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2 illuminating exchanges from the House GOP on the Trump search
Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) said Republicans of the House Intelligence Committee are “very concerned” about the motives for the FBI’s search of Mar-A-Lago. (Video: The Washington Post)
But we’re starting to see the GOP be asked to account for the remarkable faith they rather blindly invested in these talking points and in Donald Trump’s actions. And on Friday, two exchanges stood out.
Republicans on the House intelligence committee held a news conference the morning after the Justice Department and Trump appeared to agree to release the warrant. The presser also came after The Washington Post reported the FBI was looking for documents related to nuclear weapons.
We still know very little about what precisely that means, but reality seems to have set in for some of Trump’s defenders: What if the evidence they opted not to wait for before deriding the Justice Department as politically “weaponized” was pretty damning?
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) on Friday embodied this dilemma.
After more nuanced comments from committee ranking Republican Michael R. Turner (Ohio) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Stefanik grabbed her trusty flamethrower. She cited the Biden administration’s “weaponization of the Department of Justice and FBI against Joe Biden’s political opponent” and declared the search was “a complete abuse and overreach of its authority.”
But when it came time for questions — about The Post’s report on the FBI seeking nuclear documents — the same Stefanik suddenly urged people to withhold judgment.
“So before you jump to conclusions and just accept information from sources who are not the attorney general, who are not the director of the FBI, let’s see what the facts are,” she said. “That’s why transparency is key here.”
A reporter jumped in to note that Republicans — including Stefanik — have expressed a large degree of certitude about whether this was an abuse of power before learning those facts. The reporter pointed to Republicans arguing en masse that this was political and floating the baseless planted-evidence theory.
Stefanik didn’t really address the premise. She noted that Republicans have asked for Attorney General Merrick Garland and the DOJ to preserve records — suggesting that action demonstrated an interest in those facts. But that request was made as she and others were very much prejudging what those documents would reveal.
(Utah Rep. Chris Stewart stepped in to say, “I think it’s naive to assume that the American people would not wonder: Is this political?” But often, the response hasn’t been question-raising; it’s reached some rather firm prejudgments. Just minutes earlier, Stefanik was saying this was political and a weaponized DOJ — not merely suggesting it as a possibility.)
Stefanik was asked a similar question earlier Friday on “Fox & Friends,” where host Steve Doocy also cited The Post’s reporting on the FBI seeking nuclear documents.
“If that is true and they were just in the basement in Mar-a-Lago, that’s kind of a big deal,” Doocy noted.
Stefanik again expressed a sudden interest in waiting for the facts.
“Well, certainly, Steve, there’s been a lot of, again, guesses as to — and media reporting,” Stefanik said. “We do not know the facts, which is why it’s again important to follow the facts wherever they lead.”
Perhaps the most important comments Friday, though, laid out where the red line is. They came from Turner, the top Republican on the committee.
Turner, it bears emphasizing, has been somewhat more circumspect in criticizing the search than other Republicans. He has allowed that there are situations in which something like this could be justified. He told Politico on Tuesday, “Unless there is a true national security threat, this is clearly an overreach.”
Thursday’s news suggested something like that was indeed on the table — depending upon how you define “true national security threat,” of course. And on Friday, Turner expanded on what his test would be, allowing that there are “a number of things” that could qualify.
“There are there are a number of things that they could show us — and I don’t want to speculate on what those would be — that would obviously rise to the level of, maybe you didn’t have any options,” Turner said.
But Turner added that he would be “surprised” if the Justice Department couldn’t get such documents other than by searching Trump’s residence. Turner also suggested that it would be surprising if Trump ever had such documents in his possession, and even said that having documents marked “classified” involving nuclear issues might not meet his test.
“I can tell you that there are a number of things that are classified that fall under the umbrella of nuclear weapons, but that are not necessarily things that are truly classified,” he said.
You begin to see how arduous this might be for Turner and others when further details come out. But recent history has shown how Republicans repeatedly have proved adept at retroactively drawing gray areas to cover wherever we find out Trump’s conduct lies. (And Turner is better insulated than others, having at least professed early on to have an open mind.)
But plenty have gone even further out on a limb for Trump, declining to wait for the facts that Stefanik now insists on heeding. And we’re about to start learning how firm that branch is. | 2022-08-12T18:34:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Elise Stefanik and others respond to the Trump search in telling ways - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/stefanik-turner-trump-search/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/stefanik-turner-trump-search/ |
The National Archives and Records Administration issued a statement Friday in an attempt to counter misstatements about former president Barack Obama’s presidential records after several days of misinformation that had been spread by former president Donald Trump and conservative commentators.
Since the FBI search of his Florida home and club this week for classified documents kept there, Trump has asserted in social media posts that Obama “kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” and that they were “taken to Chicago by President Obama.”
Classified records from Obama are kept in a NARA facility in Washington, the statement said. | 2022-08-12T18:52:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | National Archives counters Trump baseless claims about Obama records - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/12/trump-obama-national-archives/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/12/trump-obama-national-archives/ |
A man takes pictures of Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas in 2015. On Aug. 11, rainwater fell through the ceiling into Caesars during a torrential downpour. (John Locher/AP)
Videos shared on social media showed water entering Caesars Palace and Planet Hollywood on the Strip amid a thunderstorm that swept into the area from the north around 8 p.m. local time. On July 28, the city was deluged by another storm that unleashed damaging winds and sent water rushing into casinos.
Shortly after 9 p.m., the Weather Service issued a flood advisory for all of Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, cautioning that high water could affect low-lying and poor-drainage areas. Wind gusts of up to 64 mph were clocked at the North Las Vegas Airport and near the Strip, while the Weather Service received “multiple reports” of lightning setting trees on fire.
The area is under a flood watch from 11 a.m. Friday to midnight Saturday because of the potential for slow-moving thunderstorms that could produce heavy rain and flash flooding, according to the Weather Service. At least a 20 percent chance of afternoon and evening storms is in the forecast through Monday.
A Southwest summer monsoon brought heavy rain to Las Vegas on Aug. 11, flooding streets and casino game rooms. (Video: The Washington Post)
Both recent flooding events were spurred by the Southwest monsoon, which develops each summer as prevailing winds shift from out of the west to out of the south, drawing a surge of humidity northward. This year’s Southwest monsoon has been particularly intense, helping to relieve drought conditions in the region but also causing many significant flood events. Last week, 1,000 people were stranded in California’s Death Valley National Park because of a 1-in-1,000-year downpour. | 2022-08-12T19:01:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Las Vegas casinos flood for second time in about two weeks, videos show - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/las-vegas-casinos-flooding/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/las-vegas-casinos-flooding/ |
A ‘megaflood’ in California could drop 100 inches of rain, scientists warn
It hasn’t happened since 1862, but California is due for another one
Rocks and vegetation cover Highway 70 following a landslide in the Dixie Fire zone on Oct. 24, 2021 in Plumas County, Calif. Heavy rains blanketing Northern California created slide and flood hazards in land scorched during summer wildfires. (Noah Berger/AP)
A mention of California may usually conjure images of wildfires and droughts, but scientists say the Golden State is also the site of extreme, once-a-century “megafloods” — and climate change could amplify just how bad one gets.
The idea seems inconceivable — a month-long storm that dumps 30 inches of rain in San Francisco and up to 100 inches of rain and/or melted snow in the mountains. But it’s happened before — most recently in 1862 — and, if history is any indicator, we’re overdue for another, according to a new paper published Friday in Science Advances that seeks to shed light on the lurking hazard.
“This risk is increasing and was already underappreciated,” said Daniel Swain, one of the study’s two authors and a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of California in Los Angeles, in an interview. “We want to get ahead of it.”
In such an event, some in the Sierra Nevada could end up with 40 or 50 feet of snow, and most of California’s major highways would be washed out or inaccessible.
Swain is already working with emergency management officials and the National Weather Service, explaining it’s not a question of if a megaflood will happen — it’s a matter of when.
“It already has happened in 1862, and it probably has happened about 5 times per millennium before that,” he said. “On human time scales, 100 or 200 years sounds like a long time. But these are fairly regular occurrences.”
His paper built off the work of other scientists, who examined layers of sediment along the coastline to determine how frequently megaflood events occurred. They found evidence of extreme freshwater runoff, which washed soil and stony materials out to sea. Those layers of dirt became buried beneath years of sand. The depth of each layer, as well as the size of the pebbles and material contained, offers insight into the severity of past flood events.
“It hasn’t happened in recent memory, so it’s a little bit ‘out of sight, out of mind,’” Swain said. “But [California is] a region that is in the perfect area … in a climatological and geographic context.”
On the West Coast, there are commonly atmospheric rivers, or streams of moisture-rich air at the mid-levels of the atmosphere with connections to the deep tropics. For a California megaflood, you’d need a nearly stationary zone of low pressure in the northeast Pacific, which would sling a series of high-end atmospheric rivers into the California coastline.
“These would be atmospheric river families,” Swain said. “You get one of these semi-persistent [dips in the jet stream] over the northeast Pacific that wobbles around for a few weeks and allows winter storm after winter storm across the northeast Pacific into California.”
The paper warns of “extraordinary impacts,” and reports that such an episode could “[transform] the interior Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into a temporary but vast inland sea nearly 300 miles in length and [inundate] much of the now densely populated coastal plain in present-day Los Angeles and Orange Counties.”
The impacts of a month-long barrage of soaking storms could be disastrous, but Swain notes it’s possible to have advance warning.
“This is something we’d see coming three to five days out and I’d hope a week and perhaps even 2 weeks out with a probabilistic type of prediction,” Swain said. “We’d have a decent amount of warning for it.”
Atmospheric rivers that drench the West Coast are rated on 1 to 5 scale like hurricanes
Swain’s simulations showed the odds of a megaflood event occurring are far greater in an El Niño winter versus during a La Niña. El Niño is a large-scale chain-reaction atmosphere-ocean pattern that can dominate the atmosphere for several years at a time, and usually begins with warmer-than-normal warm sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific.
“When you look at the top eight monthly precipitation totals in simulations, eight out of eight occurred in El Niño years,” he said.
The influence of human-caused climate change also plays a role: Swain says it boosts the ceiling in a major megaflood event.
“We have multiple scenarios. The future one is much larger, consistent with [climate change],” he said. “In the historical scenario, the lesser one, certain parts of the Sierra Nevada see 50 to 60 inches of liquid equivalent precipitation … but in the future event, some places see 70 to 80 and a few that see 100 in a thirty-day period. Even places like San Francisco and Sacramento could see 20 to 30 inches of rain, and that’s just in one month.”
An independent study published in Scientific Reports Friday concluded that human-caused climate change will intensify atmospheric rivers and could double or triple their economic damage in the western United States by the 2090s.
A warmer atmosphere has a greater capacity to store moisture. In the absence of storms, that means the air can more quickly dry up the landscape — hence California’s prolonged drought — but, should rain occur, the deck is stacked to favor an exceptional event.
“Moisture isn’t the limiting factor in California,” Swain said. “There’s plenty of moisture around even in the drought years. The absence is a lack of mechanism. It’s a lack of storms rather than moisture.”
While they can’t say when the next California megaflood will strike, forecasters are confident it will happen again. There’s a 0.5 to 1.0 percent chance of it happening in any given year.
Swain said one goal of his work is to push officials to prepare. He suggested working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to “run through simulations as real tabletop on the ground disaster scenarios.”
“We’ll work through where the points of failure would actually be, because one of the things we want to do is get ahead of the curve,” he said. | 2022-08-12T19:01:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California is due for a 'megaflood' that could drop 100 inches of rain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/megaflood-california-flood-rain-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/megaflood-california-flood-rain-climate/ |
This image released by Comedy Central shows the cast of the animated series, “South Park.” For 25 years, “South Park” has viewed the world through the eyes of Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman, four bratty, perpetually bundled-up youngsters in an unhinged Colorado cartoon town. To celebrate their silver anniversary this year, a concert in Colorado sings the show’s songs. (Comedy Central via AP) (Uncredited/Comedy Central) | 2022-08-12T19:01:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'South Park' enjoys a silver anniversary of satire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/south-park-enjoys-a-silver-anniversary-of-satire/2022/08/12/8bcc1900-1a6c-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/south-park-enjoys-a-silver-anniversary-of-satire/2022/08/12/8bcc1900-1a6c-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
FILE - This 1964 microscope image made available by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows damage from the polio virus to human spinal cord tissue. On Friday, Aug. 12, 2022, health officials in the nation’s largest city said they had found the virus in wastewater samples, suggesting the virus was spreading among the unvaccinated. (Dr. Karp/Emory University/CDC via AP, File) (Uncredited/CDC) | 2022-08-12T19:01:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | EXPLAINER: What to know about polio spreading in New York - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/explainer-what-to-know-about-polio-spreading-in-new-york/2022/08/12/76a97942-1a6b-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/explainer-what-to-know-about-polio-spreading-in-new-york/2022/08/12/76a97942-1a6b-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Violating the Presidential Records Act is no small transgression
The law that makes Trump’s papers public property has its origins in Watergate
Perspective by Mitchell Robertson
Mitchell Robertson is an associate lecturer in U.S. history at University College London and a fellow of the Centre on U.S. Politics.
Local law officers are seen in front of the Florida home of former president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. (Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images)
On Monday, the FBI searched the Mar-a-Lago property of former president Donald Trump. The move, and ensuing uproar on the right, thrust the 1978 Presidential Records Act into the spotlight — though new reporting on Thursday indicated that the agents’ search was focused on highly classified documents. But just violating the Presidential Records Act is not a trivial offense — some Trump allies have inferred by falsely equating it with having overdue library books — the roots of the law make that clear.
It all goes back to Richard M. Nixon. Without that president’s transgressions, Trump would have been free to do whatever he wanted with many of his personal records — including selling them, burning them, even flushing them down the toilet. Instead, Congress has established that presidential records belong to the people, not the officeholder, for a very good reason.
From the nation’s founding to the 1970s, presidents considered their papers their private property. Though subject to inquiries from curious historians during his time in office, George Washington had no national library, archive or repository in which to deposit his papers and they were left to be “scattered throughout the country, and around the world.”
The survival of presidential records relied on luck and circumstance. When William Henry Harrison’s cabin burned in 1840, so did most of his papers. Abraham Lincoln left his records to his son, who held onto them until after World War I. Florence Harding, the wife of President Warren G. Harding, burned “practically all” of his letters. William Howard Taft, by contrast, maintained a thorough inventory of his presidential materials.
As a 1977 report by the National Study Commission on Records and Documents of Federal Officials put it, these arrangements created a haphazard system which produced “a very full collection if the President was a saver, a small one if he were a destroyer.”
It was not until Franklin D. Roosevelt that a president made a forward-looking decision about his materials. Roosevelt decided to deposit his records in a presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y. — the first of its kind. Roosevelt declared his library “an act of faith” in the American people to “learn from the past.” Roosevelt personally provided the land for the library, but delegated responsibility for the management to the Archivist of the United States.
This model took hold and manifested in the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955. The wording of the law, however, only encouraged presidents to donate their materials to a presidential library. It did not compel them to do so, maintaining the traditional understanding of those materials as private property.
Presidential records came to the forefront of the national consciousness in July 1973 when Nixon’s deputy assistant, Alexander Butterfield, revealed the existence of a secret recording system within the White House. The revelation sent the White House team — which had not known Butterfield was going to disclose this fact — into disarray, with the fate of the tapes becoming a matter of national urgency.
When Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed the tapes, Nixon refused to comply, asserting executive privilege and that the recordings were his personal property. Some of Nixon’s aides and allies, including Pat Buchanan and Vice President Spiro Agnew, advocated for the president to burn the tapes. Nixon refused, believing that the recordings would exonerate him and agreeing with the advice of his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, that burning them would create an “indelible impression of guilt.”
This decision turned the fate of the tapes into front-page news in 1973 and 1974 as the Watergate scandal engulfed the United States. When the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes, Nixon released transcripts but again refused to hand over the original recordings. When he refused a further subpoena from the new Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski (after Nixon had fired Cox in the “Saturday Night Massacre”), Jaworski took the case to the Supreme Court.
In a unanimous ruling, in The United States v. Nixon the Supreme Court ruled: “the President’s generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial and the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice.” The eventual disclosure of the contents of the tapes, including the infamous “Smoking Gun” tape — which exposed that Nixon actively took part in the coverup — would seal his fate.
As Nixon’s time in the White House wound down, he wanted to take his papers and the tapes to his “Western White House” in California, outside of the prying eyes of Washington. As the New York Times reported, Nixon’s lawyers sought to draw on history to justify this decision, noting that it was “historical precedent dating to George Washington” that granted Nixon this power.
Yet, President Gerald Ford was reluctant to comply with his predecessor’s wishes, despite an opinion from Attorney General William Saxbe that the tapes and documents were Nixon’s “private property.”
This led to Nixon striking a compromise with the director of the General Services Administration, Arthur Sampson. He left over 40 million pages of documents and many of the much-disputed White House tapes with the National Archives in accordance with the Federal Records Act of 1950. But these records remained Nixon’s personal property and no access would be granted without his permission. Importantly, the agreement also codified Nixon’s right to destroy the tapes at any point in the future.
While Ford deemed the matter settled, the newly emboldened post-Watergate Congress disagreed. In September 1974, a month following Nixon’s resignation, Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) introduced the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act. Despite the broad-sounding name, the measure applied solely to Nixon. It sought to undo the “Nixon-Sampson Pact” and to order the General Services Administration to take “complete possession” of the Nixon White House materials and to screen and prepare them for public release. Congress quickly passed the law.
The day after Ford signed it, Nixon challenged the law in federal court. The Supreme Court eventually ruled 7-2 against Nixon, declaring that “claims of Presidential privilege must yield” to “maintaining access to [Presidential materials] for lawful governmental and historical purposes.”
Having dealt with the pressing issue of Nixon, Congress turned to consider a longer-term solution to this issue with the Presidential Records Act of 1978. This measure recast how presidential documents were considered. These materials would no longer belong to the president as their private property, but rather “complete ownership, possession, and control” would rest with the public. The act also placed on the onus on presidents to ensure that they “preserved and maintained … Presidential records’ concerning the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies’ of their time in office.”
This law was part of a broader raft of legislation which sought to make government more accountable to the public. Most prominent of these was a significant liberalization of the Freedom of Information Act, which sought to “purge the body politic of the secrecy excesses which marked the sordid Watergate coverup,” in the words of one of its champions, Rep. William S. Moorhead. But Congress’ reasoning went beyond Watergate. Addressing more widespread abuse of the presidential office and executive branch, including the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, and unlawful activities of the Central Intelligence Agency also drove lawmakers. Underlying these transparency and accountability laws was the spirit, as the Government in the Sunshine Act of 1976 declared, that “Government is and should be the servant of the people, and it should be fully accountable to them for the actions which it supposedly takes on their behalf.”
This history exposes how, despite what Trump and his allies insist, the battle with the National Archives and the FBI is about far more than just “paper.” It is about the right of citizens to know what their elected officials are doing and to hold them to account — even after they have left office. Americans learned in the 1970s that doing so required legislation to ensure access to presidential records, and only through rigorous enforcement can the law’s protections preserve public accountability. | 2022-08-12T19:01:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Violating the Presidential Records Act is no small transgression - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/12/violating-presidential-records-act-is-no-small-transgression/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/12/violating-presidential-records-act-is-no-small-transgression/ |
I was a foster child. Foster care adoptions won’t solve the end of Roe.
By Andrew Bridge
(Vanessa Lovegrove for The Washington Post)
Andrew Bridge is the author of the best-selling memoir “Hope’s Boy.”
With the fall of Roe v. Wade, anti-choice governors have advice for what to do with unwanted children: Give your newborns to the foster care system, and they’ll be adopted. But if these governors had even the barest understanding of their state’s foster systems, they would know that adoption is not its true purpose. I’m certain of this because I grew up in the system myself.
One of my earliest memories is of babies crying in my foster parents’ house. I was 7, and these were the first infants I held, the first I changed and fed. Many came without a name, with no known family or idea of who they were.
Los Angeles County had taken me from my mother. Mom had grown up poor, never graduated from high school, was abandoned by my father and had her first schizophrenic break just as I started first grade. I was placed in a chaotic children’s institution. Eventually, a foster home was found. Babies arrived day and night, so fragile they made me nervous. When they left, I stopped asking where they were taken. No one in the house knew.
I was never adopted — which is true of more than 70 percent of children in care. This is because foster care operates not to encourage adoption but with the opposite goal: to reunite children with their birthparents as soon as safety allows. Finding a relative or an adoptive family should’ve been the aim in my case, but the system failed at both.
No mother can simply hand her child to a foster care department. If she tries, she’ll be given a lawyer, and her baby will linger in the system while a court decides what to do. In every state, the mother will be billed for the cost of care.
“Baby Moses” or “safe haven” laws exist in every state. And a mother can abandon her newborn at a fire station, church or police precinct — a solution Justice Amy Coney Barrett offered as the answer to unwanted pregnancy, asking during oral arguments to overturn Roe, “Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?” But it’s much more complicated than Barrett’s question suggests.
The laws vary on how old a newborn can be, who can take the baby and what a mother will be asked. If a mother gets it wrong, she’ll be open to criminal prosecution. The abandoned infant will enter foster care with no family to call, no one to share information on its medical history, no history of any kind. Safe havens are simply not that safe.
Post-Roe newborns given up by their mothers will join the 43,000 babies already in foster care. But they will be a class of their own, with even fewer chances than other foster children.
Relatives provide homes for a third of all foster children. In some systems, as many as half of children are placed with extended family. Relatives are also some of the biggest adopters of foster children. But an abandoned infant’s family will be hard to find, leaving the child to be moved repeatedly from one 30-day emergency home to another or put in a congregate facility.
Opinion: As an adoptee, I know: Adoption is not a fairy-tale answer to abortion
As of September 2020, 117,000 foster children were waiting to be adopted. And the number of adoptions is dropping. On average, an adopted child will spend nearly three years in foster care before leaving the system.
But no honest discussion about foster care can ignore race. The fact is, the darker a child’s skin, the longer that child will be in care and the less likely the child will be adopted — a crucial point when Latinx and Black women, lacking equal access to quality health care and contraception, are disproportionally at risk of unintended pregnancy.
I know this from firsthand experience. After aging out of foster care at 18, I attended college (on a scholarship) and graduated from law school, then led a children’s rights organization and, later, one of California’s largest foster care adoption agencies. Trying to recruit foster and adoptive parents, I’ll never forget how many were willing to adopt — but only if the child was White or Asian.
Before they were consumed by foster care departments, independent public adoption agencies operated with smaller bureaucracies, hired social workers trained in evaluating adoptive parents and finalized adoptions in independent courts. Reviving them would take years. Even then, infants would be left to the sluggish planning of public care and the same struggles in recruiting families that exist today.
As little as I had while in foster care, it is possible to have less. A post-Roe newborn won’t be a romantic foundling. The infant’s future will be decided in a courtroom. No family, foster parent or adoptive family will be there. The assigned social worker is unlikely to show up. The baby’s life will be reduced to a file among a stack of others. The hearing will take less than 10 minutes. And no one there will have ever heard that child crying. | 2022-08-12T19:02:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Foster care adoptions won’t solve the end of Roe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/10/foster-care-adoptions-roe-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/10/foster-care-adoptions-roe-abortion/ |
The most responsible answer to the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida remains what it was: to wait for further information about exactly what was sought and why. The least responsible is to persist in the reckless rhetoric about “tyranny,” or “Third World” political persecution, or “regimes” that has flooded right-wing media and even the chambers of Congress — and so far has been followed by at least one attempted act of violence.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that Justice Department lawyers had filed a motion to unseal the warrant that authorized agents to seek out documents that the former president may have improperly retained after leaving the White House. A list of the inventory that agents took from the home would also be released. The Post has since reported that the sought-after documents include material related to nuclear weapons; the New York Times reports they include information related to extremely sensitive “special access programs.” These revelations don’t change the basic picture of the case: So far, everything appears to have been done by the book — but whether what is found will prove bombshell or bust is uncertain.
The proper response to this uncertainty is patience, from those inclined to believe the investigation will unveil some grievous offense to those inclined to believe the Justice Department has overreached. Whatever insights the warrant could reveal are likely to be vague; categories such as “nuclear documents” are broad. Thankfully, some Republicans are exhibiting signs of restraint; the party’s ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), spoke in a measured manner on Friday about his desire to ensure oversight of the Justice Department without lodging baseless accusations of abuse. Others, however, have taken cues from Mr. Trump’s conspiratorial ranting on his website Truth Social, throwing around terms such as “dictatorship” and “banana republic” to describe rule-of-law proceedings and lambasting the FBI.
These aren’t just words. They can have horrific real-world influence. On Thursday, an armed man wearing body armor tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office. The hours-long standoff that ensued ended on a rural stretch of road, where police fatally shot the man after he raised a gun at them. Reports so far suggest the man may have posted beforehand on Truth Social that he was sounding a “call to arms” after the search, and that others should “get whatever you need to be ready for combat.” Reports also suggest he may have been present at the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
The events of Jan. 6 showed that the risk of political violence in the United States is real. By now politicians and pundits should be well aware of what can happen when they broadcast incendiary remarks: People already swallowed up by ecosystems of misinformation are listening, and they may be inspired to act. Sadly, the incitement about the FBI’s search still flowed — and one man is dead. | 2022-08-12T19:02:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Rhetoric after Mar-a-Lago search followed by Cincinnati violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/mar-a-lago-search-fbi-cincinnati-office-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/mar-a-lago-search-fbi-cincinnati-office-shooting/ |
If Trump is charged, it should be for the worst of his crimes
‘Seditious conspiracy’ and ‘insurrection’ are more fitting charges than ‘interfering with an official proceeding’ or ‘defrauding the U.S.’
Perspective by Claire O. Finkelstein
(Shane Cluskey for The Washington Post)
Prosecuting a former president of the United States is a tricky business. It’s not like prosecuting Al Capone, the notorious gangster who was charged with tax evasion rather than the more fitting charges of murder and racketeering. A technical charge such as tax evasion may be suitable for obtaining the conviction of a mobster, but hardly sufficient for an occupant of the Oval Office who tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Donald Trump has millions of supporters and the weight of precedent behind him. Of course Trump should face consequences for tax evasion if he merits it, but it is critical for public perception, for history — for the preservation of democracy — that if he is charged, it is first and foremost with the crimes that best reflect the gravity of the danger he posed to the country.
On Monday, the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida for any presidential records that may have been improperly removed from the White House. On Wednesday, Trump sat for a deposition in the New York attorney general’s office, which is conducting a civil investigation into his business practices. A federal indictment may or may not arise from these investigations, but it is Trump’s role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that warrants the greatest scrutiny — and the gravest charges — from a Justice Department exercising its prosecutorial discretion under such historic circumstances.
The two most serious crimes for which Trump may stand accused, and which most clearly describe his conduct on Jan. 6 and in the weeks leading up to it, are insurrection and seditious conspiracy. If the facts and evidence support them, they are what Attorney General Merrick Garland should charge, whatever other charges he includes.
The significance of Jan. 6 shouldn’t be obscured by legalese before a public contending with the seduction of insurrectionist rhetoric. Charging Trump only with narrowly defined crimes could backfire, and Garland should resist, even if that’s what the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 ends up recommending. The vice chair of the committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), has hinted at a possible criminal referral to the Justice Department, both in hearings last month and in interviews during the course of the investigation, by highlighting two potential crimes: interfering with an official proceeding and defrauding the United States. A brief the committee filed in a legal dispute with Trump attorney John Eastman, who hatched the fake-electors scheme in the multipronged effort to overturn the election, also highlights these two offenses. Cheney has further suggested that the committee may include a referral on witness tampering, based on contact Trump had with those called to testify before the panel.
The committee may be tempted to stake out a moderate position regarding criminal charges in a misguided effort to garner public support and make the unprecedented prosecution of a former president more palatable, but the Justice Department must act independently in deciding what, or whether, to charge. To be sure, the DOJ should consider any evidence of criminality uncovered by the committee, but it should give no weight to the committee’s opinion in reaching its determination.
Restricting a federal prosecution to two rather obscure-sounding charges — and a possible third relating to the integrity of the process — would not only downplay the seriousness of Trump’s offenses but could also exacerbate the view that any such prosecution is politically motivated. After the Mar-a-Lago search, that perception took hold among Trump supporters, who accuse the FBI of acting on a technicality involving federal records, even though the bureau had a search warrant signed by a federal judge and based on a showing of probable cause that a crime had been committed. Violating the Presidential Records Act by removing or destroying government documents is not in itself in the same league as insurrection or seditious conspiracy; if, however, the records in question pertain to serious national security breaches — The Washington Post has reported that some of the documents relate to nuclear weapons — that might be a different matter.
In one Oval Office meeting, a triple Russian threat
The crime of insurrection, 18 U.S. Code 2383, imposes criminal penalties on “whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto.” Trump’s words to his supporters — telling them to go to the Capitol and encouraging them by saying, “I’ll be right there with you” — incited and literally set on foot the insurrection that followed. He also assisted the insurrection by his inaction under circumstances in which he had a duty to act — namely by failing to call out the National Guard or order other reinforcements for the Capitol Police as the building was overtaken. Trump also encouraged the crowd’s bloodthirsty pursuit of Vice President Mike Pence, which he did by tweet even after he knew that the siege had turned violent and despite urgent pleas from his daughter Ivanka Trump and others for him to call off the attack. Although it is true that the purpose of this incitement may have been to interfere with an official proceeding, as Cheney suggests, this particular proceeding was the one certifying the election of the next president of the United States, the integrity of which is critical for the peaceful transition of power. Interfering with an official proceeding, therefore, could be only a small piece of what was wrong with Trump’s conduct that day. If testimony in the Jan. 6 hearings and reporting by The Post and others is any measure, Trump’s true purpose in interfering with the certification was to create conditions that would allow him to seize control of the government and remain in power.
The crime of seditious conspiracy differs from insurrection in that it requires a plan involving more than one individual, among other things. As defined in 18 U.S. Code 2384, seditious conspiracy is when two or more people “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.”
The Jan. 6 committee has provided powerful evidence of a comprehensive plan by Trump and some members of his inner circle to do just that. In a meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, among Trump, former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne, lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, for example, serious consideration was given to the extraordinary step of ordering the military to seize voting machines to redo the election. Such an order at best would have posed a drastic national security crisis, throwing the chain of command into chaos as Pentagon officials debated the directive; at worst it would have brought the military into the plot to overthrow the government. Plots at this level are conceivable only as part of an extended conspiracy.
Seditious conspiracy is rarely charged, and prosecutors have been rightly cautious about unbottling a genie that could be used to quell protected speech or religious liberty. However, as with the seditious-conspiracy charges against Omar Abdel Rahman following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, sometimes speech turns into an actual plan, and in such cases the First Amendment no longer applies. Jan. 6 is the type of case for which the seditious conspiracy charge was made.
At least until the surprise search at Mar-a-Lago, many commentators defended Garland’s seeming inaction with regard to the former president and his associates. Among other arguments, they suggested that seditious conspiracy would be particularly difficult to prosecute, given the need to prove intent. Yet was Trump’s intent on and before Jan. 6 really so hard to discern? Would it be more difficult to prove the requisite state of mind for Trump than to prove the intent of Stewart Rhodes, Thomas Caldwell or Joseph Hackett, all members of the Oath Keepers who participated in the insurrection and whose indictments on charges of seditious conspiracy are premised on a pattern of conduct not unlike Trump’s? Rhodes, Caldwell, Hackett and others have been accused of conspiring “to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force, by preventing, hindering, or delaying by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of power, including the Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments to the Constitution.” Didn’t Trump do the same? And with the same intent or purpose?
Indeed, Trump’s intent probably formed long before that of his fellow insurrectionists. For weeks he had pressured Pence to declare the 2020 election invalid by rejecting the vote count of the states’ certified electors. He repeated these demands in his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and again by tweet later that day. His intent was particularly clear when, according to White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, he demanded to be taken to the Capitol and even physically tried to get a member of his security detail to drive him there. Trump’s intent was also apparent when those breaching the Capitol called for the vice president, who was at that moment fleeing for his life, to be hanged; Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said that Trump believed Pence deserved it, according to Hutchinson.
The only significant difference between members of the Oath Keepers and Trump is the means each chose to promote their goal — the former used stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles; Trump used a Twitter account, a microphone and the power of his office.
Prosecuting Trump would set a risky precedent. Not prosecuting would be worse.
Focusing on the possible crimes of insurrection and seditious conspiracy is important for another reason. The post-Civil War drafters of the 14th Amendment identified the special danger posed by these crimes in Section 3 of that amendment, which provides that “no person shall [hold public office] who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Although the 14th Amendment does not require a criminal conviction for insurrection or rebellion to disqualify a person from public office, such a conviction would bar Trump from holding office again. By contrast, conviction on the more banal charges of “interfering with an official proceeding” or “conspiracy to defraud the United States” would not prevent him from holding office — arguably even if he conducted his presidency from inside a federal prison.
The country fought a devastating Civil War to defend the Constitution and keep the Union together in the face of insurrectionists who believed they owed no duty to the laws of the United States. Now, as in 1861, we stand at a crossroads. While prosecuting a former president may seem fraught with peril, the road that abandons accountability for those who would attack democracy by force and violence is more perilous still. If we cannot hold the country’s leaders responsible for their most serious crimes, particularly those they commit to keep themselves in power, we cannot expect representative democracy to survive. | 2022-08-12T19:02:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Seditious conspiracy and insurrection would be fitting charges for Trump - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/12/seditious-conspiracy-insurrection-trump-charges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/12/seditious-conspiracy-insurrection-trump-charges/ |
Amber Midthunder is the 25-year-old breakout star of “Prey,” which is part of the Predator film series that once starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. On Thursday, Aug. 18 at 12:30 p.m. ET, join Washington Post national correspondent Arelis R. Hernández for a conversation with Midthunder about her new leading role and how she sees the significance of having an Indigenous female action hero at the center of a major film franchise.
Actor, “Prey” | 2022-08-12T19:03:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Breakout star Amber Midthunder on playing leading Indigenous action hero - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/18/breakout-star-amber-midthunder-playing-leading-indigenous-action-hero/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/18/breakout-star-amber-midthunder-playing-leading-indigenous-action-hero/ |
Two boys, 12 and 15, charged in gas station worker’s fatal stabbing
Police allege the boys stabbed the employee after stealing items from the gas station
Two boys, a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, have been arrested and charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of a gas station employee in the Clinton area early Wednesday, Prince George’s County police said.
Both boys are charged with first-degree murder, assault and related charges in the killing of Isreal Akingbesote, 37, of Mount Rainier, police said.
The 15-year-old, of Clinton, has been charged as an adult, and the 12-year-old, also of Clinton, has been charged as a juvenile, according to police, who did not release the names of either boy. The 15-year-old is in custody at the county Department of Corrections and the 12-year-old is being held at a juvenile detention facility, police said.
“This is a tragic situation,” Prince George’s County Police Chief Malik Aziz said in a news release. “Two juveniles are now in custody for killing Mr. Akingbesote while he was at work. We have seen far too many juveniles committing violent crimes.”
Officers responded to a reported stabbing at about 4:40 a.m. at a gas station in the 9000 block of Woodyard Road, police said. When officers arrived, they found Akingbesote with multiple stab wounds. He was taken to a hospital, where he died, police said.
According to an initial investigation, the boys stabbed Akingbesote during a confrontation with him, after police allege they stole items at the gas station.
Prince George’s County police have arrested seven juveniles this year on murder charges, according to police data. Last year, 13 juveniles in total were arrested and charged with murder, according to the data.
“Committing violent crimes are serious offenses and we intend to do our part in holding accountable anyone, no matter their age, who breaks the law in this county,” Aziz said. | 2022-08-12T20:23:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two boys, 12 and 15, charged in gas station worker’s fatal stabbing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/boys-charged-gas-station-murder/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/boys-charged-gas-station-murder/ |
Agents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago seized 11 sets of classified documents, unsealed filing shows
The search warrant lists potential crimes including mishandling defense information and destruction of records
A Secret Service agent at the entrance of former president Donald Trump's house at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, US, on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2022. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg)
The FBI search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida home earlier this week found four sets of top-secret documents, and seven other sets of less-secret but still classified information, according to a list of items seized in the high-profile raid and unsealed by a federal magistrate judge on Friday.
The written inventory — a document provided by investigators after a search — says the FBI took about 20 boxes of items from the Mar-a-Lago Club on Monday, including photo binders, information about the president of France, and a variety of classified material.
One set of documents is listed as “Various classified TS/SCI documents,” a reference to top secret/sensitive compartmented information, one of the more closely-held forms of top-secret information. In addition to the four sets of top-secret papers, agents also took three sets of documents classified as secret, and three sets of papers classified as confidential — the lowest level of classification.
The list doesn’t further describe the subject matter of any of the classified documents.
The warrant signed by a federal magistrate judge authorized FBI agents to search Trump’s office and any “storage rooms and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by [the former president] and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate.”
The warrant said it is seeking all “physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of three potential crimes, including a part of the Espionage Act outlawing gathering, transmitting, or losing national defense information.” The warrant also cites destruction of records and concealment or mutilation of government material. The contents of the warrant and the inventory were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The status of key investigations involving former president Donald Trump
The Washington Post reported Thursday that FBI agents who carried out the search at Mar-a-Lago were looking for classified documents about nuclear weapons, among other items, according to people familiar with the investigation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case and did not offer additional details, such as whether the documents involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation.
Experts in classified information said the highly unusual search of a former president’s residence underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Mar-a-Lago and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.
In a statement early Friday, Trump called the nuclear weapons issue a “hoax” and suggested the FBI planted evidence, without offering information to indicate such a thing had happened. Trump said agents did not allow his lawyers to be present for the search, which is not unusual in a law enforcement operation, especially if it potentially involves classified items. A second statement by the former president claimed his predecessor, Barack Obama, kept sensitive documents. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!” Trump wrote.
The warrant was made public a day after Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department wanted it unsealed, insisting that officials had scrupulously followed the rules of federal investigations in executing the search and that the public had a right to see the document authorizing them to do so.
Hours after Garland’s announcement, Trump posted on social media that he supported unsealing the documents. He or his lawyers could have shared them anytime since receiving them days ago.
In New York deposition, Trump takes the Fifth more than 400 times
Typically, search warrants speak in broad terms about what is to be searched, the purpose of the search, and the possible crimes being investigated. When the search is completed, investigators provide a list of property seized, but that also tends to be a general description of items, such as papers or boxes, without describing the particulars of what they contain. For most search warrants, the most detailed description of investigators’ suspicions and what they expect to find are provided in an affidavit from the agent requesting the warrant.
In this case, neither the government nor Trump proposed releasing the affidavit, which is likely to contained far more information about the case. But several news organizations have made that request, and the judge overseeing the case has given the government until 5 p.m. Monday to respond to their motions.
