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A new study reviewing hundreds of scientific papers identified more than 200 unique links between nature and our lives
An elk walks past the Roosevelt Arch, near the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Mont., on June 20. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Humans have long benefited from nature’s offerings. But beyond being an essential source of food, water and raw materials, the natural world can contribute to people’s overall well-being through a host of intangible effects — and, according to new research, there are many more critical connections between humans and nature than one might think.
After reviewing hundreds of scientific papers on “cultural ecosystem services,” or the nonmaterial benefits of nature, researchers have identified 227 unique pathways through which people’s interactions with nature can positively or negatively affect well-being, according to a paper published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.
The paper is believed to be the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding and quantifying the complex ways in which people and nature are connected. And its findings could have significant real-world implications, said Lam Thi Mai Huynh, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral candidate at the University of Tokyo.
“For the modernized world, people tend to disconnect from nature,” she said. “For ecosystem management, the best solution, the most sustainable solution, is to connect people back to nature and let the local people be the ones who help to maintain and manage the ecosystem services.”
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For Huynh, the ambitious research — an undertaking that even her academic supervisor initially thought might not be possible — stemmed from a desire to improve understanding of the complicated underlying processes behind how nature’s intangible effects — such as opportunities for recreation and leisure or spiritual fulfillment — have an impact on well-being. One major challenge, though, is that much of the existing scientific literature on cultural ecosystem services has been “highly fragmented,” the review noted.
“You have all sorts of different people looking at [the intangible benefits of nature] through a different lens,” said Alexandros Gasparatos, an associate professor at the Institute of Future Initiatives at the University of Tokyo who co-authored the paper. Although having diverse research is critical, he said, “it becomes a little bit difficult to bring everything together.”
But the new study, a systematic review of roughly 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, creates “an excellent knowledge base,” Gasparatos said.
“The whole point of doing this exercise is to understand the connection,” he added. “We give names to phenomenon.”
The review breaks down the hundreds of possible links between individual aspects of human well-being (mental and physical health, connectedness and belonging, and spirituality, among others) and cultural ecosystem services, such as recreation and tourism, aesthetic value and social relation. The researchers then went a step further and identified more than a dozen distinct underlying mechanisms through which people’s interactions with nature can affect their well-being.
Researchers found that the highest positive contributions were seen in mental and physical health. Recreation, tourism and aesthetic value appeared to have the greatest impact on human health through the “regenerative” mechanism, or experiencing restorative effects from being in nature such as stress relief, according to the paper. Meanwhile, the highest negative effects are linked to mental health through the “destructive” mechanism, or direct damages associated with the degradation or loss of cultural ecosystem services, the researchers wrote.
“In reality, you don’t just have one pathway,” and the effects aren’t always positive, Gasparatos said. “It’s not that if I go to the forest, I receive one thing.”
A well-designed park, for example, can be a place for recreation and leisure as well as connecting with other people. You might also find yourself appreciating the sight of towering trees and lush greenery or birds and other wildlife. On the other hand, a poorly maintained natural space could lead to an ugly or visually threatening landscape that might make you feel uncomfortable or scared to be there.
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The paper can provide a road map of sorts, Huynh said, to help people, particularly decision-makers, understand that there are not only various intangible benefits to interactions with nature, but also how to try to achieve them.
“If we understand the underlying process, we can help to design better interventions for ecosystem management,” she said. “We can help to improve the contributions of nature to human well-being,” in addition to potentially bettering sustainable management practices and eliminating some of the negative effects on well-being.
“It’s a long time coming to have a study like this that makes some of these linkages a little clearer,” said Keith Tidball, an environmental anthropologist at Cornell University. “This stuff has been scattered all over the place for a long, long time, and this paper takes a huge step forward in sorting out what has been previously pretty muddled.”
Anne Guerry, chief strategy officer and lead scientist with the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University, agreed. “They did a really nice job of bringing together extraordinarily diverse literature,” she said. It’s been a challenge, she noted, among researchers to be able to present the science in a way that reveals where and how nature provides the greatest benefits to people, which could in turn help “inform and motivate investments in conservation and restoration that lead to better outcomes for both people and nature.”
For instance, the research could have an impact on the role nature potentially plays in human health. “What this is going to be seriously useful for is to be able to continue to work to make the case that physicians and clinicians can actually prescribe outdoor time, outdoor recreation, even outdoor space because of these pathways that they’ve identified in this paper,” Tidball said.
In one scenario, elements of this work could ultimately be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, said Elizabeth Haase, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Climate Change and Mental Health.
“That sets us up to be able to say that when we facilitate this kind of interaction with nature, you see this kind of benefit, and then prescribe these kinds of natural experiences, or have policies that say that you’re really depriving someone of their mental health if you destroy these natural landscapes,” she said.
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But the review does have limitations, prompting some experts to caution against overinterpreting or overemphasizing its results.
One potential issue is that the existing research included in the review disproportionately focuses on individuals rather than groups.
“There are multiple times where something might be really good for an individual, but overall for the community, it might not be very good at all,” said Kevin Summers, a senior research ecologist with the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“In many cases, there can be unintended consequences for things that look like very simple, straightforward decisions,” Summers added.
Research gaps should also be taken into account, Guerry said. While the review suggests that some connections between certain human well-being characteristics and cultural ecosystem services appear stronger than others, it doesn’t mean those other relationships might not be significant, she said.
“We have to be careful in terms of oversimplifying the results and thinking that a lack of a documented relationship in this paper means that something isn’t important,” she said. Instead, it may mean that “it hasn’t been studied and we haven’t found ways to quantify it and bring it into the scientific literature and out of our sort of implicit understanding.”
The researchers addressed the limitations of their work, noting in the paper that future research “should explore in-depth how these pathways and mechanisms manifest in less studied ecosystems and understand their differentiated effects to various stakeholders.”
In the meantime, though, the findings serve as an important reminder of nature’s necessity.
“It can justify, very well, a mind-set like, ‘Let’s invest in nature because it has all these benefits,’ ” Gasparatos said.
With such strong positive benefits related to creativity, belonging, regeneration and more, “it’s easy from this paper to feel that your constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness requires a country to preserve natural spaces,” Haase added.
In a time when many people are becoming further separated and distanced from “our ecological selves,” efforts to link humans and nature are not only interesting in terms of science, philosophy or ethics, Tidball said, but “there are also human security implications here that are significant.” And, he said, if steps aren’t taken to reconnect people with nature, the consequences could be dire.
“If we continue on a pathway as a species of being in a state of ecological amnesia,” he said, “we’re going to find ourselves out of habitat and out of time and, therefore, out of luck.” | 2022-08-05T19:25:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New study finds nature affects our lives in more ways than you think - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/08/05/nature-study-impact-hiking-outdoors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/08/05/nature-study-impact-hiking-outdoors/ |
Field organizer Jae Grey places signs on a podium before an election watch party for abortion rights advocates in Overland Park, Kan., on Aug. 2. (Dave Kaup/AFP/Getty Images)
Democrats are salivating at the prospect that Kansas’s vote on Tuesday in support of abortion rights might give them a way out of an otherwise disastrous midterm cycle. History suggests they should curb their enthusiasm.
They should consider another landmark ballot initiative: California’s 1978 vote for Proposition 13. The measure, which cut property taxes by about two-thirds and severely limited the state’s ability to raise taxes subsequently, was an earthquake for its time. For decades, politics had been dominated by the New Deal coalition, which consistently expanded government’s reach and hiked taxes to pay for it. Yet 65 percent of Californians voted to go in the opposite direction. The fact that some of the largest pro-tax-cut majorities came in areas dominated by the working-class, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, made the vote politically frightening for the Democratic Party.
Republicans sprang into action almost overnight. Proposals for a tax cut, which had previously languished and was supported only by the then-tiny supply-side economics movement, became party orthodoxy. The party sent leaders such as former California governor Ronald Reagan around the country in “tax squads” to make dramatic tax-cutting a signature issue for the fall midterms. They hoped this would spark a groundswell of public opinion that could help the GOP, which had only 143 seats in the House, make significant gains.
Those hopes were dashed in the midterms later that year. The GOP gained only 15 House seats and remained utterly powerless. It picked up three seats in California, but Democrats continued to dominate the state’s congressional delegation. The same result occurred in the California legislature, where Republican gains were small and Democrats still easily controlled both chambers. Reagan had hoped Prop 13 would ignite a “prairie fire” that would sweep the nation; instead, the blaze was quickly stamped out.
It’s easy to understand why in retrospect. Democrats shifted some ground to defang the threat, passing a capital-gains tax cut that was dead on arrival before Prop 13. Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown had opposed Prop 13, but shifted immediately after its passage to ensure that it was faithfully implemented rather than undermined. Brown trailed his Republican opponent, Attorney General Evelle Younger, by four points when Prop 13 passed. By November, thanks to his switch in position, he was able to crush Younger by nearly 20 points.
Democrats and Republicans can take some lessons from the Prop 13 experience. First, voters do not automatically associate a party with a position on a ballot initiative, even if they have good reason to do so. Many partisans might disagree with their party on one issue but still prefer it overall. Democrats who note that a minimum of 20 percent of Kansas Republican primary voters on Tuesday also supported abortion rights should not assume they will abandon their party in the fall.
Individual positions also matter. Brown didn’t try to fight against the tide of public opinion. Voters forgave his prior opposition when they saw he was willing to back their priorities. Similarly, Republicans who campaign against abortion rights in the first trimester of pregnancy are likely to be viewed differently by swing voters than those who support limits in later stages of pregnancy.
Republicans can also adapt by emulating Brown. His adroit shift gave something to both sides. He resisted liberal efforts to undermine Prop 13 while also steering massive amounts of state revenue to shore up public services. Republicans running for federal office could do something similar by pledging not to support any federal legislation on abortion, saying it is properly a state issue. That would likely sooth the fears of swing voters who support abortion rights and worry about a nationwide ban while letting antiabortion activists win victories in places where they hold the upper hand.
None of this diminishes the significance of the Kansas vote. Polls have long showed that Americans tend to support abortion rights in the early stages of pregnancy and support restrictions or outright bans in later stages. The fact that nearly 60 percent of Kansas voters, and implicitly nearly all non-Republicans, endorsed that view is incredibly important for national politics going forward. The Republican Party’s first president, Abraham Lincoln, said that “public sentiment is everything.” Today’s party would be well-advised to follow his advice and work to mold opinion on abortion rather than stand in opposition to it.
Indeed, Prop. 13 helped set the contours of Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, in part because Democrats nationally never followed through on their initial accommodations to that sentiment. They were forced to play catch up in the years after Reagan’s 1984 landslide. The challenge for Republicans is to avoid that conundrum.
Kansas’s abortion vote might prove to be as important as Democrats hope and Republicans fear. Nevertheless, how both parties react to the referendum’s results will likely be more important to the midterms than the referendum itself. | 2022-08-05T19:26:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why Kansas’s abortion vote doesn’t spell doom for Republicans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/kansas-abortion-republicans-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/kansas-abortion-republicans-midterms/ |
Judges rely on Wikipedia for their opinions, a new study finds
We all use the online encyclopedia, but is it good that legal decisions make frequent use of its community-based scholarship?
Perspective by Noam Cohen
Noam Cohen, author of “The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball,” writes about how digital technologies are changing society.
Judges cited cases with Wikipedia articles more frequently than they did cases without such articles, a new study found. (iStock)
Wikipedia’s administrators — community-elected volunteers who control how an article can be edited — rejected those readers’ demands as unsourced and then “locked down” the article so only established editors could make a change, which just helped feed the conspiracy theories. Fox News personality Sean Hannity sent out a blog post’s headline on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social network: “Wikipedia Changes Definition of Recession and Then Locks Page.” Elon Musk tweeted at Jimmy Wales, the co-founder and public face of the project: “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity.” Wales pointed Musk to an explanation of what happened, adding, “Reading too much Twitter nonsense is making you stupid.”
This fight over whether the United States is in a recession is striking because of the lofty status it confers on Wikipedia as an objective truth-teller. Here are people who have convinced themselves that the government is lying to them, and they turn to a collaborative encyclopedia to be assured that they are right, like settling a bar bet with the Guinness World Records or checking a proposed word in Scrabble with Merriam-Webster.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but exceedingly rare is the judge who openly credits Wikipedia, so how could the researchers say confidently that judges were relying on it? How to prove not just correlation (it sure seems like the judge was using Wikipedia) but causality (this decision could have been written this way only after the judge read Wikipedia)?
One way might be to introduce a subtle error that serves as a marker — if a party in a case has a strange, made-up middle name that appears only in the Wikipedia article and then appears in a judge’s decision, the evidence would seem pretty clear. (Cartographers trying to prevent their maps from being copied have been known to make up a street name to catch the guilty party.) However, researchers didn’t want to introduce an error on purpose. Maybe you could examine the judges’ computers for the sites they visited, or conduct interviews? But the legal system isn’t exactly a Petri dish, designed for close study without hindrance. Instead, researchers proved the connection through a randomized control experiment, with the judges of Ireland their unwitting test subjects.
Beginning in early 2019 and continuing through early 2020, law professors and their students at Maynooth were tasked with preparing for publication 154 Wikipedia articles on influential Irish Supreme Court decisions; fortunately, only nine such Wikipedia articles existed at the time. Each author would be assigned a pair of articles. An experienced Wikipedia editor guided half the articles (one from each pair) onto the platform, letting curious fellow editors know that the mass introduction of articles came through the university. Researchers took great pains to add formatting to the articles so that Google and other search engines would quickly notice. The rest of the articles were held back from publication. “The only difference between them is one of them gets put on Wikipedia and one of them doesn’t, and then you just wait,” said Neil C. Thompson, a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and lead author of the study.
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The researchers reported that the 77 published articles instantly found an audience, receiving a total of 56,733 views through Jan. 16 of this year. Analyzing court decisions written after the new articles were published, they detected a statistically significant pattern. The Supreme Court decisions with Wikipedia articles saw a 20 percent increase in the number of times they were cited by judges, as compared to the cases whose Wikipedia articles were held back. All of that increase came from lower-level judges, whom the paper’s authors presumed were overburdened and lacking the time and resources to do formal legal research. In addition, the researchers found in decisions a similar spike in the use of certain words and phrases that first appeared in the Wikipedia articles — another way of proving causality.
The paper doesn’t offer details on how cases were decided. There is no example of a decision that was particularly indebted to a certain Wikipedia article. And the authors take pains to say they didn’t find an example of a case being wrongly decided — they stand by the accuracy of the articles they published. They instead wanted to prove the ubiquity of Wikipedia in our lives, what they call “knowledge on tap.”
In 2017, Thompson helped conduct a similar experiment involving chemistry to test whether Wikipedia “doesn’t just reflect the state of the scientific literature, it helps shape it.” Pairs of articles were created then, too — one to be published, one not. After an article on a certain chemistry topic was introduced, researchers noticed that journal articles mirrored the language and conclusions in the Wikipedia account. The academic research that was footnoted in the Wikipedia articles was found to be cited more often in subsequent academic publications, as well.
“I think what we learned from the first one was that scientists are like everybody else in society — we all are reading Wikipedia all the time, right?” Thompson said in an interview. “Some people had this view that you search for everyday things on Wikipedia, but then when you did science and serious stuff, then you only used textbooks and stuff like that. And that wasn’t what I saw going on around me. And so we said, okay, I think we should look at this effect.”
That judges were dependent on Wikipedia seems more serious, Thompson said, if for no other reason than that judges may hold a person’s fate in their hands. The paper’s disdain for that shortcut-taking is palpable, contrasting such behavior with Alexander Hamilton’s description of judges as members of an elite who commit to “long and laborious study to acquire a competent knowledge” of the law. What about the potential, the paper’s authors ask, for one side in a legal argument to edit the article about a relevant case to back its argument and persuade the judge? Should justice be allowed to hang on such a thin reed?
In practical terms, the more important finding in the research isn’t that judges may be vulnerable to self-interested changes to Wikipedia articles but that we now know definitively that judges rely on such articles. By proving this about judges, and scientists as well, the papers’ authors are helping demystify those priestly classes. They live in our world and use the same resources we do. “I think that we in academia are front of that line in terms of, you know, feeling two different ways about Wikipedia in sort of what we’re saying and what we’re doing,” Thompson said. “I absolutely think that it is very important that we just are upfront about the fact we do use Wikipedia.”
Armed with this fact, the solution shouldn’t be to shame those who use Wikipedia but rather to make Wikipedia as reliable and inclusive of all parts of society as we all need it to be. As it happens, the outcry over the article on recessions did lead to a revision. While the description of how the United States formally defines a recession didn’t change, the article’s introduction now gives slightly more emphasis to the two-quarter definition, noting that it is “commonly used as a practical definition of a recession.”
VIPs expect special treatment. At Wikipedia, don’t even ask.
Among the researchers’ recommendations for Wikipedia is that experts be enlisted to create and watch over articles on their subject areas, which may seem to challenge the revolutionary premise of “the encyclopedia anyone can edit” (as I do, for example). But as long as the term “expert” isn’t tied to the number of academic degrees possessed but rather to demonstrated interest, experience and knowledge, the idea would seem to fit the way Wikipedia operates. People who care about a subject — whether warfare, medicine or LGBTQ+ issues — already watch over those articles. There are ongoing campaigns to create articles about women and minorities, who are significantly underrepresented in its pages. Intriguingly, the earlier chemistry paper has helped Wikipedia make the case for experts to get involved, Thompson said: “We showed in the first paper that if you add some content and there’s a citation to your paper, you’ll have more citations. So that was some incentive for them.”
Though the new Irish Supreme Court articles were shepherded onto the site by an experienced editor, avoiding suspicions about whether someone was trying to make inappropriate, wholesale changes to the project, at least one article was objected to and proposed for deletion. It concerned a case that was categorized as procedural — related to whether a court could review the constitutionality of a law if the legal action had been settled. The facts in the case involved allegations of domestic violence, however, and having a Wikipedia article suddenly brought to prominence events that had long been obscure. A new editor posted to Wikipedia demanding that the article be removed because it contains “in-camera and outdated information about an Irish citizen’s private life,” adding that “these publications have caused the individual particular distress and they have especially been used to blacken the person’s name in the workplace.” The Wikipedia community was not persuaded: “The decision of the Irish Supreme Court in 2004 is a matter of public record, has seemingly been so for 15+ years and it’s hard to see how the genie can now be stuffed back into the bottle. If there are genuine privacy concerns, this is not the way to go about it.”
And we are left to ponder the philosophical question of our age (forgive the hyperbole): If a tree falls in a forest and Wikipedia doesn’t write about it, did it happen? | 2022-08-05T19:26:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Judges rely on Wikipedia for their opinions, a new study finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/judges-rely-wikipedia-their-opinions-new-study-finds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/judges-rely-wikipedia-their-opinions-new-study-finds/ |
This new tool can’t do everything, but it’s capturing some of the first light emitted after the big bang, and that is already revealing wonders
Perspective by Joel Achenbach
Joel Achenbach covers science and politics for the National desk. He has been a staff writer for The Post since 1990.
W.R. for The Washington Post
Scientists describe those distant objects by their “redshift” — how far their wavelengths of light have been shifted toward the red end of the spectrum by the expansion of space since the big bang. The higher the redshift, the more distant the galaxy in space and time. There have been other infrared telescopes — the Spitzer Space Telescope explored that realm, and even the Hubble sees a little way into the infrared portion of the spectrum — but the Webb has a much bigger mirror. There has never been a telescope that could see in such detail those very early galaxies.
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Astronomy is a form of cosmic archaeology, because everything we see is a snapshot of some point in the past. A light-year is a measure of distance — about 6 trillion miles. So when we see something that’s four light-years away, we’re seeing the light it emitted four years ago. Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, is a couple million light-years away. The earliest galaxies emitted their light more than 13 billion years ago.
“The universe, it’s been out there, we just had to build a telescope to go see what was there,” project scientist Jane Rigby memorably declared at a news conference July 12 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, when the first batch of images were released.
“It is impossible to convey how hard it really was,” John Mather, a NASA scientist who won a Nobel Prize in physics for his research on the early universe and is senior project scientist for the Webb, told the crowd on July 12.
But it did work, and now the attention pivots from the amazing engineering to the amazing science.
Jane Rigby patiently walked me through what the Webb can and can’t do. One thing I learned: Even a million miles from Earth, with that sun shield providing the equivalent of SPF 1 million, the Webb isn’t in total darkness. The heavens glow in the infrared part of the spectrum because of sunlight bouncing off dust.
“It’s our stupid solar system,” Rigby said. “It’s the zodiacal cloud. It’s the light from our own solar system. We’re stuck in our solar system, and we can’t get out of it.”
The Webb probably won’t be able to see the very first stars, she said, “unless they’re kind enough to blow up for us.” But already, the Webb has detected a galaxy that emitted its light just 300 million years after the big bang — easily a record. The instruments on the telescope can do spectroscopy on that light to see what elements are present.
“How do we make us?” Rigby asks — and then explains what she means by that very simple question. “How do you make oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron? How do you make the periodic table? I think that’s going to be really important science that comes out of Webb.”
One of the most exciting tasks of the Webb will be to scrutinize exoplanets — planets that orbit distant stars. One tantalizing target is Trappist-1, a red dwarf star orbited by seven planets, several of which orbit in what is considered the habitable zone where water could be liquid at the surface.
Webb can’t see these planets directly — it gleans information from how they alter the light from the stars they orbit — but should be able to discern if they have atmospheres. Red dwarf stars periodically emit violent bursts of radiation, and astrophysicists want to know if planets around such stars can hang on to their atmospheres amid those stellar storms. Webb should answer that and potentially detect atmospheric water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide. That wouldn’t be proof of life but would refine our understanding of exoplanets. Future telescopes could possibly see not only atmospheres but surfaces, including “ocean glint,” said Knicole Colon, another astrophysicist at NASA Goddard.
Colon told me she is curious about whether the Trappist system has multiple habitable planets or, like our own solar system, just one. And she pointed out a basic truth about new astronomical tools: They always turn up something that wasn’t on the planning document.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever solve the universe, because every time we launch something new, we make new discoveries that are not expected — and then we have to figure those out,” she said.
Here’s a life-beyond-Earth question that scientists might someday be able to answer: Can a planet have just a little bit of life? Can life eke out an existence on superficially barren places like Mars? Or does life, when it gets a foothold, typically run riot, transforming its environment into a biosphere completely smothered in living things?
“There’s an idea that you’re either pervasively inhabited or you’re not. You’re not just a little bit alive if you’re a planet,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, a NASA Goddard astrobiologist, told me. “But that’s an idea. The whole point of science is that we have to test that hypothesis.”
The fact that there are so many unknowns should not be confused with the silly notion that we don’t know anything at all. Everyone has heard some version of this idea, which is not an intellectual argument so much as a moral one, a kind of chastisement for arrogating to ourselves the belief that we can understand our physical reality.
Hogwash. If you lived a few centuries ago and asked an astronomer how many light-years distant is the Andromeda Galaxy, the answer might be “What’s a light-year?” (and also “What’s a galaxy?”). The power of science is that it tells us what is true — or at least gives us the best, provisional approximation of what is true — rather than what we’d like to believe or what seems apparent at first glance. When Copernicus overthrew the Ptolemaic model of the solar system and displaced us from the center, it was just one step in a long and stunning journey to discover how we fit into the universe.
Science, broadly speaking, has been so successful over the last half-millennium that it has raised the bar for young researchers, particularly in physics. Watching an apple fall from a tree just isn’t going to cut it anymore if you are working on a dissertation. You may need to analyze data from an entirely new tool — like the Webb telescope.
Maybe one reason it is so hard to understand some of the fundamental features of the universe is that it’s outrageous on its face. It is packed with untold trillions of stars and galaxies and planets and moons, as well as complex organisms that ask hard questions about why they exist. That’s a lot of stuff to decode. If the universe were much simpler — just a lot of hydrogen and helium floating around — it wouldn’t be as inscrutable. It would be just a big, boring gasbag. (And it would run for president!)
What will be the Webb’s greatest discovery? Its most significant contribution might simply be its successful deployment as a tool that produces prodigious amounts of science. Maybe someday we’ll figure out gravity, cosmic destiny and life on other worlds, but for now let’s just remember that we’re making progress on the great unknowns.
Technology almost surely cannot solve every one of our global problems; a fancy new telescope isn’t going to feed the hungry, promote justice, end war or suppress the worst effects of climate change. But when something like the Webb comes along — a collaboration of NASA, international space agencies, the private sector, and the collective genius of scientists and engineers across the world — it reminds us that we can still do the hard stuff. | 2022-08-05T19:26:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Webb telescope is astonishing. But the universe is even more so. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/webb-telescope-universe-big-bang/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/webb-telescope-universe-big-bang/ |
The skyline of Milwaukee, along Lake Michigan, in 2019. (Carrie Antlfinger/AP)
The Republican National Committee announced Friday that Milwaukee will be the host for the 2024 GOP convention, tapping a swing state that helped decide the outcome of the past two presidential elections.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the vote was unanimous for a “world-class city,” while expressing her eagerness to work with local leaders for the multiday event at which the party crowns its presidential and vice-presidential nominees.
The party made the announcement during its biannual meeting in Chicago.
“We are eager to see it shine in the spotlight come 2024,” McDaniel said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the members of the Republican National Committee, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, the Milwaukee Host Committee, and Visit Milwaukee to deliver an incredible convention for our Party and nominate the next President of the United States.”
While Wisconsin is a swing state, Milwaukee, like many urban centers, is overwhelmingly Democratic. Still, Johnson, himself a Democrat, expressed his excitement for the upcoming event.
“We look forward to the positive economic impact of the presidential nomination convention, and, as the host city, I am confident all the attendees will find Milwaukee to be a splendid location for the event,” he said.
Republicans said their convention is expected to have a significant economic impact in a state that could be a key to the 2024 election. Donald Trump narrowly won the state in 2016. Joe Biden prevailed in 2020, securing the state’s 10 electoral college votes.
The Democrats are expected to announce their convention site at the end of the year or early next year; Atlanta, Houston, Chicago and New York are among the choices.
The latest: Hoyer says House expected to consider Inflation Reduction Act next Friday | 2022-08-05T19:26:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Republicans vote unanimously to hold 2024 convention in Milwaukee - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/republicans-2024-convention-wisconsin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/republicans-2024-convention-wisconsin/ |
Video games have long led to fights: controllers thrown, unsubstantiated accusations of cheating, insults hurled at mothers and even dogs. But no one has ever leaked classified documents related to national security in a public forum to win an argument — until last year, twice. And then again this year.
Beginning in 2021, players of “War Thunder,” a popular, free-to-play vehicular combat video game, have thrice posted classified documents related to three tanks of British, French, and Chinese origin, in an online forum dedicated to the game. The posting of the documents was reported first by UK Defence Journal, which wrote that one poster, who uploaded the manual to a British Challenger 2 tank, said he was motivated by a desire to get a “War Thunder” developer to make the tank more accurate in the game. Another poster, who claimed to be part of a French tank unit, uploaded a Leclerc S2 manual while engaged in an online debate about its turret rotation speed. The motivations of the user who posted allegedly classified information about China’s DTC10-125 tank, and a piece of materiel, was not clear.
“It was from a user manual so it’s classified, but it’s distributed fairly widely to anyone who uses the tank, supports it, or maintains it,” said Sonny Butterworth, a senior analyst for land platforms at Janes, a defense intelligence company.
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Yudintsev said Gaijin had not been contacted by the Chinese, British, or French governments in relation to these leaks. Spokespersons from the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. National Security Agency, U.S. Department of Justice, and U.K. Ministry of Defence all declined to comment. The French Embassy in the U.S. and Chinese Embassy in the U.S. did not respond to multiple Post inquiries.
According to Barbara L. McQuade, a former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and University of Michigan Law School professor, similar postings on U.S. company forums or about U.S. armaments could raise thorny questions around liability, national security and the first amendment. Gaijin isn’t subject to these same regulations since it is based in Hungary. | 2022-08-05T19:27:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | War Thunder fans leaked classified docs to get more realistic tanks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/05/tank-plan-leaks-war-thunder/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/05/tank-plan-leaks-war-thunder/ |
A small pink teddy bear left near the police tape line where Makiyah Wilson, a 10-year-old heading to an ice cream truck, was killed in a shooting in 2018 in Northeast D.C. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Ahead of a D.C. Council hearing in January 2020, the Bowser administration told lawmakers that one of the city government’s top priorities for the coming year would be reducing gun violence and making the District a model city for police community relations. The administration outlined actions it would take to lower homicides in the city.
D.C. police statistics paint a grim picture of the time since. It’s a sad portrait of failure that won’t surprise many residents. The data show there were nearly 1,330 more violent crimes with a gun during the past two years than there were the previous two.
The picture is explicit. From Aug. 4, 2020, to Aug. 4, 2022, the District registered 363 homicides; there were 282 in the previous two years combined. Robberies totaled 2,409, 893 more than the previous period’s 1,516. Assaults and cases of sex abuse involving a gun also climbed.
A tighter focus draws an even starker image. Year over year, homicides, at 128 so far in 2022, are up 12 percent. And robbery is even worse. The Metropolitan Police Department has already logged 1,271 this year, a 20 percent rise over the same 2021 time frame.
Has D.C. been sitting on its hands?
Since 2020, the city has spent — “invested,” officials say — millions in crime-related community based solutions. District-funded workers have been doing violence intervention and street-outreach work, focusing on neighborhoods plagued with gun-related homicides, robberies, assaults with dangerous weapons, as well as locations where most gunshot victims are found. Community groups have been sprinkled with loads of mini-crime reduction grants.
The city is also trying to pair people considered at high risk for involvement in gun violence — due to prior incarceration, criminal histories or having been crime victims themselves — with specialized teams that can help them access services like job training, subsidized employment and behavioral health treatment. It’s too soon to say whether any of that is working.
This week found Linda K. Harper, the city’s director of gun violence prevention, and Chris Geldart, deputy mayor for public safety, at the Correctional Treatment Facility, where they listened to inmates tell them how to address rampant crime in the city. In response to being told by a correctional officer that, “There are a lot of subject matter experts in here,” Harper reportedly said, “That is where the answers will come from.”
Surely Harper must have spoken with tongue in cheek.
She’s been at this work for more than 20 years. From her time as substance-abuse prevention and intervention coordinator, to a senior position with the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services dealing with criminally involved juveniles, to lifelong residency in Ward 4, which plays home to drug- and gang-related activity (and where I live, too), Harper knows her way around crime and gun death. “My view of gun violence is shaped by how much loss I’ve experienced," she said in a 2021 interview. "I’ve had friends who have been killed and I also have had young people that I have worked with be killed.”
This isn’t to say city officials need not visit the D.C. Corrections Department for insight and ideas. One can never learn enough. But what are we doing about what we already know about the forces driving violence?
One of the answers is as old as the problem: illegal guns. The second is as old as the first: repeat violent offenders.
Residents who hear continued gunfire, screaming sirens and see the yellow tape and sheet-draped bodies are left to fear that crime has a firm hold on their city and won’t let go. Need that be the case?
We must confront a reality as old as the socioeconomic ills that contribute to gun violence.
Most people killed in our city are Black. Most firing the guns are Black, too.
But to descend from that point to a senseless debate over Black-on-Black crime wastes time and ignores truth.
Exposure to violence does something to you. So, too, living under economic and social circumstances that tell you — no matter how you try to convince yourself otherwise — that your life has less value, and that drugs and alcohol can help you cope or escape. At bottom, feelings of hopelessness and self-hatred can leave you to live with a smoldering rage. It doesn’t take much for arguments over nothing, or a desire to retaliate for a slight or seize a chance to get your hands on something that doesn’t belong to you, to escalate to the use of a gun. Especially if there is no hope in the future to drive the day.
That is what we need to pay attention to. It’s not moral failures but public health problems coming our way at the point of a gun.
Alleviate poverty, make schooling and a paying job worthwhile? Of course. But let’s deal with the deeper challenges that bring those dreadful crime stats to us.
Face it D.C. We know what’s behind them. | 2022-08-05T19:38:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | At the root of rising gun crime in D.C.: an absence of hope - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/rising-crime-gun-violence-dc-causes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/rising-crime-gun-violence-dc-causes/ |
Roy Hackett, British civil rights pioneer, dies at 93
Roy Hackett in 2020. (Olumedia/Guardian/eyevine/Redux)
Inspired in part by the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, Jamaican-born British activist Roy Hackett partnered with a few friends to organize their own civil rights campaign in 1963, taking on the racist policies of a local bus operator in Bristol, England.
The company refused to hire non-White drivers or fare collectors, a policy that became clear to Mr. Hackett when he saw a Black man crying outside the bus company’s offices after showing up for a job interview only to be told the position was gone.
After hearing the man’s story, Mr. Hackett recalled, “I then went and spoke to the company and told them, ‘If he can’t be taught to drive the bus, then the buses won’t be driven.’ ”
Mr. Hackett went on to spearhead a successful four-month protest that was credited with awakening England’s grass-roots civil rights struggle and changing the face of race relations in Britain. He was 93 when he died Aug. 3. His family announced the death to British media but did not share additional details.
The Black boycott of the Bristol Omnibus Co. led to the end of Britain’s long-standing unofficial — but at the time legal — “color bar” policies. Until the boycott, it was common in Bristol to refuse housing or jobs to non-Whites. The bus company contended Black transport staff would discourage White passengers.
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By the time Mr. Hackett launched the boycott movement, London and other British cities had started taking down “No Blacks” signs and hiring non-White bus and train drivers and station staff. But Bristol had generally resisted change.
Mr. Hackett’s boycott gained key support from some White Labour Party politicians, including future prime minister Harold Wilson. Groups of Asian and White students at the University of Bristol joined as well.
Protest groups in Bristol, led by Mr. Hackett, stood in front of buses to stop them.
The bus company agreed to the protesters’ demands on Aug. 28, 1963, the same day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It took two more years for Parliament to pass Britain’s landmark Race Relations Act in 1965, which outlawed discrimination based on “race or ethnic or national origins.”
Mr. Hackett was honored by Queen Elizabeth II for his civil rights activism, but unlike King or Rosa Parks in the United States, he never quite became a household name in Britain.
“He could have been Britain’s Martin Luther King if he had the same PR,” said Kehinde Andrews, a Black studies professor at Birmingham City University, in an interview with the London-based Metro newspaper. He added that Mr. Hackett “was the one that could galvanize the community, working at a grass-roots level. He said he was ‘born an activist,’ and I could see the fire in his eyes about the situation, even all these years later.”
After the boycott success, Mr. Hackett founded several groups to support Caribbean and other non-Whites in Bristol. That led to the creation in 1968 of the St. Pauls Carnival (named after a district of Bristol), an annual summer event that brings together residents of all races and ethnic backgrounds.
Roy Hackett was born in September 1928 in Islington, Jamaica. He grew up in the Trench Town district of Kingston, the capital, an area that was later made famous by the reggae singer Bob Marley, who spent part of his youth there.
Mr. Hackett worked as a bookkeeper until 1952, when he left for England to help rebuild the country after World War II. He joined a group of migrants from the Caribbean that became known as the Windrush Generation, named after the first major ship, the Empire Windrush, involved in a surge that would bring hundreds of thousands of people across the Atlantic Ocean.
His ship was bound for Liverpool but diverted by bad weather to Newfoundland, where he and his family prepared to disembark, thinking it was England.
He settled in Bristol in 1956, but the “better life” he had been promised turned into what he once described as “a dog’s life.”
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His girlfriend, Ena, joined him in Britain and they married in 1959. They were regularly turned down for housing and jobs, he said.
“I walked down Ashley Road [in Bristol] looking for housing and found one house which didn’t have a card on it that said ‘no gypsies, no dogs, no Irish and no coloureds,’ ” he told the BBC many years later. “The lady opened the door, saw me, and without saying a word, just slammed the door. It was a struggle, people were blatantly racist.”
Mr. Hackett eventually got a job as a construction worker and helped build a nuclear power station known as Hinkley Point near Bristol. For a time, one of his fellow workers was the future Welsh pop superstar Tom Jones. “He was always singing,” Mr. Hackett told the BBC.
Survivors include two daughters, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Hackett told the Guardian in 2020 that the Black Lives Matter protests, first in the United States and then around the world, gave him renewed hope for racial justice. “We fought for what we have now,” he said. “Let’s push it further.” | 2022-08-05T20:04:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Roy Hackett, pioneer for Black civil rights in Britain, dies at 93 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/05/roy-hackett-civil-rights-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/05/roy-hackett-civil-rights-dead/ |
Federal salaries lag 22.5 percent behind private sector, report finds
By Eric Yoder
Federal employees' salaries lag their private sector counterparts by nearly 23 percent, a new report found. (Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg News)
Federal employees’ salaries lag their private-sector counterparts in comparable jobs by 22.47 percent on average, an advisory group said in a Friday report that noted the “pay gap” has held steady over the last two years.
The findings by the Federal Salary Council highlight the need for President Biden’s proposed 4.6 percent raise for federal employees, unions said.
“With the latest inflation figures, rising private sector wages and the new pay gap calculation, it is even more clear that federal employees need help keeping up with rising costs and the government needs help in recruiting and retaining skilled employees,” National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon said in a statement.
The last time the federal pay gap was computed, in late 2020, the council reported a 23.1 percent gap.
The council calculates pay differences on a national average and by some four dozen city areas using Labor Department statistics on costs of labor — not costs of living — under a formula set by a federal pay law.
Assessments using other data sets and methods have reached much different conclusions, though. Some conservative and libertarian organizations have concluded that federal employees make more than private sector workers, while the Congressional Budget Office in 2017 found federal employees to be slightly ahead on average but behind among those with higher levels of education.
Biden’s recommended pay boost would be the largest for the 2.1 million executive branch workers in two decades. Under the pay law, if Congress does not enact a figure by the end of the year, that recommendation takes effect automatically.
That seems likely to occur, with the House recently passing a spending bill for 2023 making no mention of a raise. A comparable bill in the Senate also is silent. Employee organizations and some Democrats in Congress continue to push for 5.1 percent, however.
In most years, the raise figure becomes an average, with part paid across the board and the remainder paid in amounts that differ depending on where employees work. The council this year calculated that employees working in the Washington-Baltimore area would be in line for one of the larger boosts.
The salary council projected that 0.5 percentage point of the 2023 raise would be devoted to location-based pay, although that, too, would be up to Biden to decide if Congress leaves matters in his hands.
By city zone, the largest increases in 2023 would be paid to employees working in the San Francisco-Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle-Tacoma, San Diego and Washington-Baltimore areas. The smallest would be paid to those working in the catchall locality outside the designated city areas, called the “rest of the U.S.”
At its meeting Friday, the council also recommended creating new localities in the Fresno, Calif., Spokane, Wash., Reno, Nev., and Rochester, N.Y., areas and expanding the boundaries of a number of existing localities. That would boost the salaries of some 33,000 employees by moving them out of the catchall locality.
The council’s recommendations now go to a higher-level group called the President’s Pay Agent made up of the heads of the Labor Department, Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management. That group in turn reports to the White House, with final action on a raise typically taken in a late-year presidential order.
The American Federation of Government Employees called on that group to accept those recommendations, saying they would “put additional money into the hands of federal employees whose pay lags behind their coworkers.” | 2022-08-05T20:43:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Federal salaries lag 22.5 percent behind private sector, report finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/federal-salaries-pay-gap-private-sector/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/05/federal-salaries-pay-gap-private-sector/ |
The Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper’s concert at Capital One Arena was a theatrical spectacle, not just a parade of familiar hits.
Kendrick Lamar onstage in Dallas in July. (Greg Noire)
What comes next when a musician already has legions of fans, buckets of money, a handful of platinum albums, shelves full of Grammys and even a Pulitzer Prize?
By his own account, Kendrick Lamar was “goin’ through somethin’ ” for one-thousand eight-hundred and fifty-five days — the time between his last two albums — trying to figure that out. On this year’s “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” the answer was introspection and vulnerability. But on Thursday night at Capital One Arena, Lamar turned his most inward album outward, changing the questions just when it seemed like audiences had the answers.
While concertgoers expecting a parade of old favorites might have been disappointed, those who have watched attentively and listened closely to Lamar’s decade-long journey were treated to a theatrical spectacle that rewrote the rules of the rap show in the same way that Lamar has rewritten the rules of rap itself.
The first sign that this concert would not be like other arena-ready affairs came early. A curtain rose to reveal a bare stage as 10 of the album’s “big steppers” emerged from below a runway in the middle of the crowd: men in black suits, women in white ones. After a bit of gentle choreography, Lamar sat at a piano and was joined by a twin ventriloquist’s dummy, a Lil’ Kenny reminiscent of the Lil’ Penny Nike ads of Lamar’s youth. The full-size Lamar rapped along with the miniature version for a couple songs — one of the night’s many artistic embellishments and the first but not last time Lamar would be in conversation with himself.
Kendrick Lamar’s new album feels vulnerable and virtuosic
As with his albums, onstage, Lamar continued his conversation with the musical titans that preceded him. Wearing a black military suit adorned with medals and paired with sequined shades, an earring and one glove, the rapper combined iconic looks from both Michael and Janet Jackson, a fitting choice for the man in the mirror who was firmly in control all night. He even had his own windup soldier dance moves, subtle complements to the stepping, swag surfing and spiraling performed by his dance troupe.
On the microphone, Lamar’s staccato, jackhammer flow was impeccable, his syllables as precise and piercing as when recorded. At times, he even flashed an impressive singing voice; though, perhaps it’s no surprise that someone with such mastery of his instrument can shift from rapping to singing as easily as an automatic car changes gears. And though the vocal notes were the attraction, Lamar seemed just as content to dwell in dramatic pauses that were pregnant with the crowd’s adulation (and likely gave him a chance to take it all in and catch his breath).
Along with the requisite pyrotechnics and spotlights, Lamar embraced visual elements to help tell his stories. Projections on a curtain resembled shadow puppets of sharks; angels; the couple from his divisive “We Cry Together” skit and — in place of the six guns aimed at him in the lyrics of “Count Me Out” — six arrows piercing his silhouette’s skin. Taken together, the artistic flourishes demanded the crowd’s attention, through their eyes and not their camera phones. As he rapped on “Element.,” “I don’t do it for the ’Gram”; it’s clear he didn’t want the crowd to do it for Instagram, either.
Not that certain moments wouldn’t be great to share with the wider world. At one point, Lamar was encased in a plastic cube alongside four dancers in hazmat suits, one of whom “administered” a coronavirus test right before he launched into “Alright.”
The song, which has found a second life as a protest anthem, was a familiar crowd-pleaser on a set dominated by Lamar’s new album. Old favorites such as the blustering “Backseat Freestyle” and the antagonistic fire starter “m.a.a.d. city” are still powerful but are starting to show their age. When Lamar let the audience sing along to his older hits, it was as if he was giving those songs away to the crowd; he’s just about done with them now.
To paraphrase Jay-Z, if you want Lamar’s old stuff, buy his old albums. These days, Lamar seemed more concerned with the personal dialogue on “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” — with agonizing questions (“If I told you who I am, would you use it against me?”) and bittersweet realizations (“I choose me, I’m sorry").
As Lamar closed his set with “Savior,” he looked toward the crowd and asked, “Are you happy for me?” Judging by the Cheshire grin across his face as he descended below the stage, Lamar knows the answer and is ready for the next question. | 2022-08-05T20:56:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kendrick Lamar rewrites the rules of the rap show - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/05/kendrick-lamar-rewrites-rules-rap-show/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/05/kendrick-lamar-rewrites-rules-rap-show/ |
I thought of those luxurious goose bumps when I read a recent report on the prison system in Texas — one of 13 Southern states whose prisons lack universal air conditioning. The study revealed that temperatures inside prisons regularly reached 110 degrees, and in at least one prison exceeded 149 degrees.
Those temperatures are shocking and cruel. But even in a country where 88 percent of homes use air conditioning, it’s not unusual for people to suffer from extreme heat. Certain people, that is. Lower-income Americans are much less likely than wealthier ones to have air conditioning and more likely to live in hotter, urban areas without shade — with potentially deadly consequences.
Phoenix, our hottest city, endured 53 days above 110 degrees and suffered more than 300 heat-related deaths in 2020. But Phoenix exists as a major American city only because the popularization of air conditioning after World War II spurred a population explosion there — from fewer than 250,000 in 1950 to more than 4.5 million in 2022. That’s millions of people living somewhere that, by design, requires them to find a way to stay cool to survive.
If that were the only problem — and if everyone had equal access to lifesaving air conditioning — that would be just a crazy little American factoid.
So the Earth gets hotter, producing greater demand for air conditioning, which makes the planet get hotter. Everyone — but especially people with fewer resources — will suffer for it.
But we also have to treat air conditioning like the luxury it once was, using it only when we need it most — and sparingly when we do.
A few years ago, the federal Energy Star program recommended setting home thermostats to 78 degrees, a recommendation that was not well received. The consensus seemed to be that a warmer house wasn’t worth the savings on energy costs. But what if we thought of a little extra sweat as saving the planet — and ourselves — from the cost of energy? | 2022-08-05T20:58:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What do we do when air conditioning is a matter of life and death? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/air-conditioning-global-warming-life-death/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/air-conditioning-global-warming-life-death/ |
Go ahead, Democrats: Take credit for the terrific jobs numbers
(Robert F. Bukaty/AP)
In 2008, amid one of the worst economic downturns in U.S. history, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed for the New York Times railing against a proposal for the federal government to prop up the automobile industry. Headlined “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” it bedeviled Romney’s ultimately unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign. The public had decided that amid economic crises, the government should do everything it could to stave off disaster.
Today, as we look at how our economy has fared in another crisis, we can say Republicans are equally wrong in what they would have done and what they still advise doing.
That’s one of the messages of the extraordinary jobs report released Friday, showing that employers added 528,000 jobs in July. By some calculations, the U.S. unemployment rate has reached its lowest point in half a century.
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Whatever difficulties the economy is having and whatever lies ahead, one thing that’s clear is that the United States is not in a recession at the moment. Not only that, President Biden can claim, so far at least, to have what may be the greatest job-creating record of any U.S. president.
Consider this comparison. Every Republican will tell you that, whatever you think of former president Donald Trump, he was great for the economy. In Trump’s first three years in office — before the covid-19 pandemic hit — the economy added 6.5 million jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In the first year and a half of Biden’s presidency — so, half the time — 9.5 million jobs have been created.
