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A kiosk in Tehran displays copies of a newspaper featuring images of two journalists who reportedly helped publicize the case of Mahsa Amini. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)
Iran’s intelligence services are increasingly targeting Iranians abroad, ramping up threats against journalists and dissidents as they struggle to contain a popular uprising at home, analysts and Western officials say.
In Britain, police recently warned of an increase in “credible” threats by Iranian security forces against two British-Iranian journalists and their families, sending additional security to their homes and offices. The campaign comes as Britain’s domestic spy service said that it found at least 10 “potential threats” to “kidnap or even kill British or U.K.-based individuals perceived as enemies” of Iran’s government this year.
Iranian intelligence agencies “are prepared to take reckless action” to attack opponents in Western countries or to try to lure them back to Iran, the head of MI5, Ken McCallum, said in remarks Wednesday.
The threats are rising against a backdrop of widespread unrest inside Iran, an uprising sparked by the brutal death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody in September. Authorities have responded with a far-reaching crackdown, beating, firing on, and arresting protesters, and sentencing at least five demonstrators to death this week.
Targeting Iranians abroad “is a pattern of behavior that is escalating in the context of this uprising,” said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East North Africa program at the London-based Chatham House think tank.
“It really speaks to the state’s perception that the Iranians abroad are really stoking dissent. … They feel that if they can silence or send strong messages to this diaspora that it can reverberate” domestically, she said.
Some of Iran’s main targets have been journalists who work for Persian-language media such as BBC Persian and Iran International, the latter of which has come under criticism for its reported ties to Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival. Iranian officials have accused both outlets, which are based in the United Kingdom, of inciting riots and “supporting terrorism.”
Iran International’s parent company, Volant Media, denounced in a Nov. 7 statement the “escalation of a state-sponsored campaign to intimidate Iranian journalists working abroad.”
The news director of Iran International, Mehdi Parpanchi, said in an interview Wednesday that media affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Revolutionary Guard Corps, its most powerful security organization, have threatened the station before — but never this seriously.
Police told Parpanchi that the outlet’s office in London was being surveilled, as were the homes of two employees. They declined to provide more specific details, Parpanchi said.
Britain’s foreign minister on Nov. 11 also summoned Iran’s chargé d’affaires in London “to make clear that we do not tolerate threats to life and intimidation of any kind toward journalists, or any individual, living in the U.K.”
Reporting in Iran could get you jailed. This outlet is doing it anyway.
In other incidents, anti-government protests held in front of Iranian embassies have been attacked.
In Berlin, three people were injured Oct. 30 when three men with their faces covered targeted a group with banners reading “Iranians want democracy” and “Woman, life, freedom,” the Associated Press reported. In late September, police in London and Paris clashed with protesters trying to reach the Iranian embassies during rallies in support of the uprising.
In recent weeks, Iranian athletes also have used international sporting events as platforms for protest — raising fears about their safety after returning to Iran. Authorities are concerned about protests or displays of solidarity during the upcoming World Cup soccer competitions in Qatar.
The Islamic Republic also has a long history of trying to kidnap or kill its citizens abroad. Members of opposition parties and minority groups, such as Iranian Arabs and Kurds, have been frequent targets.
In July 2021, U.S. federal prosecutors charged four Iranian agents with plotting to kidnap New York-based journalist and activist Masih Alinejad.
In another shocking case, Iran lured France-based dissident Ruhollah Zam, who founded a popular Telegram channel, back to the country in 2019. He was executed the following year.
In Istanbul in 2017, masked assailants gunned down Saeed Karimian, the director of GEM Group, a Persian-language media conglomerate. | 2022-11-17T00:58:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iran targets Iranian journalists abroad as it faces uprising at home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/16/iran-targets-iranian-journalists-abroad-it-faces-uprising-home/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/16/iran-targets-iranian-journalists-abroad-it-faces-uprising-home/ |
Darrell Brooks gives his closing remarks during his sentencing in a Waukesha County Circuit Court Wisconsin on Nov. 16. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel/AP)
Man found guilty of homicide in Christmas parade SUV attack in Wisconsin
“To order anything other than what I have done, sir, would be to unduly depreciate the seriousness of these offenses,” she said.
Each reckless endangerment carries a maximum sentence of 17½ years in prison.
Dorow noted that the number of years is symbolic considering his life sentences but that it was needed “because, frankly, you deserve it.”
Brooks represented himself, leading to clashes between him and Dorow over his disruptive behavior throughout the three-week trial. He took off his shirt, shouted at the judge, at times refused to answer to his own name and accused prosecutors along with Dorow of being “slick” with evidence and rules of procedure. | 2022-11-17T01:52:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wisconsin Christmas parade driver Darrell Brooks, who killed 6, gets life - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/16/waukesha-parade-driver-brooks-life/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/16/waukesha-parade-driver-brooks-life/ |
Here’s which party had control of the House in recent years
2022: Republicans take House control
2018: Democrats take House control
Republicans narrowly recaptured control of the U.S. House in the 2022 midterms. But it was hardly the red wave most analysts anticipated. Instead, the elections could more accurately be described as a red trickle as the GOP fell short of recapturing Senate control and limped to what’s looking like the thinnest of majorities in the lower chamber. Republicans’ narrow gains, however, do follow in the footsteps of a long pattern in U.S. politics — Democrats and Republicans trading control of the House fairly regularly since 1994, when Republicans stole the majority from Democrats for the first time in 40 years.
Here’s a breakdown of the recent years the House has flipped:
Defying political gravity and history, Republicans picked up only a handful of seats to retake control of the House. They had been expected to be vaulted into a double-digit seat gain by President Biden’s relative unpopularity, a halting economy and a pretty consistent trend in which the party out of power (in this case, Republicans) has captured nearly 30 House seats in recent midterm elections — though the average since 1994 has only been 25 seats. But voters appear to have been more motivated by threats to abortion rights following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and the challenge to democracy presented by former president Donald Trump and many Republican candidates who denied the 2020 election results.
Democrats: 235; Republicans: 199
House Democrats rode a wave of anger at President Donald Trump and turned out in droves to give Democrats a 41-seat gain. Women, especially revolted against Trump’s governance, supported Democrats by 19 percentage points more than Republicans. Young people, Black women and Latinas also favored Democrats disproportionately in 2018. Voter turnout was at its highest for a midterm election in 50 years.
Republicans: 242; Democrats: 193
The Democrats held on to the House in 2008, gaining another 21 seats, and took a 57-41 advantage in the Senate. And America elected its first Black president.
But President Barack Obama took office in the midst of an enormous recession, and he quickly drew a venomous backlash from the right. The 2010 election was a story of a grass-roots movement — the tea party — which existed outside of the Republican campaign machine and was furious about the Affordable Care Act passed by the Democratic congressional majority.
The tea party rallied against government overreach, protesting Obama’s stimulus packages and health-care proposals. Tea party-affiliated outsider candidates, including Rand Paul, sprung up all over the country. High unemployment drove Obama’s approval ratings down, and in November 2010, Republicans flipped 63 House seats throughout the country.
An even bigger wave was happening farther down the ballot. Republicans dominated elections at the state level — thanks in part to a targeted strategy called Project REDMAP — taking control of legislative chambers around the country. And in most states, these legislatures would be responsible for redrawing congressional boundaries based on the 2010 Census.
Gerrymandering, the drawing of districts to favor one group’s interests, had long been employed by both parties. But the size of the 2010 wave and advancements in voter targeting gave Republicans an unprecedented opportunity to redraw the national map in their favor, and they did not pass it up.
This redistricting advantage became immediately obvious in 2012. Democratic candidates captured 48.8 percent of the nationwide vote in House races, compared with 47.6 percent for Republicans. But Democrats gained only eight seats, leaving Republicans with a 33-seat edge in the House. Democrats faced a similar uphill battle in the 2018 midterms.
Democrats were demoralized in the mid-2000s after a string of defeats. Desperate for a victory, the party handed over the reins to an abrasive young congressman named Rahm Emanuel, making him chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Emanuel had a “winning is everything” attitude and set about recruiting centrist candidates that didn’t look like traditional Democrats, in the hope that they’d woo moderate voters in red districts. He favored military veterans and police officers, including people that didn’t hold the standard party views on gun control and abortion.
On the campaign trail, he made sure that Democrats took every opportunity to tie their opponents to the unpopular presidency of George W. Bush — just as Republicans had done 12 years earlier with Bill Clinton. Plus, a series of embarrassing scandals among Republican congressmen didn’t hurt. Democrats needed only 15 seats to win the House, and they got double that.
But Emanuel drew criticism from his own party throughout the election, even after his victory. The more liberal wings, including Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, felt like the gains were illusory, in areas that the party couldn’t hold using candidates that were Democrats in name only.
And sure enough, these 2006 gains were wiped out just four years later. The ideological battle of how the Democratic Party should position itself continues to this day.
Going into 1994, midterm elections didn’t hold the same drama they do today. It was assumed that Democrats would control the House, because, for four decades, they had never lost.
And nobody had much reason to think that would change. Republicans were also the minority in the Senate. President George H.W. Bush had just lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton. Around the country, the GOP held fewer governorships and state legislature seats than Democrats.
But Minority Whip Newt Gingrich and Rep. Bill Paxon had a plan. They employed some aggressive fundraising practices and candidate recruiting, resurrecting a National Republican Congressional Committee that was on the edge of bankruptcy. A special election victory in May, for a seat held by Democrats for 129 years, made clear the campaign strategy that would guide Republicans to victory: Run hard against Clinton.
In September, Republicans introduced their “Contract with America” — a list of legislation they promised to execute within their first 100 days in power that guided campaign messaging across the country. And they continued to rail against the increasingly unpopular Clinton. After the dust settled in November, they had gained 54 seats and built a machine that held the House for the next five elections.
Martine Powers contributed to this report. | 2022-11-17T01:56:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | History of House control by year and when it has recently flipped - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/16/house-control-by-year/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/16/house-control-by-year/ |
Vanderbilt Hall stands on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn., in 2015. (Bloomberg News/Getty Images)
Yale Law School and Harvard Law School said Wednesday that they will no longer participate in U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings, calling into question the methodology and values of the famed system.
“The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed — they disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession,” Yale Law School Dean Heather K. Gerken wrote in a blog post announcing the decision Wednesday. “We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession.”
Yale Law has routinely taken the top spot in the magazine’s law school rankings. All the same, Gerken said the publication uses a misguided formula that “not only fails to advance the legal profession, but stands squarely in the way of progress.”
U.S. News college rankings draw new complaints and competitors
In the same vein as Gerken, Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning disavowed the rankings for creating “perverse incentives that influence schools’ decisions in ways that undercut student choice and harm the interests of potential students.”
In a blog post, he wrote that the school chose to bow out because it has become “impossible to reconcile our principles and commitments with the methodology and incentives the U.S. News rankings reflect.”
Manning said Harvard Law, which is ranked No. 4, has raised concerns to the magazine about methodology that work against law schools’ efforts to enhance socioeconomic diversity and support students from lower-income households.
Both Manning and Gerken take issue with U.S. News’ emphasis on LSAT scores and GPAs, which account for 20 percent of a law school’s overall ranking, saying it encourages institutions to disregard promising students with low test scores.
They also said the magazine ignores school-funded loan forgiveness programs in calculating student debt loads, which disincentivizes institutions from supporting students who want to pursue public interest careers.
Harvard University did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether it would follow its law school’s lead and also bow out of the rankings.
Yale spokesperson Karen Peart said the law school’s decision does not preclude the university or other schools at Yale from participating in the rankings. She said, “Each school must carefully consider what is best for their school and community.”
Eric Gertler, executive chairman and chief executive of U.S. News, defended the magazine’s law school rankings as a critical tool for students.
“We will continue to fulfill our journalistic mission of ensuring that students can rely on the best and most accurate information in making that decision,” Gertler said in a statement. “As part of our mission, we must continue to ensure that law schools are held accountable for the education they will provide to these students and that mission does not change with these recent announcements.”
U.S. News & World Report faced mounting criticism of its rankings this year after a Columbia University professor questioned the data the Ivy League school had submitted to the publication. Columbia later disclosed that it had reported faulty data on class size and faculty credentials, and skipped the annual rankings as it reviewed the matter. As a result, Columbia dropped from No. 2 to No. 18.
Long before that, U.S. News had drawn the ire of higher education advocates who assailed the rankings for fueling a chase for prestige to the detriment of institutions and students. Without naming the annual listing, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in August denounced rankings that value wealth and exclusivity over economic mobility and return on investment, a comment that was widely considered a shot at U.S. News.
It’s difficult to say whether Yale and Harvard law schools’ exit will impact the reputation or direction of the annual rankings. The famed scoring system still has clout even as a crop of competitors has emerged in recent years. The ranking formula has evolved, with more emphasis on student retention and graduation. College and university leaders are routinely critical and dismissive of the listing, but thousands of schools continue to participate. | 2022-11-17T02:27:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Harvard, Yale law schools pull out of U.S. News & World Report ranking - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/16/yale-harvard-us-news-law-rankings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/16/yale-harvard-us-news-law-rankings/ |
A class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 accused the Education Department of ignoring applications for loan forgiveness through a federal program known as borrower defense to repayment. (iStock)
The agreement resolves a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 by people who accused the Education Department of ignoring their applications for loan forgiveness through a federal program known as borrower defense to repayment. It was threatened after several schools, including Lincoln Tech and Keiser University, said the deal failed to assess the validity of the borrowers’ claims and would damage their reputation.
As part of the settlement, the Education Department identified 153 institutions — many of which are for-profit colleges — as having evidence of “substantial misconduct … whether credibly alleged or in some instances proven.” Anyone who attended those schools and applied for debt relief is entitled to full loan forgiveness under the agreement.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California gave the colleges that raised objections an opportunity to have their say but ultimately finalized the settlement, affirming the Education Department’s approach.
“The borrower-defense program set up by Congress has devolved into an impossible quagmire,” Alsup wrote in his 25-page opinion Wednesday. “The Secretary has crafted a process for resolving the enormous backlog of claims, and he has done so pursuant to specific congressional authorization.”
In addition to the automatic relief, the agreement provides refunds of money paid to the Education Department and credit repair to hundreds of thousands of eligible borrowers. A separate group of about 64,000 borrowers, who attended schools that are not on the department’s list, will also receive decisions on their applications on rolling deadlines.
The agreement also ensures borrowers who filed a claim after June 22, but before the judge finalized the settlement, will have their claims decided within three years. According to Wednesday’s opinion, that group of borrowers has now reached about 179,000 people.
“People are just overjoyed,” said Eileen Connor, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group representing the borrowers. “I’m hopeful this is a path forward for people and for the Department of Education to move forward and have some kind of process that works.”
Alsup’s ruling will deliver relief to scores of people awaiting decisions on their borrower defense claims, some for as long as seven years.
The collapse of for-profit chains Corinthian Colleges in 2015 and ITT Technical Institutes in 2016 — which spent their final days fighting state and federal charges of fraud — ushered in a deluge of claims at the Education Department. Former Education secretary Betsy DeVos refused to take action on claims after taking office, saying the Trump administration needed time to review the process created under President Barack Obama. | 2022-11-17T03:58:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | $6 billion student loan settlement is finalized - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/16/student-loan-settlement-finalized/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/16/student-loan-settlement-finalized/ |
Justin Verlander won his third Cy Young Award and his second in four years after going 18-4 with a 1.75 ERA and 185 strikeouts for the Astros. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
A year ago at this time, Justin Verlander was awarded only with uncertainty. He missed most of the 2020 season and the entire 2021 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery so late in his career that anyone would temper expectations. He not only was gone from the field but removed from his team off it, further from the sport than at any point in two professional decades to that point.
Twelve months later, Verlander was named winner of the American League Cy Young Award, a fitting cap to a season in which the 39-year-old pitched to the lowest ERA of his major league career before winning a World Series title and earning his first individual World Series win. The award is Verlander’s third — his second in four years — and he spent one of those years away from the game entirely.
“It definitely carries a different meaning for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important than the other two. It shows that I’m at a different point in my life. I will always kind of remember this Cy Young as looking back at the growth of me as a father, as a person, and just also the rehab and all the hard work that went into the rehab,” Verlander said. “I was just so committed to it was going to go well and I was going to come back and be me.”
On the National League side, Miami stalwart Sandy Alcantara took home his first Cy Young Award and became the first Marlins player to win it. Alcantara is the third native of the Dominican Republic to win the award, joining Bartolo Colon and Pedro Martinez. Martinez announced his countryman’s name on MLB Network as the winner of the award.
“That company right there, that makes this more and more special,” Alcantara said. “I feel so happy to be with those guys. Those guys are the mentors for me. I was watching Pedro, Bartolo, those guys on TV, and now I’m with them on that list.”
In an era of short starts and careful handling of starters’ workloads, Alcantara was something of a throwback, pitching at least seven innings in 22 of his 32 starts and throwing 23 more innings — or about three-plus starts’ worth — than the next most prolific starter. The 27-year-old threw six complete games, tied for most by a starter in the past decade. Only Verlander in 2012, Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Chris Sale in 2016 tossed as many in a single season.
He was rewarded with all 30 first-place votes to become just the 15th unanimous winner in National League history. Verlander, who already had been a unanimous choice once with the Detroit Tigers in 2011, became the fourth American Leaguer to win unanimously twice.
The Cy Young Award dates back to 1956. Only once, in 1968, when Denny McLain and Bob Gibson won it, have both leagues seen unanimous winners.
Alcantara not only pitched a lot, but he pitched well. His 2.28 ERA was fifth among qualified starters (Verlander’s 1.75 ERA led baseball). His 207 strikeouts were fourth in the National League. Alcantara is under the Marlins’ control through at least the 2026 season after he agreed to a deal that will pay him $56 million over five seasons.
Alcantara’s closest competition came from Atlanta Braves lefty Max Fried, who received 10 second-place votes. Los Angeles Dodgers lefty Julio Urías finished third. Verlander bested Chicago White Sox ace Dylan Cease, who received 14 second-place votes. Toronto Blue Jays righty Alek Manoah finished third. Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels finished fourth in the American League voting.
Verlander is a free agent, coming off a contract that paid him $25 million annually, and he probably is going to secure even more. He has won two Cy Young Awards and two World Series titles since he accepted a trade from the Tigers to the Astros midway through the 2017 season.
“I’m not one to focus on the rearview mirror. It’s nice to take moments like this award and this championship we won this year and really take a beat and really appreciate it. But you’re always looking forward,” Verlander said. “I haven’t spoken to [Astros owner Jim Crane] since the last time we spoke. He texted me he wants to be involved going forward, and I don’t know what the future holds. I’ve kind of committed to myself that we are on this journey and this journey has been nothing short of incredible with the Astros.” | 2022-11-17T03:59:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Justin Verlander, Sandy Alcantara are unanimous Cy Young winners - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/16/justin-verlander-sandy-alcantara-cy-young/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/16/justin-verlander-sandy-alcantara-cy-young/ |
North Hagerstown 3, Northern 1
BEL AIR, Md. — Even when things looked the most dire, Northern senior Maya Johnson never stopped swinging. Not when North Hagerstown took the first set of the Maryland 3A volleyball final Wednesday night and certainly not when the Patriots were down nine points in the fourth and ultimately final set.
Johnson, the focal point of Northern’s attack, finished with 25 kills, but that wasn’t enough against North Hagerstown, which took the championship, 25-23, 23-25, 25-14, 25-15, at Harford Community College’s APGFCU Arena.
Northern Coach Bobby Gibbons planned to use Johnson’s height and hitting power against North Hagerstown’s Aubrey Chamberlin, who is undersized for a setter at 5-foot-6. The Patriots took advantage of the matchup all night, with setter Reese Courtney frequently setting Johnson close to the pin.
“Maya is absolutely one of the best hitters in the state,” Gibbons said. “That was our game plan was if we go down, we’re going down with the best we got, and if somebody beats our best, then you just tip your hat to the other team and congratulate them on winning.”
The first two sets were largely point-for-point, and neither team led by more than five. The Hubs took the first and the Patriots the second by the same score, after which the players on Northern’s bench ran onto the court to try to maintain the momentum.
Instead, the Hubs came out strong in the third set. Outside hitter Gabrielle Grantham-Medley’s tough hits kept getting through the Patriots’ defense to give North Hagerstown a 21-8 lead. The Patriots looked a bit slow on defense. That made it hard for them to convert on offense, and when they did, it was largely picked up by senior libero Marley Knight.
Senior outside hitter Alexa Caronello started the fourth set with an ace, but the Patriots couldn’t hold on to the lead or fix the defensive errors that plagued them in the third set.
“It’s not what we wanted, but I’m really proud that everyone went out there, and I think everyone can say they gave it their all,” Johnson said. “I think that’s a really good feeling at the end of the day.”
North Hagerstown (23-2) has appeared in the final 12 times, but their last win was in 2012. Longtime coach Megan Crawford announced she was retiring on a winning note.
This was Northern’s 19th state final and first since 2019, when the Patriots lost in four sets to Magruder. Northern won the championship five years ago, sweeping Westminster to take the title.
The Patriots (17-2) had lost only once all season — to Huntingtown in five sets — but they came back to sweep the Hurricanes in the playoffs.
“I’m extremely proud that we made it,” Johnson said. “This has been our goal, and we might not have won it, but we said we were making it to states, and we did.” | 2022-11-17T03:59:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Northern falls to North Hagerstown in Md. 3A volleyball final - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/16/northern-north-hagerstown-volleyball-3a/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/16/northern-north-hagerstown-volleyball-3a/ |
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander hit a three-pointer over Monte Morris with less than two seconds left as the Thunder rallied to beat the Wizards, 121-120, on Wednesday night. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Bradley Beal did everything in his power in the final 30 seconds of the Washington Wizards’ 121-120 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Beal’s legs must have felt like jelly at the end of his first game in 12 days after he tested positive for the coronavirus Nov. 5, but his feet moved rapid-fire on defense. He stared down Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — one of the hottest guards in the NBA — off the ball in what ended up as a missed three. On the other end, he faced Luguentz Dort — one of the more talented lockdown defenders in the NBA — and ricocheted off his body, nailing his signature step-back shot from midrange to put the Wizards up two points with less than seven seconds remaining.
Beal walked calmly to the bench and downed a glug of water, thinking, surely, the game was in hand.
But the Thunder had come back before, erasing two double-digit leads. What was one more rally?
Gilgeous-Alexander released a beautiful three-pointer with less than two seconds to play Wednesday night at Capital One Arena to give the Wizards their first loss in five games and spoil Beal’s return to the court.
“That is — that is very frustrating,” Beal said. “Tip your hat off to the other team. They made tough plays, tough shots. Just like I did one before.”
Gilgeous-Alexander racked up 42 points, six rebounds and seven assists to power Oklahoma City over the finish line in a back-and-forth affair that ultimately came down to defense.
Perspective: The Wizards found their way without Bradley Beal. Now it’s time to eat.
The Thunder shot 54.3 percent from the field and made 16 of 31 shots from beyond the three-point line. Washington was just behind them — it shot 51.2 percent from the field and made 17 of 34 from three — but Oklahoma City (7-8) was more clutch when it counted and threw the Wizards into disarray with a switch-heavy defense in the second half.
It also had the critical knowledge that if it kept attacking the Wizards (8-7), something would crack.
“It’s obviously deflating when you have a lead, play well and allow a team to climb back in. … You can’t have a double-digit deficit evaporate like it did,” Wizards Coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. “You give a team life, and they start to feed on it. It snowballs a bit.”
When asked Tuesday at practice whether he was worried about Beal’s return throwing a wrench into the Wizards’ newfound offensive rhythm, Unseld was sure the team could plug Beal in and march on without issue.
The first quarter proved as much when Washington made 7 of 10 shots from the three-point line in the first nine minutes and took a 17-point lead. Beal had a hot start and had five points, two rebounds and two assists in his first four minutes.
But the bench struggled as much as the starters flourished. A scoring drought of more than five minutes that began at the end of the first quarter erased the Wizards’ lead.
The Thunder stormed back in the third quarter as Washington returned from the locker room with far less energy.
For the Wizards, Kristaps Porzingis led six scorers in double figures with 27 points and nine rebounds. Beal had 25 points, six rebounds and six assists.
Kyle Kuzma added 18 points and 10 rebounds.
“This loss was a bunch of mental errors across the board. Can’t do it when we’re playing a team like that,” Kuzma said. “We let a guy come in here and score at will, didn’t really do anything to affect him. That loss is on us. Wizards lost the game. Credit to OKC.”
Goodwin injured
Two-way player Jordan Goodwin walked off the court near the end of the fourth quarter after apparently getting tangled up with Deni Avdija going up for a rebound. Goodwin fell to the floor, was clutching his left leg near the bottom of his shin and immediately asked for a sub. He eventually walked to the locker room of his own power. Unseld did not have an injury update immediately after the game.
Sleepy second group
Rui Hachimura was the star of the second unit with 14 points in 18 minutes, but the rest of his bench-dwelling teammates had a quiet start against Oklahoma City. Goodwin experienced his first downswing as a backup point guard and didn’t score his first points until the end of the third quarter. He ended with four points and three rebounds in 14 minutes but didn’t get going until the fourth quarter.
Corey Kispert, who was bumped back to the bench because of Beal’s return, looked out of rhythm and had just two points in 11 minutes.
Washington also lost a 17-point first-quarter lead with the bench unit on the floor. The group didn’t score for a 5:18 span bridging the first and second quarters.
“I think it really gave the Thunder life,” Unseld said of the stretch. “Just trying to find the balance of bleeding those units together to minimize some of those stretches, but we’ve seen that second unit play exceptionally well. It just didn’t happen tonight.”
Gortat on the sideline
Marcin Gortat was back on the bench Wednesday — just a row back from his old seat at Capital One Arena. The former Wizards big man served a trial period as a guest coach during the preseason this year and was back in a coaches’ polo for the first time during the regular season against the Thunder. A Wizards spokesperson said Gortat would be with the team periodically throughout the season. | 2022-11-17T03:59:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bradley Beal returns, but the Wizards' winning streak ends on a late three - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/16/washington-wizards-oklahoma-city-thunder/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/16/washington-wizards-oklahoma-city-thunder/ |
Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend does a big college reunion with his friends at his family’s lake house every year. There will be 16 adults and two babies.
Every time I think of this event or talk about it, I start crying and get super angry and upset. I have tried to figure out why, but I just can’t seem to get to what is bothering me so much.
It’s a LOT of people to be around for six days straight. I have only met them through Zoom, and my boyfriend is a very loyal friend — and can put friendship before me. Also, bachelorette parties make me want to die, and I think this will be similar.
My boyfriend has given me a lot of options, such as spending time alone, coming late, etc.
But I don’t want to be the girlfriend who isn’t there. And these things seem mostly manageable. How do I begin to untangle the root of what is actually bothering me?
— Crying
Crying: I don’t know, but I can guess: Big groups of people aren’t your thing, but they are your boyfriend’s, so you want to accommodate. You want to be the person who can … be his person.
If this is accurate, then I emphatically encourage you to own who you are and say, “Have fun, Shmoopie,” and opt out of the whole thing. He can just tell people you’re not into big crowds as if it’s normal, because it is.
Either your relationship will survive this test or it won’t, and that will be good for your long-term happiness either way.
If I’ve misread the situation and you’re good with crowds but just aren’t feeling good about this crowd, then I would advise planning an early exit from the lake house — after a night or two, maybe — so you can take part in a limited way that allows you to wade into his college crowd but not overtax your social resources. It is a lot.
Last thing, for what it’s worth: A lot of the inexplicable tears I’ve seen turned out to be the first breakthrough of I-know-this-relationship-isn’t-working-but-I-do-NOT-want-that-to-be-true distress. Sometimes unexplained distress is just overflow feelings that need a way to come out.
Re: Boyfriends’ friends: I think the clue is that the boyfriend sometimes puts his friends before the writer. I think it could be the dawning of the realization that the relationship is not the boyfriend’s first priority.
Anonymous: At face value, maybe. But a couple can enjoy big-group socializing and still be close and prioritize each other.
They just need to embrace their whole Venn diagram: enjoying the times they’re alone, alone together, and alone or together among a group of friends. Otherwise it won’t work.
· I cannot tell you how much my life has improved since I accepted that, as much as I want to be able to, I cannot party at the same level of my friends anymore. My husband gets this and has started to let me know when it’s important to him that I spend time with his friends/family, otherwise I tend to opt out. If your boyfriend is giving you an out, take it!
· Embrace being someone who has her own strong preferences about how she spends her time. Neither your boyfriend nor any of the other guests requires your presence. | 2022-11-17T05:08:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Boyfriend’s big reunion stresses out girlfriend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/11/17/carolyn-hax-girlfriend-reunion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/11/17/carolyn-hax-girlfriend-reunion/ |
In this photo provided by Mark Godbolt Jr., his wife, Jade Godbolt gives birth at their Dallas-area home in October 2022. Godbolt, 31, a beauty and lifestyle online content creator, says there were no complications and she and her son are doing well. “I believed that my body could do what it was made to do and I wanted to be in the comfort of my home to do that,’’ she said. (Mark Godbolt Jr. via AP) | 2022-11-17T05:30:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US home births increased in pandemic but are still uncommon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/us-home-births-increased-in-pandemic-but-are-still-uncommon/2022/11/17/f34837f8-6634-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/us-home-births-increased-in-pandemic-but-are-still-uncommon/2022/11/17/f34837f8-6634-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Australian economist Sean Turnell, who served as an adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, had been imprisoned in Myanmar. (AP)
Myanmar’s junta released four foreign prisoners including an Australian aide to Aung San Suu Kyi and a former British ambassador to the Southeast Asian country, according to state media, in what authorities described as an amnesty to mark a national holiday on Thursday.
The military government, which took power in a 2021 coup that deposed Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government, will free Australian economist Sean Turnell, Briton Vicky Bowman, Japanese filmmaker Toru Kubota and American Kyaw Htay Oo, the state-run MRTV News channel said. The four will reportedly be deported.
There was no immediate independent confirmation that the four had been released but Australian lawmaker Zoe Daniel, who sits on a Parliament Committee for foreign affairs, said on Twitter she had received “credible reports and corroborating information” that Turnell had been released.
The junta, which has been sanctioned by much of the West, also faces increasing diplomatic isolation from its Asian neighbors. Indonesia, which takes over as chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a regional grouping, in the new year has vowed to take a harder line against the regime. Malaysia’s foreign minister has said he would not recognize the junta’s elections next year, which are widely regarded as a sham. | 2022-11-17T05:32:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Myanmar military junta releases Vicky Bowman, Sean Turnell from prison - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/16/myanmar-military-pardon-vicky-bowman-sean-turnell/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/16/myanmar-military-pardon-vicky-bowman-sean-turnell/ |
I know, I know, nobody wants to put “climate” and “Thanksgiving” in the same sentence. Tallying the environmental impact of a holiday feast doesn’t seem like it’s in the spirit of the thing. It’s a holiday! It’s a day when we suspend our ordinary habits and set aside our prudence to spend an entire day eating, drinking and making merry — or at least watching football. And, oh yeah, giving thanks.
But I’m here to tell you that the news is good. The mainstays of the meal are poultry and plants, which make Thanksgiving a much more climate-friendly holiday than, say, the burgerfest that is the Fourth of July. In fact, the only holiday I can think of with a more pro-environment menu is Yom Kippur.
Let’s take a look at some of the dishes in the typical Thanksgiving meal and how they stack up, climate-wise.
On the beef-pork-poultry axis of meat, poultry has the lowest greenhouse gas emission levels. (This is according to Our World in Data, the source I turn to for answers to climate questions. The site uses the data from a 2018 paper that compiled one of the most comprehensive analyses of food I’ve seen, and presents it in an approachable, customizable way.)
Poultry, in general, has about one-seventh the impact of beef (on a per-calorie basis). A turkey’s footprint is going to be somewhat higher than a chicken’s because it’s slower-growing, which means a turkey needs more feed and more time to get to table weight, but it’s still a good choice. (I am duty-bound to mention that venison is an even better one; that’s what goes on my Thanksgiving table in years when I’ve gotten a deer. Besides, it harks back to what’s believed to be the original Thanksgiving of 1621, when venison was one of the few foods we know was served.)
Some people put them in stuffing (or dressing, depending where you’re from), but at our house, they’re the appetizers. And farmed bivalves (oysters, and clams and mussels) have the lightest climate impact of any fish in the sea.
Unlike almost any other wild protein source, oysters, clams and mussels actually leave the environment better than they find it. Because they’re filter feeders, they dine on the stuff that causes algae blooms and fish kills. And all this would be true even if I weren’t an oyster farmer. Honest.
Cranberries are a little obscure, and the only analysis I’ve seen that breaks them out puts their climate impact on a par with blueberries — so they’re on the high end of plants but way better than animals. I’ll add only that if you’re one of those people who likes the jellied slices out of a can, I will never understand you.
Potatoes for the win! They’ve gotten beaten up by factions of the nutrition community for approximately ever, but that’s an argument that I (along with the other factions of the notoriously factionalized nutrition community) have never accepted.
Climate-wise, though, there’s no argument. Potatoes roll in at about one-tenth the greenhouse gas emissions of the poultry (on a per-calorie basis). Of course, the butter and cream increase the tally because dairy is comparable to poultry and pork, and if you want to cut back on those, try roasting your potatoes instead of mashing; go crispy instead of creamy.
Sweet potatoes don’t have their own listing in the analysis, but all tubers and root vegetables score well.
Finally! A good use for all that corn we usually turn into ethanol, pork and Twinkies. Whole grains in general produce a lot of food for the resources used, and corn, because it’s astonishingly productive (and no, I won’t give you my calories-per-acre lecture again) is the most climate-friendly of all of them — it has half the impact of those already low-impact potatoes.
Green vegetables aren’t quite as environmentally friendly as root vegetables. When it comes to greenhouse gases, virtually all plants are better than virtually all animal foods, but green vegetables have the highest per-calorie emissions, because they deliver nutrition with few calories. Since you’re getting plenty of calories elsewhere in this meal, the nutrition matters, as do those crispy onions that top your casserole. Green beans are fine.
At my house, as at so many others, it’s pecan, pumpkin and apple — climate winners all. Food that grows on trees tends to outperform other foods for two reasons: They grow on a carbon-storing plant that doesn’t have to be replanted every year, and each tree produces a whole lot of food.
Pumpkins, which are as near-universal a Thanksgiving staple as you can find, are nevertheless too niche to have their own line item, but they’re a non-green vegetable (yes, technically a fruit), so I think you can put them in a pie with a clear conscience. That’s a relief, eh?
Of course, pies have crusts, and wheat flour is a climate win. Butter, being an animal food and all, not so much, but you won’t catch me telling you to make your crusts with anything else.
That’s the rundown of some of the foods we’re most likely to find on a typical American table. Basically, all good! There is a Thanksgiving climate villain, but you won’t find it on the table. You’ll find it off the table, and eventually in the garbage, after the holiday: food waste.
By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard that we waste about a third of our food here in the United States. That means that one-third of all the energy, all the deforestation, all the nutrient runoff that goes into feeding us is for nothing. If you’re interested in reducing the climate impact of your diet, but have found that changing what you eat is difficult, this is where you should focus your efforts.
Various groups have attempted to estimate how much food is wasted on Thanksgiving, but there’s no real way to know. Safe to say, though, that it’s a lot. I try to plan for the actual number of people I’m going to have, and resist the temptation to cook up a spread for a village. (And my colleague Becky Krystal has some other excellent suggestions.)
If I have guests who will actually use leftovers, I always pawn some off. If you have a turkey, it’s just physics that you will have leftover turkey, but that can be repurposed in all kinds of clever ways. And make stock from that carcass! You don’t need to do anything fancy; just submerge it in water and simmer for a couple hours.
There is one last thing, and it’s the giving thanks part. I think the past few years have been a rough ride for a lot of us, and things to be thankful for may have been thin on the ground. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it’s a yearly reminder to take inventory of what I’m grateful for. I’m very lucky, and my list is long. | 2022-11-17T06:22:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The climate impact of your Thanksgiving meal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/11/17/thanksgiving-foods-climate-impact/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/11/17/thanksgiving-foods-climate-impact/ |
Michelle Obama says Americans weren’t ready for her natural Black hair
She wanted to wear braids but said she straightened her hair as the U.S. ‘adjusted’ to a Black first lady
Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks at the Warner Theatre on Nov. 15 in Washington. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Live Nation)
It would have been easier to keep her hair in braids, Obama said, but “nope, they’re not ready for it,” she added, recalling her thinking at the time.
“Let me keep my hair straight,” Obama said of her mind-set at the time. “Let’s get health care passed.”
Record 31 million Americans have health-care coverage through Affordable Care Act, White House says
Obama said her dilemma was an extreme example of the decisions Black women make daily to navigate the politics and sensibilities of their workplaces. They often find it easier, healthier and safer to wear braids, dreadlocks or Afros, but feel the pressure from White beauty standards and workplace norms to chemically straighten their hair for a more professional, “clean-cut” appearance.
Mass. just banned hair discrimination. These twins helped pave the way.
Despite growing acceptance of naturally worn Black hair, stories about hair-based discrimination pop up regularly. In 2018, a 6-year-old Black boy was blocked from attending the first day of school because he wore his locs below his ears. Later that year, a referee forced a Black high school wrestler to cut his dreadlocks before letting him compete. In 2019, a TV reporter said her news director told her that her natural hair was “unprofessional” and pressured her to change it to “what looks best.”
Minda Harts, the founder of a career development company for women of color, told The Washington Post in 2019 about a conversation she had with a White headhunter bemoaning her struggles to recruit Black women to become corporate directors. When Harts asked her whether she would be more comfortable with a Black executive who wore a ponytail or a natural hairstyle like an Afro, the woman opted for the “clean-cut” ponytail.
“These unconscious and conscious biases keep us from even having the opportunity to have a seat at the table. We haven’t even had the chance to introduce ourselves, and there [are] these assumptions of unprofessionalism,” Harts said at the time.
“I’ll be honest with you: I wear my hair straight probably 99 percent of the time because, being in corporate America, I’ve seen how clients who have braids and natural hairstyles can be looked upon.”
More states are trying to protect Black employees who want to wear natural hairstyles at work
On Tuesday, Obama discussed her hairstyle choice as sitting first lady with Ellen DeGeneres, who moderated the sold-out event. After citing the 2014 uproar over her husband’s tan suit, Obama imagined the fallout if she had changed her hairstyle, the Hill reported.
“Remember when she wore braids? Those are terrorist braids! Those are revolutionary braids!” Obama said, assuming the role of her critics.
Nearly six years removed from the White House, Obama is now wearing braids, something she showed off in the middle of her talk with DeGeneres by grabbing her hair and interjecting “Braids, y’all!” to applause from the crowd. | 2022-11-17T06:26:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michelle Obama says Americans weren’t ready for her natural Black hair - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/17/michelle-obama-black-hair-braids/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/17/michelle-obama-black-hair-braids/ |
In fairness, 2022 is hardly the first time countries have shifted their war rationales. Just recall America’s changing catalog of reasons for attacking Iraq in 2003 once the original casus belli — Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — turned out not to be a thing. But Putin is in a league of his own in asking his compatriots to suspend disbelief on his behalf.
Consider, for example, even the one narrative that, at least among Russians, may at one point have had a semblance of plausibility: the claim that Putin had to attack Ukraine to keep NATO from expanding. But in effect, NATO had already ruled out Ukrainian accession long before the war. And even after Putin invaded, Ukraine itself promised not to seek membership — an offer that Putin rejected.
As a discerning Russian, you also notice that Finland and Sweden, two proudly neutral non-NATO countries, are now joining the alliance, in direct response to Putin’s bellicosity. So Putin is actually causing NATO to expand. Adding to your bafflement, he suddenly appears insouciant about this Western encroachment, even moving troops away from the Finnish border and toward Ukraine. None of this makes sense. And your job as a Russian is not to notice.
On it goes, and down it goes, into the netherworlds conjured by the Kremlin’s propaganda ideators. Iblis, anyone? It appears that the more illogical, outlandish and ridiculous the storyline, the more enthusiastically it is embraced by Putin’s regime — and by a large proportion of Russians. How is that possible?
The answer probably lies in the depths of the human mind as Leon Festinger described it. He was an American psychologist who became interested in a cult, which he and his co-authors joined and observed, and later analyzed in a ground-breaking book, “When Prophecy Fails.”
Based on the communications between a suburban housewife, “Mrs. Keech,” and extraterrestrials, the cult’s followers were convinced that the world would end in a Biblical-sized flood on Dec. 21, 1954. They also believed that an enlightened few would be saved by a flying saucer. So they sold their belongings and quit their jobs, and waited for the prophecy to come true — and for their apocalyptic ride in the UFO.
Festinger and his colleagues wanted to know what would happen after Dec. 21, 1954 — that is, after what social scientists politely call the “disconfirmation” of the cult’s worldview. In light of the new evidence, would the group’s members change their views?
Of course not. Instead, they became even more fanatical, taking to the airwaves and op-ed pages to proselytize their convictions. Festinger understood that this reaction was a response to psychological distress. Confronted by evidence that their worldview was bunk, the cultists doubled down and sought solace in social affirmation from other people.
Festinger later developed these observations into his theory of cognitive dissonance. That’s the uncomfortable tension we feel whenever we realize that our behavior or attitude clashes with the way things actually are. When that happens, we yearn to restore consonance. But in doing so, we face a choice.
We can adapt our behavior to fit the facts. For example, we could support measures to emit less carbon dioxide, or stipulate that our favorite candidate in an election actually lost fair and square. But we often find it easier to cling to our behavior or beliefs and change the narrative instead. We don’t have to emit less carbon, because human-made climate change is a hoax. My candidate deserves to be president, because the election must have been stolen.
As Festinger understood, these psychological evasions sometimes become especially compelling. That’s the case when the belief that was falsified forms part of our identity; when it has already made us do things that are hard to undo; and when we can find reassurance and solace among others who share our worldview.
Festinger’s insights apply to all of us. That should make us humble in contemplating the ironies and mysteries of our own minds. But sometimes, the stakes of such individual self-interrogations become large enough to shape collective history, and to seal the fates of many innocent people.
When groups of people believe, despite contravening evidence, that extraterrestrials will rescue them in a saucer from an apocalyptical flood, they usually don’t injure or kill innocent bystanders. But when millions of Russians indulge the diabolical fictions of a regime that is committing mass atrocities and threatening nuclear escalation, they become complicit in the crimes.
So if you’re Russian and writhing in cognitive dissonance, find the courage to admit the obvious: Putin’s war of aggression has no justification at all. It is pure evil, and must stop. | 2022-11-17T07:01:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Believe It or Not, Putin’s Foes Are Now Nazi Satanists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/believe-it-or-not-putins-foes-are-now-nazi-satanists/2022/11/17/e426e400-663d-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/believe-it-or-not-putins-foes-are-now-nazi-satanists/2022/11/17/e426e400-663d-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
The White House went into damage-control mode after General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested that there’s no military solution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and diplomacy is needed to end it: The official US position is that Ukraine itself should set the terms of the peace and decide when, if ever, it’s ready to talk. Yet after Tuesday’s incident with two missiles landing in Polish territory after a massive Russian strike on Ukrainian power stations, it should be clear why Milley appeared to swim against the U.S. policy tide.
The danger of accidental escalation, or World War III, of a nuclear exchange is ever-present while large-scale military action continues in Ukraine. Even if the projectiles that hit Poland were fired by the Ukrainian missile defense and Poland and its NATO allies treat the strike as an accident, there’s no guarantee the next alarm won’t lead to a need for NATO to get fully involved. That threat trumps — at least from a US perspective — the rest of the fallout from the war, such as the influx of refugees to the European Union, the depletion of European stocks of weapons and ammunition or the energy price hikes. In many ways, the US even profits from the conflict as its defense industry receives more orders, its energy exports become indispensable and its status as the Western world’s security pillar is consolidated — but only until it finds itself in an escalation spiral.
That makes it necessary to look beyond the strictly moral stance, which requires that Ukraine be allowed to determine its own future and helped to remain independent and intact. Even though Russia has suffered a string of humiliating defeats, and even if some Ukraine optimists, such as retired US General Ben Hodges, are right that Ukrainians will be well-positioned by January to start retaking Crimea, Ukraine is still far from its goal of recovering all the territories that belonged to it prior to 2014. It’s impossible to predict what might happen as it pursues this goal into 2023 and perhaps beyond. That’s why Milley called on the sides to reach a “mutual recognition” that an end to the war — meaning a quick enough end — is “maybe not achievable by military means.”
It’s important, therefore, to think through the ways in which the war can — and cannot — be ended in the near future. Here’s my take on the possible scenarios.1. A swift Ukrainian military victory. It’s possible, while unlikely: The Russian surrender of Kherson in the south allows Ukrainians to move combat-hardened troops elsewhere, attack Melitopol and then Mariupol, cut off Russia’s “land bridge” to Crimea and make short work of the demoralized Russian units in the east and in Crimea itself. Ukrainians, however, will not go on to take Moscow — they don’t have the military power to invade vast Russian territory and they’ll likely get no Western help to pursue an invasion. That means the conflict will not be resolved. After Iran beat back Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its first war of conquest, the deadly conflict resumed several times as Saddam wouldn’t give up; peace only came eight years later. By itself, Ukraine’s success in retaking Russian-conquered territory is not a lasting solution while Russia’s imperialist ambitions persist. Even if Ukraine’s victory is sealed with some kind of peace deal, Russia will not honor it — just as neither side honored the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015.
2. The end of the Putin regime. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s publicly expressed stance is that he will only negotiate with Putin’s successor. It’s a long shot bet but not entirely groundless. The recent mass mobilization undermined Putin’s popularity, and the military defeats have driven even the most pro-war Russians — the ultranationalists — to blame him for the humiliations. “Absolute power has a reverse side,” philosopher Alexander Dugin wrote in a blog post. “Full power given success — but also full responsibility for failure.” But, for one thing, Putin isn’t yet so weak that the benefits of trying to overthrow him outweigh the risks. He’s still in control of the powerful repressive machine he’s built, and both the military and various “freelancers” engaged in the war on Russia’s side obey him. And for another thing, if he ever becomes weak enough, likely after more defeats, some kind of democratic revolution is less likely than a takeover by an equally or more hawkish personality or group. No group of Russians remaining in the country, and most certainly no emigre organization, has the will, determination and broad support required for a successful uprising or even the ability to execute a coup. So even if Putin falls — or dies a natural death — the conflict, quite likely, will not be over.
3. A backroom deal. For all the talk of a diplomatic effort, for all the rumors and speculation that Russia is ready to talk peace if it’s allowed to hang on to a minimum of territorial gains (see the Elon Musk tweeted “proposal”), for all the fears harbored by the Russian nationalists that the Kremlin will make a deal behind their backs — this is the least likely of all scenarios. A deal whereby Russia keeps any Ukrainian territory at all is a political impossibility for any Ukrainian government. Even if Western support dries up to a trickle, Zelenskiy will be forced to fight on because that’s what the majority of Ukrainians insists on; that’s why he stood and fought before much of the aid arrived. And even if Zelenskiy, or some successor, weakens and does a deal, it will not stand for long. The Finns, defeated by the Soviets in the Winter War of 1939-1940, came back with the Nazi invading force in 1941, retook the lost territory and only stopped some 20 miles from the center of Leningrad.
4. A Russian military victory. Perhaps counterintuitively, it would actually end the conflict: It would mean either the inclusion of the entire eastern and southern Ukraine in Russia or the installation of a puppet government in Kyiv — in other words, the subjugation or disappearance of Ukraine as an independent actor. Of course, Western sanctions pressure on Russia would persist, and Russia would have Ukrainian guerilla action to contend with, but the Soviet Union has previously succeeded in suppressing it and making Ukraine, even its Western part, relatively docile. Given the events of the last few months, however, this scenario is highly unlikely, and in the short term simply impossible. The Russian military doesn’t have what it takes to defeat Ukrainians on the battlefield — at least not now. It has lost the initiative and, en masse, it never had the necessary motivation. It needs to rearm, restaff and retrain, all extremely difficult tasks during an ongoing conflict. The chance at shock and awe was wasted back in February and early March, reality has set in, and, after decades of corruption and systemic rot, it’s not a pretty reality for the Russian army.
5. A strategic defeat of Russia by the West. Some Western policy experts have advocated for it without saying what it would require. It’s not prudent to say the quiet part out loud, but a strategic defeat would mean an occupation, de-Putinization and denazification of Russia — the fate of Germany and Japan after World War II. It can only be achieved if NATO gets drawn into a conventional conflict and decisively defeats the Russian military, while nuclear weapons somehow remain unused. It’s not impossible despite Putin’s nuclear threats, designed to avoid this specific scenario. The Russian leadership is not necessarily crazy enough to let the world go down in flames to prevent a decisive defeat. But no Western political leader, certainly not Joe Biden, appears to have the appetite for extreme risk required to put NATO boots on the ground and invade Russia. Indeed, there appears to be appetite for ending the war by any other means just to avoid having to make this decision.Barring a divine intervention, there appears to be no realistic way to end the conflict soon. And this means it will drag out until divine intervention is no longer the only solution. As it drags out, more incidents like the Polish one will threaten to upend all the wargaming and editorializing. And Ukrainians and Russians will keep dying by the thousands.
• A G-20 Talking Shop? That’s No Bad Thing: Clara F. Marques | 2022-11-17T07:01:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the Russia-Ukraine War Can and Cannot End - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-the-russia-ukraine-war-can-and-cannot-end/2022/11/17/e4abeb8c-663d-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-the-russia-ukraine-war-can-and-cannot-end/2022/11/17/e4abeb8c-663d-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
The death came after the ruling Communist Party promised this month that people in quarantine wouldn’t be blocked from getting emergency help following an outcry over a 3-year-old boy's death from carbon monoxide in the northwest. His father blamed health workers in the city of Lanzhou, who he said tried to stop him from taking his son to a hospital. | 2022-11-17T07:02:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chinese leaders face anger over 2nd child's quarantine death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/chinese-leaders-face-anger-over-2nd-childs-quarantine-death/2022/11/17/3182890a-663b-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/chinese-leaders-face-anger-over-2nd-childs-quarantine-death/2022/11/17/3182890a-663b-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
HOUSTON — Houston’s Justin Verlander and Miami’s Sandy Alcantara were unanimous selections for the Cy Young Award.
ANAHEIM, Calif. — All-Star left-hander Tyler Anderson is moving across Los Angeles, leaving the Dodgers for a $39 million, three-year contract with the Angels.
SEATTLE — The Seattle Mariners made one of the first big moves of the offseason by acquiring outfielder Teoscar Hernández from the Toronto Blue Jays for right-handed reliever Erik Swanson and minor league lefty Adam Macko.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Virginia canceled its scheduled home football game Saturday against No. 23 Coastal Carolina in the wake of a weekend shooting on campus that left three players dead and another wounded.
BEREA, Ohio — Deshaun Watson practiced with the Cleveland Browns for the first time since his 11-game NFL suspension started in August.
CANBERRA, Australia — The Australian government confirmed Thursday that Novak Djokovic had been granted a visa to compete in the Australian Open in January a year after he was deported over his stance against COVID-19 vaccination.
NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced plans for a 25,000-seat stadium for Major League Soccer’s New York City Football Club on an underdeveloped parcel of land adjoining the New York Mets’ home. | 2022-11-17T07:03:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wednesday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wednesdays-sports-in-brief/2022/11/17/f100517c-6640-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wednesdays-sports-in-brief/2022/11/17/f100517c-6640-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Ukraine live briefing: Kyiv seeks to join probe into fatal Poland blast that West says was probably caused by Ukraine’s defenses
Police tape surrounds the site where a missile killed two people in Przewodow, Poland, on Tuesday. (Karolina Jonderko for The Washington Post)
Ukrainian officials are tallying the damage from a massive barrage of Russian missile strikes across the country earlier this week that spilled over into Poland, with an explosion that Warsaw and U.S. and other Western officials concluded Wednesday was probably caused by a stray Ukrainian air defense missile.
“The Ukrainian position is very transparent: We strive to establish all the details, every fact,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday, calling for Ukrainian specialists to join an international investigation into the Nov. 15 incident, which killed two people. Earlier, he said he had “no doubt” the missile did not originate in Ukraine.
Asked by a Reuters reporter early Thursday about Zelensky’s assertion that Ukraine was not involved, President Biden said: “That’s not the evidence.” Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, continued to frame Ukrainian statements about the alleged involvement of Russian missiles as a “deliberate provocation” designed to escalate the war.
The U.S. intelligence community has information substantiating that the explosion in Poland was from at least one or as many as two Ukrainian SA-10 surface-to-air missiles that went off course, a person familiar with the intelligence told The Washington Post on Thursday. Ukrainian missiles are older and less reliable than the ground-based missile defense weapons systems, such as NASAMS, that Kyiv has received from the West.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Polish President Andrzej Duda both reached the same conclusion Wednesday, even as they emphasized that Russia bore the ultimate responsibility for having unleashed the barrage of missiles that required Ukraine to defend itself.
A court in the Netherlands is set to rule Thursday in a trial involving four men with ties to Russia accused of involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. The plane was flying over a region at the center of fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces — a forerunner to the current conflict. Nearly 300 passengers and crew were killed. Moscow denies any role.
Ukraine’s military said Wednesday that Russia launched more than 90 missiles and nearly a dozen drones on the day of the explosion in Poland, while its air force reported that 75 missiles and 10 drones were shot down that day. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Russian forces probably used a “substantial portion” of their high-precision weapons in the attacks.
Ukrainian officials are working to restore services including electricity, water, communications, financial, social and medical services to parts of the Kherson region that have been liberated by Ukrainian forces. Electricity has been restored to more than 20 settlements previously occupied by Moscow’s troops, according to Zelensky.
Michal Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Warsaw office, said the incident in Poland is likely to galvanize Ukraine’s allies as they weigh calls for more robust antimissile defense support. “The question now,” he said, “is how do we, with the Ukrainians, stop Russian air and missile attacks throughout Ukraine and if they spill over to NATO territory?”
A U.N. meeting Wednesday to discuss grain shipments from Ukrainian and Russian ports descended into an argument between representatives from Kyiv and Moscow over the explosion in Poland. The agreement expires Nov. 19, and Ukraine and Western nations are pressing for it to be extended to avoid a global food crisis.
Border village in east Poland hit by deadly fallout from war next door. Residents in this sleepy Polish village of about 400 people had become accustomed to living on the edge of a country at war. “We had been in a stressful situation since the beginning of the war — we had a lot of refugees at first,” said its mayor, Grzegorz Drewnik. “We got used to it.”
But a when a missile hit a grain silo Tuesday afternoon, killing two local men, they were left reeling, Post correspondent Loveday Morris reports from Przewodow, Poland. | 2022-11-17T07:49:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
Déthié Faye, one of the students who took part in the archaeological dives near Senegal's Gorée Island. (Guy Peterson for The Washington Post)
Off the coast of Senegal, a Smithsonian-sponsored program is training divers to explore and document sunken slave ships
GORÉE ISLAND, Senegal — The scuba divers marched through the cobblestone streets of one of the world’s most infamous former slave ports, carrying tape measures, clipboards and fins.
There was a Senegalese police officer who’d learned to dive the month before. A more seasoned diver from Benin. The only doctoral student studying maritime archaeology in Ivory Coast. They were all headed to the ocean, on a mission.
The team, walking toward its final dive, had been exploring what researchers believe are the wrecks of slave ships, as part of an inaugural program supported by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. For the Smithsonian, the effort this fall followed moves in recent years to address its complicated history with racism and exploitation. For the divers, it marked an opportunity to pursue maritime archaeology focused not on treasure but understanding.
“What we have so far is the settlers’ narrative,” said Grace Grodje, the doctoral student studying maritime archaeology in Ivory Coast, another West African nation that was a major hub in the slave trade. “There is a lot of information underwater that is not yet known. If we don’t search, we will not know it.”
As their speedboat cut through the choppy waves of the Atlantic Ocean on a sunny October morning, Grodje, 26, shrugged into a slightly too large wetsuit and slipped her goggles over her head. She had learned to dive only the month before.
Sitting at the back of the boat, Grodje strapped her tank to her back, placed her respirator in her mouth and pushed off the boat’s edge, tumbling into the water below. Grasping the anchor line, she joined Gabrielle Miller, 30, the archaeologist for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Miller gave a thumbs down, the symbol to descend, and Grodje and the other students deflated their vests. Their bodies sunk into the water, toward the wreck below.
‘The search is the success’
Underwater, Grodje and Miller peered through their goggles at a rusted chain on the ocean floor, about 30 feet below the surface. Holding a clipboard, Grodje scrawled down measurements as Miller worked the tape measure. Nearby was a deeply rusted anchor. Floating past were plastic bags and a clump of discarded fabric.
When Grodje started to drift toward the surface, carried by a slight current, Miller offered a steadying hand.
Their goal on that morning was to gather measurements that students would then map in the classroom.
Miller and Marc-Andre Bernier, an underwater archaeologist from Canada who was leading the course, said the sunken ship was discovered in 1988 and probably wrecked in the early 1800s. They said researchers don’t know for sure that it carried enslaved people, although many of the ships coming from Gorée in that period did.
As people collect more information about the ship, they said, its origins could become clearer. A few weeks before, Miller, Bernier and Madicke Gueye, a doctoral candidate whose research focuses on wrecks around Senegal’s capital, Dakar, had located another ship likely tied to the slave trade — this one about 50 feet below water. The advanced diving students had documented it.
Paul Gardullo, director of the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said the increasing study of slave ships — more than 1,000 are thought to have wrecked — will inevitably reveal important historical insights.
But the goal is “not about finding treasures and bringing them back to D.C.,” Gardullo said. Increasingly, the Smithsonian has revamped its policies to address historical wrongs. This year, for instance, it returned 29 bronze sculptures that British soldiers stole from the Kingdom of Benin. The priorities of the program in Dakar, Gardullo said, are things that museums have historically given short shrift: community engagement, international partnership, ethical excavation.
“Metaphorically and literally,” he said, “the search is the success.”
Through its Slave Wrecks Project, the Smithsonian, along with partners including George Washington University, has teamed up with Ibrahima Thiaw, a Senegalese archaeologist at Cheikh Anta Diop University, for its work in Senegal. The new program, dubbed the “Slave Wrecks Project Academy,” brought together Africans and people of African descent to study the basics of maritime archaeology, both at sea and in the classroom.
Miller said the goal was to begin to decolonize the historically White area of study. In the United States and Britain, surveys show that fewer than 1 percent of professional archaeologists are Black. Miller, a Black woman, said the number of Black maritime archaeologists is even smaller.
Her own doctoral work has focused on resistance by slaves and freed Black residents on the Caribbean island of St. Croix — where she traces some of her familial roots — and using archaeology to dispel common myths. When the work is done by people touched by the history, she said, it often becomes less about extraction than preservation and memory.
‘Trauma embedded in the water’
Waving a red, yellow and green Senegalese flag over his head, Pierre Antoine Sambou smiled and shuffled to the docked boat as his fellow divers cheered.
Sambou, a 31-year-old with a master’s degree in underwater archaeology, had brought the flag for a photo shoot, proudly waving it above his head. His excitement was infectious, and the other students began chanting: “Go Senegal, go! Go, go, go!”
Sambou said parts of Africa’s history — including the scope and impact of the transatlantic slave trade — have been overlooked or ignored within Africa for too long. Even stories about Gorée, a tiny island off Dakar long said to be a transit point for millions of enslaved people, have in recent decades been undermined with questions about whether its role was overstated. Sambou said that the work to correct and complete the historical record is just beginning, and that much of it could happen underwater.
But diving is still new to many here, and he said that when he started, he decided not to tell his family. He didn’t want to be discouraged.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Miller said, Black people often have a complicated relationship with water. During the slave trade, they were taken from the areas bordering rivers and coasts on which they’d relied for their living. Today, redlining and environmental racism have often left Black communities with insufficient or polluted water.
“For us, the water has trauma embedded in it,” she said.
The incredible quest to find the African slave ships that sank in the Atlantic
But the water can also offer healing, Miller said. Bringing together students — some of whom barely knew how to swim at first — to explore their history with the water felt so right, she said.
