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Harrison leads Presbyterian against Winthrop after 21-point showing
Winthrop Eagles (10-6, 3-0 Big South) at Presbyterian Blue Hose (8-10, 0-3 Big South)
Clinton, South Carolina; Wednesday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Presbyterian plays the Winthrop Eagles after Rayshon Harrison scored 21 points in Presbyterian’s 64-61 loss to the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs.
The Blue Hose have gone 5-2 at home. Presbyterian is second in the Big South with 11.2 offensive rebounds per game led by Winston Hill averaging 2.5.
The Eagles are 3-0 against Big South opponents. Winthrop ranks third in the Big South scoring 34.0 points per game in the paint led by D.J. Burns averaging 2.5.
The Blue Hose and Eagles meet Wednesday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Harrison is averaging 17.2 points for the Blue Hose. Hill is averaging 12.9 points over the last 10 games for Presbyterian.
Patrick Good averages 2.7 made 3-pointers per game for the Eagles, scoring 11.3 points while shooting 45.3% from beyond the arc. Burns is shooting 66.7% and averaging 14.7 points over the past 10 games for Winthrop. | null | null | null | null | null |
New Hampshire Wildcats (6-5, 1-1 America East) at Hartford Hawks (2-10)
BOTTOM LINE: Hartford hosts the New Hampshire Wildcats after Hunter Marks scored 31 points in Hartford’s 78-71 victory against the Sacred Heart Pioneers.
The Hawks are 0-2 in home games. Hartford gives up 75.8 points to opponents and has been outscored by 7.1 points per game.
The Wildcats are 1-1 against America East opponents. New Hampshire ranks second in the America East giving up 64.0 points while holding opponents to 41.9% shooting.
The Hawks and Wildcats meet Wednesday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: David Shriver is shooting 37.5% from beyond the arc with 2.5 made 3-pointers per game for the Hawks, while averaging nine points. Moses Flowers is averaging 12.8 points and 6.8 rebounds over the past 10 games for Hartford.
Jayden Martinez is averaging 15.3 points and seven rebounds for the Wildcats. Nick Guadarrama is averaging 10.3 points over the last 10 games for New Hampshire. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mack leads Wofford against Citadel after 22-point game
Citadel Bulldogs (7-9, 1-4 SoCon) at Wofford Terriers (11-7, 3-3 SoCon)
BOTTOM LINE: Wofford plays the Citadel Bulldogs after B.J. Mack scored 22 points in Wofford’s 84-64 win against the Western Carolina Catamounts.
The Terriers have gone 5-3 at home. Wofford ranks fourth in the SoCon shooting 35.9% from deep, led by Sam Godwin shooting 50.0% from 3-point range.
The Bulldogs are 1-4 in conference matchups. Citadel scores 80.1 points and has outscored opponents by 5.5 points per game.
TOP PERFORMERS: Ryan Larson is averaging 9.4 points and four assists for the Terriers. Mack is averaging 16.3 points and 5.3 rebounds while shooting 62.4% over the past 10 games for Wofford.
Jason Roche is shooting 42.7% from beyond the arc with 3.8 made 3-pointers per game for the Bulldogs, while averaging 13.9 points. Hayden Brown is averaging 17.2 points and 8.1 rebounds over the last 10 games for Citadel. | null | null | null | null | null |
Minnesota Golden Gophers (10-5, 1-5 Big Ten) at Penn State Nittany Lions (8-7, 3-4 Big Ten)
University Park, Pennsylvania; Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Minnesota visits the Penn State Nittany Lions after E.J. Stephens scored 22 points in Minnesota’s 81-71 loss to the Iowa Hawkeyes.
The Nittany Lions are 6-3 on their home court. Penn State is 1-2 when it wins the turnover battle and averages 11.5 turnovers per game.
The Golden Gophers are 1-5 in Big Ten play. Minnesota ranks eighth in the Big Ten shooting 34.2% from 3-point range.
The Nittany Lions and Golden Gophers square off Wednesday for the first time in Big Ten play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Seth Lundy is averaging 14.1 points and 5.9 rebounds for the Nittany Lions. Jalen Pickett is averaging 10 points over the last 10 games for Penn State.
Jamison Battle is averaging 18 points and 6.3 rebounds for the Golden Gophers. Payton Willis is averaging 1.5 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Minnesota. | null | null | null | null | null |
Indiana State Sycamores (8-8, 1-3 MVC) at Southern Illinois Salukis (9-8, 2-3 MVC)
Carbondale, Illinois; Wednesday, 8 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Marcus Domask and the Southern Illinois Salukis host Cooper Neese and the Indiana State Sycamores in MVC play.
The Salukis are 6-2 in home games. Southern Illinois scores 65.4 points while outscoring opponents by 4.2 points per game.
The Sycamores are 1-3 against MVC opponents. Indiana State averages 12.1 turnovers per game and is 4-4 when turning the ball over less than opponents.
The Salukis and Sycamores match up Wednesday for the first time in MVC play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Domask is averaging 16.4 points and 4.1 assists for the Salukis. Ben Coupet Jr. is averaging 9.1 points over the last 10 games for Southern Illinois.
Xavier Bledson is averaging 8.2 points and 3.5 assists for the Sycamores. Neese is averaging 11.8 points over the last 10 games for Indiana State. | null | null | null | null | null |
New Mexico Lobos (7-10, 0-4 MWC) at Colorado State Rams (13-1, 3-1 MWC)
Fort Collins, Colorado; Wednesday, 10 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: New Mexico visits the Colorado State Rams after Jaelen House scored 21 points in New Mexico’s 71-63 loss to the Boise State Broncos.
The Rams are 8-0 in home games. Colorado State ranks seventh in the MWC at limiting opponent scoring, allowing 65.9 points while holding opponents to 41.9% shooting.
The Lobos are 0-4 in conference play. New Mexico ranks fifth in the MWC with 7.9 offensive rebounds per game led by Gethro Muscadin averaging 1.6.
TOP PERFORMERS: David Roddy is averaging 19.1 points and 7.8 rebounds for the Rams. Isaiah Stevens is averaging 10.0 points over the last 10 games for Colorado State.
House is averaging 14.9 points, 4.4 assists and 1.9 steals for the Lobos. Jamal Mashburn, Jr. is averaging 10.1 points over the last 10 games for New Mexico. | null | null | null | null | null |
Northern Iowa Panthers (9-7, 5-1 MVC) at Valparaiso Beacons (8-10, 1-5 MVC)
BOTTOM LINE: Northern Iowa faces the Valparaiso Beacons after AJ Green scored 22 points in Northern Iowa’s 69-68 win over the Southern Illinois Salukis.
The Beacons are 5-5 on their home court. Valparaiso has a 3-8 record against teams over .500.
The Panthers have gone 5-1 against MVC opponents. Northern Iowa is seventh in the MVC with 30.8 rebounds per game led by Nate Heise averaging 5.1.
The teams square off for the 10th time this season in MVC play. The Panthers won the last meeting on Jan. 6. Noah Carter scored 20 points to help lead the Panthers to the victory.
TOP PERFORMERS: Trevor Anderson is averaging 9.2 points for the Beacons. Kobe King is averaging 9.0 points and 3.0 rebounds while shooting 45.3% over the last 10 games for Valparaiso.
Green is scoring 17.8 points per game with 3.4 rebounds and 2.1 assists for the Panthers. Carter is averaging 10 points over the last 10 games for Northern Iowa. | null | null | null | null | null |
North Carolina A&T Aggies (8-10, 3-1 Big South) at UNC Asheville Bulldogs (10-7, 2-2 Big South)
Asheville, North Carolina; Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: UNC Asheville takes on the North Carolina A&T Aggies after Drew Pember scored 27 points in UNC Asheville’s 76-73 loss to the South Carolina Upstate Spartans.
The Bulldogs have gone 8-2 in home games. UNC Asheville is seventh in the Big South with 8.4 offensive rebounds per game led by Pember averaging 2.1.
The Aggies are 3-1 against conference opponents. N.C. A&T is seventh in the Big South giving up 69.4 points while holding opponents to 42.0% shooting.
TOP PERFORMERS: Pember is averaging 13.2 points, 6.2 rebounds and 3.5 blocks for the Bulldogs. Tajion Jones is averaging 2.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for UNC Asheville.
Demetric Horton averages 2.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Aggies, scoring 11.5 points while shooting 38.5% from beyond the arc. Marcus Watson is averaging 10 points and 5.5 rebounds over the last 10 games for N.C. A&T. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hampton Pirates (4-9, 0-2 Big South) at Radford Highlanders (5-11, 1-3 Big South)
BOTTOM LINE: Hampton visits the Radford Highlanders after Raymond Bethea Jr. scored 21 points in Hampton’s 67-59 loss to the North Carolina A&T Aggies.
The Highlanders have gone 4-3 in home games. Radford ranks eighth in the Big South with 8.3 offensive rebounds per game led by Shaquan Jules averaging 1.5.
The Pirates are 0-2 against conference opponents. Hampton gives up 66.0 points to opponents and has been outscored by 4.1 points per game.
TOP PERFORMERS: Bryan Hart is scoring 9.5 points per game with 2.5 rebounds and 1.5 assists for the Highlanders. Rashun Williams is averaging 7.8 points and 4.8 rebounds while shooting 44.8% over the last 10 games for Radford.
Russell Dean is averaging 12.4 points for the Pirates. Najee Garvin is averaging 14.0 points and 4.7 rebounds while shooting 38.4% over the last 10 games for Hampton. | null | null | null | null | null |
La Salle Explorers (6-8, 1-3 A-10) at Rhode Island Rams (10-4, 2-1 A-10)
BOTTOM LINE: Rhode Island takes on the La Salle Explorers after Makhel Mitchell scored 20 points in Rhode Island’s 81-68 win against the UMass Minutemen.
The Rams have gone 7-0 at home. Rhode Island is seventh in the A-10 scoring 71.9 points while shooting 49.6% from the field.
The Explorers have gone 1-3 against A-10 opponents. La Salle has a 3-4 record in games decided by 10 points or more.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jeremy Sheppard is shooting 40.8% and averaging 12.7 points for the Rams. Mitchell is averaging 8.5 points over the last 10 games for Rhode Island.
Clifton Moore is averaging 11.9 points, 6.7 rebounds and 2.7 blocks for the Explorers. Josh Nickelberry is averaging 8.4 points over the last 10 games for La Salle. | null | null | null | null | null |
Iowa Hawkeyes (13-4, 3-3 Big Ten) at Rutgers Scarlet Knights (10-6, 4-2 Big Ten)
Piscataway, New Jersey; Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Rutgers hosts the Iowa Hawkeyes after Ron Harper Jr. scored 31 points in Rutgers’ 70-59 victory against the Maryland Terrapins.
TOP PERFORMERS: Harper is scoring 16.6 points per game and averaging 6.8 rebounds for the Scarlet Knights. Clifford Omoruyi is averaging 7.2 points and 5.1 rebounds over the last 10 games for Rutgers. | null | null | null | null | null |
George Washington Colonials (5-10, 1-2 A-10) at Saint Joseph’s (PA) Hawks (7-8, 1-3 A-10)
BOTTOM LINE: George Washington visits the Saint Joseph’s (PA) Hawks after Joe Bamisile scored 26 points in George Washington’s 77-76 win against the George Mason Patriots.
The Hawks have gone 5-4 in home games. Saint Joseph’s (PA) averages 13.3 turnovers per game and is 1-0 when it has fewer turnovers than its opponents.
The Colonials have gone 1-2 against A-10 opponents. George Washington has a 2-1 record in games decided by 3 points or fewer.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jordan Hall is averaging 16.1 points, 6.6 rebounds, 6.3 assists and 1.5 steals for the Hawks. Taylor Funk is averaging 1.8 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Saint Joseph’s (PA).
James Bishop averages 2.0 made 3-pointers per game for the Colonials, scoring 16.1 points while shooting 29.7% from beyond the arc. Bamisile is averaging 10.5 points over the past 10 games for George Washington. | null | null | null | null | null |
Western Carolina Catamounts (8-10, 2-3 SoCon) at Furman Paladins (12-7, 4-2 SoCon)
BOTTOM LINE: Furman hosts the Western Carolina Catamounts after Jalen Slawson scored 22 points in Furman’s 71-69 loss to the Chattanooga Mocs.
The Paladins are 8-1 on their home court. Furman is eighth in the SoCon in rebounding with 31.5 rebounds. Slawson paces the Paladins with 7.5 boards.
The Catamounts are 2-3 against SoCon opponents. Western Carolina averages 12.8 turnovers per game and is 3-2 when winning the turnover battle.
The Paladins and Catamounts meet Wednesday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Slawson is averaging 15.6 points, 7.5 rebounds, 3.9 assists, 2.1 steals and 1.8 blocks for the Paladins. Alex Hunter is averaging 12.0 points over the last 10 games for Furman.
Nick Robinson is shooting 34.8% from beyond the arc with 2.2 made 3-pointers per game for the Catamounts, while averaging 15.1 points and 6.7 rebounds. Vonterius Woolbright is shooting 47.9% and averaging 10.4 points over the past 10 games for Western Carolina. | null | null | null | null | null |
South Carolina Upstate visits Gardner-Webb following Gainey's 22-point game
South Carolina Upstate Spartans (6-10, 3-1 Big South) at Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs (9-8, 3-1 Big South)
BOTTOM LINE: South Carolina Upstate visits the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs after Jordan Gainey scored 22 points in South Carolina Upstate’s 76-73 win against the UNC Asheville Bulldogs.
The Runnin’ Bulldogs are 7-1 on their home court. Gardner-Webb has a 1-2 record in one-possession games.
The Spartans are 3-1 against conference opponents. South Carolina Upstate has a 3-7 record against teams over .500.
The Runnin’ Bulldogs and Spartans square off Wednesday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: D’Maurian Williams is shooting 39.6% from beyond the arc with 2.6 made 3-pointers per game for the Runnin’ Bulldogs, while averaging 14.3 points and 5.2 rebounds. Lance Terry is averaging 12.8 points over the last 10 games for Gardner-Webb.
Bryson Mozone is averaging 13.9 points for the Spartans. Gainey is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for South Carolina Upstate. | null | null | null | null | null |
Stony Brook visits Binghamton following Falko's 22-point showing
Stony Brook Seawolves (9-6, 2-1 America East) at Binghamton Bearcats (6-7, 3-1 America East)
Binghamton, New York; Wednesday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Binghamton hosts the Stony Brook Seawolves after Jacob Falko scored 22 points in Binghamton’s 73-65 win over the Maine Black Bears.
The Bearcats are 3-3 in home games. Binghamton ranks second in the America East shooting 36.4% from deep, led by Dan Petcash shooting 50.0% from 3-point range.
The Seawolves are 2-1 against America East opponents. Stony Brook is fifth in the America East with 7.6 offensive rebounds per game led by Tykei Greene averaging 2.9.
The Bearcats and Seawolves meet Wednesday for the first time in America East play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Falko is averaging 11.5 points for the Bearcats. Tyler Bertram is averaging 9.8 points and 1.6 rebounds while shooting 43.2% over the past 10 games for Binghamton.
Greene is averaging 11.5 points, 7.3 rebounds and 1.5 steals for the Seawolves. Jahlil Jenkins is averaging 13.3 points over the last 10 games for Stony Brook. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lehigh Mountain Hawks (6-12, 4-2 Patriot) at Navy Midshipmen (12-5, 5-1 Patriot)
Annapolis, Maryland; Wednesday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Lehigh takes on the Navy Midshipmen after Evan Taylor scored 20 points in Lehigh’s 69-57 loss to the Loyola (MD) Greyhounds.
The Midshipmen have gone 4-3 at home. Navy is seventh in the Patriot scoring 67.0 points while shooting 45.4% from the field.
The Mountain Hawks are 4-2 against Patriot opponents. Lehigh is third in the Patriot with 24.8 defensive rebounds per game led by Taylor averaging 5.4.
The Midshipmen and Mountain Hawks square off Wednesday for the first time in Patriot play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: John Carter Jr. averages 2.1 made 3-pointers per game for the Midshipmen, scoring 13.6 points while shooting 41.9% from beyond the arc. Tyler Nelson is shooting 51.1% and averaging 7.7 points over the last 10 games for Navy.
Taylor is averaging 13.8 points and 6.1 rebounds for the Mountain Hawks. Keith Higgins Jr. is averaging 9.1 points over the last 10 games for Lehigh. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wyoming hosts San Jose State following Amey's 23-point game
San Jose State Spartans (7-8, 0-3 MWC) at Wyoming Cowboys (13-2, 2-0 MWC)
Laramie, Wyoming; Wednesday, 9 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: San Jose State visits the Wyoming Cowboys after Myron Amey Jr. scored 23 points in San Jose State’s 81-56 loss to the UNLV Rebels.
The Cowboys have gone 6-0 in home games. Wyoming is fourth in the MWC in rebounding with 33.2 rebounds. Graham Ike leads the Cowboys with 8.5 boards.
The Spartans have gone 0-3 against MWC opponents. San Jose State averages 12.9 turnovers per game and is 3-1 when turning the ball over less than opponents.
TOP PERFORMERS: Ike is averaging 20 points and 8.5 rebounds for the Cowboys. Drake Jeffries is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Wyoming.
Omari Moore is averaging 13.2 points, 5.4 rebounds and 4.6 assists for the Spartans. Trey Anderson is averaging 7.4 points over the last 10 games for San Jose State. | null | null | null | null | null |
That’s what we found when we analyzed which Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election last year
A voter outside the American Airlines Center in Dallas in October 2020. (LM Otero/AP)
By Michael G. Strawbridge
Richard R. Lau
As the 2022 midterm elections approach, the Republican Party still overwhelmingly embraces former president Donald Trump’s baseless lie that he won the 2020 election. Republican candidates running for positions at all levels of government are making voter fraud and election integrity the focus of their campaigns.
But this focus isn’t all about Trump. The focus on voter fraud and threats to election integrity — which research has repeatedly shown to be unfounded — comes because an increasing proportion of U.S. voters are non-White, especially when that diversity is found in GOP candidates’ own districts.
GOP reaction to greater racial diversity
Scholars find that the Republican Party has attracted White Americans concerned about the nation’s changing racial demographics. These concerns include fears that immigration will negatively affect the economy, health care, education systems and crime rates, along with the belief that the U.S. government now unfairly favors non-White citizens. With that base, the GOP has been using a series of tactics to stop racial and ethnic minorities from gaining political power commensurate with their proportion of the population.
A ‘MAGA faction,’ is pulling Republicans away from supporting multiethnic democracy, our research shows
For example, political scientists Michael Herron and Daniel Smith found that a Republican-passed law to reduce Florida’s early voting from 14 to eight days and eliminate the final Sunday of early voting did indeed reduce voter turnout among non-Republican and minority voters. Other scholars find that Republicans have been proposing and passing stricter voter registration laws that make it harder for minority citizens to vote.
Republicans argue that stricter voter identification laws are needed to combat rampant voter fraud, an idea that studies have repeatedly debunked. Political scientists Desmond King and Rogers Smith revealed that Republicans began emphasizing the threat of voter fraud only after the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which simplified voter registration and significantly increased the number of low-income and minority voters.
Congressional Republicans’ Jan. 6 electoral objections
On Jan. 6, 2021, after the “Stop the Steal” insurrection was quelled, the House of Representatives and Senate held a joint session of Congress to count and certify the electoral college votes for the 2020 presidential election. During this meeting, Republican lawmakers, without evidence, questioned and challenged the validity of the 2020 election. More than half the Republicans in Congress, 146 out of 262, voted to exclude election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania, alleging election fraud.
Our analysis focuses on Republicans in the House, where 121 and 138 out of 209 voted against certifying the election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania, respectively. In contrast, only eight Senate Republicans supported these objections. We sought to determine why so many House Republicans supported the unsubstantiated voter fraud claims, suspecting that concerns about their own constituents’ racial diversity might motivate them.
To find out, we examined the individual roll-call votes of House Republicans regarding the two electoral objections. (House Democrats unanimously opposed both efforts.) We checked for several factors that might have influenced their decisions: the members’ personal attributes, like race, gender and ideological tendencies, and their districts’ attributes, including its partisan makeup, as well as Trump’s popularity (based on his 2020 vote share) in that district and its proportion of non-White citizens. We then used a regression model to analyze which of these potential influences was most likely to relate to their vote.
GOP members of Congress from racially diverse districts voted against certifying the election
Several things were associated with voting to object to certifying the election results: being highly conservative; representing either a more heavily Republican district or a district that voted more heavily for Trump; and having a more racially diverse district, as measured by the U.S. census.
Among House Republicans who supported at least one of the two objections, the district’s constituents were, on average, at least 19.3 percent non-White. Among House Republicans who did not support the objections, their districts were on average 15.7 percent non-White. That’s a statistically significant difference. The least diverse House Republican congressional district is only 3 percent non-White. A 10 percent increase in non-White citizens increased the likelihood that a Republican legislator objected to the Arizona and Pennsylvania election results by 26 percent and 24 percent, respectively.
Finally, the most diverse Republican district is approximately 50 percent non-White. When moving from the least to most racially diverse district, House Republicans become 78 percent more likely to support the Arizona objection and 55 percent more likely to support the Pennsylvania objection. Having more non-White citizens in a congressional district made Republican representatives more likely to vote to exclude election results based on alleged election fraud.
Presumably, these Republicans fear that they might lose their seats as the proportion of non-White voters in their own districts increases because, in general, non-White voters tend to support Democrats.
What does this mean for 2022 and beyond?
Trump is still an influential Republican figure and continues pushing the rest of the party to support his false 2020 election fraud allegations. Meanwhile, the United States becomes increasingly racially diverse every day. But these changing demographics, and the Republican effort to suppress minority influence, predates Trump and the 2020 election. No wonder Republicans continue to propose and enact more restrictive voting laws, arguing that they’re needed to prevent election fraud, in states across the country, especially in quickly diversifying ones like Florida, Georgia and Texas.
In other words, Republican efforts to rouse fears about election integrity are not simply about appeasing Trump. These claims, and related claims of voter fraud, respond to the fact that the United States is ceasing to be overwhelmingly White, which threatens their reelection prospects.
Michael G. Strawbridge (@MjStrawbridge) is a PhD student in political science at Rutgers University.
Richard R. Lau is a distinguished professor in political science at Rutgers University. | null | null | null | null | null |
In 2020, Denmark culled some 17 million minks after they were found to be at risk of carrying coronavirus. The government later admitted that the minks were improperly killed and buried, and a commission of inquiry has been established to look into the case.
In cramped Hong Kong, hamsters have been popular as pets for being cute and fairly low maintenance.
The city, like mainland China, is holding firm to a policy of “zero-covid,” imposing extreme 21-day quarantine requirements on any overseas arrivals. The territory was able to maintain zero local infections for weeks until December, when two flight attendants returning from the United States infected with the highly-transmissible omicron variant went out into the community, spreading the virus.
Last week, a 23-year-old woman working at a pet shop called Little Boss in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay was found to be infected with the delta variant, which has been rare in the city. At the same time, several hamsters in the pet shop also tested positive for the coronavirus. Health officials in Hong Kong are now investigating this as a possible case of animal to human transmission, as two more human infections, one confirmed and one preliminary positive, were linked to the pet store.
Thomas Sit, veterinarian and assistant director of the Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Department, said the government did not want to cull all the hamsters but that it was a public health decision.
Sit added that if investigations found the hamsters were infected during import, special testing on hamsters would be added before future imports, and the government will gauge other risks for other animals later.
Health authorities have now ordered all pet shops selling hamsters to shut, and for mandatory testing of all who have purchased a hamster since Dec. 22.
“We urge all pet owners to observe strict hygiene when handling their pets and cages. Do not kiss or abandon them on the streets,” said Leung.
Hong Kong’s government has responded to the most recent coronavirus wave by imposing some of the strictest social distancing and isolation measures since the start of the pandemic here two years ago. Flights from eight countries including the United States and Britain, and transit flights from 150 countries are currently banned, and students have returned to home learning. | null | null | null | null | null |
Aid groups and defense officials from Australia and New Zealand are working on contactless ways to deliver water and other vital supplies to the remote archipelago kingdom, which is one of the few places in the world to remain essentially free of the virus. (Residents went into a brief lockdown in November when a single case, Tonga’s first, was detected in a person at a quarantine hotel.)
The first clear images of the destruction wrought by the eruption and subsequent tsunami emerged Tuesday after a New Zealand military surveillance flight returned from the area. The aerial photos show land and trees blanketed in ash on Nomuka, a small island near the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano.
Tongan authorities on Tuesday confirmed that at least two people had died, reportedly including a British woman who was killed by the tsunami. Officials have declared a state of emergency and were meeting with representatives from Australia and New Zealand, the region’s two wealthiest countries, to discuss ways they could assist.
Some aid agencies have local staff members on the ground. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had 10 staff members and 70 volunteers in Tonga, but it hasn’t heard from them since Saturday.
The U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, normally has several employees in Tonga, but they were outside the country when the volcano erupted, complicating the group’s response, said Jonathan Veitch, a senior UNICEF Pacific official.
About 60 percent of Tonga’s roughly 105,000 residents had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus as of last week, according to Our World in Data. Fiji and Australia are battling outbreaks of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, a factor that could weigh into officials’ reluctance to let foreign aid workers in.