Even more remarkable, the U.S. economy has recovered all the jobs lost when the economy shut down in 2020, the most rapid employment recovery the country has ever seen.
As with all matters economic, the reasons are complex; and, of course, the large total number of jobs created reflects how far into a hole employment had fallen. But here’s one thing Democrats should never stop saying: Our approach to fixing that calamity has proved to be right.
Not that we couldn’t have done some things better. But the basic formula that was followed — pour as much money as possible into businesses, families, and local and state governments to get them through the worst of the crisis — averted what could have been prolonged catastrophe.
When covid-19 hit in 2020, Congress passed multiple rounds of pandemic relief, most notably the Cares Act, which passed almost unanimously in March 2020 (Republicans only oppose stimulus spending when there’s a Democrat in the White House). These efforts culminated with Biden signing the American Rescue Plan in March 2021. Every Republican voted against it, though many of them also tried to take credit for the provisions that helped their states and districts.
Those infusions of cash kept the economy steadily climbing out of the trough, and we’re now seeing the results. Of course, we know what Republicans would say: “But inflation! Inflation, inflation, inflation!”
Every time you turn on your TV, talking heads are highlighting inflation and Republican campaign ads say your local Democrat destroyed the economy with profligate spending.
Yes, inflation is high, and how quickly it will come down is unclear. (One bright spot: In the past month and a half, the average price of gas nationally has fallen by 90 cents a gallon.) But while it’s possible the pandemic relief spending made some marginal contribution to the current inflation, if it were all Biden’s fault (and the fault of Trump and the Republicans who supported stimulus spending while he was president), then we’d be unique in how much our prices are going up.
But we’re not. At the moment, inflation is a global phenomenon. Countries around the world with very different sets of economic policies are all experiencing higher prices than they had before the pandemic, and the United States places near the middle of the pack in the rate of inflation.
No one would dispute that inflation is a bad thing. But regardless of what Republicans did when Trump was in office, the argument they are now making is that having the government step in to save the economy was a terrible idea.
So they should be asked: What would you have done instead? Nothing?
Had we done nothing, millions of people who are now working would probably be unemployed. Americans would still be struggling to drag ourselves out of a nightmarish recession. The higher prices we’re seeing for milk and gas today might look like a picnic compared with what they could have been.
Republicans will never stop saying that whatever you don’t like about the economy must be the fault of Democrats. But if that’s true, it must also be true that Democrats deserve the credit for the terrific pace of job creation. If Republicans object to that, ask them why the decisions that led to this job market were so wrong. | 2022-08-05T20:58:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Go ahead, Democrats: Take credit for the terrific jobs numbers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/democrats-take-credit-for-terrific-jobs-numbers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/democrats-take-credit-for-terrific-jobs-numbers/ |
By Vladimir Kara-Murza
Global Opinions contributor
A billboard showing a Russian military pilot giving a thumbs up and reading "Everything will work out for us!" is displayed on a street in Moscow on July 20. (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images)
PRETRIAL DETENTION CENTER NO.5, Moscow — Every day is the same in prison, a monotonous routine from the moment we are woken up by the sounds of the Russian national anthem (the Soviet one, brought back by Vladimir Putin early in his rule) until the prison guard switches off our cell lights in the evening. The whole day ahead is known by the minute: the meals, the hour-long walk in a circle in the small prison courtyard, packages (on the days when they come in).
But the high point of the day comes closer to dinner, when the prison guard opens the porthole and hands us a stack of letters. Only someone who has been in prison can appreciate how important these can be. I receive dozens of letters every week from all over Russia; from places I’ve never been to, as far as Norilsk and Magadan. Most of the people who write to me don’t know me personally, but want to simply express their solidarity and support.
I am, of course, heartened by such sentiments, but certainly not surprised. From the start of Putin’s invasion I knew very well what his propaganda goes to great lengths to hide — and what some people in the West fail (or don’t want) to see: that there are many Russians who oppose this war. The Kremlin knows this. This is why since February it has shut down what remained of independent media, blocked more than 3,000 websites and instituted prison terms of up to 15 years for anyone who publicly opposes the war.
For the same reason, all of Moscow’s central squares — including Pushkin Square, the traditional site of dissident rallies in Soviet times, and Bolotnaya Square, which hosted the largest anti-Putin protests a decade ago — have been continuously occupied by riot police since February. While theaters, concert halls and sporting venues in Moscow have been fully open for months, the complete ban on public rallies remains in place, under the pretext of the coronavirus pandemic.
In such conditions, it is nothing short of remarkable that thousands of Russians — more than 16,400, by the latest count from human rights groups — have defied official bans and the threat of prosecution to stage antiwar demonstrations. But many more have expressed quiet opposition. Before my arrest in April, not a day would go by without people approaching me on the street or in a cafe to shake my hand and say “thank you.” Even more telling, stickers with the letter Z, the emblem of support for the war in Ukraine, are seen almost exclusively on official vehicles. (The police van in which I was driven on the day of my arrest had a large Z across the back window.) You would be hard-pressed to spot one on regular private cars on the streets of Moscow.
Growing opposition to the war among Russians received unexpected official confirmation thanks to a leaked poll conducted by the main government pollster. Publicly released polls invariably show overwhelming support both for Putin and for the war, but their reliability is about as high as the 99 percent official results for the Communist Party in Soviet “elections”; I continue to be amazed by Western analysts who take these polls seriously. A recent media exposé of the Russian polling industry revealed, among other things, that most people simply refuse to respond to pollsters’ questions for fear of repercussions — 2 in 3 before the start of the war, 5 in 6 now. “I don’t want to go to prison” is a popular reaction from respondents, according to a regional pollster. Unsurprisingly, the minority that does respond gives the expected “correct” answer.
But sometimes the Kremlin actually wants to know what Russian society thinks, and this is why it recently commissioned a survey about the war to the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center. The question was phrased carefully: Instead of a direct “yes” or “no,” the respondents were asked to select their “preferred option” between continuing the war and starting peace talks with Ukraine. The results were not meant for public consumption, but were leaked and published by the Bell, an independent online journal. According to government pollsters, the invasion of Ukraine split Russian society down the middle: The options of continuing the war and of starting peace talks received 44 percent each (a further 12 percent “declined to answer” — almost certainly belonging to the second half). Notably, a strong plurality both in Moscow and in St. Petersburg opted for peace talks, as did a large majority of all Russians below the age of 35.
The last finding is perhaps the most remarkable, as this is the generation that has grown up and formed during Putin’s two-decades-plus rule. Again, I am not surprised. In my extensive travels across Russia in recent years, I have met many young people who are tired of the archaism and autocracy of the Putin era. It is this generation — not Putin’s close circle that increasingly resembles Leonid Brezhnev’s aging Politburo — that will shape Russia’s destiny in the coming years.
Instead of generalizing and painting all Russians as enemies, as some shortsighted Westerners seem to be doing, it is important to find ways to start a dialogue with that part of Russian society that wants a different future for our country. If I can do this from prison as I pick up my daily stack of letters, it should certainly be possible for everyone else. | 2022-08-05T20:58:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Even from prison I see opposition the war growing in Russia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/russia-putin-opposition-ukraine-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/russia-putin-opposition-ukraine-war/ |
Another apology needed
Pope Francis during a meeting with Indigenous communities, including First Nations, Metis and Inuit, at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church in Maskwacis, Canada, on July 25. (Gregorio Borgia/AP)
Pope Francis should be commended for his apology to the Indigenous people of Canada for their brutal and humiliating assimilation in Catholic-run boarding schools. However, he missed an opportunity to apologize to Native Americans.
According to an investigative report released in May 2022 by the U.S. Interior Department on the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, from 1819 to 1969 the federal government operated more than 400 Indian boarding schools throughout the country. The Catholic Church received funding for many of them. The U.S. program served as the model for Canada’s. Both programs aimed to convert natives to, what they considered, “superior” Christians. Lasting devastating effects include widespread alcohol and drug abuse and deep-rooted mental health problems.
President Biden should build on the pope’s visit to Canada by offering a full and sincere apology to Native Americans for the U.S. boarding school program. This is long overdue. The Obama administration did offer an apology, but this was buried in a 2010 Defense Appropriation Bill. Mr. Biden’s apology should be along the lines of President Ronald Reagan’s to Japanese Americans in 1988 for internment during World War II and President Bill Clinton’s to Black Americans in 1997 for the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis. Mr. Biden’s apology would hold the federal government accountable for cultural genocide. It would also jump-start the healing process for Native Americans and provide a better understanding of the “story” of the United States.
Edward Drachman, Glen Allen, Va. | 2022-08-05T21:36:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Another apology needed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/another-apology-needed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/another-apology-needed/ |
Barriers to colonoscopies
A doctor holds an endoscope, used in colonoscopies. (iStock)
The Aug. 2 Health article “Colonoscopy prep is a terrible chore. Now there’s an easier way to do it.” described barriers to colonoscopies. Since July 1, 2001, colonoscopy has been approved for average risk individuals, and it is covered by all health plans. A barrier to colonoscopy is the preparation, that requires a liquid diet the day before the screening and laxatives. My colleagues and I follow Dr. Jerome Waye’s method and allow a full liquid diet which includes vanilla ice cream and milkshakes, plain yogurt, coffee and tea. This way the patient does not feel hungry or faint. The preparation is vital to the success of the screening. Another barrier is the cost of the laxatives. This can be resolved by using magnesium citrate and bisacodyl in appropriate patients or split doses of PEG3350 (MiraLAX is a common brand). These laxatives are easy to use and are much less expensive than Suprep.
Maurice A. Cerulli, Rockville Centre, New York
The writer is a gastroenterologist. | 2022-08-05T21:36:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Barriers to colonoscopies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/barriers-colonoscopies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/barriers-colonoscopies/ |
In both Russia and America, punishment does not always fit the crime
By Brian Broome
Brittney Griner stands in a locked cell during her trial outside Moscow on Aug. 4. The American WNBA star was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to nine years in prison. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Pool/AP)
Nine and a half years in jail is a long time. Fourteen years is even longer.
A child born today would be in fourth grade and exploring simple geometry by the time WNBA star Brittney Griner will be able to be with her loved ones again.
The same child would be about to enter high school — and maybe starting to think about driving — by the time Marc Fogel, a former teacher at the Anglo-American school in Moscow will be able to come home from Russia.
Fogel, a native of my hometown Pittsburgh, made what was probably the biggest mistake of his life in August 2021 when, in a misguided effort to manage his back pain, he tried to take about a half an ounce of medically prescribed marijuana on a trip to Russia. Now, he is languishing in a Russian prison cell for the next 14 years — unless something changes.
Griner’s story is better known: The Houston native was found to have vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage and was detained in February while returning to the Russian club team she played for.
Both were traveling to Russia for work. Both got caught doing something the Russian government prohibits. Both are now staring at years of imprisonment and isolation in an inhospitable land. The mind boggles.
The Post's View: Brittney Griner must go free, but not at any price
When I first heard these stories, I assumed both Americans were being railroaded. I don’t trust Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and so I immediately guessed that each of these cases was some sort of anti-American put-up job.
I then found out that both Griner and Fogel really had crossed into Russia carrying substances that are gravely illegal there. That the two are, at least in the eyes of the Russian government, criminals.
And my knee-jerk and regrettable response to that was, “Well, they should have known better.”
I’m guessing I wasn’t alone in this kind of thinking. In our culture, it’s not uncommon to look unfavorably on rule-breakers and say they should have known better. Many of us grew up with parents who favored the “hot stove” theory of education: you warn a child that the stove is hot, so they learn not to touch it. Often, the child touches the stove anyway. That’s the education part. Then you tell the child, “I told you so.” Burned fingers are the physical manifestation of what comes from not listening.
But there is something pernicious hidden in this lesson. Something we don’t like to admit or say out loud. And that is the concurrent belief that those who don’t listen to our warnings deserve whatever punishment they receive. It gives us a brief sensation of moral superiority to say, “Well, what did you expect?” Or, “I told you so.” We imagine the pain that others endure for ignoring our warnings is warranted, even reasonable.
We do this often in our own country. We hand down outsize punishments that really aren’t much about the crimes themselves but are mostly penalties for breaking the rules. We don’t hate crime nearly half as much as we love punishment. We are fanatically dedicated to upholding the rules even when the rules themselves — and the people who make them — are suspect. And we hand out sentences that speak to the vast distance between those who have no trouble following the rules and those whose lives that are harder, meaner, scrappier. We cling to “I told you so” because it helps one group maintain that distance.
But this kind of thinking is unproductive and often just cruel. And we can be just as ruthless as the Russians when it comes to the price we make people pay for not following the rules.
We must resist this kind of thinking because it is, at some level, vindictive. It is objectively wrong to punish two people for what amounts to a victimless crime. It’s an imaginary moral victory that provides comfort to no one. It might work on children, perhaps once or twice. But mostly, it just makes us feel better about ourselves.
Our government should work to bring both Griner and Fogel home. I know it will take weeks, if not months. I know we will probably have to trade some truly rotten bad guys away to get them back. And I know it will consume the time of a lot of people. But I know it will probably happen eventually and, when it does, it will be something we can feel good about. | 2022-08-05T21:36:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Brittney Griner got a bum rap in Russia. That happens a lot here, too. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/brittney-griner-russia-punishment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/brittney-griner-russia-punishment/ |
In Harvard admissions case, will justices cherry-pick their history?
Pedestrians walk past a Harvard University building in Cambridge, Mass., on Aug. 30, 2018. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
If you thought the Supreme Court term that just concluded was a disaster, brace yourself for the next one. The conservative justices will shift their focus to another long-standing goal: outlawing affirmative action in higher education.
Don’t hold your breath, I know.
The legal landscape is clear, if contested. Since the court’s splintered 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, colleges and universities have been permitted to take race into account as one factor in admissions to ensure a diverse student body. In 2003, the court, dividing 5-4, reaffirmed that basic rule against a claim that it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Now the justices are being asked to overrule that case, Grutter v. Bollinger, and given the transformation of the court in the intervening years, that outcome seems guaranteed.
So, what does history have to tell the justices? The briefs make a powerful case that the shorthand view of the 14th Amendment as strictly “colorblind” ignores the context of the time in which it was written — in the aftermath of the Civil War — and the willingness of its authors to approve “race-conscious remedies” for discrimination that are anathema to the current conservative majority.
“Absolute neutrality” when it comes to race “has never been a universal constitutional principle, either at the time of ratification or in the Court’s jurisprudence,” Harvard argues in its brief filed last month. “The Congress that adopted the Fourteenth Amendment … authorized numerous measures that benefited African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War. Against that backdrop, this Court’s far narrower holdings permitting consideration of race as one factor in an individualized decision are readily permissible.”
One such measure was the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which provided help for African Americans in everything from education to land distribution. When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the law creating the Freedmen’s Bureau, arguing that it helped “one class or color of our people more than another,” Congress overrode his veto.
The next year, Congress appropriated funds for “destitute colored people” in the District of Columbia, “rebuffing objections to the measure as ‘class legislation’ ‘applicable to colored people and not … to the white people,’” writes Harvard’s lawyer, Seth P. Waxman, a solicitor general under Bill Clinton.
An amicus brief filed on behalf of historians and law professors amplifies this view. “The Reconstruction Framers recognized that there exists an important distinction between, on the one hand, racial designations that denigrate and harm, and, on the other hand, race-conscious laws that ameliorate discrimination and advance equality of opportunity,” the brief argues.
The Constitutional Accountability Center, which advocates for a progressive interpretation of the Constitution’s original meaning, put it in even starker terms. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were the originators of affirmative action,” its brief contends. “Far from establishing an absolute constitutional ban on the use of race by the government, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment rejected proposals to prohibit any and all use of racial classifications by the government.”
What do those challenging the Harvard and UNC programs say in response? Tellingly, the brief by the group that brought the lawsuits, Students for Fair Admissions, makes almost no reference to history. An amicus brief for Edwin Meese III, attorney general under Ronald Reagan, asserts that the Freedmen’s Bureau example isn’t relevant because the 14th Amendment limited state, not federal, power, and because the “triggering characteristic” wasn’t skin color but having been enslaved. The history professors’ brief dismisses this account as “incorrect” and “ahistorical.”
Which brings us back to competing accounts of history, and the conservative justices’ demonstrated willingness to cherry-pick the version most helpful to their cause. Sorry to say, it’s hard to imagine them letting history get in the way of the result they desire. | 2022-08-05T21:36:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Ruth Marcus: What does history really teach about affirmative action? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/harvard-affirmative-action-supreme-court-case/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/harvard-affirmative-action-supreme-court-case/ |
The remnants of a structure in Fisty, Ky., following severe flooding in the eastern part of the state. (Arden S. Barnes for The Washington Post)
Regarding the Aug. 1 op-ed “The Kentucky flooding is horrific. So is Democrats’ lack of sympathy.”
The problem with Courtney Lucas’s complaint about the lack of sympathy for the flood victims in Appalachian Kentucky is that by voting for Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, Kentuckians vote against their own best interests with regard to climate change. When other states have disasters, Mr. Paul sees no need for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) relief, only keeping his mouth shut when it helps his own state.
More important, the Democrats’ anger that Ms. Lucas complains of derives from fear. Ms. Lucas needs to understand it’s not all about Kentucky. We’re afraid for the entire Earth.
Virginia Nuta, Montgomery Village, Md.
Lack of sympathy for victims of any disaster in our country, whether it be by fire, flood or GOP chicanery, is callous and un-American. However, Courtney Lucas’s disdain for some Democrats’ behavior in her Aug. 1 op-ed, “The Kentucky flooding is horrific. So is Democrats’ lack of sympathy.,” regarding the state’s flooding tragedy is misguided. We cannot single out Democrats for callous behavior. Party tribalism is not new to Americans, and it is not exclusive to any particular group. Victims of any and all misdeeds reach a boiling point. There are lots of justifiable grievances that can be lodged against the GOP and Kentucky’s leaders for either supporting or turning a blind eye on issues such as abortion rights, fair tax laws, LGBTQ rights, climate advocacy and election fraud. But mocking victims because of their state’s political posture or values is despicable.
My advice to Ms. Lucas is to realize that as a country we need to focus on sympathy and the financial support needed for Kentucky flood victims. We also need to remember the victims in our Western states and the out-of-control fires in such liberal havens as California, Oregon and Washington, despite any insensitive Democrats or Republicans.
Stephen F. Callahan, Annandale
The impressive Aug. 1 op-ed, “The Kentucky flooding is horrific. So is Democrats’ lack of sympathy.,” by Courtney Lucas might have been on the mark for some of the negative comments about the Kentucky flooding, but she missed mine. I don’t wish the anger of the Fates on anyone. However, I don’t see why citizens should not be held accountable for their actions.
Kentucky has consistently sent representatives to Washington who have voted against all climate-change legislation, fair taxation and health care. And they continue to do so. This accountability issue will affect the whole nation.
We can be certain the folks in Florida, those who helped to saddle us with Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis, will cry loud and long in a decade when more of their streets are underwater at high tide. The irony is they will blame the Democrats for not doing something to prevent it.
The issue is not a lack of sympathy but the old-fashioned American value of taking responsibility for your actions.
Richard O’Bryant, Alexandria | 2022-08-05T21:36:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Kentucky deserves our sympathy. Climate change deserves action. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/kentucky-deserves-our-sympathy-climate-change-deserves-action/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/kentucky-deserves-our-sympathy-climate-change-deserves-action/ |
Nuclear disarmament is more than a ‘worthy goal’
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres speaks at the start of the 10th annual review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at U.N. headquarters on Aug. 1 in New York. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The Aug. 4 editorial “Still a worthy goal,” concerning the review conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, didn’t go nearly far enough in its recommendation for negotiations. The editorial said that such negotiations are necessary, even if always difficult. But it should have gone further than just casting the goal of nuclear disarmament as “still a valid quest.”
Is it only a “valid quest,” as opposed to an existential imperative, to prevent a nuclear war that would wipe humanity off the face of the Earth? The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which annually assesses the risk of nuclear war, stands at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said on Aug. 1, opening the review conference, “Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation. ... We have been extraordinarily lucky so far, but luck is not a strategy.” The only strategy is to negotiate an end to weapons that will destroy us and all that we love. Nuclear disarmament is arguably the biggest challenge facing humanity, not just a worthy goal.
Jean Athey, Baltimore
The writer is a co-founder of Prevent Nuclear War Maryland. | 2022-08-05T21:36:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Nuclear disarmament is more than a ‘worthy goal’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/more-than-worthy-goal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/more-than-worthy-goal/ |
Not just your home
The Harleston Village neighborhood, back, is protected from the Ashley River by only a thin line of large rocks in Charleston, S.C. (Hunter McRae for The Washington Post)
At age 66, I’ve been around long enough to do the nostalgia tour in a number of places, starting in my hometown of Atlanta. Having lived in D.C. for more than 40 of those years, I and other residents aren’t immune to it here either. But Kathleen Parker’s Aug. 4 Thursday Opinion column “These days, I’m a stranger in my own town” about Charleston, S.C., left me wondering what she really expects. Put the city under plexiglass to keep New Yorkers out? Allow a “downtown in need of repairs” to crumble from the low country heat and humidity?
Charleston is an original American jewel. Though many people understandably view the city’s antebellum plantations through a different lens — seeing the suffering of the enslaved people who built them.
Charleston may well be underwater in a few decades due to climate change. Better to enjoy what’s there while we still can than moan about what’s lost. And while you’re at it, acknowledge its troubled history. Sorry, Ms. Parker, Charleston doesn’t belong only to you.
Karen Yudelson Sandler, Washington | 2022-08-05T21:36:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Not just your home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/not-just-your-home/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/not-just-your-home/ |
There is power in voting
Voter mark their ballots during the primary election and abortion referendum at a polling station in Kansas City, Kan., on Aug. 2. (Eric Cox/Reuters)
Regarding the Aug. 3 front-page article “Kansas voters reject bid to undo abortion rights”:
Women’s reproductive rights are the canary in the coal mine. If a Republican-tainted Supreme Court can easily strip basic health-care decisions from half of Americans, what is next? Voting rights, protections for LGBTQ individuals and many other democratic liberties we take for granted are in jeopardy. The resounding defeat of the Kansas antiabortion amendment is a bright light in these dark times. We can’t rely on our institutions anymore to protect us. We must get out and vote to protect our freedoms while we still can.
Ellen Coffey, Cumberland, Md.
I appreciate The Post’s in-depth coverage on Aug. 4 of the vote upholding a woman’s right to an abortion in Kansas. During the early 1960s, when I was a student at Oklahoma State University, I knew classmates who had to drive for two hours to Wichita, Kan., to get an abortion. Given the recent passage of draconian antiabortion laws in Oklahoma, considered the strictest in the nation, many more Oklahoma women will again have to make that trek. Luckily, Kansas has upheld its reasonable restrictions on abortions (up to 22 weeks of pregnancy).
This is just another reason that after living in liberal D.C. for all these years after graduation (and where I was able to obtain a legal abortion without any hassles 20 years later), I would never move back to my super-conservative home state. While I have several Catholic friends there who support a woman’s right to choose, I doubt that a similar vote in Oklahoma would be won so overwhelmingly.
Loretta Neumann, Washington | 2022-08-05T21:36:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | There is power in voting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/there-is-power-voting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/there-is-power-voting/ |
We must fight malnutrition
Mothers wait to be attended by a nurse with their children who present symptoms of malnutrition in Doolow, Somalia, on June 15. (Luis Tato for The Washington Post)
The Aug. 2 Health article “Rising temps could mean rising malnutrition in poorer countries, study on West Africa says” connected climate change with severe malnutrition and stunted growth. It discussed one of the many studies that reveal the importance of addressing the current food scarcity emergency, while simultaneously addressing long-term challenges such as conflict, climate change and covid-19 to prepare our global food system for long-term stability. Global malnutrition is not just an acute issue; it’s an ongoing tragedy that causes the deaths of about 3 million children under age 5 every year. Fortunately, scientific evidence has shown that a few specific interventions, the “Power 4,” can prevent the deaths of malnourished children.
The bipartisan Global Malnutrition Prevention and Treatment Act directs the U.S. Agency for International Development to focus on those high-impact strategies: prenatal vitamins, breastfeeding support, vitamin A supplements and ready-to-use therapeutic food. Recently, the bill was passed out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with no opposition. Now, a final vote in the Senate is the last barrier to making our nutrition foreign aid more effective. It’s time for the United States to step up as a global leader and support suffering families around the world. We need champions in the Senate to urge leadership to bring this critical bill to the floor for a vote.
Katie Fleischer, Washington
The writer is an advocacy associate at RESULTS, an anti-poverty organization. | 2022-08-05T21:37:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | We must fight malnutrition - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/we-must-fight-malnutrition/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/05/we-must-fight-malnutrition/ |
Quarterbacks Taylor Heinicke, left, and Carson Wentz throw on the fifth day of Washington Commanders training camp. Heinicke enters the season as Wentz's backup. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Taylor Heinicke did a bit of rebuilding this offseason, and one of his prized projects — all 7,541 pieces of it — is sitting at his home. Over the course of three days, Heinicke constructed Lego’s Millennium Falcon, a recreation of the starship from “Star Wars.”
He also built the AT-AT, a 6,785-piece movable transport and combat vehicle from “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” and two other massive Lego sets composed of thousands of pieces, which he shared in video posts on Instagram.
“Whenever I have time off, it’s something therapeutic for me to do to just keep my brain focused on something [other than] football,” Heinicke said.
Entering last season, Heinicke was Washington’s backup quarterback, but he ended up starting 16 games in the wake of Ryan Fitzpatrick’s career-ending injury. This summer, he’s back in that second-string role after the Commanders traded for Carson Wentz, but he used the offseason to work on himself physically and mentally — to focus on those little details that can be overlooked in a long season and have a big impact.
He turned to Legos after watching a close friend in Colorado build a set. And he altered his training regimen to close any holes that had been poked into his game. Often described as a scrappy and gritty quarterback, Heinicke has also been knocked for his arm strength. The Commanders’ scheme calls for stretching the field vertically, and often Heinicke struggled to get enough air under the ball to hit his receiver.
So this offseason, he went to Adam Dedeaux, a quarterbacks coach in Los Angeles who used to be a baseball player and now works with many of the top signal-callers around the league, including Carson Wentz.
“My biggest thing was just trying to work my footwork and then have more velocity on the ball,” Heinicke said. “So I’ve been working on the stuff that [Dedeaux has] been teaching me pre-practice and stuff like that.”
The magic of Taylor Heinicke is that he isn’t afraid
In 2020, Heinicke signed to be Washington’s “quarantine quarterback.” When he arrived, he was asked to keep a distance from the others in the room to ensure he’d be healthy and available in case coronavirus or injuries affected the position.
By the end of the season, they had.
Dwayne Haskins had been cut, Kyle Allen was hurt, and Alex Smith was nursing another leg injury. So Heinicke stepped in for his first playoff start, against the eventual Super Bowl champions, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His performance, which included a clutch pylon-dive touchdown, reset his career. But he also injured his shoulder, so he set out last offseason to bulk up.
“The durability was the biggest question mark,” Heinicke said. “I started one game back in 2018 [with the Carolina Panthers] and tore my triceps in the first half. There’s been a number of concussions throughout the years. So that was the biggest question mark I wanted to check, and I did that.”
He also had issues with his mechanics. Looking back at film, he saw his hips weren’t pulling through. A lot of his weight was on his front foot when he threw, so he couldn’t drive the ball well, and often his shoulder was down, prohibiting him from getting air under his throws.
Heinicke said Dedeaux opened his eyes to a lot of things he hadn’t otherwise noticed. Before practices, where Heinicke is typically the first player on the field, he goes through a unique warm-up routine to get his body ready. And at times during practices, Wentz has reminded Heinicke to think of what Dedeaux taught him about little details.
“Looking back at last year through this offseason … sometimes I overcomplicated things,” Heinicke said. “Sometimes I was looking too far into the defense when it’s black and white: If they do this, throw to here. I was just thinking too much. So one of the biggest things throughout this OTAs and minicamp is to just stick to the playbook. What we talk about in meetings, let’s just go out there and execute it; don’t think too much about it. I feel like I’ve made some strides.”
Taylor Heinicke belongs in the NFL, but he’s not Washington’s QB of the future
Heinicke knows through firsthand experience how much circumstances can change in the NFL and how quickly he might be called upon to lead Washington’s offense. Last year, he began as the backup to Fitzpatrick despite an impressive playoff showing the previous winter. This year, he is a backup to Wentz despite starting 16 games last season.
But he also knows his reality — and he could see it clearly late last season, when the Commanders set out to get another quarterback, either through free agency or the draft.
They didn’t offer him the opportunity to try to win the starting job before the season.
“I don’t think that’s an option,” Heinicke said in June. “You look at the NFL, and, at the end of the day, it’s kind of a business. And if you’re paying someone $30 million, and you’re paying someone else $2 million, you’re paying this guy $30 million to play, you know?”
Heinicke is the Commanders quarterback with the most experience in offensive coordinator Scott Turner’s system, but he arrived this year with peace of mind and the intent to serve a dual role: as reliable backup to Wentz and mentor to rookie Sam Howell — or, as he calls it, being a “Shaun Hill,” his mentor in Minnesota in 2015-16.
“I hope [Wentz] goes out there and succeeds,” Heinicke said. “Again, my job is just to back him up. Hopefully he’s on his deal, [and] I’m helping out whatever way I can, and if for some reason he goes down, I’m ready to go play. That’s how I look at it.”
As he prepares for his seventh NFL season, Heinicke has learned a few things about the game and himself — things he coincidentally often thought about as he worked on his new hobby.
“A lot of fun. Lots of details but frustrating at points, too,” he said of building the Millennium Falcon. “There’s so many small pieces that I had no idea where that fell off from. So I’d go back to the instructions trying to find it. That was my favorite.” | 2022-08-05T21:44:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders QB Taylor Heinicke is focused on the details of football — and Legos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/taylor-heinicke-spent-offseason-building-his-game-his-legos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/taylor-heinicke-spent-offseason-building-his-game-his-legos/ |
(Washington Post illustration; Ashley Landis /AP; Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment)
If you’re planning this weekend to tune into Evo — the fighting game bonanza co-owned by Sony that takes place annually in Las Vegas — don’t expect to see LeBron James.
Admittedly, nobody really had their hopes up on that front until Warner Bros. released the beta version of “MultiVersus” last week, a crossover fighting game that features popular fictional characters from the studio’s extensive list of IPs like Batman, Arya Stark and — yes — LeBron James, a basketball player so talented he can’t be real. In the game, you play as the cartoon version of the Los Angeles Lakers star from “Space Jam: A New Legacy.”
This year’s Evo will play host to a $100,000 tournament for the still-nascent brawler, but while the game is already garnering praise from genre faithful, some characters aren’t quite ready for prime time. This includes James, who is currently listed as “experimental” in the game. As such, he’s been banned, per the tournament’s official rules:
“Iron Giant, LeBron James or any other characters released after the start of Open Beta will not be allowed in the Evo 2022 ‘MultiVersus’ Open Beta Tournament,” reads the tournament rules page. “This is subject to change at the sole discretion of Warner Bros. and [’MultiVersus’ developer] Player First Games.”
“Imagine if LeBron went to Evo and they just stopped him at the door,” said one fan on Twitter.
“OK, now I absolutely want to see the real LeBron James go to Evo, enter the ‘MultiVersus’ tournament and cause mass confusion,” said another. | 2022-08-05T22:06:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | LeBron James banned from 'MultiVersus' tournament at Evo 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/05/lebron-james-multiversus-evo-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/05/lebron-james-multiversus-evo-2022/ |
WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added an astonishing 528,000 jobs last month despite flashing warning signs of an economic downturn, easing fears of a recession and handing President Joe Biden some good news heading into the midterm elections. Unemployment dropped another notch, from 3.6% to 3.5%, matching the more than 50-year low reached just before the pandemic took hold. The economy has now recovered all 22 million jobs lost in March and April 2020 when COVID-19 slammed the U.S. The red-hot numbers were reported Friday by the Labor Department. Economists had expected only 250,000 new jobs last month, in a drop-off from June’s revised 398,000. Instead, July proved to be the best month since February.
NEW YORK — As inflation skyrockets, hourly workers keep changing jobs in pursuit of higher wages. And with unemployment still near a 50-year low, experts say that option is likely to remain open to them for the near future. A new Pew Research Center survey shows that about one in five U.S. workers say they are very or somewhat likely to look for a new job in the next six months. But for many at the lower end of the pay scale, inflation has already eaten into or erased any pay gains.
NEW YORK — Stocks are closing mostly lower Friday after new data on the hot U.S. jobs market suggested the Fed won’t soon rein in its aggressive rate hikes. The S&P 500 is down 0.2% and the Nasdaq lost 0.5%, while the Dow Jones industrials notched a small gain. Employers unexpectedly accelerated their hiring last month and added hundreds of thousands more jobs than forecast. While the data suggests the economy may not be in a recession, it also undercuts investor hopes that inflation may be close to peaking. Treasury yields jumped. Warner Bros. Discovery had its third worst day ever after recording weak second quarter results.
NEW YORK — Amazon on Friday announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire the vacuum cleaner maker iRobot for approximately $1.7 billion. It’s a move that will allow Amazon to scoop up another company to add to its collection of smart home appliances amid broader concerns about its market power. iRobot sells its products worldwide and is most famous for the circular-shaped Roomba vacuum. Amazon says it will acquire the company for $61 per share in an all-cash transaction that will include iRobot’s net debt. The deal is subject to approval by shareholders and regulators. Upon completion, iRobot’s CEO, Colin Angle, will remain in his position.
DETROIT — 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. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent investigation teams to two crashes last month in which Teslas collided with motorcycles on freeways in the darkness, and the riders were killed. In both cases, the agency suspects that Tesla’s partially automated driver-assist system was in use. The agency says that once it gathers more information, it may include the crashes in an broader probe of Teslas striking emergency vehicles parked along freeways. Messages were left seeking comment from Tesla.
NEW YORK — Thunderstorms on the East Coast are causing travel headaches for tens of thousands of airline passengers. Airlines canceled more than 1,100 flights in the U.S. by midafternoon Friday. The highest numbers of canceled flights were at the three major airports in the New York City area — JFK, LaGuardia and Newark — and at Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C. American Airlines is canceling more than 200 flights — 6% of its schedule. That’s according to tracking service FlightAware. The Federal Aviation Administration says there were also long delays at many airports — more than 90 minutes at LaGuardia and Newark. | 2022-08-05T22:28:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: July jobs, Musk countersuit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-july-jobs-musk-countersuit/2022/08/05/73de2fa0-1502-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-july-jobs-musk-countersuit/2022/08/05/73de2fa0-1502-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Alex Jones attempts to answer questions about his emails during his trial Aug. 3 at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin. (Briana Sanchez/Austin American-Statesman/Pool via AP)
Infowars founder Alex Jones was ordered by an Austin jury on Friday to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, in addition to the $4.1 million Jones has been ordered to pay in compensatory damages.
Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, sought $145.9 million in punitive damages against Jones, a conspiracy theorist who falsely claimed that the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history was a “giant hoax.” Since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26 people, 20 of them young children, the boy’s parents say Jones’s remarks have created a “living hell” for the family.
The decision comes one day after Jones was ordered to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages — a ruling that the 48-year-old claimed was “a major victory for truth.”
The total of $49.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages is less than a third of the $150 million total that the family was seeking, and it remains to be seen how much of the punitive damages the parents will ultimately receive as Texas laws cap such awards.
The family pursued the $150 million figure in damages based on $1 in compensation and $1 in punishment for the estimated 75 million people who experts claim either don’t believe the Sandy Hook shooting happened or have doubts about it, according to their attorneys.
Jones was previously found by judges in Connecticut and Texas to be liable for damages in lawsuits stemming from his false claims that the shooting was a “false flag” operation carried out by “crisis actors.” Two other cases to determine damages are ongoing.
Though he eventually retracted his false claims about the shooting, Jones has been banned from major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Spotify.
During the trial in Austin, where Infowars is headquartered, Jones and his attorney were confronted with leaked text messages from Jones’s own cellphone, which the Sandy Hook parents’ attorneys said had been sent to him by mistake. This included a text message of Jones replying to an Infowars staffer warning him to take down an article alleging covid-19 is fake, according to NBC News.
“A year and a half ago, [Jones] is literally telling everyone covid is fake and he knows he’s lying,” the Sandy Hook lawyers reportedly said Friday, referring to Jones’s text message. “He’s not going to stop.”
The leaked text messages could also be of interest in the Jan. 6 hearing, and Mark Bankston, one of the Sandy Hook parents’ attorneys, said he will comply with the U.S. House Jan. 6 committee’s request for two years’ worth of records from Jones’s phone.
Bernard Pettingill Jr., an economic consultant, estimated in testimony Friday that the net worth of Jones and Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, was somewhere between $135 million and $270 million. Pettingill added that Jones was paying himself an average of $6 million annually. Alex Jones’s lead attorney, Andino Reynal, said last week that Free Speech Systems had filed for bankruptcy.
Jones has claimed in court filings that he has a net worth of negative $20 million, but attorneys for the Sandy Hook families have pointed to records showing that Jones’s Infowars store made more than $165 million between 2015 and 2018 alone.
Wes Ball, an attorney for the Sandy Hook parents, urged the jury not to believe Jones’s claims about his financial status, saying, “When this man talks, he lies.”
“Please take an amount that punishes him, and an amount that ensures he never does this again,” Bankston said, according to NBC News.
Unsurprisingly, Reynal recommended that the jury order Jones to pay a much smaller amount. Reynal suggested that the jury take the gross sum that Jones earns per hour, which is $14,000, and multiply it by the number of minutes the Infowars founder took in defaming Heslin and Lewis, which he estimated to be more than 19 minutes total. If that were applied, Reynal argued, then the family should get a total of $270,000. | 2022-08-05T22:28:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alex Jones must pay Sandy Hook parents $45.2 million more in punitive damages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/alex-jones-sandy-hook-punitive-damages/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/alex-jones-sandy-hook-punitive-damages/ |
Milwaukee to host 2024 GOP convention; 3 children among 10 dead in house fire
The Republican National Committee announced Friday that Milwaukee will be the host for the 2024 Republican National Convention, tapping a swing state that helped decide the outcome of the past two presidential elections.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the vote was unanimous for Milwaukee, a “world-class city,” while expressing her eagerness to work with local leaders as Republicans prepare to select their presidential nominee.
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson expressed his excitement for the upcoming event.
— Eugene Scott
3 children among 10 killed in house fire
A criminal investigation into the fire is underway, authorities said. The children who died in the fire were ages 5, 6 and 7, Pennsylvania State Police said.
Pregnant woman among 5 killed in crash; driver held: Authorities have arrested a driver after she allegedly sped through a red light Thursday and plowed into other vehicles in a crowded intersection, killing a 23-year-old pregnant woman, a child and three other adults in a fiery crash near a gas station in the unincorporated Windsor Hills, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles. The California Highway Patrol on Friday said Nicole Lorraine Linton, who sustained moderate injuries in the collision, was taken into custody on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence. | 2022-08-05T22:29:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Milwaukee to host 2024 GOP convention; 3 children among 10 dead in house fire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/milwaukee-to-host-2024-gop-convention-3-children-among-10-dead-in-house-fire/2022/08/05/9b46428c-0fb5-11ed-ab50-5d9e73892397_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/milwaukee-to-host-2024-gop-convention-3-children-among-10-dead-in-house-fire/2022/08/05/9b46428c-0fb5-11ed-ab50-5d9e73892397_story.html |
Supplies of C02, a byproduct of ammonia, have been running out over the past couple of months after planned shutdowns at some plants. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
To veterans of the industry, the CO2 shortage is nothing new. Last year, Alewerks Brewing Company had to shut down production for a week because of a limited supply of the gas, said Michael Claar, operations director at the brewery based in Williamsburg, Va. Claar wasn’t sure what caused that shortage.
Alewerks has been able to get CO2 this year, but it comes with a cost: a 20 percent surcharge on deliveries of the gas, Claar said. It’s one more price increase among many for breweries, which are dealing with across-the-board inflation on everything needed to produce and package beer: barley, hops, bottles, labels … you name it. Alewerks has been trying to absorb many of the costs, though the brewery expects to raise its prices this year.
Adding to the problem is the contamination of a site in Jackson Dome, Miss., which is one of the country’s largest CO2 producers, the Brewers Association wrote in its July newsletter. There, raw gas from a mine reduced the amount of food-grade CO2 available. Another factor is planned and unplanned maintenance shutdowns at several ammonia plants that are key producers of CO2, the association said, as well as the usual higher demand in summer months. That’s in part because of higher sales of beer and soda in warmer temperatures, and also because of butterfly-wing-like effects such as a need for more dry ice — which also uses CO2 in its production.
Gandsy hasn’t had to refill his 200-pound CO2 tank since the shortage hit the industry. But even then, he had to pay about 10 percent more than he did a few months earlier. He’s sort of bracing for the price of CO2 come September, when he will have to refill the tank. | 2022-08-05T22:54:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carbon dioxide shortage worries craft breweries - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/05/craft-brewers-carbon-dioxide/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/05/craft-brewers-carbon-dioxide/ |
Frances Tiafoe advanced to his first Citi Open quarterfinal Friday afternoon. If weather permits, he will play his semifinal match — against Nick Kyrgios — Friday night. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
As the best run of his career at the Citi Open stretches on, Frances Tiafoe has an issue. He keeps breaking promises to his agent.
“I had like 56 tickets coming today. I keep telling my agent, ‘Yeah, this is the last one, last one.’ Someone comes out of the woodwork,” he said.
Friends’ and family members’ requests for tickets is one of the handful of not-so-problematic problems Tiafoe faces when he plays in Washington, in front of the closest thing he has to a home crowd on the ATP Tour. Pressure to represent the region well is another. On Friday, the Maryland native deftly handled both as he defeated the No. 8 seed Botic Van De Zandschulp, 4-6, 6-2, 6-3, in a match spread across two days due to a weather delay.
It is his first berth into the Citi Open quarterfinals in his sixth appearance at the tournament. Tiafoe made his first main draw appearance in an ATP Tour event here as a 16-year-old wild card in 2014.
“Playing here in D.C., honestly, it could be if it was a 250 [level tournament] or whatever … I mean, to win this tournament would mean the world to me,” Tiafoe said earlier this week. “I have been coming to this tournament since I was 4 years old. To have my name around the stadium would mean a lot to me.”
Tiafoe’s sharp play in Washington, which he punctuated Friday with his usual roars and appeals to a crowd hollering its support for “Big Foe,” follows a semifinal appearance in Atlanta last week and a fourth-round loss at Wimbledon as he gains momentum heading into the U.S. Open.
His next match, scheduled for Friday night if weather permits, should be a doozy with the exact type of amped-up atmosphere he craves. Tiafoe is set to face the 2019 Citi Open champion and his doubles partner in last year’s tournament, Nick Kyrgios. The Aussie ousted Reilly Opelka, 7-6 (7-1), 6-2, in another match spread out over two days.
For that matchup, Tiafoe will most certainly need more tickets.
He was joined Friday in the quarterfinals by 22-year-old Floridian Sebastian Korda, who advanced with a 4-6, 6-1, 6-2 win over fifth-seed Grigor Dimitrov.
No. 1 seed Andrey Rublev will face 23-year-old Ohioan J.J. Wolf, who has shorn his infamous mullet since his last Citi Open appearance but defeated ninth-seeded Holger Rune, 7-5, 4-6, 6-3, nonetheless.
In the women’s tournament, tour veteran Kaia Kanepi was the only player to advance to the semifinals before weather delays kicked in Friday evening. The 37-year-old defeated Anna Kalinskaya, 6-7 (4-7), 6-4, 7-3. | 2022-08-05T22:58:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Frances Tiafoe wants to etch his name into Citi Open history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/citi-open-quarterfinals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/citi-open-quarterfinals/ |
7 adults, 3 kids die in fire that destroyed their entire house
Firefighters battle a blaze that destroyed a home in Nescopeck, Pa., on Aug. 5, leaving 10 people dead. (Jimmy May/AP)
Harold Baker, a volunteer firefighter in Nescopeck, Pa., was in the first fire engine on the scene of a blaze at his family’s home that left 10 dead Friday.
The fire broke out at the two-story house around 2:40 a.m. Friday. Seven adults and three children were killed, according to the Pennsylvania State Police. Baker’s son, daughter and three grandchildren were among the victims, the Associated Press reported.
The children who died were 5, 6 and 7 years old, according to the Pennsylvania State Police. A criminal investigation is underway, police said.
Baker, who was on the scene with the Nescopeck Volunteer Fire Co., told the Citizens’ Voice newspaper of Wilkes-Barre that the original address of the reported fire was for a house next door.
But as the firetruck turned onto the street and saw the flames further down the road, he realized it was his relatives’ home.
“We tried to get into them,” Baker said. “There wasn’t no way we could get into them.”
The family had been hosting a gathering, and his children were visiting their aunt and uncle, Baker said in an interview with WNEP-TV, a local ABC news station.
State police said three adults escaped. The fire completely destroyed the house, officials said.
Neighbor Mike Swank told WNEP he was watching TV when he heard a “pop” and looked outside to discover the flames visible from the front of the house.
“It was almost already totally engulfed,” he said. | 2022-08-05T23:24:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 10 people dead in Nescopeck, Pa. house fire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/house-fire-ten-people-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/05/house-fire-ten-people-dead/ |
In this photo provided by the National Park Service, Highway 190 is closed due to flash flooding in Death Valley National Park, Calif., Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. Heavy rainfall triggered flash flooding that closed several roads in Death Valley National Park on Friday near the California-Nevada line. The National Weather Service reported that all park roads had been closed after 1 to 2 inches of rain fell in a short amount of time. (National Park Service via AP) (Uncredited/National Park Service/Death Valley National Park) | 2022-08-06T00:00:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Flash floods strand 1K people in Death Valley National Park - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/flash-floods-strand-1k-people-in-death-valley-national-park/2022/08/05/c99a1ca2-1515-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/flash-floods-strand-1k-people-in-death-valley-national-park/2022/08/05/c99a1ca2-1515-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
At Citi Open, men’s seeds tumble as rain wreaks havoc on schedule
Storms interrupted the Citi Open for the second straight day on Friday. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
Washington never puts its best foot forward in August, yet that’s the perennial spot on the ATP calendar for the Citi Open. And that all but ensures players must battle not only the opponent across the net but also stifling heat, sweltering humidity, and the stoppages of late-summer thunderstorms.
