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The banned terms on the Olympic app include unwelcome references to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, Tibetan Buddhists and the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square and the Falun Gong. But the list also highlights more obscure sore spots, such as infighting between ex-leaders Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. There’s also a feature that allows users to report “politically sensitive” content they see coming from others. Yes, the technology encourages reporting on the banned or discouraged speech of others. | null | null | null | null | null |
“The individual would need to inform their local or state public health department, who will make notifications to the travel industry partners,” the CDC’s Jasmine Reed says.
“It’s a mixed bag of responses from local public health departments,” says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist with the COVID Tracking Project.
“I would contact the cruise line immediately,” she says. “Assuming that they just got back and disembarked, they probably were in their infectious period while on the ship.”
As for calling the airline, “there’s not a whole lot that the airline can do,” Malaty Rivera says. “I don’t know if the airlines are engaging in that sort of contact tracing.”
The same is true for other forms of transportation, like Amtrak, buses or ferries. Malaty Rivera wishes there was a national protocol for travelers to follow. Because of the lack of standardization in case reporting, “it’s so hard to know which systems are reliable,” she says.
“As a good citizen, call and [say], ‘I just want you to know I was a passenger on your train, plane, automobile, boat and I recently tested positive,’ and hope for the best,” Malaty Rivera says.
“The odds are against everyone right now,” she says. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ontario set to reopen dining rooms, gyms
Canada’s most populous province is ending a lockdown on restaurant dining rooms, gyms and cinemas at the end of the month.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Thursday that they will be allowed to reopen Jan. 31 with 50 percent capacity.
The province locked down again Jan. 5 amid record new coronavirus infections.
Ford said that hospitalizations are starting to slow and that officials expect cases of the highly contagious omicron variant to peak this month.
“We can be confident the worst is behind us,” he said. “We’re going to very cautiously open up.”
Health Minister Christine Elliott said non-emergency surgeries won’t resume until intensive care unit occupancy and hospitalizations go down. She said officials expect those to peak in the first or second week of February.
Bird flu concerns spur massive poultry cull
The government ordered poultry and waterfowl in parts of the southwest — home to France’s famed foie gras industry — to be killed to help stop the spread of the disease. That follows a severe outbreak that claimed about 3.5 million poultry, mainly ducks, between autumn 2020 and spring 2021.
Bird flu, whose highly pathogenic varieties can be deadly to poultry, often spreads through migrating birds, and cases typically peak in winter. Europe has been facing a grim season with outbreaks in more than two dozen countries since October, portending higher chicken prices and fewer free-range eggs. That may spell more bad news for consumers, already facing near-record food costs.
About 1.5 million poultry have been slaughtered, and an equivalent amount could be culled in the coming days, foie gras industry group CIFOG said.
About 216 cases were reported in southwest France by Jan. 18, compared with 291 at the same time last year, the Agriculture Ministry said.
Breeder flocks and hatcheries will be preserved to allow for the restocking of farms after the crisis.
6 reported killed in rocket attack in north
A rocket attack on a northern Syrian town controlled by Turkey-backed opposition fighters killed six civilians and wounded more than a dozen people, Syrian rescuers and a war monitor said. Both blamed U.S-backed Syrian Kurdish forces for the attack.
The town of Afrin has been under control of Turkey and its allied Syrian opposition fighters since 2018, after a Turkey-backed military operation that pushed Syrian Kurdish fighters and thousands of Kurdish residents from the area.
Since then, Afrin and surrounding villages have been the sites of attacks on Turkish and Turkey-backed targets. Ankara considers Kurdish fighters who control a swath of Syrian territory along Turkey’s border to be terrorists, allied with Kurdish insurgents within Turkey.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, put the death toll in the rocket attack at six, saying two children were among those killed and 30 people were wounded.
Syrian Kurdish fighters were allied with a U.S.-led coalition in the fight against Islamic State militants. After the Islamic State’s defeat, Kurdish forces set up an autonomous administration in northeastern Syria, where a small U.S. force is still based.
Bomb kills 3, wounds 28 in major Pakistani city: A bomb struck a market in Pakistan's second-largest city, Lahore, killing at least three people and wounding 28, police and rescue officials said. A new separatist group from southwestern Baluchistan province, the Baluchistan Nationalist Army, asserted responsibility for the attack. Baluchistan has been the scene of a long-running insurgency.
4 freeze to death in Canada near U.S. border: Four people, including a baby, froze to death in a remote part of Canada close to the U.S. border, police said, adding that human smugglers may have played a role. Police in Manitoba province found the bodies near the small farming community of Emerson after U.S. counterparts apprehended a group that crossed over from Canada and found evidence that others might have tried to make the same journey. First indications are that the victims died of exposure to the cold. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Don’t be fooled by the GOP’s next ‘Contract With America’
(Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
“I honest to god don’t know what they’re for,” President Biden said about Republicans at his Wednesday news conference. “What is their agenda?”
The truth is that if there’s one thing that unites the GOP, it’s that they hate Democrats, which isn’t much of a policy platform. But Republicans are now trying to create the impression that they have a concrete agenda to implement if they take control of the House.
As The Post reports, they’re “putting together a list of policy pledges to run on in the 2022 elections” and consulting with none other than Newt Gingrich to formulate this compelling platform.
The obvious analogue is the “Contract With America,” which Gingrich released before the first midterm election of Bill Clinton’s presidency, in which Republicans won a sweeping victory that gave them control of Congress.
But we have to understand the real history of the contract, because Republicans will endlessly repeat the myth they have since created around it.
Here’s how the myth goes: In 1994, serious-minded Republicans presented a detailed blueprint for reform. The voting public was so moved by this contract that they delivered to those Republicans an overwhelming victory and a mandate for change, which Republicans then pursued.
Here’s the truth: Most voters had never heard of the contract before the election, and almost none said that it made them more likely to vote Republican. But after the election — an undoubtedly big win, but one boosted by the GOP’s status as the opposition in a midterm — Gingrich convinced people that Republicans won because of the contract, despite the complete lack of evidence for that assertion.
The contract itself was a mix of standard Republican policies (tax cuts, welfare cuts) and reform proposals that have surface appeal but are terrible ideas (term limits, a line-item veto), with a little demagoguery thrown in (“No U.S. troops under U.N. command”). Almost none became law.
But the myth endures. And at times like this, when Republicans decide they need an agenda, it means trotting out some new version of the “Contract With America.”
The problem is that these days, Republicans just don’t really do policy. Most don’t care enough to craft detailed legislation to solve complex policy challenges. They like to write the kind of bill you can slap together in a few minutes. Ban critical race theory! Let people take guns into bars! Make it illegal to remove Confederate statues!
The good news for Republicans is that their new contract can be as simple-minded as they like.
The original contract was something all too familiar in our politics: a gimmick that political reporters felt obliged to treat as though it were serious and substantive, simply because one of the two major parties presented it as such. Republicans will no doubt hope that the new contract gets the same reception.
Of course, even if Republicans win the House and/or the Senate, their agenda won’t matter much, since there will still be a Democratic president to veto whatever they pass. It’s not as though under Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker we’ll immediately get a national abortion ban and more tax cuts for the wealthy; those will have to wait for a GOP president with both houses of Congress behind him.
We know what the real GOP agenda is for the next three years: to stop Democrats from enacting their agenda. If Republicans win in November, that’s what they’ll do, along with mounting an endless series of bogus investigations designed to create the impression that something fishy must be going on in the Biden administration.
They can produce a “plan,” but given who we’re talking about here, there’s little chance it will be full of practical ideas and well-thought-out proposals. Which is fine — their contract will be a campaign document, one most voters will ignore.
But don’t try to convince us all that it’s something meaningful, or that they ought to get any more credit for producing it than any candidate does for putting out a campaign brochure. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Washington Post was recognized with three Salute to Excellence awards from the National Association of Black Journalists.
Tracy Jan was awarded in the single feature story category for “What reparations mean to one American family,” her powerful narrative about a multi-generational Sacramento family that had endured both slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans in its past.
Robert Samuels, Tracy Jan, Jose Del Real, Aaron Williams won in the investigative news category for “This is what happens to us,” their data-driven investigation into how U.S. cities struggled to protect Black residents from the covid-19 pandemic, fueling disparities in disease and death.
In the commentary category, Michelle Singletary was awarded for “Sincerely, Michelle,” her memorable, moving series of essays addressing misconceptions about race, invoking her personal experience.
The NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards honor “black journalists who have amassed a distinguished body of work with extraordinary depth, scope and significance to the people of the African Diaspora.”
The winners were recognized last month at a virtual awards ceremony. | null | null | null | null | null |
Andy Murray reacts after defeating Nikoloz Basilashvili in the first round of the Australian Open. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
It’s certainly true that the absence of the unvaccinated Djokovic, along with the injured Roger Federer and Serena Williams, put a damper on the atmosphere at Melbourne Park. That the stands cannot be more than 50 percent full due to covid protocols doesn’t help.
But Andy Murray brought real joy to the tournament on Tuesday when he won a four-hour, five-set first-round match against 21st-seeded Nikoloz Basilashvili. When Murray dropped the fourth set in a tiebreaker, he looked drained and exhausted. Somehow, he pulled himself together to win the fifth set, 6-4.
Early Thursday morning Eastern time, Taro Daniel of Japan eliminated Murray, the now-34-year-old clearly spent after his earlier marathon. But the second-round loss mattered less than the first-round win. Murray is a five-time Australian finalist — losing one final to Federer and four to Djokovic — but before his victory over Basilashvili, he hadn’t won a match in Melbourne since 2017. After he lost in the first round in 2019, in another five-setter, Tennis Australia played a lengthy farewell tribute video, since it was widely thought Murray was headed for a second hip surgery and retirement.
Murray is a three-time major champion and, to put it mildly, a heroic figure throughout Great Britain. He was knighted in 2017 — please address him as Sir Andy Murray. In 2012, the Scotsman won the U.S. Open, becoming the first British player to claim one of tennis’s four major championships since Fred Perry ruled the tennis world in the 1930s
Then, injuries intervened. He had back surgery late in 2016 and missed a chunk of 2017 with an elbow injury. Early in 2018 he needed hip surgery. He was still in pain when he played after the surgery and he talked before the 2019 Australian Open about facing more surgery, saying it was entirely possible that would be his last time competing in Melbourne. He was hoping to play Wimbledon once more before walking away.
He made it to Wimbledon that year — but only to play doubles. After all the medical procedures, though, he slowly began playing his way back. His ranking had dropped out of the top 100 and he needed a wild-card spot to get into this Australian Open. He was ranked 113th entering the tournament but the victory over Basilashvili should move him back into the top 100.
And then, along came Murray, steadily working his way up in the rankings, reaching his first Slam final in 2010, losing to Federer in Australia. When he won Wimbledon three years later, beating Djokovic in the final in straight sets, there was literally dancing in the streets of London.
To those in Great Britain, the Davis Cup victory in 2015 was almost as monumental. Until it was turned into a corporate joke a couple of years back, the Davis Cup was still a huge event, especially in Europe. Murray was later chosen by his fellow athletes to be Great Britain’s flag-bearer for the Opening Ceremonies at the 2016 Rio Games.
On that afternoon in 2013 when he finally put the jokes about Fred Perry’s statue into the rearview mirror — of his sport and his country — there were plenty of tears shed. For anyone who had ever been at Wimbledon, it was an intensely emotional day.
In a completely different way, seeing Murray somehow survive that fifth set on Tuesday was just as emotional. Sir Andy Murray is more than worthy of our tears, | null | null | null | null | null |
Aaron Rodgers and the Packers are favored to emerge from the NFC. (Mike Roemer/AP)
Dynamic offenses highlighted the opening round of the NFL playoffs, marking the first time we’ve seen three round-one games decided by 20 or more points since 1982. It shouldn’t be a big surprise. Football Outsiders had six of the eight divisional finalists ranked in the top 10 of their offensive defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA) metric, which measures a team’s efficiency by comparing success on every single play to a league average based on situation and opponent. ESPN also had six of the teams’ starting quarterbacks in the Top 10 of their Total Quarterback Rating, with Joe Burrow just missing out at No. 11.
So just how likely is each of these victorious offenses to make the Super Bowl? Based on each team’s true talent level — derived by looking at its actual win rate and its projected win rate based on total points scored and allowed — we can project the coming weekend’s games 1,000 times and see each team’s odds to reach the Super Bowl. Here are the most likely matchups based on those simulations. Also included is the implied money line for each potential contest, rounded up to the nearest $50 mark. If the future odds available at a sports book are better than the implied odds you have a good value bet opportunity.
Green Bay Packers vs. Kansas City Chiefs (13 percent chance)
Implied money line: +700
Two of the best teams in the NFL makes sense as the most-likely Super Bowl matchup. Kansas City leads the league in scoring efficiency by producing 2.7 points per drive with the lowest rate of drives going three-and-out (22 percent). Green Bay isn’t too far behind in scoring efficiency (2.5, 6th). Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, the favorite to win this year’s most valuable player award, completed 69 percent of his passes for 4,115 yards and 37 touchdowns with only seven interceptions and the No. 1 ranking among passers per ESPN.
Green Bay Packers vs. Buffalo Bills (10 percent chance)
The Bills combine a solid offense (10th in DVOA) with a stellar defense, allowing a league-low 1.5 points per drive in the regular season and playoffs combined. They remain No. 1 even after adjusting for situation and strength of schedule. Buffalo’s defense is so good opponents are scoring nine points per game fewer than expected after taking into account the down, distance and field position of each play.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Kansas City Chiefs (10 percent chance)
The Buccaneers cruised to victory over the Philadelphia Eagles but they sustained injuries to key players on the offensive line, including right tackle Tristan Wirfs and center Ryan Jensen. Before the injuries, Pro Football Focus rated the Bucs’ pass-blocking unit as the third-best in the NFL, giving quarterback Tom Brady the protection he needed to work. Without it at full strength, Tampa Bay could be in some trouble.
Brady averaged 7.7 yards per attempt with a 109.6 passer rating in a clean pocket. Those dropped to 5.6 and 68.4, respectively, when he faced pass pressure this season. His rate of turnover-worthy throws — a pass that has a high percentage chance to be intercepted per Pro Football Focus — also doubled in the face of pass pressure. In other words, if the injuries cause players to miss the upcoming game, these Super Bowl projections for Tampa Bay could be optimistic.
Los Angeles Rams vs. Kansas City Chiefs (9 percent chance)
Implied money line: +1050
The passing game for the Rams is peaking. After bottoming out against the Minnesota Vikings in Week 16, scoring six fewer points than expected, Matthew Stafford has seen that tick upwards to plus-1, plus-3 and plus-6 over his last three games, which includes a solid performance against the Arizona Cardinals, completing 13 of 17 passes for 202 yards and two touchdowns. Don’t let the lack of passing attempts fool you, the Rams jumped out to a commanding 21-0 lead at the half and relied heavily on the run throughout the game.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Buffalo Bills (8 percent chance)
Football Outsiders calls this match-up “Gronk’s Homecoming” because Tampa Bay tight end Rob Gronkowski hails from Amherst, New York, a 20-minute drive from Highmark Stadium, home to the Buffalo Bills.
Gronkowski is the fifth-highest rated tight end in the NFL this season per Pro Football Focus after catching 55 of 89 targets for 802 yards and six touchdowns. He’s also one of the best pass-blocking tight ends in the league.
Green Bay Packers vs. Tennessee Titans (7 percent chance)
Los Angeles Rams vs. Buffalo Bills (7 percent chance)
San Francisco 49ers vs. Kansas City Chiefs (6 percent chance)
Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Tennessee Titans (6 percent chance)
Los Angeles Rams vs. Tennessee Titans (5 percent chance)
San Francisco 49ers vs. Buffalo Bills (5 percent chance)
Green Bay Packers vs. Cincinnati Bengals (4 percent chance)
San Francisco 49ers vs. Tennessee Titans (4 percent chance)
Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Cincinnati Bengals (3 percent chance)
Los Angeles Rams vs. Cincinnati Bengals (3 percent chance)
San Francisco 49ers vs. Cincinnati Bengals (2 percent chance) | null | null | null | null | null |
“The individual would need to inform their local or state public health department, who will make notifications to the travel industry partners,” the CDC’s Jasmine Reed said.
“It’s a mixed bag of responses from local public health departments,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist with the COVID Tracking Project.
“I would contact the cruise line immediately,” she said. “Assuming that they just got back and disembarked, they probably were in their infectious period while on the ship.”
As for calling the airline, “there’s not a whole lot that the airline can do,” Malaty Rivera said. “I don’t know if the airlines are engaging in that sort of contact tracing.”
The same is true for other forms of transportation, like Amtrak, buses or ferries. Malaty Rivera wishes there was a national protocol for travelers to follow. Because of the lack of standardization in case reporting, “it’s so hard to know which systems are reliable,” she said.
“As a good citizen, call and [say], ‘I just want you to know I was a passenger on your train, plane, automobile, boat and I recently tested positive,’ and hope for the best,” Malaty Rivera said.
“The odds are against everyone right now,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Race in America: Giving Voice with Quiara Alegría Hudes
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: Good afternoon, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Arelis Hernández, a reporter with The Washington Post. Joining me today is Quiara Alegría Hudes, her Pulitzer Prize-winning--Quiara Alegría Hudes. Sorry, messed up there. Her memoir, “My Broken Language,” is now out on paperback. Welcome, Quiara.
MS. HUDES: Hi, thank you.HiHHfdfdf
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: Awesome. Well, we're going to start from the very top, with the title of your book, "My Broken Language." Why was language such a fertile area of exploration for your memoir?
MS. HUDES: And, Arelis, just so you know, I can't see you but I'm just going to pretend like I'm seeing your face. And I can hear you loud and clear. So can you ask that question again?
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: Yeah, yeah. No, we'll see if we can work on that on our end as well. But we're going to start with the title. I was just wondering about "My Broken Language" and why you thought language was such a fertile area for exploration in your memoir.
MS. HUDES: You know, I am a diaspora Boricuas. I was born and raised in Philadelphia in the '80s and '90s during my childhood, and my first language was English. My mother's first language, who was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was Spanish. And though I did learn conversational Spanish and studied it and worked very hard, my Spanish was never close to as good as my mother's. And at a certain point in my life, I thought this marked a real failure on my part--a failure to live fully in my culture, a failure to be who I should be, a failure to honor my mother and her path and all of the relatives that I was close to.
And as I wrote this book, I--what I learned more about was the context of my own language failure in the history of colonial Puerto Rico and how language has been such a path of colonizing the island and that actually, you know, there's a real context that my multilingualism is born out of. And it's not a failure. It's a context. So "My Broken Language" is--that's part of it. That's part of why I wanted to explore, you know, how do I speak, and why, and what can I do with my broken language in terms of giving a voice to the stories I grew up absolutely loving.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: No, I totally hear you. And I'm also a member of the diaspora Puertorriqueña, grew up in the D.C. area. But, you know, we all have different ways of how navigating those cultures and different languages, brokenness or not, has shaped our sense of self and who we are. And I'm curious how that navigation, that journey of yours helped to shape your creative voice as you came into your own.
MS. HUDES: So spoken languages and written languages were just part of it. I grew up as a musician, too. I grew up listening to such different kinds of music and participating in such different kinds of music. So for instance, my mother was crowned as a santera of [unclear] in Lucumí during my childhood. And her--the living room ceremonies she would host often would have Batá drum, which is--the Batá is the voice of an orisha itself. So music was ceremony for me. Music was--my aunt, Linda Hudes was a composer in New York. So I would take a Greyhound and come and see her play at CBGB. I'd see her play her original scores for the Big Apple Circus. She would take me to rock clubs afterwards to see Etta James or Steel Pulse. I had music all around me. And as a somewhat depressed child, I had started learning to play piano, and I would play really sad trickly music like Chopin "Nocturnes," and it was--actually the language of music became a way to process physically a lot of my cultural confusion and also just a lot of my adolescent depression. So again, that's another language I grew up in processing and kind of pulling from the different influences around me.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: And how did that shape, you think, your creative voice in the writing now of your memoir and also the writing you've done in the past, including your Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, "Water by the Spoonful"?
MS. HUDES: There's this notion that artists have an authentic voice. Authenticity comes up so much for, I think, a lot of artists of color in a way that I wonder do White artists have the same--are they asked, are they expected to be authentic? And somehow, as I forged an artistic voice and artistic path, I interpreted this notion of authenticity to mean consistency and singularity of voice. And it was just something I could never pull off. I speak in different ways on different days, and I pull from different languages for different pieces. And what I started to learn was that I really needed to kind of embrace the chaos and the multiplicity. And oftentimes those voices and languages are at odds with each other, so that in some ways my authentic voice involves a conflict of self at all times. I'm mixed race and mixed culture. I was born to a brown Boricua woman, a white Jewish father, with very different class backgrounds, too. Very different spiritual backgrounds. And so as I--and this isn't like a discovery I made one day as an artist, and then it was easy, you know, as cake from there on out. This is work I do every day to say, how do I remember to live in that messiness, in that messiness of voice and in the multiplicity of language and live in those contradictions.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: You go into deep detail in your memoir about that messiness--right?--that you had to declare in your name--or have explained your name in kindergarten to classmates and you declared that you were half English, half Spanish. And when people asked you what are you, what do you want readers to take away from, you know, describing all that messiness?
MS. HUDES: I think something about language is that--and you know, poets know this really well--is that we--language becomes so familiar, it becomes invisible. We stopped noticing it. And I think one of the fun things that happened when I was writing "My Broken Language" is it helped me notice language again. For instance, there's a chapter on my mom's accent, right? Because my mom--I grew up in Philly. I had a very different spoken accent than my mom, who really wasn't immersed in the English language until age 11. And so my friends would be like, oh, your mom--you know, your mom has an accent when they called back then when each household had one phone as opposed to a phone per person. And really noticing and remembering how there were times in my life when I would correct my mom. It's hard for me to even say out loud without getting emotional. And I think I would do it in a loving and playful way. But actually, as I was kind of correcting her pronunciation, was I reinforcing an outsider status that she already had to struggle with, on a daily level, as a grassroots organizer, as an advocate for the Boricuas community in Philadelphia?
And actually, what I've come to realize--and I just treasure this. I don't--I don't know what I expect others to take away from this, but this is what I took away from it. And I want to share this, which is that she taught me English. I work in the English that my mom taught me, and this is a language, because she wasn't born into it, she doesn't take it for granted. She notices the English language all the time when she speaks it, and therefore, actually can be sometimes far more creative than us native English speakers who just take it for granted. It just rolls off our tongues. My mom is a beautiful English speaker. But she sometimes, in the process of translating her thoughts, comes up with these gorgeous, strange ways of expressing herself in a way that she earned the English language in a way I never had to.
So, in expressing that chapter, I've actually heard from other people who grew up in different languages than their parents or children, and they were grateful that I pointed out, you know, the ways that these language differences kind of create gulfs in our families but also create bridges.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: I've wondered have you ever asked your mom how she felt when you did correct her, and what did she say?
MS. HUDES: My mother is a very confident woman, and despite a world that, you know, at various times told her her spirituality was not cool, her accent was not cool, her skin tone was not cool, her feminism was not cool--despite all those things, she knew she was cool. So, I don't think she was sweating me being a brat or ignorant at times. I don't think she had to grapple with it as much as I did. That being said, I did--there's a point in the book where I wonder, you know, the island means a lot to my mom. We still have family there. We still have a home there. And I wondered like, did somehow having me this, fair-skinned English first Philly kid, did it make her feel less Boricua somehow? Did I actually pull her away from that universe? So that--but she says no, that that's not the case.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: So did you ever officially apologize? I know you write in the book and later in the essay for The Washington Post, you know, if your mom doesn't disown you, do you do eventually like, have to do--make that apology?
MS. HUDES: She wouldn't accept it. And not because she's mad about it, but she tells me I have no reason to apologize to her. In fact, when The Washington Post--I adapted that chapter in an essay for The Washington Post last week, and the headline was that I owe English language learners an apology, starting with my mother. My mom was livid about the headline. She said, you have to have them change it. You absolutely do not owe me an apology. But I said, you know, it's okay, mom. It's okay. Yes, I do.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: No, I totally hear you on that. And if you indulge me here, like my father has been in the United States from Puerto Rico from [unclear] now for 35 years or more now. And he plays these games, these word game puzzles on this phone. Now every so often I hear him say English is a stupid language, like he just has like a really hard time squaring the words that, you know, they're asking for in these apps with, you know, what is still--he still dreams and thinks and sleeps in Spanish. So no, I've totally had to also apologize to him for correcting him my entire life.
That said, I--you know, I want to move forward to when you got your Yale acceptance letter, and that you said in the book that it blew your mind that, you know, your family members or your loved ones couldn't read it. What was it like, and how did that fit into your exploration of language in this book?
MS. HUDES: Yeah, so when I got into Yale, you know, being the first in the family to go to college, and really knowing that I spent a lot of time at my abuela's house--that was the after-school hang, that was the holiday hang, and abuela had the fortune of having gone to school through second grade. And let me tell you, she used that second-grade education. She was quite smart. She did her Bible study every day. She wrote poems about nature. But that's a humble education. And so I was well aware that my mother would have loved to have gone to college, and she self-educated all her life to this day. But she didn't have the luxury of going and getting a college degree after high school. She had work to do in the community, and she had to earn.
So, getting that Yale acceptance letter, you know, it was--it was humbling. It's--you really contextualize yourself and your path. But it also came with some expectations that proved to be erroneous, because I didn't know what to expect. And for instance, I had come from such a multiplicity of cultures and musical--music languages, as I mentioned, also spiritual paths. My mom is a santera. I used to go to Quaker meeting. My mom did activism work with them. My dad being a secular Jew. And so I figured that Yale would kind of expand my education or would expand on those multiple voices. But I actually found that the Western education really shut out a lot of the traditions that I had been studying and engaging with. And so that--you know, that was a shock. That was a culture shock to say, oh, music here doesn't mean music that we dance to. Music here means music we listen to and we study and analyze. That was a real shock to the system.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: So then how--in that context, how did you reclaim your identity and agency while being at school after hearing comments like you mentioned in the book, I don't come to theater to hear "Spicanese," or this this is America, we speak English here? How do you go about sort of, you know, reclaiming that identity?
MS. HUDES: Well, two years into college, I mean, at first, I just said, hey, I love Bach. I love Mozart. I love Schubert. So let me just do that. So, I did that. But after a couple years I kind of got antsy. So, I was like, okay, my teachers don't want--every time I tried to bring in, you know, Stevie Wonder or Haramito [phonetic] songs to discuss or Celina Y Reutilio [phonetic] songs to discuss, they were like, yeah, not so much. That's for your free time. That's for the weekend. And so I figured out a way I'm like, I'm Miss Independent Study, okay? And so I figured out a way to get credit to write a musical. And then I'd got that first. And then what I told them was my musical was going to be about characters and their Lucumí pathways. So, this is an Afro Caribbean tradition. So, the music had to be appropriate to that. So that was how I started folding my own stuff into the kind of Western frame. And it worked. And so that's how I've kind of pulled it off since then. I'm strategic. I've studied people like Dolores Huerta, like Matiti Gini [phonetic], who was a community organizer in in Philly, and I studied their strategies and tactics. And to have the longevity that they have to get their work done, they're forceful, but in a gentle way. And they always kind of have a half smile on. So, I was like, okay, if I'm going to be this playwright going to big regional theaters around the nation, whether they're in very diverse cities like Philadelphia and Chicago and LA, oftentimes, the boardroom is White, the power structures are White, and most significantly for my work, the audience's that they've cultivated over their 80 years as an organization are White. Well, what do I do about that when I am creating Latino characters on stage? How do I handle that being looked at by a mostly White audience? And I've stuck with it, and I found little strategies. And but I'm--you know, I found little strategies and ways to, you know, make sure my actors don't go crazy, make sure we reach out to all of the Latino family groups and professional organizations in the area. You know, you learn these little strategies to try to make a dent. But it also was hard. And I had to take a pause from theater because it actually felt--the whiplash of that did take a toll. And I said I've got to step away from this for a minute. It's--there's too much of a discrepancy between who I'm writing these stories about and who is watching them. And this is where the book was helpful, because I had faith that this book would get into different kinds of hands.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: So, it sounds like you created that space for yourself that--through independent study to be able to explore these things. But did you--did those strategies work in the early part of career, or did you have to get to a certain point in your career to be able to have that creative space again to do that kind of work?
MS. HUDES: I--you know, the thing is, I'm not a great plug and play writer. So I kind of couldn't fake it till I make it vibe. I had to write from the heart, and I had to write from the gut always. I didn't change who I was writing about or how I was writing about them to get to a certain level and then let loose. I just actually couldn't do that well. So in some ways, that was actually a helpful thing, because I would find the spaces and the people that could--you know, that could roll with that and that could get with that. So, I wrote two musicals during college that were--that were looking at especially the Orisha, the Lucumí pantheon and philosophy and life path. It was wonderful to approach this living room practice that my mother had become so strong in. It was wonderful to approach it actually as an intellectual and academic, and learn more about it, and write those musicals about it.
Then when I got out of college, yeah, I was writing, you know, one woman shows for me to perform, even though I'm not a performer, just to get my work done. Because I didn't--there's no Latino theater in Philadelphia. There wasn't at that time. Now there is. I was like, so no one's going to perform my work, so I'm going to. And so I, you know, wrote this one woman plays about the women in my family. Yeah, it's just been part of how I roll since the beginning.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: You mentioned later on in the book towards the end about, you know, being in college, Miss Vogel coming into your life and José Rivera's place, and that there was this collision between your culture--like finally between sort of your academic life and your culture in an intentional way in the classroom that wasn't sort of independent study. You've said, you know, my histories were never assigned to me. How--at what--you know, was that a turning point for you and sort of acknowledging that? I mean, it sounds like it's always been a part of you. But at what point did you include those histories into, you know, the work that you were doing and the work that you wanted to do?
MS. HUDES: I'm so glad you brought up José Rivera. I want to rewind for a second to lead up to him. There was one moment in undergrad when I was assigned freshman year to read into Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf." That was a major first in my life, because I got to the end and the climactic scene is about women and their laying on of hands. The lead character needs this laying on of hands. And I knew that phrase and that concept like in the biblical sense, but I didn't know it in the colloquial sense. And to have Shange talking about a world of women's healing in that familiar manner, I said this is the first time I'm reading a vocabulary of myself, of my own life. It changed me forever.
Now fast forward to when I decided to become a writer, I was like I've got to learn how to write. I--you know, I haven't gone to school for this. So, I enrolled in graduate school years later, and I'm reading this play that's been assigned to me by a playwright named José Rivera, and I was like--it was a gorgeous play. It's called "Sonnets for a New Century" or "Sonnets for an Old Century." I can't remember. One of my favorites of all time. And I'm like, what's he talking--something's happening inside me. He's discussing the body in both totally vulgar and totally sacred terms in a way that was so familiar. He's discussing the body with a real urgency and sense of humor and not like a Protestant ethic but just a real like fleshy vocabulary and spirit to it. And I was like, who is this? Why? What's happening here. It felt so familiar. And then I read his bio. And honestly, it's so basic, but he was a Boricua writer.
And it--again, I'm tearing up, because, you know, these are the people who paved the paths for us. But he was the first Boricua writer I had ever been assigned to read. And that was in my 20s. Now, I had done independent reading and stuff, but he snuck up on me because I didn't do that on purpose. Paula Vogel, my teacher, slipped that one to me. And you know, book by book, play by play, bit by bit, these authors give you permission to be yourself--not like them--to be like you. And so I owe them the world and just, you know, one, I've got to say his name one more time, José Rivera.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: Thank you for that. I'm going to fast forward a little bit, because we're coming short on time, but to the success that you've had with "In the Heights," popularity of the music of "Encanto", now that we hear it's topping the charts, the music from "Encanto," and other projects that put, you know, Latinos at the center of the narrative. I mean, are you encouraged? What are the stories that you think still need to be told?
MS. HUDES: So many. Oh, my gosh. Yes, I'm encouraged. But to me, it's just about--it's not just about getting the door cracked open. It's about now we keep pushing that door wider and wider. You know, one thing that you had asked me earlier, what do I hope people take away from this book, one of the things I hope is a result of this book is just simply more books right beside mine on the bookshelf. You know, I can't represent the entire community. It's a laughable notion that I--that I would even try. I want, you know, my cousins to write their books, too. Actually, one of my cousins did while he was in prison. He sent me his book. He said you always inspired me. You always wrote your story. I want that to happen, to multiply so that we start weighing down those library shelves, you know? I want those library shelves to buckle under our weight. So, way, way more, you know, as many Boricuas as there are, there's that many Boricua stories.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: I'm curious, I'm going to go back to a question that I really wanted to ask, which is that when you started writing, you started interviewing your elders, I'm curious about what that experience was like for you and whether you would encourage other young Latino writers to do the same.
MS. HUDES: You know, that depends. My family has gone through a lot of highs and lows thanks to my like, tendency to eavesdrop and, you know, butt into everyone's business. But I really--an early-on interview really cemented that for me. I just used to love hearing their stories, you know, amazing stories of when they arrived in the Bronx, when they arrived in Philly, what happened on the island, what their life was like there.
I interviewed my Tio George about his service in Vietnam. This was in 2003, I believe, I interviewed him. And it was for one of my first plays. And he never ever spoke about--he doesn't speak about that. You know, he doesn't talk about Vietnam. He did not get drafted. He enlisted. He was a Marine. And I was like, what right do I have to ask? But I still--if I was going to interview him, I wanted to ask. I wanted to write a play about Puerto Rican servicemen and women in the United States military. So, I go to his place. I asked him one question, what year did you enlist? And he spoke for three hours straight about it. He laughed, he wept. He told me about love affairs. He told me about blood on his hands. He told me what it means for a Marine to be cleanup crew in a war. It was heavy. And I called him the next week to say thank you, Tio, for opening up to me like that. And he said, I was about to call and thank you. I said, why? He said, because I haven't felt this light in 30 years. And I'll never forget that. And that really cemented for me the value of just giving someone a platform to tell their story. I think he was looking to share these stories but didn't have--there's not like an appropriate space in civilian life to discuss these things. And so I felt like, wow, even if this play tanks or is no good, the interview was worth it.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: So, I think I have time for one more question. I wanted to ask you about what you personally took away from the questions that were raised about Afro Latino representation in the main cast for the film adaptation of "In the Heights."
MS. HUDES: Yeah, you know, I was--it was on my mind for years leading up to the production of the movie, in fact, because in my 20 years as a playwright, I have had the real pleasure--one of the things I love about being there is you create jobs. And I've had the real pleasure to create jobs and roles, and hopefully really good roles for extraordinary Latino actors in my place, Afro Latino, brown Latino, Indigenous Latino, White Latino. And that's one of actually the things I'm proudest of in my body of work.
But having been in those casting rooms, I also am familiar with how it's so easy for institutions and processes to lean towards Whiteness. So, part of what I did leading up to that process for--and I had never done a movie before. So, I didn't know what to expect. Playwrights and screenwriters don't have the same casting power in film as they do in theater. But I knew I would have a voice in the room. And so the first thing I did was I wrote the character of Nina to be purposefully Afro Latinx so that they couldn't cast it otherwise. It would just have been an inappropriate to the role. But looking back on it now--and I really feel strongly and passionately that I love our cast and they did such a phenomenal job. And I love our movie, and I'm very, very proud of that movie.
But I do see with hindsight that it was my first movie, and I recognized two and maybe three times when I could have been louder in the room. And I regret. I was a little loud. My husband and my agent assured me; they were like, you were kind of loud. But I could have been louder. And so what my personal takeaway--you know, and I regret those moments, and I apologized to the community for those moments. But my takeaway is then, I've got do better next time. And I know I have decades of work of doing really well behind me that I can call on and, you know, just raise my voice a little louder when I need to.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: Well, unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. Thank you, Quiara, for speaking with me, and thank you for your book. Appreciate you coming on.
MS. HUDES: Thanks. It was my pleasure.
MS. HERNÁNDEZ: And thanks to all of you for joining us today. Go to WashingtonPostLive.com to register for upcoming programs. I’m Arelis Hernández and thank you for watching Washington Post Live. | null | null | null | null | null |
“Capehart” with Barbara F. Walter
In the year since the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, questions have lingered over whether the country is on the brink of conflict and fission. In “How Civil Wars Start,” political scientist and author Barbara F. Walter assesses stability and risk of violence in many countries abroad to lay out a case for why the United States may be headed towards a second civil war. Join Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart for a conversation with the author on Wednesday, Jan 26. At 1:00 p.m. ET.
Provided by Random House Publishing Group.
Barbara F. Walter is the Rohr Professor of International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Walter helps to run the award-winning blog Political Violence at a Glance and has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and Foreign Affairs. | null | null | null | null | null |
Through Tonight: Gusty northwest winds pump Arctic air into the region. Despite partial cloudiness, temperatures fall into the teens most spots, with a range of about 13 to 20 likely for lows. Wind chills — on sustained northwest wind around 10 to 15 mph — send temperatures into the single digits to around 10. Layers!
Tomorrow (Friday): It’s one of those mornings that slaps you in the face. With a mix of sun and clouds, temperatures are slow to rise. Highs only reach the mid- and upper 20s, which will put us in the running for the coldest day of winter so far. Winds are around 10 mph out of the north and northwest, gusting to 25 mph or so.
30 minutes: That’s how much light we’ve gained in the evening since the low point. Sunset today is 5:15 p.m. in Washington. We’re gaining about a minute of evening light a day now, and 5:45 sunset comes February 15. From there, it’s less than a month until we spring forward for the annual time change. Spring is coming. | null | null | null | null | null |
He was 14 when he was in class at Georgetown Prep and learned his dad was assassinated in Los Angeles. After some stumbles, he became a respected environmental lawyer and activist, winning a $289 million jury verdict against Monsanto and winning multiple cases to protect coastlines and waterways.
The outlier of our nation’s premier political dynasty began questioning vaccines — loudly — before the link between mercury in vaccines and autism was discredited by the most of the world’s medical community. | null | null | null | null | null |
Searches on Akram’s cellphone led him to focus on Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York City’s Central Synagogue, who has been named on various online lists over the past decade as one of the most influential Jewish people in the country.