One evening, after a long day of diving, Miller saw Sambou on the dock with Déthié Faye, whose studies have focused on fisheries, and Angelo Ayedoun, a diver from Benin. Sambou slapped his fins against the ocean’s gentle waves as Faye clapped his hands, making a steady beat. Standing next to them, Ayedoun waved his hands and swiveled his hips, dancing as if to a hit song. All three were grinning. | 2022-11-17T07:49:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | African scuba divers explore slave trade shipwrecks off Senegal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/slave-ship-wrecks-smithsonian-senegal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/slave-ship-wrecks-smithsonian-senegal/ |
Onlookers gather at the scene of a building collapse in Ruaka, on the outskirts of the capital Nairobi, Kenya Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. The collapse of the building under construction is the second such collapse in a matter of days in Nairobi, where housing is in high demand and unscrupulous developers often bypass regulations. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-11-17T08:33:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 2 killed in second Kenya building collapse this week - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2-killed-in-second-kenya-building-collapse-this-week/2022/11/17/e87fe346-664a-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2-killed-in-second-kenya-building-collapse-this-week/2022/11/17/e87fe346-664a-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Ukraine live briefing: Kyiv seeks to join probe into fatal Poland blast tha...
By Brian Rohan
An Emirates Boeing 777 takes off from the Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg in October. (Dmitri Lovetsky/AP)
Russians have always been part of the odd cultural mosaic of Dubai’s marina, with its yachts and chain cafes, gyms and cosmetic surgery clinics, mosques and bars. But since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a torrent of newcomers has arrived — no longer seeking refuge from bitter winters, but from war and international sanctions.
He chose Dubai for its high living standards, low taxes, and easy visa requirements for Russians, saying “there’s none of the Russophobia that’s growing elsewhere in the world because of the war.”
With tattoos less popular in the Middle East than at home, Tulinov plans to open a beauty salon specializing in permanent cosmetics for Dubai’s image-obsessed “glitterati.”
This cosmopolitan city-state in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates has long positioned itself as a nonaligned haven for global wealth and finance. Now, the UAE’s decision not to join Western sanctions against Moscow over its war in Ukraine has made Dubai a new hub for fortune-seeking Russians, who see much of the rest of the world closed off to them.
Russians can get a 90-day tourist visa upon entry and can obtain residency through an employer or a new freelance visa program.
According to property brokerage Betterhomes, Russians were the largest single group of nonresident buyers from July to September this year. Many of these “investment properties” in the marina are empty, while others are rented out by their owners — either is a convenient way to park money. Some purchases are reportedly being made with cryptocurrency, a popular avenue for skirting sanctions.
The UAE does not publish a breakdown of residents’ nationalities, but Russians here talk of hundreds of thousands of new arrivals since the war. Several Western banks — including JP Morgan and Bank of America — have moved staff from Russia to Dubai in response to sanctions. Data from Russia’s federal statistics agency shows that between July and September, some 277,000 of its citizens traveled to the Emirates — more than three times as many as compared with the same period in 2019, before the pandemic.
Olesya Sabra, an English teacher from southern Russia, arrived just days before the war broke out, seeking a fresh start in a sunny spot near the sea. She quickly set up a network of nearly 300 students, mostly from the marina and other upscale neighborhoods. The majority are Russians or Russian speakers rushing to learn Dubai’s working language. “Everywhere you go you hear Russian,” she said. People have Russianized the city’s name — they call it ‘Dubaisk’ now.”
An increasing number of her students are men of military age, she said: “I used to teach primarily young women seeking a rich husband, now it’s mostly young men who show up barely speaking English and trying to find work here.”
Unlike the rush of men who fled haphazardly to countries bordering Russia in the wake of Putin’s mobilization announcement, the Russians arriving in Dubai generally have more money and more ambitious plans. Many see a chance to invest in a place that has become one of 2022’s few economic success stories — driven by petrodollar-funded investment, as well as a string of successful IPOs and a stock exchange that has consistently outperformed more established rivals.
Large Russian pavilions are ever-present at the city’s trade shows, sporting a “Made in Russia” marquee. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently traveled to the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi for meetings to expand on what both sides call a “strategic partnership”; UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan met Putin in Russia in October. As one prominent Russian lawmaker noted last month, the UAE is the leading Arab destination for Russian investments and is the largest Arab investor in Russia.
But the UAE’s fast and loose quest for growth has spurred some criticism. In March, the Paris-based intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force placed the UAE on its “gray list” of countries not doing enough to combat money laundering and illegal financial activities. The UAE has said it is committed to working with the FATF toward improvement. Either way, thanks to cryptocurrency, Russians in Dubai say they have no problem moving funds, even if sanctions mean most of their bank cards don’t work.
On The Palm, a man-made island next to the marina, a moneyed Russian business clique travels between meetings in million-dollar Maybach limos and Brabus custom sports rigs, flanked by bodyguards, then retreat to luxury resorts. Nearby, several sanctioned oligarchs, including members of Putin’s inner circle, have moored their superyachts.
“Despite all the news, business within Russia is still booming, and these guys need working bank accounts — especially for dealing with Europe,” said business consultant Adel Maher, who has seen a surge in demand from Russians looking to set up businesses and establish residency so they can use Dubai as a go-between for transferring money between Russia and Europe.
Tulinov, the tattoo artist, has more modest aims. Like many new arrivals, he didn’t wait around to see if he’d received a draft card.
“I’ve lost five military friends killed in Ukraine, it’s terrible. Most of the young people in Russia, they don’t believe the propaganda, that’s the older generation,” he said.
“When I left, every authority asked me when I’d return,” he added. “I won’t.”
For others, Dubai is simply a stopover. At one cafe in the marina, a half-dozen Russian men in their 20s had breakfast before logging on for remote work. All had plans to avoid military service if they received what they called “the invitation.”
“In Moscow I felt pressure all around me, every day you are waiting for something bad to happen,” said Bogdan, 27, an IT worker who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisals. “Every conversation leads to war.”
Bogdan said he usually travels to escape the Russian winter, but he plans to stay abroad for longer this year. “I love Moscow so I’ll be back. And Russia’s my home. I just hope I will not be forced someday to leave it forever.”
Natalya Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report. | 2022-11-17T09:51:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In the UAE, Russians fleeing Ukraine war seek success in ‘Dubaisk’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/uae-dubai-russia-ukraine-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/uae-dubai-russia-ukraine-war/ |
Philadelphia District Attorney Krasner impeached amid violent crime spike
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner in 2017. (Matt Rourke/AP)
Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled House voted Wednesday to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) over allegations that his policies led to a spike in violent crime, paving the way for a state Senate trial that could lead to his removal from office.
The 107-85 impeachment vote was split almost entirely on party lines, the Associated Press reported. (Democrats made gains in the House in November and have a chance at regaining control of that chamber.) It isn’t clear when the Senate trial will be held. Two-thirds of state senators must vote against Krasner for a conviction, but Republicans hold just a slim majority in that chamber.
Krasner, who first took office in 2018, won reelection by a landslide last year. He is not accused of violating any laws and denies that his efforts led to the sharp increase of violent crime in Philadelphia. He came to power amid nationwide concerns about racist policing and mass incarceration and has embraced polices such as reducing prison sentences and taking a public health approach to drug addiction. Under Krasner, Philadelphia prosecutors have enabled at least 10 people who were wrongly convicted of murder to be released from incarceration.
However, crime rates in Philadelphia remain a concern for voters. At least 459 homicides have been recorded in the city this year, with an additional 1,669 nonfatal shooting victims, according to Philadelphia’s Office of the Controller. Last year, a record 562 homicides were recorded — a 13 percent increase from 2020. It is difficult to assess whether there has been an increase in national violent-crime rates recently, The Washington Post has reported, though a number of Republican politicians ran in the November elections with tough-on-crime pledges.
Krasner has been closely scrutinized by lawmakers for months. In October, a state House committee issued an report that accused Krasner of purging longtime prosecutors as well as failing to convict people in cases related to illegal firearm possession.
“Every decision I make as District Attorney is with the goal of seeking justice and improving public safety,” Krasner said in a statement after the report’s release. “Public safety has always been my primary goal, and I have never deviated from more intensely focusing on the most serious and violent offenses.”
The impeachment resolution was introduced in the House last month. “While incidents of violent crime are increasing, prosecution of crime by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has decreased during this same period,” lawmakers wrote.
Krasner said in a Wednesday statement that he was impeached without lawmakers “presenting a single shred of evidence connecting our policies to any uptick in crime.”
S.F. DA recalled, L.A.’s Caruso advances as Democrats tested on crime
“In the hundreds of years the Commonwealth has existed, this is the only time the House has used the drastic remedy of impeachment of an elected official because they do not like their ideas,” he said. “… History will harshly judge this anti-democratic authoritarian effort to erase Philly’s votes — votes by Black, brown, and broke people in Philadelphia.”
House Democratic Leader Joanna McClinton pointed to two state officials who were previously removed through the impeachment process in
arguing that Republicans had gone too far: “This is not 1994, where we have a Supreme Court justice who is caught trying to get drugs illegally. This is not 1811, where we have a county judge who has been accused of injudicious conduct. But once again, the majority caucus is very familiar with wanting to overturn the will of an electorate.”
Republicans portrayed the impeachment as an effort to prevent arbitrary enforcement of laws. “Tomorrow, he may decide not to enforce the laws on assault, or the laws on illegal gun possession. But then again, tomorrow has already arrived,” said state Rep. Tim Bonner. | 2022-11-17T10:04:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner impeached by Pennsylvania House - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/17/larry-krasner-impeachment-trial-philadelphia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/17/larry-krasner-impeachment-trial-philadelphia/ |
President Biden delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on March 1. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
While Democrats have retained their majority in the Senate, Republican control of the House has the potential to constrain Biden’s ability to achieve key foreign policy goals, including his intent to continue providing high levels of aid for Ukraine in the war against Russia. An incident this week in Poland foreshadowed the debates to come, with a segment of the GOP demanding an end to U.S. support after two people died in an explosion that Western officials think was caused, unintentionally, by the Ukrainians. Analysts said those pressures will be tempered, both by Republican divisions on that topic and the president’s broad authority in foreign affairs.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said substantial bipartisan agreement on some issues, including a desire to take a hawkish stance on China, would blunt the impact on Biden of Republicans’ ascendancy in the elections. He said last week’s polls — which largely defied fears of electoral violence or the immediate rejections of results — would help allay American allies troubled by recent tumult in U.S. politics.
“The good news,” Haass said, “ … is that it shows that, at least to a degree, American democracy is not on life support. That’s a reassuring message to our friends.”
Speaking last week about Democrats’ stronger-than-expected showing at the polls, Biden said he hoped to collaborate with Republicans on foreign affairs, promising to invite congressional leaders from both parties to the White House following his trip to Asia and the Middle East to discuss how they can jointly advance U.S. security and prosperity. “I’m open to any good ideas,” he said.
The midterms’ effect on Biden’s foreign policy agenda takes on greater importance as he prepares for a reelection bid in 2024, when his international record will probably contribute to voters’ decisions.
But perhaps the most immediate concern for Biden and his advisers is the potential for a Republican-controlled House to impose new obstacles on his desire to continue the extensive military and economic support his administration has provided to Ukraine. Security aid to Ukraine has topped $18 billion since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, the largest such annual sum since the end of the Cold War, and with Ukrainian forces claiming victory in the strategic city of Kherson, there are few signs the war will conclude anytime soon.
While support for Ukraine remains strong among many senior congressional Republicans, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), who is vying to become House speaker when Republicans take over in January, has signaled the House GOP could end or limit spending on the war.
A Nov. 3 poll published by the Wall Street Journal showed that 48 percent of Republicans said the United States was doing “too much” for Ukraine, a sharp increase from 6 percent in March. Even before the election, the potential for a fracturing of U.S. support was generating concern in Kyiv.
Some Republicans’ skepticism of the war was evident after the explosion Tuesday near Poland’s border with Ukraine, a murky incident that U.S. and Polish officials said appears to have involved an errant Ukrainian air defense missile. A day after the incident, as Ukrainian leaders continued to insist that Russia was to blame for the attack, Republicans including Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) said the incident was further proof of the need to stop arming Ukraine.
“We must stop letting Zelensky demand money & weapons from US taxpayers while he is trying to drag us into WW3,” Greene said on Twitter, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
While many Republicans have privately expressed skepticism that McCarthy and a Republican-led House would cut off aid all together, one senior GOP aide said funding for Ukraine could become a sort of litmus test as far-right factions of the party assert their policy priorities. Republicans taking control of influential committees, such as Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who is poised to preside over the House Foreign Affairs Committee, are likely to face the delicate task of having to accommodate isolationists and hawks within their party.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan has said the White House’s analysis of lawmaker positions suggested that strong congressional support for Ukraine would endure. “I think you will not see these kinds of doomsday scenarios, that the purse strings will be pulled shut and it’s over. I just simply reject that scenario,” he said this month. “Yes, there may be an increasing number of voices that raise questions, but it will still be a very distinct minority.”
Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute, said competing pressures from both parties’ edges — liberal Democrats and Republicans allied with former president Donald Trump — would make it easier for Biden to resist dramatic course corrections. Differences within the Democratic Party on Ukraine were visible last month when lawmakers issued and then quickly withdrew a letter urging Biden to negotiate directly with Russia to end the Ukraine war.
“Voices will call out from the margins to do things like cut support for Ukraine or withdraw from the Middle East,” Katulis said. “But those voices lack public support for what they advocate, and the election results will likely reinforce a trend toward a more moderate path for U.S. national security in 2023 to 2024.”
Another challenge Biden must navigate with a Republican-controlled House is the likelihood of contentious congressional investigations related to his handling of international affairs, which could distract from the administration’s priorities. Those include potential inquiries into Biden’s son, Hunter, and his overseas business dealings, including with a Chinese energy firm; the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; and its immigration policy.
Although White House officials may view such investigations as partisan exercises, they will have to comply with at least some of investigators’ document and email requests, which could drain significant time and resources.
GOP’s Afghanistan report an investigative roadmap, if Republicans retake the House
Whether an expected probe into Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, widely seen as a foreign policy failing, will rival the fiery divisiveness of the Republican-led probe into the 2012 death of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, remains to be seen. Those hearings, including a House committee’s marathon questioning of then-presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, helped propel to national prominence Trump’s eventual secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, then a little-known U.S. representative from Kansas.
While analysts say Biden’s handling of the Ukraine conflict has been more successful, public hearings that revive the grim facts surrounding his ordered departure from Afghanistan — the collapse of the U.S.-backed government to hard-line Taliban militants, the reversal of key gains by women and girls, and complaints by NATO allies who said they weren’t properly consulted — could be politically damaging. Already, Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a report concluding that the administration failed to properly plan for the withdrawal.
Such an investigation has the potential to cast an unfavorable light on Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whose agency had a key role in granting visas to Afghans who had worked with the U.S. government so they could relocate to the United States. Thousands of Afghans eligible for those visas remain stuck in Afghanistan or other locations, unable to emigrate, more than a year after the U.S. departure.
Experts said they expect few major changes to the Biden administration’s approach to China, whose global rise has been cast by both parties as America’s biggest foreign policy challenge. While some Republicans have described Biden as soft on China and called for a tougher trade policy, the Biden administration already is moving to reduce China’s access to advanced computer chips while attempting to reorient the U.S. military toward Asia.
Despite the mounting tension, Biden pledged to find areas of bilateral cooperation, on issues such as climate change and food security, following a lengthy meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Indonesia this week.
Biden suggested after their meeting that no Chinese attack on Taiwan was imminent, but it was unclear whether the discussion on the sidelines of an economic summit will diminish the acrimony related to the island, including Beijing’s threats to use force to bring it under Chinese control and a visit to Taipei this fall by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
The White House also will need to decide if and how it will alter the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, which reached its lowest level in decades after the kingdom, along with other major oil producers, announced it would cut oil production a month ahead of the midterms, prompting Biden to angrily warn of “consequences.” Officials said any steps by the administration to retaliate for the decision, which was seen as a particular affront just months after Biden made a controversial trip to Saudi Arabia, would come after the midterms.
Congressional Democrats have put forward a number of proposals in response, including potential decisions that would freeze security cooperation with Saudi Arabia, withdraw U.S. troops, divert planned arms sales or remove OPEC Plus’s exemption from U.S. antitrust laws.
David Schenker, who served as a senior State Department official for the Middle East during the Trump administration and now is a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Republicans likewise may be inclined to penalize the kingdom. He said many GOP lawmakers are exasperated that strong Republican support for Saudi Arabia under Trump, including the Trump State Department’s unusual decision to sell the kingdom arms over the objections of Congress, was followed by an OPEC cut seen as a major snub to Americans of both parties.
“They felt they had gone out on a limb to defend Saudi Arabia, and [the oil decision] was really hurting industries at home in their districts,” he said.
While it’s not yet certain whether Republicans and Democrats will come together in sufficient numbers to pass punitive legislation, Schenker said one thing remains clear: “There will be a level of residual anger.” | 2022-11-17T10:39:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With GOP House win, Biden’s foreign policy faces added sway - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/17/house-republicans-biden-ukraine-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/17/house-republicans-biden-ukraine-china/ |
50 notable works of fiction
The year’s best novels, short-story collections and works of fiction in translation
‘All the Lovers in the Night,’ by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd
‘The Books of Jacob,’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
‘City on Fire,’ by Don Winslow
‘The Consequences: Stories,’ by Manuel Muñoz
‘Cult Classic,’ by Sloane Crosley
‘Dr. No,’ by Percival Everett
‘Either/Or,’ by Elif Batuman
‘Fencing With the King,’ by Diana Abu-Jaber
‘Forbidden City,’ by Vanessa Hua
‘The Foundling,’ by Ann Leary
‘Free Love,’ by Tessa Hadley
‘The Furrows,’ by Namwali Serpell
‘Glory,’ by NoViolet Bulawayo
‘Groundskeeping,’ by Lee Cole
‘The Hero of This Book,’ by Elizabeth McCracken
‘Horse,’ by Geraldine Brooks
‘Invisible Things,’ by Mat Johnson
‘Jackie and Me,’ by Louis Bayard
‘The Latecomer,’ by Jean Hanff Korelitz
‘Less Is Lost,’ by Andrew Sean Greer
‘Lessons,’ by Ian McEwan
‘The Lioness,’ by Chris Bohjalian
‘Lucky Breaks,’ by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
‘Lucy by the Sea,’ by Elizabeth Strout
‘The Marriage Portrait,’ by Maggie O’Farrell
‘Mercy Street,’ by Jennifer Haigh
‘My Phantoms,’ by Gwendoline Riley
‘Our Missing Hearts,’ by Celeste Ng
‘The Passenger,’ by Cormac McCarthy
‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,’ by Shehan Karunatilaka
‘Salka Valka,’ by Halldór Laxness, translated by Philip Roughton
‘Sea of Tranquility,’ by Emily St. John Mandel
‘Signal Fires,’ by Dani Shapiro
‘The Singularities,’ by John Banville
‘The Stone World,’ by Joel Agee
‘Thrust,’ by Lidia Yuknavitch
‘To Paradise,’ by Hanya Yanagihara
‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,’ by Gabrielle Zevin
‘Trespasses,’ by Louise Kennedy
‘True Biz,’ by Sara Nović
‘The Unfolding,’ by A.M. Homes
‘Vladimir,’ by Julia May Jonas
‘We All Want Impossible Things,’ by Catherine Newman
‘Yonder,’ by Jabari Asim
The best-selling author of “Breasts and Eggs” tells the story of a Tokyo-based copy editor who buries a traumatic episode under a solitary, regimented existence. But when she discovers the liberating properties of alcohol, the past comes flooding back.
When Polish author Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize for literature, the judges praised this hefty book. Finally, English speakers can see what all the fuss is about: a sprawling but consistently entertaining account of Jacob Frank, a real-life 18th-century mystic whose disciples believed he was the messiah.
Winslow, a crime fiction virtuoso, has designs on retiring after he completes the trilogy that this novel launched — a kind of Greek tragedy about organized crime in Providence, R.I. It all starts with Irish mobster Danny Ryan, who has to deal with the escalating fallout after his brother-in-law gets handsy with an Italian gangster’s girlfriend.
California’s Central Valley in the 1980s and ’90s is the setting for most of the poignant stories in this collection. Muñoz, a three-time O. Henry Award winner, reveals the vastness of Mexican and Mexican American identity with tales of deportation, teen pregnancy, AIDS and the quotidian drudgery of farm work.
Crosley, already known for piercing observations in such essay collections as “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” takes aim at social media and start-up culture. The novel’s protagonist, Lola, is thinking about settling down — if only she could get over the parade of exes whose accomplishments haunt her news feed.
Shortly after his novel “The Trees” was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Everett released this very different book about a mathematician who specializes in the study of nothingness. As it turns out, that knowledge could be useful to an aspiring supervillain who will shell out millions in exchange for help in weaponizing naught.
In this sequel to “The Idiot,” Batuman picks up the story of Selin Karadag as she begins her sophomore year at Harvard. After a summer spent pining over an unrequited love, the fledgling writer embarks on a series of sexual encounters in the hopes of uncovering some revelation — or at least inspiration.
A Palestinian American woman, curious about her extended family, accompanies her father to a month-long birthday celebration for the king of Jordan. But when she begins piecing together puzzles of the past, she ends up at odds with her scheming uncle.
In 1960s China, teenager Mei Xiang departs her small village to join Chairman Mao’s dance troupe, ultimately becoming his confidante and lover. Hua’s bestseller uses Mei’s decades-spanning story to consider the women who were used, then erased from the history of China’s Cultural Revolution.
A dark piece of history — the practice of incarcerating “feebleminded” women — inspires a twisting nail-biter with a caper of a climax. Protagonist Mary, an orphan, falls under the spell of the elegant doctor in charge of a home for women that turns out to be less altruistic than it appears.
The year is 1967, and Phyllis Fischer embodies the suburban ideal: nice house, loving husband, two kids. But when a younger man she barely knows kisses her, Phyllis begins to question everything she thought she knew — and loved — about her life.
Serpell’s second novel is as stunning as her critically acclaimed first, “The Old Drift.” Through this story of a woman whose brother disappeared when they were children, Serpell explores the disorienting, sometimes surreal effects of grief.
Bulawayo’s second novel, and her second to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was inspired by the autocrats who have ruled the author’s native Zimbabwe. But in this brilliant allegorical satire, the characters based on Robert Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa and others are stallions, goats and dogs.
You can choose your friends, but not your family. That’s one reminder in Cole’s emotionally rich debut about an aspiring writer who moves home to Kentucky, where his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather complicate his budding relationship with the liberal daughter of Bosnian immigrants.
When is a memoir not a memoir? McCracken straddles the line between real life and fiction in this story of a narrator whose trip to London prompts a deluge of memories about her late mother.
The Pulitzer Prize winner offers a lesson in weaving together disparate narratives with this novel inspired by a real-life 19th-century racehorse. In the 1850s, the horse is trained by an enslaved boy; generations later, a man becomes obsessed with a discarded portrait of the horse just as a zoologist finds the animal’s bones in an attic. Inevitably, but never predictably, their stories intersect.
The fourth novel by Women’s Prize finalist Cruz finds Cara Romero, a New Yorker from the Dominican Republic, unburdening herself to a woman meant to provide employment assistance. Instead, the woman ends up with 12 enlightening, sometimes hilarious sessions with Cara, who reveals the highs and lows of an eventful life.
What at first seems like a work of science fiction involving a group of astronauts who land on Jupiter’s moon grows into something broader and more trenchant — an accomplished work of cultural and political satire that calls to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan” and “Cat’s Cradle” and Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
A charming story that captures our ongoing fascination with the Kennedy marriage, “Jackie & Me” focuses on the years when Jack and Jackie were still two distinct individuals, a young man and a younger woman navigating their ways through Washington.
There’s a jigsaw-puzzle thrill to Korelitz’s tale of a wealthy New York City family. Part farce, part revenge fantasy, the book reads like a latter-day Edith Wharton novel, as Korelitz (“The Plot”) simultaneously mocks and embraces these upper-class combatants.
Arthur Less, the hero of Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Less” (2017), is back. He’s living happily in San Francisco when he learns he owes 10 years of back rent and has only a month to come up with it. Hilarity ensues as our lovable, hapless protagonist is befallen by a series of accidents and misunderstandings.
McEwan, winner of the 1998 Booker for “Amsterdam,” tells the story of an ordinary man whose personal experience is woven into the social and political developments that have shaped all our lives, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the coronavirus pandemic. Through the tale of this imaginary life, McEwan deftly explores the interplay of will and chance, time and memory.
From the author of “The Flight Attendant” and “Hour of the Witch,” this propulsive tale perfectly marries glamour and horror, as a group of Hollywood notables sets off on a safari in the Serengeti in the mid-1960s.
This story collection is the first new full-length work of fiction out of Ukraine since Russia’s war with the country began. Slim but meaty, these tales — whose main players are women displaced by war — are both unsettling and illuminating.
Lucy Barton returns, this time riding out the pandemic’s early wave with her ex-husband in Maine. Strout fans will delight in the appearance of beloved characters from previous novels, including Olive Kitteridge and Isabelle (“Amy and Isabelle”) as they struggle and hope — together but in isolation.
O’Farrell (“Hamnet”) drops us into the panicked mind of a teenage girl who knows that her husband is plotting to kill her. This is Florence in the 1550s — and the teen is Lucrezia de’Medici. In this masterful work, O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave the story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station.
Haigh’s restrained novel explores the precarious status of safe, legal abortion through the eyes of an experienced counselor at a reproductive-health clinic in downtown Boston, revealing the surprising ways lives intersect amid this divisive issue.
Bridget, the 40-something narrator of this quietly powerful novel, has, to put it mildly, a difficult relationship with her parents, particularly her mother. In deceptively simple prose, Riley delivers a compelling character study and an unflinching look at the complexity of family bonds.
Inspired by a sexual exploitation scandal involving several police departments in the Bay Area, Mottley’s debut novel imagines the life of a 17-year-old African American high school dropout who is vulnerable to abuse. Mottley, who is 19, captures her narrator’s experience with painful, poetic beauty.
Olga Isabel Acevedo is a 40-year-old dynamo from South Brooklyn who becomes an in-demand wedding planner — but she can’t seem to find romance herself. If you know anything about how romantic comedy works, you have some idea of how this story ends, but you’ll be completely surprised by how it gets there.
As in her previous books, Ng (“Little Fires Everywhere,” “Everything I Never Told You”) explores race, family and belonging. Here the setting is a near-future dystopian America where 12-year-old Bird Gardner is searching for his estranged mother in a society where anti-Asian sentiment threatens his every move.
Both a love story and a horror story, “Our Wives” follows a couple through some unusual twists in their relationship, as one spouse returns from a deep-sea expedition forever changed. There’s more than a drop of “The Turn of the Screw” in this exquisitely suspenseful debut novel.
The first novel from McCarthy, now 89, since “The Road” in 2006 features Bobby Western, a contemplative, haunted salvage diver. What starts at the pace of a thriller — with a mystery surrounding a private jet on the ocean floor — becomes an extended rumination on subjects from atomic bombs (Bobby’s father helped create them) to the inappropriate, obsessive love between a brother and sister.
The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is a very unlikely combination: a murder mystery and a zany comedy about military atrocities. Narrated by a dead man. In the second person. Karunatilaka has said the combination of tragedy and absurdity was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, but his story drifts across Sri Lankan history and culture with a spirit entirely its own.
This newly retranslated novel by Laxness, the prolific Icelandic writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955, focuses on the fortitude and inner life of the title character, who has to make it on her own in a small village. Marxism vs. capitalism is one theme of the book as it charts the changing social and economic circumstances of the village over the course of about 20 years.
St. John Mandel’s follow-up to “Station Eleven” and “The Glass Hotel” is a curious thought experiment that opens in 1912 before hopping ahead to 2203 and then 2401. This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose.
Atkinson sets out to evoke — with gusto and precision — a lost Roaring Twenties London that, perhaps, never was. This is a sprawling and sparkling tale overrun with flappers, gangsters, disillusioned war veterans, crooked coppers, a serial killer, absinthe cocktails, teenage runaways and a bevy of Bright Young Things.
Shapiro’s novel, which balances grief with grace, starts in 1985, when 15-year-old Theo Wilf crashes his mother’s Buick into a huge oak tree in the family’s front yard. The story then hops through time to fill in the details of that event and how the secrecy surrounding it shaped, or deformed, the lives of the Wilfs.
Every page of Banville’s latest beautifully written novel is an enigmatic delight. A man named Felix Mordaunt, just released from prison, wanders onto the property where he spent his boyhood. But is that really his name? And is this his ancestral home? Unreliability runs throughout.
Agee has published acclaimed nonfiction about his boyhood in East Germany with his mother and stepfather after the family migrated from Mexico. (His father was the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Agee.) This new novel, written with wondrous simplicity and depth, is a kind of fictional prequel: Set in an unnamed Mexican town in the 1940s, it tells the story of a quiet, sensitive boy named Peter.
“Thrust” is part history, part prophecy and all fever dream. Its chapters ebb and flow across 200 years in and around the New York Harbor, moving from 19th-century laborers toiling to erect the Statue of Liberty to a drowned East Coast in 2079. This sometimes surreal book offers a mind-blowing critique of America’s ideals.
Seven years after her novel “A Little Life,” Yanagihara returns with another epic, this one made up of three novella-length sections set in the past, present and future. The final one is a blistering analysis of what an endless cycle of pandemics can do to a society. “To Paradise” demonstrates the inexhaustible ingenuity of an author who keeps shattering expectations.
This novel about two childhood friends who reunite in college and design a successful video game together is not really a workplace romance; it’s a novel about the romance of work. It portrays a creative partnership as intense and as fraught as a marriage, and it draws readers into the pioneering days of a vast entertainment industry too often scorned by bookworms.
Kennedy’s captivating first novel manages to be beautiful and devastating in equal measure. It’s set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s amid the Troubles. The book’s protagonist, 24-year-old Cushla Lavery, lives with her mother in a small, “mixed” town outside Belfast, and she emerges as a flawed, bruised but ultimately defiant heroine.
“True Biz” follows an eventful year in the lives of students and a headmistress at a residential school for the deaf. Nović is a thoughtful tour guide through her own deaf culture, careful to explain what people unaware of her world may be missing, and providing mini history lessons and illustrations of vocabulary words in American Sign Language.
Homes’s latest novel is very funny and often unsettling. The sharp satire begins after the election of Barack Obama, when a major Republican donor referred to only as the Big Guy assembles a group of advisers who devise a long-term plan for retaking control of American politics.
Jonas’s provocative debut novel revolves around the fallout from accusations of sexual misconduct against the unnamed narrator’s husband, who is chair of the English department at the college where they both teach. The narrator is filled with both desire and shame about aging, and has at least one foot on the wrong side of #MeToo.
Genuinely heartbreaking and hilarious is a tough combination to pull off, but Newman does it in her first novel for adults. Edith and Ashley have been the closest of friends for more than 40 years. When Edith’s ovarian cancer diagnosis becomes terminal, the women contend with Edi’s transition into hospice. Tears mix with laughter in everyday moments, showing the power of female friendship.
Quinn’s richly imagined and energetically told debut novel, set mostly in England before and during World War II, focuses on a creative young girl named Cristabel and her stepsiblings. These spunky, somewhat benignly neglected children, with a pedigree stretching from Charles Dickens to Lemony Snicket, might seem familiar, but they have their own peculiar and particular charm.
Set on a Southern plantation in 1852, “Yonder” explores with great depth the intertwined lives of four enslaved people, alternating between the points of view of each character. The final section of the book follows their exodus, a bold and dangerous journey whose outcome remains uncertain until the very last page. | 2022-11-17T11:10:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 50 best fiction books of 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/17/best-fiction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/17/best-fiction/ |
50 notable works of nonfiction
The year’s best memoirs, biographies, history and more
‘Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,’ by Ada Calhoun
‘American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,’ by Adam Hochschild
‘Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation,’ by Maud Newton
‘As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy,’ by Alice Sedgwick Wohl
‘Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, From Vietnam to Today,’ by Craig McNamara
‘Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge,’ by Ted Conover
‘Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan,’ by Darryl Pinckney
‘Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,’ by Maggie Haberman
‘Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness,’ by Andrew Scull
‘Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery,’ by Casey Parks
‘Easy Beauty: A Memoir,’ by Chloe Cooper Jones
‘Eliot After “The Waste Land,” ’ by Robert Crawford
‘Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir,’ by Marina Warner
‘Finding Me,’ by Viola Davis
‘Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History,’ by Lea Ypi
‘Getting Lost,’ by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L Strayer
‘The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet,’ by Nell McShane Wulfhart
‘His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,’ by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
‘Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life,’ by Jonathan Lear
‘The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir,’ by Karen Cheung
‘Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age,’ by Dennis Duncan
‘The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,’ by Eve Fairbanks
‘The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness,’ by Meghan O’Rourke
‘In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss,’ by Amy Bloom
‘Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America,’ by Dahlia Lithwick
‘Lessons From the Edge: A Memoir,’ by Marie Yovanovitch
‘A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943,’ by John Richardson
‘Lost and Found: A Memoir,’ by Kathryn Schulz
‘Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self,’ by Andrea Wulf
‘Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life,’ by Margaret Sullivan
‘The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil,’ by Tina Brown
‘Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe,’ by David Maraniss
‘Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy,’ by David J Chalmers
‘Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original,’ by Howard Bryant
‘River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile,’ by Candice Millard
‘Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth,’ by Elizabeth Williamson
‘Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,’ by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green
‘Solito: A Memoir,’ by Javier Zamora
‘Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,’ by Rachel Aviv
‘Tasha: A Son’s Memoir,’ by Brian Morton
‘This Body I Wore: A Memoir,’ by Diana Goetsch
‘Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century,’ by Stephen Galloway
‘Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation,’ by Linda Villarosa
‘The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind,’ by Martin Sixsmith
‘Watergate: A New History,’ by Garrett M. Graff
‘Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War,’ by Roger Lowenstein
‘We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland,’ by Fintan O’Toole
‘When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm,’ by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
‘You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays,’ by Zora Neale Hurston
Calhoun’s memoir offers an unsparing portrait of her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and the difficulties of their relationship. She also dives into the lives of a host of influential artists and writers, many of whom Schjeldahl interviewed for a biography of the poet O’Hara that never came to pass.
America has fallen prey to mythical enemies and demagogues several times in its history, as Hochschild reminds us in his portrait of one era, 1917 to 1921, when racism, white nationalism, and anti-foreign and anti-immigrant sentiment challenged the country’s ideals.
Troubled by her family’s legacy of violence, mental illness and racism, Newton delves into genetics and cognitive science to wrestle with questions of inheritance. She also draws on anthropology, history, religion and philosophy to understand our national obsession with genealogy.
In this family memoir, Wohl discusses her sister Edie Sedgwick’s important but brief collaboration with Andy Warhol. The book also offers a troubling look into the siblings’ complicated family life.
In this staggering book, McNamara struggles to come to terms with his father, former defense secretary Robert McNamara, who supervised the tragedy of the Vietnam War and was a distant, uncommunicative parent.
Conover lends a compassionate ear to “the restless and the fugitive, the idle and the addicted, and the generally disaffected” living outside the American mainstream on an isolated Colorado prairie. With his thorough reportage, he conjures a vivid, mysterious subculture populated by men and women with riveting stories to tell.
In the 1970s, the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick guided the 20-something Darryl Pinckney through the upper echelons of Manhattan literary and intellectual life. This memoir of that apprenticeship — by one of our most distinguished writers on African American culture, literature and history — provides a “you are there” account of those thrilling years.
In this illuminating portrait, Haberman lays special emphasis on Trump’s ascent in the late-1970s and 1980s New York world of hustlers, mobsters, political bosses, compliant prosecutors and tabloid scandalmongers.
Scull tells the story of psychiatry in the United States from the 19th-century asylum to 21st-century psychopharmacology through its dubious characters, its shifting conceptions of mental illness and its often-gruesome treatments.
Despite its title, this memoir is about two misfits: Parks and an enigmatic character named Roy Hudgins. Parks, a reporter for The Washington Post, captures life in small-town Louisiana and probes Hudgins’s story to explore questions she asks herself about her own sexuality.
Jones, a philosopher and journalist, uses her experience of disability to examine the ways others perceive bodies they find difficult. In the process, she writes about subjects from tennis to motherhood to Beyoncé in elegantly tuned prose.
Drawing heavily on T.S. Eliot’s often romantic correspondence with Emily Hale, which was under seal until 2020, this mesmerizing biography helps unpack the personal life of the famously ascetic poet.
In this double portrait of her parents during the first years of their marriage, Warner follows them from the English countryside to Cairo. The book, largely constructed from documents, family stories and imaginative projection, recaptures a worldly, decadent atmosphere.
Davis is known today as the acclaimed actress whose credits include “Doubt,” “Fences” and “How to Get Away With Murder.” This memoir covers her career, but it’s more focused, with brutal candidness, on her traumatic childhood and how it shaped her later success.
Ypi’s beguiling memoir of innocence and experience in Albania’s communist era and its aftermath is told through intimate stories of a taken-for-granted life devolving into uncertainty. It serves as a profound primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust.
This book by the French writer, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature, is made up of diary entries she wrote from 1988 to 1990. They document a Parisian affair with a married Soviet diplomat, a relationship she fictionalized in her short novel “Simple Passion.”
Travel writer Wulfhart chronicles how stewardesses organized to combat all manner of indignities, such as forced retirement at age 32, demeaning “girdle checks” and draconian weight limits, and in the process transformed the airline industry.
This vivid and moving account by Post reporters Samuels and Olorunnipa draws on more than 400 interviews to help depict the world that George Floyd lived in — and the circumstances that led to his death.
In a world buffeted by multiple catastrophes, from gun violence to the destructive effects of climate change, psychoanalyst and philosopher Lear offers a hopeful path through grief and confusion.
In this blend of memoir and reportage, Karen Cheung shows how Hong Kong is changing under the pressures of gentrification and China’s authoritarian crackdown. This is a love letter to the city, but it’s one that is free of romanticized illusion and frank about its failings.
A lively tour, from ancient Egypt to Silicon Valley, of a section of books that readers often treat as an afterthought. Duncan is an ideal tour guide: witty, engaging, knowledgeable and a fount of diverting anecdotes. Don’t skip this book’s own index, which is, of course, a work of art.
Exploring the realities of life after apartheid in South Africa, Fairbanks depicts the complexities and disappointments of an ongoing period of change. Her journalistic approach welcomes readers who know little about the country, but she also offers a great deal for those more familiar with its struggles.
Acclaimed poet O’Rourke brings lyrical precision to this combination of memoir and reportage about “living at the edge of medical knowledge.” O’Rourke’s physical ailments over many years were often misdiagnosed or dismissed by doctors. In this book, she describes living with her pain while also investigating what we do and don’t know about chronic disease.
In this deeply stirring memoir, novelist Amy Bloom recounts the emotional journey she took with her husband, Brian, who chose to end his life after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Bloom’s technical prowess is evident in her conscription of banal details to preface profound and sobering insights into love, marriage and death.
Arguing that true justice requires gender equality, Lithwick profiles women who have attempted to push back on legalistic attempts to restrict their rights — and those of others. She presents them not as superheroes but as real people who rely on other women in their collective effort to change things for the better.
A career diplomat, Yovanovitch was thrust into the public eye during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. In her memoir, she takes readers through her global career while also attending to the ways Trump has changed things at home.
The fourth and final volume of John Richardson’s life of Picasso is a worthy follow-up to its highly acclaimed predecessors. Completed amid difficult circumstances — Richardson, who died in 2019, was in his 90s and going blind — it is only about half their length. But it is just as rich and astounding.
This memoir by the Pulitzer-winning New Yorker writer considers the emotional whiplash of a two-year span when her father died and she met the woman who would become her wife.
Focusing on intellectual life in Jena, Germany, at the turn of the 19th century, Wulf explores how a small group of thinkers reworked our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and action.
Sullivan, the former Washington Post media columnist and New York Times public editor, argues that media outlets are failing to adapt vigorously enough to the distortions of reality in the nation’s daily discourse, putting an already fragile democracy in grave jeopardy.
This episodic examination of the royal family’s difficulties since the death of Princess Diana in 1997 features a combination of preexisting press accounts and Brown’s reporting. It’s both high-minded and gossipy, and addictively readable.
Thorpe, one of the most accomplished athletes who ever lived, was often met with racist derision during his own day. In this deeply researched biography, The Post’s Maraniss offers a sympathetic portrait of an extraordinarily talented man.
The general outline of Manning’s story is widely known, but in her memoir she captures the more personal feel of her actions and experiences. “Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully,” she writes. Here she shows how she preserved herself in the process.
In chapters studded with references to popular culture and informed by high-level philosophical scholarship, Chalmers explores serious questions about whether we live in a simulation. Ultimately, he argues, it may not matter if our world is not as “real” as it seems.
Baseball Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson was known for his competitiveness, outsize personality and superlative talent. Bryant’s vivid and extensive account, written with access to Henderson and his wife, Pamela, shines a light on this unique and charismatic legend.
Many books have been written about the 19th-century European explorers who tried to find the Nile’s source, but this one adds new dimensions to the story. It is especially revealing on the conflicts between two of the most famous men who helped direct some of those expeditions, but it also attends to some of those largely ignored by past historians.
If the horrors of the Sandy Hook school shooting were not enough, the families of the murdered children were mercilessly stalked afterward by conspiracy theorists and confronted with vile and obscenity-laden threats, as Williamson meticulously documents in her account of this assault on grieving parents, truth and society itself.
Pointedly frank but never too unkind, this memoir from musical theater composer and novelist Rodgers dishes on Stephen Sondheim and other luminaries. And though it’s full of gossip, it also documents Rodgers’s journey to self-understanding.
In this valuable book, Zamora recounts his terrifying nine-week journey to the United States from El Salvador in 1999, when he was 9 years old, and his struggles growing up in the mythic land of Big Macs on his way to becoming a distinguished poet.
Hospitalized at age 6 for “failure to eat,” New Yorker staff writer Aviv became fascinated by the early phases of mental illness, the time before it remakes a person’s identity. In this work, she explores several cases, including her own youthful experience, and assesses the stories people tell themselves about their mental disorders.
“Tasha” is the novelist Brian Morton’s (“Starting Out in the Evening”) bracing account of his mother’s final years. “How can you see your parents clearly?” he wonders. He gives it his best, passionately chronicling his mother’s knotty past alongside his present exhaustion, exasperation and anguish.
Goetsch, an acclaimed poet, here writes about her life as a transgender woman, from the first stirrings of awareness as a young child to formative adult years in the cross-dressing world of New York to transition later in life. Along the way, her personal story casts light on the history of the larger trans community over the course of her lifetime.
Galloway traces the fraught romance of Leigh and Olivier, a couple whose marriage was characterized by great passion — as well as other, more mercurial passions. He is especially sharp on the question of Leigh’s mental health.
Race plays an enormous role in health care in the United States, with Black people in particular often facing enormously unequal treatment. Villarosa unpacks some of those dangerous inequities in a book that is both deeply researched and profoundly devastating.
Sixsmith leads readers through many of the misunderstandings that characterized the conduct of both sides during the Cold War. He also records some of the many ways that Russia and the United States provoked one another, sometimes with near-disastrous results.
Though it explores familiar territory, this book brings the Watergate era to life in a new way, thanks in part to its attention to the “flawed everyday people” who shaped the events as they played out. It also works to correct some of the many errors and omissions in past records.
The Civil War remade America — and paying for it remade the American financial system. Business writer Lowenstein draws on decades of scholarship to tell the story of how that transformation played out.
Journalist O’Toole brilliantly weaves the story of his life with several momentous decades in his country’s history. The result is a memoir, starting from his working-class roots in Dublin, where he was born in 1958, and an account of how Ireland struggled to join the modern world.
A masterful work of investigative journalism, this book delves into the often-dubious business practices of one of the world’s largest and most powerful management consulting firms.
This volume collects 51 essays by the author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” It demonstrates Hurston’s formidable range, showing her skills as a critic, anthropologist, journalist and more. Some of the texts included appear in print for the first time here. | 2022-11-17T11:10:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 50 best nonfiction books of 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/17/best-nonfiction/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/17/best-nonfiction/ |
The best books we read from years past
Novelists, poets, historians and actors on the best things they read in 2022 that weren’t published this year
Reginald Dwayne Betts at the National Building Museum in Washington earlier this year. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Ayad Akhtar, author of ‘Homeland Elegies’
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of ‘Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present’
Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of ‘Felon’
David W Blight, author of ‘Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom’
Wendy Brown, author of ‘In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West’
Marcia Chatelain, author of ‘Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America’
Michael Eric Dyson, author of ‘Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America’
Dave Eggers, author of ‘The Every’
Eric Foner, author of ‘The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution’
Chris Hayes, author of ‘A Colony in a Nation’
Walter Isaacson, author of ‘The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race’
Ibram X Kendi, author of ‘How to Raise an Antiracist’
Randall Kennedy, author of ‘Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture’
Min Jin Lee, author of ‘Pachinko’
Ben McKenzie, actor and co-author of ‘Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud’
Daniel Mendelsohn, author of ‘Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate’
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of ‘The Committed’
John Turturro, actor and screenwriter of ‘The Jesus Rolls’
George F. Will, author of ‘American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020’
Brenda Wineapple, author of ‘The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation’
Meg Wolitzer, author of ‘The Female Persuasion’
Kelefa Sanneh, author of ‘Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres’
While putting together our lists of the best books of 2022, we asked several notable writers for their favorite reading experience of the past year that involved something not published in 2022. The answers range from the 17th century to the (almost but not quite) present day.
Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” which I read just weeks before everyone seemed to be talking about it again. What a gorgeous, timely book, an amalgam of politics and relationships that felt so helpful in thinking about how to write about our country today.
I read Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” again this year, and it seems fresher than ever. Her observation about the point of totalitarian propaganda being less to convince people than to make them unable to discern the difference between fact and fiction is so applicable to our own times. And her comments about the synergies of bureaucracy and violence sum up the workings of Vladimir Putin’s regime and how it came to wage a genocidal war on Ukraine.
I read and reread passages of Primo Levi’s “If This Is a Man” every month this year, sometimes every week, each time astonished at the wildly improbable generosity and love and patience for this cruel world that permeates this story of his that he says is, like the stories of the hundreds of thousands of others who suffered the Holocaust, “different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity.” Each time I go back to a chapter or paragraph or sentence, his humility and unwillingness to rage is the surprise, and maybe part of why he noticed the many things others would ignore.
Every year I reread some part or much of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men.” It is the greatest American novel about politics and surely one of the best about human nature. And it is a masterpiece of a meditation on the meaning of the Civil War. Past and present are woven into one another, and sometimes, Warren ingeniously shows, the book of the past, once opened, slowly takes over and debilitates the present. A book seriously in touch with truth, however hidden.
This year, I reread books that, as Nietzsche put it, “altered the aspect of the earth” for me. So, classics but also things like Richard Powers’s “The Overstory” or Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy.” Laymon is incomparably knowing about the tissues connecting external orders of violence to intimate pain and self-wounding. I returned to “Heavy” prepared for the rawness but this time encountered more yearning, and fell more deeply into his salvational relation to language.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman’s “The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership” (1964) was one of two autobiographies published by one of the most influential women behind the 1963 March on Washington. Hedgeman was born in 1899, and she tells a poignant story of growing up in a small town in Minnesota, then moving to Mississippi and later New York City determined to fight for racial justice. Without her advocacy and insistence, there would have been no women acknowledged at the March on Washington, and her frustration with sexism in the civil rights movement inspired her to become one of the founders of the National Organization for Women.
Given the heightened visibility of mental health in the nation, especially in communities of color, “#Driven,” by Corey Minor Smith, is a welcome and profound engagement with serious mental illness. Smith not only grappled as a young teenager with a mother afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, moving more than 21 times and attending 14 different schools before heading to college, she also endured an unfaithful spouse and various career setbacks before becoming a successful lawyer, politician and now a member of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Biden administration. I was intrigued and moved by this book, the inspiring story of a monumental and heroic rise from poverty and social dislocation to the heights of society by virtue of sheer intelligence and colossal self-determination.
The book I’ve been recommending a lot lately is “Renoir, My Father,” by Jean Renoir. Even if you feel, like I do, that Renoir’s later paintings are too saccharine by a mile, this memoir, by his son, the film director, is one of the most vivid, honest and loving portraits of an artist you will ever read. It’s utterly unpretentious and richly evocative, and even if you have no interest in Renoir, or painting, or the France of the latter half of the 19th century, it still holds a thousand charms.
“Black Reconstruction in America,” by W.E.B. Du Bois (1935), speaks to our current moment — it tells of violent efforts to suppress the right to vote, debates about who is entitled to citizenship, the relationship of political and economic democracy, how a conservative Supreme Court can abrogate Americans’ constitutional rights, and most pertinent of all, the fragility of American democracy. It also offers an irrefutable indictment of the historical profession in this country, which for decades disseminated a mythical view of Reconstruction, sacrificing objectivity on the altar of racism.
For the book I’m writing I’ve been reading Blaise Pascal’s “Pensées,” which I think I’d never gotten to before, and it’s so good! Oscillates between dated and shockingly contemporary, but there are genuine profound insights on just about every page.
“The Player of Games,” by Iain M. Banks. This 1988 space-opera novel is part of his Culture series, which explores a distant future of humans, humanoids and artificial intelligences where there is no scarcity. It’s filled with rollicking ruminations about the clash of civilizations, strategy games real and imagined, and (of course) the meaning of life.
“Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom,” by Derecka Purnell, blew me away with its compassion, introspection, research, stories and clearsighted case for abolishing our criminal punishment system and radically reconstructing our society to address the root causes of harm and violence.
In “Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It),” University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson rejects ancestor worship by daring to sharply criticize the handiwork of the Founding Fathers. He insists that the country needs to revise its fundamental legal arrangements and urges that it do so in a convention to consider constitutional amendments. He is particularly concerned about the makeup of the Senate and the excessive power of presidents who, once elected, are largely immune to essential restraints. The acuity of Levinson’s analysis has been underlined by ominous developments, particularly the frightening rise of Donald Trump.
I read “Hunger” — a gorgeous novella and stories by Lan Samantha Chang — again this fall, because I return to great work when I need to be nourished. A literary classic, Chang’s collection is a remarkable achievement and turns a quarter of a century next year.
This year, I loved reading “Narrative Economics,” by Robert Shiller. Published in 2019, Shiller’s observation that economic narratives spread like viruses proved eerily prescient. The literal virus of the following year set the stage for an economic one in the form of cryptocurrency, infecting millions and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
This was the year I finally completed an epic reading project I started five years ago: the diaries (seven volumes, nearly 7,000 pages!) of the Duke de Saint-Simon, the French courtier who minutely recorded the goings-on at Versailles from 1696 to 1723. There’s a lot of pomp and drama (e.g., the court chef who killed himself after a gala meal went wrong), but above all it’s one of the great studies in European literature of how power works — always a useful lesson.
Behrouz Boochani’s “No Friend but the Mountains,” written via texts from his phone while he was imprisoned in an Australian refugee camp, was the most important book I read. Readers will learn a great deal about refugees, injustice, inhumanity, human courage and perseverance, and will need to rethink what they know about refugees.
The best book I read this year was André Aciman’s “Out of Egypt.” A beautiful, delicate, evocative, delightful and moving book about a lost world. You are transported into his family and their life in Egypt. It lingers long afterward, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Walt Whitman tried to be what Shelley said poets are, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” “Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography” (1995), by David S. Reynolds, is a fascinating immersion in America before the written word was diminished by the rise of graphic communications.
Not having looked at it since college, this past year I read with great pleasure John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” a dramatic poem about heartbreak, treason, failure, ambition and love, written with fierceness and unerring musicality (“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”), though I have to admit that Eve’s a pretty dim bulb. Not like that witty chronicler of contemporary strangeness, whose very sentences stand at attention, Deborah Eisenberg; her stunning stories in “Twilight of the Superheroes” helped me through many a sleepless night.
As I do most years, this year I reread “Mrs. Bridge,” by Evan S. Connell, a novel published in 1959 about an upper-middle-class Kansas City housewife just before World War II. It’s brilliant, funny, tragic and unforgettable, and I am constantly recommending it to anyone looking for a wonderful novel.
This year, I finally got around to reading “Digging Up Mother: A Love Story” (2016), by Doug Stanhope, the legendary (and legendarily recalcitrant) comedian. It’s everything you might want it to be: profane and warmhearted, full of great stories about pulling scams, eating moths and telling jokes. | 2022-11-17T11:11:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Writers on the Best Books They Read This Year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/17/writers-favorite-books/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/17/writers-favorite-books/ |
Books of the past not only add to our understanding. They offer repose, renewal and perspective. Also, they can be fun.
Perspective by Michael Dirda
(The Washington Post illustration; Andy Soloman/iStock)
Knowing all this, I nonetheless want to make the case for reading old books.
When I was young, I didn’t yearn to be rich, successful or famous but instead desperately wanted to feel at least halfway educated. To me, that meant gaining familiarity with history, art, music, languages, other cultures and the world’s literature. The foundations of learning, I quickly realized, were nearly all located in the past. Time had done its winnowing, and what remained were the works and ideas that shaped human civilization.
In many instances, the past also provided the templates, inspiration or provocations for later achievements in the sciences and the humanities. Old books, after all, help create new ones. Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” pays homage to E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” and Barbara Kingsolver’s recent “Demon Copperhead” updates Dickens’s “David Copperfield.” Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” supplied Isaac Asimov with the secret armature for science fiction’s “Foundation” trilogy.
Does that mean you should devote your evenings to arguing with Plato, working your way through Dante and learning how to live from Montaigne? Being an idealist, I think you should, though certain classics — Samuel Johnson’s moral essays, George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” — are best appreciated in middle age, when they will pierce you to the marrow. Still, literature’s Himalayan peaks can be daunting. As the Victorian classicist Benjamin Jowett once said, “We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?” In reading as in life, fun does matter.
For several years now, I’ve been exploring popular fiction published in Britain between 1880 and 1930. I started doing this because of my fondness for Arthur Conan Doyle’s books and my subsequent discovery that the creator of Sherlock Holmes flourished in an age of wonderfully entertaining novels and stories. Imagine how poor our imaginative lives would be without Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” H. Rider Haggard’s “She” and Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim,” without Beatrix Potter’s “Peter Rabbit,” E. Nesbit’s “The Enchanted Castle” and Baroness Orczy’s “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” without John Buchan’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” Rafael Sabatini’s “Captain Blood” and P.C. Wren’s “Beau Geste.”
For that matter, have there ever been better ghost stories than those of Vernon Lee, M.R. James and E.F. Benson? And are any later Napoleons of Crime more nefarious than such rivals of Professor Moriarty as Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola and Sax Rohmer’s insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu or, a personal favorite, the urbane Monsieur Zenith, the albino mastermind of the Sexton Blake thrillers? As for female criminal geniuses, they don’t come more accomplished, deadly or heartless than Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara, who appear in, respectively, “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings” and “The Sorceress of the Strand,” both by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace.
Some of these titles will be familiar, largely because of movies based on their plots. Others probably aren’t, which is a pity. Too few people now read Walter de la Mare’s subtle, sui generis masterpiece, “Memoirs of a Midget,” or Grant Allen’s tales of a roguishly likable con man collected in “An African Millionaire.” Even though I revere P.G. Wodehouse’s every sentence, my very favorite comic novels are Jerome K. Jerome’s high-spirited “Three Men in a Boat” and the scathing portrait of an unconscious religious hypocrite, H.H. Bashford’s “Augustus Carp, Esq.”
Today, most of these works are in the public domain and readily available from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive or in cheap reprints. I discovered many of them simply by asking friends about what books they loved. That’s how I learned about Georgette Heyer’s historical romances. Titles I didn’t already recognize I looked for online or when I visited a bookshop. For the various genres I’m interested in, such as the ghost story and the detective novel, I long ago bought standard critical histories, then studied them closely, especially their bibliographies. Author websites and online fan groups are obviously worth checking out, while specialist publishers frequently reissue the neglected masterworks of their respective fields. You certainly can’t go wrong in trying almost any Penguin Classic or Oxford World’s Classic. Anthologies are also immensely useful: For instance, Dorothy L. Sayer’s 1929 “Omnibus of Crime” and its two sequels are packed with stunning but often little-known mini-classics of horror and detection. Obviously, too, if you like one story by an author, you’ll probably enjoy others. Having shivered over the eerie adventures of Algernon Blackwood’s psychic investigator, John Silence, I was led to other mysteries featuring occult detectives, starting with William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder and Dion Fortune’s Dr. Taverner. | 2022-11-17T11:11:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michael Dirda on why we should read the classics and old, forgotten books - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/18/dirda-old-books/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/18/dirda-old-books/ |
Alex Edelman confronts antisemitism onstage. Trust me, it’s hilarious.
The acclaimed comedian brings ‘Just for Us’ to D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre
Alex Edelman, the writer-star of “Just for Us.” (Jesse Chieffo)
Alex Edelman likes to step offstage after performances of his hit stand-up show “Just for Us” and talk some more. It’s often just to regular folks, convulsed by the uproarious tales he spins, about being Jewish and infiltrating an antisemitic group’s meeting in an apartment in Queens. (I’ve seen it twice. Trust me: It’s nonstop funny.)
Other times, it’s one of his idols who sticks around, such as Billy Crystal or Jerry Seinfeld. In the is-this-really-happening moments that follow, he makes identical requests of each of these giants: “I go: ‘Give me one note,’ ” Edelman said. He’s looking for a gemlike bit of advice, wisdom from the comedy mountaintop. And, as it happens, all the titans oblige.
Edelman was discussing the unexpected fringe benefits of creating a sensation as he prepared to bring the show to D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre, where it began Wednesday and runs until Dec. 23. Since creating the monologue in early 2018, he has performed it 275 times or so, refining it during gigs in Australia and Scotland. Then, last year, he launched an off-Broadway engagement, produced by yet another of his idols, Mike Birbiglia, that was so successful that he had to twice find new theaters in which to extend the run.
Now, he has come to D.C., where he says he has always wanted to do the show and where he will test the reach of his style, reminiscent of thought-provoking comics such as George Carlin and, further back, Mort Sahl. “I’m doing a show that is by its nature a little bit elusive. I wanted that to be the exercise,” Edelman said, over a long lunch in midtown Manhattan. “I really wanted a show where people could have conversations with me afterward, about the ins and outs of it.”
“Just for Us” gets its inspiration from Edelman’s exploration of his own religious identity: He grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family in Brookline, Mass., just outside of Boston, with a lawyer-mother and doctor-father. He has two brothers, one of whom took up a sledding sport called skeleton so that he could compete on the Israeli winter Olympic team. (This turns up in “Just for Us” as a hilarious anecdote.) But the crux of the 90-minute piece is the fascination he cultivated, in confronting antisemites online and later in person. As he outlines in the show, his abhorrence of and yet interest in the roots of white nationalism led to discovering the Queens meeting and gaining admission without revealing his ethnicity.
The recent uptick in anti-Jewish incidents across the country fuels an unfortunate topicality in “Just for Us,” though Edelman says the topic is never not current. “It’s exhausting, the discussion around antisemitism,” he said. “People have been saying to me since 2018, ‘Oh, your show is so timely.’ I’ve heard, ‘Your show is so timely,’ every year since I’ve written it. If you want to write a show that’s evergreen, write a show about how ice cream is good or antisemitism is a problem.”
Ripped-from-the-headlines events confirm Edelman’s insight: Kanye West’s grotesque antisemitic rants, NBA star Kyrie Irving’s appalling hate speech and Dave Chappelle’s inflammatory “Saturday Night Live” monologue have freshly exposed permutations of antisemitic views. “We used to have really good antisemites, Walt Disney and Henry Ford, antisemites who built things, created jobs,” Edelman observed, with unmistakable sarcasm. “Now, the prominent antisemites are people who are past their prime.”
“In all seriousness, I am concerned,” he continued. “I knew antisemitism was out there; I was raised where antisemitism was in the casual conversation. I am concerned, because I wonder if there are more of them, or a rock has been lifted.”
Edelman is 33, with the open, garrulous demeanor of a perpetual college kid. (He lives in Los Angeles and New York and is in a relationship with the actress Hannah Einbinder, Emmy-nominated for “Hacks.”) A graduate of New York University, he began doing stand-up as a teen and refined his technique performing in New York and in the United Kingdom, where he met Adam Brace, a playwright and live-comedy director. He would become director of “Just for Us.”
The quest for connection he pursues in performance informs his offstage life as well. A case in point is his close friendship with actor-singer Josh Groban, which started in a restaurant in London, where both were in shows. (Groban being the, uh, bigger draw.) “I was sitting by myself having a Sunday roast, and Alex comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Josh, I’m Alex Edelman. We have a couple of friends in common. I’m doing a show if you’d like to come see it,’ ” Groban recalled in an interview.