The biggest concern at the moment is drinkable water, because the ash has probably contaminated much of Tonga’s supplies, Veitch said. UNICEF was sending water, water-testing kits and desalination devices, and the ships will be equipped with larger desalination plants. (Rokovucago said she hoped the government would not quarantine water supplies.)
According to World Health Organization officials, the government has advised the Tongan public to remain indoors, use masks if going out, and drink bottled water to avoid contamination from ash. | null | null | null | null | null |
By 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, the team of rescuers headed up the mountain in a truck. But they swiftly encountered an issue, authorities said. The road, which had been closed off to all cars except emergency vehicles, was deemed unsafe. (Haywood County Search & Rescue /Haywood County Search & Rescue)
That same day, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) warned people in his state “to prepare for a significant incoming winter storm” and to pay close attention to local weather forecasts. Hours later, the NWS Raleigh forecast office upgraded its winter storm watch to a weather advisory — “hazardous” conditions and “dangerous impacts” could hit without warning, the agency tweeted.
As conditions worsened on Sunday morning, the man, who had spent the night in frigid temperatures, feared the weather was "more than he was prepared to handle,” the county’s search-and-rescue team said.
The case is among several recent close calls involving hikers across the country. In October, a hiker who got lost exploring Colorado’s highest peak, ignored rescuers’ calls and text messages because he or she did not recognize the phone number. Local authorities sent out a team of at least eight rescuers who embarked on an hours-long search, only to be notified that the hiker had safely returned to their lodging. | null | null | null | null | null |
Those seeking to thwart democracy have long used forged documents
Former president Donald Trump departs after speaking at a rally at the Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on Jan. 15 in Florence, Ariz. At the rally, Trump continued to make false claims about the 2020 election. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
By Ryan Skinnell
On Jan. 10, just days after the anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, Politico reporter Nicholas Wu broke the news that in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election — while President Donald Trump and his allies were falsely alleging that widespread voter fraud had occurred — some Trump supporters in Michigan and Arizona filed forged election documents with the National Archives that incorrectly certified the Trump-Pence ticket as the winner of those states. Some Trump supporters in three other states have since been accused of doing the same.
While this unfolding forgery scandal is shocking, it’s not a new phenomenon. In fact, forged documents have a long history in anti-democracy movements around the world. Called “patriotic forgeries,” this duplicitous effort to pass off falsified documents in the name of love of country has long been used to undermine democratic systems.
The term “patriotic forgeries” comes from one of the most infamous episodes in French history: the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of passing military secrets to Germany. He was innocent, but French military officer Hubert-Joseph Henry and like-minded conservative activists (“anti-Dreyfusards”) believed Dreyfus was fundamentally a traitor because he was Jewish. And so, Henry forged official documents to support treason charges against him.
Henry’s forgery was immediately obvious to French military authorities, but high-ranking officials suppressed the evidence to make an example of Dreyfus. He represented France’s liberal democratic culture, which included expanding secularism, diversity and civil rights, and they hated him for it. The documents became central to his conviction, which anti-Dreyfusards then rallied around to prove that democracy and civil rights were inherently corrupt.
The forged documents were revealed in 1898 and Henry was arrested. Rather than face the humiliation of a trial, he took his own life.
By the time the forgeries came to light, anti-Dreyfusards had built a cult around despising Dreyfus. As a result, they saw Henry as a martyr, not a villain. After news of Henry’s suicide broke, the French author and critic Charles Maurras eulogized the colonel, opining: “Your unhappy forgery will be counted among your best acts of war.” Maurras was an anti-Dreyfusard and virulent antisemite. Like Henry, Maurras believed Dreyfus’s Jewishness made him inherently traitorous. And so, Maurras wasn’t bothered by Henry’s forgery. He defended it in the French press, declaring it a “faux patriotique” — or patriotic forgery.
Dreyfusards and their sympathizers ridiculed such ideas. English poet George Barlow, for instance, derided it as the novel theory of “forgery committed for the love of one’s country!” But the most prominent Dreyfusards, including Émile Zola, Marcel Proust and Georges Clemenceau, largely ignored Maurras and used the forgery revelation to push for a review of Dreyfus’s conviction.
But the faux patriotique persisted and became a rallying cry for France’s anti-democracy crusaders. In the days immediately following Maurras’s declaration of patriotic forgery, anti-Dreyfusards published similar articles in newspapers throughout France. Antisemitic attacks multiplied in the following weeks, and conservative activists organized mass meetings and threatened war if Dreyfus’s conviction was overturned because of Henry’s forgeries.
The mere matter of falsified documents, announced two years after they’d been used to re-convict Dreyfus, did little to change anti-democracy conservatives’ opinions — in fact, it hardened their commitment to the cause. One conservative, antisemitic newspaper, La Libre Parole, raised more than 130,000 francs from more than 15,000 people for Henry’s wife to use to file a libel suit against a journalist who accused him of treason. Maurras went on to found the antisemitic, anti-democracy, protofascist Action Française movement, which waged violent attacks on democracy throughout Europe well into the 1930s.
But using patriotic forgery to attack democracy wasn’t unique to France. The most obvious example is “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a noxious antisemitic tract purporting to be a centuries-old secret blueprint for global Jewish domination.
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were adherents to the “Protocols,” which they knew was forged, probably by Russian intelligence agents around 1903. Yet, the forgery was beside the fact, as it always is with a faux patriotique.
Like Maurras, Hitler and Goebbels were undaunted. According to Goebbels’s biographer, Peter Longerich, the Nazi propaganda minister “accepted the ‘inner’ authenticity of the protocols” because the tract supported the Nazis’ hypernational patriotism. Hitler claimed that “Jews invented the mass seduction of liberal democracy,” and the Nazis used the “Protocols” as a basis to attack both throughout the 1920s.
The “Protocols” became a cornerstone of 20th century anti-democratic rhetoric and continues to circulate widely in anti-democratic circles. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, nearly 80 percent of U.S. respondents who agreed with the “Protocols” also agreed with QAnon, a “patriotic” conspiracy theory organized around undermining American democracy.
As yet, no one has defended the pro-Trump forged elector certificates as patriotic. And that is a good thing. But the mere act of forging electoral certificates highlights the danger American democracy continues to face. Patriotic or otherwise, forgeries represent an advance of anti-democratic activism in the Republican Party.
Fake news, propaganda and conspiracy theories are not generally subject to legal action, but forgeries are. Anyone willing to take that step is banking on the collapse of American legal institutions and processes.
If the faux Henry episode teaches us anything, it’s that we cannot allow the elector-certificate forgeries to fade into oblivion. It’s vital that the perpetrators be brought to justice, but it’s equally vital that Americans recognize how dangerous these patriotic forgeries truly are. | null | null | null | null | null |
Students are protesting covid policies — and the adults who won’t listen to them
For a century, student activists have demanded a say in their schools
Demonstrators hold signs and chant during a student walkout over coronavirus pandemic safety measures at Chicago Public Schools. (Cheney Orr/Bloomberg News)
By Jack Hodgson
Jack Hodgson recently completed his PhD in History at Northumbria University, England, where he is an associate lecturer. His research examines children’s engagement with American Communism, children’s experiences of war, and the history of children’s rights.
The omicron variant of the coronavirus is causing serious challenges for public school administrators, but adult authorities seem divided over how to act. They face pressure from all sides, with some demanding they increase mitigation tactics to slow the spread of covid-19 or move to remote learning while others insist that they carry on as “normal.” In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and Mayor Eric Adams (D) have defended continuing in-person teaching, with Adams calling schools “the safest place for our children.”
Some students disagree. A junior at Brooklyn Technical High School told the New York Post “we don’t feel safe at school” because of the health risks to students and their families during the omicron surge. Moreover, because of illness absences and teachers in isolation, in-person schooling has not been synonymous with learning. Some students have reported being shepherded into auditoriums to be supervised but not taught due to a lack of teachers. Students in several cities have staged protests, walkouts and strikes.
Adults would regret not taking the JSYWL seriously. Over the next few years under a new name, the Young Pioneers of America (YPA), the group staged school strikes nationwide from New York to Los Angeles. Conservative adult organizations including the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution condemned the YPA and demanded that police use “physical force” to end children’s school demonstrations. Education officials dismissed using such force as “un-American.” But children wrote in to the periodical Young Comrade to insist that “the police can’t scare us.”
The YPA in New York held numerous protests concerning their school conditions. The city’s public school system was in something of a crisis due to aging infrastructure, budget limitations and huge increases in enrollment following World War I. The city’s decision to end a subsidized meals program in favor of a profiteering private concessions system infuriated many working-class children and parents who became very willing to support students striking from schools. Like striking students in 2022, these students of the 1920s felt that their welfare and safety was being disregarded in favor of economic factors and the convenience of adults in power.
In August 1925, students at P.S. 216 in the Bronx refused to attend school at the start of the new school year, citing the “traffic danger” of a busy road and demanding a crossing patrol be implemented. Their demands were met. Later, in February 1927, an entire class at one school refused to attend school until the heating in their classroom was fixed, complaining they were all suffering head colds.
That same year students at Brooklyn’s Thomas Jefferson High School staged a walkout, chanting their slogan, “More schools, less firetraps.” Over 1,000 students were enrolled at the school, which had only four exits. Further demands were printed in Young Comrade, including “a seat for every pupil,” “sanitary conditions” and “better ventilation.” Meanwhile students at P.S. 19 and P.S. 20 in Williamsburg went on strike with the support of their parents to protest overcrowding. In 1929, students at Brooklyn’s P.S. 109 held a mass meeting to protest their school’s damp basement lunchroom and the reopening of a previously condemned annex to ease overcrowding. The school called the police to report an unpermitted gathering, and New York Police Department Radical Bureau detectives detained several students, who were later released without charge.
What’s more, student protesters applied what they learned through the protests to later activism. Jessie Taft would go on to organize striking women in New York’s laundry industry and made headlines for chaining herself to a hotel balcony as part of a 1936 protest. Saul Wellman organized striking truckers on Long Island during the Depression before joining the Lincoln Brigade to fight fascism in Spain. In the 1950s, he organized striking auto-industry workers in Detroit as chair of the Michigan State Communist Party. The YPA’s most famous alumnus, Bronx orphan Harry Eisman, was elected as head of the International Children’s Congress in Moscow while he was held in a New York reformatory. He later earned an Order of the Red Star following Red Army service at the Battle of Stalingrad. | null | null | null | null | null |
We stopped tracking coronavirus cases at the University of Florida. Here’s why.
Our covid ‘dashboard’ had reported more cases than any other university in the country. But the data was increasingly unreliable.
Students wear masks on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville on Sept. 1. (Phelan M. Ebenhack/For The Washington Post)
By Michael Lauzardo
Michael Lauzardo is an associate professor in the division of infectious diseases and global medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine, and deputy director of the university's Emerging Pathogens Institute.
For nearly two years, I oversaw the coronavirus “dashboard” at the University of Florida. On that site, we posted the number of tests performed at the university each day, the percentage that were positive and the total number of cases. We also relayed how many students and faculty members were in isolation or quarantine. The dashboard was a tool that people on our campus referred to, and that the national media monitored (along with similar dashboards at hundreds of other schools) as they tracked the coronavirus situation at colleges and universities. In a typical week, some 3,500 people consulted the site, and there were more than 240,000 page views over the course of the pandemic.
Our dashboard attracted an unusual amount of attention because we identified more coronavirus cases than any other higher-education institution in the country — some 14,500 from May 2020, when the university began steps to return to in-person instruction, through 2021.
On Dec. 31, we stopped updating the dashboard because I concluded that the numbers we were posting were no longer useful. This generated complaints, including accusations that we were covering up cases at a time when the situation was worsening by some measures. But so many students and staff were forgoing the school’s official testing site, and other sites that reported to us, in favor of at-home tests — and not reporting the results to us — that we lost confidence that our totals bore any relation to reality. We also knew that many students were experiencing mild covid-19 symptoms but attributing them to allergies or a cold, and so not reporting them. Still others didn’t test because they didn’t want to be barred from dining rooms and classrooms — a trend that increased over the course of the pandemic.
Higher-education reporters took note of our move — as did our community, sometimes vociferously. Among those who complained to me, some argued that transparency is an intrinsically important goal; some also said the dashboard helped them to make decisions about their own behavior (signaling when it was safe to go maskless in public indoor spaces, for example). But transparency is an illusion when the data is bad; likewise, you can’t make good decisions by looking at incomplete or misleading numbers. We at the University of Florida concluded that the pandemic had entered a new chapter, and testing and reporting strategies had to change, too.
Nationally, we are moving from the epidemic phase to the endemic phase, in which vaccinated people are less likely to get infected and far less likely to become seriously ill. Case numbers, even if they could be accurately measured, are far less important than such things as hospitalization numbers paired with vaccination status. As of Jan. 1, we ceded all authority to the Alachua County Department of Health to collect and report coronavirus-related information, ending the categorization of data at the university level.
From the beginning, the dashboard was integrally connected to the campus’s virus-fighting strategy — known as UF Health Screen, Test & Protect, or STP. (I directed that program from its start in May 2020 through the end of 2021.) We created it to support the return-to-campus effort, and we were affiliated with the county health department. All test results for students, faculty and staff were reported to STP, regardless of where the tests were done or which laboratory did them. We conducted more than 500,000 tests on campus, and private labs also reported to us the test results of university community members.
For the first year of the massive effort, we required testing for select groups that were at higher risk: basically, anybody attending face-to-face classes, living in dorms (or fraternity or sorority houses) or training in a medical field. We also did extensive contact tracing. The data was comprehensive, and, at a time when little was known about what the epidemic trends would be in a variety of university settings, it allowed us to develop knowledge of what worked in our setting.
For instance, in the fall of 2020, we had a steep rise in cases roughly five to seven days after students resumed classes. From the data we could see that most of the transmission was occurring, unsurprisingly, in residence halls. So we moved testing into the dorms; infected individuals were either placed in special isolation housing, asked to quarantine or given the option to leave campus. (Exposed people typically quarantined in place.) The spike lasted about four days, but the isolation plan led to a rapid drop in cases.
The data collected for the dashboard also let us see the effect of things beyond our control. There was another spike on campus in October 2020 that coincided with the opening of the bars frequented by students. More recently, the large (but still smaller overall) rise in cases during the delta variant wave was mitigated by the aggressive vaccine campaign that preceded it.
Among universities, as I mentioned, we led the country in the total number of coronavirus cases — an unenviable category in which to be No. 1. Many commentators inferred that this must have reflected what they saw as a generally disastrous approach to the pandemic in Florida in general. In reality, I would argue, the high numbers stemmed from our aggressive testing program (as many as 3,000 tests a day), which gave us better information than some of our peer institutions had.
I disagree with many of my state’s coronavirus policies: Beginning in the summer of 2021, the university was forbidden to require masks, to mandate testing or to ask students about vaccination status. But the university itself has had decent policies to fight the virus (less so, admittedly, after those state rules went into effect): We tested and followed the numbers; we gave three N95 masks to every member of the faculty and staff (and kept them on offer afterward); we conducted (as mentioned) aggressive contact tracing, isolation and quarantine. We required masks for as long as we were allowed — and voluntary use remains high. We vaccinated high-risk faculty and staff as soon as vaccines were available and vaccinated 19,000 students in the first week students were eligible.
As of this writing, we are unaware of any deaths that occurred among our employees and students from a work or classroom exposure. (Overall student enrollment at the university is about 53,000.) To my knowledge there were two deaths of staff members that were due to exposures off campus.
We’d already begun to transition the services my office provided — testing, vaccination and so on — back to the county and student services in November because of decreasing cases and increasing endemicity. But we retained the ability to rapidly scale testing back up. And when the omicron variant hit, we scaled up big time: We went from about 1,000 tests per week in early December to 1,500 daily now. Of those, roughly 20 to 25 percent are positive. Life on campus, however, is surprisingly normal. Students who test positive are isolated or leave campus, but they can continue their coursework online. A few public events have been canceled or delayed, but many continue.
How would numbers on a dashboard change behavior these days? Everyone should wear a proper mask when indoors, get vaccinated and boosted, and stay home if they are sick. You don’t need to track cases day by day to grasp these fundamentals (assuming you could track them accurately).
We absolutely need more data in the fight against the coronavirus. We need to know who is being hospitalized for covid as opposed to with it. We will need to know how future variants differ in their ability to cause severe disease. What we don’t need is a catchall of whatever information happens to be available — including wildly imprecise case counts that include people with symptoms resembling a cold. That’s why we decided to stop updating the dashboard at the University of Florida. | null | null | null | null | null |
Two were hit-and-runs, police said
Dana Hedgpeth
Today at 10:08 p.m. EST|Updated today at 6:33 a.m. EST
Three pedestrians were killed in separate traffic incidents Monday in Montgomery County, according to police. Authorities described two as hit-and-runs.
In one of the hit-and-run incidents, a woman was struck shortly before 6:30 p.m. while crossing Veirs Mill Road at Ferrara Avenue in the Wheaton area, police said. The driver of the vehicle did not remain at the scene, they said.
The site is just north of the Capital Beltway in the Hillandale area of Montgomery.
The victims in those two incidents were not immediately identified, pending the notification of their families.
In a third incident, a man was struck and killed on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway near the Colesville Road exit, according to the Maryland State Police.
Officials said the incident happened just after 11 p.m. when a vehicle struck the man, who was later identified as Danny J. Beckford, 32, of D.C., killing him. State police said the vehicle’s driver left the scene. | null | null | null | null | null |
By 11:30 a.m. Sunday, the rescuers headed up the mountain in a truck but swiftly encountered an issue, authorities said. The road, which had been closed off to all cars except emergency vehicles, was deemed unsafe. (Haywood County Search and Rescue)
Also on Friday, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) warned people in his state “to prepare for a significant incoming winter storm” and to pay close attention to local weather forecasts. Hours later, the NWS Raleigh forecast office upgraded its winter storm watch to a weather advisory — “hazardous” conditions and “dangerous impacts” could hit without warning, the agency tweeted.
As conditions worsened Sunday morning, the man, who had spent the night in frigid temperatures, feared the weather was “more than he was prepared to handle,” the county’s search-and-rescue team said.
The case is among several recent close calls involving hikers across the country. In October, a hiker who got lost exploring Colorado’s highest peak ignored rescuers’ calls and text messages because he or she did not recognize the phone number. Local authorities sent out a team of at least eight rescuers who embarked on an hours-long search, only to be notified that the hiker had safely returned to their lodging. | null | null | null | null | null |
CAIRO — About a dozen people were killed and others injured in retaliatory airstrikes on the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, overnight, Houthi officials said on their website Tuesday.
The UAE is a partner of the coalition that has been battling the Houthis since 2015, shortly after the group took over the Yemeni capital. On Monday, police in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, said that three petroleum tanker trunks had exploded near the city’s port and that a “minor fire” broke out at the city’s international airport. The police said initial investigations suggested drones may have been involved in the incidents. Two Indian nationals and one Pakistani were killed in the attacks, police said.
An airstrike killed 14 people in Sanaa during strikes across the city launched by the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi group officials said Jan. 18. (Reuters)
UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan condemned the Houthi attacks and said in a statement that “those responsible for this unlawful targeting of our country will be held accountable.” | null | null | null | null | null |
We care about how to value “risk free” because it’s the most systemically important asset in financial markets. It determines the value of pretty much everything: stocks, lending collateral, bond yields, investment allocation. The risk-free rate is the foundation of asset pricing; if it’s askew, so are markets.
In theory, the risk-free rate should reflect how much you need to pay investors to postpone spending today until tomorrow. But in reality, the rate is determined by policy, and that’s become even more true since the pandemic. The government both supplies and buys risk free bonds. Fed policy aims to lower the risk-free rate (to spur investment) in bad times by buying lots of bonds, and to increase the rate by selling bonds when the economy overheats. | null | null | null | null | null |
Scholars estimate that the Chinese government has detained over 1 million Uyghurs and placed them in reeducation camps in an effort to assimilate the mostly Muslim minority that’s native to the northwest Xinjiang region, The Washington Post reported. Since 2017, Uyghurs have been sent to the camps for wearing headscarves or long beards, or traveling outside the country.
Palihapitiya has spoken about how his family fled Sri Lanka amid civil unrest and moved to Canada when he was 6, the New Yorker reported in a profile of the venture capitalist.
In November, Biden said he was considering a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, a measure that would allow U.S. athletes to compete in the Games but bar government officials from attending, The Post reported. Biden followed that move in December by signing a bipartisan law that bans all imports from Xinjiang unless importers can prove the products were not made using forced labor.
On Saturday’s podcast, Palihapitiya said some issues important to him included climate change and “America’s crumbling and decrepit health care infrastructure.” But when it came to “a segment of a class of people in another country” such as the Uyghurs, he said, “not until we can take care of ourselves will I prioritize them over us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Many defenders of Black, Native American and women’s political rights saw Prohibition as increasing freedom
(Rick Bowmer/AP)
One hundred and three years ago this week, the United States ratified the 18th Amendment, adding the prohibition of liquor traffic to the Constitution. Though it was repealed in 1933, Prohibition still looms large in U.S. historical memory. American politicians and pundits still trot out Prohibition’s ghost to portray any policy they dislike as a “big government” infringement on individual liberty.
Observers regularly compare a host of restrictions — on marijuana, guns, vaping, soda or abortion, along with coronavirus vaccine mandates — to Prohibition, arguing that the era showed that limits on individual freedoms just don’t work. “Prohibition” has become an antonym for liberty.
But these invocations get Prohibition history flat-out wrong. The ways in which we think about liberty and freedom today are quite different from how Americans thought about them in the early 20th century. By looking at the history of Prohibition, we can see how collective understandings of liberty and freedom have changed over time.
Prohibition was about liberty, not repression
As I chronicle in my book “Smashing the Liquor Machine,” the temperance movement that led to Prohibition was not about government dictating what you can or can’t do or drink. Instead, it began from an understanding of liberty that seems strange to many modern Americans.
The Constitution was founded on Enlightenment principles of freedom from government limits on the individual’s political rights. “Congress shall make no law,” the First Amendment says, preventing the free expression of religion, or “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These are political rights.
For much of American history, political rights were treated as separate from economic liberties, which — going back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations — involve the economic benefits of limiting government intervention in the market.
Before Prohibition, the Supreme Court repeatedly affirmed that there is no individual right to buy or sell and that government regulation of business practices does not “impair any one’s constitutional rights of liberty or property.”
That helps explain why prohibitionists thought that preventing the sale of alcohol could increase people’s freedom without undermining their political rights. They believed that commerce in addictive liquors undermined the liberty of ordinary people. The people who sold liquor were viewed as drug dealers are today — as traffickers in an addictive substance that undermined people’s free will.
Frederick Douglass — who was a prohibitionist, an abolitionist and an advocate for African American rights and women’s rights — was fond of saying, “All great reforms go together.” Abolitionism, suffragism, temperance and self-determination were all linked to the progressive ideal that no one has an inherent right to subjugate another for their own private gain.
This was the core argument made by Native American chiefs Little Turtle and Black Hawk, abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln, suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, civil rights trailblazers Ida B. Wells and Booker T. Washington, Democratic stalwart William Jennings Bryan and Republican Theodore Roosevelt.
In this globe-spanning social movement, prohibitionists campaigned against the liquor traffic — the predatory capitalists and imperial governments that had a vested financial interest in promoting the addiction and misery of their subjugated drinkers. For them, it was the corrupt saloonkeepers’ pursuit of profits that generated widespread male drunkenness, domestic violence, familial poverty and crime. Activists wanted the commerce — not the booze — prohibited.
Denied traditional political rights, marginalized and disenfranchised communities — Native Americans, African Americans and suffragist women — turned to social organization, protest and even violence to oppose their subordination to the profiteering traffic. As famed saloon-smasher Carry Nation said, “You wouldn’t give me the vote, so I had to use a rock!”
The government wants to shut down vaping? 100 years ago, the government urged soldiers to smoke.
Americans’ collective understanding of liberty changed
In the century since the 18th Amendment, Americans’ understanding of freedom has fundamentally shifted. This is in part thanks to the influence of libertarian economists after World War II.
Public writers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman had a different understanding of freedom. For example, Friedman, in his best-selling book “Free to Choose” — written with his wife, Rose — argued that capitalist free markets were a “necessary condition” for political freedom. This new thinking, which Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan enacted into policies, held that state restrictions upon buying and selling infringed citizens’ political rights.
That altered understanding is behind conservatives’ condemnation of President Woodrow Wilson for having taken away our “freedom to drink” — even though Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, which enforced Prohibition. It also explains why liberals blame “moralizing” conservative evangelicals, even though there was no religious political awakening in the Progressive Era. Both see Prohibition as an infringement of liberties, forgetting how its protagonists saw it as a means to protect freedom.
Some modern commentators slight the 18th Amendment as purportedly the only amendment that limited Americans’ freedoms. But the 13th Amendment explicitly took away White Americans’ “liberty” to enslave other human beings. Prohibitionists, abolitionists and suffragists were all united in the belief that every individual has the right to be free from subjugation for profit.
The opioid litigation has more than 2,000 plaintiffs. Here's what that means behind the scenes.
The mistake has consequences for modern debate
When people complain about government restrictions today, they often start from the belief that political freedom starts with the freedom to engage in market relations. Some business owners, for example, have invoked a “constitutional right” to work that does not exist, to justify opening up their place of business despite pandemic restrictions.
