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KYIV, Ukraine — With 100,000 Russian guns pointed at their heads, Ukrainians seem 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.
“Don’t trust Putin. Don’t fear Putin,” said former president Petro Poroshenko on Friday during a conversation with a group organized by the German Marshall Fund. (I’m a trustee of GMF but came here as a journalist, along with Sylvie Kauffmann of the French newspaper Le Monde and a half-dozen others, including two German parliamentarians and analysts from NATO and the European Union.)
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.” The official answered without hesitation: with Ukrainian sovereignty over all of its territory. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is suing The New York Times for defamation over an editorial. (Reuters)
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 2011 shooting attack in Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner that killed six and injured 12 others. | null | null | null | null | null |
Some parents and teachers are questioning the type of KN95s, while others are asking why supplies are limited. Suzie Djidjoli, a speech-language pathologist in Montgomery County, was disappointed not to be able to identify the manufacturer or filtration details about the mask she received, but she also about the worried about Virginia’s example. “Will we be next?” she found herself thinking. | null | null | null | null | null |
Some parents and teachers are questioning the type of KN95s, while others are asking why supplies are limited. Suzie Djidjoli, a speech-language pathologist in Montgomery County, was disappointed not to be able to identify the manufacturer or filtration details about the mask she received, but she also worried about Virginia’s example. “Will we be next?” she found herself thinking. | null | null | null | null | null |
The suspect, Steven Alston Jr., was being held without bond and is expected to appear in court Monday. Police believe he was armed with a “ghost gun,” a weapon assembled from different parts. The proliferation of weapons, which are untraceable, has alarmed police and prosecutors around the country.
Alston also is charged with use of a firearm in the commission of a felony/violent crime, first-degree assault, possession of a dangerous weapon on school property and possession of a firearm by a minor, according to police. | null | null | null | null | null |
A woman attends a rally on Jan. 13 to demand the Orange Unified School District in California drop its mask requirement and pass a resolution refusing to enforce pandemic mandates. (Caroline Brehman/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Baseless fears of vaccines have been a driving force among the approximately 20 percent of U.S. adults who have refused some of the most effective medicines in human history: the mRNA vaccines developed against the coronavirus by Pfizer, with German partner BioNTech, and Moderna. The nation that produced Jonas Salk has exported anti-vaccine propaganda around the globe, wreaking havoc on public-health campaigns from Germany to Kenya.
Despite signs from the earliest days of the pandemic that the anti-vaccine movement was advancing its cause by preying on the uncertainty and social division that accompanied the virus, the U.S. public health establishment never mounted a true counteroffensive, Smyser said — a view shared by other public health experts and epidemiologists.
“I think we were really naive,” he said. “This movement was allowed to get stronger and stronger with almost no pushback.”
Misinformation surrounding the safety of vaccines is not new, but social media helps it spread more widely than ever, which can lead to dangerous consequences. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
Vaccine skeptics notched another victory just last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s vaccination requirement for large employers. (A smaller mandate for workers at health-care facilities that get federal funding was left intact.)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who will speak at Sunday’s march, said the widening distrust of vaccines is an organic outgrowth of people’s firsthand experiences with negative side effects from the coronavirus vaccines. He pointed to the large number of reports of reactions to those vaccines now on file in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I think there’s a lot more skepticism,” Kennedy said. “You have a product that simply does not work as advertised.”
“What will we see when things are somewhat back to normal, and covid doesn’t dominate everything every day? Is this going to bleed over into other things, like childhood vaccinations? I really don’t know,” Smith said. “And that’s the fear.”
‘Truly frightening’
Several pediatricians interviewed by The Washington Post said they are not yet seeing an increase in the number of parents refusing vaccines for their children, but there are worrisome signs.
Deborah Greenhouse, a pediatrician in Columbia, S.C., said she has fielded eyebrow-raising questions from parents. Some, repeating a conspiracy theory that has circulated since early in the pandemic, ask whether the coronavirus vaccine injections will implant microchips in their children’s bodies. Others accuse her and other pediatricians of promoting the vaccines for personal profit. One father worried that a coronavirus test swab would give his child cancer.
“This has been the most frustrating time period in my entire career,” said Greenhouse, who has been a pediatrician for nearly 30 years.
Greenhouse said she has not seen an uptick of similar concerns about other vaccines among her patients, but worries it could just be a matter of time.
“It’s truly frightening for the future,” she said.
The scientific case for the full range of vaccines recommended by public health authorities in the United States remains as solid as ever. Research has shown those vaccines — which have all but eliminated diseases that once sickened, debilitated or killed millions every year — to be safe for the vast majority of those who receive them. The 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that claimed a link between a common childhood vaccine and autism, launching the modern anti-vaccination movement, was exposed as fraudulent.
The mRNA coronavirus vaccines have proved to be some of the best ever added to physicians’ arsenal. As of October, according to the most recent estimates from the CDC, those who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines and a booster were 40 times less likely to die of the virus than the unvaccinated. The CDC on Friday released studies showing that the vaccines continue to provide robust protection against hospitalization from the omicron variant, even if they no longer ward off infection as effectively.
A November poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found majorities of unvaccinated adults saying they will “definitely not” get a vaccine and are not confident in the vaccines’ safety.
Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to reject the vaccines — another ominous sign for public health officials, who worry that resistance to inoculation could become a permanent trapping of political identity.
Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said the enthusiasm ahead of Sunday’s rally is a dispiriting reminder of how little has been done to combat the anti-vaccine movement’s rise over the past two years.
Topol said he has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, urged federal health officials to do more to counter rampant falsehoods about vaccines.
“Misinformation spreads far quicker and more broadly than truth,” Topol said. “The administration does nothing to call them out, and that has left them to continue to grow like a metastasis. They just get bigger and more toxic, and they hoodwink and bamboozle more people who might have been neutral.”
The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about what it’s done to counter vaccine safety misinformation.
‘A unified front’
Sunday’s rally in D.C. could be a case study in the amplification of anti-vaccine views by media sources that threaten to drown out more conventional, evidence-based voices. Organizer Matt Tune said the march’s website saw a “huge spike” in traffic after Robert Malone, a physician who has become a prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccines, mentioned it on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. (Malone’s appearance provoked a condemnatory letter to Spotify, which hosts the podcast, from hundreds of doctors and public health experts.)
Organizers estimate that 20,000 people will attend the rally, marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. D.C. police will be fully activated from Friday, during the annual March for Life, through Sunday, the anti-vaccine mandate rally, spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said.
The march is billed as a protest of vaccine mandates, such as those recently enacted in D.C. and other cities, rather than the medicines themselves. But similar rhetoric — emphasizing individual autonomy rather than untenable scientific ideas — has long characterized the broader anti-vaccine movement, and the march’s speakers include movement veterans such as Kennedy and Del Bigtree, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network.
Other speakers include Malone and former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, who in a November appearance on Fox News compared White House chief medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Public employee associations that have formed to protest their employers’ vaccine mandates, such as Feds for Medical Freedom and D.C. Firefighters Bodily Autonomy Affirmation Group, are also participating.
“The goal is to show a unified front of bringing people together — vaccinated, unvaccinated, Democrats, Republicans, all together in solidarity,” said Tune, an unvaccinated 48-year-old from Chicago. He said he wants the event “to help change the current narrative … which is basically saying that we’re a bunch of weirdos and freaks who don’t care about humanity. And that’s not true at all.”
About 12,000 people have joined a Facebook group for the rally, with many saying they will stay overnight and eat in Northern Virginia to avoid the District’s vaccine mandate. Some commenters on the group’s page have compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust and urged people not to get tested for the virus. One commenter wrote: “This is an intentional permanent tyrannical dictatorship if they are not stopped by FORCE!!!!!!”
Aaron Simpson, a spokesman for Meta, the new corporate name for Facebook, said the page does not violate the platform’s policies on covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, which prohibit “content calling to action, advocating, or promoting that others not get the COVID-19 vaccine.”
“Voicing opposition to government mandates is not against Meta’s policies," Simpson said. "What we don’t allow is content that promotes harmful false claims about the vaccines themselves and we remove those posts — including in this group.”
Dan Keating and Scott Clement contributed to this report. | 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 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 is lightest.
Last week, after 2½ 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 provided only 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. She recalls them being told that 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 which she can talk about openly 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 an hour.
But 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 that her daughter had recently passed away and that 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 that officials had agreed to make an exception.
Since applying to become a substitute teacher, Grosser-Clarkson has helped several classes at her children’s school. But she did that by finding a quicker route than the substitute hiring process. She signed up as a volunteer. | null | null | null | null | null |
The band, whose performance had been delayed since 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, made up for lost time, in spades.
Pianist Aaron Goldberg, left, saxophonist Jimmy Greene, bassist Reuben Rogers, guitarist Mike Moreno and drummer Kendrick Scott, all of the The Jimmy Greene Quintet, perform at the Kennedy Center on Friday. (Jati Lindsay)
The halls of the Kennedy Center were all but empty on Friday night — an eerie feeling even in a subfreezing January. “Maybe you’ve heard of this pandemic,” saxophonist Jimmy Greene correctly diagnosed from the stage of the (ironically full) Family Theater. The coronavirus had preempted this concert with his quintet, which had originally been scheduled for 2020. There was lost time to make up for. | null | null | null | null | null |
Leffler believes the Virginia Tech station could at some point in the future set the record for lowest temperature observed in West Virginia, perhaps by a large margin. Lewisburg, in the southeastern part of the state, is the current record holder. It dipped to minus-37 on Dec. 30, 1917.
In Ithaca, N.Y., the mercury settled at minus-17, its third-lowest temperature since 2010. Albany dipped to minus-5 and parts of interior New York were as low as minus-30. | null | null | null | null | null |
Bishop McNamara center Favour Aire has helped the Mustangs to an 11-0 start this season. (Craig Hudson/For the Washington Post)
The Bishop McNamara Mustangs needed a basket and knew where to find one.
In a battle of the two top teams in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference, No. 5 McNamara and No. 10 O’Connell were tied with less than a minute remaining Friday night. The Mustangs inbounded the ball and immediately lobbed a pass to the low block.
There, the 6-foot-11 frame of Favour Aire arched backward to feel the defender behind him and caught the pass with one hand. Once he settled himself a few feet from the basket, the outcome was inevitable: a right-handed hook to give the Mustangs the lead and, soon enough, a 62-55 victory.
Aire is the towering totem of this McNamara program, a four-year varsity player who has long been at the center of this team’s hopes for local ascension. As he has developed as a player, the Mustangs have developed as a program, and on Friday night in Forestville, the two took their most recent step together.
Aire is averaging 14.5 points and 10.8 rebounds, with double-doubles in 10 of 11 games. And McNamara now stands as the only undefeated team remaining in the WCAC. At 11-0, the Prince George’s County program has transitioned from a hot start to something more concrete: the announcement of a new power within the area’s proudest conference.
The development of the Nigerian-born Aire, widely considered the best big man in the WCAC, has been a catalyst for the team’s rise to this perch.
“He’s a huge part of it,” Coach Marty Keithline said. “Watching him develop has been amazing, and now we’re just blessed to have him in this community. Everybody here, teachers and students, they love him.”
In November, Aire signed to play for Jim Larranaga at the University of Miami. The sunny beaches of South Florida will serve as the destination for a journey that began in 2017, when Aire came to America with the goal of finding a future in the game he had just begun to love.
Making himself big
Aire estimates he grew about a foot between ages 11 and 14. He went from 5-8 to 6-8, drawing gasps and nicknames each time he returned to school from summer break a little bit (or a lot bit) taller.
He was a soccer player in Nigeria who saw himself as a striker but was mostly relegated to goalie because of his length. When he was in the seventh grade, a family friend joked he was tall enough to start chasing basketball money instead. He had never really considered the sport and started to play soon after.
In November of that year, he attended a youth basketball camp in his home country. He was surrounded by older kids but big enough to compete. He wasn’t completely sure what he was doing on the floor but felt afterward that he had performed well. In fact, he looked around and grew confident that this new sport was his to dominate.
“When I was back home, I thought I was LeBron,” Aire remembered. “There wasn’t a whole lot of people that played. … I was probably one of the tallest people I had seen in my whole life, so I thought nobody could really stop me. With no skills, no workouts, anything I just assumed it would all pan out.”
It was at that camp that his father learned about the possibilities of sending his son to the U.S. to play, and the process was set in motion a few months later. Aire arrived in America on Sept. 5, 2017, a date he recalls proudly.
He would live with a guardian, Taj Hawkins, who was an AAU coach in the D.C. area. He attended eighth grade at Capitol Christian Academy in Prince George’s County, and occasionally they would have basketball practice at the high school up the road, Bishop McNamara.
Call for the ball
Not long after those middle school practices, Aire was a freshman member of the Mustangs’ varsity team. His offensive game was still raw, but he excelled on defense. He found that the footwork and timing necessary to protect the rim came naturally to him, something he credits to a childhood spent on the soccer field.
Against much stiffer competition, the sky-high confidence he once possessed in Nigeria was tabled in exchange for a more patient approach. He focused on earning playing time for the Mustangs and helping himself in the weight room, concentrated on incremental improvements such as developing a left-handed layup.
Over his sophomore and junior years, Aire rounded out his game and started to attract college interest. But if the scouts were watching, he never really noticed. His newly humble approach might have been an overcorrection. Aire says it was a shock to him that on the first day college coaches were able to contact 2022 prospects, his phone kept buzzing with scholarship offers.
“I didn’t think anybody knew who I was,” Aire said. “I thought I was just playing basketball on the low. … So, getting all those offers in one day, it made things feel possible.”
Eventually ranked as a four-star prospect, he chose the Hurricanes over Georgetown and Rutgers. Aire said Miami, in the midst of a bounce-back season, felt like the best place for him to develop — and the pleasant weather didn’t hurt.
But before the big man heads to college, he has unfinished business at McNamara. He wants to bring the Mustangs their first WCAC championship since 1995.
“You see the banners on the wall; it’s been a long time,” Aire said. “This school has done a lot for me, so it would be a nice way to leave: giving them another one.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The suspect, Steven Alston Jr., was being held without bond and is expected to appear in court Monday. Police believe he was armed with a “ghost gun,” a weapon assembled from different parts. The proliferation of such guns, which are untraceable, has alarmed police and prosecutors around the country.
It was not immediately clear if Alston had retained an attorney yet.
Alston also is charged with first-degree assault, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony/violent crime, first-degree assault, possession of a dangerous weapon on school property and possession of a firearm by a minor, according to police. | null | null | null | null | null |
Hoffman knows because he now works with Global Athlete, a group that is pushing for a better balance of power between athletes and the people who use them for profit. Looking at you, International Olympic Committee.
The 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.
“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 annual revenue. 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 an 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.
When the Games begin, there will no doubt be performances that, in the moment, override the geopolitical backdrop of the entire affair. Even the IOC can’t fully suck away the thrills the Olympic athletes invariably deliver. But even for the athletes who produce those moments, keep in mind how long that elation might last. The defining part of this particular Olympic journey, in Koehler’s words: “Athletes are interested in getting in and getting out.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Ukrainian troops with rocket launchers during a recent tactical exercise. (Handout/Via Reuters)
Ukraine is counting on the support of the United States and other Western nations to ward off a potential renewed invasion by Russia, which has massed some 100,000 troops near the former Soviet republic’s border. Moscow also recently moved forces into Belarus, Ukraine’s Kremlin-aligned neighbor, in what the Russians are portraying — to widespread Western skepticism — as a regular exercise.
U.S. and European officials also have been engaged in diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions with Moscow, although there is an impasse over Russia’s demand that Ukraine and other former Soviet states be barred from joining the Western military alliance.
What military help have NATO members promised? | null | null | null | null | null |
Another man was killed Friday night in Northeast Washington, police said.
D.C. police on Saturday identified two men who were killed in a shooting in Southwest Washington.
The men were shot Friday at about 6:45 p.m. on Forrester Street SW, just west of South Capitol Street, near the District’s southern tip. Police identified the two men as Terrance Brown, 21, of Laurel, Md., and Ezra Beyene, 22, of Burke, Va.
Police said they received reports of gunshots in the area and arrived to find both men sitting in a vehicle, suffering from gunshot wounds. Neither man showed any signs of life, police said, and they were taken to the medical examiner’s office.
Another man was shot and killed Friday night in Northeast Washington, police said.
Police received reports of gunshots in the 3800 block of Commodore Joshua Barney Drive. Officers found Marquette White, 20, of Northeast suffering from gunshot wounds.
Emergency responders transported White to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Police did not release any further information about the circumstances of either shooting. | null | null | null | null | null |
Airstrike's death toll surpasses 80
The death toll from a Saudi-led coalition airstrike that hit a prison run by Yemen’s Houthi rebels has climbed to at least 82 detainees, the rebels and an aid group said.
Meanwhile, Internet access in the Arab world’s poorest country remained largely down as the coalition continued airstrikes on the rebel-held capital, Sanaa, and elsewhere.
The airstrike in the northern Saada province Friday was part of an intense air and ground offensive that marked an escalation in Yemen’s years-long civil war.
Ahmed Mahat, head of the Yemen mission of Doctors Without Borders, said his group counted at least 82 dead and more than 265 wounded in the airstrike.
Italy's Berlusconi not running for president: Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that he won't be running for Italy's presidency, removing an obstacle to cross-party negotiations ahead of the vote in Parliament beginning Jan. 24. Berlusconi is a divisive figure, and the center-left camp already ruled out backing him.
Car bombing kills at least 7 in Afghanistan: A bomb attached to a packed minivan exploded in Afghanistan's western Herat province, killing at least seven civilians and wounding nine others, Taliban officials said. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the explosion, but the Islamic State has claimed credit for similar attacks in the country since the Taliban seized power on Aug. 15.
German conservatives elect right-winger as party leader: Germany's center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) have elected arch-conservative Friedrich Merz as their party leader, replacing the more centrist Armin Laschet, who lost September's national election to Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats. Merz, who has promised a break with the CDU's centrist course pursued by Angela Merkel during her 16-year tenure as chancellor, got nearly 95 percent of the valid votes during a virtual party conference, party secretary general Paul Ziemiak said.
Some money services reopen in Tonga: Tongans queued for limited money services that were restored in the Pacific island's capital, as the cleanup continued a week after a devastating volcanic eruption and tsunami. Tonga's government said drinking water was the priority, and that a national emergency team had already distributed 60,000 liters (15,850 gallons) of water to residents. | null | null | null | null | null |
A Ukrainian serviceman patrols a street in Verkhnotoretske village in Yasynuvata district, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, on Jan. 22. Russia on Thursday announced sweeping naval drills in several parts of the world this month, and claimed the West is plotting “provocations” in neighboring Ukraine, where the Kremlin has been accused of planning aggressive military action. (AP Photo/Andriy Andriyenko)
Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told the American people — and the world — about the United States’ concerns that the Russian government was preparing to invade Ukraine. “As part of its plans,” Psaki said, the Kremlin is “laying the ground to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion” — a false flag campaign that would lay the blame on Ukraine for instigating the conflict.
These responses may seem part of a tit-for-tat diplomatic spat, but they point to how much the West has changed its posture toward adversarial information operations since Russia’s last invasion of Ukraine. In 2014, the Kremlin disinformation playbook caught the West flat-footed; governments were simply unsure how to counter this new hybrid warfare. Now, they are better equipped to anticipate Kremlin narratives, even if they can’t always counter them effectively among key audiences — like the Russian public.
Today, Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and complicated Western attempts at diplomacy with unrealistic demands, such as barring Poland or the Baltic states from hosting NATO troops or equipment, and a guarantee that Ukraine or Georgia will not be able to join the western military alliance. Its rhetoric has also become more bellicose to match, according to our monitoring at the Centre for Information Resilience, a UK-based nonprofit social enterprise dedicated to identifying, countering and exposing influence operations.
Moscow has been priming the Russian people for a potential invasion, with a large uptick in discussion of alleged “Ukrainian aggression.” Carefully-curated Instagram accounts and mercenary TikTok influencers target younger Russians with false claims of ethnic Russians being targeted in eastern Ukraine. State news channels, meanwhile, have pumped out propaganda around the alleged fortification of Eastern Europe by NATO. Mentions of similar stories in the Russian-language news media have more than doubled since the Kremlin began to move troops to Ukraine’s eastern border in March, from about 250 mentions per day at their peak last spring to over 500 per day this week.
In 2014, the United States and its allies were caught on the back foot, reacting slowly — if at all — to the Kremlin’s campaign of falsehoods. Just as the invasion took our countries by surprise, so did its informational component, muddying the public perception of key international events such as the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula and the Moscow-backed shoot-down of Malaysian Air flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. In 2014, the Western nations simply did not anticipate, or have a playbook for, the so-called “Little Green Men” who appeared in Crimea. The peninsula was invaded by well-armed troops, with no insignia and who spoke Russian. The Kremlin simply denied the Little Green Men were their troops. Meanwhile, in the St. Petersburg troll factory, hundreds of narratives and conspiracy theories polluted the information space, making it impossible to tell what was true or false, and some Western journalists, not yet savvy to the Kremlin’s tactics, covered “both sides” of the story, giving credence to Kremlin narratives. The very notion of objective truth came under sustained attack by a nation state.
Today, Western policymakers seem to finally recognize not only that the Kremlin instigated and continues the war in Ukraine, but that the Kremlin treats the information ecosystem as an active front in any conflict. Both the British and U.S. governments have invested expertise in understanding and countering disinformation. In 2017, for example, the United States launched the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, to track disinformation and coordinate policy responses across the U.S. government and between allies. (While the GEC struggled under the politicization of the Trump administration, it is becoming more nimble under Biden, and issued a fact sheet about false Russian narratives regarding Ukraine this week.) The government has also announced it will launch a joint intelligence center to target foreign influence campaigns. In the U.K., in the immediate aftermath of the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal in 2018, the U.K. government effectively countered Kremlin disinformation because they knew it was coming. Rather than allow Russian narratives to pollute the news, they told the public to anticipate false narratives but not to listen to them. It worked.
That recognition — along with the fact that Western audiences have become savvier to Russian tactics, thanks to six-plus years of incessant media coverage — presents a challenge for Moscow today. When Wallace, the U.K. Defense Secretary, calls out Russia’s “straw man” arguments around alleged NATO imperialism, or when Psaki highlights the potential for a Russian false flag operation from the White House podium, it is effective: Policymakers in western European capitals pay a little more attention. The international community will treat any major flare-up in Crimea or the Donbas with suspicion — and that might engender more coordinated responses to any Russian aggression. Disinformation is often designed to exploit divisions in societies and between countries: The West speaking with one, unified voice is something the Kremlin fears.
But it may not be enough. The only community Russia needs to trigger, or spin into support for a conflict, is one on the border. With anti-NATO sentiment in Russia rising, and Moscow seeding a muddled narrative around NATO enlargement in the international press, the ground may already be fertilized for such a conflict — despite Western efforts. | null | null | null | null | null |
The U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office gave relatively little information about the intelligence unveiled on Saturday other than to say that the Russian government was considering trying to make a Russia-leaning former member of Ukraine’s parliament, Yevhen Murayev, the country’s new leader.
“When the Russians attempt this and say ‘this is an independent Ukrainian political movement,’ we can say ‘no, that’s not true, this is the work of your intelligence apparatus which we’ve been warning about,’” the official said. | null | null | null | null | null |
We can’t provide the right care at the right time anymore — and after two years, we’re exhausted from trying
Ann Kiernan for the Washington Post
Megan L. Ranney is an emergency physician and the academic dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University.
Walking into a shift in the emergency department these days feels a bit like entering a disaster zone.