After being invited inside and sitting through some of the service, Akram pulled out a gun and took four hostages: Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, congregant Jeffrey Cohen, and two others whose names have not been released. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The discussion on transgender athletes is nuanced and should continue
Penn's Lia Thomas swims in a meet against Dartmouth and Yale at Sheerr Pool in Philadelphia on Jan. 8. (Chris Szagola/AP)
I appreciated Megan McArdle’s Jan. 16 Sunday Opinion column, “We need to be able to talk about trans athletes.” Yes, we do. But I think the bottom line is that people who have grown up through puberty with male hormones have an unfair advantage when it comes to strength, speed and neuromuscular development. Nothing, including later hormone treatment, makes it fair for them to compete with women.
Intersex athletes present a different and more difficult question. They are on a continuum, as are we all. Some women have more testosterone, fast-twitch muscles, etc., than others. It’s the luck of the draw. But in general, it seems reasonable to say that intersex athletes should be able to compete wherever they like.
Marian Lapp, Arlington | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Preserving historic property is better than demolition
The Cornwell Farm estate in Great Falls is on the National Register of Historic Places. (Walt Lawrence)
In the case that the manor is demolished, the architectural techniques, the design and the history of the manor turn to dust.
Some might argue that the demolition of old property is inevitable. Though this might be true for cases where restoration is no longer possible, we could be doing more to preserve the history of engineering and architecture. Furthermore, studies have shown that preserving historical buildings is more sustainable, reduces waste significantly and reduces the carbon footprint of the building. With multiple advantages to the restoration of historic buildings, we should think twice before demolishing them.
Miina Anvelt, Great Falls | null | null | null | null | null |
Senators and representatives receive a substantial amount of information that the public does not, including details about how U.S. companies operate and how the government scrutinizes businesses. The fact that so much congressional stock trading goes on — with thousands of stocks traded each year by members of both parties — raises legitimate questions about whether lawmakers are using their access to that information to enrich themselves, rather than to serve the public.
The wisdom of such a prohibition is obvious. A majority of Democratic, independent and Republican voters supports prohibiting lawmakers from trading stocks, a recent Morning Consult poll shows. It’s also widely supported by good governance groups and ethics experts, who point out that while current law forbids any American from trading on “insider information,” it’s very hard to prove someone did that, especially if that someone is a member of Congress who needs that information to make policy decisions. | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. union membership falls, despite activism
Union membership falls despite activism
After a year marked by weeks-long labor strikes and unprecedented movements to organize at some of the largest corporations in the United States, unionization levels fell back to historic lows.
The rate of union membership, or the percentage of wage and salary workers who were part of a union, was 10.3 percent in 2021, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Thursday. That’s down 0.5 percentage points from 2020 and matches the prepandemic level of 2019.
Among private-sector workers, the numbers were even lower: Union members made up just 6.1 percent of that workforce, compared with 33.9 percent of the public sector.
Last year, U.S. workers seized attention through individual choices like quitting their jobs in record numbers and collective action including strikes by union members at John Deere, Kellogg’s and Columbia University — as well as nonunion walkouts at companies like Activision Blizzard and McDonald’s.
They also mounted high-profile unionization campaigns at top U.S. companies, including a failed union vote among thousands of Amazon workers in Alabama, and a successful one among a few dozen Starbucks employees in New York. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)
But these actions didn’t translate into more overall members. That’s partly because successes like those at Starbucks remained limited in scope, and also because workers at big corporations like Amazon have voted against unionization, sometimes out of fear that otherwise the company would shut their workplace.
Peloton reportedly to halt some production
By market close, Peloton was trading at just over $24 a share, down nearly 24 percent. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
McDonald's expands meatless burger sales
The company said the McPlant burger, which it co-developed with plant-based protein company Beyond Meat, will be sold at 600 stores in the San Francisco and Dallas areas starting Feb. 14.
The Chicago-based company offered no details about what it learned from its first round of sales, or whether it has since tweaked the recipe. The McPlant is made from peas, rice and potatoes, among other ingredients.
U.S. home sales tumbled in December as higher prices amid record-low inventory continued to shut out some first-time buyers. Existing-home sales dropped 4.6 percent, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.18 million units last month, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. Sales fell across all regions.
Russia's central bank on Thursday proposed banning the use and mining of cryptocurrencies on Russian territory, citing threats to financial stability, citizens' well-being and its monetary policy sovereignty. Russia has argued for years against cryptocurrencies, saying they could be used in money laundering or to finance terrorism. It eventually gave them legal status in 2020 but banned their use as payment. | null | null | null | null | null |
This is indeed impressive. Biden didn’t mention, though, that that achievement was likely reversed this month — and might soon be gone for good, with millions of children likely to plunge back into poverty this year.
Child poverty plummeted this past year thanks primarily to the fiscal stimulus Democrats passed in March. The package’s most important poverty-fighting element was an overhaul of the child tax credit. Lawmakers changed the existing benefit in several key ways: They made it much larger (especially for young children); distributed it through monthly payments, rather than one lump sum at tax-filing time; and made it available to the poorest of the poor, including those with little or no tax liability because their earnings are so meager. Historically these families were ineligible for the benefit.
In fact, the child-poverty rate for January is expected to be at its highest level since Biden took office, thanks to both the credit’s monthly payments ending and the earlier expiration of other covid-era support programs. (Elevated inflation has of course reduced low-income families’ spending power, too.) | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - The Colorado River in the upper River Basin is pictured in Lees Ferry, Ariz., on May 29, 2021. A Native American tribe has agreed to lease more of its water to help address dwindling supplies in the Colorado River Basin. The agreement involves the Jicarilla Apache Nation, the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and The Nature Conservancy. The water would be released from the Navajo Reservoir in northwestern New Mexico to feed the San Juan River, which flows into the Colorado River. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
A lesbian couple was brutally slain in Mexico. Authorities have ruled out hate crime.
But authorities said Thursday that this will not be the case this time around. The state attorney general’s office said that the investigation is “very far ahead” and that it is following “special protocols” given the sensitivity of the case and to avoid “criminalization” of the victims.
Martínez, the spokesman, said: “We understand the voices and concerns of activists and LGBT groups and we are receptive to their demands, but in this case, the initial investigation is leading to something else.”
Martínez said both incidents were not related. | null | null | null | null | null |
Atlanta-area prosecutor seeks special grand jury in Trump probe
Special grand jury is sought in Trump probe
In her letter to Christopher S. Brasher, chief judge of Fulton County’s Superior Court, Willis cited several advantages to impaneling a rarely used special purpose grand jury. Among them: It could sit for a longer period than a normal grand jury, and it would focus solely on the matter at hand.
— John Wagner
Man sentenced for posting bomb instructions: A South Florida man has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for posting bomb-making instructions in 2016 on the Internet for people who he believed were Islamic terrorists. Samuel Baptiste, 29, was sentenced Wednesday in Miami federal court, according to court records. He pleaded guilty in October to attempting to provide material support to terrorists. | null | null | null | null | null |
But authorities said Thursday that this will not be the case this time around. The state attorney general’s office said that the investigation is “very far ahead” and that it is following “special protocols,” given the sensitivity of the case and to avoid “criminalization” of the victims.
Martínez, the spokesman, said: “We understand the voices and concerns of activists and LGBT groups, and we are receptive to their demands, but in this case, the initial investigation is leading to something else.”
Martínez said Tuesday’s deaths and those of the couple were not related. | null | null | null | null | null |
He was 14 and a student at Georgetown Prep and learned his dad was assassinated in Los Angeles. After some stumbles, he became a respected environmental lawyer and activist, winning a $289 million jury verdict against Monsanto and winning multiple cases to protect coastlines and waterways.
The outlier of our nation’s premier political dynasty began questioning vaccines — loudly — before the link between mercury in vaccines and autism was discredited by most of the world’s medical community. | null | null | null | null | null |
Searches on Akram’s cellphone, they said, led him to focus on Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York City’s Central Synagogue, who has been named on various online lists over the past decade as one of the most influential Jewish people in the country.
After being invited inside and sitting through some of the service, Akram pulled out a gun and took four hostages: Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, congregant Jeffrey Cohen and two others whose names have not been released. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Supreme Court denied a request from abortion providers Thursday to send Texas’s restrictive abortion law back to a district judge who had once stopped it, and dissenting liberal justices said the court was complicit in allowing an “unconstitutional chill on abortion care.”
The court’s one-sentence order denying the request was the latest legal maneuver on the law called S.B. 8, which bans abortions in the state at about six weeks of pregnancy and sets up an enforcement for private individuals, rather than state officials. It has bitterly divided the Supreme Court.
After a hearing in November, the court in December again left the law in place, but provided a narrow path for providers to challenge in federal court what is the nation’s most restrictive law on the procedure. It identified a handful of state officials who could presumably play a role in enforcing S.B. 8, and said a suit could properly proceed against them.
As is common, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which covers Texas. But instead of returning it to a federal judge in Austin who had previously stopped the law, the appeals court agreed with a request from Texas to ask the state supreme court to clarify a matter of state law: whether those identified officials really had such an enforcement power.
That could mean months of delay, with the law remaining in place.
Abortion providers said such a move would be a direct rebuttal of what the Supreme Court had said in December.
Supreme Court says Texas abortion providers may proceed with challenge of six-week ban, leaves law in effect for now
Eight of the nine justices said litigation could proceed against the officials, and four said they expected the case to go back to the district judge and be dealt with quickly.
“Given the ongoing chilling effect of the state law, the district court should resolve this litigation and enter appropriate relief without delay,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for himself and Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan.
Roberts, who has voted with the liberals previously to stop the law while it is being challenged, did not join Sotomayor’s dissent or one written by Breyer,
“The Court of Appeals ignored our judgment,” Breyer wrote, adding, “As a result, an unconstitutional 6-week abortion ban remains in effect in Texas — as it has for over four months.”
Sotomayor’s dissent was unsparing. She noted that one judge on the appeals court panel “raised the notion that because this Court is considering a challenge to Roe v. Wade, the panel could ‘just sit on this until the end of June’ rather than fulfill its obligation to apply existing precedent.” She was referring to Judge Edith H. Jones, appointed to the 5th Circuit by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.
The court has heard arguments in a Mississippi case that explicitly asks the court to overturn Roe’s guarantee of a constitutional right to abortion, but Sotomayor noted the 1973 decision remains the law.
“Because our precedents are clear that Texas cannot directly ban abortion before viability, the state legislature enacted a convoluted law that instills terror in those who assist women exercising their rights between 6 and 24 weeks,” she wrote. “State officials knew that the fear and confusion caused by this legal-procedural labyrinth would restrict citizens from accessing constitutionally protected medical care, providers from offering it, and federal courts from restoring it. The dilatory tactics to which this Court accedes today are consistent with, and part of, this scheme.”
The abortion providers’ request to the court was a long shot; Sotomayor acknowledged they were asking for “extraordinary” relief. As often happens in emergency requests, the majority did not provide a reason for denying the petition.
Sotomayor contended the relief was warranted, and the court should have been clear Texas and the appeals court had not obeyed the Supreme Court’s decision. | null | null | null | null | null |
“I was looking at the IP list, I mean, let’s go!” Spencer said. “ ‘King’s Quest,’ ‘Guitar Hero,’ … I should know this but I think they got ‘HeXen.’ ”
“HeXen,” indeed an Activision Blizzard property, is a cult hit first-person game about using magic spells. Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard also means owning the rights to many creations from gaming’s past, including Crash Bandicoot, the original Sony PlayStation mascot. There’s also the influential and popular Tony Hawk skateboard series and beloved characters like Spyro the Dragon.
Toys for Bob, one of the studios working under the Activision Blizzard banner, successfully launched games like “Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time,” but was later folded into supporting Call of Duty games. Spencer said the Xbox team will talk with developers about working on a variety of franchises from the Activision Blizzard vaults.
“We’re hoping that we’ll be able to work with them when the deal closes to make sure we have resources to work on franchises that I love from my childhood, and that the teams really want to get,” Spencer said. “I’m looking forward to these conversations. I really think it’s about adding resources and increasing capability.”
Thursday afternoon, Spencer posted on Twitter that he has spoken with leaders at Sony, and Microsoft intends to honor all Activision Blizzard agreements to put those games, like Call of Duty, on PlayStation consoles should the acquisition be approved.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella publicly invoked the metaverse before even Zuckerberg did, when he spoke of Microsoft’s possible role in creating an “enterprise metaverse” in May 2021. Nadella again mentioned the metaverse in the acquisition announcement Tuesday.
“I’ve really been advocating internally in the company that gaming will be a catalyst for us and I can see how some of that functionality moving into enterprise scenarios and workplace scenarios can be beneficial,” he said. “But I don’t think anybody should pretend that all this stuff isn’t being rewritten. I had a meeting today with the ‘The Elder Scrolls Online’ team and we did our leadership team [meeting] in-game. That’s as much of a Zoom call as anything else!”
Microsoft’s employees, like those at most big tech companies, are not unionized. When asked how his company feels about unions, Spencer said: “I’m going to be honest, I don’t have a lot of personal experience with unions. I’ve been at Microsoft for 33 years. So I’m not going to try to come across as an expert on this, but I’ll say we’ll be having conversations about what empowers them to do their best work, which as you can imagine in a creative industry, is the most important thing for us.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Through Tonight: Gusty northwest winds will pump Arctic air into the region. Despite partial cloudiness, temperatures will fall into the teens in most spots, with a range of about 13 to 20 likely for lows. Wind chills — on sustained northwest wind around 10 to 15 mph — will send temperatures into the single digits to around 10. Layers!
Tomorrow (Friday): It’s one of those mornings that slaps you in the face. With a mix of sun and clouds, temperatures will be slow to rise. Highs will reach only the mid- and upper 20s, which will put us in the running for the coldest day of winter so far. Winds will be around 10 mph out of the north and northwest, gusting to 25 mph or so.
30 minutes: That’s how much light we’ve gained in the evening since the low point. Sunset today is 5:15 p.m. in Washington. We’re gaining about a minute of evening light a day now, and 5:45 sunset comes Feb. 15. From there, it’s less than a month until we spring forward for the annual time change. Spring is coming. | null | null | null | null | null |
The weak outlook, which the company attributed to a “Covid overhang” and economic hardship in places like Latin America, sent jitters through the streaming world. Shares of streaming companies including Walt Disney Co. and Roku Inc. dropped in after-hours trading as investors anticipated the slowdown in subscriber growth would be widespread.One surprise for Netflix was its strong performance in its home market. In the U.S. and Canada, the company added 1.2 million subscribers, around double what analysts were anticipating, bringing its total paid membership count to 75.2 million in the region.
It was a brief reprieve for shareholders, who have seen Netflix’s once high-flying stock drop 16% since the start of the year as of today’s close amid growing concern about the high costs of incessant content creation needed in the streaming business.
Some investors are wondering whether the competitive streaming business will ever be highly profitable. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Putin has carefully calculated the odds. Right now, they’re in his favor.
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a news conference on Dec. 23. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg)
What does Vladimir Putin want? It’s a question Washington finds hard to answer because we Americans rarely put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Two important essays, by Dmitri Trenin in Foreign Affairs and Eugene Chausovsky in Foreign Policy, provide some clues. Both suggest that the Russian president has stayed in power since 1999 not by being a reckless gambler but rather by being careful, even rational.
Trenin points out that Putin has watched four waves of NATO expansionism since he took power. His military incursions have usually been reactions to events rather than grand initiatives of his own. In 2008, the response followed Georgia’s decision to retake the separatist province of South Ossetia. In 2014, it came on the heels of the Maidan uprising in Ukraine that drove President Viktor Yanukovych out of office. Putin’s one significant military intervention in an area that is not historically part of Russia’s core security sphere — Syria — has been limited, mostly using Russian air power.
In the case of the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s first effort was to bribe Ukraine with an offer of $15 billion in loans and lower prices for gas after it rejected an association agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych accepted the deal, igniting the Maidan protests, and then fled his country. Putin then annexed Crimea. In recent years, he has tried to get the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to make a deal on the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, home to the highest proportion of Russian-speakers in the country and where Russian army irregulars have been fomenting an insurgency. He tried to get the Germans to push Zelensky to accept a referendum in eastern Ukraine on secession.
From the arch-conservative Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the liberal reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian leaders have regarded Ukraine as fundamentally tied to Moscow. Ukraine’s first two presidents, while asserting the country’s newfound independence, were careful not to break too sharply with Moscow. According to a census conducted in 2001, almost 30 percent of the country’s population spoke Russian as their first language.
Putin’s dilemma is that Ukraine is, in slow motion, escaping Russia’s grasp. In the past decade, the country has become more independent, democratic and pro-Western. The West, in turn, has been cooperating and assisting Kyiv in ever-greater measure. But Putin is probably also conscious of the reality that an outright Russian invasion would create what he fears most — a permanently anti-Russia Ukraine. His goal, then, is to get the Americans and Europeans to recognize that Ukrainian membership in NATO is a step too far. He also wants for Kyiv to recognize that, in the long run, it has to have good (by which he means respectful, even subservient) relations with Russia.
For the West, Ukraine is a good cause but not central to its grand strategy. For Putin, it is a key Russian national interest. Russia is next door and has deep ties to the country. Ukrainians have told me that Russian spies are active in every part of the country, including the government. Putin can find many ways to keep Ukraine crippled, weak and dysfunctional. Trenin speculates that, if Moscow’s negotiations with NATO were to fail, Russia might recognize the two eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, where separatists have proclaimed “people’s republics.” Moscow has already used the same approach with Georgia, where Russia has recognized the two Russian-dominated parts of the country, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as independent states.
But why is Putin doing this now? Partly, he sees NATO creating a de facto alliance with Kyiv. At the same time, Putin must be aware that this is a moment of Russian strength. At a time when there is a growing energy crisis around the world, Russia has consolidated its position as an energy superpower.
Energy prices are rising across the globe but perhaps nowhere as sharply as in Europe. The price of natural gas — used by most Europeans to heat their homes — rose more than 400 percent in 2021. And yet, in recent years, most European countries have been shutting down their gas production even as they have been unable to ramp up renewables to completely take their place. The result: They are critically dependent on Russian gas.
Meanwhile, Ukraine, which has received about $2.5 billion annually to allow Russian gas to travel through its country, could see that revenue plummet if Nord Stream 2, a pipeline designed to transit more Russian gas directly to Germany and Europe, is certified. In these circumstances, sanctions against Russia could trigger an energy crisis in Europe on the scale of the 1970s oil crisis, which no European government would want. | null | null | null | null | null |
Updated Jan. 19 at 10:57 a.m.Originally published Jan. 20, 2022
Manet opted for sharper tonal contrasts than Velázquez. The transitions from light to dark in the matador’s face and stockings, for instance, are abrupt to the point of coarseness. (To contemporary critics, it made Manet’s style seem vulgar — the painted equivalent of slang.) But in other ways, you can see how much he learned from the Spaniard’s surpassingly debonair brushwork, which was deliberately loose and approximate, the better to match the way the eye registers visual phenomena before their synthesis in the brain. (The link with Impressionism is obvious.) | null | null | null | null | null |
The report comes amid an explosion in the market for stablecoins, cryptocurrencies whose prices are pegged to an external asset such as the dollar. The private companies issuing those tokens market them as a safer alternative to other, better-known cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ether, that have experienced wild price gyrations. At the moment, stablecoins are primarily used by investors to facilitate trades among different crypto assets. But their backers argue they hold the potential to become a widely adopted means of payment.
But top regulators say stablecoin issuers lack adequate controls on the size and quality of their reserve holdings, inviting the risk of a sort of bank run if there’s a sudden demand for redemptions. A group of regulators led by the Treasury Department in November called for imposing bank-like rules on stablecoin companies.
Powell has said a U.S. digital currency and stablecoins can coexist. The Fed’s report said a U.S. digital currency could “spur innovation by banks and other actors and would be a safer deposit substitute than many other products, including stablecoins and other types of nonbank money.”
The central bank also noted that it would not expect a Fed-backed digital currency to replace physical cash. “The Federal Reserve is committed to ensuring the continued safety and availability of cash,” the report said, adding the bank would view a digital currency “as a means to expand safe payment options, not to reduce or replace them.” | null | null | null | null | null |
'Citizen Ashe' traces the life and career of a tennis legend
While Black immigrants have much in common with both U.S.-born Black Americans and other immigrant groups, their experience stands apart in a number of ways. Nearly a third of Black immigrants over the age of 25 have a college degree, compared with 22 percent of U.S.-born Black Americans, the Pew report notes. Black immigrant households have a higher median income —
$57,200 — compared with U.S.-born Black households at $42,000, but lower than that of other immigrant-led households.
While less than 5 percent of all immigrants admitted in 2019 came through the diversity visa program, 12 percent of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa entered the country via that path. While foreign-born Black people were less likely than other immigrant groups to live in the country without authorization, the Pew study found that 14 percent of Black immigrants were undocumented. Data from the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, however, shows that Black immigrants from Africa are twice as likely to face deportation because of a criminal conviction compared with other immigrant groups, and more than three times as likely to be detained while their cases are pending. | null | null | null | null | null |
Andy Murray after defeating Nikoloz Basilashvili in the first round of the Australian Open. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
It’s certainly true that the absence of the unvaccinated Djokovic, along with the injured Roger Federer and Serena Williams, put a damper on the atmosphere at Melbourne Park. That the stands in many cases cannot be more than 50 percent full because of covid protocols doesn’t help.
But Andy Murray brought real joy to the tournament Tuesday when he won a four-hour, five-set first-round match against 21st-seeded Nikoloz Basilashvili. When Murray dropped the fourth set in a tiebreaker, he looked drained and exhausted. Somehow, he pulled himself together to win the fifth set, 6-4.
Early Thursday morning Eastern time, Taro Daniel of Japan eliminated Murray, the 34-year-old clearly spent after his earlier marathon. But the second-round loss mattered less than the first-round win. Murray is a five-time Australian finalist — losing one final to Federer and four to Djokovic — but before his victory over Basilashvili, he hadn’t won a match in Melbourne since 2017. After he lost in the first round in 2019, in another five-setter, Tennis Australia played a lengthy farewell tribute video because it was widely thought Murray was headed for a second hip surgery and retirement.
Murray is a three-time major champion and, to put it mildly, a heroic figure throughout Great Britain. He was knighted in 2017 — please address him as Sir Andy Murray. In 2012, the Scotsman won the U.S. Open, becoming the first British player to claim one of tennis’s four major championships since Fred Perry ruled the tennis world in the 1930s.
Then injuries intervened. He had back surgery late in 2016 and missed a chunk of 2017 with an elbow injury. Early in 2018 he needed hip surgery. He was still in pain when he played after the surgery, and he talked before the 2019 Australian Open about facing more surgery, saying it was possible that would be his last time competing in Melbourne. He was hoping to play Wimbledon once more before walking away.
He made it to Wimbledon that year — but only to play doubles. After all the medical procedures, though, he slowly began playing his way back. His ranking had dropped out of the top 100, and he needed a wild-card spot to get into this Australian Open. He was ranked 113th entering the tournament, but the victory over Basilashvili should move him back into the top 100.
And then along came Murray, steadily working his way up in the rankings, reaching his first Slam final in 2010, a loss to Federer in Australia. When he won Wimbledon three years later, beating Djokovic in the final in straight sets, there was literally dancing in the streets of London.
To those in Great Britain, the Davis Cup victory in 2015 was almost as monumental. Until it was turned into a corporate joke a couple of years back, the Davis Cup was still a huge event, especially in Europe. Murray was later chosen by his fellow athletes to be Great Britain’s flag-bearer for the Opening Ceremonies at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games.
On that afternoon in 2013 when he finally put the jokes about Perry’s statue into the rearview mirror — of his sport and his country — there were plenty of tears shed. For anyone who had ever been at Wimbledon, it was an intensely emotional day.
In a completely different way, seeing Murray somehow survive that fifth set Tuesday was just as emotional. Sir Andy Murray is more than worthy of our tears. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Washington Nationals unveiled a revamped player development staff this week, checking their biggest box in what otherwise has been a quiet, lockout-dampened offseason. There are a lot of new names — some familiar, some less so — and added roles to sift through. And a lot of questions, too, a handful of which are asked and answered below.
Just how much bigger is the player development staff compared with last season? When The Washington Post analyzed 2021 player development staff sizes in December (concluding the Nationals had the smallest among all 30 teams), part-time coaches and instructors, clubhouse managers, equipment managers, special assistants, administrative staff and interns were not counted in each club’s total. Neither was anyone hired once the season began. That formula had the Nationals with 46 full-time employees working directly with minor league players last year. In December, General Manager Mike Rizzo promised an increase of “at least 24 percent” (not necessarily using The Post’s metrics).
What organizations did the Nationals hire from? Of the hires that became official Tuesday, three are from the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets, two from the Miami Marlins and San Diego Padres, and one each from the Boston Red Sox, Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and San Francisco Giants. That’s 10 organizations. Coco Crisp, the new outfield/base-running coordinator, and Delwyn Young, new hitting coach for the low-A Fredericksburg Nationals, were managers in the inaugural MLB Draft League in 2021. Bill Mueller, the new quality control coordinator, was most recently the hitting coach at Arizona State University but has major league coaching experience with the St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers.
It’s worth noting, though, that the minor league ladder doesn’t always work the same for coaches as it does for players. In some cases, organizations want their sharper hitting and pitching coaches at the lower levels, where players are more likely to make big fundamental changes and set their course. When The Post spoke with starter Wil Crowe in June, he raved about Hanrahan’s ability to spot mechanical issues, explain tweaks and, for Crowe, help increase velocity by preaching “hill connection” (keeping his back heel on the rubber for more of his delivery). Crowe, who was traded from the Nationals to Pirates in December 2021, said Hanrahan gave him tips he never heard as a prospect for Washington.
Other hires that drew some buzz among team officials this week: David Longley as director of player development technology and strategy (we’ll get to that in a second); Joe Dillon returning as hitting coordinator after two seasons as the Philadelphia Phillies’ hitting coach; and Crisp, a former big leaguer, as outfield/base-running coordinator (there’s hope that Crisp and Eric Young Jr., the Nationals’ new first base coach, will improve base running throughout the organization).
This does not, however, mean Washington has caught up. Not in any sense. For many organizations, Longley would be leading a small- to medium-sized team of analysts and/or data-focused coaches and coordinators. His challenge now — and a challenge for the Nationals as a whole — is to change a player development culture that has been slow to adopt new-age practices in recent years. They always had to start somewhere. | null | null | null | null | null |
Officers with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police search a field near Emerson, Manitoba, in Canada for the bodies of a family believed to have died of exposure as they attempted to cross the border into the United States. (Royal Canadian Mounted Police)
TORONTO — U.S. authorities said Thursday that they had charged a Florida man with human smuggling, after four people, including an infant and a teenage boy, were found dead roughly seven miles from the U.S.-Canada border in the province of Manitoba.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they believe that the four people, whose bodies were found near the community of Emerson, Manitoba, on Wednesday, were attempting to cross into the United States from Canada and had died from exposure to the cold in a blizzard, during which temperatures fell to minus-31 degrees Fahrenheit.
Shortly after Shand’s arrest, U.S. authorities said they encountered five more Indian nationals who claimed they had crossed the border on foot after walking for roughly 11 hours. They were walking in the direction of where Shand was arrested and said there were expecting to be picked up by someone in the United States.
After a nearly four hour search, the RCMP located four bodies on the Canadian side of the border. The U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota said they were “tentatively” identified as the family of four that was separated from the rest of the group.
Canada has pressed the United States to harden their shared border and to close the loophole that allows for crossings at “irregular” points of entry. But some analysts have argued that tightening the border is unlikely to deter migrants from crossing and would only make their journeys more dangerous.
Rema Jamous Imseis, the Canada representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said the agency “deeply regrets the tragic loss of life.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Georgetown’s Big East struggles continue with loss at No. 21 Providence
What to know from the Hoyas’ 83-75 setback to the Friars
Providence's Noah Horchler takes the ball from Georgetown's Collin Holloway, right, during Thursday's game. (Stew Milne/AP)
By Mike Scandura
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Don’t blame Donald Carey for Georgetown’s 83-75 loss at No. 21 Providence, the Hoyas’ fourth straight. The Hoyas’ defense deserves consideration, especially in the paint. But not Carey.
The graduate student scored 21 points (one shy of his season high), drained five three-pointers (matching a career high) and pulled down seven rebounds (two shy of his season high).
Carey’s performance was a bright spot for the Hoyas, who remain winless in the Big East (0-4) and fell to 6-9 overall. It also rewarded Coach Patrick Ewing’s decision to start him ahead of Kaiden Rice.
NCAA changes policy for transgender athletes
“That’s something I wanted to see,” Ewing said. “We have 16 more games to go. Sometimes you have to make changes. That was one of the changes I wanted to make.
“[Carey] played great. He came out of protocol after having been shut down for 10 days. We had to take our time getting him back into shape under basketball conditions.
“I thought he came out and played great.”
Conversely, the Friars continue to be the class of the Big East. The win improved them to 14-2 overall and 5-1 in the league. They have won 10 of 11.
Ajami Durham and Ed Croswell led Providence with 15 points each while Noah Horchler added 14.
Without Mark Turgeon at Maryland, Turgeonites face an identity crisis
Georgetown’s defense continued to be an issue. The Friars shredded the Hoyas when Ewing went man-to-man, shooting 51.7 percent from the floor and 50 percent (5 of 10) from beyond the arc.
In addition, Providence scored 30 points in the paint.
“We gave them too many points in the paint,” Ewing said. “And it wasn’t just [Nate Watson]. He didn’t play a Watson-type game and we still gave them 30 points in the paint and that’s what hurt us.”
The Hoyas hurt themselves early, missing their first 11 shots and committing five turnovers in the first seven minutes.
Providence capitalized. By the time Dante Harris made his first jump shot, the Friars had a 13-0 lead.
For all the good work the Hoyas did to make their margin manageable, it was erased to start the second half. Providence came out after intermission on an 11-2 run, pushing its lead to 12.
Once again, the Hoyas fought back behind Carey and Harris.
Two free throws by Harris pulled Georgetown within 64-60 but that was as close as the Hoyas would get over the remaining five minutes.
Slow starts notwithstanding, Ewing wasn’t inclined to blame the loss on that aspect of the game.
“I didn’t think it took a lot out of us,” he said. “We started out slow, unfortunately. But we fought back and cut it to three at halftime. Then we came out of halftime and they went on a run.
“After that it was nip-and-tuck the rest of the way. It’s no time to panic but we have to play with a sense of urgency.”
Here is what else to know from Thursday’s game:
Defense took a timeout
Ewing has regularly made his team’s defense a point of his postgame media sessions, typically as a lament of what his team could be doing better. The numbers only gave him more fuel Thursday. The Hoyas entered allowing an average of 79.1 points, and the Friars topped that figure in the win.
Good life beyond the arc
The Hoyas flew to Rhode Island ranked last in the Big East in three-point shooting (26.7 percent). They improved that stat by draining 56.5 percent (13-23) of the shots from beyond the arc.
For a team still seeking its first Big East win, this stretch is particularly tough for the Hoyas. The loss to the Friars was the first of three straight against ranked teams, with No. 11 Villanova visiting Capital One Arena on Saturday before Georgetown visits No. 25 Connecticut on Tuesday. | null | null | null | null | null |
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Taylor Mikesell scored a career-high 33 points, Jacy Sheldon added 24 points with 10 assists, and Ohio State beat Maryland.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Nerea Hermosa scored a career-high 21 points and Georgia Tech beat Syracuse.
BOSTON — Cameron Swartz scored 28 points, Makayla Dickens added 20 and Boston College rallied from a 14-point deficit to beat Notre Dame.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Deja Kelly scored 18 points, Kennedy Todd-Williams added 15 North Carolina held Virginia to four points in the second quarter. | null | null | null | null | null |
By Steve Karnowski and Amy Forliti | AP
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Eighteen people were picked to hear the federal case against three former Minneapolis officers who are charged with violating George Floyd’s civil rights during the May 2020 arrest that led to the Black man’s death. Twelve jurors will deliberate and six are alternates. Most of the jurors appear to be white; two appear to be of Asian descent. The jury includes people from the Minneapolis metro area, as well as suburbs and far southern Minnesota. Here are some details: | null | null | null | null | null |
What to know about the Maryland’s 95-89 loss to the Buckeyes
Associate head coach Karen Blair got a chance to coach the Terrapins with Brenda Frese attending the funeral for her father. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Brenda Frese learned a lot from her father, Bill. Many of the lessons came on a basketball court. Those that didn’t often could be applied to the sport. Planning and preparation were tenets of Bill’s, and they have become central to what makes his daughter such an outstanding coach.
That was why, back in November, Frese had associate head coach Karen Blair oversee the Terrapins in their final exhibition game. Frese was planning for when she couldn’t be on the sideline with her team. That time came Thursday, with Frese absent to be at the funeral for Bill, who passed away Sunday in his Iowa home following a battle with prostate cancer.
With Blair at the helm, No. 12 Maryland went on the road and fell to Ohio State, 95-89, in Columbus. The game didn’t follow the script Frese might have hoped for in her absence, but Blair was not disappointed with her players’ effort.
“As a team, something we’ve talked about this week is honoring Bill’s legacy,” Blair said. “He stood for hard work and family, and I think today I’m happy with the performance by the team. I thought this team came out and they played their hearts out. So I think we made Bill and Brenda proud.
“Obviously, we’re not satisfied with the loss. That’s not what Maryland basketball is about, but I think our energy and effort was right.”
Maryland (12-6, 4-3 Big Ten) has lost consecutive games for the second time this season.
Ohio State (14-3, 6-2) led for all but 105 seconds. The 95 points were the most scored against Maryland this season, and they came after a 69-49 loss to Michigan in which the Terps managed a season-low for points.
Maryland’s offense struggled for much of the night against the Buckeyes, but was buoyed late by Chloe Bibby’s 14-point fourth quarter. Bibby, who finished with 20 points, almost willed the Terps back into the game, but ultimately their defense was unable to stand up when it mattered.
Taylor Mikesell and Jacy Sheldon entered the game as Ohio State’s clear-cut top offensive weapons and the Terrapins didn’t do anything to slow either down. Mikesell, who spent the first two years of her college career playing for Maryland, opened the game with a three-pointer and buried shot after shot. The former Big Ten freshman of the year finished with 33 points on 11-for-13 shooting, including 5 for 5 from behind the arc.
Sheldon began the game as a distributor before getting aggressive with her own shot to tally 24 points and 10 assists. The Buckeyes shot a blistering 55 percent from the floor and 57.1 percent from three-point range.
Angel Reese finished with 22 points and 11 rebounds for Maryland and Katie Benzan added 16 points, including four three-pointers. The Terps turned the ball over 18 times, their second-most this season. They had 17 in the loss to Michigan.
“We’re going to work on starting hungrier and more motivated,” Benzan said of the team’s slow starts. “We need to start with a chip on our shoulder so that doesn’t happen again.”
Here are things to know about Thursday’s game:
Newest Terp
Maryland announced that guard Lavender Briggs will be transferring to College Park. Briggs was second-team all-SEC in 2021 at Florida after averaging 19.5 points. The 6-foot-1 guard will enroll in the spring.
Briggs is rehabbing a stress fracture in her left shin and will be eligible for the 2022-23 season. Briggs averaged 12.5 points in 14 games with the Gators this season before getting injured.
“Lavender is a really talented guard that [can] score and can impact the game in so many ways,” Frese said Wednesday in a statement. “She fit right in with our team and we just loved getting to know her. She will be a great addition to our program.”
Mikesell was anything but a surprise to Maryland. The senior guard started 66 straight games before transferring to Oregon. An Ohio native, she then transferred to her Buckeyes before this season.
Mikesell entered the game as the Big Ten leader in three-pointers made and three-point percentage.
Defending the arc
The Terps struggled to guard the three-point line for the second straight game, which is particularly alarming considering that was high on the scouting report. Michigan’s Maddie Nolan knocked down a career-high seven three-pointers Sunday.
Big guns AWOL
Maryland is flush with scorers at every position, but it needs its two all-Big Ten players to lead the way, especially against ranked opponents. That didn’t happen Thursday as Ashley Owusu and Diamond Miller were held to 12 points apiece.
Owusu was 3 for 15 from the floor after being held to just four points against Michigan. Miller only scored two points in the first quarter, and that came after managing just eight points on 2-for-6 shooting against the Wolverines.
“I don’t know if they did anything to limit Ashley,” Blair said. “I felt like Ashley was really aggressive and I’m actually very proud of her and Katie and how they handled the pressure. Handling that kind of pressure for 40 minutes isn’t easy.” | null | null | null | null | null |
BOSTON — Charlie McAvoy scored a power-play goal with 45 seconds left in the third period, lifting Boston over Washington.
PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia dropped its 10th straight game for the second time this season, the first team to accomplish that ignominious feat in more than a decade.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Tyler Seguin and Jason Robertson each scored twice, including consecutive goals late in the third period, to lift Dallas over Buffalo. | null | null | null | null | null |
Riad and Tesla also face civil litigation in the crash. Maria Luz Nieves, the mother of victim Maria Guadalupe Nieves-Lopez, sued Riad and the limousine company run by his father in 2020 alleging wrongful death. Nieves alleged product liability — including negligence and design and manufacturing defects — on Tesla’s part.
“Plaintiff alleges that the Incident was caused, in whole or in part, by design and manufacturing defects, and inadequate warnings, of the 2016 Tesla Model S, including but not limited to its features and systems" such as Autopilot, according to the suit.
The lawsuit described the sequence of events. At 12:39 a.m. on Dec. 29, 2019, a 2016 Tesla Model S driven by Riad in Gardena Calif., “suddenly and without warning" ran a red light and “violently collided” into the Civic, killing both occupants immediately from the blunt force impact, it alleges.
Nieves’ attorney, Arsen Sarapinian, said a jury trial was scheduled in the civil suit for July 2023, and because it was running concurrently to the criminal case he declined to comment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cae Farrington doesn’t think they had covid, but they’ve had to take steps to protect themselves against memory decay. Farrington, a 24-year-old illustrator from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., started having memory problems in August 2020. They developed what they describe as a brain fog that made it difficult to concentrate on work and tasks. | null | null | null | null | null |
LOS ANGELES — Playing the second game of a back-to-back set, the Colorado Avalanche looked tired. They weren’t able to bombard the Los Angeles Kings with their typical offensive brilliance, finding themselves on the wrong side of a 14-shot disparity.