The court-approved search of Trump’s caused a political furor, with Trump and many of his Republican defenders accusing the FBI of acting out of politically motivated malice. Some have threatened the agency on social media, and on Thursday, an armed man stormed the security entrance at the FBI building in Cincinnati. Police pursued him and he was eventually shot and killed by police. Authorities are investigating his possible ties to extremist groups, including the Proud Boys.
The Justice Department’s investigation into the Mar-a-Lago documents began months ago, when the National Archives and Records Administration sought the return of material taken there from the White House. Fifteen boxes of documents and items, some of them marked classified.
This spring, Trump’s team received a grand jury subpoena in connection with the documents investigations, two people familiar with the investigation, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details, confirmed to The Post on Thursday. Investigators visited Mar-a-Lago in the weeks following the issuance of the subpoena, and Trump’s team handed over some materials.
Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts have said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said. | 2022-08-12T20:23:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FBI's Trump Mar-a-Lago search yielded 11 sets classified documents, filing shows - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/12/trump-warrant-release/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/12/trump-warrant-release/ |
Singer-songwriter Michelle Branch was arrested Friday and charged with domestic violence in a dispute with an ex-husband. (Metropolitan Nashville Police Department)
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Michelle Branch was arrested and charged with domestic assault Thursday, Nashville police said.
Branch, 39, admitted to slapping her ex-husband Patrick Carney, 42, in the face “one to two times” after police were called to their home for a possible domestic disturbance early Thursday morning, according to Nashville court documents.
The arrest came shortly after Branch announced her divorce from Carney, her husband of three years and drummer for the Black Keys. Branch and Carney have two children, Rhys James and Willie Jacquet.
Branch is well known for her early 2000s albums “The Spirit Room” and “Hotel Paper.” She won a Grammy for best pop collaboration with vocals in 2003 for rock band Santana’s song “The Game of Love.” She was also nominated for three other Grammys for best new artist in that same year, the rock song “Are You Happy Now?” in 2004 and “Leave the Pieces” with country artist Jessica Harp in 2007. | 2022-08-12T20:32:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Singer Michelle Branch is arrested, charged with domestic assault - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/12/singer-michelle-branch-arrested-charged-with-domestic-assault/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/12/singer-michelle-branch-arrested-charged-with-domestic-assault/ |
Economists believe that household inflation expectations can be self-fulfilling prophecies, and a recent survey is sending mixed signals. A new report from the University of Michigan on Friday showed that short-term inflation expectations are receding while longer-term ones are mounting. But it’s best to ignore the month-to-month volatility and focus on the big picture: Both readings are too high, and they’re likely to keep the Federal Reserve aggressive in its fight against rising prices.
Respondents in the university’s consumer sentiment survey now expect prices to rise 5% over the next year, down slightly from 5.2% in the previous report, according to preliminary results released Friday. In the long run, respondents expect prices to rise 3% over the next five to 10 years, up from 2.9% previously.
Which number matters?
Actually, both. Understandably, economists and Fed policy makers tend to focus on longer-run inflation expectations as a measure of whether expectations are well anchored. Fed Chair Jerome Powell famously cited an upward shift in University of Michigan long-term inflation expectations as part of his justification for the central bank’s first 75-basis-point interest-rate increase in June. (That number — a preliminary reading like Friday’s — was eventually revised down, prompting significant criticism of Powell’s decision-making process in that episode.)
Friday’s slight uptick in the longer-term reading matters for markets insofar as it influences Powell’s thinking, but it could well prove to be another blip in the small and relatively volatile survey. In theory, rising long-term inflation expectations suggest a loss of confidence that the Fed will get inflation under control, and that shift in inflation psychology can ultimately beget more inflation as people move up purchases out of a fear that goods and services will be much more expensive later. They may also influence workers’ wage expectations and contribute to a wage-price spiral, in which companies are forced to pay more for labor and offset the costs by raising prices.
For their part, short-term inflation expectations get short shrift in policy discussions because they’re much more volatile. It takes a sustained period of higher prices — and higher short-term inflation expectations — for longer-term expectations to move higher. Yet new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco this week showed, in particular, that the shorter-term expectations are actually a greater determiner of wage growth than longer-term ones. Indeed, wages have lagged inflation by a significant margin in the past year, and workers fearing another year of inflation may demand significant raises. There’s some continuing debate about the typical size of the pass-through impact from inflation expectations to wage expectations (see this recent Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland working paper, which found pass through was somewhat small). But all in all, the drop in short-term inflation expectations is significant and deserves as much attention as the minor uptick in longer-term ones.
Of course, interpreting inflation expectations is complicated and perilous even when the numbers are consistent with each another. Economists still haven’t mastered how best to track them reliably, and evidence shows that survey responses tend to focus on volatile food and energy prices, not the broad and representative basket of consumer goods that encompasses the main inflation indexes. Even the concept of inflation is poorly understood by the general public, and survey data often feature wildly off-the-mark responses. In the most recent survey, 15% of respondents thought prices would go up by 15% or more, while 8% predicted deflation.
One encouraging development is that several different surveys are now confirming one another in showing declining short-term inflation expectations. The New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations showed this month that expectations are dropping, while an internet survey from Morning Consult, in conjunction with researchers from the Cleveland Fed, shows “indirect” inflation expectations have been declining for weeks. Importantly, the Morning Consult survey attempts to address some of the inherent challenges of measuring inflation expectations by attacking the question in a novel way, asking consumers how much their income would have to increase to buy the same amount of goods and services in a year. In a broad sense, however, the readings remain among the highest of the past four decades. The longer they stay there, the greater the risk that consumers will start to believe that unstable prices have truly reached a point of no return. | 2022-08-12T20:32:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Short or Long, Inflation Expectations Are Too High - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/short-or-long-inflation-expectations-are-too-high/2022/08/12/fa75ef1c-1a75-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/short-or-long-inflation-expectations-are-too-high/2022/08/12/fa75ef1c-1a75-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Federal court reinstates ban on new coal sales on public land
A Montana judge said the Trump administration’s environmental analysis was flawed and ordered leasing temporarily suspended.
A haul truck with a 250-ton capacity carries coal after being loaded from a nearby mechanized shovel at the Spring Creek strip mine near Decker, Mont on Nov. 15, 2016. (Matthew Brown/AP)
A federal judge on Friday ordered the Interior Department to put on hold the issuing of new coal leases, handing a victory to climates advocates who for years have fought to restore an Obama-era moratorium on coal mining on federal land.
In his ruling, Judge Brian Morris of the United States District Court of the District of Montana wrote that under the Trump administration, the department failed to study the full environmental effects of permitting more mining, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
Morris’s order reinstates a 2016 freeze on new federal coal lease sales, which President Donald Trump lifted two months after taking office. The move was part of the Trump’s effort to fulfill his campaign promise to promote American production of coal, which won miners’ support.
Friday’s order leaves it to the Biden administration to decide whether to issue a new environmental analysis, which would be required to resume the issuing of leases. An Interior spokesperson said the department is reviewing the decision.
Lawyers for the federal government have previously declined to defend the Obama administration’s coal mining ban. Instead, they argued that environmentalists’ lawsuit, filed in 2017, should be dismissed on technical grounds.
Under Biden, the Interior Department hasn’t sold new coal leases and demand has fallen. But there are applications pending before the agency. And last year, the administration launched a formal review of the federal coal leasing program’s effects on climate change.
U.S. emissions surged in 2021, putting the nation further off track from its climate targets
Climate advocates have argued that banning coal mining on federal land is an important step to slow down climate change.
Burning coal results in higher levels of pollution, and though renewable energy and natural gas have begun to replace coal use across the country, it still has a significant foothold in America’s power sector. Last year, a 17 percent surge in coal-fired electricity helped drive an overall increase of 6.2 percent in greenhouse gas emissions compared with the previous year, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group.
Jenny Harbine, a senior attorney for the advocacy group Earthjustice, said that given coal’s significant contribution to global warming, it would be difficult for the Biden administration to make the case for new leasing. She called on the administration to end all coal mining on public land.
“This decision is a victory in that it prevents the administration from continuing to lease coal from our federal public lands,” Harbine said. “But it’s a small step in the big picture of what this administration needs to do to make good on its commitments to confront the climate crisis.” | 2022-08-12T20:33:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Federal court reinstates ban on new coal sales on public land - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/court-coal-moratorium/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/12/court-coal-moratorium/ |
What the Chips bill left undone on China
President Biden leaves after speaking Jan. 21 at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington about Intel's announcement to invest in an Ohio chip-making facility. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
After two years of work, Congress finally passed a bill to give $77 billion to the semiconductor industry and authorize (but not actually fund) hundreds of billions more in domestic research and development. The bill, while not perfect, is on the whole a wise investment. But when it comes to competing with China, the mission is far from accomplished.
When President Biden signed the bill Tuesday, he said it would prevent China from dominating the semiconductor market and create American jobs. The bill’s supporters also argue that boosting domestic semiconductor manufacturing benefits national security by reducing the U.S. military’s dependence on foreign chips.
“The Chinese Communist Party actively lobbied against this legislation because they know this bill is bad for China and good for the United States,” said Sen. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.) on Tuesday. He and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) were the main sponsors of the legislation, which garnered 64 votes in the Senate.
While it’s true Beijing urged Congress not to pass the legislation, the final version of the bill is not as tough on China as the Chinese government might have feared. That’s because lawmakers ultimately failed to address several issues related to China’s malign behavior.
“The Chips funding and Science Act provisions are important initiatives to enhance U.S. competitiveness,” said Michael Wessel, commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USSC), which is charged with overseeing the economic relationship between the United States and China. “But we have to do much more to address the China challenge.”
Several administration officials and lawmakers told me that the final bill, which was largely written behind closed doors after a convoluted legislative process, was the best Congress could do in this caustic political environment.
The new law’s $52.7 billion in grants and loans and $24 billion in tax breaks for semiconductor companies such as Intel and Qualcomm comes with few strings attached.
Biden insisted there were strong “guardrails” in the measure that would prevent tech firms from reinvesting funds in China, thereby undercutting the competitive goals of the bill. But many Republican senators called it a slush fund for the semiconductor industry. Said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), “It’s going to cause more inflation, more debt, and create more deficits. There is no accountability, it doesn’t make any sense.”
Tech industry lobbyists opposed stronger restrictions on the Chips money and fought against a bipartisan push to institute a system for reviewing American investments in China to ensure U.S. corporations don’t subsidize Chinese military gains. Several congressional officials told me that lawmakers friendly to Wall Street would not go along with such a review process. Administration officials said that the Biden administration supported including an “outbound investment” review and will turn to additional oversight by the Commerce Department, instead.
Several other good ideas in the House and Senate versions of the bill failed to make the final version. The House bill included provisions to increase visas for Hong Kong residents with advanced skills, to take advantage of the brain drain leaving China. Also dropped were several measures that would have helped American workers hurt by China’s unfair trade practices and closed loopholes that allow Chinese exporters to avoid U.S. taxes.
The USCC’s 2021 report identified other areas where the United States needs to up its economic game against China, including requiring greater transparency and accountability of Chinese firms that raise money in U.S. capital markets, tightening export controls and cracking down on Chinese espionage and influence operations that seek to buy off U.S. researchers and steal technology.
To be sure, each of these additional measures is politically controversial. Republicans see expansion of any immigration regulations as odious and have resisted certain trade reforms. Both parties also have members who see any crackdown on China’s relationship with Wall Street as a nonstarter.
In the meantime, the onus is on the Biden administration to tighten the screws. The White House can do a lot through executive orders to increase oversight of U.S. investments in China and thwart China’s attempts to dominate entire technology sectors in the 21st century. All it needs is the will to do so.
The political upsides for Biden are clear. Most voters support tougher relations with Beijing. The White House seems to realize (belatedly) that reducing tariffs on China sends the wrong signal for no benefit. Beijing has rejected all of the administration’s attempts to sit down and negotiate on these issues.
Fabricating more semiconductors here at home is long overdue and will have many benefits. But it doesn’t get us far in dealing with the broader economic threat from Beijing. China’s predatory investing, unfair trade practices and technological expansion are increasing. The vital effort to protect our economic and national security from China’s aggression must continue, and both parties must join the fight. | 2022-08-12T20:33:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The chips bill is important. But much remains to be done - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/chips-bill-china-semiconductors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/chips-bill-china-semiconductors/ |
Compromising on Beach Drive
Beach Drive just north of Joyce Road in Rock Creek Park. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
I strongly agree with the Aug. 9 editorial “Time to reopen Beach Drive?” that there might be merit to a compromise, balancing recreation opportunities with those of neighborhood traffic impacts that might be felt by the permanent closure of upper Beach Drive. As a retired urban planner and former member and chair of the Chevy Chase DC Advisory Neighborhood Commission, I endorse the National Park Service’s preferred action. It would keep Beach Drive open to vehicular traffic during the workweek, Labor Day to Memorial Day; and it would close Beach Drive during the summer as well as on weekends and holidays, as has long been the case.
I live three-quarters of a mile west of Rock Creek Park. My definite concern with permanent closure is that significant adjacent neighborhood traffic impacts could very well develop. D.C. Department of Transportation ancillary studies in 2021 and 2022 are comprehensive and replete with data indicating the impacts that could occur east and west of Rock Creek Park. My analysis of this data suggests that these impacts would particularly be felt east of Rock Creek Park.
No doubt there are two important and conflicting points of view on this matter. A compromise is needed. I sense, from its July 18 public hearing, that the National Park Service is willing to engage in the same.
Lee Schoenecker, Washington | 2022-08-12T20:33:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Compromising on Beach Drive - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/compromising-beach-drive/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/compromising-beach-drive/ |
A Russian serviceman patrols the territory of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in Energodar on May 1. (Andrey Borodulin/AFP)
But the dangers are very real. If the war — say an errant artillery barrage — caused a disruption in the water cooling or electric systems and backup generators did not work, the fuel rods in the reactors could rapidly heat up, leading to the first stage of a nuclear meltdown. Ukraine took steps to strengthen nuclear plant security after the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan, but they may be insufficient to protect against a full-fledged war. A second vulnerability is the spent nuclear fuel. According to Reuters, a 2017 report to the International Atomic Energy Agency showed there were 3,354 spent fuel assemblies at the dry facility and around 1,984 assemblies in water pools, a total of more than 2,200 tons of nuclear material, not including the reactors. Should a bomb or artillery shell cut the water coolant, the threat would again be evaporation, rapid heating and possibly fire, spewing radioactive material into the environment, or an explosion that ripped open fuel rods, dispersing the uranium. | 2022-08-12T20:34:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A disaster is looming at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-war-zone-disaster/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-war-zone-disaster/ |
This photo provided by the Arizona Governor’s Office shows shipping containers that will be used to fill a 1,000 foot gap in the border wall with Mexico near Yuma, Ariz., on Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. Two will be stacked atop each other and then topped with razor wire to slow migrants from crossing into Arizona. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey acted without federal permission and plans to fill three gaps totaling 3,000 feet in the coming weeks. (Arizona Governor’s Office via AP) (Uncredited/Arizona Governor’s Office) | 2022-08-12T20:34:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Arizona won't wait for feds, starts filling border wall gaps - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/arizona-wont-wait-for-feds-starts-filling-border-wall-gaps/2022/08/12/5e47cc30-1a72-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/arizona-wont-wait-for-feds-starts-filling-border-wall-gaps/2022/08/12/5e47cc30-1a72-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
By Will Hobson
Former NFL players Ken Jenkins, right, and Clarence Vaughn III, center right, along with their wives, Amy Lewis, center, and Brooke Vaughn, left, carry petitions to the federal courthouse in Philadelphia. (Matt Rourke/AP)
More than 300 Black former NFL players originally denied payments from the league’s massive concussion settlement now qualify for money or league-funded medical treatment, according to a report filed in federal court on Friday, following the elimination of controversial “race-norming” from the settlement.
The report, produced by the law firm that handles claims for the NFL, summarized the initial impact of last year’s removal of race-norming from the cognitive tests players must take to determine if they qualify for the settlement awards.
The use of race-norming in the NFL concussion settlement first came to light in a lawsuit filed by two former players in 2020, and while the league and the lead lawyer for players in the case initially disputed allegations of racial bias, both sides eventually agreed to modify the case’s testing protocol in an effort to make it race-neutral.
Out of 646 Black former players who had their test results rescored using the new system, 61 qualified for new or increased settlement payments, according to the report. Another 246 former players qualified for a pre-dementia diagnosis, the report shows, which will earn them NFL-funded medical treatment. Most of those players are expected to eventually qualify for settlement payments ranging from more than $25,000 to more than $5 million, depending on factors including age and length of NFL career.
How ‘race-norming’ was built into the NFL concussion settlement
The NFL and Brad Karp, the league’s lead attorney on the concussion settlement, did not reply to requests for comment Friday. In a statement, Chris Seeger, lead lawyer for players in the settlement, hailed the changes to the test-scoring protocol, as well as the broader settlement.
"Our focus in implementing this rescoring process has been to provide more retired players and their families with critical benefits, increase their access to information, and ensure greater equity and transparency going forward," Seeger said. "With the settlement just crossing $1 billion in approved claims, we believe it will continue to be a lifeline for former NFL players for the decades to come.”
Race-norming is a controversial practice that assumes Black people perform worse on many common tests of cognition. It originated in the late 1990s, devised by doctors aiming to prevent the misdiagnosis of brain injury or disease in otherwise healthy people from underprivileged backgrounds. When cognitive test scores are race-normed, they are essentially curved using software or a series of calculations that take into account a person’s race. Other demographic factors are also commonly considered when curving cognitive test scores, such as age, gender, and education level.
In regular clinical work, doctors can choose whether to apply race norms to the test results of their patients. In a lawsuit filed against the NFL in 2020, however, former players Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport accused the league of requiring doctors to race-norm all scores from Black players seeking settlement payments, making it harder for Black players to qualify.
The league denied the allegations, and the federal judge overseeing the settlement dismissed the case. The judge directed lawyers for the NFL and Seeger to examine the issue, however, and last year the sides negotiated the removal of race norms from the settlement’s evaluation process.
The figures released in Friday’s report are not the final tally of the impact of the removal of race norms. More than 2,400 other players whose claims may have been affected by race-norming can still go through the settlement’s medical evaluation again, to see if they now qualify, and hundreds more were in the process of being evaluated when these changes were implemented.
Finalized in 2017, the NFL concussion settlement resolved a class-action lawsuit involving thousands of former players who alleged the league failed to protect them from concussions and hid evidence of the long-term risks of playing professional football. While admitting no wrongdoing, the NFL agreed to pay settlements to any member of the class of more than 20,000 former players who was diagnosed with one of a series of neurological conditions, including dementia, ALS and Alzheimer’s disease.
Through late July, more than 1,400 former players had qualified for payments under the settlement, according to Friday’s report, costing the NFL nearly $990 million. | 2022-08-12T20:34:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With ‘race-norming’ out of concussion case, Black NFL retirees get awards - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/nfl-race-norming-settlements/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/nfl-race-norming-settlements/ |
Dynamic on paper, Commanders receivers have plenty to prove on the field
Commanders receivers Dyami Brown, left, Terry McLaurin, center, and Jahan Dotson line up during training camp at the team's facility. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Terry McLaurin has signed a onesie for a baby that has yet to be born. He’s been asked to sign kids’ shoes and jerseys and towels and footballs and virtually any memorabilia anyone could think of at training camp. And oh, the selfies. So many selfies.
McLaurin is, by all accounts, a face of the Washington Commanders, especially after he signed a three-year contract extension worth about $71 million in the offseason.
Across the NFL, receivers have been paid handsomely this year, and 14 of them now earn at least $20 million in average annual salary. McLaurin, a former third-round pick whom some analysts viewed as a future special-teamer, has joined the top talent at his position — and he’s also the top talent among a receiving corps some have described as one of the best to come through Washington.
On paper.
Though everything comes back to the quarterback, as Coach Ron Rivera has said, the Commanders have turned their receiving corps into a group loaded with potential and talent. As the team prepares for its first preseason game against the Carolina Panthers on Saturday, many will be looking to see if that potential can lead to production.
“Each guy brings something different to the table,” Rivera said of the wideouts. “Each guy’s done some pretty unique things … [in] camp. And again, it is one of those tough things that we will still have to see how they play to help make up our minds. These three games will be really important to a lot of guys.”
Shortly after Washington traded for Carson Wentz, Rivera stressed the importance of surrounding the quarterback with a stout offensive line and dynamic playmakers. Rivera believes the line, with coach John Matsko’s teachings, will be deep and consistent, much like last season. The group of tight ends is intriguing, with Logan Thomas, John Bates and Cole Turner — if they can get healthy. The running backs room is well-rounded, with rookie Brian Robinson Jr. joining starter Antonio Gibson and veteran J.D. McKissic.
And the Commanders wideouts have size and speed. They can flex out wide and move inside to the slot and catch passes out of the backfield. But that was the case last season, too, and as injuries and covid-19, among other things, ravaged the roster, only McLaurin and former slot receiver Adam Humphries averaged more than two catches per game.
This year, the emphasis is the same, but the hope is for a different result.
“I think it was definitely an emphasis to have as many weapons on our offense as possible,” McLaurin said. “And when you have a lot of versatile guys — like, we have young nucleus guys who are hungry but humble — I think it’s really cool to be a part of a group like that.
“If you get pigeonholed into ‘this guy can only play this, this guy can only play that,’ it hurts not only the player, but it hurts the offense and the team. So I think we’re just trying to breed that competitiveness in our room and come out here and make plays and give Carson as many options as possible to throw the football.”
Washington’s top three receivers are already set, barring injury or some other roster-altering event; McLaurin, Curtis Samuel and rookie Jahan Dotson make up the core group. Veterans Cam Sims and Dyami Brown have so far rounded out the top five.
The final spots will depend partly on the health and needs elsewhere on the roster. Dax Milne and Alex Erickson are competing for the returner job, and one or both could secure a receiver spots based on their special teams play. Or maybe Kelvin Harmon or Marken Michel will put on a strong showing in preseason and make it too difficult for the team to leave him off the initial 53-man roster.
“Marken is a guy that’s a professional, that understands how to do things, how to practice, how to prepare,” Rivera said. “It is interesting because he’s a very savvy guy, and for him, it’s just about getting the opportunity more so than anything else. … I hope we can get an opportunity or two for him during the preseason. I hope he gets a lot of opportunities, and hopefully he can show us what he’s capable of doing.”
Washington’s healthy starters are expected to play 15 to 20 snaps against the Panthers — just enough to get a feel for another defense and their own offense.
As Rivera and his staff evaluate the receivers and find the best candidates for those final roster spots later this month, much of his analysis will be tied to the quarterback.
Wentz has drawn criticism for his inconsistency during camp, but Rivera said he’ll be looking for communication and timing, for the quarterback to make the right reads, for the receivers to run the right routes and for the offense as a whole to come together.
Throughout camp, Wentz has been seen talking with his receivers on the sideline about certain reps and nuances of the offense. He’ll often go over to a receiver after an incompletion to discuss what might’ve gone wrong. Being in sync over the littlest details during preseason will determine roster spots, and for some, it will serve as a gauge after dealing with injury or time off.
Samuel, who played only 84 snaps over five games last season because of groin and hamstring injuries, is expected to play Saturday. Though he’s seemingly a lock to make the team, as one of the top wideouts, he too will be scrutinized for his route running and timing.
Rivera noted one rep during camp in which Samuel was attempting to time out a ball across the middle with Wentz. He was trying to get a feel for the quarterback, and vice versa.
“But when you watch him, you watch him get from one zone to the other, impacting the defense as he goes through,” Rivera said. “I mean, you have to pay attention to his speed, and it causes certain things to happen with the defenses. Then when you see him with the ball in his hand, you see just how dynamic he is.” | 2022-08-12T20:34:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Commanders receivers look to turn their talent into on-field production - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/washington-commanders-receivers-terry-mclaurin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/washington-commanders-receivers-terry-mclaurin/ |
Paraguay vice president blacklisted by U.S. for corruption to resign
Paraguay's President Mario Abdo Benítez and Vice President Hugo Velazquez are pictured at the National Congress in Asuncion in November 2018, when they presented bills aimed at fighting money laundering, terrorism and organized crime. (Norberto Duarte/AFP/Getty Images)
Paraguay’s vice president, a candidate in the country’s presidential elections next year, announced his resignation on Friday after U.S. officials blacklisted him for alleged “significant acts of corruption.”
The news has thrust the South American nation into a moment of political uncertainty, fostering a lack of trust in the government in the midst of an electoral season, analysts and officials said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Friday morning that the United States had included Vice President Hugo Adalberto Velázquez Moreno on a corruption list for his alleged role in, among other things, offering a bribe to a public official and interfering in public proceedings. The U.S. government also included on the list Juan Carlos “Charly” Duarte Martínez, a close associate of the vice president.
At Velázquez’s request, Duarte allegedly offered a bribe of more than $1 million to a public official to obstruct an investigation that threatened the vice president’s financial interests, Marc Ostfield, U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, said in a news conference Friday. Ostfield described it as “an act consistent with an apparent pattern of shared corrupt activity.”
The designations mean that Velázquez, Duarte and their immediate family members are barred from entering the United States.
“The corrupt acts of Velázquez and Duarte undermine the confidence of the Paraguayan people in the stability of Paraguay’s democratic institutions,” Ostfield said.
Prosecutor on his honeymoon is gunned down by hit men at beach
Following the announcement, Velázquez told a local radio station he was withdrawing his candidacy for president and planned to resign as vice president next week. He denied the U.S. government’s accusations, which he said “fell like a bucket of cold water,” especially given his frequent rhetoric about fighting organized crime.
He said he made the decision to resign to defend himself and clear his name as a “common citizen.”
Paraguayan President Mario Abdo Benítez told reporters on Friday that the news “surprised all of us.”
“I say this with pain, because he’s a friend,” the president said, “But I congratulate him for his mature attitude in prioritizing the interests and the construction of credibility in our nation.”
Duarte also serves as legal counsel for the Yacyretá Bi-National Entity, which operates the Yacyretá Dam that is jointly owned by Paraguay and Argentina.
“Duarte’s act of corruption abused and exploited his powerful and privileged public position within the Yacyretá Bi-National Entity, risking public confidence in one of Paraguay’s most vital economic assets,” Blinken said in a statement released by the State Department.
Ostfield said the decision was not political, and that the United States planned to continue to work closely with Paraguayan President Mario Abdo Benítez on several issues, including the fight against corruption and impunity, as well as against money laundering.
Late last month, the State Department also designated former Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes for allegedly obstructing “a major international investigation into transnational crime in order to protect himself and his criminal associate from potential prosecution and political damage,” according to a news release.
The string of allegations comes just months after the brazen killing of Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci roiled the South American country, a nation of about 7 million people landlocked between Brazil and Argentina. Pecci was with his new wife, celebrating their honeymoon in a resort in Cartagena, Colombia, when hit men rode up on personal watercraft and opened fire on Pecci.
In June, Colombian authorities sentenced four people to prison after they confessed to participating in the killing. Authorities say the slaying of the prosecutor, who was known for investigating organized crime in Latin America, was connected to international drug trafficking groups.
Sebastián Acha, a political analyst and former Paraguayan lawmaker, said the U.S. government’s blacklisting confirmed suspicions held by many Paraguayans for a long time. But the news, combined with other recent corruption accusations and the killing of Pecci, has shaken the country’s trust in its democratic institutions.
“What it clearly tells us, and what we need to take very seriously,” he said, “is that the justice system is infiltrated by corruption at the very highest levels.” | 2022-08-12T20:35:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Paraguay Vice President Hugo Velázquez to resign after inclusion on U.S. corruption list - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/12/hugo-velazquez-paraguay-corruption-vice-president/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/12/hugo-velazquez-paraguay-corruption-vice-president/ |
Joy Billington Doty, veteran Washington Star reporter, dies at 91
She covered first ladies, society news, Embassy Row functions and visiting dignitaries until the newspaper closed in 1981
By Patricia Sullivan
Journalist Joy Billington Doty circa 2012 at her son’s home in Sos, France. She was a longtime reporter for the Washington Star before the newspaper closed in 1981. (Nigel Billington)
Joy Billington Doty, a British-born journalist who worked at the Washington Star from 1967 until the paper folded in 1981 and covered first ladies, society news, Embassy Row functions and visiting dignitaries, died Aug. 11 at her home in Washington. She was 91.
Her son, Nigel Billington, confirmed the death but said the exact cause was not yet known.
During her six decades as a writer, starting as a stringer for a Singapore newspaper, Ms. Doty interviewed five American presidents and their wives, the kings of Jordan and Thailand, and the last emperor of Japan, as well as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and child film star-turned-diplomat Shirley Temple Black.
“I like interviewing people. I like to do scenes that describe an evening at the White House and make people feel as if they were there,” she said in a 2005 interview for this obituary. She also liked prompting world leaders to expose a bit of their humanity.
“Indira Gandhi confessed to me, ‘It’s not easy riding a tiger,’ ” Ms. Doty said of the former Indian prime minister. “I felt a lot of sympathy for the difficulty she had” with male world leaders.
The oldest of three children, she was born Joy Manson in Liverpool, England, on March 20, 1931, to a merchant seaman and a nurse. She was 9 when she was supposed to sail to Canada as part of a plan to evacuate British children during World War II. She had an outbreak of hives and missed boarding the SS City of Benares, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1940. Seventy of the 90 children aboard died.
Eventually, her mother spirited her and her two siblings to Scotland for the duration of the war. At 18, she was so upset that her father was moving the family to Perth, Australia — when she wanted to attend art school — that she threatened unsuccessfully to marry a Royal Marine.
In Australia, she found herself restless and lost. “My parents put me in a hospital and said, ‘Be a nurse,’ ” she later told the Fort Lauderdale News. Her constant battle of wills with the head nurse led to her leaving.
On a ship to Singapore, she met a female reporter who suggested she earn money as a stringer for the Singapore Standard. “At the tender age of 21,” she told the News, “I became a lovelorn columnist … ‘Dear Georgeanne.’ ” She also married an import-export executive, Reginald Billington, and had a son.
They subsequently lived in British North Borneo (now the Malaysian state of Sabah) and in Thailand, where she did press work for the U.S. Information Agency and freelanced. She divorced and moved back to England in 1964, writing for suburban papers and eventually as a freelancer for the women’s pages of the Times of London.
Ms. Doty first came to the United States in 1967 to report stories for the Times and the London Daily Telegraph on notable American women in business and politics. Captivated by her access to first lady Lady Bird Johnson on a trip to Appalachia, she decided to stay and soon joined the Star as a society reporter.
Around that time, she met the Rev. Joseph Doty, a Jesuit priest and the headmaster of Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Md. After they married in 1969, Rev. Doty was automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church. He became an Episcopal priest.
“I love the Catholic Church and I always will, but I felt I needed more freedom to think out religious positions than I could have in the Roman Church,” he said at the time. (He later became chaplain of the National Cathedral School for Girls in Washington and headmaster of St. Stephen’s School in Alexandria, Va.)
After the Star closed, Ms. Doty wrote about the Reagan White House for the San Diego Union before moving to Scotland in 1985 for her husband’s next church assignment. He died in 2003. In addition to her son, Nigel, of Nérac, France, survivors include a sister. | 2022-08-12T20:37:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Joy Billington Doty, veteran Washington Star reporter, dies at 91 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/12/journalist-joy-billington-doty-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/12/journalist-joy-billington-doty-dead/ |
A continuing miscarriage of justice
The Aug. 9 Metro article “Still in prison despite pardon” was just one more example of what happens when the justice system goes wrong.
Vince Gilmer, a well-loved, compassionate physician, shocked his community near Asheville, N.C., when he strangled his father in 2004. He was sentenced to life in prison, a place he never should have gone. According to the book “The Other Dr. Gilmer,” it was glaringly obvious at his trial in Abingdon, Va., where Mr. Gilmer represented himself, that he was mentally impaired. At the time, he was in the beginning stages of Huntington’s disease and had suffered a traumatic brain injury during a traffic accident. He didn’t get the medical help he needed in prison. Now, thanks to the intervention of others, he was pardoned in January on the condition that he find an appropriate treatment facility.
But in his condition, he is unable to secure such a place, and government and prison officials haven’t offered much help. Hopefully, this article will draw attention to his situation and set the gears in motion for his release to a treatment facility.
Jo Ann (Gilmer) Tooley, Arlington | 2022-08-12T20:45:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A continuing miscarriage of justice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/continuing-miscarriage-justice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/continuing-miscarriage-justice/ |
Why tackling drought is a significant part of Democrats’ economic package
Boaters are shown in front of the Boulder Islands in Boulder Basin on July 28, 2022 in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
There are a lot of ways to measure climate change, but one of the most jarring involves counting corpses. Not corpses of those people killed by the effects of the warming planet — increased flooding, heat exhaustion, larger storms — but of those killed long ago and hidden where no one would ever find them, like at the bottom of Lake Mead.
Until drought powered by climate change shrinks Lake Mead so much that what was once its bottom becomes its shore.
So far, the contraction of Lake Mead as water levels fall this year has resulted in four bodies being found. There may be more; it’s hard to say. But this weird, grim statistic is an effective way of demonstrating the point. The world is changing — even if only temporarily — in ways that we would not have expected.
The drought that’s emptying Lake Mead has gripped a substantial portion of the Southwest. We expect states like Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico to be dry, but those are now unusually dry by their own standards. Which is why it’s not really a surprise that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), as she advocated for changes to the Inflation Reduction Act that is soon headed to President Biden’s desk, insisted on including a $4 billion allocation for addressing drought.
As you’re probably aware, the Inflation Reduction Act is pointedly named but broad in scope. There’s a significant investment in policies and spending that aim at reducing the production of greenhouse gases, helping the fight to control global warming over the long term. But as Lake Mead demonstrates, the effects of that warming are already here.
The National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln operates a tool called the Drought Monitor. Each week, it evaluates the extent of drought across the country in maps and data. In the two decades that the assessments cover, you can readily see how both the spread and scale of drought has increased: more places affected; worse drought.
Below, for example, are the Drought Monitor’s depictions of the first or second week of August in each of the last 22 years. The current map is at bottom.
It is absolutely the case that drought is not progressing arithmetically forward. That is, it’s not the case that drought is getting more common and more widespread each year. Next year could be modest. It’s hard to predict, which is part of the challenge.
But using the Drought Monitor’s county-level data, we can see how much of the country’s population has been affected by at least four weeks of drought in any given year. From 2000 to 2004, for example, an average of 46 percent of the population was not affected by drought; about 4 percent of the population experienced at least four weeks of exceptional drought. From 2020 to this year, an average of 39 percent of the population lives in places not affected by at least four weeks of drought, while 1 in 9, on average, live in a place that’s been affected by exceptional drought for at least four weeks.
Again, this shifts. In 2000, it was the Southeast that saw more exceptional drought. In recent years, it’s been more likely to be Western states from California to Texas. In some years, no counties saw exceptional drought. In others, hundreds did.
The Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t solve this problem with a wave of a magic wand. Instead, it creates a fund that can shift the economics of water, an increasingly complicated enterprise. Places needing to conserve water could, for example, pay farmers to offset crop loss from using less water for irrigation. In essence, it’s a very old-school sort of solution: Use the deep pockets of the federal government to solve local problems (which is why various senators from the region are claiming credit for it). That’s how global warming often works: It creates thousands of evolving local problems in addition to continental ones.
Once the bill becomes law, it will aim to refill Lake Mead over the short term by providing an economic backstop to reduce drawdown of the lake’s water and over the long term by addressing climate change broadly. Finding bodies in newly exposed areas of lakes is titillating, but the country is better served by having those secrets remain hidden deep beneath enormous amounts of water.
The latest: Wisconsin’s GOP fires election investigator who pushed false fraud claims | 2022-08-12T21:07:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why tackling drought is a significant part of Democrats’ economic package - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/democrats-economic-package-drought/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/democrats-economic-package-drought/ |
Supporters of Iraq's Coordination Framework set up tents after announcing a sit-in outside Baghdad's high-security Green Zone, on Aug. 12. (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)
BAGHDAD— Rival protesters took to Iraq’s streets Friday as their leaders vied for political dominance, just ten months after a U.S.-backed election that was meant to heal the country’s fractures left many more exposed.
The aftermath of those polls has forced years-long tensions to the surface. In a country where elites rule by consensus, rival Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni politicians have been unable to agree on key government appointments. The election’s biggest winner, powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, has withdrawn his parliamentarians from the process, sending his supporters instead to occupy the leafy grounds of the legislature.
As dusk approached Friday, Sadr’s supporters gathered in provinces across the country and outside the parliament to echo his demands. But they were not alone. Several miles away, near Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, thousands of foot soldiers for the cleric’s rivals, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and leaders of armed groups linked to Iran, gathered too, protesting what they described as a “political coup” by Sadr.
“We’ll stay as long as it takes,” said Ali Hassan, a 30-year-old government employee from Baghdad. “The people know our demands, and they know that they are legitimate.”
Iraq's wildcard cleric upends politics as summer heat descends
Locked out of that system are millions of ordinary Iraqis who have seen little benefit from the nation’s immense oil wealth. Hospitals are crumbling, the education system is among the worst in the region. For three days last week, as a heat wave pushed temperatures past 125 degrees, three southern provinces failed to even keep the lights on, as the extreme heat pushed an already shaky power grid to the breaking point.
Iraq broils in dangerous 120 degree heat as power grid shuts down
But the atmosphere was festive outside Baghdad’s parliament on Friday as young men in black T-shirts streamed through the streets carrying photographs of Sadr and his father, a revered cleric killed by dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.
A tinny loudspeaker blasted music through the air as bands of protesters sang and swayed, others enjoyed free kebabs or large chunks of melon. “We’re here to dissolve the parliament and to stand with Sayeed Moqtada’s demands,” said Hassan al-Iraqi, a religious studies student in his thirties who said that he had made the five hour journey from the northern city of Mosul.
Sadr derives his strength in part from millions of impoverished supporters who view him as a sacred figure of storied lineage, and as someone who has resisted occupation and injustice. For weeks, he has used his Twitter account to praise his supporters’ efforts on the streets, likening their efforts to a “revolution.”
The messages have been received with a mix of excitement and reverence, as bands of teenagers pass around cellphones to read his posts.
By nightfall Friday, politicians from the opposing bloc were tweeting statements in praise of their own supporters too.
Maliki called the rallies “massive” and peaceful.
“Today you have brought joy to the hearts of Iraqis,” wrote Qais al-Khazali, a Shiite cleric aligned with Maliki. “The martyr Muhandis is all happy when he sees his sons defending Iraq and the interest of the people and the state with courage and awareness,” he wrote, in reference to a powerful militia leader killed alongside Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a January 2020 drone strike ordered by President Donald Trump.