A second consecutive afternoon of rain Friday compressed the tournament’s already backlogged schedule further and inconvenienced ticket holders, closing the grassy expanse that doubles as a parking lot just north of Rock Creek Park Tennis Center because it was too waterlogged for cars.
Until thunderclaps and lighting halted play at 4:32 p.m., just over four hours of matches were contested. In that time, both the men’s and women’s quarterfinal fields were determined as more seeded players tumbled, including American Reilly Opelka and Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov, and a few upstarts surprised.
Still, the unwelcome stop in play, which lasted nearly three hours, put the proceedings further behind and led tournament officials to explore options for crowning a men’s and women’s victor on Sunday as scheduled.
That may mean staging both the quarterfinals and semifinals on Saturday and, if need be, starting Saturday’s matches earlier than noon, as announced.
Had Friday’s weather cooperated, a half-dozen players would have been required to compete twice anyway — first to complete rain-halted third-round matches from Thursday and again to contest quarterfinal matches.
Nick Kyrgios, the tournament’s 2019 champion, was scheduled to play three times Friday. First, Kyrgios had to finish his third-round match against the fourth-seeded Opelka. Assuming he won that match, as he did, Kyrgios was scheduled to contest his quarterfinal against Hyattsville native Frances Tiafoe, who also mopped up a rain-halted match from Wednesday, ousting eight seed Botic van de Zandschulp. Finally, Kyrgios was scheduled to return for a Friday nightcap with doubles partner Jack Sock against the French tandem of Nicolas Mahut and Edouard Roger-Vasselin.
For some players, Washington’s heat and hassles proved too much.
In a late-night Twitter post, American Taylor Fritz explained why he retired from his third-round match in the thick of Wednesday’s heat while trailing Britain’s Dan Evans 1-4 in the third set, referencing a previously undisclosed foot injury that he said had limited his training since Wimbledon
“Typically, I pride myself on my fitness and ability to compete in very hot/humid, brutal conditions like today,” Fritz wrote. “Today I constantly felt like I was going to pass out, my vision was going fuzzy, and the only thing that can really prepare me for playing in these conditions … is playing in these conditions, something I just haven’t been able to do since nursing my foot.”
Other players say that the trials of Washington’s Citi Open are making them stronger — even in defeat. That was the view of Opelka, 24, after his loss to Kyrgios.
The 6-11 Opelka, who boasts the biggest serve in men’s tennis, faced the unenviable task Friday of clawing back from a 6-7 (7-1), 1-2 deficit against Kyrgios, whose own serve is a blast to be feared.
After a night to sleep on their unfinished business, Opelka and Kyrgios strode onto Stadium Court around 2:30 p.m. The first point didn’t go Opelka’s way, and suddenly he was down Love-40 on his serve. Kyrgios broke and didn’t look back, needing just 14 minutes to close the choppy proceedings 7-6 (1), 6-2, finishing with 12 aces to Opelka’s 13.
Nonetheless, Opelka called his two matches at this year’s Citi Open a valuable experience.
“I hadn’t played many [hard court] matches,” Opelka said, “so it is a starting point of the hard court season for me. It’s a critical step. The humidity, the climate, the heat — it’s all great prep for the U.S. Open because that’s what happens in New York.”
Reigning U.S. Open champion Emma Raducanu, 19, is still alive in her Citi Open debut and was scheduled to face Liudmila Samsonova Friday night in the quarterfinals. But she marches on, Raducanu said, with greater belief in her toughness and resolve after weathering a near three-hour match against Camila Osorio on Thursday.
Calling her effort “pretty monumental” in fighting back for the 7-6 (7-5), 7-6 (7-4) victory over Osorio, Raducanu said: “It just gives you a lot of confidence coming through a match like that. Physically, I’m pretty pleased with how I held up in that match.”
Of the top 10 men’s seeds, only two made it to the quarterfinals: top-seed Andrey Rublev, who ousted American Maxime Cressy 6-4, 7-6 (10-8); and the 10th seeded Tiafoe.
Among the seeds who joined Opelka in defeat Friday were Dimitrov, who was beaten by American Sebastian Korda 4-6, 6-1, 6-2; eighth-seed Van de Zandschulp, who fell to Tiafoe 4-6, 6-2, 6-3; and ninth-seed Holger Rune of Demark, ushered out by wild card J.J. Wolf, a former Big Ten Player of the Year who compiled a 35-2 record as a junior at Ohio State, in the day’s biggest upset. Wolf advanced 7-5, 4-6, 6-3.
Tiafoe and Van de Zandschulp twice attempted to finish their third-round match Thursday before rain suspended play for the night, at one set each.
“Yesterday was tougher than today,” Van de Zandschulp said after his loss Friday. “You go on and off court; you’re not sure after the second (delay) if you’re going to finish the match. You have to take care of what you’re eating between delays to keep enough energy and be ready to go on court at any minute. It’s pretty tough, matches like this.” | 2022-08-06T00:12:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Storms wreak havoc on Citi Open schedule - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/citi-open-storms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/citi-open-storms/ |
By Jeff Arnold
Mystics Coach Mike Thibault ran out of answers Friday night in Chicago, where his team fell to the defending WNBA champs, 93-83. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
CHICAGO — At some point, the gantlet through the WNBA’s top teams was bound to catch up with the Washington Mystics, who had feasted of late on top-shelf competition in the regular season’s stretch run.
But after stringing together a collection of impressive victories over two of the league’s top four teams while trying to chase down a top postseason seed, the Mystics ran into buzz saw Friday night in the form of the defending champion Chicago Sky, who overwhelmed Washington, 93-83, at Wintrust Arena in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as the final score suggested.
“It felt like we were flat,” Mystics Coach Mike Thibault said. “We did not have a great practice [Thursday], and we played like we practiced. It’s probably the first bad [game] I would say we’ve had in a long while where we just couldn’t generate the energy.”
The Mystics — playing without leading scorer Elena Delle Donne, who was held out to rest for the final three regular season games — were unable to maintain the success they had found in victories earlier this week over the Seattle Storm and Las Vegas Aces.
Instead, Washington (20-13) — led by Myisha Hines-Allen, who finished with 21 points, and Shakira Austin’s 17 — was left gassed, chasing after the fast-paced Sky (24-8).
The reigning champs started fast, taking a 29-15 lead after one quarter. Thibault, helpless to do anything but watch his team unable to keep pace, spent much of the second half near the end of the Washington bench, hands in pockets, mostly speechless with what he saw play out in front of him.
While Chicago maintained its comfortable cushion with an array of perimeter shooting, including nine three-pointers in 22 attempts, the Mystics were unable to find any range and finished the loss 8 for 24 from beyond the arc.
The Mystics were unable to slow down the league-leading Sky, who built a 23-point lead by the closing moments of the first half. Chicago used a 14-2 run to break the game open, as the Mystics struggled to find any offensive rhythm while the Sky produced points at a breakneck speed.
The Mystics were never able to cut the Sky lead under double digits points in the second half. The margin was more than 20 points for much of that time.
“Give Chicago credit: They came in ready to go, they knocked down big threes, the ball moved, they had great pace to everything they did tonight and they looked — for a half, at least — like a way better team,” Thibault said.
Kahleah Copper paced Chicago with 19 points to go along with 18 from Allie Quigley and 11 from Azura Stevens and Rebekah Gardner. Courtney Vandersloot and Emma Meesseman, the 2019 WNBA Finals MVP with the Mystics, rounded out the balanced Sky scoring attack with 10 points apiece.
The Mystics, who entered Friday night’s game tied for the No. 4 seed with Seattle, will need to bounce back in quick order if they hope to keep pace with the Storm. Washington hosts the Los Angeles Sparks on Sunday at Entertainment and Sports Arena before finishing with back-to-back games against the Indiana Fever, who have five victories and sit at the bottom of the WNBA standings.
The Storm holds the regular season tiebreaker over the Mystics, whose loss against Chicago was only their second in seven games. But after suffering their first double-digit loss since June 23, when the Mystics dropped an 85-71 loss to the Storm, Thibault will attempt to get his team to regroup with still more work to be done before the playoffs arrive.
“I told [the team] that our preparation for Sunday starts right this minute,” Thibault said. “... Mentally, they have to get themselves back into the scouting report and get your sleep and get rest for two nights and try to get ourselves ready to go.”
What kind of bounce-back effort he gets from the Mystics now that the toughest stretch of the schedule is out of the way may determine how much momentum Washington can carry into the postseason.
Players focus on Griner
Mystic players said after Friday’s game that they would not speak about the loss but instead wanted to devote their time to speak about the 9-year sentence handed down in Russia to Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner.
Said forward Alysha Clark: “Obviously, the decision that happened [Thursday] weighs very heavily on the hearts of all of us as [Griner’s] sisters in this league, as friends ... We’re going to continue to call on President Biden to continue to do whatever he can to get her and Paul [Whelan] home and all of the other wrongfully detained Americans over there. We miss her, and there’s not even any words about how to describe this.
“Sports should be a safe space, and no player should be used as a political pawn, and so we’re going to continue to lift her up and we’re going to continue to speak on her behalf and we’re going to continue to have hope in the administration and that they’re going to get her home swiftly and that they’re going to get her home safely.” | 2022-08-06T03:02:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chicago Sky too much for Mystics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/washington-mystics-chicago-sky-wnba/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/washington-mystics-chicago-sky-wnba/ |
Ashley Hatch scores in her return but Spirit settles for another draw
Washington Spirit forward Ashley Hatch, shown celebrating a goal in May, scored in a 1-1 draw with Racing Louisville on Friday. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Forward Ashley Hatch often has been the Washington Spirit’s savior in tight games in recent years. With the Spirit facing the threat of missing crucial points Friday night and tumbling further in the National Women’s Soccer League standings, Hatch — making her first appearance since June — again generated a pivotal play.
The Spirit trailed Racing Louisville early in the second half when Hatch’s strike from the top of the box sneaked into the bottom left corner of the net, knotting the score in a 1-1 draw at Lynn Family Stadium in Louisville.
While the Spirit obtained a point, it will need more of those heroics in its final seven regular season games to ascend from the bottom of the league’s standings. Washington (1-5-9) extended its winless streak to 16 games in all competitions and has not won since its regular season opener May 1.
“There’s been a sense of urgency for quite a few weeks now,” defender Amber Brooks said. “So that doesn’t change. We’re seeing progress in the overall way that we’re playing and opportunities we’re getting, but we know we need to be more clinical on both ends. But there’s a lot of faith. And we know we’re taking steps in the right direction.”
Washington’s first trip to Louisville since it won last year’s NWSL championship there posed one of its best opportunities to end the slump. Louisville (2-6-7) has not won in its previous 10 matches, with its last victory coming May 22.
When Washington last played Louisville on June 17 at Segra Field, the Spirit squandered a two-goal lead in the final 25 minutes to draw, 2-2, after Nadia Nadim scored pair of goals. On Thursday, Ward said the Spirit had improved since that meltdown.
But Washington still struggled to contain Nadim on Friday. In the 55th minute, Louisville forward Kirsten Davis passed to Nadim at the top of the box. Nadim dribbled to her left before launching the ball past five defenders and goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury into the bottom left corner.
The Spirit rallied behind Hatch, who was active for the first time since she suffered a muscle strain in her left leg in early July during the Concacaf W Championship. Last year’s NWSL scoring leader started the second half and scored off a pass from midfielder Jordan Baggett in the 64th minute. It was Hatch’s fifth goal this season and first since June 11.
“Obviously I’m happy I got a goal, but I would’ve been happier if we got the W,” Hatch said. “Hopefully I can continue to stay healthy and contribute going forward. But I’m definitely happy with the progress. I’m just looking forward to getting more results our way.”
Washington, tied for 10th place in the 12-team league, will face stiffer competition soon. The Spirit’s next three games come against teams hovering near the top of the league’s standings, including a match against the Portland Thorns at Segra Field on Wednesday.
“Every game is a playoff game at this point, and we know that,” Brooks said. “We’re not shy about it. We’re ready to take on that challenge starting again Wednesday against Portland.” | 2022-08-06T04:03:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ashley Hatch scores but Spirit settles for draw with Racing Louisville - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/washington-spirit-racing-louisville/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/05/washington-spirit-racing-louisville/ |
I'm a veterinarian and always offer sincere condolences when a client loses a pet — I will send a card, make a donation to an animal charity, and often follow up with an email or phone call.
Recently I lost my much-loved dog and have been slightly appalled at the reactions of people I have known for many years. A very few have offered condolences. The general attitude has been that I “should be used to it.”
Grace: I am so very sorry. Every person who has said goodbye to a beloved pet grieves the loss of a companion and friendship connection that is very hard to describe, but should be easy to understand. Losing this connection brings on a special sort of heartbreak.
“Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased.
Dear Amy: I started dating my husband back in 2012. We’ve been married now for six years. We have both been married in the past and have adult children.
My husband’s ex-wife is a wonderful person, she truly is. She is very close with my mother-in-law and remains in her life, which is fine. My problem is that I have just now started to meet the “family” and I still don’t know all of them.
Whenever there is a family function on his side, my husband’s ex is always invited. I feel like no one will ever know me because she is still always there at all the functions. We have a graduation party to go to and she is also invited to that.
I don’t have a problem with her personally, but would like to experience family things with just that … family. Am I being too much?
Wife: Your husband’s ex has remained very close with his family — and this could be a nice result for families that can manage it. Most can’t.
Basically, I’m suggesting that you ignore her status as your husband’s long-ago ex, and concentrate on your own best behavior. Be cool, be calm, ask good questions and let your in-laws see your sparkle.
The writer mentioned knocking on the offender’s window to confront them. If I were giving him advice, in addition to the statistics you stated, I would say “don’t!”
Concerned: Absolutely! Based on the wording of his letter, I assumed that “Greg” was no longer personally confronting people. I certainly hope so. | 2022-08-06T04:12:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My dog died and very few have offered condolences - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/06/ask-amy-vet-dog-died/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/06/ask-amy-vet-dog-died/ |
Carolyn Hax: Is this a commitment issue, or a bad-taste-in-men issue?
Dear Carolyn: I turned 30 last month and I always thought by this age I’d be ready to settle down and get married. I’m not even close and I’m starting to wonder if it’s because I don’t fully focus on the man I’m dating whenever the going gets hard.
Thanks to dating apps, there are so many options and I can’t help but think about the possibility there’s someone better for me out there — someone more caring, funnier, hotter, more in tune with me. It’s not like these thoughts are in the forefront the whole time, but I usually get six months or even a year into a relationship and as soon as we hit a few bumps, I start to wonder if I really found the right guy.
How do you know the difference between someone not being long-term compatible with you and you having commitment issues? It took both of my parents two tries to find the right person — could that be affecting me? In case you wonder: Yes, I have considered therapy, spoken to a few therapists, still looking for one I like who has availability. I also have a great job, hobbies, lots of friends, and am pretty happy with my life but I’d still like to marry and maybe be a mom someday.
— Can’t Commit
Can’t Commit: The “someone better for me out there … more in tune with me” person you’re looking for is probably (ugh) you.
Sorry. So trite. But also so often, over and over and over again, the answer to someone who is darting around looking for something and feeling unfocused and unsatisfied. So often, the better answer than “figure out what you’re looking for” is “figure out why you’re looking so hard in the first place.” Whatever the reason, if you’re looking, then you’re by definition not fully present where you are.
So I urge you to do just that: Stop and breathe and be present where you are. Even if you’ve done this once already — even if that’s how you got yourself to “great job, hobbies, lots of friends” and “pretty happy with my life,” no small accomplishment, it might just mean you need to stop and breathe again.
Part of the reason is pragmatic. You want a partner and maybe children, nothing wrong with that — but they’re also not guaranteed. The only guaranteed life configuration you have is you. So being okay-contented-thrilled with that is all win.
Part of the reason is romantic-pragmatic. The person I suspect you will want to keep is the one you notice when you feel so right in your life as-is that you don’t feel a sense of urgency about adding anyone to it — until the person himself makes a case for that urgency. Until you can’t imagine life without him. Or just really really don’t want to.
One thing I found helpful to accept long before getting married was there will ALWAYS be someone better (funnier, hotter, whatever) out there. The point of marriage isn’t to nab the best one, like a trophy. I truly think the path to finding the right person is “dump early, dump often.” Really. Keep that relationship space open if it’s not being occupied by someone really great.
The longest relationship I had before meeting my husband was a little over a year. There’s nothing wrong with you for not trying to force something that cracks at the first sign of pressure. | 2022-08-06T04:12:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Is this a commitment issue, or a bad-taste-in-men issue? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/06/carolyn-hax-commitment-taste-dating/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/06/carolyn-hax-commitment-taste-dating/ |
MANILA, Philippines — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. welcomed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday, the highest ranking American official to visit the Philippines since he took office, although the meeting came at a delicate time as ties between Washington and Beijing have rapidly plummeted to their worst level in years. | 2022-08-06T06:05:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marcos meets Blinken in Philippines amid US-China crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/marcos-meets-blinken-in-philippines-amid-us-china-crisis/2022/08/06/e21a6786-1543-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/marcos-meets-blinken-in-philippines-amid-us-china-crisis/2022/08/06/e21a6786-1543-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
LISBURN, NORTHERN IRELAND - AUGUST 01: Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the funeral of the late Lord Trimble on August 1, 2022 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. William David Trimble, Baron Trimble, PC was a British politician who led the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) from 1995 to 2005 and was the first person to serve as First Minister of Northern Ireland. He had immense input in the negotiating and execution of the Good Friday Agreement that gave the people of Northern Ireland the chance to shape and determine their own future. Trimble died on 25 July, 2022, leaving his second wife Daphne and four children. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) (Photographer: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images Europe)
The biggest political assembly in the world outside of China’s National People’s Congress is Britain’s House of Lords. It is, alas, a national embarrassment in keeping with its size.
With good reason, the chamber is derided as “The House of Cronies.” The 800-strong upper house of the UK Parliament approaches its Beijing equivalent in democratic deficit, being largely appointed at the whim of the prime minister of the day, on increasingly murky criteria. According to the latest opinion polls, more than 70% of voters want it reformed.
The chamber is stuffed with party donors. Last year, The Sunday Times revealed that £3 million ($3.6 million) in donations often guarantees membership to the crony club. A century ago, Prime Minister David Lloyd George was forced out of office partly for selling peerages and honours. Some of his cronies were prosecuted. Yet earlier this year, the Metropolitan Police declined to investigate whether Boris Johnson’s own appointments to the Lords had been bought. Before he leaves office, Johnson has two more honours lists to gift, causing a scandal even before the names are officially gazetted.
Why does this state of affairs persist? The upper chamber, a relic of the hereditary system that still contains 92 aristocrats or “peers of the realm,” is held in such low esteem that the last five prime ministers have refused to become members, as once was traditional. That’s a commentary on their appointments.
Johnson has shown no intention of becoming a member of the Lords either, although he intends to flood it with more cronies of his own, having already appointed 86 members in his three-year term — twice the number of his predecessor who served for a similar term. In 2006, Johnson condemned abuse of the appointments system as “putrefaction … a quintessentially British crime.” But Labour’s Tony Blair was prime minister then. By 2010, it was the Tories’ turn to take advantage.
It’s true that there are many worthy people in the upper chamber who bring professional expertise to public debate and have a strong sense of civic responsibility. Their spokesman, Lord Speaker John McFall, has warned that the prime minister’s latest plans to pack more of his old allies into it risk undermining “public confidence in our parliamentary system.” He has written to the two Conservative leadership candidates, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, begging them to make a break with Johnson’s cronyism.
It has been widely reported that the House of Lords Appointment Commission (HOLAC), the body responsible for vetting peerages, is holding up Johnson’s latest list. But where the caretaker prime minister has a will, he has a way.
Johnson has bulldozed through other controversial peerage appointments before, like that of the Tory donor Peter Cruddas, who was embroiled in cash-for-access allegations as party co-Treasurer. HOLAC unanimously recommended that the prime minister rescind his nomination. Cruddas gave £500,000 to the party days after his elevation to the Lords and has recently been campaigning to place Johnson on the Tory members’ ballot for leader.
As a departing prime minister, Johnson has the right to propose a resignation honours list too. These have been notorious ever since Harold Wilson’s 1976 “lavender list” of nominations of business figures, allegedly written on the lavender notepaper of his adviser, Marcia Williams. She became a Lady, of course. One member on the list committed suicide while under investigation for fraud and another was imprisoned for false accounting. Although he was a four-time election winner, Wilson’s reputation never recovered.
But there is more at stake for his Conservative successor. The last long period of Tory dominance ended in a welter of sleaze allegations that paved the way for Labour’s return to power in 1997. The opposition is looking forward to pillorying Johnson all the way to the next general election in two years time and will seek to pin his misdeeds on his successor. History need not repeat itself.
The Labour party has toyed with a number of proposals for Lords reform — beginning with outright abolition to the creation of “a chamber of the nations and regions” that might cement England’s fractured union with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Gordon Brown, Blair’s upright Scottish successor, is a strong advocate of this federal solution. As is Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, a venerable member of the Tory aristocracy, a descendant of prime ministers and a former party leader in the House. This will probably be the way ahead — one day.
But solve one problem and you often create another, namely that the elected House of Commons is jealous of any proposal that could create a rival. Such constitutional tinkering is in any case complicated and time-consuming — it is often abandoned. So much so that the constitutional historian Peter Hennessy, himself a Lord, dubs reform of the House: “The Bermuda Triangle of British politics.”
Johnson’s successor — be it Truss or the less likely Sunak — will have a limited time to make a difference in this parliament. They should show the reformers a sign of good intent. Plans for incremental reform to reduce the size of the House to a more manageable 600 members by introducing a compulsory retirement age could be adapted to simply restrict the terms of members. If Lords served a mere seven years, or even 10, then the presence of cronies and donors in the mix might be less offensive — or at least they’ll churn out faster.
A moratorium on all new appointments would be better still. For what’s the alternative? The Constitution Unit think tank estimates “that without control of appointments, the size of the chamber could reach 2,000 or more.”
Both candidates vying for Johnson’s crown are pledged to cut the size of the state. Here’s a modest proposal: Where better to start than with the House of Lords, the home of institutionalized sleaze? The departing prime minister’s honours list will doubtless make the case for reform even more plain that it already should be.
• England Brought Football Home. How Much Is That Worth?: Therese Raphael
• Ruble Rally Is a Headache for Banks Stuck in Russia: Paul J. Davies | 2022-08-06T07:36:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Britain’s House of Lords Is a National Embarrassment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britains-house-of-lords-is-a-national-embarrassment/2022/08/06/d08e3222-154d-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britains-house-of-lords-is-a-national-embarrassment/2022/08/06/d08e3222-154d-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
A policeman guards electoral ballot boxes stored at a tallying center in Nairobi, Kenya, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. Kenya is due to hold its general election on Tuesday, Aug. 9 as East Africa’s economic hub chooses a successor to President Uhuru Kenyatta. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP)
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyans vote Tuesday to choose a successor to President Uhuru Kenyatta. The race is close and could go to a runoff for the first time. | 2022-08-06T07:36:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | EXPLAINER: Why Kenya's presidential election is important - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/explainer-why-kenyas-presidential-election-is-important/2022/08/06/b5d47562-1553-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/explainer-why-kenyas-presidential-election-is-important/2022/08/06/b5d47562-1553-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
MOSCOW — The Kremlin said it’s open to talking about a possible prisoner exchange involving American basketball star Brittney Griner but strongly warned Washington against publicizing the issue.
NEW YORK — Ronald Acuña Jr. got four hits and robbed Pete Alonso of a two-run homer as the Atlanta Braves built a big early lead and beat the New York Mets 9-6 to rebound quickly in their NL East showdown.
ST. LOUIS — Paul DeJong hit a two-run double with two outs in the eighth inning, lifting the Cardinals over the New York Yankees 4-3 in Matt Carpenter’s return to St. Louis.
LOS ANGELES — Tony Gonsolin pitched five scoreless innings and the Los Angeles Dodgers combined for a four-hitter against the San Diego Padres’ supercharged lineup, winning 8-1 after honoring Vin Scully.
MUIRFIELD, Scotland — In Gee Chun took the halfway lead at the Women’s British Open after a 5-under 66 in the second round, putting her in position to challenge for a second major title of the year, and fourth overall.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Joohyung “Tom” Kim began the Wyndham Championship with a quadruple bogey on his first hole and wasn’t the least bit bothered. | 2022-08-06T07:36:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Friday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/fridays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/06/e09250b6-1554-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/fridays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/06/e09250b6-1554-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Germany Looks Ready For Nuclear Exit Number 4
Nuclear exit number 1 began in 2000. The government back then consisted of the center-left Social Democrats and the Greens. The latter were in power for the first time, having grown out of the hippie counterculture of the 1970s, and in particular the German mass movement against nuclear energy. So Germany decided to phase out its nuclear power plants.
Exit 2 happened in 2010. The government, by then consisting of the center-right Christian Democrats and the pro-business Free Democrats, decided to exit from the first exit and keep the remaining nuclear plants running. Exit 3 followed within a year, after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. It spooked the government into exiting from its own exit of the preceding exit. That is, Germany again began phasing out nuclear power.
The country’s last three fission reactors are due to go offline at the end of this year. Bad timing, obviously. This is the year Russian President Vladimir Putin chose to attack Ukraine and declare economic war on the European Union. He’s already throttling the natural gas that used to gush from Russia to central Europe.
Germany, in particular, relies on that gas. It mainly needs the stuff to fuel factories and heat homes. But gas was also supposed to fill the gap in power generation left by the nuclear energy being phased out — which still accounted for 12% of electricity last year.
The Christian Democrats, now in opposition, are calling for an extension of the three nuclear plants still online. That could be done even without buying new fuel rods. The Free Democrats agree, but are treading carefully, lest they ruffle the tenuous coalition peace.
Germany’s European partners are also vociferous. They never understood Germany’s nuclear hysteria in the first place. France relies on fission for most of its electricity and is investing in more reactors. Cutting-edge nations such as Finland view nuclear power as a small but crucial part in any resilient energy mix.
Now those links are obvious. So the EU, trying hard to look united, is asking all member states to reduce gas usage by 15%. But some countries see that as bailing out the Germans for their own policy failures. As a Slovakian official puts it, why not start saving gas by firing up Germany’s nuclear reactors first?
The Dutch make a similar point. They have Europe’s largest gas field, in Groningen. But getting the hydrocarbons out of the ground causes earthquakes, so the Netherlands is phasing out production. Now Germany is asking its neighbor to rethink that exit, because it wants the Groningen gas to replace Putin’s. That would be easier to sell to Dutch voters if the Germans showed some flexibility on nuclear.
What many foreigners don’t appreciate, however, is that the German controversy is less a policy debate than a religious war — not unlike the American debates about guns or abortion, say. Many Germans have spent their entire lives protesting against the splitting of atoms. The Green Party’s base, in particular, teems with zealots who consider all nuclear energy evil, and any attempt to nuance the discussion as tantamount to treason.
But the Greens are in the government and have responsibility. They even run the relevant ministries — those for the environment and for commerce and energy. So the party’s leaders are dipping their toes into the discussion.
Germany has a gas problem, not an electricity problem, they argue. True up to a point. Keeping the nuclear reactors going would probably save only 4% of the country’s overall gas consumption, a far cry from the 15% the EU stipulates. But nobody is suggesting that this should be the only step — just that it’s one of several that Germans can’t afford to forego.
Yes, nuclear fission has risks. One is the danger of accidents that leak radiation. Another is the problem of finding permanent repositories for the radioactive waste. But all forms of energy have risks. These have to be balanced against the risks of alternatives, and against benefits.
Renewables such as the sun and wind are obviously the preferred option. But they fluctuate. And wind turbines sprawl over much more of the countryside and nature than reactors do. Gas and oil emit carbon — and often come from unsavory vendors like Putin. Coal — Germany’s default in the absence of nuclear and gas — is even dirtier. It bears most blame for accelerating climate change, the greatest risk of all.
By contrast, the risks of fission energy seem manageable, especially with new technologies. Best of all, it emits no greenhouse gases. Nor does it stop when the sun goes down or the breeze dies. That’s why the International Energy Agency says that the world needs more, not less, of it.
Even religious wars eventually wear themselves out. My guess is that Germany’s leaders, including those who head the Greens, are secretly yearning to make peace. They’re just agonizing over how to communicate that to the public. Exit number 4 is getting closer.
Germany Drew the Wrong Nuclear Lesson From Fukushima: Andreas Kluth
Germany’s Switch to Diesel From Gas Comes at a Cost: Javier Blas | 2022-08-06T09:08:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Germany Looks Ready For Nuclear Exit Number 4 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/germany-looks-readyfor-nuclear-exit-number-4/2022/08/06/8f864644-1565-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/germany-looks-readyfor-nuclear-exit-number-4/2022/08/06/8f864644-1565-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Technocrat in trouble. (Photographer: Peter Nicholls - Pool/Getty Images Europe)
The Tory contest to replace Boris Johnson as British prime minister is turning into a coronation: Johnson’s ally Liz Truss has taken a massive, 34-point lead in the recent YouGov poll over her rival, Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor of the exchequer.
What explains this overwhelming Tory preference for Truss? Certainly, the great majority of the British electorate doesn’t share it. The latest Ipsos Political Monitor reveals Sunak as the public’s favorite; he is clearly the candidate that the opposition Labour Party fear most.
But then the approximately 175,000 rank-and-file members of the Tory Party are not known for their political wisdom or moral discernment. According to YouGov, 53% percent of these hard Brexiteers still prefer Johnson over either Truss or Sunak, and 75% support Johnson’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda.
It is true that Sunak, educated at Winchester, Oxford and Stanford, and married to a rich Indian heiress, tries too hard to show his common touch, wearing, for instance, a hoodie over shirt and tie. His image was not helped by revelations that his wife didn’t pay UK tax on her international income and that he himself held a US green card while working in Downing Street. He’s made political blunders, including bragging recently about diverting government funds from poor urban areas.
Still, Sunak’s flaws pale in comparison to Truss’s. High on audacious rhetoric and short on intellectual gravitas, Britain’s likely next prime minister comes across as an English-accented Sarah Palin. As foreign secretary, she did not seem to know that the Baltic and Black Seas were two separate bodies of water. Her offer to support Britons who wanted to go fight in Ukraine had to be swiftly withdrawn by her own government.
Her most insightful assertion thus far seems to be, “I want to surf the zeitgeist to where it’s all happening.” Accordingly, she surfed on the side of Tory Remainers when they were in power, then took her surfboard over to the Brexiteers after the latter won the referendum in 2016.
As a born-again Brexiteer, she is now threatening to tear up large parts of the Brexit agreement with the European Union, at the risk of igniting a trade war. Her personal attacks on Scotland’s leader Nicola Sturgeon can only accelerate Scottish moves toward an independence referendum and the much-feared breakup of the United Kingdom.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, claims that Truss was “as close to properly crackers as anybody I have met in Parliament.” By any measure, Sunak is the superior candidate, as is recognized by his own party’s grandees. In public debates, he has briskly dismantled Truss’s incoherent economic plan.
In the eyes of Tory faithful, however, Sunak seems almost too rational — and disconcertingly non-white.
Xenophobia long ago entered the political mainstream in England. Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, had to overcome allegations from Tory leaders that he would embolden terrorists.
The Tory Party’s grassroots are even more exposed to, and in tune with, Britain’s overwhelmingly right-wing media. It would be surprising if crude prejudice didn’t at least partly determine their political choices.
Sunak’s supporters told the Times of London last month that their candidate was a victim of a “bit of latent racism” from party members. One was reported as saying, “I’m not ready for the brown one yet.” Sunak himself joked about being complimented for his “great tan” on the campaign trail.
The light-hearted remark of course hides a very awkward reality for Sunak. Like many socially mobile and economically successful children of immigrants, he has chosen to align himself with a party that protects the interests of the rich and powerful. Yet he could hardly be unaware of its contribution to racism. He admitted in an interview in 2020 that racist abuse “stings in a way that very few other things have.”
Trailing behind an obviously inept candidate, he could appeal to more liberal-minded Tories by underscoring his modest origins as the hardworking son of Indian immigrants; he could insist that Britain is an irreversibly pluralistic society. Broadening the political and moral horizons of his electorate would hardly ensure his victory but it would make easier the struggles for racial equality and dignity of other British people of color.
Instead, Sunak has taken to attacking the straw men of “leftwing agitators” who are evidently bulldozing “our history, our traditions and our fundamental values.” Last week, he proposed to radically expand the definition of Islamist terrorism and focus on “rooting out those who are vocal in their hatred of our country.”
• The Bank of Eeyore Grumbles the Truth. Who’s Next?: John Authers | 2022-08-06T09:08:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stumbling Sunak Shouldn’t Pander to the Tory Base - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/stumbling-sunak-shouldnt-pander-to-the-tory-base/2022/08/06/93eaf1be-155e-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/stumbling-sunak-shouldnt-pander-to-the-tory-base/2022/08/06/93eaf1be-155e-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
From the one-China policy to the Taiwan Relations Act, here’s what you need to know
People walk past a billboard welcoming U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 3. (Chiang Ying-Ying/AP)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this week heightened tensions between China and the United States. Behind the recent developments, including Beijing’s show of force in response, are a long history of shifting ties and frictions.
Here’s what to know about the United States’ policies, communiques and assurances regarding China and Taiwan.
What is the Taiwan Relations Act?
What are the three U.S.-China communiques?
What are the United States’ six assurances to Taiwan? | 2022-08-06T09:08:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | From the one-China policy to the Taiwan Relations Act, here's what you need to know - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/06/taiwan-china-policy-assurances-military/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/06/taiwan-china-policy-assurances-military/ |
Protesters stand outside the House chamber before a vote on banning abortion on Aug. 5, 2022, in Indianapolis. (Jenna Watson/AP)
Indiana lawmakers approved a near-total ban on abortion Friday, making their state the first in the nation to pass sweeping limits on access to the procedure since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.
The Republican-dominated state Senate passed the legislation in a 28-19 vote that had divided GOP legislators over how far the ban should go. Before Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) signed the bill into law on Friday, some GOP members had expressed support for allowing abortion in cases of rape and incest, while others opposed the bill because of those exceptions.
The measure, which will go into effect Sept. 15, allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality or when the procedure is necessary to prevent severe health risks or death. Here’s what some state officials said on the ban:
“The body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Let me repeat that: The body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Not her body, not her choice,” said Jacob, who supported removing exceptions including for rape.
Rep. Cherrish Pryor (D):
Pryor referenced the recent case of a 10-year-old rape victim who had to travel to Indiana for the procedure because abortions are now banned in Ohio after six weeks. “I just don’t understand why we would force a baby, really at 10, to have a baby,” Pryor said.
Bohacek, who voted against the bill, could not finish his testimony as he spoke about his daughter, who has Down syndrome, and his concerns about protecting rape victims with disabilities. “If she loses her favorite stuffed animal, she’s inconsolable,” he said. “Imagine making her carry a child to term,” he said before choking up and stepping away.
Rep. Ann Vermilion (R):
Vermilion condemned fellow Republicans for describing women who obtain abortions as murderers. “I think that the Lord’s promise is for grace and kindness,” she said, according to the Associated Press. “He would not be jumping to condemn these women.”
Rep. Wendy McNamara (R):
“I think we’ve landed in a great place and good policy for the state of Indiana,” said McNamara, who sponsored the House bill. She told reporters the ban “makes Indiana one of the most pro-life states in the nation.”
Sen. Jean D. Breaux (D):
“Eight of us in this chamber have ever had the possibility of becoming pregnant, yet we are about to tell millions of Hoosier women what they can do with their bodies,” she said.
“Today is a historically bad day in Indiana’s history,” Breaux, who described the legislation as an infringement on democracy, also wrote in a tweet. “Women should have the right to make these decisions in consultation with their doctors, not their state legislators.”
Gov. Eric Holcomb (R):
“Following the overturning of Roe, I stated clearly that I would be willing to support legislation that made progress in protecting life,” he said in a statement. After days of hearings and testimony, he said the legislation “and its carefully negotiated exceptions” addressed “some of the unthinkable circumstances a woman or unborn child might face.”
“I am personally most proud of each Hoosier who came forward to courageously share their views in a debate that is unlikely to cease any time soon,” Holcomb added. | 2022-08-06T10:04:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indiana lawmakers' comments on first abortion ban since Roe v. Wade overturned - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/06/indiana-abortion-ban-vote-quotes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/06/indiana-abortion-ban-vote-quotes/ |
Many think they point toward a utopian future. Others wish they’d go away.
(Golden Cosmos/Illustration for The Washington Post)
While early pandemic-era hot commodities like pocket hand sanitizers and cloth masks have fallen by the wayside, e-bikes seem to be here to stay. They enjoyed a 145 percent sales boost during the long desperate-for-outdoor-activities months of 2020 and, according to the New York Times, outsold electric cars during that year at a rate of 2 to 1. As of November, e-bikes made up 20 percent of New York’s CitiBike rental fleet — but accounted for 35 percent of the rides.
E-bikes get up to speed in popularity, providing a workout easier on the heart
Think you can’t handle a bicycle tour? Consider using an e-bike.
Ukrainian fighters take to electric bikes in the war against Russia
Indeed, even Ferrari sees the appeal of the future e-bikes seem to promise. The two kids she raised in Fort Greene are adults now, living in other areas of the borough. Today, she says, “I see all these cargo e-bikes, and I think, ‘Damn! If these were around when my kids were little, I might have considered buying one.’ ” | 2022-08-06T10:09:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | E-bikes are popular but some who share the road with them aren’t happy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/06/e-bikes-rules-laws-road/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/06/e-bikes-rules-laws-road/ |
Two landscapers are killed. Some say suspect should’ve been locked up.
Months before the shooting, prosecutors dropped a gun case against the suspect when a police search was ruled unconstitutional and evidence was suppressed
Adrian de Jesus Rivera Guzman, 48, and his stepson Juan Carlos Anaya Hernandez, 24, were shot and killed while working in Alexandria. (Family photo) (Family photo)
Juan Carlos Anaya Hernandez was an aspiring musician who serenaded his neighbors outside the Alexandria apartment complex where his family settled after fleeing violence in El Salvador.
His stepfather, Adrian de Jesus Rivera Guzman, was the rock of the family — working as a landscaping contractor to pay for rent, phone bills and groceries, lending a hand to neighbors in need, and having fun appearing on his wife and stepson’s TikTok videos.
Anaya Hernandez, 24, and Rivera Guzman, 48, were at work performing landscaping services when they were fatally shot around 7:30 a.m. on July 16. Police have linked the shootings to a burglary at the Assembly Alexandria apartments and said the landscapers were “innocent bystanders.”
“They had just left. I walked with my husband for two blocks, with his breakfast, some bread in a bag,” said Laura Hernandez, the wife and mother of the victims. “It wasn’t even 20 minutes; it was about 15 minutes when we got the call that he was on the ground.”
Police have revealed few details of what transpired, but the shooting has reverberated throughout Northern Virginia. The man police named as a suspect in the case — 27-year-old Francis Deonte Rose — had been released from law enforcement custody in neighboring Arlington County several months earlier after prosecutors dropped drug and weapons charges against him. The county’s police union and the Virginia Republican Party criticized the Democratic commonwealth’s attorney over the move — though it came after a judge suppressed evidence in the case, ruling that police had illegally searched Rose’s bag.
Police: Two men slain in Alexandria were bystanders doing landscaping
Rose has not been charged in the Alexandria slayings and is detained on charges including burglary and illegally entering a building. The Alexandria commonwealth attorney, Bryan Porter, said Thursday that further charges are not expected to be filed in the coming days. An attorney listed for Rose in court records for the illegal-entry charge, Taso R. Saunders, did not respond to requests for comment.
Rivera Guzman told his wife that two men had approached him about 2:30 p.m. the day before the shooting, she said, asking if he was the owner of the landscaping trucks and equipment stationed outside the apartments.
It seemed suspicious, Hernandez said, but “they thought it wasn’t about them.”
“We didn’t have any reason to fear them, because we didn’t have problems and we didn’t have money,” she said.
Police in D.C. and Arlington separately have charged Rose with carrying firearms illegally in the past, court records show. Rose was charged in 2019 for unlawful possession of a loaded, .45-caliber handgun that D.C. police recovered after he threw it to the ground during a foot chase. Rose pleaded guilty, but court records show he has not appeared for recent probation hearings.
In October 2020, Rose was charged in Arlington County for unlawfully possessing a firearm with intent to distribute heroin, for possessing the gun as a convicted nonviolent offender, possessing cocaine and possessing fentanyl with intent to distribute it. A little less than a year and a half later, the case would be dropped.
Court records show Rose was a passenger in a car that Arlington County police had pulled over because the registered owner had a suspended license. Police smelled marijuana and ordered the driver and Rose to exit the vehicle, according to court records.
Rose was wearing a Louis Vuitton cross-body bag strapped over his shoulder, and police told him to leave it in the car, according to a court transcript. Police found a loaded Glock handgun inside the bag and cocaine and fentanyl in his pockets, according to court records.
Rose was held in jail after he was charged. But in February, a judge in Arlington County ruled that the search that turned up the gun and drugs was unconstitutional. His defense attorney in that case, Molly Newton, successfully argued that police were not legally empowered to search the bag because it was “appended” to Rose, citing a 2002 decision by the Virginia Court of Appeals. Without probable cause to search anything but the car, the drugs in Rose’s pockets and the gun in his cross-body bag could not be admitted as evidence in court, Newton argued.
Arlington County Circuit Judge William T. Newman Jr. suppressed the evidence from the search, and noted he had a similar Louis Vuitton bag. Prosecutors immediately moved to drop the charges.
“Maybe it was a small crime he was guilty of, but now there are victims,” Hernandez said of Rose. “I know that if he’s in prison, my son and husband, they won’t come back. They’re gone forever. And even if it’s hard for me to believe, that’s how things are. I accept it. But this man can’t get out. He can’t get out.”
After Anaya Hernandez and Rivera Guzman were shot and killed, a Twitter account managed by the Virginia Republican Party blamed Arlington Commonwealth Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D). “Had she done her job, two people would be alive today,” the tweet said.
Dehghani-Tafti responded on Twitter, calling the landscapers’ deaths a tragedy and the accusation from the Virginia GOP “an outrageous and irresponsible lie.”
“The facts: we charged the defendant & obtained a grand jury indictment; we asked he be denied bond; he was held for 2 years pre trial; he moved to suppress the evidence; the court agreed, finding the police search violated the 4th amendment,” she tweeted last month.
The Arlington Coalition of Police in a news release criticized Dehghani-Tafti’s response and said she should have appealed Newman’s ruling or instituted training so that similar issues with police searches did not recur.
An Arlington County police officer testified at the hearing in February that officers in his department were trained to ask people to leave their bags inside any vehicle to be searched, “for officer safety reasons.” Asked whether Arlington police trained officers this way, a spokeswoman for the department, Ashley Savage, referred to the written policy for searches and seizures.
“Searches and seizures effected by officers shall be conducted reasonably and in accordance with the Fourth Amendment, applicable state law, and relevant case law, taking into account the totality of the circumstances of an incident in order to ensure an equitable and effective criminal justice process,” the police directive says.
“In the interest of the safety of everyone on scene, the passenger was separated from the bag,” Savage said of Rose’s search in 2020, adding that the police’s actions “were reasonable and prudent based on the information known at the time, however, we respect the ruling of Arlington County Circuit Court Chief Judge William Newman.”
After Rose was released by Arlington authorities, another judge scheduled hearings to review Rose’s probation for his 2019 conviction for unlawful possession of a handgun in D.C. Prosecutors in D.C. filed a request in May to revoke or modify Rose’s probation, court records show. D.C. Superior Court Judge Michael Ryan scheduled a hearing to review Rose’s probation in June, but he failed to appear and “has been a loss of contact,” court records show.
An attorney for Rose told a D.C. court in April that Rose had “enrolled himself in a suboxone clinic in Arlington.” Court records in D.C. show that a judge shortened Rose’s sentence in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Rose’s listed address in the records was in Alexandria — on the same block where Anaya Hernandez and Rivera Guzman were shot and killed.
Hernandez said death had stalked her family for years, even before arriving in the United States in 2018.
Her eldest son was killed in El Salvador, which the family then left due to rampant gang violence, she said. A second son was killed in Guatemala after Hernandez ignored threats that she should pay “rent” to the local gang that controlled the turf where she had set up her business, she said.
Rivera Guzman, her husband of 18 years, had adopted her boys and raised them from a young age, she said.
Now, her surviving son, Jeremias Ezequiel Anaya Hernandez, worries how the family will make ends meet. His brother, Juan Carlos, he said, supported their mother and was taking steps to establish his new life in the United States.
“He said, ‘I want to do everything in order. First, my house, my stuff. Then, God willing, my wife and my family,’” Anaya Hernandez said. “Those were his dreams.” | 2022-08-06T10:17:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two landscapers are killed. Some say suspect should’ve been locked up. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/landscapers-shooting-case-dropped/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/landscapers-shooting-case-dropped/ |
James Morosini was catfished by his father. He turned it into a film.
The ink-black comedy ‘I Love My Dad’ showcases Morosini’s affinity for screenplays with ‘a taboo embedded in them’
James Morosini's “I Love My Dad” won both the jury prize and the audience award for best narrative feature at the South by Southwest Film Festival. (Sela Shiloni)
“I Love My Dad” premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March and won both the jury prize and the audience award for best narrative feature — pretty remarkable for a movie most audiences watch through their fingers while screaming in embarrassment. The second feature film from writer-director-star James Morosini (“Threesomething”), it’s an ink-black comedy about Franklin, a brooding young man played by the filmmaker, who has cut off all communication with his unreliable screw-up of a father, Chuck, played by actor-comedian Patton Oswalt. Desperate to connect, the father creates a fake Facebook account and, under the guise of Becca (Claudia Sulewski), a willowy and sympathetic woman Franklin’s age, establishes a relationship with his son that can’t help veering into oh-no-they-didn’t/oh-my-god-they-did territory.
It sounds like a tabloid headline or the title of a particularly unseemly Subreddit: I Got Catfished By My Own Father. Yet “I Love My Dad,” which opened in theaters Friday and whose title points in at least two directions, is more than just a one-joke cringefest. On the contrary, it goes to some honest and movingly real places in the eternal struggle between parent and child — while simultaneously making you want to rinse your eyeballs with lye.