“Even just the simplest of tasks, plays, breakouts, regroups, we were not moving the puck efficiently. ... And to me, that’s a sign of fatigue. We didn’t look like we had a lot of energy,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said. “We had a talk after the second period and just said, ‘We just got to come together. We’ve got to find a way to get it done.’” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Ukrainians can’t afford to be afraid
A mother of one of the so-called Cyborgs, Ukrainian servicemen who died during defending Donetsk airport, touches his picture on a memory wall in Kyiv on Jan. 21. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)
By Nataliya Gumenyuk
Nataliya Gumenyuk, the founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, is a Ukrainian author and journalist specializing in foreign affairs and conflict reporting.
I’ve lost count of the number of calls and emails I’ve received from foreign correspondents this month. “What’s the mood like in Kyiv?” “Are there military drills in Kharkiv?” “Are people expecting help?” I do my best to respond patiently (though I can’t help feeling a bit irritated).
Ukrainians are getting on with life: returning from holidays, working and generally staying calm. There is no panic in the capital, which today looks like any European city. The nervous talk is coming almost exclusively from Washington, Geneva or Brussels.
Make no mistake, the threat of more than 100,000 Russian troops stationed near our borders is a matter of existential importance. Ukrainians understand this. But we also understand that our opinions do not necessarily matter. Though it is up to Ukraine to defend itself, there’s almost nothing our government can do to prevent a big war. An air of grim realism prevails. I call it “doomed optimism.” We control what we can control, and we cannot afford to be consumed by anxiety over what we can’t control.
Over the past weeks, Moscow has issued a series of ultimatums. They boil down to two demands: The Kremlin wants to change the international security order and subordinate neighboring countries to its whim. It insists that NATO must drop its policy of accepting anyone who wishes to join, contradicting the whole idea of the alliance.
Note that Moscow is directing all of these demands toward the United States, not Ukraine. Ukraine has essentially been stripped of any agency in discussions about its own future. And yet it is seemingly expected to fight to defend itself on its own. Support for NATO membership is growing in Ukraine — the paradox of Russia attacking Ukraine for seeking to improve its own security is not lost on anyone — but no one expects NATO boots on the ground at any point in the near future.
We Ukrainians do not consider ourselves to be helpless pawns in a game of global chess. We would like to think of ourselves as David fighting Goliath — while the rest of the world looks on.
Our army is on alert, morale is high, the troops have combat experience and the military leadership claims it is in control. At the same time, no fair observer would suggest that Ukraine has enough equipment to maintain a prolonged conventional defense against the formidable Russian military.
The Americans and the Europeans have so far offered mainly vague promises of sanctions, which they claim is a form of deterrence. Yet this doesn’t seem to be intimidating an opponent who declares it has little to lose, who cares more about global dominance than a damaged economy, and who appears to have rejected pragmatism. For a self-declared militant power such as Russia, pulling back at this point could look like weakness.
As for Ukraine, it has no obvious way of de-escalating the situation — because no one is on the military escalator in the first place. There is no political force in our country calling for a war with Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky won election to office by promising to resolve our conflict with Moscow peacefully. In his latest speech, after a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Zelensky urged Ukrainians to “take a deep breath” and “calm down.”
Ukrainians are used to war. We’ve lived through eight years of fighting; 14,000 lives have been lost. Pro-Russian forces occupy seven percent of Ukrainian territory. Those in eastern Ukraine, who are likely to be hit first in the event of an all-out Russian attack, not unreasonably say that the rest of Ukraine should learn to deal with the constant threat.
It’s hard to imagine Russian boots setting foot in Ukraine’s fun, free-loving, booming capital. Kyiv is now a city where people have learned to enjoy democracy after fighting off authoritarianism and Russian dominance in the Maidan revolution of 2014.
But the main reason for our calm is the confidence that Ukrainians will resist any invasion — even though we know that the costs will be high and the challenges daunting.
Despite its many spies, its knowledge of the terrain, and its long familiarity with the country, Moscow has for decades made the same mistake of viewing Ukraine through the lens of its own fantasies. The Kremlin assumes that Ukrainians will passively succumb to their proscribed fate and then follow the cues it gives them. This is misguided. However much Russian forces bomb and blast their way through Ukrainian infrastructure, they will find it impossible to control the territory in the long run.
This, I tell my foreign colleagues, is the source of Ukraine's sense of doomed optimism. And this is why I’m becoming irritated by their constant questions.
Yet the idea that the Western powers are limiting themselves to the role of spectators, while Ukraine plays David against Goliath, seems profoundly unjust. Russia, after all, is trying to upend the entire international order and question the idea of individual nations’ right to sovereignty. There is more than the fate of one democratic country at stake. | null | null | null | null | null |
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Black Americans ‘are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,’ sparking outrage online. His office said he misspoke and meant to say ‘other Americans.’
Black Americans are using social media to express outrage over Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comments on African American voters, with the phrase “I am American” and the hashtag #MitchPlease.
On Wednesday, as Republicans prepared to block voting rights legislation that would have ensured ballot access for many, McConnell was asked what his message was to voters of color who were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to vote during this year’s midterms if Congress didn’t pass the bills.
Almost immediately, McConnell’s words sparked furor online, with many interpreting them to mean that he sees African Americans as separate from the rest of the U.S. population.
“Senator McConnell, what is the difference between African Americans and Americans?” asked the NAACP’s Twitter account.
McConnell’s office told CNN on Wednesday that the minority leader misspoke and meant to say “other Americans,” not just “Americans.”
In a statement Friday from his office, McConnell said that he has regularly noted that the 2020 election saw record numbers of voters. “I have consistently pointed to the record-high turnout for all voters in the 2020 election, including African-Americans,” McConnell said.
But the explanation from McConnell’s office did not quell the anger.
“Being Black doesn’t make you less of an American, no matter what this craven man thinks,” Charles Booker, a Democrat running against Sen. Rand Paul (R) for Paul’s Kentucky seat, tweeted.
“Collin Powell was a real American,” tweeted an account named “Republicans against Trumpism,” attaching an image of the late general, who was Black. “[McConnell], apologize now!” the account demanded.
“Hey [McConnell], for your information, I’m also an American,” tweeted Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison, a Black man.
Soon, more Black Americans were tweeting pictures of themselves with the caption “I am American” and using the #MitchPlease hashtag.
Democrats have pushed for federal voting rights legislation in response to Republican-led state laws imposing new restrictions on ballot access. On Wednesday, Republicans blocked the measures, which combined an effort to restore portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that have been struck down in recent years by the Supreme Court with a broader effort to establish new national standards for federal elections, including minimum requirements for early voting, voting by mail and other methods making voting easier.
An effort to change Senate rules to ensure passage also failed as two Democrats — Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) — joined all Republicans in opposing the effort.
McConnell led his Republicans in sinking the voting legislation. “This is about one party wanting the power to unilaterally rewrite the rule book of American elections,” he said this past week.
Amid frustration over the outcome in the Senate, McConnell’s remark about Black Americans and voting sparked the most anger.
“African Americans are ARE Americans, 365 days a year,” tweeted the Congressional Black Caucus.
“This is 2022 and being American is not synonymous with looking or thinking like you,” Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) said in a letter to McConnell. “African Americans are, in fact, American citizens deserving of our recognition, respect, and equal protections under the law.” | null | null | null | null | null |
March for Life convenes today during a pivotal time for abortion rights
Hey, it’s your Health 202 researcher, Alex. Rachel's got a great rundown today of where we are in the national battle over abortion. But first, I wanted to say goodbye. Today’s my last day on the newsletter. I’m leaving The Post for another job opportunity, one where I’ll hopefully continue to think about and do research on health-care issues. I wanted to thank you for the tips and feedback over the past year and half. I’ve learned so much from working on this newsletter and so much of that has come from our incredible readers.
Today: The CIA finds no “worldwide campaign” by any foreign power behind the “Havana syndrome” and a dive into how private insurers are covering at-home tests. But first:
Abortion protesters march today with the prospect of a post-Roe world
State legislatures will consider a slew of abortion bans this year amid one of the most pivotal moments in decades for access to the procedure.
Last year, states passed a record number of abortion restrictions — a trend that’s expected to continue in 2022. Though legislative sessions are just beginning, lawmakers in a handful of states have already introduced bills similar to Texas’s “heartbeat” ban, with more likely on the way.
“We’re really encouraging lawmakers that this is an opportunity to go full speed ahead,” said Katie Glenn, government affairs counsel for Americans United for Life, one of the largest antiabortion groups.
Lawmakers are ramping up efforts ahead of a potentially seismic shift on whether women have a fundamental right to end their pregnancies. The Supreme Court appears willing to uphold a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks, a ruling that could undermine Roe v. Wade’s decades-old protections for abortions before the point of viability. That’s left some Democratic-leaning states to take the opposite approach, moving to protect the procedure.
Today, tens of thousands of people rally in Washington D.C. today for the March for Life, an annual event protesting abortion on the anniversary of Roe. Advocates on both sides view abortion as a potent issue in the midterms, believing it’ll motivate voters to head to the polls in November.
Texas has one of the most watched abortion laws in the nation. That’s because it has a twist: Private citizens are charged with enforcing the ban on the procedure once a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around six weeks of pregnancy. Courts typically strike down abortion bans for violating Roe, but Texas’s unusual structure is why it has remained in effect today.
Some states will soon consider similar measures, while others are focusing on other bans, like ones mirroring Mississippi’s. Here’s a snapshot of what’s been introduced around the country so far:
Lawmakers in at least five states have introduced bills modeled after Texas. This includes Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Missouri and Ohio.
Others announced intentions to follow suit, such as in Oklahoma.
In Florida, a bill banning abortions after 15 weeks cleared its first hurdle earlier this week. Such a measure could impact abortions in surrounding states, since some Southerners living in areas with less access to the procedure travel to Florida, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
“Right now, we’re seeing the beginning of what might be another wave,” said Elizabeth Nash, an interim associate director at Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights and tracks state measures.
Preparing for a post-Roe world
The landscape for abortion laws has one fundamental difference this year. Laws banning the procedure before viability — roughly estimated as between 22 to 24 weeks — could actually go into effect, depending on how the Supreme Court rules.
That’s upped the ante for advocates on both sides.
“It they let the Mississippi abortion ban stand, then it's just such a clear greenlight for all these other states that have trigger bans or have enjoined laws, or have legislative majorities and governors hostile to reproductive rights to go at it,” said Kristin Ford, vice president of communications and research at NARAL, an abortion rights group.
What that could look like: More than 20 states have laws that could be used to restrict abortions. That includes 12 states that have triggers automatically barring all or nearly all abortions if the precedent is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
On the other side, at least 15 states and Washington D.C. have laws protecting abortion rights.
In Vermont, lawmakers are moving to include a measure on this November’s ballot that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution.
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed a bill last week codifying Roe. Its bill sponsors took direct aim at the high court, contending abortion rights were “under attack in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Here's what else you need to know on the abortion front:
More than 225 organizations — such as Planned Parenthood, the Center for American Progress and MomsRising — sent a letter today urging the Senate to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a statutory right to abortion. But the bill faces an uphill battle in the chamber, where it would need 60 votes to pass.
Organizers expect reduced attendance at March for Life amid high levels of coronavirus cases, and a new D.C. mandate requiring anyone age 12 and over to show proof of at least one coronavirus vaccine shot before going inside many indoor spaces, The Post’s Casey Parks reported earlier this week.
Getting insurance reimbursement for coronavirus tests can be a hassle
As of Saturday, insurance companies were required to cover at-home coronavirus tests. But some Americans are wading through what they consider overly complex insurance forms, and requirements that forms be mailed or faxed — a tricky proposition for those without a printer. It’s a situation that many experts warned about when President Biden first announced the initiative.
The Kaiser Family Foundation released a report looking at how 13 different private insurers are covering the tests.
Six insurers have a direct coverage option, allowing enrollees to purchase tests at certain pharmacies without paying anything upfront.
Seven insurers are instead relying on reimbursing consumers later. Of those, four require that receipts and a form be mailed in. Cigna also offers a fax option. Only Anthem and Kaiser Permanente offer an online option for submitting the forms. CVS/Aetna does not describe the reimbursement process.
CIA finds no ‘worldwide campaign' behind mysterious ‘Havana syndrome'
The Central Intelligence Agency has determined that there is likely no foreign power behind the mysterious symptoms that have been dubbed “Havana syndrome,” The Post’s Shane Harris and Missy Ryan report.
The first cases of U.S. personnel suffering from symptoms like dizziness and headache were reported in the U.S. embassy in Havana in 2016. Since then, government investigators have reviewed 1,000 cases of “anomalous health incidents,” most, but not all, of which could be attributed to a preexisting medical condition or other factors, one senior official said. Several dozen cases couldn't be explained and will continue to be investigated.
The CIA’s finding that many cases could be explained by medical or environmental factors could make it harder to implement a law signed by Biden last year aimed at compensating victims of anomalous health incidents.
Patients are suffering amid surgery delays
Hospitals are delaying surgeries and other procedures, as a surge in coronavirus cases leads to staffing shortages among health-care workers and forces hospitals to close beds. For many patients, the wait is excruciating, The Post’s Christopher Rowland reports.
Doctors said that calling patients to tell them their surgeries are being postponed has been among their hardest tasks during the pandemic. They said the term “elective surgery” can be misunderstood to mean something like a cosmetic surgery when it actually applies to a broad range of critical procedures.
The chair of the Senate’s health panel is urging the Biden administration to do more to protect worker safety. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called on the administration to institute permanent workplace safety standards for health-care employers, such as requirements to provide protective equipment, notify workers of potential coronavirus exposures and conduct visitor screening, The Post’s Dan Diamond reports.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who challenged Biden’s vaccine mandates, tested positive for the coronavirus, our colleague Ellen Francis writes. Paxton’s office did not respond to questions about whether he had been vaccinated.
California, Rhode Island and New York are requiring coronavirus tests for visitors to nursing homes in an effort to protect the vulnerable population. But many family members say they can’t secure the tests, making it impossible to visit their loved ones, Kaiser Health News’s Judith Graham reports.
Democrats are scrambling to scale down Build Back Better
Democrats are deciding what parts of Biden’s sweeping social spending bill to keep and which parts to scrap after the president acknowledged that the bill won’t pass Congress in its current form, The Post's Tony Romm reports.
That could spell an end to enhancing Medicare, as we reported yesterday, given opposition from moderate holdout Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). But the West Virginia senator seems eager to include measures aimed at reducing drug prices, saying that lawmakers need to “take care” of pharmaceuticals. “You’re gouging the people with high prices. We can fix that,” he told reporters Thursday.
What’s in a name? Build Back Better may be out. “We may have to rename it,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at her weekly news conference.
Meanwhile, Manchin gestured toward a total reset after a year of debate. “We’ll just be starting from scratch,” Manchin told reporters. The comments affirmed reporting from our colleague Jeff Stein earlier this month that the senator's $1.8 trillion counteroffer to the White House is no longer on the table. | null | null | null | null | null |
President Biden listens to a question from a reporter during a news conference in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 19. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
As he enters his second year in office, President Biden said he would make a stronger push for voting rights: more travel, more vitriol, more “making the case” for what happens if voters continue to support Democrats.
But for many Black Americans whose energetic campaigning and votes helped propel Biden to the White House and secure Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the president’s impassioned vow this week came too late.
They are frustrated by his inaction on issues of equity and see a familiar carousel: a politician who promises to amplify Black voices and issues before Election Day, followed by maddening silence and inaction afterward.
“The agenda that he ran on, and got so many of us to go with him on, like police reform and criminal justice reform . . . and voting rights, they gave up on it,” said Fletcher Smith, a former South Carolina state legislator and one of a group of informal and mostly Black Biden advisers who call themselves “the Bidenites.”
Smith said Biden’s tone has been different the past couple of weeks, but he’s not convinced the results will be. “He’s not going to govern,” Smith predicted of the president. “He’s just going to go out in the nation and campaign and raise money for Democratic candidates in these congressional seats.”
For Smith and many other Black supporters, Biden’s concession that he “had not been out in the community nearly enough” was an admission that he had failed to connect with — and deliver for — one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies.
The first anniversary of Biden’s presidency represents an inflection point, with some Black voters aware of their political capital but worried that it may have been squandered by trusting Biden to renew voting rights, legislation for which has stalled in the narrowly divided Senate, and other priorities.
At his news conference Wednesday, Biden conceded that the coronavirus pandemic and other priorities in Washington had prevented him from doing “the things that I’ve always been able to do pretty well: connect with people, let them take a measure of my sincerity, let them take a measure of who I am.”
But many advocates who protested systemic racism in 2020 and, later, mobilized voters during a global pandemic to help elect Democrats, say the problem wasn’t Biden’s words but his lack of action, according to Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a Movement for Black Lives spokeswoman.
“What we’re told is that the only reason we don’t understand what they did was because they haven’t worded it well,” she said. “It feels a little bit like an insult to our intelligence.”
Woodard Henderson added, “We don’t need you to give us fancy words; we need to actually see you execute policy on the legislative level. And we need Joe Biden, as the president of the United States, to lead his party to use the power that they’ve been bestowed with.”
Over the past year, White House officials have stressed Biden’s commitment to equity issues by citing a flurry of executive actions, as well as the Justice Department’s work to fight voter suppression. They also note that voting rights is part of Vice President Harris’s portfolio, a sign of the issue’s importance.
Biden made a forceful speech in Georgia last week addressing voting rights — including withdrawing his long-held support of the filibuster, an arcane Senate rule that allows any member to keep a piece of business off the floor indefinitely. Biden said the rule had been abused to stop Black people from voting.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday that Biden has said several times “that he was deeply disappointed that voting rights legislation didn’t move forward. You’ve also heard him say, and he would repeat this to advocates who have been fighting so hard since the 2020 election, that he’s going to fight until his last breath to ensure that voting rights legislation passes.
“I know today marks one year,” she continued, “but that does not mean our work is done. Nobody’s packing up their bags.”
Still, activists are divided about the path forward, and even whether one realistically exists. During Biden’s speech in Atlanta last week, Black civil rights leaders filled the audience, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But many other Black activists opted to skip the event in protest, arguing that another gilded speech with no action behind it was not enough to meet the moment.
Black activists say the time for pretty speeches is over. They need an action plan from Biden on voting rights
In 2020, Black voters resuscitated Biden’s political career in the South Carolina primary, which he won handily, and from there helped him coast to the Democratic nomination. Biden was elected amid animus about a country many saw as tilted against Black Americans, sentiments brought to the surface by the killing of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
After Biden won the presidency, Black voters in Georgia helped hand Democrats both Senate seats there, giving the party a 50-50 tie in the upper chamber — which was broken by Harris, the first Black woman to hold her office.
Biden promised a giant step toward racial equity. But even before he and Harris swore their oaths of office, Republican-controlled legislatures in many key states were preparing — and later passed — a raft of laws to restrict voting rights. Federalizing voter protections has stalled in the Senate, stymied by threats of filibuster that Democrats cannot overcome.
“You’re in the 21st century, and you mean to tell me you can’t convince two Democrats to do a carveout on the filibuster in order to pass voting rights,” Smith said, speaking of Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W. V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who have both said they will not support filibuster reform, even for voting rights.
“Black folks, they’re too sophisticated in the 21st century to fall for that,” Smith added. “We don’t want platitudes and people and appealing to us because we just happen to be black. We want results.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers are trying to get back to the Super Bowl after four painful losses in NFC championship games. (Rey Del Rio/Getty Images)
The duality is fascinating. Any one of his long list of entanglements would be been overwhelming for most: his anti-covid-vaccination stance, his proud descent into misinformation, his long-standing feud with the Packers’ front office, the speculation that this is his last dance in Green Bay, the broken toe he’s managing to play through without surgery. Rodgers is handling it all — sometimes foolishly and often arrogantly — creating the weirdest new normal for himself. If you look at him as an icon, there are now dents everywhere. But all the while, his legend as a sublime quarterback keeps growing.
There are limits to Rodgers’s special ability to turn a mess into art, though. Over the past 11 years, the NFL playoffs have delivered the painful lesson that his singular greatness cannot support his most ambitious dreams. Since Green Bay won Super Bowl XLV in 2011, Rodgers and the Packers have been unable to get back to the big game despite advancing to the NFC title game four times. On Saturday, when the Packers face San Francisco at Lambeau Field, they will be making their ninth postseason appearance during that span, an impressive run of consistency for which Rodgers deserves the most credit. Yet his inability to trust and operate in alignment with his organization has contributed to Green Bay’s dismaying habit of falling short.
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Now he has another chance to finish the job with the Packers and win a second Super Bowl. And it’s a great opportunity. The Packers have the NFL’s best record, and they’re balanced in just about every way. Their defense has won games for them. On offense, they have a multifaceted, two-back running game to support Rodgers. And Matt LaFleur has been the right coach to direct it all, posting a stunning 39-10 record over three seasons and lifting Rodgers to historic levels of efficiency. Rodgers may never believe in general manager Brian Gutekunst, but he seems to trust LaFleur after years of dissatisfaction with former coach Mike McCarthy.
Rodgers might be the greatest make-do quarterback in football history. In that sense, he’s reminiscent of John Elway before Mike Shanahan came to Denver. They’re both preeminent leaders who can transform insufficient rosters into threats. But for all their individual heroics, we have watched them lower their heads and slump their broad shoulders as they trudge off the field.
Elway lost in the Super Bowl three times before breaking through in his final two seasons. Rodgers was fortunate to win a championship early, and since then his teams have been in line for a title again and again, only to meet the bouncer at the door. They’ve lost to four different teams in their last four NFC title game appearances. Rodgers has had to congratulate a GOAT quarterback (Tom Brady), another future Hall of Fame quarterback (Russell Wilson), a borderline Hall of Fame quarterback (Matt Ryan) and a pretty solid quarterback (Jimmy Garoppolo). He has seen a heartbreaker (the overtime loss to Seattle in 2015), a comeback that fell short (Tampa Bay last season) and two blowouts (Atlanta in 2017 and San Francisco in 2020). The pain must feel even more acute because Green Bay has lost one step shy of the Super Bowl in its past three playoff appearances.
The on-field implications create plenty of tension. Add the possibility of closure for a successful-turned-awkward partnership and the scrutiny of Rodgers’s bizarre celebrity heel turn, and the pressure feels unmanageable. But Rodgers being Rodgers, there is one more thing to carry: his legacy.
He secured a spot among the game’s all-time greats long ago. But he wants to be on the exclusive list of quarterbacks who have won multiple Super Bowls. There are 12 in NFL history, and four are players from his era: Brady, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger. Another ring isn’t necessary to validate his talent or impact on the game. But it would emphasize that his way, though unorthodox and cynical and narcissistic, still has virtue.
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In his public comments this season, Rodgers has drifted inward. Nevertheless, he thinks about the end of his career and the standard of excellence he wants to leave behind.
“It’s all a part of it,’’ Rodgers said this week. “Success is often based, for quarterbacks, on championships won. Success individually is much more than that. And on the flip side of that, failure, in my opinion, shouldn’t be based solely on your losses and your failures and your mistakes and your low points.
“It’s so much more than that. It’s mind-set. It’s approach. It’s the total package. But I understand that in our business, so much of it is focused on the wins and losses, especially in the playoffs, Super Bowl rings and all that stuff. I understand that’s part of my legacy I’ll be judged on when I’m done playing. Every year is important when it comes to furthering your legacy, but I take a lot of pride in the success that we’ve had and that I’ve had and I hope we can add to it — both from a how-we’re-judged standpoint and how-we-judge-ourselves standpoint.’’
There’s just one more thing Rodgers can do, one thing that would be the ultimate act of defiance in a season full of shocking moments from him: blend. The Packers don’t need him to be more spectacular. They need him to be with them, willing to do whatever it takes to break through, even if it frustrates him and goes against his preferences.
Rodgers has some front-runner in him. It’s not because he’s a poor competitor. It’s the result of his constant distrust of others. The playoffs tend to identify a team’s fissures. In recent years, Green Bay has been both unlucky and disjointed at the worst possible times. The Packers should be better for the struggles, and if so, their MVP quarterback must reflect all that they’ve learned. To do that, he must show he has learned something as well.
This isn’t just a last dance. It’s the ultimate challenge, too. Rodgers can unify and inspire, or he can shrug one final time on his way out the door. | null | null | null | null | null |
Bob Goalby got hate mail over his 1968 Masters victory. He never backed down.
Bob Goalby won the green jacket at the 1968 Masters after competitor Roberto De Vicenzo signed an incorrect scorecard. (AP)
Bob Goalby, who died Wednesday at the age of 92, won 11 times on the PGA Tour in a career that stretched from 1958 to 1974, besting greats such as Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. In his lone Ryder Cup appearance, he went 3-1-1 and scored not one but two wins in Sunday singles. He was instrumental in creating both the modern tour as we know it and the senior tour.
But unfairly or not, Goalby’s biggest claim to fame — and his biggest golf victory — came about because of something someone else did, namely Roberto De Vicenzo signing an incorrect scorecard at the 1968 Masters, which gave Goalby the green jacket and his lone major victory.
Goalby entered the final round of that year’s tournament in a group of five players one stroke behind Player and a stroke ahead of three players in a tie for seventh, among them De Vicenzo. Playing about 45 minutes ahead of Goalby, the Argentine appeared to have a magnificent round, finishing in 65 strokes, which then would have tied the record for the lowest final-round score in Masters history.
But things went awry for De Vicenzo on the 17th hole, which he finished in three strokes for what should have been a birdie. Playing partner Tommy Aaron, however, marked De Vicenzo down for a par 4, and De Vicenzo failed to notice the mistake when he signed his scorecard at the end of the round. Under the Rules of Golf, he was forced to accept his higher score because he had signed off on it. The 65 became a 66.
Goalby, meanwhile, had the back nine of his life, with birdies at Nos. 13 and 14. Then, at the par-5 15th, he hit a 3-iron to eight feet — Masters co-founder Bobby Jones called it “exquisite,” the best shot he’d ever seen at the hole — and converted the eagle on his way to a 66, which he thought would mean a tie with De Vicenzo and an 18-hole playoff the following day.
“I walked directly to the scorer’s table just behind the green. It was a little chaotic. Roberto and Tommy Aaron were sitting there, as was my playing partner, Ray Floyd, and I believe an official. I vaguely wondered why Roberto was still there, when he’d been two holes ahead of me. I remember saying something to Roberto along the lines of, ‘I guess we’ll be playing together tomorrow.’ But Roberto didn’t say anything. He seemed lost in thought. I wasn’t alarmed by that. My attention was all on checking and signing my scorecard,” Goalby told Golf Digest in 2018.
“When I finished, I left the table and was lingering near the green. Sam Snead had hung around to watch me come in, and he and [former pro Cary 'Doc’ Middlecoff] approached me. Doc, who had just finished his hole coverage for CBS, said to me, ‘You just won the tournament.’ I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I looked up at the scoreboard, and it showed Roberto and me both at minus-11. Then Doc, who was privy to what was being said through his TV headgear, said, ‘Roberto screwed up his scorecard.’ ”
De Vicenzo was much more succinct: “What a stupid I am,” he said.
The mistaken scorecard became part of Masters lore, though many fans felt Goalby did not deserve the victory, incorrectly thinking De Vicenzo would have won outright and not merely forced a playoff if he had signed for the correct score. Those fans did not hesitate to let Goalby know this, in a time when doing so meant a trip to the post office and not merely a click of the mouse.
“I received hate mail like you wouldn’t believe, telling me I was the worst son of a bitch who ever lived,” Goalby said in the 2018 interview. “One guy wrote, ‘They ought to put you and Sonny Liston in a sack of concrete and dump you in the ocean.’ The negative-to-positive ratio was 10-to-1 negative. The letters piled up, and every one of them hurt. For some reason, I’ve kept that hate mail. I don’t know why. Maybe to one day explain to people what the experience was like.”
But with time came acceptance, and Goalby and De Vicenzo remained friends, even playing together in team events on the senior tour, which Goalby helped create in the late 1970s as a way to help golf’s older players continue to earn money. Still, he had to defend how he won that green jacket, almost from the second he first put it on.
“Of course, I would rather win it another way,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Dan Jenkins a few weeks after his Masters triumph in 1968. “But I feel that I did win under the Rules of Golf. I think I played good enough to win. That I earned it. I think I’m the Masters champion.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Gary Russell Jr. will be fighting for the first time in two years when he defends his World Boxing Council featherweight title Saturday night. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
During every training camp in his professional boxing career, District-born Gary Russell Jr. had been able to turn to his father and trainer, Gary Sr., for guidance and one of his younger brothers, Gary Boosa Russell, for support at the family’s Enigma Gym in Capitol Heights, Md.
Yet when Russell began shifting his attention to his next opponent, the World Boxing Council featherweight champion barely saw Gary Sr., who was managing severe health issues, while continuing to mourn his brother, who died in 2020 of cardiac arrest less than two weeks before Christmas.
Thus for the first time Russell (31-1, 18 knockouts) has often trained in solitude in advance of his bout against mandatory challenger Mark Magsayo (23-0, 16 KOs) of the Philippines on Saturday night at the Borgata Event Center in Atlantic City, N.J.
“It has been very difficult, but I tell people all the time life is like boxing,” Russell said. “You’ve got to keep your chin down and your hands up, and you’ve got to fire when you’ve got an opening. I’m grateful that I have the mental capacity. I’m mentally strong when it comes to stuff like this.”
Although the plan is for Gary Sr. to be in his usual spot on fight night, it’s unclear if he will be able to do so following a foot amputation stemming from type 2 diabetes. He recently left the hospital against doctors’ recommendations to take part in training camp in person rather than via Zoom conversations.
Gary Sr. has been in his son’s corner for every bout since Gary Jr.’s pro debut in 2009.
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He has also overseen the development of all the fighting Russell brothers, beginning with eldest son Gary Jr., 33, whose only loss was to Vasiliy Lomachenko in 2014 for the then-vacant World Boxing Organization title. Gary Antonio Russell, 28, fights in the 118-pound division and Gary Antuanne Russell, 25, at 140 pounds.
“Me and my dad, there’s just a certain level of chemistry that’s just innate, and I think that right there plays a big factor,” said Russell, whose hands are among the quickest in the sport. “I refuse to have someone else to train me other than my dad, so for some of this training camp I’ve honestly trained myself.”
The two were the first to embrace in the ring when Russell won the WBC 126-pound belt in March of 2015 with a fourth-round knockout of then-champion Jhonny Gonzalez in Las Vegas. Russell since has beaten five straight opponents as the division’s longest active reigning champion.
Most recently he scored a unanimous decision over Tugstsogt Nyambayar at PPL Center in Allentown, Pa., on Feb. 8, 2020. The current layoff of nearly two calendar years is the lengthiest of Russell’s career, marked by infrequent activity since claiming the WBC title.
Russell — whose bout will be televised live on Showtime, with the main card beginning at 9 p.m. — attributes his dearth of opponents to higher-profile fighters avoiding him. A bout against Rey Vargas, for instance, was in the works last year until negotiations broke down. The undefeated Vargas moved up to featherweight after winning the 122-pound title in 2019.
Russell also has mentioned potentially moving up multiple divisions to face Gervonta Davis in what would be one of the most anticipated showdowns in the sport. Other fighters he has called out at 135 pounds include Devin Haney and Ryan Garcia.
But Russell remains adamant about not vacating his belt unless he is assured of fighting for a title in a heavier weight class.
“I don’t think Gary has faced anyone since he became champion that has the skills that I have,” said Magsayo, who is coming off a 10th-round knockout of Julio Ceja in August. “I’m going to go in there and show him something he’s never seen before, and we’ll see how he reacts.”
In addition to managing his career while his father was receiving treatment, Russell also bore much of the responsibility in comforting Gary Antonio and Gary Antuanne after their brother passed away, marking the second time the family has buried one of its own.
In 2004 another brother, Devaun Drayton, then 17, was fatally shot in Northeast. District police did not make an arrest until 13 years later, and the killer was sentenced to 52 years in prison in 2019.
Only Gary Antonio has fought since Gary Boosa’s death, and after he defeated Alejandro Santiago by a majority decision in November in Las Vegas, Russell was ringside to share an emotional family moment.
“It shows you that time waits for no one,” Russell said. “You have to give it everything that you can. I wish I had more time with my younger brother. Unfortunately I can’t get it back. All I can do is allow him to live through me at this point by continuing to be the best that I possibly can be.”
Nico Ali Walsh, Muhammad Ali’s grandson, wins pro boxing debut with a TKO
For Muhammad Ali’s grandson, family legacy extends beyond the ring
Claressa Shields enters a critical stretch in her quest to become a two-sport star | null | null | null | null | null |
On Aug. 3, 1949, representatives of the National Basketball League and Basketball Association of America shake hands after agreeing to merge the two circuits into an 18-team organization known as the National Basketball Association. Grouped around Maurice Podoloff, center, are, from left, Ike Duffey, Leo Ferris, Ned Irish and Walter Brown. (John Lent/AP)
By Curtis Harris
The NBA’s 2021-22 season is billed as its 75th anniversary season.
The league says that it was founded in 1946 when the Basketball Association of America (BAA) began operation. Certainly, the BAA is a part of the NBA’s history, but so is the National Basketball League (NBL) founded in 1937. After three years of acrimonious competition in the late 1940s, the BAA and the NBL merged on Aug. 3, 1949, to form the NBA. Thus the league’s true 75th anniversary season doesn’t begin until 2024.
By using the 1946 founding date, the NBA has neglected NBL records, all while incorporating BAA statistics into the official NBA record book; altered the histories of five of its extant franchises; and missed out on important progress toward racially integrating the hardwood made by the NBL.
The NBA’s history website describes the NBL-BAA merger as an absorption: “The summer of 1949 solidified the professional basketball picture, with the six surviving NBL teams being absorbed into the BAA and the league being renamed the National Basketball Association.”
However, the NBA’s own name bears witness to this merger of equals. The National Basketball League plus the Basketball Association of America produces the National Basketball Association. NBL + BAA = NBA.
Even the NBA’s record book from the 1949-50 season attests to this historical truth. To wit, “The basketball season of 1949-50 finds a new name flashing across the national court scene — the National Basketball Association. It is an offspring of a midsummer merger between the 12-year-old National Basketball League and the four-year old Basketball Association of America.”
Here’s an expanded look at the NBA’s history, which includes the significant influence of the NBL:
The NBL and origins of the NBA
The National Basketball League was initially established as the loosely organized Midwest Basketball Conference in 1935. Two years later, officials tightened up operations, set firmer rules on scheduling and adopted a more grandiose title in the process.
Even with the impressive National in its name, the NBL would remain primarily based in the Midwest and Great Lakes region during its life span. Despite its geographical limits, the NBL became the premier and most stable basketball league of its era. The mainstay franchises for the NBL were the Oshkosh All-Stars, Sheboygan Red Skins and Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons. During the extremely lean years of World War II, they were the only clubs to participate in every NBL season, keeping pro hoops alive for a postwar boom.
Following World War II, that boom came quickly. The NBL reached its zenith in the 1946-47 season with an all-time high of 12 teams.
Among these recruits were the Rochester Royals, Minneapolis Lakers, Tri-Cities Blackhawks and Syracuse Nationals. If those names sound familiar, it’s because they live on in the NBA today, albeit in different locales.
The aforementioned Pistons are now in Detroit.
The Royals are now the Sacramento Kings.
The Lakers moved to Los Angeles.
The Blackhawks became the Atlanta Hawks.
The Nationals transformed into the Philadelphia 76ers.
In that same 1946-47 basketball season, East Coast business executives from the National Hockey League and American Hockey League decided to fill empty dates at their arenas by riding the basketball boom themselves. Thus was born the BAA.
Of the BAA’s original 11 teams, only the Boston Celtics, Philadelphia Warriors (now in Golden State) and New York Knicks remain. Indeed, after just one season, five BAA teams folded in financial distress. The BAA subsequently raided the original Baltimore Bullets from the American Basketball League (ABL) to bring their ranks back up to eight teams for the 1947-48 season while the NBL fielded 11 squads that year.
However, the BAA aspired to dominate pro basketball, not merely survive alongside the NBL or minor leagues like the ABL. This prompted the BAA’s high-stakes gambit in the 1948 offseason. Instead of building talent over time, they would lure away franchises from the established NBL. Four clubs took the bait. In one fell swoop, the Lakers, Pistons, Royals and Indianapolis Kautskys joined the BAA.
Although the BAA was new and thus far struggling, the allure for these four renegade NBL squads was the prospect of playing in major venues like Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden to showcase their stars such as George Mikan and Bob Davies.
Despite the damage done by the raid, the NBL stiffened its resistance to the upstart BAA. Veteran player Al Cervi, quoted years later in Robert W. Peterson’s “Cages to Jump Shots,” was one such NBL devotee who was upset with the BAA’s move.
“The NBL was the strength! The BAA was a high school league,” Cervi said. “If they don’t steal four clubs from the NBL, they’re out of business.” Tri-Cities Blackhawks co-founder Leo Ferris contemporaneously called the raid “a declaration of war” and acted accordingly to force the BAA into a merger.
The NBL successfully recruited new teams to replace all the defectors for the 1948-49 season, including the all-Black New York Renaissance, which relocated to Dayton, Ohio, to compete in the league.
Ferris meanwhile got to work salvaging the NBL. And he had plenty of opportunity to do so since he co-owned the Blackhawks, served as acting general manager for the Syracuse Nationals and served in the NBL league office.
His major moves in the 1948 offseason were a pair of signings that deprived the BAA of top-flight talent. Ferris convinced Cervi to abandon the BAA-bound Royals to sign with the Nationals of the NBL. Then came the bombshell that Ferris’s small-town Nats outbid the BAA’s New York Knicks for rookie forward Dolph Schayes, who would go on to make 12 NBA all-star teams with Syracuse.
In the spring of 1949 came Ferris’s most daring move; one that has been largely forgotten but should not be underestimated.
Ferris signed five players from the University of Kentucky and gave them their very own franchise in the NBL: the Indianapolis Olympians. These five players, headlined by superstar center Alex Groza, had led Kentucky to two NCAA titles and the United States to a gold medal in basketball at the 1948 Olympics (hence the name of their new player-owned franchise). The move muscled the BAA out of Indianapolis as the Kautskys went out of business and returned the NBL to a major basketball market.
