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The impact of the pandemic was so widespread and so devastating that we will be assessing the damage for years or even decades to come.
Some losses are known. More than 1 million Americans died from the disease, a toll so immense it is almost unimaginable.
Another 96 million people have been diagnosed with the disease since early 2020, and many of them continue to be afflicted with long-term problems.
The impact on the economy was profound. We are still struggling with the aftereffects, including high inflation. The impact on our politics was similarly enormous, with our deep divisions widened.
This week, we learned the distressing but not surprising news that our children were hurt educationally by schools closing and the imposition of distance learning as we tried to protect them from serious illness.
State education officials told WBAL-TV in Baltimore that students’ test scores in the state and nationally had already been declining since 2013, but the slide worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Maryland State Department of Education said this year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a biennial assessment of fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, was shockingly bad, in large part because of the pandemic.
“It had a devastating impact on kids being out of school for that long, and it’s going to take a while to dig out from. So, it didn’t come as a surprise, but it’s still disappointing,” Gov. Larry Hogan told the television station.
The tests were administered in more than 10,000 schools between January and March. Math scores for eighth graders fell in almost every state, and declined for fourth graders in 41 states.
Maryland fourth graders scored 10 points lower on the math section and seven points lower on reading than they had in 2019. The eighth graders’ scores fell 11 points on math and five on reading.
MSDE said a majority of Maryland fourth and eighth grade students are not proficient in math or reading, with 75% of eighth grade students and 69% of fourth grade students at or below basic achievement in math.
Critics of school officials’ choices during the pandemic will no doubt trumpet these results as proof positive that closing schools was the wrong decision. After all, they will say, fewer than 1,500 children younger than 17 died in the pandemic, so it would have been safe to keep schools open and not require children to wear masks.
But they just don’t know that. If they are intellectually honest about it, they would admit it.
In the first spring of the pandemic, no one knew anything for certain.
No one knew that eventually the disease would be many times more deadly for the elderly than the young. We knew that both the elderly and the young were endangered by the seasonal flu, so we did not know if this virus would have the same impact.
Furthermore, since we did close the schools, we have no way of knowing how many lives were saved. Keeping the death toll among children to less than 1,500 might show the success of closing the schools.
How many thousands of children’s lives were we willing to gamble in the hope that the schools would be safe? And how many teachers and staff members were the critics willing to sacrifice to keep schools open?
In the spring of 2020, we were all flying blind. Our school system and almost all others had to make quick decisions based on incomplete knowledge.
Were the schools closed too long? Perhaps, but educators had to err on the side of caution when faced with a unique challenge.
Now we know that the choices made to protect our children and our school staff worked, because the toll among children was fairly small. We are grateful for that.
We also know that the impact on learning was terrible, worse than we could have hoped or foreseen. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, some critics might say the policies were wrong.
But in the midst of the raging battle to contain the deadly virus, school leaders did the best they could, and very few parents had to bury their children. Relatively speaking, that’s a positive result. | 2022-10-26T06:52:55Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Closing schools at onset of pandemic was the right call | Editorials | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/editorial/closing-schools-at-onset-of-pandemic-was-the-right-call/article_902cbaeb-b8bd-5a4d-9878-164ccd3dd83a.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/editorial/closing-schools-at-onset-of-pandemic-was-the-right-call/article_902cbaeb-b8bd-5a4d-9878-164ccd3dd83a.html |
A 16-year-old boy has been charged as an adult for allegedly firing a gun in an intersection, according to the Frederick Police Department.
The agency will not name the juvenile, as per state law? Juveniles charged as adults have been named many, many times over the years, I wasn't aware the law had changed. | 2022-10-26T19:31:41Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Teen charged as adult for allegedly firing gun into the air in Frederick | Cops And Crime | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/crime_and_justice/cops_and_crime/teen-charged-as-adult-for-allegedly-firing-gun-into-the-air-in-frederick/article_ab0a7a55-d3ad-5478-a189-cf28b539e81d.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/crime_and_justice/cops_and_crime/teen-charged-as-adult-for-allegedly-firing-gun-into-the-air-in-frederick/article_ab0a7a55-d3ad-5478-a189-cf28b539e81d.html |
Nicholas Rodean, right, who was fired from his job at a Frederick-based marketing company after the riot at the Capitol, was charged by federal authorities.
AP File Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered a Frederick man to serve eight months of home detention for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and attack on the U.S. Capitol, rejecting the prosecution's request for prison time.
“I believe your Asperger's Syndrome is significant to what you did and mitigates blame," McFadden said.
One officer noticed the round object in Rodean’s hand and asked that he put it away. Rodean did, but later pulled out a hatchet that he said he brought for self defense, the memorandum said. The officer again asked Rodean to put it away, and he did.
Rodean told officers that he was at the Capitol to “stop the steal.”
Before going to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, Rodean told his supervisor at a Navistar Direct Marketing warehouse that he wouldn’t be at work on Jan. 6, since he would be attending a Trump rally, the memorandum said.
Later on Jan. 6, Rodean’s supervisor called him since he saw a picture of who he believed was Rodean inside the Capitol. Rodean did not answer, but called the next day. When his supervisor expressed concern about where Rodean was, Rodean said “it needed to be done,” the memorandum said.
His supervisor later testified that Rodean “idolized” Trump, according to the memorandum.
The U.S. Department of Justice is requesting that a Frederick man be sentenced to nearly five years in prison for his part in a riot at the U.…
Nicholas Rodean
He'll end up in jail for one thing or another. Of that I have 100% confidence.
threecents Oct 26, 2022 3:09pm
Idolizing Trump in itself is evidence of a neurodevelopmental disorder | 2022-10-26T19:31:47Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Frederick man gets 8 months home detention for Jan. 6 Capitol riot; prosecution sought prison time | Courts | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/crime_and_justice/courts/frederick-man-gets-8-months-home-detention-for-jan-6-capitol-riot-prosecution-sought-prison/article_2c0ec247-1664-51a1-8eb5-98574b5b84d1.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/crime_and_justice/courts/frederick-man-gets-8-months-home-detention-for-jan-6-capitol-riot-prosecution-sought-prison/article_2c0ec247-1664-51a1-8eb5-98574b5b84d1.html |
What to know about the two Frederick County ballot questions
Frederick County voters will decide on two local ballot questions in the November general election, one about whether the County Council has the final say in labor disputes between the county and its firefighters, and another about whether County Council members should receive health insurance.
Voters will determine if the amendments will become part of the county’s charter when they cast their general election ballots.
Here's what voters should know about the county's ballot questions as they head to the polls for early voting or send their mail-in ballots.
Question A — Clarification of the binding arbitration process with career firefighters
Voters will decide whether to adopt an amendment to clarify language in the county charter to make it clear that the County Council has the final say in bargaining disagreements between the county and its career firefighters.
The arbitrator’s ruling is binding for the county executive. The County Council, though, would have the authority to decrease a contract amount determined by an arbitrator.
The county’s charter gives the County Council the final say in labor disputes because the council has the final vote on the county’s budget, which funds the Division of Fire and Rescue Services.
Following the vote in 2018, a union that represents the county's career firefighters sued the county, stating that an arbitrator’s decision should be binding for the entire county, including the County Council. A judge dismissed the case in March 2021.
This year’s ballot question is meant to clarify that the council has the final say, Council Vice President Michael Blue, R, said in July. Blue sponsored the proposed charter amendment.
Ballots will provide the following explanation: "This charter amendment would amend the Frederick County Charter to clarify language to make it clear that the County Council maintains sole authority to approve and disapprove the use of taxpayer funding in the county budget concerning binding arbitration awards."
Voters can vote for the charter amendment, or against it.
Question B — Allowing council members to receive fringe benefits
County Council members will be eligible to receive fringe benefits like health insurance if the county's voters approve Question B.
County Councilwoman Jessica Fitzwater, D, who proposed the charter amendment, said during a council meeting in July that the lack of health benefits for council members limits who is able to run for the positions.
The county considers council members part-time employees and pays them $22,500 per year. Council members' pay will increase to $35,000 when the next council takes office in December, following the general election.
Ballots will provide the following explanation: "This charter amendment would amend the Frederick County Charter to permit County Council members to receive allowances and fringe benefits in addition to a salary."
A union that represents Frederick County’s career firefighters on Monday accused the county …
The Frederick County Board of Elections has four locations for early voting.
Trinity Recreation Center — 6040 New Design Road, Frederick
Urbana Regional Library — 9020 Amelung St., Frederick
Thurmont Regional Library — 76 E. Moser Road, Thurmont
Myersville Town Hall — 301 Main St., Myersville
Between Thursday and Nov. 3, early voting centers will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. | 2022-10-27T01:02:23Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | What to know about the two Frederick County ballot questions | Election Coverage | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/what-to-know-about-the-two-frederick-county-ballot-questions/article_d7208b9d-9d38-5632-a054-78386a81b9f2.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/what-to-know-about-the-two-frederick-county-ballot-questions/article_d7208b9d-9d38-5632-a054-78386a81b9f2.html |
A health worker administers a dose of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine during a vaccination clinic on Sept. 14, 2021, in Reading, Pa. Uptake of the new COVID-19 booster has been slow, suggesting interest in receiving booster shots is decreasing.
New booster rollout has been slow across US, and Maryland is no exception
By Jonathan Donville Capital News Service
Despite recommendations by the Center for Disease Control, the uptake of the new COVID-19 booster in Maryland remains slow. The new booster has been in circulation for a little more than 50 days, and yet has been administered far less frequently than the original booster was over the same time frame last year.
The new COVID-19 booster is known as the bivalent booster, and was expanded for use to include children ages 5 to 11 by the CDC on Oct. 12. The booster was originally approved by the Federal Drug Administration on Aug. 31, and was recommended by the CDC the next day. In the 50 days since, the bivalent vaccine has been administered 600,560 times in Maryland, according to the Maryland Department of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard.
The original booster was approved by the FDA for certain populations on Sept. 22, 2021, and endorsed by the CDC two days later on Sept. 24. In the 50 days following the CDC endorsement, 719,478 Marylanders received the original COVID-19 booster, according to the CDC.
In total, more than 2.6 million Marylanders received a first (monovalent) booster, according to the state dashboard. More than 4.8 million Marylanders completed a primary series of the vaccine, which means either both doses of a two-dose series, or one dose of a single series, such as the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
Two-thirds of the bivalent boosters administered have gone to individuals age 50 and older, with the largest concentration being in the age group of 60- to 69-year-olds, according to the dashboard. Especially among younger Marylanders, the new bivalent vaccine has not seen much use.
On a national level, the data show that Maryland is representative of a broader trend that people are not receiving the second and subsequent boosters. According to the CDC, 111.3 million Americans have received at least one booster, while only 19.4 million have received the new bivalent booster.
Receiving a second booster dose does not necessarily mean that an individual received the bivalent vaccine, as many Americans received multiple doses of the previous (monovalent) booster. The numbers suggest that interest in receiving booster shots for COVID-19 is decreasing. | 2022-10-27T01:02:35Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | New booster rollout has been slow across US, and Maryland is no exception | Health | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/health/new-booster-rollout-has-been-slow-across-us-and-maryland-is-no-exception/article_7aa79739-f140-5e16-923b-1aab809688e3.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/health/new-booster-rollout-has-been-slow-across-us-and-maryland-is-no-exception/article_7aa79739-f140-5e16-923b-1aab809688e3.html |
Tony Chmelik
Chmelik campaigning to decrease property taxes, push for higher teacher pay
The Frederick News-Post · In The Booth with Tony Chmelik, candidate for County Council
Tony Chmelik, a Republican nominee for the Frederick County Council’s two at-large seats, said he would push for the county to lower its property tax rate and advocate for the county’s Board of Education increase teacher salaries.
Chmelik, a general contractor, said the county should lower its property tax rate of $1.02 per $100 of assessed value to the constant-yield rate for one year.
“The county needs to take a breather and give the citizens of this county the opportunity to save a couple dollars,” Chmelik said.
The constant-yield rate is the real property tax rate necessary to generate the same revenue from year to year. The constant-yield rate for the fiscal year that began July 1 is $1.02 per $100 of assessed value. Adopting this rate would have decreased the county’s tax revenue by $13 million for the current fiscal year.
Chmelik said he would propose a bill to help the Board of Education increase starting teacher salaries, so they’re at least equal to what same-sized counties pay. Starting teacher salaries in Frederick County are among the lowest in the state.
Chmelik first ran for office in 2008, seeking one of seven seats on the Frederick County Board of Education. He said he ran, in part, because he opposed the way schools were teaching children about subjects like sex and gender.
His father, Joe Chmelik, was one of the six candidates to advance to the general election that year. Tony lost in the primary, finishing 17 votes behind his father.
Tony Chmelik ran again for the school board in 2012, but lost in the general election.
He was elected to the County Council in 2014, but he lost his reelection bid in 2018.
He was elected to the inaugural Frederick County Council in 2014 and represented District 2, which includes New Market, Linganore, Ijamsville and parts of Urbana and Mount Airy.
Chmelik is one of two Republican nominees for the council’s two at-large seats. The second is County Councilman Phil Dacey, who has represented the county at large since 2018.
Brad Young, the president of the Frederick County Board of Education, and Renee Knapp, an advocate and caregiver for her adult son with autism, are the Democratic nominees.
In his podcast interview, Chmelik said he would propose freezing property tax rates for senior citizens in the county to encourage them to remain in their homes if they’re thinking about selling them. | 2022-10-27T03:23:30Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Chmelik campaigning to decrease property taxes, push for higher teacher pay | Election Coverage | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/chmelik-campaigning-to-decrease-property-taxes-push-for-higher-teacher-pay/article_68261439-7a40-5335-85b3-5513041baad3.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/chmelik-campaigning-to-decrease-property-taxes-push-for-higher-teacher-pay/article_68261439-7a40-5335-85b3-5513041baad3.html |
Kavonte Duckett
Duckett looks to boost public education funding, expand TransIT service
The Frederick News-Post · It The Booth with Kavonte Duckett, candidate for County Council
Kavonte Duckett, the Democratic nominee for the District 4 seat on the Frederick County Council, said his No. 1 priority is increasing funding for public education.
Roughly 51% of the county’s $792 million budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 was for public education. Duckett said he’d like to see 55% to 58% of the budget go to public education, which includes funding for Frederick County Public Schools, Frederick Community College and Frederick County Public Libraries.
Duckett, the director of the Alan P. Linton, Jr. Emergency Shelter for The Religious Coalition for Emergency Human Needs, said that increasing public education funding will help the public school system offer higher wages and attract the most qualified employees, from teachers and bus drivers to support staff and custodians.
“Our students eventually become our workforce,” so the county should invest everything it can in education, Duckett said in a podcast interview with the News-Post.
As the director of the shelter, Duckett said, he interacts daily with people who rely on public transportation and who are left without rides on Sundays.
Frederick County’s TransIT division provides public transportation from 5:30 a.m. to 9:45 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Duckett said he would advocate for the county’s TransIT division to offer service on Sundays and expand its hours of operations to accommodate people who work late hours.
Duckett’s opponent in the race for the District 4 seat, which covers the eastern part of Frederick, is Republican John Fer, who served for 28 years in the U.S. Air Force and later worked as an elementary school principal in Los Angeles.
In 2018, Duckett ran for one of the council’s two at-large seats, but he lost in the Democratic primary after receiving 16.2% of the vote.
In his podcast interview, Duckett also discussed the importance of representation on the County Council, considering that over the course of nearly 275 years, Frederick County voters have never elected a person of color to the county’s governing body.
“There are kids in our school system who are watching what we do. There are kids who are aspiring to one day serve on the County Council,” said Duckett, who is African American. “They need to see folks that are sitting at the dais, that are sitting at the table that look like them and that they can, sort of, connect to.” | 2022-10-27T03:23:31Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Duckett looks to boost public education funding, expand TransIT service | Election Coverage | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/duckett-looks-to-boost-public-education-funding-expand-transit-service/article_7fc44954-abde-5de0-9fd9-cbfee8825771.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/duckett-looks-to-boost-public-education-funding-expand-transit-service/article_7fc44954-abde-5de0-9fd9-cbfee8825771.html |
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., speaks as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington on July 12.
As Jan. 6 committee wraps up, Raskin looks back on key moments
While the committee looking into the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is expected to wrap up its investigation by the end of the year, remaining questions could be handled by other congressional committees, according to U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin.
With no more investigative hearings scheduled, the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack will deliver a final report and make any recommendations, Raskin, D, a member of the committee, said in an interview Tuesday.
Whether Democrats keep control of the House of Representatives in the Nov. 8 election or cede control to Republicans, Raskin said, the next Congress would have to decide whether there is more work to do in looking into the attack, and what committee should handle it.
“Midnight for us is the end of the year, practically speaking,” Raskin said of the current committee.
The committee made headlines again recently with its decision to subpoena former President Donald Trump.
Raskin said he would like to think that a former high-ranking government official would comply with a congressional subpoena, and pointed out that Trump has already talked about Jan. 6 at various rallies and other events.
He said the committee waited until closer to the end of the process to subpoena Trump out of deference to the former president's claims that he had done nothing wrong.
Now, after taking testimony from more than 1,000 witnesses, the committee has a “mountain” of evidence to guide very specific questions for Trump to answer, Raskin said.
Raskin said several moments from the committee's investigation stand out in his mind.
One was testimony that Trump asked a staffer, “Can you believe I lost to this [expletive] guy?” which Raskin said proves that he knew he had lost the election to President Joe Biden.
Another was former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony that Trump tried to get the Secret Service to allow armed protesters into a rally on Jan. 6 before the attack on the Capitol.
And a third was then-Vice President Mike Pence's refusal to get in a car and leave the Capitol that day, and his determination to stay and finish counting the votes of the Electoral College.
The events of Jan. 6 not only revealed Pence's uncertainty about what would happen if he left, but showed the vice president acting in his own constitutional capacity, Raskin said.
U.s. House Select Committee On The January 6th Attack | 2022-10-27T03:23:33Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | As Jan. 6 committee wraps up, Raskin looks back on key moments | Elections | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/elections/as-jan-6-committee-wraps-up-raskin-looks-back-on-key-moments/article_490611f5-ed5f-5f0c-b2de-f2b5cfdb2d73.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/elections/as-jan-6-committee-wraps-up-raskin-looks-back-on-key-moments/article_490611f5-ed5f-5f0c-b2de-f2b5cfdb2d73.html |
Today is the birthday of “Teddy” Roosevelt, roughrider, statesman, president of the United States. This is an anniversary that is being observed by various clubs and organizations all over the nation. Flags will be displayed in front of homes and places of business in towns throughout the nation.
Richard Dorsey, who it is said has been out of the Maryland House of Correction for only a short time, is in the foils of the law again. This time he is charged with having hurled rocks through a home in Urbana after having failed in an effort to gain admission.
The Cowboy Band of Brunswick is contemplating visiting Hagerstown and other towns for the purpose of demonstrating their ability to ride and shoot. The organization was formed about a year ago by Captain R.L. Much, an ex-rough rider. The band now consists of 45 young men.
When does a public road stop becoming a public road? Three owners of a piece of property just beyond Harbaugh Valley Road want the Frederick County Commissioners to answer that question. But the commissioners really aren’t sure. In most cases a public road is a public property until abandoned by a government. In the case of Harbaugh Valley Road, however, the commissioners said at Tuesday’s public meeting they don’t know whether the county abandoned an extension of the road or not. Three property owners want the county to maintain the extension for several hundred feet if the county owns the road.
The annual Brunswick Homecoming, slated for Nov. 6, will be a celebration of the town’s heritage. Four living and 10 deceased residents will be honored at the Brunswick Commission on History and Distinguished Citizens’ luncheon. The living citizens include Dr. Morton Kaplon, who has published more than 70 articles on cosmic radiation, astrophysics and elementary particle physics. His varied career has included service at the Institute for Space Science Studies, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation, Atomic Energy Commission and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Kaplon attended school in Brunswick, and Amos Kaplon, his uncle, still resides at the family home on South Maryland Avenue.
Teddy Roosevelt's Birthday
Richard Dorsey
Rock Thrower
Cowboy Band Of Brunswick
Riding And Shooting
Public Road Abandoned
Harbaugh Valley Road
Brunswick Homecoming
Dr. Morton Kaplon | 2022-10-27T05:35:21Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | 20-40-100 Years Ago — Oct. 27 | News | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/20-40-100-years-ago-oct-27/article_93ebbf97-89cc-53ab-b3f1-74a6f325233a.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/20-40-100-years-ago-oct-27/article_93ebbf97-89cc-53ab-b3f1-74a6f325233a.html |
Tsvetomir Naydenov, left, and Marguerite de Messières are shown near their sculpture called “An Elusive Kinetic Portrait” that sits in Carroll Creek.
Tsvetomir Naydenov, left, and Marguerite de Messières are shown near their sculpture called "An Elusive Kinetic Portrait" that sits in Carroll Creek.
The sculpture called "Elusive Kinetic Portrait" that sits in Carroll Creek.
The sculpture called "Elusive Kinetic Portrait" sits in Carroll Creek.
Carroll Creek sculpture of Frederick-born chess master earns national recognition
A Denver-based nonprofit recently put Frederick on the national map for its public art scene — literally.
“An Elusive Kinetic Portrait,” a creation of husband-and-wife team Tsvetomir Naydenov and Marguerite de Messières that’s been displayed in Carroll Creek since 2020, is featured in the Western State Arts Federation’s interactive illustrated map of public art projects across the U.S.
The sculpture is part of the Carroll Creek Kinetic Art Promenade, a series of sculptures in the waterway that move in the wind. Bernard Gouin, chairman of the project, called its inclusion on WESTAF’s map “a great honor.”
Messières and Naydenov’s piece depicts Theophilus Thompson, a 19th-century Frederick native who is considered the earliest documented African American chess expert.
Thompson was born into slavery in 1855, and historians don’t think he had any formal education. He first witnessed a game of chess while he was working as a house servant in Carroll County, and he figured out how the pieces moved through careful, deferential observation of the white players.
Within a year, he was a master.
The finer details of Thompson’s life evade historians. We know who lent him his first chess board, and we know that he published a book of chess problems when he was just 18 years old. And thanks to recent research by volunteer historians at the African American Resources Cultural Heritage Society of Frederick County, we know Thompson died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
Messières and Naydenov tried to capture the elusive element to Thompson’s story in their kinetic sculpture, which is based on the only known photograph of him. Messières, a painter by trade, pixelated the image, then recreated it with more than 1,000 hand-formed aluminum tiles.
Naydenov sculpted the metal frame, which spins in the breeze. The tiles move, too, meaning Thompson’s face is elusive; it’s only clearly visible when the angle and the wind are both just right.
“I painted both sides of the tiles the same color, so that when it would spin in the wind, his face would kind of come and go. At the time when we were planning the piece, so little was known about him,” Messières said. “You knew he was there, but you couldn’t see him clearly. It was almost like he had a story, but it wasn’t even ours to tell.”
Messières submitted the piece, which was funded by the Ausherman Family Foundation, to WESTAF’s Public Art Archive, a free, searchable database of thousands of public artworks across the U.S. and the world.
Any artist or organization can submit their work to the archive. It was launched in 2010, said manager Lori Goldstein, when WESTAF realized that there was no centralized system for keeping track of public art.
“To find public art, whether you were looking on the computer or whether you were on foot exploring, you were having to navigate to all different sites,” Goldstein recalled.
Incorporating art into public spaces serves a unique purpose, Goldstein said. The archive’s website states that its goal is to make “public art more public.”
“While I do love the world of museums and galleries, this idea of being able to experience public art in any community, whether you’re a resident or visitor, is very compelling to me,” Goldstein said. “There’s an equitable nature to public art, where there’s no fee to experience it.”
Today, more than 19,000 pieces are chronicled in the archive, Goldstein said. But a tiny fraction of those are represented in the group’s recent interactive map, published last month. Messières and Naydenov’s piece was chosen from more than 500 submissions by a jury of 12 WESTAF employees.
Goldstein said she was compelled by the Frederick sculpture not just because of its beauty but because of what it gives to its viewers. Frederick locals who haven’t heard of Thompson might be compelled to research his story after seeing “An Elusive Kinetic Portrait,” Goldstein added.
The sculpture will be on display until April 2023.
“Coming across this in person may be a way for even the local community to learn more about their own history,” Goldstein said.
“In the news cycle a lot is this question about monuments and who should be remembered,” she added. “This kind of project takes a very unique approach to looking deeper into history. Not everything has to be permanent, right? This is a way to experiment with more ephemeral forms of public art.”
See the kinetic sculpture along Carroll Creek Linear Park in downtown Frederick. It is located behind Idiom Brewing Co.
View the interactive public art map of sites across America at publicartarchive.org/anniversary-map.
Theophilus Thompson
Carroll Creek Linear Park
Marguerite De Messieres
Tsvetomir Naydenov | 2022-10-27T05:35:27Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Carroll Creek sculpture of Frederick-born chess master earns national recognition | Arts & entertainment | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/arts_and_entertainment/carroll-creek-sculpture-of-frederick-born-chess-master-earns-national-recognition/article_d413ee6e-acba-54ad-9f7d-b5104b416e86.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/arts_and_entertainment/carroll-creek-sculpture-of-frederick-born-chess-master-earns-national-recognition/article_d413ee6e-acba-54ad-9f7d-b5104b416e86.html |
Treetop Studio on YouTube.
NEW RECORDING STUDIO BLAZES ITS OWN TRAIL WITH VIDEO CONCERTS
Treetop Studio in New Market, run by Colin Shultzaberger and Donnie Carlo, is doing something new — while simultaneously taking us back to a time long ago. Treetop is essentially a recording studio, but it also offers artists video recordings of shows they perform onsite, essentially a two-for deal, where musicians record audio tracks and come away with music videos as well. Their Studio Tour series invites artists, musicians and friends to make music and hang out, harkening back to the early days of studio recording, when all the musicians were together in one room, making a song — not layering in track for track separately. You can watch their growing collection of music videos on YouTube and read our interview with them in this week’s issue.
STARGAZE THE NIGHT AWAY
There’s a new moon this week (and a solar eclipse, for those who are wondering). In other words, it’s the perfect time to stargaze. Obviously, you can have your own, private star party wherever you’d like, but if you want to turn it up a notch, head over to the Mount Airy Star Party, which runs from 8:30 to 10 p.m. at The Sky Plus at 5561 Cindy Court in Mount Airy — just a couple miles from the event host, Mount Airy Library. Astrophysicist Todd Rosenfeld will open his observatory to the public, where you can see the night sky and all its wonders through the lens of a research-grade telescope. If you want to go, register through ccpl.librarymarket.com. Spots are limited!
HALLOWEEN SHOW TO BENEFIT THE COMMUNITY FRIDGE
In the midst of brainstorming your Halloween costume, you might’ve been bummed to learn that Halloween falls on a Monday this year. What are you supposed to do with that? Here’s your answer. Go to a concert at Sky Stage in costume, hear local bands, and support an awesome community cause in the process. Greenhead, Mancala, Portside Chapel and Sir Lando will play a benefit concert for the Frederick Community Fridge starting at 6 p.m. on Halloween at Sky Stage in downtown Frederick. The $10 suggested donation at the door will help the Community Fridge, a leave something, take something food supply booth for those living with food insecurity, located at 322 W. Patrick St.
FREDERICK ON THE MAP
Do you know who Theophilus Thompson was? Though there is not much known about his life, the Frederick native was the earliest documented Black chess master in America. A local husband-and-wife artist duo helped to commemorate him by creating a kinetic sculpture that sits in Carroll Creek, just behind Idiom Brewing Co. The piece was recently selected to be included in an online, interactive map of public art sites located throughout America, a cool honor to be a part of. | 2022-10-27T05:35:33Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | NEED TO KNOW: Week of Oct. 27 | Arts & entertainment | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/arts_and_entertainment/need-to-know-week-of-oct-27/article_00965fd4-e22a-5be5-86df-b81e3cb4bd1c.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/arts_and_entertainment/need-to-know-week-of-oct-27/article_00965fd4-e22a-5be5-86df-b81e3cb4bd1c.html |
Frederick City Hall at North Court Street in downtown Frederick.
City continues discussion of employee benefits
Some part-time employees for the city of Frederick could receive health benefits from the city, and the city could pay a higher share of all employees’ coverage, under proposals being considered by the Board of Aldermen.
Part-time employees who average a certain threshold of hours worked could become eligible for city health, dental, and vision insurance, although the number of hours would still have to be determined by the aldermen.
The city could also increase its share of premiums for employees who have insurance.
The city currently provides 75% of the cost for the premiums on employees’ health insurance, but none of the premiums for dental or vision insurance. The city could move to cover up to 80 or 85% of premiums.
The moves were among a variety of possible changes to employee benefits discussed by the mayor and aldermen at a workshop Wednesday.
The discussion stems from a comprehensive salary and benefits study that was completed in 2021 and looked at the market competitiveness of the city’s structure of salary and benefits.
The city currently has 330 part-time employees, including 26 who work more than 1,000 hours per year, Katie Barkdoll, director of budget and administration, told the mayor and aldermen Wednesday.
Alderwoman Donna Kuzemchak said she would like to see the city offer benefits to part-time employees, but there has to be some line for who qualifies and who doesn’t.
Alderman Ben MacShane said he would support expanding the number of employees who would qualify for benefits, and setting the line at somewhere around 20 or 25 hours per week.
Alderman Derek Shackelford asked whether the city should change its policy to allow health insurance to start being offered immediately upon hiring, rather than starting after an employee’s first 30 days, as is policy currently allows.
Mayor Michael O’Connor sought to find if there was consensus on increasing the city’s share of insurance premiums so he can have some guidance as he prepares the city’s fiscal 2024 budget.
Shackelford and Alderwoman Katie Nash said it would be difficult to make a decision without having a better idea of how it would affect the budget as a whole.
Shackelford and Alderman Kelly Russell said they would like to see a move toward the city covering 80% of premiums.
Nash said she would like to see 85%, but said she can’t commit to supporting an increase until she sees more information.
Derek Shackelford | 2022-10-27T05:35:39Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | City continues discussion of employee benefits | Employment | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/economy_and_business/employment/city-continues-discussion-of-employee-benefits/article_18eddaca-5d10-5a52-b83c-508a6a720afe.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/economy_and_business/employment/city-continues-discussion-of-employee-benefits/article_18eddaca-5d10-5a52-b83c-508a6a720afe.html |
Mediums Terri Rodabaugh, left, and Rhonda Russo pose for a portrait at the Mount Olivet Cemetery on Oct. 17.
Terri Rodabaugh and Rhonda Russo
From left, Rhonda Russo and Terri Rodabaugh host a podcast on all things paranormal.
LET’S GET METAPHYSICAL
Psychic mediums lift the veil in new podcast
It’s no secret that Frederick is filled with history. What’s less known — at least according to Terri Rodabaugh and Rhonda Russo — is that the city’s streets and rowhomes also thrum with a more metaphysical connection to the past.
Ghosts. Spirits. They’re not confined to spooky stories told around a campfire, Rodabaugh and Russo say. Instead, they walk among us, in areas as quotidian and familiar as downtown Frederick.
Not many people can see them, but Rodabaugh and Russo say they have been able to sense the presence of ghostly and spiritual energies since they were little girls.
“When I was a baby,” Russo recalled during a recent interview at the Frederick Coffee Co., “I could see dark shadows dancing around the ceiling. I can remember that and see it plain as day.”
Now, the two women say they use their abilities to help others “lift the veil” between dimensions and connect with loved ones who have died.
Rodabaugh, who used to live in Frederick, has since moved to Gettysburg, but she and Rhonda, who remains in the city, have continued working together, conducting group readings and, most recently, recording the podcast “Lifting the Veil with Terri and Rhonda,” which they’ve created with show producer James LaPann, who is intrigued by the paranormal and spiritual world. Since releasing the first episode in January, the women have talked chakras and auras, interviewed someone who says she wrote “Gone with the Wind” in a past life, given a tutorial on crystals and provided a live reading to a listener.
Although Rodabaugh and Russo both say they recognized their gifts at an early age, it took them a long time to tell others about their ghostly encounters, let alone use their abilities to help others.
When Russo was a teenager, she said, she shut down her intuition. She wanted to date boys and have friends, and she was tired of being “the little mousy girl in the corner.”
Then, when she was around 27, all hell broke loose, as she put it.
“It was like, ‘OK, you’ve suppressed me long enough,’” she said. “‘Now, let’s get to work.’”
Rodabaugh was also in her late 20s when her abilities were reawakened. She had been attending culinary school, while also juggling a full-time job and raising her daughter. She wasn’t getting much sleep. Finally, she said, it seemed like her defenses just broke down. All of a sudden, she started seeing ghosts and spirits all over the place again.
It took Rodabaugh and Russo even longer to start providing readings to others. At first, Rodabaugh only read Tarot cards. But after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, she decided she was tired of hiding her other abilities.
“It makes you look at your life a little differently,” she said of her diagnosis. “I just decided I’m going to be me.”
Even though Rodabaugh and Russo both enjoy their job, they both acknowledged that it can be challenging. For one, it can sometimes be dangerous. Neither of them perform group readings or paranormal investigations alone. And Russo always gives her husband the address and phone number of the location where she is going.
“I tell him that if you don’t see me, or if you do see me and I’m transparent,” she said with a laugh, “something went wrong.”
The work can also be physically and emotionally draining. People cry in front of them, and Rodabaugh and Russo are both self-described empaths.
They’re not getting rich, either. They’re not the kind of mediums who purposefully scare people to ensure they return or charge extra for removing a hex or a curse.
Still, they both said, the work is rewarding.
“I get a lot of emails, a lot of messages, thanking me. I get one almost every day about how their reading changed their life,” Rodabaugh said. “Neither one of us makes a lot of money at this, but it does mean a lot. It gives me a purpose.”
Lifting the Veil podcast is available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts and Buzzsprout.
Rhonda Russo
Terri Rodabaugh | 2022-10-27T05:35:46Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Psychic mediums lift the veil in new podcast | History | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/lifestyle/history/psychic-mediums-lift-the-veil-in-new-podcast/article_6c460c6b-7cde-522e-92b4-f1131d35c715.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/lifestyle/history/psychic-mediums-lift-the-veil-in-new-podcast/article_6c460c6b-7cde-522e-92b4-f1131d35c715.html |
Barry Ciliberti
Ciliberti seeks another term to protect ER nurses from assault, prevent abortion
Maryland Del. Barrie Ciliberti said he is running for re-election to continue championing causes he is passionate about, including protecting emergency room nurses from assault and preventing women from getting abortions.
