurel is a farming community of about 1,000 residents. Cedar County Sheriff Larry Koranda described it as safe and tightknit. He said he didn’t know for sure whether the people found dead in the two houses knew one another, but “everybody knows everybody in this small community,” he told reporters.
Shortly after the second blaze was reported, a man driving a silver sedan was seen traveling westbound on Highway 20 out of Laurel, Bolduc said, adding that the man might have picked up a passenger before leaving town. Bolduc said that fire investigators believe accelerants may have been used to start the two fires and that the perpetrator or perpetrators may have burn injuries.
“Please understand that this investigation is in the very early stages,” Bolduc said, addressing reporters from Elm Street, the location of both burned houses. He asked that anyone with information come forward.
Some businesses and public buildings went under lockdown following news of the incidents, KNEN reported, although Koranda said Thursday afternoon that it was voluntary.
Some residents remained on edge.
“Nothing like this has ever happened in our community,” Scott Taylor, a Laurel resident and business owner, told WOWT.
“Of course, it scares you because the cops are like your family, the firemen are all like your family, they’re all friends, your kids live here, with us owning the businesses, we worry about all of our staff,” Scott added.
Linda Gobell told KCAU that she’s concerned that no one is in custody. Residents “don’t know what to expect,” she said. “There’s been a lot of different people running through town.”
Alan Pallas of Laurel told WOWT he was looking out his window around the time of the first fire.
“I heard, somebody said there was an explosion, but it sounded like a gunshot to me, and I seen somebody go down,” he said. “Later on, a few hours later, there was a body out there.” | 2022-08-05T10:18:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police investigating fires, gunshots after 4 found dead in Laurel, Neb. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/laurel-nebraska-deaths-fires/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/laurel-nebraska-deaths-fires/ |
Review by Daniel Stone
An image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a cluster of galaxies about 4 billion light-years from Earth. Cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton theorizes that our universe is just one of many. (NASA/ESA/CSA/AP)
There are incredible scenes from Mersini-Houghton’s life that demonstrate her sense of emotional whiplash, which almost certainly helped her build such a durable and vivid mind. After another of her father’s forced absences, he persuaded his wife to claim in court that he abused her, so that she could be granted a divorce and keep the children in the family home. By chance, the judge hearing the motion was a childhood friend of Mersini-Houghton’s father and spotted the ruse instantly. The divorce was denied, sealing the path of the family. But then the path changed again. Her dad was permitted to return home, and the family stayed together.
Or there’s the brush with chance when a British economist came to Albania in 1992 on a development mission. He and Mersini (in the days before she added the Houghton) became friends, but it wasn’t until he surprised her in the Zurich airport, paged her over the loudspeaker and informed her that he had bought the seat next to her to accompany her to her new adventure in the United States that their future was settled. An astrophysicist marrying an economist feels like the start of a joke. But it worked, and for the early years of their marriage, they carried on like distant molecules, living separate lives on separate continents.
Daniel Stone is a former editor for National Geographic and the author of “The Food Explorer.” His next book, “Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic,” will be released in August.
Before the Big Bang
The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond
By Laura Mersini-Houghton
HarperCollins. 240 pp. $27.99. | 2022-08-05T10:18:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond" by Laura Mersini-Houghton - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/big-bang-created-universe-what-created-big-bang/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/big-bang-created-universe-what-created-big-bang/ |
History’s famous delusions, those who believed them — and why
Review by Lucinda Robb
Margaret Nicholson, a former domestic servant who came to believe that she was the rightful heir to the English throne, attempted to assassinate King George III with a butter knife in 1786. Afterward, she was sent to live in a psychiatric hospital in London and was a popular attraction for visitors. (Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Listen to the radio, watch the news or log on to social media, and it won’t be long until you encounter some crazy new delusion (you can probably think of one or two off the top of your head). Yet despite how wild a theory may be or how easy it is to disprove, it seems there is always an audience ready to buy it. How, we ask ourselves, can people believe such foolish — and often dangerous — nonsense?
A delusion can be generally defined as “a fixed, false idea, not shared by others, unshakable in the face of decisive evidence contradicting it.” It is important to note that simply having delusions isn’t all that unusual. Many of us believe things, especially about ourselves, that disinterested observers might disagree with. (Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon slogan — “Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average” — comes to mind.) But the examples in this book are at the very far end of the delusion bell curve, representing landmark cases in the history of psychology.
Digging deeper into their stories, it’s possible to identify recurring patterns. One common theme is the need for respect, especially in lives that have taken an unexpected turn for the worse. When this happens, some individuals resort to delusions of grandiosity to reassert their dignity and sense of self-worth. A prime example is Margaret Nicholson, who after years of service in upper-class households found herself dismissed, abandoned by her lover and on the edge of poverty. She started to believe that she was descended from Queen Boudicca and thus the true heir to the English throne. Attempting to assert her rights, she accosted King George III with a butter knife and was saved from a traitor’s gruesome fate by the king himself, who insisted that no one hurt her (he comes off much better here than in the musical “Hamilton”). Locked up in Bedlam hospital, she became a popular attraction for visitors and was granted occasional privileges because of her notoriety.
There are times when the evidence presented can feel a tad repetitive, and the frequent cross references between cases can be distracting. If you are looking for snark and biting humor, this is not your book — Shepherd plays it straight the whole way. But overall, “A History of Delusions” is a humane and thoughtful account in an age overflowing with vitriol. Its sincerity is refreshing.
Lucinda Robb worked for 15 years for the Teaching Company and is a co-author with Rebecca Boggs Roberts of the young-adult book “The Suffragist Playbook: Your Guide to Changing the World.”
A History of Delusions
The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse
By Victoria Shepherd
Oneworld. 338 pp. $27.95 | 2022-08-05T10:18:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse by Victoria Shepherd - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/historys-famous-delusions-those-who-believed-them-why/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/historys-famous-delusions-those-who-believed-them-why/ |
Tracing the Republican Party’s devolution to one man: Newt Gingrich
Review by Christopher Buckley
Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), pictured in 1998 while serving as House speaker, ushered in not only a Republican takeover of Congress but also a more combative style of politics. (Ray Lustig/The Washington Post)
As readers of The Washington Post and his syndicated column know, Dana Milbank covers politics with snap and crackle. His gift, and his dogged reporting, serve him well in his new book, “The Destructionists” (good title), on the quarter-century-long crackup of the Republican Party.
While reading it, a line by the late P.J. O’Rourke came to mind: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
Another line kept coming to me — Ronald Reagan’s farewell letter to the American people, which ends: “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
Reagan’s letter was dated Nov. 5, 1994. Three days later, Republicans won control of the House and the Senate, led by a pale rider named Newt Gingrich. And hell followed with him.
Milbank traces the descent of the party once led by Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and John McCain as it became the party of Gingrich and Mitch McConnell and, ultimately, the cult of Donald Trump. For those once fond of the GOP, it’s like switching the channel from “Father Knows Best” to “The Sopranos.”
That’s a dated but not altogether inapt reference. The ’94 election that ushered in Gingrich’s Republican Revolution also ushered out a Congress led by veterans of World War II. Four years later, the Un-Greatest Generation became its dominant demographic.
As an exercise, try thinking “Party of Lincoln” (or Reagan) as you recite aloud this partial list of post-1994 GOP leaders, grandees, enablers and influencers: Gingrich, Kenneth Starr, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Ralph Reed, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Lee Atwater, Andrew Breitbart, Ann Coulter, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Karl Rove, Tucker Carlson, Rupert Murdoch, Jack Abramoff, Michael Flynn, Jim Jordan, Steve Bannon, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Rudy Giuliani, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, Mo Brooks, Ron Johnson, Lauren Boebert, Elise Stefanik and the 147 members of Congress who on Jan. 6, 2021, voted not to certify Biden’s election, hours after the Capitol was attacked by an insurrectionary mob. Got an ashy taste in your mouth?
The baton that Reagan passed to a new generation became a truncheon in Gingrich’s hands. For those scratching their heads and moaning, “How did this happen?” Milbank has the answer. It all began with the honorable gentleman from Georgia.
Rupert Murdoch famously offered Gingrich a $4.5 million book deal in 1994. That started to smell a tad too stinky. If Gingrich writes his memoirs, he might consider as a title “The Audacity of Mendacity.”
It was Newt who pushed the ur-right-wing nutjob conspiracy that Clinton aide Vince Foster was murdered. That big little lie metastasized a quarter-century later into “Stop the Steal.” It was Newt who defended right-wing militias after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City. And it was Newt who, while leading a hot steaming mess of a personal life, fiercely agitated to oust Bill Clinton for playing hide-the-cigar with a 20-something intern.
More significant, perhaps, it was Newt who in 1990 poisoned the well by issuing a manual with 65 insults and abusive phrases for Republicans to deploy against Democrats: “traitors,” “sick,” “corrupt,” “betray,” “bizarre,” “pathetic,” “abuse of power,” “anti-flag,” “anti-family,” “anti-child,” etc. To a group of College Republicans he mused, “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” Problem solved.
The purpose of his Devil’s Dictionary and his sermon on civility to peach-fuzzed Republicans was to inculcate demonization and to weaponize paranoia. And so here we are, in the era of “alternative facts,” QAnon, Jewish space lasers, anti-vaxxing, birthers and Alex Jones conspiracies about the dead children of Sandy Hook being ketchup-smeared actors in a government plot to seize our AR-15s. The Gazpacho police are watching.
While Gingrich was toxifying the Republican Party, someone up the Acela corridor was watching, and learning. In Milbank’s narrative, Gingrich emerges as Trump’s second-most-pernicious mentor, after Roy Cohn. What a pair of pedagogues!
It was more than just a vocabulary lesson. Gingrich inspired in his epigones a destructive — or to use a favorite term of his brightest student, “nasty” — style of politics.
“The epic government failures of the last quarter century,” Milbank writes, “can all be traced back to Gingrich and the savage politics he pioneered: three impeachments; two botched wars and a botched pandemic response; several government shutdowns; a seven-fold increase in the federal debt; a market collapse and the Great Recession. … It’s no wonder that there has been a wholesale loss of faith in American democracy.”
Milbank adduces inflection points in the GOP’s hostile takeover of politics: the repeal of the “Gephardt Rule,” which ushered in government-by-continuing-resolution and automatic increases in the debt limit. He writes, “Congress’s ability to function never returned.” The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United was a biggie, launching the era of super PACs and “dark money.” Profligate spending under George W. Bush forever made laughable any Republican assertion of fiscal continence. The GOP fomented a racial backlash against Barack Obama, turning “itself into the party of white grievance. All that was left for Trump to do was to light a match.”
Debuting in 1996, Fox News played an indispensable role in the destruction, providing airtime for what Mike Pence might call the rubber-room wing of the Republican Party. Its poster boy, the discrepantly cherubic Tucker Carlson, recently showcased a three-part series arguing that the Jan. 6 insurrection was staged by anti-Trump forces. Joseph Goebbels is smiling, if not in heaven. It might be funny, but the consequence of all this supersaturating hyper-mendacity is that 70 percent of Republicans insist that the 2020 election was fixed.
Occupying a toasty spot in Milbank’s Ninth Circle of the Republican inferno is McConnell, who more than anyone besides Trump has tainted and delegitimized the Supreme Court by turning it into “another political branch of government.” His refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing, followed by his detonation of the “nuclear option” by abolishing the filibuster to seat Neil Gorsuch, were masterpieces of cynicism. Four years earlier, McConnell insisted that eliminating the filibuster would mean “the end of the Senate.” Today’s packed, Catholic Supreme Court is as much his creation as Trump’s. That crashing sound you hear is the temple, coming down.
The court was once the most respected branch of government. Now, in back-to-back rulings, it has rearmed New Yorkers and thrown stare decisis out with the bathwater. Susan Collins, heir to the desk of Margaret Chase Smith, is feeling a bit had by Brett “I Am a Don’t-Rock-the-Boat Kind of Judge” Kavanaugh. And here comes Ginni Thomas, Clarence’s wife, to boost our confidence in the highest court with suggestions on how to overturn a presidential election.
Milbank’s book isn’t without flaws. He overreaches at times, and here and there the writing feels rushed or breathless. (“Once you’ve unhitched yourself from the truth wagon, there’s no limit to the places you can visit.”) But these are minor complaints, alongside the book’s considerable merit.
What will rise from the ashes is hard to predict. A kinder and gentler version of Trump, in the person of Ron DeSantis? Or is that oxymoronic?
All I know is that after reading “The Destructionists,” I needed a drink. Perhaps this much is safe to say: that as long as there are Republicans like Liz Cheney, Mike Pence (sigh), Adam Kinzinger, Jeffrey Rosen, Richard Donoghue, Rusty Bowers, Brad Raffensperger, Cassidy Hutchinson and Sarah Matthews, we may yet get through this dark night and see the bright new day the Gipper told us would always be dawning in America.
Christopher Buckley’s novel “Has Anyone Seen My Toes?” will be published in September.
The Destructionists
The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party | 2022-08-05T10:18:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party by Dana Milbank - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/tracing-republican-partys-devolution-one-man-newt-gingrich/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/tracing-republican-partys-devolution-one-man-newt-gingrich/ |
Perspective by Sharafat Ali
A paramedic contacts a doctor after my friend’s father Mohammad Shafi Gojri died on the way to the hospital due to sudden cardiac arrest. (Sherafat Ali) (Sharafat Ali)
Ever since the Indian subcontinent was partitioned into independent India and Pakistan in 1947, both nations have been in conflict over the Himalayan territory of Kashmir. The territory is divided between the two nations — Pakistan controls the northern and western parts, while India controls the largest portion — but claimed in its entirety by both.
Kashmir is a place of breathless beauty, from the serene waters of Lake Dal to its snow-capped mountains. But it is also the site of horrific struggle, pushed and pulled by the political ramifications of being a disputed territory.
Photographer Sharafat Ali’s project “This is normal” gives us a tiny glimpse into what life can be like for the people who live in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The region, encumbered by decades of trauma fueled by India-Pakistan tensions, was plunged into yet another bout of crisis as the coronavirus pandemic swept through.
In 2019, the Kashmir Valley was put under an even more stringent military lockdown than normal after the Indian government revoked the special status of the part of Kashmir it controls. The pandemic’s arrival only worsened the already anxious situation.
“People feared that the pandemic would wreak havoc here,” Ali said, though he added that the people of Kashmir are used to lockdowns — they have become a part of life in this disputed territory.
As Ali noted, “Lockdowns are not new to us. They’re more of a time-killing machine. Netizens are used to military lockdowns and lockdowns without internet.”
Ali’s images document the pandemic’s toll on the politically and militarily ravaged region by “exploring the people inside their homes and outside.”
“The life I watched during the times of fear made me feel so disturbed … unthinking, unknowing, day by day … their soft dyes have steeped my soul in color that will not pass away,” Ali said.
All the images in this series were produced using a cellphone. Ali told me he chose to work this way because “I did not want to appear as a photographer when people were going through a difficult time. The mobile phone gave me more confidence to intrude on people’s private lives and get the best of the work done — during and after the times of pandemic.” | 2022-08-05T10:18:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Life in the disputed territory of Kashmir under the coronavirus - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/05/life-disputed-territory-kashmir-under-coronavirus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/05/life-disputed-territory-kashmir-under-coronavirus/ |
No, Batman didn’t save the Congo: and other book reviews
Three new books set the record straight on the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Analysis by Laura Seay
Every few years, scholars of Congolese politics collectively sigh as yet another news outlet publishes a poorly informed “analysis” of the country and its problems. Whether it’s an argument that government authority is so weak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that the country “does not exist,” a claim that rebels fight for no discernable reason but banditry, or the idea that celebrity engagement can change the region’s trajectory, questionable claims abound.
Fortunately, growing interest in the study of the region has made it possible for scholars to show that these claims are wrong. Far from being an ungoverned space in which armed men wantonly engage in violence and white saviors must parachute in to save the day, the causes, consequences and solutions to the Congo’s crises are complex, but can be understood. Three new books show how.
Peer Schouten neatly dispenses of the idea that spaces are not governed in “Roadblock Politics.” It is a smart, beautifully written explanation of the actual nature of power and control in Congo and the Central African Republic. Having located over 1,000 regional roadblocks controlled by various authority figures, he shows that power is exercised and contested in ways that differ from standard, Eurocentric notions of governance and control.
Rather than a central governing authority controlling the population of a specific territory, Schouten contends that in central Africa, power is exercised along trade routes. Movement, not boundaries, is the means by which chiefs, administrators, soldiers, rebels and countless others maintain control through the collection of fees at formal and informal roadblocks. Whether it’s a truck driver carrying a load of consumer goods from Uganda or a woman walking 5 or 6 miles each way to sell produce at the local market, central Africans must pay fees or hand over a portion of their goods in order to reach their destination.
This phenomenon makes for a form of control that resists centralization, but is nonetheless predatory. Schouten convincingly explains one of the central paradoxes of regional politics: the government is weak, but its power — and the power of other, non-governmental authorities — is everywhere. It is impossible to move through eastern Congo without encountering roadblocks.
He calls this phenomenon “sovereignty on a shoestring,” encompassing everything from in precolonial trade practices to rebel financing systems to contemporary global supply chain networks. Congo exists, just not in the way outsiders might expect. Observers, Schouten notes, would do well “to consider that other modes of political control are just as meaningful.”
Brilliantly researched, “Roadblock Politics” avoids unnecessary jargon and is accessible to just about anyone, students, policy makers and general readers alike. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
In a similar vein, Jason Stearns’ new book, “The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name” tackles the claim that violence in eastern Congo is without motivation or cause. Seeking to explain why the Congolese conflicts seemingly resist resolution — despite the presence of the world’s largest United Nations peacekeeping operation and billions of dollars in aid. Stearns delves into the dynamics of conflict in the region, arguing that violence has become a social phenomenon.
How? Stearns contends that four dynamics explain Congo’s persistent violence. First, fragmentation — the phenomenon by which armed groups have proliferated, now numbering about 120 — makes resolving the conflict extremely difficult.
Second is the growth of what Stearns calls a “military bourgeoise,” national army officers who make money off of the conflict but are also responsible for providing for the well-being of all those under their command. These individuals maintain deep ties with the country’s political elites and are entrenched in both patronage networks and the economy in this part of the country.
Finally, the conflict, in Stearns’ view, is “involuted,” that is, those involved in perpetuating violence do so because they want to maintain the status quo. He also views the situation as “symbiotic,” because all parties to the conflict benefit from the situation and have an interest in keeping it going. Thus, “[a]t times, fighting persists because both parties stand more to gain from fighting than peace.” Violence becomes a self-perpetuating phenomenon.
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Stearns knows Congo better than just about any outsider. As with his other work, “The War that Doesn’t Say Its Name” is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the situation — or to work towards its resolution.
Are there ways to resolve these crises and help the people of Congo, who overwhelmingly suffer the effects of ongoing violence and state fragility? Alexandra Budabin and Lisa Ann Richey analyze one set of efforts in their thoughtful, wittily titled “Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development.” (Editorial disclosure: I was interviewed as a subject and am quoted in the book.)
Seizing on the work of actor Ben Affleck and his Eastern Congo Initiative, Budabin and Richey develop a strong critique of what they call “celebrity aid strategic partnerships,” in which stars like Affleck work with foundations, big business and aid workers to draw attention to and raise funds for the cause, in this case, support for Congolese community organizations and coffee and chocolate farmers. In doing so, they speak to the lack of accountability and growth of business-based models that prevails in humanitarian efforts tied up with foundation and corporate funding and celebrity involvement.
The authors argue that this constitutes a fundamental disruption to the way economic development typically evolves — and not necessarily for the better. Even if undertaken out of a genuine desire to help those in need, celebrity interventionism, they contend, both introduces and reinforces a logic that suggests that privatization, not public services, is the solution to development challenges. Disturbingly, this logic also demands that outsiders like Affleck, who literally portrayed a superhero on screen, are necessary to make development happen.
Thoroughly researched and often laugh-out-loud funny, “Batman Saves the Congo” is a critically important look at a growing and under-examined — and frequently absurd — segment of the aid industry. As with Schouten and Stearns’ work, Budabin and Richey’s work is necessary to understand the eastern Congo’s realities. Those considering writing another op-ed on the country should take note. | 2022-08-05T10:19:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | African Politics Summer Reading Spectacular continues! - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/apsrs-africa-book-reviews/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/apsrs-africa-book-reviews/ |
Ambassador Qin Gang was called to the White House after China launched ballistic missiles in reaction to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan
An image taken from video shows a missile launch during a Chinese military exercise Aug. 4. (People's Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command/AFP)
The White House also reiterated to Qin that it wants to keep all lines of communication open and that nothing has changed about the United States’ one-China policy, which stipulates that there is a single Chinese entity and no independent enclaves. But the White House also stressed that it found Beijing’s actions unacceptable and would stand up for its values in the Indo-Pacific.
The meeting, which has not been previously reported, was between Qin and Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to President Biden and coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation.
China’s military actions Thursday increased tensions in the Taiwan Strait to the highest level in decades, raising fears of a dangerous miscalculation in one of the world’s most charged geopolitical flash points. Beijing has openly voiced its anger over Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which it considers part of its territory awaiting unification, and U.S.-China relations were already strained because of disputes over trade, human rights and other issues.
Pelosi: Why I'm visiting Taiwan
The White House highlighted to Qin a statement from the Group of Seven industrialized democracies, Kirby said, which stressed that China should not use Pelosi’s visit as a pretext for aggressive military action in the Taiwan Strait. The White House also expressed support for a statement from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which called on all sides to de-escalate tensions and engage in dialogue.
“We made clear once again as we have done privately at the highest levels and publicly: Nothing has changed about our one-China policy. We also made clear that the United States is prepared for what Beijing chooses to do,” Kirby said. “We will not seek and do not want a crisis. At the same time, we will not be deterred from operating in the seas and skies of the Western Pacific, consistent with international law, as we have for decades — supporting Taiwan and defending a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said the Eastern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) carried out long-range, live-fire exercises and “precision strikes” on eastern parts of the strait. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said the PLA fired 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles.
The White House sought to de-escalate tensions with China ahead of and during Pelosi’s visit, which the speaker undertook against the administration’s wishes. White House officials warned earlier this week that China was preparing for possible aggressive actions that could continue well beyond Pelosi’s visit.
Virtually all the senior members of Biden’s national security team had privately expressed deep reservations about the trip and its timing, the White House official said. They were especially concerned because U.S.-China tensions are already high, and Washington is seeking China’s cooperation on the war in Ukraine and other matters.
Top White House officials defended Pelosi’s right to travel to Taiwan both publicly and to their counterparts in China, but even so, some of them still did not think the trip was a good idea, the official said.
China has sought for years to diplomatically isolate Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party claims the island, a self-governing democracy that is home to over 23 million people, as its territory, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pledged to “reunify” Taiwan with China, by force if necessary.
Chinese ambassador: Why we opposed Pelosi's visit
But Pelosi doubled down on Thursday, saying China would not succeed in bullying the island.
“They may try to keep Taiwan from visiting or participating in other places, but they will not isolate Taiwan,” Pelosi said in Tokyo, the last stop of her tour. “They are not doing our traveling schedule. The Chinese government is not doing that.”
The United States will conduct standard air and maritime transits through the Taiwan Strait over the next few weeks, he said, and will take “further steps” to stand with its allies in the region, including Japan, although he did not specify what those actions would be. The aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan and its battle group will remain near Taiwan to monitor the situation, Kirby added.
Lily Kuo contributed to this report. | 2022-08-05T10:19:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | White House summons Chinese ambassador for rebuke on Taiwan response - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/us-summons-china-ambassador/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/us-summons-china-ambassador/ |
On-track drug injections, shock devices and a dead jockey: A “bush track” in Georgia is one of dozens that profit outside the reach of regulation.
Spectators take in a race at Rancho El Centenario in July. (The Washington Post)
MILNER, Ga. — In this population-800 town in rural Georgia, where residents along winding country roads fly the Stars and Stripes and Trump banners, there’s a horse track on a pecan farm that raises only one flag: that of Mexico.
The spectators show up for race days every couple of weeks, Latino cowboys and their families arriving in late-model pickup trucks with license plates from Georgia and Alabama, Guerrero and Monterrey. Admission at the door is $100 per head in cash, collected before a cadre of armed guards search vehicles. Inside, Norteño music blends with the scent of tacos, and an announcer calls the races in profane Spanish.
But the prerace routines at Rancho El Centenario are a little different — or at least more transparent — than at a mainstream racehorse track.
One muggy day in July, when a young horse trainer in a patterned shirt and trucker hat sauntered onto the track with a syringe in hand, fans crowded the rail to get a glimpse. A jockey guided a quarter horse named Chiquibaby over to the trainer, who jabbed the needle into the horse’s neck and pushed the plunger before jumping away.
“Bring another for me!” cried out a Modelo-clutching railbird in Spanish, referring to the syringe full of mystery substances, eliciting laughter from the other fans and the trainer.
When asked about the injection following the race, the trainer said the syringe didn’t contain performance-enhancing drugs but medicine to prevent a horse from suffering a stroke or a heart attack.
But before another race that day, a reporter for The Washington Post watched a different trainer inject a horse named El Mago near the end of the 500-yard track. After that trainer tossed the syringe in the dirt, the reporter collected it and later submitted it to Industrial Laboratories, an accredited racehorse testing lab in Colorado. Its findings: The syringe contained methamphetamine and methylphenidate, the stimulant sold as Ritalin.
A few hundred years ago, match races like Rancho El Centenario’s were part of the genesis of the American quarter horse, a compact breed developed for its intense speed on a short, straight track. After racing commissions brought order to the sport in states where it was legal, unregulated “bush tracks” remained the norm in Mexico, popular among cowboys and narcos alike. In the United States, though, they existed only as a wild but minor foil to the rulemakers.
But now, experts and horsemen say, the bush circuit is quietly in a boom period, one in which animal abuse and doping go largely unchecked, hinting at deeper criminality and posing a potentially serious threat to the integrity of the breed.
Since a disbarred attorney named Arthur “Brutz” English IV pounded the red dirt track into the land of his fourth-generation family farm nine years ago, Rancho El Centenario has showcased the chaos and the profitability of such an operation.
English’s track is a scavenger of legitimate racing, in horses and personnel. A champion quarter horse that recently sold at auction for nearly half a million dollars regularly races at the track. A well-known jockey pushed out of regulated racing because of his serial use of banned electric shock devices also found refuge at Rancho El Centenario — until he died following an accident while racing there.
For years, there have been hints that the horsemen of Rancho El Centenario are utilizing practices that would incur serious discipline at a regulated track. For instance: After deputies pulled over a horseman on his way to the track in 2019, a police report shows, they discovered boxes of amphetamine and anabolic steroids in the back of his Mazda.
Other times it’s more than a hint. On a visit to the races last month, during which journalists for The Post witnessed horses being injected before races, they also observed the day’s winningest jockey wearing a shock device of the sort banned in mainstream racing.
And though betting on horses is illegal in Georgia, apparent bookies ambled along the track, calling out bets before races and distributing the winnings from stacks of cash afterward.
Unbeknown to English and his Mexican cowboy clientele, however, there has been since last year a third party to the culture clash: animal rights activists.
Over eight visits to Rancho El Centenario between June 2021 and April 2022, undercover investigators for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals collected hidden-camera footage of all of this conduct and more: gambling, injections, shock devices, repeated whipping and horses dying on the track.
The group’s investigators collected syringes following injections near the track and had them tested at the horse racing laboratory at University of California, Davis, another of the nine facilities accredited by Kentucky’s Racing Medication and Testing Consortium (RMTC). Some of them tested positive for cocaine, methamphetamine and methylphenidate, according to a letter that PETA’s lawyers sent this week, along with 17 pages of supporting materials, to the Lamar County Sheriff Brad White and the local district attorney’s office.
In the letter, PETA general counsel Jared Goodman alleged “systemic and repeated animal abuse, including whipping, electric-shocking, and drugging horses to push them past their natural limits, leading several horses to break down and be killed on the track, as well as extensive commercial gambling on every race.” He called for a criminal investigation of the ranch’s activities and some of its horsemen.
When told of the letters PETA sent out about his track, English criticized the group for “yammering to the DA and the sheriff” rather than coming to him so he could fix the problems they observed. “It’s not about making it right,” English said of PETA. “It’s about making a spectacle with them.”
He doesn’t tolerate shock devices, gambling or doping, he claimed, adding that he didn’t trust the lab results provided to The Post because he hadn’t tested the syringe himself: “My official position on whatever you claim that you found is I dispute that until I am given a chance to verify it with my own lab.”
At Rancho El Centenario and other tracks on the bush circuit, the horses are managed by stables they call cuadras. The handlers who injected El Mago were from Cuadra Esquipulas. Contacted through an active Facebook page and through English, the stable’s horsemen did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
RMTC executive director Mary Scollay said there was no reason to inject a horse immediately before a race other than to influence its performance. She said the lab results from the second syringe constituted a powerful, and potentially illegal, cocktail of stimulants for a horse. “I would imagine that methamphetamine in an injectable form would get the attention of the FDA, which is not always an easy thing to do,” Scollay said. “It might get the attention of DEA as well.”
English said he supervises nearly every event at his ranch but missed the race day in question because he had taken his family to Wales for a honeycomb exposition. Perhaps, he posited, the horsemen were acting up during The Post’s visit because “they knew I wasn’t going to be sitting there babysitting.” But English alternately distanced himself from the races, remarking, “I’m just the landlord.”
Either way, English argued, the real reason he is being singled out is the same reason nearby residents have been complaining about his track for years. The operation regularly attracts hundreds or thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to a town that is 80 percent White and where the most recent census put the Hispanic population at less than 4 percent — for a total of 29 people.
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if my customers were all White rednecks,” English said.
89 tracks and counting
Angela Pelzel-McCluskey’s first encounter with the bush circuit came in the form of a bony 7-year-old quarter horse brought to a veterinarian in Ocala, Fla., in 2008.
Pelzel-McCluskey is an equine epidemiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture charged with keeping disease from spreading through the American horse industry. The horse in Ocala, lethargic and refusing to eat or drink, tested positive for piroplasmosis, an infectious blood disease rare in the U.S. but endemic in Mexico that typically dooms its carriers to euthanasia or lifelong isolation.
Investigators traced the infection and found a cluster of 20 other quarter horses with the disease — all of them participants in unsanctioned racing, according to a study Pelzel-McCluskey co-authored.
Piroplasmosis typically spreads via ticks. In this case, though, investigators found the disease’s vector was unlicensed handlers using contaminated needles and other equipment to inject or blood-dope the horses. A year later, another dying horse brought to a veterinary hospital in Missouri led to a similar story, with investigators discovering a cluster of eight quarter horses connected to the same trainer who raced them on unsanctioned tracks.
Those cases led Pelzel-McCluskey to become the USDA’s sole expert on unsanctioned racing. She has watched with alarm, she said, as the phenomenon has steadily grown — and as the diseases she tracks have spread.
There is no official accounting of the size of the bush circuit in the United States, but Pelzel-McCluskey said that, by using social media, she has found 89 tracks in 27 states. Bush track horses now account for the vast majority of the known new cases of diseases such as piroplasmosis and equine infectious anemia in this country, she said, and known incidences of EIA have more than doubled in recent years, from around 40 annually to well over 100.
Those numbers, along with the total known cases of both diseases since 2008 — 908 — are likely severe undercounts, Pelzel-McCluskey said, because bush track horses are rarely tested. In May, 24 quarter horses in California, all of them linked to bush track racing, were discovered to have EIA and were euthanized.
Pelzel-McCluskey warned that if piroplasmosis continues to spread, the disease could be considered endemic in the United States, affecting the value of equine exports. “This is a huge potential trade problem for us,” she said.
The growth of the bush circuit is also problematic for horses on the regulated quarter horse racing circuit, the dustier cousin of thoroughbred racing popular in the American southwest and Mexico. Janet VanBebber, chief racing officer of the American Quarter Horse Association, the official breed registry, said a high percentage of the quarter horses racing on bush tracks wound up there after stints in regulated racing.
Among them are some of the top horses in the sport, including Trump My Record, which won nearly $800,000 as a 2-year-old gelding in 2019. After Trump My Record was auctioned to a Texan horseman for $460,000, VanBebber and others in the sport watched with dismay as the champion horse surfaced at bush tracks. “What I hear is that they made their money back in two match races just by the gate,” VanBebber said of the horse’s backers.
Social media promotions show that Trump My Record has made multiple appearances at Rancho El Centenario and is scheduled to race there this month. Horsemen with Cuadra Cristo Rey, which races Trump My Record, did not respond to several attempts to contact them for comment.
VanBebber said the bush circuit interferes with regulated quarter horse racing, which, like thoroughbred racing, is facing dwindling popularity and profits while reckoning with scandals of synthetic cheating and horse deaths. The tracks also make it impossible for her association to do its primary job, which is keeping tabs on earnings and pedigree.
“We have areas of concern for the horse, for the industry and for what we’re missing out on as a breed registry,” VanBebber said. “It saddens us. It’s gotten to where a lot of our owners are hesitant to sell horses at auction because they can’t determine where the horse goes.”
The brazenness, and apparent deep pockets, of some horsemen on the bush circuit have led to suspicion that organized crime is involved. Mexican drug criminals have a long history of obsessing over, and spending wildly, on quarter horses, both for private match races in Mexico and on the biggest stages of the American quarter horse circuit, which one drug family infamously dominated for several years last decade.
Speaking generally on bush tracks, Adams, the district attorney, said that due to the many avenues of potential illegality — including gambling, doping, money laundering, and smuggling horses across the border — “this is exactly the kind of operation that the cartel gets involved in."
There have been sporadic police raids of bush tracks over the years, including the arrest of 100 people in Oklahoma in 2007 and syringes and shock devices being seized alongside a spate of arrests at an operation in Texas in 2019. In both cases, the charges against the track operators included that they had broken laws involving unregulated horse racing. But such statutes don’t exist in every state. A 2007 raid of a large bush track in Gillsville, Ga., roughly 120 miles northeast of Milner, ended with its operator being found not guilty of hosting illegal gambling.
Even English noted that the amorphous quality of the bush circuit makes it nearly impossible to police. “Part of the obstacle I face in doing this is .. these folks disband, and then reassemble with different cuadras, different names and different people, regularly," English said. "There’s no practical way to keep up with that.”
VanBebber said she has attempted to convince law enforcement authorities to lead a wider takedown, with little luck: “I’ve had discussions before with different entities, and nobody seems to have the resources to pool their assets to go get ’em.”
Pelzel-McCluskey said the onus was on the quarter horse industry to agitate for unlicensed racing to become an illegal activity under federal law.
“You can sit here and say, ‘We have sanctioned legal sport with oversight and medications monitoring and track surface monitoring and safety and health,’ ” Pelzel-McCluskey said in describing the regulated industry’s dilemma. “ ‘And we have this other thing over here that does none of that.’ ”
She added, “The industry has to kind of save themselves on this.”
The birth of a bush track
When Brutz English said he first learned about the bush circuit from a hired farmhand over a decade ago, he happened to be in the market for a new way to make a living.
The Englishes are a local institution — and more recently a font of small-town intrigue. The 200-acre former plantation that is now home to Rancho El Centenario has been in the family for more than 100 years, dating from when, according to its website, the primary production was tobacco, cotton and pecans.