Stunned by the signings and the NBL’s overall resilience, the BAA was brought to the peace table. On Aug. 3, 1949, they signed paperwork to conclude a merger forming the NBA.
Assessing the NBL’s impact
Of the NBA’s 17 original franchises from the merger, only eight survive. Five have their major league roots in the NBL compared to just three in the BAA.
During its first six seasons, when the league was largely populated by pre-merger players, the NBA was dependent on and dominated by the old NBL teams. The first six NBA champions were former NBL teams. Even the franchises finishing as Finals runners-up were mainly from the NBL. The only former BAA team to appear in the NBA Finals these years was the Knicks.
Players who began their careers in the NBL also dominated the all-NBA first and second teams in this era. Of the 61 selections made for that year-end honor, 30 of them (49 percent) were players who began their career in the NBL. Meanwhile, 18 were players who started their careers in the BAA (30 percent) and 13 entered the pros after the merger (21 percent).
The NBL’s impact goes beyond just powering the NBA’s early talent pool.
That executive mentioned earlier, Leo Ferris. Remember him? Well, Ferris and Syracuse Nationals owner Daniel J. Biasone devised the 24-second shot clock in 1954. Those two NBL vets created the rule that helped usher in the modern era of basketball and made the game more thrilling for fans.
There’s also the issue of race. During the 1930s and 1940s, Blacks and Whites did play against one another in pro basketball. However, these contests were usually exhibitions and the teams were all-White and all-Black. Integration within a team was rare.
When the NBA began in 1949, it was an all-White league. The BAA had only one non-White player during its three years and that player, Wataru Misaka, played a mere three games for the New York Knicks.
The NBL was normally all-White as well. However, the NBL broke with pro basketball tradition by having Black men play alongside Whites. Its integration was never permanent. Nor was it universal, steady or perfect. But it did happen.
In the 1935-36 season, when it was still known as the Midwest Basketball Conference, the NBL’s Buffalo Bisons employed Hank Williams, a Black center.
During the NBL’s 1942-43 season, the Chicago Studebakers and Toledo Jim White Chevrolets each signed multiple Black players, marking the first time that several Black men would be playing alongside Whites. In fact, the Chicago team was majority-Black. Not until the mid-1960s would the NBA field a majority-Black team.
Speaking in 1992 to the United Auto Workers’ Solidarity Magazine, Black player Tony Peyton of the Studebakers reflected on the integrated squad. “We were proud of what we did,” Peyton said. “Just playing our home games in Cicero [a Chicago suburb] was groundbreaking, man, because black people weren’t even allowed to walk there back then.” Black teammate Bernie Price rebutted any notion that Black and White players couldn’t get along. “It didn’t matter if there were three black players and two Whites in the game, or three Whites and two Blacks, we played as a team. There was no difference.” White teammate Dick Evans added, “We were proud to be together. We admired each other.”
In the 1946-47 NBL season, two future NBA franchises employed their first Black players. The Rochester Royals hired William “Dolly” King while the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, under Ferris, signed William “Pop” Gates to their squad.
In the NBL’s final season of 1948-49, the renowned barnstorming New York Renaissance joined the league. They remain the only all-Black team to have played in the NBA or its predecessor leagues. Owned by Bob Douglas, an African American immigrant from St. Kitts, the Rens were also the only Black-owned franchise in the NBA, BAA or NBL until Robert Johnson’s ownership of the Charlotte Bobcats in 2004.
These integrations were imperfect. They each lasted just a season before the NBL fell back to being all-White. Nonetheless that imperfection provides a truer tale of racial integration.
Studying the NBL further reveals the importance that communities outside the sporting mainstream had in nurturing the professional basketball behemoth that is now the NBA.
During the 1930s and 1940s, newspapers and sports fans in large metro areas primarily focused on Major League Baseball, professional football and college basketball. They generally considered professional basketball a backwater. The White press in cities like Oshkosh, Syracuse, Moline, Rochester and Akron (as well as Black newspapers in the major metros) devoted far more coverage to professional basketball in these years. Teams like the Oshkosh All-Stars and New York Renaissance were the pride and joy of their sporting communities, be they predominantly White towns in the Midwest or Black neighborhoods like Harlem in major cities, sparking attention and devotion not to be found for years in the NBA’s larger markets. These areas disproportionately cared about professional basketball and the nascent NBA giving the league a foundation to build upon as it steadily grew over the years.
Franchises like the All-Stars and Renaissance never made it into the NBA proper. When it comes to professional league play, all they have are their NBL histories. Other franchises like the Lakers and Pistons made it to the NBA, only to have their histories partially erased. For example, the Lakers have a 1948 NBL title that goes unacknowledged by the NBA, but the Warriors’ 1947 BAA title receives full faith and credit from the NBA.
So despite a 75th anniversary that ties the league’s founding to the BAA, the NBL played an indispensable role in setting the NBA up to eventually flourish as a global entertainment enterprise. | null | null | null | null | null |
Over 30 quality assurance testers at Activision Blizzard-run Raven Software have formally asked management to recognize their union.
The 34 testers, most of them tasked with working on the popular game “Call of Duty: Warzone,” received a majority of signatures within their department to form a union. The workers in the aspiring union, named the Game Workers Alliance, cited recent layoffs, excessive overtime, low pay, expectation to relocate and allegations of toxic corporate culture at their parent company as the reasons motivating them to unionize.
Activision Blizzard had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. In a Wednesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said none of its employees were part of a union and that, to the company’s knowledge, there was no ongoing strike or work stoppage.
If recognized, the Game Workers Alliance would be the first union at a blockbuster video game company. Late last year, Vodeo became the first North American video game company to unionize. With just over a dozen workers, the indie studio organized under very different conditions but Activision Blizzard employees said they learned from their example in their efforts.
Several dozen workers at the company have been engaged in a seven-week work stoppage, which began after Activision Blizzard management laid off 12 Raven contractors Dec. 3. Members of that group told The Washington Post the company had issued assurances for eight months it would increase wages, so the firings felt like a betrayal. They began collecting signatures in an effort to unionize and went on strike Dec. 6, issuing demands that included the re-hiring of the laid off contractors to full-time positions.
“Immediately after work [in early December], we all got together, some people came over to my house and we comforted one another and we cried together," said Onah Rongstad, a current Raven Software quality assurance tester at the Madison, Wisconsin-based company. "And then over the coming days, we got together and said, we can’t just be silent about this, we can’t just let this happen, and then finally decided to strike. We’ve had a real coming together at Raven QA [Quality Assurance] after the beginning of the strike in early December, and we’re really excited that [we’re creating] this beautiful union as the outcome of this.”
The effort to unionize was done with the support of media union Communications Workers of America. The 12 testers who were told they would be let go on Dec. 3 are among the signatories calling for a union to form. Their contracts are set to expire on Jan. 28. Even after they leave the company, the department would still hold a supermajority of union card signatures.
“It has become evident that equity will never be achieved without collective bargaining power,” the testers wrote in a letter to management sent Friday and reviewed by The Post. They noted that Raven’s departmental leadership had told Activision Blizzard not to lay off the 12 contractors, but had been ignored.
According to a 2021 Gallup poll, unions are more popular than they’ve been in over 50 years, with 68 percent of Americans in favor of collective power, including 77 percent of people ages 18 to 34. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday that the number of workers belonging to unions declined by 241,000 to 14 million in the country, with a union membership rate of just over 10 percent.
Raven is among the Activision Blizzard-owned studios set to be acquired by Microsoft. The maker of Windows and Xbox made waves across the tech and gaming industries Tuesday when it announced it would buy Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion, in an all-cash deal expected to close by June 2023, pending regulatory approval. Microsoft declined to comment.
Raven Software is a studio of over 300 employees, and was acquired by Activision in 1997 for $12 million. It’s mainly known for working on the “Call of Duty” franchise, including games like “Warzone,” “Black Ops: Cold War" and “Modern Warfare." Activision Blizzard itself has over 9,500 employees and multiple studios, including those that make games like “World of Warcraft” and “Candy Crush Saga.”
In their letter, Raven testers are giving management five days to respond, including the weekend. If the company doesn’t respond by the end of Jan. 25, Pacific time, employees plan to file for a union election through the National Labor Relations Board. Since the testers have a supermajority of votes, they can go through the National Labor Relations Board to have the union formalized without management recognition. If the union wins fifty percent plus one of the votes within the department, Activision Blizzard must begin bargaining over work conditions in good faith.
The workers chose the name “Game Workers Alliance,” rather than a more specific name referring to their studio or department, so that other parts of the company, and other games workers across the country, could join over time. To do so, those parts of Raven or other divisions at Activision Blizzard will need to collect a majority of union authorization signatures and then vote in favor of a union.
In a Dec. 10 email viewed by The Post, Chief Administrative Officer Brian Bulatao wrote that employees should “take time to consider the consequences of your signature” on a union authorization card and suggested that the company could fix its culture problems without a union. Employees throughout Activision Blizzard began to discuss unionization as a possibility starting last summer, when California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) sued the company for gender-based discrimination, inequality and sexual harassment, alleging a “frat boy” corporate culture.
“My expectation is that whether we’re talking about [Activision Blizzard] management or Microsoft, any future management needs to respect workers’ rights to organize," CWA organizing director Tom Smith said. "This company has clearly shown us what low-road employment standards look like. This is a moment when they can pivot and embrace high-road labor standards.”
When asked this week about how Xbox would treat a possible union at the company they were acquiring, CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer said he was not familiar with unions.
“I’m going to be honest, I don’t have a lot of personal experience with unions. I’ve been at Microsoft for 33 years,” Spencer said. "So I’m not going to try to come across as an expert on this, but I’ll say we’ll be having conversations about what empowers them to do their best work, which as you can imagine in a creative industry, is the most important thing for us.”
Cornell professor of labor and employment law Risa Lieberwitz said the Microsoft acquisition should not impact Activision Blizzard employees’ current efforts to unionize, since the movement is still in its early stages.
“With Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the employees of Activision Blizzard can continue to exercise their rights to engage in collective activity — including their efforts to unionize," she said. “Given the negative publicity that Activision Blizzard has received regarding its conduct toward employees, Microsoft should pay particular attention to the importance of respecting employees’ rights to organize.”
Nathan Grayson and Gene Park contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
Dangerous ice glazing Carolinas as snow targets southeast Virginia
Up to a half-inch of ice could accumulate, turning roadways into skating rinks.
A high-resolution model simulation of precipitation over the Carolinas. (WeatherBell) (WeatherBell)
A high-impact ice storm is unfolding in the Carolinas, with up to a half-inch of slick glaze expected. The National Weather Service is warning of “locally devastating icing” that “will make travel dangerous or impossible” and will damage trees, trigger power outages and leave commerce “severely impacted.”
Ice storm warnings cover southeastern North Carolina to the Myrtle Beach area in South Carolina into Saturday morning. It’s the first ice storm warning issued by the National Weather Service in Wilmington, N.C., since 2015.
Farther north, winter storm warnings for plowable amounts of snow are in effect for about 5 million people in eastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia. The warning area includes Raleigh, Rocky Mount, Greenville, Fayetteville and the Outer Banks in North Carolina and much of the Hampton Roads area of southeastern Virginia.
Some areas may flirt with a half-foot when all is said and done, some of it falling atop a fresh sheet of ice. The bulk of the snow is anticipated to fall between Friday afternoon and early Saturday.
The winter storm warnings are flanked by winter weather advisories for lesser amounts of frozen precipitation to the west and south, and they include Columbia, S.C., Charleston and the north side of Savannah, Ga.
The ice threat
On Friday morning, rain was falling in the Carolina Coastal Plain, but forecasters are anticipating a speedy changeover to ice as colder air filters into the region.
“We’re getting rain, but it’s just not quite cold enough yet,” said Reid Hawkins, science and operations officer at the National Weather Service in Wilmington. “We did think it was going to be earlier, so we hope that people don’t get a false [sense of security].”
The overarching setup was characterized by “overrunning,” or mild, moisture-rich air surging up and over a lip of cold, dense air hugging the ground. That allows liquid precipitation to fall but freeze on contact with the surface.
Freezing precipitation will fall within about one or two counties of the coast from northeast of Charleston, S.C., to near the Pamlico River east of Greenville, N.C. The icing should taper down after midnight, but forecasters expect a widespread 0.2 to 0.4 inches of accumulation, with localized half-inch amounts.
“We get something like this, I think, about every seven, eight years,” said Hawkins, who emphasized the magnitude of the event. “We had one in 2018 here, but the last really big one that was really devastating was 2014 here about 40, 50 miles just [inland] off the coast. It knocked out power for several weeks back then.”
It takes only about a half-inch of ice to pull down power lines and topple trees. The Highway 17 span appears in line to be the hardest hit, with scattered to widespread power outages probable.
“Especially from just west of Wilmington northeastward near the coast of the Outer Banks, that looks like where the most significant area we’re expecting the freezing rain to be impacting,” said Hawkins.
Fortunately, many residents appear to be taking the threat seriously.
“I could see this morning coming in, there was less traffic,” he recalled. “Lots of places have closed schools and done remote learning today. I would imagine people do know a little bit more about it, but there will still be folks who think their four-wheel-drives will work on the ice. We are the South, after all.”
A strip of moderate to heavy snow will come down on the back side of the system from north-central South Carolina to southeastern Virginia beginning Friday evening and lasting into early Saturday. A wave of moisture sliding along the stalled front will provide ample support for snowfall rates in the half-inch-per-hour range, meaning overnight totals could stack up to a widespread 2 to 5 inches, with a few spots in eastern areas approaching six inches.
The snow will stretch from northeastern Georgia near Augusta through central parts of the Carolinas, including the cities of Columbia and Raleigh-Durham, and possibly Charlotte. Southeastern Virginia near the Tidewater will also be affected, with the heftiest totals likely near Virginia Beach.
The snow is expected to remain well south of the Washington-Baltimore region, although some light snow or flurries could sneak as far north as southern Maryland, the southern Delmarva Peninsula and Virginia’s Northern Neck. Winter weather advisories for up to two inches of snow extend as far northeast as Ocean City, Md.
In parts of the Carolinas, the snow will come down atop a layer of ice and sleet, concealing the treacherous, surreptitiously slick surface. The snow should exit the coast around sunrise Saturday, but flurries could linger around the Outer Banks through noon.
Thereafter, a gradual warming trend will emerge into early next week, with melting — slow but steady — expected through the remainder of the weekend. | null | null | null | null | null |
British white supremacist, initially sentenced to read Austen and Dickens, imprisoned for two years
The former home of the author Jane Austen in Chawton, England. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
LONDON — Ben John, a British man described by police as an extremist with neo-Nazi sympathies, has completed a journey from the classics to the clink.
After he was handed a suspended sentence last year for collecting antisemitic, white supremacist and extremist documents on hard drives, he received an unusual order from a judge: Read works of great literature by Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens instead.
Among the materials in his possession: an updated version of the Anarchist Cookbook, a widely available text that includes various bomb “recipes,” once common reading among anti-government radials. Possession of such books is allowed in the United States.
“He has by the skin of his teeth avoided imprisonment,” Judge Timothy Spencer told the Leicester Crown Court in August.
But this week the sentencing was overturned by an appeals court, which found that the original sentence was too lenient and put in place punishment of two years in prison and a third year on supervised release.
“We are satisfied that there must be a sentence of immediate imprisonment,” Timothy Holroyde, a lord justice on the appeals court, said Wednesday.
The original sentencing last year of John, then 21, had sparked debate and anger in the United Kingdom, with some critics suggesting that a non-White person would never receive the same punishment under Britain’s anti-terrorism laws.
“It’s just wildly not a typical sentence for extremists,” Aaron Winter, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of East London, said of the original sentence. “It’s also highly unlikely that a perpetrator who identifies as Muslim would have been handed such a light sentence: to read,” Winter added.
According to local media reports, John had first come to the attention of British counterterrorism officers shortly after his 18th birthday in 2018, when he wrote a letter to his school in the city of Lincoln claiming to be part of a “fascist underground” and railing against immigrants and gay people.
Police later said that John amassed almost 70,000 documents that included white supremacist and antisemitic ideology, as well as instructions on how to make explosives. He had been pursuing a degree in criminology with psychology at De Montfort University in Leicester when he was arrested.
But in court, the presiding judge called John a “lonely individual with few if any true friends” and said he was not convinced that harm was likely to be caused. Instead, he made John promise to stop reading extremist material and turn to something else instead.
“Have you read Dickens? Austen? Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope,” Spencer told the court, according to the Leicester Mercury newspaper.
John was ordered to report back to the judge on Jan. 4, with the judge promising to test him on it, but his jail sentence was suspended before that time.
The sentence quickly drew criticism, with anti-extremism group Hope Not Hate warning that it would send a broader message beyond the immediate case.
“These sorts of lenient sentences risk encouraging other young people to access and share terrorist and extremist content because they will not fear the repercussions of their actions,” the group’s chief executive, Nick Lowles, said in an open letter in September.
William Allchorn, associate director of the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right, said that the sentence was closely watched as far-right extremism was a growing problem among British teens and young men, with arrests of those under 18 years old having “overtaken” Islamist terrorism.
“A lot of people get involved because of that sense of belonging and being part of a group or bigger cause,” Allchorn said.
“I think the idea of assigning great works of English literature is problematic,” said Winter, adding that the idea that the far right are uneducated was a common assumption among British elites and that the recommending only White, English authors could backfire when people “who are defending the Whiteness of the British canon and British culture against what they see as wokeness and cancel culture.”
Britain’s Attorney General’s Office announced shortly after the original sentence it would be reviewing it under a program for unduly lenient sentences.
In a court appearance this month, before his sentence was overturned, John had brought copies of both Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” and Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” with him.
“I enjoyed Shakespeare more than I did Jane Austen but I still enjoyed Jane Austen by a degree,” John told the court, according to the Leicester Mercury.
British law enforcement’s focus on online reading in tracking potential right-wing extremism has drawn scrutiny from some legal scholars, with some concerned that such measures could in effect be “criminalizing curiosity.”
Alberto Testa, a criminologist at the University of West London, said that while deradicalization programs faced considerable criticism and at best-mixed results, jail time also rarely solved the problem.
“Prisons of course are not a panacea. Reoffending rates provide a clue,” Testa wrote in an email, adding that three-quarters of British inmates reoffend within nine years of their release. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lafayette's Fran O'Hanlon is retiring after this season. (Chris Seward/AP)
One of the best college basketball coaches I have ever known is retiring at the end of this season.
No, I’m not late hearing the news about Mike Krzyzewski‘s departure from Duke. And don’t expect this announcement to lead “SportsCenter” or any national sports news show. It might make the crawl. Even so, it is a sad and significant day for college basketball.
On Friday afternoon, Fran O’Hanlon announced he is retiring after 27 years as the coach at Lafayette. He has lost more games than he has won coaching the Leopards, but anyone who knows basketball or understands the politics of Lafayette will tell you that no one could have done a better job.
O’Hanlon took over a team that had gone 2-25 in 1995 and went 19-9 in his third season. The next two years, Lafayette won 22 and 24 games and won the Patriot League tournament twice, making the NCAA tournament for the first and second times since 1957.
Lafayette was the last Patriot League school to give up on the Utopian notion of giving scholarships purely based on financial need, and the Leopards struggled as a non-scholarship team in what had become an athletic scholarship League. When the school finally began giving athletic scholarships in 2006, it took several years to rebuild — especially since O’Hanlon was only allowed 11 scholarships when the NCAA maximum was 13. But O’Hanlon made the Leopards competitive again, reaching the NCAA tournament once more in 2015. Then, in one of those NCAA basketball committee “coincidences,” they drew Villanova — O’Hanlon’s alma mater — in the first round.
“Look, there have certainly been some obstacles,” O’Hanlon said Friday morning, shortly before making the official announcement that he will be stepping away. “All coaches face obstacles. I’m incredibly grateful to Lafayette for giving me the chance to be a head coach, for standing by me for all these years and for letting me have the opportunities I’ve had. It’s been a great ride.”
O’Hanlon means every word of that. And he’s right to be gracious and grateful.
And yet … “It would have been nice to stay another year,” he said. “I think we have a chance to be very good next season.”
Only one starter, Tyrone Perry, will graduate this spring from a team that relies heavily on freshmen and sophomores. O’Hanlon’s teams have always been at their best when they lean on juniors and seniors, largely because the players he recruits improve so much during their college careers. Two years ago, with an experienced team, Lafayette was 19-12; last year, in the covid-shortened season, 9-6.
Overall records in one-bid leagues can be deceiving because schools have to play guarantee games to fund their athletic departments. This season, Lafayette played guarantee games at Syracuse, Duke and Rutgers, winning the latter. “I told the players if we had won at Duke and Syracuse maybe I’d have gotten another year,” O’Hanlon joked.
Lafayette played at Duke because O’Hanlon wanted to experience coaching in Cameron Indoor Stadium. He did the same thing a couple of years ago with Allen Field House at Kansas.
“I can walk away knowing I got to coach in what I think are the three most iconic buildings in college basketball: the Palestra, Cameron and Allen Field House,” he said. “They were all amazing experiences for me.”
When O’Hanlon walked out of Cameron after his team’s shoot-around in November, several Duke students recognized him. “Hey coach,” one yelled. “Be prepared for 40 minutes of hell tonight.”
“I’m thinking overtime,” O’Hanlon responded.
That would have been 45 minutes. The Leopards kept it close for 20, trailing by just six at halftime before Duke pulled away in the second half.
O’Hanlon grew up in Philadelphia and played games in the Palestra in both high school (St. Thomas More) and college (Villanova). As a senior, he started in the backcourt along with Chris Ford on a team that reached the Elite Eight before losing to a Bob Lanier-led St. Bonaventure team.
When he played in Philadelphia’s famous Baker League, O’Hanlon’s “game name” was Rainbow Johnson, because he shot the ball with so much arc. He played in the ABA for the Floridians for one season before spending 15 years playing overseas where one of his playing names was Francis Dribbler-Dribbler.
“I was playing under the name Francis Dribbler,” he said, laughing. “On a scouting report someone wrote, “Dribbler—Dribbler.” They put me in the game program under that name, so I just kept it.”
He came home in 1986 to coach at Monsignor Bonner high school in Philadelphia before Fran Dunphy gave him his first men’s college job in 1989 (he had coached the women at Temple for a year). He was working for Dunphy when he got the call from Lafayette.
“He’s the simplest Renaissance man I ever met,” Dunphy, who is six weeks younger than O’Hanlon, said on Friday. “His genius as a coach was his simplicity. He never over-coached. He knew what the kids needed to do to win and he got them to buy into it. He’s direct, but always thoughtful. He’s not a good coach, he’s a great coach. And he is always funny.”
O’Hanlon has always had a wonderfully dry sense of humor. When Lafayette was at the top of the Patriot League, he had numerous opportunities to leave, but turned them all down. “I decided to give up my shot at the Hall of Fame to be at a place where I’m completely happy,” he said. “Tough decision, huh?”
O’Hanlon first saw the beginning of the end when Bruce McCutcheon retired as Lafayette’s athletic director in 2018. He was replaced by Sherryta Freeman, who is both young and ambitious.
“Look, you’re a new AD you’re going to want to have your own people working for you, especially in the most important jobs,” O’Hanlon said. “I completely get it. Plus, I’m 73. I don’t think I look a day over 72, but still …”
Freeman and O’Hanlon began talking about his retirement a couple of years ago. O’Hanlon wasn’t ready. He didn’t want to retire at the end of a pandemic-riddled season. They decided to make this season his finale.
“Sherryta wanted me to announce it before the season started,” O’Hanlon said. “I didn’t want that; didn’t want a farewell tour. I would have preferred to just announce it at the end of the season and slip away. But she said, ‘We want to honor you before the season’s over.' So, we compromised.”
The compromise choice was Friday — just before the start of second semester at Lafayette. In a twist, O’Hanlon tested positive for the coronavirus earlier in the week — “I feel fine,” he said — so the announcement had to be made over video. O’Hanlon gave his players the news on Monday night.
“I started by telling them how proud I was of the way they’d played in beating Army over the weekend,” he said. “Then I said, ‘But that’s not why I called you here tonight.’”
O’Hanlon isn’t sure what comes next, but he’s open to suggestions. About the only thing that is certain is this: Lafayette will have a tough time finding anyone better than him as a coach or a person. And, if he decides to slip into retirement quietly, there will be a hole in the soul of college basketball. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman. (Neeta Satam /For The Washington Post)
ST. LOUIS — When state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman stepped up to the microphone, her male colleagues stopped talking. Inside a crisis pregnancy center, Missouri’s secretary of state, three state representatives, a state senator and several support staff — all White men — settled into their folding chairs to listen to the woman one called the “female face of the pro-life movement.”
“I’m a mother of six,” Coleman, 39, said as she addressed the 20 people in the crowd. “My first son was born between my first and second years of law school. My second son was nursed as I was handed my law school degree.”
She’d brought everyone together on this afternoon in mid-December to announce her new antiabortion bill, an eight-week ban mimicking the law that has successfully eradicated almost all abortions in Texas since Sept. 1. Coleman chose to debut her legislation here, in a room with rhinestone-studded walls and a “believe in your selfie” station, because the pregnancy center’s guiding ethos aligns with her own: Faced with an unexpected pregnancy, Coleman says, women “will rise to the occasion.”
“Women deserve better than abortion,” she said before passing the mic to the first of five men.
In the spring of 2019, as state after state passed unprecedented abortion bans, the antiabortion movement was criticized for the White male faces who led the charge. As advocates on both sides now brace for the end of Roe v. Wade, the antiabortion movement has reimagined its message and its messengers. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that could eliminate the constitutional right to abortion, the state of Mississippi centered the woman, rather than the baby, arguing that abortion bans “empower” women to be their full selves, a claim critics say is hypocritical, especially coming from privileged White politicians. Coleman is among the young women and mothers who have emerged to usher the antiabortion movement into its next phase.
While Republicans have long lagged behind Democrats in electing women to public office, GOP women triumphed in 2020, when 17 won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Many young, conservative women who have won seats at the state level are now leading the antiabortion cause, said Sue Liebel, state policy director for Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect antiabortion candidates. In West Virginia, 32-year-old Kayla Kessinger. In Ohio, 27-year-old Jena Powell. In Florida, 44-year-old Erin Grall. Liebel travels from state to state, recruiting them.
At the crisis pregnancy center, state Rep. Doug Richey (R), who spoke after Coleman, said he’s been told to “sit down and shut up” because, as a man, he has “no right” to speak about abortion. Richey points his skeptics to women like Coleman, who he says understand the “challenges and difficulties” of motherhood.
“Anyone who would claim that the pro-life community is just a bunch of men who are trying to control the lives of women — they do not know what reality is,” Richey said.
Coleman gets a little thrill from defying people’s expectations. She is a Catholic attorney who buttons her cotton cardigans all the way to the top but blasts Lizzo and Beyoncé as she runs at 6 o’clock in the morning. After a long day, she and her husband will indulge in a cocktail from the book “Drinking With the Saints: The Sinner’s Guide to a Holy Happy Hour.” Then she turns on “The West Wing” — her favorite TV show, despite the Democratic president.
As the event ended, Coleman stood between her navy- and black-blazered colleagues for a picture, distinct in Chanel lip gloss and a designer dress.
“A rose between many thorns,” one of the male politicians said as they moved into position.
Coleman looked into the camera and laughed. Soon news of her bill would reach the Planned Parenthood clinic five blocks down the road.
“I think there are some who would call me a thorn,” she said.
If Coleman ever runs for national office, she knows what her walk-up song will be. Driving her Chevy Suburban home from the state Capitol in Jefferson City the week before she filed her bill, Coleman belted out “Piece of Me” by Britney Spears.
“With a kid on my arm, I’m still an exceptional player,” she sings. “You want a piece of me?”
The song takes her back to her 2018 campaign for state representative, when she went door to door for hours with her 1-year-old on her back, while her older kids — now 16, 15, 13, 12 and 10 — trailed behind. In Coleman’s Catholic community on the outskirts of St. Louis, her family is a “normal” size: You’re not truly “big” until you have eight or nine kids, she says. (To fit her family, her next-door neighbor had to buy a bus.)
After an eight-year career as an estate lawyer, Coleman said she turned to state politics out of frustration. She didn’t think the other Republican candidates could flip her purple district.
“I just looked around the field and thought, ‘These guys can’t win and I can.’ ”
Soon pundits were calling her “The Iron Lady of Jefferson County,” where she lives, after the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Coleman relishes the comparison — almost as much as she appreciates another one people sometimes draw, to Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. A Catholic mother of seven, Barrett represents a version of feminism that aligns with Coleman’s own antiabortion views, the state representative says. Coleman has reclaimed an iconic critique of Barrett with a laptop sticker that reads, in swirly cursive: “May the dogma live loudly within you.”
“If the alternative is to be called a hypocrite, then yeah, I’m glad that the dogma lives loudly within me,” Coleman said.
Coleman knew she’d do more than her competitors to further the antiabortion effort. Five months after joining the legislature, she was part of the four-person team that passed House Bill 126, Missouri’s “heartbeat bill,” which would further limit abortion across the state. Although the courts struck down the eight-week abortion ban before it took effect, Coleman and her colleagues intentionally drafted their bill as a package of restrictions, some of which would take effect even if others were blocked. The bill included a “trigger law,” which would ban all abortions as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned.
At Planned Parenthood, staff refer to Coleman by her first name. “Oh, I know Mary Elizabeth,” said Chief Medical Officer Colleen McNicholas, eyebrows raised. McNicholas has been providing abortions in Missouri for 10 years and sits in an office plastered with uterus-themed greeting cards (“Sorry I ovary-acted”). When Coleman emerged as a leader in Missouri’s antiabortion movement, McNicholas said she wasn’t surprised.
By changing the faces out front, she said, conservative leaders are “trying to move away from the obvious, which is that antiabortion laws and regulations are misogyny.”
But women can be misogynistic, too, she said: “Particularly White women and White women of privilege.” Abortion bans disproportionately impact low-income women and women of color, McNicholas added, who are already fighting to overcome the many layers of systemic oppression. Coleman can make these arguments against abortion because she “benefits from the system,” McNicholas said.
When Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch called on the Supreme Court to use Dobbs to overturn Roe v. Wade, she asked the justices to consider how much has changed since the landmark case in 1973. While an unwanted pregnancy once may have spelled professional ruin, 50 years later, Fitch claimed that “sweeping policy advances” have “empowered” women to fully pursue motherhood and a career, rendering abortion unnecessary. In the past few weeks, Fitch’s slogan — “Empower women, promote life” — has been mass-printed on masks, posters and tote bags. Coleman used it as the title for her new heartbeat bill.
“There is this idea that to forge a path for more women at the table, you have to sacrifice your family or your children,” Coleman said. “But I think it’s actually the incredible opposite. I think I only have the capacity to do the other work because I put my children first.”
The national antiabortion movement has identified Coleman as a particularly effective steward of this message. After a lifetime of antiabortion activism, praying outside clinics, Coleman adopted her two youngest, both kids of color. She loves being a mom, she said, and kisses each of her six kids on the forehead before she leaves the house each morning. “God bless you and keep you,” she’ll say.
“Those of us who are mothers can assure other women that we are empowered,” said Leibel of Susan B. Anthony List: “That becoming a mother didn’t take away my power. In fact, it gave me power.”
Politicians like Coleman have to tread carefully. Abortion rights advocates immediately attacked Fitch for what they called the hypocrisy of her argument. Just because Fitch was able to raise three kids as a working single mother, they said, doesn’t mean everyone else has the resources to do the same. If Fitch really cared about mothers, many chimed in, she’d support policies like paid leave and government subsidized day care.
People will say the same things about Coleman — and she is savvy enough to realize that the optics aren’t great. She lives in a large house in the suburbs, with a wreath on every window and a kitchen stocked with 15 different kinds of cocktail glasses. “I couldn’t do any of this if it wasn’t for Chris,” she often says, referring to her husband, an accountant and amateur mixologist who handles a large chunk of the child care. There have been times when she has employed not one but two nannies: one at home and one in Jefferson City, two hours away, at an apartment she used to rent while the legislature was in session.
To help pregnant women, Coleman suggests education and tax policies that “support the family.” As evidence, she cites her grandfather, an immigrant who took a job as a railroad laborer and worked his way up. Coleman credits a good education and a steady job: “Now all his grandchildren have college degrees.” If those policies come up short, she says, pregnant women can turn to churches and nonprofits. These organizations don’t need to offer support for very long, she argues. A supply of diapers, a stroller or some rent money can get women over the hump, she adds, until they realize that they made the right decision.
“It’s a small amount of help that makes a difference,” she said.
In the United States, the average cost of raising a child is $233,610.
Coleman’s bill was still warm when she held it in her hands for the first time.
“Eighty-eight pages,” she said, flipping through the stack of paper on her desk in Jefferson City. “Hot off the presses.”
The Capitol that day in mid-December was mostly empty, as it will be until the legislature convenes on Jan. 5. Once session begins, Coleman will be spending almost every day there, in her office stocked with Nerf guns, sippy cups and tubes of Go-Gurt. Over the next few months, legislators will decide whether to crack down even further on abortion.
In many ways, Coleman said, Missourians are already living in a “post-Roe world.” She rattles off the numbers, month by month. March 2021: 14 abortions. April: 14 abortions. “May, 15. June, 13. July, 7.” With all the restrictions, including a 72-hour waiting period, most patients find it easier to just drive to Illinois, to a large Planned Parenthood facility that opened in 2019 a few miles across the border.
Sometimes, people ask Coleman why she keeps going. Especially with the Dobbs decision expected in June, they’ll say, why go hard on another big abortion bill this session?
“This is the identity of who we are as a state,” said Coleman.
“She is always talking about different ways to stand up for life,” said Seth York, Coleman’s legislative assistant. “This will finish the job.”
Since she joined the legislature, Coleman has studied the various antiabortion restrictions attempted in other states, always hunting for new pieces that manage to slide past the courts. Even if a new law is struck down in another state, she says, it might be worth trying in Missouri, where legislation filters through the Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, known as one of the most conservative circuit courts in the country.
As soon as the Texas ban took effect, Coleman read up on the legal strategy. To challenge antiabortion restrictions, abortion rights groups have to sue the person or institution charged with enforcing the law — usually the attorney general or the state health department. But the Texas law empowers any private citizen to enforce Senate Bill 8, leaving abortion rights groups with no one to take to court. Coleman immediately texted her colleagues to see if they’d support something similar in Missouri. By the end of the week, she was on the phone with the attorney who helped design S.B. 8.
To McNicholas, at Planned Parenthood, Coleman’s new bill seems like “theatrics,” especially with a Dobbs ruling expected in June. In Missouri, she said, legislators are constantly trying to “out pro-life each other” — and Coleman recently announced a bid for state Senate.
Coleman thoroughly rejects that assessment. Especially since the Supreme Court issued its ruling on the Texas law on Dec. 10, leaving the ban in place for the time being, Coleman said she is more confident than ever that her bill “has legs.” While the high court gave abortion rights groups the power to challenge S.B. 8, its ruling was highly specific to Texas. By pointing out the particular issues with the Texas ban, Coleman said, the justices essentially gave other states a blueprint for a version of S.B. 8 they would let stand.
Coleman is hopeful Roe will be overturned, but not convinced. Because no one will know the specifics until June, she said, “having as many options in place as possible to protect the unborn is really important.”
Even if abortion is banned in Missouri, she said, her work won’t be done. The Planned Parenthood in Fairview Heights, Ill., performs hundreds of abortions every month. In a post-Roe era, liberal states would inevitably provide more abortions than ever, Coleman said.
“Then it becomes, ‘What do I do nationally to protect the unborn?’ ”
She’s not sure Congress would ever have the willpower to ban abortion at the federal level, she said. But if she ever ends up in Washington, she’d make it her No. 1 priority.
Ahead of the Dobbs arguments on Dec. 1, Coleman flew to Washington, D.C., with her daughter, Larkin. They stood at the steps of the Supreme Court among hundreds of antiabortion activists, wearing pins that read, “Empower women, promote life.”
As most protesters listened to the speakers on the podium, Coleman donned headphones and strained to hear the live-streamed arguments happening inside. She was happy to hear Barrett ask whether the “burdens of parenting” emphasized in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey might be resolved by adoption. She adopted Larkin 10 years ago.
Outside the court, a middle-aged man held a loudspeaker in one hand and a six-foot photo of an aborted fetus in the other. As a group of abortion rights protesters walked by, he started to yell.
“Shame on you, wicked women. God is going to push you into the everlasting destruction.”
Although Coleman empathizes with these kinds of protesters, she wishes they’d stop. For decades, she said, the media has amplified these voices, insinuating that the entire antiabortion movement is made in their image.
“It’s much easier to pull out the person who is just at their wits’ end,” she said.
Look a little more closely, she said, and you’ll find an abundance of antiabortion messengers who pose a much greater threat.
They are just as angry, but they smile. They nod. They talk about their children and invite you for dinner. Then, over a cocktail, they explain why they think abortion is wrong.
This piece originally appeared in The Lily. | null | null | null | null | null |
After decades, Biden plans to make mobile homes greener, sparking a fierce debate.
For the first time since 1994, the government must update energy efficiency standards for manufactured houses
Tony Flanders, a housing consultant at Factory Direct Homes, stands outside a manufactured home in Pittsford, Vt. (Hilary Swift for The Washington Post)
PITTSFORD, Vt. — At Factory Direct Homes here in central Vermont, Tony Flanders stepped through the front door of a gray double-wide mobile home and pointed at the living room window to his left.
“It’s all about insulation,” said Flanders, a housing consultant at the company, who was bundled in a dark-blue parka to withstand the frigid December temperatures.
But even this fancy double-wide couldn’t be sold in Vermont without a federal exemption, because it doesn’t meet state housing requirements. The mobile homes in which 22 million Americans live — also known as manufactured houses — are governed by federal requirements that haven’t changed in nearly 30 years.
Some say the Energy Department’s plan goes too far. “We believe in the importance of energy efficiency,” said Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization. “We just don’t think that this proposal is going to have the desired impact. And in fact, it’s going to have a negative impact on the supply of affordable, manufactured housing.”
“To us, the primary metric needs to be the upfront cost of the home,” added Mark Weiss, president of the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform, another industry trade association. “Our concern is that these new requirements are going to make them substantially more costly.”