“I think some of my ideas are consistent with the county,” said Ciliberti, a Republican, “and if implemented, I think would make the county better, make the citizenry more protected.”
Ciliberti, who has represented parts of Frederick and Carroll counties for more than seven years, finished third in this year’s Republican primary for three seats in District 4. He was behind April Fleming Miller and incumbent Del. Jesse Pippy, but ahead of Woodsboro Burgess Heath Barnes.
His Democratic challengers for the three open seats in the largely Republican district include Andrew Duck, Brandon Duck and Millicent Hall.
The Maryland general election is scheduled for Nov. 8.
After representing part of Montgomery County between 1995 and 1999, Ciliberti was appointed by Gov. Larry Hogan to represent District 4 in 2015. He was elected to the seat in 2018.
Between the 2015 and 2022 legislative sessions, Ciliberti introduced 25 bills that, among other actions, would have restricted abortion access and increased penalties for drunk driving and assaulting an emergency health care worker.
None of the bills that Ciliberti introduced passed, but the contents of some of them were incorporated into other bills, he said.
In the House of Delegates, Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats, 99 to 42, Ciliberti said.
“There are things that can be done in committee and subcommittee that can affect some of the legislation coming out,” he said, “but we are, as I said, in the minority, and we have to accept that.”
Sometimes, Ciliberti said, it’s worth filing a bill to start a conversation, “knowing full well, in some cases, it’s like Little Bighorn and we’re Custer.”
He said he’s helped kill bills that he believed would hurt Frederick County residents or Marylanders financially, but did not give examples.
During the most recent legislative session, Ciliberti introduced three bills.
HB1154 would have made intentionally injuring an emergency medical worker a felony second-degree assault.
HB1158 would have required people convicted of three or more offenses of driving under the influence of alcohol to install ignition interlock systems in their cars. This technology measures the blood-alcohol content of anybody trying to start or operate the vehicle.
HB1161 would have required physicians to give a pregnant woman an ultrasound, then wait at least 24 hours before giving her an abortion.
If re-elected, Ciliberti said, he plans to reintroduce his abortion and emergency health care bills.
He's been on the Environment and Transportation Committee since 2019. On the issue of climate change, he said, members are "doing the best they can."
However, he said, a group of climatologists says climate change is not really an issue.
"It's not as it's portrayed in the press and elsewhere — that it's a unanimous consent and concern," he said.
Following an interview, he followed up with an email, in which he clarified that he realizes the climate has been changing.
There are two schools of thought, he wrote. One believes that causes of the change are mainly manmade. The other believes the changes are, to a greater degree, cyclical.
"This debate/discussion will be an ongoing entity," he wrote. "Regardless, it is incumbent that we are all good stewards of our resources — locally, statewide, nationally, and globally."
But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the United Nations body assessing the science on climate change — the influence human activity has on the climate is now a well established fact.
More than 99% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a survey of 88,125 climate-related studies published last year in Environmental Research Letters.
Name: Barrie Ciliberti
Hometown: Urbana
Occupation: Maryland state delegate; retired University of Maryland professor
Previous campaigns/offices: Maryland state delegate for District 39 from 1995 to 1999; appointed state delegate for District 4 in 2015; elected for District 4 in 2018
Campaign website: www.barriesciliberti.com/
Social media: Facebook: www.facebook.com/barriefordelegate
Email: CitizensforCiliberti@gmail.com
Barrie Ciliberti
Another waste of a vote. | 2022-10-28T01:17:08Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Ciliberti seeks another term to protect ER nurses from assault, prevent abortion | Election Coverage | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/ciliberti-seeks-another-term-to-protect-er-nurses-from-assault-prevent-abortion/article_08c3f278-5f6e-55b0-beaa-c42fffbbffe2.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/ciliberti-seeks-another-term-to-protect-er-nurses-from-assault-prevent-abortion/article_08c3f278-5f6e-55b0-beaa-c42fffbbffe2.html |
Fer is campaigning to preserve farmland, lower property taxes
John Fer, the Republican nominee for the District 4 seat on the Frederick County Council, said he would push for the county to continue to preserve farmland and lower the property tax rate.
Frederick County has preserved more than 73,000 acres of farmland and is on pace to exceed its goal of preserving 100,000 acres of farmland by the early 2030s, 10 years earlier than expected.
Fer, who is retired and worked as an elementary school principal in Los Angeles, said he would look to expand the county’s farm preservation programs and increase revenue for them without raising taxes. He did not state a specific way for the county to increase revenue or funding for farmland preservation.
“When you look around and you see that our sustenance is being eroded by building great expanses and tracts of homes, I become concerned,” Fer said in a podcast interview with the News-Post.
Like each of the six other Republican candidates for the County Council, Fer said he would push for the county to lower its property tax rate of $1.06 per $100 of assessed value to the constant-yield rate.
The constant-yield rate is the property tax rate necessary to generate the same revenue from year to year. The constant-yield rate for the fiscal year that began July 1 is $1.02 per $100 of assessed value. Adopting this rate would have decreased the county’s tax revenue by $13 million for the current fiscal year.
Fer served for 28 years in the U.S. Air Force. While serving in Vietnam, Fer’s plane was shot down. Three crew members died, and Fer and two others were captured.
Fer spent more than six years as a prisoner of war, including two years as cellmates with future U.S. Sen. John McCain.
Fer’s opponent in the race for the District 4 seat, which covers the eastern part of Frederick, is Democrat Kavonte Duckett, the director of the Alan P. Linton, Jr. Emergency Shelter for The Religious Coalition for Emergency Human Needs.
Election Day will be Nov. 8. Early voting began Thursday and is open until Nov. 3. The Maryland State Board of Elections began sending mail-in ballots to Frederick County voters on Oct. 1.
In his podcast interview, Fer said the county should increase housing options, such as building more accessory dwelling units, which are within single-family homes or built as a separate structure on the same lot as a single-family home, according to the county’s code. | 2022-10-28T03:09:35Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Fer is campaigning to preserve farmland, lower property taxes | Election Coverage | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/fer-is-campaigning-to-preserve-farmland-lower-property-taxes/article_22de013d-dd6b-5450-859b-dac36281184c.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/continuing_coverage/election_coverage/fer-is-campaigning-to-preserve-farmland-lower-property-taxes/article_22de013d-dd6b-5450-859b-dac36281184c.html |
The city of Frederick mayor and Board of Aldermen are scheduled to discuss potential improvements to this fountain at the intersection of North Market and Seventh streets and the surrounding area on Wednesday.
Community input sought for 7th Street park project
The Downtown Frederick Partnership and the African American Resources Cultural and Heritage Society will hold a community meeting Nov. 9 to discuss plans for public art in a park in downtown Frederick.
The area around the park and fountain at the corner of North Market and Seventh streets will be refurbished with landscaping, brickwork and green space, along with some furniture, benches and a small stage.
The design workshop will be held at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9 at the Bernard Brown Community Center at 629 N. Market St. in Frederick.
The meeting is meant to gather more information about what people would like the public art in the area to look like, said Kara Norman, executive director of the Downtown Frederick Partnership.
With a small area in the northeast section of the park, they will have to “think about how to make a big impact from a small amount of space,” she said.
They’ll use information from the workshop to hire an artist or possibly a team to design the contemporary art sculpture, Norman said.
The process to improve the fountain has been a long-running one.
The Downtown Frederick Partnership hired a landscape architecture firm to create some concepts, which led to a vetted concept design after several community input sessions in 2013.
In 2019, the city set aside about $250,000 as part of its Capital Improvement Plan for repairs to the fountain and other parts of the project.
With the new money available, the Partnership worked with the Ausherman Family Foundation, which has agreed to match the city’s CIP funding for the project.
The Partnership and Ausherman Family Foundation will pay for the park improvements, while the fountain and other infrastructure would be paid for by the city, according to a previous News-Post article.
The Partnership is working with AARCH on artwork that will express a common humanity and building a more inclusive community, Norman said.
AARCH President Protean Gibril said she’s excited to see what concepts they come up with.
The park and fountain makes an interesting space, and Gibril said she’s curious to see what will end up there.
“It’s a very interesting thing to find out what we have in common, and where do we go from there,” she said.
Aarch Society | 2022-10-28T04:58:40Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Community input sought for 7th Street park project | Visual Arts | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/community-input-sought-for-7th-street-park-project/article_67d55848-2f38-5f1e-ac97-3524e7a76252.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/community-input-sought-for-7th-street-park-project/article_67d55848-2f38-5f1e-ac97-3524e7a76252.html |
Frederick High's Caroline Gregory led the girl's Frederick County Cross Country Championship from start to finish at Middletown High School.
Gregory's latest win helps Frederick girls claim first county cross-country title since 1993
MIDDLETOWN — Despite a long string of cruise-control victories, a state title last season and thorough scouting reports on who and what she might face before every race, Frederick High distance-running star Caroline Gregory still gets very nervous before the gun goes off.
In the two previous races leading into Thursday’s Frederick County Public Schools Cross Country Championships, Gregory had lost her lunch at the starting line.
This time, she managed to hold it inside. Yet she remained very nervous.
“I think it’s part of racing,” Gregory said. “Just like the nerves of how I am going to feel and things like that.”
Gregory’s racing M.O., according to Frederick High coach Frank Strakonsky, is that she likes to hang with the pack for the first mile and a half, and then she takes off.
Usually, the only question is how big her margin of victory might be.
Last November in the Class 3A state-championship race, it was nearly 12 seconds to cap an unbeaten sophomore season. In Thursday’s county meet, it was nearly a minute, up from 30 seconds last season, as Gregory led the Frederick High girls to their first county cross-country team title since 1993.
Her winning time was 18:43.86, roughly 23 seconds off her personal-best that was run on a much flatter course.
Typically, with so little push toward the finish from anyone else in the field, Gregory plays little games in her own mind to keep driving forward.
“See how far I can get from the other person, things like that,” she said.
The difference for the Frederick High girls this season — during which they have won seven of the eight meets they have run in — compared to others is the rest of their pack has moved up behind Gregory.
“Just a lot of hard work,” Strakonsky said after the Cadets finished the county meet with a team score of 36, 50 points ahead of second-place Linganore. “It’s easy to coach when you have kids that work hard.”
Behind Gregory in the county meet, Frederick sophomore Juliana Brawner finished fifth (20:25.18), junior Sofia Driver finished ninth (21:29.79), sophomore Lucinda Slagle placed 10th (21:33), junior Mary Joy Johnson finished 11th (21:40.71), freshman Ysebelle Soto placed 18th (22:20.4) and sophomore Amelia Slagle was 27th (23:00.04).
Middletown’s Erin McQuitty was the second overall finisher in 19:31.66, and Urbana’s Ivy Coldren was third in 20:04.53.
“I think we need to continue digging in and finishing out strong because we’ve had a great season,” Gregory said of her team. “I think we are all up for the challenge. We have a really good chance of winning states this year. It’s exciting.”
The Frederick girls already won the team title at the Bull Run Invitational at Hereford High School, site of the state meet on Nov. 12.
Strakonsky said the team’s goal was to win the Big Four meets, meaning the Central Maryland Conference Championships, which they did last week, the county meet, which they did Thursday, next week’s regional meet and then the state meet.
“We feel we have a legitimate shot at that,” he said. “Looking online at people’s times and stuff, we are right there. It’s just who runs at Hereford the best.”
Frank Strakonsky | 2022-10-28T04:59:00Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Gregory's latest win helps Frederick girls claim first county cross-country title since 1993 | High School Sports | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/sports/level/high_school/gregorys-latest-win-helps-frederick-girls-claim-first-county-cross-country-title-since-1993/article_519fe1f4-c73b-5be5-b3f8-914ab360923f.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/sports/level/high_school/gregorys-latest-win-helps-frederick-girls-claim-first-county-cross-country-title-since-1993/article_519fe1f4-c73b-5be5-b3f8-914ab360923f.html |
Thomas Johnson's James Partlow makes his way to the finish line to win the boys Frederick County Cross Country Championship.
TJ's Partlow wins boys county cross country title; Lancers claim team title
MIDDLETOWN — Part of summer vacation planning in the Partlow household involved James, a junior at Thomas Johnson High School and aspiring state cross-country champion, finding running trails in nearby locations on Google Maps.
“I guess I wanted to win,” he said following his victory Thursday in the Frederick County cross-country championships in 16 minutes, 27.11 seconds. “I had that drive in me.”
So, there he was, shortly after 6 a.m., on trails in New York state, Ohio and Virginia, pushing himself to build upon an encouraging distance-running season during the spring outdoor track season.
His mother, Debbie, trailed him on a bicycle to provide support and, if necessary, water.
Asked if this was a major sacrifice, rising at the crack of dawn on vacation, Debbie said, “What mom wouldn’t do whatever it takes for her kid? If he is determined to get up at 6 a.m. and go for a run, I am not going to stop that.”
It was then pointed out that Debbie is an early riser anyway, as she is typically up around 4 a.m. on most days.
“I was sleeping in,” Partlow’s father, Ben, said. “I am sipping coffee while he is finishing up. I am looking at my phone. ‘Oh, where are they? OK.’”
James Partlow finished 10th at the county cross-country meet as a freshman and seventh last season as a sophomore.
The major difference between then and crossing the finish line almost 22 seconds faster than anyone else in this year’s county meet was the work he put in over the summer.
Partlow would run steep hills in his neighborhood on a regular basis.
“The first time I got to the top of a hill, I was dying,” he said.
He also upped his weekly mileage from 25 last season to roughly 40 this fall.
“He is hardworking, and he has very supportive parents as well,” TJ cross-country coach Larry O’Hara said. “He did not shy away from the hills over the summer. He was like, ‘I know they stink. But I know they are going to pay off.’”
While Partlow was racing toward his first county title — Catoctin’s Alex Contreras finished second in 16:49.04 — the Linganore boys were running toward the county team championship for the second consecutive season.
Senior Cole Williamson, who has been battling various ailments for most of the season, was well enough to finish fourth overall for Linganore in 17:08.21 after missing last week’s Central Maryland Conference meet, during which the Lancers finished third.
Junior Cormac Moroney placed sixth overall for the Lancers, who claimed the team championship with a score of 72 points, 18 ahead of second-place Oakdale and 20 better than third-place Urbana.
“When we are at full strength, which we haven’t been for much of the season, we are tough to beat,” Linganore coach Andres Wright said.
Partlow, who won last week’s CMC meet at Boonsboro High School in a personal-best 16:01, has now turned his sights to winning regional and state titles over the next two weeks.
“[Class] 3A is very tough. But he’s definitely in the mix,” O’Hara said.
Partlow won the Bull Run Invitational at Hereford High School, site of the state meet on Nov. 12, in 16:26.1 on Sept. 17.
“All my hard work is paying off,” he said. “I am happy winning these races this season. It feels really good.”
Cole Williamson | 2022-10-28T04:59:06Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | TJ's Partlow wins boys county cross country title; Lancers claim team title | High School Sports | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/sports/level/high_school/tjs-partlow-wins-boys-county-cross-country-title-lancers-claim-team-title/article_bab94535-7272-5768-bc59-9e3a1593d8e5.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/sports/level/high_school/tjs-partlow-wins-boys-county-cross-country-title-lancers-claim-team-title/article_bab94535-7272-5768-bc59-9e3a1593d8e5.html |
Urbana (7-1) at Linganore (4-4): A decade has passed since Urbana last tasted victory over its chief rival. The Hawks are looking to change that and secure the top seed in the Class 4A-3A West playoffs. They bounced back from their first loss of the season with a 40-0 home win over Tuscarora last week. They could face the Titans again next week in the first round of the regional playoffs. On the other hand, Linganore is looking to head into the 3A West playoffs with a record above .500. That’s an atypical position for a team that has appeared in the last four Class 3A state championship games. The Lancers currently sit in the middle of the pack in the 3A West playoff chase. They have not lost to Urbana since they struggled to a 3-7 non-playoff season in 2012.
Walkersville (4-4) at Middletown (5-3): These teams are vying for better positioning in the Class 2A West playoffs. Middletown is presently the No. 2 seed behind Poolesville, while Walkersville No. 5 seed in the seven-team region. The Lions have clawed back to .500 with four wins in their last five games. Last week, they dominated Brunswick on the road, 35-0. But they have dropped their last five games to Middletown. The Knights hung on for a 14-13 road win over Catoctin last week, even without the county’s leading rusher, senior Carson Smith, who sat out to allow some bumps and bruises to heal. Smith is expected to play this week against Walkersville. As usual, this game could be decided by whatever defense does a better job of stopping the run.
Frederick (8-0) at Thomas Johnson (1-7): Frederick has passed every test it has faced so far with flying colors. The Cadets have faced big challenges in each of the last three weeks with games at Walkersville and Oakdale sandwiched around a home game against Linganore, a team that beat them twice last season. Frederick won those games by a combined score of 73-14. This week, the Cadets can wrap up the top seed and home-field advantage in the Class 3A West playoffs, their first unbeaten season since 1968 and earn their sixth straight win over their rival. Meanwhile, TJ is looking to head into the Class 4A-3A West playoffs with some momentum after falling to visiting Linganore 44-0 last week.
Oakdale (6-2) at Tuscarora (0-8): Oakdale is currently the No. 3 seed in the Class 3A West playoffs and hoping to pass Damascus for the No. 2 seed behind Frederick. The Bears’ junior quarterback, Evan Austin, is on the verge of surpassing the 1,000-yard mark as a passer and a thrower this season. He already has passed for more than 1,000 yards and 11 touchdowns. He needs 196 yards to pass 1,000 as a runner, to go along with eight touchdowns so far. Oakdale is looking to bounce back following a 35-14 home loss to Frederick last week. On the other hand, Tuscarora is looking to close the regular season on a positive note. The Titans were shut out on the road last week by Urbana.
Catoctin (2-6) at Brunswick (5-3): Heading into this rivalry game last season, Brunswick was 5-3, Catoctin was 0-8 and the Cougars sprung a 14-8 upset for what turned out to be their only win of the season. The following week, Brunswick returned the favor with a 13-0 victory in the first round of the Class 1A North playoffs. That situation could play out again this season, as the teams are currently lined up for another first-round matchup. Brunswick is presently the No. 3 seed in the 1A North standings, while Catoctin is No. 6. Both teams are seeking to regain some momentum. Brunswick has dropped two in a row since a 21-17 victory at Liberty on Oct. 7, while Catoctin has dropped four straight since a 23-10 home win over South Hagerstown on Sept. 23.
Maryland Revolution (1-3) at St. John’s Catholic Prep (4-4): The Vikings are looking to rebound after getting beaten soundly by MIAA C Conference rival Severn for the second time this season last week. This will be the first of two home games for them to close out the regular season. They will host MIAA C foe Annapolis Area Christian next week. The Maryland Revolution is a Christian school football program based out of Jarrettsville. Last week, the Revolution lost to Virginia Academy 44-0 in Ashburn.
MSD (8-1) at Perkiomen School (5-1): MSD will be looking for its eighth straight victory against an opponent that has won three in a row. Last week, the Orioles traveled to California and routed California School for the Deaf, 64-6. Zion Ortiz surpassed 100 yards rushing on just six carries for MSD. He also accounted for three of his team’s touchdowns with a pass, a run and a punt return. Meanwhile, Perkiomen School is based in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. Last week, the Panthers earned a 46-28 victory in Front Royal, Virginia, over Randolph-Macon Academy for their third straight win and fifth in six games. | 2022-10-28T04:59:12Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Week 9 High School Football Capsules | High School Sports | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/sports/level/high_school/week-9-high-school-football-capsules/article_eaa9f0c3-bb4a-5583-b445-4a960213d955.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/sports/level/high_school/week-9-high-school-football-capsules/article_eaa9f0c3-bb4a-5583-b445-4a960213d955.html |
Eight men charged with bootlegging were arrested yesterday afternoon and last night by deputies from the office of Sheriff James A. Jones. Four of the arrests were made in Frederick, and the other four lawbreakers were corralled in Brunswick, one of them at 11 o’clock last night. The raid was a carefully laid systematic plan of the sheriff, and as a result, four of the men are out under $500 bail for the action of the December court. The other four are in jail awaiting trial. Two of the men arrested in Brunswick on the charge of illegal possession and sale of intoxicating liquors were merchants of that town. James Carey conducts a shoeshine parlor, while Myer Freedman is the proprietor of a shoe store.
The ten unaffected cattle on the farm of George J. Hull, near Woodsboro, will be given the anatoxin serum for rabies this morning. No new developments had occurred during yesterday. The Hull farm is the only one on which the malady has developed, although all of the farmers in that locality are anxious and are watching for the first symptoms of rabies among their herds. It is the belief that the Hull dog, the animal in which the disease originated, did not leave the Hull farm and did not molest any of the herds of cattle in the vicinity. Elmer Hahn, a young farmhand employed by Mr. Hull, who was bitten by the shepherd dog on September 28, was taken to the Mercy Hospital in Baltimore. He showed no signs of the disease. However, as a precautionary measure, it was decided to give him the Pasteur treatment. He will be given 21 treatments by Dr. Etzler, of Woodsboro.
A decision to uphold the Frederick County Board of Education’s move to transfer about 150 students from Emmitsburg to the Thurmont Middle School was made by the Maryland State Board of Education Wednesday. The state board’s involvement in the matter came about when a citizens group appealed the decision in July of state hearing examiner Mitchell J. Cooper upholding the local board’s action. Wednesday’s decision by the state board could mean the end of appeals by a concerned parents group to keep the sixth, seventh and eighth graders at the Emmitsburg school.
The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) submitted a proposed contract Wednesday afternoon to Frederick Mayor Ronald N. Young. It was guessed “there’s a real good chance” it would be ratified by the city and put into effect by Thanksgiving. If adopted, the contract would be the city’s first written pact with its police officers.
WASHINGTON — Dead: 10. Tips: more than 138,000. Reward: $50,000 at first, then $500,000. Lives changed forever: countless. The three weeks in which metropolitan Washington lived in the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope are over, but the numbers the drama produced describe a season of fear. More than 1,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers banded together in a hunt that covered Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia — and eventually the entire country. Crime scenes: Four gas stations, four parking lots, one auto dealership, one bench, one bus, one craft store, one school, one street corner.
The 46th annual Thurmont and Emmitsburg Community Show was held from Sept. 6 to 8 at Catoctin High School in Thurmont. Over 8,000 people attended. Over 560 exhibitors entered over 2,500 exhibits at the show.
Sheriff James A. Jones
Rabies In Cattle
George Hull Farm
Dr. Etzler
Rabies Pasteur Treatment
Elmer Hahn
Emmitsuburg Middle School
Thurmont Middle School
Maryland State Board Of Education
Fraternal Order Of Police Contracct
D.c. Sniper Numbers
Thurmont And Emmitsburg Community Show
George J. Hull | 2022-10-28T06:41:43Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | 20-40-100 Years Ago — Oct. 28 | News | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/20-40-100-years-ago-oct-28/article_9d800f9d-53c2-5180-aeb9-2dba4c80e677.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/20-40-100-years-ago-oct-28/article_9d800f9d-53c2-5180-aeb9-2dba4c80e677.html |
You’re one of us
BOARD of CONTRIBUTORS I Chip Jewell
Several years ago, I was asked to help perform a review of the radio interoperability capabilities of emergency communications centers on the Eastern Shore.
As a member of the State Interoperability Executive Committee and director of the Emergency Communications Center in Frederick County, I worked with interoperability issues between eight counties and three states that surround Frederick County. The state interoperability director asked if I would assist the State of Maryland in conducting a needs assessment to assure interoperability communications throughout the state.
I my first assignment was to go to the Kent County and Somerset County communications centers on the Eastern Shore. In my role, I would not only meet with the director of each center but also actually sit in the communications center during normal operations to observe and review the ability of the dispatchers to utilize interoperability assets.
The visit to Kent County was all business. As I walked into the center, I could feel the cold reception of someone from the “state” coming to the Eastern Shore. Though a small county with only three dispatchers on duty, the county was very much prepared to utilize various communications resources as needed in the event of a major emergency. Overall, the entire Eastern Shore was very proactive with the establishment of MESIN, the Maryland Eastern Shore Interoperability Network. The Eastern Shore was the first area of the state to enable the statewide Maryland First radio system in each county.
After a pleasant but very formal visit to Kent County, I was on the road to a hotel in Salisbury to conduct an evaluation of Somerset County communications the following day. I was looking forward to this visit as I was friends with the Somerset communications director, Steve Marshall. After a night in Salisbury, I was off to Princess Anne and the Somerset County Emergency Communications Center.
A very friendly greeting from my friend Steve immediately put me more at ease as I entered the radio dispatch room. Again, I was visiting a small operational area with only three people on duty. Though Steve and I were friends, the coldness of the room was again apparent. In my suit, tie and official State of Maryland ledger, someone from the “state” was again invading the Eastern Shore.
My friend Steve looked around the room at the stressed dispatchers and said, “Everything’s fine, Chip’s one of us, his mom’s from Snow Hill.” It was like turning off a light switch. The atmosphere in the room immediately changed to a very friendly and welcoming staff that seemed actually happy to see me. The people couldn’t have been nicer as we chatted all day while I sat and made my observations. I found out one of the dispatchers may have been a distant relative.
This year, I discovered the phenomenon in determining of being “one of us” from the Eastern Shore is apparently a shore standard. As I was attending a recent meeting of the Maryland State Firemen’s Association in Harford County, the newly elected second vice president of the organization, W. Newton “Skip” Carey of Ocean City, asked me if I knew Dr. Jimmy Thomas. When I replied I knew him, and that my mother was a nurse for Dr. B. O. Thomas Jr., he said his wife was related to Dr. Jimmy Thomas.
As we talked about the Dr. Thomases who were in Frederick, I mentioned to him my mom was born and raised in Snow Hill. His eyes lit up and told me, “Well, heck, you’re one of us!” referring to my linage from the Eastern Shore. His exclamation about “being one of us” was the exact verbiage Steve Marshall used when he introduced me to his staff in Princess Anne.
It has become very evident to me that you may live on the Eastern Shore, but unless you have shore blood flowing in your veins, you are not from the Eastern Shore. Which leads to the question: When can you say you’re from Frederick? The answer to this question will be addressed in a later column.
Clarence “Chip” Jewell is fourth generation from Frederick County on his dad’s side but has Eastern Shore blood flowing from his mom’s side of the family, several generations from Snow Hill. | 2022-10-28T06:42:01Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | You’re one of us | Columns | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/columns/you-re-one-of-us/article_65a22280-9c61-51ed-bfac-3658b437b93e.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/columns/you-re-one-of-us/article_65a22280-9c61-51ed-bfac-3658b437b93e.html |
Mick O'Leary Frederick
The Frederick News-Post published an account of a censorship attempt (Page A3, Oct. 15-16 edition) at a recent Frederick County Public Schools (FCPS) board meeting. School board candidate Cindy Rose presented a list of 35 books that she wants removed from FCPS libraries. This is just one example in a recent surge in censorship efforts in school and public libraries across the country.
The American Library Association reports a 50% increase in censorship attempts in the past five years. Among the titles that have been targeted, a significant percentage deal with LGBTQ gender identity.
Rose worked from a list of books compiled by ratedbooks.org, an organization of school censorship advocates that has chapters in numerous U.S. counties. Ratedbooks.org encourages and supports local book banning efforts across the country. Thus, Rose’s actions are not those of a single individual but are instead part of a coordinated national movement of book censorship.
According to the FNP article, Rose described the books on her list as “child pornography … made available to our children” — comments that I regard as inflammatory and misleading. In fact, almost all of the 35 books are written at “Young Adult” or “Adult” levels. This means that they would not be in elementary school libraries, and only selectively in middle school libraries.
This episode follows upon another recent attempt at book censorship that occurred in our county public library. Last June, Heather Fletcher (at the time a school board candidate) attempted to interfere with public access to books at the Brunswick Branch Library (Page A3, June 3 edition of The Frederick News-Post). (Disclaimer: I am a member of the Board of Trustees of the Frederick County Public Libraries. However, I am not now representing the board but instead speaking as a concerned private citizen and county resident.) Citizens have every right to evaluate books available to the students of FCPS, and there is a formal process by which complaints can be submitted to school authorities (The FNP did not mention if Rose followed this process). But citizens also have the right to evaluate the actions of Rose, Fletcher and their counterparts across the country. Are they responsible, civic-minded actors, or are they part of a concerted, partisan program to impose broad censorship on our school and public libraries?
Mick O’Leary | 2022-10-28T06:42:07Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | County faces library censorship | Letters to the Editor | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/letter_to_editor/county-faces-library-censorship/article_8fa6a01c-06ca-514a-9c59-a2da3b2725f9.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/letter_to_editor/county-faces-library-censorship/article_8fa6a01c-06ca-514a-9c59-a2da3b2725f9.html |
Keith A. Bryan Sabillasville
As a retired police officer (1985), I am struggling to make sense of Karl Bickel’s overview of the law enforcement profession. Having spent the entirety of my career on the street — not behind a desk — I found that police officers commanded at least a modicum of respect. Today, nothing could be further from the truth, from perpetrators to prosecutors, judges to policy makers. As for claiming that officer safety is over emphasized (“Bickel makes third bid for Frederick County sheriff,” June 16 edition of The Frederick News-Post) is a statement that is indicative of a lack of intellect that defies logic. Perhaps Mr. Bickel can explain why airline passengers are told to put oxygen masks on themselves first and then assist children. Maybe Mr. Bickel can make the connection. The concept of taking care of the caregiver so that he/she is able to help those in need.
To maintain that law enforcement is safer today is hardly worthy of comment. Apparently reading and interpreting the news is not part of his skill set!
The position in question is sheriff, which comes under the umbrella of law enforcement, not social work. Social work has its place but it is not a substitute for enforcement. Trying to turn one into the other is a fool’s errand. When I am confronted with a violent situation, I want a cop not a sociologist.
Perhaps Mr. Bickel should analyze why he has lost his last three races. The people of Frederick County are not buying what he is selling!
Keith A. Bryan | 2022-10-28T06:42:13Z | www.fredericknewspost.com | Why Karl Bickel should not be sheriff | Letters to the Editor | fredericknewspost.com | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/letter_to_editor/why-karl-bickel-should-not-be-sheriff/article_46fe126e-d070-5948-a1af-05026a45dd11.html | https://www.fredericknewspost.com/opinion/letter_to_editor/why-karl-bickel-should-not-be-sheriff/article_46fe126e-d070-5948-a1af-05026a45dd11.html |
In his year-end report, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. acknowledged concerns about ethical conflicts among judges and workplace discrimination within the judiciary. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. acknowledged in a report released Friday that the federal judiciary has work to do in ensuring that judges live up to their ethical responsibilities and in creating a harassment-free workplace.
But he politely told Congress it is work that judges can do on their own.
In his 2021 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, the chief justice did not mention President Biden’s commission on reforming the Supreme Court or react to nascent congressional proposals to make drastic changes, such as expanding the number of justices or ending their lifetime tenure.
Biden Supreme Court commission notes support for term limits
But he said the judiciary’s independence is best maintained by remaining free of interference from the political branches.
“The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government,” Roberts wrote.
In the report, Roberts addressed “topics that have been flagged by Congress and the press over the past year.” Those included the failure of some judges to recuse themselves from cases in which they had a financial interest, and concerns about how the judiciary handles allegations of workplace harassment and discrimination.
Roberts referred to articles in the Wall Street Journal that said “between 2010 and 2018, 131 federal judges participated in a total of 685 matters involving companies in which they or their families owned shares of stock.”
He said that was “inconsistent” with a federal ethics statute that requires a judge to recuse in any matter in which he or she knows of a personal financial interest.
“Let me be crystal clear: the Judiciary takes this matter seriously,” Roberts wrote. “We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards, and those judges violated an ethics rule.”
But, he said, in context, that meant the judiciary had a “99.97% compliance rate.”
“For most of the judges involved (a total of 83 of the 131), the Journal reported one or two lapses over the nine-year period,” Roberts wrote. “Those sorts of isolated violations likely entailed unintentional oversights in which the judge’s conflict-checking procedures failed to reveal the financial conflict.”
Roberts said congressional intervention was not needed. The Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will dedicate themselves in the coming months to increasing ethics training for judges and researching new computer programs to detect potential conflicts in the cases that come before judges.
“The bottom line is that the Conference is taking the concerns seriously and has committed itself to the careful labor of addressing them,” he wrote. The Journal reported that Roberts said he had “serious constitutional concerns” about proposed accountability legislation in 2018.
Roberts defends colleagues on recusal issues
Supreme Court justices are not covered by the same ethics policies, although the justices have said they voluntarily comply with them. Roberts is one of three justices — Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. are the others — who own individual stocks. They recuse from cases, or sometimes sell the stock in order to participate, but they too have missed some cases.
Roberts did not address the view of some that judges and justices should avoid stock ownership.
The chief justice also acknowledged concerns about how the federal judiciary handles allegations of harassment and discrimination. He detailed steps that the judiciary’s leaders have taken to improve its reporting system, including the expansion of the Office of Judicial Integrity and the hiring of workplace relations directors in each of the federal circuits.
“Nevertheless, new protections could help ensure that every court employee enjoys a workplace free from incivility and disrespect,” Roberts wrote.
In support of a lawsuit filed by a former public defender in North Carolina, more than 20 current and former law clerks and employees of federally funded public defender’s offices and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts this summer offered firsthand accounts of a system that they say lacks protections and procedures to hold officials accountable.
Court filing alleges continuing harassment in the judiciary
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation last summer that would establish whistleblower protections for judiciary employees and create a special counsel to investigate and report on misconduct complaints within the system.
“I appreciate that Members of Congress have expressed ongoing concerns on this important matter, and the Judicial Conference and its committees remain fully engaged,” Roberts wrote.
Roberts likes to lace his annual reports with history lessons, and this year’s reinforced his larger point.
He wrote about William Howard Taft, who served as president from 1909 to 1913, and then was chosen by President Warren G. Harding as chief justice 100 years ago.
“He knew well how to navigate the halls of Congress,” Roberts wrote, and “threw his considerable political heft into creating the mechanisms of self-governance for federal courts across the country.”