Worst of all? (Or best, depending on how much you’re into schadenfreude.) This really happened to James Morosini. Speaking recently by Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, the lanky filmmaking triple threat, 32, ’fesses up. “When I was around 20 years old, I got in a big fight with my dad and I decided in kind of 20-year-old fashion that I was going to cut him out, that I was done with him. Blocked him on Facebook, changed his name in my phone to Do Not Answer. And I got home one day and this really pretty girl sent me a friend request on Facebook, and she had all the same interests as me and all these great pictures. I got really excited, and I started to feel kind of better about myself. My self-esteem started to improve. And then I found out that it was my dad, and he created this thing as a way of making sure I was okay.”
“I Love My Dad” has broken the filmmaker out of his generational cohort of young Hollywood guys, all writing and acting and putting weird comedy shorts on the internet while hoping for their big break. Morosini grew up shooting little action videos in the Boston suburbs — “kids with boxing gloves on, that don’t know how to fight, trying to punch each other” — and, after graduating from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, tried to make it as an actor, finding some success (“American Horror Story” on FX, “The Sex Lives of College Girls” on HBO Max) and little fulfillment.
“I was often cast as a bro or, like, the dumb guy,” he says. “I was making a decent living, but I wasn’t necessarily that fulfilled creatively. So I was spending a lot of time writing features and making web series and watching an obsessive amount of film. I would go down, like, the AFI Top 100. I would go down Sight & Sound’s Top 100. I would go country by country. I spent a lot of time with Éric Rohmer and became really obsessed with Michael Haneke.”
With “I Love My Dad,” he has nailed the taboo part. The scenes in which a lovestruck Franklin wants to get, uh, intimate with his new internet girlfriend while Chuck, on the other side of the phone, frantically tries to backpedal and then improvise, are horrifyingly hilarious or hilariously horrifying, especially when seen with an audience in full vocal mortification.
Patton Oswalt says comics have a social responsibility: We can’t just ‘talk about dating or airline food anymore’
When asked what he sees in Morosini’s future, Oswalt responded: “I have no idea where he’s headed. He’s gonna zig and zag like the great early ’70s directors. Sidney Lumet went from ‘Serpico’ to ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ to ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ to ‘Network.’ The directors that are true searchers never try to carve out a niche. They try to expand the canvas.”
Before that next step, though, the world wants to know: What did Morosini’s father think about the movie? “I was nervous for him to see it,” the filmmaker says, “but he loves it and he’s in on the joke and is able to laugh at himself. And, I don’t know, that’s how I try to process things in my own life. How can I laugh at them and realize that in the grand scheme of things you can laugh at anything?”
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.substack.com. | 2022-08-06T10:39:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | James Morosini was catfished by his father. He turned it into a film. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/06/james-morosini-patton-oswalt-movie/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/06/james-morosini-patton-oswalt-movie/ |
The Kansas abortion vote, in one graph
Turnout and timing proved critical to Tuesday’s voting
Analysis by Nathaniel Birkhead
A billboard in Kansas City on July 11 urges Kansans to vote “no” on a proposed amendment to the Kansas Constitution that would have allowed the legislature to restrict abortion rights. (Gabriella Borter/Reuters)
On Tuesday, Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the legislature to restrict abortion rights. As the first state to vote on abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Kansas attracted attention from a national and international audience.
How did opponents of the amendment prevail? And what does this mean for party agendas and electoral prospects going forward?
Voter turnout matters
With relatively few competitive races, primary elections in Kansas tend to be sleepy affairs. Not this time.
The figure below compares the level of turnout by county (along the X-axis, with higher turnout to the right) compared to the percentage of voters in each county voting against the amendment (along the Y-axis). Counties voting to protect abortion rights are higher on the Y-axis, and those voting to restrict abortion rights are lower on the axis. Each county is shown proportional to its population. Data for the figure comes from the Kansas secretary of state website.
For reference, the figure includes the average turnout across Kansas’s counties in the 2018 primary — a turnout of just 17 percent. In the 2022 primary, in contrast, turnout in all but three of the 105 Kansas counties outpaced the 2018 benchmark.
Notably, turnout was unusually high regardless of whether county voters, on balance, favored or opposed the amendment. But turnout was greatest in the most sparsely populated counties. By contrast, the most influential votes came from the counties that opposed the amendment (those above the 50 percent horizontal line in the figure), which were also the most populous.
These results are about more than partisanship
The counties voting to reject the amendment tended to be reliable Democratic areas. But party affiliation alone can’t explain the outcome. Even in traditionally Republican counties, more voters rejected the amendment than we would expect from partisan behavior alone. Polling on the issue was scarce, but a mid-July Co/Efficient poll showed that nearly 20 percent of Republicans intended to reject the amendment.
That trend largely bore out: On average, counties voted “no” on the amendment by a margin of 9 percentage points higher than they voted for the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate, Laura Kelly, in 2018. What’s more, “no” performed almost 20 percentage points higher by county than Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020, respectively. Here’s an example — while Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump carried conservative Ellis County by more than 70 percent of the vote in both 2016 and 2020, support for the amendment (the “yes” votes) in the county peaked at less than 60 percent.
Timing matters, too
Kansas state lawmakers wrote the “Value Them Both” amendment after a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court ruling that held that abortion rights were protected by the state Constitution. But to amend the Kansas Constitution, a supermajority of both chambers of the Kansas legislature must first adopt the amendment and send it to the voters for their approval.
The first attempt took place in February 2020, but it fell 4 votes shy of the necessary supermajority in the Kansas House of Representatives. After the 2020 elections, which saw the Republican Party consolidate its influence on the issue of abortion, and the replacement of the holdout Republicans, legislators brought forward a similar vote in 2021, over now-Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.
To increase the odds of the voters supporting the amendment, the state legislature voted to bring the issue before the public during the primary election, rather than during the general election, as is customary. Turnout in Kansas primary elections is generally quite low (under 20 percent) and overwhelmingly dominated by Republican voters — in fact, 82 percent of voters in the 2018 primaries were Republican. Thus, in early summer, everything seemed to be on track for the amendment to pass.
Then the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Voter registration surged, particularly among women, after the leak of the Dobbs decision and its release. Money from outside the state poured in to match the already well-funded “Value Them Both” organization. And “vote no” signs — which had been quite rare in most neighborhoods — became as ubiquitous as “Value Them Both” signs.
Without the intervening Dobbs decision — stimulating Democratic turnout, possibly shifting views of GOP voters and generating more voter interest — the amendment probably would have passed fairly easily. The fortuitous timing for abortion rights supporters dealt a massive blow to the antiabortion movement in Kansas and beyond.
Across the country, the Kansas results have buoyed Democrats’ spirits — encouraging candidates to emphasize the protection of abortion rights in their midterm election platforms in the hope of attracting greater support this fall. Given President Biden’s flagging approval ratings and mixed indicators about the economy, the news is particularly welcome for Democrats trying to find a winning message with voters.
Half of Americans support abortion on demand
Aside from partisan contests, the Kansas results signal what to expect when other states vote on abortion rights this November. Kentucky votes on a similar measure, for instance, while Michigan voters will decide whether the state should expand and protect abortion access.
While each state’s context is different, these were all Trump-friendly states, based on the 2020 presidential election results. However, the lessons from Kansas suggest that support for abortion protections do not necessarily dovetail neatly with presidential election outcomes. Could the Kansas results temper GOP state legislators’ support for near-total bans on abortion? We’ll know soon enough.
Nathaniel Birkhead is associate professor of political science at Kansas State University and co-author of “Congress in Reverse: Repeals From Reconstruction to the Present” (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Find him on Twitter @Nate_Birkhead. | 2022-08-06T10:39:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Voters across Kansas choose to keep abortion legal. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/06/kansas-abortion-vote-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/06/kansas-abortion-vote-2022/ |
In Europe, lifeguard drones have helped save people from drowning. But they’re costly and less prevalent in the United States.
A lifeguard is seen at Rehoboth Beach in Rehoboth Beach, Del. (Julia Weeks/AP)
The technology has gained traction in Spain, where it’s being used on nearly two dozen beaches. In other countries, including the United States, lifeguards are also using drones as an extra set of eyes.
“Every second matters,” said Adrián Plazas Agudo, the chief executive of General Drones and a former lifeguard. “Our first response is in about five seconds … It’s very important to reduce the time.”
Drones could be enlisted to fight tornados and other climate disasters
But as technology advanced, so did lifeguards’s gear.
But lifeguards still face significant issues in saving people, said Bernard J. Fisher, the director of health and safety for the American Lifeguard Association. The pandemic halted lifeguard training, and the red-hot job market drove younger Americans to higher paying summer gigs, sparking a national lifeguard shortage that’s forced fewer people to monitor wider swaths of shore. In the United States, roughly 3,690 people drown unintentionally per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s difficult,” he said.
Agudo, who spent years as a lifeguard in Valencia and is an industrial engineer, started General Drones in 2015 after a harrowing incident on the beach. He was patrolling a stretch of shore alongside Enrique Fernández, who became his company co-founder. They saw a woman starting to drown and rushed out to her — but they were too late.
“I could see how the woman drowned in front of me,” he said. “It was the breaking point.”
After that, Agudo and Fernández partnered with engineers at Valencia’s Polytechnic University to create a drone that could reach people quicker than the fastest swimmer or water scooter and potentially save lives. They realized the beach was a harsh environment and needed a drone that could withstand water, sand and wind.
Ultimately, they created a drone that’s roughly two feet wide and weighs about 22 pounds. Made of carbon fiber and wrapped in a Go-Pro-like casing, it keeps the beach environment from eroding the mechanical innards. The drone is outfitted with high-resolution camera and carries two folded life vests that inflate once upon touching water.
The drone, called the Auxdron LFG, costs roughly 40,000 euros to purchase. Counties that purchase the drone also shell out 12,000 euros per month for specialized drone pilots who’ve been trained by General Drones to execute the challenging task of flying a drone out into the ocean, where winds are strong, and deploying life vests precisely over someone who’s drowning.
Chris Dembinsky, the technology manager for Florida’s Volusia County beach safety division, said he has four small drones in his arsenal to patrol the lakes and beaches in his jurisdiction, which include famed Daytona Beach.
Dembinsky said he can’t use his drones for lifesaving missions right now. They are too small to drop buoys or help tow people ashore. The life vests they drop whip around in the wind too much.
“If we had that amount of money,” he said, “we would probably pay our lifeguards more.”
Amazon drones are coming to town. Some locals want to shoot them.
But he said that no matter how advanced the technology gets, drones cannot replace lifeguards, who can spot unsafe situations as they’re beginning.
“It may be nice to have that drone go out there and maybe they do get there quicker than the lifeguard,” he said. “But a lot of times the lifeguard has already prevented this from happening in the first place.” | 2022-08-06T10:40:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Drones are helping lifeguards save lives - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/06/lifeguard-drones/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/06/lifeguard-drones/ |
Children play a game in front of a Guanipa family home in Punto Fijo, Venezuela, on July 28. (Andrea Hernandez Briceno/For The Washington Post)
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The boy had been in the child-welfare system for nearly two years, and his court-appointed guardian was running out of options.
Brought to Bogotá by his Venezuelan mother and abandoned, the brown-haired child had spent more time in the custody of Colombia’s Institute for Family Welfare than the law here allows. Agency officials had told the country’s highest court that they had done all they could to find the mother and had come up empty. Nor could they locate relatives in Venezuela to care for him.
Now the boy’s guardian ad litem was asking the court to make him a citizen — a first step toward putting him up for adoption.
But in the boy’s Venezuelan hometown, members of his extended family — an aunt, a great-grandmother and a cousin who watched him when he was an infant — say they were never contacted by Colombian government officials. None knew about the court case.
The boy, now 6, is one of about 1,200 Venezuelan children trapped in a child-welfare system that has proved unwilling or unable to find their families, under a government that has no diplomatic relations with their own.
Colombia has now settled on what it sees as a solution: It wants to begin making these children eligible for adoption. With a judge’s approval, about 235 children in similar circumstances could be placed permanently with new families.
But a Washington Post investigation calls the government’s claims into question. Officials told the constitutional court that they had exhausted all means of finding relatives who could care for the boy. Judge Jorge Enrique Ibáñez Najar agreed, writing that “the maternal family has no interest in being contacted or taking care of the child.”
It took Post reporters using Facebook less than a week to identify and contact the boy’s relatives in Venezuela and also his mother in Bogotá.
All said they wanted the child back.
A diplomatic freeze leaves children in limbo
In January 2019, officials of Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry traveled to Colombia with plane and bus tickets for 12 children.
The 12 were part of a longer list of Venezuelan children in Colombia’s child-welfare system who had been identified by authorities in 2017 and 2018, according to documents reviewed by The Post. Colombian and Venezuelan authorities had given the green light for the 12 children to return to their home country, with some going to their families and others to foster homes or government-run care centers.
But during the Venezuelan officials’ trip, Colombian authorities stopped responding to calls, according to people with knowledge of the mission, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. After three days, the Venezuelan diplomats returned home without the children.
Colombian authorities said they had decided not to repatriate them to Venezuela in part because they could not guarantee that they would be safe in facilities run by the crumbling socialist state. Venezuelan officials said the decision was made without their knowledge or input. They accused Colombia of using the children as pawns in the political conflict between the neighboring governments.
As Venezuela’s crisis deepens, the most vulnerable are joining the exodus
Some of the 12 stayed in Colombia’s child-welfare system until they aged out. In at least one case, a parent traveled to Colombia to look for the child. Others are still in the system.
A month after the failed mission, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro cut diplomatic relations with Colombia.
The immediate cause was Colombia’s refusal to recognize Maduro’s reelection in a 2018 vote widely viewed as fraudulent. Colombia, like the United States, recognized National Assembly President Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader. But the move followed years of antagonism between socialist Venezuela and Colombia, led by the conservative President Iván Duque.
Yet, with Venezuela’s economy in free fall, its citizens continued to pour into Colombia, home to nearly 2 million such migrants, and their children continued to flood the child-welfare system. The Guaidó-led opposition, recognized by Colombia, the United States and others as Venezuela’s rightful government, had no access to state resources to aid in the search for their families.
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“Behind all of this is a complicated diplomatic and political issue,” said Felipe Cortés, a former coordinator for migrant children in the Colombian child-welfare agency who now works with Save the Children. “Venezuela could say we are kidnapping their children. But if we return them, we could also be accused internationally for not looking out for the conditions of those children.”
In 2019, the Colombian government asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to help reunite Venezuelan children with their families. But the organization has made little progress. It says it has established contact with the families of 64 children and has reunified five.
The ICRC searches for relatives by activating “a network of family ties,” using state databases and checking with churches, community leaders and others who might have clues, said Rafael Barrantes, a deputy protection coordinator for separated or missing persons in Colombia. The success of a search can depend on the information a child can provide about his or her family.
Scores of Venezuelan children have stayed in the child-welfare system longer than allowed by Colombian law, putting pressure on the agency’s overburdened workers, according to interviews with advocates and current and former local officials. Guardians ad litem, lawyers with the welfare agency who represent the interests of children in court, are obligated to close cases within 18 months.
This has caused some government officials and employees to take matters into their own hands, tracking down families on Facebook — even though they’re prohibited from using social media in government offices. Some told The Post they have personally walked children across a bridge over the Venezuela border to meet their relatives.
Other guardians are so disheartened that they are opting not to admit Venezuelan teenagers into the child-welfare system, advocates said, instead allowing them to continue living in Colombia on their own.
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Lina María Arbeláez Arbeláez, the director general of the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare, said her agency has increased investment in Venezuelan children. It has recently launched a webpage called “Do you know me?” that features their photos.
“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “If we return those children, knowing the conditions Venezuela is in, who will guarantee the well-being of that child? … International conventions tell us that whenever there is a gap, or a risk, do not return that child.”
Colombian President-elect Gustavo Petro, who is to be inaugurated Sunday, has taken steps to reestablish relations with Venezuela. Advocates say this could help in the search for children’s families across the border.
The Duque administration, for its part, advanced a bill in Congress that would grant Colombian citizenship to migrant children in the welfare agency. An agency spokesman said lawmakers did not intend to put the children up for adoption. But analysts warned that granting them citizenship could open the door to that possibility.
The bill has since failed. But Cortés, the former child-welfare official, said the citizenship plan had shown the administration’s urgent desire to “fast-track” a way out rather than address the root issue.
“The underlying problem,” he said, “is how do you find these families in Venezuela?”
Left in the care of a foreign country
When the boy was born, his mother was herself a child.
Pregnant at 16 by a neighbor more than a decade older, she relied on her mother to raise her baby. But four months after his birth, her mother died in a car accident. Her death in 2016 hit the family just as Venezuela’s economic crisis was spiraling out of control. The young woman decided to join the throngs crossing the border into Colombia.
She found occasional work in the nightclubs of Bogotá but often didn’t make enough to pay her daily rent, said the woman, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. It was no life for a child, she said, so the baby often stayed with his father, who lived briefly in Colombia. Then the mother became pregnant again.
In late 2019, she left the boy, then 3, with a friend, Sorleidys Alcalá, while she worked at a bar and saved up money for rent. A month and a half later, Alcalá said, the mother had sent no money and stopped answering her phone calls and messages. The bar staff told Alcalá that the woman hadn’t shown up for work in weeks. A social worker urged Alcalá to give the child to authorities.
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On a morning in November 2019, Alcalá carried him to an office in Bogotá and watched as a small white van took him away.
“I wanted to help you more,” she wrote in a Facebook post with a photo of the boy, a last-ditch effort to reach his mother. “But it was out of my hands.”
The post worked. Across town, a friend showed it to the mother, letting her know her son had been handed over to Colombia’s child-welfare system. It was her 20th birthday. Her daughter later entered the system as well.
If she wanted the boy back, a child-welfare worker told her, she would need a relative to come to Colombia to prove she would have a support system to help her care for the child in the country, the mother said. She called an aunt in Venezuela, Neyda Josefina Guanipa, and asked her to meet her in Colombia for an appointment with the agency.
But the aunt never made it. After Guanipa took a bus to the Colombian border, her niece stopped answering her calls, and she never sent the money she had promised to pay for the trip, the aunt said. Guanipa returned to Venezuela, devastated.
The mother did not return to the child-welfare agency, and Guanipa says she has not heard from her since.
“Nothing will be in my favor. I don’t have family here. I live in a place that’s not apt for a child,” explained the boy’s mother, now 22, tears running down her face. “In that moment, I thought maybe it would be better for him.”
The boy’s father said that he tried once to visit a child-welfare office in Bogotá but that his name was not on his son’s birth certificate and he was unable to find information about the case. Then the pandemic hit.
A pathway to adoption
The boy had spent nearly two years living with a foster family and in a group home when his case reached the constitutional court.
His court-appointed guardian told the judge the lack of diplomatic relations between Colombia and Venezuela made it “impossible” to reunite the boy with his family.
The guardian had filed a lawsuit asking for the boy to be granted Colombian citizenship. Colombia’s Foreign Ministry said it asked the Guaidó-led opposition, which occupies the Venezuelan Embassy in Bogotá, for assistance tracking down the child’s family. The ministry said the opposition never responded.
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Reached by The Post, the legal adviser to the embassy, Zair Mundaraín, did not confirm that it had received an official request from the Colombian Foreign Ministry.
The constitutional court in July gave the child-welfare agency three months to exhaust all resources to find the family. Otherwise, it said, the boy could be placed in the adoption system.
But officials in Colombia and around the world have struggled to define what it means to exhaust all resources — and to decide whether the burden of reunifying families should fall on the child’s family or on the government.
José Ángel Rodríguez Reyes, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, said adoption should be considered a last resort, for “when it is known with a significant level of certainty that, in fact, the child does not have relatives.”
This is especially true when there are political barriers to identifying families, he said, such as in Colombia and Venezuela. “As long as these difficulties are not overcome, I believe that adoption may not be adequate,” he said.
One advocate with knowledge of the constitutional court case, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to comment on a sensitive issue, argued that parents or other relatives should be responsible for looking for a family’s children.
“The question is, what did that family do all year? Why didn’t they show up? Why weren’t they looking out for the child? Why didn’t they call [the child-welfare agency] to ask?” the advocate said. “There is no mother, no father that wouldn’t cross an ocean, even with no money, to find their child.”
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Ibáñez Najar, the judge, wrote that “the behavior of the mother, and even the grandmother,” showed that the maternal family had no interest in caring for the child. Child-welfare officials said in court documents that the boy’s maternal grandmother is in Colombia and once appeared at an agency office. In fact, the boy’s maternal grandmother has been dead for more than five years. It is unclear to whom the judge and officials were referring.
The boy’s mother, living in a cramped apartment in a low-income neighborhood of Bogotá, was unaware that her son was the subject of a case before the country’s highest court until informed by The Post. She lives with a 43-year-old partner and their 9-month-old, her third child. The names of her two other children are tattooed on her arms.
She said she had assumed her son had been adopted — perhaps by an American couple. She said she didn’t know there was still a chance for him to remain in her family, “with his own blood.”
Across the border, a family waits
Three generations of the Guanipa family were born and raised in the small town of Punto Fijo, in Venezuela’s western coastal area.
The family’s houses, which take up an entire block, look alike: one-story structures with three rooms, a kitchen, and a patio where the families hang their clothes to dry in the sun.
In one family home on a recent afternoon, children were curled up watching a movie in a bedroom, the one room with air conditioning. The matriarch of the family, Yoleida Guanipa, held two great-grandchildren in her arms.
One great-grandchild was missing. The 67-year-old woman couldn’t bring herself to speak about him without breaking down in tears.
The boy’s aunts, cousins, great-aunts and great-grandmother say they wished they could have done more to keep him with the family, but they didn’t know what. They didn’t know how to contact his mother. Money for travel was limited. The pandemic made everything more difficult.
“Who is going to get in touch with us from Colombia, knowing we’re Venezuelan?” asked Yoselyn Carolina González, the mother’s cousin. “They probably think we’re bad people, or that we just went back to Venezuela and forgot about that boy. But we didn’t.”
Neyda Josefina Guanipa, who had made the trip to the Colombia border, recently remembered that the boy’s birthday was coming up, on Aug. 15. When she said his name, the boy’s 12-year-old cousin asked where he was. “He’s still in Colombia,” she replied.
The boy’s great-aunt felt confident that she could care for him. Guanipa now works cleaning houses and says she makes enough money to cover everything she needs. She has a spare room for the boy. The many children in the extended family all go to school just a block away.
Another great-aunt took out her cellphone and pulled up a photo of the boy on Facebook. She pointed out a comment she had left on the photo recently.
“God bless you my child,” she had written, “wherever you are.”
Mariana Zúñiga in Punto Fijo contributed to this report. | 2022-08-06T10:40:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colombia wants him adopted. But he has a family — and they want him back. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/venezuela-children-colombia-adoption/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/venezuela-children-colombia-adoption/ |
By Frederic J. Frommer
The five living members of the 1972 National Baseball Hall of Fame class, from left: Yogi Berra, Lefty Gomez, Sandy Koufax, Buck Leonard and Early Wynn. (AP) (AP)
“Wake up, Dad,” said Josh Gibson Jr., “you just made it in.”
With those words in Cooperstown, N.Y. a half-century ago Sunday, the younger Gibson accepted the plaque that welcomed his late father, Josh Gibson, into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, along with another Negro League star, Buck Leonard.
The two men, who played for the Homestead Grays and were known as “the Black Babe Ruth” and “the Black Lou Gehrig,” never got a shot in the major leagues. But in August 1972, they became the first exclusively Negro League players inducted into Cooperstown.
Gibson, the best Negro League hitter of all time, died of a stroke at 35 in January, 1947, just three months before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Leonard, who turned 40 that season, retired a year later.
“We in the Negro Leagues felt we could have and should have been in the majors, but it wasn’t meant to be,” Leonard said in his acceptance speech on that cloudy summer day 50 years ago, a month before his 65th birthday. “ … We felt we were contributing something to baseball, too. We played with a round ball and round bats, and we loved it and liked to play — because there wasn’t that much money in it. My getting in is something I never thought would happen.”
Gibson, a catcher, and Leonard, a first baseman, powered a “Murderers’ Row” Grays team, which dominated the Negro National League in the 1930s and ’40s. The Grays split their time between D.C. and Pittsburgh, often outdrawing the Washington Senators in their own ballpark, Griffith Stadium.
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The duo were inducted with six other players, including Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax and Yankees catcher Yogi Berra.
“They scarcely could have been more representative of Melting Pot USA,” the Sporting News wrote at the time, describing the five living inductees. “Humble and appreciative, they stood before a microphone in typically small-town USA. … A Jew from New York, an Italian from Missouri, a Scotch-Irish-Indian from Alabama, a Spaniard from California and a Negro from North Carolina.”
Gibson and Leonard were just the fourth and fifth Black players to make the Hall of Fame, following Robinson (1962), his Brooklyn Dodgers teammate Roy Campanella (1969) and Satchel Paige, who in 1971 became the first player inducted by the Committee on Negro League Veterans. (All three had played in the Negro Leagues, but Paige was the only one of the three who played most of his career there.)
Some news coverage that day characterized Gibson and Leonard as, at best, supporting actors. In its story about the induction, the New York Times reported, “In a perfectly appropriate blend of sentiment, humor and brevity, Yogi Berra, Sandy Koufax, Lefty Gomez and five less glamorized figures were inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame today.”
Fifty years later, it would be hard for any baseball historian to consider Gibson and Leonard “less glamorized” than other Hall of Famers. According to baseballreference.com, Gibson finished with a career batting average of .374, a .720 slugging percentage and an off-the-charts 1.178 OPS. Leonard had a .345 career batting average, and a 1.042 OPS.
“Josh was the greatest hitter I ever pitched to, and I pitched to everybody,” Paige said in 1972, according to the Times. “There’s been some great hitters — Williams, DiMaggio, Musial, Mays, Mantle. But none of them was as great as Josh.”
Campanella, a star slugging catcher who played eight seasons in the Negro Leagues before joining the Dodgers in 1948, told the Sporting News, “Whenever I played on an all-star team in the Black leagues with Josh, he was the catcher. I played third base. Everything I could do, Josh could do better.”
‘Too bad this Gibson is a colored fellow’
Gibson and Leonard, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere. During spring training in 1939, former Washington Senators star Walter Johnson, one of the best pitchers in baseball history, watched Gibson play in a game in Orlando, then raved to Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich, who quoted him:
“There is a catcher that any big league club would like to buy for $200,000. I’ve heard of him before. His name is Gibson. They call him ‘Hoot’ Gibson, and he can do everything. He hits that ball a mile. And he catches so easy he might just as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle. [Yankees star] Bill Dickey isn’t as good a catcher. Too bad this Gibson is a colored fellow.”
Povich added: “That was the general impression among the Nats who saw the game.”
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Senators owner Clark Griffith came to the same conclusion a few years later, although he knocked the price down a bit. “There’s a catcher worth $150,000 of anybody’s money right now. If I could have had him I’d have gone after him some time ago!” he gushed to The Post in 1942. Griffith recalled seeing Gibson hit four homers in a doubleheader the year before, one of which was the longest ball ever hit at Griffith Stadium.
And yet Griffith resisted pressure from Black journalists such as Sam Lacy to sign Gibson and other Black players — and instantly improve his mediocre team. Leonard recalled that one day around 1942, Griffith asked to meet with him and Gibson, according to a 1988 Post story by John B. Holway, adapted from his book “Blackball Stars: Negro League Pioneers.”
At that meeting, Leonard recalled, Griffith mentioned the campaign by Black sportswriters to put them on the Senators roster, and said, “Well, let me tell you something: If we get you boys, we’re going to get the best ones. It’s going to break up your league. Now what do you think of that?”
Leonard said they replied that they’d be happy to play in the major leagues, but would leave it to others to make the case. According to Holway, the duo never heard from Griffith again.
A Josh Gibson MVP Award?
Two years ago, the Baseball Writers’ Association of the America voted to remove former commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s name from MVP plaques. There were no Black players in the major leagues during his long tenure as the sport’s first commissioner, from 1920 to 1944. Now the Josh Gibson Foundation has a campaign to rename the MVP for Gibson.
“We all know that Kenesaw Mountain Landis denied over 3,400 men an opportunity to play in the major leagues,” the group’s executive director, Sean Gibson, Josh Gibson’s great-grandson, said in a recent telephone interview. “So having Josh Gibson’s name on the MVP Award would not just represent Josh Gibson, but it would represent the 3,400 men who were denied the opportunity to play in the majors. This is bigger than just Josh Gibson. Josh is carrying those guys on his shoulders.”
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He added that it would be “poetic justice” for a player denied the chance to play in the major leagues to replace a commissioner who had been an obstacle.
Sean Gibson said that his grandfather, who accepted the Hall of Fame plaque for Josh Gibson, always credited Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams for opening the door to players such as Gibson to make the Hall. In his 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech, Williams said, “I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way could be added as a symbol of the great Negro players that are not here only because they were not given a chance.”
“Five years later, Satch goes in in ’71,” Gibson noted. “The next year, ‘72, is Josh. My grandfather always gave Ted Williams credit, because he feels if Ted Williams does not mention Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige in his speech, he doesn’t know if that happens that fast.”
Gibson said he that he thinks that Williams’s background — his mother was Mexican American — helped him feel compassion for Negro League players. Another factor was Williams seeing Black players during barnstorming games against Negro Leaguers.
“So he knew about the talent,” Gibson said. “He knew how great these guys were on the diamond.”
“Ted spoke up; nobody else spoke up,” he added. “So we’re very grateful for that. His speech was only like three minutes long. And for him to include that small piece of the pie, of Josh and Satch, was huge for us.” | 2022-08-06T11:53:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | When Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard went into the Hall of Fame - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/06/josh-gibson-buck-leonard-hall-fame/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/06/josh-gibson-buck-leonard-hall-fame/ |
Shape shifting U.S. economy changes its look from one week to the next
A worker performs a quality control check on the assembly floor at the Qcells solar panel manufacturing facility in Dalton, Ga. Manufacturing was one of several sectors that added jobs in the stellar July jobs report. (Dustin Chambers/for The Washington Post)
Friday’s blowout jobs report may have quieted claims that the U.S. is in a recession, but it did not end the mystery about the state of the economy or resolve questions about where it is headed.
Government data showing the economy had contracted for the second consecutive quarter — meeting one informal definition of recession — was still fresh, as the Labor Department on Friday said employers had added 528,000 jobs in July. That was more than twice as many as economists expected.
Only eight days separated the two government reports, yet they seemed to describe entirely different realities.
The first showed a weak economy that — coupled with the highest inflation in 40 years — offered consumers nothing but grief. The second reflected a juggernaut that was minting jobs faster than workers could be found to fill them, with an unemployment rate that matched the pre-pandemic low of 3.5 percent.
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“It’s normal for different economic indicators to point in different directions. It’s the magnitude of the discrepancies right now that’s unprecedented,” said Jason Furman, formerly President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser. “It isn’t just that the economy is growing in one measure and shrinking in another. It’s growing incredibly strongly in one measure while shrinking at a pretty decent clip in another.”
In Washington on Friday, President Biden took a victory lap for the job growth while claiming credit for gas prices having declined for more than 50 consecutive days. Yet he also acknowledged the disconnect between the sunny employment report and the inflation headaches that afflict many households.
“I know people will hear today’s extraordinary jobs report and say they don’t see it, they don’t feel it in their own lives,” the president said, speaking from a White House balcony. “I know how hard it is. I know it’s hard to feel good about job creation when you already have a job and you’re dealing with rising prices, food and gas, and so much more. I get it.”
The surprisingly robust jobs number seemed to call into question the president’s argument that the economy is undergoing a “transition” from its faster growth rates last year to a slower, more sustainable pace.
No one expects the economy to continue producing half a million new jobs each month. No one thinks it could without inflation remaining at uncomfortable heights.
Almost five months after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to cool off the economy and to bring down the highest inflation since the early 1980s, the labor market report showed that the nation’s central bank has more work to do. Average hourly earnings for private sector workers rose by 5.2 percent over the past year, which hints at the sort of wage-price spiral that the Fed is determined to prevent.
Last month, the Fed lifted its benchmark interest rate to a range of 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent, its highest level in almost four years. Yet in “real” or inflation-adjusted terms, borrowing costs remain deeply negative, which acts as a spur to economic growth.
Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said last month that additional rate increases are likely when policymakers next meet on Sept. 21. The size of the next increase – either half a percentage point or three-quarters of a point – will “depend on the data we get between now and then,” he told reporters.
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Investors see a 70 percent chance of the larger move, according to CME Group, which tracks purchases of derivatives linked to the central bank’s key rate.
On Wednesday, the government is scheduled to release inflation readings for July, which are expected to show a modest improvement compared to June’s 9.1 percent figure, thanks to falling energy prices.
Powell’s decision to stop telegraphing Fed moves by providing “forward guidance” of its plans is itself a sign that the current environment is murkier than usual.
“A lot of what's happening in this economy is being driven by the pandemic, and then the pandemic response. And so, we are in a very unusual time, in many ways [it’s] challenging to sort of read through those data,” Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and a voting member of the Fed’s rate-setting committee, told The Washington Post this week.
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Almost 22 million Americans lost their jobs between February and April of 2020 in covid’s first months. The unemployment rate hit 14.7 percent, the highest figure recorded by the Labor Department in a series that began in 1948.
With July’s gains, the economy now has recovered all of the lost jobs.
But the workforce has been reshaped. There are more warehouse and logistics workers today and fewer employees working for hotels and airlines.
Employers are reacting differently than they did before the pandemic to indications that the economy may be slowing, according to Gregory Daco, chief economist for EY-Parthenon. Rather than immediately resorting to significant layoffs, they are instead scaling back hiring or engaging in targeted job cuts.
Weekly first-time unemployment claims are up, but only to 260,000 from their 54-year low of 166,000 in March.
Consumers have also acted differently, buying more goods than normal while trapped at home during the pandemic’s initial wave. Retailers that ordered unusual volumes of furniture, electronics and apparel from overseas suppliers later misjudged the pace of consumers’ return to traditional buying patterns, leaving stores stuffed with unwanted goods.
On top of the pandemic’s lingering ills, the war in Ukraine has disrupted global commodity markets, contributing to higher inflation.
All of these forces combined to produce economic data that is unusual and sometimes contradictory. Friday’s jobs report showed 32,000 new construction jobs and 30,000 new factory jobs created in the month. Yet housing starts have fallen for the past two months and the latest ISM manufacturing reading was the weakest in two years.
“We are in somewhat of a dizzying business cycle. We’re getting economic data that is fluctuating quite rapidly and it’s very hard to get a precise read on where the economy is at any point in time,” Daco said.
Individual data points also provide snapshots of the economy that are out of sync, said Kathryn Edwards, an economist at the Rand Corp.
Friday’s Labor Department report tallied up jobs gained in July. The last consumer price index reading covered June. And the gross domestic product reading that started the recession furor described activity that occurred between April and June – and will be revised twice.
“It’s a challenge for an economist, but also for a reader who wants to understand how at risk they are for an economic downturn,” she said.
Labor market and output data have been telling different stories about the economy all year. After six straight months of shrinkage, the economy is roughly $125 billion smaller than it was at the end of 2021, according to inflation-adjusted Commerce Department data.
Yet employers have hired 3.3 million new workers over that same period.
How could more workers be producing fewer goods and services?
One explanation is that workers are less productive today than during the emergency phase of the pandemic, when companies struggled to keep producing their required orders with fewer workers, Furman said.
Indeed, non-farm business productivity in the first quarter fell 7.3 percent, the largest decline since 1947, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preliminary results for the second quarter will be made public on Tuesday and are likely to show the largest two-quarter drop in history, he said.
Those figures may overstate the change. During the pandemic, companies may have been able to maintain output with a covid-thinned workforce by exhorting or incentivizing the remaining workers to work harder or longer. But there is a limit to how long bosses can motivate people by citing emergency conditions.
“They worked extra hard, but they wouldn’t work extra hard forever,” Furman said.
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Likewise, the labor force participation rate usually rises when employers are adding jobs and the unemployment rate is falling. But since March, it has fallen, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some Americans retired instead of risking working during the pandemic. Others — mostly women — who lacked adequate child care, stayed home with young children or other vulnerable relatives.
An April paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found that “the pandemic has permanently reduced participation in the economy.”
Participation by Americans in their prime working years, ages 25 to 54, has almost entirely recovered. But for those 55 and older, there has been almost no improvement since the initial plunge at the outset of the pandemic. And for younger workers, age 20 to 24, participation is lower now than at the end of last year.
“I don’t think we have a great handle on why other workers are not coming back,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics. “It’s just such an unusual period.” | 2022-08-06T12:11:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The economy is growing by one measure, shrinking by another - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/06/economy-confusion-inflation-recession/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/06/economy-confusion-inflation-recession/ |
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) speaks during an interview in his conference room at the Capitol in January shortly before leaving office at the end of his term. (Steve Helber/AP)
RICHMOND — In the final hours before leaving office in January, Gov. Ralph Northam pardoned prison inmate Vince Gilmer, whose extraordinary tale of murder and mysterious illness has drawn international attention.
But nearly seven months later, Gilmer, 59, is still incarcerated, and the ravaging disease at the heart of his case continues to worsen. Now supporters are mounting a last-ditch fundraising effort to crack the stalemate that’s keeping the former North Carolina physician behind bars.
“We’re in this very bizarre space, it’s very symbolic of … what is happening everywhere in America regarding the mass incarceration of the mentally ill," said Benjamin Gilmer, who is not related, but who has devoted much of the past decade to advocating for the man who shares his name — and profession.
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Benjamin Gilmer stumbled onto the case through an eerie coincidence. In 2009, he took a job near Asheville, N.C., as a doctor at a rural health clinic. There he confronted two disturbing things about a previous physician at the clinic who was beloved by his patients for generous, selfless care:
That doctor was also named Gilmer, and he had murdered his father.
Benjamin Gilmer’s quest to make sense of the situation was documented in an episode of NPR’s “This American Life” that aired in 2013 and more recently in his book “The Other Dr. Gilmer,” which was published in March and is being made into a movie.
Gilmer learned that his supposedly gentle predecessor had strangled his father in 2004, cut off his fingers to prevent identification and dumped the body in Virginia.
But he also learned that less than a year before the killing, Vince Gilmer had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident and had seemed different ever since. He learned that when Gilmer was growing up, he was subjected to horrific sexual abuse at the hands of his father.
And over time, after struggling to understand the strange behavior that had court officials convinced Vince Gilmer was trying to fake mental illness, Benjamin Gilmer came to believe that the explanation was an undiagnosed case of Huntington’s disease. Tests later confirmed it.
Huntington’s is a progressive and fatal neurological disorder that causes people to act in impulsive and uncontrollable ways. Benjamin Gilmer was convinced that the disease, the injury and the abuse were at the root of the crime, and that Vince Gilmer needed treatment, not incarceration.
He lobbied Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) for clemency so that Vince Gilmer could be sent to a mental health facility, but was turned down. When Northam (D) took office in 2017, Gilmer figured he had a fighting chance because the new governor was a pediatric neurologist who would be more likely to understand the disease.
In 2021, Northam rejected the appeal. Benjamin Gilmer persisted, calling and emailing administration officials and sending them advance copies of his book. Finally, on his last day in office early this year, Northam granted a conditional pardon.
“This is one that was not easy initially," said Clark Mercer, who served as Northam’s chief of staff. He mentioned the brutal nature of the crime, but said that Northam was familiar with Huntington’s as a physician and realized it was a complex case.
During his final days in office, Mercer said, Northam gave a second look to a number of pardon requests, including Gilmer’s. He ultimately granted more than 1,200 pardons during his four-year term, which his office said was more than nine previous governors combined.
When reconsidering the Gilmer case, Mercer said, the governor was swayed by the idea of mandating that the inmate establish a “home plan” for treatment and guardianship as a condition of release. Such a requirement is common, Mercer said.
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The language of the pardon requires that Gilmer get admission to a treatment facility that meets “both his psychiatric and medical needs,” have the plan approved by the state Department of Corrections and pay for his own secure transportation to be relocated.
Benjamin Gilmer said state officials, by putting full responsibility on the inmate, are essentially requiring Vince Gilmer to pay a private facility for treatment when Virginia has public mental health hospitals that would be an ideal home for him — including one adjacent to the prison where he’s being held in Marion in the Southwest part of the state.
In the meantime, he said, Gilmer’s condition is deteriorating. He relies on a wheelchair to get around because he’s too unsteady to stand. “It’s difficult for him to talk. Cognitively, he’s very slowed at this point. It’s difficult for him to swallow,” he said, adding that aspiration — essentially, choking — is a common killer for people with Huntington’s.
The disorder also causes him to behave erratically. Huntington patients often lash out physically at their caregivers — not out of malice, Benjamin Gilmer said, but because their brains are misfiring. He accused prison officials of assigning Vince Gilmer to solitary confinement as punishment.
Department of Corrections spokesman Benjamin Jarvela denied the allegation, saying via email that Virginia does not use solitary confinement.
“Mr. Gilmer has been placed in Restorative Housing on some occasions, all short-duration periods, as a direct result of his exhibiting dangerous behavior towards himself or other individuals in the facility,” Jarvela said, referring to a recent state program that’s supposed to provide a safe environment for inmates suffering from mental illness. “I’m afraid we cannot discuss confidential incarceration & health records further than that.”
The General Assembly passed a law in 2021 ending the use of “restrictive housing,” or solitary confinement, but the ACLU and other advocacy groups have charged that the “restorative housing” program it was replaced with amounts to the same thing.
The corrections department “is more than willing to release Mr. Gilmer once the terms of his clemency have been met,” Jarvela said.
Gilmer said he has appealed to state Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) to intervene, but has been rebuffed. A spokeswoman for Miyares said his office has no role in the case. A spokeswoman for Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) said via email that “the individual’s early release is dependent on the fulfillment of the pardon requirements."
The plan now is to get Vince Gilmer into a private facility so he could eventually move to a public mental health hospital in North Carolina, which won’t take transfers directly from prisons, Benjamin Gilmer said. That’s going to cost at least $100,000, he said.
This week, Benjamin Gilmer started a GoFundMe campaign to raise that amount. By Friday afternoon, it had topped $67,000 — including a $20,000 donation from the musician Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler. Any extra funds raised will allow Gilmer to stay in private care longer before transferring, Benjamin Gilmer said.
He said the situation needs to be resolved as quickly as possible.
“Everybody knows he’s terminally ill and is going to die. We’re afraid he’s either going to take his own life or aspirate tonight and die," he said. State officials “are not willing to do anything to step up, but they’re willing to let him sit there and rot in prison."
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Derision, misogyny, sexual assault: VMI women face attacks on campus and online
Sen. Tim Kaine’s nightmarish 27-hour commute on I-95 | 2022-08-06T12:11:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vince Gilmer was pardoned for murder but remains in Virginia prison - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/northam-gilmer-doctors-murder-pardon/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/northam-gilmer-doctors-murder-pardon/ |
The change is stressful for most students. Those with concerns should tap into resources before they even set foot on campus.
By Fran Kritz
(Lisk Feng/Lisk Feng for The Washington Post)
The move from high school to college can be a trying one, particularly for students with mental health concerns. But today there are ways to make it easier.
“In the last few years, and especially since the pandemic began, campus resources for all students have proliferated, and ahead of coming to campus is when students should be connecting with the resources that they need,” says Amy Gatto, director of research and evaluation at Active Minds, an organization that works to make talking about mental health on campus as natural as talking about physical health.
A 2021 survey by the American College Health Association of close to 100,000 college students found that 16 percent of college men and 33 percent of college women had been diagnosed with anxiety, and 14 percent of college men and 25 percent of college women had been diagnosed with depression.
A study published in June by the Healthy Minds Network — which conducts research on the mental health of college students — involving more than 350,000 students on 373 campuses between 2013 and 2021 found that the number of students who met the criteria for one or more mental health problems in 2021 had doubled since 2013.
That was no surprise to Sarah Lipson, a principal investigator for the network and the study’s lead author.
“Living in a new setting and away from home can often create overwhelming and stressful circumstances, and recently we’ve added the stress of the pandemic to the mix,” says Lipson, a professor of health policy at Boston University’s School of Public Health. For students with a diagnosed mental health condition, she adds, their strategy for college success should include making and implementing a mental health plan (see “10 tips for your move to campus”).
A successful start
Jaiden Singh, 20, a rising junior at the University of Arizona who struggles with academic-related stress and anxiety, is a good example of someone who did the necessary prep work before he landed on campus.
Singh, who was a member of Active Minds in high school, said the fact that the University of Arizona had an Active Minds chapter was “a key factor” in his choice to attend school there. In addition, before he started college in fall 2020, he studied the university’s counseling center website, where he found a robust selection of services, including individual and group counseling.
During his freshman year, classes were remote because of the pandemic. Singh lived at home, but he remembers appreciating an online webinar that helped students reframe their situation.
“I could anticipate the next semester hopefully on campus and be glad that I had a safe place to be in the meantime,” he says.
Kids’ mental health is getting worse. But that predated the pandemic.
Since moving to campus in fall 2021, Singh has taken advantage of one-on-one counseling, among other services.
“I found the intake process … very easy, which was a big factor, and is for many students, because just getting started accessing services can be hard,” Singh says. At Arizona, the counseling center offers an array of services, including sessions on relaxation skills, test anxiety, homesickness and time management.
Treatment and medications
For students continuing therapy and/or medications at college and “who may need to change doctors and pharmacies, it is essential that these transitions take place ahead of the term … so students can avoid interruptions in their care just when their new, exciting college experience is beginning,” says Shabana Khan, a physician and director of telehealth for the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York.
Khan, who chairs the American Psychiatric Association’s telepsychiatry committee, says changing telehealth rules make it especially crucial for students who will be attending college in a different state to find out whether they will be able to continue care with their current treating clinicians.
After the Health and Human Services Department declared a public health emergency in January 2020, many states and insurers expanded the types of health-care providers who are able to see their patients online as well as the types of telehealth services that can be provided.
In some cases, state-specific changes allowed health-care professionals of all kinds, including psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, to see patients online even when a patient had moved out of state.
Pandemic leads colleges to revise, improve mental health efforts
Today, however, some insurers have started rolling back coverage for telehealth, and many providers worried about flexibility ending (in July, HHS renewed the rules for 90 days) have stopped seeing patients remotely. Patients need to review with their providers whether they will be able to continue care, before heading to college, Khan says. “College counseling centers can help in transitioning students to new practitioners,” she adds.