But in 2005, Brutz’s brother, John “Mac” English, was convicted of arranging for a friend to kill two game wardens so they couldn’t indict him for hunting violations. As detailed in court records, his pal was wearing a wire when Mac offered him some stolen four-wheelers as payment for the double murder. (Mac English, who served 15 years in prison, told The Post that his banter was not serious and the case against him “wasn’t remotely true.”)
At the time, Brutz English was the top public defender for four counties south of Atlanta, but he had his own criminal trouble. The same year as his brother’s conviction, he was charged with vehicular homicide after he slammed his GMC Yukon into the back of a Ford Mustang, killing the former city manager inside. English, who recently blamed a “moment’s inattention” for the wreck, pleaded no contest and was sentenced to probation and a fine of $1,000.
He also was charged that year after police found in his possession a stolen four-wheeler and other property given to him by his brother, according to court records. He resigned as public defender and was ultimately convicted of receiving stolen property.
English served two years in prison before being released in 2008, and he was later pardoned by a state board that deemed him “fully rehabilitated.” After researching his farmhand’s suggestion and seeing the lucrative potential of the bush-track business, he opened Rancho El Centenario in 2013. Because Georgia doesn’t have state-sanctioned horse racing, there are no corresponding laws banning unregulated races. “You can race butterflies and ostriches if you want to,” English said.
English initially devised a novel system for charging admission by sitting outside his ranch’s front gate with a bucket of pecans. “I couldn’t sell tickets to the races because I didn’t have a commercial enterprise license,” he said. “But I could absolutely sell you a $20 pecan, and you could absolutely come in and watch the races for free.”
Ultimately, he applied for and, over the objections of some neighbors, received an “agritourism” exemption that allowed him to sell tickets to his farm. Lamar County Commissioners Nancy Thrash, who voted for English’s exemption, claimed she and her colleagues were hoodwinked by English and what she described as his superior legal mind. “He said he was going to grow blueberries and bring schoolkids over and let them pick blueberries,” said Thrash, who acknowledged English “kind of caught us with our pants down.”
“The horse track was for training horses — that was the way it was originally presented,” said Commissioner Robert Heiney, who also recalled plans involving blueberries and strawberries.
English denied deceiving the commissioners. “In truth, they didn’t ask a lot of questions,” he said.
At a county commission meeting, after it was clear English’s primary business would not involve berry-picking, resident Julia Heidbrink described, in a warning that would prove prophetic, the hazards of an unregulated horse track. “He needs safety standards, ambulance support, insurance and a veterinarian,” Heidbrink said. “There are issues with drugging horses to make them run a little bit faster. … It’s an accident waiting to happen.”
In an interview, English insisted that the only reason residents and some public officials have turned against him is his client base. With Georgia’s rapidly growing Hispanic population having topped 1 million in the latest census, English — who doesn’t speak Spanish and refers to his stable hands as “my Mexicans” — said he has recognized a growing demographic that the less tolerant would rather ignore.
“A few of my neighbors don’t like the fact that I bring all of these Latinos to this town,” English said. “They’ve said to my face, ‘Hey, if you had a bluegrass event, I’d be there.’ But when they hear that mariachi music, it drives them crazy.”
A 911 call from a resident this spring supported that supposition. The resident, who said he lived a mile from English’s ranch, yelled at a dispatcher, “We can’t even sit down and enjoy TV or eat dinner with all that Mexican music banging around down here!”
A jockey’s death
It’s not only the horses that end up on the bush circuit after being cast off from regulated racing. It’s the horsemen, too.
Roman Chapa, a frenetic former bull rider with a knack for surviving ugly spills, was for years one of the most prolific, and scandal-plagued, jockeys in thoroughbred and quarter horse racing, racking up nearly $30 million in winnings for his horse’s owners.
But in 2015, he was suspended by Texas racing officials for five years following the third time in his career he was caught allegedly possessing a shock device. The devices are banned in regulated racing because they are considered cruel to the animals, can lead to accidents and are considered a form of race-fixing.
It was an open secret how Chapa, who owed a record $100,000 fine to regulators, made a living while banished from legitimate racing. Social media posts and news reports documented he had suffered severe injuries while racing at a bush track in Tennessee.
In 2020, when Chapa attempted to regain his licenses, an Oklahoma Horse Racing Commission attorney asked him if he had participated in any unregulated races while suspended. “No, sir, I’ve been working horses,” Chapa replied under oath. But Oklahoma regulators denied him, as did those in New Mexico, and the premier quarter horse track in Texas said he was no longer allowed on the premises, state regulatory records show. So Chapa headed to Georgia.
On March 21, 2021, he was racing in a 250-yard match at Rancho El Centenario. His horse, El Muletas, tumbled. Both the animal and Chapa lay still in the dirt.
An off-duty sheriff radioed in the accident, records show, but Chapa initially declined to be taken away in an ambulance. Then English, who was at the track, made a follow-up 911 call. “The guy refused to go but he is now losing consciousness again,” he explained matter-of-factly to the dispatcher.
In social media posts, Chapa’s wife described a litany of injuries he suffered, including a “broken jaw (both sides), broken clavicle, broken vertebrae, broken ribs, and multiple small brain bleeds.” His months-long struggle to recover included 45 days in a medical coma.
He was discharged from the hospital in July 2021 but died of his injuries a few weeks later, according to an obituary. He was 50. Chapa’s widow and his most recent agent did not respond to multiple interview requests.
It was one of several serious racing accidents and breakdowns at the track in recent years, according to social media posts, police records and footage compiled by PETA.
“We got a horse fall over on somebody,” English told an emergency dispatcher following an accident in 2017. Two years later, supporters of a jockey raised money for his “fractured spinal cord” after a horse rolled over him. Other 911 calls described a man who broke a leg while bull riding and another who got a finger cut off.
In their letter to the Lamar County Sheriff’s Office, PETA cited nine accidents resulting in the deaths of horses since 2019 that the group said were either witnessed firsthand by their investigators or discovered by watching track footage. A video, filmed in March and included in PETA’s complaint, showed a horse struggling to stand with a broken front leg before being shot in the head and dragged off with a tractor.
English said the incident was handled in the most humane fashion possible. “The PETA folks would rather you watch it writhe on the track until you can get the vet down there with an IV, but we’d rather put it out of its misery,” English said. “We have done that more than once and we will continue to do that, because horses get injured on the track all the time.”
English said injuries and deaths are a fact of all horse racing. But, he acknowledged, "Certainly there are things that would make racing a horse [at his track] more dangerous than elsewhere. We don’t have the facilities and infrastructure that a place like the Kentucky Derby does. Consequently, there is less security and less health and safety stuff.”
He compared his track to the budget environs of a minor league baseball club. “And nobody wants to outlaw Triple-A ball,” he reasoned.
PETA gets a tip
It wasn’t long after Chapa’s accident, PETA investigators said, that they received an anonymous email about Rancho El Centenario, alleging illegal gambling and that horses were being abused, neglected and shot dead. The lead investigators — a husband-and-wife team who asked not to be identified out of fear for their safety — arrived at the track within a few months.
The investigators, White vegans who used high school Spanish to order elotes without cheese or mayonnaise from the concession stand, acknowledged that they stood out. They described skulking around to watch injections and then scooping spent syringes off the ground. In addition to using body-worn cameras, they said, the male investigator leaned into his gringo persona and openly recorded with a camcorder — until English pulled up in a pickup truck and asked him to put it away.
“You’re scaring my customers,” they said English told them in an alleged encounter that was not caught on camera. “They think you’re ICE.”
English recalled the conversation similarly, adding that he was “pleasant as peaches” to the strange interloper.
The PETA investigators later called the operation “one of the most dangerous things we’ve ever done,” up there with infiltrating a crocodile slaughterhouse in Zimbabwe.
In the letter that PETA’s lawyers sent to the local authorities, the group called for criminal charges including cruelty to animals, illegal gambling, distribution of controlled substances, public nuisance and racketeering.
But for the moment, English’s business is so good that he’s inspiring other operators in town.
PETA also sent a letter to authorities in Whitfield County, Ga., making similar allegations about a bush track there, Rancho El Canelo, where many of the same horsemen operate. When a reporter dialed the number listed on its Facebook page, the person who answered the phone denied any knowledge of the ranch.
In January, another Milner resident, former restaurateur Randolph “Rudy” Vaughn, held the first races on a track he built on his property, which he has named “Rancho El Caporal.”
Some neighbors complained in county commission meetings about Vaughn attracting crowds and loud music. Commissioner Thrash, who voted for a zoning exemption for Vaughn’s property, said she again felt duped — she believed he wanted to host “birthday parties and family reunions” on his property.
But Vaughn denied deceiving anybody, being a nuisance to his neighbors or copying English’s business model: “It’s just like in any town: They got two McDonald’s, you know what I mean?”
English said he’s not concerned about his business being undercut by the new guy.
“Rudy Vaughn’s not the competition,” English said. “He’s got a little itty bitty track and won’t ever have the facilities that I have.”
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How to pick the winner of a horse race | 2022-08-05T10:19:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At a Georgia bush track, horse racing with no rules - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/bush-track-horse-racing-georgia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/bush-track-horse-racing-georgia/ |
The NFL’s fight to suspend Deshaun Watson is about PR. That doesn’t make it wrong.
Roger Goodell's NFL is appealing the six-game suspension given to Deshaun Watson. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
As it turned out, the retired federal judge hired by the NFL and its players union to mete out discipline didn’t only do quarterback Deshaun Watson a favor in suspending him for about a third of a season for appearing to be a serial sexual assaulter of women. Sue L. Robinson did the league — more specifically, its commissioner, Roger Goodell — an even bigger favor. She delivered Goodell an opportunity to save face.
Indeed, the six-game suspension she levied on Watson for seemingly preying on women he had hired for massages wound up as nothing more than a trial balloon. As it ascended, it was pelted with criticism from near and far. All of which gave Goodell an opportunity he must have been happy to seize: to feign such great disappointment with the judge’s verdict — as stunningly insulting and dismissive of the women’s claims — that he was left with no option but to swoop in and save the women’s honor by appealing the decision as utterly inadequate, which the league did Wednesday.
And sometime soon, former New Jersey attorney general Peter C. Harvey, chosen by Goodell on Thursday to hear the league’s appeal, will impose a more severe penalty derived from Goodell’s moral measurement. It might well be banishment from the entire upcoming season, which would be more in line with what the critics and public cried out for in the wake of Robinson’s tortured ruling. That also would echo reporting, including from The Washington Post’s Mark Maske, that Goodell all along sought at least a season-long suspension for the Cleveland quarterback, positioning himself and the league as tough on the reported wicked behavior.
The skeptic in me suspected this was part of a public relations setup all along. After all, the new disciplinary system the league and union negotiated a couple years ago allowed for the league ultimately to handle discipline as it had in the past, with the commissioner as the final authority. The amendment agreed upon was that someone other than the commissioner would first be judge and jury, which also nodded toward public sentiment after decades of the commissioner’s office doing the policing and sentencing — or not.
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That new person was called a disciplinary officer. Robinson became the first. Her position was deemed neutral, though she is contracted and paid for by the league and players union to determine any penalties or whether a penalty is necessary at all.
However, as the 2020 collective bargaining agreement states, upon appeal, “the Commissioner or his designee will issue a written decision that will constitute full, final and complete disposition of the dispute and will be binding upon the player(s), Club(s) and the parties to this Agreement.”
So at day’s end, it is still Goodell (or his designee) making the ultimate decision. It is just that public sentiment has first been officially gauged in the process — and someone other than the commissioner has been sacrificed before the masses. Then the commissioner gets to clean up the mess to the satisfaction of critics. It won’t matter anymore that Robinson said she reached her decision only because she was hamstrung by Goodell’s weak punishment in previous cases similar to Watson’s. That will be just about forgotten.
It doesn’t end here, of course. Watson and the players union could sue the league if whatever new penalty Goodell’s office issues doesn’t agree with them. Before Robinson’s ruling, the players union announced that it intended to accept the judge’s ruling and hoped the league would do the same.
That was a trial balloon of its own that was deflated by Goodell’s office Wednesday. So the wrestling over what to do with Watson probably won’t end with the league’s appeal to, of all parties, itself.
Watson, who didn’t play last season — in league purgatory while his voluminous case file was being investigated by legal authorities as well as his employer — probably will sue the league if it orders him sidelined for a second consecutive season or longer. Last season, he was remunerated despite not playing. This time, he wouldn’t be. Instead, he could be forced to apply for reinstatement in the 2023 season.
He and his new team in Cleveland already considered such a possibility. The gargantuan multiyear contract it signed him to will pay him only a paltry portion in 2022. In the event of a suspension of less than a year, that guaranteed the salary lost for games he misses because of suspension would be negligible.
Watson would expect his union dues to kick in and have its legal wing come to his defense. But if I were a dues-paying member of his union, I wouldn’t want, I wouldn’t want union resources spent fighting for one member suspended for such lewd behavior, with Watson committing what the judge described as “ … sexual assault by allegedly ‘touching [his] penis to the women without their consent.’ ” That’s indefensible.
The only thing that might be assailable is the process that winds up earning Watson a harsher, more deserving penalty. The union could seek a federal judge to vacate Goodell’s appeal decision. But Ezekiel Elliott, Tom Brady and Adrian Peterson ran the same play in attempts to get their league-issued suspensions overturned. They failed.
Goodell’s office could decide to lengthen Robinson’s suspension to less than a season, but that wouldn’t meet demand. And demand is what this matter is all about.
After all, who knows what a proper punishment should be for Watson? He was twice no-billed by grand juries, which some in the public wrongly believe means he was exonerated. No bills don’t exonerate. He settled with 23 of the 24 women who said he sexually assaulted them, including a few who identified themselves in interviews before television cameras. (A 25th lawsuit was withdrawn.) Some in the public wrongly believe that is evidence of his guilt. Settlements are not. They merely muffle complaints and reduce the financial impact on the subject of the finger pointing.
But both actions are as much a part of the public relations operation for Watson as Goodell’s decision to reclaim the disciplining of a disgraceful player is for the commissioner and the league. | 2022-08-05T10:19:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The NFL should increase Deshaun Watson's suspension, even if it's about PR - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/deshaun-watson-suspension-appeal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/deshaun-watson-suspension-appeal/ |
‘Here There Are Blueberries,’ at California’s La Jolla Playhouse, is based on photos submitted to an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Elizabeth Stahlmann as U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding in “Here There Are Blueberries.” In the background is a photograph of young women employed at the Auschwitz concentration camp, relaxing and eating blueberries. (Rich Soublet II)
It started with a photo album, submitted over the transom to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and an archivist who grasped its extraordinary historical value. In the customary story arc of such finds, the photos — of Nazi officers, their families and colleagues wining and dining and relaxing in the sun at the Auschwitz concentration camp — would have been authenticated and put in the collection, for inspection by scholars and museumgoers.
This astonishing album, however, was also destined for the stage.
News of the photographs, acquired in 2006 by the museum and archivist Rebecca Erbelding from a retired counterintelligence officer in Virginia, came to the attention of Moisés Kaufman, an American stage director and son of Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Venezuela. With longtime colleague Amanda Gronich at Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project — creators of “The Laramie Project” — he set about reframing the story behind the photos as dramatic art.
The result is the play “Here There Are Blueberries,” having its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in Southern California through Aug. 21, with New York-based Tectonic’s sights set on a East Coast debut. The 90-minute play, directed by Kaufman, features eight actors in multiple roles and, centrally, Elizabeth Stahlmann as Erbelding.
“You know, I’m not used to being a protagonist,” Erbelding said in a recent Zoom interview. “So, talking about how the Rebecca character changes became a very strange, out-of-body thing.”
Imagining how 116 snapshots could be the source for anything more dynamic than an elaborate PowerPoint presentation was the challenge facing Kaufman and Gronich when they embarked on the project several years ago.
“I never thought I would write a play about [the Holocaust],” Kaufman said, adding that his Romanian-born father spent the war hiding in a basement, and sought refuge in Venezuela afterward, in an era when the United States put curbs on Jewish immigration.
“It is in fact a historical event about which the most has been written in the history of literature,” Kaufman said. “So the idea of doing something about it seemed redundant. But then I was shown those photographs, and something really struck a chord. These people sunbathing next to a concentration camp, or eating blueberries. I felt that this is a discourse that has not really been addressed. How do you eat blueberries and celebrate next to a concentration camp?”
So Kaufman and Gronich executed an inventive flex for theater, making the photos more than mere projections onto a set and turning them essentially into quasi-characters alongside their three-dimensional partners. At times, according to the “Here There Are Blueberries” script, action depicted in a picture is animated onstage: An image of an accordion player, for example, is accompanied by an actual accordion player, or a scene in nature is enhanced by the sounds the photographs’ subjects would have heard.
As with several previous “nonfiction” Tectonic projects, the dialogue is taken from interviews and other records. For “Blueberries,” the museum’s investigation into the album itself is key to the story. The play recounts how an anonymous donor found it in a trash can in the basement closet of an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt in 1946 and stowed it away for decades. Its unusual quality resided in its humdrum portraits of officers’ recreation at Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest death camp, synonymous worldwide with genocidal depravity.
Erbelding and other researchers discovered — through the fascinating process “Blueberries” painstakingly unravels — that the album belonged to Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, right-hand man to Richard Baer, Auschwitz’s last commandant. It’s a Nazi’s “memory book of his time at the camp,” one of the archivists says in the play. The photos, taken over six months between June 1944 and January 1945, are outwardly mundane: snapshots, for instance, of what looks like a family trip to a resort. (The Nazis had built one nearby for officers, guards and secretaries who were granted days off from their murderous tasks). Of course, knowing the context, you pore over them with a mix of revulsion, bewilderment and anguish. But curiosity, too.
“Here There Are Blueberries” — the title comes from one of the photo captions handwritten in German, “Hier gibt es Blaubeeren” — takes pains to explain why an album that includes no pictures of the horrors occurring within earshot of its subjects is worth the public’s attention. Or, for that matter, the energies of one of the world’s most important repositories of evidence of Nazi atrocities. (Later sequences in the play are devoted to the fate of the Auschwitz victims.)
“You can’t understand the Holocaust without looking at the perpetrators,” says a character based on Judy Cohen, who was curator of the museum’s photography collection at the time of the acquisition. “Six million people didn’t murder themselves. The Holocaust didn’t happen in the passive voice.”
Gronich, in a Zoom interview with Kaufman, said she saw this as a point for dramatic exploration.
“The truth of history is that this happened,” she said. “So as a playwright, as a storyteller, how do we start to look at that in a way that audiences can really begin to sort through and think about in a way that has meaning? And as much as we’d like to look at these people as sociopathic monsters, that’s an out, that gives us the excuse.”
“ ‘We don’t have to look at ourselves in the mirror’ is something another character says,” Gronich added. “So how do we process this material so that the audience is invited into it and to find connection to it?”
The museum recognized the sensitive issues in illuminating the album’s contents. “One of the things that we also wanted to make clear when we presented the album to the public is that these people in the album look normal,” said Erbelding, now a historian in the museum’s education department. “They do not look evil; they’re smiling. They’re playing with their dogs. They look like they might resemble a neighbor that you have. And, yes, that is correct, that humans have this capacity.”
It is the voice of Rebecca Erbelding that sets the play’s respectful tone. “We hear from people who have been through things — whose family members have been through experiences I can’t imagine, and they trust us with their stories,” she says at the outset. Erbelding traveled to La Jolla last week to see the show, and met with the New York-based Stahlmann, a graduate of Yale Drama School, who speaks her words.
“She’s amazing — she’s so real with it,” Stahlmann said of their encounters. “Now that I’m cognizant of her being in the audience, it’s a different dimension. I do wonder how that will subconsciously weave its way into my performance.”
In a follow-up conversation from California after she had seen “Blueberries,” Erbelding — who directed and stage-managed plays in college — reflected on the experience. “I think it is a very profound piece, and so for me personally, I will be processing the questions the play asks for a long time, and processing it differently from the rest of the audience.”
The biggest surprise came after the performance, when her presence became known and theatergoers approached her with stories about Holocaust survivors in their families, whose letters and keepsakes they still have. Would the museum be interested?
“I have handed out all my business cards,” Erbelding said. “Hopefully people who have seen the show will think about what they have in their closets — and other discoveries will result, from a play about the discovery of something that was in a closet.”
Here There Are Blueberries, by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich. Directed by Kaufman. Through Aug. 21 at La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla, Calif. lajollaplayhouse.org. | 2022-08-05T10:19:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of Nazis near death camp inspired 'Here There Are Blueberries' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/08/05/blueberries-play-nazis-holocaust-museum/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/08/05/blueberries-play-nazis-holocaust-museum/ |
So you think I can dance?
Our dance critic tried 15 dance apps. Here’s what she learned, and her top picks for fine-tuning your moves.
(Nick Little/For The Washington Post)
The dance floor is one of life’s great playgrounds, but for many of us, stepping onto it can take more than a little courage. Dance classes can be confidence boosters, but starting out can also be a bit intimidating and, given the pandemic, there are reasons to think twice about learning new moves the traditional way, in a steamy dance studio with a group of sweaty strangers. All that breathless human contact might not be right for you, masked or not.
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And whether learning to dance is on your bucket list, or you’re prepping for an occasion, or you want to level up on TikTok, in-person classes can be expensive, inconvenient or simply unavailable in the dance style you’re looking for.
This is where dance apps and online lessons come in. Digital dance classes have been around for years, but they really took off during the pandemic, as studios shut down and professional dancers needed a way to maintain their technique at home. The digital format allows you to learn at your own pace, in your own space, in a one-on-one setting. You don’t get the personal attention of traditional classes, of course, but there are pluses with the best digital platforms. Many of them offer lessons by masters in the field, some of the most recognizable names in hip-hop, ballet and modern dance. Imagine the Instagrammers of your dreams breaking down their corkscrew spins and urging you on like they’re your new best friend/cool big sib/motivational coach/find-your-own-groove guru.
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I’ve bopped and bounced my way through 15 of these teaching platforms and I’ve discovered that it’s possible to get those big, sweaty, crazy-joyous dance vibes through online classes in the convenience of your home. I’ve also found quality instruction, which is crucial. After all, you probably won’t get hurt from a bad online painting class, but you risk knee and ankle sprains or worse from twisting and swiveling with poor technique.
What interested me most is the detailed (and fun) process of learning new skills in an art form, so I limited my top picks to dance instruction rather than dance workouts, though I tried several. If you’re looking for a music-driven, dance-based workout, check out the Sculpt Society, created by dancer and fitness trainer Megan Roup; 305 at Home, an offshoot of the 305 Fitness studios, with live and on-demand dance cardio and other workouts; Forward_Space, an outgrowth of the New York studio founded by choreographer Kristin Sudeikis; and School of SOS, created by backing dancer Bonnie Parsons, who imparts a strong message of female empowerment through confidence webinars, on-demand workouts and daily live streams, and donates 10 percent of subscription profits to charities that help women.
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Some of the instruction apps I sampled are narrowly focused on a single dance style, such as Operation: Tap, which teaches choreographed routines along with technique; Pocket Salsa, offering music downloads as well as dance tutorials; and Koros, founded by world Latin dance champions Riccardo Cocchi and Yulia Zagoruychenko. This ballroom app features interactive live sessions as well as archived classes, but it’s best suited for the serious competition dancer. And at $49.99 per month, it’s the most expensive option I found.
The single-genre apps are good for the specialized student, but for this list, I gravitated to sites with more options, where a jazz enthusiast might also take a spin, say, through heels or locking classes. Among those that didn’t make it into my top five but are worth checking out: learntodance.com, with its short demonstrations of the basics (good for absolute beginners); YouDance, primarily aimed at children and teens (it’s also the only site I found that features clogging, along with the more standard ballet, hip-hop and jazz classes), and CLI Studios, which has a large catalogue of classes taught by some big-name professionals, but unlike other sites doesn’t offer previews, so you need to sign up before seeing how classes proceed.
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Another bonus: Whether your preference is K-pop or krump, West African or salsa, digital classes allow you to literally dance like no one’s watching.
This app is immediately engaging, with a lively, fluid layout that draws you from one well-produced class preview to another. The name derives from skateboard culture, a combination of stylish and easy, and the app lives up to that. It’s easy to navigate, easy to select and load classes, easy to vibe with the more than 100 instructors. Among them are social media celebrities such as B-dash and Bailey Sok, and veterans including Buddha Stretch, the exquisitely light-footed freestyle hip-hop master (I could watch his hip rolls all day long), and popping pioneer Popin’ Pete. The videos are maneuverable, which is a help: You can control the speed, change the view so you’re watching the instructor from behind, and loop the moves for more practice. Your webcam can serve as a mirror.
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Founders Connor Lim, 31, and Evan Zhou, 32, started out as competitive hip-hop dancers in the early 2000s, “when it would take three hours to download a video,” Lim said in a recent interview from Steezy’s headquarters in Los Angeles. Frustrated at the lack of resources, in 2014 they started a blog to share dancing tips. Zhou, a web developer, got involved in building the yoga app Glo, and that became the model for Steezy.
“But learning to move in 3D space through 2D video is actually quite difficult,” Lim says. “We said, ‘If we’re going to use tech to bring dance to people around the world, we have to improve how people can learn.’ ”
“We make the instructors do it slow and count it slow,” Lim says, “because there’s intention in doing that.”
I appreciate the isolated warm-ups, such as a “shoulder mobility” session, and the bits of history and culture that the instructors weave into their classes. Jojo Diggs started her house classes talking about its underground origins and Chicago history, then coaxed me into finding my “jack” — a soulful, rocking, rolling wave that ripples through the body and is the foundation of house.
“Always be thinking about your jack, your groove,” she urges, smiling as the downbeat pulsed through her like an electric charge. “It’s your source, your funk. Your natural state. It’s YOU.” I wasn’t sure if she was still talking about dancing, but so much the better. House as philosophy? Why not?
This new platform, launched in January, is an offshoot of the Mark Morris Dance Group, a world-renowned modern dance company based in Brooklyn, where it also houses a community dance center. On-demand classes in ballet, tap, hip-hop, Latin, West African, modern and more are taught by company dancers and faculty of the Mark Morris Dance Center. The format is straightforward — a teacher demonstrates in a studio, sometimes with an assistant, often with a live drummer or pianist, in keeping with Morris’s insistence on live music for his company’s performances. Demonstrations are exceedingly clear, with a focus on good technique.
“There can be an emotional barrier to coming into a dance center, especially when it’s a state-of-the-art home to a professional dance company,” says Sarah Marcus, MMDG’s director of education and community engagement. The online classes are essentially a digital replica of the dance center’s offerings, she says, and they’re geared to help the adult beginner or intermediate student ease past any inhibitions.
The Los Angeles-based contemporary dance company launched its app in 2020 and claims that it’s the first digital platform for a global dance company. This sleek, artfully designed app may appeal primarily to people who already have a dance background. It offers progressive series of classes in ballet, contemporary dance, fitness and dance for children. Brief “learn the dance” videos teach short pieces of choreography. There are master classes in a range of styles, including bharatanatyam and house, taught by guest teachers. In ballet, these include former American Ballet Theatre principal Stella Abrera and Sara Mearns, the New York City Ballet star. Watching Mearns’s pointe exercises — strictly for the advanced student — is an education in the sheer athletic difficulty of pointework, and the utter beauty of it. I enjoyed the fluid style of Shu Kinouchi, who takes an especially warm, joyful approach to his beginner-level ballet classes.
4. DancePlug
This attractive site offers “tutorials,” rather than classes. They’re meant to complement in-person classes, as the site states: “We are still strong believers that online services cannot and should not replace a regular in-person class.” Choose from warm-ups, steps, exercises and combinations, and dance styles such as hip-hop, house, tap, theater dance and Bollywood. If you’re already taking in-person classes and you have an audition coming up or you dream of a career in musical theater or commercial dance, this would be a good choice to get some extra polish.
There’s also a smart selection of articles on such topics as dealing with long covid and how to improve your musical awareness as a dancer.
This site offers master classes by such eminences as Khalia Campbell of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, former American Ballet Theatre star and Washington Ballet director Julie Kent, and Wendy Whelan, associate artistic director of New York City Ballet, who talks about the “architecture” of ballet — an intriguing concept — as she’s sending you flying across your floor. The list of high-caliber teachers is singularly impressive, and they teach all levels. The emphasis is on ballet, modern (taught by specialists in the techniques of Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham and others) and contemporary, but there’s a smattering of hip-hop, West African and jazz. There are varied cost levels; if you’re looking for frequent classes, it’s one of the pricier options.
The site offers 48-hour, single class rentals for $10 each; or you can opt for a subscription: $30/month, or $306/year. A curated bundle of four to five classes seems to be a good buy at $10 a month for unlimited access; you can choose from categories such as “Absolute beginner ballet” and “Discover dance sampler.” | 2022-08-05T10:19:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | So you think I can dance? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/08/05/dance-apps-top-five/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/08/05/dance-apps-top-five/ |
The Vermont senator wanted Democrats to seek significant changes to the economy. ‘Does this bill do that? No,’ he said. ‘Might it be better than nothing? Yes.’
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill on Aug. 4. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Bernie Sanders was jubilant. It was July 2021, and the Vermont senator had just helped finalize a $3.5 trillion blueprint to overhaul the country’s health-care, education, climate, immigration and tax laws.
“This is the most significant piece of legislation … since the Great Depression,” he told reporters after a round of negotiations that stretched late into the night. “A lot of work remains.”
More than a year later, though, the sprawling package Sanders once envisioned is far smaller in size and scope. And as Democrats prepare to hold a key early vote on the bill, the senator himself has changed his tone — from a proud architect into a potent mix of supporter and critic.
For Sanders, the new health-care, climate and tax package that the Senate aims to adopt as soon as this weekend amounts to a massive missed opportunity. While the firebrand independent is supportive of its core aims — and is seen as likely to vote for its provisions to lower drug costs and address a fast-warming planet — he has increasingly made clear that the bill stops far short of what Democrats should have pursued while in rare control of the House, Senate and White House.
Twice in recent days, Sanders has taken to the Senate floor to sound off about the bill, at one point deriding its name as “the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.” He has promised to take one last run at expanding its reach, putting forward amendments during debate that could spend billions more on health care and climate.
Implicitly, Democratic leaders have defended the heft of their political efforts, saying a slimmed-down package was the only way to resurrect the party’s economic ambitions after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) — a key fiscal hawk and swing vote in their ranks — rejected the ideas Sanders championed.
But the rationale has offered little comfort for Sanders, whose budget blueprint last year had paved the way for Democrats to expand Medicare, offer free prekindergarten, ensure paid family and medical leave, and solidify other federal safety-net programs. Now, the senator and former presidential candidate finds himself preparing for a long-awaited floor debate over a bill he views as disappointing.
Asked if he would cast his vote for the bill, Sanders replied, “I’m taking a hard look,” adding: “We’re going to have to see.”
The new Democratic economic package proposes to spend more than $433 billion on health care and climate change. It spares millions of Americans from insurance premiums set to take effect next year, and it includes investments to tackle global warming that total the largest-ever burst of federal spending to foster green energy.
Democrats hope to pay for that spending with a bevy of changes to tax policy along with a new program to lower seniors’ drug costs, saving both Medicare patients and the federal government money. Lawmakers say their blueprint can raise enough money to cover the cost of the bill and generate about $300 billion to reduce the deficit.
Democrats secured the provisions after weeks of intense talks between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Manchin, held out of view from the rest of their party. The duo clinched the deal in late July, even after Manchin signaled he could not support some of Democrats’ tax-and-spending plans out of concern about inflation.
Schumer and other Democratic leaders since then have raced to prepare the bill for the Senate floor, hoping to hold a vote to begin debate on Saturday. Ultimately, Democrats seek to adopt it under the process known as reconciliation, which allows party lawmakers to sidestep a Republican filibuster — but only if they stick together and limit their legislation to measures that implicate the budget. GOP lawmakers are united in opposing the bill.
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Anticipating a fierce fight, lawmakers held another round of meetings Thursday with the chamber’s parliamentarian, which aides said would continue into Friday. Party leaders also toiled behind the scenes to satisfy another moderate in their ranks: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.). After days of silence, Sinema finally signaled late Thursday that she was ready to “move forward,” having secured agreement with Democratic leaders to dial back some of their tax plans.
Even before they had brokered the arrangement, though, Schumer had exhibited a public air of confidence about their prospects — sensing that an opportunity to achieve Biden’s long-stalled agenda was finally was within their grasp.
“For years, many in Washington have promised to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing our nation, only to fall short,” he said in a floor speech Thursday afternoon, promising Democrats would “make good on our word.”
For many Democrats, the proposal represents only some of what they had hoped to deliver upon assuming the majority last year. Gone are their proposals that might have boosted money for public housing, extended tax benefits to families with children or committed billions of dollars toward caring for the elderly. All of those components were part of the original Build Back Better Act, a roughly $2 trillion measure enabled by the budget resolution that Sanders helped craft last July.
“It’s not everything we want, but it’s pretty rare you get everything you want in a single bill,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said, adding that the components that remain are still “powerful progressive priorities that we are about to get through Congress.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) acknowledged Thursday that he would have preferred if the proposal still included roughly $400 billion for child care. But he said Democrats managed to secure other priorities, including a campaign pledge to try to lower drug costs, adding: “It’s not going to be a hard bill to vote yes for.”
Sanders, however, has sounded a far different note. On Tuesday, he delivered the first of two speeches calling attention to the bill’s deficits. Taking to the Senate floor, Sanders did not mention Manchin directly, but he did begin by addressing “some of my colleagues” who had described the earlier Build Back Better Act as “dead” — a reference to the West Virginia senator’s recent comments.
“Now, I don’t know if that is absolutely true or not,” Sanders began. “But I do know that if it is true, it would be a disaster for working families all across this country who are desperately trying to survive economically.”
Sanders then proceeded to outline the myriad ideas lost in negotiations — from free community college for millions of low-income students to new dental, hearing and vision benefits for Medicare beneficiaries. Turning to the provisions that remained, the senator praised Democrats for including new spending on health care and climate change while ensuring companies pay at least some tax to the U.S. government. But he said many of those elements fell far short of what was needed.
On drug pricing, for example, Sanders said the drugs covered would be limited in number — and their savings years away. On climate, he lamented the inclusion of “giveaway” provisions for fossil fuels that the senator later described as at odds with the spirit of Democrats’ effort to confront global warming.
A day later, Sanders returned to the chamber, emphasizing changes he planned to push for. Under reconciliation, senators can offer unlimited amendments during debate — and the Vermont independent said he intended to put forward some that aim to restore his original spending plans. That includes amendments to provide dental, vision and hearing benefits under Medicare and take aim at oil and gas companies, he said.
Sanders’s pledge amounted to another subtle shot at Manchin, who has long opposed expanding Medicare and signed onto the new bill only after obtaining concessions that boost the fossil fuel industry. And it served as a major challenge to other Democrats, who soon may be asked to vote on proposals they supported in the past — yet gave up in the present in a bid to clinch a deal.
“Does this bill address the health-care crisis in America? No,” Sanders told The Washington Post on Thursday. “Does it deal with the cost of higher education or community college? No. Does it deal with housing? No … Does it deal with the issue of wealth and income inequality? No, it really doesn’t.”
“Reconciliation is the opportunity, the only opportunity we have, to really address the needs of working families,” he continued, saying of the bill: “No one can argue that it does [that].”