There are 50-odd patients in the waiting room needing to be seen. A number of beds are closed in the emergency department and across the rest of the hospital because of a lack of staffing. We’re holding a half-dozen acute mental health patients who desperately need care, because there’s no room in psychiatric hospitals. A few bed-bound patients are ready to leave but don’t have a ride to wherever they’re going, so they’ll be spending the night with us; there’s no one to drive the ambulances to transport them. And a couple dozen more patients have been waiting on emergency department stretchers for hours after evaluation, until an intensive care unit, medical or surgical bed becomes available. Meanwhile, we can’t use these emergency department staff or beds to care for those sitting in the waiting room with yet-to-be-diagnosed problems. Instead, I’m scanning the waiting room list to try to find the needle in the haystack — someone with a life-threatening illness that we haven’t identified yet.
By the time the patients make it to me, I’m playing catch-up on their pain, their illness and their frustration.
As an emergency physician, I thrive in challenging situations. In the best emergency care, I work with my team to quickly stabilize a sick patient, create trust with them and their family, and then come up with a clear diagnosis and therapeutic plan. I think about what needs to be done today to make sure they’re safe — and what needs to be done tomorrow, or in a month, to keep them from coming back.
In pre-pandemic times, I was usually able to do this. The system sometimes worked against me, most often because a patient lacked the right insurance to get the tests and treatments they needed. And sometimes we struggled with an acute surge of patients. For example, on a rainy night, we’d get overwhelmed with folks who’d been in car crashes. During flu season, we’d be crowded with influenza patients for a week or two. These surges were frustrating but usually relatively short.
Depending on how you count, though, we’re currently on our fourth or fifth surge of covid cases. As our health-care system is pummeled by yet another wave, it’s just too much. We never recovered from the last wave. Our bulwarks cracked, and then they were breached. It has become nearly impossible for us to take the right care of the right patient at the right time.
Across the country, emergency departments, intensive care units and ambulance services are overwhelmed. According to data from the Department of Health and Human Services, almost 80 percent of inpatient beds and 83 percent of intensive care unit beds are being used; other data sources suggest that these estimates do not fully account for staffing limitations and that even fewer staffed beds are available. Hospitals in almost half the states have paused or stopped non-emergency surgeries because of staffing shortages and hospital overcrowding, resulting in further stresses on the system, on patients and on providers.
As the severe cases accumulate, the distress among providers does, too. It’s certainly because of the exhaustion of caring for horribly sick covid patients yet again — especially now that the disease is so preventable. But even more, it’s the moral harm from the other cases, the ones that have nothing to do with covid except that they’ve been overtaken by the pandemic. It’s knowing that an elderly man was on a stretcher for hours with a broken hip, lying in his own urine, because there was no one to care for him. It’s the patient whose inflamed gallbladder smoldered while they waited. It’s the emotional exhaustion from assuaging the understandable anger of families calling for updates, only to be told that their loved one has not been evaluated yet after many hours in the waiting room.
“I just don’t think I can go back again tomorrow,” one friend texted me after a particularly demoralizing shift. Another friend told me: “I feel like we’re rats on a sinking ship. Do I jump off now or hope that someone saves us?” And every staff member who leaves causes a domino effect.
One small example: There are not enough emergency medical technicians. As a result, a patient might wait more than 12 hours for transportation after they are ready for discharge to a nursing facility or back home. That patient waits in a bed that could be used for someone with chest pain that might be a blood clot, belly pain that might be appendicitis, or a broken arm that needs pain meds.
Of course, this isn’t just about the coronavirus. Rather, the pandemic has laid bare the myriad inefficiencies and frank failures in our health-care system that we had managed to paper over until a real crisis came along. Emergency departments and hospitals have worked on a thin edge for a decade. We have been the last resort for mental health and dental care; we have routinely asked nurses, doctors and techs to work overtime during swells of trauma patients or influenza; we have tolerated threats and violence against our co-workers in the name of providing care. We have served as the safety net for a broken system. But with the serial surges of covid, we simply can’t do it anymore.
Two years in, and our health-care workers and systems have been beaten down, again and again. At no point have we stopped to take stock of how we survived the last wave, much less what’s needed to withstand another one. So let me be clear to my colleagues: This is not our fault. Our exhaustion and frustration are valid. We can’t change this alone.
We already have answers on how to fix and rebuild. They’re straightforward things, like subsidizing the training of more staff across all levels of the health-care system — from unit assistants to certified nursing assistants to physicians — and providing emotional and financial support for those who have stayed. They’re more complex steps, like setting up a public health emergency response system that is robustly funded, based on accurate data and resilient. And they’re big-picture things, like making sure that people can access care when and where they need it, and that our testing infrastructure, telehealth system and home-care network are intact. Ultimately, we also need to change the system’s incentives, so that prevention of a hospital stay is valued as much as end-stage treatment is.
Two years ago, I hoped the pandemic would help us marshal resources and political will to finally fix this system. But now, I worry that the fixes are not going to come. Health care in the United States was never perfect, especially for those who live at the margins of society. It increasingly seems that after the pandemic we’ll be left with something far worse: scarcity, inaccessibility, compassion fatigue.
So yes, I will celebrate like everyone else when the omicron wave passes. But I know there will be another one — probably another coronavirus variant, but possibly something else. At the very least, all those delayed surgeries, postponed preventive-care visits and untreated mental health problems are going to show up, and patients will need care that is simply not there.
My colleagues and I will keep showing up for work. Because if we don’t, who will? But we have been changed — and not for the better. | null | null | null | null | null |
In giving up its most points this season, the Cavaliers (11-8, 5-4 ACC), who lead the ACC in scoring defense, also permitted a season-worst 60 percent shooting from the field, with North Carolina State sinking 12 of 22 three-pointers, the most makes from beyond the arc by an opponent against Virginia.
North Carolina State’s three-point shooting percentage (54.5), which included Jericole Hellems going 5 of 9, was the highest against the Cavaliers this season in a conference game. Only Houston has shot a higher percentage against Virginia from behind the arc when it made 11 of 20 during a 67-47 win Nov. 16.
“We’re not going to win too many games if our defense is below average for large stretches,” Bennett said. “I thought it was, partly due to [the Wolfpack]. They’re quick. They run good stuff. They’ve got playmakers, but we’ve got to be really on-point with that, and that hurt us for sure.”
Hellems scored a game-high 21 points for North Carolina State, and Terquavion Smith had 20 on 8-for-13 shooting. The standout freshman made 4 of 7 three-pointers. Dereon Seabron added 13 points, six rebounds, five assists and two steals as part of the ACC’s highest scoring threesome.
Caffaro (1) and Shedrick (4) have just five games scoring in double figures between them this season as Bennett continues to seek consistency in the post with a dearth of available players.
Morsell, a native of Fort Washington, started 13 games as a freshman with the Cavaliers after a decorated high school career at St. John’s. He was selected Washington Post first-team All-Met as a senior in 2019 as well as the District’s Gatorade Player of the Year. | null | null | null | null | null |
The decision reflects the growing estrangement between the first-term senator and her party
Sinema, who in 2018 became the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona in a generation, has emerged as a major force in Washington by leveraging her status as a swing vote in a 50-50 Senate. She has repeatedly described her stance as an independent one that she has said reflects the political mood in her closely divided state.
Analysis: How Kyrsten Sinema defended the filibuster — and bipartisanship
The abortion rights groups Emily’s List and NARAL pulled their support from Sinema over the filibuster vote.
Saturday’s censure comes a year after the Arizona Republican Party censured Gov. Doug Ducey, former senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the late Sen. John McCain’s widow, for showing insufficient loyalty to former president Donald Trump.
Other Republicans in Congress — including Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Bill Cassidy (La.), and Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) — have also been punished by their state parties for defying Trump. Cheney voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting an insurrection after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6; the three GOP senators joined Democrats in voting to convict him after the Senate trial last February.
Arizona’s other Senate seat is held by Mark Kelly (D), who had wavered on the filibuster but ultimately backed scrapping it to pass the voting rights bills. He is up for reelection in November, and his seat is expected to be among the most competitive in the nation. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sometimes, Malik Faisal Akram stood out, in unsettling ways. Back home in Blackburn, in England’s industrial north, he was the guy who was banned from the local courthouse after he threatened officials there. In his short stay in Texas, Akram stuck in the minds of people — at a mosque where he became aggressive when he was told he couldn’t stay overnight and at a Starbucks when workers noticed him as the disheveled customer who sat for half an hour, constantly looking around as he nursed his cappuccinos.
But along his 4,600-mile journey from Britain to the Colleyville, Tex., synagogue where Akram would hold four hostages for 11 hours before being killed by law enforcement officers last Saturday, the 44-year-old terrorist also managed impressive stealth, entering the United States without a hitch, eluding notice in New York for several days, and wandering around Dallas and its suburbs for two weeks without attracting much attention. | null | null | null | null | null |
North Carolina State's Jericole Hellems (4) pulls in the rebound from Virginia's Taine Murray (10) during the second half. (Ethan Hyman/News & Observer/AP)
In giving up their most points this season, the Cavaliers (11-8, 5-4 ACC), who lead the ACC in scoring defense, also permitted a season-worst 60 percent shooting from the field, with North Carolina State sinking 12 of 22 three-pointers, the most makes from beyond the arc by an opponent against Virginia.
North Carolina State’s three-point shooting percentage (54.5), which included Jericole Hellems going 5 of 9, was the highest against the Cavaliers this season in a conference game. Only Houston shot a higher percentage against Virginia from behind the arc when it made 11 of 20 during a 67-47 win Nov. 16.
“We’re not going to win too many games if our defense is below average for large stretches,” Bennett said. “I thought it was partly due to [the Wolfpack]. They’re quick. They run good stuff. They’ve got playmakers. But we’ve got to be really on point with that, and that hurt us for sure.”
Hellems scored a game-high 21 points for North Carolina State, and Terquavion Smith had 20 on 8-for-13 shooting. The standout freshman made 4 of 7 three-pointers. Dereon Seabron added 13 points, six rebounds, five assists and two steals as part of the ACC’s highest-scoring threesome.
What else to know about Virginia’s loss:
Caffaro (one) and Shedrick (four) have just five games scoring in double figures between them this season as Bennett continues to seek consistency in the post with a dearth of available players.
Morsell, a native of Fort Washington, started 13 games as a freshman with the Cavaliers after a decorated high school career at St. John’s. He was selected first-team All-Met as a senior in 2019 as well as the District’s Gatorade player of the year. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man slain in the District, police say
Fatal shooting occurred in Northeast, according to police.
A man was fatally shot Saturday in Northeast Washington, the D.C. police said.
He was found about 11:20 a.m. in the 3700 block of Hayes Street after a shooting was reported there, the police said.
The man’s name with withheld until relatives could be notified, according to the police.
The homicide was the fourth reported in the city between 6 p.m. Friday and noon Saturday.
The site is in the Mayfair section of Northeast, south of Kenilworth Park, and between the Anacostia River and Route 295. | null | null | null | null | null |
Man is killed in crash, Prince George’s police say
Driver dies after car is hit, police say
A man was killed Saturday when his car was struck in a traffic collision in Prince George’s County, police said.
The crash occurred about 12:15 p.m. on Farmington Road near Indian Head Highway as the man’s car and another vehicle were both going east, the police said.
As the cars went through the intersection, the man’s car was struck from behind and he was fatally injured, according to the police. The driver of the other car was seriously injured and taken to a hospital, police said.
They said they were trying to determine why the collision occurred and what led up to it.
The name of the man who was killed was not immediately available. | null | null | null | null | null |
Funk leads Saint Joseph's (PA) against George Mason after 22-point game
Saint Joseph’s (PA) Hawks (8-8, 2-4 A-10) at George Mason Patriots (7-7, 1-1 A-10)
Fairfax, Virginia; Monday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Saint Joseph’s (PA) visits the George Mason Patriots after Taylor Funk scored 22 points in Saint Joseph’s (PA)’s 70-54 loss to the VCU Rams.
The Patriots are 6-1 on their home court. George Mason averages 72.6 points and has outscored opponents by 5.6 points per game.
The Hawks are 2-4 against A-10 opponents. Saint Joseph’s (PA) is sixth in the A-10 scoring 71.1 points per game and is shooting 42.8%.
The Patriots and Hawks match up Monday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Josh Oduro is shooting 59.0% and averaging 17.0 points for the Patriots. De’Von Cooper is averaging 1.9 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for George Mason.
Ejike Obinna is averaging 12.9 points and 7.6 rebounds for the Hawks. Jordan Hall is averaging 10.9 points over the last 10 games for Saint Joseph’s (PA). | null | null | null | null | null |
Spencer leads Loyola (MD) against Colgate after 25-point outing
Loyola (MD) Greyhounds (11-7, 6-2 Patriot) at Colgate Raiders (7-10, 3-1 Patriot)
Hamilton, New York; Monday, 7 p.m. EST
BOTTOM LINE: Loyola (MD) visits the Colgate Raiders after Cam Spencer scored 25 points in Loyola (MD)’s 78-73 victory against the American Eagles.
The Raiders have gone 4-1 at home. Colgate has a 0-2 record in one-possession games.
The Greyhounds are 6-2 in conference games. Loyola (MD) is third in the Patriot allowing 66.3 points while holding opponents to 42.4% shooting.
The Raiders and Greyhounds square off Monday for the first time in Patriot play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Nelly Cummings is scoring 16.7 points per game and averaging 2.3 rebounds for the Raiders. Tucker Richardson is averaging 10.1 points and 4.4 rebounds over the last 10 games for Colgate.
Spencer is averaging 19.1 points, 3.6 assists and 2.2 steals for the Greyhounds. Jaylin Andrews is averaging 1.2 made 3-pointers over the last 10 games for Loyola (MD). | null | null | null | null | null |
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled the name of Kashmir Press Club’s general secretary. It is Ishfaq Tantry, not Tantray. The story has been corrected.
“It amounts to stifling the voice of journalists in the region,” said Ishfaq Tantry, a journalist and the general secretary of the club’s governing body, who called the government action “illegal.” The Editors Guild of India called the shutdown the “worst kind of state heavy handedness” against independent media. | null | null | null | null | null |
What we’ve gotten wrong about the history of Reconstruction
The erasure of Black leaders from the most misunderstood period in American history
Cameron Maynard stands at attention by the monument to Confederate soldiers at the South Carolina Statehouse on July 10, 2017, in Columbia, S.C. (Jeffrey Collins/AP)
By Robert Greene II
Tyler D. Parry
One of South Carolina’s most important historical figures is little remembered today. But this man — Henry E. Hayne — and his forgotten history shine a spotlight on the racism and racial inequality still plaguing society a century and a half after the politician and trailblazer made his mark on the state. Hayne’s life exemplified the promise of Reconstruction after the Civil War, its radical achievements and the tragedy of its defeat. His erasure from the history books further marks how racism brutally eclipsed the potential of Black political power, setting the United States on a course from which it has not yet fully recovered.
Hayne was born free in Charleston to a free Black mother named Mary and a White father, James Hayne. He obtained a formal education and worked as a tailor in Charleston throughout the antebellum period. Those who knew him remarked that he could pass as White, though he viewed himself as a Black man and held a deep investment in Black liberation at the time of the Civil War.
Using his ability to infiltrate White spaces, Hayne enlisted in the Confederacy with plans to defect to the Union Army as it occupied major sections of the South Carolina coast. In reflecting on his decision, Hayne recalled that it provided the best opportunity for him to go “through the lines” and defect: “I went with the South far enough to get out of it.” He eventually joined the Union’s all-Black 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment, under noted abolitionist commander Thomas Wentworth Higginson, earning the rank of commissary sergeant.
After the war’s conclusion, Hayne became involved in local politics and quickly moved up the ranks in state government. In 1868, he began his political career as a state senator for Marion County, and that same year he represented Marion at the convention responsible for drafting a new state constitution — one that expanded rights and privileges to South Carolina’s citizens, regardless of race. The 1868 constitution tore down the barriers that had previously blocked Black South Carolinians from participation, including entry into the state university.
Hayne also served in a number of clerical appointments, such as chairing the state penitentiaries’ board of directors, and serving as a member of the board for the state normal school.
In 1872, Hayne became South Carolina’s secretary of state. This elective position probably provided him the political and social capital necessary to personally disrupt the state’s last remaining icon of white supremacy — the University of South Carolina (USC).
But the revised state constitution brought institutional changes to the university that led toward its eventual desegregation. In 1869, two Black men had been appointed to the board of trustees, and they proclaimed the university was open to all qualified men, “regardless of race, color, or creed.”
On Oct. 7, 1873, Hayne capitalized on these changes and boldly applied for matriculation into the university’s medical school, a decision that proved to be one of the most consequential maneuvers in the state’s history. Citing his credentials as a politician and active public figure, the multiracial board of trustees enthusiastically approved his application, noting he was of the “highest character and the strictest integrity.”
White students and faculty, however, rose in outrage at the prospect of integrating the school. Faculty resigned and many students protested by loudly exiting the campus, some destroying property and physically blotting their names from the campus registry as they left.
Yet, Hayne’s calculation paid off. Not only was he the first African American to enter the university as a student, but Black men followed his lead in significant numbers over the next few years, becoming the majority of the student body in 1875.
The university was soon populated by Black men from throughout the South, both the formerly enslaved and those born free. The student body continued to include a significant White population, though many of the White students now came from the North. The southern Whites who attended USC from 1873 to 1877 were those committed to the Reconstruction project. Rather than a bastion of White elites reinforcing the entrenched power structure, USC now featured Black and White students studying together amicably. This period also saw the hiring of professor Richard T. Greener, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard College, as USC’s first Black faculty member.
But the Reconstruction project proved short-lived due to the schemes and violence of white supremacists who retook state governmental power in 1877, eventually establishing the era of Jim Crow racist brutality and segregation. White legislators accused Hayne and others in the Reconstruction government of corruption as a way to seek retribution for their political activism and their fight against White supremacy.
The resurgent white supremacist order placed Hayne in physical danger, and he fled South Carolina and settled in Cook County, Ill. Although there is no record of his later life, it seems he never returned to the state of his birth and probably remained in Illinois in s until he died.
We know so little about Hayne’s later life in part because he was erased from South Carolina history.
And this erasure was no accident. Though the Jim Crow era is most well known for its manifestations of physical violence and the immobilization of the Black body politic, it also produced historians who were specifically trained to romanticize the “Old South,” misrepresent the period of Reconstruction as an abject failure, and deny that Black and White people could coexist in the same spaces or live in a state of equality.
Jim Crow’s revisionist historians never hid their true beliefs about Reconstruction’s goal of expanding opportunities for the South’s most marginalized populations. In fact, one historian clearly outlined his opposition to USC’s desegregation in 1925, saying it simply “fell victim to the mania for social equality” and was degraded in the process. These biased and bigoted historians invented the myth that Reconstruction was a failure.
Yet Hayne’s life shows the very different reality of Reconstruction history — and its significance within the broader American story. He represents what Black Americans could have achieved in this period, if only allowed to do so. At the same time, the fact that he is barely remembered alongside such contemporaries as Frederick Douglass exposes how many Americans are still uncomfortable with the Reconstruction era. But grappling with this history — and its legacy — is a crucial element to understanding why racism and racial inequality persist. It was a moment of great possibility dashed by bigotry and a lack of will with ramifications that shaped everything that came after it.
Today’s arguments about voting rights, the role of race in American history and the accessibility of higher education all trace back to the successes — and failures — of the Reconstruction era. Within the realm of education, African Americans at many White-majority institutions continue to struggle for acceptance and inclusion. But like Hayne and the other African American students at USC during the 1870s, they continue to excel despite the numerous obstacles thrown at them, knowing that their hard work is merely the continuation of Black progress and achievement. They move forward despite the many historical setbacks thrown their way. Henry Hayne’s own story is an example of that, and his life and legacy deserve greater attention. | null | null | null | null | null |
Iraj Pezeshkzad, an Iranian writer whose satirical 1973 novel “My Uncle Napoleon,” affectionately skewering the foibles of his countrymen and -women in the decades before the Islamic Revolution, became a phenomenally popular work of modern Persian literature, died Jan. 12 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was believed to be 95.
The cause was a stroke, said his son, Bahman Pezeshkzad. Mr. Pezeshkzad had lived in exile in France since shortly after the 1979 revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme religious leader of Iran. Mr. Pezeshkzad was visiting family members in the United States when the coronavirus pandemic began and had remained in the country ever since.
The satire of “My Uncle Napoleon” was directed chiefly at Iranian conspiracy theories surrounding the British, who, along with the Soviets, occupied parts of Iran during World War II with objectives that included securing the country’s oil reserves. Later, in 1953, the British assisted the CIA in a successful plot to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, further fueling suspicions among Iranians about a British hand in all of the country’s affairs.
“Let us imagine we are in the process of creating a much-needed reading list for experts and analysts on Iran,” Azar Nafisi, the author of the best-selling memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” wrote in the Guardian in 2006. “I would put ‘My Uncle Napoleon’ in a cherished place very near the top.”
“ ‘My Uncle Napoleon’ is in many ways a refutation of the grim and hysterical images of Iran that have dominated the western world for almost three decades,” she continued. “On so many different levels this novel represents Iran’s confiscated and muted voices, revealing a culture filled with a deep sense of irony and humor, as well as sensuality and tenderness.”
Some of the tenderness in the story derived from the narrator’s love of his cousin, Layli, the daughter of Uncle Napoleon. Mr. Pezeshkzad wrote in an afterword to the book that “if I wanted to make any claims of realism for this novel, it would be as a love story taken from my own life experience.”
“I found that in presenting her through the absurd story of Uncle Napoleon,” he wrote, “I was able to do her justice, and to describe her in her real innocence. I could follow my heart and remember her, and have the sweet perfume of her love refresh the atmosphere of poisonous suspicion and plotting with which she was surrounded.”
He began his literary career in his 20s, his son said, translating works by French authors including the satirists Voltaire and Molière and trying his hand at magazine articles and stories of his own. In addition to “My Uncle Napoleon,” Mr. Pezeshkzad’s novel “Hafez in Love,” translated by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and Patricia J. Higgins, was published in English in 2021. | null | null | null | null | null |
Look where we ended up. A political faction that spent March 2021 wailing about Dr. Seuss and the purported threat to speech and open discussion in the United States transitioned into a faction that advocated restrictions on the availability of particular books or lines of argument and instruction. A business choosing not to print books is chastised; laws prohibiting businesses from mandating trainings don’t engender comment. We shouldn’t assume that a handful of efforts to ban books are representative of a consensus, certainly, though Fox News’s silence on the issue (particularly relative to its Seussathon) is noteworthy. But the idea that the left is trying to mandate a particular worldview, and therefore that the state should intervene to prevent promulgation of that worldview, would certainly seem to be the sort of thing that the right would find offensive in a different context. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Trib’s new editor is Sewell Chan, most recently at the Los Angeles Times, where he was the top opinion-side editor, and previously at the New York Times and The Washington Post. Smith considers it a triumph for nonprofit newsrooms that it’s no longer unusual for them to attract the likes of Chan, or of Kimi Yoshino, who was managing editor of the L.A. Times before being named editor in chief of the Baltimore Banner. | null | null | null | null | null |
Those very arguments had been deployed for decades to exclude women, African Americans and others from jobs at every level and in every industry in the U.S. — including at major media outlets. In fact, highly qualified women and minorities were seldom named to corporate boards because board members and chief executives, who did most of the hiring, were White males who recruited from their own White, male networks. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Some personal testimony in the matter of NPR v. the Supreme Court
From left, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Justice Stephen G. Breyer at the Supreme Court in D.C. on June 1, 2017. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
But first, the backstory.