Taft “understood that criticism of the courts is inevitable, and he lived through an era when federal courts faced strident calls for reform, some warranted and some not,” Roberts wrote, adding, “The Congress of his era appreciated the Judiciary’s need for independence in our system of separate and co-equal branches, and it provided a sound structure for self-governance.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Betty White, who was found dead Friday at age 99 in her Brentwood home, did not, as the obits are factually obligated to tell us, leave behind any children — or grandchildren or great-grandchildren or great-great grandchildren.
But come on now. Betty White is survived by, to begin with, all the thousands of hilarious women in comedy and TV who find new ways to define their craft every day: the Tina Feys, the Amy Poehlers, the Julia Louis-Dreyfuses, the Cecily Strongs, the Sarah Silvermans, the Issa Raes, the Kacey Cuocos, the Mindy Kalings, the Ilana Glazers. She is also survived by hundreds of millions of surviving kin, a.k.a. her fans, who adored her in the same way we adore all the grannies, mimis, mamaws and aunties in our lives, especially the ones who tend to blurt out whatever happens to be on their minds, even if it’s a bit tawdry. (And she has billions more survivors if you count what may have been White’s truest love: all the world’s animals.)
Incredibly, White was one the first people to be seen on the newfangled invention known as television during a 1939 exhibition; through the decades, she charmed and entertained us as an actress, talk-show host and as one of the world’s most reliably gung-ho game-show guests. Where other celebs appeared to mainly goof off in the shaggy silliness of 1970s game shows, White would also join in on the lightly crude banter, but she always came with the earnest urge to win, helping everyday contestants prevail in dozens of different game shows, including “Password,” which was hosted by her husband Allan Ludden. (“Where else can you spend a couple of hours playing games with nice people and get paid for it?” she wrote in one of her several memoirs, “Here We Go Again: My Life in Television.”) | null | null | null | null | null |
Flowers, stuffed toys and cards are placed on Betty White's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame star in remembrance of the actress on Dec. 31. (Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)
Who didn’t love Betty White?
As news of the iconic comedian’s death at her Los Angeles home became public Friday, appreciation poured in from all corners of the country — including from the president.
“That’s a shame. She was a lovely lady,” President Biden said as he was informed of White’s passing as he left a lunch in Delaware, later tweeting that she was a “cultural icon.”
The 99-year-old actress — legend of film, television and razor-sharp comedic timing — had an age-defying career that spanned nearly eight decades. From her appearance as a child on a radio program to her role in the iconic 1970s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” series to her scene-stealing appearance in the 2009 film “The Proposal,” White’s comedy never grew old. But it was her role as the always sunny Rose Nylund on the NBC comedy “The Golden Girls” that cemented the actress as a national treasure.
White, who reveled in her elder stateswoman status, was just weeks away from her 100th birthday on Jan. 17. In a recent People magazine cover story marking the upcoming milestone, White said she was “so lucky to be in such good health and feel so good at this age … It’s amazing.”
“The world looks different now,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “She was great at defying expectation. She managed to grow very old and somehow, not old enough. We’ll miss you, Betty.”
Comedian Kathy Griffin, who worked with White on the sitcom “Suddenly Susan” and her reality show “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,” wrote on Twitter that White “actually treated me like an equal in the comedy gurrrl world. She was as sharp and funny as she was soft and wise … and no matter how long this world continues to spin, there will be only one Betty White.”
But it wasn’t just individuals and celebrities who felt White’s impact. Networks such as Comedy Central and Netflix dedicated tweets to White, as well as advocacy groups like GLAAD. White was a longtime advocate for the LGBTQ community and participated in one of GLAAD’s anti-bullying campaigns in 2013, joking that she should change her name to Betty Purple as a show of support. On Friday, the organization shouted out the “supporter of LGBTQ equality and acceptance” and, borrowing a line from the “Golden Girls” theme song, thanked White “for being a friend.”
Dictionary.com also paid homage to the actress, simply tweeting the word “golden” and adding a fourth definition: “Betty White.” | null | null | null | null | null |
‘Oftentimes people don’t consider Black women as part of World War II,” said Susan King, 97. ‘The focus is always on the men of the war.’
Susan King, left, sits next to Hilda McDougald at a screening of a film about Black women who worked as “Rosie the Riveters” in World War II. King is featured in the film. (Courtesy of Stephan Voss and the Netherlands Embassy)
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said there are seven women in the film. There are eight. This version has been updated.
At 97, Susan King still recalls how she came from her family’s home in Virginia’s Lancaster County to work as a riveter, making parts for aircraft at a factory in Baltimore during World War II.
Unlike the mostly White women known for their wartime efforts and dubbed “Rosie the Riveters,” King and roughly 600,000 African American women who worked at offices, shipyards and factories building parts for planes, weapons and ships never got as much recognition, many historians say.
King’s story and others with similar experiences were part of a recently produced documentary called “Invisible Warriors — African American Women in World War II” by Gregory Cooke, a historian and retired writing instructor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. D.C.'s Martin Luther King Jr. Library held an in-person viewing of Cooke’s film in December and honored some of the women who were featured in it, as well as others, for their wartime efforts.
“Oftentimes, people don’t consider Black women as part of World War II,” King said. “The focus is always on the men of the war. We get lost in the shuffle.” Cooke’s film, she said, “did a remarkable job showing how we helped in the home front in building ships, planes and bullets, and gave our time.”
The black liberators who helped defeat the Nazis and free the Dutch get their due
Cooke said he started working on the film in 2009 after becoming interested in the role African Americans played in World War II — especially the jobs Black women held.
“African Americans, and women in particular, have been left out of the true accounting of World War II history,” Cooke said. The war, he said, “has always been framed and romanticized as a White male experience and that’s not historically accurate. Were it not for these women, the White men would not have had planes, bullets and tanks.”
Frank McDougald watched the film with his mom, Hilda, 101, who left her family’s home in Mansura, La., where her father was a sharecropper, and came to D.C. to process payroll for soldiers. She lives in the Capitol View neighborhood of Southeast and was among the women honored at the MLK library event.
Her son said the film gave him a renewed appreciation for the work his mom and other Black women had done during the wartime effort.
“It portrayed what Black women contributed and the kind of discrimination they confronted,” he said.
Growing up, he said, his parents never talked about the contributions his mom and thousands of others made during World War II.
“My mom came here to work,” Frank McDougald said. “She never talked about being a Rosie.”
In the film, King discussed learning about a Baltimore plant that was training women to be riveters and enrolled in a class with a friend. She got a job for one year putting together small parts for planes.
Her pay was about $58 a week, she said. After her work during the war, she went on to college and later got her master’s degree at Morgan State University. She spent 32 years as a teacher and counselor in Baltimore.
Another woman in the film, Ruth Wilson, 99, of Philadelphia, said the film brought back memories of how she left home in New Jersey and went to work a shipyard. She later worked nearly 30 years at a coat factory.
“I thought it was fantastic,” Wilson said of the film. “Nobody had ever done that before that I knew of, so I thought it was really nice to let people know what part Black women played in World War II.”
Cooke said he found the women in the film by reaching out to senior care facilities, colleagues and friends.
Rosie the Riveter isn’t who you think she is
In the film, he details how many of the women had worked jobs as sharecropper farmers, taking care of kids, or as cooks and cleaners before the war, but because of the labor shortage, had come to factories, shipyards and offices for better pay.
“It was only because of a labor shortage of men who had previously had these jobs that women could even get these jobs,” Cooke said.
He said he wanted to focus on the roles Black women had played in the wartime effort because they had been “so marginalized that often they had no idea of what a big role they’d played.”
The most well-known image of women’s efforts in World War II, he said, is the poster that became symbolic of women working in factories and shipyards. In it, a White woman dubbed “Rosie the Riveter,” a bandanna around her head, flexes her muscles.
Of the eight women in his film, Cooke said many of them didn’t have a sense of what a significant role they had in the wartime effort. “To them, it was just a good job,” he said.
94-year-old ‘Rosie the Riveter’ once made warplanes and red bandannas. Now she makes face masks with the same cloth.
The film also depicts how women were treated differently at jobs in which the federal government had rules prohibiting discrimination based on race, but once they left those jobs, they dealt with segregated bathrooms, restaurants and water fountains outside of work.
Cooke reached out to the Embassy of the Netherlands in the District, which helped in funding and other support, because he said the embassy has done projects focused on the role of Black people in helping to liberate the Netherlands in 1945.
André Haspels, the Dutch ambassador to the United States, said his embassy wanted to recognize the “sacrifices in the U.S. not only in sending troops, but also by people who stayed behind.”
“The African American Rosies played an important role in World War II because not only did they have to fight racism but they also had to fight sexism,” Haspels said. “It was a double handicap they had to overcome.”
Cooke said he’s gotten a range of reactions to his film, from pride, joy and laughter, to anger. He said, he thinks Black women who served as Rosies will “look at it as part of their legacy.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A Komodo dragon at the Komodo National Park in Indonesia. The park was established in 1980 to help protect the giant lizards. Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry estimates about 3,000 of the reptiles live there today, along with manatee-like dugongs, sea turtles, whales and more than a thousand species of tropical fish. (Bryan Fry/AP)
JAKARTA, Indonesia — On a dirt path, forked yellow tongue darting from its mouth, a member of the world’s largest lizard species lazes on an island in eastern Indonesia’s Komodo National Park as tourists snap photos.
And about 18 miles away on another park island that harbors Komodo dragons, trees have been removed and concrete poured for new tourist facilities that have aroused the ire of residents and environmental activists.
The construction is part of an ambitious Indonesian initiative that has generated tensions between a government that wants to develop natural attractions for luxury tourism and conservationists who fear habitat for the endangered lizards will be irreparably harmed. United Nations officials have also voiced concerns about potential tourism impacts on this unique wildlife-rich park.
Encompassing about 850 square miles of land and marine area, the park was established in 1980 to help protect the famed dragons. Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry estimates about 3,000 of the reptiles live there today, along with manatee-like dugongs, sea turtles, whales and more than a thousand species of tropical fish.
Because of its biodiversity and beauty, the park became a World Heritage Site designated by UNESCO in 1991. And it’s one of Indonesia’s crown jewels for tourism, typically drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors worldwide each year.
For years the government has been trying to figure out how to best capitalize on the park, most recently designating it part of the country’s “10 New Balis” initiative — an effort to draw more tourists, as the island of Bali did before border restrictions during the pandemic. “We are embarking into a new era of tourism in Indonesia based on nature and culture, focusing on sustainability and quality tourism,” Indonesian Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy Sandiaga Uno told the Associated Press.
Part of that multimillion-dollar tourism development is a project on Rinca Island, where more than one-third of the park’s dragons are estimated to live on generally hot and dry terrain. The construction includes an expanded ranger station, viewing platform, boat dock, toilets and other infrastructure.
The project worries local environmental activists and residents within park boundaries who say their livelihoods as tour guides, boat drivers and souvenir sellers depend on the draw of the area’s natural beauty.
“When we talk about the development in the conservation area, we have to think . . . whether this is a wisely considered economic effect for the local people — or the environmental effect,” said Gregorius Afioma, a member of the local nongovernmental organization Sun Spirit for Justice and Peace. “The situation now is like collective suicide.”
“We think that this kind of business will eventually kill other businesses and even themselves because they destroyed the environment,” Afioma said, adding that local residents also fear they won’t get construction jobs for the luxury tourist destination the Indonesian government is promoting.
UNESCO — the United Nations body that designates World Heritage Site status — has also raised concerns about development in the park.
“The state party did not inform us, as required by the operational guidelines,” said Guy Debonnet, chief of the body’s natural heritage unit. “This is definitely a project of concern, because we feel that the impacts on the universal value [of the park] have not been properly evaluated.”
During a meeting in July, UNESCO expressed other concerns such as the project’s reduction of the park’s wilderness zone to one-third the previous area, addition of tourism concessions within the property, lack of an adequate environmental impact assessment, and a target to dramatically increase visitors.
“Third-party information transmitted to the State Party indicates that a target of 500,000 annual visitors for the property has been proposed, which is more than double the pre-COVID-19 pandemic visitor numbers,” said a report from the meeting. “This raises the question of how this tourism model fits [Indonesia’s] vision of moving away from mass tourism to more sustainable approaches.”
At UNESCO’s request, the country submitted more information about the project. But after reviewing it, the U.N. agency requested in October 2020 that Indonesia not “proceed with any tourism infrastructure project that may affect the Outstanding Universal Value of the property prior to a review of the relevant environmental impact assessment” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
IUCN is an international, nongovernmental organization that provides UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee with technical evaluations of natural heritage properties.
After multiple attempts to get permission from government authorities, AP was unable to gain access to the construction site, which has been closed to the public for months. But satellite imagery shows construction continued after UNESCO requested the project be paused. The government did not respond to a recent email seeking comment.
As of Dec. 6, UNESCO still had not received the requested revised assessment, Debonnet said.
The Indonesian government also granted at least two business permits in Komodo National Park, including for projects on Rinca, Komodo and Padar islands, according to an email to AP from Shana Fatina, president director at the Labuan Bajo Flores Tourism Authority, which helps coordinate government tourism efforts.
Some experts fear tourism expansion in the park could lead to disturbance of Komodo dragon habitat.
The predatory lizards, which can reach a length of 10 feet and a weight of more than 300 pounds, were recently moved from “vulnerable” to “endangered” status on the IUCN list of threatened species. The organization cited the effects of climate change and deterioration of the dragons’ habitat — including human encroachment — as reasons for the change.
Unless carefully managed, tourism projects could “have a big impact, not just from the number of people disturbing the behavior of the dragons and disturbing their prey, but also how much freshwater is being siphoned off,” said Bryan Fry, an associate professor at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That could dramatically impact the very delicate balance of these islands.”
The opening date for the new Rinca Island facilities has yet to be announced. Debonnet said UNESCO is talking with Indonesian officials to arrange a monitoring mission to assess the impact of ongoing development on the park and review its state of conservation.
And while World Heritage sites are usually discussed by the UNESCO committee on two-year cycles, the park will be discussed in 2022, Debonnet said.
“That is kind of an indication that we see there is some urgency in this issue,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
By John Reid Blackwell, Richmond Times-Dispatch | AP
RICHMOND, Va. — At a time when checking the time often means yanking a mobile phone out of your pocket, the Midlothian-based startup Handley Watches is building a business making timepieces designed to appeal to a more traditional sense of time-keeping aesthetics and function.
Handley Watches makes the kind of wristwatches that are meant to look good on your arm and give you the time quickly and efficiently, instead of going in your pocket. And the company is relying on old-fashioned craftsmanship to sell its timepieces.
The home of Jay and Alexis Carpenter on Merrington View in Chesterfield County serves as the workshop for making Handley Watches.
“They are traditional looking, for the most part,” Jay Carpenter said of Handley Watches. “They are not the digital smartwatches that a lot of people wear now.”
Instead, Carpenter makes watches that are meant to be functional and stylish in a variety of settings, whether that might be athletics or professional settings, or casual day-to-day wear.
“I’ve been an enthusiast (of watches) for a long time,” said Carpenter, 37. “I just like the art of it and the mechanics of it.”
Carpenter works full time for the business advisory firm Fahrenheit Advisors in Richmond, so the watch business is his side gig.
His move into making watches part time was somewhat inspired by his training for triathalons, which involve running, swimming and biking long distances. He noticed that many watches — especially the bands — simply don’t hold up under that kind of strain.
“Leather is great, but wet leather is not great,” he said.
The need for a highly functional watch also became more clear when the Carpenters had their first child, Penelope, who is now 18 months old.
“Now, I am not just running and swimming and biking, but changing diapers and mowing grass,” he said.
So the couple started to work on various watch designs, eventually offering up about 30 different looks to customers who shop for their watches online.
“Jay was saying: ’There has to be something that is both business professional and useful,” said Alexis Carpenter, who works full time in human resources training in the mortgage industry but also serves as a marketing and design expert for Handley Watches.
They introduced Handley Watches in March 2020.
“That was right when the world took a turn,” said Jay Carpenter, referring to the start of the pandemic. “So I figured we could fly under the radar for a time and take that time to improve our products and packaging and distribution and logistics and web content.”
Jay Carpenter has set up a watchmaking shop in an upstairs room of their home. He sources various components from overseas markets and then makes and assembles the watches himself.
The watches have silicone bands and stainless-steel cases, along with high-end batteries.
“They have high-end parts, but not at a pretentious price tag,” Jay Carpenter said.
“I wanted to combine the classic look of a watch with more of a modern, transitional comfortable band, so that is why I came up with the silicone bands,” he said.
Handley Watches is competing in a marketplace that has been altered significantly by the introduction of smartwatches that offer digital tools such as tracking the wearers’ health-conscious goals such as the number of steps they take, as well as by online selling.
The overall market for watches is almost $50 billion year, according to a June report by McKinsey & Co., which predicts a growth rate of 1% to 3% each year between 2019 and 2025 (compared to branded fine jewelry’s growth at 8% to 12% a year).
The report also predicts a shift toward direct-to-consumer business models over retail models, which will “upend the industry’s current structure, requiring brands to improve client serving capabilities and multibrand retailers to search for new ways to add value.
Sales of Handley Watches in 2021 are up about 220% from the same period last year.
“The watch business is going great,” Carpenter said. “E-commerce is the place to be. Traditional collectors are paying huge premiums for timepieces. Appreciation is out of control now in a good way, and online sales are up around the world.”
“The smartwatch pieces that you see that are more popular are getting more people into wearing traditional timepieces,” he said.
The use of smartwatches took a bite out of traditional watch sales a few years ago, but sales have since been recovering, said Mike Bisceglia, the founder and president of Stauer, a company that sells its brand of upscale watches, jewelry and other collectibles on its website and catalogs. It has offices in Henrico County and in Burnsville, Minn.
“The watch business has been actually very strong this year,” Bisceglia said,
“The smartwatches have become big, because people were counting their steps,” he said. However, “right now, the big Swiss watchmakers are sold out. They are really on back order because the economy has been so strong. High-end watches have had one of their best years ever. The prices on high-end watches have gone absolutely through the roof. Even vintage watches have gone up in price.”
The Carpenters are selling their watches at prices they hope will be attractive to both high-end and mid-market consumers. On the company’s website, the roughly 15 watches sell for between about $175 and $230.
Handley Watches has sought to build its market by cultivating corporate partnerships and professional athlete endorsement deals, such as from professional golfer Harold Varner III, who endorsed its products in August. The company also has developed a number of local partnerships, one example being a custom watch that was created for a recent member guest event at Hermitage Country Club.
Handley names its watches after locations and landmarks around Virginia, such as “The Libbie,” “The Belle” and “The Jefferson.” One of the watches is named “The Nester.” “Nester is the street where I grew up in Winchester,” said Jay Carpenter, whose roots also factor in the company’s name.
“I grew up on Nester Drive, which is right around the corner from the high school and elementary school where my parents taught and my father was a coach. The high school is John Handley High School.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Holiday gift returns may end up with this Bethesda company
By Jeff Clabaugh, Wtop-Fm | AP
BETHESDA, Md. — Bethesda, Maryland-based Liquidity Services has been helping retail, industrial and government clients capitalize on returned merchandise, overstocked goods and excess inventory for more than 20 years. And it will be a big part of repurposing gift returns again this post-holiday season.
Liquidity Services, whose online auction sites include GovDeals.com, SurplusBid.com, Bid4Assets.com and Liquidation.com, is big and growing. The company, with more than 650 employees including about 100 locally, logged more than $244 million in gross merchandise volume in fiscal year 2021, a measure of how much product it moved, up 24% from the previous fiscal year. Its near-term objective is $1.5 billion in annual gross merchandise volume.
That requires a lot of storage space between buying and selling, and Liquidity Services currently has more tan 1 million square feet of total warehouse space.
In November, Liquidity Services opened a 100,000-square-foot warehouse in Pittston, Pennsylvania just to keep up with its retail merchandise segment growth. Retail now makes up 25% of the company’s gross merchandise volume.
As the holidays have come to an end, gift returns will be highly impacted by the pandemic-era swell in online purchases.
“Last year about 10% of all in-store purchases were returned, so that’s a pretty significant volume. What is interesting is that as e-commerce grows, e-commerce returns are even a greater share. E-commerce returns are at a rate of 15% of 20% or more,” according to Jeff Rechtzigel, vice president and general manager of Liquidity Services’ retail division.
And for retailers, resellers like Liquidity Services are usually the best option for returned merchandise.
“More often than not, it doesn’t go back on the shelf,” Rechtzigel said. “Usually the box has been opened. The packaging has been damaged in some way. And it’s not perfect.”
Returned merchandise is most often repurchased by discounters, online resellers and even Mom and Pop stores.
An estimated $114 billion in holiday merchandise sales will be returned this season, and companies like Liquidity Services and others in what is known as reverse logistics also keep some of that from being simply discarded.
Returned and excess merchandise create about 5 billion pounds of landfill waste annually, according to D.C.-based reverse logistics company Optoro.
Liquidity Services has also recently branched out into direct-to-consumer surplus sales, AllSurplus Deals, sort of cuts out the middleman’s middleman, selling returned and overstocked items at deep discounts directly to consumers.
Those sales are through an online bidding auction format, though the merchandise itself is only available for pickup at the company’s newly-opened 85,000-square-foot warehouse in Phoenix, but expanding to other markets is the plan.
“Most of those items start at $5 and then competitive bidding results in a sale,” Rechtzigel said. “Consumers then pick up their purchases, often getting deals at 80% or 90% off the retail value.”
Even with its fast-growing retail segment, the majority of Liquidity Services business is outside of that segment, and it moves an eclectic mix of items.
“We have an industrial vertical that sells biopharma equipment, or energy equipment or farming machinery,” Rechtzigel said. “We also have a government services business that has some interesting stock. So we’ll sell planes, helicopters, restored automobiles. We recently sold an island.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The Philadelphia Eagles' defense is ranked No. 5 in the NFL so far this season. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Washington’s offense has stalled since the team moved to .500 in Week 13, recording its three worst performances by yardage starting with the team’s first game against Dallas. Against the Cowboys, Washington recorded a season-low 224 yards of net offense, then it followed that performance with a 237-yard outing against the Eagles and 257 yards in the team’s second meeting with Dallas last week.
The team’s first matchup against the Eagles left a lot to be desired offensively, granted the team was without starting quarterback Taylor Heinicke among other offensive starters. The shuffling players in and out because of injury, illnesses and other reasons throughout the season has resulted in an inconsistent offense.
“It's a good opportunity for a lot of these guys,” Heinicke said about new players getting opportunities. “But at the same time, it's tough when you're down three or four top guys, and you're trying to kind of mix things together.”
Against Philadelphia, Washington ran the ball just 20 times, while passing it 31 times with former New England Patriots practice squad quarterback turned third-stringer Garrett Gilbert. Washington finished with a season-low 66 yards on the ground in that game, and two of the team’s three worst rushing performances have come in their past three games. Washington trailed for nearly the whole contest against the Dallas Cowboys last week, forcing them to throw the ball more.
During the team’s four-game winning streak, the team ran the ball more than or as many times as they passed it. But offensive coordinator Scott Turner wants the offense to remain balanced, noting that they’ve won games this season with both styles of play, running and passing.
“You don’t want to be predictable,” Turner said. “You match your strengths against a defense’s weakness. Obviously, it’s not just either pick, run or pass. There’s a lot of different kinds of runs. There’s a lot of different kinds of passes. You try to match that up with the defense and try to get matchups to benefit your players.”
Two years in, how much better off is Washington under Ron Rivera?
With its playoff hopes on the line, Washington will need a strong performance from offense against Philadelphia’s top-five defense. The Eagles boast top-10 rushing and passing defenses; their run defense allows 3.88 yards per carry, fourth in the NFL, while Philadelphia’s secondary is anchored by cornerback Darius Slay, who was named to the Pro Bowl last week for the fourth time in his career.
“Our guys are working hard, trying to get better every day. We’ve had a couple rough weeks,” Turner said. “There’s obviously no doubt about that. We’re looking and everything we’re doing is trying to go give ourselves the best chance to go beat the Eagles.”
Washington’s defensive line struggled against the Eagles as well in the first matchup, giving up 238 rushing yards on 5.8 yards per carry. Jonathan Allen said Thursday that he believes everyone is at fault for the group’s recent performances, from the players to the coaches.
Allen credited opposing offenses for scheming well against the defense, but he also said the defensive line hasn’t been as sharp as they had been in games past. Sunday, Allen wants the defensive line to get back on the same page and play a more consistent brand of football to finish the season.
“I just want to go out there and I want to play good football, want to represent myself well on the football field,” Allen said. “I don't think I've done that the last two weeks on the field. I don't think anybody on this team has done that so I just want to go out there and play with a lot of heart, pride. And you know, we'll see what happens.”
Washington’s offensive rookies have performed well for the team the past few weeks. Tight end John Bates and wide receiver Dyami Brown earned high praise from the coaching staff this week: Turner said that Bates has “really exceeded our expectations,” while Rivera said Brown excited him with some of his plays against the Cowboys and he wants to see more from his rookie wideout.
Jaret Patterson had 33 yards on nine carries last week, both his most since Week 8 against the Denver Broncos, and said he’s ready for whatever workload he gets in his final two weeks, especially with Gibson on the covid-19 reserve list.
“I always stay ready so I don’t have to get ready,” Patterson said. “My mindset’s always been like that… just stand ready for whatever opportunity comes my way and just take full advantage of it.”
Injury report: Running back Antonio Gibson, guard Ereck Flowers, tackle Sam Cosmi and punter Tress Way landed on the covid-19 reserve list this week, so they’ll be out as well as cornerback William Jackson (calf). Montez Sweat, whose brother was killed Tuesday, is questionable as is wideout Curtis Samuel (hamstring) and defensive lineman James Smith-Williams (illness).
Eagles running backs Miles Sanders (hand) and Jordan Howard (stinger) are out and questionable respectively. | null | null | null | null | null |
After signing with the Washington Football Team in May, left tackle Charles Leno wasted little time in not only solidifying the team’s offensive line, but also proving to be more to his new home.
Through his foundation Beyond the Entertainer, the eight-year veteran and his wife, Jennifer Leno, have turned the month of December into a month of giving through an initiative they’ve aptly named “Leno Claus.” The tradition is one they started in 2020 in Chicago, when he was playing for the Bears, and planned to continue after signing in Washington — despite inherent obstacles with the move, the arrival of a new baby and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
On Day 1 of Leno Claus, the couple provided 40 jackets to the United Mission Relief, a Virginia-based nonprofit that provides disaster and recovery resources to underserved communities. A week later, on Day 8, they brought boxes of diapers, toothpaste and other toiletries to families at the Ronald McDonald House in Falls Church, Va.
“Leno Claus definitely comes down to giving back to the community, but also spreading awareness,” Charles Leno said. “That’s a huge thing that I’m trying to do, is spread awareness of the different services and different nonprofits out there, and then also giving people opportunities to get involved with those nonprofits. We worked with mental health nonprofits, homeless shelters and battered women’s shelters, things like that. Just trying to spread awareness because we know people are struggling with things, especially through covid.”
The award will provide the Lenos $10,000 toward a charity of their choice and extend a project they’ve been planning for years.
Instead of relying on an outside company to run their foundation, the two decided long ago that they would manage it themselves. Jennifer Leno went back to school to get a master’s degree in nonprofit management, and last year they formally launched Beyond the Entertainer.
Leno Claus was its first initiative, and created, in part, through the couple’s familiarity with Chicago. The 2021 version of Leno Claus required a bit more creativity as they adapted to new surroundings. The Lenos partnered with The Hogfarmers, a local group that helps children and families affected by pediatric cancer. They also sought the input from others through social media.
“I just remember when I was young just how impactful someone with my status can be,” Charles Leno said. “I remember going to a Raiders camp when I was younger and Tim Brown was there and Jerry Rice was there. Guys that probably didn’t even know at the time that they made an impact on my life telling me different things.
“It’s like thinking beyond what the entertainer does. You can still be a part of sport, you can still be a part of the entertainment or whatever industry you want to do. But you don’t have to just be that person in the spotlight at all times. You can think beyond that, whether that’s an agent or GM or coach — anything.” | null | null | null | null | null |
DOVER, Del. — The minimum wage in the state of Delaware will be increasing from $9.25 per hour to $10.50 per hour.
Delaware’s business owners have had mixed reactions about the change. Some say it increases consumer spending, while improving worker morale and customer service. But others say businesses can’t afford to boost pay after struggling through the pandemic. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: D.C. can’t fix distracted driving. It can fix street design.
Allison Hart was hit and killed as she rode her bike in a D.C. crosswalk on Sept. 13. (Courtesy of the Hart Family) (courtesy the Hart Family/the Hart family)
By Matthew Koehler
Matthew Koehler is a D.C.-based freelance writer.
There was another traffic crash involving a child. This one was in the 3300 block of Wheeler Road SE. A 9-year-old child is paralyzed. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) made what WAMU reporter Martin Austermuhle identified as a rare appearance to urge “especially drivers … to slow down, put the phones down, and in school zones be mindful of our young people.”
These words fall flat, though, given the fact that D.C. has already lowered the speed limit to 20 mph — 15 around schools, playgrounds, recreational facilities, etc. Encouraging drivers to behave better and even changing the law won’t work. If you don’t believe me, walk, bike or even drive around the city on any given day, and you’ll see what I mean.
The statistics and incident reports back this up.
There has been a rash of these types of crashes recently, and we all remember the heartbreaking story of the two little girls, 6 and 9 years old, and their father hit in a crosswalk on National Walk to School Day in October. They survived, but the 6-year-old needed extensive surgery.
Back in September, a 5-year-old girl was struck in a crosswalk and killed. Later that month, 4-year-old Nathan Ballard-Means was also struck in a crosswalk, but he survived.
Scrolling through Twitter, there’s another video showing a hit-and-run of a 9-year-old on a bicycle. The driver didn’t stop at a stop sign and nearly clipped the curb making a left turn. Though the hit-and-run is on the driver, the behavior could be eliminated with better road design that forces better behavior from everyone behind the wheel.
Many of us probably have our own stories of near misses, whether we were walking, cycling or even driving ourselves. Several years ago, I was struck by an impatient driver while biking in a crosswalk on 4th Street SW. That road, specifically redesigned to be a “shared-use” road, didn’t prevent me from getting hit. The driver who hit me had intentionally sped around another car that had stopped to let me cross.
The fact glaring us in the face, and we all know this, is that drivers are the problem. We’ve long had a culture and lax enforcement that turn a blind eye or even encourage bad driving. And, in many ways, our roads are designed to let us get away with it.
We’re both distracted drivers and bad drivers — a deadly combination.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the National Safety Council, the D.C. police, the mayor and the entire world, distracted and impaired driving is really the problem. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that distracted driving caused 3,142 deaths in 2019 and injured approximately 424,000 people.
D.C. has laws against using a cellphone or any non-hands-free device while driving, but, honestly, how often is that enforced? Many of us have witnessed distracted drivers at all times of the day, especially rush hour, talking on or otherwise using their phones. I’ve seen many police officers do the same — while making turns into a crosswalk with a walk signal.
At the height of the pandemic with emptier streets, this got only worse. Drivers drove faster, and more people were struck and seriously injured or killed. The bad driving doesn’t seem to be abating, either. In D.C., serious injuries and fatalities because of traffic crashes are on a several-year upward trend. There have been 359 serious injuries and 40 fatalities as of Christmas week, according to Vision Zero data.
Asking drivers to slow down and stop being distracted never works. Ever. Changing the speed limit won’t help either without some kind of consistent enforcement. The only thing that makes safer drivers is safer road design. And if we don’t have officials who can make that happen, then it’s time for them to go. | null | null | null | null | null |
Our research found that Detroit neighborhoods with larger immigrant populations thrived
Afghan men play soccer at Fort Pickett on Dec. 16 in Blackstone, Va., where up to 10,000 Afghan refugees have been housed before permanent settlement. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
By Steve Tobocman
Alan Mallach
While federal policies dictate who enters the United States and the level of short-term resettlement support, cities and towns across our nation will help their new neighbors adjust and integrate, and the effects — both positive and negative — of immigration are typically felt at the local level. As these communities prepare to welcome Afghan refugees and asylum seekers as a measure of gratitude for their support of U.S. troops and concern about their future safety, people who already live here undoubtedly have concerns about what it will take to integrate these arrivals and how they’ll affect long-term residents and local economies as we recover from a global pandemic.
Our recent research on rapid immigration in two Detroit neighborhoods suggests that communities welcoming Afghan immigrants have much to look forward to, and that their arrival could particularly benefit other postindustrial cities faced with depopulation and job loss, as well as other struggling communities. Despite pockets of revitalization, Detroit is still struggling: September’s census figures confirmed that, for the fifth decade in a row, the city’s population had declined. While the city’s mayor, Mike Duggan, is contesting the count, the continued exodus is undeniable, as is its toll: poverty, abandoned homes and storefronts, and a shrinking tax base for too many Detroit neighborhoods.
The two neighborhoods we studied — Banglatown, straddling the border of Detroit and the city of Hamtramck, Mich., and Chadsey Condon, on the city’s southwest side — look very different from the rest of the area despite having the same income levels and decades of population loss that plague so much of Detroit. That’s because the number of immigrants — mostly from Bangladesh, Yemen, Mexico and Central and South America — in these two neighborhoods has grown by nearly 50 percent over the past 20 years, from around 12,000 to 17,500, while the citywide population plummeted more than 25 percent over the same period.
How Latinos saved American cities
Population growth is just the beginning of the story. Tax foreclosures, evictions, crime and vacant houses — problems plaguing large swaths of Detroit — were all lower in these two neighborhoods and declining faster than elsewhere. While homeowners have been increasingly replaced by absentee investors across Detroit, homeownership increased in these two neighborhoods, despite immigrants’ modest incomes. More than 100 new businesses have opened along Conant Street in the heart of Banglatown: A strip plagued by vacancies a decade ago now bustles with activity and energy with spice shops, halal restaurants and butchers, Bangladeshi restaurants and clothing stores, doctors, dentists and cellphone outlets.
Our study found that residents of these neighborhoods — immigrant and nonimmigrant alike — were more satisfied with and more optimistic about their neighborhoods. They felt safer than people in the rest of the city. And these benefits occurred without the downsides of gentrification.