Find your community
One evening this spring, hundreds of undergraduates at New York City-based Yeshiva University attended a discussion hosted by the college’s Active Minds chapter, which featured three students speaking about their mental health journeys. The college’s counseling center director, Yael Muskat, was proud and unsurprised.
“We work with our students to make mental health a safe topic to discuss, and seek help for, on our campuses,” Muskat says. Like many campuses, Yeshiva doesn’t just rely on students to seek out the counseling center but also actively promotes its services, which include depression screening events, drop-in anxiety groups, workshops and speakers.
At semester orientations, student-volunteers and staff offer a warm welcome to anyone interested in learning more about the center.
Feeling low, tell someone
Conversations about mental health have become more common since the pandemic began, so find that person who feels safe to speak with, says Kelly Davis, associate vice president of peer and youth advocacy at Mental Health America, which connects people with mental health resources.
Students with mental health concerns should use their first days on campus to introduce themselves to resident advisers, counseling staff and other students they meet in dorms, classes and the dining hall. These steps will help them develop a community for sharing their college experience and for reaching out if life at college starts to seem overwhelming, Davis says.
10 tips for your move to campus
1. Study campus options before leaving home. Students with a mental health diagnosis should ask their provider whether they can continue their sessions in person or remotely, says Shabana Khan, a physician and director of telehealth for the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York. If not, ask the provider’s advice on whether you should continue counseling with a new provider at college; if the answer is yes, contact the campus counseling center for guidance.
2. Review your health insurance. Generally, insurance dictates which providers you can see and how much you will pay for visits and medication. Keep in mind that some students change insurance plans when they start college, says Kelly Davis, associate vice president of peer and youth advocacy at Mental Health America, including switching to a less expensive university health plan. If campus providers charge a fee and don’t take your insurance, ask whether the counseling center offers any free or reduced-price care and if there are local providers who might take your insurance. Also investigate whether local mental health clinics provide services for free or on a sliding scale of fees. If possible, have your current provider speak to your future provider “to catch them up on your treatment,” Khan says.
3. Find the counseling center early. Introduce yourself to the staff, especially if you’re transitioning to care on campus. Keep center contact numbers handy in case of an emergency for you or a classmate, or for any questions that come up.
4. Have a medication plan. According to the Healthy Minds Network, a quarter of college students take mental health medications. It’s important to speak to your doctor about the medications you take and anything you should change or add before you leave for school and fill prescriptions before you head to campus. Once at college, contact the campus counseling center for help getting emergency supplies or assistance in getting prescriptions started at a new pharmacy.
5. Prepare for emergencies. Ask counseling center staffers whom to call if you’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed, unsafe or capable of harming yourself or others, says Victor Schwartz, senior associate dean for wellness and student life at the City University of New York Medical School. Many campuses are also widely posting about 988, a national suicide prevention hotline that launched in July. Students can call or text 988, or call 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255).
6. Open up with others. Since the pandemic began, conversations about mental health have become more common, so build on that. Campus officials want you to thrive and know the transition can be difficult, Davis says. “In your first days, say hi to resident advisers, faculty, counseling staff, classmates online so that you start to develop a community and feel comfortable sharing how you feel.”
7. Tap into other services. Students with mental health concerns and a diagnosed learning disability or executive functioning issue should also share those records with the academic support center, says Saul Newman, associate dean for undergraduate education in the School of Public Affairs at American University in D.C. “That should be in place before the start of a semester,” Newman adds. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by a class or assignment as the semester moves forward and think you won’t be able to complete it, contact the professor as early as possible, Schwartz says.
8. Participate. Making new friends is the best way to defuse stress and ease anxiety and depression, Schwartz says. Elizabeth Lunzer, 21, who graduated from UCLA this year and was a member of the school’s Active Minds chapter, says being involved gave her a safe place to discuss her anxiety with people who understood and cared about how she was feeling.
9. Find your counseling space. Since the start of the pandemic, many people have switched to remote therapy, even when the provider and patient are on the same campus. Students should be sure to have a private space for the sessions, says Anushka Gupta, 19, a sophomore at New York University. If your room isn’t an option, ask the counseling center, library or student activities center if there is a room you can have to yourself once a week for sessions.
10. Parents may be a support system for some. Parents, guardians and family members aren’t necessarily looped in about health issues when a student is 18 or older. If a student wants to involve parents and others in their care, they can ask the counseling center how to lift confidentiality provisions to keep them informed. | 2022-08-06T12:11:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to ease the transition to college when mental health is a concern - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/06/college-mental-health-transition/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/06/college-mental-health-transition/ |
Psychologists note that excessive intervening in your child’s life can damage their ability to navigate situations on their own
By Caren Chesler
A few years ago, my son was swimming in a neighbor’s pool when some boys from his class jumped in the water and began throwing a ball around. When my son caught it, one of the boys yelled at him. When my son caught it a second time, the boy called out, “Give me the ball. You’re so annoying!”
“Be nice,” I yelled reflexively, like a lioness swatting a hyena that goes near her cub — although I scanned the area to see whether the child’s mother was nearby. People don’t like it when you yell at their kids, even if their child was unkind.
I’ve always injected myself into my son’s play — too much. “Are you 5?” a fellow mother once scolded. “Stay out of the playground.”
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Psychologists put it a little more delicately, noting that excessive intervening in a child’s life can damage their ability to navigate situations on their own. By getting too involved, parents are implicitly telling their children that they don’t trust their ability to handle a situation properly, said Jelena Obradovic, an associate professor in Stanford University’s developmental and psychological sciences program.
Last year, I picked up my son from hockey and noticed that he had scratches on his neck. When I asked him about it, he said a boy named Kevin — not his real name — tackled him after practice while they were playing soccer, and he fell onto some rocks.
“Mom, don’t say anything,” he said.
“Fine,” I said.
As soon as he walked away, I spotted Kevin — and made a beeline for him.
“Did you tackle Eddie?” I said, angrily.
“I just got here,” he said.
Just then, Kevin’s mother walked up. She said it must have been the other Kevin who tackled my son. “There are two,” she said.
I apologized and scurried off.
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When my son gets slighted, I’ve realized that my own childhood wounds flare up like hives. I become protective, but not just because I’m experiencing my son’s pain. I’m reexperiencing my own.
Obradovic published a study last year that found that when parents over-engage their children in kindergarten, it can make it more difficult for them to self-regulate. By intervening, children have fewer opportunities to practice self-regulation, she said.
“Parents need to know how to just back off,” said Obradovic, noting that that’s true even if we see our children about to make a mistake — so long as they’re not putting themselves in harm’s way. “We have to let them make those mistakes or let them handle those situations, because by creating those spaces, that’s how they practice getting better.”
I’ve tried, but so far, I’ve failed.
And now that my son has a phone, I have a bird’s-eye view of his social interactions through his texts. It was inadvertent. I gave him my old phone, but even though he has his own number, our phones are still inextricably linked. When he takes a photo, it shows up on both of our phones. When a friend calls him, my phone rings, too. And when a friend started a group text, I could read every word. And I did. He knows I can do this, but I don’t like to remind him, for fear he’ll find a way to shut me down.
Surprisingly, there’s no formal guidance on parents reading their kids’ texts, nor is there any science encouraging or discouraging it, said Mitchell J. Prinstein, the American Psychological Association’s chief science officer.
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Prinstein, whose work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill focuses on technology and adolescent mental health, said the upside of reading texts — if your child knows you’re reading them — is that it can lead to increased communication should your child have any questions about the increasingly complex social interactions they may be having online.
The downside is that, if children know they’re being observed, they may find other, more covert means of interacting and perhaps experiment with things they’ve been told not to do.
“It’s always a balance, whether we’re talking about texts or any other aspects of parenting. You’re balancing autonomy and trustworthiness with monitoring and protection,” he said.
That balancing act was tested recently when a girl in my son’s class mistakenly thought she was being removed from a group chat and got upset. She then called out the group for some “farting jokes” at school.
“What farting jokes?” one girl asked.
My son interjected, “What …” He then inserted an emoji of a fart. And in case his classmates missed it, he sent a follow-up text that said, “Fart.”
Seeing my son antagonize someone who was already upset, I blew my covert cover and told him not to be mean and to treat people the way he’d want to be treated. He responded by sending her a text welcoming her to the Fifth Grade Chat and apologizing for his comment.
But instead of texting the young girl, he might actually have ended up texting the girl’s mother. The scuttlebutt circulating the next day among my son’s classmates and their mothers was that the girl’s mother had commandeered her phone to protect her, given that the language the “girl” used in her texts was uncharacteristically adult.
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And that’s what happens when adults cannot stay out of the playground. One mother gets her son to apologize to a young classmate who might actually have been the classmate’s mother. We might never know who sent those texts, but just the idea that it was a mom who responded showed me something I needed to see: a mirror. And it made me cringe.
The other night at my son’s hockey practice, I watched as my son joked around with one of his new teammates. It seemed playful until suddenly, the boy cocked his arm back and punched my son in the face. My son fell backward onto the ice and began to cry.
“Are you kidding me?!” I said repeatedly as I ran toward him.
By the time I got there, the coach had gathered the team around him and was about to lecture them about what had happened. I had one leg over the half-wall and was stepping onto the players’ bench when the coach looked up and our eyes met. Mine were still saying, “Are you kidding me?!” while his were saying, “Lady, I got this.” I climbed back down to the floor and walked away.
After practice, my son told me that he and the boy had made amends — and that some growth and maturing had taken place.
“Good job, Mom,” he said. “You’re learning.” | 2022-08-06T12:11:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | I’m too involved as a parent. For my son’s sake, I’m trying to change. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/06/helicopter-parenting-hurts-children/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/06/helicopter-parenting-hurts-children/ |
Wild ponies are seen at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Accomack County, Va., on Dec. 19, 2018. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Along the way, the doctoral candidate at the University of Florida has become well versed in the children’s book that made the Virginia horse a household name to generations of schoolkids.
“Misty of Chincoteague,” written by Marguerite Henry and published in 1947, opens with the story of a Spanish galleon that runs aground, leaving the horses on the ship to swim to Assateague Island. Centuries later, two children on the island — based on a real family — save up to buy a pony and its foal, Misty.
“It’s a nice story,” Delsol said. “I learned quite a lot of things during my research, especially how the book had such a strong cultural significance on children’s literature in the United States.”
By accident, Delsol discovered DNA evidence linking the Chincoteague ponies to horses that once were ridden on the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. While reviewing the results of genetic tests done on colonial cattle remains found at Puerto Real — a Spanish settlement established in 1507 in what today is Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola — he realized that one of the samples was not from a cow. A single tooth found at the site came from a horse, which had most likely been shipped to the island from Spain.
When Delsol checked DNA from feral and domestic equine populations in North America, he found a very close link between the Puerto Real horse — probably used to herd cattle five centuries ago — and the ponies on Assateague.
“I compared it with modern sequences and found the closest relatives of this horse were the Chincoteague ponies,” he said. “At first, I didn’t know about this breed, so I didn’t think much about it. But then it was like, ‘Wait! What’s their story?’ ”
So Delsol did a deep dive and learned that locals believed the ponies came from a sunken Spanish galleon. He read the section of “Misty of Chincoteague” about the horses’ scramble ashore from the shipwreck.
“It was amusing to find it mentioned in a novel,” he said. “Kind of surprising when you relate it to the high-tech research we are doing.”
Since 1835, residents of nearby Chincoteague Island have been “penning” ponies — removing some of the horses from Assateague for use on the mainland. That practice continues today under federal supervision to prevent populations from getting too large. Today on Assateague, there are about 150 horses on the Virginia side and 80 on the Maryland side of the federally owned barrier island.
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“The horse at Puerto Real and the Chincoteague ponies likely came from southern Europe, probably Iberia, which is where Spain is,” he said. “There are earlier studies that hint of an Iberian origin for these horses from Chincoteague, but our study confirms it more strongly.”
He added, “However, we still don’t know how the horses got to the island — whether they were shipwrecked or if the Spanish landed on this island at some point and left them there, possibly planning to come back for them later.” | 2022-08-06T12:11:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Did Chincoteague ponies come from Spanish shipwreck? New DNA evidence. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/06/chincoteague-ponies-spanish-shipwreck-dna/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/06/chincoteague-ponies-spanish-shipwreck-dna/ |
A man is rescued from flooding by the National Guard in Eastern Kentucky last month. (Shaun Morris/U.S. Army National Guard/Handout via Reuters.) (Us Army/Via Reuters)
Devastating flash floods struck Eastern Kentucky last month, leaving at least 37 dead and many more missing. The floods occurred just months after the state was roiled by an outbreak of tornadoes that killed 74 and just after St. Louis experienced its own record-breaking, deadly floods. A wildfire in Northern California, meanwhile, has scorched more than 55,000 acres and continues to spread.
Together, the catastrophes forced thousands from their homes. Some will join the ever-growing group of displaced Americans forced to navigate the country’s patchwork of disaster relief programs.
After the president issues a disaster declaration — as President Biden did for the Kentucky floods — the Federal Emergency Management Agency steps in to offer short-term support. Along with limited home-repair assistance, it provides survivors with temporary rental assistance or shelter, sometimes consisting of mobile homes or trailers. This generally lasts for up to 18 months while residents attempt to find permanent lodging — a daunting task amid an affordable housing crisis.
In the long-term, the Department of Housing and Urban Development offers disaster recovery grants, which can be used to rebuild homes. Though these grants have existed for decades, the program has not been permanently authorized. That means Congress must appropriate funding for it and HUD must then create rules and publish them for notice and comment in the Federal Register. In some cases, it can take nearly two years after a disaster declaration for states and localities to receive these grants — and even more time for them to be distributed. That leaves many households — often the most vulnerable — in the lurch after support from FEMA lapses.
For example, Lake Charles, La., was decimated by Hurricane Laura in August 2020, but grant funding to rebuild homes is only now being delivered. Some survivors have spent years living in cramped trailers that cost more on average to move and install than building a new house in the area, as Christopher Flavelle and Edmund D. Fountain recently detailed in the New York Times.
The issue goes beyond the agencies, which are overwhelmed and limited by what they are authorized to do. With extreme weather events occurring more frequently and with greater intensity, the disaster-recovery framework is not equipped to handle the rising need.
The Biden administration is working to address some of these concerns, and FEMA is in the middle of an initiative to “reimagine” its direct housing assistance program. But Congress could do more to improve the system. Permanently authorizing the disaster-recovery grant program would help, though efforts should be made to build in sustainable funding and accountability mechanisms. Legislators should also consider ways to boost interagency coordination and reduce the procedural burden on survivors.
An analysis by The Post’s Sarah Kaplan and Andrew Ba Tran found that more than 40 percent of Americans lived in a county that experienced a weather catastrophe last year. Policies to boost climate resilience and disaster preparedness are crucial to limiting damage once calamity strikes. But, with millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes and livelihoods in natural disasters, the U.S. disaster-recovery system must also adapt — soon. | 2022-08-06T12:11:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The U.S. disaster relief system was not built for our new climate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/climate-change-disaster-relief-program/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/climate-change-disaster-relief-program/ |
Ukrainian volunteers make a camouflage net for the army in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 4 amid Russia's military invasion. (Sergey Kozlov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Most schools in Kyiv sit dark and empty these days. Russia’s invasion in February sent children back home for distance learning, and then the summer vacation started. But this school gym is packed — not with students, but with women cutting pieces of cloth, weaving, chatting.
“We do this for you, you should tell us what you need,” a woman tells a man with a military uniform.
The gym equipment has been pushed to the side and fishing nets and colorful rags are stacked on the floor — when the women are done, the nets and rags will become camouflage for equipment and troops in the front.
“When the war broke, we were sitting in our apartment and needed to do something," says Valentyna Hushchyna, 52, a former clothing saleswoman and seamstress. "I called all those who stayed, many of them elderly, to bring old clothes and fabrics and to get ready to weave. Our first net was 24 meters long and six meters wide and was very heavy. It hung from the eighth to the first floor of a building and people weaved on every floor. Now we weave them here.”
This is one of the many ways regular Ukrainians have stepped up to aid the war effort. Very quickly, neighbors organized and learned the way to make camouflage more professionally to fit the army’s needs.
“We have a night vision device that we use it to check that the cloth does not glow at night," Anna, 39, tells me. "We get fabrics from whoever we can. Someone even unraveled sweaters for the threads. If necessary, we also repaint fabrics.”
"We do it every day, so Putin doesn't win," she adds.
Ukrainian volunteers have shown the world what a united front looks like. The Volunteer Platform, launched back in March 2021, lists over 1,150 volunteering opportunities in Ukraine. The platform currently connects more than 400,000 users with over 500 organizations, UNICEF reports.
Many Ukrainians volunteer without officially registering. We see the effects of the war everyday — the casualties, the fatigue — but people refuse to give up.
“I think the whole world is already tired, because no one thought it would last this long, but I believe in victory,” says Marharyta Liashuha, 30, a doctor who has devoted herself to delivering medical supplies. Liashuha’s husband is in the military and spends a lot of time on the frontlines. Liashuha, for her part, developed a network of international contacts and delivers the aid to hospitals.
I met her in a large office stacked with boxes of medicines and medical equipment. Liashuha knows what is in every box, though she never thought she would be able to collect such large quantities of aid.
“I’m already calling the chief doctors directly and asking what’s needed. In the early days, I would just randomly ask my friends at the hospitals what was missing and try to get it,” she says.
Liashuha got her driver’s license during the war (she didn’t see the need to learn to drive before) and already brought several ambulances into the country. She says she will always remember how she had to cross on foot into Poland to pick up her first ambulance and get behind the wheel of a car by herself for the first time. “It was very scary, but what Russians were doing in my country was even more scary,” she said. “Since then, my colleagues and I delivered 17 ambulances — all went to the military hospitals and the frontlines.”
The southern city of Mykolaiv come under heavy attack in recent weeks. One day, Oleksandr Tkachuk woke up to explosions instead of his alarm clock. After sending his family to western Ukraine, he began distributing tactical equipment to local self-defense units from his gun store. He then used his contacts to distribute night vision devices and other gear.
“I am hopeful because I see the successes of the Ukrainian army in my hometown," Tkachuk tells me. “Russian artillery no longer reaches the neighborhood where my house is located. For me this is the biggest proof that everything is not in vain.”
Yes, Ukrainians are tired, but we can’t afford to rest. Russia is threatening our very existence, testing us everyday. For many, volunteering is more than act of solidarity — it’s about survival.
“I get the feeling that the more I help, the faster the victory will come,” Liashuha tells me. “And the sooner I get back the life that I thought was calm and perfect.” | 2022-08-06T12:11:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | For Ukrainians, volunteering is about survival, not just solidarity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/for-ukrainians-volunteering-is-about-survival/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/for-ukrainians-volunteering-is-about-survival/ |
Residents sit on sacks of food from the World Food Program in Jean-Rabel, Haiti, on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)
As Haiti sinks ever-deeper into pandemonium, with much of the capital seized by gunfire and gang warfare, it has received recent deliveries from the United States of two commodities that can only contribute to its meltdown: weapons and deportees. Those exports — one smuggled, the other overt — are the latest symptom of the world’s callous disregard and moral myopia regarding the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. Haiti has no functional government, no democracy, no peace, no hope. And the international community’s response is silence.
Last month, in the midst of a spasm of gun violence that left hundreds dead, injured or missing in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, Haitian customs officials seized shipping containers that it said held 18 “weapons of war,” plus handguns and 15,000 rounds of ammunition. According to Reuters, the items were sent from the United States to the Episcopal Church of Haiti. The church denied any knowledge of the container, whose contents were described on a cargo document as “Donated Goods, School Supplies, Dry Food Items.”
Days later, a deportation flight from Louisiana arrived in Port-au-Prince — the 120th such aircraft to arrive in Haiti just this year. Few Haitian deportees are given the chance to apply for asylum in the United States. Since the Biden administration took office, it has sent at least 26,000 Haitian migrants to their home country, where life has been upended since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last summer. According to advocacy groups, about a fifth of the deportees have been children; hundreds were infants under the age of 2.
The United States is not alone in its heedlessness. The Organization of American States, whose stated mission is to prevent conflicts and promote stability, has done little in Haiti beyond issue tepid statements of concern. The U.N. Security Council recently extended operations of the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti by one year, a measure that went unnoticed by most Haitians, and for good reason: It has been utterly ineffectual.
The U.N. World Food Program has been routing food deliveries to the country by sea, the better to avoid its trucks being plundered by gangs. Jean-Martin Bauer, the WFP’s Haiti director, acknowledged the gang violence means “people are not able to work, people are not able to sell their produce.” Food prices have soared by more than 50 percent over the past year, a devastating toll in a country where the WFP estimates nearly half the population of 11 million needs immediate food assistance.
Little surprise that since last October, the U.S. Coast Guard has interdicted more than 6,100 Haitians trying to reach the United States by sea, a huge increase from recent years.
It is high time for a reassessment of the convenient piety, voiced by diplomats, advocates and activists, that Haiti should be left to find a “Haitian-led solution.” The truth is that a “Haitian-led solution” is a chimera, and without muscular international intervention, the country’s suffering will deepen. To ignore that reality is to be complicit in the world’s disregard for Haiti’s anguish. | 2022-08-06T12:11:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | As Haiti sinks into pandemonium, the international community is silent - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/haiti-violence-international-community-response/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/haiti-violence-international-community-response/ |
President Biden virtually attends an event in Michigan on Aug. 2. (Al Drago/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
It has been something of a surprise to see genuinely bipartisan bills pass in recent days, including the Chips and Science Act, which will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on rebuilding the U.S. manufacturing base to better compete with China. A number of Republicans have put aside old orthodoxies to engage in industrial policy in service to the long-term national interest.
But if members of both parties are now going to work together to revitalize U.S. manufacturing, it might require a breaching of a much harder divide between the parties: The one over immigration.
The Chips bill will invest $52.7 billion in shoring up the semiconductor industry, which is increasingly essential to technological progress and the human well-being it can drive. It would invest more than $250 billion in scientific and technological research and development.
But now Punchbowl News reports that a group of technology companies, including Intel and AMD, have sent a letter to congressional leaders urging the next step in the process: Bringing in more high-tech immigrant workers.
In the spirit of this new bipartisan desire to rebuild, including in struggling areas of the industrial heartland, can we also have a conversation about immigration reform? The answer is, probably not.
In their letter, the tech companies warn that in the semiconductor industry, “we face an immediate shortage of qualified workers.” They urged the promotion of more STEM education, but said that in the short term, they are hampered by “the inability to retain talented foreign-born individuals who graduate with master’s and doctoral degrees in relevant STEM fields at U.S. higher education institutions.”
The tech companies call for a variety of reforms to make it easier for immigrants educated in STEM fields to work in the U.S. This is necessary, they say, to carry out the Chips bill’s mission of outpacing “competitors” (i.e. China) who are investing in STEM workers themselves.
Which points to some interesting tensions in this debate.
On one hand, in moving toward industrial policies, Republicans are breaking with their professed devotion to things like “free” markets and “limited” government, which Republicans favor when they serve the interests of big corporations and the wealthy.
But it’s not likely Republicans will put aside their rigid ideological opposition to reforming our immigration system to facilitate more immigration in the national interest. Yet that might also be key to rebuilding the manufacturing base.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has done extensive analyses of our technological policies, says the chip companies are generally right to see such immigration reforms as essential to making this industrial policy succeed.
“The success of this reshoring effort is utterly dependent on both homegrown and foreign-born workers who are available and well trained,” Muro told us.
Muro said it should be difficult — theoretically, at least — for Republicans to oppose such changes on grounds that only Americans should do this work without being willing to invest in creating a U.S. workforce to do it.
“There’s an essential need to build that pipeline domestically,” Muro said. “But in the meantime, it’s going to require stabilizing through importing workers who want to be here.” And if Republicans don’t agree to such immigration changes, “it could undercut the reshoring that they and others want to happen.”
In another irony, Muro noted that allowing semiconductor production to scale up fast could “also create tens of thousands of technician jobs that American workers can occupy,” including in red states such as Texas and Ohio, which are likely to become home to new semiconductor plants.
If the parties could come to an agreement that focused on educated immigrant workers, it might crack open the door to a new discussion on immigration more generally.
Unfortunately, our immigration debate was essentially frozen during the entirety of the Donald Trump era. It’s not that we didn’t talk about immigration; we just stopped talking about what the future of immigration policy ought to look like, instead arguing about Trump’s border wall, about family-separation policies and about whatever “caravan” was supposedly about to invade the United States.
You used to hear Republicans say they favor legal but not illegal immigration, but you don’t hear that much anymore. While in 2016 Trump was to the right of much of his party on immigration, most Republicans have moved to his position.
For Republicans to agree with Democrats on reform that allows for an increase in legal immigration — even with draconian enforcement measures — now seems extremely unlikely.
Some heavily Republican rural areas could benefit from new residents, which means new workers and consumers. Some struggling rural towns are seeking immigrants to prop up declining populations and stagnant economies. But you rarely hear Republicans talk about the positive effects of immigration on the U.S. economy, including on those stagnating areas.
To be clear, Democrats have committed their own serious offenses on immigration. President Biden kept too many of Trump’s border policies in place and has been derelict in honoring commitments to refugees and asylum seekers, also seemingly wanting to avoid hard debates about this issue.
But now that the parties are chummy on rebuilding the industrial heartland, can’t we have a debate over how immigration might at least fit into that? | 2022-08-06T12:11:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Want to rebuild manufacturing? Have a conversation about immigration. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/industrial-policy-immigration-rebuild-manufacturing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/industrial-policy-immigration-rebuild-manufacturing/ |
Remember this? Vaccines in short supply. Long lines at clinics. Case numbers going up every day. A spreading public dread, fear and suspicion. The government announcing everything is under control — but it isn’t. The covid pandemic and the monkeypox outbreak are quite different, but the early responses have exposed similar — and disturbing — shortcomings. Once again, the United States and the world are racing to catch up to a virus that’s moving faster.
Monkeypox, an infectious disease that can bring excruciating pain but usually not death, is caused by a virus related to smallpox. In May, it appeared for the first time outside of locations in Africa where it is endemic, and has spread rapidly in social networks of men who have sex with men. The time to contain monkeypox was at the outset. The United States now has 7,102 cases of the global total of more than 25,000 cases in countries that have not historically reported it. Monkeypox spreads by very close and prolonged contacts, such as sexual encounters, and can persist on surfaces in heavily contaminated areas, where lots of viruses has been shedding for a long time. This is not a contagion like covid, but there is a real danger it could become uncontainable and spread to other populations.
Unlike the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, effective vaccines exist against monkeypox, but the one that is most suitable, the two-dose Jynneos, has been in short supply, largely due to a manufacturing bottleneck, and will probably remain so for months. In a recent preprint, Yale School of Public Health scientists estimate that there are 498,000 high-risk gay men in the United States. In ideal circumstances, they project that rapid distribution of vaccines to one third of them, along with increased testing and contact tracing, could support containment. But that would require at least 329,000 doses, which is almost all of the 336,710 the government had shipped as of July 29. The total highest-risk, vulnerable population may be even higher, estimated at up to 1.7 million by Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Thursday. More doses are on the way, and government experts are looking at a dosing method using a shallow injection into the skin to stretch existing supplies. But the virus is also spreading fast and it may well be too late to contain it. The recent declarations of emergency by the Biden administration, New York, California and the World Health Organization underscore that the crisis is nowhere near resolution.
In the United States, much of the burden of public health falls on the states, and they are overwhelmed and chronically underfunded, many still reeling from the pandemic. The Biden administration has informed Congress that a monkeypox response might cost $7 billion, but so far Congress hasn’t even voted a cent of the last covid response request, much less addressed the crying need for a system of more effective and robust pandemic preparedness. We seem stuck in a pattern of panic and neglect, too often declaring an emergency about a virus after it has run out of control, rather than getting ahead of it. | 2022-08-06T12:11:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | U.S. monkeypox response has failed to contain disease - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/monkeypox-response-slow-united-states/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/06/monkeypox-response-slow-united-states/ |
Ancient panda species discovered in Southeast Europe
An illustration of Agriarctos nikolovi, an ancient relative of the modern panda. (Velizar Simeonovski/Chicago)
Six million years ago, a relative of today’s giant panda roamed ancient forests — but in Bulgaria, not China, scientists say.
Researchers used a set of fossilized teeth discovered in the 1970s to uncover a new species of panda. The teeth were first discovered by paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, and the species bears his name — Agriarctos nikolovi.
The find is described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The teeth are shiny and black because they fossilized in coal deposits in Bulgaria. Researchers believe they date from the Messinian age — 7.2 million to 5.3 million years ago — and that the animal lived in humid forests and swamps. It was probably comparable in size to modern pandas, which can weigh up to 250 pounds.
The fossilized teeth are less robust than those of modern-day pandas, which chomp on woody bamboo, and researchers think the ancient bears relied on softer plants instead.
The Bulgarian and Chinese research team posits that the newly discovered bear wasn’t a direct ancestor of modern giant pandas. Rather, they believe that its evolutionary family either moved from Asia to Europe — and died out with A. nikolovi — or from Europe to Asia, where it evolved into another genus of panda.
If the pandas migrated from Europe to Asia, the researchers say, it was probably because of a climate shift that “had an adverse effect on the existence of the last European panda.” When the Miocene epoch ended about 5.3 million years ago, Europe became much drier, and the swamps and forests the bear relied on for food disappeared. In the same period, the Mediterranean Sea is thought to have partially or almost completely dried up, becoming extremely salty in the process. | 2022-08-06T12:12:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ancient panda species discovered in Southeast Europe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/08/06/ancient-pandas-discovered/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/08/06/ancient-pandas-discovered/ |
In U.S. court, a fight over whether those killed on Boeing jets are ‘crime victims’
The families of those killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash hold a vigil in front of the Transportation Department headquarters in Washington on Sept. 10, 2019, six months after the crash. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
The Justice Department has argued that the 346 people killed when their flawed Boeing 737s crashed are not crime victims under federal law, even though federal prosecutors charged the company with conspiring to defraud federal regulators — and the company admitted to that conspiracy.
On Friday, after months of opposition from the Justice Department and Boeing, the families of some of those killed aboard Max jets more than three years ago sought to counter that contention in a federal court in Texas.
Their objective is about more than symbolism and history: If their loved ones are deemed “crime victims” under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, that would be a key step in their effort to undo a deferred prosecution agreement between Boeing and the Justice Department that the families say lets the company evade accountability.
In Fort Worth on Friday, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor heard testimony and accepted an expert witness report, from Christopher H. Keyes, a former senior safety official with the Federal Aviation Administration who has said that foreign regulators and airlines rely heavily on FAA documentation to shape their own safety practices and that Boeing’s actions at home had deadly results abroad in this case.
The Justice Department had argued in earlier legal filings that it could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Boeing’s fraud conspiracy resulted in “the crashes of two flights in foreign countries, run by foreign airlines, overseen by foreign regulators, and flown by foreign pilots.”
The immediate legal issue before O’Connor on Friday was whether those killed on Max jets were “directly and proximately harmed as a result of the commission of a Federal offense,” the definition of crime victim under the act.
Under that act, crime victims have a “reasonable right to confer with the attorney for the Government in the case.” Relatives of 18 of those who were killed said that right was violated and that they want Boeing executives to face prosecution.
Those killed in 737 Max crashes aren’t ‘crime victims,’ Justice says
Lawyers for the Justice Department and Boeing cross-examined Keyes on Friday, and they objected to efforts to admit into evidence official investigative reports from Max crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019 and the findings of a congressional investigation into breakdowns that led to the tragedies, according to Paul G. Cassell, a University of Utah law professor and former federal judge who is representing the families. The reports were admitted over those objections, he said.
“The judge has asked us to build a record to show that Boeing’s crimes harmed the victims’ families, and today we provided the judge with hundreds of pages of records and significant expert testimony proving that point,” Cassell said, adding that Keyes’s testimony and expert report show that “Boeing’s lies caused the crashes.”
The Justice Department and Boeing declined to comment. A second evidentiary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 26 to hear testimony from two other witnesses, an airline pilot and a risk expert. It is not clear when O’Connor will make a decision.
The Justice Department has apologized to the families for not conferring with them, though it said there was no legal obligation to do so. It said officials also revised internal policies to guarantee consultation would occur in such cases in the future.
As part of the deferred prosecution agreement with the federal government signed in the final days of the Trump administration, Boeing admitted that its employees had “intentionally withheld and concealed” critical information about an automated flight control system, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), from an Aircraft Evaluation Group at the FAA.
Under the agreement, the Justice Department will drop its prosecution if Boeing meets certain conditions over more than three years.
Keyes, relying on a review of FAA documents and outside investigative reports and more than two decades working on safety oversight at the agency, said in his report that Boeing’s deception on MCAS led, in two distinct steps, to tragedy.
First, “Boeing’s fraudulent omission of the critical information” concerning MCAS led the FAA’s Flight Standardization Board to wrongly decide that pilots did not need extensive new training to fly Max planes, he said.
The FAA board called for moderate “Level B” training, which could be done on a computer, rather than more extensive and expensive “Level D” training using a flight simulator. The board’s decision goes to an Aircraft Evaluation Group manager for approval, he said.
Foreign airlines are not bound by the FAA decision, Keyes noted, but in practice all domestic and foreign operators of the Max “depend on the FAA for appropriate and accurate information.”
Second, because of that “erroneous determination” within the FAA, the pilots on Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 “were not appropriately prepared to deal with the emergency presented to them and were unable to prevent the aircraft from crashing with catastrophic results,” according to Keyes’s expert witness report.
“An inadequately trained pilot makes for an unsafe pilot,” Keyes said in the report, adding that the two crashes were caused by both a faulty MCAS and the crews’ “lack of knowledge/training on how to properly deal with” emergencies stemming from the system.
In both crashes, the system repeatedly forced the noses of the planes down, overwhelming pilots who failed to keep the planes in the air, according to U.S. and foreign safety investigators.
Keyes said in his report that such emergencies require immediate action by pilots and that “crewmembers must be so familiar with these actions that they can perform them correctly and reliably from memory.” The lack of appropriate training “put every crewmember and passenger on board every B737 MAX at an unwarranted risk for a catastrophic event every time they took off,” he argued.
Keyes said the incentives driving Boeing’s actions, and their impacts, were clear.
“Boeing intentionally disregarded/violated [aviation safety] regulations in their quest to keep the sale price of the 737 MAX low and increase marketability,” Keyes said in his report. “Due to Boeing’s deception … training recommendations were flawed. Flawed because Boeing chose profit over safety.”
Congressional investigators, in the report accepted into evidence Friday by O’Connor, found that Boeing wanted to avoid a requirement for simulator training because it was expensive and would undercut its efforts to compete with rival Airbus.
Boeing’s automated MCAS system on the Max was designed to rely on a single external sensor, and faulty data from that sensor caused it to misfire, crash investigators said. The feature had been made increasingly powerful over the course of the plane’s development, and in Indonesia, MCAS automatically pushed the plane downward “more than 20 times” in a six-minute period before the 737 plunged into the Java Sea, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
According to a joint statement of facts from Boeing and the Justice Department in January 2021, the company in 2015 told the FAA Aircraft Evaluation Group that the system could only activate in certain high-speed situations. The company later greatly expanded when the system would kick in, including flying at low speeds such as during takeoff.
“Boeing disclosed this expansion to FAA personnel, but only to those personnel who were responsible for determining whether the 737 MAX met U.S. federal airworthiness standards,” according to the statement of facts. Boeing did not disclose the MCAS expansion to the FAA Aircraft Evaluation Group, which is responsible for determinations on training, according to the statement.
Boeing 737 Max crashes were ‘horrific culmination’ of errors, investigators say
The investigation led by House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) found that, in addition to faulty technical assumptions by Boeing engineers and misjudgments by company management, the crashes highlighted “numerous oversight lapses and accountability gaps by the FAA that played a significant role in the 737 MAX crashes.”
The FAA said it does not comment on outside litigation.
Mark A. Forkner, then chief technical pilot for Boeing’s 737, in 2016 told an FAA official by email that he was “doing a bunch of travelling through the next few months” and that he would be “jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by the FAA etc.”
Boeing chief executive David Calhoun blamed Forkner and another former employee in a statement on the deferred prosecution agreement in January 2021, saying the company regretted the conduct it described but that “it isn’t reflective of our employees as a whole or the culture or character of our company.” | 2022-08-06T12:12:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Families of Boeing crash victims challenge Justice Department in court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/06/boeing-737-max-victims/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/06/boeing-737-max-victims/ |
Analysis by Kori Schake | Bloomberg
403807 04: U.S. Army Capt. Greg Frey from Fredrick, Maryland, of the 101st Airborne, is seen through a hole blasted through plywood by gun fire as he walks away from checking his paper target taped to the wood April 12, 2002 at the firing range at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He was part of a group of soldiers zeroing in their sights on their weapons as they continue to prepare for their next mission in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) (Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America)
America’s abrupt abandonment of Afghanistan a year ago precipitated a humanitarian crisis and was a debacle for the Joe Biden administration; the president’s approval ratings plunged and have not recovered. Watching Kabul fall to the Taliban has also been a difficult experience for veterans who fought there.
Elliot Ackerman’s forthcoming book, “The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan,” is a searing condemnation of both the conduct and abandonment of the war effort. Ackerman, a former Marine Corps and CIA officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, is one of the most prolific and powerful figures of the current renaissance of writing among American military veterans. (He also the co-author, with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Admiral James Stavridis, of the bestseller “2034: A Novel of the Next World War.”)“The Fifth Act” weaves together the languor of his family vacation in Italy with the urgency of attempting to get people out of Afghanistan and the regretful ruminations on the meaning of his service and the wars he fought in. Below is a lightly edited transcript of a recent chat with Ackerman about the book:
Kori Schake: I love the book’s opening line: “The war has always been there, even though I don’t go to it anymore.” The idea of deciding to leave, of soldiers in wars of long duration having to negotiate their own separate peace, resonates throughout the book. Explain why that’s such a weighty emotional burden.
Elliot Ackerman: Because there’s always another deployment to go on. Every time I came back from Iraq or Afghanistan, there was the question of the next deployment. Are you going? It’s tough to bow out, no matter how many deployments you’ve already done. These guys you’re serving alongside are your best friends, so it’s tough to tell them that you’re done, that they can go on the next one without you, that it might not be time for them to leave the war, but it is for you. That type of decision can weigh on friendships. It certainly weighed on some of mine.
She said: “Elliot, most people haven’t been paying any attention to this for years. This is a tragedy, maybe you can just explain what’s going on.” It was that word, tragedy, that stuck with me. Going back to Horace and the ancients, in classic dramatic structures, tragedies are told in five acts. I then wrote Bari this short article that broke down the Afghan War in five acts: Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and, as the denouement, the Taliban. I later realized that would be the structure for this book.
EA: Successive Republican and Democratic administrations have deliberately anesthetized Americans to the wars being fought in their names. Our political class has done this by the way they structure our wars — we don’t pay a war tax because we place the cost in our deficit; an increasingly narrow band of Americans, that 1% of us who man our all-volunteer force, take up the burden.
The result is that war has become easy to wage because only a slim segment of society feels the pain. Wars used to be existential events in American society and generationally defining. Not anymore, and not for my generation. I’ve often wondered if it would be better to be part of a “Lost Generation” than to be “the lost part of a generation.”
EA: If you traveled to Afghanistan, one thing you would note at most of the major American military bases, in places like Bagram or Kandahar, was that even after 20 years of war much of the construction of our headquarters were done in plywood, as though our occupation were temporary and at any minute we were going to leave. This decision, to build in plywood as opposed to more durable materials, spoke to the transient psychology of the American effort in Afghanistan.
We waged a 20-year war, but at any point in those 20 years we had one foot out the door, with a drawdown scheduled within months. In his book on Vietnam, “A Bright Shining Lie,” the journalist Neil Sheehan quotes John Paul Vann, a legendary military and foreign service officer, who said: “The problem with Vietnam wasn’t that we fought a seven-year war, but that we fought seven one-year wars.” You could say the same of Afghanistan, and if you want a physical reminder of this truth, it’s our decision to build in plywood.
EA: The planning for a Global War on Terror Memorial has been going on for a number of years. The Global War on Terror, technically, isn’t over, and it doesn’t look as though the authorizations underpinning it are going to be rescinded anytime soon. This creates an interesting conundrum: How do you create a memorial to a war that’s still going on?
This spiraling trench would have all the names of America’s war dead, more than a million, beginning with Crispus Attucks, a freeman of African and Native descent who is counted as the first death in the American Revolution. Every time we fought a war, we’d dig a little deeper to add the names. Down and down, we’d go. We wouldn’t have to debate real estate on the mall, we’d just keep on digging.
Also, I’d propose that Congress pass legislation that every time the president signs a troop deployment order, he or she can only do so with a special pen that’s kept under guard on a special desk next to the last name on the American War Memorial.
KS: So much of your fiction is about warfare, and you explore it from such various perspectives — the sympathetic portrait of an Afghan who kills American soldiers in the “Green on Blue”; the desperate refugees in “Dark at the Crossing.” What’s your favorite book about war?
EA: That’s a tough one. There are so many books that on the surface are about war but whose subject is much broader than war. There are also many books that don’t seem to be about war at all but are in fact very much tethered to the subject. I guess I’ll pick a favorite from the latter category: “The Catcher in the Rye.” J.D. Salinger landed on D-Day, fought in the Huertgen Forest, and helped liberate Dachau. But he never wrote much about the war, or at least not head-on. He handled the subject obliquely.
“The Catcher in the Rye” is the greatest novel about the Second World War and its long shadow. Holden Caufield’s voice, for which the novel is renowned, is the voice of a war veteran, to whom everyone is “a phony” and who wants to visit the ducks in Central Park, to recover an innocence that will never return and perhaps never was. The novel’s last line — “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” — is one I’ve often related to.
• All Wars Are Culture Wars: Kori Schake
• Biden’s Afghan Withdrawal Achieved Nothing But Disaster: Hal Brands
• In the End, the Afghan Army Was Always Doomed: James Stavridis
Kori Schake leads the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. | 2022-08-06T13:42:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the Afghan War Was Lost, in Five Easy Steps - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-the-afghan-war-was-lost-in-five-easy-steps/2022/08/06/7eb2d102-1588-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-the-afghan-war-was-lost-in-five-easy-steps/2022/08/06/7eb2d102-1588-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
By Matt Welch, The Winchester Star | AP
Kim Craig of Winchester, Va., stands in her new laundromat, Let’s Get Fresh Laundromat,” that operates on the honor system on Kent Street in Winchester, Va., July 22, 2022. The laundromat features a coffee bar, free computer usage and steam cleaning machines. Let’s Get Fresh charges $5 to wash and dry a single load of laundry. (Jeff Taylor/The Winchester Star via AP) | 2022-08-06T13:42:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At new Virginia laundromat, honesty is the best policy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-new-virginia-laundromat-honesty-is-the-best-policy/2022/08/06/f6cee276-1587-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-new-virginia-laundromat-honesty-is-the-best-policy/2022/08/06/f6cee276-1587-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
By Khushboo Rathore, The Frederick News-Post | AP
Camp employee Csilla Szilagyii, center, assists Matt Shuler, left, and Jack Anderson during an art activity at Camp Greentop in Sabillasville, Md., on July 20, 2022. The camp was founded in 1937 by The League for People with Disabilities, Inc., and provides a variety of programs for children and adults with disabilities. (Katina Zentz/The Frederick News-Post via AP)
SABILLASVILLE, Md. — In the depths of Catoctin Mountain Park, a mile from Camp David, 19-year-old Melita Bell was overwhelmed. She had been working at Camp Greentop, a summer camp for people with disabilities, for just a week and didn’t think she could keep going.
“I was like, ‘I’m gonna quit. I can’t do this. This is outside of my comfort zone. ... I don’t know if I’m even making a difference with these campers,’ ” Bell said. | 2022-08-06T13:42:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Camp’s reopening helps families, campers with disabilities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/camps-reopening-helps-families-campers-with-disabilities/2022/08/06/f3487de2-1587-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/camps-reopening-helps-families-campers-with-disabilities/2022/08/06/f3487de2-1587-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Updated August 6, 2022 at 8:32 a.m. EDT|Published August 5, 2022 at 11:51 p.m. EDT
Abortion rights demonstrators protest outside the Senate chambers shortly before the vote to accept Senate Bill 1 which was passed by the house earlier in the day, making the Indiana legislature the first in the nation to restrict abortions, in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. August 5, 2022. REUTERS/Cheney Orr (Cheney Orr/Reuters)
Supporters of abortion rights crowded into the corridors of the Indiana Statehouse throughout the day as lawmakers cast their votes, some holding signs that read “You can only ban safe abortions” and “Abortion is health care.” Moments after the vote, some protesters hugged and others stood stunned before the crowd broke out into chants of “We will not stop.”
In a statement released after signing the bill, Holcomb said he had “stated clearly” following the fall of Roe that he would be willing to support antiabortion legislation. He also highlighted the “carefully negotiated” exceptions in the law, which he said address “some of the unthinkable circumstances a woman or unborn child might face.”
Before settling on the exceptions, Republican legislators disagreed on how far the law should go, with some GOP members siding with Democrats in demanding that abortion be legal in cases of rape and incest.
The vote followed days of testimony from citizens and a debate that grew heated at times. “Sir, I am not a murderer," Rep. Renee Pack (D) said in the chamber after Rep. John Jacob (R), a staunch abortion opponent who wanted exceptions for rape removed, described the procedure as murder.
Abortion rights organizations quickly rebuked Friday’s decision. Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the vote “was cruel and will prove devastating for pregnant people and their families in Indiana and across the whole region.” “Hoosiers didn’t want this,” Johnson said.
In a statement, antiabortion group Indiana Right to Life opposed the exceptions, and said the new law did not go far enough in cutting abortion access.
The push by Indiana Republicans to restrict abortion access stands in stark contrast with the overwhelming support for it by voters in Kansas, where an attempt to strip away abortion protections was voted down this week in another traditionally conservative state. That victory is likely to boost the Democratic Party’s hope that the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade will energize voters ahead of the midterm elections.
In Indiana, Democratic legislators described the Kansas vote as a warning to their Republican colleagues to consider the potential fallout from voters.