“There are a lot of low-income people in these homes and the impact on them is exactly the right question,” said Lowell Ungar, director of federal policy at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “But putting them in homes in which they aren’t going to be able to afford the energy bills for the next few decades is not the solution to that problem.”
Many advocates, however, haven’t been waiting for government or industry fixes. They are already building workarounds — from weatherization initiatives and zero-energy modular homes to grant programs and improved mortgage products — that can help residents lower their utility costs and combat climate change.
Updating the code
Because it’s such an interstate business, manufactured housing has long been regulated federally. Congress gave that authority to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1974 and its code for manufactured housing went into effect two years later. The last significant update to the code took effect in 1994.
Manufactured homes use less overall energy because they are relatively small. And nearly a third of such houses shipped in the United States in 2020 were Energy Star certified — according to the Systems Building Research Alliance, a nonprofit research organization that supports the factory-built housing industry — including almost all the homes Flanders sells. Some go beyond Energy Star.
But even top-of-the line models don’t always meet the local code for site-built homes. And manufactured houses lag behind in other measures of efficiency as well.
While the DOE proposal considers various alternatives to the rule, it features a two-tiered strategy in which manufactured houses with a sales price of under $63,000 are subject to less stringent requirements. The department designed the lower level — Tier 1 — so that energy-efficiency improvements don’t raise the cost of a home by more than about $750, on average. It estimates that Tier 2 would increase the price of a home by about $3,900 to $5,300, depending on its size.
The government’s latest environmental impact statement is subject to public comments until Feb. 28 and is likely to draw a slew of responses.
“I hate Tier 1. I think it’s a real equity issue,” said Stacey Epperson, founder of Next Step Network, a sustainable housing nonprofit. “These cheaper homes are shipped into the poverty regions.”
Emanuel Levy, executive director of the Systems Building Research Alliance, compares the changes to auto-fuel efficiency standards. “What’s happening is as if the miles per gallon [in cars] were being raised to 100,” he said. “You’re cutting out the affordable buyers from the market.”
Mobile-home-park residents often buy their houses but lease the land. And leased land isn’t always eligible for traditional mortgages, which can push home buyers into what are known as chattel loans. Those generally come with higher interest rates and shorter terms, making borrowing for home improvements such as energy-efficiency upgrades more expensive.
How to start tackling your home’s water — and climate — footprint
The DOE estimated that the cost increase of its proposed changes would result in around 1,500 fewer homes shipped each year due to buyers’ price sensitivity. But that’s not something Flanders, the Factory Direct Homes consultant, is particularly worried about.
“There are still dealers that are really unscrupulous … They’re just trying to get the houses pumped out and make some money,” he said. “We’re not on a level playing field.”
Finding workarounds
Peter Schneider is a senior consultant with the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC), a nonprofit that designs and administers decarbonization and energy-efficiency programs around North America, including in Vermont. He first started trying to make manufactured housing more efficient after Tropical Storm Irene hit Vermont in 2011. Among the damaged property were 438 manufactured houses — 129 of which required complete demolition.
When it came time to rebuild, Schneider wanted to find replacement homes that at least met local building and efficiency standards. “I called all over,” said Schneider, who tried companies in New York, Pennsylvania and as far away as Indiana. He had no luck.
New York was in a similar predicament with its Parks of the Future Program. “We had real trouble finding anyone who could produce energy-efficient manufactured homes,” said Dina Levy, senior vice president at the New York State division of homes and community renewal.
“There’s really an unwillingness in this industry to build anything beyond what they’re required to build,” Schneider said. “They’ve been stuck building these homes that meet a standard that was developed nearly 30 years ago.”
But Schneider, Levy and others have been finding ways around this roadblock. “We are forced to be creative,” he said.
For folks already living in a manufactured home, Schneider suggested an energy-efficiency audit as a great first step. An audit helps homeowners identify areas for possible improvement — whether that’s switching to higher efficiency lightbulbs, doing more regular heating system maintenance or installing better air-sealing and insulation.
Modular and manufactured homes are both built in a factory and are very similar housing types. “Visually, manufactured and modular homes don’t appear that different from one another,” according to an article on the website of factory-built home builder Clayton. “The main difference between manufactured and modular homes is the codes they are built to.”
Because modular homes must meet local, rather than HUD codes, they are generally more energy efficient. When Schneider couldn’t find a manufactured-home company that would meet Vermont code, he turned to a modular-home company for help. The result was what are called “VerMods.” With 10-inch thick walls, triple-pane windows and roof-mounted solar panels, they go far beyond local code and are designed to create as much energy as they use. There are now a couple hundred of them around the state.
“This is where we need to go in terms of decarbonization,” said Schneider, standing outside a VerMod park in Vergennes, Vt., the sun beaming down. There are no fossil-fuel connections on-site.
In New York, Levy’s program is going the modular route as well. The State of New York Mortgage Agency also developed a lending program that allows purchasers of manufactured or modular homes to qualify for traditional financing, even on leased land. The purchase limit is $50,000 higher for those buying at least Energy Star model homes.
And efficiency can certainly be more expensive upfront. VerMods cost as much as $200,000 — which can be more than twice the price of the Energy Star manufactured homes that Flanders sells. Grants and other incentives help subsidize a large portion of the difference. But the broader hope, Schneider said, is that paying less in utilities allows people to put more toward mortgages that build equity.
Anne Martell, a VerMod owner in Huntington, Vt., said she hardly ever gets an energy bill. “We don’t have an electricity bill until around January or February,” said Martell of the cold winter months. In total, she says she pays about $500 a month toward the mortgage and $300 per year in utilities. “It’s great.”
Schneider emphasizes that the VerMods can also help insulate their owners from future increases in energy prices. “The last people who need to be victims of our energy prices doubling overnight because of something are our disadvantaged communities or our more vulnerable homeowners,” he said.
Not everyone is happy with their VerMod. Flanders says he’s had customers who left VerMods after the homes proved less affordable than expected. But he’s supportive of the modular concept generally. The modular houses he sells cost about $40,000 more than a similarly sized Energy Star-certified manufactured house. And, despite the added costs, he said that in the past decade, modular has gone from making up less than 10 percent of his business to roughly half.
But some trailer parks only allow manufactured homes rather than modular ones. So the ultimate solution, Schneider said, is still to get manufactured-home builders to move beyond where they are right now — a process he hopes federal regulators can kick-start.
“We are demonstrating a path for builders,” he said. “But we need to bring the standard up so it’s equivalent with our standard for modular and site-built homes.”
Flanders said he wants his manufactured-home customers to have more of the same choices as those purchasing modular homes. For example, the inch of foam insulation around the outside of modular houses not only cuts down on energy use but, he says, increases the longevity, durability and ultimately value of the home. It’s well worth the several thousand dollars, he said, but the manufactured-house companies he works with don’t offer that upgrade.
“Stuff like that makes common sense,” Flanders said. “You can never have enough insulation.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Magruder High School student injured and school on lockdown, police say
The student was taken to a local hospital.
Police are investigating after a student was reported injured at Muncaster High School in Montgomery County. (Freddy Kunkle/TWP)
Fredrick Kunkle
A student at Magruder High School was injured and taken to the hospital in serious condition on Friday afternoon, police and school officials said. The school has been placed on lockdown.
Shiera Goff, a police spokeswoman, said it was not clear if the male student was shot or stabbed.
Chris Cram, a spokesman for the county school system, said he was still gathering information and was on his way to the school. Montgomery County police are investigating.
Officials said in a tweet that dismissal at the school will be delayed.
About half a dozen Montgomery County police cars blocked the intersection at Needwood and Muncaster Mill roads, as a helicopter hovered overhead. News crews set up a few hundred feet from the school, whose windows looked dark and whose parking lot was half full.
Outside the scene, the parent of a sophomore who said she raced to the school to find out what was happening was turned back by police. She told reporters she had been in touch with her child, who was safe.
“This is something you don’t need to deal with. Schools should be a safe place,” said the woman, who walked away without giving her name.
Officially known as Colonel Zadok A. Magruder High School, the school is on Muncaster Mill Road about four miles east of central Gaithersburg. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hannah Gittings, center, the girlfriend of Anthony Huber, receives a hug after speaking at a news conference following Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal in November. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
By Mark Guarino
Kyle Rittenhouse has been added as a defendant to a civil lawsuit filed by the parents of Anthony Huber, a Wisconsin man Rittenhouse fatally shot in Kenosha during street protests in August 2020.
In a criminal trial last November, Rittenhouse was found not guilty of five charges related to killing Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum and injuring Gaige Grosskreutz with an AR-15-style rifle. A civil trial could replay evidence against the 18-year-old before a jury, in addition to statements he has made in right-wing media since going free. The suit does not specify any monetary damages, but attorneys for the parents filed a $10 million claim notice in December.
“He’s responsible,” John Huber said of Rittenhouse, who fired at Anthony Huber after Huber struck him with a skateboard during a foot chase. Rittenhouse “killed two people. He became an active shooter and my son tried to stop him,” John Huber said. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to stop him, and he lost his life in the process.”
Huber’s parents filed the original lawsuit against the city of Kenosha and the Kenosha Police Department last August. The updated motion adds Rittenhouse and seven law enforcement agencies and counties from the area as defendants.
According to Ayesha Bell Hardaway, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, the self-defense argument made by Rittenhouse’s lawyers during the criminal trial “won’t absolve him” in a civil trial because the threshold for liability is much lower.
“In broad strokes they are saying [Huber’s] constitutional rights to be free of excessive force were violated because law enforcement worked in concert with Kyle Rittenhouse to intimidate and ultimately to kill peaceful protesters who were there to exercise their rights,” she said.
Among the evidence that will likely be used in trial are video of police handing Rittenhouse water and telling him and other armed citizens that their presence was appreciated, as well as video showing law enforcement standing down while arguments between protesters and armed citizens intensified. The filing says it has internal communications from law enforcement showing the police knew there were “pro-police armed individuals” gathered south of the courthouse and “they deliberately funneled protestors” toward them.
Arthur Aidala, a New York defense attorney who represented Roger Ailes and Harvey Weinstein, compared civil litigation against Rittenhouse to the O.J. Simpson case in which the former football star was acquitted in his criminal trial but found guilty in civil proceedings.
The Hubers’ lawyers will need “clear and convincing evidence” that there was collusion between law enforcement and local gunmen, because otherwise a conspiracy “is hard to prove,” he said. A more winning strategy will be if they can show that law enforcement “was simply negligent in their ability to protect the deceased,” Aidala added.
In an interview with The Washington Post, John Huber accused law enforcement of purposely antagonized protesters by forcing them away from the courthouse square and toward “the vigilantes so they could deal with them.”
“They handled it badly. Plain and simple. And their policies of how to handle the situation were all bad. All the way to the top,” he said.
Emailed requests for comment to attorneys representing the city of Kenosha, the city’s police department and the various municipal law enforcement agencies were not returned.
A spokesperson for Rittenhouse did not respond to a request for comment. Sam Hall, a Milwaukee-based attorney who is representing Kenosha County and Sheriff David Beth, responded with a statement calling the allegations against Beth and the sheriff’s office “demonstrably false.” “While we understand that the family of Anthony Huber is grieving his loss, we must make it clear … that the facts will show that Mr. Huber’s death was not caused by any actions or inactions of Kenosha County law enforcement.”
‘He loved Kenosha’
Huber, who turned 26 four days before he was killed, grew up in a small house with his mother, his aunt, a half sister and half brother. He struggled with bipolar disorder, according to his great-aunt and confidante, Susan Hughes. He used his skateboard for both recreation and transportation, and was a familiar sight throughout Kenosha, she said.
During the criminal trial, Rittenhouse attorney Mark Richards described Huber as “a rioter” who was “trying to take [Rittenhouse’s] head off.”
His family disputes that characterization. No video exists of Huber participating in any vandalism or violence. Hughes said that Huber was a friend of Jacob Blake, the Black man who was shot seven times in the back by a Kenosha police officer days before. Huber went out that night, she said, to “be present” and to document the protests with his smartphone.
“He loved Kenosha. He had a lot of friends there. And a lot of people loved Anthony. He wouldn’t do anything to [local] businesses. That was his playground,” John Huber said.
At 18, Huber was charged with several felonies related to a fight with his older half brother and was sent to jail for 138 days before being sentenced to probation. In 2017, Huber returned to prison for two years after being charged with battery for kicking his sister.
But while incarcerated, Huber began to turn his life around. He earned his high school diploma and worked in the library, where he convinced the librarian to buy a collection of graphic novels for fellow inmates.
Released in November 2019, Huber struggled with finding work and housing. But little steps mattered: He obtained his driver’s license. He had a steady girlfriend. Interested in art and teaching, he wanted to pursue a career of teaching autistic children, and he even connected with a metal artist in nearby Waukesha who said he would train him in welding.
Hughes said living on his own and working with a new doctor gave Huber the freedom “to control his own health-care decisions” regarding his mental health. “He started to feel like a human being again.”
Settlements likely
No hearings have been set in the Eastern District of Milwaukee for the lawsuit. Aidala said it is likely that some of the municipalities named will settle with Huber’s parents before it reaches trial. However, he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Hubers pursue a trial against Rittenhouse as “a form of closure.”
If they win, the court could claim future earnings Rittenhouse might make from a book deal and high-profile speaking engagements.
Hughes, who is not part of the lawsuit, said that should Huber’s parents receive money, it should be used to fund mental health services within Kenosha or for services “to help ease formerly incarcerated people back into society.”
Rittenhouse, she said, “didn’t go away quietly and pursue his dreams of nursing like he said he was going to do. He went to Mar-a-Lago. He went on Tucker Carlson. He’s a young guy who’s allowing himself to be a pawn and he’s profiting from it. Anything that can take away from that profit stream, I do support that.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Intel should not have apologized to China
Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., on Jan. 20, 2021. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News)
Intel late last year issued a routine open letter to suppliers containing a reasonable request: avoid sourcing from Xinjiang, the Chinese region in which President Xi Jinping’s administration is conducting a cultural genocide against the resident Uyghur Muslim population. What happened next, however, wasn’t reasonable at all. Intel said it was sorry.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that the U.S. semiconductor company has erased all references to Xinjiang from the open letter on its website, after the note spurred backlash on Chinese state-run media and social media. The letter stated only that governments such as the United States’, outraged at the Uyghurs’ treatment, had imposed restrictions forbidding Intel from sourcing goods or services from the region. There was no explanation why — the mass surveillance, draconian birth restrictions and forced labor the Chinese government has imposed on the Uyghur minority. Yet the mere mention of the territory was, evidently, too much honesty to bear for the architects of this fear campaign. Under pressure, including the withdrawal of a popular Chinese brand ambassador, Intel issued a statement: “We deeply apologize for the confusion caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners and the public.”
The only thing to apologize for is apologizing. Intel is helping the Chinese state lie to the world and to its own citizens — many of whom, reared on a poisonous combination of propaganda and censorship, exploded in anger at the letter. Intel vets its business partners to steer its supply chain clear of Xinjiang; its general counsel said as much at a congressional hearing last summer. But to ask the company, its refusal to be complicit in human rights abuses is more obligation than point of pride. This month, Intel said its now-scrubbed letter was issued only to comply with U.S. law. (The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which President Biden signed into law last month, requires proof that imports from the region haven’t been made with forced labor.) The missive did not, the company insisted, represent its position on Xinjiang.
What, then, is Intel’s position on forced religious assimilation? The company’s continued sponsorship of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing invites the same question.
Intel has been a vocal supporter of the Innovation and Competition Act, which the House is considering. The bill includes tens of billions of dollars to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry — helping the United States keep its technological advantage over China, and democracy its edge over autocracy. Intel might argue that the proposed subsidies would lessen its dependence on China, which demands that the company compromise on this country’s values. But it is hard to see Intel as the United States’ national champion when it bows so obsequiously to China’s noxious, repressive regime. | null | null | null | null | null |
Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe in the 1973 court case, on left, and her attorney Gloria Allred. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP/Washington Post illustration)
A blip on the screen. A sigh of relief. A miracle. An afterthought.
The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision came at a time of great political turmoil: The antiwar movement was in full swing, and the Watergate scandal had crested among the American public. Across the country, women’s and civil rights activists were fighting to get states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which would guarantee legal equality for women and men.
So when a majority conservative court upheld the constitutional right to an abortion, not everyone noticed. It was met with both elation and sadness by people who had experienced or knew someone who had the procedure. For others, it would take years before realizing the full impact of the landmark court decision.
We asked readers about their memories of that time. For many of the dozen who responded, it was part of a larger coming of age, of understanding who they were as women, the rights available to them and the choices that would shape their lives.
Their reflections are especially relevant now, as Jan. 22 marks the 49th anniversary of Roe — and the decision faces its greatest threat in decades. The Supreme Court is poised to potentially overturn the landmark decision, in full or in part, when it reaches its decision on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.
Megan Zurawicz was 19 at the time of the decision. She had grown up in a Chicago suburb that leaned conservative — she remembers being bullied by her classmates for choosing John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in an elementary school mock election.
In 1973, Zurawicz was at a crossroads: She was zealous about women’s rights and deeply invested in securing passage of the ERA. She was beginning to notice how social structures had impacted her mother and aunt’s lives.
It was also the year she left school to get married.
She had mixed feelings about Roe. She valued a woman’s autonomy, but saw the more pressing issues at the time as equal pay, equal rights and financial freedom. Zurawicz was also concerned about the message the decision would send: She said she was particularly disturbed by some young women she knew who spoke casually about getting an abortion.
Zurawicz, 68, now works for a company that provides care for the developmentally disabled and said those concerns ended up being unfounded. She is a staunch supporter of abortion rights, a transformation that happened soon after Roe, once she learned more about abortions and the circumstances under which people seek them, she said.
“I did not really register how impactful Roe was,” Zurawicz said. Now, she wants it to be “unretractable.”
Carol Crossed, 78, also did not pay much attention to Roe at the time.
“I was against abortion,” Crossed said. “It was just a nonissue for me.”
In 1973, Crossed was an antiwar activist and mother of three living in Rochester, N.Y. She was “not even aware” of the Supreme Court decision, though she learned about it “soon after.”
Crossed opposed abortion on the same grounds that she is against all forms of war and capital punishment: To her, a fetus at any stage is a human life, and it is wrong to take a life.
Still, the impact of Roe didn’t register, she said, in large part because she underestimated how widespread abortion was in the United States. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research organization, the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s could have been anywhere from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year.
Crossed said she didn’t learn about how common the procedure was until the mid-1980s. And when she learned how deeply abortion rights was entrenched in the feminist movement, Crossed said she was taken aback: “I was just totally puzzled. I thought we were feminists because we wanted to protect life.”
Now the president of the antiabortion advocacy group Feminists Choosing Life of New York, Crossed views abortion in much the same way she views war: as a form of state-sanctioned violence.
“I think abortion is an individual violence, it’s one-on-one,” she said. “A nuclear war is going to destroy many people all at once, whereas I think abortion is just a progressive nuclear war. Day by day, destroying people slowly.”
For some, Roe was significant because they were either familiar with the process of trying to get an illegal abortion, or knew women who suffered in their efforts to terminate their pregnancies.
One reader remembered being 15 at the time, and finding her mom “sobbing uncontrollably” at the news that Roe had legalized abortion.
“I asked her if she was crying with joy,” she wrote via our callout form. Her mom responded that she was crying for three friends who died in the last year from botched procedures.
The conversation changed the reader’s relationship with her mom, drawing them closer: “It would break her heart to see what is going on today,” she wrote.
In the early 1960s, Sarah Stewart McIlvain said she walked in on her roommate at Michigan State University with a knitting needle in her hand, attempting to give herself an abortion.
It was a shocking and formative experience for McIlvain, now 78, a “retired mother” and “third-generation Planned Parenthood” supporter. By the time Roe was decided, McIlvain had long supported abortion rights.
McIlvain recalls her roommate being “talked down” after having a conversation with her mother. Her roommate’s family, who McIlvain remembers as being well-connected, ended up finding a doctor who would terminate the pregnancy.
McIlvain sees that incident as a turning point in her fight for abortion rights: “It just reinforced everything I knew growing up. It was better to have than to have not, because then the rules were a little bit different for you.”
By 1973, McIlvain had observed the effects of illegal abortion for a decade. Job applications at the time asked applicants if they had ever done something illegal, and some women who had the procedure felt morally conflicted about whether to answer the question and how, she said.
When Roe affirmed the constitutional right to an abortion, McIlvain said she felt “phenomenal relief,” though she added that she wasn’t particularly surprised by the decision, even with an all-male, conservative majority at the Supreme Court.
“I’m sure each one of them knew a woman who died from an illegal abortion,” she said.
Donna Harrison remembers supporting the Roe decision when it came out.
A junior high school student at the time, Harrison considered herself “pro-choice”: “I thought abortion was simply about women being able to do with their bodies what they wanted.”
Her view of the issue was also shaped by the media, Harrison said. In her memory, “old male Catholics” were the spokesmen for abortion back then, and “the ongoing narrative” was that if someone wasn’t “pro-choice,” it was because they were ignorant.
Harrison saw herself as “a strong female who likes to do what I like to do,” she said. She knew she was not ignorant.
But her view of abortion shifted five years later, when she went off to college and studied biochemistry.
It was during a biology class her freshman year that Harrison began to see the beginning of life as starting with “the sperm-egg membrane fusion,” for all mammals — including humans.
“[It] became clear to me that there’s another human being that’s involved from the moment of fertilization,” she said.
It wasn’t an “aha!” moment, Harrison said — “it was little more painful than that, because I hate to be wrong.”
Harrison is now the chief executive of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, considered the largest nonsectarian antiabortion physician organization in the world. She considers the science “exquisitely clear” that fetuses are human beings, not simply a “blob of tissue.”
Byron Calhoun says abortion is never necessary to save a mother’s life. He’s the only high-risk OB/GYN in central West Virginia.
The larger medical community is divided on the issue of how “personhood” applies to embryos. Many medical professionals follow a “fetal viability” standard, which is when a fetus can survive outside of the uterus. Generally, this is considered to be at around 23 to 24 weeks.
Harrison thinks medical advances have helped convince others that fetuses ought to be protected: “Ultrasound has changed the narrative.”
As Roe hangs in the balance, readers who support abortion rights emphasized that the widespread illegality of abortion did not stop the procedure from happening before the Supreme Court decision. Lawmakers need to remember that “many women were dying from botched abortions done by unqualified individuals,” one woman wrote.
Those who terminated their pregnancies pre-Roe had sharp recollections of the culture of shame around abortions, as well as out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
When Suzanne Brunzie thinks of Roe, she thinks of the girls at her Catholic high school in Springfield, Ill., who “disappeared” — were pulled out of school — due to unplanned pregnancies.
Brunzie, 66, is a retired nurse living in the San Francisco Bay area; she still volunteers to help distribute coronavirus vaccines. A graduating senior in 1973, Brunzie recalls feeling “relief” at the decision.
At the time, “I didn’t really understand what an abortion was,” she said. But, she added, she recognized that for some of her peers, the decision meant having more choices.
Brunzie said there were “no options whatsoever” when it came to family planning: “No birth control, no sex ed. Just a real clash between this message — you can be anything, you can be great, you can be involved in politics or march, but there’s this whole other side where you have no choices.”
It was understood among her peers that the girls who “disappeared” were probably taken out of school to finish their pregnancies, said Brunzie. And it happened to her friend, Mary.
Brunzie remembers sleepovers with Mary: how she would bring booze to pass around and “talk about the adventures she wanted to have.” Then, Mary got pregnant and was “whisked away” to a pregnancy center, Brunzie said. Also known as “maternity homes,” pregnancy centers housed young, unwed mothers to complete their pregnancies, out of sight of their families and communities.
The maternity homes where ‘mind control’ was used on teen moms to give up their babies
For Brunzie, Roe meant that a girl like Mary could have different choices — and, potentially, a different life.
Now, Brunzie thinks Roe hasn’t just helped people end their pregnancies, it has helped to remove the stigma and shame around sex and birth control.
“I don’t remember thinking heavily about my own personal choice,” said Brunzie, “but I remember thinking out there in the world, there’s got to be thousands and thousands of women who deserve an alternative.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin speaks at a rally in 2017 in Montgomery, Ala. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
The case got its start nearly five years ago on one of the darkest days in American political memory: James T. Hodgkinson on June 14, 2017, fired on a group of Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Va., injuring several people. In a deadline frenzy to comment on the matter, the New York Times published a piece titled, “America’s Lethal Politics.” The editorial attempted to draw a parallel between the Hodgkinson attack and the a 2011 shooting attack in Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner that killed six and injured 12 others. | null | null | null | null | null |
Comedian Louie Anderson in 1987. (Douglas C. Pizac/AP)
Louie Anderson, a comedian and actor who mined laughs from his Minnesota upbringing and his girth for more than four decades and who won an Emmy Award in 2016 as the unlikely matriarch on the quirky, earnest TV comedy “Baskets,” died Jan. 21 at a hospital in Las Vegas. He was 68.
The cause was complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to his publicist, Glenn Schwartz.
Mr. Anderson was raised in a home with 10 siblings as well as an alcoholic father who often taunted him for his weight, and he spent his early career as a counselor to troubled children. He had stored up plenty of material — observational and bluntly self-deprecating — by the time he began working in Twin Cities-area clubs in the late 1970s.
He won a Midwest comedy competition in 1981 that earned him work writing for the king of the one-liners, Henny Youngman, but his national breakthrough came in 1984 with his appearance on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.”
His routine was a barrage of Youngman-like gags, delivered with a gaptoothed grin and homespun Midwestern everyman charm. “I can’t stay long — I’m in between meals, so bear with me,” he cracked, getting a huge laugh. “I went shopping today — what’s this one-size-fits-all stuff?” “When I go camping, the bears put their food up in the trees.” “Sorry I’m sweating so much, but if I don’t I’ll explode.”
His size and his extended family became the two staples of his stand-up routine.
“I try to laugh with my audience,” he later told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “I try to say, ‘Hey, aren’t we all pathetic?’ I just put myself out there as the main pathetic person. … I’m laying it out there. That’s the Richard Pryor effect. If you’re honest enough about it all, it’s really rewarding. It is healing.”
In 1994, he created the animated series “Life With Louie” for Fox, voicing a boyhood version of himself and spinning his childhood into a Saturday morning cartoon. He won two Daytime Emmys for his voice performance, and the show won the Humanitas Prize — awarded to entertainment writers who inspire “more compassion, peace, love, and dignity in the human family” — three years in a row.
A live-action CBS sitcom, “The Louie Show,” developed with fellow Minnesota stand-up Matt Goldman, featured Mr. Anderson as a psychotherapist but was canceled after six episodes in 1996.
From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Anderson hosted the daytime game show “Family Feud,” ribbing other people’s families. He never stopped doing stand-up, putting out specials every few years and performing often in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas. He also wrote humor-laced memoirs, beginning with “Dear Dad: Letters From an Adult Child” (1989).
In 2016, Zach Galifianakis created the FX cable series “Baskets” and played two characters: a sad-sack clown in Bakersfield, Calif., and his twin brother. Trying to cast the characters’ mother, he imagined someone with a nasal Land O’Lakes accent. Comedian Louis C.K., a co-creator of the show, offered Mr. Anderson the part of Christine Baskets.
Mr. Anderson didn’t play the female role as a joke, even though Christine’s slight ditziness and obsession with Arby’s, Costco and Ronald Reagan were played for laughs. Instead, he put on a blond wig and floral caftans and channeled his own mother in a balance of eccentric sweetness and vulnerability.
“The very first Christine scene, if you watch it, is completely raw and honest,” he told Los Angeles Magazine. “I wasn’t Louie Anderson playing Christine Baskets. I didn’t let people call me Louie on the set. I needed that. I’d go, ‘Don’t call me Louie. You can call me Mama Baskets if you want, or Christine, but not Louie. He’s not here right now.’ ”
The role earned Mr. Anderson a passionate new following, and he received three consecutive Emmy nominations for best supporting actor before winning the award.
“I have not always been a very good man,” he said in his acceptance speech, “but I play one hell of a woman.”
Louie Perry Anderson was born in St. Paul, Minn., on March 24, 1953, the 10th of 11 children, and grew up in a housing project. His father was a onetime jazz trumpet player who later had odd jobs as a garbage collector and a railroad worker. His mother was a homemaker — and a pack rat, he recalled.
“We weren’t hoarders,” he joked, “because we had aisles.”
Mr. Anderson described food as an early source of comfort and escape from his “chaotic” childhood, including his bullying father. He dropped out of high school at 16 and joined a local gang, once getting arrested for selling stolen snowmobiles.
His probation officer, who took a liking to Mr. Anderson, encouraged him to complete his education. He later became a social worker with abused children in the Twin Cities. “When a kid was saying he was going to kill someone or burn the building, I’d try to diffuse the thing and get him laughing,” he told People magazine.
His after-work hangout was a stand-up comedy stage in St. Paul, and he recalled telling friends how unfunny the acts were. They told him to go up, if he thought he could do better.
He did, spending four years working Minnesota clubs before moving to Los Angeles. He became a paid regular at the Comedy Store before his “Tonight Show” appearance led to major tours with Roseanne Barr and others. He played supporting roles on-screen, as a flower deliveryman in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986) and a fast-food worker in the Eddie Murphy vehicle “Coming to America” (1988).
He married his high school sweetheart soon after moving to Los Angeles, but the marriage lasted only a few weeks (“It was a mistake,” he later said). In a 2002 memoir, “The F Word: How to Survive Your Family,” Mr. Anderson said he considered suicide in the 1990s amid crippling debt and the stress of being blackmailed for years by a male casino worker who claimed that Mr. Anderson had propositioned him. The casino worker was later arrested after the comedian alerted the FBI.
Mr. Anderson had been privately battling cancer for a decade. In the last two years, he was plotting a new chapter as a singer, taking voice lessons and writing more than a dozen songs.
Survivors include two sisters.
Mr. Anderson started his comic career with darker, more sarcastic humor before switching to more family-friendly fare.
In a 2016 NPR interview with Terry Gross, Mr. Anderson recounted a joke he once tried out: “I read a thing where this guy killed his whole family. I’d go, ‘I’m surprised I don’t read that every day. I mean, I don’t think you start out where you’re going to kill the whole family, but the rush of the first one must carry you right through to the end.' ”
After laughing, Mr. Anderson said, “But it was too dark for my audience.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Thousands of Giuliani’s communications turned over to Manhattan U.S. attorney following privilege review
Rudolph Giuliani speaks about the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks during an appearance on a radio show in New York. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
House Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell
Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello, said his review of the contents of the devices revealed no messages between Giuliani and the former president, and no proof of any crime. Trump is known for his avoidance of electronic messages, a habit that has frustrated state criminal and civil investigators in New York who are evaluating his business practices.
“There’s no [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation,” Costello said. “Rudy Giuliani didn’t do anything illegal or unlawful.”
Barbara S. Jones, in her progress statement filed Friday, reported that of the more than 25,000 chats and messages contained on a cellphone dating to the start of 2018, Giuliani initially asserted “privilege and/or highly personal” status on 96 items, 40 of which she granted. His attorneys withdrew their assertions on 19 of the items, and Jones said 37 “were not privileged.”
From that set of records, 56 items were released to federal prosecutors. On another set of Giuliani’s devices, more than 3,000 communications from Dec. 1, 2018 to May 31, 2019 were reviewed, but he did not assert privilege on any of the items. They were also released to prosecutors this week.
Previously, Jones sided with Giuliani with respect to three items he said were privileged.
Prosecutors argue Giuliani associate knew donations were illegal
An attorney’s communications with a client are generally protected from outside inspection unless the exchange advances criminal activity. Privilege reviews are relatively routine and are sometimes done in-house by an independent team at a prosecutor’s office.
In the case of Giuliani, like Michael Cohen, another attorney who represented Trump before a very public falling out, New York federal courts have appointed what is referred to as a “special master” to oversee the exhaustive review process.
Jones was also appointed to review Cohen’s materials before his guilty pleas to charges involving tax evasion, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress about a Trump real estate deal in Russia.
Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine played heavily in Trump’s first impeachment trial. He was alleged to have tried to pressure Ukraine’s president into announcing an investigation into President Biden and his son Hunter in the lead-up to the 2020 campaign.
In October 2019, two of Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested at Dulles International Airport on campaign finance violations, including for using foreign funds to support U.S. political candidates.
Parnas and Fruman also were said to have assisted Giuliani in his efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to make an announcement that would be detrimental to Biden.
Fruman pleaded guilty in September to soliciting contributions from a foreign national and was sentenced to a year in prison Friday afternoon. In court, Fruman said his actions are “a shame that will live with me forever.” Parnas was convicted at trial in October and is awaiting sentencing. | null | null | null | null | null |
This undated photo released by the U.S. Navy shows U.S. Navy Cmdr. Billie J. Farrell. Farrell is scheduled to become the first woman to lead the crew of the USS Constitution, the 224-year-old warship known as Old Ironsides, during a change-of-command ceremony scheduled for Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. Farrell takes over from Cmdr. John Benda, who has led the ship’s crew since February of 2020. (U.S. Navy via AP) (Uncredited/U.S. Navy) | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: How the brilliant André Leon Talley got sidelined
The author, Karen Attiah, takes a selfie with André Leon Talley in 2018. (Karen Attiah/The Washington Post)
I just hope André Leon Talley — Vogue’s only Black creative director, who passed away this week at the age of 73 — knew how much he was loved by us normal people.
As someone who read Vogue and other fashion publications for years, I was familiar with Talley’s larger-than-life personality and stature, and his degrees in French history and literature. I was in awe of his almost encyclopedic knowledge of the spectrum of fashion, from fast fashion in middle-class malls to haute couture on the runway.
But when I met him in September 2018, I wanted to hear about office politics. For the first time in its 125-year history, Vogue had just published a cover shot by a Black photographer, Tyler Marshall, who had been personally requested by Beyoncé. It was the singer’s fourth Vogue cover, and Black models had appeared in the magazine’s pages for years. How was it possible that no Vogue cover had ever been shot by a Black person?
What I learned from Talley that day was a brief but ugly lesson on how one of fashion’s largest personalities and connoisseurs of elegance had been sidelined by the industry he loved so much. As much as Talley was a luminary and an inspiration, his was also a cautionary tale about being Black, gay and talented in a White, elite fashion world: No amount of awards, haute couture and highflying friends could save him from never truly being accepted.
Though he was said to have become a bit reclusive in his later years, Talley generously agreed to be interviewed at his house in Westchester, N.Y. He came out in one of his signature caftans, this one in what looked like an African wax print. I was wearing pants I found at a thrift store and cheap jewelry. “I like your outfit, darling,” he told me. I beamed inside as I accepted his offer of bottled water. As Talley once told my Post colleague Robin Givhan, growing up gay in the Deep South had taught him the power of impeccable manners.
I pressed Talley directly on whether he had used his position as the most visible Black man to climb the ladder at Vogue to push for a Black cover photographer. “I never pushed for anything,” he said quickly. “Vogue is not a place where you are pushy. I nuanced my points of view, safely, and realizing that I had to navigate a world that was basically a dominant White world of power. You don’t go in there pushing and saying, you know, ‘We gotta have a Black cover.’ “
He reached for a copy of the September issue I had brought along. “Let me see,” he said. “There are so many ads, too many ads,” he said, flipping forward through the magazine, then back again. “Is my name in here?” At that time, Talley was an editor at large for Vogue. But his name was not in the credit pages — an omission I was surprised to realize he had not already noted. Talley set the magazine down. It was a sad and awkward moment, one that sticks with me to this day.
He let me use the bathroom — a bold request, as I had read he didn’t like to let people inside much. The house proved to be full of a lifetime of accumulation of luxurious things. I saw clothes, shoes, trinkets from Chanel, Tom Ford, Manolo Blahnik. But somehow, the cumulative visual effect was almost cluttered. At the end of the day, no matter how expensive all the stuff was, it was … stuff.
We moved on to other subjects. He gushed effusively about Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor with whom he had apprenticed. He talked about Anna Wintour, who named him as the first Black creative director, and how he taught her so much about fashion — as she has acknowledged — but still said, “She is a colonial broad.” He dropped names of famous designers, saying Tom Ford and Manolo Blahnik were his friends. But he also complained about being abandoned by many. Living alone, he said he had never found love. He seemed to be in a state of melancholy reflection upon his life and career.
“I should have done more to build my own brand, to maybe have a clothing line, to do other projects,” he said wistfully. It was known that for all his genius and grooming of fashion’s highest stars, he was paid much less than his counterparts. I would learn later that even the house we met in was not his, but rather rented since 2004 from the chief executive of Manolo Blahnik, George Malkemus — who in 2020 tried to evict him, alleging he was owed more than $350,000.
The fashion world was still cruel to Talley, until the very end, which highlights the dire need for more equity in the industry. His passing should prompt a reckoning and reflection from those who used and then sidelined him. And, for all of us, of the perils of trying to fit in at all costs into institutions that refuse to see our worth. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Russia’s ransomware arrests send a dangerous message
The headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow in 2015. (Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)
The United States has been asking Russian President Vladimir Putin for some time now to bring down his fist on ransomware gangs in his country, yet there has been little evidence he has lifted even a finger — until now. The Federal Security Service (FSB) last week arrested 14 alleged members of the REvil hacking collective at what the security agency says was Washington’s request. This is good news. The bad part is the timing.
Ever since last spring’s assaults on the systems of the 5,500-mile-long Colonial Pipeline and meat-processing juggernaut JBS, President Biden has been making a modest request of his counterpart in Moscow: Enforce the law. But while the Kremlin has been happy to police Jehovah’s Witnesses, dissidents and businesses executives who’ve found slightly too much success, officials are less eager to prevent criminals from wreaking havoc abroad by hacking servers and demanding money to restore them. These groups tend to operate with impunity in Russia, as long as they pick the right victims — whether authorities ask them to strike.
With the REvil arrests, Mr. Putin has proved Mr. Biden’s point. He does have the power to curb the incursions plaguing libraries, schools, hospitals and city halls. The rub is, he also has the power to do nothing. Russia sends this signal at the same time it is amassing troops, armor and aircraft along its border with Ukraine, and at the same time the United States is vowing to retaliate in the event of an invasion. The message is simple: Like seeing cybercriminals behind bars? Then don’t make us angry. Meanwhile, several Ukrainian government agencies have had their websites defaced and their data wiped in recent days. The attack, initially disguised as ransomware, hasn’t been attributed yet — but many suspect it originated in Russia or Belarus. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has cautioned critical infrastructure organizations to stay on high alert.