Similarly, when politicians or pundits condemn public policies they don’t like as a new kind of Prohibition, they reveal that they don’t understand what Prohibition actually was. Concepts of liberty and freedom are forever changing, so that a movement that sought to increase freedom by smashing an economic machinery of addiction in the early 20th century has come to be seen as a fundamental infringement of freedom today.
Mark Lawrence Schrad (@VodkaPolitics) is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University and author of “Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition” (Oxford University Press, 2021). | null | null | null | null | null |
Law enforcement personnel continue the investigation to the hostage incident at Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, USA, 16 January 2022. (Ralph Lauer/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
BLACKBURN, England – The armed British man who took four hostages inside a Texas synagogue during Saturday services was known to security officials in the United Kingdom, two officials told The Washington Post, speaking under condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.
The BBC reported Tuesday that MI5, Britain’s counter-intelligence and security agency, investigated Malik Faisal Akram in 2020 and had him a watch list as a “subject of interest,” but concluded he no longer posed a risk. Britain’s Home Office declined to comment on the investigation on Tuesday.
The hostages, which included a rabbi and three congregants from Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in the suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth, escaped while Akram was confirmed dead after an 11-hour standoff with law enforcement. It remains unclear if Akram was killed by police or if he took his own life.
Akram repeatedly referenced Aafia Siddiqui — an American-educated Pakistani woman widely known as “Lady al-Qaeda,” who was convicted on terrorism charges in 2010 — and called for her release.
People who heard him on the live stream of services, which carried part of the ordeal, said Akram chose the synagogue because it appeared to be the closest gathering of Jews to a federal facility in Fort Worth where Siddiqui is being held on an 86-year sentence for trying to kill U.S. soldiers.
Akram, who is originally from Blackburn in the English county of Lancashire, grew up in a well-known family, his father the founder of a small mosque. He struggled with mental health issues, according to his brother, Gulbar Akram, who declined to elaborate further.
Britain’s Greater Manchester Police said Sunday that two teenagers were taken into custody for questioning by counterterrorism officers and that the department would assist U.S. officials with the inquiry, but declined to share further details.
Biden on Sunday said that the suspect was believed to have purchased the weapons when he landed “on the street," but cautioned that officials do not yet have “all the facts.”
“Allegedly, he purchased it on the street. Now what that means, I don’t know. Whether he purchased it from an individual in a homeless shelter or a homeless community... because that’s where he said he was — it’s hard to tell.”
Akram arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport on Dec. 29, officials have said. In a livestream of Saturday morning’s service, Akram said he had spent 16 hours somewhere in the synagogue’s area, “walking around with what I have in my bag, and with my ammo.” Law enforcement officials did not say what explosive devices they found but conducted evacuations in the area while officers disposed “of some ordinances on the scene.”
– Zapotosky reported from Washington. Hassan reported from London. | null | null | null | null | null |
Clyde Bellecourt, co-founder of American Indian Movement, dies 85
Clyde Bellecourt, a leader of the American Indian Movement, speaks at a news conference in 1973. (Jim Wells/Associated Press)
Clyde Bellecourt, a leader in the Native American struggle for civil rights and a founder of the American Indian Movement, died Jan. 11 at his home in Minneapolis. He was 85.
The cause was cancer, his wife, Peggy Bellecourt, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Although often overshadowed by fellow AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means, Mr. Bellecourt helped start the American Indian Movement in 1968 as a local organization in Minneapolis that sought to grapple with issues of police brutality and discrimination against Native Americans.
One of the group’s first acts was to organize a patrol to monitor allegations of police harassment and brutality against Native Americans who had settled in Minneapolis. Members had cameras, asked police for badge numbers and monitored radio scanner traffic for mention of anyone they might recognize as Indigenous to ensure their rights weren’t being violated.
The group quickly became a national force. It led major national protests in the 1970s, including a march to Washington in 1972 called the Trail of Broken Treaties.
At times, the American Indian Movement’s tactics were militant, which led to splintering in the group. In one of its most well-known actions, the group took over Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973 to protest U.S. and tribal governments. (Wounded Knee, the site of a government massacre of Lakota people in 1890, was chosen for its historical resonance.)
The 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee by AIM turned violent. Two Indians were killed, and one federal agent was paralyzed amid a shootout.
Mr. Bellecourt was also involved in more peaceful endeavors. Under his influence, the group called out instances of cultural appropriation, provided job training, sought to improve housing and education for Indigenous people, provided legal assistance, spotlighted environmental injustice and questioned government policies that were seen as anti-Indigenous.
Mr. Bellecourt was among those who protested the 1992 Super Bowl in Minneapolis, when the Washington Football Team (then called the Washington Redskins) beat the Buffalo Bills. The Washington team dropped its old name in 2020 after decades of criticism that it was offensive to Native Americans and after pressure from sponsors amid a national reckoning on race. Mr. Bellecourt long called for the team’s name to be changed.
Clyde Howard Bellecourt was born on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota on May 8, 1936, and spent his earliest years in a home with no running water or electricity. His father was a wounded and disabled World War I veteran. The family, which lived on his pension, eventually moved to Minneapolis.
Starting as a youth, when he was sent to a state reformatory, Mr. Bellecourt amassed a long criminal record. As a young man, he went to prison on burglary and armed robbery charges. During one of his prison stints, he met another Native American inmate, Eddie Benton-Banai, and they partnered in starting a cultural program behind prison walls to teach Indigenous prisoners about their history and encourage them to learn a useful trade or complete their education.
The group grew into the American Indian Movement, which continues to have chapters nationally and is based in Minneapolis.
Over the years, Mr. Bellecourt spoke of his struggle with addiction, and he was convicted of distributing the hallucinogen LSD in 1986. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison and served about two. He then resumed his activism.
A complete list of survivors could not be confirmed.
His memoir, ''The Thunder Before the Storm” (2016), was co-written by Jon Lurie. The title comes from the English translation of his Ojibwe name.
— The Washington Post contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
What questions do you have about the Washington Football Team’s offseason? Ask The Post.
That said, this is an enormously important offseason for Ron Rivera’s team, one that will have a new nickname when it takes its next snap. Because of that, we thought it would be a good idea to have Nicki Jhabvala, one of The Post’s excellent beat writers, join me for a little back-and-forth about the state of the franchise.
We’ll start publishing answers at 1 p.m. Tuesday, but please feel free to send some questions early. Thanks for stopping by!
Send us your questions below. The question box includes a space for your name, but this is optional. Your question may be edited for accuracy and clarity. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police: 3 pedestrians killed in 3 crashes
HILLANDALE, Md. — Three pedestrians are dead after three separate crashes in one Maryland county on Monday night, police said.
Montgomery County police said the first crash happened just after 5:30 p.m. near New Hampshire Avenue and Elton Road in Hillandale, when a Toyota Camry hit a 70-year-old Adelphi man, WTOP-FM reported. The driver remained on the scene.
Less than an hour later, a 59-year-old woman was killed as she tried to cross the street about eight miles away at the intersection of Veirs Mill Road and Ferrara Avenue in Wheaton. The driver of the car left without checking on the pedestrian, police said. Police are looking for a silver or light blue Volkswagen Passat with damage to its front bumper, grille, side mirror or windshield.
A 32-year-old Washington, D.C., man was killed in another hit-and-run crash after 11 p.m. on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway before Colesville Road, Maryland State Police said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Washington Post Helping Hand raises a record-breaking $402k for Washington, D.C.-area nonprofits
The Washington Post Helping Hand today announced it has raised a record-breaking $402,000 in its first season partnering with three new local nonprofits: Bread for the City, Friendship Place and Miriam’s Kitchen. Through donations from Washington Post readers, and a generous donation from the Robert Schattner Foundation of $150,000, Helping Hand exceeded its seasonal goal of $250,000.
“We are grateful for the support of Washington Post readers in helping Post Helping Hand far exceed its fundraising goal for the season,” said Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of The Washington Post. “Since its inception in 2014, Post Helping Hand has raised more than $1.8 million for local charities fighting homelessness, poverty and hunger in our community.”
Post Helping Hand was created to facilitate significant financial donations directly to human service nonprofit organizations in the Washington, D.C. region through Local Columnist John Kelly’s high-impact, in-depth narratives about those in need and the programs that assist them. Visit www.posthelpinghand.com to learn more. | null | null | null | null | null |
Teddy Amenabar
Following the news of the acquisition, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Kotick will stay on as CEO of Activision Blizzard, reporting to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. In an email sent to Activision Blizzard employees Tuesday and shared with The Washington Post, Kotick wrote he would stay on as CEO “with the same passion and enthusiasm” he had when he started the job in 1991. He wrote that the deal will close sometime by June 2023, pending regulatory approval, and until then, the company will stay autonomous from Microsoft.
“As a company, Microsoft is committed to our journey for inclusion in every aspect of gaming, among both employees and players,” Spencer in Tuesday’s blog post announcing the deal. “We deeply value individual studio cultures. We also believe that creative success and autonomy go hand-in-hand with treating every person with dignity and respect. We hold all teams, and all leaders, to this commitment. We’re looking forward to extending our culture of proactive inclusion to the great teams across Activision Blizzard.”
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is more than four times bigger than the previous record sum paid for a video game publisher set earlier in January when Take-Two Interactive announced plans to purchase mobile game maker Zynga for $12.7 billion. In 2020, Microsoft paid $8.1 billion to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of popular video game developer Bethesda Softworks.
Activision Blizzard will become the most expensive acquisition for Microsoft today, beyond its gaming additions. In 2016, Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for the professional networking site LinkedIn. For context, 10 years ago Disney paid $4.05 billion to acquire the rights to the Star Wars franchise via Lucasfilm.
Last week, in an interview on the New York Times podcast “Sway,” technology writer Kara Swisher asked Spencer about the sexual assault allegations in The Wall Street Journal’s report on Activision Blizzard.
“I always feel for people working on any team, my own teams, other teams. I think people should feel safe and included in any workplace that they’re in,” Spencer said on the podcast. “I’m saddened and sickened when I hear about workplace environments that cause such distress and destruction of individuals and teams.”
Last November, Spencer wrote an email to staff explaining that Microsoft was reevaluating their partnership with Activision. Spencer told Swisher that Microsoft had changed how the company partners with Activision Blizzard but didn’t go into any details. Spencer went on to say that “Xbox’s history is not spotless” and he didn’t want to chastise other gaming companies.
“This isn’t about, for us as Xbox, virtue-shaming other companies,” Spencer said. “If I can learn from them or I can help with the journey that we’ve been on on Xbox by sharing what we’ve done and what we’ve built, I’d much rather do that than get into any kind of finger-wagging at other companies that are out there.
Michael Pachter, a Wedbush Securities analyst who focuses on the video game industry, noted that the deal is significantly larger than what would be warranted given Activision Blizzard’s closing stock price last week at $65 per share. The stock is up nearly 30 percent Tuesday after the market opened.
“Microsoft gets $8 to 9 billion of revenue and $3 billion or so of annual free cash flow, plus a ton of great intellectual property and great studios," Pachter said. “They might decide to stop offering games on PlayStation, which could raise antitrust issues, but other than that, I think the deal goes through.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The question is whether this law does require school boards to implement such universal masking. If so, Youngkin’s executive order might not have any force, and might be vulnerable to a court challenge, says Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
So Youngkin’s executive order might not even survive legal scrutiny, which makes it even more galling that he’s posing as the scourge of power-abusing school boards. It’s probably only a matter of time until his order is challenged by one party or another, Tobias says, and this will have to be settled by the courts.
But whatever is to be on that front, Youngkin faces an immediate choice: When it comes to school boards that want to continue their mask requirements, will he take the DeSantis route and try to bulldoze them into compliance? | null | null | null | null | null |
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells CEOs businesses are not ‘climate police’
BlackRock's Larry Fink said in a letter to fellow CEOs that "Capitalism has the power to shape society and act as a powerful catalyst for change. But businesses can’t do this alone." (Mark Lennihan/AP)
Shareholder activists had been trying to persuade BlackRock — which frequently controls the largest block of shares in major public corporations and has $10 trillion in assets under management — to use its clout to press for measures that might slow down climate change and persuade companies reach net-zero emissions.
The BlackRock annual letters to chief executives and shareholders have become closely watched ever since 2012 when Fink publicly criticized his fellow CEOs of pursuing short-term strategies. He also took aim at what he saw as excessive dividends and share buybacks.
Fink also cautioned that private businesses could not be expected to do too much. This came after the November international climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, that included a large number of businesses. International climate negotiators sought to persuade businesses for large investments in ways to slow climate change.
BlackRock has emerged as a leader in sustainable investing, one of Wall Street’s fastest-growing businesses. One study last year by the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance found that over $35 trillion, or more than one in three of the world’s professionally managed dollars, is now invested in sustainable funds.
But because there are no regulations around these terms in the United States, it’s unclear how much of those funds are actually supporting social or environmental purposes. BlackRock’s U.S. Carbon Transition Readiness ETF, launched last year, includes holdings in Exxon, Marathon Petroleum, Chevron and other fossil fuel companies.
Fink said that BlackRock would ask companies to set short-, medium-, and long-term targets for greenhouse gas reductions. “These targets, and the quality of plans to meet them, are critical to the long-term economic interests of your shareholders,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ralph Emery, longtime country music broadcaster, dies at 88
Ralph Emery is hugged by country music star Barbara Mandrell after she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009. (Mark Humphrey/AP)
Ralph Emery, who became known as the dean of country music broadcasters over more than a half-century in radio and television, died Jan. 15 at a Nashville hospital. He was 88.
His son Michael Emery confirmed the death to the Associated Press. The cause was not disclosed.
Beginning his career at small radio stations and then moving into television as well, Mr. Emery was probably best known for his work on the Nashville Network cable channel. From 1983 to 1993, he was host of the channel’s live talk-variety show “Nashville Now,” earning the title “the Johnny Carson of cable television” for his interviewing style. From 2007 to 2015, Mr. Emery hosted a weekly program on RFD-TV, a satellite and cable TV channel.
“Ralph Emery’s impact in expanding country music’s audience is incalculable,” Kyle Young, chief executive of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said in a statement. “On radio and on television, he allowed fans to get to know the people behind the songs. Ralph was more a grand conversationalist than a calculated interviewer, and it was his conversations that revealed the humor and humanity of Tom T. Hall, Barbara Mandrell, Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins and many more. Above all, he believed in music and in the people who make it.”
Walter Ralph Emery was born March 10, 1933 in McEwen, Tenn. After attending broadcasting school in Nashville, he worked at radio stations in Tennessee and Louisiana before signing on at Nashville’s WSM in 1957.
Mr. Emery hosted “Pop! Goes the Country,” a syndicated TV show, from 1974 through 1980. From 1981 to 1983, he was host of “Nashville Alive,” on cable station WTBS.
On the talk-variety show “Nashville Now,” Mr. Emery sat at a desk, interviewing country music stars and others, much like talk-show hosts. He published two memoirs and a book about country music.
Survivors include his wife, Joy; three sons; five grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Mr. Emery had a brief recording career in the early 1960s, but he later said, “I’m not a singer and that was one of the major problems.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Boris Johnson rode into power on a wave of populism akin to the tide that propelled Donald Trump in the United States. Trump once dubbed Johnson “Britain Trump,” and the prime minister, like the former president, emerged immune from each scandal, gaffe and political firefight, basking in undimmed ratings from his base. Then suddenly, last week, something changed. Now Johnson’s two-and-a-half-year premiership appears to be entering its endgame.
For once, the prime minister had nowhere to go. Characteristically, he smirked and mumbled and shuffled. He failed to show up for Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament. The following day, he arrived with a lawyered statement. Donors and MPs from his own side joined calls for him to resign. One MP cried in Parliament while recalling his mother-in-law dying alone because the family had to obey the rules while Johnson flouted them in secret. | null | null | null | null | null |
Homes in New Canaan, Conn., mourn the death of Teddy Balkind. (Hayley Salvatore/TWP)
Over the past few weeks, the ice hockey community has come together to mourn one of its own, placing sticks outside front doors and starting games with a moment of silence to honor the life of Connecticut high school hockey player Teddy Balkind.
Balkind, a sophomore at St. Luke’s School in New Canaan, Conn., died after an opposing player’s skate blade cut his neck in a collision during a junior varsity game on Jan. 6. Though such fatal incidents are rare, Balkind’s death has reignited calls for neck protection to be a mandatory piece of equipment among youth hockey players.
In just over a week, more than 85,000 people have signed an online petition started by Balkind’s close friend, Sam Brande, pushing USA Hockey to make neck guards mandatory at all levels of play. The governing bodies of Canada and Sweden mandate the use of neck guards among amateur players; USA Hockey, meanwhile, recommends the use but does not mandate them — instead leaving it up to the discretion of hockey associations in each region.
The governing body of all amateur hockey within D.C., Maryland and Virginia is the Potomac Valley Amateur Hockey Association (PVAHA). Its rules and regulations handbook — last updated Aug. 9, 2021 — makes no mention of neck guards. Most high school hockey players in the area opt not to wear a neck guard, which are described as uncomfortable and cumbersome.
“I can tell you personally that nobody would wear them unless their parents made them,” said Jason Olden, a former United States Hockey League player and co-founder of Warroad Original Hockey Co.
Warroad, a hockey gear company co-founded by the Washington Capitals’ T.J. Oshie, has produced skate-cut resistant clothing since 2018. In August, the company prototyped a new style of neck protection that aims to provide players with comfort while still protecting critical points of the neck. Dyneema, historically used to make durable climbing rope, is the main component in Warroad’s current cut-resistant technology, dubbed Cutlon, and upcoming neck protection. Warroad uses Dyneema over Kevlar or other traditionally tough fabrics.
With new innovations in neck protection that strive for comfort and protection, Olden hopes more youth hockey players will consider wearing neck guards to prevent fatal or career-ending injuries. Although Warroad’s neck protection will not be available for purchase until the fall, Olden reported that the Warroad site saw an 80 percent increase in sales of their cut-resistant products in the past week and a half.
“Statistically, yes, the odds are with you that you won’t have that kind of catastrophic injury,” Olden said, “but now it’s right in front of us, and it’s a tragedy that shouldn’t happen in our game.”
Last weekend’s VA Showcase in Virginia Beach was a competition full of top-tier performances, with new season records set by schools throughout the East Coast.
And it was Bullis that again showed some of the best relays Maryland has to offer. Led by Mirai Bernard, Morgan Bridges, Myla Greene and Sage Hinton, the Bulldogs grabbed a new U.S. No. 1 time in the girls’ 4x200, finishing in 1:39.19. Then Lauren Leath, Bernard, Greene and Hinton did it again in the 4x400, finishing in 3:49.69 for another No. 1 time.
The Bullis girls team isn’t new to dominating in the relays. It set a national record in 2018 in the 4x200 and has won in that event every year since. Only once did it finish anything other than first in the 4x400 at the VA Showcase.
But this year, because of covid-19 restrictions, Bullis got clearance to compete only three days before the showcase. Despite having to scramble to assemble their relay squad, the Bulldogs came ready.
“The vibe at the showcase, it was really electric because as as a team, we treat every day like it’s our last, you know, because of covid and everything,” Bernard said. “So I think everybody was just excited to get the opportunity to actually run at a meet.”
For Bridges, the 4x200 was her first time running as anchor.
“I wasn’t really scared for any of the endurance type thing, it was more like nervousness of my first real relay,” Bridges said. “It was just a bit nerve-racking, especially on anchor.”
Other top performances at the event included Walter Johnson’s Katie Dutko, who ran 11:02.22 in the 3,200 meters; Howard’s Kiara Murray, who registered 18-2.25 in the long jump; and the Bishop McNamara boys’ 4x400 relay team.
The event featured plenty of talent from outside the area, offering a glimpse of what to expect for teams looking to compete at the national level.
The day before Paul VI hosted its Panther Invitational this past weekend, Danny Lowell’s teammates were telling him this would be his day to bounce back. The 160-pounder had yet to make it over the hump in his senior season, consistently finding himself in second-place finishes.
And as Lowell pinned Episcopal’s Nick Carosi, who was ranked second in the state, he made his teammates’ words of encouragement turn into reality.
“One of my coaches came up to me and said, ‘I’m really proud of you,’ ” Lowell said. “I was really happy.”
The Panthers took first place at their tournament, besting Langley by 30 points.
Lowell and Keegan McMahon were among 15 Panthers to earn points, with McMahon taking the 126-pound title. After winning a state championship his freshman year, the junior continues to impress.
“It’s just exciting, and I feel accomplished,” McMahon said. “Because all the effort and work I put in all week — getting my weight down and training for that moment.”
Lowell — a senior who is closing in on 100 career wins — and McMahon have led Paul VI to an 8-2 start this year.
“They’re the whole package,” Coach Mike Eastman said. “They’ve got both sides of the work ethic, on and off the mat.”
Most online metrics place Good Counsel senior Sean Santos among the top handful of swimmers in Maryland, so at this point in his career, he’s accustomed to a high bar and a top time. But in Sunday’s 500 freestyle at the National Catholic Championships in Baltimore — where he won gold two years ago as a sophomore — the Georgia Tech commit had to settle for a third-place finish.
“I’m really hard on myself sometimes, and I think I just need to learn that it’s okay to be disappointed,” Santos said. “Now, it’s basically just focusing more on the long term rather than the short term.”
The slight dip in time is a distinctive part of the high school swim season, as meets in January and February often arrive at the climax of a taxing training cycle for the area’s most driven swimmers. Sunday’s final event was Santos’s 10th race or practice since the previous Monday, and while he was moderately disappointed in the result, he said most swimmers are keeping their focus on bigger races such as the National Club Swimming Association junior national championships in March.
Santos believes that also held for the winner of the event, Gonzaga’s J.T. Ewing, who has swum alongside Santos since the two were in elementary school.
“We’ve raced each other countless times,” Santos said. “He deserves it.” | null | null | null | null | null |
A previous version of this article misstated part of Chamath Palihapitiya's quote about America's health-care infrastructure. He called it "crippling," not "crumbling." This version has been corrected.
In November, President Biden said he was considering a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, a measure that would allow U.S. athletes to compete in the Games but bar government officials from attending, The Post reported. Biden followed that move in December by signing a bipartisan law that bans all imports from Xinjiang unless importers can prove the products were not made using forced labor.
On Saturday’s podcast, Palihapitiya said some issues important to him included climate change and “America’s crippling and decrepit health-care infrastructure.” But when it came to “a segment of a class of people in another country,” such as the Uyghurs, he said, “not until we can take care of ourselves will I prioritize them over us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Several sports leaders with ties to West Virginia signed a letter appealing to Manchin to support the Freedom to Vote Act.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) after a meeting attended by President Biden and Senate Democrats on voting rights and the filibuster on Capitol Hill on Jan. 13, 2022. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post) | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden speaks in Philadelphia on Jan. 16. (Saul Loeb/AFP)
It’s not new that Trump doesn’t have much of a policy agenda, of course. During the 2016 election, he was explicit in rejecting the idea that his candidacy required detailed policy positions. Running for reelection in 2020, his agenda was similarly diaphanous, centered almost entirely on restoring the country to where it was immediately before the pandemic. The Republican Party signed up, dropping any traditional platform development in favor of a policy that amounted to whatever Trump wants.
After all, Trump had learned the hard way that advocating for actual change was dangerous. His efforts to work with Congress on upending the Affordable Care Act led to depressed approval numbers and embarrassment at the hands of his longtime foil, former Arizona Sen. John McCain (R). After being backed into picking a fight over a border wall in late 2018, Trump forced the government into a shutdown before deploying unilateral executive action to redirect funding to the effort. No wonder he’s more interested in stoking partisan anger than proposing an actual policy agenda.
A central ideological difference between America’s political left and political right is support for government intervention. That holds within the Democratic caucus as well; moderates like Sinema and Manchin are ideologically less supportive of spending than, say, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Despite predictions that the Democratic caucus in the House would be held hostage by the whims of its left-wing, it was the moderate right that tripped up progress on Biden’s agenda last year.
After Biden was elected, he selected as his chief of staff an individual who’d played an unusually large role in a central part of the campaign debate. In an effort to rationalize his own response to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump repeatedly tried to compare it favorably (and enormously dishonestly) with the Obama administration’s response to an H1N1 virus outbreak in 2009 and 2010. That argument often hinged on comments made a few years ago by Ron Klain, who had been Biden’s chief of staff at the time and who would become Biden’s chief of staff in 2021.
“It’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Klain said of the administration’s H1N1 response during a 2019 event, comments that Trump used to suggest that the response was a near-disaster. But Klain was talking specifically about fumbles with the rollout of vaccines targeting that virus: Had the virus been deadlier, the country would have been in peril.
That was the end of Biden’s success at meeting expectations. The emergence of the delta variant last summer, coupled with broad Republican resistance to both vaccination and efforts to otherwise contain the spread of the virus, led to a surge in cases and deaths that was disproportionately centered in Republican areas. Biden’s qualified declarations of victory against the virus were severely undercut. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: “Capehart” with Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
MR. CAPEHART: Good morning, and welcome to the “Capehart” podcast on Washington Post Live. I am Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post.
President Biden faces more than a few challenges on the world stage--China, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, and the increasing worry that Russia will invade Ukraine. Diplomacy is at the heart of Biden's efforts to forestall conflicts and project American power around the world. Where a lot of that plays out is at the United Nations. Joining me now is the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
Ambassador, welcome back to "Capehart."
