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The team’s best options seem to be via trade or the draft. Expectations will be high for his third year, but Rivera said he won’t shy away from drafting a quarterback who needs time to develop. He added that he also wouldn’t be afraid to start a rookie right away, as he did with Cam Newton, the No. 1 pick in 2011, with the Carolina Panthers.
The draft lacks a clear-cut No. 1 quarterback. There seems to be a consensus top five — Matt Corral of Mississippi, Kenny Pickett of Pittsburgh, Sam Howell of North Carolina, Desmond Ridder of Cincinnati and Malik Willis of Liberty — but each comes with question marks. The murkiness of this class is notable because, though Rivera’s handpicked front office includes four executives with general manager experience, none drafted a franchise quarterback without the No. 1 pick.
One of the best (and likeliest) quarterbacks to be traded is Houston’s Deshaun Watson, the three-time Pro Bowl pick who sat out this past season after 22 women accused him of sexual misconduct and sexual assault in civil lawsuits. Watson, 26, has denied those allegations.
If Washington finds a quarterback, Rivera believes he’ll elevate the rest of the team. Rivera pointed to 2020, when Alex Smith helped Washington to a 5-2 record down the stretch on its way to the NFC East title. He said the front office is pursuing a passer now for the same reason the team, which had incentive to lose Sunday at the New York Giants to boost its draft position, still played its starters and tried to win. | null | null | null | null | null |
Live updates:Covid-19 live updates: Official predicts ‘most people are going to get covi...
Meanwhile, schools and colleges open, close, go online, reverse themselves. In liberal and conservative media alike, countervailing voices alternately raise and dash hopes that the pandemic endgame is nigh. The National Football League scrambled to put third-tier players on the field to keep huge crowds coming into stadiums, while the National Hockey League canceled a slew of games and the Grammys were indefinitely postponed.
A Democrat who voted for Biden, Dvorachek and her family are vaccinated and appreciated being required to show a vaccination card or negative test result before attending a Houston Rockets National Basketball Association game last week.
“To me, it’s all sort of a crapshoot,” he said. “I think people are just fed up. . . . They got tired of it, and they are just going to do what they want. I am so busy with my mother that I don’t think about it. If you don’t have much going on in your life, though, you think about covid. And if you are thinking about it all the time, you will go nuts.” | null | null | null | null | null |
But Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), among other Democratic senators, are hesitant to make any changes to what kinds of legislation can be blocked. Both have explicitly opposed changes to the filibuster, though Manchin has expressed a tiny bit of willingness to revisit it.
Members of the family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said it was a “difficult decision” to be by Biden’s side Tuesday. “It’s been a long year of a lot of things not being done,” Arndrea Waters King told MSNBC. | null | null | null | null | null |
The team’s best options seem to be via trade or the draft. Expectations will be high for his third season, but Rivera said he won’t shy away from drafting a quarterback who needs time to develop. He added that he also wouldn’t be afraid to start a rookie right away as he did with Cam Newton, the No. 1 pick in 2011, with the Carolina Panthers.
One of the best (and likeliest) quarterbacks to be traded is Houston’s Deshaun Watson, the three-time Pro Bowl pick who was inactive for every game this season after 22 women accused him of sexual misconduct and sexual assault in civil lawsuits. Watson, 26, has denied those allegations. | null | null | null | null | null |
Yaquelin Cruz show a photo of her son Dariel Cruz, who was arrested during the July 11 protests, in front of the court building where he is being tried in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022. Six months after surprising protests against the Cuban government, more than 50 protesters who have been charged with sedition are headed to trial and could face sentences of up to 30 years in prison. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) | null | null | null | null | null |
The Eagles gave the Stags no time to shake off the rust, greeting them with energy and offensive efficiency from the opening tip. Senior forward Jared Turner set the tone by opening the game with back-to-back threes, and the shots kept falling. The Eagles went into halftime with a 49-26 lead.
After that dispiriting start, DeMatha Coach Pete Strickland opted to begin the second half with a lineup of bench players. Even when the starters returned shortly after, the Eagles showed no signs of letting up. They pounded the ball inside, getting easy buckets to respond to every DeMatha surge. Senior forward Quinn Clark led the Eagles with 22 points, and Jared Turner chipped in 16.
“This season has taught us to stay resilient, and it’s built our chemistry,” Jared Turner said. “We love playing with each other, no matter the situation.”
In a normal year, that near-perfect first half would have elicited a deafening reaction in Gonzaga’s Carmody Center. Thanks to a raucous choir of teenage boys, the entirety of this highly anticipated matchup between the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the area would have been a test for the nerves of both teams and the eardrums of those in attendance. | null | null | null | null | null |
Djokovic’s travel declaration, which was among documents publicly posted on Monday as part of his hearing, had appeared to conflict with images and eyewitness descriptions of him in Serbia and then Spain shortly before he flew to Australia.
Djokovic, who is unvaccinated, also sought to clear up “misinformation” about his positive coronavirus test in Serbia, which formed the basis for his request for an exemption to Australia’s strict requirement that foreign visitors be vaccinated against the virus.
The Serb said that he “felt obliged” to go ahead with a Dec. 18 newspaper interview and photo shoot despite learning that he had tested positive for the virus.
Djokovic had a mask on during the interview but took it off and screamed for the photo shoot, according to the journalist from L’Equipe, who said he has since tested negative.
The apology came after Der Spiegel published an investigation into Djokovic’s positive test, which was also made public as part of the tennis player’s visa cancellation appeal. The German newspaper reported that the test result might have been “manipulated." Other media have raised questions about photos showing Djokovic at public, indoor events without a mask after he took his test.
Djokovic obliquely addressed the reports in his Instagram post, saying that he needed to rebut misinformation “in the interest of alleviating broader concern in the community about my presence in Australia.”
The tennis player wrote that he had attended a basketball game in Belgrade on Dec. 14 at which a number of people contracted the virus. Djokovic said he did not have any symptoms but took a rapid antigen test and a PCR test “out of an abundance of caution.”
The rapid test result was negative, as was another one he took the following day before attending an event with children. It was after that event that he received the positive PCR test result, he said.
Novak Djokovic wins case against Australia over canceled visa
He went ahead with the interview and photo shoot the next day because “I didn’t want to let the journalist down,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Gillian Tan | Bloomberg
An investor group led by Todd Boehly’s Eldridge is backing Accelerant in a transaction that values the insurance-technology startup at $2.2 billion.
Accelerant raised about $193 million in equity funding from the group, which also includes Deer Park, Marshall Wace, MS&AD Ventures and existing investor Altamont Capital Partners, Accelerant Chief Executive Officer Jeff Radke said in an interview.
The Atlanta-based company will use proceeds to fund required regulatory capital and fuel continued growth of the business, Radke said. Accelerant’s gross written premium roughly doubled to more than $500 million last year, and the startup now provides insurance to more than 300,000 small and medium-size businesses, he said.
“Managing general underwriters often complain that the market lacks transparency, there is little shared risk and that the industry at large is digitally challenged,” Radke said.
Accelerant, founded in 2018, seeks to remove complexity through its data-driven risk exchange, he said.
“Accelerant’s team understands the challenges that managing general underwriters and program administrators have had with conventional carriers, and they’ve built an offering to suit those niche needs,” Boehly, who is chairman and CEO of Greenwich, Connecticut-based Eldridge, and is joining Accelerant’s board, said in an emailed statement. “With cutting-edge data and analytic capabilities, Accelerant strips away the bureaucracy that’s endemic in the industry to offer a product that prioritizes velocity and drives deep collaboration.”
The company has grown in part by making acquisitions. Last year, it purchased Agribusiness Risk Underwriters, which specializes in poultry-farm insurance-product development, underwriting and loss control. Accelerant also acquired Kinnell Holdings Ltd. and its six subsidiaries to bolster its U.K. operations. | null | null | null | null | null |
Virginia Mavhunga, a 13-year-old teenage mother, hold her child in her rural home in Murehwa, 80 kilometres (50 miles) northeast of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, Friday, Nov. 12, 2021. Virginia dropped out of school after falling pregnant and became the subject of gossip and consternation in a community yet to adjust to the sight of a pregnant girl in school uniform. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi) | null | null | null | null | null |
MELBOURNE, Australia — Novak Djokovic held a practice session, a day after he left immigration detention, focusing on defending his Australian Open title even while he still faces the prospect of deportation because he’s not vaccinated against COVID-19.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Carolina Panthers fired three assistant coaches, including special teams coordinator Chase Blackburn, offensive line coach Pat Meyer and defensive line coach Frank Okam.
CLEVELAND — Cavaliers general manager Koby Altman has been rewarded for the team’s turnaround with a contract extension and new job title, a person familiar with Cleveland’s plans told the Associated Press.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Nikita Kucherov scored a hat trick, Steven Stamokos had a goal and two assists, and the Tampa Bay Lightning beat the Buffalo Sabres 6-1.
WACO, Texas — Texas Tech ended No. 1 Baylor’s nation-best winning streak at 21 games, with the 19th-ranked Red Raiders getting a second consecutive victory over a Top 10 team while still not at full strength. | null | null | null | null | null |
California DMV to review Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving‘ and other technology t...
A DMV spokeswoman said the department had notified Tesla of the review, which is separate from an evaluation of its use of the term
Tesla electric vehicles outside one of the automaker's dealerships in Shanghai. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News)
SAN FRANCISCO — California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has opened a new review into Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” and other driver-assistance software as it seeks to determine whether it should consider the features “autonomous,” a spokeswoman said Tuesday night.
The review could carry major implications for the company headed by Elon Musk, which has deployed beta software by that name to more than 12,000 vehicles on public roads without trained test drivers. Currently, the company deploys over-the-air updates with the software to drivers who have been granted early access or passed a safety screening, in addition to paying up to $10,000. The company says the drivers must pay attention at all times.
If the cars are deemed autonomous by the DMV, however, they would need to be registered with the state. Manufacturers must provide annual reports on how often their vehicles disengage from autonomous mode, and test drivers must be enrolled in a driving record pull notice program.
Gore said the review is separate from a probe of Tesla’s use of the term “Full Self-Driving,” which seeks to determine whether Tesla misled customers.
The company’s driver-assistance features have come under the scrutiny of government regulators and safety experts as it has scaled up the ambitions of its software.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Tesla over a dozen crashes involving parked emergency vehicles while the software suite Tesla dubs “Autopilot” was active. The top federal auto safety regulator also last year began requiring companies including Tesla to report certain crashes involving automated systems within a day of learning of such incidents.
The company’s Autopilot software is a suite of driver-assistance features that is primarily used to navigate highways, from on-ramp to off-ramp, with an attentive driver behind the wheel. The software beta Tesla dubs “Full Self-Driving” expands those capabilities to city and residential streets, enabling the vehicle to make everyday driving maneuvers.
The DMV action in the company’s biggest U.S. market could severely limit Tesla’s ability to deploy and train its driver-assistance software, which it intends to one day make autonomous. Musk said in 2019 that Tesla’s autonomous ambitions would propel the company to 1 million “robotaxis” by 2020, in the form of Tesla vehicles that could operate on their own.
Musk, who said he relocated to Texas in 2020, tweeted an unrelated criticism of California’s government on Tuesday night. | null | null | null | null | null |
NYC’s new mayor calls 911 about a brawl, slides down a fire pole and faces big challenges
In his first 10 days, Eric Adams veers between ‘swagger’ and tragedy, praise and criticism, as he begins leading the nation’s largest city.
Eric Adams, holding a picture of his late mother, is sworn in as New York mayor during the New Year’s celebration in Times Square. (Hannah Beier/Reuters)
The moderate Democrat and former Brooklyn borough president, whose 2021 campaign focused on improving public safety and helping the city recover economically, had to deal with what he called the “unspeakable tragedy” of a Bronx high-rise fire that killed 17 adults and children, the shooting of an off-duty police officer in Manhattan, a snowstorm and coronavirus infection rates that are again crippling emergency services, public transportation and schools as workers call in sick.
He also announced plans to provide $111 million to help support public hospitals, signed an executive order requiring city agencies to reduce fines for the struggling small-business community and joined Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to present plans to address subway crime and homelessness.
Yet the mayor’s debut included sharp criticism from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other progressive Democrats, who took issue with his saying dish washers and Dunkin’ employees are “low-skill workers.”
“The suggestion that any job is ‘low skill’ is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little/no healthcare, and low wages,” tweeted the New York congresswoman, who worked as a waitress and bartender before running for office in 2018.
Surging coronavirus numbers meant postponing a much larger ceremony planned at the historic Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. Indeed, the pandemic is perhaps the greatest challenge Adams will face during his early months as mayor.
Some teachers union factions have demanded that public schools temporarily return to remote learning, but Adams vowed during a Jan. 3 news conference to keep students in class. “We’re staying open,” he said.
His words were more brash than reassuring. New York has “wallowed” over the coronavirus far too long and needs his kind of “swagger” to get over it, he said. “When a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger,” Adams said.
Adams survived a tough Democratic primary last year largely because many undecided voters felt the retired police captain — with 22 years in law enforcement — was best equipped to address an increase in shootings, homicides and other violent crimes. He promised to weed out rogue, abusive cops, but he also vowed to give the city’s force the tools it needs to reduce crime.
Progressive Democrats, including some City Council members, have repeatedly criticized him for his policing platforms, especially plans to reinstate a plainclothes anti-crime unit that was controversial for its aggressive tactics and was disbanded in 2020.
After his primary victory in the summer, Adams declared himself the “future of the Democratic Party” and went on to an easy victory in the general election in November.
Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic political consultant in New York, predicted that Adams’s term will become a litmus test that national party leaders will watch closely while preparing for this fall’s high-stakes midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election.
Popularity for Adams’s platforms locally, he said, could drive more-centrist party politics nationally.
At the same time, he was blasted late last week for choosing Philip Banks III as deputy mayor for public safety, given that the former New York Police Department chief was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal bribery probe. The optics of picking his brother, former NYPD sergeant Bernard Adams, to serve as a deputy police commissioner in charge of his security also drew disapproval.
The mayor’s task will be far greater than any he faced during his seven years in the state Senate and eight years as Brooklyn’s first Black borough president. The latter is a mostly ceremonial post that Adams used to help promote platforms important to him, such as healthful eating and increasing public-school funding.
He will be under immense pressure to tackle racial inequities in the city and to address racial issues involving police. While an officer, Adams routinely led marches and spoke out about cases in which he said racial profiling or police brutality had occurred. In 1995, he co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care; the advocacy group continues to focus on relations between the NYPD and the city’s African American community. | null | null | null | null | null |
Covid-19 live updates Omicron will infect ‘just about everybody,' Fauci says
White House promises schools 10 million free coronavirus tests per month
Quebec considering a monetary penalty for the unvaccinated
By Laura Meckler and Dan Diamond5:17 a.m.
Quebec’s premier is considering imposing a fee on unvaccinated adults. The Canadian province already requires proof of vaccination for entry into venues such as gyms, bars and restaurants.
China’s aviation regulator has suspended a number of U.S. flights as part of the country’s expansion of precautions against the virus. Also, the city of Tianjin will test all its residents, about 14 million people, after detecting omicron cases in an earlier initial screening.
In Germany, the number of reported daily infections crossed 80,000 for the first time during the pandemic.
Indonesia started its booster rollout which is prioritizing third shots for the elderly and people with compromised immune systems.
U.S. biotech company Novavax has started shipping the first doses of its coronavirus vaccine to Europe and received authorization for the shot in South Korea.
By Amanda Coletta4:15 a.m.
TORONTO — For several months, Quebec has required residents to show proof of coronavirus vaccination to enter venues such as gyms, bars and restaurants. Last week, it expanded the list of spaces to include government-run liquor and cannabis stores.
Now, Premier François Legault is considering a novel way to boost vaccination numbers and slow a growth in hospitalizations that has severely strained the health-care system: a “health contribution” — or fee — imposed on unvaccinated adults.
“The vaccine is the key to fight the virus,” Legault said at a news conference Tuesday.
He provided few details about how his proposal would work or when it could take effect. The premier did not specify the fee amount but said it would be “significant” and probably exceed $100. Residents who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons would be exempt.
As of Jan. 7, more than 78 percent of people in hard-hit Quebec were fully vaccinated, according to data from the Public Health Agency of Canada. Provincial officials have said that although the unvaccinated make up a small percentage of the population, they are overrepresented in hospitalization figures.
“Right now, these people put a very important burden on our health-care network,” Legault said. “I think it’s normal that a majority of the population is asking that there be a consequence.”
He said that the province was seeking legal advice on the plan and that more information would be available in the “coming weeks.”
No other Canadian province or territory has announced similar measures. Some nations, including Greece, have slapped fines on some of the unvaccinated. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Eagles gave the Stags no time to shake off the rust, greeting them with energy and offensive efficiency from the opening tip. Senior forward Jared Turner set the tone by opening the game with back-to-back three-pointers, and the shots kept falling. The Eagles went into halftime with a 49-26 lead.
After that dispiriting start, DeMatha Coach Pete Strickland opted to begin the second half with a lineup of bench players. Even when the starters returned shortly after, the Eagles showed no signs of letting up. They pounded the ball inside, getting easy buckets to respond to every DeMatha surge. Senior forward Quinn Clark led the Eagles with 22 points, andTurner chipped in 16.
“This season has taught us to stay resilient, and it’s built our chemistry,” Turner said. “We love playing with each other, no matter the situation.”
In a normal season, that near-perfect first half would have elicited a deafening reaction in Gonzaga’s Carmody Center. Thanks to a raucous choir of teenage boys, the entirety of this highly anticipated matchup between the two top teams in the area would have been a test for the nerves of both teams and the eardrums of those in attendance. | null | null | null | null | null |
The USPS just delivered a letter from an American soldier in Germany. It was 76 years late.
The letter was penned on long white paper and was dated Dec. 6, 1945. John Gonsalves was a 22-year-old Army sergeant when he wrote it from Bad Orb, Germany, near a Nazi prisoner of war camp that had been liberated by American troops.
"It was a weird feeling — like he was standing there, reading it to me,” said Gonsalves, who was married to John Gonsalves for 61 years.
“Due to the age and significance to your family history delivering this letter was of utmost importance to us,” added Stonewall, who did not respond to an interview request from The Washington Post.
Gonsalves said she met her husband in 1949 — about five years after he dropped his letter in the mail. They worked together making sandals at the Marilyn Sandal Company in Stoneham, Mass., she said.
“He was a quiet man and I believe he just wanted to put it behind him when he came home,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Jerry Harris was the breakout star of ‘Cheer.’ Here’s how season 2 handles his arrest for child pornography.
Jerry Harris attends the Vanity Fair Oscar party in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Feb. 9, 2020. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Jerry Harris was the definitive breakout star of Netflix’s “Cheer” following its January 2020 debut on Netflix — so much so that he was tapped to interview celebrities on the red carpet at the Oscars the next month, where more than one actor told him that they loved watching him on the docuseries. He picked up endorsement deals, including an ad for Cheerios cereal, and signed with a talent agency.
But on Wednesday, as the second season of “Cheer” arrived on the streaming platform, Harris remained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center of Chicago, where he is awaiting trial on federal child pornography charges. Harris, 22, was arrested in September 2020 following an FBI investigation into allegations he repeatedly solicited sexually explicit photos and videos from boys he knew to be underage. Three months later, Harris was indicted on additional charges, alleging he solicited sex from minors at cheerleading competitions.
News reports and legal documents, including a 27-page criminal complaint made public on the day of Harris’s arrest, have detailed the grim allegations against him. According to the complaint, Harris admitted to soliciting inappropriate photos and videos from at least 10 to 15 minors.
Harris’s absence and the horrific crimes of which he’s accused loom large over the second season of “Cheer,” most notably in the fifth episode, titled “Jerry,” in which his cheer colleagues emotionally recount finding out about the allegations. The episode also features interviews with two of Harris’s alleged victims — twin teenagers who say he began asking for sexually explicit photos in private online messages when they were 13 and he was 19 — and their mother, who reported Harris’s alleged behavior to the U.S. All Star Federation (USASF) and, eventually, to the FBI.
Here’s how “Cheer” tackles the allegations against its most memorable athlete.
Hearing from the alleged victims
“He asked how old I was and I told him that I was 13,” Charlie recalls in the episode “Jerry.” Immediately, he says, Harris asked him for sexually explicit pictures. Charlie sent the photo because he looked up to Harris, a star in the cheer community even before Netflix came calling, and wanted Harris to like him. Initially, they messaged in secret — it would be months before he told his brother what was going on — and Charlie says he felt “ashamed and embarrassed” about their exchanges, which began in 2018.
“It was haunting almost to hear … it just made me so angry and it made me lose even more faith, I guess, in having a safe community in cheer,” Sam says. “And then Jerry started messaging me, too. It made me feel super uncomfortable and he would just continually just push.”
The twins struggled in school and were scared to tell their mother, Kristen, what was happening because they knew how popular and beloved Jerry was within their sport. It wasn’t until Kristen happened to see a concerning text message from Harris on Charlie’s phone that the boys began to open up. Kristen says she was horrified to discover sexually explicit material — including a video of a man, who Charlie identified as Jerry, masturbating — in a password-protected section of her son’s Snapchat.
This was around the same time Harris’s popularity surged because of the first season of “Cheer.” Charlie says it was seeing Harris engage in a lively virtual chat with President Biden on the campaign trail in June 2020 that led him to want to go public with the allegations. Initially, Kristen says, she called the co-owner of the Plano, Tex., gym where Harris had trained, but the owner was skeptical of the claims, so Kristen then submitted a report through the USASF website.
Nothing came of that report, Kristen says. But her sons told her more details about what had happened over the course of the next few months. When Charlie told her about the bathroom encounter at the competition, she made another report on the USASF site. Kristen says it wasn’t until she reported the abuse to the FBI that anyone got back to her.
“After we spoke out, pretty much all sense of community was ripped away from me and Sam,” Charlie says.
“It definitely has brought into focus for us why so few people come forward and speak out about this, because it is extraordinarily difficult,” Kristen says. “The boys wanted to communicate through their example that we believe very strongly that victims of sexual abuse do not need to hide their faces in shame.”
Ultimately, the twins say they have no regrets about coming forward. “I want to be the start of a change in cheer,” Charlie says.
Reactions from friends and teammates
“Cheer” recalls how the cheer community learned of the allegations against Harris at a particularly difficult time. The annual Daytona, Fla.-based competition they had prepared for was canceled due to the pandemic, leaving many without the community and athletic outlet they cherished. For those closest to Harris, news of the charges against him compounded the disconnect they were feeling.
La’Darius Marshall, a fan favorite from “Cheer’s” first season — which depicted the duo as close friends — recalls scrolling through news of Harris’s arrest and thinking, “This can’t be true” before breaking into tears.
Gabi Butler, a prominent flyer and another of Harris’s close friends, says she felt “like someone had just died.”
“I kind of just sunk into a hole,” says James Thomas, a tumbler for Navarro’s cheerleading team who says he had no indication that Harris was behaving in predatory ways. “And cried and cried and cried and cried.”
‘Cheer’ breakout star Jerry Harris arrested on federal child pornography charge
There are also several interviews with cheerleading coach Monica Aldama, another breakout star of the docuseries, who went on to compete in “Dancing With the Stars.” It was while Aldama was preparing for her first live performance on ABC’s reality dance competition that she learned of the charges against Harris.
“The executive producer came up to me and showed me her phone, and asked me if I had seen the headline in the news that day,” Aldama recalls. “It was like an out-of-body experience at the time. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”
Allusions to wider issues in the cheer community
“Cheer” makes numerous references to Larry Nassar, who was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison in 2018 for sexually abusing dozens of gymnasts over the decades he spent as the U.S. national team doctor. Nassar’s case exposed systemic issues within gymnastics and spurred urgent calls for change in the sport.
The “Jerry” episode points to similar systemic issues within competitive cheerleading, where legal adults often compete alongside children. The episode features interviews with USA Today investigative reporters Tricia L. Nadolny and Marisa Kwiatkowski, who previously reported on Nassar and were urged by readers to look into similar issues within competitive cheerleading. The pair broke the news that Harris was being investigated for allegedly soliciting sex from minors in a story that featured interviews with Charlie, Sam and Kristen.
“Our investigation found that the way that the USASF handled the allegations against Jerry Harris was not an anomaly,” Nadolny says. “We found multiple examples of people who had been accused or even convicted of misconduct continuing to work in the sport, and all of those cases tied back to gaps in the child protection policies within the sport.”
“A lot of those gaps still exist today,” Nadolny adds.
The episode also features one of Nassar’s victims, Sarah Klein, now a victims rights lawyer who represents Sam and Charlie in their lawsuit against Harris. (The lawsuit also names USASF, Cheer Athletics and Varsity Spirit, a Tennessee-based cheerleading company, as defendants.)
“Jerry has become sort of the poster child for this within cheer because he was very high profile. And some people are going to say it’s great that he was exposed for who he is and what he was doing,” Klein says. “And some people are going to say, ‘Not our Jerry, we love him.’"
“It’s very easy, when we fall in love with people we feel connected to in some way, to have them on a pedestal and to believe they can do no wrong,” Klein adds. “And stories like this blow that paradigm up.”
Divisions on whether to support Harris
Nadolny recalls that at Harris’s bail hearing, his attorney proposed an arrangement in which Harris would be released into house arrest and “supervised by a group of mothers who he met through the cheerleading world.”
But, she says, “prosecutors strongly objected to that plan,” in part because Harris had at one point gotten rid of his cellphone after catching wind of the investigation but, upon obtaining a new phone, continued to actively contact minors. “Harris exhibits all the signs of a serial child predator and unless and until he receives significant mental health sex offender treatment, he will remain a danger to any child he encounters, either online or in person,” prosecutors said in court documents. The judge agreed and ordered Harris incarcerated until trial.
Despite the disturbing evidence against Harris, the cheerleading community is somewhat divided on whether to continue to support him. Aldama, who has faced criticism for her public response to the charges against Harris, says the former cheerleader sent her an “optimistic” letter that she has yet to respond to.
“My head’s battling the ‘He did wrong’ versus this person I know,” Aldama explains. “And I can’t wrap my head around what I even need to think and how I should feel … I don’t know what I would say.”
Butler, meanwhile, says she “can’t” and “won’t” turn her back on Harris.
“I don’t agree with what he was accused of or condone it at all, and it is very unfortunate and it breaks my heart, but it’s literally like your family,” Butler says, tears streaming. “How are you going to just hate your family?”
For Marshall, who shared his own harrowing experience as a victim of childhood sexual abuse on the show (and later struggled with his trauma being shared so widely), processing the allegations against his onetime BFF and roommate is even more personal. “I would have snatched him up if I ever would have known about any of this stuff,” Marshall says. “I feel like it would have been worse than him going to jail.”
“I don’t care how famous you are, I don’t care how much money you got, how much people love you, that don’t give you the right to do stuff like this,” he says. “Especially when one of your best friends, you know, went through something like that.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Except that in the bewilderingly shifting world of performance during a pandemic, “Mrs. Doubtfire” wasn’t closing closing. The musical’s lead producer, Kevin McCollum, had phoned Oscar that evening to say that the production would officially close at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on Jan. 9 — and then start up again March 15. Enough time, McCollum reasoned, for the omicron spike to subside, audience nerves to settle and the box office to go ka-ching again.