Experts point to that drone strike as a seminal moment in Iraq’s latest unraveling — both of the slain men were pivotal figures in maintaining unity among the country’s now divided Shiite factions.
In Baghdad’s city center, another group also gathered Friday as the heat ebbed and traffic snarled the streets. They were secular activists, and they had planned their own protest in a place etched in the annals of the American invasion: Firdoos Square, where U.S. troops once pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein.
“This whole system was built on a mistake,” said Najad al-Iraqi, an activist, who said he had not voted in a single election since Saddam’s fall. “None of these parties have ever worked for us,” he said. “They’re all corrupt, every one of them.” | 2022-08-12T21:37:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Baghdad gripped by protests as political rivals vie for power - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/12/iraq-protests-election-sadr/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/12/iraq-protests-election-sadr/ |
Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins will miss his team's preseason game Sunday in Las Vegas due to a positive coronavirus test. (Andy Clayton-King/AP)
As NFL teams prepare for their third season since the pandemic began, the coronavirus is mostly forgotten but not entirely gone.
Teams arrived at their training camps last month with no coronavirus protocols in effect and with the virus-related issues of the previous two seasons fading rapidly from memory.
But players, coaches and team staffers quickly have been reminded — with the preseason now underway — that the coronavirus is not quite as absent or inconsequential as everyone would like, and that it remains possible a team could be left suddenly without its quarterback, its head coach or other key personnel for a game once the regular season begins next month.
The latest reminder came Friday when the Minnesota Vikings announced quarterback Kirk Cousins had tested positive for the virus. Cousins will miss the Vikings’ preseason opener Sunday at Las Vegas against the Raiders and is eligible to rejoin the team next week following a five-day isolation period.
“We’re not going to see covid disappear,” Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said in a phone interview Thursday. “We’ve talked all along about trying to learn to coexist with it, and to treat it with the respect and seriousness that it deserves, but also to understand how we can operate.”
Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll missed time during his team’s training camp early this month after testing positive for the virus. Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray also missed time during camp following a positive coronavirus test.
“I’m feeling great,” Carroll said, wearing a mask while speaking at a news conference upon his return to the Seahawks’ camp. “I never did feel really bad. I just had a couple of symptoms that ticked it off, and away we went. So we’ve had to really be cognizant and respectful of everybody else. … We’ve had a lot of experience and a lot of background with this. So we feel like we did it really well.”
Houston Texans quarterback Kyle Allen reportedly is missing a preseason game Saturday because of a positive test. The Vikings confirmed Cousins’s positive test result Friday after saying Thursday that he’d been sent home because of a then-undetermined illness.
The NFL, working mostly collaboratively with the NFL Players Association, implemented strict protocols — including extensive testing, stringent mask-wearing requirements and the use of electronic tracking devices to assist with contact tracing — to play complete seasons in 2020 and 2021. Some games were postponed, but none was canceled entirely. Teams faced competitive disadvantages resulting from isolations from positive tests or quarantines based on contact tracing.
After a sharp increase in cases late last season attributed to the omicron variant, the league and the NFLPA gradually eased their testing requirements and return-to-play procedures, reasoning that it was time to figure out how to live and function with a form of the virus that was more transmissible but did not cause serious illness within the NFL population.
The NFL and the NFLPA agreed in March to suspend their protocols, which remain suspended, meaning there are no leaguewide provisions for regular surveillance testing, masking requirements or contact-tracing quarantines.
NFL suspends ‘all aspects’ of its coronavirus protocols
Teams have been told they are expected to remain in compliance with state and local health directives. Any player, coach or team staffer with symptoms of covid-19 illness is to be tested; any individual who tests positive is subject to a five-day isolation.
“I think, as always, we monitor these issues very carefully,” Sills said. “And I think that we will continue to see covid cases throughout most — if not all — of our season, just as we will in the general population. We always say that our players, coaches and staff, they’re part of their community. So as communities deal with potential future waves of the illness, we certainly can see that happen, as well. At the same time, I have a tremendous amount of confidence in our team medical staffs. They obviously have a couple of seasons of dealing with these issues and dealing with this illness. And so I think we know a lot more going into it now than we have in previous seasons.”
The league’s coronavirus testing currently is primarily driven by individuals self-reporting symptoms, Sills acknowledged. Competitive pressures perhaps could discourage such self-reporting during the regular season. But Sills said the NFL will stress that keeping everyone within a team’s facility healthy is a collaborative endeavor.
“I think that we’ve continued to emphasize, as we have in the past, that each person has a responsibility to the remainder of their teammates and colleagues to keep them safe,” Sills said, “and to make sure if they are having symptoms to speak up and to get tested, and if they’re positive, obviously to isolate away from the team.”
The NFL did not have leaguewide testing results for teams’ training camps compiled and available as of Thursday, Sills said.
“We obviously can’t predict the future,” Sills said. “This has proved to be a very unpredictable virus, and it certainly will continue to morph and evolve, and new variants may occur. So we’ll just have to remain vigilant and be ready to pivot and adjust and adapt as needed.” | 2022-08-12T21:46:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kirk Cousins's positive test is NFL's latest coronavirus reminder - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/nfl-kirk-cousins-coronavirus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/nfl-kirk-cousins-coronavirus/ |
10 killed in rampage; gunman also dead
Ten people, including two children and their mother, were killed in a mass shooting in Montenegro on Friday, and six others were wounded, a state prosecutor told Vijesti TV after an initial investigation.
The gunman was also killed.
Montenegro Police Director Zoran Brdjanin said that about 3:30 p.m., a 34-year-old man with a hunting rifle fatally shot two siblings, ages 8 and 11, and wounded their mother, who died later at a medical facility. He said the family were tenants in the gunman’s house.
The gunman then went outside and fatally shot seven other people. A police officer was wounded in an ensuing shootout, Brdjanin said.
“When we arrived ... we saw nine dead bodies, including two children,” said state prosecutor Andrijana Nastic. “ ... I can only say that the shooter was killed by a citizen.”
Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic said three days of mourning would be declared starting Friday evening.
Deadly prison violence spills into border city
A gang riot in a border prison that left two inmates dead quickly spread to the streets of Ciudad Juárez, where alleged gang members killed nine people, including four workers at a radio station, security officials said Friday.
The government’s security undersecretary, Ricardo Mejía Berdeja, said the violence started in the state prison after 1 p.m. Thursday when a member of the Mexicles gang attacked members of the rival Chapos. Two inmates were killed and 20 injured.
Then suspected gang members outside the prison began burning businesses and shooting up Ciudad Juárez.
Mejía Berdeja said four MegaRadio employees who were broadcasting a live promotional event outside a business were killed in the shooting.
Officials probe die-off of fish in Oder River
Authorities in Poland and Germany are working “flat out” to establish the cause of a mass fish die-off in the Oder River, German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said Friday, warning of an environmental catastrophe.
Tons of dead fish have been found since late July in the Oder, which runs through both nations. Officials have said they think a toxic substance is to blame but have yet to identify it.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the river would take years to return to normal. “It is likely that enormous amounts of chemical waste have been dumped,” he said, adding that those responsible would be held accountable.
5 Congolese police officers killed in protest over jailbreak: Five police officers in the Democratic Republic of Congo were killed, local authorities said, as public frustration mounted in the eastern city of Butembo over the freeing of more than 800 prison inmates by suspected Islamist militants. Protesters demanded to know how a prison in the middle of the city could be attacked with such apparent ease, said Van Germain Katsiwa, a representative of a local civil society group. Congolese troops were able to quell Wednesday's unrest, but the mood in the city remained tense, an army spokesman said.
Sierra Leone leader says protesters sought overthrow: Sierra Leone's president, Julius Maada Bio, said this week's anti-government protests, which led to the deaths of six police officers and at least 21 civilians, were an attempt to overthrow the government. On Wednesday, police used tear gas and guns to disperse large crowds of protesters throwing rocks and burning tires in Freetown, the capital, and other cities. "The chant of the insurrectionists was for a violent overthrow of the democratically elected government," Maada Bio said in an address to the nation.
Former Grenada minister tapped as next climate chief: The former climate resilience minister for the Caribbean nation of Grenada has been tapped to be the next U.N. climate chief, according to sources familiar with the selection. Simon Stiell will replace Patricia Espinosa, who finished her second term as executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in July. | 2022-08-12T22:04:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 12, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-12-2022/2022/08/12/91a3b376-1a4c-11ed-8c9b-37f55528c617_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-12-2022/2022/08/12/91a3b376-1a4c-11ed-8c9b-37f55528c617_story.html |
Taiwan will always work with the United States for sovereignty
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighter jets taxi on a runway at an air base in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on Aug. 5. (Johnson Lai/Associated Press)
Unsurprisingly, “Why China objects to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan,” the Aug. 5 op-ed by Qin Gang, the People’s Republic of China’s ambassador to the United States, was filled with many distortions. The ironclad reality is that Taiwan has never been a part of the PRC.
The op-ed conflated the PRC’s “one-China principle” with the United States’ wholly distinct “one-China policy,” under which congressional delegations to Taiwan have been the norm for decades. This includes then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s (R-Ga.) visit in 1997. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan was a continuation of the genuine friendship between Taiwan and the United States.
In a deliberate overreaction, the PRC has provoked regional instability by responding with unprecedented military exercises. These irresponsible actions threaten the safety of air and sea routes crucial to nations around the globe. Taiwan will never provoke or escalate crises, nor will we allow authoritarianism to be imposed on us.
PRC diplomats in the United States are allowed to take advantage of freedom of speech. Though the PRC claims to be concerned with its sovereignty, make no mistake: This is a struggle between freedom and authoritarianism. We will continue to work with the United States and other like-minded countries to defend our free, democratic way of life.
Sabina Chang, Washington
The writer is director of the press division of Taiwan’s representative office in Washington, D.C. | 2022-08-12T22:04:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Taiwan will always work with the United States for sovereignty - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/taiwan-will-always-work-with-united-states-sovereignty/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/taiwan-will-always-work-with-united-states-sovereignty/ |
BISMARCK, N.D. — The school board in North Dakota’s largest city decided to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings, prompting a Republican lawmaker to vow to push for a voucher program that would allow public money to pay for private school tuition.
The latest: What is the Espionage Act? | 2022-08-12T22:04:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | North Dakota district no longer reciting pledge at meetings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/north-dakota-district-no-longer-reciting-pledge-at-meetings/2022/08/12/32947cd2-1a86-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/north-dakota-district-no-longer-reciting-pledge-at-meetings/2022/08/12/32947cd2-1a86-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Jackson-Reed dismisses rowing coach for comments about Dunbar teen’s death
A local high school rowing team practices on the Potomac River near the key bridge. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Jackson-Reed will not renew Joe McMullin’s contract after the boys’ varsity rowing coach made what boosters deemed an “insensitive” comment following the death of Ceph Christie, a student at Dunbar. The Jackson-Reed Crew Boosters announced the decision, “in coordination and agreement with the Jackson-Reed High School administration,” on Friday via Instagram.
“The Jackson-Reed Crew Boosters extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of Ceph Christie,” the parent board said in the post. “The comment made by one of our coaches in the wake of this terrible accident was insensitive and harmful, and does not represent the longstanding values of our rowers, our team, or our community.”
McMullin, the boys’ rowing All-Met Coach of the Year last spring, took over the program in 2019 and led the team’s fastest varsity boat to national championship victories in 2019 and 2022. He was not a Jackson-Reed employee, and the rowing program is not directly affiliated with the school.
“Words cannot convey how truly sorry and remorseful I am for the pain I caused Ceph’s family, friends, and community,” McMullin said via text Friday. “I take full responsibility for my actions and the consequences that have resulted from them. My actions are not a reflection of my former team, my family, or who I want to be. To Ceph’s loved ones I apologize for the hurt I caused especially during a time of tremendous grief. I’m commited [sic] to doing and being better.”
The Post published a story Wednesday morning about Christie, a 17-year-old baseball star who was found dead last week in the Potomac River after what his father believed to be a boating accident.
McMullin commented both on that story and on an Instagram post linking to it. Though his comments were removed, they were screen-captured by another Instagram user, who called out the coach. Many staffers within District of Columbia Public Schools expressed anger regarding the comments.
Christie’s father, Marlon, said he refused to look at McMullin’s comment. “My family did, but I wouldn’t look at it,” he said. “… I refuse to let anyone have anything negative to take away from my son’s life, the beautiful life he lived, the legacy he left. He was positive for everyone.
“So for this coach to spew negative remarks to a young person that he may not even know or spew negative remarks on any young person, he deserved to be fired. Young people do not deserve that. Young people deserve encouragement and positivity from adults — especially ones that they look at and call a coach.”
Jackson-Reed Principal Sah Brown addressed the issue in an email Friday to the Jackson-Reed community.
“Disrespectful comments from adults working with children do not reflect our core values or the high standard of excellence we are building at Jackson-Reed,” Brown wrote. “Therefore, after consulting with members of the team’s Board, we have taken appropriate action to address this matter. The actions taken will allow the program to move forward, and we are confident that the team will continue progressing.” | 2022-08-12T22:04:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jackson-Reed dismisses coach for comments about Ceph Christie's death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/jackson-reed-rowing-coach-comments/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/jackson-reed-rowing-coach-comments/ |
President Donald Trump gives two thumbs up to supporters as he departs after playing golf at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling Va., on Nov. 8, 2020. (Steve Helber/AP)
Ricky Shiffer appears to have been all-in on Donald Trump. When Trump called for his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, it appears that Shiffer came. When Trump was booted from Twitter and started his own platform in response, Shiffer signed up. At one point, he mentioned the former president’s son in a post, telling Donald Trump Jr. that he was “just waiting for your dad.” Eventually, Donald Trump Jr.'s father showed up.
Shiffer ended up as one of Truth Social’s most voluminous contributors, according to Washington Post analysis of his account. When Shiffer showed up at an FBI office near Cincinnati on Thursday apparently ready to strike out against FBI employees — this week’s target of Trump’s anger — Shiffer posted an update to his 23 followers on the platform.
“If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I.,” he wrote. A few hours later, he was dead, shot by police in a field in rural Ohio.
We must be deliberate and careful in considering Shiffer’s fate. It is possible that, no matter what happened this week, he would have shown up at that FBI office, armed with a rifle. We cannot say that Shiffer read Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social and decided to take action as a direct result. Causality is rarely so clean, particularly when you’re picking through the ashes.
But we can say that Shiffer knew about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that triggered Trump’s anti-FBI commentary. We can say that, in the wake of the news of the search becoming public, Shiffer wrote a “call to arms” on Trump’s bespoke social media site and endorsed killing federal agents — sentiments he appears to have meant. Denying that Shiffer acted as he did because of the Mar-a-Lago search simply defies credulity.
In 2018, the question of how violence was linked to Trump’s rhetoric emerged under less-direct circumstances. A fervent Trump supporter named Cesar Sayoc sent nonworking explosive devices to a number of Democratic elected officials and members of the media who had been excoriated by the then-president. At the time, I spoke to a professor of psychology at Marymount Manhattan College, Cheryl Paradis, who’s written about the overlap of psychology and criminal actions.
“Whenever people are identified as targets,” Paradis told me at the time, “it increases the likelihood that someone might act against them.”
Trump made those legislators targets in Sayoc’s eyes. This week, Trump also made the FBI targets.
But why? When news of the search broke, Trump wasted no time in suggesting that he was being targeted unfairly, tapping into the deep reservoir of distrust toward federal law enforcement that he’d slowly filled for years. Republicans rushed to stand at Trump’s back. They could certainly have reserved judgment, waiting to see what new information emerged, but most chose not to. They joined Trump in asserting without qualification that the FBI was out of bounds. There was no loud moderating force on the right calling for caution, suggesting that, even if Trump supporters weren’t willing to grant the FBI the benefit of the doubt, they might be well served in giving things a day or two to become more clear.
The picture has in fact sharpened quite a bit in the past four days. We now know, with the release of the warrant Friday afternoon, what the FBI was looking for, what it did and what it took. We know it wasn’t a “raid,” but a warranted search for specific material. We know that Trump’s hyperventilations about the FBI perhaps having planted evidence are even less likely than they were earlier in the week; the FBI gave Trump’s team a list of what they took from the estate, signed off on by one of his attorneys. We know what laws the FBI thinks Trump might have violated, ones that depend on his possession of material that even Trump doesn’t seem to dispute that he had.
No public figure who is a target of federal investigation should be expected to embrace the situation or to champion law enforcement. But most, it seems safe to say, would have responded to the situation with more caution than did Trump. Few would have had the motivation to cast the FBI as inherently corrupt, particularly while holding the uncomplicated explanation for the search. And no other public figure would have known from years of experience that it didn’t matter how easily debunked or shaky his claims were that he himself would be shielded from any repercussions.
He himself — but not everyone else. His allies, once again, find themselves scrambling: How did their immediate condemnations of the FBI look in this new light? What was the right spin to apply here, now that it’s clear that the FBI had both authority and reason to search Trump’s estate, however inconvenient to the former president? Follow Trump in a rush into the shadows if you want, but it’s up to you to find your own way back out.
They’ll live. Shiffer, who rushed in too, didn’t.
Maybe he was fated to die in some confrontation with law enforcement somewhere, some time, but he died this week, in that confrontation. Maybe if Trump’s response to the search of Mar-a-Lago had been different, Shiffer would still have been infuriated due to his own volition or because he was caught up in the furious tornado of right-wing conversation that always follows Trump around. Maybe he still would have gone to that FBI office.
Or maybe if Trump and his allies had been cautious, maybe if Trump had quickly detailed what happened and outlined the dispute with the government, or maybe if — as the Justice Department is tacitly alleging — he had actually turned over the material the government sought, maybe Shiffer would still be alive. Maybe then that tornado wouldn’t have formed around Trump and those elected officials wouldn’t have jogged along behind him.
Maybe if the central driver of Trump’s actions wasn’t solely what was useful in the moment for Trump, one of his biggest fans wouldn’t have been shot to death by Ohio police. | 2022-08-12T22:38:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What if Trump hadn’t spent the week directing fury at the FBI? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/what-if-trump-hadnt-spent-week-directing-fury-fbi/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/what-if-trump-hadnt-spent-week-directing-fury-fbi/ |
A sign outside a District of Columbia Health Department clinic providing monkeypox vaccinations, (Michael Reynolds/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
D.C. public health officials expanded eligibility for the monkeypox vaccine Friday and loosened the residency requirement as a strategy to destigmatize the virus, even as the city records record numbers of infections.
As of Saturday, all people of any sexual orientation or gender who have had multiple sexual partners in the past two weeks will be eligible for the vaccine, in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control. Previously, men who have sex with men and have had multiple sexual partners in the past two weeks were eligible.
The new language emphasizes that people at highest risk are still gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, transgender men, and transgender women.
Under the new criteria, anyone who works, goes to a District university or college and receives care through a D.C. Department of Health program can receive the vaccine as long as they meet one of the other criteria. The vaccine was previously for D.C. residents only.
“This new language is really about destigmatizing the individuals who may need a vaccine,” said Patrick Ashley, senior deputy director at the health department. “As we know, monkeypox can affect anyone. We want individuals, especially in the MSM community, to get vaccinated but we also want individuals to get access if they feel they are at a higher risk.”
The District has more cases — 321 as of Friday — than any state yet has seen a decline in demand for the vaccine, which Ashley attributed to discomfort people may feel answering intrusive questions about their behaviors or sharing other identifying details.
The city’s preregistration website, preventmonkeypox.dc.gov, will be updated Saturday to reflect the new strategy and the reality that people may not feel comfortable sharing personal information at a government-run clinic, he said.
Instead of specifying the behavior that qualifies individuals for vaccine, they will only have to attest that they meet one of the criteria. People who attend a Friday walk-up clinic will not have to share their name or date of birth when filling out a survey before they can get vaccinated.
“The natural assumption is we’ve hit everyone who is interested,” Ashley said. “I still think there are communities that may be interested but may not feel comfortable presenting at a clinic with very specific information or criteria that is necessary.”
The city has administered 15,671 doses of Jyennos, the only vaccine approved to treat monkeypox, of 21,755 received from the federal government. Another 400 appointments are scheduled through Aug. 16.
More than 28,700 District residents pre-registered for vaccine, but public health officials estimated the number eligible could be three times as high.
Ashley said District public health officials have asked the Virginia and Maryland health departments to share vaccine to accommodate their residents who work and go to school in D.C.
Maryland reported 259 monkeypox cases as of Thursday, according to the CDC tracker. Virginia has 186 cases, state data updated Friday shows. Both states have thousands of vaccine doses waiting for arms.
Virginia has received 13,459 doses and 3,143 have been administered, leaving more than 10,300 unassigned, a Virginia Department of Health spokesman said Friday.
A Maryland Department of Health spokesman declined to say how many doses were on the shelf in Maryland, but Ashley said like Virginia thousands of vaccines are available in Maryland — a problem he attributed to the federal government’s distribution program.
“The more barriers we can remove the more people we can get vaccinated," he said. "We don’t want those vaccines to be sitting on the shelf.”
Federal officials this week announced a new strategy to stretch hundreds of thousands of Jynneos doses into several million, as local health departments scramble to allocate limited doses.
Ashley said D.C. could implement the procedure of administering one-fifth of a dose as early as the week of Aug. 22. New syringes are on order and nurses are being trained on the new technique, he said.
In the meantime, people who work with high-risk individuals said intrusive questions could be a barrier to access.
DeMarc Hickson, executive director of Us Helping Us, which provides medical, behavioral health and social services to Black gay and bisexual men and Black transgender women, said uptake of the vaccine was down this week at the second of two D.C. clinics his organization hosted.
About 70 people were vaccinated at a D.C. event in July, compared to about 50 this week. The organization administered about 90 doses in Prince George’s County on Wednesday, exceeding the supply and referring about 60 people to other clinics.
“If we are really wanting to eliminate the stigma than we eliminate those stigmatizing things like narrow questions," he said.
Peter DeMartino, the director of Infectious Disease Prevention and Health Services at the Maryland Department of Health, said answering questions about sexual behavior is necessary because eligibility is based on behavior.
“As a gay man, I have been answering those questions since I was a teenager,” he said. “Sadly I am a gay man who grew up in the age of HIV and AIDS and so our risk factors for viruses, for disease, have always been monitored by public health.”
The virus is primarily spread through personal, often skin-to-skin contact, including contact with a rash, scabs or bodily fluids from a person with monkeypox, the CDC says.
“We don’t have enough resources to provide blanket coverage,” he said. “We are monitoring that data like a hawk and as the data evolves our response will evolve." | 2022-08-12T22:43:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. expands monkeypox vaccine eligibility - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/dc-monkeypox-vaccine-eligibility/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/dc-monkeypox-vaccine-eligibility/ |
Slain man likely targeted, bystander hurt in Dupont Circle drive-by, police say
The gunfire came from a 2021 Alfa Romeo Giulia. Police said they are searching for the car.
Two men were shot, one fatally, near Connecticut and Florida Avenues in the Dupont Circle neighborhood Thursday. (Omari Daniels/TWP)
A man who was fatally shot Thursday night near a busy intersection in the Dupont Circle neighborhood appears to have been targeted by assailants in a silver Alfa Romeo Giulia, while a second victim wounded by gunfire was a bystander, according to a D.C. police spokesman.
The shooting about 9:30 p.m. sent people running from the area where Connecticut and Florida Avenues meet, near hotels, restaurants, bars and a strip club. A police report says bullets struck an apartment window, a liquor store, a Hyundai Tucson and a parking meter.
Authorities identified the man who died as Stephon Johns, 31, from Northeast Washington. Police said he was on Florida Avenue, about 100 feet from Connecticut Avenue when gunshots came from the 2021 Alfa Romeo Giulia.
After Johns was shot, police said he ran toward Connecticut Avenue and collapsed near the entrance to Assets, a strip club, where he was pronounced dead. The other victim was taken to a hospital with critical injuries. Police on Friday said he was expected to survive.
Efforts to reach Johns’s relatives were not successful on Friday afternoon. Police released a surveillance photo of the Alfa Romeo Giulia. The camera did not capture a license plate.
Dustin Sternbeck, the police spokesman, said investigators believe the Alfa Romeo Giulia was carjacked on Aug. 6 from a gas station near 18th and Florida Avenues, about two blocks from the shooting scene.
D.C. Cmdr. Duncan Bedlion of the 2nd District station said at the scene Thursday night that investigators “don’t know a lot about what sparked this shooting.” He said police believe there was more than one person shooting.
A lawyer for the owners of Assets, Richard Bianco, said the club was not open at the time of the shooting, and remained closed for the remainder of the night. He said an exterior surveillance camera “captured a pretty clear image of what occurred on the street” and has been turned over to police.
Bianco said Assets’s owner does not believe there is a connection to the club, which he said was set to open at 10 p.m. But he said the club likely had employees inside when the shooting occurred. “We’re doing everything we can to help,” he said.
James Brooks, an Assets employee, arrived at work to find police blocking the front entrance. “You see all this stuff in the news, and I’ve never been a part of anything like this,” the 32-year-old said.
The shooting in Dupont Circle happened during a violent week in D.C. which included the killing of a young man from Baltimore as he worked to install solar panels in Southeast Washington and the fatal shooting of a woman by a man who police said later killed himself.
Police statistics show 133 people have been killed in D.C. this year, a 13 percent increase from this time in 2021, which ended with the highest number of homicides in nearly 20 years. | 2022-08-12T22:43:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dupont Circle drive-by: Slain man likely targeted, bystander wounded - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/dupont-circle-shooting-targeted-bystander/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/dupont-circle-shooting-targeted-bystander/ |
5 years after deadly rally, Charlottesville wants to tell its own story
Community activists shift the focus to how they resisted the actions of white supremacists and how others might do the same
Teo Armus
Photographer Ézé Amos stands for a portrait on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville on Aug. 10. Amos is the author of an exhibit commemorating the fifth anniversary of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in an effort to acknowledge those who stood against it. (Zack Wajsgras for The Washington Post)
CHARLOTTESVILLE — One image shows a Black man wearing headphones surrounded by White protesters carrying the Confederate flag. In another, a woman stares at the camera, expressionless, her face illuminated by a single lit candle. A sea of college students assemble on a field in a third image, a sign peeking out from the crowd that reads: “take back the lawn.”
But when the city’s residents look up at the newly-placed banners, they won’t see any of that. Instead, the camera focuses on residents who fought against that hate.
Photographer Ézé Amos created a photo exhibit about the 2017 Charlottesville violence. He hopes his art will help the community heal by sharing their stories. (Video: Hadley Green/The Washington Post)
For much of the nation, the Unite the Right rally was a brazen display of racism and bigotry that awakened many people to the growing threat of far-right violence. Videos of white supremacists brutally beating a Black man and of a neo-Nazi ramming his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one of them, became synonymous with this Central Virginia college town.
As far-right extremism continues to fuel violence — with mass shootings in Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo, and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — Charlottesville’s activists and artists say it is more important than ever to hear from those residents who stood up in their city.
An archive of activism
The exhibition, which is on display on the first floor gallery of U-Va.’s special collections library through Oct. 29, highlights historical campus activism, artifacts from students standing up to neo-Nazis in 2017 and the ways community members continue fighting white supremacy. The exhibit also includes then-high schooler Zyahna Bryant’s 2016 petition to remove the city’s statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
A report released by U-Va. the month after the rally found that the school was ill-prepared to respond quickly and adequately. The report questioned why police did not act sooner when white supremacist marchers descended on the Jefferson statue and surrounded students, many of whom were attacked. A separate report by a law firm hired by the city to assess the response to the white supremacist events, sharply criticized the police department, the Charlottesville City Council, attorneys from the city and state, U-Va. and the Virginia State Police.
Kendall King agreed to display her protest plans as a "genuine snapshot of the chaos" on the University of Virginia campus and in Charlottesville in 2017. (Video: Hadley Green/The Washington Post, Photo: Zack Wajsgras for The Washington Post/The Washington Post)
“We don’t want students to forget all the terrible things that have happened because it’s easy for us to be blind,” said Romero, who was a plaintiff in a recent federal civil suit against white supremacists and neo-Nazis associated with the rally. “We’re not hopeless. We are not powerless. Things are in our hands and we have a lot of work to continue to do.”
A rise in far-right violence
“I don’t think anybody today would be shocked if the events of 2017 happened his weekend,” Segal said.
Sherry Kraft, a long-time Charlottesville resident, expressed that five years after the violence, it's gotten “more and more frightening.” (Video: Hadley Green/The Washington Post)
When the mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, believing then-President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen, insignia and symbols of hate in the nation’s capital were some of the same as those seen during the Unite the Right rally. There are people and groups who were in Charlottesville that weekend who joined the insurrectionist mob, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s HateWatch reported.
This week, within hours of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s supporters began calling for violence — something Unite the Right rallygoers spoke of in messages planning the event in Charlottesville.
Last fall, a jury found the white supremacists and hate groups who participated in and organized the rally liable, and decided they should pay $26 million in damages to the plaintiffs, including Romero.
“I don’t think we can we can overemphasize the pervasiveness that the methods they used have become the modern day playbook for extremists everywhere,” said the plaintiffs’ attorney Roberta Kaplan. She pointed to messages organizers shared with each other before the rally, including slurs against Black and Jewish people and violent fantasies of cracking skulls and driving into crowds, and the ways those plans turned into real-world action.
Her co-counsel Karen Dunn added: “There’s really not a day that goes by that you don’t see something in the world that is evocative of what happened in Charlottesville. … Everything that’s happened since has demonstrated that it was not a fluke. It was one stop on a larger journey that we’re all still on, and nobody knows where that goes.”
An exhibit for the community
Will Jones, 39, who is featured in one of the photos hanging downtown, said he is taking his kids to ride roller coasters at King’s Dominion. Bryant, the then-highschooler who started the petition to take down the city’s statue of Lee, tweeted that she is engaging in “radical rest” and ignoring emails about Aug. 11 and 12.
“I know it was five years ago, but it really always feels extremely present in life,” Romero said. “You think it's just a date but it's not. Quite literally, your body remembers that trauma and it lives with us and it's something that you never get over. You have to learn to live with it.”
Neo-Nazis marched past their synagogue chanting ‘Sieg Heil’
Charlottesville resident Will Jones, who witnessed the 2017 violence firsthand, believes it's important to challenge hate to inspire the next generation. (Video: Hadley Green/The Washington Post, Photo: Zack Wajsgras for The Washington Post/The Washington Post)
“There's work. There's handling the press. There's handling the family. There's cleaning the house. There's talking to friends,” Bro said. “But then out of the blue every so often, it will just slam me: I used to have a little girl.”
But inside a public library in Charlottesville on Wednesday evening, he led a small audience through a slide show of the 36 images he had selected to display on the downtown mall.
Some of them, he told the crowd, were people he had met in the aftermath: He got to know Captain Jim Mooney, pictured in uniform standing at a vigil, as the former assistant police chief tracked down the man who had punched Amos in the face. | 2022-08-12T23:26:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 5 years after Unite the Right, Charlottesville wants to tell its own story - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/charlottesville-unite-right-five-years/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/charlottesville-unite-right-five-years/ |
By Ron Charles
Salman Rushdie presents his book "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights" in Aviles, Spain in 2015. (Jl Cereijido/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Salman Rushdie, one of the most famous writers in the world, was brutally attacked just as he was about to speak to an audience at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on Friday. Rushdie was taken by helicopter to a hospital, according to New York State Police, where he is undergoing surgery.
Hadi Matar, 24, of New Jersey, is in custody, according to New York State Trooper James O’Callaghan.
Rushdie, 75, has contended with death threats since 1988 when he published his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses.”
What is “The Satanic Verses” about?
Why is “The Satanic Verses” so controversial?
What happened to Rushdie after that?
What has Rushdie said about the threats against him? | 2022-08-12T23:31:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who is Salman Rushdie? What to know about the ‘Satanic Verses’ author - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/12/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/12/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses/ |
WASHINGTON — With inflation raging near its highest level in four decades, the House gave final approval to President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act. Its title raises a tantalizing question: Will the measure actually do what it says? Economic analyses suggest that the answer is likely no — not anytime soon, anyway. The legislation, which now heads to the White House for Biden’s signature, won’t directly address some of the main drivers of surging prices — from gas and food to rents and restaurant meals. Still, over time, the bill could save money for some Americans by lessening the cost of certain prescription drugs for the elderly, extending health insurance subsidies and reducing energy prices.
NEW YORK — Stocks are closing higher on Wall Street, giving the S&P 500 its first 4-week winning streak since November. The benchmark index gained 1.7% Friday, and other indexes also rose. Technology stocks drove much the broad rally. Inflation cooled more than expected last month, sending stocks higher. Investors see a greater chance inflation may have peaked, allowing the Federal Reserve to be less aggressive with its rate hikes than it has been this year. Crude oil prices fell, while bond yields were mixed.
NEW YORK — Amazon-owned companies Ring and Hollywood studio MGM are partnering to create a TV show in the mold of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” MGM says the half-hour “Ring Nation” program will showcase viral footage from Ring’s doorbell and smart-home cameras. The series is the latest example of Amazon’s fusion of its various business arms. It also presents a branding and marketing opportunity for Amazon, which bought Ring in 2018. Since then, the company has dealt with rounds of privacy concerns around Ring and its relationship with police departments across the country. The show will be hosted by comedian Wanda Sykes and premier in syndication on September 26.
MOSCOW — Russia’s gross domestic product contracted 4% in the second quarter of this year, the first full quarter since Russia sent troops into Ukraine. The state statistical service reported the drop on Friday. Russia was hit with a wide array of sanctions following its move into Ukraine in late February, including ones that cut off some Russian banks from the SWIFT international transfer system, and a significant exodus of foreign companies. The report by the Rosstat service did not analyze why GDP was lower this year than in the same quarter of 2021. But it said there was a 15.3% drop in wholesale trade and a 9.8% contraction in retail trade. Russia had reported sizable GDP increases for the last four quarters.
NEW YORK — Newspaper publisher Gannett Co. confirmed Friday that it’s laying off some of its newsroom staff as part of a cost-cutting effort to lower its expenses as its revenue crumbles amid a downturn in ad sales and customer subscriptions. The McLean, Virginia-based company declined to provide details about the number of people who were losing their jobs. Gannett, which owns USA Today and more than 200 other daily U.S. newspapers with print editions, ended last year with more than 16,000 employees worldwide, according to the company’s annual report. The payroll included including more than 4,200 reporters, editors and photographers.
NEW YORK — Peloton is laying off almost 800 employees and raising prices for some of its equipment as part of its latest bid to make the business profitable and free up cash. The moves were disclosed Friday in a memo to employees of the maker of high-end exercise bikes and treadmills from the company’s new CEO Barry McCarthy. The actions also include closing Peloton’s North America distribution network and shifting its delivery work to third-party providers. Peloton also plans to slash reduce its North American store base, which currently numbers 86. But the company didn’t say how many locations will close. The moves mark the latest changes since McCarthy took over in February. He replaced John Foley, who co-founded the business 10 years ago.
SEOUL, South Korea — Samsung’s de-facto leader has secured a pardon of his conviction for bribing a former president in a corruption scandal that toppled a previous South Korean government. The act of leniency underscored the tech company’s huge influence in the nation. Lee Jae-yong’s pardon is partially symbolic since he was released on parole a year ago after serving 18 months of a prison term that would have ended in July. Critics say the billionaire has remained in control of Samsung even while behind bars. Still, the pardon will allow the heir to the electronics juggernaut to fully resume his management duties and could make it easier for the company to pursue investments and mergers. The Justice Ministry said Friday that Lee and other top business leaders will be pardoned Monday. | 2022-08-12T23:35:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Bill's inflation impact, stock rally - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-bills-inflation-impact-stock-rally/2022/08/12/15303e36-1a8d-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-bills-inflation-impact-stock-rally/2022/08/12/15303e36-1a8d-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Peloton to cut nearly 800 jobs, raise prices amid declining sales
Peloton to cut hundreds of jobs
Peloton will embark on a sweeping overhaul that includes cutting nearly 800 jobs, raising prices for its Bike Plus and Tread machines, and outsourcing functions such as equipment deliveries and customer service to outside companies.
The changes, which the company disclosed Friday in a memo to employees, also includes gradually closing many of its retail showrooms — a process that will get underway next year. It’s the most wide-ranging shake-up yet under chief executive Barry McCarthy, a tech veteran who took the helm in February.
Peloton is hoping to turn around a business that had thrived during the early days of the pandemic but suffered a punishing slowdown in the past year. Sales are declining, losses are mounting, and the company’s stock price is down nearly 90 percent over the past 12 months. The latest moves are an attempt to reinvigorate sales, boost efficiency and restore some of Peloton’s former cachet.
In its third known set of layoffs this year, the company will fire 784 employees across its distribution and customer service teams. Peloton will stop using in-house employees and vans to deliver equipment, and shutter 16 warehouses across North America. Instead, it will rely on providers of third-party logistics to set up bikes and treadmills at homes.
5 Chinese firms to leave N.Y. exchange
Five Chinese state-owned firms including China Life Insurance and oil giant Sinopec said Friday they would delist from the New York Stock Exchange amid heightened diplomatic and economic tensions with the United States.
The companies, which also include Aluminium Corporation of China (Chalco), PetroChina and Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical, said in separate statements that they would apply for delistings of their American Depository Shares later this month.
The five, which were added to the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (HFCAA) list in May after they were identified as not meeting U.S. regulators’ auditing standards, will keep their listings in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese markets.
There was no mention of the auditing row in separate statements by the Chinese companies outlining their moves, which come amid heightened tensions after last week’s visit to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Some of China’s largest companies including Alibaba Group Holdings, J.D. Com and Baidu are among almost 270 on the list and at threat of being delisted.
U.S. import prices fell for the first time in seven months in July, helped by a strong dollar and lower fuel and nonfuel costs, while consumers' one-year inflation outlook ebbed in August, the latest signs that price pressures may have peaked. Import prices, which exclude tariffs, fell 1.4 percent last month after rising 0.3 percent in June, the Labor Department said on Friday. That was the largest monthly drop since April 2020 and exceeded the 1 percent decline expected by economists in a Reuters poll.
The U.S. soybean harvest, already forecast as the biggest ever, will top previous expectations as prospects in major producing states like Illinois, Indiana and Ohio make up for shortfalls west of the Mississippi River, the government said on Friday. But corn production will be smaller than previously thought and 5 percent smaller than last year as adverse weather during critical periods of development limited harvest potential.