In Detroit, immigrants are no more affluent than their neighbors. As homeowners and renters, they are largely replacing residents who are leaving and filling up vacant properties, rather than displacing those who wished to stay. The storefronts they are moving into are often empty or underutilized. This experience should prove instructive for other postindustrial cities looking to stabilize neighborhoods without displacing the longtime residents and businesses that have remained through thick and thin.
Cities can learn from the promising practices new immigrants may bring. Our study found that real estate activity in Banglatown and Chadsey Condon was occurring outside the formal banking and mortgage financial systems, as immigrants leveraged their own financial resources and community capital networks to buy and fix up homes. Cities can boost homeownership and property improvement by building on these nontraditional methods of financing. They might help immigrants acquire vacant property from government and public land banks, as well as provide housing counseling services in immigrants’ native languages. Local governments must be careful, however, not to quash the organic ways immigrants will find to thrive in their new communities, with the creation of new, unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles.
Americans spent 20 years forgetting Afghanistan. I didn’t have that luxury.
The impacts of rapid immigration are most profound in communities with larger immigrant and refugee clusters than the 250 or 500 new Afghan arrivals that most communities will see. Still, the profound impacts observed in our research were centered in Banglatown, where the Bangladeshi community grew from 2,000 foreign-born residents to 6,000 over 18 years, suggesting that even small numbers of new arrivals can lead to benefits.
Historically, when refugee groups have been settled in small numbers in many different places, over the subsequent years, they tend to cluster in a smaller number of those places, creating larger ethnic nodes. We suspect the same thing will happen with Afghan refugees, which only further underscores the benefit to communities pursuing welcoming policies — they likely will attract additional Afghan families as secondary migrants.
These new Afghan neighbors will not likely squeeze U.S. workers out of jobs. In fact, the economist David Card, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on real-world labor markets, found that the labor impacts from the Mariel boatlift — in which 150,000 Cubans and Haitians arrived in South Florida between May and September 1980 — suggest the opposite.
Card’s research found that this large influx of lower-skilled labor “had virtually no effect on the wage rates of less-skilled non-Cuban workers,” nor evidence of an increase in unemployment among less-skilled Black residents or other non-Cuban workers. The same was true for Cuban workers already in Miami. Simply put, immigration is not a zero-sum game between immigrants and the people who are already here.
Successful integration efforts must consider the social, as well as the economic, issues that will arise. While our focus groups, surveys and interviews found no open hostility between Detroit’s immigrants and their U.S.-born neighbors, we also found little interaction between the groups, and we turned up a degree of suspicion and misunderstanding between them.
Communities welcoming large numbers of Afghan arrivals should make intentional efforts to build social cohesion between immigrant and longtime community members, such as inviting new immigrants to block club meetings and other community planning efforts or using the arts as a way to build bridges between cultures. The challenges involved in connecting long-term residents and new immigrant communities are real, but also are surmountable, as were the tensions between immigrants and their neighbors going back to the 19th century.
Welcoming America and scores of official welcoming cities and counties across America have shown how to build bridges between immigrants and longtime residents and develop mutual trust and understanding. States and cities are creating offices of immigrant affairs, multi-sector nonprofit initiatives, small business support centers and workforce development entities that help immigrants navigate their new hometowns while recognizing the value immigrant inclusion brings to all members of their communities. This infrastructure, which already exists, can be tapped to assist communities with their new Afghan arrivals.
We can make welcoming Afghan arrivals part of our recovery from the health and economic crises of the past 18 months. The same benefits and opportunities we observed in Detroit are happening across the American heartland, including neighborhoods revitalized by Bosnians in St. Louis, Ahiska Turks in Dayton, Somalis in Minneapolis/St. Paul and Burmese in Buffalo. Immigration is good for cities and neighborhoods, and an immigrant welcoming strategy is good for America. | null | null | null | null | null |
Dan Reeves, NFL head coach for 23 years, dies at 77
Dan Reeves coaching a playoff game for the Atlanta Falcons in 1999. (Ric Feld/AP)
Dan Reeves, who won a Super Bowl as a player with the Dallas Cowboys but was best known for a long coaching career highlighted by four more appearances in the title game with the Denver Broncos and the Atlanta Falcons, all losses, died Jan. 1 at his home in Atlanta. He was 77.
A statement released by his family through former Falcons media relations director Aaron Salkin said the cause was complications from dementia.
Mr. Reeves was a versatile player who played a key role in the Cowboys becoming an NFL powerhouse in the 1960s under Tom Landry, but his own coaching career — stretching over three teams and 23 seasons — is where he truly left his mark on the league.
Including a stint with the New York Giants, Mr. Reeves totaled 190 coaching victories — the ninth-most in NFL history. But he was never able to win the biggest game of all, going 0-4 in the Super Bowl, all of them blowout losses.
Mr. Reeves, Marv Levy and Bud Grant are the only coaches to lose four times in the Super Bowl.
Just 37 when he took over as coach of the Broncos in 1981, Mr. Reeves built a team around quarterback John Elway that made three Super Bowl appearances, earned six trips to the playoffs and won five AFC West titles over his 12-year tenure.
After a bitter parting from the Broncos, which led to allegations that Elway colluded with offensive coordinator and successor Mike Shanahan to force a change, Mr. Reeves moved to New York to coach the Giants in 1993.
In his second season with a franchise that had experienced little success, Mr. Reeves guided a team known as the “Dirty Birds” to a 14-2 record in the regular season and their first trip to the Super Bowl.
He again came up short of a championship, losing to Shanahan, Elway and the Broncos, 34-19.
Mr. Reeves engineered a trade that brought Michael Vick to the Falcons and made his final playoff appearance in 2002, when Atlanta became the first road team to win a playoff game in Green Bay.
But Vick was injured during the 2003 preseason, and Mr. Reeves was fired after the team won only three of its first 13 games.
Mr. Reeves remained in Atlanta after his retirement, most notably serving as an adviser to Georgia State University, when it launched a football program.
Daniel Edward Reeves was born Jan. 19, 1944, in Rome, Ga. He grew up in Americus, Ga., where he played football, basketball and baseball in high school.
He played collegiately at South Carolina, where he was a three-year starter at quarterback from 1962 to 1964 and also played baseball for the Gamecocks.
Better known as a runner than a passer, Mr. Reeves was not drafted after college. He signed a free-agent deal with the Cowboys, who initially wanted him to play safety but wound up moving him to running back.
Mr. Reeves emerged as one of the team’s key players just as the Cowboys were establishing themselves as the successful franchise that would become known as America’s team.
The following season, Mr. Reeves rushed for 603 yards and five TDs, starting every game, as the Cowboys made another run to the playoffs. They were thwarted again by Green Bay one win shy of the Super Bowl, losing to the Packers on a touchdown in the closing seconds of the famed “Ice Bowl” game at frigid Lambeau Field.
A knee injury in 1968 limited Mr. Reeves’s effectiveness, and he played only a limited role over the rest of his career. But Landry recognized his abilities, asking Reeves to serve as a player-coach while running backs such as Duane Thomas and Calvin Hill took on more prominent backfield roles.
Mr. Reeves retired as a player after the 1972 season, becoming a full-time assistant on Landry’s staff. Survivors include his wife, Pam, three children and six grandchildren. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Bradie Tennell of the USA performs during the Ladies Short Program at the Figure Skating World Championships in Stockholm, Sweden, Wednesday, March 24, 2021. Tennell, two-time U.S. champion and a favorite to make the Olympic team, has withdrawn from next week’s nationals. Tennell, who has missed the season’s main competitions on the road to the Beijing Games, has been dealing with a right foot injury. She still could make the American squad for February 2022 Olympics by petitioning for a spot.(AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Jan. 6 was anything but typical, with the coronavirus having kept many employees at home. Yet, no matter where they were as the insurrected unfolded, Capitol employees could not help but feel violated as they saw rioters invade and vandalize their workplace.
For 22 consecutive days beginning on Jan. 6, Breiterman worked around the clock, staying in a D.C. hotel where the department put her up with other officers whose grueling schedules kept them away from their families.
McKnight began to re-evaluate his purpose and how he could be “part of positive change in a way that is most authentic for me.” He also was concerned about his safety at work, where he now felt like “anything could happen.”
Richards was working from home in Philadelphia on Jan. 6, communicating throughout the insurrection with her boss, who was alone, barricaded inside her Capitol office. In the ensuing days, Richards found herself cataloging the “what-ifs” from that day — what if there had been no pandemic and the Capitol had been open? What if there had been the normal retinue of staffers on hand? What if there had been school tours and tourists? | null | null | null | null | null |
9 mostly pessimistic education predictions for 2022 -- from a teacher
Shamans perform a ritual of predictions for the coming year at San Cristobal hill in Lima on Dec. 29, 2021. (Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images)
Larry Ferlazzo, who has taught at Luther Burbank High School for the past 19 years, for a decade has written a column making annual education predictions (see his previous lists at the end of this post).
It’s time for him to look into his crystal ball for 2022. Take a look and let him know what you think in the comments — as well as make your own.
In addition to being a full-time teacher, Ferlazzo has written or edited two books on education, writes a weekly teacher advice column for Education Week, and hosts a popular resource-sharing blog.
He has also written best-and-worst roundups of education news, and here’s the one for 2021:
There was a lot of education news in 2021. Here’s the best and worst of it — by a teacher
Mask mandates in many schools will continue through the fall and will, in fact, increase in numbers. The omicron variant of the novel coronavirus will have successors, and we will all learn the Greek alphabet. The vast majority of school districts, however, will not be choosing to return to distance learning — even with high community transmission rates. Parent pushback would be too great, and many schools have learned the hard way how to reduce transmission risk. Of course, there are also some states that will continue to do little or nothing to reduce those risks.
State standardized test scores will be down. Many schools officials will NOT see that a major cause for these drops will be that the districts are only giving lip service to social-emotional learning, mental health support and genuine accelerated learning. Instead they will put their money and energy behind remediation and double down on adding instructional time and “drill-and-kill.” They will continue to appear dumbfounded that what they are doing is not working, and conclude that they should add more of the same. Welcome to another downward spiral.
Attacks on teaching about systemic racism will intensify leading up to the November midterm elections as Republicans continue to believe it will be a hot-button issue to galvanize voter turnout. It generally won’t be successful in that Republican aim, but the attacks will hurt students, their families and teachers as educators will self-censor themselves. After the election and polls find that these attacks on critical race theory — an intellectual movement that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism — didn’t expand the Republican base. Conservative strategists will forget about the issue, but damaging laws passed by Republican-dominated state legislatures restricting how teachers deal with race and other issues will remain on the books, and their impact will continue.
There will be some major consolidations in the educational technology world more educators conclude that yes, our students need more personalized learning and, no, technology might not be the only, and not even main, vehicle through which to provide it. Smaller class sizes, listening, connecting to student interests, building relationships can lead to better learning. Bye, bye unicorns.
President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan — or some version of it — will eventually pass. It’s unclear whether it will universal prekindergarten and a child-tax credit extension. As countless studies have found, outside factors such as child poverty have a much greater impact on student achievement than we teachers do, and the child tax credit has already done an impressive job at reducing child poverty. Quality pre-K programs have also been found to positively influence later academic performance. So these two efforts could end up being the most effective school improvement efforts done in many years — if they actually happen.
Despite recent school shootings, efforts to reduce police presence in schools will continue. A high priority will be made to twin these changes with an increase in other harm reduction and safety strategies, including restorative practices. Major experiments and research on how to implement these strategies, particularly in secondary schools, will take place and their results widely disseminated. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jan. 6 was anything but typical, with the coronavirus having kept many employees at home. Yet, no matter where they were as the insurrection unfolded, Capitol employees could not help but feel violated as they saw rioters invade and vandalize their workplace.
For 22 consecutive days beginning on Jan. 6, Breiterman worked around-the-clock, staying in a D.C. hotel where the department put her up with other officers whose grueling schedules kept them away from their families.
McKnight began to reevaluate his purpose and how he could be “part of positive change in a way that is most authentic for me.” He also was concerned about his safety at work, where he now felt like “anything could happen.”
Richards was working from home in Philadelphia on Jan. 6, communicating throughout the insurrection with her boss, who was alone, barricaded inside her Capitol office. In the ensuing days, Richards found herself cataloguing the “what-ifs” from that day — what if there had been no pandemic and the Capitol had been open? What if there had been the normal retinue of staffers on hand? What if there had been school tours and tourists? | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Where I went wrong in a covid year of column writing
An officer from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) stands next to a signage encouraging people to wear masks ahead of New Year's Eve celebrations at Times Square in New York on Dec. 31. (Stefan Jeremiah/Reuters)
Not really, but conservatism became less attractive as packaged by the Party of Trump. It simply became easier to poke Republicans than Democrats, even if President Biden’s wild-spending bunch began their rule with a massive spree. Though I generally prefer a moderate approach to most problems (and libations), middle-of-the-road is a dangerous place for a columnist. At best it’s wishy-washy; more gravely, it puts one at great risk of also being boring — my greatest fear as a writer. My goal has always been to keep everyone awake until the last word, including me. | null | null | null | null | null |
For Utah, a season that began with tragedy ends with a historic trip to the Rose Bowl
Utah defeated Oregon on Dec. 3 to earn the school’s first Pac-12 championship and its first Rose Bowl berth. (Chase Stevens/AP)
A decade after joining the Pac-12 conference, Utah has enjoyed a season to be celebrated. The Utes won at least 10 games for the second time in three years, they won the school’s first Pac-12 title, and they earned their first trip to the Rose Bowl, where they will face Ohio State on Saturday.
But among the team’s accolades and accomplishments — an early-season turnaround, an explosive offense and two wins over conference favorite Oregon — lies a sorrowful undercurrent following the deaths of two players, one before the season and another during the campaign.
“Obviously, a landmark season for Utah, winning the Pac-12 for the first time and getting to a Rose Bowl for the first time,” said Josh Newman, who covers Utah athletics for the Salt Lake Tribune, “but there is this cloud that is hovering over the program, unfortunately, because of what has transpired here in the last year.”
What you need to know about the College Football Playoff
Running back Ty Jordan finished a pandemic-shortened 2020 season on a hot streak, cutting, dashing and driving for 468 rushing yards and six touchdowns during the final three games for Utah.
Jordan set the tone for the Utes on the field. Off the turf, he brightened a room and inspired family and friends. He plotted a path to the school’s first Rose Bowl appearance with quarterback Cam Rising. A year before Rising and Utah actualized that dream, Jordan died by accidental gunshot wound in Denton, Tex., on Christmas night 2020.
“I talked to people in his life from Texas, from when he grew up; he didn’t know gun etiquette, never used guns before, and he didn’t know what he was doing,” Newman said. “A young person, 19 years old, had his whole life in front of him, and an accident took him away. Just talking about it, it’s unfair, and it’s tragic, and it’s tough to get over.”
Jordan’s No. 22 became omnipresent as the team sought to honor his impact.
Portal 22 in the stands of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium now bears his image and a logo with the abbreviation “LLTJ” — “Long Live Ty Jordan.” The letters are enclosed within an inverted 22, which forms a heart. Jordan’s highlights play on a continuous loop on a large screen in the lobby of Utah’s practice facility, and Newman said a handful of makeshift memorials emerged across Salt Lake City following his death.
The university paid players’ way to Jordan’s funeral at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, Tex. It also announced a scholarship in Jordan’s name, which was awarded to cornerback Aaron Lowe, Jordan’s close friend and high school teammate. Lowe changed his jersey number from 2 to 22 to honor Jordan.
Such gestures continued into this season, when, in between the third and fourth quarters of every home game, Coach Kyle Whittingham narrated a video on the Jumbotron encouraging fans to share a “moment of loudness” in Jordan’s remembrance.
“It’s very important,” Whittingham told the Tribune. “The steps we’ve taken, the job the administration has done to help with this. … It’s just, in my opinion, critical that we keep his memory alive.”
Michigan and Georgia prepare for bright lights and stars, even as they’d look great in mud
Utah lost two of its first three games, but a Sept. 25 victory over Washington State started a 9-1 run that included two drubbings of the reigning conference champion Ducks. But hours after the Washington State win, Utah suffered another devastating loss when Lowe was killed at a house party in Salt Lake City. The man suspected of Lowe’s murder was charged in October.
Again, Utah players flew to Texas for a teammate’s funeral. The “LLTJ” logo was altered to include “AL,” and the school created a scholarship in Lowe’s name. Rising, the starting quarterback, donated half the earnings from his clothing line to both scholarship funds. The team retired the No. 22, and since Lowe’s death, Pac-12 programs have painted their 22-yard lines red in tribute.
During the Utes’ first home game after Lowe’s death, an Oct. 16 win over Arizona State, a crowd of more than 51,000 turned on cellphone flashlights to honor Jordan and Lowe during the “moment of loudness.”
Utah ended the year on a six-game winning streak, smashing Oregon on Dec. 3 to win its first Pac-12 championship.
Throughout the Utes’ run, junior college transfer Tavion Thomas replaced Jordan’s production, rushing for 1,041 yards and 20 touchdowns this season. All-American linebacker Devin Lloyd spearheaded a defensive unit that allowed a conference-best 20.6 points per game.
Cincinnati’s Ahmad ‘Sauce’ Gardner will get a chance to cook on the biggest stage
Ahead of Saturday’s Rose Bowl, Lloyd and some of his teammates reflected on their goals and their grief.
“We went through a lot this year,” cornerback Clark Phillips III told reporters. “We made goals at the beginning of the season, and at the end of the season we lost some people. We lost one of our dear teammates in Aaron Lowe. We lost Ty Jordan last year. Just being in that [Pac-12 championship] game, it was something that we dreamed of and that those guys dreamed of. We felt like we were playing for something huge, something way bigger.”
Offensive lineman Nick Ford said that adversity forced Utah’s underclassmen to grow and mature. Tight end Brant Kuithe said a Rose Bowl victory would be “a great way to finish off the year” after a season of highs and lows.
Lowe’s family will be in attendance Saturday, and Jordan’s family could join them, according to a university spokesperson. During a second-half “moment of loudness,” they will witness a ritual that has become familiar to players and fans as they commemorate Jordan and Lowe and try to summon their spirits to the field that both dreamed of playing on.
“We been playing for them and through them all season,” Lloyd said. “We dedicated so much of what we do to them just because they left such a huge impact on everybody on the team. I mean, their spirit is with us. You can feel them in the games and in the locker room. You can feel them with us. So just playing for them and letting them strengthen us in games, it’s something that we take extreme pride in.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Offensive tackle Cornelius Lucas (78) believes he has had three bouts with the coronavirus. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Cornelius Lucas jokes that the coronavirus — a she, he’s decided — has a thing for him.
The Washington Football Team’s 6-foot-8, 327-pound offensive tackle is paid to protect, to use his size and years of refined technique to shed defensive linemen and keep his quarterback upright.
But over the last two years, Lucas has struggled to block out a virus that he believes has infected him three times. Each visit has included similar symptoms that can take weeks to subside, making his physically demanding job even more difficult.
“Yeah, people joke about me having a weak immune system,” he said, “but I feel like mine is really strong if I can make it through three rounds.”
Since Dec. 8, Washington has placed 36 players on its covid-19 list, decimating its defensive line, then its quarterbacks room, its linebacking corps, offensive line and skill positions. It even got the punter, Pro Bowler Tress Way, and affected nine assistant coaches and multiple staff members. The team still has eight players in the NFL protocols ahead of Sunday’s pivotal game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
Of those who have returned, many have shared detailed accounts of their varied experiences. Some felt nothing, other than the boredom of isolation. Others, like Lucas, had multiple unpleasant days, with body aches, shortness of breath and symptoms that lingered for days, if not longer. All missed either games or practice time.
“Not everybody has those symptoms,” Coach Ron Rivera said. “But the guys that do, I know the trainers work a little bit extra on them. I know we, as coaches, pay attention to that and then some don’t have any symptoms or have any lingering symptoms. … Even though it’s more contagious and they say [the omicron variant] is not as strong a variant as the delta, guys still have symptoms and guys still have some reactions to it. It affects everybody differently.”
Lucas is convinced his first encounter with the coronavirus was in early 2020, before most had heard of covid-19, before most cities shut down in response to its threat and before mask-wearing became a mandated new norm. (The first confirmed case in the U.S. was reported by the CDC on Jan. 21, 2020). Lucas was a soon-to-be free agent, just weeks away from signing a two-year deal with Washington when he was laid up with what he thought was a more common virus.
“I think no one knew what it was when I had it the first time,” he said. “ … I struggled like all of February with it. I had a cough and congestion and all that kind of stuff. They told me it was the flu, but after I had it again and I thought about it, I was like, ‘Hold on, this felt a lot like what I had the first time.’ So I just kind of put two and two together.”
Lucas believes his symptoms were due to the coronavirus that has since infected 50 million people and accounted for 800,000 deaths in the United States. He said he experienced a less-severe version of it at the start of training camp in late July, when he tested positive for the coronavirus and was placed on the team’s covid-19 list, and then again this past month as the virus swept through Washington’s locker room and many others in the NFL.
The December outbreak prompted the NFL to reschedule three games, including Washington’s first meeting with the Eagles. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said at the time that the league anticipated a surge in cases because of data it received earlier showing a waning immunity from vaccines and a shift from mostly staff members being affected to players.
“We’re often at the tip of the spear in seeing some of these changes before they show up in other elements of society because we do have so many tools at our disposal,” Sills said in a conference call with reporters. “We are able to offer on-site testing, we can do genomic sequencing, we have the tracing technology that we have, so that I think that allows us to make some of these observations at a really early stage and help understand when things are changing.”
Anthony Casolaro, Washington’s chief medical officer and the president of the NFL Physicians Society, said that of the 23 covid cases the team at the time, in Week 15, he would have held out “really only two” players from practice because of their symptoms. Most were vaccinated. Most, he said, were “essentially asymptomatic.”
During Week 15, when Washington’s outbreak reached its peak, the NFL required all teams to enter enhanced protocols. The NFL has since adjusted its protocols but in-person interactions remain somewhat impersonal; Washington’s four quarterbacks use the team auditorium, which can hold around 75 people, Rivera said, to spread out during meetings.
Still, breakthrough cases have continued. This week, practice squad quarterback Kyle Shurmur was added to the covid-19 list, along with Way, right tackle Sam Cosmi, running back Antonio Gibson and left guard Ereck Flowers.
“I was pretty sick for the first four or five days, and then I felt better toward the end,” said Allen, who missed the Week 15 loss to the Eagles. “We were hoping that I would be negative going into the game. I wasn’t feeling that bad, but I was still testing positive.
“I got pretty sick. I know some people don’t get sick, but yeah, it wasn’t fun.”
Allen, who is vaccinated, was activated Dec. 24 and played two days later, in the fourth quarter of the team’s blowout loss to the Dallas Cowboys. But he said it took another three days before he finally felt like himself again.
“Warming up for the game on Sunday, I remember I went in about 20 minutes early from warm-ups just because I was exhausted. I just didn’t have my wind back,” he said. “I was surprised. I came back [Dec. 24], we had practice, I was pretty tired when we had a Saturday walk-through, and Sunday I thought I was going to be okay, but I was pretty gassed.”
“I felt fine in the first couple days and then the symptoms really started coming in and it sucked there for a little bit,” he recalled. “ … I had a scratchy throat, runny nose for a little bit, and then I started getting body aches. I tried to do some laundry. I put all the dry clothes in my little hamper bin and walked to my living room. It was 20 steps and I was out of breath.”
Heinicke was able to test out of the protocols early, but still not in time to play the Eagles in Week 15. So Washington scrambled to sign Garrett Gilbert, started him after four light practices and hoped for the best — all while the team’s starter watched from his couch with his play binder in front him.
“I was looking at the formations, the motions and seeing what we were about to run and what the defense was running,” Heinicke said. “Kind of trying to help Garrett from my house, talking to the TV. It’s tough. You’ve battled with these guys throughout the whole year and you want to be with them and it’s a huge, crucial game. You just felt helpless and you don’t like feeling like that.”
“I texted Kam, because Kam was out too,” said Fuller, who felt “a little weak” and “achy” from the virus. “It felt weird, especially just watching it on TV. Usually when you’re out, you’re out there on the sidelines and you feel like you can help or contribute. But just sitting at home definitely was a weird feeling.”
Defensive tackle Jonathan Allen, who is fully vaccinated, said he felt more frustration than any physical ailment. He tested out of the protocols after only five days and didn’t miss a game. But while he was out, his usually regimented routine of workouts and practices were reduced to “absolutely nothing,” he said, save for walks on the treadmill.
“I felt fine,” Jonathan Allen said. “And luckily it happened early enough where I knew I was going to have time to recover and try to get back before the [Week 15 game against the Eagles].”
“I was losing my mind,” he said. “But I didn’t have any symptoms or anything. Just being locked in a room for seven days, it was definitely something I never want to experience again. … I’m healthy, I’m strong and I’m ready to go.”
Lucas is still waiting to be able to say that again.
His latest bout with the coronavirus was the mildest, which he attributes to the vaccine. But it’s been a week and half since he returned and, although he’s nearing full strength, he admits he’s “still pushing through some things.”
“I feel like covid has a thing for me now,” he said with a smile. “ … For some reason, she always finds a way into my life. But we’re writing it off. That’s not happening anymore.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Authorities say the argument was over road rage.
An argument prompted by road-rage ended with one motorist shooting another motorist with a flare gun Saturday morning in a parking lot at Bowie Town Center in Prince George’s County, according to police.
The male victim was taken to a hospital for treatment of injuries not believed to be life-threatening. Police were looking for the shooter and a white Ford pickup truck with a white cap on the bed.
Bowie Police Chief John Nesky said the incident occurred shortly after 9 a.m. during some sort of argument over driving that investigators believe occurred on Route 450.
Nesky said one motorist followed the other motorist to a parking lot on Excelsior Drive in Bowie, just off Collington Road, also known as Route 197, near a grocery store and several other retail shops.
Police released a video that shows two men standing outside their vehicles and arguing. One man then walks back to the white truck, pulls out what Nesky described as a flare gun and fires it at the other man. Police said the man was struck in the cheek by a flare.
Police were called about 9:20 a.m. | null | null | null | null | null |
Offensive tackle Cornelius Lucas believes he has had three bouts with the coronavirus. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Cornelius Lucas jokes that the coronavirus — a she, he has decided — has a thing for him.
The Washington Football Team’s 6-foot-8, 327-pound offensive tackle is paid to protect, to use his size and years of refined technique to shed defensive linemen and keep his quarterback upright. But over the past two years, Lucas has struggled to block out a virus that he believes has infected him three times. Each visit has included similar symptoms that can take weeks to subside, making his physically demanding job even more difficult.
“People joke about me having a weak immune system,” he said, “but I feel like mine is really strong if I can make it through three rounds.”
Since Dec. 8, Washington has placed 36 players on its covid-19 reserve list, decimating its defensive line, then its quarterbacks room, its linebacking corps, offensive line and skill positions. It even got the punter, Pro Bowl pick Tress Way, and affected nine assistant coaches and multiple staff members. The team still has eight players in the NFL protocols ahead of Sunday’s pivotal game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
Of those who have returned, many have shared detailed accounts of their experiences. Some felt nothing, other than the boredom of isolation. Others, such as Lucas, had multiple unpleasant days, with body aches, shortness of breath and symptoms that lingered for days, if not longer. All missed either games or practice time.
“Not everybody has those symptoms,” Coach Ron Rivera said. “But the guys that do, I know the trainers work a little bit extra on them. I know we, as coaches, pay attention to that, and then some don’t have any symptoms or have any lingering symptoms. … Even though it’s more contagious and they say [the omicron variant] is not as strong a variant as the delta, guys still have symptoms and guys still have some reactions to it. It affects everybody differently.”
‘You just felt helpless’
Lucas is convinced his first encounter with the coronavirus was in early 2020, before most had heard of covid-19, before most cities shut down in response to its threat and before mask-wearing became a norm. (The first confirmed case in the United States was reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Jan. 21, 2020.) Lucas was a soon-to-be free agent, just weeks from signing a two-year deal with Washington, when he was laid up with what he thought was a more common virus.
“I think no one knew what it was when I had it the first time,” he said. “… I struggled like all of February with it. I had a cough and congestion and all that kind of stuff. They told me it was the flu, but after I had it again and I thought about it, I was like, ‘Hold on; this felt a lot like what I had the first time.’ So I just kind of put two and two together.”
Lucas believes his symptoms were connected to the virus that has since infected 50 million people and accounted for 800,000 deaths in the United States. He said he experienced a less-severe version of it at the start of training camp in July, when he tested positive and was placed on the covid-19 list, and then again this past month as the virus swept through Washington’s locker room and many others in the NFL.
The December outbreak prompted the NFL to reschedule three games, including Washington’s first meeting with the Eagles. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said at the time that the league anticipated a surge in cases because of data it received earlier showing waning immunity from vaccines and a shift from mostly staff members being affected to players.
“We’re often at the tip of the spear in seeing some of these changes before they show up in other elements of society because we do have so many tools at our disposal,” Sills said during a conference call with reporters. “We are able to offer on-site testing, we can do genomic sequencing, we have the tracing technology that we have, so I think that allows us to make some of these observations at a really early stage and help understand when things are changing.”
Anthony Casolaro, Washington’s chief medical officer and the president of the NFL Physicians Society, said that of the 23 covid cases the team had at the time, in Week 15, he would have held out “really only two” players from practice because of their symptoms. Most were vaccinated. Most, he said, were “essentially asymptomatic.”
During Week 15, when Washington’s outbreak reached its peak, the NFL required all teams to enter enhanced protocols. The NFL has since adjusted its protocols, but in-person interactions remain somewhat impersonal; Washington’s four quarterbacks use the team auditorium, which can hold around 75 people, Rivera said, to spread out during meetings.
Still, breakthrough cases have continued. This past week, practice squad quarterback Kyle Shurmur was added to the covid-19 list, along with Way, right tackle Sam Cosmi, running back Antonio Gibson and left guard Ereck Flowers.
“I was pretty sick for the first four or five days, and then I felt better toward the end,” said Allen, who missed the Week 15 loss to the Eagles. “We were hoping that I would be negative going into the game. I wasn’t feeling that bad, but I was still testing positive. I got pretty sick. I know some people don’t get sick, but yeah, it wasn’t fun.”
Allen, who is vaccinated, was activated Dec. 24 and played two days later, in the fourth quarter of the team’s blowout loss to the Dallas Cowboys. But he said it took another three days before he felt like himself again.
“Warming up for the game on Sunday, I remember I went in about 20 minutes early from warmups just because I was exhausted. I just didn’t have my wind back,” he said. “I was surprised. I came back [Dec. 24], we had practice, I was pretty tired when we had a Saturday walk-through, and Sunday I thought I was going to be okay, but I was pretty gassed.”
“I felt fine in the first couple days and then the symptoms really started coming in and it sucked there for a little bit,” he recalled. “… I had a scratchy throat, runny nose for a little bit, and then I started getting body aches. I tried to do some laundry. I put all the dry clothes in my little hamper bin and walked to my living room. It was 20 steps, and I was out of breath.”
Heinicke was able to test out of the protocols early but not in time to play the Eagles in Week 15. So Washington scrambled to sign Garrett Gilbert, started him after four light practices and hoped for the best — all while the team’s starter watched from his couch with his play binder in front him.
“I was looking at the formations, the motions and seeing what we were about to run and what the defense was running,” Heinicke said. “Kind of trying to help Garrett from my house, talking to the TV. It’s tough. You’ve battled with these guys throughout the whole year and you want to be with them and it’s a huge, crucial game. You just felt helpless.”
“I texted Kam, because Kam was out, too,” said Fuller, who felt “a little weak” and “achy” from the virus. “It felt weird, especially just watching it on TV. Usually when you’re out, you’re out there on the sidelines and you feel like you can help or contribute. But just sitting at home definitely was a weird feeling.”
‘I was losing my mind’
Defensive tackle Jonathan Allen, who is vaccinated, said he felt more frustration than any physical ailment. He tested out of the protocols after only five days and didn’t miss a game. But while he was out, his usually regimented routine of workouts and practices was reduced to “absolutely nothing,” he said, save for walking on a treadmill.
“I felt fine,” he said. “And luckily it happened early enough where I knew I was going to have time to recover and try to get back before the [Week 15 game against the Eagles].”
“I was losing my mind,” he said. “But I didn’t have any symptoms or anything. Just being locked in a room for seven days, it was definitely something I never want to experience again. … I’m healthy, I’m strong, and I’m ready to go.”
Lucas is still waiting to be able to say that. His latest bout with the coronavirus was his mildest, which he attributes to the vaccine. But it has been a week-and-a-half since he returned and, although he’s nearing full strength, he admits he’s “still pushing through some things.”
“I feel like covid has a thing for me now,” he said with a smile. “… For some reason, she always finds a way into my life. But we’re writing it off. That’s not happening anymore.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Jamaica deports man linked to assassination
A former Colombian military member implicated in last year’s assassination of Haiti President Jovenel Moïse will be deported from Jamaica to his home country on Jan. 3, Jamaica’s attorney general said on Saturday.
Palacios was arrested in Jamaica last October and convicted of illegally entering the country from the Dominican Republic. Jamaica had issued a deportation order, but the island nation has no formal extradition treaty with Haiti, where Palacios is wanted, a local police spokesman said.
“The information supplied did not link him to the assassination and essentially indicated that he was a suspect for attempted armed robbery, without any detail,” Jamaica’s Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte said in a statement. “Our attempts to get further and better particulars from the Haitian government were unsuccessful.”
Archbishop Tutu honored at funeral
Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu was remembered at a state funeral Saturday for his Nobel-earning role in ending South Africa’s apartheid regime of racial oppression and for championing the rights of LGBTQ people.
Tutu, who died last Sunday at age 90, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his nonviolent opposition to apartheid.
At least 12 die during Hindu pilgrimage in Kashmir: A crowd surge at a popular Hindu shrine in Indian-controlled Kashmir killed at least 12 people and injured 15 others on New Year's Day, officials said. Initial reports suggested an altercation between a group of devotees led to the crush early Saturday at the Mata Vaishnav Devi shrine, where tens of thousands of Hindus gathered to pay respects in the hilly town of Katra near southern Jammu city. The pilgrimage resumed after nearly four hours, officials said. An investigation was underway.