On Jan. 7, my colleague at The Post, the distinguished Supreme Court observer Ruth Marcus, noted that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had been absent from the bench during oral arguments. Marcus asked if that might have had something to do with the fact that Gorsuch, who sits next to Sotomayor, was the only member of the court not wearing a mask, despite the relentlessness of the omicron variant, which has been pushing the covid-19 death rate to more than 1,000 Americans per day.
Sotomayor has Type 1 diabetes and is over 65 years old, which places her at elevated risk of serious, even fatal, complications should she be infected by the coronavirus. On the day she would have spent hours seated next to Gorsuch, she instead participated in court proceedings remotely.
Enter Nina Totenberg, veteran court reporter for NPR. When she followed up on the question with her sources, Totenberg learned that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had communicated “in some form” that the omicron spike was a concern that might lead Sotomayor’s colleagues to change their practice and wear masks after the holiday break.
As a radio reporter, Totenberg is not allowed to speak in sentences as mushy as the one I just wrote. So in a Jan. 18 report, she said: “The situation had changed,” because of omicron, “and, according to court sources, Sotomayor did not feel safe in close proximity to people who were unmasked. Chief Justice John Roberts, understanding that, in some form or other, asked the other justices to mask up.”
Cue the dudgeon.
From the chief justice, who hates all suggestions of disunity on the court, came a denial that anything was “asked” for. Gorsuch and Sotomayor expressed their mutual concord and respect. Totenberg changed the verb “asked” to “suggested” in a later version of her story, and pointed to the phrase “in some form or other” as a clear indication that she was not claiming perfect knowledge as to the exact wording or tenor of Roberts’s communication.
I hoped that these fudging denials would be followed by another message from Gorsuch, in which he might apologize to his friend Sotomayor for somehow missing her concerns, while assuring her that he would take her concerns to heart in the future. We both grew up in the Denver area in the 1960s and 1970s, so I assumed that he and I must have absorbed the same lessons about common courtesy and good manners. I hated to think that a Denver boy would deliberately ignore the worries of a neighbor in compromised health. At the very least, I would have expected a chivalrous offer to remain in his chambers, participating remotely, while the other eight justices agreeably masked up.
But no. Gorsuch has been silent while his supporters have gone nuts over that Totenberg verb: “asked.” Of course, Roberts could clarify the whole thing by telling us what he did say, not just what he didn’t say.
Which brings me, finally, to the Gorsuch standard of journalism.
In November 2004, I published a rather ho-hum piece making a far-from-original case that progressives had become too reliant on the courts for victories, at the cost of effective political organizing. Though it might take time, I said, the rise of more conservative courts could strengthen progressives by making them build from the grass roots.
Somehow, the piece caught the eye of Gorsuch, in private practice but marked out for bigger things. Donning his journalist cap, he wrote an essay for National Review in February 2005 approving of the argument, while declaring that I was “a self-identified liberal.” I wrote to him, thanking him for noticing my work but politely pointing out that I don’t describe myself as liberal — the only conceivable definition of his phrase.
In his reply, which I did not save, Journalist Gorsuch said essentially that such a trifle doesn’t matter. And that was that … until, during his Senate confirmation for the Supreme Court, he persisted in calling me “a self-described liberal,” which was no closer to being true in 2017 than in 2005. At which point I realized that accuracy is evidently not an important value for Gorsuch.
I would never have mentioned this. But then Team Gorsuch began nitpicking and hairsplitting, and now the story seems relevant. | null | null | null | null | null |
While the West has been focused on Russia’s buildup around Ukraine, Russian troops also deployed this month into Kazakhstan.
The country faced the worst violence it's seen since declaring independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. About 225 people were killed during the unrest, including 19 members of the security forces. Professor and native Kazakh Nargis Kassenova joined James Hohmann to discuss the situation unfolding abroad — and why she doesn’t see her home country returning to Russian control.
Kassenova is a senior fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and an associate professor on sabbatical at KIMEP University in Almaty, which was the epicenter of the protests in Kazakhstan.
Read Nargis Kassenova’s op-ed. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Attendees dressed as Spider-Man gather during New York Comic Con at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Saturday, Oct. 9, 2021, in New York. After spending one weekend in second place, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” proved it still had some fight left. Sony’s superhero juggernaut swung back to first place in its sixth weekend in theaters and became the sixth highest grossing film of all time, globally, according to studio estimates on Sunday, Jan. 23, 2022. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
TOWSON, Md. — A sport-utility vehicle driver was killed this weekend on a Maryland road when his vehicle collided with a street sweeper, police said.
Dennis L. Johnson Jr., 52, was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash, which happened early Saturday just after midnight on Pulaski Highway, located in the Rosedale community of Baltimore County, according to a county police news release.
The crash’s cause remains under investigation by the Baltimore County police crash team. | null | null | null | null | null |
Woman killed in crash in Prince George’s County
An unidentified woman was killed Sunday when the car she was driving struck a tree in Prince George’s County, police said.
The accident occurred about 7 a.m. at Martin Luther King Jr. Highway and Whitfield Chapel Road, just east of the Capital Beltway, in the county’s Ardmore area, police said. They said the woman had been traveling west on Martin Luther King Jr. Highway, or Route 704.
“For reasons that remain under investigation, the car left the roadway and crashed into a tree,” police said in a statement. “The driver was pronounced dead at the scene.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: A new investigation in India reveals an old truth about silencing women
The Twitter app icon on a mobile phone. (Matt Rourke/AP)
By Barkha Dutt
A few years ago, I had to be given round-the-clock police security after a series of online rape and murder threats. My personal number was shared on a sex escort website. And my WhatsApp was deluged with pictures of genitalia.
The immediate trigger was the fact that I used Twitter to call out the indiscriminate targeting of innocent Kashmiri students in different parts of India, after a horrific terror attack in south Kashmir took the lives of 40 soldiers. I argued we were playing right into the hands of terrorists by dividing Indians.
But the trigger could just as well have been a comment on any number of things — a critique of India’s covid-19 response, a demand for marital rape to be penalized, a reflection on the economy. Any excuse will do if it provides an opportunity to troll, abuse and eventually silence independent, opinionated women.
Last week, an investigation published by digital platform The Wire reconfirmed these lived experiences. The report’s authors say they have uncovered a secret app, linked to supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that can automate abuse, manipulate Twitter trends and target female journalists, among others, with mass messages of hate, intimidation and violence despite Twitter’s security settings.
According to the report, I am the second most targeted female journalist — receiving nearly 20,000 hate tweets in the first five months of 2021 — alongside another Post Global Opinions columnist, Rana Ayyub, and journalists such as Swati Chaturvedi, Sagarika Ghose and Nidhi Razdan.
The report, based on the account of an anonymous whistleblower who claims to be a discontented former employee of the party’s Information Technology Cell, names a party youth leader as an alleged “handler.” The youth leader has denied any knowledge of the app or its connection to the organization. Another critique of the investigation is that it relies too heavily on screenshots without actually demonstrating the operation of the app.
I am not a tech geek. But I don’t need evidence of a secret software to know that the online assaults on me and other women have been run by an extremely well-oiled, coordinated political machinery.
Of course, I have been at the receiving end of vicious and snarky trolling from supporters of every political party whenever my reporting does not confirm their biases or leanings. Left-leaning ideologues have also often been abrasive. And Kashmiri separatists have been especially hostile.
Yet, over the years, no one has been as persistent, relentless and organized in their attacks as India’s right-wing armies of cyber-troopers, bots and political operatives.
A young BJP supporter who is tasked with ramping up Internet campaigns once told me how the “othering” — both of individuals and ideas — was a key component of the party tool kit, with the aim of making hard-core supporters believe in an “enemy” only the party could fight.
The trolling against women like me is sexualized. I have been called a “presstitute,” been told I am not good-looking enough to rape and been given three fictional Muslim husbands, in an attempt to make some twisted point about my belief in religious pluralism. Another instrument of attack is fake news designed to cast people as “anti-national” traitors.
It is emotionally exhausting, suffocating and depleting to be targeted in this manner. It is also a threat to my life.
I received another reminder this week of exactly how dangerous trolling can be, especially when it is patronized by those who wield political power.
An edited clip from a news report I did in 2004 was shared by right-wing trolls to falsely claim that I had supported the “genocide of Kashmiri Pandits,” the Hindu minority of the valley forced out in the 1990s by terrorists when the insurgency took birth. The clip has been edited to completely distort the context; fact-checking sites have repeatedly called it for what it is — an absolute lie.
But, every year, the BJP’s far-right supporters make it go viral. Among those who shared it on Twitter this week, with a comment that called me a “termite,” is one of Bollywood’s big names, Paresh Rawal, who has been a BJP member of parliament. Another was Kapil Mishra, who calls himself “a proud BJP worker” and who, during protests against a contentious new citizenship law, infamously led a chant calling for those who are not patriots to be shot.
The annual, deliberate falsification of this report is so inflammatory that it can easily incite physical violence against me. In response to Rawal’s tweet, one user warns that he would have broken my teeth if he had the chance, complaining that the BJP is too tolerant.
In 2021, a YouTube video called for the hanging of 9 journalists who reported on protests by farmers; I was among those named. Instead of being punished by law enforcement, the man who threatened us and the hate-filled account he runs continue to be active on digital media platforms. The video was shared by some members of the BJP, who praised it and objected when it was taken down.
Globally, a UNESCO report found that 73 percent of female journalists surveyed had experienced some online violence. The motive is clearly to secure our silence and our surrender.
Big Tech — including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — and our government owe us answers. | null | null | null | null | null |
A Ukrainian serviceman patrols a street in Verkhnotoretske village in Yasynuvata district, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, on Jan. 22. (Andriy Andriyenko/AP)
Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told the American people — and the world — about the United States’ concerns that the Russian government was preparing to invade Ukraine. “As part of its plans,” Psaki said, the Kremlin is “laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion” — a false-flag campaign that would lay the blame on Ukraine for instigating the conflict.
These responses may seem part of a tit-for-tat diplomatic spat, but they point to how much the West has changed its posture toward adversarial information operations since Russia’s last invasion of Ukraine. In 2014, the Kremlin disinformation playbook caught the West flat-footed; governments were simply unsure how to counter this new hybrid warfare. Now, they are better equipped to anticipate Kremlin narratives, even if they can’t always counter them effectively among key audiences — such as the Russian public.
Today, Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and complicated Western attempts at diplomacy with unrealistic demands, such as barring Poland or the Baltic states from hosting NATO troops or equipment, and a guarantee that Ukraine or Georgia will not be able to join the Western military alliance. Its rhetoric has also become more bellicose to match, according to our monitoring at the Centre for Information Resilience, a U.K.-based nonprofit social enterprise dedicated to identifying, countering and exposing influence operations.
Moscow has been priming the Russian people for a potential invasion, with a large uptick in discussion of alleged “Ukrainian aggression.” Carefully curated Instagram accounts and mercenary TikTok influencers appeal to younger Russians with false claims of ethnic Russians being targeted in eastern Ukraine. State news channels, meanwhile, have pumped out propaganda around the alleged fortification of Eastern Europe by NATO. Mentions of similar stories in the Russian-language news media have more than doubled since the Kremlin began to move troops to Ukraine’s eastern border in March, from about 250 mentions per day at their peak last spring to over 500 per day this week.
In 2014, the United States and its allies were caught on the back foot, reacting slowly — if at all — to the Kremlin’s campaign of falsehoods. Just as the invasion took our countries by surprise, so did its informational component, muddying the public perception of key international events such as the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the Moscow-backed shoot-down of Malaysian Air flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. In 2014, Western nations simply did not anticipate, or have a playbook for, the so-called “Little Green Men” who appeared in Crimea. The peninsula was invaded by well-armed troops, with no insignia, who spoke Russian. The Kremlin simply denied the Little Green Men were its troops.
Meanwhile, in the St. Petersburg troll factory, hundreds of narratives and conspiracy theories polluted the information space, making it impossible to tell what was true or false, and some Western journalists, not yet savvy to the Kremlin’s tactics, covered “both sides” of the story, giving credence to Kremlin narratives. The very notion of objective truth came under sustained attack by a nation-state.
Today, Western policymakers seem to finally recognize not only that the Kremlin instigated and continues the war in Ukraine, but that the Kremlin treats the information ecosystem as an active front in any conflict. Both the British and U.S. governments have invested expertise in understanding and countering disinformation. In 2017, for example, the United States launched the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, to track disinformation and coordinate policy responses across the U.S. government and between allies. (While the GEC struggled under the politicization of the Trump administration, it is becoming more nimble under Biden, and issued a fact sheet about false Russian narratives regarding Ukraine this week.)
The government has also announced it will launch a joint intelligence center to target foreign influence campaigns. In the U.K., in the immediate aftermath of the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal in 2018, government officials effectively countered Kremlin disinformation because they knew it was coming. Rather than allow Russian narratives to pollute the news, they told the public to anticipate false narratives but not to listen to them. It worked.
That recognition — along with the fact that Western audiences have become savvier to Russian tactics, thanks to six-plus years of incessant media coverage — presents a challenge for Moscow today. When Wallace, the U.K. defense secretary, calls out Russia’s “straw man” arguments around alleged NATO imperialism, or when Psaki highlights the potential for a Russian false-flag operation from the White House podium, it is effective: Policymakers in Western European capitals pay a little more attention. The international community will treat any major flare-up in Crimea or Donbas with suspicion — and that might engender more coordinated responses to any Russian aggression. Disinformation is often designed to exploit divisions in societies and between countries: The West speaking with one unified voice is something the Kremlin fears.
But it may not be enough. The only community Russia needs to trigger, or spin into support for a conflict, is the one on the border. With anti-NATO sentiment in Russia rising, and Moscow seeding a muddled narrative around NATO enlargement in the international press, the ground may already be fertilized for such a conflict — despite Western efforts. | null | null | null | null | null |
That effort from the junior guard, a first-team all-Big Ten pick last season, on a play that had little bearing on the game’s outcome highlighted a determination seen throughout the roster as the Terps scored an 87-59 triumph at Xfinity Center, snapping a two-game skid in Brenda Frese’s return to the bench.
Katie Benzan led five Maryland players in double figures with 17 points, making 5 of 7 three-pointers to go with five rebounds and five assists. Owusu chipped in 15 points, sinking all three of her three-point attempts, and six assists, and Diamond Miller also scored 15 points and added four rebounds and four assists in a game Maryland led for all but 2½ minutes.
No Northwestern player scored in double digits — including Veronica Burton, who entered the weekend 10th in the Big Ten in points per game (17.4) but finished with nine on 3-for-10 shooting with six rebounds and six assists Sunday while dealing with foul trouble. | null | null | null | null | null |
Covid patient whose family sued to keep him on ventilator dies
Scott Quiner, a Minnesota man whose wife sued over a hospital’s plan to take him off a ventilator months after being diagnosed with covid-19, died Saturday. He was 55.
Quiner died at the Houston hospital where he was flown to for care during the legal battle, according to Marjorie Holsten, an attorney for the family. She said he remained on a ventilator at the time, but she declined to identify the facility or provide additional details on the circumstances of his death.
Anne Quiner has said she believes her husband did not receive adequate care from Mercy. A statement Holsten previously sent to The Post said Quiner did not receive adequate nutrition while on the ventilator and subsequently lost 30 pounds. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Class matters in acceptance to highly selective schools
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in July 2020. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
In his Jan. 17 Education column, “Why not lottery admissions for selective high schools?,” Jay Mathews wrote that “Asian American culture is more focused on academic achievement.” This statement generalizes the group, placing an unnecessary amount of pressure on Asian American students; those who don’t reach this “academic achievement” may feel incapable if their ethnic group is seen as high achieving as a byproduct of culture. It also implies that the reason other demographics are underrepresented in admissions-based high schools is that their cultures are less focused on academic achievement.
In reality, Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately represented in the number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. This implies a lack of opportunities, such as private tutoring or the ability to participate in extracurricular activities, in comparison with their higher-income peers, contributing to the lack of underrepresented students in highly selective high schools.
Christopher Arraya, Woodbridge | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Gorsuch is making a statement about the Supreme Court by going maskless
Neil M. Gorsuch, top right, is pictured in 2017 with four of his fellow justices on the Supreme Court, including John G. Roberts Jr., Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Regarding the Jan. 20 news article “Colleagues deny asking Gorsuch to wear a mask”:
That a Supreme Court justice would choose not to wear a mask when normally sitting next to a colleague who he knows to be immunocompromised might be a curiosity, but it is hard to imagine any other motivation than to make a public statement that has taken on a political tone. That it should happen during arguments about vaccination mandates seems blatant.
One expects the Supreme Court to be objective and free of bias. Yet we are in an era where that objectivity is questioned, and with it, therefore, the court’s legitimacy. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s actions unfortunately put that question to rest.
Bard Malovany, Arlington | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Sports, when it comes to probabilities, is a whole different ballgame
Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady throws the football in a game against the New York Jets on Jan. 2 in East Rutherford, N.J. (John Munson/Associated Press)
A 70 percent chance of success can mean very different things based on context. Chance of heavy snow? “Alright, we probably won’t have school.” Chance of survival? “Let me call my family!” Chance of the Bucks winning the NBA championship? “Looks like it’s going to be a blowout.”
Context and applications of statistics are integral to their usage. A percent chance created to predict weather, medical risk and sports events are not the same, as in Richard Zoglin’s Jan. 19 Wednesday Opinion essay, “We’ve become obsessed with statistical probabilities.” A chance of treatment success or a chance of snow is something that has been meticulously calculated based on masses of data to help us make decisions, predicting something that is supposed to be predictable, something that follows the rules of what we know in science.
However, sports are a whole different ballgame. Sports thrive off unpredictability. No matter what their respective records are, there is always a chance that the underdog will prevail. Fans make a ritual out of crowding around TVs filled with athletes, not filled with statistical chances. Statistical probabilities ruin the fan experience of eagerly awaiting the unknown by trying to predict something in a world where unpredictability is desired and cherished.
Akash Jagdeesh, Fairfax | 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’s 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 what they deduce — or hope — the justices might do in the future. | null | null | null | null | null |
That effort from the junior guard, a first-team all-Big Ten pick last season, on a play that had little bearing on the game’s outcome, highlighted a determination seen throughout the roster as the Terps scored an 87-59 triumph at Xfinity Center, snapping a two-game skid in Brenda Frese’s return to the bench.
Katie Benzan led five Maryland players in double figures with 17 points, making 5 of 7 three-pointers to go with five rebounds and five assists. Owusu chipped in 15 points, sinking all three of her three-point attempts, and six assists. Diamond Miller also scored 15 points and added four rebounds and four assists in a game Maryland led for all but 2½ minutes.
No Northwestern player scored in double digits. Veronica Burton, who entered the weekend 10th in the Big Ten in points per game (17.4), finished with nine points on 3-for-10 shooting with six rebounds and six assists while dealing with foul trouble. | null | null | null | null | null |
In mourning yet again, New York City prepares to honor fallen officer
Police officers mourn fallen colleague
The funeral for New York City police officer Jason Rivera was being finalized, as his comrades in blue mourned the loss of the 22-year-old who joined the force to make a difference in what he had described as a “chaotic city.”
A solemn scene unfolded Sunday with a column of police officers, as well as firefighters, flanking the streets as a hearse carrying the fallen officer left the medical examiner’s office.
During a Sunday morning appearance on CNN, Mayor Eric Adams (D) stressed the urgency “to deal with the underlying issues that are impacting crime in our city and has become a stain on the inner cities across our country.”
The medical examiner ruled Rivera’s death a homicide. Mora remained in life-threatening condition, Adams said Sunday. The man who police say shot them, Lashawn J. McNeil, 47, was also critically wounded and hospitalized, authorities said. Details about what led to the deadly confrontation were still emerging.
Girl, 8, fatally hit by stray bullet in Chicago
An 8-year-old Chicago girl who was shot in the head and killed by a gunman targeting someone else on the city’s Southwest Side has been identified.
The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the victim Sunday as Melissa Ortega of Chicago. A police report said she was walking on the street with her mother Saturday afternoon when someone fired shots at a 26-year-old alleged gang member who was leaving a nearby store, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Police said they believe he was the intended target.
The girl was pronounced dead Saturday at a hospital. The man police believe was the intended target was shot in the back and hospitalized in critical condition. Authorities did not have an update on his condition Sunday. No one was in custody Sunday in connection with the shooting.
Police Superintendent David Brown said the department “will not rest until the perpetrators” are brought to justice. The shooting happened amid a spike in homicides in Chicago.
Last year was the city’s deadliest in 25 years, with approximately 800 homicides.
Melissa was a student at Emiliano Zapata Academy in the Little Village neighborhood, according to the Chicago Teachers Union. The girl and her mother emigrated to Chicago from Mexico last year, according to family members organizing an online effort to pay for her funeral, which is expected to be held in Mexico.
Cruise ship changes course to Bahamas after arrest warrant: A cruise ship that was supposed to dock in Miami sailed to the Bahamas instead after a U.S. judge granted an order to seize the vessel as part of a lawsuit. Passengers were taken by ferry to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Sunday. The suit was filed in a Miami federal court by Peninsula Petroleum Far East under a maritime procedure that allows actions against vessels for unpaid debts. The complaint says Crystal Symphony was chartered or managed by Crystal Cruises and Star Cruises, which are both sued for breach of contract for owing $4.6 million in fuel. | null | null | null | null | null |
What to know from Washington’s 116-87 loss at Capital One Arena, its third in a row
Celtics forward Jayson Tatum dunks as the Wizards' Rui Hachimura and Thomas Bryant defend Sunday at Capital One Arena. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Anyone considering traveling to Cleveland for next month’s NBA All-Star Game might have saved themselves some trouble Sunday afternoon by hopping on the Metro to get to Capital One Arena. For the many, many Boston fans in attendance, maybe Amtrak was the answer.
However the fans arrived, Jayson Tatum made it worth their while with a performance worthy of the league’s annual showcase. In a battle of middling Eastern Conference teams, Tatum led the Celtics to a 116-87 win over the Washington Wizards with a season-high 51 points.
Tatum split defenders to stream to the rim for dunks. He juked Wizards players in the paint to carve out lanes for layups. And he hit a career-high nine three-pointers with a buttery smooth shot no matter whom Wizards Coach Wes Unseld Jr. put in his way.
It wasn’t a friendly welcome back for Unseld, who returned from the NBA’s coronavirus protocols to coach his first game since Jan. 12. The Boston-heavy crowd cheered loudly when Tatum checked back in with 7:21 to play, already having scored 48 points, and gave him a standing ovation when he checked out, having finished the job.
“It’s embarrassing, honestly,” Wizards guard Bradley Beal said of the loss. “That’s probably the one and only word I have for it.”
Last time out: Wizards can’t make the plays they need, fall at home to Raptors
The loss stings more because of the teams’ positions in the East — Boston (24-24) entered a half-game behind the hosts. Washington (23-24), which fell to 10th place as Boston moved up to ninth, has lost three in a row, including a defeat Friday to eighth-place Toronto.
“This one is tough because we’re all kind of bunched in the same grouping as far as records, so these games almost multiply in effect,” Unseld said. “To stay ahead of teams and keep ourselves relevant, we have to come away with these type of games at home.”
Washington’s defensive issues extended beyond one Boston all-star. It allowed the Celtics to move the ball too freely and get to the perimeter too easily — Jaylen Brown (18 points) made four three-pointers, and Marcus Smart (11) had two. It also switched too liberally on occasion, even when the assignment seemed to involve face-guarding Tatum, which resulted in putting lesser defenders on Boston’s hottest shooters.