Bain & Co. said it's "ashamed" of the consultancy's role in destabilizing South Africa's tax agency after the country's most senior treasury official called for companies to stop doing business with the firm. The public apology by Bain's managing partner in South Africa comes days after the U.K. banned the group from bidding for state contracts because of its links to corruption in South Africa. Bain was found by the country's judicial commission to have had ties to illegal dealings during work restructuring the South African Revenue Service. | 2022-08-12T23:35:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Peloton to cut nearly 800 jobs, raise prices amid declining sales - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/peloton-to-cut-nearly-800-jobs-raise-prices-amid-declining-sales/2022/08/12/20d5c516-1a2f-11ed-b777-8e8738265b2c_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/peloton-to-cut-nearly-800-jobs-raise-prices-amid-declining-sales/2022/08/12/20d5c516-1a2f-11ed-b777-8e8738265b2c_story.html |
Biden wants our son freed. How long will it take for his administration to act?
By Debra and Marc Tice
Marc and Debra Tice, the parents of journalist Austin Tice, at a news conference in Beirut on Dec. 4, 2018. A portrait of Austin Tice was displayed at the event. (Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)
Debra and Marc Tice are the parents of journalist Austin Tice.
Time, they say, heals all wounds. But after the past 10 years, we know better.
On Aug. 14, 2012, our son, Austin Tice, was abducted in Syria. He was freelancing for The Post, McClatchy newspapers and other news organizations to bring the world the truth about the country’s devastating conflict. We have not heard from him since.
The U.S. government believes Austin is alive and in Syria, held by a group affiliated with the Syrian government. Earlier this year, President Biden gave his administration a clear directive: Get a meeting with the Syrians, listen to them, find out what they want and work with them.
So why has it taken three months for the administration to even start following these instructions? We expected Austin to be home by now.
Every day for the past 3,650 days, we have felt in our lives and our hearts the hole that Austin’s presence fills — his spirit, his courage, his humor, his love. We’re Austin’s parents, so of course we think he’s wonderful. But really he’s the type of son any American would be proud of. He is an Eagle Scout who served our country with honor as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. He’s a cherished big brother. He was a law student at Georgetown when he went to Syria, where his reporting earned him the prestigious Polk Award.
When Austin went overseas, he was looking ahead to his 30s. With his military service complete and his schooling almost behind him, the decade ahead was to set the foundation for the rest of his life. Austin loves babies and wanted to start a family; he kept a weekly Skype date with his little niece, calling her even while sheltering in a stairwell in Syria. Austin has a deep sense of responsibility to help protect the vulnerable. It’s why he was considering, after law school, a career prosecuting human traffickers.
The Post's View: After 10 years of agony, it’s time for Syria to free Austin Tice
That sense of responsibility led him to Syria. From his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Austin had seen the devastation of urban warfare, particularly the toll it takes on women and children. He did not want the same fate for Syria. He believed the world needed reliable on-the-ground reporting about what was happening there. As President Biden put it Aug. 10, Austin “is an investigative journalist who put the truth above himself and traveled to Syria to show the world the real cost of war.”
Austin, in other words, is someone who lives by his ideals. In the past 10 years, however, those of us closest to him have had some of our ideals shattered. We’ve learned the hard way that our government is not what we were taught in civics class — of, by and for the people. It has been painful to see just how profoundly dysfunctional our federal bureaucracy can be.
We’ve seen this play out across three administrations. Early opportunities to get Austin back were squandered during the Obama administration. We are still scarred by the fact that, even though President Donald Trump said he wanted Austin home, national security adviser John Bolton wrote in his book that he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thwarted the president’s efforts. Now we worry about the same kind of bureaucratic obstruction happening again.
On May 2, we were grateful to meet with President Biden in the Oval Office. There, he gave his senior national security staff an unambiguous directive to engage directly with the Syrian government. But 102 days later, we are still waiting to see Austin walk free.
We’ve heard about the purported obstacles. That the Syrians won’t acknowledge holding Austin. That they won’t respond to U.S. overtures. That we can’t engage directly because we don’t have diplomatic relations with them. Sadly, these are just excuses.
The president was serving as vice president when Austin was abducted; he knows that in those early days the Syrians were eager for U.S. engagement in the case. When, in 2014, Debra spent 83 days in Damascus knocking on doors, making phone calls, doing everything possible to learn of Austin’s whereabouts, a senior member of the Syrian government said: “I will not meet with the mother. Send a United States government official of appropriate title.”
We’re encouraged by recent news that the Biden administration has initiated direct outreach to the Syrians. We hope they choose to send “a government official of appropriate title.” They should not be deterred by State Department concerns about high-level recognition of Bashar al-Assad. Officials at the highest levels of our government deal with controversial leaders every day. Just last month, the president himself fist-bumped one of them.
The other painful lesson we have learned is that, with elections and changes of government every other year, it can be difficult to sustain progress on Austin’s case. As we head into another campaign season, we fear getting pushed off again. Yet the Biden administration has an opportunity to win over voters by acting to restore our faith, and that of other disillusioned Americans, in our government. If the State Department and our national security apparatus simply follow the commander in chief’s instructions and begin a full-fledged effort to bring Austin home, it would send a clear message that our government puts the well-being of citizens above politics.
Every day without Austin brings renewed pain. Every time our family gets together, there’s a void where Austin should be. He would have loved seeing his siblings graduate from college. He would have loved seeing our family grow through weddings and births. Occasions that should be full of unbridled joy are always tinged with sorrow at the thought: Austin could be here. His prolonged absence is a wound more time won’t heal. It will only make it worse.
We appreciate that President Biden has spoken of Austin with compassion and understanding. The words of the president, a father himself and no stranger to loss, are quite comforting. Even so, after 10 years, Austin doesn’t need his parents to be comforted. He needs our government to turn the president’s words into action. He needs to come home. | 2022-08-12T23:36:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Austin Tice has spent ten years in Syria. Can Biden finally free him? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/austin-tice-syria-parents/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/austin-tice-syria-parents/ |
An itemized list of property seized in the execution of a search warrant by the FBI at former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate shows documents listed as “Confidential” and “Top Secret.” (Jim Bourg/Reuters)
On Friday afternoon, a judge unsealed the search warrant for the FBI’s search on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. The warrant revealed the FBI went there looking for evidence of crimes, including mishandling defense information and the destruction of records. The receipt of what the agents seized includes four sets of top-secret documents, and seven other sets of classified information.
But the day before, The Washington Post learned that classified documents related to nuclear weapons were among the items the FBI sought in the raid. Intelligence and national security reporter Shane Harris explains what type of information could be in these documents and why experts and the Justice Department are so concerned about it falling into the wrong hands. | 2022-08-12T23:36:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The nuclear documents - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-nuclear-documents/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-nuclear-documents/ |
Justice Dept. investigates Southern Baptist Convention for alleged mishandling of sexual abuse
Choir members are silhouetted as they get ready for a worship service at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif., on June 14, 2022. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
The Southern Baptist Convention, the second-largest faith group in the country, said Friday that the Justice Department is investigating multiple arms of the denomination following an internal report that showed mishandling of sexual abuse cases.
The investigation is related to a recent bombshell third-party report commissioned by the SBC, a spokesman said late Friday. The report concluded that sex abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says
The third-party report, which involved an examination of the period from 2000 to 2021, focused on actions by the executive committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, but the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million through its cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.
The 300-page report, the first of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC, showed how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also told Southern Baptists they could not maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse while secretly keeping such a list for years.
Anger over the report in June led the SBC’s huge annual meeting to pass a recommendation to create a database to track sex abusers and a formal group to handle sex abuse accusations going forward.
Southern Baptists vote on sex abuse proposals, debate female pastors
A Justice Department spokesman Friday evening said he couldn’t immediately comment.
For years, survivors of sexual assault in church settings have been calling on churches to admit the extent of abuse. It helped to generate a movement called #ChurchToo, a spinoff of the wider #MeToo movement, calling out not just sexual predators but also religious leaders involved in coverups or other mishandling of abuse claims.
Lawyers for the SBC Executive Committee said in a Friday night statement that the committee has received a subpoena, but “no individuals have been subpoenaed at this point.”
The statement announcing the Justice Department probe was signed by leaders including SBC seminary heads, the top official at its huge missionary body and newly elected President Bart Barber.
“While so many things in the world are uncertain, we can be certain that we serve a mighty God. Nothing, including this investigation, takes Him by surprise,” the statement said. “We take comfort in that and humbly ask you be in prayer in the days and weeks ahead. Specifically, we ask God to grant wisdom and discernment to each person dealing with the investigation.” | 2022-08-12T23:36:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FBI investigating Southern Baptist Convention for alleged mishandling of clergy sexual misconduct cases - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/12/fbi-southern-baptist-sexual-abuse/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/12/fbi-southern-baptist-sexual-abuse/ |
Fernando Tatis Jr. was suspended on Friday, when the Padres were in Washington to play the Nationals. (Ashley Landis/AP Photo)
BREAKING: San Diego Padres star Fernando Tatis Jr. has been suspended 80 games for violating MLB’s performance-enhancing drug policy.
Tatis, an all-star shortstop, will miss the remainder of this season and the beginning of next after testing positive for Clostebol, a banned substance.
MLB announces Padres star Fernando Tatis Jr has received an 80-game suspension after testing positive for Clostebol, a PED as @JeffPassan said. Stunning development.
— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) August 12, 2022
Padres say they were “surprised and extremely disappointed” to learn about the Tatis test. pic.twitter.com/d94HTU682R
The 23-year-old had yet to play this season while recovering from a wrist injury. He finished third in National League MVP voting in 2021 and is widely regarded as one of the sport’s young stars. | 2022-08-12T23:36:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fernando Tatis Jr. suspended 80 games for violating MLB's PED policy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/fernando-tatis-jr-ped-suspension/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/fernando-tatis-jr-ped-suspension/ |
Marshawn Lynch’s lawyers dispute DUI claim as police release arrest video
Las Vegas police on Thursday released body-camera footage showing what appeared to be the moments leading up to Tuesday's arrest of former Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, who was charged with driving under the influence. (Ted S. Warren/AP)
In the latter, Lynch tells officers that the car is not running before an officer tells him to get out of the vehicle, adding that Lynch could be charged with obstructing an investigation. Shortly after, an officer drags Lynch out of the vehicle before he is handcuffed.
A five-time Pro Bowl selection, Lynch rushed for 10,413 yards and 85 touchdowns across 12 seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, Buffalo Bills and Oakland Raiders. A first-round draft pick out of California in 2007, Lynch last played during Seattle’s 2020 postseason run, which ended with an NFC divisional-round defeat to the Green Bay Packers.
Lynch was arrested for DUI in 2012 but pleaded down to the lesser charge of reckless driving when the case was resolved in 2014. Before his retirement, the running back had long been cultivating his post-football career plans, opening a mini-chain of Beast Mode clothing stores and a soul food restaurant on the outskirts of Oakland, Calif. He was announced as a new minority stakeholder in the NHL’s Seattle Kraken in April. | 2022-08-12T23:36:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marshawn Lynch’s lawyers dispute DUI claim as police release arrest video - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/marshawn-lynch-arrest-car-video/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/marshawn-lynch-arrest-car-video/ |
WASHINGTON — As Juan Soto began the walk to the visitors’ clubhouse at Nationals Park on Friday for the first time as an opposing player, he passed photos hanging on either side of the tunnel showing past Washington players — a gallery that already includes an image of him, smiling in a blue jersey with a red No. 22. | 2022-08-12T23:36:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Juan Soto back in Washington, grateful for time with Nats - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/juan-soto-back-in-washington-grateful-for-time-with-nats/2022/08/12/dde8c4a6-1a92-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/juan-soto-back-in-washington-grateful-for-time-with-nats/2022/08/12/dde8c4a6-1a92-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Four critically injured after car crashes into Arlington building
The incident occurred in the 2000 block of Wilson Boulevard.
Aviva Loeb
The scene in the 2000 block of Wilson Boulevard, where multiple people were injured after a vehicle crashed into a building and sparked a fire. (Aviva Loeb/TWP)
Four people were critically injured Friday evening after a vehicle crashed into a building in the Courthouse area of Arlington, a few blocks from the Metro station, the police said.
The crash occurred in the 2000 block of Wilson Boulevard, and touched off a fire, the police said. They said in addition to the four taken to the hospital, others were being treated on the scene.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said one person who witnessed the aftermath. “It was like carnage.”
Wilson Boulevard is a major thoroughfare in Arlington, and is lined with high-rise office buildings and many restaurants. | 2022-08-12T23:48:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Multiple injuries reported after car crashes into Arlington building - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/arlington-crash-wilson-boulevard/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/arlington-crash-wilson-boulevard/ |
Juan Soto acknowledges the Nationals Park crowd before his first game back in D.C. with the Padres. “It was some great moments here, but now we just got to keep going on,” he said before the game. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Just after 2 p.m. Friday, Juan Soto walked down the long ramp from the players’ parking lot at Nationals Park, taking the same path he has before so many games, smiling at the social media crew that once jumped at any chance to post about him, angling his walk to the clubhouse he once called home.
But instead of going fully inside the clubhouse — instead of sitting by a locker in the back of the room, instead of changing into red workout clothes, instead of grabbing a late lunch from the chef cooking Latin American food in the cafeteria — Soto stopped in the small lobby. He held envelopes for the Washington Nationals’ many clubhouse attendants. As he handed them out, his familiar laughter could be heard from the hallway.
Then Soto had a few hundred more steps to go. For the first time in his four-year career, he was in D.C. and playing for the road team, his locker next to first baseman Josh Bell’s on the visitors’ side. When the Nationals traded Soto and Bell to the San Diego Padres on Aug. 2, Soto immediately realized a reunion was coming.
Ten days ago, he knew nothing but the Nationals, the team that signed him as a 16-year-old outfielder out of the Dominican Republic.
Ten days later, Soto, 23 and a veteran of the brightest spotlights, came to face them.
“There’s just a lot of emotions, a lot of feelings that I have in this stadium,” the outfielder said in the Padres’ dugout Friday afternoon, surrounded by more than 30 media members and six cameras. “A lot of memories that I’ve had in the past, so it feels pretty good to be back and see these guys and enjoy the moment. It was some great moments here, but now we just got to keep going on.”
About 30 minutes before first pitch, the Nationals played a video for Bell and Soto, who were both stretching between the third base line and center field. While Soto watched, he chatted with Nelson Cruz, Luis García and Yadiel Hernandez, then hugged each of his former teammates. Soto’s section of the tribute began with his first career homer when he was just 19. It ended with some of the biggest hits in club history: his game-winning single against the Milwaukee Brewers in the 2019 wild card game, which he called his favorite moment at Nationals Park; his score-knotting homer in Game 5 of the National League Division Series that fall; then his towering shot off Gerrit Cole in Game 1 of the World Series, the one that landed on the train tracks at Minute Maid Park.
After the early-arriving crowd gave the pair a standing ovation, Soto’s face popped onto the big screen. Wearing a backward Padres hat, having traded red for brown, he had taped a message for D.C. fans.
“I love you all, even if I have another team’s uniform. I am still going to love you guys,” Soto said through the stadium’s speakers. “Thank you. You guys made me who I am today.”
For most of July, after Soto turned down a 15-year, $440 million extension, he was the biggest story in Major League Baseball. Would he land with the Los Angeles Dodgers, following Trea Turner and Max Scherzer from last season’s trade deadline? The Padres? The St. Louis Cardinals? Or might Soto stay in Washington if the Nationals didn’t find an offer they liked?
Thanks to the Padres and General Manager A.J. Preller, the Nationals’ bar was met. Soto and Bell were shipped out for six players: shortstop C.J. Abrams, outfielders Robert Hassell III and James Wood, left-handed pitcher MacKenzie Gore, right-handed pitcher Jarlin Susana and first baseman/designated hitter Luke Voit. But before he joined the Padres, in the weeks of questions about his future, Soto repeated a few sentiments.
He loved Washington. He understood the sport is a business. He would be very relieved when the circus closed shop.
The timing of Friday, though, kept a heavy weight on Soto’s first trip back to Washington. When Bryce Harper left for the Philadelphia Phillies in free agency, he returned a whole offseason after playing his final game in Washington. After Scherzer and Turner were traded last summer, they didn’t come to D.C. until this season, with Scherzer having moved from the Dodgers to New York Mets in that time. Anthony Rendon, on the other hand, has yet to make it here as a member of the Los Angeles Angels.
With those star-sized departures, fans had months to process before seeing them in this building in another uniform. But with Soto, it was more like pouring alcohol on a fresh wound.
“It feels different,” Manager Dave Martinez said. “It just feels kind of weird because it feels like he was just here yesterday.”
There was a stark difference, too, in how Soto was introduced before his first at-bat. For the past five seasons, public address announcer Jerome Hruska lent his signature touch to Soto’s name. He drew out the vowels in Juan. His voice rose toward the last consonant in Soto’s first name. And when he reached Soto — the two syllables that, before this month, were synonymous with a smile and massive swing in Washington — Hruska would reach for his high notes.
But not Friday. When Soto left the on-deck circle, Hruska flatly spoke his name, just as he does for all opposing players. To leave room for another ovation, catcher Keibert Ruiz walked in front of the plate and starter Cory Abbott stepped off the mound. Soto tipped his helmet, the cheers getting louder until they faded into a cloudless evening. Then Soto kicked dirt around the batter’s box and prepared himself to hit. | 2022-08-13T00:45:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Padres' Juan Soto returns to Nats Park for first time since trade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/juan-soto-returns-nationals-padres/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/juan-soto-returns-nationals-padres/ |
D.C. police officer shoots man in Southeast Washington
A D.C. police officer shot a man Friday night while responding to a call in Southeast Washington, according to a department spokesman.
Police said the incident occurred shortly after 7 p.m. in the 2000 block of Mississippi Avenue SE, in the Shipley neighborhood.
Details of the shooting were not immediately available. Police said the injured man was taken to a hospital. His condition could not immediately be determined.
The police spokesman, Dustin Sternbeck, said a gun was recovered at the scene.
Police said they are planning to release additional information later Friday. | 2022-08-13T00:58:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. police officer shoots man in Southeast Washington - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/police-shooting-mississippi-ave-se/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/12/police-shooting-mississippi-ave-se/ |
New York mayor signs six bills to expand abortion access
Mayor signs six bills to expand abortion access
New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) signed six bills aimed at expanding abortion access, seeking to bolster the city’s status as a haven for women from states with severe restrictions on the procedure.
The legislation includes a mandate for clinics operated by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to provide free abortion medication. It also prohibits the use of city resources to detain people for performing the procedure, and forbids city agencies from cooperating with out-of-state law enforcement about abortions in New York.
The laws, championed by the female-majority city council, come after Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a similar statewide package in June that included new legal protections for abortion patients and providers.
Scientists warn of disastrous 'megaflood'
A mention of California might usually conjure images of wildfires and droughts, but scientists say that the Golden State is also the site of extreme, once-a-century “megafloods” — and that climate change could amplify just how bad one gets.
The idea seems inconceivable — a month-long storm that dumps 30 inches of rain in San Francisco and up to 100 inches of rain and/or melted snow in the mountains. But it has happened before — most recently in 1862 — and if history is any indicator, we’re overdue for another, according to research published Friday in Science Advances.
“This risk is increasing and was already underappreciated,” said Daniel Swain, one of the study’s two authors and a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles.
In such an event, some in the Sierra Nevada could end up with 25 to 34 feet of snow, and most major highways would be washed out or become inaccessible.
While they can’t say when the next California megaflood will strike, forecasters are confident that it will happen. There’s a 0.5 to 1.0 percent chance of it happening in any given year.
Swain said one goal of his work is to push officials to prepare. “We’ll work through where the points of failure would actually be, because one of the things we want to do is get ahead of the curve,” he said.
— Matthew Cappucci
Man arrested for shots fired at Mall of America
A man accused of firing shots inside the Mall of America on Aug. 4 before fleeing the suburban Minneapolis shopping complex with the help of several accomplices has been arrested in Chicago, authorities said.
Shamar Alon Lark, 21, of Minneapolis, was arrested Thursday along with another man, the Bloomington Police Department announced.
According to court documents, Lark faces charges including second-degree assault. It wasn’t immediately known whether he had a lawyer Friday.
Police earlier said Lark fired three rounds in front of a Nike store after a fight involving a half-dozen people.
The shooting sent some shoppers running for cover and led officials to lock down the mall. No injuries were reported.
Tex. man dies after conviction: A man who drank from a water bottle after his guilty verdict in Denton County on Thursday was taken to a hospital and died later that day, according to his defense attorney. Edward Peter Leclair, 57, was convicted on five counts of child sexual assault. County prosecutor Jamie Beck told the Denton Record-Chronicle that the bottle had "cloudy" liquid.
Country singer's family files petition: Naomi Judd's family filed a court petition Friday to seal police reports and recordings made during the investigation into her death. The family said releasing such details would inflict "significant trauma and irreparable harm." Judd, 76, died on April 30 in Tennessee. | 2022-08-13T01:06:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New York mayor signs six bills to expand abortion access - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/new-york-mayor-signs-six-bills-to-expand-abortion-access/2022/08/12/579edbc6-1469-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/new-york-mayor-signs-six-bills-to-expand-abortion-access/2022/08/12/579edbc6-1469-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html |
Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson (4) looks to pass in the first quarter of Friday night's preseason game against the Jaguars in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
Quarterback Deshaun Watson made his preseason debut for the Cleveland Browns in their game Friday night in Jacksonville, Fla., as the NFL’s appeal of his six-game suspension under the personal conduct policy remains pending. Earlier, Watson said in an interview with a Cleveland television station that he apologizes to “all the women” he has “impacted” with his behavior.
Watson started the game for the Browns and played three offensive series in the opening quarter against the Jaguars. He completed only one of five passes for seven yards.
It was Watson’s first participation in an NFL game — preseason or regular season — since Jan. 3, 2021, when he played for the Houston Texans in a season-ending loss at home to the Tennessee Titans. He was traded to the Browns in March after being placed on the Texans’ game-day inactive list on a weekly basis last season.
“I’m super excited,” Watson said in a pregame interview Friday with Cleveland’s WEWS posted on the Browns’ Twitter account. “I’m excited to get out there with my new teammates and go out there and compete. Each and every snap, I want to make sure I cherish that because I’m not sure when the next time I’ll be able to get out there with those guys [will be].”
Watson issued a public apology during that interview.
Watson has denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by women in more than two dozen civil lawsuits filed against him. He has reached settlements in 23 of the 25 lawsuits, according to the attorney for the women. One lawsuit was withdrawn and one remains active. Watson has not been charged with a crime.
He played Friday while he, the Browns, the NFL and the NFL Players Association await a ruling by Peter C. Harvey, the former attorney general of New Jersey designated by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to resolve the league’s appeal of Watson’s six-game suspension.
Sue L. Robinson, a former U.S. district judge who is the disciplinary officer jointly appointed by the NFL and the NFLPA, imposed the suspension. She ruled that Watson violated the league’s personal conduct policy by, among other things, committing “nonviolent sexual assault.” She called Watson’s conduct “egregious” and “predatory” but said she was constrained by precedent on the length of the suspension.
The NFL exercised its right to appeal Robinson’s ruling, and Goodell chose Harvey to hear the case. The league is seeking an indefinite suspension of at least one full season, a fine and required treatment. Goodell said Tuesday at the conclusion of an NFL owners’ meeting in Bloomington, Minn., that the league appealed because it felt it was “the right thing to do.”
Watson is eligible to practice in training camp and play in preseason games so long as his suspension is less than a full season. He would likely be barred from practicing and playing in the preseason if Harvey extends the suspension to cover the entire 2022 season. Such a decision by Harvey could prompt Watson and the NFLPA to file a lawsuit.
One person involved in the case said earlier Friday there had been no indication given as to when Harvey’s ruling will be delivered. That person did not express optimism that a settlement between the NFLPA and NFL on Watson’s punishment would be reached in the meantime.
“I know I have a lot of work to put in, especially on the field to be able to make sure I’m ready to play whenever that time comes, whenever I can step back on the field,” Watson said in his pregame interview. “But also ... I want to make sure that I’m growing as a person, as an individual, for my decision-making on and off the field. And I want to make sure that I’m just evolving in the community as much as possible.” | 2022-08-13T01:19:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Deshaun Watson issues public apology, plays in Browns' preseason opener - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/deshaun-watson-apology-preseason-debut/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/deshaun-watson-apology-preseason-debut/ |
This image taken from video provided by ABC7 Los Angeles, shows the scene where a railroad tank car is leaking near Perris, Calif., Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. A Southern California freeway has been closed and nearby homes are evacuated as a chemical reaction inside a railroad tank car threatens to cause an explosion. The tank car is parked on a spur off a main rail line alongside Interstate 215 in Riverside County, about 57 miles east of Los Angeles. (ABC7 Los Angeles via AP) (Uncredited/ABC7 Los Angeles) | 2022-08-13T02:38:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boiling chemical on rail car forces evacuation in California - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/boiling-chemical-on-rail-car-forces-evacuation-in-california/2022/08/12/231b70ce-1aa6-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/boiling-chemical-on-rail-car-forces-evacuation-in-california/2022/08/12/231b70ce-1aa6-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
John Fetterman, lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and Democratic Senate candidate, during a campaign rally in Erie, Pa., on Aug. 12, 2022. (Justin Merriman/Bloomberg)
ERIE, Pa. — John Fetterman chose this lakeside political bellwether county to officially restart his campaign for Senate after a three-month hiatus caused by a stroke, telling a large, spirited crowd that he is “grateful” to be alive.
“Three months ago, three months ago, I might not have made it,” Fetterman said, becoming emotional at times as he talked about his health and credited his wife for saving his life. “But now I’m standing right here in Erie.”
Hanging over his first public in-person campaign event was a single question: How would the lingering effects of the stroke hinder his ability to wage a winning campaign?
Fetterman stood onstage in a lakeside convention center without assistance for about 15 minutes as he was introduced and then gave brief remarks before about 1,300 supporters. His tone, at times swaggering and other times self-deprecating and appreciative, sounded like the victory speech he would have made when he prevailed in his May primary. Instead he was too ill to attend his election night party.
He wiped his brow occasionally while onstage and his bald head gleamed with sweat. But his syntax, which he has acknowledged to be halting at times, was largely fluent, and he only missed a few words. He was assisted at times by the crowd cheering as he paused in the midst of sentences.
Democrats see the race here as one of the most promising pick up opportunities in the Senate for the upcoming midterm elections and a key to holding onto power in the chamber. Republicans are increasingly glum about their chances here as their nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz has vastly underperformed.
But Fetterman’s health could scramble the race. Fetterman’s return to the campaign trail came three days before Pennsylvania’s Aug. 15 deadline to replace a candidate on the ballot.
Fetterman mentioned his stroke several times, crediting his wife Gisele for recognizing the signs of a health problem as they were campaigning together in mid-May and pushing him to go to the hospital.
Fetterman, currently the lieutenant governor, checked into a Pennsylvania hospital on May 13. He remained hospital-bound through the May 17 Democratic primary, which he won overwhelmingly. Doctors cleared him to return home on May 22.
“After all that he’s overcome, I know that he can really take on anything,” said Gisele Fetterman, who thanked the crowd for welcoming her husband back to the campaign trail.
A campaign known for gimmicks and clever marketing didn’t disappoint. When Fetterman took the stage at 6:45 p.m. Friday, supporters began swinging their Fetterman-branded “terrible towels.” The mustard-colored cloths with black writing were a novel handout at the rally and are similar to swag that supporters wave at Pittsburgh Steelers games.
Fetterman joined in hoisting one over his head but also used it to mop sweat from his brow.
Behind the stage hung a banner that read: “EVERY COUNTY EVERY VOTE,” a slogan used since the primary and an in-your-face reminder of the retail politicking that set Fetterman apart during a bruising primary campaign.
Fetterman plans additional smaller events in coming weeks, campaign spokesman Joe Calvello said, although no schedule has been released.
Since his stroke, Fetterman has largely retreated from the campaign trail, although he has released occasional videos and made a few virtual appearances with campaign staff and supporters.
Fetterman appeared at a fundraiser headlined by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) at a home in Philadelphia Tuesday, one of five fundraisers that he’s attended in person since the stroke.
Fetterman has done some interviews with local media since the stroke and granted a TV interview with KDKA-TVs Jon Delano on Thursday night.
“I’ll miss a word sometimes or I might mush two words together sometimes in a conversation,” Fetterman said in that interview. “But that’s really the only issue and it’s getting better and better every day.”
Major medical problems don’t necessarily spell doom for a campaign. Indeed, in the 2020 presidential primary Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) standing in the polls actually improved after he was sidelined with a heart attack.
“What we had to do was demonstrate that Bernie was up to the job of being president,” said Jeff Weaver, who was a top adviser to Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “He carried on a pretty rigorous schedule pretty fast,” Weaver said.
Weaver’s advice to Fetterman’s campaign: “You just want to go out and get out among the people, to the greatest extent possible go back to your old routine.”
On Friday, Oz challenged Fetterman to a series of at least five general election debates hosted by media outlets across the state, the first one set for early September.
Oz’s gauntlet, strategists said, was designed to focus attention on Fetterman’s health: How will he perform on a debate stage?
Fetterman’s campaign declined to say whether he would participate in these exchanges. “Today is about John, and it’s not our job to boost Dr. Oz’s struggling campaign,” said Calvello.
Jenna M. Tosto, a Clinical Specialist in Neurologic Physical Therapy with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said that it’s entirely possible that a stroke survivor could participate in a debate months after falling ill.
Tosto said that lingering effects from a stroke can include problems with speech, reduced stamina, physical weakness, decreased coordination and balance. “It’s completely dependent on which portion of the brain is impacted,” Tosto said.
For his official return to the campaign trail, Fetterman’s campaign chose the aptly named Bayfront Convention Center, a soaring building with commanding views of Lake Erie.
“Let me tell you, if you can’t win Erie County then you can’t win Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said. The county, which makes up the northwest corner of the state, went for Donald Trump in 2016 by about 2,000 votes. Four years later, Joe Biden prevailed here with a roughly 1,400 vote margin.
Fetterman’s path to victory would require winning blue parts of the state, such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but also flattening the margins in some of the more rural areas where Democrats have bled voters in recent years.
Though Fetterman promised an issue-based campaign that he pledged would be positive, he also unleashed a torrent of criticism toward his Republican opponent. He joked about Oz’s wealth, and painted him as a carpetbagger who should be sent back to New Jersey, where the celebrity doctor has long resided.
“Who would have thought that — who would ever think — that I would be — the normal, the normal one in the race,” said Fetterman.
Fetterman was dressed in his unofficial uniform, including a black hoodie and jeans. He pushed up the sleeves revealing his tattooed arms.
Before the event, volunteers gathered outside the building by the lake and posed with a life-size cutout of the 6-foot-8-inch Fetterman.
Todd Davis, 66, a retired pastor, said he’s “concerned” about Fetterman’s health and suspects that it’s worse than the campaign is letting on. But that hardly dimmed his support, saying he just hopes he remains healthy enough to win and take office.
Other backers downplayed his health issues. Duane Churchill, 73 of Fairview, Pa., said that he’s had similarly serious health conditions and fully recovered, giving him comfort that Fetterman could do the same.
He noted that former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who he said was his favorite president, used a wheelchair and that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott does, too. “Infirmity isn’t what it once was.” | 2022-08-13T02:38:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fetterman returns to the campaign trail after stroke - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/fetterman-returns-campaign-trail-after-stroke/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/12/fetterman-returns-campaign-trail-after-stroke/ |
FILE - Len Dawson of the Kansas City Chiefs running through passing drills with receivers in New Orleans to prepare for the Super Bowl, in January 1970. Dawson, the 87-year-old Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl title, has entered hospice care in Kansas City, Mo. KMBC-TV, the Kansas City station where Dawson began his broadcasting career in 1966, confirmed Dawson is in hospice care through his wife, Linda. (AP Photo, File) (Anonymous/AP) | 2022-08-13T02:38:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Len Dawson, MVP of Chiefs' first Super Bowl win, in hospice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/len-dawson-mvp-of-chiefs-first-super-bowl-win-in-hospice/2022/08/12/fbe08d0a-1aa5-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/len-dawson-mvp-of-chiefs-first-super-bowl-win-in-hospice/2022/08/12/fbe08d0a-1aa5-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Idaho’s top court lets near-total abortion ban kick in
Idaho Capitol Building on May 3, 2022. (Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman via AP)
The Idaho Supreme Court said late Friday the state’s strict antiabortion laws can take effect while it reviews legal challenges against the merits of the restrictions. This means a near-total ban on abortions will kick in on Aug. 25; the court also lifted a stay on a law that allows potential relatives of a fetus to sue a provider who carries out an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
The decision was in response to lawsuits from a Planned Parenthood chapter and a local doctor challenging laws such as Idaho’s near-total abortion trigger ban, which was set to take effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. The petitioners had asked the judiciary to suspend enforcement of Idaho’s tough abortion restrictions until courts reached a final decision.
But Idaho’s highest court denied the requests in a split decision, saying that the petitioners had failed to show that they were likely to prevail in overturning the state’s antiabortion laws.
Idaho’s near-total abortion ban has exceptions for rape, incest and when the life of the pregnant person is at risk. Abortion rights supporters had previously argued in court that the medical exception was written so narrowly that it was impossible to follow, the Associated Press reported. | 2022-08-13T03:17:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Idaho Supreme Court lets near-total abortion ban take effect - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/12/idaho-abortion-ban-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/12/idaho-abortion-ban-supreme-court/ |
Mystics coach and GM Mike Thibault woke up Friday morning not only knowing his team was bound for the playoffs, but also that it had secured a lottery pick. (Craig Hudson/For the Washington Post)
INDIANAPOLIS — Mike Thibault confirmed he did not send a gift basket to the Los Angeles Sparks as he sat fielding questions in the bowels of Hinkle Fieldhouse. But a sly smile crept across his face Friday afternoon at the thought.
A short while later, Thibault’s Mystics beat the Indiana Fever, 82-70, to cap a day that started with them learning they will have a lottery pick in the 2023 draft. They will get the Sparks’ pick after Los Angeles was eliminated from playoff contention Thursday night.
“It's not very often you get to wake up and know you're a playoff team and a lottery team at the same time,” Thibault said. “It's a good feeling because we're playing for something and we have a way to keep building, too.”
Thibault, also the Mystics’ general manager, got that coveted pick through a trade with Atlanta last offseason. He sent the No. 1 overall pick to the Dream for their No. 3 pick, Atlanta’s 2022 second-rounder and the option to swap first-round picks in 2023. The Dream was in possession of the Sparks’ first-rounder and included that in the deal. At the time, the Dream did not expect to be in contention for the postseason while the Sparks looked to have a playoff roster.
Then the season fell apart for the Sparks with the firing of coach and GM Derek Fisher and the acrimonious split with center Liz Cambage, who left after 25 games after signing as a free agent in the offseason. The Sparks’ unraveling was the Mystics’ gain.
“You don't ever know how those things are going to work out, but we felt like we were going to be a playoff team,” Thibault said. “And even if L.A. had been a playoff team, a chance to even move up a couple more picks in the draft was worth the gamble. And if it wasn't that way, we could opt to keep our own. So it was a no-lose situation for us.
“But the fact that it turned out to be a lottery pick and we’ll have maybe decent odds in the lottery, we’ll see. When you do those deals, you hope for the best, and the best worked out.”
Things to know about Friday’s game:
Strong from the start
The Mystics (21-14) nearly led wire-to-wire. They basically cruised to the 12-point victory with the Fever’s last lead coming at 6-5. Everyone who played scored, and Elena Delle Donne led the team with 24 points and seven rebounds. Elizabeth Williams scored 10 off the bench, and Shakira Austin totaled 11 rebounds.
The team desperately wanted to get back on track after losing its previous two games.
“It felt good to just, like, get out here, be on the road and get a road win,” Delle Donne said. “That’s always important, but I think we still know we can take another step, especially in preparation for what’s next to come.
“But obviously, it's always great to get a win on the road, but there's always a little bit more we can do. So excited to get back out Sunday.”
The regular season comes to a close Sunday with a home game against the Fever (5-30).
The Mystics, locked into a playoff matchup with the Storm, will open the best-of-three series with two games at Seattle. The Storm’s win over Minnesota secured the No. 4 seed.
Delle Donne said every time the Mystics step on the court these days it’s preparation for the Storm. The Fever present a good opportunity toward that end; Indiana has former Seattle coach Gary Kloppenburg on staff to coach the defense.
Hines-Allen out
Forward Myisha Hines-Allen (health and safety protocols) missed the game but is expected to be cleared before the playoffs. The self-described “Bench Mob” picked up the slack with Williams finding her scoring touch, Shatori Walker-Kimbrough getting to the free throw line and being a nuisance on defense and Rui Machida (four assists) pushing the pace.
“Elena will tell you, championship teams, they need a bench,” Williams said. “It’s usually a team that can utilize all of their pieces really well. So I know whenever the bench mob comes in, we try to bring a lot of energy, try to get rebounds and do little things like that. [I] got some get low-post touches too, just trying to move without the ball because that’s important moving forward for playoffs.
“It’s going to take all of us.”
The Mystics finish every shoot-around with a half-court shooting contest with the winner taking home a bit of cash from everyone. That winner Friday morning was newcomer Jazmine Jones, who signed with the team Wednesday.
“That's my first half-court shot of the year,” Jones said. “I said it's crazy, it would be my first shoot-around with Washington. I make the half-court shot and I get $100 on a day, so I'm cool with that.”
Jones was out of the league after completing three seven-day contracts with the Connecticut Sun on July 13. She was previously on the Fever’s training camp roster before behind waived on May 1 and joining the Sun on June 15.
The 6-foot guard and 2020 No. 12 overall pick spent that off time in Tallahassee working out and hoping for a call. The phone rang at 1 p.m. Tuesday, and she was on a plane for Washington shortly after 8 p.m. Jones averaged 10.8 points in 20 games as a rookie for the New York Liberty. She didn’t play Friday.
“It was hard,” Jones said “So I try to stay out of social media. Just stay grounded, stay humble. Keep my family around me. Don’t listen to the outside noise because that’s always not good.”
Hinkle Fieldhouse, home of Butler University, is serving as a temporary home for the Fever. The team’s regular arena, Gainbridge Fieldhouse, is undergoing a renovation. Hinkle, built in 1928, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987. | 2022-08-13T03:39:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mystics beat Fever, brace for playoff meeting vs. Storm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/mystics-fever-wnba-playoffs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/12/mystics-fever-wnba-playoffs/ |
Sad preparations are being made to have her euthanized at home, and for someone to prepare a grave. I have notified people I know who will want to say goodbye (like my grandsons, whom my pet loves), and other family members.
I hesitate telling my sister. When my last pet passed away, she wanted to be there when we buried him.
Broken-Hearted: I’m very sorry you are going through this. But please keep in mind that euthanizing your pet at the end of a long illness should not be viewed as “an awful deed.”
It is a final act of loving your animal — all the way to the end. Compared to the importance of that tender mercy — your sister’s flip-out is small potatoes.