Like others in his caucus, Sanders said Thursday that he had not been included in the highly secretive talks between Schumer and Manchin that led to their breakthrough agreement. But he said it would have been a “fruitless effort” for him to negotiate with Manchin, since earlier attempts to reach a resolution with his moderate counterpart “did no good.”
The duo at one point last year publicly sniped at each other, after Sanders went as far as to publish an op-ed in Manchin’s home state extolling the virtues of the Build Back Better Act. That fall, Manchin repeatedly fired back, saying that if Democrats wanted a different outcome, they should try instead to “elect more liberals.”
Since then, the direct public acrimony has subsided. But Sanders on Thursday maintained that Democrats broadly still have failed to mount “the kind of effort we needed” to respond to a wide array of economic concerns.
“Do I think the Democratic Party, or any of us for that matter, have done the kind of work that we should have to rally the American people around that kind of agenda? No, I don’t think we have,” Sanders said. “It’s hard stuff to do.” | 2022-08-05T10:20:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bernie Sanders becomes supporter — and critic — of Democrats’ bill - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/05/bernie-sanders-manchin-schumer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/05/bernie-sanders-manchin-schumer/ |
Brazil gets tough on Crackland, and the drug market spreads
By Gabriela Sá Pessoa
Police pressure on Crackland, the open-air drug market in downtown São Paulo that's one of the world's largest and oldest, has pushed dealers and users into adjacent neighborhoods. (Gui Christ/FTWP)
SÃO PAULO — Fatima Mendes tightens her grip on her dogs’ leashes as she crosses a street in the hemisphere’s largest city. The narrow sidewalks here are clotted with people draped in blankets, many lying down. Drug users pick through trash bins in search of items they might sell for a few reals — enough to secure the next fix. They carry away a wheezing boombox, worn tennis shoes, busted combs.
Dawn is breaking over Crackland.
It’s been two months since hundreds of drug-addicted people spilled into Mendes’s neighborhood, and her morning walks have been tense ever since. Now, when she goes to the gym, the retired tourism manager takes only her key. She avoids going out at night at all.
“You become a prisoner,” says Mendes, 58. “You cannot bring your cellphone with you when you are out, even if you are going to work. You have to be constantly on alert.”
Brazilians call it Cracolândia: a 30-year-old colony of hundreds of drug users and dealers under the control of the First Capital Command, the city’s most powerful gang, across more than two dozen blocks in downtown São Paulo. It’s one of the world’s oldest and largest open-air drug markets, moving an estimated $37 million of product each year.
Since crack cocaine engulfed São Paulo in the 1990s, nearly every city administration has proclaimed victory over Crackland, only to see it resurge, whack-a-mole style, in a different location, to the horror of the residents and business owners affected. Successive governments have tried approaches ranging from tear gas and rubber bullets to free housing and treatment.
In 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro signed a law to allow police and security to commit addicted people to hospitals by force. Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is challenging Bolsonaro in the October election, says he would consider limiting prison terms for users and redefining definitions of drug trafficking to exclude smaller quantities.
Now Crackland is on the move again. The latest in a decades-long series of police crackdowns this year is pushing the squatters beyond their long-standing boundaries and into adjoining neighborhoods.
“It is an impressive social and economic phenomenon,” says Mauricio Fiore, a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning. “It is more than a dilemma — it is unsolvable.”
The only way to break up Crackland, he says, is to raise the cost of staying for users and dealers, either by populating the area with other, more desirable people or by making life so difficult they leave.
Elbio Marquez walks three blocks into the heart of Crackland, past people with open wounds and crutches, to open the heavy iron gates of Cristolandia church. His bright yellow uniform is stamped with “Jesus transforms.”
“Coffee? Shower? A change of clothes?” he offers to the people gathered.
Suddenly, people rise to move. Run, run, they whisper. “Run where?” asks one man, confused.
Across the street, a line of police officers, armed and grim-faced, orders the gathering to disperse. As people run, a tear gas bomb goes off.
The chaos jars amid the architecture of downtown São Paulo. Crackland sits next to the Sala São Paulo, the extravagant theater that serves as headquarters for the city’s symphony orchestra, blocks from the Pérola Byington women’s hospital, and close to the Pinacoteca, one of the country’s most important museums of modern art. It’s not only a public health nightmare but also a real estate headache.
Until recent months, traffickers had full control of the region. But since the beginning of the year, police have launched a series of invasions to arrest traffickers and disperse users. Police say the operations have led to the arrests of several prominent traffickers.
“We unrooted the problem. We broke the economic cycle of Crackland,” says Alexis Vargas, head of strategy for São Paulo’s city police force.
The approach has shrunk Crackland from a height of 4,000 people in 2017 to a few hundred today. But as people disperse, residents in neighborhoods that were never affected are locking their doors and shutting down their businesses.
The police are urging neighbors to be patient as Cracklanders move through the city. “There needs to be resilience,” Vargas says. “Organized crime is resilient, so the public also has to be.”
At Cristolandia, 16 men and two women agree to attend a service in exchange for food, a bath, and new clothes.
“The first time you use crack, that’s it. Your life is over,” says Alan Felipe, 32. He says he has not used in five days. Before he quit, he says, he stole electronics and items from the local market to sell for crack. But life in the last few months has grown more difficult: “They send us from one place to another. You are hit with rubber bullets, pepper spray.”
Jittery and anxious, he says he’ll seek help from a government treatment center after the service is over. With a 9-month-old daughter, he’s determined to stay clean. “It is a battle. You have no idea how hard it is.”
Valdomiro Sousa Lima, 54, says he has been using crack for 13 years. He pulls a homemade pipe, crafted from a car antenna, from a bag. “Now there is no place to stay. We have no space to gather. Everyone is spaced out.”
Aldino de Magalhães runs a restaurant that has been in his family for generations. But sales have plunged 50 percent since the day in May when, without warning, addicted people moved into his block. “It was worse than the pandemic,” he says.
The newcomers, he says, have stolen cables and metal from the outside of his store. Customers have stopped coming by — some, scared of the addicted people; others told to work from home until they disperse.
Maria Inês Sene, 61, was leaving her home. Sene has lived near Crackland since it began. Until this year, she says, she was able to walk and bike here without fear.
Now the noise of the drug market keeps her awake at night. Before she walks out her door in the morning, she looks out the window to judge the mood. If the users seem calm, she says, she leaves. If she see fights or chaos, she waits.
In May, she was returning home from the supermarket at dusk when four men blocked her path and demanded her bags. “What am I supposed to do at that point?” she asks. “It is hard to explain what I was feeling, a mixture of panic and fear. Of course, I see the human being in front of me, but I also felt so vulnerable being surrounded by four men.”
Now, she doesn’t leave the house past 5 p.m.
As night falls, Livia Pereira da Silva sits on a park bench, watching her son climb a tree. Unemployed and pregnant, she has been squatting in Crackland with her five children for years.
“I have never had any problems with the users,” she says. “The problem is with the clashes. My problem is with the police.” During police operations, school is canceled, bullets fly and she closes the doors of her apartment to keep out the tear gas.
But the users give her kids cookies and toys, and they don’t smoke in front of them. Once, when her children were playing outside and got lost, a user brought them home. “If people saw them up close, they would have a different view,” she says. “Before they are drug users, they are human beings.” | 2022-08-05T10:20:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brazil's Crackland: São Paulo drug market under police pressure - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/brazil-crackland-sao-paulo-drug-market/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/brazil-crackland-sao-paulo-drug-market/ |
Jury sees bloodstained halls in rare tour of Parkland school shooting scene
María Luisa Paúl
The 1200 building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in October. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/AP)
The freshman building has essentially remained unchanged since a gunman opened fire inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018, sending students and teachers fleeing for their lives.
Laptops are still cracked open on desks where students’ essays remain unfinished. A copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” was in one classroom near assorted teddy bears, candy hearts and other forgotten Valentine’s Day gifts. But alongside the signs of what began as an ordinary school day in Parkland, Fla., were trails of shattered glass, bullet holes and blood where 14 students and three staff members were killed.
A dozen jurors and 10 alternates made a rare visit to the scene of the mass shooting Thursday in the sentencing trial of convicted shooter Nikolas Cruz. The 23-year-old faces either the death penalty or life in prison after pleading guilty in October to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder.
Parkland gunman’s death penalty trial begins as U.S. reels from mass shootings
The jury, along with Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer, attorneys and journalists, walked through the same hallways and classrooms in the three-story building as Cruz did four years ago. The building has remained closed off to the public behind a 15-foot chain link fence covered in privacy mesh — but prosecutors hope the scene inside will make the case that Cruz should be sentenced to death.
Reporters described the crunch of shattered glass underfoot and the sight of dried blood — contrasted by deflated balloons and decaying rose petals left behind in the students’ rush to escape. On the third floor, where six people died, “the blood in the hallway is something that I would never wish on people to have to see,” said South Florida Sun Sentinel reporter Rafael Olmeda.
“It was disturbing on a number of levels,” Olmeda said in a pool report interview. “What we saw was the end result of children who are in the middle of an average day having a wonderful time, and all of a sudden, a nightmare erupts.”
In Dara Hass’s ninth-grade English class, where Alyssa Alhadeff, Alaina Petty and Alexander Schachter died, students had been writing prior to the attack.
Six bullet holes peppering a window on the third floor showed Cruz’s attempt to fire at the students fleeing outside. Blood could still be seen where geography teacher Scott Beigel fell while ushering students into a classroom.
In an alcove outside the bathroom where Joaquin Oliver died, a pool of blood and bullet holes in the wall indicated how close Cruz was when he shot the 17-year-old, who helplessly held up his hands. The heart-shaped Valentine’s card he carried was left covered in blood. Oliver would have been 22 on Thursday.
“We don’t just see a large pool of blood where Joaquin Oliver died,” Olmeda said. “We see a large pool of blood where, we know from testimony, Joaquin Oliver sat and waited, knowing he was next to be shot.”
Reporters said the jurors did not reveal signs of emotion during the visit, although one appeared to put her arm around another in a supportive gesture.
Trial consultant Robert Hirschhorn, who was not involved in the case, said it is “extraordinarily rare” for a judge to allow a site visit in any criminal trial. This marks the first time in recent history a judge has allowed such a visit when considering a punishment, he said.
“Site visits always leave indelible and unforgettable impressions with jurors,” Hirschhorn said.
In Florida, a death penalty requires a unanimous recommendation by the jury. Cruz’s defense team, which has pushed for a life sentence based on Cruz’s difficult upbringing and mental health issues, will make its opening statement after next week’s recess.
Since the trial began on July 18, jurors have been exposed to graphic videos, photos and audio clips. They have listened to medical experts describe the destructive injuries caused by Cruz’s AR-15-style weapon. Now, they have witnessed carnage suspended in time.
Thursday also brought the last day of victim-impact statements, during which the loved ones of 17-year-old Helena Ramsay, 15-year-old Peter Wang and 49-year-old athletic director Christopher Hixon described how their lives had been upended.
Clad in a suit with a burgundy bow-tie, Hixon’s son Corey told the court that he missed the Saturday runs to Dunkin’ he took with his father, a Navy veteran.
With three gut-wrenching words, Corey brought people in the courtroom to tears — including members of Cruz’s defense team.
“I miss him,” said Corey, leaning into his mother for a hug and breaking into a sob. | 2022-08-05T10:43:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jury takes rare tour of the scene of Parkland school shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/parkland-shooting-trial-visit-school/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/parkland-shooting-trial-visit-school/ |
Albert Woodfox pumps his fist as he arrives onstage during his first public appearance at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center with Parnell Herbert, right, in New Orleans Feb. 19, 2016, after his release from Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La., earlier in the day. (Max Becherer/AP)
Albert Woodfox, a former member of the Black Panther civil rights organization, known for spending almost half a century in solitary confinement in a Louisiana jail before championing prison reform, died on Thursday. He was age 75.
Born in 1947 in New Orleans, Woodfox died there from complications from the coronavirus, his family said in a statement.
“With heavy hearts we write to share that our partner, brother, father, grandfather, and friend, Albert Woodfox, passed away this afternoon from complications caused by COVID-19,” his family said.
“Whatever you called him — Fox, Shaka, Cinque or any of his other endearing nicknames — please know that your care and compassion sustained Albert through his remarkable 75 years, and we are eternally grateful for that.”
The oldest of six siblings grew from a “leader … into liberator,” they added, inspiring the United States to “think more deeply about mass incarceration, prison abuse, and racial injustice.”
He served nearly 44 years in solitary confinement. He was innocent of the crime.
Woodfox had been part of the “Angola Three” — a group of male inmates, including Robert King and Herman Wallace, known for their long stretches in solitary confinement at the notorious maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary — a former plantation using enslaved workers that was turned into a prison known as “Angola.” The men said they believed they were singled out for institutional cruelty due to their political beliefs, after setting up a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party at Angola in 1971.
Woodfox spent 43 years and 10 months, close to half a century, in solitary confinement and is thought to have served more time in solitary confinement than any other prisoner in U.S. history, according to his attorneys.
He told The Washington Post in an interview in 2020 it had been “a horrible experience.” He said his mother and his association with the Black Panther group gave him “internal strength to endure” and a “purpose” and “self-worth” to get through the unending isolation.
In jail, along with King, Wallace and others he would study history and law, teach other inmates how to read and write and play games made up in cells. They also organized strikes and protests about prison conditions, racial injustice, sexual abuse in jail, work hours and clothing he said. “We dared to resist,” he added, “we were very influential.”
“They put me in a cell … for the sole purpose of breaking my spirit,” he told The Post. “Our cells were meant to be death chambers. We turned them into high schools, universities, debate halls, law schools.”
Woodfox was first sent to jail in 1965 on an armed robbery sentence and put into solitary confinement from 1972, accused of killing prison guard Brent Miller. Woodfox consistently maintained his innocence in Miller’s death and Amnesty International and other human rights organization have long decried the case against him as evidentially flawed.
He was freed in 2016 on his 69th birthday. King was released in 2001, while Wallace was released in 2013 and died days later of cancer.
Woodfox later published a memoir entitled “Solitary” written with his partner Leslie George in 2019 where he documented his days confined in a tiny 6 by 9 foot cell for 23 hours a day. It became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
“I still had moments of bitterness and anger. But by then I had the wisdom to know that bitterness and anger are destructive,” he wrote. “I was dedicated to building things, not tearing them down.”
In the short part of his life spent outside jail he became an avid public speaker and champion for prison reform and racial justice, stating that he did not want his mind to remain imprisoned.
“I think what I went through has made me a better man, a better human being,' he told The Post. “I’ve been asked a lot: What would I change in my life? And people are surprised when I say, ‘Absolutely nothing.'”
More than 80,000 men, women, and children remain in solitary confinement in jails across the United States, according to human rights group, the American Friends Service Committee. That figure has likely substantially risen during the coronavirus pandemic, says nonprofit Penal Reform International which documents the devastating mental and physicals impacts of confinement and prolonged isolation.
Woodfox “unrelentingly sought to share with others the mental and emotional freedom he had found in himself,” and his “triumph over profound inhumanity and degradation will forever challenge and energize us all,” his family said.
KK Ottesen contributed to this report. | 2022-08-05T11:04:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Albert Woodfox, Angola 3 inmate held in solitary confinement for decades, dies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/albert-woodfox-solitary-confinement-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/albert-woodfox-solitary-confinement-dead/ |
Equifax miscalculated credit scores for thousands of consumers. Some people may have received a different credit decision based on the coding error.
Equifax, a consumer credit reporting agency, recently had a coding issue that resulted in miscalculated credit scores. (Mike Stewart/AP)
“Our data shows that less than 300,000 consumers experienced a score shift of 25 points or more,” Equifax said. “While the score may have shifted, a score shift does not necessarily mean that a consumer’s credit decision was negatively impacted.”
Lack of credit has been a huge obstacle to Black home buyers. Now some lenders are trying to fix that.
Let’s say a lender uses the FICO scoring model in which credit scores range from a low of 300 to a high of 850. A credit score that would have been 700 but was erroneously reported as 675 could have landed a borrower in a pricing tier that ultimately resulted in a higher interest rate.
“For consumers who attempted to obtain credit between March 17 and April 6, 2022, and think their decision may have been impacted, Equifax advises that they reach out to the lender for more information,” a spokeswoman for Equifax said in an email.
Credit bureaus drew more than half of consumer complaints to CFPB in past two years
You might be thinking, “Hey, I can get a free credit score.”
Equifax explains the difference this way: “What you generally see are educational credit scores, meaning they are intended to give you a close idea of your scores for informational and monitoring purposes. While they are a good way to gauge your credit rating, you may not be seeing the exact same numbers as your lender.”
My adult child built a good credit score in just three months. Here’s how she did it.
In 2006, VantageScore was created by the three credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — to compete with FICO. It also ranges from 300 to 850.
How I got a perfect 850 credit score
But at my credit union, I have access to two different score models. One uses FICO Score 9 based on data in my Equifax credit file. The other uses VantageScore 3.0 based on my TransUnion credit report. The VantageScore report says my score was 832 as of Aug. 1.
If you pull your free credit scores meant just for educational purposes and see you are usually in the 700 plus range, you might be overconfident that you’re going to get a good deal. But that may not be the case if the score received by a lender is lower, pushing you into a less favorable pricing tier. You might not be inclined to question the difference after the lender points out that what they pulled was your “real” score.
I’ve talked to consumers who pulled their free scores before applying for a loan. They thought they were in good shape, only to find out the score the lender pulled was much lower. But they were already at the car dealer and too pumped to get their new car to back out of the purchase.
The class representative, a resident of Jacksonville, Fla., alleges she was denied an auto loan in April after the report Equifax provided to the dealership showed a credit score that was inaccurate by 130 points. As a result of the error, the borrower now pays $154 more for her car loan per month, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Georgia.
If your score is excellent — in the high 700s and over 800 — small variations won’t matter. However, if you’re just barely hanging in a certain credit range, a lower score can have a big impact on what you pay for credit or whether you qualify at all.
Why it’s so hard to fix errors on your credit report
It’s been almost 18 years since the Fair Credit Reporting Act mandated that consumers, upon request, receive a free copy of their credit report once every 12 months through AnnualCreditReport.com. (At the start of the pandemic, the bureaus began offering free weekly online credit reports and have continued to do so.) | 2022-08-05T11:26:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Equifax glitch shows why consumers need their real credit score - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/equifax-glitch-free-credit-scores/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/equifax-glitch-free-credit-scores/ |
What to watch with your kids: ‘Luck’ and more
Lydia Gaston, left, and Jo Koy in “Easter Sunday.” (Ed Araquel/Universal Pictures)
Joyous, inclusive comedy has some violence, strong language.
“Easter Sunday” is a sweet, inclusive comedy about a Filipino American named Joe (stand-up comic Jo Koy) who’s bringing his son to his family’s Easter dinner celebration — and facing all manner of chaos in the process. Expect some violence, including guns/shooting, knives and other weapons, brief punching and fighting, and a teen boy getting shoved up against the wall, as well as violent dialogue. There’s also sex-related dialogue, a romance between teens, and characters being patted affectionately on the bottom. Language includes occasional uses of “s---,” “a--,” “b----,” “d---,” “hell,” “loser” and “suck.” Characters talk about drinking and driving and have wine with dinner. A character performs in a Budweiser TV ad, which is referenced many times. (96 minutes)
Luck (G)
Streaming and in theaters
Colorful, charming animated tale has positive messages.
“Luck” is an animated film about Sam (voice of Eva Noblezada), the unluckiest person in the world. She accidentally travels to the land of Luck and learns positive lessons about overcoming challenges and managing disappointments. Characters face dangers and scary-looking monsters, but they always emerge unscathed. They demonstrate empathy and perseverance and discover that family is who you make it. There are some emotional scenes involving young children who are hoping to be adopted and end up disappointed. Characters use very mild taunts (“blabbermouth”), there’s a “poop” research center and a few scenes take place in a (juice) bar. (105 minutes)
Available on Apple TV Plus; also opening at the Cinemark Fairfax Corner 14.
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (TV-Y7)
Action-packed animated tale has lots of peril, violence.
“Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie” is an animated sci-fi movie. It’s based on the “Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” series and is part of the long-standing TMNT franchise, which is known for its action and cartoon violence. The Turtles use samurai swords and martial arts weapons. And the villains — this time, an alien species called the Krang — are creepy, brainlike creatures with tentacles that can possess others and turn them into their minions, which could be scary for some kids. Some injuries linger, such as bruising or dark spots of blood. Main characters are injured and, in one early timeline, even die. Language includes phrases such as “bada--,” “butts kicked,” and “oh, God.” The four brothers do work through their character flaws and come together to be heroes, and the movie’s themes include hope, teamwork and not giving up. (82 minutes)
Thirteen Lives (PG-13)
Teamwork, ingenuity shine in excellent, intense true story.
“Thirteen Lives,” directed by Ron Howard, recounts the true events of the against-all-odds rescue of a boys’ soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. Just as it was in real life, the peril is intense, so you’ll probably want to let kids know ahead of watching that the boys survive. But one diver does perish, and his drowning is shown on camera. Like the 2021 documentary about the same events, “The Rescue,” this film depicts teamwork and striking bravery. Every person in the movie is portrayed as a hero or role model, working through communication barriers and cultural differences to come up with a solution. There are many positive takeaways, including the idea that pulling off the impossible comes from combining a range of knowledge and skills. Specifically, viewers are likely to gain an appreciation for geology and engineering. Expect to see a couple of adults smoking, and kids are given sedatives and ketamine through needles and pills without parental consent. Language isn’t frequent but includes “s---” and “a--.” (147 minutes) | 2022-08-05T11:26:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Common Sense Media's weekly recommendations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/05/common-sense-media-august-5/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/05/common-sense-media-august-5/ |
At last, Alex Jones will pay for his despicable lies
Alex Jones steps outside of the Travis County Courthouse, to do interviews with media after he was questioned under oath about text messages and emails by lawyer Mark Bankston in Austin on Aug. 3. (Briana Sanchez/Reuters)
Testimony during the civil trial left no doubt of Mr. Jones’s mendacity. During harsh cross-examination of Mr. Jones on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents revealed that Mr. Jones’s lawyer had accidentally sent the plaintiff’s counsel two years of data from Mr. Jones’s cellphone, including emails and text messages thatshowed Mr. Jones had apparently perjured himself during sworn testimony. “This is your 'Perry Mason' moment,” Mr. Jones responded dismissively. No, Mr. Jones, this is not made-up TV drama and no one is entertained. “Jesse was real. I’m a real mom,” said Ms. Lewis in her heart-wrenching testimony. She challenged Mr. Jones to think about how his lying and fear-mongering have poisoned U.S. politics and distorted reality for the hundreds of thousands of people who follow him. In addition to his Sandy Hook lies, Mr. Jones has peddled fantasies about 9/11 and covid-19.
Molly Roberts: Alex Jones gets a made-for-TV ending
The $4.1 million is far less than the $150 million sought by the parents, but much more than the $8 recommended by Mr. Jones. The truth is that no amount of money can compensate for what Mr. Heslin described to the jury as the “living hell” that has been made of their lives. What is important is that Mr. Jones has been called to account, in an indictment of today’s culture in which the spread of misinformation is tolerated and even encouraged. “Speech is free, but lies you have to pay for,” Mark Bankston, the parents’ lawyer, told the jury in his opening statement. “This is a case about creating change.The $4.1 million is the first of possible jury awards; we hope that puts on notice others who knowingly traffic in lies to advance their political and financial interests. | 2022-08-05T11:39:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | At last, Alex Jones will pay for his despicable lies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/alex-jones-defamation-payout-finally/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/alex-jones-defamation-payout-finally/ |
Mandela Barnes could save the Democrats from Manchin and Sinema
Mandela Barnes, lieutenant governor of Wisconsin and democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, speaks to supporters at a rally outside the Wisconsin State Capitol building on July 23. (Sara Stathas for The Washington Post)
Mandela Barnes could become a model for progressive and Black candidates if he wins Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race this fall — and also give the Democrats a Manchin-and-Sinema-proof Senate majority.
Barnes effectively won the Democratic Senate primary when his top three opponents all dropped out of the race last week and endorsed him. Barnes’s primary victory on Tuesday won’t be a big upset; he is the current lieutenant governor after all.
But it wasn’t a given either. Many officials, operatives and even voters in the Democratic Party tend to view candidates who are progressive, women and/or people of color as less likely to win general elections, even though the evidence for these views is fairly thin.
In terms of these electability perceptions, Barnes launched his Senate run last summer with a bunch of liabilities: his past support of Medicare-for-all; a picture that had been taken of him and posted online in which he is holding a T-shirt that calls for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency; and perhaps most important, that he is a young Black man (now 35 years old) running in a state that is more than 80 percent White and that Donald Trump won in 2016. Wisconsin has a long history of progressive politics, including current senator and Medicare-for-all backer Tammy Baldwin (D), but it is mainly a history of White progressives.
In both overt and subtle ways, some of Barnes’s opponents, as well as journalists and more centrist Democrats, spent much of the past year suggesting he wasn’t a great candidate for the party to nominate against incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.
So how did Barnes clear the primary field?
First, he repositioned himself slightly on policy. While emphasizing his progressive views on issues such as supporting unions and abortion rights, Barnes did make not Medicare-for-all a centerpiece of his campaign, and he repeatedly noted that he does not back abolishing ICE or reducing police funding.
Second, Barnes was able to get endorsements not only from progressive Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), but also from more center-left figures in the party, such as Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) and House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) He got those endorsements because while a big part of his brand is being a progressive, Barnes has a broad network within the party, having served as a community organizer in Milwaukee, a state representative and one of the few Black lieutenant governors in the country.
Third, with the Democratic Party constantly worried it is not doing enough to connect with Americans who are middle or lower income, Barnes emphasized his humble background. He grew up in a low-income area in Milwaukee, the child of a public school teacher and a factory worker. (His parents named him Jesse Mandela Barnes as a tribute to the South African icon, and Barnes has long gone by “Mandela.”)
Finally, Barnes’s campaign consistently touted any poll that showed him defeating Johnson, directly addressing any questions about his electoral viability.
It’s not fair that Black and progressive candidates have to go out of their way to prove their electability. After all, White centrist Democrats lose all the time, too.
Nor is it ideal that left-wing Democratic politicians sometimes have to abandon well-grounded positions on policing or health care to prove their electoral viability.
That said, 2020 Democratic presidential candidates like then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Warren would likely have done better against Joe Biden if they had spent more time emphasizing that they could win the general election and played down some of their most divisive stands. Policies like Medicare-for-all and abolishing ICE have almost no chance of getting adopted, so progressive candidates who tout them create electoral problems for themselves without any practical benefit.
Without making all those moves, it’s not clear that Barnes would have won the primary and had the chance to show he can win a general election. How Barnes cleared this perceived electability bar could be an important lesson for progressive candidates and candidates of color, who are sometimes blocked by Democratic activists, donors and voters during primaries because of doubts about their general election chances. If Barnes beats Johnson, expect to see Black and progressive candidates borrow from these tactics, particularly if they are running statewide in swing states.
But a Barnes general election victory isn’t assured. Despite all of the discussion in the primary about whatever individual liabilities Barnes might have, his biggest challenge will be the same one his White opponents would have faced: running in a swing state in a year when their party controls the White House. Candidates in those circumstances often lose. While Johnson is a controversial figure, he’s still an incumbent who won a close race in 2016.
A Barnes win would be a huge coup for Democrats. He could help the party keep a majority in the Senate. He could also be part of a real Senate Democratic majority, as opposed to the tenuous control Democrats have now, always needing the votes of enigmatic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.). Victories by Barnes and the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, would give the Democrats 52 seats in the chamber, as long as the party’s incumbents also win their races.
A Barnes win would also be a breakthrough — a progressive winning in a purple state; a Black person winning a U.S. Senate seat (only 11African Americans have ever served in the chamber); a Black person winning a U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin for the first time ever.
And because he would be another “skinny kid with a funny name” who also is Black, young, charismatic and Midwestern, a Senator Barnes would likely become a national figure. | 2022-08-05T11:39:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Mandela Barnes could flip Wisconsin and show progressives how to win - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/wisconsin-senate-election-mandela-barnes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/wisconsin-senate-election-mandela-barnes/ |
Pinterest and PayPal Problems Won’t Be Fixed Overnight by Elliott
People exit PayPal Holdings Inc. headquarters in San Jose, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2017. PayPal Holdings Inc. is scheduled to release earnings figures on January 26. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Judging by the roughly 10% lift that shares in both Pinterest Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. received this week after Elliott Management disclosed a stake in each company, investors are confident the activist investor can fix problems quickly at both companies. They may be expecting too much.
Don’t get me wrong. Elliott has scored some home runs in persuading companies to overhaul their businesses, with eBay one of the most recent examples in the technology sector. By following Elliott’s advice to sell its StubHub and classified ad businesses, eBay lifted its stock price more than 150% between the start of 2019 when Elliott appeared and last fall, before the market started to slide. But the outcome of Elliott’s efforts in other situations such as AT&T Inc., Twitter Inc. and SoftBank Group Corp. was, by comparison, nothing to write home about.
And Elliott is one of the more effective activists. Consider what happened after Starboard Value moved early last year on eHealth Inc., a health insurance marketplace that specializes in enrolling people in Medicare, when the company’s stock had fallen by half in 12 months. After starting a proxy contest to win seats on eHealth’s board, the activist quickly reached a deal with eHealth to add a health care executive to the company’s board. A few months later, eHealth’s chief executive officer, Scott Flanders, departed in favor of someone with more direct experience in health.
How are eHealth’s shares doing? They are trading around $8, 87% below where they were trading when Starboard first disclosed its stake. The stock prices of eHealth competitors GoHealth Inc. and SelectQuote Inc. have also dropped over the same period. Each of the companies has been squeezed by big increases in marketing costs, thanks to rising competition, which casts doubt about the business model. It’s not clear these firms can recoup the high marketing costs with the money they make on commission selling Medicare. Starboard is sitting on an enormous loss, having paid about $100 million for a stake now worth $14 million.
Much of the media, and many investors, celebrate an activist investor’s appearance in a company as though it’s a white knight riding to rescue small investors from incompetent managements. But activists’ prescriptions — typically focused on selling assets, buying back stock or replacing a CEO — work only some of the time. And they may completely miss the mark if a company is dealing with structural change in an industry that will take a few years to sort through. In other words, investors should be a lot more skeptical about an activist investor’s proposed solutions.
Consider AT&T: Elliott disclosed a stake in the telecom giant in September 2019, saying the stock could more than double to $60 by the end of 2021 if the company reviewed its portfolio and rethought its leadership. At the time, AT&T’s stock had been lagging behind that of its main rival, Verizon Communications Inc. The company had spent tens of billions of dollars to buy satellite TV firm DirecTV and entertainment giant Time Warner, a diversification into businesses with what could charitably be called challenging long-term growth prospects. Elliott’s appearance seemed to have an impact. Seven months later, CEO Randall Stephenson announced suddenly he would step down in favor of John Stankey, his No. 2. Stankey quickly unwound the two big media acquisitions that Stephenson had undertaken, refocusing the telecom giant on its core business.
Those were smart moves. But so far that hasn’t helped AT&T’s stock price. Instead of reaching $60 by the end of 2021, it was around $18.56, 33% below where it was when Elliott first disclosed its interest. It’s still in that neighborhood.
There’s no doubt it’s better for AT&T to be more focused on its core business, if only so it can properly invest in telecom and better compete with its singularly focused rivals, Verizon and T-Mobile US Inc. But cellular is a slow-growth business that requires massive investment in spectrum and network upgrades, where competition is intense not only from other cellular rivals but cable operators now jumping into the business. AT&T’s investment in media set it back years, but even Verizon, which maintained its focus on telecom, is struggling with growth.
Similarly, the activist’s appearance as a Twitter shareholder in February 2020 led to Twitter’s agreement to evaluate its CEO succession plan and to pursue some other corporate governance changes, such as eliminating the staggered board that made it difficult for outsiders to challenge for control of the company. Twenty months later, after Elliott’s representative quit a board seat it had won as part of that agreement, CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down. But Twitter’s fundamental business challenges, which include a lack of scale and uneven advertising growth, haven’t been solved. Elon Musk had, for a moment, appeared as a potential savior, but that’s devolved into a circus.
Pinterest or PayPal could be a different story. Consider Pinterest first. Elliott’s investment in Pinterest, first reported by the Wall Street Journal in mid-July — came just a couple of weeks after founder and CEO Ben Silbermann had stepped down in response to a steady drumbeat of unfavorable news coverage of his management. His successor, former Google executive Bill Ready, seems ideally placed to improve Pinterest’s e-commerce-focused ad business.
Ditto PayPal. If you go back to the company’s first-quarter call, CEO Daniel Schulman was talking at the time about the same issues he discussed this week on the second-quarter call, which took place the day Elliott confirmed its interest. Schulman is focused on strengthening PayPal’s position in the checkout part of the e-commerce software market, where competition from startups such as Bolt has been intense.
Elliott may have prompted PayPal to focus a little more intensively on cutting costs and repurchasing shares (although whether increasing a buyback is in PayPal’s long-term business interests is an open question). And sure, it won’t hurt to have Elliott on Schulman’s case. But Elliott needs to stick around, possibly for a few years. Otherwise, whatever impact it may have could be short-lived. | 2022-08-05T11:48:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pinterest and PayPal Problems Won’t Be Fixed Overnight by Elliott - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/pinterest-and-paypal-problems-wont-be-fixed-overnight-by-elliott/2022/08/05/c22410da-14b2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/pinterest-and-paypal-problems-wont-be-fixed-overnight-by-elliott/2022/08/05/c22410da-14b2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Pushed by parent activists and buoyed by new funding, scientists explore novel strategies to treat deadly pediatric cancers
Periwinkle Day Camp attendees enjoy the camp's “water day” in Houston in June. The week-long program provides traditional summer camp activities for children who are being treated or have been previously treated at Texas Children's Cancer and Hematology Center for cancer or other life-threatening illnesses. (Marie D. De Jesús/Houston Chronicle/AP)
When Michelle Monje was a medical student 20 years ago, she saw her first case of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, a childhood brain cancer that is almost always fatal within a year. Monje decided to study the disease further — “I just couldn’t turn away” — but several senior faculty members tried to talk her out of it.
They “were concerned there was little interest because the disease was so rare and that I would struggle to accomplish anything,” she recalls.
My baby daughter died of brain cancer. Here’s what we can do to save other kids.
Catherine Bollard, director of the Center for Cancer and Immunology Research at Children’s National Hospital Research Institute in D.C., acknowledges that there are more adult cancer patients, the long-standing reason that drug companies have favored drug research in them. But curing children makes a long-lasting impact.
“Kids who survive will be productive citizens for a longer time than an adult you are trying to give an extra five years to,” she says.
‘A long way to go’
“These changes in recent years have prompted approaches that are beginning to make a real impact on improving the care and outcome of children with diseases thought incurable 10 years ago,” says Paul Sondel, the Reed and Carolee Walker professor of pediatric oncology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and a pediatric oncologist for more than 40 years. “Nevertheless, while we are seeing new progress, we know there is still a long way to go to be able to cure all children with cancer.”