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Hi, Jonathan. How are you? Delighted to be here with you.
MR. CAPEHART: I am great. Thank you so much for coming back to the podcast but also for coming back now. There is so much breaking news to get to in this interview about Ukraine. Let's start with the news that hit just moments before we came on, and that is Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is headed to Ukraine this week. Do you know what precipitated the secretary of state's previously unplanned travel to the country?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Look, Jonathan, President Biden told all of us who are his diplomats that he wants to put diplomacy first. And our most important diplomat is Secretary Blinken, and he is using his platform to engage with all of our partners, including the Ukrainians. And while you may not have known about this in advance, it has always been on his agenda to engage with the Ukrainians on a regular basis, as I have engaged with them in New York, and with all of our partners in New York. We're putting diplomacy at the forefront of all of our engagements to address this issue. And we want to be able to engage with the Ukrainians on this. Secretary Biden and the--Secretary Blinken and President Biden both said we're not going to have discussions with the Russians about you without you. This is part of our diplomatic engagement, and it's not unusual.
MR. CAPEHART: No, I mean, I understand that the secretary of state has been--has been engaging with the Ukrainians out of public view, most likely, but this will be face to face. So, we shouldn't read anything into this face to face meeting this week, especially given the news that we all woke up to this morning, that the Russians have been withdrawing personnel from their--from their diplomatic outposts in Ukraine, and some are viewing that as potentially a prelude or a sign that an invasion is imminent?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Well, certainly, we will continue to engage with them on the diplomatic front. And any actions that we've seen that the Russians have taken that may indicate that they're moving forward will cause us to ramp up our efforts as well in terms of our engagements with our partners. So again, the secretary's trip to Ukraine announced this morning is part of that ramp-up of engagement.
MR. CAPEHART: Another story, or at least nugget within stories about what's happening over there is that news of--Russian military exercises in neighboring Belarus, and one of the concerns is that those military exercises could end up resulting in a permanent Russian presence in Belarus. And the concern behind that is that it would make it possible for the Russians to race over the border from the north, from the south from Crimea, and from the east. What's the concern the United States has about those military exercises?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I mean, we're concerned about the exercises. But we're also concerned about the buildup on the border with Ukraine. All of those signal to us that the Russians are looking at Ukraine in an aggressive way. So, it's not just one action. It's the accumulation of actions and the intensity of their actions that has--have caused us to raise our concerns about the situation and to encourage others to address this situation very, very aggressively.
MR. CAPEHART: As you mentioned, there are 106--you're talking about the massive troop buildup on the border with Ukraine, but there are 106,000 Russian troops, 1,500 tanks near its border. As we sit right now, how close is Russia to invading Ukraine?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: That's a question that only the Russians can answer for you. But their actions show to us that they are taking--making moves that would suggest that they have plans to invade Ukraine. And we will continue to engage with them diplomatically, and hopefully discourage them from taking that extraordinarily aggressive step. But should they decide to take that step, they know what our response will be. President Biden has made clear to President Putin that we will respond aggressively, and we are working with our allies who will support efforts to engage aggressively with the Russians on this.
MR. CAPEHART: And I want to--yeah.
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: So, our hope is, for the course of the next few days, that our diplomatic approach will work.
MR. CAPEHART: Okay, and I want to talk about the potential U.S. response or responses if the Russians do invade. But I do want to talk about some of the aggressive action--a few more aggressive actions that the Russians have taken. Within the last--within the last five days, on Friday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki accused the Russians of a quote "false flag operation" that the Russians were engaging in to make it look like the Ukrainians were being aggressors as a pretext for Russians retaliating. But at the same time, on that same day, Ukrainian government entities were hit with a cyberattack, with some of the--some of the government websites being hit with a warning that read, quote, "be afraid and expect the worst." That cyberattack came just a day after talks broke down between the Russians and the West. How alarming was that that cyberattack to the United States?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Well, look, we--I don't agree that talks have broken down. We are continuing to engage with the Russians. You know that it was announced this morning that Secretary Blinken spoke with Foreign Minister Lavrov. So, we're still talking to the Russians. But we're also watching their actions, and we're watching their actions very, very closely. The cyberattack that took place over the weekend is being looked at and analyzed to see where that cyberattack came from. We know that the Russians will use other tactics to undermine a country, and so we're expecting these kinds of actions to take place. The misinformation, the disinformation that the Ukrainians themselves are initiating actions against Russia, this is all part of their playbook. We understand it quite well. But we know and they know that we're watching closely, and they know what to expect should they take any aggressive move toward invading Ukraine.
MR. CAPEHART: Well, it's interesting you say that the two sides--the talks are still going on, that folks are still talking. On January 13th, Russian officials indicated they might abandon diplomatic efforts to resolve the situation. One senior Russian diplomat said talks are approaching, quote, "a dead end." Judging from your answer, the United States doesn't see it that way, does it?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: You know, we're not going to give up until they take an aggressive action. We're still going to keep pushing them. We're going to keep our foot on the accelerator on this so that they understand that they have two options. They can opt for de-escalation, they can opt for dialogue, and they can opt for diplomacy. Or they can take the alternative route, which would be an aggressive action against Ukraine. And our response will be strong to that action.
MR. CAPEHART: Okay, so then let's talk about what the U.S. response would be. There are, you know, economic sanctions that could happen. How aggressive would the United States be on sanctions, on economic sanctions? Would the United States go so far as to freeze the bank accounts not just of prominent Russians and people who are close to Vladimir Putin but to freeze Vladimir Putin's accounts also?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Look, Jonathan, we've said that we will apply sanctions to the Russians, and they know what those sanctions will entail. I'm not going to advance what our playbook will be in terms of who we will apply those sanctions to and when we will apply those sanctions, but the Russians know to expect them, and they know the impact that they will have on the Russian economy.
MR. CAPEHART: And then the next question is--and I think a lot of Americans are wondering this--that if indeed the Russians do invade Ukraine and do so militarily with some of the 100,000-plus troops with some of the tanks, hundreds of tanks that they have over there, will the United States, will NATO send the military into help protect Ukraine, defend Ukraine?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We've provided Ukraine close to a billion dollars in military support to help them to prepare for such an eventuality, and we are also having discussions with our NATO partners and other allies on how we will respond once the Russians--or should the Russians take such an action. But again, this is not something that I can preview for you to help the Russians prepare for responding to our actions.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, Jake Sullivan, President Biden's national security advisor, said the United States was ready for further talks but also said, quote, "We have been very clear with Russia on the costs and consequences of further military action or destabilization, so we're ready either way." So given that quote, and given what you just said, the United States is prepared to do anything and everything, including military action?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We're prepared, as you quote from Jake, to take the necessary actions to respond to Russian aggression, including in New York at the Security Council where I will be leading efforts to bring this before the Council. If the Russians make the decision to invade Ukraine, this is an attack on the entire U.N. Charter. It is an attack on peace and security around the globe. And this is something that we will address also in the Council, and the Russians should be prepared for that. We have already had discussions with various colleagues and allies in New York. They are aware of our position, and they know to expect that should Russia make this move, that we will come to the Council, and we will come quickly to the Council.
MR. CAPEHART: So, Ambassador, on that point--and when you talk about the Council, you're talking about the Security Council, where Russia has veto power just in the same way that the United States does, and China does. So, what exactly can the Security Council do when the potential offender, the person or the entity that makes it--gives the reason for the Security Council to meet and to come up with actions has a veto--has veto power over what the Security Council can actually do in response?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: You know, in 2014, when the Russians invaded Crimea, we brought a resolution before the Council, and we got 13 votes for, one abstention, and the Russian veto. Russia was isolated, and they saw and felt the isolation. And that would be the purpose of coming before the Council. Of course, they will veto any resolution that involves them, but they will be totally isolated, and they will be on the defensive.
MR. CAPEHART: So then--okay, so the United--I'm sorry, the United Nations passes a resolution. Is there anything more the United Nations, and particularly the Security Council, can do if/when the Russians roll over that border?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We can expose what they do when they roll over the border. They use their disinformation campaign not just in Ukraine and around the globe, but they use their disinformation campaign at the Security Council. And we can expose their actions and publicize their actions in the Security Council.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, we--there was a bipartisan delegation of U.S. senators that were in--that was in Ukraine. Do you have--can you give us a readout of how those meetings went?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Unfortunately, I didn't get a readout from their visit. But I can tell you that I know that they expressed our strong support for Ukraine's--for Ukraine's independence, for Ukraine's sovereignty, and for their ability to defend themselves.
MR. CAPEHART: Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Russian officials, quote-unquote, "hinted" that Moscow could place nuclear missiles close to the U.S. coastline, which could reduce after launch warning times to five minutes. That's a provocative hint. What's your reaction? What's the United States' reaction to that news?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: You know, the Russians are pulling every straw out of the basket that they can pull out to intimidate us into allowing them to take this action. We--they know that if they take such an aggressive action against the United States that, again, they can expect the response, and that response will be a strong response.
MR. CAPEHART: And is it safe to assume that that provocative hint is related to the cool reception Russia got to its demand that NATO drastically scale back its presence near Russia's borders in Eastern Europe?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I--again, I know that they're trying to respond in a way to intimidate the world. But we're not going to allow ourselves to be intimidated, nor will we allow Ukraine to be intimidated into compromising its own security.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, Ambassador, a lot of the actions taken by Russia--aggressive actions, as you've I think accurately called them--from this provocative hint, to the troops on the border, tanks on the border, the cyberattack that just happened on Ukraine--makes me wonder how much of what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing, how much of what Russia is doing is related to what's happening here in the United States. And I'm not asking you this question to get you into a conversation about politics, but I'm wondering how much does the president's standing here at home, the low--the low approval ratings that he has, what's going on, you know, the tussle that's happening in the Senate, you know, with the president's domestic agenda from Build Back Better to voting rights--how much of that do you think is playing into Russia's calculations in terms of how far they can push in terms of these aggressive actions and questioning whether the United States is at a weak point and so we can do this, or the president is--that President Biden is at a weak point, and therefore distracted and won't follow through on the consequences that you and Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Blinken have been talking about for weeks.
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: You know, I can't analyze the motives of President Putin or what is playing into his calculus for the aggressive stance that he's taken. But the president and this administration has a lot to be proud of. We have exerted our leadership globally. We have exerted our leadership multilaterally. Our leadership in the U.N. is as strong as it's ever been, and our leadership and our respect around the globe is equally strong. If Putin is calculating that he can pressure the president, because of the challenges that the president is working diligently on here in the United States, I think it's a miscalculation, to be very, very frank with you.
It's an extraordinary miscalculation, because at this moment in time we are forging forward aggressively to address the challenges that we're facing here in the United States. We're addressing the COVID pandemic. We're addressing issues related to the economy. And we're pushing back hard to fight for issues related to voting rights. But at the same time, we have not taken our eyes off what is happening internationally and globally. And it does not in any way affect how we will respond to an aggressive action by the Russians.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, John Bolton, former national security adviser under Donald Trump, and a former U.N. ambassador, wrote in The Washington Post in an op-ed quote, "Even if President Biden is serious, Putin may not believe it based on past U.S. performance, including the United States' recent Afghanistan withdrawal. The risk of--risks of miscalculation are high." Madam Ambassador, how much does the withdrawal from Afghanistan loom in the background do you think?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: You know, we ended a 20-year war. The president committed to doing that, and he followed through on that commitment. It was a challenging withdrawal. But I can tell you that I have met with our Afghan allies who are here in the U.S., including just as recently as yesterday, and people are proud of the support that the U.S. government has provided to them and proud of their relationship with the--with the U.S. government. This was a situation that we found, and the president fixed it and while it was--it was challenging, we concluded a war that has been on the shoulders of the American people for more than 20 years.
MR. CAPEHART: All right, Madam Ambassador, we've got about six minutes left, and I want to quickly try to--try to go around the world. China. Next month, the United States will not send government officials to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Should other nations in the U.N. follow the U.S.'s lead?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We've made our position clear. We will not send a diplomatic representation to China to represent the United States at the Games. We've not discouraged our athletes from participating. We think as a true leader, we need to raise our concerns about the human rights violations that are being committed in Xinjiang and the attacks on democracy in Hong Kong, and we can't just set in in this event and ignore those situations. True leadership requires that we raise this--raise these concerns publicly. How other countries proceed is up to those countries. But we hope that should those countries attend, that they will not shy--be shy to raise these concerns with the Chinese.
MR. CAPEHART: Okay, three more countries to get to. North Korea: North Korea has launched six ballistic missiles since September 2021, which is a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. I understand another resolution either is in the works or has been passed. What good are new sanctions when the North Koreans don't abide by previous sanctions or previous reprimands?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We will continue to ramp up the pressure on the North Koreans. Their attacks are a violation of Security Council resolutions. As you may have seen last week, I went before the press, supported by other colleagues, to raise our concerns. We had an intense discussion about this in the Security Council, and we're likely to have another such discussion over the course of this week.
MR. CAPEHART: Ethiopia: You served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Obama administration. How concerned are you about the situation in Ethiopia?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I am--on a scale of one to 10, I'm at a 10 in terms of my concerns about the situation. When I was assistant secretary, we saw Ethiopia as one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, and now we are in a situation where Ethiopians are in a major crisis of fighting against each other. And we're seeing massive human rights violations, humanitarian concerns as well. My hope is that we will get to a ceasefire. As I've said previously, there are no good guys on either side. We need to make sure that the victims of the--of this conflict find a way to peace. And I'm hoping that we see some of those actions taking place over the course of the next few weeks toward a ceasefire; the AU efforts under President Obasanjo and regional partners will bring this country to a peaceful conclusion of this conflict.
MR. CAPEHART: Two more questions. Back to Ukraine and Russia and the talks, what are you hearing from European allies? Are they fully backing the United States? Is the alliance unified when it comes to dealing with what's happening between Russia and Ukraine?
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: The Alliance is unified. We have engaged very, very closely with our European colleagues, both in Brussels, in their capitals, but also in New York to ensure that we are unified in our response to the Russians. And it is that unity that I know the Russians are very, very concerned about.
MR. CAPEHART: And final question, Madam Ambassador, we just celebrated the holiday for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That we are in a--in quite a moment in this country when it comes to what he marched and died for. Just in your personal capacity, I would love as we close out with less than a minute left, your reflections on Dr. King, his legacy, and our country right now.
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: You know, being able to celebrate the legacy of Dr. King is an extraordinarily important event for our country. What he led the fight toward, the legacy that he has left behind is so, so powerful. And, you know, I thought about as we look at what is happening across our country--I grew up in the South, as you know. I grew up in Louisiana. I remember the first time my mother voted, and it was a hard-won battle to get the right to vote. And that battle continues, and we won it before, and we will win it again. And we will just keep pressing forward until we bring the importance of voting rights to a conclusion that allows for everyone to have the right to vote. We cannot sit on our laurels and not--and not keep pushing forward. And Martin Luther King's strength--gave us the strength to do that.
MR. CAPEHART: Linda Thomas-Greenfield, United States ambassador to the United Nations, thank you so much for coming back to Capehart and to Washington Post Live.
AMB. THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Thank you, Jonathan. It's great to be here. And happy belated New Year.
MR. CAPEHART: Thank you. Same to you.
And thank you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, go to WashingtonPostLive.com. Once again, I’m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Thank you for watching Capehart on Washington Post Live. | null | null | null | null | null |
Dutch historian Bart van der Boom, of the University of Leiden, told The Post by email on Tuesday that he was skeptical. He said Otto Frank’s note was only “one piece of evidence” and that the idea that the Jewish Council had access to lists of addresses was a “very serious accusation,” for which there was “virtually no evidence.” | null | null | null | null | null |
BlackRock's Larry Fink said in a letter to fellow chief executives that “Capitalism has the power to shape society and act as a powerful catalyst for change. But businesses can’t do this alone.” (Mark Lennihan/AP)
Shareholder activists had been trying to persuade BlackRock — which frequently controls the largest bloc of shares in major public corporations and has $10 trillion in assets under management — to use its clout to press for measures that might slow down climate change and persuade companies to reach net-zero emissions.
The BlackRock annual letters to chief executives and shareholders have become closely watched since 2012, when Fink publicly criticized his fellow CEOs of pursuing short-term strategies. He also took aim at what he saw as excessive dividends and share buybacks.
“BlackRock continues to be one of the largest shareholders in virtually every company on Earth, including most of the companies which are driving the climate crisis,” said Diana Best, a senior strategist with the Sunrise Project, a nonprofit group. “What they say really matters.”
Best said Fink did not articulate concrete steps companies should take to reduce their carbon footprint. BlackRock should tell firms there will be consequences for not taking those steps, including divesting from those firms, she said.
Fink also cautioned that private businesses could not be expected to do too much. This came after the November international climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, that included a large number of businesses. International climate negotiators sought to persuade businesses to take steps to slow climate change.
BlackRock has emerged as a leader in sustainable investing, one of Wall Street’s fastest-growing businesses. One study last year by the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance found that over $35 trillion, or more than 1 in 3 of the world’s professionally managed dollars, is now invested in sustainable funds.
But because there are no regulations around these terms in the United States, it’s unclear how much of those funds are supporting social or environmental purposes. BlackRock’s U.S. Carbon Transition Readiness ETF, launched last year, includes holdings in Exxon, Marathon Petroleum, Chevron and other fossil fuel companies. BlackRock also offers funds with no fossil fuel companies.
“We are clear about the investment strategies and sustainable outcomes our funds are designed to achieve,” BlackRock spokesman Ed Sweeney said in a statement. “BlackRock believes greenwashing is a risk to investors, which is why we support regulatory initiatives to enhance the transparency of sustainable funds’ investment mandates and outcomes.”
Fink said that BlackRock would ask companies to set short-, medium- and long-term targets for greenhouse gas reductions. “These targets, and the quality of plans to meet them, are critical to the long-term economic interests of your shareholders,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive from Vermont. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
But that story is wrong in every respect. In fact, over the past two years, progressives have done almost everything right, or at least as well as could have been expected. If they don’t get all the policy victories they want — and they won’t — it isn’t because of some kind of strategic miscalculation or any success forcing the party to follow their disastrous path to electoral doom.
Let’s begin here: Biden and Democrats aren’t just in a tenuous position when it comes to their congressional majorities, it’s an unprecedented position.
The Senate is divided 50-50, and Democrats have just a nine-vote margin in the House. Compare that with the majorities President Barack Obama had in 2009: 60-to-40 in the Senate, 257-to-178 in the House. Or President Bill Clinton in 1993: 57-to-43 in the Senate, 258-to-176 in the House.
Now, let’s consider how progressives have operated since the lead-up to the 2020 election. Is it a story of progressives dragging Democrats toward an untenable and unpopular left-wing agenda? Was there a brutal internal conflict over policy that progressives won?
Not at all. The party has unquestionably moved left — but not as far as the progressives have wanted. And it did so with the full cooperation of the party’s centrists, on all but some relatively minor issues around things such as the deduction for state and local income taxes.
The problem has come down to two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who have decided to stand athwart their party’s agenda.
If anything has marked the performance of congressional progressives during the past year, it has been their seriousness. They’ve been realistic about what was possible, committed to doing the hard work of policymaking, and willing to give ground in service of the larger goal of passing legislation.
Let’s look at one issue to see how this has played out. During the 2020 primary, the progressive candidates embraced varieties of Medicare-for-all, a legitimately left idea. Moderates, including Biden, advocated the more modest but still progressive public option. Biden won that debate.
But as president, Biden still hasn’t offered legislation based on his campaign health-care plan, and he probably never will. Instead, BBB contained even more limited tweaks to the system, including adding hearing coverage to Medicare and enhancing Obamacare subsidies.
And yet, like the good soldiers they’ve shown themselves to be, progressives didn’t say, “These health-care provisions are trash, and I won’t vote for this bill unless it’s Medicare-for-all.” They negotiated to make what progress they could and accepted the outcome of those negotiations.
That’s been the progressive modus operandi this entire time: Make the case for what are very popular ideas, stay flexible, accomplish what they can, and support the president. The fact that a bunch of Fox News hosts are squawking “Socialism! Socialism!” every night doesn’t mean these bills haven’t passed because the public thinks they’re too liberal. | null | null | null | null | null |
Secretary of State Antony Blinken talked Friday with two key leaders of the Afghan relief effort: Martin Griffiths, the U.N. undersecretary of humanitarian affairs, and Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee for the Red Cross. The two urged Blinken to support international efforts to provide cash for basic needs as Afghanistan’s economy and financial system collapse under Taliban rule. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sri Lanka is facing a debt crisis, and yet its stock market is up more than 60% in the last year. The Federal Reserve is getting ready to hike rates to combat inflation, and the higher interest rates move, the lower stock prices should be. The S&P 500 may be down the last few weeks, but it’s still up more than 20% for the last 12 months.
The purpose of financial markets is to price and distribute risk. But the most important asset price is the price of safety, which essentially is the yield on risk-free assets. Whether anything is truly risk-free is an important and existential question. But to be practical, we’ll call an asset “risk-free” if you’re certain to get your investment back along with some promised return.
We care about how to value “risk-free” because it’s the most systemically important asset in financial markets. It determines the value of pretty much everything: stocks, lending collateral, bond yields, investment allocation. The risk-free rate is the foundation of asset pricing; if it’s askew, so are markets.
In theory, the risk-free rate should reflect how much you need to pay investors to postpone spending today until tomorrow. But in reality, the rate is determined by policy, and that’s become even more true since the pandemic. The government both supplies and buys risk-free bonds. Fed policy aims to lower the risk-free rate (to spur investment) in bad times by buying lots of bonds, and to increase the rate by selling bonds when the economy overheats.
But if interest rates do suddenly rise, either from persistent inflation, Fed policy or concerns about debt, markets could get shocked back into reality. Stocks could fall and stay low, bond prices will shoot up, and the price of credit will rise to levels investors haven’t experienced in decades. Super-risky assets like crypto will also fall, demonstrating, once again, they don’t hedge anything. By distorting the price of safety, the risk-free rate has become one of the biggest dangers. And when that happens, everything is riskier than it looks. | null | null | null | null | null |
Several sports leaders with ties to West Virginia signed a letter appealing to Manchin to support the Freedom to Vote Act
“The eyes of the nation will be watching what happens this week in the United States Senate, just a few days removed from what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King’s Jr.'s. 93rd birthday,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday, as he called up the bill for debate.
Schumer acknowledged the bills are not likely to pass but said the public was entitled to know where each senator stands on the issue.
“Senate Democrats are under no illusion that we face difficult odds, especially when virtually every Senate Republican … is staunchly against legislation protecting the right to vote,” Schumer said. “But I want to be clear: When this chamber confronts a question — this important one so vital to our country, so vital to our ideals, so vital to the future of our democracy — you don’t slide it off the table and say never mind.”
What had changed, Biden said then, was that he believed democracy was at critical risk.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki also acknowledged Biden was aware it was an uphill battle. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden speaks in Philadelphia on Jan. 16. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
It’s not new that Trump doesn’t have much of a policy agenda, of course. During the 2016 election, he was explicit in rejecting the idea that his candidacy required detailed policy positions. Running for reelection in 2020, his agenda was similarly diaphanous, centered almost entirely on restoring the country to where it was immediately before the coronavirus pandemic. The Republican Party signed up, dropping any traditional platform development in favor of a policy that amounted to whatever Trump wants.
After all, Trump had learned the hard way that advocating for actual change was dangerous. His efforts to work with Congress on upending the Affordable Care Act led to depressed approval numbers and embarrassment at the hands of his longtime foil, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). After being backed into picking a fight over a border wall in late 2018, Trump forced the government into a shutdown before deploying unilateral executive action to redirect funding to the effort. No wonder he’s more interested in stoking partisan anger than proposing an actual policy agenda.
A central ideological difference between America’s political left and political right is support for government intervention. That holds within the Democratic caucus as well; moderates like Sinema and Manchin are ideologically less supportive of spending than, say, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Despite predictions that the Democratic caucus in the House would be held hostage by the whims of its left wing, it was the moderate right that tripped up progress on Biden’s agenda last year.
After Biden was elected, he selected as his chief of staff an individual who’d played an unusually large role in a central part of the campaign debate. In an effort to rationalize his own response to the pandemic, Trump repeatedly tried to compare it favorably (and enormously dishonestly) with the Obama administration’s response to an H1N1 virus outbreak in 2009 and 2010. That argument often hinged on comments made a few years ago by Ron Klain, who had been Biden’s chief of staff at the time and who would become Biden’s chief of staff in 2021.
“It’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Klain said of the administration’s H1N1 response during a 2019 event, comments that Trump used to suggest that the response was a near disaster. But Klain was talking specifically about fumbles with the rollout of vaccines targeting that virus: Had the virus been deadlier, the country would have been in peril.
That was the end of Biden’s success at meeting expectations. The emergence of the delta variant over the summer, coupled with broad Republican resistance to both vaccination and efforts to otherwise contain the spread of the virus, led to a surge in cases and deaths that was disproportionately centered in Republican areas. Biden’s qualified declarations of victory against the virus were severely undercut. | null | null | null | null | null |
Known for creating the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Joss Whedon was once celebrated as a feminist. The series subverted common tropes of the fantasy genre, centering a young woman who might elsewhere have been cast aside early in the story. Buffy — played by Sarah Michelle Gellar for seven seasons, beginning in 1997 — was inspiring. She earned Whedon a passionate following, his fans varying widely in age and profession.