Unlike many of its predominantly conservative neighboring states in the Midwest, Indiana did not have a “trigger law” on the books that would immediately prohibit abortion when Roe was overturned. Because the procedure had been legal in the state up to 22 weeks, Indiana became the destination for many seeking to terminate their pregnancies.
Cutting off this “critical access point” may force people to travel “hundreds of miles or carry pregnancies against their will,” the American Civil Liberties Union said.
Most recently, a 10-year-old girl rape victim had to travel to Indianapolis for an abortion after she was denied one in her home state of Ohio. The case prompted outrage among abortion rights proponents, was criticized by President Biden and drew international attention.
The OB/GYN who provided the care, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, has faced threats and harassment. Her legal team is looking into filing a defamation suit against Indiana’s attorney general, whose office is investigating how the abortion case was handled.
Kim Bellware and Ellen Francis contributed to this report. | 2022-08-06T13:42:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indiana passes near-total abortion ban, the first to do so post-Roe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/06/indiana-abortion-ban-roe-holcomb/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/06/indiana-abortion-ban-roe-holcomb/ |
RIO DE JANEIRO — In a move that shocked environmentalists, the government of Brazil’s third-largest state has given up a legal fight over protecting a state park in one of the Amazon’s most biodiverse areas. The upshot of that decision is that a man responsible for the deforestation of huge swaths of protected land wins with finality a lawsuit against the government. The park will cease to exist. | 2022-08-06T13:43:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man who destroyed vast forest wins demise of park - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/man-who-destroyed-vast-forest-wins-demise-of-park/2022/08/06/e6f8906a-1580-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/man-who-destroyed-vast-forest-wins-demise-of-park/2022/08/06/e6f8906a-1580-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
A picture provide by the Pompeii Archeological site press office, showing the latest discoveries in the ancient city of Pompeii which is enriching knowledge about the everyday lives of middle-class households. The director of the archaeological site, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022, that excavations of rooms in a home first unearthed in 2018, revealed the environment of ordinary citizens of the city, which was flourishing before being destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. (Parco Archeologico di Pompei via AP) (Uncredited/PARCO ARCHEOLOGICO DI POMPEI) | 2022-08-06T15:13:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New Pompeii finds highlight middle-class life in doomed city - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/new-pompeii-finds-highlight-middle-class-life-in-doomed-city/2022/08/06/194e5e6a-1594-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/new-pompeii-finds-highlight-middle-class-life-in-doomed-city/2022/08/06/194e5e6a-1594-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Human rights activist Gerald Nagler in 2003 at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. (Civil Rights Defenders)
Mr. Nagler’s influence on international human rights efforts and priorities spanned more than four decades, from documenting the struggles of opposition groups during the Iron Curtain era to fighting antisemitism amid a rise in nativist and extreme-right political forces in recent years.
Mr. Nagler’s entry into rights activism began with an unexpected request in 1977. Morton Narrowe, a U.S.-born rabbi and leader of Stockholm’s Jewish community, suggested that his friend seek a visa to visit Soviet Jews seeking to reach the West and known as refuseniks.
Narrowe thought Mr. Nagler was the perfect fit for a fact-finding trip and to open channels with Moscow’s Jewish community. He had no experience in international politics or human rights campaigns, and was working in his family’s optical equipment company. The rabbi guessed that Mr. Nagler wouldn’t raise much attention from the KGB and other Soviet minders.
“I didn’t think that was a good idea, because I don’t speak Russian, I don’t speak Hebrew, I hardly understand Yiddish. So I said, ‘This is not my thing,’ ” Mr. Nagler recalled in a 2002 interview. “But [Narrowe] said, ‘I think you should go and look.’ ”
“You learn so much about courage, ethics and morals,” he later said.
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In 1982, Mr. Nagler left the business world to establish the Swedish Helsinki Committee. It began as an idea at a kitchen table with his wife, Monica Nagler Wittgenstein, a Swedish journalist and authority on German literature. The group’s name refers to the Helsinki Final Act, a 1975 accord signed by 35 nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, that set out broad principles on issues including press freedoms, scientific cooperation and human rights.
“Of course, it plays a role that I’m Jewish,” he said in 2002 on his place among human rights activists, “because if something goes wrong anywhere, the Jews will probably be the first [in] line to pay the price.”
During another trip to Prague in the early 1980s, Mr. Nagler planned to take part in a meeting with writers, academics and others seen by the government as enemies. The night before the gathering, Mr. Nagler received a note that the host hotel “suddenly had to repair all its windows or something like that,” said his longtime colleague Benedicte Berner, a former chairwoman of Civil Rights Defenders and Mr. Nagler’s longtime colleague, in a telephone interview.
Until 1992, Mr. Nagler also led the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, an umbrella organization of more than 40 rights groups around the world. In 2009, the Swedish Helsinki Committee changed its name to Civil Rights Defenders.
Survivors include his wife of 65 years, who is a great-niece of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; and three children, Pamela and Camilla, both of Stockholm, and Nicholas of New York. | 2022-08-06T15:14:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gerald Nagler, leading human rights activist since Cold War, dies at 92 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/06/gerald-nagler-human-rights-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/06/gerald-nagler-human-rights-dead/ |
Federal transportation officials indicate more time is needed to review concerns about the project’s environmental impact
Katherine Shaver
Traffic is heavy approaching the split on the inner loop of the Beltway at the evening rush headed toward I-270 in July.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Friday blasted federal transportation officials for delaying a decision that would have cleared the way for him to move forward with a plan to build toll lanes on Interstate 270 and part of the Capital Beltway, according to a letter he sent to the Biden administration.
Hogan said he was “completely blindsided” and chided the acting administrator for the Federal Highway Administration for failing to approve the state’s environmental plan for the project by a Friday target date. In the letter, addressed to President Biden and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Hogan urged that they overturn the decision to take more time to study the issue. While Hogan did not name the official, he appears to be referring to Stephanie Pollack, who is the current acting administrator for the Federal Highway Administration.
“If action is not taken to immediately rectify this improper decision, we are prepared to use every tool at our disposal — up to and including legal action,” Hogan said in the letter. “While we do not want it to come to that, these reckless and apparently politically-motivated actions may leave us with no other choice.”
Officials from the Hogan’s office and the Maryland Department of Transportation, which is overseeing the toll lane project, did not respond to questions regarding the specifics of the acting administrator’s decision or how long it could delay the project. They also did not comment on what Hogan meant by “politically-motivated actions.”
In June, Maryland officials released the final environmental impact statement (FEIS) for the project. Officials from the FHWA must sign off on the FEIS and issue a “record of decision” in order for the project to receive federal funding. MDOT officials also have said they will not move forward until they receive that approval.
Pollack declined to comment on Hogan’s remarks, but in a statement, the agency indicated it needed more time to review comments on the potential environmental impacts of the project, which would widen and add toll lanes to I-270 and part of the Capital Beltway. The federal agency said it is continuing to work with officials from the Maryland Department of Transportation but gave no timeline for when that review would be completed.
“There have been strong feelings about this project and it is FHWA’s responsibility not to pick a side, but to ensure that the [National Environmental Policy Act] process is followed with integrity,” the agency said in an emailed statement. “This includes completing a thorough review of comments received to ensure public feedback is adequately addressed as we work toward finalizing a Record of Decision for this project.”
A federal dashboard created to monitor the status of infrastructure projects gave Aug. 5 as a target date for approval of the environmental study, but agency officials cautioned what is listed is not a deadline, but rather an estimate.
The plan to widen part of the Capital Beltway and I-270, two of the region’s most congested highways, has been years in the making and is Hogan’s signature traffic-relief initiative. But with only a few months left in office, Hogan’s window for moving the project forward is narrowing.
Toll lane critics cite possible flaws in Maryland traffic analysis
Hogan wants to seek approval from the state’s Board of Public Works this fall for the contract, a public-private partnership worth billions of dollars to finance, build and operate the lanes. Winning approval for the plan would lock Maryland into a 50-year agreement with a private concessionaire.
However, Hogan is term-limited, and if he is unable to secure the contract before leaving office in January, there are concerns that a new governor could make changes or even cancel the project.
Under the plan outlined by the Maryland Department of Transportation, the state would add two toll lanes in each direction to the Beltway between the Virginia side of a new and expanded American Legion Bridge and the exit for Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda. From there, the lanes would extend up I-270 to Frederick, with the lower part to I-370 being built first.
The regular lanes would be rebuilt and remain free. One of the toll lanes on lower I-270 would come from a converted carpool lane.
But the plan has drawn opposition from some officials in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, as well as environmental groups and transit advocates. This week, Casey Anderson, chair of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, sent a letter to officials at MDOT and the FHWA requesting additional time to review the potential environmental impacts of the project.
“Thank you to the Federal Highway Administration for responding to the concerns of the communities impacted by this project and delaying action to allow additional time for constituents to understand the environmental, transportation and financial implications of this project," said Montgomery County Councilmember Tom Hucker (District 5).
Approval of the FEIS also is significant because it would start a five-month clock for opponents to file any lawsuits on environmental grounds.
Hogan also blamed federal officials for two years of delays that have increased the cost of the project by more than 20 percent. As a result, he said he would seek additional federal dollars to cover the increases.
“The fundamental flaws built into this harmful project are finally catching up to it,” said Josh Tulkin, Sierra Club Maryland Chapter Director. “Despite repeatedly promising that this massive expansion of the Beltway and 270 would come at no net cost to Marylanders, Gov. Hogan’s letter now admits that this project may need a subsidy ‘potentially costing Maryland taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.’”
However, groups that support the project said it must move forward.
“In addition to stranding the hundreds of thousands of people who are stuck in soul-crushing traffic on the American Legion Bridge every day, failing to move forward will cost Maryland taxpayers billions in private financing, and hundreds of millions of dollars for local transit, bike, and pedestrian improvements in Montgomery County that are part of this multimodal project,” said Jason Stanford, president of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance. | 2022-08-06T15:14:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gov. Hogan blasts delay of Maryland toll lane project - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/06/maryland-toll-lane-project-delay-i270/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/06/maryland-toll-lane-project-delay-i270/ |
A person could live in Washington and never know about the National Deaf Life Museum. But visitors come from across the world.
The National Deaf Life Museum sits on the campus of Gallaudet University. (Courtesy of Gallaudet University)
On a desk inside a museum tucked into a building in the nation’s capital sits a book. It’s not an exhibit, but it is revealing.
It’s a guest book, and a glance through its pages show that people have come from near and far to visit the museum. Among the places they have listed as their home states and countries: Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, Puerto Rico, Texas, Germany, Brazil, Peru, Rwanda, and Russia.
When you live in the Washington region, it’s easy to take museums for granted. D.C. offers some of the country’s most impressive and unique ones.
It has museums that are run by the Smithsonian and regularly land on the itineraries of tourists. Some of those: the National Museum of American History, the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
It has museums that sit in populated areas and yank at the curiosity of people who walk past them. Some of those: the International Spy Museum, the National Geographic Museum, and Planet Word Museum.
The museum I visited on a recent afternoon would not fall into either of those categories. People in countries across the world may know about it, but you could live in D.C. and not know it exists. In an article Axios recently ran about a TikToker who is trying to visit every museum in D.C., it is listed at the bottom among “other museums you probably haven’t heard of.”
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I’ve explored many museums in the region, written about several of them and have had to repeatedly over the years pry my bug-loving child away from the insect section at the National Museum of Natural History. But it wasn’t until several days ago, when a friend and his family came into town and invited me to join them on a scheduled tour that I learned about the National Deaf Life Museum.
The museum is not in a place that would allow a person to just happen upon it. It sits on the campus of Gallaudet University and currently you have to make an appointment to visit it.
On the day we went, I took my 9-year-old son, and my friend took his family, including his 11-year-old son who was born deaf.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. But by the end, after seeing the museum through their eyes, I came to view it in two ways. The first: As a place about, not just for, the deaf community. The second: As an example of why representation matters.
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Museums should transport us and reflect us. They should leave children pulling at their parents’ hands to show them something new they learned. My son tugged at me several times in that room in Chapel Hall, where many of the exhibits sat.
Did you know that the football huddle was created by a deaf team? I didn’t, until that day.
“Inventing the huddle,” reads the title of one of the panels in that room. Below it appears a photo of the Gallaudet football team in 1894. As the story goes, that year, the team was playing against another deaf team, and quarterback Paul Hubbard didn’t want the opposing players to see the sign language he was using to discuss plays. So, he told his team to huddle. That practice is now, of course, used across the world in different sports.
Another panel features a letter written by George H.W. Bush less than a year before he would become president and about two years before he would sign the Americans With Disabilities Act. In it, he calls on a search committee to select a university president who was not only highly qualified, but who was also deaf. After describing his work in the area of disability civil rights, he writes: “From this experience, I have become aware of the two basic principles that underlay the disability rights movement; the right of disabled people to control their own lives and the right to integration and involvement in society.”
Other exhibits and collections exist in different buildings on the campus. One is “History Through Deaf Eyes.” Another is the “Deaf Difference + Space Survival.”
Deaf printers once helped create every day’s Washington Post newspaper
At the latter, we learned that during the country’s space race with the Soviet Union, in an attempt to better understand motion sickness, NASA and the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine recruited 11 deaf men to participate in a study. The exhibit details what those men endured and what was discovered with their participation. They were known as the “Labyrinthine Defectives,” a nod to the name of the organs in their inner ear that didn’t function and allowed them not to get sick in conditions that would make others nauseous.
“Experiments continued for nearly a decade on zero-gravity flights, in rotating devices, on board a ship across turbulent seas and in centrifuges,” reads the exhibit. “Because of their inner ear physiology, the deaf test subjects did not get motion sickness.”
Compared to other D.C. museums, the exhibits at Gallaudet take a minuscule amount of space. It can take more than a day to get through some of the Smithsonian museums. The National Deaf Life Museum, which opened in 2014, can be seen in a few hours.
Museum Director Meredith M. Peruzzi, who is also a graduate of the university, said that Chapel Hall saw about 8,000 visitors a year before the pandemic. Current numbers have been more difficult to track.
Peruzzi described the museum as serving “a dual role” for those visitors. “For members of the Deaf community, it is a place to see themselves, learn about their history, and develop their sense of personal identity,” she said in an emailed statement. “For hearing visitors, it offers a chance to learn about our culture, examine their own expectations and experiences of Deaf people, and feel the vibrancy of our signing community.”
By the end of our visit, my son had learned about a community that was not his own, and my friend’s son had come to an important conclusion about Gallaudet.
“I could see myself going here,” he said.
The unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images — the alt text descriptions | 2022-08-06T16:23:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A place where the Deaf community’s past and present collide - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/deaf-museum-gallaudet-university/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/deaf-museum-gallaudet-university/ |
An 1878 trademark registration for Miasmine, a doubtless ineffective anti-malaria medicine. Until about 1900, scientists were not sure what caused malaria. In the 19th century, the District of Columbia had a reputation as a malaria hot spot, irritating many doctors who practiced here. (Library of Congress)
In the fall of 1881, some of Washington’s doctors decided they’d had enough. The city in which they practiced medicine was being routinely maligned as a literal hotbed of a debilitating, and occasionally deadly, disease.
As a Nov. 9, 1881, story in The Washington Post put it: “Washington has a scapegoat upon whose back is placed the burden of all undefinable and unpreventable ills. It is called malaria.”
The article had a headline we’d recognize today as clickbait: “Is Malaria a Myth?” According to the story, newspapers around the country were leading their readers to believe that “there hangs over Washington a dreaded monster whose poisonous wings are outstretched above the city, shedding death and destruction.”
And so some physicians began pushing back. The Medical Association of the District adopted a resolution to poll its members and ask them about malaria. “It is apparent that this view of the unhealthfulness of our city is gaining ground abroad and that great injury is thereby done to its material prosperity,” said the resolution.
It was true that Washington had a bad reputation, malarially speaking. A Philadelphia writer had noted the city’s “miasmatic troubles” caused by “disgusting accumulations” along the banks of the Potomac. So common was malaria, the writer joked, that congressmen trotted out the ailment as a convenient excuse for everything from being late to meetings to suffering hangovers.
A Post reporter contacted local doctors to ask about their experiences with malaria — or “so-called malaria,” as some observers referred to it. Some said malaria was a thing. Others that it wasn’t. One, a Dr. Hagner, said malaria was present in the city but overestimated.
“I have only some four or five cases of malarial fever, and these are on E street on the river front and in the vicinity of Rawlins Square,” he told The Post.
Hagner said it was imprudent to sit outdoors with an uncovered head after nightfall in late summer and early fall. “Nothing will bring on malarial fever as quickly as this,” he said.
Also dangerous: walking in the sun or “sleeping in such a position that the night air blows on you.”
As people sought to determine the cause, 130 Washingtonians died of malarial fever in 1881.
Newspapers were full of ads for anti-malarial patent medicines. The maker of Hostetter’s Bitters crowed that its product was popular in the tropics, “where the torrid heat exhales from dank, decaying vegetation the air-poison from which produced the worst forms of fever and ague and bilious remittent.”
Air-poison? Decaying vegetation? What gives?
In December 1881, The Post published a lengthy letter from a local doctor named J.B. Johnson. Johnson recounted the history of malaria — the name, he pointed out, came from the Italian words for “bad air” — and was unequivocable in its cause: “Malaria is the result of chemical action between heat, water and decayed or decaying vegetable matter.”
Fermenting vegetable matter — it was believed a temperature of between 67 and 75 degrees was most conducive to creating malaria — generated “carbonic acid gas.”
This gas, Johnson wrote, “is found to be heavier than the atmosphere and sinks down to the earth.” It was carried along the ground by currents of air, lodging in valleys, ravines and on the sides of mountains. Being heavier than air, it couldn’t cross water, a quality “clearly demonstrated” by the way sailors were affected by it only after their ships entered malaria-stricken harbors.
Reading the 1880s coverage of malaria makes you want to hop in a time machine, grab a doctor by the lapels of his white coat and scream, “It’s the mosquitoes, you idiots!”
But even if you did, some physicians still would have gotten it wrong. In September 1881, the Washington Critic newspaper carried a brief article on one doctor’s tip that the best cure for malaria was the bite of a mosquito.
“This is a little startling to the beginner,” the paper noted, “but the theory is based on the fact, asserted at least by him, that the two always go together, and that where malaria is very prevalent mosquitoes are about in great quantities, and that the poison of their sting is nature’s antidote to the poison of malaria.”
One wonders how many Washingtonians followed his advice.
Karen Masterson, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Richmond, said, “They were the product of their time. Doctors, you know, aren’t necessarily programmed to be open-minded. Research doctors, yes, but regular doctors, not so much. They know what they know and they do what they do.”
Masterson is the author of “The Malaria Project: The U.S. Government’s Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure.” In the end, she said, it was research doctors who figured it out.
In 1899, The Post carried an 11-line brief headlined “Malarial Mosquito Found.” Working in India and West Africa, Ronald Ross, a British specialist in tropical diseases, had proved that malaria was disseminated by the mosquito. He would be awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902.
Masterson said we shouldn’t judge those D.C. doctors of the 1880s too harshly.
“You see what you want to believe,” she said. “You’re wedded to ideas that are ingrained.” | 2022-08-06T16:23:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The history of malaria is riddled with misconceptions about its cause - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/history-of-malaria/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/history-of-malaria/ |
Unprecedented rainfall caused severe flooding in Death Valley National Park which left as many as 1,000 people stranded on August 5. (Video: Storyful)
Death Valley National Park was closed Saturday after exceptional amounts of rain drenched the park on Friday, triggering flash floods that left 1,000 visitors and park staff stranded.
The park received 1.46 inches of rainfall at the Furnace Creek area — just shy of the previous daily record of 1.47 inches, set on April 15, 1988. This amounts to about three-quarters of what the area typically receives in annual rainfall and is the greatest amount ever recorded in August, according to the Associated Press.
Death Valley, the lowest, driest, and hottest location in the United States, with 1.9 inches of rain typically falling per year and only 0.1 inch typically falling in August, according to AccuWeather. In a single day, the amount of rain was more than half of what falls in an entire year on average: 2.15 inches.
Death Valley holds the record for the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. as well as several runners-up. Officially, Death Valley reached 134 degrees on July 10, 1913, but some climatologists have questioned the legitimacy of that reading. The next highest temperature on record, 131 degrees from Kebili, Tunisia, set July 7, 1931, is also controversial. Last summer and the summer before, Death Valley hit 130 degrees, which may be the highest pair of reliably measured temperatures on Earth if the 1931 Tunisia and 1913 Death Valley readings are disregarded.
Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, matching Earth’s highest temperature in at least 90 years
The rainfall inundated the park, trapping vehicles in debris, according to a video tweeted by John Sirlin, an Arizona-based stormchaser who tweeted from the park on Friday. He wrote that roads were blocked by boulders and palm trees that had fallen, and that visitors struggled for six hours to leave the park.
NPS did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s request for an update Saturday morning.
Sirlin told the Associated Press that Friday’s rain started around 2 a.m., and was “more extreme than anything I’ve seen there.”
“There were at least two dozen cars that got smashed and stuck in there,” he said. He added that he saw washes flowing several feet deep although he did not see anyone injured, and the NPS reported no injuries as of Friday.
Last July, rare summer rains also soaked Death Valley, bringing 0.74 inches in a day at Furnace Creek approximately two weeks after the park set the world record for hottest daily average temperature, at 118.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
Desert downpours: Rare summer rains soaked Death Valley and parts of California on Monday | 2022-08-06T16:45:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Death Valley drenched by record flooding, stranding thousands - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/06/death-valley-record-flooding/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/06/death-valley-record-flooding/ |
Police responded to the Legacy Restaurant and Lounge Friday at about 1:15 a.m., where they found four people with gunshot wounds, including a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy was on duty helping other officers deal with an altercation. Sheriff Joe Baron said they were attempting to move people out of the club when the suspect fired into the crowd. All four shooting victims are expected to recover. | 2022-08-06T16:45:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Norfolk to crack down on nightclub violence after shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/norfolk-to-crack-down-on-nightclub-violence-after-shooting/2022/08/06/135f5eee-159b-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/norfolk-to-crack-down-on-nightclub-violence-after-shooting/2022/08/06/135f5eee-159b-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
In 2020, author Angela Garbes found herself at home taking care of her two daughters, clinically depressed and unable to write. It was a time when people were told to stay home, unless you were an essential worker.
“But I remember sitting there being like, ‘What about me?’ ” Garbes told “Post Reports” editor Lexie Diao. “What about parents? What about mothers? Like, what we are doing is nothing less than essential. … The pandemic has exposed that without care, we’re lost.”
Garbes’s new book is called “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change.” The book examines the history of caregiving in America through the lens of the author’s own Filipinx identity, and makes the case that caregiving is an undervalued and overlooked labor that disproportionately relies on women of color. | 2022-08-06T16:45:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The essential labor of care work - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-essential-labor-of-care-work-/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-essential-labor-of-care-work-/ |
The recent weather certainly matches the calendar, but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable. The heat and humidity continue, as does the daily chances for late-day storms. As with the past few days, any storms that do develop will be scattered in nature but are likely to feature heavy downpours and some localized flooding.
Through tonight: Scattered showers and thunderstorms are possible late this afternoon and early evening. Any storms that do develop will be slow moving and will feature heavy downpours, which could result in some localized flooding. Storm chances will decrease after midnight, but it will remain uncomfortable overnight, with temperatures and dew points in the mid 70s.
Tomorrow (Sunday): More of the same on Sunday, with hot, humid conditions and the chance of afternoon storms. Temperatures will top out in the low 90s, and high humidity levels will push the heat index close to triple digits at times. Scattered storms with heavy downpours are likely to develop in the afternoon and evening hours. Showers and storm chances will decrease after dark, and it will be another warm and muggy overnight period with temperatures and dew points in the low to mid 70s.
See A. Camden Walker’s forecast through the weekend. And if you haven’t already, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. For related traffic news, check out Gridlock. | 2022-08-06T19:39:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | PM Update: Steamy and stormy weather continues through the weekend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/08/06/pm-update-steamy-stormy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/08/06/pm-update-steamy-stormy/ |
‘The infrastructure we have is really built for a climate we are not living in anymore,’ said one scientist who studies extreme precipitation
A truck drives along flooded Wolverine Road in Breathitt County, Ky., on July 28. Heavy rains caused flash flooding and mudslides in parts of central Appalachia. (Ryan C. Hermens/AP)
At one weather station in Fairbanks, Alaska, each hour of rainfall is about 50 percent more intense, on average, than it was a half-century ago. The Wichita area is experiencing rains about 40 percent more fierce these days. Huntington, W.Va., and Sioux City, Iowa, are seeing deluges roughly 30 percent more extreme than in 1970.
Places around the nation are facing more frequent, more extreme precipitation over time — a reality laid bare once again by the record-shattering rains and catastrophic flooding in eastern Kentucky and St. Louis last week.
The warming atmosphere is supercharging any number of weather-related disasters — wildfires, hurricanes, crippling heat waves. But as it also fuels once-unthinkable amounts of rain in single bursts, the problem of so much water arriving so quickly is posing serious challenges in a nation where the built environment is not only outdated but increasingly outmatched.
“What happened was way more than the system — any system — can handle,” Sean Hadley, spokesman for the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District, said of the recent storms that dumped more than 9 inches of rain there in a matter of hours, shattering the previous daily record from 1915.
An analysis of weather data by the nonprofit group Climate Central found that nearly three-quarters of locations the group examined around the country have experienced an increase in the amount of rain falling on their annual wettest day since 1950 — particularly along the Gulf Coast and Mid-Atlantic. The numbers show that 2021 was a record-setting year for extreme rainfall events, with dozens of places logging their wettest day in generations.
A separate Climate Central report this spring found that of 150 locations the group analyzed, 90 percent now experience more average rainfall per hour, compared with 1970. Those increasing bursts of extreme precipitation carry profound economic and human health risks, the likes of which have been on display most recently in eastern Kentucky.
“When I started 30 years ago, a [climate] signal was emerging,” he said. “That signal has gotten stronger and stronger. … The data are pretty definitive in showing that.”
The explanation boils down to what Kunkel calls “basic physics.” For every degree Fahrenheit that the air temperature increases, the atmosphere can hold about 4 percent more water.
The world already has warmed more than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) since preindustrial times. That increased heat means more moisture in the air — in the United States, much of which comes off the Gulf of Mexico — and more fuel for more intense rainstorms.
That means engineers, planners and public works officials don’t always have access to the most accurate and up-to-date data about current risks — and those probably on the horizon.
Berginnis said some local governments with more resources — places such as Milwaukee, Nashville and Charlotte — have undertaken research to understand and plan for the water-related challenges they face. New York City also has invested in its own studies and in measures to better gird itself against heavier rains and rising seas.
The federal government’s most recent National Climate Assessment found that, over the coming century, “observed increases in the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events in most parts of the United States are projected to continue.” The largest increases in intense precipitation events have occurred — and are expected to continue — in the Northeast and Midwest.
For now, extreme precipitation events are likely to get only more extreme and more common unless the world makes rapid and drastic cuts in planet-heating emissions — something that has yet to materialize.
Prein, the NCAR scientist, said that even if the world halts warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond preindustrial levels — a core aim of the Paris climate accord — rain and flood events are still likely to get worse in the near term. | 2022-08-06T19:48:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What’s driving the massive, destructive rainfalls around the country - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/06/many-places-are-seeing-more-intense-rainfall-thats-big-problem/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/06/many-places-are-seeing-more-intense-rainfall-thats-big-problem/ |
The graves of men killed in the war are often laden with wreaths of flowers in this cemetery in Pskov. (Photo for The Washington Post)
When Yevgeny Chubarin told his mother he was joining the Russian army to fight against Ukraine, she cried and begged him not to go. But his exhilaration shone through. By May 15, he had an AK-47 and was on his way. The 24-year-old stone-factory worker was killed the next day.
Yet some stories seep out. Vladimir Krot was a 59-year-old Soviet-trained pilot, a retired Afghan war veteran, who begged to serve in Ukraine. He kept asking despite repeated rejections and, in June, as casualties mounted, he finally was told “yes.” Krot died just days later, when his SU-25 jet went down during a training flight in southern Russia. He left behind a wife and 8-year-old daughter.
The number of war dead is a state secret. It is a crime to question the invasion or criticize the military. Independent journalists who speak to bereaved relatives or cover funerals have been arrested and told that showing such “tears and suffering” is bad for public morale. Authorities have ordered some online memorial pages to be shut down.
Internal security agents visited Dmitry Shkrebets this summer after he accused Russian authorities of lying about how many sailors died when the Black Sea flagship Moskva was sunk by Ukrainian missiles on April 13. His son Yegor, one of the conscripts onboard, was listed as “missing.” The agents accused Shkrebets of making bomb threats and confiscated his laptop, as he detailed on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook. On Tuesday, 111 days after Yegor’s death, the military finally gave his father a death certificate.
“It will never be easier,” Shkrebets wrote in a post. “There will never be true joy. We will never be the same again. We have become different, we have become more unhappy, but also stronger, tougher. We no longer fear even those who should be feared.”
But independent analyst Bobo Lo of the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, believes the Kremlin has largely contained the risk of unrest over the high casualty count. Because most people are so cautious about airing dissent, gauging the real level of support for the war is difficult. Pollster VCIOM, which is close to government authorities, reported in June that 72 percent of Russians back the fighting.
Politically, Russian President Vladimir Putin “has been able to defend this,” said Lo, a former deputy head of mission at the Australian Embassy in Moscow. “Partly through controlling the information narrative, but also because this is now seen as a war against the West.”
With many families afraid to speak out and no credible casualty count, independent media and rights groups keep their own tallies. Their numbers, based only on confirmed open-source death reports, are modest.
The independent Russian outlet Mediazona and BBC News Russian counted 5,185 war dead as of July 29, with the greatest losses in remote and impoverished areas such as the southern region of Dagestan and the Siberian region of Buryatia. The wealthy cities Moscow and St. Petersburg were barely touched, the two outlets concluded. Moscow with 12.5 million residents, lost just 11 servicemen, and St. Petersburg 35.
By contrast, the CIA and British intelligence MI6 estimate that at least 15,000 Russians have been killed since their country’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, losses equal to the decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan. And that was “probably a conservative estimate,” MI6 chief Richard Moore told the Aspen Security Forum last month.
Chubarin’s death was an ominous reflection of the Russian military’s desperation. A former conscript from the Karelia region, he signed a three-month contract and was too excited to ask how much he would be paid. His mother, Nina Chubarina, thinks he wanted to prove himself as a man. She wonders if he was trying to win back his ex-wife.
“He knew it was dangerous,” she said in a recent interview. He left on May 11, sending cheerful messages and videos after he arrived in Belgorod in southern Russia. He got little training in his four days there, then made a rushed call home. He had been issued a machine gun and was headed to the war.
“That was it. That was the last time we spoke,” she said. The military told her he was found dead near Mariupol on May 16. “He was a very brave guy, was not afraid of anything. He was so cheerful and open and so kind.”
Chubarina, a dairy farmworker, does not question the war. She just rereads a poem her son sent her while a conscript in 2017, about growing up and leaving her behind: “Forgive me for all the pain that has fallen on your weary shoulders. Please accept my soldier’s bow. It is from the bottom of my heart.”
Sergei Dustin of Baltiysk refuses to be quiet. His daughter, Alexandra, married a marine named Maksim and became a widow at 19. He vented his rage on Facebook, saying Russians needed to ask why their sons were dying.
He described the war as a “massacre started by crazy old men who think they are great geopoliticians and super strategists, incapable, in fact, of anything but destruction, threats against the world, puffing out their cheeks and endless lies.”
Some responses called him a traitor. His son-in-law had left in the winter for “training exercises” and ended up in Ukraine. An old friend from Ukraine was fighting on the other side. Dustin hoped neither would die.
He refused to hear any details about how the young man died, and his daughter shut herself inside her grief. “It’s very hard for her to understand and acknowledge that her husband was taking part in an operation that, to put it mildly, was far from nice,” he said. “This whole story just brings sorrow and tragedy for everyone.”
Not many grieving families publicly question the war effort. The silence serves to minimize public understanding of its impact on the home front. In the eastern Siberia city of Ulan-Ude, a recent survey by the independent news site Lyudi Baikala found that few residents knew that more than 250 people from the region had been killed, a count the site calculated using open sources.
Still, cracks have appeared. In Buryatia, a group of wives of Russian soldiers made a video in June to demand that the military bring their men home. Hundreds of soldiers from the region contacted an activist group there for information on how to break their contracts, according to Alexandra Garmazhapova, founder of the Free Buryatia Foundation. Casualties on a local memorial page on VKontakte rise daily.
On Monday, the deaths of local basketball players Dmitry Lagunov and Nikolay Bagrov were confirmed. A woman named Raisa Dugarova responded on the page. “Why does Buryatia have to bury its sons every day?” she asked. “Why are we doing this?”
The following day there was another entry, about the death of Zolto Chimitov, a corporal in his early 30s who had been born in the rural village of Tsakir. He became a boxing champion, later training to be a forester. He had three children.
“Oh god, please stop this war. How many of our guys can die?” a woman named Yevgenia Yakovleva wrote. “My soul is torn from pain. I don’t know how to accept this, survive and live with it.” | 2022-08-06T20:14:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russian families grieve war deaths as Kremlin conceals the true toll - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/07/russia-ukraine-war-deaths-toll/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/07/russia-ukraine-war-deaths-toll/ |
The United Nations nuclear chief warned of a potential “nuclear disaster” after shelling of Europe’s largest atomic power plant, once again urging Russia and Ukraine to allow a mission of experts access to the facility to help secure it.
The shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine highlights the potential for “catastrophic consequences” from attacks on and near the facility, Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in a statement on Saturday.
“Military action jeopardizing the safety and security of the Zaporizhzya nuclear power plant is completely unacceptable and must be avoided at all costs,” Grossi’s statement said.
After the shelling Friday, Russia and Ukraine placed blame on one another for the attack. The facility near the front lines of fighting, has been under Russian control since March, but is still staffed by Ukrainians.
In his nightly address Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted the shelling on Zaporizhzhia as another reason Russia should be recognized as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” which he has repeatedly called for.
“This is purely a matter of safety,” he said. “The one who creates nuclear threats to other nations is definitely not capable of using nuclear technologies safely.”
In turn, Russia’s ministry of defense has accused Ukraine of the attack, stating that protection by Russian-backed forces was the reason the plant was not more extensively damaged. The shelling damaged two power lines and a water pipeline, leaving more than 10,000 residents without water and electricity, the defense ministry’s statement said.
“The Ukrainian staff operating the plant under Russian occupation must be able to carry out their important duties without threats or pressure undermining not only their own safety but also that of the facility itself,” Grossi said in his statement.
The American Nuclear Society (ANS) supported Grossi’s calls to halt attacks on the facility and to send a mission there, condemning the shelling in a statement Saturday.
“It is unjustifiable for a civil nuclear facility to be used as a military base or be targeted in a military operation,” said the organization’s president, Steven Arndt, and chief executive, Craig Piercy.
The shelling on Friday did not damage any of Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors and did not release radioactive material to the environment, according to Grossi, but the plant sustained damage elsewhere.
But the situation around Zaporizhzhia is likely to grow more, not less perilous, according to the British ministry of defense because the heaviest fighting is shifting in the power plant’s direction.
The IAEA has been working for months to ensure the safety of Ukraine’s nuclear sites. In April, Gross led a mission to the country’s Chernobyl plant — the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters in 1986 — after Russian-backed forces withdrew from it in March.
He led a follow-up mission to the site in early June, with experts who assessed its status and provided training on radiation monitoring equipment. A similar mission to Zaporizhzhia, Grossi said, is “crucial” for its security.
“But this will need the cooperation, understanding and facilitation from both Ukraine and Russia,” he said, adding that U.N. Secretary General António Guterres supported the agency’s plan.
Grossi was in New York on Monday for the tenth Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons review conference. In his keynote speech, he discussed the IAEA’s “seven pillars” of nuclear safety and security, which include facilities’ physical integrity, reliable communication with regulators and the ability for staff to work safely.
Those pillars, Grossi said in his statement, had been violated at Zaporizhzhia — during Friday’s shelling and in the months since Russia’s invasion.
“We can’t afford to lose any more time,” he said. “For the sake of protecting people in Ukraine and elsewhere from a potential nuclear accident, we must all set aside our differences and act, now.” | 2022-08-06T21:20:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | IAEA warns of 'nuclear disaster' from shelling of Zaporizhzhia reactor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/iaea-nuclear-disaster-ukraine-zaporizhzhia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/iaea-nuclear-disaster-ukraine-zaporizhzhia/ |
By Joyce Sohyun Lee
Samuel Oakford
A satellite photo provided by Maxar Technologies shows a view of the Olenivka detention center, after an explosion reportedly killed Ukrainian soldiers. (Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies/AP)
Early on July 29, on the outskirts of Olenivka village in eastern Ukraine, a mysterious explosion tore through a separatist-controlled prison housing hundreds of Ukrainian detainees. The blast killed at least 50 people, according to Russian officials, including fighters who surrendered to Russia in May at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.
Both sides have blamed each other for the massacre — a potential war crime. And Russian and separatist officials, from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, where Olenivka is located, have barred independent investigators from reaching the site.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claims that Ukrainian forces caused the blast using a U.S.-supplied rocket launcher known as HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), in a strike meant to prevent fighters from giving up information.
But available images of the destroyed building at the prison appear inconsistent with a HIMARS-launched attack, according to six experts The Washington Post consulted. The experts could not definitively say what caused the damage, but they pointed to a lack of shrapnel marks and craters and only minimal damage to internal walls in the available visuals of the aftermath. Instead, there were visible signs of an intense fire, which is at odds with damage caused by the most common HIMARS warhead.
Satellite imagery appears to show recent physical changes to the complex, and former detainees told The Post they were previously housed in a different area from where the blast occurred. Ukrainian authorities that claim a deliberate transfer of fighters to a new housing area, which was ultimately the area damaged in the blast, demonstrates that Russian forces had planned an attack.
Here is what we know about what happened at Olenivka prison on July 29.
What we know about the prison and its detainees
The prison camp is located just a few miles from the front line — and about 12 miles from the city of Donetsk. It is divided into two sections: one with barracks and detention facilities and the other with an out-of-use industrial zone where inmates used to work years ago, when the prison was a regular penal colony, according to former detainees who spoke with The Post.
Since May, the facility has housed several thousand people from Mariupol. Among the detainees were about 1,500 fighters from Azovstal, the ex-commander of the Ukrainian national guard’s Azov Regiment, Maksym Zhorin, told the Associated Press.
The International Committee of the Red Cross visited the facility in Olenivka twice — on May 18 “to assess the needs of prisoners of war” and on May 20, “to drop water tanks outside,” the organization told The Post. On May 19, the ICRC said in a statement that it had registered hundreds of Ukrainian prisoners of war who surrendered in Mariupol.
But the organization has not been granted access to Olenivka since the attack.
Ukrainian intelligence officials allege that the site of the blast had only recently been outfitted to house prisoners, a refurbishment that concluded only two days before. After that, detainees from Azovstal were moved in.
A series of videos published by Russian media in early June, and recently shared by open source intelligence analyst Oliver Alexander on Twitter, shows detainees at the facility. Prisoners can be seen walking inside or near various buildings, including a mess hall and barracks, surrounded by a fenced perimeter.
Three former prisoners, released from Olenivka in July, confirmed to The Post that these locations are in the southern part of the facility, where detainees were housed. One pointed out the buildings in satellite imagery.
The blast damaged a building located north of the housing barracks — a white-roofed warehouse, attached to a longer structure. The former prisoners who spoke with The Post said it resembled parts of the industrial zone at the facility where prisoners worked in the past.
Blast site
Satellite imagery taken by Maxar Technologies on July 27 shows what appear to be groups of people congregated in open areas near where prisoners confirmed they were housed before the blast, according to Steven De La Fuente, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a senior analyst at Maxar Technologies.
Satellite imagery also confirms recent changes in the area surrounding the structure damaged in the blast. In July, a barrier was put up east of the building, according to De La Fuente and Tony Roper, a freelance military analyst and blogger. The surrounding area also appeared to be cleared of shrubbery.
In a joint statement the day after the attack, Ukraine’s military, security and intelligence services pointed to “the deliberate transfer of fighters to new premises shortly before the explosion” as evidence of “the planned nature of this crime and its commission by the Russian side.”
Ukrainian authorities also claim that graves were dug in the prison complex shortly before the explosion. Imagery captured by Planet Labs satellites shows that land at the southern edge of the compound was altered beginning sometime between July 18 and 21.
A series of ground disturbances, measuring roughly 5-6 meters in length, are visible in this area in Maxar images taken on July 27. Roper and a Maxar senior analyst said the imagery alone was inconclusive, but De La Fuente said the disturbances were “reminiscent of human gravesites” at other locations during the war.
One day after the explosion, the disturbances appeared to have been partially covered.
Ukraine and Russia trade blame for attack killing Mariupol prisoners
What each side says about the explosion
On July 29, shortly after 9 a.m. local time, a message appeared on the Telegram account of Deputy Information Minister Daniil Bezsonov of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, stating that an attack had occurred overnight at the prison, which he blamed on Ukrainian HIMARS.
Russia’s Defense Ministry then issued a statement calling the blast a “bloody provocation” by Ukraine. And on Wednesday, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said that Ukraine had carried out the attack to prevent the prisoners from giving testimony about alleged Ukrainian war crimes. Darya Morozova, a separatist official, said no Russian guards were injured.
Ukrainian defense officials have denied launching attacks around Olenivka and instead accused Russia of staging the blast to “cover up the torture and execution of prisoners” at the facility. President Volodymyr Zelensky called it a “deliberate Russian war crime.”
Based on “available data,” Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency alleged Wednesday that Russian-backed forces had spread a “highly flammable substance” which, upon detonation, “led to the rapid spread of the fire in the premises.” It did not specify the substance or present evidence. The agency accused Moscow’s FSB spy agency and Wagner Group mercenaries of involvement in the plot.
The United States believes Russia will fabricate evidence to pin the blame for the killings on Ukraine, including by planting ammunition from a HIMARS, according to a U.S. intelligence finding first reported by the Associated Press and confirmed by The Post. Russian media shared photos of what they claimed were fragments of U.S.-made HIMARS rockets at the scene.
“The Ukrainians have been sending a lot of HIMARS their way,” a senior U.S. defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief the media, suggesting that Russians could have assembled pieces from unrelated attacks elsewhere.
Ukrainian authorities also cast doubt on the list Russia published online of those killed or injured. Andriy Yusov, an official in the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, said some soldiers on the list were thought to have been elsewhere at the time of the explosion.
The United Nations plans to launch a fact-finding mission.
What the evidence shows so far
Videos of the prison posted on the morning of July 29 by Russian media sources show signs of an intense fire. But the structure is largely intact, except for the roofing. Charred bodies of victims are visible in bunk beds and on the floor. Other bodies, showing few signs of exposure to fire, are filmed outside the building. The number of bodies visible in this initial set of videos is far fewer than the 50 Ukrainian soldiers that the Russian Ministry of Defense said were killed.
The six experts — including arson investigators, engineers and weapons analysts — warned against drawing firm conclusions about the attack. But most agreed that the available visual evidence of the aftermath did not bear the hallmarks of a HIMARS attack.
George William Herbert, an adjunct professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, told The Post that while there was some evidence of an explosion of some kind, the damage seemed inconsistent with an attack involving HIMARS, which delivers rockets without incendiary warheads.
“I don’t know how you get from an explosive — but not incendiary — warhead to a fire like that,” Herbert said. “I do see some central floor area beds blown apart or twisted from an explosion, but no signs that was a rocket warhead.”
Parts of the metal roofing on the building collapsed inward but were largely devoid of the heavy burn marks visible elsewhere. Herbert told The Post that suggested the roof was brought down after an initial explosion or fire.
“The extremely light structural damage to the walls seems incompatible with the expected effects of the standard HIMARS rocket,” analysts at the defense intelligence provider Janes wrote in an assessment conducted for The Post.
Janes also said that the elaborate operation that Russia is accusing Ukraine of undertaking would have been difficult to pull off, requiring extraordinary precision and coordination as well as real-time updates on the pattern of life inside.
If Russia was the culprit, “this would clearly be a war crime,” William Schabas, an international law professor at Middlesex University in London, wrote in an email.
If Ukraine targeted its own soldiers, as Moscow has asserted, it would most likely be “the ordinary crime of murder” rather than a war crime, Schabas said. | 2022-08-06T22:20:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukrainian POWs killed in Olenivka prison explosion: What to know - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/olenivka-prison-explosion-ukraine-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/olenivka-prison-explosion-ukraine-russia/ |
A view of the White House from Lafayette Square, as seen in 2018. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
D.C. police have identified the third person killed by a Thursday lightning strike near the White House as Brooks A. Lambertson, 29, a Los Angeles bank employee who was in the nation’s capital on business.
A husband and wife from Wisconsin, who were visiting the District to celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary, were also killed, police have previously said. A fourth person was critically injured when the strike hit just before 7 p.m. Thursday, in a grove of trees in Lafayette Square, about 100 feet from a statue of President Andrew Jackson.
Lambertson died Friday, according to police.
Police offered few other details about Lambertson or additional information about the incident Saturday. But Lambertson’s employer and family said in a statement that he was in D.C. for his job as a vice president of City National Bank managing sponsorships for the company. Lambertson, who lived in downtown L.A., previously worked in marketing for the Los Angeles Clippers, according to the release.
“Brooks was an incredible young man who will be remembered for his generosity, kindness and unwavering positivity,” the statement said. “His sudden loss is devastating to all who knew him, and his family, friends and colleagues appreciate the thoughts and prayers that poured in from around the country.”
How lightning works -- and how to stay safe when it's in the area
A police spokeswoman said late Saturday that the department did not have an update on the condition of the fourth victim, who had been hospitalized after the strike. | 2022-08-06T22:42:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DC lightning strike by White House: Third deceased victim identified - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/dc-lightning-victims-white-house/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/dc-lightning-victims-white-house/ |
At the Renwick Gallery, craft that captures our polarized times
A major craft survey, ‘This Present Moment,’ engages the culture wars on every front
By Kriston Capps
Alicia Eggert's neon installation “This Present Moment” is the inspiration for the title of the Renwick Gallery's latest exhibition of contemporary craft. (Albert Ting)
At a glance, there’s nothing partisan about the life-size glass statue of a woman on view at the Renwick Gallery.