There was nothing the Wizards could do on offense to counter Tatum’s onslaught. Beal had 19 points and Deni Avdija added 13, noteworthy given how much he was asked to do defensively.
Unseld stuck with a bloated rotation that featured nine primary players but ultimately included everyone. Starting center Daniel Gafford continued to see limited action, scoring two points in 11 minutes despite committing no fouls, as the team works to reacclimate backup Thomas Bryant (11 points in 22 minutes) as he works back from an ACL tear.
Asked whether the team might consider shortening its rotation earlier than planned, Unseld said no.
“This was all kind of part of the plan. We knew we had to get two key guys back, reintegrated at a difficult juncture in the season,” he said. “So that kind of led to what we’ve been doing over the last two weeks or so. But there’s no mandate that we have to play 11 or 12; it was just trying to find a way to get these guys going.”
In his return after missing one game with neck spasms, Kyle Kuzma had 12 points and seven rebounds.
On the road again (soon)
The Wizards have one game remaining in their eight-game homestand, a Tuesday matchup against the Los Angeles Clippers. (They’re 3-4 so far.) After that, they face a dastardly stretch against Memphis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Miami and Brooklyn, with the first three on the road — which is a large part of the reason Unseld and Beal stressed that Washington has to increase its urgency.
Tatum’s big half
Tatum moved like water in the first half and bothered the Wizards all over the court — but especially from the perimeter. He made 5 of 6 attempts from three before halftime to rack up 31 points in 17:26.
The Wizards threw a few different bodies — usually more than one, including Avdija and Spencer Dinwiddie — at Tatum, but Unseld credited a lack of defensive awareness to his team’s struggles.
“I think no player should have nights like this on us anymore,” Avdija said, “... but it’s too late to say that.”
Unseld returns
Unseld had an eight-day stay in the NBA’s coronavirus protocols.
The first-year coach — the league’s 16th head coach to enter the NBA’s protocols when he did so Jan. 14 — was surprised to return a positive test when he did and developed what he called minor cold symptoms shortly afterward. He stayed connected with his coaching staff in virtual meetings and over the phone.
“You’re connected as far as game plan and talking to the coaches and the staff and reach out and touch players here and there, but you’re not there. There’s a distance,” Unseld said Saturday. “It’s kind of a weird dynamic, but it also allows you to kind of look at it from a different perspective, from a holistic perspective.”
Pat Delany, who coached one game in Unseld’s stead before entering the protocols, is still out. Fellow assistant Ryan Richman was back on the sideline Sunday after a stint in the protocols.
“The staff’s still going through it. We’re ... 47 games in and we have our full roster complement — we have yet to see the full staff and full roster in concert,” Unseld said. “It’ll be exciting, when we get everybody back, to see how it looks.”
Tom Brady, Buccaneers stage dramatic comeback but fall to Rams on last-second kick | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE- A sign for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” hangs at the Broadway opening at the Lyric Theatre on Sunday, April 22, 2018, in New York. The actor playing Harry Potter has been fired from the Broadway production following a complaint by a co-star about his conduct. Producers said Sunday night, Jan. 23, 2022, that after an independent investigation of the incident that they decided to terminate the contract of James Snyder. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
D.C. police officer shot in Northwest Washington, department spokesman says
Dustin Sternbeck, the police spokesman, said the officer was taken to a hospital. Christopher Geldart, the deputy mayor for public safety, said the injuries to the officer do not appear to be life threatening.
A possible gunman was at an address in that block and police have set up a barricade, Sternbeck said. It could not be immediately determined whether the officer had responded to a call to the location. | null | null | null | null | null |
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes celebrates a touchdown by wide receiver Tyreek Hill against the Bills. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Tom Brady was only minutes removed from his early playoff exit, and Aaron Rodgers was still too “fresh” off the Green Bay Packers’ loss a night earlier to contemplate his future. Turns out, neither really needed to give an answer.
The present and future of the NFL were on display Sunday night in Kansas City, where a quarterback duel between the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes and the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen ushered in the next era.
In a rematch of the AFC championship game here almost exactly a year ago, Mahomes again guided the Chiefs to victory, edging Allen’s Bills in a 42-36 overtime thriller that featured 10 total touchdowns and 25 points in the final two minutes of regulation. The victory, coupled with a Cincinnati Bengals win a day before, ensured Kansas City will host the conference title game for the fourth consecutive season, a feat no other team has achieved.
The win also quashed any doubt that the NFL was in the hands of Mahomes and one of his newest rivals in Allen, whose team was constructed largely to compete with the Chiefs. Together, the two put on a show, with dueling pinpoint deep passes, sidearm throws, designed runs with hurdles over defenders and off-script plays that fit seamlessly within their tailored schemes.
Yet the result came down to mere seconds — 13 to be exact — that showcased their poise under pressure. Mahomes began a stunning comeback in the final 13 seconds of regulation that extended into overtime.
“The one thing that I love about this team is they didn’t flinch,” Chiefs Coach Andy Reid said. “They kept focus; nobody threw in the hat and quit. They just kept battling. … The guys just believed it was going to get done.”
For the first 59 minutes 47 seconds, the teams traded scores and big plays in a game that both Chiefs and Bills players alike admitted was unlike any other. On the whole, the game had 974 yards of offense, 78 points, 53 first downs and not a single turnover.
Allen finished with 397 yards from scrimmage (329 passing) and four touchdowns. Mahomes totaled 447 yards from scrimmage and four touchdowns (one rushing).
“This is definitely another step for him into the Hall of Fame,” Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill said. “He had a chance to prove once again he’s definitely at the top of the helm when it comes down to quarterbacks in the league. We know it. But I feel like the rest of the league sometimes doubts him.
“He’s top two — and he’s not two.”
Buffalo got the first crack and immediately began to establish the ground game, relying on running back Devin Singletary and the feet of Allen to lead the Bills to an opening 71-yard touchdown drive. Singletary capped it with a one-yard run, marking the 10th consecutive scoring drive for his team since the third quarter of Week 18.
The Chiefs matched by moving 74 yards downfield to begin a relentless scoring cycle. After converting a third and long with a 34-yard run up the middle of the field, Mahomes later scrambled for seven and then ran it in for eight yards and a touchdown.
But the magic really started just as the first half neared its end. Mahomes, known for off-schedule throws that often seem to defy physics, found a new way to complete a pass, rolling right on a bootleg before bending his torso almost horizontal to the ground and sending the ball under the arm of a swarming defender and into the arms of Hill. Roughly six minutes later, Mahomes lofted a pass over the pass rush while falling backward, somehow connecting with wide receiver Byron Pringle in the back of the end zone for a 14-7 lead.
But Allen, only a week removed from a near-flawless five-touchdown showing against the New England Patriots, responded with a series of quick strikes. The Chiefs lost safety Tyrann Mathieu to a concussion in the first quarter, so the Bills attacked the middle of the field and then turned to the ground game with a pair of designed runs in the red zone.
With 42 seconds left in the half, Allen threw a dart up the middle of the field for an 18-yard touchdown to Gabriel Davis, a target he would favor many more times before the game’s end. At halftime, it was 14-14.
When Mahomes connected with wide receiver Mecole Hardman for a 25-yard touchdown pass late in the third quarter, Allen launched an I-can-do-that-too deep ball on the first play of the next drive, finding Davis up the middle for a 75-yard score to spark a back-and-forth rally into the final seconds.
But while the stars of the show were obvious, the supporting casts were just as significant. The Bills have Allen but also an emerging tight end in Dawson Knox, a deep threat in Stefon Diggs, an improved running game led by Singletary and a defense that, like its offense, ranked in the top five in yards.
Loaded with weapons, the Chiefs saw their dominance wane early in the season, when they struggled with timing, turnovers and a defense unfit to carry the load. That changed in early November, when they acquired Melvin Ingram in a trade with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Their revamped pass rush was vital Sunday, especially after they lost do-it-all safety Mathieu. Allen was sacked twice, both on third and long.
As the game inched toward the two-minute mark with Kansas City leading 26-21, the Chiefs’ defense (and Diggs) showed up again. Singletary was tackled for a seven-yard loss on third down, and then Diggs tackled a fan who charged onto the field.
When stadium security cleared the field, Allen faced fourth and 13 and tossed another bullet up the middle to a wide-open Davis, who tumbled backward in the end zone for a go-ahead touchdown — a lead that Allen bolstered with a two-point conversion before watching it disappear again.
Mahomes threw a short pass to Hill, who split a double team on an in-breaking route before turning upfield and speeding past four more defenders for a 64-yard touchdown with a little more than a minute remaining — plenty of time for Allen to match the feat.
And that he did, needing only six plays and 49 seconds to tack on another seven points. As the Chiefs’ defense failed to get lined up in time, Allen quickly fielded the snap and sent a 19-yard pass to Davis out of the slot for his fourth touchdown.
Mahomes had only 13 seconds to match this one, and his coach offered a bit of advice.
“When it gets grim,” Reid recalled telling his quarterback, “be the grim reaper and go get it.”
So after finding Hill for 19 yards, Mahomes turned to a familiar target and hit tight end Travis Kelce with a 25-yard pass up the seam.
“They called a timeout right before we went out there and ran that play, and I told [Mahomes] I’m probably not going to run the route that’s called. I’m just going to run to an open area,” Kelce said. “Probably midway through his cadence, he was screaming at me at the line of scrimmage: ‘Do it! Do it!’
“I was just like, ‘All right; here we go, boys.’ It was just a little backyard football with a couple seconds left that gave us the opportunity to take the game into overtime.”
Kelce’s catch put the Chiefs in field goal range, and Harrison Butker nailed the game-tying 49-yard kick. After the Chiefs won the coin toss for overtime, Mahomes needed eight plays for his final feat.
In the right corner of the end zone, Kelce made the winning eight-yard touchdown catch as Mahomes ripped off his helmet and rushed toward him to celebrate. A packed stadium erupted and fireworks bolted into the sky, ushering in the NFL’s next era. | null | null | null | null | null |
BOTTOM LINE: Tyler Burton and the Richmond Spiders visit Makhel Mitchell and the Rhode Island Rams in A-10 action.
The Rams are 8-1 in home games. Rhode Island is fourth in the A-10 with 32.3 points per game in the paint led by Mitchell averaging 7.5.
The Spiders are 3-3 in A-10 play. Richmond has a 1-2 record in games decided by less than 4 points.
The Rams and Spiders square off Tuesday for the first time in conference play this season.
TOP PERFORMERS: Jeremy Sheppard is averaging 12.2 points, 3.1 assists and 1.7 steals for the Rams. Mitchell is averaging 12.3 points, 5.1 rebounds and 3.3 blocks over the last 10 games for Rhode Island.
Burton is averaging 16.8 points and seven rebounds for the Spiders. Grant Golden is averaging 9.3 points over the past 10 games for Richmond. | null | null | null | null | null |
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Patrick Mahomes found Travis Kelce in the corner of the end zone from 8 yards early in overtime, and the Kansas City Chiefs rallied to beat the Buffalo Bills 42-36 Sunday night in a sizzling finish to a wild divisional-round weekend.
TAMPA, Fla. — Matthew Stafford outplayed Tom Brady in the final minute, moving the Rams into position for a last-second field goal that gave Los Angeles a 30-27 victory over the Buccaneers after the seven-time Super Bowl champion led Tampa Bay on a late tying drive.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Rookie Evan McPherson kicked a 52-yard field goal as time expired, lifting the fourth-seeded Bengals past the top-seeded Tennessee Titans 19-16 on Saturday to end the NFL’s longest active road playoff skid.
NEW YORK — The ECHL suspended Jacob Panetta after the brother of longtime NHL defenseman P.K. Subban accused the Jacksonville defenseman of making “monkey gestures” in his direction. | null | null | null | null | null |
Scott Quiner, a Minnesota man whose wife sued over a hospital’s plan to take him off a ventilator months after he was diagnosed with covid-19, died Saturday. He was 55.
Quiner died at the Houston hospital where he was flown for care during the legal battle, according to Marjorie Holsten, an attorney for the family. He remained on a ventilator at the time, Holsten said, but she declined to identify the facility or provide additional details on the circumstances of his death.
Jennifer Needle, an associate professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, said hospitals may take someone off a ventilator after concluding that the patient will not survive and that continued life support is prolonging the person’s suffering.
It’s rare, she said, for a hospital to go against the preferences of a patient’s advance directive laying out their wishes, or those of a surrogate — “but it does happen.” Needle, who is also a professor of pediatrics, emphasized that hospitals do not take such decisions lightly and have standard procedures to bring in multiple opinions.
Resource scarcity may play a role in the decision-making under “crisis standards of care,” Needle noted, and some states have implemented those standards during the pandemic. Crisis standards allow hospitals to allocate limited staffers, ventilators and other tools based partially on patients’ chances of survival. Minnesota has not adopted crisis standards, Needle said, but many hospitals in the state are effectively operating under those circumstances.
Whether scarce resources played into the decision-making in Quiner’s case is not clear, and Needle cautioned that the case was probably complex.
“There is such a mistrust now of science that it has unfortunately bled its way into people not trusting medical providers, who have historically been one of the most trustworthy professions that there could be,” Needle said. She pointed to some Americans’ rejection of basic medical guidance on vaccination and coronavirus treatments.
What are crisis standards of care?
Last week, the Star Tribune published an opinion article written by three physicians criticizing the judge’s order to maintain Quiner’s life support. They said the United States “is nearly unique in allowing families and courts to intervene in these situations, and to order that artificial life support must continue.”
“When resources are scarce, the community consequences of continued active treatment become more significant and urgent — because other community members’ lives are often at stake,” they said, noting that many patients in Minnesota were waiting for limited treatment. | null | null | null | null | null |
A soldier fires into the air in Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou, on Jan. 23. (Sophie Garcia/AP)
Mutinous soldiers have detained the president of Burkina Faso after gunfire erupted at military bases across the West African nation, making him the third head of state overthrown in this region in the past eight months, according to a Western official and an army officer in the country.
Authorities initially denied that President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré had been forced into military custody, asserting that the situation was calm even as soldiers battled for control of several barracks. Then the mutineers reached the presidential palace late Sunday, Reuters reported. Kaboré was physically removed from office less than 24 hours after the uprising began, said the Western official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
A Burkinabe counterterrorism officer also confirmed Kaboré’s detention Monday, saying the president “is in good hands.” The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media, said soldiers were fed up by what they saw as a lack of support from the top. Violence has steadily worsened since Kaboré took over.
“We need a strong man with clear ideas,” he said.
The apparent ouster came after hundreds marched in the streets of the capital, Ouagadougou, demanding the resignation of Kaboré, who has been in power since 2015.
The power grab in Burkina Faso comes after special forces toppled the president of nearby Guinea in September and military officers ousted the interim leader of Mali in May.
As video captured shots ringing out in the capital Sunday, protesters trashed the headquarters of Kaboré’s ruling party. Another photo showed bullet holes in an SUV belonging to the presidency.
Authorities implemented a curfew and ordered schools to shutter.
The government cut phone lines and Internet access, leaving millions in a communications blackout. Hours before his detention, Kaboré drew backlash amid the outage after he tweeted about soccer.
“I express to you the pride of the whole nation,” he wrote to Burkina Faso’s team, which bested Gabon on Sunday in the Africa Cup of Nations, advancing to the quarterfinals in the continent’s largest soccer tournament. “We are all behind you.” | null | null | null | null | null |
To save his presidency, Biden can learn from the struggles of Rutherford B. Hayes
A long-forgotten president also tried to bring Americans together in a turbulent era
An 1881 engraving of President Rutherford B. Hayes. (iStock)
By Edward O. Frantz
Edward O. Frantz is a professor of history at the University of Indianapolis and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project. He is the author of "The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy, 1877-1933."
In a nearly two-hour news conference marking the end of his first year in office, President Biden ranged through a variety of topics, grabbing the most attention when he claimed that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin would “move in” on Ukraine, thereby adding a foreign policy issue to what some call a turbulent and politically disappointing first year in office.
But there is another way to look at presidential performances, as demonstrated by Rutherford B. Hayes, the auburn-bearded Civil War veteran and three-time governor from Ohio who was our 19th president. Presidents are constricted by their political realities, some of which are of their own making, but others of which they exert little control over. Hayes’s presidency was one poised between two eras, one of the Civil War, the other of industrial and corporate expansion. The policies he pursued were at turns retrospective and forward-looking, which caused consternation among his contemporaries and many a historian trying to make sense out of the chaos.
One thing was for certain: In trying to achieve consensus and moderation, in a way that President Biden might find familiar, Hayes traversed a lonely path, finding his footing only as an opposition president confronting a Democratic Congress later in his term.
Hayes, who occupied the presidency between 1877 and 1881, is generally known for the ending of Reconstruction in what was part of an electoral compromise that awarded him the presidency in return for the removal of the final federal troops from three Confederate States.
Hayes came to office after a controversial, high-stakes election. He lost the popular vote, electoral votes in former Confederate States were contested, allegations of voter fraud and intimidation were rampant, and would-be patriots took up arms to fight for their cause.
Hayes’s detractors never stopped questioning his legitimacy. Reporter Joseph Pulitzer often refused to call him president, insisting on “Mr. Hayes” instead. Others were more cutting. They employed derisive nicknames including “Old 8-7 deputy,” which referenced the special election commission that had decided along partisan lines to award the contested electoral votes to Hayes, thereby giving him a 185-184 victory in the electoral college.
Others referred to him as “his Fraudulency,” or a bit more creatively, “Rutherfraud.” These barbs were the day’s equivalent to some of the profane memes on the right taunting Biden.
Still, Hayes obstinately believed he could work with his detractors both within his own party and in the opposition party. He spent most of his first year in office making entreaties to moderate Southern Democrats, many of whom were members of the antebellum Whig Party, perhaps hoping that they would join him in pursuit of new measures designed to turn the page on the divisive politics of Reconstruction.
This culminated with a tour through states of the former Confederacy during the fall of 1877. Preaching a message of sectional reconciliation, respect for the Constitution and supremacy of the law, Hayes seemed stubbornly to believe he could reach alienated voters.
Yet these efforts were not successful — in part because Hayes also had significant detractors in his own party.
A group of Ulysses S. Grant loyalists, such as Sen. Roscoe Conkling (R-N.Y.), were upset with Hayes’s handling of Reconstruction. They attacked him for not doing more to protect minority and Republican voters, even though they also lacked coherent plans or strategy to do so on their own.
The 1878 midterm elections were a disaster for the Republican president and his party. A slim Republican Senate majority gave way to a comfortable Democratic margin; results in the House were equally poor, with Democrats maintaining the control that they had enjoyed in that chamber since the 1874 election.
Hayes spent the remainder of his presidency embracing the power of the veto and checking the excesses of his many detractors. For instance, Hayes vetoed seven consecutive Army appropriation bills that would have repealed African American voting rights. And while vetoes helped delay some truly noxious legislation, including the Chinese Exclusion Act (which would become law after Hayes left the presidency), they did little for his popularity while Hayes was still in office.
There was one silver lining for Hayes, who had announced that he would serve only one term when accepting the Republican nomination in 1876. He was delighted that a fellow Ohio Republican, another bearded Civil War veteran named James Garfield, won election in 1880.
Hayes took solace in knowing that his administration had avoided the corruption and cronyism that had plagued the Grant administration, which was precisely the kind of thing that one-term presidents have to take pride in when many of their larger goals go unfulfilled.
If Biden wants to be remembered as something other than a transitionary president like Hayes, he will need to be intentional. Biden can start by recognizing that his legacy won’t be shaped by good intentions and appeals to nonpartisan good governance. Instead, he must realize, as Hayes belatedly did, that being disagreeable can have an upside for a chief executive placed in a truly difficult political moment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Defending Taiwan is a worthy goal. But are we ready for heavy casualties?
Politicians are saying the U.S. must protect Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, but few talk about the potential costs
Military personnel during the visit of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen at a base in Taitung on Jan. 21. (Ritchie B Tongo/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
By Jacqueline Schneider
Jacquelyn Schneider is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
For the past four decades, the United States and China have maintained a delicate compromise regarding Taiwan. The United States describes its relationship with the island as “robustly unofficial” and affirms the Chinese view that “there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China” — and for that reason does not support explicit Taiwan independence. Its unofficial relationship with Taiwan, however, extends to selling the government American weapons, sending a limited number of advisory troops to the island, and maintaining a “cultural” presence (for instance, economic and cultural offices that act as de facto embassies). U.S. presidents since Richard Nixon have played this diplomatic game, opting for strategic ambiguity about U.S. commitments to defend Taiwan.
But in some quarters these days, strategic ambiguity is sounding a lot less ambiguous. Republican members of Congress have introduced legislation that increases U.S. military sales to Taiwan and expands military exchanges between the two countries. At least two bipartisan congressional delegations have visited the island recently, there’s a new Taiwan Assurance Act — requiring the United States to advocate Taiwanese membership in international organizations — and President Biden, in an off-the-cuff statement, surprised observers by seeming to say the United States was committed to defending Taiwan in the event of an invasion. Further, recent polling suggests that, for the first time in many years, a majority of the American public supports defending Taiwan, while an even greater percentage support a more formal alliance with the island. And some influential foreign policy elites share that view: in December, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, writing with research fellow David Sacks, asserted that “Strategic ambiguity was a shrewd and effective approach for decades; now, however, it has run its course.”
While there is an increasingly bipartisan support for more assertive declarations in support of Taiwanese defense, the discussions tend to remain fairly abstract. When there is public discussion of what a war might look like, it tends toward descriptions of long-range air and naval campaigns in which stealthy submarines, fighter jets and cruise missiles use American satellites and intelligence resources to defeat an invading Chinese force. This is a narrative of technological overmatch that has dominated the American public narrative about war since Desert Storm.
But Xi Jinping is not Saddam Hussein, nor is the People’s Liberation Army the Iraqi military. Instead, the PLA is the largest army in the world and has, under Xi’s leadership, expanded its nuclear forces, developed hypersonic missiles and acquired aircraft that approach the sophistication of the American F-35. Further, the PLA has devoted significant resources to amphibious invasion capabilities, including eight marine brigades, new amphibious vessels and a large maritime militia. All of these developments, coupled with the logistical difficulty the United States would have defending Taiwan without forces that have been placed in advance on the island, mean that the defense of the island could be the bloodiest conflict the United States has experienced since Vietnam.
It's hard to say exactly how bloody it would be. Even while declassified war gaming results, think tank reports and congressional testimony ring alarm bells about rising Chinese capabilities, very few of these detail the human losses the hypothetical clash would bring. For example, while commentators sometimes discuss the strategic impact of the Chinese DF-21 missile, dubbed an “aircraft carrier killer,” they rarely specify that the sinking of a Nimitz-class carrier could kill as many as 6,000 sailors.
So even a high-tech air and naval fight to defend Taiwan could lead to thousands of lives lost. But if the United States were to commit land forces to defend the island, the Army would face a difficult and potentially contested deployment, arriving to fight alongside a Taiwanese military with whom it has limited-to-no experience. There is no official estimate for Army casualties in such a scenario, but when the United States defended the Philippines against an invading Japanese force in World War II, it lost 25,000 troops, and almost 100,000 were captured. If the United States had to reinvade the island after a Chinese invasion, that would lead to even more casualties. The United States lost about 23,000 troops in its reinvasion of the Philippines. Even the most successful reinvasion campaigns — for example, the United States landing at Inchon in 1950, during the Korean War — killed more U.S. personnel than died in all but four of the 20 years the United States was in Afghanistan.
Finally, there is the ever-present threat of nuclear escalation as the United States and China struggle to defeat each other in Taiwan without inadvertently crossing each other’s red lines. The costs of such a miscalculation would be incomprehensibly catastrophic.