Oscar’s role in “Mrs. Doubtfire” is the sort he’s made his own on Broadway, one that calls for exuberant comic chops. Raised in Rockville, Md., where he nourished a love of musical theater on cast albums and trips with his family to the Kennedy Center, Oscar got his first Broadway job in 1990, as a swing — an understudy covering several parts — in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Aspects of Love.” Over the ensuing decades, there would be roles in “Jekyll and & Hyde,” “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” “The Addams Family” and “Something Rotten!," among others. But it would be his five years in “The Producers” starting in 2001, first as Franz and later as a successor to Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock, that would burnish Oscar’s status as a go-to Broadway guy for musical comedy. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden boards Air Force One on Jan. 11. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
“Providing more rapid tests in schools is important to reduce spread in schools and back home, as well as to teachers, staff and bus drivers,” said Julia Raifman, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. | null | null | null | null | null |
Some of the conventional wisdom about isolation, quarantine and vaccine mandates may be out of date.
Residents wait in line for a coronavirus test in San Francisco on Monday. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)
By Philip R. Krause
The virus is moving so quickly that some current governmental efforts, such as the belated efforts to supply rapid tests to households, and to stress the importance of booster shots, will likely come too late to be useful. Fortunately, omicron appears to produce milder disease in healthy individuals than previous variants did — a factor that should be considered in the national response. A second key consideration, as we move forward, is that a few months from now — between vaccination and infection, or a combination of the two — very few Americans will be truly immunologically naïve to the coronavirus. They will likely have at least some protection, especially against severe disease.
Given these facts, it obviously won’t make sense for our strategy to remain fundamentally the same as it was in most of 2021 (let alone 2020). We should, instead, focus on shielding the most vulnerable members of the population — the unvaccinated, the elderly and those with underlying conditions (such as the 7 million Americans living with compromised immune systems). And we should adapt other policies to ensure that we limit viral spread while not overreacting to the prospect of infection in vaccinated people.
In some ways, the omicron campaign should be about getting back to basics. Vaccination is the most important weapon, and we badly need a more effective communication strategy to convince more Americans to get the shots. In hard-hit New York State, for example, fully vaccinated people were 90 to 95 percent less likely to end up hospitalized than their unvaccinated peers. By now it’s clear that top-down pro-vaccine messages from politicians or government officials won’t budge the holdouts — in the past month, the proportion of fully vaccinated Americans has increased by only about 1.5 percent. An effective campaign will require working closely with community health centers and grass-roots organizations.
Masks remain important, but limiting the spread of omicron demands better ones. The White House already requires anyone who spends time with high-ranking officials to wear an N95 (or equivalent) mask; that should be the standard everywhere face coverings are recommended. Supply is no longer a constraint (as it was early in 2020). These masks could be made available at a reasonable price (possibly free) to those who can’t afford to buy them. When worn correctly, they protect against omicron and any future variant that comes our way.
Refocusing on those who are at greatest risk from covid means resuming vaccination programs in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, supplying such institutions with high-quality masks and making sure that these locations have enough tests. Improving the availability and access to effective covid treatments should be a goal as well. Since omicron is resistant to most of the currently authorized monoclonal antibodies, the White House should consider using the Defense Production Act to redirect facilities currently producing antibodies that don’t work on omicron to production of antibodies that do — biding time until more effective ones are formulated.
Most people now realize it’s no longer essential — or even possible — to diagnose each case of covid, especially in people without risk factors for severe disease. But additionally, exposures to the virus are becoming so common that quarantining people for them — as the CDC still recommends for unboosted vaccinated people and for the unvaccinated — risks significant societal disruption: Recurring exposures will keep many uninfected people home from work or school. (Most exposures have a low chance of transmitting the virus, meaning that many people need to quarantine to prevent a single infection. Given omicron’s prevalence, quarantines seem unlikely to affect the pandemic much in any case, since there are so many untraced exposures.)
The CDC’s recent recommendation that covid-positive people could leave isolation after five days without a negative test led to outcry; the CDC now recommends that a positive test, if performed on day five, should lead to five more days of isolation. But the original proposal was very sensible. The fact is that with each passing day after symptoms develop, an infected person is less likely to transmit to others; the likelihood of this is even lower when symptoms are improving and when N95 masks are worn. Prolonging isolation promotes unnecessary absenteeism without appreciably reducing transmission. (In general, people with cold symptoms — whether they’ve been tested for covid or not — should stay home until they are without a fever and clearly improving.)
The exponential spread of omicron should also prompt a relaxation of some travel rules. Bans on travel from countries with high levels of viral circulation have not affected the trajectory of the epidemic in the United States. It’s now clear that omicron had established itself worldwide before it was reported in South Africa. While it is prudent to require certain measures, such as vaccination and masks for travel, testing requirements for international travelers have not delayed the importation of new variants. Such testing also does little to eliminate infections in travelers, whose greatest risk of exposure occurs off planes. (Indeed, Britain is relaxing some of its travel-related testing requirements.)
Vaccine mandates do increase vaccination rates, but omicron may reduce the argument for them — especially over time, as more of the population has a brush with covid. Earlier in the pandemic, vaccinated people were much less likely to transmit the virus to others. There was, therefore, a real possibility of controlling viral spread through vaccination. Today, however, the major benefit of vaccination is to protect the individual from severe illness and death; any possible impact on transmission is short-lived. While we believe that mandates should be used to keep critical health-care sites, businesses, and manufacturing facilities operating, there is no need even in those cases to mandate vaccines for individuals who had a recent covid infection. (Threatening to fire or suspend vaccinated university employees and students — including health-care workers — who’ve had covid but who have not gotten a booster reveals distinctly misguided priorities.)
While we hope that future variants will cause disease that is even less severe than omicron, we can’t be sure — and the next variant could be even better at evading immunity. Therefore, we need to develop a new generation of vaccines that target parts of the virus that are less likely to evolve. In the meantime, vaccine developers will need to prepare to update their vaccines to cover new variants as they appear. This will require major additional government investment. But now is the time to make that commitment, even as we change our pandemic response in other ways. | null | null | null | null | null |
Generational turnover is getting rid of ‘los mismos de siempre’ and making politics more unpredictable.
A tattoo of a lighthouse set on the Strait of Magellan decorates the arm of then-Chilean presidential candidate Gabriel Boric during a rally on Nov. 1 in Santiago, Chile. The tattoo by Chilean tattoo artist Yumbel Gongora shows the famed sea route in southern Chile where President-elect Boric hails from. (Esteban Felix/AP)
By Will Freeman
Paul J. Angelo
Latin America is a young region; one-third of its population is between ages 23 and 40. But most recent presidents and party leaders came of age during the Cold War. Now, that’s changing.
On Dec. 18, Chilean voters elected the country’s first millennial president, 35-year-old leftist Gabriel Boric. The country’s Constitutional Assembly also just made 40-year-old María Elisa Quinteros and 33-year-old Gaspar Domínguez its leaders. In 2018, Costa Rica elected its youngest president ever, Carlos Alvarado, at 38. And in 2019, El Salvador elected then-38-year-old Nayib Bukele president. In Colombia, a full six contenders in this year’s presidential race are between ages 38 and 46.
These politicians may be rejuvenating politics. But they are also injecting uncertainty about the future of the region’s party systems.
Several forces had conspired to hold back Latin America’s generational turnover in politics.
For one, when many countries returned to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s after years of military dictatorship, traditional political parties led by an aging old guard were also revived.
These parties, led in a top-down fashion like Argentina’s Peronists and Chile’s Concertación coalition, kept tight control over younger members’ political careers and party platforms. The high entry costs of electoral campaigns also meant younger candidates could scarcely afford to contest nominations in such highly stratified parties, let alone finance independent bids for public office.
Moreover, Latin America’s millennials had less interest in political systems riven by traditional left-right divides born of the Cold War. Young activists — from Chilean student leaders to women protesting femicide in Mexico — didn’t easily find a home among parties that still spoke the language of anti-communism and Cold War geopolitics. Often, instead of running for office, they took to the streets.
Then there were the everyday obstacles holding millennials back. While university matriculation rates doubled across the region between 2000 and 2010, fewer than half of students who began their studies finished by age 29. Low-quality education became a major concern for those scrambling to find jobs and pay off debt.
The new president of Honduras is a former first lady. Expect to see more former first ladies running for office.
Commonalities across millennial politicians
Across Latin America, the final years of the 2010s were plagued by corruption scandals, stagnant growth, and a regionwide protest wave. That upset Latin America’s established parties, leaving the old guard in shambles.
But by discrediting the old, the turmoil also opened the door to younger candidates. The millennial politicians who have emerged span the ideological spectrum but tend to share three traits.
First, they know how to tap anti-incumbent sentiment. As younger voices with short track records, they have the credibility to campaign as “outsiders.” In 2019, when Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had yet to earn his reputation as the region’s newest autocrat, he railed against leadership by “los mismos de siempre” (the same folks as always) while wearing jeans, aviator sunglasses and a leather jacket. Gabriel Boric, before softening his tone to win the 2021 election, criticized leaders of both the center-left and center-right parties as out of touch.
Second, Latin America’s millennial politicians are more willing to shed established party labels, often in a bid to distance themselves from perceived corruption. Many switch parties or create new ones as often as it suits their careers. Daniel Quintero, the young mayor of Medellín, Colombia, began his career with the Conservative Party, founded his own party, then won a congressional seat under the Liberal Party’s banner — all before becoming mayor of Colombia’s second-largest city as an independent.
Third, they’re social media-savvy, enabling them to connect with young and independent voters who have typically stayed home on election day. Bukele refused to participate in live TV debates in the 2019 presidential race, preferring to put his message out on Twitter, a platform he has since weaponized against critics. Meanwhile, Samuel García, the 33-year old governor of Mexico’s wealthiest state outside the capital region, Nuevo León, was catapulted to victory by his influencer-spouse Mariana Rodríguez, and regularly takes to Twitter and YouTube to denounce corruption and machismo. In some places, relatable and accessible candidates are driving an increasing share of young voters to the polls.
Across Latin America, citizens and governments are clashing over their countries' authoritarian pasts
The millennial wave could reshape the region’s politics
Unhinged from doctrinaire platforms and adept at using social media to shape the public narrative, millennial politicians may be ready to elevate neglected issues. In a region rich with natural resources and as part of a generation acutely aware of climate change, politicians like Chile’s Boric and Peru’s Verónika Mendoza, a top contender in last year’s presidential race, made environmental issues central to their campaigns. Likewise, elected officials such as Soledad Chapetón, the former mayor of Bolivia’s second-largest city, are helping to undo the historic underrepresentation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in politics.
Gen Y officeholders also reflect a changing electorate that’s willing to shed some social taboos from a previous era. Marina del Pilar, the first female governor of Mexico’s Baja California state, announced in July that she would be taking office in November while pregnant, in a country where female politicians have long faced gender discrimination. And Eduardo Leite, the governor of the large and populous Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul since 2019 and a contender in next year’s presidential elections, announced in July 2021 that he is gay, making him the first openly LGBTQ candidate to vie for Brazil’s top job.
The rise of millennial politics also poses risks. Attempting to break with the past, young officeholders tend to staff their cabinets with similarly fresh faces, perhaps failing to learn from more seasoned advisers. Moreover, if younger candidates continue to shun ideological purity and static party affiliation, political expediency may become the primary grounds for political decision-making. That might result in more pragmatic dealmaking, uniting figures across the spectrum to get things done. But it could also jeopardize checks and balances between more pliant legislatures and the executive branch or fuel further breakdown of political parties, making it harder for presidents to form the coalitions needed to govern.
For good or for ill, one thing is certain: The millennial takeover of Latin American politics will only accelerate from here.
Will Freeman (@WillGFreeman) is a doctoral candidate in politics at Princeton University and a 2022 Fulbright-Hays grantee to Colombia, Guatemala and Peru.
Paul J. Angelo (@pol_ange) is a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a foreign area officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. These views reflect those of the authors only. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ambiguous signals raise the risk of miscalculating what’s really going on.
Russia may be stepping up its cyber-activities in Ukraine, alongside a troop buildup near the Ukrainian border in recent months. (Jenny Kane/AP)
By Erica D. Lonergan
Shawn W. Lonergan
U.S., European and Russian negotiators are meeting this week to discuss the security crisis over Ukraine, and the steady build-up of Russian troops along the Ukraine border. The United States and its European allies have threated to impose additional sanctions on Russia if President Vladimir Putin invades its neighbor.
But while satellite photos in recent months show clear evidence of the Russian troop movements, Russia appears to be taking other moves against Ukraine. In December, Russia reportedly stepped up its cyber-intrusions into Ukrainian infrastructure, including government agencies and the energy sector. In response, the United States and Britain have dispatched teams to help shore up Ukraine’s cyber-defenses.
Is this cyberactivity a signal that Russia is engaging in “cyber-prep” to get ready for an invasion, in cyberspace and/or on the ground? Some commentators warn that that “all physical kinetic military action…[in] Eastern Europe will be preceded by a cyber pulse.”
Our research on the challenges of cyber-signaling offers some insights. Getting the answer to this question wrong could have tragic effects. On the one hand, failing to recognize the early warning signs of a Russian invasion could enable Putin to get his way in Ukraine. But erroneously ascribing hostile intent based on ambiguous cyber signals could inadvertently and unnecessarily escalate a crisis with a nuclear-armed power.
Biden is threatening Putin with European energy sanctions. That may be difficult to pull off.
Russia could be operating in cyberspace to prepare for war
Russia’s past behavior suggests there are reasons to see the current cyber-campaign as a precursor to invasion. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, operatives affiliated with the government also conducted a range of cyberoperations against targets in Ukraine, including disruptive attacks, website defacements and attempts to locate Ukrainian artillery formations. In 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, the assault followed several weeks of cyberattacks, including distributed denial of service attacks — which aim to overwhelm targeted servers with traffic.
Russia has also deployed cyberattacks in its ongoing campaign in eastern Ukraine. Most notably, in 2015 Russia launched a cyberattack against Ukraine’s power grid, leaving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without power during the winter — and attacked the power grid again in 2016.
In the current Ukraine crisis, it’s possible Russia is using cyberattacks to enhance its military strategy or even substitute for some conventional military operations. Cyber-operations could be a way to shape the information environment in Ukraine — and create uncertainty and sow distrust in the Ukrainian government. And cyberattacks against Ukrainian command, control and communications targets could impede Ukraine’s ability to respond to a Russian incursion.
But cyber-operations could also be an alternative to war
Of course, Russia’s cyberattacks may not be a signal of impending invasion. A number of other possible reasons might explain this increased activity. First, while it seems unlikely, the timing of observed Russian-linked cyberactivity in Ukraine’s networks could be coincidental. Russia and other cyber-capable countries routinely operate in cyberspace to probe for rivals’ vulnerabilities, collect intelligence and hold potential targets at risk — all in support of various national security objectives.
Second, Russia’s escalating cyberattacks may be linked to the ongoing crisis over Ukraine, but could be an alternative to war, rather than a precursor. Indeed, Russia could be preparing options to conduct cyber-operations as a means of crisis management or de-escalation.
How cyber operations can help manage crisis escalation with Iran
Rather than use cyber-operations as a means of coercion or to shape battlefield dynamics, governments might turn to conduct cyber-operations to de-escalate crises. Cyber-operations’ nonviolent effects and relative limitations in imposing costs make them an ideal way to resolve a crisis without appearing to have backed down. In comparison to other military options that may be on the table during a crisis, all sides may perceive cyber-operations as less escalatory.
Here’s how this might work, in this instance. The Russian president may find this use of cyber-power appealing because he has publicly committed to a strident stance over Ukraine and may not want to be perceived as backing down. A cyber-campaign might satisfy hawks in his inner circle that Putin is “doing something,” while avoiding causing physical violence that might risk triggering a Western response.
The risks of misperception are high
Are Russia’s cyber-attacks in Ukraine a precursor to invasion? One big challenge is that we cannot tell for sure — but another is that different scenarios suggest radically different policy responses from the United States and Europe. Deterrence theory, for instance, might suggest the United States and its allies issue stronger threats to Russia right now, if Russia’s cyber-behavior is a clear sign that an invasion is coming.
But if Russia is using cyber-operations to extricate itself from the current crisis — or if its cyberactivities are decoupled from the crisis — then threatening Russia is dangerous, the research suggests. A U.S. attempt to deter Russia might back Putin into a corner, and make a conflict more likely to occur.
And if Russia’s cyberactivity does signal an invasion? If this is the case, efforts by the United States and its allies to accommodate Putin could encourage further aggression if he is preparing for conflict and calculates that his rivals lack the resolve to act.
Where does this leave decision makers? Uncertainty about intentions in cyberspace is an endemic challenge. In the long term, these uncertainties reinforce the importance of improving intelligence collection to understand how adversaries might use cyber power in different scenarios.
In the immediate term, formal and informal confidence-building measures between the United States and Russia to communicate about cyber-operations and promote transparency — such as the use of the nuclear hotline to address cyber-issues, the expert consultations that presidents Biden and Putin agreed to last June or the recent diplomatic discussions — will be particularly important. Direct communications between leaders provide opportunities to clarify the intent around these cyber-operations.
The risks of miscalculation in either direction suggest prudence — and avoiding jumping to conclusions about ambiguous signals like cyber-operations.
Erica D. Lonergan (née Borghard) is an assistant professor in the Army Cyber Institute at West Point and a research scholar in the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
Shawn W. Lonergan is a U.S. Army Reserve officer assigned to 75th Innovation Command and a senior director in the Cyber, Risk & Regulatory Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the policy or position of any U.S. government agency or organization. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ida B. Wells Barbie doll. (Jason Tidwell/Mattel)
The doll will go on sale in the United States starting Monday, coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and is part of the “Inspiring Women” series from Barbie’s maker, Mattel. Other women represented in plastic include nurse Florence Nightingale, tennis star Billie Jean King and author Maya Angelou — the latter made history this week by becoming the first Black woman to appear on a U.S. quarter.
Widely regarded as one of the most fearless women in U.S. history, Wells stood less than five feet tall and began her activism after she was expelled from her local college following a dispute with the university president.
After the lynching of one of her friends, Wells “turned her attention to white mob violence,” the museum said, investigating cases and publishing her findings in pamphlets and local newspapers in Memphis, enraging locals and putting her life at risk.
She traveled internationally, particularly to Europe, shedding light on lynching to foreign audiences. Wells died in 1931 in Chicago, where she had focused on issues of urban reform and social inequality. | null | null | null | null | null |
Harold Gallaher, St. Francois County's presiding commissioner, designed the current seal in 2018 on a tight deadline because the county's original seal was made of fabric and could not be reproduced on paper. (Harold Gallaher)
“I had the weekend to produce the seal,” Gallaher, 74, told The Washington Post in an interview. “So I said, ‘Let’s get it done.’”
Until recently, the gray circle featuring a bald eagle flying over the U.S. flag, surrounded by the Bible, a cross, the county’s map, and a pick-axe and shovel, did not receive much attention.
Some users said they could not believe the seal was real, to which one person replied: “I live here and, unfortunately, it is not a joke.”
John Caserta, a graphic design professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, said he was troubled by the county’s plan to get the new design for free. Graphic design was once a skilled profession, requiring access to special training and tools. Now, he said, those careers are being replaced by low-cost software. | null | null | null | null | null |
There is a clear way for the United States to pursue an Indo-Pacific strategy. The only problem is that it is a political non-starter.
Members of the Quad summit from left, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga walk to the East Room of the White House on Sept. 24. (Evan Vucci/AP)
The Biden administration has made no bones about its desire to prioritize the Indo-Pacific region in its grand strategy. The Biden team has tried to reduce the U.S. footprint in areas deemed less vital (Afghanistan, the Middle East more generally) so as to bolster efforts in areas deemed more vital (Europe, the Indo-Pacific).
President Biden’s foreign policy team has also tried to distinguish its approach from the previous administration. Whereas Donald Trump’s approach was to fight friends and rivals alike, Biden has attempted to reaffirm strong ties with allies and partners. This reallocation of diplomatic effort was at the root of the Biden team’s buildup of the Quad and AUKUS.
As security measures go, these are solid moves. But as anyone who has spent any time studying the region will tell you, in the Indo-Pacific, economic policy is foreign policy. The entire region has benefited from China’s rise from impoverished state to consumer and producer behemoth. Talk to regional experts and they will tell you the same thing: The appetite for anything that goes beyond hedging China is minimal. There is no populist blowback to globalization across the Pacific Rim, just an ongoing embrace of commercial diplomacy. For the United States to entice any regional actor to pressure China on issues ranging from human rights to the South China Sea, there has to be economic incentives to do so.
U.S. policymakers are aware of this. In a conversation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kurt Campbell, the White House’s point person for the Indo-Pacific, said all the right things about the U.S. outreach to the region. He stressed that any U.S. approach to the Indo-Pacific does not start with China, but with China’s neighbors. He said “we have to have an open, optimistic, engaged approach to commercial interactions, investment in the Indo-Pacific.” He noted Biden’s October 2021 East Asia Summit speech pledging a comprehensive Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
Sounds great! Except that as Michael Martina and David Brunnstrom of Reuters noted in their write-up of Campbell’s talk, “some Indo-Pacific countries, many of which count China as their largest trading partner, have lamented what they see as lacking U.S. economic engagement, especially after former President Donald Trump backed away from the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade deal.” As for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, they noted, “few details have emerged and the administration has avoided moves towards rejoining trade deals [that] critics say threaten U.S. jobs.”
And here we arrive at the nub of the problem. The best way for the United States to cement ties with actors in the Indo-Pacific is to go beyond security issues to economic engagement. From the perspective of a garden-variety country within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, however, which great power looks more enticing:
The one that has hammered together a regional comprehensive economic partnership, a wide-ranging infrastructure initiative and an application to join the other mega-trade deal in the region, or;
The one that pulled out of the big regional trade deal it negotiated, sabotaged the world’s largest trade-dispute understanding and has demonstrated little enthusiasm for negotiating any trade agreement that would require congressional approval?
The most frustrating aspect of this is that for all the talk about economic populism in the United States, the polling data shows that Americans are almost as enthusiastic about globalization as the rest of the Pacific Rim. It’s the pivotal voters in swing states that both parties crave that are the skeptics about the open global economy.
In his remarks, Campbell noted, “We have to get the United States right” and show that “democracy can deliver” and “can still be effective.” For the Biden strategy to work, the administration needs to convince actors in the region that the United States is serious about economic engagement. Unless and until that includes talk about merchandise trade and services, however, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework will be little more than window dressing. No amount of adroit diplomacy can fix that policy gap. | null | null | null | null | null |
Our textbook suggests teaching about the Jan. 6 insurrection with this framing.
A person holds a sign during a vigil hosted by Declaration for American Democracy on the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg)
Sarah Allen Gershon
Nadia E. Brown
Our book’s theme is that the American democratic experiment is evolutionary and ultimately positive — something we still maintain, more than a year after the assault on the Capitol.
It’s true that 64 percent of Americans believe that U.S. democracy is in peril. But as college professors, our job is to teach students the fundamentals of American government while also acknowledging the fragility of our political system. Below, we reflect on the lessons we learned while writing this textbook in a time of a global pandemic, historic protests over racial injustice and a violent attack that attempted to disrupt congressional certification of a presidential election.
Dilemmas of teaching American democracy
As we wrote about Stop the Steal in our introductory chapter, we discussed how to characterize the Jan. 6 events. Was it a coup, an insurrection, a protest or Capitol tourism? The news media, political scientists and other analysts were discussing and debating these terms as we wrote; that language continues to be debated today. We recognized that our wording choices help shape our own and our students’ understandings of the U.S. democratic experiment. The fact that these choices are highly fraught exposes the increasingly political nature of teaching these subjects. Words are partisan. Terminology is political.
However, the facts pointed us toward classifying the actions of President Donald Trump’s supporters as an insurrection rather than a riot or coup. News reports led us to believe that those that breached the Capitol were attempting to block the lawful transition of power. Furthermore, the federal government and the District of Columbia began to prosecute individuals who unlawfully entered the U.S. Capitol building, charging them with destruction of property and assaulting law enforcement and media personnel — which reinforced the conclusion that these events were not protected freedom of speech protests, but rather harmful actions that can be regulated by the state.
Surveys find that Americans remain divided about the meaning of what happened on Jan. 6. So perhaps it’s not surprising that some students have argued about our characterization of Jan. 6 as an insurrection. Colleagues who have adopted our textbook recommended that we add the word to our glossary to give students a communal understanding of this term. Given this feedback, in the 10th edition, we will explain why we classify Jan. 6 as an insurrection, what that word refers to, and how it may be distinguished from other events.
As with other politically charged issues, these challenging discussions help give students the analytic tools they need to consider the contemporary political landscape on their own and a better understanding of the U.S. political system. And it gives them an immediate example of the fragility of U.S. democracy, showing that not only has democracy expanded and constricted over its history, but that cycles of voting expansions and restrictions recur.
For instance, since the Framers first conceptualized U.S. democracy, the nation has repeatedly broadened who can vote. And yet state legislatures have repeatedly enacted legislation that can restrict voters’ abilities to exercise the franchise — one reason Congress is attempting to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Is the U.S. headed toward a new civil war? History suggests something else.
Instructing the U.S.’s newest voters
College students are coming of age as Americans are openly discussing the possibility of a new “civil war.” The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance now classifies the United States as a “backsliding” democracy, revealing that even a system once considered a beacon of global democracy has its fault lines.
In such a climate, giving American students the tools and skills to become informed participants in U.S. democracy is crucial. This generation is politically engaged and voting at higher rates than those seen in recent decades, voicing concerns about headline-dominating topics such as climate change, racial unrest and polarization.
To speak to these concerns, we tried to write a book that includes experiences as diverse as are Americans. Trying to leverage the recent moment of reckoning with injustice was difficult for a traditionally structured textbook. To do so, we expanded our author team and created “Diversity and Democracy” boxes that give examples of how issues of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion are incorporated within or challenge the U.S. status quo. For example, we discuss the filibuster in the traditional sense, and also note how it has historically been used to thwart civil rights legislation. In doing so, we married the traditional information-packed form of an American politics textbook while also introducing students to how governing procedures can produce unequal outcomes.
Seeing the United States as “approaching democracy”
While political scientist professors cannot solve the growing partisan divide or counter democratic backsliding, we can encourage generations of students to think critically about the American political project. Our method has been to organize our textbook around the metaphor of “approaching democracy,” analyzing each new political event to see whether it moves the nation closer to — or further away from — the goal of achieving a fully representative governmental system. By learning to see through that analytical lens, students can envision how they themselves can participate in promoting and backing the democratic experiment.
That’s why we started the textbook with the words of former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel in 1990, who addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He argued that America was a model for the world’s democracies because:
As long as people are people, democracy, in the full sense of the word, will always be no more than an ideal. In this sense, you too are merely approaching democracy. But you have one great advantage: You have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years.
Larry Berman is professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis and former founding dean of the Honors College at Georgia State University.
Bruce Murphy is the Fred Morgan Kirby professor of civil rights at Lafayette College and author of “Scalia: A Court of One” (Simon & Schuster, 2021).