Graceful and enigmatic, “Vestige (Pleated Dress)” is a 2000 work by artist Karen LaMonte. Cast in glass, the hollow statue depicts a woman, headless, her figure wrapped in a vintage gown. Every detail of the fabric’s folds is rendered in frozen form. The sculpture can’t help but inspire awe at its masterful craftsmanship.
Yet in the context of the latest Renwick show — and a raft of decisions over the summer by the U.S. Supreme Court that have transformed American society — “Vestige” looks not just poetic but prophetic. The eerie absence of the woman from her own statue, reduced to the trappings of her old-fashioned dress, comes to the fore amid a raging public debate over the agency of people who could become pregnant following the court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
That’s just one piece that looks newly polarized in “This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World,” a major craft survey on view at the Renwick. Featuring 171 works, the exhibition engages the culture wars on every front, a decidedly confrontational display for the historically staid craft museum. The show touches on so many different political fault lines — such as the border, the climate crisis and the future of democracy — that it feels as if it could have been juried by the Supreme Court itself.
In Washington, protests over Roe and other momentous decisions continue: Late in July, a number of Democratic lawmakers were arrested at a rally outside the Supreme Court, including Reps. Cori Bush (Mo.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.). Yet the most powerful demonstrations about the future of the country may be found at 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue — the once-modest Renwick, cater-cornered from the White House.
Consider “Bad Ombrés v.2” (2017), a set of ceramic vases by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, 3D-printed using clay drawn from each side of the U.S.-Mexico border. Or there’s “Otro Mundo Es Posible” (2017), a textile banner designed by Aram Han Sifuentes to protest the Trump administration’s attempt to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. (Borrowers can check out this flag from the Protest Banner Lending Library in Chicago.) These works are ripped from headlines that are still breaking. In June, the Supreme Court addressed the former president’s “remain in Mexico” policy on refugees; a decision on DACA is likely in the court’s next term.
Still another piece on view, Sonya Clark’s “Monumental” (2019) — a 30-foot-long recreation of the white tea towel waved by Confederate General Robert E. Lee to surrender to Union forces at Appomattox — uses symbol and scale to unpack problems that have plagued the nation since Reconstruction. Chawne Kimber’s “still not” (2019) combines denim patches with other cotton fabrics to form a quilt that reads in part, “I am still not free.” While voting rights weren’t on the court’s docket this term, the justices did hear a case stemming from the events of Jan. 6, the gravest insurrection since the start of the Civil War.
The Renwick show is named after “This Present Moment” (2019–2020), an installation by Alicia Eggert. Pink neon tubes spell out a wall-sized aphorism: “This moment used to be the future.” Two more words blink off and on to raise the stakes — “This present moment used to be the unimaginable future” — a shift from a slogan fit for a T-shirt to a dramatic bit of doomcasting about the climate. (Or any other number of crises, really.)
Such political themes have a rocky history at Smithsonian museums. In 1995, the National Air and Space Museum canceled an exhibition on the atomic bomb that veterans groups and other critics worried would be too critical of the U.S. role in World War II. In 2010, the Smithsonian censored an artwork in an LGBTQ exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery that conservative commentators deemed to be anti-Christian — a decision that resulted in a rare rebuke for the Smithsonian secretary who pulled the piece.
“This Present Moment” — curated by Mary Savig, with support from Nora Atkinson, Anya Montiel and Elana Hain — is a measure of how far craft as a movement has pushed to embrace contemporary concepts about identity and storytelling. It’s also a mile marker for adventurous social commentary by a museum affiliated with the Castle.
And in this particular present moment, the show indirectly registers how far the Supreme Court has tacked to the right on some of the most personal and divisive debates that Americans face. For every challenging artwork on view, it almost seems, there’s a recent court decision on the matter.
The parallel is intriguing in part because the Renwick, too, seeks to settle a debate, albeit a narrower one, about the state of craft.
“I would like to put this question to bed once and for all,” writes Atkinson, curator-in-charge at the Renwick, in the exhibition catalogue. “The studio craft movement was a discrete time in American history, now past.”
No longer confined to traditional formats or techniques, this post-craft era has opened the Renwick’s doors to contemporary art, with works spanning installation, conceptual and even performance art. In that sense, “This Present Moment” is a sequel to “Wonder,” a blockbuster 2015 exhibition that saw lines out the door to see a host of room-sized, Instagram-friendly sculptures.
That’s not to say that the Renwick has overturned every precedent in craft. James C. Watkins’ “Communion” (1998), an achingly expressive ebony cauldron, beckons to the artist’s upbringing in small-town Alabama, where cast-iron pots were markers of domestic life. “Initiate” (2020), another ceramic piece, this one by Donté K. Hayes, celebrates forms from across the African diaspora without settling on any one.
If there is a post-craft moment taking shape, it appears to involve embracing community and regionalism while jettisoning the strict utility associated with vessels or textiles. Shan Goshorn’s “Song of Sorrow” (2015), a woven basket, for example, includes snippets of Kaw, Lakota and Navajo prayers juxtaposed with the violent lyrics of a children’s rhyme (“Ten Little Indians”).
There’s a Supreme Court decision to go with this piece, too: In Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, five conservative justices expanded the authority of state law enforcement agencies to prosecute crimes committed by non-Natives against Natives in Indian Country, a sweeping change for tribal sovereignty and federal Indian law.
For Indigenous viewers, this artwork — in the wake of that decision — may feel like a gut punch. For better or worse, “This Present Moment” offers that feeling in spades.
This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World
Renwick Gallery, Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW. americanart.si.edu.
Dates: Through April 2. | 2022-08-06T22:50:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Renwick's 'This Present Moment' feels ripped from the headlines - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/06/renwick-this-present-moment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/06/renwick-this-present-moment/ |
Tourists find safety after floods close roads in Death Valley; slain Ind. officer eulogized after July 31 shooting.
Tourists safe after Death Valley flooding
Hundreds of hotel guests trapped by flash flooding at Death Valley National Park were able to drive out after crews cleared a path through rocks and mud, but roads damaged by floodwaters or choked with debris were expected to remain closed into next week, officials said Saturday.
The National Park Service said Navy and California Highway Patrol helicopters were conducting aerial searches in remote areas for stranded vehicles, but had found none.
No injuries were reported from the record-breaking rains Friday of 1.46 inches. Since 1936, the only single day with more rain was April 15, 1988, when 1.47 inches fell, park officials said.
Most of the rain came in an epic downpour — just over an inch — between 6 and 8 a.m. Friday, said John Adair, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas.
Slain officer eulogized after July 31 shooting
Noah Shahnavaz, 24, an officer with the Elwood Police Department, 50 miles northeast of Indianapolis, was shot in the head just after 2 a.m. July 31, while still in his patrol car.
State police arrested the accused gunman, Carl Boards II of Anderson, about 30 minutes after the killing. He was charged with murder, resisting law enforcement and unlawful possession of a firearm by a serious violent felon.
Oklahoma City man killed himself, 3 children, police say: An Oklahoma City man fatally shot his three young children then shot and killed himself early Saturday, according to police. A person jogging or walking called police after spotting the four bodies in a vehicle in a northwest Oklahoma City neighborhood about 7:30 a.m. Saturday, said Capt. Michelle Henderson. Henderson said police had been searching for the man and his sons since shortly before 4:30 a.m. after learning that he had taken the children and made "concerning statements" about their well-being. The names and ages of the four were not released, although Henderson said the children were each younger than 7. Whether the children were boys or girls was also not being immediately released, Henderson said. | 2022-08-06T22:51:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tourists find safety after floods close roads in Death Valley; slain Ind. officer eulogized after July 31 shooting. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/tourists-find-safety-after-floods-close-roads-in-death-valley-slain-ind-officer-eulogized-after-july-31-shooting/2022/08/06/3120f098-1468-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/tourists-find-safety-after-floods-close-roads-in-death-valley-slain-ind-officer-eulogized-after-july-31-shooting/2022/08/06/3120f098-1468-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html |
China accused of rehearsing invasion
Taiwan officials said Chinese aircraft and warships rehearsed an attack on the island on Saturday, part of Beijing’s retaliation for a visit there by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The brief visit last week by the California Democrat to the self-ruled island that China regards as its territory infuriated Beijing and prompted military drills that are unprecedented in scale and have included ballistic missiles fired over the capital, Taipei.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said multiple Chinese ships and planes conducted missions in the Taiwan Strait on Saturday. Taiwan scrambled jets to warn away 20 Chinese aircraft, including 14 that crossed the median line — an unofficial buffer separating the two sides.
Dozens injured in fire at oil storage site
A fire set off by a lightning strike at an oil storage facility raged uncontrolled Saturday in the Cuban city of Matanzas, where four explosions and flames injured nearly 80 people and left 17 firefighters missing, authorities said.
The fire at the Matanzas Supertanker Base began during a thunderstorm Friday night. The government has asked for help from international experts in “friendly countries” with experience in the oil sector.
Boy at center of British legal battle dies: A 12-year-old boy who had been in a coma for four months died Saturday at a London hospital after doctors ended the life-sustaining treatment his family had fought to continue. Archie Battersbee's mother, Hollie Dance, said her son died at 12:15 p.m., about two hours after the hospital began withdrawing treatment. British courts had rejected both the family's effort to extend treatment and a request to move Archie to a hospice, saying neither move was in the child's best interests. This was the latest in a string of public cases in which British parents and doctors have sparred over who is best qualified to make decisions about a child's medical care.
Police arrest 3 more in slaying of journalist in Brazil: Brazilian police have arrested three more suspects in the slayings of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. A police statement alleges the three were involved in hiding the bodies after the killings. Phillips, 57, and Pereira, 41, were killed June 5 on their boat on the Itaquai river, near the entrance of the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, which borders Peru and Colombia. A total of seven people have been arrested in connection with the killings or the attempted coverup.
Bus crash in Bulgaria leaves four dead: A bus crash in Bulgaria killed four people and left at least eight injured, authorities said. The bus, with 24 passengers and a driver aboard, was returning to Romania from a trip to Istanbul when it crashed into a parked car on the side of a highway that links Bulgaria's central city of Veliko Tarnovo with the Danube port of Ruse, local police said.
More objects uncovered at ancient Pompeii site: Archaeologists have discovered four new rooms in a house in Pompeii filled with plates, amphoras and other everyday objects, giving a snapshot of middle-class life at the moment Mount Vesuvius's eruption buried the Roman city in AD 79. The remains were found on two floors of a previously excavated building, the Pompeii archaeological park authority said. | 2022-08-06T22:51:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 6, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-6-2022/2022/08/06/2e0fffb6-14fe-11ed-a642-b9be12ce0b34_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-6-2022/2022/08/06/2e0fffb6-14fe-11ed-a642-b9be12ce0b34_story.html |
D.C. Funk Parade brings the ‘magic’ of music back to U Street
The music festival was back and fully in-person for the first time since before the pandemic
Chuck Stuart, lead guitarist of Uncle Mary, plays Saturday at the D.C. Funk Parade on U Street. (Omari Daniels/The Washington Post)
Night Train 357 loves Chuck Brown, but he’s an ’80s baby. So as the Prince George’s County native, whose non-stage name is Stephen Wilkes, performed Saturday at the eighth annual D.C. Funk Parade, he embraced the city’s traditional music while also bringing his own brand of hip-hop.
“We’re a go-go town, but hip-hop is here, and we’re showing people that the music and talent are here and strong,” Night Train, 39, said. “My base is hip-hop music, but I love everything.”
Saturday marked the first time the D.C. Funk Parade was fully in-person on the U Street corridor since 2019, with a few hundred attendees and performers like Night Train scattered across four sites featuring live music from area artists. For those musicians, some of whom were performing at the parade for the first time, it was a stage on which to celebrate the uniqueness of D.C.’s music scene.
D.C.’s Black Broadway is gone. A Georgetown professor wants to remind U Street newcomers of its history.
The event’s theme this year was “The Magic of Music,” and it’s a magic that Eric Liley believes in. Liley, the executive director and CEO of nonprofit The MusicianShip, which put on the festival, wants young people to see in it an opportunity to grow and an alternative to violence, at a time when fears are rising in the District.
“We’re encouraging young musicians to keep playing and keep the instruments in their hands,” Liley said. “We say put down weapons of destruction like guns and pick up instruments of love, since music is what unites us all.”
Willie Mae was among the first on Saturday to arrive at the main stage, near the African-American Civil War Memorial. Mae, 73, said she has been to the Funk Parade many times in the past — and had met Brown a number of times when he performed in the city.
“I’m glad to see it come back. It gives a lot of artists a chance to showcase themselves, especially if you haven’t heard them before,” she said.
Fear over recent shootings has some avoiding crowds, businesses
Mae also liked, she said, how the festival supported D.C. youth programs. This year it raised money for The MusicianShip, a nonprofit and youth development organization that offers music education programs.
“Music brings everybody together,” Liley said. In D.C., “there’s so much rich history, and I think we have a huge opportunity to contribute to making a creative ecosystem in the city where artists want to stay.”
The Parade was, noticeably, missing its parade; next year, organizers are changing its name to the D.C. Funk Festival.
Tyree Paul, one of the rappers who performed Saturday, said the festival represents togetherness in the city. Paul, who’s from Prince George’s, was among those appearing for the first time.
“As a child, I’ve always had a love for rapping and did a lot of poetry when growing up,” Paul, 26, said. “I think the funk aspect gives you a good feeling, and I just get a good vibe from the funk festival.”
These D.C. walking tours go far beyond the National Mall
The city’s go-go and funk, he said, help give the District its distinct musical identity.
“Funk and go-go are very D.C. to me, and I feel no one else is on that level. It’s the essence of D.C.,” Paul said.
Chuck Stuart, the lead guitarist for the local rock band Uncle Mary, said the District’s local musicians have a rhythm that can’t be replicated, one he calls “a heartbeat of the city.” Stuart, who was also playing the Funk Parade for the first time, has played at other local festivals, such as the Cherry Blossom Festival and H Street Festival.
Stuart said he’s been playing guitar for 15 years. He said that hours of Guitar Hero inspired him to learn how to play. He said he spent hours playing on a shoddy Best Buy guitar, but that honed his skills after hours of practice.
“I played on it and I bled on it, but I made sure that I could play it so that when I got real guitars, I already had some practice,” Stuart, 27, said.
Liley said that organizers faced the ongoing pandemic challenge of whether people would feel comfortable enough to be back outside and in large gatherings again during the pandemic. “There’s a sentiment in a lot of people to be back out in a public environment, but there are still a large number of people susceptible to catching covid,” he said.
From 2019: After #DontMuteDC, this year’s Funk Parade is a call to action
But Liley said he hopes attendees Saturday saw that the spirit of U Street is alive and well — and that the festival will continue to honor what makes the neighborhood special.
“We will not forget about U Street Corridor or the people in it,” he said. “For those who visit or music enthusiasts or even people who don’t know about Black Broadway, the intent is to celebrate the community and performing arts.”
That kind of celebration, Liley and the artists agreed, is better in-person.
“The livestream stuff was cool, but there’s nothing like a live feeling with people being able to cheer you on,” Stuart said. “That’s what I thrive on as a performing guitarist: being able to feed off of people and give back to the community.” | 2022-08-06T23:38:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DC Funk Parade returns to U Street corridor for 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/dc-funk-parade-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/06/dc-funk-parade-2022/ |
Another blast in Kabul targets Shiite community
Third terror attack in four days intensifies fears for final days of religious mourning period
Municipality workers clean the area around a blast site in the heart of Kabul's Shiite minority community on Saturday. (Ali Khara/Reuters)
KABUL — A bombing in the heart of Kabul’s Shiite minority community Saturday killed at least two people and wounded 22. It was the third terrorist attack in the area since Wednesday, and intensified fears of further violence during the final days of Muharram, the Shiite mourning period.
The chief spokesman for the Kabul police, Khalid Zadran, said in a tweet late Saturday that the explosives were planted in a vase.
“The enemies are attempting to target the people and create a rift, but they will not succeed in their nefarious designs,” Zadran said.“We accept it as a religious and national duty to defeat such elements.”
There were unconfirmed reports that the blast had targeted a meeting between Taliban security officials and local Shiite elders, which had been called to address the escalating violence, and that two participants had been killed.
Despite Taliban officials’ efforts to calm public fears, the deadly blast Saturday evening dampened community hopes for effective action to keep them safe. It also intensified domestic and international pressure on Afghanistan’s new religious rulers, who are Sunni Muslims, to fulfill their pledge to protect all Afghan citizens after they took power last August.
After Kabul school attack, Afghans fear a return to violence
The bombing, which was not claimed by any group, followed two terrorist attacks in the past four days that were claimed by an offshoot of the Islamic State, an extremist Sunni militant group that has carried out dozens of bombings and shootings in the Shiite-dominated area of West Kabul in recent years. The group is known as Islamic State-Khorasan or ISIS-K.
On Wednesday, a group of Islamic State commandos invaded a high-rise apartment building in the Karte Sakhi neighborhood and began firing on a Taliban security team that was canvassing the area. After a 7-hour firefight, during which some families were reportedly held hostage and then freed unharmed, Taliban officials announced they had killed four terrorists and captured one.
On Friday, a bomb planted in a roadside cart exploded in a busy market near a mosque in another area of West Kabul, known as Sar-e-Karez. Officials said at least eight people were killed and another 18 injured. There were reports that women and children had been meeting at the mosque when the bomb exploded.
After the back-to-back incidents, residents demanded better protection for the community until the climactic final days of Muharram this week, which are known as Ashura. On Friday, police officials announced they were creating a special commission to ensure full security during Ashura. In a statement, Zadran asked “our Shiite countrymen” to restrict their activities to special tented mourning sites and “not to make disturbances for other people.”
During Ashura, religious emotions run high as people mourn the death of Imam Hussain, a revered Shiite figure who was killed in the 7th century. With loud dirges pounding from loudspeakers, hundreds of men and boys march or form circles where they flagellate their backs with knives and chains.
In a statement Saturday before the third attack, the U.N. Assistance Mission for Afghanistan condemned the Friday market bombing and said the Taliban government “must prevent such indiscriminate attacks” and launch a “thorough & transparent investigation.”
The location of the bombing was redolent with historic irony. The fiery blast detonated one block from Mazari Circle, a roundabout with archways and a stone plaque honoring Ali Abdul Mazari, an indomitable Shiite militia leader who led a fierce fight against Taliban forces for years before he was captured by their forces and imprisoned, where he died in 1996.
In March 2020, at least 27 people were killed and 29 wounded in a bombing after an official ceremony in the Shiite community to mark the death anniversary of Mazari. There were initial reports that the Taliban — at that point a guerrilla force fighting a civilian government — had carried out the attack, but it was later claimed by ISIS-K.
After the Taliban returned to power last year, one of its first formal actions was to blow up a statue of Mazari in northern Bamian province, a historic northern region that is the Afghan Shiite and Hazara homeland. Now, Taliban officials are sworn to protect Mazari’s followers against another, outside foe of Afghanistan.
Photos of the Saturday blast showed people running beneath posters of Mazari with a fiery burst of flames behind them. They also showed people milling around a little further up the street, among damaged display booths covered with religious banners and other paraphernalia for Muharram. | 2022-08-07T00:22:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Afghanistan explosion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/afghanistan-blast-taliban/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/06/afghanistan-blast-taliban/ |
The state, national leaders and activists on both sides are gearing up for long slog over abortion laws
Indiana Sen. Susan Glick (R), right, author of a bill banning abortion, debates state Sen. Greg Taylor (D) shortly before a late Friday vote on the measure. (Cheney Orr/Reuters)
The Indiana law, which the Republican-controlled state legislature passed late Friday night and Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) signed moments later, was the first state ban passed since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June and was celebrated as a major victory by abortion foes.
On Aug. 5, Indiana lawmakers passed a near-total ban on abortion. The bill was signed into law by Gov. Eric Holcomb (R). (Video: The Washington Post)
It also came just three days after voters in traditionally conservative Kansas surprised the political world by taking a very different tack, rejecting a ballot measure that would have stripped abortion rights protections from that state’s constitution.
The vote in Indiana capped weeks of fraught debate in Indianapolis, where activists demonstrated at the state Capitol and waged intense lobbying campaigns as Republican lawmakers debated how far the law should go in restricting abortion. Some abortion foes hailed the law’s passage as a road map for conservatives in other states pushing similar bans in the aftermath of the high court’s decision on Roe, which had guaranteed for the past 50 years the right to abortion care.
The Indiana ban, which goes into effect Sept. 15, allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or when the procedure is necessary to prevent severe health risks or death. Indiana joins nine other states that have abortion bans starting at conception.
The new law represents a victory for antiabortion forces, who have been working for decades to halt the procedure. But passage occurred after disagreements among some abortion foes, some of whom thought the bill did not go far enough in stopping the procedure.
“We are concerned that this law will hinder Lilly’s — and Indiana’s — ability to attract diverse scientific engineering and business talent from around the world,” the company said in a statement issued Saturday. “Given this new law, we will be forced to plan for more employment growth outside our home state.”
See where abortion laws have changed
“Such an expedited legislative process — rushing to advance state policy on broad, complex issues — is, at best, detrimental to Hoosiers, and at worst, reckless,” the chamber said in a statement, asking: “Will the Indy region continue to attract tourism and convention investments?”
Indiana lost out on 12 conventions and an estimated $60 million of business after it passed a religious freedom law in 2015, according to one local tourism industry estimate.
Indiana is the first state to ban abortion by legislature since the Supreme Court decision in June overturning Roe v. Wade. Other states enacted “trigger laws” that went into effect with the fall of Roe.
Indiana may be just the beginning. Abortion rights advocates estimate that abortion could be severely restricted or banned in as many as half of the 50 states.
An official at Indiana Right to Life, an Indiana antiabortion group, said the new law will end 95 percent of abortions in Indiana and will close all Indiana abortion clinics” Sept. 15, the date the legislation takes effect, unless abortion activists go to court and get an injunction beforehand.
Indiana has considered abortion restrictions for years, though it remained a state where many in the region traveled for abortion care. Now, as many nearby states — including Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia — also push for abortion bans, patients may have to travel hundreds of miles in some cases for care, said Elizabeth Nash, a policy expert at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. “Patients in Ohio won’t be able to go to Indiana for access. They’ll have to get to, perhaps, Illinois or Michigan,” she said.
Passage of the Indiana measure occurred just weeks after national attention was focused on a 10-year-old girl who was raped in Ohio, where abortion is banned after six weeks, and traveled to Indiana to terminate the pregnancy.
Caitlin Bernard, the doctor who performed that abortion in Indianapolis, tweeted Saturday that she was “devastated” by the legislature’s action. “How many girls and women will be hurt before they realize this must be reversed? I will continue to fight for them with every fiber of my being,” she wrote.
Doctors are reluctant to work in anti-abortion states
The Indiana measure drew swift condemnation from national Democrats, who sought to cast Republicans as extreme on abortion — citing the Kansas vote earlier this week, where even rural, conservative parts of the state rejected changing the state’s constitutional right to an abortion.
The law is “another radical step by Republican legislators to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedom,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Democrats are hopeful, though, that they can use what happened in Indiana to cast the entire Republican Party as extreme on abortion.
“This has nothing to do with being ‘pro-life,’ ” tweeted California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). “It’s about power and control.”
In Washington, Republican leaders have been largely silent on Republican-led states’ push to ban abortion. Polls consistently show that near-total abortion bans like the one in Indiana are unpopular with the general public.
So when Indiana Republicans ban abortion for an entire state, “they are effectively speaking for all Republicans,” said Martha McKenna, a Democratic political strategist, “and that’s why I have hope it’s a good issue for Democrats in November.”
Another political strategist, Jonathan Levy, who worked on the Kansans For Constitutional Freedom Campaign, which is opposed to limiting abortion rights, said the Kansas vote showed that extreme antiabortion positions are “going to be rejected by Americans across the political spectrum. The American people want legislators to focus on how to keep food on the table, keep the economy afloat. They think the legislature’s priorities are out of whack,” he said.
Alongside the near-total abortion ban, Indiana Republicans also passed legislation they said was intended to support pregnant women and mothers, but critics pointed out much of the money was directed at propping up pregnancy crisis centers run by antiabortion groups.
The passage of the bill left health providers and abortion counseling agencies struggling to figure out the full impact of the legislation.
Indiana University Health, a major health-care provider in the state, issued a statement saying it was trying to figure out what the ban meant for its doctors and patients.
“We will take the next few weeks to fully understand the terms of the new law and how to incorporate changes into our medical practice to protect our providers and care for people seeking reproductive health,” the health provider said in a statement.
Meantime, activists began discussing plans to raise funds and provide transportation for those seeking abortion access after the ban goes into effect, said Carol McCord, a former employee at Planned Parenthood.
“Since this is soon to be illegal in Indiana, we are looking for ways to help women travel to get services that they need,” she said. Indiana law was already considered restrictive compared with other states, so about 35 percent of women seeking abortions traveled out of state already, said Jessica Marchbank who serves as the state programs manager for the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Bloomington.
Democratic state legislators began strategizing Saturday about how to respond, including considering repeal measures and organizing voters to elect legislators who favor abortion rights.
“This is a dark time for Indiana,” said state Sen. Shelli Yoder, an assistant Democratic caucus chair. “The plan going forward is to be sure we come out in November and vote out the individuals who supported something that only a tiny minority of Hoosiers wanted.”
Immediately, Yoder said in an interview that she and like-minded state legislators are contemplating action that could undo the impact of the new law, noting that the legislature has not been formally adjourned.
“We can come back and fix this,” she said, adding that legislators are at the early stage of plotting how to do that.
Katie Blair, the advocacy and public policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Indiana, said Saturday that her organization will examine legal action.
“You can guarantee that our legal team will be working with partners to evaluate every legal avenue available to defend abortion access here in Indiana,” Blair said in a statement.
In signing the legislation, Holcomb applauded the work of the lawmakers he had called into special session this summer to find a way to restrict abortion, acknowledging disagreements among those opposed to abortion.
“These actions followed long days of hearings filled with sobering and personal testimony from citizens and elected representatives on this emotional and complex topic,” the governor said in a statement. “Ultimately, those voices shaped and informed the final contents of the legislation and its carefully negotiated exceptions to address some of the unthinkable circumstances a woman or unborn child might face.” | 2022-08-07T00:22:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Indiana adopts restrictive abortion law, prompting economic fallout - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/06/indiana-abortion-law/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/06/indiana-abortion-law/ |
Carolyn Hax is away. The following is from April 18 and 20, 2008.
Dear Carolyn: My wife and I have been married four years. We share a mortgage but don’t have kids or other significant debt. My wife works a lot harder than I do. Her company pays her $100,000 a year, but she is always exhausted. I have a publishing business that pays me $150,000 annually. I have been building my business since before we married and now enjoy the passive income it provides us.
My wife is resentful that she has to work so hard and that she sees me kicking back. I would love to travel by myself once in a while or do a guys’ trip, but I get nothing except guilt from her, which, in turn, makes me angry and resentful. It feels as if there is a constant cycle of resentment because of it.
She stays in her job because there may be potential to move up, and because she enjoys the challenge and responsibility. She is also making terrific contacts, and she likes working hard. I’ve always told her that if she doesn’t like her job, I support anything she would choose to do, regardless of her income.
I feel that I carry my weight financially (and so does she). Shouldn’t I enjoy the fruits of my labor without feeling guilty, and shouldn’t she give me the freedom to enjoy it once in a while? She has vacation days she can use if she wants. I would need to get a second job to make more money, which we don’t need right now. She implies that I am lazy and not driven. I disagree; I built my business with hard work and drive. Doesn’t my income count heavily toward that argument?
— J.L.
J.L.: I suppose, but I would make a different argument entirely: that being “driven” is seriously overrated.
I’m glad some people are. We all enjoy — in fact, take for granted — countless fruits of other people’s elective 80-hour workweeks.
I simply reject the implication that it’s necessary, or even desirable, for everyone to be driven. People pulling elective 80-hour weeks certainly enjoy — in fact, take for granted — the fruits of other people’s refusal to spend that much time at work.
That cohort includes not just our poets, volunteers and people who make sure they have nothing more pressing to do than walk at their toddler’s pace.
It’s also people who think 40 hours more than suffice.
You have a pretty sweet life. Whether you earned it or picked it up off the sidewalk is, I think, immaterial. You are content with what you have.
If your wife envies your contentment, then she needs to do something to find more — with your cooperation, of course. Her insistence that you lessen your contentment, by taking on stress equal to hers, of all things, is absurd. A stunningly selfish solution.
Granted, you don’t mention any ways you apply your spare quality of life toward improving hers: chores, cooking, social planning, to cite a few examples. If you don’t do this, then do this. “I support anything she would choose to do” isn’t a promise kept only in few possible futures; it’s one to make good on daily.
If you already do pamper her, though, and a thoughtful, happy, well-paid, supportive spouse isn’t enough to make her happy, then it’s time for you both to start asking what is.
Dear Carolyn: My son-in-law is a very bright, well-spoken young man. But he gestures with his hands when he’s talking. This may be an accepted style in Italy, but I’d always been taught that using your hands to help make a point was a demonstration of lazy thinking, and that if an effort were made to choose the appropriate words, the point would be relayed more effectively. How can I suggest to him that he keep his hands quiet when he’s speaking without offending him?
— Mother-in-Law in a Quandary
Mother-in-Law in a Quandary: To me, the definition of lazy thinking is taking something you were taught as a child and then, without questioning its foundation, its value, its accuracy, its significance or its relevance, using it as a weapon against the bright young man your child lovingly chose to bring home.
Please, in the name of reason, give him a break. By your own description, it’s clear that even if your fears are warranted — an “if” of ample proportions — this is about nothing more than his appearing less bright than he is in the eyes of people who share your dim view of southern European norms and/or demonstrative expression. That’s a pretty narrow band of injury, hardly worth the ill will you’ll generate by trying to control a grown man’s behavior — and, not to mention, by championing such a judgmental, nitpicky, xenophobic and prejudiced cause. | 2022-08-07T04:56:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Wife resents spouse’s easy, lucrative job - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/07/carolyn-hax-wife-work-resentment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/07/carolyn-hax-wife-work-resentment/ |
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — The Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group said an Israeli airstrike late Saturday killed its top commander for the southern Gaza Strip, a day after Israel killed the Iranian-backed group’s commander for northern Gaza in an air raid that triggered the worst cross-border conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants since the end of an 11-day war in 2021. | 2022-08-07T04:56:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Israeli airstrike kills 2nd top Islamic Jihad commander - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/israeli-airstrike-kills-2nd-top-islamic-jihad-commander/2022/08/07/81331138-160c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/israeli-airstrike-kills-2nd-top-islamic-jihad-commander/2022/08/07/81331138-160c-11ed-8482-06c1c84ce8f2_story.html |
Ahmad Assed, president of the Islamic Center of New Mexico, speaks during a news conference to address the killing of a fourth Muslim man this weekend in Albuquerque. (Chancey Bush/AP)
The tightknit Muslim community in Albuquerque was rocked by the killings of two Muslim men within a week’s span of each other this summer. After funerals were held Friday for the two men, “we thought, okay, we’re going to catch a little breather,” said Tahir Gauba, the director of public affairs at the Islamic Center of New Mexico.
But later that night, another Muslim man from the community became the latest victim in a string of killings that officials suspect are linked.
Naeem Hussain had attended the funerals of Muhammed Afzaal Hussain, 27, and Aftab Hussein, 41, on Friday before heading to the center for a post-service meal, Gauba said in a phone interview. Naaem Hussain, who was in his 20s, and the other two men were “regulars” at the center, Gauba said. (Though the men share a common surname, they were not related, he said.)
Naeem Hussain was found dead Friday evening shortly before midnight in the parking lot of Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, a nonprofit that provides adoption and refugee services, after police responded to reports of a shooting. The police said his identity was not yet “positively confirmed,” but Gauba said he had spoken with Naeem Hussain’s family about his death.
Albuquerque police detectives have “determined there is a connection” between the two earlier killings and suspect that the latest “may be linked,” the police said in a statement. Detectives are also probing whether the November killing of Mohammad Ahmadi outside a business he ran with his brother was connected, the police said. (Gauba said Ahmadi was not a regular member at the center.) Naeem Hussain and Aftab Hussein were from Afghanistan but had passed through Pakistan before coming to the United States, Gauba said. Muhammed Afzaal Hussain was from Pakistan and Ahmadi was from Afghanistan, according to the police.
Albuquerque police had said the three earlier killings were done in a similar fashion — “ambushed with no warning, fired on and killed,” the Associated Press reported — but declined at a news conference on Saturday to say whether Friday’s killing was the same.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Albuquerque office is assisting Albuquerque police in the investigation, said Frank Fisher, a spokesman for the office.
Gauba said the string of deaths has been “horrific” for the community of about 5,000 Muslims in Albuquerque, a city of more than 560,000. “I’ve been in the United States since ’95,” Gauba said. “I’ve been through 9/11. I’ve been through the Trump era. I’ve never felt this helpless and in fear.”
‘I think Islam hates us’: A timeline of Trump’s comments about Islam and Muslims
CAIR, which advocates for the civil rights of Muslims in the United States, said in a statement on Saturday that it was offering $10,000 for information “leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.” The organization called on the Biden administration to “take a direct role” in the matter. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Saturday.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said that “the targeted killings of Muslim residents of Albuquerque is deeply angering and wholly intolerable.”
“I am angered and saddened that this is happening in New Mexico, a place that prides itself on diversity of culture and thought,” she said in a statement. “This is not who we are.”
Lujan Grisham said on Twitter that she was sending state police to assist the Albuquerque police and FBI in the investigation “to bring the killer or killers to justice — and they WILL be found.” She addressed the local Muslim community: “You are New Mexicans, you are welcomed here, and we stand with you.” | 2022-08-07T07:55:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New Mexico killings of 4 Muslim men may be linked, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/07/new-mexico-muslim-men-killings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/07/new-mexico-muslim-men-killings/ |
For a Buffalo lawyer, the investigation of one mass shooting leads him back to another
John Elmore walks into the Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo where, in May, a mass shooter killed 10 people. (Lauren Petracca/For The Washington Post)
BUFFALO —
John Elmore’s newest clients had come to his law office in the last weeks to review their relatives’ autopsy reports, plan funerals and meet with investigators from the FBI, but lately they had also started showing up sometimes for seemingly no reason at all. Andrea Beckman parked outside a quiet strip mall, walked in a partially vacant office building, and knocked on her attorney’s door.
“Is it okay if I sit in here for a while?” she asked, and Elmore, 65, looked up from his computer and motioned to the chair across from his desk.
“Of course,” he said. “Do you need anything?”
“Just distraction. Just noise,” she said. “I’m still not doing that well when I’m at home by myself.”
It had been almost two months since her father went to buy a birthday cake for his 3-year-old son at a Tops grocery store and was shot and killed along with nine others, forcing Andrea to begin looking for a lawyer for the first time in her life. Her family knew of only one attorney in the Black community of East Buffalo — the one whose billboard towered above a gas station near Tops and whose slogan repeated in radio advertisements. “When they hurt you, I got you,” Elmore said. His personal injury practice consisted mostly of filing lawsuits for car accidents, dog bites, and slip-and-falls, and now he’d also come to represent several families of victims in a white supremacist terrorist attack that he considered the “most personal case of my career.”
He’d often shopped at that same Tops. He knew several of the victims from church or from his children’s youth sports leagues. And he had some idea of what it might be like for his clients to sort through the rage and the trauma of a mass shooting, because even four decades after another long-forgotten shooting, he was still doing that, too.
“How’s your family?” he asked. “How’s everyone holding together?”
“You know,” she said. “We’re all kind of spiraling.”
“What’s going on with your uncle? He called me last night at 1:30 in the morning, and he sounded a little confused.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. He’s in the hospital. They’re saying he basically had a mental breakdown from all of this.”
“Ugh. Poor guy,” Elmore said, as he reached into his desk for a yellow legal pad to take notes, because this was now the fulcrum of his work: to make a full accounting of the ever-expanding damages caused by yet another American mass shooting and then decide where and how to assign blame beyond the alleged shooter, Payton Gendron. Elmore had begun to explore potential lawsuits against social media websites, where the shooter had published racist diatribes and live-streamed a video of the attack; and against a body armor company that marketed its gear directly to civilians and sold the shooter a steel-plated vest that protected him from a security guard’s return fire; and against the manufacturer of his Bushmaster XM-15, which had been used to fire 30 shots in the first 20 seconds of the attack, and which the shooter wrote that he’d selected as his weapon of choice because it was a “dreaded military grade assault rifle” and “very deadly.”
Elmore had decided to partner on the case with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and with Josh Koskoff, a Connecticut lawyer who’d won a $73 million settlement against gun manufacturer Remington Arms after the same style of semiautomatic weapon was used in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Koskoff had argued that Remington marketed its semiautomatic rifle specifically to impressionable young men, but the resolution of that case had taken almost a decade, and Elmore had cautioned his clients that their own lawsuit — if they even had one — would likely drag on for several years.
“Did you see Tops is reopening this week?” Andrea said. “They replaced the broken windows and redesigned it. It’s going back to being a regular grocery store.”
“Some people are lucky enough to move on,” Elmore said.
“It’s feels like nobody even talks about what happened in Buffalo anymore. It was a big deal for a few weeks, and now it’s gone.”
“I actually have some experience with that,” Elmore said, and he paused for a moment, trying to decide how much further to go. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Did you ever hear about a mass shooting in Olean, New York?”
It was something he’d almost never talked about, but so much about the Tops shooting kept bringing him back to that day. His memories of Olean resurfaced in criminal records that described the Buffalo shooter as a “disaffected 18-year-old” and in the autopsies that detailed bullet wounds to the head and in the community forums he’d begun attending about America’s epidemic of mass shootings. One night after he left his law office, he met with six other community leaders to discuss potential solutions to gun violence.
“How many of these attacks have we had just since Buffalo?” asked one pastor, as they sat together inside a church the shooter had reportedly visited and scouted as a potential target days before the attack at Tops.
“At least three off the top of my head,” an anti-gun activist said.
“It’s rinse-repeat, and that’s been going on for what, a decade?”
“Forty-seven years,” Elmore said. The other men turned to look at him. They’d met several times to address gun trafficking and endemic gun violence in Buffalo, but Elmore had never told them exactly how he’d come to care.
“During my senior year, the first FBI-documented high school shooting happened at my school in Olean,” he said. “The shooter was actually a classmate of mine. He lived right down the block.”
“You’re kidding. I’ve never even heard of it,” the pastor said, so Elmore began to tell them about Anthony Barbaro, and how he’d sneaked into the high school during winter vacation on Dec. 30, 1974, shot and killed a janitor on the third floor, and then broken into the empty student council room that offered the best view of the surrounding neighborhood. Barbaro was the top marksman on the school’s rifle team, and he attached a telescopic sight to his long-range Remington rifle and started firing out the window and onto the street. Elmore had just gotten home from basketball practice when he heard the first reports come over the police scanner that his father, a firefighter, kept near the kitchen table. “Multiple gunshots. One victim down,” the police dispatcher said. Elmore listened on the scanner as first responders called in to say they were heading to the scene — local police, state troopers, the National Guard, and also the city’s No. 42 firetruck, driven by Elmore’s father, Herb. “Two minutes out,” he heard his father say.
He listened to the sound of at least a dozen more shots over the scanner, and then he thought he heard someone shout his father’s name. “We need help in the firetruck. Victim is critical,” someone said, and Elmore and his family kept listening and waiting for that help to arrive as Barbaro continued to fire. He shot at a gas company worker and then shot and killed a pregnant woman who happened to be driving by. Police officers tried to return fire with their pistols, but they realized they were outgunned and then took cover behind a wall. An ambulance driver arrived on the scene, and then turned around and drove off when the ambulance was hit by gunfire. Finally, the National Guard brought in a tank to help remove the victims, and Elmore and his mother rushed to the hospital. Three people were dead and 11 more were injured, including his father, who’d been shot once in his index finger and once directly through the top of his head.
“He had skull and bullet fragments embedded into his brain,” Elmore said. “He survived, but he came out different. His left side was paralyzed. He was crippled for the rest of his life.”
“Oh, no,” the pastor said.
“It was different in those days,” Elmore said. “No prayer vigil. No counseling. We never really talked about it. We just went back to school.”
They sat in silence for a moment as Elmore remembered the rest of that senior year. He’d taken over his father’s window cleaning business along with his younger brother to help make up for the family’s lost income and started driving his mother to work because she didn’t have her driver’s license. His father, a former All-Navy athlete who’d been the city’s first black firefighter, had finally come home from the hospital in a wheelchair with a missing finger, muscle tremors and a concave dent on the top of his head.
“One day you’re a carefree high school kid, and the next you’re a freaking adult,” Elmore said.
“You must have been so angry,” the pastor said.
“I’m still angry,” he said.
He’d spent years sorting through the fallout of that mass shooting, and here he was again back at the very beginning, meeting in his office with a mortician and the family of another Buffalo victim he’d come to represent. Kat Massey, 72, had been buried after a funeral with a full viewing: eyes closed, lipstick freshly applied, her body at rest under an ornate blanket. “The very picture of peace,” one of the eulogists had said that day, but now Elmore wanted to know more about what Massey had looked like before, when she first arrived at the funeral home in a blue body bag.
“One thing we’re trying to establish with this case is the brutality of this weapon,” Elmore told the mortician, Alan Core. “At some point we might want to show what an AR-15 can do to the human body.”
Core winced and looked across the couch at Barbara Massey, Kat’s sister and next-door neighbor. “Some things shouldn’t even be whispered out loud,” Core said.
“It’s terrible to talk about, but people need to understand the ugliness,” Elmore said. “You’re one of the few people who knows the truth. You saw the before, and you gave us the after.”
“Oh, well, I don’t —” Core said, and then he closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Kat hated guns,” Barbara told him. “It’s okay. She would have wanted us to do everything possible to stop this insanity.”
Core played with the knot in his tie and considered how much to say. In three decades as a mortician, he had done the embalming and restorative work to enable open-casket viewings for the victims of motorcycle crashes, train-track suicides, drag-racing accidents and domestic violence murders, but he’d never encountered anything as violent as what he’d seen the morning after the shooting. He’d transported three bodies from the medical examiner’s office to the locked-and-refrigerated room in the back of his funeral home, unzipped the bags, and studied the remains of three elderly black women he had known and prayed with, and who happened to be shopping at Tops at the same time. Core was accustomed to dealing with the worst results of gun violence. Twenty percent of his business came because of shooting deaths, and he knew how to repair and disguise the bullet-sized entry and exit wounds of a 9mm, but he’d never witnessed the impacts of a semiautomatic rifle. Some of the victims in his funeral home had been shot multiple times, and the entry and exit wounds were the size of baseballs. The force of each bullet had created a shock wave through the body known as a cavitation effect, in which arteries, veins, and soft tissues were pushed away from the bullet’s pathway and then rebounded violently back into place, destroying them further. Muscles were torn. Organs were liquefied. Craniums were shattered. Bone fragments had turned to dust.
“My first reaction when I saw them, truthfully — I fell apart,” Core said now. “It took me away. I had a meltdown. For the first time in my life, my staff had to tell me to go home.”
He stopped and looked at Barbara. “I’m okay,” she said again. Elmore reached into his desk and took out a legal pad to write notes as Core went on.
“With a regular gun, you might have a small entry wound, but the body is left intact,” Core said. “With this, I’m figuring out what we’ve been left to work with and what we can put back into place.”
He told them that he’d left the funeral home that night, gone to church for a few hours to steady his mind, and then returned to begin the work of what he called “restoration art.” Massey had weighed 115 pounds, and she’d been hit twice at close range. “I put on my jazz music, and I talked to Kat as I worked,” Core told them. He explained how he’d combined remaining bone and skull fragments with meshing and papier-mâché to rebuild a cranial structure. He rebuilt part of an ear out of wax. He continued to work on Kat and the other victims over the next several days, injecting fluids to help their bodies firm up, taking skin grafts from other parts of the body, suturing pieces back together, and finally consulting with a beautician to re-create hair style, facial expression and skin tone.
Now he pulled out his phone and showed Barbara a picture of her sister lying in her casket. More than 500 people had come to say goodbye to her that day as Core stood nearby, making sure nobody touched her or tried to move her head. She was posed with her chin lifted high, her mouth formed into a smile and a kufi hat covering the top of her head.
“You did such a beautiful job,” Barbara told him. “I waited outside Tops for eight hours that day because I needed to see her and hold her hand. You’re the one who finally gave me that.”
“It was a privilege to set my hands on her,” he said. He put the phone back in his pocket, took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.
“The thing that haunts me is that I was put in a position to act like the creator,” he said. “I’m taking things that should always be intact and either remaking or reshaping to create that final portrait of a human being. From what I saw, that man had no heart for people. His goal was to obliterate. He wanted to erase.”
“Oh, Kat,” Barbara said. She started to cry, and Core reached for her hand.
“I’m sorry. I went too far,” he said, but Barbara shook her head.
Elmore set down his legal pad, stood from his chair and started to pace behind to his desk. “I hate to ask you this, but I think it might end up being helpful,” he said. “Did you take any pictures of your work?”
“I believe so,” Core said. “I’ll ask my staff.”
“Thank you,” Elmore said. “This is all a dark tunnel, but we have to explore it.”
He’d watched the live-streamed video of the Tops shooting, studied the 180-page document authorities said was written by shooter, consulted experts on white supremacist terrorism, and reviewed advertisements for semiautomatic weapons going back more than a decade. The artifacts of a mass shooting were stacked in folders on his desk, which made him wonder about all the questions he’d never asked in Olean. His family had rarely spoken about it. What he knew came mostly from Wikipedia, so one morning he drove out of Buffalo to visit his brother and several of his high school friends, hoping to learn more.
He traveled 70 miles over the Allegheny Mountains and into the small downtown, where the mayor had thrown a parade in 1975 to welcome Elmore’s father home from the hospital after brain surgery. Three thousand people had lined the streets to greet the ambulance while the high school band and cheerleaders performed in subzero temperatures. “Herbie’s home, and now we can put this nightmare behind us,” one local politician had said that day, and then the ambulance dropped Herb off at home in a wheelchair he was too proud to use, so Elmore began following his father around the house holding onto his belt to keep him from falling.
“Did Dad ever say anything to you about it?” Elmore asked, as he sat down for breakfast across from his younger brother, Robert.
