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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 United States — 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 |
Less than a month into 2022, three more have been killed: Margarito Martínez Esquivel, a photographer in Tijuana, was shot dead outside his home on Jan. 17, while Lourdes Maldonado was killed Sunday night also outside of her home. José Luis Gamboa was fatally stabbed on Jan. 10 in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz.
As long as journalists are killed with impunity, free societies everywhere will suffer
Being a journalist in the U.S. is becoming more dangerous | null | null | null | null | null |
Heavy snow and thunder also hit Istanbul.
The ancient Acropolis hill is covered with snow in Athens on Monday. (Michael Varaklas/AP)
An intense winter storm blanketed Athens and several Greek Islands in snow Monday, where such wintry weather is highly unusual. Parts of Turkey, including Istanbul, also endured snowy conditions.
Snow fell heavily in Athens, with a report of thunder accompanying the flakes Monday. Snow isn’t terribly uncommon in Athens, happening several days per year on average, but this storm was particularly intense.
The heavy, wet snow snapped tree branches and triggered power outages, with reports of motorists stranded in their cars for at least five hours on area highways. Reuters reported six rail passengers were “slightly injured” as their train halted in the heavy snow.
Photographs showed some of Athens’ iconic temples coated in white, including the Parthenon. Similar scenes followed snow events in January 2019 and in February 2021.
In Istanbul, the heavy snow shut down flights at Istanbul Airport until 4 a.m. Tuesday, as about 6 inches (15 centimeters) accumulated, according to Reuters. Thundersnow was also reported in the city, while social media reports indicated motorists stranded on roadways and abandoning their vehicles.
While snow is not unusual in Athens, the snow that fell on several of the Greek Islands is much more rare. The Greek Reporter described the snow as “once in a lifetime weather event” on the Aegean Islands with reports of flakes on Syros, Naxos, Tinos, Mykonos and Santorini, in addition to Andros.
The storminess occurred amid temperatures 11 to 18 degrees (6 to 10 Celsius) below normal over much of Greece and Turkey. Both the chilly ground temperatures and exceptionally cold air aloft due to an intense zone of low pressure at high altitudes supported the snowfall. | 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 in children’s literature.
Runners-up, called Newbery Honor books, 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,” written by Andrea Wang. | null | null | null | null | null |
Taxiarchis Fountas has played for teams in Austria, Germany and Greece. (Chris Bauer/SEPA.Media/Getty Images)
Unless the timetable is changed, Fountas would miss the first half of United’s 34-game regular season, which begins late next month. Per club policy, United officials said they wouldn’t comment on potential signings.
Fountas agreed to a three-year pact for about $7 million, making him United’s highest-paid player, one person said. He will become an MLS Designated Player (DP), one of the classifications for those who earn more than the league limit of approximately $650,000.
Each team is allowed three DPs. Fountas becomes United’s third, joining Peruvian attacker Edison Flores and American winger Paul Arriola. United has a tentative deal in place to trade Arriola to FC Dallas for a league-record transaction ($2 million-plus in general allocation money).
Should United identify another potential DP, one who would fill Arriola’s on-field role, the trade would be executed. Team officials have been quiet about their player search, but two people close to the club said United is narrowing the list and could make another DP move soon.
Fountas is in his third season with Rapid Vienna, having scored 35 goals in 68 league appearances and one in 11 UEFA Europa League games. Previously, he played for clubs in Greece, Austria and Germany.
Fountas is in the Greek national team player pool but made just one appearance in 2022 World Cup qualifiers.
United employs MLS’s co-leading scorer last season, striker Ola Kamara, but is entertaining offers in MLS and abroad because Kamara is entering the final year of his contract. The club also has been seeking additional pieces to bolster the attack after cutting ties with Yordy Reyna, Yamil Asad and Ramon Abila after last season.
United is a week into training camp, and aside from finalizing the permanent transfer of defender Brendan Hines-Ike, promoting two players from second-division Loudoun United and adding a second-flight defender Monday, it had been conspicuously inactive as many teams sign impact players and execute trades.
On Monday, the club announced the acquisition of Hayden Sargis, a 19-year-old center back from USL Championship squad Sacramento Republic. He will provide depth on the back line (n.), back-line (adj.). Sacramento will receive $25,000 and possibly more if Sargis meets performance thresholds.
He signed a three-year deal with club options for 2025 and 2026.
“Hayden is a young center back who has all the qualities to be an outstanding piece of our backline in Hernán [Losada’s] system,” General Manager Lucy Rushton said in a statement. “He played a lot of minutes for Sacramento Republic, and we believe he is ready to make the jump up to MLS and compete for minutes on the first team. We’re excited to welcome him to the club and we’re looking forward to getting him integrated with the rest of the squad in preseason.” | null | null | null | null | null |
'Birthday bash' added to Johnson allegations
A British broadcaster on Monday reported that yet another alleged “bash” occurred at 10 Downing Street during the United Kingdom’s strict pandemic-related lockdown in 2020, this one to celebrate Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s birthday.
ITV News also said that on the evening of the same day — June 19, 2020 — Johnson hosted family and friends upstairs in the prime minister’s residence, another breach of the government’s orders forbidding indoor social gatherings.
The allegations come as Johnson awaits an investigative report by a senior civil servant into allegations about garden parties, “bring your own booze” fetes and basement “blowouts” at 10 Downing Street, which serves as both office and residence for the British leader.
Johnson earlier this month apologized to the British public for attending one garden party during lockdown, briefly. Downing Street has maintained that other gatherings were work events.
The prime minister is facing a rebellion in his own Conservative Party by lawmakers upset over what they call reckless hypocrisy.
As for the latest allegations, a Downing Street spokesperson told The Washington Post that staff members “gathered briefly in the Cabinet Room … to wish the Prime Minister a happy birthday. He was there for less than 10 minutes.”
ITV News said it was a surprise party attended by 30 people
As for the alleged evening party, the spokesperson said, “This is totally untrue. In line with the rules at the time the Prime Minister hosted a small number of family members outside that evening.”
— William Booth
Saad Hariri says he's leaving political life
Former prime minister Saad Hariri announced Monday that he was leaving politics for now and would not run in Lebanon’s upcoming parliamentary elections. The decision marks the first time in three decades that the powerful Hariri family is out of politics, adding uncertainty in a country grappling with a financial meltdown.
Hariri’s decision had been anticipated but was still a bombshell for many Lebanese. His exit leaves Lebanon’s Sunni community with no obvious leader for the time being, and there is speculation that the abstention of the moderate politician could result in hard-line Sunnis playing a bigger role in Lebanese politics.
Hariri, a three-time prime minister and current member of parliament, inherited the political leadership from his late father, billionaire businessman Rafiq al-Hariri, who was one of Lebanon’s most influential politicians. He was assassinated in February 2005 in a bombing in Beirut.
Saad Hariri, who was traditionally in the camp opposing Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah, has largely coexisted with the group, forming coalition governments that included it. That cost him support from Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia, a rival of Iran.
Hariri acknowledged in a televised speech that he had failed to prevent Lebanon from falling into the worst economic crisis in its modern history.
Hariri also said that neither he nor members of his Future Movement will run in the May parliamentary elections.
1 killed, 3 injured in campus shooting in Germany: Police said one person was killed and three injured in a campus shooting in Heidelberg in southwest Germany. The gunman, an 18-year-old student, opened fire in a lecture hall where about 30 people had gathered, the local police chief said. Four students were injured, with one later succumbing to her injuries, police said. The gunman died after turning the weapon on himself. Authorities said that they believe he acted alone but that his motives are unclear. He opened fire with a "long gun," police said, and had a second firearm and more than 100 rounds of ammunition. Police said the gunman had sent a text message before the shooting saying that he wanted to "punish some people."
2 deaths reported as quakes shake southern Haiti: Two moderate earthquakes shook southwest Haiti, killing two people and damaging homes. A 5.3-magnitude quake was followed by a 5.1-magnitude temblor nearly an hour later. Both were centered on Haiti's southern peninsula, west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Haiti's civil protection agency said at least two people died and two were injured.
2nd journalists killed in Tijuana in a week: A journalist was killed in the northern Mexican border city of Tijuana, the second in the city in a week and the third in Mexico this month. President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador called for a full investigation into the death of Lourdes Maldonado López, who had once come to him for help. Maldonado was found shot inside a car, said the Baja California state prosecutor's office. The press organization Article 19 said via Twitter that Maldonado had covered corruption and politics in Tijuana and had faced aggression because of her work.
Israel to compensate families in pilgrimage disaster: Israel is offering $158,000 in initial compensation to each of the families of the 45 people, including Americans and Canadians , who died in a crush at a Jewish pilgrimage site last year, officials said. They said the money is intended to relieve economic duress and could be deducted from any eventual legal settlement decided by a state commission of inquiry. Tens of thousands came April 30 to the hilltop site of Meron for the Lag B'Omer bonfire festival. When a crowd surged into a narrow tunnel, 45 men and boys were asphyxiated or trampled to death. | null | null | null | null | null |
WASHINGTON — With inflation punishing consumers and threatening the economy, the Federal Reserve will likely signal its intent this week to begin raising interest rates in March for the first time in three years. The Fed’s challenges will get only harder from there. Among Fed officials, there is broad support for a rate increase — one that would come much sooner than the officials had expected just a few months ago. But after that, their policymaking will become more complicated and could sow internal divisions, especially as a number of new officials join the Fed. How many times, for example, should the Fed raise rates this year?
WASHINGTON — The White House and Treasury Department launched a revamped Child Tax Credit website meant to help people who were eligible for the expanded tax credit under last year’s pandemic relief bill claim the second half of the payment they were due. The website includes a new tool that will help filers determine their eligibility and how to get the credit. Many families became eligible for the credit after President Joe Biden expanded the credit as part of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. Families received half of their expanded 2021 credit on a monthly basis and the other half will be received once they file their taxes. The enhanced portion of the child tax credit program has since lapsed.
WASHINGTON — The District of Columbia and three states are suing Google. They allege the internet search giant deceives consumers and invades their privacy by making it nearly impossible for them to stop their location from being tracked. In the lawsuit filed in a District of Columbia court, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine says Google has “systematically” deceived consumers about how their locations are tracked and used. He also claims Google has misled users of its services into believing they can control the information the company collects about them. The attorneys general of Texas, Indiana and Washington state are filing similar lawsuits in their state courts.
OMAHA, Neb. — Contract talks between the biggest freight railroads and unions that represent 105,000 employees are headed to mediation this week. The development comes after the unions declared an impasse following more than two years of negotiations. The unions said Monday that the contract talks had deadlocked because the railroads are still seeking concessions. That, even after workers remained on the job throughout the pandemic and endured significant staff cuts in recent years as the railroads overhauled their operations. Michael Maratto with the National Railway Labor Conference that represents the railroads said it is routine for federal mediators to get involved in the contract talks. He says the railroads welcome the mediators’ help in reaching an agreement.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has issued its first clean energy loan guarantee, reviving an Obama-era program that disbursed billions of dollars in guarantees to help launch the country’s first utility-scale wind and solar farms a decade ago but has largely gone dormant in recent years. The Energy Department said it would guarantee up to $1 billion in loans to help a Nebraska company scale up production of “clean” hydrogen to convert natural gas into commercial products that enhance tires and produce ammonia-based fertilizer. Lincoln-based Monolith Inc. says it can create both products while vastly shrinking greenhouse gas emissions. With $40 billion in loan authority, the Energy Department says it expects to make more loan commitments in 2022.
WASHINGTON — U.S. taxpayers, brace yourselves because tax filing season starts Monday and you can expect the task to be more cumbersome than usual this year. That’s due to an overloaded and understaffed IRS workforce, as well as complications from pandemic-related programs. White House press secretary Jen Psaki says the IRS has “unacceptable backlogs” and she says the customer service that people are receiving “is not what the American public deserves.” There will be plenty of new issues to navigate this year. For example, individuals who are eligible to claim the child tax credit and have gotten advance payments throughout the year may get a smaller refund than they’d normally see.
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s parent company Meta says it has created what it believes is among the fastest artificial intelligence supercomputers running today. It hopes it will help lay the groundwork for its building of the metaverse, a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the internet as we know it today. The company says it believes the computer will be the fastest in the world once it is fully built in mid-2022. Supercomputers are extremely fast and powerful machines built to do complex calculations. Meta did not disclose where the computer is located or how much it is costing to build. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Miyares’s first actions are appalling
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares in Richmond on Jan. 19. (Julia Rendleman/The Washington Post)
Regarding the Jan. 20 Metro article “Miyares: ‘A new sheriff in town’”:
Philosophy professor Saladdin Ahmed recently discussed the exhaustion that the American public feels from a seemingly endless series of attacks on democratic norms. He wrote that “when the public loses the ability to be shocked, one can be sure fascism has already arrived.”
I’m happy to report that day is not here yet. I was genuinely appalled by the actions of Jason Miyares (R), the new Virginia attorney general, who on taking office fired several members of the conviction integrity unit of the attorney general’s office. This unit, made up of nonpolitical attorneys, was dedicated to reversing wrongful convictions. Mr. Miyares’s spokeswoman said he has “a different vision” for the office. Apparently, a laser focus on reversing wrongful convictions is no longer needed in a new tough-on-crime regime.
Congratulations, Mr. Miyares; you’re off to an amazing start.
Kenneth Gubin, Herndon | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The Supreme Court’s decision on executive privilege was correct
The Supreme Court in July 2020. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
Regarding the Jan. 20 front-page article “High court denies Trump bid to block Jan. 6 files’ release”:
This surprising 8-to-1 vote by the Supreme Court to deny former president Donald Trump's executive privilege claims was far more than a refusal. Allowing the National Archives to give the Jan. 6 congressional committee the Trump records regarding the insurrection at the Capitol last year was absolutely the right decision.
A healthy percentage of Americans believe the insurrection was a planned event that would be the basis for going after co-conspirators and a strong reason for the Republican Party to select someone other than Mr. Trump to run for the presidency in 2024. People died in the insurrection and many were seriously wounded, both physically and emotionally.
There is nowhere Mr. Trump can turn to fight the release of the documents from that desperate day, and it is my hope that the Jan. 6 committee will now have what they need to make Mr. Trump a distant memory.
Henry A. Lowenstein, New York | null | null | null | null | null |
The Colorado congressman denied the allegations, dismissing them as the complaints of disgruntled employees.
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) speaks in the state Capitol in Denver on May 20, 2016. (David Zalubowski/AP)
In his written response to the OCE’s investigation, sent to the Ethics Committee leaders on December 2021, Lamborn denied the allegations. Lamborn accused the OCE of being partial toward Pope, citing a part of the report that claims that a “staffer credibly” cited his unwillingness to perform tasks for Lamborn’s family as proof that the OCE is on Pope’s side.
A spokeswoman for Lamborn, Cassandra Sebastian, said in a statement to The Washington Post on Monday that the congressman is “confident in the professional approach the House Committee on Ethics is taking to review the information collected by the overzealous Office of Congressional Ethics.”
According to the report, staffers were also asked to help the Lamborns’ son with job applications. And while the congressman defended himself by arguing that his office would’ve done the same for an ordinary constituent, the OCE said evidence disproved that. A former staffer — which, in his letter, Lamborn identifies as Pope — said chief of staff Dale Anderson tasked him with helping the congressman’s son with whatever he needed regarding the job application process. The staffer then spent several hours providing guidance to the Lamborns’ son, reviewing his resume and conducting mock interviews — work he said he was not asked to do for ordinary constituents.
The report also found that Lamborn may have allowed Anderson, his chief of staff, to solicit gifts from his staff on his behalf. While it is permissible to exchange gifts with congressional staff during special occasions, it is against federal law for a House member to solicit gifts from a subordinate.
Current staffers interviewed by the OCE said they voluntarily participated in Christmas and birthday gift exchanges in the office, but two former staffers said the gift giving was obligatory, with one saying that Anderson would send emails telling him to bring a gift. Another former staffer said Anderson instructed each office to provide gifts valued between $125 and $200 for the couple. | null | null | null | null | null |
(FILES) The Supreme Court building in Washington. (Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images)
The justices said Monday that they will consider, likely in the term beginning in October, a long-running dispute involving an Idaho couple who already won once at the Supreme Court in an effort to build a home near Priest Lake. The Environmental Protection Agency says there are wetlands on the couple’s roughly half-acre lot, which brings it under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act, and thus requires a permit. | 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 premieres 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 voting rights and seeing the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. | 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 last month. (Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press)
The victim was rushed to the hospital, where he fought for his life. But even before investigators could conduct a hospital bed interview, another call came in. Two miles north, law enforcement found the body of Jerome Antonio Price. Five 9mm gunshot wounds crawled up the back of his shirt. He was pronounced dead shortly after 10 p.m.
“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 news conference two days later.
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 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. His alleged crimes are an extreme example of targeted attacks on the homeless happening across the country.
According to experts and advocates, the last year has seen a spike in violence against the homeless. There was a beheading in Colorado. A sleeping man lit on fire in the stairwell of a New York City apartment complex. An attack by four juveniles on a sleeping woman in Washington state. Beyond these lurid headlines, however, are dozens of daily acts of violence occasioned by increasing collisions between the housed and unhoused populations in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, experts say.
Crime perpetrated by unhoused people against others is certainly also happening. On Jan. 16, Martial Simon, 61, who police have said was unhoused, fatally pushed Michelle Alyssa Go, 40, in front of a New York City subway in Times Square.
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 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.”
Hundreds of people gathered in Times Square on Jan. 18 to remember Michelle Go, who was killed after being pushed in front of a subway train on Jan. 15. (Reuters)
But advocates are mounting a new effort to try to capture violence against the unhoused. In 2020, the National Coalition of the Homeless released a report looking at 20 years of police reports related to crime targeting people living on the street. The analysis found that between 1999 and 2019, there were 1,852 incidents of violence against homeless individuals. Of those attacks, 515 were fatal.
California, Florida and Texas made up the majority of those attacks over the two decades, with 390, 261, and 102, respectively. In the same time period, the District of Columbia saw 58 attacks against unhoused individuals.
In 2019, the year before the pandemic, the report noted 83 attacks nationwide, with 39 resulting in death. The report noted 97 percent of the lethal attacks were perpetuated by men, while 85 percent of the fatal victims were also men.
No significant statics have been published since the start 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 who 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 teaming with other groups to present a broader study of the recent violence. Spearheaded by Brian Davis, its 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 experiencing 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.” | 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 championship 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 |
U.S. President Joe Biden walks outside the White House after arriving on Marine One in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, Jan. 24, 2022. Photographer: Michael Reynolds/EPA/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
By Jennifer Epstein | Bloomberg
President Joe Biden on Monday said his administration’s efforts to discourage greater corporate consolidation would help tame inflation, with the fastest price increases in four decades threatening the Democrats’ political future.
At a meeting with economic advisers the White House has dubbed his Competition Council, Biden promoted programs to reduce the prices of hearing aids and make it easier for consumers to repair their own telephones and other devices.
“The bottom line: this isn’t just about quick wins. It’s about reversing decades of concentration that have hurt workers, consumers and small businesses,” he said.
The council was formed to help enact an executive order on competition Biden signed in July. His administration has also worked with ports, truckers and labor unions to ease supply-chain bottlenecks that have contributed to rising prices, though the president’s top economic advisers concede the government can’t do much to influence the basic forces of supply and demand.
“Capitalism without competition is not capitalism. It’s exploitation,” Biden said. He said his administration plans to combat non-compete clauses one in five workers are asked to sign, even when they’re not given access to particularly sensitive information about their employers.
In-person participants for Monday’s meeting at the White House included Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler and Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division Jonathan Kanter, according to a White House official.
Inflation emerged last year as Biden’s topmost economic and political concern, with rising prices for everyday needs -- including energy, food, homes and cars -- weighing heavily on his approval ratings. His administration has struggled to respond, and spiraling prices are poised to help deliver control of one or both chambers of Congress to Republicans in November’s midterm elections.
Biden showed his frustration with the challenge posed by inflation, bristling at a Fox News reporter’s question about the political liability of rising prices.
The president pointed to several accomplishments stemming from the July order, including a Food and Drug Administration proposed rule to sell hearing aids without a prescription. The agency estimates the rule will cut prices for the devices from thousands of dollars to hundreds, while motivating more people with hearing problems to seek treatment.
The Department of Health and Human Services is also implementing the No Surprises Act, signed into law by former President Donald Trump which requires hospitals as of Jan. 1 to more conveniently disclose their prices to consumers or face dramatically increased federal fines.
The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission announced last week that they were joining forces to modernize rules on mergers and prevent anticompetitive deals, and Justice is also examining guidelines for bank mergers.
The Transportation Department has secured refunds for tens of thousands of travelers who weren’t able to get their money back during the coronavirus pandemic, a White House official pointed out. It’s also working on regulations that would require airlines to refund fees for baggage that’s delayed or for services that aren’t successfully delivered, such as WiFi and seat selection.
The executive order asked the FTC to consider regulating against what it described as “unfair anticompetitive restrictions on third-party repair or self-repair of items.” The agency voted unanimously to step up its enforcement of repair restrictions and, in turn, Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp announced modifications to their strict repair policies.
Biden said the move toward more flexible policies would mean Americans could save “an arm and a leg” or, in the administration’s estimate, tens of millions of dollars, on repairs and replacements.
Biden agencies have worked to block the since-scrapped merger of Aon Plc and Willis Towers Watson Plc, two of the three largest U.S. insurance brokers, and the consolidation of two major North American railroads, Canadian National Railway Co. and Kansas City Southern Railway, the official noted | null | null | null | null | null |
The Fairfield Police Department said James Iannazzo had returned to Robeks, in Fairfield, on Saturday afternoon after his son had a severe allergic reaction to a smoothie and was transported to an area hospital.
He added the police had obtained a copy of the original the video which was recorded by one of employees during the incident.
The police offered similar details of the incident as seen on the video and added Iannazzo tried to open a locked door and enter an “employees only” area, behind the counter.
Barbara Caruso, a spokeswoman for Robeks, said Monday they are still investigating what happened to the order in question, but added there is an allergy notice “posted in-store, on printed menus and is available online to provide full ingredient transparency for guests," she said in a written statement to The Post.
“We take very seriously any concerns about order accuracy for guests who have allergy issues," she added.
Iannazzo left the shop before the police arrived, but was arrested shortly after. He was charged with intimidation based on bigotry or bias in the second degree, breach of peace in the second degree and criminal trespass in the first degree.
He was released on bond and will appear in court on Feb. 7.
High school student Charli Hill, a Robeks worker, told CBS affilitate WFSB-TV that she took the video.
Iannazzo’s actions also led him to being fired from Merrill Lynch where he worked as a financial adviser, Bill Halldin, a spokesman confirmed on Monday.
In New York, a couple was arrested last week after they were filmed insulting a family on a train earlier this month, calling them “(expletive) immigrants” with “no rights in this country.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Man who shot 2 New York City police officers, one fatally, has died
Man who shot 1 officer, another fatally, dies
The man who shot two New York City police officers in a Harlem neighborhood apartment, killing one of them and putting another in critical condition, died Monday of injuries sustained when a third officer shot him, Mayor Eric Adams said.
Lashawn J. McNeil, 47, had swung open a bedroom door and opened fire at the officers Friday as they responded to a domestic call, authorities said. Officer Sumit Sulan, a rookie who was shadowing the two officers, shot McNeil as he tried to flee, striking him in the head and arm, police said.
A law enforcement official said McNeil died Monday afternoon at Harlem Hospital, where he had been in critical condition since the shooting.
McNeil then opened the door and fired on the officers. The gun he used was a .45-caliber Glock stolen from Baltimore in 2017, equipped with a high-capacity magazine capable of holding up to 40 extra rounds, NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said. Police said Monday that while searching the apartment over the weekend, they found a loaded semiautomatic rifle under McNeil’s mattress.
Trafficking suspect released without bond
A Florida man who was arrested for human smuggling after four people were found dead in a blizzard in Canada and seven more immigrants were found alive nearby in the United States was released from jail Monday without having to pay a bond.
Steve Shand, 57, is charged with transport or attempted transport of undocumented immigrants. He has not been charged in the deaths.
Shand appeared via live stream Monday from a jail in Grand Forks, N.D. U.S. Magistrate Judge Hildy Bowbeer of Minnesota did not order bond, but said Shand must report to a supervisor in his home state of Florida and surrender his passport or any other travel documents.
The U.S. Border Patrol in North Dakota stopped Shand’s van just south of the Canadian border on Wednesday. Around the same time, court documents said five other people were spotted by law enforcement in the snow nearby. The group told officers they had been walking for over 11 hours outside in frigid conditions.
Two of the Indian nationals were hospitalized. It’s not clear what would happen to the seven survivors. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said they were not arrested by that agency and are not in their custody. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Philadelphia Flyers’ Keith Yandle skates during an NHL hockey game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Nov. 10, 2021, in Philadelphia. Yandle tied the NHL record for consecutive games played with 964 on Monday, Jan. 24, 2022. Retired Toronto star Doug Jarvis holds the record. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
At least six people died, according to a Cameroon government official who spoke to the Associated Press, with the possibility of more. “We are not in position to give you the total number of casualties,” Naseri Paul Biya, governor of Cameroon’s central region, told the AP.
The incident occurred in Yaounde, the country’s capital city, where Cameroon was playing Comoros in the tournament’s round of 16. Crowds reportedly surged to get into Olembe Stadium before the gates were shut, leading to numerous people requiring medical treatment.