Mali's transition to democracy may take years longer: Mali's interim authorities proposed to its West African neighbors that a transition back to democracy following a 2020 military coup be extended by five years, the foreign minister said in comments broadcast Saturday. The transitional government initially agreed to hold presidential and legislative elections in February 2022, but it has made little progress since then, blaming disorganization and a rash of Islamist violence.
Violence against women insults God, pope says: Pope Francis used his New Year's message to issue a clarion call for an end to violence against women, saying it was insulting to God. Francis, 85, celebrated a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica on the day the Roman Catholic Church marks both the solemnity of Holy Mary Mother of God as well as its annual World Day of Peace.
Palestinian rockets explode off Tel Aviv coast, Israeli military says: Palestinian militants in Gaza fired two rockets toward the Mediterranean sea on Saturday, causing an explosion off the shore of Tel Aviv, Israel's military said. Police said there were no casualties or damage.
French incineration of cars tradition declines: Hundreds of empty, parked cars go up in flames in France each New Year's Eve, set afire by young revelers, a much lamented tradition that appeared in decline this year, which saw only 874 vehicles burned. On New Year's Eve 2019, 1,316 vehicles went up in flames. | null | null | null | null | null |
The data showed that less than a third of income-eligible transgender people were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Though the federal program is intended to keep people from going hungry, the data shows most trans people aren’t using it. (Seth Wenig/AP)
At the root of this, researchers say, is a web of discrimination that leaves trans Americans impoverished and unable to access food. Roughly 30 percent of trans people live in poverty, the Williams Institute has found.
“People are poor, and that’s why they don’t have enough food,” said Kerith J. Conron, research director at the Williams Institute, and the co-author, along with Kathryn K. O’Neill, of the new report on food insecurity. “It’s important to consider how stigma and discrimination impact economic resources across the life course,” she said. Bullying, harassment and discrimination can make it difficult to “complete high school, pursue higher education and secure better paying jobs,” she said, which is why she argues that laws like the Equality Act are key to helping lift transgender people out of poverty.
The federal Equality Act, which President Biden has called a priority for his administration, would ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The House passed the bill along party lines in February, but it stalled in the Senate.
Previous studies have found higher rates of food insecurity for lesbian, gay and bisexual people, but little research has focused exclusively on food access for transgender people. This summer was the first time the Census Bureau included questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in its survey of how the coronavirus pandemic is impacting households across the country.
Having that data can help pave the way toward solutions, Conron said.
For instance, the data showed that less than a third of income-eligible transgender people were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Though the federal program is intended to keep people from going hungry, the data shows most trans people aren’t using it.
The Census Bureau survey didn’t delve into causes for that disparity, but the National Women’s Law Center found last year that trans people face numerous barriers in applying for and using SNAP. Some trans people may not have documents that match their identity and gender presentation, and two states — Massachusetts and Missouri — put recipients’ photo identification on electronic benefit transfer cards. If the recipient’s identity and appearance no longer match what’s on the card, recipients may face discrimination at grocery stores, the D.C.-based nonprofit found.
Trans people may also struggle to meet the work requirements, which were tightened under the Trump administration. SNAP recipients must work 20 hours a week, but trans people are three times as likely to be unemployed, and more than 1 in 4 have lost a job because of bias, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality, whose 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey polled more than 28,000 trans people — the largest survey of trans people to date.
And even if trans people meet the work requirements and have the right documents to apply for SNAP, the National Women’s Law Center found that without anti-bias training, government employees can sometimes behave in ways that discourage trans individuals from accessing benefits.
Amiyah Taylor, a 23-year-old nonbinary person who works with trans people through the D.C. nonprofit Us Helping Us, said they know many trans people who’ve been misgendered or harassed as they tried to access the benefits.
“It becomes a circle of hardship,” Taylor said. “Going into these places, you don’t want judgment. There are a lot of people in the DMV area who don’t have knowledge of trans and nonbinary folks, and you have to explain everything. For people who have not gotten that legal name change, they’re having to be forced to use that birth name, which they hate. Everything they’ve worked up to, now they feel dehumanized.”
2021 is the deadliest year on record for transgender and nonbinary people
One trans friend nearly lost her benefits after she had facial feminization surgery, Taylor said, because a Department of Human Services worker thought the trans woman’s ID card didn’t look enough like her. And when Taylor went to access their own benefits, one security guard complimented their feminine outfit, but another noted Taylor’s purse, then called Taylor “sir.”
For Taylor, the experience was mostly frustrating, but other people find the discrimination so painful that they can’t bring themselves to apply. Taylor said simple solutions, such as asking an applicant for their pronouns, could help trans people feel safe as they visit government offices.
The Household Pulse Survey also found that relatively few transgender participants accessed free groceries through pantries or local food banks. That echoes a qualitative study conducted in Los Angeles and rural California, as well as a quantitative survey of trans people living in the Southeast.
In 2019, Jennifer Russomanno and Jennifer M. Jabson Tree, associate professors at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, interviewed more than 100 trans and gender-nonconforming people in 12 states across the Southeast. The researchers found that 79 percent of their survey respondents had experienced food insecurity but that less than a quarter had turned to local food pantries for help.
“I literally had to rerun the numbers six times because I thought, this can’t be right,” Russomanno said. “It actually knocked me down.”
Churches run many of the food pantries in the Southeast, Russomanno said, and trans people told her that they had either experienced discrimination at food banks or were so afraid of experiencing discrimination that they didn’t even visit one. Some relied on food they found in dumpsters, Russomanno said, and others turned to friends for groceries.
“I had one person who told me he eats rice three times a day because that’s all he could afford,” Russomanno said. “I had people tell me they were literally starving, and they still would not go to a food pantry because of the discrimination.”
Russomanno sits on the Knoxville food policy council. After her paper came out last year, leaders at local food banks told her that they don’t want to discriminate against trans people and asked for her help in reaching those who need their services most.
Though Conron has found that food insecurity is a national problem that requires national policy changes, her previous research has also shown that the most effective solutions may be hyperlocal. In Boston, for instance, the nonprofit BAGLY learned during the pandemic that many young people couldn’t get to its center to access free food. The nonprofit tried using Uber Eats to deliver food, but ultimately determined that the best way to reach trans youth was to offer gift cards through the online vendor Tremendous.
“That way, people could download the money in gift cards, so if Stop and Shop was closest or Target was closest, they could get a gift card for a food place close to them,” Conron said.
And in Asheville, N.C., a trans-led organization found at the beginning of the pandemic that its community members were struggling to afford food. Hart Groves runs the Talya Mazuz Food Program at Tranzmission in Asheville. Each week, Groves and a crew of volunteers gather donations from the local food bank, community members and a Trader Joe’s, and then distribute the food to trans people in need. Tranzmission does not require any proof of identification or income.
“We deliver food to multiple households each week,” Groves said. “We are a contactless service, so individuals don’t come to the pantry to get food. Instead, we pack it up and deliver it to their house. This is a safer option considering the realities of the pandemic, but it also offers access to certain individuals who perhaps wouldn’t be able to get to our office to shop.”
Russomanno would like to see similar programs across the country, but researchers and community activists need more data to best tailor their responses, she said. Her next research paper focuses on barriers trans people face in obtaining SNAP benefits.
“This is work that needs to be done,” Russomanno said. “I’m glad it’s getting more attention, because without this national population-based data, there’s no way to assess the severity of the problem. I’m hopeful with the Census adding these questions, and hopefully nationally based data sets will follow the same lead, we can have a bigger conversation about how we can address this in this country.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Thousands of flights canceled, delayed amid covid surge; snowstorm expected in Midwest
New York City Mayor Eric Adams looks at a fight on the street while waiting for the subway to City Hall on his first day in office in New York, Saturday. Adams was sworn in as mayor of the United States’ most populated city just after midnight. (Seth Wenig/AP)
About 2,400 flights into and out of the United States were canceled Saturday, and more than 1,100 were delayed, according to the tracking firm FlightAware.com, amid bad weather and staff shortages caused by the rapid spread of the omicron variant.
Southwest Airlines canceled at least 471 flights — more than 20 percent of scheduled trips — and delayed another hundreds more, while regional carrier SkyWest canceled over 422 flights and delayed many.
Among the bigger national carriers, Delta Air Lines cut about 9 percent of its flights while American and United airlines each scrubbed 7 percent, according to the site.
Some 1,627 flights into or out of the United States have already been canceled for Sunday, FlightAware said. A heavy snowstorm across large parts of the country is expected to cause major travel disruptions, according to the National Weather Service.
With the U.S. hitting record coronavirus infections, holiday travel has been snarled by about 12,000 canceled flights since Christmas Eve, according to the Associated Press.
Some of the biggest trouble spots for travelers were in the Midwest, where about 58 percent of flights scheduled to leave from Chicago Midway International Airport and 45 percent from Chicago O’Hare International Airport were scratched, according to FlightAware. Airports in Denver, Kansas City and Detroit also saw a high number of cancellations and delays.
The Transportation Security Administration urged people to “be patient.”
Up to 9 inches of snow expected on Saturday
The winter that took its time getting to the Midwest was finally expected to arrive on the first day of the new year.
The National Weather Service said as much as 9 inches of snow could fall by the end of the day.
In Michigan, the heaviest snow isn’t expected to start falling until Saturday night, with as much as 7 inches expected along Interstate 94 in west Michigan and 2 inches to 5 inches anticipated in the southeastern part of the state. The northern end of Indiana is expected to see between 3 inches to 6 inches of snow.
Chicago and surrounding suburbs are caught between a winter storm coming in from the southwest and a northeasterly wind coming off Lake Michigan — a combination that could create as much as an inch of lake effect snow every hour.
“Winter has finally arrived,” meteorologist Brett Borchardt told the Chicago Tribune. “We knew it was going to happen at some point.”
They also recommend that motorists should take it slow, increase the distance between vehicles and, before they get behind the wheel, check they have packed emergency supplies such as cellphones, food, washer fluid and ice scrapers.
“Hazardous travel conditions will develop this evening and continue into tonight,” the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids, Mich., said.
Cleveland officer killed: An off-duty Cleveland police officer was shot and killed in a parking lot carjacking, and multiple people were arrested, authorities said Saturday. Someone approached Officer Shane Bartek, 25, at an apartment building on Cleveland's west side around 6 p.m. Friday, police said. There was a struggle, and the officer was shot twice, police said. The carjacker fled in the officer's vehicle, police said. Bartek was pronounced dead at Fairview Hospital. The vehicle was tracked down in Euclid, a Cleveland suburb, and one person was arrested, police said. More suspects were arrested later, according to police, who did not provide a number on Saturday.
Kentucky declares storm emergency: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) declared a state of emergency on Saturday as powerful storms ripped through the state causing flash floods, power outages and property damage, including from a possible tornado in Hopkinsville, in the southwestern part of the state. There were no immediate reports of any injuries or deaths. The storms come just three weeks after deadly tornadoes tore through the region, killing more than 90 people in five states, including 77 in Kentucky. As of Saturday afternoon, much of Kentucky was under a flood warning. Portions of eastern Kentucky, as well as swaths of Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were under a tornado watch.
3 killed, 4 wounded in Miss. shooting: Three people were killed and four others were wounded after several people started shooting at a southeastern Mississippi party just minutes before the end of 2021, authorities said. One person remained in critical condition after a fight started a Gulfport New Year's party and people began shooting, according to police. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Philadelphia Eagles' fifth-ranked defense controlled Washington in their previous meeting. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Washington’s offense has stalled since the team moved to .500 in Week 13, recording its three worst performances by yardage, starting with the team’s first game against Dallas. Washington recorded a season-low 224 yards in that first loss to Dallas, then followed that performance with a 237-yard outing against the Eagles and 257 yards in its second meeting with the Cowboys last week.
Washington was without quarterback Taylor Heinicke among other offensive starters in the first meeting with the Eagles. Shuffling players in and out because of injury, illness and other reasons has resulted in an inconsistent offense.
“It’s a good opportunity for a lot of these guys,” Heinicke said of the frequent lineup changes. “But at the same time, it’s tough when you’re down three or four top guys and you’re trying to kind of mix things together.”
Against Philadelphia, Washington ran the ball just 21 times while passing it 31 times behind former New England Patriots practice squad quarterback turned emergency starter Garrett Gilbert. Washington finished with a season-low 63 yards on the ground in Philadelphia, and two of the team’s three worst rushing performances have come in its past three games. Washington trailed for nearly the whole contest at Dallas last week, necessitating a pass-heavy approach.
During Washington’s four-game winning streak that preceded its slide, it relied heavily on a run-oriented, time-of-possession offense. But offensive coordinator Scott Turner wants the offense to remain balanced.
“You don’t want to be predictable,” Turner said. “You match your strengths against a defense’s weakness. Obviously, it’s not just either pick run or pass. There’s a lot of different kinds of runs. There’s a lot of different kinds of passes. You try to match that up with the defense and try to get matchups to benefit your players.”
With its fading playoff hopes on the line, Washington will need a bounce-back performance against Philadelphia’s top-five defense. The Eagles boast top-10 rushing and passing defenses; their run defense allows 3.9 yards per carry, fourth in the NFL; and Philadelphia’s secondary is anchored by cornerback Darius Slay, who was named to the Pro Bowl for the fourth time in his career.
“Our guys are working hard, trying to get better every day. We’ve had a couple rough weeks,” Turner said. “There’s obviously no doubt about that. We’re looking and everything we’re doing is trying to give ourselves the best chance to go beat the Eagles.”
Washington’s defensive line struggled against the Eagles in the first matchup, giving up 238 rushing yards and 5.8 per carry. Defensive tackle Jonathan Allen said Thursday that he believes everyone is at fault for the group’s recent performances, from the players to the coaches.
Allen credited opposing offenses for scheming well against Washington’s defense, but he also said the defensive line hasn’t been as sharp as it was earlier in the season. Allen wants the defensive linemen to get back on the same page and play more consistently.
“I just want to go out there and I want to play good football, want to represent myself well on the football field,” Allen said. “I don’t think I’ve done that the last two weeks on the field. I don’t think anybody on this team has done that, so I just want to go out there and play with a lot of heart, pride. And, you know, we’ll see what happens.”
Washington’s offensive rookies have performed well in recent weeks. Tight end John Bates and wide receiver Dyami Brown earned high praise from the coaching staff. Turner said Bates has “really exceeded our expectations,” and Coach Ron Rivera said Brown excited him with some of his plays against the Cowboys and that he wants to see more from him.
Rookie running back Jaret Patterson had 33 yards on nine carries last week, both his most since an Oct. 31 loss at the Denver Broncos, and he said he’s ready for whatever workload he gets in his final two weeks, especially with starter Antonio Gibson on the covid-19 reserve list.
“I always stay ready so I don’t have to get ready,” Patterson said. “My mind-set’s always been like that … just stand ready for whatever opportunity comes my way and just take full advantage of it.”
Injury report: Gibson, guard Ereck Flowers, tackle Sam Cosmi and punter Tress Way landed on the covid-19 reserve list this week and will miss Sunday’s game, as will cornerback William Jackson III (calf). Defensive end Montez Sweat, whose brother was killed Tuesday, is questionable, as are wideout Curtis Samuel (hamstring) and defensive end James Smith-Williams (illness).
Eagles running backs Miles Sanders (hand) and Jordan Howard (stinger) are out and questionable, respectively. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Washington Wizards opened the new year with a new feeling, an emotion that played out on the stunned faces of every player in front of their bench during the final second of a 120-119 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Saturday night at Capital One Arena.
The Bulls’ DeMar DeRozan let fly with a contested three-pointer — just seconds after Kyle Kuzma had made one of his own, to thunderous cheers — and for the first time in a long time, Washington lost a heartbreaker. The Wizards had been 6-0 in games decided by three points or fewer before Saturday.
But the Eastern Conference-leading Bulls (24-10) scored 34 points in the fourth quarter, executing when it counted most. Washington (18-18) held steady for nearly all of the late-game onslaught, combating Chicago’s surge by shooting 52.9 percent for the game, before the Bulls’ outstanding perimeter shooting bit the Wizards at the buzzer.
The Wizards allowed Chicago to make 17 of 34 threes. They also gave up a 35-point performance from all-star Zach LaVine. DeRozan added 28.
Washington made up for its subpar defense with a second straight game shooting at least 50 percent. All five starters — including Corey Kispert, who made his fourth start of the season with Brad Wanamaker in the NBA’s coronavirus health and safety protocols — were in double figures, as was Deni Avdija (10 points) coming off the bench. Avdija again performed admirably on the defensive end, successfully bothering DeRozan, LaVine and Nikola Vucevic (22 points) at times.
Bradley Beal (27 points, 17 assists) and Kuzma (29 points, 12 rebounds) had double-doubles. On a night when the Wizards’ offense zinged without a hitch, Beal set a career high in assists. But Washington faded in the fourth quarter, with center Daniel Gafford (19 points, eight rebounds) off the floor for much of it.
Here’s what else there is to know from Saturday’s loss:
Since getting bullied by Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid on Dec. 26, Gafford has had a solid few games at Capital One Arena. He was particularly valuable Saturday, extending possessions in the third quarter and standing 8 for 8 from the floor midway through the period, leading the team with 17 points. He finished 9 for 10 in 20 minutes.
The Wizards shot 56.8 percent in the first half, efficiency that helped them weather Chicago’s onslaught from three — the visitors went 9 for 17 from beyond the arc.
Their fluid offense was even more noteworthy considering Washington played without a true point guard. Beal, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (13 points, eight rebounds) and Kispert started at guard with Spencer Dinwiddie, Aaron Holiday and Raul Neto still in the coronavirus protocols, and the spacing worked well. The Wizards had 17 assists on 25 buckets before halftime; 11 of those helpers came from Beal, who ended the half with 13 points and 11 assists.
Washington’s coronavirus outbreak has been so debilitating that even its fill-in players are being affected. Wanamaker, who was added Thursday, entered the protocols after just one day and was unavailable Saturday.
The team’s latest hardship signee woke up at 4 a.m. Saturday to make his flight to D.C. Guard Tremont Waters, a 23-year-old out of LSU who had played in 39 games across three NBA seasons, had just about two hours of downtime between his flight, a mandatory coronavirus test, the Wizards’ walk-through and the game.
“I hope he took a nap quickly,” Coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEW YORK — Eric Bledsoe scored a season-high 27 points and short-handed Los Angeles, playing on the second night of a back-to-back, rallied to beat Brooklyn.
HOUSTON — Nikola Jokic scored 24 points and Facundo Campazzo added a career-high 22 as Denver used a huge second quarter to take control in a win over Houston. | null | null | null | null | null |
Militaries are among the world’s biggest emitters. This general wants them to go green.
Richard Nugee, a three-star general, knew armed forces must adapt to a warming world. So one of the most senior officers in the British army asked for a new job: Drawing up a climate change strategy for the military.
Story by Michael Birnbaum
Illustration by Stef Wong
GLASGOW, Scotland — It was July 2003, and Richard Nugee, a British army officer, was baking inside the sweltering brick building that Saddam Hussein’s sons used as a smuggler’s hideout.
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Until a few months prior, it had been a port authority office in Saddam’s Iraq. Now it was Nugee’s headquarters and living space as he commanded British troops across a strategic stretch of southern Iraq. But with the thermometer routinely topping 120 degrees, a harsh wind blowing humid air from the Persian Gulf and no air conditioning, he had a big problem. His troops were drinking so much water that they were flushing away their vitamins. It was nearly too scorching to fight. And he was getting a lesson that extreme weather could be as dangerous to soldiers as any insurgent.
Nearly two decades later, Nugee was a three-star general at the peak of his career, after a long string of deployments in the world’s conflict zones, including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He had risen to become one of the most senior officers in the entire British armed forces — an elite club charged with commanding continents. And in the final fight of his military life, he decided to take on one of the wiliest adversaries: climate change. Militaries are both enormous emitters and facing fearsome new conflicts sparked by global warming. Nugee resolved to fight a lonely battle to address both problems.
Militaries are not known as bastions of tree-huggers. Fighting a war burns prodigious quantities of fossil fuels. The Pentagon, by some counts, is the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil. And military leaders have often resisted anything they fear would blunt their edge, including cutting back on emissions.
“Having really seen defense from the heart of it, I had drawn the conclusion that it was not paying any attention to climate change at all, and I wanted to change that,” Nugee said last month in a crowded hotel bar in Glasgow, Scotland, where world leaders, ministers and titans of industry had gathered for a United Nations climate conference.
Nugee had retired from active duty a few months earlier, trading his trim officer’s dress uniform for a civilian’s blue suit. Every now and then, he glanced down to check the time on his phone. He didn’t want to miss a climate gala hosted by Prince Charles, a fellow nature-loving Englishman, in the ballroom next door. He spoke crisply, and with purpose: the speech of a man who is accustomed both to his orders being followed — and to being met with skepticism from the fellow gray-haired clan of officers and ministers who oversee Britain’s powerful military.
Lt. Gen. Richard Nugee, a retired senior British army officer, stands near his home in Devizes, England, on Dec. 4. He has replanted native trees across his fields. (Tori Ferenc for The Washington Post)
Convinced that someone needed to shake awake Britain’s security establishment about the risks of climate change, Nugee asked to be tasked with one final mission before he turned in his stars and retired: preparing a strategy for the British military to adapt to a dangerously warming world. To do so, he gave up command of a staff of more than 600 as the head human resources officer of the British military. Instead, he would be in command of his own desk. Shorn of resources, he was forced to beg and borrow brainpower.
“This is not doing it for moral reasons. This is not doing it because it’s about emissions. It’s about our own capability, it’s about our ability to be the most successful and the most credible force that we can,” Nugee said in Glasgow, where he was one of few with a military background amid the galaxy of people trying to fight for a cooler planet.
“Anybody who ignores it would be foolish,” he said.
Spending time in Glasgow meant sharing a city with fellow travelers who, at least outwardly, had a far different style from his upright soldier’s mien. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg led protesters in angry chants. Other demonstrators staged die-ins at the conference’s gates. Nugee favored suits over protest signs. But what he was proposing was revolutionary: a British military that by 2050 would reduce its net emissions to zero and transform into a sharper fighting force in doing so.
“If we fight a war and we come second, but we can proudly say we’re the greenest army on the battlefield, we’ve still come second in the war,” said Nugee, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. “That’s not what we’re paid to do.”
Nugee, 58, grew up the youngest of four brothers, part of a sprawling English family in which he was always the baby. During World War II, his mother was a code-breaker at Bletchley Park, the British intelligence hub. His father was a lawyer, and Nugee’s brothers followed their father into that profession. But Nugee himself took inspiration from his grandfather, an army officer who fought in both world wars. A conversation the two of them had about his grandfather’s wartime experiences, three days before his grandfather died, inspired Nugee to sign up for the army at age 16.
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“My parents were astounded,” Nugee said in a later conversation on a clanking train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, where he was staying during the climate conference with a childhood friend. He stared out the window at the Scottish countryside that was speeding by. “I don’t think they knew what I was going to do at all,” he said.
His career reflected the hot spots of the day. In the waning years of the Cold War, he was posted to West Germany. Then there were repeated deployments to Northern Ireland, which was still consumed by the sectarian insurgency known as the Troubles. In the 1990s, he went to the former Yugoslavia as it fell apart in bloody wars.
But it was his post-2001 deployments that helped drive his belief that adapting the military to climate change would improve its ability to do its core job.
The heat in Iraq, for instance: In 2003, Nugee had to call in an airlift of bananas because so many soldiers’ potassium levels were plunging to dangerous lows. Colleagues back in Britain laughed at him, but the need was deadly serious, he said. Eventually the British troops responsible for securing southern Iraq managed to get air-conditioned living quarters — which was a battlefield advantage if their opponents lacked similar facilities, Nugee said.
“You’d be drenched going to the shower. You’d have a shower. You dry off. You’d be drenched before you got out of the shower cubicle because of the sweat,” Nugee said. “One of my soldiers got through 16 liters of water and still was dehydrated.”
Members of the British Armed Forces examine a concept demonstrator version of the Jankel Fox Rapid Response Vehicle at Dorset Innovation Park in England on Dec. 14. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
Armed forces can be overlooked targets in efforts to go green. Under international climate treaties, militaries haven’t been required to be transparent about their emissions, one factor in a Washington Post investigation this year that found that countries are significantly underreporting their climate footprint to the United Nations. Armies have typically been exempted from national requirements to trim the heat-trapping gases they put into the atmosphere, since national security has trumped environmental issues.
“Usually people who care about climate change, the environmental movement and so on, they are not big fans of the military at all. They’re pacifistic in nature,” said Louise van Schaik, the head of European Union and global affairs at the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch international affairs think tank.
That culture clash can leave a big gap when it comes to addressing emissions. The British military emits as much as the rest of the British central government combined. As the second-largest landholder in the United Kingdom, it controls more territory than the queen, almost 2 percent of the nation’s landmass. The Pentagon has a similarly large footprint: It accounts for 52 percent of federal electricity use and 56 percent of the federal government’s emissions.
Yet environmental activists have often focused elsewhere, most typically on places where governments are obligated to be fully transparent about the environmental impact of their activities.
Military emissions “disappeared from the statistics, but it didn’t disappear from the atmosphere,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview during a visit to the U.N. climate conference, the first time a NATO leader came to the annual gathering. He had been lured to an event that Nugee helped organize, speaking alongside British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace about the urgent need for the world of defense to take steps to address climate change.
Concept designs of foldable solar blankets are displayed at the Bovington Future Power Symposium in England — an event created to bring members of the military together with industry heads for discussions about sustainable technology development. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
Mirroring Nugee’s effort in Britain, Stoltenberg this year has pushed the defense alliance to take up climate change as a security threat and to publish emissions data for the first time. The alliance leader, a former U.N. climate envoy, has talked about watching glaciers shrink in his native Norway over the course of his lifetime.
President Biden has also pushed for more thinking about the intersection of climate change and security, ordering the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the intelligence community and the Department of Homeland Security to consider how a warming world will affect U.S. strategic interests. They released landmark — and somewhat apocalyptic — reports in October.
Nugee’s strategy stretches across 107 pages of dense, step-by-step analysis of what the British military needs to do about a warming world. He put it together during the course of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, hosting Skype and Zoom calls from his home near one of the British Army’s main training grounds in southwest England. When his laptop crashed, he would run over to a nearby base to get help.
The report suggests reducing military emissions to get in line with broader British climate targets. One recommendation is to fly military aircraft on 50 percent sustainable aviation fuel. Another is to increase the use of fuel-efficient hybrid electric armored vehicles — like Priuses, but for armored personnel carriers.
It warns that if the rest of society switches away from fossil fuels for cars and electricity, militaries can’t risk being the last ones who are reliant on them.
“If you want to be climate neutral in 2050, this sector can no longer be left off the hook,” said van Schaik, the Dutch climate security expert, who has reviewed the report.
Perhaps most ominously, it lists the many ways global warming will destabilize nations and alliances across the world. Oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia will be upended if they have no takers for their main product and they become less strategically important. Access to the rare earth elements needed for batteries and circuitry could lead to clashes between China and the United States in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Greenland. Countries where water shortages are likely — such as Iraq and Somalia — will probably face even more conflicts.
An Extreme E vehicle, powered by water, on view at the Bovington Future Power Symposium. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
Top British defense officials say they are committed to addressing Nugee’s warnings.
“We have a strong obligation to make sure that our forces deliver a sustainable deployment and indeed make sure they move from traditional energies and fuel requirements to more modern requirements,” said Wallace, the British defense secretary. “But also we will have to deal with the consequences of a failed climate change policy, if that happens. We have to deal with the consequences of migrant flows, of breaking down of communities, of fights over rare resources, border frictions which will increase as climate change increases.”
The global efforts typically focus on two entangled issues: how to reduce the emissions of the national security establishment, and how to get ready for a world that will be more dangerous and unpredictable as the mercury creeps up in everyone’s thermometers.
“As the climate hazards have become more acute, and we’re seeing that more regularly, there’s a recognition on the security side, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have to deal with this, whether we like it or not, because it’s already here,’ ” said Erin Sikorsky, who until last year led analysis on climate change and security for the U.S. intelligence community and is now the director of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based think tank, where she has worked with Nugee. “And on the environmental side, you’re seeing, ‘Yeah, this poses real risks of conflict.’ ”
Some of the old-line security establishment in the United States and Europe is waking up to the challenge.
“Preventing climate-induced security risks, that’s a Nobel Prize-winning enterprise,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s main conclave for security-related discussions.
A demonstration of the Rheinmetall Mission Master, a hybrid electric load carriage platform operated by remote control or via autonomous driving modes. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
The weather in Iraq has only grown more extreme in the 18 years since Nugee’s first deployment, as it heats faster than much of the rest of the world. Temperatures in the country hit a record 125 degrees this summer. The United Nations has estimated that the desert eats up 100 square miles of farmland every year. Heat and water shortages have driven tens of thousands of people to leave their homes over the past decade, according to the International Organization for Migration. Those developments have exacerbated tensions and conflicts inside the country, even as it becomes harder for security forces themselves to keep the peace, since their vehicles don’t work as well in the heat.
And during Nugee’s repeated deployments to Afghanistan, climate-related considerations hit him from multiple directions. When farmers’ crops failed because of drought or other challenges, they became easy recruiting targets for the Taliban, which paid them roughly $5 a day to fight, and more if they killed enemy soldiers, he said.
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Many of the Taliban’s targets were tied to the military’s dependence on fossil fuels. Diesel fuel is the key to much of modern war-fighting: It goes in Humvees and armored personnel carriers, and it gives remote outposts their electricity and communications when it is burned in generators.
“There’s a military advantage in reducing all this logistic resupply. And then there’s a life advantage in reducing the number of people being killed. So there’s all sorts of advantages in going for more self-sufficiency,” Nugee said.
The SupaCat Missions Master is an electric vehicle developed for extreme terrain. In the close-up photo, a look inside the engine of a Jankel Fox Rapid Response Vehicle. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
He also said they sometimes have an attitude that their willingness to die to defend their country means that they should not need to think about their carbon footprint: “‘We’re prepared as individuals to make the ultimate sacrifice. Surely we’re prepared to have a few emissions to protect our citizens,’” Nugee described his detractors as saying.
He said that for years, he had been raising the issue of climate change in informal conversations with people working on military issues: his superiors, ministers, members of Parliament, colleagues. Often, he felt as though the challenge simply didn’t register for the people he was talking to, or that the military’s small pilot projects related to green technology were not nearly ambitious enough to meet the problem.
“There’s a very strong military lobby which turns around and says we shouldn’t be doing this, because we have a really clear purpose: that we will do whatever it takes to defend our nation,” he said.
Part of the challenge has been generational, he said: The older ribbon-bedecked officers at the top of the military chain of command weren’t paying enough attention to environmental issues. That stifled younger officers who might be more green-focused.
About two years ago, Nugee went to the defense secretary and to the British equivalent of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is a friend.
“I said, ‘Look, I’ll do you a report, because I don’t think you’re taking it seriously enough. And I’ll tell you why you’re not taking it seriously enough and I’ll tell you what to do about it,’ " he said. “My argument has consistently been: This is about enhancing capability. This is about thinking of doing things differently. This is about working with the green technology, not against it.”
Nugee retired from the military this summer — he was overdue after passing the typical retirement age of 55 — but he has stayed on to oversee climate work. Inaction now will lead to problems later, he said, as the rest of society moves away from using fossil fuels and Britain reduces its overall emissions, making the military an increasingly large target by comparison.
Nugee in his home with his medals and a knife with his name engraved on the blade — a gift from one of the troops he commanded. (Tori Ferenc for The Washington Post)
At home, Nugee said he is trying to do his part. After installing Tesla’s home battery, the Powerwall, his solar panels are able to keep him off the grid from April until October. He is investigating whether he can install a miniature hydropower system in a brook on his property to generate enough electricity to last him through the year.
And this month he set off on an expedition to Antarctica to commemorate the centenary of Ernest Shackleton’s final journey there. The mostly military and ex-military scientists on the trip will conduct climate and pollution research on Antarctica’s Forbidden Plateau.
“It was what I was passionate about, in an environment where nobody was talking about it, and in an environment where actually, I could make a difference,” he said.
Story editing by Dayana Sarkisova. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Illustration animation by Emma Kumer. Design and development by Andrew Braford. Copy editing by Annabeth Carlson.
Michael BirnbaumFollowTwitter
Michael Birnbaum is a climate solutions reporter for The Washington Post. He previously served more than a decade in Europe as as the newspaper's bureau chief in Brussels, Moscow and Berlin. He joined The Post in 2008. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Washington Wizards opened the new year with a new feeling, an emotion that played out on the stunned faces of every player in front of their bench during the final second of a 120-119 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Saturday night.
The most efficient three-point shooters in the NBA made 17 of 34 attempts from beyond the arc at Capital One Arena, their stars hitting long-range bombs in bunches. Zach LaVine had seven, Coby White four and Nikola Vucevic three. DeMar DeRozan had just one — contested, in the corner, at the buzzer — to seal the win. The night after the Bulls guard clinched a victory at the Indiana Pacers with a one-legged three at the buzzer, he had another magical moment.
Saturday’s came less than four seconds after the Wizards’ Kyle Kuzma hit a three to put the Wizards up 119-117.
“S--- happens,” Kuzma said. “DeMar told me to hold my beer.”
Heartbreak like this was a foreign emotion for Washington, which was 6-0 in games decided by three points or fewer before Saturday.
The Eastern Conference-leading Bulls (24-10) scored 34 points in the fourth quarter, leaning on LaVine, Vucevic and DeRozan to outshoot the Wizards (18-18). Washington held steady for nearly all of the late-game onslaught and combated Chicago’s surge by shooting 61.1 percent in the final frame.
“This one was tough,” guard Bradley Beal said. “I [saw Coach Wes Unseld Jr.] on the way out — he was sitting there like he couldn’t believe it. That’s how we all feel. … We played hard; we competed. Damn, DeMar, man — he made a tough one at the end.”
In addition to DeRozan’s game-winner, the Wizards endured a 35-point performance from LaVine. DeRozan ended up with 28, Vucevic had 22, and White added 20.
Washington made up for its subpar defense with a second straight game shooting at least 50 percent thanks in large part to again having impeccable ball movement. The Wizards were without a true point guard — Beal filled in — but had an aggressive mentality on their side.
With the ball in his hands more than usual, Beal dished a career-high 17 assists. He added 27 points for his second consecutive double-double. With 29 points and 12 rebounds, Kuzma had a double-double, too.