Sarah Allen Gershon is a professor of political science at Georgia State University.
Nadia E. Brown (@BrownPhDGirl), professor of government and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, is co-author of “Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Elected Officials” (Oxford University Press, 2021). | null | null | null | null | null |
Funeral operative Steve Carter, 53, shines the nameplate on his friend's coffin — a victim of covid-19 — before bringing the coffin to the crematorium from Rowland Brothers Funeral Home on January 19, 2021. (Lynsey Addario/Getty Images)
That’s the question people around Britain are asking for one very simple reason: On that day, Boris Johnson attended a party hosted at 10 Downing Street, his office and residence. It is at least the third time the government reportedly broke the strict social distancing rules it had imposed on the nation.
A leaked email with the words “bring your own booze!” suggests Johnson’s private secretary invited some 100 staff to a party at the garden of the prime minister’s residence. An estimated 40 people reportedly took part in the event — including Johnson and his wife, Carrie. On Wednesday, Johnson apologized for attending the party but said that at the time, he “believed this was a work event.”
Hundreds have taken to social media to recall their activities around the time of the party — including socially distanced funerals, isolating hospital visits, and grieving relatives who had died far from their loved ones because of the restrictions.
Frances Speed had been given medication from doctors — but was reluctant to seek further treatment because of the government’s continuous reminders that health-care workers were being pushed to their limits, her daughter said.
“She didn’t want to pressure the NHS,” Donna Speed said, adding that her mother had been so thankful for the care her late husband had received in the hospital during his illness that she did not want to be a burden on the free health service — which many in Britain regard as a national treasure.
It is not clear whether the fallout will damage Boris Johnson — who has weathered several political scandals, as well as accusations that he bungled the government’s response to the pandemic. However, it’s clear the scandal has devastated and angered many Britons who have suffered during the pandemic, and keenly violated their sense of fairness.
Brady was among a group of grieving relatives who met with the prime minister in September last year, after her father, a “fit and healthy” key worker, died of covid-19 at the age of 55. He died on May 16 — just four days before Johnson’s secretary allegedly sent out the garden party invitations.
Anthony Mullen, a local councilor in Sunderland, a city in northern England, told the BBC: “I think this is such an atrocity, I can’t see how he can survive … It is now a question of the scale of the wrongdoing rather than whether there has been any.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Britain’s Boris Johnson apologizes for lockdown gathering at his residence, while maintaining it was work-related
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson makes a statement ahead of Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022. (AP)
After saying he had no knowledges of lockdown parties at 10 Downing Street, the British prime minister admitted that he had attended a “bring your own booze” catered gathering, organized by his private secretary, at the height of the first coronavirus wave, when ordinary citizens were forced to forgo weddings, funerals, school, office work and certainly parties.
In his long life in journalism and politics, as a free-wheeling columnist at the Telegraph, as back-slapping London mayor and now prime minister during a deadly pandemic, Johnson has faced repeated challenges to his veracity — about his newspaper articles, his romantic affairs, his cocaine use, his assurances to the queen, and most recently, his solicitation for donations to pay for the renovation of his flat.
Earlier this week, ITV news revealed an email invite for the garden party, this on May 20, 2020, from Johnson’s private secretary Martin Reynolds to over 100 staff members at Downing Street, which like the White House, serves as both office and residence for the country’s leader. | null | null | null | null | null |
8 THE NIGHT WATCHMAN (Harper Perennial, $18). By Louise Erdrich. A night watchman who is also a Chippewa Council member battles Native American dispossession in 1953.
9 DUNE (Ace, $18). By Frank Herbert. In the classic science fiction novel, a young boy survives a family betrayal on an inhospitable planet.
10 THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB (Penguin, $17). By Richard Osman. Two men and two women in their 70s join forces to catch a killer.
2 ALL ABOUT LOVE (Morrow, $15.99). By bell hooks. The first volume in the iconic feminist's Love Song to the Nation trilogy considers compassion as a form of love.
9 SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM (FSG, $17). By Joan Didion. Essays exploring California’s counterculture in the 1960s.
10 THE FIELD GUIDE TO DUMB BIRDS OF THE WHOLE STUPID WORLD (Chronicle Books, $15.95). By Matt Kracht. Birds from around the world are mocked in this guidebook parody.
6 THE GREAT HUNT (Tor, $10.99). By Robert Jordan. Good and evil characters clash as they battle to find a legendary relic with otherworldly powers.
7 LORD OF THE FLIES (Penguin, $11). By William Golding. The classic, unsettling tale of English schoolboys stranded on a deserted isle.
10 THE LAST WISH (Orbit, $8.99). By Andrzej Sapkowski. The short-story collection introduces Geralt of Rivia, the protagonist of the Witcher series. | null | null | null | null | null |
Harold Gallaher, St. Francois County’s presiding commissioner, designed the current seal in 2018 on a tight deadline because the county’s original seal was made of fabric and could not be reproduced on paper. (Harold Gallaher)
“I had the weekend to produce the seal,” Gallaher, 74, told The Washington Post in an interview. “So I said, ‘Let’s get it done.’ ”
Until recently, the gray circle featuring a bald eagle flying over the U.S. flag, surrounded by the Bible, a cross, the county’s map, and a pickax and shovel, did not receive much attention.
Some users said they could not believe the seal was real, to which one person replied, “I live here and, unfortunately, it is not a joke.”
John Caserta, a graphic design professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, said he was troubled by the county’s plan to get the new design free. Graphic design was once a skilled profession, requiring access to special training and tools. Now, he said, those careers are being replaced by low-cost software. | null | null | null | null | null |
Researchers may be right to follow the money. But they may also want to follow legislators and lobbyists’ more relaxed time together.
Snow covers the top of a statue in front of the Capitol this month. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg News)
By Sara Sadhwani
Christian Grose
Antoine Yoshinaka
Stories of lobbying often conjure up images of well-heeled lobbyists roaming the halls of Congress. But as reports of Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s globe-trotting fundraising trips this fall suggest, lobbying often takes place off Capitol Hill. Whether it’s a cozy dinner at the famed Charlie Palmer steakhouse in Washington, or the hosting of public officials at receptions and bars, lobbying in social situations is a key tool of professional advocates.
In newly published research, we find that interest groups are more likely to get what they ask for when they meet legislators or their staff socially. Much like everyone else, public officials are more easily persuaded in such settings.
What is social lobbying?
Social lobbying — while at dinners, receptions, parties and so on — takes place in many settings. To find out how often it happens, we surveyed 316 registered lobbyists in 10 states and asked how they lobby elected state representatives; 5 percent responded, a typical rate. We weighted the survey to be representative of lobbyists across states.
As you can see in the figure below, nearly every professional lobbyist reported having met legislators in their offices, which is hardly surprising. But 90 percent also reported lobbying lawmakers in at least one social setting, such as a coffee shop, bar, or restaurant.
To explore the impact of social lobbying, we conducted a randomized experiment in the California state legislature. We chose California because of its large and professionalized state assembly and senate. We then worked with a lobbying firm to randomly assign legislators to three groups, and the firm gave us access to the data generated by the experiment.
One group received a lobbying request for a meeting in their Capitol offices. A second group received a request to meet in a local restaurant. The third group, the control group, received no request or contact. Regardless of meeting location, the lobbyist asked the legislator or staffer in the first two groups to do the same thing: Support a state policy and post their support on one of the legislator’s social media platforms. All state legislators were part of the study, but only one-third were contacted as part of the social lobbying group and only one-third were contacted as part of the office lobbying group. Not all legislators who were asked to have meetings complied with the request, though the proportions complying was quite high in both groups.
The legislators reached in social settings more frequently expressed public support for the interest group’s preferred policy than did legislators lobbied in their offices or those in the control group. Specifically, socially lobbied lawmakers supported the policy more than 25 percentage points more often than either the legislators in the control group or those lobbied in their offices.
The social meetings were least effective with legislators who were ideologically distant from the lobbyists’ interest group. Legislators who’d previously taken positions close to the group’s goals were more likely to be activated by the lobbyist’s social ask.
Why is social lobbying so effective?
At its most basic level, lobbying is a communication strategy. Lobbyists’ goal is not merely to educate a legislator on their preferred policy, but to deliver information in a way that the decision-maker will be receptive. In the office, lawmakers may be pulled in several directions and often interrupted. Social lobbying sets a more casual and relaxed tone. And outside the office, decision-makers may have more time to develop personal ties or to be in a more pleasant mood. Research from social psychology finds that happier moods seem to lead lawmakers and staff to be more receptive to persuasion and more willing to comply with a request.
In short, lobbyists use the social setting to signal to legislators that their requests are important. That’s because asking someone to give up time in the office suggests that both the lobbyist and the legislator are making a commitment to the discussion.
Armed rebel groups lobby in D.C., just like governments. How does that influence U.S. policy?
Implications for democracy
To influence public policy, advocates can learn from our research. We show that an effective interest group strategy is to have face time in a comfortable and social environment. Social lobbying is a common strategy that political scientists have ignored.
Social lobbying complicates political scientists’ ability to fully account for the panoply of strategies used by interest groups. Political scientists usually focus on campaign contributions and other forms of lobbying, although a face-to-face social meeting is one of the most effective strategies.
Yet social lobbying happens in places the public can’t easily observe. And ordinary citizens — those the legislators represent and to whom they are meant to be accountable — rarely have the opportunity to socialize with their legislators to voice their concerns. Social lobbying’s effects may not fully be recorded by existing sunshine laws intended to reveal influences on government policy; for instance, campaign finance reports can’t meaningfully record anything about lobbying beyond documenting the flow of contributions into campaign accounts
As the new year gets underway for Congress and state legislatures, expect the hottest ticket in capital cities to be in the bars, restaurants and social settings around town. Being able to eat, drink and shoot the breeze with legislators outside an office setting can go a long way in helping organized interests get what they want, while potentially leaving voters out in the cold.
Sara Sadhwani (@sarasadhwani) is an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College and a commissioner on the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.
Pamela Lopez is a partner at K Street Consulting.
Christian Grose (@christiangrose) is a professor of political science at the University of Southern California and academic director for the USC Schwarzenegger Institute.
Antoine Yoshinaka (@ProfPolitiqueUS) is associate professor of political science at SUNY Buffalo. | null | null | null | null | null |
This story is based on the women’s personal accounts, which echo wider reporting on Taliban controls since regaining power. Three of the women, Sajida, K and Pahlawan, live in Kabul; Aliya, a university lecturer, was in the country’s north. Some spoke on the condition that their nicknames or initials are used because of fears for their safety.
On Aug. 16, the last day of classes at the American University of Afghanistan, students received an email: Sessions would be canceled as Taliban militants had entered Kabul. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mir Sayyid Ali (b. 1510). Self-Portrait of Mir Sayyid Ali, 1555-1556. In the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
Mir Sayyid Ali (b. 1510)
Self-Portrait of Mir Sayyid Ali, 1555-1556
In the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Mir Sayyid Ali painted this tiny — but hugely celebrated — Mughal work at the court of Emperor Akbar I
For more than 10 years, Trong Gia Nguyen, an artist in Brooklyn, has been writing every word of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” on grains of rice. Eventually, Nguyen has said, he plans to place the whole novel, inscribed on these rice grains, in a giant hourglass.
That’s a lot of work for one conceptual gag, which may explain why Nguyen’s attention is often diverted into other projects. But it’s a good gag. And obviously labor, time and scale are integral to its effectiveness. “Miniature,” wrote the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, “is one of the refuges of greatness.”
I thought of Nguyen while reading about Mir Sayyid Ali, the 16th-century artist who made this stunning Mughal miniature in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It may be apocryphal, but an account from the mid-1550s claimed that Mir Sayyid Ali was so “matchless” that he had painted a polo scene on a grain of rice: “Two horsemen stand within the field, a third comes galloping from one corner, while a fourth horseman stands at one end receiving a mallet from a footman; at each end of the field are two goal posts; and at each corner of the rice is written the following couplet: ‘A whole granary lies within a grain / and an entire world inside a bubble.’ ”
Mir Sayyid Ali was brought to India from Persia by the Mughal emperor Humayun. Humayun had been chased out of the subcontinent in 1540. But five years later, he reentered with the support of Iranian forces, taking Kandahar and Kabul, where his wife had been taken to safety by his brothers. Pregnant at the time of her husband’s ouster, she had since given birth to a son, Akbar.
Akbar was just 13 when Humayun died. But with the help of his father’s old general, Bayram Khan, he expanded his territories and defeated new foes. When tensions arose between Akbar and Bayram Khan, the young emperor had the general assassinated while on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Akbar was now free to govern as he wished.
One of the things he wished for was a court that cultivated the arts. His two most important painters were Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad. Together, the two men, both from Persia, had an enormous influence on the subsequent flourishing of Mughal painting, which is one of the glories of world civilization.
Under Islam, painting representational imagery is inherently controversial, because it’s potentially blasphemous. But Akbar justified representational painting as a special way of recognizing God. He recruited scores of painters to work at his court and liked to check on their progress every week.
This painting is about 7 1/2 inches high and 4 inches across. (If he really did paint that polo field on a grain of rice, Mir Sayyid Ali must have felt as expansive as Jackson Pollock working on this scale!) It shows a scholar — some experts think it may be the artist himself — as a young man kneeling on a carpet and leaning forward to read a book. The figure’s robes are identifiably Mughal/Indian, but his facial features and turban are Central Asian and Persian.
The book is propped on a red bookrest, which chimes with the other colors: the green robes and grass, the lavender landscape, the golden sky, the blue book, the orange carpet. You can see why Henri Matisse, Howard Hodgkin and Francesco Clemente — although they all worked on a larger scale — were so captivated by Indian painting.
It’s not, finally, the size of Mughal miniatures that matters (they were not, in the end, all that small). It’s the color. Color here is not spatial, as in the multiple tinted glazes used contemporaneously in Venetian or Northern European oil painting. Rather it is opaque — as flat, saturated and intense as possible.
A white tablet resting on the corner of the carpet is inscribed with a Persian couplet about the authority of mastery: “The sternness of the master,” it says, “is far above the affection of a father.”
I think you can read this any way you like. For me, it’s a paean to the authority not of any one master, but of art itself, which at its greatest has a stern, objective quality that has nothing to do with personal affection and is not to be trifled with. As Count Mippipopolous says of a very good wine in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”: “This one is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The union representing King Soopers workers in the state turned down Kroger’s final offer, which according to Reuters, would have raised starting pay to $16 per hour and bolstered health care benefits.
The strike involves 87 stores in the state.
A media representative for Cincinnati-based Kroger, which also owns Ralphs, Fred Meyer and its namesake grocery brand, did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Souad Mekhennet named The Post’s International Security Correspondent
The Washington Post's Souad Mekhennet awarded International Leadership Award by Simon Wiesenthal Center. (The Washington Post)
Announcement from Managing Editors Cameron Barr and Steven Ginsberg, Foreign Editor Douglas Jehl, Interim Deputy National Editor Matea Gold and National Security Editor Peter Finn:
We are pleased to announce that Souad Mekhennet will take on an expanded role as an international security correspondent working with the national security and foreign desks. Souad will be a key part of a growing effort to strengthen our international investigations.
This new role is a natural extension of the work Souad has been doing since she joined the national security team in 2017 and before that as a longtime contributor, whose first reporting for The Post was in Germany in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most recently, she was part of the investigation of the NSO Group by The Post and 16 media partners led by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories.
Souad, one of the best-sourced reporters on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, has a long string of global exclusives including the unmasking of Jihadi John and the death of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the leader of the group that staged the 2015 Paris attacks. She has been at the center of some of our deepest journalism on international terrorism, reporting from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. She has also reported for The New York Times, Der Spiegel and ZDF, the German public broadcaster. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work as part of The Post’s coverage of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Souad is the recipient of numerous awards including the Daniel Pearl Award and Germany’s prestigious Henri-Nannen Prize and Ludwig-Börne Prize.
Souad has written four books, most recently her critically acclaimed memoir, “I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad,” which the New Yorker described as “an enthralling and sometimes shocking blend of reportage and memoir from the centers of jihadi networks.” Souad will continue to be based in Washington and report to the national security desk.
Please join us in congratulating Souad on her new role. | null | null | null | null | null |
Here’s the unpleasant truth Manchin must confront: "Who we are” in this context will be defined by partisanship either way. By refusing to allow Democrats to act, Manchin is inescapably facilitating a more destructive form of partisanship — one that he himself says threatens the ‘bedrock of democracy” — than the one he is almost single-handedly blocking, and ensuring that the former will define “who we are,” rather than the latter. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) departs following the Republican policy luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Jan. 11, 2022. (Al Drago/Bloomberg)
Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) 2022 got off to a rough start.
His long-standing description of the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 as “terrorists” suddenly piqued the irritation of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson as the anniversary of the attack approached. Carlson blasted Cruz for that choice of words, prompting Cruz to appear on Carlson’s show, hat-in-hand.
Well, perhaps because Epps is being accused of being part of a government plot to incite the Jan. 6 violence based on no credible evidence? Perhaps because pushing back on the conspiracy theory necessarily means explaining the lack of evidence for the claims Carlson is making? Note the ridiculous assertion that Epps was the “central figure” on Jan. 6, as though the day’s violence wasn’t obviously a function of thousands of angry people overwhelming an insufficient police presence. No, it was this one guy that Carlson and his friends say was a fed. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on Jan. 4 said his “preference” is that any changes to the Senate’s filibuster rules include Republican support. (The Washington Post)
E.J. Dionne: The hypocrisy argument on the filibuster is itself phony
Here’s the unpleasant truth Manchin must confront: "Who we are” in this context will be defined by partisanship either way. By refusing to allow Democrats to act, Manchin is inescapably facilitating a more destructive form of partisanship — one that he himself says threatens the “bedrock of democracy” — than the one he is almost single-handedly blocking, and ensuring that the former will define “who we are,” rather than the latter. | null | null | null | null | null |
Section Three of the 14th Amendment disqualifies supporters of insurrection from holding office.
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) makes remarks at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas on July 9, 2021. (Emil Lippe for The Washington Post)
By Gerard N. Magliocca
Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law
This week, 11 North Carolina voters challenged Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s (R-N.C.) legal eligibility to run in the Republican primary for a House seat. The complaint, filed with the North Carolina board of elections, charges that Cawthorn is disqualified by Section Three of the 14th Amendment, which states that no person shall be a member of the House if, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution as a member of Congress, he then “engaged in insurrection” against the Constitution. Congress may grant amnesty to anyone subject to Section Three by a vote of two-thirds of each chamber.
This challenge tests how seriously we will take the actions of the violent mob on Jan. 6, as well as the actions of those who aided and abetted the insurrection. The suit will also augment the work of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6.
That’s because, under North Carolina law, if any voter raises a “reasonable suspicion” that a candidate does not meet the constitutional eligibility requirements for office, then the candidate must prove that he is, in fact, eligible to serve. Cawthorn will have a full and fair opportunity to present his case and make clear that he did not “engage in insurrection,” though he may well have to testify under oath in that state proceeding. The latter is a key point, because the House select committee cannot compel Cawthorn or any other member of the House to testify in the way that the committee can compel others (such as Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist) to talk — namely, through the threat of a criminal contempt of Congress referral to the Department of Justice. But the committee could draw on testimony from the state eligibility proceeding to flesh out information that it compiles from other sources.
The original “insurrection” that Section Three was designed to deal with was, of course, the Civil War. It was ratified after that conflict to prevent former officials who served the Confederacy from returning to power. Elections held across the South in 1865 resulted in what Congress’s Joint Committee on Reconstruction called at the time “the defeat of candidates who had been true to the Union, and in the election of notorious and unpardoned rebels.” As a result, the Joint Committee recommended “the exclusion from positions of public trust of, at least, a portion of those whose crimes have proved them to be enemies to the Union, and unworthy of public confidence.” In explaining what became Section Three, Sen. Jacob Howard (R-Mich.) stated: “[W]here a person has taken a solemn oath to support the Constitution of the United States there is a fair moral implication that he cannot afterward commit an act which in its effect would destroy the Constitution of the United States without incurring the guilt of at least moral perjury.” Another senator argued that Section Three was necessary “as a prevention against the future commission of offenses.” After the 14th Amendment became law, the Senate excluded a senator-elect from North Carolina because he was ineligible under Section Three. (In 1872, Congress gave amnesty to most ex-Confederates in the interests of sectional reconciliation, excluding only the worst of the worst, such as Jefferson Davis.)
Jan. 6 crossed a line. We need to say so before it’s too late for democracy.
The violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which saw the Confederate flag carried into the building by a mob that fought its way past police, raises anew the question of whether some public officials are “unworthy of public confidence” and therefore barred by Section Three from serving. To avoid the conclusion that this language might apply to the present situation, some are now arguing that the events of Jan. 6 were not an insurrection at all. Better to call what happened a riot, a jamboree, or, well, anything other than an insurrection. But these revisionist descriptions are flatly contradicted by, among other things, nearly unanimous votes in both Houses of Congress (including by Cawthorn) awarding Capitol police medals. The medal resolution said that the officers risked their lives against a “mob of insurrectionists.” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also described the attack as a “failed insurrection” on the day of the attack.
To be clear, only a small number of people are potentially subject to the constitutional ineligibility bar due to Jan. 6; Section Three is a scalpel rather than a club. The overwhelming majority of Republican officials were not involved in the insurrection. They are free to make their case to the people in future elections. Nobody is trying to purge dissenting views or candidates. Yet the Constitution does impose some limits on democratic choice by requiring, for example, that candidates for Congress and the presidency be at least a certain age and be citizens of the United States. Section Three imposed an additional eligibility requirement to protect the Constitution itself. As one senator noted in 1866, the provision was “not a measure of punishment, but a measure of self-defense.” (Full disclosure: I was asked by the plaintiffs to serve, if necessary, as an expert witness in the Cawthorn case, because of my scholarship on the history of Section Three, and agreed to do so pro bono.)
The complaint against Cawthorn alleges that he had close contacts with the organizers of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally. He promoted the demonstration in advance, saying that “the future of this Republic hinges on the action of a solitary few … It’s time to fight,” and spoke at the gathering. The complaint cites press reports that he met with planners of the demonstration; and afterwards he called some of those arrested “political prisoners.” (Because of redistricting, Cawthorn will be running in North Carolina’s 13th district, though he currently represents the 11th. A spokesman for Cawthorn said in an email to the Associated Press that “a dozen activists who are comically misinterpreting and twisting the 14th Amendment for political gain will not distract him from [public] service.”)
One Republican senator, in 1866, framed the relevant question well: “[L]ooking to the future peace and security of the country,” he asked, would it “be just or right to allow men who have thus proven themselves faithless to again be entrusted with the political power of the State?” The American people answered that question by adding Section Three of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The task before us is to honor that fundamental commitment. | null | null | null | null | null |
For many U.S. Muslim organizations, surveillance by government and other informants became a regular feature of life in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s biggest Muslim civil rights group, said the most invasive scrutiny had waned over the past decade.
Instead, the emails ultimately led CAIR executives to recordings and transcripts that documented what CAIR says is the most extensive known spying on a U.S. Muslim organization in recent memory. Two Muslim activists, CAIR says, had been handing over inside information for years to the D.C.-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, which extremism trackers consider an anti-Muslim hate group.
CAIR last month named Romin Iqbal, a longtime Ohio CAIR leader, as one of the informers, and Wednesday planned to speak about a second man, Tariq Nelson, who until about a decade ago was an active member of Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church.
This is the first reporting of Nelson’s name, details of the surveillance and the perspectives of key people involved, including Nelson, the IPT tipster and leadership at Dar Al-Hijrah, one of the region’s largest mosques.
The arrangement came to light because an IPT whistleblower, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash, told The Washington Post they came to see an initial post-Sept. 11 urge to protect the United States as going far overboard into a project that was unfairly harming the Muslim community.
In the decade after Sept. 11, surveillance by the U.S. government was so rife that it drove many Muslims from mosques and created fear and distrust in many communities. In recent years, the fear subsided somewhat as terrorism cases involving Muslims plateaued. But the uneasiness never went away. “There has been a learning to live with it, like covid,” Mitchell said
Mitchell said private Islamophobic groups such as IPT are dangerous, portraying Muslims as inherently violent or as a demographic threat to Western nations. He cited mass shooters in Quebec City in 2017 and New Zealand in 2019 who had viewed such content online.
Iqbal was among the adults who would hold programming for Muslim youths on knowing their rights. “‘If someone knocks, ask for a warrant.’ These are real conversations when I was 10,” Akhras recalled.
Dar Al-Hijrah, the Northern Virginia mosque where Nelson prayed and volunteered, was alerted by CAIR to the presence of a mole a few months ago, said Saif Rahman, the director of public and government affairs at Dar Al Hijrah. After the separate Ohio claims came to light last month, Rahman said, Nelson approached a mosque board member to confess his own work with IPT.
As word spread in the Dar Al Hijrah community, Rahman said, the reaction was shock and a sense of betrayal. He said Nelson had been highly regarded, “friendly and sociable.”
Nelson never was in official leadership for any Muslim organization but was active as a volunteer starting in 2005 at Dar Al Hijrah, he told The Post. He said he worked with youths, evangelizing and publicly promoting Islam in those ultrasensitive years.
It was in his work speaking and blogging in the 2000s against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden that he intersected with Steven Emerson, the founder of IPT and among the most relentlessly anti-Muslim pundits in the nation.
“He kind of presented it like: ‘We’re on the same side.' He didn’t speak against Muslims in general. He wasn’t interested in hijab bans or going through the Koran or anything. With him it wasn’t theological,” Nelson said of Emerson and his organization. The focus, Nelson says, was on terrorism.
Emerson’s organization Tuesday again shared statements it made last month when the Iqbal case went public.
Nelson said that there is no excuse for what he did and that many people at Dar Al Hijrah had been kind to him. But he looks back on his motivations as complex, maybe contradictory, maybe “asinine.” He remembers wanting to show Emerson, “Hey, you’re not getting anywhere. There’s nothing happening here. These people aren’t who you think we are.”
Dar Al Hijrah, Rahman said, is focusing on Islamic teachings about repentance and forgiveness. He said community leaders are working with Nelson on a path of atonement.
“The house of God is open for the best of people and the worst of people,” Rahman said. “The idea that we would be trying to screen people or closing it off would be the anathema to the notion of it being a sanctuary.” | null | null | null | null | null |
It’s the second-hottest temperature recorded in the Argentinian capital in the past 115 years, where 700,000 people lost power
Water vendors in the Palermo Woods park during a heat wave in Buenos Aires on Jan. 11. (Anita Pouchard Serra/Bloomberg)
A multiday heat wave is gripping parts of central South America, bringing record warmth to a number of large cities. Parts of Argentina are some 25 degrees above normal, while unusual warmth stretches from parts of Chile Paraguay and Bolivia. Excess strain on power grids have caused widespread outages, leaving 700,000 people without power. The heat wave doesn’t appear to be letting up until this weekend.
Buenos Aires Ezeiza Airport hit 104.2 degrees on December 29, its hottest December temperature on record and, at the time, warmest overall temperature since 1999. The city’s observatory later spiked to 41.1 degrees Celsius, or 106 degrees Fahrenheit, on January 11. Only one day — in January of 1957 — snagged a hotter temperature in nearly 115 years of record-keeping.