“You know how he was,” Robert said, shaking his head. “ ‘Never look back. Don’t show any weakness. If you cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.’ ”
“So he never told you how much he saw or what he remembered?”
“Not directly, but I heard some things,” Robert said, and he explained that a few years after the shooting, he’d listened to their father talking with a couple of firefighters who’d been with him that day inside the firetruck. They said Herb had gone into shock after the bullet hit his head, and he’d clamped his hand against the top of his skull to hold it in place. The other firefighters had tried to pry his hand away to assess the wound, but Herb was stronger than any of them. He’d kept his hand locked in place, which probably prevented him from bleeding to death.
“He sat there like that for two hours,” Robert said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Two hours?” Elmore said. “Come on.”
“I went back and looked,” Robert said. “It was at least that long before they could get him out with the tank.”
Herb had come home a few months later, relearned how to walk with a cane, started a swimming club for people with disabilities, and gone in person every two weeks to pick up his disability check at the firehouse so he had an excuse to see his old colleagues. Meanwhile, Elmore had left for college the next fall and followed his father into a job as a first responder. He’d become a police officer in Syracuse, N.Y, until one afternoon when a teenager in mental distress started screaming racial slurs at him and swinging at his head with a large metal rake. Elmore had pulled out his .357 Magnum, and he’d realized in that moment that under no circumstances could he pull the trigger. He’d holstered the gun and escaped into his police cruiser. A month later he was in law school, and he’d never owned or carried a gun again. He’d taken on murder trials and death penalty cases, losing himself in other people’s traumas and returning to Olean every few weeks to visit his father until he died at age 64 of a cancer that doctors said was potentially related to the bullet fragments still embedded into his brain.
“We had a lot of good years stolen,” Elmore said. “I try to be a positive person, but I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Sure, because you’re living it again,” Robert said, and Elmore nodded.
“I can already tell this case is going to age me,” he said. “It’s pressure. It’s late nights and seeing so much grief.”
“Plus the violence,” Robert said.
“Here we are 50 years later, still dealing with the same problems,” Elmore said, and he pushed away his empty coffee cup and thought for a moment about the similarities between the mass shootings in Buffalo and Olean: two disaffected teenagers armed with militaristic weapons, each firing more than 30 shots into a public space, targeting random strangers and transforming entire families in ways Elmore thought his clients were only beginning to comprehend. It seemed to him that a mass shooting created its own kind of cavitation effect — everything flung apart upon impact and then rebounding into place broken, torn, swollen, stretched, altered.
“He was really holding his head together all that time?” Elmore asked again. “He was alert? He was conscious?”
His brother nodded.
“Two hours,” Elmore said again, and he touched his head and looked at a clock in the diner, watching the seconds pass.
“How much longer will all of this last?” Barbara Massey asked one day as she sat in Elmore’s office a few months after shooting. She’d been filling her days by responding to all 430 condolence letters mailed to her sister’s house. She’d gone in person to each of Gendron’s court appearances to keep track of the legal proceedings. She’d mowed her sister’s lawn, weeded the flower bed, dusted the house, organized the photo albums, and cut the grass again.
“I like to feel like things are moving forward,” she told Elmore. “I need to be busy. It’s the only thing that helps.”
“That was me, too,” Elmore said. “As long as I had a job to do, I could act like I was okay.”
“I have moments when I think I’m starting to do a little better,” Barbara said. “I’ve been listening to what the pastors say when they talk about forgiveness. It sounds right to me. I try. But each time I see him walk into court, my whole body starts to shake. I feel like his eyes should be glued open, there should be mirrors put in front of him, and then I’d like to shoot that little maggot in the back of his head.”
She squeezed the table. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This has opened up a rage and a despair inside me that I didn’t even know I owned.”
“His justice is coming,” Elmore said, and he began to update her on the case. Gendron was facing murder charges in New York and 27 federal counts for hate crimes and firearm charges. His defense team had entered a plea of “not guilty” and requested a one-year delay, which meant the criminal case would last a long time and the civil cases would last much longer, but the timeline that concerned Barbara was more fundamental.
“Some days it hurts so bad I don’t know how much longer I can take it. When does it end?” she asked, and 47 years later, Elmore thought he knew the answer.
“I’m not sure that it does,” he said. | 2022-08-07T10:36:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | For a Buffalo lawyer, the investigation of one mass shooting leads him back to another. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/07/buffalo-tops-shooting-olean-elmore/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/07/buffalo-tops-shooting-olean-elmore/ |
Presidential aide Archibald Butt in 1909, left, and artist Francis Davis Millet in 1910. (Library of Congress/Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution)
Let’s be clear up front: No one knows for sure whether Archibald Butt and Francis Davis Millet were in a romantic relationship. In the times and society in which they lived, for such a thing to become known would have meant ruin.
Here’s what we do know. Butt never married. Millet was estranged from his wife and had a previous relationship with a man. Butt and Millet lived together in a mansion in Washington’s tony Georgetown neighborhood, where they threw parties for the city’s elite — including Butt’s boss, President William Howard Taft.
“The enduring partnership of Butt and Millet was an early case of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ " historian Richard Davenport-Hines wrote in 2012, referring to the policy that once required gay members of the military to keep their sexuality secret. A National Park Service page for the White House memorial fountain in their honor says they were “widely believed to have been romantically involved with one another.”
Millet was the older of the two, born into a well-to-do family in Massachusetts in 1848. As a teen during the Civil War, he served as an assistant to his surgeon father. He studied art at Harvard, then worked as a reporter as he traveled the world. He won acclaim for his murals at an art school in Belgium and for his writing as a war correspondent in the Russo-Turkish War. He and the travel journalist Charles Warren Stoddard exchanged love letters after a romantic affair in Italy.
Archibald Butt was born in Augusta, Ga., in 1865. His father died when he was a teenager, and as the eldest child, he was soon supporting his siblings and became very close with his mother. She moved with him to Tennessee when he left for college, and again when he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a reporter for several newspapers and made a name for himself on the social scene.
He was brilliant at the job, organizing the president’s schedule and state dinners and even going with Roosevelt on his frequent hunting, climbing and riding excursions. When Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, took office, Butt stayed on. The two men became extremely close — most photographs from Taft’s presidency show Butt nearby, dressed in an immaculate and eye-catching uniform. Behind the scenes, he was a key negotiator on budget issues. According to the New York Times, Butt had memorized the names of 1,280 guests at a state dinner and introduced them all to Taft in one hour.
His social cachet extended outside his work. He lived with Millet in a Foggy Bottom mansion (now housing a George Washington University law clinic), where other bachelors occasionally rented rooms, and where Butt and Millet threw legendary parties. There were constant rumors that Butt was about to announce his engagement to the latest society girl, though shortly before his death, he told the Times he had been a bachelor so long that he “had better stay so to the end of the chapter.”
It was the last anyone would ever hear from them. The ship hit an iceberg and began to sink. One survivor saw Butt standing near John Jacob Astor. Rumors of Butt escorting women onto rescue boats were later proved false.
The Washington Times quoted a friend who said “the two men had a sympathy of mind which was most unusual.” The Post said they were the “closest of friends,” comparing them to ancient Greek figures Damon and Pythias, who were willing to die for one another. Historian James Gifford, writing for OutHistory, suggested this comparison may have been an oblique way of signaling they were gay.
Within weeks of their deaths, plans were underway to honor them with a White House fountain. The official reason was to honor the two Titanic dead who had been part of the federal government — Millet had a mostly symbolic role as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts.
Located on the southwest side of the White House near the E Street entrance, the fountain has a central pillar. On one side, facing south, is a male figure in bas-relief, with a helmet and shield, representing military valor (and presumably Butt). On the other side, facing north, is a beautiful woman with a paintbrush and palette, representing art (and presumably Millet). | 2022-08-07T11:02:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Archibald Butt and Francis Millet died on Titanic. Were they a couple? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/07/francis-millet-archibald-butt-titanic/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/07/francis-millet-archibald-butt-titanic/ |
Steve Hendrix
TEL AVIV — Palestinian militants fired rockets toward Jerusalem Sunday morning after overnight Israeli air strikes killed a senior militant leader in Gaza, the second since the start of the operation. The escalation threatens to push the bout of violence that has already killed at least 31 in Gaza and sent thousands of Israelis running to shelters into an all-out war.
Firebrand politician Itamar Ben Gvir, the leader of a far-right movement and advocate for allowing prayer for visitors of all religions at the Temple Mount, visited on Sunday morning, flanked by police, and shouted, “The nation of Israeli lives!” Palestinians around him rebutted, “God is great!”
There have been no reported casualties in Israel, where the Iron Dome missile defense system has intercepted approximately 97 percent of the some 470 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel since Friday, according to the Israeli military. It said that some 20 percent have misfired and landed in Gaza.
Gaza Ministry of Interior spokesman Eyad Al Bozom said that Israel “bears full responsibility for this crime and all the crimes it commits during its brutal aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip."
The hostilities, the most serious since the 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, began last week, when Israel arrested the PIJ leader in the West Bank, Bassem al-Saadi, as part of an ongoing series of raids that followed a wave of attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians last spring.
Balousha contributed from Gaza City; Miriam Berger contributed from Jerusalem. | 2022-08-07T11:02:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Israel kills second Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader in Gaza - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/07/israel-gaza-jerusalem-rockets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/07/israel-gaza-jerusalem-rockets/ |
Monifa B. McKnight, currently the interim superintendent for Montgomery County Public Schools, addresses participants in joint school safety training at Walter Johnson High School, in Bethesda on July 25. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
“I frankly think the possibility of charter schools is an exciting one — an opportunity to look at new ways of improving student performance,” said a member of the Montgomery County school board in 1998 after the board adopted a policy opening up the county for applications for charter schools. But more than 20 years later, no charter schools exist in Montgomery County, and the school board recently gave the thumbs-down to a promising proposed charter that would offer business and finance-related education. Having the local school board sign off on charter school applications is akin to requiring Target to get approval from Walmart to open a competing business — so let’s hope this misguided decision is overruled by the Maryland State Board of Education.
The county’s board of education last month rejected plans by MBEF College & Career Academies to establish a business-oriented school in Gaithersburg serving middle and high school students. The school, according to the group’s projections, would serve 700 students in grades 6-12 starting in the 2024-25 school year. There would be a six-year phase-in plan to reach full capacity. The idea for the school resulted from mentoring and tutoring work the institute’s officials have done in the community with at-risk youths and young adults. Noticing that a lot was missing in the education of these students that couldn’t adequately be addressed outside school hours, LaChaundra Graham, one of the group’s founders said, “We asked 'how do we fill in these gaps?'” Leveraging business and philanthropic connections, the group put together plans for the school and secured a $900,000 grant from the state education department for start-up costs.
An application it submitted last year was rejected, but the group in April resubmitted it with modifications, including a change of location from Takoma Park to Gaithersburg. A school district panel consisting of 20 people with varying areas of expertise undertook an extensive review. Acting schools superintendent Monifa McKnight recommended the board grant conditional approval, finding the proposal identified “a clear vision, mission, and school plan” and that two of the founders had experience in public schools relevant to opening a charter school. Nonetheless, the board voted 7-1 (credit board member Lynne Harris for recognizing the potential merits of the proposal) against the bid, citing concerns about facilities and transportation. Never mind that the conditional approval recommended by Ms. McKnight required the school to meet certain criteria in those areas.
Given the county’s sad track record with charter schools — it refused to authorize the Jaime Escalante Public Charter School, and the one charter school that managed to open closed after two years — the vote didn’t come as a surprise. That, though, doesn’t make it any less disappointing to parents who would like to have a choice in their children’s education. The group plans to appeal the rejection to the state board. We wish them success. | 2022-08-07T11:15:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Montgomery County wrongly rejects charter school for Gaithersburg - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/gaithersburg-montgomery-charter-school-rejected/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/gaithersburg-montgomery-charter-school-rejected/ |
The SpaceX Dragon approaches the International Space Station in April. (NASA)
Russia’s recent announcement that it has decided to withdraw from the space station “after 2024” is deliberately vague, signaling at least a few more years of continued cooperation with the United States. It is cooperation, though, with an increasingly unreliable partner. For NASA, this reinforces the importance of planning ahead: for continuing operations of the aging space station without Russian involvement, and for investment in the space projects that come next.
The Biden administration and the Congress-approved Chips and Science Act officially extended NASA’s involvement in the space station until 2030. But the United States still needs other international partners to sign on for the extension, with Russia as the primary wild card. Moscow hasn’t shied away from using the space station as leverage and war propaganda. The “after 2024” comment came from Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The news wasn’t unexpected, as Russian officials have talked of leaving the space station since 2021. In recent months, the former head of Roscosmos said discussions about Russian involvement in the space station past 2024 would only be possible if U.S. sanctions against the Russian space industry and other sectors were lifted.
Despite Russia’s talk, ISS operations are stable for now. In July, the two countries’ space agencies planned joint space missions. But Russia’s caginess means that its cooperation past 2024 can’t be assumed. The space station is designed for both countries to be dependent on one another, and disentangling operations would be a difficult technical challenge. NASA should prioritize making contingency plans for keeping the space station operational without Russian support.
At the same time, its aging technology means the space station is nearing the end of its lifetime. If Russia wants to leave the space station to pursue its own space station, the United States must look ahead, too. At the end of last year, NASA picked three companies to develop commercial space stations for government and private sector use. (One of them is Blue Origin, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post.) For the United States to maintain an uninterrupted presence in low Earth orbit, these projects should be given the support they need so that a commercial station is waiting in the wings when the space station is retired. | 2022-08-07T11:15:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Russia might leave the space station. NASA should think ahead. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/russia-international-space-station-nasa-future/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/russia-international-space-station-nasa-future/ |
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban gestures to the audience after speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Aug. 4. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
All you need to know about the state of the Republican Party today is what happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been destroying his country’s democracy, received a standing ovation less than two weeks after he gave a speech in Romania in which he endorsed the white supremacist “replacement theory” and denounced a “mixed-race world.”
One of Orban’s longtime advisers quit over what she described as a speech “worthy of Goebbels” before backtracking a bit. But Orban hasn’t recanted his repugnant views, and right-wingers in Dallas thrilled to his denunciations of immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights and “the Woke Globalist Goliath.” He even excoriated Jewish financier George Soros, a Hungarian native, as someone who “hated Christianity.” The racist and anti-Semitic signaling was not subtle.
You can trace the current iteration of the Republican Party to the 1990s Gingrich revolution, as my brilliant Post colleague Dana Milbank does in a new book. Or you can go further back to the Goldwater revolution in the 1960s, as I did in my own book. But we must also acknowledge that something profound has changed in recent years.
Ten years ago this month, Republicans nominated a national ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan, a centrist former governor and a budget policy wonk. Now we have the coup-coup caucus cheering Viktor Orban. This is the Trump effect: The former president has made the marginal into the mainstream of the Republican Party, and vice versa.
Some observers were deceived by the success in Georgia of Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in handily defeating Trumpist challengers in May despite certifying President Biden’s victory. That was an aberration. In other races across the country, Republicans are nominating far-right fanatics who claim that the 2020 presidential election — and any election that they lose, for that matter — was “rigged.” By refusing to accept electoral defeat, they embrace authoritarianism.
In four key swing states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — the GOP nominees to oversee state elections deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Two of those candidates, Arizona secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania governor nominee Doug Mastriano, were outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If elected, they are no more likely to certify a Democratic victory in 2024 than they are to embrace critical race theory. Meanwhile, most House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection are being driven out of Congress. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer was the latest to lose a primary last week to a proponent of the “big lie.”
Taking a cue from Trump, the winners of Republican primaries traffic in authoritarian imagery and rhetoric. Guns have become a de regueur accessory in GOP campaign commercials. Arizona U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters wants to lock up Anthony S. Fauci for trying to slow the spread of covid-19. And Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake wants to lock up her opponent for certifying Biden’s election victory.
Masters and Ohio U.S. Senate nominee J.D. Vance are both bankrolled by tech tycoon Peter Thiel, who has concluded that freedom and democracy aren’t “compatible.” Thiel’s “house political philosopher” is far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who is also close to Masters and Vance. Yarvin has mused that we may need an “American Caesar” to take control of the federal government. Trump is auditioning for the role; his henchmen are plotting to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with ultra-MAGA loyalists in 2025.
The libertarian-leaning Republican Party I grew up with in the 1980s is long gone and not coming back. Republicans still use the language of “freedom,” but their idea of freedom is warped: They want Americans to be free to carry weapons of war or spread deadly diseases but not to terminate a pregnancy or discuss gender or sexuality in school.
Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, next to Trump as the most likely 2024 GOP nominee, is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending an elected prosecutor who vowed not to “criminalize personal medical decisions,” such as abortion or “gender-affirming healthcare.” DeSantis even threatened to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows.
These Republican extremists are often described as the “New Right,” but the term doesn’t fit. The New Right was the movement in the 1960s-1970s that produced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. You can argue that the New Right helped lead to the present imbroglio, but it’s hard to imagine Goldwater or Reagan flashing Viktor Orban a thumbs-up, as Trump did.
Some other term is needed. “Christian nationalism” and “nationalist conservatism” have been bandied about, but the most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right. If the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbanized. | 2022-08-07T11:15:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The GOP is Viktor Orban’s party now - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/vicktor-orban-republican-party-cpac-dallas-new-fascism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/07/vicktor-orban-republican-party-cpac-dallas-new-fascism/ |
After the People’s Convoy disbanded, this offshoot headed to D.C.
David "Santa" Riddell, chief executive of the 1776 Restoration Movement, leads a morning meeting at the group's site along the National Mall in Washington on Aug. 4. (Allison Shelley for The Washington Post)
For the past few weeks, Rose Koepsell has awakened to one of the best views in Washington.
“It’s surreal,” said Koepsell. “We get up in the morning, and there is the Nation’s Capitol, sir, staring us straight in the face. And then you look to the west, and it’s the Washington Monument. How cool.”
Koepsell, 57, from a small town near Lake Tahoe, Calif., isn’t staying in a pricey hotel room. She’s been living in her Dodge Grand Caravan along the Mall by the National Gallery of Art.
That’s where she and other members of the newly formed 1776 Restoration Movement — which broke off from the People’s Convoy demonstrations against coronavirus mandates earlier this year — have parked their protest.
They were hoping that thousands or maybe even millions of other Americans would join their cause, Tom Fisher, 70, a retired state park ranger from Arizona said as he stood in the shade on a blistering hot Washington afternoon last week.
Instead, there are about two dozen stalwarts who’ve camped out with American flag-draped cars and trucks since July 6 to demonstrate against what they say is America’s slow but sure abandonment of the Constitution and to call for a peaceful return “to a constitutional Republic through the restoration of a moral society.”
“I’m disappointed,” Fisher said. “I thought once we occupied D.C., people would come out.”
People didn’t. The response, instead, has been mostly indifference. As well as some heckling and trolling. And some criticism that 1776 Restoration Movement is just another group using a narrowly defined patriotism to grift for dollars and social media clout.
The protesters deny all of that. They say their cause is pure. For the past few weeks in Washington, their morning ritual has been the same. The first-risers get coffee going. Someone puts out doughnuts and fruit and snacks. Ice-filled coolers are restocked with water bottles.
At 8 a.m. the members gather in a circle under the Mall’s majestic trees. They sit for a short prayer, stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and sit back down for a meeting. It ends with a rally cry.
“1, 2, 3, FREEDOM!”
On most days the meeting is followed by a march around the U.S. Capitol with signs and flags. They have been greeted with a mixture of thumbs ups and “freedom fingers” as the group has taken to calling the universally recognized middle finger salute delivered by people who they say tell them to “get a job” or “go home.”
They have copies of the Constitution to hand out to anyone interested and pamphlets stating their beliefs: “We are a constitutional Republic We are not a Democracy. Governments are Established Not to Make us Equal, but to Protect our Liberties. Federal Agencies should be State Managed.”
A nonprofit says it collected over $1.5 million for a D.C.-region-bound truck convoy. Its director recently pleaded guilty to fraud.
The demands are both grand and vague. When asked for specifics, the members will say that they want representatives to recognize that they work for the people and address their grievances.
What the protest boils down to for most is a belief that the federal government should have much less authority over state governments when it comes to deciding almost every issue.
Support for that position here has been hard to garner. Most visitors have ignored them. The majority of the people who have stopped to talk with them have been foreigners, Fisher said. “They want to know what we’re about,” he said.
Protests, of course, are as common as joggers on the National Mall. Getting passersby to pay attention can be a challenge. On a recent weekday, a small group of young tourists stopped a short distance from the protesters taking photos with their phones and inching closer for better shots. But the object of their attention wasn’t the people or the flags or the signs. It was an albino squirrel that sat nearby munching on a piece of bread.
Still, most of the protesters say they are not discouraged and that the experience has been worth it. They are from points near and far. Frederick, Maryland and Dickinson, North Dakota. Tidewater, Virginia and Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Daytona Beach, Florida and Lebanon, Ohio. For many, it is the first time in their lives they have taken part in a protest. They all took different paths to get here, but the destination, both physical and philosophical, has brought them together in ways they hadn’t anticipated.
“This is family,” says Ohio truck driver and evangelical minister David Riddell, 57, the group’s leader, who said he never joined a protest until he connected with the People’s Convoy earlier this year. His eyes brim with tears. “So far in this movement, I’ve baptized three of them in the Potomac, renewed the vows of another couple, celebrated the 57th wedding anniversary with another one. This is family.”
In the family, Riddell allows debate and input on the issues, but he makes the final decisions, he said. He is also a member of the Proud Boys, the far-right extremist group that has a number of its leaders facing federal charges of seditious conspiracy and “opposing the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” on Jan. 6, 2021.
Riddell says he was not at the Capitol that day and has told his followers that if they choose violence, then he will no longer take part in the protest.
“Do I agree with what went on January 6? No, absolutely not. That’s not how we do things,” said Riddell, who is bald and bearded and goes by the nickname Santa. “Do we have a Second Amendment right to throw off a tyrannical government? Yes. That’s what the Constitution says. But do we have a moral right to do that at this time? The answer to that is a resounding no. You do not, because you don’t use violence until it is the absolute last resort.” Riddell is a hunter and gun owner but says he has “absolutely forbidden” members of his group from bringing guns into the District.
Like Riddell, many in the 1776 group joined the People’s Convoy earlier this year, a caravan of trucks and cars that was organized to protest vaccine and mask mandates across the country and decry what its members said were infringements on freedom.
The participants in that protest expressed a wide range of right-wing and libertarian views. Some believed in debunked conspiracy theories and false claims about satanic child-sex-trafficking rings. There were election deniers. Covid deniers. Reality deniers. There were also those who just felt the country was falling apart and away from what they believed it should be.
Some of the convoy’s members wanted to drive into Washington, bring it to a standstill and have their grievances heard. They wanted to follow the model pursued by Canadian truckers who drove into Ottawa in February to protest vaccine mandates in the Canadian capital and also blocked border crossings.
Truck convoy leaves D.C. area after weeks of traffic-snarling protests
In March and again in May, the participants in the People’s Convoy debated entering Washington and being met there by tens of thousands for a massive protest.
Instead, the convoy circled the Beltway trying to snarl traffic and make a point. Riddell would later be arrested for his role in blocking traffic on Interstate 95, but the plans to flood the city with vehicles and protesters never panned out. Riddell said that when he learned the convoy’s leaders didn’t want to drive into the capital he split from the group and others soon followed him.
Many in the splinter group say they are anti-socialist and anti-big government and anti anything they think is anti-American. Their food and gas expenses are funded, they say, by other Americans who feel the same way they do. The group’s brochure solicits donations through Cashapp, Venmo and Zelle. Riddell estimates the group has raised approximately $73,000 since forming.
They don’t believe mainstream news and get their information from far-right websites. They also follow each other’s live streams (there are lots of live streams). In their shared distrust of government and politicians and media, they found a community of like-minded souls.
They also insist they’re nonpartisan.
“This is not a left or right issue,” said Victoria LaRocca, 35, pointing out that the group doesn’t fly any Trump flags or have signs supporting any candidates. “It’s a constitutional issue. It’s petitioning.”
Some gave up everything to join the cause.
“Many have quit their jobs, lost their businesses and are ready to lose their home to be here. Some people have cashed in their 401(k)s,” said Koepsell, who speaks softly and said she joined the group because she felt directed by the Lord to respond to disasters and crises. And “America is kind of in a disaster right now.”
“When I see America I see a lot of good,” Koepsell said. “And I see a lot of brokenness. Trillions of dollars in debt. Inflation fueled by printing money. Confusion over who America is. Who America was. … We need to stop being one side against another. We need to be Americans fighting for our country.”
If some of the group’s goals were philosophical and long-term, some of their needs were practical and immediate. When he first led his group into the District, Riddell said didn’t think he should need a permit to protest. “The Constitution is our permit,” he said defiantly. But protesters need port-a-potties. And port-a-potties need a permit. “The toilets is what broke me,” Riddell said laughing.
For showers and to get a break from camping out in their cars, members occasionally headed to their base camp, a truck stop 83 miles away in Bunker Hill, W.Va., where their supplies of food, water, hygiene products, toilet paper and snacks are stored.
The protest on the Mall has been mostly peaceful but not without incident. The group’s permit issued by the National Park Service does not allow them to sleep in their cars.
U.S. Park Police officers observed violations and contacted the group regarding their noncompliance with rules, said Mike Litterst, spokesman for the Park Service’s National Mall and Memorial Parks. “Park Police are continuing to monitor the activity and if violations continue the group’s permit could be revoked,” he said in a statement.
The uncomfortable leader of an angry crowd: Brian Brase and the ‘People’s Convoy’
There have also been ongoing hostilities with members of another offshoot of the People’s Convoy who have accused the 1776 Restoration Movement of having members who are convicted sex offenders. Riddell said there was a former member of the group who had been convicted of child molestation in Indiana but that that person has left. That hasn’t stopped the bickering, online and in person, between the two groups.
On Monday, the group’s protest permit expires. By then, the last of the 1776 Restoration Movement protesters will have packed up their signs and flags and camp chairs and coolers and retreated to Bunker Hill, where they plan to regroup, reorganize, reread the Constitution and prepare to return in early September to redress their grievances once more. | 2022-08-07T12:11:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The People’s Convoy left D.C., but these folks are still here - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/07/peoples-convoy-1776-protest-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/07/peoples-convoy-1776-protest-dc/ |
Summer programs help area students, educators with learning loss
Foday Kamara, of the Tenley Achievement Program (TAP) in the Youth Leadership Foundation, mentors a fourth-grade student at St. Anthony Catholic School in Washington. (Jaidah Sizer)
“Can anyone tell me the definition of mental health?” Paulson Obiniyi asked the class of nearly a dozen seventh- and eighth-grade boys.
One of the students eagerly raised his hand and answered, “It’s, like, being sane.” The class giggled at his response.
Obiniyi began writing the answer on the board. One of the students asked whether Obiniyi was really going to accept that definition, to which he replied: “If y’all say it, I’m going to write it down. It might not be right, but we’re going to talk about it.”
The middle school-aged students were learning about physical and mental health as a part of their science class in a summer program in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast D.C. through the Youth Leadership Foundation. About 150 students enroll in the program each year. This year, the foundation was able to fully conduct its sessions with students in-person after two years of virtual and hybrid lessons. With its doors reopened, the organization brought in students who were trying to catch up academically.
In the District, researchers found that students in third through eighth grade fell behind during the first year of the pandemic by about five to six months in language arts and mathematics, compared with test results from 2018-2019, before the pandemic began. Montgomery County — Maryland’s largest school district, with about 160,000 students — similarly found learning gaps in a study it released in the fall. Eighty-two percent of its second-graders, for example, were meeting literacy readiness measures during the 2018-2019 school year. But at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, about 47.5 percent were meeting those measures. The numbers also declined for math. In Virginia, 2020-2021 results show that 69 percent of students passed their reading exams, 54 percent passed math and 59 percent passed science. Those passing rates were a drop from the 2018-2019 school year, when 78 percent of students passed reading, 82 percent passed math and 81 percent passed science. (The test was not given for the 2019-2020 school year.)
The scores were lower among the school districts’ most vulnerable students.
Billions of dollars in federal pandemic relief funds have been allocated for education, some of which has gone to summer learning and enrichment programs hosted by schools and other organizations. National Center for Education Statistics data released this month shows that about 75 percent of public schools said in June they would offer summer programs, with 33 percent reporting they increased their summer learning efforts.
“Over covid, I didn’t learn as much as I usually did. I felt like I could’ve learned more, but it was tough to get through the fact that I couldn’t interact. I had to stay at home,” said Elijah Narce, an eighth-grader participating in the Youth Leadership Foundation’s summer program. “Usually, I learn better when I’m not distracted, but when I’m at home, I get more distracted.”
Elijah struggled the most with retaining his math lessons, but this summer, he said he feels as though he is learning more. During the school year, he attends Dupont Park Adventist School, a private school in Southeast D.C.
Lolu Drummond, an associate program director for the Youth Leadership Foundation, said that during the summer sessions she has noticed the students struggling the most in reading and math.
Instead of reading aloud when they’re called on or answering a math question, students have shut down and not said anything at all, she said. The instructors have reviewed some key math skills, like division, because students have said they don’t know how to do it.
“We’ve actually had to take the time out to investigate, like, ‘Hey, what happened today? I noticed you weren’t participating. I’ve noticed during this time you kind of shut down or [were] unresponsive,’ ” Drummond said. “And that’s when it will come out that, like, ‘I’m not very good at reading. I’m too scared to read out loud.’ ”
The Youth Leadership Foundation’s summer program teaches core curriculums — like math, English, science and social studies — and extracurriculars, like sports and character development over five weeks. Most of the students’ families learn about the program through word-of-mouth, since the foundation has partnerships with schools for after-school programs, too. The program also offers one-on-one mentoring.
“The mentorship is the bread and butter of YLF,” said Janaiha Bennett, the foundation’s executive director. “We realize the importance of the individual — that everyone’s story is different, everyone’s needs are different.”
For Kingston Kershaw, a rising fourth-grader at Tyler Elementary in the District, he said he’s excited to be back in the classroom in-person, since he has always loved learning. He felt trapped while virtually attending school, because he was never able to go anywhere. Plus, as much as he loves his brother, the two would sometimes get tired of each other, he said after his one-on-one mentoring session at one of the campuses for Youth Leadership Foundation’s summer program.
With in-person classes, Kingston thinks he’s “getting pretty better,” he said. At the summer program, he said he learned more about character — like what the definition of “unity” is and why it’s important. In his history class, he gained more of an understanding of geography and discovered his favorite continent is Africa. He has also been reading more.
“I actually love doing math games and questioning stuff — that’s been pretty fun for me,” Kingston said.
In Maryland, another summer program is teaching principals and other administrators how to use an individualized approach to aid students experiencing learning gaps. The School Improvement Summer Institute is guiding school leaders on how to use “improvement science,” a framework for solving tough problems related to student achievement, said Segun Eubanks, director of University of Maryland’s Center for Educational Innovation and Improvement, which is coordinating the session.
The goal is to help education leaders develop in three core areas: leadership, equity and improvement. The program also includes panels on being an effective superintendent and how to utilize the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a multibillion-dollar educational plan to improve outcomes in the state’s schools. Education leaders were also invited from D.C., Virginia and New Jersey.
As school systems across Maryland reopened in 2021, they experienced an even tougher year than when they were learning online, Eubanks said. Principals became contact tracers tracking cases of coronavirus and had to figure out how to navigate opening and closing classrooms to curb the spread of the coronavirus. This year, administrators are also facing unique staffing shortages. Plus, a third of Maryland superintendents are new for the upcoming school year, according to the center.
“Schools are paying attention to this issue of learning loss, but it’s not the first thing on the list,” Eubanks said. “The first thing on the list is just stabilization.”
Eubanks noted the federal pandemic relief funds that most schools allocated to after-school programs and other enrichment opportunities can help close learning gaps students are experiencing. But most students will spend most of their time in the classroom with teachers. The sessions for administrators, scheduled later this month, will help educators find everyday solutions to help a student who is experiencing learning loss.
“Is it looking differently about the schedule? Is it looking at how we grade? Is it the actual instruction practice of the teachers that need to change?” said Doug Anthony, senior fellow and director of education doctoral programs at U-Md.
Back at the Youth Leadership Foundation, Obiniyi wrapped up his lesson on physical and mental health. It was the group’s last science class with him during the summer.
He tried to keep all the lessons engaging by incorporating hands-on activities and tying them to the students’ lives, he said in an interview. For this lesson on the importance of getting enough sleep, they all had to share at the beginning of the class what they ate and how long they slept the day before.
Obiniyi told them about how sleeping an appropriate amount of time could help their bodies recover and refresh them for the next day. The students took notes about how they could have more healthful diet through small changes, such as swapping out soft drinks for water. He handed out worksheets that directed students to set their own goals for how to sleep and eat better — tips they will need during the upcoming school year.
“You all have taught me a lot over the course of the summer,” Obiniyi said, ending the class.
The program’s director of character and mentorship, Krista Keil, asked each of the students what they had learned from the lessons on physical and mental health. One of the students said that it was important to keep track of their personal health. Another replied that they learned how to set goals.
One student joked as his answer, “Sleep is overrated.”
Another student teased back: “I don’t think that’s what Mr. Paulson is teaching.” | 2022-08-07T12:11:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Metro educators use summer programs to catch students up from learning loss - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/07/summer-remediation-student-learning-loss/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/07/summer-remediation-student-learning-loss/ |
Fauci, pediatricians and other health professionals — some with children of their own — look ahead to the fall semester
As the new school year approaches, parents and children hope the return to the classroom feels as normal as possible. Public health officials and pediatricians, many also with children and grandchildren, hope so, too. What is different this year is that vaccines for the coronavirus are now available for all children 6 months and older — and more than 13.8 million children have had the virus since the start of the pandemic, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
But whether all of this may confer some immunity for them as another highly transmissible variant of covid-19, B.5, spreads rapidly is an open question.
With the onset of cooler weather this fall and more activity indoors, concerns exist about the new school year. The Washington Post asked public health experts and pediatricians about advice they have for parents as their children reenter classrooms — and also how those of them with children or grandchildren are thinking about schools. They all agreed that vaccinating children was the most important thing to do. Or as William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center put it: “My first five recommendations are to vaccinate your children, vaccinate your children, vaccinate your children, vaccinate your children, vaccinate your children.”
Responses have been edited for clarity and space.
Q: So, vaccinate?
A: Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief medical adviser: Absolutely. Vaccinate your children. We vaccinate kids for a lot of diseases that have less morbidity and mortality than covid, and we keep those diseases down with vaccinations. Why wouldn’t you want to protect your children against something with a rate of [sickness and death] greater than the diseases you already routinely vaccinate your children for?
Joanna Dolgoff, a pediatrician and spokesperson for AAP and mother of two teenagers: If you want schools to remain open and you want your child safe in the classroom, getting him or her vaccinated is the most important action you can take.
Katie Lockwood, a pediatrician with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and mother of an 11-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl: Some families may be delaying because they expect the vaccines to change. There is no reason to wait. It’s better for children to be immunized with the vaccine we currently have than wait for a hypothetical vaccine we don’t have.
Schools race to improve indoor air quality as coronavirus cases climb
Tiffany Grace-Chung Munzer, a developmental/behavioral pediatrician at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., and mother of a 5-year-old and a 9-month-old: During the last two years of the pandemic, we asked kids to sacrifice so much: in-person learning, playdates with their friends and travel. The best way to make sure things aren’t more disrupted is to get them vaccinated.
Donna Tyungum, interim chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the Oklahoma Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City and mother of a 3-year-old: Covid-19 is now more transmissible with increased immune escape, which means that our children have a good chance of encountering [it] at school. Fortunately, we are in a much better place this year. Vaccines are available for every school-aged child, and layering protection with masking can help keep our kids healthy. Also, handwashing remains essential, and attaching a little sanitizer to your child’s backpack won’t hurt. Finally, keep an eye out for symptoms and use policies like test-to-stay to help keep more of our kids in the classroom.
My little boy is only 3, so not school-aged yet, but he is very recently fully vaccinated, which he handled like a champ, and he wears a mask around people outside of our household. Anyone around him indoors without a mask has a covid test first. If he were attending school this year, I would send him in a well-fitted mask, likely a child-sized KN95 at least for the first few weeks, hand sanitizer attached to his backpack, and I would talk to him about the importance of not sharing drinks and what symptoms to watch out for — and try to steer clear of — while at school.
Q: In light of the current mental health crisis among young people, how should parents handle kids’ continuing fears or stresses about covid-19? What can parents say or do to ease their anxiety? What are you doing with your own kids?
A: Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: I think we have to model the good behavior that can best keep us safe, including vaccination and wearing a mask. This also includes taking care of one another and not going out if you are sick. We can demonstrate that, if you do that, you are generally protected, which can be very reassuring to children. Also, listen to their fears, and ask them what they are scared of. Get into the weeds with them. Ask them to talk about their fears. Ask them for specifics. Take the time. Sit on the floor with them. Don’t just say, ‘It’s going to be all right.’ That’s dismissive and doesn’t address their concerns.
Schaffner: You need to emphasize how effective vaccination is, and that we are all working on this together. Explain that the school has good procedures in place to minimize risk. Emphasizing this in a positive way will provide reassurance and confidence in your children. Hugging them also is a part of that.
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Dolgoff: Open communication is the key. Let your children know they can talk to you about their fears. Validate their feelings. Tell them: “I can understand how you feel. This can be scary. However, there are lots of things we can do to keep ourselves safe.” I see it in my patients all the time of all ages, ranging from mild anxiety to refusal to go to school. We work with mental health professionals to try to ease them back into school or continue with remote learning if they won’t go back. It’s much better now than it was earlier, but it’s still an issue. My own daughter, who is 16, expressed some anxiety about returning to school after remote learning. We talked about her feelings and discussed strategies to mitigate the risk, such as wearing a mask and social distancing. A lot of the fear is the unknown and lack of control. Giving them things they can do helps them regain control. She’s doing great now, thriving. My son, who is 19, had a healthy respect for covid, but didn’t have the same anxiety as my daughter.
Lockwood: My own children are asking when covid will be over. We have all shifted our mind-set to this being an endemic issue, so instead of framing this as something to get through, I am trying to normalize it. It’s not a mysterious ‘other’ in our lives, but a normal thing we live with because we are taking all the safely precautions. When you empower kids to realize they got their immunizations and are protected, they will be less scared. My son told me there was another child who didn’t want to be closer than six feet, and that’s okay. I think the schools have done a great job in having kids respect other kids’ choices.
Chioma Torres, a specialist in developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Michigan State University, and mother of three children, ages 11, 3 and nearly 2: The covid pandemic has challenged me as a parent. I was hesitant to take my children to in-person day care and school, but eventually and cautiously I took them — out of necessity. Over this last year, I saw how important in-person learning was for all of them: My 11-year-old son struggled with virtual schooling and my now 3-year-old needed several months to adjust when finally returning to day care with social emotional delays that weren’t obvious until that transition.
My [youngest] was born during the pandemic and is used to the masks and well adjusted to day care. School and young childhood programs are important for academics and physiologic development, such as social and emotional development and peer relationships.
Children can detect fear. I decided to arm my children with knowledge and tools to stay safe. I explained and modeled desired behavior. I also have modeled wearing a mask in indoor settings and all my children wear masks at school, even my almost 2-year-old — but not unsupervised. They are among the few in their classes today who wear masks, and there are times they protest, and I explain “mommy wears a mask at work” or “let’s wear our masks to keep you and your friends safe.”
Children need honest and genuine answers without too many details and to know they are safe. Let them know you are protecting them the best way possible by keeping them in in-person learning, vaccinating, wearing masks and testing, while reminding them they are loved and supported.
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Gabrielle Virgo, a Silver Spring, Md., pediatrician: [Mental health] is almost a separate pandemic onto itself. It’s not just the illness, but the isolation. I include a good mental health assessment with all of my patients, even for the pre-verbal crowd. A lot of them have been affected because they haven’t seen faces, except for their parents’. The only faces they’ve seen are masked. I’ve had parents say their kids become frightened at the sight of other people outside. One parent told me they went to the grocery store and the toddler panicked because it was a shocking experience. I just talk to the kids. I say: How are you feeling? Happy? Anxious? They have been very, very honest. I hear about their fears and anxieties, not always for themselves but for a loved grandparent or beloved aunt. They are all excited to get the shots, which is first time I’ve ever seen that.
I try to tell parents to try to not let their anxiety affect the children. Turn off the news and social media. Play music. Talk to the kids honestly and listen to them as well. If a child is expressing extreme anxiety, we need to get them help, which sometimes is easier said than done. If there is a wait for a mental health professional, I do counseling sessions with some of the kids myself. I have to do something.
Munzer: I think asking kids what they are most worried about and listening opens the door to discussion. Sometimes the child expresses worry about covid, but it might be deeper than that, like losing someone. The most important thing is to provide an opportunity for open conversation and acknowledge their feelings. Talking about the emotion and putting it into words can often make kids feel at ease and reassured. Too often, we as parents try to lead with solutions, but that doesn’t acknowledge kids’ feelings and stresses. Your attitude should be: “My job as a parent is to keep you safe. Your job is to be a kid and enjoy life. Let me take the burden off of you.”
With my daughter, a lot of her anxiety has come through in play. At the beginning, she was 3 and everything shut down. She would pretend to fly to Arizona where her grandparents live. It was, “Oh, I’m going to fly to where ‘Mombo’ and ‘Bob-Bob’ are. Oh, their house is closed.” She flew to all these places, and all of them were closed. At the end, she flew home — and home was open. Kids should be able to express themselves through play, and adults should listen to the clues that come out in play — and provide a safe space for them to “fly” home — and that home is open for them.
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Q: Under what conditions should kids wear masks in school? Do you mask your kids?
A: Fauci: It depends on the community level of transmission. CDC has guidelines and recommendations on masks depending on how high the level of transmission is in a specific county.
Walensky: We should be open to having people wear a mask anytime they want and create an environment in schools where people don’t feel judged or have to deal with personal questions. They shouldn’t have to explain they wear a mask because “my mom is getting chemo.” They shouldn’t have to explain personal things. Generally, we recommend masks when community levels are high or medium — orange or yellow — although I’ve been seen wearing one when the levels are green, or low, because I am married to a pediatric oncologist and don’t want to get him sick, or his patients.
Lockwood: I think in areas where the rates are not high, it’s more of a personal decision. I try to let my kids have a little control over the decision-making. One — the 8-year-old — chose to constantly wear a mask. My 11-year-old chose not to. It’s important that they feel comfortable in whatever they are doing in school.
Virgo: I strongly believe in masking. We have to be realistic. We will see another new variant. This won’t be the end of it. We’re not at the point where it’s acceptable for everybody to be taking off their masks. I tell parents: Be prepared.
Q: What about other childhood vaccinations? Are we finally catching up?
A: Walensky: We have fallen behind. Between the 2020-2021 school year, coverage of kindergartners dropped from 95 percent to 94 percent. That may seem small, but it means 35,000 entering kindergarten were uncovered. I worry about what this overall general trend could mean and the impact it will have. It could leave children vulnerable to preventable diseases. As parents head back to the pediatrician, make sure their children are up to date on their vaccines — and it’s a great opportunity to get them their covid vaccine. You can get them together.
Schaffner: There has been a substantial gap, particularly among preschoolers, but pediatricians and family doctors are trying to rectify this as they see children.
Dolgoff: Parents are now resuming all the routine vaccinations. Rates in my practice have gone way up.
Q: How worried are you about the new variant and a potential fall/winter surge?
A: Fauci: We need to take it seriously. It is spreading more rapidly than earlier recent variants. We know that vaccinations are effective in preventing severe disease more than in preventing infections, so, again, it’s important to get vaccinated. For the most part, people who wind up in the hospital with severe disease are overwhelmingly more likely to be unvaccinated. Among children who have been hospitalized and died, the overwhelming majority have been unvaccinated.
Dolgoff: I am concerned the wave is only going to get worse because this variant is so transmissible. If the rates get higher, we may have to have more restrictions in the classroom. We are in a much better position than we were a year or two ago, but I don’t want us to backslide. I don’t see us going back to solely remote learning, but I worry that if the levels rise, we may have to impose some restrictions such as mandatory masking or hybrid learning.
Q: What do you say to remind kids to practice good hygiene without turning them into germaphobes?
A: Schaffner: I think the risk of turning kids into germaphobes is pretty small. Most kids tend to move in the opposite direction.
Dolgoff: They need to wash their hands as frequently as possible and be conscientious about social distancing. If we didn’t turn them into germaphobes two years ago, it’s unlikely to happen now.
Lockwood: Normalize it. We keep hand sanitizer in the car and in the house. Washing our hands has become routine, like brushing your teeth. With most things, they will learn by watching you.
Q: What questions should parents ask about school cleaning processes? What about ventilation?
A: Fauci: Proper ventilation is very important when dealing with a comprehensive approach to respiratory-borne illnesses. We should encourage schools to work toward getting proper ventilation.
Dolgoff: I don’t really get questions about surfaces anymore, but ventilation is important. What are they doing to improve ventilation in the school building? I would encourage portable HEPA units and clean outdoor air. Properly placed fans also can help improve indoor air quality.
Lockwood: Ask schools to use HEPA units and open the windows.
Q: Should things be “back to normal” in schools this fall, barring the emergence of new variants or other surprises?
A: Fauci: I don’t know what will happen in the fall. It’s possible we will get a resurgence. If there is a brand-new variant, we will have to address it by modifying the vaccines. This virus has surprised us repeatedly in the past. It has been evading us time and again. And it has been a formidable foe.
Dolgoff: I think schools are probably going to be closer to normal than they should be. People have gotten very lax. They are just tired of it. People need to pay attention to CDC recommendations and follow the guidelines — even if they are tired.
Lockwood: We have recognized how important it is for kids to be learning in person. Children entering second grade this fall have only known school during the pandemic [remote learning], so I am hoping the school year will feel more normal for everyone this year.
Walensky: We’ve learned a lot over the last two years. I think our kids can have a really fantastic school year ahead if we model the right behaviors, barring anything unforeseen. Our highest priority is that kids have a safe and successful school year. | 2022-08-07T12:33:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Covid and back-to-school: Health experts' best advice for parents - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/07/covid-school-health-anxiety/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/07/covid-school-health-anxiety/ |
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