Pianist: If you don’t ask to be paid or discuss payment, you will most likely not be paid.
For example, one letter might read, “My niece rarely responds to text messages. I am forced to contact her again and again if I want a reply. The worst was when we were planning my mother’s 90th birthday party …”
Another writer might say, “I am a busy young professional. I can’t drop everything to reply to every text that comes my way, but my uncle does not seem to understand. The worst was when my grandmother was turning 90 …”
Wondering: I’m not aware of this ever happening, but your example illustrates how important perspective is. | 2022-08-13T04:09:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: I don’t want to tell my sister my dog is dying - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/13/ask-amy-dog-dying-sister/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/13/ask-amy-dog-dying-sister/ |
FILE - Jeffrey Toobin attends the PEN Literary Gala on May 22, 2018, in New York. Toobin, who had rejoined CNN as a legal analyst following his suspension for exposing himself to colleagues in a Zoom call, said Friday, Aug. 12, 2022, that he was leaving the network after 20 years. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-13T04:09:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two years after Zoom incident, Jeffrey Toobin leaving CNN - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/two-years-after-zoom-incident-jeffrey-toobin-leaving-cnn/2022/08/12/7291ea16-1ab5-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/two-years-after-zoom-incident-jeffrey-toobin-leaving-cnn/2022/08/12/7291ea16-1ab5-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
‘Juvenile’ was fatally shot in Prince George’s
Victim was found in Seat Pleasant area
A shooting in Prince George’s County left one person dead, the police said.
The victim, described by police as a male juvenile, was found about 8:45 p.m. in the 6300 block of Seat Pleasant Drive, the county police said. His exact age was not given.
He had one or more gunshot wounds and died at a hospital, they said.
The site, in the Seat Pleasant area, is a residential street about two miles southwest of FedEx Field. | 2022-08-13T06:24:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | "Juvenile" shot, killed in Prince George's - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/juvenile-shot-killed-prince-george/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/juvenile-shot-killed-prince-george/ |
Visitors walk across parched grass in Greenwich Park in front of a view of skyscrapers in the Canary Wharf financial, business and shopping district, in the Greenwich district of London, UK, on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. Across London and most of England the unprecedented heat this summer has pushed plant life, infrastructure and residents to the edge. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
Western leaders don’t lack for good advice from the classics, but clearly they don’t always take it.
During the golden era that followed the end of the Cold War, prosperity founded on globalization and “nice” growth (non-inflationary, consistently expansionary) was treated as if it would last forever. Investment in national resilience was ignored. The pandemic, a hostile China and the war in Ukraine have shown that the fruits of the long peace were squandered.
Now the UK is grumbling through “a summer of discontent.” Inflation is running at 9.4% while energy costs in Britain have soared 57%, with more hikes due in October. Public-sector unions naturally want pay rises to match spiraling prices and have been flexing their muscles. The railway network is being brought to a standstill by strikes.
Had political leaders bit the bullet during the good times and enforced realistic staffing levels and flexible working, then higher wages for railway workers might make sense. But in the good years, no government was prepared to expend the political capital. The unions thus force drivers on London Underground railways designed to be driverless. Today most passengers also purchase their tickets from machines not ticket offices, yet the unions have successfully insisted that the latter stay open.
There is a wider unease about the government’s capacity to deliver. In a moment of remarkable candor, Michael Gove, one of the most experienced Cabinet ministers until he fell out with Boris Johnson, recently told a think tank: “There are some core functions — giving you your passport, giving your driving licenses — which are simply, at the moment, not functioning.”
Even if you have a passport, leaving the country is no picnic. Dover, the main seaport for car journeys to continental Europe, has seen long queues for passport checks. Try to escape by plane and you will find that airlines have canceled many flights for lack of staff, many of whom were imprudently dismissed during the pandemic. Short-termism has become part of the national character.
A penny-wise policy of restricting the number of hospital beds was also shown to be pound-foolish during Covid, and the health system has been in crisis ever since. A nearly seven-million strong waiting list for treatment has built up. But don’t expect to get to hospital in a hurry, even if you suffer a heart attack. The average waiting time for an ambulance is 52 minutes — that’s 30 minutes more than is mandated. Appointments with general practitioners are also hard to get. A free National Health Service is all very well, but only if you can use it.
A mile from where I live in Islington, north London, a water main has burst, flooding the streets. Billions of gallons are wasted this way every year. My local privatized water company Thames Water urges me to be “a hot spot hero,” by taking care to save “every drop” of water. A drought has been officially declared, hosepipe bans have been imposed and talk of rationing is rife — even as Britain has been getting more rainfall by the year. A modest proposal: Can’t they just fix the pipes?
No new reservoirs have been dug despite a rising population. The Environment Agency opposed the last one because it was “not needed.” The regulatory agency for water, OFWAT, has allowed investment levels in the industry to fall despite record profits.
Furthermore, a “winter of discontent” lies ahead. Cornwall Insight, an energy consultancy, projects the energy price cap to increase from £1,971 to £4,427 ($5,366.85) next April. Will the lights go out? Bloomberg’s scoop this week about government contingency planning for power blackouts has deepened the gathering gloom — not since the 1970s has there been talk of a three-day week and rationing.
If only past governments listened to expert advice about investing in an energy mix that included nuclear power and domestic gas as well as renewables. But an obstructive planning regime invited delay, and the political class as ever found strong short-term electoral incentives to put off hard choices.
Meanwhile, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak continue their ill-tempered contest for the leadership of the Conservative party and the country, while the rest of the government takes a long holiday. Their talk of tax cuts and handouts is crowd-pleasing. But with a general election due within two years, which of them is brave enough to plan for a wider time horizon? Whether big state or small, we all just want one that works. | 2022-08-13T07:12:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Britain’s Summer of Discontent Is a Tale of Bad Planning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/britains-summer-of-discontent-is-atale-of-bad-planning/2022/08/13/f98fc174-1acd-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/britains-summer-of-discontent-is-atale-of-bad-planning/2022/08/13/f98fc174-1acd-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
WASHINGTON — San Diego Padres dynamo Fernando Tatis Jr., one of the brightest, freshest stars in all of Major League Baseball, was suspended 80 games after testing positive for a performance-enhancing substance.
PHILADELPHIA — New York Jets quarterback Zach Wilson injured his right knee in the first quarter of a 24-21 preseason victory over the Philadelphia Eagles.
PARIS — Seven-time Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi was omitted from the 30-man list of nominees for the prestigious award for the first time since 2005.
MINNEAPOLIS — Tina Charles had 23 points and nine rebounds, Jewell Loyd scored 21 points and the Seattle Storm secured the No. 4 seed in the WNBA playoffs with a 96-69 victory over the Minnesota Lynx, spoiling Sylvia Fowles’ final regular-season home game. | 2022-08-13T07:12:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Friday's Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/fridays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/13/c324f42a-1ad1-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/fridays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/13/c324f42a-1ad1-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
An Israeli military vehicle patrols the border with Lebanon on July 3. Israel's northern forces are on high alert. (Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
DOVEV, Israel — From this sunbaked ridge, the small outpost is clearly visible: a trailer that appeared one morning in April, quickly followed by a two-story observation tower, just feet from the hotly contested “Blue Line” that separates Lebanon and Israel.
Lebanon says the structures are used by an environmental group. But Israeli officials say the tower belongs to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia group, and is one of 22 outposts that have appeared along the U.N.-monitored Blue Line in the past three months — part of a sudden and worrying escalation that has led Israel to put its northern forces on high alert.
“This is a major change in what we’ve seen in the last few years,” said a senior Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security issues. “Hezbollah is becoming very, very blatant.”
The group’s activities — which officials say include a doubling of the number and size of patrols near the border, a series of drone incursions and a drumbeat of threats from Hezbollah leaders — come as American mediators race to settle a dispute between the two countries over suddenly lucrative natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel is already developing one drilling site, the Karish Field, in what Lebanon claims are disputed territorial waters. After two years of talks, time is running out to reach a settlement by September, when Israel is expected to begin extracting gas from the first rig.
Negotiators have indicated that a deal may be close, after recent visits to both Lebanon and Israel by Amos Hochstein, the U.S. senior adviser for energy security. But the stakes are rising.
Israel is hoping its gas will finally make it part of the Middle East
Hezbollah has threatened to attack Israel if an acceptable deal isn’t reached and has dispatched drones toward the gas field at least twice in recent weeks, including three unmanned aircraft that were shot down by Israel in early July.
The drones appeared to be unarmed and caused no damage. But they hinted at Hezbollah’s ability to strike the offshore facility at a time when Lebanon’s economy is cratering.
“We will reach Karish and everything beyond Karish and everything beyond that,” Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah said in a televised speech. “War is much more honorable than the situation Lebanon is heading to now — collapse and starvation.”
This month the head of Israel’s military advised the security cabinet that the situation was at risk of turning into a military escalation with Hezbollah, according to Israeli media reports. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly warned Hezbollah through intermediaries that any attack will provoke fierce retaliation.
“If the deal is not accepted by Lebanon or Israel, we are heading into a confrontation,” said Jacques Neria, who was an adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s and is now with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “Any war that starts on the maritime battlefield will spill out onto other arenas. If they hit our rigs, we’ll hit them on land.”
The spike in tensions comes as Israel nervously eyes international efforts to restore an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. Israel says a new deal, which would presumably ease financial sanctions against Iran, risks further empowering Tehran and its proxies, including Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with which the IDF fought a three-day battle this month that killed 45 people in Gaza.
After a breakthrough in talks in Vienna this week, negotiators have returned to their capitals to consider what Europe called its “final” proposal to save the nuclear deal. Washington, over Israel’s objections, expressed its support for the text, but Tehran has sought to temper expectations.
For the Israelis and Lebanese living along this hilly border, sometimes within meters of one another, the risk of war is ever-present. In many Israeli communities, it is easy to hear the call to prayer from Lebanese mosques and the firecrackers from Lebanese birthday celebrations.
“They are our neighbors. Right there, those are Lebanese cars,” said Silka Schreiber, pointing at vehicles traversing the valley a half-mile from the grocery store in Metula, an Israeli town of fewer than 2,000 bound on two sides by the Blue Line fence.
But the proximity doesn’t make the current flare-up seem less dangerous to those living in the line of fire. A 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah lasted for 34 days, killing more than 1,000 people in Lebanon and dozens of Israelis. Osnat Ben Nun, 55, was pregnant during the tense run-up to the conflict and remembers antiaircraft explosions like fireworks in the night sky. Now, her child is an Israeli soldier.
“My son is in the army,” said Ben Nun, a social worker. “It feels different. I’m very scared.”
The Israeli military contends that Hezbollah is building its presence along the Blue Line in violation of international agreements. An opening in the white trailer, which is about the size of a shipping container, and windows in the tower peer directly into Israel.
Israel has asked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the body responsible for monitoring the border, to intervene, but it claims its hands are tied.
A spokesman for UNIFIL said that it was aware of the 22 posts that have recently appeared, but that it was unable to visit because the Lebanese government has declared them private property. Nor had it detected any activities at the sites prohibited by the cease-fire agreements between the two countries.
“UNIFIL has not observed any unauthorized armed persons at the locations or found any basis to report a violation of [cease-fire agreements],” said spokesman Andrea Tenenti. “On our part, UNIFIL remains vigilant and continues to closely monitor all these sites and the Blue Line.”
Israeli observers say they have watched men in the outpost taking photos of its equipment and personnel. The banner of an environmental group flies over the structures, “Green Without Borders,” which Israel contends is a front organization.
“They may not hold up cards saying ‘We are Hezbollah,’ but these are not birdwatchers,” said the senior official.
Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report. | 2022-08-13T08:09:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tensions flare between Israel and Hezbollah over disputed gas fields - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/israel-lebanon-border-threat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/israel-lebanon-border-threat/ |
Dead fish on the banks of the river Oder, which runs through Germany and Poland. (Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)
Vast amounts of chemical waste were probably dumped into a river on the Poland-Germany border, Poland’s prime minister said on Friday, killing tons of fish and creating an ecological disaster that could take years to clean up.
More than 100 Polish troops have been deployed to the 522-mile-long Oder River, which flows through Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, to launch a cleanup operation, authorities said. The chemical spill was likely to have been intentional, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in a podcast on Friday, where he vowed to hold perpetrators responsible.
“It is likely that enormous amounts of chemical waste have been dumped into the Oder River, and this was done with full awareness of the risks and consequences,” Morawiecki said. “We will not let this matter go, we will not rest until the guilty are severely punished.”
German water samples from the region revealed elevated levels of mercury in the water, according to local media, but authorities are still investigating the source of the spill. Scientists have speculated that there might be other causes for the mass fish deaths, including climate change. Poland deployed 150 troops to set up a barrier along the river to catch the dead fish, and warned local residents not to bathe in the water or eat fish caught in contaminated parts of the river.
Environmental groups have criticized Poland’s government for its slow response to the contamination, which local fishermen noticed in late July. The German environment ministry said Warsaw did not officially inform Berlin of the disaster until Thursday, weeks after the dead fish first appeared.
“We know that the chain of reporting that’s envisaged for such cases didn’t work,” environment ministry spokesperson Christopher Stolzenberg told reporters, according to the Associated Press.
“An environmental catastrophe is looming,” German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke told the RND newspaper group. “All sides are working flat out to find the reasons for this mass [fish killing] and minimize potential further damage.”
Video from the scene that was posted on social media shows fish piled up and floating along the river bank. Local fishermen say they have been helping to haul dead fish and beavers out of the water for weeks.
Scientists have speculated that factors beyond deliberate dumping could be at play. The mercury could have settled in the river’s bottom sediment due to past pollution, before being stirred up by recent dredging. Europe’s historic heat wave this summer could also be to blame. The continent is facing what is potentially its worst drought in 500 years; low water levels and high temperatures could be choking off oxygen supplies to the river’s aquatic life and worsening existing pollution.
“This is a problem we will increasingly face as we move into a world affected by climate change. Pollutants that are out there are more toxic because they are present in higher concentrations during drought conditions,” said David Taylor, a professor of environmental change at the National University of Singapore.
“We are in this strange period now, where we are beginning to see … not just the direct effects of climate change, such as droughts and storms, but also the knock-on effects.”
In 2016, Vietnam blamed a steel plant on its coast for a toxic waste spill that killed some 100 tons of fish, in what has been called the country’s worst environmental disaster. The spill contaminated 125 miles of coastline and left many fishermen in the region jobless. An internal government report found that the plant, run by Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Group, had committed more than 50 violations, according to Reuters.
On Friday, Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki fired the head of the National Water Management Agency, after 20,000 people signed a petition urging dismissal. He also sacked the chief inspector of the country’s Environmental Protection Agency for not acting quickly enough.
“The situation we are dealing with was in no way foreseeable, but certainly the responsible agencies could have acted faster,” he said in a Facebook post. | 2022-08-13T08:44:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oder River mass fish deaths on German-Polish border linked to mercury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/poland-oder-river-mercury-fish/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/poland-oder-river-mercury-fish/ |
A serviceman with a Russian flag on his uniform stands guard near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine on August 4, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the European Union to ban travel visas for Russians, and missiles hit a city in southern Ukraine near Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
The Kremlin has condemned calls to ban Russian travelers after Zelensky told The Washington Post he wants all Russians to be denied visas to Western countries in a bid to deter Moscow from annexing Ukrainian territory. In a nightly address, the Ukrainian president again told E.U. leaders to impose a ban, which would affect tourists, business executives, students and others. Latvia and Estonia are already halting the issuance of visas to Russians, closing off two vital land routes for Russians to access the European Union since the bloc closed its airspace to Russian aircraft.
Russian strikes pounded the city of Nikopol overnight, a regional official said. He said there were no casualties, while reporting damage to homes and a kindergarten in a region near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. An uptick in shelling in districts around the facility, which Russian forces control, has raised alarm. As Ukrainian and Russian forces trade blame for firing near the site, the United Nations has called for a cease-fire there.
The Pentagon said it does not know what weapons were used in an attack on a Russian air base in Crimea this week. A military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the Pentagon, told reporters the United States found that equipment which was damaged in the explosions includes “a number of Russian aircraft, fighters, fighter bombers, surveillance aircraft,” and “a pretty significant cache of munitions.”
Ukraine’s military says it now has nearly all of Moscow’s supply lines under firing range in the southern Kherson region, which Russian forces captured earlier in the war. On the front lines near Kherson, progress that Ukrainian troops made in retaking occupied villages appears to have stalled.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States “is concerned” by reports of British, Swedish and Croatian nationals being charged by “illegitimate authorities in eastern Ukraine.” Pro-Moscow separatists in the east have put foreign nationals on trial for fighting alongside Ukrainian forces.
Ukrainian officials urged the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisoners of war captured by Moscow, after an explosion killed at least 50 Ukrainian soldiers at the Olenivka detention facility in the hands of pro-Russian separatists.
Odessa’s summer of war: Summer beach days are off limits in Ukraine’s seaside city of Odessa, Loveday Morris and Wojciech Grzedzinski report in this visual story.
“The threat of sea mines and fears that packed beaches could attract Russian shelling mean that a few hours of sunning or a dip in the Black Sea is illegal,” they write.
But the draw is too strong for many residents starved for normalcy. “It’s happiness,” said Olya, 49, a vocalist spending the day at the beach with friends. | 2022-08-13T08:44:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
Ukraine Live Briefing: Zelensky asks Europe to ban Russian visas; Strikes i...
About 100,000 U.S. troops are deployed across Europe, with a growing center of gravity in the east. But for those on Russia’s doorstep, it’s not yet enough.
Karoun Demirjian
U.S. Marines fire a M777 howitzer during a military exercise at Adazi Training Area in Latvia. (Sgt. Andy Martinez/Marine Forces Reserve)
RIGA, Latvia — As the United States and NATO inject personnel and equipment into Eastern Europe in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, vulnerable allies such as Latvia are scrambling to scale up their defenses for fear they will be next to come under attack.
The Biden administration has vowed to boost side-by-side exercises in the region to hone proficiency in air-defense capability and other vital combat skills, not only in Latvia but across the Baltics and in other nations within easy striking distance of Russian forces. About 100,000 U.S. troops are deployed across Europe, an increase of 20,000 in recent months, with a growing center of gravity in the east. But for those on Russia’s doorstep, it’s not yet enough.
The military investments made over the past six months are accepted with gratitude, but leaders in the region believe the alliance must become more aggressive in the long term. They are mindful of the resistance from some corners of Congress to moving more U.S. personnel to Europe during a time of rising tensions with China, but most insist that having a greater American footprint in Europe is necessary to keeping Moscow at bay.
Even more vital, Baltic and Eastern European officials say, is a turbocharging of defense production lines to accelerate fulfillment of long-standing orders for weapons that these front-line countries say they require.
“HIMARS, Reapers, counter-battery radars: these are what we will need most in terms of military lethal power that is imminently needed to deter Russia,” Kusti Salm, secretary general of the Estonian Defense Ministry, said in an interview. He was referring to high-mobility artillery rocket systems, drones capable of conducting surveillance and precision strikes, and technology used to detect incoming fire.
“We are on the brink of taking risks,” Salm said. “Very heavy risks of our own national security tapping into some of our reserves. … And I know that there are other allies doing the same. So the only solution is rapidly ramping up the manufacturing power, and making sure the policy framework and policy financing signal support for this.”
Earlier this year, Congress approved hundreds of millions of dollars to support, train and equip foreign countries that aided the Ukraine war effort — a category that includes all of the frontline NATO states — as part of a $40 billion package of assistance for the government in Kyiv and other measures to strengthen Western defenses.
Part of the initiative calls for accelerating efforts to replace with NATO-standard weapons the Soviet-legacy systems many frontline states rushed to Ukraine early in the conflict. Many of those countries also have been supplying Ukraine with NATO-compatible heavy weapons from their own stocks.
A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon, said that, in the case of Latvia, its government felt comfortable providing Ukraine with some weapons because Russian forces that had been positioned near their shared border were withdrawn to join the war effort.
But Moscow’s hostility toward NATO remains unchanged, this official said, and Western countries need to backfill those capabilities at some point. The official did not say how long that may take. The United States is looking for the Baltic countries to build training ranges and other military infrastructure, the official added, while noting that U.S. security assistance for the region has risen to $180 million this year.
U.S. all but declines Poland’s offer to give Ukraine its old warplanes
In an interview, the Polish defense attache, Brig. Gen. Krzysztof Nolbert, said “winning that war is absolutely fundamental to security in Europe.” Poland is the third-largest donor to the Ukrainian military, Nolbert added, and has routinely urged the West to support Kyiv “more decisively as opposed to incrementally,” including by sending in fighter jets.
At the same time, Polish officials believe it would greatly help their own defense posture if the United States could accelerate delivery of certain weapons Warsaw has already been promised. Poland is awaiting Patriot missile batteries, HIMARS, F-16 fighter aircraft and Abrams battle tanks, all along multiyear schedules set before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Recently, the head of Poland’s national security bureau, Pawel Soloch, spoke with President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, about the need for defense production to be more responsive to escalating threats, impressing upon him that the U.S. foreign military financing protocols needed an upgrade, according to people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail a private conversation.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the characterization of their discussion.
“I know they are working at maximum speed,” Nolbert said. But, he added: “It’s an emergency situation. We need it now.”
In Latvia, meanwhile, the defense minister, Pabriks, told reporters this month that his country is seeking the sophisticated long-range rocket artillery that has bedeviled Russian troops in eastern Ukraine plus air and coastal defense systems generally out of reach for countries with modest budgets.
Latvia now considers the Belarus and Russian borders as one and the same, Pabriks said, and officials here closely watch what’s happening on the other side with the aid of intelligence provided by the United States and other partners.
The persistent deployments of NATO troops and weapons to countries along Russia’s flank is a strategy Western military leaders call the porcupine defense. It seeks to make the idea of invasion unpalatable to adversarial war planners by demonstrating NATO troops can instantly mobilize and back up allies already toughened by Western training and equipment.
During a stop at Latvia’s Lielvarde Air Base, where U.S. troops have taken up residence, Austin heard from a Latvian service member who professed to be the first in his country to return from Black Hawk helicopter training in the United States. In recent years, Latvian pilots were more focused on missions like search and rescue, he told the defense secretary, but now he knows how to fly in combat.
The meeting underscored, though, that even some small challenges remain. One U.S. soldier, deployed here from Ohio, disclosed that it’s often difficult to work with his Latvian counterparts in person. They’re based an hour’s drive from one another, the soldier said, and transportation is lacking.
“We’ll work on that,” Austin responded. “We’ll figure it out. … We’re going to make sure we know the people that we’re committed to fighting alongside, and you get a chance to see some of the land you may have to protect one day.”
Pabriks sounded a more urgent and ominous tone, telling the assembled troops, “If something happens on our borders, we are ready to die.”
Demirjian reported from Washington. Michael Birnbaum in Warsaw contributed to this report. | 2022-08-13T10:10:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. allies most vulnerable to Russia press for more troops, weapons - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/13/us-military-baltics-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/13/us-military-baltics-russia/ |
Timothy Weeks, who was released after three years, converted to Islam while in captivity.
KABUL — An Australian teacher who was kidnapped in Kabul by Taliban forces in 2016, then released in an exchange deal with U.S. officials three years later, returned here Friday, saying he planned to “celebrate” the upcoming one-year anniversary of Taliban rule and that he “stood behind” the current regime.
Weeks converted to Islam during more than three years in Taliban captivity and changed his name to Buad Jibra’il Omar after returning home. He said Friday that during his stay, “I saw these people in a light that nobody else has been able to do.” He recently announced his plan to return for the anniversary to the Australian press.
He was one of two faculty members kidnapped from a van near the American University in Afghanistan, a large campus in Kabul where he had been teaching English, in 2016. The other was an American, Kevin King.
Both men were released in 2019 in an exchange for three senior Taliban members. One of them was Anas Haqqani, now a top member of the current Taliban leadership in Kabul.
Weeks’ return and public praise for the Taliban, just days before the one-year mark since its takeover of power, stood in sharp contrast to the criticism and concerns many international groups and Western governments have expressed recently about the Kabul regime’s tightening repression of women’s rights and other freedoms. | 2022-08-13T10:11:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Timothy Weeks, Australian ex-hostage, visits Kabul and praises Taliban - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/afghanistan-timothy-weeks-australian-hostage-return/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/13/afghanistan-timothy-weeks-australian-hostage-return/ |
Costs are down from their peaks in the Ukraine war but are still up compared with last year
A bombed grain silo containing still burning grain inside in Zasillya, Ukraine in July. (Wojciech Grzedzinski/For The Washington Post)
Russia’s Feb. 24 attack on Ukraine sent a shock wave through commodity markets. Since then, however, fears that the war would cut off all exports through the Black Sea have proved unfounded.
Pressure on commodity markets also eased after Wall Street speculators began selling their holdings in response to the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases, which made bets on rising commodity prices less certain.
Wheat is now less expensive than when the war began. Brent crude oil, the global benchmark, hovers around its mid-February level of $97 per barrel. And the price of urea fertilizer, which almost doubled in the war’s first weeks, is back to its prewar level.
“The worst didn’t happen. … But there’s a false sense of security in the markets right now,” said Sanjeev Krishnan, the chief investment officer at S2G Ventures, an investment firm in Chicago specializing in food and agriculture. “This fall could have a lot more volatility.”
Rate hikes are little help for Estonia’s 22 percent inflation, Europe’s worst
Still, the current situation is an improvement. Earlier this year, the war between Russia and Ukraine, neighboring countries that together account for more than one-quarter of all globally traded wheat, caused grain prices to soar by 63 percent in less than two weeks. At the same time, prices for one type of nitrogen-based fertilizer almost doubled, and oil shot up to almost $128 per barrel.
One-third of the 153 countries that the World Food Program tracks recorded annual food inflation of at least 15 percent for the three months that ended July 31, according to Friederike Greb, an economist with the Rome-based United Nations offshoot.
In Lebanon, food prices rocketed by 332 percent, while Iranian food bills jumped by 87 percent and Turkish grocery costs rose by 95 percent.
“Lower prices are definitely good news for global food security,” Greb said. “But we don’t have any reason to be less worried, given what we see happening on the ground.”
When they do, the declines are often overwhelmed by the impact of falling currency values in importing nations. The Fed’s multiple interest rate increases this year have lifted the dollar against most other currencies.
The currencies of Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Laos and Malawi have lost at least 25 percent of their value against the greenback. That is, effectively, a price increase for local companies or governments purchasing global commodities, which are priced in U.S. dollars.
“We’re still in a crisis of mega proportions,” Greb said.
“It’s too early to say that we’re past the worst,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization.
The rise in prices earlier this year was amplified by speculators’ financial bets. In February, before the war started, money managers were betting in futures markets that Chicago Board of Trade wheat prices would decline, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation.
But by early March, the market herd had shifted to a massive bet on rising prices. The size of that bet peaked in mid-May shortly after the Fed’s second rate increase in three months, which was designed to bring inflation down from 8.5 percent to its target level of 2 percent.
“When the Fed says we’re going back to 2 percent, you need to get out” of the commodity markets, said economist Dan Basse of AgResource in Chicago.
European Central Bank takes big step to address rising inflation
The outlook for wheat prices became especially cloudy in the first months of the war after Russia stopped its routine reporting of export data to the United Nations’ Comtrade database, according to Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute who has approximated the missing export figures by analyzing purchase reports from Moscow’s customers.
“They’re showing about the same level of exports from Russia this year as last year,” he said. “Russian trade is on track.”
A related agreement should enable more exports of Russian ammonia fertilizer via a pipeline to the Ukrainian port of Pivdenny, which has been closed since the war’s early days, said Chris Lawson, the head fertilizer analyst for the CRU Group.
“Things are still really, really tight. But it hasn’t been as bad as the Armageddon that people expected,” Lawson said.
Pick your economy: Sizzling labor market or fizzling growth
A 25 percent devaluation of the kwacha, the local currency, has made imports more expensive, straining the household budgets of the smallholder farmers who make up the bulk of the country’s workforce.
“It’s going to be difficult,” Keino said. “Everything has gone up, but nobody has more money in their pocket. So we’ll see a lessening of the utilization of fertilizer.” | 2022-08-13T10:15:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Plunging global food and fuel costs offer poor countries little relief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/13/food-fuel-lower-prices/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/13/food-fuel-lower-prices/ |
The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about global warming
The world has changed dramatically since the last time Congress considered climate legislation.
Last time it sought to cap greenhouse gas emissions and the fossil fuel industry fought back hard. Not this time.
Last time some Republicans supported the measure, harking back to an era when environmental protection was not so polarizing. Not this time.
On Friday, a dozen years after a sprawling climate bill passed the House but failed to move ahead in the Senate, Democrats successfully muscled the United States’ most ambitious climate change proposal ever past Congress, sending it to President Biden for his signature.
The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about how human-caused emissions would warm the planet.
Whereas President Jimmy Carter once pushed clean energy as a matter of personal, moral responsibility, the new bill treats climate change as a pragmatic pocketbook matter of consumer rebates and corporate tax incentives.
Whereas climate change once seemed distant, it is now a constant presence in shaping weather patterns, the economy and daily life in much of the world, especially during the harsh summer months.
And the energy industry has been largely silent on the climate bill, reflecting the legislation’s emphasis on subsidies for clean energy. BP, Shell and Holcim, the energy-intensive concrete and cement maker, were among dozens who joined a letter promoting the bill’s passage. Aside from fees and widely agreed-upon rules on potent methane leaks, there is a nearly complete dearth of limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
The current bill also shows how the Republican Party has evolved on climate and the environment. President Richard M. Nixon signed the first Clean Air Act. President George H.W. Bush said “we must remember to treat them [the planet] not as a given but as a gift.” And Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a system for capping carbon emissions.
Yet this week, not a single Republican voted for the climate bill in the Senate or the House.
But even as the legislation garnered only Democratic support, it was a far cry from other liberal proposals to deal with climate change, including the 2010 measure. Rather than being crafted by two liberal lions — then House member and now Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and the former California congressman Henry Waxman — this current measure was shaped by the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), and the centrist Democratic Majority Leader, Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.).
Markey, who helped draft the multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal in 2019, has evolved too.
“I was angry,” said Markey describing his feelings in 2010. “I was in a rage that Senate rules would make it impossible to pass a bill that was absolutely necessary. And it did die. And because of that, I know that ending up with nothing is a political option. But it is not a planetary option.”
This time, Markey said he told the president and party leaders that whenever the time came for reckoning on new legislation, that he “would have their backs” and that he would tell climate activists that “it was a victory and we would build on it in the years ahead.”
Above all, backers of the 730-page legislation dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act — little in the bill actually deals with inflation — say that it is overdue, coming decades after leading climatologist James Hansen testified in Congress and rang the alarm over global warming.
Now, with world leaders preparing to hold their next major climate summit in Egypt in November, developing countries look to the United States for leadership even while criticizing it for the greenhouse gases it emitted over the last century.
“No bill was ever going to make up for the U.S. Congress being 30 years too late to the party,” said Dan Lashof, the U.S. director of the World Resources Institute. “It’s a breakthrough but we’re starting from a pretty deep hole that we need to dig out of.”
‘Moral crusade’
Carter was the first president to talk about solar panels, but he did so as a moral issue.
“The problem in the 1970s I think is that Carter was not tuned into pocketbook issues,” said Meg Jacobs, a historian and senior research scholar at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. “He never sold it as green jobs or saving your pension savings. He saw it as a moral crusade.”
But it was Bush who made climate change an issue for the federal government. He signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and created the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal research on climate change and its impacts. Bush also created a cap-and-trade program — a predecessor for the Waxman-Markey plan — to limit emissions of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain.
The Republican Party continued to make climate change a bipartisan concern. McCain (R-Ariz.) spoke often of the need to slow climate change and he, along with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), touted the virtues of an economywide cap-and-trade program.
In 2008, both candidates for president backed plans to slow climate change. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) president Fred Krupp said that McCain was often hailed for his wartime sacrifice during the Vietnam generation, but that he should be remembered for his efforts to tackle climate change and save future generations.
President George W. Bush was a stout defender of the oil and gas industry, but he also recognized the strength of the climate issue. In February 2002, he set a very modest target to reduce the greenhouse gas emission intensity of the American economy by 18 percent by 2012. (In fact, the intensity dropped 40 percent over that period, as cars, buildings and industry became more energy efficient.)
“The issue of climate change respects no border,” he said in July 2001. “Its effects cannot be reined in by an army nor advanced by any ideology.”
‘Broadening consensus’
Two decades later, Republican support for climate legislation has crumbled — not in the face of an advancing army, but from within.
But EDF’s Krupp said support for climate change is now growing across party lines, especially among young people. And polling by Yale University’s program on climate change shows that “the gap between Republican and Democratic views on global warming is smaller for Millennials than for older generations, indicating that there is less political polarization over this issue among younger Americans.”
“To say it is partisan obscures the broadening consensus on this,” Krupp said. “Young people are demanding change and I think their voices have been heard loud and clear.”
He also noted that in just a few years, Manchin went from a Senate campaign ad in which he tacked a copy of Markey’s cap-and-trade bill to a tree and fired his rifle at it to being a leading advocate of the new legislation. “Yes, he modified some pieces,” Krupp said, “but he didn’t gut them and didn’t seek to gut them.”
One simple measure to slow climate change would have been a carbon tax, favored by a bipartisan array of economists — including Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist William Nordhaus, a Democrat, and N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard professor. Many business executives, including some from major oil companies, also support it.
“In the big picture from a policy perspective, we know the right answer: Put a price on carbon so people innovate away from carbon and every business has an interest in solving the carbon problem,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former adviser to McCain and now president of the American Action Forum.
The Inflation Reduction Act, he said, “does the opposite. Instead of imposing a price, it is trying to get the same outcome by using a massive subsidy scheme.” He predicted it would be uncoordinated and feared it would be ineffective. “It’s all over the map,” he said.
The new legislation has scattered dozens of different tax provisions, targeting specific sectors or beneficiaries — only certain kinds of electric vehicles; battery makers and rare mineral miners only from North America; a green bank whose loans would lean partly toward environmental justice; offshore drilling and solar tax incentives; rural electric cooperatives; nuclear reactor plants whose operators have threatened to close down; and a variety of energy-efficient home appliances and building materials.
Biden administration officials say the president deserves credit for embracing a hodgepodge approach back in 2019.
“He made a really specific decision there that I think is critical,” said Stef Feldman, a longtime Biden aide who helped craft the campaign’s climate plan and who now serves as a deputy assistant to Biden. “That is the core of the plan that the president put forward in 2019, which was, in retrospect, a very big pivot moment for Democrats and national politics.”
Later Biden administration officials were able to win support from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as well as the Edison Electric Institute, a utility industry trade group that last December was one of the first industry groups to urge Democrats to resume talks after one of the many breakdowns.
“We spent a lot of time at the president’s direction engaging with building trust and bringing in these critical stakeholders across this coalition of labor [and] across this coalition of business,” Biden climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in a phone interview this week. “And I think that’s just fundamentally what made this more of a durable and resilient play over time.”
Markey said that the incentives in the new legislation have bigger foundations to build upon than in the past, comparing the Inflation Reduction Act to the 1990s Telecommunications Act.
Up until 2009, when he was writing his cap-and-trade bill, there was a grand total of about 2,000 megawatts of solar in the United States, Markey said. Last year alone, 24,000 megawatts of new solar were installed, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Also in 2009, he said, there was a total of 25,000 megawatts of wind power countrywide. In 2021 alone, 17,100 megawatts were installed, the EIA said. Even oil companies such as BP and Shell are financing wind turbines off the northeast coast.
This year, solar is expected to account for half of all new electricity generation.
“That’s why I’m an optimist,” Markey said.
World Resources Institute director Lashof is also optimistic. He noted that the Congressional Budget Office issues estimates of spending bills, but that the cost of tax credits and other incentives are inherently uncertain and could be much larger than forecast. For example, the CBO estimated that the $7.5 billion estimate for the cost of the tax credit for electric vehicles would cover 100,000 to 200,000 vehicles a year over a 10-year period. But the auto industry is expecting much more. A Consumer Reports survey found that half of new car buyers would be likely to buy an electric vehicle with price incentives.
Despite the breadth of the bill, some items are still missing. Lashof pointed out that the legislation doesn’t include funding for international climate action, angering countries who have pressed for money to pay for adaptation and damages from past emissions. On the domestic side, the bill did not provide money for transmission lines, though some funds were included in the earlier infrastructure bill. And the Green New Deal Network complained about the oil and gas lease sales in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico and the failure to include $30 billion for a Civilian Climate Corps.
“These omnibus bills are always patchworks of different things,” said Jacobs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. “But there must be some sort of guiding principle and philosophy.” Moreover, she said, Democrats demonstrated pragmatism, knowing that next year they could lose control of Congress and once again get nothing.
“The compromises in this legislation are actually pretty minor,” former vice president Al Gore said in an interview. “If you look at the legislation through the lens of carbon reductions, the few provisions that I would have certainly opposed are extremely minor in terms of the carbon compared to the massive advances in the bulk of the legislation. This was a tremendous accomplishment.”
The American Action Forum’s Holtz-Eakin was less enthusiastic. “Successful legislation is never great. It is always by people slightly disgruntled about what they had to give up,” he said. “It did get across the finish line,” he added. That much, at least “has to be acknowledged.”
Dino Grandoni contributed to this report. | 2022-08-13T10:15:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the climate package grew from idealism to necessity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/13/surprising-political-shifts-that-led-climate-bills-passage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/13/surprising-political-shifts-that-led-climate-bills-passage/ |
John Hinckley Jr. is no longer under court oversight. But he’s found that his freedom has limits.
John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981, has tried to start a career in music but has found getting live dates difficult. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
“A great day for me,” he said.
On the same day the order went into effect releasing him from court oversight, Hinckley learned a music club in Brooklyn had, citing safety concerns from threats directed at them online, canceled a small sold-out concert in July, where he hoped to perform 17 original songs. The event represented a lifelong dream for the 67-year-old, who began playing the guitar when he was a teenager. It was one of several concerts — the others in Chicago; Hamden, Conn.;, and Williamsburg, Va. — that abruptly canceled for similar reasons.
“I had been thinking about this concert for several months now, planning and practicing,” he said.
John W. Hinckley Jr.'s freedom is unprecedented. Others who tried to kill presidents faced very different fates.
The Market Hotel, located in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, released a statement on social media that said the concert was “not worth a gamble on the safety of our vulnerable communities … in a dangerously radicalized, reactionary climate.”
“It was quite a disappointment,” Hinckley said. Five hundred tickets had already been sold. The venue said it was being inundated with “some very real and worsening threats and hate.”