Argentina’s Servicio Meteorológico Nacional, akin to the National Weather Service, noted that 11 records had been smashed on Tuesday. Five major cities, including Punta Indio, Buenos Aires, Las Flores, El Palomar and San Fernando all witnessed both their warmest January temperatures on record and their highest readings in at least the past fifty years.
The agency issued red alerts for much of the country, writing that the “extreme temperatures” would have “very dangerous” effects on health.
Córdoba, a city of 3.3 million located in the strip of flat plains that stretches through central Argentina, climbed to 108.5 degrees on Monday.
Farther to the west in San Juan, a city in the lee of the Andes Mountains east of the Chilean border, temperatures unofficially may have reached 111 degrees.
Tres Arroyos, east of Bahía Blanca, set an record at 105.3 degrees, and nearby Coronel Pringles, about 45 miles to the west-northwest, also managed a record at 103.3 degrees.
“Wear light clothing and light colors,” tweeted Argentina’s national weather service. “Eat lightly. Don’t expose yourself to the sun.”
The crazy temperatures are the result of a heat dome, or a sprawling ridge of high pressure, which brings hot temperatures and sinking air. Parcels of air that sink are subject to a process called adiabatic compression, which squeezes air pockets and causes them to heat up even more. Air that “downslopes,” or slides down the Andes, experiences the same phenomenon, magnifying the effect.
The heat wave could eventually affect agriculture too; Argentina is among the world’s top exporters of soybean and corn.
Heat waves are among the deadliest weather phenomenon, surpassing tornadoes, flooding and hurricanes in their human toll in many areas. Quantifying their exact human impact is difficult due to the issue of “excess mortality,” which occurs when elderly, those with preexisting health conditions and other vulnerable populations die prematurely due to the heat. | null | null | null | null | null |
A sign on the counter of a pharmacy in northeast London advises customers on Jan. 3, 2022, that it is out of government-provided coronavirus lateral flow, or rapid antigen, tests. (Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images)
Although the Biden administration is now ramping up access to at-home tests, millions of Americans need tests every day to ensure that they can safely go to school and work as infections surge. Adding to the U.S. strain, around 10 percent of Americans do not have health insurance and testing prices can vary widely, making them even harder to come by for some.
The United States, though, is far from the only country battling yet another wave of covid cases, coupled with a shortage of antigen and PCR tests.
Here’s how some other countries facing omicron waves are handling the surge in testing:
The United Kingdom was among the first countries to confront an omicron-driven wave of infections. Initially, free of cost, at-home rapid antigen tests, known in Britain as lateral flows, were easily accessible at pharmacies or by mail through the country’s National Health Service. The government hoped to limit omicron’s spread by having people frequently take antigen tests.
Italy was one of the countries hardest hit in the early months of the pandemic. This time around, Italy is relying on vaccine mandates and its robust network of mom-and-pop pharmacies to deliver rapid antigen tests.
Israel’s population is highly vaccinated, but the more-contagious omicron variant is still spreading fast, upending school systems and businesses and increasingly filling hospitals with patients, many of whom are not inoculated.
In Saskatchewan province, however, rapid antigen tests are so widely available at libraries, fire stations and some supermarkets that some people are sending them to relatives in other parts of Canada, CTV reported. | null | null | null | null | null |
House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) gestures during a news conference at the Capitol in Richmond on Jan. 12. (Steve Helber/AP)
House Republicans went into the session with a double-barreled message: they hope to find common ground with Democrats in the Senate but they’re working aggressively to undo what they see as the other party’s misguided lawmaking from the past two years.
This year the GOP holds a 52-48 edge in the House of Delegates, after a Democrat won a special election to fill an open seat in Norfolk on Tuesday. The state Senate remains in Democratic hands, at 21-19.
“I submit that there’s no one better qualified than Todd Gilbert to lead this body,” said Del. Robert Bell (R-Albemarle) in making the nomination.
As is tradition, the Speaker’s nomination was seconded by a member of the other party — in this case, Del. Kathleen Murphy (D-Fairfax), who also happens to be a longtime and unlikely friend of Gilbert’s.
With Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin set to take office on Saturday, lawmakers will have to reach compromise to get anything passed.
Kilgore said House Republicans will work with Youngkin on his goal of withdrawing Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a compact among mostly East Coast states to trade credits for carbon emissions.
Kilgore said Wednesday that he believes the legislature can withdraw from RGGI without gutting the entire “clean economy act” that aims the state toward a carbon-free future.
“We know that we want to get to a clean economy and use the renewable energy, but you know the sun doesn’t shine every day and the wind doesn’t blow every day, so you got to have that backup power plan,” said Kilgore, whose district is deep in the state’s struggling coal country.
Del. Glenn Davis (R-Virginia Beach), who will chair the education committee in the session, said Wednesday that Republicans feel strongly the state should fund charter schools. Asked if that would result in a loss of funding for public schools, Davis said no — because in Virginia, charter schools are public schools.
“There will not be any funds utilized that goes to a charter school that is not educating a public school child,” Davis said.
Del. Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach), who will chair the appropriations committee, said Republicans plan to seek $300 rebates for each individual taxpayer and a doubling of the state’s standard deduction. He also promised to eliminate the state’s 2½ percent tax on groceries — 1 percent of which is levied by localities. Knight said he believed other funds could be found to make up for the loss of funds so localities would not face cuts.
In the Senate, the last vestige of blue on Capitol Square, the Senate Democratic Caucus rolled out its agenda for the session with an emphasis on “kitchen table” issues.
“Virginia Senate Democrats’ goal is to make every Virginian’s life easier, safer and more prosperous," Mamie Locke (Hampton), the caucus chairwoman said in virtual news conference Wednesday morning. “And we have always fought for these ideals and will never settle for less.”
Affordable child care, transportation, improvements to the state’s beleaguered unemployment commission and paid family medical leave were among the issues they vowed to push through the session.
“We’ll consider any idea he wants to put forward but we’re not going to compromise our principles and our principles are going to require us to make sure that we don’t take money away from our public schools,” said Sen. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath).
“We, as a caucus, have very serious concerns that he will have to try to overcome and we will see where the votes are,” said Sen. Jennifer McClellan (D-Richmond), who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination last year. | null | null | null | null | null |
Britain's Prince Andrew, Duke of York, attends the Sunday service at the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor, England, on April 21. (Steve Parsons/AFP/Getty Images)
NEW YORK — A lawsuit brought against Britain’s Prince Andrew by a woman who says she was trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein can go forward, a judge ruled Wednesday, after concluding that a settlement agreement the woman signed in 2009 does not unequivocally free the royal from liability.
Kaplan said he had to adhere to Florida law governing the prince’s dismissal motion, because that is the state where Giuffre’s lawsuit and settlement with Epstein were handled. The “controlling interpretation … must await further proceedings,” he wrote, adding that the “intentions of Ms. Giuffre and Epstein are anything but clear here, at least at this stage.”
In the lawsuit, Giuffre claims that Prince Andrew sexually abused in her in multiple encounters, causing lasting trauma and other personal harm. She seeks unspecified monetary damages. Giuffre’s attorney David Boies said her team is “obviously pleased” with the decision and “that evidence will now be taken under oath.”
Should the lawsuit proceed to a trial, it could put Prince Andrew in a position of hearing uncomfortable public testimony about his connection to Epstein and his alleged encounters with Giuffre,both in New York and Great Britain.
The proceedings could serve as a further source of embarrassment for Britian’s royal family, while also expanding public scrutiny and awareness of one of the celebrities allegedly involved in Epstein’s lavish, sex-focused parties. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Minnesota Twins pitcher Jim Kaat pitches against the Kansas City Athletics in Kansas City, Mo., Sept. 18, 1967. The Twins won 2-0. The Minnesota Twins will retire the uniform number of former pitcher Jim Kaat. He was recently elected to the Hall of Fame. The Twins will add Kaat’s 36 to their wall of retired numbers during a pregame ceremony at Target Field on July 16. (AP Photo/William P. Straeter, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
Critics say the ‘plague ships’ allow cruise lines to conceal coronavirus cases from ports.
Three other major cruise lines did not immediately respond when asked if they were employing similar practices. One passenger on a P & O Cruises ship in the Caribbean told The Post last week that he and his wife were being moved to a ship operated by Cunard Line after testing positive for the novel coronavirus. Both companies are owned by Carnival Corp.
Four Royal Caribbean ships are being used as quarantine vessels for crew members: Vision of the Seas, Rhapsody of the Seas, Serenade of the Seas and Jewel of the Seas. Carnival is using at least two ships: Carnival Ecstasy and Carnival Sensation.
This past week, Royal Caribbean canceled sailings for three ships — Serenade, Jewel and Symphony of the Seas — for periods ranging from a few weeks to a couple of months; the return of Vision of the Seas to regular cruising was postponed to March 7.
Royal Caribbean’s Sierra-Caro said the employees who tested positive are monitored by the ships’ medical team during the course of their 10-day quarantine and then return to their assigned ships. She said this week that no crew members have had serious symptoms or needed to be hospitalized.
A passenger on Harmony of the Seas whose young daughter tested positive for the coronavirus posted a video on TikTok under the name “Cruising With Covid” and said that more than 100 crew members were transferred. When someone replied with an allegation that it was fake, the passenger included more of his footage — set to the theme of “Titanic.”
“There’s no question in my mind that this started because they wanted to keep their ships operational and going in and out of the ports of call,” said Jim Walker, a Miami-area lawyer who sues cruise lines — often on behalf of crew members — and runs the Cruise Law News website.
He has written about the “plague ships,” a term he says crew members have used with him, several times on the website and wondered whether the ships have adequate medical staffing to handle the patients. Walker reported more than 3,700 infected crew members between three of the ships, but that number could not be independently verified. Royal Caribbean declined to provide numbers or address that report despite several requests.
Walker said he suspects that the cruise lines are also trying to save money by housing some coronavirus-positive crew members on ships instead of in hotels on land and are avoiding what could be more expensive medical care in the United States. The cruise companies did not provide a statement on those allegations, but Chiames said crew members might not be authorized to stay in hotels in some locations.
As numbers of positive cases have soared in recent weeks, some destinations have refused to let cruise liners dock with infected passengers or crew members.
A former Royal Caribbean crew member, who resigned when informed he would be moved to a quarantine ship after testing positive for the coronavirus in late December, said he believed the practice was an effort to “massage” covid numbers, although he never heard the company say that explicitly.
The former crew member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern about future job prospects, said the transfers were just one issue plaguing ships’ crews. He said he had interacted with passengers who were not properly using their masks and witnessed inconsistency from his employer in applying quarantine requirements. He said that one close contact, a supervisor, did not quarantine after he tested positive.
Sierra-Caro said that Royal Caribbean is operating with an “enhanced face mask policy” and that the operator’s “detailed action plan” calls for close contacts of anyone who tests positive to quarantine in their stateroom for 24 hours before being tested for the virus.
Despite a thirty-onefold increase in cases on cruise ships in the past two weeks of December compared to the previous two weeks, the CDC plans to let its restrictions on sailing expire Saturday. At that point, the rules will become recommendations for cruise lines to follow voluntarily.
The agency recently warned against cruise travel, even for those who have been vaccinated. | null | null | null | null | null |
Except that in the bewilderingly shifting world of performance during a pandemic, “Mrs. Doubtfire” wasn’t closing closing. The musical’s lead producer, Kevin McCollum, had phoned Oscar that evening to say that the production would officially stop at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on Jan. 9 — and then start up again March 15. Enough time, McCollum reasoned, for the omicron spike to subside, audience nerves to settle and the box office to go ka-ching again.
Oscar’s role in “Mrs. Doubtfire” is the sort he’s made his own on Broadway, one that calls for exuberant comic chops. Raised in Rockville, Md., where he nourished a love of musical theater on cast albums and trips with his family to the Kennedy Center, Oscar got his first Broadway job in 1990, as a swing — an understudy covering several parts — in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Aspects of Love.” Over the ensuing decades, there would be roles in “Jekyll & Hyde,” “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” “The Addams Family” and “Something Rotten!," among others. But it would be his five years in “The Producers” starting in 2001, first as Franz and later as a successor to Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock, that would burnish Oscar’s status as a go-to Broadway guy for musical comedy. | null | null | null | null | null |
Virginia House Speaker Del. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah), front right, takes the oath of office along with other delegates during opening ceremonies in the House chambers at the Capitol in Richmond on Jan. 12. (Steve Helber/AP)
House Republicans went into the session with a double-barreled message: They hope to find common ground with Democrats in the Senate, but they’re working aggressively to undo what they see as the other party’s misguided lawmaking from the past two years.
This year the GOP holds a 52-to-48 edge in the House of Delegates, after a Democrat won a special election to fill an open seat in Norfolk on Tuesday. The state Senate remains in Democratic hands, at 21 to 19.
“I submit that there’s no one better qualified than Todd Gilbert to lead this body,” Del. Rob Bell (R-Albemarle) said in making the nomination.
As is tradition, the speaker’s nomination was seconded by a member of the other party — in this case, Del. Kathleen J. Murphy (D-Fairfax), who also happens to be a longtime and unlikely friend of Gilbert’s.
With Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin set to take office Saturday, lawmakers will have to reach compromise to get anything passed.
Kilgore said House Republicans will work with Youngkin on his goal of withdrawing Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a compact among mostly East Coast states to trade credits for carbon emissions.
Kilgore said Wednesday that he believes the legislature can withdraw from the RGGI without gutting the entire Clean Economy Act that aims the state toward a carbon-free future.
“We know that we want to get to a clean economy and use the renewable energy, but you know the sun doesn’t shine every day, and the wind doesn’t blow every day, so you got to have that backup power plan,” said Kilgore, whose district is deep in the state’s struggling coal country.
Del. Glenn R. Davis (R-Virginia Beach), who will chair the education committee in the session, said Wednesday that Republicans feel strongly the state should fund more charter schools. Asked if that would result in a loss of funding for public schools, Davis said no — because in Virginia, charter schools are public schools.
“There will not be any funds utilized that goes to a charter school that is not educating a public-school child,” Davis said.
Del. Barry D. Knight (R-Virginia Beach), who will chair the appropriations committee, said Republicans plan to seek $300 rebates for each individual taxpayer and a doubling of the state’s standard deduction. He also promised to eliminate the state’s 2½ percent tax on groceries — 1 percent of which is levied by localities. Knight said he believed other funds could be found to make up for the loss of funds so localities would not face cuts.
In the state Senate, the last vestige of blue on Capitol Square, the Senate Democratic Caucus rolled out its agenda for the session with an emphasis on “kitchen table” issues.
“Virginia Senate Democrats’ goal is to make every Virginian’s life easier, safer and more prosperous,” Sen. Mamie E. Locke (Hampton), the caucus chairwoman, said in virtual news conference Wednesday morning. “And we have always fought for these ideals and will never settle for less.”
Affordable child care, transportation, improvements to the state’s beleaguered Employment Commission and paid family medical leave were among the issues they vowed to push through during the session.
“We’ll consider any idea he wants to put forward, but we’re not going to compromise our principles, and our principles are going to require us to make sure that we don’t take money away from our public schools,” said Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath).
“We as a caucus have very serious concerns that he will have to try to overcome, and we will see where the votes are,” said Sen. Jennifer L. McClellan (D-Richmond), who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination last year.
Once the session began, senators kicked off by voting on rules that would allow any members who are sick with or exposed to the coronavirus to participate remotely. Without debate, they signed off 39 to 0 — and shortly thereafter, the 40th member, Sen. Mark J. Peake (R-Lynchburg), began participating remotely.
Masks were encouraged but not required in the Senate, as in the House. But the Senate, which lost a member to coronavirus last year, had some physical barriers in place meant to curb the spread of the virus, which in recent days has sent the state’s hospitalizations soaring to record highs.
Three-sided plastic booths stood around the senators’ wooden desks, a precaution introduced over the summer, when they returned to the Capitol for a special session. Down the hall in the House, the desktop plastic barriers used over the summer were gone.
Also in the Senate, a three-sided, clear screen stood at the top of the dais where the lieutenant governor presides — a new feature added because Lt. Gov.-elect Winsome Sears (R), who will be sworn in Saturday, has declined to reveal her vaccination status. Outgoing Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D) presided Wednesday and will do so through Friday.
For the first time since the advent of the pandemic, senators and delegates had their usual army of teenage pages on hand to pass out documents, run errands and otherwise help floor and committee sessions run smoothly. They paired their classic blue blazers with dark masks. | null | null | null | null | null |
Critics say the ‘plague ships’ allow cruise lines to obscure coronavirus cases from ports
A pair of industry giants, Carnival Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean International, say they are transferring workers to crew-only ships to wait out their isolation periods. The movement of crews has raised eyebrows among some passengers, who have documented transfers of more than 100 workers. Neither cruise line would disclose to The Washington Post how many employees are staying on quarantine ships.
Three other major cruise lines did not immediately respond when asked if they were employing similar practices. One passenger on a P&O Cruises ship in the Caribbean told The Post last week that he and his wife were being moved to a ship operated by Cunard Line after testing positive. Both are owned by Carnival Corp.
Four Royal Caribbean ships are being used as quarantine vessels for crew: Vision of the Seas, Rhapsody of the Seas, Serenade of the Seas and Jewel of the Seas. Carnival is using at least two, Carnival Ecstasy and Carnival Sensation.
This past week, Royal Caribbean canceled sailings on three ships — Serenade, Jewel and Symphony of the Seas — for time periods that range from a few weeks to a couple of months; the return of Vision of the Seas to regular cruising was postponed to March 7.
Royal Caribbean’s Sierra-Caro said the employees who tested positive are monitored by the ships’ medical team during the course of their 10-day quarantine and then go back to their assigned ships. She said this week that no crew have had serious symptoms or have needed to be hospitalized.
A passenger on Harmony of the Seas whose young daughter tested positive for the coronavirus posted a video on TikTok under the name “Cruising With Covid” and said more than 100 crew were transferred. When someone replied with an allegation that it was fake, the passenger included more of his footage — set to the theme of “Titanic.”
“There’s no question in my mind that this started because they wanted to keep their ships operational and going in and out of the ports of call,” said Jim Walker, a Miami-area attorney who sues cruise lines — often on behalf of crew — and runs the Cruise Law News website.
He has written about the “plague ships,” a term he says crew have used with him, several times on the website and questioned whether the ships have adequate medical staff to handle the patients. Walker reported more than 3,700 ill crew members between three of the ships, but that number could not be independently verified. Royal Caribbean declined to provide numbers or address that report despite several requests.
Walker said he suspects the cruise lines are also trying to save money by housing some covid-positive crew on ships instead of in hotels on land, and avoiding what could be more expensive medical care in the United States. The cruise companies did not provide a statement on those allegations, but Chiames said crew might not be authorized to stay in hotels in some locations.
As numbers of positive cases have soared in recent weeks, some destinations have refused to let cruise lines dock with sick passengers or crew.
A former Royal Caribbean crew member, who resigned when informed he would be moved to a quarantine ship after testing positive for the coronavirus in late December, said he believed the practice was an effort to “massage” covid numbers, though he never heard the company say that explicitly.
The former crew member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern about future job prospects, said the transfers were just one issue plaguing crew. He said he had interacted with passengers who were not properly using their masks and witnessed inconsistency from his employer in applying quarantine requirements. He said that one close contact, a supervisor, did not quarantine after he tested positive.
Sierra-Caro said Royal Caribbean is operating with an “enhanced face mask policy,” and the operator’s “detailed action plan” calls for close contacts of anyone who tests positive to quarantine in their stateroom for 24 hours before being tested for the virus.
Despite a 31-fold increase in cases on cruise ships in the last two weeks of December compared to the previous two weeks, the CDC plans to let its restrictions on sailing expire Saturday. At that point, the rules will become recommendations for cruise lines to follow voluntarily.
The agency recently warned against cruise travel, even for those who are vaccinated. | null | null | null | null | null |
There’s only two ways for this to end. The first is to stop pumping money into the economy. Inflation soared at the end of World War II as rationing ended and Americans spent the money they had saved during the war. But the war’s end also meant the federal spigot was no longer running, and inflation dropped again once the initial savings-fueled burst ended. This means Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is right; the country cannot afford to pass the Build Back Better Act or other costly measures that would add more fuel to the overheated economy. | null | null | null | null | null |
But a big question is whether the decoupling will occur in the United States. Comparisons are difficult; the virus is the same, but each country has a different history, social behavior and epidemiological situation. South Africa was only about one-third fully vaccinated but might have benefited from a strong wall of immunity from previous infection, plus a younger population and omicron arriving in the summer. The United States is nearly two-thirds fully vaccinated, but has a large proportion of unvaccinated people who could easily become infected; booster shots are highly protective but two-thirds of Americans lack them. Also, omicron arrived in the United States before the delta wave expired — a one-two punch. The number of new daily cases in the United States has soared beyond 700,000, more than triple the peak of last winter. However, deaths are running at half the rate of last winter’s surge, and probably are still being propelled by delta, while rising in some hot spots. Every two days, the United States suffers the equivalent of one 9/11 death toll.
Hospital admissions are also spiking, illustrating how omicron is creating a bow wave of havoc. Hospitals are being crowded by the unvaccinated and people who seek help for other maladies but also turn out to have covid. About 1 in 4 hospitals in the country is reporting a critical staffing shortage; many are nearing capacity. Omicron is also sending tremors through the nation’s school systems. Those struggling to remain open with in-person classrooms are dealing with absences among teachers and other staff. A labor shortage and an absenteeism crisis are also rippling through the economy — airline cancellations, empty store shelves and continued supply chain interruptions. This is not “mild.” | null | null | null | null | null |
StarSolidStarOutlineStarOutlineStarOutline(1 star)
Now, with the latest chapter (called simply “Scream” again, but with the center of the title M rendered as a styled Roman numeral V), the movie doesn’t seem to care whether it earns a third category of reaction: the hate-laugh. At a recent preview screening of the new installment — co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, in a way that is so insufferably self-conscious that watching it feels like it’s watching you back, waiting for your reaction — one audience member signaled his displeasure at the heavy-handedness of its humor by loudly stating, not laughing, “Ha. Ha.”
The film centers on a bunch of teenagers in the franchise’s fictional town of Woodsboro, one of whom, Tara (Jenna Ortega), is attacked in the opening scene by an apparent copycat killer. Wearing the franchise’s iconic “Ghostface” mask and the hooded, black robe of the Grim Reaper, he (or perhaps she, using voice-altering technology) torments Tara over the phone with a trivia quiz about the “Stab” films, a fictional franchise that is said to be based on the killings depicted in the Scream universe. (Clips of the Stab canon, whose eighth installment utilizes a stylized numeral 8 instead of the letter B, appear throughout the new “Scream,” along with jokes about the fake franchise’s “sloppy, lazy filmmaking.” Insert eyeroll emoji here.)
Tara is not a fan of slasher movies, preferring what she calls the elevated horror of “The Babadook,” “It Follows,” “The Witch” and “Hereditary.” Clever girl. But her assailant is not impressed by her taste, ultimately going after her like a piece of Wagyu beef. (Every kitchen in Woodsboro seems to have a ridiculously well-equipped knife block out of Williams-Sonoma, offering an arsenal of chef’s blades, suitable for mealtime or murder.)
‘Babadook’ director Jennifer Kent talks about women making horror films
More people get fileted and gutted, as the Gen-Z cast comments, with a sense of increasingly annoying ironic detachment, on the survival “rules” of horror films that they then proceed to violate (including “Never say, ‘I’ll be right back,’ ” before wandering off to their own deaths).
Eventually, the stars of the earlier “Scream” films — Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, playing characters referred to by this film’s zoomers as the “legacy cast” — also show up, and join forces with Tara, Tara’s older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Sam’s boyfriend (Jack Quaid) to identify the perpetrator of the present mayhem.
But try as it might — and oh how it tries, mightily — to be a “meta-slasher whodunit,” as one of the high school crews puts it, this “Scream” feels less like a movie than a podcast about a movie, one hosted by a claque of irritating, smarty-pants commentators who don’t know when to shut up. There is such a thing as toxic fandom, to borrow the term used by one of this movie’s young protagonists, and “Scream,” which is filled with endless conversation about the difference between a sequel and a “requel” and more rules than a penitentiary, suffers from it, fatally.
R. At area theaters. Contains strong bloody violence, coarse language throughout and some sexual references. 115 minutes. | null | null | null | null | null |
LYNCHBURG, Va. — A 10-year-old boy was injured when someone fired a shot at a home in Lynchburg early Wednesday morning, police said.
Officers were called to Grady Street around 1:30 a.m. for a report of shots fired, Lynchburg police said in a news release. Officers learned that a home had been struck by gunfire when people were inside, including a 10-year-old boy who suffered a grazing gunshot wound, police said.
The child was treated at the scene for a superficial injury and no one else was injured, police said. Police are asking anyone who may have captured video of the incident on security cameras to contact the department. | null | null | null | null | null |
In the three years since he was diagnosed with cancer, Burhan Chowdhury has had a difficult time maintaining his yard and keeping his property in suburban Detroit in good shape. At a recent Michigan state court appearance over Zoom, the 72-year-old man struggled to breathe as he explained to a judge that he was “very weak” and unable to clean up the grass that had overtaken the home over the summer.
Burhan Chowdhury and his family first came to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 2010, eventually settling full-time in Michigan in 2014, his son said. They bought their current home in Hamtramck, located about six miles from downtown Detroit, in 2016.
The family was devastated when Chowdhury was diagnosed with cancer in his lymph nodes in February 2019, his son told The Post. Shibbir Chowdhury said he’s seen his father’s health deteriorate not just from the cancer but also a heart issue and high blood pressure. His mother also has faced health issues after she fell down the stairs and hurt her back, he said.
When the son returned home, his father informed him that they were issued a ticket on Aug. 2, 2021, for, what Krot later described as, “failing to keep the fence, walkway, sidewalk or alley free of trees, leaves” or other items. Chowdhury noted that the region’s rainy season also played a role in the vegetation getting out of control.
The family cleaned up the house soon after, but Burhan Chowdhury still had to make a court appearance to see whether he would have to pay a fine. The father did not know anything about Krot, who was appointed to the bench by then-Gov. Rick Snyder (R) in 2016. She was reelected to the nonpartisan position in 2020 after running unopposed.
At around 2:45 p.m. Monday, Krot called on Chowdhury to speak. Even though English is not his first language, Chowdhury introduced himself, explaining he was a cancer patient who had become too weak to maintain the front of the home on his own.
After ordering him to pay the $100 fine by Feb. 1, Shibbir Chowdhury asked if she understood that his father was suffering from cancer. Krot answered his question with another question: “Have you seen that photo?”
Toward the end of the exchange, Burhan Chowdhury was heard saying, “Oh my God.”
Clips of the exchange has been viewed thousands of times on social media, as critics have defended Burhan Chowdhury and derided Krot as “very rude and unprofessional.”