The Confederation of African Football, which is organizing the biennial tournament, said it was “investigating the situation and trying to get more details on what transpired.”
“We are in constant communication with Cameroon government and the Local Organizing Committee,” said the CAF, adding that a top official was sent to “visit the supporters in hospital in Yaounde.”
A nurse at a Yaounde hospital told the AP that some of the injured being brought in were “in desperate condition” and would need to be moved to a more specialized facility.
Cameroon, which had not hosted the Cup of Nations since 1972, was set to do so in 2019 before the CAF decided to move that installment of the tournament to Egypt. The CAF said a November 2018 meeting of its executive committee cited a lagging pace of preparations and potential security issues in Cameroon. Separatist groups in the country have pledged to derail this year’s Cup of Nations. Yaounde was also struck by tragedy Sunday when a fire that erupted at a nightclub killed at least 17. | null | null | null | null | null |
Right-wing sentiment flips from cautious concern to partisan frustration.
Supporters of 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 play down 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 O. 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 had 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 |
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had proposed the system in May 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, and Republicans have used it despite their lawsuit against it.
Pelosi, in a statement, welcomed the court’s decision to turn away Republicans’ “frivolous lawsuit,” describing it as “a victory for the Congress, the rule of law and public health.”
“With this failed lawsuit, Republicans have worked to recklessly endanger the health of colleagues, staffers and institutional workers,” Pelosi said. “In doing so, they have fought harder to try to score political points than they have fought to help struggling families during the pandemic. They do so with great shame and hypocrisy, as last year alone more than half of the Members of their conference designated a proxy so that they could vote remotely.” | null | null | null | null | null |
(Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
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 probably 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 as a significant political force, and with him now in semi-retirement post-2020, 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 saying whether 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 Trump’s 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 |
A Russian flag and a flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic wave in Donetsk, Ukraine, recently. Ukraine has become a proxy battle between the West and Russia, experts say. (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 has 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. President Barack Obama responded with sanctions and by kicking Russia out of a group of world leaders, the Group of Eight. But overall, the United States 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 United States has consistently supported pro-Western groups — support that transformed into military aid after Crimea.
In 2019, 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, 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 United States’ 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 United States 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 United States, 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.
U.S. presidents generally want Ukraine to succeed, said Jenny Mathers, an international politics expert at Aberystwyth University in Britain: “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 United States on Ukraine’s future. “It’s a country that’s caught between Russia and the West,” said Wengle, of Notre Dame.
In recent years, the United States has shifted its foreign priorities over to China. That was one of the top reasons Biden defended ending the war in Afghanistan — 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, an assistant professor of Russia Maritime Studies the Naval War College. “It was largely ignored,” she said.
Russia tries to take advantage of the distracted stance to advance its own self interests — often doing so 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 Biden just yanked America out of a war, with big political consequences for him.
Holland 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 the country. 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 Vice President Biden’s actions in Ukraine and Hunter Biden’s work on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Lohsen, formerly of the State Department, 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 |
The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will once again look at whether universities may consider the race of applicants when trying to build diverse student bodies, an ominous development for those who say there is a continuing need for affirmative action in higher education.
FAQ: How do colleges use race in admissions decisions?
The court — its six-member conservative majority strengthened by President Donald Trump’s three appointments — has now accepted cases that could transform its jurisprudence on some of the most controversial issues of the day: abortion, gun rights and race.
Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that spearheaded the affirmative action challenges, said polls show that Americans strongly disapprove of race-conscious admissions.
Blum’s group told the Supreme Court 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.”
Harvard does not discriminate, university president Lawrence S. Bacow said in a statement. He said the court’s acceptance of the cases “puts at risk 40 years of legal precedent granting colleges and universities the freedom and flexibility to create diverse campus communities.”
“Considering race as one factor among many in admissions decisions produces a more diverse student body which strengthens the learning environment for all,” he said.
“The University has embraced diversity, in all its forms, as a core feature of its educational mission,” wrote North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein (D) to the court. “It considers race flexibly as merely one factor among numerous factors in its holistic admissions process. And it has scrupulously studied and adopted workable race-neutral alternatives.”
Harvard, the admission policy of which is subject to review because it receives federal funds, said its process has been held up as a national standard.
The Trump administration had supported Harvard’s challengers in lower courts, but the Biden administration switched that position and told the court it should not accept the challenge.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing Monday that the administration strongly believes “in the benefits of diversity in higher education, and we take very seriously our commitment to advancing equity and equal opportunity for historically underserved populations.”
The majority opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy reiterated high-court rulings that diversity justifies some intrusion on the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, which generally forbids the government to make decisions based on race.
But Justices Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, two members of that majority, are no longer on the court.
The dissenters in the Texas case — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — remain, now joined by the Trump nominees, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
While Roberts often plays a moderating role on the court and is reluctant to overturn the court’s precedents, he has been a steadfast opponent of affirmative action.
Separately, some states, including California, Michigan and Florida, have banned the consideration of race in admissions to public universities. Such measures enjoy substantial political support. In 2020, California voters decisively rejected a proposal to repeal the state’s affirmative action ban.
The lawsuit against Harvard highlighted an especially explosive allegation: That the university allowed racism against Asian Americans to skew its review of their applications.
Blum’s group cited data that it said showed a tendency for Harvard to give strong ratings to Asian American applicants for academic performance but penalize them in ratings of personal qualities such as leadership and compassion.
The suit also unearthed an internal Harvard review that suggested Asian Americans would be admitted in greater numbers if academic performance were the only criterion for admission — a study that the plaintiff contended Harvard buried.
The university said the review was incomplete and preliminary. It also denied discriminating against Asian Americans or penalizing them in any way.
After a trial in Winston-Salem, N.C., U.S. District Judge Loretta C. Biggs ruled in October that the school’s method of choosing a class was constitutional and not discriminatory. Biggs also emphasized the importance of the issue for students of color.
The Supreme Court accepted the UNC case before it could be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
Black students were not allowed at UNC at Chapel Hill until the 1950s. Last year, they accounted for 12 percent of the entering freshman class, according to the university. The shares were 21 percent for Asian or Asian American students and 65 percent for White students. (Those numbers include some multiracial overlap.)
UNC at Chapel Hill is one of the more selective public universities in the country. It offered admission to 19 percent of more than 53,000 who applied to join its freshman class last fall.
For Harvard, admission is ultracompetitive. Last year the university said it offered seats to 1,968 applicants in a record pool of 57,435 applicants. The university said 13 percent of those admitted identified as Latinx, 18 percent as African American or Black and 27 percent as Asian American.
Eugene Scott contributed to this report. | null | null | null | null | null |
The new facility in Ward 8 is the result of a $56 million development project and includes amenities for residents such as personal storage spaces, charging docks for phones and personal devices next to every bed, laundry facilities, a mailroom, computer lab and barber shop.
The old 801 East shelter for men had 380 beds and was also considered low-barrier. | null | null | null | null | null |
The Fairfield Police Department said James Iannazzo had returned to Robeks, in Fairfield, on Saturday afternoon after his son had a severe allergic reaction to a smoothie and was taken to a hospital.
He added the police had obtained a copy of the original the video, which was recorded by one of employees during the incident.
The police offered similar details of the incident as seen on the video and added that Iannazzo tried to open a locked door and enter an “employees only” area, behind the counter.
Barbara Caruso, a spokeswoman for Robeks, said Monday that they are still investigating what happened to the order in question, but added there is an allergy notice “posted in-store, on printed menus and is available online to provide full ingredient transparency for guests,” she said in a written statement to The Post.
“We take very seriously any concerns about order accuracy for guests who have allergy issues,” she added.
Iannazzo left the shop before the police arrived but was arrested shortly after. He was charged with intimidation based on bigotry or bias in the second degree, breach of peace in the second degree and criminal trespass in the first degree.
He was released on bond and will appear in court Feb. 7.
High school student Charli Hill, a Robeks worker, told CBS affiliate WFSB-TV that she took the video.
Iannazzo’s actions also led him to being fired from Merrill Lynch, where he worked as a financial adviser, company spokesman Bill Halldin confirmed on Monday.
In New York, a couple was arrested last week after they were filmed insulting a family on a train this month, using an expletive before calling them “immigrants” with “no rights in this country.” | 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 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 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 |
At least six people have died, according to a Cameroon government official who spoke to the Associated Press, with the possibility of more. “We are not in position to give you the total number of casualties,” Naseri Paul Biya, governor of Cameroon’s central region, told the AP.
The incident occurred in Yaoundé, the country’s capital city, where Cameroon was playing Comoros in the tournament’s round of 16. Crowds reportedly surged to get into Olembe Stadium before the gates were shut, leading to numerous people requiring medical treatment.
The Confederation of African Football (CAF), which is organizing the biennial tournament, said it was “investigating the situation and trying to get more details on what transpired.”
“We are in constant communication with Cameroon government and the Local Organizing Committee,” said the CAF, adding that a top official was sent to “visit the supporters in hospital in Yaoundé.”
A nurse at a Yaoundé hospital told the AP that some of the injured being brought in were “in desperate condition” and would need to be evacuated to a more specialized facility.
Cameroon, which had not hosted the Cup of Nations since 1972, was set to do so in 2019 before the CAF decided to move that installment of the tournament to Egypt. The CAF said a November 2018 meeting of its executive committee cited a lagging pace of preparations and potential security issues in Cameroon. Separatist groups in the country have pledged to derail this year’s Cup of Nations, which began earlier this month. Yaoundé was also struck by tragedy on Sunday when a fire that erupted at a nightclub killed at least 17 people. | null | null | null | null | null |
Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo was the MVP of the 2021 NBA All-Star Game. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Such an incomplete field of candidates 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 because of 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 is whether Durant, who has pulled in more than 5.4 million fan votes, can hold off Antetokounmpo (5.1 million) to serve as the East captain for the second straight season.
Speaking of Antetokounmpo, he has 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. It’s hard to bet against Antetokounmpo, in his prime at 27, being the last man standing 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’s 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’s 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 Chicago’s seemingly endless coronavirus absences and injuries, DeRozan’s midrange sniping and crafty ability to get to the free throw line have helped the Bulls’ 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 with the past 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 has 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 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 suffered untimely in-season injuries. That leaves Gobert (16.0 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 has kept the Jazz near the top of the West 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 and safety 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 proved to be pleasant surprises.
But Morant (25.3 PPG, 6.0 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, and 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 the opposing defense in the fourth quarter, and he will be 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 |
Michael Amadio gave Vegas the only goal it needed when he swept in a loose puck that got behind Vanecek at 5:29 of the second period.
The end result was unsatisfactory, but Washington did get defensemen John Carlson and Dmitry Orlov back in the lineup. Carlson missed four games while in the NHL’s coronavirus protocols. Orlov was back after serving a two-game suspension for kneeing Winnipeg’s Nikolaj Ehlers, who is on long-term injured reserve. Orlov said he texted Ehlers to apologize after the game.
Here’s what else to know from Monday’s loss:
Defenseman Nick Jensen was placed on injured reserve Monday after he was hurt in Thursday’s loss at Boston. He will miss Wednesday’s game against San Jose but is eligible to return Friday at Dallas. Coach Peter Laviolette said Jensen is now listed as week-to-week instead of day-to-day.
The nature of Jensen’s upper-body injury is unclear. He was on the ice Saturday before the Capitals’ morning skate, but he left the ice and did not take part in the team session. Jensen has had a strong season while paired with Orlov and was averaging 19:20 of ice time. He has three goals and eight assists in 39 games.
Monday was Vanecek’s fourth straight start and his fifth in the past six games. Laviolette said last week that he was giving Vanecek a chance to take the reins. Entering Monday’s game, he had a 2.54 goals against average and a .909 save percentage, and those numbers improved against the Golden Knights.
Stephenson, 27, has flourished in Vegas after struggling to find his way into the Capitals’ lineup. As Vegas’s top-line center, he has 12 goals and 26 assists in 41 games. | null | null | null | null | null |
On Jan. 24, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reached its final destination, where it will study the universe in the infrared portion of the spectrum. (NASA)
The Webb, launched in a folded position, has unfurled itself over the past month, deploying solar arrays, a sprawling multilayered sun shield and an array of 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors that collectively are designed to function as a light bucket with a diameter of about 21 feet.
The second Lagrange point is not a fixed point in space — there is no such thing, a fact at the heart of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In space, everything is moving relative to other things. An object at L2 takes advantage of the combination of the Earth’s and sun’s gravity to orbit the sun in a single Earth year, meaning the telescope will always be roughly the same distance from Earth.
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, said Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer and vice president of science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. 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 let it fail,” Hammel said.
“It took 20 years of work to make it look easy,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Free N95 masks are starting to appear in U.S. stores as part of the White House’s plan to hand out 400 million of them free of charge from the Strategic National Stockpile.
Other major chains are expected to start handing out free masks later this week. Walgreens spokesman Alex Brown said she expects the first stores to begin offering the masks on Friday. Three free N95 masks will be available for each adult, federal officials said.
In preparation for the rollout, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month provided its most explicit guidance to date on the protection afforded by different types of masks. Well-fitting N95 masks, the guidance says, “offer the highest level of protection.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the United States, now requires its students to wear “well-fitting, non-cloth masks with a nose wire” at all times. | null | null | null | null | null |
“We’re not hitting the panic button,” forward Tom Wilson said. “We’re not like, ‘Oh, this is the end.’ We’re still a good hockey team. We still got a lot of good pieces. We’re still in a really good spot in the standings. That being said, we’ve got to turn it around.”
“We are getting some good looks, just not capitalizing. I think we might get a little frustrated from not scoring,” defenseman Justin Schultz said. “We have the players to do it. We just have to stay with it and it will come.”
Michael Amadio gave Vegas the only goal it needed when he swept in a loose puck that got behind Vitek Vanecek at 5:29 of the second period.
The end result was unsatisfactory, but Washington did get defensemen John Carlson and Dmitry Orlov back in the lineup. Carlson missed four games while in the NHL’s coronavirus protocols. Orlov was back after serving a two-game suspension for kneeing Winnipeg’s Nikolaj Ehlers, who is on long-term injured reserve. Orlov said he texted Ehlers after the game to apologize.
“We’re still trying to work out of this month and get back to at least .500,” Coach Peter Laviolette said. “That’s kind of the plan that we have inside the room, so [Monday’s loss] is a little bit of a setback, but there’s still a chance to get out of it and not have it be a losing month.”
Here’s what else to know from Monday’s defeat:
Defenseman Nick Jensen was placed on injured reserve Monday after he was hurt in Thursday’s loss at Boston. He will miss Wednesday’s game but is eligible to return Friday at Dallas. Laviolette said Jensen is now listed as week-to-week instead of day-to-day.
The nature of Jensen’s upper-body injury is unclear. He was on the ice Saturday before the Capitals’ morning skate, but he left the ice and did not take part in the team session. Jensen has had a strong season while paired with Orlov and is averaging 19:20 of ice time. He has three goals and eight assists in 39 games.
McMichael finished with 6:55 of ice time Monday. Protas had 5:53, and Leason recorded 5:02.
Monday was Vanecek’s fourth straight start and his fifth in the past six games. Laviolette said last week that he was giving Vanecek a chance to take the reins. Entering Monday’s game, he had a 2.54 goals against average and a .909 save percentage, and those numbers only improved against the Golden Knights as he finished with 28 saves.
“He’s played really well,” Laviolette said. “He’s given us a really good chance every game to win and be successful. It was kind of a funny one tonight, the way [the puck] slipped through there. It just caught him, bounced off and sat there. But he’s done a good job.”
“Coach trusts me, and he gave me these starts, and I’m trying to help the team as much as possible,” he said.
Stephenson, 27, has flourished with Vegas after struggling to find his way into the Capitals’ lineup. As the Golden Knights’ top-line center, he has 12 goals and 26 assists in 41 games. | null | null | null | null | null |
Paul Arriola could be traded as soon as Tuesday
Taxiarchis Fountas has played for clubs in Austria, Germany and Greece. (Chris Bauer/SEPA.Media/Getty Images)
Yesterday at 5:15 p.m. EST|Updated today at 11:19 p.m. EST
Unless the timetable changes, Fountas would miss the first half of United’s 34-game regular season, which begins late next month. Per club policy, United officials said they wouldn’t comment on potential signings.
Fountas agreed to a three-year pact worth about $7 million, making him United’s highest-paid player, one person said. He will become an MLS Designated Player (DP), one of the classifications for those who earn more than the league limit of approximately $650,000.
Each team is allowed three DPs. Fountas becomes United’s third, joining Peruvian attacker Edison Flores and American winger Paul Arriola. United is planning to trade Arriola to FC Dallas on Tuesday for a league-record transaction ($2 million-plus in general allocation money).
The club had planned to hold on to Arriola until it was close to acquiring another DP, ideally one who would fill Arriola’s on-field role. But after acquiring Fountas, it decided it didn’t want to wait any longer, one person familiar with the situation said. United is apparently narrowing its wish list and could make another DP move soon.
Fountas is in his third season with Rapid Vienna, having scored 35 goals in 68 league appearances and one in 11 UEFA Europa League games. He appeared in four Champions League qualifiers. Previously, he played for clubs in Greece, Austria and Germany.
Fountas is in the Greek national team player pool and appeared in one 2022 World Cup qualifier (Sept. 5 vs. Kosovo). United’s rival, the New York Red Bulls, had also shown interest in signing him.
United employs MLS’s co-leading scorer last season, striker Ola Kamara, but is entertaining offers in MLS and abroad because Kamara is entering the final year of his contract. The club also has been seeking additional pieces to bolster the attack after cutting ties with Yordy Reyna, Yamil Asad and Ramón Ábila after last season.
United is a week into training camp, and aside from finalizing the permanent transfer of defender Brendan Hines-Ike, promoting two players from second-division Loudoun United and adding a second-flight defender Monday, it had been conspicuously inactive as many teams signed impact players and executed trades.
On Monday, the club announced the acquisition of Hayden Sargis, a 19-year-old center back from USL Championship squad Sacramento Republic. He will provide depth on the back line. Sacramento will receive $25,000 in 2023 — and more if Sargis meets performance thresholds. He reported to camp last week and signed a three-year deal with club options for 2025 and 2026.
“Hayden is a young center back who has all the qualities to be an outstanding piece of our backline in Hernán [Losada’s] system,” General Manager Lucy Rushton said in a statement. “We believe he is ready to make the jump up to MLS and compete for minutes on the first team.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Outbreak on aid ship bound for covid-free Tonga after volcanic eruption
Other major chains are expected to start handing out masks later this week. Walgreens spokesman Alex Brown said she expects the first stores to begin offering the masks on Friday. Three free N95 masks will be available for each adult, federal officials said.
In preparation for the rollout, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month provided its most explicit guidance to date on the protection afforded by different types of masks. Well-fitting N95 masks, it says, “offer the highest level of protection.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the United States, now requires its students to wear “well-fitting, non-cloth masks with a nose wire” at all times.
By Frances Vinall2:30 a.m.
An Australian aid ship bound for Tonga following the recent volcanic eruption and tsunami has been hampered in its mission after 23 crew members tested positive for the coronavirus.
The HMAS Adelaide, among the largest of the Royal Australian Navy’s vessels, was to be used as a base for Australian assistance to Tonga after the massive underwater volcano eruption on Jan. 15.
The ship is carrying humanitarian and medical supplies, engineering equipment and helicopters. But the outbreak among the crew poses a challenge in providing assistance to a covid-free nation keen to avoid a new disaster.
Tonga, a nation of some 170 islands — 36 inhabited — and 105,000 people, has only ever recorded one coronavirus case, contained in hotel quarantine in October.
Peter Dutton, Australia’s defense minister, told Sky News Australia on Tuesday that the HMAS Adelaide would remain at sea while the two nations discussed options including “contactless” delivery of supplies.
“The Tongan government is discussing that at the moment internally,” he said. “Obviously they need the aid desperately, but they don’t want the risk of covid.”
An Australian plane carrying aid was forced to turn around mid-flight on Thursday after a positive case was identified.
Aircraft carrying essential supplies such as food and water from Australia, New Zealand and Japan have successfully landed in Tonga after the airport’s runway was cleared of volcanic ash on Thursday. A Royal New Zealand Navy ship arrived with water and desalination equipment on Friday, with other nations including the United States, China and Britain also offering assistance.
By Salvador Rizzo1:17 a.m. | null | null | null | null | null |
For months, Democrats have pressed for a final vote on two proposed laws. The Freedom to Vote Act would override many state laws and set national standards such as a minimum of 15 days for early voting, mail-in ballots and universal rules for voter identification. Another bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would strengthen and restore parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and make it easier for voters to challenge state voting rules.
“When you remove the missing data, the comparison turnout between the South and non-South changes, and between Whites and non-Whites in Southern states,” said McDonald from the University of Florida. “For some reason, Massachusetts has one of the largest African-American nonresponse rates.” | null | null | null | null | null |
As of early Tuesday, customers were not able to use parts of the Belarusian Railway website for booking tickets. An error message said the site “is temporarily unavailable, come back later.” Cyber Partisans said it did not intend to affect passenger service and was working to fix the problem, the Associated Press reported. A spokesperson for the group, which said it did not target security and automation systems so as to avoid creating an emergency, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. | null | null | null | null | null |
Steve Bannon was deplatformed. An obscure media mogul kept him on the air.
When Bannon launched his own talk show in the fall of 2019, calling it “War Room,” he quickly handed over its distribution to Sigg. More than two years later, the arrangement has paid off for both men.
Sigg used “War Room” as a springboard for an expanded network of conservative hosts — bringing him the commercial opportunity he sought. The network, Real America’s Voice, helped sustain Bannon despite his removal from YouTube, Spotify and other mainstream platforms. It brings his show into as many as 8 million homes hooked up to Dish satellite television, many in rural, conservative areas without reliable cable coverage.
That market was vacated when Fox News and Newsmax grew leery of topics most motivating to Trump’s base, argued Bannon, citing complaints about vaccines, cries of voter fraud and unproven ideas about federal agents provoking the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol.
“War Room” seized on those themes. Its influence arises not just from the number of people watching, which is difficult to measure across platforms, but from the audience’s willingness to take political action, whether marching against vaccine mandates or running for local office. The show, broadcast live six days a week from Bannon’s Capitol Hill townhouse, is the gathering point for the pro-Trump movement — with Bannon embracing the role of a wartime general, leading followers into 2022, or what he calls the “valley of decision.”
“Breitbart was very powerful, but this is five times more powerful,” Bannon claimed in an interview with The Washington Post following a recent show, which featured four candidates courting Trump’s base and a tech entrepreneur-turned-critic of coronavirus vaccines.
He credited the show’s availability to its little-known distribution partner. “They get it out everywhere,” Bannon said of Real America’s Voice, which he said gives him a cut of advertising revenue, though he declined to specify his earnings, saying, “I’m not doing this for money.”
Bannon has never shied from idiosyncratic backers — whether hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, whose family funded Breitbart, or exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.
A since-deleted online bio cites Sigg’s long record in advertising and television media, including at a firm conducting sales for Dish, whose revenue he helped expand by $250 million before leaving in 2004. A year later, Sigg pleaded guilty to bank fraud as part of what authorities described as a multimillion-dollar mortgage fraud scheme. Sigg falsely verified someone’s employment for a loan application and received a $1,000 check for his role, according to a plea agreement. He was ordered to pay about $141,000 in restitution, the loss suffered in connection with that loan, and sentenced to five years of supervised release.
When DirecTV dropped WeatherNation in 2018, Sigg accelerated his move to digital platforms, said a former employee, as well as his search for other content. “You could call them highly entrepreneurial,” said a person who met with executives at the time. “They were thinking, 'We’re going to get every church in America on our network.’ Church didn’t work out but then they were like, 'Hey, we could do this news thing if we can find the right niche.’”
The niche they chose was at odds with their political giving. Sigg had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats including Sens. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, federal records show. Performance One Media’s chief operating officer, Robert Schwartz, gave $2,700 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2015.
In 2019, executives gravitated to Republicans, namely Trump. Howard Diamond, who describes himself on LinkedIn as Performance One Media’s CEO, gave several thousand dollars backing Trump that year. Another executive, Michael Norton, gave several thousand the following year.
A year later, he was indicted on charges of defrauding donors, accused of using nearly $1 million, out of more than $25 million raised, for personal expenses. He pleaded not guilty and received a pardon from Trump.
Before drawing legal scrutiny, the effort gained the attention of Sigg’s fledging network, Bannon said. At the time called America’s Voice News, the network had a website by August 2018, according to an archived version.
The network debuted in September 2020 as Real America’s Voice, available not just on Dish, according to a news release, but also on Pluto TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV and Google Play. Solomon and Loudon, who has her own show shot in West Palm Beach, did not respond to requests for comment.
When asked about the discrepancy, he said he did not have the forms in front of him but that aides would follow up with “every detail.” His aides did not provide any details.
Current and former employees said they had little insight into whether the network was profitable or being propped up by the company’s weather programming. Serrano said that and other matters were “proprietary.”
“War Room” airs twice each weekday and once on Saturday, producing about 17 hours of content each week from the Capitol Hill townhouse once known as the Breitbart Embassy. The ground floor, where a producer and a sound engineer join Bannon beneath an ornate chandelier, is strewn with books, newspapers and knickknacks, including zinc supplements branded with the “War Room” logo.
In early 2020, the show’s focus shifted from Trump’s impeachment to the coronavirus. Bannon was attuned to the pathogen earlier than most, predicting a pandemic in a show on Jan. 25, 2020. More recently, he has provided a platform for disputed claims about vaccine injury and warned of a “war on the unvaccinated.” Anti-vaccine antipathy is “beyond totemic” for Trump’s base, said Bannon, who told The Post he is unvaccinated. “It’s almost defining.”