“I’m a sucker for a free ticket,” Groban joked, adding that he joined Edelman for dinner and loved his material when he went to Edelman’s show the next night. “With 99.9 percent of people, you’d have just looked at them cross-eyed. But with Alex, it was so genuine. He’s a magnet for life.”
Another pal is Benj Pasek, who, with Justin Paul, wrote the songs for the Tony-winning “Dear Evan Hansen,” as well as movie scores for “La La Land” and “The Greatest Showman.” “One of his friends told him to reach out to me,” Pasek recounted. “We had an initial meetup in 2018 and became immediate friends.”
Pasek and Edelman’s mutual passion for Jewish culture led during the pandemic to “Saturday Night Seder,” a benefit on Zoom for which Edelman was head writer and Pasek served as a writer and executive producer. The actors who participated included Jason Alexander, Fran Drescher, Billy Eichner, Cynthia Erivo, Whoopi Goldberg, Idina Menzel, Bette Midler and Billy Porter. It raised more than $3.5 million for charity. “We wanted to make something that we would have loved when we were kids,” Edelman said.
“Who he is as a person is who he is onstage,” Pasek declared, adding that Edelman’s wrestling match with ideas is “very Talmudic. It’s very much that you say something not for the purpose of being caustic, but for the purpose of understanding something in a deeper way. He does that for discussions of Judaism, Whiteness, privilege. And he puts it in a really funny candy wrapper.”
“Just for Us” has a consistent through-line from night to night, but because there is no script, the show changes. Not radically, Edelman hastened to add: “I’m not going to be an evangelical Christian by the end. I was Jewish in the beginning, and I’m Jewish still.” Even so, he maintains a whiteboard on which he comes up with five goals for every performance, items such as: “bring down the runtime”; “less ‘scene-painting’ ”; “be precise in your movements”; and “land your ending with energy.” Also: “cut down on clag.”
Clag? “ ‘Clag’ is superfluous words or details,” he explained, about a term that Brace, his director, introduced to him. “They don’t really have a reason to be there. When you’re doing a show, different things sneak in and expand. It’s really hard to cut back down.”
The advice from the entertainment legends who have shown up, though, is of a doctorate level. Crystal told him to get rid of the handheld mic and start using a headset. (It proved a huge help.) Steve Martin gave him a “tag,” a little addition to a joke. (“I didn’t know if it would work. Then I tried it and it got the biggest laugh.”) And after he lobbied Seinfeld for a suggestion, the maestro instructed him on the art of not ruining a good joke by acknowledging the audience’s response.
“He went, ‘A joke is a joke,’ ” Edelman recalled. Seinfeld explained that it took him “totally out of the show” when Edelman reacted to the laughs. “He goes: ‘I know it’s a joke. They know it’s a joke. So don’t do that.’ And you know what? He was right.”
Who knew stand-up was an endless seminar in self-improvement? Edelman’s friends see firsthand how much the comedian is in it for the meeting of minds and broadening of perspectives.
“I had a therapist who said once that life is just about being able to bounce your soul off other people, and Alex is just endlessly bouncing,” Groban said. “He wants all the time to bounce his soul off other souls.”
Just for Us, conceived and performed by Alex Edelman. Directed by Adam Brace. Through Dec. 23 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St. NW. woollymammoth.net. | 2022-11-17T11:11:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alex Edelman confronts antisemitism onstage. Trust me, it’s hilarious. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/11/17/alex-edelman-comedian-antisemitism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/11/17/alex-edelman-comedian-antisemitism/ |
‘I only want to write things that move,’ says Andy Blankenbuehler, writer-director-choreographer of off-Broadway’s ‘Only Gold’
By Sarah L. Kaufman
Ryan Steele and Gaby Diaz in “Only Gold,” which Andy Blankenbuehler co-wrote, directed and choreographed. “My mission statement was, I want dance to tell the story,” he says. (Daniel Vasquez)
NEW YORK — As the triple Tony-winning choreographer of “Hamilton,” “In the Heights” and “Bandstand,” Andy Blankenbuehler has found artistic glory, satisfaction and success beyond imagining.
But the story he burned to tell, the one that’s gripped his imagination for more than a decade, is about getting everything you want yet realizing it’s not enough. He also wanted to tell this through dance, his most cherished language. Yet as Blankenbuehler looked around the musical-theater world, he couldn’t find the inspiration he was craving. Where were the new dance-driven shows, he wondered — the ones that put dancers first and let dancing tell the story?
‘Hamilton’ choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler delivers a revolution that rocks
“There’s a lot of storytelling ability in dance, but in musical theater, people champion words first,” he says on a recent evening at the off-Broadway MCC Theater, a couple of hours before the curtain rises on his new show, “Only Gold.” “And so many times as a dancer, you don’t feel integral. You don’t feel like you are helping the story really come around.”
So he decided there was only one thing to do: flip open his laptop and write it himself.
The result is a vigorous and wholly unconventional theatrical production that’s part rock ballet, part musical theater. Blankenbuehler, 52, not only directed and choreographed “Only Gold” — he also co-wrote the book, with playwright Ted Malawer. The story, which Blankenbuehler devised, is set in fiery 1928 Paris, where a visiting king hopes to rekindle a cold marriage while his queen, their daughter and a jeweler’s wife try to seize control of their own lives.
“That idea was really exciting to me — the pressure that society puts on us to find perfection, to find the shiniest thing, to be in charge,” says Blankenbuehler, the creator of such iconic “Hamilton” dance numbers as the intricate, explosive “The Room Where It Happens” and the rotating, rewinding “Satisfied.”
One key scene helped cement ‘Hamilton’ as a Broadway legend. The team that crafted it explains how.
Blankenbuehler knew exactly what kind of musical atmosphere he wanted for “Only Gold”: “crazy, female-empowered music,” he says, “with a headbanging, garage-band sound.” He tapped British pop star and actor Kate Nash to create it. She wrote the show’s music and lyrics and narrates it, too, toggling between that role and singing and playing piano onstage. She’s backed by a live orchestra piped in from an adjoining studio.
It’s no surprise that the show’s theme of embracing new possibilities echoes Blankenbuehler’s own creative cri de coeur. He doesn’t really need to take risks at this point, having long ago made it as an artist, but he’s keen on challenging himself. He’s taken his choreography in new directions over the years, working in film (the adaptation of “Cats,” whose 2016 Broadway revival he also choreographed) and television (the FX series “Fosse/Verdon”). In 2019, the Tulsa Ballet premiered his first concert dance piece.
Lies, drugs, cheating and all that jazz: Nicole Fosse opens up about her famous Broadway parents
And yet, with a thriving career as a dance maestro, why take on the headache of coming up with a whole new show, too — literally dreaming up just about every bit of it?
After all, the dancing alone is taxing enough to create. Blankenbuehler’s method is to dance out a slew of options for each scene, experimenting for hours on end in the studio before landing on the single best choice, and then refining it over and over.
Settling into an empty office at the theater, Blankenbuehler sets down the laptop tucked under his arm. He’s slim and wiry, bristling with athleticism. Having spent the afternoon fine-tuning “Only Gold” for its official opening, he’s still in rehearsal clothes — black track jacket, running pants and sneakers. His voice bears traces of fatigue, but his words spill out at an energetic clip as he talks about the ups and downs of bringing this show to life. Especially when it came to the writing.
“As a choreographer, I’m functioning on all cylinders. I feel like I’m stronger than I’ve ever been,” he says. “But as a writer, I’m a complete novice. And so it was a horrible feeling.”
As the show came together rather bumpily, with not enough time and too much backstory and dance numbers that needed cutting, Blankenbuehler kept thinking about how “Hamilton” just clicked, for God’s sake — which is one heck of a yardstick.
But he kept at it for the sake of the dancing. To harness its power, the way he felt it in his own body.
“Most composers and writers don’t write for dance possibility. They write for singers’ possibility. They write for actors’ possibility,” he says. “My mission statement was, I want dance to tell the story. I want dancers to feel like they’re telling the story.
“In many ways, choreographers — we are writers,” he adds. “We’re just physical writers. And I think that’s where our industry at large sometimes doesn’t have faith in dance, because they think that dance is just finishing an idea, or putting the final coat of paint on an idea. But if we do our job well, the audience is learning so much more. If you do it well, you’re writing characters.”
The idea to create “Only Gold” came to him after the 2008 opening of “In the Heights,” the first Broadway musical written by actor-songwriter-playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, with its celebration of Dominican American life embodied in Blankenbuehler’s sharply etched, propulsive movement. A year or two after scooping up his first Tony for it, Blankenbuehler was on a plane, idly leafing through Vanity Fair, when a one-paragraph blurb caught his eye.
It described an outrageous $25 million diamond necklace on display in Paris that had been commissioned by the notorious Maharajah Bhupinder Singh in 1928. As the choreographer read about this eccentric ruler — a gifted athlete with extravagant appetites and wives, kids, concubines and Rolls-Royces galore, who died in his 40s — a production took shape in his mind.
“I instantly had this thought about writing a story,” Blankenbuehler says, “about a person who achieved everything that the world told them they were supposed to achieve, only to realize that it didn’t make them happy.”
The vibrant energy of Paris in the 1920s also spoke to him — the chaotic, creative “années folles,” or crazy years, when the arts and surrealism exploded and women shook off social mores, igniting a sexual revolution.
He gathered dancers into a studio and began working on moves, crafting corporeal signatures for the royals, hotel staff, jewelers. Then “Hamilton” happened. In time Blankenbuehler returned to “Only Gold.” Rehearsals, workshops. Funders signed on. So far, so good. He just needed to whip up a script. Then, in 2020, the covid shutdowns.
Also, he underwent knee surgery.
“Being stifled behind a desk, behind a computer, was 10 times as bad because I really was imprisoned,” he says. “With my surgery, with no dancers in the studio, with unfinished music. Like, I really did feel stuck … putting it on paper and not feeling good at it.” His fingers stray to the collar of his T-shirt, giving it a tug.
Malawer, his writing partner, disagrees.
“If he wants a career as a playwright, he can have one,” Malawer says. “I think he’s a fabulous writer. What’s so great about it is his innate sensibility. He approaches life and writing through a real hopeful and romantic lens, and he was confident in what he wanted.”
Crafting the script with the director-choreographer was also convenient, Malawer added, because after writing a scene together, when covid precautions allowed, Blankenbuehler would work on it further in the studio with the dancers.
“The next day, he’d say, ‘Here are the road blocks I’m hitting. How do we address this in the text?’ That allowed us to move along in a holistic way.”
But taking on so many roles presented problems, Blankenbuehler says. He missed the intense collaboration that birthed “Hamilton.”
“I know what it feels like when you get it right” because of that blockbuster show, he says. “But it was a ‘we’ getting it right, not me getting it right. And so that’s part of the problem with being director-choreographer-writer. I’ve excluded collaborators. When you have really smart people on a team, everything gets better. So the more specific my ideas get, unfortunately I have less collaborators. That can limit you.”
Blankenbuehler squints. He sits quietly for a moment.
“This is a good time to say that post-‘Hamilton,’ it’s hard to allow yourself to not be good at something,” he says finally. “I think that’s really what it is. And so I have to allow myself to not be good.”
There isn’t a great deal of precedent for what Blankenbuehler wants to do, as a musical-theater choreographer aiming to elevate dance by conceiving the whole shebang. Influences include Susan Stroman’s “Contact,” short stories told in dance with minimal dialogue, which Blankenbuehler performed in on Broadway. He also admires English choreographer Matthew Bourne, creator of wordless dance dramas. He praises Bourne’s “Play Without Words,” a tense study of sex and class in London based on the 1963 British film “The Servant.”
He holds Twyla Tharp’s Broadway production “Movin’ Out” in especially high regard. The jukebox dance musical about friends and lovers dealing with the Vietnam War, with songs by Billy Joel, “changed my life,” he says.
“I only want to write things that move,” Blankenbuehler says. “I want to write for the choreographer. I’m going to create scenarios that physicalize themselves in unique ways.” His newest writing project is about the making of the Panama Canal, when disease and despair felled thousands of workers in the jungle.
“That’s an interesting scenario to me,” he says. “To be in a situation of such physicality, trudging through the jungle, finding your way in a flood when it never stops raining.
“I mean, think what that does to your body! And then what personal conflict could you be going through at that same time? Missing your loved one, having never said goodbye to your parents? That’s ripe for a story.”
Blankenbuehler jiggles his knee. “I know I’m going to be a writer, because my body’s not going to hold up,” he continues.
“And for now, I’m just going to write for dance. Because while I can still choreograph, I want to do the biggest stuff I can do.” | 2022-11-17T11:11:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Hamilton’ choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler on creating his new show - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/11/17/hamilton-choreographer-blankenbuehler-new-show/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/11/17/hamilton-choreographer-blankenbuehler-new-show/ |
NYC’s Black schools chief isn’t sure racial integration is the answer
As he rolls back diversity programs, David Banks says families just want a good neighborhood school
David C. Banks, the chancellor of New York City public schools, visits the Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in Manhattan. (Yana Paskova for The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — When David C. Banks, future chancellor of the New York City school system, was growing up in a working-class Black family in southeast Queens, his father pulled strings to get him into a better junior high school across town. Banks and his brother left the house in darkness and took two buses to get to Flushing. In high school, his parents again believed the campus around the corner was unacceptable and sent the siblings out of the neighborhood.
The school they chose, Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens, had been the site of integration protests from White parents when it opened in 1971, though when David arrived in 1977, he encountered little racial strife. He was elected vice president of his senior class, took advanced classes and ran track. “We got along,” he said. “We liked each other.”
Now Banks, a politically well-connected educator who admires both Malcolm X and Mike Bloomberg, is in charge of the entire New York City school system, the nation’s largest. But he is not campaigning for integrated schools. And he does not think the sort of hunt his parents undertook is the best answer for today’s families.
“Sometimes our integration efforts can render really good fruit. But a lot of times we’re playing around on the margins,” he said in an expansive interview. “Historically, it’s been about how do we get a handful of Black students to be in schools with White kids who are better off. But what I always keep my mind on, and my focus on, is what about those other kids who didn’t get that opportunity? What are we doing about them?”
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But racial integration is not on their to-do list, and they have rolled back many of de Blasio’s policies. In every case, the question is whether to allow top-performing students to have their own classes and their own schools. Doing so keeps many of their parents happy, but those classes and schools tend to be disproportionately White and Asian, so they also drive racial segregation.
“When I talk to families across the city, Black families, nobody ever talks to me about integrated schools, not even once,” he said, his voice rising. “It’s not what they talk about.”
A thorny job
In 1974, Philip and Janice Banks moved their three sons from Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood to Queens, escaping gangs, drugs and violence. Philip, then a New York City patrolman, kept close watch over his boys as they grew. “If there was no homework, I’d get on the phone to the teacher and ask why,” he later recalled.
David, the oldest, thrived academically, went to Rutgers University and then worked briefly as a teacher. He left to attend law school. But a few years later, he was drawn back to education, now an administrator, moved in part by what he saw as a dire need for more Black male role models and by a spiritual guidance to work with young people. He became an assistant principal at an elementary school in Crown Heights, where he had lived as a young child. In 1995, he told a reporter that someday he hoped to be New York City’s schools chancellor.
For years, de Blasio faced pressure from integration advocates, including his own schools chancellor, to desegregate the city’s schools, where today students overall are 41 percent Hispanic, 24 percent Black, 17 percent Asian and 15 percent White. When the pandemic made it impossible to administer tests that had been used for admissions, de Blasio finally went along, and he said he hoped the changes would be permanent.
In middle school, where students apply for admission, de Blasio disallowed the use of academic “screens,” such as tests or grades, used at the time by 41 percent of campuses to decide which students were offered spots.
New York City, embracing merit, rolls back diversity plan for schools
For elementary school, he didn’t just keep gifted and talented programs. He added 1,100 seats to them, bringing the total to 3,500.
For middle school, Banks said the city’s 32 districts could each decide whether to use screens; for the coming admissions cycle, 59 out of 478 schools will reinstate them. (Students who don’t win admission to their top choices are placed at a school lower on their list.) Additionally, some schools are adding honors math and science classes for students with top grades, an alternate system to accommodate merit but one in which Black and Hispanic students are usually underrepresented.
And for high school, Banks raised the bar for grades needed to get top priority at the city’s most selective schools. He also left dormant a program that encouraged local districts to create their own diversity plans.
“What I’m trying to do is to be responsive to what the community is saying that they want,” the chancellor said. He lamented what he called a tide of families leaving the public schools. “So if there are families who are saying we want accelerated learning programs for our kids, I’m going to make sure that we can put that in place.” The views of the most privileged parents, he said, are “a very significant part of this equation.”
“If you’ve got a child who works really hard on weekends, and putting in their time and energy, and they get a 98 average, they should have a better opportunity to get into a high-choice school than, you know, the child you have to throw water on their face to get them to go to school every day,” Banks said at a forum hosted by the Association for a Better New York in October.
Are these views in line with the desires of African American New Yorkers? Polling casts some doubt. In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 68 percent of Black respondents nationwide said they favor racially and ethnically diverse schools, even if it means some students don’t enroll in their local communities. (Only 35 percent of White respondents felt the same way.)
Integrated schools have more resources, more programs and more experienced teachers, said Ivory Toldson, national director of education innovation and research at the NAACP. “Black parents want a quality education for their children and insofar as we want integration, it has been to achieve that end,” he said.
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Integration advocates hoped the de Blasio changes would even things out, and they reacted sharply to the new attitude on display by Banks. Matt Gonzales, who directs an education justice center at NYU Metro Center, said he finds the chancellor to be “full of platitudes” and unwilling to consider the implications of a segregated school system. He is also put off by Banks’s focus on keeping affluent families happy.
“Most of the families here don’t have the luxury to threaten to leave the system,” Gonzales said. “We need to make policy based on those who don’t have the choice to abandon the system.”
Meanwhile, parents supporting a merit-based system were thrilled with Banks, at least initially. Kaushik Das, an Indian American father in Manhattan who serves as vice president of the local school council, met with Banks several times, including one-on-one at Banks’s invitation, and he came away impressed. “I like everything he had to say,” he said.
But he was furious after learning that none of the middle schools in his Manhattan district would resume filtering applicants by merit, a decision made by the local superintendent. “This is so disappointing on so many levels,” he wrote in an open letter.
A quest for Black excellence
In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of Black men rallied on the National Mall in D.C. They pledged to take charge — to improve their lives, their families, their communities. It was called the Million Man March, and David Banks, then 33, was there alongside his father and two brothers. He later called the march “probably the most impactful day of my life.”
Time Magazine put the Banks men on its cover that month: Philip Banks Jr., the father, with his three sons and three of their sons. The seven of them stood at attention, arrayed in front of the family’s Tudor house in southeast Queens, dressed in suits and staring with purpose into the camera. “We, Too, Sing America,” read the headline, a new take on a revered Langston Hughes poem. They told their story and vowed to get more active politically.
“People are looking for another Malcolm or Martin, and they shouldn’t,” David Banks told the magazine. “The problem is within us.”
There was little question it would be segregated — it was designed that way from the start. The idea of boys-only education was controversial, and no one was entirely sure if it was legal. But it won support from Sen. Hillary Clinton and Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who was pursuing his own education reform agenda. In 2004, the first Eagle Academy opened in the South Bronx, with Banks as its principal.
Clinton was one of the school’s earliest supporters, and she got to know Banks as the school was forming. “His passion for educating Black and brown boys was really impressive to me,” she said in an interview. She co-sponsored a legislative provision clarifying that single-sex schools do not run afoul of federal law, removing a potential hurdle to Eagle, and said she vouched for the program early on with the Bloomberg administration as well as donors.
Discord in San Francisco schools, on race and reopening, looms large
“I’ve talked to many, many people who care about education, but they sometimes have the idealism without the practicality, or they have the kind of grinding, you know, utilitarianism without the idealism,” Clinton said. “David was the whole package.”
Eagle Academy was built more on culture than curriculum. Incoming students attended a summer orientation where teachers spoke openly about how to avoid gangs and how to behave when stopped by the police. School ran until dinnertime, with activities and extra help on-site. The idea was to keep students off the streets and out of trouble. Each student memorized the poem “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley, and the Eagles recited it together: “I am the master of my fate,” they would bellow, reaching the poem’s conclusion, “I am the captain of my soul.”
“The secret sauce for Eagle Academy,” Banks said, was “how we got young men to believe in themselves — and then the power of possibility for their own lives.”
Banks’s approach differed starkly from Bloomberg’s emphasis on standardized tests. At that time, “the average mediocre principal was trying to get more money and stronger students — which meant more screens — to get higher scores,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, who was senior deputy chancellor under Bloomberg and is now president of Bank Street College of Education. “The schools David started did the opposite.” They were specifically built to serve the most disadvantaged kids.
Eagle is better resourced than other high-poverty schools, but that doesn’t make things easy for the students it serves. The schools have never posted high scores on the tests. But graduation rates are comparable to — and sometimes higher than — citywide rates, as is the share of students who went to college and stayed enrolled there six months after graduation. (This experience helps explain Banks’s aversion to using scores to judge students; in the merit-based programs he favors for the city, the metrics are grades, not tests.)
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But schools like the Eagle Academies are the exception rather than the rule for places with high concentrations of poverty, said Stefan Lallinger, a former New York City schools official who now works at the Century Foundation, a think tank that supports integration policies. Many students arrive with financial, social, emotional and academic challenges, he said. They also lack assets such as parents with time, money and political connections to help the school. “It is certainly possible to have incredible academic achievement for high-poverty schools,” he said. But it is far from the norm.
Banks said this is where he wants to spend his energy — helping kids stuck in bad schools, not facilitating a path out of them. Because even if a few escape, the vast majority will not. His ideas include urging principals to develop relationships with their surrounding communities and helping their students to see that they are connected to a larger world. “We have so many of our kids who in our schools, they’ve never been inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They’ve never even been in Central Park,” he said.
Banks has long understood that accomplishing his goals requires political skills as much as knowledge of education. His own politics, though, are hard to pin down. He has worked for civil rights leader Al Sharpton’s Senate campaign and the presidential campaigns of former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who ran to the left as he challenged Vice President Al Gore, and centrist billionaire Bloomberg. A white board in his office bore an inspirational quote from Bloomberg: “Show me someone who is never lost, and I will show you a loser.”
Most recently, Banks was a political adviser to Adams’s mayoral campaign, and ties between the two are deep. Banks’s fiancee is deputy mayor, and Banks’s brother, Philip Banks III, is Adams’s deputy mayor for public safety. The mayor’s girlfriend works with Banks at the education department, and earlier this year, Adams appeared in a documentary praising Eagle Academy. Before all that, back when Adams was a police officer, he looked up to Philip Banks Jr., one of the few Black supervisors he knew on the force.
Adams got to know David Banks through his work with Eagle Academy, and he said in an interview that he sought Banks’s advice on education over eight years as Brooklyn borough president. “I would call him whenever I went into a school,” Adams said in an interview. He said that he always had Banks in mind as a possible chancellor should he be elected mayor. “So it was a long eight-year interview … For those eight years, it showed me that he really understood how to move to transform education.”
These relationships give Banks a degree of power and freedom that his immediate predecessors lacked, and Banks said the stories of battle with city leaders that he heard from career staff left him relieved that he doesn’t face that sort of tension.
“Welcome to our humble abode,” a student said as the door creaked open to his technology classroom. Inside, teens were doing advanced computing. Some had part-time jobs working for big tech companies.
David Banks was here to spotlight a school — the Urban Assembly Gateway School of Technology in midtown Manhattan — that doesn’t get the sort of attention showered on the city’s most elite campuses. He hoped to make clear that New York children can get an excellent education at all sorts of schools, to try to end the “scarcity mind-set” that envelops parents who are fixated on getting their children admitted to a handful of top programs.
There are many great schools, he says — places like this branch of the Urban Assembly network, where 85 percent of students are Black or Hispanic and 68 percent come from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
“This is how you build culture from the very beginning,” Banks said. He said he hoped to share ideas like this with other principals.
“Culture eats curriculum for breakfast,” Dvorakovskaya replied.
“Magic is happening every single day,” Banks said.
“When I say ‘UA,’ you say ‘G!’” a student bellowed.
“UA!”
“G!”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” the student leader said with satisfaction.
Banks watched the scene, saw that it was a marker of school pride, of positive culture — the sort of thing that keeps kids excited about school. Opportunity, he believed, was not in short supply, not a scarce resource that parents have to fight over. City schools like this one may not be well known, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t delivering an excellent education. | 2022-11-17T11:27:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NYC school chief David Banks rolls back racial integration policies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/17/david-banks-nyc-chancellor-race-equity-merit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/17/david-banks-nyc-chancellor-race-equity-merit/ |
‘When I heard they were making 10,000 sandwiches, I immediately knew I had to volunteer,’ said Jorge Barrales about the effort to feed the hungry
Volunteers in Greenville, S.C., boxed up exactly 10,0000 sandwiches on National Sandwich Day. (Courtesy of VisitGreenvilleSC)
As much as a mayonnaise can elicit a cult following, Duke’s Mayonnaise appears to have one. Professional and home chefs alike have been known to wax poetic about the tangy spread, with fans even using the empty jars for both weddings and funerals.
“I don’t associate with chefs that don’t use it. Or else, I enlighten them,” chef John Fleer, nominee for James Beard’s best chef award five times, once told NPR, adding that, “When they teach you how to make mayonnaise in culinary school, they are essentially teaching you how to make Duke’s.”
The person who invented the mayonnaise, Eugenia Duke, is said to have made 10,000 sandwiches in a single day in 1918, adding to her legend as a women’s rights activist and an entrepreneur ahead of her time.
This recently prompted people in Greenville, S.C., where her feat of sandwich speed is said to have occurred, to get together to re-create her endeavor, but this time to donate the sandwiches to people who are hungry.
“When I heard they were making 10,000 sandwiches, I immediately knew I had to volunteer,” said Jorge Barrales, who runs Papi’s Tacos in Greenville with his father.
Barrales, 38, said he uses Duke’s mayo in tortas, the traditional Mexican street sandwiches he makes at his restaurant.
“Duke’s mayo with lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, onions, jalapeños and carnitas — there’s nothing like it,” he said. “I’ve wrapped more than a couple of tortas, so I figured I qualified as a sandwich maker and wrapper.”
Taryn Scher, spokesperson for the tourist group VisitGreenvilleSC, organized the effort, saying the need to feed the hungry is acute.
“There are a lot of people hurting, now more than ever,” Scher said. “This was a way to kick off the giving season and let them know that we see them and hear them.”
Plus, when Duke’s is involved, she said, people will show up. There’s even a bridge in downtown Greenville named after Eugenia Duke.
Duke started a sandwich-making enterprise in her kitchen in 1917 to pay the bills while her husband was fighting in World War I. The following year, she is said to have made 10,000 pimento cheese, chicken salad and egg salad sandwiches with her mayo in a whirlwind of a day. (As the story was told through the generations, it’s possible it glosses over some helping hands she had making the sandwiches.)
Duke sold them for 10 cents apiece — making 2 cents profit — to army canteens, textile mills and downtown shops, and used the earnings to buy a delivery truck and begin bottling her special spread made with egg yolks, oil and cider vinegar.
Scher recently thought this was a perfect jumping off point to send out an email to hotels, restaurants and other businesses in Greenville asking for volunteers.
They called their event “10k in a Day,” noting that the sandwiches — made of pimentos, cheddar cheese, mayo, tomato and bacon — would be distributed to charitable organizations to hand out to anyone in need.
On Nov. 3, more than 300 people showed up at the Wyche Pavilion — an event center on the Reedy River that was home to the original Duke’s mayonnaise factory — to spend the day putting sandwiches together.
Several Greenville businesses joined in on the event, including Feed & Seed, a local food nonprofit.
Adam Sturm, the charity’s operations manager, said his volunteers used 1,000 pounds of cheddar cheese and 100 gallons of Duke’s mayo (donated by the Duke’s factory in nearby Mauldin, S.C.) to make several giant batches of sandwich filling.
In a nod to Eugenia Duke, Sturm said they mixed in pimentos to pep up the mix, then added bacon bits and diced tomatoes to give the concoction a twist.
“We called our sandwich a BPT — a southern classic on white bread that anyone would like,” he said, adding that he initially wondered how they were going to find enough people to take 10,000 sandwiches.
“But then it hit me that there were 10,000 people out there who really needed them,” said Sturm, 40. “I was happy to play a part.”
Volunteers worked in two-hour shifts over six hours to assemble 20,000 pieces of bread (purchased with donations) spread them with filling and attach a number to each bagged sandwich.
After the last bag had been tagged with the number 10,000, volunteers from Meals on Wheels and Loaves and Fishes delivered the sandwiches to about 25 local food pantries, homeless shelters, ministries and school groups in Greenville.
Jonathan Brashier, vice president of commercial strategy for VisitGreenvilleSC, spent some time on the sandwich line.
“I’m the biggest fan of Duke’s in the world,” he said, noting that when he was in his 20s and moved to Chicago, he was aghast when he couldn’t find his favorite brand in local stores.
“I called my family and they shipped me four emergency jars,” said Brashier, 48.
“I can’t think of a better way to honor Eugenia Duke than by feeding people in a community that ties back to her history,” he added.
Duke ran her company until 1929, when she sold it to C.F. Sauer Co. and moved to Oakland, Calif., with her husband, Harry Duke. She died in 1968 at age 90.
As the years passed, her legend grew in Greenville, said Brashier, noting that his grandmother and aunt weren’t alone in adding a cup of Duke’s mayo to everything from mashed potatoes to chocolate cake.
“The essence of Duke’s is that it’s much more than a condiment to put on a sandwich,” he said.
Heather Meadors Whitley said she doesn’t like mayonnaise of any kind, even though she grew up near the Duke’s factory outside of Greenville. But that didn’t stop the volunteer and outreach coordinator for Auro Hotels from signing up to help stuff bags with sandwiches.
“Eugenia Duke had a storied history and I think we helped add to that legacy,” she said. “I’m not sure how she pulled off making 10,000 sandwiches by herself, though. In my group, it took 10 of us just to make 850.” | 2022-11-17T11:27:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Volunteers make 10,000 sandwiches with Duke's Mayonnaise to donate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/17/dukes-mayonnaise-sandwiches-greenville-thanksgiving/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/17/dukes-mayonnaise-sandwiches-greenville-thanksgiving/ |
Higher interest rates, which are already weighing on the broader economy, are also forcing tech companies to cut back on workers
The headquarters in San Francisco on Oct. 28. (Nic Coury/Bloomberg)
Tech company layoffs are not expected to prompt a tsunami of job losses in other industries, but they are another sign of a cooling economy more broadly, economists say.
While the layoffs could trickle down into some other industries, economists say the higher-profile tech job losses have been triggered by unusual events — such as Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and overzealous pandemic hiring — that aren’t a harbinger of catastrophic layoffs in other sectors.
“There’s always some spillover,” said Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University who served as an economic adviser during the Obama administration. “If people lose their jobs, they spend less money in the area they live. But I think the sort of direct knock-on effect is much smaller than your traditional mass layoffs, in say manufacturing.”
Other economists agree. Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius wrote in a note to clients this week that “tech layoffs are not a sign of an impending recession,” adding that the unemployment rate would rise by less than 0.3 percent even if most of the tech industry lost jobs at once. And Nela Richardson, chief economist at the payroll processing firm ADP, said the layoffs at Twitter and Meta are “pretty unique corporate events that are not necessarily tied to the broader labor market.”
The labor market has fueled a robust recovery from the pandemic, even as the economy has lately shown signs of slowing down. Employers added 261,000 jobs in October, beating economists’ predictions. With nearly two job openings for each unemployed person, emboldened workers across industries have demanded higher wages and better conditions from employers facing chronic labor shortages.
Additionally, the tech layoffs have yet to make a notable mark on the weekly claims for unemployment benefits.
As the Federal Reserve has increased interest rates to cool off the economy, signs of strength remain. In October, consumers boosted retail sales by 1.3 percent from the previous month. Also, inflation measured by the consumer price index and the Producer Price Index both showed signs of easing in October, though they are still at longtime highs.
But there are plenty of signs that interest rates are cooling the broader economy, both inside and outside of tech. FedEx’s freight unit announced voluntary furloughs on Monday in response to slowing demand. Disney Plus, the entertainment giant’s streaming service, announced layoffs and hiring freezes last week. Advertising and media companies as well as big law firms have also slashed jobs.
That follows slowdowns in other interest-rate-sensitive sectors, such as real estate, finance and construction, as mortgage rates reach the highest level in 20 years, dissuading home buyers.
“I do think tech layoffs are a function of [higher interest rates] that are going to slow job growth throughout the economy,” Furman said.
While experts generally agree that a recession is unlikely to be as severe as the Great Recession of 2007-2009 or the pandemic-fueled collapse in 2020, there is a growing consensus that the economy will face a mild recession in the next year.
But tech layoffs could hurt industries that are dependent on tech and its workers for revenue. Local economies, such as San Francisco and Seattle, could feel the pinch, though many tech workers left these metro areas during the pandemic and have not returned. Some small business owners in San Jose have already expressed fears about impending financial hardship.
“There are a number of vulnerable local economies — Seattle, the Bay Area, Austin, Denver,” said Aaron Terrazas, the chief economist at Glassdoor. “In those communities, tech has been over-hiring. Those will feel the chill.”
Tech companies typically rely on a variety of contracted security guards, shuttle bus drivers, janitors and cafeteria workers — roles that also could see job cuts. Union officials at Unite Here Local 2, which represents hospitality workers in Silicon Valley, said that Facebook has not yet laid off cafeteria workers, but the company started freezing positions about a month ago.
“The occupation worst affected during covid was low-wage service jobs in high-wage areas,” said Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “We’re likely to see a similar thing play out. Those highly paid tech workers who spend $20 a day [on] a lunch will be pulling back.”
As tech companies make sweeping cuts to their spending, other local contractors and services could see cutbacks.
“Companies reduce ad spending and that ripples to media companies and back to other tech companies that rely on advertising,” Pollack said. “During covid, every tech company was canceling stock photo subscriptions. The whole range of services and subscriptions that tech companies rely on got squeezed, but that wouldn’t be nearly as large this time around. A nuclear bomb hasn’t gone off.”
Several economists noted that layoffs at Meta, Twitter, and Amazon could be relatively self-contained events, related more to their own corporate restructurings than the overall economic outlook.
Twitter’s layoffs were in large part a response to Elon Musk’s $44 billion leveraged buyout of Twitter, which loaded about $13 billion of debt onto the social media giant. The layoffs at Meta arrive as the company has struggled to develop a new product, the virtual world of the so-called metaverse, while facing a decline in ad revenue and competition from other social media platforms, such as TikTok. Amazon, which hired aggressively during the pandemic, has also seen a dent in sales this year as consumers have shifted some of their spending habits back to in-person shopping.
The companies have reported that the layoffs are largely concentrated in human resources, recruiting and advertising — areas that typically expand during periods of growth. At Twitter, however, the cuts were widespread.
Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, said the layoffs at Amazon, Meta and Twitter are a blip on the overall labor market. Wolfers noted that the latest data shows that about 5.7 million U.S. workers left or lost their jobs in the past month; meanwhile, the past two weeks have seen roughly 20,000 layoffs in tech.
“That amounts to about one-third of 1 percent of the total separations in a month,” Wolfers said. “Large numbers of separations are actually the norm in the U.S. economy. I think that there is a tendency for the human brain to look for order, even when there’s chaos.”
The information services sector, which includes tech, makes up around 2 percent of the U.S. workforce, said Richardson, the ADP economist.
Still, these layoffs arrive as tech industry investors have become less willing to take on financial risk as the cost of lending has risen, marking the end of a booming era for the industry. Over the past decade, low interest rates had allowed venture capitalists to pour cash into start-ups.
And so far this year, tech has weathered the largest number of layoffs going back to the Great Recession. The tech industry has already cut 100,000 jobs, after a period of frenzied hiring up until earlier this year, with tech companies fiercely competing — with extravagant bonuses and seven-figure salaries — for a limited supply of talent. The reversal of fortune for tech workers happened quickly.
“Here, you have a trimming of some major, very solid companies that brings them back to [a position that is] even bigger still than they were two years ago,” Furman said. “In the dot-com era, there was just huge amounts of overspending and companies disappeared. This doesn’t feel anything like that.”
Some economists have taken a more optimistic outlook, noting that industries in dire need of technical innovation — such as government, retail, manufacturing, health care and education — could benefit from the new availability of engineers and data scientists looking for work. In the past, they could not compete with the salaries and packages offered by tech companies.
“I’m going to take the contrarian view and say that I think this will be good for the rest of the economy,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford University. “I think the salaries in tech were unrealistic. Now there’s a bunch of really good coders and engineers for the rest of the economy where they are needed a lot more.” | 2022-11-17T11:36:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tech layoffs, including at Amazon and Meta, signal slowing economy but not a recession yet - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/11/17/layoffs-amazon-meta-labor-market-unemployment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/11/17/layoffs-amazon-meta-labor-market-unemployment/ |
How climate stress contributed to collapse of ancient Egypt
Ancient history has lessons for modern policymakers gathered in Egypt for U.N. climate talks
Egypt’s rulers say they fear the effects of climate change on their society. They have good reason to worry: Their ancient predecessors were probably toppled at least in part by similar climate challenges, researchers say.
Historians and climate scientists have tied droughts and other climate disruptions to political upheaval in Egypt’s Ptolemaic era more than 2,000 years ago, using the unusually well-preserved records of the Nile River to draw a line connecting climate challenges and social turmoil.
The research can’t be used to predict the fate of modern-day societies as they grapple with a warming world, but it is a measure of the stakes as Egypt hosts this year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference. Pakistan and Ethiopia were hit by deadly floods, Somalia is facing a devastating drought, and Europe had its hottest summer on record. Ancient Egypt was wealthy and powerful — until it succumbed. Modern societies face some of the same challenges of adaptation.
In the Ptolemaic era, which started around 300 B.C. and ended with Cleopatra’s suicide and conquest by Rome in 30 B.C., settlements and societies that figured out how to make themselves more resilient to climate stress — such as by storing grain to help smooth out “hungry seasons” — proved more stable, the researchers say. But climate pressures probably proved too much for the Egyptians: The eruption in 43 B.C. of Alaska’s Okmok volcano — on the other side of the world from Egypt — was so profoundly disruptive to the world’s climate systems that it led to crop failures and disease across the Mediterranean region. Ultimately, the challenges probably contributed to Cleopatra’s downfall, the researchers say.
“We know from a societal point of view, these were really stressed-out periods,” said Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University who has led a multiyear effort to study the relationship between volcanic eruptions, Nile flooding and historical societal response.
Ancient Egypt wasn’t facing man-made climate change in the way modern societies are. But the eruptions produced climate disruptions similar to some aspects of contemporary climate change, and they challenged ancient societies to respond in ways that are analogous to modern efforts. (There doesn’t appear to be an ancient equivalent to U.N. climate conferences, though.)
Then as now, climate stress was often a crisis magnifier, eroding social resilience and making it harder to deal with other challenges successfully. Even if climate issues weren’t the sole reason for Egypt’s ultimate defeat by Rome, social cohesion — and military might — had been worn away by years of bad crops and disease following the volcanic eruptions.
“What we’re seeing in a pretty clear way is the complexities of societal response, and this kind of climate shock — these kinds of year-by-year short-term droughts — is one of many aspects of societal stress,” Manning said.
The researchers focused on the Ptolemaic Kingdom because, although its measurements of the Nile weren’t as precise as those of later societies in Egypt, it did leave an extensive written record, including many papyruses that can be tied to specific dates with a reasonable amount of confidence. The kingdom — the last ancient Egyptian dynasty — rose in the years following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C., and at its maximum extent ruled over most of modern-day Egypt and parts of modern-day Libya, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Manning and his team of historians and scientists, including Francis Ludlow, a historical climatologist at University College Dublin, matched records of volcanic eruptions from ice cores in Greenland and elsewhere with measurements of the Nile’s seasonal flooding over hundreds of years.
The core samples give down-to-the-year readings on major volcanoes, whose clouds of ash can travel around the world and dim the sun, altering the climate by cooling it. The eruptions can also lead to less rainfall, doubling the impact on food production. The researchers found that eruption-year summer flooding averaged 8.7 inches lower than in normal years.
Researchers were able to connect a rise in descriptions of stress, disease and other societal challenges to years following ones in which the Greenland ice data showed there had been a major volcanic eruption.
In their first paper, published in Nature Communications in 2017, they noted significant increases in land sales in periods following eruptions, for example, which Manning and his team theorized were connected to a need to raise money to pay property taxes during years in which farming wasn’t bringing in as much money. Wars were more likely to end in a volcano year or the year following an eruption, suggesting to the researchers that societies may have had difficulty continuing to fight during years in which their resources suddenly faced major constraints.
There were major eruptions in 247 and 244 B.C., for example, a time in which Ptolemy III was away from home, engaged in a successful military campaign in what is modern-day Iraq. Ptolemy’s Roman contemporary, Justin, a historian, notes that the ruler was “recalled to Egypt by disturbances at home.” A later papyrus echoes the idea that Ptolemy was recalled home to face “Egyptian revolt” around that time, the researchers write. And a priestly decree from 238 B.C. is explicit about lower-than-usual Nile floods in the previous years and notes that Ptolemy imported grain from other territories “at great expense.”
Manning said the team of researchers has built out its database of writings from the Ptolemaic Kingdom, working to categorize them so that they can be compared quantitatively against the volcanic record.
More recently, Manning’s team has looked at the events around the fall of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. Alaska’s Okmok volcano explosion led to years of problems for the Nile River system, the historical record shows, as well as crop failures and disease. Some sort of plague broke out in the early 40s B.C., Manning said, that was likely tied to the climate challenges.
In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team estimated that the two years after the volcano exploded were “among the coldest years of recent millennia in the Northern Hemisphere” — as much as 7 degrees Celsius, or 14 degrees Fahrenheit, below average in some seasons.
“We know what happens historically in droughts,” he said. “You get people drinking bad water and you get things like dysentery.”
Cleopatra ultimately failed for a mixture of reasons, he said, including political ones that had nothing to do with the climate.
“But the climate and the disease story is giving us something more of a dynamic of these complicated societies,” Manning said. | 2022-11-17T11:36:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Egypt, hosting U.N. climate talks, has a history of climate collapse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/ancient-egypt-climate-stress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/ancient-egypt-climate-stress/ |
Diplomats and activists have criticized Egypt for presiding over a climate change conference characterized by delays and shouting matches over human rights
Attendees arrive at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, known as COP27, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. (Islam Safwat/Bloomberg)
Alden Meyer has attended 26 of 27 U.N. climate change conferences, crisscrossing the globe each year to pressure diplomats to strike deals that will slow the Earth’s catastrophic warming. But he has never seen a summit this chaotic and behind schedule.
Unlike past hosts, Egypt has taken a haphazard approach to organizing the high-stakes negotiations, according to interviews with half a dozen diplomats, activists and other longtime observers of the talks. The approach threatens to undermine global progress on climate action at a critical time — top scientists say the world has only nine years to stave off the dire consequences of unchecked global warming, from vanishing coral reefs to intensifying extreme weather events.
From the outset, observers had lower expectations for this summit, which comes as Russia’s war in Ukraine squeezes global energy markets and the fossil fuel industry experiences a remarkable rebound. But veteran negotiators say Egyptian diplomats have further eroded the prospects for progress by failing to communicate their top priorities or anticipate the issue of “loss and damage” — the irreversible, unavoidable impacts of climate change — that has dominated the discussions.
“To be an effective COP president, you have to be clear on what you want to achieve,” said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, the former environmental minister of Peru who served as president of the COP20 climate talks in Lima.
Egypt’s record on human rights has also come under intense scrutiny, and has at times siphoned attention away from the climate negotiations, observers say.
As the conference opened on Nov. 6, Egypt’s most famous political prisoner, Alaa Abdel Fattah, stopped drinking water as he stepped up his 200-day hunger strike. A dual British Egyptian citizen, Abdel Fattah was a prominent activist during the country’s 2011 revolution but has spent much of the past decade in prison. Last week, a news conference devolved into a shouting match when an Egyptian lawmaker berated Abdel Fattah’s sister and was escorted out of the building by U.N. security.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, the COP27 president, has criticized journalists and activists for focusing on human rights instead of climate policy, telling the Associated Press that some countries would rather “avoid having to deal with what they need to do, how they need to implement their obligations and responsibilities.”
A spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
At last year’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, the British hosts started consulting other countries on the “cover decision” — a political document that signals a consensus among nearly 200 nations — in the first few days of the talks. By contrast, the Egyptians began these consultations on Saturday and had still not unveiled a draft of the cover decision as of Wednesday evening, midway through the second week.
The Egyptians also waited until Tuesday evening to assign ministers to moderate negotiations over the most contentious issues, increasing the likelihood that the talks will stretch into the weekend, rather than concluding Friday as planned.
Further complicating matters, Egyptian officials have used the conference to strike deals to increase exports of natural gas, even as scientists say the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels to avert catastrophe. The number of fossil fuel industry representatives at the conference — at least 636, according to one analysis — dwarfs the number of delegates from any single country.
“I can’t think of a COP in recent memory where the gas industry or the fossil fuel industry has been so present,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, who has attended more than a dozen U.N. climate summits.
When past conferences have culminated in successful outcomes, the hosts have typically spent at least a year preparing for the negotiations, meeting with key world leaders and ironing out any differences. In 2015, when France hosted the summit that produced the landmark Paris climate accord, then-French President François Hollande took a “total-government approach for months in advance,” Kyte said.
Six years earlier, negotiations had spectacularly collapsed in Copenhagen, ending without an official deal. But the French managed to muster support for ambitious treaty language that called for limiting the Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels — and ideally to the safer threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).
In 2010, when the talks were in Cancún, then-Mexican President Felipe Calderón and his top diplomat, Patricia Espinosa, worked for months to lay the groundwork for the creation of the Green Climate Fund, which funnels money from wealthy nations to poorer ones to cope with the ravages of climate change.
Today, however, Calderón said he worries that the more ambitious goal of the Paris agreement is slipping out of reach, as prospects fade for any significant agreement at the talks in Egypt and the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to climb.
Kyte said this year’s conference has prompted some existential questions about whether the structure of these negotiations — cramming diplomats from nearly 200 nations in close quarters for two weeks to hammer out a deal to save the planet — needs to be fundamentally reexamined.
“There are some legitimate questions about how we organize these COPs,” she said. “You hear these questions asked every year, but especially in a year when it feels like the pace of progress is really wildly at odds with what we need.”
The U.N. holds a climate summit every year. Is it actually working? | 2022-11-17T11:37:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Egypt takes heat for hosting chaotic U.N. climate summit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/cop27-egypt-climate-conference/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/cop27-egypt-climate-conference/ |
Family of Bijan Ghaisar marks five years since Park Police killing
A civil suit still looms against the Park Police, and the two officers continue to refuse to answer questions about their actions
Bijan Ghaisar’s mother, Kelly Ghaisar, speaks as her husband James, daughter Kelly and son-in-law Kouros Emami hold a vigil at the Lincoln Memorial commemorating the two-year anniversary of their son's death in 2019. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Five years after two Park Police officers fatally shot Bijan Ghaisar in Fairfax County as he tried to drive away, the pain is still fresh for his family. The tears still flow from his father’s eyes, his mother still visits his grave daily, his sister still feels like their lives remain in limbo. They will gather at the Lincoln Memorial on Thursday night, as they have on the previous anniversaries, to again commemorate their sudden loss and reflect on a justice system that they say has failed to hold anyone accountable.
For families of homicide victims, the process of charging and trying a suspect is often about two years, sometimes more if a civil suit is involved. But for families of police shooting victims, the process is almost always much longer. Charging decisions sometimes take years, and subsequent trials or lawsuits create further distance to the end of the tunnel. When the Justice Department is involved, as opposed to local prosecutors, a decision on charging an officer takes an average of three years, a 2018 Washington Post analysis found.
The family of Bijan Ghaisar was shocked by the slow movement of the justice system. Ghaisar was an accountant who worked for his father in McLean, where he grew up, and had recently moved into his own apartment in Tysons. He was 25 when he was fatally shot and would now be 30. Though the officers who killed Ghaisar were criminally charged, a judge threw out the case even before any trial — deciding that it was “necessary and proper” for the police to fire their guns. Though the Park Police were sued in civil court, no settlement or trial occurred there either.
Family and friends baffled: How did a fun-loving, gun-hating, sports-crazy Buddhist wind up shot by police?
“As there has been virtually no accountability in the past five years,” Ghaisar’s sister Negeen Ghaisar said, “there has been no closure and no healing that I have felt in my brother’s murder. The pain is still raw for me, for everyone who loved Bijan and for anyone who wishes for this country’s systems to uphold their stated values.”
The Justice Department, which is defending the Park Police officers in the civil case, issued a statement Wednesday saying it “continues to express its sincerest condolences to the Ghaisar family for the death of their son.” The statement noted that even though it had not found evidence this year to reopen the case, it remained “committed to investigating allegations of unreasonable force by law enforcement officers.”
Video released by Fairfax County Police in January 2018 shows U.S. Park Police chasing, and shooting at Bijan Ghaisar's vehicle in 2017. (Video: Fairfax County Police Dept.)
With their civil suit against the Park Police, the Ghaisars are seeking to hold the police department accountable and to have the officers, Lucas Vinyard and Alejandro Amaya, answer their questions for the first time. They want to hear why Vinyard, 41, and Amaya, 43, fired 10 times into Bijan Ghaisar’s Jeep Grand Cherokee as he tried to slowly maneuver the Jeep around their marked police vehicle on Nov. 17, 2017. Ghaisar survived for 10 days in a coma before he died.
In civil suits, each side conducts pretrial depositions of the key witnesses on the other side so that the facts and arguments can be narrowed down for a judge or jury. But in the Ghaisars’ suit, the officers invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, while the criminal case against them was pending and refused to answer questions in depositions. The suit was then paused while the criminal case played out.
Now there are no criminal charges. The Justice Department, under both Attorney General William P. Barr (R) and Attorney General Merrick Garland (D), declined to pursue the case. In Virginia, a federal judge dismissed the criminal charges filed by the Fairfax County prosecutor’s office and newly elected Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) withdrew the state’s appeal.
Judge dismisses criminal charges against Park Police officers in Bijan Ghaisar slaying
So last month, the officers appeared for depositions again. And again, they refused to answer questions about why they shot Ghaisar, court records show. The officers are not defendants in the civil case, only the Park Police, but the fate of their jobs remains undecided after five years.
The Ghaisars have now asked the federal court in Alexandria to order Vinyard and Amaya to answer the questions. Their motion was referred to U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan Davis, who has previously taken a dim view of the Justice Department’s tactics, ordering their lawyers in 2020 to turn over the FBI investigative file to the Ghaisars’ lawyers within a week.
During the FBI’s investigation, Vinyard met with agents and gave a statement, and Amaya’s lawyer provided a “proffer” statement of his client’s version of events. Both officers claimed that Ghaisar drove his Jeep at Amaya, though the video shows that the Jeep slowly rolling away from the officer. An FBI re-creation of the shooting, submitted by Fairfax prosecutors, also showed that Amaya was not in the path of the Jeep, particularly when Vinyard ran into the scene from behind and fired the fatal shots.
Park Police officers claim Bijan Ghaisar drove at officer, prompting them to fatally shoot him
Senior U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton did not mention the FBI’s re-creation when he dismissed the criminal case in a short order last year. The order did not cite the briefs from either side and simply ruled: “The officers’ decision to discharge their firearms was necessary and proper under the circumstances and there is no evidence that the officers acted with malice, criminal intent, or any improper motivation.”
Now Hilton will rule on the Ghaisars’ civil case as well, after an error in the clerk’s office resulted in the criminal case being reassigned to him. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows private citizens to sue the federal government in certain circumstances, all cases are decided by judges rather than juries. So, no jury will ever see or rule on the five-minute video of the incident recorded by a Fairfax County police in-car camera.
Court records show that Ghaisar had been smoking marijuana as he headed south down the George Washington Memorial Parkway from McLean, and then drove away from a fender bender in Alexandria in which his Jeep stopped and was struck from behind by a Toyota Corolla. Vinyard and Amaya began pursuing Ghaisar south on the parkway and called for backup from Fairfax police. Police dispatch recordings show that the officers were told, and acknowledged, that Ghaisar was the victim in the fender bender, but both officers said in their proffers in 2019 that they didn’t know that.
Fairfax Lt. Dan Gohn joined the chase, and his camera captured two stops in which Ghaisar twice drove off as Amaya ran at the Jeep with his gun drawn. At the third stop, with Gohn’s cruiser directly behind Ghaisar’s Jeep, Vinyard stopped the Park Police vehicle in front of the Jeep, and when Ghaisar again tried to drive off, both officers fired five shots, federal prosecutors said, with four striking Ghaisar in the head.
Park Police officers who killed Bijan Ghaisar were told before pursuit he wasn’t suspect in fender bender
“The last five years have been indescribable,” said Kelly Ghaisar, Bijan Ghaisar’s mother. She has organized numerous protests outside the Interior Department, outside the Justice Department, even outside the police station where Amaya and Vinyard worked, seeking to have the officers charged or fired. Attorneys for Amaya and Vinyard declined to comment for this article.
“Losing a child is an unbearable experience with an everlasting effect,” Kelly Ghaisar said. “Yet losing Bijan was the worst way to lose a loved one, followed by betrayal of a country that I choose to call home.” She and her husband, James Ghaisar, immigrated in the 1980s from Iran, where her father was a police chief.
Disbelief is the emotion the Ghaisars have frequently expressed over the years, beginning with the knock on their door at 1 a.m. by two Park Police officers, five hours after the incident, telling them that their son had been involved in a shooting. Ghaisar was nonviolent and opposed to guns, his family said. The police wouldn’t tell them what happened, the Ghaisars said, and they learned only while watching the news in a hospital waiting room. The Park Police’s behavior for the first few days at the hospital, in which the Ghaisars said they were prevented from staying with or touching their comatose son, is part of their pending lawsuit.
The Park Police issued a short news release that morning, refused to identify the officers and have declined to discuss the incident ever since.
The Ghaisars were further in disbelief when they were shown the video of the shooting, which Kelly Ghaisar could not watch. They said they also could not believe that the Justice Department took two years to rule on the case and that a federal judge would ultimately say the officers’ actions were “necessary and proper.”
And the Ghaisars said they could not believe that after Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve T. Descano appealed the dismissal, state attorney general Miyares withdrew the appeal and dropped the case, saying that “persecuting the police was the wrong response.” The Ghaisars asked the Justice Department to reconsider charges but were twice rejected.
After the Justice Department’s second refusal to reconsider charges, Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the Interior Department’s inspector general in June to investigate. But the inspector general has declined to say whether he will take on the case.
Grassley, Warner call for inspector general probe of Bijan Ghaisar killing
“When people ask me how I am doing,” Kelly Ghaisar said, “my answer is: I was much better last year at this time,” before the actions by Miyares and the Justice Department. “I am angry and even more fired up for justice that has been delayed and denied.”
Vinyard and Amaya remain on paid administrative leave, a Park Police spokesman said, and have not returned to active duty since the shooting. They have not spoken publicly about the case. The Park Police have never conducted an internal affairs investigation of the case. Instead, the Interior Department last year simply informed Vinyard and Amaya that they would be fired for violating policy. The officers challenged the firing, saying it violated established procedures for investigating and disciplining officers, and the case remains pending. | 2022-11-17T11:37:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bijan Ghaisar family marks 5th anniversary of his killing by Park Police - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/ghaisar-five-year-anniversary-killing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/ghaisar-five-year-anniversary-killing/ |
(Ali Kamara for The Washington Post)
U.S. fans
Embassy events
Country-specific bars
General soccer viewing
Like many American soccer fans, Jake Didinsky can tell you exactly where they were when the U.S. men’s national team crashed to defeat against Trinidad and Tobago in October 2017, guaranteeing the U.S. wouldn’t qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Didinsky, then a college student, was working with the St. Petersburg, Fla., branch of the American Outlaws, the unofficial U.S. supporters group, watching in the Outlaws’ regular bar: “I sat in that bar, and I was crushed. I was devastated. I didn’t know how to process it.” Didinsky “checked out” of following soccer for a year. The next summer, when the world watched France lift the gold trophy, “I didn’t watch that World Cup,” Didinsky says. “I really just had no interest.”
But this year is different, and not just because the tournament is being held in the fall, thanks to the weather in the host nation of Qatar. With an exciting, sometimes erratic young team built around the talents of Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie, Didinsky, now the vice president of D.C.’s American Outlaws group, says interest in the team is sky high again — so much so that the Outlaws have arranged for four “overflow” bars where they’ll send fans if, and when, their home base, Astro Beer Hall, hits capacity. (If you remember lines forming hours before games in 2014, you’ll understand why.)
Fans across the world are experiencing this kind of excitement and hope as 32 teams prepare to face off in Qatar. Over the next four weeks, supporters wearing jerseys and face paint will pack into restaurants and bars for viewing parties full of loud chants, waving flags and, hopefully, lusty cheers at the final whistle.
The question, though, is which matches, and which bars? The time difference between Qatar and Washington is eight hours, which means the first round of matches will predominantly kick off at 5 a.m., 8 a.m., 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., resulting in some very early mornings for fans. A number of bars have announced schedules that revolve around the daily 2 p.m. matches, hoping to lure fans who are “working from home,” or those who can slip out of the office a few hours early. (The United States, coincidentally, lucked into having all three of its group stage games fall into the magical 2 p.m. time slot.)
As of press time, 100 D.C. bars and nightspots have applied for special licenses that will allow them to stay open around-the-clock between Nov. 20 and Dec. 18 and serve alcohol from 6 a.m. to 4 a.m. There are two caveats, of course: Not every bar that received licenses will actually pour drinks 22 hours per day — they just have permission to do so, so check websites and social media for updates. Also, take a minute to think before heading to one of them to watch Kylian Mbappé: The list, available on the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration’s website, abra.dc.gov, includes such decidedly non-sports bars as Flash, Madam’s Organ and Good Guys.
For fans of the U.S. team, the basement of Astro Beer Hall is the place to be, opening at 6 a.m. and operating with a “U.S. fans only” policy, though fans of opposing teams are welcome in the smaller, presumably less rowdy street-level bar. Didinsky and the American Outlaws’ World Cup organizing committee have been working overtime, partnering with Sterling’s Beltway Brewing on Yanks American Lager, which is packaged in eight different cans resembling classic U.S. jerseys, and creating limited-edition scarves for each first-round match, as well as U.S.-inspired jerseys and hats.
The Outlaws’ reputation precedes them: During the 2014 World Cup, lines of fans carrying Captain America shields and wearing American flag capes stretched down the block before doors opened. This year, Didinsky says, the organization is planning for crowds, enlisting four other bars to serve as “overflow bar partners”: Public Bar Live, Penn Social, Franklin Hall and Clubhouse Georgetown. When Astro hits capacity, Didinsky plans to post that on social media, so fans on their way can reroute to one of the other bars. The easiest way to guarantee access remains early arrival.
Astro Beer Hall is open to fans of all ages, though the Outlaws do warn that there could be “adult language” from time to time.
If the U.S. makes it further into the tournament, the Outlaws might move their main bar to a larger venue, but Didinsky has banned that topic for now: “I don’t want to make any official announcement or decision until we actually get out of the group, after living through Trinidad and Tobago.”
The United States plays on Nov. 21, 25 and 29 at 2 p.m. Astro Beer Hall, 1306 G St. NW. astrobeerhall.com. Free.
Other places flying the flag for the red, white and blue:
If the projection screen at your local bar isn’t big enough, consider Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, which is showing U.S. games on a movie screen. Admission is free, though the theater notes on its website that seating is first come, first served.
Georgetown’s Pizzeria Paradiso will open its basement game room 30 minutes before every U.S. first-round match. Specials include $20 for a nine-inch pizza and a draft beer, or $35 for unlimited pizza and four beers.
Boundary Stone is opening for every 2 p.m. game, but the Bloomingdale pub will open earlier if the United States makes it out of its group. Happy hour during games includes $5 local beers and $6 wines and draft cocktails.