They led the other three starters — including rookie Corey Kispert, who made his fourth start with Brad Wanamaker in the NBA’s coronavirus health and safety protocols — in double figures. Deni Avdija had 10 points off the bench and performed admirably on the defensive end, successfully bothering DeRozan, LaVine and Vucevic at times.
Here’s what else to know from Saturday’s loss:
Since getting bullied by Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid on Sunday, Gafford has had a solid few games at Capital One Arena. He was particularly valuable Saturday, extending possessions in the third quarter and standing 8 for 8 from the floor midway through the period, leading the team with 17 points. He finished 9 for 10 in 20 minutes for 19 points and eight rebounds but didn’t play at all in the fourth.
“I thought the switching did a better job keeping guys in front, kept us out of rotations, and Vucevic is a pretty good pick-and-pop big,” Unseld said of his rotations late in the game. “I thought we were getting dragged down the floor a bit, giving up some separation; he got some good looks. Switches kept that to a minimum, but then you’ve got to deal with the post-ups, you got to deal with the offensive rebounds.”
The Wizards shot 56.8 percent in the first half, efficiency that helped them weather Chicago’s onslaught from three.
Their fluid offense was even more noteworthy considering Washington played without a true point guard. Beal, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (13 points, eight rebounds) and Kispert (10 points) started at guard with Spencer Dinwiddie, Aaron Holiday and Raul Neto still in the coronavirus protocols, and the spacing worked well. The Wizards had 17 assists on 25 buckets before halftime; 11 of those helpers came from Beal, who ended the half with 13 points and 11 assists.
Beal and Kuzma attributed the ball movement to more aggression on offense — an attempt to compensate for the key guards who were out.
“You look at the team: Guys are out; I have the ability to touch the ball a little bit more, not just stand in the corner and be a shooter,” Kuzma said. “It’s something I’ve got to figure out within myself, watching film and just being in attack mode at all times.”
Washington’s coronavirus outbreak has been so debilitating that even its fill-in players are being affected. Wanamaker, who was added to the roster Thursday, entered the protocols after just one day and was unavailable Saturday.
The Wizards’ latest hardship signee woke up at 4 a.m. Saturday to make his flight to D.C. Guard Tremont Waters, a 23-year-old out of LSU who has played in 39 games across three NBA seasons, had just about two hours of downtime between his flight, a mandatory coronavirus test, the Wizards’ walk-through and the game.
“I hope he took a nap quickly,” Unseld said of Waters, who had two points and a steal in eight minutes. | null | null | null | null | null |
Robert A. Gross’s “The Transcendentalists and Their World” (Farrar, Straus Giroux) focuses on two of my favorite writers — Emerson and Thoreau — but in the end, I just couldn’t face 864 pages of tiny type and all that minutiae about life in 19th-century Concord, Mass. Though stunning as historical re-creation, Gross’s book ultimately struck me as a work for American studies majors rather than general readers.
Something similar seemed true of Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter’s “The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture” (Harvard). I spent two of my four grad-school years studying late antiquity, so this account of scriptural canon formation attracted me more than a little. But I finally decided that it would only appeal to those readers — and I didn’t think there would be many — with a strong interest in early Jewish and Christian theological wranglings. Might I have been wrong about that? It would be pretty to think so.
Looking for a seasonal tale of mystery, murder and ghosts? Here are 9 books just for you.
Twenty or so years ago, I reviewed two of W.G. Sebald’s melancholy, sui generis masterpieces, “Vertigo” and “Austerlitz.” Each of those pieces ran around 1,800 words. While Carole Angier’s “Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald” (Bloomsbury) would doubtless deepen my understanding of this German writer, would I actually write anything fresh and new? Just as likely, I’d simply use up my weekly allotment of 975 words telling people all over again why Sebald’s books matter.
Sad to say, this was also my excuse for skipping Richard Zenith’s “Pessoa” (Liveright), a 1,000-page biography of Fernando Pessoa, modern Portugal’s most original literary genius. Pessoa was best known for adopting multiple authorial identities and then writing in the differing styles of these “heteronyms.” Fascinated by his work, I’d once done considerable research on Pessoa for an essay pegged to his poetry and Zenith’s translation of the introspective journal-like “The Book of Disquiet.” Producing anything less now would simply feel unsatisfying.
Basic Books deserves all praise for publishing both “The Library: A Fragile History,” by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen and “The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts,” by Mary Wellesley. These are exactly the sort of engaging, ambitious works of scholarship that serious readers want to know about. Yet hadn’t several of my columns in 2021 been devoted to “books about books?” Despite the sweetness of the water, it seemed too soon to return to that well again.
After all, timing matters. “Basilisks and Beowulf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World,” by Tim Flight (Reaktion), appeared late in the year, otherwise it would have been perfect for this summer’s roundup of books devoted to mythological and fairy tale creatures. From just skimming Flight’s pages, I recognize a captivating scholarly companion to T.H. White’s “The Bestiary” and Jorge Luis Borges’s “Book of Imaginary Beings.”
I admit to being seriously tempted by Elizabeth L. Block’s “Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion” (MIT Press) just because I know nothing about haute couture. This handsomely illustrated, anecdotal volume illuminates the symbiotic relationship between late-19th-century Parisian fashion houses and their well-to-do American clients. Block, a senior editor for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s publication department, writes winningly, and I probably should have reviewed this after all.
Sophus Helle’s “Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic” (Yale) looks to be the last word on this Babylonian masterpiece. Still, much as I longed to revisit the exploits of the first superheroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, it would be, as Mr. Spock used to say, “illogical.” I’d already reviewed an earlier “Gilgamesh” translation by David Ferry and produced a substantial piece about David Damrosch’s “The Buried Book: The Loss and Discovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.” So, I reluctantly concluded, “Been there, done that.”
‘Dune’ has long divided the science fiction world. The new film won’t change that.
I’ve never believed that Edith Piaf song about regretting nothing. Having once taught Robert Walser’s best-known novel, “Jakob von Gunten” — it’s mainly set in a school for butlers — I definitely planned to review Susan Bernofsky’s “Clairvoyant of the Small” (Yale), her biography of this eccentric Swiss German writer. I already owned many of his books, including Bernofsky’s recent translation of the “microscripts,” mini-essays scribbled in the mental asylum where Walser passed the second half of his life. Before tackling the biography, I consequently wanted to read through all or most of this material — and, suddenly, there just wasn’t time. Instead, I cravenly slunk away from the chance to learn more about this strange genius.
In retrospect, I was stupidly hasty about Mary Beard’s “The Twelve Caesars” (Princeton), which isn’t at all a modernized update of Suetonius’s gossipy biographical classic. A work of cultural and art history, it investigates numerous “images of power from the ancient world to the modern,” showing how later eras pictured, interpreted and repurposed what was known of Rome’s most famous emperors. Like all of Beard’s work, it is also a mesmerizing read, as I’ve discovered too late.
At first, I was feeling almost friskily eager to start the fourth volume of the late John Richardson’s life of Picasso, “The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943” (Knopf). And then I glanced at the back cover: There were seven reviewers of Volume 3 quoted, and my name wasn’t among them. It is unquestionably petty of me to feel dissed, but one tires of seeing hosannas from the same three New York-based periodicals while The Washington Post is overlooked. The possibility that my piece simply hadn’t been smart enough doesn’t bear thinking about.
But enough for now. No doubt 2022 will bring more wonderful books that I won’t be reviewing, but also — happily — at least a few that I will.
Books Overlooked in 2021 | null | null | null | null | null |
From "Derby," published by TBW Books. (Ken Graves and Eva Lipman)
A couple of months ago, I received a package with two books by photographers I’m embarrassed to say I wasn’t familiar with at all. The books are “Derby” and “Restraint and Desire” — both by Ken Graves and Eva Lipman and published this year by TBW Books. I was immediately struck with curiosity.
Another interesting element is that the books carry joint authorship. After digging a bit, I found out that Lipman and Graves worked together for more than three decades, sharing artistic credit for their images until Graves died at age 74 in 2016.
Neither “Derby” nor “Restraint and Desire” contain much in the way of words. And that’s just fine by me. As I’ve said here on multiple occasions, photography is a language in its own right. Often, I don’t pay much attention to the writing in photo books anyway. But this time, because I wasn’t familiar with Lipman and Graves’s work, I wanted to know a little bit more. So I reached out to Lipman, who graciously sent me some much appreciated and illuminating words about their work.
It turns out that Lipman and Graves began working together four years after they first met while seeing each other working individually. They were interested in many of the same things, so they often bumped into each other. Lipman says:
“In Art we were soul mates. We rejected the notion that photography had to be a solitary endeavor. Choosing to photograph as a single entity we shared artistic credit, blurring the lines of authorship. We were both teacher and student on a journey. Ken was the dreamer working from imagination, willing to sacrifice theme for a vision less subject driven. I remained faithful to the immediacy of events and people, searching for coherence and universals in the particular.”
Both “Derby” and “Restraint and Desire” reflect the above personality traits as well as their seamless ability to work as joint authors.
Of the two books, I was initially drawn to “Derby,” probably because I’m from Midwestern stock, and it is a visual exploration of demolition derbies. On top of that, the photos are exquisite, as is the book’s production. Over and above the depiction of somewhat familiar scenes, there is a focus on rituals of masculinity that are fascinating to take in. While on the surface “Derby” is a book about demolition derbies, it’s so much more. It’s about how those rituals serve to reinforce our identities.
When I first looked at “Restraint and Desire,” I saw a book that was far more open-ended. Whereas “Derby” seemed to focus on one subject, “Restraint and Desire” floats through multiple subjects — high school dances, boxing matches, football games. But on second glance, it’s a continuation of Graves and Lipman’s interest in social rituals. Again, the subject is the vehicle to talk about something bigger. The more I look at “Restraint and Desire,” the more I like it.
There’s so much going on, all melded together through repeated gestures and rituals that say a lot about our humanness and impulses for the things we desire. Desire can be such a powerful thing, and yet sometimes we find ourselves holding it at bay.
No review can get to the bottom of what any work is about completely. And that’s the case here. There’s a richness of material in both “Derby” and “Restraint and Desire.” They are fertile grounds for multiple readings. Like onions, you can peel each one back to reveal more and more layers. What unites both of them is their examination of the rituals that make us human — feelings and traits ranging from lust and desire to compassion and vulnerability. Time and again, in picture after picture, you can pick up on these things, whether it is the look in the eye of a man draped over his car or the intimacy of touch, the gestures of hands.
“Derby” and “Restraint and Desire” are beautifully evocative books that showcase Graves and Lipman’s working relationship, not only with each other but to the resulting work. The following text comes from the publisher’s website about “Restraint and Desire,” but I think in a way it describes the photos in both books:
“With a profound visual sensitivity, Graves and Lipman collect human gestures that betray the complex interiority of their subjects. Hands often act here as the protagonist — grabbing, touching, reaching — entering and exiting the photographs like a visual metronome. Lust, fear, boredom, exhaustion and a myriad of feelings beyond the realm of language are all on display through the discerning glare of their camera and its flash.”
You can learn more about the books, including how to buy them, on the TBW Books website, here and here. | null | null | null | null | null |
Record manatee deaths cause Florida to try feeding program
More than 1,000 manatees died in Florida waters in 2021 as water pollution hurt their food supply.
Manatees crowd together near the warm-water outflows from a power plant in Riviera Beach, Florida, in February. More than 1,000 of the animals died in 2021. Some died by being stuck by boats, but others died of starvation. Business and government officials are collaborating on a program to feed the manatees this winter. (Greg Lovett/AP)
As winter begins in Florida, a new feeding plan could save many manatees from starvation. But they will still face the long-term threat of man-made water pollution stifling their food supply, wildlife officials said.
The slow-moving marine mammals will soon begin to gather at warm-water sites, such as power plants, as the ocean temperatures cool, and there may not be enough sea grass to sustain them, officials told the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The Florida Power and Light Company (FPL), the state’s largest electric utility, is contributing $700,000 for a “temporary field response station” to feed the manatees at its plant in Cape Canaveral on the east coast of the state. The money is also for rescue and rehabilitation of distressed manatees, the company said in a news release.
The program has not been tried before. “The eyes of the world are on this,” said wildlife commission Chairman Rodney Barreto. “We’ve got to get it right.”
Officials stress that people should not feed the marine mammals. They say it is illegal to do so, and it leads to an unhealthy association between the animals and food sources.
The new feeding program is intended as a temporary measure to prevent more manatee deaths while the state spends millions of dollars restoring the sea grass beds in areas such as the Indian River Lagoon, which is a critical winter habitat.
There are between 7,000 and 8,000 manatees — also known as sea cows — in Florida, according to state estimates. They are close relatives of elephants and can live up to 65 years, but they reproduce slowly. It’s illegal to harm them, because they are protected by the Endangered Species Act.
More than 1,000 manatees died in Florida waters last year, a record number in a single year. Some were killed by boat strikes and many more were scarred by those collisions. In addition, many starve to death because polluted water kills the sea grass upon which they depend.
The issue facing wildlife officials in the long-term is how to stop fertilizer-filled runoff from sugar farms and other agricultural operations, as well as storm-water and sewage flows from cities, into bays and estuaries, which can lead to the breeding of harmful organisms such as blue-green algae. Warmer water and air temperatures triggered by climate change make the problem worse, many experts say.
“We all know the underlying problem is water quality,” said Larry Williams, Florida state supervisor with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, adding that other marine creatures will soon suffer as well. “They are declining too, just like the manatees are.”
Florida wildlife commission member Mike Sole, who is an executive with FPL’s parent company, NextEra Energy, also said the manatee deaths are “really just a symptom” of the greater pollution problem. “We’ve got to also focus on the cure of water quality,” Sole said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently announced $481 million in water quality improvement grants throughout the state. Of that, $53 million is being allocated for wastewater treatment in the Indian River Lagoon area.
Barreto, the Florida wildlife commission chairman, said there must be a sustained effort to restore the manatee-friendly sea grass beds and clean up the polluted water causing the problem.
“We want to make sure the herd survives,” Barreto said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nothing invokes as much nostalgia as Christmases past. In the spirit of the season, I decided to see what Post readers were reading about in holiday seasons of yore. Alas, we didn’t have a correspondent in Bethlehem to cover the Big One. So I picked a nice round number — 100 years — and decided to read a week’s worth of papers from Christmas to New Year’s 1921. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Christina Tkacik, The Baltimore Sun | AP
BALTIMORE, Md. — Located in a former Popeye’s set amid a highway strip mall, Porter Soul Food is dishing up Southern classics and beating the odds that come with being a Black-owned restaurant on the Eastern Shore.
After opening in January 2020, it had to operate as a carryout only during some of its earliest months in operation due to COVID. That might have doomed any new business, but the surrounding community in Cambridge embraced the restaurant. Online reviews reflect the cult-like status the restaurant has built in under two years.
“Can’t wait to return to one of our favorite restaurants in the country.”
“Best catfish on the East coast!!”
Other draws for their customers include fall-off-the-bone turkey wings and oxtail smothered in gravy. And of course, there are fresh cooked collard greens and macaroni and cheese, made just the way co-owner Cynthia Porter grew up eating them.
In the kitchen, her husband, Rod Porter, cooks up turkey wings, pigs’ feet and North Carolina-style barbecue. The restaurant’s tagline is “Southern food with an attitude,” which Rod says reflects the generous seasonings that go into every dish, be it candied yams or catfish.
The Porters married in 2010 after meeting in North Carolina, where Rod is originally from. They returned to Cambridge, where Cynthia is pastor at one of the area’s largest Black churches, and Rod is an elder and co-pastor.
In some ways, the restaurant has become an outgrowth of their ministry.
“People call this ‘church,’” said Cynthia. If someone comes in seeming distraught, she has been known to take them aside. “Do you mind if I pray with you?” she said. “They’re so grateful.”
For Black customers, soul food restaurants offer “a taste of home and memory” said soul food scholar Adrian Miller, a James Beard award recipient. Soul food staples like collards have roots in the cooking of enslaved people and combine the traditions of multiple continents — from West Africa to Europe and the Americas.
Beyond sustenance, soul food restaurants also serve an important social purpose, providing a haven for Black customers, said Miller.
Many guests stop by Porter Soul after a visit to the Harriet Tubman Museum, devoted to Dorchester County’s most famous resident. Born into slavery as Araminta Ross, she led family and friends on daring escapes North. Today, Dorchester County is around 29% Black and its residents include some of Tubman’s distant relatives.
The pandemic shuttered Minty’s Place, one of the only other Black-owned restaurants in Cambridge and named in honor of Tubman. Owner Teresa Lamar, who grew up on the lower Eastern Shore, says she has been struggling to find the staff to get restarted but hopes to reopen next spring.
The small number of Black-owned restaurants in the area speaks to some of the structural racism Black people face in Cambridge and beyond. Lamar calls the historic port city along the Choptank River “a growing, thriving area that is trying to catch up with the world in some ways.”
She notes that while the majority of her customers are white, some people haven’t been has been tolerant. “I’m not there to fight, I’m there to bring a community together,” she said.
Randy Potter, president of the Delmarva Minority Business Coalition, noted that there are multiple Black-owned caterers in Cambridge, but very few Black-owned restaurants. “You’ve got to have a place to put your business,” he said, adding that some would-be entrepreneurs lack knowledge about what’s needed to start a business, or have trouble getting loans.
Potter’s group, which falls under the Dorchester Chamber of Commerce, hosts free networking events for minority entrepreneurs and lectures on topics from cryptocurrency to starting a business. And he sees signs of progress, including another Black-owned restaurant, ArtBar2.0, that is set to open soon in historic Cambridge next to the Tubman museum.
Customers’ enthusiasm for Porter Soul Food reflects, in part, just how long it’s been since there was a soul food restaurant like this in Cambridge. “It’s long overdue,” said customer Gloria Woolford, who lives a few blocks away from the eatery.
The Porters have become a surrogate family for Jessica Heath, 44, who was a regular customer after the restaurant opened and asked for a job as a server this summer. “They’re all I have.”
She and other employees of the restaurant call the Porters “Mom” and “Dad,” although neither Cynthia or Rod would reveal their ages.
Cook Pat Gray, 77, had retired from her job in the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis before joining the team at Porter Soul. (Before the Academy, she was a cook at the White House during the administration of President Jimmy Carter.) But she grew “tired of sitting at home,” she says.
During a recent visit, construction workers Mike Dashiell and Jerome Holbrook stopped by to pick up lunch. Though they live in Salisbury, they work in Cambridge and stop by every day that the restaurant is open. “I try a little bit of everything,’ said Dashiell. He even comes with his wife on his days off.
Angela Riley of Parkville came with a group of friends from Baltimore. “It didn’t disappoint,” she said.
A sign outside cautions diners that the restaurant is not a fast-food joint. Meals are cooked to order and can take time to come out. Woolford, 75, sat a booth as the cooks at Porter Soul Food prepared her lunch order. “It’s worth the wait,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The four allegedly pulled guns and took the car from its occupants at about 9:40 p.m. Friday in the 1200 block of S Street NW, police said.
They were apprehended by police who were called to the scene. They were identified by police only as a 17-year-old from Temple Hills, Md., a 17 year-old and a 16 year-old, both from southeast D.C., and a 16 year-old from southwest D.C. They were charged with armed carjacking. | null | null | null | null | null |
Walensky also told The Washington Post that the agency decided against requiring a negative test result after five days of isolation because the those tests are often inaccurate at that point.
“There’s no doubt about it: The acceleration of cases that we have seen is really unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we have seen before,” Fauci said. But, he added, “Given the large number of cases, we have not seen a concomitant increase in the relative percentage of hospitalizations.” | null | null | null | null | null |
NFL to hold a pregame moment of silence for John Madden at all Week 17 games
To no one’s surprise, it’s snowing for Buffalo’s game
As Week 17 arrives, the NFL plays on and tries to live with the virus
For Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers, Week 17 brings what may well be the final regular season home games for the only teams for they’ve played.
For Wilson’s Seattle Seahawks, the season will end after Week 18 while Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers will move on to the postseason.
The 5-10 Seahawks who haven’t reached double digits in losses since 2009, host the Detroit Lions (2-12-1) before their season finale against the Cardinals in Arizona. Wilson is wrapping up his 10th season in Seattle.
“I know you guys asked Bobby [Wagner] about could this be your last game [in Seattle as a Seahawk],” Wilson said last week. “I know for me personally, I hope it’s not my last game, but at the same time, I know it won’t be my last game in the NFL. So I’m just focused on today and getting better today. So that’s my focus and that’s my goal. I love this city and I love this moment. I love these guys. We’ve got to make sure we get better today. That’s the only thing that matters.”
Rodgers, a contender for his fourth NFL MVP award in his 17th season, has been dealing with uncertainty since calling his future “a beautiful mystery” after the NFC championship game. Last week, he was similarly vague — with one exception.
“It won’t be something where I’ll drag it out for months and months,” Rodgers told reporters. “I’m not going to hold the team back from anything and once I commit — and if it’s committing to move forward here — it will be a quick decision.”
Rodgers didn’t rule out retirement at the age of 38 but called this season, “one of my favorite years of football.” The Packers, who have the top seed in the NFC going into Sunday night’s game against Minnesota, have the NFL’s best record at 12-3.
“I think that I’m just enjoying this season for this season, and I think playing next year will definitely be in the thought process,” Rodgers said. “One of the things that obviously [is] to not be a bum on the way out and to still be able to play, I think is important to me. If this year has taught me anything, it’s that I still can play, I still have a love for the game, I’m still super competitive and still enjoy the process of the week.”
There will be a pregame moment of silence for John Madden at all NFL games this weekend.
Brewer: John Madden could have remained a coach. Aren’t we lucky he knew better?
He was one of the most influential figures in NFL history as a Super Bowl-winning coach for the Oakland Raiders; a beloved broadcaster who won 16 Emmy Awards over a three-decade career spent with all four major networks; and the face of the wildly popular “Madden NFL Football” video game franchise.
“As you know, the NFL lost a true giant on Tuesday with the passing of John Madden,” Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote to NFL teams in a memo Thursday. “To help honor his legacy, we ask that each home team in Week 17 observe a moment of silence in his memory just prior to the start of the game.”
The weather gods, as is their wont in winter, are supplying a fluff-fest for the Buffalo Bills’ game against the Atlanta Falcons in Orchard Park, N.Y.
The unlucky opponents this week are the Atlanta Falcons, who no doubt would prefer to be playing in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where they could just close the roof on the weather.
The NFL continues to push forward through its coronavirus issues, preparing to play Sunday’s Week 17 games after a week spent continuing to try to find ways to live with the virus and operate amid the pandemic.
A key turning point in the NFL’s ability to keep playing even with its sharp increase in cases, attributed by league leaders to the omicron variant, may have come Tuesday. The league and the NFL Players Association agreed to modify their protocols to shorten the isolation period for a player or team staffer to five days — down from 10 days — after a positive coronavirus test, following a recommendation Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This change, I think, is something that we are comfortable with,” Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said last week. “It feels like an important step forward.”
The effects of the change quickly were evident Wednesday, when 100 players leaguewide were cleared to come off their teams’ covid-19 reserve lists in a single day. That included 85 players on teams’ 53-man rosters and 15 players on teams’ practice squads.
“Our continued efforts, working collaboratively with the NFLPA, have enabled us to adopt these updated CDC guidelines, which we expect will assist clubs in better managing their rosters and, more specifically, increasing player availability due to the shortened return time after a positive test,” said Dawn Aponte, the league’s chief football administrative officer.
A player or staffer can be cleared to return from isolation after five days if the individual has been without a fever for at least 24 hours and other symptoms “have resolved or improved,” according to a memo that the NFL sent to teams last week.
“We’re comfortable with this change because it mirrors what we’ve been seeing in our own data, which is that people are showing signs of clearing the virus quicker than what we saw prior to omicron,” Sills said in a conference call with reporters.
The coming weeks are likely to remain trying.
“I think we’ve still got a few more weeks of probably a strong degree of positive tests,” Sills said Friday on the NFL Network. “If you look over the past two weeks, we’ve had almost 600 players that have tested positive.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan speaks during a news conference, Oct. 25, 2021, in Annapolis. (Brian Witte/AP)
In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Hogan (R) said 92 percent of adults in the state have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, yet more than 2,000 people are hospitalized with covid-19 — a number that surpasses the record set this time last year.
Pressed to defend his handling of the latest surge in cases, Hogan said his administration devoted $100 million in emergency funding to hospitals and nursing homes, waived some requirements for out-of-state nurses and health care workers, allowed nurses to graduate early and called out the Maryland National Guard to help run testing sites.
“We’ve been talking about this probably for nearly a month and preparing for it,” he said. “But you can’t really manufacture doctors and nurses that don’t exist. And frankly these heroes on the front line that have been working so hard for two years, there’s fatigue, there are people who are working at hospitals are coming down and being infected.”
Hogan did not comment on a Dec. 24 call from health care organizations, including the Maryland State Medical Society and Maryland Hospital Association, to reinstate the mask mandate.
“We’re continuing to take actions every day, nearly everything that anyone can think of to help us get through this,” he said.
Hogan praised vaccines for protecting people from severe illness and death and credited the vaccine and booster shot for preventing worse consequences when he tested positive for coronavirus two weeks ago. | null | null | null | null | null |
J.D. Crowe performing in 2012 in Indio, Calif. (Karl Walter/Getty Images for Stagecoach)
J.D. Crowe, an award-winning bluegrass banjoist, who helped establish the careers of country stars Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley in the 1970s and whose recordings with the Bluegrass Album Band broadened the genre’s appeal to a younger generation, died Dec. 24 at his home in Nicholasville, Ky. He was 84.
The magazine Bluegrass Today reported that Mr. Crowe, who retired in 2019, had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
As the leader of the Kentucky Mountain Boys, later rebranded as the New South, Mr. Crowe was among the first musicians to adapt rock, urban folk and even rhythm-and-blues to the bluegrass repertoire in the late 1960s. Often dubbed “newgrass,” it was an approach he shared with other contemporary groups such as the Washington-based Country Gentlemen and Seldom Scene.
Widely known among fellow musicians for his tone and nearly flawless meter on the banjo, Mr. Crowe led bands that were an incubator of talent. The classic mid-1970s edition of the New South featured future country star Ricky Skaggs on mandolin and fiddle, guitarist Tony Rice on lead vocals and a then-19-year-old dobro prodigy, Jerry “Flex” Douglas. The band developed a rare cohesion through a four-set-a-night, six-night-a-week gig at the Lexington, Ky., Holiday Inn.
“It was work, work, work,” Skaggs recalled in an interview. “It would be four shows a night for 45 or 50 minutes — we had to have a lot of material . . . I remember woodshedding a bunch, learning 30 or 40 songs to do every night.”
Their 1975 album, eponymously titled “The New South” but better known among bluegrass fans by its catalogue number, “0044,” was remarkably eclectic. Mr. Crowe’s boisterous instrumentals and Rice’s mellow interpretations of Gordon Lightfoot songs shared the grooves with a wild rendition of Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin’ ” and a vocal trio version of Gram Parsons’s “Sin City.”
“All we did was we took tunes nobody was doing,” Mr. Crowe recalled in the liner notes to a 2011 reissue CD, “and it was like they were new tunes as far as the bluegrass genre was concerned.”
Skaggs, already a veteran musician when he joined the band at 21, called Mr. Crowe “a man of few words who led by example.”
Although Mr. Crowe’s bands went through many personnel changes, later editions of the New South were equally stellar and included such performers as lead singer Keith Whitley, who dominated the country charts in the 1980s, and the fleet-fingered mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau. Often straddling the fence between newgrass and country rock, Mr. Crowe added steel guitar and drums to his lineup during Whitley’s tenure in the band.
Although he would freely admit to being inspired by the classic three-fingered banjo styles of Earl Scruggs and Sonny Osborne, Mr. Crowe carried many blues and rock-and-roll licks in his toolbox and enjoyed blurring musical boundaries. He derisively dismissed hidebound genre purists who took issue with the group’s versatility.
In 1981, Mr. Crowe recorded “The Bluegrass Album,” which featured interpretations of the traditional bluegrass repertoire with an all-star unit that included Rice, mandolinist Doyle Lawson (another veteran of Mr. Crowe’s band) and fiddlers Vassar Clements and Bobby Hicks. Mr. Crowe and Rice went on to tour and recorded five more albums as the Bluegrass Album Band. Grammy-winning singer and fiddler Alison Krauss reportedly kept a framed copy of their first album’s cover in her home.
Mr. Crowe and Rice brought the music of Monroe and Flatt and Earl Scruggs to a new generation at a time when many of the original recordings were available only as prohibitively expensive imported reissues.
“When the Album Band did those recordings,” Mr. Crowe told Banjo Newsletter in 2019, “we didn’t try to play exactly like them because we knew we couldn’t! They’ve already done it the best it’ll ever be done. What we did is play a tribute to them for how we learned, this is how we feel playing those songs.”
James Dee Crowe was born Aug. 27, 1937, in Lexington, Ky. His parents were farmers. He took up guitar as a boy, inspired by Ernest Tubb’s guitarist Billy Byrd. He switched to banjo at age 12 after seeing Flatt and Scruggs perform an impromptu audition for the Lexington radio show, “The Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance.” By 18, he was working professionally with singer Mac Wiseman.
In 1956, Mr. Crowe joined Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys, regulars on the “Louisiana Hayride” in Shreveport and the “Wheeling Jamboree” radio and TV programs. With Martin, he played on such hits as “You Don’t Know My Mind,” “Hold What You Got” and his own instrumental feature, “Bear Tracks,” all from 1960. Desiring a respite from constant road work, he started the Kentucky Mountain Boys in Lexington in 1961.
Mr. Crowe received a 1983 Grammy Award in the country instrumental category for his song “Fireball.” He received numerous honors from bluegrass music groups, including a lifetime achievement award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2003. The annual the J.D. Crowe Bluegrass Festival in Wilmore, Ky. is named for him.
Mr. Crowe was often asked about how to get the best sound from a banjo. | null | null | null | null | null |
The four allegedly pulled guns and took the car from its occupants about 9:40 p.m. Friday in the 1200 block of S Street NW, police said.
They were apprehended by police who were called to the scene. They were identified by police only as a 17-year-old from Temple Hills, Md., a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old, both from Southeast D.C., and a 16-year-old from Southwest D.C. They were charged with armed carjacking. | null | null | null | null | null |
After signing with the Washington Football Team in May, left tackle Charles Leno Jr. wasted little time in not only solidifying the team’s offensive line but also proving to be more to his new home.
Through his foundation Beyond the Entertainer, the eight-year veteran and his wife, Jennifer, have turned the month of December into a month of giving through an initiative they’ve aptly named “Leno Claus.” The tradition is one they started in 2020 in Chicago, when he was playing for the Bears, and planned to continue after signing with Washington — despite inherent obstacles with the move, the arrival of a new baby and the coronavirus pandemic.
On Day 1 of Leno Claus, the couple provided 40 jackets to United Mission Relief, a Virginia-based nonprofit that provides disaster and recovery resources to underserved communities. A week later, on Day 8, they brought boxes of diapers, toothpaste and other toiletries to families at the Ronald McDonald House in Falls Church.
“Leno Claus definitely comes down to giving back to the community but also spreading awareness,” Charles Leno said. “That’s a huge thing that I’m trying to do, spread awareness of the different services and different nonprofits out there, and then also giving people opportunities to get involved with those nonprofits. We worked with mental health nonprofits, homeless shelters and battered women’s shelters, things like that. Just trying to spread awareness because we know people are struggling with things, especially through covid.”
The award will provide the Lenos $10,000 toward a charity of their choice and extend a project they’ve been planning for years. Instead of relying on an outside company to run their foundation, the two decided long ago that they would manage it themselves. Jennifer Leno went back to school to get a master’s degree in nonprofit management, and last year they formally launched Beyond the Entertainer.
Leno Claus was its first initiative and was created, in part, through the couple’s familiarity with Chicago. The 2021 version of Leno Claus required a bit more creativity as they adapted to new surroundings. The Lenos partnered with The Hogfarmers, a local group that helps children and families affected by pediatric cancer. They also sought input from others through social media.
“I just remember when I was young just how impactful someone with my status can be,” Charles Leno said. “I remember going to a Raiders camp when I was younger and Tim Brown was there and Jerry Rice was there — guys that probably didn’t even know at the time that they made an impact on my life, telling me different things.
“It’s like thinking beyond what the entertainer does. You can still be a part of sport; you can still be a part of the entertainment or whatever industry you want to do. But you don’t have to just be that person in the spotlight at all times. You can think beyond that, whether that’s an agent or GM or coach — anything.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Super Bowl teams are likely to arrive in L.A. late in the week
NFL has deal on new CBA with replay officials
Andy Dalton makes his return as Bears’ starter
Saints became the latest NFL team upset about competitive unfairness
Joe Burrow salutes his receivers rather than the Krusty Krab this week
How many more teams will make head-coaching changes?
Bill Belichick’s New Year’s resolutions, part 2
Carson Wentz poised to play for Colts after activation from covid list
Thursday night package averaged more than 16 million viewers per game
Lamar Jackson inactive for Ravens; Tyler Huntley to start
Bruce Arians is set to coach Sunday after last week’s positive covid test
Expect the teams participating in the Super Bowl to arrive in the host city late in the week again, just a few days before the game, as with last season.
That was the plan for last season, although it was modified a bit when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the first team to play in a Super Bowl in their home stadium. The Kansas City Chiefs arrived in Tampa on the Saturday before the game, about 26 hours ahead of kickoff.
This season’s game is scheduled to be played Feb. 13 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. It’s likely that the participating teams will spend that week in their home cities and then travel to the Los Angeles area late in the week.
The tradition of the teams spending the entire week in the host city has been scrapped, for now, due to pandemic-related considerations.
Of course, that would change—again—if the Rams or Chargers reach the game.
Or both.
The NFL Referees Association completed an agreement with the league on a new collective bargaining agreement for the replay officials.
The deal was ratified, the NFLRA said last week, and runs through May 2027.
“I want to compliment all of the Replay Officials for their dedication to continue working through most of this season without a CBA,” Carl Paganelli, the organization’s president, said in a written statement. “The final agreement recognizes the contributions and key role that Replay Officials provide on each and every play.”
The replay officials have a CBA with the NFL separate from that of the on-field officials.