Following Trump’s defeat on Nov. 3, 2020, the show became a clearinghouse for false claims of mass voter fraud, as Bannon birthed what he calls the “3 November movement,” turning allegiance to Trump’s assertion of election theft into a litmus test for Republican candidates. The day before the Jan. 6 riot, Bannon told viewers, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
His appeal is sometimes couched in religious terms, promising viewers “divine providence” if they “commit.” One proposed commitment is patronizing My Pillow, whose CEO, Mike Lindell, is a leading purveyor of election falsehoods and among the sponsors of “War Room.”
Bannon identified Sigg’s network, paired with its radio distribution, as critical to his audience. The audio on Apple Podcasts, even though it ranks in that platform’s top 100 shows, is an “afterthought,” Bannon said. On a recent show, he said his removal from YouTube about a year earlier had expanded his reach. “When it was taken down on YouTube, the show got 10 times bigger,” he argued.
Whether or not the numbers bear that claim out, his removal from mainstream platforms held benefits for Bannon, who is now “preaching to the choir” on platforms with even less scrutiny, said Jeremy Blackburn, a computer scientist at Binghamton University who has studied deplatforming. There is also a benefit for platforms still providing his megaphone and reaping the advertising rewards.
Representatives of those platforms gave different reasons for carrying Real America’s Voice, despite moves elsewhere against its premier show. | null | null | null | null | null |
It prevented Maddie, who lives near San Antonio, from playing favorite school sports like volleyball. So her father encouraged her to join Future Farmers of America and raise pigs with her brother on the family’s nine-acre farm.
This month, Maddie figured out a way she could say thank you to doctors and nurses at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital who not only treated her cancer, but were also supportive of the entire family. | null | null | null | null | null |
Ana de Armas poses for photographers upon arrival for the world premiere of the new film from the James Bond franchise, 'No Time To Die,' in London on Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2021. (Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)
Peter Michael Rosza, another man who watched the trailer before renting the movie in October, says he experienced the same disappointment when the film ended. Just like the film’s plot, where the Beatles didn’t exist, the actress was nowhere to be found, Rosza, 44, lamented.
Now, both men are suing Universal Pictures in a class-action federal lawsuit, alleging the studio knowingly distributed “false,” “deceptive” and “misleading” advertisements and promotions for “Yesterday.” Despite being publicized as a substantial character in the film, de Armas never appeared in it, according to the suit, which was filed last week in the U.S. District Court of Central California.
An attorney representing the men did not immediately respond to a message from The Washington Post late Monday. Neither Woulfe nor Rosza replied to messages from The Post. | null | null | null | null | null |
Taylor Swift with her Grammy on the red carpet at last year's awards ceremony. (Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Shutterstock)
“[I] had a conversation about songwriting and sadly it was reduced to clickbait,” Albarn said of his interview with Los Angeles Times pop music critic Mikael Wood.
When Wood responds by insisting Swift does write or co-write her songs, Albarn says that co-writing “doesn’t count.” He then praises the lyrics of singer-songwriter Billie Eillish as “less endlessly upbeat” and “way more minor and odd” than Swift’s. “I’m more attracted to that than to Taylor Swift,” he says.
The exchange has galvanized Swift fans around the world — including Chile, where President-elect Gabriel Boric tweeted, “Here in Chile you have a huge group of supporters who knows that you write you own songs from the heart. Dont take seriously guys that need to insult or lie to get attention. Hugs from the south Taylor.”
She is rerecording several of her old albums as part of a long-running dispute with record executive Scooter Braun, who bought and later sold the rights to six albums Swift produced with the Nashville-based Big Machine Label Group, before she signed with Universal Music Group. | null | null | null | null | null |
Emily’s List is ditching Sen. Sinema because voting rights are also women’s rights
Sinema shares the group’s commitment to protecting abortion rights. But its mission is broader than that.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) walks to the Senate floor on Capitol Hill on Dec. 14. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Stacie Taranto
Stacie Taranto is an associate professor of history at Ramapo College of New Jersey and author of, "Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). She is co-editor of "Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics Since 1920." She is an associate editor of Made By History.
Emily’s List, the powerful political action committee (PAC) that backs Democratic women who support legal abortion, recently announced that it would no longer endorse Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) because of her refusal to tow the party line and support exempting voting rights legislation from the Senate’s supermajority filibuster rules.
On the surface, this move seems inconceivable. Feminist activists formed Emily’s List in the mid-1980s at a time when only the Democratic Party officially backed legal abortion and only 24 women served in Congress. Of those 24 women, just two served in the Senate and both were Republicans. In that political atmosphere, Emily’s List sought to elect more Democratic women to office, particularly to the Senate, to help protect legal abortion at the federal level if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion under certain circumstances.
Sinema fits the bill. She is a woman, a Democrat and a senator in a chamber where 75 percent of senators are men. She has a 100 percent rating from the preeminent national abortion rights group, NARAL Pro-Choice America. This is significant because Roe seems more likely to be overturned today than at any other time in the decision’s 49-year history, as the court prepares its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a ruling expected in June. Sinema supports the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would preserve abortion rights across the nation if the Supreme Court overturns Roe.
Yet a closer look reveals that the PAC’s decision not to support Sinema is perfectly consistent with its founding goals. Emily’s List aimed to preserve legal abortion, but it also wanted to democratize U.S. politics — a major goal of the voting rights initiatives that Sinema’s actions are blocking in the Senate.
Going into the 1982 election cycle, there were only two women serving in the U.S. Senate — Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) and Paula Hawkins (R-Fla.) — and no Democratic woman had ever been elected to the chamber in her own right. The eight Democratic women who previously had served in the Senate had been temporarily appointed or elected to succeed men, typically a husband or father, when the male officeholder died.
Feminist activist Ellen R. Malcolm and other Democratic feminists decided to correct that imbalance by backing Harriett Woods’s upstart challenge to Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.). Woods came agonizingly close to victory, losing by a mere 26,247 votes out of 1.5 million cast. Even more painful, observers blamed the defeat on Woods running out of money and having to cancel her TV ads in the final weeks of the contest when she was tied with her opponent in the polls.
Woods’s defeat motivated Malcolm and her allies to form Emily’s List in 1985. The “Emily” in Emily’s List was an acronym standing for: early money is like yeast (as in, it rises). The group theorized that infusing seed money into a woman’s campaign would make her look more credible from the start in the world of politics dominated by men. The early cash would also allow the candidate to build a strong foundation for her campaign — with adequate staffing, polling and a media budget — rather than spending most of her time fundraising.
Emily’s List put its theory to the test in the 1986 election cycle, selecting Rep. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who was running for the U.S. Senate, as its first candidate. Mikulski, known for her strong advocacy for women and no-nonsense attitude in the House, had national name recognition. But like Woods four years earlier, the Democratic Party establishment did not endorse her Senate bid during the primary. Instead, party insiders cast aside Mikulski in a crowded field of eight primary contenders that notably included her well-known House colleague, Rep. Michael D. Barnes (D-Md.), and then-Gov. Harry Hughes. Though Hughes’s popularity was waning because of the recent implosion of the savings and loan industry, he had been elected governor by the largest margin in state history in 1978 and again with more than 60 percent of the vote in 1982.
With upward of 1,000 members, Emily’s List contributed a then-whopping $23,916 to Mikulski’s Senate primary campaign, far more than the typical $5,000 contribution from a PAC. The buzz created by this sizable initial donation helped Mikulski overcome early obstacles in the campaign, just as the founders of Emily’s List had hoped. The group ended up raising more than $100,000 for Mikulski, and she went on to win the Democratic primary with more than 50 percent of the vote.
In November 1986, when she defeated her Republican opponent — Reagan administration official Linda Chavez, in only the second U.S. Senate race to feature two women as candidates from the major parties — Mikulski became the first Democratic woman (and only the second woman ever, after Florida Republican Paula Hawkins in 1980) to win a Senate seat without following on the coattails of a relative. Mikulski eventually served 30 years in the Senate, becoming the longest-serving woman in congressional history.
Mikulski’s historic victory emboldened Emily’s List. By its own count, in the years since, the PAC has helped elect 25 women to the Senate, 159 to the House, 16 to governorships and more than 1,300 candidates to state and local offices.
Backing from this fundraising powerhouse quickly became the most coveted endorsement a Democratic woman running for office at any level could earn, in part because the group’s list of endorsed candidates generates a great deal of media coverage.
In 1992, for example, after witnessing on television how the all-White, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee treated professor Anita Hill, a Black woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 Supreme Court nomination hearings, women ran for political office in historic numbers. After what became dubbed the Year of the Woman, the number of women in Congress shot up from a total of 32 to 54, the majority of whom were Democrats. These gains included four women in the Senate and 20 congresswomen that Emily’s List helped propel into office — among them, Carol Mosely Braun (D-Ill.), the first woman of color elected to the Senate. That cycle, the group’s membership expanded by 600 percent to an impressive 23,500 members who donated more than $10.2 million to the PAC.
As the influence of Emily’s List grew, so too did its mission, which expanded to include providing political training for candidates, recruiting more women of color to run for office and mobilizing voters — crucial support that, along with early seed money, promised to make a difference, especially for novice or outsider candidates.
These priorities were evident most recently in the historic gains women made in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. A staggering 46,000 women reached out to Emily’s List for backing in 2018, with the group helping to elect 290 Democratic women, including Sinema. That year’s gains included 120 first-time officeholders — ranging from women entering local office to political newcomer Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2020, Emily’s List helped elect more than 400 women, spending a record $50 million, almost half of which went to women of color.
These expanded priorities help explain why Emily’s List revoked its support for Sinema. While protecting legal abortion has remained one of the PAC’s central aims, its prescription for doing so has always revolved around opening up the political process for those who have historically faced barriers to entry. That’s exactly the goal of the voting rights legislation currently before Congress. While Sinema backs this legislation, her unwillingness to carve out an exception to the Senate filibuster rules enabled Republicans to kill the bill.
So while Sinema remains a stalwart supporter of abortion rights — seemingly the embodiment of the success of Emily’s List — the group is staying true to its broader mission of making politics more accessible by threatening to part with her unless she changes her stance on Senate procedure to help pass voting rights legislation. | null | null | null | null | null |
Putin could learn a lesson from Stalin’s reckless miscalculation over Korea
An invasion of Ukraine might seem like a winning strategy — but it could produce massive blowback.
An instructor trains members of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, volunteer military units of the armed forces, in a city park in Kyiv on Jan. 22. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)
By Gregory Mitrovich
Gregory Mitrovich is the author of the award-winning book "Undermining the Kremlin: American Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956." He is currently writing a book on the rise of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to mass nearly 100,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian border has raised tensions in Europe to levels not seen since early in the Cold War. To forestall this attack, the G-7 nations have issued a stern warning that “Russia should be in no doubt that further military aggression against Ukraine would have massive consequences and severe cost in response.”
The allies have threatened a “punishing set of financial, technological, and military sanctions” that would come into effect immediately after a Russian invasion. Additionally, Senate Democrats have introduced the “Defending Ukrainian Sovereignty Act,” which would impose “crippling sanctions on the Russian banking sector and senior military and government officials.” Putin has responded to these threats by mobilizing additional Russian army units in the Crimea as well as in Belarus, which has alarmed NATO members bordering that country.
Putin’s objectives remain unclear. Is his troop deployment a way to pressure NATO into negotiating a new security arrangement for Europe, or even withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe? Or does he believe he can present the West with a fait accompli by invading and installing a regime in Kyiv favorable to the Kremlin before the West can respond?
We do know one thing, however: An outright invasion promises huge consequences, a lesson Soviet leader Joseph Stalin learned in 1950 when he approved Kim Il Sun’s plan to invade South Korea. Kim had assured Stalin that the North Korean army would quickly capture Seoul and unite the country in only a few weeks, well before the United States could mount a response. Instead President Harry S. Truman immediately ordered units from the Eighth Army stationed in Japan to the Korean Peninsula as well as a massive bombing campaign to slow the North Korean advance. The invasion galvanized the West and transformed U.S. national security strategy, resulting in a massive mobilization, a decades-long nuclear arms race and a permanent militarization of the Cold War conflict.
Though the Cold War had begun several years before the North Korean invasion, American strategic planners considered military force a deterrent and saw the true field of battle as taking place in the realm of political and economic warfare. This was true even of NATO. When it was created in 1949, American policymakers believed that a public U.S. commitment to defend Europe would alone be sufficient to prevent a Soviet attack. The United States possessed a monopoly on the atomic bomb, and even more important, a vast economy that had repeatedly demonstrated its ability to outproduce its wartime rivals. As George Kennan argued in 1948, “the events of the past two wars have demonstrated that unless a European aggressor can be sure of dealing a decisive blow to the North American military-industrial potential in the initial phase of his effort to dominate the European continent, he can never be sure of final victory.”
U.S. planners concluded that the Soviet Union would not launch a war but instead would continue to subvert Europe through its massive political warfare campaigns that had already led to the collapse of democracy in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and was wreaking political and economic havoc in France and Italy. When the United States Senate debated the NATO treaty, Secretary of State Dean Acheson assured concerned senators that no American combat forces would be permanently stationed on the European continent, and none were deployed after the treaty’s approval. Instead the United States would limit its role to aiding Europe in rebuilding its own military capabilities.
The Harry Truman administration applied this strategic model to Korea, believing that Stalin would not sanction an invasion but would support North Korea’s growing efforts to spark an insurgency to overthrow the South Korean government led by Syngman Rhee. According to historian Bruce Cumings, the South Korean government suffered a lack of legitimacy because of its inclusion of those who had collaborated with the Japanese during Korea’s years under occupation. This was in stark contrast to North Korea’s Kim, who was a recognized leader of the resistance to Japan. By summer 1950, the South was consumed by a nationwide insurgency. Even then, however, American intelligence doubted that Stalin would approve a military attack until it was clear that the insurgency would fail.
Instead the communists used the insurgency as part of their invasion strategy. Why? Because Stalin and Kim already had ample reasons to doubt that the United States would intervene if they did. In a speech before the National Press Club on Jan. 12, 1950, Acheson outlined America’s defense perimeter, which included Japan and the Ryukyus’ islands but not Korea. Seeing this as a green light, Kim planned a three-day military operation to capture Seoul, which he envisioned would result in the collapse of the Rhee government and the unification of the country within weeks. Stalin approved the plan in April and supported Kim with substantial military assistance.
On June 25, 1950, 200,000 North Korean troops armed and trained by the Soviet Union poured across the 38th parallel, a demarcation line created by the United States and the Soviet Union after Japan’s defeat in World War II. The invasion shocked many in the West who had expected the Kremlin would seek to unify the peninsula through a communist-inspired insurgency. Only days before the invasion, the CIA issued an intelligence estimate warning that the North’s primary objective was to extend its control over “southern Korea” by continuing and increasing “its support of the present program of propaganda, infiltration, sabotage, subversion, and guerrilla operations.”
Stalin and Kim badly misjudged U.S. resolve as well as the Truman administration’s desire to demonstrate to its new European allies its will to fight against Soviet or Soviet-inspired military aggression. Instead of a three-day march on Seoul, the invasion sparked a three-year war that devastated the Korean Peninsula, resulting in millions of casualties, including 150,000 Americans. The United States eventually deployed more than 350,000 troops and launched a relentless bombing campaign against the advancing North Korean — and later Chinese — armies, including the use of “firebombs” that would incinerate much of the peninsula. The Truman administration also exploited the Soviet boycott of the United Nations (to protest the refusal of the Security Council to seat a representative from the new communist government in China) to gain council approval for its military intervention.
The war led to a manifold increase in defense spending as the U.S. defense budget surpassed 15 percent of GDP, and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops to Europe as the core of a powerful NATO army backed by a rapidly increasing nuclear stockpile, crystallizing a global military confrontation that would last for the next four decades. Many consider the costs of this arms race a key factor in the Soviet Union’s eventual demise in the 1980s, while in his epic work “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” historian Paul Kennedy had warned that a continued arms race would undermine America’s leading position in the world.
The Biden administration has reiterated that the United States will not deploy forces to defend Ukraine, but is “contemplating” sending U.S. forces to reassure the Baltic nations regarding America’s commitment to their defense.
This underscores the lesson of the Korean War, that attempting a “fait accompli” is a risky operation and that a similarly large-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia could instead create a dramatic strategic backlash, leading NATO to expand its military capabilities and firm up its defense commitments to exposed NATO allies in Eastern Europe, plunging Europe into a cold-war style arms race. Just as the Korean War led to the permanent positioning of U.S. military forces in Europe and a multi-decade nuclear arms race, Putin’s gambit could undermine Russian security, leaving it an economic pariah with a remilitarized NATO on its borders, the exact circumstances Putin hopes to avoid with his power play against Ukraine. | null | null | null | null | null |
Despite Manchin and Sinema, Democrats are more united than they’ve been for decades
Since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has been dismantled and rebuilt in a strongly progressive direction
Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) speak to a reporter on Capitol Hill on Sept. 30, 2021. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Adam Hilton
According to pundits, the Democratic Party is in pretty bad shape.
Last week, Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) rejected efforts to pause the filibuster to pass voting rights protections. Build Back Better, President Biden’s signature social policy and climate change bill, is on life support in the Senate, given Manchin’s objections. Meanwhile, the president’s polling numbers have slid, and grass-roots Democratic activists are frustrated that he hasn’t made progress on key priorities. What’s more, election prognosticators believe this year’s midterm elections give Republicans a significant opportunity to retake control of the House.
Many analysts have dusted off the well-worn trope of “divided Democrats.” This decades-old framing, common to both political scientists and public commentators, interprets disagreements among Democratic officeholders as evidence of deep, intractable divisions within the party.
But this go-to narrative conjures up the image of two equally matched factions in an ideological battle for the “soul” of the Democratic Party. In reality, Democrats are not a deeply divided party — at least not compared with the past. This standard narrative of Democratic division risks overlooking the party’s slow but sure reorientation over the past few decades.
Democratic division in historical perspective
Democratic infighting has been on display over the past year, as has often been true historically. This is often summarized as the gulf between the centrist Manchin and progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.).
But as I show in my new book, deep divisions and the fights they gave rise to have shaped demographic and ideological change within the Democratic Party since the late 1960s. Back then, incompatible positions regarding Black civil rights and the war in Vietnam ripped the party apart. Since then, mobilizations of voters of color, feminists, environmentalists and the LGBTQ movement reoriented the party away from its traditional base in the South and conservative White voters, helping to consolidate a more progressive coalition.
Revived Republican competition after the Reagan revolution temporarily gave moderates like Bill Clinton an opportunity to distance Democrats from these progressive causes in the 1990s and draw the party closer to the business community. But these efforts largely failed to stem the party realignment already underway. The coalition that elected Barack Obama in 2008 bore little resemblance to the White Southern male voting base embraced by Clinton’s New Democrats. In 2016, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from the New Democrat legacy to fend off Sen. Bernie Sanders’s challenge from the left.
As written, Build Back Better could support — or devastate — child care for disadvantaged working parents
Democratic divisions today
Since the 2020 election, the overwhelming majority of Democratic officials and officeholders have united around the most ambitious policy agenda seriously considered by Congress in well over a generation. Today, divisions among Democratic members of Congress, while real and significant, are not deep — they do not split the party into two warring factions — or even numerically large.
Moderate holdouts on Build Back Better can literally be counted on one hand in the Senate and on two hands in the House. Their outsize power to shape party negotiations and block marquee legislation is not due to their representativeness of the party mainstream or their cachet with its leaders. It is a product of razor-thin, no-room-for-error majorities.
Slim majorities can enhance the power of moderates. Figures like Manchin and Sinema become more prominent because of the rural-state bias of the Senate, where every state is represented by two senators, no matter how large or small the population. Senate Democrats represent tens of millions more voters than do Senate Republicans. Yet they control only 50 percent of the seats.
After Democrats’ surprising victories in last year’s Senate race in Georgia, it was clear that an evenly divided Senate would give the most moderate Democrats a great deal of leverage, because they could make or break any bill with their votes. Progressives who favor big, bold federal action have been in the majority — but cannot exercise a similar veto power. This put a spotlight on Manchin and Sinema’s decisions.
However, these two aren’t as far from their Democratic colleagues as the high-profile votes may make it appear. On issues that make it to a vote on the Senate floor, Manchin votes with the majority of his party more than 90 percent of the time, and Sinema does so 97 percent of the time. Although Manchin holds centrist positions on most issues and his antiabortion stance puts him out of sync with the Democratic mainstream, he’s even farther from the Republicans on a wide range of policy issues.
The narcissism of small differences
Manchin’s and Sinema’s obstructions may have been few and far between, but they are highly significant. Their objections have significantly constrained the policy reach of Biden’s presidency and may well prevent the Democrats from fulfilling promises to ameliorate economic insecurity and inequality, fight climate change and protect voting rights.
But while Manchin and Sinema may be at one extreme of the Democratic Party, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are at another. Most Democrats fall in between. But the two extremes are quite different. Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders’s high profiles come from a large network of activist supporters, small-dollar fundraising, and deep support in the party’s progressive caucus — meaning that they are deeply rooted within a significant faction of the Democratic Party. Manchin and Sinema’s high profiles are a product of Senate rules and tough coalition arithmetic, making them outliers. It’s clear in which direction the party is heading.
Adam Hilton (@adhilt) is assistant professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College and author of “True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Republicans lied about the need for a Jan. 6 commission. There was a lot it could have uncovered.
Even before the select committee’s anticipated hearings take place, is has provided a more complete perspective on the insurrection. Far from an effort to overturn the election by inflaming a mob, this was a multipronged coup attempt involving arguably dozens of officials in the federal government and state governments. The unwillingness of the participants to blow the whistle in real time — including those who resigned quietly — should shock and dismay Americans. | null | null | null | null | null |
The twins dance around a grenade: Nick is gay, and his coming-out during a quarrel detonates the family, possibly triggering their father’s fatal cardiac arrest. Repulsed by Nick’s behavior, their mother banishes him from her life. Marta, ever her brother’s keeper, joins him in an escape to Prague, where they search for clues to the legend of Jirí and other punitive defenestrations. “Tourists can climb the narrow stairs to the room where Catholic noblemen were defenestrated because of a religious dispute in 1618. You can look down from the window to see exactly the length of their fall,” she says. “You can look down from the window to see exactly the length of their fall. Catholics say these men were saved by angels, cradled in the arms of the Virgin herself, lowered gently to earth. Protestants say the men survived because they landed in a dung heap piled below the window.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Tuesday briefing: Free N95 masks in pharmacies; new version of omicron; digital SATs; baseball Hall of Famers; and more
Free N95 masks are now available at some U.S. pharmacies.
How it works: The government is distributing 400 million across the country, and adults will be able to get up to three each.
The rollout is still in progress: In the Midwest, grocery stores Meijer and Hy-Vee said their pharmacies are ready to hand them out. Other major chains, including Walgreens, will start later this week.
Why N95s? They’re the best at protecting against the coronavirus.
There’s a new version of the omicron variant.
What we know: It doesn’t appear to be more dangerous, but scientists have just begun to study it. Most of the cases are in Europe and Asia, but at least three have been detected in the U.S.
In vaccine news: A preliminary study showed that Pfizer’s booster gives protection for at least four months. And Pfizer has started testing an omicron-specific shot.
The U.S. put 8,500 troops on alert over the Ukraine crisis.
Russia announced the arrival of forces near the Eastern European country’s northern border today and is conducting new military drills.
What’s next: There will be another round of talks between Russia and Ukraine and European countries tomorrow to search for a diplomatic solution.
The underlying issue: Western influence in a region Russia considers its own, as explained by these helpful maps.
A Georgia prosecutor is ramping up an investigation of Donald Trump.
The latest: A judge approved District Attorney Fani Willis’s request for a special grand jury, scheduled to start May 2.
Why? She has been weighing whether the former president committed crimes by pressuring state officials to overturn election results. But she needs subpoenas to make people testify.
The SAT will go digital by 2024.
What else is changing: The exam will shrink from three hours to two, thanks to some computer programming, and calculators will be allowed for the entire math section.
Why is this happening? Many colleges have stopped requiring testing during the pandemic — and some say they won’t go back. This is a strategy to keep the SAT relevant.
Baseball will announce new Hall of Famers this afternoon.
Who’s eligible? David Ortiz, the former Red Sox slugger, is the most likely to get in. And it’s the last chance for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling.
How it works: Hundreds of baseball writers vote each year. A candidate needs to get 75% of their support to be inducted.
What about Bonds? Baseball’s all-time home run leader has been linked to steroids — and that has been enough for many voters to reject him in past years.
Amy Schneider won her 39th “Jeopardy!” game in a row last night.
That’s the second-longest winning streak in show history, passing Matt Amodio’s 38 games last fall.
What’s the all-time record? 74 games, held by Ken Jennings, who is serving as the show’s guest host.
And now … a story I hope will make you smile: An Irish couple found a message in a bottle from the U.S. — and tracked down the boy who sent it. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wendy Marco is the founder of Cold Rush Hockey, which is based out of Northern Virginia. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Learning, Marco explained, is a verb. It is an action and something that doesn’t happen without effort. Learning, she continued, is not a noun. It includes being actively involved.