Whedon kept to himself as the allegations grew in number. But that changed Monday with an extensive profile published in New York magazine. Writer Lila Shapiro spoke to dozens of people who knew Whedon prior to visiting him at his Los Angeles home, where he often denied the truth of their stories or characterized his own past words as misconstrued. The interview is a far cry from those published earlier in Whedon’s career, including one Shapiro references in the piece that deemed Whedon “the most inventive pop storyteller of his generation.”
The Hollywood Reporter story also stated that Whedon pushed Gadot, “Justice League’s” Wonder Woman, to record lines she didn’t like, and that he threatened her career when she pushed back. According to an Elle magazine profile of the actress, Gadot confirmed on Israeli television that he said he would “would make my career miserable.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Kelen, comparing the surge to flooding during a hurricane, said in an interview that talking about the peak of the variant is like asking, “Where’s the high-water mark?”
Justin Lessler, an epidemiology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, echoed that there will be “a few more tough weeks” even in places beginning to see a peak, in part because of how high case levels are.
“We’re up so high that it’s going to take several weeks to get down,” he told The Washington Post.
He stressed that the peak itself is no reason for people to let their guards down — it will take time for case levels to drop to where they were before the omicron-fueled surge began.
“So people should maintain caution and not start celebrating as soon as we see the peak,” he said.
As to whether the omicron variant could drive the coronavirus into that phase, Fauci said, “I would hope that that’s the case, but that would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that eludes the immune response.”
Lessler said scientists will be debating “exactly when the virus moves from pandemic stage to endemic stage for a while.”
He said people largely use “endemic as a proxy for the point when we don’t have to take exceptional measures to respond to waves of the disease.”
“It’s possible, and I sincerely hope that after omicron we’re in that zone. That’s completely plausible that that’s where we’ll be, but we can’t be sure of that,” he added. “And I think we have longer to wait before we can start to see this virus as a known, understood entity rather than something that is surprising us at every turn.”
Jacqueline Dupree and Andrew Jeong contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Several sports leaders with ties to West Virginia signed a letter appealing to the senator to support the Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would create national rules for voting by mail, early voting and other parts of the electoral process. Another bill that Democrats are hoping to pass, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would restore the federal government’s authority to review certain state voting laws to prevent discrimination.
“The eyes of the nation will be watching what happens this week in the United States Senate, just a few days removed from what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King’s Jr.'s 93rd birthday,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday, as he called up the bill for debate.
“Senate Democrats are under no illusion that we face difficult odds, especially when virtually every Senate Republican … is staunchly against legislation protecting the right to vote,” Schumer said. “But I want to be clear: When this chamber confronts a question — this important one so vital to our country, so vital to our ideals, so vital to the future of our democracy — you don’t slide it off the table and say, never mind.”
What had changed, Biden said in the speech, was that he believed democracy was at critical risk.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki also acknowledged that Biden was aware it was an uphill battle. | null | null | null | null | null |
The FAA is far from the only federal agency for which use of this bandwidth is critical. Some senators believe the lesson is to update the memorandum that governs FCC-NTIA coordination, or to craft a new process with a final-say adjudicator. Yet a simpler and more serious lesson may also have emerged. This dust-up spilled over from the previous administration, which allowed crucial positions, including for some time the chief of the NTIA, to remain empty. (This month, a new chief was finally confirmed.) More generally, President Donald Trump’s White House displayed disregard for the intricacies of the inner, quieter workings of the executive branch. These intricacies, it turns out, matter: to keep the lights on, to keep the planes flying and to keep our phones up to modern-day snuff. | null | null | null | null | null |
Washington executive Damon Jones, a key player in stadium search, leaves for L.A. Dodgers
Damon Jones, the Washington Football Team's chief legal officer, with Julie Andreeff Jensen, its former senior vice president of external engagement and communications, in June 2021. Jensen left the organization last September, and Jones is now leaving to become an assistant GM for the L.A. Dodgers. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Just 14 months after joining the Washington Football Team’s remade executive team and becoming an integral part of its push for a new stadium, chief legal officer Damon Jones is leaving the organization to become the Los Angeles Dodgers’ assistant general manager in baseball operations.
“Damon has been a key leader on our team and has helped our organization through a period of significant change and transition since joining us in 2020,” Washington said in a statement Tuesday.
Effective Friday, the team’s vice president and deputy general counsel, Mali Friedman, will be promoted to chief legal officer and senior vice president of business affairs.
“As an extension of her previous role … Mali will oversee the Team’s Legal and Business Affairs function and provide organization-wide legal and strategic support,” Washington said in its statement. “Mali and Damon have been working closely together to ensure a smooth transition.”
The move comes just two weeks before Washington plans to reveal its name and rebranded uniforms on Feb. 2.
Jones, a former Covington & Burling attorney who has degrees from Harvard Law School and the University of California, Santa Barbara, joined the Washington Football Team in November 2020 as one of the first hires under president Jason Wright. As Washington set out remake its business operations and develop a plan for a new stadium, Jones was tabbed to help in all facets and was appointed the lead of its internal stadium team, which toured multiple venues across the United States and overseas last year as Washington began to form a plan for its next stadium.
For Jason Wright, WFT’s outsider president, the future is all about change
Jones spent nearly 13 years with the Washington Nationals as their senior vice president and general counsel, handling player contracts and collective bargaining issues, while also playing a key role in the development of Nationals Park, which opened in 2008.
“Damon was brought in not because he’s just a good legal mind, but because he’s a great business thinker,” Wright told The Washington Post in an interview last spring. “ … It was such a coup for us to get him. He has a future as a sports CEO. I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to keep him, honestly. He’s going to be a team president one day, probably in [Major League Baseball], but he’ll be a team president. I’ll give it no more than 24 months.”
Jones is the latest among a handful of Washington business executives to leave in recent months. Julie Andreeff Jensen, its senior vice president of external engagement and communications, and Scott Shepherd, its chief partnership officer, both left last September to “pursue new and exciting opportunities,” according to a statement from Wright at the time. Chris Bloyer, a longtime executive for the team who was most recently its senior vice president of operations and guest experience, also left this month.
Ryan Moreland was hired as the team’s new chief partnership officer, and Trista Langdon was recently appointed to Bloyer’s former position.
Friedman, another Covington & Burling alum with degrees from Princeton University and Stanford Law School, joined the Washington Football Team in 2021 after serving as the VP of legal and business affairs with the XFL. She previously held roles with the Golden State Warriors and the National Hockey League. | null | null | null | null | null |
ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith says vaccination saved his life when he had covid-19
ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith credits getting vaccinated with his survival from a scary case of covid-19. (Elsa/Getty Images)
The first sign that something still wasn’t quite right with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith came in the initial moments of his “First Take” show Monday morning.
He was uncharacteristically soft-spoken, calming himself every time his voice rose as he spoke about Sunday’s loss by the Dallas Cowboys, the team he loves to troll, in an NFL playoff game. He mentioned that doctors had cautioned him to tone it down a bit, and he coughed a few times, too.
Later on the show, he explained that the reason for that and his recent absence had been a case of covid-19 that “almost took me out,” landing him in a hospital. Although in many cases the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has led to less severe bouts of covid-19, “for me personally, it hit me differently,” Smith said.
“[Doctors] told me, had I not been vaccinated, I wouldn’t be here. That’s how bad I was,” he said. “I had pneumonia in both lungs. My liver was bad, and it ravaged me to the point where even now I have to monitor my volume, got to get in the gym every day, walk before you run, work your way back, because I’m still not 100 percent with my lungs.”
Smith, who originally announced to his audience Dec. 21 that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, added that, although his lungs still haven’t completely healed, his most recent coronavirus test results are negative and he is “on the road to recovery.”
Smith said that at one point he had a fever of 103 degrees, “woke up with chills and [in] a pool of sweat, headaches were massive, coughing profusely,” and he rang in the new year in a hospital. Smith credited his doctors and the vaccine for his recovery.
“I wanted to take a moment to say to folks out there that (a) the vaccine, according to [doctors], saved me,” he said. “Now, everybody’s different, because my sister smokes and she had covid and she was fine in three days — three, four days. Me? I don’t smoke, and it almost took me out.”
Smith, who said in September that he had “reservations” about getting vaccinated even as he advocated for it, also urged people to wear masks.
“I think the one thing to emphasize the importance of, no matter how you feel about the vaccine, that mask is important,” he said, “because you don’t know how the next person is affected. How I’m affected is different from how you were affected.”
And while it was irritating for him to tone it down about the Cowboys’ loss, he was happy to be on the air talking about it.
“I’ve missed being at work. I’ve used more sick days in the last month than I’ve used in my 28-year career in this business,” he said, “and I can’t tell you how lucky and sincerely blessed I am to be sitting here with you guys [Monday], because 2½, three weeks ago, I didn’t know if I was going to make it.” | null | null | null | null | null |
It’s the former senator’s second run for the office; she was kidnapped in 2002 during the first.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Ingrid Betancourt, a politician who was held captive by Colombia’s largest guerrilla group for more than six years, announced on Tuesday that she will compete in the presidential election this year.
Before her capture by the FARC in 2002, Betancourt had gained popularity as a congresswoman for her efforts to root out corruption. In 2008, the army rescued her and 14 other FARC hostages. Once freed, Betancourt reunited with her mother and two children, got divorced and moved to England to pursue a PhD in theology at Oxford University.
“In this moment, the coalition needed the presence of a woman, and it needed the presence of a person who can speak in a different way,” Betancourt said. “I hold Colombia in my heart in a different way because my life has been different … It has been a difficult trajectory, one of pain, but also of hope and faith, a trajectory of millions of Colombians who have refused to give up.” | null | null | null | null | null |
This undated Handout showing computer-generated imagery released by Nyoman Nuarta on Jan. 18, 2022 shows a design illustration of Indonesia's future presidential palace in East Kalimantan. (Handout/Nyoman Nuarta/AFP via Getty Images)
Jakarta, one of the world’s largest megacities, is straining under the weight of exponential growth, congestion and pollution. It’s tone of the world’s fastest-sinking cities. Several Indonesian presidents have floated capital relocation plans, but none made it as far as this one.
“The new capital has a central function and is a symbol of the identity of the nation, as well as a new center of economic gravity,” Planning Minister Suharso Monoarfa said to parliament following the bill’s approval, reported Reuters. Moving government buildings to a new location, of course, does not mean that industry, deeply entrenched in Jakarta, would be quick to follow suit.
The new law details how the capital project will be funded and governed. The finance ministry said that the initial phase of relocation will occur between 2022 and 2024 — and no time frame for finalization has been set, reported Reuters. Monoarfa said that development is expected to last until 2045, CNN reported.
According to the law, foreign embassies and international organizations are expected to begin shifting their offices to Nusantara, along with state agencies, within a decade of the start of the relocation, reported Nikkei Asia.
Last April, the relocation plans faced a surge of criticism after the reveal of proposed designs for the new state palace. The mock-ups showed the palace structure in the shape of the state symbol, a mythical Garuda, with its wings spread. Critics called it campy after Joko tweeted a 3-D walk-through of the design proposal by artist Nyoman Nuarta.
Environmental advocates have criticized the impact the relocation would have on the fast-disappearing jungles of East Kalimantan.
If Indonesia goes through with the move, it will not be alone: A number of countries have made such changes, including Brazil, which moved its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, a city developed for that purpose, in 1960.
Six years ago, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi set plans in motion to move government buildings 28 miles east of Cairo, to a huge “New Administrative Capital” expected to cost around $40 billion. Last month, al-Sissi directed government o employees to begin relocating, according to Al-Monitor. The new development will be home to embassies, government agencies, the presidential compound and parliament, Al Jazeera reported, as well as a central river and 15 square meters of green space per resident.
In 2005, Myanmar unveiled the relocation of its capital from its largest city, Yangon, to the relatively quiet Naypyidaw. Former military leader Than Shwe pitched the move as a plan to avoid traffic and urban density — but analysts have characterized the change as a move to shield the military’s seat of power from the possibility of protest or popular uprising. | null | null | null | null | null |
PARIS — The French lawyer for a jailed human rights defender in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday filed a torture complaint against the new president of Interpol, Maj. Gen. Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi, as the official made his first visit to the international police agency’s headquarters in the French city of Lyon. | null | null | null | null | null |
Is it a stunt? Sure. And Chambers is a long shot, to say the least. An activist and community organizer, he has never held public office, though he has run unsuccessfully for a couple of lower offices. And he’s trying to unseat Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican incumbent running in a state Donald Trump won by almost 20 points in 2020. Kennedy may playact like he’s Foghorn Leghorn, but he should be popular enough to be reelected (and he has already raised plenty of money).
Nevertheless, Chambers’ ad is a significant marker in changing ideas about cannabis. He isn’t running as a joke; even if the odds are against him, he’s trying to be a serious candidate. If I had told you in 2000 that in 2022 you’d see a Senate candidate smoking pot in one of his ads, you probably wouldn’t have believed me.
But the cultural and political status of marijuana have changed rapidly, with two-thirds of the public now supporting outright legalization (including half of Republicans). If it’s not smack dab in the mainstream, it’s no longer counterculture either.
The legal landscape has certainly changed. In the 2020 election, voters approved legalization initiatives in New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota and Montana. In 2021, legislatures in Connecticut, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia passed legalization laws. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia now allow recreational use, and perhaps more remarkably, there are only three states — Idaho, Nebraska, and Kansas — where all cannabis products are illegal.
With it being so obvious that most Americans are now fine with legalization, you don’t see Republicans promising to crack down on pot smokers, even if their policy positions are remnants of the drug war. It functions similarly to their position on marriage equality: While most haven’t actually changed their beliefs, they know they’re on the wrong side of public opinion, so it’s something they prefer not to talk about.
While some of that would have to be done through legislation (and a federal decriminalization bill did pass the House in December 2020), so far Biden hasn’t done anything at all on the issue.
It’s hard not to conclude that this was one of those issues where Biden took a position he was comfortable with — and one to the right of other candidates urging legalization, including his future vice president — but it wasn’t something he cared about or would expend effort on. Which may not be surprising for a man who came of age in the 1950s, when cannabis was still considered an evil weed consumed only by criminals and jazz musicians.
Politicians are always a lagging indicator of change; they seldom embrace habits and ideas unless they’re sure that doing so won’t lose them support. And while plenty of officeholders (mostly Democrats) will say they have smoked pot, it’s almost always characterized as a thing they did long ago, when they were young and free of responsibilities. As Vice President Harris said in 2019, “I did inhale. It was a long time ago. But, yes.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The latest Gallup findings on the two parties’ support, released Monday, show that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents made up an average of 46 percent of adults during 2021, versus 43 percent for the Republicans, a two-point pro-GOP shift from the 48-to-43 Democratic edge in 2020. (The margin of error is one percentage point.) | null | null | null | null | null |
Resistance to change was “less than I thought it would be,” Berger told me in an interview last month at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif. The key, he said, has been to invest the money and people freed up by discarding old systems to invest in new capabilities that can combat a modern, high-tech rival such as China. | null | null | null | null | null |
Everything changed last week, when Serbia’s main independent newspaper carried the news on its front page, accusing the government of acting “in the service of Putin’s regime.” Serbia’s pro-democracy opposition, which is expected to make gains in April’s parliamentary and municipal elections, slammed President Aleksandar Vucic for “turning Serbia into a foreign outpost.” The European Union —which Serbia is on course to join by 2025 — called for an investigation, while senior E.U. lawmakers condemned Belgrade for “collaborating with an autocratic regime.” Serbia “must choose whether it wants to truly transform itself and join [the EU], or further align with the autocrats from #Moscow and #Beijing,” tweeted Viola von Cramon, a German member of the European Parliament and a party colleague of Germany’s new foreign minister. The “politics of sitting on two chairs is unacceptable.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Dutch historian Bart van der Boom, of Leiden University, told The Post by email on Tuesday that he was skeptical. He said Otto Frank’s note was only “one piece of evidence” and that the idea that the Jewish Council had access to lists of addresses was a “very serious accusation,” for which there was “virtually no evidence.”
In this footage from July 22, 1941, Anne Frank is seen leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a look at a couple who is getting married. (Anne Frank House Museum) | null | null | null | null | null |
REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft is paying nearly $70 billion for Activision Blizzard, the maker of Candy Crush and Call of Duty. The deal comes as Microsoft is trying to boost its competitiveness in mobile gaming and virtual-reality technology. The all-cash $68.7 billion deal will turn the maker of the Xbox gaming system into one of the world’s largest video game companies. It will also help Microsoft compete with tech rivals such as Meta — formerly Facebook — in creating immersive virtual worlds for both work and play. If the deal survives scrutiny from U.S. and European regulators in the coming months, it also could be one of the priciest tech acquisitions in history.
NEW YORK — Stocks fell to a new low for the year on Wall Street Tuesday and bond yields surged amid renewed jitters the Federal Reserve will lift interest rates to tackle rising inflation. The S&P 500 fell 1.8%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.5% and the Nasdaq sank 2.6%. Technology stocks and banks led the decline. Goldman Sachs fell after the investment bank reported a sharp drop in profits. Crude oil prices rose amid supply concerns following an attack on an oil facility in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Activision Blizzard soared on news of a blockbuster buyout by Microsoft.
WASHINGTON — U.S. competition regulators have mounted an effort to tighten enforcement against illegal mergers, in line with President Joe Biden’s mandate for greater scrutiny to big business combinations. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission announced they are seeking public comment on how current merger guidelines can be updated to better detect and prevent illegal and anticompetitive deals in an increasingly consolidating corporate marketplace. The agencies are stressing the importance of robust competition to the economy, workers, consumers and small businesses. In their request for public views on mergers, the regulators are stretching toward a broader definition of anticompetitive conduct.
DETROIT — California prosecutors have filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against the driver of a Tesla on Autopilot who ran a red light, slammed into another car and killed two people in 2019. The defendant appears to be the first person to be charged with a felony in the United States for a fatal crash involving a motorist who was using a partially automated driving system. Los Angeles County prosecutors filed the charges in October, but they came to light only last week. The misuse of Autopilot, which can control steering, speed and braking, has occurred on numerous occasions and is the subject of investigations by two federal agencies.
NEW YORK — Goldman Sachs’ said its fourth-quarter profits fell by 13% from a year earlier, largely due to the bank preparing to pay out hefty pay packages to its well-compensated employees. It’s the latest sign that wages are increasing sharply, particularly on Wall Street. The New York-based investment bank earned $3.94 billion, or $10.81 a share. That’s down from $4.51 billion, or $12.08 a share, in the same period a year earlier. The results missed analysts’ expectations, who were looking for on average a profit of $11.80 a share, according to FactSet.
DETROIT — Ford and security company ADT have formed a joint venture that will help businesses protect vehicles and expensive equipment they carry from theft. The first product from the venture called Canopy is a system that uses cameras, radar, global positioning and artificial intelligence to spot a potential thief and notify ADT, which will monitor the feeds and notify the customer or authorities if needed. The system will be offered as accessory on Ford and other top-selling vehicles starting next year. The company expects to integrate it in factory vehicles and offer it to other manufacturers over time. Ford is putting up about $60 million to start the venture during the next three years, with $40 million coming from ADT.
DALLAS — AT&T and Verizon say they will delay some new 5G wireless service after the airline industry raised alarms about potential interference with important systems on planes. The airlines had warned of massive flight cancellations and disruptions. The Biden administration got involved to settle the showdown between the telecom companies and airlines over AT&T and Verizon plans to launch new 5G wireless service this week. Airline CEO’s warn that thousands of flights could be grounded or delayed if the rollout takes place near major airports because the service interferes with key systems on board planes.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Many states in the U.S. are coming to the conclusion that solar, wind and other renewable power sources might not be enough to keep the lights on as they seek to dramatically cut their use of fossil fuels. Nuclear power is emerging as an answer to fill the gap as they transition away from coal, oil and natural gas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A survey by The Associated Press found that about two-thirds of states are including nuclear power in their future energy plans. While nuclear power comes with its own set of potential problems, even the Biden administration wants it as part of the U.S. energy mix as it seeks to dramatically cut greenhouse gases. | null | null | null | null | null |
Goldman 4th quarter profits falls by 13 percent
Goldman 4Q profits fall by 13 percent
Goldman Sachs said its fourth-quarter profits fell by 13 percent from a year earlier, largely because of the bank preparing to pay out hefty pay packages to its well-compensated employees.
It’s the latest sign that wages are increasing sharply, particularly on Wall Street. Most of the major banks that have reported their results have indicated plans to pay employees more in the upcoming year.
The New York-based investment bank earned a profit of $3.94 billion, or $10.81 a share. That’s down from $4.51 billion, or $12.08 a share, in the same period a year earlier. The results missed expectations of analysts, who were looking for, on average, a profit of $11.80 a share, according to FactSet.
While Goldman was able to grow revenue in the quarter, those gains were more than wiped out by the firm’s compensation expenses. The bank set aside $3.25 billion to cover compensation and benefits in the quarter, up 31 percent from a year earlier.
Goldman typically has high compensation expenses, particularly in the last quarter of the year, as the bank prepares to pay out its annual bonuses to its employees. These bonuses can often be multiple times an employee’s salary, particularly for the firm’s best-paid traders and investment bankers.
Pay at the firm is tied directly to how well the overall company does in the year, and this year was incredibly good for Goldman. The firm made $21.64 billion in profits last year, more than double what it earned in 2020.
Dealmaking and trading remained mostly strong last quarter for the firm, helping to drive profits. Investment banking revenue was 45 percent higher than it was the prior year. Trading revenue was down a modest 7 percent.
The firm’s return on equity — a measurement of how well a bank performs with the assets it holds — was 23 percent last year, more than double where it was a year earlier. Banks such as Goldman aim for their return on equity to be above 10 percent.
GM plans to launch online parts store
In its drive to add revenue from sales of software and services, General Motors is launching an online parts store that will give GM vehicle owners the ability to buy parts directly.
The automaker said Tuesday this is just one of many new digital offerings coming to car buyers in the future. Those include buying accessories, over-the-air upgrades and subscriptions digitally, as well as the option to shop for, purchase and finance electric vehicles entirely online.
GM’s new online parts marketplace will make 45,000 repair and maintenance parts, such as oil filters, engine and cabin air filters, batteries, brake pads, accessory belts, cooling hoses and windshield wiper blades, available to Chevrolet, GMC, Buick and Cadillac owners.
A GM spokesman said the automaker is not yet providing a launch date for the online parts store. It will give customers the convenience of online shopping and physical retail all in one place, GM said. Customers can choose home delivery or to pick up their order at one of 800 participating GM dealers, where staff is available to answer questions.
YouTube is cutting its investment in original programming, ending a six-year experiment with making premium television shows under veteran entertainment executive Susanne Daniels. YouTube will still fund original programming for children and Black creators, and it will honor existing commitments, the company said Tuesday in a blog post. But the Alphabet-owned business is redirecting other spending to Shorts, a feature designed to rival TikTok, and live shopping. Daniels will leave YouTube on March 1. | null | null | null | null | null |
Janice Burtch, on left, tells Lanny, center, and Bill Hathaway how she is doing since covid-19 claimed her husband, Danny. They gathered at the 50 Plus Club in Lewiston, Mich. (Nick King for The Washington Post)
Just days earlier, the club’s president — and one of its most devoted euchre players, Danny Burtch — died of the virus after a weeks-long battle.
During the next two weeks, his condition worsened day by day. He experienced a dramatic loss in lung function, his kidneys were failing, then he had a heart attack followed by a stroke that left him blind.
“If I get sick and one of our people dies because of me … I can’t live with that,” Janice said.
Things got worse once Burtch got sick. They briefly put activities on hold to prevent further spread. In-person meals resumed with just a few tables filling up every day. But with Janice staying in Traverse City while Burtch was hospitalized, bingo was canceled.
In the days after Burtch’s death, news about the omicron variant’s rapid spread sparked an added sense of fear at the club.
“When it went up to as much as 250,000 [cases] I thought that was the worst thing, that was the scariest thing. And when it went up to a million, I mean, there was no help anymore, you just [took] care of yourself and you [knew] a lot of people are going to die,” Gogo recalled. “It was a scary time.”
“Too many people are resisting,” Gogo said. “I’d think they’d be afraid of dying.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Zara Rutherford, 19, should arrive home this week in Belgium after August takeoff.
Belgian-British teenager Zara Rutherford waves from her Shark ultralight plane before takeoff at the Kortrijk-Wevelgem airfield in Wevelgem, Belgium, on August 18, 2021. Rutherford is set to land in Kortrijk, Belgium, this week in the hopes of completing her trek around the world as the youngest woman ever, beating the mark of American aviator Shaesta Waiz, who was 30 when she set the previous benchmark. (Virginia Mayo/AP)
Flying runs in her blood: Her parents are pilots and she has been traveling in small planes since she was 6 years old. At age 14, she started learning to fly. About 130 hours of solo flights prepared her for the record attempt, which she hopes will have a bigger meaning. The Belgian-British teenager wants to share with young women and girls worldwide the spirit of aviation — and an enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering and math.
Two mathematical statistics stand out for her — only 5 percent of commercial pilots and 15 percent of computer scientists are women. “The gender gap is huge," she said.
Yet once the canopy closed over her cockpit and another 6- to 8-hour flight began, she concentrated on one individual — herself.
Using Visual Flight Rules, basically relying on sight only, danger lurked even closer than when she would be able to use fancy navigational instruments to lead her through the night, clouds or fog.