Defending a democracy from an autocratic China may very well be worth even an extremely steep cost. And I would warn Chinese onlookers not to underestimate U.S. capabilities and will when the nation chooses a fight — especially after American lives are lost.
But the United States needs to have the conversation about what defending Taiwan really entails before a Chinese invasion. Selling a narrative to the American public that the United States can come to the rescue of Taiwan without significant loss of life is potentially dishonest, bad for deterrence and disastrous for military effectiveness. Washington runs the risk of falling into traps that confounded the United States in both Korea and Vietnam. In the case of Korea, the United States didn’t fully understand its own commitment to South Korea until after a calamitous North Korean invasion. In the years after World War II, the Truman administration had been debating U.S. interests in the Pacific, withdrawing forces from South Korea and sending ambiguous signals about the United States’ willingness to come to the country’s defense. When North Korea launched a surprise attack, Republic of Korea troops couldn’t combat the invasion and were pushed to the far southern tip of the peninsula. It took a major U.S. re-mobilization and a gutsy invasion of the peninsula to win back the territory that had been lost. In Vietnam, more famously, the public felt duped about the cost of an “advisory force” that turned into a large-scale war and conscription.
Some hawks are keen to galvanize public support for firm assurances to defend Taiwan. They’re concerned that a perception of public disinterest in the island’s fate might decrease deterrence and ultimately lead China to invade. But it would be a grave mistake for the United States to promise to defend Taiwan without preparing its public — and its soldiers — for the tough fight they could face. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Monday, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said the Olympics is arriving just as seasonal weather creates “extremely unfavorable conditions” across northern China. Ministry officials promised to fix the situation ahead of the Opening Ceremonies on Feb. 4 and authorized local governments to take “necessary action” to improve air quality. | null | null | null | null | null |
Three separate fires broke out at homes in Maryland
Four people were displaced from a home in Wheaton after a fire. Their family dog died. (Montgomery County Fire)
Three separate fires broke out at homes in Maryland.
One fire was reported around 2:30 a.m. Monday at a home in the 2600 block of Harris Avenue near Georgia Avenue in Montgomery County’s Wheaton area. Local fire officials said four people in the home were able to escape but a dog died. About 60 firefighters put the blaze out.
Two other fires broke out in Prince George’s County on Sunday.
One of those fires ignited around 3:25 a.m. in the attic of a single-family home in the 900 block of Montgomery Street near Sandy Spring Road in the Laurel area of Prince George’s County. The residents were able to get out after the smoke alarm went off, according to officials with Prince George’s County Fire.
A third fire happened around 8:47 p.m. at a three-story residential building in the 11300 block of Evans Trail near Interstate 95 in the Beltsville area. All the residents got out safely from the two-alarm blaze, fire officials said, but 22 adults and 10 children were displaced. | null | null | null | null | null |
Only later, after the Black 23-year-old had been jailed for almost a week, did it become clear that Brown was telling the truth, according to a lawsuit Brown filed this month. The person police were really looking for was a 49-year-old White man named Shane Neal Brown, who was wanted after missing a court hearing in a firearms case, the lawsuit claims.
Neither the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department nor the Henderson Police Department responded to requests for comment late Sunday. A spokeswoman for the city of Henderson, Nev., told The Washington Post that its attorneys are “reviewing the facts and circumstances of the lawsuit and will address the allegations in their response to the court.”
After getting off work in the afternoon of Jan. 8, 2020, Brown was driving through Henderson when Henderson police pulled him over, according to the lawsuit. Though it’s unclear what prompted the stop, Brown did not have his driver’s license. Instead, he confirmed his identity by telling officers his name and Social Security number and providing his Social Security card.
Nevertheless, Henderson police officers took Shane Lee Brown into custody, according to the lawsuit. While detained, Brown explained to numerous Henderson police officers that he was not the person they wanted. But his pleas did not change their minds, the lawsuit states: Two days later, Brown was transferred to the Clark County Detention Center.
There, Brown tried to explain to Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers that they had the wrong person, the lawsuit states. But that did not work, either. The department filed paperwork with the court certifying that it had Shane Neal Brown in custody, according to the lawsuit. | null | null | null | null | null |
We’re on high nuclear alert. Here’s a history of near-deadly false alarms.
South Korean and U.S. missiles are displayed at Korean War Memorial Museum in Seoul, on Jan. 18, 2022. North Korea has escalated its missile tests, with apparent advances in its nuclear and ballistic capabilities. (Ahn Young-Joon/AP)
This month on Capitol Hill, congressional staffers can don a VR headset and take part in the start of an atomic holocaust. Nuclear Biscuit simulates an intercontinental ballistic missile strike on the United States and gives users 15 minutes to make a presidential choice: Will they push the button for a retaliatory strike and kill tens of millions of people?
We’re on high nuclear alert this month. North Korea has escalated its missile tests, with apparent advances in its nuclear and ballistic capabilities. Heightened tensions around Ukraine have raised the prospect that Russia could place nuclear weapons close to the U.S. coastline, while the struggle over Taiwan has increased the chances of nuclear conflict with China. Meanwhile, Swedish authorities scrambled after drones circled three of the country’s nuclear power plants.
These threats pose a risk not only of a deliberate nuclear attack, but of a hair-trigger response to a false alarm that generates a bloodbath no one wanted. In the past, the world has experienced a number of very high-profile (and sometimes dangerous) false alarms. Here are some of the most ludicrous, terrifying and near-deadly.
A game of chicken
At 4:19 p.m. on March 11, 1958, children Helen and Frances Greggs were playing with their cousin in the yard of their South Carolina home when a U.S. Air Force B-47E bomber accidentally dropped its payload — a 7,600-pound nuclear weapon — onto the girls’ playhouse.
The device had been “safed,” meaning the radioactive part was on a different plane. Nevertheless, the devices high-explosive trigger leveled the Greggs’ home. The release occurred when the plane’s bombardier was trying to secure the payload: Crouched next to the bomb, he stood up and accidentally used the overhead emergency release lever as a handrail to steady himself. No one was killed, bar the chickens vaporized in the farmyard. The accident led to a swift revision of regulations for locking pins when weaponry was being transported.
On Oct. 5, 1960, NORAD, the U.S. nuclear command center, indicated that its early warning radar in Thule, Greenland, had detected a Soviet atomic attack on the West. It was reporting a 99.9 percent chance that a salvo of ICBMs was crossing the Atlantic.
Land-based U.S. missiles are kept ready to launch a quick counterattack against the aggressor. But in this case, the culprit was not the Russians or the Chinese.
It was the moon. Innocently rising in the Norwegian sky, it had reflected radar waves back at the monitoring station in Thule. Scientists have since modified detection equipment to distinguish between missiles and natural satellites.
Nuclear roar
The flash point of 1962’s Cuban missile crisis very nearly came at midnight on Oct. 25 at the Duluth Section Direction Center in Minnesota, when the intruder alarm was triggered by a lone invader climbing the base fence.
A sentry responded by firing shots. Personnel at Volk Field Air National Guard Base in Wisconsin panicked and accidentally sounded the incoming attack alarm. Pilots ran for their planes.
The sentry then realized it wasn’t a Soviet commando climbing the fence but a black bear. When the base commander at Volk became aware, he quickly ordered a member of his staff to drive a truck onto the runway and prevent the scrambled jets from taking off.
Very magnetic north
May 23, 1967, saw a geomagnetic storm in parts of the Northern Hemisphere as the sun released a powerful flare. Although not as severe as the telegraph-crashing solar storm of 1921, it nonetheless jammed radars at three U.S. Ballistic Missile Early Warning Systems sites.
With Cold War tensions between East and West still running high, military commanders ordered an alert on the possibility that the U.S.S.R. had attacked the radars. Fortunately, a group of astronomers — specifically, space weather experts — was able to diagnose the true cause of the jamming, and the situation was de-escalated.
An intemperate response
On being notified on April 15, 1969, that North Korea had shot down a spy plane over the Sea of Japan (resulting in the death of all 31 Americans on board), President Richard M. Nixon was furious. According to a Secret Service source quoted in the 2000 book “The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon,” he also was drunk.
Nixon phoned the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ordered U.S. forces stationed in Kunsan, South Korea, to initiate a nuclear strike on the North. Air Force pilot Bruce Charles disclosed in 2010 that he had been placed on alert to begin the Single Integrated Operational Plan and drop a 330-kiloton nuclear bomb on North Korea. It took a follow-up call from Henry Kissinger to the Joint Chiefs to countermand the order and affirm that the president would clarify his instruction once refreshed in the morning.
Eject disk after operation
While performing equipment checks on the morning of Nov. 9, 1979, duty officers at the Pentagon and three other U.S. command centers believed the U.S.S.R. had fired 1,400 nuclear missiles. The officers duly prepared for retaliation, launching Air Force planes and “Looking Glass,” the code name for the president’s National Emergency Airborne Command Post.
But there was no Soviet attack. A training cassette had been left in the command computer system, as NORAD recognized six minutes into the alert; it then shut down the counterattack. An off-site facility was later constructed to ensure that simulation tapes were no longer run on systems connected to military hardware.
The glitching hour
Typically, threat detection displays at U.S. command centers read a reassuring “0000 ICBMs detected/0000 SLBMs detected.” However, at 3 a.m. on June 3, 1980, they registered a total of 2,000.
As per procedure, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken up and asked to inform the president that a nuclear attack was underway. Fortunately, operators comparing signal sources determined that the 2,000 figure was a glitch. Technicians later found the cause to be a faulty 46-cent computer chip. It was replaced as a matter of urgency.
It wasn’t just U.S. defense systems that succumbed to gremlins. On Dec. 26, 1983, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a Serpukhov-15, a Soviet early-warning base outside Moscow.
He found himself staring at a red screen reading “START” as an alert siren wailed. The computer deemed that a single missile was incoming, followed by a salvo of five. Petrov duly phoned his commanders … and reported an error. He attributed his assessment to a “feeling in my gut,” combined with skepticism that a nuclear attack would consist of so few missiles.
The false alarm had been caused by sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds. Petrov died in May 2017; his potentially history-altering decision was chronicled in the 2013 documentary “The Man Who Saved the World.”
Climate strike
On Jan. 25, 1995, almost six years after the end of the Cold War, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was handed the “cheget” nuclear briefcase in response to reports of an inbound ballistic missile fired from Norway.
The “attack” was in fact a four-stage scientific rocket (complete with NASA-tested military-grade boosters) designed to study the aurora borealis over the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Scientists had earlier sent notification to Russian authorities of the launch, but the message was not passed on. As the rocket headed away from their airspace, Russian authorities indicated that the threat had passed and stood down.
Islands in the storm
At 8:07 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2018, smartphones across Hawaii suddenly displayed the message: “Emergency alert. Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”
Thirty-eight minutes later, the alert was canceled and attributed to a miscommunication by an employee of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
Think a similar event wouldn’t happen on the mainland? Don’t be so sure: Last year, a child accessed the Strategic Command Twitter account and posted a garbled message that sparked international fears that the agency in charge of safeguarding U.S. nuclear weapons had been hacked. | null | null | null | null | null |
Monday briefing: Promising coronavirus numbers; escalation in Ukraine; tax season begins; NFL’s best weekend ever; and more
Coronavirus cases in the U.S. are “going in the right direction.”
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said yesterday that “things are looking good,” though he’s still cautious.
Where things stand: Infections are down 14% in the past week, although they’re still rising in the South and West. Hospitalizations also have started to fall, though not by much.
New rule: Any international visitor entering the U.S. by land or sea needs to be vaccinated, the same policy that applies for air travel.
Tensions over Russia and Ukraine continue to escalate.
The U.S. is weighing whether to send more troops to Eastern Europe, and NATO plans to send more ships and fighter jets.
Both the U.S. and the U.K. are pulling some people out of their embassies in Ukraine.
How we got here: Russia is sending tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine’s border and could be about to invade. Talks last week to resolve the crisis went nowhere.
Your pay raise probably isn’t keeping up with rising prices.
The numbers: Hourly wages rose 4.7% last year, but overall pay fell 2.4% for all workers, when adjusted for inflation.
What that means: Many people in the U.S. are still struggling to cover basic expenses, even though they made more money last year.
The Jan. 6 committee talked to Donald Trump’s former attorney general.
Who? William Barr had been the president’s ally, but stepped down in December 2020 after disputing Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
What this means: It’s more proof that several Trump officials are cooperating with, rather than fighting, the House panel investigating the attack on the Capitol.
You can start filing your taxes today.
What to expect: The IRS warned that there could be delays getting refunds or help. The deadline is April 18.
Some tips: File online if you can — it’s the fastest way to get a refund. And you shouldn’t wait to file your 2021 taxes, even if your 2020 return still hasn’t been processed.
The NFL playoffs are down to the final four teams.
Last night: The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Buffalo Bills, 42-36, and the Los Angeles Rams beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, last year’s Super Bowl champion, 30-27.
Key moment: After a wild fourth quarter, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes threw a touchdown in overtime, ending one of the best weekends in NFL history.
What’s next: On Sunday, the Cincinnati Bengals play the Chiefs, and the San Francisco 49ers face the Rams. The winners meet in the Super Bowl on Feb. 13.
NASA’s new space telescope will reach its final destination today.
What is it? A $10 billion replacement for the Hubble that launched on Christmas. The James Webb Space Telescope is so sensitive it can study the oldest light of the universe.
Where is it going? Nearly 1 million miles from Earth, where it will orbit the sun while staying in line with our planet using an area of space called a Lagrange point.
And now … need some lunch inspiration this workweek? Try these seven simple, satisfying recipes. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Fulton Street subway platform in Manhattan. (Ed Rhodes/Loop Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
The man, who sustained a leg laceration, was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital. Police said there have been no arrests in connection with the incident.
The attacks could increase the pressure on New York Mayor Eric Adams (D), who pledged to do more to fight crime during his campaign last year. Adams, along with Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), announced plans to boost policing on subway systems and outreach to homeless people, including on trains.
Adams did not immediately reply to a request for comment but said in the wake of Go’s death that he understands many in the city don’t feel safe on the subway. “We know we have a job to do. … We’re going to drive down crime, and we’re going to make sure New Yorkers feel safe in our subway system, and they don’t feel that way now.”
Huge crowds gathered at a Times Square vigil in Go’s memory, and also in her hometown of Fremont, Calif.
“Since the rise of anti-Asian violence, I have to confess the narrow two-sided platforms at Fulton St. have caused me anxiety,” read one tweet.
Another rider said a combination of “Asian hate” and the coronavirus pandemic had made her feel scared. While police have said there is no evidence that Go’s attack was racially motivated, hate-crime reporting has also surged among marginalized groups, most notably among Black Americans and Asians and Asian Americans. “ | null | null | null | null | null |
So, just how wild was that game, with its offensive fireworks, minuscule margins, ratcheting tension and ping-ponging lead? The Washington Post measured each Super Bowl’s “enjoyment level” by examining each game’s competitiveness and tension, on a scale from 0 to 100, calculated by how close the score was at the end of each quarter, with a higher number representing a more entertaining game. What also stood out about Sunday’s game was two high-powered offenses scoring almost at will. How much these offenses exceeded expectations can be measured using expected points added, which compares the result of each play to similar plays run under the same conditions (down, distance and field position). As you would expect, this game graded as one for the ages.
According to the competitive index, Sunday night’s AFC divisional game had the highest rating of any playoff game since 2002 (88 on the scale), the first year the league expanded to 32 teams. It had the fifth-highest combined expected points added for the contest, with the teams scoring 46 more points than expected. No other playoff game in the last 19 seasons had both a competitive index result of 80 or higher plus a combined offensive EPA value of 28 or more, illustrating the clash between the Chiefs and Bills was truly one, wild ride. | null | null | null | null | null |
The court said it would examine the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, most probably in the term that begins October. Lower courts found both complied with Supreme Court precedents that said race may be used as one factor universities can consider in a wide-ranging evaluation of applicants.
But the slim Supreme Court majorities that decided Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 and reaffirmed it in 2016 are gone, replaced by a much more conservative bloc. Challengers say the court should overturn those precedents and rule that considerations of race violate federal law and the Constitution.
The Grutter decision “abandoned the principle of racial neutrality that [Brown v. Board of Education] vindicated,” wrote lawyers for the group Students for Fair Admissions, which has spearheaded previous efforts to have the court reconsider affirmative action. “Grutter endorsed racial objectives that are amorphous and unmeasurable . . . unsurprisingly then, universities have used Grutter as a license to engage in outright racial balancing.”
The group said it would be fitting to end the use of racial considerations by overturning policies at “the nation’s oldest private college and . . . at the nation’s oldest public college.”
Both universities told the Supreme Court that, as the extensive examinations in the lower courts showed, they have adhered to the court’s precedents and respected federal law and constitutional rights in building their student bodies. | null | null | null | null | null |
Miami Police interim Chief Manuel Morales and Mayor Francis Suarez announce the arrest of a real estate agent suspected of hunting homeless people on Dec. 23, 2021. (Wilfredo Lee/AP)
“Officers quickly connected the two incidents not only because of the short span of time between the two shootings but because both incidents involved victims that were homeless,” Miami Police Interim Chief Manuel Morales said at a Dec. 23 news conference.
Maceo has since been charged with felony murder, and Morales said police believe he may also be responsible for the earlier fatal shooting in October of another man living on the streets. Maceo — a real estate agent who posed with Porsches and preached the benefits of cryptocurrency on his social media — has since been characterized by authorities as a suspected serial killer who targeted people experiencing homelessness.
“We have a very dangerous person off of the streets now,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez announced following the arrest. (Maceo’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.)
Maceo’s alleged crimes are an extreme example of targeted attacks on the homeless happening across the country.
People experiencing homelessness are also often reluctant to engage with law enforcement — even when they are the victims of a crime.
“They may have had bad experiences in the past with police,” said Bobby Watts, chief executive officer of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. “Many of them also have outstanding warrants. Not because of major crimes, but most of those citations would be for vagrancy or public urination, because they don’t have anywhere else to carry out these activities.”
No significant statics have been published since the beginning of the pandemic, but advocates say they also believe crimes against the unsheltered have increased because more people are living on the streets. “2020 was the first time we saw people experiencing unsheltered homelessness exceeding that of those in shelters,” Watts said.
Students loved this teaching assistant. They didn’t know he was living in his car.
But advocates want to move beyond merely collecting grisly lists of violent episodes. The National Coalition for the Homeless is now teaming with other groups to present a more comprehensive study of recent violence. Spearheaded by Brian Davis, the coalition’s director of grass roots organizing, the effort aims to focus on patterns and risk factors within the incidents.
The report, which Davis hopes will publish in late 2022, will also utilize the responses from small survey groups of people experience homelessness. The hypothesis going into the study will be that for every 60 days without housing, an individual is likely to experience at least one violent incident. The likelihood increases if the individual is female.
The effort is geared toward hammering out the statistical dangers of living on the street, Davis said.
“There needs to be some urgency about finding safe spaces for people,” he said. “In my experience, we’ve let lots of people languish while waiting for housing to become available. We have to show that there are real world consequences, people are attacked, robbed and raped, because they are waiting for shelter.”
At least 69 D.C. residents died in 2021 ‘without the dignity of a home’
California gave people the ‘right’ to be homeless — but little help finding homes | null | null | null | null | null |
Three people killed in crash in Southern Maryland
Officials said two vehicles crashed head on
Three people were killed in a crash Sunday night in Southern Maryland.
State police said the crash happened about 8 p.m. on Route 255, also known as Hawthorne Road, at Ripley Way in La Plata. An initial investigation found that two vehicles were involved in a head-on crash. All three victims were pronounced dead at the scene.
Officials identified the victims as Patrick Bowie Jr., 44, of La Plata, who was driving a Chrysler Pacifica; Tineka Palmer, 35, the driver of a Chevrolet Impala; and Tyron Carroll, 33, who was a passenger in the Impala. Both Palmer and Carroll were from Indian Head. | null | null | null | null | null |
(REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/)
There was Donald Trump, filmed at a distance through some leafy plants decorating a common area at Mar-a-Lago, looking a bit put out. A few cajoling waves of his arms and his customers comply: a few seconds of applause, a couple of “woo!” cheers and Trump is satisfied. A double-thumbs up, a little smile, and he departs.
That was it. I mean, that’s not why he lost New Hampshire and then dropped out of the race. He was already losing in the state and his campaign’s presence there was dreary. But that moment came to symbolize the completion of his collapse. Here was the guy once thought to be a juggernaut, polling in the single digits nationally and asking the people who’d shown up to a rally to at least have the generosity of spirit to applaud. It was an encapsulation of how things had gotten away from him.
A poll came out last week from NBC News that included an interesting finding. When Republicans were asked whether they considered themselves to be more in support of Donald Trump or of the Republican Party, the GOP won by a 20-point margin. In the abstract, that’s likely what you would expect; partisans are partisans, by definition, because of their party allegiances. But over the past several years, that hasn’t been the case on this question. Trump has engendered more support than the party.
To some extent, as The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel pointed out on Twitter, this is a false choice. The GOP is so thoroughly saturated with Trumpism — his preferences, his tactics, his style — that it’s a bit like asking which Power Ranger is your favorite: They all do the same things so you’re mostly picking on aesthetics.
But that by itself is important. Seven years after Trump first emerged and with him in sort of retirement, the party seems finally to have figured out how to use to its own advantage what made him appealing. Trumpism, if you will, has been licensed out like so many Trump products before.
In recent weeks, DeSantis’s efforts in this regard have targeted Trump specifically. In an interview with the podcast “Ruthless” — co-hosted by media personality Shashank Tripathi, himself once a breathless Jeb Bush supporter — DeSantis criticized Trump’s initial call for restrictions on social and economic activity in the pandemic’s first months. Trump has been fighting back, attacking DeSantis indirectly for not admitting that he’d gotten a booster of the coronavirus vaccine, a genre of admission that, when offered recently by Trump, resulted in boos from his audience. Trumpism means viewing any advocacy of preventive measures as government overreach, so Trump’s efforts to take credit for the vaccine rollout are at odds with the impulse he long cultivated.
It’s also a sign that the party is moving on. Lots of candidates — most candidates! — running for Republican nominations are echoing his rhetoric and priorities, and nearly all would rather have his endorsement than not. But it’s not hard to imagine that Trump’s endorsement would simply become another factor in the mix as candidates scramble to appeal to the Republican base. | null | null | null | null | null |
The court said it would examine the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, most probably in the term that begins in October. Lower courts found both complied with Supreme Court precedents that said race may be used as one factor universities can consider in a wide-ranging evaluation of applicants.
Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that spearheaded both challenges, said polls show Americans strongly disapprove of race-concious admissions.
“There will be a lot of eyes on this,” said Peter McDonough, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities. “It will be a significant decision one way or another.”
The group plans to support Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill and the lower-court rulings in those cases. “The rulings affirmed the appropriateness of the manner in which they conducted their activities in light of long-standing precedent,” McDonough said. “We hope and expect this Supreme Court will consider and respect such precedent.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Damon Young joins The Washington Post Magazine as a contributing columnist
Damon Young - Washington Post Sunday Magazine Columnist - Pittsburgh. (Martha Rial)
The Washington Post today announced Damon Young will join The Post’s Magazine as a contributing columnist providing critical commentary -- sometimes comical, sometimes visceral -- on an array of topics. Young will write weekly about the angst, anxieties and absurdities of American life, specifically culture, class, money, and race. Young’s sharp arguments will contribute to The Post Magazine’s mission, which includes producing compelling journalism with a point of view.