Marco’s tutorial was just one of the many mini life lessons packed in the 45-minute skating session for these budding hockey players. Marco runs Cold Rush Hockey, one of the top hockey academies in Northern Virginia. She has spent 30 years training players of all ages, and at 56, is now the go-to skating coach in the area not only for kids, but professional players as well.
That’s why Marco’s noun and verb lesson that January morning was so important. Good skating doesn’t just happen. Everyone — even NHL players — have something to work on, Marco says.
Marco’s client list includes several Olympians and NHL players, including a handful of Washington Capitals. Most recently, she worked with Nicklas Backstrom as he made his way back from his hip injury.
The Capitals reached out to Marco in November. She and Backstrom had about 10 sessions together before he got off long-term injured reserve. Backstrom made his season debut Dec. 15. He had a slow start — after a stint on the NHL’s coronavirus protocols list and a bout with the flu — but is starting to look more like himself. He scored his first goal of the season on Thursday against Boston and followed it up with his nifty overtime game-winner Saturday against Ottawa.
Marco previously worked with Lars Eller, John Carlson, Jason Chimera, Jay Beagle, John Erskine and Jeff Halpern. She still works with Eller and Carlson in the summers. She has worked with Joe Snively — a native of Herndon, Va., who made his NHL debut with the Capitals this season — since he was a kid.
“I look at video of myself playing before 2010, when I started working with her, and it’s like I can’t watch it because it’s so bad,” Halpern said. “I wish I could go back [and start sooner]. It is like getting a superpower … I think if I saw that early in my career, it would have been a huge difference.”
Halpern worked with Marco in the summer of 2010, when he was coming off a subpar season that started in Tampa Bay and ended in Los Angeles. At the end of the year, Terry Murray, then the coach of the L.A. Kings, told Halpern he needed to work on his skating if he was going to keep going in the NHL.
“I basically said I was going to change everything and I did,” Halpern said.
Halpern was on the ice with Marco four to five times a week in sessions that included private workouts and sharing ice time with 10-year-olds. He completely changed his skating stride and technique in one summer, an adjustment he remains proud of. Halpern continued to go back to Marco for lessons until he retired, and now credits her for adding years to his playing career.
“Kids growing up in that Ashburn ice rink, and the kids that she touches, you know, in the D.C. area, they’re such good skaters,” said Halpern, now an assistant coach with the Tampa Bay Lightning. “... They’re so much better than other kids around them and it’s a credit to her. I think it’s remarkable what she does.”
“If you freeze frame them you'll see there's a line in their body from the center of their head to the point of contact of their blade on the ice,” Marco explains.
Marco grew up as a competitive figure skater in Northern Virginia. She moved back home at 27, after her career ambitions as a TV reporter didn’t work out. She started bartending and decided to teach skate lessons in Fairfax.
She started out just teaching figure skaters but quickly moved to hockey players. She liked teaching the skating intricacies needed in hockey and felt like all her skills from competitive figure skating and her time as a competitive water skier in college had come together.
She continued to teach long after she was married and gave birth to her first daughter, but in the back of her mind, she remained hopeful she could go one day go back to TV. Teaching was just a way to get by.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I want to do this hockey thing,’ ” Marco said.
She founded Cold Rush Hockey several years later. Marco said she still hopes to become a full-time NHL skating coach, but for now, her career is still very satisfying.
“I think she has immense passion,” Snively said. “It could be 6 a.m. in the morning and she has the most energy on the ice sometimes. She isn’t afraid to push you. It doesn’t matter who you are.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Boris Johnson gestures while delivering his speech during a Conservative leadership hustings at ExCeL Centre in London on July 17, 2019. (Frank Augstein/AP)
Party at the Johnson’s residence
The Mirror claims Johnson gave a speech at a leaving event for his then defense minister, Steve Higham, just before Christmas 2020. Johnson was allegedly “there for a few minutes to thank him for his service,” according to the report.
In December 2020, Johnson hosted a festive Christmas quiz in Downing Street. A photo published by The Mirror last year showed the prime minister inside Number 10 reading out questions alongside one aide draped in tinsel, the other donning a Santa hat. At the time, social mixing between households was banned.
Downing Street said Johnson “briefly took part virtually” to thank staff for their work during the health crisis.
In December 2020, Downing Street staff reportedly gathered to exchange gifts, sip wine and eat cheese in a rule-breaking event which was later joked about by Allegra Stratton, the prime minister’s then press secretary. Stratton tearfully resigned in December 2021.
The day before Number 10′s Christmas party, staff from the cabinet office held their own event in December 2020 — again while England was in lockdown. Staff gathered to bid farewell to Kate Josephs, a former senior civil servant who led the government’s coronavirus task force. Josephs has since apologized.
As London was placed under “very high alert,” and forced into Tier 3 restrictions in December 2020, staff at the Department of Transport held a festive gathering after work where they drank and danced. The department has apologized for the “inappropriate” event and for its staff’s “error of judgment.” | null | null | null | null | null |
January 21, 2022|Updated yesterday at 1:14 p.m. EST
Angie Wheeler had bonded with her patient, and now his body was failing. The nurse tried not to let him see the concern in her eyes.
It was only the day before that he had told her about his job, his wife and children. Now, the intensive care unit’s head doctor told Wheeler, he needed to be placed on a ventilator. She donned her protective gear and headed in.
Nearly two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Wheeler, 65, knew what to say:
“You’re going to go to sleep, okay? You won’t remember any of this.”
“I’m trusting you to take care of me,” he told her.
The words hurt. Why, Wheeler couldn’t help but think, hadn’t he just gotten vaccinated?
Like hospitals across the country, Luminis Health Doctors Community Hospital is facing a two-pronged crisis in this surge, with thin staffing and more covid-19 patients than ever before. Employees who remain have no choice but to shoulder bigger burdens. Among the heaviest, they say, is the emotional weight of so much preventable death.
About 70 percent of patients admitted to the hospital are unvaccinated, as are more than 90 percent of those who die there.
Doctors calling into a peer support line, created by Philadelphia-area psychiatrist Mona Masood at the beginning of the pandemic, now frequently lament the erosion of trust that misinformation about coronavirus vaccines has caused between patients and doctors, Masood said.
“This idea that we are all in this together,” she said, “has really broken down.”
Are you a health-care worker on the frontlines of the pandemic? Share your experiences with The Post
During this surge, calls to the Physician Support Line have roughly doubled.
“Everyone in the hospital dealt with lack of PPE, a lack of testing, health-care narratives rooted in political nonsense … on top of all the death,” said Kanak Patel, the ICU doctor who told Wheeler that day that the patient needed to be intubated.
“You put any workforce through that,” he added, “and it’s not going to be whole. And we’re far from whole right now.”
‘Feel like I failed him’
When Wheeler turned 65, some of her family members urged her to retire, worried about her safety.
But she never considered quitting, even when the virus was new and she was often scared. Health-care workers nationwide were leaving the profession in droves.
Last March, a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 3 in 10 health-care workers were considering quitting. More than half of those who remained were burned out, with 6 in 10 saying stress from the pandemic had harmed their mental health. And that was before the devastation brought by the delta and omicron variants.
Instead of quitting, though, Wheeler doubled down, picking up extra shifts to help with nursing shortages. It hasn’t been easy.
When she needs a break at work, she stares at the row of orchids that she cares for in a windowsill just outside the ICU, buoyed by the sight of their beauty. When she gets in her car at the end of days that stretch more than 13 hours, she turns off the radio and reflects, asking herself what went right, and if she could have done anything better.
She struggles with the mix of emotions she feels when she learns a patient is unvaccinated, frustrated by what it means for them and for the overburdened health-care system. Still, as she has over the course of four decades in nursing, she has resolved to treat all her patients like she would family.
So she rushed to her patient’s room when she heard a “code blue” called in the hospital, two days after he was placed on a ventilator. He had died.
“I kind of feel like I failed him,” she said.
“But I also wanted to say, ‘If you’d only gotten the vaccine. I wish you had gotten the vaccine. We wouldn’t be here.’ ”
‘Stretching and stretching and stretching’
Deneen Richmond, the community hospital’s president, likens the rapid increase in patient volume the facility has seen to “an explosion.”
The hospital has struggled since the early phases of the pandemic, which disproportionately affected majority-Black communities such as Prince George’s County. Residents in this D.C. suburb have far fewer hospital beds and primary care doctors than in neighboring jurisdictions and are more likely to suffer from underlying conditions that make the coronavirus more deadly.
Although state data shows Black and White Maryland residents are now dying at nearly equivalent rates, vaccination and booster rates remain lower for Black Marylanders.
And the number of covid-19 patients that staff members at Doctors Community Hospital are seeing — from about eight a day before Thanksgiving to more than 80 — dwarfs the approximately 50 covid-19 patients the hospital treated per day during the same period last January.
At the same time, about 20 percent of open positions are now unfilled, with a vacancy rate of 30 percent for bedside nurses. At points this month, as many as 60 staff members have been out sick.
New report underscores conditions that made Prince George’s vulnerable to covid-19
The emergency room and main floor of the hospital have been hit harder in this wave, driven by the highly contagious but less severe omicron variant, than in previous ones. But the ICU, too, has remained busy. And the concentrated death that staff members continue to see worries Richmond.
“Obviously, people die in hospitals all the time,” she said. “But it’s been two years of seeing more death than probably most health-care workers would have seen in their careers.”
The hospital took the unprecedented step in this surge of declaring a crisis.
Last year, it raised its minimum wage for all staff members to $17 per hour. It offered new benefits and brought in counselors and chaplains for emotional support. And, as hospitals nationwide have done, it hired dozens of agency nurses, who travel across the country and are typically paid higher salaries.
The number of patients being treated dipped in the past two weeks, mirroring state and national trends, after peaking with 3,824 people hospitalized across the state Jan. 12. On Monday, there were 2,332 hospitalized statewide. Still, Richmond worries, especially when she thinks about the future.
“I think about it sometimes like a rubber band,” she said earlier this month. “How much can we really stretch a very thin staff in the situation that we’re in? … We are stretching and stretching and stretching. But we all know at some point that the rubber band, you know, pops.”
As staff members completed their rounds on a recent morning in the ICU, doctors and nurses delivered updates in mostly flat tones. The news, for the most part, was grim.
One covid-19 patient on a ventilator had nearly coded the day before. Another, whose teenage daughter had pleaded with staff members to do everything they could to help her dad get better, had basically lost all brain capacity.
“As much as I want to be able to fix him,” physician Bobby Mathew said, “I don’t think there’s a way.”
When they got to the window outside Steven Byrd’s room, the mood lightened. Patel, the director of critical care medicine, flashed him a peace sign. The chatty grandfather gave the doctors and nurse a huge wave.
“This is the greatest staff,” he shouted at them through the thick glass.
Staff smiled through their masks as they talked through the history of the unvaccinated man, who had made big progress — now eating and sitting up on his own — since he was admitted with covid-19 the week before. Everyone was hoping for his success. The team needed a win.
Just seven months ago, they were celebrating multiple days with no covid-19 patients, marveling at the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines and hoping the end was in sight. It wasn’t long before delta hit and the ICU again began to fill. Weary employees exchanged looks of disbelief. Not again, they thought.
As covid-19 patients fill hospitals, health-care workers fight fear and exhaustion: ‘Here we go again’
Now, when Patel looks at the ICU, there are more contract nurses and fewer people who have known the hospital, and the community, for years. The team is mostly consumed by getting through the day, Patel said, making sure that patients continue to receive good care.
“We’ve gotten to the point that it’s beyond conversation,” he said. “We’ve had them all already.”
Still, he said, patients like Byrd give them hope.
He’d been too worried, Byrd told Patel, about what was in the vaccines to get immunized. And even though he still isn’t entirely sure, he told Patel he planned to get vaccinated — and encourage his grandchildren to do the same.
“As soon I am able, trust and believe,” he told the doctor. “I will be the first to have it.”
“No judgments,” Patel replied, “we’re gonna get you through.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Boris Johnson gestures while delivering a speech at the Conservative leadership hustings at ExCeL Centre in London on July 17, 2019. (Frank Augstein/AP)
Party at the Johnson residence
The Mirror claims Johnson gave a speech at a leaving event for his then-defense minister, Steve Higham, just before Christmas 2020. Johnson was allegedly “there for a few minutes to thank him for his service,” according to the report.
The day before No. 10′s Christmas party, staff members from the cabinet office held their own event in December 2020 — again while England was in lockdown. Staff gathered to bid farewell to Kate Josephs, a former senior civil servant who led the government’s coronavirus task force. Josephs has since apologized.
As London was placed under “very high alert” and forced into Tier 3 restrictions in December 2020, staff at the Department of Transport held a festive gathering after work where they drank and danced. The department has apologized for the “inappropriate” event and for its staff’s “error of judgment.” | null | null | null | null | null |
“War Room” focuses on those topics. Its influence comes not just from the number of people watching, which is difficult to measure across platforms, but from the audience’s willingness to take political action, whether marching against vaccine mandates or running for local office. The show, broadcast live six days a week from Bannon’s Capitol Hill townhouse, is the gathering point for the pro-Trump movement — with Bannon embracing the role of a wartime general leading followers into 2022, or what he calls the “valley of decision.”
When DirecTV dropped WeatherNation in 2018, Sigg accelerated his move to digital platforms and search for other content, said a former employee. “You could call them highly entrepreneurial,” said a person who met with Sigg’s team at the time. “They were thinking, 'We’re going to get every church in America on our network.’ Church didn’t work out but then they were like, 'Hey, we could do this news thing if we can find the right niche.’”
A year later, he was indicted on charges of defrauding donors, accused of using nearly $1 million, from more than $25 million raised, for personal expenses. He pleaded not guilty and received a pardon from Trump. | null | null | null | null | null |
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain talks with White House press secretary Jen Psaki, second from right, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield, right, and then-White House senior adviser Anita Dunn in the Rose Garden in May 2021 before remarks by President Biden. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
But throughout his first year on the job, Ron Klain and his sterling credentials have repeatedly bumped against the unusual challenges of governing in today’s Washington.
On the single biggest challenge facing the White House — battling the pandemic — Klain at times irked the administration’s top official in charge of the coronavirus response, pushing Jeff Zients and his team to move faster in ways they found counterproductive. (Klain and Zients denied any tension.)
Klain, 60, is praised by many in the White House and on Capitol Hill for his responsiveness and organizational abilities, and most important, is said by close associates of President Biden to retain his confidence. But even some allies suggest that Klain’s approach is not necessarily producing the desired results.
“I think that, by and large, he’s making the trains run on time — even though some of the boxcars may seem to be empty some of the time,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
White House aides have been highly protective of Klain’s image. His team arranged interviews for this article with senior West Wing officials whom they rarely make available for articles involving White House policy or political strategy.
Klain himself, in a wide-ranging interview, appeared to acknowledge that playing an inside-Washington game had been problematic for Biden in his first year, creating an image that the president spends most of his time in political negotiations. Klain vowed that Biden would spend more time on the road in 2022, interacting with Americans and showcasing his trademark style of backslapping empathy.
Many allies, and even some of the critics, nonetheless say Klain was the best choice for the job, and they point to the White House’s success in creating jobs and vaccinating millions of Americans.
“I find him to be incredibly effective,” said White House senior adviser Mike Donilon. “There’s enormous confidence in him. And, most important, he has the president’s complete trust.”
Many complaints center on negotiations with Capitol Hill over Biden’s agenda this past fall, with many Democrats charging that Klain acceded too often to the demands of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. At a critical juncture, the talks left House Democratic leaders, including Pelosi, feeling upset with Klain, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
The sore point was Biden’s decision in late October not to press House Democrats to vote immediately for his bipartisan infrastructure bill, as Pelosi and her allies wanted. Liberal Democrats, by comparison, preferred to wait until they could ensure that a companion social spending and climate plan also had enough support to pass. Biden’s senior staff was united behind his decision to hold off, according to a White House official.
“He obviously represents a very different kind of constituency than the constituency that elected the president nationwide,” Klain said of Manchin. “And that’s an inherent tension in our caucus, in our coalition.”
Klain was reluctant to rate his own job performance but said the administration’s first year amounted to “substantial accomplishments — and then a lot of things left undone.”
He said he has no timetable for staying in his position, although he hinted that he could take only so much. He noted that the first chiefs of staff for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty and Rahm Emanuel, respectively — left before two years were up. “It is a grinding job, there’s no question about it,” he said. “It takes a lot of stamina to do it. So we’ll see how long it lasts.”
Specifically, Klain is deeply attached to Tab. When Coca-Cola announced in 2020 that it was discontinuing production of the beverage, Klain’s wife, Monica Medina, who also serves in the administration, gave him a year-long supply of Tab for Hanukkah.
Klain usually arrives early at the White House. At 8 a.m., he meets with a group of seven senior advisers, all of whom spoke to The Washington Post for this article and praised Klain’s leadership. At about 8:20 a.m., he leads a larger meeting, still conducted via Zoom, with more top aides from across the White House. Shortly after that session, Klain meets with the president in the Oval Office. | null | null | null | null | null |
Where Do Great Presidents Come From? The Campaign Trail
How do you get to the Oval Office? Practice, practice. (Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg)
The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf asks: “You can appoint any American citizen to one term as president...so long as your choice has never run for president before. Who do you appoint to the White House and why?”
This sparked … let’s just say that political scientists on Twitter were less than thrilled. Hans Noel of Georgetown University, for example, put it this way: “The problem is in the question, asking people to think of a specific (great) person. The best executive is not anyone in particular, but someone who can work with the rest of the government and their party.” He added, “‘Vote the person not the party’ is perhaps the most pernicious thing in political thinking.”
You may be wondering just what’s so wrong with a hypothetical question that it could rile up people who study the presidency and the U.S. political system, and who of course understand that it was not intended as a literal proposal to do away with elections and let one of us just select a president.
The first thing is the implied importance of the president to begin with. Presidents are important political actors, but they have all sorts of constraints in office, including that they are only one person within a presidency that includes a large White House staff and others within the Executive Office of the President. Because of this, it is easy to vastly overestimate how important the president is.
Much of what is wrongly attributed to a president’s personality, style and character really have nothing to do with such things. On many matters, anyone nominated by the president’s party would have done the same thing. On others, the interests of the nation are what count, and at least most people sitting in the Oval Office would have seen things the same way. And in many cases, the president turns out to be peripheral at best to decisions that are actually made by Congress, by the courts, by executive branch bureaucracies, by state or local governments or by private individuals.
But I think another part of Friedersdorf’s hypothetical bothers me more — the part about appointing someone.
What’s the point of elections? We usually think of elections as mainly about the ability of voters — of citizens — to control the government. And that’s surely important! If people think things are bad, they’ll throw out one set of bums and elect the other set of bums, while if things seem good, they’ll keep the current bums in office. That does set up healthy incentives for politicians, but in a limited way, since few citizens pay close attention to politics and public affairs, and those who pay the most attention tend to be strong partisans and therefore least likely to be swing voters.
But there’s more. The process of running for office, when it’s working well, should tend to produce presidents who have the proper skills for the job. Those are (as Noel implies) political skills. Good politicians thoroughly understand the system. They excel at digging out useful information that allows them to deal successfully with those the president must deal with, most of whom represent various groups of citizens. They are good at bargaining, forming and maintaining coalitions, and more.
Elections don’t just tend to select for those skills; they also teach them to the candidates, because bargaining and coalition-building are the kinds of capabilities that it usually takes to win major party nominations. When nomination systems and parties become dysfunctional (as they were for Democrats in the 1970s and Republicans currently), candidates don’t learn the proper lessons and are likely to be terrible at presidenting if they win.
Another way of looking at the role of elections is through the lens of representation. Presidents, like all elected officials, establish representative relationships with their constituents by making promises during their initial campaigns and then governing with those promises in mind. These promises, which could include everything from specific policies to style in office, are central to republican government. The idea is that governance that will satisfy the nation results not from a president who has deep insights into the best possible policies, but from a whole bunch of politicians, including the president, who are good at picking up clues to the sorts of things that will make them politically successful — which in turn are the things that will turn out to be good public policy.
The notion of “appointing” a president is consistent with completely different concepts of government. One, which presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter espoused, is that by virtue of being elected by the whole nation, the president has some sort of mystical connection with the people and can ascertain what they really want. Such presidents often believe they know the people better than members of Congress or interest group leaders. They are invariably wrong.
That idea is often combined with a notion that politics gets in the way of governing, and that what’s really needed is expertise. That, too, is a bad bet. Neutral expertise is an important source of information for presidents and other politicians, but it is not sufficient. For one thing, no president has all that much expertise; the U.S. government is just too complicated for any individual to know enough. Nor is it sufficient to just hire and defer to experts. The choices politicians must make involve complicated judgments, competing interests and complex trade-offs. They are, that is, political.
The best people for the job aren’t those who embody some abstract conception of greatness. They’re people who have sophisticated political skills, the kinds that are learned by running for lower offices, by serving in legislatures and in elected executive positions, and then by running for presidential nominations. It doesn’t guarantee success. Nothing does. But the democratic wager is that leaders chosen through elections, possessing those political skills, give us a fighting chance at both high-quality self-government and good public policy.
What got a bunch of political scientists so annoyed is that the other ways of thinking about political leadership are popular, and have prominent champions in U.S. political culture and history — including presidents such as Wilson and others. There are a lot fewer people standing up for the virtues of politics as usual. | null | null | null | null | null |
He said the omicron variant offered “plausible hope for stabilization and normalization,” in Europe but warned “our work is not done.”
“I believe that a new wave could no longer require the return to pandemic-era, population-wide lockdowns or similar measures,” Kluge said. “This pandemic, like all other pandemics before it, will end, but it is far too early to relax.”
He also told journalists: “We are at a critical juncture … We must work together to bring the acute phase of this pandemic to an end. We cannot let it continue to drag on, lurching between panic and neglect.”
Some countries have moved to relax their social restrictions including Britain, Thailand, South Africa and France. The Netherlands is also expected to announced later Tuesday the reopening of its bars and restaurants.
In the United States, health experts have said that although the country has yet to reach its national peak of the omicron variant, the explosion of cases has begun to plateau in some areas. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy told journalists last week “the challenge is that the entire country is not moving at the same pace. The omicron wave started later in other parts of the country.”
Some scientists have previously speculated that the massive winter wave of omicron variant infections in the United States might produce a silver lining in the long run. They have said that the variant, while stunningly contagious, appears less likely to send someone to the hospital and that its transmissibility could boost immunity as it rips through the population. In doing so once the tide of cases has ebbed the variant could make the pandemic a less dangerous health emergency.
However other health officials have pushed back, arguing too much remains unknown about the virus to make such forecasts and that every time experts suggest it is nearing the endgame, the virus comes up with a new mutation. They also note that any broad immunity boost has come at a very high cost — with covid-19 responsible for the deaths of some 5.6 million people, globally. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: In Qatar’s glittery World Cup, the poor toil for the thrill of the rich
Children stand next to the official countdown clock showing remaining time until the kickoff of the 2022 World Cup, in Doha, Qatar, on Nov. 25, 2021. (Darko Bandic/AP)
By Natasha Iskander
Natasha Iskander is an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at New York University and the author of “Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond.”
Qatar is hosting the most expensive FIFA World Cup ever, with ticket prices nearly 50 percent higher than the previous games, in Russia in 2018. The lowest-priced ticket on sale internationally costs $302, and the cheap seats for the final set you back $604.
The cheap seats will be hard to come by — there are 60 percent less of them than at the last World Cup. But if you can get one, the stadium you’ll be sitting in will be state-of-art. The eight new stadia clustered around Doha are dazzling feats of architectural design and engineering, all of them fulfilling Qatar’s World Cup initial slogan of “Expect Amazing.”
Meanwhile, the workers who built the stadia where the games will be held — who perhaps even installed the seat you’ll be sitting in — generally don’t even make enough in a month to buy a ticket. The minimum wage for a construction worker in Qatar, which only came into force in 2021 after a sustained campaign for workers’ rights by international human rights organizations and labor unions, runs a few cents short of $275 a month. For less than the price of a seat to watch one game, migrant workers broke their bodies, endured extreme heat, and faced degrading working conditions to build the sporting and tourist infrastructure for the World Cup.
Over the past 10 years, hundreds of thousands of men have traveled to Qatar to build these structures. Migrants from all over the world — from Mozambique to Nepal, from Egypt to the Philippines — worked hard 10-hour days, six days a week, to raise stadia out of the desert, but also to build luxury residential developments, construct museums and cultural spaces, and lay down new geometric islands in Qatar’s glistening bay.
Day after hot day, scaffolders hauled tons of scaffolding pipes, planks and clamps up the lattice structures they fixed together. Cladders and rope artists craned huge panes of aluminum and glass into the air and then balanced off the edges of buildings to attach the panels. Welders torched metal to create the curved joints of buildings, wrapping their workspaces in fire retardant tarps against the desert wind and enclosing themselves in an excruciating whirlwind of fire and sparks. Workers tore up the ground to excavate deep foundations for towering high-rises or to bore tunnels for Doha’s new metro network, which aims to be the fastest driverless system in the world.
The men who built Qatar’s World Cup were brave. I know because I spent a year on construction projects in Qatar interviewing them and shadowing them on-site. They described the fear that stalked them as they scaled the skeletons of buildings. They spoke about the way the extreme heat — averaging highs of more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer months — seemed to melt the air and made them feel as if they were drowning. They recounted the rage they swallowed at being asked, under threat of deportation, to do things that violated their company’s safety regulations and that they knew would put them at risk of injury.