Crossing Northern California from Palo Alto toward Seattle, Washington, she headed into huge wildfires engulfing the area. The higher she climbed to avoid the smoke — up to 10,000 feet — the tougher it was to keep her eyes on the ground.
“The smoke was building up and up, to the point that the whole cabin stank of smoke and I could not see anything but a burnished orange color,” Rutherford said. She had to make an unscheduled landing in Redding, California.
Over Siberia, the light played tricks on her vision, sometimes making her doubt whether she saw mountains or clouds. “And for me clouds are a really big deal. Especially in Russia,” with its biting cold. Cutting through such clouds, too much ice might build up on her wings, paralyzing control. “At that point your plane is no longer a plane,” she said.
That could have happened on a section of the route where she once saw only one village in six hours. “I realized if something goes wrong, I’m hours and hours and hours away from rescue and it was [minus-31 degrees Fahrenheit] on the ground. And so I thought, actually, I don’t know how long I can survive," Rutherford said. She didn’t have to find out.
She had another close call near North Korea. She tried to squeeze between North Korean airspace and a massive cloud threatening to cut off passage for her ultralight plane.
She radioed her control team to ask if she could cut the corner over the country to get to Seoul, South Korea. “Straight away they said: ‘Whatever you do, do not go into North Korean airspace!’ ” Fortunately she was able to avoid both the clouds and possible conflict with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un’s government.
Overall, bad weather, a flat tire and visa issues added two months to the planned three-month project. During a stop in Crete, Greece, the weather was so bad that it delayed her for several days. Which gave her time to ponder the fickleness of fate. “When you’re fearing for your life, it puts things into perspective a little bit more,” she said.
The wider world, though, offered much more than fear. She spoke dreamily of the Saudi Arabian desert with its changing colors of sand and rock, the emptiness of northern Alaska and the sight of what’s been called the world’s loneliest house on Iceland’s deserted island of Ellioaey.
She’s come to appreciate simpler pleasures, too. “Before, it was — yeah — it was about the grand adventure," she said. "But actually ... watching TV with your cat has its special things as well.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Mr. Akram, 44, identified by authorities as the gunman, died during the standoff, but police have not disclosed whether he killed himself or was shot by law enforcement. He had demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted in 2010 of attempting to kill U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. People who heard Mr. Akram on a Facebook live stream of services, which showed part of the attack, said he chose Congregation Beth Israel because of its proximity to the federal prison in Fort Worth where Ms. Siddiqui is being held and because “America only cares about Jewish lives.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: We all have a stake in college enrollment
Students pose on the steps of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in May 2020. (Steve Helber/AP)
Congress can start by reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, now stuck in political gridlock. Everyone who advises students and families should share evidence that most college degrees are worth the investment of time and then support them in applying and completing financial aid applications, which are down in number. Leaders of four-year colleges and universities and community colleges need to accelerate reforms so every program of study imparts the skills students need to obtain a good job and pursue a rewarding career. They can start by honestly assessing outcomes of their programs and investigating whether students — especially students of color and those from low-income families — are concentrated in programs that do not lead to good jobs.
If enrollments are to rebound, prospective students need to see that college leaders, advisers and politicians believe in them and share responsibility for ensuring their success during and after college.
Josh Wyner, Washington
The writer is executive director
of the Aspen Institute College
Excellence Program. | null | null | null | null | null |
A health-care worker treats a patient in the covid-19 intensive care unit at Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, Mo., on Aug. 3, 2021. (Angus Mordant/Bloomberg News)
What has emerged is a different sort of pandemic, one in which far more people are getting infected but — so far — fewer are dying. Yet there’s a caveat: There have been nearly as many total hospitalizations in the past month as a year ago, largely a function of multiplying the reduced hospitalization rate times a far larger number of infected persons.
Again, it’s useful to consider that reduced risk as a function of multiple factors. Analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, during the wave of infections spurred by the delta variant last summer and fall, about 690,000 people were hospitalized who might have avoided that fate had they been vaccinated. In that period, more than 160,000 people died who might have lived had they been similarly protected. While the omicron variant appears to better able to evade immune defenses, research suggests that vaccination continues to provide protection against the worst effects of covid-19.
So we see this unusual pattern. If we look at state-level data now relative to the same point in the surge in cases last winter (that began in September 2020) or the delta wave (that began last June), we see that the number of new cases each day is higher now in all 50 states and D.C. | null | null | null | null | null |
Then-President Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (left) and Attorney General William P. Barr (right) participate in an event about the census and the citizenship question in the Rose Garden in July 2019. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
The plot effectively bookended Donald Trump’s four years in office, with a Cabinet official beginning the effort upon being sworn in on February 2017. It didn’t fully come to an end until Trump’s last days in office in January 2021, when the final gambit unceremoniously fell apart, just like its predecessors.
Along the way was a sternly worded rebuke from the Supreme Court, which said the administration had misled about its effort, later acknowledgments about the true political purpose, resistance from career officials, and a series of increasingly desperate attempts to make it happen by hook or crook.
And nearly a year after Trump left office having come up short, the developments keep coming. According to documents revealed this weekend, a top Census Bureau official in September 2020 raised a series of concerns about how much interest political officials were taking in the process. Deputy Director Ron S. Jarmin cited those officials’ “unusually” high level of “engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses.”
February 2017: Wilbur Ross is sworn in as Trump’s commerce secretary. A later-revealed memo shows he began considering adding a citizenship question to the census almost immediately.
March 22, 2018: Ross testifies that it was actually the Justice Department that “initiated the request” for a citizenship question in December 2017, and that he began exploring the matter then.
June 27, 2019: The Supreme Court rejects the effort to add the citizenship question. In a particularly striking rebuke, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the justification offered — that the data was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act — was “contrived.” His decision says “evidence showed that [Ross] was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office” and that the administration “adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process.” Roberts said it “did so for reasons unknown but unrelated to the VRA.” The decision doesn’t kill the citizenship question once and for all but gives the administration little time to make it work.
July 5, 2019: Trump appears to confirm the true goal of the census citizenship effort — not to enforce the Voting Rights Act, but to game the redistricting process. “Number one,” Trump said, “you need it for Congress — you need it for Congress for districting.”
June 2020: The Trump administration begins creating four new high-ranking jobs for political officials in the Census Bureau, according to a later report from the New York Times, an unprecedented step. The officials would later report weekly to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The Times also reported that career officials “quietly ordered that the appointees be given only rounded numbers — estimates, which could not be labeled official for political or other reasons.”
Sept. 14: The deputy director of the Census Bureau, Ron S. Jarmin, emails two fellow officials with a series of concerns about how the process is playing out ahead of the Dec. 31 deadline. Jarmin’s later-revealed memo cites political administration officials’ “unusually” high level of “engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses.”
Nov. 19, 2020: Census officials tell bureau Director Steven Dillingham that they cannot meet the Dec. 31 deadline and uphold the census’s commitment to accuracy. They say the data will not be available before Trump leaves office. Political officials including Nathaniel Cogley push for the bureau to take shortcuts, according to the Times report, possibly including seizing computers from other agencies to process data faster.
Early January 2021: With Trump’s time running short, Dillingham declares the undocumented immigrant data to be the bureau’s No. 1 priority, according to later-revealed whistleblower complaints. He allegedly sets a Jan. 15 deadline, five days before Trump is due to leave office, and proposes offering cash bonuses to make it happen (Dillingham confirmed the latter to the Times). The Times report states that the order was delivered orally and not in writing and that it was “the breaking point for the career officials who had carried out every other directive.”
Jan. 20, 2021: Trump departs office without census data and the ability to reapportion congressional seats accordingly. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: WP Subscriber Exclusive: Carl Bernstein, Author, “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom”
MS. LEONNIG: Good afternoon, and welcome to this subscriber exclusive interview. I am Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig. We have a special guest today, journalist and author Carl Bernstein. We all know Carl for his legendary work here at The Washington Post. But today, Carl joins us to talk about his new book, “Chasing History: A Kid in the”--forgive me--"a Kid in the Newsroom." In this book, Carl shares with us how he started in journalism as a 16-year-old copyboy at the Washington Evening Star, now dead. We will talk about his 61 years in journalism. Carl Bernstein, welcome to Washington Post Live.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Good to be back at The Post and with you.
MS. LEONNIG: And I can't wait till we're in that building again instead of our kitchens. I'm so glad you're here. I've got to start this by saying we're going to get right to it. I enjoyed this book so much, and there was so much to love about it if you're a journalist, and if you're just a reader of good prose.
So, you wrote at the very beginning of your memoir, "Chasing History," that your father was really in a way responsible for pushing you in the direction of becoming a newspaper reporter. Tell us a little bit about that and if you resisted him, because at 16 it sounds like you resisted a lot of authority.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, I did resist a lot of authority because at the time I went to work at the Washington Star, I had one foot in the classroom and one foot in the poolhall and one foot in the juvenile court in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is three feet, but the one in the classroom was only a couple of inches, I think. The other two were more--were more prominent. And my father rightly feared for my future, I think. I was also working down on H Street Northeast at a place called the S.N. McBride's layaway department store in Swampoodle, selling shoddy merchandise to mostly poor people shopping. And my father knew that I had some facility for writing and--because I could pass essay exams. That was about all. And also, I'd taken a 10th grade journalism course. And he had been a union organizer for the government workers’ union, and he had been a source for a great columnist at the Washington Star, the government columnist named Joe Young. And The Star, which was the town's conservative paper, as opposed to the Washington Post, even then was known as the liberal paper, he had been a source for this government columnist, and he knew somebody there who was able to get me an interview with the production editor of the paper. And I went there, and the production editor took one look at me and said, boy, I thought that the government columnist had said you were going to graduate from high school, and I was only about five foot three and spreckled and probably looked about 14. And he kept going on in his vein, and I had on this brand-new suit I had bought for the--for the interview. And it was clear to me that he was not going to hire me, and I had come to this interview thinking maybe this is going to change my life. And I had come into the interview and into this guy's office--he was actually a member of the Kauffmann family that owned The Star--and I’d come in by a backdoor off a regular corridor. And when he finished the so-called interview and made clear I was not going to get hired, he took me out to another door into the newsroom. And in that moment, I’d never seen such purposeful emotion and people hollering copy and pieces of copy being ripped out of typewriters and clicking of typewriters and everybody looking like they were in the most urgent errands in the nation. And he led me down the center aisle of the newsroom toward the city desk with reporters’ desks on either side, and I was like a puppy straining on a leash to take all of this in.
MS. LEONNIG: Can I stop you--
MR. BERNSTEIN: And then--go ahead, because I’m--you will learn in this--in this interview that I'm really circumlocutious, and it’s why I’m okay when I’m writing a story. But when I'm talking like this, I can go around and around in circles, and never get to the point.
MS. LEONNIG: You and I have a little bit in common there. So, we'll try to be better at ourselves. So, you went right into another one of my questions, which is, you know, one of the beauties of the book is you really describe what a newsroom at that time was like, and the purposeful commotion, the glorious chaos, the insanity of everybody rushing to this urgent mission. Tell me why, if you don't mind, why you think that worked? Why--how did a newspaper get produced every day in that setting? And why was it captivating to you personally?
MR. BERNSTEIN: Okay, the first thing was that The Star was a great afternoon newspaper, probably the best afternoon newspaper in the country. So, we had five deadlines. And let me add here when--and it seemed--it was always chaotic, almost, during the day, because you were always up against the deadline, up until the so-called stocks final--stocks sports final of the paper was published after 4:00 in the evening and the first edition came out at 11:00 in the morning. So, it was continuing a purposeful chaos.
But the miracle of seeing every day, in those hours, more than a big novel get redone and redone and redone through the day as the news poured in from around the world--I knew from my first weeks there that I had the greatest seat in the country at age 16. And then, in the early period that I was there, I could start to--in this apprenticeship that I had been given, I started to get a sense of how it was done, and the meaning of what news really was. You know, Woodward and I always used this phrase--and it was up on the screen earlier--the best obtainable version of the truth. That, really, I started to comprehend in my early days at The Star. In fact, there was a phrase that was used by the reporters at The Star, and that was "the truth in all its complexity." And so I think Woodward and I came up with that idea of the best obtainable version of the truth, that phrase, through what I learned at The Star. And then remained, the five years I was there, the guiding principle of what these amazing reporters and editors at this incredible newspaper--it was a better paper than The Post in those days.
MS. LEONNIG: Yeah.
MR. BERNSTEIN: So, I was just lucky.
MS. LEONNIG: So, let's get to some of those characters if you don't mind. I mean, there are quite a few. There's the very glamorous in some respect and totally circumspect captain of the ship, Sidney Epstein, and then there is, you know, the cop reporter, crusty Ted Crown, and Walter Gold, the night cop reporter. Get--pick one of these characters for us and the listeners today, and tell us why that person was so important in your career, what they taught you.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, Sid Epstein is the most important, because he saw something I think in myself that I didn't even know really was there. And he was the city editor of the paper, a great editor. I mean, I've been blessed by probably the two greatest editors you could ever have, Sid Epstein when I was a kid, and Ben Bradlee when I was a little older and came to The Washington Post at age 22. But Sid Epstein was the opposite of an ink-stained wretch. He wore unbelievably wonderful outfits. He had sherbet-colored shirts that he bought at Lewis & Thos. Saltz, haberdashery downtown with a perfect red tie matching it. He would wear wingtip shoes. And yet, he didn't look like a peacock. He looked like he was stepping out of the pages of Esquire magazine, and yet it was restrained. And he was restrained and very meticulous in everything he did. And when I'd been there for only a couple weeks--I went back into the library and looked up his clips when he had been a rewrite man back in the 1940s--and the elegance was there in his stories as well. And so I started to study Sid Epstein to the point where I decided, you know, if I ever grew up, what I really wanted to be was the city editor of The Washington Star.
And Sid, somehow, the first time I ever got to know him, I was working in the wire room tearing off copy from the teletype machines, and he said, kid, come over here. And he said, would you go upstairs to cafeteria and get me breakfast, which was grits in a Dixie cup and a Kaiser roll. And every day that became a kind of routine if I was around, and he would--he would say, kid, go upstairs and get me my grits. And then I'd been there a very short time, and I had had this incident in the composing room where I’d touched a piece of type, leading the composing room foreman to undo the whole front page of the local section, throw the type onto the floor, because I had touched a piece of type which was only in the sphere of the printers.
And I went down to Sid’s office. He called me into his office, gave me hell. He said, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said a reporter. And he said, what makes you think you can be a reporter. And by then I’d covered some civic association meetings at night, which copy boys got to do for $7.50. And I said, well, I've covered these meetings and I've always been interested in secrets. And it was right before the Kennedy assassination. And he looked at me, and he pulled out this long roll of teletype paper with kind of assignments for everybody to cover the Kennedy inaugural. And he said, kid, I want you to go to Fourth and Pennsylvania Avenue, and you're going to help cover the inaugural parade. You don't want to do anything fancy. Just look at the crowd, call into a rewrite man, and tell them what you see. And so I got to actually help in the coverage of John Kennedy's assassination--assassination, I did that too--
MR. BERNSTEIN: Inauguration after I’d only been at the paper for a few months.
MS. LEONNIG: Yeah, I mean, what a front row to history. And actually, that also is just so interesting about, you know, for six years you were in the center of some of the biggest stories that people still remember to this day--you know, space dogs from Russia, Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and as you said, the assassination, the touchdown of the Beatles. Tell me if you don't mind, what's the one that that touches you the most? And I don't mean the most historic. What's the one that stuck with you as a reporter that really was important to you in that early day of your journalism career?
MR. BERNSTEIN: This is gonna sound very strange. One of the things we did as distractionists after we--I was a copy boy about a year in was write obituaries. And also as a copy, boy, I had been sent by Sid Epstein to often go to the homes of the deceased to get a picture of the person who had died, especially if it had been under extraordinary circumstances, murder, something like that, suicide, whatever. And on occasion, after I'd been there about a year and a half, there had been a drowning in Charleston, West Virginia, of two kids who lived in Northwest Washington. It was a horrible story. And on this occasion, I was sent to their homes on MacArthur Boulevard to get a picture of them. And the first kid’s family that I went to was on MacArthur Boulevard, and I knocked on the door. And a young man, about 30 years old, answered the door. And I said I'm Carl Bernstein from The Evening Star, and I'm sorry to be here under these circumstances, and I'd like to get a picture of your brother. And he said, sure, I understand, and I'll bring it to you. He came back with a picture not of a 16-year-old kid but of like a 25-30-year-old man. And I looked at the picture, and I said, there must be some mistake here. I’m here for a picture of your young brother. And he looked at me in horror. And he said, oh, my God, what's happened? And I said, well, I'm here because your brother drowned. And I thought he was going to faint. And he said, oh, my God. And it turned out that his other brother was a D.C. cop who had been killed two weeks earlier around Thomas Circle by a burglar who had shot him. And I suddenly didn't know what to do or what to say. But I knew in that instance, better than I ever learned, that we as reporters are dealing with human beings, and that we can never, ever just run into a situation with a notebook, run out, think we've got the story, that it was impressed on me from that moment that we had to look at the people we were covering as people. And I think that's one of the things that over the years is often forgotten in journalism. And so that stuck with me, maybe even more than any individual story, strange as that might sound.
And I went back to the office, and I said to Sid Epstein, I said, you know, I don't think I ever want to do that again. I don’t ever want to go for a photo like that. And of course, I did many times. And that particular instance, I brought back the photo of the young man who had died, he had drowned that very same day.
MS. LEONNIG: You know, Carl, I got to tell you, I--that story about Martin Donovan stuck with me from your book as well. Every journalist who, you know, puts themselves out there is going to come in contact with people who are in crisis and grieving and in trauma. And I don't know how you could have done it any differently, if that means anything. I do think that is a really moving piece about what our work is like. We have to deal with people in those situations.
Let me ask you for a quick moment--because people are going to want to know--about the day you took dictation from a young Broder, one of the most famous political journalists of our time, as he was calling in from Dallas to report that John F. Kennedy was dead.
MR. BERNSTEIN: I had been at class at the University of Maryland. Being in class in itself was a rare occasion but I was, and I had seen people gathered around a radio as I left class, and Walter Cronkite was saying there's been confusion but no panic, and then he talked about the president having been shot. And I ran to my car, came down to the office in probably 12-15 minutes flat to get to the Star building, going through red lights, ran toward the front entrance to the Star building. And a great reporter, Bobbie Hornig, was coming out, and she had her notebook out. And she said, "He's dead." And I said, "How do you know that? I've been listening to the radio." She said, "Jerry O'Leary," one of the great rewrite men in the newsroom, "got it from his brother that he’s dead." His brother worked for the CIA. Ran up to the newsroom, and immediately, because I was a very fast typist--I could type 90 words a minute--the national editor called to me, "Bernstein, put on your headset and take dictation from Broder in Dallas." So, I put on my headset, and David started to dictate, and he said two priests walked out of the Dallas Memorial Parkland Hospital at 1:30 p.m. today and announced comma quote "The president is dead." I typed very fast. The head copyboy ripped it from my typewriter and ran it to the national desk. And I noticed as I was typing and my hands were shaking, that I had misspelled hospital O-L.
I should add that David Broder--David gave--who then came to the Washington Post, as did I, after The Star. And on the second day of Watergate, David came up to me and gave me the name of a Republican official who he said might know something about what's going on in this break in. And I called him, and the man did not know about the break-in details itself. But he said to me, he said, "You know, I was just talking to Bob Dole." Actually, he said, "I was just talking to Bob Dole," who was then a member of Congress, "and we both agree it must--this must be something that those two-cent generals in the White House are responsible for." And he named one of the two-cent generals, and it was the first inkling we had that, oh, really the Nixon people could really be involved in this break-in. And that tip from Broder really figured in our minds as we went about covering the story.
MS. LEONNIG: You know, I felt like I read everything about that, and I didn't know the tip came from Broder. That's fascinating. So once
MR. BERNSTEIN: We don't name him. We do say Broder did it in “All the President's Men,” but we don't identify who the--who the guy was, the Republican.
MS. LEONNIG: Got it. We'll keep that secret. So you grew up in--I'm a townie of Washington, D.C., as well, but you grew up in a different era, during segregation. You grew up in what you described as a Jim Crow town, the capital of the United States. How did your experiences with segregation in D.C. sort of shape and direct you as a journalist, ultimately, in your career? How did that--how did that figure in your life?
MR. BERNSTEIN: Probably the most important element of all, my parents were left wing people, and they had participated in sit-ins in downtown Washington where the restaurants were segregated through the 1950s. And they took me with them to sit in at the lunch counters downtown, where Black people could not be served sitting. They could stand up at the lunch counters and take food out, but they couldn't sit. We tried to integrate the tearoom at Woodward & Lothrop, the department store downtown. And I was about eight or nine, and there would be little Black kids also at these sit-ins, or mostly Black kids. And it stuck with me.
But not only that, I went to segregated--legally segregated public schools in the capital of the United States--a fact that probably one out of every hundred people in this country would actually believe. And my school, Janney Elementary at 43rd and Albemarle, was segregated until Brown versus Board of Education in 1954 when I was in the sixth grade. The swimming pools, pools in D.C., under the jurisdiction of the D.C. Recreation Department, were drained so that Black and White kids could not swim together. And so this was--my years at The Star were a hundred years exactly after the Civil War. And the Civil War still cast a pall over our lives at that time in mid-century D.C. And I knew early on I wanted to cover civil rights. And right away, in suburban Maryland, which was also Jim Crow, downtown Bethesda--the shopping strip, the movie theater, the Gifford’s Ice Cream parlor, Glen Echo amusement park--all of these elements of Washington and suburban life were still segregated, many of them by 1963. And I started to cover the demonstrations in Bethesda to integrate Bethesda, if you can imagine such a thing, and then to Cambridge, Maryland, in 1963 and in 1964 on the Eastern Shore.
And Julius Hobson, who probably some of your colleagues will remember, a great civil rights leader in the District of Columbia, he said to me one day in 1962 when we were in the room with among others, Stokely Carmichael, he said, you know, the Eastern Shore of Maryland is really Mississippi. And it was. And so I learned from these great reporters, most of them southerners covering civil rights. That's where I learned--you showed that clip at the beginning--that the truth is not neutral. The best obtainable version of the truth and what we do as reporters is, we also decide what is news. That is not a neutral function. It's not objective. It's subjective and how we go about covering these stories.
And one of the things that I learned as a reporter very early on is my preconceived notion of the story when I go out of the office in the first instance, is almost always different than what the story turned out to be. And Watergate is the best example. For the first 24 hours or so I thought, oh, well, maybe the CIA is really who's behind this. It didn't occur to me until that call that I made from Broder that this was--might really be connected to the Nixon White House.
MS. LEONNIG: Well, that's a perfect segue for my next question, which is going to bring us full force to the current day. You know, you've been pretty critical of news reporting in general of late, and you accused news organizations of not really giving a damn about their readers and their users. You're saying that they missed the basic facts, they ignore what readers want to know the answers to, and they're not pushing for real reporting. Describe a little bit more about that.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Well, I don't think your characterization--let me start by saying--is quite accurate of what I've said, that--because the first thing I would say is, let's look at the coverage of the Trump presidency by the person I'm talking to, among others. The reporting on the Trump presidency, I think, has been perhaps the greatest reporting of a presidency by the largest number of news organizations that I've ever seen. And because the truth is not neutral, and because of the way you and others covered the Trump presidency, we now understand and have the information and the best obtainable version of the truth--and Bob's books of what this presidency really was about and who this president of the United States really is.
And similarly, there is fabulous reporting going on all over the world, and especially in this country, in newsrooms. But it's the exception. The role increasingly, I think, over the past 25-30 years, has more and more been reporters--and this is particularly true since the internet, which is such a great tool, you would think. You can google something, look things up, get all the background information you need in one-tenth of the time that it used to take us, you know, going through old telephone directories and crisscross directories, finding addresses, through those kinds of books, take hours. It's nothing now.
But that's not reporting. You got to get out of the office. And take a look at the movie of “All the President's Men,” or read “Chasing History,” and what you see is the stories come from getting out of the office, talking to sources, one source after another after another after another, never taking no for an answer. If the door gets slammed in your face, you go to the next door. As Woodward and I learned, and did, the best information often comes at night, when you go to people's homes. You can't get that by staying in the office.
And I would ask you, I mean, you work in a newsroom. Even at The Washington Post, I think there's probably not enough of going outside the office. So, in that sense--and The Post is--The Post, The New York Times, a few news organizations are doing a lot better work than others. But I think, by and large, there are many reporters who do not leave the office. They get on the cellphone. But no, this knocking on doors? How are you going to really get to what the truth is unless you sit down with people and talk to them.
And also, I learned this at The Star, too. One of the essential elements of being a reporter is to be a good listener. And my experience is that people will try to tell you their own truth, even if it's not the real truth and you’ve got to go to other sources, if you give them a chance, you respect them, and you listen to them. How many times do we see--and you know this as a reporter--somebody, a reporter run into--say you're on Capitol Hill, you see the senator you want to talk to, you run up to him or her with your notebook, you get a good quote, and then you run straight back to your computer to begin to type the story, because you've got the elements of manufactured controversy. Do you go see that senator or congressman at night? Not enough people do to keep moving with the real story. And to get to the real story, you have to have interaction with sources.