Would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr. is freed after 35 years
As Hinckley worked to manage his mental illness privately, his public image continued to root him in 1981, when he shot the president and others out of a deranged plot to impress the actress Jodie Foster. A 1990 Stephen Sondheim musical, “Assassins,” made him a character alongside Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot and killed President John F. Kennedy, and John Wilkes Booth, who shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln. Conspiracy theories about his family fester in dark corners of the internet. Different punk bands have made him a subject of their songs. The pop band Devo even put one of his poems to music.
Hinckley says he doesn’t watch television and isn’t interested in learning what people say about him. “I don’t read up on that at all,” he said. “And I don’t want to know.”
“I just don’t have the depression and isolation that I had back then,” he said. “That’s what was driving me 41 years ago. But I have not had depression for many, many years. If I try to think about the way I was in 1981, I can’t do it. I mean, what in the world was I thinking? It’s like it was like another person. I do have remorse certainly for what happened. It’s in one of my songs.”
“I write peaceful songs … I just try to write songs to uplift people.”
— John Hinckley
The nearly 40 songs he has posted to YouTube, Spotify and other streaming services reflect his journey in the simplest terms. “I was lost in the world/enough to make you cry,” he sings in one song that laments the hardship of living with “nagging fear I would not be free.”
“Dark is the night/but there’s always dawn,” he sings in another. “Dark is the night/the fear will soon be gone.”
Music is soothing for him. “It’s just a good feeling to write a good song,” he said. But his ultimate purpose, he said, is to communicate with others.
“I write peaceful songs. The climate in the country now is just so bad. I just try to write songs to uplift people,” he said.
John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, is free and trying to launch his music career. (Video: John Hinckley)
On video, Hinckley presents an austere picture: He performs solo with an acoustic guitar against a plain backdrop. His songs are simply constructed and strummed. The music, which has attracted 30,000 subscribers on YouTube and more than 15,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, has connected with an audience he did not expect: Generation Z listeners who weren’t even alive in 1981.
“They don’t have their parents’ or even their grandparents’ prejudice about me. They’re open-minded,” Hinckley said. Since he emerged on Twitter, he has been barraged with messages from young people, including some musicians, who encourage him and say they recognize themselves in his struggle with mental illness.
Bunny Gaubert, 25, contacted Hinckley via Twitter and ended up creating his website and booking his Chicago date, which the venue later canceled. She said her generation is more willing to forgive Hinckley because his infamy pales in comparison to the new realities of growing up in “the weird, dark America” after 9/11.
“Our world has less shock value” than in 1981, she said. As someone who suffered mental illness in her teenage years, she said she can also empathize with his journey to get well. “After being put away like that and judged, he could have chosen anger and resentment, but instead he chose to make songs of peace,” she said.
“He didn’t get to experience life and he’s putting out a message of positivity in his music. There’s something heartfelt and honest about it,” said Paneth, 31, whose company, Scenic Presents, specializes in punk shows. One Hinckley song, “Never Ending Quest,” he said is particularly poignant: “He’s saying he’s on this quest to get out there and live his life. That’s a beautiful, honest message.”
After living in his mother’s house until her death last summer, Hinckley relocated to a one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg where he lives with his cat, a blonde tabby named Theo. He practices guitar, talks with neighbors in his building, and maintains a vinyl record collection he’s had since he was a teenager — Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Who and The Kinks are his favorites. “I am sure there are new bands that I would like, but I always go back to ’60s music,” he said.
“He’s putting out a message of positivity in his music. There’s something heartfelt and honest about it.”
— Matt Paneth, concert promoter
“I’m not a great painter,” he admits. “I don’t get a thrill of my painting like I do the music.” Besides his monthly Social Security check, the paintings provide a regular income.
Williamsburg is his comfort zone. “People are nice to me,” he said. Every Tuesday, he joins a small therapy group, and he visits his psychiatrist once a month in a nearby town.
“But mainly my focus is trying to come up with a new song,” he said.
After three dates were canceled earlier this summer, Hinckley took it into his own hands to rent the theater located in the Williamsburg Regional Library for a date in November. But three hours after he announced the date on Twitter in early August, that venue, too, canceled his appearance because “the library immediately received hostile comments through chat and email” and it was becoming apparent “the concert was clearly going to become a major disruption to library operations,” Desiree Parker, the library’s spokesperson, said via email.
Though some see his presence as controversial, mental health experts, and even prosecutor Kacie Weston — who did not object to Hinckley’s June 15 release from oversight — characterize Hinckley as someone who “has demonstrated the success that can come from a wraparound mental health system.” A judge found he was “no longer a danger to himself or to others.”
Phillip Resnick, an expert in forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, said Hinckley’s hospitalization was unusually long for someone found not guilty by reason of insanity. “The average hospital length is three to four years. He has been in a hospital for an extraordinary length of time because of the infamy of his crime, rather than evidence,” he said.
Performing music in public “would not be a concern for anyone with a psychiatric problem,” he said. “It’s not as if you’re taking him from an inpatient situation and just plopping him out in public. He has been in the public under supervision for years.”
Paneth, who recruited a drummer and bass player for Hinckley, said he continues to search for venues to work with because he believes Hinckley “deserves a stage.”
Hinckley said he is waiting things out, driven only by the “love of the music and trying to keep a positive attitude.” One piece of good news he received last month was learning that Asbestos Records, an independent ska and punk rock label, will release a vinyl recording of Hinckley’s songs later this year, according to Matt Flood, the label’s president. Once people hear his songs, Hinckley said, they will understand his only agenda is “putting out a positive vibe.”
One of those songs, says it all: “You only know what used to be/you don’t know a different side of me,” he sings. “The past is over/I have found a new and better day.”
Story editing by Matt Zapotosky. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Video editing by Amber Ferguson. Copy editing by Phil Lueck. Design by J.C. Reed.” | 2022-08-13T10:15:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | John Hinckley shot Reagan. Now he wants to play a concert. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/13/john-hinckley-reagan-concert/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/13/john-hinckley-reagan-concert/ |
Ryland Ward shows a gunshot wound on his left arm on June 8, 2022. Ward was 5-years-old when he was shot multiple times after a gunman entered First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., killing 26 people with an AR-15 style weapon in 2017. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. — Ryland Ward knows he looks different from other kids, though it’s hard for him to talk about why.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez found the Air Force was 60 percent liable for the shooting, citing disturbing details uncovered in the case, including that Air Force officials were aware Kelley had previously researched and threatened a mass shooting and had a history of severe mental health issues that led officials to declare him to be “dangerous” and “a threat.”
‘What happens after’
“What people don’t understand is how something like this changes your life,” McMahan said. “There’s the shooting. … And then there’s what happens after.”
Looking down, he saw a tiny hand reaching out from beneath a stack of bodies. The boy’s left arm was barely hanging on. His torso and pelvis area had been blasted open. Blood was pouring from a large hole in his left leg. At the hospital in San Antonio to which he was rushed, doctors said Ryland had lost 80 percent of his blood. His heart stopped beating twice on the operating table. He spent weeks in a coma.
But then came the government’s notice that it would appeal — filed just days after the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., another small town 115 miles west of Sutherland Springs.
The government’s decision to appeal the judge’s order led several involved in the case to accuse the Biden administration of hypocrisy — of trying to “avoid accountability” even as President Biden and other administration officials have pressed for action in the aftermath of recent mass shootings.
“We are talking about people who wake up every single day in pain. … We all pray that these people find peace and find a way to watch the sun rise every day,” said Bob Hilliard, a lawyer who represents McMahan.
‘This isn’t going away’
McMahan recalled seeing her son for the first time after the shooting at the hospital, unconscious and hooked up to tubes and machines. She pulled back a blanket and found only clear tape holding his small body together, as doctors prepared for surgeries. “I dropped to my knees,” she recalled. “It was the worst thing I have ever seen. Something no one should have to see … I kept thinking, ‘How could someone do this to a child?’”
“I don’t care about money, but I care about my child and what he’s going to need for the remainder of his life,” McMahan said. “Because this is about the rest of his life. This isn’t going away. We’re going to have this surgery and then another one and then another one. … And it baffles me why the government won’t just take responsibility for their missteps, how they are trying to lowball people who are suffering and will suffer for the rest of their lives.” | 2022-08-13T10:15:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sutherland Springs victims say U.S. government failed to stop gunman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/13/sutherland-springs-victims-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/13/sutherland-springs-victims-lawsuit/ |
Members of the United States Secret Service stand guard as Marine One carrying President Donald Trump lifts off from the South Lawn of the White House on Sept. 12, 2019, in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
After a summer of House committee hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, there are still enduring mysteries about how the day itself unfolded:
Why did it take hours for the National Guard to respond to the violence at the Capitol? And did President Donald Trump want to join insurrectionists at the Capitol so badly that he physically wrestled his Secret Service agent to take him there? And if so, what did the Secret Service do about it?
“I think that’s the biggest remaining mystery,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, recently said of how the Secret Service responded to Trump.
But some possibly valuable evidence is missing: text messages from the Secret Service and top security and military officials in the Trump administration.
We don’t know what’s in these missing text messages — nor do we know why they’re missing. Here’s what we do know about this evolving story.
Okay, whose texts are missing?
Texts of Secret Service agents, including those who were on the ground with Trump the day of the attack and their director at the time.
Texts of top officials at the agency that oversees the Secret Service — the Department of Homeland Security. That includes the No. 1 and No. 2 at the agency, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli. (Wolf says that he returned his equipment to the department with its data intact, and complied with all rules about retention.)
Texts from top military leaders, including the No. 1 at the Defense Department, Chris Miller, and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy.
Why are they missing?
We don’t know. The agencies involved said there is a simple explanation: a routine agencywide reset of government phones, ahead of the new administration coming in.
But in the case of the Secret Service, agents were supposed to upload texts involving government business to a server before wiping their phones in mid-January 2021. Many didn’t, The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Maria Sacchetti reported.
And in the case of the Defense Department, days after the attack, a watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking it to preserve its records. “Even at that point, it was apparent that those messages could have been important,” said Clark Pettig, spokesperson for the group American Oversight.
The Pentagon deleted texts of top military leaders — including ones deciding whether and when to send troops to the Capitol — days after that request was filed. Meaning, these messages were wiped even while there was a pending legal request to preserve them. (A defense official told The Post that these deletions were standard and, “Nobody was trying to hide or conceal anything.”)
The watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph V. Cuffari, is investigating the missing Secret Service and Homeland security texts. But he’s a Trump appointee who has blocked previous investigations of the Trump administration, and now Democrats on the congressional Jan. 6 committee say he knew about the missing Secret Service texts for months and didn’t tell them. Cuffari is now being investigated himself for his alleged partisan conduct, and Republican senators are backing him, reports The Post’s Lisa Rein.
Why is this suspicious?
The fact the texts are missing from multiple defense and law-enforcement agencies after a political event as unprecedented as Jan. 6 — one that directly involved all these agencies — raises suspicions.
“The fact this appears to have been a wider problem is concerning. We don’t know what happened or why,” Pettig said. “But it’s a significant number of potentially important records from Jan. 6 that apparently don’t exist anymore. And it should have been apparent to anyone that records from that day would be important.”
Outside cybersecurity experts and former government officials told The Post’s Drew Harwell, Will Oremus and Joseph Menn that these agencies never should have lost the text messages when they reset government phones; it’s a simple process, and it should have been relatively easy and a no-brainer to preserve messages from the day of the attack.
“It’s like we have a 9/11 attack and air traffic control wipes its records,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former Homeland security official under George W. Bush, told them.
“There is plenty of smoke,” said Meredith McGehee, an ethics expert who led the bipartisan watchdog group Issue One. “And when there is smoke like that, and you have this historic moment in which a former president seemed to be conspiring to prevent the duly elected president from taking office, then you got a problem.”
What information is missing?
We don’t know, because it’s gone. The Secret Service in particular has said it can’t recover the missing texts. And with it goes any corroborating evidence about what happened that day. For example, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in the Jan. 6 congressional investigation that Trump tried to physically push his Secret Service agent to help him join protesters at the Capitol. But she said she was told about this afterward, and didn’t see it firsthand; others denied this occurred. So it’s possible that texts from agents on the ground that day, responding to what was happening in real time, could shed light on moments like that.
Separately, over at the Pentagon, it’s still murky why it took so long for the military to organize a response — National Guard troops weren’t sent until the attack had been underway for hours. It’s not clear if military leaders disagreed about how to respond, or hesitated to respond with force or what their reasons were. Either way, it’s possible that the missing text messages could fill in our understanding of why the response unfolded so slowly.
We might never know whether this was something malicious or an innocent tech issue.
Other investigations into Jan. 6 have underscored how important documents, even seemingly minor ones, can be. In particular, the Jan. 6 committee revealed in its hearings a previously-unknown draft tweet from Trump, which indicated that the former president had seen it (though ultimately didn’t send it). It encouraged people to march to the Capitol, suggesting that urging protesters to do so in that Jan. 6 speech may not have been spontaneous on Trump’s part.
The biggest moments from a summer of Jan. 6 hearings
“As we’ve seen from the past year-and-a-half of investigations,” Pettig said, the minute-by-minute timeline matters. It’s the classic question of: Who knew what, and when did they know it?” | 2022-08-13T10:15:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What’s going on with all the missing Jan. 6 texts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/jan6-missing-texts-explained/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/jan6-missing-texts-explained/ |
After decades of deindustrialization, the Inflation Reduction Act tries to revive U.S. manufacturing jobs. Obstacles loom.
Mine foreman, McDowell County, West Virginia.(Roger May)
Travis Elswick used to spend his days detonating millions of tons of explosives, blowing holes in the Appalachian Mountains so miners could reach the coal underneath. Now he’s considering applying for a job at a battery plant expected to open here soon, aiming to join the growing domestic industry moving the U.S. economy off fossil fuels.
Elswick’s potential jump from a “surface blaster” for coal to a clean energy worker illustrates a key idea behind Democrats’ landmark economic legislation: that the nation can fight climate change by reviving an industrial core hollowed out by decades of globalization and the shift to a service-sector economy. Passed by the House on Friday and soon to be signed into law by President Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act includes hundreds of billions of dollars designed in part to return manufacturing jobs to states like West Virginia that have been pummeled by outsourcing, while aiming to slow global warming in the process.
The approach reflects a newfound consensus in Democratic policymaking — one that echoes former president Donald Trump’s promises to rebuild the industrial heartland, but with more money and a focus on the planet. The urgency of making U.S. manufacturing not just cleaner, but bringing it back on shore was amplified by the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which cemented perceptions in Washington that the United States was unacceptably dependent on imports from foreign adversaries. Changing that is central to the Inflation Reduction Act and to Biden’s other key economic measures — such as the anti-China legislation Congress passed last month and the bipartisan infrastructure law adopted last year — in which the federal government is putting enormous money into making the U.S. economy more independent. Democrats say their legislation will lead to millions of new high-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing emissions, leading to a 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions from their 2003 levels.
Abandoned coal mines are being transformed into solar installations large enough to contribute renewable energy to the electric grid. (Video: Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)
Similarly, in part due to the demands of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Democrats agreed to new subsidies for fossil fuel producers and the bill requires the government lease as much federal land to oil and gas producers as it does to producers of wind and solar power. That reflects the tension between the legislation’s climate goals and its economic aspirations to revive coal country, although climate experts say the net impact of the bill would still be a dramatic reduction in U.S. emissions.
“These are very proud folks who for generations were working in coal-mining and bringing energy to the United States,” Malhotra said. “Their work can be so crucial … Bringing such folks back to a well-paying job where we can put food on the table — it’s patriotic power.” | 2022-08-13T10:15:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | West Virginia coal country will test power of Democrats’ climate plans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/13/inflation-reduction-act-west-virginia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/13/inflation-reduction-act-west-virginia/ |
South County and Alexandria City players clash in the Occoquan 6C Region Championship in Lorton, Va., in June. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
There’s growing consensus on the danger of sport-related concussion — and how to treat athletes after head injuries. But the research at the heart of those recommendations has a fatal flaw, a new study suggests: It relies almost exclusively on male athletes.
In a review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, a national team of medical and concussion experts looked at 171 concussion studies cited by the three most influential consensus and position statements on sport-related concussion. These documents update professionals on how to treat athletes with concussions, providing important protocols for clinicians and setting the agenda for future research.
Although the statements define the standard of care, the study suggests, they are based on data that largely excludes female athletes.
Participants in the underlying studies were 80.1 percent male. Among the studies, 40.3 percent didn’t look at female athletes at all; only 25 percent of them had roughly equal male and female participation.
Researchers said there could be several reasons for the disparity such as women’s historic exclusion from sports and professional sports organizations with no female counterpart. Women’s sports are underrepresented among groups that sponsor concussion research, they write.
Bias in the sciences could have an effect, too: women are still underrepresented in both university faculties and scientific research.
Because of the research gap, it isn’t yet clear whether females respond to concussions differently than males. Both sex and gender can cause medical conditions to develop — and be experienced, reported and treated — differently.
But the researchers say there are ways to narrow the gap, and suggest the public can help.
In addition to supporting increased public health spending on research that includes female athletes, people can simply show up for women’s sports, writes Christopher D’Lauro, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a co-author of the paper.
“Go to women’s games, watch them on TV, and purchase their merchandise,” he writes. “Greater revenue for women’s sports means a greater likelihood of having robust in-place medical staff, better training facilities, and better television production values” — boosting not only the number of fans but also concussion data and effective treatment.
Under-representation of female athletes in research informing influential concussion consensus and position statements: an evidence review and synthesis | 2022-08-13T11:46:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Concussion research largely excludes female athletes, study finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/13/concussion-research-female-athletes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/13/concussion-research-female-athletes/ |
The sun shines on the dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Aug. 12. (Susan Walsh/AP)
In Washington, the smart money is always on political and legislative gridlock. And lately, experts have taken to warning — all too plausibly — of far worse. Just the other day, President Biden met with a group of historians who told him of parallels between contemporary threats to democracy and the unstable periods just before the Civil War and during the 1920s and ’30s, which saw the rise of Hitler and Stalin. Perhaps it’s just some irrational late-summer exuberance, but we’d like to argue the other side: that the national cup is half full, at least regarding the United States’ basic ability to conduct public business. As a midterm election approaches, green shoots of governability are poking through the surface of what is otherwise a scorched political landscape.
Specifically, the 117th Congress has compiled a significant legislative record since it convened on Jan. 3, 2021. Albeit narrowly divided between Republicans and Democrats in the House and split three ways in the Senate — the third “party” being a de facto micro-group made up of Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — Congress has rebounded from the mob attack of Jan. 6 and gotten things done. Since March 2021, lawmakers have passed: a $1.9 trillion plan to help the economy recover from the covid pandemic; an infrastructure package with $550 billion in new spending on roads, bridges, ports and the like; a plan to repair the Postal Service’s balance sheet; a long-overdue anti-lynching law named for Emmett Till; a modest but meaningful gun safety law; a $280 billion bill, the Chips Act, to bolster scientific research and domestic semiconductor production; and the tax-climate-health plan known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the House Friday.
Especially remarkable is that some of the measures — postal reform, infrastructure, anti-lynching, Chips and gun safety — enjoyed bipartisan support. That was true also of repeated measures providing military and economic support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and NATO membership for Finland and Sweden. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell got Senate confirmation to a second four-year term on a bipartisan basis. A bipartisan Senate group has made progress on Electoral Count Act reform, and there is a decent chance that vital measure will pass before this Congress ends. The Respect for Marriage Act to protect same-sex marriages from any possible adverse Supreme Court rulings is struggling to hit the 60-vote threshold in the Senate but might do so, given that it passed the House with 47 Republican votes. There was no federal default; the debt limit was raised enough to last through this year because Democrats agreed to a special procedure that let Senate Republicans who had been obstructing the bill save face.
None of these new laws is ideal or anything close. Some erred by going too far in pursuit of their goals: The American Rescue Plan, as the $1.9 trillion covid recovery law was known, probably overdosed the economy on spending and contributed to inflation. Others clearly did not go far enough: With its expanded background checks for under-21 gun buyers, plus increased mental health spending, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is no substitute for needed bans on high-capacity magazines and assault rifles. As for the new Inflation Reduction Act, it probably won’t affect inflation one way or the other — and lacks key social policy reforms such as a permanent expanded child tax credit. Yet it will provide substantial new funding for green energy and health insurance subsidies. And it is paid for — plus a small deficit-reduction margin — by breaking long-standing taboos against raising revenue or using Medicare’s buying power to extract lower prices from the pharmaceutical industry.
In short, for all the often justified despair over political dysfunction — and over institutions, such as the Senate filibuster, that make legislating such a slog — Congress produced incremental progress. The key was to tune out the Twitterverse and engage in old-fashioned give and take, through negotiations across party lines and, sometimes, within them. Given the backlog of unmet social, economic and environmental needs, incremental progress is frustratingly, well, incremental. And yet it has the advantage of probably being the sort of progress voters actually had in mind when they elected a divided Congress — and a relatively moderate president with long experience as a senator, Joe Biden — in November 2020.
Radical ideologies, such as the 1930s-vintage totalitarianism that the historians discussed with Mr. Biden, hold out the seductive — inevitably false — hope of redemption through upheaval. Democracy, by contrast, offers change with stability. Both at home and abroad, doubt grows that the system can still deliver on that more modest, but infinitely more humane, promise. All the more reason to take note of — and succor from — evidence that it can.1920s and ’ | 2022-08-13T11:46:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | This Congress has made incremental legislative progress - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/13/117th-congress-legislative-record/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/13/117th-congress-legislative-record/ |
Maryland Del. Dan Cox (R-Frederick) holds up a book of the Declaration of Independence in Annapolis on May 15. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Five months are left in the term of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), a period that looks increasingly like a countdown to the end of the Republican Party’s electoral viability in the Free State. Despite the GOP’s proud history there, it has lately marginalized itself to such an extent that success in this fall’s elections seems far-fetched.
Mr. Hogan, a traditional conservative, has managed to maintain his credibility, along with high levels of popular support, by governing largely as a pragmatist and avoiding culture war politics in his two terms in office. He did not patent that formula for success for a Republican in one of the nation’s most heavily Democratic states. A number of GOP officeholders who came before him — Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., Rep. Connie Morella and Sen. Charles “Mac” Mathias, among others — worked from a similar blueprint. But judging from the extreme rightward tilt in Maryland’s GOP today, Mr. Hogan may be, in the near term, the last of an admirable lineage.
In fact, the most prominent of the current Republican candidates, having positioned themselves on the fringe of American politics, do not hew to any traditional definition of conservatism.
One, gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox, has flirted with QAnon, the crackpot conspiracy theory that conjures a demonic plot of Democratic pedophiles. Another, Michael Peroutka, the party’s nominee for attorney general, has said that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were caused by “controlled demolitions” triggered by pre-planted explosives, not by airplanes hijacked by terrorists. He also suggests that covid-19, which he calls a “plandemic,” was somehow intentional; and he is a rare present-day champion of the Civil War South, calling himself a “true Confederate.” A GOP incumbent, Rep. Andy Harris, helped former president Donald Trump formulate a plan to overturn the results of a democratic popular election.
Up and down the ballot, Republican candidates subscribe to the myth that election fraud is rife, and that President Biden somehow stole the 2020 election. For top-of-the-ticket Republicans, the common denominator is blind loyalty to Mr. Trump, and a willingness to parrot his lies.
By contrast, the springboard for success among Maryland’s previous high-profile GOP public servants was an insistent independent streak that freed them from party orthodoxy.
For Mr. Ehrlich, that meant enacting a new levy on Maryland residents, the so-called flush tax, which generated tens of millions of dollars annually to upgrade aging sewage treatment plants, a major initiative to revive the Chesapeake Bay. For Ms. Morella, it meant favoring abortion rights, gun control measures and steps to protect the environment. For Mr. Mathias, it meant an abiding support for civil rights, and fearless criticism of the Watergate scandal and his party’s president, Richard M. Nixon. For Mr. Hogan, it has meant open contempt for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Cox, who tops the Republican ticket in November’s election, clinched his party’s nomination as an acolyte of Mr. Trump, who endorsed him. That support will very likely be an albatross in the general election given that Mr. Trump lost Maryland by a 2-to-1 margin in 2020.
A defeat for Mr. Cox and Mr. Peroutka would leave Mr. Harris as the lone prominent GOP officeholder in Maryland, where twice as many voters are registered Democrats as Republicans. That would mark a drastic diminishment for the party, one it has brought on itself. | 2022-08-13T11:46:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Maryland GOP is on the fringe and falling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/13/maryland-republicans-election-chances/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/13/maryland-republicans-election-chances/ |
Documents show how Trump landed Lincoln Memorial for Fox News event
Trump’s 2020 ‘town hall’ was held inside the memorial, an area where events have long been barred by federal regulations
By Jonathan O'Connell
President Donald Trump speaks at the Lincoln Memorial during a Fox News virtual town hall on May 3, 2020, in Washington. The event was moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. (Evan Vucci/AP)
In the spring of 2020, National Park Service personnel were preparing for an event President Donald Trump was holding with Fox News to address the nascent covid-19 pandemic from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, site of historic protests and inaugural concerts.
But, first, they had to brief Trump on the plans.
“As of now we’re looking at an event at base of Lincoln from 6-8 or so Sunday night. No event in chamber. I will see if that holds once POTUS is briefed later today,” Jeff Reinbold, the Park Service’s superintendent for the National Mall and Memorial Parks, wrote in an April 28, 2020, email to other agency officials.
The email is among hundreds of pages of newly released government documents that help fill in the picture of how officials from multiple government agencies worked to engineer the event at the Lincoln, one of the many norm-defying moments of the Trump presidency. They show that the Park Service provided security personnel at a cost of nearly $150,000 and that a U.S. Secret Service official apologized to colleagues for the planning process, calling it a “$#!t show.”
After the event, officials noted that the memorial itself — then 98 years old — had sustained scratches and gouges in its pink marble floor, according to a final memorandum.
In the end, the Trump-appointed interior secretary, David Bernhardt, relaxed the rules by finding that the venue was appropriate, given the president’s need to communicate with the American people during a “grave time of national crisis.” That finding has been previously reported.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice, a progressive group that acquired the documents through a public-records request, said she believes Bernhardt exceeded his authority and allowed Trump to use “the Lincoln Memorial as his stage set.”
“They’re trying to find a way, it looks like, to give him the chamber when there is no legal way to give him the chamber,” she said.
Verheyden-Hilliard’s group often litigates on behalf of those seeking access to public spaces, pressing the government to properly allow free-speech activities and protests along Pennsylvania Avenue and elsewhere.
Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the Park Service, did not address specific questions from The Washington Post. He said in a statement that the agency monitored the activity associated with the town hall, as it does any event not sponsored by the Park Service.
A spokesman for the Secret Service declined to comment. A Trump spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
Bernhardt said in an interview that he stood by the decision and that government lawyers had approved it. At the time, federal officials and the nation were in the early stages of learning how deadly and transmissible the novel coronavirus was. Mass business closures enacted weeks before had forced layoffs. The unemployment rate had quadrupled.
“I felt that it was an important moment for the country,” Bernhardt told The Post.
On May 3, 2020, at the opening of the town hall, Trump greeted Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum by saying, “We never had a more beautiful set than this did we?” according to a transcript.
The hosts asked about criticism that had already surfaced about the use of the memorial as the site for the event.
“What can you criticize? It’s — I don’t think it’s ever been done, what we’re doing tonight here,” Trump said. “And I think it’s great for the American people to see.”
All presidents use national parks as backdrops for photo opportunities and promotional events, said Kristen Brengel of the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit organization that works to protect the national park system. For his 2009 inaugural, President Barack Obama hosted a concert on the steps of the memorial and was photographed in the chamber. Four years later, he gave a speech on the steps as part of a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.
But, by siting the town hall inside the memorial, with Fox News, Brengel said, the Trump administration held an event in defiance of federal regulations in a space that is hallowed ground to many Americans.
“This wasn’t a national emergency to do an event inside the Lincoln Memorial,” she said. “This was the commercial use of a park site in the middle of a pandemic.”
On April 28, the day before the event was announced, officials began sharing early information about it with one another, according to the documents. Reinbold told colleagues that it was being planned for the front steps of the memorial and directed a Fox News staffer to apply for the necessary permit.
Reinbold mentioned that the plans could change after they were presented to Trump that day.
Security personnel at the U.S. Park Police and the Secret Service began to make staffing considerations on short notice. A Park Police official justified the need to call in extra officers on the weekend by citing an emergency order issued weeks earlier allowing for “mission critical adjustments” to help the nation respond to the pandemic.
A Secret Service official helping to staff the event apologized for the process. “Sorry this is such a $#!t show. Will have answers shortly,” wrote the official, whose name is redacted in the documents.
The next day, with the event moved into the memorial’s chamber, Fox News would not need a permit after all, Reinbold wrote. He told colleagues it was out of his hands. “They are using the site as a venue and this is not a co-sponsored or NPS event in any way,” he wrote on April 29.
Fox News began making arrangements. A Fox staffer sent Park Service officials a photo taken from the 1963 March on Washington, shot from behind Lincoln’s statue looking out at the entrance, that she hoped to replicate.
“We are also looking to achieve the camera shot in the attached picture,” she wrote on April 30.
An inscription marks the spot where King spoke, 18 steps from the top landing of the memorial.
On May 3, Bernhardt issued a “record of determination,” citing the growing pandemic and the need for the president to communicate with Americans as reasoning to allow the event. “In this grave time of national crisis, the Memorial is a uniquely appropriate place from which our President can communicate an official message to the American people,” Bernhardt wrote.
Verheyden-Hilliard rejected the idea that the interior secretary had such authority. “All they are really doing is putting window dressing on something that is clearly illegal,” she said.
“The location of the Lincoln Memorial was proposed by the administration and Fox News worked directly with the National Park Service to ensure the production followed every protocol to protect the space,” the company said.
No photos of damage were among the documents released. Fox News said it was unaware of any damage. “At no point was the network made aware of any damages as a result of the event,” the company said.
Litterst said in the statement that the damage was “addressed in-house by the park’s conservators.”
In correspondence in the days after the event, about how to respond to reporters’ questions, Litterst made clear to colleagues that he did not want to give the impression that the agency would allow such an event to take place again: “I think it’s a good opportunity to slam the door on anyone who thinks they can make a similar ask to do an interview in the chamber.” | 2022-08-13T12:34:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Documents show how Trump landed Lincoln Memorial for Fox News event - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/13/trump-lincoln-memorial-fox-town-hall/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/13/trump-lincoln-memorial-fox-town-hall/ |
New books by Julia Whelan, Lawrence Osborne, Michael W. Twitty and more
Review by Nora Krug
Stephanie Merry
(Princeton University Press; Bantam; Penguin Press)
Historian Twitty explores the crossroads of Black and Jewish culinary traditions in this follow-up to his award-winning 2018 book “The Cooking Gene.” As Twitty explains, his new book is “about a part of Black food that’s also Jewish food … a book about Jewish food that’s also Black food because it’s a book about Black people who are Jewish and Jewish people who are Black.” Twitty is himself Jewish and Black. In this fascinating book — which includes recipes — Twitty explores, as he puts it, “the intersections between food and identity.” (Amistad)
A year after TikTok helped send Hazelwood’s debut, “The Love Hypothesis,” rocketing up the bestsellers list, the romance writer returns with an even funnier, steamier STEM-set love story. In this installment, neuroscientist and Marie Curie fangirl Bee Königswasser gets her dream job working at NASA. The only catch? She’ll have to make nice with her nemesis, who happens to be tall, brooding and dreamy in the nerdiest way. (Sphere, Aug. 23)
In Lawrence Osborne’s novels, tourists can’t escape their true natures
In her memoir “Under the Tuscan Sun,” Mayes took us, of course, to Italy. In her latest outing, she stays much closer to home. “A Place in the World” is an homage of sorts to the South, where Mayes grew up — in Fitzgerald, Ga. She writes, too, about Chatwood, a house in Hillsborough, N.C., where she now lives after an extensive remodel. The experience is both a homecoming and a reckoning with the past. “I returned to the South after a long quarrel with the place,” she writes. “Racism, sexist zeitgeist, anti-intellectualism, self-satisfaction. … Those still hover, but this town, intolerant of such stupidity, is aspirational.” (Crown, Aug. 23) | 2022-08-13T13:18:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 12 books to get you to the end of summer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/13/new-books-beach-reads/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/13/new-books-beach-reads/ |
He’s buttoned that lip. (Photographer: Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America)
Donald Trump has taken lots of public flak for invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions during his recent deposition by New York prosecutors looking into his finances. To the extent that critics have pointed to the former president’s hypocrisy, they’re entirely on the mark.(1) But to the extent that they’re suggesting that Trump must have something to hide because he refused to answer questions, they’re following in a longstanding yet unsavory American tradition — one that Senator Joseph McCarthy would readily recognize.
Although lawyers routinely advise their clients not to say a word to prosecutors, we tend to look askance at those who, in the parlance, “take the Fifth.” But one needn’t be a Trump fan — I’m certainly not — to understand that invoking the right to remain silent isn’t evidence of guilt; it’s a vital part of the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Nevertheless, although the historical origin of the privilege itself remains contested, it’s fair to say that long before the phrase “take the Fifth” existed, a witness’s silence was taken by the public as evidence of wrongdoing.
Back in the 1820s, when the New York legislature held hearings on whether certain banks had engaged in wrongdoing, a witness who refused to discuss his involvement in crafting a particular document was arrested and carted off to Albany’s city jail. During a 1911 probe of the role of Texas breweries in battling local prohibition laws, newspapers decried the refusal of several witnesses to say under oath whether they took bribes. The investigators announced plans “to force answers.”
An unsigned 1922 article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review captured the view of many critics in coldly rejecting the notion that the right to avoid self-incrimination possessed any value: “The privilege which exempts the accused from being compelled to give evidence is extremely undesirable at this time in that it unquestionably shields crime and offers protection for the guilty criminal.”
But it was the Communist witch-hunts that followed World War II that firmly fixed in the popular mind the notion that asserting one’s privilege against self-incrimination was the pusillanimous act of the guilty. In 1948, for example, the House Un-American Activities Committee warned that invoking the Fifth Amendment was part of the “new and clever conspiratorial tactics” used by Communists to “conceal their espionage activities and their disloyal purposes.”
Leading members of the bar pronounced similar views. A prominent California lawyer argued that a witness could not use the Fifth Amendment in response to being asked if he was a Communist, because being a member of the Party was not a crime: “[H]e cannot use the Fifth Amendment to save himself from a personal ordeal, no matter how trying or repulsive, unless the answer to the question would actually tend to incriminate him.” So if the worst that might happen was that the witness would, say, become unemployable, the privilege did not apply.(2)
The actual phrase “taking the Fifth” and its equivalents date to that era. Although its earliest usage seems to have been by witnesses who tired of repeating “I invoke,” the term quickly became derisive. In April 1954, for instance, Senator Joseph McCarthy complained in an interview that many people “who have backgrounds of Communist activities” would refuse to testify before congressional committees. “If they act like those in the past,” McCarthy lamented, they “will even take the Fifth Amendment.”
The frustration of congressional investigators often led to sharp exchanges, as later that same year, when a publicist named Alexander Sherman was asked by HUAC about his work on behalf of the Hollywood 10. Sherman responded: “I’m afraid I must take the Fifth Amendment on that” — to which Harold Velde, the committee’s chair, shot back: “You are afraid to take the Fifth Amendment?”(3)
The privilege against self-incrimination, he argued in one essay, is a part of the “right to be left alone,” designed “to tip the scale in favor of the individual against the weight of the state.” In another article, Griswold criticized Congress for calling witnesses they knew planned to give no testimony: “[A] legislative investigation is improper when its sole or basic purpose is to ‘expose’ people or to develop evidence for use in criminal prosecutions.”
To be sure, the great arguments of the McCarthy Era over the right to remain silent largely revolved around legislative overreach. But the same lesson apples when questions are being put by prosecutors: A refusal to testify shouldn’t be considered evidence that the witness did anything wrong, a rule that the Supreme Court in 1965 formalized for criminal trials. The rest of us should adhere to the same principle.
• Bolton Plot Should Be a Warning on Iran Nuclear Talks: Bobby Ghosh
(1) Yes, there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around.
(2) Confession of bias: It was around this time that my great-uncle was imprisoned for contempt after asserting his fifth amendment rights. And, yes, he subsequently became unemployable.
(3) For my fellow nitpickers: Google Books incorrectly dates this exchange as having occurred in 1949. | 2022-08-13T13:18:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Don’t Blast Trump for Pleading the Fifth - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dont-blast-trump-for-pleading-the-fifth/2022/08/13/abd5ae90-1b08-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dont-blast-trump-for-pleading-the-fifth/2022/08/13/abd5ae90-1b08-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Greg Long is one of the world’s best Big Wave surfers. His got his edge not just from his physical ability, comfort with risk and skill on the water; he was literally born to be a surfer. His father was a lifeguard and took young Long and his brother surfing, exposing them to the sport and the surfing community when they were children. This is a typical story in that industry. When I went to the Big Wave Surfing Risk Assessment Group, a risk conference for surfers, nearly all the famous surfers there grew up in the business.
In my research I meet a lot of people who do unusual jobs, from inseminating horses to bounty hunting. The first thing I ask is, “How did you get into this line of work?” and most of the time I get one answer (always said with pride): “My father.”
Gwyneth Paltrow recently induced a collective eyeroll when she complained to Hailey Bieber (of the Baldwin acting dynasty) that her road to stardom was not easy, and that in some ways nepotism made it harder. It’s hard to feel sorry for her. She was born into wealth and privilege and her family connections helped her get a leg up in an industry where there are a limited number of jobs that, for her, just meant even more wealth and glamour.
Nepotism, or using your connections to secure a job for friends or family, has always been a dirty word, associated with privilege and perpetuating an unfair system that undermines our meritocratic ideals. And more so lately. Social media is full of posts on nepotism babies (or Nepo baby) to shade success of high-profile actors who come from successful acting families.
Our resentment may be especially raw today because of the overt nepotism that featured in former President Donald Trump’s administration. For four years his unelected son-in-law, with little policy experience, was one of the most powerful men in America, and his daughter a key adviser with a West Wing office.
Yet as much as we hate nepotism in politics — Americans fought a war so our rulers wouldn’t be divined by birth — we also romanticize it. Depending on your political party, we tend to admire dynasties like the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes and now the Trumps, even if those dynasties have had a mixed record.
Perhaps that’s because as icky as it is, doing the same job as your family member has deep roots in human society and many advantages for the economy. Rather than burn the whole system down, or stir up resentment with internet snark, we need to take what’s good about nepotism and figure out how to expand those benefits more broadly.
There was a time when going into the family business was the norm. People inherited the land they worked from their family or joined guilds through family connections. Industrialization and the nuclear family upended these ties when people went to the factory instead of learning the family trade. And this was an important part of our economic development. The economy became more meritocratic, workers could rise through the ranks and more people ended up in jobs based on talent and hard work rather than family contacts.