The international nature of the World Cup has always been on full display in Washington. One of my favorite World Cup memories involved tucking into party subs and a cooler full of beer during a late-night viewing party at the Embassy of the Ivory Coast in 2014, and I still talk about how friends and I were showered with free-flowing champagne during a raucous party at the French Embassy after Les Bleus won the 2018 tournament. But this year, for security or logistical reasons, public viewing parties at embassies seem to be few and far between. Filling the gap, to a large degree, is Wunder Garten, a mostly outdoor beer garden in NoMa.
Wunder Garten shot to soccer fame during the 2018 World Cup, when new D.C. United signing Wayne Rooney went straight from Dulles Airport to a viewing party organized by the embassies of Belgium and the U.K. During last year’s European Championship, it hosted events during England, France and Germany matches, showing the action on large TVs and a projection screen while embassy staffers handed out tchotchkes such as flags, T-shirts and, in Germany’s case, half-liter beer mugs.
During the first phase of this World Cup, Wunder Garten’s schedule includes viewing parties with the embassies of Australia, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K. and Uruguay. So how did a 13,000-square-foot beer garden become the United Nations of the World Cup? “Word of mouth,” explains event coordinator Ben McEvoy. After good experiences with the U.K. and Germany, he asked their staff to contact colleagues at other embassies about hosting or co-hosting viewing parties there. He also reached out to embassies himself via Instagram and Twitter: “It’s like shooting your shot, you know?” McEvoy says the bar plans to change the menu for events, offering country-specific beers or snacks; for example, José Andrés’s Pepe food truck is slated to make an appearance when Spain takes on Germany on Nov. 27.
The big difference between Wunder Garten’s previous hosting experiences and this one will be the weather: It’s much nicer to sit outdoors at long, Oktoberfest-style tables in June than in November. McEvoy says Wunder Garten has ordered new fire pits and heaters and plans to add a third tent to help keep fans warm and dry. Wunder Garten plans to be open for most daily 2 p.m. matches, as well as the 11 a.m. kickoffs on Saturday and Sunday. “Once the first round is over and we start seeing where other teams are going and what times they are, we’ll continue watch parties with them,” McEvoy says.
Other official and quasi-official gatherings include the French Embassy supporting parties at Penn Social, and the Croatia matches at Clubhouse (see below), which were reposted by the embassy’s social media accounts.
Wunder Garten, 1101 First St. NE. Full schedule of matches on wundergartendc.com. Free.
Every four years, restaurants and bars throughout the D.C. area become virtual embassies for faraway teams. Sometimes there’s a natural fit between fans and businesses — where else would you expect to watch Germany other than an enormous beer garden with beers served by the liter? — but sometimes the connections are tenuous at best. There’s nothing particularly Dutch about Elephant & Castle, a sporty British-inspired pub near Federal Triangle. But it’s the go-to spot for orange-clad supporters of the Netherlands, who are looking forward to watching games there after missing the tournament in 2018.
The 2021 closure of soccer hot spot Lucky Bar has hit the scene hard: It was the usual gathering place for a number of fan groups, including the easygoing Denmark supporters known as Roligans. “Unfortunately, I am not aware of where you might find some Roligans this year,” writes Frederikke Rorvang Mikkelsen of the Danish Embassy. “The Embassy is not involved in any events related to the World Cup.”
If you’re looking to support a specific team, here are some ideas. Just call ahead before heading to your favorite themed restaurant: Granville Moore’s on H Street NE, known for Belgian beers and bowls of mussels, isn’t sure whether it will open for early rounds due to lack of staff.
Argentina: El Patio, the decades-old Argentine restaurant and bakery in Rockville, is opening its doors early for the 5 a.m. clash between Argentina and Saudi Arabia on Nov. 22 — no reservations are taken — but notes that matches that don’t feature La Albiceleste will be shown only “if they fall within our [regular] business hours.” 5240 Randolph Rd., Rockville.
Belgium: Belga Cafe is opening for all Belgium games. The Nov. 27 game against Morocco, which kicks off at 8 a.m., promises “Beermosas” made with the famous Duvel strong ale. 514 Eighth St. SE.
Brazil: The Grill From Ipanema has long been a stronghold for Brazil fans, and the Adams Morgan restaurant is opening early to show all three first-round matches. Reservations are strongly suggested, and the Grill will open at noon Nov. 24 for Brazil’s opening 2 p.m. match against Serbia. 1858 Columbia Rd. NW.
Croatia: Four years ago, the Association of Croatian American Professionals took over Church Hall in Georgetown to watch its favorite team, with lines of red-and-white checkerboard jerseys running to M Street. The group is back at the same bar — now called Clubhouse Georgetown — and hosting more events, which have been promoted on the Croatian Embassy’s social media. Tickets for game watches against Belgium and Canada are $15 in advance through Eventbrite, with proceeds benefiting a children’s home in Croatia. Look for live Croatian music at halftime and a special menu with Croatian liqueurs. 1070 Wisconsin Ave. NW.
England: The Queen Vic, which attracted long lines during England’s run to the European Championship Final in 2021, opens early for all of England’s matches and all 2 p.m. games featuring Wales and the United States. Of note: Reservations are already full for the U.S.-England match. 1206 H St. NE.
France: The French expat organization l’Union des Français de l'Étranger has organized game-watching events at Penn Social in tournaments past, and it’ll be cheering for Les Bleus again on at least three occasions, with drink specials including $6 Kronenbourg. Free tickets are available through Eventbrite. 801 E St. NW.
Germany: Biergarten Haus is opening for every game starting at 8 a.m. or later, complete with limited breakfast and appetizer menus, but the biggest crowds arrive when Germany takes the field. The H Street beer garden takes reservations only for parties of 10 or more — everything else is first come, first seated. 1355 H St. NE.
Mexico: While Public Bar Live is opening for every game, expect a sea of green whenever El Tri plays. Local Meetup group Mexicanos in D.C. has arranged for all Mexico games to be played on the downtown sports bar’s biggest screen with Spanish-language commentary. 1214 18th St. NW.
Netherlands: Elephant & Castle welcomes fans of the Netherlands — just wear orange and you’ll fit in. The match on Black Friday against Ecuador has been confirmed for a viewing party; check the website dcdutch.org for updates. (The pub will be open for matches starting at 10 a.m. or later, as well as England’s 8 a.m. game against Iran.) 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.
For longtime D.C. soccer fans, this will be a very different World Cup. In the years since France lifted the trophy in 2018, the local soccer bar scene has been decimated by a combination of the pandemic and rent increases. A minute’s silence, please, for Summers, the Arlington restaurant that had been welcoming dedicated soccer fans since the 1980s; Lucky Bar, D.C.’s go-to soccer viewing destination for a wide variety of national and club teams; and Fado, the Irish pub that was a fixture for early-morning matches for more than two decades. Even up-and-coming soccer bars that felt relatively fresh during the last tournament, such as Ivy City’s Dock FC and Columbia Heights’ the Airedale, are no longer in business.
Spare a thought for Ireland’s Four Courts, the Arlington pub that had become one of the area’s most important soccer destinations but remains closed since a car drove through the front of the building in August, sending multiple people to the hospital. The Four Courts isn’t expected to reopen until next year.
So what is a soccer fan to do? The truth is, if you just want to watch a random game, you’ll probably be able to do so at any open bar or restaurant, since all matches are on Fox or FS1, with Spanish-language commentary on Telemundo. Multiple TVs aren’t really important, as the only time games are played simultaneously is the last game of the first round.
The key word there, though, is any open bar or restaurant. Many bars and restaurants will be targeting lunchtime crowds or the 2 p.m. kickoffs, not the early-morning matches. Peter Bayne, one of the founders of the Tin Shop group, which operates Franklin Hall, Penn Social and other D.C. bars, blames the “tight labor situation.”
“Having people come in at 9 a.m. so we can open up at 10 a.m. is getting harder and harder, especially after the pandemic,” he says, so he’s forgoing the earliest, and presumably less busy, matches. “We just can’t staff the earlier games.”
Bayne’s restaurants are taking different approaches: Franklin Hall opens at 10:30 daily in the early stages, showing 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. broadcasts. Astro Beer Hall opens at 6 a.m. on U.S. match days and 8 a.m. other days. Penn Social will open only for matches featuring France (the vast Penn Quarter bar is partnering with an organization for French expats) and the United States, and 2 p.m. games on Nov. 23 and 27, when it’s partnering with local nonprofit D.C. Scores for fundraising watch parties.
Across the Pond: The Dupont pub has become a fixture on the local soccer scene, hosting supporters groups from the Premier League and Bundesliga, and showing matches from across Europe. It’s opening for 8 a.m. games every day except Thanksgiving and offering limited breakfast menus. Lunch will be offered for matches beginning at 11. Reservations will be required for bigger matches, such as the United States vs. England. 1732 Connecticut Ave. NW.
Blackfinn: The bar near Farragut Square is no stranger to American football — weekends bring Kansas City Chiefs fans to watch games on numerous big screens — but Blackfinn is going all out for the other kind of football this month, announcing doors will even open for 5 a.m. games, with food and drink specials. 1620 I St. NW.
Caesars Sportsbook at Capital One Arena: Washington’s first stadium sports book, which recently added “Guy Fieri’s DC Kitchen + Bar” to its two levels of big screens and gambling kiosks, will be open for all 5 a.m. matches and open at 7 a.m. on other days. It received permission from the D.C. government to stay open around-the-clock. Look for a menu of breakfast burgers and burritos, as well as Bloody Marys, and daily specials and giveaways. 601 F St. NW.
Duffy’s Irish Pub: Duffy’s plans to open daily for 11 a.m. games, except on Thanksgiving, when it is closed. Starting Nov. 29, the Dupont pub opens for 10 a.m. matches. The pub is selling $42 tickets for the U.S.-England match that include a guaranteed seat and a limited open bar on beer and cider for the duration of the game. 2153 P St. NW.
Le Fantome food hall: The new Le Fantome food hall in Riverdale Park already opens at 7 a.m. daily, so a few 8 a.m. games won’t even raise an eyebrow. Order a sausage and egg sandwich or another breakfast sandwich from Sonny & Sons, a new hot-chicken-focused establishment from chef Kevin Sbraga, and spike your coffee for $1. Beers at the bar are $5 during all matches. 4501 Woodberry St., Riverdale.
Franklin Hall: Franklin Hall just added 2,400 more square feet of TVs, pool tables and bar space. It’s opening at 10:30 for 11 a.m. kickoffs, and once the calendar switches to just 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. matches, it’ll open at 9:30. Specials include $6 pints of Silver Branch’s soccer-themed Chasing the Cup lager, $6 Tito’s and Captain Morgan cocktails, and $9 nachos. Of note: This is an overflow bar for the American Outlaws and could get busy when the United States plays. 1348 Florida Ave. NW.
Grand Central: This sports-bar-with-a-sports-book in Adams Morgan received permission to open at 8 a.m. and is offering discounted drinks during all games, including $6 beers and $3 Jell-O shots. It’s extending hours for wagering, too. 2447 18th St. NW.
Inca Social: Peru, the home team at Inca Social, didn’t make the World Cup after losing a playoff to Australia. Still, the restaurant, which has locations in Arlington and Vienna, is showing 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. kickoffs on its projection screen, with sound. 1776 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, and 2670 Avenir Pl., Vienna.
Ivy and Coney: Though it’s best known for showing Michigan football and teams from Detroit and Chicago, Ivy and Coney announced on Twitter that “we’re open for anything 10 a.m. or later, closed for Thanksgiving, super busy if Michigan is also playing, and open for everything Round of 16 and later.” (Basically, skip the Shaw pub on Nov. 26, when Michigan faces Ohio State.) 1537 Seventh St. NW.
Last Call: From free food to all-day drink specials, Last Call is offering plenty of incentives to get customers to watch matches near Union Market. Show up for the Qatar-Ecuador game at 11 a.m. Nov. 20, or rise and shine for the 8 a.m. England-Iran showdown on Nov. 21, and get rewarded with free Buffalo and Bergen bagels. There’s a new special each day, such as a chips and queso bar and $6 tequila drinks when Mexico plays on Nov. 22, a choice of free hot dogs or bangers and discounted bourbon and gin and tonics when the United States and England face off on Nov. 25, and free bratwurst during Germany vs. Spain on Nov. 27. Doors open at 7:30 a.m. on days when there’s an 8 a.m. game, except for Nov. 24, when the bar is closed for Thanksgiving. 1301-A Fourth St. NE.
Lou’s City Bar: Lou’s has been getting more practice opening early for soccer since it became D.C.’s official Arsenal bar earlier this year. The Columbia Heights bar, which has two dozen TVs inside and on a covered patio, opens at 10:45 a.m. during the first week of the tournament, showing all 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. kickoffs, then at 9:45 a.m. beginning Nov. 29. 1400 Irving St. NW.
Midlands Beer Garden: The Midlands is opening at 8 a.m. for early games except on Thanksgiving. The kitchen doesn’t open until 2 p.m. on weekdays, so fans are encouraged to bring their own carryout or grab a bagel from Call Your Mother down the block. Games will be shown with sound indoors and out, except during the Michigan-Ohio State game on Nov. 26. (Like Ivy and Coney, the Midlands is a Michigan bar.) Drink specials include $1 off Paulaner; note that happy hour begins at 1 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. 3333 Georgia Ave. NW.
Public Bar Live: One of the first bars to announce it was staying open around-the-clock during the tournament, Public Bar plans to show every game, including the 5 a.m. kickoffs, and offer food and drinks until the wee hours, though alcohol is forbidden between 4 and 6 a.m. Note that this is a gathering spot for Mexico fans and an overflow bar for the American Outlaws, and may be crowded during those matches. 1214 18th St. NW.
The Roost: The Roost’s Cameo coffee shop and Red Apron Butcher open daily for breakfast at 8 a.m. During the World Cup, the Potomac Avenue food hall’s Hi-Fi Taco and Shelter beer bar will be joining them to welcome early morning crowds. Look for bodega sandwiches, breakfast tacos, and $5 beers from Shelter’s stellar selection of low-ABV drafts and cask ales during all matches. Note that the Roost will be closed on Thanksgiving Day. 1401 Pennsylvania Ave. SE.
Solace Outpost: Solace Brewing’s first D.C. location, which became the District’s official Manchester United bar earlier this year, will open to show every game at 8 a.m. or later, except on Thanksgiving Day, when the bar is closed. Grab a pint of the exclusive Red Devils DC Lager while you watch. 71 Potomac Ave. SE.
Walters: The sports bar across from Nationals Park, which boasts a 220-inch screen, is opening for every match that begins at 10 a.m. or later. 10 N St. SE.
The World Cup is about spectacle, and not just the action on the field. If you’d prefer to do more than just watch games in a bar, there are opportunities to do so.
The first Soccer in the Circle outdoor viewing party was held in the middle of Dupont Circle during the 2010 World Cup, drawing hundreds of fans to watch the United States draw with England. In 2014, with the support of the German Embassy, an enormous U.S.-supporting crowd cheered their team despite a loss to the eventual champions. On Nov. 21, the Welsh government is among the sponsors for a seven-hour Soccer in the Circle party. The centerpiece is the 2 p.m. match between the United States and Wales, but it also features a DJ spinning Welsh and American music, a painting collaboration with Welsh and American artists, Welsh food, and, as an appetizer, the 11 a.m. match between the Netherlands and Senegal. Nov. 21 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dupont Circle NW. dupontfestival.org. Free.
Roger Bennett and Michael Davies are the “Men in Blazers,” two British-born soccer pundits with a penchant for puns and pop culture references. Their popular podcast and Peacock TV show, which are predominantly about the Premier League and the U.S. national teams, have been a gateway drug for American soccer fans, and the duo also hosts live events, including a sold-out appearance at the Lincoln Theatre in July, featuring members of Bennett’s beloved Everton squad. Bennett and Davies, known affectionately as Rog and Davo, are taking the show on the road again during the World Cup, visiting 10 cities as part of the This Cup’s For You Tour. Expect special guests and recaps of the day’s action at Capital Turnaround, as well as plenty of beer. Jerseys and blazers welcome. Nov. 26 at 8 p.m. Capital Turnaround, 770 M St. SE. meninblazers.com. $50-$90.
If your dog loves Lionel Messi or Christian Pulisic as much as you do, bring it to the World Pup party at the dog-friendly Barkhaus bar on Nov. 20. The soccer-themed event, held during the first World Cup match between Qatar and Ecuador, includes photo ops, a food truck for dogs, free puppuccinos, and food and drink specials for humans, too. Dress your four-legged friend in an international outfit to win prizes, or fill out a World Cup bracket. A portion of the day’s proceeds benefits Action Against Hunger. Nov. 20 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Barkhaus, 529 E. Howell Ave., Alexandria. brewskisbarkhaus.com. Free. | 2022-11-17T11:37:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where to watch the World Cup in D.C.: Bars, embassy parties, special events - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/where-watch-world-cup-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/where-watch-world-cup-dc/ |
The LDS Church’s support for the LGBTQ marriage bill isn’t shocking
The church has increasingly supported LGBTQ rights — so long as it’s free to police boundaries for its members
Perspective by Benjamin E. Park
Benjamin E. Park is the editor of "A Companion to American Religious History" (Blackwell), co-editor of Mormon Studies Review and assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His award-winning book, "Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier," is now out in paperback.
The Salt Lake Temple in Utah in 2015. (Rick Bowmer/AP)
But that didn’t mean the church began supporting LGBTQ marriage. Instead, it decided to cede the broader legal terrain to cement its control over those within its fold. It began pursuing two distinct, yet closely related, initiatives: first, a push to carve out legal exemptions to equality laws under the umbrella of “religious liberty” and second, to reaffirm internal boundaries regarding their members’ sexuality. In 2015, the Church supported a bill heralded as the “Utah compromise” that LDS leaders claimed protected LGBTQ individuals while safeguarding the rights of religious institutions. These rights included exempting institutions like Brigham Young University from implementing policies enforcing LGBTQ equality, as well as assuring the church’s tax-exempt status. In the following years, the church also supported an LGBTQ -nclusive hate crimes law as well as a ban on conversion therapy.
While this demand might seem to contradict support for the Respect for Marriage Act, the two initiatives are actually interdependent: The faith is willing to make legal concessions only insofar as it is granted religious exemptions that enable cultural retrenchment. Agreeing not to oppose LGBTQ civil rights secures the space required for policing internal boundaries. Even the church’s statement supporting the new bill reaffirms that its doctrine “related to marriage between a man and a woman … will remain unchanged”; what has changed is that church leaders are no longer dedicated to imposing those same priorities on non-Mormons. | 2022-11-17T11:37:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The LDS Church’s support for the LGBTQ marriage bill isn’t shocking - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/11/17/lds-church-lgbtq-marriage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/11/17/lds-church-lgbtq-marriage/ |
Michigan Democrats can reignite their state’s vaunted labor tradition
A historic victory in the midterm elections will let Democrats repeal the state’s right-to-work laws and return to its labor roots
Perspective by Ken Wohl
Ken Wohl is a PhD candidate in history at Stony Brook University. His work focuses on the political and labor history of the New Deal.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist celebrate during an election-night party in Detroit on Nov. 9. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
One of the brightest spots on a surprisingly good election night for Democrats came in Michigan. There, they swept the statewide offices on the ballot, captured control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1983 and passed multiple liberal referendums, including one adding protection for reproductive rights to the state constitution.
Barring some change during the next two years, it will be the first time since 1937-1939 that Democrats have had complete control of the legislative process in Michigan for a full term. Reporting indicates that Democrats plan to use this newfound power to repeal the state’s right-to-work laws. That would be a fitting move for a state that was often closely associated with unionism, labor rights and the New Deal. The right-to-work laws epitomize how Michigan — and the United States — shifted away from New Deal labor politics in the second half of the 20th century. Returning to a focus on economic and labor justice in the former hotbed of unionism may help jump-start a return to New Deal labor policies and begin to address our current economic inequalities and struggles.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt won Michigan in 1932, it was the first time the state had ever chosen a Democrat for president. Roosevelt’s ascendancy in Michigan perfectly epitomized the new political coalition he put together outside the South: voters of all races in Detroit and White working-class voters in small and medium-size industrial towns that exemplified the Midwest.
Labor unions were at the heart of this coalition, propelling Democrats to major gains. Roosevelt was a champion of unions. He argued that strong and robust unions were not only needed to counter the Great Depression and ensure labor rights for workers, but also were “one of the characteristics of a free and democratic modern nation.”
Roosevelt backed this rhetoric with action. The most famous and important of his New Deal labor policies was the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, otherwise known as the Wagner Act. The law guaranteed workers the right to join a union and collectively bargain, and it created the National Labor Relations Board to ensure companies followed these provisions. The Wagner Act gave a growing industrial workforce new and vital protections, while also increasing the power of labor unions themselves.
Before the New Deal, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) dominated American labor. But without backing from the federal government, the AFL largely only unionized skilled (often White) male workers — those whose labor was valuable enough to employers to make their collective bargaining efforts effective. Meanwhile, the majority of the nation’s unskilled (often not White) male and female workers lacked the leverage to make their unionization attempts effective.
In response to the New Deal’s support of labor rights, however, unskilled workers gained the necessary leverage to form a new labor federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which grew to challenge the AFL for labor supremacy. While the two federations have since merged, in the 1930s, the AFL was more conservative and traditional, resisting efforts to break down gender and racial barriers in the workforce. In comparison, the CIO was further left, with its leadership ranks often filled by communists and socialists. It was much more willing to engage in sit-ins, wildcat strikes and other militant actions to demand change and progress. Across the Midwest, particularly in Michigan, the CIO found success and power through the United Auto Workers of America.
Strikes, such as the 1936-1937 Flint strike, ended in victory for the UAW and further increased their power and influence. Encouraged by the success of these actions, the CIO successfully pressured the Roosevelt administration to push leftward on labor rights and for more substantial union power. And it often found a sympathetic ear. In 1938, Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a minimum wage and standardized time-and-a-half overtime pay laws.
These labor and economic policies strengthened the labor movement. In the eight years between Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1932 and America’s entry into World War II, union membership in the United States increased from approximately 3 million to almost 10 million.
During and after World War II, Michigan and specifically Detroit were economic centers that represented the dreams of the New Deal and how intertwined they were with labor unions. Detroit became the epitome of the “Arsenal of Democracy,” an example of unionized workers living out the American Dream and fulfilling the promise of American exceptionalism. In the immediate post-World War II era, unions helped create the middle class by raising the standards of living and shrinking income inequality.
But the aggressive tactics of the CIO and the growing might of unions made conservatives and business leaders determined to curb their power at the first available opportunity. It came in 1947, when a Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry S. Truman’s veto. The law eliminated unions’ right to engage in wildcat strikes and other more militant forms of protest. In addition, the act empowered individual states to establish right-to-work laws. These laws allowed individual workers covered under union contracts to opt out of paying dues — while forcing unions to give them the same benefits and services anyway. This arrangement left unions with less money to spend on contract negotiations, political organization or legal defenses, reducing their power and ability to demand change.
Many of the first states to adopt right-to-work laws were in the South, where industry was more sparse and, even during the New Deal, support for unions was lower. The conservative Democrats who dominated the region feared that the labor movement and union power would lead to Black radicalization and increased efforts to end Jim Crow segregation.
Unions continued to maintain more power in the industrial Midwest. But even there, union strength faded during the second half of the 20th century. Deindustrialization, suburbanization and racial tensions weakened cities, which had formed the bedrock of labor union influence. The decline of union power was accompanied by a deterioration of the middle class and a new rise in economic inequality.
At the same time, the historical connection dating to the New Deal between industrial unions and the Democratic Party began to fray. The electoral success of Ronald Reagan turned many of the White working-class industrial voters who had made up the backbone of the New Deal coalition into “Reagan Democrats.” Despite these shifting political winds, the industrial Midwest’s labor history was deeply rooted, and the region continued to resist the conservative urge to enact right-to-work laws — even on the few occasions when Republicans gained complete control of the legislative process in Michigan.
This resistance to right-to-work laws faded in the 21st century. In 2012, a Republican legislature passed, and Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed, two right-to-work laws in Michigan. One law targeted private employees, while the other targeted public employees, marking the first time a Midwestern state had passed such laws — although others have since followed suit. In recent years, the relationship between unions and the Democratic Party has only continued to unravel, including in 2016, when union households often supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
The New Deal coalition of the 1930s is long dead both in Michigan and across the country. Even Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s double-digit win on Nov. 8 relied on very different voters from those who had propelled Roosevelt’s success in the state. Winning Detroit was central to both campaigns, but Detroit’s electoral power is far less in 2022 than it was in the 1930s. And while Roosevelt swept the Upper Peninsula and won counties across the state, Whitmer relied on college towns and exploding suburban populations that have been trending leftward.
Repealing the state’s right-to-work laws probably won’t lure the White working-class towns that have gone Republican back to the Democratic Party — because many working-class voters are no longer unionized, and paying compulsory dues for those who are in a union is unlikely to be a popular move in the current economic climate. But such a move could encourage a new push for unionization, one including fast-food and warehouse workers, which would help address growing economic inequality and lead to a higher quality of living. Michigan was once the hotbed of union and labor activity. Now, with full Democratic control of the state, it may be the best and only time for Michigan to reclaim its role as a champion of labor. | 2022-11-17T11:37:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michigan Democrats can reignite their state’s vaunted labor tradition - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/11/17/michigan-labor-right-to-work/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/11/17/michigan-labor-right-to-work/ |
Allen Weisselberg testifies at Trump Organization’s N.Y. fraud trial
Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's former chief financial officer, arrives to court in New York on Nov. 15. (Julia Nikhinson/AP)
NEW YORK — Allen Weisselberg, the longtime finance chief at Donald Trump’s real estate, golf resort and hospitality company, is expected to resume his testimony as a prosecution witness Thursday in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial.
Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty in August to evading taxes and has been promised a sentence of five months in jail in exchange for testifying, began his testimony Tuesday.
Prosecutors intend to show that the tax schemes Weisselberg orchestrated for himself and other Trump Organization executives were beneficial to the former president’s namesake company. The company is on trial in New York Supreme Court on charges involving scheme to defraud, conspiracy, criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records.
Weisselberg said during testimony Tuesday that the Trump Organization saved money when he built untaxed forms of compensation into his salary and hefty annual bonus, reducing his tax liability. At present, he earns $640,000 and his last bonus was $500,000.
Weisselberg, who has admitted to avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in income from 2005 to 2017, said the Trump Organization would have had to greatly increase the amount he took in untaxed expenses to compensate for the pay he would lose by following tax laws.
The company “would have had to give me double the amount of those expenses,” he said.
Weisselberg is on a paid leave of absence and Eric Trump, the former president’s son who now runs the company, will decide his bonus at the end of the year. Still in the company’s good graces, Weisselberg said there was a modest birthday party for him at the Trump Tower offices in August, shortly after his plea deal was finalized.
Weisselberg’s testimony touched on his direct dealings with the former president during the course of the alleged scheme, although prosecutors have not said Trump knew Weisselberg was orchestrating tax avoidance maneuvers, allegedly acting on behalf of himself and the Trump Organization.
Trump is not considered a conspirator in the alleged scheme. Jurors have seen evidence that Trump, as owner of Trump Organization, signed off on a number of large transactions relevant to the case. Weisselberg testified that before Trump’s presidency beginning in 2017, Weisselberg reported directly to Trump and met daily with him, having talks that “ran the gamut” from “football to business transactions … to things we wanted to do in the future.”
Trump approved some of the major expenses Weisselberg used to cheat state and federal tax authorities, but prosecutors have not alleged that the former president was aware of Weisselberg’s failure to include the expenses as income on his W2 form. Weisselberg said it was Trump’s suggestion for Weisselberg and his wife to move to a luxury apartment along the Hudson River in 2005 to cut down his commute time to and from Long Island and to make his life easier.
That apartment was among the many personal costs Weisselberg filtered through the business that should have been reported as income but wasn’t. He also illegally used pretax funds to pay for his grandchildren’s tuition at an elite Manhattan private school, which now costs $60,000 per year, Mercedes Benzes for himself and his wife, furniture and other items.
Weisselberg began working for the Trump family nearly 50 years ago — first for Trump’s father, Fred, who built and managed rental properties in New York City.
Lawyers for the Trump Organization have argued that Weisselberg’s conduct was to the benefit of himself — not the business — and that the company is not criminally liable.
The trial started with jury selection on Oct. 24 and is likely to conclude in December. Trump Organization could be on the hook for $1.6 million in fines if convicted.
Trump, Weisselberg and three of Trump’s adult children have separately been sued by the New York Attorney General’s office on allegations of other fraudulent business practices.
Trump on Tuesday announced his 2024 candidacy for U.S. president at Mar-a-Lago, his Trump Organization-operated resort in Palm Beach, Fla. | 2022-11-17T11:37:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Allen Weisselberg testifies at Trump Organization’s N.Y. fraud trial - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/17/trump-organization-weisselberg/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/17/trump-organization-weisselberg/ |
The stunning collapse of the world’s third-largest exchange has forced lawmakers to reckon with the costs of legislative inaction
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, testifies during a Senate hearing in February. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
The sudden collapse of one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges rattled the nation’s capital this week, as lawmakers grappled with the wide-ranging fallout — and began to confront the consequences of neglecting the surging financial sector.
In response, investigators in the United States and abroad have opened probes into Bankman-Fried and his holdings. The Treasury Department has quietly placed calls to other large crypto exchanges to assess the risks of a broader contagion. And a slew of congressional committees have readied their own reviews, including a House inquiry announced Wednesday that could see Bankman-Fried testify under oath next month.
In the process, federal policymakers have been left to ask themselves a familiar, if uncomfortable question: Could they have prevented a crisis if they had paid close attention sooner?
“Over the years, the regulators . . . sorta invited them in, these crypto companies, and we’ve seen the damage they’ve caused,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), leader of the Senate Banking Committee.
Brown called for comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation, something that Congress repeatedly has proposed as the sector grew, yet time and again has failed to achieve in the face of staunch industry lobbying. In that time, a wide array of crypto firms have experienced meteoric rises — and once-unfathomable collapses — on the promise of great wealth that didn’t always materialize.
Still, Brown remained bullish that Congress could rein in cryptocurrency companies that have put investors large and small at risk: “They need to be held accountable.”
From the burst of the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millennium to the rampant privacy mishaps at Facebook decades later, federal policymakers historically have been slow to anticipate the troubles of the digital age. Only after massive, costly scandals have lawmakers and regulators been stirred to action, sometimes with less-than-desirable results.
The nascent world of cryptocurrency — where digital tokens replace dollars, investments and payments, all without the need for traders, governments or banks — has presented perhaps the most complicated challenge to date. As an entirely new financial system has come online, Washington has been forced to choose whether to institute stringent rules on crypto or stay out of Silicon Valley’s way.
The U.S. government largely has adopted the latter approach, much to the relief of crypto companies, executives and investors. That has enabled the rapid growth and soaring valuations of bitcoin, a wide array of related currencies and an entire ecosystem of firms to support them. Until recently, that included FTX, a marketplace for buying and selling tokens that boasted its own currency — an exchange that at its height was the third-largest in the world.
But the peril of that approach came into sharp relief as FTX began to unravel. Questions about its finances — and whether Bankman-Fried used FTX deposits in potentially illegal ways — prompted large investors to sell off their FTX-issued tokens, known as FTT. With nowhere to turn and losses mounting, Bankman-Fried filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, setting off a cascading effect that has hammered Silicon Valley venture firms and start-ups that depended on FTX. Other crypto exchanges soon after found themselves at risk, with their own assets tied up in the fallout.
The shift began Tuesday, as lawmakers sorted out the repercussions of the 2022 elections. At a news conference normally reserved for Democratic leaders to lob political barbs and issue policy announcements, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the caucus chair, said the party had plenty of priorities in the waning weeks of the year — and “the situation related to the cryptocurrency industry will be one of them.”
The House Financial Services Committee, led by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), later announced its plans to hold a hearing on FTX, potentially featuring Bankman-Fried’s testimony. “Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year,” lamented Waters, describing an “urgency” to act.
Across the Capitol, the fallout from FTX quickly overshadowed what normally might be a somnambulant hearing in the Senate Banking Committee about credit unions. Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.), its soon-retiring top Republican, seized on the moment to highlight “several high-profile collapses of crypto companies, including one prominent example last week” — a reference to FTX, if not explicitly by name.
Toomey previously has purchased cryptocurrency assets, his personal financial disclosures show. But he focused his opening statement on the repercussions when a firm like FTX, which was based in the Bahamas, can run roughshod over the U.S. economy.
“As a general matter, the failure of Congress to pass legislation in this space and the failure of regulators to provide clear guidance has created ambiguity that has driven developers and entrepreneurs overseas,” he warned. “And we’ve just once again seen how that ends.”
In recent years, Democrats and Republicans at various turns have tried to regulate cryptocurrency, introducing a range of measures to empower federal agencies and pursue abuses, including fraudulent coin offerings and international money laundering. They’ve also held a number of major hearings, even grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019 over his company’s doomed crypto effort, known as Libra.
Law-enforcement agencies, meanwhile, have prosecuted some of the worst actors — unveiling charges in August, for example, against 11 individuals allegedly involved in a $300 million pyramid scheme. And President Biden himself recently has been engaged, signing an executive order in March that offered an early road map for how Washington might approach cryptocurrency regulation.
But the government at times has faced blowback for acting too aggressively. This March, for example, a bipartisan group of lawmakers known as the Congressional Blockchain Caucus took aim at the Securities and Exchange Commission over its attempts to “gather information from unregulated cryptocurrency and blockchain industry participants.” Its signatories included Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), a caucus co-chair who has argued in the past that the SEC has misused its authorities to assert jurisdiction over cryptocurrency.
Emmer is set to serve in a key House leadership role under a Republican majority next year. Appearing at an industry conference on Wednesday, the GOP lawmaker urged Congress not to adopt a “wet blanket” of regulation in the wake of the FTX crisis.
“We need to use the stage that is Congress to promote all of you beyond the walls of the Capitol,” added Emmer, whose comments were first reported by the publication CoinDesk. “People need to understand more out there that they shouldn’t be afraid of this.”
His office declined further comment.
Adding to the challenge, the government has faced an onslaught of lobbying from an increasingly powerful and profitable industry.
Since January alone, cryptocurrency exchanges and their advocates have spent more than $14.8 million to influence regulators and lawmakers, according to lobbying data compiled by OpenSecrets. Bankman-Fried and other FTX leaders, including Ryan Salame, the company’s co-chief executive, also donated more than $70 million in the 2022 election, the analysis showed. That made them the third-largest contributor in the two-year cycle, OpenSecrets found.
“The Senate has trouble keeping up with things that lobbyists prefer the Senate not keep up with,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a veteran of the 2008 financial crisis, after which she oversaw congressional efforts to keep watch over big banks. Reflecting on the reasons for congressional inaction, she added: “I have said for a very long time now that we need better regulation in this space.”
On Capitol Hill, FTX and its lobbyists actively guided lawmakers in writing legislation that would govern the company and its industry rivals. A regular in Washington, Bankman-Fried personally provided input to Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and John Boozman (R-Idaho), who introduced a bill this year that would shift some crypto oversight to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The CFTC regulates complicated financial instruments known as derivatives, as well as futures contracts for agricultural products. The crypto industry generally prefers that agency over the SEC, which governs stock and bond markets and is perceived as more aggressive. Lawmakers and administration officials have split over which regulator should have jurisdiction, partly a reflection of the complexity in defining crypto assets — whether they are commodities or securities — under law.
As she raced to a Senate vote this week, Stabenow acknowledged she had solicited feedback from “all the stakeholders … including Sam” on cryptocurrency regulation. A beneficiary of more than $20,000 in campaign donations from Bankman-Fried this election, the senator added she was “extremely surprised, of course — we all were extremely surprised and disappointed” at the downfall of FTX.
But Stabenow still stood by her legislation as an antidote to the risk and abuse seemingly rife in cryptocurrency: “That’s exactly why we need our legislation, so the CFTC can proactively provide regulation and transparency to consumers.”
Other lawmakers, though, feared that the bill had become tainted by FTX’s influence. Brown, the leader of the Senate Banking Committee, specifically acknowledged “concern” that Bankman-Fried and his industry allies had too great a hand in shaping the legislation, noting it “needs major improvement.”
“I think you look at any of the legislation, any legislation written here, [and it’s] always the fingerprints of the big banks. In this case, the big crypto companies are always all over it,” Brown continued. “That’s the fight I make every day in this committee, and it’s the fight we’ll make on this.”
As the FTX collapse rippled through the crypto world, the Biden administration urged Congress to act. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen issued a public warning about dangers to the economy as she called on lawmakers to fill in the remaining regulatory “gaps.” She said the agency’s prior reports had identified a wide range of “risks” that ultimately were “at the center of the crypto market stresses observed over the past week.”
Behind the scenes, top Treasury officials have been in close contact with major cryptocurrency exchanges and other companies in recent days to assess the FTX fallout, according to an aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the conversations. Some lawmakers, meanwhile, signaled they were exploring a raft of new proposals in the hopes of protecting Americans who buy, own and sell cryptocurrency.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a tech expert and leader of the tax-focused Senate Finance Committee, said in an interview that he planned to put forward a “consumer protection package” targeting cryptocurrency in the coming days. The lawmaker worked with other Democrats and Republicans last year in instituting the first-ever tax reporting requirements for digital tokens.
Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said this week he had “tried to reserve judgment” given the promise of the technology. But the lawmaker, another top member of the Banking Committee, stressed “there’s a reason we have rules around investor and consumer protection, safety and soundness, and the prevention of financial crime.”
As she left the Tuesday banking hearing, Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) similarly stressed that the FTX meltdown left Congress no choice but to legislate. Lummis, who once took to the Senate floor to “thank god for bitcoin,” has put forward her own, sweeping bill that would shift more oversight to the CFTC.
“I think it’s really important now that senators really focus on digital assets,” she said. “In the past, it’s been easy to put that on the back burner and address other issues that were more front-burner issues. This is now a front-burner issue … We have put ourselves at a regulatory disadvantage.” | 2022-11-17T11:41:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After FTX meltdown, Congress starts to ask: Did it neglect crypto? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/11/17/congress-crypto-ftx-regulations-law/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/11/17/congress-crypto-ftx-regulations-law/ |
Va. education board to review new history and social studies standards
But a Democratic legislator is urging the board to reject the revised guidelines, which have become a magnet for controversy
(Gobalstock/iStock)
The Virginia Board of Education is set to review new state standards for history and social studies Thursday even as a Democratic legislator is urging them to reject the guidelines, which have become a magnet for controversy.
The state’s standards of learning — known as SOLs — shape what students are tested on at the end of the school year, detailing topics that teachers should include in their lessons. Still, districts and even individual teachers typically have wide latitude to set curriculums.
State law says the SOLs for every subject must be redeveloped by the Virginia Department of Education and reapproved by the Board of Education every seven years, with the timing of reviews staggered across subjects. The process is often quiet and plodding, but this year’s review garnered widespread attention this summer after the board — led by a five-member majority appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) — questioned the department’s first proposed version of the standards, prompting a complete revision.
The five members raised concerns about the length and content of the more than 400-page initial version of the standards. In response last Friday, the education department delivered a much shorter 53-page iteration of the standards for the board’s review. This new version generally places less emphasis on the perspectives of marginalized peoples, removes suggested discussions of racism and its lingering effects, and promotes the workings of the free market, with limited government intervention, according to a Washington Post review.
In a fact sheet sent to state legislators, the education department said the changes were made because the “August 2022 draft standards were unnecessarily difficult for educators to understand and implement; they were also inaccessible for parents and families.” The new proposed standards, it said, would revise “repetitive and vague skills-based standards, which teachers could interpret in infinitely various ways, thus not resulting in ‘a shared knowledge as Virginians and as U.S. citizens.’ ”
The new standards have been lauded by some conservative supporters, including parents’ rights advocates who say the guidelines will help children develop critical thinking skills. But the new standards have earned criticism from left-leaning educators and legislators who argue that they offer a simpler version of history that pays less attention to the perspectives and lives of people of color, especially Indigenous and non-European communities.
The board’s Thursday meeting will mark members’ first time reviewing these new and shorter standards. A final vote on the standards is set for February.
A day before the meeting, state Sen. Jennifer L. McClellan (D-Richmond) wrote a letter to the board asking them to reject the proposed standards and instead proceed with the initial 402-page version presented by the department in August.
In the letter, obtained by The Post, she wrote that the revised version minimizes “diverse perspectives” and reflects right-wing political priorities.
“The revised draft deletes major components of our history and deliberately omits the diverse perspectives that shape our Commonwealth and our nation,” she wrote. “The revised standards released last week appear to have been written with the heavy hand of a political appointee with an agenda, disregarding the guidance of educators, experts, and relevant stakeholders over a nearly two-year period.”
The education department’s director for board relations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on McClellan’s letter Wednesday night.
According to a Post analysis, the education department’s revised version of the standards places less emphasis on marginalized groups’ perspectives — especially the culture and societies of Native Americans — does not mention the word “racism” and also promotes that a free-market economy is essential to democracy, further asking teachers to emphasize the idea that the government should play a limited role in regulating markets.
In her letter Wednesday, McClellan cited some of these developments in urging the board to reject the new version of the standards.
In particular, she noted that the new standards do not suggest teaching students about the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks until sixth grade, and never mention teaching them about Juneteenth or Cesar Chaves. She wrote that “the revised draft also downplays the history of Indigenous Peoples in comparison to the ‘aspirations of pioneers.’ ”
She wrote that the world history curriculum does not deliver a complex picture of global history because it focuses primarily on European history in its early years.
“And, the draft virtually omits any discussion of the history or modern-day culture of the Latino community, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and the LGBTQ community,” McClellan wrote “These decisions would mean that hundreds of thousands of Virginia children would not have the opportunity to learn about their community’s contributions to the fabric and history of our nation.” | 2022-11-17T11:57:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia school board to review new proposed history standards - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/17/virginia-history-standards-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/17/virginia-history-standards-review/ |
Mr. Gerson helped shape President George W. Bush’s messaging after the 9/11 attacks and then moved to The Washington Post, where he wrote about politics and faith
Michael Gerson, director of presidential speechwriting, meets with President George W. Bush and White House aide Karen Hughes outside the Oval Office on Jan. 29, 2002. (Eric Draper/The White House/Getty Images)
Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush who helped craft messages of grief and resolve after 9/11, then explored conservative politics and faith as a Washington Post columnist writing on issues ranging from President Donald Trump’s disruptive grip on the GOP to his own struggles with depression, died Nov. 17 at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. He was 58.
After years of working as a writer for conservative and evangelical leaders, including Prison Fellowship Ministries founder and Watergate felon Charles Colson, Mr. Gerson joined the Bush campaign in 1999. Mr. Gerson, an evangelical Christian, wrote with an eye toward religious and moral imagery, and that approach melded well with Bush’s personality as a leader open about his own Christian faith.
Mr. Gerson’s work and bonds with Bush drew comparisons to other powerful White House partnerships, such as John F. Kennedy’s with his speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen and Ronald Reagan’s with aide Peggy Noonan. Conservative commentator William Kristol told The Post in 2006 that Mr. Gerson “might have had more influence than any other White House staffer who wasn’t chief of staff or national security adviser” in modern times.
After a heart attack in December 2004, Mr. Gerson stepped back from the stresses of speechwriting and took on policy advisory roles full time. He often lamented that the Bush administration’s humanitarian initiatives, such as AIDS prevention in Africa, became footnotes in a world changed by 9/11.
Mr. Gerson left the White House in 2006, with Bush’s backing, to pursue outside policy work and writing. The next year, he joined The Post and wrote twice-weekly columns that expanded his reach as a conservative distressed by populism and the politics of anger, and animated by the conviction that religion and social activism are powerful partners.
Studied theology | 2022-11-17T12:28:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michael Gerson, Post columnist who crafted 9/11 speeches for Bush, dies at 58 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-speechwriter-post-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-speechwriter-post-dies/ |
Michael Gerson: Saying goodbye to my child, the youngster
By Michael Gerson
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson with his sons earlier this year. (Family photo)
Michael Gerson, 58, died on Thursday. For 15 years beginning in 2007, he wrote a twice-weekly column for The Post — including this beautiful meditation, originally published on Aug. 19, 2013, on what it felt like to drop off his son at college. Additional selections from Gerson’s writing can be found below. — Michael Larabee, op-ed editor
Our ancestors actually thought this parting should take place earlier. Many societies once practiced “extrusion,” in which adolescents were sent away to live with friends or relatives right after puberty. This was supposed to minimize the nasty conflicts that come from housing teenagers and their parents in close proximity. Some non-human primates have a similar practice, forcibly expelling adolescents from the family group.
Fat lot did our ancestors know. Eighteen years is not enough. A crib is bought. Christmas trees get picked out. There is the park and lullabies and a little help with homework. The days pass uncounted, until they end. The adjustment is traumatic. My son is on the quiet side — observant, thoughtful, a practitioner of companionable silence. I’m learning how empty the quiet can be.
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The end of childhood, of course, can be the start of adult relationships between parents and children that are rewarding in their own way. I’m anxious to befriend my grown sons. But that hasn’t stopped the random, useless tears. I was cautioned by a high-powered Washington foreign policy expert that he had been emotionally debilitated for weeks after dropping off his daughter at college for the first time. So I feel entitled to a period of brooding.
The cosmologists, even with all their depressing talk about the eventual heat death of the cosmos, offer some comfort. They point out that we live in the briefest window — a fraction of a fraction of the unimaginable vastness of deep time — in which it is physically possible for life to exist. So we inhabit (or are chosen to inhabit) an astounding, privileged instant in the life span of the universe. | 2022-11-17T12:45:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Michael Gerson: Saying goodbye to my child, the youngster - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-column-goodbye-child/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-column-goodbye-child/ |
(Robert Carter for The Washington Post)
Michael Gerson followed his faith — and America was better for it
One of the biblical injunctions sometimes cited by Michael Gerson, who died Thursday at the age of 58 after a long battle with cancer, comes from the New Testament book of Colossians: “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”
That advice works not only for Christian believers such as he was, but also in the sometimes brutal political world in which he made his mark. He was a presidential speechwriter whose own words were, indeed, singularly seasoned and notably full of grace. For the past 15 years, he enriched the pages of this newspaper as a columnist for the Opinions section.
But civility, as Mike also noted, does not preclude tough-mindedness. Nor should it be mistaken for a lack of principles or perspective. His own were rooted in the faith that fueled and defined his involvement with politics, and he was scorching in his assessment of his fellow evangelicals when theirs took what he saw as a more cynical turn. In a September essay he wrote these supposedly conservative Christians “have broadly chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define any useful villainy as virtue. In the place of integrity, the Trump movement has elevated a warped kind of authenticity — the authenticity of unfiltered abuse, imperious ignorance, untamed egotism and reflexive bigotry.”
“This,” Mike wrote, “is inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure.”
Mike and I were colleagues and friends whose paths crossed pretty regularly. One place we spent time together was at semiannual conferences in Florida known as the Faith Angle Forum, where people gather to discuss religion and politics.
It was during one of those meetings in 2014 that, for the first and only time, I saw Mike get angry — really angry.
I was seated next to him for a session on religious conflict and the future of the Middle East, in which one of the speakers was Elliott Abrams, a fellow George W. Bush White House veteran who had served as deputy national security adviser for Middle East policy.
“It used to annoy me enormously when President Bush, for whom I was working, would say Islam is a religion of peace,” Abrams said, “because the real response to that is, ‘Where is your theology degree from?’ ”
As Abrams continued along those lines — at one point claiming the “average American” was justified in thinking “this is crap … because all these people who are doing beheadings are Muslims” — I could feel Mike grow tense in the chair next to me. He waited his turn to be called upon, and then he confronted his former colleague.
“We praise Islam, and every president from now on will praise Islam on religious holidays because there are millions of peaceful citizens who hold this view,” Mike said. “It’s also a theologically sophisticated view, as opposed to what you’re arguing … every tradition, religious tradition, has forces of tribalism and violence in its history, background, of theology, and every religious tradition has resources of respect for the other.”
He added: “That is a great American tradition that we’ve done with every religious tradition that comes to the United States, included them as part of a national enterprise and praised them for their strongly held religious views and emphasized those portions that are most compatible with those ideals.”
As deep as his own Christian religious beliefs were, Mike was tolerant, accepting, even admiring of those who prayed differently. And while he was by and large a social conservative, Mike knew that not every question involving faith and truth could be resolved along the bright battle lines of the culture wars, or literally be set in scripture.
He celebrated gay pride month and argued that our scientific understanding of the genetic basis of sexual orientation has come a long way since the Apostle Paul’s time. But he also believed that religious institutions, including schools and charities, should have leeway to shape their own standards.
And Mike was open about the times in his life when he had his own doubts about what God had in mind for him. In 2019, he spoke frankly and publicly about being hospitalized for depression, delivering a powerful sermon at the National Cathedral and then a column for The Post.
A few days earlier, Mike and I had lunch. The speechwriter who had written so many words for others told me he was nervous about baring himself so publicly, and he asked if I would read a draft. He also confided that he had been living in a shadow where, at times, he wondered whether those who meant the most to him would be better off — unburdened — if he weren’t around.
In his sermon, he put it this way: “I suspect that there are people here today — and I include myself — who are stalked by sadness, or stalked by cancer, or stalked by anger. We are afraid of the mortality that is knit into our bones. We experience unearned suffering, or give unreturned love, or cry useless tears. And many of us eventually grow weary of ourselves — tired of our own sour company.”
Mike combined his lived faith with his gift for expression to offer a hand to others — showing that they are not alone in the dark. “Even when strength fails, there is perseverance,” he said in his sermon. “And even when perseverance fails, there is hope. And even when hope fails, there is love. And love never fails.”
Now, his unearned suffering has ended, and those he touched, including many who never met him in person, will so deeply miss Michael Gerson’s company. His grace was a blessing, and we need it more than ever. | 2022-11-17T12:45:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Michael Gerson followed his faith — and America was better for it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-faith-america-better/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-faith-america-better/ |
Post Politics Now Pelosi to address her ‘future plans’ as Republicans cement House majority
Analysis: All eyes on Nancy Pelosi
The latest: Trump’s early 2024 launch fails to rally GOP around him
On our radar: With GOP House win, Biden’s foreign policy faces new challenges
Noted: Once a ‘Young Gun,’ McCarthy weathered threats from right on potential path to speaker
On our radar: As next Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs vows to defend election rules
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) holds a weekly news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Sept. 30. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will announce her “future plans,” her spokesman said, sharing a decision that has major implications for Democrats as they prepare to operate in a House next year in which Republicans will have a narrow majority. Pelosi’s announcement about whether she will seek another term as Democratic leader will come hours after Republicans were projected to win control of the House despite a stronger-than-expected showing by Democrats in the midterm elections.
Pelosi, 82, is the party’s long-serving House leader and the first woman to hold the post. She pledged in 2018 to limit herself to four more years as her party’s leader.
9 a.m. Eastern: Pelosi meets behind closed doors with fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill.
10 a.m. Eastern: House session begins with a possible Pelosi announcement.
The decision by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on whether to pursue another term as Democratic leader has major implications for others in the Democratic caucus with leadership ambitions, particularly some younger members who have been eyeing the top three spots currently held by octogenarians.
Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) have been making moves for years, but especially in the last few months, to run to succeed Pelosi, 82, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), 83, and House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), 82.
The Post’s Paul Kane writes that on Wednesday morning, Trump finally got what he has been clamoring for over several years: a challenger to try to take out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whom Trump derisively calls the “old crow.” Per Paul:
Across the Capitol, the Trump factor played out most clearly in the House GOP battle to become majority whip, the third-ranking post in the majority.
The candidate most closely tied to Trump lost there, too. You can read the full analysis here.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is expected to give a speech about her future Thursday morning on the House floor, which opens at 10 a.m., according to a senior leadership aide who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss leadership maneuverings.
Writing in The Early 202, The Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell and Theodoric Meyer report that Pelosi, apparently still uncertain on what to do, took two versions of her floor speech home with her Wednesday night — one in which she steps back from her leadership role and one in which she runs again, according to a person familiar with her plans. Per our colleagues:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will speak about her “future plans” on Thursday, her spokesman said in a tweet late Wednesday after Republicans were projected to win back control of the House with a narrow majority.
Speculation has been swirling about whether Pelosi, who has led House Democrats since 2003, will follow through with a 2018 pledge to step back from leadership after another four years — a decision that has implications for a host of other Democrats with eyes on leadership positions in the Democratic caucus.
The Post’s Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf write that Republican leaders in Washington and around the country are openly blaming Trump for leading the party to its third consecutive electoral letdown. Per our colleagues:
The Post’s Missy Ryan and Yasmeen Abutaleb write that while Democrats have retained their majority in the Senate, Republican control of the House has the potential to constrain Biden’s ability to achieve key foreign policy goals, including his intent to continue providing high levels of aid for Ukraine in the war against Russia. Per our colleagues:
Kevin McCarthy’s rise to power began in the wake of President Barack Obama’s election, when he became the chief strategist among a trio of self-described Republican “Young Guns” in the House who vowed to retake Washington as “common-sense conservatives.”
The Post’s Michael Kranish reports that a dozen years later, after leading a tighter-than-expected midterm push to reclaim the House, McCarthy awaits an even loftier prize: speaker of the House. Per Michael:
This time around, after watching the two other Young Guns depart following a withering political assault from the party’s right wing, McCarthy is a survivor and victor in part because of how much he has transformed himself to appeal to the party’s most conservative elements.
McCarthy, 57, ended up on the path to claim the position he has long sought only after pledging fealty to former president Donald Trump and his party’s right-wing base. After winning a contentious internal party vote for the GOP nomination for speaker on Tuesday, he’ll have to work again to appease that right flank in order to win a full House vote in January.
You can read Michael’s full story here.
Arizona’s incoming governor, Katie Hobbs, said Wednesday that she will not seek to overhaul voting systems in this crucial battleground state ahead of the 2024 presidential cycle, vowing instead to defend election rules that have come under criticism from an emboldened right flank of the Republican Party.
But she does think the system could improve so that votes in tight contests like hers are more quickly counted, The Post’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker report. Per our colleagues: | 2022-11-17T12:50:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pelosi to address her ‘future plans’ as Republicans cement House majority - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/pelosi-future-house-republican-majority/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/pelosi-future-house-republican-majority/ |
Justin Jefferson somehow came down with the catch on this play Sunday against Buffalo. (Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images)
The Minnesota Vikings, already a presence at or near the top of most NFL power rankings, have been enveloped by a team-of-destiny kind of aura.
How else to explain what happened Sunday, when Justin Jefferson had a reception for the ages and the Vikings managed to win a game they’d essentially lost against the Buffalo Bills? Minnesota is 5-1 when it trails in the fourth quarter and 7-0 in one-score games. This week, it hosts the Dallas Cowboys in the marquee matchup of Week 11.
Of course, the Vikings are all too familiar with this destiny stuff, only to suffer heartbreak. For now, before we look at the rest of the week’s slate, let’s rewind the Jefferson catch one more time.
Titans (6-3) at Packers (4-6), 8:15 p.m., Prime Video: “We’re not dead,” a smiling Aaron Rodgers told reporters Sunday after beating Dallas in overtime. The secret to the Packers’ modest success of late? Running the ball (something Tennessee knows a lot about). Aaron Jones (138) and A.J. Dillon (65) combined for over 200 yards rushing against the Cowboys and took some of the pressure to make magic off Rodgers and the injured thumb on his right hand. But an offensive line that has struggled at times faces a big test from a Titans defense that had six sacks on Denver’s Russell Wilson on Sunday and is allowing only 3.9 yards per rushing attempt this season.
Bears (3-7) at Falcons (4-6), 1 p.m.: Stopping Bears quarterback Justin Fields from running — or at least limiting his effectiveness — is imperative. From Week 6 through Week 10, Fields rushed for more yards (555) over a five-game span than any quarterback in the Super Bowl era. He passed Lamar Jackson’s record of 473 yards, set from Week 6 through Week 11 in 2019, according to NFL Research. Still, Fields hasn’t prevented the Bears from becoming the first team in NFL history to score 29 or more points in three consecutive games and lose all three.
Panthers (3-7) at Ravens (6-3), 1 p.m.: Carolina comes into the game after a victory over Atlanta in which it converted a season-high six third downs on 15 attempts. That raises the question: Is P.J. Walker the guy? Is Baker Mayfield? Is there a guy? As for Baltimore, it displayed one of its most methodical scoring assaults of the season against New Orleans before going off on a bye week. Four of its five scoring drives against the Saints consumed at least eight plays, and Lamar Jackson connected with 10 different targets despite not having Mark Andrews or Rashod Bateman available because of injuries.
Browns (3-6) at Bills (6-3), 1 p.m.: This could be a classic weather game, with the forecast calling for heavy snow (think in terms of “feet”) starting Thursday and continuing until Sunday afternoon in Western New York. Despite an elbow injury, Josh Allen passed for 330 yards in the Bills’ bizarre loss to the Vikings but threw a costly interception in overtime. Suddenly, Buffalo has lost two games in a row. At this rate, the Bills may end up going to Arrowhead Stadium for another playoff matchup with the Chiefs, something they want dearly to avoid.
Commanders (5-5) at Texans (1-7-1), 1 p.m.: Although still dwelling in the NFC East cellar, Washington commanded attention with its victory over previously undefeated Philadelphia on Monday night. After a 1-4 start, it has gone 4-1 over the past five games and leads the NFL in time of possession (32:31 per game). Since Carson Wentz went out in mid-October with a finger injury, the Commanders have gone 3-1 behind fan favorite Taylor Heinicke, setting up a quarterback debate when Wentz is healthy again. Wentz is eligible to be activated off the injured list this week, but he has yet to be designated to return to practice, and Heinicke will get the nod against Houston. Put Joe Theismann’s vote indelibly in the Heinicke column.
Eagles (8-1) at Colts (4-5-1), 1 p.m.: No longer undefeated, Philadelphia will test whether Jeff Saturday, 1-0 as an NFL coach despite never having coached at the pro or college level, is the real deal. The Eagles have been strong in the first half of their games (averaging 19.4 points and 234 yards) and vulnerable in the second half (7.9 points and 142.8 yards).
Jets (6-3) at Patriots (5-4), 1 p.m.: New England won its most recent meeting with the Jets, 22-17, on Oct. 30, with Devin McCourty accounting for two of the Patriots’ three interceptions of Zach Wilson. Nick Folk kicked five field goals, and the Jets’ four-game winning streak ended. When last seen before their bye weeks, the Jets were beating the Bills and the Patriots were thumping the Colts.
Rams (3-6) at Saints (3-7), 1 p.m.: The Rams are making a strong case for being the worst defending Super Bowl champion. That dubious distinction belongs to the 1999 Broncos, who went 6-10 with John Elway retired and Terrell Davis missing most of the season with a torn ACL.
Lions (3-6) at Giants (7-2), 1 p.m.: Facing the NFL’s most porous run defense and possessing Saquon Barkley at running back, the Giants fed Barkley 35 times, and he rushed for 152 yards and a touchdown Sunday against Houston. With some of the pressure off, Daniel Jones became the sixth Giants quarterback in 11 instances since 1950 to have 15 or more pass attempts and a 150-plus passer rating (153.3) in a game.
Raiders (2-7) at Broncos (3-6), 4:05 p.m.: Two underperforming AFC West teams with first-year coaches who are on the hot seat tangle in Denver. The Raiders’ Josh McDaniels, who formerly coached the Broncos, has already had meetings with owner Mark Davis, and Brandon Marshall, who played for McDaniels in 2009 with Denver, poured kerosene on the fire. “Josh McDaniels is definitely not suited to be a head coach. Absolutely not,” Marshall said on FanDuel TV’s “Up & Adams.” “… Because he doesn’t know how to lead people. You can have all the X’s and O’s in the world … but when you go into a losing locker room, the first thing you have to do is be able to get to the players’ minds and their hearts. And he’s not capable of doing that.”
Bengals (5-4) at Steelers (3-6), 4:25 p.m.: Cincinnati crushed Carolina before its bye week, with Joe Mixon piling up over 200 yards from scrimmage — including his first 100-yard rushing game since Nov. 28, 2021 — and scoring five touchdowns against a team whose defense was ranked 10th against the run.
Cowboys (6-3) at Vikings (8-1), 4:25 p.m.: In Dallas’s loss to Green Bay, Micah Parsons generated zero quarterback pressures on just eight pass rushes for the first time in his career, something Kirk Cousins no doubt noticed. That might also draw the attention of Jefferson, who has 20 career games with 100 or more receiving yards, the most by any player in his first three NFL seasons. (Before Sunday, he had been tied with Odell Beckham Jr. and Randy Moss at 19.) He had a career-best 193 receiving yards against the Bills.