Dinah Singer, senior investigator in the National Cancer Institute’s Experimental Immunology Branch and the head of NCI’s molecular regulation section and deputy director for scientific strategy and development, agrees, but she insists scientists’ commitment to children never wavered, only that the previous challenges had been formidable.
Today, scientists know much more about kids’ cancers than they did before.
“We’ve always had a long-standing continuing interest in pediatric cancer,” she says. “What’s changed is our understanding of how fundamentally different childhood cancers are from adult cancers, which has opened new [research] opportunities.”
‘Children are wired differently’
“Children are wired differently,” says Crystal Mackall, the Ernest and Amelia Gallo family professor and professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at Stanford University and former chief of NCI’s Pediatric Oncology Branch. “Adults acquire a lot of cell mutations, step-by-step,” which is why most people who get cancer are older. “Children’s cancers are more like a switch — boom — and turning off that switch is difficult because their cancers aren’t molecularly the same.”
Bollard agrees. “There has been this assumption that we can just take drugs that work in adult cancers, and they will work in kids,” she says. “That is not correct. We can’t rely on trickle-down therapeutic approaches.”
While chemotherapy has been effective against childhood blood cancers, such as acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) — the most common childhood leukemia — it is has been less successful against solid tumors. Moreover, children receiving chemo and radiation risk serious health effects later, including new cancers and heart and lung problems, among others.
Live like Lola: A girl makes the most of life while battling a brain tumor
“We don’t worry about long-term side effects in a 70- or 80-year-old, but we have to worry about them in children,” says Douglas Hawkins, professor of hematology-oncology at Seattle Children’s Hospital and chair of the Children’s Oncology Group, an NCI funded-consortium of more than 200 hospitals treating and studying children with cancer. “If we cure cancer in a 3-year-old, it’s not to prolong their lives for a few months but for life. The gains to society are enormous.”
NCI spending for pediatric cancer research rose from 5.57 percent of its budget in fiscal 2016 to 8.77 percent in fiscal 2021, according to the institute. Also, the National Institutes of Health — of which NCI is a part — invested about $664 million on childhood cancer research in fiscal 2021, an increase of $85 million over fiscal 2020, according to NCI. NCI’s overall budget for fiscal 2021 was nearly $6.4 billion.
Scientists welcome the boost but say they still could use more. “This is a helpful increase, but still not sufficient to make the impact that childhood cancer really needs, especially given the years of life that potentially could be saved,” Sondel says.
Cell-based immunotherapy
The technique involves removing immune T cells from the patient, engineering them in the lab to recognize cell markers abundant on tumors, then returning them to the patient. The altered cells include a protein — the CAR — that doesn’t occur in nature. The CAR protein binds to the tumor and stimulates the engineered T cells into multiplying, then attacking and killing cancer cells.
Cancer report shows patients face a hardship besides the illness: Zooming bills
Although not yet curative, Monje and Mackall are excited by the behavior of the cells and plan to further fine-tune them. “It’s still early and I don’t want to overstate it, but given that this is a disease where nothing has worked, it’s unbelievable,” Mackall says.
“These CAR T cells are so specific, they just go into the tumors,” Monje says. “We see a response within weeks of their getting so much better symptomatically. We’ve seen kids go from wheelchairs to walking in two weeks. Although the cancer came back, three of the first four kids we published on had great a therapeutic response.”
As with most scientific progress, steps are incremental, she says. “This process of iteration, of bench-to-bedside, then bedside-to-bench, again and again, is how we will eventually cure diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma,” she says.
They are manipulating CAR T cells to make a protein that can block transforming growth factor beta (TGF-Beta), “a nasty cytokine that has devastating effects on T cells’ ability to grow and kill tumors,” Bollard explains. (Cytokines are small proteins that affect the activity of immune system cells.) “Most human cancers use TGF-Beta to evade the immune system,” Bollard says, adding the idea is to “power up” CAR T to thwart this cytokine.
“We want CAR T to become the standard of care within a decade for children with these solid tumors,” she says.
Targeted therapies as CAR T represent “the next revolution” in treating childhood cancers, says Andrew Kung, a pediatric oncologist who chairs the pediatrics department at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “We are very excited about their potential pediatric applications,” he says.
He cites antibody-based therapies as additional promising approaches, among them antibody drug conjugates and “bi-specific” antibodies.
Eye-catching cancer drug trial results have researchers asking: What’s next?
Conjugates are monoclonal antibodies — laboratory-made proteins that latch on to certain targets, such as antigens (foreign substances in the body) on cancer cells — that are chemically linked to drugs. The antibodies release the drugs, which kill cancer cells without harming other cells. “Bi-specific” antibodies contain two arms, one that binds to cancer cells, the other to T cells, and deploys them to fight the cancer.
Experts point out that technological advances underscoring these therapeutic advances don’t fully explain the current resurgence. They laud the work of parent advocacy groups; the willingness of hospitals and academic institutions to collaborate; data sharing, such as via the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative; legislation such as the Childhood Cancer Survivorship, Treatment, Access and Research (STAR) Act, which authorizes $30 million annually for pediatric cancer research; and a regulatory environment that has become more child-friendly.
The Children’s Oncology Group, for example, an NCI-funded global pediatric clinical trials consortium with more 10,000 experts in the field, seeks to eventually develop standards of care for pediatric cancer.
“Even the biggest institutions see only a handful of pediatric cancer cases, so the best way to study them is to band together,” says Hawkins, its chair, who says the consortium is sponsoring at least 100 clinical trials. “You can study breast cancer at one institution, but if you want to study pediatric cancer, you have to work together.”
Parents’ powerful voices
Also, new inducements and rules have prompted the pharmaceutical industry to include more children in their drug research. The Race for Children Act, for example, requires drug companies testing a targeted cancer drug for adults to test it in children if the drug’s same molecular targets are found in pediatric cancers — even if the kids’ cancer is different. “This is huge,” Hawkins says. “It’s a game changer.”
Finally, experts praise those parents who’ve lost children to cancer and organizations they started — for example, the EVAN Foundation, Alice’s Arc, the Smashing Walnuts and Kids V Cancer — for provoking strong bipartisan support for many of their initiatives.
“They keep reminding us of the devastation having a child with cancer can have,” Singer says.
“A parent of a child with cancer is probably the most powerful lobbying voice there is,” Bollard says. “It’s true that adult cancers occur in a much larger number of people. But if it’s your child — or my child — with cancer, that’s the only patient who matters.” | 2022-08-05T11:48:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | More scientists are studying pediatric cancer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/05/childrens-cancer-research-gains/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/05/childrens-cancer-research-gains/ |
Democrats say prized piece of agenda is a go with Sinema's support
Good morning, Early Birds. Tune in to “Washington Week” on your local PBS station tonight where Leigh Ann will moderate a discussion with The Post's Ashley Parker, The New York Times' Carl Hulse, NPR's Asma Khalid and The Atlantic's Tim Alberta on President Biden's agenda and the midterms. Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
In today's edition …. Rep. Andy Levin talks to Theo about the politics of Israel and Democratic primaries …. The Post's Yasmeen Abutaleb with a scoop on the White House summoning China's ambassador for a rebuke on Beijing's Taiwan response … What we're watching: Jobs numbers … but first …
Democrats did it. But they brace for more obstacles ahead.
BIG, BIG, BIG NEWS: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reached an agreement with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) Thursday night on the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act, their climate change, health care and tax bill.
Sinema said in a statement she's ready to “move forward” and Schumer said in a separate statement he believes the measure now has the support of all 50 members of the Democratic caucus.
“I have had many productive discussions with members of our conference over the past three days and we have addressed a number of important issues they have raised,” Schumer said.
Our colleague Tony Romm, who has been consistently breaking news on this bill, has more details on the changes:
“In a statement, Sinema said Democrats had ‘agreed to remove’ a key tax policy targeting wealthy investors that aimed to address what is known as the 'carried interest loophole.' She also said they had made additional changes to a second provision that aims to impose a new minimum tax on corporations that currently pay nothing to the U.S. government. The revisions would benefit manufacturers, according to two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to describe the unreleased details.”
Tony adds: “As part of it, Democrats opted to seek a new 1 percent tax on corporate stock buybacks, a move that would make up at least some of the revenue that might have been lost as a result of the changes, the two people familiar with the matter said. And they agreed to set aside new money at Sinema’s request to respond to climate issues including drought, according to the sources.”
The Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough will continue examining the bill and hearing from Democrats and Republicans as she determines whether all of the legislation's components comply with Senate rules that would allow it to be considered under the fast-track budget reconciliation process where only a majority vote is needed for passage. She is under pressure to work quickly.
Schumer has scheduled a vote for Saturday at noon, essentially a roll call to summon members back in town. Democrats plan to move to the legislation Saturday afternoon. There would then be 20 hours of debate equally divided. Democrats are likely to yield back their time in hopes of moving quickly to a marathon voting session known as vote-a-rama late Saturday or early Sunday. That's if parliamentarian has finished scrubbing the bill.
While this is a major development and will likely set the bill on the path to passage, some potential problems lay ahead for Democrats.
Republicans are plotting amendments on crime, inflation, border security and energy. “We're going to focus on issues the American people are concerned about,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said.
Immigration is an issue that could create a major complication for Democrats. They expect Republicans to offer an amendment regarding Title 42, the pandemic-era public health restrictions leftover from the Trump administration that allows the United States to reject migrants at the border. When President Biden this spring said he would repeal Title 42, Democrats up for reelection in tough races denounced the move.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) warned his colleagues during a caucus lunch this week that he'd tank the reconciliation bill if Democrats take the bait from Republicans and allow “pejorative” immigration amendments to be adopted and included in the final version of the bill.
“Everybody knows where I stand,” Menendez said.
Immigration and border security is an issue Republicans are pushing in hotly contested midterm races, especially in Arizona where Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is running for reelection. Kelly wouldn't commit to opposing Republican amendments.
“We're gonna see what folks bring up and I'll make a decision, you know, based on, what the amendment is at the time,” Kelly said.
The politics of vote-a-ramas
Vote-a-ramas are mostly an inside the Beltway spectacle and it's not clear that point scoring amendments matter much to voters. But they can be useful in attack ads.
“If you're paying attention to (vote-a-rama), you're either preparing to run ads or preparing to protect yourself against them,” one senior Republican aide said. “Even if you're not in cycle right now, you're guaranteed to see these votes cited in ads in the years to come.”
And this vote-a-rama will occur just three months from an election, making the votes potentially even more politically potent.
“It's a death by a thousand cuts more than a silver bullet,” said one senior Republican aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss party strategy. “None of this stuff takes out a senator,” the aide said, “but it reinforces a narrative.”
More Post coverage
Tony takes a look at Sen. Bernie Sanders' disappointment with a bill he says falls far short of what should be done.
And Yeganeh Torbati and Jeff Stein dig into how special interests are trying to make changes to the legislation.
Rep. Levin on the politics of Israel and Democratic primaries
Six questions for … Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.): We talked with Levin, who lost his member-on-member primary against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) on Tuesday, about the role the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is playing in Democratic primaries, what he thinks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee meddling in Republican primaries and whether he'll ever run again.
The Early: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s new super PAC, United Democracy Project, has run ads in nine Democratic House primaries this year. Six of the candidates they’ve backed won, including Rep. Haley Stevens, who defeated you on Tuesday. What effect do you think their spending is having on these races?
Levin: I think it's having a determinative effect in races. And, of course, it involves a double deception, because they lie about what their interest is. They don't run ads about Israel and Palestine, right? They run ads about whatever they think will win that race for their candidate or defeat the one they don't like. And then they also obviously don't disclose where the money's coming from. And the biggest question for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and all of us in the Democratic caucuses of the House and Senate is whether we will allow Republicans in general — and Republican billionaires in particular — to pick who the Democratic Party will send to elections in November. [Ed.: UDP’s top donors include the Republican megadonors Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer, the Democratic megadonor Haim Saban, and other donors who have given to both parties.]
The Early: UDP spent about $4.2 million backing Stevens and attacking you. A super PAC affiliated with Emily’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights, spent $3.2 millions dollars on Stevens’ behalf. Do you have the same concerns about Emily's List coming in and spending that kind of money that you do about AIPAC?
Levin: Well, I think the issues around Emily's List are different, because Emily's list is a Democratic PAC. But I think the idea of a group like Emily's List tag-teaming with a group like AIPAC is shameful and certainly problematic. I certainly support the idea of having lots of women in Congress and a lot more women in Congress. I'm not sure how often it is that Emily's List endorses somebody when [former Planned Parenthood president] Cecile Richards endorses the other person. She endorsed me in this race.
The Early: Do you think watching what has happened in these primaries over the past few months has made House Democrats more afraid of criticizing the Israeli government? Have you had conversations with colleagues about this?
Levin: Everybody's watching. When I wrote the Two-State Solution Act, colleagues would come up to me on the floor and say, ‘Oh, Andy, I read your bill. That is really smart.' And then they would pause and say, ‘But of course, I can't cosponsor it.’. It's like, I know my politics, I can't cross AIPAC. They were telling me that they substantively agreed with it and thought it was good policy. And yet they were afraid to support it. Now, add this season of primaries to that status quo ante, and I’m sorry to say that I assume it will be worse.
The Early: Have you had any cosponsors of that bill back away from it?
Levin: I believe there may have been one, but I’ll let you look for yourself on that. I don't want to call anybody out. A person announced to me that they were [removing their name] and there was no sense that they changed their mind or they realized that it wasn't a good idea. It was purely political. [Ed.: Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) removed his name from the list of cosponsors in June, according to legislative records. His office did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday afternoon.]
The Early: Some House Democrats have raised concerns about the party spending money in Republican primaries to try to boost candidates who have questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election. “It's dishonorable, and it's dangerous, and it's just damn wrong,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) told Politico last week. What do you think about that strategy?
Levin: I was aghast. We had our unity breakfast this morning and I blasted it. Our bipartisan select committee on January 6th is doing its wonderful work of trying to uncover and tell the American people the story of Donald Trump's efforts to undermine our democracy. That we would be supporting candidates who actively support the big lie — it's just wrong. The ends do not justify the means.
The Early: When you leave Congress next year, it will be the first time in more than four decades that a Levin hasn't represented Michigan in Congress. Do you think you'll ever run again?
Levin: I have no idea. I'm so incredibly proud of my dad, [former Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.),] and my uncle, [the late Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.),] and their public service. But we are not a family that believes in any kind of machine or that kind of thing. So I don't consider it a big deal that there won't be a Levin in Congress for the first time since January of 1979.
Choppy waters: “The White House summoned China’s ambassador on Thursday to condemn Beijing’s escalating actions against Taiwan and reiterate that the United States does not want a crisis in the region, after a visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island sharply escalated tensions in the Taiwan strait this week,” our colleague Yasmeen Abutaleb reports.
“After China’s actions overnight, we summoned [People’s Republic of China] Ambassador Qin Gang to the White House to démarche him about the PRC’s provocative actions,” White House spokesman John Kirby said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. “We condemned the PRC’s military actions, which are irresponsible and at odds with our long-standing goal of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
“The meeting, which has not been previously reported, was between Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to Biden and coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, and Qin.”
Meanwhile, Pelosi vowed that China would not succeed in isolating Taiwan, following China’s show of force against Taiwan which included firing missiles into the sea — five of which landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, per our colleagues Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Christian Shepherd and Lily Kuo.
The White House and its allies have dismissed Republicans talk of “Biden recession” by arguing that the economy is creating too many jobs and the unemployment rate is too low for the economy to be in recession. The argument will be tested this morning when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its estimates of how many jobs the economy gained — or lost — in July.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sought to manage expectations on Thursday in the briefing.
While the U.S. added 372,000 jobs in June, “we're expecting to be closer to 150,000 jobs per month” in July as the economy transitions to a slower but more sustainable rate of growth, Jean-Pierre said. “And so that would actually be a sign of a success of this transition.”
Controversial federal court changes debated in Manchin negotiations. By The Post’s Rachel Weiner (pub. 6 a.m.).
Republicans Begin Adjusting to a Fierce Abortion Backlash. By The New York Times' Jonathan Weisman and Katie Glueck.
Ogles wins closely watched GOP primary for U.S. House in Tennessee. By The Post’s David Weigel.
Kari Lake wins GOP primary for Arizona governor. By The Post’s Amy B Wang and Eugene Scott.
World News: A love story, forged in Myanmar’s political strife, ends in execution. By The Post’s Rebecca Tan and Aung Naing Soe.
After Supreme Court ruling, it’s open season on US gun laws. By AP News’s Lindsay Whitehurst and Alanna Durkin Richer.
Brittney Griner ‘won over’ Russian prison guards and inmates, and they reassured the WNBA star as she finished her trial. By Insider’s Rebecca Cohen and Meredith Cash.
How Alex Jones turned conspiracy theories into a lucrative business. By the New York Times’s Elizabeth Williamson and Emily Steel. | 2022-08-05T11:49:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats say prized piece of agenda is a go with Sinema's support - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/democrats-say-prized-piece-agenda-is-go-with-sinema-support/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/democrats-say-prized-piece-agenda-is-go-with-sinema-support/ |
Angels match MLB mark with seven solo homers — and still find a way to lose
Even the historic feats of Shohei Ohtani, who had two of the Angels' seven solo homers Thursday, haven't prevented the Angels from skidding toward the bottom of the American League. (John McCoy/Getty Images)
With a 44-61 record despite the best efforts of reigning AL MVP Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, the Los Angeles Angels have found plenty of ways this season to squander a prodigious performance. However, on Thursday the team managed to unearth a new method of inflicting a mind-boggling defeat on its beleaguered fan base.
In a home game against the even-more dismal Oakland Athletics, the Angels hit a whopping seven solo home runs — and, yes, lost.
Somehow, none of the seven homers came with anyone on base. Of course, that still amounted to seven runs, which is usually enough to win a major league game. Not on Thursday, however, and not with this unfortunate lot. The final score was 8-7 in favor of Oakland.
“I guess they always say solo home runs don’t beat you, but you feel like if you hit seven, you might. It didn’t work out for us,” said Angels interim manager Phil Nevin.
According to ESPN, the Angels tied an MLB single-game record with their seven solo homers. They also tied a record with seven dingers in a loss.
MLB teams with at least that many homers in a game were 113-5 in those contests before Thursday. Now the Angels have lowered that winning percentage in ignominious fashion. And while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and fire up some “ 'Tungsten Arm’ O’Doyle” references.
That reference, of course, is to the fictional star for the equally fictional Akron Groomsmen whose feats on the diamond had gone unmatched until Ohtani came along, as immortalized in a 2021 tweet that continues to go viral on occasions such as Thursday’s loss. The tweet was dreamed up not by an Angels fan but a Toronto Blue Jays supporter, one who couldn’t help but notice the Southern California franchise’s penchant for wasting the extremely good work of Trout and Ohtani.
While Trout has been sidelined since mid-July with a back ailment uncommon for a baseball player — “My career isn’t over,” he declared recently, in comments that were probably a bit more ominous than he meant them to be — Ohtani again did his part Thursday by hitting two of the Angels’ seven homers.
The Japanese superstar now has 24 on the season to go with 64 RBI and an .859 on-base-plus-slugging percentage that ranks 15th in MLB. Then there are his exploits on the mound, which include a sterling 2.83 ERA and the highest strikeouts-per-nine-innings rate (13.0) of any qualified pitcher.
In other words, Ohtani is making a strong case for a second consecutive American League MVP award. Trout, a three-time AL MVP, racked up 24 home runs and a .967 OPS before landing on the injured list.
Riding that star power and some solid supporting work, the Angels even got off to a 24-13 start and were in first place in the AL in mid-May. Since then, they are 20-48 and mingling among the AL cellar-dwellers. Along the way, manager Joe Maddon was fired, and on Tuesday Los Angeles took advantage of the MLB trade deadline to send a few players off to contending teams.
The Angels haven’t finished with a winning record since 2015, and they haven’t made the playoffs since 2014. They haven’t won a postseason game since 2009, the same year Los Angeles drafted Trout.
The 30-year-old center fielder is widely hailed as the best player of his era, and one of the greatest ever. Ohtani came aboard in 2018, and all he has done is draw comparisons to Babe Ruth. You know, the real-life baseball superhero of yesteryear, not the sardonic creation of one of the innumerable baseball fans flummoxed at the Angels’ ability to make history while drifting ever further into irrelevance.
This rates a 9.3 on the Tungsten Arm O'Doyle Scale https://t.co/Khuz8vYBvw
— Trent Reznor Ramon (@fuzzybritches) August 4, 2022
Among other factoids that emerged from Thursday’s display of squandered power, it marked the first time since at least 1900 (per mlb.com) that a major league team hit seven solo home runs to account for all its runs.
As a number of online observers were moved to point out, you can’t make this [expletive] up. | 2022-08-05T11:49:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Angels tied an MLB record with seven solo home runs and still lost - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/angels-seven-solo-homers-loss/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/angels-seven-solo-homers-loss/ |
Handguns are displayed at Coastal Trading and Pawn in Auburn, Maine. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)
TORONTO — The Canadian government is planning to ban the import of handguns into the country, according to a government official, the latest in a series of gun-control measures to be implemented under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The move, which is to be announced Friday, comes after the government introduced a bill in May that would implement a “national freeze” on buying, importing, selling and transferring handguns — effectively capping the number of such weapons already in the country at the current level, but not banning them outright.
The new measure will allow Ottawa to ban handgun imports without having to wait for Parliament, which is on a summer break until September, to pass that legislation. It’s expected to come into effect in two weeks, the official said, shortening the window for gun stores to amass merchandise.
Local media have reported that handgun sales have skyrocketed since Trudeau’s government announced the freeze, prompting some lawmakers to express concern about a run on handguns from legal gun owners looking to stock up before the legislation passed.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly are scheduled to make an announcement “on the government’s ongoing efforts to keep our communities safe from gun violence” at a Catholic school in Etobicoke, Ontario, at 10:30 a.m. Friday.
Canada vows to ‘freeze’ handgun sales, buy back assault-style weapons
“The biggest problem we have in the city is the volume of guns coming across border,” Chief James Ramer said.
The government legislation, known as C-21, also includes “red flag” laws that would allow judges to temporarily remove firearms from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, the removal of gun licenses from people who have committed domestic violence and stiffer penalties for gun smuggling and trafficking.
Canada imported more than $28.2 million in revolvers and pistols in 2021, according to government data, with two-thirds of that volume coming from the United States. Total imports were up 7.7 percent from the previous year, but down from a recent peak of $34.7 million in 2018.
Canadian trauma surgeons called for gun control. Gun groups had an NRA-style response.
The government statistics agency reported that more than 60 percent of gun-related violent crime in urban centers in 2020 involved handguns. But it also said there were “many gaps” and limitations in the data, including on the “source of firearms used in crime” and “whether a gun used in crime was stolen, illegally purchased or smuggled into the country.” No province requires investigators to send guns used in crimes for tracing.
Canada announces immediate ban on ‘military-grade’ assault weapons
In 2020, Trudeau announced a ban on 1,500 makes and models of “military-style assault weapons,” after a gunman posing as a police officer rampaged across Nova Scotia over two weekend days, setting structures ablaze and killing 22 people including a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer in Canada’s deadliest mass shooting.
Gabriel Wortman, a denturist, did not possess a firearms license and obtained his weapons illegally. The commission heard that there were “two, and potentially three,” instances in which police received information about his access to firearms. Little, if anything, was done, according to testimony.
Gunman rampages across Nova Scotia in Canada's deadliest mass shooting
Several of the weapons were traced and sourced to gun stores in Maine. A friend there told police that Wortman took one or more of the guns without his knowledge or permission, while he gave the shooter a Ruger P89 “as a sign of gratitude” for his help with “tree removals and other odd jobs at his residence.” | 2022-08-05T12:49:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Canada to ban import of handguns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/canada-handgun-import-ban/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/canada-handgun-import-ban/ |
Man found unconscious and not breathing in Potomac River after search
First responders search the Potomac River near Thompson’s Boathouse on Friday for someone “possibly missing” from a boat. (Maria Sacchetti/The Washington Post)
D.C. police say they pulled a man from the Potomac River who was unconscious and not breathing Friday morning after a search by emergency responders for someone spotted trying to swim to a loose boat.
Shortly after 5:30 a.m. Friday, D.C. fire authorities wrote on Twitter that they were conducting a rescue operation to search for a person “possibly missing” from a boat in the river. They later wrote that witnesses had reported “seeing someone trying to swim to a loose skiff” and the person was “not seen again.”
Authorities said that the Arlington Fire Department aided in the search.
A little after 7 a.m., the D.C. fire department wrote on Twitter that the incident had “transitioned from a rescue to a recovery operation.”
A D.C. police spokesperson said authorities had pulled a man from the water who was unconscious and not breathing. | 2022-08-05T12:58:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man found unconscious and not breathing in Potomac River after search - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/potomac-river-recovery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/potomac-river-recovery/ |
Two of those hospitalized with life-threatening injuries Thursday evening after an apparent lightning strike in Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, have died, a D.C. police spokesman said Friday.
Four people — two men and two women — were critically hurt in the strike just before 7 p.m. in the center of the park, in a grove of trees about 100 feet southeast of the statue of Andrew Jackson, fire department spokesman Vito Maggiolo said at a news briefing Thursday night. The U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Park Police rendered aid to the victims, which fire officials credited to the ability of the victims to initially survive.
Police identified those who died as Donna Mueller, 75, and James Mueller, 76, of Wisconsin. The other two victims remain in critical condition, police said.
Clarence Williams, Emily Davies and Jason Samenow contributed to this report. | 2022-08-05T13:11:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two hurt after lightning strike near White House have died, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/two-dead-white-house-lightning/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/two-dead-white-house-lightning/ |
Employers added 528,000 jobs in July more than doubling expectations
The labor market has been a pillar of strength for an economy dealing with surging inflation
Jayln Martin and Dan Villegas stock items for a holiday sale in November 2019 at a Walmart in Las Vegas. (John Locher/AP)
While employment in leisure and hospitality led July gains with 96,000 jobs added, huge pick ups were seen across a broad spectrum of categories. Professional and business services had 89,000 jobs added, with gains in architectural and engineering services, technical consulting, and scientific research and development. Health care picked up 70,000 jobs, primarily in health care services and hospitals and nursing facilities. Jobs also grew in government, construction, manufacturing and even mining.
“This is a job market that just won’t quit," said Becky Frankiewicz, president of the ManpowerGroup North America. “The economic indicators are signaling caution, yet American employers are signaling confidence. The economy is in a tug-of-war between risk and resilience. The empowered worker is still calling the shots.”
The July jobs report showed little signs of cooling off, proving to be a pillar of strength for an economy facing strong head winds. Other indicators, especially inflation at 40-year highs and six months of negative economic growth paint a less rosy picture. The financial markets have lost trillions of dollars in value this year, and one measure of consumer sentiment hit a record low in June.
Economists have worried that as the Fed continues to raise rates, and borrowing becomes more expensive for households and companies, workers may have less leverage in the job market than they did earlier this year. Also, economists have feared that higher interest rates could lead to a wave layoffs.
But it’s hard to have a recession with such stellar job growth.
The number of Americans quitting their jobs remains high, although lower than its peak earlier this year. A record number of workers quit their jobs over the past year, in a phenomenon known as the Great Resignation, as a hot labor market spurred by the pandemic afforded workers increased leverage to demand higher wages and better conditions, particularly in the leisure and hospitality sectors. While data suggests that this trend is also softening, the quits rate remains at a 20-year high.
The number of layoffs reported in June remained constant, despite growing media reports of job losses in the tech, advertising and health-care sectors. In June, the information sector, which includes tech, saw its layoff rate jump from 0.9 percent to 1.3 percent. Netflix, MasterClass and Coinbase cut hundreds of employees in June. Most employers, though, appear to be holding on to their workers. Plus, workers who lose their jobs appear to be finding new positions quickly.
“There’s no doubt that some employers have just come off of a time when labor markets were unusually tight, so they may be reluctant to lay people off as they would have before this period of labor shortages,” Groshen said.
“It’s a real struggle to make ends meet at all,” Tucker said. “When gas is $5 a gallon, it’s really hard to drive to job interviews because I can’t afford gas. It seems extremely unfair to have all this experience and my degree and get to this point where I’m struggling day to day.” | 2022-08-05T13:19:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Employers added 528,000 jobs in July, as the hot labor market powers on - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/jobs-report-july-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/jobs-report-july-2022/ |
Millennials Should Use Those Roth IRAs to Invest for College
Analysis by Erin Lowry | Bloomberg
Back to school. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
If there’s one thing the impending back-to-school season makes clear, it’s that the cost of higher education in the US is nerve-racking. The average tuition and fees for the 2021 to 2022 school year is $10,338 at an in-state public college, $22,698 at an out-of-state and $38,185 at a private school, according to US News data.
Based on how much costs are increasing each year, though, Millennials can expect to see far larger bills by the time their kids get to college. How does one possibly prepare for a child to go to university while also securing one’s own financial future?
The most common answer is by using a 529 College Savings Plan. But for some families, I’d argue that the Roth IRA — yes, the retirement account — offers a more flexible way to build up your kid’s higher education fund.
In a 529 plan, contributions grow tax-deferred and withdrawals are tax-free so long as they’re put toward qualified educational expenses (including for K-12). Although there are no income restrictions and no annual contribution limits, there are lifetime contribution maximums. Family members can also contribute to a 529 plan that you set up for your child.
The issue with 529s is that they can be restrictive. And it’s ultimately hard to predict your child’s future.
Should they not attend college or another qualifying institution — such as a trade or technical school — and you withdraw the 529 funds for a non-educational expense, they will be subject to taxes and a potential 10% penalty. While there are options in case the original beneficiary isn’t college-bound, you really have to be diligent about the eligibility rules when using the money. The plans also can come with higher fees and fewer investment choices compared to other investment strategies.
This is where the Roth IRA comes in. These are funded with post-tax dollars, so your future self, at 59.5 and older, can withdraw both contributions and earnings tax-free. Depending on current and predicted tax brackets, this can be a huge advantage, especially for younger people investing for retirement.
What many don’t consider is that these accounts can also be leveraged to invest for non-retirement goals in a tax-advantaged way.
If you’ve had your Roth IRA for at least five years, you are eligible to withdraw contributions at any time without paying a penalty — and you can use these funds as you wish. (Note: This only applies to the post-tax contributions you made and not the earnings on those contributions. An early withdrawal of the latter can trigger a tax penalty.)
Millennials setting money aside for their children’s college fund should consider the Roth IRA as one vehicle for doing so — but if, and only if, it is a supplemental retirement savings account. Meaning, you also have a 401(k) or another retirement fund that you’re investing in for your own future. You do not want to tap your future nest egg to pay for schooling (there are loans for that).
Roth IRAs are subject to income phaseouts, which can make it more accessible to younger Millennials and older Gen Z who are not in their peak earning years yet. It also means paying taxes on income while you’re in a lower tax bracket, which is probably less that what you’d pay in retirement.
Married parents with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $204,000 or less — and who file taxes jointly – can each contribute up to $6,000 a year to a Roth IRA. Those 50 and older can contribute $7,000. Single parents with an AGI of $129,000 or less can contribute the same amounts. Those earning more than these thresholds can contribute a reduced amount unless you earn more than $214,000 as married, joint filers or more than $144,000 as a single filer, in which case you are ineligible for a Roth IRA. (Many looking to get around these restrictions opt for a backdoor Roth IRA.)
Maxing out just one Roth IRA with $6,000 annually, starting the year a child is born, would result in $108,000 of contributions by the time a child is 18-years-old. Considering that each parent can have an IRA, you could have double that. (And you can start contributing to the account even before a child is born.)
The Roth IRA loophole allows you to withdraw these contributions any time, after five years, without a tax penalty. The earnings on your contributions, meanwhile, can stay invested and grow for your use in retirement. If necessary, you may be able to withdraw earnings penalty-free for education expenses, but you’d still need to pay income tax if you’re under 59.5. If you’re over this age when your child goes to college, then you can withdraw both contributions and earnings without paying income tax or penalties.
Keep in mind that this does not equally apply to a Roth 401(k). Despite having a similar tax treatment as a Roth IRA, you do not have the same level of flexibility with contribution withdrawals.
There is also one big catch: A Roth IRA withdrawal will impact your child’s financial-aid options for school. Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) will count withdrawals from a retirement account as income. Assets in retirement savings don’t count against FAFSA, but withdrawals do. That means your income for that year will look higher on paper, even if all those funds are paying for your child’s college education, and this could impact how much student aid your child can receive.
If your child will be heavily relying on federal student loans to pay for the majority of college tuition, then you should do the math on how much a retirement withdrawal will impact their access to loans. Another option is to wait until their junior or senior years before taking the withdrawals. FAFSA decisions are often made using the tax income from two years prior. Students apply for aid in the 2022 – 2023 school year are asked to use their parents’ 2020 tax return.
Whether you pick a 529, a Roth IRA or a mix to prepare for the cost of college, make sure you do not deprioritize your future needs in the process. You don’t have to rob yourself of a comfortable retirement in the name of sending your child to school.
Erin Lowry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering personal finance. She is the author of the three-part “Broke Millennial” series. | 2022-08-05T13:19:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Millennials Should Use Those Roth IRAs to Invest for College - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/millennials-should-use-those-roth-iras-to-invest-forcollege/2022/08/05/f35aa8a4-14b6-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/millennials-should-use-those-roth-iras-to-invest-forcollege/2022/08/05/f35aa8a4-14b6-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
By Luis Andres Henao | AP
This July 22, 2019, photo taken from video gives a 360-degree view of Ramadan prayers on the plateau of the Dome of the Rock, which can be seen in The Holy City, a virtual reality experience in the metaverse. (The Holy City VR via AP) (Uncredited/Third Party) | 2022-08-05T13:20:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | From Mecca to the Vatican, exploring sacred sites with VR - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/from-mecca-to-the-vatican-exploring-sacred-sites-with-vr/2022/08/05/cc45c8ea-14be-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/from-mecca-to-the-vatican-exploring-sacred-sites-with-vr/2022/08/05/cc45c8ea-14be-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Climate change makes Appalachian life even harder. So why do we stay?
Eastern Kentucky has long been hostage to greed and poverty, but here we know something about survival, and our complex home
Perspective by Silas House
Silas House is the author of seven novels. His latest, "Lark Ascending," about climate refugees, will be published in September.
Men row along a flooded Wolverine Road in Breathitt County, Ky., on July 28 after heavy rains caused flash flooding and mudslides in parts of central Appalachia. (Ryan C. Hermens/AP)
In the picture, 98-year-old Mae Amburgey sits atop her bed as floodwaters rise on every side, four feet deep in her Letcher County, Ky., home. Her legs are submerged in the cold, muddy water as she watches the flood pour in around her, destroying everything she owns. There is a strange calm about her posture — arms wrapped elegantly about her knees, a strength in her shoulders even in this moment of utter defeat — but her face is shaped by concern and grief. Her granddaughter posted the picture in the hopes that someone seeing it would rescue “Mom Mae” and two other relatives.
Not far away, near the small town of Whitesburg, 17-year-old Chloe Adams had awakened to her family’s home being overtaken by water. She knew that if she didn’t escape she’d drown. Chloe grabbed only her dog, Sandy, and swam out. The teenager hoped to make it to her uncle’s house on higher ground, where the rest of her family was sheltering, but the water was too deep and rough, so she and Sandy waited for five hours on the narrow roof of a shed that was almost completely submerged before she was rescued in a kayak. In a photo that would eventually be seen by multitudes, she looks into the camera with exhaustion, but her determination is intact. Sandy rests securely on Chloe’s aching legs.