The White House shouldn’t be cowed. Russia’s “ransomware diplomacy,” as one expert put it, should encourage the United States to consider cyber an essential component of its arsenal as well. That means more explicit threats about not only the economic consequences but also the cyber consequences Moscow will face for interfering with sensitive targets here, or for having hacking collectives do so at its behest. Defense is as important as offense; the administration is seeking to remedy decades of negligence, most recently in a memorandum directing national security agencies to secure themselves. CISA is trying to help the private sector stay safe, too.
So far, so slow — Wednesday’s memo, for instance, came six months later than a 60-day deadline imposed in May’s sweeping cybersecurity executive order. The Government Accountability Office reports also found agencies have been haphazard in implementing recommendations and requirements. A robust cybersecurity strategy is no longer a matter of preparing for the future; now, it’s a critical part of contending with the present. | null | null | null | null | null |
Snow begins to fall at the White House on Dec 16, 2020. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Not directly, of course. In a draft executive order obtained by Politico, her mistake is framed as part of a sweeping international conspiracy to hijack the election to Trump’s detriment. Dated Dec. 16, 2020, here’s how it articulates the mistake in Michigan’s Antrim County, where Guy served as county clerk.
“I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, find that the forensic report of the Antrim County, Michigan voting machines, released December 13, 2020, and other evidence submitted to me in support of this order, provide probable cause sufficient to require action under the authorities cited above because of evidence of international and foreign interference in the November 3, 2020, election.”
The document goes on to order that voting machines be collected and that an assessment of the devices be completed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — at the time, John Ratcliffe, a fervent Trump ally whose credentials for the gig were not robust. (Ratcliffe had already helped amplify another conspiracy theory, that Hillary Clinton had originated the Russia probe.) Ratcliffe’s office was given 60 days to issue its report — a period that would extend well past the Jan. 20 date when Trump would be out of office. Should he still be planning on leaving.
But, again, it’s worth picking out that specific assertion about Antrim County, about what — we later learned — Sheryl Guy had accidentally done.
On the morning of Nov. 4, 2020 — that is, the morning after the election — it was obvious that something was goofy with the results of the presidential contest in Antrim County. Trump had won the county by nearly 2 to 1 in 2016, 4,000 votes in total. Yet, this time, it appeared that Trump had lost to Joe Biden by about 3,000.
Time’s Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague told the story of what happened next in a report published last month. Guy was in the McDonald’s drive-through when someone texted her to point out that the results were hard to believe. She hustled back to the office and worked with her team to recheck the figures, quickly discovering that Trump had, in fact, won.
So what had happened? Well, at the last minute, she had needed to add a candidate to the ballots. That’s where the mistake occurred.
“When she added that last-minute candidate for village trustee to the ballots,” Bowden and Teague write, “she should have updated the counting machines with the new parameters. But she hadn’t. So when the numbers started rolling in, they dropped into the wrong columns. A little over two thousand Trump votes had been shifted to Biden’s column. Her error.”
In their rush to fix their mistake, her office had inadvertently made another one, double counting some votes. The result was that a final tally wasn’t confirmed until Nov. 6, three days after the election. Not that it really mattered. The Associated Press had called Michigan for Biden two days prior, given that he won by more than 300,000 votes. Even if Antrim County had needed to pull all of its votes away from Biden, he still would have won easily. It was a mistake that was caught, explained and fixed in short order, one that didn’t affect the final results.
The Michigan secretary of state released a public statement explaining what had occurred. But it was too late.
A right-wing media ecosystem primed by Trump to look for evidence of “fraud” decided that fraud was precisely what had happened in Antrim County. Despite the fact that the results didn’t effect the state outcome. Despite the fact that the error was explained. Despite the fact that it was a Republican county that Trump had won. Antrim County became a shorthand for “fraud committed via electronic voting machines.”
That’s in part because of the “forensic report” mentioned in Trump’s executive order. It was published by an ad hoc organization called Allied Security Operations Group, tied closely to an activist named Russell J. Ramsland. Even by the beginning of December, Ramsland had not covered himself with glory, at one point that November mistaking data on voting in Minnesota with information from Michigan. But he was undeterred. Last May, The Washington Post documented Ramsland’s sweeping efforts to dig up evidence of fraud, including his group’s ultimately successful legal effort to obtain the voting machines used in Antrim County.
Over 23 pages, the report scraped together every nefarious-sounding allegation it could. It alleged, for example, that, while federal standards meant that only 1 in 250,000 ballots could return errors — articulated incorrectly as 0.0008 percent in the report — the figure in Antrim County was 68.05 percent. (Adding the hundredths place proves how precise the analysis was, obviously.) It also rejected Guy’s explanation of human error with a wave of the hand: Actually, it asserted, the problem was the voting machines.
The state responded to these allegations quickly. A joint statement from the Michigan attorney general and secretary of state asserted that the report “demonstrates lack of credible evidence of widespread fraud or wrongdoing.” The “qualifications of those who authored the report are suspect, with no evidence or credentials provided to back up their ‘expertise,’ ” the statement reads. It points to an affidavit submitted by Michigan Bureau of Elections Director Jonathan Brater, who stated that “the report makes a series of unsupported conclusions, ascribes motives of fraud and obfuscation to processes that are easily explained as routine election procedures or error corrections, and suggests without explanation that elements of election software not used in Michigan are somehow responsible for tabulation or reporting.”
This was public two days prior to Dec. 16, the date on the draft executive order. As were various fact checks of Trump’s efforts to elevate ASOG’s claims. The Detroit Free Press debunked the argument about those error percentages, which were not error percentages, on Dec. 15.
And yet there’s Antrim County, kicking off Trump’s soberly considered decision to leverage the weight of the federal government to cobble together a reason he should get to remain president. The Michigan secretary of state’s Dec. 7 news release had stated flatly that what occurred in Antrim County was “an isolated error” and that “there is no evidence this user error occurred elsewhere in the state.” But here it was at the front of Trump’s line of dominoes running from Sheryl Guy to an international criminal conspiracy.
The review of the vote in Antrim County was completed Dec. 18. It found that Antrim’s final tally was, in fact, incorrect: It undercounted Trump’s margin by 12 votes.
Last June, a legislative committee run by Michigan Republicans released a lengthy report examining the state’s election processes in 2020. It found no evidence that anything suspect had occurred. But it took special pains to address the situation in Antrim County.
“The strongest conclusion comes in regard to Antrim County,” it read. “All compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further.”
A remarkable summary of an incident that nearly upended American politics. | null | null | null | null | null |
Caroline Green and Michael Parsons of USA, who finished in first place, pose with their medals after the ice dance free dance skating program during the ISU Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in Tallinn, Estonia, Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Sergei Stepanov)
TALLINN, Estonia — Caroline Green and Michael Parsons of the United States won the ice dance title at the Four Continents figure skating championships on Friday, while Cha Jun-hwan of South Korea took the lead in the men’s short program. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: Future of the Supreme Court with Thomas Griffith & Cristina Rodriguez
MR. BARNES: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Robert Barnes, and I cover the Supreme Court for The Post. We’re very fortunate today to have two members of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court joining us, former Federal Judge Thomas Griffith, and Professor Cristina Rodriguez, who was co-chair of the commission.
Judge Griffiths, Professor Rodriguez, welcome to Washington Post Live.
MS. RODRIGUEZ: Thanks for having us.
MR. GRIFFITH: Thank you. Hi, Cristina.
MS. RODRIGUEZ: Hi. Good to see you.
MR. GRIFFITH: Good to see.
MR. BARNES: Old friends getting back together again, I see. Professor Rodriguez, would you start us off, please, and tell us the impetus for this committee and sort of the, I guess, unusual mandate that you had, which was not really to make recommendations to the president?
MS. RODRIGUEZ: The committee was effectively making good on a campaign promise that then candidate Joe Biden made during an interview. When asked about the prospects for Supreme Court reform, he said that he would form a committee in order to study those ideas. The committee was set up not to make recommendations but to canvass as wide a range of views as possible in order to provide an actual analysis of the proposals that are prominent in the public discussion for the president's benefit to better inform his understanding and the public debate over whether the Supreme Court needed reform in the first place and over which types of reforms are the ones best suited to whatever problems one might identify with the way the court currently operates.
MR. BARNES: Judge Griffith, let's go to one of those right away, which was the idea of adding new members, more members to the Supreme Court. The court’s membership has varied over the years. But for more than a hundred years, it's been set at nine. Can you tell us about the discussion that the commission had on this issue?
MR. GRIFFITH: Sure, we had--we had public hearings, and then we--where we invited experts from around the country to speak to the issue, then we had public meetings where we discussed it amongst ourselves--the issue amongst ourselves. And as Cristina pointed out, our mandate was not to resolve the issue, was not to come up with a recommendation of whether the status quo shall remain or the court should be expanded. Our mandate was to describe the nature of the debate so that the president would be better informed about what was at stake in the debate. And so our debates were--at least the ones I participated in--were not so much as the pros and cons of expansion or keeping the court at the size it's been at for so long but whether--but rather how we describe that debate for the president and for the American--for the American public.
And I have to say this. So, I'm one of the political conservatives that made this a bipartisan commission. And you know, the final report isn't exactly how I would have written it. It's not exactly how Professor Rodriguez would have written it. It was the--it was the work of 34 people working together. So, there's always compromise involved. But what I think is the most striking feature of the report--and frankly, I don't think it's gotten enough attention--is that in a day of bitter partisan divide, 34 people got together and created a civil means of discussing one of the most contentious issues of the day and produced a report that was supported by every member of the commission.
So quite apart from the substance of the report, I think the process of the report is something that should get attention. And for this, I give full credit to the White House, who made it clear to us throughout the process that that they wanted civil discourse, that they wanted all views to be considered. And even though there were only a few of us who would be labeled as political conservatives, our views were fully--were solicited, were described accurately. And I think for each one of us--I shouldn't speak for the others, but at least for me and--but I think the others agree--it was a remarkable process that I think produced a report that’s worth studying.
MR. BARNES: Professor Rodriguez, could you--I'm going to let Judge Griffith get to the cons of this. Could you give us the pros on this idea of adding more members, whether or not it's something you personally endorse or not. You’re a good reporter. You're able to present objectively the arguments on both sides. Can you give us the pros?
MS. RODRIGUEZ: As a lawyer, too, I am capable of doing that. And I should say that this was the issue over which I think there were the deepest disagreements, and the disagreements were such that we couldn't go as far as we might otherwise have liked in analyzing the validity of the arguments in favor or against reform. And instead, our goal was to present the case as advocates in favor of expansion and opponents of expansion would make them. But the core of the argument in favor of expansion is twofold.
The first is that the current composition of the court is the product of machinations during the confirmation processes over the last three nominations, where Republicans violated norms. Chief among them was their refusal to provide Merrick Garland--President Obama's last nomination--a hearing, much less a vote, and that as a result there's a skew in the composition of the court. And that's premised on, I think what is a widespread belief that the decisions of the Supreme Court are highly consequential, and even if justices themselves are not partisan actors, they do have ideological and jurisprudential worldviews that change depending on whether they are those who would be appointed by a Republican or by a Democrat.
But the more fundamental argument in favor of reform is that over the last several years--and this dates back before the controversy over Merrick Garland's nomination--the Supreme Court has been making decisions that proponents argue undermine the processes of democratic decision making, chiefly by interpreting the Voting Rights Act in ways that narrow its reach and that declare certain key parts of it unconstitutional, which has allowed states to engage in regulation that restricts the franchise. And the concern that these proponents had and that's articulated in the report is that that means that the normal ebb and flow that you would have in the appointments to the court across ideological divisions might be in danger of being stopped altogether and that a single party is seeking to entrench itself in the decisions of the Supreme Court are facilitating that.
Now I should say--and I'm sure judge Griffith will ably articulate the arguments against it--that where those feelings were deeply held, the feelings that that was a mischaracterization of the recent practice of the Supreme Court was also deeply held, and that taking that approach to then justify expanding the court, to counter pack the court, so to speak, would be significantly damaging to the institution as a whole and would only spawn a back and forth that would further politicize the court that that is already regarded as highly political in nature.
MR. BARNES: Judge Griffith, I'm going to give you a chance to talk about an op-ed that you wrote afterwards, in which you said that you--why you thought adding members was a bad idea. You know, part of it is, as you know, that all of the conservatives on the Supreme Court now were nominated by Republican presidents. All of the liberals were nominated by Democratic presidents. That probably sounds to most people like it makes sense. But it wasn't that way for a very long time on the Supreme Court. So, take that into account when you talk about why you think now would be a bad idea to add justices.
MR. GRIFFITH: Sure, sure. Well, first of all, Professor Rodriguez did a good job explaining the opposition to it. Let me step one--take one step back and maybe frame this in a little larger view. I think there's a--there's a fundamental disagreement among some of the commissioners about the role of the Supreme Court under the Constitution. And those of us who opposed expansion, at least I’ve exposed expansion--start with the idea that the Supreme Court, although certainly not perfect, has done a remarkable job in the history of the republic. It's the--it's the crown jewel of our--of our constitutional government. I spent a number of years deeply involved in rule of law projects in former communist countries. And everywhere I'd go and meet with reformers, they looked to the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court as the model of an independent judiciary.
I thought one of the most moving moments during our public proceedings came from an anecdote told by Walter Dellinger. Walter was the acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration, a professor of law at Duke, and a distinguished appellate advocate and public servant. Walter told the story of how he argued the side of the government in the Clinton V. Jones case, the case about whether Paula Jones would be allowed to proceed with her lawsuit against a sitting president of the United States. Walter argued for the government's position in the Supreme Court. He lost. That position was rejected nine to zero. Walter told the story that he was in Beijing, teaching Chinese law students at the time the decision was handed down. And he spoke, and he was quite moving, I thought, about the astonishment that his law students greeted that opinion, that a low-level state employee could pursue a lawsuit against the president of the United States and that the Supreme Court upheld that nine--it was just simply astonishing to them.
I tell that story because I'm one who thinks the Supreme Court is playing very well its part in our constitutional system, and I worry about efforts to change that, the unintended consequences that would come from that. Now, we know that for many of the proponents of expansion, there are intended consequences, and the intended consequences are to affect the decisions of the Supreme--future decisions of the Supreme Court in a--in a way that's more to their liking. Look, I don't agree with all the decisions the Supreme Court. I was on the panel that was overturned in Shelby County. I think the Supreme Court got that decision wrong. But I reject the idea that this Supreme Court is some part of a plan to restrict the ability of American citizens to vote or that has a partisan preference for one party or the other. And that's just simply not true.
And I worry that people who make those claims, people who make proposals for change based on some idea that the Supreme Court is not legitimate, they play into something that I think's quite toxic in our culture today, and that's this sense of distrust or mistrust. Jonathan Haidt said recently, he predicted a cataclysmic failure of American democracy because he said we just don't know what happens when you drain all trust out of a democracy. I worry that that the arguments that are made for expansion of the court assume that the court is filled with political partisan actors and that the that the antidote to that is to fill it with more partisan actors. Well, that's not been--that was not my experience in the federal judiciary. It's not filled with partisan actors. It's filled with men and women who are doing their level best to follow their oath to be impartial. They have different views about how to read the Constitution, how to read a text, a statute, or a regulation. But they're not being driven by partisan concerns. And I worry that too much of the argument in favor of expanding the court buys into that fiction. It leads to distrust. And we need to have--we should have and we need to have confidence in the Supreme Court, particularly at a time when trust is diminishing for many of our government institutions.
MR. BARNES: Well, you know that that leads into a question that I would like to read you from Jean in Nebraska. And, Professor Rodriguez, I'll ask you to take it on first. Jean says, how do we get back to trusting that the Supreme Court is apolitical?
MS. RODRIGUEZ: I think that's a difficult question to answer, because I don't think the Supreme Court is apolitical. I agree with Judge Griffith that most judges and justices are doing their best to interpret the law and the Constitution with a view to what those things mean, as opposed to what the right outcome is for whatever partisan affiliation they hold. But the Supreme Court's decisions in particular are highly political, in that they're often questions of first impression. The ones that generate controversy, that lead to interest group formation, and that raise the interest of the public are ones that represent either undecided questions about constitutional values or that reflect ways in which the country's views about the nature of constitutional values and how far government regulation can go in relation to those values are changing over time. And so I think that one way to improve the perception that the court is not engaged in partisan decision making and is not illegitimate in that it's favoring one side over the other is to think about reforms that would make the Supreme Court more aligned with democratic majorities.
And there are two types of reforms that would adhere to that objective that we explored in the report. The first is term limits for Supreme Court justices. This is obviously a long-term proposition. Many people, myself included, think that it would require a constitutional amendment to achieve that. So, it means that it's a difficult reform to achieve. But if we were to adopt a system of term limits, we would say, for example, if it were an 18-year non-renewable term, each president would have the opportunity to appoint two justices to the court. And the justification that proponents of term limits give that we underscore in the report is that would make the court and its ideological composition broadly responsive to the outcome of democratic elections over time, not that it would be partisan or responsive to the particular political debates of the moment, but that the composition would more carefully and closely reflect the way the country is evolving. And I think it's both easier to accept losses at the Supreme Court for issues that you care about and to have faith that the court will stay in line with public views about what the Constitution means and what it should protect, if we have a system of nomination and confirmation that more closely tracks the ebb and flow of politics. And I think that is an example of a kind of big picture, difficult and complex reform to enact that could create a better system overall, that might have some something to say and do about the polarized state of our politics that is now infecting the court and people's perception of it.
MR. BARNES: Judge Griffith, when I think about this issue, I think about something Justice Kagan said when she was confirmed by the Senate. The first call she got was from the Chief Justice, Chief Justice Roberts, who said congratulations and he looked forward to working with her for the next 25 years. And she said, only 25? You know, is there really a reason for us to think that the Constitution intended for people to serve all of their lives on the Supreme Court? And you know, this is one of those things that I don't think the rest of the world does look to us about, where we're the only country that doesn't have either term limits or a specified retirement age.
MR. GRIFFITH: Well, the lifetime appointment is--it's there in the Constitution, right? I mean, so if you're going to change that, you're going to change something quite fundamental. So, the conservative in me says, be careful about that, right? No, in fact, the Constitution was created, the court was created with lifetime tenure. And so that's--I think ought to be very careful about tinkering with that. I agree with Professor Rodriguez that it would require a constitutional amendment to change that. And I'm not certain it would be desirable. Some of our greatest justices--Justice Ginsburg, Justice Brennan, Justice Black--served longer than 18 years. So, I don't think--I don't think--I actually came into the commission thinking, well, maybe this is a good idea. But as I heard the testimony and read the problems with it, I was persuaded that it's not a good idea, that it might have unintended consequences that would weaken the strengths that the current Supreme Court--Supreme Court has.
If I can move onto something Professor Rodriguez said--I thought she said, very, very well--but I have a fundamentally different view about the role of the court, the role of the judiciary, and whether they are supposed to be responding to evolving democratic norms. Of course, at one level you want to say they are. But at another level, I think it's important to understand that the--perhaps the most fundamental decision that the framers made in creating the Constitution was who decides the law. That seemed to be in some cases even more important to them than what is decided. Who decides the law? We call it the separation of powers.
And our Constitution is based on a radically different idea than had ever been presented before, and that is that in our--under our system, "we, the people," make the laws through politically accountable representatives through the people they vote for. The judges aren't voted for by we--judges occupy a very tenuous role in a democratic republic. And I believe the view of the judge is to be the faithful agent of those who make the laws, and that the judges not to be interposing his or her own policy preferences in deciding the outcome of the case, but they're supposed to be looking to what we the people have decided through their elected representatives through law. When you have that view, your--the question isn't whether judges and justices are following social trends and changing norms. It's whether they're following the law as enacted by "we, the people" in the Constitution in the acts of Congress. That's a--that's, I think, a very different view of the role of a judge than some of the proponents of term limits and expanding the court that have. But I think it's a fundamental disagreement.
MR. BARNES: Let me ask you about reaction to this and also whether or not you see some action coming on this--on this report or on these subjects. You know, as you know, the Supreme Court right now is considering whether to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's been asked to do that. That was a decision made 50 years ago that said that there was a constitutional right to abortion. If it's overturned, it likely would be along these lines of the Republican-nominated justices on one side, the Democratic-nominated justices on the other. If something like that were to happen, would that, do you think, provide a new momentum for either of these proposals? Professor Rodriguez, would you start with that?
MS. RODRIGUEZ: I do think that if and when the Supreme Court in June curtails the right to terminate a pregnancy, and depending on how it goes about doing that, that it will cause significant political reverberations. I do think that will strengthen the vehemence of the calls that some people are making for expanding the court. But the bottom line is that the Democrats don't have the power in Congress to do that at the moment. I don't think that it's a realistic reform, especially given the prospects for the next two elections.
I do think, however, that the debates that we're having now, and the Commission report that is advancing those debates, will shape a longer-term debate over the court. And I wouldn't rule out the possibility that sometime in the future when a political window does open, that there would be structural reforms to the court. And when that happens, it's possible that we will look back to this moment, not just to whatever the court does with respect to Roe vs. Wade, but also what the court is likely to do and has already done with respect to Congress's power to regulate and federal agency’s power to use their statutory authorities to do things like address the pandemic through vaccine regulation, that those changes and shifts in the court’s doctrine will be identified as a moment in which people began to take seriously court reform.
And I hope that the report that we produced, because it was focused on analyzing the arguments for and against reform--and thinking through implementation questions will be an invaluable resource. So even though I think whatever happens with all of the court's cases in June, is likely to produce a lot of political debate. I don't see the needle on court reform itself moving given the way the power in Congress breaks down at the moment. But I do think it will contribute to a longer arc of Supreme Court reform debate.
MR. BARNES: Let me ask you, there were some proposals toward the end of the report that seem to have a lot of support, things such as a specific and written code of ethics for Supreme Court justices, the fact that--or the proposal that justices should not individually own stocks, that the arguments should continue to be streamed, things that sort of go to transparency at the Supreme Court. Are those things Congress could and should act on, on its own, regardless of what the White House does on this report? Either one of you.
MS. RODRIGUEZ: I'll start.
MR. GRIFFITH: I’ll let the co-chair...
MS. RODRIGUEZ: I think that most of those reforms are ones that the court could itself adopt. The commission did not take a position on whether Congress should enact reforms, whether with respect to judicial ethics or other transparency type reforms. There is some analysis in the report about Congress, in fact, having the authority to do so, but I think it's fair to say that it would be preferable for the court to act to bind itself, but to do so in a way that's clear to the public and that is actually consistently followed. And there was widespread agreement that something like a judicial code of ethics and limitations on stock ownership and the like are wise and prudent for the court and the public's perception of it and its lack of bias in decision making. But for Congress to regulate the court in that fashion, even if it's within its power, is something that people would be cautious about.
MR. BARNES: Judge Griffith, go ahead.
MR. GRIFFITH: I'm sorry, I was going to say I agrees. As a former member of the federal judiciary, I’m a little bit anxious about Congress overreaching, and I'm much in favor of the court supervising itself in this regard. We have a chief justice who's a keenfully aware--keenly aware of the role of the court in the public eye, and I have confidence that they'll respond appropriately as necessary.
MR. BARNES: Okay, Professor Rodriguez, quickly, Judge Griffith said that he changed his mind after hearing some of the discussion at the commission. Is there anything that you changed your mind about? Something you thought going in, that changed as a result of the study and the work that you did?
MS. RODRIGUEZ: I think over time I became more sympathetic to what we call in the report the disempowerment reforms, that fundamentally the challenge is that the court has too much power in the present moment. And I came to believe that more strongly than I did before, despite being a teacher and scholar of constitutional law for almost two decades. I think that that reinforced my view that term limits are an important long-term solution to the problem that will help deconcentrate the power of particular individual justices. But I also think that reforms that are addressed to ensuring that the court is, in fact, deferential to political actors are ones well worth considering. The challenge--and this is articulated in the report--is that the types of reforms that would go the furthest in advancing that objective are the ones that are most likely to require a constitutional amendment, and those things that the Congress can do on its own, such as stripping jurisdiction of the court to hear certain types of cases, are less effective because of their one-off nature. And so there is an implementation challenge associated with these sorts of reforms.
I think the other thing that became clear to me about the debate over Supreme Court reform--and this relates to the debate over expansion, but also to disempowerment--is that the reform debate has a way of letting Congress off the hook, that a lot of what we're debating today, through the lens of Supreme Court reform, is actually a consequence of Congress not doing its job, and that the institution that is most in need of invigoration in our system is, in fact, the Congress. Of course, part of the reason that it is not as effective as it maybe once was in enacting legislation is the same polarization that's driving the debate of Supreme Court reform.
So, there's a deep problem in our political culture that makes it difficult for any of the institutions of government to function in a way that achieves consensus or respect across the ideological spectrum. And so that is a much larger issue than the court reform debate, but thinking really long and hard about whether proposals for court reform would, in fact, address the problems that people often cite reform as necessary to address I think necessitates this bigger picture consideration of the limits of our system as a whole and the need for Congress to take greater responsibility for addressing the problems in economic and social life.
MR. BARNES: Professor, I think you could get nine votes for that at the Supreme Court. I want to thank you both for participating in this very interesting and timely conversation. Our time is up.
I want to thank you for tuning in to Washington Post Live. I’m Robert Barnes. And for our upcoming events on Washington Post Live, please go to the website WashingtonPostLive.com. Thank you again. | null | null | null | null | null |
Lisa Rein
Jeffrey Vincent Brown, nominated in 2019 to the federal bench by then-president Donald Trump, said that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal workers and contractors constituted an overreach of executive authority.
The ruling amounted to yet another blow to the administration’s most ambitious public health measures — its work to corral the pandemic through vaccinations. It is yet another vaccine requirement that has been invalidated by the actions of appointees of Trump and other Republicans. But it is likely not the final word. the Department of Justice filed an appeal to the ruling, and the case could at some point be heard by the Supreme Court.
The requirement was expected to apply to more than three million federal employees, including the military, but not including USPS workers, as well as at least four million federal contractors.
“Obviously, we are confident in our legal authority here,” she said.
But the disciplinary process was still being hashed out into the new year.
The administration paused any discipline for noncompliance with the mandate over the Christmas holidays, and at this point few - if any - employees have been suspended or fired. Tens of thousands of federal workers have, however, requested religious waivers, and many agencies say they are still reviewing these requests.
In the meantime, those who had been awaiting decisions on waiver requests were permitted to work alongside unvaccinated employees as long as they wore a mask, stayed socially distant and were tested regularly.
Vaccine boosters protect against severe disease from omicron, CDC says.
Unvaccinated rates are higher in conservative areas of the country, leaving relatively high percentages unprotected at agencies that include Veterans Affairs (11.5 percent); Agriculture (11.8 percent); Energy (9 percent); the Bureau of Prisons (17.5 percent); Homeland Security (10.5 percent) Social Security (9.7 percent).
A correctional supervisor at FCI Herlong, a federal prison in Northern California, who asked that his name be withheld because he was not authorized to speak to the media, spoke about the disorganization of the vaccine effort at his facility, saying that many of his co-workers were holding out from getting vaccinated as the deadlines for enforcement kept getting pushed back.
He had a religious exemption request approved in December and gets tested at work every Friday. But he said he’s heard chatter from co-workers who felt compelled to get vaccinated that lawsuits — attempts to get more money from the government — could be forthcoming if and when the mandates get thrown out.
“It’s all getting really blurry and it’s making no sense,” he said. If the day ever came that the vaccine requirement was better enforced, he envisioned unvaccinated people finding ways to prolong their holdouts, as the prison is short-staffed and many of the supervisors didn’t believe in the requirement. His own weekly testing, he said, was a “pencil-whipping” exercise by a sympathetic supervisor — a formality that could be fudged if needed.
The Biden administration said last fall that it would discipline and potentially dismiss holdouts. It offered the possibility of medical exceptions and waivers based on religious beliefs against vaccines. But there has been a lot of limbo and widespread confusion across the government on testing requirements.
The administration’s first attempt to set up a testing program last summer failed to get off the ground as managers struggled to sign contracts with testing companies either on or off-site. The Office of Personnel Management last week announced another testing requirement to take effect in February.
“We are confident in our legal authority,” OPM said in a statement. “Importantly, as we face the most transmissible variant to date, every leader should be focused on using the tools we know work to protect the American people. Vaccination is our strongest tool against the virus.”
Friday’s ruling is likely to cause further turmoil inside the government over how agencies should deal with unvaccinated employees as they protect the safety of the public and employees who are vaccinated.
Yet another source of confusion for the federal government has been new hires. Many agencies have imposed the mandate as a condition of employment, requiring people they’ve made offers to show proof of vaccination.
“At the beginning of filing season, our members are not helped by this conflicting message by an unelected judge who lacks medical and organizational management expertise of the executive branch,” said Chad Hooper, an Internal Revenue Service manager who leads the nonprofit Professional Managers Association, which represents agency managers.
About 2,000 IRS employees have requested religious or medical waivers, he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
KYIV, Ukraine — With 100,000 Russian guns pointed at their heads, Ukrainians appear to take a stoical pride in not seeming rattled. They appear ready for what could be a savage war. Their main worry is that the United States and its allies will get so nervous they will yield to Russian pressure.
It’s a dizzying and frightening prospect, to imagine a war triggered by a doomed attempt to rewrite history. The most reassuring note is that Ukrainians, in the eye of the storm, don’t appear all that worried. I posed to Ukraine’s defense official the question asked by Gen. David H. Petraeus at the beginning of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, “Tell me how this ends.” He answered without hesitation: with Ukrainian sovereignty over all of its territory. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police, community members and others meet near the Columbia Heights Metro Station to discuss recent shootings and other crime in the area on Jan. 20 in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
A woman who recently moved into an apartment steps from the Columbia Heights Metro station saw a man shoot another man at 2 p.m.
A mother who lives across the street complained her daughter is relegated to riding her scooter in the building’s hallway because it’s too dangerous outside. A retiree recounted hearing gunshots: “Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”
They live in the heart of Columbia Heights, within a block of the city’s busiest Metro station and prime shopping areas at 14th and Irving streets NW. It is a centerpiece of the District’s renewal, an area that combines the vibrancy of an urban neighborhood with the bustle of an outdoor mall.
In the past three months, life here has been marred by bullets, fear and anger.
“This area is not safe,” said Peter Clark, the 64-year-old retiree who described the “bam, bam” of gunshots to police during a community walk with residents Thursday afternoon.
He has called Columbia Heights home for the past three decades, and he now lives in Trinity Towers, an apartment building across the street from the Metro. His high-rise and neighboring Columbia Heights Village residences have long been a mainstay of the community, yet they are also separate from the newer development along 14th Street.
“I came home one night, and there were two cars parked in those spaces,” Clark told police officers on Thursday, pointing to a lot behind Trinity Towers where residents complained the streetlights often go dark. “All of a sudden, they turned around and started shooting.”
Since the beginning of November, D.C. and Metro Transit police have counted at least seven separate shooting incidents in or around the station, with eight people struck by bullets, two fatally.
Thousands of bullets have been fired in this D.C. neighborhood. Fear is part of everyday life.
Many of the shootings have occurred during daylight, when tenants spill from apartments and condos and commuters push into the underground trains. The pandemic has slowed the pace, but the streets remain busy, and sometimes dangerous.
In November, bullets twice in 20 days struck people outside the station, wounding two people each time. One of them died. Later that month, police said a 19-year-old was shot and wounded on a train at the station.
One rush-hour evening in December, police said a man got off a train after a fight, stood on the underground platform and fired at the train as it pulled out of the station. No one was injured.
Three more people were shot this month — two men wounded a week apart outside the station, and a 33-year-old man killed in the 1300 block of Columbia Road NW, two blocks away. .
Bullets fired from one of this month’s shootings also put holes in the side of the outdoor Metro elevator shaft and shattered a window of the Wawa on the ground floor of a luxury apartment building that towers over the station’s entrance. A plate-glass window remained boarded on Thursday, just below a sign seeking new tenants.
Gunfire is not new here. The 1300 block of Columbia Road, around the corner from Trinity Towers, has long been a hot spot for crime, and was the site of a shooting in 2019 that left six people wounded and one dead. In 2020, eight people were wounded and one was killed at 14th and Spring streets NW, a little less than a mile north of the station.
D.C. Police Cmdr. Han Kim, who heads the Third District police station and covers areas from Logan Circle through Adams Morgan, told residents there is little rhyme or reason behind the shootings. Some are the result of disputes between street crews, he said, while others stem from simple arguments that escalated.
Violence borne out of spontaneous disputes are more difficult to prevent, police have said, generally out of reach of violence interrupters and mediators who try to calm tension involving gangs and rival neighborhoods. Metro Transit police said they are keeping a near round-the-clock presence at the station, with police cars parked with emergency lights flashing to draw attention to their presence.
Kim pleaded for people to help them with tips. “We need the assistance of the entire community here,” he told the group, adding, “We have to get guns off the street” and ensure those arrested are “held responsible for their crimes.”
Some residents complained about the D.C. Council’s 2021 budget cut to police that the mayor’s office blames for a shortfall of 200 officers as crime spiked. Various community leaders and District officials talked of programs to help extricate people from troubled lifestyles to fight crime at its root causes.
The woman who talked of her daughter riding her scooter in the corridor told the group she had lived in Columbia Heights most of her life, and pleaded for help making Trinity Towers, where she lives, like other apartments across the street.
“They’re building on top of buildings on top of buildings,” she said noting many of the new residential high-rises boast rooftop pools. The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns, said the nearest community pool for her children is two neighborhoods away.
“It’s nice around here,” she said of the area in general. “But let’s be real. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on.” And, she said, “these kids are angry.”
The woman who saw the shooting from her window said she now has second thoughts about staying. A recent arrival, the 32-year-old said she was at home working at her government job, talking to colleagues on the phone, when she heard what she thought was a car backfiring.
She went to her window and said she saw a man with a gun shooting another man. The woman, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity for safety fears, told her story to police and city leaders at the community walk. She complained that she reached out to police and to a council member’s office seeking help, “and I never heard back.”
“The biggest issue is feeling safe where you live,” the woman said later. “I was in my home, it was 2 in the afternoon, on a Wednesday, and I witnessed a man get shot. It really has me thinking about leaving the area.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Brian Laundrie talks to an officer after police pulled over the van he was traveling in with his girlfriend, Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, near the entrance to Arches National Park in Utah on Aug. 12. (Moab Police Department/AP)
Four months after Gabby Petito went missing while on a cross-country road trip with her fiance, the FBI says all evidence points to her partner as the sole culprit, including a notebook found with his body.
In its final update on the investigation, the FBI on Friday shared its timeline of the Petito case, from last August, when Brian Laundrie, 23, used Petito’s debit card on his drive back to Florida, to the medical examiner’s report that Laundrie died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His remains were found after a month-long manhunt on Oct. 20 in Florida’s Carlton Reserve, along with a backpack, revolver and notebook, which the FBI said contained “written statements by Mr. Laundrie claiming responsibility for Ms. Petito’s death.”
The 22-year-old’s killing has drawn international interest on social media, including Internet sleuths who scrutinized the couple’s social media posts and those who criticized the lack of similar attention on missing women of color.
Despite the questions swirling around the case, it’s unclear how much more the public will learn about Petito’s last days. Authorities have not indicated they would bring a prosecution against anyone else for Petito’s death, which was ruled a homicide by strangulation.
Before Gabby Petito's body was found, she was pulled over with Brian Laundrie on Aug. 12 in Utah. A clinical psychologist analyzed the footage for The Post. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
The notebook and Laundrie’s other belongings have been requested by his parents, News Nation Now previously reported. The family’s attorney, Steven Bertolino, did not respond to questions about the notebook Friday but shared a statement:
The Petito family thanked the FBI for helping them “navigate through the worst moments of their lives,” in a statement shared by their attorney Richard Stafford.
“We truly appreciate the FBI’s diligent and painstaking efforts in this extremely complicated case,” the statement continued. “The quality and quantity of the facts and information collected by the FBI leaves no doubt [that] Brian Laundrie murdered Gabby.”
Announcing “all logical investigative steps have been concluded” in the case, FBI Denver Division Special Agent in Charge Michael Schneider acknowledged the role the public played in seeking answers around Petito’s disappearance and Laundrie’s manhunt.
“On behalf of the FBI, I want to express my deepest appreciation to the public for the thousands of tips that were provided during the investigation, and to our local, state and federal law enforcement partners for their work throughout the investigation,” he said in a statement.
Laundrie and Petito had set out on their cross-country camping trip in June from Petito’s home in New York state, with plans to arrive in Portland, Ore., by Oct. 31. Instead, according to the FBI, Laundrie used Petito’s debit card beginning Aug. 30 without permission to drive home from Wyoming, where the couple was last seen together.
Laundrie also seemed to attempt to deceive law enforcement by texting his own phone from Petito’s phone, the FBI said.
He returned to his parents’ Florida home Sept. 1, 10 days before Petito’s family reported her missing.
Days later, amid the intensifying scrutiny into the disappearance of his fiancee, Laundrie slipped away on law enforcement’s watch, driving to Carlton Reserve, a vast wetlands area in southern Florida.
His Ford Mustang was recovered near there, and more than a month later, skeletal remains were found.
A Florida woman went on a night walk with her dog. A black bear attacked her: ‘I feel lucky to be alive.’ | null | null | null | null | null |
Two shot, critically wounded in Southwest Washington
Two men were shot and critically wounded Friday evening in Southwest Washington, according to the D.C. police.
One of the two was unconscious and not breathing, and the other was unconscious and barely breathing, said Officer Sean Hickman, a police spokesman.
He said the shooting was reported about 6:45 p.m. on Forrester Street SW, just west of South Capitol Street. | null | null | null | null | null |
Once the case was decided, the court, as is its usual practice, sent the case back to the appeals court. The ordinary thing for the appeals court to do would have been to refer it back to the trial level judge, who appeared inclined to put the law on hold while the litigation continued.
Then came Texas, with a new delaying tactic. Actually, the state said, the licensing officials don’t have any authority under Texas law to enforce the abortion law. And, the state added, that question of state law should be sent over — "certified,” in legal terms — to the Texas Supreme Court to decide.