In Week 10, the Bills-Vikings epic stole the show
Chiefs (7-2) at Chargers (5-4), 8:20, NBC: What was expected to be the NFL’s glittering division is a two-team fight. The Chiefs are making their second Sunday night appearance in three weeks after Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert were flexed into the spot. Mahomes has the most passing touchdowns in a player’s first 75 career starts in the Super Bowl era (176 after throwing for four Sunday against Jacksonville, moving past Dan Marino’s 173). Mahomes will make his 73rd start Sunday. No wonder the networks, if they had their way, would put Mahomes in prime time every week.
49ers (5-4) at Cardinals (4-6), 8:15 p.m., ESPN: Some quarterbacks earn big contracts with gaudy stats, and then there’s Jimmy Garoppolo. In a strange-but-true fact, San Francisco’s quarterback is 10-2 in games (including the playoffs) in which he has not passed for a touchdown. | 2022-11-17T12:58:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL Week 11 schedule, matchups and five-minute guide - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/nfl-week-11-games/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/nfl-week-11-games/ |
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is seen on the sideline before the start of an NFL game Sept. 15 in Kansas City, Mo. (Charlie Riedel/AP)
Prospective bidders for the Washington Commanders believe if Jeff Bezos is intent on buying the NFL franchise, it’s his for the taking because the Amazon founder’s net worth would enable him to outbid all contenders. Nonetheless, according to people with ties to the process, multiple groups are vying to establish themselves as the next-leading option in case Bezos decides not to pursue the team or sets a hard ceiling on what he’s willing to pay.
It is not clear whether Commanders owner Daniel Snyder intends to sell Washington’s NFL franchise in full or simply seek investors to buy a minority stake in the team. He and Tanya Snyder, his wife and the team’s co-CEO, have hired an investment bank and said they will explore all options. Any sales process is likely to be slowed by the legal issues surrounding the Commanders, given that new buyers or investors would not want to be liable for any financial judgments against the team, according to multiple people familiar with the conversations among potential bidders.
Should Snyder decide to sell the entire franchise, potential buyers other than Bezos include the bidders who tried but failed to purchase the Denver Broncos before they were sold this summer for $4.65 billion to a group led by Walmart heir Rob Walton, according to a person familiar with the NFL’s inner workings. Some already have acknowledged their interest.
Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, declined to comment on his potential bid for the Commanders when asked about it Saturday night at the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Portrait of a Nation Gala.
“I can’t talk about it,” Bezos said.
Bezos was similarly noncommittal during an interview with CNN that aired Monday.
“Yes, I’ve heard that buzz,” said Bezos, who was seated beside his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.
Sanchez said: “I do like football. I’m just going to throw that out there for everyone.”
Bezos added: “There’s not much I can say about that right now. But she does like football.”
Will @JeffBezos buy the Washington @Commanders?
He was asked about it during a @cnn interview. pic.twitter.com/RDzWMWlNwx
Bezos has an estimated net worth of $121.1 billion, according to Forbes, which ranks him as the world’s fourth-wealthiest person. Other owners have expressed interest in having Bezos pursue an NFL franchise. He has been linked to the Seattle Seahawks, who probably will be sold in the coming years by the trust of late owner Paul Allen, the former Microsoft co-founder.
“I’m sure that eventually it would be in everyone’s best interests if someone that’s as community-oriented as [Bezos] gets involved in the Seattle situation,” New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft said in a 2019 interview with The Post.
Amazon pays the NFL roughly $1 billion annually to carry the league’s “Thursday Night Football” package. Bezos sat alongside NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell at the season’s first Thursday night game carried by Amazon.
Bezos said during his CNN interview: “I grew up in Houston, Texas, and I played football growing up as a kid. It is my favorite sport. You know, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
One potential obstacle is the consumer protection lawsuit filed last week in the civil division of the D.C. Superior Court against Snyder, the Commanders, the NFL and Goodell by the office of Karl A. Racine, the District’s Democratic attorney general. Racine’s office said last week that the defendants “could face millions of dollars in penalties.”
Some familiar with the situation said they believe those issues could take six to 12 months to resolve. That is not the only legal action that is likely to complicate any sale. Investors are aware that other lawsuits could arise from ongoing investigations into the team.
In addition to Racine’s lawsuit, Snyder and the team are under investigation by the NFL, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the office of Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares (R). Investigators for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia have interviewed witnesses about allegations of financial improprieties involving the team, according to multiple people familiar with the situation. The team has denied committing financial improprieties.
Racine said Friday that his office would take further action in court on the allegations of financial irregularities if Snyder and the team do not take advantage of an opportunity being afford to them “to pay back exactly what we found they owe D.C. residents.”
Bezos’s consideration of a potential bid has continued since a person familiar with the situation initially said Nov. 3 that Bezos is interested in the Commanders and potentially might bid with music mogul Jay-Z as an investor in his group. Bezos and Jay-Z met over dinner last week in Los Angeles, according to a report by TMZ.
David Rubenstein, the co-founder of the Carlyle Group, was asked along the red carpet before Saturday’s event at the National Portrait Gallery whether he intends to bid on the Commanders.
“What’s your next question?” he said.
Rubenstein is bidding for Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals with Ted Leonsis, the owner of the NHL’s Washington Capitals, the NBA’s Washington Wizards and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics.
On the issue of bidding on either the Commanders or Nationals, Rubenstein said: “There’s a lot of great teams that are going to be for sale. We’ll see what happens. We’ll see. You should ask some of the other people here. I think Jeff Bezos — is he coming? I don’t know. But ask him.”
The Commanders have said that the Snyders hired BofA Securities, a division of Bank of America, to consider potential transactions for the franchise. The Commanders have not specified whether the Snyders intend to sell all or part of the franchise.
One person with knowledge of the process expressed the belief that until a few weeks ago, Snyder had planned to sell only a minority share of the team but now realizes that he must sell the entire franchise. He is facing a considerable debt burden, and the team is seeking to build a new stadium to replace 25-year-old FedEx Field, routinely ranked by fans as among the NFL’s worst venues.
But according to several people with knowledge of NFL transactions, Snyder will struggle to find an investor willing to pay $1 billion to $2 billion to be his junior business partner unless he is willing to guarantee an opportunity to “buy him out” and become the full or principal owner at a future date.
In a recent radio interview, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones referenced the issue of Snyder’s debt in explaining why he wasn’t surprised Snyder was exploring a potential sale. In March 2021, the NFL granted Snyder a $450 million debt waiver (above the $500 million debt ceiling that applies to all NFL teams) that enabled him to buy out the 40.5 percent collective stake of limited partners Dwight Schar, Fred Smith and Robert Rothman for $875 million. That loan must be repaid by 2028 for Snyder to remain in the league.
The NFL said last week that it is up to the Snyders whether to sell the entire franchise or only part of it. Either would require the approval of three-fourths of the other team owners.
“I’d refer you to the club for information regarding any potential transaction,” Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy said during a conference call with reporters. “It’s, of course, their decision.”
Mat Ishbia, the president and CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage, and media entrepreneur Byron Allen also are among those interested in bidding on the team. Ishbia and Allen were among the bidders for the Broncos, who were sold in June by the Pat Bowlen Trust to Walton’s group. That $4.65 billion purchase is the record sale price for an NFL franchise. The owners officially approved the deal in August. Forbes estimated in August that the Commanders are worth $5.6 billion.
Other bidders for the Broncos included Clearlake Capital co-founders Behdad Eghbali and Jose E. Feliciano, who previously attempted to purchase a minority stake in the Commanders from Daniel Snyder’s former limited partners; Josh Harris, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management and the owner of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers and the NHL’s New Jersey Devils; and Todd L. Boehly, the CEO of Eldridge Industries, the chairman of the Chelsea Football Club and a part-owner of MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers and the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
A spokesperson for Boehly has not responded to requests for comment. Spokespeople for Harris and Eghbali and Feliciano have declined to comment.
Some familiar with the dynamics of pro sports ownership in D.C. speculate that Leonsis or others in his Monumental Sports organization could end up as investors in a bid led by Bezos or another prospective majority owner because of the expertise they could provide in the operations of pro teams, the local sports market, and venue infrastructure. | 2022-11-17T12:59:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As Commanders sale speculation continues, all eyes are on Jeff Bezos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/washington-commanders-sale-jeff-bezos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/washington-commanders-sale-jeff-bezos/ |
Some voters said they cast ballots for Republicans in congressional races because they wanted to end single-party Democratic control of Washington, but history shows that divided government doesn’t always lead to bipartisan progress
Local business owner, Alejandro Flores-Munoz watches election returns at a Democratic election night watch party in Denver on Tuesday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Some voters chose last week to divide America’s government — giving Republicans control of at least one house of Congress as a Democrat continues in the White House — specifically to gum up the works and slam the brakes on the party in power. Some voted to express their frustration over soaring prices and their sense that the country is moving in the wrong direction. And some sought to split control of Washington to encourage, even force, the two parties to do business with each other.
Although this month’s midterm elections remain unresolved in several key states and Democrats retained a narrow majority in the Senate, President Biden’s two years of all-Democratic control of the executive and legislative branches of government is coming to an end. There was no red wave, and voters in aggregate seemed more exhausted than energized by both parties’ extreme fringes. Still, Republicans will have a small majority in the House come January, when the new Congress is sworn in, allowing them to obstruct many Biden initiatives and forcing the two parties to work together, at least minimally, if they intend to keep the government operating.
The next two years will be, depending on whom you believe, “a recipe for gridlock” — so says Ralph Nader, the third-party activist who knows a thing or two about razor-thin electoral margins — or “a grand opportunity for big breakthroughs,” in the view of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker who made his name as leader of one side of a sharply divided government in the 1990s.
For much of American history, divided government was the exception. But since World War II, it has become pretty much the rule. Presidents have led unified governments — with their party controlling both the Senate and the House — for only 15 of the past 53 years. Democratic presidents enjoyed unified rule most often: Jimmy Carter for his entire four-year term, and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Biden each for only two years. George W. Bush was the only Republican to get that opportunity, for portions of his two terms.
Last week, some voters said they cast their ballots with the stated aim of ending Democratic control of the elected branches of government.
Raised in a Democratic family, Sarah Kehlenbeck was a Democrat herself for many years. But as retirees living primarily on fixed incomes in West Des Moines, Iowa, she and her husband felt compelled to use their vote to make clear their plight in an economy that she said has “really tanked.” She voted to reelect a Republican senator, Charles E. Grassley, to try to cleave control of the Senate away from the Democrats.
Divided government has “happened before, and it usually happened after a president didn't do a real good job of providing for the country,” she said. A power split could “ideally cause them to have to get together and work things out.”
In New Britain, Conn., Gonzalo Ortega, a 19-year-old college student studying engineering, voted for Republican challenger George Logan in a hotly-contested congressional race not so much to make progress on any particular policy, but because “it keeps both sides in check. It doesn’t allow either side to do anything too extreme.”
But the idea of divided government smacked of a disturbing paralysis to voters in New Britain, who reelected their Democratic House incumbent, Jahana Hayes. “I’m terrified that the Republicans can get into any kind of power,” said Sheri Toczko, 44, a Democrat who is on disability leave.
Setting the two parties against each other in Washington is a deeply ingrained American habit. As far back as 1992, a National Election Studies survey found that 40 percent of Americans liked it “better when control is split between the Democrats and Republicans,” as opposed to 32 percent who preferred “when one party controls both the presidency and Congress.”
The nation’s founders worried that one-party rule would concentrate too much power in one set of politicians. “Where a majority are united by a common sentiment,” James Madison wrote, “the rights of the minority become insecure.”
Most recently, the sharp increase in political and cultural polarization and a growing tendency by voters to demonize the opposing party have bolstered many Americans’ wont to vote out the party in power.
“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties,” Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, tweeted last week, asking “independent-minded voters” to vote “for a Republican Congress, given that the presidency is Democratic.”
Many academics who’ve studied voting behavior warn that there’s little evidence that Americans vote specifically to keep Washington out of one party’s hands; sometimes, they just want to throw the bums out or vote for their favorite candidates, regardless of the impact on the balance of power.
“The evidence is less that voters consciously choose to divide the government and more that they’re just expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who studies political party alignment. “What we’ve seen in divided governments in the past tells us that Republicans now will be less willing to compromise, will launch all sorts of investigations and could very well attempt to impeach administration officials all the way up to the president. We’re in for a confrontational two years, with the possibility of government shutdown.”
But some politicians who’ve lived through divided government say voters correctly intuit that split control can produce significant policy deals.
“Divided government has not been very pretty in recent years because of polarization and personalities, but it’s often a good thing and it can produce real breakthroughs,” said Gingrich, who rode the 1994 midterm division of government control to a period of intense battle and occasional compromise with Clinton.
Several historians cited the welfare reform that Gingrich and Clinton pushed through in 1996, the deal to save Social Security that Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill agreed to in 1983, and the tax reform of 1986 that the same duo supported as examples of how divided government can give both parties cover to agree to big changes, knowing that the other party won’t bash them for it.
“But that kind of bipartisanship is unimaginable now, in this time of such high partisan animosity, when people believe that the other side is not just their opponents but their enemies,” Abramowitz said.
“The great challenge is for Kevin McCarthy — the key figure here: Can he develop and communicate some ideas and start passing serious things?” Gingrich asked, referring to the House Republican leader representing California who hopes to be chosen as speaker.
But although McCarthy has posted dozens of policy proposals online, calling his agenda “Commitment to America,” others in his party seem focused on a different, more antagonistic approach. The House Freedom Caucus of hard-liners most loyal to Trump — many of whom reject the fact that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election — includes members who want to impeach Biden or some in his Cabinet, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Are we going to be a Congress that is going to [say] our job for the next two years is to block everything that’s going to come out of this administration?” asked Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), whose reelection bid remains unsettled, awaiting a tabulation of ranked choice votes on Nov. 23. “Or is it going to be ‘Let’s try to figure out how we can we can move forward on some initiatives … that can work not only to the benefit of Republicans, but the benefit of the country’?”
One of Murkowski’s constituents in Anchorage, Steve Lane, 72, said he voted for her because he likes her independent streak; still, he said he expects Republicans to set aside any serious policy agenda and spend “two years on investigations. And we’re gonna have an impeachment or two … I don’t think you’ll stand a chance of doing anything. Very little legislation. Congress has been dysfunctional.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who in recent years boasted of his ability to halt Democratic initiatives, said in 2014, when Republicans wrested control of the Senate during Obama’s presidency, that “When the American people choose divided government, I don’t think it means they don’t want us to do anything.”
But the years that followed saw little bipartisan action on major issues, as McConnell and other congressional Republicans mainly focused on blocking Obama’s agenda, including some of his judicial nominations.
Biden, in a news conference the day after the midterms, said he is “ready to compromise with Republicans where it makes sense on many issues,” adding that voters “made it clear: They don’t want every day to be a political battle.”
“You’re giving too much credit to the tens of millions of five-minute voters who just don’t look into the candidates and their proposals,” said Nader, whose independent bid for president in 2000 may have made the difference in the razor-thin race that ended with Bush defeating Democrat Al Gore. “Voters who don’t do their homework don’t realize that divided government is a recipe for gridlock. Gridlock can be good on some foreign issues, such as if you have a peace Congress blocking Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney on war in Iraq. But on domestic issues, gridlock solves nothing.”
John Gimas doesn’t see it that way. He served in a divided New Hampshire state government a decade ago — he was a Democratic representative when Republicans held the legislature and a Democrat was governor — and the experience persuaded him that split control prevented either party from pushing the state too far in either direction.
Now a Republican, Gimas said a divided federal government both serves as a check on excessive power and forces both sides “to compromise and work together.”
Voter optimism about making the two parties deal with each other reflects the confidence that financial markets have shown in divided rule. Wall Street has for many years rewarded the division of power in Washington and some financial industry observers said the upcoming period of split control is likely to lead to spending controls and higher domestic oil production — moves that could ease inflation, as Tigress Financial Partners analyst Ivan Feinseth said last week. “History has shown that split power in Washington, with the opposite party of the president controlling Congress, is a strong background for share price gains,” Feinseth wrote in an analysis.
Even if voters don’t necessarily choose divided government consciously, “most Americans want a check on unbridled power, on a government that thinks they have a mandate that they don’t really have,” said John Feehery, a Washington lobbyist and longtime aide to House Republicans such as former speaker Dennis Hastert and former majority whip Tom DeLay.
The next two years won’t bring “broad ideological victories for either side,” he said, “but there could be some compromises on things like immigration because the system is so broken.”
The country’s divisions remain deep and abiding, and hard-liners in both parties reflect a skepticism about compromise that’s been growing on both ends of the ideological spectrum, but Feehery can see a split government finding its way toward action against inflation with legislation that perhaps also addresses other big problems.
“Ultimately, divided government is a way to get both sides invested in compromise,” he said – if public opinion can be rallied in support of any bipartisan initiatives.
In Columbia, S.C., Republican banker Gloria Humphreys is ready for that. She said she voted for Republican candidates this month to say no to the “totally partisan” doomsayers and express her optimism that the economy can be improved.
“That’s all you hear, that if you vote Republican, oh my God, the world’s gonna end,” she said. At 65, she said, she voted against the Democrats because “with my 401K, I’m going to be working until I’m 80-something.”
Yet she remains hopeful about the direction of the country, even in a divided Washington. The prospect of congressional gridlock doesn’t rattle her, at least, “not as much as having a free blank check to write,” she said. Elections are Americans’ corrective medicine, Humphreys said, and she trusts them to get it right: “Our democracy is what we’re doing here. We’re voting. That’s democracy.”
Julian Mark in Washington; Steven N. Burkholder in New Britain, Conn.; Nathaniel Herz in Anchorage; Marisa Iati in Manchester, N.H.; Brittany Shammas in West Des Moines, Iowa; and Rodney Welch in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report. | 2022-11-17T12:59:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate, House control is split. Can divided government make progress? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/divided-government-senate-house-control/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/divided-government-senate-house-control/ |
Federal Reserve policymakers believe that inflation expectations are self-fulfilling prophecies, and they’re dead set on preventing them from moving materially higher. But expectations are hard to measure in real time, and the most popular household surveys are limited by respondents’ often poor understanding of what inflation truly is. They may confuse price levels with inflation (a rate of change), and they tend to over-extrapolate from a few narrow experiences at the gas station and the supermarket.
Of course, economists and survey architects are aware of these shortcomings, and there’s been considerable enthusiasm around the idea of making the questions more intuitive and personal. Morning Consult, in work with economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, introduced a survey question last year that asks consumers how their incomes would have to change to make them “equally well-off,” given their expectations about prices in the next 12 months. In the past couple of weeks, the Morning Consult metric — drawn from weekly surveys of 20,000 people on average — jumped to a record. I spoke to John Leer, chief economist at the decision intelligence company, about the recent data. A lightly condensed and edited transcript of the conversation follows.
What is your indirect consumer inflation expectations gauge telling us?
For the second week in a row, we’ve had really record high inflation expectations — up to 8.25% for the week ending this past Saturday, up from 8.02% the week prior. This in many ways sort of bucks the trend that we’ve seen over the last two months where we saw basically a lot of volatility that essentially resulted in instability. And now we’re clearly seeing a turning point with elevated inflation expectations. … It’s hard to refute now — after having two consecutive weeks, 20,000 survey respondents per week — that 12-month inflation expectations are elevated.
There’s a view now that folks actually will have to make more money, their wages would have to grow faster, to keep up with how they expect the price of goods and services to evolve. What we haven’t seen — and this is a separate paper — is I think folks don’t believe that they’re actually going to be made whole. They know that they would need to make in this instance 8.25% more to keep them at parity, but that would require a lot of negotiating power.
How do you solicit inflation expectations? Why do you think it’s a better way?
We ask people how much their wages would have to change to make them equally well-off for their expected changes in the price of goods and services that they buy. That’s valuable for a couple of reasons. First of all, the basket of goods: We cater to individuals. So we know that expectations tend to be better informed when you make it very micro-specific, very specific to the respondent. … that’s benefit one. The other is framing it in terms of people’s wages. Inflation can be a hard concept for people to understand, even people who are fairly financially savvy. Is it prices? It’s not quite prices. Is it change in prices? Well it’s not quite a change in prices. It’s the rate of change in something called a price index. So what we’ve done here basically is by asking people about what they spend for their goods and services, in their head they’ve mentally constructed the basket of goods and services that they’re using. And then we’re asking folks about the rate of change in wages which again allows you to look at everything in a single number. And I think that’s functionally how people think about inflation: It’s going to make me poorer. OK, well how would I need to be offset to be equally well-off?
I would say that’s still my primary hypothesis [of what happened in the data in recent weeks]. We’re in early stages of testing that hypothesis, and really proving it or disproving it takes a little bit more work … but it’s been interesting because those inflation expectations remained high even after the election. I would have thought, OK, we’re going to have a divided government, spending’s probably going to be a little bit lower, there’ll be more gridlock … it is possible that it really is just fear-mongering, that we’ve got political ads hammering home high levels of inflation. That historical experience is what people use to inform their future expectations.
What’s certainly true right now is that 12 months ahead inflation expectations are elevated. The cause is only really, really valuable if you think that in the absence of those ad campaigns going forward that you would see a drop in inflation expectations, that this has just been an entirely temporary phenomenon. It might be; we’re two weeks into it. That’s the value of some of this high-frequency data, because we’re going to be able to track this stuff every week, and you’re more able to make some causal claims.
First and foremost, I think about the world in which we live currently, and you’ve got to be a realist about how people engage with surveys. Few people answer the door if somebody knocks. Even fewer people are going to answer their phone if an unexpected number rings, and so that’s just the reality in which we live. … The second part is that in the US internet penetration is extremely high across a shockingly high range of demographic groups, and that allows us to access a lot of different folks. … The benefit there is that then gives us access to a very large sample at a very high frequency.
The issues with online surveys are very, very similar to the issues that folks have with non-response rates via phone surveys. You’ve got to address them one way or another in this current world, and my view is that we are able to provide a lot of value by doing the high-frequency large-scale surveys.
Short-term inflation expectations get short shrift. The Federal Reserve and many economists tend to focus on longer-term expectations when assessing whether expectations are well anchored. Your longer-term expectations data aren’t ready yet for public eyes, but in the meantime, why should we pay attention to the short-term expectations?
Our very preliminary take is that in our data it does not look like there’s a noticeable difference between 12-month and the five-year [inflation expectations]. The respondents do not seem to be as sensitive to the time horizon as what you see in some of these other surveys.[Short-term] inflation expectations are certainly important for the wage-setting process, probably not in the US as much as in Europe and places where they have a more unionized labor force and they go through a more formal wage-setting process. They’re coming up with their forecasts for inflation essentially, which they use to inform their wage bargaining. In the US, we essentially have rolling periods of wage negotiation since there’s fairly low union coverage. And I think that again doubles down on the need to have higher-frequency data, and I think the 12-month time horizon is appropriate. | 2022-11-17T13:07:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A New Way to Measure Inflation Expectations Has Bad News - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-new-way-to-measure-inflation-expectations-has-bad-news/2022/11/17/2e3923b4-6670-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-new-way-to-measure-inflation-expectations-has-bad-news/2022/11/17/2e3923b4-6670-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Israeli elections have become a referendum on Netanyahu
After five elections in four years, how do Israelis view democracy?
Analysis by Clareta Treger
Liron Lavi
Israel's likely next prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, attends the swearing-in of the new parliament on Tuesday. (Abir Sultan/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
On Nov. 1, Israelis went to the polls yet again — marking the fifth election in less than four years. This election saw the return to power of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after just one year out of office, and the rise of an alignment between two far-right parties called “Religious Zionism.”
Restoration of “Jewish national pride” featured heavily in Netanyahu’s Likud party campaign as well as the Religious Zionism party’s campaign. The two parties, plus two ultrareligious parties, are expected to form Israel’s next government, a right-wing coalition that claims to have a stable majority in the Israeli parliament. The coalition is likely to push for judicial changes that will undermine Israel’s Supreme Court and save Netanyahu from his corruption trial.
Netanyahu’s victory accentuates his dominance in Israeli politics, and many Israelis worry that it has potentially disturbing implications for Israeli democracy. Are they right?
In our research with Michal Shamir, Naama Rivlin-Angert, Israel Waismel-Manor and Tamir Sheafer, we find that voters’ appraisals of Netanyahu are connected to their attitudes toward Israel’s democracy. Our analysis of multiple surveys of Israeli voters shows that positive views of Netanyahu — but not of other politicians — are associated with support for illiberal approaches and authoritarian views.
Why would that be?
Are Israel’s elections about democracy — or Netanyahu?
Netanyahu, by far the most dominant figure in Israeli politics in recent years, has served so long as prime minister that Israeli elections have become a referendum on him personally — rather than a vote on substantive issues and party policies. But Israelis have been keeping a close eye on the future of their democracy. According to the Israel National Election Studies (INES) data, following each of the four prior elections, at least half of the Israeli electorate stated that the elections were mostly about Netanyahu. The “future of democracy” ranked as the second-most-common answer when INES asked Israelis what the elections were about.
To explore whether and how Israelis connect Netanyahu and the future of democracy, we utilize the April 2019, March 2020 and March 2021 pre-electoral waves of the INES election studies, with 1,347, 729 and 1,498 adults of voting age, respectively. Tel Aviv University’s B.I. and Lucille Cohen Institute for Public Opinion Research carried out the fieldwork, with the 2019 and 2020 surveys conducted over the phone, and the 2021 study including both phone and online modes. Using this public opinion data, we examine how appraisals of Netanyahu are related to support for democratic values such as equal rights, freedom of speech and commitment to the democratic rules of the game.
Israel’s left hates Netanyahu. But his real problem is that some right-wingers hate him, too.
These surveys show that Israelis’ support for democratic values remains stable and even high (for some principles) throughout the three elections: 80 percent are committed to democracy and support political equality, and 60 percent reject authoritarian leadership. In addition, about 50 percent support adherence to the democratic rules of the game and freedom of speech for those who criticize Israel. This is in line with trends dating to the 1980s, which show that much like citizens in other democracies, Israelis strongly support democratic principles, as shown in the figure below.
This support stands in striking contrast to the diminishing public support for parties, the Israeli parliament and government — which has ranged in recent years between 15 and 30 percent.
The personification of democratic values is one way democracy erodes
But this public support for democratic principles only tells part of the story. It is what political scientists term “diffuse support” for democracy. Scholars have argued that this support encompasses a civic culture that constitutes a shared vision of democracy and is paramount in helping democracies survive.
Will Israel further normalize relations with its Arab neighbors?
How does this diffuse support for democratic values square with the sweeping success of the far-right and anti-liberal parties in Israel’s 2022 election?
When we look at citizens’ appraisal of prominent politicians and support for democratic principles, we find that such support erodes when democratic values become personified — namely, attached to and identified with a dominant politician. We show that positive affect for Netanyahu is associated with support for illiberal approaches and authoritarian views, measured by preferences for “strong leadership” and lower commitment to the democratic rules of the game. We find no such relation with respect to Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main competitor for the prime minister’s office.
Netanyahu’s dominance and his long-lasting incumbency has led to what other scholars termed “presidentialization,” a scenario in which the entire focus is on one dominant politician heading the country’s executive branch. Our study shows that this does not mean a shift away from issues to individuals. Instead, leaders, especially in a presidentialized political system, may stand for identities, ideas and values. Such personification can bring substantive issues to the forefront, including democracy itself.
Indeed, recent studies, as well as ours, show that political elites in a democracy cannot always be trusted as democracy’s gatekeepers. To the contrary, they may encourage nondemocratic sentiments.
The ramifications of democracy’s personification are not limited to Netanyahu — or Israel. Rather they tap into the broader concerns over a global “crisis of democracy.” While low levels of trust in political institutions are evident in democracies around the world since the 1970s, support for democratic values remained high.
However, the evidence from Israel suggests that key elements of support for democracy may erode even when voters’ democratic support seems high in aggregate. The personification of politics may be a key mechanism by which democracy erodes.
Clareta Treger (@claretat2) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Policy, Elections & Representation Lab (PEARL) at University of Toronto.
Liron Lavi (@Liron_Lavi) is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University. | 2022-11-17T13:08:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Does Netanyahu's return raise concerns about Israel's democracy? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/israel-netanyahu-election-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/israel-netanyahu-election-democracy/ |
Yes, McCarthy is still House Republican leader. Who’s the new GOP whip?
Congressional leadership elections can have surprising results
Analysis by Matthew Green
Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) speaks to reporters at the Capitol on Nov. 15. (Michael Mccoy/Reuters)
This week, House Republicans held closed-door secret-ballot elections to choose leaders for the new Congress that begins in January. These elections signal the direction Republicans are likely to head in, especially as the GOP is projected to regain control of the House.
The news media closely covered the election of the GOP’s nominee for speaker. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) won that election handily, though more than 30 Republicans voted for conservative challenger Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), suggesting McCarthy may face some trouble when the full House chooses its speaker in January.
More surprising was the race for Republican whip, the leader charged with the pivotal role of rounding up and counting votes for the party’s agenda. The surprise winner in the three-way contest was Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), head of the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC). He was widely believed to be at a disadvantage because he is ideologically moderate, was belittled by allies of former president Donald Trump and would presumably be blamed for the lack of a red wave in the midterm elections.
How did this happen? Leadership races are complex affairs. A candidate’s ideology, coupled with an endorsement from high-profile outsiders, is not necessarily enough to win — especially against an opponent who gave electoral resources to other lawmakers.
Both parties select their leaders by a secret ballot vote for all new and returning members of that party. If there are more than two candidates, they employ a multiple-round system. If no candidate wins a majority on the first ballot, the candidate with the lowest vote total is eliminated and the balloting proceeds in successive rounds until one candidate wins a majority.
This week’s election for whip pitted Emmer against Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.), the current chief deputy whip, and Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee. Emmer narrowly managed to avoid elimination on the first ballot, coming in second with 72 votes, one vote more than Ferguson but behind Banks, who won 88. Then in the second and final round between Emmer and Banks, Emmer won, 115-106.
Win or lose, progressive candidates have influenced the Democrats' agenda
Ideology isn’t all that matters
In our research on past leadership races, we found that legislators frequently consider the ideology of a candidate when deciding whom to vote for. The conservative nature of the Republican conference presumably gave Banks an edge, since his ideological leanings (as measured by NOMINATE scores, which political scientists use to approximate attitudes from recorded votes) were the furthest to the right of the three candidates.
But we also discovered that ideology alone doesn’t explain all lawmakers’ decisions. In some races, it doesn’t matter at all. When Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), later elected House speaker, ran for GOP whip in 1989, for instance, he successfully appealed to moderates and conservatives alike to get himself elected. Banks’s conservatism was thus no guarantee of victory.
Helping other candidates can make the difference, regardless of election results
Our research showed that campaign contributions to lawmakers from candidates’ leadership political action committees (LPACs) are closely associated with whether those lawmakers vote for them. (LPACs are political committees that leadership candidates use to raise and spend campaign money for their colleagues). This is largely because it signals that the candidate will do more as a leader to help them get reelected, no matter how well the party does in the election overall.
According to the latest data from Open Secrets, Emmer’s LPAC donated some $150,000 to 24 incumbents and thousands more to over a dozen first-time candidates. By contrast, Ferguson’s LPAC gave just $86,000 to 16 incumbents and Banks’s LPAC donated a mere $35,500 to six incumbents. This — plus the help that he gave other candidates through the NRCC — probably gave Emmer a leg up over his two rivals.
Getting second round commitments is key
As noted above, when more than two candidates run for a leadership post, the elections are held in rounds, with the lowest vote-getter eliminated. It is therefore crucial in such races that strong candidates woo the lawmakers who support weaker ones, to get their votes in subsequent rounds of balloting.
According to one source, Emmer’s campaign focused on getting second-round vote commitments from Ferguson’s supporters. That proved to be a smart strategy: Emmer would not have won without the majority of Ferguson’s supporters voting for him in the final round.
Will Biden and Trump face off again in 2024?
Outsiders don’t have much pull
Banks had worked hard to cultivate the impression that Donald Trump preferred him to be whip. And Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., called Emmer a “coward” and a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) and, along with Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, lobbied Republicans to vote for Banks.
Getting people outside of Congress to endorse a leadership candidate is not a novel strategy, but it’s no substitute for campaign contributions or member-to-member lobbying. Outsiders rarely have the same persuasive pull as lawmakers do, and their involvement in a leadership election is sometimes perceived as meddling.
So it was in this race: As some lawmakers expected, Trump’s endorsement backfired and was probably seen as undue interference in a pivotal but internal party affair.
Matthew Green (@mattngreen) is professor and chair of politics at the Catholic University of America and co-author most recently (with Jeff Crouch) of “Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur” (University Press of Kansas, 2022).
Douglas Harris is professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland and co-author (with Matthew Green) of “Choosing the Leader: Leadership Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives” (Yale University Press, 2019). | 2022-11-17T13:08:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will Kevin McCarthy be the new Speaker of the House? Who's the new GOP whip? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/mccarthy-emmer-republicans-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/mccarthy-emmer-republicans-congress/ |
Thursday briefing: Republicans win the House; same-sex marriage bill; Karen Bass; Starbucks ‘Red Cup Day’ strike; and more
Republicans won control of the House.
The latest: California’s 27th Congressional District was called for Republicans yesterday. That gave the party 218 seats, enough for a majority.
What that means: With the Senate in Democrats’ hands, the balance of power in Congress is split for the next two years, which will make governing harder for President Biden.
What’s next? The new House speaker will be chosen in January, and the Republican nominee, Kevin McCarthy, could struggle to win enough support.
The Senate took a big step toward protecting same-sex marriage.
How? By advancing the Respect for Marriage Act. Twelve Republicans joined Democrats to support the bill yesterday, which clears the way for it to pass this week.
Why it’s needed: Democrats have warned that marriage equality and other rights could be at risk after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.
Multiple explosions were reported across Ukraine today.
Where? In the capital, Kyiv; Odessa in the south; and the central city of Dnipro. Russia has stepped up its strikes after Ukraine retook the key southern city of Kherson last week.
What else to know: Western officials believe that a deadly explosion in Poland on Tuesday was caused by a stray Ukrainian air defense missile, rather than Russia.
Los Angeles elected its first woman as mayor.
Who? Current U.S. Rep. Karen Bass. After a close race, she defeated billionaire real estate developer and fellow Democrat Rick Caruso yesterday.
The task ahead of her: The nation’s second-largest city is reeling from a racism scandal and is struggling to find solutions for violent crime, homelessness and corruption.
Starbucks employees in dozens of cities plan to walk off the job today.
Why? To protest how the company is handling union negotiations. The strike at over 100 stores coincides with “Red Cup Day,” when Starbucks hands out free reusable mugs.
The bigger picture: This is the first time unionized Starbucks baristas have banded together across the country, and it’s part of a wave of increased labor activity this year.
Harvard and Yale law schools pulled out of a major college ranking system.
Why? The schools said yesterday that the U.S. News & World Report’s influential annual rankings are problematic and don’t put students first.
The bigger picture: The rankings have been facing growing criticism for years, but it’s unclear whether the schools’ decisions will have a wider impact.
Lab-grown meat moved closer to your dinner plate yesterday.
Why? The FDA said it’s safe to eat. That paves the way for products made from real animal cells — but that don’t require slaughter — to be sold in stores in the coming months.
What’s the point? Animal-based foods are responsible for as much as 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, and experts think this technology could help change that.
And now … speaking of climate solutions: Here are some others gaining traction at COP27. Plus, Thanksgiving is one week away: Ask our reporters travel questions today. | 2022-11-17T13:08:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Thursday, November 17 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/11/17/what-to-know-for-november-17/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/11/17/what-to-know-for-november-17/ |
(Screenshots from sources; Washington Post illustration; iStock)
Evan Fournier seemed poised for a big night. The New York Knicks’ guard tends to torch the Boston Celtics, his previous team, and Beau Wagner, an attorney in the Chicago area, couldn’t believe that DraftKings was giving Fournier just 50-to-1 odds of being the top scorer when the Knicks faced the Celtics in January.
A serious sports bettor, Wagner, 42, wagered $1,000 on Fournier. Stars like Jayson Tatum and Julius Randle were favorites to be the game’s top scorer, but in Wagner’s eyes, Fournier’s odds were too good to pass up.
He was right: The Knicks’ sharpshooter scored a game-high 41 points.
Wagner tweeted a screenshot of his $50,000 winning ticket, and the official DraftKings account retweeted it with the caption, “BEAU KNOWS BETTING.”
A printout of the tweet hangs on Wagner’s wall. But his appreciation for DraftKings quickly gave way to resentment. A day after his Fournier bet, Wagner discovered that DraftKings wouldn’t let him bet more than $100 on an NBA game. A few days later, he tried to place another prop bet through the online sportsbook and wasn’t allowed to put down more than $3.63.
“The major problem I have is that DraftKings used my ticket to make it seem like you can win big, just like they do in their commercials,” Wagner said. “You promote my tweet and literally the next morning, I’m limited.”
DraftKings isn’t alone. Many U.S. sportsbook operators are seeking to boost profits by weeding out winning customers. Bettors who show signs of savvy are being limited faster and more aggressively than in the past, based on interviews with 20 bookmakers and accomplished bettors. As a result, Americans who are trying to make sports gambling their livelihood — or at least a profitable side hustle — are going to extreme lengths to evade limits: betting through proxies, sprinkling in deliberately dumb bets and wearing team jerseys when betting in person in an effort to pass as a “square.” Some have even returned to unregulated bookies, who don’t limit their action nearly as much.
Although some states, such as New Jersey, prohibit sportsbooks from banning rule-abiding customers simply for winning, imposing different limits on different customers is allowed nationwide. Sophisticated bettors, or “sharps,” point out that if they aren’t allowed to bet more than pocket change, they might as well be banned. Asked about that apparent loophole, a spokesperson for New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement said, “We are not in a position to evaluate hypotheticals.”
Dan Hartman, director of Colorado’s Division of Gaming, said there is no right to be a professional sports gambler. “It’s a form of entertainment,” he said.
Several leading sportsbooks, including DraftKings, either declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story.
FanDuel, the leading U.S. sportsbook, calls itself an entertainment company. DraftKings CEO Jason Robbins caused a stir among serious bettors last year by declaring, “This is an entertainment activity. People who are doing this for profit are not the players we want.” The not-so-subtle implication: The company is only interested in losers.
Sports betting can’t exist without some form of limits. “If Warren Buffett came in tonight and wanted a billion dollars on the Bears game, of course we wouldn’t take that,” said Chris Andrews, director of the South Point sportsbook in Las Vegas. But American bookmakers are increasingly adopting what’s known as the European model, Andrews said: ruthlessly “sacking” winning customers. “A friend of mine tried to bet a 30-to-1 future,” Andrews said. “They gave him 35 cents. It’s ridiculous.”
One professional bettor in New Jersey started on a losing streak at BetMGM. “They were rolling out the red carpet, offering me a lot of different promotions,” says the bettor, who, like several people quoted for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his desire to not be flagged by other sportsbooks. Once he started winning, his limits were slashed; now BetMGM won’t let him bet more than $10 on some games. “It’s hard to tell me that you care about responsible betting when somebody’s down six figures and you keep enticing them to bet more,” he said, “but once they get close to even, you cut them down drastically.”
Life in ‘a brand new industry’
Although genuine sharps might make up less than 1 percent of the betting public, bookmakers say, recent limiting policies impact as much as 10 percent of customers. Among pro bettors, DraftKings, BetMGM and PointsBet are frequently cited for imposing the harshest limits. Caesars and WynnBET are praised by some for offering high limits. The sharps’ favorite place to bet appears to be Circa Sports, which posts high limits available to all customers, regardless of skill.
Sportsbooks have many ways of identifying sharps. The pros tend to bet as much as possible, and generally don’t bet close to gametime, by which point the market has matured and the lines are sharper. Above all, bookmakers will probably impose limits on customers who consistently get good closing line value. For example, if someone bets on the Washington Commanders early in the week when they are seven-point underdogs, and by Sunday the spread has dropped to 5, the bettor “got the best of the number,” even if the Commanders end up losing by 10.
“I’ve seen people get limited before that are down thousands of dollars, but they’re consistently beating the line,” said Rob Pizzola, a professional bettor. “It feels like a lot of these sportsbooks are extremely risk averse. If there’s even a 75 percent chance you’re going to win over time, they would rather just not take your action.”
Nick Bogdanovich, a longtime Las Vegas bookmaker who works at Circa after nearly a decade at William Hill, concurs. “It’s a brand new industry” in many states, he said. “It’s not like there’s hundreds of qualified bookmakers out there. You’re training a lot of guys who are green.”
But software and staffing only explain so much. The aggressive crackdown on winners highlights a fundamental debate in gambling: Some bettors know how to overcome the house’s built-in advantage. Do their strategies amount to taking advantage of the sportsbook, or simply playing the game strategically?
One serious sports bettor in Colorado used to get booted from casino blackjack tables for card counting. “Counting cards is definitely not cheating,” he said. “You’re just using your mind.” The same could be said of tactics that get sports bettors limited.
For example, sportsbooks are known to limit customers who bet “steam” — quickly betting outdated lines at books that are slower to adapt to changing markets. On the other hand, line shopping is a basic part of intelligent betting. “If I was in the mall and four different stores have the same pair of sneakers, I’m going to see who’s got the lowest price,” said a New Jersey-based bettor who goes by Markus Ericsen on Twitter. “Why do I get punished for doing that with sports lines?”
Sportsbooks are also quick to limit bettors who are winning props — specific, situational wagers — arguing that props are a promotional gimmick to bring in customers, not the bread and butter of betting. Gamblers, meanwhile, say that books should take action on any line they’re confident enough to offer.
Traditionally, bookmakers have tolerated sharps because they help steer price discovery — the process of finding the best line. “We found out over the past three decades, it’s best to limit them rather than kick them out,” said Jay Kornegay, executive vice president of operations at SuperBook Sports. “We use their information to make our lines as strong as they can be.”
“The bookmaker/bettor relationship does not have to be antagonistic,” said Rufus Peabody, a pro bettor and co-founder of the gambling advice site Unabated. “The problem is that all these books want another book to take the sharp action and then essentially just free ride and copy their lines.”
There is — or at least there once was — an etiquette to sports betting. In exchange for a book taking their action, sharps would self-police. If a bookmaker had a so-called fat finger and posted an obvious mistake, “You wouldn’t go and bet it, you would tell the bookmaker that it was wrong,” said the legendary Las Vegas bookmaker Roxy Roxborough. “Those personal relationships don’t exist anymore in the online world.”
Now, faced with what bettors consider egregious limits, self-restraint goes out the window. “If you feel really screwed over by a book,” Peabody said, “you’re going to be more likely to try to exploit any mistake you can.”
Evading limits with ‘beards'
At some brick-and-mortar sportsbooks, bettors can bet at kiosks in addition to the counter. Although kiosks have lower limits, it’s easier to bet anonymously through them. “It’s become a personal ATM for a lot of professionals,” said the New Jersey-based sharp Gadoon “Spanky” Kyrollos.
Kyrollos, who employs 13 people for his betting operation, says because of limits, most of his bets are placed through other people, known as “beards.” Sharps dream of “flipping whales”: wealthy bettors with a history of losing who have exceptionally high limits. The actor Ashton Kutcher once told Esquire that he collaborated with a betting syndicate, winning $750,000 in four weeks of college football.
A former schoolteacher in New Jersey who goes by The Hitman on Twitter says he uses beards to place bets through roughly 25 accounts at DraftKings. He works in collaboration with a childhood friend who lives in Las Vegas. The friend is tasked with finding longtime losers who are willing to place bets in exchange for a cut of the winnings.
By helping turn squares into winners, some sharps view themselves as a sort of Robin Hood; “These books are grossing tens of millions of dollars off of people’s mistakes or addictions,” the friend said. “We’re the good guys.”
Even with his network of beards, because of limits, The Hitman also bets through dozens of unregulated bookies. “The average local bookie gives me $200 on props,” he said. “How can BetMGM, a billion-dollar business, give me $10, and the woman booking out of her bra in Atlantic City is giving me $200? It just doesn’t make sense.”
By imposing severe limits, regulated operators are pushing business to illegal bookies and offshore operations. A longtime bettor who goes by Brock Landers on Twitter said in an interview that when more than a dozen regulated sportsbooks opened in New Jersey, he was excited to be done with the stressful and, at times, unsafe process of betting illegally. Within months, harsh limits had him back betting through local connections.
“It’s kind of crazy that we thought regulation would clean up all the issues with illegal gambling,” he said. “It’s not like anything has been solved.”
Flipping whales and wearing disguises at sportsbooks might sound like the plot of the next “Ocean’s 11” sequel, “but believe me, it’s the biggest pain in the a-- in the world,” Kyrollos said. “The challenge is no longer winning. The challenge is making sure that I’m able to bet enough to make my business sustainable.”
As a result, he encourages people to think twice about pursuing his profession. “If you’re smart enough to be successful in sports betting,” he said, “you can make a lot more money in an industry where you’re not penalized and ostracized and treated like a thief.”
Matthew Metcalf, director of Circa Sports, says he and his colleagues try to have conversations with customers suspected of doing something that could get them limited. “Nine times out of 10,” he said, “guys are friendly and say, ‘Hey, I really appreciate you reaching out.’ ”
He believes the burgeoning industry needs to work to restore the good-faith relationship between sharps and sportsbooks. “You can’t have a business without customers,” Metcalf said, “and you can’t abuse your customers long term.” | 2022-11-17T13:25:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sportsbooks use limits to restrict sharp bettors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/betting-limits-draft-kings-betmgm-caesars-circa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/betting-limits-draft-kings-betmgm-caesars-circa/ |
USC and UCLA could find the end zone a whole lot in Saturday's rivalry game.
This column was a Mississippi cover away from an 0-4 weekend this past Saturday, when Illinois and UCLA let me down as favorites while New Mexico couldn’t keep pace with Air Force as a big underdog. We’re running out of time to turn things around, but at 22-21-1 for the season there’s still a chance to move into the profitability zone.
No. 7 USC at No. 16 UCLA, over 75, 8 p.m., Fox
This is a high total, but it’s warranted considering both teams’ all-offense, no-defense ways. To wit:
UCLA ranks third nationally in offensive success rate, and USC ranks fourth. Their defenses rank 112th and 119th, respectively.
The Bruins’ defense has given up 149 scrimmage plays of at least 10 yards (97th in the country), and the Trojans have given up 152 (101st).
Both of these offenses have been great at keeping drives alive on third and fourth downs, with UCLA posting a national-best success rate of 60.2 percent and USC at 55.7 percent, which ranks sixth. Conversely, both defenses have been dismal at getting opposing offenses off the field: The Bruins rank 103rd nationally in third/fourth down success rate, and the Trojans are even worse at 125th.
Yes, UCLA put up a season-low 28 points against a truly bad Arizona defense this past weekend, but that was more the Bruins’ fault than anything else. UCLA still averaged 6.1 yards per play, and seven of its 10 drives crossed the Arizona 30-yard line. But three of them resulted in zero points (a fumble, a missed field goal and an end-of-game loss of downs), and that was the difference. Arizona quarterback Jayden de Laura also averaged 11.3 yards per attempt against the Bruins’ defense, and USC quarterback Caleb Williams (31 passing touchdowns, two interceptions, 8.8 yards per attempt this season) could be in line for a big day.
Last year’s UCLA-USC game featured 95 points, and that was before Lincoln Riley brought his offensive wizardry and a host of gaudy transfers to the Trojans. I expect a bunch of points again.
No. 20 Central Florida (-16.5) vs. Navy, 11 a.m., ESPN2
Navy is 5-0 against the spread as a double-digit underdog this season, but the Midshipmen are playing in the final contest of a grueling three-game stretch, have questions at quarterback, have no hope of a bowl game at 3-7 overall and perhaps have started thinking about their annual tilt with rival Army on Dec. 10. This all sets up well for UCF, which will look to maintain momentum from this past weekend’s win at Tulane as it tries to secure the Group of Five’s spot in a New Year’s Six bowl game.
Navy looked hopeless in the first half of this past weekend’s game against Notre Dame, which scored touchdowns on five of its six first-half possessions and missed a field goal on the one it didn’t. But the Midshipmen completely changed defensive tactics in the second half, blitzing often while employing a cover-zero package — each receiver was covered man-to-man, with no deep help from the safeties — in the secondary. The change seemed to baffle the Fighting Irish, who gained a paltry 12 yards in the second half but held on for a 35-32 win.
UCF quarterback John Rhys Plumlee threw only three passes against straight man coverage against Tulane, but he completed all three for 30 yards. Against Memphis on Nov. 5, he completed 6 of 8 passes for 73 yards against man coverage. The week before against Cincinnati, UCF quarterbacks completed 61.9 percent of their passes for 145 yards against man coverage (Plumlee was injured in the second quarter and replaced by Mikey Keene). The point is Plumlee probably won’t be as befuddled by Navy’s schemes as Notre Dame quarterback Drew Pyne seemed to be. UCF ranks 20th in passing success rate overall, while Navy’s defense ranks 120th in that category.
It’s unclear who will start at quarterback for Navy. Xavier Arline, who began the season as a backup, left the Notre Dame game with an apparent leg injury in the fourth quarter and was replaced by Maasai Maynor, who was appearing in only his sixth game over three seasons. It’s all a lot to ask of a team that fought hard in losses to Cincinnati and Notre Dame and now must face a third straight tough opponent.
Louisiana Lafayette (+24) at No. 19 Florida State, noon, ESPN3 streaming
Florida State has won its past three games by a combined 124-22, with the past two victories coming on the road. The Seminoles finally are trending in the right direction in Mike Norvell’s third season as coach, and quarterback Jordan Travis has completed 75 percent of his passes with nine passing touchdowns and only one interception in those three big wins.
Louisiana Lafayette, meanwhile, is muddling along at 5-5, a massive letdown after last season’s historic 13-1 campaign. The Ragin’ Cajuns will fall short of their expected preseason win total (the number was 8.5 victories), and they need to win one of their final two games to qualify for a bowl.
So why, then, do I like the underdog to stay reasonably close here? For starters, Florida State’s impressive three-game stretch has come against Georgia Tech (which already had fired its coach), Miami and Syracuse (both in free fall). Plus, the Ragin’ Cajuns’ strength lies in their pass defense, which is allowing a respectable 6.9 yards per attempt and has more interceptions (14) than touchdowns allowed (13). In its most recent game, a 36-17 win Nov. 10 over a Georgia Southern team that passes at one of the highest rates in the country, Louisiana Lafayette gave up only one passing touchdown to quarterback Kyle Vantrease, and his 57.1 completion percentage was his second-worst mark of the season.
This also is a good situational spot for the Ragin’ Cajuns, because the Seminoles might be looking ahead to next weekend’s season finale against Florida. With both Sunshine State rivals creeping back to respectability, it’ll be the first time in a few years that the matchup will have much in the way of heat to it, and the Seminoles might either let their guard down or rest their starters if things get out of hand early. The SP+ efficiency metric pegs this as closer to a 13-point Florida State win, and I like the big dog to keep things at least somewhat respectable.
Buffalo vs. Akron, Akron team total under 19.5 points, 3:30 p.m., CBS Sports Network
It’s becoming increasingly likely that this game will be played in snowy, windy conditions as a lake-effect storm pummels the Buffalo area between Thursday and Sunday. This could hinder an Akron offense that passes the ball 60.6 percent of the time (sixth nationally) and has gained 77.8 percent of its yardage through the air this season (eighth nationally).
There’s also the matter of the Zips’ quarterback situation. Starter DJ Irons left Akron’s previous game — a 34-28 loss to Eastern Michigan on Nov. 8 — in the second quarter because of injury and didn’t return, and backup Jeff Undercuffler was ineffective, completing less than 50 percent of his passes and throwing two interceptions.
Akron will need to run the ball to have much of a shot in blustery conditions, but the Zips rank 130th out of 131 Football Bowl Subdivision teams in expected points added per rush while Buffalo’s defense ranks third in that category. Don’t be deceived by the numbers put up by Akron’s Cam Wiley in the Eastern Michigan game. Of his 144 rushing yards, 73 came in the fourth quarter when the Zips were down three scores and struggling to move the ball through the air (55 of those yards came on one fourth-quarter touchdown run). Wiley had rushed for only 44 yards in his previous four games combined.
Akron is 1-9 and hasn’t beaten an FBS team this season. Buffalo needs one win for bowl eligibility. The Bulls and the weather should keep the Zips off the scoreboard. | 2022-11-17T13:25:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | College football picks, best bets, locks, favorites, underdogs, over/under - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/college-football-best-bets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/college-football-best-bets/ |
Light technicians at a studio in Marseille install a projector ahead of a scene for the French soap opera "Plus Belle La Vie." (Sandra Mehl for The Washington Post)
MARSEILLE, France — Over the years, the southern French city of Marseille has seen countless soap opera fans rushing to its TV studios, armed with cameras and publicity photos to be autographed. But in recent months, the people thronging at the studio gates are carrying something new: protest banners.
Their goal? To stop the looming end of a long-running hit TV series.
“No to the end of ‘Plus Belle La Vie’ ” read the banner of protester Laetitia Moiroux, who had traveled more than 100 miles to Marseille to make her discontent heard when we met her this summer. She credits the series with having turned around her life.
After experiencing harassment as a teenager, it “gave me back my self-confidence,” the 36-year-old said.
When “Plus Belle La Vie” — which roughly translates as “Life is Sweeter” — airs for the last time after almost two decades this Friday, it will mark the end of a show that was the first and most enduring of its kind in France. Since it started in 2004, the series inserted itself deep into the public debate and transformed the way the French view their second-most-populous city.
At its peak, a weekly audience of 13 million people followed the diverse cast of more or less ordinary characters as they faced the challenges of life — about a fifth of the entire population or the equivalent to almost 70 million viewers in the United States. Families moved their dinner schedules to make time for it.
The daily soap opera was successful, in part, because it often mirrored the country’s big political or social debates, but within comforting surroundings of a familiar setting and in the lives of characters whom viewers have grown attached to over the years.
Much of the series took place on the replica of a town square that filled an entire TV studio, where the characters fought, laughed and cried. Its buzzing cafe bar, the Mistral, looked so realistic on screen that scores of tourists have tried to locate it over the years in Marseille’s historic old town.
“Sadly, we have to explain to them that it doesn’t actually exist,” a Marseille official said once in a 2006 newscast. Her remarks, however, did little to stop thousands more from trying their luck in the ensuing years.
True fans of the show, however, knew that the real inspiration for the bar was the 200-year-old Bar des 13 Coins in the city’s Panier neighborhood.
When the soap opera was launched, “it was the first time that a series discussed the daily lives of people,” said Laurent Kérusoré, one of the actors.
When France legalized same-sex marriage in 2013 despite fierce resistance, the show’s writers married two of its male characters, including the one played by Kérusoré, in what became the country’s first big televised same-sex wedding. At the height of the 2016 migrant influx into Europe, the show added episodes about the lives of undocumented immigrants in France. And as the cost of living surged in France in recent months, some of the show’s characters faced new challenges in making ends meet.
Despite its at times polarizing plots, and criticism that it has leaned too far to the left, the appeal of the series transcended political lines. Rather than lecturing viewers, the show gave them a gentle push, introducing them to characters they may previously not have felt comfortable interacting with in person. For instance, by “showing the little details of their lives,” said Muriel Mille, a sociologist.
And while French cinema struggles with the inclusion of non-White characters to this day, “Plus Belle La Vie” early on reflected the multicultural diversity of Marseille, both on screen and in the writing room, Mille said.
“We really believed in revolutionizing everything,” recalled Serge Ladron de Guevara, an executive producer.
Not every staffer was immediately convinced.
Despite working on the series as a sound engineer, Gilles Cabau didn’t always follow it on TV. But when he and his grandmother watched an episode together over Christmas, he realized the extent to which the program was shaping public attitudes.
“She told me: ‘This [character] is gay and he’s with this other man — but anyway, he’s sweet!’ ” Cabau laughingly recalled. “The topics we discuss in ‘Plus Belle La Vie,’ those are not things she was directly exposed to.”
We met Cabau on a sizzling day in July. It was his last day working for the series, and the crew was filming an outdoor scene near Marseille’s old port, with the city’s seaside fortress towering over them. When the final sequence was shot and Cabau lowered his microphone, the crew around him burst into applause to celebrate their last day with him.
The daily production routine has turned the staff into a tightknit community over the years. “There were weddings, there were births, divorces,” said Claire de La Rochefoucauld, a director and producer with the series. She estimated the number of babies from couples that met on set to be around 45.
The end of the series won’t just be a financial loss for her and the 600 others who worked on it. It will also be the end of a national showcase for Marseille.
Even though it is France’s oldest city, Marseille’s reputation as a crime hot spot long made it an afterthought for tourists and businesses in France. That has only begun to change in recent years, with Parisians moving to the southern beach city in droves and embracing the city’s multicultural and sometimes chaotic identity.
“Marseille, to some extent, represents everything Paris doesn’t have: the sea, the sun, good humor, joy of life,” said de Guevara, who believes that his series played a part in changing public perceptions.
“It’s a bit like a pop song,” added Pierre Martot, who plays a police officer in the series. “The more you listen to it, the more you become accustomed to it.”
For “Plus Belle La Vie,” that growing familiarity may have both been a blessing and a curse. As viewers grew increasingly accustomed to the storylines and rival series offered new and different content, ratings eventually declined.
Some staffers believe that the pandemic accelerated that trend. The show’s producers largely ignored the pandemic in their scripts, even as the country came to a historic and eerie standstill.
De La Rochefoucauld said the pandemic would have been difficult to fully reflect in the show, given that there was often a six-week delay between production and transmission and the ups and downs of the virus waves were unpredictable.
But she acknowledged that when the viewers tuned in from their quarantined homes or under nighttime curfews, what they saw was “no longer their life.”
When it announced the end of the series, France’s public broadcaster cited the need for “renewal,” arguing that “viewer expectations and program consumption have evolved.”
De Guevara, the executive producer, felt the series was not anywhere near to being done. He had been encouraging his writers to team up with ecological activists to put climate change center stage in the scripts.
“There would have been dozens more topics to talk about,” he said. | 2022-11-17T13:33:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Plus Belle La Vie soap opera coming to an end in France - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/plus-belle-la-vie-france-soap-opera-end/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/plus-belle-la-vie-france-soap-opera-end/ |
Who will win World Cup 2022? Rising stars or legends could be key.
Neymar, Messi or Ronaldo could propel their teams to the final, but keep an eye on young players from Belgium and Spain.
Neymar, one of Brazil's stars, shown during a game against Colombia last year. (Ricardo Moraes/Reuters)
The men’s World Cup soccer tournament starts in the small Middle East country of Qatar on Sunday. Teams from 32 countries will compete to see who will win the World Cup trophy.
FIFA, the international soccer organization that runs the World Cup, estimates that 5 billion (!) people will watch some part of the tournament on television, according to its president, Gianni Infantino.
The 32 teams are divided into eight groups. The teams play three matches within their group. Teams are awarded 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie. The two teams with the most points in each group move on to the knockout rounds, where the winners move on and the losers go home.
So which team will win the World Cup? France is the defending champion and has plenty of talented players, such as midfielder Aurélien Tchouameni and forward Kylian Mbappé.
But it is tough to repeat. No country has won back-to-back World Cups since Brazil won in 1958 and 1962.
Speaking of Brazil … the Brazilian team is ranked Number 1 in the world and is loaded with scorers led by international superstar Neymar. The South American soccer powerhouse has won five World Cups, more than any other country (Germany and Italy have won four). Count on the Brazilians to make another long run in the 2022 tournament.
Chances are, however, the 2022 champion will come from the European continent. Ten of the top 12 men’s teams are from Europe.
Spanish stars Pedri (19 years old) and Gavi (18), are young but may make a big splash in this year’s tournament. They have established themselves by playing well together for the legendary club Barcelona.
Belgium is ranked second in the world and may be the best soccer nation never to win a World Cup. The Red Devils, as they are called, are packed with veteran players but may need a spark from 21-year-old midfielder Charles De Ketelaere.
And I haven’t even mentioned traditional European soccer powers such as Germany and the Netherlands, which also have promising young players.