“Damon is an amazing writer with a distinct voice, at once funny and thoughtfully earnest,” said Richard Just, editor of The Washington Post Magazine. “He is a brilliant observer of American culture, history, and politics. But fundamentally, I think, he's a storyteller who has arguments to make -- one of the best practitioners of this craft in American journalism today.”
Young’s debut memoir “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays” won the 2020 Thurber Prize for American Humor and Barnes & Noble's 2019 Discover Award. It was also longlisted for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, nominated for both an NAACP Image Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and is a Krause Essay Prize nominee.
Young, 43, is also the co-founder of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas, was a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, a columnist for GQ, and has written for The Atlantic, Esquire, NY Mag, The Undefeated, EBONY, and The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Young is also the creator and host of a forthcoming podcast with Crooked Media.
The Washington Post will publish Young’s first columns on Monday, January 31 and Wednesday, February 2.
The Washington Post Magazine will publish these columns in print on Sunday, February 6 and February 13.
Readers can sign up to have Damon’s columns delivered to their inbox by following him here. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Lessons from Martin O’Malley for Maryland Democrats
Then-Prince George's County County Executive Rushern L. Baker III, left, and then-Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley serve a slice of cheese pizza, corn and broccoli on at Edward M. Felegy Elementary School on the first day of school in Prince George's County on Aug. 26, 2014, in Hyattsville. (Mark Gail for The Washington Post)
By Mileah Kromer
Mileah Kromer is director of the Sarah T. Hughes Center for Politics at Goucher College.
Democrats have lost three out of the last five gubernatorial contests in Maryland, where the party holds a two-to-one registration advantage over Republicans. Party leaders and campaign professionals have since invested in analyzing exactly how and where the campaigns went wrong. The shortcomings of these candidacies offer valuable lessons to the current crop of gubernatorial hopefuls. But so, too, do the victories of Maryland’s last two-term Democratic governor, Martin O’Malley.
The elements of O’Malley’s first statewide win — strengths in campaign organization, aggressive sparring with opponents and messaging that resonated with a broad cross-section of voters — are particularly instructive and offer insight that still holds promise more than a decade later.
For starters, before O’Malley was a candidate, he toiled as a field director who put in the long hours and unglamorous behind-the-scenes work of electioneering. The experience gleaned from that work — organizing precincts, door knocking and identifying localized political power sources — informed the basis of his campaign strategy.
O’Malley’s 2006 team heavily invested in field operations, rallying elected Democrats to his cause and capitalizing on their local political networks to create a unified effort. Paid staffers and steering committees were set up in every region and equipped volunteers with voter lists, campaign literature and signs. The candidate relished the opportunities to meet voters in small venues and events across the state.
Those efforts cut into the margins of his opponent, incumbent Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), in the suburban battlegrounds of Baltimore, Anne Arundel and Howard counties — all places where Ehrlich needed to win big. O’Malley also averaged more than a third of the vote in the western, Eastern Shore and southern counties. As it was then, a statewide victory for Democrats is still largely a function of turnout in the populous strongholds of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and Baltimore City. The O’Malley campaign invested in get-out-the-vote efforts in these areas, too. But his lesson for Democrats is not to cede winnable votes elsewhere in the state.
O’Malley enjoyed the data-driven elements of governmental problem-solving and could rattle off supporting statistics on the campaign trail. But his public policy chops aren’t what won the day.
As the media-savvy mayor of the state’s largest city, he knew how to land a rhetorical punch. O’Malley used his platform to criticize Ehrlich and Republican politics relentlessly and effectively. This dogged press strategy simultaneously built name recognition and hurt Ehlrich’s favorable public image even before O’Malley’s formal entrance to the governor’s race. Though they have tried, Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) contemporaries have not been able to do the same. And Democrats will now have to contend with the possibility that Hogan’s sustained popularity will help his chosen successor, former commerce secretary Kelly M. Schulz, should she win the Republican primary.
Voters have long viewed Democrats as better on public education and social policy and Republicans as more apt to handle economic matters. But O’Malley flipped the script. Though he still spoke to the issues that traditionally favor Democrats, he focused his campaign messaging on growing middle-class jobs and hammering Ehrlich for raising taxes and fees. O’Malley also positioned himself as a champion of consumers by blasting the Ehrlich administration over rising electricity rates and college tuition. A poll by The Washington Post in the lead-up to the 2006 gubernatorial contest indicated that nearly equal numbers of voters viewed O’Malley and Ehrlich as the best candidate to handle taxes and the economy.
Popular policy platforms still fall flat without affinity for the candidate proposing them. To this point, O’Malley held a double-digit advantage over Ehrlich on the perception that he “understands the problems of people like you.” For comparison, Democratic nominee Benjamin T. Jealous was down 20 points against Hogan on this same indicator in his bid to oust the Republican incumbent in 2018. Moreover, 62 percent of voters held a favorable view of O’Malley in October 2006. Only 41 and 36 percent thought the same of Anthony G. Brown in 2014 and Jealous at similar points in their respective races against Hogan. Still, here, there is a reality that can’t be ignored: These two Black candidates faced racism endemic to American politics, which undoubtedly factored into their campaigns.
To be sure, O’Malley had a significant structural advantage that the 2022 cycle will not afford to current Democratic candidates. Then-Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan spared O’Malley from a challenging primary contest by dropping out of the race. An uncontested primary allowed O’Malley to focus campaign resources and his full attention on the general election. The current Democratic primary race is already shaping into a competitive and expensive affair. Recent fundraising numbers suggest that some Democratic gubernatorial candidates are adept as O’Malley at raising money. So, too, were Brown and Jealous. The trick will be not to squander it all in the primary (again), especially for a double-digit win. The field will at least get the benefit of an open-seat race.
Since O’Malley’s first gubernatorial run, the policy conversation and broader electoral dynamics have changed. Ideological divisions are deeper, and there is widespread satisfaction with the direction of the state under divided government.
And, of course, no politician ever lives up to the campaign’s loftiest hopes and full promise. O’Malley is no different. He won several progressive victories as governor: passing strict gun control laws, legalizing same-sex marriage rights, abolishing the death penalty and making in-state college tuition available to undocumented immigrants. At the same time, his policies on criminal justice continue to receive harsh criticism, and Hogan’s own effective messaging has rebranded much of the Democrat’s economic record as excessive taxation.
Regardless, it is undeniable that O’Malley and his team knew how to win statewide elections. Over the next few months, we’ll find out if Democrats have learned from loss and O’Malley’s electoral success — and whether Republicans have done the same. | null | null | null | null | null |
What he might know: Barr announced his resignation on Dec. 14 and officially exited on Dec. 23, meaning he was absent for many of they key late developments in the Jan. 6 timeline. But before he left, he did publicly rebut Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and took part in meetings about them with Trump and the White House, including in early December. And there is plenty of evidence that Trump sought to lean on the Justice Department to legitimize his claims. A U.S. attorney who resigned under pressure said Barr told him at one point in early December to make looking into the voter-fraud claims pushed by Rudolph W. Giuliani a “top priority.”
What Meadows might know: Meadows is fighting further cooperation and has been held in contempt of Congress — facing the prospect of the kind of criminal charges that Stephen K. Bannon now faces. But what he has provided — and could provide if he were compelled to testify — could give the committee unique insight into both what was happening around Trump on Jan. 6 and the preceding efforts to overturn the election. It has been disclosed that Meadows was heavily involved in pleading with the Justice Department to legitimize Trump’s claims, passing along a number of debunked conspiracy theories including one about Italian satellites.
What they might know: Alexander would seem able to speak to any ties between the White House and the organizing of the Jan. 6 rally at which Trump spoke — with other organizers suggesting there was concern about pushing people toward the Capitol, as Trump did. Patel is a Trump loyalist who has been a key figure in other Trump controversies. He formerly served as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who resigned from Congress earlier this month. | null | null | null | null | null |
Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo won MVP in the 2021 NBA All-Star Game. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Such an incomplete field of candidates naturally means there are fewer heated debates over who makes the cut for Cleveland. That’s especially true when it comes to the 10 starters, who will be announced Thursday. Here are The Washington Post’s picks for the starting lineups, which consider individual statistics, availability and contribution to team success. The Post’s selections for the rest of the rosters will be made Jan. 31.
While Durant (29.3 points per game, 7.4 rebounds per game, 5.8 assists per game) might be unable to play in the All-Star Game for the third straight year due to injury, he has easily earned a selection as the NBA’s leading scorer and the reliable engine of the otherwise wobbly Nets. Even if the 33-year-old forward is sidelined through the break, he has logged 1,313 minutes, already exceeding his total for last season, when he dealt with health protocol absences and a hamstring injury. The only drama here is whether Durant, who has pulled in more than 5.4 million fan votes, can hold off Antetokounmpo (5.1 million) to serve as East captain for the second straight season.
Speaking of Antetokounmpo, he’s quietly worked himself into a strong position to claim his third MVP award. The Bucks’ title defense has been shakier than expected, but Milwaukee’s centerpiece has continued to deliver huge numbers (28.6 PPG, 11.3 RPG, 6 APG) and elite impact on both sides of the ball. With Durant fading from the MVP mix, Antetokounmpo is starting to look like Stephen Curry’s top competition. In his prime at 27, it’s hard to bet against Antetokounmpo being the last man standing during this season.
The ever-imposing Embiid has moved past a bout with covid-19 to separate himself from a fairly weak crop of frontcourt candidates that includes Miami’s Jimmy Butler (too injured), Boston’s Jayson Tatum (too inefficient) and Cleveland’s Jarrett Allen (too limited as a scorer). Simmons’ season-long holdout has kneecapped Philadelphia’s title hopes, but it has had little impact on Embiid, whose gaudy production (28.7 PPG, 10.7 RPG, 4.3 APG) is virtually identical to last season and has kept Philadelphia’s head above water.
DeRozan’s inclusion in the backcourt category has rankled many observers, who correctly point out that he typically plays forward in small ball alignments. Positional semantics aside, DeRozan (26.3 PPG, 5 RPG, 4.8 APG) has emerged as a worthy starter by leading the Bulls from the 2021 lottery to the East’s top tier. Despite a seemingly endless series of health and safety protocol absences and injuries to key teammates, DeRozan’s midrange sniping and crafty ability to get to the free throw line has helped Chicago’s offensive efficiency jump from 21st last year to seventh this year.
The final backcourt spot represents the East’s only real debate and features three candidates: Harden, Chicago’s Zach LaVine and Atlanta’s Trae Young. Of the three scoring-minded players, Harden (22.7 PPG, 8 RPG, 10.1 APG) still possesses the most complete and sophisticated offensive game. His impact and shooting numbers have slipped compared to the last five years, but a “B-minus” campaign from Harden is sufficient given that LaVine is coping with a knee injury and Young’s Hawks are in 12th place in the East.
Although he trails James and Curry by a wide margin in the fan voting, Jokic (26.1 PPG, 13.8 RPG, 7.6 APG) is the West’s deserving captain on this ballot. The reigning MVP leads the league in Player Efficiency Rating, Win Shares and a host of other advanced statistics while single-handedly keeping the injury-ravaged Nuggets in the West’s playoff mix. Jokic has surpassed James and Chris Paul as the NBA’s most effective passer and positioned himself alongside Curry and Antetokounmpo among the league’s most indispensable players. Denver would probably have the West’s worst record without him.
James (29 PPG, 7.7 RPG, 6.3 APG) continues to own the ballot box, pulling in a league-leading 6.8 million votes through three rounds, and he will serve as a captain for the fifth straight year if he can fend off Curry (6 million). Even though the middling Lakers have been a dysfunctional mess, James should skate to his 18th all-star selection thanks to his impressive production. A discussion about whether the 37-year-old James has earned a starting spot purely on merit, rather than popularity, will need to wait until at least 2023.
Any hope for a robust debate over the final starting spot was lost when Leonard and Williamson opened the season on the shelf and George, Davis and Green all sustained untimely in-season injuries. That leaves Gobert (16 PPG, 15.1 RPG, 2.3 BPG) as the winner by a process of elimination, topping Karl-Anthony Towns, whose Minnesota Timberwolves are too far back in the standings. Gobert is perennially overlooked in the fan vote, but he’s kept the Jazz near the top of the West standings by leading the league in rebounding and covering up for a roster filled with subpar defenders. For evidence of Gobert’s importance, consider that Utah went 1-4 and conceded 119 points per game during his recent stint in the health protocols.
Curry (26 PPG, 5.3 RPG, 6.2 APG) has cooled slightly since he opened the season by playing the best basketball of his career and becoming the NBA’s all-time leader in three-pointers. Even so, his singular ability to command extra defensive attention has paired with Golden State’s own sturdy team defense to turn the Warriors into a leading contender. As was the case during Curry’s MVP years, his value is often best seen by the success of the teammates. Andrew Wiggins, Otto Porter Jr. and Gary Payton II have all proved to be pleasant surprises.
But Morant (25.3 PPG, 6 RPG, 6.9 APG) offers the best of both worlds: The Grizzlies are the West’s third seed and have posted a top-10 offense, while their star point guard has raised his numbers across the board. At 22, Morant has proved equally capable of dazzling with his highlight plays and dissecting opposing defenses in the fourth quarter, and he will become the first Grizzlies player to start in the All-Star Game since Marc Gasol in 2015 if he can hold off Doncic in the fan vote. | null | null | null | null | null |
“The Last Cuentista,” by Donna Barba Higuera, won the John Newbery Medal for Children’s Literature on Monday. The book, which blends science fiction and Mexican folklore, is the 100th book to receive the honor, considered the highest honor in children’s literature.
Runners-up, which receive Newbery Honor Medals, were “Red, White and Whole,” by Rajani LaRocca; “A Snake Falls to Earth,” by Darcie Little Badger; “Too Bright to See” by Kyle Lukoff; and “Watercress” by Andrea Wang. | null | null | null | null | null |
“Being the Ricardos” A Conversation with Javier Bardem
Javier Bardem joins Washington Post Live on Monday, Jan. 24 (The Washington Post)
Academy Award-winner Javier Bardem takes on the role of Desi Arnaz in his latest film, “Being the Ricardos.” The movie chronicles a fraught week as Arnaz and Lucille Ball face a series of professional and personal crises that threaten their show, “I Love Lucy,” and their marriage. Join Washington Post national arts reporter Geoff Edgers on Monday, Jan. 24 at 1:00 p.m. ET for a conversation with Bardem about preparation for this role and other highlights from his career.
As Spain’s most internationally acclaimed actor, Academy Award® winner JAVIER BARDEM has captivated audiences worldwide with his diverse performances.
Bardem is currently starring as Desi Arnaz opposite Nicole Kidman in Being the Ricardos, written and directed by Academy Award® winner Aaron Sorkin. The film chronicles a fraught week for Desi and Lucille Ball, from table read to audience taping, as they face a series of professional and personal crises that threaten their show, their careers and their marriage. Amazon will release the film in theatres on December 10 and on Prime Video December 21, 2021.
Bardem can also be seen in Denis Villeneuve’s epic science-fiction film Dune, which premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival to rave reviews. Bardem will reprise how role in the upcoming sequel. Another upcoming role will include Disney’s 2023, The Little Mermaid, featuring Bardem as King Tritan.
Additionally, The Good Boss, which is Spain’s official submission for the Academy Awards®, directed by friend and frequent collaborator Fernando León de Aranoa, has been nominated for a record breaking 20 Goya Awards in Spain. In this satire, Bardem plays Blanco, the charismatic owner of a family-run factory, under pressure as he covets a local award for business excellence. As the veneer of the perfect company cracks, Blanco has to deal with a vengeful fired worker, a depressed supervisor, and an ambitious intern. The film premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival and is also nominated for a record breaking 20 Goya Awards in Spain.
Bardem recently wrapped production the feature film Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile based on the beloved children’s book by Bernard Waber about a crocodile that lives in New York. The film is slated to be released by Sony Pictures in July 2022 with original songs by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, the Oscar winning songwriting team from La La Land. Will Speck & Josh Gordon are directing with a script by Davies.
In 2018, Bardem starred opposite his wife, Penelope Cruz, in Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows which opened the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Also in 2018, Bardem and Cruz starred in Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s biopic, Loving Pablo, which tells the true story of a dramatic love affair between notorious drug lord, Pablo Escobar, and Colombian journalist, Virginia Vallejo.
Previously, Bardem starred in Darren Aronofsky’s mother! opposite Jennifer Lawrence as well as the fifth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean blockbuster franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.
In 2012, Bardem took audiences by storm in one of the most touted installments of the James Bond franchise, Skyfall, as the villain, Raoul Silva, opposite Daniel Craig, Dame Judi Dench, Naomie Harris and Berenice Marlohe. He has continually received critical acclaim for his role, in addition to being nominated in the supporting actor category for both a Critics Choice Movie Award and a Screen Actors Guild® Award. The same year, Bardem co-produced and starred in Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony, a film documenting how the colonization of the Western Sahara has left nearly 200,000 people living in refugee camps.
Bardem was awarded the Best Actor prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Biutiful, a role which also earned him his third Academy Award® nomination.
In October 2011, Bardem and his co-producer Alvaro Longoria, the film’s director, addressed the United Nations General Assembly’s decolonization committee, urging the delegates to end human rights abuses in the region. The film premiered at the 62nd annual Berlin International Film Festival and has been acquired by Canal Plus in Bardem’s native Spain, and was released by GoDigital via iTunes in the U.S.
In 2008, Bardem received the Academy Award® for Best Supporting Actor for his chilling portrayal of sociopath killer, Anton Chigurh, in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men. The performance garnered a Golden Globe® Award, a Screen Actors Guild® Award, a BAFTA, and countless other film critic awards and nominations.
Bardem won the Best Actor Award at the 2004 Venice Film Festival for his performance in Alejandro Amenabar’s film The Sea Inside, making him the second actor ever to win the award twice. He also won a Goya Award and received a Golden Globe® nomination for this role. Bardem has won the Goya Award; Spain’s equivalent of the Oscar, five times and has received a total of eight nominations.
In 2000, Bardem received his first Academy Award® nomination for his portrayal of the Cuban poet and dissident Reinaldo Arenas, in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls. He was named Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, received Best Actor honors from the National Society of Film Critics, the Independent Spirit Awards, the National Board of Review, and received a Golden Globe® nomination for this role.
His other notable film credits include Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder; Eat, Pray, Love, opposite Julia Roberts; Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for which he was again nominated for a Golden Globe® and Independent Spirit Award; John Malkovich’s directorial debut The Dancer Upstairs; Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s Mondays in the Sun, which was named best film at the San Sebastian Film Festival; Michael Mann’s Collateral; Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera; and Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts, opposite Natalie Portman. | null | null | null | null | null |
Don Wilson, co-founder and rhythm guitarist of the instrumental guitar band the Ventures, whose hits included the surf-rock standard “Walk, Don’t Run” and a version of the theme song for the 1960s TV show “Hawaii Five-O," died Jan. 22 in Tacoma, Wash. He was 88.
His son Tim confirmed the death in a statement to the News Tribune of Tacoma, but did not provide a cause.
The Ventures’s first album, “Walk, Don’t Run” (1960), with Bob Bogle on lead guitar and Nokie Edwards on bass, sold millions of copies and became a rollicking cultural touchstone; the title song was the No. 2 hit in the country. Their later albums included “The Ventures in Space” (1964), “Wild Things!” (1966) and “Guitar Freakout” (1967). Their version of the “Hawaii Five-O” theme song became a top-10 chart success in 1969.
Donald Lee Wilson was born in Tacoma on Feb. 10, 1933, and grew up admiring county-western and big-band music. He played trombone before picking up the guitar from a fellow soldier during Army service. He was a car salesman and then a construction worker before forming a band with Bogle in the late 1950s, soon adding Edwards on bass guitar and Howie Johnson on drums.
Johnson broke his neck in a car wreck in 1961 and died in 1988. Skip Moore played drums on “Walk, Don’t Run,” and Mel Taylor took take over on drums and rounded out the classic lineup, with Edwards on lead guitar, in 1962. | null | null | null | null | null |
H.S. basketball notebook
Spalding's Ty Peterson, shown dribbling during a Jan. 8 game against Coolidge, had a career night last week against Mount Carmel. (Scott Taetsch/For The Washington Post)
Ty Peterson’s first shot of the game was a transition three.
It’s a shot that requires a fair amount of confidence, with a player choosing to get a little bit greedy when an easier basket might be available, but the Archbishop Spalding senior was feeling good Wednesday night and let it fly.
“And once you see one go in, you just keep shooting until you miss,” Peterson said.
In a 96-74 win over Mount Carmel, Peterson didn’t miss much. The senior guard exploded for 47 points, one of the highest individual point totals in the D.C. area this winter.
“I’m not really a stat-chaser, so I wasn’t paying too much attention to it,” Peterson said. “At halftime I figured I had around 20 points, but I was pretty focused on just finishing the game.”
He finished with eight made threes and used his hot shooting hand to get easy looks at the basket, too. The defense didn’t seem to adjust much, so he kept taking the opportunities he was given, and the numbers piled up.
Coming into that game, Peterson had been slightly disappointed in his personal performance this season. The No. 2 Cavaliers (15-3) were playing great basketball, which was most important to the senior, but it had been a frustrating winter on the offensive end. He was averaging less than 10 points per contest.
His teammates mobbed him at the final buzzer Wednesday, well aware of the stat line he had just put up. But Peterson didn’t have too much time to reflect on the game of a lifetime. He had to rush home and turn his focus to a more pressing concern.
“The bus ride home was fun with my teammates hyping me up and cheering me on and stuff,” Peterson said. “But I didn’t really reflect much — once I got home I had some homework to do. Honors Government.”
St. Charles returns after near two-year delay
Everything about the St. Charles girls’ game at Huntingtown on Wednesday seemed new for Coach Darrelle Smith. Not only did providing water bottles and masks for his players feel unusual, but so did completing pregame warmups and standing for a rendition of the national anthem.
The game was St. Charles’s first since Feb. 28, 2020.
“It’s almost like getting back on a bike for the first time,” Smith said, “after not riding for a couple of years.”
After the 2020-21 season was canceled because of the pandemic, 10 players arrived for St. Charles tryouts in November — and one later became ineligible for grades. While the Spartans were optimistic at the beginning of December, players tested positive for the coronavirus almost every week.
Their depth was thin because they couldn’t field a junior varsity squad for the first time since the Waldorf school opened in 2014. More obstacles arrived when Charles County suspended sports between Dec. 23 and Jan. 9.
“All the preseason expectations were kind of out the window,” Smith said. “Me and my associate head coach were just doing the over-unders among ourselves, and we were like, ‘We got 22 games.’ And very quickly, we saw that we weren’t going to have 22 games.”
Eight games were canceled, but Smith tried to maintain his players’ motivation. He felt relief when his team arrived at Huntingtown around 5 p.m. Wednesday and hadn’t received a cancellation notice.
By the end of the night, St. Charles had won, 50-45, for its first victory in 23 months.
Page Greenburg, G, Maret. The senior guard scored 22 points Tuesday against St. Andrew’s to reach 1,000 for her career.
Kyle Honore, G, Potomac (Va.). In a win over Colgan on Tuesday, the senior nabbed six steals to go with 24 points.
Solomon Mensah, G, Gaithersburg. The junior averaged 23 points, 10.5 rebounds, four blocks and three assists in the Trojans’ wins over Clarksburg and Northwest.
Daniya Warren-McClure, G, Coolidge. The junior averaged 18.5 points, five rebounds and 3.5 steals as the Colts swept H.D. Woodson and McKinley Tech.
St. Charles boys at Thomas Stone, 6:30 p.m. Friday
Lake Braddock boys at Fairfax, 7:30 p.m. Friday
St. John’s girls at Good Counsel, 7:30 p.m. Friday
Parkdale girls at Suitland, 7 p.m. Thursday
McKinley Tech now a DCIAA contender
After his team’s 64-58 win at Coolidge on Friday night, McKinley Tech’s Terrell Webster posted a simple request on Instagram. “I just want my respect,” he said.