Shibbir Chowdhury said he plans to pay the fine for his father in the coming days. He reiterated that the home is in good shape now, and has been in the last few months. The son has also been taken aback by the online support offered to his father over his interaction with the judge. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, left, and Jerome Bettis celebrate after the Steelers’ 21-10 win over the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl XL football game Sunday, Feb. 5, 2006, in Detroit. The Steelers are hoping to send Roethlisberger out the way Roethlisberger and company sent out Bettis in the 2005 playoffs, with a Super Bowl win. The seventh-seeded Steelers open the playoffs on Sunday, Jan. 16, 2022, at AFC West champion Kansas City. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File) (GENE. J. PUSKAR/AP) | null | null | null | null | null |
Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare was suspended during the Tokyo Olympics this past summer. (Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images)
The complaint alleges that Eric Lira, a self-proclaimed “kinesiologist and naturopathic” therapist, provided banned substances including human growth hormone and erythropoietin, or EPO, to the athletes. Lira, 41, is the proprietor of Med Sport LLC, an El Paso company. According to a LinkedIn profile, he has operated in both Texas and Juarez, Mexico. It is not yet clear whether Lira has a lawyer, and he did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.
According to the complaint, the investigation began in July 2021, weeks before the start of the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, when a subject referred to as “Individual-1” found packages of vials of apparent PEDs, including growth hormone, in an athlete’s Florida home and provided photos of the drugs to the FBI. The packages included Mexican drugs bearing Lira’s return address that had apparently been mailed to an Olympian referred to in the records only as “Athlete-1”.
In the days before the Tokyo Games, according to the complaint, that athlete tested positive for human growth hormone. Though the court documents do not identify Lira’s alleged clients, the details in the complaint concerning “Athlete-1” match the circumstances of elite Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare. She was suspended during the Games and ultimately received a multiyear ban. Okagbare did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
As Okagbare returned to the United States, according to the complaint, her phone was searched by American border officials and an FBI agent. The complaint cited phone communications in which she allegedly arranged for Lira to supply her and a male athlete, referred to only as “Athlete-2,” with drugs she referred to as “honey” — for human growth hormone — and “epo,” for the “blood-building” drug erythropoietin.
Though Okagbare referred to Lira as a “doctor,” according to the complaint, the FBI found that he is not licensed to practice medicine in any of the states where he allegedly operated. A special agent noted in the criminal complaint that Lira’s self-described specialty as a “naturopathic” therapist refers to unlicensed physicians who “diagnose, prevent, and treat acute and chronic illness to restore and establish optimal health by supporting the person's inherent self-healing process.”
In 2021, Lira’s company received $23,800 in funds from the Paycheck Protection Program, according to a database tracking coronavirus relief. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: The Early 202: Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.)
MS. ALEMANY: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Jackie Alemany, a congressional correspondent and author of “The Early 202,” The Washington Post’s early morning newsletter.
My guest this morning is the former Chairman and top Republican of the powerful Ways and Means Committee of the House, Texas Congressman, Kevin Brady. Welcome to Washington Post Live, Congressman Brady.
REP. BRADY: Good to see you, Jackie. Thanks for having me.
MS. ALEMANY: Thanks for taking the time with us this morning. Let's start with the news that inflation surged 7 percent year-over-year in December. Those numbers are just out this morning, the fastest rate since 1982. What would you like to see the Biden administration do immediately to help those paying 7 percent more for goods than they were a year ago?
REP. BRADY: Yeah, it has been devastating, as you know, for families. I think a new study showed last year the average family spent $3,500 more to buy the same products and services that they did the year before. That really hurts families in a big way. And you're seeing these same price increases at small businesses, who are now passing it on to their consumers, as well. So, I think the short answer is, first, I'm glad the administration and the Federal Reserve finally admits that inflation is here. It's high; it may not go away any time soon. I think admitting your problem is important. But secondly, don't make it worse. And I am worried that in the build back better version that passed the House there are a number of provisions in there that actually create barriers to getting workers back into the workplace. That will drive inflation up higher or make it almost systemic. No one wants to see that, from either party. So, my advice to the president certainly would be, thank you for finally acknowledging it. Now, stop the policies that would make it worse.
MS. ALEMANY: So, if not build back better, is there anything Congress can or should do?
REP. BRADY: Yeah, so, first thing we should do is make sure that our program to help people don't erect barriers to reconnecting to work.
A good example would be the child tax credit, created by Republicans, working with Bill Clinton in 1997, both to help families with the cost of raising kids but as importantly an incentive to reward work and reconnect parents to a job and it worked beautifully. The current child tax credit put in place for the pandemic earlier in '21 actually removed the need for earnings or for work and, in fact, turned it into a significant welfare program. And as we discovered, it actually made it tougher for businesses to hire workers. A number of them left ad a new study shows that if that child tax credit were extended, you know, without any connection to work, that we will see another one-and-a-half million workers exit the workforce exactly at a time when you frankly desperately need all of them. And we know, too, the greatest path, most direct path out of poverty, is a good paying job with rising wages. And so, that's an example of where the president needs to back off from a policy that I think can harm the economy.
MS. ALEMANY: Would you support the child tax credit, though, if there was a means test for it?
REP. BRADY: So, I would support it the way it has operated successfully since 1997. And Republicans, as you may remember, we doubled the child tax credit to $2,000. We made it more refundable and indexed that to inflation. And we expanded it to more families to be able to use it. I think the smartest, best way to help those families is to make those reforms permanent, which include, by the way, that reward for reconnecting to jobs and earnings.
MS. ALEMANY: And seeing these inflation numbers this morning, do you think it was a mistake and potentially a liability going into midterms this year for your colleagues who voted yes on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which you voted against and urged your colleagues to vote against?
REP. BRADY: A political problem in what way, Jackie?
MS. ALEMANY: Just in terms of going onto the campaign trail and, with these inflation numbers going up, being able to speak to why they supported a $1.7 trillion investment into the economy.
REP. BRADY: Well, I'm not sure--the infrastructure bill is not necessarily tied to inflation, but certainly the $2 trillion--nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan is--Federal Reserve of San Francisco admitted as such, you know, that was not paid for. It was presented as a COVID bill to stimulate the economy; turned out to do neither. Less than a dime of every dollar actually went to COVID, and some of that was later diverted from the pandemic. And the rest unnecessary spending that actually drove up inflation there. So, I think the bigger, I think, answering and reckoning for members of Congress are who voted for that unpaid bill that drove up inflation and later voted for the Build Back Better bill which, again, you know, is going to drive inflation up higher and make the labor shortage worse.
MS. ALEMANY: So, you don't think it was a mistake to support the bipartisan infrastructure bill, but you do think it would be a mistake to support build back better going forward?
REP. BRADY: Yeah, there's no question. I think--look, every day people learn more about build back better, the less support it has.
And I think more telling--and I'm not sure why Democrats aren't paying attention to this--while individual provisions may be popular, most Americans believe it will do nothing to help them. They don't like what they're hearing about the tax increases on small businesses, the tax increases that will frankly drive U.S. jobs overseas, make it better to be a foreign company than an American one. They don't like the thought of, in the child tax credit, essentially paying people not to work and essentially encouraging them not to reconnect, and they don't like the special interest provisions or the tax breaks for the wealthy. Two out of three millionaires will see a huge tax break under build back better. About one out of three middle class will see a tax increase. That's not what they were told this president would focus on.
And I think for most Americans, it's been a bitterly disappointing year, this first year of President Biden's. The economy, which should be soaring, he's bungled, certainly has not managed the pandemic well. This administration's lurched from crisis to crisis, from border to crime. I think maybe more telling, Americans believe President Biden is a weak leader in this world at a time when they want to see strength. And so, I think I've been here in Congress, this is now my 26th year, I don't think I've ever seen a more partisan start to an administration and a worst first year than what we've seen under this president.
MS. ALEMANY: And as you just noted, next week does mark the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden becoming president with Dems controlling both chambers of Congress.
If you had to give it a grade other than the worst first year you've seen, what would that grade be?
REP. BRADY: You know, because he fell so short of every expectation, from his promises to unite the country, to be competent in his leadership, which has proven not to be the case, where America, frankly, poll after poll shows Americans have lost confidence in his ability and confidence to lead in so many different areas. You know, you would have to give him a solid D in that regard. And the challenge is, is he going to change? You know, is he going to understand that there is an opportunity to lead in a bipartisan way. I think on the economy, on trade, on retirement, security, I think there's an opportunity to lead in a bipartisan way on becoming medically independent from China on crucial medical medicines and other ingredients there.
But I'm just--I don't believe the president or his advisors will allow him--and certainly congressional Democrats have no interest in working in a bipartisan way on things people care about.
MS. ALEMANY: If there was interest in getting something done in a bipartisan way going into this new year, what are some areas that you think Democrats and Republicans could agree on?
REP. BRADY: Yeah, I think certainly we ought to start with trade because, as you know, to have a strong economy, you have to have three things: One, you have to have a good, pro-growth tax code that rewards incentive and makes America the most competitive economy on the planet. That's what the Republican tax cuts and jobs acts did, and we saw the fruits of that.
You need workers, not just for the short term but for the long term. Without an adequate supply of the workers you need, our growth will never recover to what it could be. And then, you need customers. That's where trade comes in. I think America has a moral and an economic obligation to lead on trade; yet, we're not. Frankly, we're on the sidelines with what is a de facto moratorium on new free trade agreements by the administration, while China, Europe, Russia, others--Japan--are divvying up the world's customers for their farmers and their manufacturers and their tech companies. We're on the sideline.
The good news is we have a lot of bipartisan momentum from the new U.S. Mexico Canada agreement under President Trump. We have an excellent U.S. Trade Representative in Katherine Tai. I think there's bipartisan support in Congress for new trade agreements with the UK, certainly, with Europe, reengaging a second confidence agreement with Japan. Certainly, there's opportunities in Kenya and at the WTO bipartisan support for reform there, as well. And I believe we need a second, a phase two agreement with China. That work isn't finished there. And at the beginning of all that, a president--every president deserves trade promotion authority, the power to negotiate agreements on Congress's behalf to our objectives and goals. Without that--the president at this point doesn't seem to have an interest in. Without that, our trading partners know that America is not serious about engaging. So, I would start with trade because I think it's an economic issue that works to our advantage. I also think there's a lot of momentum we could build off of. And I'd be eager to work with this president on opening trade and gaining more customers for made in America products.
MS. ALEMANY: And I want to get to the issue of coronavirus, especially as the omicron variant is still surging in the United States. You recently said that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats had taken the eye of the ball when it came to testing and that Americans were frustrated.
How would you compare the Trump administration's approach to COVID versus the Biden administration's?
REP. BRADY: Well, obviously, I think they came--started at two different places. Obviously, we knew nothing about COVID and what it could do from a health standpoint or an economic standpoint or an isolation standpoint. And so, every day was a learning experience with the Trump administration. They moved quickly. Congress did, in a bipartisan way, to address COVID, both from a health care standpoint and helping save jobs in local businesses. I think that frankly those two bipartisan bills were the high point of working together on this.
2021 saw a different approach. It was a go-it-alone approach and the nearly $2 trillion COVID stimulus had very little money devoted really to the pandemic. I think the president took his eye off the ball, got distracted from this health pandemic and wasn't prepared for what we knew would be variants. What we didn't know was what they would look like, how would they--how severe they would be or how would it affect those of us who are vaccinated.
And so, I think the president's been terribly slow in reacting, certainly not addressing the issues, whether their mono-nuclear bodies or the testing supplies or the country--right now, he's scrambling to try to make up some ground there but I don't think he's handled it well at all. And now, I think the public's worried about what's coming next. If you can't handle what turned out to be a less severe but quickly moving variant, will we be prepared, will the president be prepared, when another one comes along?
MS. ALEMANY: And former President Trump, in an interview with NPR this morning, just sort of spliced through some of the disinformation that we've been seeing about vaccines and said that he was vaccinated and boosted and recommended that all Americans do the same.
Is that a recommendation that you agree with?
REP. BRADY: You know, I do, and I recommend that to my constituents back home, encourage them, look, to talk to a doctor--to talk to someone you trust. You know, it is a personal decision, but yeah--and I continue to urge that back home, individually. I'm not sure how many I've convinced with that encouragement, but I'll continue to do so.
MS. ALEMANY: And your colleague, Marjorie Taylor Greene, just came out yesterday and accused the government of withholding ivermectin treatment for COVID, which is not a scientifically supported treatment, and said that some of her colleagues also had taken it as a remedy.
What's your response to that? Is that--have you taken ivermectin? Is this something that you would agree with?
REP. BRADY: Yeah, so, I have not. I know others back home where I live in Texas have and had good results from that and frankly swear to how quickly it allowed them to recover. I had a conversation this weekend with someone who had that experience. So, I think, look, it is important, especially in a pandemic like this with all these emerging variants, look, to be open to the types of treatments that can address this, while we're also developing some of the major overall--whether they are the vaccines or the actual treatment pills, as well.
I think everyone would agree that there is a lot of distrust about exactly what the science is. There's seems to be conflicting opinions from the CDC and the administration day by day. It is a very confusing message. And for me, back home, as I try to explain what the new guidance is, it often conflicts with concurrent guidance and new guidance.
And so, I think there really--I think the administration is also driving a greater distrust and a confusion about how we handle variants like omicron. And they really need to get their act together on this, because this may well not be the final variant that we have to deal with.
MS. ALEMANY: I want to get to a more personal topic for you. You've represented Texas's 8th Congressional District since 1997. That's 13 terms. You've worked with five different presidents. How has the Republican Party changed during your tenure in Washington?
REP. BRADY: Well, Congress has changed during my tenure in Congress, but I'll tell you this one--I love my job. I love who I work with and respect a lot of lawmakers on both sides now in the truth. You know, I have a lot of faith in Congress, in this institution. I think there is what I like to call a middle class of lawmakers, people from both parties who come up each day. They work very hard, try to do the right thing to represent their district, and are looking for ways to solve problems together. You know, you don't see them every day. You don't hear about them every day, because they're not necessarily extreme. They are doing their work, and I think if we could introduce more of America to that middle class in Congress, there would be a greater faith in who we are, in our ability to solve real problems.
I think both parties have changed a lot and have changed significantly and will continue to do that--continue to do so.
MS. ALEMANY: And you announced this past April that you wouldn't be running for a 14th term next--this year. Why are you leaving Congress?
REP. BRADY: So, I do love this job and I fear that I would do it forever, because I think you can make such a--I had the opportunity to make--change the lives of every American for the better with tax reform and a number of other provisions that we've had.
But 26 years is enough. It's been a remarkable privilege. And so, yeah, it is time. I'm not returning to Texas; I never left it. I'm looking forward to whatever that new adventure might be. But I--the truth is, look, I'm leaving Congress the way I came into it, which is an absolute belief this is the greatest country on earth. And Congress has the ability to address these problems; I'm absolutely convinced of it. So, yeah, I'm also excited about the future. You know, I think this coming November America frankly is going to make a change in the leadership of the House and perhaps the Senate, as well, return those checks and balances to government hopefully in a way that President Biden will, you know, change his course and begin to work with us on these big challenges.
MS. ALEMANY: And you segue perfectly to my next question. You seem pretty confident that Republicans are going to win in midterms and take back the Senate and the House this coming November.
Do you agree with what the president said this morning, that it is a good idea to continue to relitigate the results of the 2020 election? Is that a winning issue for the Republican Party?
REP. BRADY: Well, look, I think first January 6th was a shameful moment in our history. We shouldn't dismiss it, nor should it be exploited for political gain. It ought to be a teachable moment. I was hoping it would cause our country and our leaders to step back and stand down from the political violence we saw in 2020, the political violence of the looting and the rioting, anarchy that cost 30 Americans their lives, as well as what happened on January 6th. I thought this was an opportunity for a truly independent commission, made up--not influenced by Congress, but independent, respected Americans who could identify the causes and the sources of the political violence that ran through 2020 and then on January 6th.
Unfortunately, we will never see a true picture of what led up to this. We will see one party's take on it. I think that there will be very little opportunity to work together and heal as a country and I think that was a--frankly, is a missed opportunity.
MS. ALEMANY: And I want to get back to the January 6th committee, but do you think it's a disadvantage for Republicans to keep talking about 2020 and the 2020 election in 2022?
REP. BRADY: Well, I think for Democrats their hope is to put January 6th and President Trump on the ballot this coming November, but they'll fail at that because the Americans--it will be President Biden and congressional Democrats who are on the ballot. Frankly, from a political standpoint, Americans don't like what they've seen. In states like Texas where Democrats applauded Joe Biden coming within five points of President Trump. His approval rating is at 32 percent right now in Texas. Every element, frankly, of the country, from the left to the right and the middle are bitterly disappointed about his performance, and what they're seeing coming out of Congress, that does nothing to make their lives better.
And so, that's what's going to be on the ballot in November. I'm confident in the House, as Republicans we're absolutely united against this socialist agenda and the damage it's doing and I think we'll go into these elections united, as well, with a very positive message about, if this president wants to work together, what we can do, frankly, to repair the damage that he's done in the country but, more importantly, rebuild, for example, an economy--or restore an economy maybe even stronger than one America enjoyed before COVID.
MS. ALEMANY: And I just want to clarify, it was President Trump who said just this morning that he thought it was an issue that he won--that the 2020 election was rigged, that Republicans should run on.
But do you agree with Senator Mike Rounds, that the former president did in fact lose the 2020 election and, per a statement he released, that there isn't new information nor evidence of widespread fraud that have altered the results of that election?
REP. BRADY: Jackie, let me just say, I've answered this for the past year, and I'm focused on the coming year. The truth of the matter is I think the greatest threat to democracy has been over the last 20 years more and more Americans have lost faith in election results.
It began with the Bush and Gore election. It began where Democrat leaders challenged the results of electoral slates of President Bush; twice in President Trump. I think you saw this in the polling. Before November, 60 percent of Americans said they didn't completely trust the election, and it's probably a bigger number now. I think that ought to be a red flag, especially when you've seen--while I know President Trump is criticized on this election, it was former President Carter, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden himself during his campaign for president, called President Trump's election illegitimate--illegitimate. So, you had leaders of the Democrat Party as well setting the tone and saying the exact same things that undermine election trust. So, I really believe we're making a mistake in both parties not to understand we ought to be working together to make sure people do have trust in these elections.
MS. ALEMANY: Right, but we are talking about this past election, the 2020 election, and the former president is the one who does keep repeating false claims about [unclear]--
REP. BRADY: Well, you are talking about that. I understand this is something our Democrats and some of the media want to continue to focus on, but that's pretty selective standards, I think, ignoring the contributions of Democratic Party to distrust in elections, in which they have played, I think, a major role and in fact set the tone for some of what we're seeing today.
I made a personal and legislative decision to focus on stopping what I think is a very dangerous agenda from the Biden administration that really is--as we can tell from the inflation numbers, the border crisis, the crime crisis in America, and now the weakening of America's standing around the world. That's what I'm spending--these tax hikes. That's where I've decided to devote my time. And I think that's, for me, and certainly my constituents, exactly the right place to focus.
MS. ALEMANY: Right, and I know you said that you have answered this previously but I just am wondering if we can get a clear answer of just right now about--
REP. BRADY: Yeah, Jacqueline, I have, over and over. Just google it and you'll see, but I think this is a game of gotcha, political gotcha, that frankly the--I know some love this stuff, but back home, you know, people already on their lives, they want to know what the answers are to this inflation, to this economy, to the crime and the border crisis. And that's where I think, frankly, the country ought to best spend their time.
MS. ALEMANY: Congressman, I'm not trying to play gotcha with you. There's just--there are countless audits happening in--
REP. BRADY: Yeah.
MS. ALEMANY: --swing states across the country right now that are--that have been directed by Republicans and a GOP-led ballot review in Arizona just came out a few weeks ago.
REP. BRADY: Yeah, Jacqueline, I understand. Look, there is--and there have been improvements, in my view. Some of the states have taken on areas of the election to make sure that we make it easier--like Texas--to make it easier to vote and tougher to cheat, actions which frankly I think will help restore trust in elections. I wish more state legislatures were doing that, just as Florida did after the Bush-Gore election. Pull back the curtain of both parties to find out how do we make sure we're doing this right way in building that confidence. I'd like to see more of that continue. Again, you know, while we are doing each other over imaginary claims of voter suppression, we ought to be focused on, you know, again, election integrity in a bipartisan way I think would serve the country so much better.
MS. ALEMANY: And I want to ask you about Donald Trump. He continues to be extremely popular amongst Republicans. Do you want to see him as the party's nominee in 2024?
REP. BRADY: Well, I tell you what, one--he--as you know, very strong candidate because of his performance in office. I will tell you personally I deeply enjoyed working with him on, you know, rewriting America's tax code, because of what we accomplished, lifted millions of Americans out of poverty, drove up the wages for people of color, some cases by 70 or 80 percent higher than under President Obama and Joe Biden. He made America the most competitive economy on the planet, and provided good jobs for a lot of Americans who'd been left behind under the old tax code. I enjoyed working with the president on that, on trade, and a lot of the economic issues.
He knows where he wants to go, and I think those policies of President Trump, whether it is strong borders, rebuilding the military, taking China on head on, making sure those who've made mistakes get a second chance, you know, coming out of prison, issues like that, I think are policies that Republicans continue to support in strong ways, and we should.
MS. ALEMANY: And our last question before we have to wrap up today, on March 1st, President Biden is going to deliver his State of the Union address, the last one you'll ever attend as a member of Congress. What would you like to hear from him?
REP. BRADY: You know, I would like him to admit that he hasn't really followed through on his promise to American people of competent leadership and bipartisan problem-solving. That's nowhere to have been seen in the first year and I think, as a result, I think Americans of all stripes are just bitterly disappointed in his performance.
I think he should acknowledge that veering so hard to the left has hurt his standing, certainly the Democratic Party, and that he's willing to start fresh with Republicans on the major challenges facing this country. That's what I'd like to hear him say. And I'm one of those Republicans, and I think there are others, who would be willing to try to work together on some of these major challenges.
MS. ALEMANY: And unfortunately, Congressman, we're all out of time, so we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks so much for joining us today.
REP. BRADY: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
MS. ALEMANY: And I’m Jackie Alemany. As always, thank you so much for watching. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com, and find more information about all of our upcoming programs. | null | null | null | null | null |
In the three years since he was diagnosed with cancer, Burhan Chowdhury has had a difficult time maintaining his yard and keeping his property in suburban Detroit in good shape. At a recent Michigan state court appearance over Zoom, the 72-year-old man struggled to breathe as he explained to a judge that he was “very weak” and unable to clean up the grass that had overtaken the property over the summer.
The family was devastated when Chowdhury was diagnosed with cancer in his lymph nodes in February 2019, his son told The Post. Shibbir Chowdhury said he has seen his father’s health deteriorate not just from the cancer but also a heart issue and high blood pressure. His mother also has faced health issues after she fell down the stairs and hurt her back, he said.
When the son returned home, his father informed him that they were issued a ticket on Aug. 2, 2021, for what Krot later described as “failing to keep the fence, walkway, sidewalk or alley free of trees, leaves” or other items. Chowdhury noted that the region’s rainy season also played a role in the vegetation getting out of control.
The family cleaned up the property soon after, but Burhan Chowdhury still had to make a court appearance to see whether he would have to pay a fine. The father did not know anything about Krot, who was appointed to the bench by then-Gov. Rick Snyder (R) in 2016. She was reelected to the nonpartisan position in 2020 after running unopposed.
At around 2:45 p.m. Monday, Krot called on Chowdhury to speak. Even though English is not his first language, Chowdhury introduced himself, explaining he was a cancer patient who had become too weak to maintain the property on his own.
After his father was ordered to pay the $100 fine by Feb. 1, Shibbir Chowdhury asked the judge whether she understood that his father was suffering from cancer. Krot answered his question with another question: “Have you seen that photo?”
Toward the end of the exchange, Burhan Chowdhury was heard saying, “Oh, my God.”
Clips of the exchange have been viewed thousands of times on social media, as critics have defended Burhan Chowdhury and derided Krot as “very rude and unprofessional.”
Shibbir Chowdhury said he plans to pay the fine for his father in the coming days. He reiterated that the home is in good shape now and has been in the last few months. The son has also been taken aback by the online support offered to his father over his interaction with the judge. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lindell didn’t get into specifics about how this roundup would take place. After all, the federal prison population is about 158,000 at the moment, meaning that each currently serving prisoner (who presumably would have these additional Lindell-triggered charges tacked onto their sentences) would now need to share his or her cell with 1,900 other people. Everyone gets to use the cot for 45 seconds a day. | null | null | null | null | null |
Twin panda cubs debut at Tokyo zoo, charm devoted fans
Born in June, the twins will be on view to the public for just three days to start.
Giant pandas Xiao Xiao, above, and his twin sister, Lei Lei, play at Ueno Zoological Gardens in Tokyo, Japan. Wednesday was the cubs' public debut. The zoo is limiting the public viewing to three days because of a surge in coronavirus cases in Japan.
Twin panda cubs made their first public appearance Wednesday in Tokyo, Japan, but they will be on display only briefly — three days — due to a spike in coronavirus cases driven by the omicron variant.
The twins, male Xiao Xiao (pronounced she-ow she-ow) and his sister Lei Lei (lay lay), were born at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo in June. On Wednesday, they took their first steps in front of fans, who held up smartphones to film the cuddly pair as they played together.
In a video of the event released by the zoo, the cubs sit back-to-back on a tree playing with bamboo while visitors can be heard saying “kawaii (cute)!” in the background. Then Xiao Xiao steps on his sister to move up the tree.
“My heart thumped with excitement when I first saw them,” said Kirie Tanaka, a panda fan who came from the western Japanese city of Osaka for the day.
During her turn, the cubs were attempting to eat bamboo and “that was just adorable,” said Tanaka, whose hat and bag were decorated with panda-motif ornaments. “It’s so comforting to see them.”
The twins, which were palm-size pink creatures when they were born, now weigh as much as a toddler and have developed black-and-white fur. They enjoy climbing trees and playing together, according to the zoo.
In preparation for their debut, the twins and their mother were placed in a shared living space, where they were exposed to sounds from a radio to get used to noise and voices from visitors.
The zoo has been closed since Tuesday as the omicron coronavirus variant spreads rapidly across Japan. The zoo is open only for the twin panda exhibit until Friday, with 1,080 visitors who won slots in a lottery granted access each day. | null | null | null | null | null |
Instead, the administration has continued to defend the lawsuit. Alsup ordered DeVos to appear before the court, but the Biden administration filed a petition in June asking the Ninth Circuit to overturn his ruling. A decision is set to come down any day now.
An Education Department spokesman said the federal agency is working diligently to collect and review evidence that it anticipates will result in more approvals. The agency also is weighing ways to strengthen the process for borrowers to seek relief, the spokesperson said. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEW YORK — A judge's ruling against Prince Andrew in a sexual abuse lawsuit Wednesday was bad news for the British royal. But it doesn’t say much about whether his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, will ultimately prevail in her civil suit, or even substantially increase the likelihood the case will wind up before a jury. | null | null | null | null | null |
Georgia Rep. Jody Hice, who is running for secretary of state. (Emil Lippe for The Washington Post)
There was a time when election administration in America was considered dull and outside the realm of partisan competition. While an ambitious politician might move from being secretary of state to becoming a legislator or a governor, few would dream of using the job running state elections to advance their party’s political goals. That would have been seen as grossly unethical.
No more. Thanks in large part to Donald Trump and the GOP war on democracy, secretary of state races may be some of the most hotly contested contests in the 2022 elections, and for the foreseeable future.