Not all World Cup players are young. International superstar Lionel Messi (35) of Argentina has said this will be his last World Cup. That could also be true of fellow top-tier footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (37) of Portugal. While they have never won a World Cup and may be slowing down, soccer is a game where one great strike or pass can swing a game. Messi and Ronaldo are capable of that kind of magic.
What about the United States? The Americans missed the 2018 tournament, so they lack World Cup experience. They are also stuck in a tough group with England (Number 5 in world rankings), Wales (19) and Iran (20). The United States would count this World Cup as a success if they can finish in the top two of their group.
Thirty-two teams. Sixty-four matches. All the greatest world soccer stars. The World Cup is must-see sports.
Fred Bowen writes the sports opinion column for KidsPost. He is the author of 27 sports books for kids including his latest soccer book, “Soccer Trophy Mystery.” | 2022-11-17T13:46:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who will win World Cup 2022? Rising stars or legends could be key. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/11/17/world-cup-2022-top-teams/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/11/17/world-cup-2022-top-teams/ |
Rishi Sunak budget seeks to stabilize U.K. economy rattled by Liz Truss
In this photo provided by the Parliament, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivers a ministerial statement in the House of Commons in London on Thursday. (Andy Bailey/AP)
LONDON — The new government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak executed a screeching U-turn from his predecessor on Thursday, unveiling a new economic plan that calls for billions of dollars in tough spending cuts alongside steep tax increases, in a package designed to stabilize skeptical financial markets and tackle soaring inflation.
Unveiling the five-year plan, Britain’s new finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, warned that the United Kingdom faced a global “economic storm,” with soaring energy and food prices, coupled with the highest inflation rate — 11.1 percent last month — in more than 40 years.
He acknowledged that the $65 billion package — half in new taxes and half in spending cuts — would be painful and felt by ordinary citizens. As he read out the statement in the House of Commons, lawmakers on both sides were, for the most part, unusually quiet.
Rishi Sunak vows to earn Britain’s trust in first speech as prime minister
Hunt told the nation that the data show Britain is already in recession, which he called “a recession made in Russia,” because of its war in Ukraine.
Hunt said that it was crucial for the British government to work alongside the Bank of England to lower inflationary pressure. He acknowledged that Britain needed to “give the world confidence … that we pay our way” and so he said his tax-and-spending plan would reduce borrowing over time. The government will give itself five years to hit debt and spending targets, instead of three years currently.
Opposition leaders say that part of the economic pain felt today was caused by the Conservative Party itself, which has been in power since 2010.
“The mess we are in is a result of 12 weeks of Conservative chaos, but also 12 years of Conservative economic failure,” said Rachel Reeves, Hunt’s counterpart in the opposition Labour Party.
“This government has forced our economy into a doom loop where low growth leads to higher taxes, lower investments and squeezed wages, with the running down of public services — all of which hits economic growth again,” she said.
Britain is the only Group of Seven nation that has not yet recovered to its pre-pandemic size, after suffering from a decade of lower productivity and near-stagnant income growth.
Economists, including some officials at the Bank of England, are also saying that Brexit — the consuming obsession previous Conservative governments — has not helped but likely hurt the British economy, and will likely continue to do so. Sunak, a former hedge fund manager, was an early advocate for Britain’s leaving the European Union.
Richer than the royals: Win puts Rishi Sunak’s wealth in the spotlight
At a committee hearing in the House of Commons earlier this week, Swati Dhingra, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, told lawmakers, “it’s undeniable now that we’re seeing a much bigger slowdown in trade in the U.K. compared to the rest of the world.”
She declared that Brexit contributed to increased prices and reduced wages.
Today’s road map stands in stark contrast to the one issued just eight weeks ago by the previous government that proposed billions in unfunded tax cuts. The markets recoiled, which sent the cost of government borrowing — and mortgage and lending rates — spiraling upward, as the ill-fated premiership of Liz Truss imploded.
Truss had vowed to transform Britain into a low-tax, high-wage economy, but she didn’t explain how she would pay for her sweeping tax cuts. Critics disparaged her as a supply-side ideologue peddling trickle-down economics. Truss herself admitted that she had attempted to go “too far, too fast.” Her premiership was the shortest in British history.
The new finance minster, the fourth in as many months, is seeking to reassure markets that the grown-ups are back in charge.
Hunt’s budget will mean millions of people will be paying more tax on their incomes. As one example, people earning more than $148,000 a year will pay the highest rate of 45 percent beginning next year. Corporate tax rates, once set to decrease, now will remain the same.
Hunt said that while government spending will continue to increase in real terms every year for the next five years, it will do so at a slower rate. Most of the spending cuts in the plan will come later. Elections are scheduled for 2025.
The long-awaited independent forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), an official watchdog, was decidedly gloomy. It predicts overall growth for this year at 4.2 percent, but size of the economy will shrink by 1.4 percent in 2023. The agency forecasts an inflation rate of 9.1 percent this year and 7.4 percent next year, with unemployment expected to rise from 3.6 percent in 2023 to 4.9 percent in 2024.
The OBR said Thursday that despite the new government support to subsidize and cap soaring energy bills, living standards are going to fall by 7 percent over the next two years, erasing eight years of growth.
The Bank of England has warned that the country is headed for its longest recession in modern history; interest and mortgage rates are on the rise; and more workers, from nurses to transport workers, are on strike or threatening to. Paris recently overtook London as Europe’s largest stock market after recession fears hurt British stocks.
How Liz Truss became the shortest-serving prime minister in U.K. history
All this comes against a backdrop of extraordinary political and economic upheaval. The last time that the U.K. government unveiled a budget, the pound dropped to its lowest level against the U.S. dollar and then the Bank of England had to intervene.
The new Sunak administration is for the first time setting out its economic plans and hoping to reassure the markets that credibility, competence and prudent borrowing are something that they can expect from Britain.
Matthew Agarwala, an economist at the University of Cambridge, said that the spectacular failure of what became known as “Trussonomics” had left Sunak in a box.
“If we had a reputation for sound economic management, we might be able to stretch the rules a touch, but at the moment, markets have very little faith in U.K. leadership and they will be watching us like hawks,” he said. | 2022-11-17T14:30:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rishi Sunak’s autumn statement budget raises taxes and cuts spending - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/uk-budget-autumn-statement-jeremy-hunt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/uk-budget-autumn-statement-jeremy-hunt/ |
Analysis by Frances Schwartzkopff | Bloomberg
A person is reflected in a window of a JPMorgan Chase & Co. bank branch across the street from the company’s headquarters in New York, U.S., on Monday, Sept. 21, 2020. JPMorgan CEO Dimon has made the case for a broader return, saying his firm has seen “alienation” among younger workers and that an extended stretch of working from home could bring long-term economic and social damage. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
Should a business or an investment fund care only about how environmental, social justice and governance (ESG) issues affect its bottom line, or should they also be attuned to how their operations affect the world? These questions get at the heart of something called “double materiality.” While the idea that both are important has been embraced in Europe, it has yet to make significant inroads in the US. At issue is what information companies should be required to report — and who decides?
At the basic level it’s an accounting principle, referring to something that may have an impact on -- be material to -- how a company performs. A material risk can threaten targets or goals -- something of keen interest to investors. In the context of ESG, this is known as single materiality and means mainly ESG factors that may pose a threat or opportunity to a business and its bottom line, such as extreme weather. It doesn’t tell you anything about how “green” a company’s business practices are, but rather how vulnerable its earnings may be to ESG risks.
That’s where greenness comes in. “Double materiality” adds the risks a company’s activities pose to the environment and society to those that it potentially faces internally. How such things should be accounted for in corporate reports remains the subject of intense debate. For now, reports vary wildly, making it hard for investors to compare one company or fund with another and make informed decisions.
Many. The International Sustainability Standards Board, launched in 2021 at the United Nations COP26 climate summit, is trying to write a global rulebook for climate and sustainability reports. Already, the US-based Sustainability Accounting Standards Board has guidance for single materiality -- referred to as “outside-in” -- which is used by hundreds of companies. The Global Reporting Initiative, founded in the wake of the 1997 Exxon Valdez oil spill, provides voluntary “inside-out” standards for reporting a company’s impact on people and the planet. Another international partnership, the GHG Protocol, has related guidelines for tallying the “scope” of a company’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases, including those emitted by suppliers and customers, which the ISSB wants to include. Some companies use SASB, some GRI, some both and others something different. Meanwhile, the European Union is blazing its own trail.
Almost a decade ago, the EU began requiring companies to report non-financial information in an attempt to make them more accountable for ESG issues. That was the first time disclosure requirements included the concept of double materiality. But wide gaps soon emerged in the quality and quantity of information, amid complaints that the rules weren’t well understood or applied. So a redrafted EU rulebook provides companies with more explicit requirements and forces many more businesses to comply. That so-called Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive will be phased in for the 27 EU countries starting in 2024.
Double materiality isn’t incorporated in Securities and Exchange Commission rules or proposals. Nor does it shape the bulk of ESG ratings provided by firms such as MSCI Inc. US regulators have largely focused on improving the quality of reports on single materiality by, for example, requiring publicly traded companies to detail their costs from extreme weather events or capital investments to help reduce emissions. An SEC official said in May 2022 that the agency’s aim was “to achieve as much interoperability” as possible between what the SEC could require and global standards.
Historically, corporate reporting has focused on the near-term and only lightly touched on ESG. But climate change and societal stresses related to the Covid-19 pandemic have made them harder to ignore. That’s led to demands for more information, since what may be a small issue for a firm may be or become a big problem for the communities in which it operates. Water availability is often named as one such issue.
The initial proposals from the group writing the global rulebook, the ISSB, would require companies to disclose the impact of ESG risks on their business -- single materiality. It also has indicated an openness to double materiality, and is working to coordinate its rulebook with others. Eventually, the global rules, though voluntary, will likely be used widely, like international accounting standards are. The EU operations of US firms such as McDonald’s Corp. and General Motors Co. will probably have to comply with European rules to operate in the bloc. JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in September it would start offering clients a data-analysis tool that covers double materiality. Fidelity International, one of the UK’s biggest money managers, incorporated a double materiality strategy in 2022 and applies it across all managed assets.
In the US, some Republican-led jurisdictions have started penalizing banks and asset managers that embrace ESG reporting at all, arguing that it goes too far in bringing progressive politics into investing decisions. At the other end of the debate, some climate change activists and other ESG advocates have criticized current efforts for not going far enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions or fight inequality. | 2022-11-17T14:39:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What New ESG Approach ‘Double Materiality’ Means — and Why JPMorgan Is a Fan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/what-new-esg-approach-double-materiality-means--and-why-jpmorgan-is-a-fan/2022/11/17/9b09e7ec-6681-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/what-new-esg-approach-double-materiality-means--and-why-jpmorgan-is-a-fan/2022/11/17/9b09e7ec-6681-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Next year, for the first time, Medicare will be allowed to start negotiating the prices of some prescription drugs. The policy is expected to lower out-of-pocket costs and save the US government almost $100 billion over a decade. It could prove one of the most valuable parts of the Inflation Reduction Act — but it isn’t without flaws. For this effort to succeed as it deserves to, it will eventually need both bigger ambitions and closer attention to detail.
Most seniors get their prescriptions through Medicare Part D, a benefit provided through private plans that contract through the government. Spending is projected to hit $119 billion next year, accounting for almost a third of what the US lays out on retail drugs. When Part D was being designed in the early 2000s, pharmaceutical manufacturers pressed for a “noninterference clause” to stop the program haggling over price. Without it, they argued, innovation would be stifled. Already, some manufacturers are blaming the IRA for stalling or halting drug development plans.
This risk looks exaggerated, to put it politely. At the moment, just 10 older brand-name treatments (chosen according to total spending) are included in the negotiations, and the list will expand only slowly. New formulations, drugs with generic or biosimilar competition, and certain treatments for rare diseases will be exempt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law as it stands will prevent just 15 of 1,300 new drugs from hitting the market over the next 30 years.
Granted, cutting the revenue that manufacturers expect to eventually collect from new drugs is likely to have some effect on innovation — but that doesn’t justify paying whatever producers dare to ask. Medicare is acting on behalf of taxpayers as well as patients, so a balance needs to be struck. It makes sense to move cautiously, but if all goes well, further legislation could broaden its scope faster than the IRA envisages. Bear in mind, public-sector drug buyers in other rich countries (not to mention Medicaid and the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US) take striking such deals for granted.
Ambition aside, managing the new approach to best effect will pose challenges. With billions at stake, manufacturers will deploy every resource to lessen the impact. (Judging from the sector’s share prices, investors think they’ll succeed.) Medicare is starting to hire new personnel to conduct appraisals and negotiations. Yet the sums provided for this look too small. Also, companies might hope to shield their revenues by shifting patients from existing drugs to new versions without clear therapeutic benefits — so-called product hopping. Medicare will need to detect and prevent it.
Glitches are likely to emerge before the policy begins to deliver lower prices — in 2026 at the earliest. Meantime, the public support needed to sustain the reform shouldn’t be taken for granted.
For instance, the plan expects Medicare to be guided by its assessment of the treatment’s “maximum fair price” — a judgment, in part, of the drug’s cost-effectiveness. This would raise ethical questions concerning the value of life and so-called quality-adjusted life-years. Yet the legislation offers no guidance on this process. For the new approach to command public confidence, methods will need to be clarified, explained and defended. Medical systems in Europe and the UK have developed data-driven approaches, and Medicare would be wise to draw on their experience.
Many years overdue, this reform is a modest start. But, given the chance, the new approach can get a better deal for patients and taxpayers without materially harming innovation, and pave the way for more. That’s quite a prize.
• Biogen Lands a CEO Who Can Navigate Turbulence: Lisa Jarvis
• How to Fix the Dialysis Spending Crisis: The Editors | 2022-11-17T14:39:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Medicare’s Drug-Price Negotiations Can Get More Ambitious. Here’s How - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/medicares-drug-price-negotiations-can-get-more-ambitious-heres-how/2022/11/17/45b652cc-6680-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/medicares-drug-price-negotiations-can-get-more-ambitious-heres-how/2022/11/17/45b652cc-6680-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Ever since it won the right to host the 2022 World Cup, Qatar has been a controversial choice. The Persian Gulf country’s scorching climate made it impossible to hold the competition during the usual summer slot, so it was switched to November and December -- just when national leagues are in full swing. Deprived of their star players, domestic competitions will have to shut down for up to six weeks. Investigations continue into how Qatar, a tiny nation of 3 million people with no soccer pedigree, managed to win a secret vote to become host. Human-rights groups have decried the treatment of foreign workers building the stadiums and accommodation for visiting fans. The government says the event is a catalyst for improving its labor laws.
Ever since 2010, when soccer’s ruling body FIFA awarded Russia and Qatar the rights to consecutive World Cups, allegations of vote-buying have swirled. Two members of the 24-man FIFA executive committee that chooses the hosts were suspended before the 2010 ballot after being filmed offering their support for cash. An investigation continues in France into the award of the 2022 tournament. An indictment was also filed in the US in 2020 that accused several officials of receiving payments to back Qatar’s bid. Their trial is set to begin in a federal court in New York in January. Qatar denies paying anyone for the hosting rights. FIFA said that holding the event in the country was in line with its goal of expanding soccer into new regions.
Qatar is betting the tournament will help to modernize its image and make it a tourism and business destination on par with regional rival Dubai. The World Cup is the world’s most-watched sports event, with the last one held in Russia in 2018 attracting 3.6 billion television and online viewers. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that Qatar was on course to complete $300 billion of infrastructure projects before the opening game on Nov. 20. That looks like a lot for a country smaller than Connecticut, but Qatar is one of the world’s wealthiest nations thanks to vast natural gas reserves. Organizers expect the event to add $17 billion to the economy, equivalent to about 10% of gross domestic product in 2021.
Media reports have detailed cases of laborers working on the new stadiums and other infrastructure being subjected to inhumane treatment and unsafe working conditions. Amnesty International accused the government of failing to properly investigate the deaths of many migrant workers. The World Cup preparations have shone a light on the Gulf region’s “kafala” (sponsorship) system, under which laborers require their employer’s permission to switch jobs, return home or even open a bank account. In 2019, the United Nations assailed Qatar for racial discrimination, saying a worker’s nationality played an “overwhelming role” in how they are treated.
While denying allegations that laborers are ill-treated, the government has been building some new living quarters and promised to improve safety. Qatar introduced new labor laws in 2020 designed to guarantee a minimum wage and make it easier to move jobs in what it says is an effort to dismantle the kafala system. Rules instituted in 2021 further limited the hours that workers can toil outside in the summer heat. At least on paper, the reforms make Qatar’s labor laws among the most worker-friendly in the Gulf region. Rights groups acknowledge that working conditions have improved in recent years, but continue to publish reports documenting unpaid wages, illegal recruitment fees and poor enforcement of labor rules.
Qatar is ruled by its emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who controls the government and the judiciary. Political parties are banned and most of the population are noncitizens with few civil or political rights. Homosexuality is officially illegal, though penalties are infrequently enforced. While FIFA rules stipulate that displays promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights be permitted in stadiums, a senior official responsible for security during the event warned that rainbow flags could be taken away from fans to protect them from being attacked. In March 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report calling on Qatar to reform the male guardianship system, a loose group of practices and rules that make many women’s personal decisions contingent on approval from a male family member.
The weather should be quite pleasant. The average mid-November high is 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius), and the heat tends to dissipate in December. Nonetheless, some of the tournament’s eight outdoor stadiums are equipped with air conditioning systems -- adding an extra challenge to FIFA’s pledge to make this World Cup carbon neutral. The limited number of hotels in Qatar means some fans are being encouraged to stay in other cities in the region and travel by plane to matches.
The country’s dress code reflects its Muslim traditions. While there’s flexibility in five-star hotels, women and men must cover their bodies from shoulders to knees in malls and most public spaces. Public displays of affection are unwelcome; even hand-holding is rare. With a handful of exceptions, alcohol is limited to restaurants attached to high-end hotels, though World Cup organizers have said tourists will be able to drink in designated fan zones. | 2022-11-17T14:39:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Qatar Is a Controversial Venue for 2022 World Cup - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-qatar-is-a-controversial-venue-for-2022-world-cup/2022/11/17/e710eaba-6680-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-qatar-is-a-controversial-venue-for-2022-world-cup/2022/11/17/e710eaba-6680-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Stephen Curry has played at an MVP-caliber level through the first month of the NBA season, but the Golden State Warriors are mired in a puzzling championship hangover. (Matt York/AP)
The greatest shooter in NBA history has become famous for his expressiveness in gleeful times, bounding around the court, pounding his chest and even putting opponents to bed when necessary.
But Stephen Curry has long possessed remarkable composure when facing adverse circumstances, avoiding the slumped shoulders, finger-pointing and profane tirades that can become commonplace when losses mount.
Late in the third quarter of a blowout loss to the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday, the Golden State Warriors star exhibited a rare breach of decorum. After teammate Andrew Wiggins was called for a foul, Curry’s frustration bubbled to the surface and he punched the basketball high into the air. The moment passed quickly: Before the whistle blew for a technical foul, Curry had, true to form, already calmed down and chased after the ball in an effort to return it to an official.
Unfortunately for the Warriors, the trying times that have marked the beginning of their title defense figure to be longer lasting than Curry’s split-second vent session. In a season that was cast as perhaps the “Last Dance” for a veteran core that has won four titles in the past eight seasons, Golden State is already grappling with the fact that only Curry has consistently stayed on beat.
Well before he capped last season with a signature triumph in the Finals, Curry opened the campaign by playing the best basketball of his career. The 14-year veteran has been even better through the first month of this season, averaging 32.8 points, 6.8 rebounds and 6.4 assists per game. Not only is Curry comfortably above the vaunted 50/40/90 shooting splits, he is averaging more points, rebounds and assists than Michael Jordan did during the Chicago Bulls’ “Last Dance” run of 1997-98.
At 34, Curry has blended expert technique, mental mastery and improved strength in a devastatingly efficient and consistent package rarely approached by players in their mid-30s. During the 130-119 loss to the Suns, who were without starters Chris Paul and Cam Johnson, Curry poured in a season-high 50 points, nine rebounds and six assists.
And yet Curry’s yeoman work hasn’t been enough to keep the Warriors above water. With its loss to Phoenix, Golden State fell to 6-9 on the season, placing it 12th in the Western Conference. The Warriors are now 0-8 on the road and 1-4 against top-six seeds in either conference thanks to a 27th-ranked defense and a disjointed bench that regularly squanders Curry’s best efforts.
“It’s a struggle right now,” Curry said to reporters, in the aftermath of Golden State’s worst start on the road in 33 years. “Let’s keep it real. We have to understand that it’s going to be really hard to dig yourself out of the situation we’re in because there’s a lot of issues. But it’s not anything we can’t overcome.”
As Golden State was run off the court by Phoenix, Coach Steve Kerr scolded his team for its “pickup game” approach and lack of trust in each other. Clearly hoping that the message would stick, Kerr used his postgame news conference to call out his team for “hanging [their] heads” and “feeling sorry for ourselves.” The Warriors, he said, “lacked” the “combination of joy, competitive desire, unity and purpose” they have displayed for much of the past decade.
“I’ve failed,” Kerr said to reporters. “I’ve got to bring these guys together. … We’ve got to get everybody on board, on the same page, in terms of just worrying about winning. … Everyone can’t wait to play us and kick our a--. We’ve had a lot of success, a lot of fun, a lot of joy in beating people over the years. Teams don’t forget that.”
The Warriors launched their season last month hoping to put Draymond Green’s punch of Jordan Poole behind them and expecting to play an 11-man rotation that would include recent lottery picks James Wiseman, Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody. Kerr planned to deploy a “Strength in Numbers” approach like he used to win a title in 2014-15, yet he has been forced to cope with a group that has performed more like the 2020-21 Warriors, a fundamentally flawed one-man army that lost in the play-in tournament despite MVP-caliber play from Curry.
While there have been no conspicuous flare-ups between teammates since Green’s inexplicable preseason strike, Golden State has lost its easygoing verve and its ability to fashion a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Klay Thompson has been mired in a shooting slump, Green’s defensive impact has slipped and Poole has been less reliable than expected. Meanwhile, the prospects have been largely dumped from the rotation: Wiseman was assigned to the G League this week after a poor start, Kuminga has been a non-factor and Moody has been an afterthought.
A group of newcomers has replaced that trio: Donte DiVincenzo, JaMychal Green and Anthony Lamb. Collectively, they represent a step down from Gary Payton II, Otto Porter Jr., Damion Lee and Juan Toscano-Anderson, who all found new homes during the offseason.
Thanks to a record-setting payroll, the Warriors were able to retain their entire starting lineup and re-sign Poole to a nine-figure extension. But their bench overhaul, which was motivated in part by luxury tax concerns, has significantly compromised their defensive intensity and versatility. Golden State has slipped in several areas, including getting back in transition, holding opponents to one shot and avoiding unnecessary fouls.
The Warriors’ malaise has lasted long enough that it qualifies as a championship hangover, but they haven’t yet reached the point of sheer panic. Last season, the Boston Celtics hovered around .500 for nearly half the season before getting hot and reaching the Finals. Golden State is still just three losses back of the West’s fourth seed, and the conference standings won’t fully shake out for some time.
Even so, Kerr and Curry have adopted a grave tone in their self-evaluations. The time for course correction is now. Curry noted that the Warriors have never previously suffered from “rough patches this long where you haven’t found anything to create an identity around 15 games in,” and he said that he was “ready for the challenge” of helping get his teammates “in the right mind frame to win.”
“Just put the focus on the team,” he said, speaking carefully like always. “If your energy can be focused on the team, having each other’s back vocally or with your energy and body language. Whatever the sacrifice might look like when you’re out there on the court, that usually creates good vibes and you can feed off of that and get out of a hole. You can’t obsess about the stat sheet. That’s not how the game is played.” | 2022-11-17T14:41:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stephen Curry, Steve Kerr worried about Warriors' slow start - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/stephen-curry-is-better-than-ever-warriors-are-floundering/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/stephen-curry-is-better-than-ever-warriors-are-floundering/ |
Senegal’s Sadio Mane is expected to miss the “first games” of the World Cup following a recent right leg injury. (Sven Hoppe/DPA/AP)
Senegalese talisman Sadio Mane will miss his country’s “first games” at the World Cup because of a right fibula injury he suffered playing for Bayern Munich last week against Bundesliga club Werder Bremen, Abdoulaye Sow, a Senegal football federation board member, told reporters this week.
Sow did not clarify how many games Mane will miss, but they could include Senegal’s opener Monday against the Netherlands, a Nov. 25 contest against host Qatar and a Nov. 29 group stage finale against Ecuador.
France hopes to become the first country to win back-to-back World Cups since Brazil did so in 1958 and 1962, but the team’s impressive depth will be tested in Qatar. It will also be without Juventus midfielder Paul Pogba (September knee surgery), Chelsea defender Wesley Fofana (October knee injury) and RB Leipzig forward Christopher Nkunku, who on Tuesday suffered an injury while training that ended his World Cup before it started.
Steffen was viewed as the most notable snub from the U.S. World Cup roster, which was unveiled last week, after he served as U.S. Coach Gregg Berhalter’s first choice at goalkeeper for much of the coach’s tenure.
Brendan Rodgers, Chillwell’s former manager at Leicester City, drew attention to the injury conundrum during the lead-up to the World Cup, telling reporters, “players will give their best [for their club], but there can be no doubt in the back of their mind that one injury could keep them out. | 2022-11-17T14:41:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | With World Cup set to kick off, some of soccer's brightest stars are out - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/world-cup-absences/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/world-cup-absences/ |
The Downtown Holiday Market returns to the middle of F Street this weekend and runs through Dec. 23. (Maria Luz Bravo for The Washington Post)
Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo: ‘Cendrillon’ at the Kennedy Center: Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, the dance troupe founded by Grace Kelly’s daughter, makes its Kennedy Center debut with a not-so-traditional reinterpretation of Cinderella. Choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot does away with obvious fairy tale trappings in this intriguing “Cendrillon,” replacing glass slippers with gold glitter while still incorporating Sergei Prokofiev’s classic “Cinderella” score. Through Sunday. $39-$129.
World Cup Trivia at Guinness Open Gate Brewery: The World Cup starts on Sunday, but do you know your Ronaldo from Rivaldo, or the Leopards of Zaire from the Indomitable Lions? Test your knowledge at a special trivia night at the Guinness brewery. Organizers are calling it a “fan party,” so the questions won’t all be soccer related, though scarves and jerseys are encouraged. The maximum team size is eight. 7 to 9 p.m. Free.
Triple Crossing Tap Takeover at Shelter: Richmond remains one of the East Coast’s best beer destinations, and Triple Crossing is one of the key reasons. This mini tap takeover at Shelter, the bar inside the Roost food hall near Potomac Avenue, will make you a believer. The eight beers have something for everyone, from crispies (Hilltop unfiltered kellerbier; Czech pale lager on gravity cask) to hazies (the flagship Clever Girl IPA with Mosaic and Citra hops; the bolder Nectar & Knife double IPA with Simcoe and Mosaic). 4 p.m. Beer prices vary.
Capital Book Fest: For its final event of the year, Capital Book Fest offers thousands of used books — and, for those nostalgic few, used CDs, DVDs and vinyl — for $6 or less. Books are provided by bookstore Carpe Librum, and profits benefit nonprofit Turning the Page, which aids parents of students in improving academic performance. Registration is appreciated but not required for this sale in front of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center downtown. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free.
International Partnerships Concert at Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall: Here’s a true sign of transatlantic cooperation: The U.S. Air Force Concert Band has invited the Prince of Denmark Air Force Band to perform in the United States for the first time, in honor of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark’s 50 years on the throne and the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force. The concert includes both ensembles performing together at Northern Virginia Community College’s Alexandria campus. 7 p.m. Free.
Downtown Holiday Market: For the third consecutive year, the Downtown Holiday Market is taking over two full blocks of F Street instead of the relatively crowded sidewalks in front of the National Portrait Gallery. The spacious footprint was developed for social distancing, but it allows for a much more comfortable experience browsing the 62 booths of vendors selling jewelry, prints, candles, chocolate and other goods, including spaces reserved for local Black-owned and minority-owned businesses. Snack on empanadas, mini-doughnuts and sweets while browsing and listening to a wide variety of musicians and performers: The lineup for Friday’s opening includes excerpts from the Washington Ballet’s “Nutcracker” and a concert by Sugar Bear and E.U. This is a market that warrants repeat visits: New vendors rotate in after Dec. 4. Noon to 8 p.m. daily from Friday through Dec. 23; closed Thanksgiving Day and Dec. 5. Free.
District Holiday Lights: Fourteen of D.C.’s commercial corridors are getting dressed up for the holidays, as shops and restaurants decorate with lights, tinsel and the odd inflatable snowman. Browse the festive displays beginning Friday night, and if you find yourself drawn in to do some shopping or to warm up with a drink or snack, so much the better. Participating neighborhoods include Mount Pleasant, Logan Circle and Cleveland Park, with a map of businesses on the D.C. Holiday Lights website. After exploring several neighborhoods, vote for your favorite displays online. Through Jan. 8. Free.
Manic Street Preachers and the London Suede at the Fillmore Silver Spring: When the Manic Street Preachers released their debut album in 1992, the Welsh neo-punk band vowed to burn hot and flame out quickly. Instead, the group turned to sweeping arena rock and became an institution; its most recent album, 2021’s “The Ultra Vivid Lament,” went to No. 1 on the U.K. charts. Yet the band is little known in the U.S., where it has rarely toured. (Friday’s show is the Manics’ second ever in the D.C. area.) Perhaps the trio’s lyrics are too bookish and political for mainstream U.S. success, but its rousing and increasingly eclectic music should have wide appeal. There are even a few outright pop songs in the catalogue of the Manics, who insist that “Ultra Vivid Lament” shows a strong Abba influence. Also on the bill is the London Suede, whose debut album arrived a year after the Manics’. This British neo-glam band (known at home simply as Suede) has a slightly higher profile in the U.S. but never achieved the prominence on this side of the Atlantic of such contemporaries as Blur. The group’s new “Autofiction,” the ninth album in a career interrupted by a 2003-2010 hiatus, has been hailed in Britain as a return to form. Maybe it will be Suede’s long-delayed American breakthrough. 8 p.m. $49.50.
Alexandria Cider Festival: Since 2012, Virginia cider makers have designated a week in November as the official Virginia Cider Week. While there are tastings and special releases across the state, the highlight in this region is the Alexandria Cider Festival. Ten producers from the Old Dominion, including Winchester Ciderworks, Potter’s Craft Cider and Albemarle CiderWorks, pour their hard ciders in the grounds of Old Town’s historic Lloyd House. Tickets include tastings and live music; food is available for purchase. Proceeds benefit Alexandria museums. 1 to 5 p.m. $55-$65. $20 designated drivers.
Native Cinema Showcase: The National Museum of the American Indian’s virtual film festival showcases Indigenous filmmakers, with screenings of six features and 30 shorts representing Indigenous communities in eight countries. During the Native Cinema Showcase, tune in for documentaries; a collection of family-friendly short films; music videos; and longer works such as “Bootlegger,” a Canadian drama about a debate over the sale of alcohol on a reserve in Quebec. A few of the films have a limit on the number of viewers, so you’ll want to register in advance. While the festival is predominantly online, Saturday brings an in-person screening of the documentary “Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting” at 2 p.m. in the museum’s Rasmuson Theater, followed by a discussion with a panel including museum director Cynthia Chavez Lamar. Seating is free on a first-come, first-served basis. The conversation will also be live-streamed. Festival Friday through Nov. 25; in-person event Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. Free.
Bartees Strange at 9:30 Club: Bartees Strange went from very D.C. corporate jobs (including, most recently, communications director for a nonprofit) to an alternate career path where he’s now a rock star headlining 9:30 Club. (Dreams really do come true!) The genre-hopping Strange is touring behind his sophomore album, “Farm to Table,” which is a bit more chilled out than his frenetic, critically acclaimed debut. It’s also a declaration of Strange’s arrival to the upper echelons of indie rock — complete with boasts about FaceTiming Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon. Doors at 6 p.m. $20.
Club Quarantine Live at the Kennedy Center: In the early days of the pandemic, D-Nice’s streaming DJ sets on Instagram brought joy and funk to huge audiences, ranging from Michelle Obama and De La Soul to music lovers sitting on their group house couches. D-Nice is taking the show on the road and becoming the first hip-hop DJ to headline the Kennedy Center’s Opera House. Special guests include EPMD, Digable Planets, Faith Evans, LeToya Luckett and many more. Creative black-tie outfits are requested. 7:30 p.m. $189-$299.
D.C. Punk Rock Flea at St. Stephen Episcopal Church: Where do you find the perfect gift for a friend or co-worker who gets excited about zines, vintage hardcore records, punky pins and hand-dyed vegan scarves? That’s exactly what sets the D.C. Punk Rock Flea apart from other markets at this time of year. Held in the basement of the legendary punk venue St. Stephen’s in Columbia Heights, the event doubles as a food drive for We Are Family, an organization that delivers food, gifts and other services to D.C. seniors. There’s no admission charge, so bring a can or two of food. Noon to 5 p.m. Free.
Dupont Circle 18th Street Popup: Local artisans have you covered if you’re looking to freshen up your home before that two-dozen-guest Thanksgiving you regret agreeing to host. This pop-up market, featuring 14 makers and hosted outside on the 1800-1900 blocks of 18th Street NW, is focused on home decor, including textiles, pottery, wall art and wood crafts. Expect houseplants and macramé for sale from vendors like PLNTR, whose storefront is located steps away. Noon to 5 p.m. Free.
Friendsgiving with Darling Nikki at Hill Prince: Join DJs Jerome Baker III and Mathias — the talents behind the twice-monthly Darling Nikki party at Capo and veterans of the city’s top nightspots — and guest Micky Slicks for an early Friendsgiving in the back of comfortable H Street NE lounge Hill Prince. Dance to everything from retro R&B jams to current pop hits, effortlessly mixed. You’ll be grinning in no time. 10 p.m. $5.
DC Gaymers ‘Pokémon Scarlet’ and ‘Pokémon Violet’ Release Party: The release of “Pokémon Scarlet” and “Pokémon Violet” has the gaming world abuzz, and not just because you can make really freaky sandwiches to feed your pokepals: There’s a large open world to explore and a number of new characters. Get a taste of the game at Uproar, where DC Gaymers, a group of LGBTQ gamers, is holding a release party. (BYO Nintendo Switch.) In addition to battling mons on Uproar’s TVs, there’s a raffle for a special Pokémon OLED Nintendo Switch. Doors open at 5 p.m.; Pokémon from 6 to 9 p.m. Free admission.
The World Pup at Barkhaus: If your dog loves Lionel Messi or Christian Pulisic as much as you do, bring it to the World Pup party at Alexandria’s dog-friendly Barkhaus bar. The soccer-themed event, held during the first World Cup match between Qatar and Ecuador, includes photo ops, a food truck for dogs, free puppuccinos, and food and drink specials for humans, too. Dress your four-legged friend in an international outfit to win prizes, or fill out a World Cup bracket. A portion of the day’s proceeds benefits Action Against Hunger. 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free.
Ted Lasso Costume Party at Dacha Navy Yard: The World Cup starts Sunday. The next series of “Ted Lasso” starts — well, “at some point,” to quote Jason Sudeikis at the Emmys. But the beginning of the world’s biggest soccer tournament might as well celebrate America’s most-loved soccer export. Dacha Navy Yard is screening the opening match between Qatar and Ecuador alongside a Ted Lasso costume contest. Dress like Coach Beard or wear an AFC Richmond jersey and receive a free beer; win the contest and receive a $100 gift card. The match begins at 11 a.m.; stick around for live music from Cover Art at 1:30 p.m. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free.
Bikes and Lights at Watkins Regional Park: Get a bit of a festive workout by pedaling through 2.5 million lights at the Festival of Lights’ annual Bikes and Lights event, which takes place before Watkins Regional Park’s seasonal display opens to cars on Nov. 25. No vehicles will be allowed on the roads during this event, so cyclists will have the three-mile route to themselves, riding past animated displays ranging from Santa Claus to “The Wizard of Oz.” Holiday-themed costumes and bike decorations are welcome, and participants are required to have lights on their bike and to wear a helmet. 5 to 8 p.m. $5 per bike; children 10 and younger ride free. Online registration required.
Groovy Nate at Hook Hall: There’s been a lot of talk about the Grammys this week, but let’s not forget a local artist who was nominated last year. Groovy Nate, who received his nod for contributions with the One Tribe Collective, has one of the youngest audiences in town — and what would you expect from a man who caters to the pre-K and early-elementary crowd? In Groovy Nate’s world, there’s beatboxing on “The Wheels on the Bus,” and the musical PSA “Put Your Seat Belt On” is backed by a deep go-go groove. He visits Hook Hall in Park View for the Family Fundays series, where there are crafts for kids and coffee for parents. 10 a.m. to noon. $5 per family.
Rock Creek Beach Party in Rock Creek Park: Earlier this month, the National Park Service announced that Upper Beach Drive, a thoroughfare that’s been closed to cars and open to cyclists and pedestrians since the beginning of the pandemic, will remain closed to cars year-round. That was welcome news to the Rock Creek Conservancy, a nonprofit group that works to preserve the park — so much so that it’s throwing a party. Head to Picnic Grove 10 off Beach Drive on Sunday morning for a celebration of nature with bird walks led by D.C. Audubon, readings from the D.C. Public Library, demonstrations about immersive plants in the park, hot chocolate and s’mores, and music by DJ Lance. 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Free.
Ice rink preview at the Wharf: Despite last week’s 70-degree days, chills this week portend the end of PSL season loud and clear. Those as eager as the weather to welcome winter can get a preview of the snowy months at the Wharf, which is celebrating its ice rink reopening for the season Nov. 23. But before just anyone can lace up their skates, the Wharf offers a one-day free skate for Southwest D.C. residents. Proof of residency is required, and anyone under 16 years old must be accompanied by an adult. Noon to 6 p.m. Free.
Ani DiFranco at 9:30 Club: She started as a solo troubadour, accompanied by just her acoustic guitar, yet Ani DiFranco was never really a folkie. The stalwartly indie feminist singer-songwriter adopted attitude from punk and phrasing from hip-hop, and gradually developed a jazzy, soulful style exemplified by her latest album, 2021’s “Revolutionary Love.” At 52, DiFranco is not the relentless road warrior she used to be, but her mellower style is not a sign of retreat. Her newest material may be unusually lush, but the pattering congas and swirling flutes don’t blunt the edge of such songs as “Do or Die,” which includes a vision of seeing “right there on Pennsylvania Avenue / the sheetless KKK.” The show will include three acts signed to the singer’s Righteous Babe label: Gracie and Rachel, Jocelyn Mackenzie and Holly Miranda. Doors open at 7 p.m. $41.
Habib Koité and Bamada at City Winery: When Mali’s Habib Koité made his European debut in 1991, most African musicians known outside their homelands fronted big bands that emphasized Western instruments and drew heavily from African American soul and funk. Koité changed the paradigm when he founded Bamada, a virtuosic four-man backing group with a gentle acoustic style that features such traditional instruments as the xylophone-like balafon. Koité himself plays guitar, but tuned so it sounds like a n’goni, a West African lute with a chiming tone. Koité’s songs, with lyrics in Bambara, French and occasionally English, are built on rippling African polyrhythms, but such lilting tunes as “Baro” also feature vocal harmonies akin to California folk rock. That’s a mode that comes as naturally to Koité and Bamada as the call-and-response chant of “Cigarette Abana,” the rollicking tune that was their first African hit and remains a crowd-pleaser three decades later. 7:30 p.m. $35-$55.
Soccer in the Circle: The first Soccer in the Circle outdoor viewing party was held in the middle of Dupont Circle during the 2010 World Cup, drawing hundreds of fans to watch the United States draw with England. In 2014, with the support of the German Embassy, an enormous U.S.-supporting crowd cheered their team despite a loss to the eventual champions. On Monday, the Welsh government is among the sponsors of a seven-hour Soccer in the Circle party. The centerpiece is the 2 p.m. match between the United States and Wales, shown on a giant outdoor screen, but it also features a DJ spinning Welsh and American music, a painting collaboration with Welsh and American artists, Welsh food, and, as an appetizer, the 11 a.m. match between the Netherlands and Senegal. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free.
Capitals Rock the Retro at 9:30 Club: The Washington Capitals 2020 Reverse Retro jersey proved to be one of the best-selling jerseys in the league — hard to outdo, until this year’s design got a whole party dedicated in its honor. During an event hosted by Elliot Segal of radio show “Elliot in the Morning,” select Capitals players will celebrate the jersey drop with ’90s Tribute band White Ford Bronco at 9:30 Club. Fans can pick up a free Reverse Retro T-shirt (not jersey) with a ticket purchase. Doors open at 7 p.m. $25.
‘The Last Waltz’ at Boundary Stone: “The Last Waltz,” one of the greatest concert films of all time, captures the Band’s star-studded farewell concert on Thanksgiving Day 1976. And every Thanksgiving Eve since 2011, it’s been shown at Boundary Stone, Bloomingdale’s neighborhood pub, with full sound. Book a table for 9 p.m., or slightly before if you want to ease into Martin Scorsese’s epic documentary. 9 p.m. Free.
The Night Before at the Black Cat: For decades, the Black Cat’s Red Room has been a refuge on Thanksgiving Eve, welcoming those trying to escape their families and those who weren’t making the trip home. This year, the Cat is bringing back two veteran DJs: Mark Zimin and Stereo Faith, whose Britpop- and indie-pop-fueled Mousetrap parties have been drawing crowds for a long, long time. Doors open at 8 p.m. Free.
Rare Essence at City Winery: If you’re going to feast on Thursday, you might as well dance off some calories in advance. Go-go legends Rare Essence take over the loft at City Winery for a preholiday show. There’s limited seating in the loft, so arrive early — doors open at 7:30 p.m. — to try to find a place at the bar. 9:30 p.m. $35-$40.
Disq at DC9: Here’s one way to keep your take on indie rock from becoming formulaic: Start a band with multiple singer-songwriters. On its second album, the new “Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet,” Disq performs tunes composed by four of its five members. If that weren’t enough to provide variety, the Wisconsin group flips styles within individual songs: Guitarist Logan Severson’s “Prize Contest Life” is an easygoing midtempo rocker with high-tenor vocals that detours suddenly into raw-throated grungy aggression. Such shifts are characteristic of the album, which floats blithe melodies over three-guitar roar and occasionally throws synth noise or bassist Raina Bock’s soprano into the mix. The stylistic restlessness suits the band’s lyrics, which depict uneasy minds and a capricious universe. Mostly, though, the musical permutations just ensure that Disq never settles into a rut. 8 p.m. $13-$15. | 2022-11-17T15:01:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Holiday events, festivals and concerts in the Washington, D.C., area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/best-things-do-dc-area-week-nov-17-23/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/best-things-do-dc-area-week-nov-17-23/ |
Taylor Swift performs onstage in Los Angeles on Aug. 22, 2015. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images)
Jonathan Skrmetti (R) said his office had received complaints from people who tried purchasing tickets for “Eras,” Swift’s first tour in over four years, and said they faced a chaotic process and a “severe lack of customer support” from Ticketmaster. It was not clear Thursday morning whether the attorney general has opened a formal investigation.
“We are concerned about this very dominant market player, and we want to make sure that they’re treating consumers right and that people are receiving a fair opportunity to purchase the tickets that clearly matter a great deal to them,” Skrmetti said of Ticketmaster during a Wednesday news conference, according to a transcript provided by his office.
“We just need to take a closer look,” he added.
The chaos over Swift’s ticket sales caused some politicians to raise questions about the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and the event company Live Nation, amid allegations from consumer rights groups that the company abused its dominant position in the market. Skrmetti, who said his office had “previously looked into antitrust allegations involving Ticketmaster and Live Nation,” stressed that neither company has been accused of misconduct.
Ticketmaster did not respond to a request for comment from The Post early Thursday.
Ticketmaster launched the sale of tickets to “Eras” in the United States on Tuesday, but many fans who descended on the platform to secure a coveted spot said they experienced technical glitches, long wait times and higher-than-expected ticket prices. Some said they were unable to buy tickets.
The website briefly crashed as Ticketmaster reported “unprecedented” demand and rescheduled some presale events to the following day.
Skrmetti, who serves Swift’s home state, said Ticketmaster should have been prepared for the surge in demand and questioned whether “because they have such a dominant market position, they felt like they didn’t need to worry about that.”
In particular, Skrmetti highlighted the fact that consumers signed up for presale codes that promised fast and easy access to tickets, but this did not appear to materialize. “We need to look into exactly what was promised and whether that was provided,” he said.
Skrmetti is not the only politician calling for more scrutiny of possible antitrust violations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that “Ticketmaster is a monopoly” that should be broken up.
The U.S. Justice Department approved Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation in 2010 after the companies agreed to certain conditions, including for Ticketmaster to license its ticketing software to competitors. At the time, the move was criticized by some artists and activists who said it would give Ticketmaster the ability to endlessly increase fees. But the Justice Department argued that the terms of the merger would “protect competition for primary ticketing, which will in turn maintain incentives for innovation and discounting.”
More than a decade later, some antitrust and consumer groups say the merger has created a harmful monopoly. Several of these groups launched a campaign last month aimed at convincing the Justice Department to “investigate and unwind” the merger, accusing Ticketmaster of using its dominant position in the live-events and ticketing market to “hike up ticket prices, tack on expensive junk fees, and exploit artists, independent venues, and fans.”
Skrmetti on Wednesday said the Justice Department’s agreement with Ticketmaster and Live Nation “was theoretically going to reduce the antitrust risks.”
But, he continued, “if we’re seeing a situation where people are trying to use the service and aren’t getting the product that they’ve paid for, the product that they were promised, that could be an indicator that there’s not enough competition in the market.”
Tatum Hunter contributed to this report. | 2022-11-17T15:09:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taylor Swift ticket sale chaos on Ticketmaster prompts Tennessee AG probe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/17/tennessee-ticketmaster-taylor-swift-sale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/17/tennessee-ticketmaster-taylor-swift-sale/ |
Wreckage at the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 near the village of Hrabove in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on July 21, 2014. (Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters)
AMSTERDAM — A Dutch court on Thursday convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian national who commanded pro-Russian separatists in Donbas of murder in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine in 2014, in which all 298 passengers and crew on board were killed.
The conviction of the defendants, including two Russian military intelligence officers, implicates the Russian government, which long denied responsibility and refused to extradite the defendants. A third Russian defendant was acquitted.
The verdict draws the line under a years-long investigation into who fired a Buk surface-to-air missile that hit the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, leaving bodies and wreckage scattered across fields in eastern Ukraine.
The incident occurred during fighting between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in an area where several Ukrainian military jets were shot down in the weeks preceding the destruction of MH17.
Here’s what we know about the four suspects charged with downing Flight MH17
None of the suspects in the case appeared for the trial that began two and a half years ago.
The Kremlin always adamantly denied any involvement in the MH17 downing and sought to smear the probe as politically biased, promoting various explanations for how the plane was shot down from blaming the Ukrainian government to dismissing the evidence in the case as fabricated.
Dutch investigators went to great lengths to debunk those claims, publishing a detailed timeline of the strike, laying out the defendants played in delivering the missile system to the launch location in Pervomaiskyi and the subsequent downing of the plane.
Investigators in downing of jet over Ukraine charge 4 suspects with ties to Russian intelligence, pro-Moscow militia
“Despite evidence to the contrary, the West was happy to accept the idea that separatist groups in Ukraine weren’t just proxies for the Russian Federation, so they could turn a blind eye to Russian aggression,” said Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative group Bellingcat which used open source intelligence to link the Buk missile system to Russia’s 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile Brigade and shared their findings with the Dutch investigators.
“This led to a frozen conflict in Eastern Ukraine which gave Russia time to prepare for a full military invasion of Ukraine, leading to international impacts to energy and food supplies,” Higgins added. “Had the West stood up to Russian aggression in 2014 we may have avoided the situation we’re in today.”
Just two days before the MH17 verdict was handed down, the nearly nine-months-long war in Ukraine saw one of its tensest moments when a missile landed in Poland, killing two people. Officials in Washington and Warsaw said it was likely a stray Ukrainian air defense missile that landed in the Polish-Ukrainian border area.
The U.S. National Security Council said in a statement that whatever the final conclusions of the investigation into the incident may be, “the party ultimately responsible for this tragic incident is Russia” as it launched the war.
Russian Embassy in Australia quipped back, tweeting this statement was “all you need to know about MH17 investigation and trial.”
One of defendants in the case, Igor Girkin, was a commander of Kremlin-backed separatist forces in the Donetsk region and once boasted that he had “pulled the trigger of war” in Ukraine. For years he lived safely in Russia but has reportedly returned last month to the front line in Ukraine.
Girkin is believed to be the most senior military officer who was in direct contact with Moscow at the time of the plane’s crash and helped transport the missile system that shot down the plane. He has previously said he felt “a moral responsibility” for the mass deaths of the passengers but denied that he played a direct role in it.
In mid-October, Girkin wrote on his popular Telegram blog, which he often uses as a platform for fierce criticism of the military strategy executed by regular Russian forces, that he had joined the “active army” once again. His wife, Myroslava Reginska, shared a photo of Girkin, who also goes by the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov, wearing a military uniform.
Following the reports that Girkin returned to the front line, Ukrainians have launched a crowdfunding campaign to collect a $100,000 bounty for his capture. If Ukrainian forces succeed in detaining Girkin, the Netherlands would likely seek his extradition in hopes of bringing some justice to the hundreds of family members who lost their loved ones in the MH17 downing. | 2022-11-17T15:18:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MH17 verdict all defendants convicted in flight downing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/mh17-verdict-conviction-flight/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/mh17-verdict-conviction-flight/ |
The foundation for the two-time champions was built at Clairefontaine, the gold standard of national soccer academies
The Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine celebrates the two World Cup titles won by France at the entrance with a statue of the trophy and two stars. (Cyril Marcilhacy for The Washington Post)
CLAIREFONTAINE-EN-YVELINES, France — Nestled in a forest about 40 miles southwest of Paris, a winding, rhododendron-lined lane leads to a security gate and, just beyond, a manicured lawn with a towering copy of the World Cup trophy shimmering in the sun. In front of it are statues of two large stars — one for each world championship France has won, in 1998 and 2018.
This is the home of French soccer — the Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine, widely regarded as the gold standard of national soccer academies.
A decade after its 1988 opening, Clairefontaine, as it is commonly called, spawned the golden generation of French players that won the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European championship. A steady stream of world-class players has followed, including striker Kylian Mbappé, among the stars of the national team that will launch defense of its title at the 2022 World Cup, which gets underway Nov. 20 in Qatar.
If Les Bleus succeed, France will become the first country since Brazil in 1962 to win back-to-back World Cup championships. And a third star will be added at the entrance of Clairefontaine.
It is an idyllic, 140-acre setting, even on busy days when the national team is in residence along with the 13- to 15-year-olds who train at the youth academy.
At the heart of the grounds is a 17th century, ivy-covered chateau referred to as “the Castle” by players and staff.
All pathways seem to lead to the renovated Castle, yet it is off limits to all but the country’s star-studded A team. The academy students walk past it each day but can’t enter or even see inside. It is not a given they will ever get the opportunity.
So the Castle stands, at the center of all activity, as an aspiration.
On this afternoon, coaches bicycle past. Maintenance staff scoot by on golf carts. Battery-powered lawn mowers the size of hedgehogs silently crisscross the grounds, trimming so that no blade of grass is a centimeter from perfection, then return to their charging stations.
This calm and order reflect the philosophical heart of Clairefontaine, where individual skill is honed and then forged into collective excellence amid tranquility, structure, and the shared conviction that it is a privilege to sacrifice personal goals for that of squad and country.
The French Football Federation’s success in turning the country into a global force has made Clairefontaine the envy of other nations, several of which have sent emissaries to study its model. England drew from the blueprint in opening St. George’s Park, the training home of its national team, in 2012. Belgium, Turkey and Latvia have borrowed from Clairefontaine’s approach. The United States, one of the few major countries that doesn’t have a national training center, has eyed the French model in U.S. Soccer’s push to establish one.
French national team manager Didier Deschamps, who served as captain of the 1998 World Cup champion team and coached Les Bleus to the 2018 title, has welcomed rivals to the forested enclave to study, critique and borrow from its system of developing young players.
“It’s very flattering and gratifying that other countries come and see,” Deschamps said through an interpreter in an interview at Clairefontaine. “We are not here to close doors.”
But building a World Cup contender is not simply about replicating bricks and mortar; nor is it a matter of finding the next Mbappé, a graduate of Clairefontaine’s youth academy, as were Thierry Henry, Nicolas Anelka, and Louis Saha, among others. For France, the transformation is rooted in a culture and philosophy that may not translate elsewhere.
It did not occur overnight, Deschamps noted, but was the product of the French Football Federation’s three-decade effort to elevate the country’s global standing in the sport via first-class facilities and coaching, science-based training protocols, and support services for its most promising youngsters.
“The quality and talent of our players counts, for sure. But it’s also all the elements that surround and form the players,” Deschamps said. “And it’s not just because we’re French that we think we are the best. We are open to learning from other countries too. It’s a question of culture, habits and philosophy.
“I am not saying that we are a painting to come and admire. We truly welcome other countries to come and watch, maybe even give suggestions for improvements.”
Training begins early
There is an explosion of energy when the boys return from school. Fresh off the bus, they scurry into the academy’s three-story stone dormitory, scoop up their snack boxes of yogurt and juice, and greet Christian Bassila, manager of the Clairefontaine Academy, with fistbumps.
Though they range in age from 13 to 15, the boys vary wildly in height and development. Some could be mistaken for 10-year-olds; others, college freshmen. They are the seed capital for France’s future World Cup teams, selected to attend the academy because of their potential.
The French Football Federation, which governs the sport, supervises 13 such academies throughout the country, serving distinct geographical regions.
Clairefontaine serves the historically talent-rich Île-de-France region that includes Paris. It is unique among the 13 academies because is also serves as the training home of France’s national age-group teams. It was home of the victorious Les Bleus throughout its 1998 World Cup, which was hosted by France. And it’s where the national team regrouped after this summer’s UEFA Champions League final to launch final preparations for Qatar.
Here, Franck Raviot wears two hats. He is goalkeeper coach of the national team. He is also director and goalkeeper coach of Clairefonatine’s youth academy, ideally suited to explaining the structure and philosophy of the national system that is credited with turning France into a global soccer power.
It starts with identifying exceptionally promising youngsters through a rigorous series of tests, evaluations and interviews among thousands and thousands of applicants. The 20-23 best players in each region are selected annually and provided first-class coaching, facilities, and support at no cost to their families.
The boys leave their families and move to their region’s academy to train Monday through Friday. They attend the local school together and go home each weekend to visit their parents.
The initial academy training focuses on elevating their technical ability. The boys get faster, stronger and more capable with their weaker foot. They sharpen their technique, precision with the ball and tactical acumen.
As they progress through the academy, they are taught values the academy deems essential for success: respect for oneself, the team and the institution; the drive to work hard to learn and improve; and humility.
“We all have dreams. These young players all have the desire to become Mbappé,” Raviot says with a smile. “Between the dream and the reality is a very, very long path. The path is sometime winding, littered with potholes and traps. You always have to be driven by this humility, this taste for work, this respect that allows us to climb mountains that are difficult.”
As manager of the academy, Bassila is the man who keeps the boys on that path, aided by a clear system of rules, rewards and demerits.
“It’s not just teaching about football, but living within a group and being responsible,” explains Bassila, a former defender on France’s under-21 team. “They’re very immature; they need to be guided. You need to repeat things over and over.”
Each dorm room on the upper floors displays photos of its two roommates, with their name, number and position. Nonetheless, the academy teaches all positions and trains each boy for two positions.
There are no posters on the walls inside. Neatly folded identical jerseys, shorts and socks are stored on open shelves, with Nike cleats below. Bedsheet corners are tucked with military precision.
It is not easy to leave home at such a young age, says French national team defender Raphael Varane, 29, a product of the national academy system.
Reared in Lille, three hours north of Paris, Varane started playing with his local club team at 7. At 9, he joined a professional team, Lens. At 13, he was chosen for one of 20 spots in the national academy in Liéven after several rounds of interviews, evaluations and physical tests.
He recalls feeling “a bit lost” at first, having given up so much of his childhood for a career he wasn’t sure would ever materialize. The competition was intense at every turn.
At a young age, Varane learned the importance of discipline. He made significant strides physically, technically and tactically, as well.
“There is only one thing they can’t teach you: It’s about instinct,” says Varane, a center back with Manchester United. “When the ball arrives, everybody thinks you are going left, but you go to your right, and you don’t know why. It’s about feeling; it’s about how you move.
“It’s very, very different than playing football in the street or with your friends. I know a lot of players with a big, big talent who don’t play professionally.”
Varane vividly recalls his first visit to Clairefontaine. He was 17 and summoned as a member of France’s Under 21 team.
What captivated him was the grandeur of the Castle.
In Varane’s case, it wasn’t until two years later that he first stepped inside, named to the national team at 19 by Deschamps, who wanted the young defender to start learning his methods soon after he was appointed France’s manager in 2012.
“It was like, ‘Okay, the legendary Castle!’ ” Varane says, recalling his awe and anxiety. “When you arrive in your room, you have the name of the player who was in the room for the previous competition. You say, ‘Ah!’ for example. ‘Zinedine Zidane was in my room!’ ”
No winning without unity
The 2010 World Cup in South Africa proved a fiasco for France, its roster of big names and bigger egos wrought with dissension.
Deschamps, the defender who led Les Bleus to the 1998 World Cup and 2000 Euro title, was tapped in 2012 to continue the work of Laurent Blanc to restore order, excellence and goodwill among alienated French supporters.
His priority, apart from assembling the athletes he needed, was to instill the mentality that winning teams demanded.
“I knew all about that,” Deschamps says, speaking in French while emphasizing words in English. “It’s true that technical qualities and individual talent will make a difference on the pitch, but the collective strength — the team working together — is what counts. No team can win without unity.”
Since July 8, 2012, Deschamps has achieved that while steering the national squad through spells of conflict and scandal.
He omitted the outstanding striker Karim Benzema from the 2018 World Cup team amid allegations he had attempted to blackmail a teammate. Yet Deschamps also led a process of reconciliation that brought the 34-year-old Real Madrid star and recently crowned Ballon d’Or recipient back to the fold after years of exile.
“I think I always choose what’s best for the team,” Deschamps says, declining to elaborate. “It’s a good thing for the French team, for him, and finally me.”
With France’s 2018 triumph over Croatia, Deschamps became just the third man in history to win a World Cup as both a player and coach, joining Brazil’s Mario Zagallo and Franz Beckenbauer of what then was West Germany.
Asked how he successfully manages so many gifted French players and strong egos, Deschamps takes umbrage.
“The players that I have don’t have egos,” he says.
This is a point he must make, he explains, in nearly every interview.
It is true he has the best players, he notes. But his job, as coach, is to find a balance among them by making each feel important.
“That is the essence of what I have to do, and this is particularly the case for our forwards, through their character and personality, is to make them want to work as a team. Of course we’re going to talk about Mbappé, Benzema and [Antoine] Griezmann more so than our midfielders and our defenders. But these players all accept that they have to be part of the team.”
That doesn’t mean he seeks deference.
“I don’t want players that say, ‘Yes sir! Yes sir!’ ” he says. “I need players with strong personalities, but I have to find a social equilibrium in the team, with my technical staff.”
Deschamps’s staff is smaller than those of most nations, roughly 20 close-knit coaches who share his philosophy.
According to Varane, Deschamps commands players’ respect by blending authority and warmth, and by being clear in what he wants — chiefly, efficiency on the pitch — while allowing players freedom and creativity, as long as they think for the team.
“He chooses you because of your talent and because of your personality, too,” Varane said. “It must be complementary with other players. … Some very, very good players are not here, but he builds a team.”
Under Deschamps, national team players must also accept their role in preparing the next generation.
“Each generation transmits to the other one,” Varane says. “It is natural.”
Passing on the dream
It stays light quite late during French summers.
On this early evening the under-18 squad has set off on mountain bikes for a training ride through the forest, accompanied by their coaching staff and trainers. They wear helmets as well as matching training gear and devices that monitor their vital signs.
The national team is in its third day of residence since gathering at the Castle to prepare for a Nations League match against Denmark at Stade de France, with a trip to Croatia to follow.