As someone from eastern Kentucky whose family lost nearly everything to a flash flood when I was a child, I was rushed back in time to that cold day when my mother and I escaped our house trailer as it was being engulfed by roiling waters. My family was safe this time, but the complex place I love was not; Appalachia was pummeled once again. The Hindman Settlement School, a center for the literary arts, foodways and dyslexia programming where I often teach, saw its offices, archives and many classrooms devastated by the storm that came so fast there was no time to save anything. Participants in a writing workshop there had to flee their dormitories in the middle of the night to seek higher and more stable ground, fearing the rising water and mudslides. Many Appalachian people have had this experience. But now it’s happening much more often. We are all victims of climate change.
Americans’ responses to the images and stories that came out of the devastating flooding of eastern Kentucky in the early-morning hours of July 28 tended to fall into two camps. One group voiced compassion and joined the relief effort by donating their money or their services. The second fired off tweets of derision (“Let’m swim,” one person wrote), negating people they deemed responsible for voting in the obstructionist senators Mitch McConnell, who has blocked climate change measures and mining regulations for decades, and Rand Paul, who has continually criticized and voted against relief bills to help others, including hurricane victims. “These people got what they voted for,” another commented.
So many in the area have lost their homes, their children, their own lives. But we should also care because science shows that someday soon the same thing may happen to many more of us. We can be better people by imagining ourselves in the most desperate situations of others.
We’re already seeing the climate crisis reshaping American lives. According to the U.S. government, heavy rain events have intensified across most of the country; a warmer atmosphere’s ability to hold more moisture has led to an increase in such precipitation. In eastern Kentucky late last month, nine inches of rain fell in 12 hours. A few days before, St. Louis had record downpours. Meanwhile, our two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead in Nevada and Lake Powell in Utah, both on the Arizona border, are heading toward dead pool status — the point when the water level is so low it can’t flow downstream from the dam. Massive forest fires are devouring parts of California, Idaho, Montana and Hawaii. Scientists agree more than ever that we are experiencing extreme weather caused by climate change.
The people most affected will generally be those who live in the poorest regions of the world, which are also the places that have tended to be the richest in natural resources. The Democratic Republic of Congo has abundant minerals such as diamonds, gold and copper, yet its poverty rate is among the highest in the world. Studies show that petroleum-rich areas such as Iraq and Syria often have less democracy. It behooves the corporations that control these lands to keep the people poor and under their thumbs so they can suck the resources dry with the least amount of interference. The poorer the person, the less power they have to fight back or effect legislative change.
This has always been the case in Appalachia, where we are up against huge businesses and the government but also centuries-old stereotypes that were at least partly born to more easily snatch our natural resources.
Often when I am on book tours, people will ask me why I choose to live in Kentucky. They find it hard to fathom why anyone would want to live in a place that films, TV shows and other media have taught them is a cesspool populated only by slack-jawed yokels. This question reveals classism and ignorance of what it means to be poor or working class, or to have an allegiance to place. Eastern Kentuckians stay for the same reasons people went back to their homes after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy or the California infernos.
I have a deep pride in being from Appalachia despite an utter frustration at the way the region votes. You can love a place to your bones and still not completely understand it. We are people who have fought for labor rights and the environment for decades. I’m the grandchild of a coal miner who lost his leg to the mines and years later gave his breath to them as well when he died of black lung, like so many others. We’ve fueled this nation with our timber, coal, gas, soldiers, music, literature and more for two centuries. Some of us stay here because we have no other choice; my family didn’t live in the flood plain because we wanted to but because we were poor.
I had to study awhile to figure out why Mae Amburgey seemed so familiar to me. I realized it was because I had seen that same look on my mother’s face when we escaped the flood all those years ago. Hers is the face of so many who have come before her and who will come after, of all people who have had to fight to survive. I’m haunted by the weariness and determination in the eyes of Chloe Adams. Hers are the eyes of so many children from all over the world who are powerless against others’ greed.
They are my people not only because they are Appalachian, like me, but because they are human beings. They are familiar faces because they are all of us, caught in the clutches of entities that have more rights than we do as individuals, including companies that so often get favors from politicians like McConnell and Paul, neither of whom have even shown up in the devastated place they are meant to represent. (McConnell said he planned to visit the region and Paul said at a Louisville news conference that he would “try to get out there as soon as we can.”) They are ourselves and our children and our grandchildren in the near future; the climate crisis is happening now.
“My heart goes out to all the other people who lost and suffered so much more than I did in this horrific devastation,” Adams said once she and her dog were safe and dry. Despite being nearly 100 years old, Amburgey swam out of that house. She was swept by the churning waters into a nearby bridge, but she then made it to the boat of her rescuers.
Tonight, rain is falling across eastern Kentucky once again. | 2022-08-05T13:20:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Appalachian novelist Silas House on living in his complex region - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/appalachia-eastern-kentucky-silas-flooding/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/appalachia-eastern-kentucky-silas-flooding/ |
In the Berkshires, smaller attractions pack a big punch
By Necee Regis
West Stockbridge, Mass., located in the Berkshires, offers scenic views. (Necee Regis for The Washington Post)
The first day of summer. The first things I do, after turning off the highway onto the rolling back roads of the Berkshires, are crank the car windows open and inhale the perfumed air. No matter that I’m allergic to almost everything: resiny hemlocks, sweet clover, vanilla-scented bedstraw and almondy meadowsweet. The sneezing is worth the heady rush in this bucolic region of Western Massachusetts.
In addition to lush greenery, there are more than 100 cultural attractions throughout the Berkshires, a geographic region that spans the northern and southern borders of the state. Most savvy travelers have heard of Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Mass MoCA, one of the largest contemporary art museums in the United States. But what of the area’s smaller, equally interesting destinations?
On my trip in late June, I set out to explore some venues that could easily — but shouldn’t — be missed. I opted to stay in Lenox for its interesting hotels, shops and restaurants — and because it’s centrally located and would make the ideal home base. It’s one of many towns in the area where the words “quaint” and “picturesque” leap predictably (but accurately) to mind.
Stockbridge, a small Berkshires town with a big artistic reputation
In a region of narrow, winding roads, finding Chesterwood requires navigating the narrowest and most winding. (Thank you, GPS.) The 122-acre property in Stockbridge is the former summer home and studio of Daniel Chester French, a sculptor best known for the “Minute Man” in Concord, Mass., and the seated Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, which is celebrating its centennial year in D.C. Chesterwood’s historic home will be closed until next year for extensive renovations, but visitors can peruse informative exhibits at the visitor’s center, tour the formal gardens, stroll woodland trails and enter the studio, designed in 1897 by French’s colleague Henry Bacon, a Beaux-Arts architect whose final project was the Lincoln Memorial.
Stepping into the studio, with its soaring 26-foot-high walls and views of the gardens and Monument Mountain, feels a bit like entering a sacred space. Diffused natural light bathes plaster models that span the artist’s career, including poignant studies of his wife’s, his daughter’s and his own hands, as well as the final seven-foot-high plaster of the seated Lincoln, whose rugged visage is an inspiration at any scale. An unfinished marble sculpture, Andromeda, lies supine, as if waiting for the artist’s return.
About a mile down the road, stone pillars mark the entrance to the sprawling campus of the Norman Rockwell Museum, home to the world’s largest collection of Rockwell’s art. The museum collaborated with Chesterwood to produce “The Lincoln Memorial Centennial Exhibition: The Lincoln Memorial Illustrated,” on view through Sept. 5. Inhabiting two of the museum’s galleries, the exhibit focuses on the work of contemporary and historical illustrators, cartoonists and artists who have used the monument as a symbolic element in their work, complemented by archival photographs, sculptural elements and artifacts. Rockwell’s illustrations and paintings of the 16th president are in the mix; indeed, no other national figure appears in his work more frequently than Lincoln, whom he publicly called “the greatest American.” Allow time to visit additional changing exhibitions and Rockwell’s studio, tours of which need to be booked in advance.
From the museum, it’s a quick drive to West Stockbridge, an area often overshadowed by its larger neighbor, Stockbridge. What this community lacks in size it more than compensates for with its one-of-a-kind offerings. Two of the main streets in town are populated by mom-and-pop shops selling antiques, fine art, Shaker furniture and books. The Hotchkiss Mobiles Gallery is full of colorful sculptures — created in the sprawling adjacent studio — hanging amid pottery, glass, jewelry and other crafts.
On Center Street, Charles H. Baldwin & Sons has been manufacturing pure vanilla and other fine extracts since 1888, following the same recipes as the founders — using only Madagascar beans — and the same copper percolator and aging barrels. Visitors are apt to find ebullient owner Jackie Moffatt, whose husband’s great-great-grandfather founded the shop, overseeing the space crammed with baking ingredients, old-fashioned toys, candles and retro gifts.
For food, the Public Market serves specialty hot and cold sandwiches to go, or stop by No. Six Depot for hand-roasted, small-batch coffees; tea; smoothies; and sweet and savory snacks. The Truc Orient Express Restaurant, owned and operated by the Nguyen family for 44 years, serves authentic, traditional Vietnamese food for takeout, including the hands-on locals’ favorite, “Happy Pancake,” a rice-flour crepe stuffed with vegetables and your choice of shrimp, pork and chicken.
In Massachusetts, a seacoast city that feels like home
The nearby TurnPark Art Space, created by Igor Gomberg, a Ukrainian immigrant, and Katya Brezgunova, a Russian immigrant, showcases contemporary architecture and sculpture on the 16-acre site of a former marble and lime quarry. The landscape of hills, woods, meadows and lake is designed to be a place of exploration for adults and children. Indeed, there’s an “Alice in Wonderland” feeling to walking its paths and discovering fantastical art — a colorful, glazed ceramic village sprouting in the underbrush; a life-size golden figure floating in the quarry — in unexpected places. Other works pack an emotional punch, such as photographs by Gomberg’s son, Dmitry, of Ukrainian refugees (displayed inside Shami Shinogi’s “Eyeball,” a round structure made of wood and sticks) and Victor Melamed’s “Collateral Damage,” which documents victims of the current war with portraits and stories printed on fabric that flutters in the trees.
About 25 miles east, the area around the tiny town of Becket seems even more rural than the rest of the region, making it an unlikely candidate to host a preeminent dance festival each year. Yet it does just that. After turning off Jacob’s Ladder Road and taking a long, bumpy drive along George Carter Road, I arrived at Jacob’s Pillow, a dance center, school and performance space that is celebrating its 90th-anniversary season this summer. Set on 220 acres of towering forest and resting on the traditional lands of the Agawam, Nipmuc, Pocumtuc and Mohican tribes, the rustic venue (affectionately called “the Pillow”) feels like a step back in time.
Aware of the pedigree of the dancers past and present who have performed here — including Alvin Ailey, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Twyla Tharp, Ronald K. Brown and Kyle Abraham — I was expecting a manicured campus with steel-and-glass architecture. What I found instead was a charming collection of weathered barns, sheds, dirt paths with lights strung between trees, and wood posts with signage directing visitors to performance venues, including the newly expanded and renovated Ted Shawn Theater, named after the dancer and impresario who purchased the land and subsequently founded what would become the festival in 1933.
For a sublime dance experience, nothing beats settling onto benches in a forest and watching a performance at the Henry J. Leir Stage. With its stunning backdrop of mountains and trees rustled by perfumed breezes, it perhaps best embodies the merging of pastoral wilderness and the creative spirit found in the Berkshires.
Regis is a writer based in Wellfleet, Mass. Her website is necee.com.
The Whitlock
16 Church St., Lenox
thewhitlocklenox.com
Located in the heart of town, this former 18th-century farmhouse is a newly rehabbed boutique inn offering 30 rooms with non-fussy, modern interiors, and dining inside or alfresco. Rates from $167 per night.
Wheatleigh
11 Hawthorne Rd., Lenox
wheatleigh.com
The Italianate-style Gilded Age mansion, set on 22 acres of lush parkland landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, is a Forbes five-star hotel with high ceilings, museum-quality art and antiques, fine dining and an outdoor heated pool. Seasonal rates from about $700 per night in low season and from about $800 in high season, which is Memorial Day through October.
The Portico by Jeffrey Thompson
wheatleigh.com/restaurant/theportico
Set in a glass-enclosed Italianate portico at Wheatleigh, this eight-table restaurant serves multicourse menus crafted by chef Jeffrey Thompson. Modern French gastronomic offerings include sea trout, foie gras, lamb and Pointy Snout osetra caviar. Reservations required. Open Thursday to Sunday, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.; closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Four-course prix fixe dinner, $135 per person; six-course tasting menu, $185 per person.
8 Main St., West Stockbridge
weststockbridgepublicmarket.com
Locally owned, go-to spot for build-your-own and specialty sandwiches, hot dogs and pulled pork on buns; available daily for takeout. Snag a seat at the outdoor picnic table or pack for a picnic. Sandwiches from $4.99.
Truc Orient Express Restaurant
3 Harris St., West Stockbridge
facebook.com/trucrestaurant
Family-owned Vietnamese restaurant offering spring rolls, BBQ pork on rice noodles, five-spice whole Cornish hen and its signature “Happy Pancake.” Vegan options available. Order ahead and dine on the outdoor deck or take it to go. Dinner Friday through Sunday, 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Entrees from $20.
The Pillow Cafe
358 George Carter Rd., Becket
jacobspillow.org/pillow-dining
Full-service dining and cocktails in a tent on the grounds of Jacob’s Pillow. Two- or three-course prix fixe menus, with selections such as corn chowder, a miso salmon bowl and steak frites. Reservations required. Open Wednesday to Saturday, 4 to 9 p.m. for dinner, and Saturday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. for brunch. Prix fixe two-course dinner, $50 per person; three-course dinner, $65 per person. Brunch items from $12.50.
bit.ly/ophelias-restaurant
This restaurant and bar at the Whitlock inn serves healthy breakfast offerings and tasty entrees. Open Wednesday and Thursday, 5 to 9 p.m., for drinks only at the bar; Saturday and Sunday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. for brunch; Friday to Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m. for dinner. Cocktails from $12, brunch mains from $13 and dinner mains from $19.
4 Williamsville Rd., Stockbridge
chesterwood.org
The site of the former summer home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French, who created the seated Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial. Open Thursday to Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., through Oct. 24. Guided tours available. General admission: $20 per adult, $18 seniors, $15 military, $10 college students and young adults, and those under 13 are free.
9 Glendale Rd./Route 183, Stockbridge
nrm.org
A 36-acre campus with museum and studio of painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, presenting the world’s largest collection of the artist’s work in changing exhibits. Open Thursday to Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. General museum admission: $20 per adult, $18 seniors and retired military, $10 college students, and free for active-duty military, front-line medical workers and more. (Check website for details.) Add-on studio tours available for an additional $5 per person.
Charles H. Baldwin & Sons
1 Center St., West Stockbridge
baldwinextracts.com
Makers of pure vanilla and other extracts since 1888. This is the place to stock up on baking ingredients, retro toys, candles, greeting cards and sundries. Call for hours.
TurnPark Art Space
2 Moscow Rd., West Stockbridge
turnpark.com
Outdoor sculpture park in 16-acre former marble and lime quarry founded by Igor Gomberg and Katya Brezgunova. Includes small indoor gallery and gift shop. Open Wednesday to Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Entry is $10 per person, and those under 12 are free.
Jacob’s Pillow
jacobspillow.org
A 220-acre National Historic Landmark and summer attraction for dance with performance venues. It’s also a school showcasing world-premiere performances, workshops, exhibits and community events. Season ends Aug. 28. Ticket prices vary.
visitma.com
Potential travelers should take local and national public health directives regarding the pandemic into consideration before planning any trips. Travel health notice information can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s interactive map showing travel recommendations by destination and the CDC’s travel health notice webpage | 2022-08-05T13:20:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Off the beaten path in the Berkshires - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/05/massachusetts-berkshires-attractions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/05/massachusetts-berkshires-attractions/ |
Ferry tales in the Pacific Northwest
By Liza Weisstuch
A ferry leaves the dock at Friday Harbor, San Juan Island’s main town. (Photos by Liza Weisstuch for The Washington Post)
It was about 2 p.m. Pacific standard time, but I was still on East Coast time, so I ordered a beer at the bar at Friday Harbor House, an elegant but informal hotel overlooking a marina on San Juan Island. Two women beside me were having coffee, and one turned to me and asked, “Do you want to see whales?” She grabbed a big camera bag and motioned me to come with her.
She seemed trustworthy, so I ditched my beer and followed her to her car. As we sped down an open rural road, her phone kept dinging. She was getting alerts from a local Facebook group: There had been a spotting. We pulled into a parking lot and stepped over craggy rocks toward the water.
“There he is!” shouted Sara Hysong-Shimazu, my ad hoc guide, pointing at Stanley, a Bigg’s killer whale that she identified by his dorsal fin and saddle patch (the gray-and-white pattern on his back). She’s a naturalist, photographer and captain with Maya’s Legacy Whale Watching. She told me that Stanley travels with his mom and two younger sisters. “It’s a really cool family.”
More people arrived with tripods and binoculars. Orcas are as integral to the lifestyle on the San Juan Islands as vineyards are in Bordeaux, France.
San Juan Island is the second-largest and the most populated of the San Juan Islands. (A ferry deckhand compared the nomenclature to that of Hawaii: Hawaii is one of the Hawaiian Islands.) It was my third stop on a five-day journey I took this spring through the Puget Sound and beyond by public transportation, a trip compelled by my obsession with ferry travel.
Why ferries? Despite the assorted nuisances of airports, it’s hard to deny that flying is a marvelous mode of transport. Driving across the country is a luxury if you have the time. But still, whether land or sky, you’re enclosed. On the water, every sense is activated, and you can take it all in at a comparatively easy pace.
Washington state’s ferry system, the world’s second-largest, is part of the Washington State Department of Transportation. It dates to 1951, when the state took over operations from the Puget Sound Navigation Co., one of the surviving companies from the early days of Puget Sound’s privately owned mosquito fleet. Its 21 auto-carrying vessels convey about 23.4 million customers, including commuters, tourists and day-trippers, to and from 20 terminals on 10 routes. And a few days of traveling a handful of those routes left me with the impression that I’d journeyed far beyond a single U.S. state.
A local's guide to Seattle, Washington
The islands draw academics who come to Friday Harbor Laboratories, the University of Washington’s marine biology field station, to study. They lure committed enthusiasts and whale-curious tourists like myself who happen to be in the right place at the right moment. They draw the more terrestrially inclined, too, such as Shaun Salamida and his wife, Amy, who moved to San Juan Island and started Madrone Cellars & Cider. It’s in a historic farmhouse, and when I visited the next day, Shaun offered me samples of the exquisite lineup: dry-hopped apple cider, tart marionberry apple cider and tangy, dry perry made with local Asian pears.
My trip started in Seattle at the State Hotel, a 1904 building and former gambling hall where the art is local and the bathrobes are long versions of gray hooded sweatshirts. (Very grunge-chic.) At the un-rock-and-roll hour of 7 a.m., I headed to the ferry terminal, a quick walk past vendors at the Pike Place Market, such as the little coffee store that gave rise to Starbucks.
Fellow passengers were mostly day-trippers: a family from Germany with a giggling toddler and disaffected preteen, a trio of college students road-tripping up the West Coast, many retirees. The ferry rumbled about nine miles across the glassy Puget Sound, and approximately 35 minutes later, with the Seattle skyline rendered in miniature behind us, we were deposited at the terminal in the Winslow area of Bainbridge Island. The adorable mid-island space could easily be mistaken for a hamlet in Upstate New York or Western Massachusetts, what with its indie bookstore and Mora Iced Creamery, the shop known for its namesake flavor made with island blackberries. It’s so popular that it gave rise to a chain with locations in three states.
The island measures about 65 square miles, almost three Manhattans. It’s legally referred to as the City of Bainbridge Island, and there are 23 ferry crossings to Seattle each weekday and 22 on weekend days. Pickleball originated here in the 1960s. The city has a posh suburban bedroom community vibe. The urban-expat contingent is strong.
Brendan McGill is one of those expats. He runs two restaurants in Seattle, three in Winslow, all along a single block, and owns a four-acre farm. Lunch at his Café Hitchcock included pastrami on rye, made with his house-dried beef. On this Tuesday afternoon, Brendan had stopped by to drop off the last of the sunchokes and to collect scraps from the kitchen to feed his piglets, who will themselves end up in the kitchen. Ultimately.
“It’s a unique vantage point to be tethered to a top-tier American city, but also drive 10 minutes and get your beautiful organic greens straight from the farmer,” he said of life on Bainbridge. His wife’s grandfather homesteaded here, he told me.
Some of the urban expats are returnees, such as chef Tadao Mitsui, who opened Heyday Farm House on the six-acre Heyday Farm, a property he and his wife bought in May. His meals exploit the bounty of the place with fresh greens, local seafood and drinks from island producers. He was drawn back to the island after cooking for a few years in Seattle. His roots to the region are deeply fastened. When his father, James, was 7 and living in Washington, Tad told me, he was sent to an internment camp. He became a noted poet known for writing about the event.
That history came into sharp relief the next morning at the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, a National Park Service site. The serene pathway, built on an old ferry landing site, curves along cedar panels framed by lush fauna. They’re inscribed with the names of 276 Bainbridge residents of Japanese descent who were rounded up by the U.S. Army, forced onto a ferry to Seattle and taken to concentration camps during World War II. They were one of the first groups of Japanese Americans to be removed, and Bainbridge was one of the few communities to welcome them back after the war.
7 special islands to visit this spring without leaving U.S. territory
Back in Winslow, before boarding the ferry, I stopped for lunch at Agate, a farm-to-table eatery with a muted glamour that feels inspired by Venice Beach. Getting to the next stop, Whidbey Island, required crossing back to Seattle and driving about 25 miles north to the terminal in Mukilteo, a small city on the mainland. There are 40 departures a day to Clinton, the Whidbey terminal. It takes about 20 minutes to cross Puget Sound, and the scenery passes like the greatest hits of the Pacific Northwest: receding views of the small coastal town, sailboats and speedboats dotting the water, far-off mountains, a lone bald eagle soaring past. Approaching Whidbey, the skyscraper-high trees dwarf the luxe waterside vacation homes.
Whidbey’s natural majesty has stirred many. It was the inspiration for David Guterson’s best-selling novel “Snow Falling on Cedars.” Parts of the film were shot here. The roster of celebrity sightings is growing: Grammy winner Macklemore shot a video here, and actor Eddie Redmayne has made appearances. Conan O’Brien showed up in June when a play by his wife, Liza Powel O’Brien, premiered at the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts. Conan was honored by locals who dedicated a garbage can in his name when he visited. Tom Cruise was spotted when he was filming “Top Gun: Maverick” at the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, an active military base.
That night, I parked myself at the bar at the Captain Whidbey Inn, a whimsical, nautical-style inn built on the water in 1907 and recently given a facelift. The main building is all log walls and nautical decor. There’s lots of seating around the original fireplace in the lobby and guests who are happy to chat. I met a local and her companion who now live in Ecuador, as well as a Boeing engineer and his wife, on vacation from the mainland.
Like all of the islands I saw, the landscape has a magnetic pull on people. Whoever loves Whidbey really, really loves it. Scott Price loves it so much that shortly after moving here from Seattle seven years ago, the former tech worker was moved to buy a 16-acre plot of land when he heard it might be developed. He decided to make it a public space and invited artists to create work, leading to the opening of Price Sculpture Forest in 2020. Some pieces, such as a realistic metal eagle about to attack, blend into the landscape and make up a path called Nature Nurtured. More fanciful ones, such as the life-size Tyrannosaurus rex made of driftwood, make up a path he named Whimsy Way.
That, however, could easily be a sobriquet for Deception Pass Bridge. Completed in 1935, it stretches across the water that cuts through Deception Pass State Park, Washington’s most-visited. It connects the Whidbey to Fidalgo islands at a heart-stopping 180-foot height.
I was en route to the ferry terminal in Anacortes, on Fidalgo’s northern end, to make my way back to Seattle. But first, I paused to take in the spine-tingling views from the bridge, knowing that the panoramas on offer on the ferry deck might be even more spectacular.
Weisstuch is a writer based in New York City. Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @livingtheproof.
Captain Whidbey Inn
2072 Captain Whidbey Inn Rd., Coupeville, Whidbey Island
captainwhidbey.com
Located on the Penn Cove waterfront, this recently restored frontier-era-style retreat has been a girls’ school and a general store, among other things. Bucolic yet posh, the inn offers three accommodation options: rustic rooms in the main lodge building; Scandinavian-inspired Lagoon rooms in a newer building; and spacious private cabins. The tavern features seasonal, local fare, including mussels and oysters from the cove. Rooms from $179 per night; cabins from $495.
Friday Harbor House
130 West St., Friday Harbor, San Juan Island
fridayharborhouse.com
Located on a bluff across from the harbor, this stunning hotel is a few minutes’ walk from the center of town and the ferry terminal. The 24 guest rooms blend minimalist Scandinavian design with Pacific Northwest coziness. Sustainable, local seafood and locally grown produce dominate the menu at the restaurant. The bar has craft cocktails, and many guests lounge with them on the Adirondack chairs overlooking the water. Rooms from $400 per night.
500 Winslow Way E., Bainbridge Island
agaterestaurant.com
Contemporary American fare with global leanings (ratatouille, Japanese noodles) define the menu at this light-flooded, modern restaurant that features local ingredients. Highlights include starters such as homemade bread and crudo, and entrees such as the elk burger and Alaskan halibut. Entrees from $24. Open Tuesday to Thursday, 4:30 to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 4:30 to 10 p.m. Closed Monday and Sunday.
Heyday Farm House
4370 Old Mill Rd. NE, Bainbridge
heydayfarm.com/dine
Located on a six-acre farm, this family-owned-and-operated restaurant is a study in field-to-table dining. Starters are salads and soups made with the farm’s bounty. Changing main dishes are arranged by category: land (pork, etc.), sea (salmon, etc.), air (chicken, etc.) and grain (garden veggies with farro and lentils, etc.). The wine list includes collaborations with Kerloo Cellars in Woodinville, Wash. Check website for special events. Open Thursday and Friday, 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Reservations recommended. Mains from $26.
Café Hitchcock
129 Winslow Way E., Bainbridge
cafehitchcock.com/bainbridgeisland
Chef Brendan McGill’s empire’s casual eatery is a cafe by day and restaurant by night. The menu, which changes often, highlights produce grown and livestock raised on his four-acre farm. The cafe shares a building with Seabird, McGill’s new high-end project featuring elegant island-inspired dishes. Open Monday and Tuesday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. to midnight; Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m.; and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mains from $14.
Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial
Pritchard Park, 4192 Eagle Harbor Dr., Bainbridge
bijaema.org
This outdoor memorial at Pritchard Park commemorates the people of Japanese descent who were sent off Bainbridge Island to internment camps in 1942. Designed by local Native American architect Johnpaul Jones, this National Park Service Historic Site features an expansive wall with the names of the residents who became detainees. Memorial open daily, year-round. Guided tours offered Tuesday to Thursday at 10 a.m., noon and 2 p.m. by reservation only. Free.
Island County Historical Museum
908 NW Alexander St., Coupeville, Whidbey
islandhistory.org
The museum, whose collection includes remnants from the last Ice Age, Native American boats and tools, and artifacts depicting pioneer-era family life, chronicles the island’s rich history. Open Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Donations suggested.
Price Sculpture Forest
678 Parker Rd., Coupeville, Whidbey
sculptureforest.org
This sculpture park has two trails: one featuring pieces made largely with natural materials that blend in with the landscape, and another designed with more whimsical and child-friendly works. Open daily, 8 a.m. to sunset or 7 p.m. (whichever is earlier). Free.
visitbainbridgeisland.org
visitsanjuans.com
whidbeycamanoislands.com | 2022-08-05T14:12:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to see the islands of Puget Sound by ferry - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/05/washington-state-ferries-islands-puget-sound/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/05/washington-state-ferries-islands-puget-sound/ |
Images after the tornado show dramatic damage, collapsed homes and shredded walls across an area of the Maryland island that’s home to just over 200 people
Tornado damage on Smith Island, Md. (Tiffanie Woutila)
An unusual and intense tornadic waterspout tore through parts of Smith Island, Md., on Thursday evening, leaving behind significant damage to homes.
Videos show the lofty twister, which developed from a strong, rotating thunderstorm over the Chesapeake Bay, barreling onto an island community in the middle of the bay, surrounded by a spinning plume of water.
There were some minor injuries, though no one was “badly hurt” or killed, said Ewell Fire Department President Robert Jones, according to reporting from Chesapeake Bay Magazine.
Dramatic videos show an apparent waterspout destroying multiple homes and boats on Smith Island, Md., on Aug. 4. (Video: The Washington Post)
But there appears to have been dramatic damage associated with the tornado. Images on social media show collapsed homes and shredded walls across an area that’s home to just over 200 people. Smith Island is made up of three island communities and lies on the border of Maryland and Virginia’s territorial waters about a dozen miles from the mainland.
“We stand ready to assist the local response,” tweeted Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Thursday evening.
The tornado, which affected the community of Rhodes Point at around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, has yet to be officially rated by the National Weather Service. Such a rating requires an in-person survey by forecasters, which is typically conducted within a couple of days of a twister.
The tornado struck with little warning, preceded only by a Special Weather Statement that warned of 45 mph wind gusts. As Smith Island lies near the midpoint of three National Weather Service radar detectors, radar beams intersected the storm at around 8,000 feet above the ground; this was probably too high up to properly detect the type of atmospheric spin that could have warranted a tornado warning.
Waterspouts are often falsely believed to be harmless seaborne spinups, akin to dust devils, that rapidly decompose as they encounter land. Some so-called fair-weather waterspouts, not associated with thunderstorms, do fit this description.
But tornado waterspouts, according to NOAA, “have the same characteristics as a land tornado” despite developing over open water — and can cause substantial damage upon landfall.
Such tornadic waterspouts sometimes accompany hurricanes, and are occasionally experienced along the Gulf Coast, particularly western Florida. Noteworthy twister outbreaks in 1999, 2016, and 2020 all involved extensive damage caused by tornadic waterspouts.
The environment over Maryland on Thursday had ingredients seemingly unfavorable for twister development, with strong instability-atmospheric energy akin to fuel for storms- but very weak wind shear, which helps thunderstorms organize and spin. As a result, forecasters at the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center did not designate a risk area for tornadoes.
Thunderstorms sometimes rotate, and produce twisters, in environments that appear inhospitable to tornado development.
Terrain features such as rivers and hills have been known to increase the amount of atmospheric spin available to storms in hard-to-predict ways, though it is unclear at this time if that is what allowed Thursday’s tornado to develop despite an unfavorable atmosphere.
A GoFundMe effort has been set up to assist in the recovery and clean up. | 2022-08-05T14:20:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Smith Island, Md., hit by damaging tornadic waterspout - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/05/smith-island-tornado-waterspout/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/05/smith-island-tornado-waterspout/ |
Retired D.C. police lieutenant charged in fatal shooting of library officer
The shooting occurred at a training session at a library branch in Southeast Washington
D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III is shown on Aug. 4, 2022, discussing the fatal shooting that afternoon at the Anacostia neighborhood library. (Clarence Williams/TWP)
A retired D.C. police lieutenant has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after a library officer was fatally shot Thursday during a training exercise at a library branch in Southeast Washington, according to a police spokesman.
The spokesman, Dustin Sternbeck, identified the retired lieutenant as Jesse Porter, 58, who left the force in November 2020. He lives in Northeast Washington.
Sternbeck identified the officer who died as Maurica Manyan, 25, of Indian Head, Md., in Prince George’s County.
Porter was being held Friday morning. It could not immediately be determined whether he had an attorney.
Police said the Porter had been contracted by the library to provide training for some of its officers on the use of extendible batons. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III said it was unclear why a live firearm was involved in the training but that “it is not good practice to do that.”
The library police officer, who was shot near the end of the training session, was pronounced dead at a hospital, police said.
“It’s a very tragic situation that we are dealing with here,” Contee said.
The chief said about six people were in the room at the time of the incident, including the trainer, the victim and several other library police officers.
The D.C. Public Library is an independent city agency that has its own police department. Its officers, who are licensed to be armed, are responsible for public safety at library locations, said library system spokesman George Williams.
Thursday at the library was supposed to be a “job readiness” day, where neighborhood residents could stop by for help setting up emails and preparing their résumés. By evening, the library had posted signs on the door saying the building was closed because of an emergency. | 2022-08-05T14:20:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Retired police lieutenant charged with involuntary manslaughter in killing of officer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/shooting-police-library-manslaughter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/shooting-police-library-manslaughter/ |
But Kabul residents praise security forces for quelling attackers during tense Muharram festival
A member of Taliban security monitors a checkpoint in Kabul on Aug. 1. (Stringer/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
KABUL — Rustam Haidery, 22, was watching a TikTok video in his bedroom Wednesday morning when a bullet smashed into the window ledge above his head. Leaping up, he saw uniformed Taliban forces setting up barricades in the street below. From a 12-story apartment building on the next block, he thought he heard someone crying for help.
Soon, heavily armed men were knocking on neighbors’ doors, charging up stairs, and taking up positions on nearby balconies and rooftops. Gunfire was coming from several directions. Haidery and his family decided to flee and soon found themselves in a stream of residents hurrying away from the danger.
“The children were scared, but the police escorted us out of the area until we could find a car,” Haidery said Thursday morning, soon after the family returned home. He recalled hearing as a child that the Taliban extremists, who held power in the late 1990s, were bullies and killers. This time, he said, they seemed different. “They are in charge of the government, and they know they have to protect people.”
The battle raging that day, which would stretch to more than seven hours, was a high-stakes confrontation between Taliban forces and a group of commandos from the Islamic State, a rival Sunni Muslim militia that views Shiites as apostates. It has attacked the mostly Shiite Muslim minority district of West Kabul many times over the past eight years.
The clash also came at a moment of particular tension and vulnerability for the country’s rulers, who were already facing an economic and humanitarian crisis. On Sunday, a U.S. drone strike slammed into a house in a highly secured area of central Kabul, killing al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The stunning attack embarrassed Taliban leaders and threatened to shatter the U.S.-Taliban peace deal in 2020 that had ended two decades of conflict.
Since the Taliban returned to power last August, the Islamic State offshoot group known as Islamic State-Khorasan has increasingly challenged the regime’s ability to provide security. In April, the group bombed a high school and a crowded Sufi shrine in West Kabul, as well as mosques in two other cities, leaving scores dead and wounded. This time it attacked during the Shiite festival of Muharram, a 10-day celebration that Taliban security officials had made extra efforts to secure.
All Wednesday afternoon, as gunfire erupted intermittently in the working-class neighborhood, the drama was hidden from public view as Taliban forces cordoned off the entire West Kabul sector with dozens of roadblocks. But rumors spread quickly that the attackers had commandeered the orange high-rise apartment building, Karte Sakhi Tower, and taken several families hostage, firing at the Taliban forces from inside and preventing them from freely responding.
Finally, just after 6 p.m., Taliban security officials announced that the siege was over. They said at least four Islamic State attackers had been killed and one captured. They also said two Taliban forces had died, including one female officer, but that no civilians had been harmed. They did not explicitly acknowledge that any families had been held hostage but said they had “conducted the operation with precision” to avoid civilian casualties.