As a new Brennan Center report shows, money is pouring into secretary of state campaigns at a pace far faster than just a few years ago, as one contest after another revolves around the question of whether the person running elections in the state will be a devotee of Trump’s conspiracy theories about 2020.
In the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, and Minnesota, the report concludes, “fundraising in secretary of state races is two and a half times higher than it was by this point in either of the last two election cycles.” In all six of the states they examined, “there is at least one candidate who has questioned the legitimacy of the last presidential election.”
NPR recently found at least 15 Republican candidates running for secretary of state who question the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory. This is essentially the only real issue in these Republican primaries: Will GOP voters support someone who pledges fair administration, or someone who supports Trump’s false claims and offers an implicit promise to make sure future elections don’t go the wrong way?
A partisan secretary of state could make any number of decisions in advance of an election to put a thumb on the scales, when it comes to shaping the details of voter registration, polling places, and processing of votes. But Norden also points to what might happen after the polls close — specifically, controversy around the secretary of state’s obligation to certify results.
But in the future, he said, “you can imagine a secretary of state saying ‘I can’t certify these results,’” which could throw everything into chaos. This could get worse if a pro-Trump legislature is simultaneously trying to hand him their state’s votes in defiance of the electorate’s will.
Norden articulated the nightmare scenario: "It’s a very close election, it comes down to one state, and you have an election official who is refusing to certify.” Should one of those Trumpian candidates — say, Jody Hice, who is challenging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the Republican primary in Georgia — be in charge, it would be surprising if they didn’t do whatever is necessary to ensure that Trump wins.
Try to imagine a situation in which one of these Trumpists is secretary of state in 2024 in a state like Georgia or Arizona, and once again Biden pulls out a narrow victory over Trump in their state. They got elected by saying such a thing was by definition evidence of a fraudulent election. They know Trump will brand them a traitor if that result stands. So what will they do?
It’s important to remember how ad hoc and buffoonish Trump’s 2020 efforts were; they failed not only because they were built on easily disproven lies but because the people waging the effort on his behalf were (and remain) a collection of nincompoops. But even a nincompoop can do great damage if they have the apparatus of the government in their hands. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hollingsworth, 38, is the 12th Republican to decide to opt to retire or seeking another office.
“As I contemplate how I can work for you in new and better ways in the future, I won’t run for reelection this year,” Hollingsworth, who was elected in 2016, said in a statement on social media. “You deserve a Member of Congress totally and completely focused on the 9th District, and, though I have remained committed to that promise these three terms, now I will fight for you and us in different ways.”
Hollingsworth has represented Indiana’s 9th Congressional District, which includes Bloomington and suburbs of Indianapolis and Louisville, Ky., in the southern part of the state. He has served on the House Financial Services Committee since taking office in 2017.
Hollingsworth, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University, co-founded a company that rebuilds manufacturing sites. He was ranked as one of the wealthiest members of Congress during his first term. He made headlines a month after the start of the pandemic by arguing that it was time for Americans to go back to work after companies and governments shut down in an effort to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
In his announcement, Hollingsworth advocated for term limits and bemoaned the “problem” of politicians using their positions to catapult them to even more powerful political offices and lobbying positions.
“As an outsider, I was successful because it was clear to me that those who have an incentive to maintain the status quo can’t be relied upon to change the status quo,” the lawmaker added.
Republicans are favored to recapture majority control of the House in November’s midterm elections as the party out of power typically prevails in a president’s first term. While 12 Republicans have decided against reelection, 26 Democrats have said they will retire or seek another office. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Officer down: The tragic loss of Baltimore’s ‘Mom from the West Side’
People line up to pay their respects to fallen Baltimore City police Officer Keona Holley. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)
Two years ago, at the 37, Keona Holley switched careers, leaving a job as a nursing assistant to become a Baltimore City police officer. “The community,” she said about her choice, “needs Baltimore city police officers that’s not just here for a paycheck. They’re here because they care.” Officer Holley was shot about a week before Christmas, ambushed in her patrol car while voluntarily working an overtime shift. She died on Dec. 23; at her funeral this week, hundreds of mourners from across the state and country joined her family and friends.
It is important to pay respect to Ms. Holley and to her service. There have been unprecedented criticism of policing and justified calls for reform after the murder in 2020 of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But that reckoning must not lose sight of the many officers — we’d say the majority — who, like Ms. Holley, are in the job for the right reasons and do it honorably.
Officer Holley knew of the dangers of police work. Sgt. Bill Janu, a Baltimore police instructor, recalled a moment during her training when she ran out of the room crying, later telling him she was afraid of leaving her four children motherless. But she stuck it out. “‘I just want to give back to the community,’ ” he said she told him. She regularly posted on Facebook about the police work she was proud of; she was known in the community as the “Mom from the West Side.” On Dec. 16, she was on duty when she was shot from behind multiple times. Police have arrested two men in her killing and connected them to a second homicide the same day, but there has been no information about a motive.
According to preliminary data compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 61 officers across the country were fatally shot on duty last year, a 36 percent increase over the 45 officers shot to death in 2020. The leading circumstance for the fatalities, the organization reported, was ambush-style attacks in which there was no warning or opportunity for officers to defend themselves. In 2021, 19 officers were killed in ambush attacks, compared to only six officers killed in such attacks in 2020. Nonfatal attacks on police were also on the rise.
Some have suggested the increase in attacks has been fueled by anti-police sentiment and anti-police rhetoric that have resulted from policing coming under scrutiny. No definitive research has backed up that theory, and other factors — more guns, an overall increase in gun violence, the stresses of the pandemic — may have played a role. What is clear is that officers like Keona Holley offer the best hopefor police and the communities they serve. That she herself saw the need for police to be better makes her loss all the more tragic. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The IOC and human rights
The Olympic rings in Beijing, on Jan. 7. (Andrea Verdelli/Bloomberg)
Regarding Minky Worden’s Jan. 4 op-ed, “ ‘Sportswashing’ will cost the Olympics and World Cup”:
In March 2020, the International Olympic Committee released a 42-page report on the state of human rights within the IOC, which included a recommendation that the IOC work with trade unions to identify and address human rights risks associated with the Olympic Games. So why is it that the human rights director for the IOC is refusing to meet with the Coalition to End Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region, a coalition of human rights groups and trade unions? In 2017, the IOC added a human rights clause to host city contracts, requiring governments to “protect and respect human rights” in the host country. But why did the IOC exempt China from signing the human rights clause? And why did the IOC play coverup for China after it forcibly disappeared tennis star Peng Shuai after she made allegations of sexual assault against a former Chinese Communist Party official? The answer is simple: The IOC would rather stay in the good graces of a genocidal regime than stand up for human rights or protect the athletes who are entrusted to their care during competition.
Every freedom-loving country must do what IOC President Thomas Bach is too cowardly to do: Stand up to Chinese President Xi Jinping and punish him for his genocide in Xinjiang and his gross abuses in Taiwan, Tibet and Hong Kong.
Rick Scott, Washington
The writer, a Republican, represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. | null | null | null | null | null |
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol requested Wednesday that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) voluntarily provide information about his communications with President Donald Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
In a letter to McCarthy, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), said the panel is interested in his correspondence with Meadows ahead of the attack, along with McCarthy’s communications with Trump during and after the riots. Details of those conversations could provide the committee with further insight into Trump’s state of mind at the time, Thompson wrote.
The letter came on the same day that the committee interviewed former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, a source with knowledge of her testimony confirmed to The Washington Post. McEnany was subpoenaed in November, with the committee noting that she was with Trump at times during the attack on Jan. 6.
McCarthy is the latest Republican House member whose cooperation has been requested by the panel. Letters were sent recently to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. Both have said they do not intend to cooperate.
The committee is now actively considering how best to get members to comply with its requests, including by issuing subpoenas.
“If we can get the necessary authorities and assurances that go with it, we’ll do it,” Thompson said in a Washington Post Live interview last week of the requests to Jordan and Perry. “Both those individuals are important and have been implicated into this illegal activity that occurred on January 6.”
In his letter on Wednesday, Thompson cites McCarthy’s conversation with Trump on Jan. 11, where McCarthy “may also have discussed with President Trump the potential he would face a censure resolution, impeachment, or removal under the 25th Amendment,” Thompson wrote. “It also appears that you may have identified other possible options, including President Trump’s immediate resignation from office.”
Conversations with Trump’s legal team, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and others about McCarthy’s “continued objections to the electoral votes from multiple states late in the evening of January 6th and into the morning of January 7th” are also of interest to the committee, Thompson wrote.
The request from the committee also reveals a new text message from Fox News host Laura Ingraham to Meadows in which she writes that Trump would be “well advised” to discourage “protest at state capit[o]ls esp with weapons ... given how hot the situation is.”
Thompson’s letter cites public statements made by McCarthy expressing concern about the Trump’s false claims of a “stolen election” raising the specter of violence, and asks whether McCarthy “received FBI briefings regarding potential violence immediately following January 6th” — and if he communicated those concerns of violence with Trump or White House staff.
It is unclear how McCarthy will respond to the request to cooperate voluntarily.
The letter to McCarthy underlines Thompson’s determination to question members of Congress with knowledge of Jan. 6, and it seems likely that similar letters to other members will be forthcoming.
The reaction among House Republicans to those entreaties so far has not been positive. Jordan wrote to Thompson last week that the committee’s request “is far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry, violates core constitutional principles and would serve to further erode legislative norms.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Q&A: Jasmine Roth of HGTV joins Jura Koncius to discuss remodeling
(Mike Radford)
Jasmine Roth stars in HGTV’s “Hidden Potential,” where she helps transform cookie cutter homes into something more personal. In her new series, “HELP! I Wrecked My House,” she helps rescue failed DIY home improvement projects. She also appeared in the Emmy-nominated series “A Very Brady Renovation.” Roth, who grew up in Virginia and now lives in California, started her career as a corporate consultant in Huntington Beach. She and her husband Brett invested in some land there, built a home for themselves and eventually founded boutique development company Built Custom Homes. Roth is the author of “House Story: Insider Secrets to the Perfect Home Renovation,” published in October 2021. | null | null | null | null | null |
For many U.S. Muslims, the new scandal has been a reminder of the post-9/11 microscope under which they live
Romin Iqbal of the Council on American-Islamic Relations speaks at a news conference at CAIR-Columbus headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, in 2018. CAIR has fired Iqbal, alleging he had a years-long secret association with a group that has promoted anti-Muslim views. (Brooke LaValley/Columbus Dispatch/AP)
For many U.S. Muslim organizations, surveillance by government and other informants became a regular feature of life in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s biggest Muslim civil rights group, said the most invasive scrutiny had waned over the past decade.
Instead, the emails ultimately led CAIR executives to recordings and transcripts that documented what CAIR says is the most extensive known spying on a U.S. Muslim organization in recent memory. Two Muslim activists, CAIR says, had been handing over inside information for years to the D.C.-based Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), which extremism trackers consider an anti-Muslim hate group.
CAIR last month named Romin Iqbal, a longtime Ohio CAIR leader, as one of the informants, and on Wednesday planned to speak about a second man, Tariq Nelson, 48, who until about a decade ago was an active member of Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va.
This is the first reporting of Nelson’s name, the details of the surveillance, and the perspectives of key people involved, including Nelson, the IPT tipster and the leadership at Dar Al-Hijrah, one of the D.C. region’s largest mosques.
The arrangement came to light when an IPT whistleblower, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash, told The Washington Post they came to see an initial post-Sept. 11 urge to protect the United States as going far overboard and becoming a project that was unfairly harming the Muslim community.
In the decade after Sept. 11, surveillance by the U.S. government was so pervasive that it drove many Muslims from mosques and created fear and distrust in many communities. In recent years, the fear subsided somewhat as terrorism cases involving Muslims plateaued. But the uneasiness never went away. “There has been a learning to live with it, like covid,” Mitchell said
Mitchell said Islamophobic groups such as IPT are dangerous, portraying Muslims as inherently violent or as a demographic threat to Western nations. He cited mass shooters in Quebec City in 2017 and New Zealand in 2019 who had viewed such content online.
Iqbal was among the adults who would conduct programming for Muslim youths on knowing their rights. “ ‘If someone knocks, ask for a warrant.’ These are real conversations when I was 10,” Al-Akhras recalled.
Dar Al-Hijrah, the Northern Virginia mosque where Nelson prayed and volunteered, was alerted by CAIR to the presence of a mole a few months ago, said Saif Rahman, the director of public and government affairs at Dar Al-Hijrah. After the separate Ohio claims came to light last month, Rahman said, Nelson approached a mosque board member to confess his own work with IPT.
As word spread in the Dar Al-Hijrah community, Rahman said, the reaction was shock and a sense of betrayal. He said Nelson had been highly regarded, “friendly and sociable.”
Nelson never was in official leadership for any Muslim organization but was active as a volunteer starting in 2005 at Dar Al-Hijrah, he told The Post. He said he worked with youths, evangelizing and publicly promoting Islam in those ultrasensitive years.
It was in his work speaking and blogging in the 2000s against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden that he intersected with Steven Emerson, the founder of IPT and one of the most relentlessly anti-Muslim pundits in the nation.
“He kind of presented it like: ‘We’re on the same side.’ He didn’t speak against Muslims in general. He wasn’t interested in hijab bans or going through the Koran or anything. With him it wasn’t theological,” Nelson said of Emerson and his organization. The focus, Nelson says, was on terrorism.
Emerson’s organization on Tuesday again shared statements it made last month when the Iqbal case went public.
Nelson said that there is no excuse for what he did and that many people at Dar Al-Hijrah had been kind to him. But he looks back on his motivations as complex, maybe contradictory, maybe “asinine.” He remembers wanting to show Emerson, “Hey, you’re not getting anywhere. There’s nothing happening here. These people aren’t who you think we are.”
In a statement released Wednesday by CAIR, Nelson said he “was going through a personal crisis and experiencing extreme financial difficulty” and rationalized taking the money. “I am not asking anyone to trust me again. I just wanted to explain myself and at least ask for forgiveness from those willing to forgive.”
Dar Al-Hijrah, Rahman said, is focusing on Islamic teachings about repentance and forgiveness. He said community leaders are working with Nelson on a path of atonement.
“The house of God is open for the best of people and the worst of people,” Rahman said. “The idea that we would be trying to screen people or closing it off would be anathema to the notion of it being a sanctuary.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare was suspended during the Tokyo Olympics last summer. (Giuseppe Cacace/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
The complaint alleges Eric Lira, a self-proclaimed “kinesiologist and naturopathic” therapist, provided banned substances including human growth hormone and erythropoietin, or EPO, to the athletes. Lira, 41, is the proprietor of Med Sport LLC, an El Paso company. According to a LinkedIn profile, he has operated in Texas and Juárez, Mexico, which borders El Paso. It is not clear whether Lira has a lawyer, and he did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.
The court records suggest among his alleged clients was a Nigerian sprinter who was banned from the Tokyo Games after testing positive for human growth hormone. Prosecutors said in a news release that Lira was the first person charged under federal anti-doping statutes giving American authorities global reach to indict synthetic cheaters in major sporting events. The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, named after the whistleblower in the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal, was signed into law in 2020.
According to the complaint, the investigation began in July, weeks before the start of the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, when a subject referred to as “Individual-1” found packages of vials of apparent PEDs, including human growth hormone, in an athlete’s Florida home and provided photos of the drugs to the FBI. The packages included Mexican drugs bearing Lira’s return address that apparently had been mailed to an Olympian referred to in the records only as “Athlete-1.”
In the days before the Tokyo Games, according to the complaint, that athlete tested positive for human growth hormone. Though the court documents do not identify Lira’s alleged clients, the details in the complaint concerning “Athlete-1” match the circumstances of Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare. She was suspended during the Games and ultimately received a multiyear ban. Okagbare did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
As Okagbare returned to the United States, according to the complaint, her phone was searched by American border officials and an FBI agent. The complaint cited phone communications in which she allegedly arranged for Lira to supply her and a male athlete, referred to only as “Athlete-2,” with drugs she referred to as “honey,” for human growth hormone, and “epo,” for “blood-building” drug erythropoietin.
Though Okagbare referred to Lira as a “doctor,” according to the complaint, the FBI found he is not licensed to practice medicine in any of the states where he allegedly operated. A special agent noted in the criminal complaint that Lira’s self-described specialty as a “naturopathic” therapist refers to unlicensed physicians who “diagnose, prevent, and treat acute and chronic illness to restore and establish optimal health by supporting the person’s inherent self-healing process.”
In 2021, Lira’s company received $23,800 from the Paycheck Protection Program, according to a ProPublica database tracking coronavirus relief. | null | null | null | null | null |
They limited total earmark funds to 1 percent of the overall budget — about $15 billion out of the less than $1.5 trillion allotted for federal agencies in the 12 spending bills. Lawmakers were prohibited from steering money to private, for-profit companies, limiting the requests to local hospitals, schools, municipal authorities and other nonprofit organizations.
The Justice Department won corruption convictions against more than a dozen lobbyists, a few federal agency workers and several lawmakers went to federal prison. By 2011, when Republicans took control of the House, then-Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) banished the practice. | null | null | null | null | null |
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The disruption of Maryland’s reporting of COVID-19 data last month was caused by a ransomware attack, state officials said Wednesday.
Chip Stewart, the state’s chief information security officer, said the state has not paid extortion demands for the attack, which began on Dec. 4.
“We are recovering with deliberate action to minimize the likelihood of reinfection,” Stewart said. | null | null | null | null | null |
BALTIMORE — The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing a Maryland agency alleging it discriminated against a male employee by paying him less than female colleagues because of his gender.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, claims that the Department of Transportation’s State Highway Administration paid Robert Rager thousands of dollars less than women performing the same job, The Daily Record reported. The lawsuit claims the agency violated the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which prohibits pay discrimination based on sex. | null | null | null | null | null |
Taliban proposes joint management of aid
The Taliban administration on Wednesday proposed a joint body of its officials and international representatives to coordinate billions of dollars in planned aid.
It was not clear whether the United Nations and foreign governments would back any such agreement as it would constitute a stark increase in access to international funding by the Taliban, whose officials have been sidelined due to sanctions. On Tuesday, the United Nations asked donors for $4.4 billion in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan in 2022 and the White House announced it would donate an additional $308 million.
An abrupt withdrawal of foreign aid last year after the hasty U.S. exit and Taliban victory in August left Afghanistan’s fragile economy on the brink of collapse, with food prices rising rapidly and causing widespread hunger. Western sanctions aimed at the Taliban also prevented the passage of basic supplies of food and medicine, although this has since eased after exemptions were passed by the U.N. Security Council and Washington in December.
Iran accused of using social media for spying
An Iranian operative posing as a Jew living in Iran persuaded five Israelis via social media to provide information that included photos of a U.S. diplomatic mission, Israel’s counterintelligence agency said.
The four women and a man charged in the investigation were described by Israeli media as Jewish immigrants from Iran or their descendants. Three are grandmothers.
The Shin Bet agency said in a statement they were indicted on a charge of “serious crimes” over the past month in connection with their contacts with “Rambod Nambar” on Facebook and WhatsApp. The alleged Iranian sting ensnared people with no direct access to top-secret information. The Shin Bet said some of the women received money from “Rambod” and chose to remain in contact with him even though they suspected he might be an Iranian agent.
U.S. sanctions six N. Koreans, one Russian after missile launches: The United States has sanctioned six North Koreans, one Russian and an entity it said were responsible for procuring goods for North Korea's weapons programs. The U.S. Treasury Department said the moves were in line with U.S. efforts to prevent the advancement of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs "and impede attempts by Pyongyang to proliferate related technologies." It said the sanctions followed six North Korean ballistic missile launches since September 2021, each of which it said violated multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Hezbollah hosts Saudi opposition outside Beirut: In a defiant gesture certain to anger Riyadh, Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah group hosted a conference for Saudi opposition figures as well as members of Iran-backed Houthi rebels, which a Saudi-led coalition is currently at war with in Yemen. The gathering came as the Lebanese government is trying to mend relations with Saudi Arabia that hit a new low in October, when the kingdom recalled its ambassador from Beirut and banned all Lebanese imports.
Iran releases British Council employee accused of espionage: Aras Amiri, an Iranian employee of the British Council detained for more than three years in Iran and sentenced to a decade in prison over widely criticized espionage charges, has been freed and returned to the United Kingdom, the organization said. Amiri won her appeal to Iran's Supreme Court, the British Council announced. She had been arrested during a private trip to visit family in Tehran.
Four sentenced to death in car bombing in Pakistan: A Pakistani court sentenced four men to death for their involvement in a car bombing last year that killed four people near the residence of anti-India militant leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed. The court also served up a five-year jail term for a woman convicted of facilitating the attack. All five are Pakistani and were arrested after the June 23 attack in Lahore. Saeed, who has been designated a terrorist by the U.S. Justice Department and has a $10 million bounty on his head, is the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166. | null | null | null | null | null |
By moving the democracy bills to the Senate floor, Schumer dramatizes the stakes before Manchin and Sinema. It’s one thing to talk about rules in the abstract. It’s quite another to kill a bill guaranteeing the right to vote. Biden is all-in now, and the president plans to attend Thursday’s Senate Democratic Caucus lunch to make his case personally. | null | null | null | null | null |
Let’s be clear: No one wants to take kids out of school. At this point in the pandemic, the benefits of in-person education are clear. Not only is it better for learning, but it is also better for the social and emotional development of children, for their safety and for the nourishment for those who might not have access to food at home. Not to mention, it makes it easier for parents and caregivers to work.
counterpointTeachers unions are in the wrong on covid-19. Democrats must force them back to work.
Discussions focused on the benefits of in-person learning must consider this. And it must also acknowledge that existing recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will not remedy the situation — especially the erroneous notion that three feet of distancing can prevent the spread in educational settings. | null | null | null | null | null |
She complained that the press describes the Build Back Better bill as “social spending.” She instead made the case that the bill, which stalled in the Senate, is really “the only shot we’ve got of getting millions of women back to work” who have left the labor market. The former venture capitalist said she presses CEOs every day to recognize that they have obligations not just to shareholders but also employees. She tried to make a business case for them to support more paid leave, prekindergarten, job retraining and home care. “Marginal tax rates and corporate tax rates have been through the roof. That’s not good. But our president doesn’t support that,” Raimondo said. “It’s also not true that government can solve all problems. What you need are policies that enable workers to work.”
Raimondo gets less attention than either populists on Capitol Hill or Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but she is confident that the infrastructure bill, which finally passed in November, will allow for universal broadband by 2030. If that happens, this will be Biden’s Hoover Dam — a vast public works project that brought water and power to the southwestern United States nearly 90 years ago. She worked with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) to balance Republican concerns about price controls with Democratic desires to make the Internet affordable. “We didn’t want to overregulate, but we also weren’t just going to give all the money to the Internet service providers and hope for the best,” said Raimondo. | null | null | null | null | null |
In a statement Wednesday evening, John Falcicchio, D.C. deputy mayor for planning and economic development, said the vaccine mandate was intended to keep residents safe as omicron surges.
“We understand that some may disagree but we have been moved by how well our residents, visitors, and businesses have implemented mitigation measures and know they will do the same with the vaccine requirement,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The U.S. government has called for a ‘thorough investigation’ into the death of the 80-year-old man
People stand next to a poster of Palestinian American Omar Abdalmajeed As'ad, 80, in Jiljilya village in the West Bank on Jan. 12. (Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)
The victim, identified as Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad, was still wearing a plastic restraining zip tie on one wrist when he was found early Wednesday morning in a village outside of Ramallah, according to Palestinian officials.
The Israeli military confirmed Wednesday that As’ad had been stopped during a security check of the area and detained after he “resisted a check.” An spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said that As’ad was held for only a short time and that he was alive when he was released.
As’ad was returning home from visiting relatives when he was stopped in the village of Jiljilya by Israeli soldiers, according to a statement by the Palestinian health ministry. Witnesses told Palestinian media that he was handcuffed and led away about 3 a.m. Wednesday.
Israel said the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division would launch a formal probe. “The IDF will investigate this event in a thorough and professional manner, acting in line with our values and protocols,” said Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, a spokesperson, in a statement.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said U.S. officials had requested “clarification” from Israel of the events surrounding As’ad’s death.
‘Hate crime’ attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians spike in the West Bank | null | null | null | null | null |
Since then, disclosure of emails and texts — from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, conservative media figures and protest leaders — support the need to explore these questions. Specifically, the committee wants to hear from Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who have claimed the inquiry is political and the requests to them unprecedented, and have said they will not voluntarily cooperate. On Wednesday, the committee formally requested an interview with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). That leads to the question of whether the committee, as it has done for former administration officials and private persons, can compel testimony and document production from the members’ colleagues. Put another way, are members of Congress above the law? | null | null | null | null | null |
Tax relief gets tepid welcome from Maryland legislative leaders
ANNAPOLIS MD - JANUARY 12 Gov. Hogan holds a news conference before submitting legislative districting maps to the Maryland State Assembly as they reconvened to take up legislation in the last session before the November election at the Maryland State House on January 4, 2022 in Annapolis, Maryland. It is Gov Hogan’s last opportunity to push through his agenda before the end of his term. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
As the state General Assembly got underway, Maryland’s legislative leaders offered tepid support Wednesday for some of the tax cuts Gov. Larry Hogan proposed.
The tax proposal that received the warmest reception would continue Maryland’s biggest-in-the-nation cash payment to the working poor, which expires in two years.
Democratic leaders stopped far short of championing Hogan’s ideas. But state House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County) said she was intrigued by the proposal to make permanent the state’s generous earned-income tax credit, widely viewed as one of the most effective anti-poverty tools. It pays up to about $6,700 in a lump sum, based on a sliding scale tied to income and family size.
“Our emphasis is trying to do right for the citizens that we all serve and we want to make sure that what we implement does make sense and we’ll be able to help Maryland families,” she said.
The credit is one of five Hogan proposed to use a $4.6 billion surplus to deliver tax cuts. How best to spend the unprecedented surplus is expected to dominate the state General Assembly session that got underway Wednesday, alongside legalizing marijuana, creating a paid family leave program, mitigating the impact of the pandemic and reducing violent crime.
Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) said senators were “open to the conversation, but with a cautious eye” on passing any tax cuts that have a long-term effect on the state’s balance sheets.
“It’s got to be thoughtful, and it’s got to be purposeful,” he said. “It can’t give the bank away.”
Hogan on Tuesday continued to push for the marquee element of his sweeping tax-cut plan: eliminating tax on retirement income. He first promised to do so on the 2014 campaign trail but has so far attained only small tax breaks for groups such as retired military and first responders.
“It’s the right time; we now can afford to do this,” Hogan said of his plan, which would cost an estimated $4 billion over the next five years. “They usually just say ‘We can’t afford it,’ and I would say we can’t afford not to do it,” he said.
The governor, meanwhile, offered no endorsements of the some of the Democrats’ top initiatives.
He took no position on a bill to offer 12 weeks of paid family leave to every worker in the state, saying that there is likely to be about 3,000 proposals introduced during the 90-day session and “we’re not going to take a position on every bill that they come up with.”