Residents of the village have been invited to watch Les Bleus practice from a modest grandstand on one side of the pitch. A media contingent watches from the opposite side.
Most players are just returning from their club teams, but they fall easily into a choreographed, communicative dance with the ball.
Deschamps looks on from the pitch, hands clasped behind his back, overseeing the discipline and efficiency he prizes.
On an adjacent pitch, the academy youngsters hold their training session, too. The boys erupt with squeals whenever they score a goal, extending both arms and zooming around like airplanes.
After dusk settles in and training ends, the powerfully compact Mbappé stays late with a goalkeeper and a few defenders, firing extra shots. He arrived on these same grounds roughly a decade earlier, full of promise like the current crop of youngsters.
Graphic: A closer look at the USMNT roster
But unlike them, he doesn’t make a peep when his shots find their way past the keeper. There are no theatrics. He simply repeats the drill, over and over.
His only reaction comes when the rare ball clangs off the post or misses its mark. Then, Mbappe erupts in howls of anguish.
At this stage of his career, success is expected.
“The youngest players look at the dream, the French team, and they tend to copy what they see,” Deschamps says of the dynamic at Clairefontaine. “That means they should be seeing positive elements. So each player has a duty in everything he does, whether it be on the pitch or off … to have a positive influence and to give a good image to the young players.” | 2022-11-17T15:22:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | France's Clairefontaine Academy is a blueprint for World Cup success - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/france-world-cup-clairefontaine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/france-world-cup-clairefontaine/ |
There could be value in backing Green Bay Packers running back AJ Dillon on Thursday night. (Jeffrey Phelps/AP)
If history is any guide, Thursday night’s game between the Green Bay Packers and Tennessee Titans should be a spectacular blowout. Since Aaron Rodgers took over as the Packers starting quarterback in 2008, Green Bay and Tennessee have played four times; three of the games were decided by 22 points or more. The winning team has also scored at least 40 points in each of those matchups, potentially making us hopeful for a lot of one-sided scoring on Thursday night
The betting public, however, has its doubts. The total opened at 40½, drifted up to 42 and then trickled back down to 41. The market has also decided host Green Bay should be the favorite, despite its unsightly 4-6 record. The Packers opened as 1½-point favorites on Sunday night before bets pushed it to -2½ and eventually -3, where it stands now at most books (some were offering Green Bay -3½, as you’ll see below).
My own personal power ratings have this game much closer, which could make the Titans and the points or the Titans on the moneyline enticing. For more on that, read on.
Aaron Rodgers, under 242½ passing yards, playable to under 240½
Rodgers is averaging 231½ passing yards per game this season with a median of 234 yards, giving considerable weight to the under on this prop. Using his season-long averages, we would estimate the price for under 242½ yards to be -170, yet you can find it widely available at prices of -114 or better. Plus, Tennessee’s defense is no slouch. Both Football Outsiders and Pro Football Focus grade its pass coverage as above average.
AJ Dillon, over 33½ rushing yards, playable to over 35½
Tennessee is tough to run on, stopping a league-high 24 percent of rushers at or behind the line of scrimmage this season. Then again, so is Buffalo (23 percent stuff rate, second in the NFL), and Dillon ran for 54 yards against the Bills a few weeks ago. The New York Jets (19 percent, ninth) are good, too, and Dillon ran for 41 yards against them on Oct. 16. Based on his performance in 2022, this prop for Dillon should be priced at -175, giving it a lot of value at kickoff.
Titans +3.5 (DraftKings with -115 juice; +3 is widely available and I’d play that, too)
On Sunday, nearly the entire country had the opportunity to see the Packers upset the Dallas Cowboys. It was Fox’s national game of the week in the late-afternoon window, a matchup between two of the NFL’s most prominent brands, and Green Bay’s overtime win to snap a five-game losing streak garnered 29.2 million television viewers, the league’s most-watched game on any network this season.
Conversely, unless you lived in the Rockies or (more or less) the state of Tennessee, you probably didn’t catch much of the Titans’ 17-10 win over the Denver Broncos, their sixth win in seven games.
Knowing all that, I think the spread here reflects the incorrect feeling that the Packers are back because of one much-watched win over a somewhat good team. As noted above, this spread was Green Bay -1½ on the lookahead line and now sits at -3 or -3½, and I’m not entirely sure why other than the Packers’ unearned mystique.
Titans running back Derrick Henry should feast on a Green Bay defense that ranks 30th in rushing DVOA and was on the field for 79 plays just four days ago. Tennessee’s defense, meanwhile, sacked Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson six times and now gets a Packers offense that has injury concerns on the line: Neither tackle David Bakhtiari (knee) nor guard-tackle Elgton Jenkins (knee), the team’s usual starters who both played all 64 snaps on Sunday, have practiced this week, and both are listed as questionable.
Green Bay’s win Sunday was statistically unlikely and shouldn’t be seen as a sign that the Packers have reversed course. The Cowboys led by 14 and had a 96 percent win probability in the fourth quarter. They couldn’t convert on fourth and short on the opening possession of overtime, giving the ball to Green Bay for the game-winning field goal. What if they had converted that first down — NFL teams have converted on that down and distance from that field position 60 percent of the time since 2002 — and then scored the winning touchdown? Green Bay wouldn’t be giving three or even 3½ points, that’s for sure. Take the Titans here. | 2022-11-17T15:22:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the Titans are the pick against the Packers on Thursday night - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/titans-packers-thursday-night-picks-bets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/titans-packers-thursday-night-picks-bets/ |
‘I never dictate what to feel or think’
By Sinden Collier
"Silent Screams" (All photography courtesy of Sinden Collier)
Sinden Collier is a photographer based in Houston. In 2001, she was the first Black female photographer signed by Getty Images. Collier’s “Trains of Thought: Welcome Aboard” received an honorable mention on Elizabeth Avedon’s list of 2017′s best photography books. Her photographs have been featured in magazines and advertising campaigns, both nationally and internationally. In December, Collier’s work is being shown in “Citywide African American Artists Exhibition” at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. | 2022-11-17T15:40:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Visual World of Fine Art Photographer Sinden Collier - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/11/17/visual-world-fine-art-photographer-sinden-collier/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/11/17/visual-world-fine-art-photographer-sinden-collier/ |
Ukrainian and Western officials have disagreed about who fired a missile that landed inside Poland
Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends a meeting Thursday in Bangkok. (Chalinee Thirasupa/Reuters)
BANGKOK — Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday denied that this week’s deadly missile explosion in Poland and subsequent disagreements of its origins revealed a lack of communication and coordination with Ukraine following contradictory statements between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Western leaders.
“We’ve been in regular contact with our Ukrainian partners throughout. I spoke to my Ukrainian counterpart … We’re sharing the information that we have and, again, the investigation is ongoing,” Blinken told reporters during a news conference at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Thailand.
The top U.S. diplomat ignored a question about whether the incident raised questions about the credibility of Zelensky’s claims. Instead, Blinken blamed Moscow for placing immense pressure on its smaller neighbor, which again this week has scrambled to intercept waves of Russian missiles aimed at civilian facilities throughout the country. Western officials believe it was an errant Ukrainian air defense missile that fell across the border into Poland on Tuesday, killing two.
Blinken’s comments come as Zelensky waffled on his claim that the explosion had to be Russian projectiles. He said earlier this week that he had “no doubt that it was not our missile,” forcing top U.S. and NATO officials to make a rare public break with the Ukrainian leader — a dramatic departure from their strenuous efforts to create as little daylight between them and Zelensky to show a united front against Russia.
“Russia is responsible for what happened,” Blinken said. “What we’re seeing every single day now is Russia raining down missiles in Ukraine, seeking to destroy its critical infrastructure, targeting the ability Ukraine has to keep the lights on, to keep the heat going to, to allow the country to simply live and move forward,” he said.
Zelensky backtracked some on Thursday, telling an audience at an economic forum, “I don’t know 100 percent — I think the world also doesn’t 100 percent know what happened.”
Biden disputes Zelensky claims on Poland missile
Hours earlier, when President Biden was asked about Zelensky’s claims, he said he disagreed with his assessment, saying “that’s not the evidence.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also said there was “no indication” the missile strike was the result of an attack by Russia.
Two senior U.S. administration officials said they would not dispute the characterization of intelligence linking Ukrainian missiles to the explosion. The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters
Instead of focusing on U.S. differences with Zelensky’s remarks, Blinken pledged to send more military assistance to help Ukraine fend off Russian missile strikes.
“Ukraine has a right to defend itself, and we’re committed to supporting Ukraine in every effort,” he said.
Top U.S. general tries to clarify his case for a negotiated end to Ukraine war
Ukrainian officials hope the missile incident will re-energize efforts in the West to provide sophisticated missile defense systems.
The Ukrainian SA-10 missiles U.S. intelligence officials believe were involved in the explosion are older and less reliable than the newer missile defense systems Kyiv received from the West that have intercepted dozens of incoming Russian missiles. U.S.-supplied NASAMS, for example, are a higher quality ground-based missile defense weapon.
If Ukraine did inadvertently shoot an SA-10 missile deep into Polish territory, this would not be the first case of a Soviet-era missile defense system missing its mark. Syrian air defense systems, for instance, have in the past gone off course, landing in northern Jordan or rural Lebanon.
Blinken’s remarks came on the second day of his meetings in Bangkok for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, or APEC, where leaders are hoping to cooperate on a range of issues including covid-19 responses, the resumption of international travel and lingering supply chain issues.
Biden is skipping the forum to attend his granddaughter’s wedding. In his place, Blinken and Vice President Harris are delivering remarks and holding bilateral meetings aimed at strengthening the United States’ economic integration in the Asia-Pacific — a region that accounts for about two-thirds of global economic growth.
Blinken said “what we do now” will determine the future of freedom and prosperity in the region and “will shape the trajectory of the 21st century.”
Blinken was joined at the forum by U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai who told reporters Thursday that the United States seeks to use trade policy to elevate women and entrepreneurs and “unlock economic opportunities for underrepresented parts of our populations.”
Harris is scheduled to give a speech at the APEC CEO summit on Friday where she will detail the Biden administration’s economic agenda for the Asia-Pacific region.
“The central message of her remarks will be that the United States has an enduring economic commitment to the Indo-Pacific, and there is no better partner for the economies and companies of the Indo-Pacific than the United States of America,” said a senior administration official in advance of the trip. | 2022-11-17T16:06:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Blinken denies missile incident shows communication rift with Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/blinken-bangkok-poland-missile-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/blinken-bangkok-poland-missile-ukraine/ |
French hunter on trial for manslaughter says he mistook victim for boar
Portraits and candles are displayed in tribute of Morgan Keane on Dec. 4, 2021, in Cajarc, France, a year after he was killed by two hunters. (Valentine Chapuis/AFP/Getty Images)
Two hunters went on trial for involuntary manslaughter Thursday over the death of a man two years ago, in a case that has provoked a national debate over hunting laws.
Morgan Keane, a British-French 25-year-old, was cutting wood in the small village of Calvignac, in southwestern France, when he was shot dead on Dec. 2, 2020, according to French news media reports. The mayor said at the time that Keane was just 100 meters (around 328 feet) from his home when he was killed.
Suspect Julien Féral told the court on Tuesday that he had seen a “dark mass,” according to French radio station RTL. “I told myself it was the boar that I had missed [earlier in the hunt]. I aimed, I fired. Obviously if I had seen a human silhouette, I would not have fired.”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it,” he said, sobbing. “I’m sorry.”
A police investigation found the suspect, now 35, as inexperienced and not knowing the area well, and that the hunt had been poorly organized, according to Agence France-Presse reports. He had only held a hunting license for around six months at the time of the shooting, France 3 reported.
The head of the hunt, named by local media as 51-year-old Laurent Lapergue, also appeared in court. Prosecutor Alexandre Rossi said that he had “failed in the organization of the hunt” on the day in question, according to AFP. The judge said it had been an “absolute miracle” that an accident had not happened earlier, according to RTL.
Lapergue’s lawyer said that he had given safety rules for the hunt and had not breached his responsibilities — although her client accepted in the trial that “some do not listen to instructions,” according to France 3.
The two men could face up to three years in prison, a fine of 75,000 euros (around $72,600), as well as a ban on possessing weapons for five years or a permanent loss of their hunting permits if convicted, prosecutors say. A verdict is expected on Jan. 12, 2023, according to AFP.
Keane’s death led to a public outcry and a renewed focus on hunting laws in France. An online petition campaign, called One Day A Hunter, began sharing accounts of people killed or injured in hunting incidents — as well as what the organizers describe as inadequate sentences given to those involved.
Their petition, which has received more than 130,000 signatures, made a number of demands to increase safety.
“So far, the examples show us that justice is very tolerant toward hunters; even the perpetrators of fatal shootings rarely go to prison. It is time to end this impunity,” the group argued.
The pressure led to the publication of a report by the French Senate in September 2022, which made 30 recommendations to increase security around hunting, such as improved training, banning the use of alcohol and allowing local authorities to limit the days or hours in which hunts can take place.
The National Federation of Hunters criticized the report, with its president, Willy Schraen, accusing the senators of succumbing to anti-hunting influence.
According to French government figures, 90 injuries caused by hunting weapons were recorded in the 2021-22 season, including eight fatalities — although overall numbers have fallen over the past 20 years. | 2022-11-17T16:06:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | French hunter says he mistook Michael Keane for boar in fatal shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/france-hunters-man-shooting-boar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/france-hunters-man-shooting-boar/ |
No big shift for GOP on same-sex marriage, despite Roe’s impact on 2022
The Senate on Nov. 16 invoked cloture on a bill that would require nationwide recognition of marriages performed in states where they were valid. (Video: The Washington Post)
Republicans suffered a disappointing 2022 election. And that was in no small part thanks to the Supreme Court overturning a personal right it had once granted — the right to an abortion — a decision which cast a spotlight on many Republicans’ unpopular views on the subject.
But the GOP has showed no signs of making a large-scale shift.
Republicans on Wednesday did provide enough votes to advance the Respect for Marriage Act, which would ensure federal and state recognition of legal same-sex marriages. Twelve GOP senators helped the bill clear the 60-vote threshold by two votes. That follows on the 47 House Republicans who voted for the measure this summer. Once the Senate officially passes the bill, its slightly different version will go back to the House before President Biden signs it.
That the GOP helped pass the bill could insulate the party from criticism that it stands in the way of a policy supported by 7 in 10 Americans. And it takes off the table some of the most troubling political possibilities were the court to also overturn the right to same-sex marriage, as Democrats have warned it might. (The bill is essentially intended to guard against that possibility; the court has already legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.)
But this bill was more modest than many people realize. And the percentage of GOP senators who voted against it — around three-quarters — was similar to the proportion of House Republicans who did so four months ago. Even this summer, No. 2 Senate GOP leader Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) indicated there were likely enough votes to pass it in the Senate. And the bill was delayed till after the election in hopes it could garner more GOP support. But the events of the intervening months apparently didn’t sway enough Republicans to get it very far past 60 votes. Time — and an election — did not expand GOP support in the Senate.
The pull of the base still won the day for the vast majority in the party, as it almost always does.
While the bill has often been characterized as codifying same-sex marriage into law, it actually doesn’t go as far as the court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. While that decision forced states to issue same-sex marriage certificates, this bill only requires the federal government and states to recognize legal same-sex marriages. Were Obergefell to be overturned, a state could still ban same-sex marriage, but it would have to recognize marriages from other states, as would the federal government. (The bill provides similar protections for interracial marriage.)
Some same-sex marriage proponents argued this was insufficient and wouldn’t go far enough to truly protect LGBTQ rights. But the bill was aimed at passing constitutional muster and surviving potential court challenges, given that the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the federal government can’t “commandeer” states to pass laws like ones recognizing same-sex marriage.
So basically, lawmakers weren’t even voting to compel every state to legalize same-sex marriage. They were merely asked to codify state and federal recognition of a right that the Supreme Court has ruled already exists.
Republicans had walked a fine line on this issue; many of them did not emphasize their actual positions on same-sex marriage. Some argued the bill contained insufficient religious-liberty protections, though an agreement was recently reached to expand them. Largely, their main line of argument was that the bill was unnecessary, because it was implausible the Supreme Court would do with same-sex marriage what it did with abortion rights.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurrence took great care to say that the decision’s reasoning did not endanger the court’s previous rulings legalizing contraception, interracial marriage and same-sex marriage. (Justice Clarence Thomas, however, undercut that by saying the contraception and same-sex marriage decisions should indeed be revisited).
This allowed Republicans to punt on the substance of the Respect for Marriage Act to some degree — and to instead say they were voting against it on technical grounds, just like many of them emphasized they voted against convicting Trump in his impeachment trial on a technicality.
But for a party which has for decades derided “activist judges” and “legislating from the bench,” this was an opportunity to put Congress’s stamp of approval on this right. And while it may indeed be unlikely the court will ever overturn same-sex marriage, it’s hardly a ridiculous idea, given what transpired this summer with a decades-older right with more precedent behind it.
Nor is there any real question about where public perception lands on same-sex marriage; consensus on this issue has built faster than arguably any other major issue over the past quarter-century, with no signs that it will stop building.
The GOP’s approach has long been to just stop talking about it, and they got an assist in 2015 when the Supreme Court effectively took the issue off the table. The thinking right now is apparently that they gave the Respect for Marriage Act enough votes to ensure the issue will soon leave the spotlight but without requiring them to fully embrace same-sex marriage — and that might ultimately be a safe political play.
But the vast majority of Republicans in Congress did just cast a vote at odds with the American public. Not only do 7 in 10 Americans support same-sex marriage, but past polling suggests that support for the substance of the Respect for Marriage Act might even be slightly higher. A Quinnipiac University poll shortly after the 2015 Obergefell decision showed that, at the time, Americans opposed allowing states to prohibit same-sex marriage by 13 points. Yet they supported requiring states to recognize legal same-sex marriages from other states by an even larger margin: 21 points.
What’s more, however much Republicans assure that the Respect for Marriage Act was unnecessary, polls conducted in the immediate aftermath of the court overturning Roe v. Wade suggested they were out of step with the public on this: Majorities were indeed concerned that same-sex marriage would be next, or felt that it was likely that would happen — 56 percent in each case.
This was an opportunity to put those concerns to rest and align with a strong majority of the public. But even those who suggested they might get to “yes” or that they supported the right to same-sex marriage — like Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), respectively — were not moved to vote that way, even after the events of the 2022 election. The bill was passed in large part thanks to moderates and retirees, who delivered a majority of the 12 “yes” votes.
Analysis: No big shift for GOP on same-sex marriage, despite Roe’s impact on 2022 | 2022-11-17T16:10:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Only 12 Republican Senators voted for the same-sex marriage bill - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/gop-senate-marriage-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/gop-senate-marriage-vote/ |
Watch how Republican control of the House came into focus
More than a week elapsed as the Associated Press projected winners based on ongoing vote counts
Republicans have regained control of the U.S. House following eight days of vote counting. The determination of who would get a majority took four days longer than it took to call the presidential election in 2020.
The winners of most of these contests were projected on election night or soon after, but six remained uncalled as of Thursday morning, more than a week later. The Post relies on two organizations, the Associated Press and Edison Research, to project winners in House races. Here’s a visualization of how the AP race calls have added up as both parties raced toward the 218 seats needed for a majority.
The U.S. election system is a patchwork of state rules, and much of the delay is explained by states that build in more time to collect and tabulate votes.
Vote counting and race calling have been slower, for instance, in states that make heavy use of vote-by-mail. In California, mail ballots were accepted up to a week after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 8. The delays are also explained by a number of races with razor-thin margins and states like Alaska and Maine that use ranked-choice voting to determine the winner in the weeks following Election Day. | 2022-11-17T16:11:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How House race calls unfolded over eight days before control was decided - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/house-race-call-timing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/house-race-call-timing/ |
The simple reason Republican senators voted against same-sex marriage
Their voters and donors are more likely to oppose it.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) meets with reporters after being reelected to his longtime role as Senate Republican leader at the Capitol in Washington on Nov. 16. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Same-sex marriage is one of the more remarkable examples of how politics can shift rapidly. A decade ago, views of allowing same-sex couples to wed were evenly split; nearly every state banned legal recognition for same-sex unions.
Attitudes shifted quickly after that. Support for same-sex marriage grew, and in June 2015, the Supreme Court ordered that same-sex unions be granted the same protections as marriages between men and women. Opposition largely collapsed. The issue had been settled.
And yet. On Wednesday, the Senate held a vote considering whether to advance federal legislation protecting same-sex marriage in the event that the Supreme Court — after having rescinded its decision in Roe v. Wade — decided to unwind its protections of those unions. And while 12 Republican senators joined the Democratic majority in advancing the bill, 37 Republicans opposed moving ahead on the measure.
Why? The ongoing political power of the conservative base — and that base’s ongoing, fervent opposition to the idea.
Every four years, Stanford University and the University of Michigan conduct a national poll, American National Election Studies, measuring sentiment on political issues, ideology and vote propensity. In 2020, it measured views of same-sex marriage, finding that more than two-thirds of Americans think those unions should be recognized by law. About 1 in 5 Americans support only civil unions for same-sex couples. Fourteen percent, meanwhile, oppose any recognition whatsoever.
As you might expect, though, there are wide divides by party. The ANES breaks out party identity into seven groups, ranging from strong Democrats through independents who lean toward one party or the other and on to strong Republicans.
Among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, 4 in 5 support same-sex marriage. Among Republicans, it’s just over half — and among strong Republicans, only 2 in 5 support same-sex marriage.
If we consider ideology — again on a seven-point scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative — you can see a much sharper divide. Nearly all “extremely liberal” Americans say they support same-sex marriage. Only about 1 in 5 “extremely conservative” Americans do. Nearly half of that group thinks there should be no legal recognition for same-sex relationships at all.
We can use another measure of ideology, Voteview’s assessment of politicians’ votes, to show how this overlaps with the Senate vote. The most moderate members of the GOP caucus were more likely to vote to advance the bill. The more conservative members were more likely to oppose it. (The most conservative Republican senator to vote to advance was Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.).
Now let’s overlap ideology and party. You can see first that those with stronger Republican identities are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage: 70 percent of moderate Republican-leaning independents support same-sex marriage, versus 53 percent of moderate “strong Republicans.”
But the bigger difference is between moderates and conservatives. Fewer than 1 in 4 extremely conservative strong Republicans support legal recognition for same-sex marriage.
That pattern also holds for self-reported campaign contributions.
There’s another useful consideration here. The vote to advance the legislation in the Senate had 62 yes votes, somewhat less than the 67 percent support same-sex marriage enjoys nationally. Those 62 senators, though, represent about 66 percent of the country’s population (allocating half of a state’s population to each of its senators). In other words, while same-sex marriage does enjoy strong support nationally, the vote to advance the bill ended up representing the level of support fairly accurately.
That the bill needed 60 votes to advance in the first place, of course, is a different subject entirely.
On our radar: Senate expected to take final vote on same-sex marriage after Thanksgiving | 2022-11-17T16:11:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The simple reason Republican senators voted against same-sex marriage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/same-sex-marriage-republicans-senate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/same-sex-marriage-republicans-senate/ |
Content from Volvo: Accelerating Opportunity: Women and the Automotive Industry
This content is produced and paid for by a Washington Post Live event sponsor. The Washington Post newsroom is not involved in the production of this content.
Although more women have drivers licenses than men and women are the majority of car buyers, the auto industry has long been dominated by men. But today, women are making inroads in this sector as technicians, engineers, designers, and executives. We’ll hear from some of the dynamic women who are helping the industry shift gears toward more diversity. | 2022-11-17T16:12:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Content from Volvo: Accelerating Opportunity: Women and the Automotive Industry - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/11/15/content-volvo-accelerating-opportunity-women-automotive-industry/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/11/15/content-volvo-accelerating-opportunity-women-automotive-industry/ |
Building and sustaining public trust in science
The coronavirus pandemic has underlined the value of clearly communicating scientific data, public health guidance and risk factors amidst uncertainty. On Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 9:00 a.m. ET, join Washington Post Live for a series of conversations with Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, and Kurt Newman, president and CEO of Children’s National Hospital, about strengthening trust in science across society, countering misinformation and navigating heightened political divisions.
Francis S. Collins
Special Advisor to the President for Special Projects
Former Director, National Institutes of Health
Katrine Wallace
Epidemiologist, University of Illinois Chicago, School of Public Health
Kurt Newman
President & CEO, Children’s National Hospital
Presenting Sponsor: Bayer | 2022-11-17T16:13:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Building and sustaining public trust in science - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/12/06/building-sustaining-public-trust-science/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/12/06/building-sustaining-public-trust-science/ |
There’s a clear disconnect between what most patients value in health care and what hospital systems and insurance companies want
Advice by Shirlene Obuobi, MD
Shirlene Obuobi for The Washington Post
I was on the 10th hour of a 28-hour shift in the intensive care unit when I noticed the message. I had missed a call from one of my primary care patients, an older woman who was complaining of a headache.
This round in the intensive care unit has been particularly scarring. My team is nicknamed “Team D for Doom” because of what appears to be our bad luck: We have admitted a disproportionately high number of sick patients. Our days are spent alternating between emergencies and end-of-life conversations.
I have not yet learned detachment, and I’m not handling the secondary trauma with the straight-backed indifference that is expected of physicians. I spend a lot of time crying in bathrooms and not enough time checking my inbox.
I call my patient, an apology on the tip of my tongue.
My patient isn’t willing to hear it. She is creative with her insults, and so loud that my co-residents can hear her expletive-ridden admonishments through the receiver from feet away. “You don’t give a … ,” she continues, using an expletive. “None of you doctors do.” She hangs up, but not before firing me.
It’s the first time a patient has accused me of not caring about them, but it won’t be the last.
It happens again when I inform an underinsured patient that the cardiac scan they need can’t be done during their hospital stay, leading to a delay of six weeks or more in appropriate therapy.
And when I inform a woman who is struggling with homelessness and recurrent infections that the surgery she needs has to be done at the county hospital to which she has no reliable transportation. An older woman with newly diagnosed cancer cries when I am an hour-and-a-half late to her clinic appointment, making her miss her ride home.
It is hard to hear every time. I wish I could tell all of these patients that I do care; that I, like so many physicians before and after me, entered the medical field out of a desire to help others.
But many patients define caring as taking the time to listen and thoroughly investigate their complaints, following up promptly on test results and advocating for them.
This kind of caring takes time and resources that many practicing physicians are not given.
There’s a clear disconnect between what most patients value in health care and what hospital systems and insurance companies want. The American medical system rewards procedures, imaging, tests and other diagnostics that generate revenue and have high reimbursement rates. This is reflected in the disparity in salaries for procedural and non-procedural specialties. For example, endocrinologists, who manage common conditions such as diabetes and osteoporosis, are paid about half as much as gastroenterologists, whose practice includes procedures such as colonoscopies, despite similar lengths of training.
Because they don’t generate revenue from procedures, non-procedural specialists are pressured to increase their patient volume and are often given appointment slots as short as 10 minutes.
It is quite literally impossible for a primary care physician to provide appropriate, guideline-recommended counseling to an average-size patient panel in one clinic day. A recent study estimated that to do so would take a 27-hour day. Despite this, the prevailing expectations from patients and institutions alike is that physicians provide thorough, holistic and compassionate care that generates high satisfaction scores.
Over the course of my training, I’ve found that leaning into my patients’ humanity has personal and professional consequences. Thoroughly investigating one patient’s complaint means running behind in clinic and upsetting patients with later appointment slots.
Taking the time to attend to multiple patients’ concerns before rounds means not finishing discharge paperwork in time and being labeled as inefficient. Calling back my primary care patients to answer questions about their test results means sacrificing three hours on my day off and upsetting my loved ones, who already feel low-priority during my training.
On the other hand, minimizing or dismissing symptoms generally lacks consequences. Physicians who adopt a more brusque and paternalistic approach seem to be more efficient.
Many physicians, however, can’t stomach the moral injury that stems from knowingly providing incomplete care. The result often is burnout, which has led 1 in 5 physicians to consider leaving medicine altogether.
For me, art has been a coping mechanism. I started drawing and sharing comics to chronicle my experiences as a medical trainee and to cope with the unexpected impact of moral injury.
I chose cardiology, which requires additional training, in part, because its procedural and diagnostic components would allow me to narrow my scope and, I hope, negotiate a work-life balance that will help me to remain an empathetic physician.
One of my mentors, a primary care physician who has been in practice for 25 years, recounted locking heads with her supervisors over her request for 40-minute appointment slots for new patients. They were concerned that she wouldn’t be able to generate enough revenue to justify her employment. She compromised by stretching out the length of her clinic day by three hours. Now she works until 8 p.m. It means that she doesn’t make it home for dinner with her husband, that she will be up late writing notes and that she will be up early in the morning to do it all over again. But for her, the extra work hours are worth it. Her patients don’t feel rushed, and she feels fulfilled in her work again. I admire her sacrifice, but the fact that it’s necessary makes me uneasy.
A week after I’m let go by my irate patient, I am running late again in clinic. I burst through the door of my final patient of the day. I’m flustered, but he greets me with a laugh. He tells me not to worry, that he appreciates that I take my time with him and figures I must be doing the same with everyone else.
It’s not much, but his reassurance reinforces that I’m doing the right thing, that I’m in the right place, and that the mission that drew me to my profession in the first place is valued by someone.
Shirlene Obuobi is a second-year cardiology fellow at University of Chicago medical center. Her comics about navigating health care appear on her Instagram @ShirlywhirlMD. She is the author of “On Rotation,” a novel about a Ghanaian-American medical student. | 2022-11-17T16:13:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why it seems like your doctor doesn’t care about you - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/11/17/doctor-care-compassion-medical-system/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/11/17/doctor-care-compassion-medical-system/ |
Post managing editor Steven Ginsberg is leaving the paper to become the top editor of the Athletic. (Eric Hanson/Eric Hanson for The Washington Post)
The Athletic has named Steven Ginsberg, a managing editor at the Washington Post, as its executive editor. The move comes nearly a year after the New York Times bought the subscription sports publication for $550 million.
Ginsberg has been a managing editor at The Post since January, overseeing the publication’s national reporting and sports coverage. Among other projects, he helped spearhead The Post’s ongoing “Black Out” project examining the NFL’s failure to equitably hire Black head coaches.
“We conducted an intensive search and interview process during which it became clear that Steven is the right leader for The Athletic’s newsroom,” David Perpich, the Athletic’s publisher, told the Times staff. “He is a champion of ambitious and creative journalism who has a love for breaking news, beat reporting, analysis and investigative scoops.”
Before becoming a managing editor, Ginsberg, 50, was The Post’s national editor, a role in which he oversaw its political coverage during Donald Trump’s presidency. He joined the Post in 1994 as a copy aide and worked as a business and metro reporter before becoming an editor.
Post reporters have won six Pulitzer Prizes under his supervision, including the Public Service award last year for coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection and its aftermath, Sally Buzbee, the paper’s executive editor, and Cameron Barr, its senior managing editor, told the newsroom in an email Thursday morning.
“Steven’s departure brings to an end an exemplary career at The Post,” they wrote, adding: “We are grateful for his many years of distinguished service."
Ginsberg declined to comment.
The Athletic was founded in 2016, and its newsroom has grown to more than 400 writers and editors across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, where it expanded to cover the Premier League in 2019. The site raised around $140 million in venture capital funding and has more than 1 million subscribers. The Times acquired the company earlier this year and has begun integrating the Athletic’s coverage into its bundle of offerings that includes news, cooking and games.
The Athletic has lost $29 million in the three quarters since it was acquired by the Times, according to the Times’s earning reports. But its publisher, David Perpich, told the Post that the Times sees a business opportunity in selling advertising and expanding the site’s reach and he expects the site to be profitable in three years.
Ginsberg was one of several candidates to replace former Post Executive Editor Martin Baron when he retired in 2021. That job went to Sally Buzbee, the former top editor at the Associated Press. Ginsberg was a defendant in a lawsuit filed last year by one of his reporters, Felicia Sonmez, who said the newspaper discriminated against her after she publicly said she had been the victim of sexual assault. The lawsuit was dismissed; Sonmez has appealed. | 2022-11-17T16:28:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Athletic names Washington Post’s Steven Ginsberg as its new editor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/steven-ginsberg-athletic-washington-post/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/steven-ginsberg-athletic-washington-post/ |
Medical workers inside Wuhan Central Hospital in Wuhan, China, on April 1, 2020. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)
The story of how the pandemic got started — and turned into a global catastrophe — remains a black box. It should not be.
The first cases could provide the most important clues about the origins of the virus, yet we know the least about them. They could show whether the outbreak began by a zoonotic spillover, perhaps from animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, or was an inadvertent research-related accident, such as a leak from a research facility in Wuhan. The early cases could illuminate missteps in public health that allowed the virus to spread. They could point to failures in the early warning and surveillance systems, offering important lessons for the future. And knowing more about the early cases could reveal the extent to which China concealed vital information from the public when the outbreak might still have been brought under control.
The Beijing government has insisted the virus came from somewhere abroad, perhaps imported on frozen food. But the key to unlocking the origins lies within China. It is particularly important to discover how far and wide the virus spread in December 2019. The outbreak probably eluded detection at first, then was detected but not recognized as a new disease by doctors and nurses. After that, it was both detected and recognized, but the vital reporting was suppressed by Chinese authorities, both local and national.
To prevent the next pandemic, and to better understand this one, a serious, sustained and credible investigation is needed.
What is China hiding?
The Wuhan early cases —
An accurate account of 2019 covid cases could help establish the origin of the pandemic. But the tallies for that time differ substantially. A serious investigation is needed.
What China told the WHO team
in early 2021:
174 total covid cases in Dec. 2019
What three peer-reviewed Chinese
scientific papers tell us about cases
recorded as of February 2020:
Between 73 and 86 more cases
than the count given to WHO
Between 247
and 260 cases
in Dec. 2019
What South China Morning Post
reported March 13, 2020, based on
leaked Chinese government documents:
9 cases in November not mentioned
in the official count.
cases in
Nov. and Dec.
83 more cases in December
Sources: World Health Organization; Cao Wuchun, et al., International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020; Yu Chuanhua, et al., Global Health Research and Policy, 2021; Josephine Ma, South China Morning Post, March 13, 2020; An Pan, Li Liu, Chaolong Wang, et al., JAMA, April 10, 2020; Gilles Demaneuf, DRASTIC.
What China told the WHO team in early 2021:
What three peer-reviewed Chinese scientific
papers tell us about cases recorded
as of February 2020:
What South China Morning Post reported
March 13, 2020, based on leaked
Chinese government documents:
The Wuhan early cases — more questions than answers
Each square represents one covid case
What three peer-reviewed Chinese scientific papers
tell us about cases recorded as of February 2020:
What South China Morning Post reported March 13, 2020,
based on leaked Chinese government documents:
9 cases in
The December mystery
In the autumn of 2019, there were many signals that something unusual was happening in Wuhan, a city of more than 11 million people. Russell J. Westergard, the deputy consular chief at the U.S. Consulate there, later wrote that, by mid-October, the consulate team was aware of “an unusually vicious flu season.” Medical records show influenza-like illness, a measure of patients with respiratory ailment, soared late in November and in December in Wuhan at a rate higher than previous winter surges. The National Center for Medical Intelligence, a U.S. intelligence-gathering outfit that keeps watch for unusual health events that could affect the military, also registered signs of unusual illnesses at the time.
Officially, the first case was someone who fell ill on either Dec. 10 or 11, though it has been difficult to establish. When sick patients first appeared, health-care workers might not have been able to distinguish their ailment from a bad seasonal flu. Later, doctors wrote “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” or origin, on patient records. At the same time, the doctors and nurses were aware that a new SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak would mean trouble. A previous one in 2002-2003 sickened 8,098 people, killed 774 and made SARS a synonym for fear, something to watch out for.
Josephine Ma, the China news editor of the South China Morning Post, in Hong Kong, reported later that the first patient was a 55-year-old who fell ill on Nov. 17, 2019. Eight more people, from 39 to 79 years old, got sick later in November. Quoting leaked government documents, Ms. Ma found 27 infections by Dec. 15, and 60 by Dec. 20. The total number of cases — mostly retrospectively confirmed either by laboratory tests or clinical diagnosis — had risen to 266 by Dec. 31, including the nine November patients. Her report was published March 13, 2020.
Read the DRASTIC report on Wuhan's early cases here.
The research group DRASTIC, which has been probing the origins of the virus, has now found evidence that Ms. Ma’s report was right on target. The researchers have determined that by the end of February 2020, China had identified as many as 260 cases from the previous December. Yet China reported to the World Health Organization a year later — in early 2021 — that there were only 174 cases that December. This raises important and still unanswered questions: Who were these early cases? How did they get sick? Why were they not reported to the WHO?
The January silence
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued an “urgent notice” to health institutions to look out for cases of “pneumonia of unknown origin” at 3:10 p.m. on Dec. 30. Then, at 6:50 p.m., came a second notice, warning “not to disclose information to the public without authorization.” That evening, ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, a physician at Wuhan Central Hospital, wrote in a private Weibo chat group that seven people had contracted a virus like the one that causes SARS and were quarantined at his hospital. He and other doctors were summoned by police on Jan. 1 and reprimanded for spreading rumors about SARS-like cases appearing in Wuhan hospitals. Li later died of covid-19.
On Dec. 31, the Wuhan health commission issued its first public bulletin. It reported 27 cases of “pneumonia of unknown origin.” On Jan. 3, 2020, the commission issued a second bulletin, with 44 confirmed cases. On Jan. 4, the National Health Commission demanded laboratories and others not release any information about the illness to any media, or post it on social media. On Jan. 5, the Wuhan commission reported 59 cases, but claimed that there was no sign of human-to-human transmission and that no health-care workers had been infected.
In late December and early January, Chinese scientists identified and verified the virus as a SARS-type through genomic sequencing. This raised a red flag: It had strong potential for human-to-human transmission. But they did not warn the public. On Jan. 11, the Wuhan health commission issued a fourth bulletin, revising the total cases downward to 41, and declaring — once again — that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” had been found.
The Huanan Seafood Market, considered a possible source of the virus, had been closed and cleaned on Jan. 1, but that did not stop the spread. Instead, it was exploding.
After the SARS disaster of 2003, China had invested in building the National Notifiable Disease Reporting System for tracking infectious diseases. Supposedly, it would provide a very quick detection of outbreaks. But in Wuhan, it failed. Many front-line doctors were not aware of it, confused about how to report an infection of unknown nature, deterred by procedures, and fearful of making a mistake and being blamed for falsely reporting a new type of infection. As a result, according to journalists from the magazine Caixin, most medical reports were passed verbally, by mail and by phone for the first 28 days and thus were not entered into the system that was supposed to track them.
The annual political meetings in Hubei province and in Wuhan were held from Jan. 6 to Jan. 17. The government did not disclose any new cases to the public. Chinese authorities covered up the truth rather than reveal it — the trademark of an authoritarian, secretive system that prizes political stability at any cost. But privately, on Jan. 14, the head of the National Health Commission admitted to provincial officials in a teleconference that the situation is “severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003,” according to a memo obtained by the Associated Press.
Not until Jan. 20, three weeks after the Huanan market had been closed, and amid a rapidly expanding caseload, did Chinese experts appear on television and acknowledge the seriousness of the human-to-human transmission. On Jan. 23, China locked down Wuhan.
Gag orders
China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which reports to the National Health Commission, lacks clout, unable by law to publish epidemic data, or declare an epidemic on its own. It acts as a consultant to the health commissions, which are political and have decision-making authority.
But experts at the CDC did want to understand the outbreak, and that required accurate data. Starting on Feb. 6, the agency intensified its work to identify cases, including tracking retrospective ones by using hospital medical records. A leader in this effort was Yu Chuanhua, a professor of epidemiology and health statistics at Wuhan University, and a prominent scientist in his field. As he and his team examined cases, working with the CDC, the totals for December grew quickly. On Feb. 17, the CDC published a revelatory official bulletin for December, which showed 104 cases confirmed by laboratory test, 37 of them clinically diagnosed. This was a drastically different picture from the 27 cases the government had first reported to the public for that month.
But in making its report, the CDC likely overstepped its authority. On Feb. 25, the National Health Commission imposed a gag order on the CDC, demanding that it not publish papers “until the epidemic is under control,” that it must get approval from above for any new research, and no one in the CDC could share information about the epidemic, or samples. On March 3, a much wider, confidential notice was issued by the State Council — a gag order on all research and data in China on the pandemic.
The WHO probe
About a year later, in early 2021, another attempt to answer questions about the origins of the pandemic got underway. From Jan. 14 to Feb. 10, a joint mission of 17 Chinese scientists and 17 from other countries and the World Health Organization met in Wuhan. Within the overall mission, a smaller working group on epidemiology studied the vital question of early cases. As part of this exercise, Chinese scientists reported to the WHO team that 174 December cases were found in the National Notifiable Disease Reporting System. These were cases of patients who had been hospitalized. Of them, 100 were confirmed by laboratory testing and 74 by clinical diagnosis.
Some of those infected had contact with the seafood market in Wuhan, some did not, and some had contact with other markets. The WHO report said “no firm conclusion” could be drawn yet about the seafood market, which sold live animals and frozen meat, among other products.
The WHO team, led by food safety expert Peter Ben Embarek, wanted to know: Were there any earlier cases, say in October or November, that might offer clues to how the pandemic began? In response, the Chinese scientists conducted a search of 233 health institutions in Wuhan, examining 76,253 records of respiratory conditions in the fall of 2019. Only 92 cases were considered possible, but all were excluded after review by the Chinese experts or retrospective testing. The Chinese apparently did not provide original raw data, methods or any independent means for corroboration by the WHO team of these results. The final report concluded that “it is considered unlikely that any substantial transmission” was occurring in October and November.
The joint mission was contentious. Dr. Embarek later said that China had brought heavy pressure on the researchers to not make any mention of a possible laboratory leak as the origin. Eventually, Chinese scientists relented to a statement that such a leak was “extremely unlikely.” But they had provided the visiting WHO team no way to verify such a conclusion. Dr. Embarek also said, after leaving China, that the virus “was circulating widely in Wuhan in December,” suggesting the official 174 cases were only the tip of the iceberg and the virus could have infected 1,000 or more people that month.
Who were the additional cases?
Despite the gag orders, Dr. Yu and another leading Chinese scientist, Cao Wuchun, had access to the official CDC database. Dr. Cao is a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who studied abroad and has many connections in the international community. He was responsible for preparing what is now the official record of the 2003 SARS outbreak. Surprisingly, both scientists published papers on pandemic epidemiology that are revelatory. Dr. Yu’s paper appeared in Global Health Research and Policy in May 2021. Dr. Cao’s report in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health came out in September 2020. A third paper, by scientists from Harvard University, Huazhong University in Wuhan, and Fudan University in Shanghai, provided additional details from the CDC database. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April 2020. All three papers were peer-reviewed.
The papers show that there were between 247 and 260 cases in the official CDC database for that troubled December, far more than China admitted at the outset of the pandemic, and more than the WHO was told a year later. According to the research group DRASTIC, the exact total was probably near the top of that range. The cases had reached that total in the CDC database as of the end of February 2020. This also dovetails with what Ms. Ma reported in the South China Morning Post on March 13. In the end, 33 people who fell ill in December eventually died.
The research group says the Chinese papers and other materials show the larger total includes at least 165 cases that were laboratory-confirmed, ruling out any question of validity. That compares with 100 such cases reported to the WHO. Who were these additional cases? Where? And what about November cases? The papers from the Chinese scientists do not provide answers to these questions, which might help determine how the pandemic began.
Finding an ‘epicenter’
Scientists continue to focus on the early cases, even without cooperation from China. Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute and others took the 174 cases from the WHO-China joint mission and plotted the residential location for 155 of them using maps in the WHO report.
In a paper published in Science magazine in July, they and their co-writers argued that the December cases were “geographically centered” on the Huanan Seafood Market, which they call the “epicenter” of the outbreak. They argue that a zoonotic spillover from wildlife happened there. Dr. Worobey has stated that a zoonotic spillover is the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic, based on his research. We asked Dr. Worobey whether additional cases could change his conclusion. “With any kind of situation like a SARS-CoV-2 virus that can cause mild or even asymptomatic infection, you’re always taking a sample,” he said. “There’s probably at least 10 times more cases that we haven’t sampled because only something like six percent end up in the hospital. We fully expect the cases that we don’t sample to come from exactly the same geographic distribution as the ones that we do sample.”
What if, as the Chinese scientists revealed, there were far more confirmed December cases than in the WHO report? What about the nine in November, as the leak published by Ms. Ma disclosed? The additional cases could affect the scenario of how the outbreak began, and the timing. The seafood market might have been the point of a zoonotic spillover, but it might also have been the scene of a superspreader event. The incomplete data from China is a serious obstacle for anyone trying to reach a firm conclusion about how the outbreak began.
It is critical to gain a better understanding of how such a monumental disaster for mankind came about. A serious investigation must return to China, looking at both the zoonotic and research-related hypotheses. It must be thorough and credible, carried out with broad expertise that includes both scientists and public health experts from within China and beyond. Nothing should be off limits or excluded.
A major lesson of the pandemic is that disease surveillance — early warning systems — is crucial. Surveillance can give a leg up on mitigating disease spread, track the path and makeup of transmission in the population, and help vaccine and therapeutic researchers start to develop countermeasures. But as China discovered, the window for early warning might be short, and spotting an illness can be especially difficult if the pathogen has never been seen before. If the origins of the pandemic are found, it would give the world a head start in looking for the next one. China’s vaunted electronic notification system didn’t start working for nearly a month while the virus was rapidly spreading. That was a failure, in part, of the Chinese political system, which created a series of roadblocks, starting at the local level and later imposed at the national level. But it also is a failure that could be avoided anywhere with well-designed disease surveillance, especially taking advantage of the great advances in genomics.
Secrecy led to fatal consequences in the pandemic. The world owes those who have died — 6 million people by official count, but probably twice that or more — to be better prepared in the future. The coverup is immense and still in place. China should now agree to a full and thorough scientific investigation that returns to Wuhan. This black box needs to be opened.
The Editorial Board on the origins of the coronavirus
Opinion|As the pandemic exploded, a researcher saw the danger. China’s leaders kept silent.
Opinion|To prevent the next pandemic, we must find the source of covid-19. China’s stonewalling is unacceptable.
Opinion|Who were the first coronavirus cases? China should help solve the mystery. | 2022-11-17T16:36:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Wuhan’s early covid cases are a mystery. What is China hiding? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/covid-early-cases-wuhan-china-mystery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/covid-early-cases-wuhan-china-mystery/ |
Virginia State Police taking over investigation of U-Va. shooting
From left, Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D'Sean Perry, the three University of Virginia football players killed Sunday. (University of Virginia Athletics/AP) (AP)
The Virginia State Police will take over the investigation of the shooting at the University of Virginia this week that left three football players dead and two other students injured, officials announced Thursday.
The move came at the request of the University of Virginia and its police department, which had been handling the high-profile probe into the slayings that occurred on a charter bus, as a group of about 25 students returned from a field trip in Washington on Sunday night.
“Due to the investigation’s expansion across multiple jurisdictions, VSP is able to bring additional resources and personnel to this active and complex investigation,” the state police said in a statement.
Virginia State Police has been involved in the investigation of the shootings since its early stages, the university said. The U-Va. police department will remain involved in the probe, along with the Albemarle County Police Department, the Charlottesville Police Department, the Virginia Attorney General’s Office, federal prosecutors, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., 23, is facing three counts of second-degree murder for the slayings of Chandler, Davis Jr. and Perry, as well as other charges.
During his initial appearance in court Wednesday, Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney James Hingeley said a witness told investigators Jones seemed to be targeting certain people when he opened fire on the bus. Hingeley said one of the victims was shot in his sleep.
A judge ordered Jones held on no bond until his next court appearance Dec. 8. The motive for the shooting remains under investigation.
The Virginia State Police expects to put out an update on the case later Thursday.
The latest: In an initial court appearance, a prosecutor claims that suspect Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. fired at a football player as he slept. The U-Va. football team’s game against Coastal Carolina has been canceled as the team mourns.
Who are the shooting victims? Officials identified the deceased victims as current U-Va. football players Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis and D’Sean Perry. | 2022-11-17T16:50:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In UVA shooting, Virginia State Police will take over investigation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/virginia-state-police-investigate-uva-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/virginia-state-police-investigate-uva-shooting/ |
Man, teen shot aboard Metrobus near charter school in Southeast D.C.
Justin George
A man and a female teenager were shot aboard a Metrobus near a charter school in Southeast Washington Thursday morning, according to D.C. and Metro Transit police.
Both victims are expected to survive, officials said, adding it appears the man was targeted and the young female was a bystander. The victims are not affiliated with KIPP D.C. Legacy College Preparatory school at 8th and Yuma streets SE, steps from where the shooting occurred, according to a KIPP spokesman.
But some students from the school were aboard the A2 Metrobus when the shooting occurred shortly before 8:30 a.m., according to a letter to parents from the school in the Washington Highlands neighborhood.
The letter, shared by a school spokesman, says students who were on the bus “are all safe and have been accounted for at the school.” The school did not go into lockdown, the letter says, adding “our teachers and staff did a great job of securing the campus.”
D.C. police said they were looking for an assailant who appeared to be about 17 years old. No arrest had been made as late Thursday morning.
A Metro spokeswoman, Sherri Ly, said the shooting appears to have occurred during an argument between two men on the bus. One of the men shot the other man, she said, and “the bullet then ricocheted off the floor, striking the juvenile female.” One of the victims was found on the bus, police said, and another had exited and was found outside.
Both victims were taken to hospitals for treatment.
Metro General Manager Randy Clarke, who was at a Metro board meeting Thursday, said he was aware of the shooting.
He said police have launched a redeployment plan in recent months that includes more officers on buses, trains and in stations, adding both protection and greater visibility.
Clarke said Metro is adding “screens” this week at stations to inform people they are under video surveillance. Buses, he said, also have surveillance cameras aboard.
Transit police, meanwhile, also have increased recruiting efforts and are graduating more recruits than in previous years to fill long-standing officer shortages. | 2022-11-17T17:07:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man, teen shot aboard Metrobus near D.C. charter school - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/shooting-metro-school-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/shooting-metro-school-dc/ |
The House of Representatives in mid-July easily passed the legislation on a 267-157 vote, with 47 Republicans voting with every Democrat in support. In the Senate, which is split 50-50 between the two political parties, the bill advanced significantly on Nov. 16 after it cleared a procedural hurdle with 12 Republican votes. Republicans won an amendment ensuring that the measure would not diminish religious and conscience protections and would not infringe on benefits, rights or status unrelated to marriage. The next legislative step is a final Senate vote, which requires only a simple majority. The bill would then go back to the House and if it passes as expected it would head to President Joe Biden’s desk for him to sign it into law. | 2022-11-17T17:42:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What the Same-Sex Marriage Bill in Congress Would and Wouldn’t Do - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-the-same-sex-marriage-bill-in-congress-would-and-wouldnt-do/2022/11/17/8ef03852-6696-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-the-same-sex-marriage-bill-in-congress-would-and-wouldnt-do/2022/11/17/8ef03852-6696-11ed-b08c-3ce222607059_story.html |
Rich and poor nations remain split on compensation for climate change impacts, as China and U.S. leaders engage on cutting methane emissions
Climate activists protest at Sharm el-Sheikh International Convention Center during the COP27 climate conference in Egypt on Thursday. (Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)
The divide between these two factions could be seen in an inconclusive 20-page document released early Thursday morning by the Egyptian COP presidency at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP27. The document showed no consensus around the key issue of finance, particularly funding for irreversible loss and damage caused by rising temperatures.
The vague outline underscored the ironic nature of this year’s negotiations: The escalating damage from climate change has deepened divisions between wealthier and developing nations rather than galvanizing more-aggressive action.
“There hasn’t been a real effort to bring this to a consensus,” said one European negotiator. “It’s looking like a really quite challenging next couple of days.”
“Extra efforts need to be exerted by all parties to ensure that we reach agreement on this matter,” said COP27 President Sameh Shoukry at a news conference.
In a more promising move on Thursday, Chinese special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua joined a U.S. event on cutting emissions of methane — a sign of thawing relations after presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met at the Group of 20 summit this week. Though Beijing stopped short of agreeing to formally join a global pledge to reduce the potent greenhouse gas, it was the first time Xie and U.S. special climate envoy John F. Kerry have appeared together since climate talks between the world’s two biggest emitters broke down earlier this year.
“It's not like when John F. Kerry and Xie sit together, magic will happen,” he said. “But if the political conditions are so poor they cannot talk to each other, then we have even less reason to believe that the global community can actually tackle the climate challenge effectively.”
He appealed to negotiators to “rise to this moment and to the greatest challenge facing humanity.”
In the case of China, the world’s most populous nation extracted a record amount of coal in the first eight months of 2022. To avoid power shortages and ensure energy security, the government plans to continue expanding coal mine output through to 2025, one reason it has balked at joining the methane pledge and other pledges.
“We need to move from a purely expressive political commitment to a decision to establish a loss and damage fund. That is the minimum that can be accepted at this time,” said Molwyn Joseph, the lead negotiator from the Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda. “Anything less ... is a betrayal.”
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister of climate change, acknowledged the political obstacles facing the leaders being asked to pay for climate harms. Many wealthy nations are facing a cost-of-living crisis and an energy crunch amid the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Officials from the United States and other countries have also warned that agreeing to a loss and damage fund might lead to legal liability for trillions of dollars in climate harms.
While diplomats haggled behind closed doors, a coalition of civil society groups took over one of the conference’s main meeting halls Thursday for a “People’s Plenary.” It was one of the most raucous acts of protest yet at the COP27, which has been heavily criticized for limiting people’s ability to demonstrate outside of the United Nations-controlled venue.
“We believe climate justice can only be achieved if rich nations pay their climate debt,” Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network International, told the assembled crowd. “We stand in defense of 1.5 C guardrail, beyond which will be a death warrant for millions.”
But the divisions among negotiators have likely doomed the talks to stretch into overtime. Even if they work round-the-clock, many don’t expect the conference to end until late Saturday.
Christian Shepherd contributed from Taipei, Taiwan. | 2022-11-17T17:42:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Climate talks hit ‘breakdown’ over finance, fossil fuels as time dwindles - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/climate-change-cop27-egypt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/climate-change-cop27-egypt/ |
The owners of the plant in the U.S. Virgin Islands must apply for an air pollution permit under the Clean Air Act before resuming operations, the Biden administration said
The Limetree Bay oil refinery in St. Croix, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday it will require an idled refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands that rained oil onto nearby homes to obtain a new air pollution permit before restarting operations.
The idled plant in St. Croix, formerly known as the Limetree Bay refinery, experienced multiple accidents over the course of last year that spewed noxious fumes and showered oil droplets onto surrounding homes, sending some residents to emergency rooms.
A refinery rained oil on thousands of St. Croix homes. Now it could reopen.
In September, the EPA inspected the refinery and found “significant corrosion” of equipment including valves, pipes and pressure relief devices. Inspectors concluded that the plant poses the risk of a fire, explosion or other “catastrophic” releases of “extremely hazardous substances,” the agency said in a report released last month.
Local residents have questioned why federal officials have not done more to protect the health and safety of this Caribbean island’s predominantly Black and Brown population.
“Since 2019, St. Croix Foundation and our nonprofit partners have been on a lonely advocacy journey trying to compel policymakers to consider alternatives to this ‘ticking time bomb’ on our shores — to no avail,” Deanna James, president of the St. Croix Foundation for Community Development, said in an email last month.
After the refinery’s previous owners filed for bankruptcy in July 2021, a bankruptcy judge approved the plant’s sale for $62 million in December to West Indies Petroleum and Port Hamilton Refining and Transportation.
Tracking Biden's environmental actions
Fermin Rodriguez, vice president and refinery manager for Port Hamilton Refining, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But he previously told The Washington Post the company was “working with EPA and we’re providing all of the information that they requested.”
It could take two to three years for the facility to receive the required permits, EPA officials said on the call with reporters. Even then, officials said, it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to install the necessary air-pollution-control technology — a potentially prohibitive cost for the owners.
Still, Judith Enck, who led the EPA regional office overseeing the U.S. Virgin Islands under the Obama administration, said she thinks the agency could be taking more aggressive steps to ensure that the facility never reopens.
“Requiring a new permit is a positive step, but it leaves the door wide open for the continued operation of a dangerous facility that has caused real damage,” said Enck, who now heads Beyond Plastics, an advocacy group. “What we needed to hear from the EPA is that they are taking control of the facility immediately and bringing in contractors to physically deal with these dangerous conditions.”
Meanwhile, West Indies Petroleum has denied its ownership interest in the facility, despite having won the bankruptcy auction. Representatives for the firm could not be reached for comment. | 2022-11-17T17:42:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | EPA orders troubled St. Croix refinery to obtain new permit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/refinery-st-croix-epa-limetree/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/refinery-st-croix-epa-limetree/ |
(Andrew Brookes/Getty Images/Cultura RF)
The secret police are no longer hiding behind lampposts. In Vietnam, they hunt down dissidents on Facebook. For those daring and outspoken enough to criticize the one-party police state, a Facebook post can lead to swift arrest and punishment, as it did for Bui Van Thuan.
Vietnamese authorities arrested Mr. Bui Van Thuan, 41, in August 2021. That month, he had posted on Facebook criticism of a government plan to use troops to shop for people under covid lockdown. He also posted negative comments about the government’s appeal for financial donations to help fight the pandemic. According to Human Rights Watch, he wrote, “The Communist Party of Vietnam and its tentacle associations and organizations is a giant nest of parasites. They live parasitically from the sweat and work of the people, and they have absolutely no effect except for pulling the country back away from development and civilization.” After his arrest, he was accused of “making, storing, disseminating or propagandizing information, materials and products that aim to oppose the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” Prosecutors issued an indictment in September this year in which they claimed to have found 105 articles he had posted on two Facebook accounts, of which 27 had content that went “against the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” Mr. Bui Van Thuan faces up to 12 years in prison.
The Communist Party of Vietnam holds a monopoly on power and tolerates no dissent, free speech or free association. Authorities have blocked websites and pressured media and telecommunications companies to remove content critical of the party or state. At least 23 journalists were in prison in Vietnam last year because of their work, as well as dozens of others who spoke out openly and honestly.
The persecuted include four contributors to Radio Free Asia, a private, independent organization that receives funding from the U.S. government. Nguyen Tuong Thuy, a blogger on free speech and civil rights issues for RFA’s Vietnamese service for six years, was arrested in 2021 and indicted on a charge of “making, storing, and disseminating documents and materials for anti-state purposes.” He was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Nguyen Van Hoa, an activist blogger who had been a video producer for RFA, got a seven-year prison term in 2017 for “conducting propaganda against the state,” a reference to his videos about the government’s handling of a devastating toxic waste spill in 2016. Truong Duy Nhat, another RFA blogger, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2020 in a politically motivated prosecution. He had been jailed from 2013 to 2015 for work criticizing Vietnam’s government. Nguyen Lan Thang, a contributor to RFA’s Vietnamese Service since 2013 and a pro-democracy activist and blogger, was arrested in July.
Also wrongly imprisoned in Vietnam is human rights blogger Pham Doan Trang, convicted in December 2021 of distributing “anti-state propaganda” in a trial lasting one day. She is serving a nine-year sentence. She was honored by the Committee to Protect Journalists on Nov. 17 with a 2022 International Press Freedom award.
Vietnam should release them all. Exercising free speech and conducting independent journalism are not crimes. | 2022-11-17T17:43:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Vietnam cracks down on its citizens' Facebook posts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/vietnam-journalists-facebook-arrests/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/vietnam-journalists-facebook-arrests/ |
Nancy Pelosi will step down as top House Democrat after two decades in leadership
The first woman to be elected speaker of the House, Pelosi has led House Democrats with an unflinching grasp on the caucus
WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 17: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., arrives to the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on November 17, 2022. (Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who broke Congress’s glass ceiling as the first woman to hold the top position in the House, announced Thursday she will not seek reelection as the House Democratic caucus’s top leader, ending one of the most consequential and historic leadership tenures in American political history. She will continue as a member of the House.
Her decision to not seek reelection as the top Democrat in Congress’s lower chamber marks the culmination of a political career widely seen as setting the standard for wielding political power. Historians largely agree that Pelosi redefined the speakership, and she made history climbing the ranks of Democratic leadership, becoming the first woman to be second in line to the presidency as speaker of the House — twice.