“These evil elements were hitting civilian targets in Kabul and other parts of the country,” the statement said. “With the help of God, we managed to eliminate them.”
That evening, ToloNews aired a grainy, long-distance video showing Taliban forces hurling dynamite over a ground-floor wall of the apartment complex, watching the wall explode in a cloud of debris and then hurrying a group of hunched-over civilians away from the site.
The news that the attackers had been thwarted was met with relief across the large West Kabul community, home to several hundred thousand Shiite and ethnic Hazara minority members, where initial activities for Muharram had been abruptly halted. The spate of bombings in April had previously drawn angry protests from Shiite leaders and activists, who mistrusted the Sunni leaders’ commitment to protecting them.
This time, police made extra efforts to secure the community for Muharram, coordinating with local leaders and patrolling the area frequently. In interviews last week, many residents said they felt more confident about their safety than in previous years. Then, word suddenly came Wednesday that a Taliban security team making a safety sweep had come under fire from the high-rise building, just two blocks from the majestic, blue-domed Karte Sakhi shrine that draws thousands of people during the 10-day festival.
By early Thursday morning, though, calm had returned and Muharram festivities were starting up again. Both Shiite and Sunni residents near the shrine praised the Taliban forces, saying they had fought hard to stop the terrorists in their midst. People brought tea and bread to police guarding access to the Karte Sakhi Tower, which was now empty, pocked with bullet holes and surrounded by security tape. Shuttered shops reopened and families trickled back after spending the night with relatives.
“They sacrificed themselves for us, they evacuated all the homes safely and they prevented a big tragedy,” said Mohammad Farhad, 48, a former school administrator who lives one block from the tower. “There was a lot of fear at first, but now people are coming home peacefully.”
A few blocks away, a man putting up a stand to offer free juice and milk, decorated with colorful banners for Muharram, said he was happy that the attackers had been stopped but still worried they would try again next week, during the festival’s final days known as Ashura, when public emotions peak amid penitential parades and dirges booming from loudspeakers.
“The Taliban made good on their promise. Everyone saw that, and everyone feels less scared now,” said Sayed Mansour, 26. “On the other hand, Muharram is not over yet.” | 2022-08-05T14:20:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ISIS targets Afghanistan's Shiite Muslims, roiling Taliban rule - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/afghanistan-isis-taliban-shiites/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/afghanistan-isis-taliban-shiites/ |
By Rick Noack
Baker Sylvie Debellemaniere sweats in the Paris heat. Traditional baguette dough requires special care in hot weather. (Adrienne Surprenant/MYOP for The Washington Post)
PARIS — In normal times, more than nine out of 10 Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. Some people have a choice between two or three on their street. Don’t want to cross the road? Not to worry. In many spots, there’s a boulangerie on either side.
In the city’s 15th arrondissement, what’s usually a five-minute mission required a 15- or, mon Dieu, 20-minute trek in the summer heat this past week — at least for this correspondent, an untrained baguette hunter. Three out of seven neighborhood bakeries were already shuttered, with more planning to close in the coming days.
In Paris, frozen pastries pose as homemade. Here’s how to spot impostors.
“We have rising wheat prices, rising energy prices, and of course rising fuel prices,” he said.
Europeans shocked by ‘heat apocalypse’ as temperature records fall
Paris has also had a summer of extreme heat. When bakers are working with 450-degree ovens and no air conditioning during a heat wave, when they have to race to keep ahead of their melting butter, when they’re trying to avoid soggy baguettes and “stringy bread disease,” it’s not hard to see why they might decide to head for the coast or the mountains.
This week at the Frédéric Comyn bakery, recently awarded for the capital’s best baguette, black shutters were pulled down behind the sign proclaiming: “Official supplier of the Élysée” presidential palace. There was no indication of when the bakery would reopen. (Many French government officials won’t return to the capital before Aug 24.)
A few hundred meters down the road, a competitor had affixed an image of a beach umbrella with dangling stars to the front door. “Happy holidays,” a sign greeted those left behind.
In France, where bread shortages partly prompted the storming of the Bastille and the end of monarchy, bread has occupied a special status as both a national symbol and a tightly-regulated nourishment. To avoid a famine in the capital, or another revolution, the French government decreed in 1798 that the availability of bread had to be guaranteed.
In its most modern form, that decree was reflected in the requirement that half of all Parisian bakers stay open in July, the other half in August, evenly distributed across the capital. Bakers who went on vacation were legally required to put up signs pointing people to the nearest open alternatives. Violators risked fines of 11 euros a day.
Even though the average daily diet of bread has dropped from 800 grams in 1875 to around 80 grams, bakeries remain deeply ingrained in the country’s culture. The TV show “France’s Best Bakery,” in its ninth season, draws millions of viewers. During coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, boulangeries were considered essential businesses, and a trip to the bakery was an approved activity.
But France is also a country with a strong workers’ rights movement and reverence for vacations. And in 2014, as part of a law designed to simplify corporate practices, the government scrapped the on-call requirements for bakers.
Sylvie Debellemaniere, who sells dozens of different artisanal breads, was closing her shop on Friday for the rest of the month. She said it was largely a financial decision. Rising costs had already narrowed her profit margins, forcing her to increase the price for her baguettes from 1.20 to 1.30 euros. And in August, she said, bakeries outside of prime tourist locations can’t count on much of a customer base.
“Many people haven’t been on vacation in two years because of covid,” she said. “Everyone wants to leave. All the customers are fed up with Paris.”
Like most Parisian bakeries, her shop — Boulangerie De Belles Manières — has no air conditioning. She worked there through multiple heat waves this summer, tending to the hot ovens while the temperatures outside soared past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. She found it helped to wear looser clothes, and she tried to drink more water. But she said perhaps the most effective coping mechanism was psychological.
“There’s no point in ruminating all day,” she said. “I tell myself that it’s chilly — and that works.”
The summer heat isn’t just uncomfortable. It can mess with the chemistry of baking.
“Butter is very, very sensitive to heat,” said William Boutin, 37, a pastry instructor at La Cuisine Paris, who had spent the morning teaching students the art of the croissant and still had some flour on his cheeks. French butter can start melting at 82 degrees — far below the temperatures the capital has recently seen.
Heat also impacts dough, accelerating its rise. If the heat speeds up the proofing process too much, breads can lose their desired texture, becoming denser, or they can develop undesirable flavors. Fast-rising dough is trickier to shape, too, Boutin said.
For some pastry-producers and bakeries, this has prompted difficult choices.
“Some of them in Paris decided to not sell — and to not make — viennoiserie” during the heat waves, Boutin said, referring to products like croissants and pains au chocolat. “If you don’t have a good air conditioner, you have to increase the speed of your work.”
Other bakers have hoped that by working harder and faster, they could outsmart the heat. They’ve experimented with reducing the water and yeast in their dough and abbreviating the kneading and resting phases.
They’ve researched how to avoid “stringy bread disease” — a bacterial contamination that’s partly linked to heat waves, and that is characterized by the bread giving “off a sour smell of rotten fruit,” according to a French bakery magazine La Toque, which dedicated a series of articles to the difficult relationship between bread and heat waves.
And still some bakers were disappointed to find that baked loaves sitting in the heat and humidity became too soft by midafternoon.
Farano said adaptation is key.
He doesn’t use butter in his bread, allowing him to escape some of the problems that have hampered colleagues.
His Pane Vivo bakeries produce natural sourdough breads from an ancient wheat variety and have found a growing fan base among Parisians looking for a healthier alternative to the dominant white baguette bread. Some of his breads include Corsican herbs, others are studded with dried figs or dark chocolate.
“Our clients, once they start eating this bread, they can’t go back,” he said, as a steady stream of customers arrived, many of them visibly excited to find the shop open.
Georges Sidéris, 63, said he had little hope when he set off on a mission to find his favorite breads on Thursday. “I told myself: I’ll give it a try, you never know,” he said.
But even in August in Paris, his mission was successful. Sidéris bought a “Livia” with olives and rosemary and a “Figata” with dried figs. He flashed a wide smile while holding his loaves tight. | 2022-08-05T14:21:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | When Paris closes in the heat of August, baguettes are harder to find - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/paris-august-closed-baguette-heat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/paris-august-closed-baguette-heat/ |
An iRobot Braava Jet floor cleaner (top) and Roomba vacuum are displayed at the company's headquarters in Bedford, Mass., in 2016. Amazon has acquired the company in a $1.7 billion all-cash deal, the companies announced Friday. (Charles Krupa/AP)
Amazon will acquire iRobot in a $1.7 billion all-cash deal, the companies announced Friday, expanding the e-commerce giant’s array of consumer robotics and smart home devices.
iRobot is best known for its robotic vacuum Roomba, a $61 a share acquisition that highlights Amazon’s push into the home, linking consumer products through artificial intelligence. From fitness wearables and tablets to streaming devices and its Alexa digital assistant, Amazon has advanced a lineup of devices under an ecosystem that ties consumers more tightly to the company and its services. Last year, it introduced Astro, a $1,000-plus robot meant to ferry around small items and keep its cameras peeled for intruders.
The proposed deal is also a continuation of Amazon’s business strategy to expand market share in different product categories through acquisitions. Ring, the maker of the video door bell and the home security product Blink both merged with Amazon as the company expands its list of gadgets and home-centric offerings.
The next generation of home robots will be more capable — and perhaps more social
The planned deal comes just two weeks after Amazon announced the purchase of primary care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion, in a major expansion of the tech company’s health-care ambitions. One of its largest acquisitions ever, the tie-up will give Amazon a physical network of health-care offices and providers and bolsters the company’s existing health-care portfolio, which includes an online pharmacy and Amazon Care, a virtual and in-home urgent care service.
Shares of iRobot surged nearly 20 percent following the announcement Friday morning.
Amazon’s offer of $61 a share represents a premium of more than 20 percent for iRobot. | 2022-08-05T14:51:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Amazon acquires Roomba-maker iRobot in $1.7 billion deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/amazon-irobot-roomba/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/amazon-irobot-roomba/ |
A pedestrian walks past signage for ethereum and bitcoin in Hong Kong in 2021. Nomad, a so-called crypto bridge, is offering 10 percent bounties to recoup upward of $190 million in tokens seized by hackers, the company announced this week. (Paul Yeung/Bloomberg)
Crypto start-up Nomad is offering 10 percent bounties to retrieve as much as the $190 million in digital currency seized by hackers this week, the company announced in a Twitter post.
Nomad posted the address to its crypto wallet and said anyone who returns at least 90 percent of the stolen funds will be considered a “white hat” — hackers who work with companies to probe their networks, in some cases taking payment in exchange for pointing out security flaws. It also promised not to pursue legal action against these people, while emphasizing its commitment to recoup stolen funds one way or another.
“Nomad is continuing to work with its community, law enforcement and blockchain analysis firms to ensure all funds are returned,” the company wrote.
A vulnerability in Nomad’s code allowed hackers to make off with nearly $190 million worth of tokens. More than $22 million had been recovered as of Friday morning, according to the blockchain analysis platform Etherscan.
Nomad functions as a so-called blockchain bridge, which allows users to swap cryptocurrency from one blockchain to another. The attack was known as a “free-for-all” because the original hacker’s code allowed anyone to copy it, opening the floodgates for anyone to join the fray. | 2022-08-05T14:51:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nomad offers 10 percent bounty in $190 million cryptocurrency hack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/nomad-crypto-bounty/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/05/nomad-crypto-bounty/ |
Researchers say the water, enough to fill 58,000 swimming pools, may temporarily warm the climate and deplete stratospheric ozone.
The GOES-17 satellite captured this image of an umbrella cloud generated by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15. (NOAA/NESDIS)
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption lasted less than a day, but it unleashed the most water vapor into the atmosphere by a volcano on record. Researchers say the blast may temporarily warm surface temperatures in years to come and also deplete stratospheric ozone.
On Jan. 15, the underwater volcano erupted and sent a shock wave that reverberated around the world. The powerful blast ejected aerosols, gas, steam, and ash 36 miles high, likely the highest volcanic plume in satellite records. The blast damaged more than 100 homes and took at least three lives on the island of Tonga. A new study also shows the volcano released an unprecedented amount of water vapor, a strong greenhouse gas that traps heat on Earth.
NASA satellite data show the volcano launched more than 146 teragrams of water — enough to fill 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools — to Earth’s second layer of the atmosphere known as the stratosphere, where the ozone layer is located and just above where airplanes fly. The study stated the amount released is equivalent to 10 percent of the water already in the stratosphere.
“This is the first time that this type of injection happened in the entire satellite era,” which includes water vapor data back to 1995, said Luis Millán, lead study author and atmospheric scientist at NASA. ″We have never seen anything like this before so that was quite impressive.”
Volcanic eruptions eject many different types of gases and particles. Most eruptions, including Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, release particles that cool Earth’s surface by reflecting sunlight back into space, but they typically dissipate after two to three years. Very few, however, blast water vapor so high. This water vapor can linger longer in the atmosphere — 5 to 10 years — and trap heat on Earth’s surface.
Millán speculates that the water vapor could start having a warming effect on the planet’s surface temperature once the accompanying cooling particles dissipate in about three years. He is unsure how much the temperature would increase, as it depends on how the water vapor plume evolves. The team suspects that the increased warming will last for a few years, until circulation patterns in the stratosphere flush the water vapor to the troposphere, the layer where Earth’s weather occurs.
“This is just a temporary warming, and then it will go back to whatever it was supposed to go back to,” said Millán. “It’s not going to exacerbate climate change.”
NASA atmospheric scientist Ryan Kramer added that, given the numerous factors that drive temperature changes on time scales of years, the warming effect from the volcano could also get lost in the noise, depending on its magnitude.
On a shorter time scale, the increased water vapor could also worsen ozone depletion in the stratosphere, said Susan Strahan, an atmospheric chemist with University of Maryland Baltimore County and NASA.
Stratospheric ozone protects the surface of the Earth from damaging ultraviolet radiation. Chemicals which deplete the ozone layer were largely phased out through the 1987 Montreal Protocol and subsequent amendments.
Strahan, who was not involved in the study, explained that the excess water vapor will affect many chemical reactions that control stratospheric ozone concentrations. NASA satellite data in July already shows a decrease in ozone levels compared to previous years in the location where the excess water vapor is most concentrated, but she added a full analysis would need to be conducted to tease out the cause.
“There are probably impacts right now, but what we need [is] a model to tell us is by what mechanism(s) did the impacts occur. Meteorology and chemistry will almost undoubtedly both play roles — the questions are how much, where, when?” Strahan said in an email.
Strahan also said the excess water vapor could enhance the formation of special noctilucent clouds, which appear as shimmering, ghostlike wisps in the night sky. They occur around 50 miles in the atmosphere, higher than the stratosphere, and are some of the rarest, driest and highest clouds on Earth. For many people, the clouds provide remarkable skygazing. However, researchers think any noticeable change in these clouds would not appear until later, depending on how long it takes for the water vapor to travel upward in the atmosphere where the clouds form.
Overall, Millán said the excess water vapor is nothing much to be concerned with on its own, but “something that is just interesting that is happening.” He and his colleagues are taking this opportunity to test their computer models that help us understand climate change and weather forecasting in general.
“We have these massive amounts of water vapor moving in the stratosphere, and we can test how well the models reflect its movements within the atmosphere,” said Millán. “This volcano is going to give plenty of researchers a lot of work.” | 2022-08-05T14:51:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tonga volcano blasted unprecedented amount of water into atmosphere - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/05/volcano-eruption-tonga-record-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/05/volcano-eruption-tonga-record-climate/ |
By Michele Booth Cole
Jordan Barksdale
Activist and #MeToo Movement founder Tarana Burke. (KK Ottesen for The Washington Post)
Michele Booth Cole is executive director of Safe Shores — The DC Children’s Advocacy Center. Ashley Harrell is director of the client advocacy services program of Safe Shores. Jordan Barksdale is teen advocacy services coordinator of Safe Shores.
In 2021, D.C. implemented the Sexual Assault Victims’ Rights Amendment Act of 2019 (SAVRAA), which gives 13- to 17-year-old victims of sexual assault in D.C. the right to an advocate — a trained professional from a community-based organization — to help teen survivors understand their medical, legal and mental health care options as well as support them in whatever choices they make.
For a 15-year-old girl on her way to school one morning last spring, the right to an advocate became real. As cars and buses hummed by on the street, a stranger appeared in the girl’s path, pulled her into an alley and forced her to perform oral sex.
Shaken and scared, the teen, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy, somehow made her way to school and immediately told her school counselor about the assault, which activated the city’s multidisciplinary child abuse investigative response. The counselor reported the teen’s allegation to the police department and to the teen’s parents. The responding Youth and Family Services Division detective put the teen in contact with an advocate from the Teen Advocate Initiative at D.C.’s Children’s Advocacy Center. The advocate arrived at the school within an hour and began the work of helping the teen navigate a complex process amid a physical and emotional crisis.
First, the advocate talked with the teen to find out whether she wanted to move forward with a sexual assault medical exam. Then, she went with the teen to the emergency department of a hospital, sat with her in the exam room and explained in the soft voice of compassion that the nurse would need to collect DNA for legal evidence.
The advocate shared her laptop with the teen to watch a lighthearted Netflix show while waiting to be triaged and examined. By the end of the hours-long hospital visit, the teen’s polite but vacant stare had given way to a shy smile. Her healing journey had begun.
The letter and spirit of the sexual assault victims’ rights law came to life in that case. It was an all-systems-go response, rooted in the needs of the young survivor. Her school had sounded the alarm. Police connected the teen with an advocate. Then, that advocate provided the teen with information, referrals, safety planning and emotional support — all centered on honoring the teen’s voice and encouraging her agency.
This case illustrates the power of SAVRAA to effect meaningful change in how D.C. addresses teen sexual assault. It also shines a light on the unique responsibility and critical role law enforcement and schools have in making sure the system works optimally for young crime victims. Schools have a nonnegotiable duty to protect students and report allegations of abuse and assault timely to law enforcement.
The city’s middle and high schools, in particular, could be natural allies of teens. At a minimum, D.C. schools have a legal and ethical obligation to report reasonable suspicions of abuse and allegations of teen sexual assault promptly to appropriate local authorities rather than attempt to conduct their own investigations. The School Safety Omnibus Amendment Act of 2018 requires all employees and contractors of D.C. schools, including school officials, teachers, coaches, nurses and mental health professionals, to report suspected child abuse and neglect.
So, a logical and urgent next step for D.C. schools, which have daily contact with the majority of District youths, is to educate their students, faculty, staff, parents, caregivers and contractors about preventing sexual violence and about the right teens now have to an advocate and how to access one.
By informing D.C. students of their right to an advocate, schools could play a powerful role in addressing an underlying criminal justice and public health problem that has wide-ranging repercussions: the underreporting of teen sexual assault. Often, teen victims don’t tell anyone about the violence they’ve experienced because of shame, threats by the perpetrator, fear of not being believed and fear of being separated from or rejected by their family, among other reasons. The $380 million USA Gymnastics settlement with more than 500 victims of child sexual abuse as well as the recent conviction Ghislaine Maxwell on charges stemming from teen sexual assault have shown us that.
The underreporting of teen sexual assault means a staggering number of D.C. teens are struggling with the aftermath of sexual assault alone. Yet D.C. has enacted laws to prevent this.
By upholding these two D.C. and proactively protecting students, D.C. schools could make the #MeToo movement a reality for many of the city’s youngest victims and throw open the gates to justice and healing for thousands of young victims of sexual violence.
Tellingly, the #MeToo movement, which has impacted the lives of so many women, is rooted in girls’ experiences with sexual assault. Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, originally uttered the phrase “me too” silently to herself after being unable to respond to a 13-year-old girl who confided to her that she had been sexually assaulted. Burke said she later wished she had simply told the girl: “Me too.”
When more D.C. teen survivors of sexual assault know that respectful, nonjudgmental, compassionate, personalized, ongoing support is available to them right away, wherever they are, in the event of a sexual assault, there could be a huge shift for young victims. That shift would start with an increase in reporting, leading to an increase in teens’ access to medical and mental health services, which would ultimately result in a healthier, safer, more productive D.C.
Another school year is right around the corner, and the time to prioritize student safety is now. We need a D.C. where teen sexual assault is reported as soon as it’s known, and right away teens receive the help they need and deserve. We need a D.C. where every school implements abuse prevention and student protection protocols and codes of conduct that govern how students are treated. We need all D.C. schools to report allegations of child sexual abuse promptly and consistently.
What would happen if students experienced a government and community that worked for and with them to help and protect them? Imagine the shift and its ripple effects. What would happen, indeed? There’s only one way to find out.
To report teen sexual assault in D.C., call D.C.’s Child and Family Services, Agency 202-671-SAFE or the Metropolitan Police Department, 911. To get help after teen sexual assault in D.C., call the DC Victim Hotline, 844-4-HELP-DC (844-443-5732).
D.C. must do better by Black moms | 2022-08-05T14:51:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | D.C. has a new law to help student victims of sexual assault - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/dc-has-new-law-help-student-victims-sexual-assault/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/dc-has-new-law-help-student-victims-sexual-assault/ |
By Timothy Rumage
Aubrey "Mikey" Berryman
Timothy Rumage and Aubrey “Mikey” Berryman are housed at Beaumont Correctional Center in Beaumont, Va.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Christian faith teaches him that whatever he has done to the least of these, he has done unto God. Yet this year, he subjected “the least of these” to an act of abject cruelty, dashing the hopes of thousands of Virginia’s most forgotten by reneging on a promise made two years earlier. That promise would have allowed many incarcerated people in the Department of Corrections to be released just a little bit early, provided they remained on perfect behavior and completed all programming offered to them. But in June, at Youngkin’s urging, this Earned Sentence Credit law (ESC) was largely repealed, two weeks before taking effect.
What made the repeal especially galling was that in April, Youngkin lauded Virginia’s criminal justice agencies for their rehabilitation and reentry services, proclaiming April “Second Chance Month.” Youngkin explicitly acknowledged that the vast majority of us will return to our communities — and return successfully, with the support of the very agencies he praised. Although this was at odds with Republican messaging during the 2021 campaign, it was refreshing and led some to believe he might abandon demagoguery and govern with policies informed by evidence.
ESC is one of those evidence-based policies a second-chances governor should support. Research shows that long sentences are counterproductive, driving mass incarceration by imprisoning people long after they could safely return home. Moreover, Youngkin apparently felt the Department of Corrections was prepared for the new approach, since it claims one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country. And lastly, incentives for rehabilitation simply make sense: Promoting personal development leads to better returning citizens and less recidivism.
By June, however, Youngkin’s tune had changed. Rather than championing second chances, he pivoted to demonizing incarcerated people, as though we weren’t even deserving of a first chance, let alone a second one. He amplified lies shared by legislators. And once the repeal succeeded, he smugly proclaimed it “a good day in Virginia” for “removing violent criminals’ ability to get off early and reoffend.”
The repeal affected all nonviolent sentences being served by people who also had sentences for “violent” crime. Although proponents claimed this would impact only 560 people, that was just those who became eligible for release on July 1. The Department of Corrections has since confirmed that the repeal renders about 8,000 people ineligible for additional credits — about one-third of Virginia’s prison population.
We know prison isn’t intended to be easy, but the governor’s actions involved a cruelty that no one should have to endure.
Tim’s daughter Emma is his pride and joy. Tim believed, based on the Department of Corrections’ detailed reentry planning and letter confirming his release date, that he’d be out in time to see Emma graduate from high school. Nothing would have meant more to him. But now, after the repeal, he won’t be there. Worse, he’ll miss yet another opportunity to support her during a formative period of her life.
As for Emma, she’s heartbroken. She has witnessed her dad become a better man, owning his past, overcoming addiction, learning new professional skills and avoiding the ubiquitous “trouble” on the inside. She trusted the commonwealth when it promised that people such as her dad could earn an early release. Now she doesn’t know what to think. It’s like the loss of his liberty wasn’t punishment enough; they needed to play mind games at the very end, just to make the punishment hurt even worse.
Mikey’s family is similarly devastated. Almost two decades ago, Mikey participated in a terrible plan, but even before it was complete, he felt the weight of his guilt and tried to save the victim’s life. That moral burden was the beginning of his road to redemption. After he was sentenced, he devoted his time in prison to turning his former self into a stranger.
After so many years working on himself simply because it was the right thing to do, the commonwealth promised to acknowledge Mikey’s hard work with an earlier release. Hard time makes you guarded and expect the worst, but Mikey finally allowed himself to treat hope as reality — his second chance was truly on the horizon. Mikey planned to open a graphic design business, start a nonprofit and, most important, reconnect with family. But in June, those dreams again became just that — dreams.
Folks like us and our families aren’t the only ones who will suffer from Youngkin’s decision: Our communities will as well. Think about it — he didn’t keep us in prison forever. He merely delayed our release, by months for some, by years for others. Either way, most are returning home relatively soon. But the incentive for rehabilitation is gone. If someone isn’t self-motivated, what’s in it for them? And if they don’t work on themselves, they’ll be less prepared to parent their children, enter the workforce, get an education, maintain a residence and stay clean — precisely the things that keep returning citizens out of poverty, out of addiction and, ultimately, out of trouble. Returning citizens who’ve reformed themselves ought to be Virginia’s success stories, who teach us redemption is possible. Instead, Youngkin jeopardized public safety by making incarcerated people less prepared to return home.
Youngkin’s faith doesn’t just teach him to care for the forgotten and vulnerable; it also has something to say about keeping one’s word. According to Proverbs 11:3, “The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.” We listened to the governor during his second-chances media tour. We heard him praise rehabilitative services. We trusted him, just as we trusted the legislature in 2020. But we now know the truth — that his words were duplicitous. At the same time he promised us a second chance, he was seeking to deprive us of exactly that. We urge Youngkin and the 70 legislators who joined him to rectify the mistake they made and restore to us the hope they dashed. | 2022-08-05T14:51:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Gov. Youngkin dashed hopes by reneging on his second-chance promise - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/gov-youngkin-dashed-hopes-by-reneging-his-second-chance-promise/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/gov-youngkin-dashed-hopes-by-reneging-his-second-chance-promise/ |
Hello there! Some personal news(letter).
Hello everyone, and happy Friday! I’m thrilled that so many of you have already decided to join me on this newsletter adventure. In our frantic, overloaded digital lives, email inboxes are our front steps. I don’t take for granted that you’re inviting me in.
It’s only natural that I, as a Leo, launch my new Friday newsletter now, the hottest and laziest time of the year. August is the Sunday Funday of the calendar, the month when those who can decamp to pools, beaches, lakes and mountains, knowing it won’t be long till September shows up, pumpkin-spice latte in hand, to order us all back to work.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking so much lately about how our culture views sleep, rest and work. My most recent column was about President Biden testing positive for covid-19, only for the White House to insist — in practically every tweet, social-media post and official statement — that he was working, working, working!
Even in normal times, America is allergic to rest. So it comes as no surprise that our cult of busyness has proved quite resilient in this time of covid. Last Saturday, after Biden once again tested positive, in a “rebound” infection, the White House doubled down, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre appearing to laugh off the suggestion that the president would have been better off taking it easy.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if Biden is working himself too hard by working through COVID, and if that contributed to his relapse.
"I mean, anybody, be it 79 or 46, has to rest when you get this."
"Um, no." pic.twitter.com/0oBwUE3I5u
— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) August 1, 2022
It’s not a laughing matter. It bears repeating that doctors have advised against “pushing through” a case of covid, as doing so could weaken your immune system and make your symptoms worse.
Besides, rest is our birthright as human beings — literally, in fact. Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” Rest is as much a labor rights issue as it is a matter of health.
However, as David L. Richards and Benjamin Carbonetti noted in a 2012 paper in the International Journal of Human Rights, the right to rest is one of the most routinely attacked sections of the declaration. Rest is “not an idle waste of time or a mere absence of, or recovery from, work,” they wrote, “but, rather, necessary for a life of ‘dignity.’” Exploitation and overwork are affronts to human dignity.
As the world grapples with the ongoing threat of covid, along with scorching temperatures due to climate change, we need more cultural and systemic allowances for rest and recovery — as well as for people who suffer from energy-limiting conditions. Katie Bach of the Brookings Institution estimates that a shocking 2.4 percent of U.S. workers — some 4 million full-time equivalent employees — are now out of work because of long covid. My home state of Texas leads the nation in heat deaths. In the United States, there are no national protections for heat exposure on the job.
If we are to be a nation that is more resilient to public health emergencies and climate change, we will need more cultural and political activism in defense of the right to rest.
I’ve been learning more recently about advocates for resting and leisure, including the Nap Ministry and the World Organization for Leisure. In Britain, people are experimenting with a four-day workweek. Maybe one day Americans can step off our exhausting cultural treadmill.
So yes: Enjoy your holidays!
Read my latest here: Biden working through covid is bad for America’s public health.
Global Radar: Brittney Griner sentenced
Some awful news out of Russia: On Thursday, WNBA star and Houston native Brittney Griner was sentenced to 9½ years in prison. Griner was detained in February after Russian authorities claimed she broke the law by carrying a small amount of cannabis oil into the country. The Biden administration raised hopes last week that a deal with Russia could be made — to swap Griner and another American, former Marine Paul Whelan, for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout. But right now the prospects for Griner’s quick release don’t look good.
My colleague Jason Rezaian, who spent 544 days as a political prisoner in Iran, was spot on when he wrote about increasing hostage-taking by authoritarian regimes in his March column “Why I’m so worried about Brittney Griner.”
I keep coming back to the reasons that many WNBA stars play in Russia in the first place: They just don’t make enough money in America. Griner earned $227,000 as a player for the Phoenix Mercury; in Russia, female players can earn more than $1 million a year.
On Tuesday, WNBA legend and coach Becky Hammon, who played in Russia for years, made an appeal for mercy to Vladimir Putin. Other stars who have played in Russia include Diana Taurasi of the Phoenix Mercury and Breanna Stewart of the Seattle Storm. Given how much male pros earn in the United States, we can hope that WNBA players could at least be paid enough to not have to supplement their incomes in repressive countries. But as more Americans are detained abroad, Jason reminds us of a scary reality: We are in a hostage crisis.
Home Front: Preserving Black media history in the digital age
Like so many Black girls growing up in the ’90s, I remember poring over copies of Jet and Ebony while at the salon to get my hair permed. The magazines, owned by Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Co., were founded in 1951 and 1945, respectively, and became two of the most influential culture and lifestyle publications of the 20th century.
They were sold several years ago, and eventually a bankrupt Johnson Publishing considered auctioning off the magazines’ photo archives, which contained some 4 million photos and negatives chronicling 70-plus years’ of important figures and events in Black history. Last week, the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture announced that they would purchase the archive for $30 million. The plan is for it to be housed in the NMAAHC and to be made available for public viewing.
The purchase is a win for preserving Black media’s past, but the state of Black media today is more troubling. That’s a subject I’ll no doubt return to in future newsletters.
For the Culture: Queen Beyoncé’s summer dance break
Anyone who has read me for a while knows that I am going to weigh in on the cultural force that is Beyoncé. The surprise release of her 2016 “visual album” “Lemonade” changed the game; that work was an unapologetic ode to Blackness, female empowerment and the magic of the South. Her 2020 musical film “Black is King” was an artistic embrace of sounds from the African continent, including Afrobeats and house music. And of course, “Homecoming,” a live album recorded at Coachella in 2018, was a love letter to HBCU culture, with her steppers, marching music and homage to Black Greek traditions.
Beyoncé's latest album, “Renaissance,” feels like just what we needed after two years of pandemic. Many of us have missed the energy of dancing with each other, feeling the pulse of the music and movement of our bodies. Tracks like the single “Break My Soul” are reminiscent of the gay ballroom culture of the ’80s and ’90s. Writing for Pitchfork, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd put it perfectly: “Renaissance is inherently about bodies undulating in the dark, under strobes; sexual agency; and the Black queer and trans women who are both politicized and the most endangered people among us.”
We live in a time when the bodily rights of trans people and women are being stripped away. But “Renaissance” is reminder that even during periods of oppression, we were made to experience joy and connection.
Fun Zone: Nandi Bushell, South Africa’s drumming sensation
I grew up playing the piano, but I’ve always wanted to learn the drums. During the pandemic, I finally bought an electric kit to teach myself. I love to go on YouTube and listen to drum covers for inspiration. One drummer I’ve been following for a while is the 12-year-old sensation Nandi Bushell. The bubbly South African preteen, who has more than 800,000 followers on Instagram, went from jamming on toy drums with her dad to playing on stages with the Foo Fighters. I promise you this clip will make your day:
Almost 3 years ago I let out an uncontrolled scream that has taken me on this incredible journey. In a few weeks I will be playing on stage at wembley with legends of rock. I hope this video inspires you to be yourself, dream big, and work hard! everything is possible! #nirvana pic.twitter.com/Bt6pmqjy2I
— Nandi Bushell (@Nandi_Bushell) August 3, 2022
Cat Corner: Meet Artemis!
And last but certainly not least: Last February, I brought home a kitten that I named Artemis. And my life has not been the same since! A little bit about Artemis: He is an a 1½-year-old seal-point Birman, and he has this irresistible face:
Artemis is, yes, the name of the Greek goddess of the hunt and of unmarried maidens (ahem, me). But Artemis’ name is also an ode to my childhood love of the Japanese anime “Sailor Moon” — the cat who is the guardian and companion of Sailor Venus in the show is called Artemis.
Artemis greets me at the door every time I come home. He loves people and gets along with most dogs. He also has a loyal fan base on Twitter, which rushes to his defense every time he engages in bad behavior.
“ #ArtemisIsInnocent: How Pretty Kitty Privilege Undermines the Justice System and American Democracy”
In this essay, I will — pic.twitter.com/dDEXuKUUAI
— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) June 21, 2022
He will be making regular appearances in the newsletter — and he would also love to see your pet pics, too!
Thank you for reading! I’ll see you next Friday.
Do you have questions, comments, tips, recipes, poems, praise or critiques for me? Submit them here. I do read every submission and may include yours in a future version of the newsletter. | 2022-08-05T14:51:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Karen Attiah: Some personal news(letter) - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/karen-attiah-newsletter-rest-work/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/karen-attiah-newsletter-rest-work/ |
Jeff Stein, Josh Rogin and Jennifer Rubin on how the economy will impact the midterms
On Washington Post Live’s “First Look,” associate editor Jonathan Capehart speaks with The Post’s Jeff Stein, Josh Rogin and Jennifer Rubin about how the economy will affect the midterm elections, the future of the GOP and Nancy Pelosi’s possible trip to Taiwan. Conversation recorded on Friday, July 29, 2022. | 2022-08-05T14:52:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Amber Phillips, George Will and Ruth Marcus on Tuesday's primary results and abortion politics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-live-first-look/amber-phillips-george-will-and-ruth-marcus-on-tuesdays-primary-results-and-abortion-politics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-live-first-look/amber-phillips-george-will-and-ruth-marcus-on-tuesdays-primary-results-and-abortion-politics/ |
At least 7 dead after Israel strikes targets, kills militant leader in Gaza
A Palestinian firefighter works at the site of a destroyed building after Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, Aug. 5, 2022. (Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
JERUSALEM – The Israeli military launched air strikes on targets inside Gaza Friday, according to Israeli officials and people inside the enclave, killing a leader of an Islamic militant group.