During their time in Qatar, they also became highly skilled. Most migrants arrived with minimal construction experience, if any, but they worked hard to learn the advanced construction techniques required to build the stadia and museums that international star architects had imagined. Construction workers in Qatar became experts in their trades, among the most highly specialized in the world. All for $275 a month.
At the end of their shifts, they were bused back to their cramped and often squalid labor camps, banned from the structures and spaces they spent their days building. Qatari law is applied to effectively prohibit construction workers from most of Doha, confining them instead to barracks in the desert. The government runs periodic police sweeps to detain or scrutinize workers caught in Doha’s public spaces But World Cup spectators need not worry about these things: The parks, malls, museums, hotels, and, of course, stadia around Doha were all built with them in mind.
In the first 24 hours after the lottery to purchase tickets went live last week, fans requested 1.2 million. Those tickets won’t go to migrant construction workers, many of whom will tune in to the games from their homes in Indonesia or Bangladesh or Kenya, or from elsewhere in the world. Others will watch from labor camps outside the gleaming, cheering city of Doha, on their phones or on televisions they pooled their wages to buy.
Yet, no matter who is watching the World Cup — whether it’s a fan who splurged for a ticket to the final or a worker fighting off sleep after a grueling day — all will be watching Qatar’s transformation of the beautiful game into one that uses the labor, bravery and skill of the poor to build thrill and pleasure for the rich.
Iran is spinning a fairytale that there’s no place like home. No one’s buying it. | null | null | null | null | null |
Coleen O’Lear named The Post’s new Head of Curation and Platforms
Announcement from Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and Chief Product Officer and Managing Editor Kat Downs Mulder:
We are thrilled to announce that Coleen O’Lear will become The Post’s new Head of Curation and Platforms, effective immediately.
Coleen will work closely with leaders across the newsroom, product and engineering to develop and implement strategies for curation, packaging and distribution, and find ways to surface more of our great journalism for a growing global readership across a wide variety of products and platforms.
Coleen has been an innovative force over the past 10 years, serving as homepage editor, mobile producer, managing producer, editorial director and deputy director of emerging news products and, most recently, head of mobile strategy. This range of experience has put Coleen on the cutting edge of editorial and technical trends, making her well-positioned to take on this role.
As Head of Curation and Platforms, Coleen will oversee multiple teams, including the homepage, copy desk, apps and Apple News, social media, operations and SEO, and news product. This group includes more than a hundred journalists who are responsible for programming, packaging and optimizing our journalism across multiple products. These teams develop fresh approaches for new platforms; ensure our journalism effectively reaches and engages a growing audience; and build templates, workflows and tools that help us maintain high standards and quality everywhere we publish our work.
Coleen has demonstrated her ability to lead complex initiatives from inception to implementation throughout her career. She has a comprehensive understanding of our tools, workflows, audiences, voice and teams. She has partnered with engineering, product, design, analytics, marketing and advertising to develop products including “The 7” and By The Way, as well as managing our Snapchat Discover channel and partnership with Apple News. She has been a key partner to product and engineering for the unification of our flagship and Select apps, which is in progress. She was a founding member of the team that built the Select app in 2014.
Coleen joined The Post in 2011 from the Island Packet in South Carolina, where she was assistant copy desk chief. Before that, she was a copy editor at the Times-Picayune, where she worked in news and sports, and was part of a pioneering digital team at NOLA.com. She also teaches a class about the business of media innovation at Northwestern University’s Medill School.
Please join us in congratulating Coleen on her new role. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Republicans lied about the need for a Jan. 6 commission. There is a lot it already uncovered.
Even before the select committee’s anticipated hearings take place, it has provided a more complete perspective on the insurrection. Far from a single effort to overturn the election by inflaming a mob, this was a multipronged coup attempt involving arguably dozens of officials in the federal government and state governments. The unwillingness of the participants to blow the whistle in real time — including those who resigned quietly — should shock and dismay Americans.
Democrats' best argument for 2022: The GOP creates chaos | null | null | null | null | null |
“War Room” focuses on those topics. Its influence comes not just from the number of people watching, which is difficult to measure across platforms, but also from the audience’s willingness to take political action, whether marching against vaccine mandates or running for local office. The show, broadcast live six days a week from Bannon’s Capitol Hill townhouse, is the gathering point for the pro-Trump movement — with Bannon embracing the role of a wartime general leading followers into 2022, or what he calls the “valley of decision.”
By that time, Sigg had faced legal problems stretching back decades, according to Colorado court records, including drug, assault and harassment charges, as well as civil claims involving disputes over money. Between 1997 and 2010, he amassed more than $235,000 in unpaid federal taxes, according to a lien filed against him in January 2012 and withdrawn within weeks.
At least two of Sigg’s adult children now work for his company, Performance One Media, which was registered in Colorado in 2006, records show, a year before his old firm filed for bankruptcy protection. His daughter handles human resources, according to current and former employees, and his son works with Real America’s Voice, a Performance One subsidiary. They did not respond to requests for comment. A former employee said, “You can’t go to HR, because it’s the owner’s daughter you’d be talking to.”
Bannon, who was charged with contempt of Congress this past fall after defying a Jan. 6 committee subpoena, said he was untroubled by Sigg’s criminal record, calling him and his business partners “scrappers from the cable business.”
When DirecTV dropped WeatherNation in 2018, Sigg accelerated his move to digital platforms and search for other content, said a former employee. “You could call them highly entrepreneurial,” said a person who met with Sigg’s team at the time. “They were thinking, 'We’re going to get every church in America on our network.’ Church didn’t work out, but then they were like, 'Hey, we could do this news thing if we can find the right niche.’ ”
A year later, Bannon was indicted on charges of defrauding donors, accused of using nearly $1 million, from more than $25 million raised, for personal expenses. He pleaded not guilty and received a pardon from Trump.
If the network is making money, it’s because of Bannon’s show, current and former employees said. “It’s not even close in terms of the advertising money he brings in,” a former employee said. “Even election coverage was below Bannon.”
Dish offers a “broad range of content that will appeal to the many different interests of our customer base,” a spokesman said. A spokeswoman for Pluto TV, which says it has more than 54 million monthly active users, said, “We do not partake in any editorial decisions or moderation.” A Google spokesman did not respond to a question about why Google-owned YouTube removed “War Room” even as it remains on Google Play through Real America’s Voice. | null | null | null | null | null |
Matthew Stafford never won a playoff game with the Detroit Lions. He now has two with the Rams and is targeting another against the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC championship game. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
The vindication of Matthew Stafford didn’t come with any of his 4,886 passing yards during the regular season, not with any of his 41 touchdown passes. It didn’t come with the Los Angeles Rams’ NFC West title nor even, really, with their convincing first-round playoff triumph over the Arizona Cardinals.
No, the idea when the Rams traded for Stafford in the offseason and then continued during the season to assemble a star-laden cast around him was for him to be a quarterback who could produce in the biggest moments, who could help the Rams to realize their lofty aspirations of making a run very, very deep into the NFL postseason.
So what really mattered — what began to make it all worthwhile — occurred here early Sunday evening at Raymond James Stadium when Stafford made the throws in crunch time that produced a 30-27 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, sending home Tom Brady and catapulting the Rams into this weekend’s NFC championship game against the San Francisco 49ers.
“I’ll tell you what,” Coach Sean McVay said after the game, “he certainly delivered … That’s why you go get him.”
The Rams had squandered a 27-3, third-quarter lead. They’d allowed Brady and the Buccaneers to tie the game in the final minute. Their Super Bowl-or-bust season was about to go very decidedly bust. But then Stafford came through in a big way with completions of 20 and 44 yards to wide receiver Cooper Kupp to set up kicker Matt Gay’s winning field goal as time expired.
The longer completion came on a play on which Kupp was supposed to be merely a decoy, running deep to occupy defenders and create openings for other receivers.
“We describe it a lot of times in our meetings as a ‘love of the game’ route,” Stafford said. “You’re really never getting the ball. You’re just clearing out some area, working for some other routes. They decided to bring everybody and that’s really the best option at that point. I felt it after the snap, kind of recognized it was going to be an all-out pressure and was able to put it to a good spot. Coop made a great catch.”
It’s not all about Stafford, of course. McVay got the Rams to the Super Bowl three years ago with Jared Goff at quarterback. The roster is as top-heavy as it gets with two of the league’s most prominent defensive players, tackle Aaron Donald and cornerback Jalen Ramsey. Kupp led the NFL in catches, receiving yards and touchdown catches. The big-name acquisitions continued during the season when the Rams traded for pass rusher Von Miller and signed wideout Odell Beckham Jr. after he was released by the Cleveland Browns.
Yet Stafford had plenty to prove, even after a dozen seasons and more than 45,000 passing yards with the Detroit Lions. He’d established himself as a tough, durable, productive and respected player. He’d had a 5,000-yard passing season and he’d been selected to a Pro Bowl. But he’d never been a centerpiece player on an upper-tier team. Detroit managed just four winnings seasons in his 12 years there, and Stafford didn’t have a single postseason victory, going winless in three playoff games with the Lions.
That part has changed this month.
“Matthew Stafford, baby, he’s got two playoff wins, two really good playoff wins,” Miller said. “He’s played great. He’s [gone] against Kyler Murray and Tom Brady, man. Nothing is perfect in the playoffs. You’ve just got to find a way to win, find a way to string wins together. Matthew Stafford, he’s doing it. It’s an honor and a privilege to be his teammate.”
The Rams certainly didn’t make it easy on themselves against the Buccaneers. But their near collapse actually allowed Stafford to show his game-on-the-line, postseason-pressure mettle.
“I would have loved to have been taking a knee up three scores,” Stafford said. “But it’s a whole lot more fun when you’ve got to make a play like that to win the game and just steal somebody’s soul.”
It wasn’t an entirely smooth ride through Stafford’s first season with the Rams. His 17 interceptions were tied for the most in the NFL. Even so, he certainly seems to have McVay’s trust.
“Always had a lot of confidence in Matthew,” McVay said. “That never wavered. It never wavered, the confidence he had in himself, the teammates, the coaches. He had a look in his eye.”
The Rams will host Sunday’s NFC title game in Inglewood, Calif. They’re one triumph from playing the Super Bowl on their home field at SoFi Stadium. But to get there, they must overcome a San Francisco team that beat them twice during the regular season and could have the vocal support of a large number of fans who take to the road eagerly. Stafford struggled in both games against the 49ers, totaling four interceptions in the two defeats.
“It’s going to be a big challenge for us,” Stafford said. “Hopefully it’s one of those games where we come out and it’s heavy blue and yellow and we have a nice live, loud crowd that makes it tough on them … To be honest with you, before the game, I didn’t care if we were going to Green Bay or if [the 49ers] were coming to us. I just wanted the opportunity to continue to play with this group of guys. Now that we have that, I’m excited.”
It’s a high-stakes game, which is exactly what Stafford was seeking when he left Detroit and precisely what the Rams had in mind when they brought him in. But the difference now is that Stafford already has demonstrated he can produce in such a situation.
“It means a lot,” Stafford said. “That’s a lot of hard work for a lot of years going into a short amount of time. A lot of hard work this year, too, with some great teammates. That’s the thing I’ve loved and I’ve really appreciated being a part of this team is how many guys are pulling the rope in the right direction, doing everything they can to be prepared for those moments.” | null | null | null | null | null |
In summer 2005, E! offered viewers a rare look inside the Playboy Mansion with a reality show about three women, all blond and in their early 20s, who were dating Hugh Hefner, the then-octogenarian founder of Playboy magazine. The series, which would run for a total of six seasons, quickly introduced viewers to Holly Madison, who described herself as “Hef’s No. 1 girlfriend.” As Madison recalled moving into the sprawling Gothic-Tudor just two days after her and Hefner’s first date, she mused, “I guess you could say we were made for each other.”
The first episode introduces Jennifer Saginor, the daughter of Hefner’s longtime doctor. Saginor says she was just 6 when her father first took her to the mansion, which she described as “a magical kingdom” where she could have anything she wanted from candy to gourmet lunches to endless leisure time in the game room. The mansion’s “larger-than-life” owner, she says, was like an uncle to her.
Surrounded by glamorous women — and men, including her father and Hefner, who openly judged the looks of the women vying to be in Playboy — Saginor says she struggled with her self image and was encouraged to get plastic surgery as young as 15. It was around the same time that Saginor says she “fell very hard” for one of Hefner’s girlfriends. Away from her mother, Saginor says she “longed for the affection that only a woman could give” and became very close to the woman, identified only as “Kendall.”
Saginor recalls one night in which the woman ordered daiquiris up to her bedroom, where “one thing led to another.” Mitch Rosen, who worked as a butler to Hefner from 1983 to 1989 says in the docuseries that he “served Mr. Hefner’s girlfriend and Jennifer drinks in bed” when Saginor was underage and that “the people that knew [about the affair] knew that Jennifer was underaged.”
“Many of the girls wanted to tell you their problems,” Tetenbaum adds. “And that made us all nervous. We had to be very careful because we knew we were being monitored.”
Even after dissolving some of the mystique around her childhood, Saginor says she took pains to “portray Hef in a very, very positive light,” in her 2006 memoir, “Playground: A Childhood Lost to the Playboy Mansion,” out of a sense of lingering loyalty — and fear of repercussions. She recalls Hefner calling her while she was in Los Angeles promoting her book. He told her he was proud of her and asked about the interviews she had lined up for her next tour stop. He also asked that she keep his knowledge of her underage relationship a secret. Though she agreed, Saginor says all of her interviews were summarily canceled “in succession.”
By the time Madison arrived at the mansion in 2001, Hefner’s girlfriends had all started to resemble each other, which she says was yet another way he exerted control. Six months into her stay, Madison cut her long blonde hair to set herself apart. Hefner “flipped out,” she says, and “was screaming at me saying it made me look ‘old, hard and cheap.’”
“We were told one day that we needed to sign contracts and we need to sign them that day or E! wasn’t going to renew the show,” says Madison. “I just didn’t want to sign a contract that in essence was signing a contract to be in a relationship since the show was about three girls he was dating. That felt very prostitute-ish to me.”
Madison also signed, but says she did so “under duress.”
Madison left the mansion in 2008, the same year she completed her run on the E! reality series. Her co-stars Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson had already left by then. “At that point, there were no women to pit me against, there was none of that left,” says Madison. “I had been locked into the mentality at the mansion and had felt like 'there’s no other future for me outside.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Sarah Godlewski could be the best chance to rid the Senate of Ron Johnson
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) speaks at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Sept. 14. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Sarah Godlewski is no run-of-the-mill Democrat, let alone a left-winger. Unlike some of her progressive competitors for the Democratic Senate nomination, she has strong business and national security credentials and has won in two statewide contests in the key swing state.
She came to politics through a multimillion-dollar socially responsible investment firm she co-founded. When she reached out to the state treasurer’s office to push for more investment in the state, she learned Republicans wanted to eliminate the job through a ballot initiative in 2018. She helped organize a movement to preserve the office, defeating the initiative with 62 percent of the vote. She also won the race that year to fill the office. She now administers a state trust fund of $1.2 billion.
“I think at the end of the day I consider myself a pragmatic leader focused on getting things done,” she told me in an interview on Monday, pointing to her ability to work through gridlock in the state Capitol to help push through a bipartisan child savings account plan and to help public schools bridge the digital divide.
She stressed the need to run a “72-county race," adding, “You have to be able to meet people where they are and be pragmatic.” In a state where races can be decided by a margin of just a few votes in every precinct, she has positioned herself as the Democrat who can win not just urban areas, but also suburbia and rural Wisconsin.
Incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) presents a juicy target for Democrats. He has been a staunch “no” vote against virtually every Democratic initiative, including infrastructure. In recent years, he has gone full MAGA — lying that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a largely “peaceful protest”; spreading gibberish about covid-19 and anti-vaccine rhetoric; and peddling pro-Russian propaganda.
Godlewski therefore has a choice of issues to focus on. Nevertheless, her primary argument is straightforward: “What do Wisconsinites want? Just to get things done.” She continued: “What has Ron Johnson done? He voted against infrastructure. He voted against emergency covid aid.” She urged Democrats to run on their “record of delivering.”
For example, she noted that 28 percent of rural Wisconsin residents lack high-speed internet, but Johnson opposed the infrastructure bill that would fund broadband for all Americans. She also noted that Wisconsin, despite being a big dairy state, has no one on the Senate Agriculture Committee, which leaves it “without a seat at the table,” she says, to advocate on behalf of her state.
“No doubt trade wars have hurt our farmers,” she said, pointing to the U.S. ginseng crop, 95 percent of which is grown in Wisconsin. After the Trump administration launched its trade war with China, ginseng exports plunged and threatened to wipe out the industry. She also stressed that extreme weather resulting from climate change has wreaked havoc on farmers. Not unlike moderate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), she’s as comfortable talking crop prices as child care.
On inflation, Godlewski candidly said it has been a “strain on Wisconsin.” Like President Biden, she talks about “putting money back into Wisconsinites’ pocket” by reducing the cost of big-ticket items such as health-care coverage, prescription drugs and child care.
For a state politician, Godlewski has a strong foreign policy background from her time as a military contractor and later as a fellow at the Air War College. She supports Biden’s tough line on Russia. (Johnson, by contrast, stood foursquare behind the former president, who did nothing but bow and scrape before Russian President Vladimir Putin.) More generally, she argued the United States is “getting back on the world stage” after pulling out of the Iran deal, the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization. She dubs Donald Trump’s retreat from international leadership “horrific.”
On crime, Godlewski said flatly, “I am not a ‘defund the police’ candidate.” She argued the federal government can help by increasing funding to police and to providers of “wraparound” services such as social workers and mental health professionals.
And when it comes to protecting democracy, she said voters she meets are remarkably engaged. In 2018, Democrats won 54 percent of the popular vote for the Wisconsin Assembly, but held only 36 percent of the legislative seats. “That’s because the legislative districts look like letters of the alphabet,” she said. With extreme gerrymandering, she argued, voters “question if legislators are really listening to them.” She also railed against the ludicrous Republican “audit” of the 2020 election that has cost about $1 million. And she is a strong “yes” on dumping the filibuster. “Why can’t the Senate get anything done?” she asked.
Godlewski’s most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary is Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes from Milwaukee, who has been collecting endorsements from marquee progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Godlewski has a few things going for her in the competitive race: She can self-fund. She can boast about her appeal outside Democratic strongholds. And like Biden, who won the state by about 20,000 votes, she can connect with centrist and progressive Democrats as well as disaffected Republicans (who can vote in the open primary).
Godlewski is banking that Democrats champing at the bit to boot out Johnson recognize she is best positioned to replace one of Trump’s favorite senators. Whoever the nominee will be, the general-election race against Johnson will certainly be one of the most expensive and heavily watched in 2022. | null | null | null | null | null |
Rachel Van Dongen named The Post’s Director of Elections
WASHINGTON, DC- JUNE 02: Washington Post National editor Rachel Van Dongen photographed at the Washington Post in Washington, DC, on June 02, 2015. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Announcement from Interim National Editor Matea Gold and Politics Editor Peter Wallsten:
We are thrilled to announce that Rachel Van Dongen will become The Post’s director of elections.
This is a critical new leadership role charged with planning and directing the presentation of our coverage of primary and general elections across all platforms, and one that requires deep knowledge of our digital operations, a track record of collaboration and vast experience with elections. Rachel, who has led the 202 newsletter franchise to extraordinary success over the past seven years and spent a decade running political coverage, brings a powerful combination of innovation and high metabolism to the position.
Rachel’s mission will be to leverage the collective journalistic firepower of the newsroom, along with the product and engineering teams, to ensure that The Post is the premier destination for the most authoritative, accessible and trustworthy election coverage. Among her responsibilities will be helping to drive robust and innovative live coverage plans, ensuring election results and analysis are displayed in smart and audience-friendly ways, and engaging our vast data resources to provide insights to readers and reporters in real time.
She has an impressive list of ideas for shaping the way we deliver information, for expanding our reach to younger and more diverse audiences, and for building trust with readers by bringing greater transparency to how we use data. As part of the Politics staff, she will work in partnership with the campaign editor and other politics editors and coordinate closely with colleagues in a wide array of departments in shaping the presentation of local, state, national and, at times, international elections.
During her time overseeing the 202 newsletters, Rachel launched The Daily 202, which helped break the mold for authored newsletters at The Post with original reporting and analysis along with embedded video, social media and graphics. She grew her team from seven to 13 people and launched half a dozen other newsletters in policy areas key to The Post, including health care, climate, technology and cybersecurity. Last year, Rachel helped shepherd the newsletters through a major redesign process involving all corners of the newsroom and colleagues across The Post’s product, design, engineering, marketing, advertising and PR teams.
This is Rachel’s second stint at The Post. From 2008 to 2011, she helmed WhoRunsGov.com, an experiment in creating a new kind of political directory, and launched the Plum Line with Greg Sargent. She directed 2012 campaign coverage for Politico before taking over that publication’s Congress team and serving as deputy managing editor. In the early 2000s, she spent four years based in Bogota, Colombia, as a freelance foreign correspondent for the Economist and the Christian Science Monitor.
Rachel is a native Washingtonian who attended Barnard College in New York and got her degree in English literature with a minor in political science. She lives in Columbia Heights with her husband, Juan Fernando Gomez, and their son, Lorenzo.
Please join us in congratulating her on taking on this new position, which begins Feb. 22. | null | null | null | null | null |
Holton-Arms senior Sophie Duncan swims during Friday's Independent School League swimming championship. (Cory F. Royster)
Few swimmers in the D.C. area have achieved more individually than Holton-Arms senior Sophie Duncan, so even after her team lost a competitive bout to Stone Ridge at the Independent School League championships Friday, she could take stock of an especially successful stretch — adding wins in the 100-yard butterfly and 200 individual medley on top of an Olympic trial qualification and Stanford commitment in 2021.
It just took a few hurdles to get there.
A year earlier, in the middle of her push for a qualifying time, Duncan broke her wrist. She spent the following six weeks swimming and training with a waterproof cast, which offered practically no mobility in her wrist and impaired her technique. But it didn’t slow her enough, and just a couple of months after the cast came off, she qualified.
“It had always been a dream of mine, since I first started swimming … this is basically the dream of any swimmer,” Duncan said. “It’s arguably one of the biggest meets there is besides the Olympics.”
Duncan is now focused on February’s Metro swimming championships, the culminating race of her high school career, as well as the ongoing season with Nation’s Capital Swim Club, where many of the individual medalists from the ISL championships also swim. At last weekend’s practice, she promised that she and the Stone Ridge swimmers were getting along.
“Our club coach always gets us fired up at practice by bringing up the Holton and Stone Ridge rivalry, so it definitely carries over to practice, too,” Duncan said with a laugh. “But no harsh feelings, no rubbing it in, or anything like that.”
About two weeks ago, Blair wrestling coach Tim Grover sent his athletes a podcast, on which professional wrestlers talked about having an “alter ego” when they step on the mat. This idea seemed to inspire the Blazers.
Freshman Daniel Wu has started imagining himself as a powerful grizzly bear when he wrestles. For fellow freshman Jaden Cheung, “it’s like a Viking, and also a barbarian that’s on fire.”
“The whole concept of an alter ego, I find quite interesting and powerful,” Wu said. “And it doesn’t have to be in just sports … it can be applied to many aspects of life.”
Cheung’s high school career was off to a slow start until recently, when he won 12 of his last 15 matches. Last weekend at Winters Mill’s Falcon Invitational, the 120-pounder took a commanding 10-1 lead on the Falcons’ Dalton Dwyer — to whom he’d lost earlier — in the first-place match, en route to collecting his first career title.
Wu, who feels more calm and confident while envisioning himself as a big bear, reached the 106-pound championship in his first varsity tournament, where the former judoka held undefeated Chris Gaeng of Winters Mill close for much of the match.
The Blazers’ strong weekend continued as junior heavyweight Aaron Vernon — a 215-pounder who gives up as many as 70 pounds to his competition — took home a title.
“In the podium picture, there are two people next to him — it’s like the letter ‘M,’ ” Cheung said.
When Katherine Khramtsov lost a faceoff in her own zone late in the second period Wednesday, she shook her head and scrunched her face in disappointment. The Stone Ridge senior was determined to make up for her mistake. Moving with a vengeance, she regained control of the puck, skated it into Georgetown Visitation’s zone and deposited it into back of the net.
“I’m a little hard on myself sometimes,” Khramtsov said after the 10-7 at the Gardens Ice House in Laurel. “If a faceoff goes wrong, it could easily turn into a goal; that’s why I get upset with myself. It’s just the drive to win, the drive to succeed every single shift on the ice every minute, every second, every play.”
Despite having two players defending her much of the night, the Princeton recruit scored six goals for Stone Ridge in a matchup between the area’s two best girls’ teams. Sophomore Madeline Peppo also netted a hat trick for Stone Ridge.
“I think it was a great performance all around, especially for the team,” Khramtsov said. “It was great to have other goal-scorers.”
Visitation’s traditionally deep squad was missing several key few players. Sophomore standout Lucy Thiessen, who was matched up with Khramtsov during Visitation’s 11-9 win in December, was unable to play because of a positive coronavirus test, and captain Phoebe Heaps was out with an injury, forcing the Cubs to pull up a few junior varsity players.
“Obviously our entire game plan had to be dependent on containing Katherine Khramtsov,” Visitation Coach Conrad Rehill said, “but she’s just so good that once she gets the puck on her stick, there’s really nothing you can do about it.”
Coach Desmond Dunham has a track record of winning championships and bringing top-tier competition to the sport. As the track and cross-country coach at St. John’s, Dunham helped create one of the most dominant local programs in recent years.