But in 2003, Adam Bellow (son of writer Saul Bellow) argued that there was a new kind of nepotism emerging in the economy. Unlike the systemic nepotism from the pre-industrial era, people now had other options and joined the family business by choice. And in the last 20 years there are more reasons to believe that is true. Assortative mating (choosing a partner similar to yourself) increased the odds of having two parents with similar levels of success that get passed along to their offspring. In a more competitive economy, there are bigger gains to giving your children a leg up into that first job.
Despite all the economic changes in the last 200 years, nepotism has been a constant feature. According to the 2010 US census, about 22% of men under 30 work in the same company as their father, with higher rates in Canada and Denmark.
The study found sharing an employer with your father was associated with higher earnings. Construction and manufacturing jobs are most likely to hire the children of current or former employees.
Working in the same company as a parent is only one form of nepotism. It’s even more common to work in the same industry or occupation, like Paltrow or Long. This may not be overt nepotism since it doesn’t always involve using family connections to get a job. But advantages are realized in other ways. You start your career with access to industry networks and with insider knowledge of how things work. Generally, the more guild-like a profession — doctor, lawyer, steel worker, fire or policeman — the more likely it is to be handed down. This is true even in the economics profession. A recent research paper estimates that 65% of American-born economics graduate students have at least one parent with a graduate degree.
We all know at a gut level why this feels so outrageous. Nepotism is unfair (if you think of fairness as everyone starting behind the same line). It’s especially unfair when people are seeking high-status jobs in a high-stakes, already unequal economy.
And it has some nasty consequences. It can place the least-talented and unmotivated person in crucial jobs that could be better filled by someone else. There is a long history of children running family businesses into the ground. Government positions awarded on family connections often end up in corruption and waste.
Nepotism also limits options and undermines mobility. Surfer Long is adept at working mathematical models to predict waves, so perhaps he could have made a fortune on Wall Street if he were born into a different family (though he wouldn’t be so cool).
In the current economic and political climate, anything reeking of privilege demands to be dismantled, which may be why Paltrow’s comments struck a nerve and why #nepobaby is so often trending in social media.
But try taking a different view of the concept. What some people call nepotism others might call an efficient transfer of valuable human capital. Take two standout economists and nepo babies, Larry Summers and Emily Oster. Both were raised by prominent economists (both parents), and both have stories of how their parents injected economic logic in their child rearing. Summers’ father set up a bidding system to distribute TV-watching times among his children. A big part of being a good economist is the ability to think like an economist and apply the same kind of reasoning and logic. Just as Long was taken surfing at an early age, Summers and Oster were exposed to economic reasoning very early. This surely contributed to the economists they are today. That comes from more than just knowing the right people; they were born to be economists.
Human capital is also conferred in more subtle ways. I have a parent with a Ph.D. (not in economics) as did most of the people in my Ph.D. class, and this was critical to finishing my degree. First, it occurred to me to go to graduate school in the first place because I had a role model who planted the idea in my head that if you liked a subject, you take it all the way. Second, the emotional support was invaluable. The first time I called my mother in tears because a professor told me I wasn’t smart enough to be an economist and should drop out, she told me, “They tell everyone that. I heard it a million times, too. Finishing a Ph.D. isn’t about who is smartest, it’s about persistence and politics.”
I stuck with it. Excelling in any career involves many setbacks and dealing with bullies. Having a family member in the business means you have a built-in mentor and coach who is invested in your success. This is hard to replicate and unfair because others don’t share the advantage. But it’s still extremely valuable to society and the economy.
The other good thing about staying in the family business is it instills a sense of pride. I recently interviewed Leland Chapman, son of Dog the bounty hunter, about the bounty hunting business. I can’t overstate the sense of pride he had carrying on the family tradition. Many people are unhappy and dissatisfied with their jobs these days. A sense of tradition and pride in our work is missing, but following in the same job as your parent can impart that feeling.
So nepotism has its place in the economy, and in some ways the economy is evolving to encourage more nepotism. It’s more competitive, so getting in at the right firm early can mean higher earnings for life. But there are also forces working against the worst parts of nepotism. Posting jobs online means employers can widen their search and depend less on word of mouth for hiring. Knowing someone will still always give you an advantage, but staying in that job as an underperformer may be harder because now it’s easier to monitor productivity and competence.
There is value in working in the same occupation as your family, and that needn’t be unfair or harmful in an economy where success is not zero sum. If there are good jobs for everyone then nepotism is less of a problem.
Rather than fight nepotism with hiring restrictions or admissions quotas or online shame, we should focus on taking what works about it and expand those opportunities to other people, so the economy can accommodate more people’s success.
For instance, we can improve education so everyone gets better critical thinking skills and exposure to different jobs. Recent research indicates that simply exposing children to people from a more successful family can have a positive impact on their earnings and boost their human capital. In that case, looser zoning regulations might encourage more economic diversity, or a national service requirement could provide a chance for people from different backgrounds to interact as peers, conferring more of the benefits of nepotism to more people.
But first, to overcome society’s instinctive revulsion for the very idea of nepotism, perhaps we need a new word to describe its more beneficial aspects. The child of an etymologist might be able to help us out with that.More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
Presidents Hire ‘Yes Men’ at Their Peril: Jonathan Bernstein
US Needs to Bribe Homeowners to Embrace Density: Eduardo Porter
Wall Street Is Failing Women in Retirement: Alexis Leondis
How Did Kushner Get $2 Billion From Saudis?: Timothy O’Brien | 2022-08-13T13:18:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Open Your Mind to the Benefits of Nepotism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/open-your-mind-to-the-benefits-of-nepotism/2022/08/13/ab7d3634-1b08-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/open-your-mind-to-the-benefits-of-nepotism/2022/08/13/ab7d3634-1b08-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Tinnitus, commonly described as ringing in the ears, affects about 749 million people worldwide, according to research in the journal JAMA Neurology and based on about five decades of data. Not a disease but rather a symptom of an underlying health condition, tinnitus is the perception of a constant or intermittent sound in one or both ears when there is no external source for the sound. Other than ringing, some people describe it as a clicking, hissing, buzzing or whistling sound. Often, the cause stems from damage to the auditory system, which is the body’s system (involving the ear, the brain and the nerves that connect them) responsible for the sense of hearing. The American Tinnitus Association, however, says that tinnitus can be a symptom of roughly 200 different health problems, including a blocked ear canal, head or neck injury, a sinus infection, certain medications, a host of diseases and medical conditions, as well as hearing loss from prolonged exposure to loud noise or age-related hearing loss. Also, some people develop tinnitus for no obvious reason, according to the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found little difference by sex in the prevalence of tinnitus, but its occurrence did increase with age — affecting 10 percent of young adults, 14 percent of those middle age and 24 percent of those 65 and older. Although there is no universal cure for tinnitus, finding and treating the underlying condition may quell the sounds. If that does not work, a doctor may suggest ways to manage the effect of tinnitus on daily life, such as the use of hearing aids, sound generators (for internal or external use), techniques to ease stress and increase relaxation or, if appropriate, medication or counseling. | 2022-08-13T13:18:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tinnitus afflicts nearly 750 million people worldwide - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/13/tinnitus-ear-ringing-symptoms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/13/tinnitus-ear-ringing-symptoms/ |
Hawaii primary sets up races for governor, Congress in blue state
Term limits and a surprise retirement set the stage for Saturday’s intraparty contests.
The Hawaii Capitol in Honolulu, which is where the offices of the governor and lieutenant governor are located. (Audrey Mcavoy/AP)
A term-limited governor and a surprise congressional retirement set the stage for Saturday’s primaries in Hawaii, with Democrats battling over offices they’re favored to win in November.
The race for the Democratic nomination to succeed Gov. David Ige (D), who’s ending his second term with low approval ratings, pits Lt. Gov. Josh Green against former Hawaii first lady Vicky Cayetano and Rep. Kaiali'i Kahele. Four other Democrats are on the ballot, but Green has consistently led in polls leading up to the primary.
Hawaii elections are conducted via ballots mailed to voters. For the primary, the deadline for ballots to be received is 7 p.m. local time on Saturday.
A medical doctor, Green became the public face of the state’s aggressive response to the coronavirus pandemic, including a long-running requirement that travelers to the state provide negative tests or proof of vaccination.
“I’ve become like part of the family for most of the state,” Green, 52, told The Washington Post before his campaign launch in February. Cayetano, 66, got into the race last summer, and Kahele, 48, abandoned his safe House seat in May after a single term to run for governor, focusing on campaign finance reform.
The attacks did little to slow down Green. In debates and TV ads, he’s called his opponents desperate and promised to build more housing to tackle soaring costs and reduce homelessness.
National Republicans have not targeted the race, after investing in former lieutenant governor Duke Aiona’s 2014 campaign, only to see him lose, to Ige, by more than 12 points. Aiona, 67, entered this year’s race right before the filing deadline, and has led in polls but raised less than $24,000 for his comeback bid — about a tenth as much as retired MMA fighter BJ Penn, 43, his leading rival for the nomination.
Six Democrats are running to replace Green as lieutenant governor, and polls have found a tight race between state Rep. Sylvia Luke, 54, and former Honolulu City Council Chair Ikaika Anderson, 44, with most voters undecided.
The race for Kahele’s open seat, in the 2nd Congressional District, has attracted more money and attention. In the final weeks, it transformed into an expensive battle between Sen. Jill Tokuda, 46, a liberal backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and state Rep. Patrick Branco, 35, who shares most of her positions and has the support of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Both candidates support an assault weapons ban, Medicare-for-all legislation, and codifying Roe v. Wade. Few policy differences emerged in the three months since Kahele decided to abandon a safely Democratic seat that President Biden carried by 30 points. But last-minute spending from Web3 Forward, a super PAC funded by cryptocurrency investors, attacked Tokuda for winning a National Rifle Association endorsement in a previous race.
“All of these hit pieces that have been out against me, quite frankly, I’ve been devastated by them,” said Tokuda in a debate this month, denouncing the role played by “dark money from the mainland.”
The 2nd Congressional District covers most of Hawaii’s territory, outside of populous Oahu. In the Honolulu-based 1st Congressional District, Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) is being challenged by Sergio Alcubilla, an activist and nonprofit director who entered the race after Case, 69, joined other centrist Democrats in demanding a vote on last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill before action on the party’s social spending and climate package.
The 1st Congressional District, which backed Biden by 29 points in 2020, was the most Democratic seat represented by any member who demanded that infrastructure spending be separated from the “Build Back Better.” The latter was stalled for months until a revamped version of it was restored in the Inflation Reduction Act. Some unions and liberal groups have endorsed Alcubilla, 43, who spent a bit more than $100,000 on his primary while Case spent close to $500,000.
Both House seats are rated as safely Democratic in November by the Cook Political Report. Ex-congressman Charles Djou, the last Republican elected to Congress from Hawaii, left the GOP in 2018 and endorsed Biden for president in 2020. | 2022-08-13T13:18:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hawaii primary sets up races for governor, Congress in blue state - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/hawaii-primary-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/hawaii-primary-election/ |
My partner and I have been toying with the idea of moving out of New York City for a while. We’re exhausted by everything lately — the pandemic, inflation, stress and the list keeps going. We took a trip to the mountains in upstate New York to test out what it would be like to live somewhere else, which made us even more indecisive. At least we learned one valuable lesson: the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. | 2022-08-13T13:19:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Travel can show us that the grass isn’t always greener - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/13/moving-from-city-country/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/13/moving-from-city-country/ |
D.C. investigating response to 911 call after death of 3-month-old boy
Officials concede that a misstep led to a delay in sending help to a call about the boy, who had been left in a hot car
A top D.C. public safety official conceded Friday that a misstep in dispatching paramedics delayed the arrival of a medical team after a 911 call about a 3-month-old boy who had been left in a car. The boy died, and authorities said they are investigating the circumstances.
Police identified the boy, who died Tuesday, as Aaron Boyd Jr. His mother, reached by phone, declined to comment.
Paramedics did not arrive for 13 minutes after the initial call, although police arrived sooner, according to a government official and records reviewed by The Washington Post. It was not immediately clear what effect, if any, the delay had. But D.C. Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Christopher Geldart said that it took the medical team “too long” to arrive.
He called the wait time “outside the norm of what we would expect” and said officials are looking into how they can improve the dispatch system to help prevent tragedies like Aaron’s death.
The 3-month-old was likely to have been in the car for up to an hour before the call for help, Geldart said. Officials are awaiting a toxicology report to determine the cause and manner of death.
The following timeline of the emergency is based on information provided by Geldart, computer-aided dispatch records and recordings of scanner traffic reviewed by The Post.
The emergency began at 6:01 p.m. Tuesday, when an emergency call came from the 600 block of Park Road NW with a parent reporting that their infant had been “accidentally left in the car.”
The call-taker with the Office of Unified Communications, the agency that handles 911 calls, put in an alert for a child locked in a car. Fire department dispatchers sent a rescue team that did not include ambulances.
But, a minute later, the parent told the call-taker that the infant was out of the car, inside their apartment and not breathing. The call-taker changed the dispatch request — first, by recording that the baby was out of the car, and next, at 6:02 p.m., by writing that he was in cardiac arrest.
Somewhere in the seconds-long window between those two modifications, the fire dispatcher noticed that the child was out of the car and canceled the call for service, Geldart said. The dispatcher did not, according to Geldart, realize that a new team was needed to handle an even more dire emergency.
By 6:04 p.m., police dispatchers saw the call for an infant in cardiac arrest and sent their own team to the apartment building.
Five minutes later, the call-taker, who was on the phone with the parents and walking them through CPR techniques, realized that the EMS team had not arrived. She called her supervisor over for help, Geldhart said. The supervisor rushed over to the fire dispatchers, who realized that they erroneously did not have a call out for help at that address. They corrected the mistake at 6:09 p.m.
Police arrived on the scene at 6:10 p.m. Paramedics arrived four minutes later. By that time — it was 12 minutes after the call-taker learned a 3-month-old boy was not breathing, and 13 minutes after 911 was first contacted.
Aaron was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
“This tragic event is the subject of an active investigation,” the Office of Unified Communications said in a statement. “OUC will release the findings of our investigation when it is completed.”
Geldart said the city has been considering asking the fire department to take over dispatch responsibilities from OUC employees.
“All of this is tragic,” Geldhart said, adding that medical dispatches typically arrive within nine minutes. “We would love to say we want an ambulance there within two minutes for something like this.”
Dave Statter, a public safety advocate and former journalist who runs an online site that covers fire and emergency management news, and ABC 7 TV first reported the misstep.
In July, the Office of Unified Communications sent firefighters and paramedics to the incorrect address for a report of a newborn baby in cardiac arrest, which resulted in a minute-long delay before help reached the infant, who did not survive. It was unclear whether the delay of about a minute contributed to the baby’s death. | 2022-08-13T14:40:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. investigating response to 911 call after death of 3-month-old boy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/boy-dead-car-911-call/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/boy-dead-car-911-call/ |
To spend time with the moms is to see: Alone, some could find themselves drowning. But together, they’ve been able to do more than tread water.
A Virginia trailer park where a group of moms decided during the pandemic to help one another survive and thrive. (Theresa Vargas /TWP)
The heat was unforgiving and the mosquitoes were biting, but the women who filled the foldout chairs in Imelda Castro’s backyard didn’t seem bothered.
During the pandemic, that small strip of greenery tucked behind a Northern Virginia trailer park has been a haven for them. It has served as a classroom, an office and a community play space.
That backyard is where the women learned from a health-care worker what medical services their children are entitled to receive.
That backyard is where a DJ played music on Día del Niño, Day of the Child, and the community invited a police officer to take a swing at a piñata. “She had never hit one before!” said a woman who captured that moment on video.
That backyard is where, every Friday, the women form an assembly line and empty with impressive efficiency a truck filled with fresh produce and other goods, and then make sure everyone in the trailer park who needs food gets it.
“If we didn’t have this community we’ve built, we’d be very vulnerable,” Rosalia Mendoza said in Spanish as she sat in one of those foldout chairs. “We’re united, and it makes us stronger. What affects one trailer affects the whole community.”
Poverty often takes from people. It snatches. It steals. It can leave people with empty bellies, low self-esteem and a lost sense of security.
That’s why the women want people to know what they’ve created in that trailer park on Route 1. From a shared struggle, they have built something special — a network of moms who regularly check on one another, inform one another and push one another.
To spend time with those moms is to recognize this: Alone, some could find themselves drowning. But together, they’ve been able to do more than tread water.
“This is unique,” Patricia Moreno said of the community. “This is not everywhere.”
Moreno has spent the last two decades as an outreach worker for Anthem HealthKeepers Plus, a job that takes her into low-income communities throughout Northern Virginia to teach residents about their Medicaid benefits. Her fluency in Spanish and willingness to go into even the most neglected of neighborhoods has made her a welcome presence among Latino immigrants who don’t trust easily authority figures.
Moreno first learned about the women when one of them, Ana Delia Romero, called to ask whether she would come speak to them about health care. Moreno went to that backyard, and then she went again.
The population of the trailer park is one that nonprofit workers often worry about. The majority of the residents are immigrants from Central and South America, and their families are tied to the local economy by threads that are usually among the first to be severed during economic downturns. Most of the men work in construction and restaurant jobs, two industries that were hit hard during the pandemic, and many of the women don’t work because of a lack of access to transportation and child care. In the last few years, several families have gone weeks without income, and some have faced eviction.
Moreno said many people in the communities she visits are hesitant to ask for help, or accept it, but these mothers have worked hard to turn their trailer park into a village. They watch one another’s children. They give one another rides. They invite people to come teach them about subjects that will benefit their families and their neighbors. The women have created a WhatsApp group and use it often to communicate.
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I’ve never seen a system like this,” Moreno said.
On the day I visited, she sat with eight of the women in the foldout chairs. Also there was Ivana Escobar, director of collective impact for United Community, a nonprofit that provides food to the trailer park and support to the women.
“We go to every community in this area,” Escobar said, “and these women have made something stronger than anywhere else.”
As the women tell it, Ana Delia Romero, who is partially blind, is the one who started bringing them together. She was the first person in the community to test positive for the coronavirus, and she ended up in the hospital for six days. After she recovered, she started volunteering with the Health Department. She knew many Latinos were hesitant to learn about the virus and the safety precautions they could take, and she wanted to help get that information to more people.
She also wanted to make sure none of her neighbors was going hungry during the pandemic. She got involved with free food-distribution efforts and started knocking on her neighbors’ doors to ask whether they had enough to eat. Soon she realized the need was great enough that it would be easier if the food came to her community.
Escobar said that Romero asked United Community whether a truck could deliver food to the trailer park, and now, a truck comes every Friday. When it arrives, the women unload the contents and distribute them. On the day I met the women, all but one were wearing a United Community T-shirt. Escobar said they don’t get paid by the organization. They handle the food distribution as volunteers.
“The women here, they mobilized themselves,” Escobar said. “You wouldn’t even know they’re struggling because of how they show up.”
One of the women said being able to help her neighbors has boosted her self-esteem. Another said she hopes other immigrant communities hear about what they’re doing and put in place similar models.
“When Ana asked, ‘Who wants to volunteer?’ the answer was ‘Me, me, me,’ ” Elizabeth Villatoro said. “This community doesn’t have excuses. Anna doesn’t say, ‘I lost my vision, I can’t do anything.’ Alberta doesn’t say, ‘I have children with special needs, I can’t do anything.’ We do what we need to do.”
As two young boys ran through the backyard, the mothers talked about some of the community’s needs. The children don’t have a nearby playground, and the closest soccer field is a 30-minute walk. One woman also noted that adult classes would be helpful for community members who speak indigenous languages and can’t read or write in English or Spanish.
“If this didn’t exist, if we didn’t know each other, it’d be a disgrace, because we wouldn’t know what to do in an emergency,” Mendoza said.
They wouldn’t know who to ask about their rights when facing eviction. They wouldn’t know who to tell when they realized the school year was about to start and they couldn’t afford supplies for their children.
On Friday, Moreno showed up again in that backyard. This time, she brought with her 200 filled backpacks. | 2022-08-13T16:12:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How a group of moms turned a Virginia trailer park into a village - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/moms-immigrants-trailer-park/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/moms-immigrants-trailer-park/ |
Two boys, 12 and 13, shot and wounded in Columbia Heights, police say
Two boys, ages 12 and 13, suffered non-life-threatening injuries after being shot in the Columbia Heights neighborhood early Saturday morning.
Metropolitan police say they believe the shooting happened while the two were walking outside in the 1200 block of Irving Street Northwest. The boys continued walking after the shooting to meet police at the 3100 block of 11th Street Northwest at 12:22 a.m., police said. Each of the boys suffered one gunshot wound and was transported to a hospital, police said.
No suspects or motive have been identified in the shooting. The case is still under investigation, police said. | 2022-08-13T16:20:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two boys, 12 and 13, shot and wounded in Columbia Heights, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/dc-columbia-heights-shooting-teenagers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/dc-columbia-heights-shooting-teenagers/ |
FBI agents took 11 sets of classified documents, several marked ‘top secret’ from the Mar-a-Lago Club
An itemized receipt for property seized in the execution of a search warrant by the FBI at former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 12. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)
When a federal magistrate judge unsealed on Friday the court-authorized warrant used to search former president Donald Trump’s home, he also made public an inventory list of all the items taken in the high-profile raid.
The inventory of 28 seized items provides a glimpse of what was still being kept at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence and private beach club, more than a year after the National Archives and Records Agency began trying to retrieve presidential records improperly taken from the White House at the end of Trump’s presidency. It offers few details.
Here’s what you need to know about classified information to help decode some of the items included in the inventory list.
Confidential is defined as information that could “damage” national security if it is publicized, is the lowest level, according to Steven Aftergood, a security specialist at the Federation of American Scientists. The largest number of government workers and contractors — thousands upon thousands — have access to this information. It could include basic State Department cables and information provided by a foreign government, Aftergood said.
“Even if it doesn’t involve highly sensitive secrets, it would be marked as confidential,” Aftergood said. “And you do not want to release it, because it would complicate diplomatic relations with that foreign government.”
Secret is the next level of classification, referring to material that, if released, could cause “serious damage” to national security. Aftergood said this is the broadest category. The budget of a U.S. intelligence agency, for example, could be classified as “secret.”
The most sensitive information is classified as top secret, meaning it could cause “exceptionally grave danger” to national security. And within “top secret” exists a number of sub-classifications often dealing with the most protected pieces of American information and intelligence. Top-secret information could include weapon design and war plans.
Sensitive Compartmented Information, a category that falls under the “top secret” classification, includes information derived from sources and intelligence. That may be an electronic intercept or information provided by a human informant in a foreign country.
“The concern there is that if it were disclosed, then not only would national security be at risk, but the individual source or method could be, too,” Aftergood said.
FBI agents recouped four sets of “top-secret” documents, three sets of “confidential" documents and three sets of “secret” documents from Mar-a-Lago, according to the list of items seized in the raid and unsealed by a judge on Friday. Another set of documents was labeled “Various classified TS/SCI documents,” a reference to “top-secret” and “Sensitive Compartmented Information.”
But the list didn’t describe the documents beyond their classification levels. Since much of the information seized was classified, legal experts had warned beforehand that any inventory list would be vague to protect the contents of the documents.
“Throughout the executive branch, there are a few hundred officials who can generate and designate it,” Aftergood said.
“You go through serious levels of background checks to get a clearance, and not everyone passes,” Ali said. “You want people who can be trusted with this sensitive information and do the right thing.”
Trump’s team has publicly said that he declassified all the documents found in Florida before leaving the White House. But it’s unclear whether he went through a document-by-document declassification process, working with the relevant agency.
No, according to security experts. There are other laws that protect the country’s most sensitive secrets beyond how it is classified. For example, according to Aftergood, some of the intelligence and documents related to nuclear weapons can’t be declassified by the president. Aftergood said such information is protected by a different law, the Atomic Energy Act.
Another law — called “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” — states it is illegal to remove documents related to national security from their proper place if it could risk the security of the country, no matter the classification level of the information.
“The classification is just one piece of the picture,” Aftergood said. There are other protections in the law that can make disclosure or unauthorized retention problematic or even criminal.
Removing certain property and documents from the White House would also violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires presidents to preserve official records during their time in office. The act says that records from a presidency are public property and do not belong to the president or the White House team. Violating the records act would be a civil, not a criminal, offense.
The warrant lists the codes of three U.S. laws that may have been violated. That does not mean all of them were broken, however, or that these are the only laws that could have been violated in connection with the FBI’s investigation. The laws pertain to destruction or moving of government documents and carry criminal penalties.
Section 793 — “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” — is known as the Espionage Act. It’s a broad law, and violating it does not necessarily mean that someone committed espionage. The law states it is illegal to remove documents or records related to national security from their proper place if it could risk the security of the country.
“It’s almost a misnomer, because when people hear ‘espionage,’ they think the classic definition of espionage spying,” Ali said. “But here it does not have anything to do with that, as far as we know. This may not be the cloak and dagger type of espionage.”
The second, Section 1519 — “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy" — criminalizes the destruction or hiding of documents to obstruct an investigation. The warrant does not detail which investigation the removal of these documents could be obstructing. It carries a prison sentence of no more than 20 years.
And the third, Section 2071 — “Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally” — makes illegal the willful theft or destruction of any government document. Every offense of this act could carry a sentence of up to three years of prison. A person convicted of violating this section is barred from holding federal office, according to the law.
Government officials who have been accused in the past of mishandling classified information include David H. Petraeus, a CIA director during the Obama administration, and Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, a national security adviser during the Clinton administration. Both eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for unlawfully removing secret documents. | 2022-08-13T16:38:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A guide to classified information and the Trump Mar-a-Lago warrant - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/13/trump-warrant-classified-answers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/13/trump-warrant-classified-answers/ |
FILE - Anne Heche arrives at the 74th annual Directors Guild of America Awards on March 12, 2022, in Beverly Hills, Calif. A spokesperson for Heche says the actor is on life support after suffering a brain injury in a fiery crash a week ago and isn’t expected to survive. The statement released on behalf of her family said she is being kept on life support to determine if she is a viable organ donor. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-13T17:52:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | LAPD ends investigation into Anne Heche car crash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/lapd-ends-investigation-into-anne-heche-car-crash/2022/08/13/ca5f3596-1b2d-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/lapd-ends-investigation-into-anne-heche-car-crash/2022/08/13/ca5f3596-1b2d-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Biden’s party remains on the defensive in the coming elections, but a flurry of events has given Democrats hope of holding off the worst this fall.
President Biden attends a bill-signing ceremony at the White House on Aug. 9. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
President Biden has suffered through many bad weeks and difficult months. This past week wasn’t among them.
A few months ago, Republicans were expansive in their predictions about what would happen in the upcoming midterms. Democrats were in the dumps. Many Republicans remain quite bullish about their prospects — and for many good reasons. But today, Democrats are cautiously optimistic about their chances to defy those early predictions and deny Republicans the big gains once seen as inevitable.
Democrats who weathered the 2010 midterm election, which saw the party take a beating and lose control of the House, say the political climate, while still tilted toward the Republicans, is not nearly as bad as it was then. “When I would walk into a coffee shop, or a McDonald’s, or a gas station, I was getting yelled at,” said one Democratic elected official who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could speak candidly. “And this isn’t even anywhere near that — not even close.”
In 2010, Democrats were on the defensive for what they and then-President Barack Obama had done, namely enacting the Affordable Care Act, which was roundly criticized by the right.
Today Biden can point to having produced an expansive legislative record with the slimmest of majorities in the Senate and House. That won’t free him from criticism by Republicans over specific policies, or solve some of his other problems, but it has the obvious potential of raising the energy level of his base.
There was a view inside the White House six weeks ago that the summer could produce the kind of good news that now has materialized. This was at a time when things were beginning to change politically. It was just after the Supreme Court had overturned Roe vs. Wade, injecting a powerful issue into the campaign dialogue that is energizing many female voters. It was also after Congress had approved a gun safety bill, modest as it was, for the first time in 30 years.
That wish list has now become a reality. It began with the passage of a bill to support manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States and of legislation to provide support for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Both were approved with some Republican votes.
The Inflation Reduction Act fell well short of what was being discussed a year ago at this time, the so-called Build Back Better Bill that had a much heftier price tag but never survived the negotiations with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.). Both blessed the new bill, making passage possible. So what began as a summer in the doldrums for many Democrats has become a time of tempered celebration. Will it be short-lived?
The White House didn’t wait for final passage of the bill to issue its fall campaign messaging memo, with hard-edge language on how Democrats and the president had taken on and defeated corporate and special-interest groups — from big drug companies to the gun lobby to oil and gas companies.
There was news beyond Congress that the White House also viewed as favorable. The inflation rate for last month came in at 8.5 percent above a year earlier, still near a 40-year high and therefore still a Republican talking point. But it was down a tick from the previous month’s 9.1 percent level, raising the question of whether inflation has peaked and if it has, will voters really notice.
Meanwhile, the national average for gasoline prices dipped below $4 for the first time since last spring. Prices are still well above where they were when Biden took office, but given how sensitive consumers are to any movements in the price of gasoline, the softening was welcome news to Democrats.
All of this is stirring at a time as the biggest news story of the week threatens to toss in another wild card to the fall election outlook: the federal search warrant that brought FBI agents to remove boxes of documents, including 11 sets marked classified, from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. | 2022-08-13T17:52:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden gets a big victory and Democrats get some November talking points - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/biden-gets-big-victory-democrats-get-some-november-talking-points/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/biden-gets-big-victory-democrats-get-some-november-talking-points/ |
In a letter, Maloney and Schiff call for intelligence officials to conduct a damage assessment of the highly classified information found at Trump’s club
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) talks with reporters on Capitol Hill on Nov. 6, 2019. He is joined by, from left, Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (R-Va.), Del. Elinor Holmes Norton, (D-D.C.), Rep Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.). (Susan Walsh/AP)
The letter was sent to National Intelligence Director Avril Haines by House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and cites the search warrant cataloguing the classified documents of various levels of sensitivity found at Mar-a-Lago.
The warrant also said that federal agents were investigating the potential violation of three different federal laws, including a part of the Espionage Act outlawing gathering, transmitting, or losing national defense information. The warrant also cites the destruction of records and concealment or mutilation of government material. | 2022-08-13T20:07:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Top lawmakers seek intelligence assessment of documents from Mar-a-Lago - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/top-lawmakers-seek-intelligence-assessment-documents-mar-a-lago/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/13/top-lawmakers-seek-intelligence-assessment-documents-mar-a-lago/ |
Commanders team president Jason Wright spoke to reporters on Saturday, ahead of Washington's preseason game. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Washington Commanders team president Jason Wright says the team’s sponsorship and ticket sales are up, its rebranding has gone better than he anticipated and he will continue to weigh in on social media if he feels his players and team are “disrespected.”
In a wide-ranging interview with reporters ahead of Washington’s preseason game against the Carolina Panthers on Saturday at FedEx Field, Wright spoke on myriad topics about the team — including its business and marketing operations and workplace culture — as well as his recent comments on social media about a local television interview, which drew widespread attention.
Washington has already sold more tickets for this season than it did during the whole of its 2021 campaign, according to Wright.
“But a big part of that is the season-ticket member base has increased so much,” Wright said. “And that’s the foundation on which attendance is built. … We couldn’t be happier with the progress that’s been made. We feel like we’re maxing out.”
Wright, 40, declined to provide specific numbers on suite and ticket sales because he “doesn’t want to get ahead of my team being able to tell their stadium.” But he said the Commanders’ overall renewal rate on season tickets is up 15 percent, and the renewal rate on suites is up almost 30 percent.
Joey Colby-Begovich, Washington’s vice president of guest experience, detailed the team’s continued rebranding, including the installation at the stadium of more local food options, kiosks to improve the efficiency of ordering concessions and art. There’s a new, 44-member entertainment team, and the marching band has returned. The team also unveiled its revamped fight song Saturday and will soon hold fan voting for a new mascot, which will be revealed early next year.
Commanders’ revived marching band will have a new look and sound
The Commanders rebrand — which saw the team evolve from its old, controversial moniker to the temporary “Washington Football Team” name to the Commanders in February — has created challenges. Wright admitted that Washington lost season ticket holders during the first stage of that rebrand, when it operated as the Football Team.
“Bit by bit, we’re grabbing those folks back, but it’s certainly not because of the new name and identity,” he said. “There are a set of fans, which I would say is probably smaller, that did come back to the team because the old name was rescinded, but if you’re talking about the balance, probably more left than came back.”
Wright said a big part of Washington’s transformation has been going back to the past and reopening its doors to alumni. The rebrand is “intentionally not meant to feel like an expansion team,” he said, so multiple alumni appearances have been scheduled to stay close to the team’s “legacy.”
Anheuser-Busch did not renew its beer sponsorship earlier this year, and a naming rights deal with Inova for Washington’s training facility in Ashburn expired. Yet overall sponsorship was another area Wright claimed the team has improved significantly.
“You would think with the negative public head winds that we’ve faced that we would be down in sponsorship,” he said. “But we’re up in categories, total, year over year. We’re projecting to be up double-digits in overall sponsorship. It’ll be our highest sponsorship [revenue] total since 2005.”
During Wright’s tenure as team president, Washington has operated amid multiple investigations stemming from allegations of sexual harassment by former employees, as well as an ongoing investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform into the team’s workplace culture and owner Daniel Snyder.
Wright said Saturday the “ghosts of Christmas past” have added challenges to his job, but “all of us here signed up knowing that” and “all of the big issues and headlines that no longer exist in the organization.”
He continued: “But everybody who came here had the aspiration to completely flip something on its head, and it’s really in the day-to-day interactions, because while there are the big things that have popped in headlines, the real change and change in culture in this organization is how we day-to-day interact with people. … It’s very different.”
Wright drew headlines on Friday when he responded to a reporter who posted a clip of an interview with Commanders quarterback Carson Wentz. The reporter asked Wentz about his trades from Philadelphia and Indianapolis, and Wright took exception.
“Thankfully, Carson demonstrated grace & class in response to this pompous, unprofessional mess,” Wright tweeted. “I recognize you have made a living on childlike provocation but it needs to be called out. Don’t expect special access and good luck building rapport with the guys.”
On Saturday, Wright said he believed it was “appropriate to defend our guy and stand up for our team in a direct and equivalent way.”
“I think the thing that you will see me doing more often is making sure that we are treating each other in a more up-and-ups way,” he said. “I think we’ve done enough work over the last two years on building a healthy culture within the organization and honest way of working with y’all, that we can take plenty of criticism. … But it needs to be done respectfully.”
Stadium progress: Wright addressed a number of other topics, including the ongoing search for a new stadium location. He said the team is closer to finding a location in either Maryland, D.C. or Virginia than it was last year, and said he expects the team to “be able to hit our timeline.” The Commanders have to stay at FedEx Field until 2027, after which it can either stay or leave.
Week 1 attendance projection: Wright said he is anticipating a 15 percent increase in tickets sold for Washington’s season opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars. | 2022-08-13T20:20:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jason Wright touts Commanders ticket sales, sponsorships - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/jason-wright-commanders-rebrand-ticket-sales/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/jason-wright-commanders-rebrand-ticket-sales/ |
Manny Machado and the San Diego Padres will be without Fernando Tatis Jr. for the reason of the season. Tatis was suspended for violating MLB's PED policy. (Nick Wass/AP Photo)
The San Diego Padres hoped they were on the cusp of emerging as a blissful offensive juggernaut when news of Fernando Tatis Jr.’s season-ending suspension relegated them to fighting for their lives again. Perhaps they always had been, really, because even their trade deadline deal for Juan Soto and Josh Bell hadn’t guaranteed them anything.
By Saturday morning, San Diego was clinging to the third and final National League wild card spot and further back from the NL West-leading Los Angeles Dodgers than any other second-place team in baseball — fending off the struggling Milwaukee Brewers without the young superstar they thought they would be adding for the stretch run, not at all guaranteed an October berth. Such is the fragile state of the baseball playoff picture on this mid-August weekend, as blurry at the top in some cases as at the bottom, still capable of being changed entirely with a few strokes.
That picture is bigger than ever before: MLB will use a new, larger playoff format this year in which the two division winners with the best record in each league will receive a bye, leaving the other division winner to play one of three wild-card teams in a best-of-three series to advance. Instead of five teams qualifying in the playoffs for each league, this year will include six.
And as of mid-August, there are few sure things.
The Dodgers are, as has become their annual tradition, the closest thing to a playoff lock as there is. They are 35 games over .500. They have outscored opponents by nearly 250 runs. Their lineup is loaded. Their rotation has weathered major injuries to remain surprisingly steady. They own the biggest division lead in baseball — 16 games up on the Padres. The second-biggest lead in baseball belongs to another October regular, the American League-leading Houston Astros, whose stingy right-hander Lance McCullers Jr. was scheduled to make his first start of the season Saturday. Astros starters already owned the lowest ERA in the American League without him.
The ‘Field of Dreams’ game was a hit last season. Can MLB keep it going?
The best record in the AL once belonged to the New York Yankees, who at times this season looked likely to unseat the Dodgers as the sport’s juggernaut, but have since slid back into something resembling mortality. They are 30 games over .500, but 7-14 in the second half, thanks in part to a sudden onslaught of injuries that has led to the kind of slide that can snowball quickly under the searing New York spotlight. But they are also riding one of the greatest individual seasons in recent baseball history as Aaron Judge chases down Roger Maris’s regular season home run record* (*non-steroid era) with 46 home runs through 113 team games — on pace for 66.
They are 10 games up on the Toronto Blue Jays in the AL East, a solid if not insurmountable difference in a division that has three other teams within two games of each other and wild card positions. The Jays have yet to find the kind of magic their talented young roster seemed likely to stir.
The Tampa Bay Rays, thus far less of a factor than normal in this division, are likely to get young star Wander Franco and a peck of other injured contributors back in the coming weeks. The Rays currently trail the unlikeliest member of the playoff picture, the Baltimore Orioles, by a half a game for the final AL wild card spot. Because despite trading away stalwart Trey Mancini and closer Jorge Lopez, the upstart Orioles are a part of the AL playoff picture.
From July: The Orioles, with moxie and magic, are in an unfamiliar spot: On the rise
The Orioles will play the next month and a half with no pressure, having entered this season with expectations of mediocrity then handling their trade deadline without much urgency. They will try to hold off the far more beleaguered Blue Jays — who entered this season with World Series dreams, fired their manager this summer and made practical but not transformative moves at the deadline — as that team hopes to salvage its season.
All of them will be elbowing for position with the Seattle Mariners, a team that rattled off 14 straight wins to pull themselves back into contention then pounced on the best-available starter at the deadline in Luis Castillo. The Mariners have not made the playoffs since 2001, the longest active drought in the four major men’s North American pro sports. At times over the past two years, they have looked like a team capable of staging the kind of storybook October run they’ve been waiting for. It has yet to materialize.