The attacks followed several days of days of threats from militants in Gaza after Israel arrested an Islamic Jihad leader in the West Bank earlier in the week.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health said at least seven people were killed and 40 injured in two initial strikes, one in Gaza City and another in Khanyounis in southern Gaza. Video posted on social media showed extensive damage to at least one multi-story building.
Among those killed was Tayseer Jabari, a top Islamic Jihad leader, according to a statement by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The Israel Defense Forces said shortly after the strikes that it was attacking militants belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza in an operation dubbed “Breaking Dawn.” The first strikes may have been targeting leaders of the Al-Quds brigades, Islamic Jihad’s military wing, according to Palestinian media.
— Gaza Report - اخبار غزة (@gaza_report) August 5, 2022
The enclave is governed by the Hamas militant group, usually considered a rival of Islamic Jihad. But Hamas condemned the attacks. “The resistance, with all its military arms and factions, is united in this battle and will say its word with full force,” the group said in a statement. “It is no longer possible to accept the continuation of this situation as it is.”
The Israeli military had sealed the checkpoints in and out of Gaza and had closed roads and restricted movements in nearby Israeli communities as tensions spiked in recent days. The move sparked complaints from citizens that they were being held hostage by threats from Gaza and prompted calls from Israeli hard-liners for Israel to take action inside the enclave.
“To our enemies, and specifically to the leadership of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, I would like to emphasize, your time is up,” Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said during a tour of the area earlier Friday.
After Friday’s action, the military warned residents within 80 kilometers of Gaza, including Tel Aviv, to be alert from rocket fire and issued an emergency alert to last at least until Saturday evening.
Israeli forces had arrested Bassam al-Saadi, an Islamic Jihad leader, after a firefight in the West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday. A 17-year-old Palestinian was killed in the exchange. Israel said al-Saadi, 62, had been coordinating militant activities in area known for armed resistance.
The exchange marks the most extensive military engagements between the two sides since an 11-day air war a year ago in which more than 250 Palestinians and 13 people inside Israel were killed. | 2022-08-05T14:55:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At least 7 dead after Israel strikes targets, kills militant leader in Gaza - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/israel-gaza-idf-strike/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/israel-gaza-idf-strike/ |
The brazen murder that spotlighted Berlin’s timid Russia policy
By Souad Mekhennet
The Berlin courtroom where Vadim Krasikov, 56, was on trial for the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, 40, on Dec. 15, 2021, when Krasikov was sentenced to life in prison. The judges denounced the killing as “state terrorism” orchestrated by Russia. (Christophe Gateau/Pool/AP)
BERLIN — Germany’s new government had been in power for just a week last December when it was presented with a test of its mettle.
In a wood-paneled hearing room at Berlin’s highest court, Vadim Krasikov, 56, was convicted of carrying out a killing on behalf of Russia — an act the judges slammed as “state terrorism.” The 2019 murder of former Chechen fighter Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, 40, had been particularly brazen. He was shot three times in broad daylight in a Berlin park by a hit man riding a bike.
In response, the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz expelled two Russian “diplomats” who were in fact intelligence officers — not from the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency the court deemed most likely responsible for ordering the murder, according to one official, but from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence. The hope, German officials said, was that Germany could maintain its intelligence presence in Moscow — much smaller than the number of Russian operatives in Berlin — and avoid large tit-for-tat expulsions.
Germany’s timid reaction to the verdict was part of a long-standing pattern of appeasing the Kremlin, critics say, a policy that straddled different governments and was designed to protect Germany’s business ties with Russia, particularly its need for Russian oil and natural gas. But some now question whether the unwillingness to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin, even in the face of state-sanctioned murder, added to the Kremlin’s sense of impunity before the invasion of Ukraine, at a moment when the United States was warning that Russia was planning an attack.
The reaction was one of the “signals” that Russia received that even a new government was not going to act to rein in Moscow, said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin at the time. “The political reaction was absent,” he said. “It was ridiculous. It was the critical period, when everyone knew, when the Americans knew, that Russia was going to start the war.”
The killing took place just before midday on Aug. 23, 2019, a balmy summer day. Khangoshvili’s then-18-year-old daughter Amira returned home from class to find him putting on his shoes. He told her he had some “business” to take care of before heading to Friday prayers at a nearby mosque.
“He was in a good mood, smiling,” she recalled. “He said he wouldn’t be long.”
A few minutes later, in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten park, the first shot ripped through Khangoshvili’s chest before the killer, wearing a long black wig to hide his identity, delivered another to the back of the Chechen’s neck, investigators testified. Krasikov then got off his bike and stood over Khangoshvili to deliver a final shot to the head with his 9mm Glock 26 pistol equipped with a silencer. Witnesses in the park looked on in horror.
The killing sent a dual message, said one German security official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. “To the Kremlin’s opponents it’s saying, ‘We can kill you no matter where you are,’” the official said. “But then also to Germany, the message was: ‘We don’t care about or respect your country’s sovereignty.’”
Sergei Nechayev, the Russian ambassador to Germany, described the verdict and Krasikov’s life sentence as “a biased, politically motivated decision” and said claims of Russian involvement were “absurd.” But the FSB recently suggested including Krasikov in a prisoner swap to secure the release of two Americans held in Russia, basketball star Brittney Griner and security consultant Paul Whelan, according to U.S. officials. The Biden administration described the FSB offer, which was first reported by CNN, as “not serious.”
A German government spokesman said authorities in Berlin were briefed on U.S.-Russian discussions, but declined to comment further.
Russia’s all-out assault on Ukraine in February has launched what Scholz has dubbed a Zeitenwende, or turning point, in German foreign and defense policy.
“If you take Feb. 24 as a turning point, I’m on the side of those people who are saying we have to look at many things that happened in the past and reflect further,” said Konstantin von Notz, a Green politician and member of the parliamentary oversight committee for Germany’s intelligence agencies. “That includes this case.”
Germany did not “read the signs” of Russia’s increasingly nefarious actions in Europe, he said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to the details.”
Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin doesn’t care if he offends for his cause
The fact that the killer was caught, allowing the trail to Moscow to be exposed, was down to luck, Notz added. “If that didn’t happen, we probably wouldn’t know … of Russia’s involvement.”
A bungled escape led to the killer’s capture. Two witnesses spotted Krasikov changing clothes in bushes and throwing his bicycle in the Spree river, and they called the police. Investigators later pulled the Glock out from the water. Krasikov, who had a passport on him in the name of Vadim Sokolov, claimed to be a tourist who had stopped to urinate in the bushes.
But a day after the killing, thousands of miles away in South Africa, Christo Grozev, executive director of the investigative outlet Bellingcat, was carrying out a joint training session with the Russian publication the Insider for journalists from across the continent.
“It fit perfectly what I was training them, how we go about evaluating fake identities,” he said. He searched Bellingcat’s trove of leaked Russian databases to see whether the name Vadim Sokolov existed, but it came back with no match. “We concluded that it was likely a fake identity.”
Within a week of the killing, Bellingcat published a piece outlining why Russia’s claims that the killer was not connected to the Russian state were implausible. The passport had been issued in Sokolov’s name only 10 days before its holder traveled to Europe, and matched a batch of passports issued to Russian intelligence officers.
“It’s something we’ve accepted as a mission, to shame governments and prosecutions into doing the full job, and not just the easiest job,” Grozev said.
Despite the killing being quickly linked to Russian intelligence, it took until December for the case to be referred from the Berlin police to federal investigators.
“It was clear that on a political level that they needed to decide how to treat this case,” said one U.S. official. “It was very clear that they were thinking, if we take this step, it’s a political step.”
But Bellingcat’s work made the case hard to ignore — Krasikov’s indictment cited Grozev’s statements and work for the investigative outlet 159 times. “It absolutely was Bellingcat,” the U.S. official said.
In December 2019, when federal prosecutors first announced that Russian state authorities might be behind the killing, the government of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel expelled two Russian diplomats, with Merkel citing the fact that Moscow had not cooperated in the investigation.
Asylum rejected
An ethnic Chechen born in Georgia, Khangoshvili had grown up along the fault lines of the restive post-Soviet Northern Caucasus. In 2000, at the age of around 20, he took up arms in the Second Chechen War. He commanded a group of about two dozen men from the Pankisi Gorge, a valley in Georgia that was a hub for the Chechen separatists.
In 2004, according to family members and the German investigation, Khangoshvili participated in an attack on a police station in Nazran in the Russian republic of Ingushetia that led to the deaths of 58 police officers. German investigators said the raid marked him for “retribution.” When asked about the Berlin killing at a news conference in December 2019, Putin labeled Khangoshvili a “bloodthirsty” killer.
After fighting in the Chechen war, Khangoshvili returned to Georgia in 2004, where he lived under his mother’s maiden name. He helped Georgian intelligence with the identification of Russian spies and negotiations with Islamist militants, the German court was told, and became close to the government of Mikheil Saakashvili, the Western-leaning former president of Georgia who headed the country during its 2008 war with Russia.
Within the war between Russia and Ukraine, a war between Chechens
In a 2012 letter from the FSB office at the Russian Embassy in Berlin to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the FSB accused Khangoshvili, then based in Georgia, of being a member of the Caucasus Emirate, a militant Islamist group that claimed responsibility for attacks including one on the Moscow metro in 2010 that killed 39 people. His family says he believed it was part of a Russian effort to smear his name, complicate any future asylum procedures and dampen reaction if he was killed.
Five of the 19 alleged members in a list attached by the FSB, including Khangoshvili, have since died under suspicious circumstances, according to German investigators. One of those named was stabbed and shot by suspected Russian spies in Istanbul in 2015; another was killed in a car bomb in Kyiv in 2017.
Khangoshvili was deemed a “high-value target” by Russia, German investigators said. In 2015, there was an attempt on his life in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where he was shot four times while driving in his car. For Khangoshvili and his family, there was never much doubt who was behind the attack.
“I know for sure that I have no enemies in Georgia,” Khangoshvili said in an interview with a Georgian television channel from his hospital bed.
With Georgia slipping increasingly into Moscow’s orbit and amid warnings about his safety, Khangoshvili decided he and his family needed to flee. He initially left for Odessa in Ukraine, where Saakashvili was briefly governor. There he met his second wife, a 22-year-old philosophy student, marrying her in February 2016. She requested anonymity, citing fears for her security. They traveled on to Germany, where Khangoshvili claimed asylum in January 2017.
His first wife, who says the family was threatened in Georgia in an effort to force Khangoshvili to return, fled to Poland, where his first wife and childrenlived for almost a year before lodging a separate asylum claim in Germany in the summer of 2017. His first wife separated from Khangoshvili after she discovered he had married again.
When he was killed, Khangoshvili lived with his second wife, their 18-month-old son and Amira, his oldest daughter from his first marriage, in a one-bedroom apartment just a few minutes’ walk from the park where he died.
Khangoshvili hoped Berlin would be a haven. “I thought that Germany is one of the safest countries in the world,” he said at one asylum hearing, according to files viewed by The Post.
The threats continued, however. “We know that you are now in Germany,” read one message he received in December 2016, according to court documents. “Don’t think that this is the beginning of your new life. Your hell only begins.”
Still, Khangoshvili’s asylum case was rejected multiple times, as was that of his first family. His second wife, whom he married in an Islamic ceremony, had a passport from a European country.
After one refusal, his first wife, Manana, took pills to get herself hospitalized to stop the family’s deportation. “They marked it as a suicide attempt, but it was pure self-defense,” she said.
In a 2018 rejection, the asylum judge reasoned that the threat of assassination was not sufficient cause to provide protection because if Moscow wanted to assassinate Khangoshvili, “the Russians could then pursue him in Germany just as easily.”
Even after the killing, Russian authorities continued to press for information on Khangoshvili’s family members, asking in a January 2020 letter for their addresses, incomes and professions, ostensibly to consult the family on Russia’s continuing investigation into Khangoshvili.
“This request is obviously used by the Russian security apparatus to spy on the family of the crime victim in Germany,” lawyers for the family wrote in one document. German authorities did not respond to the Russian request.
Manana and her children finally got asylum after her ex-husband was killed. “Now it doesn’t bring me any joy,” she said.
A matter of timing
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia had 150 to 200 spies with diplomatic immunity working out of its embassy and consulates in Germany, far outnumbering the contingent Germany has in Russia, according one German official.
After Krasikov was found guilty in December, the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, argued against targeting the FSB to keep open lines of communication between the two services, according to German officials. The BND declined to comment.
“We didn’t want to cut our own flesh,” said one Greens staffer. “It was a time when we needed and wanted all of our ears in Russia.”
It was also a matter of timing, the staffer said. “We were just working out how to govern and find our role,” he said. “Back at that time it was hard to see where we were and how to change the course of policy toward Russia.”
Germany’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
After the attempted killing of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain with the nerve agent Novichok in 2018, the British government rallied a coordinated response with Europe and the United States. More than 150 Russian diplomats were expelled, including 60 from the United States, in what Britain said was an attempt to degrade Russian intelligence capabilities.
Germany expelled four — the same total number as it would later eject over the killing on its own soil.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany has expelled a further 40 “diplomats” but still allows at least 100 Russian spies to operate out of its embassy and consulates, according to the German official, including FSB officials at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. A European security official put the number of remaining “identified” Russian spies at 50 to 100, including those Russia has officially flagged to German authorities as working for its intelligence branches.
The real number is believed to be double or triple that, the official said.
Anastasiya Ivanova in Berlin contributed to this report. | 2022-08-05T15:12:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine war triggers new questions on Russian hit in Berlin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/berlin-khangoshvili-krasikov-russia-killing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/05/berlin-khangoshvili-krasikov-russia-killing/ |
Huzzah! The U.S. has recovered all the jobs lost early in covid.
A hiring sign is posted in a Los Angeles store front on July 26. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Good news, readers! Today is the day we can finally retire the chart once known as the Scariest Jobs Chart You’ll See Today. That’s because the U.S. economy has recovered all the jobs that were lost at the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Friday:
The unemployment rate, which is based on a different survey, has also returned to its pre-pandemic low of 3.5 percent.
But some industries remain a shell of their pre-pandemic selves. For example, local governments have 555,000 fewer filled jobs, a decrease of 3.8 percent, with the losses divided between education and noneducation jobs.
Leisure and hospitality (a category that includes restaurants and hotels) is still down by 1.2 million jobs on net, or 7.1 percent. How and when this sector will recover to its former size — assuming that’s even in the cards — is unclear. We might continue to see major restructuring in the years ahead, and the pre-pandemic, low-wage, labor-intensive business model many restaurants and hotels relied on may have to adapt.
Employers added 528,000 jobs in July, more than double expectations
Less than ideal: We really should have more jobs today than what existed pre-pandemic, as the working-age population has grown. Also, it looks likely that wage growth — at 5.2 percent year over year — was again outpaced by inflation in July. (We’ll know for sure next week, when the consumer price index data is released.) And unless inflation suddenly tempers, the Federal Reserve is likely to keep ratcheting up interest rates.
Additionally, the reasons that the unemployment rate dropped to 3.5 percent in July were not entirely good: It’s partly because the labor force participation rate declined slightly, and people have to be actively participating in the labor force (i.e., working or looking for work) to get factored into the standard calculation of unemployment. A strong economy should be drawing more people into the labor market, not fewer. | 2022-08-05T15:56:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Huzzah! The U.S. has recovered all the jobs lost early in covid. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/july-jobs-report-great-news/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/july-jobs-report-great-news/ |
Republicans are coming after Social Security. Democrats, take note.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), left, talks with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Capitol Hill on July 20. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Social Security is an enormously popular program. It’s also hugely effective. Minus their monthly check, a large number of seniors would live in financially straitened circumstances.
So, of course, the Republicans are once again taking aim at it and are, in the process, handing Democrats an issue almost as politically potent as abortion rights as they fight to hold on to their slim majorities in the November elections.
The most recent to join the fray is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). He announced earlier this week that he believes Social Security should be up for a congressional reauthorization vote every single year. “If you qualify for an entitlement, you get it no matter what the cost,” he huffed on a podcast.
The nerve of those entitled seniors. They paid faithfully into a program and expect a check. Imagine that!
This ups the ante from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who opened the Social Security floodgates earlier this year when he proposed putting all government programs — including Social Security and Medicare — up for renewal every five years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) immediately declared it dead on arrival, but that hasn’t stopped some Republicans such as Johnson from expressing their approval.
Catherine Rampell: Our uninsured rate is at a record low. But no victory laps just yet.
And then there is Arizona, where Blake Masters, Sen. Mark Kelly’s Republican challenger in November, has declared himself privatization-curious when it comes to Social Security.
“We need fresh and innovative thinking, maybe we should privatize Social Security,” he said in June. “Get the government out of it.” After enormous pushback, he backtracked, saying “I shouldn’t have said ‘privatize.’ I don’t think we should … mess with Social Security.”
Definitely spoken like a man you can rely on when it’s crunch time for Social Security.
The Social Security trust fund is set to run out of money by 2035. In a worst case scenario, when that happens, benefits would be cut — likely by 20 percent. But even that doesn’t need to happen. There is nothing stopping Congress from simply voting to allow Social Security benefits to be paid for out of general revenue.
The Republicans mouthing off claim to want to save Social Security from itself and that they aren’t attacking the program. Johnson says a yearly renewal would allow Washington pols to “fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be bankrupt.” As for Masters, he parrots the common but false belief that the program won’t be able to pay anyone benefits in the future.
Democrats, on the other hand, actually have systemic plans to address these woes. As I noted last week, there are two bills in Congress that would shore up the program while expanding benefits. One, sponsored by Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.), would extend solvency for several years. Another, championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would solidify it through the end of the century.
Both bills would raise taxes on higher earners. Perhaps not coincidentally, neither has a single Republican co-sponsor.
In fact, polls show voters want, per Sanders and Larson, a more generous and stable Social Security program, not a smaller, riskier and precarious one. This isn’t a surprise. As the pension system has increasingly given way to defined contribution schemes such as 401(k) plans, more and more Americans are at risk of running short of money in their golden years.
This is particularly true for Latinos, a group Republicans are making gains with, who possess a mere fraction of the wealth of White households, and are less likely to use individual retirement savings options.
So it was no surprise, when progressive polling group Data for Progress asked likely voters last month whether they supported Scott’s plan to end federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if Congress didn’t vote to reauthorize them, the proposal received a resounding thumbs down, with three-fourths of those surveyed expressing their dismay.
When President George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans tried to push through Social Security privatization in 2005, it quite possibly contributed to the party losing control of the House in 2006.
Conversely, it’s quite possible that Donald Trump triumphed in 2016, in part, because as other Republican candidates seemingly competed to see who could toss grandma from the train hardest and fastest, he declared he would “save” Social Security. Yet, by 2020, he, too, was making noises about “entitlement” reform.
Since the program began, there have been Republicans who have attempted to cut back on or get the government out of Social Security. All of this trash talk is just the latest line of attack, taking advantage of a combination of deficit scare-mongering, fears for the program’s future, and a pervasive and widely shared sense that the U.S. government no longer works and can’t accomplish much for anyone — something I’ve dubbed the “can’t do” society — to make progress toward a long-sought goal.
It’s almost as though these Republicans can’t stop themselves from acting on the hope that when it comes to Social Security, the majority of voters won’t take them seriously, even as the GOP base laps their message up. But, in an age when increasing numbers of Americans are going to need a Social Security check to get by in retirement, that seems like a risky bet. | 2022-08-05T16:00:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Republicans are coming after Social Security. Democrats, take note. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/social-security-privatization-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/social-security-privatization-midterms/ |
In general, they’re not big fans. Many say that it would be much simpler to raise the corporate tax rate or eliminate tax breaks that many lawmakers consider too generous. Another major critique of the bill as originally drafted was that some companies wouldn’t be able to claim all the deductions allowed under the tax code, notably tax benefits known as depreciation for investments in equipment and buildings. But a late deal struck to secure the pivotal vote of Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona would create an exemption for depreciation tax deductions.
The bill as originally drafted would have raised about $313 billion over a decade, according to Congress’s non-partisan scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, making it the biggest tax increase in the bill. That number will be revised based on the changes that Sinema demanded. | 2022-08-05T16:22:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the 15% US Minimum Corporate Tax Would Work - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-the-15percent-us-minimum-corporate-tax-would-work/2022/08/05/5f8754ba-14cf-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-the-15percent-us-minimum-corporate-tax-would-work/2022/08/05/5f8754ba-14cf-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JULY 28: A “help wanted” sign is displayed in a window in Manhattan on July 28, 2022 in New York City. The Commerce Department said on Thursday that the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell 0.2 percent in the second quarter. With two GDP declines in a row, many economists fear that the United States could be entering a recession. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images (Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America)
The tight labor market probably didn’t get the US into this inflationary mess, but it is part of the reason that it’s going to be so hard to get out of it.
A report Friday showed nonfarm payrolls jumped 528,000 in July, bringing the unemployment rate to just 3.5%, matching the lowest level since 1969. Where the household and establishment surveys had sent mixed signals in previous months, the latest data showed unambiguously that the labor market remained red hot in July. Average hourly earnings rose 0.5% last month from a month earlier, pushing the year-over-year rate to 5.2%.
Of course, good news is bad news in these financial markets, and everything turned back to what it meant for a Federal Reserve intent on breaking the back of the worst inflation in 40 years.
Those remarkable numbers struck fear into the hearts of traders, who instinctively know that they will embolden the Fed to raise interest rates even higher, with two-year Treasury yields surging 20 basis points on the day, seemingly en route back to their June highs. Traders are right, of course, because the brisk pace of wage increases that’s come from the tight labor market is simply inconsistent with the Fed’s goal of stable prices. Companies can’t stop raising the prices of goods and services while they’re handing out raises at this pace. Fed Chair Jerome Powell is likely to see the latest report as a green light to stay aggressive with his interest-rate increases, including a 75-basis-point one at the next meeting in September.
Of course, average hourly earnings are subject to compositional effects — a shift to certain types of employment can distort the average — but this month’s uptick was fairly broad-based across industries and sectors. It also confirmed further signs of wage pressure in the better (but more lagging) employment cost index published last month.
So how much pain in the job market will be necessary to get inflation under control?
Nobody wants to see people lose their jobs, but the Fed governors and presidents who vote on monetary policy all seem to acknowledge that curbing inflation will entail some level of trade-off with unemployment. Everyone who submitted estimates for the Fed’s summary of economic projections forecast unemployment reaching at least 3.9% by the end of 2024 — the median was 4.1% — and it’s likely that those estimates will be revised up in September.
Before the current bout of inflation, many in the economics community were ready to abandon their historic emphasis on the relationship between unemployment and inflation, known as the Phillips curve. In the decades leading up to the pandemic, the “curve” had become more of a “cloud,” and many economists thought that the relationship had ceased to be very helpful either as a predictive or prescriptive tool. In 2019, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said the real argument was on “whether it’s dead or just gravely ill.”
That was easy to say when inflation itself seemed as if it was gone forever. Now, the Phillips curve is back with a vengeance and features prominently in many of the most public debates about inflation. Among several others, economists Olivier Blanchard, Alex Domash and Lawrence Summers now suggest that the unemployment rate may have to rise to around 4.9% to get inflation under control. They say that the job market is overheating at current levels, as exemplified not only by low unemployment but also by an unprecedented level of job vacancies.
Ultimately, you don’t have to agree with the theory. Unemployment is probably going to rise in the in the months ahead no matter what, whether you see it as a requirement for taming prices or just collateral damage.
The Fed’s interest-rate policy is a blunt and brutal tool for fighting inflation. Higher interest rates make money harder to come by, while slumping asset prices make people feel a little poorer. Chair Powell understands that, even if he won’t admit it, which is why the central bank won’t back off of its interest-rate campaign anytime soon. For better or worse, this report is only going to embolden the Fed to go harder. | 2022-08-05T16:22:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Unemployment Heads in the Wrong Direction for the Fed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/unemployment-heads-in-the-wrong-direction-for-the-fed/2022/08/05/64c70554-14d6-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/unemployment-heads-in-the-wrong-direction-for-the-fed/2022/08/05/64c70554-14d6-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
This photo provided by Utah Department of Public Safety shows the scene of an accident involving a Tesla and a motorcycle on July 24, 2022 near Draper, Utah. Two crashes involving Teslas apparently running on Autopilot are drawing scrutiny from federal regulators and point to a potential new hazard on U.S. freeways: The partially automated vehicles may not stop for motorcycles. (Utah Department of Public Safety via AP) (Uncredited/Utah Department of Public Safety) | 2022-08-05T16:22:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US agency probes Tesla crashes that killed 2 motorcyclists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/us-agency-probes-tesla-crashes-that-killed-2-motorcyclists/2022/08/05/f7e141ae-14d8-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/us-agency-probes-tesla-crashes-that-killed-2-motorcyclists/2022/08/05/f7e141ae-14d8-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
One tip: Never shelter under a tree when there’s lightning.
Lightning strikes were unleashed during a severe thunderstorm in Washington, D.C., before four people were apparently struck near the White House on Aug. 4. (Video: Dave Statter)
Thunderstorms are a staple of the summertime across the Lower 48, and they all produce lightning — a wild phenomenon that can also be dangerous. In D.C. on Thursday, two people died after being hospitalized with life-threatening injuries after an apparent lightning strike near the White House.
These bolts of raw electricity ricochet through thin air, arcing from stormy skies and blasting whatever they hit with a deafening roar. Lightning can be mesmerizing, dangerous, beautiful and terrifying, but how much do you know about what happens when there’s a strike?
Lightning is an electrical discharge and nature’s balancing mechanism for distributing charge throughout the atmosphere.
Thunderstorms become electrified through a process called triboelectrification. Electrons can be shaved off a water particle — like a raindrop or snowflake or hailstone — and end up on another, leaving the former with a net positive charge and the latter a bit extra negative. Generally speaking, ice crystals acquire a positive charge, while raindrops take on a negative charge.
That makes the top of a cloud, where temperature are well below freezing, positively charged. Below that is a more expansive “central negative” within the storm. A shallow, broad positive charge sits at the storm’s base like the bottom of a hamburger bun.
Most lightning we see is either intracloud (within the cloud) or takes the form of cloud-to-ground bolts, most commonly originating from the middle negative charge. The greater the electric field within a cloud, the more “sparky” the storm will get.
How does lightning work?
Getting an electric spark to jump through thin air is tricky. The ambient electric field has to be great enough to overwhelm the “dielectric breakdown strength” of air.
Think of a dam. It prevents water from flowing beyond it, unless the volume of water behind it reaches a threshold sufficient to burst the dam. Then the stored-up water can break through unimpeded.
For air, that magic number is 3 megavolts (or 3 million volts) per meter. Charge accumulating on the surface will begin to bleed into thin air in a fine stream of electrons known as a “corona” discharge. That heats the adjacent air, lowering the resistance and making it possible for that spark to begin spreading in jagged increments.
It’s unclear what processes unfold within a cloud, but eventually what’s called a “stepped leader” of electricity races toward the ground, leaping in a branched, fractal pattern.
A series of “upward streamers,” or narrow tendrils of electricity, reach skyward from the surface, akin to a group of students raising their hands. Eventually, the downward stepped leader connects with one of the upward streamers to create an unbroken channel of electricity between the cloud and the ground. Current pulses surge through the channel, each causing a burst of light. That’s why lightning appears to flicker.
Surprising facts about lightning
Lightning isn’t that thick. In fact, it’s only an inch or two across. It just looks brighter due to luminosity.
Lightning is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Within that narrow lightning channel, the electricity heats the air to near 55,000 degrees. That causes a rapid expansion of the air, which produces the atmospheric shock wave we hear as thunder.
Lightning can be triggered. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico use rockets to trigger lightning, and then employ high-speed cameras and instruments to collect data. It’s also well-established that airplanes, helicopters, tall man-made structures and even wind turbines can spark their own strikes.
“Upward lightning” is a thing. It’s exactly what it sounds like — lightning that leaps from the ground to the cloud, fanning outward along the cloud’s expansive lower positive charge. In fact, self-initiated upward leaders are common from man-made transmission/broadcast towers, and is an area of emerging research.
Some lightning is more likely to spark wildfires. While lightning is hot, it’s also brief. That limits its window of opportunity to ignite a wildfire. But instead of current flowing between the sky and ground in a brief series of staccato bursts, some lightning takes the form of a “continuing current” discharge. That means the current flows over fewer more long-duration pulses. Because the current is heating the ground for a greater amount of time, the odds of a wildfire climb markedly.
Men are struck roughly 4 times as often as women. In the United States, men account for 84 percent of lightning fatalities, and women make up only the remaining 16 percent.
Lightning fatalities are trending downward. Because of improved forecasts, education and awareness, lightning fatalities have declined significantly in recent decades. An average of 43 people died of lightning in the United States between 1989 and 2018 but that number dropped to 23 between 2012 and 2022. A record low 11 deaths occurred in 2021.
Tips and facts to know for staying safe when there’s lightning
Never shelter under a tree. If lightning strikes a tree, the charge can flow through the trunk and laterally strike individuals beneath it, or also spread through the roof system. Many lightning tragedies have stemmed from individuals seeking shelter beneath trees. The previous lightning fatality in D.C., which took place on May 17, 1991, occurred after a group sheltered beneath a tree during a lacrosse game.
Leisure activities — especially fishing and boating — are the greatest source of lightning fatalities. “[F]ishermen and boaters are likely to be out in the open and more vulnerable to a direct lightning strike,” a report from the National Lightning Safety Council from 2020 stated.
Lightning can strike even in blizzards. Thundersnow is real and it can be dangerous. On Jan. 25, 1990, lightning strike hit a light pole during a thundersnow storm in Crystal Lake, Illinois. The charge traveled through the frozen ground and injured 11 people nearby shoveling or pushing stranded motorists.
Lightning can travel 10 or more miles away from a parent thunderstorm, and even strike in the clear air far from any rain. So-called “bolts from the blue” are often more powerful and potent, since they originate from the positively-charged top of a thunderstorm. These are among the most dangerous, since they can strike in otherwise tranquil conditions. That’s why experts recommend sheltering at the first sign of thunder, as that’s a sign you’re close enough to be struck by lightning.
Ninety percent of lightning strike victims survive. There are an average of 30 lightning fatalities in the United States every year. The pair from Wisconsin killed by lightning near the White House on Thursday brought this year’s fatality count to 11.
Jonathan’s story: After tragic ‘bolt from the blue,’ two simple rules that could save your life | 2022-08-05T16:22:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Surprising facts and safety tips for lightning and thunder - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/05/lightning-thunder-thunderstorm-facts-safety/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/05/lightning-thunder-thunderstorm-facts-safety/ |
Police: Body found in Baltimore's Inner Harbor
BALTIMORE — A body was found floating in the water at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on Friday morning, police said.
Baltimore police said Inner Harbor and water rescue units responded to the 400 block of East Pratt Street around 7 a.m. for a report of a body found in the water, news outlets reported.
The body was removed from the water and the person was dead at the time, police said. No further information is known about the victim and the cause of death hasn’t been determined yet. | 2022-08-05T16:23:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police: Body found in Baltimore's Inner Harbor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/police-body-found-in-baltimores-inner-harbor/2022/08/05/d24e7940-14d1-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/police-body-found-in-baltimores-inner-harbor/2022/08/05/d24e7940-14d1-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
How Alex Jones was embraced by Trump, Rogan, years after Sandy Hook lies
Alex Jones speaks with reporters after day six of trial at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin on Tuesday. (Pool/Via Reuters)
In roughly 10 years since he declared the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history to be a “giant hoax,” Infowars founder Alex Jones has been denounced and de-platformed by tech giants such as Facebook, YouTube and Spotify, and faced significant financial blows. The latest came Thursday when a jury ruled that Jones had to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting after he created a “living hell” for the family.
But as Jones’s false claims and rants launched him into the national political dialogue, the ascent of America’s foremost purveyor of outlandish conspiracy theories from fringe to mainstream has arguably been solidified thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Rogan embracing Jones and endorsing his ideas to online audiences of millions of people in recent years.
His 2015 interview with Trump offered a window into some of the future president’s talking points at his rallies.
Jones going on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in 2020 allowed him to push false claims about coronavirus vaccination on Spotify, where he had been banned. A clip shared widely on Twitter this week shows how Rogan, whose show has an estimated audience of 11 million per episode, has previously defended Jones as “hilarious” and having entertainment value.
“What is he doing that’s so awful?” Rogan asked. “It’s entertaining!”
Representatives for Trump and Rogan did not immediately respond to requests for comment early Friday.
The decision from an Austin jury on Thursday means Jones could pay significantly less than the $150 million sought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, for remarks after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 people, 20 of them young children, dead. It remains to be seen how much Jones, 48, might be ordered to pay in punitive damages. The jury is expected to return Friday to weigh that amount — a sum that could be considerably higher.
On Aug. 4, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble read an Austin jury's decision to fine Alex Jones 4.1 million in damages to Sandy Hook parents. (Video: Travis County 459th District Court)
Shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting, Jones, who has previously promoted conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 attacks, falsely claimed that “no one died” at the school and that the attack was “staged” and “manufactured” by gun-control advocates. The remarks not only outraged grieving parents but led to death threats and abuse from strangers. After Heslin told the jury this week that the false claims had made his life a “living hell,” Jones conceded in court to the family that the shooting was “100 percent real.”
“Neil and Scarlett are thrilled with the result and look forward to putting Mr. Jones’s money to good use,” Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the parents, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “With punitive damages still to be decided and multiple additional defamation lawsuits pending, it is clear that Mr. Jones’s time on the American stage is finally coming to an end.”
His presence on the national stage was elevated when Trump, who became the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, agreed to be interviewed on Infowars. Trump and Jones said the December 2015 interview was arranged by Trump confidant Roger Stone — years later Jones and Stone would be subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I will not let you down,” Trump said to the Infowars founder.
Jones has acknowledged the impression he seemed to have on Trump, taking credit for introducing the then-candidate to the idea that media members were his “enemy.”
“It is surreal to talk about issues here on-air, and then, word-for-word, hear Trump say it two days later,” Jones told his audience at the time.
The connection between Trump and Jones was documented in “United States of Conspiracy,” a 2020 special from PBS’s “Frontline.” One of the lies Jones spread on his show was that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former president Barack Obama founded the Islamic State. Trump repeated Jones’s false claim about Clinton and Obama at one of the Republican candidate’s rallies before the 2016 presidential election, according to PBS. Trump repeated another of Jones’s lies about how the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was associated with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy during an interview with Fox News.
Former Infowars staffers told “Frontline” how Trump seemingly using Jones’s false claims as his own was “a super power trip for Alex that was irresistible.”
“Someone in the mainstream — Trump — using the words that Jones had been using for decades, I think that emboldened Jones and it changed him as a personality,” said Josh Owens, a former video editor at Infowars.
The support from Trump elevated Jones in the national conversation, like when Fox News host Tucker Carlson hailed Jones as “one of the most popular journalists on the right.” Joe Walsh, the former GOP congressman from Illinois who has since become a vocal critic of Trump and his allies in the Republican Party, noted on Twitter this week how “there’s really no difference between Alex Jones and Donald Trump. None.”