And in the fall he released his memoir, “Running Against the Odds,” in which Dunham writes that trophies are just a byproduct of more important goals of sports: to motivate, educate, and inspire young athletes.
“We all have problems in this world and especially young folks,” Dunham said. “I just use that on a daily basis to try to motivate my athletes to dig in harder, to look at training as an opportunity and not an obligation, and bettering themselves and letting them know that how you do anything is how you do everything.”
This year has brought new challenges to his Cadets, as they try to navigate a season heavy with restrictions brought on by the pandemic.
Dunham can speak to how the sport can be an outlet. He recounts in the memoir a difficult upbringing, including a strained relationship with his father, as well as struggles with dyslexia and a speech impediment.
“It was something where I was able to harness all of my challenges that I was going through, it became just an amazing escape,” Dunham said. “It really just allowed me to bring a certain balance and calm to my world of chaos.”
As part of the memoir’s pre-sale campaign, Dunham partnered with Under Armour to donate a pair of running shoes or racing spikes to young athletes for each book sold. They donated 300 pairs of sneakers during that effort. | null | null | null | null | null |
The new system, called Topics, will track users on Google’s Chrome browser and assign them a set of advertising categories, like “travel" or “fitness," based on the sites they visit. When the person goes to a site with ads, three of those topics will be shared with advertisers on the site, allowing them to show a relevant ad.
The previous proposed system, called FLOC, assigned users to a group of people who Google’s AI determined all had the same interests. Privacy advocates argued that the ID number associated with a user’s group could be logged by websites and advertisers and used to build profiles of people.
The proposals are part of Google’s master plan to get rid of third-party cookies, the little bits of code that websites drop into a person’s browser that let them follow them around the web, building detailed profiles of their behavior and continuing to advertise to them long after they leave the site. The system is a minefield for privacy and has spurred many people to download ad blockers. But Google relies on advertising, and argues content producers like news organizations and other websites need ads to survive, so it’s been proposing alternatives that try to find a middle path between the current free for all situation and a totally private web.
But the new systems would give more control to Google and less to the advertisers it says it is defending. Right now, websites can collect their own data on peoples’ habits and use it how they see fit. With Google’s proposals, the company itself would keep all the data, running calculations to determine what its users’ interests are and then only giving the topic to the advertiser. The move has already pushed many advertisers to ask customers for their email lists so they can advertise to them directly rather than rely on the web.
Regulators have already cried foul about Google’s plans to block third-party cookies. The company had already been revising its first set of proposals because the UK competition regulator said on Monday a group of German publishers sent a complaint to the EU’s competition authority. | null | null | null | null | null |
MALTA, NY - JUNE 10: Semiconductor chips are printed onto silicone wafers and loaded into containers in the clean room at GlobalFoundries Fab 8 in Malta, New York on June 10, 2021. There’s a worldwide shortage of chips, and GlobalFoundries is one of the big producers. (Cindy Schultz for The Washington Post) | null | null | null | null | null |
Race in America: History Matters with Michelle Duster
Ida B. Wells was a suffragist, civil rights activist and pioneering journalist who chronicled the lynching of Black Americans in her reporting. On Tuesday, Feb. 1 at 11:00 a.m. ET, Michelle Duster, author of “Ida B. the Queen,” discusses her great-grandmother as we kick off our Black History Month series about the role Black women have played in the country’s development.
Provided by representatives with Michelle Duster.
Michelle Duster is an author, professor, public historian, and champion of racial and gender equity. She has written, edited, or contributed to sixteen books. Her most recent Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells was released on January 26, 2021 by Atria/One Signal Publishers (division of Simon & Schuster). She co-wrote the popular children’s history book, Tate and His Historic Dream; co-edited Impact: Personal Portraits of Activism; Shifts: An Anthology of Women’s Growth Through Change; Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls; and edited two books that include the writings of her paternal great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells. She has written articles for Ms. Magazine, TIME, Essence, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, People, Glamour, Daily Beast, and the North Star. She has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, WTTW, CBS & CW as well as numerous radio shows. Her advocacy has led to street names, monuments, historical markers, murals, statues, and other public history projects that highlight women and African Americans, including Wells. She has written two children’s picture books. Ida B. Wells, Voice of Truth will be published in January 2022. You Dared will be published by mid-2023 (Henry Holt: division of Macmillan) | null | null | null | null | null |
Days after its release, the film hit the top of the most-watched list this week in Egypt, Lebanon and other countries around the region. It brought to the screen conversation that may be common in many parts of the Arab world, but typically unfold at home, among friends or in whispers.
In a TV interview, lawmaker Mostafa Bakri accused the film of “targeting” family values in Egypt, where a crackdown on the LGBT+ community has led to dozens of arrests. The lawmaker criticized the depiction of homosexuality and singled out the story line of a father navigating his daughter’s questions about sex. | null | null | null | null | null |
A family wearing protective masks purchases concessions for a movie at the Emagine Theater in Hartland, Michigan, U.S., on Friday, Oct. 9, 2020. Under Governor Whitmer’s executive order, Michigan movie theaters are now permitted to reopen welcoming guests at a limited capacity. Photographer: Emily Elconin/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
“People are skeptical about business travel because of all the remote workforce,” Squeri said on a conference call with analysts Tuesday. “Business travel is going to be completely different. And, I think, as you have more people in more remote locations, they may need to get together three, four, maybe five times a year to come to headquarters.”
As the pandemic shut offices across the country, businesses shifted client and employee meetings online, reducing their spending on things like airfare and conferences. While AmEx expects a full recovery in travel and entertainment spending for individual consumers and small businesses by the end of the year, a similar rebound in corporate travel and entertainment spending will take longer, the New York-based company said.
“Consumers are learning to live with it -- we’re over it,” Squeri said in an interview. “They’re going everywhere right now except the office.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Woody Allen’s latest, ‘Rifkin’s Festival,’ is a pretty film. Pretty forgettable, that is.
Gina Gershon, left, and Wallace Shawn in “Rifkin's Festival.” (Quim Vives/Wildside/Gravier Productions)
Although “Rifkin’s Festival” debuted at the San Sebastián Film Festival in September 2020, the Woody Allen comedy languished, until now, without an American distributor, as long-standing accusations of sexual abuse against the filmmaker received a fresh airing in the 2020 HBO docuseries “Farrow vs. Allen.” Set in San Sebastián, Spain — appropriately enough, against the gorgeous backdrop of the festival — the writer-director’s latest movie tells the story of a nebbishy film professor (Wallace Shawn) who suspects his gorgeous film publicist wife (Gina Gershon) of having an affair with a handsome French director (Louis Garrel). The cinephilic, sometimes sycophantic milieu is lightly satirized, with an opening montage of inane questions from film journalists posed to movie stars and directors.
“In the movie, were all your orgasms special effects?” is an example of the humor, which is broad and not especially clever. The same might be said of the film’s central conceit, in which Shawn’s Mort Rifkin — like many Woody Allen protagonists before him, a stand-in for the filmmaker himself: neurotic, insecure and obsessed with death, God and the meaning of life — has black-and-white dreams based on classic films by such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Orson Welles. These cinematic nightmares show Allen to have insights on such movies as “Citizen Kane,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Exterminating Angel” and “The Seventh Seal” that are no deeper than those of a C student in an undergraduate film-history class.
The protagonist, who narrates the film as flashbacks during a conversation with his psychotherapist (Michael Garvey), seems justified in his suspicions of his wife and her client, who flirt with each other shamelessly. Simultaneously, Mort embarks on an infatuation with a pretty Spanish physician, Jo Rojas (Elena Anaya), whom he visits after experiencing chest pains. She’s also unhappily married, to a philandering painter (Sergi López).
In a refreshingly realistic take, the doctor — way out of Mort’s league and more than 20 years his junior — shows absolutely no interest in him, other than as a friend and someone to commiserate with.
The film’s location, which centers largely on the Belle Époque Hotel Maria Cristina but also includes boat trips and other scenic detours, is absolutely lovely to look at, with lots of pretty architecture and golden light. But the story itself feels low energy and slightly lazy.
Shawn seems mildly and often inappropriately amused by nothing, with a perpetual expression on his face that is midway between a half-smirk and outright bemusement. The dialogue includes many moments of self-conscious awkwardness (too many to count, honestly) in which straightforward examples of small talk — “I got you something,” “Where have you been?” and “How are you?” — are met with a confused “Me?
“Rifkin’s Festival” explicitly sets us up to expect a story that revisits Allen’s grand fixation on the big questions, or as one character puts it, “What’s it all about?” But in the end, the film doesn’t feel like it’s about very much at all. It’s a throwaway movie, a bit of filler in the Woody Allen canon. Like a dream you’ve half forgotten by the time you get to the breakfast table, it’s neither good enough to make much of an impression or bad enough to completely forget.
PG-13. At Landmark’s E Street Cinema; also available on demand. Contains suggestive and sexual material, some drug use, strong language and mature thematic elements. 92 minutes. | null | null | null | null | null |
Conservatives, led by DeSantis, erupt over another unproven coronavirus treatment
First hydroxychloroquine. Then ivermectin. Now the right is crying foul over the FDA withholding two monoclonal antibody treatments that studies show are not effective against omicron.
Few things inspire as much passion in the Republican base these days as alternative and often-unproven coronavirus treatments — even as many in the party continue to shun the most proven-effective treatment: vaccination. There has thus been a premium on politicians promoting the treatments or at least decrying scientists and government officials who question or reject their use.
In 2020, the prime example was hydroxychloroquine. In 2021, it was ivermectin. And early in 2022, it’s monoclonal antibodies, which multiple early studies show are not effective against the now-dominant omicron variant.
The Food and Drug Administration announced Monday that it would halt emergency-use authorizations for two monoclonal antibody therapies, one made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and one by Eli Lilly. The reason: Although they were useful against previous coronavirus variants, the early evidence suggests omicron has completely changed the game.
At least with these monoclonal antibodies, unlike hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, there was evidence they were once quite effective; that’s just not the situation we find ourselves in at this point.
The FDA decision has led to a perhaps-predictable response from some on the right, including the Republican who has most forcefully promoted monoclonal antibodies: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
This was at the core of the FDA’s decision to reverse its 2020 emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine. “It is no longer reasonable to believe that oral formulations” of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine “may be effective in treating COVID-19,” the FDA determined, “nor is it reasonable to believe that the known and potential benefits of these products outweigh their known and potential risks.”
Indeed, the evidence for hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness had long been spotty, despite its promotion on the right, including by then-President Donald Trump. “What do you have to lose?” Trump said repeatedly. But that’s not the calculation the FDA must make.
Similarly, despite DeSantis’s claim that there is not “a shred of clinical data to support” the FDA’s decision, there is indeed significant data on the monoclonal antibodies’ lack of effectiveness against omicron.
As Nature reported more than a month ago, preliminary studies suggested that monoclonal antibody therapies, including the ones the FDA has now halted, showed virtually no efficacy against omicron.
Another conducted by Columbia University researchers along with the University of Hong Kong echoed those findings a week later. As Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center summarized:
A more recent study, published in Nature last week, built upon the evidence. It stated that while some monoclonal antibodies had an effect, the ones used by Regeneron and Eli Lilly “completely lost neutralizing activity against” omicron, and the combinations used by Regeneron and Eli Lilly “also lacked inhibitory capacity.”
Some of these studies, of course, are a month old. And, indeed, there has been controversy over the continued use (until Monday) of these specific monoclonal antibody treatments. The Department of Health and Human Services briefly halted their shipments on Dec. 23, before resuming them about a week later.
DeSantis had fought back, suggesting that the therapies could still be used against what remained of the delta variant. At the time, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that delta still made up about one-quarter of infections in the United States; today, it accounts for a fraction of 1 percent.
But both DeSantis and Pushaw have also pushed back on the idea that the monoclonal antibody treatments don’t work against omicron. Pushaw earlier this month seemed to cite anecdotal evidence, saying that “there have been omicron cases treated with other [monoclonal antibodies] that showed significant improvement, contrary to the initial study that came out and apparently informed the now-reversed HHS policy.”
The Washington Post reached out to Pushaw on Tuesday morning to ask for data supporting the claim that monoclonal antibody treatments remain effective against omicron, but it did not receive a response.
It’s certainly possible and even likely that omicron patients treated with these monoclonal antibodies showed significant improvement, as Pushaw said. But as with other unproven treatments that have been pushed using similar anecdotes, that doesn’t mean the treatment was the reason for it. Most people hospitalized with the coronavirus, after all, will recover. | null | null | null | null | null |
WASHINGTON, D.C. - FEBRUARY 13, 2021: Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman walks through a Capitol hallway during the fifth day of the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
For the first time since the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman has spoken out publicly about his experiences during the attack, where his actions were credited with saving countless lives.
“I keep asking myself that question every day, like who the hell am I?” Goodman told the hosts at the beginning of the interview, when they joke that it felt surreal to have landed the first exclusive interview with him after he turned down so many others. But Goodman said he felt safe with them, noting one of the hosts is Byron “Buff” Evans, a personal friend and coworker who was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Goodman said most people don’t realize he was actually outside for a bit during the siege. When he ran into the mob at the Senate, Goodman said he was surprised to see that the crowd had penetrated the inside of the complex.
“I honestly didn’t know they were that far up into the building,” Goodman said. “[I thought] Aw hell, they’re actually in the building. They lock eyes on me right away and just like that, I was in it. It wasn’t a matter of let me leave them alone or not. I feel like they would have followed me anyway”
“I was just in go mode, you know what I mean?” he said, adding that he was focused on safety and deescalation, “to a point,” as he faced angry people screaming in his face, some of whom he suspected could have been armed.
“Any situation like that you want to deescalate but at the same time you want to survive first,” Goodman said. “You never know. It could have easily been a bloodbath so kudos to everybody there that showed a measure of restraint with regards to deadly force, 'cause it could have been baaad. Really, really bad.”
“My daughter, she’s hilarious. All she said was, ‘I saw you on TV’ and then she went right back to, ‘Okay, so I need these V bucks for Fortnite,’ which for me was good. It was good,” he said. “'Cause it got my mind off there … What it was was, okay, you’re home now. You can relax and go into daddy mode.”
“And what’s the narrative then?” he said. “I’ve had my ups and downs with the popularity … That’s mostly why I haven’t been doing any interviews or anything like that.”
Senators unanimously awarded Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman the Congressional Gold Medal on Feb. 12. (The Washington Post) | null | null | null | null | null |
Conservatives, led by DeSantis, erupt over another unproven coronavirus tre...
Omicron wave is wakeup call about need to vaccinate the world, say Hill Democrats, experts
They urge additional investment, saying the risk of new variants remains high as long as billions of people are unvaccinated.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by LEGNAN KOULA/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (12768987c) An Ivory Coast man receives a coronavirus vaccine last week before the Africa Cup of Nations soccer match. (Legnan Koula/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Senior administration officials, public health experts and Democrats say that the omicron wave has illustrated gaps in the U.S. global covid strategy, warning that low-income nations are particularly vulnerable to coronavirus and the risk of another variant will remain elevated as long as billions of people are unvaccinated.
“The assignment is incomplete,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who is leading a group of Democrats calling for $17 billion in additional funding for global vaccination delivery and infrastructure to inoculate people in the developing world. “We need to make this investment going forward, and we need to do it ASAP.”
Some lawmakers and officials also say they remain unhappy with President Biden’s decision to split authority over global covid strategy between White House covid coordinator Jeff Zients and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, arguing the structure complicates decisions and forces the two men to navigate between competing crises. Zients’ covid team has recently focused on the surging U.S. outbreak, and Sullivan’s national security team is addressing threats such as Russia’s potential invasion of Ukraine.
About 10 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine have been administered around the world, but they have been concentrated in wealthy nations, according to a World Health Organization review shared with The Washington Post. High-income countries have administered about 14 times more doses per inhabitant compared to low-income countries, WHO found. About 84 percent of the population of the African Union has yet to receive a single shot, even as about 40 percent of Americans have received booster shots, according to The Post’s vaccine tracker.
The Biden administration maintains that its leadership structure is working and that its global strategy — which is focused on donating vaccine doses abroad — remains unchanged, despite omicron’s ability to evade some immune protection conferred by vaccines. The United States has now donated about 390 million doses to other countries, far more than any other nation, with Biden pressing global leaders to ramp up their donations.
“We know what works, and it’s vaccines. And we’re leaning into that hard,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. “The science is clear. Vaccines are protecting, particularly when boosters are deployed.”
The United States is also helping fund efforts to increase vaccine manufacturing capacity around the world, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said in an interview on “The Ezra Klein Show,” adding that the administration recognizes the global shortfall. “We are not where we need to be,” Klain said.
Officials touted a new campaign, led by the United States Agency for International Development and initially funded with roughly $500 million, that is now supporting mobile vaccination sites, improvements to vaccine storage and addressing other logistical needs in low- and middle-income countries around the world.
“This is a winnable fight,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, executive director of USAID’s covid task force, saying that recent spikes in vaccination rates in African countries like Zambia, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire show “proof of concept” for the U.S. strategy. For instance, 22 percent of people in Ghana have now received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, after vaccination rates were stalled below 8 percent for most of 2021, according to data tracked by Oxford University’s Our World in Data project.
White House officials confirmed they are targeting late March for an international summit, led by President Biden, intended to hold global leaders accountable for pledges they made last year, including a vow to “fully vaccinate” 70 percent of the world by the fall of 2022. To help lay the groundwork for that meeting, senior officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra also are preparing to host meetings with their own global counterparts, said two people with knowledge of those plans who were not authorized to speak.
Gayle Smith, who led the State Department’s covid response last year, said that Biden’s strategy was working but remains dependent on international cooperation.
“We know what it takes. And we’ve got the skills, the knowledge, the facts, and … the resources to do it. We’ve just got to muster the global political will to not just do more, but do enough,” Smith added.
But public health and international policy experts say the White House’s strategy continues to fall short, warning the collateral damage of covid remains high as countries reel from disruptions to health systems, social services and the resurgent risk of other infectious diseases like measles. Meanwhile, a key Biden pledge — to tamp down global virus spread — is far from being met.
“The big picture, of course, is that we haven’t been able to limit transmission,” said Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for Global Development, a not-for-profit think tank focused on international development. “Cases are increasing everywhere. And viral diversity is therefore increasing … It’s a very good time to revisit the strategy and to plan for an extended period of several years where we’re going to be more at risk for the emergence of new variants.”
Congressional Democrats are pushing the White House to immediately request billions of dollars earmarked for the global response as part of a supplemental funding package that could be sent to the Hill this week, warning that some covid stimulus funds are nearly exhausted.
Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), the vice chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs who also signed the letter, said there’s “nothing more important” than prioritizing the global covid response.
“I’m beside myself about what’s happening in Ukraine … But if your focus is on America’s foreign policy, and you’re not waking up every morning and going to sleep every night, thinking about vaccinating the world against covid, then there’s something wrong,” Malinowski added.
Democrats also said they were worried that the omicron variant — which is less deadly than some previous variants — would be prematurely perceived as helping usher in the end of the pandemic, with billions of people around the globe potentially gaining immunity that might help ward off future infections. Some public health experts also have argued that omicron could shift covid toward a more manageable stage of the virus.
Atul Gawande, a high-profile surgeon and author who was sworn in this month as USAID’s assistant administrator for global health, countered that the administration has envisioned multiple scenarios for the omicron wave and what comes next — none of which are easy.
In an interview, Gawande said “the best case is that omicron sweeps through the world quickly,” but still leaves behind global “testing shortages, enormous demand for the oral antiviral medications that need to be made available, stress on masks, supplies and other critical elements, plus the demand not only for full vaccination, but for boosters to roll out across the world.”
“The worst case is that we have the next variant not be so mild and evade our tests and vaccines,” Gawande added. “Almost like starting with an entirely new infection again.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: The Maryland General Assembly should adopt Hogan’s tax plan
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) in Annapolis on Jan. 4. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
By Randolph May
Randolph May is president of the Free State Foundation, an independent nonprofit think tank in Rockville.
As the 444th session of the Maryland General Assembly convened in Annapolis on Jan. 12, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) proposed a package of targeted tax cuts estimated to provide about $4.6 billion in tax relief. He touted the proposal as “the largest tax cut package in state history.”
Given Maryland’s massive projected budget surplus — about equal to the size of Hogan’s tax relief package — the legislature should adopt meaningful tax cuts. Absent such action, it’s likely that Maryland’s business climate will continue to worsen, and that Maryland may experience out-migration from the state, especially by retirees.
Hogan’s proposal targets the bulk of the tax cuts — about $4 billion phased in over time — to eliminating taxes on retirement income. The remainder is aimed at enhancing Maryland’s refundable earned income tax credit and providing additional tax incentives for manufacturers to relocate to Maryland or expand existing employment opportunities in the state.
As a matter of sound tax policy, it might be preferable for the General Assembly to enact an across-the-board income tax cut. After all, according to a March 2021 study in WalletHub, Maryland has the third-highest personal income tax burden of all the states. A study by the nonprofit Tax Foundation, also published in March 2021, found that in 2019, among all the states, Maryland had the sixth highest effective state and local tax burden.
Though a proposal embodying broader base income tax reductions, ideally, might be more desirable, Hogan’s package nonetheless has much to commend it. There is a case to be made for granting retirees tax relief. And given the common depiction of Maryland as a state that, increasingly, is unfriendly to business, tax relief for manufacturers makes sense too.
Start with retirement — and this eye-opener. In Bankrate’s July 2021 study “The Best and Worst States for Retirement,” Maryland ranked dead last. This ranking was driven in substantial part by Bankrate’s 40 percent weighting for the “affordability” factor in which Maryland ranked 47th. “Affordability” in turn was impacted heavily by the state’s tax burden. Admittedly, the other factors employed by Bankrate — weather, culture, wellness and crime — are susceptible to a certain degree of subjectivity. But it’s not prudent to dismiss out of hand a study by a respected organization like Bankrate that ranks Maryland as the worst state for retirement.
This is especially true when the latest Census Bureau data show Maryland lost population between 2020 and 2021 because of out-migration (that is, after accounting for births and deaths.) And the latest annual United Van Lines National Movers Survey confirmed the out-migration, with 28 percent of those leaving Maryland citing “retirement” as a reason.
Hogan’s proposed tax incentives for manufacturers should help address Maryland’s problematic business climate, even though, again ideally, across-the-board corporate tax reductions might be preferable. The Tax Foundation’s 2022 State Business Climate Index, released in December, placed Maryland 46th out of the 50 states. This ranking is based on an assessment of how well states structure their tax systems, so the extent to which Hogan’s tax incentives for manufacturers will affect the ranking is unclear. But it’s likely that, if adopted, they will improve not only the perception of Maryland’s business climate but also the reality.
The point of reciting all these statistics is not to facilitate construction of a fancy spreadsheet. Rather it’s to suggest Maryland has problems that can be addressed if the legislature would abandon its default “tax and spend” mind-set. With the General Assembly’s Spending Affordability Committee now projecting a historic budget surplus of $4.1 billion at the close of fiscal 2022, and with “structural surpluses” projected through 2027, now is the time to provide Marylanders with meaningful tax relief, rather than using these surpluses to embark on further spending sprees.
Governors and lawmakers from all over the country are proposing substantial tax reductions in 2022 in light of their own projected budget surpluses. These proposals are coming not only from Republicans in so-called red states like Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas, but also from Democratic governors Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul in blue California and New York.
At the end of the day, it’s not a matter of simply following the lead of politicians of all stripes across the country. It’s doing what’s right for Marylanders. The General Assembly should enact into law substantial tax relief along the lines proposed by Hogan.
How many Marylanders fought for the rebels was overstated | null | null | null | null | null |
Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at the 2019 State of the Union address. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
The court announced this week that it will soon be hearing cases in two vital areas, and in both cases, the outcome on a court that now has a 6 to 3 conservative supermajority is all but certain. When these are decided, affirmative action in higher education will likely be outlawed, and the government’s ability to protect the environment will be cut back.
The GOP does, however, have a comprehensive negative policy agenda — a list of things they want to stop Democrats from doing. Which is where the Supreme Court comes in.
Republicans know that it would be politically impossible to enact many of their ideas at a national level; you may have noticed that when they controlled the White House and Congress in 2017 and 2018, they did not try to pass legislation outlawing abortion, disbanding the Environmental Protection Agency, and repealing every state-level gun regulation.
As it is, on abortion it now looks all but certain that the court will strike down Roe v. Wade later this year (though abortion will remain legal in states Democrats control). These new cases show how the court’s majority is ticking off items on a long list of ways it wants to remake American law.
In a series of prior cases, the court narrowed the scope of what kind of affirmative action policies are legal, but left universities with some ability to consider race in admissions. In the last decision in 2016, it ruled that universities could include race as a consideration, but its use had to be narrowly tailored and demonstrated to be the only way the school could accomplish its admission goals.
That case produced an angry dissent from Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. Two of the justices who ruled with the 4 to 3 majority — Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — are no longer on the court. There is approximately zero reason to believe that affirmative action in education will survive the court’s current term.
Second, the court agreed to hear a case concerning how the EPA applies the Clean Water Act. While the facts of the case look narrow — it concerns whether or not the waters on the plaintiff’s property qualify as wetlands, and what kind of permit is required to build there — it will be up to the court to decide how far to go when they inevitably rule against the EPA.
They could go quite far, not just in this case but in subsequent ones. We can expect to see the court taking one case after another in which they reach deep down into statutory interpretation, always with the same end result: to restrict government’s ability to regulate, so long as it’s doing so in service of goals like protecting the environment, workers, or public health.