In her more than three decades serving in the House, Pelosi earned a reputation for amassing power in the face of male colleagues who at times undermined her opinions, and she earned respect by delivering votes on her party’s top priorities, even if that meant twisting the arms of her colleagues to take a bill over the finish line. Pelosi’s ability to keep her caucus in line has led to bipartisan recognition that she alone may be capable of wrangling Democrats’ disparate factions. She led the House Democratic caucus through a bitter fight in 2010 to pass the Affordable Care Act and most recently managed a razor-thin majority in passing several key pieces of President Biden’s legislative agenda.
Pelosi’s decision to step back has been somewhat expected; she said in 2020 she would not seek reelection to a leadership position. But she revealed little about her intentions outside a small and extremely loyal circle of trusted confidants, and her plans were never fully clear.
Her choice to step back from leadership comes weeks after her husband, Paul Pelosi, was violently attacked in their San Francisco home by an intruder who was searching for the speaker. The attack on her husband played a major role as she deliberated on her decision, Pelosi said during a recent television interview. She noted in the interview that she felt guilt about the violent attack as the intruder was looking for her.
A rise from Baltimore
Nancy Pelosi’s entrance to politics began the moment she was born in 1940 to Annunciata M. D’Alesandro and then-Rep. Thomas D’Alesandro (D-Md.), who later became mayor of Baltimore. Pelosi moved to San Francisco in 1969, where she remained active in Democratic politics and quickly became known as an activist helping the Democratic National Committee. It was there she started to gain a reputation as a prolific fundraiser, a trait that has set her apart in recent years as the Democrat who consistently raised the most money for her colleagues’ reelection efforts in the House.
In 1986, Rep. Sala Burton (D-Calif.) — whose husband Rep. Phillip Burton (D-Calif.) mentored Pelosi before his death — gave Pelosi her blessing to mount a congressional campaign as her successor if a special election were to be called in the event of her death. In 1987, Pelosi faced her first — and last — competitive race against a crowded field of 13 candidates, edging out Harry Britt, a gay activist who succeeded Harvey Milk on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Several months later, the 47-year-old mother of five won the seat against Republican Harriet Ross to finish Burton’s two-year term.
Sworn into office a week later, Pelosi was invited out to dinner in Washington to meet a crop of young House Democrats, including now Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and others. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced Pelosi to them by making a bold prediction — meet the future first woman speaker of the House.
Pelosi wasted no time making her mark in the House, taking up China’s threats against Taiwan as a top priority for her and her constituents in San Francisco’s Asian American community. In 1991, Pelosi famously stood alongside Reps. Ben Jones (D-Ga.) and John Miller (R-Wash.) to unfurl a banner reading, “To those who died for democracy in China” at Tiananmen Square, where students defending democracy were killed two years earlier. Those who know her best point to the massacre at Tiananmen Square as a catalyst, drawing Pelosi in both as a lawmaker representing San Francisco’s prominent Chinese community and as a mother who was pained watching college-age students, like her own children, being persecuted for defending democracy.
Her chance to enter leadership came in 1999 when she decided to challenge Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) for majority whip, assuming that the seat opened up if Democrats won back the majority in November 2000. Though Republicans kept the majority that year, then-Democratic Minority Whip Rep. David E. Bonior (D-Mich.) resigned the post in 2001, sparking a rematch between the two former interns to Rep. Daniel Brewster (D-Md.). Pelosi became the first woman to win the post — by roughly 20 votes.
One year after her victory over Hoyer, Pelosi led a Democratic rebellion against the Iraq War resolution that her congressional mentor, Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), crafted with President George W. Bush’s administration. While the resolution passed in October 2002, Pelosi whipped a large majority of Democrats to vote against it, signaling a major shift in Democratic caucus politics toward coastal liberals opposed to war.
In 2002, Gephardt announced his intention to run for president, creating an opening for Pelosi to run for the top Democratic spot in the House. She formally became minority leader after intraparty elections that year, becoming the highest-ranking woman to achieve such a feat.
The rise to House speaker
As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars dragged on, Pelosi became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, strongly rebuking the president in stark terms ahead of his reelection campaign in 2004.
“Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he’s not a leader. He’s a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has decided upon,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in May 2004. “Not to get personal about it, but the president’s capacity to lead has never been there. In order to lead, you have to have judgment. In order to have judgment, you have to have knowledge and experience. He has none.”
Bush went on to win reelection, while House Democrats lost seats that year, a rebuke that motivated Pelosi to aggressively work to win back the majority in 2006. In the first of many times Pelosi had to successfully hold her caucus together, she pushed back against Bush’s plan to reform Social Security and urged her members to coalesce in opposition, which they did.
Democrats’ support for the war also began to wane, mirroring public opinion at the time, and they began to position themselves as the party supporting withdrawal. As questions swirled over whether Bush had misled Congress about the rationale for invading Iraq, Democrats began to call for impeachment proceedings against him. But with her eyes on the majority, Pelosi told The Washington Post in May 2006 that a Democratic-controlled House would launch investigations into the administration — stressing that impeachment was not the goal but acknowledging, “You never know where it leads to.”
The antiwar effort helped House Democrats successfully clinch 30 seats in the 2006 midterms, paving the way for the party to regain the House majority for the first time since 1993. Largely credited for relentlessly campaigning and fundraising for candidates, Pelosi was then the unanimous selection by House Democrats to become speaker of the House, setting up the historic moment months later when she became the first woman to hold the position. Bush commemorated the moment during his 2007 State of the Union speech, turning to her before uttering, “Madame Speaker,” which garnered loud applause.
The election of President Barack Obama later that year gave congressional Democrats the ability to finally pass legislation they were unable to under a Republican.
The Obama administration spent much of its political capital crafting the Affordable Care Act to broadly reform health care in the United States. And for over a year before the 2010 midterm elections, Pelosi worked relentlessly to muscle the bill into law — an almost insurmountable challenge as House Democrats knew they were risking their political careers if they supported the controversial legislation. After the Senate lost its filibuster-proof majority, many considered a “skinny” health-care bill as an alternative to get bipartisan support. Instead, Pelosi took charge and worked to get the legislation over the finish line in the House.
As House Democrats predicted, the passage of the ACA led them to lose a historic 63 seats and with it their majority in 2010. Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars vilifying Pelosi during those midterm election, sinking her popularity to new lows. But she stayed on as minority leader, defeating a token challenge from moderate Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), a Blue Dog who survived the political bloodbath.
A challenge from within
Pelosi spent the subsequent years trying to claw back the majority and defending Obama’s legacy as Republicans moved to overturn the landmark health-care bill. As the 2016 elections approached, Pelosi banked that Democrats would win 15 or more seats thanks to the momentum behind Hillary Clinton to become the first female president. But the expectations were never met as Donald Trump was elected president and only six Democrats picked up seats that year, prompting members to question her agility atop the caucus.
It was then that Pelosi faced the toughest internal challenge of her two decades atop the caucus, as fuming members began to openly call for a generational change that would oust her, Hoyer and Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) as caucus leaders. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), a relatively unknown lawmaker at the time, launched a fierce challenge against her in late 2016 that left her pleading with members to secure the necessary two-thirds majority vote. While she was able to amass the support needed to stay on as minority leader, the encounter weakened her internally.
Trump’s declining popularity and Republicans’ attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act boosted Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Not wanting to distract from that energy, Pelosi adopted “Just win, baby” as her mantra in public and private, a blessing for moderate candidates running in crucial swing districts to say they would not vote for her as speaker if Democrats regained the majority.
Pelosi also helped recruit a diverse class of candidates that would appeal to voters in 2018, including a historic number of women, with military and national security roles that would work to counter what they claimed was Trump’s unwavering threat to democracy. It helped bring a “Blue Wave” to Congress as 41 moderate and liberal Democrats flipped GOP seats to win back the majority.
On Jan. 3, 2019, Pelosi became the first speaker since Sam Rayburn (D-Tex.) in the early 1950s to lose the gavel and stay around long enough to reclaim it.
During that first year back in charge, several liberal activists joined the Democratic caucus, all eager to defy leadership and push their progressive priorities. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who ousted Pelosi’s presumed heir to the speakership, staged a sit-in at Pelosi’s office to protest Democrats’ inaction on climate change. The more confrontational approach, which defied the deference often given to leadership, fomented tensions that have persisted between moderates and liberals in the caucus, even though Ocasio-Cortez and members of the liberal “Squad” have often fallen in line with Pelosi’s desires since.
While questions about her age and ability bubbled up, Pelosi often made up for it by the way in which she would defy Trump. House Democrats, including those who did not plan to support her if she mounted a bid this cycle, say the memorable photo of her standing in the White House’s Roosevelt Room and pointing at Trump during a confrontation is an excellent example of her dedication to standing up against anyone who crosses her or her party.
Pelosi spent most of 2019 turning down the temperature on demands to impeach Trump from within her conference, telling The Washington Post in March of that year that Trump was “just not worth it.” But after months of holding back the liberal flank’s demands, Pelosi’s hand was forced after it emerged that Trump had urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for business dealings ahead of the 2020 presidential election, linking the request to the release of U.S. military aid.
In early 2020, Trump was impeached on a party-line vote for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate acquitted the president, but Pelosi’s disgust toward Trump persisted. Two months later, as Trump finished a defiant State of the Union speech, an angry Pelosi stood behind him and ripped apart her copy of his speech.
Shortly thereafter, the world was overcome by an invisible common threat: the coronavirus pandemic. Pelosi largely oversaw negotiations with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that resulted in a bipartisan agreement to inject $2.5 trillion into the economy. Pelosi also instituted remote voting to allow House business to continue, a decision routinely attacked by Republicans.
Pelosi again calculated that Democrats would keep their majorities and possibly expand them as the country was set to rebuke Trump and elect Biden as the 46th president. While Biden did win the election, split-ticket voters helped Republicans flip seats in 2020, resulting in a narrow nine-seat House majority for Democrats and foreshadowing troubles ahead for keeping an ideologically fractured caucus together.
But before congressional Democrats could help a Democratic president pass priority legislation, Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen enraged his supporters, who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a final effort to overturn the results of the election.
After getting whisked away to Fort McNair as rioters ransacked the Capitol, Pelosi began impeachment proceedings against Trump almost immediately. A week after the attack, Pelosi held an impeachment vote and witnessed 10 Republicans join all House Democrats in supporting the article against Trump — the most bipartisan impeachment vote in American history. The Senate again acquitted Trump, but seven Republicans joined Democrats in voting to convict.
With Biden as president, Pelosi faced her most daunting task as she tried to meld support within her caucus for two planks of his administration’s priorities. After the Senate crafted and passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, Pelosi held the legislation as leverage to ensure her chamber could first find agreement on Biden’s social spending package and pass both bills together. But as negotiations for Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill stalled — and with moderate and vulnerable Democrats clamoring for legislative wins to tout ahead of the 2022 midterms — Pelosi maneuvered getting Biden to break the stalemate by telling House Democrats that he supported decoupling the legislation and promising liberals he would work with the Senate to pass their priority bills.
Then, in late 2020, after the infrastructure bill passed, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) announced he would not support the $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill, citing climbing inflation. His statement sent leaders, including Pelosi, back to the drawing board.
While the slim margin allowed members to easily raise objections to measures, Pelosi was still able to use the powerful ability she has to find the votes and bend members’ will to get there. It’s a trait that even Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), have admitted admiring.
“You could argue she’s been the strongest speaker in history,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in an interview last year. “She has shown more capacity to organize and muscle, with really narrow margins, which I would’ve thought impossible.” | 2022-11-17T17:43:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nancy Pelosi will step down as top House Democrat after two decades - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/nancy-pelosi-house-speaker/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/nancy-pelosi-house-speaker/ |
Caron Butler, Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison formed a formidable trio for the Wizards from 2005 to 2010. (Ned Dishman/NBAE/Getty Images)
At halftime of Friday’s game against the Miami Heat, the Washington Wizards will recognize the trio of Gilbert Arenas, Caron Butler and Antawn Jamison, who formed the franchise’s “Big Three” from 2005 to 2010 and made three consecutive playoff appearances together. The reunion, part of the team’s throwback night as it celebrates 25 years since the Bullets became the Wizards, was a long time coming.
Friday will mark Arenas’s first return to Capital One Arena since Feb. 4, 2011, when the three-time all-star and Wizards legend, who went by Agent Zero during his eight seasons in D.C., was greeted with “a mix of boos and a standing ovation” seven weeks after being traded to the Orlando Magic. Arenas was scheduled to make a 2020 appearance in D.C. with a different Big3 — Ice Cube’s three-on-three basketball league — but the outfit’s season was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m the only one that has anxiety right now,” Arenas, 40, said of his upcoming return during a recent interview with Butler, Jamison and former Wizards TV analyst Phil Chenier. “Oh my God, what are [the fans] going to think? Am I going to get booed? I have so many emotions.”
While Jamison and Butler have maintained close ties with the team in retirement — Jamison was named the Wizards’ director of pro personnel in 2019, and Butler, now in his third year as an assistant coach with the Heat, served as a Wizards analyst on NBC Sports Washington — Arenas has been largely estranged from the franchise since he was traded to the Magic in December 2010, a move that came about a year after he was suspended for bringing guns into the locker room. The infamous incident stemmed from a dispute between Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton on a team flight over a card game gone wrong and prompted incoming owner Ted Leonsis to clean house. Butler and Jamison were both dealt ahead of the 2010 trade deadline.
Caron Butler co-authors young adult book series
“When we looked at the history of the Wizards name, we wanted to focus on the best players ever to put on the Wizards jersey,” Hunter Lochmann, Monumental Sports and Entertainment’s chief marketing officer, said in a phone interview. “Gilbert is obviously one of them, so it felt very natural that, with this anniversary, this was the time [to bring him back].”
In a team release, Wizards General Manager Tommy Sheppard said: “Gilbert, Caron and Antawn represent a definitive era for the franchise and they deserve to be recognized for the excitement they generated on the court and the impact they had in our community, both of which led to a new generation of Wizards fans.”
a walking bucket 🪣
𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝟎 returns to @CapitalOneArena on Friday night. pic.twitter.com/usL7ntP1Cr
Arenas signed as a free agent with Washington in the summer of 2003 and helped change the fortunes of the franchise. Jamison arrived via a trade with the Dallas Mavericks the following year. During the 2004-05 season, Arenas, Jamison and Larry Hughes led the Wizards to 45 wins — their most since 1979 — and their first playoff berth since 1997.
After Hughes signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers as a free agent, Washington acquired Butler in a trade with the Los Angeles Lakers. Butler came off the bench to start the 2005-06 season, but by December he had forced his way into coach Eddie Jordan’s starting lineup, and a new Big Three was born. The trio’s run ended after three first-round playoff exits — all against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Friday will be the first time Arenas, Butler and Jamison have been together in years.
“I knew when those other two guys were on the court with me, it didn’t matter if it was Boston, Miami, the Lakers, I had two other guys that were going to compete at a high level,” Jamison, who once called Arenas the best teammate he ever had, told Chenier. “It’s a genuine friendship between all three of us.”
Despite Arenas’s concerns and some of his repugnant comments in the past, including misogynistic remarks about WNBA players, the reception for him Friday figures to be warm. The scene inside Capital One Arena should also look familiar. The Wizards use a classic court — designed to look as it did before the franchise changed its colors back to red, white and blue in 2011 — for games when they wear the classic white, blue and bronze throwback jerseys they introduced this season, as they will against the Heat.
Adding to the nostalgia of the night, the arena’s digital displays, including the scoreboard, will feature a classic look, and R&B artist and producer Teddy Riley, of Blackstreet fame, will headline a postgame concert. The first 10,000 fans at Friday’s game will receive a Wizards hat designed by Jamison and inspired by the black and gold alternate uniforms from the Big Three era. (In an unfortunate throwback, the hat was designed in partnership with and features the logo of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that filed for bankruptcy this month and was formerly the naming rights partner of the Heat’s arena.)
“We’re really proud with how we’re taking the classic concept and the look,” Lochmann said. “When you come to a game, the jerseys, the court, the signage, what our entertainment teams are wearing, the broadcast all have that same look. You know you’re tuned in or at a classic game. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been fun.”
The team plans to recognize other Wizards alumni at additional throwback games throughout the season. Beloved former TV play-by-play man Steve Buckhantz, who called Wizards games for 22 years and, alongside Chenier, narrated most of the Big Three’s greatest moments, will also be celebrated at some point in the coming months. Lochmann declined to comment on whether Buckhantz will be part of Friday’s festivities, but he said Buckhantz and Chenier are an “integral part” of Wizards history. | 2022-11-17T17:44:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gilbert Arenas, Caron Butler, Antawn Jamison to be honored by Wizards - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/18/wizards-reunion-gilbert-arenas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/18/wizards-reunion-gilbert-arenas/ |
The Bills are scheduled to host the Browns on Sunday at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y. (Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images)
The NFL is considering the possibility of relocating the Buffalo Bills’ home game Sunday because of the prospect of a massive snowstorm hitting the area.
The Bills are scheduled to host the Cleveland Browns at 1 p.m. Eastern time Sunday in Orchard Park, N.Y. Forecasts are calling for three to six feet of snow in parts of western New York. The NFL is monitoring the forecast and is remaining in contact with the Bills and Browns, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. No decision had been made as of midday Thursday.
The game could be moved if it cannot be played in the Buffalo area. One possibility mentioned Thursday was playing it Sunday in Detroit, when the Lions are on the road facing the New York Giants in East Rutherford, N.J.
In that case, the Bills could spend the week in Detroit, where they’re scheduled to play on Thanksgiving against the Lions.
The NFL is not contemplating keeping the Bills-Browns game in the Buffalo area and postponing it until Monday, according to a person familiar with the discussions. That would require pushing back the Bills-Lions game until Friday, which the league seems unwilling to do. The Lions traditionally host a Thanksgiving Day game.
The NFL has said it will play a game on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which Amazon will carry on Prime Video, beginning next season. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) But that apparently won’t happen this season, even with the weather issues in Buffalo.
This is the second time this season the league has contemplated relocating a game because of severe weather. As Hurricane Ian threatened Florida, the league said it would play the Buccaneers-Chiefs game Oct. 2 in Minneapolis if it could not be played in Tampa.
But the Buccaneers announced three days before the game that it would be played as scheduled in Tampa, at the behest of local officials. The hurricane devastated parts of Florida and left millions of people without power. But the effects in the Tampa area were not as severe as originally feared. | 2022-11-17T18:56:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL considers moving Bills-Browns game as huge snowstorm looms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/nfl-bills-browns-snow-move/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/nfl-bills-browns-snow-move/ |
Congress’s lame-duck priorities
Children draw during a Dec. 13, 2021, rally in D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The Nov. 13 editorial “How Congress can make the lame-duck session a mighty one” suggested that there are too many competing priorities in the lame-duck session for Congress to prioritize resurrecting the expanded child tax credit.
Who is going to volunteer to tell poor children that they need to get to the back of the line?
The expanded child tax credit was a lifeline, giving families the dollars they needed to buy food, cover utility bills, purchase school supplies and pay for other essentials. It swiftly became one of the most effective anti-poverty policies in U.S. history: Between July and December 2021, the expanded credit lifted millions of children out of poverty, fueling a 50 percent decline in child poverty overall. Research suggests that the impact would be even greater if made permanent.
Perhaps the prognosticators are correct and it would be more politically feasible to wait to try to bring it back. If so, what a damning indictment of our priorities as a nation.
Adam Zimmerman, Rockville
The Nov. 13 editorial on the lame-duck session suggested that action to reinstate the enhanced child tax credit (CTC) is business better left to the 118th Congress. Because it enjoys bipartisan support, this particular legislation can wait until a more advantageous time, it seems.
Though it has been treated as such for generations, child poverty is not a kick-the-can issue. If the issue is put off until after the first of the year, inevitably other matters more “necessary” will relegate this to the back burner once more. Child poverty continues to be a problem in this country only because it is allowed to be. There will never be a convenient time to give it the attention it deserves unless we make it a priority.
A growing list of Democrats and Republicans now acknowledge that monetary allowances for children are remarkably effective in confronting poverty. Precisely for this reason, the issue should be taken up now.
That the expanded CTC was allowed to lapse is shameful. Its reinstatement before the end of the year would truly make this lame-duck session a mighty one.
Joanna DiStefano, Morgantown, W.Va.
If the lame-duck Congress cannot repeal the debt ceiling entirely, it should change it to say, “The debt ceiling shall be automatically raised as necessary to support spending previously approved by Congress and the president.” That avoids a big scary number that would be fodder for attack ads. It’s also exactly what prudent fiscal policy requires.
Stephen Beste, Springfield | 2022-11-17T19:05:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Congress’s lame-duck priorities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/congresss-lame-duck-priorities/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/congresss-lame-duck-priorities/ |
The price data for FTX Token (FTT) is displayed Wednesday on a laptop. (Lanna Apisukh/Bloomberg News)
Disgraced crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried implied earlier this year that he might spend as much as $1 billion on political donations before 2024. Now, would-have-been recipients are probably relieved he didn’t.
The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has resulted in catastrophic financial losses for its executives, its employees and its investors alike. The fact that the implosion has raised questions of alleged fraud also puts into an awkward position the numerous campaigns and political action committees that received donations from the onetime multibillionaire, widely known as SBF, who owned it: What should they do with this potentially ill-gotten cash? There’s no right answer, but there is a wrong one. Federal legislators, almost all of whom will likely be involved in regulating the crypto industry in general or investigating FTX specifically, can’t keep it.
Mr. Bankman-Fried personally gave more than $13 million to candidates and organizations of both parties in just this past midterm election cycle, and his PAC devoted more than $23 million to propping up the Democratic Party. His right-hand man, Ryan Salame, did much the same for the GOP; the party received almost $24 million from him, more than $12 million from his PAC.
The trouble isn’t merely that the sources of these generous gifts are now disgraced. It isn’t even just that the beneficiaries of these generous gifts will have a glaring conflict of interest when it comes to addressing the FTX scandal, though that’s true. The problem is also that it is unclear where the money came from. Mr. Bankman-Fried may have “earned” it from running FTX or Alameda Research, his trading firm to which FTX appears to have lent customer funds. It turns out these ventures appear not to have been separate and solvent entities, and now users are unable to withdraw their funds from FTX — while lawmakers have, or had, plenty in their pockets thanks to the same businesses. It’s not just the integrity of the legislators that’s in question; it’s the integrity of the cash itself.
A handful of members of Congress from both parties — seven out of close to 100 queried by Popular Information — have said they’re relinquishing the money. Many, many more have remained silent. Some have mulled sending the money to whence it came, but that risks contributing to FTX’s legal defense. Some, such as Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) intend to turn it over to whatever client reimbursement fund is set up during bankruptcy proceedings. That’s probably the cleanest answer to the question. But others are more poetic. A few legislators are sending to charity these donations from an entrepreneur who claimed to be devoted to a radical kind of altruism. The cause chosen by Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.)? “Financial literacy.” | 2022-11-17T19:05:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | With FTX bankrupt, politicians should get rid of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-campaign-money-return/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-campaign-money-return/ |
Asylum-seeking migrants from Central and South America wait to be registered by border agents after being smuggled across the Rio Grande from Mexico into Roma, Tex., on Wednesday. (Adrees Latif/Reuters)
The Trump-era public health measure known as Title 42, which became a pretext for expelling migrants en masse at the border, might be dead. The likely result is a surge of new border crossings. Congress has routinely ducked responsibility for addressing border dysfunction, in large part the result of an asylum system that lawmakers have left broken. Unless Congress acts, the nation will face the consequences of lawmakers’ dithering.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in D.C. ruled that the government can no longer use an order, invoked at the pandemic’s outset, whose public health benefits have long since evaporated. Minuscule numbers of migrants who enter the country test positive for the coronavirus. Despite that, thousands are turned back daily at the border under Title 42, in the name of combating the coronavirus — and without access to an asylum officer or any consideration of their claims. Well over 2 million such expulsions have occurred since March 2020.
It might be true, as Republican state attorneys general argued in trying to retain Title 42, that the end of mass expulsions under the order will encourage even more undocumented migrants to cross the border, where record numbers were apprehended in the past year. It is equally true that the measure’s continued use is legally arbitrary and logically unjustifiable, as Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in D.C. concluded. Even as U.S. border agents barred asylum seekers as public health threats, the judge observed, millions of other people flowed into the country by bus and automobile, with little in the way of health checks.
Now let’s hope the predicted result of Judge Sullivan’s decision — a spike in unauthorized border crossings — will spur Congress to get serious about overhauling the system for vetting and processing asylum applications. The goal should be to quickly admit and adjudicate those who have legitimate fears of persecution in their home countries, and swiftly deport those who don’t.
The progressive collapse of this country’s asylum system over many years, and not the Biden administration’s admittedly murky messaging on migration, is the main cause of today’s accelerating disarray at the border. Most of the 770,000 migrants waiting for their asylum claims to be reviewed by overwhelmed immigration courts entered the country before the president took office in January last year. Their average processing time in immigration courts, more than three years in some states, is a result of woefully insufficient numbers of immigration judges and asylum officers and insufficient processing center capacity. Only Congress can address that, and legislation to provide new resources to do so has been proposed. It has stalled, a victim of immigration’s entanglement in the nation’s broader culture wars.
Granted, the president and his border policies have contributed to the problem. On taking office, President Biden set about dismantling the Trump administration’s restrictions, including, starting earlier this year, by trying to scrap Title 42 expulsions. Simultaneously, officials pleaded in vain for migrants not to attempt to enter the country — without any effective strategy to deter them.
In response to Judge Sullivan’s ruling, the Biden administration asked for a five-week grace period to prepare for the anticipated surge of migrants. It has prepared to rush resources to the border, including thousands of beds to hold detainees in tent facilities, and is planning for quicker deportations as a deterrent. Ultimately, though, the fix, and the failure, lies with Congress. | 2022-11-17T19:05:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | With Title 42 gone, a migrant surge is coming. Congress should act. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/title-42-migrant-border-surge-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/title-42-migrant-border-surge-congress/ |
Walker lacks the reputation and credibility that runoff voters need to see
GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker speaks at a campaign stop at Battle Lumber Co. on Oct. 6, in Wadley, Ga. (Meg Kinnard/AP)
If, by some cruel fate, Herschel Walker wins the Georgia runoff election, it won’t be the first time a prominent athlete has reached the U.S. Senate.
New Jersey’s Bill Bradley (D) did it in 1978, when he was elected to the Senate, where he served from 1979 to 1997. That followed an illustrious career on the basketball court that featured an Olympic gold medal and 10 years with the New York Knicks, including two NBA championships.
And Jim Bunning (R) represented Kentucky in both the House and the Senate over the course of a political career that stretched from 1987 through 2011. His life as a politician came on the heels of 16 years as a major league pitcher, which was capped with his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Walker might be counting on his celebrity athlete status as a University of Georgia Heisman Trophy winner and an acclaimed former professional football running back to land a coveted spot in Washington.
But Walker, I believe and hope, is destined to fall short of the finish line.
He woefully lacks what Bradley and Bunning had when they sought office. It’s the same thing other standout athletes — former pro-football star quarterback Jack Kemp, former top National Football League receiver Steve Largent and former University of Oklahoma star quarterback J.C. Watts — had when they won election (all as Republicans) to the House: namely, credibility based upon honorable reputations earned before seeking public office.
Except for memories of his on-field gridiron heroics — during three seasons with the Donald Trump-owned New Jersey Generals of the original U.S. Football League, followed by 12 seasons in the NFL — Walker brings to public service very little that commands respect.
Truth and Walker are too often strangers.
For instance, Walker has claimed to be a University of Georgia graduate and said he was his high school’s valedictorian, both of which CNN found to be untrue. CNN also debunked Walker’s references to his military career and having “trained with the FBI.”
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reviewed hundreds of pages of public records tied to Walker’s post-college business ventures and found a record that included “exaggerated claims of financial success.”
“In repeated media interviews,” the AP reported, “Walker claimed his company employed hundreds of people, included a chicken processing division in Arkansas and grossed $70 million to $80 million annually in sales.”
But upon checking further, the AP found that when Walker’s company applied for a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan during the pandemic, it reported just eight employees. And it received about $182,000 in covid-19 aid.
Were that all.
What on earth can be said about Walker and abortion?
He has campaigned as an opponent of abortion, including in cases of rape, incest and the protection of a mother’s life. He has embraced Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) proposed national ban on abortion at 15 weeks.
However, two women have separately said Walker pressured them to have abortions during their affairs with him. He has strongly denied both claims. One of the women claimed he paid for the abortion that he wanted her to have. When confronted with a copy of a $700 check given to her in 2009, Walker acknowledged writing a check, but he continued to deny the woman’s claim that the money was provided to pay for an abortion.
At bottom, it’s his word against theirs.
And who knows what to make of the Herschel Walker who sat for an interview in 2021 with conservative social media personalities and said, “The father leaves in the Black family. He leaves the boys alone so they’ll be raised by their mom. If you have a child with a woman, even if you have to leave that woman — even if you have to leave that woman — you don’t leave that child.”
Yes, that is the same Walker who once cited absentee fathers as a “major problem.”
That same Walker also confirmed during the campaign in June that in addition to having a 22-year-old son, with whom he is close, he has another son, 10 years old, whom he financially supports but does not see, and two additional grown children. Said Walker of the revelations, “I have four children. Three sons and a daughter. They’re not ‘undisclosed’ — they’re my kids,” Walker said. "I support them all and love them all. I’ve never denied my children.”
“You don’t leave that child,” said Walker a year ago — but that was when conservative cameras were rolling.
Walker’s entry in the Senate race was stoked by Trump, who used his Tuesday night reelection bid to praise Walker as “a gentleman and a great person … a fabulous human being.” Good grief.
Walker is counting on Trump’s endorsement, his own celebrity and a pious search for redemption pitched to social conservatives to deliver him victory in the Dec. 6 Georgia runoff.
If the people of Georgia haven’t lost their minds, Walker’s wishes won’t be enough.
There is no single ingredient essential to transitioning from a prominent career — in sports or anything else — to a Capitol Hill job. But a reputable public persona, such as that offered by Bradley, Kemp et al., can help.
Herschel Walker has little of that to offer. | 2022-11-17T19:05:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Walker lacks credibility and honorable reputation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/walker-lacks-credibility-honorable-reputation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/walker-lacks-credibility-honorable-reputation/ |
Women will keep advocating for equality until we are equal
Equal Rights Amendment bookmarks and stickers. (Julia Rendleman for The Washington Post)
In his Nov. 13 op-ed, “50 years later, the ERA staggers on,” George F. Will neglected to mention that, per Justice Antonin Scalia, women are not a protected class in the Constitution. Perhaps that’s why women are still advocating for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, looking at all forms of legal strategies to try to finalize it as a constitutional amendment. Mr. Will’s column lacked any sensitivity to the issue at hand.
As it took women fighting for years to be able to vote, the fight will continue to have women as a protected constitutional class. Given the current assault on women’s rights, this becomes even more important. Perhaps if men were not a protected class, he would advocate differently.
Yvonne M. Perret, Cumberland, Md. | 2022-11-17T19:05:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Women will keep advocating for equality until we are equal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/women-will-keep-advocating-equality-until-we-are-equal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/women-will-keep-advocating-equality-until-we-are-equal/ |
Conditions are looking unsettled in the eastern United States, especially on the Friday and Saturday after the holiday
The American GFS model simulates storminess for Thanksgiving weekend. (WeatherBell)
An estimated 54.6 million Americans are expected to travel 50 miles or more for Thanksgiving this year, according to AAA. That’s a stark jump from last year and is just shy of pre-pandemic levels. And naturally, whenever travel is involved, the weather forecast is crucial.
It’s still too early to know exactly what may be in store for the Thanksgiving holiday, but the big picture and overarching pattern are coming into focus. It’s looking like a storm will develop over the Great Plains around Wednesday, shifting east while transferring its energy to a second fledgling storm that will intensify off the East Coast.
The weekend after Thanksgiving could feature inclement weather that may disrupt air travel while affecting road and rail conditions with wet weather for some and a plastering of snowfall for others.
Here we break down what we know, followed by an early region-by-region forecast.
On Tuesday, the weather pattern over the Lower 48 will feature predominantly zonal, or west to east, flow. That means air temperature near or slightly above average for most of the country, with little in the way of active weather.
That quickly changes into Wednesday, however. A weather disturbance will work ashore over the Pacific Northwest, bringing a few showers as it passes over the Columbia River Basin and northern Rockies.
By Thanksgiving, a strengthening storm system will begin draping warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico northward across the South and the Tennessee Valley, accompanied by showers and thunderstorms. Rain is likely over the southeast and the Ohio Valley on Friday. Then things become interesting on Saturday of the long holiday weekend.
Moisture gathering over the Carolinas will work north. At the same time, the main low-pressure system, which by then may be near the Appalachians, should shift its oomph into a new low developing east of the Delmarva Peninsula. The system will probably push northeast and could feature snow on its backside where the “cold air wraparound” chills the atmosphere. Significant accumulations in northern New England can’t be ruled out, though more than a week remains before this potential disturbance materializes.
What to prepare for when traveling
Where the weather will be nice: Most of the country except the coastal Carolinas, parts of the northern Plains and perhaps the extreme Pacific Northwest.
Cities/airports to watch: Charleston, S.C., may see some showers, as could Wilmington, N.C. There could also be some breezy crosswinds in Seattle that could affect flights, but any disruptions should be minimal.
Where the weather will be nice: Most of the West. In fact, temperatures of 10 to 15 degrees above average will be common across the Rockies, West Coast and the Desert Southwest. High pressure will be cresting overhead, which will stave off any inclement weather, like a magic force field of sunshine.
Cities/airports to watch: Oklahoma City; Dallas-Fort Worth; Wichita; Kansas City, Mo.: New Orleans: Memphis; Biloxi, Miss.; and Mobile, Ala., could be in the path of the developing storm system. Rain showers will be intermittent, but heavier downpours are possible. There could also be some gusty northwesterly winds over the Texas plains, perhaps between 35 and 40 mph, which could affect flights.
Where the weather will be nice: The Plains, the southwest, the West and parts of the Gulf Coast. There could be a rogue shower over the northern Rockies, but likelihood is low.
Cities/airports to watch: Nashville, Tampa, Orlando and Atlanta, home to the largest airport in the world, can expect rain and perhaps a few storms. Madison, Wis., Chicago, Detroit, Columbus and Indianapolis can expect a few showers, too. Much of the Interstate 95 corridor in the Mid-Atlantic could also see rain, including Raleigh, N.C., Washington, Richmond, Baltimore and Philadelphia. New York City, Boston and Hartford, Conn., could see rain, too, but it would be more likely late in the day. Heavy snow could become an issue in the interior Northeast, west of the big cities.
Saturday and Sunday:
Given the forecast is nine days out, we’re at the end of the range in terms of how much we know with respect to timing. We expect continued rain in parts of southern New England.
Farther north, snow is likely in northern areas. If you live in or are traveling to Rutland, Burlington or Brattleboro, Vt.; Manchester or Concord, N.H.; or central or western Maine, including Augusta, Bangor or Presque Isle, you should be prepared for wintry weather. | 2022-11-17T19:14:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thanksgiving travel forecast: Storm may affect eastern U.S. after holiday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/thanksgiving-weather-forecast-travel-storm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/17/thanksgiving-weather-forecast-travel-storm/ |
Two people fatally shot in Va. home invasion, police say; man in custody
Two people were killed during a home invasion in Virginia late Wednesday, officials said Thursday, and police have arrested a suspect in the killings.
On Wednesday at around 11:15 p.m., officers responded to a home in the 17400 block of Isle Royale Terrace in Dumfries for a reported shooting, Prince William County police said in a statement.
They found two adults — Alyssa Trynese Gainey, 22, of Woodbridge and Javon Alberto Williams, 24, of Dumfries — who had been fatally shot by a man who had forced his way into the residence, the statement said. A pit bull mix in the home was also shot and had to be euthanized, according to the statement.
Police said the suspect, identified only as a 24-year-old Woodbridge man, knew the victims and was previously in a relationship with Gainey.
The suspect was arrested in a short-term parking lot at Dulles Airport, according to police, and charges are pending. | 2022-11-17T19:14:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two people fatally shot in Va. home invasion, police say; man in custody - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/two-people-fatally-shot-va-home-invasion-police-say-man-custody/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/two-people-fatally-shot-va-home-invasion-police-say-man-custody/ |
Nancy Pelosi’s strategies were flawed. Democrats must move on from them.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks during her weekly news conference in D.C. on Sept. 22. (Shuran Huang for The Washington Post)
With Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepping down as the leader of the House Democrats following the Republicans winning control of the chamber, the Democratic Party should acknowledge the many shortcomings of her tenure and avoid repeating them.
Becoming the first woman to serve as speaker of the House is a tremendous accomplishment in a nation that has long blocked women from positions of power. And some on the right have acted in a disgraceful manner toward Pelosi. Most recently, she has been the target of at least two attempts to physically attack or even kill her — on Jan 6. 2021, and then again last month when a man broke into her San Francisco home in search of her and assaulted her husband, Paul. Even aside from those incidents, many Republicans have used over-the-top and at times sexist rhetoric to demean her.
So there’s an understandable instinct to defend her, particularly for left-leaning people like myself who generally agree with Pelosi’s policy goals. But it’s important to honestly and fully assess her record.
In the simplest sense, Pelosi’s tenure should be regarded as lackluster because the party has won a House majority in only four of the 10 elections since she became House Democratic leader in late 2002. The Democrats’ sixth defeat under her leadership means that they will yield power to a class of Republicans who are among the most radical, extreme people to ever control the chamber. It is hard to think of anyone with such a mixed record being allowed to lead a high-profile organization for 20 years — let alone considering a 21st and 22nd, as Pelosi did over the past few days.
And it’s not just about the Democrats’ failure to win the House under Pelosi’s leadership. Unlike even President Biden, who has only really led the party since 2020, Pelosi has been one of the chief decision-makers and prominent figures for the Democratic Party for the entire past two decades. Over that span, the party has consistently lost elections at the state and federal levels, resulting in numerous terrible policies being adopted by Republicans while good ones are stalled. An increasingly radical, antidemocratic Republican Party already dominates much of the country and could win control of the entire federal government in 2024.
Almost no one in the United States has had more opportunities to stop the rise of the Republicans than Pelosi. Considering that Republican strength, her tenure cannot be viewed as successful.
Pelosi herself wasn’t on the ballot in the districts that Democrats lost this month, nor was she, say the party’s presidential nominee in 2016. And several other congressional Democratic candidates have long been in top leadership positions despite lackluster results for the party: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (Ill.), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.) and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (S.C.). I hope some of them also consider stepping down and making way for new leaders.
But Pelosi has been at the helm longer than Schumer and in a more powerful role than Clyburn or Hoyer. She has been a defining figure in the creation of today’s Democratic Party, which has four major flaws that led to consistent electoral and policy failure: excessive caution; an over-reliance on centrism; a brand that is little more than “we are not as bad as the Republicans”; and weak organization at the local and state level.
Pelosi’s failures stem in part from overlearning from her first major success as a party leader.
After the 2004 elections, when Republicans won the House, Senate and presidency, Pelosi and then-Senate Democratic leader Harry M. Reid were in charge of a Democratic Party that was divided and listless. For the 2006 elections, the two Democratic leaders recruited centrist and even conservative candidates to run in purple and red areas. They opted against pushing an innovative policy platform in favor of a strategy of focusing largely on the foibles of George W. Bush and congressional Republicans.
The Democrats flipped both the House and Senate. It’s not clear whether they won in 2006 because of the Pelosi-Reid strategy or simply because the Iraq War and Bush’s attempt to partially privatize Social Security irritated voters. Either way, it became Democratic orthodoxy that the way to win was a combination of promoting bland policy ideas that polled well, nominating centrist candidates and emphasizing the errors of the Republicans over the Democrats’ own vision.
Pelosi herself aggressively enforced that orthodoxy. She was the most powerful figure in determining which candidates ran in House races and which political operatives directed their campaigns. And through her weekly news conferences and other public remarks, she shaped broader party strategy. Only a few months after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other members of “the Squad” were elected in 2018, Pelosi started criticizing them as impractical and overly focused on media attention, making clear that she was hostile to the progressive movement in the party and that other Democrats should be as well.
She constantly argued that Democrats should emphasize policies such as guaranteeing Americans were not denied health insurance because of preexisting conditions, even as repeated election defeats for Democrats showed that focusing on economics and health care alone did not galvanize voters.
Running on “we are not as bad as the Republicans” is a great strategy when a Republican president is in office pushing unpopular things. But in the absence of a Bush or a Trump in the White House, it’s not enough. Democrats won the House under Pelosi’s leadership only when a Republican president was in office and unpopular (2006, 2008, 2018, 2020).
Centrism alone isn’t sufficient either. While Pelosi was bashing the Squad in 2019 and 2020, the more centrist members she was aligned with were often running bland campaigns. Many of them were defeated. So the Democrats lost ground in the House two years ago even as they flipped the presidency and the Senate.
In the run-up to this year’s elections, Pelosi was again urging Democrats to focus largely on so-called kitchen table issues. Thankfully, others in the party ignored her and campaigned on abortion rights, democracy and other issues, in addition to the economy. Meanwhile, Pelosi ally Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) became the rare figure leading a party’s campaign arm who lost his own seat. New York Democrats leaned into left-bashing and centrism — and their loss of four seats in that state is a big reason the party won’t get a majority in the House.
Even when they won their elections, Pelosi’s centrist candidates were a huge problem for Democrats. In both 2009-2010 and 2021-2022, House Democrats struggled to pass major legislation because a bloc of centrist lawmakers kept balking. While these centrists usually claimed that they objected to some specific provision in these bills, in reality, these members were often simply eager to distance themselves from the broader Democratic Party. By recruiting candidates whose only real ideological commitment was not being Republicans, Pelosi and her allies all but guaranteed the party could not govern effectively.
Pelosi’s hyper-caution is related but distinct from her centrism. It has been a huge disadvantage for Democrats to have been led for so long by figures like Pelosi who are reluctant to pursue a policy that doesn’t start out with 60 percent support in a poll. Republican leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Donald Trump are willing to take controversial actions that sometimes work out, such as McConnell’s blocking of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, for almost a year in 2016.
For the first several months of 2019 and then again in the days after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Pelosi personally stalled efforts to move toward impeaching Trump. She wrongly feared electoral backlash in 2019. In 2021, she wrongly hoped Trump’s Cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment and force him out of office.
In politics, sometimes you have to do things that are not obvious political winners from the start. Impeachment got more popular in 2019 as Democrats pressed forward with it. Campaigning on threats to democracy helped Democrats this cycle, even though polling showed the economy was many voters’ top issue.
After Jan. 6, immediate votes in the House and Senate on Trump’s impeachment and removal would have put a lot of pressure on Republicans. But once the Democrats stalled, it was easier for the GOP to unify and vote overwhelmingly against punishing Trump.
State-level politics is, unsurprisingly, an area that a congressional leader like Pelosi hasn’t been focused on. But not mobilizing the party to fight against the Republican takeover of state governments was a huge oversight by Pelosi and other Democratic leaders over the past two decades. One of the biggest reasons Democrats lost the House this year is that Republican-controlled state legislatures drew congressional district lines in ways that made it very hard for Democrats to win a majority.
Pelosi has had many successes in her tenure. She was a critical supporter and ally of the first Black president. She was a key figure in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, one of the most significant federal policy accomplishments in decades. She helped push Biden’s robust agenda through the House the past two years.
But Pelosi should have stepped down years ago, as most congressional leaders do after their party is defeated in elections with them at the helm.
The danger now is that Democratic voters and officials are deeply invested in the myth of Pelosi as a great leader. Such reverence will prevent an honest accounting of her failures and a real break from her tenure.
The likely replacement for Pelosi as Democratic leader is Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.). I can’t predict the future, but I think this is a mistake. Jeffries represents a change in terms of identity. He would be the first Black House Democratic leader and at age 52 is 30 years younger than Pelosi.
But in terms of strategy and vision, I worry he won’t be a real break from Pelosi’s approach. He has been part of the party’s leadership team for the past four years, a major supporter of Pelosi and a critic of those who want to push the Democrats in a fresh direction.
The Democrats are moving on from Pelosi. But to thrive, the party must move on from cautious, centrist, uninspiring Pelosi-style politics. | 2022-11-17T19:14:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Nancy Pelosi’s strategies were flawed. Democrats must move on from them. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/nancy-pelosi-speaker-era-failure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/17/nancy-pelosi-speaker-era-failure/ |
Dusty Hernandez-Harrison is boxing again after father’s fatal shooting
Dusty Hernandez-Harrison is fighting for the first time Saturday night since the fatal shooting of his father and trainer Sept. 24. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Dusty Hernandez-Harrison, like many boxers, often goes on extended runs early in the morning when he’s training for a bout. For added inspiration, the D.C.-born fighter almost always called his father and trainer, the late Buddy Harrison, during those scenic journeys around the nation’s capital.
Throughout this most recent training camp, however, there were times when Hernandez-Harrison would end his workout prematurely, bow his head, turn around and walk home, having lost all motivation to continue in the wake of Harrison’s shooting death.
“He’s the reason why I box. He’s the reason it’s in my life,” Hernandez-Harrison said. “Very little of my boxing has not been done with him watching. All my best moments in boxing he was there, so that part’s been hard. It’s been extremely hard.
“I won’t sit here and lie to you and say, ‘Everything’s been going great.’ A lot of people want to do that. I’m not that type. It sucked. There’s been days I woke up, and I was like, ‘F--- it, I don’t want to go to the gym today. For what? I don’t want to do it no more.’ ”
Harrison, 62, was fatally shot Sept. 24 outside his home in the 2700 block of 30th Street SE. The attack occurred at approximately 11:40 a.m., and Harrison was pronounced dead at the hospital. The suspects, whom authorities described as three men dressed in black and carrying handguns, remain at-large.
As the investigation continues, Hernandez-Harrison (34-0-1, 20 knockouts) is set to face Mexico’s Jose Humberto Corral (20-31, 12 KOs) Saturday night for the first time since the tragedy. The heavyweights are meeting in the eight-round feature bout of “Beltway Battles Round 3” at Entertainment and Sports Arena.
Hernandez-Harrison spoke about his father last week at Urban Boxing Navy Yard, which also was the last place they saw one another. Two days before the shooting Hernandez-Harrison, 28, and his father attended an open workout for news media in advance of “Beltway Battles Round 3,” originally scheduled for Oct. 1.
The card also was to showcase Hernandez-Harrison in the main event, albeit against a different opponent, in his comeback from a hiatus lasting more than two and a half years, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The layoff included mental fatigue, according to Hernandez-Harrison, that contributed to him ballooning in weight. By the time he got back into boxing as a promoter for the first two installments of “Beltway Battles,” Hernandez-Harrison had gained more than 100 pounds from his early years as a promising welterweight contender.
But with Harrison’s encouragement, Hernandez-Harrison began to reclaim the joy he initially found in the sport. That change in perspective, along with getting married, led to Hernandez-Harrison shedding much of the weight he had added during his inactivity. He was itching to fight again.
“Some of the pictures that he posted [on social media] were him saying this was the happiest moment of his life, the proudest moment of his life,” Hernandez-Harrison said of his father. “A lot of people can look at that and say, ‘Damn, this is sad,’ but for me, I look at it and find peace in it. We had our problems that were public. We didn’t talk for a while, but then we came back, and we were phenomenal at the end. Couldn’t have been better.”
So ready for a comeback was Hernandez-Harrison that he told The Washington Post exclusively two days after the shooting he still intended to fight the following Saturday. But event organizers postponed the card until this weekend, citing security concerns.
Hernandez-Harrison, meantime, has not been paying much attention to the investigation. His family keeps him appraised with any updates, but Hernandez-Harrison indicated he would rather channel positive energy into boxing as opposed to allowing the investigation to consume him.
“I don’t get into it,” he said. “I’m religious, and my peace is knowing where my father’s at. I’m not here for — I don’t need revenge. A lot of people want justice. To be quite honest I don’t care. Like, I’m happy where my dad is at, and I’m focused on my own life, and that’s all. And I know a lot of people don’t want to hear that. Even my mom’s like, ‘We need justice.’ I don’t. That’s not on my mind at all.”
Since his father’s passing, Hernandez-Harrison has been working with Billy Briscoe and Bruce Babashan as his primary trainers. Briscoe had worked with Harrison in previous training camps. Babashan is a relative newcomer to Hernandez-Harrison’s team.
Hernandez-Harrison’s weight also is up since he was last slated to fight, accounting for Saturday’s bout being contested at heavyweight.
Regardless, it was supremely important, Hernandez-Harrison said, simply to step into the ring as soon as possible to honor his father, whose Old School Boxing Gym continues to operate thanks to donations from the community that long embraced Harrison for his generosity in supporting the homeless and others in need.
A 10-bell count is planned for Saturday night’s card, as are other tributes to Harrison, according to organizers.
“He’s serious, but we’re not of the single mind that we always can be, that we like to be, because of the life circumstances,” Babashan said of Hernandez-Harrison. “So I think his head is in a good place. I think his heart is in the right place for everybody else. He’s getting good work in the gym, but I’d be less than honest to say we weren’t challenged by this situation in unique ways that none of us are super familiar with.” | 2022-11-17T19:14:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dusty Hernandez-Harrison is boxing again after father’s fatal shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/dusty-hernandez-harrison-buddy-boxing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/17/dusty-hernandez-harrison-buddy-boxing/ |
Maryland wins $1.5 million federal grant for development near Purple Line
Federal funds will help to plan for affordable housing, along with bike and pedestrian connections to stations.
A steel structure that will hold elevated light-rail tracks through downtown Silver Spring in October 2020. (Katherine Shaver/The Washington Post)
Maryland was awarded a $1.5 million federal transportation grant Thursday to support the development of homes, offices and shops near the Purple Line light rail.
The money from the Federal Transit Administration is to be used to plan for mixed-use development, the preservation of existing retail, affordable housing and access for cyclists and pedestrians along the 16-mile line that will connect Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.
The grant, one of 19 awarded nationally, totaling $13.1 million, is from a long-running federal pilot program that was expanded by the infrastructure law. It was designed to spur construction near transit hubs, providing options for people to live and work without relying on cars for daily errands.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement the grants would mean “more communities will be able to develop the areas around their transit stations, which will mean stronger local economies, cleaner air, and better access to the essential services families rely on.”
Officials with the Maryland Transit Administration didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday about plans for the money.
Experts say dense development near transit stations is key to the success of such systems, bringing people and destinations within easy reach, but note that increasing land values can also spur gentrification and price out longtime residents.
As Purple Line construction resumes, the fight against gentrification is on
There are already signs the Purple Line is helping to attract investment in the older suburbs it passes through.
This month, Prince George’s County and University of Maryland leaders announced plans to develop a publicly owned parking lot into a mix of housing and retail near the College Park Metro station, which is at a future Purple Line station.
At the same time, planners and local officials have been working since 2013 to ensure that growth doesn’t come at the expense of existing residents.
The Purple Line has been subject to repeated delays and cost overruns. The project is projected to open four years behind schedule, in 2026, and cost $3.4 billion. | 2022-11-17T19:15:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland wins $1.5 million federal grant for development near Purple Line - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/11/17/purple-line-maryland-federal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/11/17/purple-line-maryland-federal/ |
Who has signed up to back Trump in 2024 — and who loudly hasn’t
Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
Just over a week after the 2022 midterm elections — and with some contests still undecided — the 2024 Republican presidential primary has gotten underway.
Credit for that development can be given to former president Donald Trump, whose enthusiasm about running (and, certainly, about muddying the political waters for any potential federal indictments) prompted him to announce his bid for the party’s 2024 nomination. If successful, he’d be the GOP nominee for three cycles running.
But the response to his announcement offered new hints that he might not be as successful as he hopes to be. Yes, a number of elected officials and prominent individuals quickly lined up to support him, a show of strength fairly unusual for someone making an announcement so early and with no other official candidates in the race. A number of former allies and donors, though, took the opportunity to indicate that they were ready to move on to someone else.
Given that Trump’s obvious goal was to use his announcement as a measure of his strength, we decided it would be useful to see who had been prompted to weigh in, one way or another. For the most part, Trump’s backers come from the cadre of loyalists who have stood with him all along. Those opposed or sitting out are often those with their own ambitions — plus, unexpectedly, one of Trump’s children.
Here’s the list. Did we miss someone important? Let us know.
Supporting Trump
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.): Posted a video supporting Trump after his announcement.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.): Writing for the Daily Caller, Gaetz declared: “Only Trump can be trusted to enact the ‘America First’ agenda he ran on in 2016. We won’t accept any imitation.”
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.): He tweeted, “I look forward to President Trump once again righting the ship.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.): Offered her “complete and total endorsement” when speaking to reporters.
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.). Tweeted an energetic endorsement: “I WILL BE VOTING FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP IN 2024!!!!!!”
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell: Attended Trump’s announcement, where he — jokingly? — predicted that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) would also endorse Trump.
Rep.-elect Max Miller (R-Ohio): A former aide to Trump, Miller quickly offered his endorsement in a statement.
Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.): Was at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday and offered his “complete and total endorsement.”
House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.): “I am proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for President in 2024,” she said in a statement to Breitbart. “I fully support him running again.”
Melania Trump: For some reason, Breitbart News felt that this needed to be confirmed.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.): Quickly offered his support for Trump: “He doesn’t have to learn the ropes. He knows the ropes.”
Opposing Trump
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.): After having been targeted by Trump in the GOP primary for Senate, Brooks lambasted Trump’s 2024 bid, saying that other candidates would be “vastly superior” to “the loser Donald Trump has proven himself to be.”
Donor Ken Griffin: Speaking to Politico, Griffin said that “for a litany of reasons, I think it’s time to move on to the next generation.”
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R): Hutchinson expressed his opposition after Trump’s announcement. “The message he delivered last night … was the same one that lost the last election cycle and would lose the next.”
Donor Ronald Lauder: A spokesman confirmed Lauder’s opposition to CNBC.
Former acting Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney: Mulvaney was skeptical in a CNN interview, saying, “I think he’s the only Republican who could lose.”
The editors of the National Review: In a harsh editorial (mirroring one offered prior to the 2016 nomination fight), the magazine bashed Trump: “It’s too early to know what the rest of the field will look like, except it will offer much better alternatives than Trump.”
South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R): Told the New York Times that Trump didn’t offer “the best chance” for the party in 2024. This probably stings more than most; Noem was so supportive of Trump at one point that she presented him with a model of Mount Rushmore with his head added.
Former vice president Mike Pence: With characteristic vagueness, Pence told ABC and the Times that “I think we’ll have better choices.”
Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.): Pence remained loyal first to his family. “I’m gonna back my brother,” he said.
Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo: Tweeted a dig at Trump, saying the party needed leaders who were “not staring in the rearview mirror claiming victimhood.”
Donor Stephen Schwarzman. “America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” the former Trump donor said in a statement to Axios.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R). Speaking on Fox Business, Earle-Sears said, “I could not support him. I just couldn’t.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R). Called Trump a “loser.”
Waiting or staying out
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). Asked by reporters if he was prepared to endorse Trump, McCarthy said, “You guys are crazy.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “The way I’m going to go into this presidential primary season is to stay out of it,” he said at a press conference. “I don’t have a dog in that fight.”
Ivanka Trump. Posted on Instagram that she “[did] not plan to be involved in politics” in 2024. Her husband, Jared Kushner, was on hand for the announcement. | 2022-11-17T19:16:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who has signed up to back Trump in 2024 — and who loudly hasn’t - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/trump-president-2024-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/trump-president-2024-election/ |
Cookies, dogs and walks are part of the amenities
Brian Chesky revealed Wednesday that he is listing a private room — actually, a “thoughtfully designed suite featuring personal photos and artifacts from the early days of Airbnb” — in his San Francisco home for rent on the platform.
“I had some weekends available in January, February and March, but they booked out even before I posted this,” he wrote on Twitter. “I’ll keep opening more weekends throughout the year.”
In the listing, he promises access to a full bathroom with a large shower, use of a “spacious chef’s kitchen,” views of the Castro neighborhood and time with him and his dog, Sophie. The house rules note that there is 24/7 security at the home, parties and drugs are not allowed and guests will need to show proof of vaccination against coronavirus, including at least one booster.
Chesky is opening up his home as the company seeks to attract more new hosts to the platform. In updates this week, Airbnb rolled out new tools to make it easier for people to put their homes on the platform and increased damage protection for hosts from $1 million to $3 million.
During an interview on “CBS Mornings” Wednesday, co-host Gayle King said Chesky’s home-sharing experiment seemed risky.
“I wanted to show people that it’s not that risky,” he said. “I wanted to show people if I, the founder of Airbnb could do it, then you can do it as well.”
He also revealed in 2015 that he still sometimes rented out his couch, according to media reports at the time. Past guests have lauded the “comfy couch,” welcome basket and morning yoga session. His reviews date back to the year Airbnb officially launched, 2008.
The first is from co-founder and former roommate Joe Gebbia: “I’ve seen him host in action, and it’s not to be missed.” | 2022-11-17T19:17:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky just listed his home. It’s already booked up. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/11/17/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-home/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/11/17/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-home/ |
The pilgrimage to Trump’s club shows the failed GOP candidate for governor seeking to maintain her profile in the former president’s orbit
Republican candidate for Arizona governor Kari Lake speaks during a GOP election night event on Nov. 8 in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Kari Lake, who was projected Monday to lose her race for governor of Arizona, traveled Thursday to former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, according to two people familiar with the activity.
One of the people said she received a standing ovation when she entered a luncheon hosted by the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded last year by Trump allies and former members of his administration. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private events.
The think tank is hosting a “Gala and Experience” at Trump’s club on Thursday and Friday. A verbatim quotation says the agenda is to “ensure polices are prepared and finalized for new sessions of Congress and the state house.”
Lake has not conceded defeat. The visit to Mar-a-Lago, while vote counting continues in Arizona, illustrates that she is already taking steps to maintain her profile in the former president’s orbit. Her support also could prove consequential for Trump, who launched his 2024 presidential campaign this week under criticism for his role in the party’s underwhelming performance in the midterm elections. Lake has been floated as a possible vice president contender for Trump’s ticket.
Lake, a former television news anchor, modeled her bid for governor on Trump’s campaigns and echoed his false assertions that he was cheated out of reelection in 2020. She speaks to the former president regularly, according to current and former campaign advisers. The former president called in to her campaign’s “war room” on Sunday to express disbelief that Republicans were trailing in vote counts and to express support for her and other GOP candidates.
Lake was projected Monday to lose the race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, the current secretary of state. On Tuesday, Lake reacted to Trump’s announcement of a third bid for the White House by declaring on Twitter that he had her “complete and total endorsement!” Lake was frequently discussed as a potential vice-presidential pick for Trump, although she maintained on the campaign trail that she intended to serve a full term as governor if elected.
Now that she’s been defeated for state office, her political path is less clear. On Thursday, she told her supporters on social media that “we are still in this fight,” denouncing Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters, for problems on Election Day that involved malfunctioning printers.
In the early hours of Election Day, printers at 70 of the county’s 223 polling sites produced ballots with ink that was too light to be read by vote-counting machines. That caused ballots to be rejected by the machines. Voters were told to either wait in line, travel to another voting location or deposit their ballots in secure boxes that were transferred to downtown Phoenix and counted there. County officials dispatched technicians to fix settings on the printers experiencing the problems. While technicians were out at other polling locations, they also changed settings on printers proactively, a county spokesperson said. County officials plan to investigate the root cause of the printer problems in the coming weeks.
Lake and her allies have cast the problems as “voter suppression,” a theme that may become central to GOP legal efforts in statewide races. But county officials have repeatedly said no one was denied the right to vote and noted various instances of Republicans spreading misinformation about the use of the secure boxes on Election Day, despite such boxes having been used for years.
Her campaign also issued a series of video testimonials from voters who claim to have been denied a chance to vote. They included a link to a fundraising page for Lake’s campaign.
A judge refused a request from Republicans to extend voting hours on Election Day in light of the problems, finding that no one had been prevented from voting. Lake’s campaign is weighing its legal options in coordination with Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general who is trailing his Democratic opponent but whose race has not yet been called, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations. | 2022-11-17T19:31:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kari Lake travels to Mar-a-Lago fresh off projected loss in Arizona - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/kari-lake-arizona-trump-mar-a-lago/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/17/kari-lake-arizona-trump-mar-a-lago/ |
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