Undeterred, the 5th Circuit stepped in to aid and abet Texas’ efforts to sidestep the constitution and ignore the Supreme Court. The three-judge panel hearing the case took the remarkable step of ordering oral arguments on the certification question — more delay. In the majority were Reagan nominee Edith H. Jones and Trump nominee Stuart Kyle Duncan. Judge Stephen A. Higginson, an Obama appointee, dissented. “The defendants already lost this point in the Supreme Court,” he wrote. “They should not get a second bite.”
At the oral argument, Jan. 7, Jones said the quiet part out loud. “What happens when the Supreme Court, if the Supreme Court, as many expect, says something about Roe v. Wade that implies that [the] prohibition on abortions after heartbeat may be enforceable,” she asked. “What happens then? Is this case alive or dead? ... Maybe we should just sit on this until the end of June,” by which point the Supreme Court will have ruled on Mississippi’s abortion law and may well have overturned Roe.
Courts are not supposed to work this way. They are supposed to follow the existing law even if they disagree with it. They are not supposed to place their bets on that they deduce — or hope — the justices might do in the future. | null | null | null | null | null |
Supreme Court will revisit dispute between Oklahoma, tribal leaders
The Supreme Court building in Washington. (Mariam Zuhaib/AP)
The Supreme Court will consider limiting a controversial 2020 decision that greatly expanded the amount of Indian land in Oklahoma and disrupted criminal prosecutions in the area, the justices announced Friday.
The court declined the state’s request to overturn its decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, which sided with tribal leaders in finding that a large portion of land in the eastern part of the state qualifies as an Indian reservation
But the justices said they will consider a more limited question: “Whether a State has authority to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes against Indians in Indian country.”
Oklahoma reels after Supreme Court ruling on Indian lands
It would have been unusual for the court to accept a direct challenge of a precedent so fresh. But the McGirt decision was 5 to 4, with conservative Justice Neil M. Gorsuch joining the court’s four liberals to form a majority.
Since then, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, making a different outcome at least a possibility.
And Oklahoma said in its petition to the high court that the decision has produced something just short of chaos.
“No recent decision of this Court has had a more immediate and destabilizing effect on life in an American State than McGirt v. Oklahoma,” the state wrote.
The court held in McGirt that part of the state once within the boundaries of the Creek Nation qualifies as Indian country for the purposes of prosecuting major crimes.
Supreme Court says much of eastern Oklahoma remains Indian land
Since then, state courts have reached the same conclusion regarding the remainder of the Five Tribes in Oklahoma, meaning “almost 2 million Oklahoma residents—the vast majority of whom are not Native American—suddenly live in Indian country for purposes of federal criminal jurisdiction,” the state wrote.
The state contends tribal and federal law enforcement is overwhelmed with the new responsibility, forcing victims to go through second trials or forgoing some prosecutions. “The reality is that the McGirt decision has hamstrung law enforcement in half of the state,” Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) said in a statement.
Tribal leaders say the state’s response has bordered on hysteria and ignores the efforts made to conform with the Supreme Court’s decision.
Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said the court was right to reject “a blatantly political request to overturn its McGirt decision.”
The case at the Supreme Court involves Victor Castro-Huerta, who was convicted in state court of neglecting his 5-year-old stepdaughter, a tribal member who has cerebral palsy and is legally blind. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals threw out his conviction because the crime occurred in what is now considered tribal lands.
But a court filing from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation said the case actually is an example of how the system works since McGirt. Castro-Huerta has been re-convicted in federal court and is awaiting sentencing, it said.
The case is Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta and will be argued in April. | null | null | null | null | null |
Louie Anderson performs his stand-up comedy routine at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas in 2017. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
By Robyn Bahr
Louie Anderson was, by far, the funniest stand-up comic I have ever seen perform live.
About a decade ago, when I was an unemployed and depressed recent post-grad who had no sense of my future, I visited my cousins in Las Vegas, who were able to score some discounted matinee tickets to see Anderson at a resort club. Although I was vaguely familiar with the comic because he had produced and starred in a 1990s Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood, “Life With Louie,” I had zero expectations for the event. I certainly had nothing better to do.
About an hour later, however, I was guffawing so hard at Anderson’s everyday observations, endearing familial impressions and lithe, in-the-moment wit, that he started heckling me for being too enamored with the show. “Do you need some help over there? Yikes.” Of course, his derision only made me laugh harder.
For Anderson, it was probably just another Thursday afternoon. For me, it became a flashbulb memory, a reminder that art has the power to not only divert people from their dispirited ruminations but also help them reframe their despairing mindsets. And quite honestly, the comedian wasn’t too peppy that day. If anything, I appreciated the underlying pathos in his dry (famously nasal) deadpan delivery.
Anderson, who died Friday at the age of 68 of complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had a gift for entwining humor with vulnerability. He was a raconteur who could allude to hard truths about the human condition but without ever disheartening the audience. Whether he was imitating his beloved mom’s love for retail markdowns or sharing the realities of being on a medically prescribed diet, he made life’s fundamental sadness relatable. In turn, that relatability sparked knowing, empathetic joy in his audience. His pain connected with ours. The pain, of course, was never the whole story.
He exuded sweetness. He was known for impersonating his harried Upper-Midwestern mother, Ora, and skewering his 1950s and ’60s childhood growing up as a poor, chubby kid in Saint Paul, Minn. He remained visibly boyish into his 60s, his gap teeth and blonde mop lending to his cheeky, cherubic persona. He was honest about his struggles, particularly in regards to his difficult childhood and his lifelong issues around weight. He never exactly invited us to laugh at him or the family members he frequently embodied onstage, but to feel with them.
In an interview with Conan O’Brien in 2019, he shares an anecdote about making a birthday coupon book as a kid for his mom, who was married to an abusive alcoholic: “ ‘I’ll wash the dishes; I’ll do the laundry; I’ll kill dad for you.’ ” The audience laughs. “It’s a true story,” he swears. They laugh even more. He relays that one day he came home and heard his father greet him, “There he is. Hitman Louie. Ya gonna kill me, Louie? Here I am.” Anderson chuckles, cutting the tension of what could be a story for a therapist. He says the coupon became a running joke in the family. He also provides a fuller picture of his dad, describing the man’s musical talent and pride in his kids. There’s no villain in this moment. Anderson built community with his audience by unraveling the gauze on his old wounds.
Anderson was known for “clean” family-friendly comedy, which led to the semi-autobiographical Fox animated kids series “Life With Louie,” which ran from 1994 to 1998, and his work as the host of the syndicated game show “Family Feud,” from 1999 to 2002. Clean comedy can sometimes pigeonhole comics; Rosie O’Donnell and Bob Saget spent years trying to shed their sanitized images after gaining notoriety for kid-focused fare. Anderson seemed to reach for basic human truth over any particular type of branding. He held various film and television roles during his nearly 40 years in Hollywood.
His final major act was perhaps his most resonant. In 2016, he won a Primetime Emmy for his transcendent role on FX’s surreal and existential griefcom “Baskets,” starring as the Costco- and Ronald Reagan-loving mother of a frustrated professional rodeo clown played by Zach Galifianakis. (He was nominated three times in the supporting actor category for the character.) Channeling the specter of his own larger-than-life mother, who raised 11 kids, Anderson crafted one of the most lovable and memorable TV characters of the past 20 years.
In any other hands, Christine Baskets could have been a one-note caricature — historically, “gender-bending” in comedy is the joke itself — but Anderson made you forget the questions of gendered performance. The role isn’t drag; Christine’s mannerisms aren’t amplified to critique performative femininity or masculinity. The series may be absurdist in construction, but Anderson as Christine is not heightened. He plays an ordinary no-nonsense woman, a widow in the dusty suburbs of Bakersfield, Calif., who just wishes her sons would lead stable lives. With a blonde bob and an array of sensible sweater sets, Anderson melts into the role. (His transcendent work predates the disappearing acts that defined the lead performances of cult comedies “PEN15” and “Chad.”)
Emotionally shut down after her husband’s suicide and a lifetime of her own mother’s nitpicking, Christine focuses on the quotidian details of her condo lifestyle. Viewers aren’t positioned to mock her consumerist obsessions but see our own aggrieved matriarchs in her opinions on Arby’s fries and bulk purchasing. In Christine, I saw my own twice-widowed grandmother, a woman who loved home shopping networks and taking me to Costco for hot dogs. A woman who carried shame about her body through nine tumultuous decades, despite all her incredible accomplishments.
Anderson imbued Christine with humanity. Throughout the series, the character grapples with her diabetes and the expectations of caring for herself. She’s uncomfortable swimming in front of other women her age because of her size. In one of the most beautiful moments from the series, following an episode where she comes to terms with her maternal guilt, Christine drives to an isolated Pacific beach to do her water aerobics in private. It’s dark, she’s alone. In her red floral swimsuit, she steps into the ocean and we see her finally take a breath.
The image is liberating but also comforting. She’s letting the water wash away her years of indignity. The moment, and Anderson’s natural warmth, helped wash away some of my deep-seated bodily shame, too. | null | null | null | null | null |
Until fall 2003, champions were limited to 5 games. Now that double-digit streaks are increasingly common, former winners can’t help but think about what could have been.
Amy Schneider and Matt Amodio are both million-dollar winners on “Jeopardy!” in the last year. (Jeopardy Productions Inc.)
Of course, the concept was a non-starter. Until a few months later, when it suddenly wasn’t. The show kicked off its 20th season by instituting a new “sky’s the limit” rule — “a deliberate ploy by the show to beef up ratings,” Claire McNear wrote in her “Jeopardy!” history book “Answers in the Form of Questions” — allowing contestants to win as many games as possible. Soon, a mild-mannered computer engineer named Ken Jennings arrived on the scene and stayed put, steamrolling contestants week after week after week, causing some to complain that he was holding the show “hostage” until he finally lost and walked away with 74 wins and $2.5 million.
While anything close to Jennings’s level of success remains rare, a number of contestants have enjoyed lengthy winning streaks — and remarkably, two in this past year, as Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider have crushed the competition with 30-plus wins and over $1 million each in earnings. (Schneider just won her 37th consecutive game on Thursday night.) Other recent streaks include James Holzhauer (32), Jason Zuffranieri (19), Jonathan Fisher (11), and in winter 2020, when Jennifer Quail, Karen Farrell and MacKenzie Jones all won eight games within three months.
But as these phenoms help breathe life into the long-running franchise and have indeed resulted in ratings spikes, these winning streaks have also led to some complicated feelings among mildly jealous former five-day champions who can’t help but wonder: “What if?”
“Yeah,” Beck sighed when asked if he felt any envy watching such competitors. “It’s hard not to think about the ‘What coulda, shoulda, woulda’ happened. I don’t think I would have gone 50 games, 30 games or even 20 games. But who knows? To have the opportunity would have been cool.”
It’s not something he dwells on — but he was so close to being able to compete without limitations. When Beck walked away with a Jaguar in addition to six-figure winnings (in some seasons, producers awarded new cars to five-day champions), he affixed the car with a vanity license plate: LST5TMR.
“Some people thought it was a jerk move,” Beck said, but joked it was “nice for one’s ego” to remember his minor spot in show history as the last winner who retired after five games. “I wish I could have gone on longer. But the way it worked out was great.”
That sums up the attitude of most five-day “Jeopardy!” winners: Even if they feel envious, they emphasize they’re grateful for the amount they won, and that they enjoy rooting for the super-champions. After all, they certainly don’t want to complain when they know thousands of hopefuls would give anything just to be on the show — and as with most successes in life, it partly comes down to timing and luck.
“It’s kind of a First World problem — you get $75,000 for pressing a button instead of maybe $150,000 for pressing a button,” said Babu Srinivasan, who won the former amount over five games in 2001. “Big picture, I’ve never been mad about getting $75,000.” If there’s anything to be jealous of, he said, it’s that modern super-champs can segue from winning streaks to being household names with other opportunities post-“Jeopardy!”
At the same time, it’s only natural to think about what could have happened with the chance for a life-changing amount of money.
“You’re always going to be a little resentful,” said Chuck Forrest, who noted it was a “much different time” for the show back when he competed in the second season, and theorized that producers didn’t want contestants to become bigger than the competition itself.
“I was more jealous, I think, when they doubled the point values,” said Grace Veach, recalling that when she was a contestant in 1997, it was several years before producers increased the clue values on the board in 2001. “I was like, ‘I could have made twice as much!’ ”
“If you had asked me 15 years ago, I would have said I was mad because I would have liked the opportunity to go beyond five games,” said Sandra Gore. However, she said, that emotion has faded as she’s retired and lives very comfortably. Plus, her $53,507 earnings in 1987 enabled her to move from New York to California.
That’s another common feeling among the 15 contestants interviewed for this article — just wishing they had the chance to see how far their quiz skills could take them. Elise Beraru, the very first contestant to ever win five games on the first season in 1984, purchased a color television set, VCR and stereo with her winnings. Now, she no longer watches the show; the last time she tuned in, she said, was Alex Trebek’s final episode last January. While it’s difficult to watch anyone else host, that’s not entirely why she’s still skipping episodes with Amodio and Schneider.
Actress Mayim Bialik and former champion Ken Jennings will host "Jeopardy!" through 2021. It's unclear who will permanently fill Alex Trebek's former role. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
“I think that part of the reason I don’t watch these long streaks is because I’m jealous. Just a little bit,” she admitted. “God knows I wouldn’t have minded winning, you know, $700,000 instead of $37,000. I can speculate … I don’t know that I would have had the kind of extended roll that contestants are having now. But I would have loved to have the chance.”
Michael Rooney, who won $50,201 in 1999, said “certainly there was a little smidgen of envy” watching new players triumph — but he, along with other five-game winners, was invited back to play in tournaments to rack up even more money, which took the edge off any disappointment.
“I just love the game,” Rooney said. “If current executive producer Michael Davies invited me back to play a game in an abandoned parking lot for a plate of nachos from the Sony commissary, I would come back just for the thrill.”
As a practical matter, some former champions admire the endurance of contestants who can stand onstage, day after day, and keep racking up victories and money. There has been much speculation about the surprising number of recent winning streaks, from grumblings that the clues are easier (producers scoff at this idea) to the fact that with countless online “Jeopardy!” resources to study ahead of time, such as the in-depth J! Archive site, players are simply more prepared than ever.
“People who have made these multi-show runs have constitutions, in my opinion, that can handle that,” said Leah Greenwald, a 1988 five-day winner. “I do not feel that I could have been a contender. I do not have any illusions in that respect...and I have complete peace in my life.”
Dan Melia, who won $75,600 in 1997, isn’t sure how he would have done if his streak continued, but does remember he tried to call his parents between games and forgot their area code. “My brain was really fried … to me, that’s the amazing thing about people who do these multiple games. To focus that long is really mentally tiring.”
He has no regrets about his length of time on the show: “It’s like lengthening the baseball season, and then people start hitting more home runs than Babe Ruth,” he said. “It’s whatever the conditions are when you’re there.”
Even those like Beraru, from the first season, who confess it’s difficult to watch others triumph so spectacularly, are still comforted by the fact that they have a place in “Jeopardy!” lore.
“Like I tell people,” she said, “there are some who won more money and won for longer, but no one else will ever be the first. That, nobody can take away from me.”
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Creativity may be key to healthy aging. Here are ways to stay inspired.
Singer Andy Steinfeldt explains his handstand push-up technique to a group of fifth-graders at Groveland Elementary School in Minnetonka, Minn. Steinfeldt keeps his creativity flowing through travel, exercise and motivational speaking about his resilience after prostate cancer. (Grace Mevissen)
July 12, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
If you’re interested in staying healthy as you age — and living longer — you might want to add a different set of muscles to your workout routine: your creative ones. Ongoing research suggests that creativity may be key to healthy aging. Studies show that participating in activities such as singing, theater performance and visual artistry could support the well-being of older adults, and that creativity, which is related to the personality trait of openness, can lead to greater longevity.
When researchers talk about creativity, they aren’t limiting it to the arts. Author and Georgetown University psychiatrist Norman Rosenthal defines being creative as “having the ability to make unexpected connections, either to see commonplace things in new ways — or unusual things that escape the attention of others — and realize their importance.”
James C. Kaufman focuses on “everyday creativity” when teaching his introduction to creativity course at the University of Connecticut. The phrase, which comes from creativity expert Ruth Richards, refers to ordinary tasks such as parenting, yard landscaping or advising a friend.
Kaufman believes anyone can be creative. “Creativity can be cultivated by following passions both old and new,” he said. “Try not to compare yourself to genius creators or be so focused on the outcome that the process stops being fun.” In addition to Kaufman, I talked with other experts and people known for creative longevity to learn the best ways to keep ideas coming over the decades.
Think — and travel — outside the box
“People who travel tend to be more creative,” said Darya Zabelina, a psychology professor at the University of Arkansas. Traveling encourages people to reexamine their models of reality, Zabelina said. Some studies show that travelers have more creative success, and people who enjoy unfamiliar experiences perform better on divergent thinking tests, open-ended questions calling for numerous ideas. Performance on these tests differs from IQ and may predict aspects of real-world creativity.
Writer Naomi Shihab Nye, 69, of San Antonio calls herself a “wandering poet.” Through extensive travel, she’s become more observant, writing about the parallels she sees among different cultures in her work, which includes novels, young adult fiction, picture books, songwriting and poetry. “It’s utterly important to keep exposing yourself to experiences to be less rigid and judgmental,” said Nye, who received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.
Singer Andy Steinfeldt, 73, records songs in the languages of the countries he’s visited — seven tongues so far. “You get ideas from other cultures you don’t get here in the Midwest,” said the Minnesotan, a retired businessman.
Any novel stimulation, not just world travel, can benefit creativity. Nye has a broad “appetite for difference,” seeking out interactions with people of varying ages and backgrounds. Kentucky poet Gregory Welch enjoys “opposite days.” When he turns his routines upside-down for 24 hours, new perspectives pop into his head.
Morning people can try focusing on creative solutions at night (and vice versa). Research indicates that people do better at creative problem-solving, as opposed to more analytical challenges such as memory questions, at their non-optimal times, when inhibition is lower.
Letting your mind wander helps, too. Many highly creative people make time for idle thoughts unrelated to specific tasks. This engages the mind’s “default mode network,” brain regions that facilitate the imagination. Although mind-wandering seems to decrease with age, it can be nurtured. One way is to practice free association. Nye recommends “poetry therapy”: leafing through a poetry book for appealing lines, then free-writing. “You’ll come up with interesting thoughts you didn’t have before,” she said.
Another tip: Be playful, even childlike. Research shows that adults excel at divergent thinking tests after pretending they’re 7 years old. That’s the habit of Ashley Bryan, a Maine artist who will turn 98 on July 13. In 1962, he was the first Black American to publish a children’s book as both author and illustrator. “Each day,” he told me in an email, “I look forward to finding the child in myself who’s anxious to create something new and wonderful.”
Apply knowledge
Generating ideas is one part of the creativity equation, but knowledge is required to identify the ones that will work. Here, some older people thrive. Even if mental speed declines, a person’s base of knowledge is well-preserved as it expands over time, enabling greater intuition and pattern recognition.
“You have more to draw on,” said Nye, who thinks her creativity improved in her 60s. Anita Archer, a 74-year-old Oregonian and education researcher who has designed groundbreaking curriculums for 54 years, agrees. “You collect information, and then you create beyond that.” Kaufman, the psychologist, points to Clint Eastwood’s lifelong moviemaking. “ ‘Unforgiven’ was a statement about westerns that a 25-year-old movie director couldn’t make.”
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But knowledge doesn’t spawn creativity if it’s sealed in a vacuum. Psychologists find that “cross-training” is important; successful opera composers, for example, experiment with non-operatic genres to make their compositions more unusual. And especially creative scientists pursue multiple lines of research within an area.
Likewise, forming atypical collaborations may push your preconceptions, enhancing creativity, whether with lab experiments or home cooking recipes. But straying far could be detrimental. Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State, found that economists who won the Nobel Prize later in life were creative synthesizers of information they accumulated in one area over a long time. “If you’re jumping around,” Weinberg said, “there’s less opportunity to do that.”
Sixteen years ago, Rosenthal, the Georgetown University psychiatrist, who’s known for pioneering the use of light therapy for seasonal affective disorder, felt his creativity slumping. At 55, he had promising ideas for more books, particularly one about the healing powers of poetry, but couldn’t decide how to write them. “It was only when I started meditation that my ideas flourished,” he said.
Since then, he’s penned several books, including “Poetry Rx” and others on meditation. In Rosenthal’s study of 600 meditators, 83 percent told him they’ve become more creative. Meditation also had a significant effect on creativity in three studies involving 362 students in Taiwan.
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Most of the older creatives interviewed for this story reported meditating. Research suggests it strengthens the executive function of the brain, helping to prune out ideas that won’t work. And by reducing stress, meditation may embolden strategic risk-taking, another element of creative success, according to Rosenthal’s anecdotal research.
He also believes that meditation cultivates what psychologists call “field independence,” using your own compass to problem-solve without being overly influenced by others. Developing this quality was key for Valerie Trueblood to break through as a fiction writer at 63. As a younger adult, she said in an email, she sometimes tailored her work to editors’ expectations, before becoming truer to her vision. Now 77, she feels a “freeing indifference to the literary zeitgeist.”
Mine adversity
People who score highly on the trait of openness to experience seem to respond more creatively to adversity, including the pandemic. Zausner believes that people have more personal growth when they use creativity to confront and process their pain and fear. “Allowing our feelings to come up lets us move forward with life,” she said.
This was true for Bryan, the author and illustrator, who was rejected from art school because of his race and faced racism as a soldier in World War II. “Each challenge allowed me to use art to help me understand what I was experiencing,” he said, “turning adversity into triumph.”
Stay strong and motivated
Just as creativity can enhance health, being strong in mind and body can enhance creativity. Kaufman suggests activities such as Sudoku to keep the brain sharp, which “helps you hold onto creativity longer.” Steinfeldt is a punster — “not stupid dad puns,” he assured me — who competed onstage at the Pun-Off World Championships in Austin. Recently, he took first-year French and Italian courses with University of Minnesota freshmen.
Regular exercise increases stamina, which is necessary for generating many ideas. Unsurprisingly, my interviewees don’t just go to the gym. Steinfeldt strives to break Guinness records; he can hold a reverse plank with 100 pounds on his back for 2 minutes, 15 seconds (the record for any age is 1 minute, 32 seconds). He organized a media event — building on his business and marketing background — for his “strength endurance trifecta,” a blur of handstand push-ups and planks, hoping to inspire others to try it.
Staying motivated is also key to creative longevity. Steinfeldt is giving back to younger generations with motivational speaking about his resilience after prostate cancer. Trueblood, the novelist, is motivated to continue writing, because it helps her make meaning of her life and the death of loved ones. “Death is a great inspirer,” she said.
The relationship goes both ways; being creative is sometimes motivation enough. After a pandemic absence, Bryan, the illustrator, is returning to his studio on Little Cranberry Island in Maine. As his 98th birthday approaches, “I always have ideas whirling in my head,” he said. “My passion for being creative will never cease.”
Matt Fuchs lives in Silver Spring, Md., and writes about health and culture. Follow him on Twitter.
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Day 1 produced a slight hint of something not quite right. A mini wave of nausea caused me to notice that I was sneezing quite a bit and ripping through a box of tissues. I had thought it was only the lingering effects of the weekend’s ice storm — and life in an elderly house (c. 1827) that requires an indoor coat in winter. I think of home, appropriately, as a large wine cooler.
How did I catch it? That’s the riddle of our time, especially if, like me, you’ve had your three shots and typically wear a mask in public. Additionally, and testament to my not-so-latent obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I hold my breath if closer than six feet to another human until I can scoot away. A bird’s-eye view of my erratic path through a grocery store would look like a drunk rat trying to resolve an inscrutable maze.
The downside to this argument is that not everyone has been vaccinated, and many of those folks could get sick and possibly die. But really, whose fault is that? If you want to survive covid, there’s only one clear option: Get the shots and cheat the reaper. Evidence is overwhelming that people with covid who are unvaccinated are much more likely to be hospitalized.
If you’ve followed all the rules, good for you — and me. If all else fails and you feel as though you might be getting sick, try to make the best of it. Charge your batteries, stockpile some easy edibles and notify your butler(s) that their services may be required. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: There can be no ‘both sides’ on voting rights
Demonstrators hold signs during a protest at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg News)
Toward the end of President Biden’s nearly two-hour news conference on Wednesday, a reporter, acknowledging that schools are opening, raised the possibility that Republicans will “weaponize” the school-closing narrative by accusing the president “and other leading Democrats [of] allowing them to stay closed in the midterms next year and that ... issue has a lot of traction with suburban parents.”
To which Biden responded: “What do you mean ‘allowing’? I’m confused by the question.”
As well Biden should have been. There is not one shred of evidence of Biden arguing to keep schools closed. In fact, the president spent the opening of the news conference making just the opposite case.
Surely the reporter posing the so-called Republican attack narrative must also have heard Biden say, “We’re not going back — we’re not going back to lockdowns. We’re not going back to closing schools. Schools should stay open.”
I heard Biden say, and so must have his interlocutor, that “because of the American Rescue Plan, we provided the states $130 billion — $130 billion to keep our students and educators safe and schools open: funding for ventilation systems in schools, social distancing, hygiene for classrooms and the school buses. In addition, we’ve added another $10 billion for covid-19 tests to be able to be administered at schools.”
And Biden went on: “I encourage the states and school districts that use the funding to protect our children and keep their schools open: Use it.”
None of that seems to have mattered. Using the news conference to raise the prospect of partisan political conflict appears to have driven the question.
The exchange must have stayed with Biden — as it did me — because he came back to it minutes later in a cautious reflection. “I’ve had a couple — well, I shouldn’t get into this,” he said at one point.
“Again, I’m no expert in any of this,” Biden said. “But the fact is, I think you have to acknowledge that what gets covered now is necessarily a little bit different than what gets covered in the past.”
He added: “The nature of the way things get covered — and this is my observation over the years I’ve been involved in public life — [has] changed. And it’s changed because of everything from a thing called the Internet.” Biden said coverage has “changed because of the way in which we have self-identified perspectives based on what channel you turn on, what — what network you look at.”
I would add coverage has changed based upon the news media’s perception of the viewing and reading public’s tastes: Hail the victors; bash the vanquished.
Biden’s news conference was filled with questions about the covid-19 pandemic and testing, inflation and failures — to date — to pass his Build Back Better plan and voting rights reforms. Timely, important? Yes. And heavily laden with redundant queries? Yes.
But let’s pause to consider the amount and extent to which the Biden administration was drawing around-the-clock, blow-by-blow reporting on problems in September that were far from the mind on Inauguration Day.
The Haitian migrant crisis on the southern border, schisms within the Democratic Party that threatened Biden’s plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, a rupture with the French over a new U.S.-U.K.-Australia defense pact, the Afghanistan pullout, the possibility of a government shutdown, and the prospect of Congress failing to raise the government’s debt ceiling and the international financial calamity to which that might lead.
Those breathlessly told stories described challenges that emerge on a president’s watch. They come with the territory. How they are met and handled either immediately or over the long haul are the questions that matter most.
Trying to tell readers and viewers whether Biden is winning or losing on a given issue, or what he and his opponents are saying about one another — the practice of horse-race-style journalism — takes away from what’s really at stake for the public. But that’s what we have come to be subjected to.
A Post headline Thursday morning read: “In final clash, voting rights bill fails in Senate.” The only thing “final” was an effort in the current session to counter Republican state legislative schemes to make it harder for voters unlike themselves to exercise their hard-won right to vote and have their votes counted. Voting rights advocates now point to the midterm elections and the need to send more voting rights supporters to Congress. More roll calls to come.
It was, indeed, sad to read “Democrats contend the legislation is needed to counter changes … that they argue will make voting more difficult, particularly in minority communities.” Voter suppression is not a matter of “argument.” It’s a fact. Republican legislatures are wittingly enacting measures with the intent of making voting harder for likely Democratic voters — mostly Blacks and other racial minorities — to cast ballots. There’s no “both sides” case here. Race matters today, as it always has in the United States.
And don’t attribute the opposition of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and his united GOP to backlash. That suggests “reaction.” Call it what it is: resistance to Black suffrage — a resistance as old as the poll tax, the noose, Jim Crow and Southern-led filibusters. Closing polling locations, purging voting rolls, limiting early voting and voting by mail, and creating unnecessarily long voting lines are as malicious in intent as literacy tests.
Despite Republican obstruction, voting rights protections are not dead. That’s the danger of horse-race journalism — “the way things get covered” that Biden talked about. Despite what’s “reported” in the news, the fight, beyond doubt, goes on. Just don’t look for it in the news out of Washington. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: What happens after omicron? Hard decisions about vaccines.
Health-care workers in D.C. prepare to administer a coronavirus booster shot on Jan. 18. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Vaccines are the answer to the pandemic, but not a perfect answer. They protect against serious illness and death, but efficacy can wane and new virus variants emerge that are more difficult to combat. A big question hanging over the pandemic and over vaccines is: What happens after omicron?
The uncertainty is on display in Israel, which rolled out the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine early on. Israeli officials concluded that the first booster — the third shot — had done a good job against the delta variant last year. With the omicron wave, Israel decided to offer a second Pfizer booster, or fourth shot, to people over 60, those with compromised immune systems and health-care workers.
When the campaign launched this month, early signs were promising, with reports of higher antibodies. But on Jan. 17, the lead researcher of a study on the second booster at Sheba Medical Center, Gili Regev-Yochay, announced it wasn’t much better than the first, when confronting omicron. “Despite a significant increase in antibodies after the fourth vaccine, this protection is only partially effective against the omicron strain, which is relatively resistant to the vaccine.” She added, “Maybe there are a few more antibodies but not much more compared to the third dose.” The study is tracking 154 health-care workers at the center who got the booster two weeks before. The second booster did not prevent infection, she reported. No data was released, and the results are preliminary, but the announcement suggests the pandemic won’t be ended by simply repeating booster shots. In the United States, uptake of the first booster is only 42 percent of the fully vaccinated over 18 years old. Would the public accept another? It is simply not feasible to boost the world every five months.
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The mRNA vaccines can be reformulated, and Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, said Jan. 10 a new vaccine will be ready in March aimed at omicron as well as the other variants. A switch to an omicron vaccine raises a host of questions. Will the omicron variant still be prevalent when the shot is ready? If a switch is made to a new vaccine, will it take away from production of current vaccines? What shots should be used for people who have previously been vaccinated and those who have not? The decision to switch is high-stakes; another variant could easily emerge, leading to another switch. There’s a real need for a more global process to guide companies about what vaccines to make and when to switch — both the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization seem to have grasped this.
Ultimately, in chasing variants, we are always going to be behind the curve. Along with the immediate battle with omicron, renewed effort must be made to develop next-generation vaccines that will provide broader and longer protection and dampen transmission. Ideally, scientists will develop a universal coronavirus vaccine that encompasses all of these characteristics, capable of protecting against many — or all — known variants. That day cannot come soon enough. | null | null | null | null | null |
In Venezuela, a soldier can be sent to prison for being gay. The courts could change that.
Soldiers guard a polling station during an election do-over on Jan. 9 to determine the governor of Barinas, Venezuela. (Matias Delacroix/AP)
By Ana Vanessa Herrero
CARACAS, Venezuela — On an early morning in 2013, a soldier alerted a supervisor that a comrade had left his post. He had seen him getting into a red car with a man “who looked gay,” prosecutors said in court documents.
A sergeant rushed to the car, ordered the soldier to return to his post and grabbed the other man’s ID card. Officials later collected forensic evidence from the scene and ordered the soldier to lower his pants, looking for proof that the two men had had sex.
The soldier was convicted of abandonment of service and “sexual acts against nature.” He was sentenced to almost two years in prison and banned from the military for life. The prosecutor, who repeatedly quoted soldiers using derogatory words for gay men, deemed his actions “dishonorable,” “unseemly” and “unworthy” of the military.
Nearly a decade after that arrest, and more than 10 years after the United States repealed its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Venezuela continues to prohibit gay sexual activity between service members, punishable by one to three years in prison. The article in the military code of justice makes the socialist nation one of the last countries in Latin America to criminalize homosexuality.
Now, for the first time, Venezuela’s highest court has announced it will weigh the constitutionality of the law. The decision of the Supreme Court of Justice comes five years after the advocacy group Egalitarian Venezuela filed a lawsuit asking it to repeal the provision.
“It’s a fight for a social transformation,” said Giovanni Piermattei, the organization’s president, “that perhaps we will eliminate that stigma, the belief that we’re less male, less female or less courageous.”
Venezuela’s Supreme Court of Justice is not an independent judicial body. Critics argue the court is an instrument of President Nicolás Maduro, and that its decisions are routinely manipulated. José Manuel Simons, one of the lawyers who brought the case in 2016, argued this was why it took the court five years to decide to take up the issue. He doesn’t expect a ruling that in any way condemns the military. But the court’s judges have voted to expand some gay rights in the past, and Simons said he felt confident they would rule in favor of repealing the article.
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Egalitarian Venezuela launched the action in 2016 after finding the article in a section of the code under the heading “cowardice and other crimes against military decorum.”
Problems with Venezuela’s judicial database in the years since, amid the country’s economic collapse, make it difficult to know how many people have faced criminal charges or jail time. But lawyers and advocates say members of the armed forces received criminal sentences for gay activity until 2016.
Court documents publicly identify gay service members by name, identification number and address. They describe invasive medical exams to determine whether suspects had sex.
In the 2013 case of the soldier caught in the red car in Miranda state, prosecutors quote a course book on Venezuelan military criminal law, which itself cites a 1951 U.S. Senate report entitled “Employment of homosexuals and other sexual perverts by the Government.” A Senate subcommittee, writing during the Cold War effort to crack down on U.S. federal employees suspected of being gay, argued that gay people and “other sex perverts” are “generally unsuitable” for employment and “constitute security risks.”
Repealing the article from the military’s code of justice would mean the end of penalization of LGBTQ people in Venezuela, Simons said.
“It would tell a lot of people it’s not against nature, it’s not a sin to be LGBT,” Simons said. “And any person, even if you don’t like the military … can participate and form a part of the state without feeling that they’ll be discriminated against for being who they are.”
It would also send a powerful message in a country that has been highly militarized since the rise of paratrooper-turned-strongman Hugo Chávez, and where the armed forces continue to wield far-reaching authority. Under Maduro, Chávez’s successor, key sectors of the country’s crumbling economy have fallen under control of the military, which now manages the distribution of food and raw materials and the national oil company.
“The majority of political forces are now related to the armed forces,” Simons said. “If the armed forces don’t allow LGBT people … this discrimination is going to repeat itself.”
Representatives from Venezuela’s military did not respond to a request for comment. The law continues to receive support from some conservative members of Venezuela’s Congress.
“I think we must preserve the values that have until now maintained our armed forces … those that have to do with moral character,” said Javier Bertucci, an evangelical pastor and former presidential candidate. “The preferences of a minority shouldn’t be imposed on the majority.”
In September, the National Assembly reformed the military code, banning trials of civilians by military criminal courts. But the assembly, the majority of which supports Maduro, left the “sexual acts against nature” article untouched.
The judicial system has been asked to weigh the issue before, according to a person with direct knowledge of the case, but it has declined because many judges fear going against the powerful military elite.
“Their power relies on the absolute control of weapons and the sources of illegal and legal economy in the country,” said Rocío San Miguel, a military analyst based in Caracas.
Some gay former service members told The Washington Post their families pressured them to enlist as a form of conversion therapy. They say they joined an institution that made it clear people like them were not welcome. Some were kicked out. Others chose to leave, fed up with a culture of homophobia and harassment or threatened with criminal charges.
“My mom always felt that what I had was a mental problem,” said Juan, a former member of Venezuela’s National Guard in Caracas. He spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld out of fear he might still be charged.
Juan’s mother hoped the military could change him, he said. After joining the National Guard at 17, he kept his identity a secret for a dozen years — until his supervisors started having suspicions. At one point, a fellow service member told Juan he had been ordered to investigate whether he was gay. The investigator admitted that he, too, was gay.
When Juan was ordered to report to a prosecutor’s office for questioning, he fled the country.
When Alexander Álvarez joined the army in 2018, he also kept his sexuality private. But after a female soldier pursued him romantically, he confided the reason he wasn’t interested. Then one night during roll call, the woman blurted out to all assembled that Álvarez was gay.
A commander called Álvarez into his office and told him he could leave the army, if he wanted. “He told me that with this condition, I couldn’t be there,” said Álvarez, now 21.
Álvarez chose to stay, to prove to his commanders and fellow soldiers that he wouldn’t buckle to their pressure — “that even though I was gay I could endure the same as them,” he said. “I was still a man.”
But for the next six months, he said, he was constantly bullied. His supervisors would hover behind him at meal times, refusing to let him eat. His fellow soldiers stole his food and hid his belongings. Ultimately, he decided to leave — and to flee the country for Colombia.
Yeremi Moreno, now a chef in Spain, said she felt constant discrimination for being gay, and pressure to tell her superiors if others in her battalion were gay. A supervisor said she had to, Moreno said, “because they couldn’t allow gay people in the armed forces.”
Moreno said she was prevented from eating with the rest of the troops. Instead, she was isolated in a different room. She was followed on her days off by service members who took pictures of her in gay bars. After one night out, she was detained for 72 hours. She retired from the military a decade ago, shortly after coming out.
Amelia Valecillos joined the army when she was 16 in the hopes of starting a stable career. The military, she said, made her feel like she was “capable of achieving something good.”
She ended up falling in love with a female comrade. They exchanged love letters; she hid the notes in her closet.
Her commanders discovered the relationship. They pressured her to confess she was a lesbian by threatening to tell her family. She would be awakened in the middle of the night and forced to stand until dawn. Sometimes she went a week without any sleep. “That’s what you get for being a dyke,” they told her.
After months of pressure, in 2005, she was sent home. She never heard from the other woman again.
“I just learned that she was kicked out like me,” Valecillos said, “for the same reason.”
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Erin Gemmell captures four medals as Stone Ridge swimming wins second straight ISL championship
The Gators were pushed by Holton-Arms but pulled away at the end of the meet
Stone Ridge juniors Erin Gemmell, left, and Lauren Tucker after the team's victory at the ISL swim championships. (Spencer Nusbaum)
There weren’t any fans permitted at Friday’s Independent School League championship, a sharp change for a meet that often features some of the area’s — and occasionally the country’s — top swimmers. But the makeup of the top team, Stone Ridge, gave an air of familiarity to an event that was back on after being canceled in 2021.