MS. LEONNIG: Carl, super helpful. Thank you for clarifying that. I've got to be--even though I have a list of another 20 questions or more that I want to ask you, I'm going to try to be fair to our subscribers, et cetera, and go to some reader questions. And if we get through them, I'm going to throw more of mine at you. Alright, so first.
MR. BERNSTEIN: I’ll try to be briefer.
MS. LEONNIG: No, no, it's good. You're doing great. Lilian from El Salvador has this question for you. What was, Carl, the most difficult choice in your career?
MR. BERNSTEIN: To leave The Washington Star. I knew that they were not going to let me stay on as a reporter unless I finished college. Well, there's no way that I was going to finish college. I'd been, you know, thrown out already, dropped out. It was an impossibility that I would ever finish college. And it was just around the time that The Post and The Washington Star were hiring only college graduates to be reporters. In fact, at The Star the last noncollege graduate to become a reporter, it had occurred four years before. But I knew I had to leave. And though I loved The Star, as I say in the book, The Star in this instance didn't quite love me back. Sid Epstein, almost all of my editors wanted me to stay on as a reporter without a degree. There was a managing editor there named Bill Hill, and he just would not let me stay on as a reporter. And Sid Epstein went to him and said, look, we're hiring all these new reporters. Bernstein's already done all this reporting. He's got great experience. And managing editor said no. And I went to see him. It was the first time I'd ever been in his office. I did not think much of this guy to begin with, quite honestly. I thought he sort of played at being managing editor. But he said to me an amazing thing. He said, "Carl, experience is no substitute for the training program," which was this rather detailed training program that all new reporters went through. But I had the experience, but I knew I had to leave at that point.
And I went up with the assistant city editor to Sid Epstein to Elizabeth, New Jersey, this little paper that had one-fifth the circulation of The Star. And I stayed there for one year, long enough to do some work that won a bunch of prizes, and then I got hired at The Washington Post. And the city editor there was a guy named Steve Isaacs, under Bradlee at this point, and I knew I wanted to work for Bradlee. And he said to me, "Why do--why do you think you can come to work and be a reporter here at The Post?" And I said, "Because I've had the best education you could ever have by working at The Washington Star for five years." And he’d seen my clips and he said, "You're hired."
MS. LEONNIG: Well, clips should be the judge. They should be the guide for this. I'm going to ask you another one, Nicole in California, who asks, if you tried to break the Watergate story today, do you think the corporate media climate would have allowed it to have the impact that it did back then?
MR. BERNSTEIN: I'm going to read the rest of the question, "--or is right wing media too obstructive today to allow what happened?" I think that most news organizations, I know very few that would turn down a good story or a great story, and I think that that is still the case today. And I think if Bob Woodward and I came in with a story and those facts again, I think almost any respectable news organization--and I'll rule out places like Fox News, those that are ideologically inclined as opposed to reportorially incline--but I think almost any news organization would welcome such a story.
The huge difference today, I think, is that so many of our readers and viewers are not looking for the best obtainable version of the truth. They're looking for information that will reinforce what they already believe. And I think that's part of Trump's success, that he understands this, but that so many readers, viewers, consumers of news and information are not interested in the best obtainable version of the truth. They want information that will underscore their already held beliefs, prejudices, ideology. And this is not just the left or the right. It really, I think, is true to some extent of both. Though I think there's a bigger problem on the right, quite honestly. I think this is as big a problem as anything having to do with newsrooms.
MS. LEONNIG: To keep in that vein for a second, let me go to David, a question from David in California. How would you, Carl, compare Nixon to Trump?
MR. BERNSTEIN: I think Nixon was capable of doing some responsible things in the presidency. Donald Trump, I see very little evidence of him doing any responsible things in the presidency and not looking at the presidency as something to help the country, to help the people of the country. I think Nixon was capable of that. Though he--even though he wanted to reach for it, he was incapable of it because of his own character and the fact that he was a criminal president of the United States.
But the huge difference between Watergate and the Trump presidency and what has happened is the Republican Party. Courageous Republicans were a big reason that Richard Nixon was held accountable. You look at the Ervin Committee, the Watergate Committee investigation that was passed to undertake that investigation by a unanimous bipartisan vote of the Senate. That would never happen today. Look at the investigation of January 6th and how no Republicans except for Liz Cheney and a couple of others are supporting it in the Congress. But you then go back to the House Judiciary Committee and brave Republicans who cast votes in that committee for the impeachment, articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon.
And then the ultimate act by Republicans. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 nominee for president of his party, of the Republican Party, he, Bob Michael, the House Republican leader, other leaders of the Congress of the United States, at Goldwater's urging went to Nixon. And Nixon fully expected that the Senate of the United States would acquit him in a trial as Donald Trump was acquitted twice. And these leaders went down with Goldwater. He sat across from Nixon in the Oval Office. And Nixon looked at Goldwater, and he said, Barry, how many votes do I have in the Senate? And Goldwater looked at him and he said, Mr. President, you might have four, you might have six votes for acquittal, but you don't have mine. And at that moment, Nixon realized he had to resign, and he did, announced his resignation within 48 hours.
That's the difference. There was a responsible Republican Party that was willing to look at the facts. You have nothing like that today. In fact, what you have is a Republican Party that has now thrown itself wholly into the agenda of an authoritarian criminal president of the United States, a seditious president of the United States such as we've never had in our history.
MS. LEONNIG: And, Carl, what's interesting about that is that party that has completely yoked itself to the big lie that the election was rigged and the January 6th was a group of nice people, just tourists, you know, visiting D.C. and trying to support their president. That big lie is magnified by places like Fox News and all sorts of even more permeating talk radio. What are your ideas on how to effectively counter that propaganda machine, that disinformation media?
MR. BERNSTEIN: I think we're doing and do all that we can. I think, again, more reporters need to get out of the newsroom. But of all things, in terms of covering--I do think we need to get out in the country a lot more, because look, 50 percent, just about, of the people of this country, maybe even more are going along with this authoritarianism, have embraced Trump, have embrac--and embraced Republicans who are so craven about slavishly following this authoritarian path.
So all we can do is our reporting. You know, our job is to get the information out there. It's not to bring about a desired political result. At the same time, you would hope and think that if, as we have done, we present the facts about Trump, about the big lie, et cetera, et cetera, you would hope that the message of the truth would reach our readers, viewers, citizens of this country. That's not happening. So what we have and a big part of the story is, this isn’t just isn't just about politics. This isn't just about media. We have undergone a cultural--this is about culture, the culture of the United States. We have undergone a cultural shift in this country over the past 20-25 years. The cold civil war, as I've called it, goes back those 20-30 years. Trump ignited it. We have now passed the point of ignition. And that is also what our story needs to be--post-Trump ignition America. Why and how are we--in what place are we as a people?
MS. LEONNIG: And by the way, I should say that that good question came from Beverly [phonetic] in California. And the next question I'm going to give you, Carl, is from John in Canada. He wants to know from you why you think so many Americans are against their own government.
MR. BERNSTEIN: That's a good question. I'm sitting here blank, because it's such a complex question, and I don't know the answer to it. I think people are--part of it is people are always looking for a scapegoat. I think also there have been tremendous failures of both the federal government and state government in this country. Look, this country in the post-war era had the greatest meritocracy in the history of the Earth. Where are we today? That meritocracy has largely disappeared. We have a plutocracy. That has something to do with government inaction. We have government bureaucracy, where we know it doesn't work often. One thing we see, though, is that mayors of cities seem to be much more--and sometimes governors--much more in touch with what goes on in their states and cities than then their representatives in the U.S. Congress. But I don't really know the answer to the to that question.
MS. LEONNIG: Okay.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Also, okay, we're a divided people. That’s the other answer.
MS. LEONNIG: But I think you're right that some great reporting can be done on why so many people are buying this snake oil. And that's something I think The Post is pretty interested in too.
I'm going to ask you another question. This one's from Robena in Virginia. She asks, you know--she's going to ask one of the best reporters in the country what are the challenges for reporting on public corruption? What can we do as a country to better support our journalists who are threatened by the people they write about? That's a two-parter, but I know you can handle it.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Again, I think the greatest threat is not the physical threat. The greatest threat is the accusation of prejudice, of having an ideology. And those threats, even when they are not--what Woodward and I were most afraid of in Watergate, we're often asked were your lives in danger, all this, all these kinds of questions. And this same question seems to convey that element. No, we're afraid of--what we were afraid of in Watergate, and I think as reporters we're always afraid of, is making a mistake if we're doing our jobs. We're really always afraid of making a mistake.
And what the question I think is on to, is that an awful lot of people think we're always making mistakes, when in fact, in covering corruption, as the question is about in part or largely, that you just keep reporting. And if you--I hate to say this, if you if you really need physical protection, you hopefully work for an institution.
And incidentally, the threats against reporters today are horrible, and they usually come from politically inclined people. I don't know about yourself, Carol, but if you take a look at the comments on Twitter, or whatever, and whether they're antisemitic or are veiled threats, or not so veiled threats, this has become commonplace in this culture that I'm talking about. So, I think all you can do is go on with the reporting, try to get the support of your news organization. And if that means--you know, look into the security precautions we now take in newsrooms today. It's extraordinary. That would be kind of how I would answer the question.
MS. LEONNIG: I got you. All right, I would be a bad reporter if I didn't ask you a kind of fun, personal question.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Sure.
MS. LEONNIG: Which is, you know, many people were introduced to your personal life through the book and the movie “Heartburn.” And I wondered if you would tell us a little bit about what your reaction to--reaction to that book and that work was by your ex-wife.
MR. BERNSTEIN: As a result of my own actions, and I think my response was to just ride it out as best I can--could. Sometimes I was not very good at it. I kept working. I was at ABC News. I kept doing my work and also being a father to my--to our children. But it was a difficult period.
And look, I've had an amazing life, a big life, and it's had ups and downs. And hopefully I've learned from both the ups and the downs. And the other thing is that, you know, eventually made our peace. Nora and myself, we have two great kids. One, Jacob, is a fabulous reporter at The New York Times for the Style section. Just an incredible reporter and writer. He did a great movie, actually, about his mom. Our other son, Max, is--I keep using the word great, but I mean, I'm blessed. We both were blessed as parents. Max is a great musician. He's a guitar player for, if you can imagine such a thing, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus.
MS. LEONNIG: So, he rates really high with my daughters.
MR. BERNSTEIN: So, things have worked out. But you know, I think that would be my answer to the personal question. And yeah, look, I had a life that partly was in gossip columns for a bit back there. And so what and--
MS. LEONNIG: Thank you for answering that question from Francis [phonetic] from Georgia. And forgive me that I always credit you guys after the fact, I apologize.
I'm going to ask one last one, just for me. And that is, when you look at the state of our country today--you know, you're a legend in this field, you've been inspirational. What's your biggest worry?
MR. BERNSTEIN: That as a country and a people we may well be beyond the ability to unite around democratic, lowercase d principles, that our institutions, many of them, including our state legislatures, an awful lot of them, including so much of the Congress of the United States, but including the people themselves, we have lost the notion of a civic compact in this country. And with it, we have also lost our history, I think, that there is not a recognition among enough of our people in this country as to what our real history is--not the glossy history necessarily of, you know, George Washington cut down the tree and I cannot tell a lie and all that, but the real history. Because, look, we are a young country. We are also the oldest democracy in the world, and our democracy is not functioning well enough for there to be a consensus about the need for democracy in this country.
And we may be, particularly with Trump, and if you look at how large his movement or those who are willing to embrace it and the big lie et cetera, et cetera--how big this change in our culture is, I think there's real reason to fear that with the genie out of the bottle to the extent that it is, that we may never be able--possibly we may never be able to regain who we are as a democratic nation and as a prevailing democratic notion among the people of this country. I think it's a horrible, horrible, worrisome situation.
And also, look abroad. Look how other countries and people now look at us in this country. Very different. We are not the leading power in the world in terms of esteem or also in terms of what we are accomplishing in so many ways and not accomplishing. And we also live in an age when Putin, a leader of a country with 3 percent of the world's GDP, has managed to destabilize the West and this country.
MS. LEONNIG: Our circumlocution has reached its end.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Yes, there we go. I did it. I went in a circle again.
MS. LEONNIG: We could talk for another hour or two.
MR. BERNSTEIN: We didn’t talk about rock and roll, though.
MS. LEONNIG: I would love to talk about all of it. Unfortunately, we are out of time, and we have to leave it there. I’m very sad to say it. But thank you so much for joining us, Carl. It's really been really educational.
MR. BERNSTEIN: Thank you.
MS. LEONNIG: And I’m Carol Leonnig. As always, thank you for watching. To check out the interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find more information about all of our upcoming subscriber programs. Congratulations on being the first to join our subscriber event, and look forward to seeing you again soon. | null | null | null | null | null |
The legislation would remove a memorial to former senator Francis G. Newlands, a Democrat of Nevada who advocated for abolishing the right of African American men to vote and restricting immigration to White people only; he died in 1917. His name appears on a 60-foot sandstone fountain within Chevy Chase Circle, which straddles the D.C.-Maryland line, and bears the inscription, “His statesmanship held true regard for the interests of all men.”
Van Hollen and Cardin’s bill is a companion to a House measure introduced by Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) in 2020, which followed a resolution from the Chevy Chase Advisory Neighborhood Commission supporting the removal of Newlands’s name from the fountain in a 5-0 vote.
Newlands, who purchased land that would eventually become Chevy Chase in the 1880s, was known for sponsoring the 1902 Reclamation Act that funded irrigation in the West andfor supporting women’s suffrage.
But in 1912, Newlands advocated for the repeal of the 15th Amendment, which provided the right to vote to Black men, and unsuccessfully lobbied the Democratic National Convention to include the elimination of Black suffrage in its platform, according to the book “Reclaiming the Arid West: The Career of Francis G. Newlands” by William D. Rowley. | null | null | null | null | null |
The legislation would remove a memorial to former senator Francis G. Newlands, a Democrat of Nevada who advocated abolishing the right of African American men to vote and restricting immigration to White people only; he died in 1917. His name appears on a 60-foot sandstone fountain within Chevy Chase Circle, which straddles the D.C.-Maryland line, and bears the inscription, “His statesmanship held true regard for the interests of all men.”
Van Hollen and Cardin’s bill is a companion to a House measure introduced by Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) in 2020, which followed a resolution from the Chevy Chase Advisory Neighborhood Commission supporting the removal of Newlands’s name from the fountain in a 5-to-0 vote.
Newlands, who purchased land that would eventually become Chevy Chase in the 1880s, was known for sponsoring the 1902 Reclamation Act that funded irrigation in the West and for supporting women’s suffrage.
But in 1912, Newlands advocated the repeal of the 15th Amendment, which provided the right to vote to Black men, and unsuccessfully lobbied the Democratic National Convention to include the elimination of Black suffrage in its platform, according to the book “Reclaiming the Arid West: The Career of Francis G. Newlands” by William D. Rowley. | null | null | null | null | null |
Is it a stunt? Sure. And Chambers is a long shot to say the least. An activist and community organizer, he has never held public office, though he has run unsuccessfully for a couple of lower offices. And he’s trying to unseat Sen. John Neely Kennedy, a Republican incumbent running in a state Donald Trump won by almost 20 points in 2020. Kennedy might act like he’s Foghorn Leghorn, but he should be popular enough to be reelected (and he has already raised plenty of money).
Nevertheless, Chambers’s ad is a significant marker in changing ideas about cannabis. He isn’t running as a joke; even if the odds are against him, he’s trying to be a serious candidate. If I had told you in 2000 that, in 2022, you’d see a Senate candidate smoking pot in one of his ads, you probably wouldn’t have believed me.
But the cultural and political status of marijuana has changed rapidly, with two-thirds of the public now supporting outright legalization (including half of Republicans). If it’s not smack dab in the mainstream, it’s no longer counterculture either.
The legal landscape has certainly changed. In the 2020 election, voters approved legalization initiatives in New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota and Montana. In 2021, legislatures in Connecticut, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia passed legalization laws. Eighteen states and D.C. now allow recreational use, and perhaps more remarkably, there are only three states — Idaho, Nebraska, and Kansas — where all cannabis products are illegal.
With it being so obvious that most Americans are now fine with legalization, you don’t see Republicans promising to crack down on pot smokers, even if their policy positions are remnants of the war on drugs. It functions similarly to their position on marriage equality: While most haven’t actually changed their beliefs, they know they’re on the wrong side of public opinion, so it’s something they prefer not to talk about.
While some of that would have to be done through legislation (and a federal decriminalization bill did pass the House in December 2020), so far, President Biden has done nothing at all on the issue.
It’s hard not to conclude that this was one of those issues in which Biden took a position he was comfortable with — and one to the right of other candidates urging legalization, including his future vice president — but it wasn’t something he cared about or would expend effort on. Which might not be surprising for a man who came of age in the 1950s when cannabis was still considered an evil weed consumed only by criminals and jazz musicians.
Politicians are always a lagging indicator of change; they seldom embrace habits and ideas unless they’re sure that doing so won’t lose them support. And while plenty of officeholders (mostly Democrats) will say they have smoked pot, it’s almost always characterized as a thing they did long ago when they were young and free of responsibilities. As Vice President Harris said in 2019, “I did inhale. It was a long time ago. But, yes.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Everything changed last week, when Serbia’s main independent newspaper carried the news on its front page, accusing the government of acting “in the service of Putin’s regime.” Serbia’s pro-democracy opposition, which is expected to make gains in April’s parliamentary and municipal elections, slammed President Aleksandar Vucic for “turning Serbia into a foreign outpost.” The European Union — which Serbia is on course to join by 2025 — called for an investigation, while senior E.U. lawmakers condemned Belgrade for “collaborating with an autocratic regime.” Serbia “must choose whether it wants to truly transform itself and join [the EU], or further align with the autocrats from #Moscow and #Beijing,” tweeted Viola von Cramon, a German member of the European Parliament and a party colleague of Germany’s new foreign minister. The “politics of sitting on two chairs is unacceptable.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Visitors wade in the Great Salt Lake at Antelope Island near Syracuse, Utah, on Aug. 1. Water levels in the lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, have dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Although 2021 tied for the sixth-hottest year on record, it ranked as the warmest La Niña year. La Niña, a phenomenon that slightly cools sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific, may have cooled global temperatures by about 0.06 degrees (0.03 degrees Celsius), but human-emitted greenhouse gas effectively masked the impact.
(Scott Duncan)
Besides the swath of extreme heat records, other weather extremes plagued North America, particularly the United States. The freeze from winter storm Uri in mid-February sent deep Arctic cold all the way to Texas, the costliest U.S. winter storm on record.
December was record-warm for the United States, while western Canada shivered in extreme cold. The clash of extreme cold in the north and extreme warmth to the south was a key ingredient in the devastating and unprecedented severe weather episodes in December. The heat in the southern United States smashed December records by large margins. Some places beat all-time November records, too.
Scott Duncan is a professional meteorologist now based in London who grew up in the Scottish Highlands where he experienced all sorts of extreme weather. This exposure to Mother Nature from an early age developed his passion for weather and climate. | null | null | null | null | null |
The parents of Austin McEwen filed a lawsuit in Madison County, Ill., on Monday, saying Amazon’s decisions contributed to the 26-year-old man’s death on Dec. 10, 2021. Among them was the decision to call employees and contractors such as McEwen to work during the holiday rush despite more than 24 hours of severe-weather warnings for the area. McEwen was among six people killed at the facility Dec. 10. (Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The McEwen’s lawsuit says that Amazon “carelessly” required their son and others to continue to work even as the tornado approached, and that there was no proper tornado shelter or alarm at the 1.1-million-square-foot facility. The Washington Post previously reported that Amazon confirmed the lack of loudspeaker system; in the moments before the tornado hit, managers went through the building with megaphones, ordering people to take shelter.
A spokesperson for Amazon disputed those characterizations, saying in a statement that the lawsuit “misunderstands key facts, such as the difference between various types of severe weather and tornado alerts, as well as the condition and safety of the building.”
“The local teams were following the weather conditions closely,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said. “Severe weather watches are common in this part of the country and, while precautions are taken, are not cause for most businesses to close down. We believe our team did the right thing as soon as a warning was issued, and they worked to move people to safety as quickly as possible.”
Alice McEwen added that her family and those of the five other deceased workers deserve answers, and that they can only hope to get them through a lawsuit.
In Mayfield, Ky., eight people died after an EF-4 tornado struck a candle factory. The building collapse and resulting injuries and deaths prompted a similar round of workplace safety investigations at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former FARC captive to run for president
Íngrid Betancourt, a politician who was held captive by Colombia’s largest guerrilla group for more than six years, announced Tuesday that she will compete in the presidential election this year.
The last time Betancourt ran for president, in 2002, she was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and held hostage in the jungle. She became one of the highest-profile captives during the country’s 52-year conflict with the FARC.
Despite the horrors she endured — at times being chained by the neck — Betancourt supported Colombia’s 2016 peace deal with the FARC.
Betancourt is entering a crowded field at a relatively late stage ahead of the May election. Leftist senator Gustavo Petro is leading in the polls. Betancourt will first have to win the centrist coalition’s primary in March.
— Samantha Schmidt and Diana Durán
Far-right killer gives Nazi salute at hearing
Anders Behring Breivik, the man responsible for one of Norway’s most heinous crimes in recent memory, gave a Nazi salute as he entered court Tuesday to argue for early release from his 21-year prison sentence.
In July 2011, Breivik killed 77 people by setting off a bomb in Oslo and opening fire at a youth summer camp. He was given the maximum prison sentence permitted under Norwegian law.
At the time, the judge ordered “preventive detention,” reserved for criminals seen as a danger to society beyond the length of their sentence. That makes it unlikely that Breivik will ever be released, though he became eligible for parole after having served a decade in prison.
On Tuesday, Breivik carried signs into the hearing that read “Stop your genocide against our white nations” and “Nazi-Civil-War.”
Since Breivik’s incarceration, he has argued before Norwegian and European courts that his isolation in a three-room cell violated his rights. His case against Norwegian authorities was shot down by a top European human rights tribunal. But his post-incarceration hearings have also been opportunities for him to trumpet his far-right leanings.
— Amy Cheng
Parliament approves capital's relocation
Parliament on Tuesday approved a bill to relocate Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta to a site deep within the jungle of Kalimantan on Borneo island, the most significant advancement of an idea the country’s leaders have been toying with for years.
The new state capital law, which provides a legal framework for President Joko Widodo’s megaproject, stipulates how development of the capital will be funded. The initial relocation will start between 2022 and 2024, with roads and ports prioritized, the Finance Ministry said.
Plans to move the government away from Jakarta, a megacity of 10 million people that suffers from chronic congestion, floods and air pollution, have been offered by multiple presidents, but none has made it this far.
Jakarta will remain the capital until a presidential decree is issued to formalize the change.
Hong Kong to kill 2,000 hamsters over virus fears: Hong Kong has asked pet shops and owners to hand over close to 2,000 hamsters for culling, after 11 of the small rodents tested positive for the coronavirus in a pet store. The territory has also suspended the import of small animals. Authorities announced the decision after health experts found two groups of hamsters, which originated in the Netherlands and arrived in Hong Kong on Dec. 22 and Jan. 7, to be "high risk" for carrying the virus. Officials said hamsters turned over by owners will be killed to "cut the transmission chain." | null | null | null | null | null |
No charges in Black teen’s custody death in Kansas
No charges in Black teen's custody death
The teen’s family decried Bennett’s decision.
Lofton’s brother Marquan Teetz and a local pastor on Tuesday asked a court to release video of the altercation, citing the state’s open records law. The Wichita Police Department on Tuesday released its body-camera video.
Lofton was living with foster parents when Wichita police responding to a report of a disturbance encountered him outside a home on Sept. 24, according to a report from Bennett based on a review of video and other evidence. His foster family said Lofton had been behaving erratically in recent months, had become paranoid and was hallucinating, according to the report. Bennett said that Lofton was in the midst of a mental health crisis and that police initially tried to get him to seek treatment.
The 5-foot-10, 135-pound Lofton resisted police, assaulting at least one officer before they could restrain him, Bennett’s report said. Police took him to the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center.
A December autopsy report ruled the death a homicide and contradicted an earlier, preliminary finding that the teenager had not suffered apparent life-threatening injuries.
Man convicted in shooting that killed 3: A man accused of killing three people and wounding three others in an April shooting at a bar in Wisconsin was found guilty on all charges Tuesday. Rakayo Vinson, 25, of Kenosha, was convicted of three counts of first-degree intentional homicide and three counts of attempted first-degree intentional homicide. Vinson was arrested in Mount Pleasant after he stole a car from friends, who turned him in after he returned the vehicle. | null | null | null | null | null |
Congregation Beth Israel synagogue, where a 44-year-old British national held four people hostage for more than 10 hours. (Emil Lippe/Getty Images)
Despite all the security training they’d sat through and everything that the congregants knew about the heightened dangers of hate and ignorance, they still kept the faith and opened the synagogue door to for the stranger who knocked. He was welcomed inside Congregation Beth Israel where it was warm on a particularly cold Saturday in their small Texas community. He was offered tea. Then, he revealed his violent intentions. Wielding a gun, he made hostages of the rabbi and the three worshipers who were attending services in person on the Sabbath. The four escaped, not because police officers stormed the synagogue, but because security experts had schooled these civilians on how to be proactive, look for their moment and save their own lives. And when it appeared that the gunman, full of antisemitic bile, had grown more agitated and desperate, they bolted for the door and ran to safety.