Advocates see 2022 as their best chance yet to pass a comprehensive paid leave program like the ones in D.C. and nine other states, as an election year that coincides with the pandemic has focused attention on caring for sick family members. State lawmakers also cleared other big-ticketed pieces of its agenda, passing a sweeping education policy in 2020 and police accountability measures in 2021.
“This year feels special,” Myles Hicks, campaign manager for the Time to Care Coalition, said Wednesday, holding one end of a banner up outside the State House as lawmakers walked by in 37-degree weather. His paid-leave advocacy group counts AARP, the NAACP and Catholic Charities among its hundreds of organizational members statewide.
The plan would function similarly to unemployment insurance, creating a pool of money that can be replace up to 70 percent of a worker’s wages during 12 weeks of paid leave. Benefits would be capped at $1,000 a week for higher-paid workers.
To pay for it, the current proposal would use about $20 million of the surplus to set up the program and then have employers and workers equally split the cost of running it — deducting $3.62 per week from each worker’s paycheck and having employers pay the same amount.
Ferguson and Jones both said they passionately support such a program and were optimistic but not certain it would pass this year. Ferguson said it is very complex to enact such a program among private employers, and Jones said she was still looking for consensus on how to execute it.
Hogan was also hesitant to commit to supporting legislation that would legalize recreational marijuana but said a referendum “may be a better path” than having lawmakers give it an up-or-down vote.
Maryland’s medical cannabis rollout was blasted for its lack of diversity. Meet a woman helping to change that.
“I think we’ll have plenty of time to talk about that,” he said at a news conference.
House Judiciary Chairman Luke H. Clippinger (D-Baltimore City) said his chamber wants to put it on the 2022 ballot and ask voters if cannabis possession should be legal in July 2023. That would give lawmakers less than a year to develop a framework to tax and regulate the recreational marijuana market.
“I don’t expect the regulatory process to be done this year,” he said, a remark that puts the House plan at odds with what senators say they want: to have a full framework for the market developed before asking voters if they want to legalize it.
If it were on the ballot this fall, Maryland would be among the last in the region to legalize recreational marijuana but potentially the first to begin retail sales. Virginia lawmakers legalized marijuana possession in July, but retail sales are not expected to begin until 2024 under a framework that is not yet in place. D.C. voters legalized possession in 2014, but Congress has blocked the city’s ability to launch retail sales.
But before any other major legislation gets moved, lawmakers plan to approve new legislative maps for the 188 General Assembly leaders.
Hogan on Wednesday delivered copies of legislative maps that were created by an independent commission he created to redraw districts. The legislature is planning to vote on maps that were drawn by its own commission, which has been a point of contention between the Democratic-controlled legislature and the administration. Hearings begin Tuesday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Judge allows lawsuit against Prince Andrew
A lawsuit brought against Britain’s Prince Andrew by a woman who says she was trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein can go forward, a judge ruled Wednesday after concluding that a settlement agreement the woman signed in 2009 does not unequivocally free the royal from liability.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said the agreement was not so clear.
In a 46-page decision, Kaplan wrote that the only factor he had to consider in deciding the prince’s motion to dismiss was whether the agreement could be interpreted in multiple ways. Kaplan wrote that it is “not open to the Court now to decide, as a matter of fact, just what the parties to the release in the 2009 settlement agreement signed by Ms. Giuffre and Mr. Epstein actually meant.”
Andrew, 61, has vehemently denied the allegations in the lawsuit and has not been criminally charged.
In the lawsuit, Giuffre alleges that the prince sexually abused her in multiple encounters, causing lasting trauma and other personal harm. She seeks unspecified monetary damages. Giuffre’s attorney David Boies said her team is “obviously pleased” with the decision and “that evidence will now be taken under oath.”
— Shayna Jacobs
Justices toss GOP Statehouse maps
In a 4-to-3 ruling, the court sent the maps back to the Ohio Redistricting Commission to take another crack at complying with provisions of a 2015 constitutional amendment. That amendment requires that there be an attempt at avoiding partisan favoritism. Justices gave the panel 10 days and retained jurisdiction to review their handiwork.
Army ups bonuses for recruits to $50,000
In the last two years, as the pandemic raged, many decided to stay in, lessening the pressure on recruiting to help keep the Army at its full strength of 485,000. Last year’s recruiting goal was 57,500, and Vereen said it will be about the same this year.
To entice recruits, those who sign up for a six-year enlistment in one of several high-demand career fields can get bonuses that total as much as $50,000. Given the high standards, it will be difficult for many to qualify for the top bonus. Until now, the Army has offered a maximum bonus of $40,000. | null | null | null | null | null |
Georgetown Coach Patrick Ewing, center, will miss Thursday's game against Butler. Filling in for him against the Bulldogs will be Louis Orr, third from right. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Georgetown will be without Coach Patrick Ewing for Thursday’s game against Butler at Capital One Arena. The university, while not disclosing the issue that will keep Ewing out, announced in a statement that the coach will miss the game “in accordance with DC Department of Health guidelines.”
Assistant coach Louis Orr will fill in for Ewing against the Bulldogs (8-6, 1-2 Big East).
The Hoyas (6-6, 0-1) had four games postponed from Dec. 22 to Jan. 4 because of covid issues. The Big East adjusted its policies last month for games when the coronavirus leaves a program with fewer than seven players available. The amended policy allows for the games to be rescheduled, if possible, but counted as a no contest if not.
NCAA bracketology: Football is done, so let's turn our attention to hoops
Ewing was hospitalized with covid-19 in the spring of 2020 and announced it on his Twitter page. The Hall of Famer has not tweeted since Dec. 8.
Ewing last addressed the media following a 92-64 loss to Marquette on Friday. He was particularly frustrated with the loss, cut his news conference short and walked out of the room.
Orr joined the program as an assistant after Ewing took over in 2017. The former coach at Seton Hall from 2001-06, Orr was named Big East coach of the year in 2003. He has also been the coach at Siena (2000-01) and Bowling Green (2007-14).
The Hoyas play at St. John’s on Sunday, at Providence on Jan. 20 and against Villanova on Jan. 22. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Protecting Public Safety with Los Angeles Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides
MR. JACKMAN: Good afternoon, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Tom Jackman, a criminal justice reporter here at The Post. Today we’re going to look at the growing problem of rising violent crime across America with a focus on possible solutions. My guest is the deputy Los Angeles police chief, Emada Tingirides. Welcome to Washington Post Live, Chief.
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
MR. JACKMAN: All right. So, we're going to talk a lot about solutions to crime. But I want to ask you first about your path to your position as a deputy chief in that department, doing something that is not traditional, didn't used to be thought of as traditional policing. You're a native of LA. You grew up in Watts and became a police officer in 1992--around the same time as the Rodney King riots. But you didn't become a standard lock em’ up, let someone else sort it out police officer. You started working in community relations in southeast LA, and then helped create the Community Safety Partnership program. And in 2020, that program became a full-time bureau in the LAPD, with you as deputy chief. So why did you become a cop in 1992? And how did you wind up in this particular role of, you know, community policing? What were you thinking?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: Well, actually, I joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1995.
MR. JACKMAN: So '95.
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: The '92--yes, sir. The '92 Rodney King incident is what propelled me to do this type of work--not to mention I came from a family of service. My mother was a nurse and worked in the emergency room at USC MC in the '80s where shooting victims and homicide victims were walking into that hospital in the hundreds. And so I come from a background of service. My grandmother was an LA County Sheriff and an educator for over 35 years, and I just grew up in an environment where public safety and giving back to others was part of my DNA.
Growing up in South Los Angeles and at the turn of the crack cocaine epidemic, and seeing what it did, how it ripped our community apart, that along with wanting to just give back and make a difference in the city that I grew up in, is what really propelled me to become a police officer. When the Community Safety Partnership Bureau started, it was really just in my DNA and not something that I had to think hard about. I knew it was the right thing to do, to work alongside the community, to come up with solutions to address some of the root causes and despair in our communities, and do it collectively with our nonprofit organizations, with law enforcement, with our community, with our intervention and prevention services, to make a difference in some of our most violent communities in the city of Los Angeles.
MR. JACKMAN: Right. Well, so let's drill down a little bit on that word "solutions." You're also a member of the Council on Criminal Justice Violent Crime Working Group, and today published a report entitled "Saving Lives: 10 Essential Actions Cities Can Take to Reduce Violence Now." So, tell us about some of those recommendations.
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: Absolutely. I want to say when I was first approached to join the working group, I was a little nervous. I knew that we would have individuals as part of our team from--that were professors from academia. And I'm thinking, what do they want from a police officer? What am I going to have to add to this? We had street workers, intervention, prevention, professors, public health. And we really were a group of individuals with so many different experiences and ways of looking at crime, where we actually came together and found out that we have a lot in common. We all agreed that we needed to collectively work together, that we needed to come up with solutions to look at the root cause of the crime in our communities, from financial, from crime prevention through environmental design, to police being strategic in their approach to identifying individuals that are creating havoc and fear in our communities, from having professors from different institutions talk about some of the evidence-based solutions to this problem, and having the opportunity to work with this very diverse group to come up with solutions at a time across this country where violence has increased, fear has increased, and from a law enforcement perspective, the support for the work that we do decreased.
And so the work that we did and the solutions that we came up with were holistic. They're grounded in public health. They're grounded in partnership and coming together to come up with solutions. One of our recommendations is to ensure that our city leaders agree with this type of work. Like in Los Angeles, we have the Mayor's Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development. There is a direct report to the Los Angeles mayor as it relates to our intervention and prevention efforts in our city. The solutions can be implemented throughout this country. They're based in relationships, in coordination. And I think there was a very thoughtful process that went into this working group, and I'm looking forward to our city adopting these recommendations, as well as sharing it across the country.
MR. JACKMAN: So, you mentioned evidence-based solutions. Well, that's you. I mean, you're the one that's out there gathering the evidence. Your people are on the street. So, what have you seen, your time on the street, your time overseeing the community safety partnership, what works on the street? And how does that relate to these recommendations? What's in here that came from LA?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: I'll tell you what works: the partnerships. The partnerships and the ability to build relationships. In order to do that, we have to be balanced in our approach, willing to listen and sit down and understand some of the issues and concerns. And part of that process is truth and reconciliation. It is having empathy and compassion, like our work group mentioned, to understand where our community’s been, to understand how law enforcement has engaged with our community, and then to uplift that community voice.
Part of the work that we do with the Community Safety Partnership Program, alongside a nonprofit organization called Urban Peace Institute, is to conduct community sentiment surveys as it relates to the living conditions in communities, as it relates to how the communities feel about police officers, as it relates to what the community can do to enhance their capacity to address the violence and quality of life issues, and work alongside police to make a difference.
I've had the ability to work in the community of Watts for over a decade. There was a time in some of the housing developments we were experiencing seven homicides a year in our housing developments. As we worked with the community, worked with our intervention and prevention agencies, worked with our city council leadership, we started to see a reduction in crime. We had to do that with some strategic suppression, with making arrests, with addressing the individuals and bringing them to justice for the crimes that they were creating, but we were solution-based about it. We were strategic about it. And we worked collectively with the community to make those changes.
Recently, a study was done in the community in South Los Angeles, and what the community said was--71 percent of them said, we want more police in our community. Sixty-three percent said their biggest fear was violent and gang activity in their community. We have to look at those fears. And even if they don't produce a crime number but it's how someone feels, it's our role collectively with public health, law enforcement, our schools, our nonprofit organizations to come up with a strategic plan, measurable actions to address that and make a difference and a change in our communities.
MR. JACKMAN: And I want to ask you more about that. But I also want to address, I guess, what would be a criticism, which is, well, but the homicides went up in Los Angeles the last two years, and around the country in each of the last two years. I saw that you mentioned in The LA Times last week that other crimes had gone down. But what do you say to the old school folks who say this community relations stuff, that doesn't work? Let's go back to hardcore enforcement? You mentioned strategic suppression. But when crime is going up city wide, what do you say to people who say maybe we should do more strategic suppression?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: We have to look at the root causes of why homicides occur, why individuals make a decision to pick up a gun and attempt to take or take someone's life. And a lot of those decisions are based upon mental health, based upon individuals who have post-traumatic stress that hasn't been addressed. Those are things that strategic enforcement alone cannot solve. That's our mental health system. That's looking at our criminal justice system and ensuring individuals coming out of our prison system have resources, have the support so that they can go back into the community and become productive citizens and give back to the community that they one time wreaked havoc in.
I've had the opportunity to sit down and work with ex-gang members, work with street outreach workers, work with gang intervention. We all want the same thing. We want peace and safety in our communities. In one of the largest public housing developments west of the Mississippi, in 2021, we saw an increase in homicides. We had eight homicides in a community that had almost a decade of peace and a reduction in violent crime. And when these incidents happen, the response from the community was anger and fear, but wanting to come up with solutions to figure out why these homicides happened.
And what we learned working alongside our mental health, working alongside our clinicians that responded out to these communities to address the trauma that these homicides had with the children and the families in our public housing developments, what we learned is those homicides were based off conflict, someone not getting along with someone else. How do you suppress that as a law enforcement officer? That's mental health. That's understanding the capacity of the individuals in our community and getting them the resources to address conflict outside of picking up a gun and being angry about an incident or someone dating someone else, or just being upset, so I grabbed a gun and went out and shot someone. That creates so much fear and trauma in a community. I have five public housing developments that I've seen two years in a row with no homicides at all, that sustainable, violent crime reduction efforts, through strategic enforcement with our gang units, with our community safety partnership officers, working alongside intervention and prevention, to make those communities safe.
MR. JACKMAN: One of the recommendations--and I think you sort of touched on it there, but I'd be interested to know more about it--says cities should identify the key people and places driving the violence, and you know, warn people of their--what could happen to them. They could get arrested. They could get killed. How does that work in real life? How do you go on the streets and say, you know, you need to cut this out? How does that work?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: It's--you have to do it alongside the community. And if you're working in communities that don't have trust for law enforcement, it's a tough message to have a cop send to the community. The message we send is when we make that arrest, we're making a statement that this isn't going to be tolerated in our community.
Part of doing that, though, is having a discussion, explaining to the community why we took the actions that we took. It's very critical to identify key individuals in our communities that are willing to sit down at the table and discuss with a balanced approach, with public health, with law enforcement, with our city leaders, and make our communities safe. Some of the key leaders that we utilize in our Community Safety Partnership program are our street outreach workers, our intervention workers.
We also meet regularly with the prevention services. We try to have this restorative justice, root cause approach so that we don't see this continual increase of violence in our communities. And that means coming across a youth who may have committed a small infraction but finding out why, and then connecting him to the proper resources so that that person doesn't recidivate. And those resources are key in working alongside law enforcement to make that change.
MR. JACKMAN: I saw in a report done by UCLA that looked about at this in 2020, that the neighborhoods are generally receptive, but it takes several years to see results. Has that been your experience? And is that what you would tell people wanting to launch an all-out project like this in their city?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: It definitely takes time. When you look at the catalyst for violence, when you look at the catalyst for the civil unrest in communities, a lot of it is based on a lack of resources. A lot of it's based on a breakdown in our justice system, a breakdown in the resources in our communities, a breakdown in our public health systems and our education system. That builds frustration, anxiety, fear, which can result in conflict and anger.
We saw that with the 1965 riots. When you throw in a strained relationship between law enforcement and the community, that adds. And so it does take time. And part of that healing process is listening to one another, understanding the culture and the history of what has occurred in these communities, and sometimes, having to apologize for the wrongs of individuals on both sides. The officers have to understand and respect the communities that they're working in, and the communities have to learn to understand the policies and procedures and empathize the officers as well. When you can come to an understanding, a mutual understanding of respect and realizing that police want the same things that the community wants, which is safety and health in our communities, you can begin to make change. And part of the Violent Crime Working Group was an acknowledgment that we have to change on both sides, and how we do that, and identifying those key leaders, identifying those key resources and communities, understanding that relationship building, and truth and reconciliation takes time. It takes commitment. It takes understanding.
And the pendulum will swing as trust is built. And sometimes it does take five to 10 years. And the UCLA study identified that. Ten years in doing this relationship-based policing work, we found that violent crime decreased, but trust between law enforcement and the community increased. When you're able to accomplish that, but to continue to work through it and not get complacent, you can begin to see and make change in the community.
MR. JACKMAN: There's one player in the system who's not mentioned in the report, and that's the prosecutor, the district attorney, and particularly with the new progressive prosecutors such as George Gascón in LA and Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore, there's a new approach with decriminalizing some offenses and trying to reprioritize prosecutions and investigations. So--and there's been a strong pushback from line officers in some places. Can your program work with progressive prosecutors? Is there a conflict there? How's it--how's that working out?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: Part of the recommendations and what we discussed with our working group is coordinating with everybody, and that includes our criminal justice system. I mentioned earlier about recidivism and having resources for individuals that are coming out of the prison system. Oftentimes, when you come out of prison, you have a difficult time getting a driver's license, or an ID, or getting a job, because there's policies in place where if I'm a parolee, I can't get a job.
Right now, with the Community Safety Partnership program, we're working with vocation, we're working with trade schools, to accept individuals who come through the prison system, to get them jobs, to get them an ID, to get them a trade, so that they can make money and put food on the table and be able to survive and live in the community that they once terrorized, giving back to their community. The responsibility is on all of us. It's on every system to ensure that we have resources in place to accept individuals back into our society.
That's not to say that certain individuals should sit in prison for 20 years. I don't necessarily disagree with the reduction of some of the sentencing that--for small-graded crimes that have occurred across the country. When we look at the root cause of why some of these crimes are occurring, is it a criminal issue? Or is it a public health or social issue? There's not one answer to it all. All of our systems have to have a public health lens to address this violent crime crisis, to address our jail system to ensure when these individuals are arrested, and they do their time, they don't come out and recidivate and terrorize our communities further.
MR. JACKMAN: Well, do you feel like the liberalization of bail--and there's a feeling among police that that people are getting arrested and coming right back out--is that making things worse? Is that--is that what you're talking about? I'm talking about now pre-trial, pre-conviction, the people that you know, get busted, well, it's just a property crime and they’re let right back out. Is that a problem?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: The concern is we're not balanced. And when you're unbalanced, it can cause disruption and destruction. And it's not this or that. We have to be in the middle. We have to look at all sides and not place emphasis on one side versus the other. And when we implement strategies, but we don't bring all of our partners to the table to discuss those strategies, then it becomes unbalanced. There's a confusion on the law enforcement end as it relates to the new policies in place. And there's confusion on the community’s end. There's a lot of discussion about violent crime, but the voice of the victims oftentimes gets left out. And our victims need to be part of those solutions and recommendations that come from our government and decisions that are made in order to have a holistic approach to crime and ensuring that we make our victims whole.
MR. JACKMAN: Right. Well, back to crime and guns, and you’ve discussed this--actually you have a piece in Time magazine today about how our politics is also the main impediment to another uniquely American aspect of the challenge--millions of guns, many of them falling into the wrong hands. The FBI reports that firearms were involved in 77 percent of murders in 2020. That's up. We know first-time gun ownership is up. You know, have you seen a reason for a surge in gun ownership? And is there any reason to be hopeful when it doesn't--when it seems like gun laws are going in the opposite direction from more tightly regulated?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: I--guns are dangerous, and they are the catalysts of the fear in our communities. And in Los Angeles, we have seen an increase in our victims shot and an increase in our violent crime. Another concern are the ghost guns. You can't trace them. They're passed on from one individual to the next. And we've seen a huge increase in the possession of ghost guns in Los Angeles.
And I mentioned balance and policies and regulations on ownership of guns, and that really, too, is up to our government, like we did with our Violent Crime Working Group, to sit down and look at our victims, look at our policies, look at what guns do to communities, and really identify why people are settling disputes with a gun. The person that pulls the trigger is the issue and the concern. And why is that individual, that perpetrator, that person making a decision to take somebody's life with a gun? It's not the gun itself that commits the crime. It's the person pulling the trigger and making that decision to destroy a community and someone's life and wreak havoc in a community. Our laws, how we respond to gun crime has to have accountability, and individuals that pull that trigger need to be held accountable.
But at the same time, like our work group identified, what are the solutions? Getting key people, intervention, street workers to get out there on the street and find out why these individuals are carrying these guns, ensuring that individuals that do commit crime are held accountable for their actions, and then looking at our laws and policies as it relates to gun ownership and why we have those guns. What are the solutions? And how do we collectively--for decades this has been a concern and an issue, firearms--but how do we collectively come up with solutions? And one side isn't--have the answer. It's balanced.
MR. JACKMAN: A question that a number of us, a number of readers have wanted me to ask you is about the death of the teenage girl Valentina Orellana Peralta in a Los Angeles department store, shot by a police officer with a rifle in a crowded place. What do you tell somebody on the street who comes up and asks you about that? And what questions do you have about that case?
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: I had several individuals from the community reach out to me to express their sorrow for what occurred. And it's extremely tragic, tragic incident that took place, and this young lady lost her life. And I have had multiple conversations with people in the community that empathize and feel completely torn and upset about what occurred. And part of my response is--
MR. JACKMAN: But what do you say? What do you say to them? Go ahead.
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: Yes, that's where I was going. Part of my response first is thanking them for reaching out and not alienating law enforcement and being willing to pick up the phone and call and express how they are feeling. Part of understanding pain and the temperature of a community is listening and understanding and having empathy--as we mentioned in our work group, having empathy--reaching out to key leaders and having those difficult discussions about what has occurred.
One of the things that we’ve found with the Community Safety Partnership program is when something critical happens in a community, decades ago we would be at odds with the community and not sit down and even have a conversation about it. This incident occurred, and we were able to sit down and have conversations and listen and understand and strategize and talk about how can it be prevented. And so what I say is, one, we are sorry, and we feel for the family and the tragedy of that incident. And two, thank you for being willing to come forward and discuss these difficult incidents with law enforcement as we come up with solutions.
MR. JACKMAN: Well, that's a lot. And unfortunately, we're out of time, so we'll have to leave it there. But thank you so much for joining us, Deputy Los Angeles Police Chief Emada Tingirides.
DEP. CHIEF TINGIRIDES: Thank you so much for having me.
MR. JACKMAN: I’m Tom Jackman. As always, thanks for watching. To check out what interviews we have coming up, head to WashingtonPostLive.com register and find more information about all of our upcoming programs. | null | null | null | null | null |
Instead, the administration has continued to fight the lawsuit. Alsup ordered DeVos to appear before the court, but the Biden administration filed a petition in June asking the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn his ruling. A decision is set to come down any day now.
An Education Department spokesman said the federal agency is working diligently to collect and review evidence that it anticipates will result in more approvals. The agency also is weighing ways to strengthen the process for borrowers to seek relief, the spokesman said. | null | null | null | null | null |
There are only two ways for this to end. The first is to stop pumping money into the economy. Inflation soared at the end of World War II as rationing ended and Americans spent the money they had saved during the war. But the war’s end also meant the federal spigot was no longer running, and inflation dropped again once the initial savings-fueled burst ended. This means Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is right; the country cannot afford to pass the Build Back Better Act or other costly measures that would add more fuel to the overheated economy. | null | null | null | null | null |
Let’s be clear: No one wants to take kids out of school. At this point in the pandemic, the benefits of in-person education are evident. Not only is it better for learning, but it is also better for the social and emotional development of children, for their safety and for the nourishment for those who might not have access to food at home. Not to mention, it makes it easier for parents and caregivers to work.
counterpointDon’t negotiate with teachers who walk out over covid. Fire them.
Discussions focused on the benefits of in-person learning must consider this. And they must also acknowledge that existing recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will not remedy the situation — especially the erroneous notion that three feet of distancing can prevent the spread in educational settings. | null | null | null | null | null |
But a big question is whether the decoupling will occur in the United States. Comparisons are difficult; the virus is the same, but each country has a different history, social behavior and epidemiological situation. South Africa was only about one-third fully vaccinated but might have benefited from a strong wall of immunity from previous infection, plus a younger population and omicron arriving in the summer. The United States is nearly two-thirds fully vaccinated but has a large proportion of unvaccinated people who could easily become infected; booster shots are highly protective, but two-thirds of Americans lack them. Also, omicron arrived in the United States before the delta wave expired — a one-two punch. The number of new daily cases in the United States has soared beyond 700,000, more than triple the peak of last winter. However, deaths are running at half the rate of last winter’s surge, and probably are still being propelled by delta, while rising in some hot spots. Every two days, the United States suffers the equivalent of one 9/11 death toll.
Hospital admissions are also spiking, illustrating how omicron is creating a bow wave of havoc. Hospitals are being crowded by the unvaccinated and people who seek help for other maladies but also turn out to have covid. About 1 in 4 hospitals in the country are reporting a critical staffing shortage; many are nearing capacity. Omicron is also sending tremors through the nation’s school systems. Those struggling to remain open with in-person classrooms are dealing with absences among teachers and other staff. A labor shortage and an absenteeism crisis are also rippling through the economy — airline cancellations, empty store shelves and continued supply chain interruptions. This is not “mild.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Citizen Lab analyzed forensic information from the victims’ phones, and its conclusions were vetted by Amnesty International’s Security Lab. Citizen Lab found what it called “circumstantial evidence” that the hacks originated from Bukele’s government, but the attribution was not definitive. The government did not respond to an emailed request seeking comment. In a statement to the New York Times, the government denied responsibility and said it was not a client of the Israeli-based NSO Group, the creator of Pegasus.
The 40-year-old Bukele, a charismatic politician known for his leather jackets and Twitter salvos, won the presidency in a landslide in 2019 presenting himself as a corruption-fighting outsider. He has grown steadily more authoritarian in office, dismissing Supreme Court rulings and attacking journalists. A senior U.S. diplomat, Jean Manes, expressed concern last year about a “decline in democracy” in the Central American country.
The investigation into the phone surveillance began last year, when journalists tested their devices using a tool provided by Amnesty to detect possible hacks. The journalists then contacted the international digital rights group Access Now. Frontline Defenders, another research group, also worked on the case. In November, Apple alerted 23 Salvadoran journalists and several civil-society activists that their devices might have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers. | null | null | null | null | null |
The journalists were among at least 35 people in El Salvador whose iPhones were hacked with Pegasus between July 2020 and November 2021, according to an analysis by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab and other groups. Also targeted were human rights activists and reporters for other news organizations.
“This is jaw-droppingly aggressive and persistent targeting,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher for Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. “El Salvador’s media environment is under tremendous threat at the moment.”
The NSO Group says it licenses Pegasus only to vetted government clients — typically, law enforcement and intelligence agencies — to investigate terrorism and other serious crimes. Pegasus allows its operators to remotely control smartphones, allowing the collection of location records, files, photographs, recordings, contact lists, emails, passwords and encrypted communications.
The cases in El Salvador add to the findings of the Pegasus Project, an international consortium of 17 news organizations, including The Washington Post, on abuses of the spyware. Consortium members reported last year that NSO Group clients had, in some cases, used or attempted to use Pegasus against journalists, academics, political figures, human rights activists, diplomats and business leaders. The U.S. Commerce Department blacklisted the NSO Group in November because of the misuse of Pegasus.
El Faro has produced some explosive exposes. In September 2020, the news site reported that the Bukele government had secretly negotiated a deal in which the MS-13 gang would refrain from bloody public murders and channel votes to the ruling party in exchange for benefits for its incarcerated leaders. The Biden administration recently made a similar allegation. It has been denied by Salvadoran authorities.