Reasonable people can disagree about the value of stare decisis, the principle that the court should respect its prior decisions except in the most exceptional circumstances. But it’s clear that this court no longer even pretends to do so. However much they dress up decisions with conservative movement catchphrases (Originalism! Textualism! The Framers!), they’re no different from a party that wins control of a legislature, then begins passing bills to change the policies it objected to when it was in the minority.
Here is the trick Republicans have pulled. First, they used the minoritarian features of the American system to shift the Supreme Court dramatically to the right. Two successive Republican presidents were elected with fewer votes than their opponents; then they appointed five justices between them. Most were confirmed narrowly by a Senate where Republicans represent far fewer Americans than the body’s Democrats do, even when those Democrats are in the minority.
But that is what it has almost always been, and what it is today. The idea that the court just calls “balls and strikes,” in Chief Justice John Roberts’ famous phrase, is more laughable than ever. This court is the Republican Party’s policymaking vanguard, and its ambitions are nearly as limitless as its power. | null | null | null | null | null |
FILE - Rihanna attends an event for her lingerie line Savage X Fenty at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles on on Aug. 28, 2021. Rihanna is backing her belief that climate change is a social justice issue by pledging $15 million to the movement through her Clara Lionel Foundation. The “We Found Love” singer Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022, announced the donation to 18 climate justice organizations doing work in seven Caribbean nations and the United States, including the Climate Justice Alliance, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the Movement for Black Lives.(Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | null | null | null | null | null |
NORFOLK, Va. — Hotels in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region have been seeing their revenues rising. But the rest of the state is still trying to catch up to pre-pandemic levels.
The school’s Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy said that Hampton Roads saw 9% higher hotel revenues in 2021 compared to 2019. The region is also outperforming the nation’s top 25 markets regarding revenue growth, revenue per available room and other metrics.
And yet hotel revenues for the commonwealth as a whole are still 18% lower than those in 2019. Northern Virginia and Richmond still have significantly lower rates. Northern Virginia’s revenue in 2021 was still 47% lower than 2019. Richmond’s was 4% lower.
“With increasing vaccinations, rising consumer confidence and continued pent-up demand in leisure travel, we have seen significant improvement in the performance of the hotel industry over the 2019 levels, and we expect the industry to continue its recovery in 2022,” Agarwal said. “However, increasing cases of omicron, continuing COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated also threaten to undermine the pace of recovery.” | null | null | null | null | null |
NYC subways kill dozens of people each year. Other countries have paid for safety.
One of the victims, 40-year-old Michelle Alyssa Go, was killed after a homeless man shoved her ahead of an oncoming train at the Times Square station Jan. 15. The other victim, a 62-year-old man, was pushed onto the tracks Sunday at the Fulton Street station but survived with minor injuries.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority logged 169 collisions between trains and people in 2020 — 63 of them fatal, according to the City. The previous year saw 62 deadly strikes. Sarah Feinberg, then theinterim president of New York City Transit, told the news outlet that 12-9s — radio code for a person under a train — are “absolutely devastating” for the victim and “traumatic” for train operators, frontline workers and witnesses.”
This month’s shoving incidents have spurred fears among the city’s millions of daily riders and galvanized calls for authorities to better protect passengers. But while episodes like these are rare, they also appear to be an outsize problem in New York and the United States at large. No major U.S. public transit rail systems have installed platform screen doors onto existing stations, according to Bay Area Rapid Transit.
But after the death of a visually impaired person who fell onto tracks in Machida, Tokyo, the Japanese government in 2011 called on railway companies to install doors along platforms on stations that saw more than 100,000 riders per day, according to Japan newspaper Mainichi.
According to a 2015 report by planning officials from the West Japan Railway Company, the “wire style” gates were a successful experiment — with 90 percent of passengers welcoming the increased safety level they experienced and supporting further installations.
To overcome the difficulties of having different providers’ trains with different door configurations using the same tracks, train doors have QR codes, which QR readers on the platform scan to open train and platform doors simultaneously.
Tokyo Metro, a subway operator in Japan, was the first company to adopt platform doors in the nation in 1991. The company added doors to its newly opening lines and found a way to retrofit doors onto platforms of entire lines — and completed the at night to avoid disrupting service, according to Japan Times columnist Alice Gordenker. A 2016 Mainichi report found that two-thirds of Japan’s busiest stations still lacked barriers.
Brazil has had platform screen doors at the Sao Paulo Metro for over a decade. Many of the newer stations feature full length automatic glass doors, taller than the trains themselves.
In 2019 the government announced a further expansion of platform door installation at 36 more stations, with the added challenge of being retrofitted onto older stations. Each new door must be at least 2.1 meters (nearly seven feet) in height, be mostly transparent and have a sensor scanning for the presence of people in the gaps between the doors.
“Platform screen doors increase the efficiency of the metro because it makes it almost impossible for the passenger to cause any interference on the track — from trash thrown on the track to an accident with people falling, being pushed or attempting suicide,” said João Octaviano Machado Neto, then municipal secretary of mobility, according to Rail Journal.
Paris has also launched initiatives to get platform doors installed on its stations, part of a massive automation overhaul of some for the oldest routes of Paris Metro. Some of the system is driverless and completely automated.
Last October, Clearsy, a prime contractor for parts of the platform door deployment, announced the operation of the doors across several Paris metro lines, including curved stations.
The New York City subway is among the world’s oldest , serving over 1.5 billion passengers annually. (In 2020, the number was closer to 600 million). The first subway station opened in 1904.
The political will also seems to be absent, despite a spike in interest every few years after a death by shoving gains national attention. “It is such a rare occurrence that no matter how tragic it is, it shouldn’t change our lifestyle,” Mike Bloomberg said in 2013, when he was mayor, the Atlantic reported. | null | null | null | null | null |
In summer 2005, E! offered viewers a rare look inside the Playboy Mansion with a reality show about three women, all blond and in their 20s and 30s, who were dating Hugh Hefner, the then-near-octogenarian founder of Playboy magazine. The series, which would run for a total of six seasons, quickly introduced viewers to Holly Madison, who described herself as “Hef’s No. 1 girlfriend.” As Madison recalled moving into the sprawling Gothic-Tudor just two days after her and Hefner’s first date, she mused, “I guess you could say we were made for each other.”
The first episode introduces Jennifer Saginor, the daughter of Hefner’s longtime doctor. Saginor says she was just 6 when her father first took her to the mansion, which she described as “a magical kingdom” where she could have anything she wanted from candy to gourmet lunches to extended leisure time in the game room. The mansion’s “larger-than-life” owner, she says, was like an uncle to her.
Surrounded by glamorous women — and men, including her father and Hefner, who openly judged the looks of the women vying to be in Playboy — Saginor says she struggled with her self-image and was encouraged to get plastic surgery as young as 15. It was around the same time that Saginor says she “fell very hard” for one of Hefner’s girlfriends. Away from her mother, Saginor says she “longed for the affection that only a woman could give” and became very close to the woman, identified only as “Kendall.”
Saginor recalls one night in which the woman ordered daiquiris up to her bedroom, where “one thing led to another.” Mitch Rosen, who worked as a butler to Hefner from 1983 to 1989, says in the docuseries that he “served Mr. Hefner’s girlfriend and Jennifer drinks in bed” when Saginor was underage and that “the people that knew [about the affair] knew that Jennifer was underaged.”
“Many of the girls wanted to tell you their problems,” Tetenbaum adds. “And that made us all nervous. We had to be very careful, because we knew we were being monitored.”
Even after dissolving some of the mystique around her childhood, Saginor says she took pains to “portray Hef in a very, very positive light” in her 2006 memoir, “Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion,” out of a sense of lingering loyalty — and fear of repercussions. She recalls Hefner calling her while she was in Los Angeles promoting her book. He told her he was proud of her and asked about the interviews she had lined up for her next tour stop. He also asked that she keep his knowledge of her underage relationship a secret. Though she agreed, Saginor says all of her interviews were summarily canceled “in succession.”
By the time Madison arrived at the mansion in 2001, Hefner’s girlfriends had all started to resemble each other, which she says was yet another way he exerted control. Six months into her stay, Madison cut her long blonde hair to set herself apart. Hefner “flipped out,” she says, and “was screaming at me saying it made me look ‘old, hard and cheap.’ ”
“We were told one day that we needed to sign contracts and we need to sign them that day or E! wasn’t going to renew the show,” Madison says. “I just didn’t want to sign a contract that in essence was signing a contract to be in a relationship since the show was about three girls he was dating. That felt very prostitute-ish to me.”
Madison also signed but says she did so “under duress.”
Madison left the mansion in 2008, the same year she completed her run on the E! reality series. Her co-stars Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson had already left by then. “At that point, there were no women to pit me against, there was none of that left,” Madison says. “I had been locked into the mentality at the mansion and had felt like ‘there’s no other future for me outside.’ ” | null | null | null | null | null |
Ana de Armas at the world premiere of the James Bond film “No Time To Die” on Sept. 28. (Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)
Peter Michael Rosza, another man who watched the trailer before renting the movie in October, says he experienced the same disappointment when the film ended. Just like the film’s plot, in which the Beatles didn’t exist, the actress was nowhere to be found, Rosza, 44, lamented.
Now, both men are suing Universal Pictures in a class-action federal lawsuit, alleging the studio knowingly distributed “false,” “deceptive” and “misleading” advertisements and promotions for “Yesterday.” Despite being publicized as a substantial character in the film, de Armas never appeared in it, according to the suit, which was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
An attorney for the men did not immediately respond to a message from The Washington Post late Monday. Neither Woulfe nor Rosza replied to messages from The Post. | null | null | null | null | null |
After 15 seasons at the helm, Sean Payton informed the New Orleans Saints Tuesday he's stepping down as head coach. (Derick Hingle/AP)
Sean Payton has decided to step away as coach of the New Orleans Saints, according to a person familiar with the situation.
It did not initially appear that Payton had resolved to retire permanently from coaching. Instead, he decided that he needed to take some time away from the sideline.
Payton, 58, leaves the Saints’ sideline after 15 seasons in which he secured a Super Bowl victory and teamed with Drew Brees to form one of the most successful coach-and-quarterback tandems in NFL history.
Payton won 63 percent of his regular season games and guided the Saints to the playoffs nine times. They won the Super Bowl in the 2009 season. He missed the 2012 season as part of the NFL’s penalties against the Saints for the “Bountygate” scandal.
The Saints missed the playoffs this season with a record of 9-8. They played without Brees, who retired after last season, and lost starting quarterback Jameis Winston to a season-ending knee injury.
Payton reportedly met Monday with Saints General Manager Mickey Loomis. The Saints announced they will hold a news conference Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern time.
Payton’s decision was first reported Tuesday by NFL Network. | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker on Friday blocked the University of Florida from barring professors from participating in lawsuits against the state. Issuing a preliminary injunction involving a conflict-of-interest policy enacted in 2020, the judge accused the university of trying to silence the professors because of fear their testimony, in cases involving voting rights and mask mandates, would anger Republican state officials and lawmakers who control funding for the state’s flagship school.
The 74-page order likened the actions of the University of Florida to Hong Kong’s removal last year of an imposing statute that had stood for more than 20 years commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre victims because of political pressure from the authoritarian Chinese government. “Some might say, ‘that’s China, it could never happen here,'” the judge wrote, “But Plaintiffs contend it already has.” A footnote drove the point home, “If those in UF’s administration find this comparison upsetting, the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.”
The university has offered varying explanations — first contending a conflict of interest, then saying the faculty could be witnesses if they weren’t paid and then lifting the ban and claiming to have rewritten the policy to make future bans more difficult. The judge noted that only when the matter gained national prominence did the university, its reputation tarred, relent for these professors. What it still has not done — despite what he called “ample opportunity to limit its discretion to salvage its constitutionally infirm policy” — is to amend the policy to state that the school will not rely on political considerations to deny an outside activity request.
More is at stake than the individual rights of professors. Teachers, the judge wrote, quoting Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, are the “priests of our democracy” who provide guidance in the pursuit of truth and informed citizenship. “When such critical inquiry is stifled,” Judge Walker wrote, “democracy suffers.” The judge set trial for November and the association that accredits the university is conducting its own inquiry. A spokeswoman for the university said it is considering its next steps. Here’s an idea: recognize that the mission of a university is to promote knowledge and understanding and not cower to the interests of the politicians in power. | null | null | null | null | null |
The pandemic also motivated Alexandra Arkoian, 43, a mental health therapist and project manager. “Covid has had its challenges with remote work and adapting to a different daily flow of life,” Arkoian said. “It caused me to reevaluate my needs and how I want to live my life."
The building has nine units. Four are already under contract. Prices range from $399,000 to $1,095,000.
CORRECTIONS: An earlier version of this report stated incorrectly that Alexandra Arkoian is an occupational therapist. She is a mental health therapist. Also, the earlier version said three units were under contract. Four are now under contract. The story has been updated. | null | null | null | null | null |
The vaccine issue is simple. Passing judgment on Aaron Rodgers is complicated
Aaron Rodgers looks on during the second half of Green Bay's playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers. (Aaron Gash/AP)
As it has done for several years now, an international organization fighting human trafficking on Tuesday announced a rollout of its latest campaign, timed to the upcoming Super Bowl. The group, called It’s a Penalty, planned a news conference at LAX. Uber drivers were to be given tags to hang in their back seats with a hotline number. Hotel executives were to pledge the support of their properties.
As such, de Carvalho’s organization conscripts concerned NFL stars in its mission. In a 30-second video on American Airlines and Southwest Airlines flights, passengers hear from Rams punter Johnny Hekker, Buccaneers receiver Chris Godwin, Bears quarterbacks Andy Dalton and Nick Foles.
And from the Packers, just as he participated a year ago, quarterback Aaron Rodgers — who is also the league’s best-known and most outspoken anti-vaxxer.
Rodgers just last week amplified his vaccination skepticism in an interview with ESPN, panning President Biden’s charge that the pandemic is being driven by the unvaccinated like Rodgers, and suggesting that social media sites were in the wrong by censoring those like Rodgers who spew doubts about the science. He even exhaled some reckless suspicion about Biden’s victory.
For the record, yet again: The science from the Centers for Disease Control most recently found that “among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020-October 2021, severe covid-19-associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare.”
In the NFL, as in society, Rodgers is an outlier. The league has said upward of 95 percent of its players are vaccinated. Still, Rodgers appealed to the league that he was allergic to two of the approved vaccines, was uncertain of the efficacy of a third approved shot, and had protected himself by taking ivermectin, zinc and monoclonal antibodies treatments. He then tested positive in early November and was forced by league protocols to miss a game.
For the record, yet again: The CDC does not approve of ivermectin as a prophylactic against covid. It hasn’t found zinc to be of any help unless you’re looking to reflect ultraviolet rays at the beach. And it says monoclonal treatments are for those at high risk.
I wondered if Rodgers would appear at the It’s a Penalty event. After all, despite another MVP-worthy season — this time amassing more than 4,100 yards passing with 37 touchdowns and just four interceptions — Rodgers doesn’t have anything pressing to do this week. The three-time MVP was unceremoniously booted from the playoffs Saturday night in a stunning 13-10 loss to San Francisco on his winter wonderland of a home field in Green Bay.
It was a setback that, because of Rodgers’ perplexing stance on vaccinations, spurred a stream of self-satisfied schadenfreude on social media.
Everybody had jokes! #ByeAaron was trending. Politico David Axelrod tweeted that despite being favored, Rodgers and the Packers “WEREN’T immune!!” Robby Kalland, a writer at Uproxx, quipped that Rodgers “should’ve done more of his own research on the 49ers defense.” Former player turned TV run-a-mouth Shannon Sharpe wrote that Rodgers “won’t have to worry about being Covid tested next [week] or ppl trying to silence him.” And Robert Reich, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor, even invoked cause celebre Colin Kaepernick on his Twitter stage: “Just a reminder: Colin Kaepernick led the 49ers to three victories over Aaron Rodgers and the Packers.”
Indeed, until Rodgers got caught in a lie by misleading the public about whether he was vaccinated (and then turning out to be vaccine skeptic), he was as conscious about social justice issues — which is exactly what vaccination is — as any athlete out there, bar none.
When former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker tried to strip his state’s public-sector unions of virtually all collective-bargaining rights, one person who came to the defense of the unions was Rodgers, who would also serve as a Packers’ shop rep to the NFL Players Association. About the same time, Rodgers became actively involved in the fight against conflict mining, specifically in the central African country Congo, where raw materials that make our phones and laptops are sourced under eye of armed groups that have fought and committed all manner of human-rights abuses over the spoils of that trade. He’s a face of the movement’s Enough Project — and now he’s also fighting human trafficking.
I wish we could be uncomplicated. But I recall marching for U.S. institutions and businesses to divest from South Africa only to see the legendary poet Nikki Giovanni refuse to join other artists in declining to entertain the brutal apartheid regime and sporting a South African Krugerrand on her watchband.
What of Rodgers in the end? It’s not over, not yet. His season is, but not his career. He’ll be back next year, in Green Bay or some other locale, where people who this week trolled him with Internet punchlines will cheer him as a potential savior.
For me, it reminded how convoluted, disingenuous and sometimes preposterous we can be. All of us, including Rodgers and his newfound haters. | null | null | null | null | null |
After 15 seasons at the helm, Sean Payton informed the New Orleans Saints Tuesday he’s stepping down as head coach. (Derick Hingle/AP)
Sean Payton has decided to step away as coach of the New Orleans Saints, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
Payton, 58, is not necessarily retiring permanently from coaching in the NFL but was fatigued from the challenges of the job and concluded that he needs some time away from the sideline, according to one of those people. He is not expected to coach during the 2022 NFL season and has drawn interest from networks as a broadcaster.
The Saints did not immediately confirm the move but announced that they will conduct a news conference at 4 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. They will become the ninth of the 32 NFL teams to be in the market for a new head coach.
Payton leaves the Saints’ sideline after 15 seasons over 16 years in which he secured a Super Bowl victory and teamed with Drew Brees to form one of the most successful coach-and-quarterback tandems in NFL history.
Payton won 63 percent of his regular season games, compiling a record of 152-89, and guided the Saints to the playoffs nine times.
They won the Super Bowl in the 2009 season, cementing the once-downtrodden franchise’s status as a rallying point for its community after New Orleans was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Saints were displaced from New Orleans that year but returned to the city in 2006, their first season with Payton as their coach and Brees as their quarterback. The reached the NFC championship game that season.
Payton missed the 2012 season as part of the NFL’s penalties against the Saints for the “Boutygate” scandal. The league cited Payton for failing to do more to halt a program administered by defensive coordinator Gregg Williams that, an NFL investigation concluded, provided the team’s players with payments for hits that injured opponents.
The Saints missed the playoffs this season with a record of 9-8. They played without Brees, who retired after last season, and lost new starting quarterback Jameis Winston to a season-ending knee injury.
Payton spoke late in the season of how demanding this season was. The Saints left New Orleans in August because of Hurricane Ida and were based temporarily in the Dallas area. They played their season-opening home game, a triumph over the Green Bay Packers on Sept. 12, in Jacksonville, Fla.
Payton missed a game in December after testing positive for the coronavirus. Defensive coordinator Dennis Allen filled in for Payton during a Dec. 19 triumph over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa. Payton returned to coach a depleted Saints team, with their roster ravaged by coronavirus-related issues, to a 20-3 loss to the Miami Dolphins in New Orleans on Dec. 27.
Payton also had acknowledged in March 2020 that he’d tested positive for the virus.
Payton reportedly met Monday with Saints General Manager Mickey Loomis.
Allen and Saints offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael Jr. likely will be among the candidates to replace him. The Saints must comply with the league’s minority interviewing requirements even if they intend to promote an assistant coach from Payton’s staff.
They join the Las Vegas Raiders, Jacksonville Jaguars, Denver Broncos, Miami Dolphins, Chicago Bears, Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants and Houston Texans in searching for a new head coach.
Payton is under contract to the Saints through the 2024 season. Another NFL team would have to work out compensation with the Saints if he were to opt to return elsewhere to coaching in a future season. | null | null | null | null | null |
Crypto’s plunge wipes out profits for everyday investors
The White House is working to better coordinate a so-far fractured response from federal regulators.
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. is among the professional athletes who have struck promotional deals that involve converting their salaries into crypto. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
The slide has accelerated over the past week as investors have fled riskier bets for safer harbors. The so-called #cryptocrash has put pressure on Washington regulators to impose stricter rules on the industry — and raised fresh questions about the dangers of crypto for the average investor.
The plunge in crypto prices has tracked a stock market selloff that has seen the broad-based S&P 500 shed about 8 percent of its value this year, as investors brace for interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve and potentially underwhelming corporate earnings.
Cryptocurrency is suddenly everywhere -- except the cash register
In the meantime, the crypto swoon is hitting celebrities and everyday investors alike. A number of star athletes have entered into promotional deals with crypto companies that involve converting at least parts of their salaries into digital assets. Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. announced in late November he would be converting $750,000 of his 2021 pay into bitcoin as part of an agreement with the payments service Cash App.
The industry’s surge has drawn in a widening circle of Americans: One in six now say they have invested in, traded or otherwise used cryptocurrency, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. And that pool is increasingly diverse. Forty-four percent of those who have bought or traded crypto in the last year are non-White, and 35 percent have annual household incomes below $60,000, according to a poll over the summer by NORC at the University of Chicago.
Many crypto holders remain undeterred. Relative veterans point to their experience holding on through a crash in prices in late 2017 and early 2018 that investors now call the “crypto winter” — and the dramatic rally that followed it. They say recent price fluctuations have not shaken their faith in the technology’s long-term value, bidding farewell to new investors with a kind of “so long, leaves more for the rest of us” elan.
“Goodbye to all the non-believers. GTFO,” David Hoffman, co-owner of Bankless, tweeted on Saturday, as prices continued to plummet.
“Obviously no one is happy to see their portfolio shrink 40 percent in seven days, but it’s really a matter of: Do you believe crypto is going to be the dominant financial platform of the future?” said Hoffman.
Likewise, newly-wealthy crypto holders who moved to Puerto Rico in the past year to take advantage of tax breaks on crypto investments have not seen much impact from recent price fluctuations, said George Burke, a tax break beneficiary who moved to the island last May.
“The crypto people here are likely long-term holders. Many, like me, have been in the space for years and seen multiple price cycles. No need for any of us to panic sell. We’ve seen it before,” said Burke, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Protocol, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platform incorporated in Delaware.
Protocol did consider the market moves in deciding whether to go forward with its planned public sale, since “public sentiment and investor contributions” are closely tied to the price of Bitcoin, said Burke, whose company has four team members based on the island. Ultimately, they decided to move forward.
White House officials plan to release as soon as this month a memorandum that people familiar with the matter said would span numerous topics related to cryptocurrencies. Those include White House guidance surrounding a central bank digital currency, a form of digital cash that would be backed by the Federal Reserve and could compete with some privately-issued cryptocurrencies. The White House is also expected to weigh in on the impact of crypto on the stability of financial markets and the need to sync regulations of digital currencies with other countries that may have very different approaches.
The White House effort — ongoing since last summer but first made public in a Bloomberg report — is not expected to contain significant policy recommendations. But it is likely to designate further action to parts of the federal government, including the Department of Treasury and Securities and Exchange Commission. The White House memorandum is expected to be produced by the National Security Council.
Jose Santana Torres, a taxi driver who began trading cryptocurrency around 2018, after accepting payment for rides in Bitcoin, said he felt insulated from volatile market shifts because he moved valuable holdings in Bitcoin and Ether into Tether, a so-called stablecoin that claimed to be backed by an equivalent amount of U.S. dollars. The company paid a $41 million fine to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in October to settle allegations that the claim was misleading.
“Still holding it for the next bull run...Not big deal for me,” he said. | null | null | null | null | null |
Former Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke, left, attends his January 2019 sentencing hearing in Chicago for the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune via AP)
Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) and the Rev. Jesse Jackson are among those objecting to the early release of Jason Van Dyke, who was convicted in 2018 of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery — one for every shot he fired at McDonald as he walked away. Van Dyke, who resigned from the Chicago Police Department after his conviction, will be released from state custody Feb. 3 having served less than half of the original 81-month sentence imposed three years earlier.
“There is no justice, it seems. This convicted police officer is spending 39 months in prison — 39 months — for killing a Black man here in Chicago,” Rush said during a news conference Monday.
Killings by police are undercounted by more than half, new study says
Rush was joined by members of McDonald’s family and Chicago civil rights activists at the event organized by Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH Coalition as he called on John Lausch, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to take action.
“I am calling on the U.S. Attorney and every other person in charge. I am calling on them right here, right now,” Rush said. “We want justice for McDonald and his family.”
A spokesperson for the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois on Tuesday referred to a November 2015 statement from the office that “the federal investigation of the shooting remains active and ongoing,” but declined to comment on the status of the investigation into McDonald’s death or the calls from activists to bring charges against Van Dyke specifically.
How Derek Chauvin became the rare police officer convicted of murder
Chicago activists have been calling on Lausch since 2019 to probe Van Dyke’s case and renewed their efforts around the anniversary of his death.
Van Dyke’s early release, long predicted by sentencing experts, has been on the radar of local activists, who on Jan. 15 called for the city’s transit workers to shut down in protest until federal officials respond. The Rev. Marvin Hunter, McDonald’s great-uncle, told the Chicago Tribune at the time that he disagreed with the tactic and urged that they pursue “real criminal justice reform” instead.