NFL rule changes: Modified instant replay, more positions allowed to wear single-digit jerseys
Replay officials have been given expanded duties this season to be allowed to communicate with the on-field officials about certain calls. That has drawn widespread praise, allowing some obvious mistakes by the on-field officials to be corrected quickly and seamlessly, without a formal instant replay review process or a coach’s challenge by one of the teams.
Many coaches and some others within the sport have lobbied for the NFL to take the new system a step further and enact a “sky judge” system, by which the replay official in the booth would be empowered to overturn an erroneous call by the on-field officials on a wider variety of plays.
But the league and the NFL’s competition committee have expressed wariness in the past, in part because of the demands of finding 17 replay officials sufficiently qualified to put such a system into effect. They also are concerned about the potential for inconsistency if 17 sky judges are, in effect, applying 17 perhaps varying standards to what should prompt an overrule.
Quarterback Andy Dalton returns to the starting role for the Chicago Bears when they host the New York Giants in an early-afternoon game at Soldier Field.
Dalton gets the starting nod with rookie Justin Fields still plagued by an ankle injury.
Coach Matt Nagy went back to Dalton after Nick Foles started last Sunday’s triumph at Seattle.
It is Dalton’s first start since a Week 13 loss to the Arizona Cardinals in which he threw four interceptions.
NFL teams and fans simply are going to have to live with competitive inequities as the league attempts to complete a second season played in the pandemic. That has become particularly true with the sharp increase in cases recently, attributed to the spread of the omicron variant.
But that won’t stop the complaints from coming when those involved feel that they haven’t been given a fair chance.
So it was for the New Orleans Saints, who were depleted for their game this past Monday night against the Miami Dolphins.
“I was told pretty early on that the game wasn’t going to be postponed and just had to deal with it,” Saints General Manager Mickey Loomis told WWL radio last week, according to the station’s website. “That was their solution: play the game no matter what. We don’t have to like it, but we have to live with it.”
The Saints lost to the Dolphins, 20-3. Rookie quarterback Ian Book, making his first NFL start because Taysom Hill and Trevor Siemian were on the covid-19 reserve list, was sacked eight times and threw two interceptions, the first of which was returned for a touchdown.
“When you have 18 active players and four of your practice squad players test positive for covid, it’s just too much to overcome, frankly,” Loomis said in his radio interview. “It wasn’t fair to the players. It wasn’t fair to our coaching staff, and certainly not the fans. It was a tough week, but it’s behind us now.”
By Cindy Boren12:40 p.m.
Last week, Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow went with a “Krusty Krab” shirt in a “SpongeBob SquarePants” salute.
This week, after carving up the Ravens with 525 yards passing, he went in a different direction with his pregame wardrobe choice. He wore a shirt bearing the faces of Tee Higgins, Ja’Marr Chase, Tyler Boyd and you can’t really blame him. Those three caught 404 yards worth of passes for three touchdowns in the 41-21 victory.
It seems possible that there could be a relatively light further turnover among NFL head coaches in the coming weeks.
Two teams, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Las Vegas Raiders, already are in the market for new coaches, unless the Raiders opt to retain interim coach Rich Bisaccia. The Jaguars fired Urban Meyer as their coach. Jon Gruden resigned as coach of the Raiders.
Which teams will join the Jaguars and Raiders?
There has been intense speculation about the job insecurity of the Chicago Bears’ Matt Nagy, the Denver Broncos’ Vic Fangio and the Minnesota Vikings’ Mike Zimmer. There has been talk about the possibilities for major changes in Seattle that perhaps could include Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll. Some wonder about the Carolina Panthers’ Matt Rhule.
Firing-and-hiring cycles often bring surprises. But unless the New York Giants reverse course and, contrary to recent speculation, fire Joe Judge as their coach or a still-struggling franchise ousts its coach after only one season, there might not be all that much more still to come.
Coach Bill Belichick was asked about his New Year’s resolutions during his postgame news conference following the New England Patriots’ defeat last Sunday in Foxborough, Mass., to the Buffalo Bills.
Belichick, predictably, was not very expansive on the subject in the aftermath of a loss that knocked the Patriots from first place in the AFC East.
During his news conference Friday, Belichick was asked again, by the same reporter.
And, again, he didn’t say much.
“They would all be personal,” Belichick said. “So it probably wouldn’t mean anything to you, anyway. Thank you.”
You have to admire the persistence of the questioning, at least.
Quarterback Carson Wentz was activated Saturday by the Indianapolis Colts and is expected to play in Sunday’s early-afternoon game against the Las Vegas Raiders in Indianapolis.
Wentz and the Colts benefit immediately from last week’s protocol change by the NFL and NFL Players Association shortening the isolation period for players and staff members following a positive test for the coronavirus, regardless of their vaccination status.
The Colts activated Wentz from their covid-19 reserve list. Procedurally, that move had to be made by Saturday’s leaguewide roster deadline even though Wentz had not been cleared at that point to rejoin team activities. Wentz was not eligible for such clearance until Sunday. But the current protocols allow a team to activate a player Saturday based on the expectation the player will be cleared Sunday to play. If a player were to fail to receive such game-day clearance under that scenario, he could not be replaced on the roster.
Wentz was placed on the covid-19 reserve list Tuesday. He reportedly remains unvaccinated and tested positive for the virus. His five-day isolation ran through Saturday. To be eligible to be cleared, a player must be without a fever for at least 24 hours while other symptoms have resolved or are improving, under the protocols.
The NFL and NFLPA agreed Tuesday to shorten the isolation period from 10 days to five days for all personnel, based on a recommendation made the previous day by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Colts, at 9-6, are the AFC’s No. 5 seed entering Sunday’s play and can clinch a playoff berth with a victory over the Raiders. Rookie Sam Ehlinger practiced with the Colts’ starting offense during the week in place of Wentz. Coach Frank Reich confirmed that he spoke to retired quarterback Philip Rivers last week. But the Colts did not sign Rivers.
The Thursday Night Football package averaged 16.4 million viewers per game across Fox, the NFL Network, Amazon Prime and other platforms this season.
That included the 28.6 million viewers for the Packers-Browns game on Christmas Day, which came on a Saturday but was part of the package.
The Packers-Browns viewing audience was the second-largest for any NFL game this season, behind only the 41.3 million viewers for the Cowboys-Raiders game on Thanksgiving Day.
The Thursday night package will be carried exclusively on Amazon Prime beginning next season.
Quarterback Lamar Jackson is on the Baltimore Ravens’ inactive list for their early-afternoon game against the Los Angeles Rams in Baltimore.
Tyler Huntley is set to start at quarterback for the Ravens.
Jackson misses his third straight game because of an ankle injury. He had been listed as questionable on the injury report.
Jackson did not participate in the Ravens’ practices Thursday and Friday. He was a limited participant in Wednesday’s practice but was seen limping while on the field. Coach John Harbaugh said Friday he believed that Jackson had “a chance” to play in this game.
The Ravens have lost four straight games and have fallen to No. 8 in the AFC’s postseason standings; seven teams per conference qualify for the playoffs.
Josh Johnson was the Ravens’ fill-in quarterback for last Sunday’s defeat at Cincinnati, with Huntley on the covid-19 reserve list.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers Coach Bruce Arians is expected to be on the sideline for Sunday’s early-afternoon game against the New York Jets in East Rutherford, N.Y.
The Buccaneers announced Saturday that Arians had cleared the coronavirus protocols and would coach Sunday.
The team said Tuesday that Arians had tested positive for the virus.
He returns quickly under the newly shortened five-day isolation period, approved last week by the NFL and the NFL Players Association, for players and team staffers following a positive test. | null | null | null | null | null |
The suspension came hours after she published a tweet falsely suggesting “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” Included was a chart featuring data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which provides self-reported information that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns does not imply causation.
In a statement on the messaging app Telegram, Greene lambasted Twitter, saying it “is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth. That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them.” She shared the message on other social media alternatives on which she has a presence, including Gettr, a conservative-friendly site led by former Trump adviser Jason Miller.
On Twitter, Greene maintains access to her congressional account, @RepMTG, as it is not in violation of company policies.
The social-networking site famously issued a permanent ban last year on then-President Donald Trump, days after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Twitter had long resisted action against Trump but said it was moved to respond because of the risk of further violence.
Greene, | null | null | null | null | null |
Second place over the weekend went to Universal Picture’s animated sequel “Sing 2." It took in $19.6 million in its second weekend to bring its two-week total to $89.7 million. That’s a steady result given that family movies and films skewing toward older moviegoers have been the slowest to bounce back during the pandemic. “Sing 2” added another $54.9 million internationally. It’s trajectory should make it the top animated release of the pandemic.
“The King's Man,” the third installment in Matthew Vaughn’s “Kingsman” series, grossed a modest $4.5 million in its second week after a lackluster debut. But that was still good enough for third place. The Disney release, produced by 20th Century Studios, has made $47.8 million globally.
After flopping on its debut last week, Warner Bros.’ “The Matrix Resurrections” dropped a steep 64% in its second weekend with $3.8 million. The film is simultaneously streaming on HBO Max, a 2021 practice that the studio has pledged to end in 2022. The long-in-coming “Matrix” reboot was even edged by the second week of the Kurt Warner NFL drama “American Underdog," which grossed $4.1 million for Lionsgate. | null | null | null | null | null |
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) speaks at a news conference in Annapolis on Oct. 25, 2021. (Brian Witte/AP)
In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Hogan (R) said that 92 percent of adults in the state have gotten at least one dose of vaccine. More than 2,000 people are hospitalized with covid-19 — a number that surpasses the record set this time last year.
Pressed to defend his handling of the latest surge in cases, Hogan said his administration devoted $100 million in emergency funding to hospitals and nursing homes, waived some requirements for out-of-state nurses and health-care workers, allowed nurses to graduate early and called out the Maryland National Guard to help run testing sites.
“We’ve been talking about this probably for nearly a month and preparing for it,” he said. “But you can’t really manufacture doctors and nurses that don’t exist. And frankly these heroes on the front line that have been working so hard for two years, there’s fatigue, there are people who are working at hospitals [and] are coming down and being infected.”
Hogan did not comment on a Dec. 24 call from health-care organizations, including the Maryland State Medical Society and Maryland Hospital Association, to reinstate the mask mandate.
“We’re continuing to take actions every day, nearly everything that anyone can think of, to help us get through this,” he said.
Hogan praised vaccines for protecting people from severe illness and death and credited vaccinations and booster shots with preventing worse consequences when he tested positive for the coronavirus two weeks ago. | null | null | null | null | null |
I tested positive on the eve of Christmas Eve. I’d been feeling a bit tentative all week: a stuffy nose, a cough, fatigue. I thought it was a cold but it was hard to ignore the news reports about omicron. My Twitter feed was full of stories with such headlines as: “With omicron, it may be harder to tell if you have covid, the common cold or the flu” and “Is That Sniffle a Cold? Or Is It Covid?” and the oddly specific “Attention John Kelly: It’s Not a Cold. It’s Covid.”
I wasn’t sure whether to share the news of my covidity. I worried some people would see it as proof that vaccines and boosters don’t work. I think the opposite. If this is all that I experience — a stuffy nose, some aches — I got off lightly, especially compared to people struck with covid earlier in the pandemic and to health care workers, who have been on a roller coaster since March 2020. If you won’t get boosted/wear a mask/stay home for yourself, do it for them. | null | null | null | null | null |
A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art shows the artist’s range, if not who she really was.
“Circle Picture” (1933) by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. (Kunstmuseum Bern/Gift of Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach)
NEW YORK — Perhaps the best way to make sense of the protean creativity on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sophie Taeuber-Arp exhibition is a simple list of the kind of work on display. There are paintings, sculptures, wall hangings, stained glass, marionettes, stage designs, photographs, jewelry, bead work, textiles, line drawings, architectural renderings and furniture. She also designed clothing and worked as a dancer and choreographer.
Which is exactly the opposite of who she really was. As the curators make clear through careful juxtapositions and archival material, the Swiss-born artist planned many of her works meticulously, creating paper renderings. Often, she pursued ideas with small, serial variations, such that each work seems to imply by necessity the design of the next one, rather like an IQ test in which we extrapolate forthcoming patterns by analyzing preceding ones. As Jean Arp once said, “My wife brandishes compass and ruler day and night,” and that is more than evident from the taut perfection of many of her best geometric designs.
Few artists have so completely inhabited the two basic threads of modernism, impulses that seem in retrospect almost diametrically opposed. In 1918, she began designing marionettes for staging of a commedia dell’arte play called “King Stag,” a classic Dada performance in which the slightly surreal puppets, confected from tubes, cones and masklike oval faces, included characters such as Freudanalyticus and Dr. Oedipus Complex. The marionettes, on view in the MoMA exhibition, are a delight and were embraced as sculpture by the avant-garde even if early performances of the play were closed by the 1918 flu pandemic.
Parallel to the embrace of absurdity, the childlike, the unconscious and what was then called simply the “primitive,” Taeuber-Arp also pursued the linear, rational, even dogmatic orderliness of modernism. She was an architect who designed her own studio and home, an interior designer who covered walls with grids of color, and an interior designer who brought a strong sense of purposeful design to domestic space. One work included in the Tate and Basel exhibitions (and included in the substantial catalogue) is a schematic for how to store things in a utility closet that she designed for a 1930s Berlin house. It not only indicates the size and interior shape of the closet, it shows where the brooms, dustpans, brushes, towels, cleaning cloths and even the iron were to be stored.
The MoMA show includes several other fine, axonometric drawings from the same Berlin project (designed for Ingeborg and Wilhelm Bitter), but it’s worth looking up the interior closet rendering. In the modern house, these tools of daily life are almost always banished or invisible. But in this lovely little drawing, Taeuber-Arp has joined the two strains of modernism together, she has given us the waking fantasy of order and geometry, and the hidden “unconscious” of the broom and dustpan. She saw both, she saw the interrelation between them. The old world must be swept out, but there must be space for the broom in the new order that replaces it. She was almost exceptional in that.
For Alma Thomas, beauty was everything
Her early work on “King Stag” helped establish her reputation as an artist. Design work, including interior designs for a cafe and dance hall complex in Strasbourg, France, known as the Aubette, gave her the freedom to pursue painting and sculpture more independently. Much of this large exhibition is given over to paintings and other works made in the 1930s, when she explored and sometimes exhausted different vocabularies of squares and circles, lines and wedges, and unique shapes including a bent-sided form that looks almost as if traced from one of the classic early Dada works, Marcel Duchamp’s 1913-1914 “Three Standard Stoppages.”
It’s easier to feel admiration for her work, and her inexhaustibility, than love for whomever she was, which isn’t clear from this survey. Her gradual erasure was probably inevitable: She was a woman in a man’s world; she worked in media, including fabric and jewelry, that still struggle for full recognition in the hierarchies of the art world; important work was lost or altered; her husband’s stature partly eclipsed hers; and geometric abstraction was a field crowded with competition.
Photographs made of Sophie Taeuber in 1920 hint at the next stage in the rehabilitation of her legacy. She is seen partly hiding behind one of her most important early works, a small sculpture called simply “Dada Head.” The bulbous faux head functions as a mask, and in one image, she also wears a thin veil. She succeeds in conveying a message common to serious artists: that it is the work, not the woman or the man behind it, that matters. But the work leaves us hungry to know her, too.
“Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through March 12. moma.org. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Fairfax County wants people to know they can prevent gun violence through its red-flag law
Demonstrators in downtown Cincinnati in March 2018, in a "March for Our Lives" protest for gun legislation and school safety that was spearheaded by teens from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. (John Minchillo/AP)
By Paul A. Friedman
December 31, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EST
Paul A. Friedman is the founder and executive director of Safer Country, an Alexandria-based gun-violence prevention nonprofit working to keep guns out of unsafe hands.
It’s time to start waving the red flag. In the world of gun-violence prevention, a red flag is a call to save a life. On Dec. 13, two gun-related events in the D.C. region mapped out two very different public policies toward guns. The dichotomy is telling. One proposal would encourage the use of guns to solve conflicts in our society; the other aims to prevent gun tragedies by intervening before they happen.
On Capitol Hill, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) announced a bill that would “codify Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law at the federal level, abolishing the ‘duty of retreat’ when attacked.” In other words, if you want to battle it out with a gun, it’s legally okay to do so. Offering people the legal option of shooting back rather than avoiding a violent conflict is a bad idea. More shooting means more deaths, including of bystanders. Instead, our national goal should be to prevent guns being turned on our fellow human beings.
About 25 miles to the west in Fairfax County’s Public Safety Headquarters, the gun-violence prevention nonprofit that I founded and run, Safer Country, joined with Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chair Jeffrey C. McKay (D), two other supervisors and the commonwealth’s attorney to announce a countywide red-flag law public awareness campaign. The idea is to let people know they can prevent a gun tragedy by contacting law enforcement when they observe someone acting in a way that signifies real danger.
Tragically, too many of our states have it backward. At least thirty states have a “stand your ground” law. Only 19 and D.C. have a version of a red-flag law, also called an extreme risk order. Virginia became the 19th when it passed its red-flag law in early 2020. Since then, there have been 34 attempts to use the law in Fairfax County. In a county with 1 million people, it seems likely that not enough people know about a law that gives them the power to act.
A red-flag law empowers police to disarm a person if a judge believes there’s an imminent danger that person will use a gun to harm himself or herself or others. If a court order is issued to temporarily remove a person’s guns, and if the danger has not eased by a required hearing 14 days later, that person may be barred from purchasing, possessing or transporting a firearm for up to 180 days.
If we can raise public awareness, more people are likely to alert the police when they believe someone they know is in real trouble. Safer Country was fortunate to find an ally in Lee District Supervisor and Public Safety Committee Chair Rodney L. Lusk (D). He and committee co-chair James R. Walkinshaw (D) produced a unanimous and bipartisan vote by the full board to promote the county’s law. That campaign now has a website and a slogan Safer Country recommended: “Prevent a Gun Tragedy — Speak Up!”
This law saves lives. In one high-profile case, Richard Sherman, a star football player, repeatedly threatened to kill himself. Sherman’s family asked for help under a red-flag law in Washington state, and the local police were able to take possession of four handguns and a semiautomatic rifle, defusing the immediate danger. Sherman has since received mental health counseling and has resumed his football career.
There’s no way to know for certain that Sherman would have carried out his threats, but we know that the red-flag law made it much less likely. Had he lived in one of the 31 states that lack such laws, it would have been a lot harder for his family and public safety officials to keep Sherman from possibly doing harm. In most states, there are few options for public safety officials or family to act in advance, even when there are clear signs that somebody is on the verge of using a gun to do harm. That’s why this law is so valuable.
Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., told me, “If red-flag laws had been in existence before [the shooting], my daughter would be alive today.” He also tweeted, “And this is why we need laws like red flag laws, to give law enforcement every possible chance to prevent someone who should not own a gun from having one.” The confessed Parkland shooter had spoken in advance that he had thoughts about using his rifle to kill.
With red-flag laws, we can create a safer country, even if we have to work county by county. Let’s all wave that flag and save lives. | null | null | null | null | null |
These photos are a vibrant portrait of a uniquely Floridian era gone by
Madeline in pool, Haddon Hall Hotel, Miami Beach, Fla., 1999. (Naomi Harris)
Naomi Harris’s new book, “Haddon Hall” (Masa + Void, 2021) is ostensibly about a place and time in Florida that has faded away. Oh, but it is so much more than that. When you reach the end of the book, you’ll notice that you’ve been introduced to a vibrant group of people with the affection of a friend. You see, it is not merely a descriptive exercise; love and camaraderie oozes from Harris’s images.
For a time, Miami Beach’s South Beach was a haven for what have been called “snowbirds.” Harris recalls this in a text in her book:
“After years of working hard and surviving the Depression, the war and concentration camps, Jewish ‘snowbirds,’ a nickname in Canada and the United States for who migrate south for the season, flocked to the area to rest, soak in the sun and escape the winter cold of the Northeast.”
South Beach experienced its heyday of “snowbirds” escaping frigid northern climates, swapping them for the entertainment provided by strolls near the beach, bingo games and dances in the 1970s. Once the ’80s came around, the scene started to decline for many reasons, including gentrification.
As that happened, many of the people who used to go to South Beach stayed farther north. But some remained, ending up in a hotel called Haddon Hall. And that is where Harris found the people in her book when she moved to South Beach to begin a project focusing on survivors.
Harris was inspired to seek out survivors by the story of her maternal grandmother, who had escaped the Holocaust by moving from Poland to Canada in 1928. Although her grandmother was spared the horrors of the concentration camps, Harris says that all but two of her grandmother’s sisters died in the concentration camps. Her grandmother became closed off and was haunted by survivor’s guilt.
Her story prompted Harris to travel to the Miami area in 1998 in search of survivors. As she relates in “Haddon Hall,” she spent that time going to community centers, synagogues and lunch programs looking for subjects. And then one day she stumbled on the Haddon Hall Hotel:
“One balmy evening as I walked along Collins Avenue in the heart of South Beach, the sound of big band music lured me inside a small establishment called Haddon Hall Hotel. Here in the foyer, the silver-haired revelers packed a tiny dance floor. Captivated, I watched, slowly realizing that I’d stumbled upon a unique group of individuals. From that moment, my initial goal of documenting only Holocaust survivors changed, and for the next two years my photographs focused on the residents of the hotel and their stories. They were all survivors of something.”
Far from being a flyby glance at the people and places of the time, the images in “Haddon Hall” are the product of deep commitment, the kind you can come by only through immersion. Harris got to know the people of the Haddon Hall Hotel so well that she became a surrogate granddaughter.
The book introduces us to this extraordinary group of people Harris got to know, including Madeline, Ida, Marie, Leigh and Gina — all of whom are in this selection of images. We meet them in their rooms and by the pool, enjoying the activities of their halcyon days — exercising, brushing their teeth, swimming and just plain old “kibitzing.”
Harris’s evocative images bring us into this circle of people who’ve found and sought solace in each other in a unique place and time. They jump off the page and lodge in your mind’s eye through Harris’s lens. “Haddon Hall” is like a family album, wrought with vim, vigor and a healthy dose of empathy. It’s a beautifully engaging testimony to a bygone era.
You can see more of Harris’s work on her website. And you can buy “Haddon Hall” here or here. | null | null | null | null | null |
Coach Bruce Arians said after the game that Brown will not remain with the Buccaneers.
“He is no longer a Buc, all right?” Arians said during his postgame news conference. “That’s the end of the story. Let’s talk about the guys that went out there and won the game.”
Brown was playing his second game for the Buccaneers since serving a three-game suspension imposed by the NFL for misrepresenting his vaccination status. Brown submitted a fake vaccination card but subsequently was legitimately vaccinated, a person familiar with the situation said at the time.
Arians allowed Brown to rejoin the team even though he had said when the Buccaneers signed him last season, as Brown completed an eight-game suspension for violating the NFL’s personal conduct policy, that he would be allowed only one misstep in Tampa. Arians recently said circumstances had changed and it was in the Buccaneers’ best interests to allow Brown to return. | null | null | null | null | null |
PM Update: Winter storm warning in place as heavy snow develops on Monday morning
A good 3 to 6 inches of snow is expected across the region
*Winter storm warning from 1 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Monday for the immediate area *
From temperatures in the 60s to a full-fledged snowstorm in less than 12 hours. You’ve probably heard the news by now. A winter storm warning goes into effect late tonight ahead of a quickly developing storm system poised to drop several inches of snow across the region. Check out our official storm forecast for more details.
Through Tonight: The cold front moves through properly in the next few hours, and temperatures will drop off rather dramatically in the evening hours. Precipitation (rain and sleet) will break out sometime after 1 a.m., eventually changing to sleet and snow in the predawn hours. Low temperatures will bottom out right at about 30 degrees, with accumulation starting in earnest on some surfaces just before sunrise.
Tomorrow (Monday): Precipitation should change to all snow regionwide by about 6 a.m., and the snow may become heavy for a few hours, especially during the rush-hour time frame. Expect about 3 to 6 inches on the ground by the late afternoon (after 3 p.m.), when the snow should begin to taper off. Areas just south of Washington could see even higher amounts with somewhat lesser amounts expected in our northern areas.
Temperatures will rise to the mid-30s in the afternoon once the snow stops and winds will be gusty out of the north at 15-25 mph. Things will clear out and become very cold tomorrow night, with refreezing likely. Low temperatures will be in the teens to low 20s. | null | null | null | null | null |
Karen Smith, vice president of Friends of Broward County Library, distributes at-home coronavirus test kits in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Dec. 30. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/AP)
Georgia has shattered records, with nearly 1 in 3 tests coming back positive in the last week of December — and in metro Atlanta, nearly half of tests were positive. New daily infections in Florida have hit an average of about 43,000 — far above the peak of 23,000 reached during the delta variant surge in the summer. Louisiana also has eclipsed daily infection records set during its summer surge, with 12,500 cases reported Thursday, which state officials said was nearly twice the record, established in August.
Omicron surge could reach U.S peak by mid-January, experts say
David Rubin, who monitors coronavirus trends nationally for PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said he expects the Southeast to be a major driver of the nation’s cases this month. But he said he expects a fast decline, mirroring patterns observed during omicron variant surges in South Africa and Britain.
“The [South’s] bigger test is probably going to be in the summertime, when they usually have their big surges,” Rubin said. “We are going to continue to have waves in the new year that I think will become lesser in amplitude over time and will lead to fewer hospitalizations over time.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) cautioned Sunday that the next month could mark the “worst part” of the pandemic in his state, with residents who are unvaccinated against the virus placing a strain on hospitals. Hogan appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” days after Maryland hospitals eclipsed a record set a year ago of more than 2,000 people hospitalized with covid-19.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has held regular briefings since cases started exploding and has required businesses to mandate proof of vaccination for entry or that customers wear masks. But Republican governors in Southern states with outbreaks have remained comparatively muted and have resisted measures to contain the spread, as they did during the delta variant surge.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said he would not reconsider his ban on local mask mandates and told a radio station that “we’re moving forward with life as we know it” when asked recently about his response to the omicron variant.
As infections in Georgia surge to record highs and hospital beds fill up faster than in any state besides New Jersey, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) announced that his administration would expand testing sites, deploy 200 National Guard troops to hospitals and testing sites, and spend up to $100 million to add as many as 1,000 health-care workers. But he pointedly rejected measures to contain the virus and criticized Atlanta for recently reimposing a mask mandate.
First they ran out of PPE and masks. Now hospitals face staff shortage.
“It is time to trust our citizens to do what’s right for themselves and their families,” Kemp said in a statement Wednesday. “That is why I will absolutely not be implementing any measures that shutter businesses or divide the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, or the masked from the unmasked.”
“Unfortunately, the deja vu we are experiencing in Georgia also includes state-level public health leadership that in the face of a predictably severe surge of the pandemic is really doing very little to proactively respond,” Heiman said.
“We will see more people hospitalized and more people dying, especially as it moves into the more rural parts of our state, where there’s a higher number of people who are unvaccinated and less health-care infrastructure to take care of people when they are sick,” he said.
“People need to know if they come to a hospital during a surge, they are going to have to be patient,” Veazey said. “This issue is not going away. We must live with it just like the flu, and the only way to really curb that is to be fully vaccinated.”
But the South remains the most poorly vaccinated region of the United States, with about half the population vaccinated in most Southern states, unlike in New Jersey, New York and the District of Columbia, where about 7 in 10 residents are fully vaccinated as omicron variant cases surge. Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas also have some of the nation’s lowest booster rates, as does D.C.
That has raised acute concerns about Southern hospitals that may not be able to bank on a largely vaccinated community ending up with mostly mild symptoms. Hospitals have warned they can be overwhelmed by even smaller surges in cases if infected staff members are sidelined, or if even a small fraction of those sickened in a huge outbreak are admitted.
“So, you are going to have a lot more people who are going to get sick because they don’t have any immunity,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “Now, the South has had pretty substantial outbreaks already, and it may be that people have some natural immunity. That could be the one thing that perhaps is a saving grace.”
Louisiana has urged vigilance among residents who were infected during a massive summer spike that prompted the governor to impose a statewide indoor mask mandate and the mayor of New Orleans to mandate proof of vaccination to enter the city’s music venues and restaurants. State officials reported that about 1,200 people had experienced reinfections in addition to about 9,500 people infected for the first time at the end of the year.
Experts say this is not surprising, especially given evidence from South Africa that the omicron variant is reinfecting people in droves. But it remains unclear whether disease-fighting antibodies from previous bouts of the virus can stave off the worst complications, keeping unvaccinated people infected with omicron out of the hospital. Experts believe immunity induced from vaccines has that effect.
“It’s so hard in the midst of this process to understand whether previous natural infection might also provide some benefits in terms of severe illness. That’s far more difficult to understand,” said Susan Hassig, an epidemiologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. In the meantime, those who have previously gotten the delta variant “shouldn’t count on that protecting them — certainly not from infection, which means they could spread it to a whole host of people with their family and workplace.”
As in the summer wave, about 80 percent of those now hospitalized in Louisiana with covid-19 are unvaccinated. Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake medical center in Baton Rouge, said vaccinated patients are generally coming in for precautionary visits because of other medical conditions that could be aggravated by the virus, while unvaccinated patients are coming in as sick as they were during the delta variant wave.
Confusing information leaves pandemic-weary Americans to navigate risk decisions
“We see this idea a lot: Surely everybody has had this. Surely enough people have been infected [that] the pandemic is going to go away. And it just has not played out,” O’Neal said.
“All we can say is people who have been previously vaccinated are faring better,” O’Neal said. “That’s the only trend I can take from all of these surges.”
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) urged residents to celebrate New Year’s Eve only with other members of their household to control the spread of the virus, citing explosive omicron variant numbers. He recommended masking but did not reimpose a mandate as he did during the summer, when hospitals warned they were at risk of being overwhelmed.
While the threat of the omicron variant has led to the return of mask mandates or new vaccine rules in blue parts of the country such as D.C. and the San Francisco Bay area and in communities across the Northeast, mandates are unlikely to return in large numbers in conservative swaths of the country.
That’s by design in many places such as Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has repeatedly taken steps to limit public health powers. Most recently, DeSantis called a special session of the state legislature to pass bills restricting the ability of businesses and local governments to mandate masks and vaccines.
Experts say such measures, which have proliferated across the country, will make it harder to stop surges of the omicron variant.
“The best way to prevent infection right now is to have everyone wearing a mask, and we know without a mandate that’s not going to happen,” said Cindy A. Prins, a University of Florida epidemiologist.
As Florida shatters coronavirus records, Democrats ask where is DeSantis
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings (D) has drawn fire from DeSantis for attempting to enforce social distancing rules and for imposing a vaccine mandate on county workers.
Central Florida hospitals have not raised alarms about being overwhelmed as they did during the summer surge. Still, Demings said he wants the option to impose temporary mask mandates in the event a massive omicron variant spike leads to widespread worker shortages in a region dependent on winter tourism. He also criticized DeSantis for not holding news briefings or regularly addressing the omicron surge in the state.
“Those tools are all controlled by the state of Florida, but where is the state, where is the governor right now? He is missing in action,” Demings, who is married to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Val Demings, said in an interview.
“What we are seeing here is this sleight of hand going on,” the Orange County mayor said. “On the one hand, our governor says we want to empower local governments but effectively took all the power away from local governments. They are not filling the void. They are not stepping up.”
Christina Pushaw, a spokeswoman for DeSantis, referred questions to state health officials, who did not respond. But she questioned the value of aggressive measures to contain the omicron variant, contending that regions with “strict mask mandates and vaccine passports are experiencing the same or worse surges than the open areas of the country.” | null | null | null | null | null |
I tested positive on the eve of Christmas Eve. I’d been feeling a bit tentative all week: a stuffy nose, a cough, fatigue. I thought it was a cold, but it was hard to ignore the news reports about omicron. My Twitter feed was full of stories with such headlines as: “With omicron, it may be harder to tell if you have covid, the common cold or the flu” and “Is That Sniffle a Cold? Or Is It Covid?” and the oddly specific “Attention John Kelly: It’s Not a Cold. It’s Covid.”
I wasn’t sure whether to share the news of my covidity. I worried some people would see it as proof that vaccines and boosters don’t work. I think the opposite. If this is all that I experience — a stuffy nose, some aches — I got off lightly, especially compared to people struck with covid earlier in the pandemic and to health-care workers, who have been on a roller coaster since March 2020. If you won’t get boosted/wear a mask/stay home for yourself, do it for them. | null | null | null | null | null |
After a half-day search effort, 40 dogs that were staying at a boarding facility in Superior, Colo., when the flames erupted were accounted for.
Thomson said that as his family watched news about the fire from afar, the priority was finding out whether their dog was okay. “We just wanted to know he was safe and then we would worry about our house and things like that," he said in an interview on Sunday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: A riverkeeper’s dismissal is a sign of a deeper problem
Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman near Upper Marlboro, Md., in 2020. (Courtland Milloy/The Washington Post)
The Patuxent River is the largest in Maryland and is the proving ground for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program in many ways. The Patuxent River Commission and its Patuxent River Policy Plan are examples of this innovation. Contrary to the administration’s “big lie” approach mischaracterizing the commission’s mission, the truth is that the commission has been addressing land use issues since it was created in 1980. The administration and its political allies prefer a laissez-faire approach to managing growth, and their “strategy” also included eliminating key members from the Patuxent River Commission, including Fred Tutman, a very dedicated member and the only African American riverkeeper in the nation.
Managing growth is critical to protecting the Patuxent River and the Chesapeake Bay. It is also important for our landscapes and communities, but Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has been hostile to these issues and has weakened many of the state’s efforts. Traditionally, Maryland’s governors have thankfully been strong on addressing growth and the environment. That leadership has been severely lacking for the past seven years. My hope is that Marylanders seek a governor this year who will restore the state to its national prominence on these important issues.
Richard Eberhart Hall, Baltimore
As a former resident of the area, returning after an extended absence, I was surprised and mystified by the removal of Patuxent riverkeeper Fred Tutman from the Patuxent River Commission. After more than two decades of irreplaceable contributions to the health and management of the more than 100 miles of waters and lands of the Patuxent River Basin from Mr. Tutman, his summary removal without explanation is simply a gross political error and should be opposed immediately.