Despite their 16-5 record, the Trainers have spent much of the year in the shadows of Wilson and Coolidge, the preseason favorites in the District of Columbia Interscholastic Athletic Association. Webster and the Trainers have leaned into the perceived lack of respect by referring to themselves as “the underdogs.”
“To us, Coolidge was just another team on our schedule, but a lot of people have been doubting us,” Webster said. “Winning just showed people who we are and gave us the respect we deserved.”
Dating to his time at St. John’s, which was primarily spent on the bench as a seldom-used reserve, Webster has been on a quest to remind himself and others that he still possesses the talent that made him an intriguing prospect out of middle school.
“I knew coming into my junior year I had a lot to prove,” Webster said. “I wasn’t proving anybody wrong, though — just proving myself right.”
McKinley Tech is in position to clinch one of the top two seeds in the DCIAA playoffs, and Webster — who’s averaging 17 points per game after his 30-point outburst against Coolidge — thinks his team is capable of breaking through.
“We know that we haven’t done anything yet,” Webster said. “But if we can stay locked in on the defensive end each possession and continue to play for each, we will win it all.”
Osbourn Park is jelling
Few things, outside of the school’s name stitched on its jerseys, were supposed to look the same for this Osbourn Park girls’ basketball team, after the Yellowjackets lost almost 90 percent of their scoring from last year’s squad that fell in the Class 6 state championship game. But the team’s goals — a district, regional and state title — did not change, and now it looks like the No. 14 Yellowjackets (12-1) are on the fast track to at least hit the first two targets.
Coach Chrissy Kelly said that the team has taken bits of the identity from last season, in particular its effort and defensive-minded approach, but the players also want to create their own legacy.
“The younger kids that now have the opportunity to step in … they got to sit on the sidelines and say, ‘Well, I should be in.’ Well, now it’s your time,” Kelly said. “That’s really what they understand about that continuation of the culture.”
The team has overcome plenty already. Five members of the nine-person roster tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this season, and last month the team played an impromptu game against Madison, who toppled them in the state finals last February and beat them this time by 18.
Recently, though, Osbourn Park has looked just as strong as last year’s squad, as it has won its last three matchups — against the Cedar Run District’s second- and third-place teams — by an average of 26 points.
“We’re definitely just trying to stay focused and stay on track,” senior Hailey Kellogg said. “Winning by 20 or 30 is good for us, but it’s also teaching us how to stay humble and continue. There is always growing from those games.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In 2020, Mahomes and the Chiefs were back in the AFC championship game against the Titans and went on to win the Lombardi Trophy, beating the 49ers as Mahomes became the youngest quarterback and third-youngest player in NFL history to be named Super Bowl MVP. And in 2021, Mahomes had a date with Brady, who had joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, after that AFC title game victory over the Bills. Just what was it besides blazing talent that caught Brady’s eye back in 2019? | null | null | null | null | null |
Protecting Public Safety with St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones
Homicides in St. Louis dropped by about 26 percent in 2021 after hitting a record high in 2020. On Monday, Jan. 31 at 3:00 p.m. ET, Washington Post criminal justice reporter Tom Jackman speaks with Mayor Tishaura Jones about her city’s strategies to protect communities, the role of policing and navigating the coronavirus pandemic.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones
Transparency, Integrity, and Service define who she is and how she did it. Since 2012, Tishaura O. Jones has helped the City of St. Louis earn and save over $30 million and counting.
With a deep personal commitment, a wealth of experience, and a proven record of leadership, Jones started her career as a public servant in 2002 when she was appointed as Democratic Committeewoman of the 8th Ward in the City of St. Louis. A history-maker on a mission, she served two terms in the Missouri House of Representatives, and was selected as the first African American woman in Missouri history to hold the position of Assistant Minority Floor Leader. She also is the first African American woman to serve as Treasurer of St. Louis.
Mayor Jones has a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Hampton University and a Master’s degree in Health Administration from the Saint Louis University School of Public Health. A graduate of the Executives in State and Local Government program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, she has served as Vice President of Public Finance for Blaylock Robert Van, LLC, an investment banking firm, as well as adjunct faculty at the Anheuser-Busch School of Business at Harris-Stowe State University.
In her tenure as Treasurer, she launched the Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) to help St. Louisans make better financial choices, as OFE’s College Kids Program has helped over 18,000 public school students start saving through educational savings accounts. With over a million and a half dollars saved to date, these college saving accounts will help more city children get a higher education, using parking revenue, family contributions and community support
Mayor Jones’ volunteer service is as notable as her robust career accomplishments. A member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., her dedication to public service has earned her numerous accolades including awards from the St. Louis Coalition for Human Rights, the RCGA, and the Lupus Foundation of America. From financial empowerment to the modernizing of services, Jones has helped make city government easier to navigate, easier to participate in, and easier to understand.
She is also the proud mother of Aden. | null | null | null | null | null |
By last week, the time had finally come — in fact, it was probably well past due — to remove the bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt that had stood for 80 years at the entrance of New York’s Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West. It was made objectionable, as an unmistakably colonial paean to white supremacy, by the accompanying likenesses of two subservient figures on foot, an African man and a Native American man, that flanked Roosevelt’s heroic figure, mounted in horseback. | null | null | null | null | null |
A transformative gift and new research center make Boston a hub of Dutch and Flemish art
The art of the Netherlands in the 17th Century Gallery at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
BOSTON — How do great art museums develop their collections? There’s an inclination to think it all took place in the distant past. In fact, of course, it’s an ongoing process.
Occasionally museums decide to collect in an area they have completely ignored. But more often, they play to existing strengths. Great works act as magnets for more works. It’s a type of evolution that can leave gaping holes. But the compounding effect can be remarkable, transcending any one donor, director or curator.
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, one of just a handful of American museums with ambitions to collect across cultures and time periods, is best known for the depth of its holdings in American art and 19th-century French art, its artifacts from Egypt, its Greek and Roman collections, and its Asian art.
The Dutch Golden Age is chronically doomed, it seems, to feel hyper-relevant to our own era. The period saw the consolidation of a proud republic, a new spirit of intellectual and creative freedom, and the accumulation of great wealth based on maritime trade — some of it supported by slavery.
All this fed into a very competitive art market and extraordinary growth in production. Over the course of the 17th century, an estimated 5 million paintings were made in the Netherlands. The republic’s unique circumstances led to an endlessly absorbing interplay between market forces, status and religious beliefs, as well as new forms of self-consciousness both about what it is to be a citizen of the world and what it is to be a breathing human animal wearing particular clothes, engaged in particular activities at particular times of day in, say, Amsterdam, Deventer or Delft. (Whatever else it does, Dutch painting puts you right there.)
The MFA’s renovated galleries are ravishing. With works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Peter Paul Rubens, and oodles of their peers and competitors, Boston is now one of the best places outside of the Netherlands to get a comprehensive introduction to Dutch and Flemish art, making it a worthy rival to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Better yet, in an alcove between two of the galleries — like a wardrobe leading to Narnia — is an elevator that takes you down to hushed and wood-paneled rooms hung with yet more Dutch and Flemish paintings. These rooms include a library, study pods, a seminar room and a commons. This is the MFA’s new Center for Netherlandish Art.
The CNA, which aims to “promote the study and appreciation of Dutch and Flemish art,” is the first of its kind in the United States, according to a museum news release. Working with scholars and universities both local and far-flung, its mission is to stimulate “interdisciplinary research and object-based learning.” Its focus, in other words, is not just on 17th-century art as defined by art historians but also on whatever scholars in other fields find interesting about it, which might extend (it already has) to the development of new markets, the history of the slave trade and what Dutch landscape painting may reveal about climate resilience.
Perhaps the best thing about the CNA is that it’s physically part of the MFA. Situated on the museum’s ground floor, it’s about 10 seconds away from the upstairs galleries (one of which is reserved for displays generated by the center). Touring the premises with CNA Director Christopher Atkins as some of the last books were being placed on the shelves, I inhaled the special atmosphere of scholarship being undertaken in the presence of the actual objects of study. There’s nothing quite like it.
The van Otterloos and Weatherbies also funded the CNA, with the van Otterloos crucially donating a collection of more than 20,000 books acquired from the late art historian Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann. The library, combined now with the MFA’s preexisting William Morris Hunt Library on Dutch and Flemish art, is at the heart of the CNA.
At the head of the sequence of seven renovated galleries, the MFA curators have displayed one of the museum’s greatest treasures, Rogier van der Weyden’s “Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin” (1435-1440). Its placement in an exposed threshold space is a little unsettling. But as a gateway to the rest of the Dutch and Flemish collection it makes sense.
Scholars of early Netherlandish and 17th-century Dutch art tend to occupy separate fiefdoms. But the traditions are clearly linked, and the contention here is that the main currents in Dutch 17th-century painting can be found in van der Weyden’s masterpiece.
One of those currents is the theme of the artist at work (Saint Luke is patron saint of artists, and van der Weyden may have used himself as the model). So it’s apt that just a few steps away is one of the museum’s other great treasures, Rembrandt’s masterpiece “Artist in his Studio.” This, too, may or may not be a self-portrait, but it certainly demonstrates a new degree of self-consciousness about painting pictures.
The little Rembrandt hangs beside a new gift from the van Otterloos, “Interior of a Painter’s Studio,” painted two years later by Jan Davidsz. de Heem. De Heem, one of the great Dutch still life painters, lived in Leiden, like the young Rembrandt, and the studio here looks remarkably similar to Rembrandt’s. But where the Rembrandt painting shows the painter and only the backside of his canvas, de Heem chooses to show the back of the painter and, fully visible, his unfinished canvas on the easel.
A highlight of the new hang is a recently rediscovered series of five paintings illustrating the five senses. They’re by a largely forgotten female painter, Michaelina Wautier (1604-1689). Acquired by the van Otterloos, the paintings show young boys looking through glasses (sight), playing a recorder (hearing), pinching a nose to block the odor of a rotten egg (smell), eating richly buttered bread (taste), and staring at a finger cut by a knife while whittling wood (touch). The boys’ expressions are so vivid and Wautier’s treatment of a stock theme so original and direct that you want to know more.
That is the effect of this entire rehang. It sparks curiosity about new images and new notions and sets old things in a fresh light. Two still lifes by Osias Beert, for instance, feature an assortment of sweets alongside oysters, wine and caviar. The sweets were made with sugar imported from Brazil. They are displayed, provocatively — and truthfully — alongside a depiction by Frans Post of a Brazilian sugar plantation exploiting the labor of enslaved people.
Of course, paintings are more than just socio-historical documents and the curators strike a nice balance between providing social context and showing faith in the paintings as works of art. People love Dutch paintings because they’re beautiful, ugly, technically virtuosic, stylistically diverse and often funny. They can be uncannily familiar and bafflingly strange. And they always make you look at your own world from a new perspective.
Boston is one of America’s most segregated cities, and the MFA sits right on the edge of Roxbury, which is more than 50 percent African American and more than 25 percent Latino. The museum is finally beginning to look like it wants to connect with this neighborhood and to welcome more diverse audiences by, among other things, displaying work by African American artists throughout its most trafficked areas.
In other ways, too, after a difficult few years, the MFA is looking transformed. It is playing to its strengths, with superb new displays of Greek and Roman art, Impressionism and, now, Dutch and Flemish art. But if you think the MFA’s holdings in these areas are fabulous, consider that its collections of Asian art are even better. In fact, they are among the very best in the world.
Sadly, its scattered and lately reduced Asian galleries don’t even come close to reflecting this. Given that three-fifths of the world’s population is Asian, that our economic, political and cultural futures will be richly intertwined with the many countries of Asia, and that the stuff owned by the MFA is just so good, it strikes me that doing justice to the Asian collection should probably be museum director Matthew Teitelbaum’s next big priority.
New Dutch and Flemish galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, mfa.org | null | null | null | null | null |
Don Wilson, co-founder and rhythm guitarist of the instrumental guitar band the Ventures, whose hits included the surf-rock standard “Walk, Don’t Run” and a version of the theme song for the 1960s TV show “Hawaii Five-O,” died Jan. 22 in Tacoma, Wash. He was 88.
His son Tim confirmed the death in a statement to the News Tribune of Tacoma but did not provide a cause.
The Ventures’ first album, “Walk, Don’t Run” (1960), with Bob Bogle on lead guitar and Nokie Edwards on bass, sold millions of copies and became a rollicking cultural touchstone; the title song was the No. 2 hit in the country. Their later albums included “The Ventures in Space” (1964), “Wild Things!” (1966) and “Guitar Freakout” (1967). Their version of the “Hawaii Five-O” theme song became a top-10 chart success in 1969.
Donald Lee Wilson was born in Tacoma on Feb. 10, 1933, and grew up admiring country-western and big-band music. He played trombone before picking up the guitar from a fellow soldier during Army service. He was a car salesman and then a construction worker before forming a band with Bogle in the late 1950s, soon adding Edwards on bass guitar and Howie Johnson on drums.
Johnson broke his neck in a car wreck in 1961 and died in 1988. Skip Moore played drums on “Walk, Don’t Run,” and Mel Taylor took over on drums and rounded out the classic lineup, with Edwards on lead guitar, in 1962. | null | null | null | null | null |
This combination of cover images shows “Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the 20th Century” by Dana Stevens, left, and “Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life” by James Curtis. (Atria via AP, left, and Knopf via AP) (Uncredited/Atria/Knopf)
By Douglass K. Daniel | AP
History allows both Stevens and Curtis to end their books on higher, hopeful notes. Keaton’s salvation was the next big thing in entertainment: television. He appeared on early live programs, including a few of his own, and found work in offbeat roles on “The Twilight Zone,” ”Route 66” and other series well into the 1960s. And he lived long enough to be rediscovered and to enjoy rapturous applause at special screenings of his old movies. | null | null | null | null | null |
CONCORD, N.H. — Investigators have narrowed the window of the disappearance of a New Hampshire girl missing since late 2019 at age 5 to a 13-day period coinciding with the eviction of her father and stepmother from their home, with witness accounts of the family living in cars, the attorney general’s office said Monday. | null | null | null | null | null |
Russian flags wave in Donetsk, Ukraine recently. Ukraine has become a proxy battle between the West and Russia. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
It’s a proxy battle between Russia and the West
The United States tends to not prioritize this — until it has to, and by then it’s become a big issue
In 2014, Russia quickly and rather easily took over Crimea, a peninsula previously under Ukraine rule. It was a remarkably aggressive move. Then-President Obama responded with sanctions and by kicking Russia out of a group of world leaders, the G-8. But overall, the U.S. was caught off guard and didn’t respond forcefully, said Susanne Wengle, who studies the post-Soviet region at the University of Notre Dame.
There have been regular skirmishes ever since in Ukraine, and the U.S. has consistently supported pro-Western groups — support that transformed into military aid after Crimea.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump called up Ukraine’s newly elected president — ironically, an anti-corruption reformer — and threatened to hold up a huge package of military aid for the country if it didn’t dig into his political rival, Joe Biden. The quid pro quo that House impeachment investigators demonstrated eventually got Trump impeached by the House (and acquitted by the Senate.)
Now, Russia is massing troops on the border of Ukraine, and looking like it wants to invade the country, perhaps in response to the U.S. and West’s increased support for Ukraine. And Biden is trying to decide how to respond.
How Ukraine has become a proxy battle between the U.S. and Russia
It’s a country, of particular historic importance to Russia, a strategic buffer between Russia and Europe, and it’s linguistically and culturally close to Russia, said Maria Snegovaya, who studies Russia from George Washington University.
For the U.S., Ukraine is a country in Russia’s sphere that has a real chance of breaking free, said Andrew Lohsen, a former State Department official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In a region where you don’t have too many countries that still seem like they can achieve this transition to a market economy and an open society, Ukraine is one of the few that remain in play,” he said.
American presidents generally want Ukraine to succeed, said Jenny Mathers, an international politics expert at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom: “In Ukraine, the U.S. sees a nation struggling to make its own decisions and chart its own path, and that is a very powerful story for Americans.”
That’s created this tug-of-war between Russia and the U.S. on Ukraine’s future. “It’s a country that’s caught between Russia and the West,” said Wengle, with the University of Notre Dame.
In recent years, the U.S. has shifted its priorities abroad over to China. That was one of the top reasons Biden defended ending the war in Afghanistan, was to focus on the rise of China.
As a result, several experts we spoke to say that the United States has largely let contentions with Russia fall by the wayside. Ukraine is probably not the top of any incoming president’s foreign policy list, said Emily Holland, with the Naval War College. “It was largely ignored,” she said.
Russia tries to take advantage of America’s distracted stance to advance its own self interests — and they often do this by using Ukraine.
Several experts we spoke to pointed out that now is as good a time as ever for Russia to make its move: Biden is weak at home, his poll numbers are down, and the nation is focused on the coronavirus, the economy and upcoming midterm elections. And he just yanked America out of a war, with big political consequences for him.
Holland of the Naval War College said Ukraine is known for being remarkably corrupt, and there are a lot of Ukrainian oligarchs with money to advance their interests in Washington.
Both Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, have ties to it. Manafort was an adviser to the prime minister of Ukraine and pro-Russian forces there. And Trump tried to allege a quid pro quo between then-Vice President Biden’s actions in Ukraine and Hunter Biden’s work on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Lohsen, the former State Department official, views Russia’s encroachment on Ukraine as the beginning, not the end, of its attempts to expand in a way that makes the United States take notice. And that means Ukraine will probably continue to be in the news. | null | null | null | null | null |
Sarah Childress named Deputy Editor for The Post’s Long-term Investigative Team
Sarah Childress ( and Sarah Childress/Sarah Childress)
Announcement from Deputy Investigative Editor David S. Fallis and Investigative Editor Jeff Leen:
We are thrilled to announce that Sarah Childress will be joining us as a deputy editor on the long-term investigative team. Sarah comes to us from PBS Frontline, where she is a senior series editor and has partnered with local and national outlets on award-winning multimedia investigations.
For an investigation she led on the Flint, Mich., water crisis, Sarah pushed reporters to dig into seven years of death certificates, which eventually found the toll from the city’s contaminated water was likely far greater than officially reported. After the documentary “Flint’s Deadly Water” aired in 2019, prosecutors reopened their investigation and indicted nine people, including an aide to the governor who Frontline revealed had threatened researchers looking into the crisis.
Last year, Sarah helped guide the multi-part Tampa Bay Times investigation “Poisoned,” which documented unsafe conditions and failed oversight of the Gopher Resource lead smelter. She committed Frontline’s resources to the project and gave a top-line edit to the stories, working closely with the local writers and editors to bulletproof the reporting. The investigation exposed the environmental and human impact of the smelter, located in a mostly impoverished community of color.
Sarah joined Frontline in 2012 as its first digital reporter. In 2015, she partnered with The Post on an authoritative look at the use of federal consent decrees, “Forced Reforms, Mixed Results.” And, in 2017, she chronicled the rise of the modern militia movement, producing the documentary “American Patriot” and writing “The Battle over Bunkerville,” an ebook.
Before Frontline, Sarah was a correspondent for five years at the Wall Street Journal, reporting from Nairobi. She began her journalism career in 2003 at Newsweek, writing from Iraq and covering Hurricane Katrina. Sarah’s journalism has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Jack R. Howard Award for Broadcast for the Flint documentary. She graduated from Notre Dame and teaches an investigative journalism class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sarah grew up in a close-knit family in Michigan, where she spent the summers sailing and the winters skiing. An avid reader and attempted runner, Sarah will be based in Boston, where she lives with her husband Mark, a professor at Minerva University; their two children, Ezra and Luka; and a rescue cat named Miche.
She starts Feb. 28. Please join us in welcoming her to The Post. | null | null | null | null | null |
Not only do the mirrors have to be aligned, but the scientific instruments that will study the captured light must also be cooled, calibrated, and checked out, noted Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer and vice president of science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). She does not expect the telescope to be able to perform scientific observations until June or July.
“NASA takes the time to get these things right. For these big programs, like the Mars lander and the James Webb Space Telescope, we don’t really have an option to make it fail," Hammel said.
“It took 20 years of work to make it look easy," she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Kuwait’s government said Monday that it had referred two senior military officers for prosecution in a major corruption case related to the country’s purchase of Eurofighter Typhoon combat planes, after an investigation into the jets’ improperly inflated price.
It wouldn't be the first scandal to cast a shadow over Kuwait's army. The embezzlement of nearly $800 million from Kuwait’s military aid fund forced the resignation of the government two years ago. The former prime minister and defense minister remain detained pending trial. | null | null | null | null | null |
The documentary is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this week. The in-person festival was canceled and all the premiers will be online, reducing the glitz but perhaps increasing the reach of a message far bigger than the fight for abortion rights.
Booth began her activism with optimism, traveling to Mississippi in 1964 to advocate for voting rights and seeing the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. | null | null | null | null | null |
Police stand by a vehicle on the campus of Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany, on Jan. 24. (R. Priebe/Pr-Video/DPA/AP)
BERLIN — German police on Monday said one person was killed and three others were injured in a rare campus shooting in the university town of Heidelberg in the country’s southwest.
The gunman, an 18-year-old student, opened fire in a lecture hall where about 30 people had gathered for a biology tutorial, local police chief Siegfried Kollmar said.
Four students were injured, with one later succumbing to her wounds. The gunman died after turning the weapon on himself, Kollmar said at a news conference.
“It breaks my heart,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said of the shooting.
Authorities said they believe the perpetrator acted alone but that his motives remain unclear. He opened fire with a “long gun,” police said, and had a second firearm with him — along with more than 100 rounds of ammunition.
According to Kollmar, the gunman had sent a text message before the shooting saying he wanted to “punish some people.” He added that he wanted to be buried at sea.
Police had earlier warned people to stay away from the campus as authorities launched a “large scale” response to the shooting, but later said in a statement that there was no longer any danger to the public.
Heidelberg University, established in the 14th century, is the oldest in Germany. The country has strict gun-control laws, and school shootings are extremely rare. The perpetrator is believed to have purchased his weapons abroad, security officials said. | null | null | null | null | null |
The shooting occurred near Spring Road and 14th Street, on the northern border of the Columbia Heights and Petworth neighborhoods. Recent shootings in Columbia Heights have been a concern.