Though there was little initial outcry in the aftermath of McDonald’s shooting, the tide swiftly turned 15 months later with the release of dashboard camera footage that undermined the police narrative of the shooting.
Then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushed out his handpicked police superintendent, while voters ousted the top prosecutor who had waited more than a year to bring charges in McDonald’s death. The DOJ launched a probe into the Chicago Police Department and later wrote a devastating report chronicling a pattern of racist policing. The fallout led to political consequences for Emanuel, too, and is widely understood to be the reason he declined to seek a third term as mayor. In his final year in office, the police department was placed under a federal monitor to oversee reforms.
Van Dyke’s 2018 conviction was the first time in roughly 50 years that a Chicago police officer was convicted of killing a person on duty. Despite several high-profile verdicts against officers such as Derek Chauvin and Kim Potter, police officers are still rarely convicted of murder (though they can face civil charges regardless of a criminal conviction).
More than seven years later, yearly watchdog reports have found that the city continues to miss significant reform deadlines. For Emanuel, his handling of the dash camera footage release in McDonald’s death threatened to derail his confirmation as U.S. ambassador to Japan last December, but he was ultimately confirmed.
“Where is the cover up king? You know who I’m talking about: the former mayor of this city, where is he at now? He is somewhere in Japan, living life as an ambassador for this nation,” Rush said. “Something is wrong with that picture.” | null | null | null | null | null |
South's military: North tested cruise missiles
North Korea fired two cruise missiles into the sea off its east coast on Tuesday, South Korea’s military said, amid rising tension over recent weapons tests.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff did not specify the missiles’ range or trajectory.
The launch was North Korea’s fifth of the year, after tests of a tactical guided missile, two “hypersonic missiles” and a railway-borne missile system.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed last week to bolster the military and warned that he could lift a self-imposed moratorium on testing atomic bombs and long-range missiles.
North Korea has not launched intercontinental ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons since 2017 but began testing shorter-range missiles after nuclear talks stalled. The U.N. Security Council bans it from testing ballistic missiles but not cruise missiles.
Kurdish-led forces free hostages held at prison
U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces said Tuesday that they freed nine of their troops held hostage by Islamic State militants leading an assault on a large detention facility in northeastern Syria.
After they broke into the prison on Thursday, Islamic State militants were joined by others rioting inside the facility, which houses more than 3,000 inmates, including minors.
They took hostages from among the prison staff and have since been holed up in the northern wing at one end of the facility. The clashes with the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have killed dozens on both sides.
The SDF has been closing in on the northern section of the prison, where it estimates that up to 200 militants are holed up.
7 people injured as U.S. combat jet crashes in South China Sea: A U.S. Navy F35C Lightning II combat jet conducting exercises in the South China Sea crashed while trying to land on the deck of an American aircraft carrier, the military said. The pilot was able to eject before the aircraft slammed into the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson and fell into the water. The pilot and six other sailors on the deck were injured.
Haitian ex-senator says U.S. deported him: Former Haitian senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean-Charles told the Associated Press that he was arrested in the United States and deported to Haiti. It was not clear why he was deported. He said U.S. authorities detained him as he returned from Nigeria and interrogated him about his Africa trip. He said he spent the night in jail and was deported the next day. Jean-Charles ran for president in 2015 and 2016 and was considered a close ally of slain President Jovenel Moïse.
Iran sentences Frenchman on spying charges: A Frenchman detained in Iran and hunger-striking to protest his treatment has been sentenced to eight years in prison on espionage and propaganda charges. Benjamin Brière, 36, was arrested in May 2020 after he took pictures in a desert area where photography is prohibited and asked questions on social media about Iran's obligatory Islamic headscarf for women. Brière's sentencing follows that of a human rights activist, Narges Mohammadi. Her husband tweeted over the weekend that she was sentenced to eight years in prison and 70 lashes. Mohammadi was arrested in November after she attended a memorial for a victim of violent 2019 anti-government rallies. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Biden’s Federal Reserve nominees should be quickly confirmed
Sarah Bloom Raskin, then a deputy Treasury secretary, at a 2014 meeting of the President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
Ms. Bloom Raskin has come under fire for urging the Fed not to bail out struggling oil and gas companies during the early days of the pandemic. In hindsight, she was right. Gas prices rebounded and energy firms quickly bounced back. More broadly, she has been a vocal proponent of U.S. regulators, including the Fed, making financial firms consider climate risk moving forward. This is common sense. It won’t shut down lending for production and use of fossil fuels, but it would push banks to start quantifying a huge risk to the financial system. | null | null | null | null | null |
That could have come from any anti-union press release you’ve ever read. Given the company we’re talking about here, it was a shock.
REI is a co-op, which means that it doesn’t have shareholders but is, in name anyway, owned by its members. But unlike the organic co-op market in your neighborhood, this one is a company with billions of dollars in sales and 15,000 employees. The company says “we put purpose before profits” and encourages people to “Buy from brands that align with your values.”
I should disclose my own interest here: I’ve been an REI member for a couple of decades, ever since the day I went into one of their stores to buy a backpack for what would be the first of many hiking trips. If you ran into me on the street, there’s a good chance I’d be wearing something from REI.
So it’s painful to see them come out as anti-union.
At least that’s how it appeared at first. If you contact the company about the unionization question, you’ll get an email reply that, at least as of Tuesday, adopts a different tone than its initial statement. Much of the language is similar, but the line that says “we do not believe placing a union between the co-op and its employees is needed or beneficial” is not in the email.
So the company may know it made a terrible mistake, and is trying tamp down a PR problem and figure out what it ought to do. At least that’s what we should hope.
But if a company makes its “values” part of its sales pitch, then it has to live up to them. And if it’s specifically touting its liberal values — like fighting climate change and promoting racial equity — it can’t simultaneously oppose collective bargaining and expect that its consumer base won’t shop elsewhere.
At least some of the workers seem to have other concerns beyond pay. Employees have been critical the company’s handling of the pandemic, and one told the New York Times that there has been “a tangible shift in the culture at work that doesn’t seem to align with the values that brought most of us here.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Emmett Lewis appears in the documentary “Descendant” by Margaret Brown, an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. (Sundance Institute via AP) (Uncredited/Sundance Institute)
Brown grew up in Mobile, and has previously documented its racial histories. Her 2008 film “The Order of the Myths" thoughtfully depicted the segregated tradition of Mardi Gras while also delving into the history of Africatown and the Clotilda. She was moved to return to the subject when journalist Ben Raines first thought he had found the wreck, leading news media and others to flock to Mobile. (Raines’ initial discovery was wrong, but he is credited with spurring interest in a search that led to the identification of the wreckage.)
While he doesn’t appear in the film, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is an executive producer of the film. He, too, is a Clotilda descendant, something he learned as a guest on PBS' “Finding Your Roots,” with Henry Louis Gates. It took the show’s researchers more than two years, Thompson said, to track down his family history. | null | null | null | null | null |
Wafer-thin inventories leave factories vulnerable to shutdowns if their chip deliveries are interrupted by weather or covid-19
Semiconductor chips are printed onto silicon wafers and loaded into containers at a factory in Malta, N.Y., in June. (Cindy Schultz for The Washington Post)
Manufacturers and other buyers of computer chips had less than five days’ supply of some chips on hand late last year, leaving them vulnerable to any disruptions in deliveries, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday as it pushed Congress to endorse federal aid for chip makers.
The report highlighted the severity of a global shortage that has hobbled manufacturing and fueled inflation for more than a year and that defies easy solutions.
Manufacturers’ median chip inventory levels have plummeted from about 40 days’ supply in 2019 to less than five days, according to a survey of 150 companies worldwide that the Commerce Department conducted in September.
The lack of chip inventory leaves auto manufacturers and other chip users with “no room for error,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Tuesday as she presented the findings.
“A covid outbreak, a storm, a natural disaster, political instability, problem with equipment — really anything that disrupts a [chip-making] facility anywhere in the world, we will feel the ramifications here in the United States of America,” she said. “A covid outbreak in Malaysia has the potential to shut down a manufacturing facility in America.”
“The reality is Congress must act,” Raimondo added, urging lawmakers to pass a proposal for $52 billion in federal subsidies to incentivize construction of chip factories. “Every day we wait, we fall further behind.”
The Senate passed the measure last year. The legislation has been tied up for months in the House, though House Democrats are expected to introduce their version of the legislation as soon as this week.
Industry executives say federal funding is likely to create more long-term supply of chips but not to alleviate the short-term shortages because chip factories take years to build.
Survey respondents said they didn’t see the shortages going away in the next six months. Some industry executives say they could last into 2023.
Median demand for chips among buyers that responded to the survey was as much as 17 percent higher in 2021 than 2019, as consumer purchases of electronics surged during the pandemic, and as more products required computer chips to function.
Boosting production of this sort of chip will be challenging because the profit margins aren’t as high, making them less attractive for chip makers, said Charles Clancy, senior vice president of Mitre Corp., a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers.
“It’s kind of like the generic-drug problem in pharmaceuticals,” he said. These older chips “are not cutting-edge.”
A lack of chips forced auto manufacturers worldwide to idle factories and slash output by as much as 7.7 million cars last year, causing shortages of new and used vehicles. The collapse in auto sales to consumers because of the chip shortage shaved more than two percentage points from U.S. gross domestic product growth in the third quarter.
Raimondo said soaring car prices accounted for a third of overall inflation last year, which rose to 7 percent, a 40-year high.
“This new data underscores that it’s time to stop dragging our feet on this. The House has been sitting for months on a good bill to build more semiconductors here in the U.S., and there’s urgency to act now,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), a vocal supporter of the legislation, said Tuesday.
The Commerce Department survey found that chips sold through brokers often came with especially high price tags. “So we are going to focus more acutely on that issue: What’s going on, why are the brokers charging so much?” Raimondo said.
U.S. chip maker Intel last week announced it will spend $20 billion to build two new chip factories in Ohio, aiming to complete the work in 2025. Intel’s chief executive said that work would proceed faster if the company receives some of the proposed federal subsidies.
In the early 1990s the United States was home to about 37 percent of global chip manufacturing, but that has dropped to about 12 percent in recent years as more production shifted to Asia.
About 75 percent of chip production today takes place in East Asia, and over 90 percent of the most advanced chips are manufactured in Taiwan — a particular vulnerability for the United States, given China’s aggression toward the democratic island, U.S. officials have said.
Some lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have voiced opposition to the subsidies, saying the semiconductor industry is highly profitable and doesn’t need federal aid.
Asked about this Tuesday, Raimondo said that because the cost of building chip factories is higher in the United States than it is overseas, the federal government must offer subsidies if it wants chip makers to build here.
“We want these companies to set up their manufacturing facilities in America,” she said. “So that’s why this is necessary. This isn’t just an economic issue, it’s a national security issue,” she added, noting that high-tech chips are needed for military equipment, quantum computing and artificial-intelligence applications.
She also called the $52 billion of proposed federal money a “drop in the bucket” compared with the “hundreds of billions” that industry must spend if it is to build more factories domestically. “Every company is going to have to invest an enormous amount of their own capital in order to hit the goal,” she said. | null | null | null | null | null |
18-year-old charged with murder in killing of 19-year-old in University Park last year, police say
A Maryland man has been arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of 19-year-old Luis Miguel Utrera last fall, Prince George’s County police said in a news release Tuesday.
Andres Aguilar, 18, was taken into custody in the District on Jan. 19 by the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force, which is led by the U.S. Marshals Service and includes officers from the Prince George’s County Police Department. He is charged with first- and second-degree murder, authorities said, and is being held in the District pending extradition to Prince George’s.
The University Park Police Department responded to a report of a shooting the afternoon of Nov. 17, and found Utrera in the driver’s seat of a vehicle that had crashed into a tree, authorities said. Utrera had suffered a gunshot wound and died at the scene.
Police allege that Aguilar shot Utrera during a “drug-related robbery.” | null | null | null | null | null |
The twins dance around a grenade: Nick is gay, and his coming-out during a quarrel detonates the family, possibly triggering their father’s fatal cardiac arrest. Repulsed by Nick’s behavior, their mother banishes him from her life. Marta, ever her brother’s keeper, joins him in an escape to Prague, where they search for clues to the legend of Jirí and other punitive defenestrations. “Tourists can climb the narrow stairs to the room where Catholic noblemen were defenestrated because of a religious dispute in 1618. You can look down from the window to see exactly the length of their fall,” she says. “Catholics say these men were saved by angels, cradled in the arms of the Virgin herself, lowered gently to earth. Protestants say the men survived because they landed in a dung heap piled below the window.” | null | null | null | null | null |
Supreme Court Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and John G. Roberts Jr. are pictured at the 2019 State of the Union address. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
The court announced this week that it will soon be hearing cases in two vital areas, and in both instances, the outcome on a court that now has a 6 to 3 conservative supermajority is all but certain. When these cases are decided, affirmative action in higher education will likely be outlawed, and the government’s ability to protect the environment will be cut back.
The GOP does, however, have a comprehensive negative policy agenda — a list of things it wants to stop Democrats from doing, which is where the Supreme Court comes in.
Republicans know that it would be politically impossible to enact many of their ideas at the national level; you might have noticed that when they controlled the White House and Congress in 2017 and 2018, they did not try to pass legislation that would outlaw abortion, repeal state-level gun regulation or disband the Environmental Protection Agency.
As it is, on abortion it now looks all but certain that the court will strike down Roe v. Wade later this year (though abortion will remain legal in states Democrats control). These cases show how the court’s majority is checking off items on a long list of ways it wants to remake U.S. law.
In a series of prior cases, the court narrowed the scope of what kind of affirmative action policies are legal, but left universities with some ability to consider race in admissions. In the last decision by the court in 2016, it ruled that universities could include race as a consideration, but its use had to be narrowly tailored and demonstrated to be the only way the schools could accomplish their admission goals.
That case produced an angry dissent from Justices John G. Roberts Jr., Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito. Two of the justices who ruled with the 4-to-3 majority — Anthony M. Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — are no longer on the court. There is approximately zero reason to believe that affirmative action in education will survive the court’s current term.
Second, the court agreed to hear a case concerning how the EPA applies the Clean Water Act. While the facts of the case look narrow — it concerns whether the waters on the plaintiff’s property qualify as wetlands, and what kind of permit is required to build on such land — it will be up to the court to decide how far to go when they inevitably rule against the EPA.
They could go quite far, not just in this case but in subsequent ones. We can expect to see the court taking one case after another in which it reaches deep down into statutory interpretation, always with the same end result: to restrict government’s ability to regulate, so long as it’s doing so in service of goals such as protecting the environment, workers, or public health.
Reasonable people can disagree about the value of stare decisis, the principle that the court should respect its prior decisions except in the most exceptional circumstances. But it’s clear that this court no longer even pretends to do so. However much it dresses up decisions with conservative movement catchphrases (Originalism! Textualism! The Framers!), it is no different from a party that wins control of a legislature, then begins passing bills to change the policies it objected to when it was in the minority.
Here is the trick Republicans have pulled. First, they used the minoritarian features of the the U.S. system to shift the Supreme Court dramatically to the right. Two successive Republican presidents were elected with fewer votes than their opponents; then they appointed five justices between them. Most were confirmed narrowly by a Senate where Republicans represent far fewer Americans than the body’s Democrats do, even when those Democrats are in the minority.
But that is what it has almost always been, and what it is today. The idea that the court just calls “balls and strikes,” in Chief Justice Roberts’ famous phrase, is more laughable than ever. This court is the Republican Party’s policymaking vanguard, and its ambitions are nearly as limitless as its power. | null | null | null | null | null |
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker on Friday blocked the University of Florida from barring professors from participating in lawsuits against the state. Issuing a preliminary injunction involving a conflict-of-interest policy enacted in 2020, the judge accused the university of trying to silence the professors because of fear their testimony, in cases involving voting rights and mask mandates, would anger Republican state officials and lawmakers who control funding for the state’s flagship school.
The 74-page order likened the actions of the University of Florida to Hong Kong’s removal last year of an imposing statute that had stood for more than 20 years commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre victims because of political pressure from the authoritarian Chinese government. “Some might say, ‘that’s China, it could never happen here,'” the judge wrote, “But Plaintiffs contend it already has.” A footnote drove the point home: “If those in UF’s administration find this comparison upsetting, the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.”
The university has offered varying explanations — first contending a conflict of interest, then saying the faculty could be witnesses if they weren’t paid and then lifting the ban and claiming to have rewritten the policy to make future bans more difficult. The judge noted that only when the matter gained national prominence did the university, its reputation tarred, relent for these professors. What it still has not done — despite what he called “ample opportunity to limit its discretion to salvage its constitutionally infirm policy” — is amend the policy to state that the school will not rely on political considerations to deny an outside activity request.
More is at stake than the individual rights of professors. Teachers, the judge wrote, quoting Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, are the “priests of our democracy” who provide guidance in the pursuit of truth and informed citizenship. “When such critical inquiry is stifled,” Judge Walker wrote, “democracy suffers.” The judge set trial for November, and the association that accredits the university is conducting its own inquiry. A spokeswoman for the university said it is considering its next steps. Here’s an idea: recognize that the mission of a university is to promote knowledge and understanding and not cower to the interests of the politicians in power.
OPINIONS ON SPEECH AND SCHOOLS
A win in Florida for academic freedom — and for democracy
‘Let’s ban algebra, too!’ adds Fla. legislator who is clearly not three kids in a trench coat | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Black Americans were ‘other’ for too long
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.), Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Capitol Hill in D.C. on Jan. 19. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP)
It seems that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) left out one very important word when he recently uttered the statement “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” That word is “other.”
Black folks have been the “other” Americans since before the founding of the nation. Finally, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, finally making us first-class citizens, which, it seems, some members of Congress want to amend.
Pamela Hairston Chisholm, Martinsville, Va. | null | null | null | null | null |
Opinion: Under our crazy tax code, rock stars can’t afford not to be hypocrites
Bruce Springsteen at his home in Colts Neck, N.J. on Sept. 26, 2019. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
The most fascinating trend in capitalism is the surge in big-dollar deals for intellectual property rights to all kinds of popular music.
On Monday it was announced that Bob Dylan sold master recordings of his tunes to Sony for an estimated $200 million, having previously dealt a separate copyright on the lyrics and music to Universal for an estimated $300 million. In December, Bruce Springsteen sold his song catalogue to Sony Entertainment for a reported $550 million. Also cashing in: Paul Simon ($250 million), Ryan Tedder ($200 million), Neil Young ($150 million) and Stevie Nicks ($100 million), among others.
Much has already been said about why this is happening. The growth of streaming has made songs with proven audience appeal more valuable. Copyrights that promise to yield royalties for decades function as low-risk capital assets, like bonds. Private equity firms sometimes buy big-name song catalogues on behalf of investors seeking a steady flow of future income.
The tax man is getting stiffed, though. One propellent of music catalogue sales is the favorable treatment that the proceeds enjoy under federal tax law; easy money for The Boss means revenue-loss for the federal government.
Clearly, there’s more to this picture than meets the eye. While hardly a crisis, the episode is instructive about incentives, unintended consequences — and the politics of economic inequality.
When Springsteen or another singer-songwriter sells the rights to music, the government taxes the proceeds as capital gains, which are subject to a rate much lower than the one for ordinary wage and salary income. This is due to a 2006 tax code adjustment, lobbied into law by country songwriters who were upset they paid a higher tax rate on their royalties than commercial publishers did.
It’s a debatable complaint, but Congress, eager to please Nashville and not anticipating much revenue loss, went along. Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates, including the latest one issued in November 2020, have considered the 2006 law’s cost de minimis — less than $50 million per year.
That’s probably not true anymore. If taxed at the top ordinary rate of 37 percent, the combined $1 billion Springsteen and Dylan have pulled in would net the government $370 million. At the top capital gains rate — 20 percent — it only yields $200 million, a difference of $170 million. (For technical reasons, singer-songwriters do not face a 3.8 percent surcharge ordinarily applied on capital gains for upper-income individuals.)
Though still modest relative to the $219 billion total cost of favored treatment for capital gains in fiscal 2021, the gradually expanding singer-songwriter break does exemplify a crucial problem with the tax code’s capital-labor differential. It creates an incentive for special interests to lobby for the lower rate, whether it’s economically justified or not.
In that sense, singer-songwriters are like the hedge fund managers who talked Washington into labeling, and taxing, their winnings as capital gains, through the “carried interest” break, which costs the government roughly $1.4 billion per year.
The only thing richer than these rockers is the irony: Springsteen famously embraced Occupy Wall Street in 2012; Young endorsed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president in 2020. Now, they are becoming tax-advantaged gazillionaires.
What’s more, The Post reports that there was a “rush” to get deals done in late 2020 before the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress could close tax loopholes — a needless worry so far, as it turns out. (Publicists for Springsteen and Young declined to comment.)
You can say this makes left-leaning music icons hypocrites because, well — it sort of does. Yet it would be more charitable and more relevant, policy-wise, to say that it makes them normal. Anyone would do the same if the law allowed it, which it does. Sanders himself made a $1 million book deal, and got pretty indignant when questioned about it.
People like money. If you offer them more of it, they will take it. Generally, they’ll also find a way to argue they are entitled to it, even if — like the tax breaks being showered on aging rockers for works created long ago — it’s not rewarding new creativity.
Humanity’s limitless quest for money — the easier the better — explains why socialism doesn’t work. Certainly, the current music-money bonanza ought to inspire some Hollywood progressives to check their sanctimony.
Yet the pursuit of easy money is bad for capitalism, too, which is why tax-averse Republicans also have something to learn from the suddenly frothy market for music IP.
It challenges the GOP notion that tax cuts, especially for capital gains, always spur productive activity — as opposed to sometimes creating new opportunities to game the system, also known as rent-seeking.
A well-functioning capitalist democracy would subject a broad, loophole-free base of income to progressive, but non-punitive, tax rates. A side benefit: When society’s rules are more consistent, so is society’s behavior. | null | null | null | null | null |
NEW YORK — Stocks closed lower on Wall Street Tuesday after another volatile day of trading. Technology companies like Microsoft were again the biggest drag on the market. The S&P 500 gave up 1.2%, but clawed back much of a midday drop after being down as much as 2.8%. The index has been falling steadily all month and is now down 9.2% from the record high it set on the first trading day of the year. The Nasdaq fell 2.3%. Markets have been jittery over rising inflation and worries that the Federal Reserve’s actions to fight it will either be too late or too aggressive.
NEW YORK — The stock market is losing crucial support from the Federal Reserve. Omicron is causing havoc at businesses around the world. And Russia just might be preparing to invade Ukraine. These are just some of the uncertainties leading investors to sell stocks. The S&P 500 has dropped nearly 10% from its record set on the first trading day of the year, the biggest setback for Wall Street since its collapse when the pandemic first struck. The U.S. central bank is moving away from its easy money policies and preparing to raise interest rates. That likely spells more volatility for the stock market, which had another down day on Tuesday.
SILVER SPRING, Md. — U.S. consumer confidence declined this month as Americans became slightly less optimistic about their near-term financial prospects amid persistent inflation and the highly contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus. The Conference Board, a business research group, said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index — which takes into account consumers’ assessment of current conditions and the their outlook for the future — fell to 113.8 in January, from 115.2 in December. The board’s present situation index, which measures consumers’ assessment of current business and labor conditions, rose this month but the expectations index, based on consumers’ outlook for income, business and labor market conditions, fell.
DENVER — With decreasing snowpack due to drought and climate change, the ski industry has invested millions of dollars in more efficient snowmaking systems. According to the Colorado-based National Ski Areas Association, about 87% of the 337 U.S. alpine resorts the trade group represents have snowmaking capabilities. Some question whether the practice is a wise use of energy and water. But a Colorado water official says snowmaking accounts for less than one-tenth of 1% of the water that is diverted in the state and is considered a beneficial use because it brings in tourism. U.S. ski resorts say they’ve been working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but note more needs to happen on a global scale.
LANSING, Mich. — General Motors is making the largest investment in company history in its home state of Michigan, announcing plans to spend nearly $7 billion to convert a factory to make electric pickup trucks and to build a new battery cell plant. The moves were announced Tuesday in Lansing. They will create up to 4,000 jobs and keep another 1,000 already employed at an underutilized assembly plant north of Detroit. The automaker plans to spend up to $4 billion converting and expanding its Orion Township assembly factory to make electric pickups and $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion building a third U.S. battery cell plant with a joint-venture partner in Lansing.
REDMOND, Wash. — Demand for Microsoft’s cloud-computing services and work software helped boost its quarterly profits by 21% as the pandemic kept many office workers at home. The company on Tuesday reported fiscal second-quarter profit of $18.8 billion. The software maker posted revenue of $51.7 billion for the October-December period, up 20% from a year earlier. Microsoft last week announced its plans to buy high-profile game publisher Activision-Blizzard for $68.7 billion, an all-cash deal that could be the priciest tech acquisition in history. But the financial results revealed Tuesday show it’s still business-focused products such as Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and its suite of software products that are driving the company’s growth.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has officially withdrawn a rule that would have required workers at big companies to get vaccinated or face regular COVID testing requirements. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration confirmed the withdrawal Tuesday. But the agency says it still strongly encourages vaccination of workers. OSHA announced a vaccine-or-test mandate in early November for companies with at least 100 employees. The rule would have impacted more than 80 million U.S. workers. But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the rule on Jan. 13, saying OSHA had overstepped its authority. The court left in place a vaccine rule for health care workers. | null | null | null | null | null |
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