But the raised profile also cost Jones. In 2018, Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify were among the platforms to ban all content from Jones and Infowars for violating their hate-speech guidelines. After Roku dropped Infowars in 2019, Jones shared a cryptic post to his Instagram account of a tweet from Infowars reporter Owen Shroyer, which featured an artistic banner of Jones’s face looking enraged.
“Strike me down now and I only become more powerful,” Shroyer wrote.
Roku gave Infowars a platform reaching millions. After hours of outrage, it backed down.
In the podcasting world, Rogan is one of its premier personalities. Rogan, a lightning rod for controversy with a huge following, came to an agreement with Spotify in 2020 for a reported $100 million for his podcast library.
So when Rogan welcomed Jones on his show in October 2020, the Infowars host listed off a series of falsehoods surrounding coronavirus safety measures such as vaccination and masking, climate science and the polio vaccine. During the course of the three-hour appearance, Rogan also referenced Jones’s lies surrounding the Sandy Hook shooting.
“We all know that you’ve [messed] some things up, right?” Rogan said to Jones in 2020, specifically mentioning Sandy Hook. “But you’ve gotten so many things right. This is why I keep talking to you about these things, and that’s why I defend you and why I think it’s … dangerous to censor you.”
In response to the backlash that followed, Rogan defended having Jones on his show. Rogan said on Instagram that he fact-checked “every single crazy thing he said” and that “all of them were verified.”
“I knew people were going to criticize the content of the podcast without even listening and I was right,” Rogan wrote. “He said a lot of crazy, but accurate things, and that’s what I’ve been saying about him for years.”
Even though Spotify banned Jones and Infowars from its platforms, company executives also defended the booking, writing in an internal email how “it’s important to have diverse voices and points of view on our platform,” according to BuzzFeed News. Rogan found himself under fire at the beginning of 2022 for controversies surrounding coronavirus misinformation and the many previous instances in which the host used the n-word.
A spokesperson for Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rogan’s supporters have also taken a vested interest in Jones. On Reddit, users on the subreddit dedicated to Rogan have flooded the forum with posts about Jones and clips from the defamation damages trial. While some on Reddit are sick of reading about the one-time Rogan guest, others can’t get enough.
“Alex Jones spewing FACTS!” one supporter wrote. | 2022-08-05T16:23:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alex Jones was embraced by Donald Trump, Joe Rogan years after Sandy Hook lies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/alex-jones-sandy-hook-trump-rogan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/alex-jones-sandy-hook-trump-rogan/ |
Floodwaters along KY-15 on July 28 in Jackson, Ky. (Arden S. Barnes/For The Washington Post)
HAZARD, Ky. — The water bottles have arrived by the thousands.
They sit, still in their plastic cases, stacked high in front of churches, schools and in parking lots. They pack the back seats of many sedans, the beds of pickup trucks and any available space on all-terrain vehicles.
Portable, potable water has become vital in some sections of southeastern Kentucky, a region that had much of its water delivery infrastructure destroyed by devastating flash flooding that killed at least 37 and displaced hundreds.
“You can’t clean anything without water,” said Donald “Happy” Mobelini, the mayor of Hazard, a city of about 5,000 at the center of the flooding.
Gallon jugs of water are almost as ubiquitous as bottles. In recent days, tanker trucks full of water have been brought in. But the region needs more.
Almost as soon as the donated water arrives, it’s used by thousands who need it to bathe, drink and wash off the thick coats of mud that floodwater left on the insides of businesses, homes and clothes.
After the heaviest rain subsided last week, much of Hazard was without electricity and running water. Over the past few days, power and water have been restored a few thousand at a time. Mobelini said that much of the county’s south side should have their water restored by the end of the week.
But he said he could not give a timeline for when water would be back for many of the counties’ outlying rural communities, which suffered much of the worst destruction.
“The pipes are gone,” Mobelini said of those areas. “We’ve got, like, five teams from different cities in here to help us assess, but we’re going to have to rebuild the whole infrastructure, so I don’t know how long that’s gonna take.”
“We’re not anywhere near recovered,” Mobelini said. “We need those big corporations to step up and really, truly help with more than water.”
PHOTOS: Kentucky flooding claims at least 37 lives
Much of the region’s tough terrain may challenge reconstruction efforts. The small community of River Caney, which occupies a narrow valley a county over from Hazard, is reachable by a single state highway.
Before the flood, a blacktop road ran through much of the community. On Wednesday, large portions of that road appeared as if it had been reclaimed by the surrounding hills. Broken power lines hung low while crushed cars, discarded sheds and houses populated the roadside. The semi-turbid waters of Caney Creek gurgled down from a nearby hillside.
The rain last week came so quickly that Caney Creek jumped its banks and carried some homes down the valley. The home of Lurain Noble was uprooted in the flood, she said near a pile of cinder blocks where her home once stood. Unlike others, her house was still visible but was a few yards down the street and obviously damaged.
To escape the rushing current, the 54-year-old Noble and her family struggled up a nearby hillside, which had become a muddy slip-and-slide. They waited there for the waters to subside, and she said she had been staying with her nephew ever since. However, she has been returning to her home daily, trying to determine what’s salvageable and at times using the waters of the creek that caused so much damage.
“I take my stuff to the creek and wash it off. It’s got mud that thick,” Noble said, spreading her fingers a few inches apart.
Years ago, Noble said she and others in the community got their water from nearby wells. They did that until the water coming from their taps turned black. She blamed a nearby mining operation that was blasting away layers of mountain to get to coal beneath.
“When they lit those shots off up there, it jars your whole house,” Noble said, adding that they had since switched to piped-in public water, which the community has been without since last week.
Noble said she has heard nothing definite on when that water service could be back.
Strangers have repeatedly come through in recent days, handing out jugs and cases of water. Noble said some of her neighbors who have stayed behind have used it to bathe and clean. Others haul in bags of ice to help preserve milk and eggs in coolers.
“They’ll bounce back,” Noble said. “We don’t give up over here. I won’t. I’m coming back home. I think everyone back through here will tell you that.”
Others have gotten creative to meet their community’s new water needs. In the city of Hindman, in hard-hit Knott County, the Hindman Settlement School has revived a more self-reliant water delivery system.
The school, founded in 1902 to educate the children of mining families, was for much of its history getting water from a well, pump and cistern on a nearby hill, said Will Anderson, the school’s executive director. In recent years, the school switched to getting its water from the city.
“They don’t think there’ll be water here, two weeks to a month,” Anderson said on Tuesday. “So we had the idea of, well, maybe our old system still works.”
Maintenance workers got the well up and running late in the day on Monday, he said.
“We went over to the faucet outside of our building, turned it on, and for the first five minutes it looked like chocolate milk,” Anderson said. “I mean, it was just thick and ugly. But after running for about five minutes, it’s coming out relatively clear.”
The water is not potable but can be used to flush toilets and, most important, clean out homes. Anderson said they want to bring in an expert who can determine whether it’s safe for showering, but in the meantime residents can come and fill large tanks with the water for use in cleaning.
“That’s been a huge relief for a lot of people, because we had gone probably five days without water,” Anderson said. “And so, it’s simple things like that are just like a breath of fresh air.” | 2022-08-05T16:23:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After floods, Kentucky struggles with a new challenge: clean water - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/kentucky-floods-clean-water/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/kentucky-floods-clean-water/ |
Fetterman to hold first campaign rally since suffering a stroke in May
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman on March 4. Fetterman is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. (Keith Srakocic/AP)
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic Senate nominee, will hold his first public rally next week since suffering a near-deadly stroke four days before the May 17 primary election, his campaign announced Friday.
The rally is planned for Erie, Pa., one of the state’s swing counties, on Aug. 12. Fetterman has only recently resumed attending in-person fundraising events and has made a few brief public appearances — but nothing of the scale of what’s planned next week.
“Before the 2020 election, I said that if I could know one single fact about the results, I could tell you who was going to win Pennsylvania. Whoever wins Erie County will win Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said in a statement announcing the rally. “Erie County is Pennsylvania’s most important bellwether county. I’ve visited Erie dozens and dozens of times in the past, and I am honored and proud to be returning to the campaign trail here.”
Donald Trump won Erie County in 2016, and Joe Biden captured it in 2020.
Fetterman faces celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz in the November election. Oz has remained active on the campaign trail since prevailing in the Republican primary, although he has faced criticism for reportedly taking trips to Ireland and Palm Beach, Fla.
Despite his absence from the campaign trail, a recent poll showed Fetterman with the advantage. Fetterman held an 11-point lead over Oz, 47 percent to 36 percent, in a Fox News poll released July 28. Three percent backed independent candidate Everett Stern, and 13 percent supported someone else or were undecided.
In an interview late last month with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — Fetterman’s first media interview since his stroke — he said he felt ready to return to the trail.
“I might miss a word every now and then in a conversation, or I might slur two words. Even then, I think that’s infrequent,” Fetterman said. “So I feel like we are ready to run, and that’s the only issues I have. That’s the absolute truth, 100 percent.”
Fetterman’s campaign office announced on May 15, two days before the primary, that he had suffered a stroke “caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long.” The doctors worked to “quickly and completely remove the clot, reversing the stroke, they got my heart under control as well,” Fetterman said in the statement released by his campaign. Doctors attached a pacemaker with a defibrillator.
He told the Post-Gazette that he has “no physical limits,” walks four to five miles each day in 90-degree heat, understands words properly and hasn’t lost any of his memory. He said he is working with a speech therapist and sometimes struggles with hearing.
The race to fill the seat held by retiring Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R) is considered one of the most competitive in the country and will help determine majority control of the Senate.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the GOP’s campaign arm, has been mocking Fetterman with a count of his days off the trail and an image of him with the words “Have You Seen This Person?”
It sent out another release hours before the Fetterman campaign announcement, saying, “Another Fetterman-Less Friday.” | 2022-08-05T16:23:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee, to hold first campaign rally since suffering a stroke in May - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/fetterman-pennsylvania-senate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/fetterman-pennsylvania-senate/ |
ATHENS, Greece — The head of Greece’s intelligence service and the general secretary of the prime minister’s office have resigned, amid allegations of the use of surveillance software against a journalist and the head of an opposition party.
This just in: Fetterman to hold first public rally since suffering stroke | 2022-08-05T16:24:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Greece: Intelligence chief resigns amid spyware allegations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/greece-intelligence-chief-resigns-amid-spyware-allegations/2022/08/05/0e08d4f6-14cf-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/greece-intelligence-chief-resigns-amid-spyware-allegations/2022/08/05/0e08d4f6-14cf-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
KIGALI, Rwanda — Rwanda’s government is rejecting a report by United Nations experts saying they have “solid evidence” that members of Rwanda’s armed forces are conducting operations in eastern Congo in support of the M23 rebel group whose deadly resurgence has led to talk of war as well as protests against the U.N. peacekeeping force. | 2022-08-05T16:24:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rwanda rejects UN report on support for rebels in Congo - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/rwanda-rejects-un-report-on-support-for-rebels-in-congo/2022/08/05/a1dd08b2-14d6-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/rwanda-rejects-un-report-on-support-for-rebels-in-congo/2022/08/05/a1dd08b2-14d6-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
“Spirit will always have a place in my heart ... And it does yield heartburn”
After an effort to merge with Frontier Airlines failed, Spirit said it had agreed to be acquired by JetBlue Airways, with the deal expected to close no later than the first half of 2024, pending shareholder and regulatory approval. The two airlines emphasized their commitment to competing with larger U.S. carriers with low fares — while also highlighting the customer service JetBlue is known for.
If the plan is approved, the signature yellow Spirit jets will be transformed into JetBlue planes, the snacks-for-purchase will give way to free chips and cookies and the long list of fees will turn into … a shorter list of fees. This is the airline industry in the 21st century, after all.
Your favorite airline is buying your least favorite airline
It unapologetically stripped away the free perks or even basic amenities that most fliers had come to expect, introducing fees to check bags, carry bags on, choose seats or have a boarding pass printed by an airport agent. Snacks and drinks — even water — come at a cost. Spirit promised low base fares in exchange but caught some travelers by surprise. And it crammed planes full of seats to maximize the number of people it could carry, limiting legroom in the process.
“They were certainly intrepid explorers of the frontiers of misery in the friendly skies,” said Rollert, whose mother was a flight attendant. “But in fairness, the other side of that is that they provided a way to make flying, I think on the whole, cheaper. They put a price on our misery, and for a lot of people, that price seems to be a pretty good one.”
At the same time, Spirit drew widespread attention for provocative promotions to passengers that riffed on scandals. The company offered a sale inspired by disgraced politician Anthony Weiner, deals that referenced an alleged prostitution scandal among Secret Service agents and an ad featuring suntan oil-slathered woman in the wake of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill that urged travelers to “check out the oil on our beaches.”
Spirit, Frontier merger talks end
New leadership in 2016 made it a priority to improve operations — long a pain point — and changed gears on the eyebrow-raising ad strategy. Spirit went from ranking last in on-time performance among U.S. carriers large enough to report the data in 2016 to fourth two years later. | 2022-08-05T17:01:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | RIP, Spirit — America’s most hated airline - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/05/spirit-airlines-jetblue-merger/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/05/spirit-airlines-jetblue-merger/ |
Kevin Spacey leaves London's Central Criminal Court last month after attending a hearing in his sexual assault case. (Maja Smiejkowska/Reuters)
A judge on Thursday ordered Kevin Spacey to pay more than $30 million to “House of Cards” producers for losses brought on by the actor’s firing in 2017 over sexual harassment allegations from crew members.
A petition filed in November stated that MRC, the studio behind the Netflix-distributed series, fired Spacey from his lead role after a months-long investigation into claims that he had directed a “pattern of sexually ‘predatory’ behavior” toward young crew members. The allegations followed others shared publicly by actor Anthony Rapp in October 2017. Spacey was written out of the final season of “House of Cards,” which ended in 2018.
According to court documents, a private arbitrator found in October 2020 that Spacey’s behavior breached his acting and executive producing contracts. He was ordered to pay MRC and others more than $30 million in compensatory damages and other fees. Spacey appealed the decision but was unsuccessful in the end — another panel of arbitrators affirmed the original $30 million award in November 2021.
In Thursday’s ruling, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mel Red Recana gave legal weight to the arbitration award and stated that Spacey and his lawyers had failed “to demonstrate that this is even a close case.”
“We are pleased with the court’s ruling,” Michael Kump, an attorney for MRC, said in a statement. Spacey’s representatives have not responded to The Washington Post’s request for comment on the decision.
Spacey has faced dozens of sexual assault allegations since 2017, some of which resulted in legal action. In May, the United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service authorized sexual assault charges against him for incidents said to have taken place between 2005 and 2013, when he served as artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. He has denied the allegations, pleading not guilty to the five counts in July. | 2022-08-05T17:19:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kevin Spacey ordered to pay ‘House of Cards’ producers $30 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/05/kevin-spacey-house-of-cards/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/05/kevin-spacey-house-of-cards/ |
Her first short-story collection, ‘The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,’ was translated into more than 30 languages and became a bestseller
Author Melissa Bank at her New York City apartment in 2005. She was best known for her first book, the linked short-story collection “The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing.” (Kathy Willens/AP)
“It’s as if to say these are books by chicks, about chicks and for chicks, and what happens to a single woman isn’t of consequence to anyone but herself or other women,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 2005.
The character usually had a quip or one-liner at the ready, including when her lover encouraged her to come work for him. “I could bring you up on charges for that,” she replied, explaining that he was guilty of “work harassment in the sexual place.” Other passages suggested her loneliness in a single sentence: “He gave me a kiss on the cheek, as though he always had.”
Released a few years after Helen Fielding’s best-selling novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “The Girls’ Guide” became a publishing phenomenon, selling at auction for $275,000 — “rare for a novice, let alone a book of short stories,” the New York Times observed — and was translated into more than 30 languages. Its title story was optioned by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, and two other stories were adapted into a 2007 movie, “Suburban Girl,” starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin.
The second of three children, Melissa Susan Bank was born in Boston in 1960. Her precise date of birth could not immediately be confirmed. She grew up in Elkins Park, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb that she described as a place “you were supposed to be having a happy childhood, but you weren’t.” | 2022-08-05T17:19:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Melissa Bank, author of 'Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,' dies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/05/girls-guide-melissa-bank-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/05/girls-guide-melissa-bank-dead/ |
This aerial image taken from video provided by KABC-TV shows authorities responding to a traffic accident in the suburban neighborhood Windsor Hills, in Los Angeles, on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. Several people were killed, including an infant and a pregnant person, and others were injured in a fiery traffic collision in Southern California. (KABC-TV via AP) (Uncredited/KABC-TV) | 2022-08-05T17:54:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fiery Southern California crash kills 5, including baby - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fiery-southern-california-crash-kills-5-including-baby/2022/08/05/ded90d72-14e2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fiery-southern-california-crash-kills-5-including-baby/2022/08/05/ded90d72-14e2-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Voters cast ballots on Nov. 2, 2021, at Lucketts Community Center in Leesburg. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
And so we have come to the low, dishonest end of the long court fight over the constitutionality of Virginia’s 2021 House of Delegates elections.
U.S. District Court Judge David. J. Novak ruled that the plaintiffs in the second lawsuit seeking to compel House of Delegates elections this November lacked standing to sue (never mind the 40 year-old precedent in Cosner v. Dalton) and that his court just didn’t have the power to require new elections because, among other things, “the global pandemic delayed the reapportionment process just as it disrupted nearly every aspect of American life.”
Which is a bit like saying the dog ate the redistricting process, and we all know how darned hard it is to control that dog, right? Right?
Were Novak at all interested in doing his job, he could have reached this conclusion more than a year ago, saving everyone a lot of time, effort and money.
But Novak preferred to blame others for his own major role in the dithering. Not without reason, of course. Dithering was the major legal strategy from the beginning of this case more than a year ago.
Former attorney general Mark R. Herring (D) rightly came in for a round of criticism for his office’s rope-a-dope legal strategy — one Novak could have nipped in the bud, but refused to for, uh, reasons. Others could have gotten similar treatment for their studied public silence on the case — from ex-House speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) to ex-governor Ralph Northam (D) to any of the Democratic pols who will say just about anything on social media but couldn’t find a public word to say about this lawsuit.
There’s much more judicial hand waving in Novak’s opinion. If one believes in the principle of one person, one vote, and that the convenience of politicians and governments should always take a back seat to voters’ rights and privileges, then Novak’s opinion will not only disappoint but also infuriate.
It’s of a piece with the legal strategy Herring and the rest of the Democratic statewide leadership blessed and employed throughout 2021. For a crew that can’t say enough about how bad Republicans are on voting rights and how big a threat the GOP poses to democracy itself, Virginia Democrats showed where their real interests lie: protecting incumbents.
As for the alphabet soup of organizations that make a good living on the voting rights issue, well, they were conspicuously absent from Novak’s courtroom.
And as for Virginia Republicans, kudos to Herring’s apt pupil, Attorney General Jason Miyares, for carrying the Democratic strategy to its conclusion. And as for the rest of the GOP? As they were always the biggest beneficiaries of Democratic legal strategy, they have even more reason to celebrate Novak’s legal punt.
As for everyone else in Virginia, take lead plaintiff Jeff Thomas’s remarks to heart, as reported in The Post:
But it’s also very on-brand for Virginia’s political class, which, in a number of unflattering ways, still can’t (or won’t) shake its Byrd machine roots.
One key element of Byrdism was carefully managing the electorate — which then meant not allowing people of the wrong color, ideology or social standing the right to vote.
Funny how that still holds, considering another of the plaintiffs, Loudoun County NAACP president Michelle Thomas, lives in a House district that has 50.8 percent more residents than the state’s least populous House district.
The harm there? Loudoun County’s Black and Brown voters will remain woefully — and unconstitutionally — underrepresented in the House of Delegates until January 2024.
That’s the Virginia Way — low and dishonest to its core. | 2022-08-05T17:55:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A dishonest end to one person, one vote in Virginia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/dishonest-end-one-person-one-vote-virginia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/dishonest-end-one-person-one-vote-virginia/ |
Abortion rights supporters react Aug. 2 in Overland Park, Kan., as early returns showed that a proposed state constitutional amendment was likely to be defeated. (Evert Nelson/USA Today Network/Reuters)
When the votes rolled in Tuesday night on a proposed amendment to the Kansas state constitution that would remove the explicit right to an abortion, what was expected to be a tight race was instead shockingly lopsided: The amendment was roundly defeated, 59 percent to 41 percent.
Analysts were quick to frame the result as a setback for the antiabortion movement, but activists and experts say it also amounts to a rejection of the Catholic Church hierarchy, which had shelled out massive sums of money in support of the amendment’s passage. The vote may hint, too, at a mounting backlash against the church’s involvement in the nation’s abortion debate — not least among Catholics themselves.
Naumann’s archdiocese and other Catholic organizations also spent millions, however, representing the single largest donor base for the pro-amendment umbrella group known as the “Value Them Both” campaign.
According to financial disclosures and media reports, the Kansas City Archdiocese spent roughly $2.45 million on the effort this year, with the Catholic dioceses of Wichita and Salina together spending an additional $600,000 or more. Some individual Catholic parishes across the state chipped in, as did the Kansas Catholic Conference, an advocacy group tied to the state’s bishops, which reportedly spent $100,000. Separately, the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote raised around $500,000 for the pro-amendment Do Right PAC, according to the news outlet Flatland.
Kansas nuns oppose state abortion amendment, challenging archbishop
According to Natalia Imperatori-Lee, chair of the religious studies department at Manhattan College, the ad probably better represents the average Catholic’s views than the campaigns funded by bishops. The church officially decries abortion, but U.S. Catholics, generally supportive of legal abortion, have grown more liberal on the issue over time: According to a recent PRRI poll, the percentage of White Catholics who believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases jumped from 53 percent in October 2010 to 64 percent by June of this year. The shift among Hispanic Catholics was even more dramatic, from 51 percent in 2010 to 75 percent in June.
“The bishops have been so focused on the idol of abortion legislation that they have failed to step back and see the complication of criminalizing abortion and what that means — especially for vulnerable, non-White, non-wealthy communities,” Imperatori-Lee said. “If this is what the bishops are going to do, if this was their plan for a ‘post-Roe’ world, then Catholics are going to be very disappointed.”
“I do not apologize one bit for our advocacy,” he said in an interview.
Weber lamented the heightened tensions triggered by the state’s abortion debate — abortion rights demonstrators were threatened with arrest, and a Catholic church in Overland Park was defaced — but pointed out that bishops have lobbied for issues other than abortion in the past. The conference, he said, was among those who pushed state lawmakers this year to expand Medicaid coverage for new moms from two months to 12 months. Weber also suggested that bishops would fund campaigns around similar issues if they were put up for a vote, as in the amendment referendum.
Even so, Weber acknowledged that efforts to convey his group’s broader agenda to everyday Catholics have fallen short.
One organization that financially skipped the Kansas amendment battle was Catholics for Choice, which advocates for abortion access. The group did not spend money in Kansas in part because, according to leader Jamie Manson, it didn’t need to.
She added, “I am looking forward to more David vs. Goliath victories ahead.”
The underdog spirit in the Kansas fight was embodied by two Catholic nuns who penned an anti-amendment letter, published in the lead-up to the vote, that amounted to an act of defiance against local bishops.
“A church sign said, ‘Jesus trusted women. We do too,’” the nuns’ letter read. The sisters went on to bemoan the harm caused by restrictive abortion bans passed in other states and noted that supporters of the amendment primarily focused resources on banning abortion, rather than legislation that would assist mothers who bring children to term, such as “healthcare, parental leave, Medicaid and other support for poor women.”
Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic and former Kansas governor who served as secretary of health and human services in the Obama administration, lauded the nuns’ letter, calling the sisters “courageous.” Whether or not it had a broad impact, Sebelius said, it reminded her of when nuns spoke out in favor of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which countered the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ opposition to the bill and is credited with paving the way for its final passage.
With this week’s vote, “I have no doubt at all that the nuns’ statement in Kansas made a difference to women who follow what the church has been saying and what they had been promoting — and listened to the nuns instead,” Sebelius said.
The Kansas vote suggests that the bishops, having won a long-awaited victory at the Supreme Court in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, may now be fighting uphill battles in many states, with uneven support from a rank-and-file who would rather see them invest church money in other places.
“That money could do a lot of good — diapers and formula,” Imperatori-Lee said. | 2022-08-05T17:56:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Joseph Naumann, Catholic bishops lost in Kansas abortion vote - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/05/catholics-kansas-abortion-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/05/catholics-kansas-abortion-vote/ |
Washington once had three undrafted free-agent linebackers it liked, including Tre Walker of Idaho, on its roster. Now, after Walker's retirement and Drew White's torn ACL, there's only one left. (Craig Hudson/For the Washington Post)
“Well, [this is] going to prompt us to obviously look at [linebackers],” Rivera said. “[Walker’s] a young guy that we did like, that we thought had some ability. Really good tape coming out of Idaho. It's unfortunate, but if the young man has something else he wants to do, then he's going to go on and do it.”
Carson Wentz, Commanders’ new starting QB, settles in as camp begins
“Actually, not really,” Scherff said. “I had a great time and a great experience in Washington, and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for all the coaches that I played with … there. For me, Week 1 is another game that I have to get myself ready for, and, you know, we just got to show up and get ready to play, because they’re a heck of a team.” | 2022-08-05T19:16:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Commanders linebacker retires; Carson Wentz struggles - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/commanders-linebacker-retires-wentz/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/commanders-linebacker-retires-wentz/ |
Members of the Texas National Guard direct migrants from a Texas Department of Criminal Justice bus at the Eagle Pass Commercial Port of Entry in Eagle Pass, Tex., on July 28. (Paul Ratje/Bloomberg)
The Biden administration on Friday denied D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s request for assistance from the National Guard to help the city process the busloads of migrants that Republican governors in Texas and Arizona have been sending to the nation’s capital, leaving the District scrambling to accommodate them.
Bowser (D) expressed frustration at the federal decision, saying she would try again with a more narrowly tailored request for National Guard help with certain tasks related to the migrants’ arrival.
State governors can call up their National Guard troops without federal consent for a wide variety of tasks. But since D.C. is not a state, Bowser cannot activate the Guard without approval from the Department of Defense. She had sent a letter asking for the help last month.
“When the mayor of the District says she needs or he needs … the D.C. National Guard to support the safe operation of our city, we expect a fair consideration,” Bowser said on Friday shortly after learning the Defense Department had rejected the request she made July 19. The decision was first reported by NBC News.
D.C. aid groups overwhelmed by migrants arriving from Texas and Arizona
The Department of Defense issued a statement Friday on the decision.
“We have determined providing this support would negatively impact the readiness of the DCNG and have negative effects on the organization and members. We understand SAMU First Response has received grant funding through FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program, and has indicated that sufficient EFSP funds exist at this point to provide migrant assistance,” the statement read.
Bowser faulted both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the Biden administration for treating the busing of thousands of migrants who have crossed the Mexican border as a political issue, rather than focusing on the pressing needs of people getting off buses with no plans for where they will sleep.
“I have done — regardless of Republicans in Texas or Democrats on Pennsylvania Avenue — what I need to do to run the city. And when we have a growing humanitarian crisis that we expect, that the federal government expects, is going to only worsen, I have got to deploy the resources that I need to handle it. And we need our National Guard,” Bowser said. “If we were a state, I would have already done it. I would have deployed the National Guard.”
Abbott started sending migrants to D.C. by bus in April, as a way of highlighting his disagreements with Biden over immigration. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) then followed suit.
Volunteers who have been assisting each arriving bus for weeks, through mutual aid networks disapproved of Bowser’s proposal to activate the Guard, saying that what the migrants need is homeless services, not a military response.
Column: Immigrants looking for new lives are not a National Guard emergency
They have pushed the Bowser administration to extend city services like beds in family shelters to the arriving families. Members of the D.C. Council have questioned whether the mayor is doing enough with local D.C. resources to help.
While the federal government has provided a grant to a nonprofit organization to assist the migrants, volunteers say far more support is needed. The nonprofit, SAMU First Response, has said it can only assist about half of the 15 weekly busloads of arrivals, and the shelter it has set up in Maryland for arriving families with children can only hold about 50 people who can stay only three days.
At times, helpers have been stretched so thin that arriving migrants have had nowhere to go and have slept at D.C.'s Union Station upon getting off the bus.
Madhvi Vahl, an organizer in the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, said that the group’s 250 to 300 volunteers are spending thousands of dollars a day in donations to respond to the migrants’ immediate needs, from shoes to medicines to Uber rides to hospitals. Volunteers greet each bus, help migrants find their way to shelters or hotels where the city pays for their lodging, and sometimes put migrants up in their own homes.
“The city should not rely on the labor and the funds of D.C. residents and volunteers to support folks and welcome folks," Vahl said, urging Bowser to pursue more extensive FEMA grants to cover the costs of housing and help for migrants. “We’re not case managers, you know? We of course have been doing our best and will continue doing it as long as we’re able. But the city needs to make a decision to actually be the sanctuary city that we claim to be.”
Peter Hermann and Vanessa G. Sánchez contributed to this report. | 2022-08-05T19:16:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Feds deny Bowser’s request for National Guard to help with Texas migrants - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/dc-migrants-texas-national-guard-bowser-denied/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/05/dc-migrants-texas-national-guard-bowser-denied/ |
A sign is displayed outside a D.C. Health monkeypox vaccine clinic, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022, in Washington. Three D.C. Health clinics began offering limited walk-up monkeypox vaccinations for eligible residents Friday, pending vaccine availability. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Even before the first U.S. case of monkeypox was confirmed in Massachusetts in mid-May, D.C. public health officials were preparing for an influx of infections.
The District soon recorded more cases per capita than any state, and launched an aggressive vaccination effort to blanket the at-risk community in protection. The federal government gave the city and other hotspots priority access to vaccines. But a nationwide shortage has left much of the gay and bisexual community — most cases are among men who have sex with men — awaiting doses as infection spreads.
The federal government this week declared monkeypox a 'public health emergency’ to shake loose funding and bolster its response to the rapidly-spreading virus, which is shared through close personal contact and has so far predominantly infected men who have sex with men. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showed more than 7,100 cases had been recorded across the country as of early August, a total that has doubled about every eight days and which experts say is a significant undercount.
How can I get vaccinated in D. C.?
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Robert Bickford, who led Prince George’s Community College, dies at 92
He helped grow the school into a ‘vitally important’ institution, said former Prince George’s County executive Rushern L. Baker III
Robert I. Bickford led Prince George's Community College for 27 years. (Doug Barber)
Robert I. Bickford, who led Prince George’s Community College for 27 years, overseeing its growth into one of the county’s major centers of professional training and educational advancement, died Aug. 3 at his home in Bowie, Md. He was 92.
The cause was respiratory failure, said his daughter Robin Brooks.
Dr. Bickford was a lifelong resident of Prince George’s County, where he began his career as a high school physical education teacher in the 1950s. He rose through the administrative ranks at PGCC before his appointment as president in 1972 and, by the time he retired in 1999, had led the Washington-area college for well over half its history.
He “built it from its foundation” into an “important higher educational institution,” said Rushern L. Baker III, a former Prince George’s County executive, describing PGCC in a phone interview as “vitally important to the county and its growth.”
PGCC was founded as an evening school at Suitland High School in 1958, with an inaugural class of 71 full-time and 114 part-time students. Nine years later, the college moved to Largo, where its main campus remains today.
Under Dr. Bickford’s leadership, PGCC’s student population rose from 10,000 to 35,000, and its annual budget grew from $7.7 million to $50 million, according to a Washington Post report. Its physical expansion included the construction of a $13.5 million science center, Chesapeake Hall, which featured 17 new laboratories.
PGCC today includes five satellite locations across the county, from Laurel to Upper Marlboro.
The expansion of PGCC coincided with the growth of the region. Prince George’s County, once majority White, became majority African American in the 1980s. The demographic shift was reflected in the student body at PGCC, where Black students constituted 15 percent of the student body when Dr. Bickford took office and 70 percent of the total when he stepped down.
Department of Data: Is Prince George’s still the richest majority-Black county in America?
Critics of Dr. Bickford argued that he did not move with sufficient speed to bring similar diversity to the college’s teaching ranks. By 1998, just 23 percent of the college’s full-time instructors were people of color, The Washington Post reported.
Other critics noted that tuition rose to be the highest of any community college in Maryland. “It’s a dubious distinction,” Robert Hardwick, his executive assistant, conceded to The Post in 1991. But PGCC remained substantially less expensive than many four-year institutions and, by all accounts, provided tens of thousands of students with a path toward greater education and professional opportunity. In 1978, The Post described the college as “the backbone of higher education for the average county resident.”
PGCC generally catered to older students, many of whom attended classes part-time. Some planned to pursue an associate’s degree at the school and then transfer to a four-year institution, such as the University of Maryland; others were seeking technical or professional training to make themselves more competitive in the job market.
Compared with many four-year colleges, PGCC offered smaller class sizes and more flexible hours, which were of critical importance to students who also held down jobs. Some students enrolled for remedial instruction in English or math; others sought degrees or certificates in fields including health care, hospitality, accounting, public safety, criminal justice, computer science and automotive technology.
Dr. Bickford transformed “what might have been an after-school or night program,” Baker said, into “an actual college … where a lot of our children and future executives are starting their careers.”
Dr. Bickford was succeeded in 1999 by Ronald A. Williams, the first African American to lead the community college.
“Dr. Bickford was a visionary leader who set in motion groundbreaking initiatives at the College during his 27-year tenure as president, the effects of which are felt profoundly today,” the current president, Falecia D. Williams, said in a statement. “We would not be where we are as a community if not for Dr. Bickford’s belief in who [we] could become and steadfast commitment to guiding us there.”
Robert Ira Bickford Jr. was born in Brentwood, Md., on Aug. 5, 1929. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a homemaker.
Dr. Bickford was a 1945 graduate of Bladensburg High School, where he was elected class president and showed an affinity for athletics, playing baseball, basketball and soccer, according to his family.
He enrolled at the University of Maryland, where he played on the school’s baseball team — once facing off against future president George H.W. Bush, playing for Yale — and received a bachelor’s degree in education in 1950. He received a master’s degree in education in 1964 and a PhD in higher education in 1972, both from George Washington University, according to his family.
Dr. Bickford began his career in education that year as a physical education teacher at Maryland Park High School. He later taught at Suitland High School, where he coached sports including baseball, basketball and football, instructing student-athletes including future U.S. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Baltimore Orioles manager Ray Miller.
Dr. Bickford was teaching at Suitland High when PGCC opened and was first employed by the college as a part-time instructor and golf coach. He joined the staff two years later as director of student activities and athletics. He was later dean of the evening and summer school division before assuming the presidency.
His wife of 64 years, the former June Douglas, died in 2014.
Survivors include five children, Beverly Schill of Bowie, Mark Bickford of Wake Forest, N.C., Susan Mathias of Stephens City, Va., Wayne Bickford of Crofton, Md., and Robin Brooks of Ellicott City, Md.; 12 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
Reflecting on his career, Dr. Bickford told The Post in 1998 that he found pride and meaning in what the community college “stands for.”
“It provides the opportunity for everyone to go to college,” he said. “To see people that didn’t have much of a chance make something of their lives has always been very fulfilling to me.” | 2022-08-05T19:17:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Robert Bickford, who led Prince George’s Community College, dies at 92 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/05/robert-bickford-prince-georges-community-college/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/05/robert-bickford-prince-georges-community-college/ |
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