The Gators sported plenty of depth and one powerhouse swimmer. This year, that was Erin Gemmell.
The junior, who is also a member of the U.S. national junior team, shepherded Stone Ridge (362 points) to its second consecutive title over second-place Holton-Arms (334 points), with the two teams winning each of Friday’s 11 events.
While a handful of future Division I athletes raced beside Gemmell on Friday, she reaffirmed her dominance as an Olympic hopeful with four overall medals and two first-place individual finishes, in the 50- and 100-yard freestyle, reminiscent of recent Stone Ridge alumni Katie Ledecky and Phoebe Bacon.
Gemmell’s time in the 50 free (22.73), was just .04 seconds off the league meet record and almost a full second ahead of the second-place finisher. Gemmell scored a signature moment for herself and her teammates, who donned cowboy hats poolside.
“I actually love feeling a little bit of stress before a race,” Gemmell said, “because I know that it makes me swim faster.”
Historically, at least three teams usually enter the championship meet with an outside shot at a top-two finish. This year, no other school besides Stone Ridge and Holton-Arms topped 100 points, creating an atmosphere where the two programs were also responsible for amassing the most noise.
“Usually the rest of our school and spectators come out, but the energy was really fun and exciting,” said Stone Ridge junior Lauren Tucker, who won the 500 free.
Those two squads couldn’t have gotten much louder than they did during the penultimate event, when Stone Ridge freshman Cameron House, the youngest winner of the day, came back from an early-race deficit to set a meet record (1:05.07) and secure a split-second victory over a Holton junior.
“People handle pressure differently,” Stone Ridge Coach Bob Walker said. “Her mom and dad were swimmers; she’s a swimmer. … ‘Pressure’ isn’t probably a word that comes up in the house.”
Holton, which had won six of the previous nine titles, was led by senior Sophie Duncan, who captured individual wins in the 100 fly (54.95) and 200 individual medley (2:01.56, a meet record). Duncan, an Olympic trials qualifier, will swim at Stanford next year.
Duncan received support from teammate Courtney Watts, whose .09 second victory in the 100 backstroke tightened the score with just two races remaining. But House’s win created separation for Stone Ridge, and a league-record time in the 400 free relay (3:28.59) capped a championship day for the Gators. | null | null | null | null | null |
Junior forward Donta Scott, who wasn’t part of the starting lineup for the first time, scored a career-high 25 points, 15 coming in a dominant second half that saw Maryland finish the game on a 24-7 run. The exclamation point was Hakim Hart’s dunk in the closing seconds. Soon after, Fatts Russell was screaming toward the ceiling of Xfinity Center and the Terrapins (10-9, 2-6 Big Ten) were celebrating perhaps their biggest home win of the season.
“It’s big for us because it gives us confidence,” Scott said. “It instills that we may have lost a lot of games early on, but the season isn’t over. As long as you’ve still got a game ahead of you, you’ve always still got that fight left in you.”
Illinois (13-5, 6-2), without the 7-foot Cockburn in the paint, committed to its outside shooting, making 11 of 35 attempts from beyond the arc. The Illini were led by Alfonso Plummer, who recorded 18 points, including 5 of 11 from three-point range, but scored just four in the second half.
The Terps exploited the void left by Cockburn, and they controlled the paint, where they outscored the Illini 40-16. Maryland hardly needed three-point shooting, going just 4 of 11 from deep as it built a comfortable lead. The Illini went the final 5:03 without a field goal.
Georgetown transfer Qudus Wahab, a former All-Met at Flint Hill, was an early beneficiary of Cockburn’s absence. Wahab scored 11 points in just 16 minutes on 5-of-7 shooting with four rebounds.
Reese, who spelled Wahab after the big man exited, made a pair of three-pointers for the second straight game. His second, with 8:24 remaining, put Maryland up by a point when the contest was still tight. Reese finished with seven points in 23 minutes
Simon Wright, a graduate transfer who started 35 games through four years at Elon, received his first start as a Terp. He took the place of Scott, a three-year starter. In Wright’s previous 10 appearances, he averaged 3.4 minutes and 0.7 points.
Scott said he found out he wasn’t starting a few days ago. “When I played today and I got my first step on the court, my mind-set was just, do anything to get this win for my team,” Scott said.
The Terps relied on the same starting lineup through the first 16 games of the season, but lately, Manning has made some tweaks. He kept usual starters Hart and Russell out of the starting lineup at Michigan earlier this week. He described the decision as a way to “challenge” those veterans and noted that the coaches had reached a point where they were “going to push some buttons.”
“It’s our job as a staff to challenge our guys to not only do well off the court, as well as on the court,” Manning said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Junior forward Donta Scott, who wasn’t part of the starting lineup for the first time this season, scored a career-high 25 points, including 15 in a dominant second half that saw Maryland finish the game on a 24-7 run. The exclamation point was Hakim Hart’s dunk in the closing seconds. Soon after, Fatts Russell was screaming toward the ceiling of Xfinity Center and the Terrapins (10-9, 2-6 Big Ten) were celebrating perhaps their biggest home win of the season.
“It’s big for us because it gives us confidence,” Scott said. “It instills that we may have lost a lot of games early on but the season isn’t over. As long as you’ve still got a game ahead of you, you’ve always still got that fight left in you.”
Illinois (13-5, 6-2), without the 7-foot Cockburn in the paint, committed to its outside shooting, making 11 of 35 attempts from beyond the arc. The Illini were led by Alfonso Plummer, who recorded 18 points, including 5 for 11 from three-point range, but scored just four in the second half.
The Terps exploited the void left by Cockburn, and they controlled the paint, where they outscored the Illini 40-16. Maryland hardly needed three-point shooting, going just 4 for 11 as it built a comfortable lead. The Illini went the final 5:03 without a field goal.
Georgetown transfer Qudus Wahab, a former All-Met at Flint Hill, was an early beneficiary of Cockburn’s absence. Wahab scored 11 points in just 16 minutes on 5-for-7 shooting with four rebounds.
Reese, who spelled Wahab after the big man exited, made a pair of three-pointers for the second straight game. His second, with 8:24 remaining, put Maryland up by a point when the contest was still tight. Reese finished with seven points in 23 minutes.
Simon Wright, a graduate transfer who started 35 games in four years at Elon, received his first start as a Terp. He took the place of Scott, a three-year starter. In Wright’s previous 10 appearances, he averaged 3.4 minutes and 0.7 points.
Scott said he found out he wasn’t starting a few days ago. “When I played today and I got my first step on the court, my mind-set was just do anything to get this win for my team,” Scott said.
The Terps relied on the same starting lineup in the first 16 games of the season, but lately Manning has made some tweaks. He kept usual starters Hart and Russell out of the starting lineup at Michigan this week. He described the decision as a way to “challenge” those veterans and noted that the coaches had reached a point that they were “going to push some buttons.”
“It’s our job as a staff to challenge our guys to not only do well off the court as well as on the court,” Manning said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Many Ukrainians wouldn’t favor a pro-Russian leader — but would the U.S. support an anti-Russian insurgency?
A service member of the Ukrainian armed forces walks along combat positions near the line of separation from Russian-backed rebels near Horlivka in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Jan. 20. (Anna Kudriavtseva/Reuters)
By David A. Lake
In the event of a Russian incursion into Ukraine, what happens next? One report suggests the Biden administration would consider making Ukraine ungovernable by supporting and supplying arms to local resistance groups. Rather than using NATO forces to deter a Russian attack or openly allying with the Ukrainian government, the U.S. might support an indigenous resistance if Russia invades Ukraine.
If it took that route, the Biden administration would appear to be setting the stage for a repeat of U.S. support for another insurgency — one that led to the denouement of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark A. Milley have warned their Russian counterparts that any incursion would be followed by an insurgency. But it’s a policy with significant cost, and a move likely to leave a shattered country in its wake.
Russia’s strategy involves indirect rule
My research on indirect rule suggests Russia is unlikely to formally incorporate Ukraine (or any other former satellite) into some new version of the Soviet empire. While the port and naval facilities in the Crimea might have been worth seizing, the rest of the Ukraine is more symbolic than essential to Russia’s security and economy.
Rather than risk international opprobrium for terminating the sovereignty of a recognized member of the international community, a more likely scenario is that Moscow would seek to subvert the current government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and rule indirectly through a pro-Russian Ukrainian proxy, much as happened under another Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovych. To the extent that Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to block NATO’s expansion further to the east, this approach ensures pro-Russian leaders in the target countries would rebuff any Western invitations.
Russia’s strategy is a classic one of building spheres of influence through indirect rule. Though his motives are intentionally obscured, Putin is most likely seeking client regimes dependent on Russia — and willing to follow the Kremlin’s lead on foreign policy.
Great powers most often exert influence by tipping the political scales within a target country toward factions sympathetic to their own policy preferences. Once in power, the winning faction then enacts policies to benefit both itself and the great power behind its political victory.
Not all cases of indirect rule rely on direct military intervention. Russia’s intervention in Belarus in 2020 in support of Alexander Lukashenko and recent expedition in Kazakhstan in support of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev are extreme examples of indirect rule. Once Russia has secured a client in power who cannot survive on his own, compliance on foreign policy issues is likely to follow.
If these clients face domestic unrest, the great power will intervene to ensure their continued rule. A week ago in Kazakhstan, a brief intervention signaled Putin’s support for Tokayev — and helped quell widespread protests. Knowing that his regime survived only with Russia’s aid, Tokayev is now indebted to Moscow. Russia has employed this strategy elsewhere, including support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.
The U.S. has few options in Ukraine
If Russia plans to invade Ukraine to install a friendly government, then the United States is in a difficult position. Increased Western sanctions appear unlikely to dissuade Moscow. Banning Russia from the international financial network may hurt the Russian economy, but the anticipated pain has already been baked into Putin’s political calculus.
With direct military action against any Russian incursion in Ukraine apparently off the table, the Biden administration appears to have conceded that it won’t defend the territory. In building up its own military forces, Russia is demonstrating greater resolve.
Alternatively, my research suggests the U.S. might continue to support its own client regime in Ukraine against one backed by Russia. But a “bidding war” — with the U.S. supporting Zelensky while Russia supports a contender — would become costly, with both superpowers spending huge amounts of money and effort to offset one another with little effect on the relative strength of the two contestants. Here, too, Russia now appears to have greater resolve and is likely to outbid the United States.
Would the U.S. help make Ukraine “ungovernable?”
Recent reports suggest the Biden administration may be discussing another strategy — making Ukraine or any other potential pro-Russian client difficult for Moscow to control. If the U.S. supports domestic resistance in Ukraine, Moscow might eventually decide that maintaining a friendly government in Ukraine is not worth the cost in blood and treasure.
A pro-Russian leader would be unpopular to many Ukrainians, particularly in the western regions of the country. The loss of their democracy, political freedoms and economic ties to the West would likely leave large portions of the population alienated and aggrieved — and perhaps more inclined to support an insurgency against a proxy government.
Providing military and other aid to pro-Western groups within Ukraine would involve relatively low costs — and, some Biden officials might argue, ensure that no pro-Russian leader can consolidate authority. This would shift U.S. policy from supporting a government in Ukraine or elsewhere to simply backing whatever groups or rebels seem likely to make life miserable for a Russia-backed ruler.
In this scenario, U.S. aid to insurgents would likely raise the costs to Russia of supporting its proxy. Moscow might then need to support the leader militarily, by supplying arms and potentially “volunteer” troops — as well as subsidize the economy, most likely with cheap natural gas already shipped through the country. The U.S. hope in this scenario would be to weaken any regime and raise the costs to Moscow sufficiently that it abandons its proxy and goes home, much as happened in the Soviet Union’s failed attempt in Afghanistan or in Washington’s “endless wars.”
The downside of this strategy, of course, is its very prospects for success. Following former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rule, the United States might find itself cleaning up the pieces of a broken Ukraine — much along the lines of what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. That would leave Washington, if it’s unwilling to take on another near-impossible task, little choice but to live with a new pro-Russian Ukraine.
David A. Lake is Gerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is completing a book on U.S. indirect rule. | null | null | null | null | null |
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Tennessee Titans will have Derrick Henry on the field for their AFC divisional game with Cincinnati after moving the NFL’s 2019 and 2020 rushing leader from injured reserve to the active roster.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Dale Earnhardt Jr. was voted NASCAR’s most popular driver a record 15 times. He didn’t forget “Junior Nation” on his way into the Hall of Fame.
LA QUINTA, Calif. — Patrick Cantlay fought through gusting wind on his back nine to take a one-stroke lead into the weekend at The American Express in a bid to win for the third time in four starts.
NEW YORK — Hall of Famer Clark Gillies, a stalwart on the New York Islanders’ dynasty that won four straight Stanley Cup championships in the early 1980s, has died. He was 67. | null | null | null | null | null |
The new ‘Scream’ swings at two targets and misses: Horror films and Hollywood
Here’s why the best film in the franchise is actually 'Scream 3′
Ghostface in a scene from “Scream.” (AP)
Kyle Turner is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
By the time audiences hear a landline ring at the beginning of the new “Scream” movie, most viewers know what’s next: a voice at once seductive and menacing will quiz the unlucky person on the phone about scary movies. If they answer incorrectly (which, at some point, they always do), they’ll not only be killed, but also become, more often than not, the source of a news and media cycle that’ll spin out into the movie’s plot. It’s a scenario that’s so played out that these stories have spawned a meta-slasher franchise called “Stab” within the meta-slasher franchise that is the cinematic “Scream” universe. This is, in other words, a film about films about films, one that calls attention to its own longevity to perpetuate it.
To some degree, this all makes sense: The series, which started with the 1996 film directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, prides itself on its self-awareness. This new “Scream” follows a different group of teens, including Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) and her estranged sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega), as well as the trio from the original series in Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox) and Dewey (David Arquette). In returning to the roots of a franchise that originally satirized other horror franchises, it sloppily makes its ambivalence its subject. The story’s status as a “requel,” a clunky portmanteau of “sequel” and “reboot” that is coined in the film itself by Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), is introduced as both the dominant language of IP-driven movies and the motivation for the killer, who’s going after anyone related to characters from the first “Stab,” which is to say characters from the first “Scream.” It’s an anxiety spiral in a house of mirrors.
But while the new “Scream” laments Hollywood’s paltry offerings, it is ultimately an unusually hermetic text. It looks at itself more than it does at the culture that has allowed decaying properties to be constantly reanimated. It’s critical, yes, but only superficially so, never really challenging the trends and tendencies that make movies like this possible.
Going back to the movies should be fun. Instead it feels like a boring sequel.
To be fair, the solipsistic anxiety of “Scream” is not entirely uninteresting. At its best, it attempts to think about its own cinematic legacy as a kind of real lineage. Our new protagonist, Sam, is revealed to be the daughter of Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), one of the killers from the first film, and she sees visions of him, drenched in blood, in the mirror, like the new film literally looking its predecessor in the eye.
But that’s all this “Scream” ever really does: contemplate its own reflections, as if in an infinity mirror. It makes passing digs at “elevated horror” like “Get Out” and “The Babadook,” but never really has much to say about what the appeal of such films tells us about the industry that produces them or the audiences that consume them. Instead, it directs its ire toward entitled, toxic fans, low-hanging fruit and thin as an object of critique, especially given the sloppy ways it tries to incorporate that into the movie. A YouTube video here, a comment from a character there. If “Scream” movies are reflections of the culture, this new one feels incomplete.
The subtext of these complaints, and of the film’s impaled tongue-in-cheek winks to itself and other contemporary scary movies (either “elevated” genre fare or reboots like the 2019 “Black Christmas”), is that filmmakers have ceded their own interest in original storytelling to the power of franchises. But “Scream” neither clarifies this idea nor sits with this idea, favoring hacky complaints about fan culture over a real interrogation of the industry that feeds fans what they want. It presumes nostalgia drives media consumption, never really considering the thing that the “Scream” franchise has always known: that there’s real horror to be found in the way that our senses of self can be wrenched from us by mass media corporations, to be copied and replicated in ways beyond our grasp or control.
Five myths about Hollywood
Where the new film falls short, the most interesting engagement with these problems is in the franchise’s most dismissed film, “Scream 3.” Set primarily in Hollywood on the set of “Stab 3,” the film conceives of a Hollywood that’s not only bankrupt of ideas, but sets out intentionally to drain the same idea of every last drop of blood. While the new “Scream” whines about the film industry from afar, “Scream 3” shows the audience just how barren, creatively and morally, it can really be.
While “Scream” tenuously connects its younger cast to its older cast, “Scream 3” embraces the ironic and uncanny: In it, character actors (including Parker Posey and Emily Mortimer) play character actors (with names like Jennifer Jolie and Angelina Tyler), and have them play Sidney, Gale and Dewey from the first film. It’s a clever bit that allows “Scream 3” to luxuriate in mocking desperate performers, while also saving its most cutting observations for the dysfunctional institution itself.
The new “Scream,” by contrast, has nothing to say about consumer choice and its manipulation by executives, since it’s barely able to square why franchise movies and “elevated horror” can potentially engage the same viewer. It’s so concerned with its own universe that it forgets that its universe was crafted from the cloth of our real one.
While the third act of “Scream” takes place at the same house as the first film’s finale, it’s a gimmick that loses its conceptual excitement quickly. Okay, so it’s the same house as the original? And the new and old stars are there? So what? We’re supposed to congratulate the movie on its meta-self-reflexivity. But when that’s the only interesting thing it has to offer, it betrays its own stagnancy.
“Scream 3,” by contrast, gets the franchise’s second-best set piece, where Sidney is chased by Ghostface in a set of her old house. It’s a facsimile of the past, a replica of the home of her trauma, a personal house of horrors that’s been built for a movie series that continues to let her story run wild as a thrilling entertainment in perpetuity, never to tire of itself.
“Scream” isn’t the first of its series to have franchise fatigue and contemplate the problem of originality in a post-“Scream” world; that’s what the opening sequence of “Scream 4” bemoaned. “It’s been done to death,” snarls Anna Paquin. No wonder the newest “Scream” feels like a graveyard. We’ve been here before, and these bodies have long since been buried. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which had almost entirely kept the coronavirus out, went into lockdown on Saturday for the first time in the pandemic. The government imposed a 24-hour curfew after passengers on the first international flight in months tested positive.
Thirty-six people on a flight from Fiji tested positive upon landing about a week ago on the first plane to arrive since the nation reopened its borders this month. All 54 passengers were quarantined at a facility, but at least four cases were since reported in the community, including a security guard at the center.
American Samoa, which only detected its first infection in September, also announced a full lockdown for 48 hours starting Saturday after an uptick of 15 coronavirus cases that arrived on a flight from Australia.
In Kiribati, the president’s office said there was “now an assumption that covid-19″ was spreading in the community. “The only way that we could fight this virus is through complete vaccination,” it said. "It is critical that all work together to do our part in combating this pandemic.”
About 90 percent of the population has received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine and 53 percent has had two shots, according to Radio Kiribati, citing official data. The national radio station said the Fiji flight was chartered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
With a population of nearly 120,000, Kiribati lies between Australia and Hawaii, about a four-hour flight from Fiji. The nearest continent, North America, is thousands of miles away. Travelers to Kiribati must show proof of vaccination and negative test results before departure, along with quarantining for two weeks on arrival.
Many remote islands have maintained “zero covid” policies and imposed lengthy travel bans during the pandemic. The small size of Pacific Island nations has in some ways helped ward off the virus, with many able to shut their borders and some vaccinating the population quickly, although for others, it also meant they lacked the public health infrastructure to deal with a large-scale outbreak. | null | null | null | null | null |
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, now less than two weeks off, are perhaps the surest example yet that the IOC is an athletes-last organization. It is staging these Games in China — the second Olympics in that country in 15 years — despite China’s record of, among other atrocities, forced labor, torture and arbitrary detention against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region in the country’s northwest. On that, the IOC is and has been silent for years.
“I think athletes are distracted and concerned while still trying to remain focused, based on the ones we’ve spoken to,” said Rob Koehler, the director general of Global Athlete. “And the IOC has really done nothing to minimize or relieve those concerns based on a lack of reaction, a lack of public statements to assure athletes will be fully protected. … It reinforces what we’ve had concerns with for a long time: The IOC favors stakeholders and rights holders over athletes’ safety and well-being.”
Keep that in mind as the Games dance across your television screen. Without the athletes, there is no product. Yet the athletes are at the bottom of the IOC’s food chain. Global Athlete helped produce a study that reports the IOC generates $1.4 billion in revenue annually. A full 90 percent is distributed to either national Olympic committees around the globe or the international federations that oversee specific sports. Some 4.1 percent is funneled through those NOCs and IFs for athlete scholarships, grants and performance incentives. The revenue going directly to athletes: 0.5 percent.
Which leaves the IOC exposed — again — as an organization that pursues finances first and finances last. Keep in mind that these Games are in Beijing because bids originally submitted by Oslo, Stockholm and Krakow were withdrawn because of a lack of public and political support in Norway, Sweden and Poland, respectively. That’s solid thinking by the people and leaders of those cities and countries, because hosting Olympics is almost invariably lousy for the people of the host city. It’s a shame, though, because think how differently the athletes might feel if the Olympic flame made its way into a chilly stadium in Oslo rather than Beijing. Take a photo of that moment with the phone you’ve had all year, not some burner you’ve been issued so your private missives aren’t screened. | null | null | null | null | null |
Richard Fuller, 45, shovels a sidewalk in Norfolk, Va., on Saturday Jan. 22, 2022. A winter storm left as much of six inches of snow in parts of coastal Virginia and North Carolina as well as ice further south in parts of North Carolina and South Carolina. (AP Photo/Ben Finley). (Ben Finley/ap) | null | null | null | null | null |
MILLSBORO, Del. — For Patti Seaman, the trip from Camden to Millsboro for a Wreaths Across America retirement ceremony Jan. 18 had family ties.
Her son, Jason Lee Diehl, who served with the U.S. Army during Operation Iraqi Freedom and died in a motorcycle accident at age 29 in October 2015, is among the veterans buried there.
“That is why I am here,” said Ms. Seaman. “I come down every year to place (a wreath). And this is the third year I’ve done the retirement. It is very relaxing out here, even on a day like this.”
Ms. Seaman was among the estimated 70 volunteers who bundled up and joined Delaware Veterans Memorial Cemetery staff and several Delaware National Guard members in the wreath retirement. It was the closing chapter of the successful 2021 Wreaths Across America campaign.
“Considering our numbers and the task at hand, I couldn’t have been happier,” said Teresa Townsend, the WAA location coordinator for the Millsboro cemetery.
The volunteers, some armed with rakes to expedite the decor’s removal, retrieved more than 3,500 wreaths that had blanketed every gravesite and columbarium since mid-December.
“It is very important to us,” said Dave Heffline, commander at AMVETS Post 2 in Long Neck. “There is nothing more important than the memory of the veterans. That’s why we are here. That’s what we do.”
Mr. Heffline was joined by several other Post 2 members.
“It has to be done, so our guys are here to do it,” he added.
Master Sgt. Waymon “Butch” Harmon also was on hand, representing the Delaware National Guard, many of whom have been deployed to hospitals and other prioritized locations under Gov. John Carney’s COVID-19 state of emergency.
“We’re few in numbers today. However, we’re still out there doing it,” said Sgt. Harmon. “Everybody has come together in the community to participate in a worthwhile event.”
He said he views the wreath retirement as more than just gathering the balsam and tossing it in a dumpster, provided by Stockley Materials.
“The retirement, it’s just as important as actually laying the wreaths,” said Sgt. Harmon. “We are still paying honor to these great men and women that gave the ultimate sacrifice. We are paying honor to them. We’re completing the mission.”
Wreaths Across America 2021 marked the third consecutive year that wreaths were placed at every grave and columbarium in the Millsboro location, thanks to family, community support and a sponsorship-match promotion.
“And that’s the way it should be. It is the last thing we can do for our fallen comrades,” said Mr. Heffline. “We appreciate all their effort, everything they have done for us. Without them, we wouldn’t have a country.”
Wreaths were taken to the Sussex Correctional Institution in Georgetown, where inmates will remove the greens from the metal frames, preparing both for recycling. The wreaths themselves are put back into nature as nutrients via Stockley Materials. | null | null | null | null | null |
Cache digs through the snow with trainer Chris Brindisi during avalanche dog team training at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. (Amber Baesler for The Washington Post)
It is quiet in the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s staff locker room at noon. Most of the ski instructors, chairlift operators and patrol team members are in the field. Then, a whistle blows, sending a bounding 2-year-old Dutch shepherd, Cache, sprinting down the aisle and around the corner.
Avalanche dogs are said to date back to the 1700s, when St. Bernards accompanied Swiss monks between monasteries. Today, avalanche dogs help search-and-rescue teams around the world — from the Alpine villages in France to the Annapurna mountains of Nepal. Across the United States, they are mainly employed by ski resorts and nonprofit groups. The dogs’ stories are heroic, such as in the rescue of a ski lift operator in 1982 who survived five days buried under tons of snow. | null | null | null | null | null |
In ‘You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays,’ Hurston, who died in 1960, is at the top of her game
(Amistad; Photo courtesy Barbara Hurston Lewis, Faye Hurston, Lois Gaston)
By Lisa Page
Walker traveled to Eatonville, pretending to be Hurston’s niece — “as far I’m concerned, she is my aunt — and that of all Black people as well,” Walker wrote in a 1975 article for Ms. Magazine. Her goal: to find Hurston’s unmarked grave and mark it. The headstone now reads, “Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South.” That is a fitting description for the prolific and provocative author who, from the 1920s to the 1950s, published four novels and an autobiography, as well as numerous short stories, essays, articles and plays.
Many years later, Hurston’s books are back in print, including “Barracoon,” an account of the transatlantic slave trade, which appeared in 2018. Now we have “You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays,” a dazzling collection of her work edited by professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West.
Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, ‘Barracoon,’ finally sees the light of day
“You Don’t Know Us Negroes” reveals Hurston at the top of her game as an essayist, cultural critic, anthropologist and beat reporter. The volume includes 51 essays that cover an extensive swath of history, through the glories of the Harlem Renaissance into the early days of the civil rights movement; they record an American landscape in transition. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alain Locke, Fannie Hurst and Ethel Waters are just a few of the luminaries who make appearances.
Profiles of politicians and leaders are also numerous and include Eleanor Roosevelt, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and presidents William Howard Taft and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Most of the essays appeared previously in Negro Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, Negro World, the Pittsburgh Courier, the American Mercury and many other publications, but some appear here for the first time.
For example, the title essay, “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” was slated for publication in 1934 in the American Mercury but never made it into print “for reasons that remain unclear,” according to West and Gates. The piece expresses Hurston’s contempt for “Negro literature” — “the consequence of the hasty generalization that we Negroes are obvious and simple because, at a glance, we seem to be so” — as well as White America’s ignorance regarding Black life: “The writings that made out they were holding a looking-glass to the Negro had everything in them except Negroness. Two hundred and forty-six years of outward submission during slavery time got folks to thinking of us as creatures of tasks alone. When in fact the conflict between what we wanted to do and what we were forced to do intensified our inner life instead of destroying it.”
Black agency is a theme that runs throughout the collection. The editors argue that Hurston “was a proto-black cultural nationalist, a forerunner of an artistic and political philosophy that would become central tenets of the Black Arts Movement, born circa 1966.” These essays bolster that assessment.
West and Gates organized the collection according to theme in five sections. Art, language, race and gender, folklore and politics are covered here, and Hurston is, by turn, provocative, funny, bawdy, informative and outrageous. She makes no secret of her contempt for male intelligence in the “The Ten Commandments of Charm.” Hurston, who was married three times, writes: “Forget not the first law of conversation, which is, Thou shalt not talk about thyself, nor the last law, which is, Help every man to express himself brilliantly. Thus shalt thou be accounted a ‘fascinating conversationalist,’ though thou utterest not a single word.”
In the same section, Hurston riffs on noses: “The uses of the noses are as varied as their looks. They are (1) to separate the eyes; (2) to keep the lips from running up to the forehead; (3) to wear powder … (4) to whiff and locate one’s food; (5) to administer the snub and no snub is so snobbish as the snub administered by the proper organ of snubbing.”
For many writers, Zora Neale Hurston’s work has been a guiding light. Now there’s even more to read.
Hurston will make you laugh but also make you remember the bitter divide in Black America around performance, language, education and class. Her love of folklore, dialect and country people set her apart from many of her peers, who thought she was practicing minstrelsy.
Her disdain for pretension, practiced by Black people in power, what Hurston called “bookooing,” is all over her essay about the NAACP, where she rants about the divide “between house servants and field hands.” She calls universities “begging joints” full of college presidents with their hands out for donations. And her famous opposition to school integration is fleshed out in “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix,” where she asks, “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?”
But the surprising page turner is at the back of the book, a compilation of Hurston’s coverage of the Ruby McCollom murder trial as a beat reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier in the 1950s. McCollom, a wealthy married Black woman and mother of four, murdered her White lover, a doctor and revered member of her community.
Some of Hurston’s writing is sensationalistic, to be sure, but it’s also a riveting take of gender and race relations at the time. “Human nature cannot be ignored,” she notes. “The McCollums were wealthy and otherwise stood high in the community. These local Colored people were for the most part, little people, the kind of people, irrespective of race, who have only the earth as their memorial. With death, they go back to the ground to rejoin the countless millions of other nameless creatures who are remembered only by the things which grow in soil. There is ever a residue of resentment against the successful of the world. It has nothing at all to do with race. Thus from the beginning of time the most popular story is one in which the poor triumph over the more fortunate. … So there was a certain amount of revengeful satisfaction in seeing Ruby … brought low.”
Gates and West have put together a comprehensive collection that lets Hurston shine as a writer, a storyteller and an American iconoclast. What Alice Walker began, all those years ago, comes to fruition here. Hurston is truly commemorated in all her glory.
Lisa Page, an assistant professor of English at George Washington University, is co-editor of “We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America.”
Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West.
Amistad. 436 pp. $29.99 | null | null | null | null | null |
Big Sur wildfire burns near California’s Highway One and forces evacuations
The Colorado Fire, which started Friday in the Palo Colorado Canyon, has burned about 1,500 acres in the hours after evacuation orders were issued by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, Michael Meddles, assistant chief with Cal Fire in Monterey County said. The blaze is 5 percent contained, he added.
Jim Shivers, a spokesman with the California Department of Transportation, announced that a stretch of the iconic Highway 1 was closed in both directions due to the fire, which is located north of the Bixby Bridge and near the Palo Colorado section of Monterey County.
Officials said the evacuation orders were in effect for “all areas West of 3800 Palo Colorado Rd. to Highway 1 and south to Bixby Creek,” but it remains unclear how many residents in California’s central coast are affected by the blaze. About 430,000 people live in Monterey County.
No injuries or deaths have been reported as of early Saturday. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Dry northeast winds pushed the fire southeast toward Highway 1, according to the National Weather Service. The NWS had issued a wind advisory in the San Francisco Bay area for Friday night through Saturday morning, with meteorologists noting that stronger winds were more likely at higher elevations.
Videos and photos shared to social media show how the Colorado Fire remained largely uncontained along the scenic coastline in the early hours of Saturday.
The wildfire is the latest in a series of blazes to burn across California in the past year. Among those was the Dixie Fire of 2021, which was the second-largest in California’s history and the biggest to burn in the U.S. last summer, as climate change turbocharged severe storms, floods and fires. More than 1,300 structures were leveled, causing government agencies to dole out roughly $540 million to battle the blaze. The Dixie Fire burned nearly 1 million acres, an area larger than New York City, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles combined.
Concerns surrounding fires potentially impacting Highway 1, a California spectacle that features stunning beauty along its 650-mile route, have lingered. As wildfires reach places they’ve never been before, the state’s shifting weather patterns have presented different threats to the exotic road with raw landscapes.
One of the most serious blazes in recent years was the 2016 Soberanes Fire along Highway 1 just south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., the small beach city about 75 miles outside of San Jose. The fire burned nearly 60 homes and killed a bulldozer operator, and it was among the most expensive fires to fight in state history at the time. Some hiking trails in the area have yet to reopen.
Humidity levels in the area are in the teens and wind gusts are around 35 mph, according to the NWS.
More than 1,000 customers with PG&E, the state’s public utility, are experiencing power outages from Los Padres National Forest to Carmel as of late Friday, KRON reported.
The Red Cross has set up a shelter for those affected by the blaze at Carmel Middle School, officials said. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals also announced that it’s providing emergency pet supplies at the shelter.
The NWS said a wind shift Saturday is expected to push some of the smoke and haze from the Colorado Fire toward the Monterey Peninsula and Salinas. | null | null | null | null | null |
The temperature was observed at a weather station managed by Virginia Tech at the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge.
Weather records have been kept in Canaan Valley since 1944, according to Leffler. The Virginia Tech weather station, however, was only installed about three years ago by meteorology instructor David Carroll. It is probable that the temperatures fell even lower there in the past.
The station is sited at the northern end of the valley at an altitude of 3,150 feet.
Many locations in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast were abnormally cold Saturday morning. Caribou, Maine plunged to minus-27, tying a record for Jan. 22 set in 1984. Temperatures in northern Maine were as low as minus-35.
In Washington, the low of 17 was the coldest since it was 10 on Jan 31, 2019.
Temperatures are forecast to moderate somewhat in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast over the coming days but remain on the cold side of normal. | null | null | null | null | null |
More than a measly raise is needed to fix D.C.'s substitute teacher problem
Other places across the country are coming up with creative solutions to school staffing shortages, and D.C. is offering substitutes $1.80 more an hour
“I was thinking, ‘I’m a teacher, I know a lot about the field and this is a way I could help out when my schedule has some vacancies,'” recalls Grosser-Clarkson who has two children, ages 4 and 6, and works as a teacher educator at the University of Maryland, instructing future teachers who are working toward getting their certification.
Grosser-Clarkson applied to become a substitute teacher with D.C. Public Schools at the end of October, and she hoped to spend time in classrooms in December and the beginning January, when her workload was lightest.
Last week, after two and a half months, she finally got approved to work as a substitute.
She describes retired teachers being asked to provide transcripts for colleges they hadn’t attended in decades and all applicants having to create a lesson plan and present it online. The school system only provided a handful of time slots in November for people to sign up to give those presentations, making scheduling difficult, she says. When her turn came, she found herself in a virtual meeting with other applicants. They were told, she says, they had five minutes to give their lessons and that if they went over their allotted time, points would be deducted.
“Honestly, I laughed out loud at that point because why are points involved?” Grosser-Clarkson says. “I’m sorry, but you have a teacher shortage and we’re trying to help you.”
What Grosser-Clarkson experienced while trying to become a substitute teacher in the nation’s capital — and can talk openly about because she doesn’t depend on the job for a salary — offers important insight at a time when cities and counties across the nation are experiencing serious staffing shortages in schools.
On Tuesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced in a news release that the city was boosting the pay of its daily substitute teachers from $121.50 a day to $136.00 a day. That amounts to an increase from $15.20 an hour to $17.00 an hour.
But based on conversations that also took place after Bowser’s raise announcement, it’s also going to take more than money to address the city’s substitute teacher problem. It’s going to take the city keeping its promises and making the hiring process thorough but not tedious.
“Come April, come May,” she says, “when some of these colleges are letting out, there is this huge pool of young, healthy, energetic folks who would be willing to fill these positions and I feel like you’re shutting them out.”
Grosser-Clarkson says a human resources employee was explaining that to her and other new substitute teachers in an online meeting when a retired teacher asked if she could get an excused absence within that 31-day period. She explained her daughter had recently passed away and she would need to attend the funeral in January.
She says the retired teacher later contacted her and thanked her for speaking up. She also told her officials had agree to make an exception.
So far, Grosser-Clarkson has helped several classes at her children’s school. But she did that before she was approved to work as a substitute teacher. Because that process was taking so long, she found a different way to help. She signed up as a volunteer. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Colorado Fire, which started Friday in Palo Colorado Canyon, has burned about 1,500 acres in the hours after evacuation orders were issued by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, said Michael Meddles, assistant chief with Cal Fire in Monterey County. The blaze is 5 percent contained, he added.
Jim Shivers, a spokesman with the California Department of Transportation, announced that a stretch of iconic Highway 1 was closed in both directions due to the fire, which is located north of the Bixby Bridge and near the Palo Colorado section of Monterey County.
Officials said the evacuation orders were in effect for “all areas West of 3800 Palo Colorado Rd. to Highway 1 and south to Bixby Creek,” but it remains unclear how many residents are affected by the blaze. About 430,000 people live in Monterey County.
No injuries or deaths had been reported as of early Saturday. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Dry northeast winds pushed the fire toward Highway 1, according to the National Weather Service. The Weather Service had issued a wind advisory in the San Francisco Bay area for Friday night through Saturday morning, with meteorologists noting that stronger winds were more likely at higher elevations.
Videos and photos shared to social media showed how the Colorado Fire remained largely uncontained along the scenic coastline early Saturday.
The wildfire is the latest to burn across California in the past year. The Dixie Fire was the second-largest in California’s history and the biggest to burn in the United States last summer, as climate change turbocharged severe storms, floods and fires. More than 1,300 structures were leveled, causing government agencies to dole out roughly $540 million to battle the blaze. The Dixie Fire burned nearly 1 million acres, an area larger than New York City, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles combined.
California’s shifting weather patterns have presented new threats to Highway 1, a California spectacle that features stunning beauty along its 650-mile route.
One of the most serious blazes in recent years was the 2016 Soberanes Fire along Highway 1 just south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, about 75 miles outside of San Jose. The fire burned nearly 60 homes and killed a bulldozer operator, and it was among the most expensive fires to fight in state history at the time.
Humidity levels in the area are in the teens and wind gusts are around 35 mph, according to the Weather Service.
More than 1,000 customers with PG&E, the state’s public utility, were experiencing power outages from Los Padres National Forest to Carmel as of late Friday, KRON reported.
The Red Cross has set up a shelter at Carmel Middle School, officials said. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals also announced that it is providing emergency pet supplies at the shelter.
The Weather Service said a wind shift Saturday was expected to push some of the smoke and haze from the Colorado Fire toward the Monterey Peninsula and Salinas. | null | null | null | null | null |
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