David McLain, Eastpoint, Fla. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Archbishop Tutu’s view of Israel
Bulldozers remove debris on Dec. 21 from the Al-Jawharah Tower that was hit by Israeli airstrikes during clashes between Israel and Palestinians last May in Gaza City. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
Regarding Redi Tlhabi’s Dec. 28 op-ed, “We must honor Tutu’s global struggle for justice”:
South African Redi Tlhabi referred to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s commitment to ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
In 2008, I went to Boston with one of my daughters, a peace studies major, to hear Archbishop Tutu address a FOSNA/Sabeel Conference on the theme “The Apartheid paradigm: how does it apply to Palestine-Israel?” Frankly, I went more to see this amazing man than to hear the content of his speech. The speakers were informative and painted a devastating picture of what occupation looks like and feels like. I was hooked on supporting Palestinian rights after I heard Archbishop Tutu state that the situation for the Palestinians was worse in many ways than the situation had been in South Africa during the apartheid years.
The United States and Britain finally joined the effort to boycott and isolate South Africa to force an end to its system of apartheid. We’ve waited long enough to be convinced that the Palestinian situation is equally devastating to a people.
Courtney Petersen, Washington | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Improve life for West Virginia families
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) in the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Dec. 14. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Regarding the Dec. 29 front-page article “ ‘We need this money just to survive’ ”:
I hope both senators from West Virginia will realize that we need to improve life for young families in West Virginia. Children are our future, but we are not helping young parents meet the challenges of raising children in the 21st century.
West Virginia is the only state to lose population over the past 70 years as young people leave to find work. Those who stay are lucky to get minimum-wage jobs that do not pay the bills; many become disillusioned and start depending on drugs to escape hopelessness or to make money.
In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. For years, many West Virginia parents have not been able to provide adequate day care for children. If good care had been available for poor children, adults could have raised generations of effective wage earners.
In 2019, Kids Count data showed that 12 million American children lived in poverty. Appalachia is one of the areas hardest hit by intergenerational poverty. When the child tax credit expires and the full effects of pandemic inflation hit, family circumstances will be worse than ever in West Virginia.
Heather R. Biola, Elkins, W.Va. | null | null | null | null | null |
Antonio Brown chucked his shoulder pads, hurled his black undershirt into the stands and walked off the MetLife Stadium field shirtless, exhorting the crowd as he jogged across the end zone and into the tunnel, disappearing from view. As his team lined up for third and 7, Brown torched what remained of his career. The spectacle rested upon a fundamental fact that should embarrass so many in the NFL: Brown orchestrated an exit of his own volition.
Coach Bruce Arians announced afterward that Brown no longer plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which Brown had already declared with his behavior. That Brown could choose the time and manner of his departure, no matter how bizarre, should shame the Buccaneers and many others across the NFL. All the times Brown should have received serious help or significant punishment over the past three years, he received more chances to play football.
Each time one team grew tired of his antics, another clamored to sign him. When two women accused Brown of sexual assault and the NFL suspended him half a season for a separate battery charge involving a moving company employee, Tom Brady leaped to rehabilitate him. When he used a fake vaccination card this year, the NFL slapped his wrist with a three-game suspension and Arians allowed competitive desperation to trump his zero-tolerance vow about Brown.
Of course, that’s barely the start of the story and leaves many questions unanswered. What set Brown off on the sidelines, when wide receiver Mike Evans’ attempts to calm him down failed? Why did the Buccaneers acquire Brown in the first place and allow him to return this season? Did Arians regret signing or retaining Brown? What responsibility does Brady own in trying to redeem Brown?
The Buccaneers signed Brown last summer at the urging of Brady after a spate of troubling behavior. The NFL had suspended Brown eight games after he pleaded no contest to burglary and battery charges and received two years probation as the result of an incident with an employee of a moving company. The NFL never suspended Brown in relation to accusations of sexual misconduct made by a former trainer and an artist he hired to work in his house, because those accusations did not lead to charges.
“He screws up one time, he’s gone,” Arians told NBC’s Peter King at the time. This year, Brown screwed up. The Tampa Bay Times reported accusations that Brown had forged his vaccination card, made by a personal chef who said Brown had not paid $10,000 he allegedly owed him. The NFL investigated and corroborated the accusation. The league suspended him three games. But Brown was not gone.
“I could give a [expletive] what they think,” Arians added, when asked about critics of Brown’s return. “The only thing I care about is this football team and what’s best for us.”
Arians and the Buccaneers welcomed back Brown because they believed they needed him to defend their Super Bowl title. The night before Arians spoke, they had been shut out against the New Orleans Saints. They had lost wide receiver Chris Godwin for the season to a torn knee ligament. Brown had a deep connection with Brady, and he was their best available wide receiver. They overlooked the damage Brown could do because of his talent.
That was nothing new. At the end of his Pittsburgh Steelers tenure in 2018, Brown threatened to punch a reporter who wrote about him. Pittsburgh Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin benched Brown for a crucial Week 17 game after Brown, angered because teammate JuJu Smith-Schuster won the team MVP award, skipped Saturday preparation. The move precipitated an offseason trade to the Las Vegas Raiders. Brown imploded during training camp with the Raiders after he refused to comply with new NFL helmet specifications, skipping practices and pitching fits until the Raiders released him before he played one regular season game.
The actions painted a portrait of a man who needed help and a break from football, not a warm embrace and a playbook. The New England Patriots wasted no time in signing him. He played one game for them before the sexual misconduct allegations surfaced, along with a raft of people who accused him of not paying large debts. Reportedly against the wishes of Brady, who had invited Brown to live with him, Patriots Owner Robert Kraft released him.
“That’s honestly a difficult situation,” Brady said Sunday in a news conference. “I think we all want him to just — I think everybody should find, hopefully do what they can to help him in ways he really needs it. We all love him. We care about him deeply. We want to see him be at his best, and unfortunately it won’t be with our team.
“We have a lot of friendships that will last. The most important thing about football is the relationships with your friends and your teammates. And they go beyond the field. I think everyone should be very compassionate and empathetic toward some very difficult things that are happening.”
But Brown could help Brady win football games, and that took priority. In the NFL’s universe of mores, no sin is greater than quitting midgame. Brown’s latest strange misstep will likely cost him his career. If he can receive the help he needs away from football, it will be the best thing for him. It should have happened long before Sunday. | null | null | null | null | null |
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Diamond Miller sprinted downcourt and met Shyanne Sellers in the air for a leaping chest bump after No. 6 Maryland forced overtime against No. 8 Indiana on Sunday afternoon. A raucous crowd inside Assembly Hall suddenly fell silent as five more minutes were put on the clock.
The sequence capped a furious comeback in the final three minutes of regulation after the Terrapins looked to be dead in the water, but the joy of the moment was fleeting.
All of the momentum that fueled the rally had been exhausted when the fourth quarter ended, and the Terps didn’t have enough in overtime of a 70-63 loss, their first in Big Ten play.
Maryland used a 10-1 run in the final 2:53 of regulation to tie the score at 61, then managed just two points in overtime. The Terps never looked comfortable against the Big Ten’s No. 2 defense. The Hoosiers (11-2, 3-0) gave up no space, and Maryland (10-4, 2-1) could not relax for even a moment. Indiana held Maryland to 24.2 percent shooting after halftime, including 0 for 7 in overtime.
Angel Reese scored a game-high 22 points and added 12 rebounds for Maryland. Diamond Miller finished with 17 points in 31 minutes off the bench. Ali Patberg led the Hoosiers with 18 points.
The Terps went into halftime trailing 33-29 despite shooting 52.0 percent. The problem? Turnovers.
Maryland jumped to a 17-10 first-quarter lead, but the defense relaxed and gave up a pair of baskets at the end of the quarter to make it 17-14 after 10 minutes.
Indiana’s defense got it together in the second quarter, holding the Terps to 12 points as they remained sloppy with the basketball. Maryland had several transition opportunities it didn’t convert because of turnovers or simply missing layups. Eleven first-half turnovers erased the positives from a strong shooting percentage, and Maryland finished with 19 giveaways.
Key reserve Faith Masonius left in the third quarter after hitting the floor and grabbing her left knee. She was unable to put any weight on the leg and had to be helped off the court. Masonius sat on the bench momentarily before being taken to the locker room.
She returned to the bench on crutches and with a large ice pack on her left knee. Maryland officials called it a lower leg injury and said she would be reevaluated in College Park. | null | null | null | null | null |
Let’s not make it into an issue going into the season finale against the Giants. Whether Allen plays or not is moot. We know his arm is stronger than Heinicke’s. We know Heinicke is more creative and resourceful.
What we also know headed into 2022 and beyond: the quarterback who could potentially lead Washington into becoming a consistent, reliable, dangerous winner is not currently employed by the team. Maybe he will be acquired in the draft. Maybe he will be acquired by trade. Those are discussions for the offseason — which is nigh. | null | null | null | null | null |
Severe storms bring damage to Southern states
Storms bring damage to Southern states
A line of severe storms damaged homes, knocked out power and downed trees in parts of the South late Saturday into early Sunday.
Authorities closed roads in Hazel Green, Ala., after power lines came down and homes suffered damage. The Madison County Sheriff’s Office shared photos online, including one of a snapped power pole.
The weather also caused damage to businesses in Hazel Green, about 15 miles north of Huntsville, local news outlets reported. Huntsville Utilities said service has been restored to parts of Hazel Green, but work continues with multiple downed power poles in the area.
The storms followed a system earlier Saturday that brought flooding to parts of Kentucky. Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said Sunday that four tornadoes were confirmed. No injuries were reported. The strongest storm was an EF-2 tornado that caused significant damage in Hopkinsville, with estimated peak winds of 115 mph, the National Weather Service said.
Temperatures dipped Sunday after the severe weather rolled through, and winter storm warnings were posted from northern Alabama to southern New Jersey, with up to 7 inches of snow possible in some areas. Freeze warnings were posted from southern Texas to Mississippi.
Cheney: Trump is 'at war' with 'rule of law'
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair, described Trump’s “dereliction of duty” as he watched from the White House while events unfolded, and resisted calls from his children and allies to intervene.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), said the select committee, which he chairs, is looking at whether Trump’s actions were part of a broader plan, and whether they merit criminal referral to the Justice Department.
Trump “demonstrated he’s at war with the rule of law, that he’s willing to blow through every guardrail of democracy,” Cheney said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Those warnings are taking on greater urgency as Thursday, the first anniversary of the attack, approaches. Trump, 75, continues to repeat false claims about his 2020 electoral defeat, and has hinted at plans to run for the White House in 2024. The House panel’s final report is expected by the end of the year.
A year removed from the riots, threats to members of Congress continue to increase, Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Prince Andrew can't yet halt lawsuit, judge says: Prince Andrew's effort to immediately block the progression of a lawsuit by a woman who says he sexually assaulted her when she was 17 — on the grounds that she no longer lives in the United States — was rejected by a federal judge as oral arguments were set to proceed Monday on the prince's request to dismiss the lawsuit. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told the prince's lawyers they must turn over documents on the schedule set in the lawsuit brought in August by Virginia Giuffre. The prince's attorney, Andrew Brettler, has called the lawsuit "baseless." Kaplan, in a one-page order Friday, noted the prince's lawyers have requested that "extensive" materials be turned over by Giuffre by Jan. 14, including documents related to where she has lived. Kaplan's order expressed no opinion on the merits of the prince's claims that Giuffre should be disqualified from suing because she lives in Australia. | null | null | null | null | null |
South: Person crossed border into North
South Korea’s military said Sunday that an unidentified person had crossed the heavily fortified border into North Korea.
The person was earlier spotted by surveillance equipment at the eastern portion of the border, known as the demilitarized zone, but avoided capture by South Korean troops on Saturday night. The surveillance later detected the person crossing the border, officers with the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
South Korea sent a message to North Korea on Sunday morning to ensure the safety of the person, but the North has not responded, the officers said.
It was unclear whether this was a rare case of a South Korean hoping to defect to the North, or whether it was a North Korean who had briefly entered South Korean territory for some reason before returning to the North.
In September 2020, North Korea fatally shot a South Korean fisheries official found floating in its waters along a poorly marked sea boundary. South Korea said North Korean troops were under orders to shoot anyone illegally crossing the border to protect against the coronavirus pandemic.
The two Koreas are split along the demilitarized zone, the world’s most heavily armed border. Defecting via the 155-mile-long and 2.5-mile-wide DMZ is rare.
Egypt calls for calm as Gaza hostilities flare up
Egyptian officials pushed Sunday for Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip to rein in hostilities and adhere to a cease-fire in place since the war in May.
Egyptian officials called on Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza to stop actions seen by Israel as “provocative” and for Israel to accelerate arrangements agreed upon as part of the cease-fire, an Egyptian diplomat with knowledge of the ongoing efforts said. The diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with the media.
The cease-fire, brokered by Egypt and other mediators, has been fragile but has largely held since the 11-day war between Hamas and Israel in May. But the militant group says Israel has not taken serious steps to ease the blockade it imposed on Gaza with Egypt after the Islamist movement seized control of the coastal enclave in 2007.
Bulgaria detects first cases of omicron coronavirus variant: Bulgaria has detected its first 12 cases of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, the Balkan country's chief health inspector said. "We have confirmed the new variant in samples from 12 people," Angel Kunchev told reporters. Kunchev said that the infected people, who are mainly from the capital, Sofia, were experiencing mild symptoms and that none were hospitalized. | null | null | null | null | null |
After a half-day search effort, 40 dogs that were staying at a boarding facility in Superior, Colo., when the flames erupted were accounted for
Thomson said that as his family watched news about the fire from afar, the priority was finding out whether their dog was okay. “We just wanted to know he was safe and then we would worry about our house and things like that,” he said in an interview on Sunday.
In a briefing on Sunday, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said the animal control office had been working “nonstop” since the fire began and asked for requests for animal rescues to be made through the Boulder Office of Emergency Management website.
Hwang gathered information online and helped call around, and managed to confirm the location of some pets. Soon her efforts snowballed, and she said her Twitter account became a hub of information. Numerous people started sending her photos of missing dogs and cats, asking her to share the images widely. She posted descriptions and images of lost pets, retweeted information about veterinarians and shelters that were lending a hand, and shared updates when the animals were reunited with their families. She said she stayed at home as the new year rang in to continue to help in whatever way she could.
Then Creasey got a call about two of the last dogs that still hadn’t been located. Two people had found Dexter, the Thomsons’ dog, along with another named Poppy. Creasey updated the owners and drove to pick up the dogs right away. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nothing invokes as much nostalgia as Christmases past. In the spirit of the season, I decided to see what Post readers were reading about in holiday seasons of yore. Alas, we didn’t have a correspondent in Bethlehem to cover the Big One. So I picked a nice round number — 100 years — and decided to read a week’s worth of papers from Christmas 1921 to New Year’s 1922. | null | null | null | null | null |
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Diamond Miller sprinted downcourt and met Shyanne Sellers in the air for a leaping chest bump after No. 6 Maryland forced overtime against No. 8 Indiana on Sunday. A raucous crowd inside Assembly Hall fell silent as five more minutes were put on the clock.
The defensive stop to close the second half capped a furious comeback in the final three minutes after the Terrapins looked to be dead in the water, but the joy of the moment was fleeting. All of the momentum that fueled the rally had been exhausted when the fourth quarter ended, and the Terps didn’t have enough in overtime of a 70-63 loss, their first in Big Ten play.
“The better team won today,” Maryland Coach Brenda Frese said. “I thought the team that was more experienced with veteran leadership showed through. I thought they did a tremendous job competing for all 45 minutes. . . . The momentum it took to get back in the fourth quarter to then take it to overtime, I thought we looked really tired in overtime because it took so much out of us.”
Maryland used a 10-1 run in the final 2:53 of regulation to tie the score at 61, then managed just two points in overtime. The Terps never looked comfortable against the Big Ten’s No. 2 defense. Indiana (11-2, 3-0) gave up no space, and Maryland (10-4, 2-1) could not relax for even a moment. Indiana held Maryland to 24.2 percent shooting after halftime, including 0 for 7 in overtime.
Angel Reese scored a game-high 22 points and added 12 rebounds for Maryland. Miller finished with 17 points in 31 minutes off the bench. Ali Patberg led the Hoosiers with 18 points.
“It was just about who wanted it more,” Reese said. “We just didn’t play together at the end. We just turned the ball over and, I mean, we’ve just got to get back to Maryland basketball. ... It’s only January, and we’ll see them again.”
The Terps went to halftime trailing 33-29 despite shooting 52 percent. The problem? Turnovers. Maryland jumped to a seven-point first-quarter lead, but the Terps relaxed and gave up a pair of baskets at the end of the quarter to make it 17-14 after 10 minutes.
Indiana’s defense got it together in the second quarter, holding the Terps to 12 points as they remained sloppy with the basketball. Maryland had several transition opportunities it didn’t convert because of turnovers or simply missing layups. Eleven first-half turnovers erased the positives from the strong shooting, and Maryland finished with 19 giveaways.
The Hoosiers entered the matchup allowing 56.3 points per game, with opponents shooting just 37.1 percent.
“Give them credit: Their defense is really good,” Miller said. “They were pressuring us 94 feet the whole time. But I think it was mainly us. There was a lot of unforced turnovers that we had, and we just need to execute way better and try to be on our P’s and Q’s so we have more possessions.”
“Just trying to get back for my teammates but also listening to my body,” Miller said. “My body felt pretty good today, so I continue to play.”
Frese called Miller “terrific” but added that it is taking time for the team to adjust to having her on the floor.
Owusu struggles
Third-team all-American Ashley Owusu struggled in the first three quarters of Sunday’s game before finding some life late. She finished with 10 points on 4-for-13 shooting to go with one assist and seven turnovers.
At one point in the fourth quarter, Owusu air-balled a midrange jumper, which has been the bread and butter of her game. The game may have been her worst in the past two seasons, but she came on late in the fourth with a reverse layup to cut the Hoosiers’ lead to one and then a bullying bucket through contact to tie the score at 61.
“I think Indiana did a great job scouting,” Frese said. “Obviously, South Carolina did the same thing. I thought Ashley got a lot more aggressive where we needed her to get to in that fourth quarter. Her last four points to help us send it to overtime were confident plays. Those are the plays we need Ashley to continue to make. ... But as your floor general, one assist [and] seven turnovers — that’s an area that I know she prides herself on, taking care of the basketball and making plays for her teammates.”
Key reserve Faith Masonius left in the third quarter after hitting the floor and grabbing her left knee. She was unable to put any weight on the leg and had to be helped off the court. Masonius sat on the bench momentarily before she was taken to the locker room.
She returned to the bench on crutches and with a large ice pack on her left knee. Maryland officials called it a lower leg injury and said she would be reevaluated in College Park. Any absence would be a significant blow; Masonius is one of the best defenders on the team and provides a boost of energy off the bench. | null | null | null | null | null |
Let’s not make it into an issue going into the season finale against the Giants. Whether Allen plays is moot. We know his arm is stronger than Heinicke’s. We know Heinicke is more creative and resourceful.
What we also know headed into 2022 and beyond: The quarterback who could lead Washington into becoming a consistent, reliable, dangerous winner is not currently employed by the team. Maybe he will be acquired in the draft. Maybe he will be acquired by trade. Those are discussions for the offseason — which is nigh. | null | null | null | null | null |
Abdalla Hamdok in 2019. Hamdok resigned as prime minister in a televised statement Sunday. (Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images)
Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok resigned in a televised statement Sunday, ending a short-lived political agreement with the country’s military, which had temporarily deposed him in an October coup before allowing him to return to power.
Meanwhile, a massive protest movement has repeatedly filled the streets of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, denouncing both the military and Hamdok, whom they saw as compromised for his cooperation with the forces that sought to sideline him.
A prominent doctors union has tallied 58 deaths among protesters targeted by security forces in the 10 weeks since the coup.
Military officials arrested Hamdok and dissolved the government on Oct. 25, then kept him under house arrest for a month. The move sparked outrage among Sudan’s protesters, whose movement, now three years old, brought about the fall of longtime dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir in April 2019.
That transition to a civilian government was meant to move forward in November, but it was derailed by the coup. Sudan’s military leader, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has repeatedly pledged to shepherd the country toward elections by mid-2023. He says he will not run.
Many in the country deeply distrust the military’s leadership. Burhan and other top military officials were part of Bashir’s campaigns that destabilized much of southern and western Sudan, and resulted in the secession of South Sudan in 2011.
Hamdok’s resignation sets up a potentially explosive confrontation between the military, a powerful paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the protest movement.
Recent protests in Khartoum and other Sudanese cities have been brutally dispersed by the RSF and police who have used live ammunition, huge amounts of tear gas and batons. The doctors union has reported on several occasions that RSF forces have stormed hospitals, looking for injured protesters to arrest.
“I have had the honor of serving my countrymen for more than two years,” Hamdok said Sunday, “and during this journey, I have sometimes done well, and I have sometimes failed.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A railing along the north tunnel at FedEx Field collapsed Sunday evening, sending multiple fans toppling to the ground and nearly taking out Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts as he walked off the field.
According to a Washington team spokesperson, the area where the railing collapsed is the stadium’s ADA accessible section, which is designed to hold up to six wheelchairs and six companions but is not built to a carry a load of fans. The team did not address why so many fans were in the section before the railing collapsed.
Hurts sidestepped the railing and the handful of fans that fell to the ground. But he stayed to help up those who fell — and then stayed longer as several corralled him for hugs and photos.
During the opener against the Los Angeles Chargers in September, a pipe burst in the stadium, creating a waterfall into the stands. Fans in a video that made the rounds on social media said it was sewage. The stadium’s official Twitter account claimed afterward that it was rainwater from a storage tank, and moved the affected fans to a suite for the remainder of the game.
And for the early part of the season, the steam machine used during Washington’s player introductions created a thick cloud above the tunnel that made it difficult for players to navigate their way onto the field. The steam became a story unto itself, and again warranted input from a team spokesperson, who told the Washington Times that the overflow was due to humidity and that the team would make alterations to reduce the steam. | null | null | null | null | null |
But the members interviewed overwhelmingly agreed that Pelosi’s replacement should be equally as historic as electing the first female speaker. That leaves White men who are mulling a run — such as Hoyer and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), a Pelosi ally — in a difficult spot with a party that is looking for more diversity at the top. It is also to the benefit of Jeffries, who would be the first Black person to lead either party in either chamber.
“This is no time to speculate on future leadership elections,” Kathryn Alexander, Clark’s communications director, said in a statement. | null | null | null | null | null |
A railing along the north tunnel at FedEx Field collapsed Sunday, sending multiple fans toppling to the ground and nearly taking out Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts as he walked off the field.
According to a Washington team spokesperson, the area where the railing collapsed is the stadium’s ADA-accessible section, which is designed to hold up to six wheelchairs and six companions but is not built to carry a full load of fans. The team did not address why so many fans were in the section before the railing collapsed.
Hurts sidestepped the railing and the handful of fans who fell to the ground. He stayed to help up those who fell — and then stayed longer as several corralled him for hugs and photos.
During the opener against the Los Angeles Chargers in September, a pipe burst in the stadium, creating a waterfall into the stands. Fans in a video that made the rounds on social media said it was sewage. The stadium’s official Twitter account claimed afterward that it was rainwater from a storage tank and moved the affected fans to a suite for the rest of the game.
And for the early part of the season, the steam machine used during Washington’s player introductions created a thick cloud above the tunnel that made it difficult for players to navigate their way to the field. The steam became a story unto itself and again warranted input from a team spokesperson, who told the Washington Times that the overflow was because of humidity and that the team would make alterations to reduce the steam. | null | null | null | null | null |
“He fit in better than I even would have hoped,” Young said. “... I had a really good feeling that he would be able to help us. He’s the ultimate pro and knows how to play at both ends. He was awesome.”
“It’s so great to see,” Paul said. “We have been waiting for that emotion from him for a year. You just never know when you are going to get your opportunity and to see him play with that emotion. ... You can get down in this league especially when you are on a team as good as ours and you find yourself out of the rotation. But he’s been working and has stayed ready.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Shamans perform a ritual of predictions for the coming year at San Cristobal hill in Lima, Peru, on Dec. 29. (Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images)
Larry Ferlazzo, who has taught at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento for the past 19 years, for a decade has written a column making annual education predictions (see his previous lists at the end of this post).
It’s time for him to look into his crystal ball for 2022. Take a look and let him know what you think in the comments — as well as make your own predictions.
In addition to being a full-time teacher, Ferlazzo has written or edited 12 books on education, writes a weekly teacher advice column for Education Week, and hosts a popular resource-sharing blog.
He has also written best-and-worst roundups of education news, including this one for 2021.
There was a lot of education news in 2021. Here’s the best and worst of it — by a teacher.
Mask mandates in many schools will continue through the fall and will, in fact, increase in number. The omicron variant of the novel coronavirus will have successors, and we will all learn the Greek alphabet. The vast majority of school districts, however, will not be choosing to return to distance learning — even with high community transmission rates. Parent pushback would be too great, and many schools have learned the hard way how to reduce transmission risk. Of course, there are also some states that will continue to do little or nothing to reduce those risks.
State standardized test scores will be down. Many school officials will NOT see that a major cause of these drops will be that the districts are only giving lip service to social-emotional learning, mental health support and genuine accelerated learning. Instead they will put their money and energy behind remediation and double down on adding instructional time and “drill-and-kill.” They will continue to appear dumbfounded that what they are doing is not working, and conclude that they should add more of the same. Welcome to another downward spiral.
Attacks on teaching about systemic racism will intensify leading up to the November midterm elections as Republicans continue to believe it will be a hot-button issue to galvanize voter turnout. It generally won’t be successful in that Republican aim, but the attacks will hurt students, their families and teachers as educators will self-censor themselves. After the election, polls will find that these attacks on critical race theory — an intellectual movement that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism — didn’t expand the Republican base. Conservative strategists will forget about the issue, but damaging laws passed by Republican-dominated state legislatures restricting how teachers deal with race and other issues will remain on the books, and their impact will continue.
There will be some major consolidations in the educational technology world as more educators conclude that yes, our students need more personalized learning and, no, technology might not be the only, and not even main, vehicle through which to provide it. Smaller class sizes, listening, connecting to student interests and building relationships can lead to better learning. Bye-bye, unicorns.
President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan — or some version of it — will eventually pass. It’s unclear whether it will universal prekindergarten and a child-tax credit extension. As countless studies have found, outside factors such as child poverty have a much greater impact on student achievement than we teachers do, and the child tax credit has already done an impressive job at reducing child poverty. Quality pre-K programs have also been found to positively influence later academic performance. So these two efforts could end up being the most effective school improvements in many years — if they actually happen.
Despite recent school shootings, efforts to reduce police presence in schools will continue. A high priority will be made to twin these changes with an increase in other harm reduction and safety strategies, including restorative practices. Major experiments and research on how to implement these strategies, particularly in secondary schools, will take place and their results will be widely disseminated. | null | null | null | null | null |
Antonio Brown chucked his shoulder pads, hurled his black undershirt into the stands and walked off the MetLife Stadium field shirtless, exhorting the crowd as he jogged across the end zone and into the tunnel, disappearing from view. As his team lined up for third and seven, Brown torched what remained of his career. The spectacle rested upon a fundamental fact that should embarrass so many in the NFL: Brown orchestrated an exit of his own volition.
Coach Bruce Arians announced afterward that Brown no longer plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which Brown had already declared with his behavior. That Brown, 33, could choose the time and manner of his departure, no matter how bizarre, should shame the Buccaneers and many others across the NFL. All the times Brown should have received serious help or significant punishment over the past three years, he received more chances to play football.
Each time one team grew tired of his antics, another clamored to sign him. When two women accused Brown of sexual assault and the NFL suspended him for half a season for a separate battery charge involving a moving company employee, Tom Brady leaped to rehabilitate him. When he used a fake vaccination card this year, the NFL slapped his wrist with a three-game suspension and Arians allowed competitive desperation to trump his zero-tolerance vow about Brown.
Of course, that’s barely the start of the story and leaves many questions unanswered. What set Brown off on the sideline, when wide receiver Mike Evans’s attempts to calm him down failed? Why did the Buccaneers acquire Brown in the first place and allow him to return this season? Did Arians regret signing or retaining Brown? What responsibility does Brady own in trying to redeem Brown?
And a question for the NFL at large: Why will this incident probably bring the end of Brown’s playing career when so many more serious off-field misdeeds went lightly punished?
The Buccaneers signed Brown last summer at the urging of Brady after a spate of troubling behavior. The NFL had suspended Brown for eight games after he pleaded no contest to burglary and battery charges and received two years of probation as the result of an incident with an employee of a moving company. The NFL never suspended Brown in relation to accusations of sexual misconduct made by a former trainer and an artist he hired to work in his house, because those accusations did not lead to charges.
“He screws up one time, he’s gone,” Arians told NBC’s Peter King at the time. This year, Brown screwed up. The Tampa Bay Times reported accusations that Brown had forged his vaccination card, made by a personal chef who said Brown had not paid $10,000 he allegedly owed him. The NFL investigated and corroborated the accusation. The league suspended him for three games. But Brown was not gone.
“I could give a [expletive] what they think,” Arians added when asked about critics of Brown’s return. “The only thing I care about is this football team and what’s best for us.”
Arians and the Buccaneers welcomed back Brown because they believed they needed him to defend their Super Bowl title. The night before Arians spoke, they had been shut out by the New Orleans Saints. They had lost wide receiver Chris Godwin for the season to a torn knee ligament. Brown had a deep connection with Brady, and he was their best available wide receiver. They overlooked the damage Brown could do because of his talent.
That was nothing new. At the end of his Pittsburgh Steelers tenure in 2018, Brown threatened to punch a reporter who wrote about him. Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin benched Brown for a crucial Week 17 game after Brown, angered because teammate JuJu Smith-Schuster won the team MVP award, skipped Saturday preparation. The move precipitated an offseason trade to the Oakland Raiders. Brown imploded during training camp with the Raiders after he refused to comply with new NFL helmet specifications, skipping practices and pitching fits until the Raiders released him before he played one regular season game.
The actions painted a portrait of a man who needed help and a break from football, not a warm embrace and a playbook. The New England Patriots wasted no time in signing him. He played one game for them before the sexual misconduct allegations surfaced, along with a raft of accusations of him not paying large debts. Reportedly against the wishes of Brady, who had invited Brown to live with him, Patriots owner Robert Kraft released him.
“That’s honestly a difficult situation,” Brady said Sunday in a news conference. “I think we all want him to just — I think everybody should find, hopefully do what they can to help him in ways that he really needs it. We all love him. We care about him deeply. We want to see him be at his best, and unfortunately it won’t be with our team.
“But we have a lot of friendships that will last. … The most important thing about football is the relationships with your friends and your teammates. And they go beyond the field. And I think everyone should be very compassionate and empathetic toward some very difficult things that are happening.”
But Brown could help Brady win football games, and that took priority. In the NFL’s universe of mores, no sin is greater than quitting midgame. Brown’s latest strange misstep probably will cost him his career. If he can receive the help he needs away from football, it will be the best thing for him. It should have happened long before Sunday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Injuries reported after fire at state facility
More than two dozen people required medical treatment Sunday night after inmates set fires at a corrections facility in Baltimore, according to state and city officials.
A total of 28 injuries that were not life-threatening were reported at the state-run Maryland Reception, Diagnostic and Classification Center, after five fires were set at the building in downtown Baltimore, according to reports from the city fire department and the state fire marshal.
A fire department spokeswoman said four of the injured people were taken to hospital. A union representing state employees said those hospitalized included two correctional officers.
Firefighters were called to the 500 block of Madison Street in response to a “mattress fire” that produced heavy smoke, the union said in a tweet.
At least 30 inmates needed emergency treatment for smoke inhalation and poor ventilation, the firefighters’ union tweeted.
The center evaluates and classifies inmates, and assigns them to other state corrections facilities, according to a state website. It has an estimated operating capacity of 670 inmates, the website said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Alysa Liu of the United States performs during the women's free skate at the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating in November. (Shuji Kajiyama/AP)
U.S. Figure Skating will hold its championships Jan 6-9 in Nashville and will announce the team of skaters for the Beijing Winter Olympic at the end of the weekend. The men’s team is almost set, led by the country’s biggest current skating star, Nathan Chen. The women’s team is far less certain, however, and will likely come down to who skates best in Nashville. The event will also award championships in women’s, men’s, pairs and ice dance competitions.
Where are the U.S. Figure Skating Championships?
Who are the top male figure skaters?
Who are the top female figure skaters? | null | null | null | null | null |
Snow hits D.C. region Monday morning; snowfall expected to pick up
Drivers are advised to stay off roadways; the federal government and some area school districts are closed
Snow is forecast to hit the D.C. region Monday. (National Weather Service)
Snow hit the D.C. region early Monday but mostly melted initially as road surfaces and grassy areas were too warm for it to stick. The snowfall was expected to pick up later in the morning, making travel hazardous.
Crews in several jurisdictions were ready, but most were not initially putting down treatment because it would wash away on the warm, wet roads, transportation officials said. However, forecasters said temperatures were expected to drop and that snowfall would pick up and stick, making for potentially dangerous road conditions. Some areas could also see sleet mixed with the snowfall, officials said.
The federal government is closed Monday, and employees are expected to telework. Several school districts in the region, including in the District, are closed and others have delays for the first snowfall of the season.
In Northern Virginia, about 2,000 trucks and pieces of equipment are ready to start spreading road treatment, according to Ellen Kamilakis, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Transportation.
“Stay off the road throughout the height of the snow,” she said. “We’re concerned about the rate of visibility. It really is best to stay off the roads, and if you can’t, then allow as much time as you can and go as slow as you can.”
In the District, officials said more than 100 snowplows were out as of midnight. In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said that enhanced patrols would be on the roadways and that crews were ready to treat bridges and toll areas.
The winter weather also adds to days of delayed flights at area airports.
No big crashes were initially reported on any of the region’s major highways. Metro is running on a limited schedule, and riders should expect delays and increased wait times. Many area bus routes are also running on revised schedules.
Forecasters said the snowfall is expected to pick up in some areas by 7 a.m. Accumulation will range from 4 to 8 inches in the immediate D.C. area and could be as high as 5 to 10 inches in the southern parts of the region, according to The Post’s Capital Weather Gang. Locally higher amounts will be possible.
Experts said the snowfall is expected to end by the late afternoon, as temperatures are forecast to drop to the upper 20s and low 30s. Area power companies warned that residents and businesses could see outages, depending on the storm’s strength. | null | null | null | null | null |
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