The most formidable wild card team in either league may be whichever team does not win the National League East — as currently positioned, those playoff-tested Atlanta Braves. After a brief post-all-star break wobble, the New York Mets look as steady as ever, untethered by demons of disappointment past and unintimidated by Atlanta. But Atlanta has proven its ability to coalesce at the exact right moment, so with a six-game lead, the Mets are not necessarily out of reach just yet.
In both leagues, the most chaos may end up emerging in the Centrals, the weakest divisions in the sport that are nevertheless decidedly up for grabs. The St. Louis Cardinals added steadying presences to their rotation and are just 1½ games ahead of the Milwaukee Brewers in that division. The Brewers, after making the eyebrow-raising trade of Josh Hader, have struggled and spiraled somewhat since the deadline. But their formidable rotation always seems capable of holding them together enough to stay competitive late.
And in the American League Central, the Chicago White Sox are in the midst of a disappointing season, but will try to beat out the Minnesota Twins and young Cleveland Guardians for the top spot. It is possible, due to the relative power of the Mariners and American League East, that only one team in the Central will qualify for the postseason. The race to win that division, then, may prove one of the most exciting down the stretch, even if it’s not talked about as much.
Any act of baseball nature, like the Tatis suspension or a major injury, seems capable of recasting most of the picture entirely, so much remains uncertain. And as the annually dominant Dodgers can explain — even the sure things in September are no sure thing in October. | 2022-08-13T20:55:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MLB's playoff picture remains hazy in mid-August - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/mlb-playoff-picture-august/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/mlb-playoff-picture-august/ |
Commanders quarterback Carson Wentz (11) throws during the first half of Washington's preseason game against the Carolina Panthers. (Nick Wass/AP)
Ron Rivera got much of what he’d said he wanted Saturday afternoon.
His starters, playing in their first game as Commanders, stayed within the window of plays he’d hoped they would. They executed a lengthy scoring drive that showed the depth of their rushing corps and resilience of their line.
His starting quarterback, Carson Wentz, efficiently operated the offense, and the rookie, Sam Howell, put on a show for a late rally.
Flawless, it wasn’t. Not by any stretch.
The Commanders lost to the Panthers, 23-21, on a field goal in the final seconds in their preseason opener, offering the clearest gauge yet of just how close — or just how far away — they are from competing for a playoff run and improving upon their 7-10 record last season.
More importantly, the game provided a close-up look at many players vying for roster spots and gave others a platform to shine.
Though many fans came to see Wentz, Howell, the third-string rookie quarterback, won over the crowd as he rallied the Commanders with two touchdowns in the final three minutes. He single-handedly reinvigorated a sparse crowd and helped lesser-known players leave their marks, too. Among them were receiver/returner Alex Erickson, who led the Commanders with 54 receiving yards and scored the go-ahead two-point conversion.
But it took some time for the Commanders to take control.
The defense that has won the majority of battles against its offense in training camp came out flat, allowing the Panthers offense to convert more than 65 percent of its third downs.
And the offense started with a three and out and then a fumble, courtesy of running back Antonio Gibson, who struggled with ball security last season.
But the energy picked up as the game went on. Wentz completed 10 of 13 pass attempts for 84 yards in his 21 offensive plays. He didn’t throw a pick or a touchdown, and for the most part he successfully ran the offense. The team’s first series died when tight end Armani Rogers dropped a deep pass along the right sideline. The pass was on target, but Rogers, in tight coverage, bobbled the ball as he spun around and lost control.
When the offense came back out for its second series, Wentz completed passes of two, four and six yards to Rogers to get a first down, but the drive ended on Gibson’s fumble.
The Panthers scored on their subsequent drive to take a 10-0 lead — kicker Zane Gonzalez nailed a 41-yard field goal to end Carolina’s opening series — when Rashard Higgins waltzed into the end zone.
But the Commanders bounced back in a way Rivera had hoped, methodically using 14 plays to make their way down field for their first touchdown of the new era. Gibson was benched for the series following his turnover, and rookie running back Brian Robinson Jr. took over.
To start the drive, Wentz connected with Terry McLaurin along the right sideline for a 16-yard gain. Robinson ran for 11 yards two plays later, and then, on third and four, Wentz connected with veteran back J.D. McKissic for a 15-yard catch-and-run to put the Commanders on the Panthers’ 9-yard line to help set up a one-yard touchdown run by Robinson. Wentz and the Commanders were 3-of-3 on third downs in that drive.
Rivera promised that all three quarterbacks would play, and Heinicke took over at the start of the next series, with roughly nine minutes remaining in the second quarter. But he struggled with accuracy and rhythm with his receivers and finished 4-of-9 for 21 yards, an interception and 12.0 passer rating.
Just as the crowd seemed to quiet, Howell entered the game with about nine minutes left in the third quarter. The fifth-round rookie, who was once projected by some analysts to be a first-round pick in the 2022 draft, put on a show.
His first pass was a completion. His longest completion was 40 yards. His best series came with about 9:44 remaining, when he went on a spree of first downs, connecting with rookie receiver Kyric McGowan for a 27-yard catch, finding Marken Michel for 17 yards, then scrambling up the middle for a 17-yard touchdown on his own. Howell finished 9-of-16 in passing with 143 yards and added 19 rushing yards and two rushing touchdowns to his tally.
The Commanders’ new fight song, an alteration of the team’s previous one, blared from the loud speakers after his first score.
By his second, fans were on their feet.
But by the end, a 45-yard Panthers field goal sailed through the uprights to give Carolina the victory. | 2022-08-13T22:04:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carson Wentz debuts for Commanders vs. Panthers, rookie QB Sam Howell shines - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/carson-wentz-commanders-panthers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/carson-wentz-commanders-panthers/ |
Analysis by Mark Maske
Carson Wentz throws a pass before getting hit by Panthers defensive end Yetur Gross-Matos on Saturday. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The sunshine was bright and brilliant. The crowd was sparse. Carson Wentz’s appearance was relatively brief. And in their first preseason game with their new team name, the Washington Commanders tried to take a step toward reinvigorating their fan base and putting more of the focus on the football being played on the field rather than on the issues swirling ceaselessly off it.
That task falls somewhere between considerable and daunting. If any progress was made Saturday, it was incremental, as the Commanders lost to the Carolina Panthers, 23-21, before an announced crowd of 44,855 at FedEx Field.
Wentz played decently, completing 10 of 13 passes for 74 yards in his preseason debut for his third NFL team. There were no firm conclusions to be drawn from this low-stakes outing about his ability to give the franchise lasting stability at quarterback.
“I thought he threw the ball well,” Commanders Coach Ron Rivera said. “I thought he threw it where he was supposed to. … He did the things that we hoped he would do.”
But there were no exhilarating moments either, even by preseason standards. There was little to excite the crowd, such as it was. The most enthusiastic and consistent cheers, in fact, came as rookie quarterback Sam Howell engineered a pair of fourth-quarter touchdown drives.
“I thought that what our guys did coming back, giving ourselves a chance, there was a lot of excitement,” Rivera said. “And that’s what we want to do. We want to create some excitement. We want to play hard. We’ve got to play smart. We’ve got to play better.”
The number of people actually in the stands appeared far more modest than the official attendance figure. The stadium the Commanders are attempting so desperately to leave for an upgraded version — somewhere — when their lease expires in 2027 was strikingly empty on an August afternoon that was as pleasant as they come.
Preseason football is far from captivating. But on such an idyllic day, with a new team name and a new quarterback unveiled, a better turnout might have been expected if the fan base had not been so disaffected by the franchise’s off-field turmoil. Tickets reportedly were available on the secondary market for as little as $1, according to the Athletic.
It speaks to the enormity of the fan dissatisfaction, ranging from anger to apathy, that Rivera and a front office led by team president Jason Wright must try to overcome.
The Commanders and their owner, Daniel Snyder, remain under investigation by the NFL, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the attorneys general of D.C. and Virginia.
Snyder spent more than 10 hours late last month testifying voluntarily under oath to the committee remotely after his attorney refused to accept service electronically of a subpoena. Snyder faces potential disciplinary measures by the NFL, depending on the findings of the league’s ongoing investigation being conducted by attorney Mary Jo White. It has been 13 months since Snyder turned over control of the franchise’s daily operations to his wife, Tanya Snyder, the team’s co-CEO, after a previous NFL investigation by attorney Beth Wilkinson.
The team’s efforts to secure public funding for a new stadium in Virginia have been put on hold. As if there wasn’t enough unrest, Wright criticized a local television reporter Friday on Twitter for his line of questioning in an interview with Wentz. The questions put to the quarterback were not particularly inflammatory or out of line for a player who has been traded twice, most recently after only one season with the Indianapolis Colts.
Wright wasn’t backing down Saturday, telling reporters before the game he thought his Twitter comments were appropriate. He also said he believes the Commanders will be able to stick to their timeline for playing in a new stadium. He portrayed a team in promising financial health.
Snyder, Wright and the team consistently have tried to paint the picture of a revamped franchise taking proactive steps to move away from its past issues. That was not convincing to the House Oversight Committee, which concluded in its investigation that Snyder and members of his legal team conducted a “shadow investigation” to discredit his accusers and shift blame.
In the quest to win back fans, playing better football would help. Rivera is a more-than-capable coach who won an NFC East title in his first season with the team. Even so, he’s seeking the first winning season of his Washington tenure as he begins Year 3. So much depends on Wentz, who put up solid numbers for most of last season in Indianapolis before he and the team unraveled late, missing the playoffs and prompting Wentz’s abrupt, not-by-choice exit.
If Wentz plays reasonably well, no one will remember critics’ contentions that the Commanders surrendered too much to trade for him. There are enough other pieces in place for this team to return to a contender in a division that remains without an elite team. But would, say, a 9-8 record be enough to make the fans care again? It is the job ahead of Rivera, Wentz and the Commanders to make that a relevant question.
“I thought the energy and the atmosphere was cool,” Wentz said. “Obviously it’ll keep getting more revved up as we get closer to Week 1. But it was good to get out here, to not be booed, and to have some fun in front of these fans.” | 2022-08-13T22:22:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Commanders working to generate on-field buzz - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/washington-commanders-focus-football/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/washington-commanders-focus-football/ |
Two killed when small plane crashes on road
Peoria County officials said the plane crashed at about 12:30 p.m. on Route 116. County Coroner Jamie Harwood said two people who have not been identified were killed and autopsies will be conducted Monday, the (Peoria) Journal Star reported.
Judge sentences boat pilot to 18 years for 3 smuggling deaths: The smuggler who was at the helm of an overloaded 40-foot vessel that capsized off Point Loma, Calif., last year, causing three migrants to drown and sparking a chaotic rescue effort, was sentenced Friday to 18 years in prison. Antonio Hurtado, 40, was illegally shuttling 32 migrants into the United States aboard the aging trawler-style boat the morning of May 2, 2021, when the vessel drifted onto the rocks below Cabrillo National Monument and broke apart. He pleaded guilty in April to felony charges of attempted human smuggling resulting in death and attempted human smuggling for financial gain.
California governor proposes extending nuclear plant's life: California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Friday proposed extending the life of the state's last operating nuclear power plant by five to 10 years to maintain reliable power supplies in the climate change era. The proposal to keep the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant running beyond a scheduled closing by 2025 gave new urgency to a decades-long fight over the seismic safety of the site. And critics depicted Newsom's plan as a huge financial giveaway for plant operator Pacific Gas & Electric, while warning it would gut environmental safeguards. The seaside plant midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco produces 9 percent of the state's electricity. | 2022-08-13T22:26:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 2 killed when small plane crashes on roadway in Illinois - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2-killed-when-small-plane-crashes-on-roadway-in-illinois/2022/08/13/ad2c61a6-146b-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2-killed-when-small-plane-crashes-on-roadway-in-illinois/2022/08/13/ad2c61a6-146b-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html |
Gangs leave vehicles ablaze in border cities
The Mexican border cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, Rosarito and Ensenada were hit by gang violence that included vehicles being set ablaze and road blockades. It was the third time this week Mexican cities have seen widespread arson and shootings by drug cartels. The gangs appear to be targeting stores, vehicles and innocent bystanders in response to disputes or attempts to capture gang members.
Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero blamed it on disputes between drug gangs. “Today we are saying to the organized crime groups that are committing these crimes, that Tijuana is going to remain open and take care of its citizens,” Caballero said in a video, “and we also ask them to settle their debts with those who didn’t pay what they owe, not with families and hard-working citizens.”
Russian official expresses optimism on Griner talks: Russia for the first time expressed guarded optimism about talks with the United States on a prisoner exchange involving WNBA star Brittney Griner and another jailed American. " 'Quiet diplomacy' is continuing, and it should bear fruit, if of course, Washington strictly follows it without slipping into propaganda," Alexander Darchiyev, head of the North American department of the Russian Foreign Ministry told the state Tass news service. Last month, the Biden administration proposed a swap involving Griner, a two-time Olympic Gold medalist, and Marine Corps veteran Paul Whelan, who was jailed in Russia in 2020 on spying charges he denies. In return, the United States would free Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer, and a second Russian also held in a U.S. jail, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
At least 15 migrants die in Libyan desert: Libyan authorities said Saturday they found at least 15 migrants dead in the desert on the borders with Sudan. The migrants were all Sudanese, likely attempting to reach western Libya in efforts to board trafficking boats to Europe. The Department for Combating Irregular Migration said the migrants' vehicle ran out of fuel. The agency said nine other migrants survived, while two remain missing.
Sissi announces shake-up of Egyptian cabinet: Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi announced a cabinet shake-up, which was approved by parliament in an emergency session, affecting 13 portfolios, including health, education, culture, local development and irrigation ministries. Also included in the reshuffle was the tourism portfolio, a key component of the economy.
Wind gusts hit music festival, killing 1, injuring dozens: One person was killed when high winds caused part of the main stage to collapse at a dance music festival near the Spanish city of Valencia early Saturday. Thirty-two people were taken to a hospital and three remained there on Saturday afternoon, regional health authorities said. Other infrastructure was also damaged when gusts battered the Medusa Festival, a huge electronic music event held over six days. National weather agency AEMET said there had been gusts of 82 kph (51 mph) recorded at a nearby airport. | 2022-08-13T22:27:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 13, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-13-2022/2022/08/13/09c08ae8-1a7d-11ed-8c9b-37f55528c617_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-13-2022/2022/08/13/09c08ae8-1a7d-11ed-8c9b-37f55528c617_story.html |
It’s a town, an educational community, a social movement, the embodiment of the “pursuit of happiness” and so much more.
Flowers bloom outside the Chautauqua Institution welcome center in Chautauqua, N.Y. Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was attacked there Friday by a man who rushed the stage as Rushdie was about to give a lecture. (Joshua Bessex/AP)
After writer Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage at the Chautauqua Institution on Thursday, the idyllic New York community of Chautauqua, known for its annual summer educational and cultural programs and tranquil lakeside setting, was thrust into the international spotlight. For those on the ground, Friday’s events punctured the image of a utopian summer retreat — typically marked by thought-provoking panel discussions and leisurely swims. Sam Peters, 19, who has been attending Chautauqua Institution events with his grandfather since he was a baby, said the mood after the attack was one of disbelief, with many Chautauqua regulars asking, “How could this happen here?”
To some, lowercase-c “chautauqua” is a common noun, used as shorthand for an educational event composed of lectures, performances and/or concerts, and not tied to any particular geographic setting. As it turns out, Chautauqua — the town and the Institution that gave rise to the word — has a long history, leading to a social movement that defined America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The site in western New York, situated about 1½ hours from Buffalo, has been visited by some prominent figures in U.S. history, including four sitting presidents (Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton), Susan B. Anthony, Sandra Day O’Connor and Mark Twain. President Theodore Roosevelt attended several times, calling it “the most American thing in America.” Socialist labor organizer Frank Bohn once said, “He who does not know Chautauqua does not know America.”
The name Chautauqua is said to come from a word in the language of the Indigenous Erie peoples meaning a bag tied in the middle or two moccasins tied together — a reference to the odd shape of the lake that bears the name: two elongated bodies of water, just barely connected. The town of Chautauqua was established in 1805, slightly west of the lake.
In 1874, two Methodists, philanthropist Lewis Miller and minister John Heyl Vincent, founded the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly, an academic resort and educational experiment intended to train Sunday school teachers and church workers. Gradually, the Assembly grew beyond its religious origin and would ultimately evolve into the Chautauqua Institution we know today.
A few years after the original Assembly was established, it expanded into other areas of general education. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle was founded in 1878 with the mission of providing those who could not afford higher education with a “college outlook.”
One of the first experiments in remote learning, the four-year CLSC course was taught through mail correspondence and guided at-home reading. It was intended to help people use their free time in a more rewarding way (instead of giving in to such temptation as gambling or drinking). Students in remote areas — often women and rural laborers — formed reading circles to stay motivated and split the cost of books, spreading the influence of Chautauqua beyond western New York. At the end of their study, they were invited to Chautauqua to receive certificates of completion.
The success of CLSC led to what became known as the Chautauqua Movement, sparking “daughter chautauquas” that sprung up in far-flung areas across the U.S. from the 1870s to the 1930s. Eventually, the word chautauqua became a generic term to describe a range of educational events in rural areas. Traveling chautauquas began popping up around the turn of the century, also known as circuit chautauquas or tent chautauquas, with speakers and performers hired by talent agencies. According to some historians, the movement peaked around 1915, when 12,000 communities had hosted a chautauqua.
The movement faded in the 1920s. Historians cite a number of causes: a rise in car culture; the increased dominance of evangelical Christianity that didn’t align with the freethinking nature of chautauquas; and increased educational opportunities for women. The Depression also made financing difficult.
Nearly a century later, several active chautauquas remain in operation outside western New York, in such places as Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania and Ridgway, Colorado. And the original Chautauqua Institution continues to thrive, drawing more than 142,000 visitors each summer for a nine-week season. Guided by four pillars — arts, education, religion and recreation — the organization has its own theater company, symphony, opera, ballet and visual arts center, as well as classes, interfaith lectures, a rotating chaplain and outdoor recreation.
Documentarian Ken Burns has called the Institution an embodiment of the “pursuit of happiness.” “Happiness with a capital ‘H’ is about lifelong learning and the improvement of the brain, the heart, the body and the soul throughout one’s lifetime,” he told the Chautauquan Daily. “And there is no place on Earth that embodies that rigor and that joy more than Chautauqua Institution.”
Mary Khosh, who has been going to Chautauqua for 50 years, said the Institution has a history of handling difficult conversations with grace, making Friday’s attacks all the more shocking.
“It’s not a place where anyone shies away from discussions about anything that’s controversial. It’s a place where you do discuss heavy topics,” she said. “The wonderful thing about Chautauqua is it is inclusive and welcoming and warm. And I hope people don’t get so frightened that they change all that.” | 2022-08-13T23:49:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What is Chautauqua? A brief history. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/13/chautauqua-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/13/chautauqua-history/ |
African American Museum hosts block party celebrating hip-hop anthology
The anthology was released in 2021 and tells the story of hip-hop and rap’s history
Grammy-nominated Alphabet Rockers, who define hip-hop as a freedom culture, perform during the inaugural Hip-Hop Block Party at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History on Aug. 13. The event marked the first anniversary of the release of the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
When did you fall in love with hip-hop? That was the question that Majic 102.3 FM’s Vic Jagger asked the several hundred attendees in the audience on Saturday at the block party right outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“If you all were there from the beginning, you better make some noise,” Jagger said to the crowd.
The radio personality helped kick things off as the museum celebrated the first anniversary of its Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap.
Last August, the museum released the anthology which chronicles hip-hop’s growth and influence. The project began as a collaboration between the museum and Smithsonian Folkways, the Smithsonian’s nonprofit record label, as a way to tell stories about African American music and what experiences inspire that music.
The anthology itself is a multimedia collection that includes 129 tracks on nine CDs ranging from 1973 to 2013, and features such hip-hop artists as Grandmaster Flash, Roxanne Shanté, and Sugarhill Gang. The anthology also includes a 300-page book with essays from hip-hop creators.
Work on the anthology began in 2014, before the museum’s opening, with an executive committee composed of key figures in the music and hip-hop community, such as rappers Chuck D and MC Lyte, historian Jeff Chang, and artist and writer Questlove.
The attendees, both inside and outside of the museum, came out Saturday to appreciate the genre, take part in dance lessons from break dance group Culture Shock DC, attend a panel on the history of hip-hop and rap, and, of course, jam to music.
“What a great occasion to have this festival on the birth month of hip-hop,” rapper LL Cool J said in a video presentation. “Hip-hop culture is important and it is a huge part of American culture in general. We’re dedicated to elevating and celebrating hip-hop culture in every aspect.”
Midge Kay said she remembered watching hip-hop first sprout in block parties in the Bronx. She said back then, she and others didn’t believe the style would survive, but said it’s crucial that events like the block party celebrate the importance of hip-hop and rap. Kay said she still has a lot of music from LL Cool J on her phone.
Hip-hop as a genre began in the Bronx, with Aug. 11, 1973 considered its official birth date. At a party on that date, Clive Campbell, also known as DJ Kool Herc, developed “the break,” isolating the beat track from a record and extending it using two copies of the same record on his two-turntable system. With breaks and record scratches, Herc extended the beat, making the track long enough so that break dancers could keep dancing and Herc himself could start rapping to add flavor to the track.
“We know the history of jazz, but it’s important to see how hip-hop has evolved. Music is a unifier,” Kay, 59, said. “We continue to see music evolve and, like life itself, if you don’t evolve, you get left behind.”
Dr. Dwandalyn Reece, a curator of music and performing arts at the museum, said on a panel that hip-hop is infused into everyday life, deserves more attention and should be preserved.
“We had the civil rights movement, we had the Harlem Renaissance, it’s no different,” Reece said. “It deserves to be preserved and generations to come deserve to learn from it.”
Kevin Young, who became the museum’s director in January 2021, said the motivation for the anthology was to give a sense of the broader culture that hip-hop created and represents. Young said he hoped visitors learn about hip-hop’s origin and the journey it’s taken since its beginnings.
“I think hip-hop really found its footing in the late 80s and early 90s with people talking about the culture, but it keeps evolving,” Young said. “A lot of what we think about the museum is how Black culture is central to American culture, and hip-hop does that.”
Young said the collaborative effort in creating the anthology is credited to those who led the hip-hop movement in its inception.
“I think community almost leads the way with hip-hop and you have to think about those folks who were pioneers and leaders in hip-hop,” Young said.
There have been no changes in the anthology since its release last year, but Young hopes to keep it going, adding more songs, so people continue to teach and learn about hip-hop.
“Part of this long conversation about what the meaning of hip-hop is important. People have been very responsive to the anthology,” Young said. “Just like any great art, the stuff that works well lasts. There are parts of old-school hip-hop that feel fresh to me and I think that’s the lesson I take. Be layered. Be complicated. Move people, both physically and emotionally.” | 2022-08-13T23:49:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | African American museum block party highlights hip-hop and rap history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/african-american-museum-hip-hop-anthology/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/13/african-american-museum-hip-hop-anthology/ |
The upper seats are sparsely populated during the first preseason game for the Washington Commanders. (Robb Hill/for The Washington Post)
It was arguably then, in Washington’s first home game as the Commanders, that the franchise emerged from cultural purgatory. The two years of planning, and the fraught six months of rolling out, had finally built to a collision between past and present, and as the beat climbed, some tried the new lyrics on the video board — “Fight for our Commanders!” — but many instead hollered the old lyrics, which came naturally.
The Washington Commanders’ logo, team crest and uniforms, explained
“I don't want to get ahead of my team being able to tell their story,” he said. “We're not quite there yet. We're not going to have a full stadium every game this year. I don't want to get ahead of our team being able to tell the real story of the resurgence of the fan base, which is still probably another year or so out.”
On the walk into the stadium Sunday, the place looked largely the same. The new logo was visible on lamp posts, directional signs and burgundy trash bins. There were a few banners on the south side of the building, alongside those for corporate partners — though even there were glimpses of the past. One advertisement for United Airlines read: “Proud to fly for the Washington Football Team.”
“That'd be like me going to my high school and saying I'm not going to root for my high school because I don't like the principal,” he said.
Becoming the Commanders: How Washington’s NFL team found its new name
Inside the stadium, the Commanders had remade what they could. They put up more than a dozen works by local artists from their initiative “Command the Canvas.” They input new technology to speed up the concession stands, including a program in the upper bowl to order ahead on the Grubhub app. They expanded the local food and beverage offerings, and because they’re apparently still without a beer sponsor, offered an array of alcoholic drinks, including craft beer and hard seltzers.
The new name was everywhere. The video board played themed segments, including “Command the Season,” in which players picked games they were most looking forward to, and “Command the Drip,” which featured Wentz’s teammates rating his introductory news conference outfit, a gold jacket and a red shirt. Veteran tight end Logan Thomas gave it a score of 3 of 10; second-year tight end John Bates gave his quarterback an 8.
At the stadium Saturday, Colby-Begovich, the vice president of guest experience, said he hoped fans would recognize his team’s work despite the things it couldn’t control, like the play on the field and the confines of the stadium. He wanted fans to imagine innovation the team could implement at a new venue in the future, and as Washington seized a brief lead late in the fourth quarter, fans delivered a strong second rendition of “Hail to the Commanders.” | 2022-08-13T23:58:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders era dawns in Washington at team's preseason opener - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/commanders-rebrand-fans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/commanders-rebrand-fans/ |
Strained supply chains, inflationary pressures in the pipeline and worries about the health of the labor market. Sound familiar? This is the US in 1945 as President Harry S. Truman tried to engineer an end to World War II and minimize disruptions that would accompany peace.
The role of the atomic attacks on Japan, fears of Russian encroachment and the collapse of Japanese industry are well charted in discussions surrounding Tokyo’s capitulation on Aug. 15, 1945. Less well known is the impact of financial and commercial tensions developing on the home front. I spoke to Marc Gallicchio, professor of history at Villanova University and author of “Unconditional: The Japanese surrender in World War II,” which dives into the debates within Truman’s team about ending the war, including fears of an impending economic calamity.
These concerns didn’t stop at America’s shores. What did planners envisage for Japan’s economy and did they drop the ball by not thinking more about the prospect that China — a wartime ally — would one day challenge the US? The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. DANIEL MOSS: Describe domestic economic conditions and how were they shaping Washington’s decisions in 1945?
MARC GALLICCHIO: From early that year, with the impending defeat of Germany, people were beginning to look past the war. Not only the general public, but also business leaders, who were concerned that not enough emphasis had been placed on reconversion to a peacetime economy. If peace burst upon the US suddenly, the economy would be unprepared. Manufacturers were still in wartime mode, primarily producing goods for the military. There were restrictions on consumer activity, there was food rationing, price limits imposed. There was anxiety that if the war ended suddenly, all these soldiers and sailors would come home and the domestic economy would be in no shape to absorb them into the workforce.
There was this rising chorus of complaints among executives and legislators — you begin to see it in the newspapers — that the army is absorbing too much manpower and material. Now that they have a one front war to fight, the questions were increasingly about why so much was needed to fight just Japan when they had been fighting both Japan and Germany? The worry was all these wartime jobs and contracts would end and business would not be ready make the transition to domestic production.
There was great fear of unemployment. That turned out to be less of a problem than expected, but access to consumer goods and worries about inflation were real issues. By the early summer of 1945, the coal industry was warning that unless it could get more miners, there would be shortages. For that they needed personnel released from the army, which was reluctant. Moving people and goods across the US was becoming more difficult after four years. There was a lot of track maintenance that needed to be done. So there were petitions for the early release of people from various professions and the military just didn’t want to do that.
DM: What priority did Truman give these economic pressures, given the development of the atomic bomb and worries about the implications of Russia’s entry into the war against Japan?
MG: Before Truman went to the final summit of the war at Potsdam in July, he sided with the army. But Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson, in whom Truman had great confidence, opposed the army’s position. It’s not clear what Truman would have done if he didn’t have the bomb.
Truman receives these extraordinary cables from Vinson at Potsdam telling him there will be a serious crisis if the US doesn’t move more forcefully toward reconversion. Vinson starts to suggest that surely the army doesn’t need all these resources. We need unconditional surrender, but maybe we can get there through blockade and bombardment, which would allow for fewer men. The military was against that view because they believed it would lead to a protracted war, the American public would lose interest and the Japanese would use that to their advantage. What Vinson was proposing in order to avoid disaster was a modification of unconditional surrender. He didn’t outright say that, but that would probably have been the result.
Truman learns in Potsdam that the bomb can be deployed months before the scheduled invasion of Japan and probably before Russia came in. I don’t think he thought the bomb would keep Russia out, necessarily. His first reason for using it was to bring about the defeat of Japan, though he may have viewed the possibility that the war could be over before Russia got too far into Northeast Asia as a bonus.
The bomb made invasion unnecessary. It also meant this slow-moving crisis in the US economy could be addressed.
DM: There was intense debate over whether to modify the demand for unconditional surrender in hopes of coaxing Japan to lay down its arms. What kind of compromise, if any, was made?
MG: The idea that an imperial institution would remain never made it to the statement issued at Potsdam. But there was this idea of a liberal peace that would allow the return of soldiers to Japan, allow the country to re-enter the world community, have access to raw materials abroad — as opposed to control of them. Japan would be incorporated into a liberal postwar international economy. They could have a government of their choice once they have convinced the peace-loving nations of the world that they would no longer be a threat. You could read between the lines and say that if the emperor shut things down quickly, he would be someone who could lead Japan toward that state described in Potsdam.
DM: The struggle against Covid has often been framed in martial terms. Did the US have what amounted to a wartime economy during the peak of the pandemic?
MG: We didn’t get extensive regulation of the overall economy. There were big restrictions on bars, restaurants, airlines. State support was there, but it wasn’t as omnipresent during people’s lives as during WWII. What didn’t surprise me one bit was the enormous demand to lift restrictions on social lives and the economy.
We have this collective memory of WWII as being a time when there was unity, where everyone was willing to sacrifice and that’s contrasted with later wars like Vietnam, where there was a lot of controversy. But by 1945, that just wasn’t the case. There was growing dissent, a great deal of anger, directed particularly at the army.
DM: Did US officials give much thought to what Japan’s economy might look like after the war?
MG: There was clash between New Dealers and business-friendly planners and advisers to Truman. People like Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, and Joseph Grew, Undersecretary of State, saw Japan as having done a remarkable job of industrialization since the late 19th century. They didn’t see the monarchy as an inherently dangerous institution, as far as the US was concerned. All you had to do was sweep away the militarists. Their fear was that if you did away with the emperor and undertook deep, extensive reforms, that would sow the seeds for revolution and communism.
Then there were New Dealers who saw the problems as much deeper. They felt that in the process of modernization, Japan never moved beyond a feudal structure. They thought the emperor’s status enhanced the power of the military and the big industrial conglomerates. In order to get a really democratic Japan, you have to do away with the emperor, do away with big trusts and democratize Japan socially and economically. Liberate women, allow unions to properly organize and so on.
A lot of critics of unconditional surrender said after the war that Truman should have told Japan it could keep the emperor, since that is what ended up happening anyway. But it’s important to note that after unconditional surrender, the emperor did not have the same authority that he would have had if Truman had committed to keeping Hirohito on the throne. In the end, the US was able to implement a host of significant reforms because Truman insisted on unconditional surrender and occupation. One of the biggest reforms was a new constitution that reduced the emperor to the figurehead that Grew and Stimson mistakenly claimed he had always been.
DM: In 1945, what would they have thought if told that China would emerge as the key rival to the US?
MG: There was not much anticipation of China playing a leading role in the Far East for quite some time. That was in part the reason why people like Stimson and Grew thought it necessary to build Japan back quickly so it could be a force for stability. None of them foresaw a juggernaut emerging in China.
DM: Was it a mistake to pay insufficient attention to what China might become?
MG: China kind of gets pushed off the page. American military thinking was sequential in that the goal was defeat Japan first and then look over the horizon and see what is out there. It might seem like short-sighted policy, but the view was “look, if we have Japan, we can keep the rest of the world out of the Pacific and we will be able to defend the US come what may in China.”
People just wanted to be done with it, to bring the boys home. Even though American power was at high tide, that tide was also starting to run out. The staying power wasn’t there.
• 1947, 1970s, 2008. Take Your Pick, Inflationistas: Daniel Moss
• What the World Got Wrong About Shinzo Abe: Gearoid Reidy
• WWI History Is Wrong, and Skewing Our View of China: Hal Brands | 2022-08-14T01:29:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cost of Victory: Converting a Wartime Economy to Peace - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/cost-of-victory-converting-a-wartime-economy-to-peace/2022/08/13/3b30a158-1b6d-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/cost-of-victory-converting-a-wartime-economy-to-peace/2022/08/13/3b30a158-1b6d-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html |
Aníbal Sánchez gave the Nationals five strong innings, allowing three runs while striking out four. (Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)
Here’s the thing about August for sellers at the trade deadline: Someone gets a chance. Sometimes, multiple someones. The roster is thin, the season is bleak, it often feels like the calendar can’t move fast enough, as if the promise of next spring is a distant fantasy.
But almost always, someone gets his chance.
And here’s the thing about Joey Meneses, a 30-year-old rookie for the Washington Nationals, a guy who spent 11 seasons in the minors — riding buses all over the world, feeling every low imaginable — until he was called up to replace Josh Bell on Aug. 2: He doesn’t have his own bats yet.
Yes, he is a professional ballplayer. Yes, he wears No. 45 for the Nationals, playing a mix of first base, left field and right. But quality wooden bats? They’re expensive, especially for a career minor leaguer who isn’t repped by a high-spending agency. So in his first nine appearances, Meneses has used borrowed lumber to smack five homers, including a game-tying shot in a 4-3 win over the San Diego Padres.
His first homer, a solo shot in his debut — a blast that came only hours after Juan Soto and Bell were dealt to the Padres — was with a bat he picked up from Johan Camargo, whom Meneses crossed paths with while Camargo was with the Class AAA Lehigh Valley IronPigs this summer. Meneses has also swung bats from New York Yankees infielder Miguel Andújar, former Texas Rangers first baseman Ronald Guzmán, former Nationals outfielder Gerardo Parra, teammate César Hernández, Boston Red Sox minor league infielder José Peraza and Johan Mieses, an outfielder in Boston’s system. Meneses’s ideal size is 34 inches, 31 ounces, but he doesn’t discriminate if the numbers are close.
“I’m still waiting for my shipment, man,” Meneses said recently. “I didn’t like the team bats we had in Rochester, so whenever I saw a guy I knew, I just told him, ‘Hey, bro, let me get a bat. Come on now.’ It’s like a collection I got. My bag is full of other guys’ names.”
Before Saturday’s matchup with the Padres and Yu Darvish, Parra’s and Hernández’s bats were in Meneses’s cubby in the Nationals’ dugout. But when he singled off Darvish in the fourth, it was with a dark red bat given to him by Mieses, a 27-year-old from the Dominican Republic. Meneses, a native of Mexico, then took that bat and crushed a 415-foot homer against Darvish in the sixth.
A batter before, with two down in the inning, Yadiel Hernandez lifted a two-run, opposite field homer off a first-pitch fastball from Darvish. With five homers already, Meneses trails just Trevor Story (seven) for the most homers in the first nine games of a career since 1901.
Story had seven after he debuted six years ago with Colorado. That’s pretty decent company.
In the end, though, Meneses couldn’t act alone. Despite an inefficient start to his outing, Aníbal Sánchez held a loaded Padres lineup to three runs in five innings. César Hernández collected three singles for Washington (38-77) and scored on Victor Robles’s go-ahead knock in the seventh. When the play unfolded, it seemed as if Soto had thrown out Hernández at the plate, holding a tie intact. But the Nationals quickly challenged that catcher Austin Nola had illegally blocked the plate, and the call was overturned by replay review.
From there, Hunter Harvey and Carl Edwards Jr. finished four scoreless innings for the bullpen. Steve Cishek and Kyle Finnegan worked the first two. With a single in the eighth, Nelson Cruz became the first player to reach 2,000 hits in a Nationals uniform. Two batters after that, Meneses drove a high fastball to the warning track, falling maybe 10 feet short of another homer.
Win or lose, Meneses will take the opportunity to prove himself at the sport’s highest level, a dream that sometimes seemed unreachable from Japan or America’s tiny towns. Yet it does feel even better on the right side of a result.
Why did shortstop Luis García sit? The 22-year-old left Friday’s loss with left groin tightness and will be reevaluated daily. Asked whether this could lead to C.J. Abrams’s promotion from the Class AAA Rochester Red Wings, Manager Dave Martinez kept his answer general, saying only that he and General Manager Mike Rizzo discuss all possibilities. Abrams, 21, was one of the six players acquired in the Soto/Bell trade. Many around the club are antsy for him to arrive and bump García to second base.
What are the next steps for Erick Fedde? After throwing simulated innings at Nationals Park on Friday, Fedde will next pitch for Rochester in a rehab assignment Wednesday. Fedde, 29 and a rotation staple for most of the year, has been sidelined since July 31 with right shoulder inflammation. Martinez hopes for him to throw between 75 and 80 pitches in his outing with the Red Wings. | 2022-08-14T03:31:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nats get past Padres as rookie journeyman Joey Meneses homers again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/joey-meneses-keeps-sparking-nats-with-bats-borrowed-along-way/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/13/joey-meneses-keeps-sparking-nats-with-bats-borrowed-along-way/ |
“Mildred” and I were best friends throughout childhood. After high school we went our separate ways but stayed in touch over the years. I retired last year at age 65 and moved back to my hometown area, where she also lives.
I’m so annoyed when we reach our destination, I’m a nervous wreck! I have tried politely asking her to let me drive, and she gets upset.
Scared: About 45 million Americans are senior drivers — and this number is rising — as boomers become seniors and seniors become elders, and most want to continue driving.
Or they’re younger, aggressive, and reckless themselves. If you or she are physically on the frail side, even a minor fender bender where the air bag deploys could be dangerous.
Dear Amy: My husband recently passed away, and I am adhering to his wishes by not having a funeral. I am fine with that, but apparently his family isn’t.
Grieving: Providing the preferred method of closure for your late husband’s family is not your responsibility.
Dear Amy: In a recent answer to “Loving, but Sad Daughter,” you wrote: “Your father’s Wikipedia entry should be revised. You could edit it yourself …”
Volunteer: “Loving, but Sad Daughter” was concerned because after her father’s death, she saw that both his obituary and his Wikipedia entry left out her mother’s existence — leaving the false impression that she was the daughter of her father’s second wife. | 2022-08-14T04:06:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My friend is a terrible driver who makes me nervous - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/14/ask-amy-terrible-driver-friend/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/14/ask-amy-terrible-driver-friend/ |
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