The hostages survived and their assailant was killed. And the foundations of faith — those precepts of generosity, grace and trust — were tested yet again. After the terrible ordeal in Colleyville, the public thankfully didn’t find itself weeping over lives brutally taken by a gunman.
The generosity of Congregation Beth Israel calls to mind the welcoming embrace of the worshipers at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. The Black men and women opened their hearts to the stranger who came to the door during their Bible study. They fellowshipped with him and prayed with him. And then he, a white supremacist, killed nine of them, including the senior pastor. The worshipers had not allowed the history of American racism and violence against Black churches to cause them to throw up physical barricades and emotional walls. They didn’t look at the young man who would become their murderer as a stereotype or an archetype. They saw an individual. Surely, that’s a testament to the resilience of the human heart.
But then the very nature of faith is in being willing to take a risk, to believe in a source of goodness or solace or strength that’s impossible to explain. Faith is wholly illogical. A congregation is little more than fertile ground where the tiniest seeds of hope can grow.
Faith in silence
No, what makes these attacks on places of worship so grievous — beyond the lives that are lost and the families that are traumatized — is that they take aim at the spirit of community that these buildings foster. Their power is the light they shine out beyond their walls. They’re admirable not because of the way in which they treat their most devoted members: the ones who fill up the collection plate or who have instant recall of long passages of scripture. The grandest house of worship isn’t necessarily the historical building with a place of honor on a wide boulevard. It isn’t the one with the largest membership or the most prestigious one. It’s the house whose doors are always open to the least of its neighbors. And every assault is a reminder that those open doors are an astounding, heartbreaking miracle. | null | null | null | null | null |
“We are entering, sadly … our third calendar year for our fight against covid,” Bowser (D) told reporters before touring the Ward 7 covid center, which opened Tuesday alongside centers in wards 1, 2 and 8. “We know that it’s going to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. We have recognized that we have to adapt to these realities and stay ahead of the curve.”
After a months-long surge driven by the omicron variant, infection rates dropped in recent days by about 30 percent in D.C. and Maryland, and less in Virginia, where the spike took longer to materialize than elsewhere in the region, according to The Washington Post’s coronavirus tracker.
The District last week reported that 10 residents died of the coronavirus. Each was unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status, said Patrick Ashley, the head of emergency response for the city’s health department, which will continue to stock tests at select libraries, firehouses and other locations.
Bowser added that more than 6,000 D.C. Public Schools prekindergarten students submitted results — nearly 100 percent compliance — as part of a weekly and mandatory testing program newly rolled out by the school system. The program targets prekindergarten students who are not yet eligible for vaccination. The reported positivity rate was less than 1 percent, which is lower than the rate among older kids, she said.
County residents and business owners who turned out to oppose the proposed vaccine passport at a virtual public hearing Tuesday said it would not slow the spread of the coronavirus and would burden businesses already suffering amid the pandemic, driving economic activity away from the county.
“Its negative consequences far outweigh the benefits,” said Mauricio Vasquez, a board member with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce for Montgomery County. The chamber “fully supports” efforts to increase vaccine uptake, he said, but is concerned a sweeping mandate would be costly and difficult for small businesses to enforce. | null | null | null | null | null |
Mr. Akram, 44, identified by authorities as the gunman, was fatally shot by law enforcement officers who rushed the suspect after the hostages made their escape. He had demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted in 2010 of attempting to kill U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. People who heard Mr. Akram on a Facebook live stream of services, which showed part of the attack, said he chose Congregation Beth Israel because of its proximity to the federal prison in Fort Worth where Ms. Siddiqui is being held and because “America only cares about Jewish lives.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Secretary of State Antony Blinken talked Friday with two key leaders of the Afghan relief effort: Martin Griffiths, the U.N. undersecretary of humanitarian affairs, and Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The two urged Blinken to support international efforts to provide cash for basic needs as Afghanistan’s economy and financial system collapse under Taliban rule. | null | null | null | null | null |
Janice Burtch, left, tells Lanny and Bill Hathaway how she is doing since covid-19 claimed her husband, Danny. They gathered at the 50 Plus Club in Lewiston, Mich. (Nick King for The Washington Post)
Just days earlier, the club’s president — and one of its most devoted euchre players, Danny Burtch — died of covid-19 after a weeks-long bout with the virus.
During the next two weeks, his condition worsened day by day. He experienced a dramatic loss in lung function, his kidneys were failing and then he had a heart attack followed by a stroke that left him blind.
“If I get sick and one of our people dies because of me … I can’t live with that,” she said.
Things got worse once Danny Burtch got sick. They briefly put activities on hold to prevent further spread. In-person meals resumed with just a few tables filling up every day. But with Janice staying in Traverse City while Danny was hospitalized, bingo was canceled.
In the days after Danny’s death, news about the omicron variant’s rapid spread sparked an added sense of fear at the club.
“When it went up to as much as 250,000 [cases] I thought that was the worst thing, that was the scariest thing. And when it went up to a million, I mean, there was no help anymore, you just [took] care of yourself and you [knew] a lot of people are going to die,” she recalled. “It was a scary time.”
“Too many people are resisting,” she said. “I’d think they’d be afraid of dying.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The parents of Austin McEwen filed a lawsuit in Madison County, Ill., on Monday, saying Amazon’s decisions contributed to the 26-year-old man’s death Dec. 10. Among them was the decision to call employees and contractors such as McEwen to work during the holiday rush despite more than 24 hours of severe-weather warnings for the area. McEwen was among six people killed at the facility Dec. 10. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The McEwens’ lawsuit says that Amazon “carelessly” required their son and others to continue to work even as the tornado approached, and that there was no proper tornado shelter or alarm at the 1.1-million-square-foot facility. The Washington Post previously reported that Amazon confirmed the lack of a loudspeaker system; in the moments before the tornado hit, managers went through the building with megaphones, ordering people to take shelter.
A spokeswoman for Amazon disputed those characterizations, saying in a statement that the lawsuit “misunderstands key facts, such as the difference between various types of severe weather and tornado alerts, as well as the condition and safety of the building.”
“The local teams were following the weather conditions closely,” Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. “Severe weather watches are common in this part of the country and, while precautions are taken, are not cause for most businesses to close down. We believe our team did the right thing as soon as a warning was issued, and they worked to move people to safety as quickly as possible.”
She added that her family and those of the five other deceased workers deserve answers, and that they can only hope to get them through a lawsuit.
In Mayfield, Ky., at least eight people died after an EF-4 tornado struck a candle factory. The building collapse and resulting injuries and deaths prompted a similar round of workplace safety investigations at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory. | null | null | null | null | null |
The city, though, is famously segregated — so much so that it has been a case study for BBC documentaries. Mostly, the White residents moved out. In the city center, many former churches are boarded up, or repurposed as snooker halls or new businesses.
Gulbar Akram, the hostage-taker’s younger brother, told The Post that Malik had mental health issues, but he declined to elaborate.
The Guardian newspaper reported that Akram was banned from a Blackburn court in 2001 after he said he “wished a court usher had been on the planes flown into buildings to commit mass murder” in the 9/11 attacks. | null | null | null | null | null |
Saints beat Georgetown Prep, 77-62
St. Stephen's/St. Agnes guard Garrett Brennan finds Devin Ceasar with a backdoor pass in Tuesday night's win over Georgetown Prep. (Michael Errigo/The Washington Post)
Late in the third quarter of his team’s 77-62 win Tuesday against Georgetown Prep, as the Saints pieced together their biggest run of the night, St. Stephen’s/St. Agnes senior Garrett Brennan stood at the forefront of a frenzied bench and edged closer to the court as he mimicked a passionate closeout.
Brennan is one of few relics left from a pre-pandemic era of success for the Saints, a period in which the program won two conference championships on the back of an all-out, physical defense.
Now that he’s a senior leader on a new-look Saints team, Brennan likes to show his passion for defense, whether he’s on or off the court.
“All of the seniors viewed it as our job to infuse that culture into this team,” Brennan said. “I had to let them know that [Coach Mike Jones] wins with defense. We go to work on defense.”
On Tuesday night in Alexandria, the No. 9 Saints slowly turned up the dial on their defense to pull away from No. 13 Georgetown Prep in an important matchup in the Interstate Athletic Conference.
“We practice fast so we can play fast,” said senior guard Devin Ceaser, a transfer from St. Mary’s Ryken, said. “It can be challenging, but we want it all to come together in the games.”
Coming out of the 2019-20 season, the Saints (7-2) were the unquestioned kings of the conference, dropping just one league game across two championship seasons. Now, like so many other programs, they have emerged from that void with hopes of reestablishing themselves as a team to beat in the D.C. area.
But the IAC is full of programs ready to ensure that no team stays atop the conference too long. Episcopal beat the Saints just last week, and Jones knows each game will be a grind in this long-delayed title defense.
“We want to bring the same type of energy that that 2019 team brought,” Jones said. “I’ve showed them clips, just to give them an idea of how hard they played and what it takes.”
It was the Little Hoyas (6-5) who held momentum early on Tuesday, maintaining a lead for much of the first half. They flaunted a distinct size advantage over the Saints and used it to produce easy looks inside.
But the Saints, playing without three key players because of covid protocols, kept their heads and chipped away with a physical half-court defense that produced several steals.
“A steal to us is just as exciting as a dunk,” Brennan said. “Because you know if you get that steal, you’re going to get that dunk.”
By the third quarter, the Saints had worn down the Prep offense and pushed their lead to double digits. Ceaser led the way with 21 points while junior guard Mason So added 19.
On the final possession of the game, a Georgetown Prep player fumbled a pass as the clock neared zero. With the Saints on the verge of a win, the home crowd had already started to applaud. But an assistant coach could still be heard yelling from the bench, asking his players to do what this team does: keep playing defense.
“Get that ball,” he yelled. “Get on the floor!” | null | null | null | null | null |
No. 3 Paul VI and No. 4 Bishop McNamara are pulled off the court a minute before their girls’ basketball showdown because of a positive coronavirus test
Bishop McNamara Coach Frank Oliver, shown in 2019, said six of his team's games this winter have been postponed or canceled. (Will Newton/For The Washington Post)
About five minutes before one of the area’s most anticipated high school girls’ basketball games, Bishop McNamara Coach Frank Oliver hurried down his home gym’s sideline with his phone glued to his ear. With his school’s administrators on the call and Paul VI Coach Scott Allen nearby, they discussed what to do based on a separate conversation Oliver just had with a nurse 10 minutes earlier.
One of his players’ coronavirus tests from that morning came up positive. So Oliver and Allen gathered their teams near midcourt with about 60 seconds until tip-off in Forestville to inform them the game had been postponed.
It was the latest — and perhaps the most last-minute — example of the challenges teams face as they continue their seasons while the pandemic persists.
“I wouldn’t have imagined that at all,” said Oliver, a 43-year-old who played at DeMatha in the mid-1990s. “I’ve been playing this game all my life. Thirty years I’ve been in the [Washington Catholic Athletic Conference] or around it, and I’ve never seen anything like this."
The Mustangs (7-4) canceled their home showcase last weekend because of the school prohibiting spectators and the risks of welcoming out-of-state teams. Around noon Tuesday, though, Oliver confirmed No. 4 McNamara’s game against No. 3 Paul VI (10-4) would occur at 7 p.m., as scheduled. It would be a rematch of the last WCAC championship game in Feb. 2020, which the Mustangs won.
The junior varsity squads played at 5 p.m., and at the end of that game Oliver prepared to deliver a speech to his players before a school nurse called with the news. Both teams’ players warmed up while rap music filled the gym. On Paul VI’s bench, Allen considered the excitement this top-five matchup could provide.
“This should be a good one,” he said.
About five minutes later, Oliver approached Allen, who walked near the corner of the gym to call a school administrator. A few minutes later, Allen walked back to Oliver shaking his head.
Oliver and Allen crossed the court to inform three referees the game would be postponed. At 6:59 p.m., the officials left the gym and the music hushed as the coaches assembled their players on each side of the court. After brief meetings, players grabbed their belongings and exited.
“They don’t know who else has been infected,” Allen said. “And if we play the game, then everyone could be.”
Oliver said his players were not in a healthy psyche to speak after the game. McNamara was set to compete in Geico Nationals in spring 2020 before the prestigious tournament was canceled. The Mustangs played five games last season, and Oliver said six of their games this winter have been postponed or canceled.
As Oliver stood against a wall in a near-empty gym, pondering the contact tracing he will need to complete in the next 24 hours to determine if his squad can play Holy Cross on Friday, Allen exited toward his team’s bus.
“All right, Scott,” Oliver said. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
“Yeah, we’ll figure it out,” Allen responded. “It’s the right thing to do.” | null | null | null | null | null |
And while it might sound a little easier to keep a couple of dedicated recycling bins around, both companies are, in their own way, tackling a flaw in our waste management systems that many people probably aren’t aware of. As it turns out, much of the material we toss into our recycling bins doesn’t actually ever get recycled. That’s for a whole host of reasons: improperly cleaned materials can contaminate others that would have been recyclable otherwise, and some of the items people might just assume are recyclable — say, plastic cutlery — usually aren’t. And ultimately, that means more trips to the landfill. | null | null | null | null | null |
Deal to buy Activision Blizzard — the maker of Candy Crush and Call of Duty — for $68.7 billion would be Microsoft’s largest acquisition
Microsoft on Tuesday announced it is buying embattled video game publisher Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, a historic deal that consolidates under the tech giant’s roof an increasingly wide range of businesses delivering everyday technologies.
Microsoft announced in a blog post Tuesday it would acquire the video game publisher behind hit franchises Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Candy Crush. Activision Blizzard has come under fire in recent months from public allegations of gender discrimination and sexual harassment, as well as worker strikes — all of which increase the risks for Microsoft’s biggest acquisition ever.
Buying Activision would add power to Microsoft’s already heavy-hitting game business, which includes gaming unit Xbox and popular kid’s game Minecraft, and position Microsoft well to compete in the emerging “metaverse” business prioritized by tech companies. Microsoft has built itself into a tech conglomerate in recent years through big deals such as career networking site LinkedIn and coding site GitHub, as well as its homegrown cloud-computing powerhouse Azure — part of a growing trend among tech giants toward operating sprawling empires.
The Activision tech deal is the largest one in recent memory, several times the size of Amazon’s and Facebook’s largest acquisitions of Whole Foods Market and WhatsApp, respectively. But this deal sets up a major test for U.S. regulators, who are increasingly skeptical of consolidation in the tech industry.
The companies don’t expect the deal to close until 2023. Microsoft has largely escaped the trustbusting scrutiny that its fellow tech giants have endured recently, in part by carefully applying lessons it learned in its huge antitrust battle with regulators two decades ago.
The Activision acquisition dwarfs others that have faced opposition from the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department, including the $40 billion semiconductor deal the FTC sued to block in December.
Antitrust enforcers from the Justice Department and FTC hosted a news conference Tuesday on strengthening enforcement of mergers, asking the public to weigh in on how they can ensure competition guidelines can address digital markets.
“All of the signs, all of the indications point toward more demanding scrutiny,” said William Kovacic, a professor at George Washington University Law School and former FTC chair.
Staffers from the Justice Department and FTC declined to comment on the deal during Tuesday’s news conference.
The purchase price is a significant premium on Activision Blizzard’s stock price before the deal was announced, even as the smaller company grapples with multiple lawsuits and claims of a toxic work environment. Activision Blizzard has established itself as a leader with several popular game franchises, but Microsoft would be taking on a troubled asset.
In July, the publisher was sued by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) in a suit that alleges widespread gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment at the company.
Activision Blizzard also faces a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, as well as a class-action lawsuit instigated by shareholders, and an unfair labor practices complaint filed by workers and the media labor union Communications Workers of America. The publisher’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, has faced repeated calls by employees to step down.
Microsoft announced that Kotick will stay on as CEO of Activision Blizzard, but he is expected to step down when the deal closes, according to media reports.
When the deal is finalized, that company will report to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer.
The deal price would surpass Microsoft’s 2016 acquisition of professional networking site LinkedIn, which the business software company bought for $26.2 billion. Microsoft made a name for itself as a PC and business software maker, and is now one of the largest providers of cloud-computing services in the world with its Azure division. But the company has its arms in a sprawling list of businesses, including gaming, health care and artificial intelligence.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has for years acted to preserve the company’s gaming unit, even when some analysts had suggested the Xbox business wasn’t worth keeping.
In an email sent to Activision Blizzard employees Tuesday and shared with The Washington Post, Kotick wrote he would stay on as CEO “with the same passion and enthusiasm” he had when he started the job in 1991. He wrote that the deal will close sometime by June 2023, pending regulatory approval, and until then, the company will stay autonomous from Microsoft.
Despite being one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $2 trillion, Microsoft to date has largely sidestepped the recent flurry of antitrust scrutiny aimed at Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Microsoft pointed out in its blog post announcing the deal that buying Activision Blizzard would make it the third largest gaming company by revenue, still beat by Tencent and Sony.
That may not be enough to keep regulators at bay. The deal would be one of the largest in the history of the tech industry, edging out Dell’s acquisition of EMC in 2016.
Herb Hovenkamp, an antitrust professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said the Microsoft deal is likely to invite antitrust challenges, given its size.
“The agencies might be applying closer scrutiny given that they have been attacked for being somewhat under deterrent with respect to mergers over the last decade,” Hovenkamp said in an interview.
Regulators at both the DOJ and FTC have said antitrust enforcement needs to be modernized to address consolidation in tech. This deal could prove to be a bellwether.
“It’s going to be interesting to see if this gets looked at in a nontraditional way, if some new theories get tested here,” D. Bruce Hoffman, a partner at Cleary Gottlieb and former FTC official, said.
The acquisition comes at a time when the video game industry has made major strides both financially and culturally. In 2020, with people around the world self-isolating and turning to games amid the coronavirus pandemic, the gaming industry recorded double and even triple digit jumps in engagement in terms of sales and time spent online. S&P Global Market Intelligence predicted in November of last year that video game content revenue would surge past $200 billion in 2022 following marked year-over-year leaps between 2019 and 2021.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is more than four times bigger than the previous record sum paid for a video game publisher set earlier in January when Take-Two Interactive announced plans to purchase mobile game maker Zynga for an estimated $12.7 billion.
In 2020, Microsoft paid $8.1 billion to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of popular video game developer Bethesda Softworks.
The acquisition could also position Microsoft to better compete in the nascent business of the “metaverse,” or online worlds that have become a recent focus of tech companies. Facebook recently changed its corporate name to Meta, in part to reflect its emphasis on building out the metaverse.
Buoyed by the releases of major new games like “Call of Duty: Warzone” and a mobile version of Call of Duty, Activision Blizzard’s stock soared over the past two years, peaking at over $100 per share in February 2021. But the company’s fortunes swung in July with the filing of the lawsuit from California’s DFEH. That lawsuit alleged gender-based discrimination and harassment, primarily at Blizzard Entertainment, one of the company’s major studios and the developer of World of Warcraft.
Blizzard President J. Allen Brack stepped down as a result of the lawsuit, replaced by a tandem of Mike Ybarra and Jen Oneal. Oneal stepped down from the position after just three months and left Activision Blizzard at the end of 2021.
The allegations in the DFEH lawsuit, and what some workers saw as a lacking response from the company, prompted a series of walkouts by employees. In November, more than 1,000 Activision Blizzard employees signed a petition calling for Kotick to resign as CEO, a call that was echoed by shareholders.
Nadella briefly addressed the concerns during a call with investors Tuesday.
“We believe it’s critical for the Activision Blizzard to drive forward on its renewed cultural commitments,” he said. “We are supportive of the goal and the work Activision Blizzard is doing, and we also recognize that after close, we will have significant work to do in order to continue to build a culture where everyone can do their best work.”
Industry analysts believe the controversies around Activision Blizzard may have pushed down the acquisition price.
“[Microsoft is] paying a lot less than it would have a year ago,” said Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer on the business of games at the New York University Stern School of Business.
Gender discrimination and sexual harassment allegations have roiled the entire tech industry in recent years, including Microsoft. Microsoft announced last week that it has hired an outside firm to conduct a review of the company’s sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies after a shareholder proposal pushing for the investigation was approved.
Teddy Amenabar contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
A health-care worker treats a patient in the covid-19 intensive care unit at Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, Mo., on Aug. 3. (Angus Mordant/Bloomberg News)
What has emerged is a different sort of pandemic, one in which far more people are getting infected but — so far — fewer are dying. Yet there’s a caveat: There have been nearly as many total hospitalizations in the past month as a year ago, largely a function of multiplying the reduced hospitalization rate times a far larger number of infected people.
Again, it’s useful to consider that reduced risk as a function of multiple factors. An analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, during the wave of infections spurred by the delta variant in the summer and fall, about 690,000 people were hospitalized who might have avoided that fate had they been vaccinated. In that period, more than 160,000 people died who might have lived had they been similarly protected. While the omicron variant appears to better able to evade immune defenses, research suggests that vaccination continues to provide protection against the worst effects of the virus.
We see an unusual pattern: If we look at state-level data now relative to the same point in the surge in cases last winter (which began in September 2020) or the delta wave (which began in June), we see that the number of new cases each day is higher now in all 50 states and D.C. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rudolph W. Giuliani, as a guest on a talk radio show in New York in September 2021. (Robert Bumsted/AP)
The committee has also subpoenaed and obtained records of phone numbers associated with Eric Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiance of Donald Trump Jr., a person familiar with the committee’s work, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed Tuesday. The news was first reported by CNN.
Epshteyn, who has also worked as a pro-Trump TV pundit, tweeted a statement slamming the committee’s work as a “Stalinist witch hunt against President Trump and his supporters.” He added that he would “be happy to” share unsubstantiated claims of election “fraud that permeated the 2020 election in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and beyond.”
Eric Trump and Guilfoyle, meanwhile, are among more than 100 people whose phone records have now been subpoenaed as part of the investigation — but their subpoenas are the first involving the communications records of a member of Trump’s family. The Post has previously reported on Guilfoyle’s role working with Julie Fancelli, a top-tier Trump donor who is the largest publicly known donor to the rally that preceded the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Guilfoyle and Eric Trump both appeared onstage at the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.
“We’re piecing together information from the President’s inner circle and others who were in a position to see and hear what the plot was leading up to the riot,” committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told CNN in an interview Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Terps have struggled to assemble a solid 40-minute showing in conference play. Recently, Maryland has experienced dramatic swings from one half to the next. Scott said the team needs to do a better job of communicating during stoppages when games start to slip away and relay the message: “Oh, if we don’t change what we’re doing now, then the game could get lost early on than later on.”
Against the Wolverines, they 62.1 percent in the second half, but it wasn’t enough to overcome a miserable first 20 minutes. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Terps have struggled to assemble a solid 40-minute showing in conference play. Recently, Maryland has experienced dramatic swings from one half to the next. Scott said the team needs to do a better job of communicating during stoppages when games start to slip away and relay the message: “Oh, if we don’t change what we’re doing now, then the game could get lost early on.”
Against the Wolverines, they shot 62.1 percent in the second half, but it wasn’t enough to overcome a miserable first 20 minutes. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cal Baptist Lancers (11-6, 1-3 WAC) at Tarleton State Texans (8-11, 3-3 WAC)
Stephenville, Texas; Thursday, 8 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Tarleton State takes on Cal Baptist in a matchup of WAC teams.
The Texans are 7-1 in home games. Tarleton State is 0-2 in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Lancers have gone 1-3 against WAC opponents. Cal Baptist ranks fifth in the WAC scoring 34.8 points per game in the paint led by Taran Armstrong averaging 1.2.
The Texans and Lancers meet Thursday for the first time in WAC play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Montre’ Gipson is shooting 43.2% and averaging 15.2 points for the Texans. Tahj Small is averaging 14.3 points over the last 10 games for Tarleton State.
Tre Armstrong averages 2.2 made 3-pointers per game for the Lancers, scoring 12.0 points while shooting 39.6% from beyond the arc. Daniel Akin is shooting 62.4% and averaging 12.2 points over the last 10 games for Cal Baptist.
LAST 10 GAMES: Texans: 6-4, averaging 65.7 points, 26.9 rebounds, 11.0 assists, 8.6 steals and 2.2 blocks per game while shooting 43.3% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 65.9 points per game. | null | null | null | null | null |
Bowling Green faces Akron after Curtis' 21-point game
Akron Zips (10-5, 3-2 MAC) at Bowling Green Falcons (9-8, 2-4 MAC)
Bowling Green, Ohio; Thursday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Bowling Green hosts the Akron Zips after Samari Curtis scored 21 points in Bowling Green’s 92-83 victory against the Northern Illinois Huskies.
The Falcons have gone 6-2 in home games. Bowling Green has a 1-1 record in one-possession games.
The Zips are 3-2 in MAC play. Akron is seventh in the MAC with 12.5 assists per game led by Xavier Castaneda averaging 2.7.
The Falcons and Zips meet Thursday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Trey Diggs is shooting 40.4% from beyond the arc with 2.6 made 3-pointers per game for the Falcons, while averaging 10.1 points. Daeqwon Plowden is averaging 16.7 points and 7.4 rebounds over the last 10 games for Bowling Green.
Ali Ali is shooting 46.6% and averaging 13.9 points for the Zips. Castaneda is averaging 13.1 points over the last 10 games for Akron. | null | null | null | null | null |
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