Police said the man then ran north to the 1400 block of Quincy Street, in Petworth and went into a multifamily residential building. Officers searched the building and set up a barricade but later determined he was not inside. | null | null | null | null | null |
Will Farquarson, from left, Chris Wood, Dan Smith and Kyle Simmons of Bastille pose for a portrait to promote the album “Give Me the Future” on Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2022 in London. The band’s 13-track, fourth studio album, dives into the world of science-fiction, exploring the way technology can be a tool for escape. (Scott Garfitt/AP)
By Ragan Clark | AP
NEW YORK — In 2020, Bastille found themselves in a unique position. Coming out of their last album and into the pandemic, the English pop rock band not only had one album’s worth of songs, but two or three. | null | null | null | null | null |
This photo combo of images provided by the New York City Police Department shows NYPD Officers Wilbert Mora, left, and Jason Rivera. The two officers were shot while answering a call about an argument between a woman and her adult son in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. (Courtesy of NYPD via AP) (Uncredited/NYPD)
NEW YORK — The man who shot two New York City police officers in a Harlem apartment, killing one of them and putting another in critical condition, died Monday of injuries sustained when a third officer shot him, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. | null | null | null | null | null |
To the Trump cult, Jan. 6, 2021 was no more than what former vice president Mike Pence has called “one day in January.” To the rest of us, and surely to future historians, it was an unprecedented violent assault on the citadel of our democracy and an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. | null | null | null | null | null |
First, tens of millions of Americans, including a majority of children, remain unvaccinated, and even more have not received a much-needed booster. Efforts to reach the un- and under-vaccinated must continue. Beyond that, we need an Operation Warp Speed 2.0 to aggressively study new variant-specific vaccines as well as including intranasal vaccines that stimulate mucosal immunity, key for preventing infections and pan-coronavirus vaccines. We don’t know which of these will work, but we must make the investment to study and build them. | null | null | null | null | null |
Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Rome, Georgia, on Nov. 1, 2020. Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg)
Fulton County Superior Court judges on Monday approved the request made last week by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and said Willis will be allowed to seat a special grand jury on May 2, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
In a letter last week, Willis, a Democrat, told the chief judge of Fulton County’s Superior Court that the move was needed because a “significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”
In an interview earlier this month with the Associated Press, Willis said that her team was making solid progress in its investigation. | null | null | null | null | null |
Right-wing sentiment flips from cautious concern to partisan frustration
Supporters of then-President Donald Trump smashed windows and doors to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (John Minchillo/AP)
The second pattern often interlaces with the first. In it, any investigation into something that was done, usually by Trump or his allies, is cast as hopelessly partisan and dishonest, conducted by dishonest, partisan actors toward partisan, dishonest ends. In support of this idea, the right gets to work ginning up both reasons to downplay what is being investigated and to cast aspersions at the investigators.
Pattern one: Republican officials like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) criticized Trump and the day’s events. Slowly, though, Republican concern over what had occurred curdled into frustration that it was still being discussed. The Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans saying it was very important to prosecute the rioters who took part in the attack at the Capitol dropped from 50 percent to 25 percent between March and September. More than half of Republicans in that poll said too much attention had been paid to the issue.
The best analogy to all of this, I’d offer, is the Russia investigation. There was an obvious effort by Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, manifested by the dumps of stolen material and the underpowered social media efforts. There were questions about links between those efforts and Trump’s campaign that spawned a set of investigations. And instead of seeing what the investigations yielded, Trump and his allies whipped up a dishonest narrative about the investigations themselves and the investigators, a narrative that effectively inoculated the Republican base against the eventual findings. Ask your typical Fox News viewer to describe the Russia probe and they’ll talk about a warrant obtained against a guy who’d already left the campaign and probably know nothing about Trump’s campaign manager passing polling to a guy believed to be linked to Russian intelligence. | null | null | null | null | null |
Transcript: “Being the Ricardos” A Conversation with Javier Bardem
MR. EDGERS: Hi, there. This is Geoff Edgers. I’m the national arts reporter here at The Washington Post. Now “I Love Lucy”--it’s hard for us to even understand this today, with TikTok and 5 million publications and the internet and our phones--but “I Love Lucy” at its peak was watched in 11 million households in our country. There were 15 million households with television. Just think about that dominant. So, what a great show, what an important show. This film, “Being the Ricardos,” documents sort of a week in the production of the show. And we’re so lucky to have with us today one of the stars of that production, Javier Bardem, who we have seen in so many films. We’ll talk about some of those.
But thank you so much for joining us here at Washington Post Live.
MR. BARDEM: Thank you very much for having me here.
MR. EDGERS: Absolutely. So, I want to start off by asking you. I might seem obvious, but what was it you saw in this role when I'm sure you get pitched plenty of scripts? What was it about this one in particular?
MR. BARDEM: Well, actually this one in particular, I was kind of chasing it, chasing after it because I heard about the project long before Aaron Sorkin even wrote the script. And I was very intrigued to know who this couple was. I knew about "I Love Lucy" show. I knew about Lucy and Desi, but I wasn't too familiar with it since the show wasn't as popular in Spain as it is in the States. And then once I started to read about them both, and I read the autobiography of Desi called "A Book," and I start to watch all the episodes of "I Love Lucy," I start to really feel absolutely excited about portraying such an iconic figure.
MR. EDGERS: Now what--you said you read his book. Tell me what kind of research you do in a situation. You've played real people before, but I'm not sure you've played a real person who so many people identify. So, tell me about what you went--what went into researching this.
MR. BARDEM: Well, first of all, what you have to do is to really try to be respectful, as much as you can, with the legacy that that person gave to the world. And for that, you need to do a very thorough, specific, long research to try to get as many voices, including the most important one of them all, which is the character's voice, into your--into your brain so you can start to recreate that. And at the same time, like a contradiction, there's a moment where you have to forget all that and give up with the anxiety of trying to achieve to be like that person, because that's not going to happen, and try to grab as much as you can the essence, the spirit of what the person was, and what he meant to his fellow contemporaries. And that's, at the end of the day, what I think a performer should do rather than do the mimics of it. Of course, we--the actor wants to get as close as we can to the person we're portraying. But there's a moment where it's dangerous. You can get lost in the external of it and forget a little bit what was the motivation, what was the energy, what was the spirit, what was the essence of that person.
MR. EDGERS: The essence. That's a really good word, because I think that describes what you do in this film, which is, you're not exactly him, but you captured something about his spirit. I'm always fascinated by actors who come in and play real people. I think about Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman, where everybody had to call him Andy, right? And he--his idea of sinking into that character was to become that person. Does that happen to you? Do you find parts of Desi slipping into your real life when you're--when you're filming something so intensely?
MR. BARDEM: Well, I think every actor has their own book, and everything is valuable. And it's permitted as long as you don't really intimidate others or limit others' work with your behavior. That's my golden rule. Like you are part of a team. It's not about you. You are part of a team of people who are creating a story. And for that, do whatever you need in order to get your head into it, but never lose track that you are just a grain of sand in a big desert of talents making their best effort to make it happen. So that's important.
For me, I'm not so much into the obsession of it all. I was. I'm 52 years old now. And I guess I kind of learned that, because there were moments where I could be more obsessed with it--and not--I mean--and be that character for 24 hours. But I found that it didn't really work out for me, because I would play my best scenes in the catering table. I was playing my best scenes going to a toilet. It's like the camera wasn't rolling. It's like, for me, yes, it works just to be focused, do the job, and then when you come back home, of course some of it will stay with you. It's impossible to leave everything behind. But not to the extent that I need everybody to call me Desi. That will be ridiculous. And also, I find it very scary that they would call me Desi. Like, who is that? Ah, right, the character.
MR. EDGERS: You know, I read about the idea that you and Nicole Kidman, both at a certain point sort of dropped out, out of anxiety for this film--I mean, is that really true or is that exaggerated? Because I guess why get so anxious?
MR. BARDEM: Yeah, that's an exaggeration. I mean, we were--I think when we when we got the call from Aaron, and they said, okay, now we're going, it was at the peak of the pandemic. It was February--on January/February 2021. And we both were in our places. I was in London, shooting a movie. She was in Australia, I think. And we were like, two months to start shooting. And of course, we got nervous because both of us felt we didn't have much time to prepare as it was needed. And that's what we shared with Aaron Sorkin, saying, I don't know if we're going to be able to achieve what we need to achieve. It's a huge mountain here, because we have not much time. The movie was put together very, very, rather quickly. I mean, kudos to the production team. And then all of a sudden, we had, I don't know, two months, two months and a half to prepare for the role. And that's what scared us. But we never said I'm pulling out, I'm pulling out. We never said that. I mean, we both knew from the very, very first moment how great characters they were and what a great opportunity to really work with Aaron Sorkin's magic words.
MR. EDGERS: Yeah. Did you--did I also read--and forgive me, I'm finding information out there in the world, and then I'm correcting it with you here. That is our job. This is a fact correction mission.
MR. BARDEM: Yeah.
MR. EDGERS: Did you--did you work with—
MR. BARDEM: Not everybody does it. So that's a good thing. It speaks highly of you.
MR. EDGERS: Well can't trust--can't trust everything you read, my friend. Did you really work with a comedy coach? Is that true?
MR. BARDEM: Well, I worked with a clown coach, yes. I worked with a clown coach as much as I could, knowing that there was a very tight frame of time where I have to do lessons, singing lessons, conga lessons, guitar lessons, human accident lessons, English speaking lessons, then reading the book, then watching the episodes, and all of this while I was shooting "The Little Mermaid." So, it was kind of an intense time. And yes, I had like four or five sessions with a great clown that I know from Spain that will help me to find the physicality of his.
MR. EDGERS: Can you--are you a juggler? Can you do that?
MR. BARDEM: No. No, I am--I think I'm a good soldier. I think I follow orders very strictly.
MR. EDGERS: Yeah, yeah.
MR. BARDEM: Like when they give--when they give me an assignment, I do it. But I need--I need a lot of order around me. And the good thing is that when you have so many Zoom classes, there's an order to follow. And that's what's keeping me going on the right track. I'm not getting the attention to what it was wrong to do, which is to, for example, realize how iconic and huge these characters were. I never thought for a second, oh, my god, I'm never going to get there, I'm never going to be able to fulfill what everybody's expecting of this character. I never had time for that. I just was only focused on trying to get as close as this as I could.
MR. EDGERS: So, you mentioned guitar playing and playing the bongos and singing. I think we have a clip here of you as Desi doing some of these things. Folks, do we have something? Yeah, maybe? Maybe we don't. I don't know. I've seen the film, though. But you do play guitar, but you don't play guitar in real life, right?
MR. BARDEM: No, I look at my fingers. I mean, to learn when you're 52 years old to play guitar by Zoom, it's like--it's impossible. It's like--so all the teachers, all the masters that were teaching me all these things were so patient and so nice and so I mean protective, because they were all despairing, saying, no, there's not going to be ever a possibility of this guy learning to play congas or guitar by Zoom. But we did it. We did it with consistency.
MR. EDGERS: We do have a clip. I'm sorry, this--remember we're The Washington Post. This is not a TV network. So once in a while, it takes us a minute. But we found the clip. Can we roll the clip of Javier as Desi?
MR. BARDEM: That was fun.
MR. EDGERS: Do you sing in real life? Have you ever been a singer or no?
MR. BARDEM: Not really. I--look, I like rock and roll music, hard rock, and I scream in the shower here and there. But I never had a chance to sing a song. But funny enough, Rob Marshall which is my amazing director and I adore him as a director and as a friend, he was the first person to trust me in singing a song. And actually, when the offer of Desi came, I was doing "Little Mermaid," which is a musical. It's the first time I was ever going to sing a song. And--but I--what I learned is that it's a muscle. It's a muscle. And if you give--and as any other muscles, if you rehearse and you train, there's a moment where the voice comes out. And so I don't think it's that difficult. I think everybody can sing if they put into it, they put the effort into it.
MR. EDGERS: Yeah, I think you sound great. And now I brought a prop because I--there's another thing I read. This record, right? You like this record?
MR. BARDEM: Oh, yeah.
MR. EDGERS: So, there we go. AC/DC "Highway to Hell." Is it--is it false, though, I've read somewhere that at one point you learned much of your English from the record "Highway to Hell."
MR. BARDEM: That's true.
MR. EDGERS: Is that accurate and is that safe for children?
MR. BARDEM: Of course, it's not safe for children. But listen, I have--I have an 11-year-old, and he's learning English with "Highway to Hell" as well. So--and let me tell you, with the things that have--that have been said today, that are being said today in different songs, "Highway to Hell" is like for infants almost.
MR. BARDEM: But, yeah, I learned my English when I was very young, eight, nine years old by trying to understand the lyrics. So, I would read and translate and I would sing them aloud, out loud.
MR. EDGERS: Yeah, I'd say the first concert I saw was AC/DC when I was 13 years old in Boston. And it was like, you know, cannons and Angus Young, and God, what an incredible experience, right?
MR. BARDEM: Yeah, amazing. I saw them--last time it was 2015 in Spain. And it was--it was--it was amazing that these people can-–what they can do on stage is crazy.
MR. EDGERS: Yeah. And if you blur your eyes, it doesn't look weird that there's like a 70-year-old man wearing a schoolboy's uniform.
So, you know, something that came up during this--during "Being the Ricardos"--and forgive me because I don't actually know if this is true or false--there were questions about whether it's okay for a man from Spain, you, to play a man who was from Cuba. First of all, do we know who actually accused you of that? Did people get upset about this? Or was it just like "people say"?
MR. BARDEM: No, it is true. And I know--I know that they--that's why I was searching for the role and why I was trying to know the state of the project itself. I knew they were looking for other actors, and I was fine with that. I said, okay, it makes sense that they are looking for Cuban actors or actors with Cuban blood or Cuban family. And but for whatever reason that didn't happen and they came back to me and I was like, okay, I'm ready and I will do whatever I can to worship him and worship his origins and worship who he was and his accent and his culture. I understand that. I think it's a fair discussion to have, to have more representation of the minorities on movies, as much as I defend the right for any actor or actress to play a role even though she is not from that place, or she doesn't have the same sexual orientation that the character, because that's what we do for a living. We create characters. I'm fine with those within this case Cuban actors or Latin actors being the first option that the director should go to, you know, to cast a character like Desi. Of course.
But if it doesn't happen, or the director feels like, no, I want this other actor because I think he's going to have what I--what I'm looking for, for whatever reason, then we should respect that, because that's what we do. We become people that we're not. And that's the art of our craft, and that's also the challenge. And that's why we admire so much when we go to a movie theater, how far has gone the actress or the actor to get as close to that character as possible. That's part of the job, and that's part of the pleasure of it.
MR. EDGERS: It's so interesting because I--you know, where I first was exposed to your great talents, "Before Night Falls." I remember that film. Love that film. And that discussion, you were playing a Cuban poet who was gay and persecuted.
MR. BARDEM: Absolutely.
MR. EDGERS: And it was beautifully done. I don't remember at that time in the world anyone saying, for Pete's sake, that guy's not a Cuban poet.
MR. EDGERS: And what--and I mean, another great example is you play--in "The Sea Inside" you play a quadriplegic, and he was from Spain, but you obviously, you know, were able bodied. So, tell me something. When you think about this, you want to find people, minorities, people who are not often given the chance roles, but also, it's not like you're a guy who people have said, boy, he's had it's so easy. I mean, you are from Spain. English is not your native language. And how do you keep yourself from getting frustrated in hearing these kinds of criticism and stepping back and saying, boy, I gotta think this through a little bit more.
MR. BARDEM: I don't step back in the sense that I think it's--I support it. I support the discussion. I support--I support the fact that that the directors and producers should go and cast as production the people that are from those places, or I mean, if they are playing--if we are talking about a character that is gay, fine, of course. If you want to find an actor that is openly gay and wants to go with a role and he really can give you what you're looking for, of course, go. But what if it doesn't happen? Then what should we do? Paralyze the project? Should we condemn any other actor for not being of a same sexual orientation that a character is supposed to play? Should we ask for passports before any--to any other actor to see where they're from before casting them for anything? Should we ask them their sexual condition or their sexual orientation before giving them a role? Are all the actors and actresses happy enough, open enough about their sexuality to say publicly? What with--what happened with all these actors and actresses that are gays, but they don't want to share? And they are playing as the sexual characters? Should we punish them? Should we--should we forbid them to play those roles? I mean, it's complicated.
And the bottom line is, like as I said in an interview, if we're going to go as far as we can with it, then we should start by forbidding any actor playing Hamlet unless they were born in Denmark. And that's how crazy it can get. And let's not forget. That's what we do for a living. And some of the most amazing ever historic, iconic performances of all time has been done by actors who are not from the same origin. Marlon Brando, "The Godfather." Meryl Streep, Margaret Thatcher. Daniel Day- Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, and many others. I mean, so it's fine to have a discussion. I support the minority. And one last thing. There is no such a thing like a Spanish character. I'm from Spain. We don't have Spanish characters in any movies. It's very hard. I mean, I've worked outside of Spain for 30 years, and I found only two Spanish characters--one with Woody Allen because it happened in Spain, and the other one, Captain Salazar in "Pirates of the Caribbean" because he was Spanish because I was playing it. There is no such thing as Spanish. So what should we do ourselves? Cannot we act if we really work hard on trying to match the accent like in "Before Night Falls" or in Desi Arnaz or in Pablo Escobar? I mean, it--should we also tell the actor from Latin America not come to Spain. They really work hard and tried to match the accent and speak beautiful Castilian so they can have access to great roles here. It's delicate.
MR. EDGERS: That's a great a great answer. And it's about a conversation and being able to talk openly about these things. My son, who's 11, wanted me to tell you that "Skyfall" is his favorite James Bond movie and that your performance was is stunning. I still think "Before Night Falls," you were better in it. But that's just me. Tell me something. You go after films. You go after roles. Is there someone you would love to play that you have not been able to yet? Is there a film you're dying to make that's like your dream film? Anything you could mention, or do you just wait for it to come?
MR. BARDEM: Honestly, I don't--I don't have that thing that obsesses me. I don't. I was very much looking forward to play Hernán Cortés in the conquest of Mexico, which it was a great project, but it happened that it was cancelled after the--because of the COVID. That would be a great role to play. But again, if it hasn't happened, it's for a reason. That's my way of thinking. Like, if it didn't happen it's because it didn't have to happen. Now, let's wait for he comes. And I'm blessed that I have a job and I can earn a living out of it and I--and that I have offers. So that by itself is a bless. And I just--among all the offers that come, sometimes they come more, sometimes come less. Sometimes they are more interesting, sometimes they are not. Among all of this, you choose what you think is the best one and just try to do your best with it. That's all.
MR. EDGERS: Yeah, I'm just gonna let you--we only have a minute left, because you have a busy schedule. Okay? But climate change is something we cover very closely here. And I know it's very dear to you. Is there something you can tell us about how you got involved in this? I noticed like Antarctica is very important to you, something through your brother. Tell us a little bit about that.
MR. BARDEM: Yeah, I had the chance to go in 2018 with an expedition on a Greenpeace big ship to the Antarctica and see firsthand the work, the amazing work they all do--the biologists, the scientists. The people are really spending their lives entirely saving and caring for our human place, human health. And that was a wide eyeopener for me. Like, we all know what's going on. But when you see it firsthand and when you see all these glaciers melting down, and you see that there is plastic in the waters--in those waters that haven't been sailed yet, it's like, wow. I mean, we have a huge responsibility. And it has to happen with the governments. I mean, we need a strong policy that really guide us through a more environmental situation, because we are citizens. We can do what we can do. But we have to really pressure the governments to really make a big step forward to a healthier planet. That's for sure.
MR. EDGERS: Do you have any--I mean, I have my--you know, my Fauci mug, which I love--I love using. But you know, it's like, everybody's arguing about everything. Some people are saying there's--you know, there's no climate change. What can we do as human beings to actually try to try to help with this situation? And you know, because it is so hard to get anything done these days.
MR. BARDEM: Absolutely. Yeah, we are all so sensitive about everything. We are all--everything is all criticizing each other and throwing things at each other. What can we do? I don't know. I think--I think we have to support the youth, the younger generations. They know. They're on the streets. They are marching. Greta, for example, is a biggest example. They know. They care. They feel it's their future, what's at stake, which is true. Everybody's future, especially theirs. And we have to support them, and we have to really give them the room for them to speak and try to bring the attention, the media attention to them because they know.
MR. EDGERS: Well, look, I can't tell you how grateful I am that you've been here. I--anytime you want to come to the National Arts Bureau, we'll put on "Girls Got Rhythm." I'll turn it up to 11.
MR. BARDEM: [Humming] Yes.
MR. EDGERS: Right? I mean, for God's sakes, is there anything better? So, look, good luck with this film and with the next film, and we'll be watching. And I am so pleased that we got to talk about this. Have a great--have a great day.
MR. BARDEM: Thank you so much for your time. I loved it. Thank you.
MR. EDGERS: Sure. All right, folks. So, look, guys, one of the greatest actors that’s ever lived, and we got him. Alright, so visit WashingtonPostLive.com. You’ll see other programming. We’ve got stuff across the board, fantastic programming. And I’ll look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks so much | null | null | null | null | null |
(Peter Hermann/The Washington Post)
The shooting occurred near Spring Road and 14th Street, on the northern border of the Columbia Heights and Petworth neighborhoods. Recent shootings in Columbia Heights have been a concern for residents.
Police said the man then ran north to the 1400 block of Quincy Street in Petworth and went into a multifamily residential building. Officers searched the building and set up a barricade but later determined he was not inside. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: One Fairfax County schools pandemic modification should return and become permanent
Fairfax County Public School buses are pictured in Lorton. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
By Joseph Amsbary
Joseph Amsbary is a 2020 graduate of Fairfax County Public Schools.
There is still time for Fairfax County Public Schools to reinstate a policy that would drastically reduce the pressure nearly 90 percent of students face because of grades.
In the 2020-2021 school year, FCPS changed its policy regarding pass/fail class offerings in its secondary schools as a response to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of limiting to a select few the classes that could be graded this way, FCPS allowed students to choose any two classes to be graded pass/fail. This policy is not in place for the 2021-2022 school year, but it is not too late to change that. Last year’s policy change was announced on March 18.
FCPS principals, for the mental and academic well-being of their students, should bring back the previous pass/fail policy for the current school year and maintain it beyond the pandemic.
I understand that the pass/fail modification was intended as a temporary solution for the difficulties of learning during the pandemic and that it was considered best to switch back to the comfortable, familiar system with school back in person. The 2020-2021 policy got it right, though. For one, the coronavirus is far from behind us as case numbers are rising yet again. Moreover, although FCPS might be back in person, students still face challenges from the pandemic, including increased stress, financial issues and reduced socialization. If a two-class pass/fail option was a good solution last year, it remains a good solution this year.
The benefits of a policy that allows students to take two classes pass/fail are not limited to pandemic environments, either. For one, we should not expect students to be perfect at everything they do, regardless of their interests or natural abilities. I would rather foster students’ strengths and passions. Students don’t use everything they learn in all of their classes, so we should give them the freedom to focus on what excites them most, which very well could become their future pursuits. In a pass/fail system, students can use the policy to relieve the pressure from classes they find tedious. Even better, they can choose to learn their favorite subjects without the extrinsic motivation of stringent grading overtaking their intrinsic motivation to learn more about the topic.
Reducing the extrinsic motivation from grades could also increase academic risk-taking. A 2018 paper by Kelsey Chamberlin, Maï Yasué and I-Chant Andrea Chiang compared traditional grading systems with partial or full pass/fail systems and demonstrated that students at a school with conventional grades experienced a greater fear of failure. In high school, we should encourage students to take chances and explore so they can identify and refine their passions. In addition, students who are less afraid of failure will be better able to view mistakes in class as opportunities for reflection and improvement rather than as a sign of incompetence.
All this is not to say that students should get two classes in which they do not have to try. Students will still receive grades in pass/fail classes, offering crucial feedback on their progress. Grades will adopt a new meaning, though, as a marker of progress instead of a source of anxiety. Additionally, students will not be able to slack in their classes, because passing a class requires students to complete their assignments and prepare for exams. Thus, they will still practice the skills related to that subject, which should be the main goal of any class. Students could just take a healthier approach, prioritizing knowledge and skills over GPA.
Principals already know how to operate a pass/fail system from last year; the main determinant of its success would be how it is communicated. First, students need to know this policy exists. Last year’s pass/fail offerings were not well communicated. Second, optimal results require students to understand the rationale behind the policy. Show them how to let intrinsic motivation guide them through their favorite classes or how to give themselves a break in a class they struggle with.
Last year, the coronavirus pandemic prompted a shift to a partial pass/fail system, but this system has benefits regardless of external conditions. To reduce stress and promote intrinsic motivation and risk-taking in your school, bring back the two-class pass/fail option and teach students how to use it effectively. | null | null | null | null | null |
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