Bukele has regularly assailed El Faro. His government has accused the news site of tax evasion and money laundering — charges it denies — and deported a Mexican journalist, Daniel Lizárraga, working as its editor. Last year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called for security measures to protect 34 journalists at El Faro, saying their “right to life and personal safety was at risk.”
The investigation into the phone surveillance began last year, when journalists tested their devices using a tool provided by Amnesty International to detect possible hacks. The journalists then contacted Access Now. Front Line Defenders, another research group, also worked on the case. In November, Apple alerted 23 Salvadoran journalists and several civil society activists that their devices might have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers.
Martínez said the El Faro journalists were upset to learn of the cyberattacks, but no one had quit. “The whole newsroom is going to continue to investigate,” he said. “We will continue with this, have no doubt.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Virginia outlasts Virginia Tech behind Francisco Caffaro
CHARLOTTESVILLE — The Virginia men’s basketball team got a career scoring performance from backup center Francisco Caffaro and clamped down defensively on Virginia Tech in the closing minutes to outlast its rival, 54-52, Wednesday night at John Paul Jones Arena.
The Cavaliers beat Virginia Tech for the fifth time in the last six meetings to claim the first leg of this season’s Commonwealth Clash behind Caffaro’s 16 points on 5-for-7 shooting and a game-high nine rebounds in playing a season-high 31 minutes.
Virginia (10-6, 4-2 ACC) went ahead to stay, 53-52, on two free throws from guard Armaan Franklin with 1:31 left in the second half. The Hokies had a chance to take the lead in the closing seconds, but leading scorer Keve Aluma slipped trying to dribble past Caffaro and was called for traveling with 14.2 seconds to play.
Aluma finished with a game-high 22 points on 9-of-20 shooting with six rebounds. Cattoor and Murphy were the only other Hokies players to score in double figures, each with 10 points as Virginia Tech (8-7) dropped to 0-4 in the ACC for the first time since 2014-15.
In winning for the third time in four games, Virginia benefited from 14-3 margin in points off turnover, a 9-2 buffer in second-chance points and 18-2 in bench scoring, allowing the Cavaliers to withstand 3 of 13 shooting on three-pointers.
The first half concluded with the Cavaliers in front, 25-23, after they used a 10-0 burst capped by a contested jumper in the lane and a transition three-pointer from Franklin to open an eight-point advantage, the largest for either team over the first 20 minutes.
Caffaro, a 7-foot-1 redshirt junior hailing from Argentina, started the second half for the first time this season in place of Kadin Shedrick, who played sparingly in the first half because of early foul trouble and contributing minimally while on the court.
Each player has been a liability on offense in the majority of games this season, placing additional burden on Jayden Gardner, an undersized forward listed at 6-6 who leads Virginia scoring and rebounding after transferring from East Carolina.
Virginia’s leading scorer this season finished with four points on 2-for-10 shooting, ending a streak of three straight games in double digits and marking his lowest point total since managing four points during a 67-47 loss to Houston on the road Nov. 16.
Gardner has scored in double figures in 12 of 16 games this season and in all but one of Virginia’s conference games, that coming in a 67-50 loss to visiting Clemson Dec. 22. | null | null | null | null | null |
CHARLOTTESVILLE — The Virginia men’s basketball team got a career scoring performance from backup center Francisco Caffaro and clamped down defensively down the stretch to outlast slumping Virginia Tech, 54-52, Wednesday night at John Paul Jones Arena.
The Cavaliers (10-6, 4-2 ACC) won for the fifth time in six meetings in the series to claim the first leg of this season’s Commonwealth Clash behind Caffaro’s 16 points. The redshirt junior made five of seven shots from the field and had a game-high nine rebounds in a season-high 31 minutes.
The Cavaliers also held Virginia Tech scoreless over the final 3:14, during which time Virginia forced three turnovers.
“He’s coming in and getting extra time, and he’s purposeful,” Virginia Coach Tony Bennett said of Caffaro, whose previous scoring high was 10 points three years ago. “He’s one of the most fun-loving young men — I was going to say kid — but young men on our team. He really is. He plays hard, and again it’s new to him. He has not played a lot, and now he’s getting to play more.”
Virginia went ahead to stay, 53-52, on two free throws from guard Armaan Franklin with 1:31 left. The Hokies had a chance to take the lead in the closing seconds, but leading scorer Keve Aluma slipped trying to dribble past Caffaro and was called for traveling with 14.2 seconds to play.
Aluma finished with a game-high 22 points on 9-of-20 shooting with six rebounds. Cattoor and Murphy were the only other Hokies to score in double figures, each with 10 points as Virginia Tech (8-7) dropped to 0-4 in the ACC for the first time since 2014-15.
“Two good teams going nose-to-nose,” Hokies Coach Mike Young said. “Both teams really fought on both ends of the floor. Certainly didn’t see Caffaro — Caffaro’s a good player now. He’s a big, physical young man. Take nothing away. He played a good ballgame.”
In winning for the third time in four games, Virginia benefited from 14-3 margin in points off turnovers, a 9-2 buffer in second-chance points and 18-2 in bench scoring, allowing the Cavaliers to withstand 3 of 13 shooting on three-pointers.
The first half concluded with the Cavaliers in front 25-23. They had used a 10-0 burst capped by a contested jumper in the lane and a transition three-pointer from Franklin to open an eight-point advantage, the largest for either team over the first 20 minutes.
Caffaro, a 7-foot-1 redshirt junior hailing from Argentina, started the second half for the first time this season in place of Kadin Shedrick, who played sparingly in the first half because of early foul trouble and contributed minimally while on the court.
Each player has been a liability on offense in the majority of games this season, placing additional burden on Jayden Gardner, an undersized forward listed at 6-6 who leads Virginia in scoring and rebounding after transferring from East Carolina.
“The mind-set is always the same,” Caffaro said. “Going in you’ve got to play hard, so yeah, that was pretty much it. Today was more minutes, and I took advantage.”
Virginia’s leading scorer this season finished with four points on 2-for-10 shooting, ending a streak of three straight games in double digits and marking his lowest scoring total since managing four points during a 67-47 loss at Houston on Nov. 16.
Gardner has scored in double figures in 12 of 16 games this season and in four of Virginia’s six conference games. He also was held to single digits in a 67-50 loss to visiting Clemson on Dec. 22. | null | null | null | null | null |
MELBOURNE, Australia — Novak Djokovic acknowledged his Australian travel declaration form contained incorrect information, and he also confessed to an “error of judgment” in taking part in an interview and photo shoot in Serbia last month after testing positive for COVID-19.
LOS ANGELES — An extra week of games, close finishes and a non-election year helped propel the NFL to its highest regular-season ratings in six years.
NEW YORK — U.S. prosecutors charged a Texas man with providing performance-enhancing drugs to athletes competing in last summer’s Olympics in Tokyo, including the star Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare. | null | null | null | null | null |
Netscape co-founder bought antiquities from alleged trafficker whose offshore dealings were exposed in the Pandora Papers
A sandstone statue called a Harihara, right, in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A similar piece is described in the indictment of art dealer Douglas Latchford. This week, prosecutors moved to seize Cambodian relics Latchford sold to a tech billionaire who co-founded Netscape. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The 35 relics from James H. Clark’s private collection include a monumental sandstone sculpture that once adorned an ancient Khmer capital city and bronze sculptures from near Angkor Wat. The items were obtained more than a decade ago, according to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, from the late Douglas Latchford, a British art dealer indicted in 2019 and accused of trafficking hundreds of antiquities from Southeast Asia.
While the complaint identifies the person returning the art only as a “collector,” Clark confirmed in an interview with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Washington Post that the pieces had been in his private collection. A 2011 Latchford book also attributes eight relics that match photos of those now in federal custody to Clark’s collection.
After Pandora Papers, Met officials contacted U.S. attorneys about relics Cambodia says were stolen
Clark rose to prominence during the 1990s, when his firm Netscape helped to transform the internet into a tool widely accessible to the general public. Clark has taken part in several multibillion-dollar startups over his decades-long career as an entrepreneur.
He said he became interested in Cambodian art after vacationing in Southeast Asia roughly two decades ago. “I was freshly wealthy in the early 2000s,” Clark said, adding that he was buying artwork of various styles at the time. “I naively accumulated a bunch of pieces through Doug Latchford, and it wasn’t until near the end that I thought: ‘You know, this isn’t quite stacking up right.’ ”
Clark said he stopped dealing with Latchford over a decade ago, after Latchford offered to sell him an elaborate relic for $30 million and then did not respond to a question regarding provenance documentation.
Among the items Clark relinquished to authorities are a bronze four-armed Hindu goddess, a bulky stone warrior and a footless bronze Buddhist deity. | null | null | null | null | null |
A Russian tank fires during drills in southern Russia on Jan. 12, as Moscow rejected Western complaints about its troop buildup near Ukraine. (AP)
BELGRADE, Serbia — The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe is meeting in Vienna Wednesday in the latest attempt to avert a major European security crisis as Russia masses troops on Ukraine’s border.
After two other meetings this week ended in an impasse, there is little optimism that a third one will reach a breakthrough, although analysts say it is still important to keep talking.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that talks with the United States and NATO were unsuccessful, but that at least there was dialogue.
He condemned a bill announced Wednesday by U.S. Democrat Senators on tough new sanctions against Russia, including President Vladimir Putin and other top military and government officials if there is military action against Ukraine.
Peskov called the sanctions bill “extremely negative, especially against the background of the ongoing series of negotiations, albeit unsuccessful, but negotiations.”
Sanctions against a head of state “is an outrageous measure that is comparable to breaking off relations,” Peskov said.
The meeting of the OSCE permanent council, which includes Russia and Ukraine, is part of a series of diplomatic steps this week designed to defuse tensions over the massing of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border, which has raised fears that Putin may be planning a renewed attack.
Russian officials have denied any such plans and have rebuffed NATO calls to de-escalate, saying it has a right to move troops and forces on its own territory. Russia has countered with demands for sweeping new security guarantees from the United States and NATO, including a halt any further expansion eastward of NATO.
“Our main goal is, in principle, to establish a dialogue,” he said, speaking to independent Russian television Dozhd. “Yes, our positions are polar [opposites], but this does not mean that there are no elements and areas on which we cannot agree.”
Thursday’s talks follow a meeting between United States and Russian officials in Geneva Monday and a special meeting of the NATO-Russia Council Wednesday, the first such meeting in two years.
A member of the Russian delegation in Wednesday’s NATO-Russia Council talks, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, said the talks were frank and indicated there remained “a long list of differences on fundamental issues.”
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said NATO allies showed a united face at the meeting in support of NATO’s open door policy and the right of every country to determine its own security arrangements. She added it was too early to say whether the talks would avert the threat of war, but this would become clearer after Russia’s delegations to the series of talks this week returned to Moscow and reported to Putin. | null | null | null | null | null |
A new arms race beckons. History shows what could freeze it.
Dedicated activism can make governments rethink bellicose approaches to the arms race
The first atomic explosion at Trinity test site on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, N.M. (AP)
By Henry Richard Maar III
Henry Richard Maar III is a modern U.S. historian and the author of "FREEZE! The Grassroots Movement to Halt the Arms Race and End the Cold War" (Cornell University Press, 2021).
In recent weeks, the United States, Russia and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council reaffirmed that a nuclear war “cannot be won and must never be fought.” It was welcome news. But we should also take a closer, skeptical look at this statement.
After all, the same nations pronouncing such benevolent goals continue to fund and build a new generation of destabilizing weapons not currently covered under arms control treaties, while simultaneously boycotting at the United Nations the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The United States, for example, plans to spend $400 billion over the next decade and $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize its nuclear arsenal. Though important transnational organizations such as the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) have succeeded in making nuclear weapons illegal, no nation in possession of these weapons has supported disarmament. There are no mass rallies demanding arsenal reductions, let alone abolition.
As tensions with Russia rise, strategically obsolete intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) remain on hair-trigger alert, creating the potential for accidental nuclear war. With the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, a new arms race beckons.
The present moment may feel defeatist for dedicated activists and arms controllers alike. But the history of anti-nuclear activism during the Cold War illuminates how grass-roots organizations such as SANE (the Committee for a SANE Nuclear World) and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign previously pushed reluctant governments to act.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the United States and Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, SANE organized rallies to raise awareness of the dangers of nuclear fallout. After the world came within a breath of nuclear war in 1962, SANE Chairman Norman Cousins engaged both President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, paving the way for the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Later in the decade, opposition to anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) merged with opposition to the Vietnam War. To quell this, President Richard M. Nixon embraced detente (the lessening of tensions), leading to both the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) and the ABM Treaty. Yet loopholes in these treaties allowed the arms race not just to continue, but to flourish, while surrounding arms control in a haze of acronyms and technical jargon.
With the Soviets on the march in Afghanistan, President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 seeking massive increases to the defense budget and an array of potential first-strike weapons. His hostile public rhetoric toward the Soviet Union undercut administration efforts to privately improve relations. At his first news conference, for instance, Reagan suggested the Soviets “reserved unto themselves the right to lie, to cheat,” and later he famously referred to them as the “evil empire.” His frequent questionable statements placed the public and European allies on edge, whether it was implying in 1981 that a nuclear war in Europe could be limited or “joking” over a hot microphone in 1984 that the United States would “begin bombing [the Soviets] in five minutes.”
Perhaps even more alarming was the casual talk of survivable nuclear war seeping out of the administration. Most infamously, the administration’s undersecretary of defense for European nuclear theater forces, T.K. Jones, casually explained that surviving nuclear war would be as simple as digging fallout shelters and shoveling a layer of dirt on top: “It’s the dirt that does it,” Jones cheerfully proclaimed.
The worsening Cold War, however, also reinvigorated the peace movement. While peace activists in Europe rallied against basing intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the continent, in the United States, activists rallied around a strikingly innovative idea: a bilateral halt (or “freeze”) to the arms race. The idea was the brain child of Randall Forsberg, a self-identified “different kind of arms control advocate.” Forsberg’s freeze was simple to understand: Both the United States and the Soviet Union would halt (or freeze) the testing, building and deployment of nuclear weapons. Forsberg’s proposal, “A Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race,” became the founding document of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.
The campaign sparked a political wildfire with bipartisan support. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) introduced a nuclear freeze bill in the U.S. Senate, while Rep. Silvio Conte (R-Mass.) introduced an identical bill in the House with 122 co-sponsors.
In June 1982, over 1 million people took to the streets of New York City to rally against the arms race — one of the largest political demonstrations in the nation’s history. By the fall of 1983, in the midst of the highest tensions of the late Cold War, 200 million viewers tuned in to watch ABC’s Sunday Night Movie “The Day After.” Depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war on Lawrence, Kan., the film brought home the dangers of the continued arms race to even apolitical viewers.
The administration initially attempted to redbait the Freeze by linking it to the Soviet Union. The movement, however, resisted such easy labeling. When the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops began debating a pastoral letter critical of Reagan and the arms race, Reagan treated the bishops with “kids’ gloves,” as one National Security Council staffer later acknowledged. The administration could not risk alienating the Catholic bishops and, by extension, Catholic voters — a key, traditionally Democratic constituency that swung for Reagan in the 1980 election. The administration thus repeatedly emphasized there was “no real disagreement” with the bishops, but only a simple misunderstanding. Soon, even Reagan was praising Freeze activists as “sincere and well intentioned” and “saying the same thing I’m saying.”
The Freeze put the White House on the defensive. National security adviser William Clark privately suggested that the debate was potentially “the most important national security opportunity and challenge” the administration faced and further advised to keep it “secret” that the “activists have our attention.” Campaign advisers understood that the issue that could sink Reagan’s reelection chances — and with it the entire Reagan Revolution — was not the economy, but the continued threat of nuclear war. Reagan’s speeches soon changed tone, and publicly he went from the hawk who dismissed arms control and detente as a “one way street,” to the dove who proclaimed “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Reagan won reelection handily in 1984, and with the emergence of new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, the Cold War soon began to thaw. Gorbachev stepped into the space the Freeze was vacating, implementing the movement’s ideas such as a moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons. The Freeze merged with SANE in 1987, becoming “SANE-Freeze” before changing to its current name, Peace Action. Though Reagan never acquiesced to the movement’s demand for a nuclear freeze, it still changed the dialogue surrounding nuclear weapons: No sitting president since has publicly advocated limited or survivable nuclear war.
In subsequent years, the U.S. and Soviet/Russian nuclear arsenals saw drastic reductions thanks to successive arms control treaties. Current U.S.-Russian relations, however, may well return to the myopic levels of the early 1980s, bringing with them an ever-increasing chance of catastrophic nuclear war. As President Biden concludes the Nuclear Posture Review, 700 Nobel laureates have called for him to take steps to reduce that risk. In Congress, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) have introduced the Hastening Arms Limitation Talks (HALT) Act, with the goal of a freeze on the further global deployment of nuclear weapons.
But there’s a key difference between the contemporary call for a 21st-century nuclear freeze and its 1980s counterpart: The latter was at the center of a vast social movement with grass-roots support across the nation. For the HALT Act to succeed, it will need the support of a grass-roots peace movement that can flex its membership muscle much as the Freeze did. Indeed, as the history of the grass-roots anti-nuclear activism shows, even when Armageddon appears at the doorstep, it is still possible to pressure even the most hard-line governments to turn back the Doomsday Clock. | null | null | null | null | null |
As Turkey slashed interest rates last year, the value of the Turkish lira plummeted
A money changer counts Turkish lira bank notes at a currency exchange office in Ankara, Turkey on Sept. 27, 2021. A (Cagla Gurdogan/Reuters)
By David A. Steinberg
But Turkey — where inflation last month hit 36 percent, among the world’s highest rates — chose to cut interest rates on four separate occasions between September and December 2021, reducing the central bank’s key lending rate from 19 percent to 14 percent.
My research suggests that Turkey’s interest rate reductions are likely to have important political consequences. Lowering the interest rate has caused the value of Turkey’s currency, the lira, to plummet, which hurts the popularity of Turkey’s ruling party.
The pandemic has worsened Africa’s debt crisis. China and other countries are stepping in.
Why Turkey cut interest rates
One person in Turkey bears primary responsibility for these rate cuts: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The president dismissed a number of central bankers who stood in the way of lowering interest rates and replaced them with people who share his views on this matter.
Erdogan often calls high interest rates the “mother of all evil.” He has justified his support for low interest rates on his Muslim faith and his interpretation of the Koran’s commandment that prohibits the charging of interest. Erdogan believes that lower interest rates actually reduce inflation — a view that’s the exact opposite of what most economists and policymakers believe.
Low interest rates can be attractive for political reasons. Firms and households that want to borrow money like it when they can do so more cheaply. One report posits that the roots of Erdogan’s “antipathy [toward high interest rates] may lie in part in the pain they heap on to heavily indebted small companies,” a group that is “the bedrock” of his political support.
Low interest rates have other costs
But low interest rates also come with other costs — for emerging economies, these costs can become acute when U.S. interest rates are on the rise, as they have been lately. When the U.S. raises interest rates, money flows out of emerging markets and into the United States in order to earn these higher rates of return. This also strengthens the value of the dollar relative to other currencies. But if other countries respond by raising interest rates themselves, they can prevent capital outflows and the weakening of their currencies.
Debt ceiling battles may hurt the U.S. dollar
Turkey’s decision to cut the central bank rate has the opposite effect. It gives professional investors and ordinary savers alike more reason to sell lira and buy foreign currency, which pushes down the lira’s value.
In September, before Turkey’s central bank started cutting interest rates, the exchange rate was $1 to 8.5 lira. By Dec. 21, it took 17.5 lira to buy $1. The lira regained some ground, but is currently more than 50 percent below where it was four months ago, before the rate-cutting experiment began.
Here’s how that the rapid loss in the lira’s value affected Turkey’s economy. A weaker currency makes imports more expensive, which further fueled the country’s already-elevated inflation rates. Higher import prices tend to disproportionately harm poorer citizens — who spend a larger share of their income on tradable goods.
A weaker currency is also a problem for Turkey’s business community. Banks and other corporations in Turkey have to finance their debts in dollars and euros. The weakening of the lira makes it harder for these firms to repay their debts, which poses a threat to the financial well-being of Turkish companies.
Many Turks say the government didn’t stop the wildfires quickly enough. Here’s the story.
What about the political costs?
The Turkish currency crisis has sparked protests throughout the country. The sharp drop in Erdogan’s approval also suggests that the country’s monetary problems are undermining the president’s popularity. My research provides further evidence that currency crashes hurt the political standing of national leaders.
In 2018, during another period of currency depreciation, I asked a nationally representative sample of Turkish adults what they thought about the lira’s depreciation. The survey, conducted by Frekans Research, used face-to-face interviews with 2,000 people, who were randomly sampled from within randomly selected regions of Turkey. Over 90 percent of respondents thought the depreciation of the Turkish lira was bad for them personally. A similar share (89 percent) agreed that the depreciation of the lira is bad for the country.
In a recently published article drawing on this survey, I explain how the lira’s depreciation probably cut some electoral support for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party. The study compares people who were interviewed on days when the lira was strong with otherwise similar people interviewed after the lira’s July 2018 crash. I estimate that the 6.5 percent depreciation of the lira that occurred that month reduced electoral support for the incumbent party by nearly seven percentage points.
Does Erdogan’s future depend on the lira?
In late December, Erdogan redoubled his efforts to stabilize the lira. While still refusing to raise interest rates, he unveiled an unconventional — and risky — scheme to discourage Turkish savers from selling lira. The central bank simultaneously stepped up its intervention in the foreign exchange market. These measures succeeded in strengthening the Turkish lira, albeit only briefly. The lira’s depreciation resumed shortly thereafter.
Some commentators now speculate that Erdogan’s monetary policy decisions could ultimately “cost him his job.” Turkey’s next election is scheduled for June 2023 — but some analysts believe Erdogan will call for an election earlier. My research on Turkey, and evidence from other currency crises, suggests that the outcome of that election will depend on whether the lira continues to fall.
David A. Steinberg is an associate professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. | null | null | null | null | null |
Delta Air Lines on Thursday will be the first U.S. airline to report financial results from the final quarter of 2021, a period that saw passenger traffic rebound to near pre-pandemic levels but one that ended in chaos with thousands of flight cancellations.
The Atlanta-based carrier’s results will offer an early look at where the industry stands nearly two years into a global pandemic and weeks after bad weather and airline staffing shortages — fueled by the omicron variant of the coronavirus — upended hopes for a trouble-free holiday travel season. Other carriers, including American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue Airways, are scheduled to report earnings over the next two weeks.
Airlines were optimistic when entering the final quarter of 2021, having weathered the coronavirus’s delta variant, which slowed passenger demand in late summer and early fall. At least five U.S. carriers were profitable in the third quarter, and of those, at least two, Delta and Alaska Airlines, reached that milestone without the benefit of billions of dollars in federal pandemic aid, which expired at the end of September.
Several carriers, including Spirit Airlines, Southwest and American, subsequently suffered high-profile meltdowns as bad weather exacerbated staff shortages, leaving passengers stranded after thousands of flights were canceled.
In an interview last month with CNBC, Delta chief executive Ed Bastian said the combination of strong passenger bookings and a slight easing of fuel costs would mean profitability for the carrier in the fourth quarter. However, that was before the omicron variant forced carriers, including Delta, to cancel thousands of flights.
Most recently, the airline has been embroiled in a dispute with the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA for pushing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reconsider its isolation guidelines for those who test positive for the coronavirus but do not show symptoms. The CDC recently updated its guidance, reducing the isolation period to five days from 10, prompting Delta to change its policy. Sara Nelson, AFA’s international president, has criticized the CDC’s decision — and the decision of Delta and other carriers in adopting it.
In a Jan. 7 letter, Peter W. Carter, Delta’s chief legal officer, accused AFA of “posting and promoting false and defamatory information about Delta Air Lines” regarding its pandemic policies, including a tweet that alleged Delta was telling employees who were exposed to the coronavirus and had symptoms to come to work.
“Delta has always followed the science to form our policies regarding COVID-19,” the airline said in an emailed statement. “We sent a cease and desist letter because we believe institutions and leaders must speak carefully, truthfully, and factually.”
Nelson on Tuesday responded: Carter’s “letter does not, however, quote a single statement or social media post that is false in any way, much less defamatory. We believe our statements are truthful and accurate.”
The union, the largest in the country representing flight attendants, launched an effort in 2019 to organize Delta flight attendants. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man fatally shot in Greenbelt, Md.
A man was fatally shot early Thursday in Greenbelt, Md.
The man was not immediately identified, pending the notification of his family.
The shooting happened just after midnight in the 5800 block of Cherrywood Terrace, about a mile from Beltway Plaza Mall. Police said they got a call about shots fired and that when officers arrived, they found a man with a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene. | null | null | null | null | null |
A screengrab from a 2017 video of surgeon Simon Bramhall, who was convicted of assault and fined that same year after branding transplant organs with his initials. (PA Video/PA Wire/PA Images)
Bramhall was suspended from Queen Elizabeth Hospital by the end of 2013 and resigned the following May when he told the BBC he had made “a mistake.” In 2017, he pleaded guilty to two counts of assault and was later fined 10,000 pounds. At his sentencing, the judge acknowledged that the physical harm the patients suffered was “no more than transient or trifling,” although he said the emotional and psychological impact was severe, the Daily Mail reported. | null | null | null | null | null |
Nicholas Rossi, who used the last name Alahverdian, faked his death in 2020 from late-stage cancer. Law enforcement found him in Scotland last month. (KSTU)
In fact, authorities allege Alahverdian, whose actual last name is Rossi, made up the cancer diagnosis and dramatic death as a ruse to cover up his escape to Scotland. The 34-year-old was trying to evade arrest on fraud and sexual assault charges in at least two states, according to the Utah County Attorney’s Office.
In a macabre twist, law enforcement tracked down Rossi because he actually was near death. Rossi checked himself into a Glasgow hospital about a month ago with a severe case of covid and was placed on a ventilator, Rhode Island State Police Maj. Robert A. Creamer told the Providence Journal.
Hospital staff soon learned that Rossi, who was going by the name Arthur Knight, was wanted by Interpol, the Scotland Sun reported. He was arrested last month and is in the process of being extradited to Utah.
About a year after Rossi’s alleged death, the Journal reported that state police did not believe he was dead and were actively searching for him. They maintained he was on the run from the FBI, which had questioned him about a fraud complaint against him in Ohio. Soon after, Rossi announced he’d been diagnosed with late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma, claiming he had just weeks to live.
He also had a warrant out for his arrest in Rhode Island for not registering as a sex offender, according to the Journal. In 2008, Rossi was convicted of two sexual assaults in Ohio. In 2017, the DNA from that case was uploaded to a national database, according to the Utah County Attorney’s Office.
The county attorney noted that Rossi could have continued to evade law enforcement if various agencies hadn’t worked together.
“You have a rape case in the state of Utah and through quite ingenious and massive collaboration between law enforcement entities, we find a suspect in a hospital in Scotland,” Leavitt said. “There’s absolutely no way in the world that we’re going to be able to bring this case to justice without those efforts.” | null | null | null | null | null |
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